Above All, NO PAPER!!!

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” Kafka, The Trial

 

I sit at my kitchen table, pondering the question of why so few of my students can express themselves well in English.  What, after all, causes illiteracy? I’ve just read a response from a bright student that reads, “the important think happen in the falling Rome is that Ceasear dead and did not become king.” The girl who wrote it complained that she couldn’t work with her group because they didn’t speak English. Well, neither can you, hon. ESL isn’t the reason for failure if native-speakers struggle so.

My phone beeps—a student’s mother texting to ask for makeup work. Her kid is suspended, one of five already from my classes this semester. Other children have skipped since the first day. Is that it? Absenteeism from school the root cause of illiteracy? But no, I skipped more classes than I attended in high school, and came out reading. And the ones in class seem not much more literate than the kids who never attend.

Maybe it’s teenage culture. Students want to speak slang, not academese. During the kids’ Julius Caesar skits I quickly realized that some Shakespeare doesn’t translate well into the 21^st century. It was while kids were reading aloud the bit about how “Brutus gave Caesar blows” and “blows are worse than words” and again, that “we will now trade blows” that I realized half the class was stifling grins. I wanted to cackle as I realized what interpretation my teenagers had put onto Shakespeare, but held it in. Let Julius Caesar be as homoerotic as they want to make it. Still, that laughter means they completely missed the point about why Antony and Brutus started a war. Or did Shakespeare mean it to be that lewd?

Once enmeshed in Shakespearean sexuality I decided to let the matter sit, and check my email. The administration had sent out a missive that explained that audits of the school suggest that students are doing too much paper-based work in our school, too many worksheets and notes and packets and not enough technology or project-based work. The email exhorts us, “Above all, NO PAPER!!!”

EUREKA! Our kids are illiterate because we’re not allowed to teach them literacy! We’re not supposed to use paper to teach them! The best classroom is one in which they take no notes, read no texts, write no essays. They’re meant to play games, talk to each other, and constantly use the computers and i-pads that are in such short supply in the school. In fact, the district seems intent on driving them towards what may very well be a future well-adjusted member of society: a team-playing socially proficient graphic designer or code monkey who is also, paradoxically, completely illiterate. Hurrah for American schools. My kids will have fun in class, and they will learn historic content, but if I listen to the directives from above, they will also be completely unable to access others’ ideas or express their own. That they will be so little able to compete with those who can read terrifies me; that they will be so little able to join the ranks of writers condemns me as a teacher.

I gaze out my window and picture the entire school district as an Escher painting stretching into federally mandated impossibilities, myself one of the marching peasants forever doomed to tread its futility. What would life without even the desire to open a book be like? Dreary, empty, ineffably godforsaken. Some days, the American school system resembles nothing so much as a Kafka novel, baffling and preposterous but less funny because oh dear god right, it’s not funny at all— the children! The children, the children cannot read, the children cannot write… locked in a dreadful prison of illiteracy worse than anything Kafka describes. 

Remember, teachers: Above all, NO PAPER!!!

Kafka’s advice:

“One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the dispositions of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery – since everything interlocked – and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless.”