Month: May 2017

Three weeks ago, all adults in my school district — teachers, staff, and parents — received an email from our director of guidance:

“I want to inform you of a trending Netflix series called “13 Reasons Why” [which] revolves around 17-year-old Hannah Baker, who kills herself and leaves behind audio recordings for 13 people she says were in some way part of why she killed herself.”

The email, which was three pages long, described the show’s controversies:

“The show has been highly watched by young people and has received lots of media attention. Because the show takes up issues related to suicide and sexual assault, there have been strong (and strongly mixed) reactions from many viewers along with several professional and advocacy groups.”

“If you have experienced significant depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts or behaviors in the past, this show may be risky for you to watch.”

Nor was ours the only worried school district.  This same kind of letter has been sent out this spring by principals and guidance counselors across the U.S.

In other words, “13 Reasons Why” is something rare nowadays: a show for teens that still has the capacity to scare the hell out of their parents and teachers.

Naturally I was curious what my juniors and seniors in Media Literacy class thought of the show.  So the day after the email went out to their parents, I asked them if they’d seen it.

“Oh, my God!  Can we talk about it?”

“We should do a unit on it!”

“Just binge watch it, Alden!  I watched all 13 episodes in one night.”

I asked them if they thought the show glorified suicide, as some critics have claimed.  

“Nooo!

“No, it doesn’t!  But it’s SO realistic!”

“That’s so wrong!”

Any good teacher knows that outrage, or at least passion, is a great place to begin real learning.  So I asked the students, “How can we study these themes in class?”

A bright student raised her hand.

“‘13 Reasons Why’ is really about mental illness.  But — they don’t show it very well.”

“Maybe we could study how mental illness is shown in the media?”

With that, I scrapped my plans for the next two weeks and sat down that evening to watch Episode 1 of “13 Reasons Why.”  My wife, who’d read Jay Asher’s 2007 young adult novel on which the show is based, was game too.  I wasn’t expecting much, but what I found was even more excruciating than I expected.  Part of it was that I’m a teacher; shows about teenagers committing suicide are not exactly the way I like to wind down in the evening.  I still go to bed sometimes worried that I’m going to get “the call” about one of my students wrapping his car around a tree on some Vermont country road after a few Budweisers.  But it’s more than that.  Forget a car crash; “13 Reasons Why” is like watching 13 car crashes.  The first episode is hard to watch, the second is brutal; by the third you ask, “How many more of these are there?”; by the end, you wish you’d never looked.

***

Let’s face it: for most of us, high school is brutal.  In conversations with other adults, I’m often struck by how many of us would rather simply forget those years, almost like a bad relationship we broke off the day we turned 18.  For a few lucky souls, high school was a high point: popularity and romance came easily; awards were won and so were games.  These people — and how we hated them! — were like the royalty.  It’s no wonder schools crown homecoming kings and queens: there’s a rigid social caste with a clear hierarchy that most of us struggled to fit into.  You feel like you’re under a microscope at all times; everyone’s watching your every move.  You’re incredibly self-centered, yet live and die by what others think of you.  You want very much to stand out, while also fitting in completely.  

The best shows about high school capture this.  My favorite, ABC’s TV drama from the late 80s / early 90s, “The Wonder Years,” was particularly good at reflecting how life felt at 15 years old: the way a small moment — a low grade on a test, the girl who you like looking right past you in the hall, or your mother saying hi to you during a fire drill (yes, dear lord, it happened on the show) — could feel like the absolute end of the world (or at least your life).

Unlike “The Wonder Years,” “13 Reasons Why” doesn’t take the small moments of cruelty and blow them way out proportion.  Instead it has truly awful events happen, one after another, to the same character until she can take it no longer and neither can we.  After the first episode, where a compromising photo of her is sent around the school, you start to flinch every time you hear the theme music at the start of a new episode, because you know that some fresh torture is awaiting this poor girl, Hannah Baker.  

Toward the end of the series, it starts getting ridiculous, as the writers start piling on more and more cruelties per episode, as if wanting to tamp out all doubt as to why Hannah killed herself.  It wasn’t mental illness; it wasn’t some ambiguous haze of depression rooted in a troubled childhood.  Hannah comes from a fairly stable home with two good parents; she’s played by a gorgeous actress and given the same hyper-intelligent dialogue (peppered with references like “Orwellian”) that is wholly unrealistic for a high school sophomore.  It’s like the director is saying, “There’s only one reason why she did it: cruelty.” It’s a 13-part car crash, and it’s too much.  On one implausible evening late in the series, poor Hannah has her own disastrous sexual encounter that causes her to reject the one boy she truly loves, witnesses a friend’s rape, gets into a car accident that causes another friend to abandon her, and — as if that weren’t enough — her accident directly leads to a classmate’s death in a separate car accident that evening.  It’s madness.  Teenagers will lap up this melodrama; I cringed.

The show’s premise is gimmicky, its plot is both repetitive, yet convoluted.  The recently dead girl, Hannah Baker, tells the story in voice-over, and each episode is devoted to one person who is “responsible” for her suicide.  For a few episodes, it’s fine.  After 13, it’s monotonous.  But at the same time, the plot is crowded with so many subplots that I was left scratching my head more than a few times.  Each episode toggles between past and present, and the main tension in the present day scenes — that the popular kids who bullied Hannah don’t want their secrets to come out — feels forced.  A good TV show should never allow us to see the machinery of its plot devices at work; “13 Reasons Why” is so clunky that I could never lose sight.

The show trades in almost anachronistic high school cliches: varsity jackets and cheerleader skirts, lonesome cafeteria tables, beer-soaked house parties, clueless parents and teachers, jock- and goddess-worship in the halls and the cafeteria.  At its most basic, this is a classic high school bullying story in which the popular kids oppress the outcasts and justice must be done.

Then there are the two infamous scenes: a rape (another one) and the climactic suicide.  Both are most horribly, most graphically filmed.  Suicide is an event that, when shown to those who are already vulnerable, can inspire copycat suicides.  The cinematic realism of this scene is a large part of why the show has mental health and school officials up in arms.  

And though my students argue otherwise, “13 Reasons Why” really does glorify suicide, for two reasons: first, it presents the illusion that a dead girl can enact revenge and control things from beyond the grave.  This is a romantic notion, but an incredibly false one; when you’re dead, you’re dead.  There’s no controlling anybody — and certainly no savoring it.  Second, the show presents the related illusion that the cute, sensitive boy you always liked will take up your cause and avenge your death by holding your tormentors to account.  This too is a dangerously misguided notion.

Then there’s the scene that makes high school guidance counselors want to hurl their TVs out the window.  In the final episode, Hannah reveals her rape and all but reveals her plans for suicide to her guidance counselor.  He informs her that because she isn’t sure of all the details, there’s nothing he can do.  He tells her she needs to move on!  This is insane!  Anyone who’s gotten within smelling distance of a public school knows that all teachers, counselors, and administrators (not to mention coaches, paraeducators, and even bus drivers) are what’s called mandatory reporters.  That means they have a *legal obligation* to report any whiff of abuse or assault to the authorities.  Any guidance counselor I’ve ever met has done hundreds of these reportings.  They’re utterly routine.  The idea that any guidance counselor would fail to report something as serious as a rape because he or she didn’t have all the details is so silly a plot device as it is to imagine that an emergency room wouldn’t accept you if you couldn’t tell them all the details of your accident.  It’s absurd.  

Equally absurd is a scene when Hannah’s teacher receives Hannah’s anonymous note expressing suicidal thoughts.  The teacher is portrayed as having done nothing to find out who wrote the note.  My students and I had a good laugh over this.  “Really?” I asked them.  “Really?  She had no idea that the one girl curled up and looking pained, the one person who wasn’t making rude comments as the note was read — she had no idea *that* was the suicidal girl?  And you’re telling me she didn’t recognize the handwriting?”

But could it be enough to keep the next suicidal teenager from seeking help?  That’s the question all of us in education are worried about as a result of the show.  It was especially hard to watch as a teacher because the adults on the show — other than the guidance counselor — are portrayed as present, competent, but completely unaware.  It’s hard to believe that so many adults could be that unknowing, but it didn’t take more than a single episode for me to wonder how many incidents of cyberbullying are going on every day that I’d have no way of hearing about among my students.  

The one bright spot for me was the acting.  The cast is wonderful.  The two main characters — Hannah and Clay — are played by wonderful actors who have great chemistry.  Clay, in particular, is preternaturally brooding and haunted; he strikes it just right in getting across that mixture of boy and man, of confidence just beginning to find itself, that Hannah (and I’m guessing many high school girls watching) find irresistible.

If anything, the actress who plays Hannah is a little too pretty and is made to be a little too socially competent for you to believe that she’d be the target of such ridicule.  Many other high school dramas (Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Speak,” for instance) resort to making their heroine look plain, or damaged, and to giving her awkward, desperate-to-please dialogue anytime she’s around the cool kids.  The creators of “13 Reasons Why” on the other hand, don’t stoop.  Hannah Baker is unapologetically beautiful and articulate.  When her friends abandon her or boys treat her as an object, it seems unrealistic that they’d be anything other than what Clay is: utterly bewitched.

I’ll also mention the actor who plays the worst of the villains in a villain-heavy show: Bryce, the rich kid rapist archetype (Land Rover, mansion, star athlete).  While most teenage rapists are played as volatile and dangerous, Bryce is a likable, good-hearted backslapper.  Even the scene in which he beats up Clay ends with them clinking glasses of scotch.  It’s disarming, and does demonstrate the degree that the show goes to in order to flesh out the backstory of even the most odious characters.  That’s a bright spot.

I’ll also mention that I love the diversity of the cast.  The first girl who makes eyes at Clay across the gym is African American, and so is Hannah’s first friend.  Interracial couplings among teens and their parents are assumed to be normal; so are six-and-a-half foot Asian basketball stars, gay characters of all shapes and kinds, and friend groups that appear to include every ethnicity.  If there’s plenty of bullying and slut-shaming in “13 Reasons Why,” there’s very little of the traditional race- and sexuality-based bullying and segregation common in most American high schools.  I’ll take that, at least.

***

One of the most agonizing things about high school is that, at the time, you think that’s all there is to the world.  Many are the high school misfits, pushed the margins, who go off to Boston or to San Francisco for college and flower, suddenly realizing that there’s more to life than competing over the sexual attentions of the quarterback.  That’s part of what gives so many tales of high school alienation their poignancy — we the audience can see how unappreciated is the sensitive boy or the nerdy girl by his or her classmates, and how wrong they are.  We know it will get better, but it often seems as though it won’t when you’re in it.  

Hannah Baker’s mindset must have been something akin to this as she began her descent toward suicide.  The problem is, we’ll never know.  The show never really takes us inside her head for the descent, instead focusing our attention on the horrific external events in her life.  We’re spared psychological insight and, really, after a few episodes, it’s almost impossible to identify with Hannah, because so painful.  

We ended up doing the unit on mental illness in class.  We studied the way the media misrepresents mental illness.  “13 Reasons Why” was a perfect case study.  “13 Reasons Why” gives us 13 horrifying reasons why Hannah did what she did, but painfully little insight.  

In the end, “13 Reasons Why” ultimately misses the real reasons why.

Last year I posted twice about the North Fork of the Pemigewasset river: the wilderness creek boating adventure of the White Mountains.  Unfortunately, the spring of 2016 was a bust: we got almost no rain between March and October, with some parts of New England experiencing a serious drought.

I spent the whole year hoping the North Fork would run, and it didn’t.  Then I spent this spring wanting to run it, and for a variety of reasons, not being able to.  Still, I found myself excited to see what was in there, and I wasn’t going to let a lack of water stop me.  I decided to hike in this past Saturday to scout the run.

With my wife headed out the door early on Saturday morning anyway, I set a plan get up early.  I’m an early riser by nature.  I’ve never been able to sleep much past 8 am, even if I’ve been up all night.  I tend to regard the mornings as my best, sharpest time; as for the evening, I tend to agree with famous literary critic Samuel Johnson, who had a line from the Bible engraved on his watch: “The night cometh, when no man can work.” So with a sunny day and the prospect of a beautiful hike into an alluring river before me, I had no trouble rousing myself at 6, downing a cup of tea and some energy bars, and jumping out of the car at the Zealand trailhead by 6:30 am.  There were dozens of cars in the lot with dew on them — these must have been people spending Friday night at the popular AMC Zealand hut.  A lone female hiker was just setting off as I curled the car into my parking space, and after 15 minutes of lacing my boots, loading my pack, and wolfing another energy bar, I set it as my goal to pass the woman before the first stream crossing.

As first sunlight crept into the gorge, I quickly blew by the woman and ribboned my way up into Zealand Notch via the network of boardwalks spanning streams, bogs, and beaver ponds.  The trail was flat and my legs, folded up most of the week beneath a desk, wanted to GO.  It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking into a run at the excitement of being in the woods again, headed toward a remote river with rapids I very much wanted to discover for myself.

It’s pernicious, really, the effect of a week spent behind a computer: too much screen time makes your neck hurt, your shoulders slump, and worst of all, your attention span dwindle to zero.  I’d spent the week grading student papers, preparing lesson plans, answering emails, and in between those tasks, checking the Washington Post for the freshest political news story breaking out of Washington’s most tumultuous week.  Pinging — that’s the word for it.  I was pinging from website to website, task to task.  I’d open an article and then immediately leave it, open a new tab, and tell myself I’d read it later.  So many websites are devoted to getting your attention, to getting your clicks — but in doing so, they destroy your attention span.  I click on articles and stories and then I don’t even read them.  I flit from site to site and scroll through endless Facebook photos without any enjoyment.  It’s almost entirely devoid of pleasure — a compulsion — finally, an addiction.  And now, deep in the woods, I felt the incredible rush of peace and tranquility as I got away from it all.  The sights and sounds suddenly manifested themselves around me: the singing of birds, the bright colors of trees and flowers, the warmth of the sun, the rising mountains around me, the rushing of a brook.  Ahead the Pemi Wilderness, the largest track of land with no roads in the White Mountains, was like a great blanket folding protectively around me.

Soon I was in new territory for me — crossing through the depth of Zealand Notch and pausing to look up at Zeacliff, the guidebook-cover view where I’d once hiked with my wife on our tour of the Bonds two years before.

There are two ways to paddle the NF Pemi.  The “easier” way — both in terms of whitewater and in terms of hiking — is to do the hike I had just done, and to put on Whitewall Brook, paddling this river for a few miles into the North Fork.  I had relegated this idea in my mind for three reasons:

1. It dumps you into the North Fork downstream of the best rapids
2. Whitewall Brook itself contains no whitewater
3. Whitewall Brook — says anyone who has run it before — is usually clogged with beaver dams and fallen trees

Still, I couldn’t resist going for a look myself.  Here’s what it looked like: narrow, flat, and unremarkable.

After that it was back up to the trail, and then, in a shockingly short time, I found myself at the trail intersection for Thoreau Falls.  Last winter, I’d hiked here with my wife from the other side, from Ethan Pond, and on a 20-degree day, with feet and feet of snow on the ground, and precious little daylight, Thoreau Falls had sure felt a long, long way from anywhere.  How long had it taken us to get there?  Two and a half hours?  Three?  But I’d worn boots and microspikes then.  Now, wearing shorts and a light pack, I was amazed to have covered the same distance in just an hour and a half.

The other way to run the North Fork is to hike in to Ethan Pond — the way my wife and I had done it — and to put on the North Fork shortly below the pond.  Now if you could actually put on close to the pond, this would be worth it, but you can’t.  The river is far too small and strainer-filled to put on even a mile downstream of the pond.  When I’d scouted the year before, I concluded that you couldn’t really put on until about a half mile east of the Shoal Pond Trail junction.  But I could see on the map that the river wasn’t very steep between that point and the footbridge that crosses the river about a half-mile upstream of Thoreau Falls.  So I decided to start my scout here, at the footbridge.

I should note that on this day, the North Fork was clearly too low to have run in a boat.  The East Branch of the Pemi gauge was at 900 cfs and falling reasonably fast.

Here’s what I found . . .

Just below the footbridge were three or four bedrock slide rapids that looked really fun.  Here they are in order:

Then there’s the edge of the world:

That’s the horizonline for Thoreau Falls, a HUGE, much-photographed waterfall.

Here is what it looks like from below:

Reminds me of that huge slide in Yosemite that was on the cover of that old Scott Lindgren boating video, “Aerated.”

Boaters have speculated about whether Thoreau Falls is runnable in a kayak.  Here’s what I think:  If someone held a gun to my head, I’d seal launch in and run the bottom half.  If no one had a gun to my head, and I was having a really, really good day, and it was all roadside, I’d seal launch in and run the last fourth.  As it is, I think I’d just as soon skip the whole damn thing.

Directly below Thoreau Falls, the North Fork charges down seven or eight super-steep rapids.  They’re not generally as clean as the rapids above the falls, but like those rapids, they’re bedrock:

The rapids with boulders in them looked more marginal:

It was slow going, crawling through the thick trees on shore.  I even stumbled across an ancient rusted gas can far up on shore, proving that man really can intrude on even the most inaccessible land.  Eventually it seemed like I’d hiked down to where it looked like the gradient began to relent, but there may be more downstream that I didn’t see.  I do know that not far downstream, the North Fork joins up with Whitewall Brook, and the river relaxes to class II and III for some distance.

The rest of the run is still a mystery to me: almost ten miles of intermediate rapids, the longest stretch of whitewater in New Hampshire that nobody ever runs.  I can’t wait to see what’s down there.

My assessment is that it’s probably best to hike in as I did, from Zealand, even if you intend to put on the North Fork, not Whitewall.  Hiking up the AT from Ethan Pond is, in my mind, a waste of energy.  That hike is no shorter to Thoreau Falls than the one I did (both are about five miles), and the Zealand hike — provided that Zealand Road is open — cuts off about 900 feet from the Ethan Pond hike.  What I did is not exactly flat, but it’s not far off.

While the East Branch of the Pemi is not a perfect indicator, it’s not a bad one either.  At 900 cfs and falling, the river at Thoreau Falls was definitely too low.  I think you’d want the East Branch to be at least 1,300 cfs, and probably more like 1,800 — double what I had for the scout.

I am hoping to go back when the water’s up, but this time to take my boat.  Carrying a 40 pound creek boat for five miles is not ideal, but I believe the solitude, the exciting rapids, and the sense of adventure on the North Fork of the Pemi would make the carry-in more than worth it.  I also think that while it would be fun to run Whitewall Brook into the North Fork someday, the true heart of the run includes the big rapids at Thoreau Falls.  That’s what I want to do.

Ten or twelve class V rapids, followed by ten miles of class II-IV — where else in New England do you get that?

And besides, as I realized on my hike back to the car that morning, it’s not really about the rapids.  It’s about the leaving the road behind and getting into your kayak and going somewhere that it would be really hard to get into otherwise.

In the end, the North Fork of the Pemi is about the adventure.

I can’t wait.

“Why, why, WHY??”

The kid, a junior in my third period English class many moons ago, is banging his head against the two-inch thick literature textbook on his desk.  

“WHY do we have to do HOMEWORK!!??”

Although his antics left me unswayed — I still assigned homework that night, and most every other night that I’ve been an English teacher these last seven years — I can sympathize.  Not only did I, like every other red-blooded boy who’d rather be kayaking or skiing than thumbing through the Middle Ages, harbor the same bitter resentment toward homework when I was 17, but even now, at 35, there are a lot of days when I want to let loose a not-dissimilar scream:

“WHY can’t these kids ever just DO THEIR HOMEWORK!!??” 

For years my response was the same: just keep assigning it.  I had to do it in high school, so they do too.  But lately — ironically on the heels of a particularly successful teaching year in which I assigned *less* homework — I’ve been wondering if I wouldn’t be better off, after years of banging my head into the desk, reconsidering my approach.  There is another question to ask — one that I’d never really considered until this year:

Why not just stop assigning homework?

***

The idea of homework is well-intentioned.  Although school can feel endless, it’s actually quite short — just 5.5 hours of class, plus an hour of lunch and transition time.  That’s not only 30% shorter than the average adult’s work day, it’s infrequent — just 180 days out of 365.  Stretched over a calendar year, kids attend class an average of just 2.75 hours per day.  They attend my English class an average of just 17 minutes per day.  Seventeen minutes!  I’ve spent more time deliberating over what socks I’m going to wear.  Homework was dreamed up not to wrench kids from their families but to supplement this wholly insufficient diet.

And homework doesn’t always conform to the worst stereotypes of needless busywork; at its best it builds on knowledge and understanding gained in class, or provides the raw material for what we actually discuss in class.  You read The Great Gatsby for homework, then you come into class and discuss the symbolism of the green light on Daisy’s dock, or the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.  Essentially, you’re reading so you have something to talk about and think about in class.  It’s the very opposite of busywork; it’s integral.

But what if the students don’t do it?

***

Here’s a typical conversation that I had last year with one of my classes.  

Me:  “So, what did you think of the part in Paper Towns when Margo gets revenge on all her enemies?

Class:

Me:  “Why are you all avoiding eye contact with me?”

Class:

Me:  “Did some of you not finish the reading?”

Class:  

Me:  “Did any of you start the reading?  (Pause.)  “Do any of you know what book we’re reading?”

Dead air: that’s what it was.  Suddenly, I’d gone from having a carefully scripted lesson plan to — poof! — having nothing at all, because my plans had taken for granted that the kids would do the reading.  And what can you do?  I don’t want to assign any homework that isn’t going to be important to next day’s class.  But in doing so, I’m relying on students to come in reasonably prepared.  And that’s a big risk.

***

Years ago a former student, a bright young man, confessed, “You know, I didn’t actually read any of the books for your class.” My mouth dropped open.  I remembered giving him decent marks, even praising his engagement.  “Guess I fooled you, right?”

I was furious at first, but then I turned sad.  More than conning me, this young man had conned himself — right out of an education.  He’d missed out on a year of improving his vocabulary, his inferencing, his ability to process new information.  How many others out there slide through public high schools reading very little besides text messages and the occasional SparkNotes page?  By my count — lots of them.  And it has to stop.  Because even worse than the awkward dead-air and the wasted teacher labor is the deeper truth: these kids aren’t getting better at reading.  Why?  It’s simple: they’re not practicing. 

So should we abolish reading books for homework?

It’s not as far-fetched as you might think.

***

In my view, the No Child Left Behind era unleashed a new urgency in elementary schools, causing grade school teachers to double down on homework for young children.  At the same time, a counter-movement began in American high schools: reducing homework in favor of giving students class time to complete traditional homework tasks, such as writing essays.  When I entered the profession in 2010, I was shocked to hear many of my colleagues make impassioned pleas to abolish homework entirely.

Most of the kids who don’t do homework, they opined, come from homes that, in the parlance of our profession, “don’t support a good learning environment.” From the noise of the television, to the fact that mom and daughter share a bedroom in a run-down trailer, to subtler cultural barriers, there are almost a thousand forces keeping these teens from being able to curl up in a quiet space to read “Macbeth.”  Punishing them on Monday morning because they didn’t finish their Geometry problems — when they didn’t get enough food this morning and still haven’t decompressed from the alcohol-fueled antagonism that landed Mom in the hospital — is not only bad teaching practice, but wholly unjust, say homework detractors..  

I can’t understate how pervasive this idea is in American schools — this divide between homes that do support learning outside the classroom, and homes that don’t.

The other argument to jettison homework that I heard was simple: the kids won’t do it.  Now if they wouldn’t do anything, that’d be one thing, but that’s not the case.  Instead I began to notice something strange: slap the most dreary and daunting worksheet down in front of these kids during class, and they’ll put their heads down, roll up their sleeves, and start chugging.  There is a dirt-practical, “get ‘er done” ethos at work — not to mention a healthy school climate in which students are eager to hold up their end of the social contract in exchange for caring and tolerant teachers.  But hand those same kids a whimsical eight-minute assignment to be completed over a long weekend, and the same grim sense of duty that they displayed in class will vanish into a haze of irresolution and unaccountability.  

“I just didn’t get it done,” they’ll admit.

Others will put up a fight: “I work six hours a day after school; I can’t do homework!” — and they’re certainly not mollified by suggestions that they need to do their homework lest their shift at 7-11 shape the contours of their future earnings forever.

That dichotomy — the industrious worker during class and the do-nothing at home — only fueled some of the arguments I heard against homework.  I couldn’t decide whether these arguments were charitable or a bunch of hogwash.  I inclined toward the latter.  After all, here were the kids who needed extra practice the most.  Must we burden them further with the soft bigotry of low expectations?

Because as the rich kids and the smart kids imbibe their nightly medicine, they get, well, smarter — and someday, theoretically, richer.  

***

And just because some students DO lap up the homework that we give them doesn’t mean it’s right, only that it’s effective.  Advanced Placement and upper-level students do their homework, but knowing this, all of their teachers assign it, piling them higher and higher with essays, lab reports, and history chapters to read until most of these students are staying up nights, complaining, and constantly forced to triage — focusing on basic completion rather than inquiry, depth, and quality.  The detrimental effects on our kids’ mental health resulting from the college-industrial complex, the vicious meritocracy of American education — “Get into a good school or your life is ruined!” — have been well documented.  I once knew a man who was a psychiatrist in an upscale college town.  He was not going broke.  

***

It’s tempting for educators to simply blame parents, but it’s not that simple.  Most parents want to support homework, but they don’t know how to.  I’m not sure I would know how to were I parent either.  We are a culture that prizes work-life balance.  Children model what they see, and what they normally see are adults who resolutely leave their jobs behind once they enter the front door of the house — sometimes heroically so, in order to “be present” for their kids.  Even if they *do* presume to enforce nightly homework, isn’t their very example, conforming to our culture’s healthy notion of work-life balance itself undermining their very message?

Then there is the prevalence of absurdly captivating entertainment technology, most of which allows us to steer far away into virtual worlds with the flick of our digits, and you’ve got a culture that struggles to set a studious example after hours.  One only needs to look at the hypocrisy of my own profession: teachers who cry foul at any work expected of them outside of the contract day while simultaneously bemoaning their own students’ inability to do homework.  I’m not sure about you, but I’m not about to sit down at the kitchen table and model two hours of sustained study after dinner.  By the time I get done with a full day of teaching, I’m ready to go out and set a bad example.  We’re not going to crack open War and Peace after a hectoring day at work.  We’re going to dial up the most mind-numbing media we can find, and frost it off with a nice cold beer.  The children, as always, learn what they see.

***

Curiously enough, while we English teachers have continued to assign reading homework, we’d largely abandoned assigning writing homework right around the time I stood in front of my first blackboard.  By 2010 it was taken for granted that we’d give the kids two full class periods to complete an assigned essay.  This year I took that approach to its logical end, designing a writing course that contained no class books read for homework at all.  Suddenly my curriculum could not be undercut or found out or made into dead air because there was no variable I couldn’t plan for.  This class was almost entirely homework free, and almost universally successful.  The students improved because I set aside swathes of time for them to do the thing I wanted them to work on: writing.  I had them write only during class time — when I could prowl the room and swoop in at the first sign of Facebook.  Could we have covered more if they’d been able to write for homework?  Yes.  But did they improve markedly and did they appreciate being given class time to get their work done?  Yes and yes.  The class has been one of my greatest successes as a teacher.  At some point, you must cut your losses and eke out what you can from these kids.  Nothing should be sacrosanct — not even homework.

That’s why next year I’ll be doing the same thing, but this time with reading.  I’ll be giving my literature students large chunks of time to read in class.  Instead of emphasizing talking about literature and writing about literature, I’ll emphasize reading literature — and demonstrating analytic skills in activities like two column notes, reading journals, trying to re-instill in kids a love of reading by doing it together.  And also trying to instill an ability to pay sustained attention for long periods to something difficult.

Not all of their reading, mind you.  We won’t be abolishing homework completely.  But we’ll be abolishing most of it in favor of what I know works.  Until we Americans decide we want more for our kids than 2.75 hours a day, we’ll use the class time that we have.  Besides, we’ll be going a long way toward admitting what teachers have long known in their hearts: there’s no easy  answer to teaching reluctant kids.  But whatever it is, it can’t be a lie.