immersion literacy

Stop and Smell the Poetry

Content Area Thinking...

It was golfer Walter Hagen who first asked us to “stop and smell the flowers.”

Much as it is in life outside of school, life inside the classroom is much too rushed for my tastes. Everybody seems to be racing from one lesson to the next in an effort to “cover everything.” I’m not sure why everybody is in such a big damn hurry.

I understand that a certain amount of material must be mastered in order to proceed from one grade to the next – even from one course to the next. Still, for the most part, this is only true in courses like math and world languages as the content in those classes builds upon itself from year to year. This is certainly not the case in English, social studies, science and most elective courses (where the curriculum is more spiraled).

And still we rush. We rush as if the curriculum police might move in at any moment and whisk away those teachers who spend too much time on lesson and not enough on another.

In some parts of the country the pressure to cover more material is made more difficult with end-of-course exams that are created by the state or district. These tests tend to be content-heavy: You know, “Who fought in the War of 1812?” – that sort of thing. Of course, this should make us all quite nervous.

In an immersion literacy environment, knowing who fought in the War of 1812 is not nearly as important as knowing how to “think” about wars, conflict, nation-building, rhetoric, propaganda and revolution. Though there is some key information that an intelligent and active citizenry needs to know, so much of what we teach in schools is so specialized as to border on trivia (and not knowledge). 

I would submit that intelligence is not about how much we know. It’s about how much we know about how much we know. Let’s look at science for one example. My son, who is in second grade, has been getting a little bit of science instruction at his school. A few months ago, he told me that they were studying the different types of rocks (igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic) and he could recite with great confidence what was unique about various rock formations, etc.

Now, let’s fast forward a few months to this past week. A retired lady who likes my son a lot always brings him back a gift from her travels around the world. This time it was a couple of really cool rocks that she found along her route. There was a note attached that said they were sedimentary rocks. Of course, I asked him what that meant and, as you might have guessed, he didn’t know. “But didn’t you study that in school this year?” I asked him. “Oh, yes, but that was months ago. I don’t remember much of it anymore.”

Let’s let that sink in for a minute.

This brings me to the Carnegie unit. It’s the way high schools and colleges marry the number of classroom hours to number of credits earned. It’s all a bit absurd, really. If, for instance, a student needs one school year to master biology, he or she is in luck as that is exactly how long biology must be before we can award a “credit” in the course. But, alas, if a really bright student needs only a half a year to master biology, he or she is out of luck as biology is a year-long course and that cannot be altered. On the contrary, if a student needs more than a year to master biology, he or she again is out of luck. Everyone must master biology (and chemistry and geometry and most other core classes) in 182 days between August and June. By the way, drama and chorus are also year-long courses and are given the same amount of time to master as algebra and geometry.

This is not the time or place to call upon changes that seem out of reach – doing away with the Carnegie unit or even providing some flexibility to states or school districts to revisit how much time each course is afforded.

    Instead, my argument today is about priority. It’s about what’s possible and what really matters.

So I say we teach them to read, write and think.

In science, I say we teach them to read, write and think about science. In social studies, I say we teach them to read, write and think about history and current events. In English, why not just teach them to read, write and think? 

I’m asking this because it’s been troubling me since I first started this blog more than a year ago. In light of this, allow me to repeat some of what I pointed out in that first blog post months and months ago.

I’m reminded of a line from Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. As the ultimate scientist in wont of answers, she is sent into space in search of life among the stars. As she floats weightlessly in the darkness of space, she cannot find the words to describe her experiences. “They should have sent a poet,” she says.

Indeed, they should have sent a poet. 

I say all of this because I believe that the science of learning too often trumps the poetry of learning. It seems that we’re in such a rush to teach content, to feed information to kids, that we don’t take the time to teach students to think. We don’t see it as our first priority to teach kids to question, to reason, to defend their own thinking, to write and speak in passionate and articulate ways. That’s because most of us are teachers of our content first and teachers of all that other stuff as time permits. In fact, we are much more likely to ask students to memorize and than to theorize. I wish it were not so.

    My point is that reading, writing, thinking and speaking are life skills. The other stuff – the formulas, names and dates – are not. In fact, most of us can’t remember a tenth of what we learned in school. Today, if I need one of those names or dates, I hop on the computer and find it in seconds.

I, for one, want more for our kids. The fully learned adult can appreciate and capture what Harvard professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot describes as “the art in the development of science and the science in the making of art.” She also points out that John Dewey made a similar plea for schools to do more in support of context and deep thinking. In his classic text Art as Experience (1934), he called for education to be more artful – beautiful not merely pretty, creative not merely competent, discovery not merely mimicry.

Of course, beauty cannot be rushed. Art cannot either.

Here’s hoping we find a way to slow down a bit and find some poetry among the stars.

What to Teach? What's the Point?

         Literacy Musings...Sometimes I’m tempted to ask every teacher and every student the same question: “So what?” The more I teach and the more I study the art and craft of teaching the more I question why we teach what we do. My latest quest for answers took me to a book that most would find terribly dense and boring: The Struggle for the American Curriculum from 1893-1958 by Herbert Kliebard. It’s a book for those curriculum nerds like me who want to understand why we teach what we teach. It’s a short history of the key curriculum changes in American secondary schools during the early 1900s.

Kliebard begs to explain why we do what we do and he names the men (very few women voices were heard in the 1920s and 30s) whose philosophies shaped what was (and is) taught in American schools. This list of thinkers includes John Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, Charles Eliot and others. While I would not recommend the book to the casual reader (it’s certainly not a page-turner), I would suggest it to anyone who is thinking about tinkering with curriculum standards in any school or district.

The text brings to light a long-standing battle over what should be taught in schools and what kinds of citizens (and thinkers) we’re trying to craft for the next generation. This relates to immersion literacy is many ways, specifically in the areas of reading and writing. It brings us back to one of the key questions surrounding content literacy in schools: What’s the point of learning all of this history, science and literature if it doesn’t serve to make us deeper thinkers and better communicators?  In other words: “So what?”

So what if I know the policy of the Jacobin party during the French Revolution? So what if I know that it was Mark Antony and not Brutus who gave the last funeral speech in Julius Caesar? If we do what Covey (and many others) ask and “begin with the end in mind” we force ourselves as curriculum leaders to wonder aloud about the things that kids are learning in school and whether they are critical to our end-goal of informed citizens who are critical thinkers and readers – a highly literate faction who can write and speak with a command of the language and a knowledge of the world around them.

Let’s make something clear. I would never advocate that young students not have an understanding the French Revolution or other key events in history. Nor would I support excluding the reading of Shakespeare from our schools. Still, I would support the exclusion of the trivial details that our students are asked to memorize for tests and I would replace all that instructional time with a greater inclusion of cross-curricular connections that help students see their studies as sense-making activities that are pieces of a “great picture.”

That phrase – “great picture” -- comes from a report that is referenced in Kliebard’s book (p. 235). In 1935, the National Council of Teachers of English issued a report titled A Correlated Curriculum in which the council members argue for greater correlations between English and other subjects. “The failure to correlate the various subjects of instruction leaves the student unaware of their connections as related parts of the scheme of life.”

Kliebard’s book also spends a great deal of time addressing the key recommendations (and squabbles) among the Committee of Ten, a group of thinkers who in 1893 issued a report that was designed to standardize what was taught in schools. In its report, the committee tackles the teaching of history and social studies and includes a number of value statements that serves to “broaden and cultivate the mind” and to “prepare the pupil in eminent degree for enlightenment and intellectual enjoyment in after years” (meaning the years after formal schooling ends) (p. 239).

Of course, most that kind of lofty thinking was rebuffed and replaced with a more pedantic list of content specific names and dates. David Snedden (1917) was one of the most outspoken critics of the “memorization of highly concentrated facts and generalizations of almost encyclopedic extent and variety.” As Kliebard puts it: “For Snedden, it proved diffcult to imagine how facts and generalizations in history would function in the future lives of students” (p. 240). Unfortunately, there were (and still are) too few David Sneddens with too little clout.

Even today, most middle schools and high schools suffer from too much teaching of too much stuff – and nearly all of it is loosely connected or disconnected from what is taught in the classroom across the hall. That is why I make my plea for teaching less stuff well. And that is why this blog exists – to provide a philosophical base for those who want to deepen their curricula and to offer a few pedagogical steps in making that happen. 

In a report issued by the Yale University faculty in 1828, the professors there made an impassioned plea for a system of education that focused on two things: “the discipline and the furniture of the mind” (original papers, 1829, p. 300). In short, they were referencing the powers of the mind to think critically and the content knowledge that was needed for students to function in society (Kliebard, p. 5). The balancing of those disparate missions continues today with the furniture winning out in most schools on most days.

            I say it’s time for a little more mental discipline whilst the furniture be paired down to only what’s necessary and the rest taken to the curb and sold at cost.

The Great Conversation...Continued

Literacy Musings...In the waning months of 1951 a collection of the country’s great intellectuals, mostly men, gathered in book-filled rooms on the campus of the University of Chicago to join in a conversation that has been ongoing since mankind first began asking questions. What do we want to know? What do we need to know? What does it mean to be learned?     

     Those men were compiling a collection of classical readings that they presented as the Great Books approach to learning, a liberal arts education that has endured throughout the history of Western culture. The idea of reading the great writers and discussing their common themes and understandings is not new. Many universities still embrace this approach. Others have ridiculed the idea as an antiquated method whose time has passed.
       

    Those men titled their collection The Great Conversation. You can find the complete collection in many libraries, including my own. As for me, I’ve spent my summer reading Machiavelli and Hobbes in a desperate attempt to fill in the large gaps in my learning. Though I’m not suggesting herein that we completely embrace a Great Books approach in our middle and high schools, I am making the case that we have much to learn from these works. These great writers have all but disappeared from our schools. Even when they are included in our textbooks, we get only a small excerpt or a short summary of their thoughts. As an English teacher for 10 years, I certainly exposed my students to some of those great writers – Shakespeare, Swift, Milton and Melville to name a few. Still, there are dozens of other writers who my students have never read, and never will.

    In the content areas of social studies, science and math, we almost never see these thinkers in play. Yes, we study Newton’s laws but we don’t read Newton. We study political and economic frameworks but we don’t read John Locke or Adam Smith. We teach math concepts and terms but we rarely study the writings of Pascal or Einstein. That’s probably because those writers are not found on standardized tests.

The editor of this impressive collection was Robert Maynard Hutchins, the former president and chancellor of the University of  Chicago. By the way, Hutchins became president of that prestigious school when he was only 30 years old. In the preface, he writes: “We are as concerned as anybody else at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civilization seems to be taking.”  And then he adds: “Adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone.”

He goes on to provide a rationale for a type of schooling that asks more questions than it answers. He warns about an educational philosophy that rejects the older books for the newer ones, writes off the answers of the past as antiquarian and irrelevant and values only that which is modern and trendy.

“We do not think that these books are the only books worth reading. We think that these books shed some light on all of our basic problems, and that it is folly to do without any light we can get.”

What Hutchins is getting at is a broader sense of knowing that isn’t specific to today, one that refrains from the episodic and reactionary curricula that dominates our modern classrooms. He is talking about knowing yourself better by first knowing those who came before you. He is talking about building on what those thinkers have to share and then adding your own voice to this Great Conversation.

To learn to read, think and write is to learn the habits of mind that help our young people do well on standardized tests but also help them when they leave us, when they are without a pencil and a bubble sheet. Those who are concerned that American adults today are uninspired and uninformed should help us to change our schools so that we create young people who can do more than pass standardized tests. Under the right circumstances, we can develop our young persons so they grow up wondering about things, challenging our mandates and forcing change.

Hutchins writes: “A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled.”

Shakespeare and others have warned us about this many times. In fact, I’m reminded of the great funeral speeches in Julius Caesar as the townspeople gather and then are easily swayed first by Brutus and then by Mark Antony. They are quick to believe all that these great orators are telling them – mindlessly supporting the man who speaks the most eloquently and, well, last.

Let it be said here that I don’t subscribe to reading the Great Books (or any collection of books) as a panacea. In fact, I don’t even agree with the books that are named on many lists of Great Books. What I’m selling is an idea that reading things other than textbooks are critical to understanding the world around us better – necessary for understanding ourselves better. To exclude the Great Books from our current school conversation is to fashion ourselves “know-it-alls,” more modern than they, smarter than they. I call it the hubris of the present.

To talk among ourselves as if our problems are unique to our times and as though we have little to gain from those who preceded us is naïve in the most dangerous of ways. We are not the only participants in this conversation. Many have preceded us and, let us be clear, they are still talking to us today.  

If you listen closely, it’s a conversation with Aristotle and Copernicus, Newton and Freud, Descartes and Pascal. It’s a conversation with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes and Melville. It’s also a conversation with Gwedolyn Brooks and Sandra Cisneros and those who we have not yet met.

Whatever you think of those men in 1951 you cannot deny the nobility of their efforts to challenge our way of thinking, to clarify our path to knowing. And you cannot deny that others were there with them during those long days at the University of  Chicago. Virgil was there, and Plutarch and Dante as well. They were there then, just as sure as they are with us today.

My Awakening, My Voice

Literacy Musings…I have found my voice many times over many years. My personal journey as a writer and thinker has been shaped by many people, some of whom I don’t even know, others whom I cannot recall. I can say with confidence that I know enough about what I believe in and how I best express myself to have a clear and distinctive voice. I also know enough to say that I cannot pinpoint an exact date and time when I finally found it. I can, though, tell you that my literacy awakening is tied to a lifetime of personal awakenings. It seems that the more I learned about myself the more I became a better writer with a clearer voice. Like most, through each phase of my life, I have gained a stronger sense of what I believe in spiritually, politically, morally and philosophically. I guess you can say that I “know thyself” better now than when I was young and directionless.

            That’s what reading will do for you. That’s what self-reflection will do for you.

            I also know that when I was 16 years old I was just as clueless, dumbfounded, and inarticulate as the next kid. I never read anything that wasn’t assigned and I skated through my high school classes by taking every short cut possible, something that I regret to this day. I studied as little as I could, read the Cliff’s Notes whenever I could find them, and I dated a girl who was an honors student and could help me with most things. I beat the system and graduated in the middle of my class.

            That all changed when I went to college, something that no one in my immediate family had ever done. I had no model for success, little money and little support. I had me. When I joined the student newspaper at the University of Florida I was awakened to a world of writing and critique that would be a model for how to teach others. The older students (who served as the newspaper’s editors) would pick apart my writing, sometimes word by word, and offer a sort of in-your-face critique that changed me from an awkward young hack to a confident, reflective story-teller.

           That sort of daily critique of my writing continued after college when I worked for a couple of daily newspapers, covering everything from local government to crimes and misdemeanors. I remember specifically honing my skills around word choice, “tight” writing, metaphor, and detail. I also learned that all writing had to be interesting if I wanted anyone to read it.

            I learned some of the same things when I went back to college the second time to major in English, knowing now that my calling was education (a decision that I’ve never regretted). I learned that poets and novelists wrote with the same skill-sets as journalists. I came to believe that good art is good art, no matter the canvas.

            Sometimes I wrote for money, sometimes for myself. Along the way, the things I wrote started to sound like they came from “me.” I had a voice. It wasn’t until I became a teacher that I realized the role I was to play in helping young students find their own voices – not just as writers but as thinkers.

            I realized that “teaching” young people to think deeper and write clearer was possible for them, just as it was for me. I showed them the “secrets” to writing and studying and learning that I was not exposed to until college. I demanded their best and, funny thing was, they were happy to oblige. Why? Because all kids want to be excellent at school and they all want to learn – even those whose outward appearances say otherwise.

            How do I know? Because I was that kid.

No, I wasn’t the bad kid nor was I the good kid. I was the one in the middle, the one in the back of room who the teacher rarely called on. You could say that I was the kid in school who “defined average.” Now, as a teacher and leader, I have a life mission to re-define average. What do I mean by that? I mean that I’m naïve enough to think that we can raise our expectations for what it means to be “average.” We can expect more from all kids, especially those in the middle. We can demand that they make arguments that are well-conceived in their notions and well-articulated in their manners.

No doubt that students will struggle mightily at first as struggle is a prerequisite to learning. Still, I believe that they will learn. They will find their voices. And they will have much to say.

The Blending of Art and Science

Literacy Musings...What can I say? I’m more left-brained than right-brained. I’m much more of an artist than a scientist. I always have been. That’s not to say that evidence and proofs and formulas are not important. Oftentimes, they are critical to finding the answers. Still, I sometimes wish we were more concerned in schools with the questions than the answers. To put it another way, I’ve just never been one for learning something without a real sense of the beauty or art that accompanies it. Science and discovery are critical and necessary, but science without context (without art) somehow loses its sublimity. I mean, what would the space program have been without Neil Armstrong’s compelling narrative as he descended the steps of the Lunar Module onto the soft terrain of the moon? What would it all have meant to us if Walter Cronkite wasn’t there to relay those death-defying moments in purely human terms? To others, the space race was the ultimate science experiment. To me, it was the quintessential ballet. It was poetry.

     Of all the great memories of the space program, I continually go back to the sound of Jim Lovell and Frank Borman reading from the Book of Genesis as they gazed upon the Earth on Christmas Eve. I’m also reminded of the line from Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. As the ultimate scientist in wont of answers, she is sent into space in search of life among the stars. As she floats weightlessly in the darkness of space, she cannot find the words to describe her experiences. “They should have sent a poet,” she says. Indeed, they should have sent a poet. 

     I say all of this because I believe that the science of learning too often trumps the poetry of learning. It seems that we’re in such a rush to teach content, to feed information to kids, that we don’t take the time to teach students to think. We don’t see it as our first priority to teach kids to question, to reason, to defend their own thinking, to write and speak in passionate and articulate ways. That’s because most of us are teachers of our content first and teachers of all that other stuff as time permits. In fact, we are much more likely to ask students to memorize than to theorize. I wish it were not so.

     My point is that reading, writing, thinking and speaking are life skills. The other stuff – the formulas, names and dates – are not. In fact, most of us can’t remember a tenth of what we learned in school. Today, if I need one of those names or dates, I hop on the computer and find them in seconds. This is not to say that content knowledge has no (or little) value. Of course it does. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous. But it does mean that content without context isn’t knowledge. It’s trivia.

     I, for one, want more for our kids. The fully learned adult can appreciate and capture what Harvard professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot describes as “the art in the development of science and the science in the making of art” (p. 3). She also points out that John Dewey made a similar plea for schools to do more in support of context and deep thinking. In his classic text Art as Experience (1934), he called for education to be more artful – beautiful not merely pretty, creative not merely competent, discovery not merely mimicry.

     Now that’s true knowledge. And you can’t Google that.

Reference

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. & Davis, J. (1997). The Art and Science of Portraiture.

San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.