Soccer Girls

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bandarqqMy daughter Elsa first expressed interest in soccer after she got an American Girl Doll for Christmas.  In a catalogue, Elsa saw a soccer outfit that came with a matching set for the child.  She asked if she could get the matching soccer outfits for herself and her doll—Jeanette—and then asked if she could play soccer, too.

Once we told her she could play soccer, she really got into the idea.  Then, this summer, she became captivated by the Olympics, and every day begged to watch the girl athletes.  She loved the swimmers, the gymnasts, and the soccer players, especially.

She began soccer two weeks ago.  She plays on Saturdays in the morning, and since she is in the K-2 group, they only have six sessions, but she has loved it.  There are girls with more skill than her, but no one can match her will.  She scored three goals in her first four-on-four game, and five in her second.

At the same time, our adoptive 17-year-old daughter Maria (she’s an exchange student from Italy, in case you didn’t read last week’s blog) is also playing JV soccer for EO Smith High School.  She played soccer as a little girl, but not since, so no one—including her—has unrealistic expectations about her performance, but she has enjoyed playing, and even got to participate in her first game earlier this week.  She played defense for ten minutes.  When I asked her about the game on the car ride home, she was excited they won, but did not recall the score, and when I asked her what school they played, she could only tell me their uniforms were blue.  But that wasn’t the point, anyway.  Maria was just happy to be playing soccer with the other girls.

All this made me think about my freshman year at UConn when I covered the women’s soccer team for the Daily Campus.  I didn’t know, little yet appreciate at the time, that we were only fifteen years from the passage of Title IX, and that these girls I was watching and interviewing were the first generation to benefit from the new law.  All of them, like me, were no older than seven when the law was passed.

That team started five freshmen, including Beth Grecco, who would become an All-American, Kristin Janosky, who used to throw in the ball by doing a flip that would propel the ball farther than she could throw it (I believe she was one of the first girls in the nation to use this technique), Britton Arico, who is still one of the all-time leading scorers, and Angela Gibbons, whose family had sued her school district to allow her to play on the all-boys soccer team, and then went on to be co-captain and leading scorer.  They also had a goalie named Bonnie Miller who is still the all-time saves leader, and who had achieved a certain degree of fame for saving two men from drowning the summer before her senior year.  However, perhaps the most impressive athlete on that team was midfielder Kim Prutting, who would go on to be a three time All-American and play on the US National Team.  That team lost in the NCAA quarterfinals to UMass, and the biggest reason was probably a thigh injury to Kim Prutting that severely limited her mobility.

At that time, women’s sports was still very second class, despite Title IX, and I had an uncommonly high level of access to the coaches and the players.  The Daily Campus used to print an annual Fall Sports special issue, and I interviewed several of the girls for feature articles, just talking with them in their dorm rooms.  I also traveled with them on the team bus to the NCAA Tournament.  The night before the quarterfinal game, head coach Len Tsantiris invited me out to dinner with him, his assistant coaches, and the UMass head coach.  After the girls lost 3-1 the following day, seniors Bonnie Miller and Jen Kennedy invited me out to dinner with the team, and all the girls thanked me for the good coverage I had given them all season.  They weren’t accustomed to it, and they wanted to show their appreciation.

That was 25 years ago this fall, and I’d like to thank all those young women for making it possible for Maria to use soccer as a means to make friends and for Elsa to score eight goals on a co-ed team.

Classical Myths And Modern-Day Heroes

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bandarqI’ve been reading Beowulf with my on-loan teenage daughter, helping her wade through translated old English verse.  It is painstaking at times but can also be fun, making Maria laugh by pantomiming the killing of Grendel’s mother with the giant sword he finds in her lair.  And Maria is smart, and so we also talk about important concepts from the work, like heroism and the conflicts between pagan and Christian heroic codes that permeate the work.

At the same time, Cormac is studying comparative mythology—Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian—in his 4^th grade enrichment class.  They’ve been talking about heroes, too, and sooner or later his teacher will pose the question of what constitutes a pendekar today.

Then the other day with my undergraduates, we were discussing Faulkner’s Sanctuary, and I was pointing out some of the various allusions in the novel to Paradise Lost, The Scarlet Letter, and Classical myths such as that of Narcissus and Odysseus.  (My undergrads are sadly not very well read, and only a handful had read either Hawthorne or Homer, and none had read Milton). The protagonist of Sanctuary is a small town lawyer named Horace Benbow, who’s fleeing a morally compromised situation with his step-daughter, and winds up defending the husband of a prostitute against charges that he raped the daughter of a local judge.  One young woman in my class made an astute observation that Horace seemed like a modern, common man’s hero, going on a journey and battling metaphorical monsters.  I enthusiastically agreed, and pointed out that Horace’s surname even alludes to the scene in the Odyssey when Odysseus challenges the suitors to bend and string his bow, which none of them can do.  Odysseus then bends the bow, which allows him to kill the suitors and thereby cleanse his home, defend his wife, and restore order to a world fallen into chaos and disrepute.

All this talk of heroism got me thinking about heroes in this masa when so many athletes have been discredited as cheats, and politicians have been reduced to mud slinging power seekers, and public servants like teachers and state troopers are routinely demonized by legislators and journalists alike.  I thought, who and what is a pendekar today?

On Wednesday, I brought my daughter to art class after school, over at UConn’s Depot Campus, and on the way out I ran into an old friend and his kids.  I’ll call him Ben, for the sake of privacy.  Ben’s about 52 and looks it.  He has not seen the inside of a gym in decades.  He smokes, though he has been trying to quit for as long as I have known him.  And he probably drinks a little too much.  Ben grew up working class, had an undistinguished high school career, and worked many unglamorous jobs before attending Avery Point and then transferring to Storrs.  Upon graduation, Ben worked here and there, was often out of work, and then briefly owned his own business.  For many years now he has worked in retail. 

In terms of heroic codes, Ben does not come particularly close to meeting any Classical criteria.

But let me tell you a little about Ben.  In his twenties, Ben fell head over heels for a slightly older woman who had recently divorced her abusive husband and was struggling to raise her two daughters as a single mom.  Ben married that woman and loved and raised those girls as his own.  Both girls went to college (one to an Ivy League school).  And both are now happily married with children. 

Ben and his wife made decisions back in the day to not have children of their own.  They were busy enough raising the two girls.  But after the girls were grown up and moved out, Ben and his wife decided it was time to try to have a child together, before they were too old to attempt it.  The short version of the story is that they lost the baby in the third trimester.  Enough said. 

As soon as their grief subsided sufficiently, Ben and his wife contacted the state about pre-adoptive foster care.  Initially, they were told there’d be a long wait.  They were surprised, and asked if there weren’t plenty of children in need of homes.  The agent told them there were plenty of kids, but they were all black and Hispanic.  If they wanted a white child, they’d have to wait.  Once Ben and his wife assured the woman that they did not care about the race of the child, they were told they could have a foster child within days.  In fact, they had twins in less than a week.

The twins had been born prematurely to a heroin-addicted prostitute.  Their biological father, as determined by DNA testing, was serving a life sentence for first degree murder.  The kids had (and have) myriad medical needs, and the fight for full custody took three years and was exacerbated by an activist judge who refused to give custody of Latino children to non-Latino parents.  In the end, Ben and his wife won that battle, which was seven years ago now.

Today, the twins are middle schoolers.  They receive all the medical care they need, they take dance and music classes, study martial arts, and ride their bikes up and down their street.  They have a stable home, a loving mom and dad, two older sisters, and even nieces and nephews.

Ben does not have the noble lineage of Aeneas, the ripped torso of Achilles, or the flowing auburn locks of Odysseus.  Nor does he have the academic or professional resume of a renowned scholar or a wealthy entrepreneur.  But Ben is a loving husband, and, more impressively, he has stepped in where other men have failed, slayed the demons of prejudice and bureaucracy, and helped raise four children into healthy, happy, successful people.  Perhaps you’ll never read his story in an epic poem or a best-selling novel, but his heroism is arguably peerless.

Being In The Classroom Is The Best Part Of My Day

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ceme 99 onlineOne of the most frequent complaints I hear from teachers these last few years is that more and ever more is being demanded of them.  (I would say ‘us,’ but, at least for now, I don’t think it’s quite as bad in higher education).  We’ve seen gradual mission creep for years.  We’ve been expected to teach not just the content of our subjects but skills in reading, writing, thinking, computing, research, et cetera, et cetera.  I doubt I have to spell it out for most readers.  You know the drill.

But to this we have now added untold layers of assessment, data collection, data analysis, and data-driven instruction.

As one former colleague used to say, “We’re still supposed to have the kids read books and write papers, right?”  Another used to say, “Once you close your door and it’s just you and your kids, that’s the best.”  He’d utter this like a chant to remind himself what he loved about teaching and why he taught in the first place.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since I got a sad message from a former undergraduate a couple weeks ago, a brilliant and talented high school English teacher, just entering her fourth year.

She wrote, “I'm so burnt out.  I get these frantic urges to just run like hell to anything else.  It's such a deep feeling of dread going into school.  It's not the kids or the people I work with at all.  Being in the classroom is the best part of my day.  But I've grown so tired of the bureaucracy and red tape and paperwork and phone calls and meetings and evaluation forms that tear me away from the actual teaching and learning part.  I feel like I'm suffocating in paperwork.  Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but man, is it supposed to feel this way?  Maybe I need to move on.  My needs and my ambitions are bursting at the seams and I feel my impact is so menial.”

At about the same time, I received a different message from a former high school student who has become an elementary school teacher.

This young woman wrote, “I just wanted to share with you a story from school today.  I had asked my students to bring in their most prized possession to get to know one another, and one of my fifth-graders brought in a letter from the Connecticut Writing Project, congratulating her on one of her pieces being honored [in Connecticut Student Writers magazine].  She was so proud of it she was absolutely beaming, and when she asked me to read it afterwards, I saw it was signed by you!  I just wanted to let you know how far your impact is spreading and that you most certainly made a ten-year old girl very confident in her abilities as a writer.  So from one teacher to another, THANK YOU!”

This note, of course, delighted me.  I’m happy that we made this little girl feel such confidence in her ability, and I’m proud of my former student.  (I’m always so proud when my former students go into teaching).  But in the context of the other note, I felt a little sad, too.

Principally, I'm very cognizant that this ten-year old and her teacher were deeply moved by something from outside any curriculum.  Something creative.  Something unassessed.  Something that is not collected, disaggregated, analyzed, charted, and used to inform teaching.  Which is in most ways a good thing, except that I fear the creativity, authenticity, joy, and pride so central to this student’s experience are becoming increasingly separate from the core focus of most classrooms, and certainly separate from most of the initiatives born of this current reform movement that has held us in thrall for the past decade.

The experiences of these two young teachers underscore two things for me:  the obvious limits of reform, especially corporate reform, and the positive influence teachers can have upon their students, even if it has to be exercised surreptitiously once we close our classroom doors and are left with just our kids.

Embracing The Shitty First Draft

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Lately I have been trying to get my students to buy into the Shitty First Draft.  I teach writing intensive courses each semester, and one of the core requirements of the W courses is that there must be explicit writing instruction.  When I sit down at the beginning of each semester and think about what I want to do differently or better in my courses, I always come to the conclusion that I can do a better job of teaching writing.  This is not necessarily true in the Advanced Composition course the Education students have to take, but I’d have to admit that there’s some truth to my own self-criticism in regards to the American Lit courses I teach each fall.

The students have to write a 15 page paper, for which I require a succession of drafts.  I build in workshop days approximately every fourth class for the students to work in groups on their latest drafts of the assignment, and during these I sit in on the groups and add my two cents.  I also require conferences at midterm and make myself available for conferences by appointment throughout the semester.  But this isn’t always enough. 

This semester, I have found that my students are having tremendous difficulty just generating ideas for their papers, and they are coming to workshop sessions with very paltry drafts.  Not just shitty drafts in the classic sense of the term, but drafts that are really nothing more than a paragraph or a list.

After having talked to about half of the twenty students in the course, I began to see clear patterns.  1.  Students were not taking the time to read the samples of student essays I had provided, and even when they did they really did not know what was important to observe.  2.  The students were not especially well read, either in terms of classic literature, Bible stories, or mythology, or in terms of current events.  In terms of popular texts like movies and television, they were unsure how to begin reading these as texts.  3.  They were so terrified of not having enough to say about a topic for fifteen pages that they strove for exceedingly broad topics in the resigned belief that even if they didn’t write a good paper they’d at least be more likely to fulfill the page requirement.  4.  They were unwilling to embrace the messiness of the drafting process.  They were horrified by the thought of cutting and pasting, moving things around, exploring tangents, and having multiple, interrelated tasks going on simultaneously.

So then I asked myself what I could do differently.  I started by taking a day to discuss some of the student papers I have posted on a course wiki, talking aloud about what I thought was successful, effective, or interesting, and why.  I asked the students to make observations and note patterns of what students did to make the papers effective.  In conferences, I spent time going online and showing the students good websites for current events, starting with places like the New York Times.  Many students were surprised at how comprehensive such a site was.  I also gave a lot of pep talks and struck deals.  I’d say, "Get to seven pages and then let’s revisit this idea about the 15 page paper."  I also had to assure the students that the learning process was more important than the grading process.

Lastly, and this was in many ways the hardest and most important psychological hump to get over, I had to encourage and cajole the students into embracing the shitty first (and sometimes second, third, and fourth) draft.  We read Annie Lamott’s chapter by the same name.  I showed them how I use two—and sometimes, with the help of a laptop, three—screens to be able to see multiple drafts and pages, so I can cut and paste from one draft into a new one, while simultaneously doing research on a third screen.  I told them stories I’d heard from Wally Lamb about using notecards on bulletin boards, and even showed photos of William Faulkner’s home where he wrote his outline of ideas and events for A Fable on the walls of his bedroom. 

I don’t know yet how much this has or will help, but students thus far have expressed thankfulness for these various efforts.  Their next draft is due on the 18^th.  I guess I’ll find out then how much of this was taken to heart and mind.

Bricks And Mortar, And The Underfunding Of Public Education

Jejak PandaTerima Kasih Sudah Kunjungin Blog Ini
ceme online terbaikI ran a professional development workshop at a new magnet school in New Haven earlier this week.  The building is a beautiful structure in a very impoverished part of town.  The library alone was gorgeous.  Wooden bookshelves, vaulted ceiling, lots of muted sunlight from high windows.  The carpeting gave off that new smell.  The tables were also made of wood, as were the chairs, each of which had animal designs cut into the backrests—frogs, turtles, butterflies, and lizards.  It was, in a word, immaculate.

Because a month and a half into the school year, no child had ever entered the room.

The school has no librarian. 

There’s also a merk new Mac lab that has never been used because there’s no tech person.

I experienced something similar a couple years ago when I did a site visit to the Sports and Medical Sciences Academy in Hartford.  Architecturally gorgeous new building, and the teacher I observed was new and eager.  She told me that she hoped to teach a journalism class in the television studio.  But when I asked about the studio, she shared with me that it had never been used.  No one on staff was qualified to use it, and so it remained locked up.

The building I teach in at UConn was just renamed following some construction upgrades.  The building across the quad is getting a facelift, a new roof, central heating and air, and wireless internet.  The building behind mine just opened an addition.  All over campus there are projects that involve building new offices and classrooms, or renovating outdated buildings.  These projects were mostly funded by the UConn 2000 and 2010 bills.  At the same time, we have just approved a four-year plan for tuition increases that will fund dramatic expansion in the hiring of faculty, which will bring our student to teacher ratio down to about 15-1.  No building projects or funding plans are without controversy, but on the whole I am pleased about the construction on campus, and I am glad it is being accompanied by a hiring plan, lest we find ourselves with nice new facilities but no instructors to teach in them.

But my examples expose some serious problems in the funding of education, and some serious discrepancies between K-12 and higher education.  Much of the new construction and renovation of schools throughout Connecticut (and the country) has been funded by the US Recovery Act or by various corporate grants.  But this bill and these grants only provide for bricks and mortar.  Not that I begrudge the funding.  On the contrary, I’m happy that at least some students in New Haven and Hartford are in these wonderful, clean, up to date buildings.  But there’s something wrong when federal and corporate funds are helping to erect structures at the same time that depreciating property values in this recession are lowering municipal property tax revenue and resulting in reductions in the teaching force, or, at best, hiring freezes.

The university can address this perkara by implementing tuition increases and transferring the cost of faculty hiring to the incoming students (and, indirectly, to the federal government and private lending agencies who provide students loans).  The K-12 system can’t do this even if they want to—unless they raise taxes, and raise them dramatically.  But that is unlikely to happen.  Just look for example to what happened in Region 8 not too long ago (and prior to the recession, I should add).

Voters in Hebron, Andover, and Marlborough approved a significant new building project and then followed this with a reduced education budget that took 12 votes to pass (at no small cost for each new referendum) and ultimately resulted in a four teacher reduction in force.  Voters effectively RIFed two reading teachers, a music teacher, and an art teacher.   

But I don’t really blame the voters. The real perkara lies with the ineffective ways we fund education.

I’d also add, however, that these examples expose larger problems with our cultural values.  Education just isn’t the cultural treasure we’d like it to be, and even within education, liberal arts and the humanities are disrespected and underfunded.

Just to demonstrate my point:  This summer the CWP was awarded two Title II grants of $20,000 apiece to fund Teacher Leadership and Professional Development in a High-Need School.  Then, early this semester, the university announced three major awards:  a $9.3 million grant from the NIH for human genome research, a $7.5 million grant from GE for electrical distribution research, and a $24 million commitment to build a new basketball practice facility, the bulk of which comes from a private donor who heads an investment firm.  Again, I have no objections to these donations, but the size and the discrepancy highlight this divergence in values.  Science and sports simply trump public education.  Let’s face it—my two grants combined will equal the doughnuts and coffee budget for those genome and electricity grants.  No exaggeration.

We really need to find a better way to fund—and value—public education.

Saturdays With Sam Clemens

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bandar ceme terpercayaWhen my alarm went off at 6 AM on Saturday morning, I gave serious thought to my sanity.  Or my judgment.  I was ripping myself from blissful weekend slumber to go meet a bunch of freshman and sophomore students from my interdepartmental course for students interested in teaching high school English.  We clambered into a university van provided by the First Year Experience (FYE) program, scarfed down black coffee and donut munchkins, and settled back for a trip to the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford.

As part of the Fellowship I received last year from Teachers for a New Era, I designed a non-residential Learning Community and a 1-credit course called Pre-Teaching Secondary English, open to freshmen and sophomores who think they want to be high school English teachers and who likely will apply to the Neag School of Education during their sophomore year.  The INTD course is complemented by a section of Freshman English themed around Education.  A couple students are in both classes.  The FE course is taught by an English graduate student named Heather who happens to be a certified high school English teacher in New York state.  I also have a sophomore student leader named Sarah who is assigned to my INTD course by the FYE program.  She serves as a mentor to the enrolled students and functions for me much as a grad student might.  This means that I get to come up with ideas for the course and the learning community but Sarah does most of the work to make it happen.  She gets academic credit for this, and the experience enhances her candidacy for the school of education.

All of this is new to us, and Sarah and Heather have been tremendously helpful to me in conceptualizing the course and planning readings, assignments, classroom activities, and extra activities like this field trip.

We had a beautiful fall day for our trip, and as the majority of us waited in the parking lot for a couple of students who drove directly themselves, we listened to the Park River as it rushed beneath us.  You can actually hear it through a prominent storm drain near the stairs to the main entrance.  Jeff Mainville met us in the lot and walked the nine of us along the north side of the house, bypassing the reception desk in the lobby of the visitors center.  As we walked, Jeff provided some historical background about the area and the house.  Once inside, we had the luxury of having the house to ourselves.  I have taken the tour many times in the past.  It’s a great tour, but typically there is a tour group just in front of you and another just behind, and you have to keep moving.  On this day, we were alone, and the tour took a leisurely hour.  Jeff’s focus was on curatorial aspects, like the architecture or the furniture.  He could tell us the make and model of each chair, as well as when it was acquired by the museum.  Knowing these were future teachers he had on his hands, and that I could practically give the tour myself, Jeff encouraged the students to ask questions that might be more relevant, and invited me to chime in.  We even got a tour of the servants’ quarters, which is usually a separate tour.

Afterwards, the students and I were treated to a 90 minute lecture and discussion by Craig Hotchkiss on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that placed the novel in its proper historical context.  Craig was a social studies teacher at South Windsor High for 33 years, and has evolved into a expert on Huck Finn.  Like Jeff, knowing that he had future teachers for his audience, Craig customized his talk to accommodate pedagogical concerns, and opened the talk to a more meta discussion of the teaching of the novel.  We discussed challenges to the book, notably the still recent one in Manchester, and looked closely at historical events surrounding the writing and publication of the novel.  We also looked at Twain’s life and his support for African-American scholars and artists in order to put Twain’s attitude and intentions in a better and more accurate context. 

Most of the students took copious notes and asked great questions, even though we had gone well into lunch time and we all were becoming distracted by hunger.  We ate in the Japanese restaurant there in the visitors center and had great conversation over food.  Our driver still had time before he had to return the van, so this left the students time to explore the galleries downstairs and to peruse the bookstore and gift shop.  I walked away glad that I had sacrificed a little weekend rest to give these ambitious future teachers such a worthwhile experience.

The Annual Hurricane Issue

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It is eleven o’clock on Thursday night, and I still have no power.  We live only a mile and a half from campus, but we are on a dirt road in the woods, surrounded by nature preserve.  I can’t complain because it is an idyllic setting.  But it’s not so good during storms.  There are too many trees.  In fact, most days I can’t get good cell phone service.

This morning I hoped we might get power back because there was a Northeast Utilities car parked along our road, but when we returned from seeing Pilobolus at Jorgensen tonight, that same guy was still waiting for a repair crew to show up.  Maybe tomorrow we’ll get lucky.

Meanwhile, we have tried to make the best of it.  We had power Sunday till around 6:30 in the evening.  That night, after dark, we read Halloween stories to the kids by candlelight.  The following morning, no one had school, of course, and we were fortunate to have sustained little damage.  One large limb came down in our back yard.  A neighbor had a large tree take out a fence and almost hit the garage.  But when we ventured out into the road to walk up the hill, we encountered two very large, old trees down.  One completely took out a set of power lines, and both tree and lines lay across the road.  Another had fallen against lines and was pressing hard, just waiting to fall.  There was no way to drive up that hill and out.  In the other direction, our road crosses the Fenton River.  Only kasus is that the bridge has been under repair for ages.  You can walk or ride a bike across it, but there’s no way to drive a car across.  The workmen have heavy machinery blocking the way even if you wanted to try.  So we were effectively trapped in.

About ten in the morning, Cormac and I decided to head out to campus.  We didn’t want to cross the downed lines, so we hiked toward the river and picked up the Nipmuck Trail, which follows the Fenton.  We hiked about a mile to where it crosses Gurleyville Road, and then walked up Gurleyville to Bundy to Dog Lane and then to campus.  If you know the area at all, that part of Gurleyville is just one long hill.  Not too bad for me but quite a challenge for a nine year old boy.  It took us an hour to get to the community center.  I carried a shoulder bag with towels, toiletries, and a change of clothes.  Cormac and I were able to gather information, take showers, grab coffee, juice, an apple and a pastry, and head home.  Another hour.  For all the inconvenience, it was pretty nice father-son time.

Eventually, tree removal guys came and cleared the trees.  We know you’re not supposed to drive over downed lines, but there was clearly no power, and so we and all the neighbors proceeded to drive out over the lines to get to town.  Not that there was much to do.  Most stores weren’t open till Tuesday or Wednesday, and no one had school.  I slept a lot.  I have a perpetual sleep deficit that I will probably never make up till death finds me, but I made up a few hours over the past several days.  And in the daylight hours, we all did a lot of reading and a fair amount of walking around the area. 

I rarely get to do much pleasure reading these days, so it was delightful to read Smithsonian front to back, and then devour Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, which I have been wanting to read for years.  It’s sad but beautiful.  The book is the compilation of two long essays written around 1979, during which time Auster’s father died suddenly and then his grandfather died in a prolonged way, his marriage failed, and his young son came close to dying from pneumonia.  The book is a meditation upon memory, family relations (especially fathers and sons), and identity.  I was even inspired to write a short essay, though I doubt I will share it with any but a few select people at this point.

So I am very ready for the power to come back, but I am thankful for the time to sleep, read, and spend time with my kids.  Tomorrow I leave for a conference and get to stay in a hotel for two days.