Marching for Justice With #BLMCHIYOUTH

Leaving the house sometimes, I imagine what it would be like if I never came back. What if the run of good luck that has kept me from the fate of so many Black men and women who meet guns or bullets or chokeholds or night sticks runs out? All of those awful possibilities came rushing back to me last Sunday as I got ready to go to the #BLMChiYouth protest against the police shooting of Paul O’Neal.

I said goodbye to my five year-old daughter, Lucy. She was cross-legged on her bed looking at a book. I gave her a hug. She asked me where I was going. I told her about the Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Chicago.

“Are there going to be police there?” she said. She brushed a strand long brown hair away from her forehead.

“I guess so,” I said.

“You’re not going to get arrested, are you?” she said. I still couldn’t get the image of all those police officers standing around, slapping fives, checking themselves for injuries, while the life ebbed out of the young man at their feet, his hands shackled behind him. What a terrible way to die.

“No, baby,” I said. I gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I’m not planning on getting arrested.”

After navigating traffic and finding a parking spot, I got to Wrigley Square about thirty minutes late for the protest. The sun was still high in the sky, and people were crowding the sidewalks, enjoying the last moments of the weekend. On the square there were about 200 or so people sitting on two sides of a grassy field. The crowd skewed younger and whiter, but there was a good presence of black and brown faces as well. Across the street, lines of police were arrayed along Michigan avenue.

The protest organizers stood in a circle at the fountain nearby. Eva Lewis, a young black woman with long black and purple braids, thick glasses, and yellow ankh earrings was earnestly reading a long list of names over a bullhorn. The names were all people who had been killed by police.

I walked around the perimeter of the square so I could get a lay of the land and get a sense of the group’s vibe. Despite the fact that I grew up in Berkeley, California, where demonstrations are an unofficial part of the curriculum, large gatherings always make me nervous, especially when they involve interactions with police. The Dallas shootings at a BLM rally last month added yet another layer of gruesome possibility. But despite my discomfort, there is something deeply satisfying about getting with a bunch of like-minded people to draw attention to an injustice that should not be ignored. Exercising the right to free public assembly and speech makes me feel most American, I suppose.

I immediately noticed the white guy with dirty blonde hair and a large green backpack walking near the crowd’s edge, muttering about something Eva had said.

“Did she just say that America was created to protect white men?” he said. He repeated the question over and over, shaking his head and laughing. I moved away so I could keep an eye on him and the nearest exit. From the way some of the black people in the crowd were stealing glances at him, I wasn’t the only one wary of his disbelief.

On the other side, I noticed a light-skinned brother taking deep draws on a cigarette, also muttering about the proceedings. He had a blue baseball cap tipped forward at a jaunty angle. He was skinny, but tall and tense. He surveyed the crowd with disgust, his eyes light green and googly.

“This shit weak,” he hissed and shook his head. “This shit lame.”

He didn’t appear to be talking to anyone in particular, but a woman with a notepad sidled up to him and identified herself as a reporter. His face brightened a little as he talked and she scribbled.

Honestly, I had some concerns, too. Having white allies is important to any stand against white supremacy, but I can’t help but have Malcolm X’s Message to the Grassroots speech in my head, where he complains about white influence making the March on Washington whiter and more palatable. Like cold cream in hot black coffee was the analogy he used. Being black often means occupying spaces designed with the comfort of white people in mind. I didn’t want to protest with knuckleheads, but I also didn’t want this to be about making white people feel comfy.

After a moment or two, Eva came back out and made a shocking statement about what we were going to do: the goal of the march was to shut the streets down, but not get arrested.

I’ve been to a lot of protests and before an event gets started, usually you’ll get advice about what to do if you got arrested, but can’t recall anyone ever saying the goal was to avoid arrest. Protester street cred is supposed to come from getting locked up. Throwing your body against the gears of the machine, and all that. But this new approach felt oddly subversive.

“If you a CPS student, I know you not trying to get arrested,” she said. “Because I know I ain’t.”

It was startling to hear a young activist pragmatically consider what a clash with the police might mean for her and all the people gathered together. There are times when an effective protest may require people sacrificing their freedom, but she was letting us know that this wasn’t that kind of party. (Besides, there's ample evidence that mass arrests are a tactic being used to dismantle BLM movements around the country) I had already promised Lucy I was going to be coming home that night, but hearing Eva say this made me not feel like I had to carry the promise like a secret.

As a teacher, I admired her classroom management acumen as she made everyone repeat several times that no one was going to get arrested. She also said that we needed to stick together. If we were by ourselves, we should find a “protest buddy” who could look out for us. We shouldn’t put our hands on anyone. We shouldn’t cuss at police. We should not do things that would get us arrested. We should listen to instructions from the organizers. Racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia were all unacceptable.

Everyone was smiling and looking ready to go. The gaggle of young women and men who were organizing the event were holding a powwow on the side to go over the final details, and Green Eyes came over. He moved his hands wildly, but seemed mostly calm as he mansplained how “weak” and “lame” the nascent protest was and detailed his idea for making it less so. They tried to placate him by listening, but he stomped away when he didn’t get the reception he wanted. He walked to the center of the still-seated crowd.

“You see those motherfuckers over there?” he said, pointing to the police lining the sidewalk on the other side of Michigan Avenue. “They taking this shit for a joke. I’m tired of this bullshit”

Eva grabbed a bullhorn and yelled back.

“If you have any respect for the black girls who are putting this together, you will stop.”

But Green Eyes was in his own world, at the center of everyone’s attention. He was a model of righteous black fury. Cursing and jabbing at the air. The crowd fidgeted and news cameras were hoisted on shoulders. I felt the impulse to pull away from the spectacle, but an older brother with a black beret and a large black liberation flag stepped in front of the young brother. And then another one of the young poets, and another, and another. Nobody was being overly aggressive, just letting him know what he’s doing is not acceptable. They surrounded him like bullshit antibodies.

It was tense for a moment as he yelped, “Get your goddamn hands off me,” but then the organizers told everyone to stand up and we were on our way. Crisis averted. As we marched down Michigan, a chant starts, “No justice, no peace, no racist police.”

Green Eyes approved.

“See, that’s what the fuck I was talking about,” he beamed.

Walking down State, the organizers tell everyone to link arms and come in tight. I’m hesitant because I don’t know anyone, but I guess that’s the point. They encourage us to share names with one another (Two college-aged white kids, Elaine and Kareem, are on either side of me) just in case anything happens. As we’re marching and yelling, I’m a little surprised at how connected and strong I feel amidst the tall buildings and roaring traffic.

Side note: Participating in public protest nowadays means being ready to not only confront the stares of bystanders, but also their cameras. A protest should disrupt the normal flow of people and capital so the public is forced to consider the injustice. Disagree with the cause or not, people are forced to think about what they think, even if what they “think” is just a product of brainwashed thinking. The thing that’s complicated now is that people insulate themselves from thinking by holding their phones up. When thought and emotion get too intense, people feel the impulse to point their cameras at it. I notice the wry smiles on people’s lips as they stare at their screens as we pass. I wonder are they thinking about police brutality or how many likes their footage will earn them. Hashtags in their eyes.

As someone participating in protest, this raises the stakes because at any moment, anything could happen that could be beamed to screens all over the world. Don’t trip over your shoe. Don’t throw a rock. Don’t say the wrong thing. Really, the police don’t need to patrol a crowd that’s being recorded, and recording itself.

But I also get it. The young ladies who organized the protest had put the whole thing together online and were very aware of how to use it to their benefit. They encouraged people to take out phones and take pictures of them and tweet about the event. After all, that’s how I heard about the event. So it can be an important tool, but you wonder when the effort to encourage awareness mutates into a performance of “wokeness”.

I saw the scruffy white guy from earlier as we walked up State. He had a friend with him and they were both sipping cans of Milwaukee’s Best. The crowd was chanting  “Black lives, what? Black Lives Matter!” and these guys are chanting “All lives matter!” Some people around me hear it and yell at them, but they just flash silly grins and keep chanting. I leaned over to one of the guys.

“Why are you doing that?” I said.

“Well, because they do matter,” he said, matter-of-factly.

I agreed that all human life is significant, but that wasn’t the question that Black people have had to answer in this country. The question of valuing the lives of Black people is the question that Paul O’Neal faced as he scrambled over that backyard gate, heavy with breath, school backpack jangling with nothing but a screwdriver inside. (By the way, why was he so committed to that little backpack? He was either driving around in a brand-new stolen Jaguar with the backpack pressed uncomfortably against his seat or he grabbed it in and put it on after he crashed his car and fled the police gunfire. Something about it was important to him. He’ll never be able to tell us why.) Black Lives Matter is necessary because it’s an answer to a question that this country has not yet set itself to come to terms with.

I didn’t say all that too him, but basically I fussed at him like I would fuss at a student who was being disruptive during class presentations. He got the point and apologized. I told him I was glad he was there and how important it was for guys like him to represent, but I restrained the impulse to share my name with him and I walked away.

My adrenaline had gotten going talking to Milwaukee's Best and within a few steps I felt like I had been running wind sprints. The sadness came all of a sudden and the weight of why we were marching put lead in my feet. I stopped chanting and just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, just being a part of the crowd. Just being a vessel for someone to use for good purpose.

I credit the organizers for that moment. Not only did those young ladies take ownership of the event, providing a very clear vision of what they wanted to happen, they also did little things that made me feel cared for, like encouraging those who had come on their own to link up, like pausing the march to have people share hugs with people they didn't know, to adopting chants the crowd contributed. All stuff that made me feel cared for. Stuff that made it easier to just breathe and be present.

And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Black women have always done this kind of organizing, it’s just patriarchal nonsense that has kept some of our best and brightest leaders on the sideline. I noted the young brothers who formed a line of security and consulted often with the main organizers. The love and respect that they showed was a model for everyone there.

I had to leave the march early to keep my bedtime appointment with my two year-old, but I felt a bit of catharsis as I drove home. I didn’t leave the rally feeling like I had ended police brutality or the state-sanctioned murder of black people in America, but it certainly left me with a vision of the type of leadership that will move us there. That will move my children there. Thank God for that.

Teaching While Awed

It's been a couple of weeks since I wrote about grading papers and I've been thinking a lot about one of the most important experiences I left out when reading student work: Awe.

In Parker J. Palmer's The Courage to Teach, he talks about how important awe is to good teaching. Awe is about witnessing, not dissecting. Awe is not about grading, but appreciating.

A teacher needs to have a sense of awe for their subject, meaning recognizing that something within your area of study is greater and far more encompassing than the limits of your comprehension. We are drawn to that large weighty thing in the same way we're drawn to this huge spinning rock in the middle of the universe. Awe gives gravity to our teaching.

(Side note: children, who have not been robbed of their innocence, are deeply in touch with their sense of awe--and that's why they are the best students.)

So, I have to stay in touch with the staggering and humbling feeling that I've only scratched the surface in my understanding of the literature that I present to students. I could teach a book like Fahrenheit 451 a thousand times and still not feel like I've found everything there is to appreciate. I have to feel like I have a lot to learn, not because I'm so ignorant, but because the material is so great. And when I stop feeling that, maybe I shouldn't teach it. And maybe I should change professions, too.

But that's not the only type of awe that's vital. I also need to allow myself time and space to be awed by the children I teach. That means that after completing all of the "work" of grading and responding and entering and conducting the "business" of teaching, I have to set aside time to appreciate the beauty in the writing of my students.

This type of beauty ain't always easy to see, but in order for me to really know my students, I have to be observant and present enough to be awed by them. I have to recognize some essential good thing in their work that connects to some essential good thing in the material we're exploring in class. If I can't see a connection, I'm not the teacher to help them discern the connection themselves, and the class will be a waste of time.

But if I am able to help them connect their goodness, there are few things more powerful than a classroom glowing with the awe of true learning. Yup.

The 5 Stages of Grading

Another winter break is drawing to a close, and this is the time when I get most misty-eyed about my life as a teacher. A time for reflection on the beauty and majesty of the profession I've been called to.

It's also the time when I've got a lot of grading to do. The kids cheered when I said I wasn't going to give homework, and I felt good for them. But with the school bell echoing in my ear, and the students sprinting off towards their break, I started to enter my stages of grading.

Step 1: Denial and Isolation

Looking at your inbox stacked high with papers needing to be graded, you'll look at them, take a deep breath and mouthfart something about a teacher's work never being done. Besides, grading all of your students projects at once couldn't be that difficult. It might even be fun. You grin through your lying teeth and isolate yourself from the papers.

If you live alone, you drop them heavily in your empty house, giving added pathos to your Ikea coffee table. If you have a family, you drop them heavily on the dining room table or some other very public place. Everyone should know about all the fun you're going to have grading awesome awesome papers at home instead of relaxing.

So yeah, you're feeling a little confrontational. And that's why it's a good thing that you just want to isolate yourself. Any conversation you have with a member of your family is going to involve that cue of student essays. No one wants to be around you because you're denial is wearing off. You stink of resentment. You are starting to realize that you are going to spend hours and hours grading. The suck.


Step 2: Anger

Now you're starting to get pissed off. You sit down to see what the papers look like and you are angry. How dare you have to spend all this time reading the thoughts of these pipsqueaks, these ne'er d'wells, these cusses! What they need is for you to go Joe Clark on them! And so what, almost all of them completed it! They didn't do it good enough! And that's because they weren't paying attention in class and didn't take the learning seriously! You're so angry that it starts to feel good. 

Step 3: Bargaining

Well, perhaps things are not that bad, you think. Perhaps there's a way to keep the whole class from failing with their terrible, terrible papers. Perhaps there are a complex series of algorithms that will help drag them up from the depths to which they have fallen. You start looking at the grades and seeing what happens if you increase the value of the signed syllabus assignment to 1000 points.

But looking at your students in this way makes you feel unlike yourself.  You've become a pencil pusher. An accountant. A box checker. You're Ben Stein reading the roll. Beueller. Beueller. Beueller. You feel like a phony.

Step 4: Depression

You are a goddamn phony. This whole time, you thought you could teach, but instead you're just really good at sucking. And look what you've done. You've gone ahead and warped the minds of scores of children. You haven't been teaching them anything, and on top of that, anything they did learn, they learned it wrong. Their minds will be forever misaligned like stripped screws. Ruined by a charlatan.

This is the point where whatever coping mechanisms you've developed over your lifetime start to kick in. Whether it's your family or your religion or your cat, or even a 1/2 gallon of ice cream, you're going to need them. Teaching clarifies the soul, it doesn't tend it. Not in this context anyway. You need a way to renew yourself to be effective. And more importantly to be human. So handle that.

Step 5: Acceptance

You're buoyed by the positive lift you got from your renewal source. You pull out the papers and you take things from a different approach. Flipping through the papers, you stop seeing them as a mass of work, further documentation of your horrible teaching. Instead, you listen to the voices behind them. You read them with the ear of someone who is actually trying to hear what the author is saying, instead of just waiting for the right moment to interject a critical remark. Even in the most garbled writing, if you listen closely, you can hear the voice that wants to be heard.

Hopefully as you hear the child's voice, you don't let yourself get sucked into your comfortable role as evaluator. If you do, you'll probably go all the way back to Step 2. But if you can, just pull back for a minute and realize that the world of this child is bigger than you could ever imagine. Your class, your teaching, occupies space, but you are just one of many teachers. Your job is not to judge who they are as people, but help them be qualified to judge it for themselves. 

But, you also have to assign a grade to the daggone things. In the end, the integrity of the learning requires transparency. A kid deserves to know where they stand, no matter the education they've received. The barber should not hesitate with the mirror. So, you grade them and make as many helpful comments as you can. Re-articulate the objectives for the assignment, and just as importantly, find something in their thinking to praise. Even if it takes a while.

Finally, you will need to frame the experience for your students. After they get their papers back, they need to hear what you heard in their work and how that will affect the learning from here on out. All of this takes time.Time you don't have because you got so good at Step 5, and its resultant insight, that you thought it best to write about grading the assignment, instead of grading the actual assignment.

You might say that's a new level of Stage 1 Denial, but we all know a teacher's work is never done. 

A Teacher's Presence

During my first year of teaching, I studied the faces of my students for the answers to a host of questions: Do you respect me? Do you think I care about you? Do you know that I don't know what I'm doing? Do you think I am a good teacher? Do you know that I'm afraid? Do you like me? Essentially, instead of seeing my class as a room full of individuals, most days I stood up and saw row after row of fun house mirrors, reflecting my own deficiency. I looked to their faces not to find out who they were, but to find out who they thought I was. 

As a result, I suspect the person in my classroom who learned the most during that year was me. I learned a lot about what my students thought about my teaching. Some liked it, some hated it, and some tuned out. But the most depressing outcome was that instead of being about learning, my classroom continually slipped back into a referendum on how good I was at my job. We had great moments in class, and there were students who did amazing work, but it wasn't until later that I figured out that in order to teach effectively, you have to be present enough in your class in order to see the person you are teaching.

Instead of being guided by a question about external impression, the most important question a teacher confronts is Who am I? This is the true essential question for learning in my classroom and before I can get my students to grapple with it, I have to be fully engaged with it myself.

Not only do students need to see that I have considered the question, but they also have to see that I haven't stopped asking it of myself. They need to see that the point of the question is not to provide an answer that can be bubbled in on a Scantron (male, female, teacher, student, black, white, poor, rich) but instead that the process of observation and reflection required by the question is the goal.

Paradoxically, the more I'm engaged and present with the question, the more clearly I'm able to see the individual sitting in front of me. Instead of seeing only myself in my students eyes, I start to see who they are and, perhaps, who they could be. I use this knowledge to shape a classroom experience and curriculum that communicates what I've witnessed. In that way, one of the most important elements of teaching is the ability to witness. It's not coincidence that the first question a witness in court is asked is: Were you present...?

One of the reasons that teaching is such a challenge, especially early on, is that presence is not something you can just pick up when you step in the classroom. You have to manifest presence in your life overall in order for it to be effective in your class. Some days I'm good at it, some days I suck at it. My bag of tricks has expanded over the years, but when I get stuck in class and the learning is stagnant, I still confront the same old questions that I did during my first year, but now I know those questions are secondary to the true matter at hand: How present am I? How present are my students? How will the things we're learning make us more so?

Just the other day I stumbled upon Parker J. Palmer's The Courage to Teach, where he says:

Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. The methods used by the these weavers vary widely: lectures, Socratic dialogs, laboratory experiments, collaborative problem solving, creative chaos. The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts--meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self. 

It's probably no coincidence that in a time when our technology is purposed to promote an illusion of connectedness, that teaching is under assault. Listening to the discourse around education, you would have thought that "true" education only started with "reform" or whatever buzzword being recently applied to schools. But people have been teaching for as long as there has been humans, and no matter the era, the best teachers are still those who are most connected with themselves, with their students, with their subject, with the world. 

Those that can...

...should show somebody else how to can. That's my teaching philosophy. If you want your kids to be better writers, than they need you to model it for them, as scary as it sounds. Don't be afraid to make yourself a writer in your own classroom. That was the main topic of discussion in my interview with former Indiana Review editor Alessandra Rolffs. But really the best reason to click is the picture of my daughter, Little Miss Knowitall. Check it.

Elbows: A Meditation

Mr. President, I feel your pain. I've seen pictures of you on the news, holding your swollen lip like a piece of sour candy. The image will undoubtedly be more fodder for the tragic narrative they have been waiting to apply to your presidency. After the mid-term elections, it's obvious that you're not perfect like you tried to make us believe. You aren't strong enough. You're not tough enough. You can be beaten. In Jim Demint's words, you can be "broken". In your own words, you can be "shallacked".

Note to Pres. NeO: Find another word to describe defeats. Despite its etymology, 

"shellack" sounds like something a slave master does to a slave.  *No KuntaKente*

Mr. President, I knew this day would come. Ever since they said that you were not only a regular hooper, but in fact a baller. Ever since the summer of '08 when I saw you sink the most clutch three pointer in the history of politics during a visit to troops in Kuwait.

Did McCain ever really have a chance?

Ever since I saw you out-shoot the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team in the White House backyard during their post-national championship visit. The same team that has won 80 straight basketball games (and counting). I knew this day would come.

 

Ever since I saw you dismantle former all-American Clark Kellog during a "friendly" game of POTUS, I knew this day would come.

I guarantee you Clark missed a couple of those shots on purpose, 

but only because he didn't know he was going to lose. You can't give me that kind of room. Indeed.

The game, and its adherents, often leave marks that can't be concealed. I knew the day would come when evidence of your hoop life would be writ large across your flesh for all to see. On this day the people you are charged to lead would read these marks and create new meanings, meanings that you couldn't control. Meanings that speak to your frailty (humanity?). I knew this because whether you're President of the United States or a high school English teacher, if you get bruised up, you about to get talked about.


Mr. Shakur got socked in the eye, y'all! Dang, Mr. Shakur, you got lit up! I told Mr. Shakur he better have my money! Why they have to hit you all in the eye like that, Mr. Shakur? It was like, bink! [mimic slow-motion punch to eye,then punch-drunk-stagger around classroom]

I have heard it all.

But basketball is a passport for me. My face and complexion always raise more questions than they answer when people see me. I'm hard to place. I have to spend more time explaining myself, where I came from, why I'm here. The truth of my story is too complicated for people to grasp in a short time, so seeing me play basketball offers a Cliff Notes version of my identity.

My students have often had a similarly difficult time placing me, and that's why I try to let them know who I am by getting on the court. As soon as I start working somewhere, whether it's Minneapolis, or Baltimore, or Chicago, I play. Basketball is part of my teaching philosophy. 

It's amazing how much extra effort you can get from a student in the classroom if you can take them to the hole and finish with your left. The court gives your students insight into who you are as a person. My students learn that my jump shot is often shaky, that the hardest shots for me are the easiest, and that I have a tendency to curse myself when I'm frustrated. But they also learn that I don't neglect my defensive responsibilities, I'm not afraid of contact, and I'm more likely to praise a teammate than criticize one.  

When I get the opportunity to play students, I try to show that my fetish for hard work is not limited to the classroom. That I'm not just a teacher that believes in them because I don't have anything else to believe in. That I can operate on multiple levels. That I will block your shot if it's weak.

 

More than anything it allows for a coaching relationship that's different than the classroom. When you play basketball with students, you literally have to work together to score points. In a real way it makes all of the success and challenges communal. The things I encourage my students to do on the court are the same things I ask them to do in the classroom: Stay focused. Keep your eyes open for your teammates. Don't be afraid to shoot. Keep hustling!

But as you demonstrate your ability to operate in multiple realms, you also are subject to the norms of those realms. On the court the teacher can be physically challenged without consequence. Sometimes these challenges result in injuries for said teacher.

In Baltimore, during an after school game, I got an inadvertent headbutt from a student. This caused a nasty cut above the eye brow, that required a few stitches. That wouldn't have been terrible if this hadn't been the same week I met the parents of my then girlfriend (future Mrs. Knowitall!) for the first time. Awkward, to say the least.

About a month later, a student pushed me in the back during a layup. I caught my feet, but not before I turned and slammed the back of my hand into a brick wall. I finished the game, but my hand swelled up like a balloon. This was in the salad days of my barely existent Americorps medical benefits, so under the wise advice of my roommates (If you can move it, it can't be broke!) I didn't seek immediate medical treatment.

Misstra Knowitall stupidity quiz #4080

After I shattered my hand, I:

A. Attempted to bind my wounded ring finger to my middle finger for stability.
B. Created a makeshift splint out of a popsicle stick and some medical tape.
C. Played basketball again, a couple times, despite the sharp pain in my still swollen hand.
D. All of the above.

If you chose D then you obviously know how dumb I can be about basketball injuries. By the time I went to the doctor, they told me that my hand had already healed--crookedly, of course. I'm lucky that my backroom orthopdeiatrics didn't leave me with a hook hand. However, the rest of my born days my ring finger will tuck shyly beneath its sturdier brother.

I read a brilliant essay by the poet Ross Gay where he talked about the "visionary" elbow of a student taking out his teeth during a basketball drill. Ross considered the elbow not as an instrument of revenge or turpitude, but as an expressor of primal possibility. The elbow as teller of survival stories. The elbow as speaker of those magical words: here's how my story goes.

I don't drive through a lane of sharp-boned, loose-limbed children like I used to. I have to admit a sort of perverse pride in being able to endure injury. Even if you've never read Don Sabo's classic essay, Patriarchy, Pigskin, and Pain, you realize that somebody who continues to play pickup basketball with a broken hand has issues. As I've gotten older, I have realized that I don't need to shatter bones to help children. I've learned to be a better teacher in the classroom so I don't have so much to prove on the court.

I have also realized I have told more of my story on the court than I have story left to tell. My knees sing sermons as they bend, and the day when my story is more appropriately told outside the confines of the court's white lines, rather than within them, grows closer by the day. But that's okay. Now I'm more focused on helping the young people I teach tell their own stories. Teach the benefits of being active, rather than passive, participants in their own destinies.

The President finds himself in a similar position. In his autobiography he talked about the ways that basketball helped shape not only his identity, but the way that people perceived him. As petty as it sounds, if he didn't have a reliable jump shot, there would be very real questions about whether he was a Black man or not.  But he's also getting older. He's probably in excellent shape, but years wear you down, especially when compounded by the stress of the job. Although both Bubba and Dubya came running into the presidency, they both left with a limp.

Big Daddy Cane

So our President's days as baller-in-chief are certainly numbered. But like I said, that's not the worst thing in the world. You enjoy it while it lasts, then you move on and help the next ones out.

In the comments to one of the news reports of NeO's injury, a reader speculated about whether the man who busted the President's lip would ever be asked back to the White House game. Maybe Obama would hold a grudge and ban him from the court. Those comments show a profound misunderstanding about the heart of a baller. Seeing the President holding his lip, seething, it's clear to me what's on his mind:  

Let's run that back.

Snatching the Pebble: From Writing to Publication

Have you read our submission guidelines, Little Grasshopper?

I'm teaching a class on literary publishing at the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing this week (side note: yeah, Martha's Vineyard!). I'm going to write more about what I'm doing later, but I thought I would share some literary links that I found helpful. Check them out. (If you know of any others, please feel free to put them in the comments section)

• Duotrope.com: Exhaustive list of literary magazines, their response times, percent of work rejected, and percentage of personal responses they give. Very helpful and continually updated.
• 1,000 Fans. This article is all about the idea that all an artist needs to “quit their day job” and write full time for a living is 1,000 fans. Basically, it’s about creating a network of people interested and willing to pay for your work. Must read.
• Literary Journal Rankings. This author ranks a wide range of journals. Ranking journals is kind of a rank concept, but it helps to have a sense of the reputation of the place you’re submitting.
• Newpages.com. They have an excellent listing of literary magazines, all of which are reviewed. This helps out a lot to give you a sense of the work that journals are looking for. Their blog is also a good resource for finding out about what’s going on. Keeping your eye out for contests and special issues is a good way to increase your chances of publication.
• Literary journal blogs. This is a good way to find out the latest about what’s going on at a literary journal. Ninth Letter, Indiana Review :) , Third Coast, and a gazillion others use blogs to let writers know about current events at the journal.
• Author blogs. Neil Gaiman has probably the most popular author blog. Tayari Jones provides an excellent example of how to create a community around your writing. Joy Harjo also has a pretty cool blog.
• Nathan Bransford is a literary agent with a lot of helpful advice, from writing query letters, to finding an agent, to publicizing your book once it’s published.

And here's Jim Carrey's take on snatching the pebble. Seems appropriate for writers.

Standardized Teaching

The death of the book (as we know it) will hasten the death of the teacher (as we know it).

Book, man

At my current school, and many others like it, I have been told to instruct and assess with a careful eye towards "replicating the standardized testing environment."

The thinking is simple: if you want kids to do well on an assessment, then you make sure you teach them so they can know how to do the things you're going to ask them to do on the test. And you practice in those conditions, over and over.

And then it occurred to me the other day that we surprisingly still do standardized testing with paper books. The grading is all scanned in, but there are more inefficiencies in the system. Why kill all those trees? Why not have the kids just take tests on the computer?


That question may take a few more years to resolve logistically, but very soon computer testing will become standard. And that shouldn't really seem like a big deal until you think about how we "replicate the standardized testing environment." If you are going to be assessed in a digital environment, wouldn't you want your learning to be in the same realm?

And if learning is based mostly in the digital environment, what role does that leave for the teacher? The teacher who battles for the attention of students who are progressively more emotionally invested in their consumptive technologies?

Not much.

My students are generally on their best behavior when they have a computer in front of them. They don't disrupt, they don't talk loudly, they keep their hands to themselves (thank God, finally!).

Of course that doesn't ensure effective instruction, or even actual learning. If we're trying to socialize competent, productive members of society, you need a human leading the instruction. Otherwise, the results will be less than ideal.

But that doesn't mean people won't try to use alternate methods, particularly in lean economic times. Human teachers are expensive, in terms of investment of time and money, and wouldn't it make sense to invest more in software (as it were), as opposed to hardware? If you had a program that could show the same test results as a human, wouldn't you hire the program? Some might even say it would be immoral to do anything less. Again, that's taking for granted that learning is only worthwhile if it can be represented by a number.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to numerical assessment of student learning. When you're trying to teach someone a piece of information, the most important question is not one the pupil asks, but the question a teacher asks to check for understanding.

The problem with this new approach to education is less in the principal, but more in the practice. Mahatma Ghandi's philosophy of non-violence is well known, but less attention is devoted to his reservations and distrust of technology. He uses the introduction of trains to India and the virulence of British colonialism as an example. Ghandi says it wasn't trains themselves that were evil, but they were transporters of evil across large distances. The rapid movement of goods was a catalyst for exploitation. Can anyone say cotton gin?

Student performance scores represent a technology that can tell us a lot about how to instruct our children. But it can also be used to transport the evil of greed. Once education is completely corporatized, and once the test performance of children is tied to profit, that's when the evil will be most easily transported. That's when schools will close and open like fast food franchises. That's when caring professionals will be cast out like "obsolete" autoworkers. That's when a generation of students will be taught to value test performance over knowledge.

But we're not there quite yet. We have to be willing to weather the storms of active minds, without relying on electronic pacifiers. We have to work to ensure the careers of educators are not determined merely by test data, but the activation of student thinking and learning. That's why we need to craft an educational philosophy informed, but not enslaved by data.

Real Talk

A student from my school was killed the other day. Walking down the street last Wednesday night, someone snuck up behind Jarren Lindsey and shot him.

I didn't know Jarren well. I had his cousins in a couple of my classes, but he was a tenth grader and I teach freshmen. I did take some pictures of him during an art project for another class. They were working on a project where they painted out a significant moment in their lives. It was amazing to look at the things the kids shared. The kids looked like "regular" teenagers, but they had these incredibly heavy stories behind them. Jarren's was no less heavy, but you could tell he was proud of the painting he had done. In one of the pictures he smiles at the camera, like he's telling a joke. In another, he's looks sober, older.

According to the newspaper, Jarren and his cousin had just walked some girls to the bus stop and were on their way home. That was the first week of spring break and the weather had just cleared up and was unseasonably warm. People were out and restless on the street. Out of the shadows, someone struck down Jarren and sent his cousin running for his life. Jarren was 16 years old. 
To be honest, I've tried not to mix the world of this blog with my teaching world. I'm a compartmentalizer and it's easier for me to deal with the demands of all my little worlds as long as I can keep them separate. I've tried not to write about personal stuff that's not directly tied to the topic at hand: funk, in all of its forms. Sticking to the script, so to speak, has been tough this year. The second year of teaching is no joke, and to go along with all of that, my school has been slated for closure because of test scores and budgetary reasons.

But something about this feels different. This is about Jarren, but it's also much bigger than Jarren. Two days before Jarren lost his life, I was heading out to play basketball at the rec center near my house. It was 9pm, which I consider early when it comes to playing ball, and my wife and I heard about six gun blasts near our house. We sat up and talked for a little while, but despite my wife's protestations, I grabbed my ball and got in the car. I was driving a block over when I noticed a bunch of guys standing in front of a house. They looked heated about something, but I didn't immediately connect it to the gunshots. When I saw unmarked police car waiting in the cut, I knew something was up.

And something was up. Soon after I left, the police stopped somebody on that corner and, according to the news, shot him after he drew a gun. Unfortunately another one of my students lives in a house right on the corner in front of where the shooting happened. I've chided her about being out late, but the whole thing happened right before her eyes. William Hardy, the young Black man who died, was 27 years old.

And just yesterday morning, a freshman at Douglass High named Danny Gilmore was on his way to school and was shot in front of a grocery store. He wasn't killed, but he is paralyzed. Police believe it might have just been a case of mistaken identity. The alleged shooter is 18. This all happened 8:15am, mind you.

As I get ready to teach my last quarter of freshman English, I've got all of this heavy stuff on my brains. I was planning on seeing my students again for the first time on Monday. I would have all my energetic, engaging lessons planned. I would lead us head-long into a journey of inquiry and discovery that would motivate them to give their best, even in the school's last moments.

But that's not exactly what's going to happen. Instead, I'll see many of my students at Jarren's funeral on Friday. Instead of having everything figured out and planned when I see them, I'll probably have just as many questions as they will.

Ironically, the feeling reminds me of how I felt when Obama was elected. I was caught up in all my reservations about the implications (political, social, economic,etc.) of having a Black president, but my students swept away all the reservations and allowed me to just feel that moment, even if the forces at work were too big for me to understand.

That's what makes this type of post so difficult, because the events of a life generally don't interest me as much as the causes or implications of those events. But lately it seems a little trite to talk about causes or implications. I could link to articles about the schools crisis. Or the gang crisis. Or the gun crisis. Or the drug crisis. Or the roots of poverty laid down by years of racial segregation in Chicago. But I guess this ain't the time for that.

Now's the time to mourn these young men who have had their lives shattered by violence, and pray that no one else falls victim. It's also time for me to continue to plan this last semester for my students. The goal won't be for me to explain all of the causes and implications of incomprehensible events, but instead help them develop the tools they can use to fashion new understandings of the world around them. Understandings that will change things. Understandings that might save lives.

But Friday comes first.

Teaching Writing and Blowing the Whistle

Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about teaching and why I'm doing what I do. Writing is a big part of what I do with my life. I would even like to make a (gasp!) living doing it. But it wasn't always like that for me. There was a time in school where I didn't really enjoy writing all that much.

When I was in the 7th grade my PE teacher, who I will simply call Coach (his mirrored sunglasses and obscenely bulging neck veins are crystal clear, his name a mystery) introduced us to our school’s “weight training facility”. Volleyball, football, and baseball had been the physical education staples up until this time. In junior high, however, we were crammed into a grimy portable classroom with a circuit of shiny machines that would help us “train”. Class would consist of us moving from one machine to the next, pumping away until we heard a shrill blast from Coach’s whistle.

Coach inspired us with fear (again, the veins and the sunglasses) but after awhile we learned how to slack off just enough that he wouldn’t fail us. Undoubtedly many of us exercised muscles that we never would have otherwise (I never understood the appeal of that weird leg-spreader machine) but there was an unreality to the experience that made it seem silly.

Previously, exercise had been a pleasant and unconscious byproduct of play, but PE class turned it into what seemed like a sophisticated punishment—something to be tolerated or avoided. Looking back on the reading and writing I did in school, I see a strong parallel.

Of course I was “prepared” by my school experience in the strictest sense of the word. Our trips to the weight training facility “prepared” me to interact physically with weight machines, but didn’t prepare me to address my most immediate athletic concern—improving my atrocious jump shot. Instead of motivating me to squeeze as many repetitions as I could out of the 90 seconds we had at each station, Coach’s glowering, punitive presence actually made me want to do less.

Similarly, school taught me how to write a standard five paragraph essay using a bare minimum amount of thought and time to achieve a satisfactory grade. Essays seemed less about discovery than recitation, and that wasn't of much interest to me. Grades were held over our heads to motivate us towards success, but too many times this was articulated as “not failing”. There was little inquiry about our own academic goals, beyond college, and we were rarely asked to synthesize what we learned in readings or in class to other areas of our education or lives. The experience was not much different than a visit to the "weight training facility" where you worked a single muscle with no thought towards coordinating those tissues towards flexible movement.

I realize that education is primarily a personal endeavor. Every student has to demand to be educated in order for anything to happen. And I’m not saying I learned nothing in school; I just wish they had expected and required more of me as a writer and a reader. With the focus on easily digestible bits of information, I think I got lost in the tedium of repetitive motion exercises. I wanted to write things that would change and engage the world, but I don’t feel like I was challenged to do that. So I was “prepared,” but just not in the way I needed.

I think about this a lot now that I am the keeper of Coach’s proverbial “whistle.” My high school students work on five-paragraph essays: five reps of hooks, two sets of contextualizing statements, three concrete detail crunches, and 60 seconds on the commentary sentence step machine. The mastery of these elements is important because they set the foundation for good writing and thinking. But the reality is that I’m also having them work on them because that’s what’s going to be on the test that’s going to be used to gauge how “educated” they are.

Tests have their place, but the danger is that this type of learning becomes rote if it consumes the entire learning experience of the student. It's also dangerous because it's easy to assess whether or not a kid knows how to write a standard thesis statement. It's much more difficult to assess whether a student can think for themselves and create something new. In a test-heavy environment, sometimes the learning that can be easily assessed is the learning that gets emphasized the most. (Coach could read the newspaper as long as he heard the squeaks of the metal equipment.) The English teachers I remember most fondly are those who were not concerned with just the recitation of knowledge, but how this knowledge might profoundly effect what I wanted to do with my life.

Kids need to master content and skills in order to be good writers, but if we never make a connection between a student’s interests and how what we’re learning can aid their pursuit of that interest, we can blow as hard as we want on our whistles; no one will be listening.