Taking Kids to Spain

Students need to be in the zone

Spilling in reds, oranges, and blues, the Spanish sun splashes graffiti on the medieval flagstones. They stand there, the children, in their Nikes and Adidas, Uggs and slip-ons. Looking up, their eyes try to adjust to the unforgiving contrasts of light and dark.

“These vaults, the crotch vaulting- look at it, amazing- are the work of unknown craftsman from the 14 and 1500's...” The voice of our guide, Salome, echoes into nothingness, quickly replaced by the muffled chatter of the students. “You are standing in a place that represented the place between heaven and earth for the people of this town. Hundreds of years ago, if you'd been a peasant, you would have been in awe.”

The high school kids appear divided on this, in classic adolescent fashion. Some are bored and tired, barely aware of where they are. Others are fighting the ennui, trying to make sense of any of it. And then others: transfixed, mouth agape, eyes filled with wonder.

I make eye contact with one of them, a boy named Nick. It's been a long trip from NY to Spain and we've been here for days. I raise my eyebrows with a “what do you think?” expression. He looks at me and says, “Wow, Mr. Kleba, I had no idea. It's incredible. How did they do all this?”

The right response to him is, of course, "How do YOU think they got those stones up there, dude?" The ensuing conversation would be lovely and productive.  But I pause.

I look back up to the towering heights of the stone arches, questions of my own echoing in my head. Nick's reaction is the holy grail in education, the sublime moment. Normally at school, he's distracted and out of it, watching the clock. I've had him in class. But right now, he is wide open, ready to learn, thrilled by the idea of understanding more. He's prime meat.  In the cool dark of this cathedral, he is so bloody teachable. At this moment, he could learn just about anything.

And I ask myself: how did he get to this moment of wonder? What series of events led to this kid's specific experience? Why is he in the zone while others are not?

The Zone

Getting a person to the place where she is willing to learn is the single most important job of a teacher. Sure, we've got to keep the buggers in their seats, patrol them for petty crimes, and drag them through mazes of mandated tests, forms, and procedures. But, mostly, it's about getting them into the zone.

The best teacher you ever had-- think about him or her for a moment-- was a master at getting you in the zone. You never liked math until you had Ms. Murphy. Social studies made no sense until Mr. Psota breathed life into it. Chemistry was an inscrutable cloud until Mr. Ferris helped you pilot it.

In the zone, you found yourself more interested in learning. You let your wonder free. You forgot about the burdens of everything and became engaged in the matter at hand. You suddenly cared about how or why something worked.

Nick got in the zone because a bunch of teachers, working outside of the typical parameters, did a lot of stuff to help get him there.

1. TRAVEL. He had to leave the world of comfort and stability back home. Getting out of the unfamiliar was required. Strange language, strange food, strange bed-- all of it had an impact.
2. INVESTMENT. He needed to be invested in the trouble of it all-- paying a lot money to travel helped with that, but so did the work of packing and traveling he put in.  
3. GREAT MATERIAL. He had to be confronted with something worth learning, something bigger than himself. Something with undeniable value and meaning in of itself.
4. CREATIVE TEACHERS.  He needed teachers who could create and facilitate zone moments.

We only went to Spain so that Nick, and others like him, could get into the zone. The best thing we did was carefully pluck the kid out of the routine of his life and give him a way to appreciate something.

Factories Cannot Produce Experience

We are having the wrong conversations about education.  We want a more perfect education system-- and it's crazy.  We are spending too much money and time keeping kids in systems. Our education culture is stilted in its repetitive, construct-based model. We don't need better curricula-- we need better teachers. Frankly, we don't even need better testing-- we need better opportunities for the kids.  

We can't address what's not working in education by taking all the kids on field trips- that's not the point.  But creating conditions for kids to experience beautiful, inspiring, and challenging moments should be our prime focus.  And, culturally, politically, and economically, we aren't even talking about how to do it.  

Can we afford to take kids to Spain?  No, definitely not in this economy.  But can we afford not to?

The Art of Triage

Winning doesn't mean not losing

I used to love watching M*A*S*H*. As a kid I'd sit on the brown, short pile rug in our TV room, back against the sofa, watching reruns. Hawkeye and Trapper, elbows deep in surgery, would make jokes about hot nurses, stupid generals, or bootleg martinis-- whatever really-- and, by the end of the show, make some sincere point about how awful war is. They were flawed but honorable people, stuck in a terrible situation and with awfully limited resources, trying to keep people alive.

My favorite thing about the show was how the members of the 4077 stayed human despite how bad things got. You had to laugh to keep from crying.

I learned a word watching that show: triage. In the world of MASH, it meant that some people might have to lose a kidney or a leg in order to live. It also meant that some people wouldn't die while others would. Everything would hang from the surgeon's choices based on impossibly limited options.

Triage is built on a deficiency model. What DON'T I have? What CAN'T I do? People working within it must make the most of what is available. There is one bottom line. Survival.

It's the model at work in most of our public schools.

Surviving, not thriving

We live in a country where it somehow makes political and economic sense to have a high pressure, under-resourced school system. Teachers work in a constant deficiency model, focusing on boundaries instead of goals. Instead of focusing on growing fantastic students, pushing them to heights not yet known, we are busy with saving academically sick and dying students.

When you are a public school teacher, picking what and how you teach has almost nothing to do with what you WANT to do. It's all about what you CAN do given your many immutable limitations. It's not “no child left behind.” It's more “try to screw the children over as equally as possible.” No matter how much I want to like it, there's no “race to the top.” It's only “make sure you're not stuck at the bottom.”

Our slumping education system is preoccupied with not falling apart. We are playing like a team trying not to lose by too many points. We aren't teaching like champions; we are sawing off limbs.

The Art of Triage. It's the construct of war refugees, natural disaster victims, battlefront surgeons, and public school teachers.  

The next time someone tries to tell you that we need to spend less on education, don't argue.  Just tell them about triage.

I think I'm going to make myself a martini. Do we have any olives laying around, Hawkeye?
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Casey Anthony and Atticus Finch

WWAFD? (What Would Atticus Finch Do?)

A pretty mommy, a dead girl, and a lawyer from Alabama

Yesterday, on television, I heard a person say that the American public was divided in three groups:

1.  Those who think Casey Anthony is a child-murdering psycho who was unfairly found not-guilty.

2.  Those who think there wasn't enough proof to convict her, despite her likely contribution to her daughter's demise.

3.  Those who scratch their heads and say “who the hell is Casey Anthony?”

Almost everyone who is saying anything in the media, from TV to facebook, is in group 1. It's frankly hard to find anyone who thinks that Ms. Anthony is innocent.

The Casey Anthony trial has achieved a sort of unique “media gravity” over these past couple of weeks. In a media culture where number of hits drives the value of any story, this trial has gone viral in a way we haven't seen in years. And no wonder: the facts of the case are strange and horrific. They are also wildly compelling. I watched the closing arguments at my mother's house, cleaning up after a picnic.

Comparisons to the OJ Simpson trial are not surprising-- nor are they unwarranted. While the controversial element of race played no direct part, some of the American media's other favorite topics did. Gender. Beauty. Youth. Family disfunction. A crime against a little girl.

The public has largely convicted Casey Anthony-- and the fact that the jury found otherwise has become it's own media story. People are, apparently, really angry and dismayed. I've been interested in the widely reported “outrage” at the verdict.

It all seems so familiar to me-- but not because of the parallels to the OJ Simpson trial. The idea that so many people would be so upset by a jury verdict that didn't “make sense” to them got me thinking about a book that, despite its hallowed place in American public schools, seems so at odds with how people are reacting to this trial.

Look, I don't know for sure if Ms. Anthony killed her daughter.  She certainly doesn't look very innocent to me.  But I don't know for sure-- and neither do you.  And that's point.

A Roman Carnival

As an English teacher, I can't help but love certain books that I've taught. Talk to enough of us and you'll find that teachers often describe the “honor” of teaching certain concepts, skill, or ideas. It's a part of the gig that many teachers see as the real duty of a teacher. We serve the kids, sure-- but we also serve the very “stuff” that we are tasked with instructing.

I loved teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. As a first year, I got to teach my first pupils about Atticus Finch, Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson. I marveled that I got to be the guy who introduced students to one of the best texts in American history, a text so richly drawn and so wildly significant that the mere mention of Atticus' name inspires reverential sighs from people of all stripes.

I remember catching a janitor at my school surreptitiously reading the dust jacket after school. He peered over at me and said, “I love this book. This is the only thing I read in high school.” He sighed and, before returning to emptying the trash cans in the room, added, “Atticus Finch is a cool dude.”

It's true. Atticus is cool. And the basic concept of the text, that our flawed and fragile trial system is the last and most elegant line of defense against mob rule and prejudiced thinking, rings my bell these days as I watch this Anthony trial hoopla.

So, as we shake our fists at flickering flat screens across the country, bemoaning the end of justice, turning on porch lights to honor a little girl whose death will, sadly, never be understood, let's find some context.   Take a look at the text of Harper Lee's incandescent novel about the bitter and difficult road to justice by trial, in all of its harsh reality and inspiring glory.

And, after reading these quotes, I'll bet you'll want to read Mockingbird again. Spread the word, baby.

Chapter 11

"Atticus, you must be wrong...."

"How's that?"

"Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong...."

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

Chapter 16

“You goin' to court this morning, Miss Maudie?" asked Jem. […]

"I am not. 't's morbid, watching a poor devil on trial for his life. Look at all those folks, it's like a Roman carnival."

"They hafta try him in public, Miss Maudie," I said. "Wouldn't be right if they didn't."

"I'm quite aware of that," she said. "Just because it's public, I don't have to go, do I?"

Chapter 20

Atticus went on. "But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal – there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. […] Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal...

"I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system – that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty."

Chapter 25

How could this be so, I wondered, as I read Mr. Underwood's editorial. Senseless killing – Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openly and convicted by twelve good men and true; [Atticus] had fought for him all the way. Then Mr. Underwood's meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

Detachment

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Movie review of the world premiere of "Detachment" at the TriBeCa Film Festival.

The truth about high school is that it's worse than you remember it.

Watching Tony Kaye's enthralling “Detachment,” you can't help comparing your high school to the one on screen. You remember the terrible teachers you had, the sterile hallways, the asinine classmates, and the absurd assignments. You can remember the “weight that presses on everyone” as Mr. Henry Barthes, played by Adrien Brody, tells his class.

“If you can just hang on, everything will be alright.” Mr. Barthes is that hero teacher that we love tell stories about. He's the Christ, the Buddha. He's meant to save us from ourselves.

The problem? Mr. Barthes is a great teacher because he has no life outside of teaching. Like countless other mythologized teachers, Barthes is a detached island to himself, without spouse, children, or personal life.  He's a lonely dude.

As a public school teacher sitting in the audience at the world premiere last night in Tribeca, I have mixed feelings about telling you that Tony Kaye has masterfully succeeded in capturing public school in a macabre and beautiful chalkboard sketch. His lush, mannerist portrait brings a gorgeous but searing light to the lonely reality of the teaching profession. Mr. Kaye's “Detachment” presents school the way so many of us on the inside see it: a windswept wasteland scourged of its humanity by a culture that burdens its underfunded and unfairly censured teachers with rearing, policing, and institutionalizing our children.

I hate to say it: public school really is this bad. The few great teachers that our system manages to attract are barely hanging on from year to year, knocked senseless by a society that demands way too much from them.

Adrien Brody is riveting as a seemingly serene but deeply damaged substitute teacher.  His sloping eyebrows, sometimes treacly or overwrought in other performances, here convey an-inch-from-the-cliff hopelessness without ever becoming a mask.  Mr. Brody's Henry Barthes is sweetly but searingly honest with his students as he sadly skulks the halls of his school.  Barthes is also furious enough to throw desks in his classroom and scream at a late night nurse at his grandfather's assisted care facility. In close-up, documentary-style interviews, Mr. Brody's eyes flash like lightning one moment and then become as dull as concrete the next, daring us to try to understand how one can care so much and so little. It's a career performance.

Barthes' determination to be disconnected keeps him the perennial substitute-- in the classroom and in his personal life. Barthes tends to his grandfather but finds more than enough time to help out two lost girls, a young prostitute and an overweight loner. Despite his earnest efforts, almost none of it works out well. The complicating plot lines, all involving family surrogacy around Barthes, serve the notion that teachers must be dispassionate and alone in order to perform their jobs. The story survives its few yet regrettable school cliches by sticking to this thesis.

Despite the fact that the number of big names threatens to make the movie look like a cameo-fest (Lucy Liu?  Christina Hendricks?  Marcia Gay Harden? Blythe Danner?  James Caan?  Really?), the ensemble gels together surprisingly well.  After all, weren't your teachers an impossible cast of characters?  The performances are just fine, largely, but two are particularly successful. While Mr. Caan's grinning jester provides a refreshingly necessary gallows' humor in some of the film's darkest moments, it's Ms. Liu's imploding truth-teller that lends undeniable heft to the story. As a guidance counselor faced with yet another unreachable know-it-all teen, Ms. Liu's character finally breaks down, berating the student with a bleak prophecy of the child's future. “You will NOT be a model! You will forever be on a carousel, competing with 80% of the country for a minimum wage job for the rest of your life!” the guidance counselor screams uselessly at the apathetic teen.

It's grim stuff, made more grave by the undeniable ring of truth.

The ancient Greeks tell us "we suffer our way to wisdom."  By the end of the film, you'll hope that is true for most of these characters.  Somewhere on screen, between a silent hug and the opening lines to Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher,” you will find a glimmer of hope. But you have to work for it.

School, as the film has drawn it, is a Munch-esque desert where the best anyone (teachers and students) can do is survive. But the fact that Barthes, and teachers like him, won't give up-- and the fact that Mr. Kaye made this movie-- tells us that hope is alive, if not well.

This hope rests almost entirely in our lonely, detached teachers.

The Teachers of Penzance

A song for an old teacher.



Bud Stock would say things that completely stupefied us.

Slowly pacing the classroom, he would leave chasm-sized pauses in his lectures. He'd stare out the window, like a captain gazing at the sea, absently pulling on his goatee. A minute would pass.

In the beginning of the course, some of us nurtured the belief that, sometimes, Mr. Stock would forget where he was. His AP English class was like no other AP class in school: slow-paced, recursive, and marked by silences. It was weird. His voice was slow, when he used it, and his cadence was measured on a scale that we teenagers did not understand. He took pauses between readings of Thoreau or Auden, O'Connor or Dickinson, stand like a statue at the bank of window panes, and say something that moved the ground.

“It's not really yours until you give it away.” He'd turn to us and ask “Or not. What do you think?”

It was Mr. Stock's mastery. He challenged our ideas and how we constructed them through choice texts, great pauses, and few words. We wanted to think like Mr. Stock. We wanted to answer his questions, read the pieces he gave us, and, well, be smart.

Were we tested? Sure. We had to participate in discussions, write essays, proofread each other, diagram sentences on the board, and read aloud. He famously hated talking about grades- and, yet, he graded us. Mr. Stock prepared us for the AP and SAT- and, yet, he rarely talked about either test. We were all evaluated using many nuanced, less quantifiable methods.

Mr. Stock was an artist and a technician. He served the quantifiable through qualitative measures.

Nonetheless, the million dollar question is (put in a big ol' pause here and stare out the window for a moment): would a formal evaluation of Mr. Stock show him to be a 'good teacher?'

Given the gravity of the decisions we have to make about education, nationally, it's actually a billion dollar question.

My answer: hell yes!

Mr. Stock was an artist and a technician. Like a good surgeon, attorney, or architect, he served the quantifiable through qualitative measures. He was well read. He knew his tests and his techniques. He knew his students. He knew that inspiration coupled with discipline made students sing.

Mr. Stock was the very model of a modern Major-General. Of teachers.

Everyone likes a pirate, sure. They look so cool.  But when the sea gets rough, and stuff gets bad, you don't care about cool.  What you want is a Major-General, a genius who has mastered information: animal, vegetable and mineral.

The challenge, of course, is to make a system that can attract, recognize, develop, evaluate, and reward a teacher like Mr. Stock.  A system suited to developing great artisans of teaching, broader than standardized lesson plans and byzantine testing systems.

'Cause it ain't what we got now. What we've got now is too many pirate kings singing songs of tax cuts, standardized tests, and teacher evaluations.

Here's to Bud Stock:  a navigator, a leader, an artist, a technician, and a model.  The very model.  Thanks, man.

NEXT EDUCATION BLOG:  my proposed system of improved teacher evaluation.  Tenure is dead!  Long live tenure!