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.

 

 

 

Education is an Old World and a New World, Both

I know it’s liable to drive tribalists crazy, but the truth is that education is both conservative and liberal, both traditionalist and progressive.

Education is conservative and traditionalist at its core, and to pretend otherwise is silly. The point of teaching content—any content—and not simply skills—is to connect our children to their cultural history and allow them to continue the story that our forebears started and that we have been a part of. 

Education allows each of us to be smarter than any of us; it allows us to access the history of thought, of experimentation, of discovery. The ability to access a wide and deep world of other brains is the superpower that has made humans what we are. 

But education is also progressive. Maybe not in every time and in every place, but certainly here in our country. Our Founders read history to find out how other people in other places had solved problems similar to the ones they were facing, and they used what they learned to forge a new path for themselves. 

We have students read novels about problems and conflicts and sadness and pain—not to bum them out and make them feel the world is terrible, but to help them develop empathy beyond what they can see and hear, and to build within them a desire to help others and improve the world. Yes—improve the world. Because the desire to make the world anew is our birthright as Americans (and sometimes our tragic flaw). 

A med school professor who made a speech to my freshman class, the first day of college, spoke of the early European explorers and the importance of finding a point on the horizon past which you know nothing, and sailing straight for it. That—he said—is what education is all about. That—he said—is what this country is all about.  

And yes, those explorers did terrible things when they reached what they thought was a new world, because they brought their traditions with them, which included all their limitations and ignorance and bigotry. And that part needs to be taught, too. The blessings and the curses. 

Never stop asking. Never stop learning. Never be satisfied that you know everything you need to know. Never assume the land you stand on is the promised land, or that you are its savior. The real promise is the fire that drives you forward. But don’t go forward empty-handed…or empty-headed. Learn the past. Learn from the past. And build on it. Conserve…and progress. 

My Aunt

We interred my aunt’s ashes this morning. It was a winter day in southern Florida—cool and grey and threatening rain for most of the morning. The mausoleum was filled with Baums and Shapiros and Leibowitzes and Friedlanders, with Stars of David carved into marble above each name. Most of the people there were of my Aunt’s generation, born in the early 1930s. Some were a bit older; some were a bit younger. There was one couple—siblings or spouses, I couldn’t tell—who had died recently at 27 and 33. But they were the exception. Most of the people who had come to their final rest here had lived long lives. I had not really thought about the relentless in-gathering of my parents' generation when three uncles had died over the past few years. For two of them, I had not been present at the funeral, and for the third, it had been an actual graveside service—a lone hole in the ground, a singular story: his thing alone. In the mausoleum, though, we were not alone. My aunt was with her people—her husband, interred in the alcove next to hers, and her more distant kinfolk in rows and columns all around her. You could see the blank spaces getting filled in.

My cousins and I were quiet and serious. We read the Kaddish. We told or listened to stories. We tried not to think or talk about COVID. We tried not to think or talk about our missing cousin—the youngest of my aunt’s three boys, who had died of cancer just a handful of weeks earlier.

And then, because the dignity of death is a lie, a handyman stepped forward, climbed a stepstool, and sealed my aunt’s remains inside a cinder-block alcove with a putty gun that whirred pragmatically in the silence.

My closest cousin got teary talking about growing up down the block from our aunt, receiving nothing but love and warmth and support from her. I did not have any ready memories or stories. I did not grow up down the block. I did not hang out with them.  And those cousins—her sons—were all much older than I. Enough older that it mattered when I was a kid.  

My closest cousin’s mother was there—the only representative from that generation and the last of the women, my mother having died some 22 years ago. I could see her shaking as her son told his stories, reaching for one tissue after another. The sole survivor in the room with us.

The actual sole survivor, though, was my father, the baby of the family. Not the actual youngest, but the youngest to have survived to adulthood. He was three thousand miles away. He had asked his doctor if it was safe for him to make the trip, and his doctor had laughed at him. You? he said. You, with the weak lungs from years of smoking? You, with COVID rampaging all over the country? You? Go to FLORIDA?

We regrouped back at my closest cousin’s lovely house on the Intercoastal Waterway. We watched the rain finally come pouring down, and we ate cold cuts, and we looked at pictures. Later, we held a Zoom call to include the other cousins, who had not been able to make the trip, and to give my father a chance to read a eulogy for his sister.

In my father’s family, the first child was called by his actual name, but the son who followed was forever Buddy, and the daughter who came next was Sister, or Cissie. Anyone who came after, like my father, got names. I have no idea why it worked like that, but I was a teenager before I realized that Buddy and Cissie were not what their birth certificates said.

My Aunt Cissie was painfully thin, and she ate like a bird and smoked like a chimney and loved her vodka. She had blonde or red hair right up until the last time I saw her, this past Thanksgiving, when grey hair and frailty had transformed her so uncannily into the image of her mother that my father (who had been allowed to make that trip) was unnerved.

My aunt hosted enormous  holiday dinners at her house, which were always loud and raucous, and at which I often felt small and young and lost. She made Jell-O molds which I hated, with suspicious-looking pieces of fruit suspended inside. She made brisket which I loved, using a recipe that everyone in the family ended up adopting, and which my wife and I make to this day. It is Cissie’s Brisket, and it always will be.

My aunt and my mother talked almost every night when I was growing up. When dinner was over and the rest of us tramped upstairs to watch television, my mother would get on the kitchen phone—the wall-mounted phone with the extra-long cord, and she’d putter around, cleaning up and putting things away and then just sitting with a cigarette, talking about her day and my aunt’s day and…whatever else they talked about every night.

A part of me hopes they are talking together again in their heavenly kitchens.

I don’t really believe in that, but I wish I did.

The hosting of big, holiday dinners has long since shifted to my generation, though none of us live near each other and the getting-together is sporadic. But when it happens, it is joyful and gratifying in ways that I rarely felt was when I was small and the cousins were large and I had trouble finding my place. Now we are the big people, and the family-ness of us when we get together is powerful. When one of us laughs, we hear our own laughter—and our fathers’ laughter—in each other’s voices. It is something my own sons have talked about when my side of the family gets together. It makes them very happy. It is a thing my wife identified years ago as, “loud love.” 

It is loud and it is love, and it feeds my soul in places where I’ve forgotten I was hungry. It is better than a Jell-O mold, and even better than my aunt’s brisket. It is, I realize, precisely the thing my cousin talked about this morning, bequeathed to us by our parents and blooming in our own generation. It is a better inheritance than any other I could imagine.

Why I Am Not Surprised

When I was in seventh grade, my Social Studies teacher decided to hold a mock trial as part of the curriculum. I don’t remember what the academic purpose of the whole thing was, whether the trial was based on some actual, historical event. All of that is lost to me. What I do remember is that I was the prosecuting attorney (a position I was very proud of, as my father was a law school professor), and that the whole trial was a shambles.

Why was it a shambles? Because were in seventh grade, and seventh graders—especially seventh grade boys—don’t care about much that the adult world finds important. To make a mock trial work, people have to take their roles semi-seriously. The witnesses have to read their depositions and learn their story. They have to be able (and willing) to work with their lawyer to create a direct examination that runs through the evidence. They have to be able (and willing) to improvise coherently when cross-examined by the other lawyer. That’s the only way the storytelling works. And, of course, the jury has to take its job semi-seriously and care about rendering a fair verdict.

You can already see where this is going. I took my job seriously, and few others did. I managed to hold my witnesses together reasonably well, and it was easy (and fun) to cross-examine the opposing witnesses, who couldn’t keep their stories straight and didn’t much care if they were caught in a “lie.” I made my case; the other side barely tried. It was open-and-shut.

And then the jury returned a verdict against me. Unanimously. I couldn’t believe it. So I went up to the kid who had served as jury foreman and asked him what had happened. “I had all the evidence on my side!” I cried. “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re a nerd, so fuck you.”

In today’s case of “The United States vs. Political Seriousness,” I offer this anecdote as Exhibit A.

Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because people thought she was corrupt, or because of her emails, or because of her pantsuits. She lost because she was a wonk, a nerd, someone who took the job way too seriously. Donald Trump was the class clown. He offered no coherent policies, no real rebuttals to Clinton’s positions. He offered a raspberry and a fart joke. He said, “fuck you, nerd.” And enough people laughed along with him to let him win.

That’s my theory of the case, and you can see it playing out all over again. Joe Biden’s approval rating is slipping, and yet he’s delivering on everything he said he’d do. In a rocky, stumbling, chaotic way, sure—but that’s democracy for you. We don’t run our country the way the Chinese Communist Party runs theirs. He said he’d get vaccines out; he got vaccines out. He said he’d withdraw from Afghanistan; he withdrew from Afghanistan. He promised an infrastructure bill; he passed it with bipartisan support. He promised a spending plan; he’s on the verge of passing it. And no one seems to care.

Pundits are blaming the administration and the Democratic party for poor messaging, and I’m sure that’s a part of the problem. But I think the larger problem is that we’re a bunch of seventh-grade boys, and we find competent administration of government boring and stupid. Bomb-throwers and rioters and propagandists are cool. Outrageous liars are interesting—and when they get away with outlandish, incomprehensible lies, we think they’re too cool for school. If someone tells us that those people are doing damage to our culture or our politics, we say, “fuck you, nerd.” Seventh-grade boys don’t think about what will happen tomorrow if they burn down the school today, as long as they get to laugh at all the nerds trying to carry books and lab equipment outside to safety.

There’s nothing nerdier or wonkier than thinking about causation and correlation, assessing the future effects of possible actions today. Cool kids don’t assess; they act without thinking, and they let the chips fall where they may. Acting without accountability is cool; rigging things so that everyone else is left holding the bag, while they walk away scot-free, is the ultimate act of cool. We celebrate the bomb-throwers, not the people who have to clean up the mess afterwards. We sneer at the people stupid enough to care enough to clean up the mess.

We’ve worked hard, as a culture, to erase distinctions between childhood and adulthood, and this, perhaps, is one of the results. We do not put away childish thing and we do not look up to people who behave like adults. Pete Buttigieg will likely not be a viable presidential candidate—not because he’s gay, amazingly enough, but because he takes his job too seriously. If Joe Rogan chose to run for something, though…I don’t know if he’d win anything, but he’d certainly be a contender. If you’re on TV and you’re a loudmouth who loves to score cheap rhetorical points against “guests,” you have a shot. If you’re on TV in any capacity, even if you’re a shady doctor selling crap supplements to the gullible, you have a shot. In fact, the more obvious it is that your supplements are crap, the higher esteem you’ll be held in. We will admire you for fooling the sheep (who are always “them,” never “us”), just as many of us admired Trump.

We don’t care if our problems are solved. We don’t care if our roads have holes. We don’t care if the poor go hungry. All we want to do is point at the grownups and the nerds, like Nelson on “The Simpsons,” and laugh.

Why Grammar Matters

(originally published at www.Achieve3000.com)

What we know about learning (what we’ve known at least since the National Research Council’s, How People Learn) is that when information is contextualized, it is understood and remembered better. We can memorize lists of discrete things, like vocabulary words, multiplication tables, or rules of grammar, but to truly understand those things, they need to relate and connect to each other and form a larger schema, or concept, in our minds. We can memorize disconnected words, but we only make new words part of our daily vocabulary when we use them in a variety of sentences.

If you make a habit of reading challenging stories and essays, do you need to memorize lists to grow your vocabulary? Probably not—it’s how literate people have expanded their vocabularies for centuries.

The same is true for the rules of grammar. A good reader intuitively understands how words work together, how sentences form, and how punctuation works. She might not be able to tell you precisely what a comma splice is or why dangling modifiers are confusing, but she may know enough, instinctively, to avoid those errors in her own writing—especially if her daily reading material is more sophisticated than a Cat in the Hat book. Children in ye olden days who learned how to read using the King James Bible became adults who learned how to write things like the Gettysburg Address, or I Have a Dream.

Reading Intervention Programs Can Limit Exposure to Complex Texts

If we limit exposure to complex text for young readers, we may be restricting (for years!) their access to sophisticated vocabulary, grammar, and sentence construction, a problem schools try to mitigate through direct instruction of vocabulary lists and grammar rules. We end up teaching things disconnected from any context, which leads students—and the adults they grow into—to ask questions like, “Why does grammar matter?”

Some reading intervention programs limit exposure to complex text by placing students into reading levels based on test scores or allowing students to choose a comfortable reading level for themselves. This may work well for students who are intrinsically motivated to excel if they are given opportunities to accelerate into more challenging levels (opportunities such as monthly Lexile adjustments). For many students, however, leveled reading can become a jail cell of old-fashioned “tracking,” where some students are challenged, and other students are simply...managed. Students who are kept at lower reading levels will have limited access to complex sentence structure, rich metaphor, and artfully crafted thought. The issue here is not the rules of grammar but the uses of grammar.

Grammar matters because meaning matters, and grammar is the tool we use to construct that meaning. Grammar matters especially in written language, because in person we can always make up for muddiness with facial expression and body language. In print, every bit of meaning has to be conveyed through how words work together on the page. In print, there’s a world of difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma” and “Let’s eat Grandma.” In print, you need to be careful about when to use “there,” “their,” and “they’re.” In speaking, or texting, a more common form of communication for young people, not so much.

A Lack of Foundational Literacy Resources for Secondary Students

Every little drift from what is correct is like a tiny smudge or inky thumbprint on a photograph. One mistake won’t ruin the picture, but a whole series of them will obscure the image entirely. We write because we want to make ourselves understood—to persuade, to entice, to explain, to insist. If we decide that grammar doesn’t matter, we’ve decided that the burden of understanding should fall on the shoulders of the reader, not the writer. The reader should care so much about what we’re trying to say that they should work extra hard to make sense of what we’ve written. That’s just an unreasonable expectation. You want someone to care about what you’re trying to say? Make an effort to say it well.

Direct instruction should be provided in very targeted, bite-sized chunks, to be delivered as needed, when needed--and why we immediately connect that instruction to engaging reading material in which students will see examples of the grammar concept or rule. If students don’t see grammar work as helping them read better and write better (understand better and communicate better), it becomes just another assignment to complete.

Reading Intervention Programs Must Work for Teachers

There is a time for teaching the proper names of things—for making sure students know what a phrase is, what a clause is, when to use conjunctions, and what the difference is between a complex and a compound sentence. Drawing that instruction out of engaging reading material, instead of worksheets, makes the learning more meaningful and connected for students. But instruction can be even more powerful (and ultimately stickier), if it rises naturally from examples of a student’s own writing and a teacher’s gentle but insistent prodding to manipulate, expand on, and experiment with those sentences. How could you make this sentence shorter without losing the main idea? How could you change this sentence from positive to more ambivalent? What would you have to do to add three more descriptive words? How could you connect these two ideas? If I didn’t let you use the word, “very,” what would you use instead? What would make this sentence more powerful? What would make this sentence more beautiful? What makes a sentence beautiful, anyway?

All these questions give students opportunities to tinker with the text they have created, to learn how plastic and malleable written language can be, how many different shades of meaning a sentence can take on. And every tinkering can provide an opportunity for the teacher to pause and explain what rule or concept the new sentence or a new word might be an example of.

You might even—dare I say it—bring back a little, old fashioned sentence diagramming to show students the underlying structure of their own, simple sentences, and how that structure changes as the sentence becomes more complex. When it’s applied to their own writing, students can find diagramming fascinating—especially students for whom English is not their first language, and who think the rules of this new language are arbitrary and insane (which, of course, they can be).

Grammar isn’t a thing that we have to learn because it’s on a pacing plan or a state standard. It’s not a thing at all, really. Grammar is the way our language works—it’s the skeletal and muscular system that holds the body of written thought together and lets it move. If you pick up grammar by reading great works of literature, and by repeatedly tinkering and playing with sentences of your own, you can learn not only how make writing move—you can learn how to make it dance. 

Sliders vs. Toggles

We are ruining our world and ourselves by insisting that important issues are toggle switches instead of slide switches.

You know the difference. A toggle switch has a limited number of settings—on and off, 0 or 1. A slider can be moved across a span between two extremes, and can include many states between. Toggle-thinking allows for only two static states: it’s A or B; it’s black or white. Slider-thinking allows for a spectrum of states: it’s anywhere from A through Z; it’s black, white, or many shades of grey.

For any political or cultural issue, there are surely A and Z positions, and people who hold them. But there are millions of people who hold hundreds of views between those extremes, and their voices are effectively shut out of the discourse, because winning an argument is now more important than solving a problem, and A is a stronger argument against Z then W is.

But most of us live in the in-between, and we need to reclaim that space, because it’s where problems are actually solved. And more importantly, it’s where people find it possible to live together.

I’m a liberal. I like reading and having conversations with conservatives, to learn how they see the country and the world. I like having my opinions tested against other perspectives. But real dialogue is only possible when both parties acknowledge and accept that the issue at hand is actually represented by the full spectrum of opinions, not one extreme or the other. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice are ridiculous team names. Everyone in the country is pro-life, generally, and also pro-choice, generally. Most people (not everyone) are also pro-both-sides on the specific issue of abortion, to varying degrees. Acknowledging that the spectrum is real and valid is the beginning of real discourse. Exploring where we all set our slider-switches is how we begin to craft compromise and, ultimately, policy.

If you believe that the rights of the individual are supreme, sacred, and inviolable—that all government is evil, that all taxation is theft, and that no individual can be compelled to shape or change his behavior or choices to accommodate any other individual, well…there’s no discussion possible. If you believe that the health and vibrancy of the community or the state is supreme and that what’s good for the group outweighs what’s good for the individual—all the time, in all cases—there is likewise no room for discussion. And some people do hold those extreme positions. I find them scary people. They only see true believers and apostates, the forces of God and the legions of Satan. The only resolution to the problem of different opinions is cultural—or actual—war, and the obliteration of the Enemy.

For most of us, it’s the spectrum that’s real—the dynamic tension of opposite positions, each of which has merit and both of which need to be “in play” to some extent in order for us to be happy and healthy. Now we can talk. Now we can argue about where on the spectrum we should draw the line between individual rights and public life (for example). We can say, “Yes, a business owner should have the right to offer the products and services that she wants, the way she wants, BUT a citizen should also have the right to purchase products and services on the open market, in the public square, regardless of race, religion, gender, or any other personal detail. Now what are we going to do about it?”

I’m tired of us not being able to get to, “What are we going to do about it,” and I’m tired of pretending that this inability is accidental or fated. It’s neither. Our inability to talk to each other and solve problems is deliberate and planned. We are placed and kept at each other’s throats to build and maintain the power and wealth of those who represent the extreme positions—many of whom don’t even believe in those positions but have found it profitable and advantageous to hold them.

The spectrum is messy and confusing. It requires argument. It requires understanding. It requires shoving the slider a little more this way, a little more that way, till you get the setting just right. Choosing A or Z is a lot easier. Hating Z because you’re at A is also a lot easier.

But none of this was meant to be easy.

Who Needs Teachers? Your Textbooks Do

It used to be fashionable to talk about how technology was going to solve all of our educational equity and excellence problems—bringing relevant, high-quality content to all students, scaffolding instruction to meet each student where he or she was, and engaging every student in meaningful learning, even if that student didn’t have access to excellent teachers…or any teachers. Maybe teachers weren’t necessary anymore, we argued. After all, students can reach out to Wikipedia and YouTube and online calculators and so on, to get any bit of information they might need. They can teach themselves! And, with new national standards, everyone will be learning the same things at the same pace, so…problem solved.

Ha, ha! Obviously, none of this has come to pass. Perhaps less obviously, none of it even made sense.

With learning standards stuffed with more content than could ever be taught in 20 years, much less the 12 we’re given, and standardized tests focused on the low-DOK, low-Bloom levels of thinking that computers can easily score, perhaps it was easy for some of us to think that the primary role of the teacher was to disseminate information.

It is not. It never was.

Look at the great teachers of history. We don’t remember Socrates because he told people a lot of things; we remember him because he asked a lot of annoying questions that made people think about things. Teachers do not simply hand out facts; they shape minds.

Please note: I did not say teachers should not provide factual information to students. You can’t ask students to think about literature, history, science, and mathematics if they don’t know any of those things. And Googling a term is not the same thing as knowing something. Neither is reading a textbook chapter.

So, what is the role of the teacher when it comes to using a textbook? School districts spend millions of dollars adopting these things, and school boards all over the country engage in fierce debates about which ones are most appropriate for their students. Occasionally, we learn that a textbook presents information in a way that one group of people or another objects to. Or—worse—we learn that a publisher is presenting information differently in different states, as this recent New York Times story uncovered. Shockingly, we learned that the Texas and California versions of an American history textbook differed slightly in what they chose to include, and how they framed or presented that information—not only because of each state’s learning standards, but also because of the partisan politics that informed both the crafting of the standards and the adoption decision-making criteria of the local school districts. Shocking!

Except…is it? Textbooks are written by actual people, not machines—and some of those people, or their publishers, may have political biases, agendas, and points of view. Some of them may even be hypocrites who care only about making money. This makes textbooks different from every other book ever written…how?

The only way in which this discovery could be truly shocking is if we genuinely believed that textbooks (or any books) were supposed to be completely neutral, objective, and bias-free—that they could and had to tell the single, reliable, uncontestable “truth,” and that all a teacher had to do was assign students to read a chapter and then answer the questions at the end.

That’s nonsense. Every text has an author; every text has a point of view. That’s true even when an author tries not to have a point of view.

This is why, where young people are involved, every text needs a teacher. And every teacher has the right—the obligation, really—to take a stance regarding that text and engage readers in a critical dialogue about it—even if the extent of the dialogue is a single question, like, “How can we know whether or not this statement is true?”

I know: textbooks were never meant to be objects of critical debate. The whole point of a textbook was to take a tremendous amount of complex information, boil it down into bite-sized chunks, and feed it as effortlessly as possible into student brains, much the way a mama bird might chew up a worm before feeding it to her chicks. That’s why textbooks are invaluable if your goal is to cram students full of facts, and insufficient, or even problematic, if your goal is to get students to think. But in this hyper-partisan, fake-news, Russian-bot, deep-fake world, it is critically important to get students to think about the content that is streaming relentlessly into their brains. Even when that content comes from a textbook publisher. In the end, it’s not what the text does that matters most; it’s what you do with the text.

As Clare Basil recently argued, in defense of Classical Education:

This approach requires understanding our nation’s history, not only by reading a list of texts considered crucial to our history, but inquiring after how those texts––the ideas they embody and the movements they give rise to––shift how Americans define themselves as a people.

How can teachers do this? Not by limiting what students read or see based on their own biases; and not by suppressing their own voice and silently feeding text to their students. Teachers can help students start to think critically about what they read, and see, and hear, by asking three little questions—every day, all the time:

1. What do you think?
2. Why do you think it? (in other words, how can you prove that you’re right?
3. Why does it matter?

Or, if you want to get a little more complex, teachers can build critical thinking by doing the following:

• Providing historical and cultural context and perspective
• Demonstrating how to evaluate textual evidence
• Eliciting and challenging student opinions
• Holding students accountable for defending their opinions with evidence
• Introducing new information that supports or contradicts the text
• Teaching students the basics of rational argument, and the rhetorical fallacies that poor arguments make use of.

You can do this with an essay, a novel, a movie, a song. You can even do it with a textbook. You are not obligated to agree with every word a student reads, just because the district paid a lot of money to obtain those words. But you are obligated to engage with those words…especially if you disagree with them.

Look: everything that comes into a classroom, in physical or virtual form, is simply a resource for teachers to use. None of it can take the place of that teacher. Not even if the publisher says it can. Not even if the principal says it must.

Remember at the end of Dirty Dancing (if you’re old enough), when Patrick Swayze says, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner?” and pulls Jennifer Grey out onto the dance floor?

Well, I say: “Nobody puts Teacher in a corner.”

Grab that textbook and kick off your shoes. It’s time to dance.

 

Everything Counts

Originally published on the Achieve3000.com blog.

How do you prepare for an important challenge you’re about to face? Whether it’s running in a race, acting in a play, or taking a test, preparation usually involves honing your skills and then applying them in practice simulations. If you’re going to run in a 10K race, you might pace out the course to become familiar with the hills, turns, and potential bottlenecks. If you’re acting in a play, you rehearse the lines and stage movements with the other actors until your actions become second nature. Test-taking and reading practice are no different. You learn basic math and reading skills, and then you apply those skills in testing situations, so you can be ready for the “Big Show.”

The question is: can practice that is not laser-focused on the task-at-hand still be valuable?

In test-world, teachers sometimes think students should only practice their skills in the context of test-like scenarios in order to prepare for the final Test. Many educators fear that exposing students to other forms of assessment would confuse and distract them, or otherwise weaken their aim. But outside of test-world, nobody seems to talk that way.

Are you a runner? Well, then, you should certainly get to know the course before the big day, but any running you do will be worthwhile – whether it’s directly on the course or not. In fact, there are many benefits to practicing on a variety of terrains of varying difficulty, because you never know what might happen on race day. What if, for some reason, the police had to block off part of the racecourse and re-route people? This might make the actual course on race day hillier, or curvier, or just different. The same applies to studying, math and reading practice. If your training is too narrow, your ability to apply your skills and knowledge in the real world of change and unpredictability may be constrained.

Similarly, if you’re acting in a play, you should rehearse your lines and your movements as much as possible. You should have everything memorized. BUT…what if someone drops a line, or two, or twelve? What if a piece of scenery falls down and blocks the exit you’re supposed to use? Anything can happen.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led the Allied forces during and after the D-Day invasion (and should therefore know a thing or two about logistics), once said, “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Why? Because facts-on-the-ground can change, and therefore surely will change. Successful soldiers must be ready for anything. Successful racers must be ready for anything. To create a culture for successful students, we too must prepare them for anything.

Grant Wiggins used to say that every standardized test was a transfer task. He claimed that chasing after a test and thinking you could get your hands around it with any certainty was a fool’s errand. There was simply no way to teach every fact and figure required by the state standards, and no guarantee that a fact you chose to cover would definitely be included on the test. The blueprints were simply too broad, and the previous years’ tests, if they were available at all (and in many states, they weren’t) provided no guarantee of what might be asked this year. Teaching fact X to prepare for test question X was hopeless. You might hit that bullseye, but you might also miss the target.

That is why Wiggins talked about tests as transfer tasks. The goal, as he saw it, was to train and hone your skills like an athlete—both narrowly and broadly; in focused drills and in madcap scrimmages. As he said:

When I was a soccer coach, I learned the hard way about my players’ ability to transfer skills from practice to a game and the need to better assess for it. The practice drills did not seem to transfer into fluid, flexible, and fluent game performance. It often appeared, in fact, as if all the work in practice were for naught, as players either wandered around purposelessly or reacted only to the most obvious immediate needs.

The epiphany came during a game, from the mouth of a player. In my increasing frustration, I started yelling, "Give and go! Three on two! Use it, use it--all the drills we worked on!" At that point, the player stopped dribbling in the middle of the field and yelled back, "I can't see it now! The other team won't line up like the drill for me!"

Seen in this light, everything that makes use of core reading and writing skills counts. Reading graphic novels counts. Reading the sports page of your local newspaper counts toward your reading practice. Debating the merits of South Park vs. Family Guy counts. Writing witty YouTube recommendations to see if the algorithm is narrowing or broadening your interests counts. None of these things will manifest themselves directly on any state test, or likely on any classroom test, but they all help students practice their skills in reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Helping your parents find the best “snacks for the cost” while grocery shopping counts toward your math practice. Arguing with your friends about which NBA star’s shot record is better counts as debate and critical thinking practice. Learning that when taking a position on something like climate change in an argument, it’s incumbent on you to bring some evidence to the table—those things count, too. All these situations that build your critical thinking, your computational thinking, or your creative thinking count. And yes, so does practice in the context of the Big Test, to the extent you can predict its shape and structure. It definitely counts. It’s just not the only thing that counts.

Learning is cumulative and commutative and strange. Seeds you plant in one place sometimes grow into plants in an entirely different place. It’s a sometimes-blind investment, a leap of faith. When students have to perform in some kind of challenge, including a Big Test, they’re going to need to creatively apply their skills and knowledge, at least to some extent. Something will be strange and new and unpredictable. Something will not be “lining up nicely” for them. That’s where knowledge transfer comes into play. That’s where creativity becomes essential—because what is creativity, really, other than the putting together of existing things in new and unexpected ways? The more different kinds of LEGO pieces we have in the boxes of our brains, and the more practice we have in using them to build different things, the better we’ll be able to build when the need arises.

So, should I have my students read fiction if they are only going to be assessed on non-fiction? Yes—not only because fiction is a good in itself, but also because a crucial way to understand something is to contrast it with its opposite. What can an essay do that a story cannot? What can a poem do that neither can accomplish? Read about a single topic across multiple forms and genres, and you’ll come to understand the super-power of each genre a little better.

Should I give my students math problems with graphs and images if the Big Test only uses words and numbers? Yes—if only to learn how my students think. If my classroom test on fractions only uses numbers, and students get the questions wrong, I might think they don’t understand the concept. If I give them a variety of questions, using numerals, words, and images, and find that they score higher when a question includes an image, there’s something else going on.

Teachers and students are not archers trying to fire arrows at a single target, losing crucial points if they miss the bullseye. That is not how any of this works. There are hundreds of targets, each with its own bullseye. Every arrow fired is worth the effort. Every arrow fired increases our strength and accuracy. It all adds up.

Life is a transfer task. Everything counts.

Reaching for the Heights

The trailer for the movie, In the Heights, was released this week. Many people have been viewing it, sharing it, tweeting about it, and generally going bananas over it, miserable that they’ll have to wait until summer to see the movie. I remember having the same feeling when the soundtrack to Hamilton came out. In both cases, it didn’t take more than a single song to get people’s hearts racing. There is something in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music that conveys the pure, exuberant joy of living in this country and belonging deeply to it. It’s not that he writes boppy dance tunes that make us mindlessly happy; it’s that he writes straight from—and to—our American hearts.

Because of where he grew up and when he grew up, and who is family was, and where he went to school, his music draws from Hip Hop and Rock and Broadway and Salsa and god-knows-what-other sources. He can do this, not because he is a scholar, but because he grew up the nexus of American musical and cultural streams. He took in everything, and he transformed it into something we had both never heard before and, at the same time, knew to be ours.

What other immigrant artists does he remind me of? George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, who did exactly the same thing in their own time, pulling in Jazz and Blues and Gospel and Classical and Folk and Music Hall and Klezmer, and creating music that had never existed before, but said “America” to much of the country during their lifetimes and ever after.

The purpose of the “melting pot” was not to boil everything down into an unappealing, gray mush, but to create a sizzling, spicy, amazing mélange—a thing both new and old—made up of many cultures and flavors and sounds, but all fitting together into something strong, compelling, powerful, and new—composed of its raw materials but transcending any of its component parts. That was, and is, our country at its best. When we meet everyone, and listen to everyone, and share each other’s stories, and taste each other’s foods, we end up creating new things that draw from the best of everyone and become something that belongs to all of us, and could only have been created by us. We create new things, and we become new things.

Do we have issues of cultural appropriation to deal with? Yes, we do. But there is a difference between stealing someone’s voice to use as your own, for your own benefit, and raising your voice alongside someone else’s and learning their songs. Cultural diffusion is not the same thing as cultural appropriation, and to blur the two and insist that It Must Stop is not only wrongheaded; it’s impossible. There is no such thing as cultural purity, any more than there is such a thing as racial purity. We are mutts, all of us, and however we define ourselves, that thing is the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of bumping up against, learning from, and borrowing from other people. I could argue all day that mutts are hardier and more valuable than purebreds, but in the end, it’s a ridiculous argument to have to make; among humans, there are no purebreds. The entire idea is nonsense.

But as we retreat from each other in fear and suspicion, we try to draw new/old lines around “our people” to define them in opposition to “those people,” and insist that everyone inside the magic circle is our family, our tribe. Retrograde nationalists, who didn’t used to be able to speak honestly in the public sphere, now feel safe in proclaiming that long before the United States was a constitutional republic, it was a LAND meant for a certain group of PEOPLE—and those people were of English and German or Dutch descent, full stop. Others may come, at the pleasure of the original settlers, but the land does not really belong to them. People say this, openly, in 2019. Even people not of the original “settler stock” say this. In no founding documents anywhere—at the federal level or the state level, or even in colonial charters, to the best of my knowledge—is peoplehood or citizenship or belonging defined by or limited to country of immediate origin. But they say these things, openly, in 2019. Irish and Italian and Greek and Russian and Polish and Korean and Chinese and Mexican and Dominican and Indonesian and Indian and African Americans (and on, and on, and on), beware: you are guests in this land, even if your family has been here for 100+ years.

Is it any wonder that members of minority groups respond to this kind of talk by drawing magic circles around their people and playing what the political right calls “identity politics?” The right loves to rail about identity politics destroying the fabric of America by focusing on small-group distinctions instead of large-group definitions, but they forget that this is reaction, not action. If African Americans take to the streets, chanting “Black Lives Matter,” instead of “All Lives Matter,” it’s because they’ve been told, relentlessly and violently and for generations, that they cannot consider themselves part of the “all.” All the marching, all the protests, all the activism, just to learn that large swaths of White America will never accept you as equal, regular, "normal" parts of the country. And when African Americans finally take White America at its word, we start posting nastily on Twitter about how THEY are refusing to act like part of US, and THAT is what is destroying our nation. What chutzpah…to use an expression from yet another minority group that’s being warned, after generations of relative peace and stability, that they don’t really belong here, and had better behave themselves. 

Take note of what these ethno-nationalists are saying: it does not matter what you believe, how you act, how you vote, or what creeds or principles you adhere to. If you belong to the wrong GROUP, you are not really an American...and you never will be. Alexander Hamilton's story is not and cannot be Lin-Manuel Miranda's, and to claim spiritual ownership of it is an affront to them. Barack Obama's presidency is an asterisk to them--a blip--and the current president's efforts to undo every accomplishment of that administration has nothing to do with political policy--it's about ethnic cleansing. Whether he says that or believes it, large numbers of his followers do, and it is explicitly why they follow him. That is what so-called conservatism has turned into. There are things they want to conserve, all right--we just need to be very mindful of what those things are.

And if we put up with it? Shame on us. If we participate in it in our own way, responding to other people's tribal retreats by circling our own wagons in smaller and smaller magic circles of "us," then shame on us even more.

Because...where will it lead? Will we have to change the Great Seal on our dollar bills?  Give up those the old, Latin phrases that no one bothers to teach anymore? Novus ordo seclorum? A new order of the ages? No. Sorry. The new world is just the old world, transplanted. We've chosen to resurrect all the old, comfortable hatreds. E pluribus unun? Out of many, one? No. Sorry. We've chosen to remain many. E Pluribus Pluribus. Get off my lawn.

And how will we redesign the Great Seal itself?  The fierce eagle, with thirteen arrows grasped—together—in a single talon, fighting a common fight, doesn’t feel right anymore. Neither does the giant pyramid, drawing Americans from all corners of the globe into a single point, with the all-seeing eye up top. Maybe instead of the pyramid, we can have a wall. A single, giant, slab—no dimension, no shading, no shape. Just a slab. And on the other side of the seal, perhaps, a giant middle finger extended—from everyone, to everyone, with the inspiring, Latin phrase: futue te ipsi.

No thank you. Not for me.

Listen, I like being a New Yorker. I like being a Jew. I like being all the distinct, different things that I am. But I also love being part of the crazy tapestry or bubbling melting pot or [insert your own metaphor here] that is America. This is my country. And I should be able to sing about it AND about my family, or my block. I am large; I contain multitudes. Yeah--I claim him as mine, too. 

Even in the middle of the fractious 1960s and 1970s, I grew up singing songs like this in school:

This is my country! Land of my birth!
This is my country! Grandest on earth!
I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,
For this is my country to have and to hold.

Isn't there room in this vast, open country, to sing songs like that AND songs from our own communities? Can't we all contain multitudes?

In the Heights, I hang my flag up on display
We came to work and to live and we got a lot in common
It reminds me that I came from miles away

In the Heights
I’ve got today!

And today’s all we got, so we cannot stop

Today is all we’ve got...but we’ve got it together. Let’s not throw that away.