The BOTG Nightmare Come True

The Tourist - Radiohead (mp3)
Nut In Your Eye - Alcoholic Faith Mission (mp3)

A teacher in Pennsylvania has scared me shitless.

She wrote a semi-anonymous blog. She said some harsh things about her job and about her students. Sometimes using really inappropriate naughty words. Words even worse than “shitless.” She got found out. She got in big trouble. She made national news. Extra extra read all about it!

Considering that neither of BOTG’s authors have as our primary goal “fame sans fortune,” the story of Natalie Munroe is a pure horror story for us. With Natalie’s fate, you get all the notoriety and little if any of the financial reward.

Neither of us are quite as jaded about students as Mrs. Munroe seems to be. But I’m absolutely certain that someone could come in, take our writing out of context -- or, OK, maybe once in a while take it totally IN context -- link it to the two actual human beings hiding behind the curtain of Internet semi-anonymity, and start us down the slow road of ending our careers.

Because I take Mrs. Munroe’s fate so personally, I can write with even greater conviction that she seems like exactly the kind of teacher we don’t need more of.

Kids today are screwed up. I don’t debate that, and I don’t make that statement with any sense of superiority. I state it as a matter of fact. But anyone who has read this blog with any regularity -- yes, all three of you -- knows that Bob and I tend to look up the seniority chain when assessing blame for problems in education.

Lethargic or spoiled child? Look to the parents. Lethargic or indifferent classroom? Look to the teacher. Lethargic faculty? Look to the administration. Wherever common sense tells you to lay blame, go one step farther up the ladder whenever possible. (NOTE: Bob, I’m sure I’m unfairly lumping you in here, so please feel free to clarify where you think I’m a moron.)

The feeling I get from reading her cached entries is that her frustration is more condescending. Hers is the indignation of Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club. Outward more than inward. Them more than us.

Yeah fine, we’ll throw stones at Alejandro Escovedo or someone once in a while, but I think we tend to be very careful when doing so about issues like education, teaching and learning. Bob is an utterly phenomenal teacher, and I’m not, but I’ve got the classroom experience necessary to appreciate the craft and know not to dismiss its degree of difficulty too lightly.

Mrs. Munroe is not unique. Our school, all schools, have teachers who are fed up. Many of them deal with a student body far more nightmarish and problematic than the one at our school. And I sympathize with them. Asking teachers to hold onto their ideals and hopes in their daily environments is like asking prison guards to keep thinking the best about human nature. (Granted, our school in this analogy is that country club prison where the inmates get pedicures, but the guards still get testy at times.)

Just because she deserves sympathy doesn’t excuse her, unfortunately. Hers is a job that offers few rewards, most of them long-term investments, and many horrors. But her attitude... well, it’s for shit. She’s lost her edge, as Top Gun might say. She needs to turn in her wings.

Kids didn’t just magically turn sour on education in 2008. Apathy isn’t some virus that just started infecting the teenage masses in the 21st Century. Every year, the educational experience these kids receive becomes farther removed from their present reality. To bastardize Matthew McConaughey’s quote from Dazed and Confused, “High school education, man. It gets older, and the kids stay the same age.”

The intellectual arsenal many teachers bring into the classroom is the equivalent of bringing a WWI biplane into a dogfight with an F-15. They bring out the educational equivalent of Howdy Doody and Gidget and then wonder why the kids don’t engage.

I’m not just talking techno-gadgetry here. One of our best and most captivating teachers, even in the spring of 2011, is a straight-up hardcore lecturer. He talks. And talks. And talks. You, the student, listen. And take notes. And steel yourself to have the right damn answer if and when he calls on you. And most of the students love him! Granted, his students are mostly high-pressure, Type A, study-obsessed ones. But so what? He’s got his niche, and he’s damn good at it.

My bet is that Mrs. Munroe thinks she’s entitled. Entitled to students who are enthralled with her wit, her intelligence, her talents. She shouldn’t have to earn their enthusiasm. Yeah well, tough tamales. If she entered the teaching profession unaware of the general disaffected nature of being a teenager, then she was either homeschooled on a small island in the Pacific or drank so much in college that she totally forgot what it was like to be a high school student.

Slam the students. They deserve it. But for every sentence you write slamming the smallest cogs in the machine, write a few paragraphs questioning the system, the administrators, the teachers, and the parents. It’s the adults who run the damn thing. If the problems with the asylum could be addressed merely by fixing the inmates... well, you wouldn’t much need the damned asylum in the first place.

Big Brother Goes to College

The Shot Heard 'Round the World - Ween (mp3)
The Schooling - My Friend Steve (mp3)

Still working on my best of lists. So you’ll just have to read or ignore another random commentary today.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of rooting for Big Brother.

A story in the November 15 New York Times explores the increasing use of technological “clickers” to monitor student attendance and attention in college classrooms, and parents all over the country who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to advance their children’s knowledge and abilities, should be thrilled that technology is at last doing something to prevent rather than provide distraction for their kids.

Remember when someone on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” wants to Ask the Audience? And then everyone in the audience keys in their answers? Best I can tell, technology is allowing professors to make the college lecture hall or classroom into a giant, individually-trackable Ask the Audience.

So when Ben Stein is up there asking the snoozing classroom about the Laffer Curve and Voo-Doo Economics, he can actually track the attentiveness of each student in that class by requiring them to input answers while he banters about.

Will this allow shitty boring teachers to, while failing to make any point of significance or failing to teach anything of import, ignore their own shitty boringness? Of course it will. But in my experience, 90% of shitty boring teachers are incapable of even recognizing a fraction of how terrible or boring they are. Further, no amount of wishing or politicizing will magically erase shitty boring teachers from the planet's surface. To bastardize Garrison Keilor, not all teachers can be above average.

Therefore, if I’m paying for my child’s college education, I don’t really care how boring or shitty a given teacher or professor may be. I care that my child shows up to class, pays attention, and works diligently. The person most essentially responsible for my child’s education is... my child.

When my advisees tell me they are doing poorly in a class because a teacher is bad or boring, I consider that to be a convenient and lazy excuse most of the time. (Occasionally, the level of teacher crappiness is indeed reasonable cause for student struggle.)

Plenty of studies correlate positive relational dynamics with student performance. The more a kid likes his or her teacher, the more they trust and respect that person, the better they’re likely to do in a class. Fine. But if part of college is to prepare us for the harsh world beyond, then part of that education is that we cannot solely rely on those in charge of us to be our motivators and inspirators. Almost all of us will, at some point or another, work for people who don’t inspire us, who don’t encourage us. This will not excuse us from remaining passionate or committed to our responsibilities. And if it does excuse us, then the job is a job rather than a calling.

Having discovered the Twitterverse last spring, I’m utterly wrapped up in reading reports and research about the evolution of teaching & learning. It’s great to read one day about the vital nature of computers in keeping math education relevant and read the next day about the danger of computers in classrooms or in the home. The simpleton might dismiss these findings as contradictory, as eggheads fighting, when the truth is far more fascinating and energizing.

Technology, like all great tools, can be used for good or ill, for advancement or dysfunction. Laptops and cell phones and Twitter and everything else in our modern techno-worlds can be both good and bad at once, just like humans.

And the harsh truth is, in college classrooms all around the country, a little more Big Brother is a good idea. Next up: lightscribe pens with fingerprint identification for in-class essays, software with plagiarism software that works much like spell-check now, underlining suspect passages almost as we type. (NOTE: If someone reading this is smart enough to come up with a good business model, I only ask for a tiny pittance for the idea. Have your people get in touch with my people.)

"A" is for Absolute Crap

Get Better - Mates of State (mp3)
Rise - Eddie Vedder (mp3)

My co-blogger and former teacher likes to opine that my high school class was probably the most intelligent to ever graduate from our school. While this claim is certainly debatable in a school that's more than a century old and full of plenty of amazing alums, it's also impossible to deny that my graduating Class of 1990 was up at the very top. If we weren't the best, we were at least in the race.

We had two students score perfect on the SAT. We had one student who left school a month before graduation to take a job in Silicon Valley. We had 23 National Merit Semifinalists -- over a fifth of our class and still a record for a single year -- and another dozen or so Commended Scholars.

This isn't bragging, because my class had plenty of flaws, particularly a load of hubris even larger than our brains, and the flaws didn't stop there. I'm the first to acknowledge that being of higher caliber academically didn't make us better or easier to manage or enjoy as students.

More often than not in the past 19 years, our school has struggled to tally more than 10 National Merit Semifinalists in a class, which is a great number in the South, but isn't all that impressive amongst high-priced independent schools nationwide. Since those two perfect SAT scores in 1990, the 19 years hence has produced maybe three, maybe four perfect SAT scores? Yet, I would bet a dollar to a dime that the GPA of a graduating class in the last five years is leap years ahead of the GPA of our class.

Even if we're splitting hairs here between the academic capabilities and work ethic of today's students versus those of 20 years ago, there's no justifiable way to explain the sharp rise in GPA, and it's not just at my school. It's at high schools and colleges across the nation. I rarely find myself nodding enthusiastically to anything Walter Williams writes, but his observations -- based on data, not mere conjecture -- on grade inflation leave me wondering if anyone cares. I mean, 91 percent of Harvard graduates leave "with honors." Shouldn't that bother, like, LOTS of people??

There's a reason people stopped giving a shit what Roger Ebert thought of a movie. That guy had his thumb up so often you woulda thought it got injured in a car accident or was a carpal tunnel reaction to sticking it up Siskel's butt too much. "At the Movies" suffered from the same kind of grade inflation. When movie critics start giving Two Thumbs Up!! to absolute shit, what's next? Well, then the guys had to start saying, "Two Thumbs WAY Up!" and "Two Thumbs Way WAY Up!"

If things were "right" with the world, shouldn't a 2.5 GPA student at Harvard be able to transfer to a less selective school and, putting forth the same effort and intensity, earn a much better GPA? As it stands, I have trouble believing an average Harvard student could drastically improve his or her grades by attending UT-Knoxville (yes, I'm besmirching UTK a little, but if that offends you, pretend I said "LSU").

Here's what's funny about the school where I work. If our teachers followed the rules they claim to follow, student GPAs would sink. They'd sink like the Titanic after it had cracked in half. According to our rule book, a paper is supposed to be reduced by a letter grade for every day it is late. If a paper is four days late, it would, in theory, automatically fail. Students can then re-write the paper and make up half the distance between the re-written grade and the late paper grade.

If all our teachers abided by this one single rule, I bet the average GPA across our school would drop by at least a point. A frightening number of students would fail and be incapable of earning a passing grade by the end of the first semester.

Here's the kicker. Guess what our teachers complain about? They complain that the students wait until the last minute to write papers. They complain that the students never turn shit in on time. I almost always ask them if they enforce the grade penalty on late assignments, and they either confess they don't, or they lay it at the feet of the administration, like they're just the foot soldiers of a dictatorship.

Teachers, you see, are world class hypocrites. They complain about lazy students, but they enable laziness. They complain about being micromanaged by their higher-ups but fail to take things into their own hands when the opportunities arise. They complain about inattentive and distracted students but are easily the most inattentive and distracted bunch of adults this side of a meeting of Cocaine Addicts Anonymous whenever you gather them together and ask them to pay attention to anything.

Grade inflation angers me not because grades are sacrosanct. They are mere symbols, but they are supposed to mean something: how deeply a student grasps the expected concepts and rigors of a particular class. Either teachers are a bunch of losers who expect far too little, or they're collectively being too kind to those in their care. I daresay most teachers hear about grade inflation, shrug their shoulders and wonder what the big deal is.

Let's either ditch the grades, reinvent another way of assessing our students, or get this shit in order before the entire academic bell curve nationwide is limited to the decimal places between 4.01 - 4.50.

I'd like to go back to the day when George W. Bush received "Gentleman's C's" rather than "Gentleman's A-minuses."

[NOTE: Speaking in broad generalizations requires that I acknowledge that, if you're a teacher reading this, I certainly wasn't talking about YOU. I meant those dorks and incompetent fools with whom you work.]

The Mates of State's latest album is The Re-Arranger and is sublime. "Rise" comes from the Into the Wild soundtrack. Both can be purchased on iTunes or Amazon.com.

Ethics Schmethics in a Charlie Brown World

Beckon - I Nine (mp3)
Scared, Are You? - Better Than Ezra (mp3)
NOTE: (8/20 - 2:20 p.m.) Hotlinkfiles.com is back up. For the moment. Enjoy the songs while they last!

With the return of hundreds of adolescent males into our daily existence inevitably comes the reminder that this time in their lives is chock full of absolutes and absolute uncertainties. If there's two things teenage boys know for certain, it's (a) they have no doubts about some stuff, and (b) they are totally clueless about other stuff. Often they don't even know which things fit into (a) and which fit into (b) until decades later, but they'll rarely admit it.

Teenage boys love breaking rules and dancing on the edge of the cliff, but apparently they also insist that the edge of that cliff be defined and clear. They push limits by their nature, but to do so requires that they know what the limits are to begin with.

Two of the topics central to both of the summer reading books I proctored were how teenagers create and hone their own ethical framework, and the minimal sideline role adults tend to play in the crucial moments of a teen's life.

The Charlie Brown Factor

This observation is neither original nor uniquely named. It's merely observing that, in most young adult fiction and in most teen-centric movies, adults serve minimal purpose. They are the incompetent, clueless, comic relief. Or they are the overmatched and overconfident enemy. Or they are the helpless concerned observer unable to reach the drowning teens, doomed only to see them swallowed by the water.

If you need to meet any of these archetypes, rent any two John Hughes films, and you'll find them.

Adults like myself, who feels connected to students and their lives, who has dedicated a hefty portion of his life working to serve and direct them, don't particularly cotton to the notion that we are fringe players at best, comic foils at worst. What makes this all the more agonizing is how true it feels.

When I think back to my miserable teenage existence, adults were almost always limited to these roles. Not because I didn't respect them. Not because they weren't important to me. I listened to them. I craved their advice and presence. I dearly loved my parents and many of my teachers.

However, when I think of those crucial moments in my young life when the shit hit the fan or the rubber hit the road, it was almost requisite that I had no port -- no adult -- in the storm. In fact, perhaps because of my love and respect for so many adults, their absence was all the more essential for me to cut my teeth on life's hard knocks.

Adults were still vital, though, and I try and remember this in my current role. I relied on adults for advice. Sometimes the advice was prior to the tempest, and sometimes it was afterward. Sometimes it was during the calm amidst the storm. But just being able to go to them before or after made all of it seem more survivable. I also relied on them to nurse my wounds when I fucked up, or electrify the fence when I tried jumping over, or hug me when I felt so alone that the word alone seemed insultingly insufficient.

We can't be there for them in those life-altering moments of crisis. But we still have a part to play on their stage.

Ethics, Schmethics!

If as teenagers we must most often face our darkest moments without the lifesaver of adults we love by our side, we still manage to go into battle with our ethics as our shield. Some of us bring our faith as our sword. (Or our helmet, if you're not the aggressive type.)

Teens often go into the darkest battles without adults because adults tend to weigh down this armor. We older folk are often so concerned with protecting the perceived ethics of a situation that we neglect the human being trapped under that heavy ethical gear.

David went into battle with Goliath with no armor, no massive weapons. He went in without shield or sword or helmet. He had a strap of leather, and that's it. He picked up a nice-lookin' rock on the battlefield.

I'm inclined to believe that ethics make us the Goliath. Ethics weigh you down. They make it tough for you to breathe. You can't keep that shield up high enough to protect you. You can't swing that sword fast enough to hurt anyone. You can't see anything clearly with that damned helmet swallowing your skull.

Don't misunderstand. I'm all for ethics. But they weigh a ton, and the best ones make for better lovers than fighters. Working in a school that claims to value character education and ethical development, I've witnessed dozens upon dozens of boys whose ethical armor proved brittle and irreparable. What's more frustrating is that the fewer ethics tethering a boy down, the more he seems to get through adolescence unscathed. He tends to do the scathing. Sometimes to others, but eventually to himself.

I realize I've made David the bad guy in my crappy little metaphor, but the more I'm here, the more I see the kids I most loathe sliming their way through the system with smiles on their faces. They bring little of value to themselves into the battle and thus have less to lose, less to repair in their losses. They win because they bring nothing with them but a little strap of leather and a few rocks they can pick up on the way. They're guerrilla warriors who do whatever it takes.

As a teenager -- hell, even as an adult -- it's terribly difficult to hold onto your ethics when witnessing one battle after another where the dude with fewer or no self-regulated rules comes away bloodied but seemingly victorious. We're left repeating our little mantra and working to convince ourselves we believe it: It's not a sprint; it's a marathon. It's not a sprint; it's a marathon.

Often, if we can just survive those vicious blows and keep plugging away underneath all the heavy trappings of ethics, we can even take comfort that, eventually, our mantra proves true. If we manage to live that long.

"Beckon" is from I Nine's debut album, Heavy Weighs the King. "Scared, Are You?" is from Better Than Ezra's second album, Deluxe, Baby. The first is available only on iTunes, the latter on both iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.


Other inspirations for this post: Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, Hacking Harvard by Robin Wasserman, and this article on Slate.com.

(In)Glory Days

Young America - Jump Little Children (mp3)
Teenager - Better Than Ezra (mp3)

"The Infamous El Guapo."
"Infamous? What does that mean?"

"IN-famous is when you're more than famous."
-- The Three Amigos

For most people, adolescence -- particularly high school -- is an IN-famous time. William Shatner's melodramatic acting style holds nary a candle to the minute-to-minute emotional roller coaster of the starship U.S.S. Teenager. On that spaceship, a strange odor can make a girl cry. The clearing of a throat can start fights between boys. A shirt that doesn't fit right, hair that doesn't brush right, and zits that don't pop right are among the WMDs hidden in the ship's crawlspaces. All passengers on board are required, at least one time during their service, to claim that they hate their parents.

Hormones are the engine that keeps the U.S.S. Teenager in hyperdrive through space. Many on the crew can handle exposure to lighter levels of this radiation, because they have the opportunity to release them through physical interaction with the opposite sex. Unfortunately, some of us work on the engineering crew, where we had to stay below deck, incapable of getting lai-- uh, are forced to merely absorb the radiation without an appropriate outlet for releasing it.

The strangest part is that I find myself spending the better part of my life in that world, like a Tribble that has snuck aboard the U.S.S. Teenager as a castaway. That's kinda what teachers are, I think.

Teachers are all stowaways. Not all of us really love that particular starship, nor did we all adore our time as teenagers. This just happens to be the ship that's taking us where we were hoping to go at one point or another. Some of us have chosen to remain on board indefinitely.

Not only do I work in a high school, I find myself voluntarily emerged in books, movies, TV shows about adolescents. "King Dork" was one of the most enjoyable books I read in 2007, but I also read "Be More Chill," "Looking for Alaska," and "Hacking Harvard," and at least three or four more teen-centric books. The first season of "Friday Night Lights" has me absolutely mesmerized in spite of the fact that I romanticize neither high school football nor towns obsessed with it. "Freaks & Geeks" and "My So-Called Life" are two of the three best single-season television shows ever, both very much about the miseries of high school.

I am one of the millions who worship at the altar of John Hughes, an altar all who worship him can tell you is located in Shermer, (Come On Feel the) Illinois, where Anthony Michael Hall is the Arch-Bishop, Molly Ringwald is the Mother Superior, and James Spader (left) is that Paul Bettany Opus Dei character (right).

Why is this? Why are we so drawn to that which most of us despised experiencing? Why, God -- er, Mr. Hughes -- Why??

"When you grow up, your heart dies," says the true love of my teenage loins, Ally Sheedy, in "The Breakfast Club." While that assertion is insultingly ludicrous, I totally adore the convicted fear behind it.

Most adults have been on so many emotional roller coasters, have experienced so much loss and lust and elation, that we often can manage to keep our emotional lunch down. We don't have to vomit our emotions every time that roller coaster does a loop-de-loop. When we get that Christmas bonus we've been desperately awaiting, we don't jump up and down like some overweight black woman on "The Price is Right." At 30, the dramas we need to escalate our emotions are far weightier than they were at 15. What once took a rip in the favorite jeans or rejection from the potential prom date suddenly requires a trial separation or the death of a friend.

But the fear -- and teenagers really fear this, because every emotion that courses through them is at an elevated threat level -- is powerful and obsessive. If adults fly at Emotional Mach 3, teens are almost always set for a jump into light speed. And jumping regularly.

Our hearts don't die. They just get pickier. Or, as a more cynical feller once said, The child is grown / The dream is gone / but I have become Comfortably Numb.

Working for a living surrounded by teenagers -- or even just reminding ourselves of what they're going through via books or TV shows -- can stave off this numbness. What better example of symbiotic beauty than this, to make a living by helping teens fight their fears of growing up while they help combat the numbness that can fester in our hearts?