Notes From the North Country

One thing that I’m proud about coming out of my fellowship last year is the newfound confidence that I have as a teacher.  Perhaps it’s related to the validation associated with receiving such a prestigious honor as a Rowland Fellowship, but I believe it’s more likely that this new confidence is more a matter of learning to see my job, and my role as a teacher, in a completely new way than before.

Continue reading “On Receiving Feedback from my Students”

The other day I went down to the basement to retrieve three boxes of guidebooks to ship out to a supplier.  As I was rummaging around in the dark corners searching for the once-ubiquitous cardboard boxes bearing the name “Malbaie Press” (my invented publishing company), it began to dawn on me:  there aren’t anymore left. Aside from a few boxes I’d set in my office to keep for posterity, that’s it. Twelve years after publishing my whitewater guidebook, Let It Rain, I’m finally sold out.

Continue reading “Let It Rain is Sold Out”

Over the past few months, my wife and I have been embarking on what I’m sure is the most important battle we’ll face in parenting:  regaining our sanity. I’m talking about sleep training. The principal technique I employed was “being an awful person.”

Of course, we started by trying the most humane method: “co-sleeping.” This is where you share a room or even a bed with your child.  It didn’t work. Babies are loud. Co-sleeping would be like if you had a broken alarm clock that went off every 20 minutes and you said to yourself, “You know what, maybe the place to put this thing is in the bed right next to me?”

Soon we opted for the other extreme:  the “cry it out” method. If co-sleeping is compassion, cry-it-out is tough love.  You set your baby in a crib in a different room, close the door, and hope for the best.  It’s hard. Your baby is all alone in a dark room, screaming like he’s being attacked by geese.  He needs you. He needs someone to comfort him and feed him every 11 seconds and mumble soothing words, such as, “Why can’t you go the f to sleep?” But you can’t.  If he learns that crying makes an adult appear, he’ll never sleep alone.  You have to let him “cry it out.” But you feel like an awful person.

My wife, who possesses traits such as compassion and empathy, struggled to resist.  Only a series of textbook open-field tackles by me kept her hand from the nursery doorknob.

I, on the other hand, had no trouble being the bad guy.  Apparently my parenting style is modeled on the evil prison warden Samuel Norton in “The Shawshank Redemption”: “Oh, he’s crying, is he?  Put him in solitary, in the nursery!  Eight hours!”

But it worked.  Hours of screaming shrank to minutes.  Then, magically, he was asleep. Now, he barely grazes the crib and he’s passed out like it’s a NyQuil commercial.

Sometimes a little tough love goes a long way.

***

It’s not unusual for my wife and me to have lengthy conversations entirely dedicated to describing bodily fluids.  There’s probably a day coming soon when we accidentally forget, and — sitting at a dinner party, sipping wine and making polite conversation about Elizabeth Warren’s immigration proposals — blurt out, “Well, I’m all for migrants’ rights, but right now I need to migrate to the toilet.  The last time I pooped was six hours ago, and if I wait any longer, we’re going to need to do an outfit change, if you know what I mean.”

“Don’t worry, honey, I packed you a spare onesie.”

Even if we don’t slip up in public, at home in private, we find ourselves talking a lot about bodily functions.  But what words to use? Poop and pee are little kid words.  I feel like one of those kindergarten teachers who gets home and forgets she’s not still at work: “Sweetie, before we go out to the club, do you need to make a doody?”

So what other words to use?  For starters, you can’t use bro-ish euphemisms.  Your baby doesn’t have to “take a leak.” He’s not pledging Alpha Delta Phi.  You can’t call out across a roomful of in-laws, “Hey, can you check his diaper and tell me if he took a dump?” Clearly, no.

Of course you’ve got your polite euphemisms, but new parents don’t have time to be polite.  We need specificity. Six month-olds don’t “go to the bathroom” or “visit the restroom.” (Chances are he has already “visited” his diaper.)

I suppose you could go with comic pop-culture phrases.  “Son, do you need to take the Browns to the Super Bowl?” But let’s face it: the Browns will never go to the Super Bowl.

So I have taken to using fancy Latin words instead.  They’re polite, but specific (and make you sound like you’ve been reading Norman Mailer).  Someday my son is going to be in preschool, telling the teacher, “I have to micturate. Don’t worry, already defecated.”

***

Here’s another parenting decision I’ve had to make.  

With my son riding in the car with me now, I have tried to cut back on cursing at other drivers.  Just what we need on his first day of kindergarten.  Some nervous five year-old walks in front of my son on the way over to the carpet for circle time, when suddenly: “Hey, did you just cut me off, you f—ing s—head?  Where’d you learn to drive? Trump University?”

***

Speaking of which, can you imagine the pressure on kindergarten teachers?  My wife and I are going to be a mess in our first parent conference: “Alright, what’s our ceiling, here?  Are we talking off-the-charts genius? Or that weird kid who makes bird noises during math? You’re not saying anything.  Should we be thinking Berkley, or low-level TSA? What about mid-level?”

Being a high school teacher is much easier.  By the time kids get to me, their parents have pretty much heard it all.  

“Uh, hi, Mrs. Smith, just wanted to let you know that your son Johnnie . . .”

“I know, I know, he’s a little shit.  We’re literally counting the days until we turn his bedroom into an office.”

Hopefully my wife and I will have some idea before we go to that first conference, but I have a feeling we’ll still be sweating.

***

Last point.  

It is hard for me, an introvert, not to hope my son turns out to be an extrovert.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gifts introverts possess — inner fire, reflectiveness, an affinity for deep conversation and intense friendships.  I do. But life is unmistakably easier for extroverts. It’s our culture. Garrulousness is currency. Introspection is suspect; “reserved” is a pejorative term.  The need to escape people (to recharge) is usually confused with disliking them.  

Better to be uncomplicated, an extrovert. An optimist, too, if possible.

***

Those are my hopes now at seven months. Now if you’ll excuse me, some f—ing jerk just cut me off . . .

What do you think the most important class is in school?  Math? Science? Social studies? How would you know, anyway?  Because I don’t mean the class that seems the most important.  I mean the class that the school and the community demonstrate, through their actions, is the most important.  There’s one way to know: You’ve got to follow the money.

There are two places we spend money on classes:  time (which is money in schools) and staff. So to locate the most important class, you might start by considering which classes 1) Are given the most time during the school day, or 2) Are best staffed (have the lowest student-teacher ratio).  Sound fair? Let’s look.

Consider two typical classes at an American high school:

• Class A meets 38 minutes per day, with a student-teacher ratio of 20-to-1.

• Class B meets 120 minutes per day, with a student-teacher ratio of 10-to-1.

Which one’s more important?  That’s not even hard. So what are they?  What two classes could be so imbalanced, with one so clearly valued over the other?  Does this really happen in modern schools?

The answer is yes.  It happens in almost every school in America, right now.

Class A is English.  Class A is math, or science, or social studies.  Class A is any core academic course.

Class B meets right after school.  It’s two hours long. There are no interruptions.  There are usually two, sometimes three coaches, for a small number of students.  Parents flock to watch Class B. Kids in Class B are celebrated for their accomplishments around the school and community.  Class B can sometimes get them special scholarships to college in ways that any individual class like math or science cannot.  Class B is clearly a lot more important.

Starting to see the picture?

Class B is after-school sports — the most important class in American schools.  

It’s true.  We say we value academics, but the numbers don’t lie: sports get more time and staffing than any academic course.  Every day kids spend more time on the basketball court or the football field than they do in any one academic class.  Total it out over a year for a multi-sport athlete, toss in time spent driving to games and practicing in the summer and it’s not even close.

Teachers know.  Ask any poor English teacher who’s had to run writing groups with a half-empty room because twelve of his students had to leave an hour early for away games.  Ask any principal who has ever strolled into a packed basketball gym and run into a half-dozen parents who’ve ducked parent-teacher conferences for a decade. They know.  Here in America, we love our sports.

***

But should our schools be the places to house them?

This is the question posed by a fascinating book I just read, Schools That Do Too Much, by Etta Kralovec, published in 2003.  Kralovec believes that sports, expensive and time-consuming, drain public school resources better spent on core academic programming.  Not only that, but Kralovec believes we’re better served by pushing the responsibility for funding and directing sports out to community organizations.

Kralovec traces schools’ stewardship of competitive sports to the early 20th century, when Americans were increasingly utilizing compulsory public education to “Americanize” large numbers of newly-arrived immigrants.  For a time, competitive sports were the purview of student-run athletic associations, until reformers, concerned about the “rowdiness” of student leagues and “driven by the anti-immigrant sentiment of the day” began to insist sports come under the control of government-run schools:

“Believing that sports would be a great way to teach the American virtues of hard work, fair play, and competition, civic and school officials began calling for sports clubs to be housed in public schools.  A public campaign was launched denouncing student-led leagues as unsafe . . . and this was the birth of the institution of school sports.”

To this day, Kralovec writes, sports are so entwined with public education that it’s almost impossible to read a school budget and determine the cost of athletics.  Most Americans don’t even question the arrangement.

But we should.  

Why?  Because, as the title of her book implies, American schools are overburdened.  I agree. It’s starting to become clear to me that early 20th century progressive reformers, who not only saddled public schools with Americanization but with curing social ills, might just have overplayed their hand.  If you make big promises, you just might be held to them. In the wake of both the 1957 launch of Sputnik and 1983’s “A Nation at Risk,” responsibility for America’s perceived lack of international economic and technological competitiveness fell squarely on the shoulders of its schools.  This was never fair, and we knew that; later, when the economy boomed and innovation flourished, public schools received none of the credit. It was simply that the increased importance reformers had trained on public schools made them easy targets when things weren’t going well.

But it’s not as though school reformers had made the case to an unwilling public.  In fact, the opposite. As Michael Katz argues in his essay “Public Education as Welfare,” unlike many European countries, we’ve long offered education as the primary social support in lieu of government welfare programs:

“In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while other nations were introducing unemployment, old age, and health insurance, the United States was building high schools.”  

According to Katz, in contrast to American ideals of equality, which have always been about “a level playing field where individuals can compete unhindered by obstacles” and in which “education has served as the main mechanism for leveling the field,” European countries “focus on group inequality and the collective mitigation of handicaps and risks that, in the United States, have been left for individuals to deal with on their own.”

Rather than building a social safety net, we built schools, confident that education — along with American virtues of thrift, hard work, and ingenuity — are the most viable escape from poverty and hardship.

In other words, if ed reformers oversold what schools can do, their arguments fell on receptive ears.

***

All of this supports Kralovec’s argument: by doing too much, schools do little well.  It’s time, Kralovec argues, to rethink our educational goals and to carefully examine what we devote precious time and money to.

What should we do?  Get engaged, says Kralovec.  Attend school board meetings.  Review the budget. Ask to see how much money is spent on competitive sports.  Then ask, how does this money support the goals and mission of the school?

After all, how many students really do play sports?  I don’t think I realized until I became a teacher how few students continue playing competitive sports all the way through high school.  Where I work, by roughly tenth grade, the middle class kids are well on their way to captaining sports teams, padding their college resumes, and being applauded at state championships and at sports banquets.  Meanwhile, the poorer kids are turning in their cleats and jerseys for a 3-9 shift at Shaw’s bagging groceries. They’re not gearing up for the college admissions arms race, and they’d rather have a car than a high batting average.

But sports are expensive.  I looked at the budget for one central Vermont high school.  They spent $741,000 on co-curricular activities. That’s $1,000 per student!  That’s also more money than is spent on Social Studies ($647,279).  Of that money, about $608,000 was spent on sports alone.  Now, add in the $518,983 spent on P.E. and you’ve got $1,126,719.  That’s about 8% of the total school budget. How many kids are actually playing sports?  What’s the cost per student? These are good questions to ask.

And what about the educational value of sports?  This question is raised every year by students I teach who ask, “Why do I still have to take PE classes if I play three sports a year?  Can’t I get PE credit for being on the soccer team?”

This question pits a district’s PE goals, which usually include building habits of lifelong health and wellness, against a competitive sport’s, which are not subject to local or state educational standards.  When was the last time anyone even had a conversation about the learning goals of our sports programs? Where would that even happen?

Here’s how I see it.  I think we view competitive sports as merely an extension of the PE department, although not graded, and not supervised directly by PE teachers.  Sports are enrichment, let’s say — the way the debate team is enrichment. You must take a minimum number of PE classes, then sports exist if you want to further your physical education.  

Fine.  But let’s take a hard look at what that says.  We know that sports often dictate schools’ use of time.  The firmest argument always given to starting and ending school when we do, which we know is developmentally too early for teenagers, is because of sports commitments.  Not to mention all the kids who miss class because of away games. Think about that: Our entire school schedule is dictated in large part by the enrichment activities of one department, paid and administered by the school, but run largely outside of the dictates of local educational standards by coaches who are not required to be licensed educators.  Every school in America does this. When you walk into most schools you see a trophy case full of sports awards, not academic celebrations. It’s interesting to think about.

Also interesting is the surprising extent to which high school sports are already being run by non-school organizations.  Travel soccer teams and AAU basketball teams are more and more common. A few years ago I was taken aback to hear high school students in my class discussing how inferior the play was on the school’s varsity team than on their privately-run travel team.  Perhaps, in the way that other after-school programs are often outsourced to community organizations, someday sports will follow suit. This is what Kralovec advocates.

That said, I don’t see it.  For better or worse, sports are important PR for schools.  They’re a way for the community to feel pride in an institution.  They’re also a powerful “recruiting” tool: many are the young men whose primary attachment to the school is their sense of accomplishment on the football team, their feeling of belonging on the basketball court.  Once a week in the fall they get to wear their game jersey in the halls and feel like a conquering hero, not a remedial math student. There’s a reason most high schools have “spirit weeks” and a reason so many of them train in on sports-centered pep rallies: social climate is important in schools, and sports are a great way to foster pride and connection to the school among students and community members.  Could we accomplish this sense of belonging in other ways in schools? Perhaps. But sports have grown into that space so fully that it’s hard to imagine schools without them.

Schools That Do Too Much asks important questions about values.  What do we spend our time on? What do we spend our money on?  What should be the focus on a school? How much should schools take on given their limited time and money?  Where does this need to take on so much, including competitive sports, come from, historically?

It’s a great read that’ll make you think. I highly recommend it.

Let me tell you about the college student that I hope all my high school students become.  

In fact, let me tell you about the college student I wish I’d been.  

He only graduated two years ago but he is already a published author.  His name is Zachary Wood and his new book is called Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America.  I think you should read it.

Wood rose to national prominence while an undergrad as the president of an organization at Williams College called “Uncomfortable Learning,” dedicated to bringing controversial speakers to campus.  Today, two years after graduating, he’s a hero in free speech circles. He writes and speaks to a variety of influential audiences. In the book he writes openly about his desire to run for President someday; a lot of important people who’ve met him don’t laugh at his chances.  After reading this book, I wouldn’t either.

As someone who believes in the First Amendment, it’s challenging to see how in the past five years, in the name of progressive reform, many liberals, perceiving the First Amendment as a protection of systemic discrimination, have turned against free speech.  Long ago, the reverse was true; important gains for liberals during the Civil Rights Era were secured largely through courts’ robust interpretation of the First Amendment to protect liberal activists. Even more challenging has been to see not just conservatives but right wing provocateurs grab the mantle of free expression, using their platforms to do little more than poke at liberals, then position themselves as martyrs when they’re shouted down.

It’s hard not to blame liberals though.  The First Amendment is being used by the Supreme Court to justify increasingly sketchy interpretations of free speech.  Examples include the protection of large companies’ campaign donations as “free speech,” the break-up of unions due to the apparent free speech rights of individual members, and the protection of small business owners’ rights not to service gay customers on the grounds that the very products they sell are somehow speech not to be coerced.  It’s hard not to think that we’ve gotten a little far from the point. When justice Elena Kagan complained that conservatives are “weaponizing the First Amendment,” she had a point. Under the Roberts court free speech is starting to seem less a defense of the powerless than a defense of the powerful.

What good is it then, really?

Enter Zachary Wood.  

***

Zachary Wood stands out.  When I first read about him, I was not surprised that Wood, a preternaturally gifted spokesperson for viewpoint diversity and a bringer of controversial speakers to his liberal campus, was once vilified by peers as a “white supremacist.” I was surprised to learn that Wood is not even white.  In fact, this vocal critic of ideological homogeneity is not only not a stereotypical white boy college Republican in preppy clothes, or a vaguely white nationalist, anti-this and that-style troll.  Zachary Wood is a liberal, progressive, African American man. Unlike most of his college peers, he is not rich. In fact, he comes from an impoverished background rife with abuse.  It is this background which both directs him toward a political mission of social progressivism but also implores him to pursue very different means of achieving his goals than those of most of his peers: what he terms “uncomfortable learning.” His story is one that means something in today’s divided America.

Let’s start with his background, which is absolutely unlike anything I’ve ever heard about.  Wood’s mother, who raises him, suffers from serious mental health issues which cause her to abuse her son in a vividly-depicted series of escalating confrontations, but at the same time to instill in him a remarkable self-reliance, poise, and conviction.  It’s as if she is teaching him to withstand her in order to withstand greater foes. For example, at one point Wood’s mother, finally under the guidance of mental health professionals, has apparently completed a remarkable turnaround. A naturally articulate and gregarious person, she and Wood are invited to speak, a mother-son team, at mental health conferences as a kind of testament to the power of modern psychological treatment.  Trouble is, she is by no means fully healed, only skilled at hiding it. She continues abusing her son (recounted in some truly dark vignettes) — all the while schooling him in the arts of public speaking in preparation for their conference talks (which are a hit). Even as she privately taunts him with some of the most uncomfortable (and sometimes weirdly sexual) invective I’ve ever read, she demands that he stand tall, make eye contact with her, and never retreat an inch.  It’s truly bizarre: in the process of making life a hell for her son, Wood’s mother is instilling deep pools of courage and resilience.

And it is this courage that allows him, years later, to make his mark.

Here’s what I admire so much about Wood.  He does not court controversy to relish the attention, raise his profile, rankle fellow students needlessly, or even because he agrees with the conservative thinkers he invites to campus.  Instead, over and over again in the book he explains his bedrock belief in the importance of exposure to divergent viewpoints in order to strengthen his own arguments and understanding of the world.  It’s diversity he wants — viewpoint diversity.

If you’re reading this book even half-awake, you quickly realize that Wood’s desire to hear all voices is really just part and parcel with his almost overwhelming hunger to learn.  By high school, Wood, having escaped his mother’s abuse, moves to Washington, D.C. to live with his father, who is caught in a cycle of debt and poverty, despite working three jobs.  Each day, Wood commutes an hour each way by train from his Anacostia neighborhood past gang members and drug addicts who taunt and sometimes beat him, across the city to the uber-rich suburb of Potomac where he attends a fancy private school.  If anything, Wood might work even harder than his father. Although he is popular and well-liked on campus, he is so zealously wrapped up in his learning that at one point he passes out on his makeshift desk, reading all twenty-two of Cornell West’s books in order to say something perceptive during the Q & A at West’s upcoming speaking engagement.  When Wood’s father visits him in the hospital, the first thing Wood asks for is his books. His father, a constant but laconic presence, wisely tells him no — he must restore some semblance of balance in his life.

But this is not just a Horatio Alger story where a young man from a poor family does double time in the library to keep his grades high, before riding a college scholarship straight into law or business school, eventually escaping the cycle of poverty and making partner.  Wood has more than financial gain in mind for his studies. This is why I think Wood is such a role model: It’s not grades he’s interested in, it’s learning.

Wood actively wants to make the world a better place.  Remember, he’s interested in politics. His values are recognizable as social-progressive (which is why it is ironic that he has been hailed by conservatives for his free speech advocacy).  He pauses a number of times for perceptive, politically-tinged asides about his mother’s mental health treatment, his father’s poverty (“it’s expensive to be poor”) and the social conditions that contributed to his dangerous neighborhood.  It’s not hard to see his budding political ambitions.

But perhaps because he has always been an outsider — poor and black in a rich, white private school — he has grown accustomed to trying to understand the way others think, and it dawns on him that if he wants to improve the world we live in, first he must learn everything he possibly can about why the world is the way it is.  This is not just rhetorical. He is not just trying to win the argument. He’s interested in understanding context.  I didn’t learn this until much later in life: the importance of asking not “Why can’t we?” but first “We do we?” Not “Why can’t we end discrimination?” but “Where does discrimination come from?” It’s a similar desire to know that leads him to a voracious reading of history and philosophy, and to an insatiable curiosity to listen to his ideological opponents.

During high school, Wood presses his wealthy white peers (and sometimes their parents) as far as he thinks he can, trying to learn why they think the way they do.  But it’s not until he attends a summer program at Stanford University, where he engages in a series of classic late-night common room debates with a genial conservative friend that he learns the thrill of intellectual debate.

Then he gets to Williams College.  

Suffice to say, his small, elite New England campus — which he chose for the rigorous tutorial program (of which he makes characteristically voracious use) — does not offer this same kind of robust debate.  Wood finds himself in an ideological bubble where most students and even professors subscribe to the same set of progressive-left values.  It is for this reason that Wood takes up with a student group called Uncomfortable Conversations, and immediately begins pushing the campus to engage in the kinds of debates that he believes are urgent.

When Wood invites a series of increasingly controversial speakers to campus, the backlash is fierce.  Wood tells a number of anecdotes about how vilified he becomes. The most disturbing is a death threat he receives, a drawing of a tree with a message strongly implying he should be lynched.  That Wood is African American and poor makes it especially striking when many of his peers at Williams, most of whom are white and rich, criticize him, with one of them labeling him a “white supremacist.” What’s awkward is that most of his peers and professors — even the ones who are African American — are card-carrying progressives, whose discomfort with the dissenting views that Wood seeks to bring to campus is partly based on the desire to protect minorities like Wood himself from discrimination and harm.  Consider the irony of a historically white campus like Williams trying to create a welcoming environment for persons of color by opposing the efforts of and even personally vilifying Zachary Wood — just the sort of poor, minority student they’re claiming to protect.

It’s not surprising then that conservative media adopted Wood for their own cause, but for all his classmates’ protestations, Wood time and time again reiterates that while he shares their progressive ideals, he just wants to better equip himself against his opponents:

“I wanted to push myself even more to immerse myself in the complexities of what my opponents thought and felt so that I could use them in service of my own goals . . . If I knew my opponent well enough to confidently conjecture his moves and lines of reasoning, I could act astutely and respond effectively.”

And this is what I think is so promising about Wood’s approach.  We can only convince people if we understand where they’re coming from.  The more we remain in ideological echo-chambers, the more we caricature the other side’s beliefs and motivations.  In a way, we not only allow them to dehumanize us, but we dehumanize them.

Perceptive readers soon realize that in the end it is not the conservative speakers who Wood invites to campus that are his true adversaries — it’s his intolerant peers.  They are his best training. It is their arguments he finds himself most seeking to understand, their hearts and minds he tries hardest to win over. He came to Williams College looking for debate and he found it — except it was among his own kind.

I know I never would have had the courage to be a Zachary Wood, especially while I was in college.  It’s hard to imagine withstanding the censure of one’s peers the way he did, especially on a small rural campus, particularly with your name in the national headlines.  Even more importantly, I can’t imagine ever having had the wisdom and perspective of a Zachary Wood when I was 28, let alone 18. Imagine being mature enough to resolve to set an entire campus on its head because of a far-sighted principle.  To be fair, there are moments in this book that remind you how young and idealistic Wood is, and how fresh and unprocessed many of these experiences are, how unmitigated by reflection and time. But generally I found myself coming up short time and again at Wood’s old-soul perspective on the importance of both viewpoint diversity, intellectual curiosity, and of simple, old-fashioned reading and studying as a compelling counterpoint to the ideological division, the rush to judgment, and the tribalism that dominates our politics today.

These are the qualities I admire in Zachary Wood.  These are also the qualities I aspire for my own students to have.  They are finally the qualities I aspire to have myself. Read this book and take note of Zachary Wood.  Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot more about him.