Teaching in the Time of Cholera

“She felt the abyss of disenchantment.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

My brain feels like soup with small chicken bones lurking behind dumplings and carrots, just waiting to splinter and choke. I worked hard for calmness, for strength, and it’s fragile. I had this intrusive, nightmarish thought while trying to sleep that my _______and ______have plans to travel to ________and _____is pregnant. What if what if what if what if what if what if what if

What if we are not going to make it?

Wait, I can’t do better than that? Apparently not.

Writing is therapeutic, yet I procrastinate to the point of sabotaging the 19+years of keeping this blog, this blog that has gone nowhere, sputtered out, out of gas, while others have monetized, gained traction, followers, fans, and my creativity chokes on the weeds of envy and slime.

Well, that got dark fast.

I will do better, I say. I will. I will write more consistently and offer something of value to folks who read this.

While I am not sure how I can encapsulate this moment — there are far more qualified scholars, journalists, and writers than I, but I am a darn good bullet list maker, so here it goes.

A Non-Exhaustive List of the Things That Are in Constant Rotation In My Brain:

  • Since #gamergate hit in 2014, a targeted attack against Anita Sarkeesian and other women in the gaming field, boys have been fed a steady diet of trolling lessons, toxicity, and indoctrination.
  • Boys were and are under a barrage of toxic messages from men: men who seem wealthy, abuse and objectify women, and break the law and never seem to pay or have a consequence. Now I get boys mentioning Jordan P, Andrew T, and others. They defended PewwwwdEEEE Pi years ago, too. They showed students images of Hitler and “trains” and laughed.
  • We’re up to four women (and of course it’s more) in our nation who have been murdered for the act of losing a pregnancy. This particular nightmare swims in my brain– the idea that they are in a hospital parking lot, and inches away from care, and no one helps them. Not one brave medical staff goes out to HELP THEM.
  • And I can’t warn students and their families because teachers have been censored.*

*So, let’s talk about this.

Long story short, I had to talk with admin about some recent…events. It’s okay, everything is fine, and it did shore up my resolve to continue to teach critical thinking skills. And if anyone thinks this is simple, easy, or engaging in this day and time of misinformation and disinformation, that is the very air we breathe, the Bird-Boxing of us all, it is not. It’s not healthy, it’s heartbreaking, and it doesn’t matter. I have to do this. I have to do it so carefully, cautiously, and with huge amounts of wisdom and grace that some days I just don’t have. I don’t trust many adults now. I don’t trust them with their own children. And I have to get over that, now. Like, right now. Reflecting on what it means to trust means to let go of control. It is not my job or purpose to control or coerce. In actuality, I’ve never been one to try to control others — seriously. I believe in respect, self-respect, reciprocity, and love. And that my internal dialogue says is I am deeply grieving — we all are. Even if some don’t realize it yet because they think they “won.”

But even a forest fire generates new growth. I can plant seeds and hope for a new forest.

Some seeds:

https://www.comm.pitt.edu/argument-claims-reasons-evidence

Next post will be more ‘seeds’ of critical thinking ideas.

Requiescat in Pace: eulogizing our reading lives

Burying authors we loved.

I have not drawn any conclusions and do not want to engage in a debate, good faith or otherwise, about this topic of problematic authors. I would wager there isn’t one of us who hasn’t had to wrestle with our better or lesser angels regarding our “heroes.”

Grief is a complex emotion.

And when it comes to art and the artist, grief can look like apologies or giving grace so we, the audience, consumers, or appreciators of the art, can move through it with a recycled conscious.

Edgar Allan Poe was a hot mess. There are many well-done and crafted documentaries about him, and since I am a fan-girl adjacent to his works, I’ve watched most of them. I’m sharing this one because it illustrates clearly the mystery of his death. (And, when I tell students he married his 13-year-old cousin, the reaction is immediate, “Ewww!”

Not bad, not bad…

Poe died on October 7, 1849. I ‘celebrated’ this by instructing students in close reading and discussions about “The Cask of Amontillado.” Yes, a story with one of the most incorrigible ‘unreliable narrators’ and the unfortunate Fortunato. I adore Poe’s works, and I have made it very clear to my students that I didn’t pop out of the reader’s box knowing how to understand his prose. It’s taken me years of study, re-reading, researching, and discussing. In fact, I shared with them I spent the better part of hour trying to understand fully what this quote means:

 I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

Edgar Allan Poe

(By the way, dear reader, if you’re this far into this post, congratulations. You’ve entered my procrasti-writing zone where I am anxious about getting to the point.)

(And Montresor may have failed in his purpose of letting Fortunato know what he did wrong.) If Poe had been a modern writer, he would have been ridiculed, censored, and mocked on every social media platform. Marrying a child cousin is a big ick. And I still love his writing and works. I am not an expert but simply a dilettante. His works are so fun to teach because students can discover the throughlines of his thematic messages relatively easily, even if the language is archaic. They get it.

And they also used to get another author whose works I shared frequently, and I don’t have to translate (much) to modern English: Neil Gaiman.

And I am mourning him.

Yes, I believe what he did to harm women was egregious. I struggle to bring myself to read the reports. It seems he, like so many other men in positions of privilege, power, and opportunity, used his position to sexually harm women.

I have loved his writing for decades, and I have recommended his books. I’ve seen him speak two times, and his soft British voice lulls me to a comforting sleep. American Gods brought the epitome of mythology, religion, new world orders, and anthropomorphic gods to life. Coraline brought monstrous mothers with button eyes that we all face. Good Omens not only gave me a delightful view of angels and devils, co-written with the incomparable Terry Pratchett, but then an amazing series to watch, which is magnificent. But now all those people: the actors, writers, producers, set designers, etc., are out of a job. And for years, I used The Graveyard Book as a mentor text for one of the best first sentences in a novel, ever:

There is a short story I used to use occasionally because it was a great mentor text for word choice and writer’s craft, “Chivalry.”

“Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.”
― Neil Gaiman, Chivalry

When we need to speak of authors in the past tense, to go from “love” to “loved,” we share a piece of ourselves that is dead, hurt, and aching. The whimsical feelings of epic fantasy and immersion have grave dirt and cemetery stones weighing our memories down, desecrating and defiling them.

I, as a reader, can never know the pain, shame, and horror the women he harmed know.

And this is just a thought exploration: JKR calls for death and harm to thousands of people. She defiled the Harry franchise for millions of us. Nazis did this, too. She is a TERF fascist. And there are dozens of authors who destroyed their reputation and the value of their literary skill with harmful acts: some toward their own children (Munro), some with harm similar to Gaiman (Alexie), and so many others. This is not their funeral, though, this eulogy is for Gaiman. And I don’t even want to get into Mists of Avalon.

I am going to consider this benediction from the American Library Association, however, when trying to reconcile my own reading experiences with the authors.

This one hurts, Neil. Your authorial death hurts. I’m sure in 50, 100, 150 years if students read your works and are just as confused as mine are when they read Poe and Shakespeare, they will come to love your stories as I did, and because of the passing of time, they can disregard your human flaws. For now, you’re mentally chained up behind a wall, with a motley crown echoing jingling bells in memory.

Footnotes:

Yes, I spent five minutes relearning how to do proper quotation marks.

Like Texas…

This is a meme I saw on a fellow educator’s FB page: I added the “I wish Magats…” line. I responded to his post with something like, “I wish Texas were safe for everyone.” He responded, “It’s pretty safe.”

Now, he and his family recently moved from the PNW to Texas. I only know him from mutuals, and we have a parasocial relationship. I do not know his political leanings. Most encounters have been positive, except for the time I thought he would enjoy What We Talk about When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon, but instead I got a copied review that was paragraphs-long by a man saying how the book was wrong, and he wouldn’t read it because of what a male reviewer wrote, and most of what the male reviewer wrote was, in fact, wrong, but then one of his buddies jumped in with one of the most fat-phobic and misogynistic comments, so the boys had a good laugh.

That was a long way around to say, “Ew.”

I am learning, sometimes the hard way, that my opinions and experiences have no merit or value to many others. When a 15-year-old girl screams at me that I’m using “appeal to authority” because she just learned this logical fallacy in her sophomore English class when I was sharing a life experience, then yes, I am beginning to build those hard-shell layers that 1. there is no safe place 2. my value is small and limited. And I’ll just write a blog post.

So…Texas.

I was born in Texas. My dad was born in Texas. My mom is from that area and lives there. So do my two sisters and their families. And aunts, uncles, cousins, and their families. My new daughter-in-law has relatives there. And guess what?

I will never, ever live there again. I fear for the families there, for the men, women, and children who want to live violence-free, with reproductive health available, medical attention when needed, and be able to go to school, shop, places of worship, public facilities without someone denying them life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

Even my conservative Methodist grandfather said of Ann Richards that she was a “pretty smart gal.”

The MAGAts, Libertarians, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Ted Cruz, have been harming citizens of Texas for decades, not even touching on the generational, white supremacist trauma of Texas. Juneteenth is a celebration based on power, strength, and hope because a white slave owner LIED to his enslaved people.

These particular brands of Christo-Nationalism* (and reminder: this has NOTHING to do with Christianity or faith, just like Southern Democrats have NOTHING to do with freeing enslaved peoples)

If my acquaintance believes this is what makes “Texas pretty safe,” it terrifies me.

It’s heartbreaking when I see current adults buying into all of this. All of this violence, generational trauma, and harm. I will never understand it; like my Texas roots, it’s lost to me. And while I don’t pray, I do vote. And I try to educate. I’ve lived in about nine different states and one other country, and what is true about Texas is it does get into your soul.

And when you’re being mean to me, this is who you’re being mean to:

*This article does a poor job of explaining it, and comforts white supremacy: “Christian nationalists do not reject the First Amendment and do not advocate for theocracy, but they do believe that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in the public square. The term “Christian nationalism,” is relatively new, and its advocates generally do not use it of themselves, but it accurately describes American nationalists who believe American identity is inextricable from Christianity.”

Advice for Teachers: Standards, Skills, and Strategies

In late July, I called my ELA besties around the country to weigh in on some ideas for American Lit. There is an existing district scope and sequence, and from what I’ve gathered, there have been some needed tweaks and adjustments to the common assessments: mostly scheduling and cohesion, but some adjustments nonetheless.

One of my skill sets is backward planning, and I am forever a fan of UBD (Wiggins/McTighe), so I put together, with their help, a curated list of materials, and planned to incorporate the district’s scope and assessment focus/questions. I mention UBD because I can absolutely plan the beast out of PLC work and common assessments. This is going to be my 19th time at the rodeo.

I love working with my department head on these ideas; she’s receptive and collaborative and helps add focus. We both laughed when we met and agreed we are verbal processors, and she is skilled at listening to my processing. She understands the notion of “work in progress” and how my drafts are designed. We will interweave the skills necessary and develop assessments that are authentic and hopefully, engaging.

And here is the thing: if I could really get new and veteran ELA teachers to understand one important concept, the text is somewhat immaterial. What matters is the combination of skills, strategies, and standards working cogently and effectively for students’ growth and learning. These must be transferable, quantifiable, and reflective processes for students to make learning stick. Whether or not one spends six weeks on “The Crucible” or one week on The Great Gatsby isn’t the priority: when developing continuity and robust instruction in curriculum, always circle back to the three S’s.

I’m currently listening to (and then checking back in with the text) of How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. Chapter 17 which discusses measurements and standards. And while the United States is still not on the metric system, part of that global domination plan (colonization is so 1700s) is to make the world standardized. For better or worse, the CCSS did make an attempt to standardized instruction. Many states didn’t adopt the Common Core, and many parents and school boards unfortunately conflated the Core with standardized testing. TL:DR high-stakes testing sucks. The standards aren’t bad. They’re vague enough so that educators can put their spin and instructional design on them but clear enough to give focus and direction. His writing reminded me of educational standards, the Science of Reading debacle, and how research can support or defame just about any topic in education. It’s messy.

If we want to clear up this mess, we focus on the skills, strategies and standards in our content areas and create these as our framework.

That’s it. Make the bolts fit the nuts. Or something like that.

Summer Series of Saves #2024: dismantling the essay

I am unsure where the wheels fell off the bus this year, and I can’t pinpoint the moment—maybe I was trying to do too much, or maybe the students are still recovering from 2020, perhaps? (And also, as an aside, I went to look up prior posts about this, and WordPress has done this weird thing with some of my links. I shall deal with this later.) Some students went to my prinicipal and complained about a few things, one of them being I gave them “too many essays” to write. Now, some of these “essays” were focused on parts of an essay, trying new things, and quick writes. I told them time and again this is what they need to know how to do now and for the rest of their academic careers.

They took it personally.

One of the grand and perpetual expectations of we ELA teachers is we teach how to write essays, and there is no shortage of advice, materials, books, PD, from the creative to the formulaic, we have mentor texts, learning targets, dissection of the whole and constructing the deconstructed.

So what’s my plan for this year? Again, try to organize it in a way that students get it. I am focused on the success of a few students sprinkled throughout the day, from GenEd to Honors, who used the graphic organizers and materials I provided and pushed through them to truly get how they help and scaffold essay writing.

But moreoever, I am exhausted by the individuality of teaching: the whole-class instruction does not seem to be working, and there is no one cause or factor. Setting up partner groups immediately for workshop might be one fix to this– more on this later. (Thinking Dr. Catlin Tucker’s work on stations…). I have had great success with the Puget Sound Writing Project/National Writing Project’s workshop model for years, but this year…oof. Maybe it was all that time isolated from other humans?

The plan: this post is somewhat of a placeholder for my thoughts and a launch pad: next I’ll organize the calendar of what happens when, and why, for students. Stay tuned.

https://www.rethinkela.com/2016/12/essays-every-high-school-student-should-read/
Essay List

Some other posts about essay writing:

Essay, that’s what I say
2023 Summer Series of Saves: next year…
Summer Series of Saves: Disrupt the Essay, Continued. (IV)

Outside to Inside the Classroom…

https://www.edutopia.org/article/non-education-books-teachers

This post beckoned me to write my own recommendations of books that are not “teacher” books and have been instrumental in my professional development. These are a mix of non-fiction and fiction.

(And looking over my TBR list, this is a small fraction.)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Free to Be, You and Me

Welcome to St. Hell by Lewis Hancox

Oh my goodness, I’ve read so many more and will read. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, re-readings of Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, too many to name this morning.

What books have influenced you that are not teaching books, but have impacted your teaching practices?

Building more RAFTS and Drabbles

The Best Ideas…

I just had an epiphany: if I spent as much time actually making art and writing as I do collecting ideas, supplies, and instructions I would be the Queen of All the Things now.

Okay, appreciate that. I’m also in the mode of “what will I do differently, the same, or better next year?” but that’s a post for another time.

Here are a few ideas that passed my line of sight recently:

First is a drabble idea: While I’ve done sensory image focus on drabbles in the past, I am going to reshape it based on @seeceeread’s idea to focus on character building through smells. I won’t mention the alcohol in my instructions, though, because, you know, Rule No. 1: “Don’t get Mrs. Love fired.”

Post by @seeceeread

View on Threads

The second idea is for RAFTS: use Josh Johnson’s routine as a mentor text for reviews for all kinds of things:

These ideas are now archived in this most excellent blog I’ve been writing for…ever.

Write.

Sometimes, my body just knows when I’ve eaten too much junk. I crave fresh fruits or vegetables, and even drinking a glass of ice water feels like a luxury. I’ve been drinking a lot of ice water lately — partly because it’s my latest sensory joy and it’s helping me battle some depression. That might sound odd, but if you know, you know.

ANYWAY.

The point is, sometimes we know when we need a change, something fresh, something more authentic. One tiny part of this that may have larger benefits and impacts is that we need to go back to handwriting and possibly cursive, making marks, and small motor skills. (And for those bodies who cannot make marks in traditional ways, of course, provide assistance, technical or otherwise.) I can’t speak for other secondary teachers, but anecdotally, I’ve witnessed about two dozen-plus students whose handwriting is illegible.

We have a reading/literacy crisis, (and no, SOR is NOT the answer). It’s just another in a long line of folks trying to sell you a story. We also have forced-error barriers to students’ learning: the amount of tech, cell phones, devices, lack of keyboarding instructions, soft censorship of topics and book bans,

Anne Lutz Fernandez says it best and comes in a timely manner in her post, “In Praise of Paper.” Timely because about two weeks ago, I was thinking about going back to binders, three-hole punches, and tabs. I currently use composition notebooks, but due to my own ADHD, grief, and attrition, I have not maintained or sustained their use. And yes, by and large, it’s up to me. I do have students who will occasionally ask me if they need their notebooks that day, and because I don’t remind them daily, use falls off. But I’m not letting them go.

For many, cursive handwriting has negative connotations: rulers hitting knuckles, not being allowed to write with the sinister left hand, forcing perfectionism, and nothing but tears for children. And like my composition notebooks, I can only do and offer choices and knowledge in my classroom. Here is what I plan to offer students next year:

  1. I give out sketchbooks when I can afford to. Here is a link to my Amazon Wish List.
  2. Provide cursive packets. Canva has many free templates.
  3. AVID binder organization materials
  4. Time to practice keyboarding skills. Many of the computer labs of the olden days have gone the way of rotary phones.

Also: I don’t think writing by hand is going to be a panacea for AI encroachment. I made this Google Site for myself, and some curated content to share with teachers/students: AI, Plagiarism, and Credible Work.

Some research, if you’re into that sort of thing:

What does the research say about teaching students manuscript and cursive writing? What are the best practices according to research?

Go low…and be strong.

Please read this entire essay by A.R. Moxon, “Lying to Fascists” published by The Reframe.

As a teacher, one who’s been in classrooms/districts since the mid 2000s, I’ve seen the impact of harmful policies, NCLB, ESSA, the ‘big tests’ COVID building closures, tech, and now parents and guardians who vote against their and their children’s best interest.

I’m struggling, y’all. I’ve been attacked by Twitter trolls, doxed, and damaged. It’s traumatizing, but I’m not alone. And that is the issue. I think folks believe that it’s an individual teacher they disagree with and not looking at the big view. There are so many systemic issues in education, and sadly, the status quo turns out to be…am I scared to say it? You betcha.

One key pull quote:

“Here’s what I want you to understand today: These Americans who want to kill Americans have, through their intent and actions, already destroyed the thing you want to protect. What you want to protect is already gone. The reason we can’t live in a society with them is not because we have any intention to harm or kill them, but because they are eager to kill so many of us that they are willing to destroy society to do it. Either they get their way, and society is no longer accessible to most of us, or they don’t, and everyone including them gets to access society. Therefore, I think they shouldn’t get their way or be treated as if they should. These are people who intend to destroy whatever they need to in order to rule over our lives to secure their own personal enrichment and comfort, and are so confident in their success that they announce their intent. They do not care about you, and they certainly do not care about your good faith efforts beyond the extent to which they make it easier for them to seize control. They will never give you credit for working to find their rationales reasonable. They will never return the benefit of the doubt you extend. Our mission is not finding ways to work with them. Our mission is finding ways to sabotage their efforts and to keep their targets as safe from them as we can.” A.R. Moxon

https://www.the-reframe.com/lying-to-fascists

A repeated motif: “Keeping people safe”, and the people are my students. I am charged with keeping them safe from gun violence, (which I have no control over), keeping them safe from misinformation and disinformation, (which is often undermined by their parents), and growing their literacy and communication skills (which I have some control over), but no control over if they have enough sleep, enough to eat, if they have housing, if they’re making friends, if they have mental health concerns, or neurodivergent needs, etc.

Finally: act to keep people safe and free, against those who would harm them and control them. This should be our guiding light. I think it will be a clarifying one. I’ve spent a couple months talking about using differentiators to separate ourselves from fascists by doing what they can’t. This is the ultimate differentiator, the ultimate thing that fascists cannot do.

https://www.the-reframe.com/lying-to-fascists/

No wonder why there are so many attacks on public schools, teachers, unions, curriculum, etc. Because they know if they destroy us, working toward their fascist theocracy, we are not going to be able to keep anyone safe. I am not a brave woman. I need my job, and I love my job. So when it’s time for me to “just teach” I will — and that “just teaching” is still grounded in critical thinking skills, close reading, and a variety of texts and interests for students. “They” do not care about us, and we’re not going to change minds; however, what Moxon says is true: our strength is our care, our hope, and our love.

“This is the ultimate differentiator, the ultimate thing that fascists cannot do.”