A Good One

Saintseester, in a comment to my last post, wrote these very true words:

I know these egg-heads are frustrating; I try to remind myself (daily) that it is the “trouble” I remember. The good students who work hard tend to slip by our radar because they are not giving us fits!

She’s right - the squeaky wheels really do get the most of our attention. I also find, as I’ve written before, that these, oh, how do I put it? - let’s call them challenging, shall we? - these challenging students are the ones who teach me the most about what kind of teacher I am and what kind of teacher I want to be. I really do love my problem children for encouraging me, through their completely unbelievable antics, to constantly expand and polish my teaching practice.

Lest you think that all my teaching experiences are frustrating ones, though, I’m going to tell you a story about one of my good kids.

I have a couple of really stellar students this term. Smart and articulate, motivated and inquisitive, these kids thrill me in class discussion. They’re willing to probe, to question and, on occasion, to step out on to limbs they’re not sure will hold their weight. They make gorgeous connections between what we’re working on and what they’ve noticed out in their worlds. They’ll challenge the things I tell them - I love that - and force me to articulate my lesson in a way that demonstrates that I really do know what I’m talking about.

One student in particular stands out this term. I’ve mentioned this boy before - he’s the one who presented me with this week’s Grammar Wednesday question - and we’ll call him Renaissance Man, or RM for short. He’s really deserving of the name; his interests include politics and history, he’s a hiker, a surfer, a photographer, and a rock-climber, and my impression of him is that his young body houses an extremely old soul - I can just see it in his eyes. He was a participant in last term’s composition class, and he signed up for my public speaking course this semester. I was thrilled to see his name on my roster.

Last week, I tasked the students with composing and presenting a commemorative or appreciative speech. This has been a favorite activity in classes past; students get to speak about something that’s personally meaningful to them, they don’t have to research the topic, and I don’t require a written component to the assignment; much of the pressure of the usual work is off in this activity, and the students consistently hit them out of the park.

RM volunteered to speak third, following a student who gave a lovely tribute to the first responders of 9/11 and a girl who gave a gorgeous speech about how deeply she was moved by attending the birth of her half brother. They were tough acts to follow, but RM was totally up to the task.

He strode confidently up to the podium and started to tell us about someone who was crucially important to him - his grandfather. His introduction was beautifully crafted; I felt as if I would recognize the man if I were ever to meet him. It was going remarkably well, and RM had us hooked.

About a quarter of the way into the speech, though, something happened that I would never have anticipated from this boy. RM’s eyes filled with tears and he ground to a complete and dramatic halt. He stopped talking. He looked down at his paper while gripping the sides of the podium. He let go, stepped back, and bit his thumb, still staring down. Then, after what felt like an eternity, he took a deep breath, brushed his hair away from his eyes, took another deep breath, nodded ever so slightly, and returned to his speech.

It was a profound experience to watch RM completely lose, then determinedly regain his composure. As I sat there, watching him founder, I was seized by the desire to quietly tell him that he could return to his seat, but something stopped me. I KNEW he could do it, and more than that, I wanted him to know that I knew.

When he was finished, I looked around the room and found that not a few eyes were rimmed with tears. RM was sitting directly behind me, and I turned around to ask him if he wouldn’t mind deconstructing what just happened - if he would be willing to share with us what he had to do to stay upright at the podium and go on with his speech.

Jon took issue with this request and blurted out that couldn’t I see that RM was upset and why would I make him talk about it?! I responded that RM had just given us an enormous gift for an opportunity to learn, and that he had every right to decline my offer. He didn’t - I knew he wouldn’t - and he spoke about the experience of losing his grandfather and the opportunity that he was given, at the age of 13, to speak at the man’s funeral. He spoke about how, then, he’d not been able to regain his composure; he was a child, and he so desperately loved and missed his grandfather that he was helpless to stop the tears, but that didn’t stop him from speaking. What he had to say was important and necessary, and no one expected him, then, to keep himself together. He finds, he told us, that it gets easier to talk about his beloved grandfather as time goes by, but that he’s still so important to who RM is as a person that he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to speak about his grandfather without having to do an enormous amount of flood control.

When he was finished with the debriefing I’d asked him for, I asked the students to write a brief response piece about the experience of watching what had just happened. As the students were writing, I wrote, too, and here’s what I said:

I mindfully fought the urge to speak up - to allow you the chance to go back to your seat without finishing your speech - but something (someone?) stronger than the desire to spare you discomfort held me back. You are a strong soul, and you had something important to say. I didn’t wish to rob you of that opportunity by implying, by allowing you to sit down, that your struggle to control your emotions was less important than the audience’s discomfort at watching that struggle.

I sat here willing you strength. I imagined (or, perhaps I didn’t imagine) your grandfather here willing you strength. Your ability to regain your composure and go on with your beautiful tribute to your grandfather was inspiring, and I’m grateful to you - both as a teacher and as a feeling human being - that you were willing to do this difficult bit of work.

Oh, yeah. I’ve got good ones.

Two Things

I’ve got two things to write about, both alternating between a huge sigh of relief and an anguished wail of frustration.

Let’s start with Jon shall we? Remember Jon? Well, despite my warnings of a few weeks ago, nothing about this student’s behavior or performance has changed for the better.

It’s another reporting week, so I emailed a copy of Jon’s page in my grade book to Sam, his department head, along with copies of the abysmal work he did on his mid-term; representative of this “work” is the fact that he answered essay questions about Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech with sentence fragments - for example, his answer to “Why is Dr. King’s speech so powerful and such an effective piece of persuasion? Do you think that time has had any impact, positive or negative, on the effectiveness of the speech? Explain” was, and I quote:

The way he uses his words and compares the negative to the positive. Positive impact racism isn’t as bad as it used to be.

That’s it.

I came home last night to find this in my inbox:

Dear Chili:

Thank you for the e-mail. I can appreciate your frustration with Jon and can visualize the classroom setting. I’ve had conversations with him in the past but it seems that he thinks he knows it all. With your permission, I would like to sit and talk with him next week. If you think it best that both you and I sit and talk with Jon that is fine also. I’ll look for you on campus on Monday morning. I commend you for your commitment to Jon’s success despite his attitude and lack of dedication in your course. Excellent detail in your attachment, by the way.

Enjoy the upcoming weekend,
Sam

Seriously? For all the frustration and hassle, I really do love working at TCC.

Ready for the next one? I actually texted SaintSeester about this when I read it yesterday, it worked me up so.

This, completely unedited by me, is Charlotte’s response to the second question of that same take-home exam, in which I asked students to characterize the tone of King’s speech, and to support their claims with examples from the work:

The tone of Dr. Kings speech, is one of power, yet with great regard of emotion. At times it sounds like is about to go all over powering, and a bit dark, like “let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.” It seems as if he is about to go all EMO (student emphasis), but at the last moment he goes back to normal Dr. King tone. The other tone of his speech, is very personable. Things that mean a lot to him self, yet able people who even today are able to relate and find a meaning to. I loved how he went on naming states, it lets people from different places connect to his idea.

She earned a 40 on the exam - there were two answers that she wrote that I, an exceedingly smart and intuitive woman with a fair bit of experience deciphering student-speak, couldn’t even understand.

Thankfully, Charlotte’s department head wasn’t surprised, either, when I brought a copy of this exam to her.

Yikes.

Grammar Wednesday, Part Two!

I couldn’t come up with anything fun to write about this morning, but one of my students, a wonderful Renaissance Man, asked me this:

“Is it ungrammatical to say that someone can have something “for free”?

HUH! I don’t know!

We do say that we can buy something “for” this or that much money; “I bought my car for 16, 000 dollars,” for example, or “the grocery store has a special on oranges; four for a dollar.” The word “for,” in this case, is a preposition that means “in consideration or payment of;” we trade this (money) for that (the car or the oranges).

Free is an adjective - it describes something; it’s not a quantity or a noun. Something either is or is not free; I don’t exchange “free” for something else.

I told my student that I really didn’t know the answer to his question, but that I’d put it to some smart friends of mine (that’s YOU!). What do you think? I understand that it’s descriptively grammatical - we say it all the time - but is it prescriptively grammatical? If we look at it from a standpoint of pure structure, is it correct to say that you can have this “for free”?

Grammar Wednesday

I’m hip-deep in grading papers this morning, Everyone. I could give you a lecture on what makes a sentence complete and why you should never, EVER use sentence fragments in writing that is being turned in for a grade, but I’m a little too depressed at this point to make that fun, so today’s Grammar Wednesday post is brought to you courtesy of EnglishFail.com.

Have a Happy Wednesday!

I Swear to You…

… I DO NOT make this stuff up.

Check out what I found as I was going over the homework my students handed in yesterday:

Sigh…..

Mid-Terms

We’re just starting week five of an eleven-week term, so I’m getting the students ready to take a mid-term exam.  I’ve got the public speaking test all ready to go, and O’Mama and I are collaborating on the assessment we’ll give to our composition students.

As part of the mid-term, I give the students an assignment to go along with a reading/viewing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.  I say this every term, so forgive me if you’ve been here with me before, but I’m constantly amazed by how little my students know about this iconic speech.  Sure, they  know the tag lines; they’ve seen the black-and-white clips of Brother Martin in the shadow of Lincoln’s statue that get played once or twice a year around the MLK/Civil Rights Day holiday and Black History Month.  It’s true, though, that most of them - in many cases, all of them - have never heard the speech from beginning to end.  There’s something about that which disturbs me, both as an educator and as an American.

Granted, the Dream speech isn’t really Dr. King’s masterpiece - he wrote a great many speeches and sermons and letters that were more technically complex and carried a more pointed message - but the fact remains that this particular oration is a touchstone in American history.  It came at a time when the United States was on the brink and things could have gone either way.  Dr. King was a vital voice in the Civil Rights era and regardless of how complicated his legacy may or may not be, he continues to stand as an integral part of our collective experience.

The problem, though - at least, as I see it - is that this part of our history isn’t being carried on as part of our collective experience.  Whether it’s because of NCLB or a shift in focus away from comprehensive study in history or because we have it in our minds that the problems of the 50s and 60s are a thing of the past (which is, of course, ridiculous, but run with me for a second), the fact remains that the students who are coming to me have absolutely no concept of what happened in our country even 40 years ago.  This ignorance leaves them ill-equipped to understand what’s happening today (see my conversation about the Tiger Woods-Kelly Tilghman-Golf Week incident from last week as a great example of how a failure to understand history can have very real implications in the here and now).  This ignorance leaves them ill-equipped to think critically about issues of race and class and gender, about the concept of equality and fairness, or about how people interact with one another, and leaves them drifting a bit when it comes to having to articulate where they stand on these questions.

I cannot single-handedly change these kids’ lives or alter their perceptions.  I can, however, expose them to things that they should have been familiar with long before they got to me, so I continue to show Brother Martin’s speech, I continue to ask hard questions about it, and I continue to expect my students to investigate the past to find answers to their present.  It’s not much, but it’s something I can do.

image credit

So THAT’S How You Do It!

True story, you guys.

I’ve got a student. For the sake of her privacy, we’ll call her Charlotte. She’s in one of my public speaking classes and she’s presented a bit of a challenge for me, even in these early weeks.

Charlotte gives off the air of wanting to be anywhere but in class. She stares off into space, she doesn’t turn in homework, she mumbled her way through her first speech and couldn’t get back to her seat quickly enough.

The only thing that Charlotte seems intent upon is not participating in class. She’s working really hard at it, to the point that I think the rest of the class is hoping I won’t call on her because the ensuing silence - and the staring competition Charlotte challenges me to every time I utter her name - makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable.

It should come as no great surprise that Charlotte is failing the class. Because of our teach-out situation, the college is mandating that we report on student progress at close intervals during the semester, and one of the reporting deadlines was last week. I wrote up a progress slip for Charlotte on which I had written as a comment that she “actively refuses to participate in class and her work shows a decided lack of effort.” I brought it to her to sign. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Charlotte, I need you to read this and sign it, please.

Charlotte: What does this mean?

Me: What do you mean, “what does this mean?”

C: This part about participation. I participate.

Me: Really? HOW, exactly, do you participate?

C: I don’t know…

Me: EXACTLY. Charlotte, whenever I call on you, that’s the first thing that comes out of your mouth. You invariably have nothing to say, even when I ask you pointed questions to direct your thinking. That says to me that either you’re not paying attention or you don’t care enough to formulate a response. Either way, you’re not adding anything substantive to our conversations and, as a member of this community, adding to the conversation is part of your responsibility.

C (with a dramatic eye-roll): But I COME to CLASS.

Me: Yes, you do, but you need to understand that coming to class and participating in class are very different things. I even say so in my syllabus - it’s not enough to just be in your seat; you need to be active in the process.

C: Mumbles something incoherent.

Me: I’m sorry?

C: Just because you don’t think I participate doesn’t mean I don’t.

Me: Okay, that’s fair. I fully understand that people’s perceptions of situations can be vastly different. My question to you, then, becomes this: how can you get my perception of your behavior in this class to more closely resemble your perception?

C (I swear to God/dess, Everyone; I’m not making this up - this is exactly what she said): Well, you could just not care.

I think she’s on to something! Not caring would solve pretty much all my teacher-problems! I’d never again have to worry about preparing interesting lectures, making meaningful assessments, or being conscientious and helpful in my grading. I’d not have to concern myself with deadlines or professional responsibilities! Gee, Charlotte, THANKS for that bit of advice!

Seriously, though - I looked at her and said “did you REALLY just say that to me?!” to which she responded, “well YEAH” (read that to sound like “well, DUH!). I managed to regain my composure and told her that she’d have to come up with a better strategy than that, because my not caring was never gonna happen. I then told her that the conversation was over, directed her to sign the paper, and made a beeline to her department head to report on the confrontation.

The DH wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear the story, and she assured me that it would go nowhere - Charlotte is known as a drama queen in the department and she wasn’t likely to come to her DH to complain about me anyway because she’s all bark - she knows she’s got no ground to stand on in this because all of her instructors have the same complaints.

One last little bit to the story: I had hoped that our little tete-a-tete would spark at least a temporary improvement in Charlotte’s behavior in the classroom, but that was a naive wish on my part. When I handed out a three-page article about the Tiger Woods incident that I wrote about yesterday, I looked up about a minute into the reading to see Charlotte picking at her fingernails. She looked up at me and I said “did you read?” She said, with her usual eye-roll and tongue tisk, “yah.” When I called on her to reiterate the main ideas of the article, she parroted back the summary I gave them as I was handing the papers out.

Sorry, Sweetie, but that doesn’t count.

I Love My Job

There are a number of reasons I love being a teacher; not least among them is that I get to think. Not all the time, mind you - there are plenty of days that go by without any strenuous mental activity on my part - but often enough, I get challenged to see something in a new way or to come up with an articulate and logical defense of my own thinking.

This past week has been my favorite of my public speaking classes. This is the part of the semester where I bring up the First Amendment and the idea of the intersection between “free” speech and “ethical” speech. This unit never - ever - fails to spark my thinking about something important, and this semester was no different.

In the past, I’ve used Imus as an example of how, just because “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” people can still get in a boatload of trouble just by opening their mouths without having their brains in gear. The clutch pops, the engine stalls, and all hell breaks loose. The fact of the matter is, though, that Imus is old news and, people being what we are, there’s ALWAYS another example of poor decision making to fall back on.

This term, I decided to look at the Kelly Tilghman-Tiger Woods-GolfWeek fiasco. The short version of the story is that Ms. Tilghman is a golf commentator, and in an ad-libbed, time-filling bit, responded to Nick Faldo’s claim that young players are going to have to “gang up” on Tiger Woods in order to beat him by saying that they should “lynch him in a back alley.” A longer version of the story can be found here.

The upshot is that Ms. Tilghman apologized to Woods (with whom she is a personal friend) and Woods essentially brushed the whole thing off. Tilghman has no record of racist thinking and, it seems, really didn’t know what she was saying; lynchings were rarely done in urban areas and almost NEVER done in private. They were violence with a purpose, and were intended to be public and outrageous. They were often photographed; there was nothing “back alley” about them.

The real problem came a week later, when Golf Week magazine decided to make their cover article about the incident, and to illustrate their point with an image of a noose on the front of the issue (they’ve done an amazing job of scrubbing the internet of the image. Go here to see an article with the cover still embedded in the text). To say that it was a poor decision would be a lovely example of understatement.

The students read about the incident and the magazine cover, and then I gave them this article by Mike Wilbon. Wilbon is someone I admire and respect. He’s smart, he’s insightful, he’s calm and considered, and he’s funny as hell (watch him and Tony Kornheiser go at it on a few episodes of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption and you’ll see what I mean). I think that Wilbon does an excellent job of deconstructing the entire affair; he speaks intelligently about Ms. Tilghman and adds his own personal experiences with her to further the idea that she meant nothing by the remark, he brings up the larger questions of racism and sexism as they pertain to the incident, and he brings up the very real point that those who don’t understand history are doomed to make poor decisions because they simply don’t know any better.

One thing Wilbon said that I don’t agree with, however, was this:

What tends to go unexamined also is the number of black producers working in positions of impact at networks such as the Golf Channel (or ESPN or the national networks for that matter) or black editors working at magazines and newspapers who sit in on meetings where covers are discussed and ultimately decided. Were these staffs more racially inclusive, certain thoughts and notions would be challenged before something becomes a finished product.

I’ve been pondering this line of thinking, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is, essentially, a racist comment.

I can assure you that you’d be hard-pressed to find someone whiter than I. My heritage is almost entirely Scots; I’m a red-headed, white skinned woman who’s lived her entire life in an essentially all-white environment, New England not being known for its vast racial diversity. I can also assure you that, were I on the staff at Golf Week magazine, I would have taken strong issue with the decision to put a noose on the cover.

I resent the assumption - and it’s one that’s widely held by many, many people - that if one is a member of a minority group, one is automatically open-minded. I’ve run up against this over and over again - my students make assumptions about race and class and gender and open-mindedness; some of my friends and colleagues make the same assumptions. Black people are more sensitive to race issues than white people. Gays are more sensitive to discrimination than straight people are. Poor people feel the sting of classism more keenly than do middle-class folks.

Where do these ideas come from? Does the fact that I’m white, straight, well-educated and middle class mean that I am completely oblivious to the injustice of discrimination, racism, and homophobia? Who’s to say that a black person wouldn’t have allowed the noose to go on the cover? It was a powerful image, it sold magazines, and there’s nothing that says that every black person is affected by the baggage that image carries with it.

To make assumptions about people on such a broad scale is utterly ridiculous, completely unfair and, in the end, potentially dangerous. I know for sure that it’s also offensive - at least to me.

In the end, I really hope our conversations as a class helped to pry a few minds open a little bit. There will always be some students who won’t understand what I was trying to teach them until they themselves are the targets of some wrong-headed assumptions. My dearest wish is that, when that happens - and it WILL happen - they’ll remember our class.

Grammar Wednesday

Mrs. Chili is stumped on this one, kids. Help a girl out.

I was driving to work yesterday listening, as is my habit, to NPR. My local station’s anchor was reporting on our gray and yucky weather pattern and she said something very much like this (I’m going from memory as I don’t take notes while I’m driving):

We’ve got some more rain in the forecast through this evening; one to three inches of rain is expected by nightfall.

I walked into the college and headed straight for the Goddess of the Front Desk. She’s my go-to girl for things like this; she and I share a love of our language and she revels in geeky research projects (she loved me for sending her off on a quest to settle a metonymy vs. synechdoche question last week). I relayed the weather quote and she looked at me a little blankly.

“In that sentence,” I explained, “INCHES is the subject. The subject of a sentence can’t come after the word ‘of,’ right? So if ‘inches’ is the subject, shouldn’t the verb be plural? Shouldn’t the sentence read one to three inches of rain ARE expected?”

We couldn’t come up with the answer. One to three inches IS sounds right, but that’s probably because we’re so used to hearing “rain” (or, just as likely, “snow“)  - a singular noun (or, rather, a non-count noun with singular properties) as the last word before the verb.

We tried it with other quantities - four gallons of milk and five pounds of chocolate - and decided that the plural verb sounded better in those cases - four gallons of milk are required for the commercial bakery class this morning and five pounds of chocolate are being delivered this afternoon, right to my door (I wish!) - but the singular verb still sounded better with the rain and snow, despite our mutual agreement that, grammatically, the plural verb is required.

A Day of Silence

In observance of the Day of Silence, this blog will be silent Friday, April 25, 2008.
Today is the 12th annual Day of Silence, and today is dedicated to Lawrence King:

“Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence (DOS), a national youth movement bringing attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment. This year’s DOS is held in memory of Lawrence King, a 15 year-old student who was killed in school because of his sexual orientation and gender expression. I believe that ending the silence is the first step toward building awareness and making a commitment to address these injustices. Think about the voices you are not hearing today.”