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!

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.

Don't celebrate National Poetry Month

Those "Special Months" - Black History Month, Poetry Month, National Widget Month - are a tempting trap for a teacher. Focus on this topic or area for this specified period of time and it will be "covered." It's a little frightening how many English teachers I talk to who freely admit not knowing much about poetry and/or not really liking it.

First of all, not knowing about something is NEVER an excuse not to teach it. It is an invitation to learn more. From my own experience, the most exciting things to teach are the things you are learning at the moment you are teaching. Much better than the stuff you've known for ages and ages. I didn't know much about poetry when I started teaching it, but I think I know something about good writing and bad writing and the difference. The trick is not to be sucked into the craft issues around verse which can smother an appreciation for poetry. If you're teaching English, you should have developed some personal taste, and that's all you really need. Teach what you respond to and/or what you believe your students will respond to.

The idea is NOT to teach "all about poetry." It's to teach poetry. I face this problem in general music courses all the time. Students come in at the beginning of the year with all sorts of facts about how many children Bach had and how old Mozart was when he died, but trivia about the lives of musicians is not music. Similarly, English teachers sink into a swamp of Robert Frost's New England roots, the use of anaphora and how a triolet is put together without ever developing a taste for poetry, either in themselves or in their students.

You know, like this:



In fact, these analytic habits are so ingrained that your students may assist you in killing poetry, like this:



And so poetry becomes a "unit," which is defined as "something we have to work on right now but soon you will be able to forget completely." To read and write poems for one month in an academic year is like only listening to music in the fall. If poetry is going to get under your skin and that of your students, you need to make it part of your routine, at least on a weekly or perhaps biweekly basis -- but no less frequent than that.

WHY should you care about poetry? Your students just need to be able to pass the HSPAs, write a resume and a college essay. They're never going to "need" this. If that's how you feel, stop, step back and remember that you are teaching literacy. Language and its uses. And poetry is language at its most assertive and vigorous, doing what only words can do. It's the same reasons you don't teach art by looking at book illustrations or teach music by studying Muzak. Most of the time we put language to work serving some other master -- typically, persuasion or narrative. (Both of those tasks can be performed by other means.) But poetry is lacuna pro lacuna, words on display, leaping and pirouetting as only they can do.

Step One: Find a whole bunch of poems YOU LIKE that you can explicate with energy and enthusiasm.

Where to look? Here's a few suggestions:

Poetry 180 A poem a day for high school students and teachers at this website created by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. There are two versions of this collection in book form, if you're still attached to those old-fashioned things.

A note about anthologies - you can always look at the big ones, the Norton and the Oxford being the best. But they are rather anonymous and extremely over-inclusive, and you will have to slog through or pass over a lot of poems that mean nothing to you to find one that does. My advice is to find an editor you are comfortable with, or at least understand their point of view, and see what kind of poems they like.

She Walks in Beauty by Caroline Kennedy, an anthology organized around the stages of a woman's life.

Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. There's a no-frills title for you. It's based on a daily radio feature, so you can be sure these poems are good for reading aloud to people who don't go to poetry readings. Read Keillor's preface about poems that are clear, direct and communicative, rather than dense and literary.

An Invitation to Poetry The third volume of the "Favorite Poem Project," which are poems selected by actual humans (not college professors or literary critics) because they are significant to those people. I like this third volume for the classroom, because it comes with a DVD of 27 different people talking about their poems and their lives and reading or reciting the poems aloud. Many of these videos can be seen online at the link above, too.

Editor Robert Pinsky also has a fine collection, Essential pleasures: a new anthology of poems to read aloud, which is a great place to start looking for poems to commit to and recite from memory. I've written before about the virtues of memorizing of poetry, and I am making a resolution to learn a new poem by heart each month, as a challenge to my students.

(If you respond to poetry that's over 90 years old and out of copyright, you can check out this list of public domain anthologies on Bartleby.com. And of course there is a lot of poetry online, so you can simply follow your nose - but that can be very time-consuming.)

Step Two: Learn how to SAY the poem. Not read it, because if a poem is still a thing on a page to you, that's what it will be to your students. You don't have to memorize it, but you should know it well enough to spend most of your time speaking making eye contact with your students. Here's a poem I like to start the school year with, performed by its author, Taylor Mali:



I like this one because it not only notifies students what I expect of them (keep an open mind) but lets them know that I have aspirations and feelings as their teacher, that their progress means something to me.

Step Three: Repeat. Repeat regularly. You'll get better at this, if you only just start by presenting a poem you really like, opening up an issue or two or three that the students can talk about -- that is, be sure it's interactive and not just a performance by you. Don't worry about filling up a period. A few minutes at the start of one class each week would be awesome, as long as it's regular.

The advent of Taylor Mali raises the topic of Slam Poetry, which deserves its own post, especially in terms of incorporating slam into a regular middle school or high school English course, as contrasted with starting a club or a special group. But since I raised the subject, there are a couple of good anthologies and descriptions of the slam phenomenon, Poetry Slam by Gary Glezner and The Spoken Word Revolution by Mark Eleveld.

And I need to write yet another post on the use of writing poetry in a regular course. But I will tell you this from experience: Do not allow them to use rhyme at all for the first half-dozen assignments. Students will disappear down the hole of doggerel. They get obsessed with rhyming and, unless they are skilled and experienced, will not give you anything from the heart or the head, but just string together rhymes and syllables of padding in between. But I do recommend using poetry as a way of teaching ALL KINDS of writing. It teaches students to be economical, visual and precise. More of that another time.

And one MORE additional post I need to write. You need to assign students AND yourself to create an anthology over the school year. I highly recommend creating a class-wide wiki. But that's for another time. Soon, I promise.

So forget Poetry Month. My students know I celebrate Poetry Tuesday. If it's not regular and repeated, it's just "extra" and you will communicate the message that poetry *doesn't count.* And frankly folks, if you are an English teacher and you don't have anything to say or teach about poetry, you might be in the wrong line of work.

Chuck Jones said Wile E. Coyote came from a Mark Twain book

Chuck Jones recommends to a class of fans to try cracking open a book or two:
January 24, 1992

Knowing how to read and not reading books is like owning skiis and not skiing, owning a board and never riding a wave, or, well, having your favorite sandwich in your hand and not eating it. If you owned a telescope that would open up the entire universe for you would you try to find reason for not looking through it? Because that is exactly what reading is all about; it opens up the universe of humour, of adventure, of romance, of climbing the highest mountain, of diving in the deepest sea.

I found my first experience with Wile E. Coyote in a whole hilarious chapter about coyotes in a book called Roughing It by Mark Twain. I found the entire romantic personality of Pepe Le Pew in a book written by Kenneth Roberts, Captain Hook. I found bits and pieces of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and all the others in wonderful, exciting books.

I dare you all, test your strength: Open a book.

Sincerely,

(Signed)

Chuck Jones

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.

Teaching plays with audiobooks

English teachers are divided among themselves about the use of audio books for reading assignments. Many feel that offering audiobooks permits students to avoid the hard work of deciphering text visually, a skill they will need to acquire. I am of the school that listening to a story still requires deciphering and interpretive skills; I encourage students to use audiobooks while following in the book; and in many cases this is simply the only way many struggling readers will acquire the material at all. (I also believe there are more undiagnosed cases of reading disabilities than we know.) I have been known to distribute CDRs with Mp3 files of audiobook versions of books we're studying when I believed it would be of genuine assistance to the student.

There are a lot of audiofiles out there, but many of the free ones available (such as LibriVox) are made by volunteers, so you should check out how they sound before recommending them or supplying them to students.

The one less disputed use of audiobooks is in studying plays. Most of the time, my students are enthusiastic about reading aloud when they can take specific roles (as contrasted with reading ordinary prose). Sometimes, however, classes are shy or students are reluctant to read expressively. Also, Shakespeare can be very daunting to read alone, especially when reading "cold." And I usually pass over the text several times in the classroom to insure students have maximum exposure to this challenging material.

Often I used my own or borrowed recordings to rip Mp3 files. But I have located some links for free downloads of some plays, which I thought I'd share with you. As I find more, I'll share them with you. Most of the files are in compressed format and will require expander software. For Windows users like me, I like 7-zip, which is free and has been completely reliable. Some of these downloads are in Mp3 format.

Let's start with one that's on a lot of syllabuses--I've been teaching it almost my whole career: The Crucible.

Then there's Hamlet, and there are several versions to offer. First is the BBC Radio Version featuring Kenneth Branagh leading the Renaissance Theatre Company. It may not be absolutely complete, but it's about as complete as you can find. The files have been uploaded in three sections, which we shall refer to as one, two, three and four.

Next we have the recent production seen on public television here, with David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as both Claudius and The Ghost. It is in a single Mp3 file.

And just for an exotic difference, here's the Nicol Williamson Hamlet of the late 1960s with Marianne Faithful as Ophelia, Anthony Hopkins as Claudis and one of the first angry-young-man interpretations. Again, this is an Mp3.

While we're on the subject of Hamlet, some Honors and AP teachers work with Tom Stoppard's brilliant Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. There is no audiobook of it yet, but here's a rip of the soundtrack of the film, which, while visually dull, tracks the text of the play very closely. Also, it has Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, who are perfectly cast as the title characters.

Speaking of honors classes and absurdism, there are two good recordings of Waiting for Godot. One is with Bert Lahr, E.G. Marshall and the original American cast, in two parts, one and two.

The other is a starry BBC Radio version with Ian MacKellan as Estragon and Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, also split into Act I and Act II.

Meanwhile, back with Shakespeare, the next most popular play in the classroom has to be the (shhh!) Scottish Play. This is a BBC Radio version with Richard Eyre directing Kenneth Stott and Phyllis Logan, again split into sections one, two and three. (BTW, can't wait to see the television production later this year with Patrick Stewart as an unspecified Eastern European despot sporting a 20-something hot trophy wife Lady Macbeth. Interesting interpretation.)

Another fairly common play in the classroom is Othello, which can be heard in a production starring Anthony Hopkins, with Bob Hoskins as an inspired Iago, again split into parts one and two. The text is virtually complete.

I remember well reading King Lear during my senior year in high school, and I wish I could have heard John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi, Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins and company. Files are divided, like Lear's kingdom, into parts One, Two and Three. The text is virtually complete.

If you crave novelty, you can also check out Sir Alec Guiness's Lear here, somewhat abridged.

Many schools teach The Tempest, which can be downloaded here with a cast led by Sir Ian MacKellan.

In my first school, I initiated the teaching of Shakespeare in our middle school. Reasoning that I wanted something readily understood, and that most high schools in the area taught Midsummer's Night Dream or Romeo and Juliet in the freshman year, I opted for Taming of the Shrew, which can be downloaded here in parts one and two.

It's a shame more schools don't teach Richard III, because for a history (or is it a tragedy), it's rollicking good fun. You can go with a complete rendition by Kenneth Branagh and cast, posted in parts one and two; or you can go with the abridged soundtrack from the film starring Laurence Olivier. (Branagh just spends all his time catching up with Olivier, doesn't he?)

If you're really intrepid, this is not very clearly marked, but there is an entire archive of all of the Arkangel Shakespeare recordings here, arranged so you can download just what you want. I'm sort of lukewarm about this library, as they don't boast as distinguished casts as most of the productions I've posted here, but it may be the only place to find a free copy of some of the lesser plays, in case you're teaching Measure for Measure, Titus Andronics or Two Noble Kinsmen.

I wanted to post audio versions of those all-time favorites, Julius Caesar, Midsummer's Night Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Merchant of Venice, but I'm still looking for excellent free copies. If I find them, I'll post them. Meantime, you could use the Arkangel versions posted above.

And for a lighter touch, you can introduce younger students to Shakespeare with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by the Reduced Theater Company. The DVD is probably better for the classroom, but if you want an audio version, maybe for yourself to listen to in the car, the entire radio series of six half-hours can be found here in parts one and two.

Rip this book now!

The first thing you need to know about the novel Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is that you can read the entire novel, right now for free, and so can your students, if they have internet access.

The second thing you need to know is that a large proportion of your students will really like this book. It is, after all, all about adolescent rebellion, and rebellion that succeeds.

The third thing you need to know is that the subject of the book is one of the most important challenges and debates facing our democracy today: the tension between increased security against terrorism and individual liberty.

The fourth thing is that it is entertaining and fast-moving. Some things are a bit over-explained, but that seems to be a feature of YA fiction, and it makes sense because so few of my students seem to be aware of how things work outside of their own very narrow world. Partly this is a function of youth in general, but we are also developing into a more and more insular society, cocooning our kids away from reality. Which is one fun and liberating aspect of this book--the high school-age characters in the book are able to move freely around the greater San Francisco area where the story is set, and are quite knowledgeable about the city and its 20th-century cultural and political history.

The point is, if you wanted to (and were permitted to) teach this book, you would not need to allocate one penny to acquire copies, because here it is free on the Internet in every format you want, plain text, html, .pdf, iPhone, Kindle, Palm, even an embeddable Facebook version, and many more.

Not only does author Cory Doctorow, host of the very entertaining site BoingBoing, invite readers to reformat the book, he even invites remixes, mash-ups, parodies and fanfic--which could be a leaping-off place for a writing assignment for your students.

The book is not perfect--I have my own demurrals--but it is intelligently written, with much reliable information on encryption and security. In any case, it is thought-provoking and likely to spur reflection and discussion in your class. If you doubt me, go ahead and read it yourself. It won't cost you a dime.

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.

The plan for English Class today

[I have no idea why this post is in several different font sizes. I have spent a half-hour trying to fix it, and I have to move on...]

The goal today is to spend the entire period writing, but not necessarily about the same thing. You can take breaks by adding pictures or gadgets or otherwise decorating or re-decorating your blog. Make sure that I have the URL of your blog and that I am following it. You may want to link to your friends’ blogs this period, and you can spend some time reading their blogs and leaving comments.

Following are some suggestions to write. At least some of your entries must be about English class matters—about reading and/or writing.

Blogging Prompts

1. If you don’t have an entry on this blog for any of my suggestions for your Shakespeare pre-write, select one of those and write about it. Here's the link for freshman classes. Here's the link for seniors. Or go to my homepage.

2. What is your procedure for reading Shakespeare? Is it difficult or simple to understand at first pass? What do you do about words you don’t understand? What if you think you understand the words but the whole phrase doesn’t make sense? Even without understanding all of their words, do the characters and their actions make sense? What about the verse structure—how does that affect your reading experience—or does it at all? How difficult is it to see through the archaic language and the verse and get a sense of the characters? Do they feel like living people? Why or why not?

3. Write about your independent reading. Concentrate more on the experience than the book. Where and when do you read? Are you having a good time with it or has it become a chore? Is it a “good” book, and what do you mean by that? What makes a book a “good” book? What are some of your personal “Top Ten” books and why?

4. Write about anything that's happened to you of interest in the last two weeks, something that's made you think, amused you, anything that you think someone else might want to read.

5. What have you read on the internet, news or anything else that you want to bring to other people's attention? Make a link to that item and then write your comment. For instance, you could talk about how proud you are of the NMHS Women's Basketball team making it to the Group One finals, and playing with such spirit. It doesn't have to be news. It can be anything that interests you.

6. You can also link to a favorite site and comment on it.

7. You could embed a picture, like I've done at the top of this post, and comment on it.

8. If you can't think of anything to write about, try this. If you don't like the suggestion you see, click "Next Prompt" until you find one you like.

9. Have fun and make this your own!