Canon Fodder

Why do we spend four years of high school English class reading and discussing mostly fiction, poetry, and drama? To prepare us for the rigors of real-life book club? Reading fiction is a wonderful pursuit. But few people actually do it in their professional lives. Too few do it in their free time. Is there a chance they don't like it because it was forced on them too early, too much? I don't have that data. I do have a few responses from friends:

Literature is art. Good literature can teach a great deal about the human condition. -- Bryan

True enough, although I think the "human condition" response is a conditioned one.

In sixth grade I hated math and I asked my father "what's the point?" I remember very specifically he said "it teaches you how to think." He was right. And literature teaches you empathy. Equally important, if not more so. -- Susan

Not to mention, it also teaches you to read. :)

I recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which would likely qualify as a human condition teacher. His stylized writing and post-apocalyptic setting contained familiar "human vs. ____" elements, and included Pandora's hope-in-the-face-of-titanic-desperation moral (or curse). We are certainly meant to empathize with the suffering father, who must continually justify his decisions both to survive and to raise a child in such a world. These, though, are less elements of the human condition as they are of McCarthy's condition. As they are constructed of his experiences and perceptions of the world, they are at best a derivative lesson.

If the primary curriculum element of literature are empathy for the human condition, we could take them to Port-Au-Prince, or New Orleans, or the Gulf Coast, to wherever people suffer, and ask, "How can we help?" Would not such a scenario also force them to think? To problem-solve, prioritize, address logistical issues, sort, organize, communicate, and a host of other skills?

If, as Susan's father asserted, sixth-grade math can teach us how to think, at what point does higher-level math overtake thinking as the desired outcome? Can nothing teach "thinking" quite like trigonometry? How often are adults tasked with solving trigonometric functions (or even calculating a hypotenuse)? Yes, this is the familiar "When am I ever going to need to use this?" question. Or maybe it's the "Is this going to be on the test?" question, writ large.

Is it efficient to teach children to extract a valuable skill surreptitiously from an irrelevant one?

These aren't new questions. Why is the canon the canon? is asked by every student who suffers through it. I'm wondering if we teach around the goals, rather than toward them. And I'll be back with more questions.

Newareness

At a meeting last night and just before class this morning, I have noticed the ADD as a part of my conscious interactive mind:

This morning, I arrived at school not tardy but later than I wanted to, and had very little time to go over the lesson plans before class began. It turned out that the teacher only needed me for about 15 minutes, and all I had to do was start the movie and take attendance (both of which I usually like to do myself but delegated to students), but I noticed that I could only digest about half of the instructions she was giving me. The combination of the written plans I glanced at while listening, the large stack of papers on the her desk to which she kept referring while she talked, the buzz of the students coming into the room and noting my presence, and the general seat-of-the-pantsness of this particular assignment swirled around my head like cream in coffee, puffing and lilting until finally I reached a tepid equilibrium of half-understanding.

Last night, I met a friend of a friend over beers for a conversation about his field (clinical psych), and although the bar was relatively quiet and mellow, and the conversation fascinating and personal, and the sensitive guitarist singing open mike tunes to a tiny audience, I had to take more than one time-out (literally - I even explained to him that I was making a more conscious effort to understand how ADD was affecting me in social settings) to still and separate various tracks of thought and attention. I wonder how experienced ADD managers do this consciously.

Elements of the swirl: menu offerings, draft options, the guitarist's setlist and "Hey! He just strummed the opening chord to John Mayer's St. Patrick's Day, I should be on Name That Tune!", my friend's friend's life's details, my life details, my friend's life details (he wasn't there, but his details were), another friend who would soon be waiting for my call...

I do know that I would recognize certain elements of the conversation or certain facts that were shared if I heard them again, but I couldn't narrate the course of the meeting without fictionalizing it. I do know that it was a good meeting, and that I will likely have another in the near future.

Searching for Teachers With ADD

- Searching "teachERS with ADD" yields better results than "teachING with ADD."
- Of the first 20 google hits on "teachers with ADD," all but three appear focused on the student, not the teacher.
- This article from addconsults.com appears to have been formatted by an ADD sufferer, but seems to offer some good advice. Worth a review.
- This Teachers.Net article, dating to 2001, sympathizes with the ADHD student because the teacher also suffers, but offers no strategies for the teacher.
- This must be a joke, but his heart (if not his head) is probably in the right place.
- Clearly a joke, and a good one. The host site is informative but lacks depth.

What They Should Write in High School History Class

I had a conversation with my mother-in-law this evening, about Ed 2.0. I don't know if that's what educators in the field are calling it, but what I'm referring to is the coming and ongoing shift in classroom planning and pedagogy to embrace and embed technology into the curriculum. Stepping out of the role of front-of-room deliverer of information.

Anyway, my mother-in-law. She's a 20+ year vet who's trying to become part of the new. When she brought up plagiarism, I wondered how high school students can possibly NOT plagiarize when asked to write a research paper about a war, or a president? My junior year US history term paper was about Roosevelt's supposed hesitancy to get the US into WWII. But seriously, now. I could either come back with a survey of the existing literature, or some carefully reworded paragraphs stating ONE author's opinion on that subject. A literature review would have been a reasonable and useful thing to learn to write. But to ask ME to take a side seemed ridiculous. Or at least, redundant.

What are they going to have time to find that hasn't been written about one of those issues? What purpose does it serve to send students through a tiny handful of secondary (or tertiary) sources, and ask them to formulate a thesis from a stack of notecards? How can a teacher help students wade through a given event or period and bore down to a level of specificity they can handle without reaching the absolutely trivial? Shouldn't a research paper encourage students to explore something they know, until they can find an area that is yet unknown?

I propose a research paper that forces students to identify a topic on which they can conduct original research. That connects to their lives AND, nominally, at least, to the subject of the class. Why aren't students spending the bulk of their US History class time tracing their own family's history to and through America? Not only would a rich tapestry of various family histories emerge and intersect, but a) students would have a natural hook to drive their interest and supply their research with primary sources, but b) they will have the opportunity to explore those events, processes, laws, and figures that most influenced that history. It would challenge the teacher to present the subject in non-linear fashion, but isn't that becoming increasingly impossible each year anyway? In 1989, while the Berlin Wall was coming down, we were studying the Civil War. Why weren't we studying US foreign policy during the Cold War? We barely got to Vietnam. How can this year's class possibly get through it?

By the time they even sneak up on the period that had the most visible impact on the world in which they live (or lived, pre-9/11), they will be out of time to write anything decent about it. Not that they'll care, since they'll be finished with US History, done with the Constitution test, and ready for summer.