Reflections on Part Three of John Warner's Why They Can't Write, Pages 127-183 (Post #4) - A Guest Post by Lauren Carfa

At The Oakridge School, the entire English department is reading John Warner's Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. Six of us have volunteered to post reflections on the book as we read and discuss the text. Lauren Carfa, 3rd grade ELA Instructor, volunteered to post the fourth reflection, which I've provided below.

Must It Be All or Nothing?

I have, embarrassingly, severely held up the progress of this blog! While life has truly been a big factor in this, I’ve come to realize some personal avoidance as well. I have really struggled through this book because I find myself often frustrated either with what Warner is suggesting, or with what I feel is a lack of completion. What I mean by that is I feel he keeps saying what is wrong, what not to do, and why, but that is it. I’m left wondering what he suggests as a better method.

I’ve tried to be very reflective as I read this text. I wrote at the beginning of my notes for this section that I am a product of the system that he is writing against. I was taught how to write for the purpose of taking and passing a standardized test and then moving to the next level and I wholeheartedly agree that, while I have some strong and helpful skills in writing, my education was narrow and lacking. Sadly, I didn’t find college to be any different at any of the institutions I took classes from. This personal experience lends me to feel supportive of many of Warner’s arguments about what students need. I wish my educational experience had been more about encouraging thought and creativity rather than teaching me to meet specific measures that may or may not bear fruit for me in life.

On page 129, Warner says “If you believe school is properly viewed as something like ancient Sparta...much of what I have to say...will sound like the rantings of a soft-hearted dreamer entirely divorced from the real world.” I keep coming back to this statement because I do think so much of what he says isn’t realistic. I don’t see how to merge his desires and aspirations for education with the reality of people. However, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere near the other option he offers. To me, this further illustrates what I keep feeling about so much of his opinion - there is no middle ground, just either or, us or them.

Further illustrating my struggle to sift through the reading, I know that all of the above isn’t fully reflective of my section that I am to represent, but rather my feelings on the book as whole.

In my section, Warner talks about the need for students to be fed and come to school well-rested, and also says, “...but can we agree that enhancing the intellectual, social, and emotional capacities of students is likely to lead to these [preparing children for higher education and careers] outcomes?” Perhaps this will be the conclusion of Warner as well, but the piece I often find to be missing in the field of education is relationship. I really believe relationship is what sets educators into the categories of someone who leads, produces, or brings up students who are successful, confident and capable, verses the educator that holds a place, or worse, stifles the love of learning. Warner keeps referring to the “tyranny of grades” and compliance. I think of tyranny of grades as nit-picking for mistakes, rather than looking at the whole picture of what the goal of the learning was. Regardless, he is right - grades and compliance can lead to defeated, apathetic children. I think that type of educator is one that lacks relationship. I believe that grades and compliance, inside relationship, can be healthy, beneficial, and provides a platform for success and growth. This also applies to writing. Grade, or don’t, but if you don’t have a relationship with your students they won’t grow and develop as a result of your efforts either way. In my opinion, this point is exemplified on page 141 when Warner lists five things that should be our goals. Goals 4 and 5 state:

4. We will end the tyranny of grades and replace them with self-assessment and reflection.

5. We will give teachers sufficient time, freedom, and resources to teach effectively. In return, they will be required to embrace the same ethos of self-assessment and reflection expected of students.

My question is, how do we then determine this standard is met? If there is not a relationship and there is no grade or requirement to demonstrate the expectation is being met, I envision a huge range of “success”. Don’t misunderstand, I do not think that everyone should turn out the same or have identical goals. I want to celebrate the individual. I mean in terms of teachers certain they are impacting students when students feel lost and uncertain, or students certain they are top of their class when they haven’t mastered basic skills. Self reflection is not a strength for everyone.

Finally, on page 153 Warner talks about the circumstances in which writers thrive and advocates giving students experiences and opportunities to make choice and build a practice and love for writing. This, I can get excited about. This, I can get behind. I just don’t understand why it must be completely separated from grades and structure. I see a classroom where both can hold space.

I chose to include the following pictures to demonstrate why I still hold value to giving children structure to work first within, and then out of. This first picture is of a writing piece done with little to no structure. The requirements were very broad and focused on minor things such as how to turn it in, to make sure you have your name, etc. The children had a choice of topic, including one that was free choice. There was no grade attached and no structure given to follow.

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This next picture is of the same student's writing, during even the same week. This picture is a portion of their final copy pages for a project in which they had choice over the topic, but they had to follow a structure and use various tools practiced in class as part of their grade.

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My expertise is not in English, though I am an “English Teacher”. My expertise is in children. I believe children need guidance and structure that comes from a loving person they respect. That is the place they grow from.

Lauren Carfa

Reflections on Part Two of John Warner's Why They Can't Write, Pages 35-123 (Post #2) - A Guest Post by Stephen Hebert

At The Oakridge School, the entire English department is reading John Warner's Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. Six of us have volunteered to post reflections on the book as we read and discuss the text. Stephen Hebert, AP Lang & American Lit. Instructor, volunteered to post the second reflection, which I've provided below.

A Recent Lesson in Atmospheric Conditions

This past week, I witnessed a disappointing phenomenon in my classes.

After spending the first three quarters of the school year figuring out my new school, I decided to dedicate this final quarter to a series of pedagogical experiments. My first experiment was to find a new approach to the most difficult text we read all year: The Scarlet Letter. I turned the book into a role-playing game in which students had to complete a series of “quests” in order to escape 17th century Boston and make their way back to the present. For the first two weeks, students seemed quite excited. We had weekly goals for how much they needed to read, but otherwise, their progress in the game was left up to them. They could choose which quests to complete and which to ignore.

Something changed, however, this past week. In the Upper School, we have progress reports, and I had to somehow convert students’ performance in the game to a letter grade for these reports. I put students into groups and asked them to devise systems for turning game performance into a letter grade. After listening to a dozen different proposals spread out over five class periods, I took the most popular ideas, combined them, and then put them on the board. Very quickly, the energy that we’d built up in class over the previous two weeks died out.

Why?

When I asked students about it, the theme was quite clear: “Grades are the worst.” For me, this is just a variation of what John Warner suggests in the opening chapter of this section: “School sucks.”

In “The Problem of Atmosphere,” Warner begins with a social experiment that leads him to a startling claim: “Students are not coddled or entitled. They are defeated” (38).

I tend to agree.

The System and the Culture

As a teacher and a chaplain at three different independent schools, I have spent many hours over the last ten years counseling students who have been defeated by grades and test scores, who feel so beaten down that the opportunity for growth is no longer possible for them until they can get some distance from the system that made them feel that way.

What are the characteristics of that system?

As an Upper School teacher, I’d argue that the specter of college admissions plays a large role. More specifically, the misguided belief that all students need to go to college to be “successful” and that only certain colleges count. The highly competitive nature of college admissions, coupled with the belief that a blown test or quiz will end their chances at getting into University X, creates a culture of compliance rather than creativity, a culture that values grades over learning, a culture that sees school as a transactional, quid pro quo arrangement, rather than a journey of (self-)discovery.

Our students fear failure.

They look at a 100-point scale and they see 70 ways to fail (0–69) and less than half as many ways to succeed (70–100). Even worse, many of them believe that anything less than an A- is a failure. As we prepare them for college and life, where the economy is more and more based on gigs which require creativity and soft-skills, this narrative of "success" has put our students in a bind that doesn’t allow them to experiment, to make a mistake, to skin their knees. Thus, we make our contribution to the anxiety epidemic. If I believed that my future hinged on a particular quiz or test, then I’d probably be anxious too. 

Writing as Antidote?

What does this have to do with writing?

As Warner says to his students, “writing is an ‘extended exercise in failure’” (41). As teachers of writing, we have an opportunity to provide students with an alternative to the do-or-die culture that they find themselves mired in. Why? Because we can teach them how to fail. We have to.

In her response to Jared’s post, I deeply appreciated Lauren’s extended bicycle analogy in which she approached teaching writing in the third grade as a way of building skills by laying down fundamentals. You have to know the basic rules of bike riding in order to ride a bike: how do the pedals work? where are the brakes? what's up (or down) with gravity? 

Lauren Carfa's comment from the Oakridge English department's private blog

It reminds me of one of my son's first bike riding lessons. His grandmother bought him a balance bike for his fourth birthday. He loved that thing! He would zoom all over the driveway and sidewalks on it. One day, he decided, against my advice, to brave the very steep hill just beyond our driveway. I watched out of our kitchen window as his little blue helmet disappeared from view down the hill. I ran outside to see him speed downhill and steer intentionally into a hedge on the side of the road a few hundred feet away. I ran down after him, disentangled his little body from the bushes, cleaned him up, and wiped the tears from his cheeks. When I asked him why he steered into the bushes, he told me, “I didn’t know how to stop.” (Incidentally, this is how he stops on ice skates too...)

As it turns out, steering into the bushes is an effective way to stop your bike, but it may not be the best way. It’s reckless.

Likewise, in coaching golf and baseball, I’ve watched kids get hung up on the details. Recently, I was working with a nine-year-old pitcher. I was trying to get him to move his hips in a certain way so that he could really push off the rubber and toward home plate; hopefully, he’d generate a little more speed and accuracy. I took him through a drill to give him the right feel for what his body should be doing, but when he got up on the mound to try it out, he was so focused on what his lower body was doing that he literally forgot to release the ball. Instead of throwing it toward the catcher, he spiked it into the mound several times before I told him to just forget everything and throw a strike.

Sometimes, when we are faced with a glut of rules and regulations, we find ourselves stymied, unable to even complete the simplest tasks.

In writing, there must be some middle ground, some sweet spot where we can avoid being totally reckless while also avoiding stultification. We must be able to create an atmosphere in our classrooms that foster the kind of creativity that we long for in our students.

But how?

The key might be in taking seriously what Warner tells his students: “[E]very piece [of writing] is a custom job, created by a unique intelligence (the writer), in the service of the needs (purpose) of a specific audience” (72).

Questions to Consider

This leads us to a series of questions to reflect on and explore in our own practice and in our own institution:

• What are we doing to create an atmosphere that encourages students to take risks and learn from their failures?
• What systems in our classrooms, in our department, in our divisions, and in our school should we re-examine?
• How does our grading and assessment of writing reflect our values as educators?
• How are we creating writing assignments that help students to see each piece of writing as “a custom job”?

Or, perhaps you disagree with John Warner (and me). Maybe you’ve got an alternative way of understanding the atmosphere, the systems, and the fads that Warner calls out in this section. Maybe you’ve got a passionate argument for why the system isn’t broken. Spell it out below!

Stephen Hebert

Reflections on Part One of John Warner's Why They Can't Write, Pages 1-31 (Post #1)

At The Oakridge School, the entire English department is reading John Warner's Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. Six of us have volunteered to post reflections on the book as we read and discuss the text. I volunteered to post the first reflection, which I've provided below. 

Last week, we read Shirley Jackson’s terrifying short story, “The Lottery,” and discussed its significance as a class. There was consensus among the group that the story was asking us to reflect critically on the idea of “tradition.” We analyzed its most important symbol – the black box from which the characters draw slips of paper for the gruesome ritual of the lottery. We learn from the story that the black box is older than anyone there and therefore possesses a kind of sacred quality for the residents. However, the narrator notes that “the black box grew shabbier each year” and “much of the ritual [that related to the box’s purpose] had been forgotten or discarded” (5). Later we discover that the box they’re using isn’t even the original one, and towards the ending of the tale, the narrator chillingly states, “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones” (9). My classes agreed that the black box symbolizes certain “traditions” – not tradition in a generic sense – but specific cultural practices whose origins are largely forgotten but the impact of the practice remains strong. The scary question posed by Shirley Jackson is one which asks us to think about traditions we still practice that not only lack purpose but may be harmful to certain individuals in our community. Every society has its black boxes, and John Warner wants us to interrogate the culture of writing instruction to expose the shabbier practices we still hold on to.

Black Box Traditions Are a Way to Control the Variables

For instance, take the five paragraph essay. Does anyone know where it came from? Why does it settle for five units instead of four? Why emphasize the limits of form as opposed to the infinite possibilities involved in a process? The 5 paragraph construct, according to Warner, can be traced back to Harvard’s entrance exams in the late 19^th century!! Last I checked, the skills demanded by 21^st century universities and employers are drastically different than what was needed in the 1800s. Warner writes, “The five-paragraph essay is an artificial construct, a way to contain and control variables and keep students from wandering too far off track. All they need are the ideas to fill in the blanks. It is very rare to see a five-paragraph essay in the wild; one finds them only in the captivity of the classroom” (29). The five-paragraph essay gives us a manageable set of variables as instructors and (perhaps more importantly) as graders. Warner makes clear, though, that often “we overestimate our own past proficiency at writing” – meaning it’s important we examine the costs of this traditional construct before casting the first stone when grading students’ ability to correctly adhere to the form.

Students Already Demonstrate the Skills to Write

In the section “Johnny Could Never Write,” Warner observes that “…[S]tudents freely and effectively communicate in other mediums, often using the skills we claim to desire and develop in academic writing. When students turn to school-related tasks, though, those skills seem to disappear” (16). Students already have the skills, meaning the real challenge for us as instructors is shifting attitudes and beliefs that students hold about their writing. However, certain “black boxes” of writing instruction are getting in the way of this. In the opening section, Warner employs the analogy of training wheels to diagnose what’s wrong with traditional approaches to writing instruction. Just as training wheels actually keep the learner from practicing the most important skill for riding a bike, in this case balance, the five-paragraph essay prevents students from developing the writer’s most important skill, which he identifies as choice (such as choice of audience, topic, tone, form, etc.). In other words, the 5 paragraph essay limits students’ opportunities to make the choices that matter as a writer. But I want to take Warner’s analogy further; it’s not just the training wheels when it comes to how we teach writing. If we taught bike riding the way we teach composition, students would read about the rules of bike riding; they would answer worksheets that test their comprehension of those rules. We might even watch videos of the greatest bike riders in history, and occasionally, we would ride bikes ourselves (but with training wheels, of course). And we wonder why students don’t like to write. One thing’s for sure: this approach is not helping us overcome the challenge of transforming students’ attitudes about the practice. We act like the risks of letting them crash or get off course are as physically dangerous as those related to actual bike riding when in reality our classrooms have the potential to be the safest places for students to crash, fail, and try again. As Warner states, “Prohibitions may prevent disaster, but they also may close off the possibility of great discovery”(31).

Human-focused Design Over Function-focused Design

The Council of Writing Program Administrators compiled a list of qualities they think to be most important for every developing writer: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and meta-cognition (25). Warner’s claim is that black boxes like the five-paragraph essay or the tendency to isolate grammar instruction have the result of taking writing out of an authentic context thereby making it less motivating for students to engage creatively and persistently in the process itself. In fact emphasis on traditional modes of assessment “has left our practices largely divorced from the kinds of experiences that help students develop their writing practices” (28). My claim is that we need to focus a little less on outcomes (which tend to take writing out of its contexts) and start worrying more about the outset: Do students already believe in themselves as writers from day one? Is there an authentic context, purpose, and/or audience that beckons them to write? This means moving away from a function-focused approach (function prioritizes efficiency, manageability, conformity, etc.) to design our writing instruction using a more human-focused framework (which prioritizes choice, purpose, ownership, and creativity). Otherwise we risk casting stones at something we should be nurturing – namely, every student’s “deep need to represent their experience through writing” (Lucy Calkin The Art of Teaching Writing). To do that, we have to take the risk of riding without training wheels. 

Questions for reflection:

What are the black boxes of writing instruction (or instruction in general)?

What instructional practices do you want to change in your classroom and what prevents you from doing so?

What instructional practices have you changed in recent years? How are you doing it differently?

What classroom traditions do you want to change? Which ones do you think still hold value and why?

Some resources for extra reading:

Colley, Jared. “Why I’m Done with Paper Prompts: An Imagined Conversation with Jacques Ranciere and Lucy McCormick Calkins.” What Should We Do with Our Classrooms? 2 June 2018.

Council of Writing Program Administrators. “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.” National Council for Teachers of English & National Writing Project, January 2011.

Hidden Brain Podcast. “The Carpenter Versus the Gardener: Two Models of Modern Parenting.” NPR, 28 May 2018.

Nazerian, Tina. “Is the Five-Paragraph Essay Dead?” EdSurge, 18 October 2017.

#Ranciere18 - Keepin' Up With Socrates: Giant Steps Indeed

This giant step taken, the need becomes less imperious, the attention less constant, and the child gets used to learning through the eyes of others. Circumstances become diverse, and he develops the intellectual capacities as those circumstances demand. -J. Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster 51

Imagine trying to learn through the eyes of John Coltrane. If there were ever a song that could establish a hierarchy of who's the fiercest when it comes to musical performance what better challenge than Trane's maddeningly complex standard, "Giant Steps."  Just ask Paul Chambers, the bassist who recorded with Coltrane on his first of four official Atlantic Records releases (my favorite being Olé Coltrane, but that's off topic). 

Giant steps... Some can wax it better than others, but for most of us, our fingers compromise the notes as they struggle to keep pace with Coltrane's orbit of melodies and key changes. Again, just ask Paul Chambers: his recording during that famous session demonstrates the struggle all of us have keeping pace on Coltrane's path. And Paul Chambers was a masterful musician with an illustrious career, playing with all the greats. On this occasion, it was Chambers' last performance for Coltrane (at least in a studio). Perhaps it was time for the bassist to forge his own path. After all, there's little space for doing so when tracing the celestial orbit of a comet like Coltrane.

Playing alongside Coltrane in a session like "Giant Steps" is probably like discussing mathematics with Socrates. The pressure is cooking: Can you keep up? Can you find the hidden pattern? Do you know where he's going next? Pay attention. And again, please try to keep the pace; the metronome is ticking. If Socrates, for instance, put me on the spot and demanded to know the length of the side of a square whose area is twice the amount of another square whose side is the length of X, I think I'd have a hard time keeping up, staying calm, and forming my own coherent thoughts: I'd be a deer in the headlights, blinded by the light of Socrates. Decimated by the velocity of his oncoming orbit (see the Meno).

On Orbits and Revolutions: Tracing the Master's Secret vs. Mapping the Student's Journey

You don't learn with Socrates; you only learn through him, meaning through his eyes. But he's humble about it though. After all, he'd be the first to tell you that "he knows he knows nothing." Isn't that why the oracle proclaimed him wiser than the rest of us? He's emancipatory as well, right? I mean he did make the claim that even slaves could know higher-level truths of mathematics just as naturally as anyone else (see the Meno). He even asserts that such truths are in all of us.  Radical, right? His pedagogy obviously scared the hell out of the Athenian elites, proclaiming in a state of panic that he was corrupting the youth. So what's not to like here? Isn't this the kind of emancipatory revolution Jacotot and Rancière are attempting to achieve?

First, we have to examine our language games when it comes to speaking about truth procedures:

'Know yourself' no longer means, in the Platonic manner, know where your good lies. It means come back to yourself, to what you know to be unmistakably in you. Your humility is nothing but the proud fear of stumbling in front of others. Stumbling is nothing; the wrong is in diverging from, leaving one's path, no longer paying attention to what one says, forgetting what one is. So follow your path (Rancière 57).   

Thus, each one of us describes our parabola around the truth. No two orbits are alike. And this is why the explicators endanger our revolution... The coincidence of orbits is what we have called stultification... This is why the Socratic Method, apparently so close to universal learning, represents the most formidable form of stultification. The Socratic method of interrogation that pretends to lead the student to his own knowledge is in fact the method of [the schoolmaster]" (Rancière 59). 

Paths... Orbits... Celestial trajectories through the infinite cosmos. I love Rancière's articulation of truth procedure as an orbit or path that revolves around something we might call capital-T Truth (Rancière's structuralist professors might've called it the Real). This is not some kind of proclamation of the post-Truth era born out of the laziness of rhetoricians and spin doctors (thinking of Kellyanne Conway's audacious high-jacking of postmodern discourse with the sly suggestion of "alternative facts"). This isn't about facts. This isn't about science. Two things that are very real: just ask the climate scientists. We as teachers are so much more than fact checkers. This is about the power of intelligence, which can only be fully realized if a student is freed to find her own path, no matter how messy it may be. Rancière states, "The only mistake would be to take our opinions (orbits) for the truth (the center)" but this is only a conceptual error, not a procedural one, if the learner is engaged in her process (italics are my addition). In other words, proceed on your path! We are not celebrating every orbit willy-nilly at the expense of doing away with the center, but we are reminding the explicators that the master's method is not the center as well, which is the stultifier's conceptual error, an error that (unlike the student's) becomes procedurally problematic due to one's position as schoolmaster.

Class becomes a culture of compliance (be like me; trace my answers), and not an environment for emancipation. The Socratic method facilitates learning, for sure, but it's not going to emancipate the learner, (but to call it corruption would be absurd: We are not the Athenian reactionaries).

So specifically speaking, what is the objection then? In what ways is Socrates' method still in the service of stultification? Why is he so close, yet so far away?

On Slaves and Schoolmasters: Whose Work? Whose Path? 

Ever been to law school or known someone who has? My wife went, and I recall more tears than feelings of empowerment. Everyday she was her professors' Glaucon, subjected to questioning, trying to show she had the right answer - that she knew "the master's secret." The Socratic method can swallow a person whole, much like Coltrane's dizzying chord changes. By the end of it, one doesn't recognize oneself; one has been broken down and built anew, made into the likeness of a burgeoning lawyer (or a frenzied post-bop jazzmaster).

Ever visited a lively, discussion-based class, full of Socratic circles and all, and winced once the class began because it centered around the teacher, shaping an overly-eager-to-please group of students in his/her likeness? Constantly correcting, redirecting, or re-articulating the students' words, such that the messiness of students' conversations is dressed up in the likeness of the teacher's "more scholarly" way of saying things. I have seen this class. I've been this teacher; he still creeps up impulsively, like almost every day. But why does this explicating spectre still haunt my pedagogy? The answer: it's less work emotionally, or at least it feels that way, to supply a reproducible answer as opposed to verifying the integrity of the student's search. It's easier to plan for, it's easier to mark, and it's easier to provide feedback.

Rancière writes, "Only the lazy are afraid of the idea of arbitrariness and see in it reason's tomb. On the contrary, it is because there is no code given by divinity, no language of languages, that human intelligence employs all its art to making itself understood and to understanding what the neighboring intelligence is signifying" (62). It's hard work to verify the exercise of intelligence; no scantron sheet can account for it. The ignorant schoolmaster accepts this challenge to verify "that [the student] is always searching [because] whoever looks always finds. He doesn't necessarily find what he was looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to thing that he already knows" (33). Not only is this hard work, it's full of uncertainties, and sometimes a teacher's learning gets in the way of "demanding the manifestation of an intelligence that wasn't aware of itself... of verifying that the work of the intelligence is done with attention... [T]he learned master's science make it very difficult for him not to spoil the method" (29). We as teachers have answers, and the students are keenly aware of it, which gets to the heart of where Socrates and Rancière (w/ Jacotot) part ways. Both believe that the power of learning is in everyone regardless of social standing. Both believe that anyone can be intelligent, the irony being that Socrates (Delphi's celebrated ignorant master) implies two more words to the end of his message: "Be intelligent like me." He does this indirectly due to a conceptual error (my method is the method, the center of all orbits) which becomes procedurally problematic ("Come, find the answer. I know you can do it! You're smart!"). The error, of course, was to fixate on answers instead of orbits. To declare the destination before mapping any kind of journey. The Hubble Telescope didn't have a destination in mind when it pointed its lens to the stars, and Rancière's metaphor demands us to look there too, not to caves beneath the earth (see Republic Book X). This is the difference: a pedagogical emphasis on finding the hidden answer versus a focus on searching for the sake of learning. And for Rancière, the stakes couldn't be higher because it's a difference between cultivating compliance or empowerment.

The Socratic Method

The Panecastic Method

While Socrates is busy proving the location of where the answer to the question resides (see Meno), Rancière demands that we recognize the non-locality of all intelligence. It's in all of us: Everything is in everything.  If we trace the masters, we will find answers, but if we map our own journey, we could discover the wonders that no one knew were there. Of course, learn the labyrinthine charts of Coltrane's "Giant Steps," but chart your own standard as well. We know you can; "your humility is nothing but the proud fear of stumbling in front of others. Stumbling is nothing; the wrong is... forgetting what one is. So follow your path" (57).

If you'd like to learn more about the practical work I've done to transform my class discussions from a Socratic style to one that's more "emancipatory," take a look at the OESIS webinar I did back in May, which can be found here:

https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/5313878514640577027

This has been a post for the #Ranciere18 Reading Project. Please feel free to comment and join the conversation.

If you want to get more involved, our google doc is here and our hypothes.is group is here. Email me at jcolley@theoakridgeschool.org if you want editing access to the Google Doc.

#Ranciere18 - Students Need to Take Responsibility for Their Learning. Do the Circumstances of Schools Make It Possible? A Guest Post by Joel Backon

A couple of comments before I begin. First, I am in awe of the blog posts and Twitter responses I’ve seen to date, and thank Jared for organizing this “book club”.  Second, Chapter Three, Reason Between Equals, seems to be the core of Ranciere’s argument. Consequently, I’ll try to tackle the first three sections and leave it to a colleague to handle the rest.

This portion of the book is about intelligence in the broadest sense of the word. As I understand it, young children appear to have a similar intelligence because they are driven equally by instinct and need (paraphrase of 51). One can infer from the next portion that lesser people “...develop the intelligence that the needs and circumstances of their existence demand of them.” (51) So most children are somewhat similar to lesser people. It is now easier to understand that some people exercise will, reflection, and veracity, qualities that propel them to new intellectual heights, as long as their self-knowledge is strong (metacognition) and they don’t follow the path of Icarus. As an ignorant schoolmaster, how am I to understand such a worldview? Does it not create the kind of caste system that was prevalent in the nineteenth century and was seriously challenged during the Sixties? Why isn’t it okay for people to know what they need to know without being classified as lesser people? Are we destined for an intellectual elite or will we be able to create a society that transcends needs and circumstances for higher callings, even if those callings are not the traditional prestigious professions?

Will we be able to create a society that transcends
needs and circumstances for higher calling?

I would like to argue that Ranciere is suggesting something here. If we ask students to take responsibility for their own learning, they will push beyond needs and circumstances because they will feel emancipated (Ranciere’s term - I would say empowered). That’s how the Flemish students learned French. Jacotot emancipated or empowered those students with clear goals and an expectation that they would be successful. His strategy is at the core of good teaching. I’d also like to argue that Jacotot’s strategy would be far more difficult today because we are cursed with knowing more about how kids learn. We are faced with institutional obstacles that grew out of the factory model of education and failed to disappear or be replaced. We now value autonomy, mastery, and purpose (Daniel Pink), and in doing so, have little use for grades, seat time, standardized assessments, late penalties, and detailed rubrics. They are designed to crush the wills of our students so they revert back to needs and circumstances. We must teleport Ranciere to the twenty-first century so he can help us retool our craft to ignite the best from each one of our students.

"We now value autonomy, mastery, and purpose... and in doing so, have little use f
or grades, seat time, standardized assessments, late penalties, and detailed rubrics."

Argument complete. I’m not an English teacher; literary analysis is not my strength. As a historian, I pick up artifacts from texts and try to reconstruct them into something meaningful that will propel us forward today. Trying to figure out exactly what Ranciere means is not a challenge I relish. Using his thoughts to connect with my own experiences and the world around me is more my cup of tea. Please analyze my argument at face value first, and then apply the literary analysis so I can better understand Ranciere’s intentions.

This has been a post by Joel Backon (@jbackon) for the #Ranciere18 reading project. Go here to see the google doc, and go here to join the hypothes.is group.

#Ranciere18 - Part of Your World - A Guest Post by Nick Dressler

It’s kind of fun to do the impossible

-Walt Disney

I’m not the kind of teacher who works for the summer, but don’t get me wrong: I like a good vacation.  Two weeks is about right.  Just enough time to take the family somewhere nice, see some sights, try some new food, maybe—procure a little inspiration.  Then it’s back home for summer school, a couple enrichment camps, and a little gardening before the term starts back up again in August.  Perfect.

This year, my wife and I found ourselves a little antsier than usual, so after school let out for the summer, we jetted off to the UK.  That’s right, reader: London, England.  The capitol of Western culture.  We hit the streets as soon as we landed and enjoyed a quick drink on top of some Yorkshire fish and chips.  Delicious.  When we finished, though, my imploring glance toward my wife was met with a silent riposte and furrowed brow that said it all: “This isn’t up to snuff; let’s get out of here.”  I’m not one to say no to my wife, so we moved on to France, straight away.  Paris, more specifically.  The capitol of Western culture.  Enchantee, Paris.  Immediately, we did the Paris café thing.  Dark coffee, magnifique.  The crème brulee, tres bonne.   Absolute paradise, it was; my little family seated under an umbrella beside some old-looking red brick streets, my little children wiping their cute little mouths of croissant crumbs with cute little napkins, not a care in the world; me—as we speak—drawing my laptop from my backpack for a hasty blog about education.  On my left wrist: a handy, ironic eighties calculator watch that most people think is a Walter White thing, or maybe an homage to that kid from Stranger Things, but the truth is it’s the same watch Ryan Gosling wears in Half Nelson; I bought it immediately after I saw that movie, when Bryan Cranston supported Frankie Muniz and those Stranger Things kids’ parents were seeing off the very decade the show would reference some two decades later.  That’s right: I out hipster the hipster, everyone.  I was there first.  On the other hand, literally, on my right wrist, I sport a blue, rubber Micky Mouse Magic Band with which I can purchase anything at any of the parks, eyes blinded to the bloody cataracts of capital streaming from my wallet.  It drips quietly, the money.  Gone without a whimper.  It also opens my hotel room door.  I am quite the contradiction, nowadays.

Oh, did I forget to mention?  By London and Paris, I meant their miniature, Mouse-sanctioned simulations, as featured at Epcot Center—my family and I are in Disney World, of course; we didn’t even need to cross the Atlantic and we were hand-delivered the highlights of Europe right to our faces, right to our eyes, right down our distended gullets.  Eliminated are the inconveniences of international travel: no extra flight, no unnecessary walking, no dirt or grime in the streets, no pesky foreigners, and no awkward fumbling through un petit peu de francais.  I don’t even need to crane my neck to view the top of the Eiffel Tower as the good people at Disney have condensed it down to just a third of its actual size. What we have is all we want, just a distilled version of England and France right here in the culturally comfortable humidity-hug of sun kissed Florida, USA.  Disney has even shipped in some incredibly qualified English and French citizens to work as waiters in these countries.  Anything for authenticity at Disney World; anything in the name of fun.

All disingenuity aside, I have to admit this Disney World is, if anything, creative, even if it triggers night sweats in Baudrillard.  I consider the different rides and shows and architecture examples of some very innovative people bringing worlds of fiction to life, which is, for me as an English teacher, part of the daily challenge of my job.  These guys, though, they’ve got it down.  Every single detail. Before we left for the park this morning, for instance, we took a dip in our hotel’s Finding Nemo themed pool where my six-year-old son heard audio from the movie piped into the water itself only to be heard when a swimmer dips his head beneath the surface.  Incredulous, he returned to my pool chair.  “You were right dad; Disney world is awesome!”  Just wait, my son, you haven’t even seen the parks yet.  It was like Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” all over again: I can try to describe it for him, but until he experiences it, he will not—he cannot—fathom my description. 

And here is where my two current ventures—Disney vacations and Ranciere texts—intersect (I’m the only one reading Ranciere at mini-France, believe it or not).  Disney world, with all its creative magnificence, stupefies us, which, as Kristen Ross explains, “implies a sense of wonderment or amazement” (7) to the point of inaction.  Disney is attractive, sure, and to the right audience, it can be inspirational.  I imagine, for example, a select group of young visitors go on to lead creative lives after sampling the Disney wares and might even offer their trip to Disney World as a formative experience.  But for the vast majority, Disney World is the goal in-and-of itself.  It’s not a starting point; it’s the end—save up enough money to get the family to Disney, swallow the oily spoonfuls of their fully ripened creative juices, return home, repeat.  For these, Disney world is not creative emancipation from the shackles of possibility that it might be for some.  No, Disney World is the illusion itself—that fetishized social opium that keeps the masses content, quiet, and, more importantly, homogenous.  The people at Disney don’t want my kids, their customers, to go on to lead creative lives, they want my kids to come back to Disney World, to watch their programming, to develop a sense of brand loyalty so my kids buy into the product Disney offers.  Going to Disney World alone becomes a sort of American Dream—a carrot just large enough to galvanize we languid mules through the drudgery of our quotidian lives, be it school or that inhuman rat-race known as the working world.

© BANKSY - photomontage of Napalm Girl by Nick Ut 

This is the problem with capitalism.  Not only are there winners and losers, but these positions are entirely liquid.  Winners don’t have to stay there de jure as they did by virtue of being born into the upper classes during feudalism.  Winners in a capitalism must necessarily become conservative to protect their spots at the top.  Generation upon generation legally exploit the lower classes of their product—their economic capital, their social capital, their creative capital—sometimes stupefying but always stultifying the ambitious proletarian to inaction, failure, and conviction of personal futility.

As part of the capitalistic superstructure, then, our schools must do the exact same thing, only we the teachers take on the role of Disney World and our stakeholders the park-goers.  Our job is to make the content stand on its head.  We’re supposed to interpret it, jazz it up, decorate our rooms with it, relate it to the lives or our students, to contemporary events—we spoon-feed material to our students the same way Disney stuffs our faces with their productions, and, trust me, they learn to eat it, and ask for more if need be.  And although some of our students go on to use what we have taught them to enhance their lives morally and materially, the vast majority learn to play our game simply to graduate to the next grade until they are eventually finished with the ordeal altogether, school being nothing more than a necessary obstruction to the commencement of their actual lives when they graduate from the university. 

I don’t think we teachers do this consciously, so don’t take this as an accusation, as such; however—and Ranciere is clear here—teachers who explicate, despite positive intentions, do nothing to raise their students and, in fact, create a stultifying gap between their intelligence and their students’ the same way Disney World does between their “cast-members” and their fans.  Disney claims only to show, to entertain, to present, not to encourage or improve.  They don’t want you to match their levels of creativity, they want you to hemorrhage bucketfuls of capital into their mouse-eared buckets because you cannot and never will be able to do what they do.  And you know it.  And after you spend your year regenerating your capital, they want you to do it again.  Same goes for schools.  Pay us to enrich you.  Take a break.  Go to Disney World, for crying out loud.  See France and England while you’re there.  See Morocco.  But after that, you come back and do it again and again.  Always come back to school, the unending circle of power from which there is no messiah and no redemptive nirvana.

From Sir Ken Robinson's Changing Education Paradigms

So what do we do?  Even if Ranciere provides what proves to be the perfect recipe for success, it’s not like our school system is in any shape even to absorb such a teaching philosophy—not when grade point averages, standardized test scores, and college scholarships rule the roost.  After all, Ranciere admits that, while Jacotot’s method proves students can and will learn anything they want to, what they want to learn might be nothing at all.  I don’t know about you, but if my students learn “nothing at all,” I am out of a job, and my progressive philosophy of teaching statement will do nothing to hinder the executioner’s ax.  So, again, what do we do?

I recommend starting small.  Winston Smith small.  We can’t expect a total overhaul of the school system at once; it’s the little rebellions that lead to reform.  Change what we can in our classrooms.  Pick one assignment if we have to—one activity, one policy, one discussion.  If we really believe what Ranciere says, we need to get the momentum moving in the right direction, and change will come.  Organic food hasn’t always been available at local chain grocery stores, has it?  But it is now.  Something changed for the better, and the results are there for all to benefit.

This has been a post by Nick Dressler (@nick_dressler) for the #Ranciere18 reading project. Go here to see the google doc, and go here to join the hypothes.is group.