More and more attention is being paid to the notion of writing in the 21rst century. This report just came out and it’s got some stuff that is well worth reading. However, the irony that I am posting this on a digital thread on a ning, well… in a way, if you are already reading this, it’s like preaching to the choir.

Having said that, there is no doubt that the world is changing under our pens and keypads. The idea that students in the next era will have to be competent writers using 3,000 words, 300 words, 30 words, 3 words and no words to express their ideas is somewhat of a leaping off point for comprehending both the opportunities and challenges of the era ahead.

Yet, while writing changes, shifts and morphs I am not fearful because the importance of critical thinking rises with these new mediums — instead of diminishing. In my estimation, thinking seems to be more important than ever as weighing, evaluating, synthesizing and applying brain power appears to be more important than ever to the writers and readers of the 21rst century. I mean so many folks are bemoaning the demise of newspapers but it’s not the black ink which smudges on our fingers in a semi-hard to navigate linear, non-interactive transmittal of information in an environmentally unsound paper-wasting business model that people are decrying… what they really fear is the art of real journalism is being supplanted by bloggers who have no training in the art of effectively verifying information. If newspapers die, I am not sure we care. If journalism dies then democracy is at risk. Now on one hand, the first hand twitterers and bloggers who are on the scene at things like the Mumbai bombing provide some of the most insightful information into what happened at the scene of the disaster — so the bloggers and twitterers certainly have their place. On the other hand, if people don’t pay for their news, then the NY TImes, Washington Post and so on, do not pay real journalists to go investigate, illuminate, and communicate the salient facts (i.e. the perpetrators, their motives, the impact on a geo-political scale and so on). Twittering an analysis of the international complications which arise from destabilizing governments through attacking civilians seems as if it might be a bit lightweight. (Huh? 140 characters isn’t enough space to get Kissinger-style insight into the circumstances? You are just so old fashioned, Mr. Alan!)

Now I am not so quick to defend traditional journalism because they let a buffoon like George Dubya pull the wool over our eyes with the whole WMD farce which really cost America… well, I am not going to go there. But traditional, mainstream media drank the kool-aid for the neo-cons who were hell bent on invading Iraq under a cooked up WMD scenario so all the things which I fear traditional journalism is supposed to defend us against and represent is on shaky ground with me. However, if world news devolves to the point that a 15 year with a blog is on equal footing with a pulitzer prize winning Chicago Tribune reporter in terms of disseminating our news, I do feel there is some cause for concern.

So what does 21rst century writing look like? That’s easy — it looks like a lot of things… and it’s evolving. But how do we effectively think about writing — both while we are doing it and when we are reading it? These, seem to me, the real questions.

The Book of Academic Life

Today’s reading is from the “Book of Academic Life,” chpt. 1, verses 1-15

In the beginning there was the Plan.
And with the plan there were the Assumptions.
And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the faculty.
And they spoke among themselves saying, “It is a crock of shit and it stinks.”
And the faculty went unto their Chairs and said, “It is a bucket of dung and we cannot live with the smell.”
And the Chairs went unto the Deans saying, “It is a container of organic waste, and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it.”
And the Associate Vice-Provosts spoke among themselves, saying, to one another, “It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong.”
And the Associate Vice-Provosts went to the Provost, saying, unto him, “It promotes growth, and it is very powerful.”
And the Provost went to the President, saying unto him, “This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of the university with very powerful effects.”
And the President looked upon the Plan and deemed that it was good.
And the us the Plan became Policy.
And this is how shit happens.

When you are a teacher, sometimes you get worn out.

I mean WORN OUT. It’s inevitable. That’s why I endorse caffeine. After all, when you teach teens, they have hormones, sugar and youth on their side. Caffeine is the great equalizer. It allows me to hit another gear when I ordinarily would not have another gear in me but oh-so-desperately need it.

You can take away my paper supply, you can take away my access to resources, you can take away the electricity, pencils and even my chair — I’ll be just fine. But take away my caffeine and the game is over.

So yesterday we had walk-throughs. Basically, under the punitive rule of NCLB being that we are a Probationary 3 (I think) school, we have muckety-mucks come in from the… well, I am not sure where this lady came from… to “evaluate” our classes.

So this lady walks into my room with her little checksheet and starts scrutinizing. She checks for things. Mysterious things. Things that are supposed to prove I am teaching and my students are learning.

Having the content standards written on the board seems to be quite important to her. I always have them up but the truth is, I only really do it for the muckety-mucks because in reality, I see virtually no educational value to posting these things on the board. Teaching them is very important. Writing them on the board is practically irrelevant. I mean, it is a reminder to myself of what I am supposed to be doing? That’s kinda like putting a post-it note on my bathroom mirror in the morning reminding myself to “BRUSH YOUR TEETH” isn’t it? And just because the post-it note exists, this doesn’t mean that I will have brushed my teeth. And if the post it note is not there it doesn’t mean I won’t have brushed them either. Writing things on the board such as this strikes me as superfluous… but when you are a muckety-muck with checksheets there are boxes to put X’s through and this seems to be one of the bigger ones.

And how in the heck would she know if I simply put some standards on the board when school started in September and just left the same ones there all year in case muckety-mucks like her popped in for a surprise visit?

Administrators hate those kinds of questions, don’t they?

Overall, I felt “judged” by this woman with all the negative connotation the word “judged” musters. I recall no positive acknowledgement of what I was doing right. (And she walked into a class of high school freshman who were all 100% silent at their desks composing a response to literature based on a novel we were reading — no small feat if you know what it’s like to teach English 9). I obtained no useful feedback as to how my craft could be improved. (But in full disclosure, I sincerely doubt that the input of a muckety-muck who spent a grand total of about 5 minutes in my room would have given her any credibility to comment on my methodologies). And truly, I questioned whether or not she could even step into a high school classroom and actually perform the job she had been assigned to evaluate. She just didn’t seem like she had the verve, the energy, the spirit nor the determination to actually be a real teacher.

But she’s perfectly qualified to evaluate other real teachers, right? Essentially, her short visit left me dispirited.

Then today came and my students rocked a few projects whereby the applied their knowledge of figurative language by creating digital slide shows with musical sound tracks explicating the difference between similes and metaphors through one of 5 themes evident in the novel Tears of a Tiger… and the world was right again.

I mean, I love teaching but the muckety-mucks are like some sort of wet blanket on my fire to do this job. It’s obvious that we, as a nation, don’t trust our professional educators anymore to be professional educators and the fact is, it’s demoralizing. I mean this muckety-muck could have said something positive. She could have tipped her cap to my work ethic, efforts to reach my kids, obvious demonstration of classroom management and on and on and on.

But what did she care about? Her checksheet. And what do I care about? My kids. And you know what, I don’t think they are the same thing.

So yes, I put the standards on the board to avoid confrontation because with so many battles to fight with the muckety-mucks, this seems like one that’s not really worth it. But teaching is not about the checksheets. It’s about the students and I’d venture to say that nowhere on her list were things like “students felt emotionally safe in the environment to express their genuine inner feelings and the educator’s policy of running a Mock Free Zone contributed to a tangible — if ineffable — sense of classroom community.”

Geesh? Why do paper pushers have so much clout?

Let me clear… I LOVE CLASSIC LITERATURE!! It’s why I became a writer and a teacher. Books have been nothing less than a spectacular and irreplaceably special part of my life. They’ve shaped my career choice, my social circles, my overall outlook on life and the manner in which I am raising my daughter. However, no one takes value from books they do not read — it’s that simple — and being that I teach in a school where we sport a near 50% drop-out rate, the ol’ “my way or the highway” methodology when it comes to text selection overwhelmingly results in kids saying, “Okay, I’ll take the highway.”

And it’s happening in Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, Tuscon and on and on and on…

Sure, kids are cutting off their noses to spite their collective face but on the other hand, thousands of them come into our nation’s classrooms every day with a salty, bitter taste when it comes to the thought of reading and if we, as educators, remain so immovable (as we overwhelmingly have in the past 20 years) when it comes to embracing the idea that a kid must first view a book as an object which potentially holds great pleasure and possibility for them, as opposed to only great shame and punishment, then we are complicit when it comes to the miseducation of America’s youth.

For the teachers who think they are defending the honor of the canon by remaining intractable when it comes to getting kids to first like books — something legions of kids today have never had anyone do for them — before they ask them to wrestle with deep, meaty texts, well… it’s a recipe for not only academic, but societal, disaster.

BTW, I am in no way, shape, or form alone in this quandary. As a matter of fact, I’d venture to say that there are SCORES of teachers across our nation who are facing the very same hurdles I am on a daily basis. They are asking themselves, “How do I take kids who overtly make no bones about the fact that they do not like to read and get them to first and foremost, engage openly and honestly with a book, start to finish, reading the whole darn thing.”

Just having kids complete a book — that’s right, just reading one whole book — is a success that a huge amount of middle and high school ELA teachers today across our country are not enjoying. Nathaniel Hawthorne is great but he’s not being gulped down under the covers and being read by flashlight long after mom said, “Go to bed,” and at my school, the English teachers routinely laugh at the idea that more people do not read The Scarlet Letter than do when it is assigned.

And what can they do, fail the kid? Well, get in line. Turns out that kid is already failing math, science, and history.

But there is another way. It’s called winning his heart. The YA books that are being trashed on this board for not being of “high enough literary merit” is how I do that.

I tell you this, hundreds of pages of adolescent literacy research clearly illuminates the immense benefits, if not outright, fundamental necessity for, engagement in the classroom. However, nowhere have I ever seen any research which supports the idea of dis-engagement as an instructional strategy. And when you are staring out at 37 teens armed with no prior history of almost any sort of positive interaction with books and all you are provided with is the canon, it’s a freakin’ tough road to hoe.

That’s why we build bridges using relevant, accessible, gripping, popular (goodness, did I just validate popularity — gawd, I must be a heretic!) YA novels.

And for those who disagree, all I can say is I hear that inner city Detroit has a few teaching positions open. Go bring your theories of high fallutin’ literature as a sole academic diet to where the rubber meets the road — particularly in urban America — and see how well you fare. Suddenly, Speak, The Outsiders, Monster, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid provide a whole new meaning to the term “being a text with literary merit”.

Gang bangers shot a student yesterday while he was walking through our school parking lot after classes had ended on my campus for the day. This is a teacher’s perspective, a point of view that comes from a person who had just left that very same parking lot not 5 minutes (literally) prior to the gunfire.

And as the cliché goes, we all know that bullets when they leave the barrel of a gun have no name.

I am sad but not dispirited. I am hurt but refuse to be jaded. I am concerned but not fearful because giving into my fears is the means by which everything I aspire to do with my life, career, work and goals will be undermined. If educators such as myself buckle and cave in to the terror an event like this most absolutely causes then every objective that I as an individual and we, as a society, purport to hold dear is at risk. I can’t give in to the fright because if I do, the “bad guys” most certainly win.

Now more than ever, we need the “good guys” like me. We need our teachers.

Yet, who are the bad guys anyway? Is it solely the 16 year old kid who pulled the trigger that is responsible for this heinous act? Most certainly yes! And no, too. I mean I work with teens for a living and if there is one thing which is absolutely certain it’s that behavior such as this does not happen in a vacuum. Without even knowing the perpetrator I can already tell you a few things about him.

He had a history of academic underperformance. There were clear patterns of truancy. He almost certainly has a prior juvenile record as a result of a few (more minor) scrapes with the law.

Oh yeah, our schools weren’t meeting his needs, too. That’s right, this kid is 100% to blame but it’s also “our” fault, as well. (And by “our fault” I do, indeed, mean yours and mine.)

Whereas this teen most certainly could have benefited from being exposed to an academic curriculum that clearly and emphatically illuminated the importance of non-violence and provided tools for conflict resolution that enabled a child like this to recognize that there are other ways to handle disagreements with fellow teens outside of “grabbin’ a gatt”, this teenager was instead exposed to things of such monumental worldly importance as comprehending the differnence between similes and metaphors. Instead of sitting this student down to help him shape a sense of self identity that included positive feelings, emotional empathy and high self-regard, we made sure to sit this student down and give him multiple standardized bubble tests year after year after year that primarily sought to measure his deficiencies instead of seeking to reward and validate his strengths. Instead of serving the needs of this child, we spent our time trying to shape this child in a way that served the needs of us.
And we failed. (Yet again.)

If being a teen is anything, it’s about searching for one’s own identity and the identity that this felon latched onto was one of being “hard”, being “down” and being “accepted”. Whereas most right-minded people view this teens actions as horrendous, despicable and punishable (as do I) what most people fail to recognize is that this teen views his actions as brave, heroic and noble, regardless of how bastardized his interpretation of these words are inside his own inner vocabulary. The child who pulled this trigger did so because his own sense of identity taught him that shooting 4 bullets into a crowd of people on the campus of a high school is the “right thing to do” and no matter how convoluted his logic, it’s his logic. Not mine. Not yours. Not most of ours. It’s his.

And it’s a logic that he learned.

It’s a logic that he was taught.

It’s a logic that blossomed in the absence of a proper teaching of logic (and by that I mean “moral” logic). Teens who do things like this – and there are literally hundreds of thousands of them across our country – do so because of what they have been taught to do. And by not taking the initiative to overtly teach teens between right and wrong in school what we do is leave a vacuum that obviously, nature abhors. (I am not even going to digress into the “It’s the parents’ job to do this argument. Okay it is. But they ain’t doing it, so now what? Allow this to continue on unabated. Gt real, people!)

Kids are very much like nice patches of rich land. We can plant metaphorical roses or lemon trees or chrysanthemums – whatever we want. However, if we choose not to plant anything (as we are doing by an outdated sense of what constitutes core curriculum in our schools these days) these rich fertile patches of “kid land” do not remain as such. Weeds grow.

And not that kinda weed.

Ask any gardener, the absence of tending to rich, fertile land means that, by definition, neglect will blossom and ultimately evolve into a destructive force that will inevitably consume the entire terrain.

Now, in no way am I ready to go all soft and cuddly on the kid who shot up my high school campus yesterday and say that what we need to do as a society is give this teen a warm hug. However, being that no one died in the shooting, what is most probably going to happen is that we are going to convict the kid and send him to jail where, for the sake of argument, I’ll approximate he’ll do 8 years behind bars. (There’s a HUGE chance he’ll do much less time but that’s a different matter.) And where does he end up after 8 years in jail?

Even more “hard”. Even more “tough”. Even more felonious.

This is why the helicopters really circled my school and the news media published all the Student Shot at Lynwood High School stories. It’s not just a tale about a monster, it’s a tale about a monster who is going to grow into an absolute sociopath and we, as citizens are almost entirely disempowered to do anything about it. All we can really do right now is sit back, watch our TV screens with panic in our hearts and lock our doors. The time to have been able to do something, to authentically intervene, has, for the most part, passed.

And that’s what is truly tragic.

But the media wins. I mean the news media is serving us a double dose of fear and the fact is, it’s bad for all of us, but we are mostly like cigarette addicts who know it’ll eventually kill us but for now, the taste of the tobacco and the hit of nicotene feels really good. I mean I had a student get into Stanford last year. I don’t recall them sending any helicopters to cover that event. I also had a kid get into M.I.T. No channel 7 ABC news coverage then either. Matter of fact, I’ve had scores and scores of kids do scores and scores of amazing things this year – far too many to list – and yet not one story in the mainstream media pops out in my mind to highlight either my high school’s, or any of my student’s, remarkable and positive accomplishments.

But one kid gets shot in the ass and here comes the cameras.

So what can be done? Well, I am searching for those answers myself. It’s why I write the books I do, it’s why I endeavor to help other educators all across the nation in the way that I do, it’s why I showed up today at my school less than 24 hours removed from the shooting and put in a hell of an excellent effort at reaching my teens with an eye toward reaping real results.

But I tell you this, one thing I know for sure: our schools need to change. We are all party to this calamity; each of us is culpable in some small way. After all, am I not my brother’s keeper?

Am I not an American teacher?

So before you shake your head and say, “Oh, what a shame,” when you read the headline, “Student Shot at Lynwood High” ask yourself, how can I help to be a part of the change.

Because America needs you… and we are all responsible. Please help to do something.

Midterm exams. The school year is halfway over. So much I still want to do yet still, so much that I know will not get done.

So far we have read 6 novels — I am a bit behind my typical pace. Usually, I like to tackle 14 books a year but we’ve been doing more intense Project Based Learning, 21rst century, collaborative, high level projects than ever before in my class and the learning curve for both myself and my students has been steep.

However, being that it’s always good to reflect and see where you are as a teacher at times like these (because it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees in the day-to-day barrage that teaching can be), I’d have to say I am quite happy with the way the year has gone thus far. Plus, as far as tackling the standards, they are coming more quickly than ever as a result of all the PBL. Truly, my kids are just drinking the knowledge down. My best guess is that since they are being forced to apply their learning in a tangible manner, they are commensurately being forced to learn more — and learn about these things more deeply and quickly — than most of them have ever been challenged to do.

And what have I found? That my kids have stepped up. I mean I have scores of kids who had never done any sort of projects in the world of digital literacy who are now virtual maestros on computers. Really, kids are just sponges and if you give them an opportunity they will reveal talents which many other educators who do not challenge their kids in this way never get to see.

American education is changing. I see it. And that’s a good thing. And while people moan about how complicated changing our schools can be, how difficult the challenges are and blah, blah, blah, what it really boils down to is a simple willingness to adapt. For educators who are open to learning, open to growing, open to realizing that they don’t always have to be the “holder of all wisdom” in the classroom, the world of schooling is a spectacular oyster: fun, surprising, innovative, challenging and supremely beneficial to the kids.

It’s a new world out there and any teacher who is still doing things they way that they did them even as recently as 5 years ago needs to, in my opinion, think about freshening up their approach and reflecting on the types of skills which have become more valuable for the next generation of learner. Spelling used to be so important. Nowadays, I think spelling is unquestionably trumped by the need for kids to be able to discern fact from opinion. (We have Spell Check — how long before google or Microsoft comes up with Fact Check and, with a click of a mouse, will highlight all the bullshit on the internet posing as credible information? Now that’s an invention society can really use!!)

Of course I’ve stumbled thus far this year as well. It’s inevitable. But I’ve also expanded my practice and tried new things which are steeped in educational value for 21rst century students. For this, I feel good.

However, being that I am pausing to reflect I realize, I do need to step it up. More reading. More reading. More reading. Considering that I have a chest full of tools at my disposal to elevate their reading comprehension as well as their academic performance — not to mention their writing skills — I need to step on the gas to make sure I get through a bunch more of it. The first half of the year has vanished in a blink of an eye and the second half will, I am sure, do the same.

Watch out kids! If you thought we were moving at a demanding pace first semester, it’s time for Mr. Alan to step on the gas!

All of us get down now and then. It’s just a natural part of being alive. I think that schools sometimes have a way of bringing teachers down though, down in a way that can be profound. Why? Maybe because the pain isn’t really just about your own life but it’s the pain you see in the lives of kids — pain you work so hard to shelter young people from but at the end of the day, you just can’t. There are too many of them and too few of us and we all know how badly we are up against it in terms of time, resources, support, and so on.

And then, just when glum seems like it can turn to morose (for reasons that need know specificity; all educators ride an emotional roller coaster every year and none of us are immune. Not even us almost chronically optimistic folks) something comes your way which reminds you why life is amazing and schools are even amazing-er.

Check it out…