Matching Tracksuits

It’s four thirty; no one really wants to be here, yet at some level, we’re all keenly aware of how important it is to be here. Still, we’ve wished our students well for the day, we’re hungry, and really the last thing we want is to sit through professional development — i.e., a Power Point presentation.

In all honesty, it’s a great disservice to the district head of secondary English instruction to reduce down all her research, planning, and background conversations to three words: “a Power Point.” Mrs. B has done a superb job helping us all get a grasp on the changes Common Core mean for our teaching, and without her quarterly professional development (PD), I’d be much further behind the curve than I am now. I walk away from each session feeling better about my teaching, feeling I have a lot of new strategies to implement, and feeling generally more confident in my ability to prepare kids for high school. But in the tired haze of a Thursday afternoon, it can all seem just a bit much.

“You want me to teach for eight hours, then sit for ninety-minutes on the other side of the desk?” You can see that question almost visibly in thought-bubbles above every attendee’s head. Glance around the room and you’re not likely to be surprised at what you see: bottles of various sizes and materials, filled with diet soda, iced tea, water, and various mysteries — no, not those mysteries — as well as coffee cups, snack wrappers, smart phones, laptops, watches, jewelry. It’s like we’re all getting ready for bed and watching television at the same time: we’re all as comfortable as we can be without actually kicking off our shoes. The presentation starts, and you see someone surreptitiously scrolling through messages on her phone, someone else looking at the news on her laptop. You hear someone desperately trying to open a snack — perhaps a bag of pretzels — without making too much noise. You see two teachers huddled together, finishing a conversation that started before the presentation. You think of how tired you are, of how much you’d like to be napping. And then it occurs to you: “We’re just as bad as our own students.”

In English I Honors, we’ve been accompanying Odysseus as he struggles to make it back to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope. We reach Tiresias’s prophecy from the underworld and the confusion starts.

‘Great captain,
a fair wind and the honey lights of home
are all you seek. But anguish lies ahead;
the god who thunders on the land prepares it,
not to be shaken from your track, implacable,
in rancor for the son whose eye you blinded.
One narrow strait may take you through his blows:
denial of yourself, restraint of shipmates.
When you make landfall on Thrinákia first
and quit the violet sea, dark on the land
you’ll find the grazing herds of Helios
by whom all things are seen, all speech is known.
Avoid those kine, hold fast to your intent,
and hard seafaring brings you all to Ithaka.
But if you raid the beeves, I see destruction
for ship and crew. Though you survive alone,
bereft of all companions, lost for years,
under strange sail shall you come home, to find
your own house filled with trouble: insolent men
eating your livestock as they court your lady.
Aye, you shall make those men atone in blood!
But after you have dealt out death–in open
combat or by stealth–to all the suitors,
go overland on foot, and take an oar,
until one day you come where men have lived
with meat unsalted, never known the sea,
nor seen seagoing ships, with crimson bows
and oars that fledge light hulls for dipping flight.
The spot will soon be plain to you, and I
can tell you how: some passerby will say,
“What winnowing fan is that upon your shoulder?”
Halt, and implant your smooth oar in the turf
and make fair sacrifice to Lord Poseidon:
a ram, a bull, a great buck boar; turn back,
and carry out pure hekatombs at home
to all wide heaven’s lords, the undying gods,
to each in order. Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
And all this shall be just as I foretell.’

They see the line about being “lost for years,” and with with some guidance, realize that this is Calypso and that the blind prophet says it using future tense (“under strange sail shall you come home”).

“Wait,” they say. “That’s what the Odyssey begins with? How is it in future tense?” (We begin our exploration of the Odyssey on Calypso’s island in book five, skipping all of Telemachus’s search in books one through four.) With some more guidance they realize it’s a story within a story. A prophecy in something like a flashback. Which itself is all set within the larger story: a story within a story within a story.

“And people liked to praise about Pulp Fiction‘s non-linear storyline,” I say with a smile, but no one gets it.

Among all the metrics we use to measure kids’ performance, the most useful in many ways is the MAP test. We give it at the beginning of the year and again at the end, and in past years, we’ve set personal performance goals using it as a standard. Average yearly growth for an eighth grader reading at grade level is about three points. Great growth is around seven or eight points. For those a little below eighth grade level, good growth is around six or eight points.

This year, I’ve conducted an experiment, pairing daily during silent sustained reading students who excel at reading with those who excel at other academic ventures. The idea was simple: the strong readers would help the weaker readers by explaining what and how they inferred things in the article, working together to figure out word meanings in the article strictly from context clues, discussing the contents of the article, and a number of other tricks and practices. We’ve been doing that most of the semester. Recently, the students took a shortened version of the MAP test and the results merited a Klondike ice cream party: average growth for one semester was 7.4 points, with two students increasing by an astonishing 15 points and one student by 14 points.

It was a good day to be a teacher.

In all my classes, I emphasize the importance of being able to back up assertions about a given text with information from the text. “Where do you see that in the text?” It’s a typical question in the classroom.

With one group today, we were doing a Socratic Seminar on the question of who is ultimately responsible for Juliet’s fake death at the end of act four in Romeo and Juliet. Our discussion skill focus was on backing everything up from the text and, equally important, recognizing when others have made claims that aren’t necessarily backed by the text and calling them on it.

“Where do you see that in the text?”

“Show me from the text.”

“I don’t see that in the text.”

At the end of the day, a young lady came back to inform me that during math class, she’d felt the teacher was wrong and said, “Excuse me, Mrs. M, could you show me that in the text?”

Students’ drawings of Queen Mab.

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies ‘ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:

Dear Terrence,

I understand you didn’t really like the sonnet assignment. That’s fine: not every assignment has to be to your personal liking or approval. Understand, though, that, because this is not a poetry writing class, I had no intention of grading it with the kind of severity that would result in a bunch of failing grades. It was the struggle of writing in iambic pentameter that I was after, as well as the experience of having to think about each and every word as you wrote. That’s probably not something you’ve ever done before, but you’ll write plenty of things in your life that you should consider word by word.

But, you didn’t like it. Perhaps you even thought you couldn’t do it. As a solution, you decided to bounce around the internet for a while until you found a sonnet that you thought you could pass off as your own, then you typed it up and attempted to do just that.

I wish you had spoken to me about this earlier: I could have given you some pointers to help you not get caught. But you are caught. Still, in the spirit of charity, I’ll share the pointers anyway.

1. Be aware that I have taught English for a long time. I know how eighth graders sound, even the most gifted, when they’re writing. I know what kind of topics they choose. I know what kind of vocabulary they’re likely to use. So at least choose a sonnet that sounds like a kid wrote it, not a hormonally challenged adult. With that much experience, I have a pretty strong intuition about what is and isn’t from the pen of an eighth grader.
2. Understand that I know your personal writing voice. It’s not just that I know how eighth graders write; I know how specific eighth graders — including you — write. I know what kind of ideas you’re likely to write about and which ideas might never cross your mind. I’ve given you standardized testing that provides me with ample information about what kinds of words you’re likely to understand and to use in your own writing.
3. I expect it. I know someone will do this, and I read every paper with the thought that, no matter who the author, there’s a latent (don’t pawn off work with that word in it: I know you don’t know what it means) chance of someone trying to pull one over on me.
4. I’ve caught them all. Every single one. Remember the Terminator? That’s me. Only without the bulging muscles. Or the Austrian accent.
5. Make sure you know all the words in your plagiarized work. It’s awfully telling when a teacher uses a word (intentionally, of course) that you’ve used in your work only to receive blank looks from the one person who used the word (a word like, say, “latent”) in “her” work. (I put her in quotes because, well, you understand.)
6. Choose a sonnet that’s about a topic that the average eighth grader would be interested in. I know you personally, so it’s not just a matter of an abstract idea: I know what type of thing you’re likely to write about. Burning passion is not one of them. No eighth grader would write about that topic, especially you.
7. Finally, I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: make sure it sounds like an eighth grader. Eighth graders to speak of anyone’s “wanton fiery beauty.” Eighth graders don’t write poems with final lines beginning “pleasure me.”

With these ideas in mind, I’m sure you’ll be more successful in your next efforts to act as a thief and pass off someone else’s work as your own.

Regards,
Your Disappointed but Not Surprised Teacher

A pleasant Friday afternoon surprise: two students, classified by some as “average” in every way, working on a web site evaluation activity, noticed something I hadn’t even noticed. First, they notice that two sites mention the same book.

Next they notice that one site gives the title incorrectly.

Excitement.

“I guess this means it’s a less reliable web site, right Mr. Scott?”

I’ll say.

The idea is to get students working immediately. They walk into the classroom and find work projected on the Promethean board and are to get started.

From today.