Bible as literature, and independent reading programs

Today after Meeting, Sunday school addressed Bible interpretation. We watched a short ESR video about how the Bible should come with a warning label: Use with caution.

I didn't really listen to the video, I was writing down service project ideas for the youth (including the construction of bar tables for fellowship hour. It's awkward to have a good conversation with someone trying to hold a cup of coffee, and a paper plate full of food, which you can't eat, because your other hand is holding coffee.)

During our small group discussion, Jim brought up a point about Biblical interpretation I appreciated. He said that the way we use language influences the way we think of people. So when we say that God is "He," we start to think of men as being higher and more godly. When we refer to God as "King," we start to see kings as higher and more godly.

During colonization of Africa, Jim pointed out, this conflation between God and King served European monarchs very well, as the missionaries taught the colonized people their religion, and the connection between the King who is God and the King who is in France or Britain, was established.

The monarchs made it their goal to turn the tribal leaders into petty despots, whereas before the imposition of colonial rule the tribal chiefs had functioned more as Quaker clerks, discerning the will of the group based on a deep and spiritual awareness of the needs and desires of those making up the governed body. Insert foreign King and outside monetary incentives, and those capable leaders are rendered petty despots.

The Bible implies that Kings are Godly, in the English translation.

Just now I said, "The next time students read". I might have said "The next time I teach Things Fall Apart," but based on the book I'm reading right now, about how to encourage students to be life-long learners, I might never teach that great novel again, or any other great novel for that matter.

I have written already about my current reading of The Book Whisperer, but today I'm more excited about it than I have ever been. The chapter I just read discussed the problems of the whole-class novel. I am well aware of these, but I have never really given credence to my hesitations because reading novels together as a class just seems like the obvious thing to do - everyone does it in high school English classes.

Everyone, that is except Donalyn Miller and the other teachers she's won to her side.

When reading all-class novels, the good readers resent the slow pace. The slow readers resent the difficulty and the need to read aloud in front of their peers. Making sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of comprehension is a time consuming process. Reading during class takes up a lot of time. Assigning reading to do at home is problematic because there will always be students who don't read at home, and thus are behind in class. These will likely be the students who need the most help anyway.

Thus far I have resisted Miller's arguments against reading literature together as a class because I think there is so much good that comes from discussing the issues raised in a text as a class - the kinds of themes and ideas that students are not able to pull out of literature on their own, but are definitely capable of seeing once it's pointed out, and enjoy discussing.

Miller addressed this concern with one small sentence, which had not fully occured to me. Used short stories and poetry, images and film to explore themes and topics together, then ask students how they connect with the independent reading books they are reading. If students can transfer the skills learned in a discussion about a short story to the books they are reading on their own, that's all the proof you need of comprehension.

I am already imagining my tenth graders, and how relieved many of the able readers would be if we could just stop reading things together and get down to reading what they wanted to read. How much would their vocabularies and background knowledge on various things increase?

Also, I am thrilled at the idea of getting to focus on short stories, poetry and nonfiction together, and even film! Ah! I can't wait to have my own classroom.

Signs from God that help in making decisions

These are the kinds of signs I dream of, the ones that help in making decisions. Lately I've been tempted to walk up to Eden Grace's house, and rap on the door and say, "OK, time to tell me where I'm headed next." It was she who, in 2014, introduced me to Joyce Ajlouni, my first contact at the Ramallah Friends School. It was she who, in February 2016, came to Palestine and told me about Earlham's MAT program. So where to now, Eden?

I've been asking God too, and I struggle all the time with the idea that God reveals things on his timing. I want to know where I'm going to be next year, right now.

Today I got a beautiful metaphorical reminder that God's timing isn't designed to frustrate me, it's designed to make sure I don't jump the gun with my own actions, or stay too long in one situation which is not the right one.

It was a long few days in the 9th and 10th grade classrooms. I finished on Friday afternoon having worked frantically through lunch with several students who were a) irate that their grades for their final Macbeth essays were so low and wanted to edit and resubmit and b) trying to download video portions of their presentations for the afternoon classes. Just before fifth period I scarfed my lentil soup, cold, while standing in front of the computer.

After school I organized all the presentation rubrics from the afternoon's classes, and let the feeling of Friday wash over me. It was not a particularly calming feeling this week, given that we're starting two new units next week, both of which I have yet to plan. I felt agitated. It was 65 degrees and I wanted to go running, but the western sky was ominous and the hourly forecast promised scattered thunder storms.

I decided to go out anyway. It was already raining when I jumped off the porch, but it wasn't raining hard. After a few minutes when my body warmed up, it was perfect to have the light rain as a perpetual shower. There were very few cars on the road, and no runners on the footpath.

It was getting dark fast, not just because it was 5:45, but because the clouds were now really moving in. I contemplated whether to shorten the route. It was such a pleasant run. I thought I probably should, since as I approached the fork that would take me home early, lightning brightened the sky three times.

Just as I approached the foot of the stairs and was about the forego them and keep going, a fork of lightning jabbed the sky and thunder sounded shortly afterward. I said aloud, "OK!" and went up the stairs to the shortcut home.

The rest of the way home was fairly peaceful, but not 30 seconds after I got onto the porch, the lightning became at least four times as frequent, and the rain began falling in torrents.

That lightning was God, telling me right at the moment of necessary action, "Turn here". I didn't get a warning before then, because I was still enjoying the run, and it was still OK to be running. When God was ready for me to redirect my energy, for my own best interest, he let me know with a gesture I couldn't ignore.

That's the way it's going to be with where I end up teaching next year. I really don't need to know right now where I'm going to be. I'm still enjoying the "run" where I am now. And this is still the right place for me. God will let me know when to take a sharp turn up the stairs when it's time for me to actually jump.

A poem that is saving arachnid lives

I have two spiders living in my apartment, entirely because of a poem I read at Meeting (it was printed on the cover of the bulletin) last week: 

Allowables
- Nikki Giovanni

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Not even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

A legitimacy crisis for the American Founding Myth

I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Its thesis is essentially that success is not something that springs from one person's drive, grit, determination and intelligence (and certainly not from her genius). All those things are important, and play a role, but there are arbitrary circumstances and a colossal amount of luck involved in the most famous "success" stories of our era, and even the past eras. 

Gladwell is taking a whack at the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, anyone can make it" myth upon which the American Dream relies. Even though I agree with everything he's saying, and have had an understanding for a long time of the incomplete recipe for success we like to hold up as an example (mostly because of my program of study for economics at Utah) it still makes me vaguely uncomfortable to listen to his book, because it is so destabilizing to think about America without this idea that we can all make it through hard work.

This weekend I read an article in the New Yorker about how the super rich are preparing for some kind of DoomsDay. One of the wealthy Silicon Valley titans who has a basement full of food and shotguns is quoted as saying “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos.” 

Our healthy founding myth seems to be fraying. Gladwell uses the example of a Jewish law student who, after attending a good high school in New York, could have gone to City University for free, but chose to spend $450 to go to Michigan State, and took the money he'd earned over the summer and hitch hiked to ANn Arbor to start school. He got a job at a factory on the side to pay for expenses.

It was possible, heck, even easy, to be in control of your own path in the 70's for this man, socially marginalized as he was. That is so different from what my students face today in terms of the availability of free higher education and the promise of jobs to help them through school, and then to pay them after school. 

The Matthew Effect

On Friday night, I remembered at 9:56 that I had an interlibrary loan book that had arrived for me at Earlham's library. I called the switchboard while frantically pulling out my computer to see when the library closes on Fridays. As someone answered, I read: 10 pm. I asked to be put through to the library, and a calm student voice answered, "Lily Library, how can I help?"

This friendly voice said it would wait for me until I got there, and I took off running across Earlham's unseasonably warm campus (48 degrees) to get The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child, recommended to me by a teacher friend.

Author Donalyn Miller argues in favor of an independent reading program in English Language Arts classes in this book. She proposes a workshop model for a classroom, in which a teacher is a master and students learn tricks of the trade. 

In the classroom, the trade is reading and the teacher is the most literate person in the room, charged with teaching children how to make sense of whatever they read, long after they've left the classroom. The goal is to create readers; this is the only goal, as far as Miller is concerned. '

Miller refers fairly early on to a phenomenon at many schools. Remedial reading classrooms read less and less, while the more proficient readers read more and more. Those who are good at reading become better, and those who struggle keep struggling, never making significant strides, and certainly never developing a love of reading on their own. She links this to the Matthew Effect, a phenomenon described in the gospel of Matthew thus:

Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.

She argues in favor of having all students pick books at the beginning of the year and that a significant chunk of class time, between 15 and 30 minutes (on her 90 minute block schedule) be dedicated to independent reading each day. 

I have not finished the book so I don't know what her suggestions are for engaging students around a single text in a class that also has an independent reading program. I love the idea of independent reading, and absolutely am compelled by her argument that it builds students' desire to read after they leave the classroom, but I also want to read things together, to have a common source for discussion and thinking about specific, more challenging ideas that would certainly not occur to the students were they only reading their own young adult fiction, or whatever they chose to be reading.

I had never heard of the Matthew Effect before. I have no idea what is being discussed in that part of the Bible, and as we were cautioned last week at Meeting, "Context is everything" when reading a Bible verse, so I'll withhold judgment on what seems a very unjust principle in that verse. 

Apparently that's not the only verse which supports the Matthew Effect. 

Later in the day I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and heard this verse: 

For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. (Matthew 25:29)

Sounds familiar. 

Gladwell is making a similar point to Miller, but speaking about success more broadly. Those who have certain conditions at birth and during childhood, are exponentially more likely to succeed, regardless of their merit or their inherent talent. This is not surprising to those people who know that where you were born, and how educated your parents are, matters, but his examples are no less compelling. 

Earlier in the day I had been speaking to a mother and teacher about the level of vocabulary among my students in Richmond. They are unfamiliar with far more words in English than my students in Ramallah were, even though those were ESL students. I told my friend yesterday that the difference seems to be a) how much they read and b) the education level of their parents. 

Gladwell's example confirm my suspicions. The people who do well are those whose parents were highly involved in their development as learners, and importantly, as actors. I do not mean actors in the theater sense, I mean people who exercise agency. Higher class parents teach their children how to advocate for themselves, how to ask for what they want, and how to question people in authority. 

Lower class parents allow their children to develop naturally and mostly independently. The research Gladwell cites shows that lower class children grow up being well-behaved, creative and collaborative, but they don't know how to speak up as well. They do not develop a necessary sense of entitlement. 

Reflecting on my own youth I see what solid training I got in advocacy for myself. My mother taught me how to assert myself from a very early age, to ask for what I need, and to work with people in a way that helps me get it while building a relationship with them. Those are the skills that allow people to be successful. How can I teach that in my class?

OK I've strayed significantly from developing independent readers to fostering a sense of entitlement in students. I wonder if the classroom can be a place for learning both? I'm not sure. It seems it would be difficult to train assertiveness in the classroom successfully if it were not modelled and appreciated at home too. 

Mere Christianity: The natural self

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis has a lot to say about the natural self. He says that what reveals our true selves is the way we react to situations before we have time to organize ourselves. How do I respond to something unpleasant, or inconvenient to me, if I don't have time to arrange my face and settle my own emotions on the matter? This reaction, this unfiltered reaction, is the real us. 

For me this is a rather frightful idea, since I work pretty hard to curate my responses to things that are inconvenient or unpleasant to me. I can tolerate most of them, but it takes me a moment to figure out how to arrange my reaction. When I am truly caught off guard, I'm afraid I don't respond very charitably. My knee jerks pretty violently. 

In this weekend's listening to the book on audio, two points about the self have come up which I think are interesting. 

The first is the idea that most of us take religion or Christianity as a way to control this natural self of ours - some sort of straight jacket we can put on our natural selves to tame its impulses. "I go to church in order to fill me with charity and love towards others, so that during the week I can respond with love to my sister or brother." That sort of understanding of religion's role. 

Lewis says that this is the wrong way to go about it. We should not consider how Christianity adjusts us in order to make us better. It positively transforms us into different beings. 

Here is how he puts it: 

Christ says "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours."

I nearly laughed when I heard the line "I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it." Lewis calls Christianity both harder and easier than the version of religion where we try to maintain our old selves while allowing Christ to torment us about our wrongs, and deny us the things we desire. This is so frank! And it provides a strange sense of relief - my old self is irrelevant to the new project! Now, allowing yourself to be killed seems hard. Indeed, for me, this is the sticking point of Christianity. I do not want to give myself up to God. I like to be in control, and I'm afraid of what he will do with me if I actually give myself over in the complete sense described above. 

Another part of the book is helpful here, however. Lewis says that the "self" we are keen to maintain is not truly as much our original creation as we like to think. We are created by society. 

Here is how he puts it:

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call "My wishes" become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 

... 

Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call "me" can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

I guess I agree. The things that I don't want to relinquish about me - my tastes, the way I look and talk and walk and work and relate to others - are all results of things outside of me. I have capitulated to their control without much thought. I have already given myself over, essentially, to the ideals that govern my daily life and my long term ambitions. Do I feel a sense of control over these? Yes. I do feel as though at least among these, I have free will to choose. If I saw an ambition I didn't like, I would steer clear of it. But that is not even true. I find myself captive of certain ideals and beliefs which I would rather dispense with. But I can't. 

At the end of the book, which I reached today, Lewis mentions the way we can tell when we are in the presence of people who seem to have a real sense of the divine. They are different. Their faces and countenances are different. They have a peace which others don't; which we don't. I am grateful to know some people like this. They have all given themselves over to something larger than themselves, and are not concerned with the small machinations which provoke my anxieties. 

I am glad for their example, and I hope to catch what they have!

Teacher shortages in California

There is a website called edjoin.org where prospective teachers can see job postings for school districts. I've looked at different districts in California. This is the page which greets searchers: 

Look at the number of postings in CA versus the other states! It's crazy! There are 1,000 school districts in CA. That's a lot of teacher positions to fill, and apparently it's getting harder each year. 

The city latest on my list has been Chico, where at least some members of the school administration are willing to hire as many people as there are open positions, thanks to waves of retirements expected to deplete teacher ranks in the next few years. 

I don't know what schools are going to do. Even Richmond High School is strapped for hiring - there just aren't teachers coming out of the credential programs. My program at Earlham has been in existence for fifteen years. Cohort 7 was 25 students. Mine (cohort 15) is 10 students. And none of us is getting certified in math. 

Math teachers, and science, are always what the newspaper articles say are the hardest to find. I really don't know what districts are going to do. We need to reinvent the image and the pay scale for teachers to draw more highly qualified candidates into the field. This will not do for our next generations.