Blame It on the Rain

I'm feeling restless. Yes, the end of the year careens toward me, but it's not the cause of my ennui. We've had rain ceaselessly for 5 days in the DC area, some of it torrential, some of it necessary, but most of it unwelcome. It has caused an unusually high level of introspection and career examination in me. My advanced seniors have left, and so this may also be a contributing factor, as well. Nevertheless, I wonder constantly at the opportunities there may be waiting around the corner. Specifically, would it be possible to obtain a paid leave for a year in order to participate in a classroom teacher exchange program? It is such a temptation to embark on an adventure--from the perspective of a language teacher, especially! A new language to learn, new people to meet, new foods to try (and cuisines to learn to prepare), new students to teach, new systems to learn. A life-long learner enjoys such challenges, and I think it may be restorative and at the same time challenging. I'm going to be doing research these options, and I'll post my updates!

Go Away, Sweeties...No, Wait, Stay!

I remember--however hazily--when I was a senior in high school. We attended classes till the sour, bitter end of classes. We were still students, after all. It was ostesibly our job, right? My friends and I worked hard for our final grades, laboring under the pretty frail threat of the revoking of college admission "if our grades fell." The catch was that we seniors didn't actually know way back then just how very frail this threat was, so we made sure to finish strong on our last round of finals--yes, finals, just like everyone else. In fact, we were somehow proud to be able to show our stuff, go out with the proverbial bang, and allow our parents to be proud of a report card and teacher remarks yet one last time before moving to the dorm and out of our homes forever.

The monumental, "finale" conception of senior year has lost its luster. At the school where I teach, everything which happens starting on April 1st becomes a prolonged anti-climax worthy of the most angst-fraught drivel written by early-thirties American writers who descend through the quotidienne and serve to stultify and nullify efforts to even just awake every morning--yes, Dave Eggers, I mean you. Please understand that we have some real A-plus personality types who are as eager as those "A" (and even just "A-minus") personality types of my high school days. There are eighteen-year-olds in my literature class who still read with aplomb, attention to detail and (now, muted) zeal. These are the grandest exception of recent senior classes, however. What is it about a college acceptance letter that sends them into a spiral of cynicism and banal dismissal of all intellectual pursuit? They are better than this: more capable thinkers than most who suddenly fall off a cliff and into paroxysms of "whatever" or "lol" when faced with a task of even the least challenge saddens me as an educator.

I am professionally and personally responsible for maintaining enthusiasm and involvement until the last day. I sure hope I do a good job.So many of my colleagues, though, are even capable of falling prey to the abuliac (see: "abulia," nineteenth-century Spanish literary reference) eighteen-year-old heads lolling before them like bladders on a stick. How do we keep them plugged in? Showing a film can be enlightening: reading guides, comprehension questions (especially for a foreign language film without subtitles, in my particular case), small group debates, character sketches, a diary page from the antagonist, etc., can all be great follow-ons to viewing a film. Showing 5 in three weeks, though? You should be fired. If you go out with a whimper, why shouldn't the students? If you keep teaching--and I mean teach, teach like there's no tomorrow, folks--students keep learning. It's amazing. We are powerful. We are meaningful. Our students have spent most of the last 365 days with us and love us. We love them, too. Why do we let each other down, year after year? We're bound to stumble, but get back up. If you stay on the ground, you can get trampled.
-(1/lol)

Language on the Periphery of the Academy?

Independent schools do talk about five core academic areas: science, history, mathematics, English and foreign language. Nevertheless, at least at my school, history and English are of paramount consideration. I'd like to know at what point veering away from the study of the Classics--Greek and Latin, foreign language, at their heart--happened. I suspect that it was around the end of the first World War. To what it may owe is still beyond me. In the end, what is expected of math and foreign language teachers is to assign a small battery of exercises able to be completed in approximately twenty minutes at the lower-level language acquisition course. In history and English, however, an hour of homework in each class is not uncommon. Of course these courses require reading, goes the old saw, and this takes longer. Foreign language learning is at its core reading-intensive and should "take (just as long)er," too. I cannot tell you the number of times my measly drills or practice worksheets fall to mighty English or history. Teachers essentially compete with one another for each student's finite pool of time, thinking, of course, that theirs is the more important (or even most important) discipline. This is a false and inefficient way to envision what is supposed to be a holistic curriculum, appropriate by each age group.

As I have stated in an earlier blog, independent school teachers fancy themselves masters of the house once the door closes. Even department chairs exercise relatively little authority over what is taught once the rubber hits the road. I have come to fear that 'independent' in the independent school moniker has come to mean 'lazy.' In public school systems that radically espouse the much-touted (and très en vogue) "backward design model," there is a coherence across grade levels: teachers meet as a grade level team to discuss how broad themes and specific modules (i.e., individual lessons) interweave and reinforce that year's goal, as defined by that grade level, etc. Creating coherence is hard work, head work, done by many, during and after regular school hours. If you're a teacher, you don't want this job. If you're an educator, you're thrilled by the prospects...and the possibilities for saving time and cementing once and for all learning about a singular concept. This is massive team work, openness and transparency--independent schools struggle with all three of these elements.

You may be asking, "What role can foreign language play in this kind of complementary curricular structure?" Since this is a structure in which literature written in English, history, science and math work in concert, foreign language is the perfect glue with which to bind the disciplines. No textbook in foreign language is assembled this way. They are so predictably thematic it's saddening. Honestly, if you've seen one, you've seen them all. You've taken foreign language? Your textbook was like this, too: "En el supermercado," "Las relaciones interpersonales," "Los pasatiempos," etc. Students and teachers alike tire of these fraudulent situational curricula. What we need is a course which enriches teaching centrifugal force or environmental science. A course which compliments Shakespeare with a little Lope, a little math with Mayan representational systems. What does this look like? It looks like Spanish and French and Chinese and other foreign language teachers are going back to school. Isn't this exciting? To get to be a student of Romeo and Juliet or basic trigonometry again? Foreign language teaching has always been in the forefront of innovation: we can continue the trend by working within the frustrations of the 24-hour student day, teach foreign language, and wow our colleagues when they say, "Why do my students know the vocabulary of revolutionary movements around the world?" Just smile, and say, "Spanish class is awesome, right?" They'll want more of what you got, and just maybe get them to come to some Spanish classes once in awhile and see where they can complement your teaching.

The best scenario, obviously, is a school whose leadership embraces--nay, exhorts--this kind of interplay among its teachers and complementary teaching tactics. We just have to be a little less "independent," a little less "lazy," and a lot more team-minded.

Loss and Villainy

Today, students and I spoke only in passing about Osama bin Laden's elimination by U.S. secret forces. I say, "in passing" mostly because I myself am not sure how to feel, and I rarely like to enter a conversation with students without having at least an idea of how I'd like to frame my thoughts, opinions. I've been wondering about it all day. What's my problem? Shouldn't I be ecstatic? It was partly 9/11 that sparked my panic attacks starting at the end of September 2001. The guy who was the detonator of those attacks--those in NYC and those in my neural pathways--was dead, his DNA swiped and body unceremoniously dumped in the sea.

By what means can we communicate to our children that bin Laden deserved what he got, and yet convey the sense of sadness and bare necessity with which I hope his assassination was carried out. I'm not trying to sympathize with bin Laden. I mourned the loss of those 3,000 lives in September 11th, but to carry on a blood feud at staggering cost to the American taxpayer purse and psyche against simply the head (granted, the icon) of a nefarious terrorist organization seems like a bit of a false economy. There are over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians (though sources estimate this between 98,000 [Iraqi body count.org] and 1,033,000 [Opinion Business Research survey]), 8,800 Afghan civilians and over 7,211 dead American and coalition troops between the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. These figures combine to paint a very bloody picture of the cost of the bin Laden head hunting waged by America and her "coalition of the willing" over the last decade.

The throng of twenty-somethings chanting, singing, fingers jousting the air in jubilation in front of the White House last night brought something home to me--these kids are not so far removed from the ones I teach, so I wonder if my students react in a similar way to the news of Osama's assassination. The thought made me more than a little uneasy. There's no jubilation in the face of another's death, just like there is no joy in a televised or public execution. There may be relief, a kind of closure, sometimes just a finish, an end to waiting for the other shoe to drop. In bin Laden's case, the other shoe could've been another attack on U.S. interests here or abroad.

I hope the lesson, seen from afar, in the absence of explanation, isn't that revenge is okay. Instead, the lesson might be that doing the right thing isn't always possible. Sometimes your hand is forced to take odious actions like killing. It isn't pretty, we don't like to do it. It should always be avoided if possible, and you should always feel remorse for doing something bad. We must temper our joy at Osama's death--after all, it is just relief writ large, and not intended to inflame anyone's sensibilities. If I sigh because I am relieved, and along with it I exhale a nervous laugh, don't mistake it for elation or joy.