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“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.

A few years ago as I was standing on top of Tuckerman Ravine on Mt. Washington, New Hampshire,  a new and unpleasant thought occurred to me.

“I really don’t want to fall.”

I was staring down what looked like an elevator shaft covered in snow, called Left Gully.  That year the wind had blown the snow especially deep at the lip of Left Gully, creating a cornice that has been measured at 55 degrees.  Shortly below, Left Gully “flattens” to an average of 35 degrees.  In fact, Left Gully is one of the “easier” ski routes there; many other lines in the ravine average 40 degrees.  Tuck’s veterans have compared it to “skiing off the edge of a marble.”

“I really, really don’t want to fall.”

“But I might.”

Well, I didn’t.  Part of the reason was because with the hundreds of spectators watching me, I was pumping out so much testosterone,  I probably could have lifted a car.  Making a few jump turns was no big deal.  Part of the reason was that the afternoon corn snow — a close cousin to fresh powder — was almost comically soft under my skis.  Every turn was like slipping into an easy chair and being handed a drink at end of the day.  By the time I got to the bottom of the elevator shaft, I had a grin on my face that would make you want to give up grinning.  Forget falling — one turn in and I didn’t want it to end.

But here’s the thing: the fact that Tuck’s is so steep that it makes you think about falling — even if you’ve been skiing since one-piece Bogners were stylish — is pretty remarkable.  There are a lot of things we love about spring skiing on Mt. Washington — the sunshine, the soft snow, the camaraderie — but the adrenaline rush of staring down a slope almost as steep as your kitchen wall is surely one of the biggest reasons we keep going back for more.

What’s interesting is that skiing doesn’t usually feel like this.  If like me you have been skiing for a while, but have only done so in-bounds at ski resorts, chances are you’ve probably forgotten what it’s like to feel your heart rise into your throat.  The reason is simple: most ski trails aren’t that steep.

Look at the numbers.  Gunbarrel, the steepest trail at Ski Sundown in Connecticut back when I started skiing in 1992, is just 19 degrees.  Sure, it’s a ski trail in Connecticut, but it’s steep enough.  Lengthen it, stick it on any mountain in Vermont or New Hampshire, and it’s still a black diamond — a trail designated for experts only.

But Gunbarrel is *half* as steep as Tuckerman Ravine.  Half!  If Gunbarrel is an expert’s trail, what is Tuckerman?

Consider perhaps the steepest, most famous expert trail in the East: Killington’s Outer Limits.  I’ll never forget how scared I was the first time I skied it.  It felt like skiing off the side of a building.  By the time I was 14, my mother would drive us up to Killington for the day and hunker down at the Bear Mountain lodge while my brother and I lapped Outer Limits’s Subaru-sized moguls from first chair to closing.  I loved it just as much because I enjoyed the challenge as because I felt proud skiing one of the East’s steepest expert trails.

Outer Limits averages just 29.5 degrees.

For better or for worse, 30 degrees is about as steep as it gets at New England ski resorts.  You’ve got Stein’s Run and Upper F.I.S. at Sugarbush, Starr at Stowe, Avalanche at Cannon, Paradise at Mad River Glen.  Those trails were early test pieces for me.  But I felt completely comfortable skiing them by the time I was first learning to open my school locker.  By the time I was 17, when I stood at the top of Outer Limits, falling never occurred to me.

Right as skiing became comfortable, I sat in my first whitewater kayak.  Within a year, I paddled toward the edge of a 20-foot waterfall, my heart rising straight into my throat.  A year later, I got into my boat and started paddling down a river that had killed an expert kayaker — and which I knew might kill me if I made a mistake.  Approaching a big rapid, I felt a sense of fear that I rarely felt in skiing anymore.  But at the bottom of the rapid, after I had survived — and especially if I had paddled well — I felt a sense of pride, achievement, and togetherness with my friends that I had never felt while skiing.

Until I discovered Tuck’s.

Now I’m hooked.  Who knew skiing could be so scary again — and so fun again?

Two years after my last run, I finally made it back up to the ravine again last weekend.  I had spectacular weather — 60 degrees, blue skies, and that same magical corn snow — and good company.  Skiing Tuckerman Ravine is a remarkably pure experience.  We rode no lifts, sat in no lodges, and ate only what we carried in.  We skied a different line than I’d done last time.  Once again it was the steepest skiing I’d done all year.  After I put on my skis, I stood for a moment, looking over the edge.

“I really hope I don’t fall.”  I paused.

“But I’ve done this before.  And that feeling right now?  That’s the best part.”

 

Here’s a scary thought: Donald Trump is influencing our children.

We know this already.  But it shocked me to discover fresh evidence this week that students in my very own high school classroom are already adopting Donald Trump’s cynical view of the news media without even realizing it.

Continue reading “The Most Important Class in School”

 

Some people waste years in therapy trying to understand where their darkest fears originate.  Not me.  I know exactly who’s to blame.  My own darkest fear can be traced straight back to one man: William Shatner — and to a single, terrifying episode of the TV show he once hosted — “Rescue 911.”

I think lots of us harbor strange fears and phobias.  I don’t mean things that we’re rationally afraid of — like dying slowly, or getting cornered at a party by a Scientologist.  I’m also not talking about a fear that, if you admitted to it, would only welcome you into a vast, statistical majority.  Lots of people have arachnophobia (the fear of spiders) or glossophobia (the fear of public speaking).  That’s old news.  But what if you had glossoarachnophobia (the fear of spiders speaking in public)?  Now THAT would be weird.  That’s what I’m talking about — the kind of quirk that would cause your friends to start laughing at you — and never really stop, for basically as long as they knew you.  There they’d be in the back of the room someday, watching you accept a Major Civic Award, and they’d be thinking:

“Can you believe that John is terrified of his own armpits?  How does his wife take him seriously?”

Well, I have one of those embarrassing fears, and I’m about to tell you what it is.  I’m not revealing it in hopes of expunging it — because (as I’ll explain), I’ve already tried and it didn’t work.  Instead, I’m revealing my phobia for a simple reason: it’s too comical not to write about.  And maybe by reading about mine, yours won’t seem quite as bad.  “So I’m terrified of Bob Saget?” you’ll think to yourself. “At least I’m not that Alden Bird guy — who’s scared of . . . ”

Cooking.  I’m terrified of cooking.  There!

Not all cooking.  I can make a sandwich or boil pasta.  You probably wouldn’t want to eat it unless you’d been trapped upside down in a pickup truck for about four days, but I can make it work.  Instead, my culinary terror emanates from a single, awful source: an utterly paralyzing, totally overwhelming fear of hot cooking oil.

This phobia, which has charted the course of my life — at least as far as my visits to kitchens are concerned — can be traced back to a single night in 1991 when I was nine years old.  I had just settled into the couch to watch my favorite TV show on a quiet evening after my parents had gone out.

It started out exactly like an episode of “Rescue 911.”

Rescue 911:  The Gory Days

For those of you who don’t remember it / weren’t alive / didn’t watch trashy TV because your family had certain standards / were a bunch of dorks, “Rescue 911” was RIVETING, especially if you were nine years old.  What they did was to take real emergencies — usually ones involving young boys just like me who’d gone to sleep on the one night their parents were out of town and woke up to find the house on fire — and dramatize it (and I mean, DRAMATIZE it).  This wasn’t a show where fires slowly engulfed homes.  We’re talking windows blowing out, alarms screeching, children gagging on thick smoke — all set to a soundtrack that was either ominously tranquil (the introduction was always, “It was a quiet night at home . . .”) or heart-stoppingly suspenseful.  Just rewatching the famous opening credits 26 years later does things to my circulatory system that causes dollar signs to flash into my cardiologist’s eyes.

Whenever possible, they’d use the real accident victims as narrators.  It was always fun to see these people on camera for two reasons:  1) they were never as attractive as the actors who portrayed them, and 2)  Great pains were taken to preserve the spirit of whatever physical quirks the original people possessed.  If the guy who got plowed over by a tractor wore a handlebar mustache/mullet combination that made it look like he’d tied a cat across his face, “Rescue 911” made sure their slightly-handsomer actor was wearing the same cat.

The whole thing was hosted by William Shatner, who would walk out from behind a dispatch console or a fire truck with one of those “this is incredibly serious” looks on his face and introduce the next story like it he was FDR informing the nation about Pearl Harbor.  If that wasn’t enough, his clothing was even funnier.  Poor Shatner always looked like he was wearing Charles Barkley’s suit, which wardrobe staff had decided to secure with rope at all the relevant openings to ensure it wouldn’t come off.  This ridiculous get-up prompted one witty reviewer to speculate that Shatner would probably “need the jaws of life to get him out of those suits.” In retrospect, pretty much every appearance by Shatner (whose career was probably in need of a 911 rescue call for him to have taken this gig) was probably at least a solid 7.5 on the Unintentional Comedy scale.  Of course I was only nine years old at the time, so I had no way of appreciating this.  All I knew was that “Rescue 911” was my favorite show, and back in 1991, I never missed an episode.

On the night in question, my parents had gone out and left me with a babysitter, my neighbor Mike.  The first segment on “Rescue 911” that night didn’t seem scary at first.  A grandmother was cooking tacos for family dinner, frying the tortilla shells in hot oil.  Then one of her grandchildren ran past and caught the electric cord that connected to the fryer.  The fryer upended.  The hot oil poured onto the boy.  More than anything, it was the sound — that hiss — that reverberated deep into my psyche and did some fundamental rewiring in my brain. 

At the commercial break, I turned toward Mike and he was still staring at the screen, shell-shocked.

“Uh, I think my whole body just went numb,” I said.

“I don’t think I can feel my legs,” replied Mike.

The Lingering Effects:  I’ll Wait in the Living Room While You’re Cooking Bacon

Mike was older than I was, so maybe he was not lastingly traumatized.  I was lastingly traumatized.  Even 26 years later, I had significant trouble even typing these last few paragraphs without having to stand up to leave the room.    To this day I can’t be in the same room as someone frying an egg, or cooking bacon without significant discomfort.  Every time I even think about hot cooking oil, my skin starts feeling numb — almost like it has been burned.  Sometimes my wife will come in for a hug after she’s done frying onions and I’ll say, “No, please, don’t touch me!  It’s not that I don’t love you, I just have a weird phobia!” It’s almost as if I was the one burned that day, not the little kid in the video — like I have PTSD just from watching television.  It’s fascinating, really, that ten minutes of Hollywood re-creation could have a lasting, visceral effect on my body.  

Exposure Therapy:  Fail!

Exposure therapy doesn’t work either — at least it didn’t for me.  

Back in high school when I arrived behind the counter of the seafood department at Price Chopper for my first day of work and saw the deep fryer, I didn’t think I’d even be able to walk past it.  Imagine having to work next to a bucket teeming with poisonous snakes.  That’s what it felt like to me.  Just the presence of the fryer was enough to make me light-headed for the first few shifts.  The only reason I didn’t quit or fake a shellfish allergy to get transferred to the bakery was that I was too embarrassed to make a scene.  

The result was better exposure therapy than any shrink could have dreamed up.  Not only did I have to figure out how to walk past the fryer, I had to actually learn to use it.  I had to fry french fries, clams, breaded haddock.  I never realized the extent to which the general population treats grocery store seafood departments like Long John Silvers.  We had one older gentleman who’d come in for a box of fried fish every afternoon.  “Cook it hard!” he’d implore me in his raspy voice.  And cook it hard I did, even though at first this was — I am not joking here — something that made me see tiny little stars in the upper reaches of my vision.  But I did it.  And I never actually passed out.  Soon, that terrible feeling that constantly said, “The fryer is right behind you — watch out!” disappeared.  Instead of standing as far away as possible while I raised and lowered the basket of clams, I had no trouble standing next to the machine.  Eventually I was able to clean it after it was turned off.  By the time school started again and I left Price Chopper, using the fryer was no bigger a deal than reaching into the lobster tank.  When I finally hung up my fish-smelling apron, I was cured.  I’d faced down my darkest fear — and won.

Except I hadn’t.  I don’t remember when it dawned on me, but it must have been the first time after my seafood stretch that I walked into a kitchen and someone else was frying something in hot oil.  My skin got that old feeling again, and the room started to spin.  It was the same fear — and it was back.  In fact, it had never left.  In practice, I was fine.  I could do it myself.  But in theory, the idea of hot oil still short circuited my brain, bypassing all of the lived experiences, straight back to that fateful night in 1991.

In the end, perhaps it merely comes down to an issue of control.  Being able to work the fryer myself versus being terrified when someone else is doing so is not a whole lot different than the old wish of so many weak-kneed fliers:

“I wouldn’t be scared . . .  if I could just fly the plane!”

At least I can do that much.

 

 

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

 

For many years, back when I taught high school freshmen, I was lucky enough to teach the classic dystopian censorship novel, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  When I first came to the book, I didn’t have a clear idea of what censorship even was, let alone where it came from.  We live in a pretty tolerant, enlightened society — or at least, I thought we did.  

My idea of censorship could basically be summed up by that famous scene in “Field of Dreams” where Kevin Costner’s fiery wife lays into the matronly townswoman at the PTA meeting (“You Nazi cow!”) for trying to ban James Earl Jones’s fictional 60s-era provocation novel, unsubtly titled The Boat Rocker.  That’s what censorship seemed like.  It was Sarah Palin at the Wasilla library.  It was ignorance, it was stupidity.  It was backward, Bible-thumping moralizers getting ginned up to toss Curious George from the local schools because of sexual undertones (“What’s he so curious about?  Could it be he’s Bi-Curious George?”).  Absurd.

If I pressed myself, I could think of other examples.  I thought of religious enthusiasts burning Beatles albums after John Lennon called the Beatles “more popular than Jesus Christ.” I thought of vague notions of Big Brother dictating what we could or could not say.  Of course I thought of the Nazis burning Jewish books.  Censorship was something that came from religious fervor, from an autocratic government, or from patently evil civilizations.  It wasn’t something I understood to be a real danger in our own time — or if it was, it was done by boobus Americanus, not by the educated.

How wrong I was!

Fahrenheit 451 set me straight.  In it, Bradbury teaches that censorship doesn’t always come from mustache-twirling villains — or from religious zealots.  It comes from right-thinking, intelligent people who are convinced that their argument is superior — and that the other side does not deserve a voice.  The book’s antagonist and chief book burner, Captain Beatty, defends censorship on the grounds that it keeps the peace among a diverse population.  Because any book is bound to offend someone, then it’s better to ban all books.  Beatty believes that he and his fellow book burners ensure the peace and good humor of the people.  “We’re the Happiness Boys,” he explains.  

Beatty is by far the smartest and even best read character in the novel, but he firmly supports censorship because he believes he is right.  Ray Bradbury knew that intelligence and open-mindedness — much as we’d like to think they go hand-in-hand — are all-too-often mutually exclusive.

That is certainly the case today in America, where some of the most intelligent Americans are fighting in support of Captain Beatty’s ideas.  In fact, right now the battle over censorship is being fought in the exact places where ideas should be debated most freely: on American college campuses.

I started to notice something was wrong in 2015 when the University of Oklahoma, a public institution subject to the First Amendment, expelled two students for singing an offensive chant at a private event.  This was a clear violation of their First Amendment rights.  They have every right to think racist thoughts and to say racist things without being expelled.  The university’s expelling them represented a dangerous step toward censorship on college campuses.  

Censorship happens when the majority persecutes a minority voice.  That the majority in this case was the progressive left and the minority was a group of racist frat-boys makes little difference.  In fact, that’s precisely the point that many on the political left — those who dominate elite American campuses right now — are unable to see.  Blinded by their sense of moral rightness, they are eager and willing to censor the free speech of those they disagree with.  This is all especially bad because not only is it Constitutionally wrong, but it goes against the mission and values of higher education: the free exchange of ideas and the commitment to freedom of expression.

Since that time, the righteousness of campus censors has continued, and I’ve wondered how long my Alma mater, Middlebury College, would be spared the national embarrassment of some similar act of intolerance.

Last week, it finally happened.  An invited campus speaker, Charles Murray, a fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), was shouted from the stage by a group of protesters.  Later, his small group was set upon by an angry mob after the talk.  During the confrontation, Middlebury professor Allison Stanger was assaulted.  

Much has been written about this event during the past week.  But what surprises me most is not that the event received much media attention, but the reluctance of commentators to call this event what it was.  

This was not an act of protest.  Protest is a perfectly legal and good thing for students to do.  But when students shouted down the speaker and did not let anyone else hear his speech, they censored him.  Violence aside, this was an act of censorship.

The Censors’ Arguments

Because this event attracted national media attention, students and professors have felt the need to justify what happened.  It has been quite helpful to read written defenses during the past week, because it allows one to slow things down and see past the anger to the reasoning, to test whether such reasoning makes sense.  In reading these justifications, I am largely struck by three things:

 

Blaming the Victim:  I am struck by how willing some people are to claim that it was essentially the professor’s own fault that she was assaulted because she made the mistake of legitimizing this speaker’s appearance.  One online commenter I know wrote:

“It`s unfortunate that a professor at Middlebury has suffered physically for associating with a purveyor of eugenic hypotheses. Then, again, when you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.”

This is little different than blaming a rape victim for her own rape because of what she was wearing.  There is no excuse for this sort of violence.

 

Paying Lip Service:  Second, I’m struck by how greatly censorship apologists contort themselves to pay lip service to free speech, while in fact arguing for censorship.  Their argument seems to be: free speech for everyone, just not those I disagree with.

 

The Platform Argument:  Third, I’m struck by how many people simply believe that this speaker should never have been invited to Middlebury College because his views were controversial, backward, or disproven — and because inviting him to campus gives him a platform to spread his ideas and a tacit endorsement by the college.  

The “Platform Argument” has been the most used tactic that student censors have employed to justify their actions.  At first glance, it seems wholly reasonable.  After all, it’s within a college’s right not to invite anyone that they don’t wish to invite.  But what about when some people want to invite a speaker, and others don’t?  How do we decide who to reject? Is the Platform Argument a good method?  

Let’s find out.  

 

The Platform Argument:  A Slippery Slope to Censorship

If you believe that inviting Mr. Murray to speak is wrong because it gives him a platform to spread his ideas, then fine.  But aren’t his books also a platform for him to spread his ideas?  After all, what students objected to most was the content of Mr. Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve.  If we don’t want to give his ideas a platform, shouldn’t we also send out an all-school email, banning Mr. Murray’s books from being taught in classes?  

And what about the library?  Aren’t his books there too?  Better check.  After all, we can’t be providing him with a platform.  Better pull those books from the shelves!

But let’s not stop with Mr. Murray.  Students claimed Mr. Murray’s racist attitudes did not belong on campus — but what about Aristotle, who wrote famously racist chapters about natural slavery?  Surely we can’t give his books a platform either?  Ban them.  We can’t have ideas like that on a college campus.  And what about Thomas Jefferson?  Or Shakespeare?  Let’s not forget Joseph Conrad.  And surely there’s no more watching “Braveheart” after what Mel Gibson has said?  Let’s get these works out of classrooms and out of the library immediately.

In fact, I have an idea.  We could have a ceremony outside.  We’ll throw all the offensive books into a pile and set fire to them!  Nothing would better symbolize our refusal to give racist thinkers a platform.  “These ideas don’t belong on college campuses!” we’d cheer — echoing the claims of students last week at Middlebury College.  The flames would rise higher and higher into the night and we would be righteous.

Surely you can see where I’m going with this.  The “platform” argument is one we must be careful with, because it is a slippery slope downhill to censorship.

 

But We’re Not Censors!

Here are some objections to the reasoning above that I can think of:

“But we should have the right not to invite any speaker we don’t want to!”

Yes, just as you have every right not to teach any book you don’t want to teach, and not buy any book you don’t want in the library.  But just because *you* don’t want a book taught in classes or held in the library doesn’t mean the college should remove it.  And just because a majority of students don’t want it doesn’t mean they should remove it.

“But inviting a speaker is a bigger platform and a more effective way for him to spread his ideas than teaching his book or shelving it in the library!”

I agree with this.  But then what you’re really arguing is: we don’t mind him being given a platform, just not such an effective one.

Fine, so let’s fix the problem.  I see three ways.

 

1.  Don’t invite speakers whose ideas don’t deserve an effective platform.

 

2.  Make speakers’ platforms less effective for spreading their ideas — at least speakers we deem as dangerous or offensive.

 

3.  The Library Policy:  You accept any speaker on campus that anyone wishes to invite, with reasonable oversight from college employees: just the way you accept any books in the library or to be taught in classes.

 

The First Option — A Mess

1.  Don’t invite speakers whose ideas don’t deserve an effective platform.

Again, this is the Platform Argument, which we have already shown is a slippery slope to censorship.  Over the past week, many students have proposed standards for inviting speakers, such as:

No speakers who have not been peer reviewed.  

(Surely this wouldn’t work.  No Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders during last year’s election!  And no Dalai Lama or Pope.)

No speakers whose ideas have been discredited.  

No speakers who preach hatred.

No speakers on campus who possess discriminatory views toward historically oppressed peoples.

(Congratulations!  You’ve officially shut down free speech on campus!  Now you’re sounding like a real censor!)

But what if the majority of students think it’s right?

What about if the campus were suddenly filled with Trump supporters?  Wouldn’t they disallow Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders?  Does that sound right?  Although it would not be illegal to reject speakers based on majority votes, it would clearly have a chilling effect on minority (read: conservative) students, who’d never be able to slip their speakers past the voters.  That’s the wisdom of the First Amendment: it protects minority voices from official censorship so that the free exchange of ideas will openly flourish.  Obeying the will of the majority is always democratic, but censorship is always democratic too.

 

The Second Option — Absurd, or is it?

2.  Make speakers’ platforms less effective for spreading their ideas.

This seems patently absurd, yet many of the censorship apologists were calling for this.  They sometimes grant that a controversial speaker should be invited, but they argue that he must be checked.  Here is a sample of the ideas I saw proposed:

A contrasting speaker should have been allowed to debate Mr. Murray.

Fine, so perhaps we should make a policy: all speakers should be required to have a contrasting speaker.  When Barack Obama speaks at Middlebury, Donald Trump must get equal airtime.  Clearly students would consider this a bad policy when they apply it to their own speakers.

Students should have had a chance to debate Mr. Murray.

They did — there was a scheduled Q & A session, and an official questioner prepared to push Mr. Murray.  But students seemed unhappy with even this format.  It’s unclear what they wished, but perhaps they wanted a purely equal footing.  It’s hard to picture what this would look like, but clearly students would not want white supremacist students on an equal footing with a progressive speaker.

In order not to appear to endorse Mr. Murray, the school had an obligation to offer students special preparation to refute his ideas.

Many professors did just this.  That’s a good thing.  But the school shouldn’t be required to do this before each speaker, clearly.  After all, do we require they meet with a faculty member before checking out Mr. Murray’s books in the library?  Clearly students only wanted this because they disliked this particular speaker.

 

The Third Option:  The Library Policy

3.  The Library Policy:  You accept any speaker on campus that anyone wishes to invite, with reasonable oversight from college employees: just the way you accept any books in the library or in classes that students or professional educators deem appropriate.

This strikes me as exactly what happened at Middlebury.  A student group, the college AEI club, invited Mr. Murray, with the sponsorship of the Political Science department.  

Strangely, in all the discussion I read, I didn’t see many criticisms of the school policy itself.  Students and professors were unhappy that the Political Science department didn’t reject this speaker as being unworthy.  This reasoning leads right back to the Platform Argument, which we have already examined the dangers of.

The question of who gets to invite speakers to campus and how they get to do this is a worthy one. I hope it will be debated vigorously. I hope, of course, that it will not be settled in such a way as to include so many protections toward offending anyone that the college will never invite substantive speakers, or speakers who represent minority viewpoints, because that has a chilling effect on free speech and free debate on campus.

 

Controversial Speakers = Violence:  The Trump Card

American colleges have been largely liberal bastions for many, many years.  Why has censorship become such a problem in the past few years?  The answer is this: students increasingly feel a strong role in a social mission to right the wrongs of historical injustice, and their fervor is at a high not seen since the 1960s.  In their zeal to promote a social agenda of progressive reform, students — aided by the language of trauma and psychology which themselves are increasingly present in our culture — have come to equate unwelcome ideas with violence and trauma.

These progressive students have been derided by the conservative press for being “special snowflakes” and delicate Millennials: a generation of trigger-warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions who are too delicate to hear ideas they disagree with.

While I am not bothered by their social mission or by their disdain for hateful speech, I am bothered when anyone defends censorship, and I believe it’s important to see these arguments for what they are.  

In an online essay that is remarkable for its defensiveness, for its lack of logic, and for its acrobatic attempts to wiggle free from the shackles of the First Amendment, Middlebury professor Linus Owens defended the censorship of Mr. Murray by equating the physical assault on Professor Stanger with the very act of inviting Mr. Murray: “[L]et’s not forget the real violence of bringing a known and active racist and anti-poor people ‘intellectual’ into our community.”

It’s important to keep in mind that this claim is a metaphor, not literal fact.  While real violence or direct threats toward people are not protected under the Constitution, rhetorical violence (offensive or bigoted speech) of the kind cited by Professor Owens is.  If it was not, Donald Trump and many of his supporters would surely be in prison for their opinions.  Perhaps this is what Professor Owens and his kind would want, in the end.  So while students and professors may use the term “violence” metaphorically, we should see such claims for what they are.

Professor Owens also writes:

“While legal scholars can debate the nuances of what constitutes hate speech, telling us that this falls far short of official standards, many of us recognize hate when we see it.”

The First Amendment recognizes no such thing as “hate speech.” While Mr. Murray’s statements are perhaps offensive or hateful, this is exactly the sort of speech that we as Americans are forced to hear: the price of having a robust code of free speech that doesn’t recognize hate speech is having to hear offensive speech.  The idea is that the way to counter hateful speech is not with censorship, but with more speech.  When you give people space to spout their crazy theories, it only makes them look crazy. When you debate their arguments soundly with facts, reason, and logic, it only makes them look misguided and wrong.  On the other hand, when you shout people down and use violence, you subvert the values of reason, logic, and civility that academic forums should be espousing. In short: you sell yourself out.

It’s important for college students (or their professors) to learn this, I think, both to prepare for the real world (in which offensive speech is the norm in our political arena), and simply because we need the First Amendment now more than ever.  This is exactly the time to have a robust free speech code in America, just as we must have a robust freedom of the press. Because right now there’s a VERY easily offended man in the Oval Office who’d love more than to cite rhetorical “violence” against him as well — and to use any pretext to silence opponents.  Right now the First Amendment won’t allow him.  We should not allow this buttress to be weakened, and we shouldn’t be teaching our students that it’s okay to do so.

Lastly, Professor Owens seems to believe that free speech is incompatible with a progressive social agenda.  It’s not.  It’s well documented that the First Amendment protections offered under the Constitution largely enabled Civil Rights Movement organizers and advocates for further their causes.  The First Amendment is not an infringement on social progress — but often its best ally.

 

The Upshot:  This is What Censorship Looks Like

In the end, these claims amount to no more than a simple excuse for censorship.  The Middlebury alumni letter written in protest of Mr. Murray inadvertently reveals exactly this:

“This is not an issue of freedom of speech. We think it is necessary to allow a diverse range of perspectives to be voiced at Middlebury . . .  However, in this case we find the principle does not apply.”

While there is nothing wrong with protesting views that you do not endorse, when you cross over into shouting down a speaker and not letting him speak, you have crossed into censorship.

And while there is nothing wrong with objecting to a speaker’s viewpoints, we must be careful about equating an invitation with an endorsement.  We don’t do this with library books or with books taught in class.  Why do this with speakers?  

We must also be careful of judging a speaker without reading his works or listening to him speak — something many campus censors were surely guilty of.  

We must be careful of dismissing a speaker’s entire body of work simply because a portion of his work is apparently controversial.  This is not to say we shouldn’t study his work for offensive views, but that we should not be too quick to dismiss his work — or to censor his work — because of it.

We must always be careful about believing that our moral high ground or our majority opinion allows us to silence any voices we do not wish to hear.  We have every right to debate these voices or not to listen to them, but we cannot banish them from existence or shout them down so that others may not hear them simply because they are counterproductive to our stated social project.

Lastly, we must do better to listen to each other.  Not only on American campuses, which should treat controversial speakers the way they treat controversial books — with piercing study, with tough questioning, and with reason and logic — but also in our daily lives.  If our most recent election showed anything, it’s that we need to do better to listen to each other if we have any hope of coming together as a country.  I continue to believe that only by openly debating can we move forward, and informed debate requires understanding of the other side’s positions.  In short — listening.  We cannot do this if we equate conflicting ideas with violence.

 

The Confidence We Need

In the end, censors always reek of fear.  Censorship says: “We can’t let these ideas be spoken aloud, otherwise they will prove irresistible.” Never was the fear more pronounced than during the televised speech Mr. Murray finally gave after he was moved from the stage to a private room.  During the course of his speech, students could be heard yelling outside the room, banging on the doors, and pulling the fire alarms.  At first glance, they are juvenile.  Knowing the violence that was to come later, these sounds are also ominous — the sound of the angry mob.  But more than anything, as I listen to them now, they are fearful.

“Get him out!  Get him out!” they seem to scream.  “We must remove him from campus immediately!  His ideas are too attractive and they will spread!”

But there is a much more confident and more effective way to counter bigoted views.  Back in 1994, around the time that Mr. Murray’s The Bell Curve was published, a young man who’d just been named the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review used an interview on National Public Radio to speak about his vision for America.  During the interview, he took the opportunity to debate Mr. Murray’s views.

Yet instead of using censorship, this young man used the old tools of reason, logic, and evidence to coolly dispatch Mr. Murray’s bigoted ideas.  What’s striking is the tremendous confidence he radiates: confidence in himself and in the power of open debate to expose racist ideas for what they are.  The very opposite of the censors’ cowardice and vilification, this young man confidently combats ideas he does not agree with — even ones that seem to question his very life story — without being thrown off his game one bit.  It’s wonderful to hear, a virtuoso performance — all done with a self-possession and a mental sharpness that I would want for all graduates, and something very much missing in today’s debates.

That young man’s name?  Barack Obama.

And his way seems much better to me than censorship.

Normally I find inspirational quotes corny, especially when they’re posted on walls.  We in education are the worst offenders, specifically raising the sorts of dead-serious, soul-crushing mantras that make you want to duck out of fourth period Life Science to go vomit:

• “Shoot for the Stars!”
• “Hard Work + Determination = The Road to Success!”

The most cringe-worthy I ever saw was:

• “The Elevator to Success is broken.  You’ll have to take the stairs — one step at a time.”

This was back in Washington, D.C. — home of a remarkably dysfunctional school system — and I always imagined the poster should read:

• “Unfortunately this is the D.C. Public School system — the stairs are also broken.  We regret to inform you that there is *no* route to success at the present time.  We apologize for the inconvenience.”

But years ago, I did see a poster in someone’s house that I actually liked.  Perhaps its subtle mockery of the whole saccharine-sweet genre appealed to me.  Or maybe it just made sense:

• “Follow your dreams; be organized.”

Now I always had a handle on the first part of the quote.  Follow your dreams — much easier than trying to follow someone else’s, I’ve found.  But I was never much good at the “be organized part” until a few years ago, when I became what I like to call “a veteran teacher.” By that I mean “someone who is no longer having chalk and / or pencil sharpeners thrown at him” — or “who has at least learned how to duck effectively.” I am joking!  But while I was staggering through those first few years in the classroom, wondering “is it too late to go into something more relaxing — like maybe shark tank cleaning?” — I was starting to understand the importance of being organized.  It was a really important revelation for me as a young teacher, right up there with “don’t ever argue with an eighth grader,” or “middle school lunch duty causes something important inside you to break,” or “also you should probably never argue with anyone whose developmental state involves dating a girl who is not aware that you are dating.” Learning about the importance of being organized was a milestone in my life, which is why it’s too bad that I’ve now taken it too far.

But let me back up.  First of all, the fact that I’d ever become organized in the first place was an outrageous long shot, along the lines of Donald Trump winning the presidency despite doing a better job trying to shoot himself in the foot than anyone since Plaxico Burress.

For most of my life I was an unrepentant slob.  I had the sort of room that people would walk into and say, “You don’t have a girlfriend, do you?” In my early twenties I rented a house with three other kayakers.  The upstairs bathroom, which I shared with my friend Jack, was particularly vile, largely stemming from how often we took notice (“once in a while”) and from our rigorous cleaning schedule (“once in a never“).  At one point during this era I specifically recall visiting the bathrooms at both Mad River Glen and Fenway Park and thinking to myself, “I don’t see what the fuss is.  These are fine.”

Then there was my car: a singular mix of snack debris, wet kayaking gear, and the type of odors that cause murderous hitchhikers to say, “You know what?  I’ll wait for next car, thanks.” Of course the people who rode in my car the most — other kayakers — didn’t care a whit.  All they cared about was getting a ride back to the put in so they could hop in their own car — which probably made mine smell like new floral arrangements.

Right around when I traded the paddle for the red pen and started teaching — and started dating women whose main aspiration did not include getting a drysuit sponsor — I visited a place I had never been to before.  It was called the car wash.  They had a vacuum that you could use to slurp up the cracker crumbs that were older than Strom Thurmond residing in your seat cushions.  I also began to realize certain truths — little things like:

“If you don’t leave decaying river booties in your car, there won’t always be a three-space vacancy on either side in the parking lot.”

It was a heady time.

And you know what else helped me start to quite literally “clean up” my act?  A book!  I’ve always been a reader, dating back to the time before I could actually read, but would just pretend (I believe I read all about Ronald Reagan’s thumping of Walter Mondale in this fashion).  Now you’d think it was a book about being organized that finally changed me.  Something like:

• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

• She’s Just Not That Into You (or Your Smelly Car)

• Trash, Recycling, or Compost? Who Gives a Shit, Just Throw It Away!  

But it wasn’t!  My metamorphosis came not from Good Housekeeping, but from good writing: the classic American guide to crafting a sentence — Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.  

How?  Think about the book’s most famous wisdom: “Omit needless words,” which I’d been chanting to myself since high school.  Long before I’d begun tossing unneeded socks, I’d been tossing unneeded words — an enthusiastic (if not always observant) trimmer of tangled sentences.  E.B. White’s advice came easily to me; somewhere deep down I love getting rid of stuff.  If I’d been a different sort of man, I might have been one of those Donald Trump- or Michelle-Rhee-like bosses whose idea of a fun time is to get drunk and lay off whole floors of his workforce.  I always had little trouble throwing stuff out.  There went the old pair of shoes, there went the threadbare hat, there went the “philosopher jacket” (as my friends called it because I’d worn it so broodingly around campus) that had enveloped me during a decade of my most formidable memories, now more duct tape than coat.  If it hadn’t been used in a  year, I’d do what I’d always done with extra nouns and verbs: toss it.  Paring a thing to its essentials — a written essay, a company, or perhaps even a clothes closet — had always seemed both clarifying and liberating.  That which fails to weigh us down makes us only stronger.  I never had trouble unburdening myself once I got around to it.  Trouble was, I rarely did.

The change happened slowly.  What I know is this: it was motivated by fear.  Fear at first that I would lose my class’s attention if I wasn’t well planned, and never get it back.  Then a fear that if I did not plan out my classes carefully, my students would depart into the world with the literacy skills of adolescent water buffalo.

At first this fear burned itself off in fanatically detailed lesson plans, the type of things that are planned out to the minute.  I’d even write it all out on the overhead PowerPoint in comically didactic steps:

• “Next you will pick up the pencil with your right hand . . . ”
• “You will hold it between your thumb and forefinger . . .”
• “You will resist the urge to throw spitballs at the new kid . . . ”

It got so bad that my coworkers were teasing me.  They asked me if I wrote out minute-by-minute schedules like that for my wife at home.  Of course not, I assured them, the schedules I write for her are only hourly.  (“12 pm: get indignant about husband’s blog post.”)

Soon I began whipping the physical space of the classroom itself into organized shape.  Again, it was fear: on a paper-strewn desk I’d all-too-easily misplace my plans, leading to horrifying dead-air time, leading to the inevitable flurry of misbehaviors.  My mental thought process went something like this: “If I don’t keep things straight around here, I’ll lose my plans.  If I lose my plans, I won’t have anything for kids to do.  And if I don’t have anything for kids to do . . .  they might start SEXTING!”

At some point I looked around and realized I was more organized than not.

I wasn’t the only one.  Public school teaching is a humbling profession, and I began to look around in meetings to see that I wasn’t the only one fondling his planner like a beloved stuffed animal.  There are plenty of teachers who swagger in and spend Year 1 trying to “go with the flow,” or “following where the students lead.” Those teachers usually spend Year 2 applying to law schools.  Being up against 100 adolescents every day makes even the most ardent improviser look for a nice, wide, well-marked path to follow.

But it wasn’t until maybe a year ago that I took things a little too far.  By then I had things humming.  Work was methodically collected, shunted off into labeled folders, graded and entered into the gradebook according to a set priority during set times, and distributed back to the student, all with mechanical precision.  Worksheets were printed a day ahead of time, organized in a special place, distributed, then any extras saved according to a strict “Noah’s Arc” policy: keep two of each kind, then send the rest to the bottom of the bin.  Student absences — the bane of any organized teacher’s existence — were hardly an issue.  If a student missed a quiz, his name was immediately slapped on a blank copy in hard, red ink and shuttled off to a special place where he knew to pick it up on his return.  Late assignments were accepted within a week and no longer.  In time I put all assignments on Google Classroom for absent students to make up.  After a time, it was like clockwork.

Even my time was brutally organized.  Where once I’d lounged around with my feet up, drinking coffee and talking to students who wandered in, now if anyone came into my room in the breaks between classes, or even during lunchtime or after school, I’d look at him like I were a highly efficient Swiss rail conductor and he a herd of cattle that had stopped on the tracks.  I suddenly realized that I was becoming too organized.

The problem is, being too organized can turn you to stone, can cause you to look askance at real, live human interaction — so unpredictable and noisy compared the surgical precision of a well-executed teaching plan.  Instead of pausing to linger in the doorway to talk with students about the Warriors, about their driver’s tests, or about how their older brother was doing in college, I was busy routing their homework into the appropriate bin, or goading them to find their seats so we wouldn’t waste time.  During free periods students would wander in — ostensibly to ask about the details of some assignment, but really because they wanted attention, wanted to be heard by another human being.  Yes, I wasn’t bringing home extra work on the weekends, but was I missing out something better — the kind of beautiful, unscripted moments with children that inspired me to teach in the first place?

So that’s why I’ve been trying to scale it back this year.  I’ve told myself: there’s no need to have *every* minute planned.  Because human beings are messy, and sometimes what you really need to adapt to this is a kind of studied messiness.  It’s good to have a plan, but just like in whitewater paddling, you have to be prepared to amend that plan.  I’m not talking about going back to winging it like I did my first year.  I’m talking about an even deeper, more audacious kind of organization: planning things out so well that you’ve built in some time to be bothered — some time to react to life as it comes at you in all of its wonderfully unpredictable swells.  Time for people, time for listening, and, yes, a time for going with the flow.  

The unplanned stuff — that should all be part of your plan.

Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve been played until much later — especially if you’ve been played by a veteran.

This turned out to be the case last week, although I didn’t realize it at the time, when my wife confronted me with what sounded like a perfectly reasonable request.

“Alden,” she said, “I’d really like it if you’d read this book and then we could talk about it together.”

I should have realized that something was up when she used my full name.  Normally my wife calls me by my initials, A.B.B.  Someone once misheard her and thought she was calling me “A.D.D.” — as in “Attention Deficit Disorder.” That’s sort of like saying, “Hey, I.B.S.!  Yeah, you, Irritiable Bowel Syndrome!  Can you pass the remote?”

The use of my full first name is normally reserved for Major Infractions, the kind for which I usually end up performing some act of domestic penance, like committing to large-scale vacuuming projects.  I can’t tell what’s worse about the full-name technique: its devastating effectiveness, or fact that my wife learned it from me.

For years I’d regaled her with battlefield stories of how I, a high school teacher, have employed the full-name technique to great effect on unsuspecting teenagers.  When I first started teaching, I knew I needed an identity, a way to respond when I wanted to motivate students.  Unfortunately, most of the obvious ones didn’t fit.  I’m not a Bobby Knight-style yeller; I don’t throw tantrums (or chairs).  For a while I tried cultivating a “speak softly but carry a big stick” persona — sort of like Joe Pesci’s character at the end of “A Bronx Tale” — the gangster who barely has to whisper to communicate how dangerous he is.  Unfortunately I suffered from something of a credibility gap.  While it’s completely terrifying to hear something completely innocuous whispered in your ear — provided it’s done by an unhinged gangster, such as, “You might want to start picking up your socks . . . ” (because you know that if you don’t, he’ll kill you and your neighbors and your neighbors’ pets), it’s somewhat less intimidating coming from a guy wearing an Oxford shirt who drives a minivan, when he whispers, “If you don’t do your homework, you may end up with a C- this semester.” Just a different effect.

I tried on other teaching personas:  the “I’m just trying to help you” guy (had no effect), the groovy “everybody just chill out, man, and let yourself, like, feel feelings” guy (led to speculations about my drug use), and finally, the highly-exasperated, “I might quit teaching at any moment because of you kids!” guy (actually seemed to encourage them).  None of it worked.

That’s when I found the answer: disappointment!  No kid, deep down, wants to let down his parents, so I figured — why don’t I channel some of that?  Why can’t I make telling me they forgot their homework feel like they have to tell dad they accidentally wore his favorite suede jacket as a raincoat?  I even stumbled upon the perfect model in the character of Lester Freamon, the savvy, wizened detective in the crime series “The Wire.” None of the young detectives in his unit ever wanted to disappoint Freamon, mostly because 1) he was the most badass, genius criminal investigator since Porfiry Petrovich, and because 2) they knew if they did come back without the goods, Freamon would give them a disappointed, fatherly look over the top of his reading glasses and make them feel like complete failures.  This act was so effective that it became a running joke on the show.

Very soon, bolstered by a few years’ teaching experience, and by some jots of grey in my beard, I started emulating Freamon and sending severe looks of my own across the top of my perfectly imaginary reading glasses.  I’ve even considered buying a fake pair just to enhance the effect.  I also began to approximate Freamon’s wise, all-knowing tone — which I carried a step further by always using a student’s full name (just as his parents might).

“Christopher Jonathan Snutterson,” I’ll say slowly to some poor junior — most of whose friends have never heard his full name, preferring something shorthand and sensitive, such as “Snut-bag.”

“May I speak with you a moment — outside?”

By the time I get this young man outside the classroom (“public praise, private reprimand” is the educational catchphrase), and deliver the next line, it’s all over:

“Young man, I am disappointed.”

I’m not angry (which is often a shortcut to shutting down the adolescent brain) — just let down, which sometimes doesn’t register, but sometimes stirs something primal — and I play it to the hilt (and in some sense, of course, I really am let down).  I tend to use this approach almost exclusively on young males, with whom the paternal subtext is particularly effective: “Young man, as a self-appointed father figure in this particular situation, I expected a lot more from you.” Sometimes it doesn’t work, but often it does.  My greatest reward came last fall when one mother told me that her son’s grades had improved dramatically simply because he’d been too guilty to disappoint me.

I rarely use this technique with girls.  (But then again, girls never call each other “Snut-bag,” do they?  They just make catty comments under their breath like, “Do you really think you’ve got the boobs for that dress?”)

So imagine my frustration when I realized that the Lester Freamon technique was just as effective when turned back on its creator — me!  In fact, my wife has gotten quite good at it, although the subtext is somewhat different.  “Alden Bancroft Bird,” she seems to say, “I’m your wife and I make your sandwiches and don’t you love me?” It’s less about disappointment, and more about eliciting sympathy.  It’s completely unfair.  Plus, I’m powerless to use it back on her.  The same look that projects “fatherly” and “benevolent” to misbehaving but desperate-to-please teenage boys comes off more as “paternalistic” or “condescending as hell” to the women’s-college-educated demographic.

Not to mention that my wife is capable of a sort of Jedi mind trick that instantly causes any semblance of moral authority I have to vanish.  We’ll be taking a casual stroll at Sea World when she will suddenly do something that would seem to give me an overwhelming upper hand — say, knocking me into a tank full of live sharks.  There is thrashing, and crimson water.  Finally park officials hoist out the remains of a man who is basically okay, but missing jaw-shaped chunks of his body.  You would think I’d be untouchable at this point, but then she’d give me that look (my look!) which says: “You’d better not make a big a deal out of this, or, god forbid, make a face.  If you do, have fun recovering from blood loss in your new bachelor apartment.”

But what about the book, you ask?  The one my wife had strongly suggested I read and then we discuss?

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  

Need I say more?

 

Postscript:

This post is dedicated to my friend and coworker Laure Angel, an outrageously good educator and human being who never needed a gimmick or “look” to bring out the best in her students.

What is it about Steve Bannon?  What is it about this slithering snake of a man, this fact-free fear monger, this red-jowled anarchist that he somehow has the one thing that nobody since that unscrupulous Queens slum-lord, Fred Trump, has had: the ear of The Donald?  Why Steve Bannon?

After all, Trump doesn’t listen to anyone else.  Everyone in Trump’s life, bimbos included, seems like they have to weather a spit-flecked tantrum or engage in routine bowing and supplication before he’ll bother to learn your name, or at least to go in front of the press and lie belligerently on His behalf.  The only way Kelly Ann Conway knew how to get Trump’s ear was by making sure her words ended up on Fox at 3 am, when she knew he’d be watching.  You don’t actually picture Trump listening to her; you picture him pouting when she tries to take away his phone.

I’m reminded of a crude joke told at a Trump roast by . . .  it had to be Jeff Ross.  I can’t tell this joke on a family blog (that is — because my family are likely the only ones reading it), but let’s just say the punch line had to do with Trump being the only person who could sexually arouse Trump.  It also seems to me as I think about it that the only person Trump listens to is probably Trump.

Except for Steve Bannon.  Bannon — who has recently been appointed to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the entire Supreme Court, who’ve all been reassigned to work as cocktail waiters in one of Trump’s casinos — is Trump’s political hit-man.  Now, I get it — every president has to have a hit-man.  Bush had Karl Rove.  Obama had Rahm Emmanuel.  Hillary Clinton had Anthony Weiner (self-inflicted hits).  These men were known for having political savvy, electoral influence, much-photographed genitalia, and the moral scrupulousness of carnivorous fish.  Next to Steve Bannon, these guys look like Malala.  Plants wither when Bannon enters a room.  College students demand safe spaces.  And — most curious of all — Donald Trump listens.  I guess that when your vision of modern America already resembles one of the “Saw” movies, the only person in the country who can tell you a terrifying enough bedtime story to keep you interested is probably Bannon.  He’s sort of like Darth Vader’s bad conscience.

This is doubly strange because –as I said — Donald Trump doesn’t really listen to anyone else.  In fact, I think the thing that bothers me most about Trump is that, for a man who says he speaks for the people, he is almost pathologically incapable of listening to them.  Listening is fundamentally an act of patience and of humility, and Donald Trump I believe actively campaigned against both qualities, calling them un-American, a “disgrace,” and unlikely to bring jobs back.

When was the last time Donald Trump ever mentioned a private citizen, unless it was to publicly berate her?  Barack Obama’s speeches were peppered with references to ordinary Americans.  His campaign stops were built around fish fries, diners, and rib joints.  His early days in the White House were often bookended by trips to Ben’s Chilli Bowl.  Back in 2009 a reporter asked the newly sworn-in president what he missed most about private life.  His answer: being able to listen to ordinary Americans outside the “bubble” of the Oval Office.  Every evening, President Obama read ten letters from normal Americans.

For all the messiah-worship of his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was a public servant.  He’d worn out his shoes on the sidewalks of Chicago as a community organizer.  Later on he did the same thing as a state senator.  Neither job was glamorous.  But both afforded him the chance to get to know people with very different lives than his own.  These experiences shaped his time in the White House.  He learned how to listen to these people because he worked for them.

Donald Trump has never worked for anyone in his life.  That would show weakness.  And it was part of his appeal.  Nor was he a public servant.  This too was part of his appeal.  The enduring image of Donald Trump’s campaign is not of him shaking hands and talking with voters in real-life situations, but of him doing photo ops in airplane hangars in front of staged backdrops at his massive rallies.  He’s not a public servant listening to voters; he’s a celebrity meeting fans.  Unlike Barack Obama, Trump has very few of these real voters’ stories to guide his decision making in the Oval Office.  Because the only time he was listening to voters was when they were cheering for him.

But that’s how it is for a narcissist, isn’t it?  When your entire soul is a dark, sucking vortex that needs love, love, love all the time for me, me, me, there’s not a lot of space left over to listen to anyone else’s opinions.

We’ve all met these people before.  They’re self-centered enough that they can’t grasp that other people besides themselves have opinions or feelings.  It’s empathy that’s missing.  Not the far-left, Brown University, give-everyone-a-trigger-warning sort of empathy, but the Atticus Finch version: the simple ability to climb into another’s skin and see the world from his point of view.

Make no mistake, to be president you need to possess a massive ego.  You have to be self-confident almost beyond a normal person’s ability to comprehend.  But you also have to listen, and listening requires it’s own kind of confidence — the confidence to hear criticism, to allow the camera to focus on someone else for a moment.  No one would ever confuse Barack Obama with a back-slapping pol along the lines of Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush, but you always got the feeling that if you sat down and had a beer with him and talked to him about why you thought his educational policy was crap, he’d listen to what you had to say — even if he would probably counter with a menacing clarity.

With Trump, it’s not so much that he wouldn’t listen, it’s that he wouldn’t know how.  It’s not in his genetic make-up.  Listening and empathy both require a strength that Donald Trump does not possess.  He is good at reading people, at finding their weaknesses.  He can get the better of them.  But this isn’t really listening; it’s sizing people up.  And he can certainly listen to a crowd chant his name.  But saying that Donald Trump can “listen” to people simply because he can lap up their adoration is like saying a heroin addict is self-reliant because he can always find drugs.  Trump doesn’t listen.

Years ago, when I started teaching, I worked in a very poor school district where many students had inherited a legacy of academic failure.  Frustrated by their rude behavior and lack of interest, I developed a belief that neither they nor their families cared much about improving their lives.  How else, I thought, to explain their poor performance in school, their stubborn desire to remain what they were?  I was, in short, equal parts arrogant and ignorant.

But as I began doing the job of a public servant and interacting with these families, I learned that most of them shared goals for their children that were strikingly similar to my own: a better future, more opportunities, fulfillment and happiness.  In that work, I found myself taken aback at how lucky I’d been in my own life, and how baffled I’d be if I’d run into the obstacles many of my students’ families took for granted: disease, poverty, systemic racism, or simply not knowing the key that opens society’s doors.  My interactions with these children and families fundamentally changed my view of our society.  To me, this is what public service is all about: the ability to listen in order to understand that your fellow humans — whether they’re adversaries, or constituents, or the families in the community — are just that: fellow human beings, with stories of their own and points of view that are different from yours, but no less valid and no less worthy of being heard at the top.

But Donald Trump can’t do any of that.  Born rich, he’s never had practice listening to other people except to get the better of them.  

Seems to me that’s exactly what he has done.

Last week I had pinkeye.  Not just normal pinkeye, but double pinkeye: both eyes.  I looked like I’d been partying for four days straight with Tony Montana.  The medical name for pinkeye is conjunctivitis, which in Latin means, “your eyes look like junk.” You know it’s bad when the first thing your doctor says when he comes in is, “Wow, looking at you makes me want to wash my hands.” His fresh-faced Dartmouth intern had a look that said, “Umm, this doctor thing just got REAL.”

Pinkeye is not something you normally get as an adult.  I hadn’t had pinkeye since I was about nine and Donald Trump was just a friendly extra helping Kevin McCallister find the hotel lobby in “Home Alone II.” A lot of people get pinkeye when they’re young.  Here’s how it goes: first your eyes get red.  Then the school nurse reacts like you’ve contracted bubonic plague.  She politely informs you that you’ve been transferred to another school district (in Romania).  And then you get better after a few days.  It’s not a big deal — except to school nurses.  I swear, if you ever want to cause a riot at a school nurse convention, just walk into the room and yell, “I’ve got pinkeye!”

(You can also try saying loudly, “Oh, are you bleeding?  Don’t worry — I don’t need gloves.”)

How ironic then that I contracted my first case of pinkeye in about twenty-five years from a school nurse.  It was this past November and, finding myself having to inch my chair closer and closer to the TV just to make out the subtle visual distinction between such characters as Princess Leia and Chewbacca, I decided it was time to get my vision tested.  It just so happened that the nurses were overseeing a school-wide vision testing at the high school where I work, and were kind enough to allow me to duck in line and to put my eyes into the machine, where they were probably the 200th pair that day.  The next morning I woke up knowing that I didn’t need glasses, but looking like a walking advertisement for Visine.  Pinkeye.  I missed three days of work straight — a record for me.  Once it cleared up, I figured, “Hey, at least I’m done with pinkeye for, say, the rest of my life.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d been a pollster in Michigan.

Now there’s a weird thing that happens to teachers: our bodies know when vacation is coming up.  For weeks and weeks kids are getting sick around us — coughing, sneezing, touching door knobs, blowing their noses, handing in papers for us to grade that probably contain more germs than a New York City subway car.  Our classrooms are basically giant Petri dishes.  Somehow we manage to will our bodies to stay healthy — right up until vacation.  Then it’s like our bodies realize, “Hey, we can finally let our guard down.” And we get sick.

It happens to me every year, especially during February Break.  Every year I steel myself for it, but every year it happens anyway.

This Christmas Break was no different.  I tried.  The week before vacation, I coaxed a plus-sized bottle of sanitizing soap from the nurse’s office and spent the days leading up to break lathering myself up with the stuff.  I wiped every surface in my room with a set of bleach wipes before and after school.  I started operating the door knob with my shirt sleeve around my hand.  Your basic germaphobe behavior.  I basically turned into Bill Murray in “What About Bob?” I did everything short of hosing out the classroom in between periods.  I was NOT going to get sick.  Not this Christmas.

Well, I got sick this Christmas.  A few days later, anyway.  Ironically during the time when I was stuck home alone, I caught a virus that ripped through me like Grant through Richmond.  I passed the rest of the week — which I’d planned to spend skiing and drinking beer and just generally enjoying the novelty of being outside during daylight — confined to the couch and put through a spate of Lifetime movies, the most scarring of which was a thriller centered on a charming woman who was already on her third round of husband killing by the first commercial break.  Let’s just say if I’d had more energy I definitely would’ve relocated our entire knife collection to somewhere my wife would never find them (such as in my paddling gear).

Finally, a few days later, I’d clawed my way back up to health, feeling a little bit like the forest does after a wildfire.  In fact — in classic teacher fashion — I’d gotten well just in time to go back to work, which I did last Monday.  I figured that was the end of it: just another case of the body allowing work but denying fun.  Typical.

But a strange thing happened.  By that afternoon, my eyes were tearing up more often than John Boehner’s.  By the time I got home, my eyes looked like I’d been smoking dope with raft guides.  The next morning I took one look in the mirror and knew I’d better stay home — otherwise I’d break the record for “most students immediately switching English teachers in a single day.” Not to mention the poor school nurses, all of whom would probably have to be carted out after they heard the news that there was pink eye in their school.

I passed the next four days — a record number of work absences for me — in a variety of ways.  There were the trips to the doctor, the look on his face as he examined me that said, “Don’t act freaked out . . .  Don’t act freaked out . . . , ” the antibiotics that did not work.  Then there was the fact that looking into any sort of light felt like torture — sort of like Reince Priebus probably felt when the armed men made him stare into that lightbulb and repeat, “I will support Trump . . . ” I began insisting that all lights be turned out anywhere I was in the house, and I also began wearing sunglasses all the time, like some Hollywood diva.  

There was of course there was the inevitable guilt at missing four straight days of work.  This is no Mad Men-era workplace, when Don Draper goes out on long, boozy lunches that turn into two-week benders and no one asks any questions.  Anyone who is wired to be a teacher will understand: even though it makes no sense, you always feel just a little bit guilty when you’re absent.  It’s like you’re letting the kids down.  Then of course you come back a week later and the kids say, “Hey, were you out or something?” Public schools: they keep you humble.

Finally by last weekend I’d once again clawed back up to something approaching normal health, though I’ve spent the rest of the week looking worriedly back over my shoulder for the next illness chasing me.  It’s been four days and it hasn’t come yet.  Hopefully I’m all set on pinkeye now for about fifty years.  

In the meantime I’ll be scrubbing my hands and wiping down my classroom.  Because before you know it, it’ll be February Break.

Two years ago I decided to conduct an experiment that turned out to be bad for my ego but good for my marriage:  could I teach my wife to downhill ski and not have to thumb through the Yellow Pages under “Lawyers, Divorce”?

Common wisdom tells us, “Don’t ever try to teach your wife to do anything that you think you’re really good at — especially if it involves going fast in the general direction of large trees.” You have to be careful because you might turn her off forever by endangering her life,  or worse — by ordering her around like she’s six years old.

What you have to do is ease her into it.  “Oh, look at that!” you’ll say, “We’re watching football again.  Isn’t this kind of fun?” Don’t ever seem like you’re trying to teach her stuff; there’s no faster way to kill a relationship.  Although when she’s hanging out with her new boyfriend, Juan, at least she’ll finally understand pass interference.

Happily though in my case, the answer to my experiment turned out to be “yes.” I was able to teach my wife to ski — without her whipping the wedding ring back at me on the chairlift.

Continue reading “The Couple That Skis Together”