Author Archives: Miriam Hughes

Teacher in Training: Learning How to Juggle the Variables

Micro-Teach was a valuable and difficult experience that I will long remember.  Clear instructions for the assignment and the positive culture in our classroom were extremely helpful stage setters that I will take away and try to apply in practice.  The class was so kind and receptive!  I believe Professor Sample established a tone and expectation of professionalism, creativity, tolerance and constructive participation.  High morale is an intangible that makes a big difference.  

Yet, the exercise remained difficult, and I can only begin to imagine how such a challenge is compounded when a classroom consists of less responsive and unevenly prepared students with varying attitudes.  The comments that many of you have provided on such realities provide clear warning.  I have more work to do to continue to understand what works in the classroom.

Micro-Teach was a humbling experience.  The assignment taught me as nothing else quite could that one must think very concretely about timing, audience levels, entry points for stimulating interest, a framework of enduring objectives, and all those other steps and techniques that the teacher needs to thoughtfully devise in order to engage students and help them reach higher learning levels without risking over-reach and confusion.  In the process, the teacher needs to be prepared to accommodate detours, keep her eye on the overall design (without seeming to do so too consciously), and to shift the game plan around on a slippery dime according to class dynamics.  In a way, I bet that’s what Billie Holiday did, and Mal Waldron, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and maybe even Frank O’Hara.  ENGH 610 has showed me – and made me practice – many ways to approach teaching as its own art.     

I look forward to hearing from anyone adventuresome enough to do my homework or to otherwise comment on the challenge of “Lady.”  Thank you all sincerely for making this experience so worthwhile and lasting in my mind.  It is exactly why I decided to go back to school.  Yours, Mimi

The Bull’s Eye Works in Many Endeavors

The concentric rings that work backward from a bull’s eye of goals for enduring understanding can also work as a pyramid.  From the top down, one must delineate overarching objectives that translate into well-defined goals and fan out into linked activities and criteria for measuring their success.  This is a useful intellectual construct and guide to action that applies to many endeavors.  Our U.S. embassies abroad in more than 160 countries undertake such an annual design process to ensure that their activities fulfill our national objectives.  Otherwise, these myriad efforts might be scattershot and we would risk misusing public resources, that is, your money.  Ditto for designing activities in a classroom, where teachers too are managers of resources, negotiators and shepherds of human potential.  

In every U.S. embassy, preparation of the Mission Performance Plan (MPP) is a major annual undertaking.  Consider Mexico City, where dozens of U.S. Government agencies operate under one roof.  Section chiefs come together to articulate Mission Objectives (the bull’s eye or the peak of the pyramid), which must be linked to strategic goals of the White House and State Department.  For example, one objective would probably be to strengthen U.S.-Mexican border security.  Among the goals that emanate from this bull’s eye might be an aim to reduce cocaine trafficking across the border.  “To Do” this goal will require training of an additional 300 Mexican border police and enhanced data sharing.  Activities and indicators of success will take into account the number of police who receive training in the U.S. and in Mexico, with an expectation of a 20% reduction in trans-border trafficking in 2014.  Responsibilities are assigned, with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) taking the lead in coordination with the FBI, DHS and the consular section.

Without such a goal-centric plan, which flows from the abstract to the concrete, we lack intellectual coherence, focus and ballast.  We flounder and we may fail our customers, who are the American public or our students.  We miss the opportunity to pool our efforts and learn from others’ expertise and our interactive engagement.  Whether the design is a circle or a pyramid, it must have enough flexibility to incorporate variables that arise spontaneously, including in the give-and-take of a classroom.  I thus think of the Teacher as a Manager, a Diplomat, Designer and Coach who plans and orchestrates, starting with the bull’s eye, or the peak of that Aztec pyramid, and then never loses sight of it.                  

Who Was Nat Turner and What Went Missing?

In creating a dramatic account of Nat Turner, Kyle Baker could have started from any point in the story.  That he chose to begin with a portrayal of communal life in Africa, with the rape of a civilization by marauders, then the shaving, branding, neck irons and claustrophobia of a chained voyage across the Atlantic provides the depth and indelible dimension of a saga.  His graphics move us along with dramatic power and credibility.  At the same time, some vital information is missing from this vivid interpretation of a historic incident.  What really motivated Nat Turner?  This week’s reading stimulates the question: what dam burst in his active mind? 

Kenneth Greenberg notes how the psyche of a slave could be demolished, particularly (and ironically) in the case of a more ambiguously close and paternalistic relationship between a slave and master.  I wish we knew what really happened to Nat.  What traumas did he suffer?  What conflicts seared his piercing intelligence?  The record leaves critical gaps.  Either Turner withheld a full accounting from Thomas Gray, hewing to his own beatific vision just prior to death, or Gray excised any particulars that might have shone a contemptible light on the white masters and an inhumane system in our nation.

I began to wonder.  How old Nat was when his father ran away?  Why did Nat himself run away and then decide to return?  What kind of work did he perform, and what did he witness?  Was he or a family member abused?  Beyond his religiosity, what motives prompted him to lead other slaves to put their own lives on the line in an act that was doomed to futility?

It seems that Nat himself did not do a lot of the killing.  The sword he carried was a blunt and ineffective instrument.  Nat seemed to have strong survival skills.  At what point did something snap?    

Baker’s account raises breathtaking awareness.  However, the historical record with which he had to work leaves many questions unanswered.  I will never forget the expressions on the eye-popping faces of the black and white characters, and the scope of human cruelty and suffering that Baker depicts with fluidity.  I concluded that his book is a work of art, even though it is incomplete and flawed as a story and history.  

Confession of a Tardy Blogger

Just realized I missed last week’s blog.  Please depict me with Scott McCloud’s severe zigzag lines.  Puddles of ink around darkly shaded cheekbones and eye bags highlight a face in tension, which dominates the frame.  The background is busy.  What would signal my inner state of mind?  Perhaps piles of notebooks around a computer, a basket of dirty laundry and dishes that cry out for washing.  At this point, I would rather read a graphic novel. 

Nat Turner surprised me.  I did not think I would like this pictorial form of literature; I was a skeptic.  Caricatures are bound to be superficial conveyances, I thought. 

In fact, the “information density” to which Erik Rabkin refers applies to this work of art, which moved me deeply.  Images of outrage are superimposed upon the reader’s imagination.  I cannot forget the neck irons, a busted drum, curling whips, a bawling baby tossed to sharks, and human cargo crammed into the bowels of a creaking ship.  The images reflect the “jarring combinations” that McCloud writes about.  If Kyle Baker’s narrative is not linear, historically minute or fully realized, it nevertheless arouses awareness and shocking emotional power.  A historical saga is humanized.

I refer to an NPR American Masters TV program on Philip Roth last night.  Did anyone else catch it?  At age eighty, this prolific novelist remains reflective, articulate and active.  Quoting Chekhov, Roth said that the mission of literature is the proper presentation of a problem, and not its solution.  “You invite understanding,” he said.  “And often you get it wrong.  That’s how you know you’re alive.” 

Kyle Baker’s depiction of the forces that generated a bestial insurrection may not be fully coherent.  For example, I found a disjunction between a gifted child’s ethereal piety and its transmutation into unsparing violence.  As a reader, I puzzled over this gap.  But my eyes returned again and again to the images.  Baker takes us on a journey, his variegated frames invite us into the abusive world and minds of slaves, and he makes us participate in a narrative of degradation, guilt and shame that occurred here in Virginia in our own nation.  His graphic work invites our engagement and it stimulates more questions, if not pat explanations or solutions.

 Much more compelling than laundry and dishes.     

Learning – Or Not Learning – How to Drive (What Would Lara Croft Do?)

The fact that at age sixteen I failed to learn how to drive a car has handicapped my life activities and my mobility. To friends and associates, I apologize awkwardly, “I’m afraid this is a phobia. Behind the wheel, I have no coordination. I can’t do it.” All over the world, I have paid the price for taxis and often risky public transportation, and blamed myself for my shortcoming. (You’re a weirdo, Mimi. Everyone drives, even the Micronesians do it on their little Pacific islands. Why can’t you do this?)

Suddenly, James Paul Gee turns on the light, particularly with his chapter on “Telling and Doing.” He illuminates how a flawed learning experience can impair one’s self-identity and ability to integrate knowledge and skills; he shines a light on another model. Instantly, like in a video game, I can peel back the years (rather, the decades) and better understand what happened to my driving. Video heroine Lara Croft, who pushed back on her mentor Von Croy and figured out other ways to gain the competencies she needed, had not yet appeared when I was learning – or not learning – how to drive.

In my high school, the Drivers Ed program piled on “overt information” about road signs, car signals, speed limits and how to calculate distance between vehicles and change a tire. Then we did two scary sessions behind a wheel among some orange stanchions. I knocked them down. With a laminated Learner’s Permit in my wallet, it was time for Dad to take me out on the road.

“You’re an idiot!” he hollered. “Driving isn’t difficult. Don’t you understand how to make a left turn? Slow down, slow down!” My father was a scientist, a superb driver and a very logical and intimidating man. Maybe he didn’t realize I hadn’t learned the basics, like steering, accelerating and applying my foot progressively to the brake. At the end of our second lesson, Dad took the wheel to drive home. “I can’t take any more of this,” he said. I agreed.

Mom told me not to worry. Somehow we would get through the driver’s test together. In fact, the written test was a breeze. It was easy to memorize all that stuff in the manual. Unfortunately, I failed the operational segment three consecutive times. On the fourth try, an angel seemed to guide the wheel, as I glided through a parallel parking exercise within an inch of perfection. “That’s the way she always does it,” Mom declared to the policeman. “She was just nervous all those other times.”

With my driver’s license in hand, I took my Mom’s Pontiac (my Dad had banned me from his Cadillac) and proceeded to suffer three accidents in the next two months, including a fender bender at the Hot Shoppes drive-in, a failure to check the mirror before changing lanes on Rockville Pike, and damage to another vehicle in the parking lot of Montgomery Mall.

It never occurred to me, especially as a tearful adolescent, that I needed other learning strategies, that I might challenge my parents, or return to the basics and transfer theories into better driving practices step-by-step. I was no Lara Croft. My “projective identity” became that of a lifelong pedestrian.  Stepping back now and considering innovative ways to engage learners actively, in context and from the bottom up, I realize that the way we learn can make a profound difference in our lives. Frankly, that is why I want to be a teacher – even if I have to walk to school.

 

Kill the Theory!

Sheridan Blau clearly seeks to build the confidence and competence of his students and their critical appreciation of literature.  To that end, he is willing to invent, participate with them in discovery processes, and revisit the dinosaurs that buttress professors at the expense of their students.  I was delighted to note Blau’s warning about the dangers of confusing students by trying to superimpose literary theories. 

Kill them, I say!  (The theories, that is, not the students.)  In college, I was briefly exposed to a survey of frameworks that included called new criticism, deconstructionism, formalism, feminism, Marxism, Freudianism and a plethora of other pet abstractions.  These notions struck me as philosophical abstractions that might be provocative, particularly to an English literature major.  However, in my case they left me out of my depth.  I was a political science major.  There was so much else about reading and writing English that I needed in order to move forward.  Instead, I was expected to devour a range of theoretical conundrums in one big, bewildering leap. 

In my sophomore English class, a Professor asked us to read several academic articles on Walt Whitman’s poems and explicate our most compelling retrospective hypothesis of the meaning of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry within the parameters of one or more of the interpretive theories mentioned above, or something like that.  Gingerly, I raised my hand to confess that I had no familiarity with literary theory.  “Well learn it,” barked the Professor.  “You’re in college now.”

 At the university bookstore, I bought a Guide to Literary Theory.  The feminism, political and psychoanalytical constructs elicited some resonance, but many of the other hair-splitting notions that I tried to skim still seemed elusive and something of an artificial stretch when applied to a poem.  I became anxious. 

Consequently, one spends hours faking the assignment.  One cloaks analysis in the guise of faintly understood and stilted, borrowed academic language, just as Blau describes.  And worse, I began to despise the poetry that we were reading by the exuberant Walt Whitman.  The painstaking imposition of theory onto his celebratory, democratic stanzas made the reading experience seem elitist and punishing.

 Thank you, Sheridan Blau.  Your observations about the dangers of the inappropriate imposition of hypothetical dogma onto literary gems rang out, giving me permission to find more accessible, enjoyable and hands-on paths to the interpretation of texts.  Let us help our students, particularly in their most formative stages, embrace the difficulties with the most effective tools possible, which are not necessarily the fanciest ones.  If theory cannot be introduced judiciously and pragmatically, then kill the intellectual intimidation, I say, and save the students!      

 

 

    

 

The Venerator

In my school experience, teachers often assumed the “missionary” role, which Arlene Wilner describes, or the authoritarian stance in which a lecturer controls the keys to knowledge and interpretation.  Sheridan Blau demonstrates how this teacher-centered approach tends to hold students in thrall and may confuse and disempower them.  I guess I’m lucky I survived my headlong, unqualified plunge into Ernest Hemingway, which a zealous high school teacher unwittingly encouraged. 

My English teacher was a bachelor, intense, short in height, and thoroughly sincere, who paced the floor in front of our desks and monopolized the classroom.  He venerated everything Hemingway had ever written, describing the master’s narratives as the keenest canvases imaginable of life, love, and passion.  At age sixteen, I needed little convincing.  Just as Wilner depicts, I was a naïve reader who imbibed Hemingway’s characters and stories instinctively and wholeheartedly, without rational reflection.  In my mind, it was clear that I was Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises.  After I saw the film version of the novel, I cut my hair (dark brown then) to look like Eva Gardner.  Then I envisioned myself as a female personification of Robert Jordan, hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, embedded with the partisans in the mountains of Spain.  In a shop in Georgetown, I bought rope-soled sandals that proved uncomfortable to walk in.  I traveled to Spain and got into a lot of trouble. 

“Hemingway is very dangerous,” a George Mason University professor recently remarked in an MFA class.  “If you don’t understand that his writing is artifice, you might try to live his fiction.”  Without providing details, I told him that this had happened to me. 

Only decades later, have I begun to approach literature with some critical distance.  Previously I lacked the tools and insight; in school we listened wholesale to the teacher’s opinion.  The Wilner article particularly resonates because of the clarity and candor with which she depicts her efforts to fathom her students’ cultural perceptions and levels of maturity.  Sometimes she fails to engage them then she maneuvers imaginatively to help a diverse class relate to new ways of textual interpretation, enhancing their self-awareness and modes of thinking.  It is an art to be a teacher who guides students to develop their own realistic powers of analysis, and it may save them.        

  

History Endorses Apprenticeship: But Does It Work to Teach Literature?

The article on “Cognitive Apprenticeship” (Collins, Brown and Holum) enshrines principles and experiences of learning that bring to mind such historical figures as Benjamin Franklin and Benito Juarez.  Both these leaders used trade apprenticeships as springboards for advancement and lifetimes of self-development.  However, I wondered whether apprenticeship provides an apt paradigm for teaching the more abstract subject of literature?  After all, Stanley Fish argues that poetry is such an indeterminate art form that it blurs the distinction between the realms of subjectivity and objectivity.  Does the apprenticeship paradigm apply to this type learning?

I recall Benjamin Franklin, who was one of 17 children in his family.  His father withdrew him from school at age ten and sent him to work as an apprentice in his brother’s print shop in Boston.  Under the reputedly harsh tutelage of his brother James, Benjamin learned how to set type and help compose pamphlets.  He began to submit newspaper articles anonymously.  In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin opened his own print shop.  He became an excellent printer, mathematician, inventor, diplomat, and author, who helped write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The “Cognitive Apprenticeship” article seems to exemplify how a rigorous, close learning foundation can launch someone like Franklin.  It emphasizes that students must actively use their knowledge, tackle difficulties, and acquire the confidence to expand and improve in other areas.

 Benito Juarez is another hero who seems to fulfill this vision.  I have visited the village of Guelatao high up in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico where he was born into  poverty.  Juarez was a Zapotec Indian who became an orphan at age twelve.  In desperation, he walked barefoot some fifty miles to the Oaxaca state capital.  In Oaxaca, a Franciscan friar adopted Juarez and put him to work in a bookbinding apprenticeship in his home.  All the implements of the bookbinding trade are on view today in the room of the adobe house where Juarez lived and worked.  In this humble, hands-on workshop and abode, he also learned Spanish, reading and writing, and he found a path to law school.  Juarez became Mexico’s Minister of Justice, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a five-term President, who established the rule of law in the Constitution of 1857.  

I believe that a crucible of apprenticeship can against all odds transform individuals, particularly those of such determination and talent.  However, I cannot exactly envision Franklin or Juarez in a classroom learning literature as “cognitive apprentices.”  How does apprenticeship apply to a field that is more organic and to classes that are less intensive than a full-time, close relationship with a master teacher?  I concluded that key principles do apply to the teaching of literature, but that the active practice of writing is also required.  Apprenticeship is a hands-on process.  Some of the authors we read this week underscore this type engagement and the need to make personal connections with a text.  Student-centered learning requires the teacher to help relate a poem meaningfully to students’ lives and encourage them to see differently and struggle with their own attempts at writing (Showalter.)  Rabinowitz asserts that the very ambiguity of literature requires a teacher to provide practical analytical devices as keys to comprehension.  And Linkon shows how a piece of literature can be introduced into a larger framework that enlarges a student’s understanding of conceptual relationships.  She provides a toolkit – beyond the chisels and strips of leather that I saw in Juarez’s workroom – which any apprentice requires for an immediate and lifetime experience of effective learning.  At its best, this is what education can do.        

On “Cathedral” and Fishing Deeply – Mimi Hughes

Ben Wever’s focus on “Cathedral” as a crucible of how people learn is illuminating. This was my second reading of Carver’s famous short story, and I approached it in view of insights gleaned from our assigned article on “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.” That is, I tried to take the time to read the story more deeply than I had initially done several years ago and to extract more meaningful connections.

The first time I read “Cathedral,” I absorbed the sheer immediacy of the narrative, immersing myself in the ambiance of marital tensions, an imagined blue collar cage of a home with alcohol, pot and a TV blaring, and the strange insertion of a blind man into a scene of commonplace domesticity. Racing through the story within my own limited frame of reference for its entertainment value, I suppose I was fishing in shallow waters, as the article describes.

This time I asked myself, “How would I try to teach ‘Cathedral’ to a class?” How did Carver achieve his vision? As a teacher, certainly I would need to fish in deeper waters myself in order to encourage others to embrace the challenge. This time as I read and reread segments of the story, I better appreciated how the rough, casual first-person narration was deceptively simple and subtly revealing. The narrator skims over his wife’s history, including her suicide attempt. His easy flow of words betrays the confines of their lives and as Ben Wever notes, the narrator’s own underlying insecurities. I would challenge a class to highlight some of the lines that they found most revealing. What does the dialogue tell us? I found the blind man’s repeated use of the word “bub” to be brilliant. I heard and saw him as a fellow in his own right. How else did the author make the characters come alive?

We know the blind man Robert from his gestures of fierce self-reliance, such as his operation of a ham radio that puts him in touch with the world, an incongruous preference for the color TV in his home, his ravenous eating, drinking and smoking, and his zest for a strawberry pie that he identifies by taste at dinner. The details are polished gems. Robert knows exactly how to break through the narrator’s defenses and to enlist his friendship; a connection is created. The wife who brings the two disparate men together becomes almost irrelevant, as she passes out between them on the sofa in her pink slippers and pink robe, which parts at the fold. The story is uncannily provocative.

It would be exciting to steer a class toward examining the elements of style, language and timeless thematic and psychological meaning that Carver achieves with such engaging simplicity. Reading closely and analytically is indeed an essential skill to derive meaning from serious texts. It is so worthwhile to try to exercise this broadly applicable skill and open the path for others to practice it, in my opinion.