I don't want my students punching each other.

That should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. If you're a teacher, you know why I feel compelled to offer disclaimers such as that.

However, since no punches were actually thrown in the incident I'm about to describe, and I can therefore now look at it humorously, I'd like to tell this end-of-semester story.

The only name I can think of for the phenomenon to attribute this incident to is "group-work rage." Like road rage, but for group work. If you're reading this blog, you were most likely at one time or another the smart, diligent kid in the group who got stuck picking up the slack for one or more not-so-concerned members of some group you had to do a project with in your K-university experience. You know the frustration of this game of academic chicken. They know you will crack and do their work for them, so they wait you out and do nothing. And you look like a chump, but what can you do? Tattle on them? It might temporarily feel good to rat them out, knowing the teacher might lower their grade, but you'd probably also feel like a coward for going behind the person's back.

In short, you probably really wanted to punch them. And one of my students almost did. After a sort of calling-out that involved some profanity, the high achiever actually asked the student whose work was "eh" to "take it outside." To the academically "eh" student's credit, he was mature enough to refuse. The frustrated high achiever immediately apologized and I definitely had long talks with both parties.

But on the plus side, the high achiever had the guts to tell the other student to his face that his work was not as good as the rest's. That's something, especially if you, as I do, have memories of the cattiness of some suburban high achievers who order what my eleventh-grade English teacher called their "mommy-lawyers" to call to complain about whatever displeases them at school, or who, in the wake of earning a B, plot in the hallways to get their teachers fired.

The recent incident's high achiever was not like that. He was a hard-working kid who came to office hours for help revising every essay. I know that he works extensive hours outside the classroom.

Because of that, and maybe because I am a super-old-fashioned person, some part of me was impressed that this high achiever was actually willing to take a few hits to uphold the quality of work in my class. There's something about a man willing to fight for his honor, for my honor.

So, to this would-be, knight in shining book-armor, I say that you that you must not act on your urge to punch your group-mates. But I appreciate the sentiment behind it. You literally stood up for smart kids doing group work everywhere.

I've also been watching a lot of E! News.

I'm not too proud to admit it.

I also confess that I've become an avid follower of E! News host Giuliana Rancic's reality show, Giuliana and Bill. Yep, I've been following the whole saga of failed IVF, breast cancer, and now baby Duke's arrival.

Aside from the obvious draws of such a show (winking smiley face), I think I like following Giuliana's story for another reason as well: I like that a girl with a Masters degree gets to wear designer gowns and is routinely followed around by a bevy of girls (hair/makeup/personal assistants) who would probably have made fun of her in middle school, what with her scoliosis and Italian accent. (I learned all this from her E! True Hollywood Story.)

So when she showed all of said assistants her pretty new house, and asked, "Sick, right?!" I was all like, "You go, smart girl!"

I need a band.

Now that vacation is here, I'm on my natural sleep schedule, which means I get to watch all my favorite TV friends without DVR: Chelsea, Conan, Jay, Jimmy. As I watch all my favorite late-night shows, it occurs to me that I want the kind of production support that they have:

First, I would like a warm-up guy to get my audience in a good mood before I get there.

Second, I would like a make-up touch-up person to run up and fix my lipstick every ten minutes.

Third, I would like a band to provide regular breaks for me so that my audience can stay in a good mood while I get my make-up fixed. 

Neil Postman laments how everything, including education, is compared to television, and how we should immediately stop this, but what if he's wrong? Maybe education should be treated MORE like a TV show. After all, TV gets all this money and respect and it allows them to put on some amazing productions. Imagine how much I could do if I had a personal assistant!

Why I love Nicki Minaj

I admit it. I listen to hip-hop. I love hip-hop. It is my favorite thing to listen to, especially when driving to school in the morning. My latest obsession is with Nicki Minaj, but I have all sorts of other embarassing hip-hop CDs tucked into a compartment of my car.

Put simply, I need to get pumped up to be in front of people all day. I liken it to when my mild-mannered suburban high school boys would tell me they listened to rap on the way to compete in a sporting event.

I try to ignore the derisive lyrics, but some of the lyrics are really good. Most contemporary poets are too cool to worry about rhyme and meter anymore, but rappers aren't.

While sometimes hip-hop stars seem to have an unearned braggodoccio, that is, they come from a world where style sometimes rules over substance, I think the agressive self-affirmation of hip-hop artists is just what I need if I'm preparing to discuss Wuthering Heights at 8:00 in the morning. (And a lot of coffee helps, too.)

I know I have earned my authority and credibility, but that doesn't fully explain how I can have the guts to face sleepy and angry teenagers every morning. I need to hear the beats that inspire you in your gut. There is something visceral about teaching. You really need to be fully there, fully present, fully passionate, fully yourself. Charisma is key. I bet many of you can relate to the experience of having taught the same lesson but one day you were "feeling it" or "in the zone" and the next time you weren't, and you can really tell the difference. If I don't give it all of my enthusiasm, class just doesn't "go." I need to be properly pumped up before my performances.

What do you do to get "in the zone" for teaching? Isabel Gillies writes some funny stuff about this in Happens Every Day, a memoir she wrote after she temporarily gave up her acting career in New York to become an adjunct drama teacher at Oberlin College in Ohio, where her husband and the father of her two children got a full-time job there (he would then proceed to cheat on her with a colleague). The book was popular when Starbucks was featuring books in their stores a couple of years back.

Yep, for those early-morning classes, bring on the Starbucks. And while my more respectable colleagues are doing tai chi, I prefer to blast the hip-hop. I get a surge of courage from  the pink-haired "little black girl" (as she referred to herself on the recent E! Special that I did watch--another admission--) from the streets of New York who bosses around the tough guys.

I've had my socks made fun of.

Lots of people lament the decline of civility in our society. But sometimes people have a shallow understanding of what that means. I don't mean it would be "nice" if people said "please" and "thank you" more often.

I mean that we are living in a world where a fifteen-year-old made fun of my socks. How can I be my true self, how can I be present and really be there for the kids if I have to worry about being disrespected on such a fundamental level? I've certainly had much worse things said to me, but for some reason the "socks" thing really stings. I think it's because nobody wants to look like a dork, and that fear runs really deep all through life.

I was wearing socks because it was 2000 and I was teaching at a California high school in which all the classroom doors opened up to outdoor hallways and it was freaking cold at 8:00 a.m. and therefore I couldn't not wear socks under my hippy-chic / professional long skirt from the '90s. I thought the length of the skirt hid the socks adequately. I was wrong.

This person who made fun of my socks (and gave me all sorts of other grief) was eventually classified as "gifted at-risk" and accepted into what is called a "middle college," or a high school housed on a college campus.

When I first heard of such schools, I thought it was a neat concept. High school sucks for smart kids, and how cool that someone finally saw that and made an alternative place for us! Oh, except not for me, because I was not only smart but also respectful, and that respectfulness would have been stereotyped as submissiveness.

I'm troubled by what I see as a trend of confusing acting like a jerk with having something to say. I even took an interview for a teaching position at this middle college high school, and they flat-out said that they wanted the student who will argue with the teacher. Now, a good teacher will invite students to argue with her intellectually. But I had the feeling they meant merely the student who challenges authority just for the sake of challenging authority.

I saw Dr. Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade speak at Mt. SAC last spring, and he was talking about the disruptive student in the back of the class, and how that student "has so much heart." I think an extrovert who is smart or hurt may show it by acting out, but I worry that some educators seem to believe that all who act out are smart, hurt extroverts. The thinking seems to go something like this: the more trouble-maker-ish you are, the more interesting/smart/hurt/worthy of attention you must be. Could it be that sometimes people act out because they are jerks? I am troubled by the idea that acting like a jerk is acceptable if you have a good reason.


It's not acceptable to be a jerk just because you're smart. Or because somebody hurt you. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Don't make fun of my socks, man.


Finally, I think acting out in response to grief is a behavior particular to extroverts. By only focusing on the jerks' problems, what happens to the introverts? I suspect the introverts are the ones that punish themselves, not others, for their pain. I suspect it's not the extroverted trouble-maker who falls through the cracks, who gets depression, who self-harms. Who's looking out for those kids?

I teach English.

There are two kinds of high school English teachers. There are the ones who say things like, "I don't teach English; I teach kids!" and then there are the ones who roll their eyes when they hear stuff like that. The introvert knows content but is stereotyped as weak or boring; the extrovert does not usually have the same content-area preparation but is, as Willy Loman said, "Well liked."

Content is, as I've explained in other posts, often brushed off because you can "use" any literature to teach a "process," whether it be writing, critical thinking, or interacting with others. But I think it's still about the content. After all, look at the alternatives.

If education is all about the teacher, we have a dictatorship. If it is all about the student, we have narcissism. You shouldn't hold blindly onto some fixed canon from the good old days nor should class be a big therapy session for students obsessed with the ephemeral.

The content is life. The content is the great conversation that people have been engaging in for eons about how to live a good life. If a class is focused on that, both students and teachers learn.

"Do you actually like grading papers?"

A student asked me this the other day. He's probably heard every teacher he's ever had complain about grading papers.

You would think a bunch of introverted, content-loving professors would love to run out of class and cozy up to some reading material, but we often don't. Even a self-proclaimed introvert colleague said to a group of us, "No one goes into teaching because they want to grade papers. Everyone wants to be in the classroom."

I have a few hypotheses about why even the most introverted among us sometimes hate grading papers (and I think much of this applies also to why online teaching is not as fulfilling as face-to-face even though it's all reading, supposedly an introvert's dream):

• We need to get our students writing a lot so that every once in awhile there's a great burst of insight. Writing involves a lot of "throat-clearing" before you get anything good out. I think a CSUN prof is responsible for that metaphor. So, while we understand that we have to read a lot of "eh" writing, it's not something we look forward to. 
• There are so many students and you have to go so fast. 
• You can't just read or even just read and comment; you have to grade. There are so many factors to consider in writing. My rubric is a page long. And that's the abbreviated one. There's the constant stress of "Was I fair?" "Am I consistent with how I was grading yesterday?" This is especially bad for highly sensitive people or those who are constantly analyzing their inner workings. 
• Most importantly, introverts are not cold-hearted misanthropes. I want to see my students smile. I  want them to laugh at my jokes. I want to see the twinkle in their eyes when they get an idea. It's not that I don't want to talk to people. I want to talk to people in coherent ways. I want a classroom where only one person is talking at one time and we're all engaging in the same discussion. 

Diana Senechal (in Republic of Noise) and Neil Postman (in his Amusing Ourselves to Death discussion of how 19th-century people used to attend three-hours-long lectures voluntarily) both have discussed how, oddly enough, a large group discussion or a lecture can appeal to the introvert. It has to do not with the number of people present but with the singular focus that exists in a whole-class discussion or in a lecture. 

It has occurred to me that the idea that I, an introvert, prefer whole-class discussion to group work could be viewed as paradoxical. In a sense, I ought to love small group work. Isn't it supposed to let me make more individual connections with students? Doesn't it make more sense for an introvert to want to communicate with a small group rather than a whole class? Isn't it a fact that introverts like to connect with fewer students more deeply than with more students less deeply? I think why I disliked group work for so long was because I could not focus on one single group at any given time. I felt I had to constantly circulate and eavesdrop and worry about what everyone was doing. I felt like I had to be in five places at once, or move from place to place, switching gears constantly. (This may be a hold-over from worrying about classroom control all the time in a society where the teacher is always supposed to stimulate and entertain the students and students left to their own devices will default to "goofing off.")  I enjoy group work most when I can turn off the "worrying about everyone" switch in my brain, spend ten to fifteen minutes with a single group, and engage deeply in their discussion. I explain why I want to spend focused time on each group and will not interrupt that and run over to another group if I suspect misbehavior. It's their education, and I'm not abandoning a good discussion to go police some goof-offs. They need to take responsibility. Just as a focused teacher deserves focused students, focused students deserve a focused teacher.