Recently, I taught my sophomores about qualification – the practice of using certain words to qualify generalizations, such as probably, generally, perhaps, etc. Qualifiers, in my opinion, are eminently important since they are the best way to avoid error (such as suggesting that all swans are white) and still make strong evidentiary claims.

But today I ran into an example of overqualification – that is, qualification where none is needed:

Very few of you [in the audience] has [sic] a coin in your pocket with only one side.

Cases such as this where qualifying a claim would indicate that a logical contradiction is possible show how qualification can sometimes end up in absurdity. No one needs to qualify claims about one-sided coins anymore than claims about being able to draw square circles or be married bachelors. If a statement is tautologous, then there is clearly no reason to qualify it.

The text I will use for the activity I have in mind is Jonathan Coulton’s fabulously bittersweet song Blue Sunny Day. I suspect that this activity could be repeated with other songs, but I chose this song for several reasons. The first is that the song itself is musically upbeat – peppy and in a major setting* – and that will help engage students from the get-go. The second is that the tone of the music does not actually match the tone of the lyrics, which are slightly ironic but in the end a little depressing.

The third – and perhaps the most important – is that the song is quite ambiguous. The problem of the narrator – for there is an actual story to this song – is not entirely evident from the lines, but if you read closely enough, you can piece together the very odd problems that the narrator indeed faces.

In fact, the problem itself is another way to engage students: one of the narrator’s key problems is that he is a vampire and cannot go into the sun. (Here I will clearly have to exorcise the ghosts of the Twilight franchise from the room!) The song never says this overtly, though, and the clues are very sparse: the second verse begins, “Looking for an easy mark/I hit the Denny’s after dark/And take a lonely waitress home to drink,” and the song ends with the narrator stepping into the sun: “As I go to pieces and the breeze blows me away”. The underlined sections are puns, and students may interpret them in ordinary mundane ways instead of how they are intended to be taken (e.g. “take X home to drink” as “invite X to one’s house in order to consume alcohol” vs. “invite X home to literally drink X’s blood”).

These ambiguities make the language rich with meaning, and it provides a perfect opportunity to have students learn how to do a close reading and how to make inferences based on prior knowledge. For instance, it takes an understanding of the normal (non-Twilight) vampire mythos to see how “going to pieces” could be a clue indicating that the narrator is literally turning to dust as vampires normally do in the sunlight.

I hope to make this a fun centerpiece to a lot of introductory thoughts on literacy and what it means, especially taking it into realms that they know – movies, comic books, video games, music, etc. – and drawing out what makes them literate in those media.† If they can start thinking analytically about their own literacy, then that should hopefully carry over into other spheres of thought and will cultivate a better sense of critical thinking in general.

I’m hopeful and excited about the idea since it gives me a more interesting start to the year and will hopefully build some much-needed literacy skills. But if nothing else, I hope it will be a fun and engaging activity.

I am happy to announce that I have not yet been disappointed.

Before I get into the specifics of what I’ve read so far (which isn’t much, but there’s plenty to say about that), let me just say that I was impressed first and foremost by a few of the authors of articles in this edition. The first two actual articles are written by (respectively) George Hillocks, Jr., and Thomas M. McCann; the former is a very highly respected language arts researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, and the latter is another very respected researcher, former superintendent, and associate professor at Northern Illinois University (who also gave the keynote at this year’s ITEC conference that I attended in April at Illinois State University).

My knowledge of these gentlemen is roundabout: I had heard of Hillocks through Peter Smagorinsky (both from a college text and from articles in EJ) and knew that Hillocks basically set the standard for English language arts through his constructivist modeling. When I heard McCann’s keynote in April, he also spoke of Hillocks as somewhat foundational. Hillocks is particularly responsible (I believe) for the recent conclusion that traditional grammar instruction does not improve student writing, despite how well entrenched it is in modern practice.

If I had generalized Hillocks’s position into a rule, I might have had warrant for guessing what his position is on teaching arguments: don’t teach the formal stuff. (Do you know the Toulmin method? You do if you got the significance of the italicized words.) As disappointing as it is for me to admit – I love formal logic! – I think Hillocks is right. When I teach logical fallacies, most of it goes over their heads, even with giving them examples and asking them to determine what they think is wrong first. Simply put, students can tell you that it’s illegitimate to argue based on how popular a belief is, but they don’t really care that it’s called the bandwagon fallacy or argumentum ad populum or even argument from popularity. Robert C. Covel later disagrees with this and does introduce an interesting point: students may encounter terms like ad hominem if they get interested in national discourses, even on 24-hour news or some political shows, but I think that such discussions probably should not carry much weight.

What has surprised me (in some ways) about the Hillocks and McCann articles, as well as later ones, is the wide range of activities intended to teach critical thinking. Hillocks suggests a murder mystery scenario, asking students to identify general rules that can then be applied to the scenario to deduce what actually happened; McCann presents an activity where students have to analyze paintings to see which one would be best suited to be donated for a hospital waiting room; Paula M. Carbone even explains how a commonplace book – a scrapbook of sorts intended to help students engage current issues – can be used to cultivate multiple perspectives, an invaluable tool for arguing effectively.

Since I am so passionate about helping students learn how to think well, these ideas strike me as incredibly useful, and I suspect that I will use Hillocks’s idea in particular for my sophomores this year. (It’s fitting since we’ll read Agatha Christie at the end of the year, and I have students write their own murder mysteries to get them to think about the components of a good mystery.) I do a lot of persuasion with all of my classes, and this would be an interesting way of testing how this method works on a class I’ll get to follow for the next few years and see how they progress.

Educators – if you’re still with me this summer – what are some critical thinking exercises that have worked well for you? Leave a comment about how you use critical thinking and reasoning in the classroom.

But beyond all of the very interesting (and frequently hilarious) discussions we’ve had in the workshop itself, I am thankful for the opportunity to connect with teachers from all over the United States: from Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and a host of other states. The group I’m with is incredibly well-experienced (with many teachers having over 20 years of experience – I’m the least experienced teacher here), incredibly well-traveled (I think I might be one of only a few who has never gone abroad), and so incredibly witty. Perhaps the best conversations have happened outside of the workshop, with dinners at many of the fine establishments around Bloomington. (By the way, for those who have never been, IU has a gorgeous campus. Go see it sometime if you have the opportunity.)

The conversation that I just came from, however, was perhaps  the most awe-inspiring conversation I’ve ever had. One of our lecturers is a professor of East Asian language and literature at a Midwestern school (I’m not sure if I can really give more specifics in deference to the individual’s wishes) who also happened to be present in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989. The details given about the protests leading up to the massacre, the massacre itself, and what happened to this individual afterwards (including arrest and imprisonment for 3 months) were simply unbelievable. There was a group of the teachers that went to lunch with this lecturer and discussed China more broadly, and it was absolutely…I don’t know that I have words left to describe it. It is one of those conversations I will not quickly forget, and one that I hope to share with others.

This are the moments that I love as a teacher: learning moments. I knew about the massacre, why it started, what occurred, and so forth. But I didn’t know how to explain to my students (who present on Tiananmen Square in my senior world lit course) the human impact of this horrible tragedy and really what it says about the Chinese government – and perhaps worse, what current Chinese college students say about it. (The lecturer told us that one such group of students claimed that the government had to stifle the protests to retain stability and that his/her memories of the massacre must be the result of brainwashing. I think a lot of jaws dropped at that.)

I will have many more things to bring to the table this coming year because of this workshop, and I am so glad that I sacrificed a little bit of time – and a little bit of time with my family specifically – to come and do this. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

We had one of these investigative moments this past year with my younger son, specifically regarding the possibility of a metabolic disorder causing his hypotonia (and perhaps contributing to his autism and global delays as well). To get more clues, blood work was needed to test for the level of certain amino acids and other chemical markers. One of these markers was lactic acid: elevated levels might indicate a metabolic disorder and provide something for a geneticist to work with.

There was a problem with this, however: lactic acid levels tend to rise with muscle exertion, so the blood needed to be drawn from my 18-month-old son without causing him to exert himself while we were trying to get blood.

If you’re not aware, taking blood from an infant is no walk in the park. Logistically, it’s not easy to get a needle into an infant’s miniscule* veins, and a tourniquet is needed to make the veins appear prominently enough. Guess what a tourniquet does? It causes muscle exertion. So when the first blood test for this was done, the lab techs taking the blood were instructed not to use a tourniquet. The result was not pretty: close to 20 minutes and a few sticks to get enough blood for the various tests, and even then a tourniquet was used briefly to get the needle in.

When that first test came back high for lactic acid, we came back in and were instructed to get a second blood sample to be on the safe side. The same thing applied here, except that it took us nearly an hour and probably 4-5 sticks before these different techs got enough blood (and again, they had to use a tourniquet). It was torture for all involved, not the least of whom was our infant. And lo and behold, there were high levels of lactic acid.

Finally, we saw a geneticist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and we expressed our concern to him that these tests might not have been valid because of the way they were taken. At the end of the visit, the geneticist and genetic counselor took what turned out to be the final blood sample by putting on a tourniquet initially, finding the vein, and getting the blood drawn – all in around 45 seconds.

The test came back with normal levels of lactic acid.

I later mused about this whole experience with my wife and how difficult it was the first two times in comparison to the last. “The problem with the first two,” I remarked, “is that they had a very limited goal for their samples: Don’t use the tourniquet because it causes muscle exertion. The last one had a much better and broader goal: Get the blood without causing much muscle exertion. If the first two samples had been done with the broader goal in mind, then maybe they wouldn’t have abstained from using a tourniquet.”

And like many things, I realized that this notion applies just as much to me in the classroom.

When I plan for a school year, especially for a year-long class, I should be setting goals as to what I want students to be able to do at the end of the year, using semesters as a marker for what has been accomplished thus far – a formative assessment. But I didn’t keep larger goals like those in focus when I did my weekly and daily planning, and as a result, I was working to stem the tide for one day or get through a specific piece of material without seeing how I was impacting my students on a larger level. I don’t even know what kind of shape my students this past year left in, whether or not they accomplished the things I had hoped they would. That is a serious problem for me that needs to be remedied.

So when the next school year comes, I need to have goals – and the right ones, not myopic goals that will only get me through this day or this week – and monitor them diligently, changing my instruction as necessary to make the goals work.

Otherwise, I might just be stabbing away for nothing.

*I first typed in “miniscule” without any thought to the spelling, but my in-browser spellchecker said that was wrong. Turns out that we were both right, and I didn’t even realize there was any controversy over the spelling. Nice to learn something you never set out to learn.

By which I mean: It’s infecting even my dreams!

Okay, “infect” is a little bit hyperbolic. Still, though, I’ve been out of school for over two weeks, and I’m still thinking about it. Even when I’m not there (physically), I’m there (mentally).

Literally, though, I have been dreaming about school. This wouldn’t be strange except for the fact that I rarely ever remember my dreams. My mind keeps going back to it – or, should I say, forward to it, i.e. the upcoming school year. I have over two months before it comes and plenty else to occupy my thoughts (moving, selling a house, replacing vehicles and major appliances), but what do I think about?

Teaching.

I’m so bad about this at times that I actually checked my class rosters for next year (yes, I was able to get access to them – don’t judge me). Mostly good news from those at least regarding my junior and senior classes, who have been split along different lines and perhaps in more reasonable distributions. My sophomores, however, are really disparate: 15 in one and 7 in the other, with almost all of the challenging students* in the larger section. I doubt I will be able to change this, of course, so I’ll just have to prepare. It’s early in the day (if memory serves), and I already knew that I would need to come down very firmly on this class to ensure a good year. I have some cracks in the wall that is likely to be erected by this class, and I fully intend to exploit those weak spots where possible.

That sounds horrible – the rhetoric of exploitation – but I assuredly only mean it in a disciplinary sense. Otherwise, I want students to thrive, and I already have at least one incoming sophomore who said that she’s excited for my class (maybe because she has older siblings who I’ve taught this past year).

Best part, though: only 3 friggin’ preps. No more elective, no more single-shot classes. And they’re all classes I taught this past year, so I will have a great deal of material already prepared for what I will re-teach, even though I will definitely change a lot of things for this year. Most ambitious project: more research for all of the courses (well, except for seniors, who already have research in the curriculum).

I have a lot to think about…but for now, I think I’ll try to escape those thoughts, or at least put them on the backburner.

The Good Stuff

One of the problems of doing a reflection for a whole year is that sometimes the good things can slip through the cracks of memory. (The bad things are very seldom ever so neat and tidy that they go down the cracks – the memory hole, if you will – so easily.) Nevertheless, I think I can identify some good things that came out of this year.

Probably the biggest accomplishment that I can think of is setting up a reputation for being approachable and personable to all students, even the ones I don’t have in class yet. Part of that stems from having lunch supervision this year and being in a situation where I needed – or at least felt it prudent – to explain certain decisions, especially those that weren’t mine. This ranged from explaining the concept of in loco parentis to the most recent example when I had to point out to a student complaining about the seemingly unfair punishment of some classmates that they had clear choices and chose the wrong ones. Again, gotta give the credit to James Nehring: dealing with students like they’re reasonable people who have reasonable concerns makes a big difference.

Another great thing that came out of this year – even if a bit too late – was the realization that being approachable and personable can sometimes lead to students feeling like they can take advantage of you. There’s of course a balance to find between being available to students and setting clear boundaries, and I think even my failures in that this year have made me realize that mercy is nice sometimes, but students still need to see clear consequences for their actions. I admit that I cut a lot of students slack this year – mostly because there were times where I felt it would have been unfair because of other shortcomings of mine in communication – but I really made it clear this last quarter that things needed to change.

In addition, I learned a great lesson about the importance of changing the rules of the game to help define boundaries a little better. My biggest failure this year was probably my major quarterly book project, which wasn’t always very well structured. As a result, students failed to approve books for projects and often threw projects together at the last minute (especially projects that involved drawing or sketching), trying to manipulate the guidelines set in order to do virtually no work at all to get credit for the project. As a testament to this: my wife helped me clean up my room today, and she picked up one such project and remarked incredulously, “They actually turned this in for a project?” So I know next year to set different guidelines for book approvals (by midterm, I think) and to put far more stringent limits on the projects that can be done, in addition to enforcing them early on. (Fortunately, only one class – the sophomores going into their junior year – will have this project with me next year, so that limits the number of students who will have to learn these significant changes.)

One final thing (I can’t say too much now – maybe more later): I’ve learned that I work with some people who aren’t exceptionally good communicators. I had been told by professors that kicking students out of the classroom was often a sign to administrators that you couldn’t control your classroom, so I kept students in the classroom and things got out of hand. When I talked to veteran teachers, their advice way into the year: “Kick them out on the first day they act up. You won’t get any guff about it from anyone.” Had I known this earlier in the year, I might have saved myself a lot of headache. So one very simple lesson I’ve learned is to ask questions and find reliable sources who will provide guidance – and it seems like I’ve got a lot of good stuff in that regard.

The Problematic Stuff

I don’t want to dwell on my failures too much – I’ve had plenty of them – but I need to acknowledge those things where I already knew what I should have done and simply failed to do it or do it well.

One thing that will be a big obstacle for me to overcome next year is discipline. Now, I will say in my defense that I did have a few exceptional situations that complicated my classroom management significantly, but there were plenty of situations where I needed to take better control of the situation – including kicking problem students out – and I just didn’t manage it.

This was no less evident than in my writing class, which was out of hand enough that students not in the course had a pretty good idea of how certain students in the course acted. (For the record, I heard nothing that blamed me for the class’s lack of discipline, which was encouraging.) There were certain students who are so unresponsive to the normal disciplinary techniques that often work for me with many students, and I ignored more than I should have. What will really help me for next year is having an awareness of the sorts of behaviors that have already been displayed by certain students and setting my threshold for those behaviors very low – and acting at the first sign of recurrent behavior. Even though I try not to let myself get riled up by students, I think there’s a degree to which I need to get angry about these kinds of misbehaviors, and this sort of righteous anger – perhaps out of concern for all that the other students lose – can help motivate me to do the right thing.

One other little thing: I feel like I failed to challenge students in a lot of ways. A lot of that was in daily planning, and I hope to get a much firmer grip on daily activities, making use of time, and forcing students to get engaged by whatever means necessary. They can get engaged – I’ve seen it at various points from virtually all of my classes – and I need to make that happen in creative ways.

The Stuff I Never Would Have Expected

This might be better as a short list:

• Getting kidney stones for the second time
• Having a student threaten to have the school board fire me (which wasn’t even possible)
• Being nearly overshadowed by my predecessor two teachers back, and subsequently
• That incredibly well-liked and -respected teacher’s untimely passing and having to help my students cope with that loss
• A mass protest in the wake of staff layoffs due to massive budget cuts

It was an incredibly crazy year, certainly for me in context of my past experience but probably also in terms of the average school year as well.

The Verdict

I don’t consider my performance this year to have been exemplary, but I think I got through without too much damage to myself or the students. There were bumps in the road, some of which I suffered better than others, but mostly I found myself rising to the occasion and doing what I needed to do. But I’m not going to toot my own horn: if I were to self-assess, I would say that I get a C+ for this year, with my exceptional moments here and there.

However, I see hope for the future. Many of my students last year in student teaching told me that I’d be a great teacher someday, and I think they’re right – as long as I see that goal ahead and work hard at it, honing my skills and finding what works for my students, adapting where necessary. I need to be bolder, more creative, and smarter about how I approach the classroom.

But for now, the summer is soon to begin. After graduation tomorrow evening, I can relax and work on other things for the summer, including a music project that I’m going to be participating in with some other people connected to my alma mater.

Post-Script: The Final Notes

Speaking of graduation and music, I do want to bring out one more victory I had. My experiences bringing in my guitar this year led to an interesting request from some of my seniors: to play songs to go with the senior slide show that is shown at graduation. We worked out what songs I could do from a list of songs they wanted to have (some of them included because I played them in class), and I set out to arrange them. In order to record them well enough to be played at graduation, I enlisted the help of an English professor at my alma mater who has a small recording setup in his home, and in about 16 hours or so, we recorded 5 popular songs, all instruments played by yours truly. (That includes acoustic and electric guitars, piano, organ, synthesized drums, synthesized bass, synthesized strings, and vocals.) I’ll get to listen to them tomorrow evening at graduation, and I hope they go over well. If nothing else, it will be something rewarding to have left the senior class, and that’s worth a lot to me. (By the way, I’ll post a link to what I’ve done when I get all of the songs uploaded to the Myspace account I set up.)

And now, with these finishing touches to the year, I am going to call it a night.

To (roughly) quote Thornton Wilder: “You get a good night’s sleep, too.”

I have been arguing in various Internet forums – message boards, chat rooms, and more recently, facebook statuses/comments – ever since I really got into the Internet roughly 10 years ago. And I have very consistently noticed one trend in the most heated of battles that I feel I must speak out about. I call it the “more research” gambit.

I first encountered this way back when I first encountered people who were profoundly anti-vaccination. I was surprised by this even from the beginning – before I knew the core complaints, it just sounded odd – but I quickly came to see that the more I got involved, the more frequently I heard:

You just need to do more research.

Even before I knew this as fallacious reasoning, I thought this entirely unhelpful. If I am to ascertain the truth of something, what research am I supposed to do? What sources provide good information? Where do I go from here if I want to figure out the answer apart from the argument? No one ever followed up with that information. If there was more information out there that would elucidate the arguments of my opponents, they never saw fit to enlighten me with those facts.

But this is a more common occurrence than just the one forum where I first noticed it. I saw it even tonight in a comment on a status about government involvement in healthcare (I really should know better by now). It’s exasperating, mildly amusing, and totally irrational.

Here’s the problem: telling someone they need to do “more research” (or if you’re dealing with someone truly arrogant, you might be told simply that you need to do research in general) shirks the burden of proof. In arguments, the person making a positive claim bears the burden of proof in supporting that claim with reasons, evidence, etc. It’s fundamentally the reason why the accused in civilized courts of law are presumed innocent until proven guilty: the positive claim (charging someone with a crime) demands proof, not the negative claim (the denial of such an act).

When you tell someone that they need to do more research, what you are essentially saying is, “Go look it up yourself; I can’t be bothered to provide evidence for my claim.” No one should be persuaded by an argument where you imply that your opponent is simply ignorant without attempting to correct that ignorance, and anyone who argues thusly should be rightly dismissed as someone arguing merely to win an argument, not to really arrive at a true conclusion.

Remember, arguments are not merely about wasting time trying to persuade your opponent: in the end, hopefully you will come out with a firmer grasp on your own position or a new understanding of the issue. Sending your opponent on a wild goose chase for more evidence, especially with the presumption that your opponent hasn’t already done the research, won’t result in any new or better understanding, and so it should simply be rejected.

So if anyone ever utters that phrase – You just need to do more research – tell them this:

Put up or shut up.

And that’s all there is to it.

Last Friday, I finally had a great opportunity to see some of my students in action, under some interesting circumstances: our girls’ softball team played in my hometown (where I currently live) against my alma mater. I knew this was coming, so I planned in advance to make it, and I took along my oldest son (the younger one would have come, but he had just had tubes put in his ears, and it was a windy day).

The reaction of students was awesome – the girls were initially pretty surprised that I came, with one of my seniors saying, “Wait, Mr. B is here? Our English teacher?” And they got to see my son in the throes of a meltdown, spurred mostly by the fact that there was a playground within sight that he desperately wanted to play on. I think that really did bring it home to some of them that, hey, I’m a real person, too. (Class discussions about autism have also helped this.)

And when I returned to school yesterday after the weekend, another teacher passed on that some students had even brought up that I came to the game, and she said they were impressed at that.

Again, it’s a shame that it took so long for this to happen (why can’t the teams here play my alma mater more often?), but I’m glad it did. Maybe this will lay some foundations for the future.

Fingers crossed.

I’ll update again soon when I have a moment to breathe, and I definitely have a lot of reflecting to do with only a month or so left of my first year. It has gone by fast, and I need the opportunity to look back and critically evaluate what I did – or didn’t do – that affected the course of this year.

[I'm also testing something with WP - don't mind this.]