What Children Can't Read

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bandarq onlineI was reading Susan Campbell’s piece earlier this week in The Hartford Courant on banned books. If you didn’t already know, this week (September 26 to October 3) is Banned Book Week. Susan grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian home, but, as she says, even in her home there was no ban on what the children read. Books were seen as too central to learning, and the children were permitted to read whatever they wanted and encouraged to talk about their reading with the adults in the family.

My rather secular Catholic home was essentially the same in its approach to reading and books. My mother and grandmother were proud of me if they discovered me reading something ‘too adult’ for my age. I don’t remember reading anything especially racy, but I do recall an incident in the second grade. The students took turns bringing a book from home to read to the class on Fridays. My turn came up in early December, and I brought in my copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which I had just received and devoured the previous week. I remember Mr. Brucker taking me aside to tell me I could read it to him some afternoon. I also remember reading The Red Badge of Courage and A Tale of Two Cities in the sixth grade. The former I finished and understood, but the latter I just slogged through because I didn’t want to admit defeat, and really understood very little. In the eighth grade I somehow got hooked on Herman Wouk and read The Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance. I suppose someone would tell me that these books were inappropriate for a boy my age, but, to paraphrase Susan, I nonetheless grew up to be a law abiding adult who votes in elections and sleeps with my own spouse—and only my own spouse. Go figure.

In my years teaching high school English I endured several book challenges. I witnessed a couple of challenges at our middle school to Nightjohn and The Bridge to Terabithia, among others. The Bridge to Terabithia, as you can guess, was objected to because of the elements of magic. Nightjohn was objected to because some parents were sick of having their children being forced to read about slavery. They felt that the students were being made to feel guilty for something they were not responsible for. Never mind that such thinking would rule out reading history of any kind.

At the high school I was at the center of a challenge to Romeo and Juliet and at the periphery of a challenge to Ragtime. The parents who challenged Romeo and Juliet objected to the sex, of course. Why is it so often the sex and not the violence? No one seems to care much that Tybalt kills Mercutio or that Romeo kills Tybalt, or that the lovers commit suicide, for that matter, but all the sexual innuendo in Mercutio’s and the Nurse’s lines get some parents up in arms. The objection to Ragtime was also over sex, and this case was especially odd because the text was being read by seniors in a section of UConn English—17 and 18 year-old students taking a college course in a high school—but one boy’s mother got upset about the scene in which Mother’s Younger Brother is hiding in an armoire and watching Emma Goldman undress Evelyn Nesbit. We had a principal who, despite being a former English teacher, was afraid to get into a confrontation with the parent and so was ready to accede to her demand to remove the book from the curriculum. It took having the whole English department faculty confront him to get him to back off from this position. At the time, I had never read the book, but I was so upset on principle that the principal was going to allow the ban that I went home that night and read the whole book, and then wrote a concise defense of the book and that scene, in particular. My colleagues in the department voted to have my statement read aloud by the principal at a board meeting, which he reluctantly agreed to do. But once the mother of the boy heard somehow that the members of the English department were unified in their opposition, she no-showed the board meeting and the challenge was tabled.

Lately my wife and I have been reading Roald Dahl books to my six-year-old son at night before bed. We read The Fantastic Mr. Fox last week, and are about halfway through Danny, the Champion of the World this week. He’s loving them. We have already read a couple of Harry Potter books, as well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The War of the Worlds (he’s into science and monsters and such). So far, no apparent detrimental affects on his character or morals.

Last week he had a funny incident at school. He’s in first grade, and his school is listed as a failing school, so there are all sorts of intervention programs to try to bring up the CMT scores. One agenda they have is Reading is Fundamental. Basically, some people from RIF come to the school once a month, and each child gets to choose a free book. My son loves this program, but he keeps picking third grade books, and the RIF folks keep telling him that he has to choose a first grade book. I suppose they must have a limited number and that they bring books at grade level according to the numbers reported to them by the school. So, last time, my son refused to take a book because the first grade selections were ‘baby books.’ I told him next time to offer to read a third grade book to the person to prove it’s at his ability level. Meanwhile, I’m left wondering why so may adults expend so much energy trying to tell kids what they can’t read.

How Meritorious Are You?

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judi ceme onlineThe other day I was exchanging emails with my friend Jon, who like me was a high school English teacher for more than a decade before making a move to higher education. Both of us have school-age children and spouses in education. We were cynically commenting on President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Duncan’s Race to the Top program, which was announced this past July. According to its website (http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html), Race to the Top “provides competitive grants to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform; implementing ambitious plans in the four education reform areas described in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA); and achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and ensuring that students are prepared for success in college and careers.” Jon made the observation that the phrase “Race to the Top” “conjure[s] images of students scrambling up ladders, stepping on fingers, a few triumphantly cheering from the precarious high perch, others clinging for dear life midway, and many, many more having fallen off completely.” I suggested that we hold a competition for a renaming of the act. My suggestions were Mission Impossible; Operation Assessment Overload; Waiting for Merit; The Few, the Proud, the Adequate Yearly Progress; or Testing: Yes We Can! Jon suggested that I spend too much time thinking about these things, which is probably true.

The problem, of course, isn’t that the federal government is trying to improve public education nor is it the five billion dollars in available grant funds. It’s the strings that the government is attaching to those funds. Yesterday’s Hartford Courant ran an article by Grace Merrit that discusses the State Board of Education’s first meeting to begin grappling with Connecticut’s application for funds from the Race competition. Merrit’s article points out that “To be eligible for [funds], applicants must prove that performance assessments for teachers and school administrators are linked to student and school performance.” This will have to entail the evaluation of teachers, and this will most likely result in some form of merit pay for teachers tied directly to student performance, and we all know that such performance will be measured not by grades but by standardized test scores. The short-hand version is that, for schools to get federal funds, teachers will have to raise CAPT and CMT scores. Or, to paraphrase State Board Vice Chairwoman Janet Finneran, we will have to sell our souls and abandon our teaching philosophies.

I can’t help but think about merit at UConn. I know I have written about this before, and it’s dull to go into detail, but suffice to say that it is one of the most contentious subjects at our department meetings. Professors end up quibbling about whether or not administrative work (like running a writing program!) is equivalent to the publication of scholarship. They quibble over the relative merits of a poem compared to a scholarly essay. There is concern that the process is too subjective. And really, the money is paltry, maybe a few hundred dollars. It’s not that. It’s that people work hard and they get upset when a committee of their peers gives them a modest merit rating. It’s like the tale of the boy who writes an essay on his grandmother and gets a C+. He walks away not so much upset about the grade as he is upset about the fact that you just told him he has a C+ grandmother.

Well, the good news about this (and I am being completely sarcastic here) is that if you teach in the suburbs you’ll dodge the bullet, at least this time around. Your district won’t be getting any of that Race to the Top money the state receives and you won’t have to deal with teacher evaluations, either. The state is targeting twenty urban school districts for these funds (and the necessary teacher assessment component). They are Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester, Bloomfield, New Britain, Bristol, Middletown, Meriden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Danbury, Hamden, Naugatuck, New Haven, New London, Norwalk, Stamford, Waterbury, West Haven, Windham, and the Technical High School System. As I write the names of these towns I picture teachers I know from each district and their various reactions of fear, anger, disbelief, and resignation.

As I was processing my own emotional responses to this, I was thinking about how hard if not impossible it is to devise a fair and accurate assessment system for teachers. And I was thinking about another article I had read in the Courant a couple weeks before, by James Starr and Mayra Esquilin. They were writing about how successful Hartford’s schools have been in the wake of reorganization and reform efforts throughout the district. Starr and Esquilin point out that CMT scores have climbed by 25% since 2007, and graduation rates are up to 42%. (They don’t say it in the article, but graduation rates were below 30% just a few years ago). This is wonderful and encouraging news. But just two days later a letter to the editor ran that lambasted Hartford teachers and administrators for graduating only 42% of their students. Can you imagine the public outcry if those teachers and administrators received merit pay when only 42% of Hartford’s students were graduating? Conversely, can you imagine the discouragement and anger among teachers if after achieving such improvement they received no merit recognition?

It’s simply a Catch-22. And really, as much as we’d all like to be paid better, I suspect it wouldn’t really be about the money for the teachers. Honestly, once those federal funds trickled their way down to the teachers they’d never get much anyway. It’s about being recognized for our hard work. Most of us, I suspect, would be damn happy with a letter from our administration praising our good work, or a prominent article in the Courant or elsewhere reporting positively on our meritorious efforts.

Write Your Own Papers; Take Your Own Tests

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ceme online terbaikLast week Ed White came to campus and met with writing faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Ed is semi-retired now but still works as a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. His most well known and critically acclaimed work deals with writing assessment, including Teaching and Assessing Writing: Understanding, Evaluating and Improving Student Performance, Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher's Guide, and Writing Assessment: Politics, Policies, Practices. Teachers from the CWP-Storrs might be most familiar with him from work he has co-edited with Lynn Bloom, including Composition in the 21st Century. Over three days Ed gave a few workshops and was feted one evening at Lynn Bloom’s lovely home, where I had the privilege of talking with him at some length. The following day I was his cross-campus escort, making sure he got to the Center for Undergraduate Education on time. The lunch-time workshop at the CUE building that day was well attended and interesting. There were actually people sitting in the hallway where they could hardly see but could still hear what Ed had to say. The discussion took one of its most interesting turns when Ed told the roomful of Freshman English instructors, Writing Center tutors, and Education graduate students that the best way to assess the value of an assignment was to complete it themselves. “Have you ever tried that?” asked Ed somewhat rhetorically and with a knowing smirk. Everyone looked at one another a little oddly, as if to confirm that they weren’t the only ones in the room who had never done that.

I think many if not most of the writing project folks write with their students, though I still wonder how many of us complete the larger writing assignments we give, like portfolios or term papers. I know I didn’t when I was in the high school classroom. Coincidentally, a few days later (this past Tuesday, to be exact) I was running a professional development workshop at Lyman Memorial High School for its English Department members and a few Special Education teachers who co-teach English classes. Ostensibly we were working on CAPT and how to improve CAPT scores, but more broadly we were looking at the research that had informed the original design anjuran for what became the CAPT, and how to allow that research to inform our teaching practices. The original anjuran included the short responses to a story that are familiar to all of us, but extended well beyond those four (originally six) written responses to include response groups, revision, teacher conferences, more revision, and ultimately the completion of a portfolio to be assessed. So what I had the teachers do in the latter half of our workshop was complete a full CAPT-style lesson. They read Colette’s “The Other Wife” and responded in writing to the four CAPT questions, but then they met in response groups of four and used Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff’s Ways of Responding guidelines from A Community of Writers to give one another feedback on their responses. After this, each teacher went back to his or her desk and spent a half hour crafting the short responses and peer feedback into a single, coherent essay. At their October 21 department meeting, the teachers are going to look at these and continue the process.

A great deal was learned from treating the written responses as drafts to workshop into a longer essay, but I think just as much was learned from actually taking a CAPT test. I know there were young teachers in the room (including one who had been my student in high school!) who had taken the CAPT themselves as high school sophomores, but none of the veteran teachers had ever taken a CAPT test before, and doing so was enlightening—though not necessarily in the most positive ways.

Many of the teachers discovered that one or more of the questions were difficult to say anything insightful about. Just about everyone took too much time on the first question and left themselves little time to respond to the more sophisticated third and fourth questions. Some found that they just wanted to respond but weren’t sure which question their response conformed to, and so just randomly put it under one or another. Another teacher found he really wanted to jot down ideas and an outline but felt too pressed for time to do so to his satisfaction. Yet another teacher had an interesting experience for all of us to learn from because she based one response on a misreading of a line from the story (does everyone remember the now infamous story about the girl who was undergoing chemo treatments and the hundreds of students around the state who misunderstood what chemo was, thinking it was the dye she had used to turn her hair purple?) but then had a really profound insight into the story in her response to one of the other questions. How should that be scored? I don’t know if anyone walked out of the room that day with any certainty about how to better prepare students for the test, but at the very least everyone had greater empathy and insight to build upon when we meet again in January to continue planning.

On another note, I hope everyone saw the article on Ken Cormier in Tuesday’s Hartford Courant. Most recent CWP folks are certainly familiar with Ken. He’s a writer and a musician who is a PhD candidate in the English Department. He hosts a radio show on WHUS called The Lumberyard and in 2007 made audio recordings of the Summer Institute Fellows, some of which made it into an episode on his program. He’s run writing workshops for teachers at the 2008 Summer Institute, and was our keynote speaker at last year’s Student and Teacher Writing Conference. Anyway, Ken just released a new album, his third, called Nowhere Is Nowhere, and the Courant gave him a good review. Check it out.

I Teach Students How To Be Human!

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bandar judi cemeWe had a department meeting today, and one of the topics of discussion was the new rules put in place regarding travel. The details of these new rules aren’t important, but in discussing them our conversation touched upon how much more corporate the university has become. I suppose this is true everywhere. There’s so much paperwork to complete on every discrete aspect of our profession that we run the risk of losing sight of our obligations to teach students and produce research, scholarship, and art. Or maybe we keep those obligations in sight but we find our ability to meet them compromised by layers of bureaucracy and oversight.

The evening before, I was at Bulkeley High School. I have been invited to be a Higher Education Partner on the Partnerships and Co-curricular Programming Subcommittee for the new Hartford Humanities Studies School (this is not the exact name, as they have not yet officially named the school), part of the reorganization process for Hartford Public Schools. Sounds boring at face value, but I found our discussion really interesting. The idea is to have a school with a focus on the Humanities, with courses on Art and Culture, Foreign Language, History and Social Studies, and Literature and Language Arts. These categories follow those established by EDSITEment, which is an online resource for teachers, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The other committee members and I have the privilege of helping to name the school and shape the mission statement, including goals and objectives, and thus to influence curriculum design. I’m pretty excited about the venture and glad to have the opportunity to work with so many other professors, teachers from the school, community members, student representatives, people from the Urban League, and folks from private foundations like the Mark Twain House and Museum, the Hill-Stead Museum, and the Connecticut Historical Society.

I did find, however, that as we worked on the mission statement, some people began to focus on things like student discipline, which consumed a fair amount of discussion. Now I know student discipline is important, and if we were to frame it in terms of citizenship it might find a place in the document, but on the whole I found myself thinking that discipline and several other worthwhile subjects were just getting too far afield. Suddenly our discussion had less to do with a humanities education as it did with broader issues of running a school. Suddenly we found ourselves talking about bureaucratic procedures and ways to police the students. A few of us had to politely redirect the conversation onto the subject of what we wanted the students to study and learn in a humanities institute that would differ from a traditional high school or from one of the other new Academies. (At the high school level alone there are academies dedicated to Teacher Preparation, Culinary Arts, Insurance and Finance, Engineering and Green Technology, Law and Government, Nursing, Journalism and Media). And I thought to myself, how easily we all fall into this trap. It’s not that discipline policies are unimportant, but when we focus on those or make other bureaucratic issues our primary focus, we lose sight of larger issues.

I may have written about this before because I like the story so much, but I had a funny experience with a colleague from my department a couple years ago when we were invited to a luncheon hosted by two graduate students from the School of Education. The students were conducting some sort of study in which they were trying to gather data on higher education perceptions of secondary education. Basically, they wanted to know what we thought students lacked when they arrived at UConn so the School of Education would be better able to prepare its students to prepare their eventual high school students for college. Once again, a perfectly worthwhile aim, but the discussion began to focus more on assessment, standards, goals and objectives and the like, and less on the students and the content of their classes. Coincidentally, the other English faculty member at this luncheon is the only other professor besides me in our department of 68 (yes, 68, and that doesn’t include adjuncts or grad students) with significant secondary teaching experience. I think that’s relevant here. Anyway, I could see him getting increasingly frustrated by the direction of the discussion, and finally he could take it no more. He blurted out, “None of this is relevant! I teach English. English is a humanities field, and they call it the humanities for a reason. I teach students how to be human!”

So that was more or less what I wrote on my first line of my draft of a mission statement for this new school: “The mission of the humanities studies school is to teach students how to be human.” I liked that. I doubt if it will make it into the simpulan draft, however. It’s too idealistic, or more likely it is too difficult to measure a student’s humanity with any sort of standardized assessment. Oh well.

Some of you may wonder why I did not write this week about the murder that took place on campus this past Saturday. I certainly thought about doing so. I mean, how can you ignore something like that? But I really didn’t know what to say about something so tragic. The following day I walked right by the site with my six-year-old son after seeing Harold and the Purple Crayon at Jorgensen, on our way to the Co-op to buy a book with a gift card from his birthday. Then I thought of something E. B. White once said when he was criticized during World War II for not writing often enough about the war. I am paraphrasing from memory here, but White said something to the effect of, “I write about life as it should be so that when war ends people will remember how life is supposed to be lived.”