Hooked: How John Adams became my favorite founder

I have a problem with picking up too many books. In theory I am convinced it is not a problem. At a given time I might have four books that I am reading, usually of a variety of genres. One book is my main pursuit and focus, which is the position any work of literature takes; in addition to that one I am usually working through a book about faith or the life of a believer (last year’s favorite was Shepherding a Child’s Heart); lastly I am typically reading a book about teaching (usually perused just at work). When I began listening to audio books while exercising it increased my threshold to four, and while the genre for this title is open, I avoid repeating those of the other books.

This theory is obviously very particular, but inevitably I pick up books and add them to the piles, thinking I can increase my threshold. I can’t. A case in point occurred over Christmas break. I opened Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, thoroughly enjoying the exposition. I love Dickens–Great Expectations stands strong in my top five list of great books–and the extended time over break seemed like the perfect opportunity to crack into what many consider his best work. The problem is that at the same time, while exercising, I was listening to David McCullough’s 1776. As I’ve mentioned, I loved 1776, and my admiration of McCullough was a topic of a few conversations with my brother-in-law. Inevitably, I suppose, he gave me a beautiful copy of John Adams for Christmas–a hard cover with the deckle edging. Even the paper was beautiful, and I sat on the sofa on Christmas leafing through the pages enjoying the sensuous pleasure of an elegant book.

The trouble is that, given a little extra time, time which I had on Christmas day, the sensuous quality of a book invites one into the intellectual quality of the book’s opening. Depending on the degree, the intellectual quality of the opening then draws one into the quality of the middle, which pulls one through to the end.

That’s my story with John Adams. I opened up to the first pages and found myself hopelessly drawn in by McCullough’s power.

In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. . . . Dressed as they were in heavy cloaks, their hats pulled low against the wind, they were barely distinguishable even from each other, except that the older, stouter of the two did most of the talking.

He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk.

Dickens would have to take a rest. I hated to do such a thing to Dickens, to put him on “get to you later” status alongside The Gulag Archipelago and The God That Did Not Fail, and, I admit it, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek–books I enjoyed but abandoned and now sheepishly intend to finish someday. I hated to do it, but I had to take this step into revolutionary America, because I had to know more about this John Adams fellow from Braintree, the one who talked so much. Plus, in a more immediate sense, I had to find out who the other rider was, and McCullough had not yet told me.

Looking back, I am a bit surprised at what this book did to me. From the moment I began reading I slept little, shared much, and cut out everything possible to leave myself more time to enter John Adams’s world. I enjoy history, but I have always unapologeticly favored  literature. Yet McCullough and Adams paired to hook and hold me like few other books have.

The most obvious reason for my vulnerability to this book was my total cluelessness about the material involved. I knew a little about the revolutionary period–I could probably have passed an elementary school exam on the subject–but my lack of mature understanding made every event in the book a surprise. Take the Declaration of Independence as an example. Though familiar with the document’s contents, my understanding of its creation was light–like a piece of paper with a light pencil sketch of Independence Hall. Onto that sketch McCullough has defined the lines of tension as a colony considered its freedom, and colored for me living scenes of Adams’s boisterous leadership during floor debate.

Similarly, my ignorance about the politics of early America left me astounded at the duplicity of it all. Thomas Jefferson was amazingly sneaky in opposing Adams and Hamilton–prompting others to write materials but never saying anything himself. Madison was similarly engaged in all the partisan political activity that retiring politicians today lament as if it were a modern invention. Of course, those two pale in comparison with Alexander Hamilton, whose name was previously familiar to me because he did something with the treasury and had a duel with Aaron Burr. Now I realize the extent of his ambitions were more than anything I’d imagined–Abigail Adams called him a “another Bonaparte,” and McCullough praises Adams for outwitting Hamilton and ultimately making him irrelevant. Amazing.

All of this information alerts me to how thirsty I am for more. In between chapters I ran to my encyclopedia to find more about Hamilton and Madison, and during down times after work I admit to searching through biographies of Thomas Jefferson. I love the way one piece of information ignites a need for more. I read about Adams’s journey across the Atlantic with his son John Quincy with a dictionary by my side to help me through some of the shipping terminology. Far from frustrating me, however, the descriptions of the sails and the ship and the events thereon left me wondering what books have been written entirely about sailing in the 18th Century or earlier. Whatever they are, I now want to read them.

Of course it would help greatly if those books had also been written by McCullough. The man is a writer, not just an historian. He plays upon my lack of knowledge and practically taunts me with it, letting me know what I don’t know long before he plans to tell me. Take this comment about Hamilton as a sample:

Plainly, Adams feared a military coup by the second “Bonaparte,” which goes far to explain what was soon to take place. (522)

He told me nothing about what was soon to take place, just that this bit of information about his fear would go towards explaining it. That habit prevented me from losing interest as Adams’s life moved from one stage to the next–there always existed an unanswered question about what would happen.

Beyond the tease, however, McCullough exploits the natural strengths of the story. He squeezes an astounding level of play from the character foil between Adams and Jefferson, and the further he squeezes it, the more you realize he’s justified in doing it. One section I read aloud multiple times characterizes the two men’s contrasting notes from a tour of English gardens they took together. Jefferson, McCullough had previously noted, wrote little of a personal nature in his journal, filling it with data on temperatures and purchases, while Adams recorded in his own journal great quantities of personal thinking and feeling. At Stratford-on-Avon, McCullough comically explains how Adams

was distressed by how little evidence remained of Shakespeare, either of the man or the miracle of his mind. “There is nothing preserved of this great genius . . . which might inform us what education, what company, what accident turned his mind to letters and drama,” Adams lamented. Jefferson noted only that he paid a shilling to see the house and Shakepeare’s grave.

Continually McCullough also discusses the polar approaches to money the two men took–Jefferson spending without restraint, Adams living frugally and desiring even more modesty than his functions as a dignitary allowed him to maintain.

Perhaps it is through these contrasts that I discover why Adams himself is so attractive to me. When thinking of the founding fathers, I used to consider myself a “Jefferson man,” if only because my passion for the beautifully written word found a man worthy of accolade in Jefferson. Yet now I have met Adams, a simple, hard working New Englander with a passion for a simple life, lively conversation, correspondence, and books. Here was a man whose faith was foundational to his being and his wife a supporter and instigator of his passion. In short, here was the founder for me.

Anything that would keep me out of Dickens for a month has to be good, but I could not have foreseen how much I would enjoy this book. It is one of the few books I do not recommend, but commend. In fact, I do more than commend, I insist.

What you’ll need to do, however, is let me know what you think after you have read it. It’s what Adams would have done.

Thanks for reading.

________________________________

• Book pile on Flickr by: romana klee

 

You want to be a great teacher? Show some grit and persevere

I hit the print icon at The Atlantic without much thought. The article, called “What Makes a Great Teacher?” sounded like something I should read, and anything in The Atlantic takes longer to read than I want to spend staring at the computer screen. As the toner molded with the page I realized how low my hopes for the article were and half regretted wasting the paper. Its publication in a magazine for general readership might be a rehash of things I had read before, perhaps even a condensed version of What Great Teachers Do Differently, a perfectly harmless book that disappeared from my consciousness within days of finishing it (twice). Ultimately, I’ve spent so much time reading professional development articles that say the same thing in a different way that there is no faster way to discourage me than reading it again.

Then I read the article and realized it contained something a little different. Not a lot different, and nothing I’d never considered before, but enough difference to be refreshing.

The article surveys data Teach for America has been using to track and study its participants over the last decade or so, data the program has not published before and data that throws an interesting punch to the assumptions we carry about great teachers.

For example, five not-surprising general findings of the study are that great teachers

1. Constantly reevaluate what they’re doing
2. Avidly recruit students and their families into the process
3. Maintain focus, ensuring that everything they do contributes to students’ learning
4. Plan exhaustively by working backwards from the desired goal
5. Refuse to surrender to circumstances (which often include poverty, bureaucracy, and budget shortages)

I see “exhaustively” worked its way into the mix, and it appears from reading the article that such an adverb is more significant than one would hope. While none of the official findings declared that great teachers work really hard and lose sleep over it, you can see the relationship between the exhaustive aspect and the work not only in number four on the list, but in number five. In the words of Timothy Daly:

At the end of the day . . . it’s the mind-set that teachers need–a kind of relentless approach to the problem.

I am an old jock, meaning that once upon a time I played a lot of sports and competed athletically. I adored pushing myself physically, and one of the things that seemed to set me apart from those who were not as good as me, and that set those better than me apart from me, was relentlessness. Great athletes relentlessly worked at the sport, no matter how tiring it was. They pushed themselves until they were faster and stronger, until what made them tired today didn’t make them tired tomorrow. They pushed opponents until opponents gave up or made a mistake. They were relentless.

That makes sense to me, not only as an analogy, but as a definitive way to describe the work teachers do in the classroom. Teachers who push to improve despite work loads, despite difficult students, despite bureaucracy, despite technology, despite the exhaustive nature of the work–they’re relentless. Thus, Teach for America has found that the best predictor of success in candidates for teaching is their history of perseverance. Often, that can mean something as simple as GPA (especially trends, like a GPA that rises as college progresses rather than falls) or what they call leadership achievement, where a person runs something and shows tangible results.

The strange thing about teaching, though, is how much time we spend working in other directions. To improve, most districts push for teachers to take classes, to develop themselves professionally. To reward or bait teachers into improving, districts (along with the teachers’ unions) construct pay scales that increase teachers’ pay when more hours of graduate credit have been earned. You’re a teacher and you want a raise? Get a master’s degree. Yet Teach for America’s research shows that “a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.”

That qualifies as the least surprising new thing I have heard this month. My experience in the graduate world of education convinced me of one thing: where a large pool of potential customers exists, customer friendly products are bound to emerge. On the whole, graduate school for teachers is a consumer industry, a ticket one needs to have stamped to get paid a better wage. The instructors in such programs may have higher hopes, and the students might even have momentary visions of something different, but when it is all said and done, it’s about the paycheck, isn’t it? That seems to mean the main thrust of the professional development model is a bust. That is not a claim the article makes, however, so I’ll take the hit if that suggestion is overstated.

Regarding the relentlessness, this article described it as grit, and I like that term. It has given me a new way of viewing what I am doing here, a way that firmly affirms the reality of my situation even as it encourages me to endure.

Are there obstacles? Sure. Lots of them. From disengaged families to entitled students to budget cuts to bureaucratic hoopla, there are plenty of obstacles to go around. Yet when they pop up, what will my response be? According to this article, and according to my experience, that is where a great teacher earns the accolade. The great teacher shows some grit and perseveres.

I am not willing to call myself a great teacher–I have revealed enough on this blog over the years to build a case against myself if ever I am tempted to don such a title–but I am convinced I can do better, and that this is part of the formula.

It has to be, because without grit, I’ll never overcome the relentless pile of papers sitting to the left of my keyboard.

Thanks for reading.

Addendum: Sally Thomas has a few things to say about this article as well and her comments are worth perusing.

________________________________________

• Paceline on Flickr by jowo
• A little boy from Yuksum on Flickr by Sukanto Debnath

 

Asking Google what we wonder

It’s time to write research papers.

Thinking I could ignite curiosity by giving students time to look around the Internet while thinking of topics, and thinking I could direct them towards better research by asking them to develop a list of questions instead of a list of generic topics, I took my sophomores to the computer lab and asked them to write a list of 20 “How come?” questions.

I wrote a list of my own along with them, samples include

• How come Alexander Hamilton was so powerful and well supported?
• How come France sold the Louisiana Territory for so little money?
• How come Venice has waterways for streets?
• How come the Eiffel Tower became the symbol for Paris?
• How come school has 12 grades?
• How come professional athletes make sooo much money?

The questions could be things they knew part of the answer to but wanted to examine more, which is the case for most of my questions. I encouraged them to think of anything interesting from another class, or anything intriguing they’d seen on TV, or anything.

What very many did in response was head straight to Google and type in “How come” and wait for Google to fill in the field. Thus, “How come Michael Jackson is white?” appeared on many papers, and I was embarrassed to see the other things that students saw when they entered the phrase. Other students completed actual searches with that phrase, and the top hit contains a question I saw on at least five papers: “How come yelling on a mountain can start an avalanche?”

Other students couldn’t resist the one-liner pages: “How come Kamikaze pilots wear a helmet?”

I had decided a while ago that curiosity was a problem with my students, but it’s obvious from this assignment that I don’t know how to foster it. Ultimately I asked them, “What are you curious about?” and their response was to turn to Google and ask it, “What am I curious about?” The answer unfortunately appears to be “Very little.”

If education is a journey, the road is uphill.

Thanks for reading.

_____________________

• Dining Venice Style by: vgm8383 on Flickr
• Uphill road by: Steffe on Flickr

 

Living up to a higher situation, or Living higher than the situation?

Questions I am asking myself today:

• Can my students depend on me?
• Am I a consistently kind leader in my classroom?
• Are my expectations high, consistently?

I am still reading through Susan Schaeffer MacCaulay’s For the Children’s Sake and will be for a while, since I read it for only about 15 minutes three or four days a week. Today, though, a section called “Faithfulness” raised the above questions. In that same section I ran across an anecdote I read aloud to my freshmen while launching their massive, student-driven project to create a class journal.

In England, when the top 15 percent used to be creamed off and sent to top “academic” schools, one headmaster (principal) conducted a small private experiement. He took a few children, whose test results had actually placed them well below that top group. Without telling his staff he put them into the elite classes.

Of course, the children and teachers assumed that the tests had projected what sort of person they were–clever and capable. And those youngesters lived up to what the situation told them they could achieve.

Of course, this wouldn’t work in every instance. But what a truth it demonstrates! (51)

Inspired by the example, though not surprised at all (and the “of course” suggests MacCaulay didn’t expect me to be surprised) I read it to my students in an attempt to convey to them what I was trying to do with this large-scale project. I wanted them to know I expect them to accomplish great things, that they are capable of doing something hard.

After such inspirational speeches, however, I am slightly wary, asking myself what students are thinking, knowing the talks rarely come off the way I expect them to. I deliver them with inspirational music in the background, but the music exists only in my head, so students cannot catch the effect.

A minute after class I got my answer. One of the top students in the class came up to me privately and shared something with me:

Could you move John? He’s throwing gum at me and it’s getting in my hair.

Yes. I can move John.

And I can hope that somehow, despite the immaturity, I can be depended upon to maintain high expectations.

Thanks for reading.

 

Give me a landscape made of obstacles

I have a little bulletin board outside the door of my classroom, and periodically I get ambitious and try to fill it up. Currently I have peppered it with quotes and bits of wisdom concerning perseverance and hard work. I thought I’d pass along the contents for the fun of sharing and in case anyone wanted to take any of it.

The banner across the top quotes Dana Gioia’s poem, “Rough Country” and the poem itself is posted near the top of the board:

Give me a landscape made of obstacles!

I also have a brief two paragraph description of John Keats’s poetic endeavors, particularly the failure of his long poem, “Endymion,” which did not stop him from persevering but helped him improve for what he would do next.

Then I’ve got these two signs, created at Picnik from a couple of creative commons licensed images on Flickr.

They’re black and white because I don’t have a color printer here in my department, and I haven’t passed along the urls to the photos because I forgot to save them anywhere other than the fine print of the pictures and am admittedly too busy lazy to try to retype them.

 

O. Henry can’t count: Students notice the obvious in “The Gift of the Magi”

Who knows how many times I have read the beginning of O. Henry’s story, “The Gift of the Magi.” By now I read it the same each time, emphasizing the weight of every specific detail:

“One dollar and eighty seven cents.”

I pause dramatically before moving on, to make sure students catch the feel of Della’s plight even before they know Della.

“That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.”

My pause this time is shorter, as I aim to pick up momentum through the first long sentence of the story, but just as I begin to utter the beginning of that sentence, “Pennies saved one and two at a time . . . “  a student shouts over the top of me.

“Where did the other seven cents come from?”

“What?” I ask, stopping short.

“Where did he get the other seven cents?”

I look up from my paper and see the numbers in my head. 60 pennies? But 87 cents? “I don’t know,” I admit.

“Did he have a 27 cent quarter?” the student posits.

Turning red, I stifle a laugh and bite my lip. Soon I release the laugh and spiked my copy of the story to the floor.

“This is amazing!” I half yell, half laugh. “O. Henry was an idiot!

“And I had no idea!

“You guys are changing literature for me.”

_________________________________________

• Image: Spare Pennies by: smackfu

 

Time to wonder and make things happen: Some thoughts inspired by The Wheel on the School

An older and wiser man than I once told me that his wife’s legs were connected to her heart: whenever this couple began to walk together, she began to spill the contents of her heart to him.

I often thought my own legs were connected to the part of my brain that generates ideas, possibly as a power source. When on the verge of something particularly good, I hop out of my chair and walk, usually on some sort of errand because I am too self-conscious to pace. I like to think John Adams experienced something similar, as he was noted for stretching his legs along the acres of his farm in Braintree as far as five miles a day, a habit he and his son continued even while living on the outskirts of Paris (McCullough).

Methods of wondering and thinking vary widely, obviously. My daughter explained to me yesterday that the character in her book stares into her wooden shoe while she thinks, and another character, the village’s grandmother, rocks back and forth while sucking on a wine ball.

Walking, rocking, or staring into a shoe–the particular method seems to matter less than a common element to each: there exists ample time to use it.

The idea of leaving time to think is one I’ve explored before, but I am convinced it is also intimately tied to the concepts I mentioned this week about play and the structural inability of school or institution to provide an environment for independent and creative play.

Given the constraints of the system, the natural and understandable constraints of a place with hundreds of people guided by dozens, how can school be a place where time is provided for wondering?

This summer I read Susan Winebrenner’s Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom and in one section she discussed allowing gifted students to pursue research projects in place of content they’d already mastered. When doing these projects, she pointed out, students might need to research for a number of days to discover what they’re curious about. They might even need to change their topics after doing quite a bit of work, if they discover that their chosen topic is not interesting or deep enough. The idea behind the method was clear: allow the students to follow their curiosity and form their own project. Let them wonder.

Too often I grow frustrated by students’ lack of curiosity, but too often I do not connect the lack of time to wonder with that lack of curiosity.  If there’s one thing we do well in school, it’s fill the students’ days with prescribed activities. At least, I do it well. It’s admittedly the heart of my classroom management technique: if they’re busy, they won’t have time to misbehave.

Yet I wonder about the unintended consequence of my strategy. Do I help train out of students the initiative to live a healthy life of the mind, one unafraid of time to think? Do I deprive them of the most important tool for problem-solving–time to work on a solution?

The book my eldest daughter is reading (well, having read to her), the one with the wooden shoe and the grandmother’s wine ball, is Meindert Dejong’s The Wheel on the School. In the first chapter the main character, an elementary student in a small class, reads a paper wondering why there are no storks in her town. The teacher seizes upon the idea and asks each student what he knows about storks (all the other students are boys). The final boy’s answer leads to a wonderful tribute to the power of wondering, a tribute that has started me to wondering how I might foster curiosity in my students.

Elka thought a while. “I’m like Lina, Teacher; I know little about storks. But if storks would come to Shora, then I think I would learn to know a lot about storks.”

“Yes, that is true,” the teacher said. “But now what do you think would happen if we all began to think a lot about storks? School’s almost out for today, but if, from now until tomorrow morning when you come back to school, you thought and thought about storks, do you think things would begin to happen?”

They all sat still and thought that over. Eelka raised his hand. “But I’m afraid I can’t think much about storks when I don’t know much about storks. I’d be through in a minute.”

Everybody laughed, but the teacher’s eyes weren’t pleased. “True, true,” he said. “That’s right, Eelka. We can’t think much when we don’t know much. But we can wonder! From now until tomorrow morning when you come to school again, will you do that? Will you wonder why and wonder why? Will you wonder why storks don’t come to Shora to build their nests on the roofs, the way they do in all the villages around? For sometimes when we wonder, we can make things begin to happen.

“If you’ll do that—then school is out right now!” (6)

Is it really that important to create an environment where students can wonder? Does wondering increase reading scores and math scores? My bet is yes, because “sometimes when we wonder, we can make things begin to happen.”

Thanks for reading.