What Now?

Asking the way

Crazy-busy here, since we're on the trimester system and the first term is coming rapidly to an end, so there is tons of grading and exam-writing and all the rest. But actually exam-writing has its lovely moments, one of which I want to share.

This fall my freshmen did a week on list literature -- poems and prose using lists as a literary device. They read Walt Whitman, June Jordan, Annie Dillard, James Berry, Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, Philip Gross, et al., and they wrote three pieces of their own, each modeled on one of the pieces they'd read. And some of them came up with some very good poems, which they are now submitting to our school's literature and arts magazine. All very lovely, and definitely an assignment I'll do again. So I wanted to put a new example of a list poem on their exam and ask them to write a paragraph about it, doing the same kind of analysis we'd done in class.

My quest for a new list poem led me to Korean poet Ko Un; four pieces of his were translated and published in the latest issue of Poetry. I really like them! Here's the one I'm thinking of using on the exam:

Asking the Way

by Ko Un, translated by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock
 
You fools who ask what god is
should ask what life is instead.
Find a port where lemon trees bloom.                
Ask about places to drink in the port.
Ask about the drinkers.
Ask about the lemon trees.
Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask.

Isn't that lovely?

(I don't actually expect that most of my freshmen will be able to say much insightful about the poem -- it will be the first time they've seen it, after all -- but I'm trying to put something challenging and new on the exam for all of my classes. Not worth that many points, but I like the idea of making them think about something new in addition to doing the more comfortable thinking about Catcher in the Rye, which we've talked and talked and talked about.)

Another option I could use is yet another of Ko Un's poems in the same journal issue: "Taklamakan Desert." As I read them both over again, I think the latter might be a better choice for the students, even though I like the former better. I still have a few days in which to figure this out, and I'm open to other suggestions as well, of course! In the meantime, I'm so happy to have learned of a new poet, even if I can't read most of his work.

Escape versus escapism

D. and I are on vacation right now, and it is pretty frickin' fabulous. I spend much of my day sitting in this chair, looking at the view on the left. And then, at other times, I head out to the end of the dock and sit in those chairs in the picture below. Where I sit mostly depends on the sun, since I respect my fair skin and try to stay out of the direct sunlight. 

But wherever I'm sitting, I have a book with me. I mean, duh, I'm on vacation! (I also go for a long walk every day and sometimes go for a paddle in the kayak if the water is calm, so I'm not just sitting on my ass, although mostly that's what I'm doing.)

And knowing this inclination of mine, I brought a whole box of fun vacation novels, mostly mysteries since that's my escapist genre of choice.

But here's the thing: After the first day, I piled them all back into the box, because I was having trouble getting into my escapist novels. I wanted to read something real, not something trivial.

I finally figured out that, with a view so beautiful, I want a book to read slowly, pausing frequently to gaze about me in appreciation as I sip my diet Coke (if morning), iced tea (if afternoon), or wine (if evening). And so I have found myself doing things like slowly working my way through Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own -- which I didn't appreciate at all when I gulped it down in college, but which I'm loving now that I'm taking lots of time with it and regularly stopping to mull over a sentence as I watch the beautiful lake in the changing light.

Escapist reading, on the other hand, sucks me in entirely so that I almost don't notice my surroundings. That's one of the beauties of it, why it's so perfect for a cold or rainy Saturday when one just wants to stay in bed much of the day, or a sunny summer afternoon when one doesn't want to think much at all. For me there's always something goal-oriented about escapist reading; I read it fast, and with the express goal of finishing the novel that day (or at most that weekend) because I can't afford the time to be sucked into a novel on the next day as well, since work awaits. Such escapist reading is almost the only way that I do any pleasure reading during the school year.

But apparently, when I've actually escaped my normal life and am in a place of such beauty, escapism is exactly the wrong thing. Who wants to be pulled into a novel so deeply that one misses this gorgeous view? (At night when I'm tired and it's too cool to sit outside, I'm still turning to lighter fare, but even then it's the least fluffy of the escapist novels I brought.)

Seriously, this week has been one of my best reading experiences in I don't even know when, the sort of experience that reminds me why I became an English major way back when. Except that when I became an English major, I was still all about gripping novels and didn't like poetry or essays much at all. Those are tastes that I have acquired later, mostly as a result of my teaching. So maybe it's more accurate to say that my reading this week has reminded me why I'm still an English teacher after all these years. 

So then, here's the question: How do I manage to bring home with me this kind of deep, thoughtful, non-goal-driven reading? I have this picture of myself sitting of a winter evening in front of a roaring fire with a glass of port while I read poetry, but that has not tended to be how my life actually works. Among other things, I don't like port.

One thing I was thinking about was that, if I can wholly adopt a sabbath rhythm to my weeks, this kind of slow reading would be much more sabbath-like than getting sucked into a fluffy novel, which is fun but not actually restful. This past year I was already trying to claim Saturday as a day of not working, but maybe I could go further and make it a day of restful reading, which escapist reading is really not for me.

I have an English teacher friend who teaches in a public school and thus has way more students and grading than I do, and yet she is often rereading some well-loved classic novel as though she has all the time in the world. Maybe that's the way to go about it -- re-reading rather than reading. Since I already know what happens in My Antonia or the like (to choose just one novel that I loved reading and re-reading but haven't opened in years), I can imagine reading it slowly and with delight rather than racing through it, since I've always before read it for a class that I was either taking or teaching and thus had a deadline. Okay, maybe that's the thing to try.

You know it's been a good vacation when I am trying to figure out how to bring some of the experience home with me! Two and a half more days of this loveliness, and then we head back home.

Okay, I think this is what I'm going with ...

Ooh, Lordy, that was an exhausting week at the AP Summer Institute! Here's how tired I was: In the three-hour drive home, I had to pull over into a rest stop and take a 45-minute nap. And then I slept over ten hours last night, and then napped from 1 to 5 p.m. the next day. Yeah, I think I was a little tired.

Some of the tiredness is just from the hard-as-rock mattresses, even though my brilliant plan to use a sleeping bag as a mattress topper did help. Some of it is just the overload of being in social situations. I'm pretty much smack-dab in the middle between extroversion and introversion; I certainly speak up and participate in class discussions, but then the strain of chatting with folks at meals and in the evening social situations kind of wore me out. Fortunately, there were some very outgoing people in my AP Lit class who would call me and other folks over to join them at a table, which helped with the social awkwardness.

Anyway, one of the great things about the workshop was that the guru-in-charge was very permission-giving about including contemporary literature in place of some of the "classics" we might be feeling pressured to teach. We learned that the AP Lit exam has been including more recent literature, both in its poems and prose passages to explicate and its suggestions for literature in the open-ended essay question. Our guru also stressed the less-is-more philosophy; AP Lit is not a forced march through one great book after another.

So after I did all my napping this weekend, I rethought the book choices I'd made earlier in the summer. (I'm so lucky that I got special dispensation to order my books after I got back from the AP workshop. Whew!) As you may recall from way back in the fall, we redid our senior courses for next year, and one change we made was to offer multiple sections of AP Lit with different themes, making them more like college English courses. The AP Lit course I'll be offering is on "Crime and Punishment, with "crime" defined variously during the year. So here's the current list:

Crime and Punishment -- AP Literature

Summer reading:

• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Throughout the year:

• Short stories (photocopied)
• Poetry -- Michael Meyer, ed., Poetry: An Introduction, 7th ed.

Fall term:

• Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
• Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray and "Ballad of Reading Gaol"
• Moises Kaufman, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde

Winter term:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Spring term:

• Nella Larsen, Passing
• Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine

Spring term is lighter because we'll be doing a lot of poetry, plus exam prep, and then the exam is in early May. And then I'll lose a bunch of the students afterward to senior projects, so I'm thinking about having my remaining students read the mystery novel of their choice as a fun ending to our year of thinking about crime and punishment. And I've got an idea for a long-term writing project that I'm not quite ready to go public with.

Do you all see any red flags? Any obvious omissions?

Resisting reductionism, and reminding myself to be grateful

I'm at an AP Summer Institute this week, preparing for next year's teaching of AP English Literature. As is always the case, I'm enjoying the official instruction time and finding the unscheduled social time fairly stressful. And it doesn't help that I've got the killer summer cold that just won't quit; a week and a half into this virus and I'm still sneezing and wheezing and hacking up a lung every other minute, which makes me feel like a germ-spreading leper around other people anyway.

Our workshop yesterday afternoon reminded me of why I actually haven't been anxious to teach AP Lit (although I also resented the dept head's clenched grasp on the class, not letting anyone else take a stab at it). We were reading some sample student essays from the AP exam, on the function of a symbol in an important work of literature, ... and, oh my heavens, what a tedious bunch of essays! Reading a bunch of simplistic essays on the symbolism of blood in Macbeth or the green light in The Great Gatsby is pretty much everything I have tried to avoid in my career as an English teacher, and I had a moment of panic about what the next year might bring. Part of the issue is that, left to my own devices, I would never give students an assignment to discuss a symbol, because I know from experience that such an assignment will produce tedious, formulaic essays.

And then this afternoon we had a lively discussion with a local author, whose most famous novel (one that I had never heard of, but it was a finalist for the National Book Award back in the '90s). I liked his prose but not his characterization, so I won't be assigning his novel to my students, but he was quite the raconteur and an interesting speaker. Anyway, a couple of folks in my class -- all high school English teachers -- asked questions of him that betrayed such a tedious understanding of literature and how it works; when he was clearly a bit affronted, they expanded on their points by explaining the kinds of analysis they have their student do -- things like deciding how every pertinent detail was a symbol and of what -- and not only was the author not convinced (at one point he said, "One could certainly read the novel in that way, but it's the least interesting way that I can think of"), but I again had a sinking moment of thinking, "Oh no, is this what I'm in for in teaching AP Lit?"

And then our group leader -- a guru in the world of AP Lit -- gave a bit of a sweetly scolding admonishment about resisting reductionism, and my spirits rose again; clearly I wasn't the only one not thrilled about the things these folks were saying! And then I remembered that I have always been fortunate enough in my institutional contexts that I can pretty much do what I want in my own classroom, even (or especially) when I think my neighbors are doing something boring or silly or pointless, and that this hasn't changed. And I have always thought it's a huge bummer that English teachers are having their student regurgitate reductionist theses about how the green light in Gatsby equals this or that, but I've never done it myself, and I still don't have to. So I've calmed down again and remembered that I can teach however I think best, just as I always have.

Interestingly, it turns out that I've made peace with reductionism in another context, and that is the AP Lit multiple choice section on the exam. Getting all pissed off at the inadequate answers on multiple choice literature exams is actually one reason that I didn't go into public school teaching; eight years ago, when I was looking into a high school teaching career, I took a gander at the state exam I'd have to take to get certified and totally threw a gasket about how stupid the answers were on the MC test. (And I still think that it's a pretty stupid test, actually; in my supportive spouse role, I took a full practice test last year when D. was getting certified.) But over my four years of teaching the AP English Language course, I made my piece with the MC section of the AP exam, which I thought was pretty smart as far as MC tests go. Sure, I don't always love the answer options, but if you're going to hitch your wagon to the AP star, you have to learn to deal with the exam itself.

Anyway, I bring this up because our homework tonight is to do a full hour-long MC section of the 1999 exam. This afternoon I settled down in the library with a collegue from the class, both of us intent on doing the homework right away. I plowed my way through, got the whole thing done in 40 minutes, and missed only one question (yay, me! I brag here because I'm definitely going to be hiding that particular light under a bushel in class tomorrow), and then wound up in a conversation with the guy I'd walked over with. He was in the midst of the same sort of MC angst that I'd felt when I'd looked at the state exam eight years ago, and I gave him my "embrace reductionism in this one special circumstance, even as we resist it elsewhere" spiel, which he seemed to find helpful.

We're not quite at the half-way point in this AP Summer Institute, and I'm already longing to be home and wrestling with / preparing for my own AP course for next year, not burdened by some of the foolish things that other English teachers say. I don't mean that to be as snotty as it sounds; many of these folks are teaching in circumstances that I can't even imagine -- failing public schools with daily violence -- and I admire many of the things that they're doing with their students ... but not necessarily their literary acumen. And so, once again, I recognize how very, very privileged I am to be in a position where I actually get to value literary acumen because no one is trying to hurt me or my students.

Well, I guess it has its moments

Being department chair, that is. As you know, I have not loved the gig this year. But this week I finally got to enjoy the upside of this position.

Earlier this week I got an email from the head of the middle school, explaining that she had met with the sixth-grade teacher and that he was going to change one of the books he teaches because it gets many complaints every year and it's a fantasy novel (Dianne Wynne Jones's Charmed Life), which doesn't really have any literary or pedagogical value, and that we should replace it with "a classic."

This seriously annoyed me, and I emailed her back that afternoon, asking, complaints from whom? parents? students? What's the substance of the complaints? I observed one of his classes, and his students were super engaged in talking about the novel.

I also added a paragraph about the literary and pedagogical value for sixth-graders of reading, analyzing, and writing about fantasy literature. I wrote it in a tone that was super friendly but still made clear that I knew what I was talking about. Oh, and I cc'd the teacher on my email; she hadn't included him on the original email.

I didn't hear back from her.

But in the meantime, it sounded to me like there might be an undercurrent of tension between the middle school English teachers and the middle school head, so I emailed my middle school colleagues and asked them if it would be helpful for the four of us to sit down and talk about book choices for next year.

We had lunch today, and it was so fun and productive! First of all, they are just lovely people, and since we're in different divisions of the school, we don't have the tensions that can creep into working relationships. Second, we laid out all of the books that each of them is teaching currently and what changes they'd like to make. In particular, the seventh-grade teacher is new this year and had to teach the previous teacher's books all year, and I knew she wanted to make some changes.

And lo and behold, serendipity! She really doesn't like teaching Animal Farm, one of the books that she inherited, but the students loved it, so she was feeling stuck with it. At the same time, the eighth-grade teacher loves To Kill a Mockingbird, but she's taught it 14 years in a row and is beginning to go a little crazy and wants a change. And hey, wait a minute, she'd actually love to teach Animal Farm instead, as part of a dytopian unit with Lord of the Flies; and guess what, the seventh-grade teacher adores To Kill a Mockingbird, and the seventh-grade social studies emphasis is already on civil rights. Why not do a switcheroo?

Easy-peasy solution, and everyone left lunch happy! That is exactly the miracle I've been looking for all year long: using the department head position to actually make positive changes and make other people's lives better. I'm sure that some other things I've done during the year have had that ultimate effect, but they've all been done with great labor and stress, whereas this middle school lunch conversation was about as easy as things could get.

Well, I do still have to get the middle school head on board with the changes, but I've already planned to make the presentation to her in a meeting in a couple of weeks with two other administrators present, which I think will help the approval process go as smoothly and informally as it really should.

Anyway, back to the sixth-grade teacher and his book selections for next year: One of the things that was totally fun about lunch was sitting around talking about what books we loved in sixth grade. All of this was by way of brainstorming what he could replace Charmed Life with. His current books are Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (summer reading) and Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming. He's been using Johnny Tremain but is going to swap it for The Witch of Blackbird Pond, a book that I totally loved as a kid. He needs one more novel, and here are the options that we came up with at lunch:

• A Wrinkle in Time
• Harriet the Spy
• All-of-a-Kind Family
• Anne of Green Gables
• The Great Gilly Hopkins (which I'd never heard of)
• Caddie Woodlawn
• Island of the Blue Dolphins

What do you all think out there in blog-land? What would be your top choices of this list? Any other favorites from middle school?

Fallacies and Model UN

About half of my students in AP Language are on the school's winning Model UN team. This has been a real boon for the classes this year; these students are already convinced that language matters, that rhetoric is powerful, and that the world around them is exciting.

But -- here's a weird thing that happened in the last couple of weeks: I was teaching them about rhetorical fallacies, and we were going through a slew of them -- slippery slope, ad hominem attacks, red herrings, straw person, etc.

And for many of the fallacies, the Model UN girls would glance at each other and smile and then tell me, "We do this all the time at Model UN; it works really well!" So then we'd talk about how these can be really effective strategies but that they are dirty pool; the important thing is to spot when your rhetorical opponents are using these fallacies so that you can (a) not fall for them, and (b) call people on them. So the lesson wound up just fine, but I was concerned about what our Model UN folks were doing.

I asked the Model UN advisor about this, and she said that the goal is for the participants to get noticed, and that in a way being over the top in one's rhetoric is a good thing. It's all about attracting attention from the other teenagers who are all participating in the Model UN simulations.

So I'm kind of bummed that our students are actually practicing these rhetorical fallacies and are finding success in doing so. I mean, seriously, our Model UN team comes home with trophies. I was an extra chaperone on a team conference last year, and I was appalled at seeing the girls wear overly tight and short skirts and really high heels, because the more sexualized girls can get more of their motions passed since the teenaged boys salivate over them. So I was already dismayed at what the team was apparently teaching the girls. But the rhetorical fallacies business is bumming me out even more.

Crime and Punishment: a bleg

The not sucking continues apace, but there seems to be time to do little else these days. A friend and colleague stuck her head in my room a couple of days ago to say that she misses me and is worried because every time she sees me I look stressed and frazzled. And that's not at all inaccurate, although I'd say I'm busy rather than stressed. That is, I'm feeling fully capable of doing everything that needs to be done; I'm just running out of hours of the day to get it all done.

Anyway, the end is in sight on two particular hectic-making projects, so I'm hoping that in short order I will be able to draw breath and relax a little, not to mention blogging. But in the meantime, I have a question for you:

If you were going to teach a year-long course entitled "Crime and Punishment," what texts would you want to teach? other than Dostoyevsky's novel, of course.

Any genre, any time period, any country (as long as the work has been translated into English, obviously).

I'm not doing badly on novels, and I have some play ideas, but I really need help with poetry. I've thought of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues but not much else, especially poetry that is lyric rather than narrative. Plus, I tend toward the English and American in my choices, so I'd be interested in hearing other suggestions. And both "crime" and "punishment" can be defined very broadly.

Any suggestions will be most appreciated!

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.