Punching the Whale

There’s nothing worse than seeing students enter your classroom making faces of disgust and abhorrence. I know I’m one of those new teachers who falls victim to the “cool guy” persona way too regularly, but creating a classroom environment that students don’t hate isn’t “cool,” it’s polite. And sure, everyone’s going to get that one student who waddles into your room, drudging over the threshold with revulsion, but when that one student turns into ten, it means you’re doing something wrong.

That’s why it’s important to differentiate instruction in ways that are meaningful to the students. It’s a pretty simple idea, and upon hearing it, most teachers are likely to go “huh, that makes sense” but like most ideas in teaching, theories are much more easier to ponder than to practice.

A small anecdote: The way I go about differentiating instruction to fit the needs and interests of my students is to allow many options for the students to explore with unit projects. One such project lies in my poetry unit, where I allow my students to pick any song they would like, then find three poetic devices within the song, and then explain how they further the meaning or the impact. I was proud of myself. Not only would I gain some insight into what the high schoolers were listening to (cool guy syndrome), but I would also have my students learn about something they are already into and a part of. That is, before the projects came in.

At first it was easy. Picking poetic elements out of rap songs isn’t hard, so most of my students had fun, and thought the assignment was easy. Then came the Spanish speaking students. They brought in songs I have never heard before, in a language I couldn’t understand. How could I grade this? They could be telling me that the song was about peppermint poodles and I would have nothing to say to them. I don’t speak Spanish. I ended up having them write their project in English, which thoroughly ruined any melodic element of the song, but at least I could understand. Looking back, this wasn’t a huge problem, but it does raise an issue.

When you let your students choose what to study and what to read, at least one student is going to do something so unexpected that you won’t even know how to handle it.

But, in the end, teaching is about knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do. Handing over a little control isn’t going to ruin your job, since thinking that you are 100% in control would make you a horrible teacher anyways. To differentiate instruction in meaningful ways, a teacher must open up their options, give parameters, and expect the unexpected.

And when all else fails, respect this rule of teaching: BE LOGICAL.

I like technology. Where many teachers were born before the rise of computer technology and internet communication and had to learn these new tools second hand, after discovering that they were more than just a fad, I grew up in a time saturated with QWERTY keyboards and glowing monitor screens. I am the first generation of computer kids. I had an old Tandy computer in our workroom when I was six years old, but I had the feeling that my father looked at it as a toy, where as I looked at it as half power tool, half television set. Maybe that’s why I get the impression that most of my colleagues look at technology through a different lens than I do. Where I see myself throwing technological resources into my classroom to make my life easier, other teachers and professors seem to be poking at it with a stick.
As I read our texts for this week, many of them referred to using technology in the classroom and in the world as a revolution that will change everything. Now, I’m not going to belittle the impact of computers or the internet on our world, but saying that these tools have changed everything is a bit out of bounds. Technology in our world isn’t a revolution. Revolutions change fundamental practices of a people or a society, usually destroying the outdated status quo in the process. Computers and the internest isn’t doing that because people, and that includes teachers and students, are doing the exact same thing they used to do before computers; they are just doing them in different ways.

Take the fundamental verbs people perform while sitting at a computer: reading, writing, and watching. When it all boils down to it, that’s what people do on computers, and that’s what they have done for thousands of years. Instead of typing on a typewriter or with a pen, they now do it with keyboards and screens. Instead of reading a newspaper, people read the same newspaper on the internet. Instead of watching television, people now watch the same programs on their computer screens, or they watch 15 second clips on YouTube. The computer hasn’t changed what people do. The computer has changed how people do it. So, why did people change the way they did these fundamental things? Because the computer made it easier.

There are tons of ways to write on a piece of paper. You could use a pen or a pencil. You could type it on a typewriter. You could even stab your finger and write it in blood. So why do people go out and spend $1000 dollars on a computer to use Word Processor? Because it’s the easiest way to create a professional looking product. Computers are making things better and easier than ever before. That’s why we should use them in the classroom. Every time a teacher incorporates technology into the classroom, they should be asking two questions: “Does this make my lesson easier for my students and myself?” and “Does this make my lesson better for my students and myself?”If the answer to these questions is Yes, use technology. If the answer to both of these questions is No, technology is therefore useless. Cassettes were easier and better than records, CD’s were easier and better than cassettes, and MP3’s are easier and better than CD’s. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be around because people wouldn’t buy them. Technology doesn’t exist if it doesn’t make life better.

So, while professors and scientists poke at microchips with wooden sticks pondering technologies impact on the cerebral cortex, I know this; technology makes teaching better and easier for me. Technology has the potential to make teaching and learning easier and better for everybody, because making things easier and better is technologies essential purpose in this world. If it wasn’t achieving this goal, it wouldn’t exist.

I spent 30 minutes the other day researching the definition of Deconstruction. I was hoping, maybe, that this theory would be something like Feminism, or Marxism, that was simple in definition, but complex in deep understanding. What I found was not that.

The 30 minutes of research only confused me, and my knowledge of Deconstruction even more. I was in the dark. I was confused, and frankly, a little bit angry. I know that as a Master’s student I’m supposed to be wrapping my head around extremely complex ideas that I need to strain my prefrontal cortex to begin to comprehend, but I didn’t think this idea was above my head. How can I put this humbly: my level of intelligents gives me the ability to grasp intangible ideas just fine. I never had problems before, so what’s the problem now?

The problem was the blow-hard scholarly language used to define and discuss what Deconstruction is. Everything written about this literary theory (even the wikipedia article) was so full of artificially elevated rubbish language that finding the core meaning of this idea was next to impossible.

So I took the high road. I went to my colleague’s house, where we discussed what, exactly, this Deconstruction thing was all about over a couple drinks. We attempted to simplify it to terms human beings could understand, and we did a good job of that. We learned that Deconstruction wasn’t an entirely new thought as much as it was a reaction to the theory of Structuralism, which spawned a scholarly debate that persists even now. Without knowing Structuralism, there is no knowing Deconstruction.

Structuralist think that language is an inherent trait in mankind. That language is something we are born with that puts our species above all other’s, and that language is a tool used to better understand the universe. That made sense to me, and all the writing on the subject was straight to the point, clear, and didn’t attempt to make me feel stupid. This was because Language is Understanding.

The Deconstructionists don’t believe this. They believe that language is the muddled lens that put humanities mind in a box that we cannot escape from. They believe that since we think in language, and there is no way to think outside of language, that language  is a cage of the mind.

Whereas Structuralists believed that we are born with a certain inherent language system hidden somewhere inside the brain, Deconstructionists believ language is completely artificial and arbitrary, and that symbols of language can carry so many different meanings depending on the context, that meaning can almost never truly exist at all.

And that is why Derrida wrote like this. Deconstructionists are against the myth of logocentrism (the Western practice of always attempting to find the central “true” meaning of things). When I was researching the definition, I was being logocentric, and the Deconstructionists clubbed me over the head for it. A definition is a central meaning. Deconstruction is against central meaning, therefore, Deconstruction refuses to have a central meaning. Those Deconstructionists are a very wily bunch. They sure pulled one over on me.

I finally feel comfortable talking about Deconstruction. I just have to make sure that I don’t use those big, useless, meaningless words that Deconstructionists like to use so much. I hate big, useless, meaningless words.

I love technology. I’ve grown up with it and it has always been part of my life. Using technology to me is as common and natural as socializing or eating. That gives me a certain perspective that most teachers lack when it comes to technology.

Let’s face it; the teaching community is aging. I don’t know what the average age of a teacher is right now, but I’m guessing it’s about to retire, and I’m part of a new wave of much needed professionals. This generational gap creates a lot of resistance and even fear of technology within the classrooms, since most of the time the students are more proficient with teacher tools than teachers are. Also learning about these ever evolving instructional devices to the older crowd is more tedious and time consuming than it is to their younger students. None of these challenges, however, apply to me.

I was writing DOS prompts onto my Tandy when most of my students were still in their mother’s wombs, so I really want to incorporate technology into my classroom, much like  Rozema and Webb discuss in chapter 3 of Literature and the Web. I have run into a different challenge however. A lot of applications and planning I want to achieve with Web 2.0 tools requires my students to have access to a computer at home, but many of them don’t. Signing up for the computer lab in my school takes months in advance, and currently I only have 2 computers in my room. Technology is expensive, and as I have the government to send my bill, many of my student’s have single mother’s scraping by to pay the gas bill.

Then I thought about all the older teachers who don’t use technology because it’s too great a hurdle to learn and found that I was no different than them. Student access to technological resources is an excuse, not a reason not to use the latest technologies, since, in the end, if teachers don’t use technology, then we don’t get technology, and if we don’t get technology, then we lose out on so many learning opportunities that would have been accessible and now aren’t. There is no stopping the surge of technology in the classroom. Only challenges; challenges that must be overcome by us, the new teachers.

Ok, I fell off the topic of blogs, but they fall into exactly what I’ve been talking about, and I believe this is connected to Webb and Rozema in thoughtful ways. What do you think?

    It was a Wednesday when my class got off topic. It was off topic in a good way though. There was a journal article up on the board which read “Have you ever hurt someone for a good reason? Have you ever been cruel to be kind?” It turned out to be a good article, and the way I can tell is when students ask if they can share their answers.

There was a lot of discussion about dumping boyfriends and general everyday gossip, but then my mentor teacher decided to show a news clip from the internet on the SmartBoard. The news clip was from a gas station security camera and showed a man entering the store, walking up to the line at the cash register, and then viciously punching another man in the back of the head, sending the victim to the floor.

After the students picked their jaws up off the floor, some out of shock and some out of laughter, a female student perked up and said “What if he just had an attitude?”

I answered with “Who? The guy who got punched?”

She answered “No. The guy who punched the other guy.”

I asked her “Would that make it all right?”

She said “I guess not…” but I wonder if she would have really thought about it if I hadn’t have asked.

It was after class that I finally realized what happened. While my mentor teacher and myself were relating to the guy getting cold-cocked in the back of the head, at least one of my students was placing herself in the shoes of the assailant, sometimes, as they might think, the justified assailant. This student wasn’t only placing herself in the aggressors shoes, but also justifying the unjustifiable action of punching a man in the back of the head.

But it isn’t her fault. I am reminded of this fact as I read Mary Ellen Flannery’s article “The D Word.” Now I’m not one of those older folks that believe the whole system is falling apart because the new generation is going to tear it down through disrespectful apathy, but I will agree that many students are getting the wrong message from home, and sometimes their entire lives. One of my colleagues put it this way: “They don’t know manners” and you can’t blame someone for not knowing something. It would be like throwing someone in jail for not know the capital of Canada, but something a whole lot less dramatic, and very similar happens every time a teacher hands out detention slips for students who “disrespect” their teacher for not knowing any better.

This is why I am so happy about “Model good behavior” being the first rule to classroom management. Whether we like it or not, teachers are pseudo parents to these children, and as such we have to teach them just as much about life as we do any subject, especially if they aren’t getting it at home. It just so happens that respect is a subject lacking in many homes in this nation, so again we must fight against the tide as teachers, hoping one small victory after the next we are making an actual difference in this world.

You know what I want to read? I want to read a book on how to teach Shakespeare by someone who is writing this book for people who DON’T like Shakespeare. Rex is writing to English teachers, since this is a book about education. People who aren’t English teachers are not going to read this book. So why, in chapter 4, does Rex spend so much time attempting to sell me Shakespeare. I have a degree in English. Colleges don’t let you have an English degree without at least respecting Shakespeare. Rex doesn’t need to sell me on this.

His salesmanship, however, seems to be more directed towards me than my students. He constantly praises his complex elevated language, which makes sense to me, but wouldn’t mean anything to my students.

What I do like what Gibson has to say about conventions though. That “All drama depends on the acceptance of a number of conventions.” (p. 47) is completely true, and as English teachers we have to face that conventions have changed extensively since Shakespeare’s time. People today want realism. They want to go to a movie or watch TV and see something they are familiar with, weather that be situations, characters or language. Shakespeare is not familiar to high school students. Even if the situations Shakespeare creates are familiar to students, which most of them are, the students can’t get past the language, and if they have to work to get past it, that’s already more work than watching or reading something else.

You might be thinking that I didn’t really have a main idea when I started writing this, and you’re right, there’s no thesis statement said in this article yet. I have one now though. If you’re trying to sell Shakespeare to high school students, don’t start by telling me about his schooling and the conventions of the day. Those sound more like excuses on why these students already hate Shakespeare. Stick to the story and the characters. That’s what’s fun about him. I respect Shakespeare, but I don’t like him enough to admit that his language is outdated and incomprehensible to a modern audience. Let the students that show interest in the language explore that, but building lesson plans around it is a dangerous situation. You can’t make anybody love something, and we have to respect that as English teachers.

On a more favorable note, the Romeo and Juliet line exercise in the Story chapter (p. 97) is wonderful. It can get students up and moving and let’s them feel the action and emotion of the play. This is what teaching Shakespeare should be about. If I can get a student to feel the emotion that Shakespeare was presenting, I win as a teacher. If I teach a student how to recognize puns in Macbeth, I accomplished a standard dictated by my job.

People would rather talk than listen. I don’t know if there has been any research on this, and I don’t care. It’s something I don’t think a mountain of statistics or personal opinions could change my mind on. Has it always been this way? I have no idea, but it’s that way now, so who cares how it’s been. If I were to guess, it probably is more true today than it ever was, since blogs like this one can make my, and any other person’s opinions look like published gold. This article, I think, asks us as teachers to take advantage of this new “talking” culture by incorporating a highly tuned, pre-planned curriculum into a conversational environment. This sounds like a great idea, so why is it every time I try something like this in a classroom I feel like I’m a salmon swimming against the stream?

It’s two reasons I think. Number one goes back to my first point; that people like to talk rather than listen. A 30 person conversation is difficult because it requires 29 listeners at any given moment.  Keeping everyone listening, interested, on task and keeping the conversation on track is a major challenge to teachers, especially new teachers with less than stellar classroom management skills.

Hmmm, I just read that paragraph and discovered that I’m saying the more effective teaching strategy is difficult because of my own lack of experience. Hmmm, well then…. Onto reason 2.

I have had days where I’ve seen classroom discussion fall apart, but when I passed out the worksheets or displayed the PowerPoint notes, the class falls silent and all students automatically get on task. I don’t think my students have been trained to discuss literary works as much as they have learned how to write down notes verbatim and hand in worksheets with the so called “right” answers on them. The reason I feel like a salmon swimming against the stream is because I am a salmon swimming against the stream. With as much research telling teachers that this is a failed way to educate students, it hasn’t changed because of the Pavlovian impulses from days gone and dead. In order to create a new educational environment, we must punch the heart out of the old system. Wow. Another meaning for my title. That’s nice.

Anyways, back to my point. For any of this graduate research to be worth anything, it’s going to take brute force from hard working teachers in the classroom to be of any use.

So I just finished reading chapter 2 of our text book, and I must say that I like this book. It can be dry at times, like most textbooks are, but the upsides of this text definitely outweigh the downsides. This chapter on writing seems to encompass everything I’ve heard about the teaching of writing in the last 6 months. The author hits on major papers I’ve had to read and summarizes them in two sentences. Also the authors display major conflicts within English education in breadth and brevity. The first list of 10 things to think about while assigning and grading writing assignments was everything I’ve learned within this program in one brief explanation. If there is one problem with this book, it’s that it’s too much information too fast. It’s difficult to remember so many guidelines when they are compact in such a potent summary.

I have one question to ask, however. My readings in texts throughout this program have regularly opposed my experiences in the field of education. For example, In the case of DJ, I don’t know many teachers at my practicum that wouldn’t teach this student through the negative repercussions of bad grades and failure. In the texts there seems to always be some creative solution to get a student motivated and achieve, but they always seem to be highly work intensive. So my question is when a student isn’t putting in the work to succeed, is it the student’s fault or the teacher’s fault? If they aren’t putting in the work to succeed, why should we work twice as hard to deal with their 50% effort? Maybe I sound like I’m giving up on students, but I’ve never done that before. I believe this is a rational question though. Will these students always need someone putting extra effort forth for them to succeed?

After reading my title, you might be thinking “What’s up Rory? You got beef with whales?” Let me get this straight: I do not currently, or ever have, hated sea mammals, and I certainly have never caused bodily harm to them. I’ve never even been in a position to hurt a whale. If I was, it would totally depend on the setting and my mindset to know if I would even consider punching a whale. In this case punching a whale has less to do with actually punching a whale, and much more to do with being a good teacher.

See, the title has been shortened. It was originally intended to say “Teach like You’re Punching the Heart out of a Whale” which makes way more sense. I’m not saying to teach violently. That’s about the worst educational strategy. It has more to do with the difficulty involved in punching the heart out of a whale. Before even getting to the heart business, punching a whale would be incredibly hard to do. They are usually deep underwater, which does a good job of not sustaining human life, and like most things in the water, they can swim much faster than we can. Next you have to punch it hard enough to make it’s heart dislodge from whatever place it resides, and propel itself through all sorts of whale mess to break free from its freshly pulverized whale cadaver. That’s pretty close to impossible.

In just the way that punching the heart out of a whale is impossible, being the perfect teaching is a task just as daunting. To educate every child to a level of competence, take advantage of every minute of class, and to make a meaningful and lasting impact on students lives is insanely difficult. Here’s the thing though. That can’t stop us from trying. Just like when I finally get my shot at that whale, I’ll be shooting for a full blown de-heartment, when I walk into a classroom I’m looking to make an impact on every individual sitting in that room, including me. To strive for anything less would be to give less, and that’s not acceptable.

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