What Now?

This year's Dangerous Words

Long-time readers may remember my Dangerous Words assignment, in which students and I read together Randall Kennedy's Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troubling Word in conjunction with our reading of Huckleberry Finn, and then students choose their own derogatory slur of a social category and investigate it, ultimately making an argument about what its usage should be in modern society.

I'm doing the assignment again this year, having taken last year off from it because the students and I never really developed the trust necessary to tackle such a challenging and potentially explosive project. This really is an assignment that requires a measure of goodwill from most participants, and there were enough kids last year who withheld that goodwill that I just didn't think it was worth the risk. But this year the balance has shifted back, and while I have a few slackers, I don't have anyone who seems to want to undermine the course. So we're going for it!

We had a very good discussion of Randall Kennedy's book; I have finally hit the sweet spot with it; the first year I taught chapter 1 and it worked well, so the second year I taught the whole book (really only three chapters), and it was too much; this year I taught chapters 1 and 3, and it was perfect.

The students have now chosen their words and spent a couple of days in the library doing research with me there to help; they will of course have hours more to do. Here's the breakdown of words for this year:

bitch -- 4 students (this word is always the big winner)

retard -- 3

faggot -- 3

whore -- 2

slut -- 2

cunt -- 2 (first time anyone has chosen this word for this project!)

chink -- 2

raghead/towelhead - 1

Shylock - 1

oreo -- 1

midget -- 1

Mormon -- 1

bastard -- 1

Jewish American Princess (J.A.P.) -- 1

nerd - 1 (not very dangerous, but an interesting etymology, as I learned the first year when a student researched it)

dumb blonde -- 1 (I'm skeptical that this is going to go well, not least because the student is a total slacker)

prude -- 1 (I expressed doubt that this term referred to a social category, but the student insisted that it did and is perhaps going to make a gender argument, so I let her go ahead with it, although I have reservations)

The leading contendors are the same as they have been the two other times I've done this assignment, so no surprises there. The smartest kid in the class (indeed, one of the smartest students I have ever taught) chose "slut," which disappointed me, but undoubtedly she'll do fabulous things with it and perhaps reinvigorate me with regards to these leading contendors.

But in the rest of the list there are some interesting surprises. One of the other smartest kids in the class chose "Shylock," and I told her that she'd have to go to the extra step of reading Merchant of Venice on her own ... and she did so last weekend! Obviously I told her I'd be happy to talk about the play, but wow, I'm so pleased to have a student who thinks, "Sure, why not read a Shakespeare play this weekend?" Fortunately, the two students who chose "cunt" are very smart and really hard workers, so I'll be interested to see what they come up with. Unfortunately the kid who chose "Mormon" is a total slacker, but I'm hoping that this research subject will have enough personal meaning for her that she'll actually be willing to burn a few calories on it. Oh, and one of my other smartest students, who is doing the word "chink," came up to me yesterday in the library to ask if I "would mind" if she used a Thomas Nast political cartoon in her analysis; um, no -- please go for it!

What I'm noticing more than ever this year (maybe just because it's been a couple of years since I did the assignment) is that many students want to limit the investigation, to shut things down and close off possibilities just as things are getting interesting. I had a frustrating (probably to both of us) conversation with one student yesterday who is working on "retarded"; she had found that people sometimes use the word to mean "drunk" (as in the Black Eyed Peas song), but she didn't want to write about that because she thought it would just confuse things and that it really was a usage that was mostly conversational and couldn't she just stick with the three definitions that were in the OED? She and I have been struggling all year, because she wants formulas and for everything to be always neat and tidy, whereas I want her to embrace the mess and let her mind roam free and make interesting connections. So this essay may be the place where she finally breaks through and lets subjects get big and interesting, or it will be yet another essay in which she gets a B- for writing something technically correct but boring and straightjacketed.

The student who is working on "bastard" is brighter and somewhat more imaginative but still always very concerned with "getting it right," and she found it in no way interesting that the word has apparently been used (at least in the past if not now) by biologists to refer to hybrid species; she wanted to leave out that information as completely irrelevant, and when I said, "Oh my gosh, are you kidding? It's so interesting! What does it tell us about the implications of 'bastard'?," she looked at me skeptically; I think it was one of those moments where students think, "Why do English teachers read so much into meaningless details?" 

The other student I'm concerned about at this early stage is the one who's doing "Jewish American Princess." I've now had two conversations with her about the project, and she seems to be completely shutting down intellectually. She seems unable to wrap her head around the fact that there are multiple arguments that can be made about any word, despite our repeated discussions about this very fact with Kennedy. She also told me that her grandmother, who escaped Europe just ahead of the threat of the Holocaust, was horrified that she would be researching this term, and I asked if she thought it would be possible to do an interview with her grandmother about an older generation's experience with the word (which is a kind of research that I encourage students to do). She looked at me oddly and said, "Why would I interview her when she's going to disagree with my argument? What would be the point?" Sigh. So we talked again about casting the net widely in research, about interacting with all sorts of ideas and letting those ideas enrich one's paper, and about the way in which Kennedy had included all kinds of people's opinions and then discussed why he agreed with them or not. But she still didn't seem to get it. I finally asked her if the topic felt too personal to her and whether this was why she was trying to shut things down; is it because she thinks she herself falls into the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess? or whether she's been protected from anti-Semitism and it feels too vulnerable to look into the ugly face of prejudice? She allowed as how this might be the case and that she'd do some self-reflection as she worked on this paper. (Of course, I also found out from her advisor that she's competing for a slot in the Junior Olympics this weekend, so she's under a lot of stress, and maybe that's why she just wants the rest of her life and her academic projects to be clear and simple at the moment!)

I hadn't quite decided whether to share with the students the "dyke" essay that I wrote as a model the first year; students found it really helpful as a model the first year, but the second year they didn't seem to find it so. But I think this year's group might. And, having written above about the particular problems some students are having, I think that it might be useful for them to read the essay and then talk with me about it, so that I can tell them how much I didn't know about the word before I started doing research, how I found various sources, etc. And it's an 8-page model, as opposed to Kennedy's entire book, so I think that will help show them just how much information and thought they really can squeeze into an essay; some of them seem inclined to give the etymology and a couple of examples, and they need to see the level of research and thinking I'm expecting them to aim for. Plus, one of the things that's helpful in my essay (which I didn't intend; it just worked out this way) is seeing how to handle unclear or confusing information, in this case the etymology of "dyke." Okay, I think I just convinced myself! But I'm going to give it to them to read next weekend, after their initial bibliography is due to me; I want to see what they can come up with first, and then we'll use my model essay to talk about building on their initial efforts. (Another reason I think I've been reluctant to share it is that a history colleague asked to read it in the second year, and after he'd done so he commented to me that I'd "sucked all of the oxygen out of that word," which I wasn't sure how to respond to; I think he means that I'd included a lot of information, but of course his language choice seemed pretty negative, and it was totally one of those moments where I felt shame at being an over-achiever. But this particular colleague clearly feels threatened by me intellectually and always has, and, as a friend of mine likes to say, "When you're beautiful, people gonna hate." Plus, there is an additional bonus to the essay, in that I officially come out to students, which is not a big deal at FGS and hardly a surprise to anyone but still feels like a positive thing to do. So to hell with that colleague; I'm going to go for it.)

The change that I'm going to make this year is to give students an opportunity to share their work after they've finished their papers. This was a suggestion that my first group of students made a few years ago after the first run of this project; they really wanted to hear about what other people had come up with. I haven't quite figured out how I want to do that -- what I'd most love is to just have a couple of days of free-flowing conversation after they turn in their papers, especially because they're turning them in just a couple of days before spring break, but I'm worried that this could fall flat. Hmm, I need to think about that part of the project some more.

Anyway, some of you probably remember when I was first cooking up this assignment three years ago, and I thought you'd be interested to hear about its latest iteration!

Rockin' Othello

Bardiac asked in the comments earlier this week how Othello was going, and the answer, I'm glad to say, is fabulously!

I'm sure that's a completely "well, duh" sort of answer for those of you who love teaching the play, but I had sent Bardiac a panicky email over winter break, saying "Help! Last year it didn't go especially well, and I have kind of a block about this play and nothing really to say about it, and ack! Whatever shall I do?" And she was absolutely lovely and talked me off the ledge and sent me her class notes, which of course is one reason that things are going better with the play this year than last.

I also finally realized that last year when I taught it was immediately after spring break ... which is to say when I'd just gotten back from South Africa and was still exhausted for the first two weeks back in school. So, gosh, maybe it's no wonder that I wasn't feeling on top of my game! This realization has helped my confidence enormously this time around.

It's also helping that I am now teaching this course for the second time in a row and was much more deliberate and thoughtful about how I ordered the texts, so we came into Othello having read Adichie's Purple Hibiscus in December and talked a lot about internalized racism, colonialism, and cultural messages. Then when we started up in January, the first thing I had the students do is start working on a personal essay that explored a cultural or familial message they'd grown up with that had shaped their identity in some way, either because they'd accepted it or rejected it or were still working out a relationship with it. I'm finishing up reading these now, and they've been much more interesting than their run-of-the-mill essays, and the students seem more insightful about why Othello might be so quick to believe that Desdemona has betrayed him, because they're more thoughtful about what it means for him to be a Moor in Venice and the racist messages that he is surrounded by ("Haply for I am black ...," etc.).

I also dropped the reading quizzes I'd done last time and instead am having students write "character diaries" for each act of the play; for each act, they have to choose a different character and write a diary entry about the action of the act from the perspective of that character. The students are having fun with these (in that they actually come into class and say, "Gosh, that was fun to write!"), as opposed to the quizzes, and they are quick for me to grade but also I can catch misunderstandings, as in the student who thought that Act 1 took place over an extended period of a few weeks -- good to figure these misunderstandings out early on. Plus this is my first foray into having students post their work on a discussion board in Moodle; I still don't really like Moodle, which I find clunky, but it's good in this case that they can read one another's work (but only after they have posted their own work), especially because they are all choosing different characters -- it's like one big collective study session. (It does occur to me only in this moment that I need to clarify for Act 5 that they can have the character write the "diary" BEFORE they all die at the end!)

The nice thing about teaching in high school is that we can take our time, so they're reading an act a week, which is a very relaxed pace and means we have a lot of classroom time to talk; also, once they finish each act, we take the 25 minutes or so to watch that act in the Fishburne/Branagh film version, which they think of as a huge treat -- VERY important in the gloomy days of January!

The one thing that did work really well last year is that the students and I did not talk about Act 5, but rather I divided them into three acting troupes and gave them the task of editing and acting out part of the act (Scene 1, and then I divided Scene 2 into two), an idea I got from the otherwise not great Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello: Shakespeare Set Free from the Folger Shakespeare Library. The students did a great job of working out a lot of things on their own, and their performances at the end were amazing. I'm definitely doing that again (and of course we won't watch the Fishburne/Branagh version of Act 5 until they've finished their own performance). Then they'll write up an analysis of their performance, including an explanation of the choices they made and a discussion of what they would want to do with the scene if they could take it to Broadway and have a real budget.

The other thing I'm emphasizing this winter is their developing a more personal and interested voice in their writing. So we started with the personal essay, and then their Othello essay is going to be a combination of a personal and academic essay; I'm giving them as a model the opening of Jane Smiley's "Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's 'Masterpiece,'" an essay whose argument I disagree with (Smiley conflates the antebellum context of Uncle Tom's Cabin with the Post-Reconstruction context of Huckleberry Finn in a way that makes me crazy and that completely misses the point of the latter novel) but that has an engaging personal voice and real ideas about the novel. So we're going to see if they can pull that off with Othello -- wish us luck! I have found in the past -- and then I forgot to act on it this year until now -- that students have far more interesting things to say about literature if they can say it in a personal voice; last year, when I told students to begin a writing assignment with "I really think that ...," they had so much smarter things to say! Now obviously they will have to learn to take out the "I really think that" for more formal essays, but my thought is that it's better to work through to that point, saying the interesting things and learning how to make them more formal, than to forbid the personal voice as some of my colleagues do. What I told them is that if I and their 9th-grade teacher Mr. L and their math teacher Mr. E were all writing a memo to the head of school, even if we didn't put our names on those memos, she would undoubtedly be able to tell who had written each because we have distinctive voices, and that this is what I want them to develop. And I think that the way to develop this is to start personal, engage with the ideas they're writing about, and then help them craft those ideas and that strong personal voice into more traditional academic prose. Or at least that's the theory I'm working on for the rest of this year with my sophomores; I just can't take any more bland, generic essays!

So, Bardiac, that's a very long-winded answer to your question about how Othello is going this winter. I'm really feeling so pleased!

December oasis

December really is a great month at FGS. The fall term ends right before Thanksgiving, which means that the faculty spend Thanksgiving "break" grading exams, calculating grades, and writing comments, as well as planning the new term ... but then there's a sense of blessed peace and calm during the weird three-week start of the second trimester before winter break. Or at least there is for me; some colleagues in other departments try to squeeze a lot into that term, and the students tend to feel stressed out, but in English I think we mostly do a good job of choosing an appropriate text for the length of time we have. Also, because we've ended the first term, I'm usually moving away from the many smaller assignments that I often give in fall term to get students up to speed with skills and reinforce the reading habits I want them to have, which means that my grading slows way down -- blessed relief! December therefore often feels to me like a wonderful little protected period in an otherwise hectic year.

This year I'm teaching a new-to-me novel to my sophomores, and it's going FABulously! It's Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the students are totally into it. I read the novel in about 24 hours back in the spring, and many of my students are having the same experience that they just can't put it down. They'll come in and say things like, "I already read tonight's homework last night because I couldn't stop reading," or "I finished the book already!" One kid said to me on Thursday, "This is the first book for English class that I have ever liked just as a book!" ... which is maybe a sad statement about her experiences in English class but I think is more about how accessible the book seems to them, even though there's a lot going on in it. Another kid who never says much of anything in class couldn't stop speaking up this week because she's clearly so interested in what's going on in the novel. It's been a lot of fun! (And my department chair is observing my class on Monday as part of my sixth-year review; I'm hoping they maintain this air of lively inquiry and enthusiasm when she's there!)

Now, we'll see how their essays go, but I'm hoping that their enthusiasm gives them additional energy to focus on the assignment. I gave them a challenging topic, on the connections in the novel between domestic violence and colonialism, and they were scared at first, but they're increasingly having a lot to say about it, and I actually have high hopes for the papers. I did something new for me, which is to give them the essay topic on day two of our reading the novel. I want them to work on tracing themes through the novel, and it seemed to me that 10th-graders might do better with this if they knew from the very beginning what themes they were looking for. I mean, we talked a lot about the 14-page introductory chapter that clearly lays out much of what will be important in the novel, so theoretically they should have been able to annotate the novel as they go, but they are only 10th-graders, and I figured that knowing that one will be writing a paper on a topic and needing a lot of textual evidence about it would be the extra motivation they need to really think sharply about the novel as they read. And it's totally working thus far -- they're doing a great job at noticing textual details -- so I may want to think about doing this or some variation on it for other books we read. (Unfortunately, they'll turn in their essays on the last day of classes before winter break, and I'll then have a pile of grading to do as the break begins. Sigh. But it was the only way to take our time reading the novel and give them time to write, and with my iPad/Notability grading I can at least send them back their graded essays once they're graded instead of hanging onto them until January 7. Of course, they may not pay much attention to my comments, and I do worry a little about sending bad grades home when kids can't talk with me about them until January, but that still seems better than waiting to give the papers back almost three weeks later. No perfect solution here.)

It's also nice because we watched Adichie's TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," back on the first day of class, and we'll watch it again after we finish reading the novel next week. And probably at the end of the year as well. It's been a great touchstone for this World Literature course, and I think that the students like having seen and heard the author when they're reading the novel. I can't always give them that, of course! But I think it's good to do so when it's possible.

They are loving the novel so much that I'm actually slightly nervous about heading into Othello in January -- Shakespeare is just going to be more work for them, no two ways about it -- but the two texts are going to work beautifully together, and students really do come to love the play (more than I do, actually; it's definitely not my favorite), so all will be well.

Here's what teaching a novel for the first time is doing for me this December: I'm getting to use my brain in a different way than I often do these days, and I'm having a lot of fun with it, which is highlighting for me the ways in which I'm often in autopilot with teaching works I've taught many times before. I do worry about getting bored, which isn't entirely about teaching HS -- in my five years at St. Martyr's I was already getting bored with some Gen Ed courses that I taught year in and year out -- but certainly the limited number of courses available for me to teach is a factor. I need to find ways to stave off boredom and keep myself interested in the absence of elective courses. This World Lit class is good because the teachers have all agreed that, aside from a few texts that we're all going to do, the rest of the year we can choose what we want. And in my AP Comp class I have a lot of freedom, although the fact that I have to teach The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby does actually limit my "free" time; I may try to drop one or more of them in the future, although I suffer some canonical anxiety whenever I consider this. The English department is talking about revamping our senior electives (which I've never taught), although I'm not tempted to teach these because (a) the fact that they are year-long courses means that all of the topics end up being kind of broad (and we have no choice in this year-long business, given the way our school schedule works), and (b) half of the senior class winds up in AP Lit, so the students available for the electives are the unmotivated or less capable, and (c) I don't have any real interest in teaching seniors because they're all neurotic grade-grubbers in fall term, and by spring term even the good kids have mentally checked out. And the 12th grade is the only year in which we offer these electives.

So, as sometimes happens, having this great teaching experience this December is actually making me kind of restless and frustrated with my teaching situation in general. But despite that, I'm enjoying this little December oasis.

Thinking about introversion, high sensitivity, and social anxiety

I've just now finished Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which has been my main vacation reading. Cain defines introversion very broadly for the purposes of the book, thinking not only about the extroversion-introversion scale but also about highly sensitive types and about shyness/social anxiety, attributes that are often related but not completely correlated. The book has given me real food for thought, especially as the school year is about to get going.

First (because everything is all about me), it's given me some ways to articulate my changing sense of my own personality over the last few years and especially about my need for regular downtime, away from other people and stimulation -- a need that I have not always recognized but that I want to be more deliberate about fulfilling. As I was reading Cain's book, I started thinking that perhaps I was an introvert after all, although by the time I finished I had decided against this characterization; but of course these labels refer to the extremes of a scale rather than to two completely separate groups, and I do think that I'm further toward introversion than I have sometimes acknowledged. The one time in my life that I took the Myers-Briggs test, back in 1999 or 2000, I was almost in the middle on the extroversion-introversion scale, although I was slightly to the extroversion side. And I still think that's accurate -- at the time, I tested as an ENFJ, and that description still seems pretty spot-on to me, more than the INFJ description does -- but I think that, after receiving that "diagnosis," I adopted the label of "extroversion" without paying enough attention to the ways in which that label doesn't always fit me. A regular feature of ENFJ descriptions, for eample, is that "Because they are so tuned in to emotion, engaging with other people can sometimes become overwhelming for the ENFJ. More than other Extroverted types, they need time alone, away from the demands of serving and caring for others." (From this site.)

So I think if I had to characterize myself now, I'd say that I'm a mild extrovert with some social anxiety. I'm socially adept in structured situations, especially the classroom -- where I know the rules! -- but quite awkward in less structured environments. So, for example, during the week at Bard, I was outgoing and cheerful and talkative and friendly during class sessions but weird and awkward and inward-turned at the various social occasions, one of which I skipped altogether; at the opening reception, before the class sessions had begun, I got myself a glass of wine, walked around the room once, and then panicked and sat down on a bench in the corner and kept myself busy reading every scrap of paper in the program folder, even the stuff I didn't care about, so that I wouldn't so obviously have no one to talk to -- not my bravest moment! And I found going into the dining center quite difficult every single time, although I'd be fine once I was at a table where I knew someone. And the social event that I skipped was partly because I didn't want more social awkwardness but also because I needed some downtime after a full day of intense workshops.

Not that labels matter so much -- much more important to know oneself and act according to one's own best interests. So I need to make sure that I have enough downtime, especially important in a career that demands a lot of extroversion. (When I first switched to HS teaching, I was wiped out at the end of every day, not just from teaching four classes but from being socially on all.the.time! I have since learned to modulate in this arena, but I still don't often want to talk when I get home because I've drained my conversational reserves by 4:00.)

And I need to push myself through some of my social anxieties but also recognize that I'm just never going to be a person who shines in some social situations, and that's okay -- and actually, this is pretty much what I already do, going to programs like the Bard week even though I know ahead of time that meals will be stressful for me but that the class work will make it worthwhile. And I usually wind up making a friend or two at such programs. So that's all fine.

In part because I've been reading this book, and in part because we've had such a difficult year and are beginning to recover from it, D. and I have spent a lot of time this week talking about how we each think and interact with each other and the rest of the world. She tends to think aloud, whereas I tend to mull things over by myself and then announce decisions I've come to (sometimes about topics that I hadn't indicated at all that I was even thinking about), a classic extroversion/introversion difference. Neither of us is good at big parties, but she enjoys a dinner party, whereas I'd rather get together with one friend over coffee. We both need a lot of alone time as well as some together time. She's much better at talking with strangers in a meaningful way, while I'm much better at small talk with the neighbors. Again, we needn't rush to label these things, but it is worth our knowing especially our own and the other's more introverted or extroverted ways of thinking and communicating, the differences in which have led to some communication difficulties between us at times. Also, with an eye toward the year ahead, when she'll be home alone writing while I'll be at school interacting, she needs to seek out regular social interactions; we can't fall into the same pattern that we have at other points in our life together, when I come home tired of talking while she's been at home alone all day and is eager for conversation.

But this is not all about me, me, me. I was reading Cain's book in large part because I've been thinking over the past year about student personalities as they relate to class participation and learning. Last year I had two particularly large and talkative classes, and in a lot of ways those lively classes were really fun, but by their very excessiveness they highlighted some problems that I've seen repeatedly:

• Many students who talk a lot don't always have valuable or important things to say and are sometimes talking just to hear themselves speak and because they've been socialized toward certain modes of class participation. I got very tired of hearing students repeat what other students had already said, and we also had some problems (particularly in the younger class) of rampant digressions, such that I was often trying to rein folks in and keep us on topic, and it often took us much longer to work through a topic than it seemed like it should. I love the energy of these talkative kids, but that energy isn't always matched by thoughtful reflection.
• Some quieter students have really valuable contributions to make but either can't elbow their way into conversation or clearly don't think it's worth the cost to do so. Or sometimes they forced themselves to speak up in class but weren't really listened to by their classmates because they spoke less emphatically.
• And some students just check out and use a talkative class as an excuse not to do any thinking or work for themselves.

So I read Quiet to help me think about ways of engaging different types of students in the work of a class. And I came away from this reading ever more committed to trying out the Bard pedagogy that I first experienced this summer. I think it's crucial to create some environments in which everyone speaks but has gotten to carefully craft their contribution ahead of time and in which there's no fighting for the floor. We'll have more traditional free-for-all discussions as well -- both skill sets are important, after all -- but quieter students will know that there are regularly opportunities more suited for their gifts, and the check-out-of-class-mentally students will know that there will be frequent times when they have to engage whether they want to or not ... although I recognize that there's only so much to be done about students who are wilfully not taking advantage of their educational opportunities. My HS class this summer featured a lot of kids who wrote the blandest, most boring things possible during our "written discussions" -- the term I'm adopting for our Bard-style writing-then-talking experiences -- so obviously if one is intent on not thinking, one can manage to do so. But fortunately these kids are a distinct minority at FGS. Anyway, nothing really new here from my post right when I got back from Bard, but I have re-committed to this pedagogy as I head into the new school year; it's going to be a different enough way of running class from the FGS norm that I think such commitment from me is necessary so that I don't drift away it back to a class dynamic that is more familiar and thus more comfortable.

And I also want to make much more explicit with my students that class participation grades are aboutquality rather than quantity of comment! In fact, last year I toyed with the idea of dropping participation grades altogether, but then decided that class contributions were in fact an important part of student learning and something that therefore deserved to be part of the overall grade. But I want to stop writing on students' term comments that they should speak up more in class and instead find ways of talking about the quality of their ideas as expressed in writing and speaking.

Back to Cain's book itself: I would definitely recommend it, although with the usual caveat that it's longer than it really needs to be. With almost every chapter, I'd think "Yep, got it" ... and there would still be several pages left in the chapter. But it was engagingly written, had helpful things to say, and avoided oversimplification (or at least acknowledged when a particular statement was an oversimplification). I also found useful the chapter on cultural differences and particularly on Asian cultures and introversion; FGS has a large Asian population (about 40% of our upper school students board on campus, and many of those students are international, often from Asian countries), and Cain didn't say anything momentous that I hadn't already observed myself, but I still found it useful to read her interviews and research. I also enjoyed the historical chapters on the development of the Extrovert Ideal in American culture. Overall, it was a well-researched book; Cain is trained as a lawyer, not a psychologist, but she's spent years as a consultant on negotiating and on helping introverts work well in a largely extroverted culture, and she had clearly read extensively in psychological research and interviewed many specialists. And it's a book that I willingly read from beginning to end during my vacation week, so that speaks well to its merit!

 

Summer reading, and thinking about an introduction to essays

The FGS English department assigns summer reading to our students, on the theory that reading a couple of books will keep their brains alive during the summer months. (Many of them read quite a lot, of course, so this is about those who would prefer not to open any book covers between June and September.) We've usually required one book for the course they're going into in the fall (it's been The Count of Monte Cristo for the 9th-graders for ages; recently we switched to The Kite Runner for the sophomores; as of last year, it's The Crucible and Fences for the juniors; and The Picture of Dorian Gray for the seniors), and then they choose a couple of books off a long list of recommendations that are geared to their age level. It works pretty well. (Last year we dropped the number of free-choice books to one since the head of school added a "community read" book, an experience that had its pluses and minuses. But I digress.)

For my AP Comp class, however, I get a completely free hand about the summer reading requirement. The first year I just had students read Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw as their required book and then had them read two free-choice books, but last year I went a little crazy and required Gladwell, plus Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, plus the Old Testament part of Timothy Beal's Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories that Everyone Needs to Know. Based on my experience of the first year in the course, I was trying to send a message that AP Comp is serious business -- hence a lot of reading -- and I also wanted them to wrap their heads around nonfiction as the dominant genre of the course, which of course makes it different from any other English class they've ever had. But piling on the work was not the way to do either of those things. This year I'm aiming to hit somewhere in between the past two summers but still accomplish both of those goals.

And I suddenly realized yesterday that I have to make up my mind in the next three weeks what I want students to read this summer. Yikes! This deadline has been completely off my radar, which means that I now have some hustling around to do. (Gee, how fortunate that these three weeks should happen to coincide almost exactly with the last three weeks of the term. Aargh, stupid trimester system!) So here are my current thoughts, and I'd certainly love any brilliant ideas you may have (or, heck, not brilliant ideas are welcome too!):

• I love the Timothy Beal book, and a modicum of biblical literacy is sort of becoming this extra goal I have for my AP Comp class, since there's nowhere else in the curriculum that they're going to get it right now. But I assigned way more to them than they could really take in -- since, after all, all of these stories are completely new to most of them! -- so I think this year I'll require them to read just Genesis during the summer, and then we'll read other parts of the book during the school year (as I did this year, having them read Beal's excerpts of the gospel of Matthew before they read Frederick Douglass, for example -- it made a world of difference in their understanding of his narrative! And, as I did last year, I'm going to do a week on the Exodus story and its rhetoric in later speeches.)

• Many of the students weren't wild about The Professor and the Madman, so I won't be requiring that. But what I might do -- something that many AP Comp teachers do -- is give them a list of book-length nonfiction (maybe mostly narrative nonfiction?) and have them choose one to read. So I could include The Professor and the Madman but also add other well-respected nonfiction, memoirs, etc. and let them decide what appeals to them most. (Please give me your top nominations in the comments -- it would be so helpful to know what nonfiction you all have found most interesting in recent years!)

• I really like Gladwell's essay collection -- he's definitely at his best in the short essay, I think, rather than the full-length book -- but I wonder if there's something better I could be using to give students an introduction to the essay, which is essentially a new genre for most of them? I want a collection that includes essays other than (although perhaps including) personal essays -- pieces in which an author is grappling with ideas in an intelligent way. But I also want essays that students who have never seriously read essays before could read on their own during the summer and not feel that their vacation was being ruined because it's all too hard! One possibility is to go with the annual Best American Essays collection, which would probably be fun for me as well since it would be a new collection every summer. The 2011 collection was edited by Edwidge Danticat and has great reviews on Amazon, and of course this would be exposure to several different essayists. I also thought about giving them some master of the craft, like George Orwell, and having them read only specific essays, with the expectation that we'd read other of the essays during the school year. Or maybe I should go with some au courant essayist? I'll confess I haven't read anything by either Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith, but maybe something along those lines would work well?

• Plus, the head of school is still on her "community read" kick, so we'll all be reading one of the novels that she's choosing. The top three current possibilities include not one but two novels set in Nazi-occupied Europe, so I'm not expecting a lot of kicks and giggles from whichever book she chooses. But all of this is out of my hands.

As I look at these four bullet points, I realize that this isn't actually looking like less than last summer. But if I drop WAY back on the biblical material they read and I give them a lot of choice in their full-length nonfiction book, I think I'm still making the summer options less onerous, and hopefully more fun.

Although, in many ways, I just don't need this task right now, there is definitely something to be said for planning for the future as a way to distract myself from the huge amounts amounts of grading that are my lot in the next couple of weeks. It's a form of productive procrastination that reminds me that, despite all of the mistakes that I've made and will continue to make this year, there's a shiny brand-new year waiting out there on the horizon. It's like the thrill of a new notebook in curriculum form.

I'll look forward to hearing any suggestions you have -- for either essays or nonfiction books -- and I'll definitely tell you all what I finally decide!

Kelly Gallagher's Readicide

Between finishing up summer school and preparing for our nieces' arrival, I've been neglecting this blog. We are currently mid-visit, and there will definitely be a blog post reflecting on the experience of having a 7 1/2-year-old and a 10-year-old staying with us for a week.

But, at the moment (and by "moment," I mean that it's taken me more than a day to write this post, in between cookie-baking and arts-and-crafts and meal-wrangling and all of the other things that seem to be involved in taking care of children), I thought I'd share a review of a book I finished reading the other day: Kelly Gallagher's Readicide (Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2009), which is subtitled "How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It." The book was recommended on the AP English listserv that I'm part of (a list with incredible volume; I'm actually keeping up with it this summer, but I mostly ignore the list during the school year).

The first thing I'll say about the book is that it's not that well written -- dangling modifiers, a lack of grace in the prose, etc. -- which I find kind of annoying, especially in a book by an English teacher. So I quickly decided that this was a book I was reading strictly for information and advice rather than enjoyment, as it were. Once I had settled on this utilitarian approach to the book, I found it helpful ... largely because it affirmed my own sense of things, which of course is always a lovely attribute in a book!

Also, the first half of the book (the first two chapters) is a sustained attack on No Child Left Behind -- an attack I'm entirely in sympathy with, although NCLB is not a factor in my own teaching life, thank goodness. Seriously, whenever I feel guilty about teaching in a swanky private school and think that I should be down in the trenches, I read something about the teaching conditions in public schools and remember one of the primary reasons that I am where I am. (Other reasons include the number of students/classes I'd be teaching and the fact that I refused to go through the accreditation process -- which would have included doing some coursework -- when I already had a Ph.D. and had been teaching for years!) So I read those first couple of chapters sympathetically but quickly, since they were not what I was especially interested in for my own teaching.

It was the second half of the book that was my reason for reading the book. Gallagher argues in these chapters for finding the "sweet spot" of reading instruction, between under-teaching and over-teaching and between an all-recreational reading and all-challenging reading curriculum.

The third chapter attacks head-on the high school pedagogy that I hate, hate, hate, which is to assign students a gazillion questions and little busy-work assignments for each chapter. Gallagher calls this "overanalysis," by which he doesn't mean "reading too much into the book" (in the wording of the student complaint that always annoys me) but rather "the constant teacher-induced interruptions, the constant chopping up of great books" (59). The example he gives is the Los Angeles Unified School District's 122-page study guide for To Kill a Mockingbird, including 7 goals and 9 "habits of thinking" that students are supposed to accomplish over the course of 20 lessons. They're all good goals, mind you, but by the time a class finished slogging through all of the lessons and filling out all of the worksheets on each and every chapter, any student with gumption must surely have grown to hate the novel by then. This was my own experience in 9th grade with Great Expectations, a novel I've never been able to bring myself to go back and re-read because spending all of those weeks on it when I was 14 effectively killed any enjoyment I might have otherwise associated with the novel. Gallagher calls this "valu[ing] the trivial at the expense of the meaningful" (60), and I'm sorry to say that I've seen this same approach in the pedagogy of some of my colleagues, who are not bound by any school district and yet who still will assign high school students lists of required study questions for each and every chapter of a novel (my department chair's study question handout for her juniors for The Scarlet Letter was 20 pages!); filling those out would destroy my enjoyment of these novels, and I can't imagine that they'd have a different effect on students. (I do give my 9th-graders study questions for each book of The Odyssey, but they are strictly for the students' own use; each kid can decide on her own whether she wants to write out answers, just read the questions over and make sure she can answer them to test her own comprehension, or ignore them altogether.)

Another part of Gallagher's call in this third chapter is for balancing challenging books with recreational reading. He presents compelling data about the role that reading-for-fun plays in students' intellectual development and in their academic achievement and expresses concern for those kids who are growing up in print-poor environments. At FGS, the English department requires students over the summer to read a required book and then a couple of recreational books from a list that we update every year ... but then once the school year begins, we really drop any emphasis on recreational reading, and all reading assignments are essentially canonical. Influenced by Gallagher's argument, this coming year I'm going to require my 9th- and 10th-graders to read a couple of books for fun each trimester. And by "require," I mean that they have to fill out a simple one-page sheet for each book, with their ranking of the book and with a simple analytical question ("what's one internal or external conflict that's important in the book?" or "why did you rank the book as you did?" and the like), so they have a little accountability and a little practice in thinking critically about a book but clearly the point is mostly just to read for fun.

The fourth chapter then addresses the opposite end of the spectrum, in which teachers treat even difficult reading as they would recreational reading and don't offer any instruction along the way. I don't really know any teachers who fall into this particular camp, but apparently there are recreational reading proponents who argue for treating Hamlet pretty much the way that they treat Twilight, trying not to "spoil" the book by, you know, teaching anything about it. This may occur more in our social studies department, which tends to assign one novel a year strictly for its content or setting and, in my experience, treats the novels as simply a more fun way of presenting factual information rather than really treating them as works of art that bear analysis. But, as I said, I don't know anyone in an English department who falls into the no-real-teaching camp, so the fourth chapter was sort of interesting but not actually something that will affect the way I teach.

So there's my review: The third chapter gave me a concept (recreational reading helps students' intellectual development) -- not unfamiliar to me, of course, but worth repeating -- and something concrete -- the recreational reading assignment -- that I'll use this coming year. Otherwise, the book was worth only a fast read, although I didn't really disagree with anything Gallagher said.

Rediscovering an old favorite

The children's room at our local public library is tucked away around back behind the check-out counter. I'd seen its doorway when checking out books, of course, but I'd never bothered to head down the corridor and see what the room held. But our wonderful nieces, ages 7 1/2 and 10, are coming to stay with us in a couple of weeks (yay!), so I decided that I should go exploring when I was at the library yesterday. I wasn't expecting much -- our local branch is not much to write home about, and most of the books I check out are ones I've had sent over from a bigger branch -- but I hoped that they'd have an okay selection so that the girls could check out books while they're here.

The good news is that, although the space is pretty dingy and one wouldn't really want to hang out there, it looks like their holdings are far more than adequate to keep us occupied for the week of their visit.

The better news (there is no bad news here ) is that, as I wandered up and down the aisles of the "chapter books" section, a book spine caught my eye. Clearly one of the older books on the shelf, its spine read The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton. I pulled it off the shelf ... and took a quick intake of breakth. Could it be?

I flipped open the book, glanced at the epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and skimmed the table of contents. When I realized that Ch. 18 was titled "The Chambered Nautilus," I knew that it was really true: I had rediscovered a favorite book from my youth. Or maybe it had rediscovered me?

It was one of those books that I had read repeatedly as a child -- never owning it, but checking it out from the library over and over as I did with many of my favorites -- but whose title and author's name I no longer remembered. And only a few details of the book itself remained in my mind: busts of Emerson and Thoreau, a long scarf, and kids magically getting trapped in a chambered nautilus and having to figure out how to get back out. But of course those details weren't enough to take to a librarian; or maybe that would have worked, but I was too embarrassed to try, and it's not like there was anything urgent about my getting my hands back on a beloved but hazy book from my distant past. But every once in awhile I would think about that chambered nautilus and try to recall the book's title.

Needless to say, I checked it out from the library!

I reread the novel in one sitting this morning, and it was wonderful, not just for its childhood associations but in and of itself. Here's the premise: Two children, Eddy and Eleanor, live in a big old Victorian house in Concord, MA, with their aunt and uncle, the latter of whom is a former professor of Transcendentalism, now off his rocker and carrying on conversations with plaster busts of Thoreau and Emerson. The kids discover a secret tower room in the house, learn from their aunt that two other children -- their aunt and uncle -- disappeared from this room when they were children, and decide that they are going to discover what happened to those children while also trying to track down a treasure that seems to be hidden somewhere in the house. (The treasure will, they hope, allow their aunt to pay off the back taxes and keep the family in the home they love, a house that is considered an eyesore by the conventional folks of Concord, who are just itching to get a chance to demolish it.) What follows is a series of increasingly dangerous adventures, in which their dream world of magic ultimately threatens their very lives.

It's an adventure/mystery novel with a lot of elements of fantasy -- of the magical realism sort, not the fairies or unicorns sort, I hasten to add. The entire novel is steeped in Transcendentalism, and so this must have been my introduction to Emerson, Thoreau, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, although of course I knew all about Louisa May Alcott. Thoreau and Alcott both make appearances in the novel, Emerson is quoted repeatedly, and Holmes's poem "The Chambered Nautilus" was the origin of that one plot detail from the novel that I remembered so vividly. It's sort of scary in parts -- especially the totally creepy Jack-in-the-box -- but comfortably so.

The only way in which the novel, published in 1962, felt at all dated to me was in its gender depictions, which are stereotypical -- Eddy dreams of being President of the United States; Eleanor dreams of being a mother -- but not atrociously so; Eddy and Eleanor take turns rescuing each other, and the final adventure really belongs to Eleanor. There's a wee bit of exoticism in a depiction of two characters from India, but I found the characterization ultimately nuanced enough not to be problematic. And otherwise, there was not one disappointment, which does not go without saying when one is rereading a book after thirty years! (As in my rereading of, for example, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, which I found quite annoying, although I do still love A Little Princess.)

The funny thing is that, when I went looking online to get more info about Langton and the book, I found a blog post by an author who had had the exact same experience of loving the book as a child and not being able to remember it as an adult but then serendipitously running across it again.

I also learned that Langton wrote an entire series, the Hall Family Chronicles, of which The Diamond in the Window is only the first volume! The last of these, The Dragon Tree, came out only in 2008, so these eight books have been spread out over the course of over 40 years. It will be interested to see how the series holds up; I have requested the second volume, The Swing in the Summerhouse, from another branch (see point above re: the dinkiness of our local branch) and am looking forward to working my way through the rest. My hunch, from reading the Amazon descriptions, is that I'll find the series uneven, but I think there will be enough enjoyment to make it a delight to read through them all in order.

Sadly, The Diamond in the Window is now out of print, but there are used copies aplenty, and I think I'm going to pay a little extra and spring for the hardback version with the cover that I remember. After all of these years, I deserve a more permanent reunion with this novel.

What a delight to have an old favorite practically leap off the shelf at me!

Overstimulated

Yesterday afternoon I was working on my biography project and thus reading about the histories of the high school and college that my subject attended.

Then, over dinner, D. and I watched an installment of Middlemarch, which we're enjoying.

Afterward, I took advantage of the spring break luxury of time and went to bed at 9:00 with a big stack of books.

First I re-read one chapter in my biography subject's memoir; I needed the info for the chapter I'm working on, and every time I read that memoir I fall in love again with her voice and get reenergized for the work of this biography project.

Then I read one chapter of Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. I'm finally getting around to reading this in honor of the KJV's 400th anniversary, but it's also working so beautifully with the prep work I'm doing for teaching Macbeth again this spring. And it's just so interesting in its own right!

Then I turned to Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life; I'd been reading it the night before and enjoying it but had gotten sleepy in the middle of a chapter and so wanted to finish up that chapter (on "The Hall," so I'm near the beginning).

Finally, I opened David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, a young adult novel about a romance between two tenth-grade boys. I meant to read just a few chapters, but it's such a sweet and engaging story that I got swept away and kept saying "Oh, just one more chapter; they're short, after all."

Suddenly it was well after midnight and clearly time to turn out the lights.

But not so easy to turn off my brain, with all of these different stories swirling around in my mind. Causabon and medieval houses and King James I and teenage romance and nineteenth-century  education for women, all mixed up together until I felt like I was going crazy! I tossed, I turned, I tried concentrating on only one of the stories, I muttered, I tried wiping my mind entirely clear and thinking about no stories at all, I sighed gustily -- still, no sleep. Finally I guess I wore myself out, for I know that I did eventually fall asleep, but I was not especially rested this morning.

Note to self: Reading in bed is fine, but choose just ONE book at a time.

Dangerous Words after the fact

Yay -- classes are over! Exams start tomorrow, and I'm up to my neck in final portfolios (which my juniors do in place of exams), and the end is clearly in sight, so I'm feeling pretty happy despite the amount of work that needs to happen in the next 6 days.

But rather than getting some of that work done, why don't I blog and tell you all a little more about how things turned out with the Dangerous Word essay?

It was, in a word, a smashing success! An exhausting success, admittedly -- it took a lot more of my time and energy than I had anticipated and was one of the reasons I had an exhausting spring -- but that will probably be less of the case next time around (not least because next year I'm teaching only one section of juniors, not to mention having already written a sample essay and seeing no reason to write another).

So here are some details:

• Of my 40 students, 10 wrote awesome papers (A or A-), which I consider a monumental success rate; I'm no pushover on grading, but one-fourth of the papers really were that good! The students worked harder on this than they had worked on a paper before, and they really put in the hours, and these 10 kids really put in the thinking required, and the results were very exciting.
• Another 10 wrote papers that were fine (B+ or B) -- solid work that missed being an A either because the thinking wasn't quite as sophisticated or the research not quite as extensive, but still absolutely reasonable work. So that's a full half of the class getting a B or above on an assignment I graded pretty strictly. The students were really motivated, and I gave the paper a big enough build-up that they took it seriously and did the work.
• Another 7 wrote papers that were just eh (B-) -- they either did the work but couldn't pull it together, or they went through the motions successfully enough to pass muster but no more. But given that B- is pretty much my default grade on many assignments, I think this number isn't bad at all.
• And 13 wrote papers that sucked (C+ to D-). So, yes, the largest category of students fall into the sucky category, which isn't what one would want, but this was an assignment that simply couldn't be faked (at least not by amateur fakers!) and that required a certain base number of hours and energy output. I didn't plan it to be a separate-the-goats-from-the-sheep assignment (but then I never can anticipate which assignments will work that way), but it seems to have had that effect.

Nineteen of the 40 students chose their Dangerous Words essays to revise for their final portfolio, making it the most popular of all assignments all year in this regard.

Last week, I had them fill out evaluations of the assignment, stressing that they were pioneers (or guinea pigs, as one student noted) in this assignment and that I would take their feedback very seriously in thinking about the paper in future years. Now, admittedly, I got their feedback on the day when they turned in their final portfolios and were feeling pretty proud of themselves as writers, which may have skewed the results upward somewhat, but they were anonymous surveys and I stressed that I had already given them their term grades and that this feedback was strictly for the purpose of revising the assignment in the future. So I trust what they told me.

And what they told me is mostly that they loved the assignment! Indeed, many of them used the word "loved"! And this group of students were on average not academic gunners always eager to take on a new intellectual challenge, and yet they really had gotten into this assignment. Some representative quotations from their surveys:

• “It made you get out of your comfort zone. It made you open your mind and learn about a word and its history.”
• “This assignment helped me realize the power that words hold. I liked the idea of learning so much about one specific word that holds so much power because we often take words for granted and forget the impact that they actually have.”
• “My favorite part was writing about the shift of the word between the generations. I really enjoyed doing this paper.”
• “I learned how difficult research can be, but also how enjoyable it can be.”

Being high school students, several of them particularly liked how exciting it felt to work on such a "dangerous" topic. In the words of one student: “I loved that it was a slightly ‘taboo’ assignment. I felt pretty badass on the first day when we spent class in the computer lab looking up words like ‘bitch.’ … it was long and took a lot of research/writing work, but it was all worth it.” But my sense is that, for many students, it went beyond feeling "badass" and moved into authentic intellectual inquiry not hampered by the usual sense of what they were "supposed" to do. One student said that she liked "being able to express how I felt about it without getting in trouble." Another wrote, "I liked that I had never read something just like what I was writing and that people did different words. I felt what I was saying was original, new and mine.”

Those responses are making me really happy!!

Okay, so not everyone was a fan. Three students said they didn't like the assignment; one of them wrote, “I learned something about myself. I learned that I don’t really care about words. I think they aren’t really so effective. I know for some people they do [sic] but I don’t really care too much.” Well, at least she's honest! And another kid, who mostly did like the assignment, suggested dropping the research component and making it more about personal opinion. (Umm, no.) But honestly, that's four (well, three and a half) grumpy students out of 40 juniors? Not bad at all!

The most frequent suggestion I got from them was to put together a list of words that future students could choose from, because selecting the word was one of the hardest parts of the assignment, and that is the one suggestion that I think I'm not going to follow. Honestly, many of the words that students chose were ones that wouldn't have occurred to me ("guido" wasn't in my vocabulary, and I wouldn't have chosen "Oriental" because I would have thought it too hard -- but the student who chose that word did an amazing job with it!), and while of course it's true that choosing a topic is one of the hardest parts of any research project, that seems to me exactly the reason to make them go through that process.

Another frequent suggestion that they made that I'll have to think about more is that they wanted to find out what their fellow students came up with in their research; several of them said that there should have been a presentation component to the project. So, first, this makes me happy because it is essentially students saying that they should have had to do even more work! Plus, they were genuinely curious about other people's research! Hurrah! But I had actually deliberately not included such a component because it's one thing to write about a derogatory word and another to speak about it publicly, and I didn't want their rigorous research and writing to descend into embarrassed giggling. In all of my conferences with students on this paper, I was extremely careful about how and under what circumstances I used their chosen word, and I just couldn't see my way to figuring out how to handle student presentations. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that, if there had been a public presentation component, none of my students who chose "pussy" would have chosen that word, because all of them found it a very awkward word to work on (although one of them ended up doing a great job with it, thinking about what it means to refer to women's genitalia without even acknowledging that there's a person attached; she was so horrified by what she found men saying about the word that I think she is now a budding feminist, so that's one for the "win" column!). Plus, I wanted students to feel free to choose words of personal significance to them, and I thought that a more public component might make that less likely.

At the same time, many of them were very interested in my sample dyke essay (and a lot of them said on their evaluations that it was extremely helpful in terms of figuring out citation and organization, so that's good), and I think it makes sense to figure out a way for them to learn from each other's work. One possibility is to have each of them write a one-paragraph abstract of their papers that we could then post online, although I think it's hard to write an abstract that's as interesting as the paper. Or maybe I could have them create informative posters -- I don't really know how poster sessions work in the social sciences, but maybe that's an option; if you've done poster sessions professionally, I'd love to hear from you how they work! -- although again I think some of them would feel embarrassed to create a poster about the word "faggot" or "slut" or whatever. I guess another possibility is to give the students several options for how to share their work and let them choose what feels most appropriate for them. I'd be interested to hear any thoughts that you all have on how to handle this piece of the assignment in the future.

The other interesting piece of advice I got was to connect the assignment more clearly to the work of the course, since some students found the project interesting but extraneous to an English class. It wouldn't have occurred to me that an investigation into language could seem not germane to an English class (especially since it grew out of our work on Huckleberry Finn), but apparently that association that's so obvious to me wasn't so obvious to all of my students, so this is definitely something I can do better with next year!

All told, I couldn't be more pleased with how this assignment went. I'll do it again next year, and it will be interesting to see how it differs when I'm using it in an AP English Language course as opposed to the standard American Lit course (I'm teaching only the former next year). On the one hand, better students should do an even better job; on the other hand, some of the biggest success stories of the assignment for me were the weak students who got really into this paper and managed to earn Bs for the only time in the year. I don't know if the regular junior classes will use the assignment; the colleague who is taking my place in the American Lit course is interested in maybe using it, but my other two Am Lit colleagues didn't even bother to respond when I sent them the assignment this winter, so it may be that this is simply my project in the department. And I'm okay with that; I think it's a project that requires absolute conviction and commitment by the teacher -- without that, it's a disaster waiting to happen, I think, and it's not surprising that most of my colleagues would shy away from it.

So, although the spring as a whole was especially draining this year in a way that I hope doesn't become typical, it does feel like at least the teaching component of my year (which is, after all, the vast majority of my job) was a major success thanks in large part to this Dangerous Words assignment. Hurrah!

Dangerous words -- the teacher's take on the assignment

Spring break is over, and we're back in session at FGS. I had managed to arrange things nicely so that I had no grading to do over the two-week break (yay!), but I had given myself homework nevertheless: I had decided that I was going to write an essay for my dangerous words assignment to function as a model for my students. None of my students had chosen the word dyke, so that's what I wrote on.

Hours and hours later, I finally had a paper. It turns out that this is quite a big project that I've assigned my students! Not inappropriately big, I think -- it is their major essay in their last term -- but certainly it is a heavy-duty project. And I say "hours and hours," but I really did most of it this past weekend, so it's not unreasonable.

And of course I got totally sucked into the paper for its own sake, so I think it quite likely that I spent longer on it than my students will! I worried at points that I was overdoing it, but I finally decided that it was okay to set the bar pretty high for what I was looking for from them. I'm also going to be really clear with them that every paper will be different because different words have different interesting things about them, so they're not trying to re-create my essay.

I handed out the model essay today, and we're talking about it in class at the end of the week. I have never, ever given students a model for an essay, and I'll be very interested to see how it works. Of course, if it turns out to be a great project, I'm then stuck with a lot of high school essays to write!

Anyway, I thought you all might be interested in what I wrote, so here it is:

Dyke: It Takes One to Say It

Dyke. The word can strike fear into the heart of any woman, lesbian or straight, who hears it in the wrong tone of voice in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it can also create a warm sense of community and pride among women whose primary sexual attraction is toward other women. Frequently used as a derogatory term for homosexual women, in particular for those whose appearance seems masculine, dyke has now been reclaimed by many lesbians as a term of proud cultural identification. The word’s origins are shrouded, but its present and immediate future seem clear: dyke has become an acceptable, gay- and woman-positive term when used as in-group language, but it is still a potentially threatening enough term that its use outside of that in-group is tricky at best and dangerous at worst. My recommendation would be to leave the word dyke strictly to the dykes.

The non-slang meaning of the word dyke – more usually spelled dike – is primarily “a water-course or channel, including those of natural formation,” such as a river or water running through a ditch, and secondarily “an embankment, wall, causeway,” “a wall or fence” (“dike, dyke,” Oxford English Dictionary). The dikes used in land-reclamation in Holland are perhaps the use of this definition most familiar to Americans. As contemporary slang, however, the word dyke refers to a lesbian or to a masculine woman (“dike, dyke,” OED). Related terms are bulldyke or bulldike, bulldyker or bulldiker, and bulldagger (Spears 319).

Language of dyke and bulldagger is historically and still frequently used as an insulting characterization of lesbians, one often accompanied by the threat of violence. For example, in November 2008, when a lesbian couple, Anji Dimitriou and Jane Currie, were attacked by Mark Scott outside their children’s elementary school in Ontario, Canada, he allegedly called them “fucking dyke bitches” while punching them in the face and spitting in Dimitriou’s face (Welsh); Scott’s vitriolic words clearly intensified the violence of his actions. The words dyke and lesbian are also often applied to women by men whose sexual advances have been rejected. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for example, a 1989 date rape awareness campaign was mocked by some male students on campus, who revised the “‘No’ means ‘no’” slogan by displaying signs reading “‘No’ means ‘dyke,’” as well as “‘No’ means ‘tie me up’” and “‘No’ means ‘kick her in the teeth’” (Valentine 67-68; Becker). This practice of accusing women of lesbianism simply because they refuse unwanted sexual advances is known as lesbian-baiting or dyke-baiting; in a homophobic society, many women are anxious to avoid being identified as a lesbian, and thus dyke-baiting is often used to keep women “in line,” to pressure them into having sex, and to keep them silent about rape and attempted rape. Lesbian-baiting has been a particular problem in the United States military, where, according to a 1997 report,

[f]emale soldiers who refuse the sexual advances of male soldiers may be accused of being lesbians and subjected to investigation for homosexual conduct. As in the case of men falsely accused of sexual harassment, women accused of lesbianism believe that the mere allegation harms their careers and reputations irreparably. (Secretary of the Army, 66)

As these examples indicate, being called a dyke can have devastating consequences for one’s career or even one’s life. There are clearly good reasons that women – whether lesbian or not – may fear the word dyke when spoken by men and may find it not only disparaging but dangerous.

Such threats are not, however, the only usage of the term at this point. According to linguistics scholar Susan E. Krantz, the word dyke has undergone a significant linguistic change, from disparagement to pride: “the lesbian community has transformed the derogatory dike into a positive identifier to be used within the community to signify toughness and assertiveness or simply as a generic term for all lesbians” (Krantz 220). In the words of activist Joan Nestle, founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City, “In the late ’50s, … when I was first exploring a public lesbian identity, the most dehumanizing taunt suspicious heterosexuals hurled at me was ‘bull dyke.’ It was filled with their conception of what a lesbian was like—an ugly, aggressive animal.” She adds that the New York City police referred to the holding cell for women arrested in raids of lesbian bars as “the bull dyke pen.” In 2006, however, she and over twenty other activists and scholars testified that the word dyke is no longer a derogatory word. As she says, “I knew better than anyone what it meant when in the late ’70s, younger women proudly reclaimed the word ‘dyke.’ … Young women full of strength and hope … emptied the word of its bigotry and fear, replacing it with community and self-affirmation” (qtd. in Raab). For example, San Francisco lesbians since 1993 have organized annual “Dyke Marches” in conjunction with the city’s gay pride parades, a tradition of lesbian visibility that has spread to other cities (The San Francisco Dyke March). Older lesbians often affectionately refer to young lesbians, especially those who have recently “come out,” as baby dykes, and Gay Pride parades in many cities feature women’s motorcycle groups called Dykes on Bikes.

When the San Francisco Dykes on Bikes – the first and most well-known of these motorcycle clubs – tried to trademark the name, however, they ran into difficulties that make clear the importance of context in determining the meaning and power of the word dyke. Nestle’s testimony above, about changes in the word dyke, was on behalf of the group, which had a long fight before being granted a trademark on their name. In 2004 and again in 2005, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) denied the group’s trademark application on the grounds that the Lanham Act prohibits registering trademarks that “may disparage” a group of people. In the words of the PTO’s 2004 decision, “The fact that some of the disparaged party have embraced or appropriated the term DYKE, does not diminish the offensiveness of the term that has historically been considered offensive and derogatory” (qtd. in Anten 389). Legal scholar Todd Anten argues that the PTO should consider the identity of the person or group who is making the request and allow potentially disparaging names when requested by a member of the potentially disparaged group (390-91). After the PTO rejected Dykes on Bikes’ application, the office received hundreds of pages of statements and evidence to prove that the word is not always or only denigrating. As Vick Germany, president at the time of Dykes on Bikes, explained, “The word dyke has been used to put us down, and we have taken that name and reclaimed it as a source of pride.” In December 2005, the PTO reversed its decision and approved the trademark request, conceding that the word dyke was no longer considered disparaging by many in the lesbian community (Guthrie).

Such a public claiming of the word does not, however, mean that it is not still used in denigrating and violent ways – witness the brutal beating of the lesbian mothers mentioned earlier – but rather that the word’s context and speaker make all the difference in its meanings. Nestle may claim that dyke has been “emptied … of its bigotry and fear” (qtd. in Rabb), but others would argue, as Krantz does, that this emptying has happened only “within the [lesbian] community” (220) and not in larger society. What is celebratory when the Dykes on Bikes say it, can be threatening, career-destroying, or even life-ending when a violent man uses it. In the words of scholar Christy Stevens, “Although dyke remains a derogatory term within dominant-culture discourses, functioning as a threat that compels women to perform prescribed feminine roles and behaviors, many lesbians consider dyke a positive appellation describing a strong and independent lesbian” (251). This dual use  of the word is apparent in Dykes to Watch Out For, a biweekly comic strip by lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel that ran in alternative and college town newspapers for over twenty years. Clearly the title of the comic strip itself is a public claiming of the word dyke as a form of self-identification for lesbians, but Bechdel recognizes that the word’s definition is more complicated than simply proud self-naming; unlike those who simply celebrate the word, she recognizes its potential danger. In her autobiographical “Cartoonist’s Introduction” to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, published in 2008 after the strip ended its long run, Bechdel includes side-by-side panels that illustrate the word’s dichotomy. In the left-hand panel, as a young Alison and a friend head into a concert by Alix Dobkin, a lesbian singer, an angry man on the street glares at them and calls them “dykes”; in the right-hand panel, Alison is inside the concert, so excited to see that there’s a vibrant lesbian community that she says to herself, “dykes!” (xii). As Bechdel recognizes, an angry man and an excited young lesbian mean very different things when they say “dyke,” and these rhetorical contexts must be borne in mind when making decisions about appropriate uses of the word.

As Stevens notes, “[l]esbian feminists’ attempts to resignify dyke sparked critical interest in its etymological origins” (250). Linguists have speculated and argued over possible etymologies of dyke and its related terms, but lexicographical consensus remains that those origins are obscure. One theory, now largely discredited but still in limited popular circulation, is that the word hermaphrodite was sometimes shortened and mispronounced as morphodite, which over time became morphodyke and eventually dyke (Hill 269; see also Krantz 217). Another proposed etymology arises from the non-slang meanings of the word dyke, meaning ditch or trench, which for some observers is a parallel to female genitalia; linguist Richard Spears, however, argues that this etymology “is far too speculative” (322). Other possibilities include dyke’s arising from an earlier slang definition of the word that cropped up in America in the nineteenth century; perhaps a variation on the word deck, dike referred to dressing up, as in an 1851 use of the word in Benjamin H. Hall’s A Collection of College Words and Customs: “At the University of Virginia, one who is dressed with more than ordinary elegance is said to be diked out” (“dike, dyke,” OED). If dike thus once referred to male clothing, some people have argued that dyke might have been a term for a woman dressed as a man, but Spears again points out the lack of evidence for this etymology (323).

One of the weaknesses of these proposed etymologies is that the earliest appearances of the word in print are in the form bulldiker and bulldycking, in Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem respectively; these are both 1926 Harlem Renaissance novels, indicating that this slang use of the word arose as part of the African American subculture in New York during the 1920s (Krantz 217; see also Spears 320). Any etymological possibility that does not take the form bulldiker into account thus must be suspect (“dyke (or dike),” Rawson’s). Krantz makes an interesting etymological proposal that bulldyke may derive from the meanings of bull as “false” (as in “that’s bull”) and dyke as “dick,” meaning penis or man (a coarse slang dating from the late nineteenth century (“dick,” OED); thus, as Krantz proposes, “the original term for masculine lesbian could have been bulldicker or bulldick, either specifically meaning ‘fake penis’ or, more innocuously but still to the point, ‘false man’” (219). Bulldagger would then have a similar derivation, with a dagger representing a penis due to “similarities of … shape and function”; thus, a bulldagger, like a bulldyke, would be a false man and therefore a mannish woman (Krantz 219). Krantz admits, however, that “[a]ll of this, of course, is highly speculative” (220). Many other potential etymologies and possible sources – what Spears refers to as “odds and ends” (324) – have been put forward by linguistic historians, and yet no consensus is clear; the Oxford English Dictionary thus retains its etymological note, “Of obscure origin” (“dike, dyke,” OED).

Of course, most people who speak or hear the word dyke neither know nor care about competing etymological arguments. What they care about, understandably, is the context in which the word is being used, which determines whether the specific atmosphere is one of threat or pride. That importance of context is, for me, what removes the word dyke from my daily vocabulary. While I am interested in the powerful move of reclaiming dangerous words, of oppressed people’s turning the tables on their oppressors by assertively changing the connotation of derogatory words, of essentially saying “Hell, yeah, we are ‘dykes on bikes” and damn proud of it!,” I also think that such reclamation is always unstable as long the oppressors still have power over the oppressed. I am a lesbian, but I never call myself a dyke. I certainly don’t mind it when other people self-identify as dykes, and I have sometimes, when in a group consisting only of lesbians, jokingly referred to someone as a “baby dyke,” but the word dyke itself retains enough of its threat for me that it makes me uneasy. Perhaps because I’ve spent considerable time in homophobic environments, I am wary of potential threats, and it seems problematic to use a word for myself that would make me angry or afraid if someone else used it. But I am equally reluctant to police the language that other people use to describe themselves; it seems to me that the power of self-naming is central to a strong sense of identity. What I do think is vital, however, is that the word dyke remain strictly in the purview of self-identification rather than other-identification; that is, a woman may choose to call herself a dyke, but no one else should call her that! Ultimately, therefore, just as “it takes one to know one,” it should “take one to name one,” and I would argue that only a dyke should use the word dyke.

Acknowledgement: I appreciate the assistance of librarian Ms. G and of my partner, D., both of whom read drafts of this essay and provided helpful feedback.

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