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Baldwin
1953
James Baldwin's first novel and coming-of-age story which potently transforms American literature and examines racism and religiosity.
“The chief source of the ‘problem of discipline’ in schools is that…a premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest. The teachers’ business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.” - John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916
On my very first day of my very first observation for my Intro To Education class, I was very excited. Especially as an older student, all the gen eds and essays and PowerPoint presentations had felt like so many hoops and bureaucracies and here, finally, I was going to be able to get into a real classroom and start learning how to do the thing! In that class…in that class, I watched several students struggling to stay awake while they read A Raisin In The Sun, the 1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry. A few of them were ignoring it entirely, headphones on; most of the rest were silent, blearily staring at the page while some unfortunate soul was picked on to do the reading aloud. A familiar scene to any high school teacher, I’m sure. Then, something shifted as this teacher shifted to a broader discussion - a question went up on the board: ‘Are the relationships you see between men and women equal and/or healthy?’ Heads came up, headphones came down, attention shifted and the students began to interact! They had thoughts, opinions; they started engaging with the themes of the play and relating those characters to their own experiences.
They talked about boyfriends and girlfriends, but also about their parents’ relationships, and then about their relationships with their parents. Pretty soon, the students were sharing traumas in a way which surprised me a little - we didn’t do that when I was a kid, but it’s something I do now as an adult, which is I think an interesting generational shift. Certainly the teacher grew less comfortable as the students relaxed into this familiar topic and tension. They started laughing, sharing horror stories. The teacher scrambled to find a position of authority - and it was at this point that my notes, halfway down the page on the first day of my first class learning how to be a teacher, observe my new role model telling a child that he deserved to be punched full in the face by his mother (an event which had occurred recently, making the boy bleed) because “his tone was disrespectful.” The teacher was not joking, but the students laughed it off, something they’ve heard all too often, and their analysis grew deeper. One student - actively attempting to relate to the text they were nominally studying - tried to explain being an atheist in an aggressively Christian household, and was firmly told that his mother had the right to forcibly demand he believe in her religion as a rule and exact punishment for disobedience. Another student presented a clear structural breakdown of a pattern of arguments in her house, understanding when her mother had a headache, identifying the cause of the headaches and explaining to her mother that she was lashing out because she was in pain, asking her to please be more aware of herself. The teacher mocked her openly, claiming that she “just said that to be annoying.”
The bell rang, and the students shrugged and went to their next class. Since that day, I’ve observed at least a dozen different classes in different schools, some only for a few days and some over the course of months. None of them have ever improved this impression. There was a man who told his students that they were going to end up in jail or “with their brains blown out on the street” if they didn’t get good grades. “How are you going to secure the good jobs,” he asked a teenage girl under his care, “with your three baby daddies and four kids on welfare?”
…
So here’s what I’d like to happen here: I am going to retrace the steps of a thought, in the context of some formal academic readings you might find as a prospective teacher, and hopefully I am going to bring whoever reads this with me. After which, I may make some mention of how important it is to me to build this ambling thought process into any attempt I make at education.
...appropriation, such a good word for what happens to these students and a reminder that teachers often approach grading as an adversarial task. This is a conversation about control.
Peter Elbow’s article “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals” is a discussion I’m not entirely certain Elbow himself had the language to articulate when he wrote it. On its surface, it is about a set of roles he sees as in conflict with one another. Upon my first read through, I was particularly struck by how Elbow defines the role of Reader through an academic lens but conceives of a Writer as more free and expressive. It’s worth noting that in this framework, the Writer is the one with agency, they have something to say and take the action to articulate it. The Reader’s only role, it seems, is to judge according to a predetermined set of standards. This distinction grows even more troublesome when the roles shift again to Writers as Students and Readers as Teachers - and the power dynamics shift as well, when he finds the conflict which is actually at the heart of this piece. “[R]eaders and [W]riters have competing interests over who gets to control the text.” (Elbow 75) This is an essay about control. And it is at this same point in the essay where he reframes those roles: “We see this contest between readers and writers played out poignantly in the case of student texts. The academic is reader and grader and always gets to decide what the student text means. No wonder students withdraw ownership and commitment.” (Elbow 76, emphasis mine) This is where he moves into Being a Student vs Being a Teacher. This is Elbow’s true conflict, the thing he’s trying to describe from the start. We can see how it centers agency and control as we watch him reverse his own argument to reinforce the point and explain that when the teacher is ‘writing’ the text - lecturing - they still claim the control of it. Because it isn’t really about reader and writer; it’s about Student and Teacher.
Nancy Sommers and D.M. Murray each seem to dance around this same issue of control, without saying as much outright. Take these lines back to back, first from Murray’s “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product,” then from Sommers’ “Responding to Student Writing.” They read almost like part of the same thought: “Year after year the student shudders under a barrage of criticism, much of it brilliant, some of it stupid, and all of it irrelevant.” (Murray 3) “This appropriation of the text by the teacher happens particularly when teachers identify errors in usage, diction, and style in a first draft and ask students to correct these errors when they revise; such comments give the student an impression of the importance of these errors that is all out of proportion to how they should view these errors at this point in the process.” (Sommers 150) Look at the language - a barrage of irrelevant criticism, and appropriation, such a good word for what happens to these students and a reminder that teachers often approach grading as an adversarial task. This is a conversation about control.
Now, where Elbow was largely theoretical, Sommers and Murray are both more practical, concrete guides toward specific action. Their essays, individually, do not center this conversation. Murray gives us a forceful call to action, almost a manifesto, defining the process of writing and breaking down the ways in which teachers lose their students in their misplaced desire for a product. Sommers walks through the function and process of feedback, lamenting how our shallow, standardized system of education has inevitably produced shallow, standardized teacher feedback on student work (which eventually becomes shallow and standardized in turn). Still, Murray doesn’t once use the words “control,” or “power,” or “agency” in his essay.
It’s only really in conversation with Sommers or even setting them both in the landscape of Elbow, that we start to really notice this thread as something more than incidental. Murray talks about motivation, and respect…and ultimately, every one of his Implications are laser-focused on what Elbow would recognize as who gets to control the text. Murray is telling us that even defining the text as a product is part of that appropriation - to the student, it isn’t the final paper that matters at all, in fact once it’s finished it is very likely excised from all thought. What mattered most, what informs their education and perspective and often identity, is all the thought and organization and sleepless nights and confusion and frustration it took to get there. “We have to respect the student, not for his product, not for the paper we call literature by giving it a grade, but for the search for truth in which he is engaged.” (Murray 5)
...these types of rules were foremost among the students who had the most difficulty writing. They were stopping up the process. The students who reported smoother, less stressful success in their writing were the ones who employed broader, fuzzier guidelines.
Mike Rose is an educator with a reputation for working in low-income neighborhoods as well as prestigious universities, and with adults who missed out on some formative education, particularly young veterans - quite a spectrum of students! His writing is characterized by the frequent use of case studies, which I’m inclined to read as indicative of his ability to center student perspectives in his understanding of teaching. In “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer's Block,” Rose employs ten such case studies in an attempt to map out the anatomy of student executive dysfunction in the face of assigned writing. (This distinction feels important, even though he doesn’t really mention it - this is a discussion of the role of the Student, specifically composing for academia.) He puts a lot of effort into defining several terms - rules, plans, algorithms, heuristics - in an attempt at that cognitivist scientific objectivity.
Let’s just take the algorithms and heuristics, and drop all the other synonyms - algorithms, here, can be defined as methodical and structured rules. The five-paragraph essay format is algorithmic - introductory paragraph, ending with a thesis statement, three main points each beginning with a topic sentence, then a conclusion. (Algorithmic writing, incidentally, is quicker and easier to grade.) Students interviewed by Rose had accumulated plenty of algorithmic rules from teachers over the years, just as practically any student can immediately rattle off when asked - don’t use sentence fragments, or parentheticals, don’t splice commas, don’t end sentences in prepositions, don’t write in the first person, don’t ask rhetorical questions….that’s a lot of “don’t,” don’t you think? And what Rose found was that these types of rules were foremost among the students who had the most difficulty writing. They were stopping up the process. The students who reported smoother, less stressful success in their writing were the ones who employed broader, fuzzier guidelines. Where “algorithm” comes from an ancient word for a numerical system, “heuristic” is rooted in the idea of discovery and invention - so deeply apt that the former has a clear and objective meaning while the latter has a messier, more interpretive one. Heuristics employed by these students, Rose found, were more forgiving, more fluid, less absolute…and they were also more functionally connected to the point of the writing. ‘What do I want to say? How do I want to say it?’
Who has the control of an algorithm? Those objective rules are taught, they are established by the Academy and passed down as laws. And we believe them - algorithms are treated as objectively correct. Even in an example I gave in a presentation I designed, I described heuristics as navigating a grocery store to find what you need by reading the signs and going to the section that feels right, whereas an algorithm would be to search aisle by aisle until you come across the item - it may not be efficient, but it’s guaranteed to work, right? But since then, I’ve been thinking about it and…algorithms and heuristics aren’t even objective categories when we’re talking about composition, are they? They are ideologies. These are frames of mind, and the faith we hold in algorithms is precarious, potentially harmful. Is it because the power of so many algorithms is in their argument of authority? The way we tend to inherit them is from teachers, elders, textbooks and guides. You can see it in the shape of them, as well - look again at the restrictive “don’t,” with an implied “you.” Even if I were to rewrite those as “I shouldn’t” there’s still a lingering “why” or “who says” floating around it. The heuristics, by contrast, place all of the power on the Writer, rather than some imagined Academic with a red pen poised to grade.
What do I want to say?
What do you want to say?
The desire for control across the school system has as its goal and direction an impossibility, in exactly the same way as desire for control over any classroom or student individually is an impossibility. You cannot force a child to engage with your content; you cannot force someone to learn.
Alfie Kohn opens almost every lecture he gives with a question for all the parents and teachers in the audience: ‘What is your long-term goal for your students and children? What kind of people do you hope that they become?’ And it isn’t rhetorical - he collects answers to this question from the audience, many answers! They want their kids to be kind, curious, resourceful, happy, passionate, caring, creative, empowered…all the things they think of as Good People, presumably. All things they want to see more of in the world. Notably - and this is part of the exercise - the parents never seem to say “wealthy,” and the teachers never seem to say “academic.” Nobody raises their hand to express how important it is that their kids grow up to use the Pythagorean Theorem, or to employ perfect grammar. So how is it that in Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, Kohn cites several studies asking students ”what their teachers most wanted them to do,” or “what it means to ‘behave well,’” and all of their answers have to do with sitting down, shutting up, and getting good grades. (Kohn 64) How is it that the fondest goals and deepest desires of parents and teachers are so divorced from the day-to-day lessons being learned by the students? “It is unsettling,” says Kohn, “because it exposes a yawning chasm between what we want and what we are doing, between how we would like students to turn out and how our classrooms and schools actually work.” (Kohn 61) Or in other words - the input of the algorithm is not resulting in the stated objective. Somehow, in this rigid system we call Education, the teachers are making the same mistakes as the students - inheriting flawed algorithms and getting stuck!
Chapter Five of his book is titled How Not To Get Control Of The Classroom. It explores the given definitions of “classroom management” and its implicit and explicit goals. Should the teacher be “in control” of the classroom? Does that even mean what we think it means? Is a managed, compliant classroom going to learn more? Are they going to internalize an enthusiasm for the content and carry it with them beyond that classroom? Kohn claims that, “What we have to face is that the more we “manage” students’ behavior and try to make them do what we say, the more difficult it is for them to become morally sophisticated people who think for themselves and care about others.” (Kohn 62) But forget about Kohn for a moment - what would Elbow say to “classroom management?” Or Murray, who told teachers to shut up and respect their students? What is the common thread I’ve been plucking at here? I thought it was about power and control, but maybe Murray had the right of it…maybe this is a piece about respect.
Linda McNeil establishes her thesis immediately at the outset of her book, Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge. “Our public schools have evolved historically as organizations serving two potentially conflicting purposes: to educate citizens and to process them into roles for economic production.” (McNeil 3) Capitalism is directly opposed to education; it values controlled, limited training specifically for the purposes of exploiting labor in a way it deems efficient (which of course isn’t actually efficient but is as efficient as you can get while relying on mass exploitation and threats of violence). That “behavior management” which students had so readily internalized instead of those grand goals and dreams we have for our children? Well - who benefits from children learning that ‘well behaved’ means sitting down, shutting up, and doing the work assigned to them?
McNeil doesn’t only focus on control and authority in education, but also a key element I haven’t articulated yet - empathy. In order to map the roles of Writer and Reader, or Student and Teacher, in order to render a genuine respect for students and to understand which feedback is useful to them, in order to suggest helpful heuristics…we have to make a genuine attempt to understand the perspective of each student. There is no universal algorithm for teaching. This is arguably the broadest possible interpretation of McNeil when she says, “To examine school knowledge as a part of, and as a product of, the organization of schools, it is necessary to document that knowledge as it is experienced in the organizational setting. That is, one must experience school course content not merely in printed curriculum guides or texts, but in the classroom, as it is encountered by students.” (McNeil 20) But structurally, the point stands - her book follows the specific, individual classrooms of four different schools for the same reason that Rose relies on case studies to convey his pedagogy. Because no amount of ivory-tower academia is going to be sufficient - education doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This is the contradiction which McNeil doesn't list outright but nevertheless describes - the push for uniformity among those in favor of controlling school systems, the growing and harmful sameness and standardization, set against the inescapable fact that no two schools can ever be perfectly alike. The desire for control across the school system has as its goal and direction an impossibility, in exactly the same way as desire for control over any classroom or student individually is an impossibility. You cannot force a child to engage with your content; you cannot force someone to learn.
Elbow’s stated goal is for his students “to feel themselves as writers and feel themselves as academics.” (Elbow 73) Does his goal still translate to wanting his students to feel themselves as Students and as Teachers? I think that might be true, yes. And as teachers, what a common loss it is for us to forget the feeling of being a student…to have put ourselves in the role of Dispenser of Knowledge and Holder of Correct Answers for so long that we forget how to let someone teach us. Especially someone we see as a student.
I struggled with that section on algorithms and heuristics, because I loathe constructing a binary - often a fatal flaw in the inclination of human definitions. I still can’t help but think that algorithms facilitate rules which are enforced by authorities, while heuristics facilitate tools which are handed down by experts and peers. What’s the difference between an authority and an expert? I’m not sure. And if this is the binary I’ve constructed, then how is it deconstructed into a healthier, less limiting spectrum? Also not sure. There’s a reason this piece doesn’t present a clear, overt argument - I don’t enjoy pretending I have all the answers.
Kohn’s book title centers Discipline; McNeil’s centers Control. While writing this I’ve been wondering what, fundamentally, is the difference between control and discipline? I expect that a lot of parents and teachers have thoughts on this distinction - and I expect that’s why Kohn chose the title he did. Would my professors have felt differently if instead of “behavior management” techniques they told us outright, “Today we’re going to be learning how to control the children in your classroom?” Perhaps. Perhaps not. Would the students, my class-mates, have reacted differently? I hope so, but I still don’t know. Would I have, when I was younger? I dearly hope so.
It’s the thing we’re taught, right? If you’re not managing that classroom, then you’re a bad teacher.
Somehow, I still intend to work in education. I suppose not as much in the Education Industrial Complex, as I’m beginning to see it…but somewhere nearby, maybe helping to pick up some of the broken pieces this machine leaves behind, if I can. I’d like to do something digital, asynchronous, and available across a longer timeline - so that autistic kid who lost their words when the world was overwhelming, they can still type to me. And that ADHD kid who can’t focus on command or work to strict deadlines, we can work on some projects in bursts and stops, and see what sticks. The queer kids who were busy getting bullied and systemically disenfranchised, we don’t have to read some normative Western Canon crap; we can build a little book club for contemporary YA books they can actually see themselves in and invest in.
You hear teachers these days bandying about some popular buzzwords like “inquiry-based” or “student-led,” and….I don’t know, they’re easy words to say I guess? But they take real effort and attention to practice, and they can’t be fed into the machine in bits and pieces; it’ll only tear them up. One teacher in one classroom trying to eliminate the grades and focus on the meaning of the learning…is only going to get washed out in the flood of standardized testing that consumes those children. I wonder whether that first teacher I mentioned in the very beginning, if they were proud of putting that question up on the board and calling that class “inquiry-based?” Does that school, does the administration put that in the brochures? Does it look good on their applications for funding? Meanwhile, the second they actually felt some semblance of agency in that room, she was frantic to regain control.
It’s the thing we’re taught, right? If you’re not managing that classroom, then you’re a bad teacher.
…
It’s nice to know, at least, that if I ever did get into the classroom then I absolutely would have been a bad teacher.
References:
Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 46, no. 1, 1995, pp. 72–83. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/358871. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
Kohn, Alfie. Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2006.
McNeil, Linda M. Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge. Routledge, 1999.
Murray, Donald M. “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” The Leaflet, November 1972 https://mwover.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/murray-teach-writing-as-a-process-not-product.pdf. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
Rose, Mike. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, 1980, pp. 389–401. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/356589. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 2, 1982, pp. 148–56. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/357622. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
