Recently, there’s been a serious budget problem in the state where we live — a situation by no means unique. Specifically, the problem is a major budget shortfall, also known as “that thing which happens when you elect a moron,” but who’s counting?
This means many things for education in this state, and for teachers specifically, it means that they might not get a very necessary cost-of-living raise. Sure, they promise, but I’ll believe it when I see it in my actual teacherly hand. In the meantime, various and sundry people in our state have been hitting the blogs on the local paper (or simply venting their spleen on the editorial page) about those useless leeches on the public tit: school teachers.
Teachers, they argue, have it easy. They work for only nine months a year from approximately 7:00 until two-ish, and even so, the educational performance of their students is so poor that a whopping majority of students in our district failed a standardized math test. By “whopping majority,” I mean over 88% failed the geometry test and 90% failed the Algebra 1 test.
Now, we’ll disregard for a moment the fact that math teachers have a fairly strict state-designed timeline of what-to-teach-when, and let’s disregard also that the test (given in first semester) addressed concepts that weren’t supposed to be taught until second semester. Naaah, it’s all the teachers’ fault. Teachers are lousy and we should get rid of them. Fire them all.
I say we should take the naysayers at their word. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the first thing we do, let’s get rid of all the teachers. Right now, our state spends over three billion dollars on education, of which teachers’ salaries are surely a decent chunk, all of which (obviously) could be saved if we fire all the teachers.
One of the first effects of this decision would be that parents would finally get to take full charge of their students’ education, something that not all, but too many of them, complain about bitterly. For instance, I recently received a letter from a student’s parent that stated something to the effect that I had taught Parent’s Child far more than any other English teacher had, and that Parent’s Child had learned more from me than s/he ever had before. That utterly irrelevant consideration aside, though, the parent felt I was “unfair.” Mind you, it’s tough to bring this accusation against someone who insists that students submit all essays and major work under pseudonyms, so I have no idea who my students are when I grade their papers. For all I know, the person who signs themselves, “Pimp My Essay” (actual student pseudonym) could be that softspoken girl in the back row. Still, I’m unfair.
Firing teachers would solve so many problems. No more problems with kids being given too much homework, no more problems with kids being taught evolution, no more problems with “unfairness” in general. Too many parents seem to believe that teachers’ only function is to pass their students along with A’s and B’s, so firing all the teachers would ensure that parents could be able to do exactly that. Of course, they’d now have to be in charge of teaching everything from phonics to physics, but that’s okay. Physics isn’t rocket science, after all — oh, whoops, I guess it is — but I say without irony that homeschooling parents everywhere do exactly this all the time and know exactly how easy it is.
Or how hard.
Of course, this basically means that parents would have to find some way to take care of their children during the five days per week they were formerly in school, but since teachers are basically the paid babysitters of the state, according to some critics, then their essential function should be easily dealt with by actually getting a babysitter. Why rely on the “nanny state” when you can have a real nanny? Okay, it can get a little pricey — Kindercare, according to this document, costs $154.00/week for a child to attend from 7:45-3:30, which adds up quickly to about $5,544 for a 36-week school year, but who’s counting?
For those students — sorry, underage citizens — who are basically too old for babysitting, why not reinstitute a policy that many of these critics miss from the good ol’ days of their youth: bound apprenticeships? You know, where at about age 12 or so, they’re farmed out to a master tradesman for a period of time (usually six years) to learn a trade? The tradesman gets free labor; the kid gets free job training. It’s a win-win situation, far as I can see. It worked for our founding fathers, right? (Well, okay, it didn’t work for Ben Franklin, who thought his apprenticeship under his brother basically sucked, so he ran away to Philly, but who’s counting?)
Seriously, when people find your job irrelevant, disregard the time or effort you put into it, don’t believe it’s particularly necessary to pay you in accordance with your education, your ability, or your results (or all three), then the answer is clearly to give them what they say they want.
Someone on a message board I frequent brought up a fascinating issue. Like me, “Poster With Headscarf” (not her real pseudonym) is one of those parents who is rigorous about sheltering her kids from the media, including Disney — even the Disney she calls “happy Disney,” i.e., Robin Hood or The Aristocats. I’m even worse, really, because I’m one of those suuuupah-evil parents who even banishes Disney.
Anyway, PWH brought up the fact that as a child, her movie viewing was really not restricted in any way — her brothers had a Betamax and basically watched everything: The Wall, A Clockwork Orange, you name it. “How were you,” she asked, “NOT sheltered from the media when you were a kid?”
Interesting question.
My mom claims that during our childhood, my sibling and I never watched anything but PBS, and this is partially true if by “childhood” you mean “only the first six years of one’s life.” For those first six years, I was pretty much convinced, having had no evidence to the contrary, that there was only channel 6 (the PBS channel) and there were only two types of programs: ones I liked (Electric Company, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street) and ones that were so criminally boring they made your teeth fall out (The McNeil-Lehrer Report; Lilias, Yoga, and You). Faced with the grim prospect of an adulthood in which Mr. Rogers would no longer have any appeal, an adulthood caught between the U.S. economy and Downward Facing Dog (whoops– same thing!), I wasn’t that interested in TV.
Then I discovered that the knob on the face of the TV — the one with the OTHER numbers besides 6 — might have some significance.
Enter I Dream of Jeannie. I happened upon it right when the opening credits were rolling: that ill-drawn cartoon of a spaceship landing on a beach, a genie bottle opening, and a line-drawn version of a still-unnaveled Barbara Eden slithering out to boogie on the sand and be subservient to Master Tony.
After Jeannie came Gilligan’s Island, and after Gilligan’s Island, there was all sorts of other crapola: Underdog, for one, and a show whose title I can’t recall about a woman who was basically a superhero embodiment of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Really, you think the makers of that show smoked enough weed? I do, but they pale in comparison to Sid and Marty Krofft, the perpetuators of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters and H.R. Pufnstuf. Get it? PUFF and STUFF? And the lead dude’s shaped like a giant mushroom? GET IT?
Yeah, thanks.
Well, needless to say, that TV exposure amounted to hoursandhoursandhoursandhours of time. Probably years, when you add it all up…years in which I could actually have been, you know, doing something.
Then, of course, came the Annus Mirabilis: the invention of cable television. Basically, there were three cable channels, HBO, Showtime, and The Movie Channel. At last, free movies! Wheee! Of course, what I didn’t realize was that the movies would include these gems:
Porky’s
Porky’s II
Beastmaster
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle
My French Teacher –Really, the Citizen Kane of statutory rape movies
Some lame movie about Armand Assante seducing a young and callow Tatum O’Neal
Some lame movie about Richard Burton seducing a young and callow Tatum O’Neal
Some lame movie about Jacqueline Bisset seducing a young and callow Andrew McCarthy
And of course, it being cable, they aired these movies FIFTY THOUSAND TIMES.
On the literature front, I really did no better; in fact, I did far worse. My mom had a theory that any book was fair game. If it dealt with subject matter that didn’t really apply to me as a child (i.e., The Joy of Gay Sex, I suppose? or was she thinking about The Gulag Archipelago?), her theory was that I would put it down and not be interested.
Wrong.
What this meant was that I read even worse garbage than I watched, including prostitute Xaviera Hollander’s dubious autobiography, the entire oeuvre of Judy Blume, including (of course) Forever — a book that prompted any kid named “Ralph” to suffer the shame of sharing a name with a teenager’s penis — and the utterly cloying Wifey. From there, I progressed (or degressed?) down to Jacqueline Susann.
Oy.
So my question is this: What’s your personal list? What did you watch or read as a child that you would NEVER, as in NEV. AH. let your child read or watch?
Despite mymonastic moniker, we’re not homeschooling for religious reasons as much as intellectual ones. In what’s probably an enormous act of hubris, we sincerely believed (and still believe) that we can do a better job instructing our child than Local Neighborhood School can. Part of the reason we think we can do this better job is pretty simple: we have a better reading list.
The blog Flesh and Spirit recently referenced a compelling article about Harry Potter. The author considers the accusation, often leveled against the Harry Potter books, that they are “dangerous,”
particularly to Christians or those who have a problem with magic.
Ultimately, the author concludes, the Harry Potter books are dangerous — just as any literature is “dangerous”:
To a child who is not well-read, Harry Potter is dangerous—and so is any other book he or she may read. But the best defense against one idea is not fewer ideas, but more of them; and the best defense against one book is a whole host of them. Being widely read, in other words, is the best inoculation against the dangers of literature. Being widely read enables a person to not only see an idea, but, as Chesterton put it, to see through it.
Owing a big debt to Alexander Pope – as he’d probably acknowledge — the author concludes that “literature is dangerous—except when taken in large doses.”
A little learning, Pope advised, is a dangerous thing. Drink from the spring of wisdom, and you risk mental intoxication. The only cure? To drink deeply.
Too often, I think the texts that kids are presented, especially in school, are the equivalent of fast food given to starving people, but it’s given on the basis that any kind of “food” must be good. For instance, on the reading list for the students at one high school I’m familiar with is Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Okay, I like myself a good airport novel as much as the next guy, and Jurassic Park is a great mind-distractor when the flight attendant is counseling you about the proper function of the overhead bins, but as literature, it stinks for much of the same reasons as Twilight stinks: the characterization is thin as tissue paper, the plot is pretty darn predictable (once the dinosaurs get loose), and the writing is just above serviceable. At least J.K. Rowling, whose writing is only serviceable as well, enjoys the pun-fun play of language in her humorously Dickensian names — I’m still in love with the name “Dolores Umbridge,” a character who reminds me painfully and accurately of many school administrators and counselors I’ve worked with.
Crichton never even gets that far.
Would someone tell me why this book is included on a high school curriculum? If it’s because of the notion that this book raises ethical questions of tampering with nature, why not Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? I’m not even a science person, but even I can tell that the “science” in Jurassic Park is merely an overlay of a Cliffs Notes-level version of chaos theory.
This is one of the reasons we homeschool: because the spring of wisdom presented in many of the schools in our area, even the good ones, ain’t nearly deep enough. It’s not that reading garbage literature will hurt you — that is, unless garbage is the main source of your intellectual meal. To that end, I’d like to provide an excellent resource: John Senior’s list of the 1000 good books you should read before you try the 100 great ones. The book The Well-Trained Mind is an other outstanding place to go for an excellent list as well, or any college such as St. John’s which has a largely classical or Great Books curriculum.
For those of you who aren’t regularly around teenagers, you might have seen this book cover on your way through Borders or Barnes and Noble:
Twilight is a publishing phenomenon, to say the least — it’s sold something over 3.5 million copies, even muscling out Harry Potter on some lists, if memory serves, and is responsible for (among other things) one of my first-period students writing “I Heart Edward Cullen” all over her notebook.
The first thirty pages of the novel had me somewhat intrigued: a young teenage girl from Phoenix moves to rainy Forks, Washington to be with her estranged father. There, she starts high school and immediately encounters a brooding, mysterious group of students whose strangeness seems to have the air of another world, or at least an older time. In that respect, it initially reminded me of the relationship between the outsider Richard and the élite Greek scholars of Donna Tartt’s obsessive and weirdly fascinating novel The Secret History .
Suffice it to say that the bloom started to come off the rose fairly swiftly after about page 30, and there were more than four hundred pages to go. Let’s start with the main character, shall we?
I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t remember the heroine’s name even though I was well into the book and I had to check back a few pages to see whom I was reading about. The name, by the way, is Isabella Swan, a moniker that seemed more suited to a trashy Bertrice Small-type romance than a young adult novel, but I was willing to go along with the ride — hey, I’ve enjoyed novels with protagonists named Amber St. Claire– but to my annoyance, the heroine seemed to be barely more than a blank page. As some reviewers for Amazon noticed, this character vacancy is probably a chief reason for the novel’s popularity, for how better to project one’s own fantasies than onto a blank screen? What passes for characterization is Meyer’s description of Bella as one of those faux-naive types existing nowhere except in trashy romances — the type who seemingly has no idea she’s attractive even though she could walk on a carpet of dropped male tongues on her way to biology class. Instantly upon her arrival in not-so-sunny Forks, she’s surrounded by a circle of cutouts from Central Casting: the goofy, chatty girlfriend, the nice-but-a-loser would-be suitor, the clueless dad who seems like a cross between Sheriff Andy Taylor and Gomer Pyle, and (of course) the mysterious Edward.
The mysterious Edward’s mystery is that he’s a vampire. Oh, and he’s gorgeous. His amber eyes occasionally glare, occasionally gleam, and are occasionally onyx. He’s a genius and does everything with precision and perfection. He is far more sophisticated and street-smart than the heroine, and makes his knowledge known in a world-weary tone that does great credit to the writers of the Cliffs Notes for The Picture of Dorian Gray. He’s gorgeous, and he drives a Volvo, and his house contains a lovely collection of antiques, including his family members. Oh, and in case you forgot, he’s gorgeous.
Meyer bends over backward – really, the woman does a whole Pilates class – to sidestep what we can call Vampire Ethics 101. As other readers such as Amazon’s Gaimangirl have observed, Mayer eschews ethical complexity throughout. For all of the strained and cringeworthy moments in Interview With the Vampire or its sequelae (a vampire in a rock band? Ow…), at least Anne Rice spent thought and time presenting a diverse array of approaches to the moral conundrum of being a vampire, whether it was the rich joy of human predation practiced by the decadent Lestat or the torturous, Catholic self-hatred of Louis in that same novel. Compared to Stephanie Meyer, Anne Rice looks like Kierkegaard. Meyer’s approach is to present the issue perfunctorily and deal with it in a joke: Edward and his vampire family are, he laughs, “vegetarians,” which means they prey only on animals. Oh, and since they don’t use weapons to hunt those animals, they’re not even violating hunting statutes.
What I can’t accept is that a vampire has any kind of interest in going to high school. Really, isn’t that one of the first things that every teenager would do if they were a vampire? Is she serious? Like, “I’m undead and have eternal life, but I don’t want to settle for a GED”?
What I also can’t accept is that the author did NOTHING with this premise. I can only imagine what the authors of the ironically self-mocking show Supernaturalwould’ve done with the idea of a high school vampire in an AP U.S. History class:
Vampire Student: “Well, actually, Mr. Smith, there was a lot of uncertainty in the U.S. in 1945 about whether hitting Hiroshima with the atom bomb was the right course of action…”
AP Teacher: “And you know this how, Mr. Cullen?”
Vampire Student: “Uh…call me a living history fan.”
Mayer never really explores the logic of her own premise, that this family of vampires has settled in on the rainy Olympic Peninsula to live in a town of three thousand people. Even the inhabitants of a hypothetical small town populated only by incredible idiots, all of whom were eternally distracted by a supply of free cable TV showing nothing but porn and Hannah Montana, would tend to notice little things like the fact that one’s kids never really grow up and just keep going to high school, or that that nice Dr. Cullen got his medical degree from Cambridge… in the 1600s.
At the risk of being dogpiled by an angry, torch-carrying mob of Meyer fans, if Twilight were just this bad, it could be laughed off as the silly, ill-written trash it is.
Regrettably, it’s more than a novel: it’s a teenage phenomenon, but too many teenage readers tend to regard the novel with what can kindly be called an utter lack of critical distance. One Amazon reviewer, “Sara Nightingale,” hotly rebutted an accusation that Bella’s actions were “stupid” by saying, “Bella isn’t stupid; she just doesn’t always think things through and tends to follow her instincts.”
Um, Sara…isn’t that what stupid means?
The lack of critical distance is more than laughable, though. When this relationship between Bella and Edward becomes regarded as the perfect romance — and it has; there are Vampire Romance Clubs apparently forming in honor of this book – it starts to become dangerous.
Let’s never lose sight of something really crucial, folks: Edward is gorgeous, Edward is sexy, Edward has amber-or-is-it-onyx eyes, and Edward has skin that sparkles like he’s covered with cheap glitter lotion if you put him in the sunlight.
But more important than all things, Edward is a killer.
Whether he’s a killer of animals or a killer of human beings, he’s a predator, and in that sense, Edward Cullen is not fundamentally different from the serial killer narrator of Darkly Dreaming Dexter or that other sexy beast, Ted Bundy.
Edward feels a constant, physical lust to take Bella’s life, to make that red blood flow, and much of the tension in the novel comes from his resisting his desire to rip her throat out. They cuddle together (chastely, for Mayer is a good Mormon gal), in a scene that has Bella literally courting death as she initiates a kiss.
Over and over, in ways both literal and figurative, Bella places herself into danger so that Edward can save her, even (in a later novel) cliff-diving into rushing waters that drag her to near-death so that the experience will allow her to”hear” Edward’s voice in her head. Bottom line, Bella feels cannot live without Edward, so she wants to die in order to be with him forever.
Already a blank page, Bella experiences a masochistic desire for self-erasure which is deeply disturbing, the more so because Mayer accepts this death-drive at face value and presents it uncritically…even romantically. Unable to have sex with Edward as a mortal, the only way Bella can truly experience intimacy with him is through her own death, through the erasure of her mortal self and the assumption of his own (and vastly superior) identity. Meyer never questions this potentially painful issue to any length, never asking herself (or having Bella ask herself) what that would really mean, to give up her home, her father and her mother, her friends in Forks or Phoenix, or the pains and benefits of assuming an adult identity, being pregnant, giving birth, and watching one’s children grow up. Were this presented honestly or literally as a case of a teenager who’s attracted to a violent stalker and wants to become one of his victims, or were Bella a woman from a different race who wanted to give up her essential self in order to assume a white identity (very white, in this case), many people would justly be outraged. Peel off the vampire overlay, and what you have is misogyny.
That’s bad enough. The fact that Bella, with no ethical qualms whatsoever, wants to be a vampire herself is worse. Bella herself wants to be a killer. (This is fairly ridiculous, since the heroine literally faints at the sight of blood in biology class. Apparently, she’d wind up being the Karen Carpenter of the vampire world.) One fundamental difference, though, between Bella and a serial killer like Bundy or Dahmer or a fictional one like Dexter, is that serial killers are largely born that way. Bella, though, has a choice.
Well, for any of you would-be elementary teachers out there, there should be a new position opening soon at Port St. Lucie’s Morningside Elementary School. VERY soon. In case you want to inquire about the position, their number (listed on the Internet) is 772-337-6730.
According to astory that broke May 23, elementary school teacher Wendy Portillo took a somewhat unusual approach to dealing with Alex Barton, a student in her kindergarten class who, due to what is most likely a case of Asperger’s Syndrome, has proven somewhat difficult to manage during the year.
She had him voted off the island.
According to the news reports, Wendy Portillorequired five-year-old Alex Barton to stand in front of the class and encouraged each one of the other kindergarten students to say exactly what they thought of him. Among other things, his classmates told Alex that they thought he was “disgusting” and “annoying,” and voted, by a 14-to-2 margin to have him removed from the class.
Think for a moment about what this must feel like.
The worst part — by far the worst — is that this emotional savaging (can we call it anything else?) was orchestrated, encouraged, and in fact dreamed up by the person in the class who is supposed to have the greatest responsibility and wisdom, and whose betrayal, therefore, was by far the worst: Wendy Portillo. It’s one thing when a group of children savages another child on the playground; it’s another thing altogether when an adult is giving her sanction and blessing to it.
Everyone out there who’s been a teacher has had students who were disciplinary nightmares, whose management basically took up the entire class and prevented there from being any teaching whatsoever. That’s why many states have some kind of “escape hatch” clause in their school’s discipline plans that essentially says, “Okay, we’ve tried everything; now we have to remove this one kid for the sake of the other twenty-nine.” That’s fair and reasonable, provided that the teacher really has worked through the hierarchy of steps, from consulting with the student to having a sit-down with the parent, principal, and counselor.
But this is far different.
I don’t just feel sorry for this child, although I do. I also regret to say that I believe this incident has the power to shape the minds and morals of the other children who were invited, with this adult’s sanction, to deride and ostracize a little boy. They learned that if an authority invites you to do so, it is legitimate and licit to call someone “disgusting” or “annoying” to their face without, I presume, any fear of physical or verbal reprisal. They learned that it is permissible and right to vilify someone whose mental condition makes them different. They learned that if an authority figure says it’s okay, it must be okay.
You know whom I applaud? The two kids who voted against the other fourteen.
That took balls. Or ovaries, take your pick. Hard enough as it is to oppose your peers, it’s nearly impossible when you’re FIVE. It’s harder still to oppose a teacher whose idea of justice begins and ends with the kangaroo court. To do so requires moral integrity, more moral integrity than was present in the rest of that classroom. Those parents should be proud.
Sorry I haven’t been posting for awhile — family issues, basically.
Anyhow, I thought this week I’d return to a favorite topic for homeschoolers, specifically the S word: socialization.
See, like every other homeschooler on the face of the planet, I’ve been asked the “What about socialization?” question, but (possibly) unlike every other homeschooler on the planet — or other school-ers, for that matter — I’ve never really been clear on the concept of what other people mean by “socialization.”
I’ve also never been clear on the concept of why people think school is the only place to acquire it, either.
I guess they think so because of John Dewey, the philosophic founder of the modern school, whose ideas changed school from a place where knowledge was acquired to a place where socialization occurred. In his definition of his educational philosophy, Dewey stated,
“The school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”
Okay, I’m not a genius here, but am I the only one who doesn’t know what Dewey really means here? I rail at my students about being clear, using few abstract nouns where concrete nouns would do, avoiding anything that smacks of jargon or essayspeak, and I think that’s trained me to turn off my brain and say, “Blahblahblah…” when I run into prose like that, or like Dewey’s. I didn’t know, for instance, that education was a social process. I thought it was the act of imparting knowledge. And how can something be a “process of living,” but not a “preparation for future living”? Like, it’s only good for right now, not next week?
I don’t get it.
Anyway, I’m calling out to ma homies across the Interwebz here to help out here. What is YOUR definition of “socialization”? What do you think people really mean when they use this word?
Did you ever read one of those news stories about, say, nineteen-year-old college professorsand wonder to yourself (among other things), How did her parents manage to find a program willing to accommodate her?
Or how about, How did her parents ever manage not to get treated like they were a pair of wackadoos?
Professor Sabur got her undergrad in applied mathematics at fourteen and then went on to receive her M.S. and Ph.D. in materials science. Clearly, she’s a brilliant woman whose prodigious intelligence includes having learned to read at eight months old.
In sharp contrast to “McKenna,” a commenter onParent Dish who said, “I imagine she never competed in any team sports, or made it to her senior prom…” Color me silly, but I imagine that she doesn’t really give a rat’s butt about any of the above, nor should she. People who are interested in developing nanophotonics generally find that field of interest slightly more relevant than, “OMG, do you think he’s going to ASK ME TO THE PROM? OMG! GTG - POS!!”
What I’d like to know, though, is exactly how the conversation between her parents and the school went down. Seriously, what happened? She was in fourth grade and basically skipped right to college. Did her parents call up Stony Brook University and say, “Hi…um…We’re not sure whom we talk to about this, but our daughter would like to go to your university. Is it a problem if she eats in the Student Union, or can she still bring her Hannah Montana lunch box?”
Even if the conversation went something like, “Hi, our daughter can do differential calculus; do you mind if she enrolls?” I’d still like to know the answers to my two questions: How did she find a program to accommodate her, and how did her parents not get treated like a pair of wackadoos?
I’d also love to know what her parents did about English.
See, I have this theory that parents of mathematically gifted children have it fairly easy because of two main reasons: Math tends to be sequential and math has no sex scenes. If your child is one of those OTHER kinds, though, you’re kind’ve screwed.
I know this comes as an utter shock to everyone, but giftedness in language and written expression isn’t precisely sequential. Yeah, yeah, I know we generally read Henry and Mudge in Puddle Troublebefore Titus Andronicus, but it’s not like you can say, “Oh, well, you really can’t understand 1984without having read The Giver and Anthem.” That might seem as if it allows for a great deal of flexibility, but in real life, this means that the parents of verbally gifted kids are going to hear the following explanation at least one time: “I know that she’s read Romeo and Julietbefore, and all the short stories and poems on our syllabus, but I’m sure she’ll learn something new in the class.”
Yeah. Like how to be bored as hell.
The other problem that plagues parents of kids gifted in language as opposed to math is that math has no sex scenes. Believe me, if math had had sex scenes, I know I might have done much better with it in high school. Instead, the dirtiest thing I encountered was the word “acute,” as in “That’s an acute angle…no, once the beer goggles are off, that angle’s actually kind’ve fugly.”
But seriously, what do you do with a kid who’s in (let’s say) fourth grade, as Professor Sabur was when she went to college? What if the kid is, as are most humans on the planet, not ready for college at age eight or nine, but is certainly more than capable of reading and analyzing literature at the level of an advanced high school student? What do you do? Plunk them in front of a copy of The Lord of the Flies so he can read that killing-the-sow scene with its yummy overtones of anal gang rape?
Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgement for his point and began to push until he was leaning forward with all his weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch…Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. They lay heavy and fulfilled upon her….The boys drew back, and Jack stood up, looking at his hands….Roger began to withdraw his spear and the boys noticed it for the first time. Robert stabilized the thing in a phrase which was received uproariously: “Right up her ass!” \
And seriously, where do you get high school credit when you’re still measuring your age in single digits? Most colleges and universities tend to like things like “proof you can do the material,” so again, I’d love to know just how this goes down. Do they just skip getting class credits and take the AP exam?
Yet more proof that mediocrity gets a LOOOOOOT of airtime in this country. In this clip from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, the former American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler struggles with the question, “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
Among other gems…
Pickler admits that she thought Europe WAS a country, and
She’s not sure if France is a country.
Jeff Foxworthy has to struggle to keep her focused and on task.
I’m going to come out and say what someone should’ve come right out and admitted a long time ago: Lots of teachers just plain hate gifted kids.
I’ve been reading The Fountainheadlately. Lest anyone think this is the moment when I whip off all disguises and reveal myself as Adso the Objectivist, Closet Alan Greenspan Fan, this is not it. I’m not an Objectivist nor a passionate Rand acolyte: I disagree with significant elements of her economic and political philosophy and found myself shaking my head more than once at what I considered to be less-than-probable character motivations or situations in the novel. That said, though, Rand was, by all accounts (even the hostile ones), a clearly gifted, clearly brilliant thinker, and she has a brilliant person’s intolerance — contempt, really — for mediocrity and incompetence that speaks profoundly to the condition of anyone who’s ever been a gifted student in a public school.
What Rand understands better than any other author I’ve ever seen is the concept of the meme: the notion that an idea, a thought, a way of looking at events or thinking about them can be spread almost like a virus. One person expresses an idea and it catches on as that person says it to another person who says it to another person until finally the point of origin is lost and the meme starts being just one of those ideas that “everyone knows.” (Two brief examples: When did you first hear the phrase “bling bling” or “Rick roll’d”? When did those first slide into your consciousness?)
Rand’s deep grasp of the idea of the meme is more astonishing when you think that the bulk of her writing took place well before television became a significant force in American culture or had more than three channels – and the mysterious tubes of the Internet, with its blogs and YouTube and “viral videos,” lay in the far-off, Jetsons-like future decades and decades away. Through the power of the meme, Rand understood, a way of conceiving reality could become reality: a meme could become “what everyone knows” or “what everyone says” or “what everyone believes.”
Whoever controls the meme, to paraphrase Orwell, controls the perception.
Rand’s archvillain, the improbably-named Ellsworth Toohey, reminds me a great deal of an adult version ofThe Family Guy’s evil infant genius Stewie, and very much like Stewie, Toohey is a seemingly-harmless manipulator with dark dreams of world domination. Unlike cruder fascists of his and Rand’s time, Toohey has no desire to use such blunt tools as force or war, particularly since he desires a greater power than physical control: he wants control of the mind. As a columnist for an influential USA Today-like newspaper chain, Toohey has a subtle understanding of the force of the media and its power to generate memes. Put your finger on the crucial lever of the meme, Toohey suggests, and you can run the entire machine with the subtlest touch.
As the novel progresses, it becomes horrifyingly clear that what Toohey wants is not to control what people think. After all, if you prohibit freedom of thought, as in Orwell’s 1984, people — even people who never particularly seemed to value freedom of thought before — tend to rebel despite the best efforts of the Thought Police. Toohey is more insidiously brilliant than that. Rather than control what people think, Toohey wants to prevent them from being capable of thinking at all.
To do that, Toohey argues, one must erase people’s capacity to make distinctions between good and evil, excellence and mediocrity. Lacking those crucial intellectual yardsticks, we can no longer distinguish the one from the other and the two become the same. To paraphrase Orwell again, freedom becomes slavery, war becomes peace…and ignorance becomes strength. Mediocrity, in Toohey’s plan, must be elevated to the level of excellence, a plan he foreshadows in a discussion with an utterly crappy playwright named Ike the Genius, the author of the monumental theatrical oeuvre No Skin Off Your Ass:
“Ibsen is good,” said Ike.
“Sure he’s good,” [Toohey replied], “but suppose I didn’t like him. Suppose I wanted to stop people from seeing his plays. It would do me no good whatever to tell them so. But if I sold them the idea that you’re just as great as Ibsen – pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…and then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter – neither the authors nor those for whom they wrote….There’s no room in the theater for both Ibsen and you. You do understand that, don’t you?” (472).
What does this have to do with gifted kids?
Easy.
I made the point before that public schools select the most mediocre (or worse-than-mediocre) students to be its teachers and professors of education. It’s not a real insight to observe that students who do not do especially well at school do not particularly like the students who do. The students who need the same concepts to be taught and retaught before they can be adequately mastered generally resent the ones who get it on the first or second try. The students who struggle to grasp an idea will resent being tutored by “the smart kid,” even if “the smart kid” approaches peer tutoring with patience and compassion – traits which people still measuring their ages in single digits do not often possess in great measure. Some students who have achieved success in school by dint of sheer hard work harbor genuine – and understandable – resentment of the ones who never study, who never have to study. Life – or at least school – seems to come so easily to them…almost as if they had been, well, gifted.
When those struggling students become teachers in their own right, guess what happens when some of them have a gifted student in their own classes?
Is it any wonder that the reaction of too many teachers to a gifted pupil is not joy that they have a brilliant pupil who grasps a concept the first time she hears it, but a sense of vicious satisfaction that at last, they get to put that smartass knowitall in her rightful place?
I would argue that, like most hatreds, this one also comes out of a sense of fear. Some teachers cannot tolerate the idea that they’re not the smartest person in the room…nor even the best-educated one. Teachers who majored in education instead of some version of Useful Content are particularly vulnerable to having their levels of education probed by the kind of gifted kid who’s been exposed to more mediocrity than is good for him or her. I have a student like that right now. Like a teenage version of Oscar Wilde (complete with raised eyebrow and utterly devastating power to use words as a weapon), he constantly tests me to probe what literature I’ve read, what philosophy or art I’m familiar with, shooting somewhat obscure cultural references over the net of conversation to test my intellectual backhand. I enjoy his presence thoroughly.
I have a feeling, though, that this opinion has not been universally shared by all of his teachers — and that, if pushed, he would easily unleash the mental hounds and expose a teacher who pissed him off as an intellectual fraud, kind’ve like this scene from Finding Forrester:
In real life, of course, kids usually get the verbal smackdown and stop there. They tune out, they act out, or they don’t come, just like Mr. W. mentioned in his comment from a few weeks ago:
I really don’t understand teachers that dislike the smart kids. One of my brightest and most interesting, although proportionately lazy, students from last year has an English teacher this year who can’t stand him, has declared him arrogant, and doesn’t think he should be in an honors class. The kid was challenged in English last year, and this year he’s disrespectful because he’s bored. I’m sad for him.
This backlash that takes place daily in classrooms around the country is the only theory I can offer for such intellectual blights as “multiple intelligence theory” or its prevalence in schools across the country. Under multiple intelligence theory, everyone is gifted in some way, whether that be by the traditional standards and measurements of giftedness, or for more (shall we say) esoteric forms of intelligence.
My second favorite “intelligence” of all is naturalistic intelligence, where you really groove with leaves and trees and name your first child Rain even if he’s a boy, but my all-time personal favorite must certainly be intrapersonal intelligence, the idea that one excels at knowledge of oneself. How that’s actually to be…you know, measured or compared in the manner of legitimate definitions of intelligence is really beyond me – really, what are you going to say? “I know myself better than YOU know YOURself”? Then again, I’m not very intelligent in that regard.
Multiple intelligence caught on in pretty much every classroom in America and became a staple of education college theory. Many, if not most teachers, are required or expected to include lessons tailored to the many different intelligences present in one’s classroom. For the kinesthetic intelligences, teachers could have students move around while learning; for visual learners, teachers could show a movie instead of having their kids read the book; for musical learners, teachers could have students do a rap song for their Romeo and Juliet unit instead of writing some boring old paper analyzing the author’s point. You get the picture.
Multiple intelligences goes beyond that, though. If its only power were to suggest that teachers break it up a little and find more than one way to communicate a concept, that would be a sound piece of commonsense advice for many teachers to take – not exactly a concept that’s world-shattering in its novelty, but good practice overall.
But no, there is more, much more that multiple intelligence theory actually does in a classroom.
Multiple intelligence has a lush and irresistible appeal to anyone who has ever felt that their own intelligence is somewhat mediocre. So muddled and murky is the understanding of “intelligence” in this theory that almost any talent, quality of personality, personal preference, or simply existence can be defined as a form of “intelligence.” When I was in the College of Education, we learned about this theory and again when I was getting my endorsement to teach gifted. The ed. professor passed out little self-quizzes so we could all find out what kinds of intelligence we all had. (According to those results, I myself am quite good at linguistic-verbal thinking, logical thinking, and despite my scorn for this form of “intelligence,” naturalistic thinking. This is because I can identify a maple tree and tell it is not a tamarisk.)
For some formerly mediocre students learning of this theory in education classes, the multiple intelligences self-quiz is a moment of joy, a time when they find out that yes, they really WERE gifted the whole time, because literally, under MI theory, everyone is gifted.
We’ve all heard that, haven’t we? It’s become common knowledge – it’s what everyone believes and knows to be true, even the experts in education. How many times have you heard PTA parents, school administrators, or yo momma saying, “All students are gifted,” or “I don’t really believe in giftedness because everyone has a gift”?
The last statement amuses the crap out of me: it’s like saying, “I don’t really believe in the color purple because everyone is purple.”
It’s the logic of the first statement that is truly dangerous. You see, if I assert, “All students are tall,” that basically erases the whole notion of “tall,” doesn’t it? What if I asserted that “All children are fat”? Presented with a child whose BMI was dangerously low, I could merely assert that all children are fat in their own way and this child was on the obesity spectrum regardless of the fact that I could sink my fingers between each of his ribs.
If all children are gifted, of course, then no one is. Not you, not me, not the kid who can do calculus at age 7. It’s “Harrison Bergeron ” all over again. It is Ike the Genius raised to the level of Ibsen until finally, no one can tell the difference between the two.
I posted last time about my theory about why gifted students hate school (short answer: scary teachers) and added, somewhat mysteriously, that I would write more about the issue.
Here it is, in brief: Gifted students hate school because school is a sucking quagmire of mediocrity.
Okay, I know this hardly qualifies as an original thought, but perhaps my personal experiences can enlighten the issue a little bit: the mediocrity begins in society, but it seems to be concentrated, like B.O. in a cabbie’s upholstery, in schools of education.
In society, for which schools are a major tool of “socialization” (a word every homeschooling parent rightly fears, particularly since California judge H. Walter Croskey recently admitted that a central reason all students should be sent to public school is to enforce their “loyalty to the state“), mediocrity has been a rising fashion trend for some time now. Certainly television has elevated mediocrity to the status of a spectator sport: on reality TV, quite literally, anyone can be a star. Long gone are the days of celebrity when maybe you needed some kind of….oh, you know, talent to be a star: beauty, singing ability, a lovely figure, a handsome face, the ability to dance, act, or tell a joke. Now, you just put yourself on YouTube and you’re an instant classic: you become the Leave Britney Alone guy or theTemper Tantrum About the Car girl, or (unwittingly and unwillingly) the Star Wars kid. The line between talent and talentlessness has become so muddled and obscure that it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. Mediocrity rules.
The problem with gifted students is that basically by definition, they’re not mediocre.
The problem with schools is that basically by definition, they are.
Schools of education have taken the job of apotheosizing mediocrity - enshrining it, insisting on it, working dutifully to ensure that mediocrity defines the system from A to Z starting with the very people who populate those schools: ironically, the very worst students in the system. The influential 1983 report A Nation at Risk, whose findings have not substantially changed since its publication, found that too many teachers are “drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.” Those same students become teachers, so rather than your kids or my kids being taught by the best and brightest (or at least the solidly competent), they’re being taught in too many cases by people who essentially weren’t very good at school.
What’s worse, many of those students of education become professors of education: a case of the blind leading the blind. Acknowledging some of these problems, the University of Chicago, one of the most academically demanding universities in the country, utterly eliminated its own college of education some time ago, saying, “Our primary criterion in making this recommendation was academic excellence. If the department had been excellent, but costly, I certainly would not have recommended closing the department.” But it wasn’t. So they did.
Obviously - or maybe not so obviously - not every teacher is mediocre. Lest I be misunderstood here, I’ve been proud to know a great number of excellent, inspiring, and professional teachers whose energy and ability to turn on those mental lights made a profound difference for me.
However, let me hasten to say this: they were the exceptions to the rule.
When I was going to the College of Education at Unimpressive Local University, I was surrounded by students and professors who were a great deal like my observer Pat. These people weren’t evil, weren’t scheming, weren’t “bad” in any moral or ethical sense. Most of them were in education because they “loved kids,” which isn’t necessarily a good enough reason to think they could teach them, but on the whole, loving kids is a good quality for a teacher to possess. Many were in education because something else - their go-nowhere day job, their marriage, their ambitions to become a lawyer - hadn’t panned out. Quite a few were in education because they thought it would be easy: job security with summers off.
One thing you need to understand, though: Not knowing the Nation at Risk data at the time, I naturally thought that people who wanted to be teachers were probably people who had excelled in school.
At first, I couldn’t figure out why being at the College of Education felt so different from my experience earning my M.A. in Useful Content, but I kept flashing on a few key elements such as…
… the girl who pronounced the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida’s last name as if it were a snack chip. When she made fun of Derrida’s theories - or what she said were Derrida’s theories; they didn’t resemble my understanding of Derrida - no one corrected her.
… the teacher who looked and sounded like a clone of Tipper Gore who taught Methods of Teaching Literature (a multiply oxymoronic course title, as it turns out). Actually, Professor Tipper didn’t actually teach “methodS,” but more like “method,” period.
The method in question was reader-response, which consists of a student reading a text and saying what they found (in Professor Tipper’s words) to be “imPORdunt” about it and how it made them “FEEyul.”You weren’t supposed to mention what the author’s point was or how she used the tools of language or argumentation to communicate it, as I found out. The dance of the author’s language, the stretch and press of her attempt to put into words an elusive emotional state or vast, unspoken realization wasn’t important — sorry, imPORdunt — and what she was trying to reveal to the world about the world’s condition wasn’t of interest either; what mattered is how you felt about it.
The first time I tried to respond to what was impordunt, I mentioned the one element I had enjoyed in the poem she’d given us: that there was a (possible?) allusion to a line in the book of Genesis about “dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.” Yeah, I know it was a stretch: I based that idea on the fact that there was the word “dust” in the poem and someone died at the end. Eh. Oh, well.
“How did it mayke yew FEEyul?” Professor Tipper smiled. She was one of those people whose teeth are too white. “What you said is very innerestin, but the imPORdunt thing is how it made you FEEyul.”
How did it make me feeyul? A little bored. Somewhat nauseated.
This method of teaching, I thought, would basically turn the students into little one-celled paramecia: creatures not capable of any real insight into the author’s point they’d found there in the words and used their brains to bring forth, but creatures only capable of the bluntest responses to the bluntest of stimuli. Reader-response wouldn’t teach students about anyone else’s conceptions of the world, only about how others’ words existed to stimulate their own self-referential feelings - whatever those feelings were and whether or not they had anything to do with the author’s meaning or point. An endless reinforcement of a tautologically narcissistic worldview, this method would give those students nothing beyond themselves and hardly even that.
“It’s kind of hard to express,” I lied.
“Weyul, just tell us.”
“Really? You really want to know?” I asked somewhat skeptically.
Professor Tipper nodded brightly.
“Maybe you should call on someone else.”
She declined.
“Okay…I feel…that this is an emotionally exploitative work whose main purpose is to make the readers regret teen suicide, but, well…it’s about as honest and truthful as a Very Special Lifetime Channel program with lots of hugging and learning.”
Professor Tipper’s smile vanished. “Um,” she said, turning away from me. “Verry innerestin. Anyone else?”
I soon found out that very little was demanded of me academically in the College of Education. In place of the long analytical papers I’d written for my Useful Content degree — papers where I’d been required to micro-analyze data and lengthily explain in what way that data applied to my thesis (and find out again and again where I’d basically failed to do that and needed to work harder), I was essentially asked to do little more than make the occasional silly presentation or contribute to some nebulous “group project” in which any of the work or thought I’d done was subsumed in the mediocre whole.
Now, maybe the stuff I would’ve done otherwise would’ve been lousy on its own - but if this makes any sense, at least it would’ve been my lousy work. I might have learned from my lousiness that way. In the College of Education, even though I’d come there to learn, I learned very little, and what I did learn, I learned from competent experts - in short, people who were not professors of education, but who were actual classroom teachers like Barb. If it hadn’t been for Barb, I would quite literally have had not the first clue what to do on the first day of school — or the other 179 that came after it. I
When I went back for my endorsement in gifted education, I was less surprised but no less dismayed to find that education classes really hadn’t changed. I already knew a decent amount about giftedness from reading articles on Hoagies and Davidson Institute of Talent Development’s website, or reading books like Deborah Ruf’s Levels of Giftedness or certainly the Templeton Report. However, very little was taught to me in the gifted education classes - and I don’t mean, “I already knew a bunch of stuff that they were teaching” but more, “They didn’t teach very much content.”One class was entirely devoted to how to use PowerPoint. I don’t mean one class period; I mean an entire class. Hey, I admit I had no clue how to use PowerPoint and actually did learn, but I ended up devoting far more hours to my projects than they deserved - dedication that earned me the title of classroom PowerPoint God, an honor that was bestowed on me unfairly, mostly because PowerPoint acted on me as heroin does to an addict: with my sad, sick, and completely anal-retentive fixation on trivial details, I could not leave these stupid projects alone until they were absolutely perfect.
Irony time: to the best of my knowledge, I will never actually use this technology in the classroom.
The sad thing was that I really wanted to write a paper on profound giftedness and explore the topic as I had explored the texts I’d read as a graduate student in Useful Content: I wanted that sense of mental dig, of grappling with the logic of my argument and finding sources to support it, but I was told to do a PowerPoint, and that pretty much limits what you can say to a few words on a handful of slides. I should add that even though I’ve now taken seven classes in gifted education, I really don’t know much more than I did after reading the Gifted 101 articles on Hoagies — and I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do in a gifted classroom.
In short, there is a relentless tide of mediocrity in schools of education, one that’s nearly impossible to swim through because only your personal ethic, your sense of wanting to do an outstanding job on whatever meaningless, useless, time-wasting group project you’ve been assigned stands between you and just doing whatEVurrr to get the meaningless grade you were going to get anyway. Going through education classes was like trying to sharpen a knife on a marshmallow - you meet with no substance, no real resistance.You learn to be mediocre. You learn that not to be mediocre — to strive for scholarship, to insist on a level of academic rigor — is either viewed as useless or pretentious, or it’s groupworked and PowerPointed out of existence. Mediocrity is the norm — and that creates an environment that is downright hostile to gifted students.
I’ll say this for the week and end here: Schools are not about achievement. I used to think that teachers would love gifted students, or at least tolerate them. Now I think that the system — and of course, some individual teachers themselves — actively hate them. But more later.
