Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

You can submit a sample of your writing to this new web site and it will tell you what author you write like.  No joke.  Huffington Post wrote about it recently:

For anyone who has ever thought Charles Dickens was lurking inside his or her prose, a new website claims it can find your inner author.

The recently launched I Write Like has one simple gimmick: You paste a few paragraphs that exemplify your writing, then click “analyze” and – poof! – you get a badge telling you that you write like Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway or Chuck Palahniuk.

The site’s traffic has soared in recent days and its arrival has lit up the blogosphere. Gawker tried a transcript from one of the leaked Mel Gibson phone calls. The suggested author: Margaret Atwood.

The New Yorker found that an invitation to a birthday party was James Joycean. Many others were aghast to discover they wrote similarly to “The Da Vinci Code” scribe Dan Brown.

The New York Times tried putting in actual novels, such as “Moby-Dick.” Herman Melville, it turns out, writes less like himself than King, according to I Write Like.

Atwood, herself, tried the site only to discover she also apparently writes like King. “Who knew?” she tweeted.

There is a novelty to it for sure.  There is also a history to this approach to teaching writing. Education scholar Robert Scholes writes about the birth of English from classical studies.  When studying Greek and Latin texts, 19th century students studied the author’s writing so they could emulate them.  You read Cicero in order to write like him.  When English was struggling to be respected as a discipline in the early 20th century, it fell under the spell of critical essays.  To this day, exams tend to ask students to play the role of mediocre literary critic, because it somehow strikes us as more rigorous and scholarly.

My hope is that sites like IWL will rekindle our interest in what Scholes calls “writing literarily”, that is, in reading literature in order to write with literary style.  Imagine, rather than simple asking student to write a thematic essay on a short story by Hemingway, we asked students to also write like the author.  Students would have to have a sophisticated literary sensibility to do so and would develop a much richer understanding of how writers write in order to influence readers.  It has been over a century now and the time has come to mend the split between literary and composition studies.  Three little words can help us get there: I Write Like…

A product development group’s study recently found that readers read more quickly on paper than on e-readers, the iPad in particular.  Ian Paul, of PC World, writes

So it appears technology hasn’t quite figured out yet how to replicate the experience of the printed page. That said this study leaves a lot to be desired owing to its small test group size, but it would be interesting to see a similar study on a much larger scale. I’d be curious to find out, for example, if there’s any big difference in reading speeds based on age groups.

Paul is right to point out that the test group leaves much to be desired (only 24 people who already read with frequency) and I agree that a larger study would be intriguing.   Do reluctant readers, for instance, find the device on which they read to make a difference in a text’s readability?  Or, are some works better read on some devices (this study uses Hemingway’s short stories). There are other considerations raised by this study, too.

Reading Faster is Better

Or so one would think based on this study.  Why is reading speed so important?  Speed is important, perhaps, if one’s job requires them to sift through piles of information in search of only useful data.  Sure, then speed matters.  But, does speed help or hinder one’s experience of reading for pleasure?  Is speed pleasurable?  Or, what if you are reading to think more deeply about yourself as a person (a kind of reading we could all do more of… our young adult students are no exception)?  Is rapid reading a positive attribute in that case?  The emphasis on quick reading suggests to me that the study does privilege a certain kind of reading: reading for specific uses.  This kind of reading runs the risk of ignoring other reasons for reading… readings that aren’t easily aligned with the work-place or with data-gathering.

There Must Be a BEST Way to Read

This study makes you think there is a best way to read out there.  One would think reading more quickly or with clearest comprehension is necessarily a good thing.  And yet, reading slowly in order to enjoy a story or reading a story that defies comprehension can be convincingly argued to have a place and value (consider the kind of confusion, for instance, Italo Calvino masters or that Milton creates through his convoluted Latinate style).  And why choose one over the other?  I would argue that it is much more valuable to teach students to ask themselves what kind of reading experiences they wish or want to have with a particular text.  A student who chooses to read an article on an iPad or a novel on paper (or vice versa) is making a choice that can rightly be ascribed to a maturing reader.  And likely a lifelong one, too.

Who Reads, Not What is Read (or What it’s Read On)

Our attention is misguided if we find so interesting the reading pace of a small study group on iPads while neglecting the more important question: why do these readers read at all.  And equally, why don’t some readers read at all?  The real subject of study is NOT the text that is read or the machine that presents it.  The real subject is the reader.  It is the reader who reads and without whom there is not text or text-presenter.  And all readers CHOOSE to read; they cannot be forced to.  Why readers do and don’t read is–in my mind–a central question in this age of new literacies and technologies.  How they read is also essential.  But, on what they read?  That is only of interest if it helps answer the former questions. We must always come back to who reads and why.  Without that, studies like this one are of only fleeting interest at best and will be quick to go the way of yesterday’s iPad.

A piece in The New Republic by Jed Perl beautifully describes the complicated relationship between writer and reader.  He is especially concerned with the effect that speedy technology is having on this relationship.  He writes:

…the speed with which words, once written, are now being read—a speed shaped by technological innovations long before the Internet turned the quick turnaround into the virtually instantaneous turnaround—has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader.

Writers’ Right to Remain Silent

He starts to tease out this idea: writers do themselves a disservice when they write in order to be read by some imagined reader.  (For the record, this is a point that conflicts with my own view on the matter. Or did, at least.)  Perl thinks that the thinking process is an intimate one, a messy one, a drippy one.  Writers make sense of things by writing and sometimes forgetting or rereading.  It’s that

most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page.

Writers have a right to be left unread.  To be read is to be drawn into a relationship, a commitment, that etches one’s thoughts into some textual stone.  There is value, Perl argues, in simply writing and in NOT being read:

Nobody understands the extent to which, even for the widely acclaimed author with ready access to publication, the process of writing can sometimes necessitate a rejection or at least an avoidance of one’s own readers.

That avoidance of readers gives writers a sort of right to remain silent.  What’s more,

That silence is a part of writing—that the work of this day or this week or even this year might for good reason be withheld—is becoming harder and harder to comprehend.

Forcing Students to Publish

I agree that recently it has become a new industry to publish one’s ideas quickly and quirkily.  I say this, of course, while doing exactly that. (Have you checked my Twitter feeds or clicked on the suggested links below?!)  Still, there is something to be said here for what we do as educators as well.  Aren’t we in the business of making students publish there ideas, no matter how premature those ideas might be?

The Intimacy of Literacy

I’m thinking about this age of accountability and assessment in education when if it isn’t made public and quantified, it doesn’t count.  And yet, there is much to be gained, Perl says, in exactly that: not counting, not sharing.   What would it mean for us as educators to NOT assess students’ work until they are ready to publish it to us?  Are we, as a profession, guilty of disrespecting the intimacy of literacy?

Teaching What We Don’t Know

I’ve asked a similar question before with regard to students’ reading.  Teachers don’t know–for certain–that students read for class.  They know how well they read quizzes, perhaps, but reading itself is a private act and we only know as much as students wish to share with us.  We fight it, perhaps, or trick ourselves into thinking we “can tell” when a student reads for class.  But we don’t know.  Perhaps there’s a lesson to learn about writing too.  Perhaps writing merits its own distance and silence.  In these days of Tweets and Facebooking and blogging, making one’s ideas public is gaining uncritical acceptance.  For Perl,

But if there are risks involved in resisting the public, there are also dangers involved in running after the public. Nobody talks about those dangers anymore.

Someone should be discussing those dangers with students.  Teachers should.

Rigor is a tragic word in education.  On the one hand, it has gravitas–it conveys a history of academic excellence and challenge.  On the other hand, it gets volleyed around in educational politics with the whim and witlessness of a group of school children playing hackysak during lunch. 

This is the word that is being hacked and sacked in education now.  Some policy makers have hesitations about the Race to the Top initiative, especially as it concerns the relationship between the state and the fed.  Ed Week writes,

Some House lawmakers suggested the initiative could help address the frequent criticism that the 8-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, the latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, allows states to set their own academic standards.

That policy inadvertently encourages states to reduce rigor so that they can clear achievement targets, said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the education committee and an author of the NCLB law.

As a result, “the quality of education a student may receive is left up to their ZIP code. It’s a matter of geographical luck,” he said. “Having 50 different standards in 50 different states undermines America’s education system.”

I smell a rigor argument afoot.  The “quality”, they say.  Such a simple word that means precisely nothing.  The worry is that we are embarking on a national standards campaign with accompanying exams.  I’m not completely convinced it would be such a bad thing; certainly not as bad as what post-NCLB has been.  It behooves schools, collectively, to have some common language or point of assessment.  But the language must be precise. And precise language takes time.  That’s my own worry: I don’t object to national standards on any principle; I don’t even object to national exams if they are created smartly and if they are prevented from dominating instruction.  What I object to is dodgy rigor–the word without the vigor.

The New York City Department of Education’s system for assessing schools’ achievement comes under fire again from the New York Times.  Disregarding that this piece comes out well after the mayor’s election is safely secured, the article points out that not all schools are held to the same standard, even though the systemic differentiation is justified on the grounds of helping IEP students, ELLs, and other who have been historically underserved.  The Times writes:

Several of the city’s largest high schools that have struggled for years received low grades on the progress reports, and those schools have a high population of black and Latino students, as well as special education students and English language learners.

One high school principal in Queens, who declined to be named for fear of punishment, said that the school had received more needy students in recent years and that it was difficult to help them catch up.

“I don’t disagree with holding us to a higher bar, but not all schools are being asked to do the same thing,” the principal said.

In conversations I’ve had with a principals recently, this sense that the city’s assessment system is unfair and doesn’t fairly represent schools’ successes pervaded.  For instance, if schools are rewarded for the “growth” they make year to year–that is, moving from a B to an A–what reward is in place for an already successful high school?  In another instance, if schools are rewarded for reaching out to students’ homes, is it really fair that whether you are a school of 100 or 5000, you get only one parent coordinator to help you do that? 

To be clear, I think a system of comparing and developing a strategy to improve schools is vital to the city.  I also think the assessment method is in need of assessment itself.

A report from the Everyone Graduates Center has come saying that 9th grade is unusually good at holding students back.  What seems to be a study that focuses on a particular year of study could equally be interpreted as a reflection on a wide disconnect between middle schools and high schools in terms of what is taught and assessed, not to mention how in both cases.  Here’s an table from the study to consider:

From Pics for Blog

The US Chamber of Commerce has just released a report card, called “Leaders and Laggards,” giving each state an assessment for its use of “educational innovation”.  There are many things worth noting.  Here are two: 1) the report comes at a time when–all too conveniently–the mad rush has begun for Race to the Top funds has begun; and 20 the report seems to rely on fairly traditional understandings of assessing the impact of innovation.  Education Week notes,

What researchers were not doing was measuring “nifty, faddish experiments,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Instead, the analysis was meant to examine whether a state has created a “flexible, performance-oriented culture,” he said.

Nifty? Faddish?  Now that has the ring of innovation.

Teachers have known this for sometime: state standards have been eased in the wake of NCLB to give the illusion of raised test scores.  The New York Times article lays it out, including this excerpt relating to New York teachers:

Some states raised standards in one subject but lowered them in another, including New York, which raised the rigor of its fourth-grade-math standard but lowered the standard in eighth-grade reading, the study said.

It merits raising a broader question, too.  Not just the controversy of how some states played with testing standards, but the problem of using these kinds of tests to compare students at all. 

Education Week talks about “common-core standards” that are in process.  We might have a unique opportunity to inform these standards when you consider the “review” feature on the CCSSI’s web site.

A recent Stanford study found that charter schools do better, over all, than public schools in cities like here in New York.  This article below summarizes the study and some of the reasons that might explain the difference:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/education/22charters.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1253618031-BjjBHuCrlpwBL33/4TWQdg

In a recent post, Angela Maiers talks about the use of reading levels in literacy instruction and gives it her own 21st century literacy twist.

Good readers know that they can never to judge a book by it’s cover, but do good reading teachers know that they can not  judge a reader by their reading level? Reading Levels have always been a hot topic in my face-to-face conversations with teachers. Now, new Web 2.0  tools like Fab Lexile (Thanks Keisa) and Google Docs Text Leveling (Thanks Richard) have made it even easier to discover the reading level of your favorite text. But, before you punch in those numbers, let’s take some time to consider exactly what “reading level” means to readers

There is definite power and advantage in having a “gradient of increasingly more difficult text” for students to practice their developing literacy competencies across. Helping students understand their “just right” level can be aided by leveling tools and systems as it allows students to more efficiently find books that match their abilities and interests.

While I agree that the reliance on reading levels is incredibly problematic–I’ve heard students labeled “A 3″ by teachers who are uncritically immersed in reading level programs, which while seemingly innocuous is nothing less than dehumanizing–I also think that using free and immediate reading level assessment software like the one that comes with Google Docs (in its Word Count tool) can help students think critically about how they write.  Are they writing on a 5th grade or 11th grade level, according to the reading level assessor?  It’s determined by numbers of letters in words, words in sentences, sentences in paragraphs.  Is that all there is to writing well? Of course, not.  Can students learn to pay closer attention to their decisions as writers by considering these factors? Of course, they can.

Last week, newly released test scores in middle school English went up on average in New York City.  While skeptics suggest it could just mean the tests are getting easier, both Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein were publicly pleased.  On the very day the scores came out, they were both in Washington chatting school reform with the president.

I have seen the middle school English Language Arts test.  It is comparable to what high school students take on their ELA Regents exam.  It worries me.  So much emphasis is put on test results and too little is said (or perhaps heard) about what is lost in such exams–especially when it comes to English and literature.

As quoted in the NYTimes,

“This is confirmatory of the fact that results continue to grow and increase,” Mr. Klein said in a telephone interview while he was on his way back from Washington. “I think we have multiple data points now that show that we are making that progress.”

When it comes to English, what constitutes progress?  Test scores?  My concern is that the reading of literature is experiential, aesthetic, and private.  You can’t test it authentically.  In a strange twist, to the credit of the State, they don’t even really try to test literature.  Most of what is tested is reading comprehension and argumentative essay writing.  When students do encounter literature, it isn’t in any literary sort of way: At a desk, in a stuffy room, clock ticking, questions awaiting response might spawn the writing of literature–some sharp societal satire–but not the reading of it.

As school reform becomes synonymous with test scores and achievement, literature will continue to become less and less literary in schools.  And as more emphasis is put on teaching into new literacies, literature awaits the settling of falling dust as it fades into its bookshelves.

A teacher shortage is near. As older teachers retire and new teachers fail to make it past the first couple years, there will soon be too few teachers to go around. The solution, might be

To ease the exodus, the report says, policy makers should restructure schools and modify state retirement policies so that thousands of the best veteran teachers can stay on in the classroom to mentor inexperienced teachers.

What I’m about to say borders on blasphemy, I know: Maybe the teacher shortage isn’t a bad thing. My concern is that the needs of our students is changing rapidly. They think digitally, learn in multi-modal ways, and educators must adapt to these changes. In my experience, however, educators willing to learn new literacies and adapt are the exception to the rule. Many don’t. While I don’t mean to mitigate the contribution analogue teachers have made to the profession, I also think that the methods of education have changed. It’s a matter of methods.

With this in mind, policy makers’ safety net plan might do more harm than good. I don’t think we can both “ease the exodus” while trying to prepare out students for living and working in these new digital times. Perhaps the best position to take here is to focus efforts on new technologies and the new methods they make possible. As for teachers, maybe it’s time to be letting go.

What is Georgia doing?  This is what I read today on the train:

The Georgia House of Representatives signed off on final changes to a plan that boosts the pay of certified math and science teachers. The proposal would allow new secondary school teachers with proper certification to start at the salary of a fifth-year teacher.

This is iconic of a deep problem in education.  Policy makers think of education in terms of content.  That’s it.  Clearly if a teacher teaches math or science, they are more important and worth more money.

But, what about the quality of education?  Have none of us had experiences with math or science teachers who were less than effective?  The message this sends is that pedagogy is not as important as content.  If content is so discrete, however, we don’t need teachers at all.  Just give kids review books and be gone with them.

Arne Duncan wants new kinds of data from states.  While governors will get billions in stimulus money right away, the second half of the dough will be held until states get straight.  According to the Times,

The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.

It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.

Yes.  It will show both of those things.  Math teacher friends of mine joke about how absurdly easy some exams have gotten as New York has tried to raise test scores.  It’s like watching a bad limbo contest.

But still, while I am all on board with holding school systems more accountable, what these systems do as businesses differs from what teachers do in classrooms.  Data can indeed be gathered about how money is spent: fire up the spreadsheets!  Data can’t be gathered as easily about how students learn.  What does learning look like?

In Disrupting Class, Christensen describes tries to reiterate Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences premise: each student learns differently.  He comes from a business management perspective, which reveals itself several times as he conveys his affection for data and numbers and charts.  Nevertheless, he maintains that education must give students individual room to learn at their own individual pace.  For him, this is where online learning comes in.

Policy makers and scholars and teachers must come to terms with their competing definitions of data.  Until the differences between types of data are addressed openly, students will continue to fall deeper and deeper into the Data Gap.

Teaching literature might need to downsize.  While reading an article recently about nanotechnology curriculum, I wondered what nanoliterary criticism would look like.

What if students are asked to respond to some traditional literary prompt–How does Clarissa Dalloway’s language betray her feelings for Septimus?–and add this twist to it: Please respond to the prompt with your cell phones using 140 characters or less.  Why ask students to spend 5 – 10 pages answering a question when in one thoughtfully composed paragraph will give a teacher enough to work with.  Not to mention it could be assessed more quickly.

If paper-based culture values breadth, this digital age values terseness.  Imagine working for a week crafting a single SMS response.  It might well be nothing less than poetic.

I farm out my taxes to an accountant.  I simply can’t read tax forms: the grids, the numbers, the blanks, the jargon.  Though I think of myself as a literate person, tax forms strike me as chaotic and opaque.  Hand it over to H&R Block.

Some parents feel the same way about new report cards called standard-based reports.  They include numbers instead of letters—scales of 1-4 rather than F-A.  An article describes these new report cards as

part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.

Though I question whether “Educators praise them for setting clear expectations” it makes sense that parents are finding the report cards unclear.  The letter scale “’is ingrained in us,” Mr.Tirozzi said. “It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”’ 

Any method of accountability is paradoxical: it both tries to standardize student learning while also trying to assess an individual learner’s abilities.  However, having accepted the fact that such report cards will be the norm for quite a while longer, schools would be wise and responsible to reach out to parents and help them learn to read these kinds of reports.  The worst thing that can happen is to have a parent, at home, disregarding a report from school because it is opaquely represented.  In such a scenario, the parent models for the child to disregard schoolwork, even if they don’t mean to. 

Perhaps while schools are helping enhance parents’ rubric-reading abilities, they can also provide assistance in cracking another unreadable text: tax forms. 

There are two problems with the word “accountability” as it is being used by the Obama administration. (To be fair, it’s the way the word is used in education in general too.) The problems are “account” and “ability”.

As described in fair detail in a recent book called Disrupting Class—which explores the future of online learning using Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences as a starting point—students learn at differently, different ways and paces. In short, their abilities differ infinitely. Accounting, however, works in the opposite way: it is about a uniform system of measurement. Is it about students’ abilities or about accounting kids like numbers? Either way, ditching the word is a first step.

The new season of Top Chef starts in one week. By that time the world will know who our new president is, and I’ll be quite glad to be back to serious television.

In short, Top Chef strikes me as the more legitimate competition. In both television series, competitors wrest for a prize–culinary repute on the one hand and political power on the other. In Top Chef, however, the competitors spend a fixed amount of time responding to specific challenges, relevant to the wished-for job. They must rely on their own talents which, however well-boasted such talents might be, will be tested and evaluated by qualified judges. If your chicken piccata is made with bread crumbs, Chef Colicchio will tell you it’s not good enough and that any chef worth his salt knows that you only use flour for that dish. Last season, when competitor Spike used frozen scallops in a challenge and defended it by saying that it was in the restaurant’s walk-in and therefore the owner of the kitchen was to blame for having such low quality ingredients in the first place. The owner, Chicago icon Rick Tramonto, fired back that purveyors deliver sub-par foods all the time and only a rubbish chef would send rubbish out of his kitchen. At the end of the series, regardless of how staged it all seems or how many advertisers are slipped into challenges, the viewer can sleep soundly knowing the competitors were tested with thoroughness and relevance.

In presidential elections, however, the “challenges” are empirically miles away from the presidency.  What does a pseudo-debate in which candidates from both sides dance around each other’s policies and ideas have to do with getting politics done for the country?  If Top Chef were run like an election, competitors would submit a video claiming the right to compete, spend weeks debating each other about how to best prepare one dish over another, and direct viewers’ attention to pictures of past dishes they made, and maybe even a menu or two.

No one would watch it.

And yet the country is gripped by this presidential election. I’m all for passion in politics, and by that I mean rigorous assessment of politicians abilities and ideas, not a televised mock interview based on twisted track records and rhetoric. At least Top Chef demands some culinary proof. When it comes to the presidency, we have to choose a candidate without so much as tasting a spoonful.

Our schools, too, can learn something from this tension between Top Chef and Top Chief.  At times it seems like we settle for the appearance of achievement rather than learning.  Appearance of achievement comes in the form of standardized test scores and other seemingly factual assessments.  In reality, such scores are as manipulable as language.  It’s illusory assessment.  If you’re a state trying to boost math scores, the solution is simple: make the test easier.  Math teacher friends of mine say that’s exactly what New York did a number of years ago.  Whether it’s cooking or politicking or teaching, we all have a commitment to ensure that the assessments matches the job.  This begs the question: Since we have a show dedicated to cooking and bevies of shows for the presidential race, how far away are we from the next great reality TV show, Top Teach?

The professoriate is losing its radicals, the New York Times reported recently, and new professors are more moderate than their predecessors. The article suggests that the professors who flooded universities in the 60s and 70s were cut from a different cloth. Today’s academics are less politically motivated, more moderate, and research-minded rather than ideological. Teaching, however, has never been apolitical. Just ask Socrates.

Before the great Greek philosopher gulped down his fatal dosage of hemlock, he stood trial for corrupting the minds of the young. Having traipsed around Athens asking people difficult questions, never arriving at a certainty and always pushing deeper questioning above all else, Socrates was thought to be challenging democracy in politically turbulent times. The judicial remedy, of course: to kill him.

I use Socrates as an example because, in his story, it is moot to argue whether or not he explicitly criticized democracy. That is to say, it wasn’t what he said, but rather, his trial seems to have been about his teaching method—persistent questioning of one’s ideas. Whereas I’d like to say that pedagogy and politics be left to their respective corners, Socrates’ story suggests the two occupy a round room. In terms of Socrates’ trial and sentence, there seems little difference between pedagogy and politics.

It seems to me that healthy thinking necessarily critiques any subject matter. To think is to, as objectively as possible, learn certain content matter and then develop questions out of it. But, I might ask, what is one to do with the questions and conclusions one arrives at? If, as a professor, I study the way students have been taught to read over the course of western education, and I arrive at the conclusion that reading has been taught at the expense of oral expression, what do I do with that conclusion? Do I begin each course with pontification: “Reading, as it always has in our country, oppresses oral communication!”? Do I write on the top of my syllabus, “Reading kills the mind”? Do I campaign on campus for legislation that privileges oral communication over reading?

Hardly. As a professor, my role would be to share with my students the various arguments taking place around a specific topic or question and then to share my own perspective. My students, I hope, would then arrive at their own conclusions. In short, I argue for this: Dialectic over rhetoric. If professors present the latter while calling it the former, they perpetuate the type of sophistry that Socrates warned of, the result of which is intellectual manipulation.

This particular Times article presents the retiring professor as politically mindful and active. Professor Olneck, of the University of Wisconsin, for example, begins his syllabus for a course called Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in American Education thus: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.” Those seem to be the words of a sophist, for they presuppose the outcome of inquiry thereby preventing students from genuinely (and safely) arriving at their own conclusions. Where is the room for true dialectic when the course begins at its own end. How will students respond to the statement, “They have not kept that promise”? Is there room for disagreement here? And if there is, how is a student going to know that?

The article later discusses the work of Gerald Graff, current MLA president and professor at University of Illinois – Chicago, who, when writing about the culture wars taking place in American universities posits the notion of “teaching the conflicts.” For Graff, the role of the professor is to present to students the various conflicts in a given field and let them decide for themselves. In later works, Clueless in Academe most notably, Graff goes on to say that professors need to model thinking for their students, especially in the form of verbal and written argument-making. Academic culture is, for Graff, one of argument. This take on academia seems to differ slightly from the recent lectures and writings of Graff’s contemporary, Stanley Fish. Fish, as I’ve noted previously, thinks that professors need to keep their political views out of the classrooms. Graff would hardly take issue with that. Fish goes on, however, as he did at a lecture a few months ago at Teachers College, to argue that the professor is the content expert in the classroom whose job is to transmit knowledge. I suggest that as long as a professor or classroom goes in with the attitude that he is the expert, his students are likely to genuflect at the altar of his expertise. A fair and genuine argument seems highly unlikely.

The Times presents the notion of a “sensibility gap” between the older generation of professors and the new. A fledgling professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab, describes how “’Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,’ she said. They want to question values and norms; ‘we are more driven by data.’” It is the ideological older generation who demands that newer scholars “question values and norms,” whereas the younger generation seeks objective data. I caution others not to be duped by the suggestion that data necessitates objectivity. As the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard discussed in his Postmodern Condition, knowledge creation can be created by anyone willing to pay for it. And perhaps this is an understated and paramount point: funding.

We can talk all we want about political-activism verses data-driven research. If neither side at least acknowledges that paychecks play a part in the debate, then it’s an empty argument. I don’t think the paycheck point stunts the dialogue, but it must be at least acknowledged. This is where Socrates again serves as a model: in Apology, Socrates is described as not accepting payment for his work. Perhaps only the pauper can claim to be a pedagogue. The rest, whether they call themselves social activists or data-driven researchers, are the descendants of sophists.

I’ve become hypersensitive to a term recently that gets floated in education discussions. It seems used with lightness and universal comprehension. The word is literacy. In a recent meeting, someone asked a roomful of educators and doctoral students what literacy actually meant. No one knew. On a basic level, we agreed that it had something to do with reading and writing. This troubled me greatly. Has the term literacy come to mean so little that the relationship between reading and writing is going unscrutinized? What, after all, is the relationship between the two. Reading and writing are used in unison frequently. It seems that at the center of the current conflation of reading and writing is an age-old reductionism: that reading and writing go hand in hand—that there is a seeming causal relationship between the two. Perhaps by allowing these two separate words to be subsumed by literacy, we in education have allowed our own language to become cloudy. Let’s look at a musical example to prove a point.

As a singer, I can read music. Given a few minutes, I can scan through the musical notation after identifying the key signature and hum the song. Being able to read music, however, does not mean that I can compose music. To assume that one ability necessitates the other would be to overestimate my own skill-level and to underestimate the complexity of reading and writing music respectively. Does singing a song mean one can write a song? Hardly. Now, my analogy has its flaws and could be critiqued fairly. But at the heart of it is a simple point that is not easily ignored: reading and writing are two distinct acts and it behooves educators and researchers and theorists to pry the two of them apart.

“Of course reading and writing should be considered together,” one might argue, “because in order to write one must know how to read.”

True, but in order to read one does not need to know how to write. The two are not necessarily related. Consider these essential differences between writing and reading: students produce writing; they cannot produce reading. The prior is epistemological in nature, whereas the latter is ontological; the prior is a matter of production, whereas the latter is social/spatial; the prior is external, quantifiable, categorizeble; the latter is internal, qualitative, and ephemeral.
Historically, writing seems to have become primary, especially in the latter part of the 19th century when the values of industrialization placed value on product development. Reading began to be seen as a tool for the production of writing, rather than an end for its own sake. Here, we see a teleological treatment of reading—it is a means to a written end. But is that to say reading is purposeless unless the reader writes about the reading? This is troubling. What the reader writes about is likely not to be what was read at all. Rather, it might well be some second-rate version of the reading the student thinks the teacher wants him to have done. The clearest example of this can be seen on a state exam.

One question on a recent New York State Regents exam presented two passages. The student is asked to read an excerpt from a memoir and a poem in order to write a “unified essay about parenting as revealed in the passages.” While there is more to the prompt, including specific instructions as to how to read the texts—including showing evidence and identifying literary elements—I’m struck by the kind of reading the student is told to do here. Is this reading? My instinct is to say, No it isn’t. But perhaps that would be rash. It is a type of reading: teleological reading, perhaps. Using the modifier before the word reading could make a significant difference not only in the way educators or researchers or theorists talk about the act of reading, but it could make be revolutionary for students. I imagine other modified terms for types of reading: aesthetic reading–students reading for emotional impact or pleasure; social reading—students read for the purpose of discussing in a social-academic setting; analytical reading—students read for the purpose of unpacking the structural makeup of a text; laissez faire reading—where students are left alone to read whatever they like, however they like. In any case, students must be brought into the conversation about how they are asked to read texts in school. To neglect the conversation is to encourage dishonest readership where teacher and students go about their roles inauthentically.

It is the invisible ephemerality of the act of reading that we educators have ignored or dismissed. The result has been classroom pedagogy, methods books, and literacy research that have objectified the individual identity of student-readers in the name of knowledge production. Movements to restore the student-reader’s identity (most notably Reader Response and transaction theory) have failed precisely because they have ignored the subjective nature of readership, and the limits of pedagogy: teachers teach students, they cannot force students to be readers. Granted, they can impart and practice certain reading skills, but there comes a point where the student chooses to read or not to read: And the teacher can never know for certain. Only the student himself can choose read.

The divorce of reading and writing must be a group effort. It is a relationship so firmly established at the core of western culture, not to mention educational thought, that to pull them apart will require the ideas, musings, and practices of all involved: educators, researchers, theorists, and especially students. The reward could be great—a new epoch of learning, one of transparency and authenticity, of pleasure in schooling, of deep literary experiences that are as of yet unimaginable.

General Electric just gave the New York City public school system $17.9 million. It’s the largest single grant given to the city schools and will be distributed over a five-year period. The mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, had this to say: “Public-private partnerships like this one with the GE Foundation have been essential to our success in turning around a failing public school system. This generous grant will help to prepare our students to be the leaders of the 21st century economy which will be built on science, math and technology” (http://www.thecro.com/node/725). While it’s not clear how exactly the money will be used to help schools (something about funding a “pilot program” in ten city schools), I’m intrigued about the mayor’s, GE’s, and other politicians’ emphasis on science, math, and technology. As an English teacher, I’m trying to avoid the pitfall of discipline jealousy: a sort of Marsha-Marsha-Marsha response to watching the above three content-areas be given so much attention and money as funding for the arts dwindles. And we see the effects of this in the research being produced, for example.

Literary studies have played Jan to other disciplines’ Marsha for at least a century. The famous scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams graphs poetry based on the instructions from a popular textbook is an example:

In the early 20^th century, lacking scholarly respect and funding, literary scholars developed a method of critiquing literature that sought to be as objective about poems as the scientific method was about data. It was no longer about the art of poetry; it was about the poem as an object for quantifiable study. The idea was that literature and poetry were too open to rampant interpretation—the reader could read a work however he wished—and some other academically rigorous method was needed if the study of literature was to be taken seriously. We see the results of this movement, referred to as New Criticism or Formalism, even on the New York State Regents exam today:

The notion of showing how an author used certain literary devices evidences the type of attempt at objective literary analysis that developed in the wake of the reverence and funding for the sciences that was alive and well a century ago. Take, as another case in point, the work of researchers in what’s being called content-area literacy. Rather than just focusing their studies on what it means to read and write, some researchers are aiming their work at what it means to read and write in a specific discipline, like science. I don’t wish to discount or discredit this type of research. I only wish to point out that a professor researching how students process information in science class might well be more likely to get funding than a professor doing a similar study in English class, and certainly music class. It’s not, however, that the tide has suddenly shifted towards funding the sciences or technology.

For example, the mayor’s use of the word “technology”carries with it an interesting story. Often nowadays we are likely to hear science, math, and technology all lumped together. Not to mention “21^st Century” education. What pols mean by “technology” isn’t what scholars mean by it, though. One scholar, Walter Ong, posited the notion that the act of writing is in fact a technology insofar as it uses a tool (a pen, pencil, stylus) to aid humans to do something they can already do: communicate. But writing is not what GE or the mayor have in mind when they bestow millions on the City school system. I wonder what they imagine technology to look like: do they think of computers (hardware, networking, repair), the internet (web site design, research), or maybe even blogging? Would the overseers of this grant consider students who blogged about their learning to have been worth GE’s investment?

Doubtful.

Words like “science”, “math”, and “technology” have little meaning to the dolers of monies. And without clearer meaning, the grant is as likely to trickle into sub-contracted organizations that can justify the measurement of their success any way they like, using words like “achievement” and “succeed” and “growth” or phrases like “move students” and “the data suggests”. Whereas the value of literature will always be inexplicable, much to the frustration of the teachers and scholars in its field, the real value of GE’s grant is likely to be as inexplicable–only its results are likely to come with the graphs and charts and data that have always appeased businessmen and mollified scientists. The Dead Poets might say these same graphs and charts and data frighten the art out of poetry.

In yesterday’s paper, the New York Times heralded the Department of Education’s efforts to break up the large public high schools into smaller learning communities.  Speaking of one particular high school in Brooklyn, the Times wrote: “Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his effort to overhaul the system, saying students who get more personal attention will have more success in the classroom.”  Yes, students who have more personal attention from adults seem more likely to achieve their goals.  I get that.  But what interests me more is how this notion became newsworthy; how we got to this point in education.

A few months ago, Stanley Fish came to speak to students at Teachers College, Columbia University. I was in attendance. His talk consisted of his reading from a manuscript that was to be published this year and taking questions from the audience occasionally. The thrust of his argument has been repeated many times before and since in his op-ed pieces and blogs for the New York Times. It goes like this: “there are some college and university teachers who mistake the classroom lectern for a political platform and thereby substitute indoctrination for instruction. But, I argue, this need not happen — it is not an inevitable consequence either of our fallible natures or of certain subject matters — and when it does happen, it should be labeled as wrong and regarded as a reason for discipline by the school’s administration” (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/politics-and-the-classroom-one-more-try/). This argument, which Fish has resurrected in the wake of the University of Colorado’s raising of funds to appoint a Chair in Conservative Thought and Politics, states that the classroom is not a political forum; it is a place of knowledge acquisition, of objective discourse. On that evening, something bothered me about Fish’s argument. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, and it was only after a few glasses of wine with my wife and our friend that it occurred to me. It seems to me that Fish’s position falls apart when applied to public school classrooms. His audience that night was made up of mostly secondary school teachers (current or pre-service) and the difference between the private college setting and the public classroom went unsaid.

So, I’ll say it now.

Fish’s primary concern is that there are a breed of professors who pass off their political views for course content, or, who prey upon their students’ captive attention. The classroom is not place for politics. The professor’s job is to convey his expertise to the students, who are to study it, grapple with it, and produce some original response to it. It is apolitical. Now, this group that he was talking to, remember, were soon-to-be public school teachers, many of whom express a desire to change students’ lives or even society through their teaching. For many, and one such friend sat beside me on the edge of his seat with near anger at what Fish was saying, teaching is necessarily political–the books you choose to use in your classroom and the way you read them, how you assess students’ learning, and even how the students address you. All is political. And the self-aware teacher uses the politics of the classroom for good instead of evil.

The college student is not the public school student. The public school teacher is necessarily political, that is to say, the public school teacher works for the city or state and, as such, has certain responsibilities that extend well beyond content expertise. From taking attendance (for which a teacher can be held legally accountable) to reporting certain observations to guidance counselors or the police are just a couple examples. Let’s look at the latter more closely. Imagine Professor Fish giving a lecture on Book II of Paradise Lost, in which the various fallen angels debate how to retaliate against God for ousting them from heaven. A student walks in late and sits in the first row. As she sets up her place for note-taking, Professor Fish notices that she has a black eye. In such a scenario, the professor may continue his lecture, which, again, is his job: to convey knowledge. He might ask her to stay after class and ask her about it. But it’s not his job.

=”MsoNormal”>A public school teacher must report it. Legally. This is a crucial point of difference between Fish’s no-politics-in-the-classroom argument and teaching in a public school. My students aren’t yet adults.

That having been said, I’m not in favor of rampant political manipulation (or intellectual manipulation for that matter) in the classroom either. Teachers have tremendous influence on their students. The wearing of political pins, sharing of personal anecdotes, and even likes and dislikes must be considered professionally. Recently, I sought to teach students about allusions in Milton’s writings. In order to explore the concept before applying to the literature, I played an excerpt from Jay-Z’s song “A Dream” in which he samples his predecessor Notorious BIG’s voice, and repeats lines or snippets from BIG’s song “Juicy.” My point was that when one artist alludes to another artist or text, the allusion carries with it history and even culture. You get two texts for one, and you get it simultaneously.

The next day, one student showed me that he had bought “A Dream” and had it on his iPod.

Is this political? Not necessarily. But does it point to the subtlety of influence that teachers have on their students? Yes, it does. Influence, however, does not mean politics. Granted, Fish has certain blatant scenarios in mind—University of Colorado, currently. But short of professors or teachers using explicit political language in their classrooms, aren’t we talking about basic professional responsibility? Pedagogues should model thoughtfulness for their students. Fair enough. Perhaps if politicians had better models of thoughtfulness our students—in New York City, for example—would have the attention, resources, and physical space to learn. Perhaps Professor Fish could advise those politicians. In an op-ed, of course, not his classroom.