Annual reflection and setting new goals

I have never done this in public, but I think it's worth doing if only to publicly commit myself to some goals and raise my own level of accountability.  Now, as we approach the dawn of a new school year, it's time to lay out specific plans for improvement in my courses and my classroom.

Management Issues

Lateness - With only a 40-minute period, too much time is being lost to lateness.  Moreover, the problem got so bad late in the year with one course that it was hard to determine, even ten minutes after the bell, whether I had enough students to proceed with my plan or to shift course.  I would shift, and then the stragglers would show up.

One problem is that detention does not work.  It palpably does not work, because at the end of the year we still had dozens of students assigned to detention every day.  This is as effective as locking up drug addicts has been in fighting addiction in our country.  Yet we persist (in both cases).

I've spent some time this week reading everything I can find on the subject and it is all the same and it is all unhelpful, because the advice addresses individual aberrant cases of lateness, and a lot of attention is given to tracking and record-keeping.  I am fundamentally opposed to punishing myself for a student's misbehavior.  (That is one reason I don't have my own detention.  Another is that I am too involved in co-curricular activities to be able to drop what I'm doing and see a student after school.)

Phone calls home are school policy and I will, of course, comply.  But I don't believe in them, partly because we have so few reliable ways to communicate with our parents in a timely manner (will have to work on THAT this year) and because I teach seniors.  Parental disapproval and sanctions may be effective, but they are a poor preparation for the phase of life my students are about to begin.  They need to have their own discipline and their own habits in place, unless their parents are going to run their whole lives for them.

Clearly I need to move beyond sanctions.  Many of my colleagues (including many who should know) believe the lateness thing is cultural.  (Incidentally, that should not be viewed as racist.  Many European Mediterranean cultures do not value punctuality, and they are not generally oppressed minorities in this country.)  However, I need not investigate root causes or do some deep character education.  What I need to do is establish that whatever culture my students come from, when they enter my room, they enter MY CULTURE with my expectations.

So I need to be disciplined myself, start the class within a minute of the second bell, disregard who's there and not there, ignore late students when they enter (which I do anyway) and deal with lateness reporting issues later.  I will establish that I will mark absences at the top of the class and that unless they sign the latebook, it will go down as a cut, with the attendant consequences, which are out of my hands.  Hopefully, once it is clear that the class begins when it begins, the issue will diminish.  I only wish that I could flip my classroom so that the entrance was in the back of the room, but that is not practical for a number of reasons.  In any event, I will stop trying to use punishment and shame, and try and establish a social and cultural norm and set of expectations, at least within my own four walls.  Consistency.

This also supports a specifically educational imperative I want to press this year:  that, as we learn to write, we are writing in a specific and separate dialect called Standard Written English.  (Not Standard White English.)  SWE is not the way we speak every day.  It may not even coincide with formal speech.  It is a special, particular language which my students will be expected to use in college composition, and in most written communications other than to friends and family.  It is not a denigration of natural speech, but a commonly accepted and preferred alternate to it, and using it does not signal racism, but simply the employment of a Lingua Franca.

So in both punctuality and form of written expression, we have different expectations in the classroom than you have with family and friends.  Not superior, just different.

Phones - There is little or no support on the ground for a no-phones policy in class, although that is the stated written policy of the district.  Confiscation is not practical and could lead to liability problems, especially without support up the line.  Again, I must establish a cultural expectation, which I will reinforce with by distributing a copy of the page in the district handbook banning phones and having each student sign and acknowledge that.  I know that is no solution to anything, and is frequently an empty gesture, but perhaps it will be a signal that I intend to be consistent with that.  I must not let myself slip and lose heart about reminding students to get the phones out of my sight.  On the other hand, there will be times (I hope) when I will invite the students to use their smart phones in class, as a reminder that it is not that I am a Luddite, but that there is a time and place for everything, and that it is important to be present in the place where one is physically present, and to leave the cyberworld from time to time to be here now.  You know, all zen and stuff.

The Teaching of Literature  - I read an interesting piece this summer about the ascendancy of teaching literature over rhetoric in our high schools, which puts them out of joint with our colleges.  The fact is, I have never formally studied rhetoric, but as a former lawyer, I am familiar with and equipped to teach its application.  And as a reader, I am far more interested in journalism and other forms of non-fiction than I am in literature.

This comports with a district and building initiative to intensify the reading and analysis of short non-fiction on a regular basis.

So a couple of interlocking decisions.  I am not going to attempt to "teach" novels.  I will frame them and contextualize them at the outset.  Students will read them independently, using a schedule I provide as a rough guide.  I am still debating assessment of reading, whether to journal, quiz or other technique. From time to time, students will rotate in leading discussion, a process I will teach, building on what they learned junior year.  There will be the assessment of rote reading in a one-period timed test and a more important assessment in the form of a project which requires synthesis, as I have done historically since I began teaching.  The larger point is that our book of the moment should only occupy one or two days per week.  This leaves two days for writing and two days for everything else.

The Teaching of Writing AND Reading Non-Fiction  - This provides an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.  As mentioned, there is an initiative to stress non-fiction reading.  The plan as it stands right now, is to assign new non-fiction reading each Monday.  (Note to self -- because photocopying must be submitted in advance, must have non-fiction selected before leaving building on Thursday night.)  This can be in class, silently or aloud, partially in class and partially independently, etc. etc., depending on the specific task to be performed in connection with the reading -- analysis, rebuttal, extrapolation.  Then writing based on the writing can be assigned every other week, to be submitted electronically by Thursday.  I must then faithfully review and assess all writing over the weekend and return e-mail it before Monday.  On alternate weeks, students will be re-writing per my comments, to be submitted the following Thursday.  That is, one week write, next week rewrite.  After one semester, and with the use of projections and lecture-demonstrations, students will understand the edit and rewrite process well enough to do peer review, and start to incorporate those ideas about better style into their own drafting.

I have to brace myself to work harder this year and get better at seeing around corners.  At least this year, I've read most of my literature once already.  And the longform work must be interlaced with more short work.

Assessments - More of them, more at higher levels, more rapid marking and return of them.  Last year, my students rarely had the opportunity to benefit from comments.  That must change.

Advanced Placement -  I have ideas about re-formulating the Advanced Placement, starting with administering practice tests within the first week and regularly thereafter.  Earlier classes seem to have been completely sandbagged by the test, and there is no reason for that.  As high level as the class is, at some level it is all about the test at the end.  I am determined to have some 4s and 5s this year.  I will have more to say about this after next week, when I complete my mini-course on teaching AP.

Social Justice in Film  - Very charged up about this new elective.  I have always had trouble designing assessments for electives.  I am thinking of two principal modes at the moment -- having students blog about each film and having a rotating assignment of introducing and giving context to each film.  I will give the student a list of terms, names, etc. which are connected to the film and ask them to prepare 10 minutes for the class.  (Naturally, I will be prepared to back this up.)

Work Deadlines - This year I really want to walk the talk.  Keep deadlines myself and hold students to them.  I must start at the beginning of the year and not accept late homework at all, other than for excused absences.  I understand that students are allowed to re-take tests, but if they never hand in a paper assigned in lieu of a test, can they "re-do" that?  I am inclined to given them the 55 for a missing assessment and then assign something else, rather than give the impression that deadlines mean nothing, and that any work can be handed in at any time before the last day of the marking period.  That was just making me miserable.

I am hereby putting my DC and my principal on notice that my September gradebook may look very scary, but I am confident the situation will correct itself if I remain firm.

Use of the School Website  - As soon as possible, I am getting all my classes to the computer lab, show them my page, show them where their work is posted, give them the Twitter feeds and the Facebook page they can like in order to receive information about all the homework assignments.  It must be clear that if they are absent, excused or not, they are responsible not only for doing the work but for finding out what it is.  I must consistently refuse to answer questions about what the past work was except to direct them to the website.  They must learn that this is how most college courses operate.  The professor will not chase you and scarcely will talk to you about past assignments.  They must assume responsibility.

Apps - Speaking of the school website, I have it on reasonably good authority that a bright high-school level hacker/code monkey could write an app that makes our school website legible on a smart phone.  I would love to offer a prize for a student to do that for all the obvious reasons.  I also want to research free or cheap apps that help students manage their assignment calendars, not to mention college and scholarship application deadlines, which leads me to...

The War Room - I hope that Coach T and I can hold to Mr. Gregory to his agreement to commit Room 401 to be a War Room for college applications and scholarship applications.  Too much was compromised last year due to students not managing timelines.  We need to support that, to counsel students on their choices and to celebrate ALL THE ACCEPTANCES.  Last year, some got noticed and some didn't.  That's not right.  They are all a big deal, and we have to make them that way.  Which reminds of something else that needs to be different this year...

College Presentations during English instruction time  I need better advance notice of this, and they must be limited.  There have to be other times and places found to meet with seniors other than decimating a graduation requirement course.  Also, I'm putting my foot down on this specifically -- NO CLASS TIME AFFORDED TO FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS.  We don't know what those schools are doing, what kind of financial problems they could create for our students, and they are off-mission for us.  Yes, some post-high-school education is the goal for all Newark Public School students, but AHHS is specifically a college prep school, and our message should be consistent.  Again, there must be other means, other times for the for-profit schools to reach our kids.

Well, that's all I can think of now.  There are a lot of details that are still fuzzy to me, such as the sequencing of my literature units (chronological order did not work), but this reflection was more about architecture than engineering.  Time for the latter later.

Now I've published this and you can all throw it in my weary and bedraggled face in June!

What works

I've been sitting on this piece for a while, but since I am in the throes of final exams as I write, it seems appropriate to share it now.  You should read the post yourself, but to summarize, a college professor describes his process of switching from in-class timed essays as his final assessment to independently-written work as a more valid and accurate measure of his students' progress in his course.

I applaud this professor for his reflectivity, and the reasons he gives for changing his methodology all make excellent good sense.  His course sounds very rewarding, and I am certainly looking forward to adjusting the general-literature high school courses I teach to be more thematically unified.  He even writes so temptingly about the Margaret Atwood novel Oryx and Crake that I thought about putting it on my summer reading list, until I read the synopsis and realized it has all the irritating and tedious qualities of science fiction -- made-up words, arbitrary premises, implausible psychology and politics.  Yes, I realize that if you are going to write about humans, things will be implausible and unpredictable, which is why I prefer history, in which it is impossible to argue with the events or a play, in which you see the implausible performed in front of you -- again, it cannot be denied because it is made palpable.

Everything else just strikes me as Lewis Carroll.  But then, I am becoming impatient with just about all fiction.

But the real point I want to make is that this fellow persisted in a procedure which he knew was not just unsatisfactory, but downright counterproductive and completely worthless at producing reliable data about student achievement for 15 years.  And every semester.  He did something that didn't work 30 times before he decided to change it.

Perhaps that defines the difference between college instruction and us secondary and middle-school peons.  My first year of teaching -- before I knew anything, I looked at the numbers for the vocabulary instruction system I had inherited (the dreadful outdated Sadlier-Oxford series) and realize that the numbers had not moved at all over the year.  The students who scored high at the beginning of the year scored well at the end.  The students who struggled continued to struggle.  Was it difficult to jettison that?  When it took up at least one-fifth of my instructional time, and sometimes more?  Easiest thing in the world.  What I substituted was far more work intensive for me -- I got a list of SAT words and identified them in the assigned reading, and built exercises and quizzes from that -- but many students showed real improvement.

True, one often has to delay jettisoning a non-working portion of a course until there is an alternative that has some possibility of being more effective.  But that's what summers are for.  But knowing how awful it feels to persist with something that demonstrably doesn't work even once -- I can't imagine how you could keep going at it 30 times.  (And read the comments in the post.  The writers make some intelligent observations about learning in college -- which were made and measured scientifically in K-12 pedagogy about 25 or 30 years ago.  Next, I expect some college professor to announce the startling discovery that students learn in different ways from each other!)

I come to teaching from the performing arts, and what I love about the latter is their pure empiricism.  It's OK if nobody knows that Moby Dick was great until 30 years after Melville dies.  But a play, a film, a piece of music must work right now or it fails on its own terms.  Because the way the artist in the performing arts develops and improves is to listen to the audience.  Same with teachers.  What doesn't work with students, doesn't work, no matter what the theorists and consultants say. 

Now, back to work on my perpetual motion machine!

Shakespeare as Videogame, Part 5

The Story So Far:
Kerr, mild-mannered high-school literature teacher from another planet and his son, Rob, fearless videogame-designer are exchanging ideas about converting a Shakespeare play into a videogame in an effort to learn about Shakespeare and about videogames.  Previous entries can be read below on this blog and at Rob's blog.

Rob's most recent post is here, but here's his reply to my last set of thoughts.

Rob: I like that you brought up the language. It is really hard to get rid of the great dialogue Shakespeare has given us. I imagine that's why Baz Luhrmann refused to give it up in Romeo + Juliet, and later the same choice was made in Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, despite setting the story in contemporary California. It's definitely an argument against re-setting any Bard-game in a different time and place.



On the other hand, gamers are no strangers to 'thee's and 'thou's, so an adapting game developer probably wouldn't need to worry too much about translation to contemporary english, so you could really go either way (a more modern setting or an authentic one), and it's not an easy choice.

Et two, brute!

One great thing about using Shakespeare's actual words is that there are so many of them. Since games are a series of choices which each, ideally, have different consequences, games require more content than plays or films do (not to mention the fact that they're currently expected to last about ten times as long). For instance, Julius Caesar has a bunch of ghosts which are mentioned as portents of Caesar's death (but never shown, presumably for budgetary reasons). They might be cool to include in the game, but the play has given them no lines. Luckily there are plenty of ghostly lines from Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth which might be perfect.


The Tempest as an online open-world multiplayer adventure is interesting (that's what you suggested, by the way, in game industry jargon). There aren't many online multiplayer games designed for heterogeneous groups of that size. That may be because people wouldn't play it, or because it's an untapped market; I'm not certain.


One thing I foresee as being problematic is the compliment of verbs. In creating a videogame, an early decision is always "What verbs can the player character do?" The verbs that some of the characters have at their disposal -- summoning fairies, invisibility, flight, hypnosis, meteorological control -- are a lot more interesting than the verbs other characters have -- gathering wood, getting drunk, stealing clothes, talking to your girlfriend's parents, etc.


If I can take your role a moment without hurting my own cause too much, I think the best strategy for adapting The Tempest would be to stick to Ariel as your one and only player character (or perhaps split her into multiple characters with the same attributes). She is empowered enough to feel fun to play, but still has a master who she fears. Her master gives her specific missions to complete, and then summons her to do more. If she does well she is promised a reward -- her freedom.


In terms of the thematic approach you mentioned, I think it's a sound one. I'd relate that idea to The Art Of Game Design's tenth lens, The Lens of Resonance. There are a few one might pick as a kernel to base a Julius Caesar videogame around. The best, I think, is loyalty. The decision to kill Caesar is mostly a conflict of loyalties. Loyalty to a friend vs. loyalty to the state is Brutus' dilemma.


If I were adapting Julius Caesar to a game today, I would spend some time establishing the camaraderie between the characters. I might include, as a level, the beautiful story Cassius tells in scene 2, line 90, of how Julius saved him from drowning, to establish the affinity of Cassius towards Caesar. Then there would be a level where you would have to mitigate some of Caesar's tyranny, perhaps by saving a servant who he would have mistreated, in order to show how he damages the republic.



Then I would give the user a choice of whether to take part in the plot against Caesar's life -- in other words, to continue the story as Brutus or Marc Antony. I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities in each of those decisions, and each are honorable men -- there are no true villains in this story, which makes it an even stronger choice, to my mind. That's just a first instinct, though.


Veering off course a bit, some people in the comments of the previous installment had the (I thought, inspired) idea of using a minor character as the player character to explore the world of Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet without influencing (much) the main storyline. I don't think it works so well with either of the plays we chose, but what do you think of that idea?

Here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!

Kerr:  To begin with the end, which is the most natural thing for easily distracted people like me, what your commenters are suggesting might be termed the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead gambit.  (Incidentally, I have a copy of that play here with me and the ampersand is officially part of the title.)  I refer to the game-changing Tom Stoppard play in which Hamlet's two schoolmates who are co-opted by Claudius to spy on Hamlet and report on him, and who are marked for death themselves become the central figures in a Beckett-like conceit in which they are trapped in a space mostly continguous to and occasionally coincident with the space occupied by the play Hamlet, waiting like Becket's hobos for another, more important, more decisive character to either put things to rights or end their lives.  It works as a virtually literal reflection of and on Hamlet. 

I agree with you, Rob, that it's a good concept for a Shakespeare video game, especially if one is open to side excursions.  I can imagine Bernardo and Marcellus perpetually trying to get the Ghost to come back and talk to them (it speaks only to Hamlet) or Ross trying to keep from getting killed in Macbeth, as he is buffeted between the Macbeth and Malcolm camps.

But I also agree that we need to table that discussion until we have utterly abandoned both The Tempest and Julius Caesar. 

Let me see if I can codify the decision tree that seems to be emerging.  If The Tempest is to be our source, we should settle on a point of view character such as Ariel.  If we choose that route, then we need to pick the character and that character's goal.

If Julius Caesar is to be our source, we should consider alternate historical settings so that we do not have to contemplate a Rome in which Caesar is not assassinated and Brutus does not die at the Battle of Phillipi.  If we go down that route, we should discuss the setting.  Other than an age in which kings are in charge, the only other setting in which groups of people can murder leaders with impunity is within some sort of gang setting.

And the third major rabbit hole to fall down is the question of selecting another very driven tragedy such as Macbeth (I can't see Romeo and Juliet at all -- the stakes are too small and commonplace) or Richard III and perhaps going full Rosencrantz.  While they have similar trajectories, how a minor noble becomes and remains king through the use of sustained violence, I like Richard more than Macbeth.  It has more killings and more appalling ones, plus the wooing of Anne.  A Macbeth game is going to have to figure out how Lady Macbeth works, which is troublesome since she and Macbeth are virtually in lockstep throughout the story, at least in terms of their overt actions.

I think the time has come to fish or cut bait.  I'll let you have your say and then we should try to arrive at a consensus.  Or am I, like a poor game designer, shutting down viable and rewarding options for play prematurely?

Shakespeare as Videogame Part 3

"Say, Ariel, any idea who's winning?"

Rob and I have only just started this dialogue, he at his blog on Gamasutra, a game design site, and I here, and we are already getting recognition. His post was a featured one at Gamasutra, and has also been aggregated here at Broadway Stars, a theater news site I visit regularly, and home to the excellent podcast This Week on Broadway.

You can read Rob's reply to my last post at Gamasutra, but in the interest of completeness, here it is:

Rob: Growth and change? Don't you know videogames are all about shooting aliens in the face?



In all seriousness, I think JULIUS CAESAR would make a good videogame because of the emphasis on action and conflict. As much as I enjoy it, THE TEMPEST seems to be a story mainly about people almost doing something, but then deciding against it.


In JULIUS CAESAR Brutus and Cassius are forced to kill a dear friend for the sake of Rome, and Rome is bribed to side against them. Then they must fight a war which was evenly matched until Brutus made a strategic error.


Certainly, the play was Shakespeare's most accurate (though it includes dubious incidents of ghosts), but that doesn't mean that the game needs to be 'trapped by the facts of history.' To convert a play to a game means introducing some nonlinearity, so we can ask and answer a bunch of what-if questions in this game.


What if Caesar had found out about the plot? What if he'd stayed at home instead of going to the senate? What if Brutus were a better orator, or strategist? We could even go so far as to change the setting entirely. This story could be set in the Mafia of the 1930s, a Galactic Federation, or a Pirate Ship.


In contrast, THE TEMPEST must include a wizard and a fairy and a freakish beast-man. There aren't a lot of settings that can accomodate that.


I think the many story threads of THE TEMPEST are a weakness rather than a strength. The perspective of this play is not high enough to be a god-game or management sim, and not low enough for a first-person experience. I'll admit that THE TEMPEST was a tempting choice, because of superficial similarities to fantasy-genre games, but I think there's less there than meets the eye.

Maybe I'm just lacking imagination. How do you imagine a TEMPEST video game playing out?
 
Kerr:  To begin with, I want to bookmark some ideas and return to them at a later post.  First, I would like to explore the idea of moving Julius Caesar to another setting.  This is a time-honored tradition in Shakespearean production.  I would say today it is standard practice to costume in modern business suits, and of course, Orson Welles created a landmark modern fascist interpretation in 1936.  I suppose I hadn't considered that possibility, and it opens up a lot more of the plays, especially those that have traditionally been reset in different times and places, such as Othello and Macbeth and the ever-lovin' Midsummer's Night Dream.  Personally, I would like to set all the romantic comedies aside, as the stakes, typically who will end up side-by-side at the altar, do not feel like a "fit" for gaming.  But we need to explore the idea of divorcing Shakespeare's narrative from its original settings -- and doing so gives license to ignore those pesky historical facts that troubled me so.
 
This does place a sideways finger on the inherent flaw in the entire concept--we are attempting to engage Shakespeare's power without his language.  I must admit that I cannot conceive how that can be incorporated, but I would like to see how we can.  It is true that Shakespeare took his received materials and wielded them into different, more complex, and more resonant narrative shapes, but that is still not why he is the most revered writer in the world.  It comes down to the very words themselves and we ignore them at our peril.  But I await instruction as to how blank verse and other Shakespeare text can be employed as an integral part of a game, and not just a decorative feature.  Could there be tasks or goals associated with language which are required to progress in the game?
 
Back to The Tempest.  I am probably going to reveal the depths of my ignorance about gaming, but in my simple understanding, the most successful games are social multi-player games in which people explore a universe, rather than simply being a god controlling others.  That was my template for Tempest.  Certainly somebody would want to be Prospero seeking to regain his dukedom.  You could be Caliban seeking to perform tasks to achieve independence from Prospero or Ariel seeking to earn your freedom from Prospero.  You could be Alonso or Antonio, seeking Ferdinand and escape from the island.  You could be Ferdinand, seeking to perform the tasks to be worthy of Miranda.  You could even by Miranda, striving to become an independent adult away from her father.  And for any role not being adopted by a player, the game could take on that role from sets of pre-determined alternative tracks.  And Stephano and Trinculo can work as all-purpose troublemakers, available to thwart anyone's goals and plans.  The design trick is to figure out how these interact, and how, for example, an action of Caliban could alter the Antonio plotline, or something Miranda does could impact Ariel's quest.
 
But maybe I am getting ahead of my self.  If I were directing The Tempest for the stage, I would never run down any of these story or even character rabbit holes until I had decided what the play was about.  Once I've landed on that, all my other decisions can proceed therefrom.  It is unecessary to come up with the final and definitive answer as to the meaning or themes of any given play; one simply has to latch on an idea or ideas -- no more than two or three, tops -- that are supported by the text and which can help the play sustain in performance.  So, for instance, Hamlet is about dozens of different things, but if the director decides the play is about Betrayal then everything everyone does can proceed from there.  The set, costume and lighting designer, the way the actors move and interact, the choice of goals within scenes --everything can be interpreted through the lens of "betrayal."
 
So what is The Tempest about, and what would be a good choice for a game design?  We have already talked about freedom and confinement, as reflected by Caliban, Ariel, Ferdinand, Miranda and the enchanted passengers of the wrecked ship.  Prospero is even arguably confined by his desire to reverse the wrongs of the past, a desire from which he needs liberation.  That connects to another theme, reconciliation and forgiveness.  This could present serious challenges for a game driven by pre-determined logic, but perhaps receiving forgiveness can be broken into steps which need to be performed properly.  There is a conflict between the natural and technological worlds, if we interpret magic as a type of techonology.  Or we could look at magic as something between nature and technology -- man-made, but drawing on secret natural aspects of the universe.
 
Why this English-class discussion of themes?  Because we need to decide why we're making the game.  We need some criterion to couch all the other decisions.  We need something that will keep us moving in a defined direction, because it is clearly easy to get lost in the woods.
 
I don't know if what I'm imagining is technologically feasible -- a more straightforward story with clearly defined goals might be far better.  It's easy to come up with an adaptation of Macbeth as a first-person-stabber game.  But I am also looking to explore those aspects that make Shakespeare Shakespeare.  Nowadays, thanks to Joseph Campbell, we all know how to cook up a hero's journey by the numbers.  Thus I am drawn to the more particular, the more peculiar, the more inconsistent and the more complex elements that constitute Shakespeare, especially from mid-career on.
 
Or am I just talking through my wizard's hat?

Literature as Videogame or Vice Versa, Part 1

What follows is a dialogue between Rob and Kerr.  Rob is a video game designer in the Chicago area.  Kerr is a literature teacher in Newark, NJ.  Also, Rob is Kerr's son.  

The posts will appear here on this blog and at Rob's blog on Gamasutra, found here.

Their topic is: 'What Shakespeare play would make the best video game, and what would that game be like?'

Rob:  Hey, Dad.  So your first impulse was to say 'The Tempest' would make a great video game.  I think that's a great choice, but just for giggles I said 'Julius Ceasar' would be the best.  I have some ideas, but why do you think 'the Tempest' would work so well?

Kerr:  The obvious aspects that make THE TEMPEST videogame fodder is that there is magic -- in fact the central character is a magician -- there are strange non-human characters such as Caliban and Ariel, and the fantastic setting -- an unspecified remote island which can take on any terrain that the designers and directors choose.  There are also many separate story threads:  Prospero overseeing Miranda's entry into adulthood; Ariel's quest to be free; Caliban's desire to be seen as human; Prospero's revenge on Antonio and Alonso; Antonio and Alonso's plots against each other; the romance between Ferdinand and Miranda; the hijinks among Stephano and Trinculo, as manipulated by Ariel.  And then there is the magical disappearing banquet, not to mention all the strange magic surrounding the titular tempest.

Moreover, many characters grow and change and learn, which, it would seem to me, should be a good thing in a videogame, whereas in Shakespeare, such growth and change often happens to a single character, such as Lear, who is chastened by his experience, whereas everyone else has been merely punished by the consequences of his foolishness.

JULIUS CAESAR, for one, is particularly trapped by the facts of history.  It is one of Shakespeare's most accurate exercises in history, especially when contrasted with something like RICHARD III or MACBETH (which is based on a more legendary history) in which, largely for political persons, Shakespeare inverts the real historical heroes and villains.  Today we might say works like this are "inspired" by history.  But even they have a  hard bright line around them in the form of historical fact.  This closes down alternatives -- Julius can never not be killed by assassins; Macbeth can never not ascend to the throne and then be killed in battle.

Of course, I am conducting my analysis under a handicap -- I am not as familiar with the format of videogames as you are with plays in the theater.  I recognize that all games do have a closed ending, a conclusion, some point at which some players have succeed and some have not.  It raises a philosophical question -- as narrative aspires to closure, do games in a perfect universe aspire to perpetual play?  Is ending a game merely an acknowledgment of either our desire to identify winners and losers or our need to stop playing periodically and eat and sleep and attend to other bodily necessities?  Or do games also need to end as an inherent part of their nature?  And do we even need to address this question in order to further our conversation?

So I bounce it back to you, Rob.  Of all 37 or 38 of Shakespeare's theatrical works, what caused you to light on JULIUS CAESAR as a potential videogame?  Perhaps your answer will instruct me in an aspect of gaming of which I was unaware.

"Students are turned on by greatness and bored by mediocrity"

(First of all, I apologize for the ad inserted before this video, but I think the clip is worth the wait.)

The title of this post is a quote from a former student of Albert Cullum, who left a career in theater in the late 1940s to teach elementary students, most notably in Rye, New York in the early 1960s, where much of his work was filmed by Robert Downey (Sr.). He created a powerful legacy and a challenge to every teacher.

I've never written about the film A Touch of Greatness because I first saw it before I began this blog, but it has been and remains a major source of inspiration for me as a male, second-career teacher seeking to bring what I learned in my earlier life into the often stale air of the classroom. It probably tells you too much about me that I can't watch even this brief trailer without tearing up, because what is going on is so very beautiful; this deep communication and love between teacher and students based on the teacher's confidence that children can and want to learn in complex and varied ways about the very best in our world and in our culture. We don't have to spoon-feed them the best in our culture or shield them from things we think are too hard or too psychologically complex.

In one sequence, the students are having a spirited debate as to the world's greatest author, between Sophocles, Shakespeare and Shaw. You can see a student who could not be older than 6th or 7th grade expressing a preference for Shaw over Sophocles for his unpredictability. A 6th grader charged up about Shaw!

He taught the classics not because he wanted to be high-falutin'. He did it because they are the essential building-blocks AND expressions of our culture. They state what we believe about what is good and what is bad. They are guides to a good life. To teach them is to reject the idea that our schools are adjuncts to America's employers, preparing productive and docile workers and obedient subjects, I mean citizens.

In short, to make your students readers, give them something they want to read. Now the question for me is not what to teach...I will let my ambition guide me. No, the problem is how to deliver that content past their prejudices about school material, and how to make them the active agents in their own progress and development.

The scientific literature

Cards on the table time: I have always had the desire to teach English in a school setting primarily devoted to math and science. This may relate to a family proclivity -- my father, brother and son all are engineering types who were and are extremely articulate and verbal. (My brother is even a published author in his field.)

Or it just may be that teaching English to literature nerds is like shooting ducks in a barrel. How much more satisfying to lead science and math wonks to discover how important the ability to explicate and persuade is? After all, sooner or later, scientific progress depends on the ability to communication with non-scientists, even if for something as crude and utilitarian as writing grant proposals and accurate succinct abstracts of reports?

Literature and Science have a lot to say to each other, and science has provided a number of protagonists in literature, going back to the near-mythic character of Doktor Faustus, who poses the elemental question as to whether it is possible to know too much. More recently, we have turned scientists into characters of legend and, yes even myth. Galileo, Curie, Pasteur, Fermat, Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg and Feynman have all proved to have achievements and personalities large enough to gather deep cultural resonance, beyond the specific facts of their lives.

Let's leave aside science fiction* and mad scientists, and acknowledge there is a body of film about good and real science. A Dangerous Mind, Infinity, October Sky, and Apollo 13 which has at least as much science as it has adventure. Sloan Science and Film is a major NGO project that celebrates good films about real science.

But the theater has been a far more hospitable place for the serious consideration of science, including Brecht's Life of Galileo, Copenhagen (about Heisenberg and Bohr and the atomic bomb), Proof, In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, RUR (the play which originated the word "robot"), and the musical Fermat's Last Tango. Any of these would be marvelous to study and/or produce in a high school setting. And, in a way, Shakespeare's Tempest, while about a magician rather than a scientist, deals with the problem of having so much knowledge that on the one hand, you can manipulate the people around you, and on the other hand, the community becomes dependent upon you.

Today, in a technology driven age, it can be argued that Galileo, Tesla and Einstein are more significant mythic figures than Odysseus, Sisyphus and Pandora. In any event, it would be exciting to explore them with students who know more science than I do.
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* Bad science fiction is about adventure and most good science fiction is actually about politics, which make them irrelevant to this discussion.

Spoiler alert: Stop worrying about spoilers

The reports broke a few weeks ago, and personally I was not surprised at all. "Spoilers" is a misnomer, because knowing the end of a story ENHANCES enjoyment of the work rather than spoiling it, according to a study by two UC San Diego professors published by Psychological Science. As a group, English teachers go berserk at the thought of Cliff Notes and their equivalents being widely available for free online, for fear that students will vitiate the reading process by jumping to a synopsis or summary of the book being read by class.

Aside from the regressive practice of having the entire class read the same thing at the same time, the over-emphasis on revelation on story or plot points keeps students frozen at the lowest level of the reading experience. It teaches students not to enjoy reading, but to endure it in order to get to the important thing -- What happened at the end? Reading becomes a means, not an end in itself.

The threat is not the use of supplemental materials in connection with reading, but their being used as a substitute for real reading. And focusing your reading assessment on having the students know what happened not only cripples and reduces the reading experience but is an open invitation to cheat. It's like the NCLB cheating scandals -- when you place huge stakes on something which CAN be arrived at by cheating, of course people will cheat. Your assessments (and the government's assessments of schools) need to be conducted in such a way that cheating is impossible.

Ancient cultures knew this. The stories of Odysseus, Jason and Oedipus were told over and over and always ended the same. I suspect the same was true of Gilgamesh, not to mention Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. The essence of the oral culture was not surprise endings, but the art of the teller, the beauty, harmony and expressiveness of the verse, the telling details, the vividness of character. Scheherazade didn't stay alive with O. Henry plot twists, but through the artfulness of her storytelling. An Athenian wouldn't think of going to a play for which he didn't know the ending. Likewise, mostly, for an Athenian. Stories were all about the mythos, the definition of the culture that produced the story, its values and aspirations. One is not supposed to be surprised by one's own culture. It's the water you swim in all the time. It's renewing, enriching, inspiring, rejuvenating. Perhaps sometimes cautionary. But never startling, except in the way that all deep truths are startling.

And as teachers of reading, we should be teaching the appreciation of how stories are told, not the content of the stories. We should be dealing with deep thematic content, subtext, structure, style, language, syntax, diction and the relationship of the story to mythos, not What Happens Next.

Bad news. Sooner or later, this is going to require students to write at length and in detail. Which means that you're going to have to read it. And if you don't craft the task well, this could be quite tedious, especially if you have three or more sections doing the same thing at once. (I would love to be able to teach the same course in different order to different sections some time.) But if you're not prepared to read a lot of student writing, much of it substandard in a lot of ways, and make a lot of comments and endure the rewriting process with them, perhaps you're in the wrong racket. Because no matter the value of alternate assessments for different learning styles and different intelligences, the bottom line is the student's ability to decode and encode ideas and emotions from and into written language.

Stories -- they can be told with gestures, with pantomime, with pictures. Stories are not literacy. So if we use stories to advance literacy, let us focus on the literate aspects of that expression, not on the crude lineaments of narrative.

And in the spirit that spoilers make reading better, let me recommend a very fine site, The Book Spoiler. You can even be paid for submitting your own detailed synopses of books, spoilers and all.

You can take your hands off your ears and stop shouting "La la la" now.

Free serialized literature via Blog

From Neatorama comes a sub-blog called Bit Lit, in which they'll "be serializing entire novels and short stories—even some poetry, many published by major publishers like Random House. Every day, a new chapter until the entire story is complete.

"Plus, [they]’ll be interviewing authors and having contests to give away free, autographed copies of their books."

For teachers looking for alternative sources of free reading material, this could be very valuable.

Speaking of free reading material, I do not vouch for the legality or the permanence of this site, but it contains virtually all of the work of F. Scott Fitgerald, including that certain novel about that very rich person which many of us teach. It is Russian based, so it has all the texts in English and Russian, just in case you have an ESL student from Russia!

Whither teaching literature?

There's no point in disputing it -- reading from a digital device, especially an e-reader will not only replace paper school books, but for most subjects, it will be a far, far better way to deliver text. No longer will science and history teachers be forced to teach out of 20-year old texts, or have to update them with photocopied handouts. Publishers will provide regular updates, perhaps even during the school year. ("Leave your iPads with me tonight so we can run the updates.") Moreover, departments can switch textbooks rapidly when a new, better one comes out, although presumably publishers will require multi-year contracts, or at least, I would if I were a publisher. And let us hope that publishers will disable editing, so that the Texas Department of Education will not edit out offensive parts of US History or the theory of gravity (it is, after all, "only" a theory).

The question comes with the reading of literature. I am looking forward to being able to alter our reading lists with the click of a touchpad, rather than worrying about what books we have enough copies of in the bookroom, especially when I have three sections of the same course. I presume these new devices have better, more long-lasting batteries than our laptops. Henry James and Faulkner take some time to get through (no, I don't teach those authors in high school, but I do teach Shakespeare and Fitzgerald, neither of whom can be read the same way one reads The DaVinci Code). But even if the author is more readily readable, like a Steinbeck or a Vonnegut, a different order of reading is called for than for the absorption of text. The dichotomy used to be described as "lean forward" versus "lean back," although that terminology will probably fade as tablet devices become more common.

As this Smithsonian article describes, this is not the first time our relationship to text has changed drastically.

In ancient times, authors often dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of letters, so scribes wrote down the letters in one long continuous string, justastheyoccurinspeech. Text was written without spaces between words until the 11th century. This continuous script made books hard to read, so only a few people were accomplished at reading them aloud to others. Being able to read silently to yourself was considered an amazing talent.

Your grandchildren will probably think it weird that you used devices in which text was only available sequentially and it was non-searchable. (Hence the invention of the concordance.)

But a novelist or a short-story writer is not a journalist or a scholar. He is descended from the story-teller sitting at the edge of the fire, relating the tale of the great hunt of two springs ago, or of the ancient rivalry with the people on the other side of the great wood, or of the trip the warrior took to the land beyond the three hills. The story-teller does not want his story to be searched or cross-indexed or annotated or commented upon. He wants to stimulate emotion and imagination, not discussion and debate. Like it or not, story-telling is a top-down procedure. She tells, you listen. Maybe you ask, "What happened next?" but that is just a little ceremony designed to help whip up emotions among the audience. It is not really a challenge to the storyteller to come up with something different. Any parent of young children knows that the important thing about the story is that it must be EXACTLY THE SAME EVERY TIME. You cannot change the girl with fish in her socks to a boy with ferrets in his pants, or the magic grilled cheese sandwich into a magic Reuben. (You tell stories to kids your way and I'll tell them mine, alright?) Interactivity is NOT the point.

Not to mention that fireside. A place for contemplative reading is important. Yes, we do read books on buses and planes, but would we really chose to do so? My personal dream of a good place to read a book is under a maple solid enough to lean on in the early autumn, near a vigorous, but not too noisy, group of frisbee-tossers (including, hopefully, a talented Labrador or Spaniel). OK, that's a prettied-up picture of my own college days, but you get the idea. Reading a story is about being receptive for long periods of time, not being perpetually poised to respond, but giving the storyteller room to expand and explore on his tale.

All our oldest tales are sprawling, perhaps because they became add-on affairs. One storyteller picks up the story of Gilgamesh and Humbaba as mortal enemies, fighting to the death, and then, perhaps because of the temperament of his audience, or a desire for variety, or a desperate need to fill time or the perversity of his own nature, transformed it into a story of the enemies becoming bosom companions. (Side note -- the oldest written story in the West tells of enemies becoming friends, not the other way around. Is it because it is impossible to really know someone without coming to like something about them? One can only absolutely hate complete strangers.) And The Ramayana and The Mahabharata are ridiculous that way. They are so episodic and eventually, self-contradictory, that they can only have been created by a succession of story tellers, rather than a single source. They might be called the earliest iterations of fan fiction in civilization. But even fan fiction is not interactive. It says, "here is MY take on Star Trek/Lord of the Rings/Firefly. If you don't like mine, make your own."

So why do we like to tell and hear stories? It is hard to dispute that our greatest interest in life is ourselves. Stories tell us about other people. The inescapable conclusion is that we like to consider other people in order to compare and contrast them with ourselves. They are a way to add to our own storehouse of human experience without the possibility of difficult or painful consequences. I don't have to actually fight off the Sirens myself in order to learn how dangerous they are to me and to my family life. The agony of Sisyphus lets me know that my own sense of futility and frustration is not unique to me.

This would suggest that we are interested in facts for some other reason, to know how things "really are." But what use is it to know that Napoleon's invasion of Russia failed in 1812 in and of itself? These facts seem to be peculiar to this particular event, and that is as far as Hitler seemed to go in 1941. Hitler seems to have failed to use any analytical tools to understand why following roughly the same plan was likely to fail.

So why do I care? I have no intention of taking an invading army into Russia, and if I did, I wouldn't use an 1812 nor a 1941 army (nor would the Russians). I need to abstract the facts up to a higher elevation. If I am a military leader, I examine the topography and ordinance involved. If I am just a regular walking-around guy, I can take away the lesson that I don't embark on a difficult and dangerous task unless I am absolutely sure that I am completely prepared. I can draw a personal analogy between Napoleon's attempted invasion of Russia and, say, my desire to play in the NBA or date a super-model (I am hypothesizing a young, fit unattached version of myself here). I had damn well better be prepared.

So, the value of stories is their connection to myself and my experience. And the value of facts is their connection to myself and my experience. Data-based courses do this by analogy. Literature does it by metaphor. In either case, the essence of learning is comparing things to other things and finding the common points and the divergences. And the reason to absorb all these comparisons and contrasts is to inform our decision-making process. Essentially, all education is aimed at the way we make choices.

[What of the facts of math and science, you say? What do these have to do with life--other than the most quotidian use of arithmetic? The value of the facts derived in these disciplines is in the process rather than the facts. The facts in and of themselves are merely descriptors of the universe as we found out--they bear no lesson other than their own intractability (or tractability, as the case may be.) The means by which we arrive at scientific truth is a beautiful process, possessed of a pleasure akin to that of artistic creation. Physicist Richard Feynman called it The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Not the pleasure of knowing the truth, but the pleasure of learning or deriving the truth. And the truth is arrived at independent of our prejudices and preferences. Moreover, each scientific truth points to the next one. Each must be tested and tried and each uncovers a new question. It is an unending pursuit--thus scientific truth and philosophical truth share the common ground of being endlessly unfinished. All of science bears the single lesson - don't be satisified, don't stop, never be certain you know.]

Then there is no reading, no learning, no story, no fact that we cannot at some level or in some way connect to ourselves and a lesson for our own existence. What does this have to do with the way this data arrives in our brain cells? As the Smithsonian article says,

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do.

Perhaps it is only the velocity with which we react to what we read, simply a matter of how soon we begin the dialogue. Maybe literature itself will change. Perhaps we will see a great, epic, make-your-own adventure to be studied by students a hundred years hence. But as I wrote in my note on Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother, while the author has invited active engagement with his novel, even encouraging remixes and fan fiction, he is not permitting readers to actually alter the book itself. The story is the story is the story, and we cannot turn time back to get the story un-told. It is and will continue to be, what it is. [I note that the non-fiction book I Live In The Future And Here's How It Works by Nick Bilton promises interactive extensions of the book online, but the actual book website merely provides links to purchase the text in its entirety, external links to review of the book and a space for reader comments. This is hardly a true enrichment of the text.]

Doubtless e-readers will change our relationship to text, but we don't know exactly how yet. I only know that I'm not yet ready to take an iPad to the bathroom.

Top 10 Books I Wish I Taught In English Class

Summertime, and time to prep any works I'm going to teach the first time, and usually revisit the ones I've been teaching, especially books I've only taught once. I don't know about other teachers, but I rarely get a book right the first time out with a class. You need time with young people to learn what they'll respond to, both in the book and in your lesson objectives and designs.

And, truth be told, there are some books that will elude you year after year. Maybe they're great but difficult to get students to connect with (Huckleberry Finn's dialects are often a tremendous barrier). Maybe they're not very good to begin with. (All names of novels suppressed.) And maybe, good or bad, the book doesn't reach you, the teacher, personally and you can't get past that. You haven't found your own connection and therefore have nothing real to communicate.

I struggled with Othello the first year I taught it because neither the students nor I related to that type of extreme sexual possessiveness and jealousy. And Othello's relationship to the rest of the world, his arrogance and defensiveness are hard to reach through, or at least it was for me and a room of 16-year-olds. Then I decided to forget about sex and consider the issue: who do you trust and why? And who around us wants to hurt us, though we can't detect it? Once I approached the play from that direction, it continued to unfold new treasures.

Still, the summer daydream that keeps returning is the speculation as to what books I'd like to teach most if I had my druthers. I presume every English teacher has a list like this, perhaps not written down, but stored in the heart and only allowed in the open every once a while, when we have time to look down any other road but the prescribed curriculum.

So here is my dream list, at least as I can recall now in the early summer of 2010. No doubt other, better choices will occur later, and perhaps I'll post about them. Meanwhile, please add on your suggestions, wishes or dream books at the end of this note, or e-mail them to me.

10. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

I don't teach 5th or 6th grade, which is really when every boy and girl in the world should be required to read this book by international law. And as wonderful and complex as the series gets, the essential message is contained in the first third of the first book--the message every kid alive needs to hear. It doesn't matter what the people you live with or the people you see every day say about you now. There are people in another place (perhaps another time) who think (or will think) that you're fantastic, that you have (or will have) special powers and abilities and that you can (or will) accomplish great things, which will benefit other people. When Harry is inundated with the invitations to come to Hogwarts that his uncle has been hiding from him--when he is overwhelmed with the knowledge that there are people who want him and care about him and will help him become what he will become--I am devastated. It's something kids need to know about themselves, one of those truths that only a fable can deliver.

9. Democracy in America

Yes, I know it's Social Studies, but they never do anything but skim it and pull quotes out of context. DeTocqueville's book is a road book (and there's a great course in and of itself), and should be read as such, perhaps even tracking the journey on a map. Sure, there are great analyses of the root characteristics of our culture and our society. But they all arise from specific observations of behaviors encountered on the road. If this book couldn't get a classroom discussion going, then the teacher involved has no business teaching. [Alternative selection - selected Dialogues of Plato. I know that sounds like heavy going, but I taught them twice to 7th graders, who wrote their own imitation dialogues and performed them.]

8. Angels in America

I teach drama and write and direct plays in schools, so I have to include a play. Angels in America is the best play written in America since Williams, Miller and Albee ruled the theater. (Albee is still writing good plays, but he is no longer the supreme ruler--Mamet is.) It is a miraculous fusion of journalism and poetry, and employs a powerful and convincing stagecraft to bring us from the lower depths to 20,000 feet above the earth. This should be our time capsule play--Dear Future America, If you want to know about the second half of the 20th century, read (and then produce) both parts of Angels in America. Any play that can put an actual literal angel next to the real Roy Cohn and make them equally plausible is a work of sheer transcendent genius. (Alternate work--Brecht's Life of Galileo, the ultimate modern work on the role of the scientist in our dangerous world, in which science is alternately demonized and weaponized.)

7. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

(Note--I originally put My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber here. I would love to go on and on with memoir, and particularly with humorous memoir. But I have to admit that Thurber's humor, much as it appeals to me, may feel musty to a lot of students not used to the style of chaffing that was au courant 80 years ago.) There's nothing controversial or ground-breaking about ATGIB. It used to be taught in schools, but it fell off the list in favor of trendier works. But it hasn't dated a bit. The story of the love between an alcoholic father and his bright, sensitive daughter is timeless. It's about the moment you learn that your parents may be wonderful, but they are not flawless. And that you can forgive them for that.

6. Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

I have such trouble breaking students of the habit of writing summaries instead of stories. They tell rather than show. We used to teach Hemingway to demonstrate the use of simple reportage in narrative, but he seems stilted and affected today. Carver is, for these purposes, the new Hemingway, and his stories feel more like screenplays than classic literature--simple descriptions of action and dialogue without rendering judgment on his very flawed and often confused characters. A wonderful model as a writer, although many of his stories involve a lot of alcohol, so a big disclaimer would be in order in the event of classroom use.

5. Catch-22

Holden Caufield just whines about the hypocrisy and absurdity of modern life, but Heller teaches us to laugh at it. Not the gentle laughter of acceptance, but the laughter of righteous anger. And, for me, literally LOL--as in, catching yourself laughing and looking around to see if anyone else noticed. Today Catch-22 itself, the rule by which asking to be found insane is definitive proof of sanity is a basic token of cultural literacy. And it would help the kids to know that the so-called "Greatest Generation" was not a mindless group of patriotic simps, awaiting orders from their benevolent leaders. A lot of them got drafted and lot of them hated their COs and hated the service and hated the whole situation that screwed up their lives, all the subsequent sanctimonious about them notwithstanding.

4. A Confederacy of Dunces

This might be a little redundant in light of Catch-22, but for me, you can't have too many laughs in English class. At least the right kind of laughs. The protagonist of Confederacy is fat, spotty and flatulent, but deserving of respect for his insane and paranoid brilliance. If any book cautions against judging a book by its cover, this one does.

3. A Prayer for Owen Meaney

I am an unreconstructed John Irving fan, and Owen Meaney is his best, for my money. I love the juxtaposition of apparent improvisation and careful working out and planning, which makes the final impossible and absurd image of the book devastating and poignant. Like Dunces, we have a misfit hero, a croaking dwarf with the heart and soul of a Cyrano.

2. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman

Everyone knows we need greater integration between the sciences and the humanities, but nobody does much about it. This memoir by the Nobel-prize winning physicist is really the diary of a curious mind. It doesn't get into deep science, but it does reveal an attitude of mind that we need far more of in every walk of life. Feynman simply never took anything for granted--always questioning, always probing, always asking things he's not supposed to ask. Moreover, as Feynman's father taught him when he was a small boy, to name something, identify it, classify it is not understand what it is or how or why it works. Tradition, superstition, and culture have no place--only facts. This is becoming scarce in the fact-free universe we are building for our children, where science is being banished from Washington DC and the State of Texas. Plus the book is very entertaining and funny. Feynman is the kid who talks out of turn, but instead of getting in trouble, he makes new discoveries that benefit everyone, including the people who wanted to shush him. Not every teacher may appreciate this habit of mind, by I believe it will be de rigeur in order for the next generation to survive.

I'd like to see more popular science represented on this list, including books by Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, Bill Bryson's Complete History of Nearly Everything, Oliver Sacks, Martin Gardner and Stephen Hawking. Perhaps readings in popular science should have its own semester during one's high school career...

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I confess I still haven't read much philosophy--most philosophers are terrible writers and they spend so much of their time creating jargon that makes their prose impenetrable and dull. Zen is two books in one--an outward road trip via motorcycle with the author and his pre-teen son, and an inward journey, the quest for the meaning of "quality." On the way, we are treated to an introduction to the history of philosophy, plus a father-and-son story that was brought to my mind when I recently saw the film of Cormac McCarthy's book The Road. Which reminds me--I want to read that book, it might make my list next time I do this. Anyway, this book really reinforces the notion that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Actually, I wasn't sure I could fill out a list of ten when I started, but now I know I have to have left off many things that are precious to me that I would want to introduce to students. Would love to see what you come up with, and what I recall in days to come.

Since I began writing this post I finished a YA novel called Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, best known to me as one of the hosts of BoingBoing. It is a very stimulating story about security, technology, encryption, political and technological resistence and the obligations of citizens of a free state under attack. It would probably make my Top 10 list, but I want to write about it separately at length, so let me just say that not only should you read it, but you can read it FOR FREE in its entirety here. That very fact is one of the things the book is about. I hope it is a harbinger of the way our present students are going to be thinking and acting in the 21st century. More on that one later.