I'm watching the first season of "My So Called Life." Perhaps when the show had come out in '94, I was not ready to relive certain parts of my high school experience. Maybe I was so into the lives of Brandon Walsh and Kelly Taylor to immerse myself in anything remotely angst-ridden. About as far as I got into grunge at that time was jamming to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and trying to decipher the lyrics when singing in the car.
I was 2 years out of high school in '94. I was a borderline wreck. Pretty much a wreck. Failed relationship with a girlfriend, recent community college dropout. Failed writer of poetry. There was absolutely no reason to traverse the hallways of teenage problems. Age 19 had its share.
In the first and only season of the show, episode 6, amply called "The Substitute" details how a mysterious sub amps up the safe lives of the literature magazine crowd. It's very Dead Poet-esque. In one of those great montage scenes that all educational movies have, the teacher walks through the throng of students whose attention he holds for the first time in their lives. Desk arrangements change from rigid rows to concentric circles of creativity. Kids are walking through the hallway actually interested in school. Inevitable, the courage to write thoughts on paper becomes troublesome to the powers that be--namely the school principal, the dogged administrator who lives simply to squash independent thought at every turn.
I'm blogging as I watch the turn of events. Students publish "radical" lit magazine, principal denounces such thoughts, bans magazine. Out heroine takes it upon herself to print her own version. These kind of episodes, even as scripted as they are (ironic considering the freedom of not playing it safe is exactly what their conceit is), get me fired up. I've cried at enough versions of these movies and episodes you'd think I had seen them and their plots for the first time. I'm a writer at heart, torn between the lure of writing the Great American Novel for fame, and the obscure sweater-porn beatnik who chills boothside in a coffee shop hoping to share his words for the "moment" and nothing else.
In college I was part of a literature group that met weekly in a local Chinese restaurant to hash out story ideas, critique on another and provide feedback for becoming published. It was the kind of group any lit teacher would hang their hat on as an essential of kids learning and working beyond what happens in the classroom. Since I know I have written about this topic before, I won't go much further into detail, but these are the times when I'm so in love with writing, education and the process of creativity that I could see myself teaching one of those standard-tv-issue lit classes and firing up a group of high school kids who never realized their true potential.
Much of this thought goes into my normal, everyday process for teaching my elementary students. I've tried several classroom management and self-directed behavioral strategies over the years to warrant my own screenplays. However, I don't typically have those, "captain, my captain" moments. I doubt many teachers actually do. The best I get are the picture captions I display on cork board every year behind my computer.
Mr. C is the best.
You're the best teacher ever.
We love Mr. C.
Lately there's been frustration on my part of my own performance. The nagging perfectionism debates, the Mr. Hand episodes of lecture v. rant (I chuckled at watching "Fast Times" the other night when Mr. Hand shows up at Spicolli's house to "square the account" of wasted time in his room. Oh, my kids are lucky I am married and not readily available during the summer). The pressure of late for many in my profession is raising test scores (or, "why are my kids failing?"), motivating kids (especially boys) school funding. Any of these 3 topics can dispel a month-long professional development training to cynicism. Outside of a teacher's lounge, you're liable to hear even more. Teachers are being asked to do more, with less parental support, with less administrative support than ever before. Many studies claim that teacher performance is the number one determination of a child's ability to succeed, even when other studies claim outside factors like poverty or support at home rank higher. There are magnet schools, charter schools, voucher programs and on-line schools. Sometimes I wonder if parents were involved in their own neighborhood schools, and consequently, the admins and teachers invited the community in (besides sending flyers home for Open House--any monkey can do this), that there wouldn't be a need for the schools that seem to help drain public schools dry.
We're testing kids more than ever. One reason is to assess a child's growth, true, but this has manifested itself into a new culture of number crunching addicts. America loves the scores so much, they've added more and more it seems each season. Online tests are coming soon. Why? Saving paper and paying test graders can be mighty expensive when a computer database can do it for you. I'm not terrified of the new online testing coming to Ohio in a few years, but I can't say I'm thrilled either. You know what my kids do when they take a test online? They don't read the passage, they click to be done fastest, and generally bomb the test more than they would on paper. In some states, the new tests are crashing servers. In others, they don't have the computers in place to administer them.
Back to before. I can't see the same episode of "My So Called Life" focusing on testing, much less movie about it (although "Stand and Deliver" comes close, albeit the test was designed to prove to the world that Latino students in impoverished LA could outshine their suburban counterparts). Perhaps one day, a student of mine will leap upon a desk and cry out, "Captain, My Captain." More than likely, they are going to throw their test down in disgust and scurry from the room in search for their own creative outlets (in a charter school, no less). Will I clap or ask the kid to sit back down?
