Since finishing my last book, I have moved on to a book I have wanted to read for ages, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. As a parent of a child with autism, I have heard interesting things about the fact that this story is written from the point of view of a person who has autism and speaks frankly about it. I can’t speak directly to how an autistic person sees the world, but I think that the way Haddon approaches the writing is very authentic, and it is written with first-hand experience of autistic individuals: Haddon had worked previously with autistic children. It’s a very compelling work; I started it today and am already about 75% done with it.

So far, two very interesting topics have jumped out to me. The first is a literary issue, concerning metaphors:

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words μετα (which means from one place to another) and φερειν (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.

I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person is talking about.  (p.15)

And shortly thereafter in a footnote concerning the sentence “It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils”:

This is not a metaphor; it is a simile, which means that it really did look like there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils, and if you make a picture in your head of a man with two very small mice hiding in his nostrils, you will know what the police inspector looked like. And a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile. (p.17)

Forgiving some obvious errors – the phrasing “a pig is not like a day” indicates a simile, which is explicitly not problematic according to the narrator Christopher, and “the apple of my eye” is not so much a metaphor as an idiom – I find the evaluative distinction between a metaphor and simile to be fascinating, mostly because both are examples of figurative language, language that is explicitly not meant to be taken literally. (Of course, one can reliably assume that an autistic narrator will be prone to errors of hyperliteralism; it’s a stereotype. Christopher in particular is also very opposed to lies in general, so bringing out this point isn’t surprising.) It should give us pause, however, in our own language use to consider those disadvantaged groups that may have problems with comprehension: language learners and those with linguistic delays or deficiencies.

(I also had never really thought about the etymology of the word metaphor: it is definitely very meta.)

The second is more contemplative, which is Christopher’s musing on prime numbers:

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them. (p.12)

Dead on, in my opinion.

I don’t even have to finish reading this book to tell you, faithful reader, that you should read this book if you haven’t already. If nothing else, it will give you some insight into a more diverse way of seeing the world, and you will find yourself entertained in the process.

If one can be considered a fan of some grammatical artifact, I am a fan of the subjunctive mood, for some undefinable reason. Maybe it’s because the subjunctive is somewhat of an endangered species, having all but disappeared from modern English. I’m not a stickler about it – I don’t know that I can really be called a stickler about anything grammatical other than the bare essentials for communication – but I have been known to advise students in feedback about its formal use. Yes, it might be acceptable in general to say something like “If I was six feet tall, I would be much better at basketball” even though the subjunctive would call for the construction “If I were six feet tall…”

However, I suggest that there are instances where understanding of the remaining uses of the subjunctive mood or at least the underlying reasons for its existence are useful, since it does still exist but is rarely ever taught explicitly. Generally, this should consist at least of an understanding that the subjunctive can be used to express a state or proposition that is contrary to fact.

Some real-life situations:

1. A student in one of my classes was talking about something gender-related (I don’t recall the specifics) and asked me, “Mr. B, if you were a guy–”; at this point, I interrupted and said, “Whoa, wait a minute: are you saying that I’m not a guy?” He didn’t intend (I think) to communicate this piece of information, but it was communicated nonetheless through the construction.
2. Similarly, my wife recently started out a sentence, “If I were me,” at which point I remarked that she must have some severe identity (and logic) issues.

So even if the subjunctive is on its way to extinction, despite my affinity for it, understanding the remnants of this mood can in fact be useful. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I finished the book I’ve been reading this week earlier today, Why Do We Gotta Do This, Mr. Nehring?: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School by James Nehring, and I have to give it my highest recommendations for any junior high or high school teacher (although it will be more topical for the latter). It is a very compelling book, equal parts narrative and commentary but all contained within a narrative framework that is very approachable. Nehring does a great job of telling the story of education – not a history, but the way things are. I say “are” because I don’t think things have changed a whole lot in the 20 years since this book was written and published; in fact, if you replaced all instances of “Walkmen” with “iPods,” there would be virtually no dissonance with the reality of education in 2009.

There is much that can be said about Nehring’s commentary – perhaps the most important part of the book, although the narrative is entertaining and engaging – but I want to return to that dreaded question that I wrote about a few days ago*.

The question, of course, is in the title of the book, and Nehring returns to it on multiple occasions. Later on, when Nehring is talking about explaining the reason for “why we gotta do this” to a low-achieving class, he turns the lens inward:

Teachers have grown weary of telling kids why they gotta do stuff. Worse yet, I fear we’ve stopped asking ourselves. So we tell the kids with knuckleheaded determination that they gotta do it, so just do it. And when pressed, we say it’s on the test or it’s just something that an educated person should know. So a kid tries his best, under the circumstances, to learn what he must conclude is meaningless, and he either learns it or doesn’t learn it or he learns it partially, then turns around and forgets it completely because after all it’s meaningless. The next year, when a different teacher starts teaching the same stuff, the kid figures, why ask why we gotta do it since we gotta do it, anyway. Third time around, if the kid’s sense of justice has not been completely subdued, acceptance turns to resentment: All right, I’ll do it, dammit. While all this is going on in the kid’s mind, the teachers follow a related mental path. You learned this last year, says the teacher. Don’t you guys remember anything? Then, in the faculty room, teachers talk. We teach this every year to these kids, and you’d think by the time they reach high school, they’d know it. If concern among the staff becomes great enough, then a departmental meeting is called (sometimes multidepartmental) and at this meeting all jointly exclaim how terrible it is that kids don’t know this stuff, and it’s TV, and it wasn’t this way twenty years ago, and it’s time we set up some rules and policies. If there are educationists in the group, they talk about “articulating the curriculum,” which means that instead of making the kids do the same meaningless stuff every year, we make them do a little of it each year on the incorrect assumption that the kids can’t do it because it’s too difficult, when of course the real reason is that they don’t do it because it’s meaningless. (pp. 124-125)

There’s a lot in that passage, much of which isn’t all extraordinary in education. But what it does make me think about is what I’m doing and what I should be thinking about.

It’s a fundamental problem with the way we set up curricula, in my opinion, and I can’t say that I’ve done much to change it despite having the power to control what I teach almost absolutely (that is, my curricular choices have really only been limited by the available materials, not really by top-down proscriptions on required material). Why do we read Moby-Dick in American lit (or at least study it)? Generally, the answer is something like “Because it’s one of the classics” or “Because that’s part of the standard curriculum for an American lit survey.” If you want to go for a more intellectual answer, you might say something like “Because it provides excellent material to compare the elements of Dark Romantic or Anti-Transcendentalist literature with Romantic and Transcendentalist literature,” but that of course just pushes the question back one step further to “Why do we gotta worry about stuff like transcendentalism?” Eventually, that question needs a satisfactory response.

Some of the material I’ve been teaching has an easy explanation. My sophomores have been preparing informational speeches, which they will begin presenting on Monday, and the answer there is easy: “Because knowing how to speak well in a formal setting is an incredibly important that will help make you successful in the real world.” My seniors wrote a college application essay, and…well, I didn’t have to explain the relevance of that assignment to them. Neither did I have to draw out the reason for writing autoethnographies, which my seniors really dug into and explored in interesting ways.

But I can think of opportunities that I’ve missed to really connect my curriculum to the real world. When I got remarks like this when studying Native American creation myths in junior English, I could have said, “Because it’s important to understand what oral cultures valued” or even “Because it provides us an opportunity to look at our own myths with a critical eye.” I could have more fully explained to my sophomores how reading about individuals from different cultures can allow us to draw connections to our own lives and see how some themes and issues, like missing a loved one who you are apart from (a theme of one of our stories, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” by Jhumpa Lahiri), are somewhat universal; the answer here is “Because making these connections will help us empathize with other cultures and think of them not as strange and uncivilized but as fellow humans” or “Because understanding those who are different from us is important for us to coexist with them as citizens in an increasingly globalized world.”

It’s a question I want to keep asking myself, in the hopes that I don’t press on to teach my students something that I don’t think is worthwhile. I’m in a place to make my classes fairly customized and relevant to my students, in a way that perhaps many teachers don’t have the flexibility to do. Don’t want to teach Julius Caesar? See ya, Brutus and Cassius. Want to teach something that is outside the canon? Go ahead, if it’s appropriate for the audience (reading level, maturity level, etc.). So why don’t I do that?

Truthfully, because it’s a lot of work. But that doesn’t make it out of the question, and it’s a goal I still hope to achieve at some point, even if it’s not attainable in the first year.

One more thing that I want to add (this is long enough already) – Nehring talks about a student in the early days of personal computers and word processors (and we’re talking early, given that this is the late ’80s) who starts plagiarizing information for reports, even going so far as to offer the service for other students. In the same way that he turns the lens inward regarding the rationale for our curricular choices, Nehring states why this often happens:

When kids are not taught how to do something, they learn how not to do it. Teachers call this cheating. Kids call it survival. (p.130)

Having had a student cheat, I agree with this – it took a conversation to understand that the student didn’t know what to do and had resorted to plagiarism instead of coming to ask me. When I understood that, it was easy to offer a second chance and rethink my own pedagogy.

It’s not easy to look at teaching this way, and certainly we get blamed for a lot as teachers that we don’t deserve blame for, but it’s a different perspective, one that can make us re-examine what we do. We must remember that out of all the people that walk into our classrooms, there is only one person whose actions we will ever be able to change: ourselves.

It’s not really a victory in the classroom, but I count it a victory nonetheless.

One of my professional duties is lunch duty, which probably sounds ridiculously boring but which I find to be a very useful time. This is for several reasons: first, it’s non-instructional time, and the amount of actual supervisory work is incredibly low. I also have duty for the first period of lunch (out of two), and this period happens to be almost the exact disjunction of the set of students I currently have in class – that is, I teach 10^th-12^th graders (well, most of them), and this period covers 7^th-9^th grades – so I have been able to get acquainted with a number of students who I will (most likely) have in class in the next few years. Consequently, I think I have begun to build positive relationships with many of these students, and I think this will work out in my favor.

But these aren’t even the best things about having lunch duty. My favorite part is, to be blunt, basketball.

The students have roughly 30 minutes to eat, and there are a number of students (particularly boys) who finish in about 15 minutes and then use the rest of the period to do other things, especially basketball and, to a lesser extent, volleyball. They play on one side of the multi-purpose room where we eat lunch, and so it’s easy to supervise.

I’ve always liked basketball – not really professional basketball (college or NBA), but the real thing, live and in person. I used to play basketball quite a bit when I was younger, although I eventually grew less interested in it. (I attribute part of this to my father, who has been an avid basketball player for ages.) So watching the kids play has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my day, at least when the students are cooperating and playing fairly.

As with every other day, the bell rang to signal the end of the lunch period, and the boys playing basketball split into two groups: those who bolted for the door, and those who fought to get one or two more shots before they had to get to class. And as I always do, I go over to get the basketball and shoo the students off to class so I can put the balls away and get to my own lunch.

But something different happened today – when I got the ball, the few students left, all of them freshmen, urged me, “Shoot it, Mr. B!” At first I shrugged it off, and then my eye caught a red ribbon that had fallen on the floor (this week is Red Ribbon Week, and students are wearing red ribbons with a weak adhesive on the back). I asked them whose ribbon it was, and one student says, “If you shoot it, then I’ll pick it up.”

Now a compromise had been issued, and it wasn’t even contingent on my success in the shot. I quickly did a cost-benefit analysis: if I don’t shoot, then I’ve missed an opportunity to meet the students on their terms in a low-risk setting; if I shoot and miss, then we can laugh it off and continue on our day; but if I shoot and make it, then I have the opportunity to really gain the students’ respect.

What did I really have to lose?

So I did the wise thing and took the ball forward a little from where I had been standing to the three-point line, thinking aloud, “Okay, but I haven’t shot a basketball in years, literally.” (That’s actually true.) And I took the shot.

And like the ending of a predictable basketball movie, it was nothing but net.

I still can hardly believe that I made the shot, especially a three-pointer. I fully expected to miss – I had just been hoping that I would at least hit the rim!

The best part, though, was seeing the freshmen boys just erupt when the ball made its swoosh through the net. It was easily one of the best moments I’ve had this year with a group of boys that I’m really starting to like, despite only seeing them for half an hour in a non-instructional setting. Still, I can hope that this one little moment, this one little victory, will put me in a still better place to really engage these students on a personal level when they get to my classroom next year (if all goes as planned).

If only all my days were like this: nothing but net.

Post now updated with post-data – see bottom of entry.

I have often been disappointed at the reaction that some students have had to activities I’ve prepared, especially the ones I’ve been excited about. I once tried to do an activity with eighth graders that was essentially an improvisational exercise utilizing an understanding of the four types of sentences – declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, imperative – based on an improv bit that was done on the late great improv show Whose Line Is It, Anyway? where the participants are given a certain type of sentence and can only use that type of sentence to carry on a dialogue. (The Whose Line? bit focused on questions, and they also did something similar with song titles.) I thought it would be fun and it would engage current knowledge – well, it bombed, badly. Part of it was a lack of understanding of what they needed to do, and part of it (I think) was a lack of motivation to be creative.

So when I started planning an activity today, I decided to temper my enthusiasm with a little cynicism about how well it will be received.

A brief explanation: We’re covering speeches in my sophomore English class, starting with informative speeches. I wanted to focus on the nonverbal elements today, but I decided to take a different approach than I did with my juniors, where I simply gave them the material verbally. Think about that for a minute: I used verbal communication almost exclusively to deliver material about nonverbal communication. If that isn’t wrongheaded, I don’t know what is.

Thus my idea for today was conceived: give the students an opportunity to present the material to each other nonverbally. You can think of it as sort of teaching-by-charades, except that verbal communication is acceptable (and sometimes necessary) to present the various elements of nonverbal communication (NVC). For instance, one of the elements I want students to be aware of is pitch/tone, specifically to avoid monotone speaking. It will be essential that the student speak in order to convey this issue.

I have an envelope right now of a dozen or so different NVC elements that students will choose at random and then take a few seconds to figure out how to deliver without stating them directly. It’s a chance for students to get a little creative and crazy with the class in a (hopefully) productive way.

So here are my ratings of this activity:

• Personal satisfaction: 8 out of 10
• Student satisfaction (ideal): 6 out of 10
• Student satisfaction (probable): 4 out of 10

We’ll see if I’m wrong or I’ve understated how they’ll respond; it might also depend on the class and the individual students. I’m still hopeful, but I’m not going to get my hopes up – they have been dashed too often for me to feel too confident about the activity for the first time.

Go on, sophomores – prove me wrong. Let’s have some fun.

Update (15:16, 10/27): My final assessment after using this activity – about 5-6 out of 10. Better than hoped, but not as good as my initial assessment. I think that this approach to activities I really like might be somewhat more realistic.

As noted recently, I’m currently reading James Nehring’s wonderful book Why Do We Gotta Do This Stuff, Mr. Nehring?: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School. It’s a fascinating book, written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that focuses on one day but jumps back and forth between the (somewhat) hypothetical events of this single day and the very real issues that affect teachers, such as groupwork and leading discussions. I’m enjoying it immensely.

I wondered when looking at the title if Nehring would discuss that dreaded question – “Why do we have to do this?” – and I wasn’t disappointed:

In my first year of teaching I would have regarded this question as profanity. In my inexperienced teacher’s mind I would have interpreted the question to mean, “This stuff is bogus, it’s a waste of time,” and for anybody to suggest that the lesson I spent three hours preparing the night before, laboring with care to create as an exemplar of instructional technique, is “bogus,” and for anyone to suggest that what I spent six years in college and graduate school studying, and which the adult world recognizes without question as important and meaningful, is “a waste of time,” well, it just shows what an idiot that person is.

Of course, what I did not appreciate in that first year was that it was my job to cure kids of their idiocy, i.e., their self-absorption, by showing them the world has a bearing on their lives. Anyway, I now take “Why do we gotta learn this stuff, anyway” at face value because it is, after all, a forthright question. (pp. 38-39)

I have long despised this question, mostly (I think) because I want to presume that students understand the chain of authority responsible for instruction: from school board to superintendent to principal to me, all of us agreed that this material is an important of our curriculum. Well, no, and even if they do understand it, I think that many students try to question that authority – and frankly, I think that I do want them to learn that questioning authority is a good thing when done in appropriate ways (and that is often the kicker).

At any rate, I’m beginning to think that Nehring is right on the money here. There might be some students who ask this question to distract from what is happening, to get them out of work or whatever, but that ought not to be the presumption of the teacher. What can a student do if you give her a reasoned argument about the relevant purpose of why we study what we do? Deny your argument and continue to disagree that it’s useful? Oh well, they can take their complaint to a higher authority, then; until then, the area between your ears is my responsibility, and I will continue to insist on a course of action that I think is the most appropriate, listening to reason where it is proffered.

The only problem is that it can be so exhausting…and I don’t know really how to combat that. Maybe it would be prudent to ask the student to express their complaint in an alternate setting, such as after class or school, so that complaints can be diminished within the strict instructional setting. I would be open to ideas.

Another possible solution: Try to be so proactive that students are constantly aware of how any given material is directly relevant to them. If there are any teachers out there who can pull that off, leave me a comment  – I will want to subscribe to your newsletter (and witness this miracle for myself).

I have actually been on somewhat of a roll with my personal reading lately: in the past three weeks or so, I’ve finished the novel A Separate Peace – which was excellent – and read through Dave Barry’s History of The Millennium (So Far) (a fake history in Barry’s normal vein of humor – absolutely hilarious) and Ernest Hemingway’s early short story collection In Our Time, which contains a number of Nick Adams stories. (Both of these were, coincidentally, bargain buys at a local Waldenbooks.)

Tonight, I started reading a book that came to me by way of a rummage sale, something that my mother (who is a fanatic about these kinds of things) picked up for me because it’s about teaching and…well, you probably know how mothers can be.

The book is “Why Do We Gotta Do This Stuff, Mr. Nehring?”: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School by educator James Nehring (now an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell), published by Fawcett Columbine in 1989. I’ve read a couple of books by teachers about their experiences (most notably Educating Esme by Esmé Raji Codell, a fine read from an elementary teacher’s perspective), so I thought I knew what to expect.

But I have to admit that this is the first book of this sort that I’m reading as a full-time teacher, and it struck me when I started reading the first chapter that I have a much better point of reference now. For example, the major controversy in this first chapter (and keep in mind the time): kids having Walkmen.

It has to be said – Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (For those of you who, like me, don’t speak French: The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

I’ll keep you posted as I read through this book.

Faithful readers: What are you reading? Anything good?

That’s “Thank God For Short Weeks.”

Today is the last day of instruction, and only the first half of the day meets for classes (so no juniors – hoorah!). It couldn’t come soon enough.

The last few days since I last posted anything have been extremely trying. Notable moments (good and bad):

• Tuesday: Celebrated the National Day on Writing in a few classes by doing writing of some kind, and I taught a mini-lesson on six-word memoirs; several of the students really got into it, giving me such gems as “Promises are made by truthful liars.” Also, sophomore hits me in the head with Dan Brown’s latest novel (I wish the student had better taste in smaller books). Oh, and I had to correct my seniors on the true etymology of the F-word (it’s from a common Indo-European root with analogues in several Germanic/Scandinavian languages; it has nothing to do with acronyms like “Fornication Under Consent of  the King”), which is, um, not something I had ever really expected to come up…
• Wednesday: Discussed evaluation with principal, which by and large was good; asked for some feedback on how I could improve and talked that out a little. A sophomore class really pushed me over the edge, and I gave another detention to one student in particular who has repeatedly pushed me too far.

I need the break, and I wish I were getting one: tonight is my older brother’s wedding rehearsal (I’m in the wedding party, my first time in that experience), and tomorrow is a few parent-teacher conferences in the morning (that might give me some new material to write about) and the wedding in the late afternoon. I am going to be wiped out, most definitely.

Wish me luck.

My recent post on autism has apparently sparked some interest (hello Trinity students!), which I’m not altogether surprised at: autism is a hot topic these days, and for good reason. It’s especially a matter of concern for teachers, who are now faced with a greater likelihood of having a student on the spectrum mainstreamed into one of their classes.

Well, besides all of the nice comments that the last article sparked (despite the fact that it was mostly about my own personal dealings with autism as the parent of an autistic child and not really about education in general), I happened to get a message through facebook from a former classmate of mine who student taught and graduated at the same time as I did back in the spring. This message, however, was not about teaching and ASD but instead about teaching with ASD.

In the message, my classmate mentioned that she had struggled with teaching somewhat during the course of the education program we were in and decided (very wisely) to seek out counseling if student teaching did not proceed well because she seemed to have the content and pedagogical competence as well as the motivation to succeed. When student teaching did not proceed well, she followed through, and within a few sessions, the counselor had suggested Asperger’s syndrome. I think, in a way, her experience is somewhat similar to my own except that her concern was more significant given that it was a detriment to her chosen profession of teaching: she wanted to find an answer for why things weren’t working, and according to her, hearing this even without an official diagnosis was a relief.

But when I discussed this issue with her, my thought was not about my own desires for an answer being vindicated. She recalled hearing one of our professors talk about a former candidate who was unable to pursue teaching because of Asperger’s, which made me think, How many potential teachers are out there that are unable to follow through on their desire to become educators simply because of the obstacles of having some form of ASD?

And then immediately after: And are there any teachers out there who do manage to teach with ASD? If so, what obstacles do/did they face, and how do/did they overcome them?

It’s a fascinating question to me, and I’m afraid that I can’t find anything on it after the brief amount of research that I’ve done. Still, I have a hard time believing that teachers like this don’t exist out there, and I think that maybe their experiences could benefit individuals like my former classmate who have the passion and desire to teach but don’t know how to adapt their own unique neurological wiring to the needs of their own students in the classroom.

If you are an active (or former) teacher living with some form of ASD or if you know an active or former teacher who is open about their ASD and would like to share their experiences, please contact me at docereestdiscere AT gmail DOTcom. I would love to hear about how teachers deal with this so that it can be used to help others who might be able to join us in this noble profession with the knowledge of strategies and techniques that will be effective and useful. And if you know of any research on this subject, contact me as well!

Seriously, I get tired of writing about the teachers’ lounge. If it weren’t for the fact that I do like socializing with my colleagues during the one real time I get to see any of them (besides my lunch duty, which I share with another new teacher), I think I would avoid it. It seems like when I pay attention to what’s actually in there (which I do somewhat out of necessity, since my lunch period starts 15 minutes before the rest of the group), I inevitably find something that makes me go through what seems like the stages of grief: anger that someone in my hallowed profession would applaud something so stupid, depression that someone would actually disseminate bad information when our job is to promote knowledge and understanding, and finally acceptance (or maybe resignation) that I can’t change everything.

But then the idealist in me says, What do you mean, you can’t change everything? How will you know if you can’t do something about this if you don’t make an effort?

Permit me to stop being cryptic now and get to my point: Today, in that interim between the end of my lunch duty and the official beginning of the next lunch period, I was looking around at the papers on our table, and I found what was obviously an E-mail forward printed off in huge letters. After the last experience with one of these, I was apprehensive but read on anyway. (Sometimes a desire to understand is potentially painful, like the proverbial feline death by way of curiosity.)

I started reading and, despite a few points that I thought were odd, found myself nodding along:

After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:
‘Let me see if I’ve got this right.

‘You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.

‘You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride.

‘You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.

‘You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams.

‘You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.

‘You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.

‘You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

[Those extra single periods were on the printout: no joke. I don't recall how many there were, though, so the above is merely an approximation.]

At this point, it sounds like a hyperbolic criticism of all the things teachers have to do with so little in return, and that is bound to resonate with most teachers (except those who have an abundance of resources and a large salary – I know they exist). But then, as you might guess from the fact that I left off the ending, everything goes down the tubes.

The final sentence is, regrettably,

I CAN’T PRAY?

Which made me go, What?! (Tangentially: I really wish there was an ASCII character for the interrobang; it would save me so much time in moments like these. Wait a second – there is‽)

Now, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that, as a teacher in a small rural Midwestern community, there are liable to be a high percentage of Christians, many of whom fit into the “religious right” kind of category. (I think that I have several colleagues who are Catholic; the county we’re in has a high amount of those, I’ve noticed.) So I guess I’m not all that surprised that the topic of prayer in schools, long a contentious issue for very religious individuals, would rear its ugly head. I just thought that they would get their facts straight.

Sigh.

For the record – and teachers out there, I hope you understand this already – this is a gross misunderstanding of the very real issue that teachers and prayer causes with First Amendment considerations. Religious righters like to talk about how prayer has been removed from public schools, but that’s not a fair assessment without some qualifications. (This resource by the Anti-Defamation League is a good place to start; some of the information there will be summarized below. Please let me know if I have misconstrued the facts.)

Yes, it is now a well-established precedent that organized prayer (especially when teacher-led) is a violation of the Establishment Clause, and so that tradition has been gone for quite some time now. I’m glad for that – any potential benefits (thinking specifically here of solidarity among groups with fairly homogenous religious beliefs) are outweighed by the potential dangers of excluding students who do not share that belief, and it is unequivocally not a good thing to coerce religious practice or even endorse any specific religious practice (such as prayer).

But students have a free right to pray and read religious texts in school, both individually and in groups (but only outside the classroom setting where a learning environment is not being disrupted). I remember having a group in my high school that met occasionally during lunch in a teacher’s classroom (although the teacher was often out of the room) for prayer, and that is (to my knowledge) perfectly constitutional. Student-led and -organized religious practices cannot be construed as establishment of a religion by the government because the parties involved are not governmental representatives (as long as the school does not provide a platform – student-led prayers over an intercom would still be unconstitutional). Teachers are.

Now, I could see some individuals being upset at the fact that it is true that teachers’ First Amendment right to practice religion can be somewhat abrogated when the teacher is acting as a representative of the government (which is basically any time we are in school), but there is a good reason for that – it helps avoid Establishment Clause violations. For better or worse (hopefully the former), teachers have influence over students, and it is unethical to use that relationship to influence a student toward a specific religion; as a result, teachers cannot do anything that would resemble proselytizing while they are acting as an agent of the government. It’s a hard line to walk, but it’s a necessary one.

Here’s a personal example of late: A student asked me, totally out of the blue, “Do you believe in evolution?” (I have to say, I hate that question. If it were worded “Do you think that evolution occurs?” then I wouldn’t be so aggravated at it.) I responded that I believe that it has occurred, and the student then asked me if I believe in God. (As much as I hate the initial question, I hate this sequence of questions even more.) I hesitantly responded that I do, quickly noting that it is irrelevant whether I believe in a god or not to be an effective teacher. I didn’t even necessarily want to reveal my own beliefs because I have a strong belief in leaving my personal beliefs on religion, politics, and most anything that is not a part of my discipline out of the picture so that I don’t influence any of my students unduly – if students come to the same conclusions, I want it to be because they reasoned to those conclusions independently of what I believe.

So praying in public in the role of a teacher is problematic largely for that reason: it sets up an influence that is a manipulation (intentional or not) of the student-teacher relationship. Teachers can’t do that, so public prayer is out.

But prayer in toto? Absolutely not. If you’re a teacher alone in your classroom during your prep period, silent prayer would absolutely not be an Establishment Clause issue (as far as I can tell). And outside of the school setting, there is clearly no way that schools can police your behavior, and you are free to pray for students all you want (and certainly some students might merit it!). You just can’t pray with students when acting in that role – again, that violates the nature of the student-teacher relationship.

The nature of this balancing act is frequently misconstrued – my own mother, for instance, has argued with me that prayer has been eliminated from schools altogether – but I just can’t believe that an educator (or at least someone who is currently working in education and would also be considered a representative of the government, I believe) would celebrate such a flagrantly untrue piece of garbage like this. We should know what is permissible and what is not, and if we don’t know, then we shouldn’t be putting that information out there in case it might mislead others. The bottom line here is that we are educators, not miseducators. We should be working toward knowledge and understanding, not regressing into ignorance.

My real dilemma is now, as I alluded earlier, whether or not to just accept that there is ignorance among my colleagues or to do something about it. At this stage, I am very highly leaning toward the latter in the least confrontational way possible, most likely an anonymous letter that I would put on the table expressing how disappointing it is to see misinformation disseminated in the teachers’ lounge when it should be advancement of knowledge that we are trying to promote among the members of our professional community. I might even attach a printout of something like the ADL link I gave above in order to highlight the facts that exist regarding religious practice in schools.

I don’t know for sure yet. I want to do something, though, to challenge the status quo that seems to think it’s okay to put things out there on our collective table that could be potentially divisive or offensive to some of our staff. I don’t want – and shouldn’t have – to be the one to correct whoever it is that is doing this, but something’s gotta give. I feel very strongly about crushing ignorance, no less in my colleagues than my students, and I think that, even in differing educational philosophies, that same passion should be at the core of why we teach.

And if it isn’t, then I think that we have bigger problems than prayer in public schools.