Garage Sales

My mom loved garage sales.  I've been thinking about that a lot as I prep for my first sale in four years.  As I sweep and dust and re-locate the non-sale items, between my moments of embarrassment for leaving my garage in a "make-do" mode for so long I try to remind myself why Millie loved this ritual so much.  After all, as I survey my domain, it's clear this isn't a way to get rich. There is nothing cost effective when a two-day sale requires a week of prep to get rid of items at five and ten cents. I'm doing this, I tell myself, to be a good neighbor to other garage salers who are exceptional neighbors to me.  Okay, that's reason enough.

For Mom, it was never about money; rather, she loved the sale--she had been a sales clerk at J.C. Penney's before she married Dad--and the socializing with friends and customers alike.  Mom was one of those people who truly didn't know a stranger.  I once left her alone on a mall bench while I shopped.  Fifteen minutes later she had the life history of the woman who had sat down beside her.  A garage sale, then, she saw as a gold mine of conversation and community news.  Only once did her sale threaten to go sour.  At a sale she was running for our neighbor, two women got into a shoving match over a refrigerator.  To be honest, I think Mom sort of enjoyed the spectacle--the other customers certainly did.  Fortunately for the sale, one of the customers was local law enforcement who played Solomon, and Mom got her money.

Mom was at her best when she teamed with my aunt, Maxine.  Together, they gave customers the one-two punch.  While Mom loved the social aspects most, Maxine zeroed in on the "kill," as she would say:  the sales for a profit.  Her goal was always a bare garage.  You had to be careful when Maxine was in prime form, though.  One Friday I stopped by their garage sale after teaching.  Taking a few minutes to chat with Mom, I didn't notice Maxine at work--until I bent down to pick up my tote bag with papers and gradebook.  She had sold it, literally behind my back.  At that moment I moved faster than the customer, who was pulling out the drive, to rescue my students' papers.  When I returned to the garage, Max was still at it.  She had plopped a bunch of plastic flowers in the garage trash can (not intended for sale) and sold it as a bouquet.

Thinking about my own garage sale venture, I guess I'm like Maxine in that I want to end up with a bare garage.  But perhaps the payoff already has occurred for me, because the prospect of a neighborhood sale has forced me to make decisions I have avoided for seven years.  I finally opened some drawers that were filled with Mom's things and decided that now is the time to share them with others.  Thinking about how much she loved sales, I know she would approve.

Thinking About the Students

This morning I was perusing yesterday's Throwback Thursday posts on Facebook when I came across a series of high school photos from Prairie View High School in Linn County, Kansas--ones I had taken for the yearbook back in the late '70's and early '80's posted by a PV alum. I came back to those as I was scrolling through some of the contentious articles about current education funding and accountability of students and teachers.  It occurred to me that those pictures are here for people to enjoy today because of a school board in a rural Kansas district that put students first in their decision making.  I don't know if any of the folks on that board had much preparation for the job, but it didn't matter because they were there to see that their children received the best learning opportunities they could figure out how to provide.

I was hired at Prairie View under the condition that I clean up the journalism program, even though I had no prior experience in the field (not even in high school), did not have journalism certification, did not know how to use a SLR camera, and had never been in a darkroom. That doesn't sound like the board made a very good decision, does it?  It's not easy to get specialty teachers, though, in small, rural districts, and what I did bring was an established record in the classroom and with extra-curricular supervision.  

What sold me on the challenge was the principal's promise that he would fill the classroom with the school's top students, who would do the job even though they would receive only elective credit, since I did not yet have journalism certification. Why would they enroll, and why would the school do this? Humiliation, the students told me.  They were upset with the quality of their school publications, and the principal promised them that if they would help I would work with them to produce publications they could be proud of.  What teacher could ask for a more highly motivated group?  Basically, they just wanted something that they could share with family and friends.  We stumbled and we made some mistakes, but we published some fine newspapers and yearbooks, bits of which are now popping up on Facebook.  

And throughout, the school board offered our program more than we asked for.  My second year I had to argue with the board when it wanted to remove advertising from the yearbook and fund us completely as a way of rewarding us for a successful first year.  My thinking was that students would lose some valuable learning opportunities if they no longer had to establish and maintain a budget, sell advertising, and create the ads themselves.  The board listened and agreed and came back the following year with a better deal.  This time they would buy additional photography equipment and darkroom chemicals if I would treat the course like a lab, with all students having to pass using a SLR camera as well as developing and printing pictures. With 25 students having to use a single, small darkroom, this was a challenge, but we did it--and continued doing so during the rest of my tenure there. 

These folks were thinking about career skills before such topics were trendy.  Instinctively, they opted for what would benefit the children in their care.  What teacher could ask for more?

Don't Kill High School English (Part II)

In “Death to High School English,” a 2011 salon.com article, Kim Brooks, bemoans the lack of writing preparedness by students coming to college, and blames, in part, the tendency to focus on literature, especially classics, which, she says “might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student.”   She argues this because she sees literature as separate from “learning to support an argument or use a comma,” essentially, her definition, along with an effective thesis statement, of effective academic writing.  In a previous post, I discussed some factors that affect writing success in highschool, ending with one advocating reading.  Here, I want to argue for the value of high school students reading broadly, including the classics, in order to write effectively.

In my experience, the greatest deficit student writers have upon entering college is an inability to read mindfully—and I am writing this as a composition specialist.   

The fact is that precision with grammar and even argumentation isn’t enough if the writer isn’t a sound and engaged thinker.  Writing accurately isn’t sufficient; college writers have to write about something of substance.  That’s where the ideas that they read come in to their writing. Moreover, they have to compose within the rhetorical constraints of the language, rhetoric they can learn by reading it.  And beyond those basics, they need to develop style.  This entails learning nuances of written communication so as to develop appropriate stances for their various writing situations.  It takes practice, for example, to recognize as a reader when a writer is being sarcastic.  Then, it requires good judgment as a writer to determine whether to apply those strategies in one’s own prose.

Reading at the college level is reading what, to be sure, but also it is reading what is not there.  Some refer to this as reading with and against the grain.  (Peter Elbow’s believing and doubting game is a version of this concept.)  Students can be taught this adult reading strategy in high school as they discuss reading, whether classics or comics.  The key point is to support contentions by using the text rather than merely a personal impression. 

But reading for a college-level composition course requires more:  more than what and what not, it also requires how (the writer writes).  I discovered early on that my students had never thought that they could learn about writing by reading, but they learned differently by asking questions about the writers’ craft:

• What is this person doing that works for me?

• What, if anything, is problematic about this writer’s writing?

• What else might the writer do with the writing?

With these sorts of reader-response questions, students realized that they could learn from others how to make stylistic choices about their own writing.  After we did that a few times, I noticed that students started referring back to what they read, not for what the person wrote but for the way he or she wrote it.  I would hear something like this:  “I tried to work with my idea like X did in this paragraph because I liked the way she asked a question and then answered it.”  Some people will say that this just ties students to models rather than encouraging them to develop their own voice.  To the contrary, I think of this awareness of others' strategies as tools that students can use to develop their own writing prowess. 

Speaking of tools, one of the most efficient ones is tied to reading classics:  allusions.  Think of an allusion as a shorthand for people sharing a conversation.  Those who know the back story of an allusion will share a full understanding of what a writer is conveying.  Conversely, a writer who has reason to believe that his or her readers know the back story, has the luxury of using an allusion rather than laying out the details that gives the term a full meaning.  A few examples: 

• The recent NSA disclosures prompted references to 1984.  To understand those references fully, a person needs to at least be aware of the plotline of Orwell’s book, not the year. (The reference to NSA, by the way, is also an allusion, this one depending on knowledge of current politics.)

• Romeo and Juliet laws have a meaning of their own, but to understand why that is the widely used term for such regulations, a person needs to be familiar with the Shakespearean play.

• A person who doesn’t want to do things might be referred to as a Bartleby, after Melville’s character.

• I’ve used the phrase, “this is a Tom Sawyer moment” to indicate a time when others are tricked into doing what I want them to do (after the painting episode in Tom Sawyer).

• A generally derogatory reference for a Black person who is regarded by other Blacks as acting too White is Uncle Tom, after the Harriet Beecher Stowe character.

• We talk of a catch-22 when a person is trapped by contradictory rules.  The term has full meaning only when a person is familiar with Joseph Heller’s book.

• A brave new world isn’t usually brave, unfortunately.  To understand that, people need to know Aldous Huxley’s dystopia.

If we don’t share this lively, vivid shorthand, think of the meanings lost, or the turgid prose required to retrieve them. 

Ultimately, communication is a social activity, shared experiences, including ones created by individuals reading—for plot, for characterization, for truths, or for values—texts that become part of their future contexts as they continue to communicate with others.  Broad and deep reading is as essential to good writing, I believe, as any perfectly placed comma.

Don't Kill High School English (Part I)

Kim Brooks, "Death to High School English," salon.com (May 11, 2011).

Kay Parks Bushman Haas posted the salon.com article, “Death to High School English,” a topic that always peeks my interest, having taught both high school and college.  Brooks bemoans the lack of writing preparedness by students coming to college and blames high school curriculum, which may focus on literature or oral communication or group work rather than on effective writing, a concept  she seems to equate with sentence-level grammatical accuracy and thesis-support essay writing.  She ends by essentially positioning herself as the white knight, ready to rescue students with her college composition instruction from runaway commas.

Okay—I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much.  I agree with Brooks that many students come to college with inadequate writing skills, especially now that they try to compose entire essays on smart phones.  Having first become concerned about student writing when I taught social science in the 1960s though, I am convinced that the solution is more complex than ditching a model that seems not to work.  

In the first place, “English” as a term can be confusing at both the high school and college levels.  We call the coursework “English,” but at the secondary level, depending on the district, we may be referring to literature, writing in all its guises (composition, creative writing, poetry, playwriting, journalism), and, in some cases speech communications  From personal experience I can attest that no teacher can be expected to be an expert in all these fields, but chances are that her certification will allow her to teach any or all of the above.  Moreover, the chances are good that she will be assigned based on the school’s need rather than on her level of comfort with a subject matter.  And, given college curricula, the chances are equally great that the only formal writing courses she has had are Composition I and II, subjects likely to have been taught by graduate teaching assistants with no prior experience in rhetoric and composition themselves.  

An aside:  In my own case, after getting a degree in social science education, I returned to college, racked up the literature courses as part of an American Studies Masters and certified to teach English.  My grammar course was theoretical, targeted at Ph.D. language candidates rather than at teachers, and the classroom instruction in that course was something I would not force upon my worst enemy.  Because I had completed a methods course for social science, I did not have to complete one for English, and  I had no additional writing courses, having completed the composition requirement nearly a decade before.  With that, the state considered me “certified,” and I was hired to teach sophomore, junior, and senior English.  AND journalism (newspaper and yearbook, including photography)—for which I didn’t even have high school experience.  No problem—my English certification extended to the journalism classes until I added a journalism certification a year later.  

My classes were small and my students were eager—and I was/am a perpetual learner, so all worked out well.  You can see, though, where the situation could go wrong:  I knew a lot about literature, nothing about methods and journalism, and little about grammar and writing.

It’s that experience and the hundreds of college students that I met later that cause me to feel strongly about the need to focus on writing AND reading (yes, including classics) in high school.  Actually, I’ve thought of this for so long that I’m going to break my posts into two:  1) factors affecting writing success in high school, and 2) why read.

• Look at teacher preparation and teaching requirements:  Are secondary teachers required to take composition theory and methods courses taught by specialists? Are they required to complete a grammar course that incorporates teaching methodology?
• Look at hiring standards:  Do prospective hires in all disciples complete a writing sample on-site?  Do English prospects complete a grammar proficiency exam?
  
  
• Look at educational philosophy:  Does the district support writing throughout the curriculum so that both students and staff understand that effective communication is a major educational objective?  Are faculty and staff expected to demonstrate effective written communication in their professional capacity?  Are district-wide netiquette and social media policies published, taught, and implemented?
  
  
• Look at the curriculum:  Does the district-wide curriculum incorporate writing opportunities throughout its courses of both formal and informal types?  Does the district support those initiatives by providing writing-across-the-curriculum support for faculty and writing center support for students?  Do faculty and students receive appropriate incentives and rewards for incorporating writing effectively and consistently throughout the school year?
  
  Another aside:  I am not a fan of capstone projects that allow students to procrastinate because of a lack of progress checks throughout the year.  Five times I have had to deal with college freshmen whose high school experiences had conditioned them to procrastinate.  They even wrote of how teachers, under pressure to have students succeed, bailed them out of their senior thesis at the last minute.  Despite my warnings to the contrary and progress checks incorporated into the assignment, they assumed that I would behave similarly.  I didn’t, and five grades fell, as did one scholarship.
• Look at technology:  Does school software support writing?  (Is a robust writing program readily available?)  Is a school-wide grammar support available on computers and/or learning management software?
   
• Look at reading:  Does the faculty read for professional advancement, for information, and for enjoyment?  Do the students see the faculty reading?  Is substantial reading expected of students in all courses? (More on reading in the next post.)