In the Classroom Today

Dispatches from the Trenches

This will be my last dispatch on education - for a while, anyway. After this post, my aim is to get back to some lighter subject matter, as many of my commentaries on schools these days seem to devolve into complaints. Valid as I believe those complaints may be…it is simply time for a breather.

The two pieces below originally appeared in the 2011, Vol. 3, edition of the online literary journal, The Christendom Review. The first one was also excerpted by the well-regarded publication First Things (but without attribution!).

Molding the Future of a King: A Rationale for Using T.H. White’s Classic Novel in the High School Classroom

In one of the prep schools where I taught in the southern U.S., we were asked every year to identify students whom we believed possessed “leadership qualities.” Such qualities were never specified, but I had the general impression that these promising young people were to be culled from the ranks of the over-achievers, those at the top of the academic heap, the team captains, or those gregarious souls who could hold their peers rapt with natural charm. The quiet, bookish sorts who never volunteered for anything became invisible when I scanned my classroom for the potential leaders of the school.

Of course, as with so many other aspects of modern education, this method of identification was not merely wrong—it directly contradicted all that history has had to show us regarding true leaders. I could make a fairly long list of great men and women whose early lives were unremarkable; it would include Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, if I were to pose a question to anyone who works with young people – “What happens when you tell a child that he or she is inherently privileged and will someday lead his peers?”—the answer would invariably come back: “You’ll end up with a spoiled brat.” On the grandest scale, these brats would grow up to be tyrants, and all failed civilizations and systems of rule have been sunk by them.

T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is an adaptation of Arthurian legend, but it is also one of the best treatises I know of on what really makes a leader. The boy who is destined to become the king, whose birthright is given not only by his Anglo-Norman father and his Gaelic mother but by God as well, is not aware until the very end of Book One that he is the rightful heir to the throne, and he is every bit as surprised as his foster-brother Kay, who is anticipating his own knighthood. Up until this moment, however, the Wart, as he has been scornfully nicknamed, has been an unwitting trainee, exposed to personal dangers and terrifying systems of government through a series of transmogrifications in keeping with Merlyn’s assertion that experience is the only real education. Any instruction the boy does receive is rendered by those who are themselves immersed in their various arts and who speak in the rich languages of tilting, falconry, practical mathematics, and so on; there is no such thing as an Education Major. The Wart is so caught up in the intensity and excitement of his journey that he has little time to ponder his own future, and in any case, he believes he will be a servant and squire to Kay:

“‘Well, I am a Cinderella now,’ he said to himself. ‘Even if I have had the best of it for some mysterious reason, up to the present time – in our education – now I must pay for my past pleasures and for seeing all those delightful dragons, witches, fishes, cameleopards, pismires, wild geese and such like, by being a second-rate squire and holding Kay’s extra spears for him…’ ”

Of course, he has forgotten how things turn out for Cinderella, but it is this innate humility and the absence of preconceptions that will shape the man who can ultimately make the right decisions both in the heat of battle and at the table of diplomacy.

In great part, the book is about this sort of looking backward in order to discern cause and effect, action and consequence. Even such seemingly arbitrary events as the escape of a hunting hawk in the forest or a punch to the nose in a moment of confrontation are later perceived as critical episodes in the shaping of a king whose own destiny is integral to that of a nation. Re-reading and teaching this book always put me in mind of Churchill’s remark in The Gathering Storm regarding the day he truly understood the eminence of his own role in the early days of World War II: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” From a boy whose father had sent him to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst only because he believed him unfit for Oxford, this tells us much about his belief in the meaning of his own failures as well as his successes. Similarly, in The Once and Future King, the young Arthur often cannot see the real value in his lessons until the appropriate time arrives.

Another intriguing aspect of White’s telling of the old tale is the manner in which he endows his character with a natural inclination to self-sacrifice. In this sense, he is rather un-kingly:

“ ‘If I were to be made a knight,’ said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, ‘I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.’ ”

It’s an extraordinary remark for a child to make, and Merlyn immediately warns him not to be presumptuous. The uncomfortable irony about any king, president, or premiere who would unhesitatingly pay the ultimate price for his cause is that, in such an event, we will have lost our leader. In older times, the death of a commander on the battlefield meant the demise of his army, and so it is that in any proper telling of the Arthurian myth, we must never have the death of the hero. He does, indeed, go out on the appointed day to meet his destiny, but the circumstances of his end—and more significantly, of his return—remain mysterious. Just as the boy Arthur who turned the big roasting spits in the kitchen and who innocently vowed to be the best squire who ever lived could not have benefited from knowing his own future, the seasoned warrior-king goes out to meet his last great enemy with a single-minded sense of purpose.

Therein, I believe, lies the best reason for having this book in a high-school curriculum: for once a young person realizes that he or she, too, has a purpose, once he or she begins to emerge from the mists of childhood and to see the path clearly, once the look in the eyes which wonders “Why am I here?” is replaced by the one which says, “There it is! That is what I’ve been missing”… why, then the real excitement starts for both student and teacher, because the best teacher is also a student, and the best leader is also a follower, and the best king is also a servant. Granted, there is only one who can remove the sword, but what fun to stand up at last and see that everything you’ve done, every little thing, and even the things you forgot to do or deliberately avoided doing, have all played a part in bringing you to the realization of your own role in the unfolding myth. 

What I Learned by Teaching Hamlet

When I was a younger man, and a novice but ambitious teacher of literature, I thought I knew two essential truths concerning the play which has been called the centerpiece of Shakespeare’s tragedies: one, that no teenager could possibly hope to understand this complex, cerebral work; and two, that it is a secular play.

The latter idea seemed marvelous to me, given that Shakespeare was writing in a time when—although it might have been dangerous to proclaim oneself a Roman Catholic in early 17th-century England—there was certainly no recourse, no system of belief at all, in fact, beyond the old Catholic church and the newer brand of Christianity sanctioned by the Anglican Church. In short, I thought that Prince Hamlet’s existentialist ideas and his ultimate obsession with the body’s dissolution, as well as his startling lack of spirituality by the time we arrive at the graveyard scene, were further marks of the playwright’s genius. After all, he also anticipated theories about the relativity of time and space (see Jakes’ speech in Act 2, scene 7, of As You Like It) and the cultural stereotypes that would in part define modern racial conflict (see Othello). This is what writers of vision do, I thought: they tell us not only who we are, but who we will become.

I was mistaken, however. Hamlet is not a secular work.

But before I recount the shift in my attitude on this second point, let me dispense with the first—the idea that a high-school student cannot fully grasp the play’s themes—for I have changed my mind on that one, too. I had a student a few years back, one Theo. He was not a particularly brilliant or motivated boy, but he seemed riveted by our study of Hamlet from the get-go. I find the odds that the average 17 year-old should find himself caught up in such a play (except for the bloody events at the end, perhaps) seem to grow ever more remote, for here is a work which requires intense concentration on every page, perhaps on every line. The “multi-tasking” approach in education does not really suit a close study of this play. In any case, Theo practically hung on every beat of blank verse, he extensively researched Elizabethan vocabulary and history, and he enthusiastically volunteered to read aloud from day to day, and ended by handing in a very strong analytical essay. I was in a perpetual state of amazement until a colleague informed me that Theo’s father had died the previous summer, and at last the pieces of the puzzle tumbled into place.

My own father passed away in July of 2008. When my seniors took up their study of Hamlet the following winter, I realized that I was seeing the tragedy in a new light. The lens of grief, which is alternately blurry or painfully sharp, had altered my regard for the play, and I suddenly realized that the fuller comprehension of it has little to do with one’s age but very much to do with what one has endured—and in particular with what, or whom, one has lost. Someone familiar with Hamlet might say that the murder mystery and the accomplishment of a son’s vengeance are the real draw here, but I say that the deeper mystery comes in seeking to reconcile this life to the next, in sustaining our faith that there are “more things in heaven and earth,” and that the search for a father goes on and may even take us through invisible doorways. To apply purely secular reasoning to this possibility moves us ever further away from God, stealthily, steadily, and with deadly consequences.

This brings me to the second revision in my thinking about Hamlet: for all his visionary genius, Shakespeare is not, in fact, exposing us to some of the first tentative mumblings of atheism (indeed, his short-lived contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, was inclined to atheist speculation); rather, he is showing us what happens when a man steps apart from God. Granted, there is no worthy friar in the play, and the prince has grown up surrounded by power-hungry people who apparently seek no one’s counsel anyway. Even Hamlet’s father, although he is the victim of a murder, expresses through his death a sort of misconnection with God, having died unconfessed, with all his sins upon his head. We see in the prince’s first soliloquy the seeds of the same sort of distorted thinking:

O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter…
                                            (1:2)

The difficulty here is that God’s law against suicide really has little to do with our regard for our own flesh. It is not designed to prevent one destroying an offending body, but rather, in part, from destroying the world which one perceives through the senses. The other principle that Hamlet seems to miss is that we are not the real owners of our bodies, after all. To say that I would kill myself if God had not forbidden me to do so puts me at roughly the same level as a small child who says, “I would steal this candy, but my mother has told me I will get in trouble for taking things.” We shouldn’t destroy our own bodies for the same reason we should oppose abortion and the death penalty—because a design is being perpetuated upon our conception, and we are here to see it through, using free will wherever we can to do our part in the knitting of the pattern. To willfully eliminate one’s part is to toss another unraveled thread into the trash bin of misery, that misery whereby we remain separated from God.

Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s ghost brings him into vivid contact with another reality, and he is both thrilled and terrified by it, as any of us would be. And as it would likely be for any of us, the vividness begins to fade, and Hamlet falters in his determination to avenge his father’s “foul and most unnatural death.” No rational man would rush out and kill his own uncle because a ghost has urged him to do so; even in his state of depression, delusion, and paranoia, reason prevails for a time, and Hamlet hesitates.

But Christianity is reasonable, too. It tells us that just as we have thirst, and water is the solution, there must ultimately be answers to all of our most troublesome inquiries (and Hamlet is a play inundated with questions). The old world of vengeance and violent retribution really means self-obliteration, when we pursue it to its final outcome, and so we might conclude that the dead king is suffering in purgatory not merely because he died unabsolved but perhaps also because in life he could never move beyond ambition and the power of his own station and ascend to an understanding of forgiveness, or at the very least to munificence. Or, as both the prince and his friend Horatio speculate, he could well be a demon, and not at all the curly-haired Hyperion who lives in Hamlet’s memory—an idea which would have been quite credible to Shakespeare’s audience and which would still be feasible to many Christians today.

Thus the true identity of his father seems to elude Hamlet for much of the play. It is the most masterful illustration I know of the search that we all undertake for our lost fathers. Sometimes, the men we pursue in our longing are mere ghosts, and some of them may be demons of one sort or another. Hamlet, perhaps unwittingly, actually answers the question of his father early on, in Act 1: 

He was a man. Take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
                                            (1:3)

He intends this characterization as an homage, but really he ought to say that his father was merely a man; he shall not look upon his like because he was himself, in fact, merely an imperfect likeness of the Father, the one for whom we thirst as though for water, and although he briefly breaks the silence of the grave, he is a king who cannot return.

In the end, the horror of that same silence descends on Prince Hamlet like a mound of heavy dirt. He has failed to realize that all of his words, and all those of Claudius and Polonius and Horatio and Osric and all the others who have so much to say in this play, and all of the words on all of the pages in all of the books in Elsinore’s library, ultimately bring us nowhere. In the end, there is only the Word. And I believe that this is where my understanding of the play may come in line with the author’s intent, on some level, for solid flesh does melt, just as our words evaporate and turn to silence; the playwright’s own words are the grandest in the English language, and yet they can take us only up to the threshold of the next world. The real manner in which we cross it is determined by Faith.

In the Classroom Today

Dispatches from the Trenches

In Defense of Non-secular Schools

“I have no religion.”

I hear this assertion from time to time, most recently from a colleague who sees himself as progressive (and please note that I have not placed the word in quotation marks, since I genuinely respect his intellect). My objection to the claim is not that it offends me; it is simply that I don’t believe it.

If we take “religion” to be a system of beliefs held with ardor and faith, a particular conscientiousness, then any adult with a reasonably functioning brain certainly observes some sort of religion, even if its tenets include the steadfast denial of belief. For instance, a scientist who thinks that science will someday have answered all of the great questions about purpose and meaning is a profoundly religious person. Religion provides a framework of thought, in essence, and some things fall within that frame and other things do not.

Religion makes the world intelligible to us, and that is crucial to education. In my experience as a teacher of literature and of writing, I perceive recurring ideas, images, narratives, and so on that reveal recurring truths, and all of these bring intelligibility and meaning to the noise of human interaction. Any teacher who comes into the classroom hoping to get something done, to finish the day really feeling like something has happened, and who believes that his or her subject is far more than simply a collection of information to be dispensed, is by nature a religious being.

Of course, we know that when most people refer to a “religious” school, they mean an institution that is affiliated with a particular church, a parochial school. Typically such a school is meant to advance the tenets of the church, but it also provides instruction in math, science, and so on - secular subjects, one might say, but even those may be approached within the framework of belief (e.g., the study of life science is also the study of the created world). These ideas are not necessarily at odds; as Pope John Paul said in 1985, “Rightly comprehended, faith in creation or a correctly understood teaching of evolution does not create obstacles: evolution in fact presupposes creation…” (Symposium on Evolution).

No doubt some would argue that a Jewish girls school, for example, is an insular environment which breeds homogeneity, and in some ways that may be true; but those sorts of flaws are only connected to the specific culture of the school and the people who are there, and not to the universalist viewpoint the institution hopes to convey. The real school, the palace of ideas, wants to give the student a singular, cohesive method by which she can approach a corrupt world and somehow contribute to its healing, guided by the values which have been part of her education. A number of different writers - sociologists, philosophers theologians - have used the term “everythingism” to describe the condition in which one may be too intensely drawn to too many things - books, ideas, hobbies, belief systems, and so on - to understand any of them particularly well. The danger is that everythingism can lead to the mistaken belief that all things are equal in value, and in turn we wind up in a world without morals (since morals, after all, must be those principles that stand salient against the great jumble). Good nonsecular schools, by contrast, seem keenly interested in sussing out the greater or lesser worth in certain ideas.

Please bear in mind that I am not necessarily thinking of the 1960s-era Brothers school, for example, which a good friend of mine loves to look back on and loathe so passionately - and understandably so, since his memories are comprised mostly of corporal punishment and humiliation, a mental photo album of welts. Nor am I speaking of the small-town Baptist “academy” where another friend spent hours on his knees in the dean’s office, reading aloud from the book of Job. I mean fully accredited schools founded by men and women of both intellect and faith who believe that academic rigor and a spiritual life do not exclude one another.

Before entering the public school system, I taught for ten years in a private Episcopalian school. I now realize how freeing it was to hear accomplished and in some cases brilliant colleagues discussing their own beliefs and spiritual struggles with intelligent students, many of whom, though they may not have “bought in to the program” entirely, were at least openminded, academically ambitious, and from varying ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. In fact, one of the main reasons I joined the church myself was that in those days, I hung around a lot with men and women whom I admired, who also happened to be Christians. I was fortunate to have come under their influence.

Certainly there are those who associate private education with elitism. My only response might be to note that in the nonsecular school where I worked, the admissions committee was quite fair in awarding financial aid to low-income parents who desired to have their kids in a focused academic environment; and generally, the kids themselves possessed the will to put in the effort and sacrifices required for any worthwhile journey. I would not say that the students I knew there were any more talented than their public-school counterparts, but they had a framework, a lens, if you like, that allowed them to see clearly what was really at stake for them. Not only that, they knew why they were there. I am sad to report that in public-school hallways, I see many students, every day, who appear to be lost; believe it or not, they do not know what their purpose is in this place. It is not simply that they hate school and wish to be someplace else; they truly do not know why their presence is required here.

I think the reason for this is simple: there is no joy in it for them. They view it as a building with a set of unreasonable rules (NO HATS! NO TALKING! SIT DOWN! STAND UP! GET IN LINE! WAIT FOR THE BELL!). Oh, we all have good intentions, and schools are fraught with teachers, coaches, counselors, and administrators who love kids, want the best for them, hope to inspire them…but the weight of the system inevitably descends upon them. For example, true creativity (a quality we ought to encourage) is often unbridled, particularly in a young person, and yet that impulse is frequently met with brute force and then summarily smothered. This has been true for some time. Even the affable populist Bruce Springsteen - now seventy, if you can swallow that one - has declared, “I hated school. That’s rock ’n’ roll 101.” For who should the pupils find in authority when they enter these institutional walls but a bunch of rule enforcement officials, many of whom seem as disillusioned, deflated, and miserable as themselves?

I am generalizing, obviously, but my point is that there is joy in realizing one has a purpose, after all, or at least in beginning to seek for it, and in being among others who are up to the same thing. It means that this day, this place, is just a piece of a road, a greater journey. A life of purpose means that the best days and places always lie ahead, but in order to get there we must also pay attention to what is happening now; it is a curiosity of the human brain that at some point, it becomes capable of holding both of these thoughts - of the moment and of the future - and that together they have significance and meaning. It is my opinion overall that private nonsecular schools are more apt to provide this essential framework.

In the Classroom Today

Dispatches from the Trenches

The Current Conflict

Since I became a public school English teacher in 2006, amid all of the ambiguity, one thing has become clear to me: a war is being waged. The sides are not yet clearly defined, however, and so at the present moment, I can only call it tribal warfare. As with other wars, it is driven by ideologies, money, and territorialism, and those with the most at stake bear the hardest burden and pay the highest price. 

Before I moved to Maine, unwittingly becoming a foot-soldier in the fray, I taught in private schools in the south, and although those schools certainly have their own distinct problems, too, it was accepted that families had sent their youngsters there by choice, had chosen to pay tuition and book fees, and therefore they shared the same objectives as the institutions themselves - to enhance the status and effectiveness of the schools and to make the students college-worthy. I am not necessarily advocating for private schools; there are plenty of ineffective ones around as well, and in any case, I believe in the American right to a free education. As long as we continue to offer such, why can’t it be a quality education in every town and neighborhood? The answers to that question, at present, are not in hand, but perhaps we can make some critical progress in identifying the challenges.

To begin with, the extraordinary success of American schools throughout most of the Twentieth Century has created a sense of autonomy and insularity. I have attended many faculty meetings and workshops in which the guiding question was something like “What new program or committee should we create to address this or that problem?” but I have never once heard a question such as “What did Finland do to build such an amazing educational system in only thirty years?” or “How has it happened that now even in Vietnam, for example, students’ scores on international tests have surpassed our own?” Simply said, it is out of arrogance that we do not examine the achievements of other societies and learn from them.

While unfunded arrogance may be harmless, the misuse of money - as with most social ills - colors the waters of education like bacterial algae. Shawn Moody, a Republican candidate for governor of Maine in 2018 was harshly criticized by opponents for remarking during a forum that Maine schools are overfunded. His choice of words was certainly unfortunate and likely contributed to Moody’s ultimate loss to democratic candidate Janet Mills, but Moody did try to provide further context for his statement. According to the Portland Press Herald, “Moody said he thinks schools need to ‘operate efficiently, and that he wants to expand career and technical education and help teachers he described as overworked and burdened by too much bureaucracy. ‘They need help and I’m coming to the rescue,’ Moody said of the teachers. The unions, he said, are ‘scared to death’ an outsider can do ‘the real reform that K-12 desperately needs.’” My own reaction? Moody was right. In a state that can already boast of the nation’s seventh highest annual per-pupil expenditure ($15,912, according to USA Today) yet suffers the 25th lowest median salary for all workers ($36,210), one might ask what more Maine folks can do. Indeed, a better question might be: how is the money being spent?

I have seen up close the bureaucracy Moody referred to; it is insidious and ever-festering. In their efforts to retain academic credibility, the schools where I have taught have implemented one costly strategy after another, from something called the “Pyramid of Intervention” to the unwieldy Smarter Balanced project (which the state abandoned after only one year, having paid $2.7 million for the privilege of piloting perhaps the most poorly designed standardized test in the history of standardized tests). Absurdly, classroom teachers - those who are most likely to know which initiatives stand a chance of actually working - have little to no part in such decisions.

As for parents, I believe that overall they are willing to pay increased taxes for stronger educational programs, as I certainly was when my own children were in school. However, we must be perpetually aware of the numbers involved and not allow our sense of distress concerning school funding and performance to determine what we will pay for. In the town where I live (not the one in which I teach), this past November, voters were presented with a referendum question seeking a $40 million loan to expand and renovate Yarmouth Elementary School, improve security measures at Yarmouth High School, fund a roofing project at Harrison Middle School, and upgrade the restrooms at Rowe School. I’d be the first to agree that a decent roof and new bathrooms are important, but to have it all in one swoop in a county that already imposes some of the highest property taxes in America seems cumbersome - especially when, as best as I can tell, not a dollar was earmarked for academics. Nevertheless, the measure passed 3,168 to 2,091.

Not all school districts here and elsewhere are quite so gung ho, of course, and even if they were, in most of them, families do not have the resources to entertain such exorbitance. The advocates of one proposed solution, school vouchers (which actually dates back to George H.W. Bush’s administration), account for another tribe in this war of attrition between guerrilla factions. Many critics see both vouchers and charter schools, which provide government funding for privately run schools, as part of the gradual privatization of education in the US. Analysts disagree as to whether this will result in equality of education or simply turn low-income districts into holding pens - unwanted territory, in essence. In her insightful essay for the Washington Post, called “Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Story of Privatizing Public Education in the USA,” Joanne Barkan writes,

As for the higher-performing charter schools, research has shown they often boost test

  scores by “counseling out” the most challenging students — those with cognitive and 

physical disabilities, behavior problems, and English language learners. These students 

remain in district schools, increasing the concentration of at-risk students in precisely the 

districts that have lost funding to charter schools.

The good news is that on all sides in the great battle are those who seem to share the objective of restoring and improving the quality and value of an American education (although it may go without saying that if education does become privatized, there will be some new billionaires on Forbes’ list). As for me, I can only count myself as one of the “grunts,” at times unaware of the nature of the forces at work but willing to serve the common cause with creativity and resolve, as do most of the teachers I know. And if, to some degree, I can also act as an observer, a sketch artist, if you will, then perhaps eventually we may both gain a greater understanding of the causes and best possible solutions to the conflicts we face.

In the Classroom Today

Dispatches from the Trenches

At the Altar of Choice

I am not angry at those who have more money and possessions than I have. For most of my life, I have striven to produce quality work as a writer, musician, and artist, but I’ve also worked as a teacher in order to have a home, send my children to college, and to bear the economic yoke of being an adult in my society. Along the path, I have also discovered that I very much enjoy teaching, and I believe that for much of my career, I’ve been an effective educator. I have arrived at this place in my life mostly through my own choices.

I am well aware that for many other people in the U.S. and abroad, such is not the case, but by and large, most of us make thousands of personal choices over the years that ultimately define what we become. The Determinists, the nihilists, and the fatalists may hash it out any way they like, but that is my considered position. I certainly was not born with a knack for decision-making; yet I believe in Natural Law, and thus adhere to the theory that we possess an innate sense of right and wrong. Still, I would also say that my ability to act upon choices had to be nurtured over time by my parents, older siblings, teachers, and so on. Sometimes that nurturing involved tightly limited, closely monitored choices. And in school, oftentimes and in certain situations, there were no choices at all.

I contend that students today have far too much choice. “Which of these books would you like to read, Cheswick? This one with the pretty cover? This one with all the words in it? Or perhaps one that you’ve already read before?” Suffice it to say that when it comes to books, most students don’t have the experience to choose those that will really contribute to their literacy. Only a knowledgeable and well-read adult can guide them in this.

The same applies to other kinds of choices, too. I have never forgotten a story told by a school superintendent in the district where I was teaching several years ago. He described a high-school boy who would come to him every spring for four years, “broken in spirit” because he could never make the school’s baseball team. “He just loved baseball. He had chosen the game because it was his passion.” It was clear to me that baseball had not chosen him, however, and I wanted to ask, “Why didn’t he just try out for the cross-country team? Baseball is hard, after all.” But the superintendent had worked himself into such a tear-streaked state of empathy that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Having lots of choices in school - a “menu,” as one educational guru has put it - is, in fact, sometimes counterproductive. Students are addled by the various dishes placed before them, and unfortunately the healthy eater (to extend the metaphor) should have only one dessert.

I realize that there is a fine line between limiting choices and suppressing creativity. As a young person, I was greatly interested in art and had a powerful imagination, but I had no discipline. I did not know what sort of art I wanted to make. I asked myself, “Do I want to paint? If so, shall I work in oils, watercolors, or acrylics? All of these? What about drawing? Pencils? Inks? Charcoal? Am I a realist or an abstractionist? What about pastels? Then again, sculpture seems like a satisfying medium. Clay? Metal? Wood? Play-doh?” Eventually I was lucky enough to have a couple of mentors who perceived my strengths and my limitations, and they helped me to make specific, limited choices so that I might find some success. Of course, when my ambitions shifted to writing, the old wrestling match was renewed: Fiction? Nonfiction? Poetry? Drama?

I’ll go further and say that for these reasons, the teacher needs to be more than simply an education major who keeps up with the latest theories on differentiated learning and classroom management. The teacher must be an expert in his or her subject area. For example, an English teacher ought to be the most well-read person on campus, bar none, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harold Bloom and beyond, and at the very least, he ought to be able to write the same clear and lively prose he expects of his students. Only then can the teacher become a guide as trustworthy as Beatrice when the traveler enters the many spheres, both dark and celestial, of choice.

In the Classroom Today

Dispatches From the Trenches

The Keyboard is Mightier

I am beginning to believe that my generation has seen some of the broadest cultural shifts of any that has passed…but of course, I suppose that people of every age have believed that about themselves. Even the ancient accountant who said, “You know, Xenophon, perhaps we should put away those beans and try out this new-fangled abacus” undoubtedly believed that he was inducing sweeping change. 

A man born in 1890 who lived to be eighty would have seen the turn of the century, two world wars, the rise of the automobile, the advancement of commercial flight, the eruption of rock ’n’ roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of MLK and two Kennedys, the first lunar landings, and so on - all a pretty good argument for his time on earth as the pre-eminent historical observer.

Yet consider this: as a boomer born in 1958 and turning a mere sixty this year, I have been privy to the most significant technological shifts modern civilizations have ever seen: the ability to transmit and glean information instantaneously, as well as the perpetual shrinking of the mechanisms by which we do it.

I have been a teacher of literature and writing for nearly twenty-eight years now and need only look at a handful of changes in the way I do my job in order to see the impact of computer technology. I don’t recall the first year that I typed grades and comments into a computer program, but it was probably in the mid-1990s. Until that time, my poor students and their parents had to struggle to read my scrawling. I’ll never forget the teary-eyed sophomore who came to me to ask why I had written that she was “horsing around this quarter in class.” She calmed down after I explained that what I had actually written was that she was “having a sound third quarter in class.”

Email has forever changed the way teachers communicate with parents and students. In addition to individual conferences every semester and the odd afternoon phone call just before happy hour, I am now obliged to read and respond to a stream of emails from over-zealous parents who wish to monitor their children throughout the day: “Crenshaw’s irritable bowel flared up this morning. Please allow him to see the nurse as needed,” or “Crenshaw left his p.e. shorts on the breakfast table this morning. His older sister will drop them off on your desk around ten.” Still, I suppose the involved parent is preferable to the ones that I never hear from at all (and there are plenty of those).

The weight of administrative tasks has been greatly increased by computer technology. I know - advanced communication capability was supposed to make us more efficient…but such has not been the case, sadly. Certainly we have saved a good deal of printer paper, but it is a special brand of anxiety that sinks in when I open my mailbox every hour and find ten new emails demanding my immediate attention. On the other hand, fun is frowned upon: please do not take up valuable kilobytes with trash talk about your alma mater’s basketball team or links to noteworthy articles in The Onion.

These are only three of a myriad of drastic shifts that have occurred in one educator’s daily life in this “developed” world. As to further changes bound to happen at any second, I still take some comfort in thinking back to a workshop I attended roughly twenty years ago, during which a young professor of literature showed us his website. He said that everything he did throughout a given semester or so was there: all the lectures, word-for-word, all assignments, even audio clips of birds honking to enhance a reading of Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” were accessible at the touch of a fingertip. After his presentation, I asked him, “Has it occurred to you that now that everything you do is on a website for your students’ edification, your university no longer really needs you? The real you, I mean, not the virtual you.”

“I’m not worried about that,” he replied. “I just heard a great lecture last week by an expert in higher education. He made an air-tight argument that students still need interaction with real people. There will always be a need for teachers, since there’s no substitute for the human touch.”

“Interesting. Was it at your college or someplace else?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I watched it online.”