Moving Day

 I'm moving this operation over to Substack. For anyone out there looking for me, here's where you'll find me: https://brokenhand.substack.com.

The Normal Distribution and the Act Like a Man Box

 

I've been thinking about "manhood" and what it means--or what we think it means--to be a man. I am not a psychologist or a sociologist or any other kind of -ologist qualified to say anything with authority. I’m just a guy, thinking out loud. I'm a guy who has been a man for his whole life, and a father of two men for nearly 23 years. But that's all I am, so...caveat lector.

What I keep thinking about is: what is normal? Statistically (I’m not a statistician), normal is not a single thing; normal is a distribution around a mean. We’ve all seen the “bell curve.” To be formal about it, according to this statistics website:

“The normal distribution is a continuous probability distribution that is symmetrical around its mean, most of the observations cluster around the central peak, and the probabilities for values further away from the mean taper off equally in both directions.”

A “continuous probability distribution” feels very quantum-physics-y to me in its suggestion that reality is less concrete and fixed that we perceive it to be—more wave than point, more probability than certainty. (I’m not a physicist—these are all just the ramblings of a dilettante reader.)

Todd Rose tells some amusing anecdotes, in The End of Average, about times when we have sought an actual individual to represent the “average” of a set of qualities representing manhood or womanhood. In both cases, the search came up empty. There was no single person who represented the mean of all manly or womanly qualities; the pure middle was an empty set.

Qualities exist across a continuum, and they bunch and gather around the mean. Imagine a normal distribution of masculine traits and behaviors, with what we call the very feminine at the left-hand tail and what we think of as the hyper-macho at the right hand-tail. I’m making this up. Most of us would bunch and gather around the mean as aggregates of behavior, but if you isolated particular behaviors, or attitudes, or affects, our individual scores might be all over the place. That’s what makes us individuals.

That’s what makes us individuals, but we socialize ourselves and each other pretty hard, as men, not to be all over the place, but rather to fit snugly inside what Rosalind Wiseman calls “the Act Like a Man” box. There is one acceptable way to be a boy or a man—deviate from it at your peril.

We’ve been raised with some pretty hardcore, binary thoughts about gender and sexuality. “Normal” men are one thing, feel one thing, behave one way, are attracted in one way to one opposite sex. Anything that deviates from that “normal” is, by definition, deviant. But the reality is that “normal” is a cluster of things hovering around a mean, not a singularity where all things meet. If there is such a thing as mean masculinity, it exists only because most cases of Actual Men hover around that point, at locations to one side or another of that mid-point it in equal measure. In other words, not all men are X; some men are a little X+ (meaning to the left of X, not better than X) and some are a little X- (meaning to the right of X, not lesser than X); some are a LOT X+ and X-.

But what have we men done? We have looked at that distribution and we have invalidated almost everyone to the left as being dangerously “faggy” or “gay.” Maybe only the tail; maybe almost all the way up to just short of the mean. Depends on the generation. But even in our relatively enlightened times, too many of us live in terror of anything to the left of the mean, and hope that we, personally, are never tagged as being in that group. But the extreme right? The extreme right is considered totally safe and viable: the hyper-macho, the toxic, the brutal—those are all considered reasonably permissible ways of being a man. So, we don’t just accept the cluster around the mean—we say “real men” exist at the mean and all the way out to the furthest extreme of only the right-hand tail, while anything even slightly to the left of the mean is dangerous and to be shunned.

Remember—the mean, the average, the “normal” would not exist unless there were equal numbers of cases on BOTH sides of it. That’s how distribution works. Which means there are a hell of a lot of us to the left of the mean (in aggregate and also in a variety of individual traits). But we’ve decided to make invisible and untouchable any expression of masculinity in the left-of-X range. Those traits do not exist and must not exist in the Act Like a Man box. 

Which is ludicrous, right? Because if the values to the left of the mean disappeared, the mean would shift hard towards the right. By definition. But we like to pretend that nothing to the left of the mean is part of who we are, and we reinforce that idea constantly.

Would gay men, measured alone, fall into the same rough distribution, or would their mean skew a little to the left? I don’t know.

Would straight men pulled out into a separate group skew a little to the right? I don’t know.

What I do know—or sense, because, again, I have no expertise in any of this—is that masculine traits and behaviors among men as a whole follow something like a normal distribution regardless of sexual preference, and that all of this—all of it—should be considered a normal and ordinary range of expression of masculinity.

I wrote a year ago about how we might be better served by thinking of gender qualities along a linear continuum—a slider switch rather than an on/off toggle. But if you insisted on marking intervals along the masculinity slider for measurement purposes, I think you’d find that, in aggregate at least, most of us would probably register at around 5 on a 1-10 scale. Regression to the mean.

Why does that matter? It matters because people in the majority like to pretend that minorities do not exist—or, at the very least, that their existence as minorities makes them less-than-worthy or less-than-real or less-than important. But remember: in a distribution, even the extremes help to define the mean. And remember: so very, very much of life on earth falls into these distributions. For any set of values clumped around a mean, there are always tails at either end. They are not weirdos or deviants or wrong. They simply represent the tails—they are people with certain traits expressed less often than others within a particular population. But they are expressed. They are part of the data set. They are part of us. They help define us. They belong.

And I’ll repeat this thought as well: the mean is simply an aggregate of traits and behaviors. Go searching for the individual person who is a perfect representation of the average of all traits--Mister Perfectly Average Man, and you’ll come up with an empty set. There is no perfectly-averagely-masculine man. If masculinity were made up of 100 separate traits, none of us would register at-the-mean 100 times. We’d be a little to the left here, a little to the right there, a little further out in some areas, a little closer in for others. As individuals, we are all over the map—and yet, so many of us are terrified of allowing ourselves to vary.

There are as many ways to be a man as there are men. There is no box. There is no fucking box. We need to just stop. We need to let some air in and let each other breathe.

Teaching for the Stretch

 I wrote this eBook for Catapult Learning in 2015 on the importance of flexible thinking, better teacher-questioning, and the need to "play with your food" as a student.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZSnsAQ09jywWWr4rSR1xThDLhubRfI4F/view?usp=sharing

Tinkering with the Text

This is a repost of an article I wrote for the Achieve3000 online magazine in November of 2020. The magazine appears no longer to be available online, so I thought I'd post it here for quasi-posterity. It focuses on topics covered in earlier of my blog posts and in PD sessions and keynote speeches I used to deliver under the umbrella title, "Teaching for the Stretch."

 ***

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows

 

We all want our students to read and grapple with interesting texts, but how do we know whether a text we assign will be interesting …whatever that means? Do we look at the topic? The genre? The author’s use of language? The font size?

Well, all right…maybe not font size. But what can we rely on? What do we do when only some of our students (or none of them!) are engaged by the material we bring to them? Some people argue that we need to change the curriculum to make it more relevant to our students. Others argue that we need to make the students care more about the curriculum we already have. Don’t read this book; read that book. Don’t cover this topic; cover that topic.

It can be incredibly difficult to find reading content that is equally compelling and fascinating to every single learner in your classroom. But looking for that single, magic text is actually a mistake. The fact is, nothing in this world is inherently, by-it’s-very-nature interesting. Things are interesting only to the extent that we bring our curiosity to them. Our investment of interest is what makes things interesting.

This means, I think, that ANY piece of text can be compelling; it all depends on what we do with it, and what we let students do with it. When students see a text as a series of tasks to complete—an assignment that well-behaved students will comply with, regardless of how they feel about it…well, just writing those words makes me feel depressed.  But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can move from compliance to compelling—from chore to play.

When I say “play,” I don’t mean that we need to gamify our lessons (again, whatever that means). I mean that we can find meaningful things for students to explore and tinker with in a text—opportunities to play with language, with structure, and with ideas, instead of simply responding to questions.

As the historian, Johan Huizinga, writes, everything we think of as culture originates in some form of play. We are homo ludens—a species that learns through play. The statistician and author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, says much the same thing in his book, Antifragile: our understanding of the world comes first from tinkering, and only later from scholarship. For us as educators, a text can be more than a thing to read and respond to; it can be a playground for students to mess about in.

 

The Accordion

Are you aware of how many fractions exist between the numbers 1 and 2? The answer is: an infinite number. Even if you only divided things in half, you could go own halving numbers forever: first between 1 and 2, then between 1 and one-half, then between 1 and one-quarter, then between 1 and one-eighth…on and on it goes, literally forever, into the inconceivably infinitesimal. A number line can be an accordion, opening up and playing notes you’ve never heard before.

Can a text work like this? I can’t claim a news article can be plumbed infinitely, but there is certainly more in even the simplest piece of writing than most of us tend to make use of. There is abundant raw material to explore and play with, from the whole text to an individual paragraph, to a single sentence and even a word. When you’re working with students on a text within Achieve3000 Literacy or ActivelyLearn, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it.

 

The Whole Enchilada

Thinking about the text as a whole is where many teachers focus their attention: what is the article or story about? What is the main idea? What is the tone? When we dig into details, it’s often to evaluate in what ways, and how successfully, they support the main idea.

If we wanted to give students opportunities to tinker with the text at this holistic level, what are some things we could do?

One of my favorite ways to get students to understand a text is to do what I call, “changing the givens.” Changing or removing some underlying fact or structure of a text can sometimes help students understand the importance of that structure or fact. Here are a few examples at this whole-text level:

• If this text had to be 20% longer for some reason, what could you add to it, to improve it?
• If this text had to be 20% shorter for some reason, what could you take out, that wouldn’t detract from its power or effectiveness?
• If the piece has a definite viewpoint or perspective, how could you convey the same information from a radically different perspective? If it argues a particular point, how would you argue the opposite point (but make it feel like it was the same author, writing it)?
• Could you rewrite this text in a different genre, but keep the tone, main idea, and the important information intact? How would you transform this article into a story…or a one-act play…or a poem?  What does the transformation tell you about the power of the genre in which the original was written?

  

The Paragraph

When we have students analyze non-fiction paragraphs, beyond how they support the main idea of the article or essay, we usually ask them to look at how the author supports and expands upon the topic sentence. What evidence do they bring to bear? How well do they explain and use that evidence?

• Here are a few other interesting things you could have students do with paragraphs:
• Have students rewrite the paragraph as if it were meant for a younger (or older) audience.
• Have students rewrite the paragraph as if it were meant for an audience predisposed to disagree with the author.
• Have students try to support or defend the topic sentence with entirely different evidence or arguments than those the author provided. 

·

The Sentence

In my experience, sentences receive very little attention, especially once basic grammar is taught. We focus on paragraphs, on essays, on stories--and yet, the sentence is the real workhorse of any writing--the smallest unit of an idea. Middle and high school teachers who struggle to have students write more beautifully, or powerfully, or even cogently, often labor to mark-up entire papers, when it’s really the inability to craft an excellent sentence that lies at the heart of poor writing.

The “Sentence Composing” approach created by Donald and Jenny Killgallon is one way to help students craft better sentences, but why not also let students tinker and play with sentences they find in stories and articles they’re reading in school?

• What is your favorite sentence in the entire article? Why do you like it?
• Is this a good sentence? How do you know? What makes it “good?”
• Is it beautiful? Powerful? Why? Where does the beauty or power lie?
• How could the sentence be improved if it’s not very good?
• How could you improve the sentence with a single word, or with a single structural change?
• If it’s a compelling sentence, what words would you change, or what structure would you reorganize, to weaken its power?
• If you wanted to state the opposite idea, or make a contrasting argument, what would you write?

  

The Word

When we focus on individual words, it’s often to teach students new vocabulary—words we’ve decided they need to know. We give them definitions, or we ask them to look up definitions. We may ask them to write sentences using those words. The approach is usually to take words at face value and simply know them. But if we believe that real “knowing” comes from playing and tinkering, what are some things we could ask students to do with new words they encounter?

• What’s your favorite new or unusual word in the article? Why do you like it?
• How many different forms or versions of that word are there? How many different ways can it be used? Can you write a paragraph using EVERY form of the word?
• How many times can you use that word in conversation from now until our next class period? Keep track!
• Where does the word come from? (Here’s an online tool students can use to do that research).
• If you look at the origins of all of the words in a phrase or a sentence, how many different times and places contributed to that grouping of words? 

Taking the World Out for a Spin

All of these activities and exercises take time, and certainly no one is going to use all of them, all of the time. But if we want students to own what they’re learning—to know things deeply and completely—we need to give them opportunities to “mess about” with the content we’re giving them.

After all, when you buy a Smartphone, you don’t just leave it on the desk and say, “Well, there it is.” When you go shopping for a car, you don’t simply look at the statistics and then hand over a credit card. You take the car out for a test drive. You put it through its paces. You see what it can do.

Our language has tremendous flexibility, beauty, and power. Getting control of it, through fluent reading and confident writing, helps students take control of their lives in innumerable ways. If we believe that this language is a gift, we should treat it like any gift we give to children, and encourage them to use it, abuse it, toss it around, bang it up a little bit,  and find out just what it can do.

Two Haiku

Point towards the deep source
Of mind of things of starlight
There is no thing there

Handwriting in smoke Invisible evidence Wind on the water

a little boy knows no tomorrow

 A little boy knows no tomorrow
The game he has set for you
Piece by piece 
Like a trap
Like love
Awaits 

   but you breeze down the stairs brush a kiss on his head say tomorrow 

Tomorrow is a thing
You know
The assumption of more lets you open the door 

   the breeze and the brush and the game forsaken and the house behind you
   ...recede

But to him
Your boy
Tomorrow is no thing  

The game will wait
The pieces—arranged so carefully
Will be pushed aside by busy feet
The board perhaps upended
To make room—to make time— to make way— 

You know this is no cause for tears
Small things can all be fixed   
Tomorrow 

But one little boy waits alone
In a world that is always today 

Will ChatGPT Be the Death of Writing? No.

Like everyone else in Ed World, I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s new tool, ChatGPT, sometimes with excitement and sometimes with dread. I asked it to compare Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt with Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. Done. I asked it to summarize the core principles of trial practice for attorneys. Done. I asked it to write me a villanelle about eggplants. Done. The poem was crap, to be honest, but as the old, Russian saying about the dancing bear goes, the impressive thing is that it can do it at all.

Plenty of folks in our world are terrified of this new use of artificial intelligence, convinced that it will make original student writing impossible, and the classic, five-paragraph essay obsolete. If it was difficult to catch a student plagiarizing before, now it will be impossible, as ChatGPT is synthesizing original text out of myriad sources, not cutting and pasting from, say, Wikipedia.

Should we be afraid? No. But we should certainly be looking at what we’ve been doing and the expectations we’ve been setting for our students. This is not the first time students have leapt at the opportunity to take shortcuts (ethical or otherwise) to deliver work product to their teachers. Instead of agonizing over how we can shut down this new tool, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why students are looking for ways to take shortcuts and have someone or something else do their work for them?

Perhaps your response will be something like, “children are horrible, amoral animals who look for any chance to take advantage of adults and avoid work.” Understandable. We’ve all been there. But let’s attempt a more positive outlook and see where it gets us.

Children like to learn. Children want to know things. This is undeniable. Humans are born experimenting, inquiring, testing the world around them to understand how it works. Before we have language, we are asking questions. Why do babies put everything in their mouths, even when they’re not teething? Because taste and touch are two of their five senses, and they use everything at their disposal to figure out WHAT IS THIS THING I HAVE AND WHAT DOES IT DO?

To be blunt about it, school can either cultivate this innate inquisitiveness or squelch it. Sometimes it does a little of both. At any rate, there’s no reason to assume that children would not want to express themselves in writing and share what they are thinking or what they have learned. If they’ve come to see writing as a chore, it may be because we have presented it as a chore. If they see writing as “work product” rather than a demonstration of the cool things they know, they will naturally find ways to deliver that product with a minimum of effort. Who wouldn’t? And, to push it further, if they see all of school as an exercise in “getting things done” rather than “knowing things”—in other words, if compliance is all they think we care about and want from them—they will find the easiest and most efficient way to comply. As would we. As would anyone. So: if the most important thing about an essay is that it gets turned in on time and gets a good grade, well…what’s the best way of accomplishing that goal?

What if we did a better job of framing the goal of an assignment—and school in general—as gaining knowledge and understanding? What if a student truly felt that knowing things was the goal? If that was what school really felt like to students, the idea of offloading all of one’s work to an AI engine would feel counterproductive. Sure, the bot would get the essay done—but the student would be left knowing nothing. What would be the point?

As I was pondering all of this, I remembered something I had seen in a small town in the Republic of Slovakia, 30 years ago, when I was teaching English. In that town, and perhaps in the country as a whole, there were no standardized tests to close out a student’s K-12 journey and validate their learning before sending them off to college. What this town had, instead, was a series of public demonstrations. Once classes ended, the school was turned over to the seniors, their families, and a group of Important Adults, including the school administrators, the teachers, and local dignitaries like the mayor. Everyone dressed up. Families brought food and drink. Students took turns, individually, coming into various room and facing various sets of adults sitting behind long tables, and then they had to…well, basically, they had to perform their learning, one academic subject at a time. Questions were thrown at them, and they had to stand and deliver. They had to engage in discussion and sometimes debate with members of the adult community and show that they were ready to join that community’s ranks. It was more than an assessment; it was a rite of passage.

Ted Sizer, in his books, Horace’s Compromise and Horace’s School, and in his work with the Coalition of Essential Schools, talked about moving from traditional tests to “exhibitions” of knowledge, complex projects designed to enable students to demonstrate what they had learned in grounded, real-world ways. Surely, there are ways to craft assignments and assessment projects in such a way as to require (and require documentation of) independent thinking and planning, so that no AI engine can do all of the work for students. Surely, there are ways to liberate student writing from mere compliance and make it something students want to do—to express who they are and to show off what they know. If we succeed at that, then ChatGPT and whatever comes after it simply become tools for accessing and organizing information—not as an end-product in itself, but as raw material for something more authentic and meaningful.

If you care about the subject you teach, there’s nothing more heartbreaking than suspecting (or flat-out knowing) that students have passed your class but have left your room not really knowing anything new or important—or that whatever they have learned is so superficial, so fleeting, that the knowledge will sift through their fingers and blow away on the wind. Let’s look at ChatGPT as a challenge, instead of a threat. Let’s look at it as an opportunity to do better, to ask for more, and to stop letting, “I got it done” be the highest good in our schools.