29. Primordial Muck

Putting the curriculum in the curriculum...

I have a kid who hates to write in her reading log. It’s most days of the week, frankly. Kid is supposed to read every night and then write a response: a summary, a reflection on a connection to her life or another text, something about a character. She doesn’t want to do it. She groans, her face sagging, her eyes squeezed shut like she’s about to weather a flu shot. 

Loves to read though. Graphic novels, middle grade fiction, quaint fairy tales, Shel Silverstein poems, mythology, youth nature magazines, fantasy. She reads at her desk, on her bed, in the bouncing car until she almost pukes, hanging off the couch in painful-looking poses.

I get why writing is less fun than reading: it is not entertainment or escape.

And, in case you haven’t gathered, the kid is mine. Not one of my students. My own spawn. 

She doesn’t hate all writing this much. After dinner the other night, she liked drafting slides (on paper) for a bizarre scatological rant/lecture that wouldn’t have been out of place on a city street corner (with bystanders taking noticeable detours). She self-published a “fashion magazine” over the weekend. When encouraged, she writes meandering travel journal entries that include three or four sentences on, say, the above-average food at a Dutch pizza joint and perhaps one for the day’s assortment of vistas, ruins, and art. When pressured, she will write thank-you cards for gifts. Without encouragement, she will write cards to family friends offering condolences for the loss of a beloved pet. Making a play for the writing she does for school, I once tried to appeal to Y’s artistic nature. We were in the car. I impulsively played songs from Pet Sounds and pointed out the different instruments, how all the sounds complement one another. Hear how it is constructed, I said (like I was one large weed cookie into a record-spinning session with friends already wishing they’d made other plans). Writing is building, I said, it is music. You can make sounds, you can persuade, you can transport your reader to another place—you can be an architect with language, you can erect cathedrals, castles, bunkers…

She became sleepy. 

I think her distaste is not for the act of writing or the thinking process it facilitates but for her school’s insistence on a single home routine. Some will say that any constructive routine for kids is healthy—household chores for responsibility, drills for soccer, the rituals specific to a martial arts discipline, and so on—but this routine involves seeing the same graphics on the same photocopied paper in the same folder night after night after night. Monday through Thursday, it requires students to pick from an unchanging menu of “safe” response-to-literature mini-paragraph prompt options seemingly applicable to any text. 

I think it’s a good regular exercise, the imposition of a structure for active reading. I give guiding questions to high school students. I use a “book club” structure for informal small group discussion, with one member taking notes to document a conversation ordered by just one or two key prompts—an endeavor heavier on the “what-were-you-thinking-about-when-you-read” end of the spectrum than the this-is-a-puzzle-you-must-solve side of things. I want my students to be entertained and moved by books; fewer than 3% (facts, documented, highly official) will be English majors and only slightly more than that will even take a genuine non-mandatory college-level literature class. I want them to be adult readers who at least weekend in the citadel of ideas, and so I will happily trade what some teachers would define as “more rigor” for emotional investment and a modest expansion of consciousness (as if you still can’t make them write in complete sentences). 

But with my students, I try to both maintain and vary the routine. Sometimes the response-to-literature prompts are about “detective work” and sometimes they’re about play—like when I have students write a series of text messages to Holden Caulfield or flip the perspective in a paragraph, imagining the interior monologue of a character whose opinions are never heard. 

Anyway, we’ve tried a little Jedi mind trick when it comes to Y’s nightly reading logs. We’ve given her a bound journal she can think of as, you know, a journal—or a literary spellbook or whatever—and, divorced from the white worksheets, maybe, with that change alone, the experience can feel less brutal. The pages can be scanned or ripped out and sent to school stapled to the backs of those white worksheets. It’s a very simple shift but one that, so far, has paid off—modestly. I can’t say it was my idea (all credit to K).

A naysayer enters the arena. Simmons, the intruder brays, you’re a soft-boiled sap—a kid—your kid—needs brutal experiences in farm-league academia because major-league academia is brutal and so is the early-stage adult professional career world, and so this brutal humdrum routine is an essential preparation for a brutal and humdrum life. It’s not a new argument, but like many old-fashioned ones, the usual reasoning hinges on tradition as opposed to logic or joy.

I just don’t care, I tell the naysayer. I’ve got one kid with one life. My students have one life apiece. The world is awful. I don’t think it’s at all unrelated! I mourn suffering. Children dying by the thousand in Gaza, and media and (normally) modestly acceptable mainstream national politicians laundering the daylights out of it. The likelihood of Y having to someday move to British Columbia or something to avoid encroaching climate catastrophe. Thirty-five percent (at minimum) of a nation’s voting population transfixed by fascism and xenophobia in a sort of amused, nihilistic, playing Grand-Theft-Auto-but-never-the-missions way. They either believe in it or they’re just having fun in the simulation. 

It’s brutal. 

So why prepare kids for brutality? Let them play a better game. At worst they find delight before the sky falls. As I’ve long emphasized, literature won’t cool down the summer of 2045, but it will help us cope and be better to one another. I want Y and my students to think critically, learn to express themselves, and find power and joy in language. The experience of getting to that point can’t be brutal or they just won’t bear it.

Grammarly can, in real time, show them how to make their writing “more persuasive” or “more vivid.” The results will bore teachers but, according to a rubric, likely not doom their grades. So, if it’s brutal, they’ll just do that. They need a model for the experience being fulfilling, meaningful, exciting, light, deep, weird, exuberant, goofy, self-enriching, self-actualizing. 

All classes come with a submerged curriculum. With every text, assignment, rule, and routine in any class, one can ask: beyond the academic goal, what does this teach, what is intended or incidental, even unconscious on the part of a teacher? Is the routine or collaboration or process, by design, its own lesson? Not a new idea. In a multiphase group project that mirrors a real-life creative or research endeavor, that’s usually acknowledged, even at the forefront of the work. Likewise, is my draconian late work policy (no late work unless a student receives accommodations or has an excused absence) a piece of a submerged curriculum? Certainly. One might call it hostile—the idea that kids can get behind early and then struggle to catch up. Brutal. 

Ah, but, as I have written before, they can revise and proofread (with help) anything as often as they like, I tell this new naysayer—and for an improved grade. And they can request extensions. And they don’t need to even bother in the event of an emergency—a pet’s death, a sibling’s trip to the hospital, or a delayed flight. In this case, the submerged curriculum says: I want you to keep up with the reading and writing and be ready, on any given day, to hurl your beautiful mind and soul into the discourse stew, and so I will disincentivize sloth and procrastination by aggressively using the main currency at my disposal; however, I also want to manage a kinder domain to stand in contrast to the you-could-be-fired-for-this logic of the adult professional career world; I want students to learn to self-advocate and dedicate themselves to growth; I want them to trust me, to come for help, to know that I am not out to crush them.

Given Y’s homework load—the nightly spelling and writing sheets that compete for time with martial arts training, swimming lessons, choir rehearsal, art, independent reading, daydreaming, stretching, snacking, hydration, and other imperatives—I don’t know if her school has any conscious rationale beyond the school’s good reputation on the test prep front.

This thinking has helped me out in Lit 11 this semester. This course—my first time teaching it—surveys a century of American history (and our present) through a series of texts. Standard frame (with some Simmonsian flair and some Simmonsian ambition and some Simmonsian stumbles). But the submerged curriculum—copacetic to that textual frame’s consideration of American dreams, success, reinvention, belonging, desperation and so on—is about autonomy, choice, responsibility, power, curiosity, bravery, collaboration, and flexibility. I want nearly every assignment to be public, practical, and realistic, to require adventure or invention or self-reflection. I've committed to that in every course, and it feels especially appropriate here. 

Teaching The Nickel Boys, without ignoring its historical and current societal contexts, I’ve decided to have students essentially study their own educations, to consider the lessons, content, and submerged curricula that have made them them. We start with Elwood Curtis, a fellow teen. He learns from the fact of his unjust oppression, Martin Luther King, his history teacher, James Baldwin, his grandmother, his hotel kitchen colleagues, and his corner store boss before he arrives at Nickel Academy.

At some point, teachers usually end up constructing their own lore, not necessarily for students’ ears but for their own understanding of the work to be done. We’re hopefully in the business of adding value to lives. We have to think about the parts of our sum. But high school students are swimming in the primordial muck of their own development and, without prodding and guidance, won’t often peer into it, at best, for another decade or so, usually when the formal schooling phase is over.

Reading the novel, right after Elwood gets to Nickel Academy, I conducted a survey of my students. You’re experts on your high school, I told them—what traits and behaviors allow a student to be successful here? Don’t get in trouble, be disciplined, work hard, be respectful, and so on. A few kids suggested staying motivated or learning from mistakes. One solitary girl said that curiosity was key to achievement. Only I concurred. No one mentioned creativity or joy. In Elwood’s first encounters, the evil administrator of Nickel Academy, his henchman, and the school’s desperate student prisoners trumpet the same traits and behaviors.

When I asked my students what they noticed after making a chart for each school, theirs and Elwood’s, they made the connection but didn’t see the issue. The logic? It’s good to be disciplined, hard-working, and respectful when college acceptance or As and Bs are on the menu instead of violence and white supremacy. Nickel’s advertised curriculum (not the reality, obviously) is…good?

It’s only when you push students about what they’re supposed to learn from school that they start to get it. They’ve accepted the idea that school is supposed to be brutal. Even as they often resist it creatively, they don’t usually question the premise. Yes, senior journalism provocateurs will write opinion articles debating “the point of what we learn” but they usually mean, more or less, that the time spent reading books and analyzing them would be better applied to financial literacy or career prep. Whether they reject or accept what’s being served, the message they’ve gotten about the point of education has been very practical and very boring. It’s about preparation for work and survival. And, as Station Eleven’s Traveling Symphony maintains in its clever ganking of a Star Trek line, survival is insufficient.

So, inspired by my kid’s school’s submerged curriculum, my own experiences and reflections, The Nickel Boys, and what I’ve gathered about my students’ educational universe, I’ve created a promising assignment for Lit 11. Simmonsian in scope, ambition, and (probably) pitfalls, yes, but playing it safe is also insufficient. And no fun. 

I’m having students map their education across time, from early life through elementary and middle schools to the present, and across space, from one sphere of experience to another. They’re taught lessons at home, on teams, in churches, in classrooms, from the news, from media, from pop culture. To be completed in stages over the course of a month, the product is a digital essay, a customized Google site (based on a teacher-created template) combining text with (mostly) original images. The goal is for each student to take an audience through an educational timeline. Each entry—I'm requiring eight—consists of a story, the identification of a lesson, and a reflection on its significance or utility in at least six proofread sentences. I’d rather have 40-something total sentences that reflect care, attention (architecture!), and growth than a six-page essay they funnel through Grammarly or don’t bother to turn in. 

I did my own site as a model (and for that template). I tried not to write over their heads. Have I done a newsletter about creating models? Perhaps it’s time. Anyway, I formally mapped myself—took a trip down well-trod territory—and dwelled on acting classes, mix tapes, transferring from one high school to another, summer arts camp, and a few teachers—like Dr. S, who taught me how to write like a non-dumbass (see above…a lesson I have since jettisoned).

I see certain themes materializing across my “map,” most of which I’ve previously divined: for example, learning to get comfortable speaking in public through performance, the realization that becoming other people in plays at 15 allowed me to begin to become myself.

I am encouraging students to see the links between entries, to note where one experience bolsters another. (I’m also telling them that what they choose to reveal has zero bearing on the grade; after all, I am not in the business of valorizing candor about potentially painful topics). It’s true: being a role player on a sports team and doing volunteer work can each teach you humility and communalism. But I’m deliberately avoiding asking students to come to firm conclusions about who they are and what they’ve learned across the vast map of their education. I may change my mind tomorrow and update the assignment in a coffee-fueled frenzy but my current thought is that I want them to see how messy this is. Just like with Elwood, forces in the past and present can work with or against each other. His grandmother and history teacher don’t provide the same model for coping with the fact of his unjust oppression; they diverge and do battle. Students will see that friends resist parents resist school resists church resists friends resist sports resist school resist work… 

It’s normal that students won’t be able to see a tidy thematic spine running through each entry. It’s good then to see contrasts, to consider the complexities and disagreements in one’s making, to think about what to embrace and what to decide to reject or deprioritize, whether it's a stultifying homework routine or a teacher who won’t stop making you do tedious, ambitious projects that require self-reflection and adherence to due date expectations.