Talking Gatsby with my AP LA class

              All right everyone. I’m so excited to be talking about this book with you all. How many of you read and took notes on the first chapter of The Great Gatsby? Looks like about four fifths of you. We can work with that. Did you find quotes and questions you want to discuss? Good, good. Let’s get this warmed up. Oral quiz! Who said, “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful fool.” No hands. Oh, yeah. I forgot. Don’t be shy. I’m sure you know this. Biff?
              I don’t know.
              Bop?
              I’m not good with quotes.
              Ben?
              Don’t know.
              Bessy? Come on, Bessy: I hope she’ll be a fool. A beautiful fool. Who of the very few characters we meet in the first chapter might have said that?
              Gatsby?
              No. Gatsby hardly even's in the first chapter. Beau?
              Is it Gatsby?
              NO! Does ANYONE know who said I hope she’ll be a fool? Yes. Belle.
              Daisy.
              YES! Daisy. Thank you. Daisy is essential to this narrative, and that voice that makes Nick lean forward—maybe flirtatious, maybe hushed… Let’s get a sense of our characters before we go to your quotes and questions, and call out if you’ve got something that pertains. And let’s start with Daisy. What do you notice about her, or think about the way she’s portrayed? Anyone. Come on. How about it, Brenda?
              What did I think of Daisy?
              Yes, what'd you think of Daisy.
              I don’t know.
              Okay, well, what did you notice about Daisy, or what do you learn or know about her.
              What do we know about Daisy?
              Yes.
              I don’t know.
              Anything.
              …
              Okay, Brian, how about you? What do you know about Daisy?
              Um.
              Try this. Is she rich, poor? Is she shy, outgoing? Is she married, single?
              Is she rich?
              YES! She is fabulously rich, and comes from generations of Midwest wealth. What else do you know?
              She lives in the Midwest?
              No! Where does she live? Anyone. I introduced the geography yesterday. We looked at West Egg and East Egg. We looked at Gilded Age architecture, specifically from this region—from where?
              New York?
              YES! Daisy lives on Long Island. Let’s just move on. Who does she live with? Brock?
              With her family?
              Yes, can you name anyone in her family?
              I’m not good with names.
              All right, anyone. What’s the name of Daisy’s husband, Mr. Buchanan?
              Oh, I remember!
              His first name, please.
              Oh.
              It’s Tom! Tom Buchanan.
              Oh yeah.
              Brianna, what do you know about Tom?
              He’s married to Daisy…
              Yes...
              Is he rich?
              YES! They live in a huge palatial villa on Long Island Sound. What else?
              …
              Brassy, what’s something you know about Tom, in addition to him being married and rich?
              Is he a businessman?
              You’re guessing! Come on, all. I’ve only been calling on people who raised their hands to show they’d done the reading and note-taking. We have something here you can’t get anywhere else. We have a group of people who all read a rich piece of literature and history, together, and who got to assemble here in a way that just doesn’t get replicated easily for the rest of your lives, all our thoughts and curiosity and the energy and richness of so many minds attuned through the lens of a piece of art, a piece of magic, building on our own thoughts with an experienced guide to the book in front of you, and all of you, unpacking together, turning things over, nudging thoughts and observations you'd never have had on your own without that friction of many minds in a concentration of time and purpose coming together. This is so precious. But you have to do the reading, which means more than putting your eyes onto a page, but visualizing, thinking, feeling. Come on. Let’s stay with Tom. What do you know or sense about him? Yes, Benny, thank you.
              He’s pushy and entitled. He’s aggressive, and kind of a jerk.
              YES! He’s pushy, aggressive, so entitled, and absolutely. A jerk. And he's racist.
              Whoa, Mr. Grosskopf, you can’t call him that!
              Yeah, where do you get that?
              You’re just going to just call him a racist?
              Page 17. Open your books. Look! Open them. “Civilization’s going to pieces. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? Well, it’s a fine book and everybody ought to read it.”
              He’s racist because he liked a book? That's kind of a stretch.
              “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved. It’s up to the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control.”
              That’s just a couple lines. I don't know how you expected us to catch that.
              “The idea is we’re Nordics. We’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization. Do you see?”
              …
              Okay, all; let’s move on. How about Jordan. What do you remember about Jordan Baker? I’ll give you a hint: Nick realizes he recognizes her face because he’s seen her in pictures before. She’s a little famous.
              Oh, I remember. She’s a model.
              No! Another hint. She’s an athlete.
              Volleyball.
              No. Another hint. Who are these people? It’s a country club sport.
              Tennis!
              Polo!
              Golf!
              Yes, golf. When we first see Jordan, she’s strangely balancing like a statue on an enormous couch. It’s a very weird, static image, very clearly observed as the tension of a pose. 

              Now, what about Gatsby? Do we see him in this chapter, any of that something-gorgeous-about-him-ness, any of that romantic-readiness? Do we glimpse him at all?

              We see him in his house.
              Yes, we see a figure in his house. Any other time? Yes, Belle.
              We see him standing at the end of his dock, with his arms outstretched.
              Yes, it’s the very last image of the chapter. Let’s read it together: “He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been at the end of a dock.” What does that look like? Is it like this? That doesn’t seem right. Someone show me. Okay, now get some trembling in it. That’s so weird looking! Is that what the reaching out looked like? Brian’s got an interpretation: Get that green light, Gatsby! Does that look more normal? No, it doesn’t! This is such an unfathomable description to me, I can’t make sense of it in my head! Anyone else? Still looks weird. You all look like a bunch of zombies! What is he reaching for? What is Gatsby feeling? I know from this description he’s experiencing something there in his solitude, arms out towards the sea like a symbol, but we don’t know what yet.
              Let’s go to that final fifth character of the chapter, our narrator. What do you know or sense about him? He says, in the very first lines of the book, not to pre-judge: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” We’ve been inside his brain this entire time, looking out at these wild and strange posed characters, so we should be able to tell if he’s been judge-y or not. Have his observations reflected lack of judgment? Is he just describing? Do you have hints of judgment?
              The first few pages, when he makes this statement, are full of overt pronouncements, but when he first meets Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, do you see it then too? These are quiet, sometimes just in the adjectives and adverbs. In tonight’s reading about a small party in Manhattan, watch for it: What do you notice about Nick as an observer? Does he judge or not? What and how is he taking in the world around him, and is he participating in these riotous excursions? Is he an insider, an outsider, and who is he talking to—is he talking to us as insiders, outsiders? See what you notice. And at some point, we need to consider why our narrative starts with Nick’s father’s advice about criticizing others.
              But really read, please.

              (Belle. Benny. I'm going to try.)

 

Students spent three weeks reading and doing nothing else: Results

               For three weeks in December, two of my eleventh-grade classes read physical books in class, whatever they wanted, and had no other homework beyond writing a page a day in physical journals, about whatever they wanted. There was no project attached, no standards about what they read or wrote. My only role during these three weeks was to enforce the routine—observe they were indeed reading, check off their accretion of writing. 

Query: What will happen if you, students, get to choose your own book for school and you have a routine of reading, unplugged, together in a community every day for a few weeks? What will happen if you enter into a routine of free writing daily by hand?

Theory: You will increase your stamina and pleasure reading, and also become better observers of your day, eventually taking pleasure in getting down thoughts, ideas, observations and experiences; these improvements will, in turn, position you to heighten your concentration, curiosity, empathy, and critical precision.

Methods: Daily reading in class, daily writing at home.

               I wanted to see students getting absorbed in the reading of physical books, improving stamina and concentration and quietude, sharpening curiosity and empathic generosity for other points of view.
               I wanted to see students writing in physical journals, gathering and training the swarm of daily thoughts and observations, deepening how they move through the world and building upon thoughts and feelings. 

               And I wanted students to be free of those layered demands an assignment or audience evokes—to get as far away from grades as possible, experience themselves in relation to imaginative-ness and creativity and story and reflection with no one looking over their shoulder, checking if they were reading or thinking right or getting what they needed for a deliverable product.

              Here’s how it went.

              Fifth period was better at it—more interested, more involved, more engaged. After amiable socializing at the start, I’d feel them every day settle in and get absorbed.

              In sixth period, that never happened long. They remained hyper-aware of who had the bathroom pass and of my location in the room and if I was watching them. They’d sneak conversations and homework and even toys like a Rubik’s Cube I saw discretely passed around.

              And what did they think? When we returned to school this week after the three weeks of reading, we took a full period to reflect on the experiment.

              About half in each class finished the book they’d started, even though there was no requirement to do so. In fifth period, many additionally spoke of how they found the reading sessions a time to slow down and take a break from the grind of the day, to relax and make time for reading they wouldn’t find otherwise. About 80% of them looked forward to it; 90% really enjoyed the books they’d chosen. And most telling of all, about 55% continued reading into the holiday break when it was no longer required. There was some restlessness there: Some said they just didn’t like holding still and reading with others, and a couple students in fifth period said they hated reading and didn't stop. But mostly fifth period liked the experience, and some reported real change: “It helped me start reading again.” “I’m not a good reader, so I’m surprised how much I got into it.” “I went from looking at words to visualizing story in my mind.” “This reminded me how much I like reading.” “I realized books are an entertainment outside my phone I want to make time for.”

              In sixth period, meanwhile, I encountered more anger, resistance, and attempts to work the system from the start. Only 30% looked forward to reading sessions, and 60%, not 90, liked the books they’d chosen; only 20% continued reading over the ungraded holiday break. There were those who liked ending their school day this way, but most reported the discomfort of their chairs, the dryness of the reading, the awkwardness of silence, the boredom.

              So what do the disparities between class mean? Are the types of students in the class so different? Here’s what I say to that: It’s the typical difference between classes that happen, as any teacher might describe. No matter how a teacher shifts and plans, some groups are in it and some aren’t, as a group culture burns from many interactive dynamics made up of many social and academic histories and more.

              It does seem very much in the nature of truth and messiness that both experiences happened. I launched the whole experience as a reaction to my anger at what I perceived to be sixth period’s lack of curiosity and focus and the phones and shifting academic and leisure experiences I blamed for them. The fact that sixth period more than fifth continued in restless mercenary reaction to the experiment does not make the results ironic but earns a sigh. The lesson is I need to play this differently with sixth period, or, what may be wiser and more sustainable for a teacher: sometimes intentions click, and sometimes they’re frustrated.

              As for the experiment with writing, it failed. What I hoped was that students given no prompts would, if minds already churned, start noticing details throughout the day or generate ideas while writing; or, for more phone-addled minds, I hoped they’d get bored and then become resourceful or creative and find another gear, turning to internet prompts and poetry and story, and so discover new creativity and energy. But that didn’t happen. Writing remained a chore for most. This is less interesting to me. Students can use prompts and more guidance for better results, and I can offer that.

              But the experiment in reading poses much larger challenges and questions. I do think internet and then smart phones have changed relationships to reading, to knowledge, to learning, to concentration, to entertainment, as with so many other aspects of our economic and social world. As a teacher, I mourn some of the deep changes I have observed over time. But I don’t blame the technological revolutions alone: I blame growing class inequality in America, and the escalating costs of universities that have created conditions for the anxious resumé-padding in which families engage from the time kids are little-little. One possible conclusion, especially from results in my fifth period class, is that a lot of these kids even now would likely be reading if they weren’t grinding it all day and after school, competing in select team sports, etc. School is getting in the way of their learning and curiosity and concentration, because it’s all day and so exhausting that down-time is an experience streaming and scrolling-scrolling-scrolling rather than the sustained, broad, imaginative and reflectively thoughtful, quiet experience of a book.

Think Feelingly

               A standard 11^th grade writing task is to write a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King’s writing craft is so slyly attuned to his balking white audience, even as his cramped 7,000 words were drafted on bits of newspaper and writing pads in the confines of his cell, that his letter is repeatedly anthologized and studied as a masterwork of persuasion. But it is certainly more, too, because its pleading message to complacent white citizens, in its grief, anger, and biting urgency, now carries the weight of half a century with too little changed: police still brutalizing Black bodies, social and economic realities tenaciously holding, and, when any who object to such realities do anything, almost anything at all, besides calmy and solitarily litigate or write an ignorable op-ed, still the angry protestations and accusations of division.

              A rhetorical analysis—showing what a writer, speaker, or artist does to achieve a textual purpose—can be a formulaic exercise, and that’s how we generally teach it: a version of a five-paragraph essay with its three-pronged thesis suffocating every chance at intuitive and intellectual connection, often turning to a recipe of the Aristotelean appeals of pathos, logos, and ethos to do the work.
              The task is about understanding how we reach each other, and all too often—given a sharpening of tribalized community and cyber-noise—our desperate need to do so. This is where I go. I have become deliberate in my teaching of sincerity.
              But our students have been so well trained.
              Here is a typical response focusing on King’s most heart-rending paragraphs—a litany of horrors that suddenly erupt after seven paragraphs of deferential reasoning:

• King also appealed to emotion by using personal examples and creating empathy. While explaining the problem with asking black people to wait a little bit longer before taking action against segregation, King says, “When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eye” (King 2). Caring deeply about children is a universal experience, as is the belief that children are innocent and pure and shouldn’t have to suffer. By talking about the impacts of segregation on his children, the audience is able to relate and imagine being in the same scenario with their own children, and they become more empathetic than if he had only talked about himself. By using relatable examples and emotion-provoking language, King caused them to empathize more with him and the anti-segregation movement and better understand the urgency and importance.

              Clinical, earning an A, and a so-what.
              But I had a good week this week, because in addition to essays that include the one above, another of my students took me at my word. Here is a portion of her essay in response to the same passage:

• He is not so elegant with this letter through the whole thing. He is vulgar. He creates this tension between him, his situation, the mess of which racism was, and the arrogance of the clergy. His impatience is loud. He makes this evident without even having to use descriptive words. When he is addressing the clergy telling him his manner was “untimely,” this heated paragraph had the strongest run-on sentences. It feels as though one cannot stop halfway through, they must finish and be forced to read his words. It is almost tiring. Word after word, bullet after bullet, emotion just bursting in these sentences. One that is the most passionate is when he was talking about how they have never felt the way his people do. “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will…when you have seen hate filled policemen curse kick brutalize…when you see the vast majority of your 20 million brothers…in an airtight cage of poverty” (pg. 2), and the sentence goes on. The way in which he writes this is so passionate. He creates this swirl of tension. With these long trains of words, he is firing at the clergy. The way he does not stop speaking and is almost telling them to wait until he does, it hurts.

The author is not a top writer and she was shocked when I liked her essay at all.
              Wow, I didn’t put much time into writing that paragraph; it was just stream-of-consciousness, she said. I told her that this allowed her to unleash: She intuitively tried to capture the feeling she had, of King’s utter rage and sorrow as he’s trying to move white men to feel what they’ve never had to feel, and she captured it like a poet, turning to metaphors and sonic devices because she needed to tap the heart as well as the mind to get at it.
              How do I convince others what their emotionality is to their thinking and engagement in all things?
              When we were reading Dr. King’s letter, I took the time to go to the era and the place, to discuss the Children’s Crusade there, and of Bull Connor’s response, and to show them pictures I took while I visited Birmingham; I sang “Birmingham Sunday” about the four girls killed in a bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church on Easter Sunday, which I heard first through Joan Baez, and showed them my interview of a man in the park by the church, whose anger was still palpable. Absolute silence followed my singing. I said, I’m taking you through all of this because reading King’s letter is not just an intellectual exercise. And a plea to see and respond to another’s human dignity is not a game. I’m going through the history, I’m laying my vulnerability before you, because I want you reading and feeling his words with your hearts, all through your skin; if you’ve got analytical writing under control, I want you also to try reflecting King’s pain in your own description and discussion. 

               You will do fine just doing the tasks of a rhetorical analysis; but you will see how much more is available to you, in dialogue, in connection, in meaning, in activism, if, as a writer, as an audience, as a citizen and neighbor, you invest feeling with curiosity and fact and can think feelingly. 

Hardened Schools, Hardened Hopes

               A few days ago, vice presidential candidate JD Vance upset many parents by conceding school shootings to be a “fact of life,” and suggesting there’s nothing to do about guns, and that we must instead bolster the security in what are otherwise the tempting, soft targets of our schools.

              Last Spring, after another shooting outside Garfield High, Seattle Schools began to discuss the return of uniformed resource officers, who’d been unwelcome since the de-policing energy following George Floyd’s death in 2020.

              As officials were debating, students in my Roosevelt English class wanted to talk about how they felt about police in the schools—addressing race, profiling, school-to-prison pipelines, but focusing especially on how much such a person could help in the face of an armed threat. Finally, students turned to me for my thoughts.

              And to my dear students, I said: I am sorry. I don’t have a solution. I have grief.

              We now have cameras at every corner in every hallway. All doors are locked and we video-buzz the main office to let us in. Classrooms have interior locks and black-out shades and we practice huddling together quietly on the floor away from windows and doors. Fire doors close off hallways soon after most students go home. Field trips require huge teams to approve all the security measures we must prove are in place. We’re looking to build a perimeter fence.

              Schools are supposed to be places where we grow and inspire our children, teach them to be citizens and neighbors. Schools have been the gathering hubs for surrounding community that’s usually named after the very schools that have always been their beating heart.

              I want school to be a place that speaks to our curiosities rather than our fears.

              Why must our best solution to school shootings be locking up our children?

Ends and Beginnings

               Much of teaching last year was dispiriting, as it had been the two previous years following the return from Covid. A year ago, I met with a financial advisor, who showed me that my half-pension, half-401K plan is pretty much garbage even if I put a bunch more years into teaching—and only a little more broken were I to leave the profession far sooner than that—in three years, say, after I’d served over 30 years. Tin handcuffs! I found this incredibly liberating. And so, all year, unlike most of my coworkers, and especially the department heads to whom I’d passed the sputtering torch, when confronted by nonsense at work, nothing keeping me, I was able to live up to my professional goal for the year and Let Shit Go.
              Despite this attitude and relentless encounters with the absurd, the end of the school year was triumphant: I felt connected to students and our work together in ways I hadn’t since before the pandemic.
              I attribute this both to Letting Go and choosing a moment to ratchet all the way back up.
              Leading up to the two-week visit from the South Africans in late March was full of stress and panic and agonizing interactions with a dozen people from the district and our principal and nurse whose goal, it seemed, was to discourage us from ever, including on a weekend day trip, meeting our students outside the walls of my classroom. Here was Shit I could not Let Go because 16 visitors and many here were deeply and joyously part of this, and so, I experienced the kind of torment I can’t even describe because it’s so boring and bureaucratic. One morning, I was exasperated to the point of career danger, and I announced to my program team that I could no longer serve as its teacher leader in the next year.
              But for now, towards those two weeks and through them, I stayed dialed all the way up.
              When the South Africans came, we were there to meet them at the airport; they shadowed students in classes and paneled discussions in others; homestays and neighborhood social pods were active and successful; we had a weekend retreat in a forest; we volunteered at a garden run by the Black Farmers Collective; we toured the Wing Luke Museum and the Chinatown International District; we jointly led games and discussion in an elementary school; we attended the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Garden on an anniversary of forced internment, and we heard from a Suquamish storyteller on the reservation. Students and visitors spent as much time with each other as their sleeping schedules would allow, and I was learning and loving my own guest, Mimi (an experience I detail here). It was a rich two weeks that blotted out everything else; and when we came to the tearful, weeping end, I was on a high, knowing I had put my all into what would probably be the last, big thing I led as a teacher. My last big thing.
              Having done that, I really could let go. Mimi raised the stakes of my teaching, and I came out of the experience relaxed and sincere. The program students and I had arrived at a mutual trust and affection and the thoughtfulness of a community that had experienced risk, growth, and grief together.
              Meanwhile, I finally arrived at some mutuality in my other classes, too, in part because I stopped fighting for attention and attendance and just leaned towards those ready to engage together.
              About a decade ago, my father-in-law said he believed schools should just teach to those wanting to be taught, which is what I found myself doing at the end of the year. At the time, I had said to him, Yes, while that would save schools so much time and money, many kids come to schools with attention and skills fragmented by life circumstances entirely outside their control that nevertheless put those students at high risk of difficulty at school. Those students need the interventions and care of educators even more than those prepared and ready to focus. I still believe this.
              But by the end of the year, and with so little help from my school forthcoming, I put myself first: I taught to those ready to engage, without policing or case managing. And I enjoyed it. Students in it with me enjoyed it. And those other students? Didn’t notice I’d let their shit go.
              On the day of the final exam for the program class, I told them how much their there-ness meant to me. And at the end of the period, I received hug after hug from students, and some tears.
              We had one more moment together—what we call the Ends and Beginnings ceremony, in which we introduce the incoming group and celebrate the outgoing. As a master of ceremonies at our community evenings, I keep the timetable tight and limit my own talk to introductions; but this was my last moment as the head of the program, and I decided to spend some attention on myself.
              I was secretly anticipating my retirement from the school after 29 years of service in the school that graduated me and all three of my daughters, and was fearing the hollow, life-defeating anticlimax of the school’s failure to recognize who and what I’ve been in those three decades—something I’d seen too often from hallowed old vets who’d been given a little speech and faded away or worse, ended their careers in angry sick leave and received no speech at all.
              At the Ends and Beginnings ceremony, I honored myself. I spoke to what was meaningful to me about the program, how it fostered the kind of community big and loving enough that students within it were willing to risk vulnerability and ignorance, and therefore depth of commitment, compassion, and learning. And I said that as much as the program means to students, it means even more to its teachers, who put their all into creating a meaningful experience just so we have one place where we know it’s  possible: What we do with you all represents what learning can be, what school can be. As an idea, and as a reality, it has saved some of us teachers. It’s the torch we light for ourselves. I told the community what I put in, what I took out. You can watch my speech here.
              And when I was done, I had the reception I knew would sustain me even were I to experience a couple more years of teaching frustrated by distracted students and obstructive administration and a hollow institutional goodbye at the end of them. Students, parents, alumni, and community members stood in line to hug me and give their recognitions.
              My sincerity and heart have been the best of my teaching. I hope to give them unobstructed entry this next year and what, after that, may be my final year teaching.

End of 2023-24 school year letters to students, administration

June 24, 2024

Dear BLT, RHS Admin, PTSA, absolutely anyone who might be able to do something about out-of-control smartphones in our building,

               I was cheered last week to learn that Hamilton and now Eaglestaff middle schools have decided to purchase Yondr pouches to secure student smartphones for the school day. I have been longing for exactly that at Roosevelt, or at least for an admin-supported policy that will not leave individual teachers to battle alone against students who can hardly help themselves. I am writing to plead for help with the phones.
              I started the 2023-2024 school year with a strict phone policy that demanded learners store their devices in designated pockets at the front of the room. I purchased multiple chargers to power 16 phones there. For a month and a half, the difference in the room was a revelation: to have students’ heads up and listening and interacting with each other, like an actual classroom—and not what it had been the year before (and what it came to be again), when I would have to fight to get heads up, fight for collective focus, fight for students to hear each other and tune in to class discussion, or to try instead to teach to rows of stooped bodies signaling boredom and disdain.
              Five minutes at the beginning of every period were spent chasing phones into the pockets at the front of the room. I thought if I invested the time and energy at the beginning of the year, students would fall in line, and most did, but multiple students, in every period, in every grade, continued to need chasing and arguing. The urge to get on their phones was simply too overpowering. Because our attention, time, and strength as teachers is strained so many ways, despite how much was gained by my daily efforts to keep phones away, I finally got tired and gave in.
              I know there are teachers who’ve figured out how to keep devices away. I also know many more teachers—nationally, too, a cacophony of frustration—are as desperate as I for a more systemic response.
              The case against phones in schools is being made around the country, and I’m sure you know it: social media are algorithmically induced to get eyes on screens, to provoke a slurry of anxiety and fear and desire that sell products, to amplify bias and abbreviate beliefs; and smartphones expose students to bullying and comparison and social pressure, at great time and experience cost. Meanwhile, notifications are designed to return nearby phones to hands and studies repeatedly demonstrate they succeed, even as they ding ding ding ding ding a student’s focus into pieces.
              From my teacher’s point of view, phones turn students into classroom zombies: Teenagers can’t multitask nearly as well as they think they can.
              Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation argues that two mammoth changes needed in schools are affordable and within reach: one is about more unregulated play; the other is for schools to lock up phones, all day, including during lunch. At the price of a third of a textbook per kid, $30 (and Hamilton’s PTSA said they received a hefty bulk discount lowering the price more), we can get our kids back.
              Get us those magnetic pouches, or advocate for a muscular, administratively supported school-wide no-phones policy. I’d prefer the pouches, to avoid the hourly battles over phones; to keep kids from grabbing their devices and wandering the halls to check them; to prevent all those meet-me-in-the-bathroom gatherings that have been happening this year; to get them to interact with each other in healthier ways in their down time. But I’d settle for an actual school-wide policy supported by administration.
              I’ve been teaching for a month and a half shy of 29 years. Teaching has never felt this stupid. I repeat the image from above: Vying hour after hour with the dispiriting arrays of silent bodies hunched over devices. I implore you—help us. Don’t leave teachers alone with this soul-crushing, career-dimming battle over phones.

David Grosskopf

June 20, 2024
Dear Margins and Centers students,
 
              I’ve been receiving a few emails from students because there was a scored reflection on the day of the final, and the missing points will help them get to an A- or A.
              15 students showed up to my 2^nd period Final. 11 came to the 4^th. In both classes, we finished the documentary about the battle over Arizona’s Ethnic Studies programs, did a little writing, had lively discussion about learning and schooling, and shared in a gratifying note and moment of closure.
              One of the things we discussed after we finished the documentary is a moment the politician John Huppenthal reflected on his visit to Mr. Acosta’s classroom: “My visit there wasn’t a typical day: it was more a discussion that took place. I wasn’t seeing anything that represented a typical day whatsoever.” At another moment, he condemned the Raza classes for reading “the Marxist” Paulo Freire, just as we have done. But because he didn’t actually read the Freire, Huppenthal didn’t understand that “a discussion” is a purposeful and, yes, typical element in the Raza classes: Critical thought and active engagement with the living world that recognizes our human dignity—it happens through dialogue, not through repetition of memorized facts and proficiencies; and the intellectual community that engages in such dialogue together not only challenges, refines, and energizes our ideas, but draws from our strength together, because 1) the best learning happens when we’re not defensive or exhausted but feel safe enough to be challenged and supported enough to get things wrong, and because 2) we build collective power and joy as a community in conversation.
              Another thing we discussed during our final was a national survey that suggests 70% of teens are bored in school most or all of the time. In second period, a couple students signed out and came back when the conversation was over. Another couple students texted and chatted and pointed to their phones, until I thanked them for the illustration and then asked our class if their actions were cause or effect of their boredom. Students in the room said “Effect.” Watching all year, I think that’s a snake eating its tail.
              So, how do these things fit together—skipping the final but seeking the points, Huppenthal not understanding Freire, the bored teens in all of our nations’ schools? All year, too many students have too often checked out of the essential element of our class—who we are and what we build in community and conversation. Marginalized issues and marginalized voices and marginalized people: silencing and mistreatment call for witness and justice. Sometimes you are the center of groups, sometimes the margins, and very often you are both—and either way, it’s community and conversation that leads to empowered and compassionate understanding and action.
              Our final didn’t have points—not many of them, anyway. But it featured the best and most important thing that we do—discussion—and used as its vehicle the documentary Precious Knowledge, a mirror to what, why, and how we’ve been doing what we’ve been doing. But if you could have joined us for the ending and chose not to because you could afford the points, or if you spent the time on a device then clocked in for the points on the little journal reflection, your grade might not have been hurt. But you failed the final exam.
              As the year has gone on, our conversations in class have become better—more thoughtful, more lively, more useful. I love learning from you and cherish the kind of energy, risk, and growth that’s possible in a group, which is what makes a classroom rare and special, and a reason I love being a teacher.
              If I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye and you peaced-out without a word, I hope you have a restful summer.

David Grosskopf

When a Way of Life is Dismembered, Re-Member

              Last week I participated in a National Endowment of the Humanities Landmarks workshop on the Grand Coulee Dam (“The Intersection of Modernity and Indigenous Cultures”).

              I was drawn to the workshop after trying for several years to convey to students why coastal and plateau Salish peoples are so affected by the health of regional salmon. Dams in particular are featured in shared texts by Elizabeth Woody and Lawney Reyes (Seven Hands, Seven Hearts and Bernie Whitebear: An Urban Indian's Quest for Justice), as Woody describes Dulles Dam drowning the region’s most productive, sacred fishery, Celilo Falls, and Reyes describes effects on his family when the Grand Coulee Dam turned Kettle Falls into Lake Roosevelt. I tried to capture the cataclysmic difference between the bustling fishing sites and the calm, warm waters that replaced them, and year after year I failed to do so.

              Last week, I spent time with thirty other teachers in Spokane, Kettle Falls, and Grand Coulee with academics and speakers from Washington and Arizona universities and the Nez Perce Tribe, the Spokane Tribe, and Bands of the Colville Nation. I was especially affected around the central theme of harnessing nature for power, but also around foods, and the stories that connect us.

              In the last few years, I’ve tried to teach more local and Native American history and culture; people from Yakama Nation talked to my classes the importance of food:

              I planned with Yakama Peacekeepers a weekend retreat that would include a day devoted to foods and stories about them. The plan was this: In the morning, some students would go to the fields to join in harvesting root vegetables and greens, others would help dress a deer that hunters were to have taken for the occasion, and the rest would work together in the kitchen to prepare foods meaningful to their own families and traditions. The intention was to eat together and tell stories about our foods. Then Covid happened and the weekend retreat did not.

              Then last year, we brought a class to the Toppenish longhouse, where prayers of gratitude and blessings of welcome and descriptions of provenance encompassed indigenous foods before we ate them. On the bus drive across the plateau, our guide and teacher Polly pointed to a place seemingly nowhere that led to the same yellowed hills we were seeing everywhere, and she told us, Just past there, in this season (Spring), the ladies go to gather camas roots—private property but also a “usual and accustomed gathering” place to which treaty and the Boldt decision allowed them access.

              There was something here, something important, and we visitors all felt it; but I still didn’t have enough understanding to convey myself what was important about food to local native peoples.

              This last Tuesday, Laurie Arnold of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and a professor at Gonzaga, helped me to not only feel the importance of food but also how it is connected to every element of daily living, coexisting within rhythms and seasons of these lands and waters, binding food preparations to community, memory, humility, expansive care.

              Dr. Arnold began by telling us she travels yearly to Kettle Falls, where a salmon ceremony still takes place. When she grew up, this occurred at St. Paul’s, one of the remaining sites from the missionary era, but it now takes place by the water: they sing, they offer prayers, and they bang stones together to recreate what salmon used to hear when they swam over the singing rocks of Kettle Falls on the roaring Columbia River. Salmon are not a resource, another speaker, Allen Pinkham, told us earlier: they are a life source. The fact that people still go to the shores of the becalmed Lake Roosevelt for a salmon ceremony when salmon no longer run is a statement of grief, and a connection to the past, and also a statement of hope and continued care. Whether the salmon can make it there or not, we want to honor the salmon, Arnold said—the first kin to say I am here for you and will sustain you. It is our responsibility to give thanks and protect our cousins the salmon.

              A similar intentionality of movement, harvesting, and preservation occurs along the plateau’s seasonal round, and this affects everything: not only diet, but social and spiritual life as well. During camas-gathering season, the root chief convenes the root ceremony, and then women dig roots and put them in baskets around their bellies, chit-chatting with each other all through. The roots are cleaned, peeled, and readied for preservation. They dig a big pit, ten by ten feet perhaps, and the roots bake there, underground for days, which is a big community event, too: a great time for connection. People work all year, and they socialize all year too.

              This management and cultivation of the land is highly organized and represents deep, ancestral knowledge. Look at these structures built with tule reeds, Dr. Arnold says, showing us slides of shelters and fish traps with shared geometry. The tule reeds are hollow, so when it’s hot and dry, the reeds are open and air gets through and hot air breathes out; when it rains, the damp expands the reeds and keeps out the wet. This is very old technology. These are a people who understood where they lived and how they lived there. The homelands foster people and care for them, Dr. Arnold said, and in turn, Plateau peoples find their identities and spiritual practices from their homelands, which it is their responsibility to protect.

              So what happens when the seasonal round is broken? What happens when someone takes away your food—how do you get it now? A store? Food is not just about food, but about community, about co-existence, about deep practice.

              In the plateau, settlement didn’t really happen until the 1850s, which is called BC time—before missionaries. Once they came, change happened fast, in the span of a generation and a half. Lives were changed entirely. The dam represents an entire transfer of wealth. The Grand Coulee Dam destroyed so much plant life on the plateau. Crossing Lake Roosevelt is far more difficult than crossing the Columbia River as it was before. Just trying to get at the foods there is now trespassing. Colville peoples and the graves of their ancestors were plucked out of their homelands. And the seasonal round was stopped—the loss of access to ancestral foods is a nutritional, cultural, and spiritual disruption. An economic and power boom occurred locally and across the West, but the Plateau peoples bore the cost in ways that can’t be assessed or compensated.

              However, Dr. Arnold also emphasized growing localized success in co-management, and larger co-management—with healthy ecosystems benefiting all—within reach. The Upper Columbia United Tribes and Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission have been in collaboration to get more indigenous voices involved for cultural and ecological consultation to serve people better. And people are moving closer to recovering practices that remain meaningful.

              So when we are talking about the importance of food, it involves connection to community, to past and future, to interrelationships with land and the animal peoples, to stewardship of and gratitude to all of these things. I can go to a store and pick something up for dinner; but so many processes go into the event of every can and vegetable stalk and box of pasta and ding dong, that such connection is wholly abstracted. Yet there are ways I can learn the blessings.

 * * * * *

              The other thread I want to pull from last week is about story. Randy Lewis, Wenatchi band of Colville, went out of his way to tell us he wasn’t a storyteller, and that, at 80 years old and recovering from stroke, his brain is a snow globe. That’s what he said: But everything he said suddenly came together like a laser gathering light.

              He started by telling us that he learned to fish at Celilo Falls when he was five. White people would watch all the dip netting on platforms from the road above the Falls and try to buy the fresh-caught salmon. Lewis’s mother, Mary Marchand, was among those dip-netting, and Tommy Thompson, the salmon chief and headman of Wyam, told the men not to hassle her for it—she’s feeding many kids—and when you see her, you better give her a smile. At five years old, Randy learned from women how to dry the fish in the sun, and he took fish that were to be thrown back and dried them, and sold them as salmon to white onlookers, earning adult wages at $13 a day. This is how Randy Lewis would tell a story, with sparkle and mischief. Then, after giving us this image of lived experience at Celilo Falls, he changed the mood without changing his tone:

              He was told he had to be there at Celilo Falls the day the Dulles Dam would wall up the river; it would be an important event, their Ceremony of Tears (the three days mourning event that occurred 17 years before, in 1940, with the drowning of Kettle Falls). And, he said, when the song over the rocks was silenced, the women keened and the men turned away.

              When I was a child, Lewis told us, there were four dams. Now there are fourteen. Everything’s been dammed. A lot of the land used to be green, and we owe it to the salmon, who fertilize the earth. We would never have been able to dream of a day when the salmon would be extinct. That we have salmon at all now is due to the tribes’ efforts.

              Storytellers, Lewis told us, animate what was and the way things are. Western society indoctrinates people not to believe or see the spirit world that we nevertheless sometimes catch out of the corner of our eye, but native kids continue to see this world throughout their lives. Storytellers made the spirit world easier to see. Aunts and uncles and cousins would kneel down on a quilt and just let it all go. All animals—the first peoples—have a spark from the creator, and they all have medicine and knowledge. The elders would sit there and start humming, and then the words would come out. My aunt said we learn our industriousness from the beaver; and all of a sudden, we realized we were hearing a song, and my aunt looked just like a beaver, singing. My grandmother, who could kill you in more ways than you could die, brought us outside and had me gather the sticky mud. Then she started telling stories about the creator bringing first peoples to life, while she, at the same time, was sculpting little characters from the mud. We existed out of time, hearing stories this way. Storytelling is rich like that.

              But it’s more than this. There’s much in the seasonal round, in the wheel of life, the circle of life—whatever you want to call it—that has been broken in this last century and a half. We were an ancient people and we never had to leave. And now the ways of life are, piece by piece, broken off that wheel. But then we come together, and we share our stories of what life was like and how we lived: we patch our souls back together as we speak and as we listen, and we find our connections again. The stories are important because when a way of life is dismembered, you can re-member it.

              Here’s what you can do, Lewis told us: Learn a place. Learn the place where you live. Go backwards. Who lived there before you? Find their stories. Add your own story to it: How did you come to this place? That is how you work on making the world and spirit inside you whole.

              That line—when a way of life is dismembered, you should re-member it—was a thunderclap for me. All week, learning about ceremonies, gatherings, descriptions of how different peoples lived from and learned from fish, plants, and animals, other people, the thread was in stories that recall, that acknowledge, that offer wisdom about ecological and communal practice. These stories are, currently, dismantling dams on the Klamath River, and soon enough, the Snake River too; but they also connect people to themselves and to the world around us. Much is broken. How much of this we can heal soon is doubtful. But we can work on healing, and we can kindle our spirits.

              Many kids these days are afraid of a looming climate apocalypse, and this feeds a despair I try to address as a teacher and adult in their world. They would do well to listen to the stories of indigenous peoples around the world, who have already endured a catastrophic apocalypse: as they’ve come together to recover practices and revive languages and to tell stories, they’ve adapted, found joy and connection, and they’ve endured.

              Randy Lewis said as a child he was about to kill a spider when his mother told him stop: we learn how to weave from that spider. That’s us, she said: that web she’s made, and all the strands in it. A spider uses that web to survive. We didn’t put the strands there and we don’t have a right to remove them. If a strand is broken, we have to work to replace all those strands so the world is healthy again.

LSG

               A few weeks ago, I walked out on one of my classes.
              My strength as a teacher has never been policing my students. I don’t expend much energy directing traffic to the bathroom, monitoring furtive behaviors, punishing disruptions beyond verbal redirection. I’m slow to anger. I find goofy antics funny. But my greatest strengths have allowed me to get away with this: I meet students in shared humanity, as partners in understanding and repair of the world. I love digging into the complexities and challenges of literature, art, democracy, or politics, and have been, as a result, able to immerse students in discussion and questions that have tended to engage them. I don’t have lunch detentions, but the critical mass has been with me. Had been.
              After a few weeks of lessons and work time, research presentations or essays were due in my college-in-the-high-school course. Several essays had come in fourth period, but none of the presentations were ready. A student came to my desk before the bell and told me I’d misled them all about our online submission due date, which occurred that morning before school, and not midnight, as he presumed. I asked when my assignments have ever been due at midnight—all year, every assignment has been due right before school. Well, it was confusing, he said.
              When class started, I asked who was ready to present, and indeed, no one was. The student raised his hand and said, I think what this means is that we should have an extension because...
              Stop! I looked at him intently: Before you go on speaking, be very careful about what you’re about to say.
              But he wrinkled his eyes and continued: I was just going to say, you have to understand that you’re not the only one giving us work.
              I looked at him. I shook my head. And I left.
              I took an exasperated circuit around the building, hot with students’ languor and their easy faith in me, and, in relation to this project, ruminating too over a seeming lack of curiosity and civic interest.
              I returned after a slow walk to a few kids waiting at the door. Inside, the air was buzzing.
              When the tumult died down, I turned to the student asking for a class extension and said, Do you want to try that again? And he said, What. What did I say? I turned to everyone else and told the class, You all need to do some talking together, and I left again, this time, in clear didactic purpose.
              When I returned, I asked what they discussed. A few students said they had plenty of time for research and preparing the slide decks and that I must be annoyed how they’d used their time. A student who’d only just arrived suggested it wasn’t what the student said but the tone in which he’d said it. The loudest voice said, Why can’t you just tell us what we did wrong?
              So I told them. I want you to be excited to share what you learned, I said. I want to see some urgency, and some nerves. I want you to be upset that you weren’t ready for each other. I want to see you looking forward to what your classmates have been passionate about. I want to see your curiosity, your light, your accountability for yourselves and engagement as a community that’s had eight months of intellectual growth as a group. I want to see you take sincere responsibility for your learning. And yes, I want you to own what’s yours. You weren't ready: What did you do and what didn't you do when you realized you wouldn't be ready? I left you to talk, because I want you, you together, to unpack and address what’s wrong here—you, as learners and as a community with a stake in what happens in the room.

 * * * * *

              I know students have been hobbled by Seattle’s more than a year in remote education. I suspect that recovery has been slowed by our district’s compassionate response to the unique challenges this pandemic has posed for our students, as well as the justice-minded recognitions that finally reached the white mainstream when our nation mobilized—in their masks—around the 2020 murder of George Floyd. These more equitable grading practices, restorative justice approaches, and recognitions of historical trauma have not typically been joined to the infrastructure needed—training, people-power, and above all, time—to support this community-, dignity-based response; and the result is instead a relaxing of standards and consequences: in our school as elsewhere, it’s the privileged kids that exploit these while others further fall.
              I wonder if the dual response that swept the nation since the pandemic—the justice-minded recognitions in blue states, and, in red states, rage against covid protocols and the “awokening” of America—have resulted in two distinct disasters playing out: a permissive relaxing of consequences in blue states, exacerbating chronic absenteeism and poor executive functioning and behavior, and in red states, censorship of literature, history, and dialogue, threatening the health, safety, and collectivity of more than one generation.
              But I also believe that our students have endured a cataclysm at least equal to that of the pandemic—their phones. The surgeon general has written about it. Teachers and districts around the country have contended openly with it. My own district is suing social media companies about it. And the National Center for Education Statistics reports that 77% of schools prohibit phone use for non-academic purpose—and even in those schools, teachers are in a constant battle of wills. My high school is not one of those with a school-wide prohibition. Our principal says she is protecting teachers from possible lawsuits in the event that a confiscated phone is lost or stolen.
              Nevertheless, at the beginning of the school year, every day, I spent five minutes at the start of each class, making sure students had placed phones in their assigned pockets at the front of the room, hunting the missing phones, demanding trades of power banks for handsets, standing and waiting with my hand out with the same two or three kids every period. Even though invested time did not, as I’d hoped, speed up this start-of-class routine—am I not annoying or scary enough?—I was pleased by what came of the five minutes badgering: Students were collectively looking up and focused on what I was saying, participating in discussion with one another, engaging in the content and skills of the class. It was the sun clearing the utter despair of a room where too many were huddled over phones or laptops and turned away from each other and from me.
              The day a student refused wasn’t the day I lost the fight. She said she had a doctor’s note. The note said she had ADHD and that her phone helped her concentrate. It’s a whole thing, she said. Ask my mom about it. She’ll explain. Eagerly, I contacted her mother, certain no parent and no doctor would approve such logic. But the parent backed her daughter, referred to the doctor’s note, argued ADHD conferred special multi-tasking abilities, and was, finally, deaf to my panicked dread that one kid intently scrolling would break my whole policy.
              The day I lost the fight came soon, though, and here’s why. In the course of our exchange, the parent carbon-copied our principal; after touchy exchanges about race and racism to which the principal was silent, when that particular tension was resolved, she suddenly spoke up to celebrate us: Good job, team! But here’s how I took it: She saw my desperation to maintain the phone prohibition and she heard the mom assert it didn’t apply to her daughter—and my principal did not intervene to back me.
              I stopped fighting the kid. I could have kept fighting, I know—but I felt helpless and alone, professionally exhausted. And within a week, the other phones came out.
              For so small a slight as a principal trusting me to manage my business, I gave in? Yes. I was run-down already, already believed myself undermined—by the number of unsupported and mismanaged students with special needs as a percentage of my 162 students; by the number of exceptions we were expected to offer every assignment (encouraged modification, example: thesis, notes, outline, workshopped sample, draft and 3-8 page essay replaced by three unpolished sentences) and exceptions to every classroom rule (demanded modification, example: consequences for repeatedly throwing food across the room at a student’s head replaced with reminders about no-food-in-class). I felt undermined already by inefficient and often absurd demands on time outside the classroom and, even more, by systems and bosses deaf to practical instructional needs to meet such challenges. I felt demoralized by the meetings styled as professional development to address these challenges and provide “tools” to meet them, because the tools they provide us are always actually a variation of “do more”: more communication; more conferencing with kids, parents, and intervention teams; more individually tailored instruction and assessment; more research into existing counseling, assessment, and disciplinary data. I’ve come out of these meetings recalling Animal Farm’s Boxer saying, “I will work harder.”
              All of this is existentially and professional perilous; and for this reason, the actual motto I’ve adopted for the year is “Let Shit Go.”