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.