1. education
2. school

The Plane is Going Down
Imagine you are the father of an 8 grade student. It is the Monday after Daylight Saving
Time has kicked in, and it is dark when the alarm goes off. But, sitting like a vulture on
your chest is a memory of the night before, when you and your spouse had an ugly, knockdown-and-drag-out fight. Nothing physical: no fists, no thrown plates or bottles, but the air
was charged with deadly missiles nevertheless: a foul, savage altercation, one low-blow
followed by another, a raging exchange of unfair and psychically fatal accusations, every
Relationship Rule broken, the digging-up for display of long-forgotten injuries. Weight was
mentioned, hair loss, impotence, frigidity. At one point you threw at your wife that little bit
of business in the Jacuzzi at the Labor Day party, where, after a pitcher of ‘Margs, she
popped her boobs out to float among the suds, while your boss, cigar clenched in his even
teeth, played Up Periscope and made comments about the smell in the men’s room after
you had left every morning ‘round ten; she, in turn, had brought up for viewing and
comment that unfortunate situation with the fifteen-year-old babysitter that had occurred
one night while you drove her home, after a barbecue at Stan and Tammy’s, a night of
Maker’s Mark and sexual frustration, the vas deferens as tight as if charged with viscous,
ninety-weight gear oil, which situation had been, thankfully, made to go away after an
embarrassing and uncomfortable sit-down with the girl and the girl’s parents and your
humiliated wife. And so you wake to literal, and spiritual, and familial darkness, and when
the fight of the night before replays itself you want to 1.) Lose consciousness immediately
2.) Kill yourself 3.) Kill someone else…And just at this point your cell phone pings, and you
groan and turn to look at an email that has just come in from your son’s English teacher,
which, when read, and after knowing that your son has not expressed an iota of interest in
school after kindergarten (and even then it had been touch-and-go—finger painting and Big
th
Blocks were the equivalent of ivory tower intellectualism to him), nor exhibited any talent
for school-related skills (reading a simple book was harder than Chinese algebra, to
paraphrase Tom Waits, and even now he would have a hard time coming up with 8x7=)
you experience a churning wave of nausea and the sharp flashes of an immediate migraine:
PARENTS AND STUDENTS:
The Research Outline is due next Tuesday, March 17. After teaching the
lessons on how to write the outline last week, I encouraged the students to start
that night, while the lessons and examples were fresh. And I also said they
should complete all or part of Section I of the outline, and bring it in to me to
show me, so I could correct any misunderstandings or problems, and so they
could continue successfully. Yesterday, I asked the students about their
progress. Only a handful of students said they had even started. And only one
student out of 153 has shown me a work in progress. I am very concerned. I
fear the students will wait until the last minute, and they will not understand
what to do, because of the time between the lessons and their starting work.
This is the most important and most difficult part of the entire project. It
should take students between three and five hours to complete the outline, but
they have two weeks. Almost all the research and note cards were done in
class; but the outline is an independent project at home. The complete outline
(3-5 pages) is due next Tuesday, no exceptions, no late work, no excuses. And
after Tuesday, we will move on. So this is a notice, and also rather a warning,
because never in the past have I had so many students in the position they
seem to be in now. Please make sure the students are working on the outline,
and please have them bring a page of their work to me so I can check it before
they continue. If Tuesday arrives, and there is no outline, or it is deficient in
any way, this will be a problem that will be insurmountable. I will talk to the
students today, and review, in abbreviated form, the lessons about writing an
outline, but there is a great responsibility on them they need to accept and
complete.
Thanks, WR
…And now…you know whom you want to kill.
What an asshole! you think, while reading the email again, looking for, and finding,
diction and phrases that could be considered passive aggressive, snarky, condescending.
What kind of teacher is this that can’t steer his own ship in the admittedly tough towering
seas of middle school, but has to dump his duty on your aching head on this of all the
fucked-up days…And now you see him, remembering that evening in September, what do
they call it, Back-to-School-Night, although you and the wife had taken the edge off the
impending crush of parents and the idiot smiles of administrators by hoisting a few at The
Flynn before the pre-open house PTA meeting in the gym, so much was fuzzy about that
night, but you think you remember the English teacher. Old guy, mostly bald, close-shaved
goatee, thin: either cancer or he runs a lot. You could tell he thought he was pretty hot shit:
big vocabulary, long sentences, dramatic vocal flourishes. He wore jeans and cowboy boots
and a pull-over shirt, as if he didn’t give a fuck. He talked about books and poetry and
youth literacy and a bunch of other stuff in the allotted ten minutes. You didn’t pay
attention to much, still abuzz from the libations at The Flynn. But he was kind of different,
and you thought it might be fun if you were in his class as a kid, if only to fuck with him.
Your own kid liked him, the English teacher, though: he came home the first week with
enthusiasm and stories about English class. But then he, the kid, stopped talking about
anything at all, just always sulled-up in his room, doing or thinking who knows what…So
whatever comes from your attempt to interpret this e-mail through your son’s
understanding of it, and his growing, mysterious hostility to you, will have to overachieve
just to get to the level of sucking...
hhh
Not to give the wrong impression, the impression of a Worst Nightmare when it comes
to high-maintenance teachers, I do not send emails like the one above very often. As a
matter of expected policy and stated fact, part of my job is to communicate with parents. I
do this through weekly electronic grade and assignment reports sent home via email,
through returned papers, through responding to parent queries immediately and in detail.
But sometimes the shit hits the fan: your nearby nuclear power plant blows a gasket; a
rebellion in the neighboring republic boils over and soon squads of murder-minded sadists
out for revenge are pouring down the street; the tweakers in the trailer, which has been
parked in the neighboring vacant pasture for months, miscalculated a boiling point, or
underfed a pressure line to the distilling alembic, and a green poisonous cloud is soon
rolling out the doors of the trailer itself, rolling across the fence towards the soccer field, the
tweakers themselves scurrying for sanctuary in the bushes like fire-deranged wood rats
fleeing a rolling cloud of flames and smoke, and you calling the alarm from your
classroom, where you calmly watch an entire PE class collapse with scarred lungs on the
fresh spring turf.
Feral Tweaker Compound Adjacent to My School The emergency that prompted the above email was announced by me sitting straight up in
bed at 2:51 the other morning, wide-eyed with the sudden, inexplicable realization that my
students this year are not, for the large majority, interested in doing any work, nor are they
interested in pretending to do any work, and when confronted with the prospect of getting
an “F,” the only real power I have in terms of negative reinforcement, AKA smelling the
coffee, they look at me with the same interest as if I had just laid a pencil on the table. Fuck
me, I thought, looking woefully at the digital display on the alarm clock, either too early or
too late for any good to come of this. Tuesday, March 17, would arrive, and the
penultimate phase of the research project, which extends over three months and is worth a
total of 600 points, will be due, and only a handful of students—perhaps half in the honors
classes—will have their papers submitted. This will surely mean they will fail English on the
last trimester report card. If half the students are failing your class, though the real reason
might well be their lack of motivation, interest, attention, and work completion, those
factors, being essentially out of your control, are not the first problems you consider. Given
a particular test, project, assignment, or unit of learning: Did you teach the lessons and
assignment well? Was there a check for understanding? Review? Were the directions
clear? Was the intellectual/cognitive level of the material suited for the target classroom
population? Is the overall feeling tone in the classroom conducive to expectations for
student success and achievement? Are you, in fact, an incompetent, crappy teacher? Are
you a good teacher, who nevertheless is hamstrung by a non-supportive and dysfunctional
system or administration, so there is actual rampant crime in your classroom, nothing but a
vulgar orgy of non-learning, with overtones of serious threat, all day long, and there is
nothing you can do about it, because no one who should be watching your back with
serious, legal artillery, even the National Guard with the power to arrest, if necessary, is
brave enough to recognize the enormity of the problem and step up in your defense? All
these must be considered before turning the finger with finality towards the students alone.
And even then, if the students are not working, are failing your class, is it not, somehow, in
some rarefied consideration of accountability, still your fault? It is your job to teach, and if
the end result of teaching (learning) is not produced, you are, no matter what else, failing at
your job. Sobering thoughts, and a dismal scenario from any perspective, save for that of
the students, who in all probability do not give a fat rat’s ass.
The particular assignment the students are working on, or are not working on, the Fine
Arts Research Project, is something I imagined many years ago, and have been fine-tuning
ever since. I had spent a summer in Spain, climbing around on crumbling castles, and
touring museums until everything stretched between canvas started to look the same, and I
walked past thousands of Old Masters at the Prado with overstimulated insensibility, and
stared numbly at Edward Hopper, Dalí, Degas, and a wry Lichtenstein at the ThyssenBornemisza Museum a block down the street. I had to rescue the 8 grade at my school
from the punishing research project the kids had to undergo through the history
department. I knew that history would actually be glad to hand-off research to English, and
I thought it would be cool if my kids could study an artist and paint a picture. That thought
is what started the project that almost twenty-years of 8 graders have now completed.
Researching and writing for research is one of the ELA strands under the California State
Standards, now Common Core, so research is very much one of the things I am supposed
to be teaching. The Fine Arts Research Project, as it stands now, requires the students, in
seven different discrete phases, to 1.) Obtain an overview of art history (Western
th
th
Civilization); 2.) Identify a particular style/school/ period of art and a representative artist;
3.) Using a model outline for three different levels of student ability, collect and assemble
research information from a variety of sources—a visit to a public library is required; 4.)
Write and submit a source list/works-cited list in MLA form; 5.) Write note cards, 150
minimum, to cover the information on the model outline; 6.) Write a four-part outline on
a period of art, an artist from that period of art, and a particular painting by that artist, as
well as a personal reaction to the experience of the research; 7.) Create a final project
presentation from one of five options: formal research paper, technology display, tri-fold
backboard display, class lesson, or a copy of the painting studied during research.
Although, for the school-weary, this sounds tedious; although, for parents who have come
to curse the very word project with envenomed spirit, most of the work is done in class,
and because the research project is separated into distinct sequential steps, all the student
has to do is focus on one phase at a time: before they know it, the students are finished,
and the result is an art festival at school, which draws the community in, and which the
students attend with deserved pride.
The most difficult part of the project is writing the outline; nevertheless, most of my
students are able to do this, granted, with varying degrees of accomplishment and success. I
went back a few years and compiled some ratios, the first number being the total students
in my classes, the second being students who did not complete a research outline:
2010-2011
162/6
2011-2012
171/7
2012-2013
149/5
2013-2014
155/7
And now, returning to the present, the first day of spring, March 20, 2015. The outlines
have been submitted electronically on Google Classroom, graded, returned, and I am
forlornly considering my gradebook program. Despite the e-mail, despite the premonition
that something was terribly wrong, despite my reteaching of the reteaching, the warnings,
the invitation for students to bring in parts of their outlines for correction and
encouragement, after the March 17 deadline, and two more elapsed days for kids who were
absent, or as a simple and generous grace period, the numbers are in:
2014-2015
153/42
…which explains much, or nothing, just as a bag of rotting fish explains much, or nothing,
but still expresses a certainty: it stinks.
hhh
You, the student’s mother, digging your phone out of your robe as the email comes in,
are trying to get something going with oatmeal and Pop-tarts while minding, sort of, the
epicene toddler fussing on the hard, cold floor, the pregnancy with which came as a
surprise, no, shock, no, back-handed slap, a few months after that camping trip to the
desert, your son staying at the neighbor’s RV a few spaces over, you and your husband
steamy and horny in the tent after the 'Margs and 12-pack of chilled Modelo Negro was put
away, the condoms long since downscaled from Must Have camping gear, what with the sex
appeal both of you had for each other at about the level of Bedouin bowel surgery, now
that constant fighting had taken the place of sex. And fighting, like sex, both can participate
in no matter the size; and which, unlike sex, does not mean that either one will come out
on top. I’ll pull out, baby, second on the list after the check is in the mail, and you had
fallen for it, you so pissed after missing your second period, going down to the Rite Aid for
the PT, cursing the color when it came up on the tab. And now this, all you needed, some
POS English teacher, who does he think he is, in an email insinuating that it is somehow
your fault that your fucktard son has about as much chance of getting a high school
diploma as ISIS commander Abu Wahib has of getting an honorary membership in B'nai
B'rith, you asking him, the fucktard son, every night if he has any homework, and what are
you to do, hook his tiny balls up to 120v AC to get the truth out of him? He says no
homework or I’ve done it or Mr. Roemmich lets us do our homework at school, and how
are you to know different, even as he is talking through the door you can see him playing
the latest video game craze, Gang Rape, and when you dug his latest progress report out of
his backpack, which had been stuffed and hidden there for weeks, and saw the .67 GPA,
you almost, almost whirled and swung the backpack against his face like a bitch in a bar
fight…Now remembering this Roemmich from back-to-school night: a supreme asshole,
trying to look both hip and avuncular, failing at both, talking about books, even quoting a
few lines of poetry to make a point, not bad, that, but you could tell he was full of himself.
Jeans and cowboy boots? Really? And we pay these smartasses to teach our kids? Not that
it could be easy, the very thought of having to hole up with forty creatures like your son
every day for an hour giving you a case of the howling fantods, the teacher going on about
Common Core this, writing proficiency that, as if any parent there could give a flying fuck,
they only there to give the impression they are concerned and involved, your own asshole
husband almost drooling on himself from the three Boilermakers he had at The Flynn,
and don’t think for a minute you didn’t see the leer he had for that skanky slut serving
them, he almost licking her tits straining against the push-up bra when she bent down to set
their drinks, and then the teacher, the old guy with the bald head and throw-back
sideburns, made a few cracks that some laughed at but you didn’t understand, and now,
reading the email from the teacher, you wonder how you could possibly approach the
matter with your kid, not understanding the email yourself (“…Section I of the outline…”
Huh? WTF?), who had suffered through school, never getting it, stopping the practice of
reading, for all but the most limited understanding of literacy, at about the third grade, until
liberated by that first pregnancy in your junior year, now remembering of school mostly
girl-feuds and girl-fights, allegiances and estrangements, puzzling activities like long division
giving you a headache every day, then that skeevy biology teacher, an awkward, misplaced
young man of twenty-four, and his bit of spontaneous tutoring in the supply room with you
that got him fired, then the Teen Mother’s School for a few months until you said fuck this,
got married to dickhead, and already the toddler seems, you don’t know, a bit slow, the
look in its eyes, its echolalic babbling, someone might as well come and stamp Special Ed
on its forehead right now, and the email has given you a headache, even more of a
headache to come as your son slouches into the kitchen, chews on a Pop-tart while you
interrogate him about the Research Outline, he skirting the questions with the skill of a
Mossad Counterterroism Torture Expert, he leaving a few minutes later to meet up with
his droogs before school, probably to smoke up some of TJ’s mother’s medical marijuana
from a hookah pen (Zantastic Double Up OG being the apparent flavor of the month)
leaving you with the stated declaration that All was Under Control, and also the sure
knowledge that it was all a House of Bullshit Cards, soon to fall, and there was nothing to
be done about it...
hhh
One certain way to tell that something is rotten in Denmark, that is, rotten in your
classroom, is when it is apparent that you, the teacher, are working harder than your
students. If, for example, I am ruining my weekends, poisoning spring break, getting to
school at 5:30 just to make sure students get adequate and timely feedback on their writing,
and the writing that is submitted violates every writing standard taught since kindergarten,
including the conventions of starting a sentence with a capital letter and the general rules of
punctuation, there is a disparity of energy output that is frustrating, unreasonable,
counterproductive; that is to say, it sucks. With the research project finished, the writings
we are doing now are those that will lead to the production of a portfolio for each student
at the end of the year called the Personal Volume. It is fun, and a handsome project. We
create original artwork, I show the students how to sew and bind the pages into the covers,
and the kids can personalize their books with song lyrics, poetry, pictures, graphics, and
other favorite passages and writings; they can establish a theme for the entire book based
on their consuming interest at the time: ballet, soccer, baseball, or, frequently, an homage
to a favorite band: Suicidal Tendencies, My Chemical Romance, The Fabulous
Spuzzguzzlers. There are nine required writings, each one taught in class, practiced, and a
final effort produced. The students are supposed to bring the papers to class on the
assigned day so we can revise and proofread them; instead, because many parents do not
now have printers in their homes, and because, fuck it, it is easier just to press submit, the
kids are sending me all these papers on Google Drive, and I come to school each day,
open my Drive with a groan, and see all these submissions, which I then must open, print,
retrieve from the printer, collate, staple, remember to put a name on it if there is none, and
I am beginning to feel like the underpaid copy boy at Office Depot. And, through this
grueling regimen, my own classroom printer, which I really need, is shuddering like a ’63
Volkswagen with burned valves, a new toner cartridge costs $120, which I do not have, and
if I ask my principal for it, he will look at me like the tweaker son who has just fled rehab
and is back for a pleading hand-out, which you will furiously hand-over, knowing that it will
be spent on brain-burning dissipatives within the hour. And, what’s more, when kids turn
in a paper from a distance, with a button, it is rather like an anonymous phone threat or
Facebook bashing: because it is impersonal, the kids are likely just to type a page of
mindless English diarrhea and send it; whereas if they had to hand me a paper in person,
knowing that I would glance down at it to scan for even the most obvious symptoms of
unacceptable effort or care, they would probably try to do better. But, no. Here is the
verbatim last part of a putative descriptive writing piece titled “Powerful Memory,” which
came in to me on Google Drive just minutes ago:
…Irene and I had fell in the lake because we crashed into another boat
so we had to swim back, when we got back to the boat he let me drive
this time and it was probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever done he
was telling me to go faster and faster and i did and was drifting it was like
driving a car I was going like 105 on the meter the wind in my face and
the mist blinding me like tears but he put the little wind shield up and we
were playing a game where you have to jump the other peoples waves or
try to hit the birds that are flying close to the water i think i got one the
sheriff boat behind us so my uncle switched seats with me and he
stopped the boat and the sheriff boat stopped next to us and told my
uncle not to go so fast and he let other people drive it but when he drove
back he hit a wave and the cooler flew fresh off the boat and we had to
go and get it but there was a little floating porta potty on a dock in the
middle of this huge lake and my uncles was trying to be funny and
hopped of the boat onto the dock and went to the bathroom we were
blasting music with his new stereo system and left him he had to get a
ride from the sheriff which was not the best thing considering what had
happened earlier.
This by a student of average intelligence, though low motivation, who now is
producing any work at all this year because of a BFM (Big Fucking Meeting) I held
with him and his parents a few weeks ago, who has gone to school in America since
pre-school, and whose performance on standardized tests suggests he can be a
capable student. What do I, the teacher, do with this paper? Spend twenty minutes
correcting each mistake, then returning it to the student for revision? That is what I
did with the first batch of papers this spring; but they were so bad that I felt insulted
reading them. The next group I had the students sit at their desks with their papers in
front of them and a freshly sharpened Ticonderoga pencil in hand, and I tried to get
them to parse each phrase, clause, sentence, and paragraph. I wrote a list of several
dozen red flag words or usage problems: possessive punctuation, verb tense
consistency, lie/lay, capitalization of proper nouns: all very elementary, which
concepts have been taught to the students (I surmise) for seven years…And when I
finally did collect the papers to read for myself, many/most of them were covered
with the writer’s own corrections. This was good, I thought. Until the next group
came in, and they were as fraught with errors and careless nonsense as they were
before. I need to be talking to the students about the content of their writing, about
how they can develop their own style and create a piece of writing that manages
exactly what its author intends; instead, I am simply trying to get the students to
produce something on the page that resembles standard English. I have been
teaching writing for 28 years, and, frankly, for the first time, I really do not know what
to do. The plane is going down, the pilot has suffered a terminal career issue, and
there is nothing anyone can do about it.
But that is not entirely correct: as my superintendent has said, If the students are
having fun, they will learn. His idea is that by giving the student access to technology,
a Chromebook to take home and have in class each day, and letting them explore
their own interests through PBL (project based learning), the kids will become so
interested in their self-directed inquiries that kids will actually be teaching themselves,
will learn despite their antipathy for learning. In which case my problem would be
solved. I would just start the class each day with a perky, OK, kids, what do you want
to learn about today? Or, more likely, check-in with each student through a grid on
the whiteboard, or, even more likely, through a spreadsheet on my Mac Book Pro, to
see where each student is on their road to self-education. (NB: even the big
newspapers are coming around to using their as a neuter singular pronoun, the
antecedent of which is gender-uncertain, as major writers, Shakespeare included,
have been doing for 700 years.) And for the rest of the period the kids would be
working alone, or in groups, or in pairs, to create films and websites and video
projects ostensibly demonstrating what skills they have mastered and what
information they have secured. But…it should be no surprise that of all the new
learning paradigms, the Khan Academies, the EdModo lessons, MobyMax sites and
lessons, the myriad other programs I am supposed to be learning about and using
with my students, few if any, I have found, deal with in any meaningful way, literature
and composition. And poetry? Poetry lessons on-line are uninformed, soulless, or so
silly and pointless that they degrade the very name of the art. No: if we are to insist
that students become good writers and adequately-versed in literature, this will always
require a passionate, knowledgeable teacher, unless the student is a near-genius
autodidact: I have had students like that, and all it took for them was an idea, and
they would be on that idea with focused intensity until all interest and knowledge had
been wrung from it. First collecting the books, the opinions, the background, they
would write and fill journals and wonder and muse, and rewrite and show me their six
inches of spiral notebooks that resembled nothing so much as a self-written textbook:
those students, rare though they are, can learn in any environment, and would
flourish in a self-directed classroom. The others? The immense majority? Not so
much. After three, or five, or seven years, soon K-12, making videos, and slide show
projects—which obviate any extended, sustained reading and writing—the students
might be able to, perhaps, make a cute video with bullet-point captions, or a
spectacular video, with special effects and music, using programs in which the real
genius resides in the original coders and computer engineers, not the studentconsumer who drags-and-drops and cuts-and-pastes to create these miracles; they will
not have the intellectual endurance it takes, nor the imaginative language skills
required, for reading lengthy works and writing sustained prose. And people who do
not read and write, who by definition are not intellectuals, and who become leaders
of institutions, get by on waves of slick bullshit, which slick bullshit has left us in the
untested, treacherous waters where we float and bob, circling weakly now in the
current, scanning the horizon for succor and finding none.
I love to have fun with my students. Today we had a blindfolded Pin-theMoustache on Shakespeare contest in celebration of his 451 birthday: the winner
(Dylan P.) won a three-volume Complete Works of Shakespeare. But often the
pursuit of “fun” becomes a contaminant: not everything important, interesting, worth
doing, or valuable for one’s future academic or intellectual ability is fun. And when
students begin to think I don’t want to do this because it is not fun, as they are soon
to do in the classroom my superintendent proposes, then no student will undertake
the hard work of sustained writing, studying the difficult grammars of foreign
languages, and reading book-length works of accomplished prose. Because none of
those are fun, even for scholars, Latinists, bibliophiles. Judging whether an activity in
the classroom is fun is like eating purple music with a helium inch. Huh? It does not
st
make sense, it does not compute, they are apples and oranges and acids and bases;
the concept and criteria are not appropriate for each other, just as you would not use
a teaspoon to measure the air.
So what I try to do, when it comes to reading and writing, is convince the students
that reading and writing are fun, or at least rewarding. I implore the students to write
with passion and interest because what they write has never been written before, and
will never be written again. Their writing is a unique product of their undeniable
individuality. Here I am trying to capitalize on every adolescent’s self-absorption.
When reading, I gush over passages, I lead
discussions to tie the ideas in a book to the students’ lives. If not fun, I try to teaching
writing and reading as if they were engaging and empowering and relevant. That is
about the best I can do, and it is a successful message for only a small population of
my students; for the rest, the damage has been done, and the concepts of
engagement, empowerment, and relevance only are in the domain of neo-pop
paraphernalia, virtual reality games, and the siren calls of social media to which they
are forever connected.
hhh
…And you, the kid, Dustyn, just moving around the different feeling zones of day-after-day,
the frustration, the anger, the ridiculous horniness, the mind-tunnel effects of THC just all
forming a sullen personality for the exterior that looks like part stupid, part pissed-off,
partly giving off a Now-There’s-A-Kid Who-Could-Go-All-Columbine-On-Us Vibe. And
you do not know what happened. Just a few years ago you were a kid, and being a kid was
good, nothing to sweat over, maybe it sucked when your parents would fight all night, and
you would hear them raging through the thin walls of your bedroom, wrapping yourself
around Mr. Augiedoggie and sucking on one of his velveteen ears for comfort when it got
really bad…and school was OK then, not too hard, not too much, though you didn’t see the
point of reading much after the third grade, and when you then tried, because you were
assigned, a book in the sixth grade, you found it hard, incomprehensible really: somehow
in those three years, the process and idea of reading had changed from picture book
pleasure to a dense tangle of arcane symbols too abstruse to hold your attention for more
than a sentence or two. You would look at the page, at the paragraph, and start to read but
the words had no impression on your mind, and soon whatever strand of meaning was
beginning to coalesce was driven off by the hordes of gnawing, random thoughts and
distractions and worries. And if there were a quiz on a history chapter or passage of
reading in classes later on in school, though the words had passed before your eyes only
hours before, it was as if they had never been written. And, fuck it: those smart boys and
bright-eyed bitches caught it all the first time: math formulae and their uses; how
California’s history was a saga of racial exploitation; how to write sentences with parallel
construction. The only thing you got was when your sixth grade teacher read aloud to your
class Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, and what you got was how cool it would be to be on your
own with no one in your face or up your butt about this or that or everything...and you also
got the message in the book of survival of the fittest...that made perfect sense, and once or
twice after blasting some ferocious bong hits over at Demazio’s basement, where his dad
kept the man-cave reefer stocked full of crappy bargain beer, crappy but efficacious on the
nervous system of novice drinkers like yourself, why once or twice when baked you had
fantasized the necessity of trashing your family with some device or weapon, this so you
could only get on with the delicious fantasy of being on your own, with your own script to
write, no more being constantly reminded of your daily failures...And your ears had perked
up this year when Mr.Roemmich, your English teacher, had mentioned once, then
reiterated often, the phrase survival of the fittest, but it was in the context of a new book he
read with the class, The Call of The Wild, and this book you did not get at all...the dog,
Buck, sure, that was cool...but the language might as well have been Shakespeare, and
when Mr. Roemmich would gush and gasp over a passage of language, of all things, you
would sit in your chair in a numb humming of absolute blankness, and the more he talked,
and the more you did not understand a word he said, the silent roaring in your ears built in
reddening intensity until it sounded like a 767 taking off, and you wanted to run from the
room...and that time you had zoned out and the roar continued to drown-out everything in
the room, until you looked around and saw all the kids looking at you and laughing, even
Kylee Baxter, especially Kylee Baxter, whom you had had a serious sneaker for since
second grade, and who now gave you a Washington Monument-style stiffy whenever she
passed in the halls, and that one time when you were lining up for the assembly in the gym
and the kids behind you were pressing forward, and you found yourself pushing up against,
then rubbing up against, Kylee from behind, and there was about to be an erection
eruption, a sundering of cloth though the zipper was one of those used in tents on Mt.
Everest, and she had turned and looked at you, and she knew, you thought, the look that
said she knew, and you knew she knew, and she knew you knew she knew, and then you
could not look at her again, though to have her like you was the closest you could ever
come to anything like an answered prayer, and then, that day in class, all the kids laughing
because you had spaced-out, and Mr. Roemmich had said something, the kids later saying
it was something about you, Dustyn, practicing to be a understudy for Jeff Spicoli? whatever
that meant, and now you really hated that guy, humiliating you like that, and what made it
worse was that you really liked him, at first; he was cool and funny and told these great
stories...but then one day he was talking with the class and he said something about how it
was really hard to enjoy students who disrespected his class and subject by not doing any
work, by not listening, by not paying attention...and you realized then that he was talking
about you, maybe only about you? Because the rest of the kids were always saying how easy
it was to get an A in Roemmich’s class, and Kylee always saying she wished she only had
one class to go to each day, English, although you could not imagine why because all you
ever did in English was read and write and talk and discuss poetry, And when Roemmich
started talking about poetry, or reading a poem, or for Christsakes, reciting a long poem
from memory, a task you imagined as daunting as trying to shuffle a deck of cards while
riding a unicycle on your head, he got this dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, his face all
scrunched up with some inner ecstasy, as if he were in the middle of a fancy fuck, not that
you knew exactly what that was, but you would soon enough, and you not getting it, not
getting the world of ideas unless they were tortured and your own, you having no view of a
future that was anywhere near normal, in the sixth grade, sure, there was still a chance...but
now you know, you are a fucktard, heard your parents saying as much the other night
during one of their rages in the bedroom, your mom aging a year each day, it seemed, what
with the ankle-biter drooling all over the house...your dad, you think, should have kept it in
his pants just once, the last thing any of you needed was another human to contend with, let
alone one you were supposed to nurture, nourish, care for, and not in the last bit resent,
resentment being the Family Feud Theme of the Moment, your dad only pleasant now
when he was drinking, which seemed to be always, you even catching the sweet-sour smell
of alcohol on his breath when he sometimes picked you up from school at three-fuckingthirty in the afternoon, and every minute of school was an anxious disaster of failure
impending, even when you had a chance to say hi or make some sharp remark to Kylee it
seemed to come out wrong, and you could hear a roar of derisive laughter building all
around like when you are buried by high surf at the beach, and you sometimes think you
could not take it anymore, although it were hard to define, and the only moment you
could imagine in the near or ever-future when you might have some peace would be that
afternoon when you got home, when you didn’t even bother to answer your mom, as you
banged the door and stomped to your room, when she asked if you had any homework,
opening the window to your room, sliding the screen out, and loading the torpedo pipe
with some bud-heavy dope, firing it up, sucking in the resinous, blue smoke, holding it in,
hitting the pipe four or five times good, until you were absolutely BAKED...then fading on
your bed with earphones on, to the peaceful, mellifluous tones of Insane Clown Posse,
turned up so loud that your teeth would rattle...
hhh
My students now leaning over their Chromebooks in Room 305 on this end-of-April
day, the second test this season on the high-stakes CAASPP...I have had to sign serioussounding affidavits saying I would not do this, I would do this, under threat of this and that,
and it is at once serious-as-suicide and blessed with the feeling tone of one of Ignatius
O’Reilly’s pangyrics on his ever-suffering pyloric valve, all this high-minded energy put
towards testing, the main purpose of which is to make billions of dollars for the consulting
companies and hangers-on...Which will all be for naught soon anyway, as soon as it
develops that no one can pass the test, or as soon as some genius anarchist penetrates the
(probably-weak) firewalls of the test companies and plants a software bomb in an
innocuous line of code and the test questions and answers are all posted on Instagram
immediately, along with a Twitter barrage announcing this, so the entire Smarter Balanced
platform is wiped out, invalidated...or, and this could be sooner, a grass-roots opt-out
movement is started and spread through social media, and soon only three kids, trailertrash offspring whose parents had been on a tweak for a week and were uncommunicative
when the papers were thrust before them, are signed-up to take the test...and the rest of the
students are left to...educate themselves...Yes, people, the newest trend is to take the job of
teaching away from the teacher, and put learning in the hands of the students...The fans of
this flipped paradigm are legion, and growing: my own school is going this route, and
walking down the halls one sees see in almost every classroom students sitting behind their
Chromebooks, or working in small groups to make videos, or other electronic
presentations: the idea is that when the teacher teaches, only the teacher goes through the
process of metacognition that leads to intellectual growth; when the students are charged
with their own educations, they must, perforce, think, and analyze, and synthesize, and be
responsible for the outcome. This is a great plan—for its proponents, not so much for the
students—because it sounds so liberating, so enlightened, so PC, and, interestingly, so easy,
because we do not have to worry about teaching and pedagogy anymore; and what we really
do not have to worry about, as educators, is knowing anything. It is all in the hands of the
students, and the students will be happy as clams in a Tijuana mudflat. True, no students
will write long papers or read long books anymore, and hence this generation will be
unread and basically limited to captions, or caption-like summaries when it comes to
writing...But aren’t those archaic endeavors too, reading and writing? In this age of Tweets
and Twats, and News Crawlers at the bottoms of the omnipresent, ubiquitous Screens,
books might be mentioned, but not read; writing might be referenced, but not seen for
what it is, the highest form of human thinking. Only the most unusual, self-driven students
will get an education; the rest will putter and founder through some years of school, and
emerge college-unready, and possessed with no skills really, except how to make and post
YouTube videos, or use myriad programs, which are uninteresting and passé the moment
they are au courant, to produce work of little value, no interest, and shocking intellectual
shallowness, and set-up GoFundMe campaigns for next year’s Coachella Festival...And the
only place books will still be taught and read, rhetoric and prose stylistics required and
practiced, and the Canon of Western Literature and Thought esteemed and held up as a
intellectual and moral standard, will be in the pricey, private schools, the Choates and
Exeters and La Jolla Country Day and Black Pine Circle in Berkeley: which in turn will
feed into the elite universities, and, as a result, the great unwashed get screwed again, and
the economic imbalance becomes even more skewed, if that is possible, the middle school
class of 2015 standing ten years from now in a long line somewhere, waiting for something,
perhaps a chance to show someone a JAV (Job Application Video); but there are
thousands more in line ahead with their videos too...and, actually, ten years from now, all
one will do is post the JAV to the employers’ websites, where they can ignore it and reject
the applicant in a millisecond, without the unpleasantness of showing him to the
door...And we should have suspected something back then in 2015, when the poobahs of
education were touting S.T.E.A.M. programs, and Pre-engineering Magnets, and you, a
student, probably enjoying those classes where all you had to do was fuck-around with
computer games and programs, maybe building a bridge out of Fettuccini or rolled-up
paper tubes, maybe doing some elementary “coding” with drag-and-drop programs and
game rules, you being told that this was your future: you were going to be an engineer, a
computer designer, you would work for Google or Apple. And then…right about ninth
grade, maybe earlier, the math got hard, and the dream was exposed as fraud just as the
Emperor stands buck-naked in the village square: it was all bullshit…forever and always, the
tech people would have to be able to breeze through calculus and physics and chemistry as
easily as you learned to tie the laces of the Big Wooden Shoe in kindergarten…and the rest
left behind, the nerdy boys who like playing with things because they are boys, were left
rolling boogers in their empty hands, left with no skills, woefully unprepared for anything,
and Google laughed its way off into the future with the crème-de-la-crème, caring nothing
for the human detritus remaining.
The degree to which my beloved career has been nullified, degraded into nothing by
technology in just the past two years has been breathtaking. And if someone, say a
principal, superintendent, school board member, would even deign to feign sympathy, pat
me on the back and say, “Bill you do really still matter,” the fact is that indeed I do not
matter, and if in fact what I represent—a dedication to high literacy, attained through
rigorous reading, thinking, and writing, and promoted with a high degree of personal
interest, creativity and energy—is considered valuable in all but smirking lip-service, there
would have been howling protests at the very mention of PBL of the Flipped Classroom:
these are seductive ideas that sound good and look good on the surface…but there are just
other examples of Bad Ideas based on anti-intellectualism that plague Big Education
continually, only this time, this time, the infection might be fatal.
hhh
And you, the teacher? Crusty old throwback, creaking out of your classroom chair even
though it is still dark outside this very early morning…Unable to sleep, the basket full of
unread papers in your classroom haunting you, the suspicion that your career might have
dissolved from your life over night…You drank a cup of coffee on the front porch watching
the slightest lightness come into the eastern sky before driving to school. One day soon
there will be a great wave of longing and loss washing over you as you realize that every
remembered minute of your teaching career will never exist again even in the dimming
vaults of memory…You thinking about the old days that were not even that old, the
chalkboards and mimeo machines, the Christmas Programs and Halloween carnivals when
you could still name them thus…the dramas and tragedies that were confided, the
ridiculous, the hilarious, the thousands of encounters that would in themselves make a life
memory were it not that they were diluted by thousands and thousands more…The essays
read and papers graded: sometimes you imagined a stack of corrected student work going
from floor to ceiling: how many stacks would that be? But now the papers are in front of
you again, and the cliff swallows are swarming in the quad outside your room…These PV
papers titled “My Life in Twenty Years,” and here is the first one off the stack, verbatim:
A. L.
Per. 3
Me in 20 Years
I'm probably going to work at a minimum wage job. I'm going to work there
because I started to slack around at school. I didn't do my work or my homework
I didn't turn it my projects, or do my class work. My GPA was barely passing in
8th grade, and when I got to high school it was even lower.so I dropped out of
high school, then my mom gets mad and kicks me out. I look for a job and get one
that pays very low, I find a cheap hotel to stay at and live for the moment. Also I'm
going to be hungry and I buy a little bit of stuff because I don't enough money to
buy a lot. Then since I spent my money on the food I'm not going to have enough
money to pay the motel. From there I'm going to get kick out and living in the
streets. All of that just because I didn't do good at school.
You, the teacher, put the paper down and stare out the window: What is the tone here?
Scorn? Sarcasm? Despair? Fuck-you Honesty? Or…more likely, knowing the student, and
knowing that all he writes will very probably come true, his general mien is one of Constant
Comedy, so most probably he thinks this is very funny; the question, then: what does he
think you think, and does he care? You now going back to the day before, trying to teach
while the kids had their Chromebooks open: they were to be on the Academy of American
Poets website. But who knows where they were…and as you talked and led them through
the site, this in advance of a poetry project just beginning, the kids did not look at you, they
were transfixed, moving the cursor and shuffling from page-to-page…And you thinking how
hard it was to teach without eye contact, and to demand eye contact would mean having the
kids close their computers, while the lesson required them to be on-line …trying to teach or
communicate with people who at best have only 1/8 of their attention to give you…the same
in staff meetings now: all the teachers must bring their Mac laptops to the meetings,
because so much is on-line, including the Google forms and agendas…but the principal, or
whoever, is talking and all teachers are looking at their computers, checking e-mail,
planning trips, cracking up over the Professional Wrestling Name Generator website (yours
is Typhoon Dynamite), and you can tell the principal is pissed, because he is talking and
no one seems to be listening…but how can you be sure? And isn’t this the new paradigm he
is promoting? Having the kids on computers 80% of the time doing their own work will
lead to a situation where any other school behavior will be rejected even had they still the
skills to embrace it. Fuck it, you say, the sun coming up now, considering going out to the
fields and walking on your slowly mending broken foot, walking through startled pairs of
roosting killdeer and beneath a fence lined with fucker crows, hearing the inevitable Lynyrd
Skynyrd Greatest Hits from the 8-track in the tweaker trailer when you round the western
edge of the track…then remembering a lesson the day before in Period Two, you reading a
“poem” taken off the internet written by some angst-ridden teenybopper on a confessional
chat site:
Sea of Suicide Looking down at the sea so deep
A fatal possession I want to keep
sigh within, looking back
I'll remember always all I left
Fall straight in
emotions clinging to my skin
no one cares, never will…
Then having the students turn the page over to this:
three vases
the three glass vases standing in the hall
in a last ray of summer evening light
each of the vases holding three roses
drowning underwater the three roses
yellowrose pinkrose & also bluerose
down in the water their fullpetal heads
that flow a little like little girls’ hair
in the dark hall in a last ray of light
we were three little girls is that the three
I was born third on the third of a month
on the wallpaper were three old roses
over & over the same old roses
the dreamdrowning flowinghair roses
& in the dream a ray of evening light
Sarah Arvio
…Exhorting the students to experience with you, in its pure, unadorned severity on the page,
the semiotic incarnation of meaning, subtle, visionary, dreamlike, vague and ethereal...how
images, remembered images seared on the brain, become introductions to another world of
another poem...the roses repeated in three incarnations: in their vases, in the sisters, in the
repeated pattern of the wallpaper...and all is captured in a sickly late-afternoon vision, as if
from the fevered brain of an ill child...we can almost hear, somewhere, the ticking of a large
clock, smell the musty decay of an old house, feel, in some sense, through the power of the
imagination triggered by words, something Compson-like in the Roses and Reflections and
Relationships...how the poem is about drowning and dreaming, making sense of a situation
from long in the past by a vivid symbol and its suggestions...You explained in specific
language how and why modern poetry relies on imagery, concrete detail, metaphor and
allusion to create word sense and suggestion; and how poetry of this nature is by definition
elliptical and suggestive rather than expository, explanatory or final. How poetry asks
questions because questions are the only answers to questions that are unanswerable by
science, God, or man's conscious knowledge. How poetry works its magic in making
connections between unlikely things; how metaphor is the nectar sipped from a single cup by
Athena and Apollo, their arms twined around each other like snakes on a Caduceus...And
you drew on the whiteboard diagrams and pictures and glyphs, all tying the poem together
with the strands of imagination...at one point in your reverie, at some place in the world you
were trying to take the kids, you stopped long enough to look around, to touch the ground,
and saw that perhaps only three were paying attention, were looking and listening, had any
interest at all...true, those three rapt, with you, their eyes alive, but you thinking that threeout-of-thirty-eight is dismal, grim, off-putting, not to be tolerated...but what are you to do?
Poetry and its savage arms, its rarefied delicacies, too arcane and incendiary for the Common
Core, for the Chromebook Brigade...Because no program or book or device can teach the
art of reading poetry, just as no substitute or simulacrum can replace the panting warmth of a
first-time lover. Our connections to poetry and the poetic voice must be human, we need a
guide, a Vigil, to lead us through the circles dark and mystifying...and then you know that
they are lost, that this is your students' moment: to either accept the possibility that there is
something called great art that deserves our respect, or it is an aged anachronism that, far
beyond being forgotten, they will never be able to take a first, arms-and-mind-wide-open step
towards aesthetic enlightenment...and fuck it, you are thinking this, and a Great Melancholy
Looms...and you feel like the career equivalent of an old man in a wheelchair who sits
drooling on himself in the rest home, implacable in his silent rage, eyes like coals while the
insensate idiot nurse wipes his chin and coos to him in baby talk, he who fucked and drank
and fought his way across America for decades and squeezed in two major wars, who for
never a minute gave in to sloth, boredom, unimaginative bullshit, who could build anything to
code just with a glance at the plans, now the pathetic cast-off patronized by the larcenous
LVN whom you watch slipping a few Oxy's out of the other patients' med cups each evening,
which explains her tendency to bedpan spills and those long extended smoke breaks on the
little porch outside the wing...then it is full light outside, too late for a walk or run, and only
three piles of papers have been corrected, the tediousness of it getting to you, but...but then
you remember at the end of disastrous poetry lesson of the day before, Odette had come up,
Odette the girl who only five years ago was being dragged across the Syrian border to a
tenuous status in Turkey, where she had to learn Turkish in the camps, then eventually to
the U.S., where she had to abandon the Turkish and, with determined resignation, start on
English, now in 8th grade in Honors English, having the highest average in a formidable class
of 40, a devourer of sophisticated books, a writer of sublime prose, hungry for any adventure
in education...Odette coming up to you with horror in her eyes, at how the students had
reacted, feeling sorry for you, afraid there would be no more lessons, no more poems, no
more delight and passion, she now holding out the poem to you, as if a pleading
supplication..."Mr. Roemmich, she said, you will always have this..."
Wm Roemmich
May 2015
© 2015 William Roemmich
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