I’m worried I’m turning into Andy Rooney. So much to complain about at the end of this semester, and this was my first thought when dutifully planning to knock out a newsletter before the holiday settles. Why? The news is fairly dark. I have more students with sub-10% in the gradebook than ever before. The final Handmaid’s Tale project—a “conference”—mildly flopped. Just yesterday, a kid had the audacity to tell me that he didn’t do anything for months in my class but that his ability to attend college depends solely on my benevolence and willingness to give him a custom-tailored extra credit project. I could go on. I am semi-burned out on this gig, I have to say, but this is not abnormal at this stage. The external forces—technology, poverty, national existential dread, anti-intellectualism, global misery, and so on—are also massed against students reading and writing and wanting to join you and me in the “citadel of ideas”—a concept perhaps as ludicrous as the utopian metropolises certain “techies” pretend to imagine creating. Let’s breach the walls and fast-forward the idiocracy. I have seen more AI fakery than I expected this semester. I have seen more straight-up positively quaint old-school Sparknotes copy-pasting too—and more repeated attempts by the same perpetrators. It’s almost as if students acknowledge the futility of their efforts in the process of making them. I will get caught and fail, they seem to think, but at least I will not have to spend any time attempting to do otherwise.
This is darkness. It doesn’t make me mad. It just bums me out. And it makes me—gasp—agree with a NYT columnist not named Jamelle Bouie for perhaps the first time in the last five years: Frank Bruni, this very week, characterizing himself—a Duke journalism professor of all things—as “a sad evangelist for a silly religion.” Of course, he’s talking about teaching syntax and structure to accomplished students theoretically interested in writing, complaining about how they just don’t value what he values and, soon, his colleagues may not either. Okay, Mr. Bruni! I’m over here trying to get students to accept the pesky notion that art has some place in human life. It can feel like erecting a city from scratch.
Teenagers have always ditched, cheated, and dismissed the efforts of teachers, but rebels used to be funny, I hear myself saying beneath my (increasingly) fluffy eyebrows on 60 Minutes, they used to be challenging, play guitar or rap, love skateboarding, enjoy cooking, fill sketchbooks with strange cartoons, have SOME driving interest that school simply doesn’t accommodate due to its inflexibility, and we’re not talking about destitute kids terrorized by unsafe neighborhoods and homes, because that would be different, and I have had those kids too, and I like having any students who are lacking confidence or love shouting but won’t yet write or perform pranks for attention, and I know that the presentation of insecurity and stress varies, but this too-pervasive entitlement (bridging socioeconomic gaps, I might add), this xanaxed-out boring boring boring dullsville stone-eyed vibe is worse than any vocal rebellion, and it’s certainly not really the fault of students, because this is about a thorough education in limited vision, the worst sort of coddling, a loss of hope, oppressive screen time compounded over 15 years of life, brains warped like vinyl records left too long in hot attics, beep, boop, bleep, boop, and I can already hear the voice of a very wise popular-on-social-media teacher who has one prep and has taught for two years exclaiming (to acclaim, fingersnaps, etc) that such a sentiment is everything wrong with the profession, but, nonetheless…
Anyway, I’m done complaining.
I want to spend the rest of this December newsletter celebrating students who stood out this semester for care and scholarship. They were antidotes to the distressing trend, stakeholders in the citadel of ideas, inheritors of the tradition.
I want to highlight T who is in one of my Lit 12 classes. This person is classroom magic. Bounds down the hallways. Wears earpods constantly (to avoid being overstimulated by extraneous noise). In class discussions, makes vivid extemporaneous connections between current events and the plot and themes of The Handmaid’s Tale—and at the conference, stood out for noting that Serena Joy, pre-Gilead, was something of an influencer, albeit in the early 80s televangelist sense. We talked about this, how she lost her status and fame with the creation of a new faux-theocratic state, and how, if Atwood were writing this same book now, she might have to write in an Andrew Tate character, some kind of straightforward aggro-chauvinist performance artist to say the quiet parts very very loudly, to preach real darkness in the guise of near-parody. Because that’s how we are now. How would Gileadian messaging flourish with the technology we now have at our disposal? We don’t have to imagine!
In her contributions, T always makes a point of referencing the work and ideas of fellow students, and I love how she does it—by naming them at the outset: “I really liked Henry’s comment about…” or “I got this idea from Nicole.” There’s a sense, likely instilled at home, of the value of creating a community of learners, an awareness of what it means to socialize around a topic of discussion, to engage and actively celebrate the ideas of others to maintain the power and flexibility of that community. I actually connect this in class to the content of the novel we’ve just finished. Commander Fred characterizes Gilead as a response to diminished male power; autonomy is not a finite resource, of course, and that applies to discussions as well as sexual politics: a student with strong ideas AND the power and desire to uplift and amplify the ideas and power of others trumps a student who seeks to drown the class in a flood of his brilliance. T knows how this works better than 99% of students and most teachers. It’s what I want to teach and I have the consummate model in class.
I want to hand some flowers to D in Lit 11. This guy has stood out all semester. Sometimes, I make a joke in class, a play on words, something dad-ish and annoying, and I can always count on D to (I think) genuinely laugh. Quietly—so as not to draw attention to himself. D is a pretty rare kid. Not because he is a great student, but because of how he carries himself. He’s a straight white suburban baseball dude, part of the school’s socially dominant white minority population, the sort of school character who is more likely to stand out for bravado and gamesmanship around grades than genuine scholarship. I’m stereotyping, yes, but I’ve also taught in this county for ten years. I’m hedging enough—it’s absolutely a thing. D doesn’t need any extra points in the gradebook, and if he wanted to grease my heartstrings, he’d write more directly about how inspirational and erudite I am. But in his reflection, completed today, he answered a question about what he’s learned so far this year, and he approached it unlike the typical student in his demographic. “The skill I developed most was critical thinking,” he writes (in the wake of a literature-based unit about the Vietnam War and subsequent refugee experience). “I gained so much perspective on what people’s lives can look like…the struggles and hardships they've gone through…I want to strive to live my life this way.”
Thus, like T, he announces himself as an eager buyer in the citadel of ideas, a fellow with capital to burn and lofty ambitions.
This is perhaps pedestrian by adult lights, but it means a lot coming from a privileged kid—again, of a demographic more likely to toss off something safe about avoiding procrastination (just to finish as quickly as possible). This sentiment matters. D blends his curiosity (Jamba-style) with a major empathy “boost,” an awareness of the value of learning about the lives of refugees and bitter veterans and idealistic protestors and revolutionaries and failed generals and ambitious filmmakers, and so on. He will resist all the forces—tech, social pressures, and so on—that try to wall him in. Dudes like D aren’t like this at age 16, not most of the time. Even if they are—privately—they don't typically publicly acknowledge the value of privileging what isn’t part of their lived experience. They visibly worry that it might reveal some fissure in their quality, their impregnability as a swaggering operator in a realm set up for their success. Like T, D relinquishes nothing with his curiosity and empathy. He submerges or diminishes no part of himself to more willingly open himself up to the worlds he doesn't know.
I want to put some respect on S, a wonderful (and fun) student in my core journalism class for seniors. There’s the standard journalism class truth I’ve seen take shape over six years of teaching the course: the best students seek out the most help with reporting, story structure, organization of materials, and sentence-level diction and syntax choices. They get as many eyes as possible on their work. They come to tutorial sessions. This flips the rule in the lit classes I've taught (non-AP classes, I should make clear): the students who usually get As, with notable exceptions, are more likely to avoid me than the students who get Bs, to simply roll out the approaches that have borne fruit in prior literature-based classes, and let the chips fall with as little stress as possible. Why trouble the teacher if what you do works? S fills her own articles with comments and questions. Giving her feedback means having a conversation, not dropping potentially ignored decries from the top of a mountain (overlooking the citadel of ideas). S sends emails at all hours. She changes her opinion article topic in the middle of the assignment, not because she didn’t have a solid one, but because, the more she researched, the more she realized her initial thesis wasn’t reflective of her beliefs. She changed her own mind. And she’d rather do more work and produce something authentic than take an easier but disingenuous path.
Another permanent resident in the citadel of ideas, S is certainly ambitious. She wants an A, but she’s ambitious in a more compelling way. She doesn’t want to play it safe with a story she’s writing. She wants to go big. Her news story about a land sale and ensuing housing development seemed straightforward, but she did call architects, the shadowy developer, and neighborhood residents skeptical of the planned expansion. She sees the playing field (or game board, or whatever). An AP Spanish student (though not a native speaker), S translated her own story—which took her about two hours—and, according to classmates (native speakers), she did a good job. I was proud of S for trying and prouder of her for happily allowing a stranger with a different layer of Spanish language expertise edit her translation. For a profile, she decided to interview a charismatic retired area elementary school teacher—a polymath-y “voracious student of everything,” a classics buff, a visual artist, a musician. In the interview, they touched on Plato and Archimedes, with the former teacher expounding on the allegory of the charioteer. S (not a classics buff) didn’t let this old chap talk over her head. She took notes and studied up—so the narrative could read like her reasoning and voice as she paraphrased and interpreted, trying to understand and capture his character (and passions). Most students would just drop massive unwieldy block quotes into the story and not bother really knowing what their audience was bound to read. As a journalist, S gets what the work entails. She is relentless about learning what she doesn't know. And the effect is that the rest of class has come to see her as someone with knowledge to spare—a reliable editor and sounding board for ideas.
So, hey, there’s more where that came from. Plenty of points of light.
An interesting thing happens. You form an overarching narrative about the trajectory of a year, and this year, that portrait has been, as I said, dark. A lot of disinterest, much reticence. But the sum doesn’t match up with the parts. When I start with S, D, and T, and then go through a roster, student by student, I don’t necessarily see as much evidence for the grim takeaway. A nodded off at his desk a week ago, but two days later, he contributed twice to a discussion in class, more than he’s volunteered in the past two months. V chimed in for the first time all year during that somewhat dispiriting attempt at a conference. W produced a research-free paper for said conference—a disappointment considering my expectations for…research—but nonetheless addressed the school community’s unfortunate recent history of off-campus sexual assault cases, writing eloquently about how the middle school years transformed the behavior of her male friends. M might squeak by with a D-, but I at least know she has good taste in cartoons given the Kiki’s Delivery Service stickers plastered across her laptop. I’ll work with that in two weeks. Sometimes the points of light are small indeed. But I don’t have to squint to see them.