There’s a rather special used bookstore in Columbus,
that I usually stop at in my first afternoon home for a vacation. Half-Price Books is where I grew up.
This summer I picked up my regular $1 novels, classics, the young adult novels
I’ve started rereading in an effort to ever-better understand my students, my
feminist theory, and also a new genre I’ve taken to reading: teaching books.
The one that I’m reading now has me racking my mind as I think back on last
year’s mistakes and planning for next year’s work.
Literacy with an
Attitude, by Patrick Finn, borrows heavily from Paulo Freire’s ideas to get
kids who may have oppositional identities, which lead them to resist mainstream
oppressive American culture and the schools that teach it, reading to resist
and writing to resist. I read the first half of the book with a neck heavily
cricked from nodding; I see my kids in his descriptions of working-class
schools and all the working-class pedagogy laid upon their shoulders.
The second half of the book describes what teachers can do
to change this. To invest students in school without making it seem a betrayal
of their community, to teach students not to be obedient but to challenge. I’m
reading the chapters looking back over my shoulder, sighing and grinning at
scenes that could have come straight out of my classroom. Here are some of the
moments that I found and want to change next year:
Finn discusses gatekeeping—refusing to engage with a
student’s content until they have mastered convention. I think I was rather
good about prizing expression over mechanics, but it’s the sort of thing one
can never stop telling oneself to regard. Gatekeeping can also include telling
a student what’s important in their
expression. It immediately put me in mind of A, an accomplished raconteur from
my first semester, and Q, a kid who can get going like a revivalist preacher
when he’s wound up, and how I would hold up a hand and say, “thanks, but let’s
get back to the first point you made, the one that was actually connected to our topic…” Obviously those
boys were also trying to interrupt the class and grab a laugh, but I do think I
need to intentionally ponder what I shut out from class discourse and what I
consider valuable.
Something of which I was exceedingly proud was the way I had
students bring their own lives into the classroom, discussing how they would
have reacted or what they thought of situations that cropped up in history. Yet
I think I need to be more explicit in asking them to connect their own lives to
the history. Their essays in second semester allowed them to do this, but I
need a clearer connection day-to-day. Hm. Also, the fact that I have to come up
with brand-new ideas for psychology leaves me a bit wobbly, but I’m working on
it.
A moment that I saw clearly mirrored in my own classroom
from the book was a teacher whose class went off the rails on debate, but who
viewed such expression as invalid. Now, there was a glorious point this past
year when my kids erupted into a fantastically passionate debate on
immigration, and another class broke into fierce discussion of racism in
America. In both cases I kept them raising hands, and did all I could to have
them responding to each other, not just shouting their own opinions. Yet, after
reading this book, I realize that the fact that I set a time limit on the
debates, closing it off after twenty minutes so that we could return to our
class schedule, meant that I effectively capped something the kids were passionate
about. I should have given them paper and told them to write out their opinions
as a way to harness their ideas into writing practice, and allowed them the
expression that they were still hungering after from the debate.
There’s something that has been lingering uneasily in my
mind only popped into clarity after reading Literacy
with Attitude. My students wrote essays last year assessing revenge in
connection with the atom bomb. Many of them discussed how revenge is right,
revenge is just, it’s only fair. I read their essays with aghast superiority,
giving them credit, of course, if they expressed their views well, but
internally shocked by what I saw as their moral degeneracy. Later that month,
one kid smacked another for breaking his headphones, and told me it was okay, revenge
was fair, he’d written about it in his essay. This prompted a response that I
still cringe to think back upon. I told him, and the entire listening class,
that revenge is wrong, it’s childish, it’s evil (can we ever say it enough?
Until the grotesque, inhuman murderers of Muhammed Abu Khdeir hear?), and that
those who supported it in their essays would grow out of it some day to be
ashamed of themselves.
I do believe that revenge is wrong. I do believe that it
shows littleness of human spirit. But the way I denounced it in class
completely devalued the expression that my students had put into their essays.
It told them that they could write as well and as much as they wanted; my
opinion, stated verbally with none of the editing that they had poured into
their essays, was more legitimate than theirs. It told them that their
community, which they had spoken of as valuing revenge, and their parents, many
of whom were quoted in essays in support of revenge, were immature and morally
impaired. I cannot think of a better way to tell them that they come
from wrongness, and I don’t think, at all, that it made a difference. Not one
kid was going to fold their hands and say, “oh, okay, Ms. W thinks it’s bad, so
I’m not going to get revenge again.” No, they looked at me and thought, “her
white ass has no clue what it’s talking about, and maybe she can rely on all
the stuff she’s blabbing about like authority and dialogue, but at the end of
the day, this is the only way that works.” If I’d treated their opinions with
respect and their sources with dignity, they might have been more open to the
questions I asked them while they were writing and in the margins of their
essays. But my soapbox shattered the illusion of conversation with one
blow—this was a monologue, not a dialogue, and they were meant to be the
receptive, docile hearers. Next year, I need to watch for this.
Don’t get me wrong. I made many more mistakes than these.
But I’m peeling back the layers of them piece by piece as I plan, and these, connected
with literacy and empowerment as they are, strike me as some of the most
interesting and what I am most passionately concerned with fixing.
 |
| If I drew a graph, this is what it would look like. |
By the way, I’ve been at home for the past week, and
received a revelation from my father. He just found out, while responding to a
question by some guy writing an article about an article that mentions his article, that the guy named a graph
he (my father) invented after him. It's cool, he drew one for me, it's a graph with no C4's, C6's, or C10's, but the point is, that we have a family graph. We are
very proud. And my genetic geek credentials just shot up a thousandfold.
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