What Now?

A picture AND a thousand words

Classes ended today -- yay! The only grading I have to do over the weekend is to respond to my juniors' first draft of their college application essays, which they turned in today, and then on Tuesday my three freshman and sophomore classes will take their final exam. But the end is clearly in sight.

But before I mentally head off into summer, I want to write about the other cool thing my sophomores did this spring (in addition to their Othello performances). And I need to give credit where credit is due; this is a project that all of the sophomore English classes did (although we each tweaked it slightly as we liked), and it was the brainchild of one of my colleagues, but I loved the lesson and will definitely be repeating it in future years.

After the class had finished reading and writing about Othello three weeks ago, we launched into our final book of the year, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus. (Note for next year: I'm used to going through this book very quickly with college students, and I should have given it more time for high school sophomores, who often wanted to stop and talk about the Holocaust in addition to discussing the book itself. Fair enough, and important conversations to have, but I needed more class days than I allocated to it.) I had them write up panel analyses, analogous to passage analyses, but then, as their last project of the year, they wrote their own comics, their graphic memoirs.

I gave them two options: either their own story of facing an obstacle or tragedy, or the story of their interview with someone else who had faced such obstacles or tragedy (a la Spiegelman). They knew that they were going to share these memoirs with the rest of the class, so I counseled them to choose their story carefully with that public readership in mind.

And of course most of them aren't artists, so we offered them a software option: Pixton for Schools, a very cheap software program for making one's own comics. So part of the lesson was in getting up to speed with a new software quickly. Even the students who drew their comics by hand had to go on to Pixton and figure out how to create an avatar (their "pixture") so that they were getting at least some of this software lesson, although I decided that the writing/creative process was more important than the software learning process, so students could create their graphic memoirs however they wanted to. I even showed them an XKCD comic to make the point that there were many options for creating comics.

I was really impressed at how very hard the students worked and at how good most of their comics were, considering that it was their first attempts at such a genre. I wish that I'd scanned the hand-drawn comics, some of which were really good, but at least I can show you what the students were able to do with Pixton (which is what most of them chose to use):

Here are a panels from six different students' comics:

The students followed a pretty typical learning curve with Pixton, I'd say. I gave them class time to work on their comics, and on the first day there was so much griping and groaning about how it was "impossible" to do this or that. But by the end of the class period, they were doing all kinds of cool things, and in their final comics theycreated all kinds of cool effects:

The students took the project very seriously and showed real care for and pride in their stories. Many of them worked in symbolic elements, a la Spiegelman, and they thought about their craft.

After a week of work (some in class, much at home), they presented their comics to the class and were an incredibly appreciative audience for one another. It was a fabulous way to end the year! (although I've also thought about doing it next year in that awkward three-week period post-Thanksgiving, pre-winter break.)

 

Get up on your feet

... and now I'll have that Madonna song in my head for the rest of the day. Well, I could do much worse.

So, last time I blogged, I meant to write about this great thing my sophomore class did, but then I got distracted by how sucky D's grad program is, and my good pedagogy made way for her school's bad pedagogy as subject matter. I appreciate your supportive comments, by the way; I'm really clinging both to the fact that by the end of the summer she'll be halfway through this experience and to the hope that the second half of the program will be at least a little bit better.

But now let me actually tell the story I meant to tell last week, about my sophomores. And I will start by saying that I totally get that what I did with them is in no way innovative pedagogy; indeed, it was basically a canned activity that I simply modified. But it was a new experience for me and worked well and so is worth mentioning here on the blog, partly as a reminder to myself to do it again.

In April, my sophomores and I were reading Othello together, and I'll admit that I was not doing a great job with the play. Partly I was finding it confusing to be teaching Macbeth to my freshmen and Othello to my sophomores at the exact same time, and I more than once got myself confused. And partly because Othello is not one of my favorite plays in general. And partly because we started the play right when we got back from spring break, and I was still a zombie for at least a couple of weeks after that and thus not on my game. And partly because I teach at a mostly white school and had two black students in the class (and thank goodness I didn't have just one, which has happened more than once at FGS), and both of these kids had been on the South Africa trip with me, where we'd all been immersed in thinking about race and racism, and I was feeling anxious for them about whether reading this play about racism was going to make coming to class feel draining or problematic. (I talked with each of them individually in our first week with the play and asked them to please check in with me any time that they wanted to talk.)

For all of these reasons, I just felt like these few weeks with the play were not What Now? at her pedagogical best.

So I finally decided to take myself out of the experience altogether.

On the day that the students came into class having finished reading the play, I said "hello" and then pretty much stopped teaching (at least as we usually understand the term) for the week. Using the lesson plan (which I modified) from the Folger Shakespeare Library's Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello, I had the students divide themselves into three acting companies, each of which was assigned part of Act 5 (scene 1, and then scene 2 divided in two). And then they had the rest of the week (three class days, for a total of 2 1/2 hours, plus working outside of class) to edit the scene so that it would fit into 10 minutes, to assign roles, and to rehearse a performance, including taking care of props, costumes, and scenery as well as practicing the acting itself. They didn't have to memorize the lines but had to be so familiar with it that they weren't glued to the script. The performance was scheduled for Friday -- Grandparents' Day, so they would have a supportive audience.

I was really impressed and surprised at how quickly they got down to work and stayed on task for the entire week. Maybe it was because they knew they were going to have an audience? And of course it was a graded project, so they knew this wasn't just kicks and giggles. They are a really awesome group of kids and have been all year, so I don't know that this diligence would be the case in every circumstance, but it's also true that even the flakier kids were really working hard. The editing part of the project was especially valuable, because they had to think about every line and decide what it meant and whether it was crucial to understanding the scene or not. And, because they are high school girls, the costuming added to the appeal for many of them. (And also because they are high school girls, the third group used one of those enormous Barbie dolls -- probably three feet tall -- as the dead Desdemona for the second half of scene 2. The girl who brought it in was a little embarrassed to still have the doll, but it certainly worked for their purposes. Totally cute.)

At first I felt like a slacker because I really didn't have to do much for those few days of class, but when I realized just how hard they were working and how much better they were understanding the play because of that work, I decided to congratulate myself instead. So I spent part of my time making up an official program for the performance as a surprise to the students; I'd made each group come up with a name for their acting troupe and send me their cast list, and I put it together with some Othello artwork for a lovely program indeed.

And I also decided to make a little political hay out of the experience; once it became clear both that they were going to do a great job and that only a couple of them actually had grandparents coming, I decided to invite all of the upper school faculty, knowing that only a few would actually be free that period but that a performance needs some warm bodies in the audience to seem real. And sure enough, several faculty came, as did the academic dean and the head of school (in whose mailbox I'd slipped the program the day before, figuring she would be too busy to come but that she'd like to know it was going on; I was surprised but delighted when she actually showed up!). I was particularly pleased that a couple of the weaker members of the class were invested enough in the performance that they specifically asked their advisors to come to the performance.

The day of the performance, one girl was sick, although we'd kind of been prepared for that possibility since she was out the day before as well. Things like uncontrollable absences are one reason that I usually hate to do group projects or performances, but in this case, everything went beautifully because another sophomore -- not actually in my class at all, but friends with my students -- happened not to have a class that period and said that she would step into the role. Fabulous! Of course she'd been reading the play as well in her class, and fortunately her teacher happened to be one of the audience members and thus was there to appreciate this show of Shakespearian enthusiasm.

And really, they were just great. I was so proud of them! I had been so fierce with them about the need to stay in character and about the fact that giggling among the actors would lower the entire group's grade that they were totally committed to their roles (unlike some of the grandparents, who clearly found some of the death scenes amusing). The acting wasn't great, of course, but it was pretty darned good considering that they are 15 or 16 and mostly non-actors and pulled the scene together in three days. And the acting troupe that had Othello's killing of Desdemona had self-selected and were really the best actors of the group, such that I actually was deeply moved at Desdemona's death, which doesn't often happen for me in that scene. The students could tell that they had done great work and were obviously proud of themselves, and the audience members were vocal about how impressed they were, and I had a serious proud-mama glow going for the rest of that day and the weekend.

Now, it is obviously hardly an original idea to get students up on their feet to act out Shakespeare -- in fact, it's probably kind of embarrassing that I've never done so before to this extent -- but it was still going out on a limb for me, because so much was outside of my control and resting on the students themselves. And they amply rewarded my trust in them. It was a great experience.

Then, the next week they had to turn in a promptbook (which I again modified from the Shakespeare Set Free series). In addition to their edited script, they had to write up both an explanation for what they were trying to communicate in their performance and a reflection on the performance itself and had to do some planning as though they were next going to take the performance to a real stage with a real budget: design the stage set, create costumes for major characters, and plan for lighting and sound effects. Those promptbooks proved fairly quick to grade, I'm glad to say, and added a touch of academic legitimacy to the entire experience.

After that, we spent a week watching the Branagh film of Othello while they were working at home on an explication essay of an Othello soliloquy. I was going for a combination of performance pedagogy and more traditional academic pedagogy. Although I get lots of good ideas from the Shakespeare Set Free series (I've also got the volume that includes Macbeth, which I think is much better and more easily modifiable than the Othello book), I don't like how their emphasis on performance mostly ignores academic ways of interacting with the text. If one were to simply follow their lesson plans, for example, students wouldn't actually write any essays on Shakespeare at all. So I've always modified their plans or just used individual, one-off class plans here and there throughout my work on the play. (Side note to Jackie: I used the word journals for Macbeth again this year but slightly modified the assignment to halve the amount of grading -- a real improvement!) So this spring's combination of performance, performance analysis, and textual analysis seemed like a great compromise that hit all the points I wanted for the play.

It was such a great experience that I want to hold onto both this specific lesson plan (and I'll be teaching the sophomore class again next year) and the fundamental lesson of turning the work over to the students so that they figure things out themselves. I do try to do that a lot, but I need to be on constant alert to keep myself from stepping in more quickly and more often than I really need to. I know that letting students struggle through and grapple with problems themselves is better pedagogy, even if at times it seems inefficient; I just need to remind myself of that fact frequently and hold out for myself experiences such as this Othello performance as clear proof that the results can be fabulous.

When bad programs get worse

You know how D. has gone back to school to get her MSW? And that the whole program has been a major disappointment? Well, the disappointment continues in a big way. She came home last night with the news that she'd gotten a low grade in one class (with the same professor who made her life hell last term; unfortunately, it's a two-semester course in which one is not allowed to change professors between terms), due in part to the professor's criticisms such as "Your PowerPoint presentation didn't include a bullet-point list of everything you were saying." D. had had the apparent temerity to use the slides for graphics, charts, etc. that she then spoke about instead of writing up her entire presentation in bullet points and then reading it aloud from the screen. And so her grade got docked, while people who gave much more boring, read-aloud-from-the-screen presentations got A's in some cases. Oh, and she got in trouble on her paper for having an original idea; the professor told her she shouldn't have included something if she couldn't provide a citation for it, and D. said that she had provided sources for the raw data of her analysis but that the analysis of the data was in fact original ... but apparently original analysis isn't something MSW students are supposed to be doing, and so that grade got lowered as well. In the end, she got a B- in the course. Now, it's possible that D. could challenge the grade -- this professor was denied tenure and will be gone any day now, and there have been repeated complaints about her all year from many students -- so maybe D. can go to the dean and request a grade review, except that it's also become apparent that keeping her head down is the best strategy for getting through this program and getting her degree.

Fortunately, there is one (although only one) professor in the program who is becoming a mentor to D., and when he heard the news of this grade, he sighed and said, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." And then he told D. that he'd gotten crappy field ed placements and bad grades throughout his MSW program because he thought outside of the box -- apparently a punishable offense -- but that once he'd gotten through and become a certified clinical social worker, no one cared about his grades anyway, and he'd gone on to have a great career. And he reminded D. of what he'd told her before, that the MSW program (either just at this school or across the nation, I'm not sure) doesn't reward creativity and independent thinking but that these attributes will be valued once she's out in the real world. I hope that's the case, although I think there are probably lots of employers out there who also want people to just shut up and do what they're told and not have any original ideas about anything.

Really, this program is set up for 24-year-old white women who want to work with little children because they're just so adorable -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- and so anyone who's not in this mold is getting hammered. And this is a really well-respected social work program, apparently the most academically rigorous in the area. Color me unimpressed. And yet I've known several wonderful, thoughtful, smart social workers. Do they all just suffer through the two years of grad school and get their licensure, treating the whole thing as simply getting a stamp on their passport to a good career? Maybe this is what professional masters programs are like, and my experience as a doctoral student is just from a completely different world.

It's very hard to know how to be a supportive spouse in this circumstance. When D. came home with the B- news last night, first I got angry at the professor (and there's been much of that sentiment all year long), and then I cried, and then I felt despair that all of this sacrifice (hers and mine) to get her through this program was perhaps not going to be worth it. The whole reason for this damned program is so that she can finally have a "real" career in which she goes off to an office each day and does work she cares about and earns a good monthly paycheck, a combination that hasn't happened in far too long. And so really what I want is a guarantee that two years of MSW suffering will end with this result. I do understand that there are not guarantees in life, but I at least want to know that this outcome is a reasonable expectation. D. seems to think it is, and so I hang in there, but it's very draining emotionally, especially at the end of a long year.

Here's the quandary: I don't really know how to respond when I come home from a long day of work and am so very tired and am met by news of the latest bad pedagogy and unfair grading and pointless-seeming classes. In addition to the righteous anger and tears, I've also tried looking on the bright side, having blind faith, remaining the calm presence who rises above the ups and downs -- none of them is quite right. I do better at the concrete tasks of being supportive: proofreading papers, volunteering to get class projects bound at Staples, fixing dinner, doing laundry, etc. Oh, plus that little matter of being the only bread-winner in the family and keeping a roof over both of our heads. And D. is certainly very appreciative of my support in these arenas. But I'm clearly floundering in the emotional support arena. I'd be happy to fake the appropriate supportive response if I knew what it was, but I don't know what it is, and D. doesn't seem to either. Maybe there is no right kind of support; maybe this is just the sort of thing that one has to hunker down and survive and not expect to be happy in -- but that's awfully hard to do for two years. We're almost halfway through (classes have ended, but D. has a few papers to finish, and then she's spending the summer doing field ed.), and I think I'm just feeling really tired at the thought of another whole year of this.

Okay, this ended up being a very gloomy post, which is not at all what I'd planned when I sat down to blog. I was going to write a cheerful post about a cool thing we did in my sophomore class, but that got me to thinking about good and bad pedagogies, and before I knew it I was venting about the bad pedagogies in D's program and the resulting emotional fallout. Okay, the new plan is to shake off this gloom, get outside on this lovely Saturday, work myself into a better mood (I woke up feeling grumpy, which no doubt explains the gloom of this post), and then later on post about my sophomore class, since that is in fact a very happy story.

Heartbreak Hill

I was griping and groaning with two colleagues this weekend about how annoying it is when non-teachers say to us, "Oh, you've only got a month of school left -- you must be coasting toward the finish line!" I said that this was like saying to a marathon runner, "Oh, you've only got 5 miles left, so the rest of the race is going to be super easy!" One of my colleagues, who unlike me is actually a runner (although I don't think he's ever run a marathon), said, "Mid-April to mid-May is totally our Heartbreak Hill." At first I thought this was a standard marathon term (and if I had to run a marathon, I'd probably think that every hill was a heartbreak!), but it turns out that Heartbreak Hill is between the 20th and 21st mile of the Boston Marathon ... and really it's a great metaphor, because it's not that it's such a steep hill but rather that the runners have all hit the wall by that point and are so exhausted that even a modest hill is a nightmare. And that's pretty much what this month has been like!

But, as of 4:30 this afternoon, I crested the hill! (or maybe got down again to the other side of the hill -- I don't quite understand how the hill fits into the course.)

So here's what happened today that gives me confidence that I'm actually going to make it through this school year marathon:

• The student art/literature magazine that I co-advise got off to the printer at lunchtime. Yay! We'll get back the proof copy tomorrow and have to proofread it one more time, so I'm not quite done with this project, but the hard work is all done. This is my 5th year advising this magazine, and it's gotten easier each year, thank heavens, but it's still an enormous amount of work each spring. (It would be much easier if we could just do the work ourselves, but of course the point is to facilitate the students' doing the work. It would also be easier if my co-advisor didn't make me a little crazy, but we've learned to work together pretty well over the last five years.) Oh, and we had to select next year's editors by today as well.

• I mailed off Mother's Day gifts to my mom and mother-in-law right after school. Things are still tense with my mom ... which is to say that I haven't actually talked with her in over a month, since I sent that email. So I guess maybe we're not speaking? I did actually call and leave a message for her a couple of weeks ago, but honestly I've been so crazily busy that I haven't really had much time to talk. Or I guess there would have been time if I could be confident it would be a nice, short, unvexed phone call, but of course that probably won't be the case. I sent a family email giving another health update (not that there's so much to update, but it was a good excuse to contact her) but didn't get any response at all. But I'll call her this weekend for Mother's Day. I'm dreading it, but it needs to be done, and now that I'm past Heartbreak Hill, I should have the time and energy to make contact again.

• I finished grading my AP Comp students' practice AP exam at 4:30 this afternoon -- that was the moment where I suddenly knew I was going to make it. The students turned them in on Monday, and I needed to return them tomorrow, so I had to read a set of timed essays every day this week (the exam has three essays, as well as a multiple choice section), which in practice meant getting up at 5:00 a.m. each morning since I've been so wiped out at night. The exam is next Wednesday, and I'm glad to say that most of them did really well on the practice exam.

• And in the meantime I've also done AP Comp selections for next year (so many great students that I'll be teaching two sections of the course!); met with the unhappy students who didn't get selected (and got another of those unhappy emails just tonight, so there's yet another of these conversations to schedule); had a couple of meetings and done some prep work for a fabulous upcoming writing project (subject of a later blog post); celebrated D's birthday; planned and advertised a workshop I'm teaching during the alumni reunion weekend right after graduation; and, oh yeah, continued teaching four classes with three different preps, all of which had major projects due. None of those things is a big deal in and of itself, just the many miles I'd been slogging that made those first three bullet points harder to deal with.

Those courses and some grading continue for two more weeks -- I guess teaching is the remaining few miles left in this marathon. But I'm clearly going to make it across the finish line at this point! I actually felt pretty sick the last couple of days, which I think was just exhaustion, but today I'm back in fighting shape. The lovely thing is that I had dinner plans with a good friend tonight, so that I got to celebrate my Heartbreak Hill victory before heading into the final leg of this race.

Wow, this metaphor has kind of broken down at this point, hasn't it? The point is that the end is in sight, and now I can start looking forward to summer for real. After a long slog this past month, I think life is going to get good again in short order.