Kluger has a definite opinion about how one should approach and interpret law, and while mine would probably differ from his if I were to learn more about the subject, I was in enough agreement with him, particularly as it regarded the rights of black Americans to full equality, to enjoy the book thoroughly.

I found the story of Charles Houston’s life and work in famous cases and at Howard University particularly inspiring, such that if I were in high school today and had to pick a topic for a speech or paper, his name would top the list. We as Americans are in debt to people like Houston, people who sacrificed their personal lives for a cause only posterity would fully enjoy.

Charles Houston, whose extremely high standards as dean of the law school at Howard University ultimately changed America's history.

Reading the specifics of Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson was disturbing, and I plan to pull some of the excerpts I read in Simple Justice into my American Literature classes next year. One of the most rank sentences in Justice Brown’s Plessy opinion was this:

The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. (74)

With a quick stroke of the pen, Justice Brown separated political equality and social equality, something the Fourteenth Amendment never did. To my mind it is easy to see such words as one of the most tragic sentences in American history. Imagine if he’d never written it. The separate but equal history that followed it might not have had a legal foot upon which to stand. Yet Justice Brown did write it, and like so many Americans to follow him, he didn’t see segregation as objectionable at all:

Laws permitting, or even requiring, [racial] separation in places where [the races] are to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. . . . (74)

How separation does not imply inferiority when it is one race insisting upon the separation at the expense of the other race is something Justice Brown would not admit. Louisa Holt, in her testimony for the Brown v. Board of Education case in Topeka, pointed out quite succinctly the problems with such reasoning:

The fact that it is enforced, that it is legal, I think, has more importance than the mere fact of segregation by itself does because this gives legal and official sanction to a policy which is inevitably interpreted by both white people and by Negroes as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. Were it not for the sense that one group is inferior to the other, there would be no basis–and I am not granting that this is a rational basis–for such segregation. (422)

Such an argument was considered in 1896 when Plessy was decided, but Brown simply brushed it off as a construct of the black race:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two race stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. (79)

To call that Plessy opinion insulting does not begin to describe it. It represents a special kind of denial of or blindness to what is right, a display of how we can perpetuate unrighteousness. Reason is a good tool, particularly as it regards determining justice, but it is as subject to human sin as any other part of us. Looking back on Plessy and the slavery that preceded it and the racial oppression that followed it, knowing that each step was reasoned out and carefully justified, I find myself humbled, because I know those who propagated such sin and rationalized its existence were just as human as I. As Elie Wiesel has pointed out about his Nazi tormentors: they loved their children, they loved music, just like anyone else. To look down on Justice Brown and the segregationist South as more susceptible to unrighteousness is to make me a Pharisee–the older brother of the prodigal son, one who is just as unable as they to see my own rotten humanity. It gives me pause, because in our day there are surely sins of which I am part of perpetuating, likely as blindly, and I wonder if I have the courage to pray for God to reveal to me my own sin. That’s a prayer, my pastor pointed out this weekend, that God tends to answer if we’re willing to pray it.

Thanks for reading.

1. Be fashionably late. If necessary, hang out outside the door for a couple minutes to make sure all your interviewers have a chance to get settled before you make your big arrival.
2. Wing it. Researching the company and the position’s qualifications are really not as important as showing them who you are despite what they want.
3. Relaxing is for sissies. If you’re too relaxed during the interview, they’re likely to think you’ll be relaxed on the job—like naps-when-they’re-not-looking and shopping-for-St.-Patrick’s-Day-relaxed. Be tense. It’ll show them you mean business.
4. Put your game face on. Everyone smiles during interviews, but look around a typical workplace. Are they all smiling? Are they friendly? It’s not really what the place wants. Want they want is victory. Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan didn’t win championships smiling nice. Put your game face on, and they’ll know you’re a winner.
5. Don’t look them in the eye. Don’t look an angry dog directly in the eye, or he might attack. You look your interviewer directly in the eye, and the next thing you know, you could find yourself in the bathroom with scotch tape trying to repair your pretty dress.
6. Leave your philosophy at home. They know you have an approach to the job and some sort of experience. You wrote it on the application. Why should you repeat it now? Nobody wants to hire that guy who retells all the same stories all the time.
7. Look different. Dressing nice is fine, but what about making yourself stand out? What about looking so memorable they’re talking about you before they even get to your name in the pile of interviewees?
8. Don’t ask questions. People say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but are you willing to risk your future job on such a maxim?
9. Come Empty Handed. Paper, pen, and the ability to take notes? This interview is not a time for jotting love notes and admitting you can’t remember anything. They see you jotting a note, they’ll automatically think: “This is the kind of person who will go to the bathroom and forget why they got up from their desk.”
10. Don’t say thank you. Saying thank you implies that you owe them something. Your thinking they owe you something means your confidence is too low. You deserve this. You own this. This job is yours, and this interview is simply a formality you have to go through before you take over that interviewer’s corner office with the window. Saying thank you is simply admitting weakness.

• Mother on Flickr by: Mick and Wout

It is the duty of the educator to prepare students to live lives of quality and purpose¹. Intellectually, a life of quality involves being reasonable, adept, and thoughtful, and enables people to be vigilant citizens² of their community. Skills that will prepare students to live such a life include the ability to reason carefully (part of what I mean here is often referred to as critical thinking), to think agilely (within this is the idea of problem solving) and to reflect deeply.  These skills and the knowledge base needed to sustain them are best attained through an interdisciplinary, liberal arts study.

Within the humanities, these skills are attained best when students evaluate how others express their thinking and precisely what thinking is expressed. In concert with that evaluation, the students themselves attempt to express substantive ideas in clear and convincing ways. Said another way, these skills are attained by examining to what extent others have expressed beautifully that which is true, and by attempting themselves to express truth beautifully.

Language arts content that aids this pursuit is measured by its ability to last (that is, its endurance for yielding pleasure and insight after close and repeated study) and its ability to develop in students empathy for fellow people.

Within this pursuit, the teacher is foremost a model of that which is taught, which obligates the teacher to live that life of quality and purpose. As a model, the teacher is therefore able to act as a guide for others, serving occasionally as a source of knowledge but mostly as one who points the way for fellow explorers.

It is important to note that a life of quality and purpose is not synonymous with a life of academic scholarship. Students’ interests, talents, and areas of intelligence vary, and it is appropriate for educators to expect production to vary. It is essential, however, that once such individuality is taken into account that educators expect quality from students, as accepting less conditions students to apply poor efforts and undercuts the very attribute education is intended to produce.

Along these lines, an educator has a duty to view students individually, to work with them practically, empathizing with them before reprimanding them and using the most appropriate disciplinary strategy for each situation.

The teacher is not above the student but farther along than the student, and the teacher’s purpose is to show the student how to come to that same place of quality and purpose.

___________

1. It must be said that from my perspective a life of purpose is tied to a Christian world view, succinctly summed up in the Westminster Shorter Catechism: man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. In this view a life of purpose is not possible without that transcendent meaning. Since I teach in a secular institution, I do not teach students this purpose, but I leave it in my philosophy of education because even in this secular context I am convinced that purpose and meaning are essential for a life of quality. See, for example, Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning.

2. I am indebted to Robb Webb for the phrase “vigilant citizen.”

Everybody has a time in their life when they have the urge to read. Books, magazines, and newspapers are among the best to read. Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to have that feeling anymore.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the answer. If you suffer from a disease that causes you to like reading, this book is a must. It will make you not want to read another book in your life. Scientists say 95% of the people in my English class are glad we are done reading it.

Be careful when reading this play in a book and don’t read too much at any one time. But lack of use may result in a care about reading. Side effects may include: drowsiness, headache, backache, side ache, heart attack, mild foot pain from kicking it across the room, and a lack of possible fun that could have been had instead of reading.

If you come to the front of the class I will give you a copy free of charge and if you are the first one up here I will give you all of the copies I can find; they make really good fire starters.

I could explain why this young man likely felt this way about the book, but instead I’ll just laugh. Keep in mind, I’m not “laughing it off”; I’m laughing, because what he said was funny, and that’s about all there is to it.

Thanks for reading.

• Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Flickr by: Hunter333

I want to be the kind of reader who can note insights in the margins of my text and leave a trail hot so I can find it again later. Perhaps someone will appreciate those notes someday—say a child or grandchild who acquires a copy of a particular book; or perhaps that record will be of interest only to me. Either way, if there exists an ideal of the kind of reader I want to be, David McCullough may have described it best in his biography of John Adams:

Unlike Jefferson, who seldom even marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstoncraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestly. “There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them . . . ,” Adams read in Rousseau. “The government ought to be what the people make it,” he wrote in response.

At times his marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in Mary Wollstoneccraft’s French Revolution, which Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said. To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels . . . but it would not tell the time of day.” On a blank page beside the contents, he wrote, in part:

If [the] empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and all morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained? . . .

In all, in this one book, Adams’s marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words. (619)

The most heavily annotated page in Adams's copy of the French Revolution. Look at the size of those margins! (from the John Adams Library: http://www.johnadamslibrary.org/explore/highlights/highlights3.aspx)

Adams seems to fit the first character Billy Collins sketches in a poem called “Marginalia,” one who is vehement and definite in his opposition to what is printed on the page:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Connor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

In moments, I have been this character. In a book on writer’s notebooks, where the writer aspired to make all her students follow writing habits similar to professional writers, I scrawled angrily, “They’re not all going to be writers!” But it’s one of the only notes I jotted in the book. One time in college I was so frustrated with a long poem—it was “Child Harold’s Pilgrimage”—that in exasperation I scrawled, “What the heck is he saying” and then stabbed the page so severely that the imprint went through Child Harold and into the rest of Lord Byron’s section in the anthology. I reread that passage recently, and it is tough, but I am sure it’s infinitely tougher on five hours of sleep and read in large chunks with little time to spare, which is surely the rest of the context surrounding that little tantrum. Such examples may constitute margin notation, but more what they show is that the ways I am not like John Adams make a long list.

I began marking books in high school, when I took a class where we were asked to buy the books. Thus I bought Robert Pirsig’s The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and attempted to explain to Pirsig ways I thought he was wrong. I was only 18, so I felt a bit daunted by the task, but also felt the need to tell Pirsig, or at least myself, what I thought about particular passages.

In college the art of marking passages became a necessity, but I still did so timidly, as Collins describes:

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

I definitely used pencil, and I was definitely tentative. One time I went to a professor and asked him what he marked when he read, not so much because I felt like I could use an insider’s tip to sharpen my own skills, but because I figured I wasn’t doing it right.

As tentative as I was, marking was fun and became a bit of a game for me. I’d mark in pencil while I read, trying to identify key passages in the literature, occasionally writing a word in the margin, but more frequently just underlining a sentence or two. When I’d finish a chapter, I’d flip back through the book and review the underlined passages, so as to solidify in my mind the thrust of what I’d read. In class, the professors would lecture through the book, and if they mentioned a passage, I’d underline it in pen. I’d give myself proverbial bonus points if I had already underlined the passage they read, and I used the frequency of these bonus points as a measure of my improvement as a reader.

But that is my most dominant marking habit—marking important passages, mostly for future retrieval. It means that for the most part I mark things I support in what I am reading.  I am like the

Fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

Timothy Keller gets lots of checkmarks when I read him, and when I want to find a passage in The Reason for God, I am reasonably confident that while flipping through the book I can focus my attention on just the underlined passages, because if I liked it enough to remember it, I probably underlined it.  Granted, my underlining can get to be a bit much in my favorite books: that copy of John Adams is so full of underlined passages that I created a note card index to my markings, so when I want to return to a particular section I begin by consulting the note card (I found the passage on Adams’s marginalia on the fourth note card in the set).

Yet the interaction aspect of such notation lacks something; in fact, it’s generous to call it notation, since there are usually no notes accompanying the underlining. I obviously aspire to interact more thoroughly with my texts—hence the John Adams ideal—but somehow I don’t quite achieve the goal. Mostly the margins of my books contain checkmarks and the occasional name of another writer who makes a similar point and who popped into my mind while reading.

Inherent in this judgment about my lack of notation is a conviction that I could be reading better. Like Thoreau sucking the marrow out of life, I want to suck the marrow of wisdom from a book so thoroughly that the spine crumbles. If I were interacting with it more, jotting more insight into the margin, that would be evidence of such appreciation.

In my time since college, however, I have come to realize that my lack of conversation in the margins of my books may have less to do with my ability to read well and more to do with my habits of reading and noting. To this point, noting for me has been an act of marking, of place-keeping. I note so as to find it later, to make reference more simple and to highlight key passages for consideration. Though I rant at times of extreme objection, I know I am not like John Adams, for he and those like him are conversing more thoroughly than I ever have while reading. I am closer to those Collins describes, whose markings in a book assert how much we want to be like Adams more than how much we are like him:

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages

What is the difference, then, between me and readers like Adams?

I think Alan Jacobs reveals part of it for me in his recent book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Most fundamentally, Jacobs praises the act of reading slowly: “We should not underestimate what can be accomplished by those who are willing to read more slowly and with greater care” (70).

Jacobs links reading with greater care to marking texts, and that link is particularly important, he shows, when it concerns questions or confusion:

If you write the question in the book’s margin—even if you just scrawl a question mark—you are marking the scene of your confusion. You are registering your puzzlement, not for the book’s sake but for your own sake. The interruption in the flow of your reading is a significant event, and you are quite literally taking note of it. (56)

It’s the interruption of the reading that Jacobs then focuses on, pointing out the virtue of stopping to write out the entire question in the margin of the book, as it

Takes more time—it gets you out of the flow of mere passive reception—and . . . it forces you to articulate the precise nature of your vexation. A mere question mark could indicate confusion, disagreement, a feeling of lacking information—any one of a dozen things. When you write out your question you render the discomfit exactly. (57)

In writing a question I discover what is forming at the back of my mind, and if I were to read on, I would likely forget the specific nature of my curiosity. Stopping gives me time to respond, to form what Jacobs calls “attentive response” (61).

That attentive response is a major part of what I lack in comparison to Adams and his ilk, but it’s not all. I may read King Lear as slowly as I can, but the truth is that I rarely have insight inside me worthy of writing on the page. Yet I noticed something this year while teaching in my Shakespeare class. In preparing our reading of the plays, I was enjoying reading into the deeper layers of Shakespeare—those layers T.S. Eliot described as revealing themselves gradually and which I for the most part happily ignored while in college. I ascribe my interest in these layers to my re-reading of plays—it was the second time I’d taught the class, and I was benefiting from the re-teaching of Othello and As You Like It. That seems to me to be a clear argument for the virtue of revisiting the classics, and a perfect example of how men like John Adams gain the insight they did. It wasn’t the first time he’d interacted with the ideas in the text, and the second time around, he was more prepared to respond and interact.

That’s not to say that Adams reread every book he marked in, but McCullough notes in the passage I quoted that Adams read Wollstoneccraft’s French Revolution at least twice, and his reading in his area of expertise—philosophy of government—certainly enabled him to think particularly critically when reading any book on such a topic (which means it wasn’t the first time he’d interacted with the ideas). Like it or hate it, if the book is worthwhile, one reading is likely not enough. In the words of Jacobs again, “A first encounter with a worthwhile book is never a complete encounter, and we are usually in error to make it a final one” (128).

I am reading a book right now called Education for Human Flourishing. Written by Paul Spears and Steven Loomis, it’s a pretty thick book examining the foundations to educational philosophy, and I am determined to extract every bit of wisdom I can from its pages. To do so I’ll need to use my pencil for more than underlining, and to do that, I’ll need to slow down, stop often, and review. So far, I’m improving: the first chapter is 30 pages long, and in its margins I have jotted 33 notes. I’ll never be John Adams, but perhaps with practice I can become a margin man.

Thanks for reading.

_______________________________________________________

• Collins, Billy. “Marginalia.” Sailing Alone Around the Room. New York: Random House, 2002.
• Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. New York: Oxford, 2011.
• McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

That didn’t change the truth of the statement, however. That the first impression carries too much weight is well described in William Poundstone’s article for the Wall Street Journal, “How to Ace a Google Interview“:

The deep, dark secret of human resources is that traditional job interviews don’t work very well. In fact, there’s been quite a bit of research on the topic. One example is a famous experiment that Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal of Harvard did in 1992, with videotapes of traditional interviews. People who saw 10-second clips of an interview had roughly the same opinion of the interview subject as did the actual interviewer—making a strong case that job interviewers go by first appearances and are fooling themselves into believing they’ve gleaned additional information from everything that comes after.

That first impression matters, even when it misleads us, as it obviously does in job interviews.

Yet I cannot convince my students how crucial this truth is, especially as it relates to their writing. They’ll write an article and they find the introduction so difficult that they just skip it. Or open with just their thesis statement. Or ask a question.

I hate it when they ask a question. I tell them the risk of a question is that it invites an answer.

“Have you ever wondered why Nike makes shoes?”

No, I haven’t. Next, please.

“Should marketers target kids?”

I don’t know. Next.

“Have you ever wanted to go white water rafting?”

No. NO. No!

As jaded as I have become to the opening question–a crutch I have forbidden in students’ writing, by the way–I am really quite open to strange first lines. I am such a sucker for a good opening, in fact, that the residual enjoyment of one has  carried me through half a book. It has also caused me to abandon books. I’ve been happily reading something when I have casually, innocently, picked up a different book and glanced at its first page. That’s what happened with David McCullough’s John Adams, a book I had not intended to start the day I got it as a Christmas present, since I had just begun Bleak House. But McCullough opens like this, and I knew Dickens would be there when I was finished, and I couldn’t help myself:

In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.

The same thing almost happens every time I re-read The Odyssey with my students. I read a shortened version of it with them (alas, it is the truth) but after the open I always want to return to the entire thing:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns,
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

Similarly, no matter how unenthusiastic I may be about guiding a new group of 15 year olds through Romeo and Juliet, I get excited at the first familiar words of the prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona where we lay our scene.

I’m a sucker for intros. Last week I went to the library intending to look at Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice. It’s a history of the Brown v. the Board of Education decision and the struggle for equality that lead up to it, and it was recommended to me years ago by one of my college buddies, one who has now become a history professor specializing in the history of civil rights and the evangelical church’s role in them. I found the spot on the shelf and cursed my friend’s recommendation, for this book was almost two inches thick. I didn’t have time for 800 pages; I had other things on my list that I wanted to read. But I checked it out anyway and if I really hadn’t wanted to read it, I shouldn’t have opened to the first page:

Before it was over, they fired him from the little schoolhouse at which he had taught devotedly for ten years. And they fired his wife and two of his sisters and a niece. And they threatened him with bodily harm. And they sued him on trumped-up charges and . . .

And it goes on, but I have to stop typing. As soon as I finished the first page, I knew I’d be reading the book. The same thing happened with Susana Clarke’s tome of a novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel:

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

I was hooked by the end of the second sentence and by the end of the first paragraph, won over (you’ll have to read the rest of the paragraph on your own).

There’s really no end to great openings, though. Yesterday I was drawn to the bookcase by our beautiful copies of The Lord of the Rings. I was curious how old our kids need to be before I can begin reading Tolkien aloud with them–yes, I know how long the books are, and I admit it’s something I’ll want to do for myself if they’re willing to come along for the ride–and I was reminded how wonderful the opening to The Fellowship of the Ring is:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

When a writer says eleventy-first in the first sentence, you know you’re into something different, something strange and, well, something itself of special magnificence.

My conviction is clear: anybody who can write an introduction like these knows how to write a book I want to read. This is a message I need my students to hear. If you can write an intro; if you can hook the reader in one paragraph, they’ll trust you enough to listen to you, to like what you have to say possibly even more than they should.

We certainly work on introductions. I give my students handouts, we survey writers’ techniques, and I give them essays with the introductions removed and have them rewrite a list of potential openings for them. But that is just the drill. What they ultimately need to do is give it a shot. They’ll never suddenly figure it out if they never try something new, if they never take a risk and try out a wild attention grabber. I’d much rather a student reach for awkward attention grabbers and introductions than be too scared to attempt one.

The beautiful thing about writing in school is that it isn’t the real world. We teachers may knock ourselves out trying to create for our writing assignments genuine real-world purpose, but sometimes, when you’re learning how to do something, it’s nice to know it isn’t the real deal. Perhaps if a student is willing to practice creating striking openings in the “lab”, they’ll have discovered how to make that important first impression by the time it really counts.

But if they never figure it out, at least they can look at my example and realize they’re not totally hosed even if that first impression thing bombs. After all, I got hired.

Thanks for reading.

Of course, I like ideas and I find it a tad ridiculous that anyone would be lacking ideas when people like me find it so easy to think of them. I suggested to a few legislators that they read Daniel Pink’s Drive for a better understanding of human motivation (at least as far as research tells us), figuring it would be a good place to start. As I mentally returned to Pink’s topic, I found myself generating my own ideas regarding teacher-evaluation and learning, ideas I think far outstrip Governor Daugaard’s proposal, especially in its understanding of people. Pink explores three factors essential for motivating people in creative and problem-solving careers: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Since I think purpose is something inherently wonderful about education my idea focuses primarily upon the first two characteristics (though purpose comes into play). The idea is an amalgamation of things I have seen elsewhere, and it is one I am growing to like, to be honest.

Autonomy

The basis of the plan goes like this. Each year teachers 1) identify an area in which they would like to improve, 2) create a plan for improvement, and 3) work to improve in that area. The area where they need to improve is selected by the teacher (hence, autonomy). It is really selected by the teacher, not a Model-T style where they can study anything they want, as long as it is formative assessment. Is the teacher wanting help on classroom management? Then maybe they’ll read about it or do a series of classroom visits with colleagues who are good at it. Is the teacher wanting to look into a writing workshop? Perhaps the teacher can take a class and read a couple books on it. Is the teacher wanting to increase her knowledge of Shakespeare to sharpen her content knowledge? Then perhaps she should read a couple of his plays and a book or two about the Bard. It is crucial that the area of study is chosen by the teacher, and that the teacher is seen as a scholar capable of guiding this process. Too many of our professional development classes are narrowly focused within a small range of technical skills, and if we were to force teachers to choose particular topics for their learning, we would narrow the possibilities. Take my recent reading as an example: James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599. I will never find a professional development class on this topic, yet I learned more from this book that will make me a better teacher of my Shakespeare class than I ever did by taking the professional development classes that have historically consumed my time.

Mastery

The plan I described above is not revolutionary. Through the eight years I have spent at my current school I have seen at least two attempts at such a reflective learning plan, but to no avail. Why? For one, the plans rarely granted teachers true autonomy (see the Model-T reference above). Further, they never supplied the teachers with enough time to allow them to pursue mastery. The purpose was undercut because teachers knew the plans were little better than worksheets that no one had time to complete or examine. The scope of the reflective work was so small that even attempting it wholeheartedly did not lead to mastery.

Accountability, Purpose, and Mastery continued

Part of what I think is missing is a system of true accountability, which actually adds an element of purpose to the pursuit. If, to create a parallel example, I ask students to complete a writing assignment but then do not read it, it undercuts the idea that what they have done has any purpose. I might say to them that the assignment’s purpose is to improve their skills and that my reading it will not alter whether their skills have improved. But what they will likely hear is that their work is not important enough for me to look at. In one sense accountability is a way of tracking someone, of seeing that they’re doing what the authority wants. In an additional sense, though, accountability, if conducted in a respectful manner, shows that the authority cares enough about what someone is doing to be involved in checking it.

This is why I think a system of accountability that respects teachers as scholars would be highly motivational and would lead to more mastery than exists within the current system. In my little idea that I’m crafting here, each teacher completes an inventory of what they are doing to improve through a given year. What are you, as a professional, learning this year? The portfolio, of sorts, is made up of a description of learning and “artifacts” to show that the learning has actually taken place. Artifacts might be samples of students’ work, or they might be a series of reflective journal entries written in response to some books that the teacher has read, or they might be a paper or two that the teacher has written assembling various pertinent research. Hopefully they would be a compilation of all those things, but its precise form should also be flexible, not formulaic (a formula severely undercuts autonomy).

Once completed, the teacher submits this learning portfolio to a panel made up of fellow teachers and an administrator. In a large school I would have a number of panels, in smaller schools, one or two. On a particular panel, I would have five people (including that administrator). Two would be teachers from a pool that is serving on the panel that year. In a bigger school, one should be from the same department as the evaluated teacher. That pool would need to serve for the whole year to maintain consistency, and teachers would be selected for (or, more likely elected to) that position, hopefully putting in place only the most trusted and fair colleagues. Also on the panel would be a teacher more or less drawn at random (every teacher should be obligated to serve on a panel or two through the course of the year) and one colleague selected by the evaluated teacher.

That panel then would listen to a presentation from the teacher where the teacher would describe the learning that took place–essentially giving a tour through the portfolio–and speak to any questions the fellow teachers would have. The administrator, who would have been the one to sit in on the teacher’s classroom as an observer, could share relevant information from the observation that would support or bring into question what was learned. At the end of the presentation, the panel of teachers should discuss with the teacher their thoughts about the learning that has taken place, give a type of recommendation or commendation, as applicable, to the administrator, and then that could be considered as part of the evaluation of that teacher.

In concept the panel is an accountability piece, put in place to verify that the teacher is learning. It provides an intimidating audience, to be sure, but about as fair a one as can be conceived of as well. Theoretically, the simple act of having to tell other people what you’re doing to learn would motivate a teacher to take the learning seriously–who wants to be the teacher who gets called out for taking the easy route?

But such a panel also provides an opportunity for teachers who are working hard to share with colleagues what they have done. How often do teachers in their normal working arrangements get to share what they are doing with an audience who would appreciate it? It does not happen. Some colleagues of mine who just completed graduate school were begging people to come to their final presentations, which were conducted on a Saturday (the presentations were quite good, by the way–much better than most of what I have seen at education conferences). They had worked extremely hard and were proud of what they’d learned, and having an audience for it was invigorating and motivating. Yet the crowds were small and made up mostly of family and close friends. These colleagues deserved more official recognition of their professional work.

The Reality Check

Would a plan like this cost money? Certainly. If it would work well, teachers would need time to work on the research and reading that goes along with learning and improving. If teachers were to sit on panels they would need subs to cover their classes (or for the two who are on all the panels, perhaps even an extra planning period–a nice perk for taking on the extra responsibility). With a plan like this I’d be of the opinion that teachers’ contracts should be extended with proportional compensation. That might be expensive, but would it cost as much as the governor’s plan, which, according to an editorial in the Rapid City Journal, is going to be one of the most dramatic increases in education funding in state history? All that money for a plan that likely will not even work?

Ultimately my plan is not about money and I share it not so much because it needs to be published but because the governor’s plan needs a foil; it needs something that by comparison will reveal how empty it is. My “plan” is about understanding what it is to be human and what motivates a human being. We are not computer programs needing a new input or upgrade; we are not hogs getting excited about a bigger cup of Kool-aid at the end of the race; we are people.

As people, we frequently need to be encouraged in our goal of guiding children to lives of quality and purpose, and a good way to motivate us, to encourage us, is to approach our profession with a high view, to see us as scholars capable of and interested in improving and learning. To use Daniel Pink’s framework, it means seeing us as worthy of being granted autonomy, as capable of pursuing mastery, and as requiring purpose in our pursuits. The governor’s plan, with its focus on making it easier to fire teachers and rewarding the very top tier, does not take a high view of our profession. It is pessimistic in its core. Perhaps what he and others might consider doing if they want to motivate teachers to improve is begin by understanding who we are and what we are trying to do.

Thanks for reading.

• Learn on Flickr by Mark Brannan

• $5,000 bonuses each year to the top 20 percent of teachers in each district.
• $3,500 bonus each year to secondary math and science teachers
• No more tenure for teachers

Opinions obviously abound, including this one from Jim Shaw, the former mayor of Rapid City who supports the plan and has apparently been waiting for something like it to be introduced:

Facts show we can do a much better job. The U.S. spends twice as much per student compared to most other countries, but our student achievement rankings are near the bottom.

Daugaard’s statistics point out that student enrollment in South Dakota declined by almost 50,000 between 1971 and 2011, but the number of teachers increased by 869 and other school staff by 3,569.

Daugaard also says spending per student in the state has more than doubled during that time, but test scores in South Dakota have remained flat.

Daugaard articulated what many of us have long believed: Simply throwing more money into education without increased accountability is not the answer.

Personally I was not big on the plan, though not due to specific items but due to its overall assumption about what motivates human beings (and teachers in particular). In reading the newspaper’s description of Daugaard’s plan, I flashed back to the research into human motivation that I read about in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive. In Drive, Pink presents a damning case to the carrot and stick methods of reward and punishment that we so often fall back on, at least in the context of creative and problem-solving pursuits.

In one sense, the observation is obvious. We are not motivated by money nearly to the extent that we believe. Would Gov. Daugaard have come up with a way of solving the budget shortfall without making cuts if we’d simply offered him monetary incentive? Of course not. Similarly, teachers are not going to be motivated to teach better because they might get a bonus. In fact, any teachers who might be motivated by such a bonus would likely be the ones on the very opposite end of the spectrum–in threat of receiving the stick of firing.

A decent salary makes me feel valued and helps me decide whether I can enter the profession. Today, however, I am trying to do my best for my students, but I hadn’t thought about my paycheck until I picked up the newspaper and read about this issue. What that means is that my paycheck is not a motivating factor. A decent salary makes it so I can stop thinking about my salary and focus entirely upon why I am here–teaching students.

There are specific details in the governor’s plan that a person could discuss, but it is the overall approach that alarms me, and I hope as the legislature moves forward to evaluate it, they will consider the wisdom of the underlying principal of attempting to motivate a workforce with carrots and sticks.

This is the message that I sent to my state representatives, whom I chose to contact through email. The responses I received were prompt and thoughtful. The legislative representatives and senators recognized my concern, occasionally sharing it, but also recognized a need to do something, and they were glad that the governor came forward with a concrete idea.

In a further response to a state senator, I chose to highlight a secondary area of concern I have with the plan–its potential effect on the culture of the faculty.

The nature of our education system’s given task is team-driven. As teachers, none of our students are ours alone. We are measured as a school and held accountable as a school. At the high school level I am one teacher of six a student likely has at a given time, and there is a real chance at my school that a student could have as many as 30 different teachers during high school. If that student performs well in my classroom, that is great, but the reality is that I am about 1/30th of his classroom experience here. I am part of a team of teachers working to impact that student’s learning; there is no way to pretend I am more significant than that.

In this way, Governor Daugaard’s plan concerns me in its need to rank teachers–an action that strips away the emphasis on team and clearly identifies who is most valuable and who is not. I have heard some folks express concerns that the plan could stifle collaboration–that teachers will be less likely to share good ideas because those ideas are what might make them part of the top 20%. I suppose this could be true, but honestly, I doubt it would be the case in more than a few rare instances. What seems more likely is that teachers will move through their days and interact with colleagues with the aura of competition and measurement hovering over them, and that kind of unwitting obsession definitely undercuts the team-identity. How can a person focus on students when they’re focusing on themselves?

• “This new hire is pretty sharp. Will she bump me out of the 20%?”
• “The principal popped his head in the door. Was that activity good enough to keep me in the 20%?”
• “I got an advanced class–good. Perhaps then my students’ scores will put me in the top 20%.”
• “She’s been in the top 20% for two years, but we all know she’s not that good a teacher.”
• “I am just not a top 20%, but I’m not a bottom 20% either, so what does it matter?”

If a basketball team had only five players, would the coach rank them all every week, rewarding only the top two players with special recognition and incentive? How would that motivate the other three? How would that help the team? Does it matter whether I’m the second or third best player on the team, or does it matter whether I do whatever it takes to help the team win the game?

Through my eight years of teaching I will confidently affirm one thing above all others: teaching is quite difficult. A plan that measures and ranks teachers can easily erode confidence that all teachers need–even those who would rank only in the top 40% of teachers rather than the top 20%. I can see such a plan agitating and magnifying teachers’ insecurities and defensive responses to correction and critique, because it places the teachers in a position where they need to think of themselves and their status. I can see it undercutting the true state of our pursuit: a team working to propel the learning of a large group of young people.

Do I have any constructive alternatives? This is the challenge one representative tossed at me, and at this moment I have to admit I don’t have any direct substitutions to mention. I do not recognize some easy tweak to the governor’s proposal that would make it palatable, because it is the underlying approach of the plan that concerns me, and any ideas I would have would admittedly begin by scrapping the plan and re-evaluating the original goal: how can we motivate teachers to improve? It seems to me that much more motivational would be a plan that works to empower teachers to improve themselves and that gives them the time and opportunity to master their profession. I could talk for an hour about a plan like that . . .

And that might be exactly where people like me are failing. The dominant theme I detected in my state legislature’s responses was this: “We can see there needs to be fixing, and no one has any better idea, so this is what we’re going to do.” When the governor presented his plan, I jumped up and wrote to my state legislature to say I did not like it. But before he presented that plan, I never said boo to anyone about ideas I might have to improve our lot.

Duty is a word we don’t use much anymore in our culture outside of Marine commercials, but that does not eliminate it. I think I have a duty as a teacher and citizen to participate more fully in the legislative process; a duty to be not only protective and reactive to legislation that is introduced, but pro-active and constructive about legislation and policies that do not exist yet.

Later this week I think I’ll jot one idea I have, something that fits my qualifications as empowering teachers to improve and giving them time to master their profession. Perhaps it won’t help anything or matter, but it’s better than just complaining.

• SD State Legislature on Flickr by: Paul-W

Possibly due to how obvious my fascination with such books is, a friend recently asked me for some titles to read with his sons when they were gone on a trip. It got me thinking about boys and books and what kinds of titles I tend to suggest when boys are looking for something to read. I thought I’d share a few titles I constantly put in front of my 9th and 10th grade boys when they’re looking for something.

It seems important to mention that I am not talking about “struggling readers” with these–that brings up an entirely different category of suggestions.Neither am I necessarily talking about AP Literature bound students. These are books I find don’t get rejected by grade-level reading ability males in their freshman and sophomore years.

Without further ado, here are 10 books I think boys will like:

Lord of the Flies by: William Golding

Golding has said that he chose to feature boys in this book because boys tend to show the traits he wanted to explore in a more obvious manner. He included no girls because themes of sexual tension were not what he was after. I remember reading this novel in high school and only half joking with my childhood buddy which characters we would have been. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a good one.

Shiloh by: Shelby Foote

This book utilizes the same research Foote uses in his Civil War: A Narrative, but the book is fiction. I listened to the CD from the library this summer and it was one of the best read audio books I’ve heard. It certainly does not glorify war, but it explores it and considers the battle from many angles; that is something I think many guys want to do.

True Grit  by: Charles Portis

Obviously this novel has been adapted for film twice with great results each time. I listened to the book and it was awfully interesting. The protagonist is a girl, so it may not seem manly on the surface, but the themes easily open up conversations about what grit is and why it matters, and most guys can appreciate the kind of grit on display here (I’ve actually read about some interesting research that shows that what we call grit is the single biggest predictor of success for individuals–far more accurate than GPA, extra-curricular involvement, or test scores).

Endurance by: Alfred Lansing

    My obsession with Shackleton is well documented, so there’s no need to recount it here. The book starts slow but gets entrancing before long.

Into Thin Air by: Jon Krakauer

I loved this book. Granted I have always had a fascination with high altitude climbing anyway, but what guy with an adventuresome spirit wouldn’t? This book really brings up questions about how far is too far when it comes to taking risks, as well as questions about what is most important when pursuing a goal. Plus that it’s all true is fascinating.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by: Sherman Alexie

A former student of mine–an American Indian student–told me he was reading this book and that I should read it. I did and later asked him why he liked it so much. “It’s so true,” he said. Alexie captures what it is to be a teenage boy and from the perspective of my student, at least, what it is to be an American Indian boy. There are a couple sections with crude talk, but to be honest, it’s far less crude than what I used to hear in the locker room, and it arguably does much to contribute to the genuine nature of the character.

Friday Night Lights by: H.G. Bissinger

This is about Odessa, Texas more than the games, and many students hate the book because they think it’s going to be an exciting sports novel. If, however, a student is thoughtful about the culture that surrounds sports, he will find a lot here to like.

1984 by: George Orwell

The power struggle in Orwell’s novel seems to be something guys can understand. When boys in my classes begin this book, they usually finish it. When girls begin it, they often quit. I wouldn’t call that a scientific study, but it might make me want to conduct one . . .

The Lord of the Rings by: J.R.R. Tolkein

This isn’t a surprising or shocking title for such a list, but these books are so good they shouldn’t go ignored. Also, since the years of Peter King’s movies are getting lost in the past, fewer high school students have read them.

The Iliad or The Odyssey by: Homer

The textbook excerpts of The Odyssey in our Prentice Hall literature texts have sapped the life from Homer’s work, especially the life that a student would enjoy. When my students hear some of the cut parts–like the battle in the hall that our text summarizes by saying, “Aided by Athena, Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus, and other faithful hersdsmen kill all the suitors.”–they ooh and ahh over them. A decent reader, encountering an exciting translation like Robert Fagles’s, is able to love these works.

That’s my list. It’s far from complete, but these are the 10 that came to mind first. Thanks for reading!

Ben Saunders Walks to the North Pole

Obviously I like adventurers, especially cold weather ones (see my obsession with Shackleton and Everest for further proof). I used Ben Saunders’s talk to fit into my character lessons for this year: greatness is reserved for those willing to endure the pain it takes to achieve it. I pointed out that a valid question is what greatness has to do with us–after all, greatness is by definition something only a few can achieve. Saunders uses the word potential, and I submitted to my students that for each of us, greatness is something we achieve when we’ve reached the top percent of our potential.

Janelle Monae Makes a Body Want to Move

I can’t dance, but I wish I could. Someday I hope to take my wife out to dancing lessons as a series of dates, but for now I’ll have to stick to spectating. Janelle Monae’s video is worth spectating . . .

Christmas Worship through Carols

I love Christmas carols and especially love concert choirs. In addition to wishing I’d learned how to dance, learning to sing is something I wish I’d learned to do. I admitted to my students today that it would have been good in high school to take choir–I truly would love knowing how to read music and simply sing the bass line. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized that my vocal range is sufficient for such singing, that music is written for “normal” voices like me to sing in parts . . . Who knew? Anyway, “Once in Royal David’s City” gets a lot of play on my computer during Advent.

Thanks for reading–and watching . . .