Jim Burke: The English Teacher's Companion

Our Chinese Mothers: David Brooks, Amy Chua, Michelle Rhee, Walter Williams, and Paulo Coehlo

It seems lately that everyone is wondering what happiness is and whether it is worth chasing or can even be caught. Amy Chua suggests it comes from achievement, the achievement of yourself and your own children (although in a subsequent article, she seemed to revise some of her thoughts, suggesting that sometimes you have to accept that a child is different than you want them to be).  

Author Paulo Coehlo says his goals in life are to have challenges and have fun, not to be happy. Michelle Rhee, former Washington, D.C. superintendent (who now resides in my hometown of Sacramento), suggests this generation of kids possesses a false sense of its own happiness and talent from years of empty praise and trophies for coming in last.

And a new book about raising girls shares lessons from girls' schools about how to guide them through life so they aspire to be like Hilary (Clinton) not Hilton (Paris). Of course, as this article about white boys makes clear, there is growing cause for concern about the diminished expectations for white boys, many of whom are failing at alarming rates.

Walter Williams, in a weekend interview for the Wall Street Journal, suggests that it was the expectations of others, in particular white people, that posed the greatest threat to his own success growing up.

Everyone seems to be casting around lately for a set of rules, a guide, a Truth about how to be happy, how to be successful, how to raise children to be the equivalent in life of what theater people call "triple threats" (i.e., can sing, dance, and act). Add to these different meditations---all of which seem to focus on race, culture, or ethnicity---David Brooks's latest piece in the New Yorker. In this excellent article, which no doubt derives from his next book, he talks about happiness and success in relation to what science, particularly neuroscience, tells us about how we should live our own lives or raise our children to live theirs. David Brooks, by the way, thinks Amy Chua is a "wimp."

What do I think? I think Brooks and the cognitive scientists he mentions are right to point out those unconscious processes that override the efforts we, as parents and teachers, often think make such a difference. Yet I'm not ready to go all in as Steven Pinker seems to say we should in his TED Talk about the "blank slate." 

At some point, we must each, at some point in our lives, accept, as Cassius says to Brutus in Julius Caesar, that the fault "is not in our stars, but in ourselves." Dealt the brain we are, born into the family we are, into the era and culture we can only claim as our own, we must make our own way forward, becoming as Hesse's Siddhartha says, our own teachers, taking from those we meet along the way what words, what wisdom will help us make sense of the world and find our place and purpose in that world.

How do you cook 26 burgers on a 25 capacity grill?

One of the best professors I had in college was an economics professor at Santa Barbara City College who loved Star Trek and whose mother owned a restaurant that served some of the best burgers in town. 

Whenever possible he used either (or sometimes both!) Star Trek or the restaurant as a metaphor for some principle of economics he was teaching. 

One night he walked in and began by saying we would be studying how to cook 26 burgers on a twenty-five capacity grill, the idea being that you had to always have one in the air. 

Well, as teachers, we always have one in the air. That one is something we want to do, or someone we want to be with, someplace we should be but cannot yet go...because we are cookin' all the other things we've got going.

But some times, you just have to pull back, go with twenty burgers, leave a little room for the special orders of life--whether unlooked for love or unexpected loss--that come at you from nowhere. This eases the spring a bit, takes the edge of the stress.

It is within that space, that moment's extra peace and ease, that we can reclaim what we need to come up with such great lessons that our students will, as I do, remember lessons Professor Maroaka taught nearly thirty years ago, even as I laugh thinking about him comparing the macro economy to the Starship Enterprise and the micro economy to the little ships that orbited the mothership. 

It's not bad, it's just information

Years ago I heard an Jenne Gossard, who was at that time California State Teacher of the Year, if I remember correctly. I think it was maybe in my second or third year of teaching. 

At some point, she talked about how transformative it was to become a teacher-researcher: it just made everything in your class data. Not quite the way we use that word today, or at least not in that spirit. 

She said if you were studying your class to get better, and things went horribly wrong, it was so much easier to step back and grin and think to yourself, "Well, isn't that interesting. If I do x then why happens."

So when I look at the work my senior class did on the Camus assignment, the one where I provided the example, went over it, gave them a tool to use to do it, and 50% of the kids did it---well, that's just really interesting data, right?

I don't know what went wrong. Or what went right, even. I need to think about it. And I need to ask them. Kids want to learn; everyone wants to learn. Sometimes we forget that. But when I remember to ask them, they always help me.

And in the process, they sometimes give me data about myself, which I try to step back and see as interesting.

For every class, a proposal: Make it matter

One of the best moments for me at NCTE last year was when Kelly Gallagher, whose work and commitment I've always respected, said in passing: "We should present together some time." And since you have three people to present at NCTE, we invited Penny Kittle, another teacher-writer whose work and ways we both admire. 

So the three of us have been collaborating online, though email, the last few weeks to prepare a proposal. And the discussion is the reward, really. But the process has me thinking: What if we gave the same level of attention to each day's class, had to write it up as a proposal that would be accepted or rejected depending on its merit, its value?

Yes, of course, there are all sorts of awful sides to that idea---which I am not advocating, just to be clear---but the clarity that comes with thinking about how best to spend  twenty minutes before a group who comes to learn from you: that challenges you. How could you possible propose to show a film for several days, or a period, or even more than a few minutes, really, and still get a meaningful effect, a powerful result? How could you justify to yourself spending a day let alone several constructing a model of the Globe Theater? Or having students just write about their feelings in response to literature day after day?

When you sit down to plan your next lesson, think of that class period as a session at some national convention like NCTE (which you should attend next year in Chicago). Make every minute count. Challenge your every idea: Why read that? Is that the best configuration for a discussion or is there a better one? Why have them only discuss the poem; won't the discussion provide a great foundation for them to then write a short analysis of the poem after the discussion? And so on. 

The sessions everyone learns to avoid at NCTE are the ones where professors and grad students stand and read papers because they must "publish or perish." So they stand and read from the script of their own paper. They are not teaching; rather, they are telling. 

And yet, as E. B. White wrote in one of his famous lines from Elements of Style: Every sentence should tell. Which is to say that it should do work, make a difference.

Only do what makes a difference, that's my credo. When I talk with Penny and Kelly (should I go by "Jimmy" when presenting with them for improved parallel structure?) these last few weeks, the exchange inevitably includes references to what we each did in class that day. What comes through in our remarks more than anything is that we are each pretty darn exacting of ourselves, which is what allows us to go in and ask so much of our students the next day.