What Now?

Clearly I missed the boat professionally ...

... because I now know I should have been a technology consultant, so that I could rake in oodles of money to go to a school, talk with various folks for a couple of days, and then a month or so later come back to the school and give a presentation that says this:

• It's important to have a vision of what you want technological integration to look like in your school.
• Once you have that vision, it's good to set goals to help you achieve that vision.
• It's also important to set aside time to achieve those goals, really making them a priority.
• Oh, and professional development should be ongoing.
• Once you've taken these steps, you'll have achieved technological integration. Yay!

Wow, no one could ever figure this out on their own; thank goodness there are consultants to tell us these things!

This "are ya kiddin' me?!" blog post brought to you by an actual, real-life consultant who presented at this afternoon's faculty meeting. Oh, and lest you think that the vague generalities above are because I'm maintaining blogging discretion and pseudonymity -- oh no, this is a not-even-exaggerated version of his power point presentation. There was stunned silence afterward as he called for any questions; there wasn't even anything *there* to ask about! The only question I could think of was, "Umm, where's the actual substance of your presentation?," which I decided would be rude to ask, and clearly everyone else was of much the same mind. Now, in fairness, he may have had actual useful information to give to the Tech Department, with whom he had a separate meeting, but academic technology was supposed to be one of his primary areas of focus, and he really had no more to say than the bullet point above.

Normally I would have headed straight home after the faculty meeting and would thus have stewed about how outrageous it was and wondered how much we paid this guy for his drivel, but fortunately the faculty folk band had a rehearsal tonight, so instead I joined my friends (some of whom are actual musicians, unlike me) and played ukulele for an hour and a half, which was way more fun than stewing alone. And then, since D. had a school meeting tonight anyway, I went from rehearsal to the dining hall and had dinner with these and other colleagues (ah, the advantage of teaching at a boarding school!), where we bitched and moaned about the consultant but did so in a mostly humorous and not bitter way.

And the one comment I heard from every single faculty member I talked with this evening? "Dang, I should have been a consultant!"

Raindrops keep pounding on my head

In my old-ish age, I seem to have become a human barometer, except instead of my knee twinging or the like when a storm is coming, I get pounding headaches whenever it is raining or about to rain. Pain relievers don't do much; neither does caffeine or lack of caffeine or any of my other go-to remedies. Nope, I just have to wait for the atmospheric pressure to settle down.

So April showers kind of suck, regardless of how many May flowers they may bring.

Grr. Argh.

With friends like these ...

Good Lord, what a week! I knew from the get-go that it was going to be exhausting -- deadlines, meetings, tons of work to get through, and on top of it all I had a terrible cold -- but I didn't know that it was going to begin with an attack from a departmental colleague, after which things just kept going downhill.

On Monday, the one part of the day that I was not at all worried about was the lunch meeting with my two Freshman English colleagues, Mrs. Q and Mr. Z. The junior American Lit class is the vexed one, complete with lively and substantive arguments among the faculty, but my two Freshman English colleagues and I get along really well, sharing resources and ideas but also content to let the others do our own things; that's the relaxing course.

Or so I would have said before Monday, but apparently I would have been wrong!

The point of the lunch meeting was to kick around ideas for a unit that we've added this spring, plus there were a couple of other decisions we needed to make for next year's course. Mrs. Q and I were doing some lively brainstorming, and Mr. Z was participating quietly in his much less lively way; Mrs. Q and I are both extrovert talkers and processors, while Mr. Z is much more slow and deliberate in his thinking. Things seemed to be going well and productively until I brought up the last decision we need to make for next year.

And that is when Mr. Z unexpectedly unleashed a tirade! He is always soft-spoken, and so this was a very quiet tirade, but it was in some ways all the more powerful for that since he spoke in this intense, hushed way as he leaned in. At first he was ranting about the "culture of change" that he was disturbed by and how he was always feeling pressured to change everything he did in his courses, and Mrs. Q and I were trying to figure out what he was talking about and who he was feeling this pressure from. And he said that the source of his unhappiness was ... ME!

It turned out that he lays this "culture of change" entirely at my feet, and he said that he was very concerned about the effects I was having on the curriculum and that I was such a rigid and controlling person that I wanted everyone to walk in lockstep as I dictated. He clearly feels victimized by having to work with me.

It was such a shock that I didn't even know how to react at first. I latched onto his "culture of change" comment as a place to start responding, and I brought up the only actual change that we'd made in the course since my arrival and said that I thought he'd been really happy about that one change. Yes, he admitted, he had liked that change. And then I said that, when I'd come into the course last year, I'd agreed to teach it exactly as Mrs. Q and Mr. Z had since they had planned the course together as they wanted to teach it, but that I'd always been clear that, once I'd taught it for a year, I might have some suggestions for us to think about; I asked, did he not think I had the right to have as much say as the two of them in the course if all three of us were teaching it? Yes, he admitted, I did have such a right. So what change was he unhappy about? I asked. Well, he said, he just knew that I was going to make him change everything, and that was clear by the way I'd forced the decision about a grammar curriculum on the whole department. Now this is a particularly irritating comment for him to make since there was an entire departmental committee that investigated grammar books, and all we'd done was to present what we'd found and point out pros and cons of the top contenders, and in fact it was Mrs. Q and Mr. Z who'd actually made the final decision since I'd said I would go along with whichever choice they made! But apparently none of that mattered; I'm still the one who is, in his eyes, responsible for the "culture of change" that he doesn't like.

Imagine this entire conversation happening very quietly, such that folks at the other end of the long table wouldn't even have known anything was going on except for the moment when I reared back as his tirade against me began. And I'm sure I sounded defensive in my response, but I was also being very respectful toward him in a way that now makes me angry to think about -- I kind of wish I'd been overtly pissed off -- but somehow with his quiet tone it always takes me awhile to really get angry at what he's said. (I've had that experience with him before in meetings, where it's only later, driving home, that I get really frustrated with him. It's a very useful weapon he's got in his arsenal!) What I am happy about is that I didn't cry and that my voice only wavered once, when I said that he could just decide the grammar book because I'd done more than enough work for the department on that front and that I was now done.

But my keeping it together lasted only as long as getting out of the cafeteria. I started crying in a quiet way on my way back to the classroom building, and then I locked myself into the little faculty bathroom in the basement and had a major cry for about 10 minutes. But then I needed to wash my face and pull myself together, because of course that would be the afternoon that I had two observers in my classroom, a couple of administrators from a girls' school in another state. (And did the administration ask Mr. Z to let them observe his class? No! Mine was one of the 2 or 3 classes that they observed that day. Suck on that, Mr. Z!) I was not in top form that afternoon, I'll admit, and the observed class wasn't bad but wasn't my best ever, and the rest of the afternoon I felt the tears very close to the surface. Unfortunately D wasn't home to comfort me that night, so I stayed on campus and worked and didn't let myself really think about the conversation until that evening. I wound up crying myself to sleep, not really about Mr. Z himself but out of a kind of paranoia; if Mr. Z, who I always thought liked me, apparently resented my very presence in the department, what did that mean about all of the other colleagues who I thought liked me? Maybe I had been a pariah all along and hadn't even realized it?!

By the next morning I knew that some of my paranoia of the night before was silly, but I was still feeling really vulnerable at school, not least because Mr. Z's classroom is right across the hall from mine. We don't actually run into each other very often, since he tends to stay holed up in his room, but we do share a hallway and a printer, and as luck would have it we had a department meeting that afternoon.

It helped to talk with Mrs. Q about what had happened. She'd had to leave campus right after lunch the day before (she works only part-time), but on Tuesday she made a point of bringing up the Monday conversation. She said that she was sorry that she hadn't said anything the day before but that the whole thing had been so bizarre and unexpected that it was only as she was processing it that night that she'd fully realized how attacked I must have felt (so apparently I'm not the only one who takes a while to work up a response to Mr. Z's comments), and she wanted to make sure that I knew that Mr. Z's attacks had been entirely about his own anxieties and that his characterization was not the way that the department and other colleagues saw me. As soon as she said that, I started crying again, but this time out of relief of some of that paranoia I was still feeling.

So now the question is, how to go forward? At least with my junior American Lit colleagues, when we have arguments we all voice our opinions very clearly and strongly, and there's no residue of constraint left afterward; we're all very clear about what we agree and disagree on, we've expressed ourselves quite frankly about the others' decisions, and our collegial relationships don't seem hampered. But with Mr. Z, it's quite a different thing because he stores up resentment and then lets it out forcefully but quietly, and there is no catharsis apparent after his explosions. At the departmental meeting Tuesday afternoon, we both participated but didn't make eye contact or speak to each other, and perhaps that is how I'll plan on proceeding. It's not at all clear how we'll make the decisions we need to make for next year; one a couple of issues, including the grammar book, I just told the chair quietly that Mr. Z wanted to think about it a little more and that we'd get back to her with a decision, but at some point books have to get ordered! I also don't want Mrs. Q to wind up as go-between for the three of us; I'll admit that, when I heard the two of them having a pleasant conversation in the next room a couple of days later, I felt resentful, because apparently there's a part of me that wants Mrs. Q and me to join together in freezing him out, but this is obviously not the best part of me, and I'm doing a pretty good job of not giving into it. I don't know whether it makes things easier or harder that FGS is a girls' school that emphasizes a culture of niceness; we just don't do open hostility, and everyone gets along, at least on the surface.

And speaking of gender, there's one more piece in this whole messy puzzle that's bugging me, and it has to do with an entirely different colleague, someone who is actually a pretty good friend. I told her all about the messy conversation and my tears, and she thought I should go talk with him and tell him that I was hurt and that we needed to talk through these issues. And maybe she's right about that, but I'm simply not in a place to do that right now. I'm really hurt, and I think I'd cry if we started talking again, and besides I think he should make the next move by apologizing to me, at which point I'll be happy to talk. (I'm not holding my breath for this to happen though, so we're at something of an impasse.) Her assessment is that Mr. Z is clearly a pretty weak man as far as gender types go and that I'm obviously a strong woman and that he's threatened by me. And I think that's true. But here's what makes me really frustrated with her: She thinks it would be a really good idea for me to go talk to Mr. Z and for me to cry in front of him, because that would make him see that I'm really vulnerable and would thus make me seem like less of a strong woman, which would lessen his own anxiety about his weakness as a man, and then he wouldn't resent me so much. WTF? I responded that I am indeed a strong woman, and if Mr. Z has a problem with that he can just suck it up and learn to deal and that I'm not going to cater to his gender anxieties by letting him feel superior to me after he attacked my character and my professionalism. No way.

So you can see what a very difficult week it was. I felt absolutely stretched to the breaking point emotionally, and I'm not speaking to one of my colleagues and feeling entirely out of sync with another. And there are only 5 full-time faculty in the department! By the end of the week I was wondering if I should tell the chair that I didn't want to teach the freshman class after all next year -- just take myself out of that particular mix -- but then I decided that I was reluctant to let Mr. Z drive me out of a course I really like and that I should clearly not make any big decisions during such a bad week. So I'm in wait-and-see mode.

My big goal for the weekend is to recover my health (the cold is on the wane but still with me) and my equanimity. Yes, I have 42 research papers to grade and classes to plan and tons of other work to do, but all of that can wait until I'm feeling fully myself again.

Canon and pedagogy wars in a high school English department

Yeesh, what a week! The financial news was great, of course, but there was also the angry dad who came charging into my room yesterday afternoon without an appointment, really pissed at the school and looking for one of his daughter's teachers to yell at -- and yay, he found me! Plus, one of my advisees went AWOL the other day and skipped her afternoon classes, so now there's a hubaloo about that. The good news in these two annoying events is, of course, that they almost NEVER happen at FGS. Seriously, pretty much no one ever, ever skips classes (although there is definitely abuse of the health center, of the "oh, I don't feel so well; I better go lie down for an hour" variety), and parents are definitely held at an arm's length by various structures and administrators at the school. So this week's events were an extra challenge but at least not the sort of thing one has to worry about very often.

But here's the annoying thing that does seem to happen more often at FGS: irritating struggles with departmental colleagues over the sorts of arguments I sometimes had in grad school and wouldn't mind having in a fun sort of way now over a glass of wine but get annoyed when I have to deal with them to get my job done.

The source of the problem, really, is how closely I have to/ get to work with my colleagues who teach other sections of the course, and indeed other courses. On the one hand, I learn things from my fellow teachers on a regular (if not frequent) basis, and I'm grateful for that. On the other hand, I'm used enough to autonomy and to designing my classes and assignments in certain ways that I get really annoyed at having to get other folks on board and with having to do some things the way other people want to.

The big argument this week, one that is recurring from previous weeks and will undoubtedly occur many times again, was about the reading list for our American literature course. At the high school level especially, this is the realm of hyper-canonization, and so one must apparently teach the standards: Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman's poetry, Huckleberry Finn, Great Gatsby. All lovely books, although I can already tell after three years that I won't be able to teach these same books year after year. It's strange that, even though my specialization has been American literature, that's the course that I think I'll eventually walk away from, specifically because of this hyper-canonization and the resulting limitations on what we have to teach and thus, because of limited time, can't teach. So a couple of weeks ago, I had the temerity to suggest that we drop another work that we've all been teaching, one that is certainly a great work of literature but doesn't really fit into the course without a stretch. First, the chair had to okay the discussion in the first place, and then those of us who teach the course met with the chair and went round in circles about it, and now we've been wrangling about it over email. And really, all of the various permutations of the course that we've come up with in these conversations are just fine, but it's so darned annoying that we have to all agree instead of each doing our own individual cool thing.

And really, the truth is that we don't all have to agree completely -- there's room for individual variation in our courses -- but we do have to coordinate enough that several times a year we have these irritating negotiations that aren't really negotiations because we don't have clear leadership or expectations or rules for said negotiating. My department chair has tried to get us to use at least one common assignment per term, and I can see value in that, but honestly I've ducked that rule as much as anyone else because I can't stand any more such negotiations and want to have some freedom to go my own way.

Now, you know that I really do love my job, right? And these annoying conversations don't happen very often; this latest just so happened to fall on a week in which I had the other unusual annoyances from the first paragraph. And I even like my colleagues most of my time, but dang, I get tired of these interactions.

The other departmental argument this week wasn't really an argument, since a colleague threw down a gauntlet and the rest of us declined to pick it up. And by gum, it was my old pal, Dead Poet Society teacher -- gosh, what a surprise! In response to some other departmental chatter on email, he sent an email to the entire department to say in a very patronizing way that it was nice that I thought AP Language was a course that emphasized skills but that really it was impossible to teach reading and writing anyway because they are so complex and ultimately unteachable. Now, if he meant that we can take students to a certain level of competence but that they then have to take those final steps into true fluency themselves, I'd be right there with him, but really this was simply another iteration of his  philosophy that most students can't write and that there's no point doing the boring work of trying to teach them since they won't really learn, that the best we can do is expose them to great literature and have them use their own writing to tell emotional stories about their own lives. Oh, and that those of us who think we are teaching them anything are simply conventional and hide-bound in our assumptions rather than all Zen and wise like he is. I was so pissed that I spent half an hour writing a response ... which I sent to D instead of to him, since the goal was to vent rather than to engage! In the end, no one replied to him at all; I think everyone just rolled their eyes and muttered, "Asshole. When is he going to retire, anyway?"

Normally I'd know enough just to ignore him and not get my knickers in a twist about it, but this came the morning after the previous annoying discussion, in which he had actually been the reasonable one and our other colleague had been the annoying one; so once again it's clear that all of my colleagues in this American literature course make me kind of crazy and that everything I want to do will become an issue with one or the other of them! Seriously, I don't have this problem at all in my other course, where the three of us who teach it get along quite nicely, share our work well enough but do our own thing, and no one frets. So clearly this American literature course is just a constellation of strong-willed and stubborn faculty, and of course I place myself in that group as well.

And having said all of that, I will say that I'm preparing to launch a big paper assignment in that course that I'm totally excited about. I dutifully shared it with my colleagues, and neither of them has responded in any way, but I am charging ahead with it on my own. So obviously it's not really true that I'm restricted from every side; indeed, I have remarkable freedom, and to the extent that I don't, I actually think it's quite reasonable for our students to have comparable experiences in their courses. So mostly I'm just blowing off end-of-the-week steam here; I've been increasingly tired and grumpy as the week has worn on, but now it's Friday and I can relax and ignore my colleagues -- who of course are mostly lovely people.

Fortunately, the week ended with my sweet freshmen, who told me that they loved having my class last thing on Friday afternoons because it was so relaxing and fun, and who then threw themselves into an appositive exercise with such good will and high spirits that I was actually laughing out loud. Oh, and they were all distressed that J.D. Salinger had died; we had just read Catcher in the Rye, and many of them loved it, and so I think there was an immediacy to his death that moved them. I guess the moral here is that adults often suck, but kids are lovely. That's not a bad way to end the week.

Latest thoughts on teaching writing

I'm gearing up my sales pitch with my students for Why It's Important to Write Strong Arguments. The subtext of this sales pitch is "why your English teacher isn't a rigid bitch for making you write thesis-driven essays. No, really, it IS good for you."

For the last three years, the junior English teachers have had our students do a writing self-assessment (I call it an "analytical memoir") and set writing goals for the rest of the year. We wait until the end of the first term to do this (we're on a trimester system) so that they have a couple of significant junior-year writing experiences under their belt (in their English and history class, as well as lab reports for science) and have a much better sense of what they're doing well and what they really need to work on; plus, by that point many of them have internalized the fact that the junior year is most important for college admission (both grades and letters of rec), so they're motivated to do better. It's a good assignment, and most of the students take it seriously and set good specific goals for themselves.

But this year, reading them was a much more frustrating experience for me, because almost half of my students had the Dead Poet Society teacher last year! Remember him, the guy who assigns only personal essays and believes that writing in an "authentic" voice means never making an argument? Well, this fall I've been reaping what he sowed, which has made parts of the fall term a doozy.

The pattern has now become clear: Students tend to really hate DPS's class in the first term, since he never gives any instructions or guidance other than "write me an essay." But once they figure out what he likes -- very emotional stories about their lives -- then they settle into his class pretty easily, realizing that it just isn't that hard. This isn't to say that they all get good grades, because they don't, but I think the lesson they learn from a bad grade is that they should include even more emotion on their next essay. And even if they wind up with a B- for the course, it's not like they had to work all that hard for it. There's no conferencing around papers or revising, no corrections for or instruction in grammar, no discussion of thesis or evidence. No, they just sit around talking about the Meaning of Life, and then they write personal stories about their own lives and the meaning therein. What's not to like? Of course, in the meantime, his colleagues were all fuming, but there was really nothing any of us (except for the chair) could do about it. So I've reminded myself frequently not to get my knickers in a twist, and have just done my best to ignore him.

And then all of his sophomores from last year arrived in my class this year, and it's been culture shock. Or, rather, it's been a return to the style of earlier English classes they've had, and I clearly underestimated the extent to which that would involve some mourning for many of the students who had enjoyed DPS's "hey, why ruin a book by analyzing it?" teaching strategy. (That characterization of him is slightly unfair, but only slightly.) So some of the students have had a rough transition, one that I should have anticipated more than I did. In ignoring DPS, perhaps I've also been ignoring the ways in which I need to respond to what I see as the damage he's doing.

Several of his former students complained in their writing self-analyses what a hard time they were having this year because they missed "creative writing," where they didn't have to think so much. Of course, there's a problem right there with their assuming that anything "creative" doesn't include thought, but I'm sure that their approach to DPS's assignments really was to pour feelings rather than thoughts onto the page. There's another problem with, in some cases, their lack of a sense of audience, since some of them actually wrote that they thought I was giving boring assignments -- not the smartest thing to say to the person grading one's paper! We've talked about audience already, but clearly we need to continue that particular conversation.

But mostly what I'm taking from these analytical memoirs they wrote is that I need to do a better sales job on why the writing I'm asking them to do is important. And really, I should always do this, taking my own advice about understanding and appealing to my audience. Sure, DPS has made this sales job a little more difficult by telling his students that he "despises thesis essays" (and, I can't help but think, the implied corollary that he despises the teachers who assign them), but that's not the students' fault. I have very clear reasons for giving the assignments I do, but perhaps I've assumed that those reasons are clearer than they are.

So I came back this week, the first of the new term, with an agenda: Keep working with students on rhetorical analysis and their own rhetorical abilities, but also convince the students that there's significant value in this work.

Here's the first assignment of that new agenda: I'm giving the juniors a "creative" assignment in which they have to write a one-page, single-spaced cover letter applying for one of four fictional summer internships that I created. (They can also create their own internships with my approval.) And when I gave them the assignment, I talked a lot about how people get internships and jobs in the real world and that this cover letter would be a model for all of those that they'd write in their life. Many of the students seem very motivated by this assignment, which has the multiple benefits in their eyes of being short, being personal, being practical, and having a little humor (I gave the internships funny names and addresses).

And when I turn back the graded cover letters, I will then -- and only then! -- say, "Okay, you just argued for a clear thesis ('I'm a great candidate for this internship'), provided evidence (i.e., their skills and experiences), and explained the significance of that evidence to support your thesis. Voila! -- making an argument is an important life-skill!" And whether they do well on this assignment or not, I need to keep being this explicit about the reasons that it's important to practice these skills, and I need to keep the "sales job" going all year long.

Sunday miscellany, 'cause that's all I got in me

• This school year is kicking my ass in a major way. On Friday night I crawled into bed at 8:00 p.m. and read for a little bit before crashing before 9:30. Apparently I groaned in my sleep for a couple of hours. I slept for 10 hours and finally felt okay on Saturday. I got a good night's sleep last night ... which didn't stop me from napping for two hours this afternoon.

• I'm telling myself that I'm always exhausted in the first couple of weeks of classes, and the fact that the exhaustion has carried over through the third week this year is easily explainable because I'm teaching an overload and running a committee this fall, so gosh, no wonder I'm tired. And yet this still feels like more-than-usual tiredness, which is a bummer.

• Perhaps apropos of all of this, I'm worried that my thyroid levels might be off. I've been having mild joint pain in my shoulders, knees, and sometimes hands for the last few months, and that is apparently a possible indicator of low thyroid levels. I had a doctor's appt with the thyroid specialist back in August but had to cancel it because of the trial, and of course it took forever to get another appt., but I finally have one next Friday afternoon. I'm hoping that she says, "Ah, such a simple matter; we up your dosage, so, and you're a new woman within a week!" Of course, that's what I always hope for from a visit to the thyroid doctor, and it pretty much never happens, but a girl can dream.

• At least my color-coding of my classes is working really well and is continuing to make me happy, especially for the ongoing opportunities to shop for office supplies.

• The busy-ness and the exhaustion are interfering mightily with what should be ongoing cleaning in preparation for my mother's visit this weekend ... but instead, I'm doing things like napping. Ah well. I'll confess that when I chatted with her today, I talked up my thyroid concerns and made a bigger deal than necessary about how it was so hard for me to carry on with things like cleaning and straightening because I was so tired all the time -- going for sympathy so as to cancel some of the inevitable judgment once she arrives. But from the phone call, it sounded like she was going to be on good behavior and be cheerful during the visit, so if we can keep that going, all will be well.

• But she doesn't arrive until Thursday, and grading needs to happen before tomorrow, so I'd better get back to it.

That damned Dead Poets Society!

Okay, I actually love that last scene when all the students stand on their desks and say "O captain, my captain" -- indeed, I teared up all over again just watching it on YouTube -- but the film does totally annoy me by setting up Keating's (Robin Williams') character as battling a straw man, a soul-killing English curriculum that is all about graphing poems and not about passion or love of beauty, whereas he is trying to help students live an authentic life.

That film came out 20 years ago (my goodness, how time has flown), so there's no good reason for me to have my knickers in a twist about it now except that one of my departmental colleagues clearly fancies himself in the Robin Williams role and seems to see the rest of us as poem-graphers, although he doesn't try to impose his ideas on the rest of us, and I mostly try to ignore what he does because I think it's so wrong-headed and it raises my blood pressure. But this past week we had a departmental professional day -- which was mostly a really good day, and I do like and mostly respect my colleagues -- during which this colleague talked about his writing pedagogy, and so my blood pressure spiked again. There's not really anything I can do about it -- in my humble opinion, this guy should not be teaching at FGS, at least in the way he's doing so now, but I think it would be foolhardy to die in this ditch -- so I'm going to vent here instead and then try to be done with it.

As part of our departmental professional day, each of us brought in an assignment to share with the rest of the faculty, and it was great to hear about the interesting things that my colleagues are doing. With some trepidation I brought in one of my final assignments for my juniors -- it's the most sophisticated, intellectually challenging essay assignment I give them, and I was worried that my colleagues would criticize it as too "college professor"-ish -- but my fears were apparently unfounded, and it was greeted with some interest.

As the same time I was afraid of being judged, I was also judging (so often the case, isn't it?!), and I've been het up about this colleague's pedagogy all week. I should say that I really like this colleague -- heck, let's just call him Robin Williams for now -- as a person and a lunch companion; he's an all-around good guy and an interesting conversationalist, and he is genuinely interested in young people, and I would be happy to have him as a colleague if I didn't think that he was irresponsible as an English teacher.

You see, he believes that the only worthwhile writing is Great Art -- which he has the students read -- and Authentic Personal Writing, which is what he asks students to write. Analysis, argument, research, critical thinking -- none of these, he has decided, is authentic for students, and so he doesn't assign such things ... and indeed, I don't know if he would accept them if a student turned them in. He always gives his students the same assignment -- "write me an essay" -- and they are supposed to respond with a personal essay that uses  vivid imagery to tell a story from their own lives. They aren't supposed to analyze literature so much as be inspired by it, so the closest they ever come to a traditional English paper is a "literary-inspired personal essay," and even then the only instruction is "write me a personal essay inspired by anything in the literature we're reading."

In his own words, "I believe that we only learn to write well when what we write matters to our hearts and our souls as well as our minds (or, in another vocabulary, comes from our right brains as well as our left). I believe it has to matter so much that if any given piece of writing turned out to be the last thing we were able to do in our lives, we’d be content with it as our final work — as a testament to who we were." He says there is no point in writing anything other than "what we know, know well, know in our bones."

These quotations are from the essay he wrote and read to us during the professional day. He couldn't really share an assignment, which is what the rest of us were doing, because his only assignment ever is "write me an essay," so instead he wrote and read to us (and later emailed to us) an essay about his thinking about the essays -- all fine and well, and I was looking forward to hearing his explanation and justification. But his essay didn't actually make an argument at all but rather recounted a series of anecdotes about various students he's known over his 25+ years of teaching, and the quotation above are the limit of justification that he offered for his sole focus on the personal essay.

In other words, he didn't make an argument -- indeed, I think he scorns on principle to make an argument -- so perhaps it's not surprising that he never asks his students to write arguments. I, on the other hand, think that learning to make an argument is one of the most important skills that one can learn in an English class. A compelling argument can change the world; this is how a person convinces someone to give her a job or to vote for a particular law or to address a social ill. Language is power, and helping our students gain access to that power is the way that being an English teacher helps to make the world a better place. Or so I think.

I think maybe he doesn't like to make arguments because that would imply that he's trying to convince others of something whereas we're all supposed to looking inside ourselves to discover our inner truths. Hmph.

One of the impressive things about this colleague is that he always grades paper assignments overnight -- I mean, that's major -- but now it turns out by his own admission that he does very little commenting on the papers (because, I guess, that would be squelching their authentic voices?) and he doesn't believe in correcting grammar or sentence problems or the like. It's not clear to me how he knows what grade to assign. Hmph again.

There are many things that get to me about all of this, one of which is that I think he's working from an incredible position of privilege in assuming that all students are going to somehow have the luxury of living "authentic" lives in which they never have to do anything that isn't completely meaningful and deeply satisfying. There's something to be said for sucking it up and learning to write well even if you're not on fire with enthusiasm for the project. I mean, I try to create interesting assignments, and I do assign a personal essay each year, and I tell students that the first-person can totally be their friend ... in some contexts. But we also discuss different rhetorical contexts and how to write different types of assignments, and we talk about "real world" applications of the types of writing that they do in class. I know I sound a little defensive here; I guess my feathers are ruffled by the suggestion that somehow this colleague is more "authentic" in his work with students than I am. But I have to feel sorry for the students who are in his class this year and are going to be in mine next year, because they're going to be rusty on the types of writing that I and most teachers will expect from them.

Maybe to be expected, and maybe not, is that this guy was one of THE beloved teachers at his last school, where he taught for many years; he's the kind of teacher that students remember years later. Certainly he's distinctive and transcendentalist and a kind, decent man; he also starts each class with five minutes of meditation, because that's the kind of guy he is. (He left that school and came to FGS only because he and his wife are retiring to this area.) And I wish I could be more generous in accepting our different pedagogies; I really don't think I'm the kind of person who insists that everything be done my way (although I'm probably a little more like that than I'd like to admit), but in this case I think he's letting the students down in the name of helping them. I guess I could see him teaching a senior class on the personal essay and having them read Annie Dillard and the like and write their own essays; that would be recognizing that the personal essay is only one of many genres and worthy of its own study, and I would find that a reasonable approach. But to have a bunch of sophomores and juniors write only personal essays for an entire year?

There's clearly a real weakness in our hiring selection process that this writing pedagogy was a completely surprise to our department chair, who learned only a couple of months ago that this colleague assigns only personal essays. Now that I think about it, no one ever asked me what kinds of assignments I give either.

Now, every single teacher at FGS is on a one-year contract, which is standard for independent schools. When I've told college professor friends about this, they invariably look concerned about my job security. But in fact, as far as I can tell, there's actually much more job security much more quickly than my tenure-track mind initially grasped, and as soon as one's contract is renewed the first time, one's pretty much in like Flynn. So I think this colleague is pretty much going to be my colleague until he retires, which will be in maybe a few years. And I do really like him and know that he has the best of intentions. But he's just so wrong, I think. Ah well.

Okay, spleen all vented.

Pish posh!

Sigh. When will I learn?

Today at lunch, several of us were chatting about Turnitin.com, a program that FGS used for a couple of years and then stopped subscribing to, all before my time. Since I just got finished dealing with my second plagiarism case in as many weeks (grrrr!), I was arguing that we should consider subscribing again.

One of my departmental colleagues said, "When we had it before, some people found they didn't have time to use it."

"Pish posh!" I scoffed. "It takes no time at all to use. And it certainly takes less time than googling phrases from student papers for hours, which is what I've been doing."

"Well, I never had time to use it," he replied coolly.

Sigh. Oh dear. Apparently I've managed to annoy this normally mild-mannered colleague yet again; I seem to have done that more than once in the last couple of months, which isn't good.

But really, why hide behind "some people" for one's own opinions? And certainly there are many arguments to be made for and against Turnitin.com (and I've had those arguments many times at St. Martyr's when we introduced the program there), but I find "I don't have time" a ridiculous assertion. Anyway, the point of this blog post isn't about the pros and cons of plagiarism prevention but rather about conversation among colleagues.

On the one hand, I'm irritated at myself that I didn't take the time to calmly and mildly state my opinion instead of flinging off a "pish posh!" and denigrating an argument I found silly. I did so in a cheerful enough way, and honestly I think that the tenor of the conversation was such that only a very sensitive person would have been offended ... but I have more than one very sensitive colleague at FGS, such that I regularly feel I'm a bull in a china shop, and I frequently find myself wishing that I were less outspoken, less flamboyant in my statements. And maybe "pish posh" is a stronger phrase than I think?

On the other hand, really, who gets hurt by "pish posh"? One of the things I miss about higher ed. is that folks were somehow seasoned or molded or toughened up or something by academia such that we enjoyed a lively and frank exchange of ideas. There is certainly very little that I miss about St. Martyr's, but I do miss department meetings in which we could say to one another with every appearance of mutual enjoyment, "Nonsense! I find your argument entirely unconvincing." I used to leave departmental meetings with more energy from the adrenaline of conversation, even when we were talking about nothing more than a boring policy or procedure.

At FGS department meetings, however, I find myself either tiptoe-ing around a few of my colleagues and their oh-so-sensitive feelings, or I boldly chime in on a conversation and then feeling bad afterward for hurting people. And even my less-sensitive colleagues who are always up for a good argument tend to kind of personal and pointed in those arguments, such that they don't seem to be disagreeing with a stated opinion but rather finding the person who stated the opinion faintly ridiculous. So I actually got my feelings hurt at one meeting back in the fall when everyone jumped all over a proposal I'd made, because the comments were incredibly personal and implied that I obviously didn't really care about students or their education if I could have made such a proposal. It was all quite nasty and not at all what I was used to from St. Martyr's department meetings, even though in the latter we talked about far more contentious issues.

So maybe I'm a big ol' hypocrite, casting stones but living in a glass house. Or maybe I'm still communicating in a way that's not appropriate to my new setting. Or maybe the English department is particularly dysfunctional and this isn't an issue in other departments. I'm actually inclined to give this latter possibility some weight, since I only feel this nervous and afraid of hurting feelings in departmental meetings; faculty meetings as a whole are much livelier affairs in which people don't seem worried about walking on egg-shells, which makes me think that maybe I'm not so out-of-place at the school in general.

Sigh. And, dagnabit, pish posh!

Snarling grumpiness

Wow, I was seriously pissy all week long. Most of last week also. Is this simply because it's January? Maybe I'm just moping with a case of the blues? Am I legitimately annoyed or just irrationally peeved? Hard to know, really.

Some of it is undoubtedly force of the ambition to do great things, albeit in a completely insignificant way, about which I posed last week, and its equal and opposite effect, which is that my department has been making me insane for the last two weeks. Ever since the weird department meeting last Tuesday, things have just been, well, weird, and grudges have been carried, curricula and pedagogy have been insulted, and passive-aggressiveness has abounded. All very irritating. I've been quite irate with many members of the department for several days. Oh, plus my department chair said that I was being "territorial" when sharing assignments with other teachers, and so in a moment of pique I pulled all of my assignments out of our online shared faculty folder; but since that was all done online with no announcement, I don't think it came across as the temper tantrum that it actually was. But really, things have been tense.

At the same time, I have to acknowledge that everyone else in the department is either a better poker player than I (not hard) and can hide irritation, or else has let things go and I'm really the only person who's been driven crazy by all of this. I do feel slightly better since a history teacher who's new this year sent me a private email last night -- entirely unrelated to English department stuff -- to say essentially "What the hell is up with my fellow history teachers, and why are they doing everything wrong?" So at least I'm not the only person who occasionally is convinced that she is the only right-thinking person in a group.

Weeks like this, in which I'm so frustrated with my colleagues that I could scream and I see no clear way out of the big mess that is our department, make me rethink my ambition to be chair and instead opt to retreat into the little fiefdom that is my classroom, where I can do things right and ignore the wrong-headedness of others.

On the other hand, I don't want to become a crank. Must watch that tendency. This afternoon a colleague with whom I'd had a little scrap earlier in the week said to me in the course of a conversation in which we were mostly making up for said scrap, "Well, this is an important topic for us to talk about as a department; at least we talk well together." And I had to ask, "Wait a minute, you think that the English teachers in this department actually communicate well with one another?" And he did think so. So maybe my expectations are totally out of whack? Maybe I'm just a grumpy crank who's never satisfied? But at the same time, another colleague of mine always drinks a glass of water right before the meeting so that she'll have an excuse to get up and go to the bathroom halfway through the meeting because they're so irritating, so it can't just be me who thinks we don't talk well together. (I do find it amusing that this colleague is so ethical that she has to create the need to go to the bathroom and can't just excuse herself for 10 minutes for no good reason; it amuses me because I would do exactly the same thing.)

So anyway, it's been a very grumpy two weeks. I have learned over the years that when pretty much everybody around me is being completely irritating, that this is probably instead a sign that it is I who am being irritable. So my goal for this weekend is to have a real weekend -- to sleep late, to do very little work, to read a fun novel -- so that maybe I'll rediscover some joie de vivre before Monday morning.

End of rant. I'm about to go out to dinner with D. to get this weekend started.

Cartographic Erasure

I spent the last two days working in an archive that had me a couple of hours away from home, on a campus I'd never had the chance to visit. It was a good visit -- productive research, in a charming and quirky town, and I got to have dinner with a favorite blogger!

On my first day there, after the archives closed, I wandered around campus a little bit with my map, trying to get the lay of the land. I found F.Q. Jackson's undergraduate dorm, and then realized that directly next to it on campus was a church of her denomination. Of course I wondered if it had been there when she was in school, so I snooped around a little bit to see if I could find a cornerstorne or something to tell me how old the church building was. (No such luck, so I've now sent an email to the church asking for this info.)

But here's what's weird: The church building is NOT on the campus map. It's on the campus, mind you, but not on the piece of paper that purports to be a map of said campus. This was so confusing that I checked it out from almost every angle to make sure that I hadn't lost my mind, or at least my ability to read maps. But no, I had read correctly; according to the map, there was only grassy lawn (actually colored a grassy green on the map) where the building was in fact standing. Talk about disorienting.

My guess is that the denomination or congregation rather than the school now owns the church, although I don't know if that's always been the case, and that the school decided to include on the map only the buildings that are actually part of the college itself. And I'm wondering if there's some sort of anti-clericalist anxiety in this decision. I didn't see any other missing buildings on the map -- but I didn't actually have the time to walk around to every single building and make sure that it corresponded to its location on the map -- and it occurs to me that the school perhaps thought it looked weird to have an unaffiliated church on campus and so they simply "made it go away," on paper if not in fact.

But honestly, what good is a map if it only includes SOME buildings and not others?! It is incredibly disorienting to have a map and the place mapped not correspond to each other, and it seems to me that the whole point of a map is orientation rather than disorientation!