Making the rounds on Facebook is a button I’d very much like to purchase.  This sums up the last decade of U.S. educational policy: “Those who can, teach.  Those who cannot, pass laws about teaching.”  From “No Child Left Behind” (promoted by President George W. Bush) to the comparably flawed “Race to the Top” (promoted by President Barack Obama), educational policy has been guided by ludicrous ideas like: rather than giving public schools the funds they need, they should be forced to compete for less money.  Also: instead of creating conditions that foster learning, let’s focus purely on testing.  And let’s not forget this one: instead of making college affordable to all, states should gradually stop supporting higher education, shifting that cost onto those who can least afford it — the students.

Which brings me to my point.  It’s time to end the war on education.  Really.  Stop fighting the people — teachers, librarians, reading specialists, college professors — who are working to educate the next generation of Americans.  Stop slashing budgets, firing teachers, interrogating school librarians, cutting salaries, increasing class sizes.  Worldwide, U.S. students are ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math.  And we’re dropping steadily.  In secondary education, between 1995 and 2008, the U.S. slipped from ranking second in college graduation rates to 13th in college graduation rates.

So.  Let’s end our race to the bottom.

In his last State of the Union, President Obama said that teachers in America should be regarded with the same respect as they are in South Korea, where they’re considered “nation builders.”  I couldn’t agree more.  But, apart from a tepid acknowledgment of teachers’ rights, the president said little when Wisconsin’s governor sought to cut teachers’ salaries and strip them of their rights to collective bargaining.  In that same State of the Union speech, referring to a number of challenges we face, the president called this a “Sputnik moment.”  Again, this sounds great.  But in response to the last Sputnik moment, the U.S. government invested in education.  Right now, we’re busy divesting — indeed, we’re dismantling our public education system.

Why?  No, it’s not “the sluggish economy” or “we lack the resources” or “in these times of financial exigency, we all must make sacrifices.”  It’s because the dominant idea shaping the national dialogue is that capitalism is a moral system, a smoothly efficient social Darwinism that will allow good ideas to thrive and bad ideas to fail: if the government would simply get out of the business of governing, the argument goes, then everything would improve.  So, let’s slash taxes on the wealthiest, slash funds from public programs, and we’ll all be happy in a libertarian utopia.  This is utter nonsense.

People in both political parties need to acknowledge that a progressive income tax is (a) fair, and (b) has helped sustain our public institutions for eight decades.  People who make more should pay more.  So, yes, eliminating the so-called Bush Tax Cut (extended by President Obama) would be a start.  As, of course, would collecting taxes from companies that avoid paying taxes.  ExxonMobil, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and others all had profitable years in 2010, but managed to avoid paying taxes.  So, ending corporate welfare would provide another source of revenue.

America is not broke.  It’s pursuing policies that redistribute wealth to the wealthiest, and thus take funds away from everyone and everything else.  One effect is the dismantling of our public institutions — like schools and libraries.  These institutions took generations to build.  And, now, the nation watches as its representatives undo generations of hard work.  We watch as governors and state-appointed lawyers actually accuse educators (in which I include librarians) of being a drain on public funds.

Enough!

UPDATE, 17 May 2011: Jenipher (below) tells me that one can purchase the buttons via UnionButtons.

Last Friday, in my English 703: Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature class, the students and I spent 5 minutes talking nonsense.  We’d been reading theories of nonsense, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books — I thought it would be both fun and educational to put those theories into practice.

So, based on our readings of Tigges, Anderson and Apseloff, and others, I had them enumerate some of nonsense’s formal qualities: language as game; use of puns, double meanings, inversions, opposites; playing on idiomatic language, taking figurative language literally; and so on.  Then, we prepared for the nonsense chat. I set it up as a conversation with me on the one side, and a student on the other.  These were the rules: (1) I asked them to raise their hands when they felt they had an entry point.  (2) When the student could sustain the nonsensical banter no longer, she or he was to pass off the conversation to the next person whose hand was raised.

If speaking nonsense isn’t your forte, you could modify the above exercise as follows: make the teacher both referee and equal participant (i.e., not obliged to hold up the entire side of the conversation).  Speaking nonsense comes quite easily to me.  (Try to contain your surprise.)  You see, my brain naturally comes up with multiple options in reply.  Most of the time, I chose the “sense” reply, and ignore the other options.  If I’m in a social situation, I listen to the other options, and will move back and forth between humor and seriousness, depending on my audience.

Anyway, back to class.  We sustained the conversation for 5 minutes, no problem.  (I wish we’d recorded it — some of our exchanges were quite funny.)  After we finished, I asked them about the experience of talking nonsense.  What had they learned?  This conversation was interesting.  As one student point out, it’s using language not to communicate, but to compete.  As another said, it’s an isolating experience — echoing a comment from nonsense scholar Wim Tigges, whose “An Anatomy of Nonsense” (1987) we read.  Speaking nonsense does, of course, heighten one’s awareness of language’s formal qualities: in order to speak it, you sustain syntax in order to subvert sense.  As Tigges puts it, “nonsense is not the absence of sense, but rather a frustration of expectations about sense” (25).  It plays on the tension between meaning and its absence.

I love to discover pedagogical “stunts” that work (I dislike such stunts for their own sake).  This, I am pleased to report, was a useful exercise.  It educated while it entertained.

Yes, it might have made more sense to post this query prior to the new semester, rather than just after the term has begun.  But my tendency to work close to deadlines means that the syllabus is never finished until just before the term starts.  In any case, I’ll be teaching Literature for Children again, and — as always — would like to make the course better.

I’ve taught the class over two dozen times in the last decade, and have revised the syllabus along the way — omitting some texts, adding others.  Last spring, I revamped the paper assignments.  I now gear them towards (a) getting students to think beyond their likes and dislikes, and (b) keeping up with the field, finding new books.  For the first assignment, they write about a childhood favorite: what attracted them to the book then, and how is their response to the book now similar and different to what it was then?  For the second, they look at the same book, answering instead how the book works.  What genre is the book?  Is it a successful example of the genre?  For the third, they need to find a new book (published in the last ten years) of a different type — different genre, and different intended audience.  And it cannot be a book from the syllabus.  Then they need to answer the same questions posed for the second paper.  I really like this assignment because it pushes students towards appreciating the value of books that may not be to their individual tastes.

But I invoke the popular MTV program (2004-2007) in my blog post’s title because I’d like to shake up the syllabus a bit.  What I have works, but it could work better.  I’d like to improve in three areas, the first of which is “diversity” in two senses of the term: first as an identity category, and second as a genre category.  Ideally, I’d find works that expand diversity in both ways.  It’s very important to me that anything on the syllabus be a good representative of any category: nothing can be included solely as a “diversity” candidate.  The third area I’d like to improve is newness. I always bring in books (some old, some new) not on the syllabus: for example, this past Wednesday, when I taught The Giving Tree (chosen because it can be read many ways, and because it’s a book that provokes discussion), I also brought in the recent parody, The Taking Tree.  When I teach In the Night Kitchen, I always show them some Little Nemo in Slumberland strips. Etc. But I’d like to give some of the newbies a more permanent place.  I’ll of course retain some historical focus, and certain classic texts will remain: fairy tales, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, Langston Hughes (I’ve not listed specific titles of poems on the syllabus, but some of his are in the class pack).  But, as I say, I want to add more recent books.

So, children’s-literature-readers, with the above objectives in mind, which texts should go?  And which texts should be added?  (The age cut-off, by the way, is adolescence — at Kansas State University, Literature for Adolescents is a separate course.)  Clicking on this sentence will take you to my current Literature for Children syllabus — click on the link or scroll down to the Schedule of Assignments.  Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might have.

Reports about Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses are burying the lead or omitting it all together.  At a time when the humanities are under attack, this book reveals that humanities majors are learning more than all other majors.  You read that correctly.  The students who are acquiring the most knowledge from their college educations are those who major in English, Philosophy, Music, Fine Arts, Religion, History, Theatre, and Modern Languages:

Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)

That’s from Scott Jaschik’s piece in Inside Higher Ed, one of the only articles to even mention this important victory for the humanities.  True, it’s not the lead, and the parenthetical diminishes the importance of the subject.  (That final sentence makes the absurd claim that the humanities have both “more-demanding reading and writing assignments” and somehow less “substance.”  What?)  Their apparent anti-humanities bias aside, Arum and Roska’s study brings good news for those of us who value the humanities.

Why, then, do the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and others fail to mention the fact that humanities majors are learning more than their colleagues in other fields?  Why are the headlines “University students learn next to nothing” (Macleans) or “New Study Confirms the Obvious: First Two Years of College Spent Sleeping and Partying” (Vanity Fair)?

There are many reasons, all of which have been stated elsewhere with greater eloquence.  (For those who wish to skip a summary of the obvious, jump past this list to the next paragraph.)  Some reasons include:

1. Americans’ anti-intellectualism.  Most Americans distrust the well-educated, and consider knowledge with suspicion.  To point to but one recent example: For the past decade, The Today Show has featured the winners of the Caldecott and Newbery Awards.  This year, on the first show after the awards were announced, Today‘s featured guest was Snooki.  The winners have yet to appear on the program.
2. The widely held notion (by many state legislatures, at any rate) that college is a waste of the public’s money.
3. And, of course, cultural prejudice against the humanities.  English majors: how often do your relatives ask you what you’re going to do with that degree? How many of your classmates ask why you need a B.A. in English to ask “Do you want fries with that?” How many Engineering majors get asked the same questions?

All of the above are either false or based on false premises.  If you’re able to think critically about the world, you’re less likely to be misled (by, say, politicians who claim that we “can’t afford” to fund public education adequately).  If you gain a college degree, you’ll have a better chance at finding gainful employment.  And, as for the notion that humanities majors enter the job force ill-equipped, that’s simply nonsense.

To focus on the students I teach, English majors go on to become librarians, screenwriters, teachers, technical writers, lawyers, journalists.  They work in non-profits, publishing, advertising, public relations.  One former student of mine works for Hallmark.  You can do a lot with a degree in the humanities. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham writes, ”the humanities elicit and exercise ways of thinking that help us navigate the world we live in. For my money, that’s about as essential as it gets.”  To be a student of the humanities is to consider with greater nuance and deeper understanding just what it means to be human.  What could be more important than that?

Yes, you’ve all heard about NewSouth Press publishing Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer without the “n” word.  But a couple of important points are getting lost in all the uproar.

As Natalia Cecire points out on her blog, the “political correctness” circus-goers are missing the point. I find it more noteworthy that such Bowdlerization is a common practice in children’s literature, but that it takes the Bowdlerization of a “classic” to make the news. The uproar focuses on Huckleberry Finn, the book canonized as a classic (i.e., for discerning grown-ups), and not Tom Sawyer, the book deemed “for children only” — even though both books have been altered in this new edition. (As Bev Clark has pointed out, at the time of their publication both books were considered both “boys’ books” and literature [for adults].)  The implication here is that it’s more acceptable to Bowdlerize the children’s book (Tom Sawyer) than it is to Bowdlerize the classic (Huckleberry Finn).

Also, people should be more offended not by so-called “political correctness” but by our unwillingness to help children make sense of offensiveness. Though Mark Twain was progressive on race for a 19th-century white male, his books ought to offend current sensibilities. If reading Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer in the 21st-century fails to offend, then we’re not really reading these books. And that’s a subject worthy of further discussion.

Not That Kind of Doctor‘s delightful post on “The Five Stages of Grading” prompts me to share my own grading method: Procrastigrading.  While the word is a portmanteau of “procrastinating” and “grading,” I do not mean “put off grading indefinitely.”  Instead, give yourself a one-week deadline for each assignment (quizzes, exams, papers, anything), and begin grading on day 6.

I adopted this method over a decade ago, while working as an adjunct professor, with a 4-4 teaching load.  Here’s why.

1. Grading devours all the time you give it.  You need to limit its diet.
2. Grading stacks of comp papers (as I was at the time) can be a soul-crushing experience.  Why spread the agony over multiple days when you can ruin a single day instead?
3. You have other important work to do.  Whether you’re a grad student or a professor (at any rank), you need to keep advancing that research agenda.  Time spent grading is time not spent publishing the articles and books that will get you (a) a job, (b) tenure, and (c) promoted.  Priorities!
4. Teaching is also important work.  Time spent grading is time not spent reading or preparing for class.
5. And thus… efficiency!  A one-week deadline & starting as close to the deadline as humanly possible means an extremely intense (and, possibly, grueling) grading experience.  But it prevents the grading monster from gobbling up too much time.  See also no. 2, above.
6. I am now at the point where I literally cannot focus on grading unless there is a metaphorical gun to my head — that metaphorical gun is the deadline.  And, unless the deadline is imminent (i.e., tomorrow), then the metaphorical gun is too far away to be really threatening.  Really.  Prior to day 6, my attention simply will not remain on the grading.
7. The week deadline is important not just because it provides a narrow window of grading but because recency in feedback better helps students to learn from their mistakes.  The longer it takes to return the work (with comments), the less pedagogically effective your comments are.  Ideally, you would turn the assignment back the next class (and I try to do this with quizzes).

True, this method does not always work perfectly.  Sometimes, it means I’m up until 2 a.m. the night before (morning before) class and then, after a few hours’ sleep, grading feverishly in the hours before class.  Sometimes, I miss my mark and end up returning the work in 9 days instead of 7 days.  But 97% of the time, I return work in 1 week or sooner.

I suspect that this method is not original to me.  And I admit that it’s an imperfect solution to the anguish of grading.  Indeed, one might argue that procrastigrading works better on the 2-3 teaching load that I now have rather than the 4-4 teaching load that I had when I started using it.  Whatever its limitations, one thing is certain: procrastigrading will help you move through those “Five Stages of Grading” much more swiftly.  You’ll skip Denial, have limited time for Anger, be too conscious of the ticking clock for much Bargaining, too busy to be Depressed, allowing you to spend most of your time on Acceptance/Resignation, a.k.a. Getting It Done.

Images from Dave Pear’s Blog and Save Pottstown!!