In Memorium

This isn't my thing.

Reflecting on someone's life after they've passed.  Not my thing.  I leave words for memorials and services to those more adept than I, who have more experience at it.  But that's the thing about getting older.  I'm gaining the experience.  Too much, it seems.

The very first compliment that Rob Quel ever gave me was the worst thing he could have said.  It was 10th grade.  I was in his Writing Lab class.  We were giving impromptu sales pitches.  He handed us an object - we got up to sell it.  Most of the items were random.  Some, I suspect, were calculated.  One kid got a bottle of Gatorade.  The soccer player.  Nice.  Me?  He handed me a pen.  And in a scene prescient of "The Wolf of Wall Street" he told me to sell it.  I have no memory of what I said.  I remember overhearing myself, though, and thinking, whoa, why you getting worked up over a pen?  But that was me at 15: cared too much about EVERYTHING.  I finished.  There was some polite applause and Mr. Quel, sitting in the back of the room, said, "Wow.  You should consider a career in evangelism."  I assumed he thought I didn't know what the word meant.  I was smug in the knowledge that I did know the word and hated it.  Of all the things to suggest: religion.  To me?  Really?

And thus was a relationship born.  How could I have known it would span this long.

He coached me as an extemper.  He was tough, even unfair sometimes.  When I was elected to speak at my high school graduation, by my peers, he looked over my speech half an hour before I was supposed to deliver it and suggested it was too vague.  I bristled.  How you want me to change it now? I asked, silently.

Then Rob Quel dropped out of my life for almost a decade.  I had drama of my own to deal with.  When I returned to E.C. Glass in the 04-05 school year, he was still in the elementary world.  Assistant Principal here; Principal there.  I started to hear sometime later that he might come back to Glass as an admin.  His wife worked here; his oldest kid was going to school here.  Made sense.  Then I was slapped with the first unthinkable thing in my professional life: my Principal, a man for whom I would stand in fire for, was yanked away.  Unceremoniously.  Gone.  Not gonna lie: I'm still bitter about that.  I'll probably always be bitter about that because we are, as a school, still living with the resonance of that decision.  Not as bad as invading Iraq.  But a personal war here nonetheless.  One I'm still fighting, most days.  So the year after I lost my Principal, Rob Quel reappeared.

One of the first things he said to me that year, after a day of school that week, was a Harry Wong reference.  He admonished me not to expend more energy than the students.  Make them do the "heav lifting."  I felt a tinge of that old excuse me? response.  I'll exert the energy I choose, thank you.  But he was partially right.  My students were sitting in one place too much, listening to me drone on too much.  They needed more to do.

Rob challenged me all the time to make the time in my class worthwhile for them.  Once, maybe three years ago, I was sitting in his office after school reviewing the evaluations from my students.  He was reading some out loud - the bad ones - and giving me a hard time.  "Too many students like you," he said.  "Clearly you're doing something wrong."  But then he found an honest concern.  "I think," he started, "that conservatives feel nervous about voicing their thoughts in your class."  We looked at the responses together.  Sure enough - there was something there.  That was a hard conversation to have.  I think it was hard for him to confront me on it too.  He knew my politics and while I thought I had tried hard to keep it out of my grading I didn't keep current events out of my classroom.  I could hem and haw about it all I wanted but the perception was real.  How was I going to handle it?

But my best memory of Rob was every time he threw my classroom door open, arresting my lesson and demanding my students rise up and not be subjected to "sad stories" any longer.  Our debates about Old Man and the Sea were legendary.  He always wanted the old man to beat the living crap out of those sharks.  He didn't need the story to have a happy ending, but it didn't need to have a depressing one.

Life, though, has a sense of irony.  Because depressing is sitting in my classroom at 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon and realizing that he will never throw my door open again.  He will never challenge my literary prowess on social media again.  It'll be quiet uptown, I suppose.  And I'm not sure I'll ever hear a voice fill that void.

One of my favorite stories is by Norman MacLean, a memoir about his childhood in Montana with a minister father (religion again) and a rebellious younger brother.  I quote from that work more and more these days.  Two moments stand out to me.  The father, after a family tragedy, tells Norman, "We can love completely what we cannot completely understand."  Rob served in many capacities to me.  A mentor.  A teacher.  A foil.  An antagonist.  And I will never understand his passing.  I can work at finding some peace though, I guess.  But the ending of that particular story is probably more relevant.

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

Santiago, the fisherman, strains for all his worth but he never saves that marlin.  Rob would tell me to fight the sharks.  But it's hard because now these waters are haunted.

Autobiography, In Parts

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, IN PARTS

Part I: Nouns

In my first academic iteration (read: first English teaching gig), I was convinced on Day One that what I knew mattered.  Content was key.  I had convinced myself that having a working and accessible knowledge of William Wordsworth’s life, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s eccentricities, and Pablo Neruda’s theories of poetic devices were all critical to the success of my students.  I think I envisioned teaching as a kind of firing squad.  Kids would pepper me with questions throughout the year (“What does Homer mean when he writes…?” “Is Chillingsworth meant to reflect a certain person that Hawthorne knew?” “Did Walt Whitman have lots of sex with men?”) and I would need to defend, respond, answer those questions or perish.  My content knowledge was my shield.  The things I knew, the facts I could produce about history and literature, mattered more than literally everything else.

This absolute faith in what I call the nouns of teaching was reinforced during those early years in so many ways.  I was tasked with teaching a lot of Poe in those days.  So as I introduced The Cask of Amontillado (still my favorite Poe story) or Mask of the Red Death (my least favorite) or Fall of the House of Usher (the most oversold Poe story, in my opinion) I spent whole class periods reviewing Poe as a person: his drinking and gambling addictions, his year at UVa, his marriage to his cousin, his mysterious death.  I had come up through a public schooling that involved a lot of note-taking.  Teachers would fire up those old white-hot bulb overhead machines with the transparent sheets to write on.  Usually these devices contained pages and pages of notes, information that was vital for us to record, memorize, and then use later on a test or exam.  I don’t really bemoan this process (much as it is considered anathema in education circles today) because it did instill in me a desire to know and master this information.  Introductions to units, be they in English or history or physics, typically involved copying this massive amount of information and listening as the teacher commented on the information.  Some of what the teacher said was considered additional notes that we had to copy down also.  All of this informed my approach during these early years of teaching.  I too would fire up that overhead machine.  I considered myself ahead of the game, too, because I had written out those background notes (Poe’s life, for example) legibly and thoughtfully.  I considered what additional information I wanted to say while I presented the notes.  Lots of time went into this preparation.  But, I would add, the time was definitely focused on what *I* would do or say and not what the students would do or say.  In retrospect, their presence was almost secondary to my lesson planning, a very “teacher-centered” way of approaching education.

I had some early reality checks to this style of teaching as I encountered students who fell asleep during class or who zoned out.  Even worse: kids who just refused to take the notes.  They would look out the window, pass notes to others in class, or even whisper during my lesson.  (Honestly it wasn’t a lesson; it was a lecture… and a poor one at that.)  Again, my formative years in school taught me that this kind of behavior was indicative of students who needed to be corrected, who didn’t understand the value of what they were doing or hearing, this amazing “gift” I was bestowing on them.  I would stop, often, and draw them out asking them to explain their behavior.  This often led to confrontations and belligerence and rarely solved the actual problem.

During this time I think I envisioned the problem as student motivation.  Why didn’t these kids want to learn?  I had craved knowledge and learning and school throughout my entire educational career.  It was alien to me that anyone would not feel the same way.  This was stuff that you didn’t already know.  Didn’t you want to know it!?  I was incredulous.  What was the world coming to?

The nouns of teaching manifested themselves in other ways too.  When I interacted with other faculty members, particularly members of my own department, I often measured myself against them in relation to what we knew about English.  I would randomly quote parts of The Canterbury Tales (yup, I was THAT guy) and when another English teacher looked at me in confusion I chalked it up to a win.  This morality tale played out in many ways.  It was reinforced by senior members of my department.  At lunches or on planning periods, they would bemoan the state of content knowledge of new teachers entering the profession.  “These kids,” they would say, “just haven’t read enough.”  Comments like these fed my esteem and ego.  I could confidently stand in front of my class and make connections from Poe to Macbeth that would impress scholars the world over.  Forget whether my students had read Macbeth and got the reference; that was immaterial.

My only other indication that something was wrong, that maybe this wasn’t the paragon of all great teaching methods, came at the end of various class periods.  Once again, as a student I had always found the last five or ten minutes of a class the best time to draw more information out of my teachers.  As we packed up our notes and bags we were encouraged to ask questions.  Often our questions were content related.  Do you have other funny Hemingway stories? What else about Jefferson and Franklin’s relationship did we not know?  So as I modeled my early classes on what I knew from my own high school experience I was surprised when those final minutes of class were dead silent.  Kids would pack up and glance at each other but no one spoke.  “Any questions” I would ask.  “Thoughts? Comments?”  Nothing.  Zip.  For awhile I thought they were just overwhelmed with it all.  Just needs to soak in, I told myself.  Give it a few months of this and they’ll come around.  Except they never did.  I suspect at this point a more self-aware teacher would have taken time to reflect.  They would have evaluated what the root cause of all this was.  For me, though, it was the dimmest glimmer of a concern.  Again, my position was enabled by some around me who assured me that “students these days just don’t care like they used to.”

Part II: Verbs

In my second academic iteration, I began to realize with the help of those veteran teachers around me that while content knowledge is important and one can’t truly be an effective teacher of any subject without a solid foundation of knowledge none of that matters if the students in the room don’t learn anything.  This became especially clear to me as I began teaching my AP Lang & Comp course.  As a writing course this thing required me to focus on the skills my students were developing.  If they started the year being unable to write sentences with clear subject-verb agreements and they ended the year writing sentences about Walt Whitman’s fluid view of sexuality still with subject-verb agreement issues then what they had “learned” was fairly robotic and of little importance, for their writing had not improved.

It took teaching AP Lang one whole year before I started really clearly seeing that “moving the needle” for my students, affecting their writing in a meaningful way was way harder that imparting random facts about authors and history.  In some cases they were downright resistant to that change.  Stop telling me what to fix, they would (silently) say, and just give me the “A” that I’ve always gotten in English class.  There were moments that first year and early the second year that I really and truly confronted my first crisis of faith: was I any good at this thing?  Was I nothing more than a kind of automaton, spitting out facts that kids really didn’t care about anyway?  Technology was catching up too.  Notes on the board were quickly becoming a thing of a bygone era.  As cell phones became more and more ubiquitous in the classroom, copying notes from an overhead project was a matter of clicking the picture button on the phone.  This allowed students to zone out for 20-30 minutes at a time, click a picture at the end, and have (on paper) the same understanding that their classmates had.  Factual regurgitation tests, once the gold standard for a rigorous class, were also challenged.  A good cell phone with internet access allowed a student to get all the answers he or she needed.

By the end of that first year and as I struggled to redesign for that next year I kept coming back to the notion that my most important job had less to do with what students got out of a course and more to do with how they performed.  Moving the needle.  Students who started the year only able to write simple sentences (subj-verb-compl) needed by year’s end to get more comfortable and demonstrate some control over more complex structures.  Those nouns that had always been so very important suddenly weren’t.  I couldn’t quite articulate where this change was leading until one day early in the second year of teaching this course.  It was likely the third or fourth day.  We had reviewed the syllabus, deconstructed the 9 point rubric, read some exemplars and a student asked a very simple question: how hard was the grading.  Simple yet not.  In contrast to prior years, I was more sensitive to the fear that underlaid that question.  The student was asking, in a fairly public way, whether she was going to fail this course.  I remember reassuring her that grading was fair, with opportunities to improve throughout the year, and that the rubric from the College Board was specific about things.  What things, she asked.  And then I said: “Your verbs matter.  Not whether you say the thing you kinda mean but whether they say exactly what you mean.”  And there it was.  Verbs matter.  Actions matter.  They matter way more than the nouns.  Information can and was being hurled at these young adults at an incredible rate.  Everyday they were being bombarded with information and facts about chemistry and european history and geometry and the Spanish language.  At every turn, in every classroom where they sat down there were things to know.  And remember.  And later prove to the teacher that they could remember them.  But here, in this composition course, it didn’t really matter if they could recite Nixon’s “Checkers” speech or list the reasons Aristotle saw poetry as a superior art form.  What mattered was their ability to explain, articulate, defend, analyze, and write.  Verbs, verbs, everywhere.  I needed to do more; my students needed to do more.  They needed to write (not take tests) and they needed to reflect and they needed to talk about what they wrote.

So finally there was this: I was gifted a workbook when I took over the AP Lang & Comp class at my school called “Voice Lessons,” by Nancy Dean.  I hadn’t really employed it during those first years.  It was a go-to for days when I was absent.  But I had used it wrong; I was having students read it and write long responses and then I was reading those writings.  And grading them.  Worksheets!  The memory disgusts me.  But then it started dawning on me that these activities, which are small snippets of clever, thought-provoking language, were really more geared for for students to talk about.  I started using these as “bell ringers” (although I hate that term too) and ways to make the first 5-8 minutes of class meaningful.  So instead of work these prompts, these singular creative examples of phrasing, became catalysts for kids talking about not just the words in front of them but their own writing.  The best part - and other teachers will smile at this - was after a couple weeks of modeling how this warm-up activity worked the kids arrived at class eager - like pushing each other through the door eager - to see what the example was today.  This most recent year I found the most success thus far.  New desks at our school allowed for more organic grouping, so kids could look at the example, comment about it a bit, and then transition to their own use.  Kids shared - sometimes willingly - with the class when they had used this very construction.  Or when they planned to use it in the future.  In some of my classes, students visited other groups to ask them about their perception of the example.  It sparked so much conversation.  I’m not ashamed to say these 5 minute blips sometimes became 20 minutes teachable moments about carefully selecting adjectives and turning a weak verb into an interesting gerund.  It was dynamic and different and sometimes - just occasionally - fun.

Perhaps most importantly my kids were doing something, changing something about their writing instead of learning more facts, more nouns.

Rabbits and Argument, in AP Lang

This is the story of a young boy and his pet rabbit.

Let's call the boy "Alex".  When Alex was young he wanted a pet.  Many of his friends had dogs, some had cats, a few had hermit crabs, and one even had an iguana that lived in a Jacuzzi.  (Note: Florida isn't like other states.)  Alex begged and pleaded for a pet but when he was asked what kind of pet he wanted, he fell silent.  He didn't want a dog; his parents were allergic to cats.  What else was acceptable in the humidity of the tropics? A bird? Too noisy.  A gerbil? Too messy.  He took a couple trips to the pet store before deciding.  Rabbits.  He wanted a rabbit.

Out back of his house was a screened-in porch with an in-ground pool which provided the perfect place for the rabbit to run around during the day.  Alex would play with the rabbit (as much as rabbits "play").  He would drive his Hot Wheels cars all over that creature.  When he played Star Wars the rabbit was often the creature that the Empire and Rebellion fought over to attain control of the galaxy.  Then, at some point, the rabbit would unceremoniously hop away during a key battle and most of the combatants would die horrible rabbit-related deaths.  It was a dark time for the Rebellion.

One evening the rabbit, maybe his name was Scruffy, refused to go back in his cage at night.  He had always gone back in his cage but tonight he was more ornery, more contemptuous of the humans.  He ran around the pool, taunting them.  Finally, well after Alex's bedtime, the family decided to just let the rabbit stay out that night.  It was an enclosed area; it was not in danger from animals outside.  It could find a corner and sleep when it got tired.  What's the worse that could happen?

The next morning the blinds to the back deck were drawn closed even though the sun was starting to peek up.  It was a school day so Alex was ferreted around getting fed and books in order and clothes on right so that he didn't think to ask about the Scruffy.  It was like any other day, right?  The thing that Alex never saw was the the result of Scruffy running crazily around the pool and missing a corner by the smallest margin.  No one heard the splash because no windows were open.  Later, when it was being explained, the body already disposed of, he could only imagine - with that mind that would later fuel a love of writing and speaking and creating - what the horrific sight must have been.

Why would your AP Lang teacher tell you such a gut-wrenchingly sad story as a way to motivate you for tomorrow's argument test?  What good could possibly come from traveling through such grief?  Two things.  First, Shakespeare teaches us that sadness is a part of being human.  We can either learn from our grief or be haunted by it forever.  Whether our sadness is telescoped out, meaning we see it coming but are powerless to stop it, or it blindsides us on a Tuesday afternoon, it seeks to be reckoned with.  We cannot do other.  I fear some of you face writing with much that same grief - like it is something to be avoided at all costs and when it does come it's like orcs overrunning the Shire.  Writing - even writing that is graded or otherwise critiqued - is not something to be feared.  I will always think fondly of that rabbit but what I learned about responsibility and care, among other things, are such an indelible part of me now that I owe part of who I am to that experience.

Second, and no less important, when we think of writing (especially arguments - which are maybe the most important writing we will ever do for what is argument but you putting yourself out there in the most vulnerable way possible?) these events that make up lives are the things that give reason to our beliefs, our arguments.  Why do you believe the things you believe? Because of what you have succeeded at? Because of what you have failed at?  Because of what you have learned?  Argument doesn't have to be clinical.  It's not just "what do you believe about this prompt?".  It's what do you want to say - TODAY - that is important and interesting and relevant to this topic that will make your reader sit up and pay attention?  Our last prompt was about ownership: I don't believe I have ever "owned" a pet, for example, but I believe their time with me has made me a better person.

I believe your time this year has made you a better writer.

And tomorrow, you get to prove it.

Quicksand and Vectors

In the movie "The Replacements," expression-challenged Keanu Reeves delivers a pretty memorable speech about the nature of adversity.  He is sitting in a locker-room, pre-football game, while the coach try to talk a team up from the previous week's defeat.  The coach, played by Gene Hackman, asks his players, "what scares you?" After a fun interchange about spiders and bees, Keanu pipes up.  "Quicksand," he says.  The team is confused so the coach has him explain:

"You're playing and everything is going fine.  And then one thing goes wrong and another and another.  And you try to fight it but there's nothing you can do.  You're in over your head. Like quicksand."

I think this fear is more legitimate for high school students in 2016 than it is even for professional football players.  Because here's the reality of your lives: things were going well.  You had good grades, you worked pretty hard, everything seemed pretty smooth.  Then BANG.  You suddenly weren't moving forward.  You were stuck.  But hey adversity was nothing new so you doubled back and tried something else.  BANG. You started to feel trapped.  Classes used to be so easy.  But this junior year thing, this college writing thing.  It seemed like a trap.  Wait, you said without saying it, I have to tackle a complex, truly difficult prompt, organize a response on a level I've never encountered before, all while getting held to a rubric that feels way over my head?

At this point in the year, AP Lang can feel a bit like quicksand in that regard.  Vocabulary, rhetorical tools, sentence styles, tone, audience... so many things to keep track of all at once.  So what if instead of adding to the overwhelming complexity of it all we try to simplify things?  What if we reduced the pressure instead of turning it up?

If we reduce an RA to its simplest component it's really all about purpose.  Why did the author put these words on paper?  Why?  Once you can answer that you can tackle corollaries: why is it effective? what tone is created? how does that tone convey the purpose to the audience?

In the wonderful animated movie "Despicable Me", Gru (voiced by Steve Carrell) runs into a man at the Bank of Evil (formerly Lehman Brothers) who calls himself "Vector".  It's another spendid cinematic exchange.  But Vector's name is symbolic, he says, because he (like the word itself) has direction and magnitude.  ("Oh yeah!")

Vector is an interesting idea to apply analysis too.  Authors, with their words, have direction (purpose) and magnitude (tone).  They are headed somewhere; they have a goal.  They can also convey a certain immediacy about that journey.  We have seen evidence of different tones in almost everything we read.  In "Usher", Poe knows that his dark and chaotic tone will ultimately help him achieve the wonderfully introspective purpose of his short story.  In "Young Goodman Brown", Hawthorne skewers the overly judgmental Puritans to achieve his ends.  Even in "Candide" today Voltaire effected a tone - sardonic, sarcastic, slightly inappropriate - to drive his frustration home.

So what if tomorrow instead of worrying about how many rhetorical tools you can find you asked yourself a simple question: what is the "vector" of this passage? Where is it going? Can I articulate the goal here?  And once I can how is it trying to get there?  Am I supposed to feel something along the way?

Because here's what you already know: quicksand thrives on people flailing about reaching in any direction for literally anything.  It's chaotic and unfocused.  They sink faster.  So to avoid it you need to reach out with a deliberate effort for a specific goal and pull yourself toward the answer.

That's your vector.

Deeper Obligations

Politics leaves us all a little broken.

But bitter, earth-shattering politics isn't all the new to our species.  In 1170, King Henry of England committed one of the most politically-motivated murders this world has ever borne witness to.  He incited his confidants to take the life of his former-best friend Thomas Becket.  The TL;DR version of this story (although the whole story is well worth your time) is that Becket was Henry's right hand many for many years.  Then in 1168 Henry names Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important religious post on England.  Henry did this in an attempt to make the church subservient to the English crown.  He was sure that Becket - his friend, his informant, his bodyguard, his everything - would bring the rebellious elements of the church in line for the good of the whole country.

Becket did no such thing.  Almost immediately Becket challenged the King's authority in a whole host of controversial issues.  In short, he became King Henry's worst nightmare.  And the King - not for the last time in English history either - moved to have this man killed.

One line from Becket's writings remains with us to this day.  When the King, in writing, asked his friend why he was suddenly so resistant and objectionable, the Archbishop replied, "With this new position you have introduced me to deeper obligations."

That's an interesting phrase and I think it pertains to you this year.

We've talked before about how writing used to be for school or for the teacher or for the grade.  Some of you claim you still feel that way, even in AP Lang.  I think that's legitimate and honest feedback.  But I want more than ever for your writing to be something that you express because you believe in it.  YOU believe in it.  The prompt might be a bit mundane in your eyes but something in the text galvanizes you in a way that is unshakable.  The words you produce, then, become not just the things you think you ought to say to get a good grade but things that you no longer have the power not to say because they are eating you from within.

Becket was placed before a man he counted as his friend and still he found within him the unquenchable desire to do the right thing. To stand up for people he believed in, for a world view that mattered to him.  And we all have those moments.  Things that push us to finally write and communicate in a way we wish we always had.  Sometimes those things are huge (elections, family changes, friends) and sometimes the reason we cannot contain our words start with the smallest crack in the foundation of something we thought was rock solid (a la House of Usher).

Last week Leonard Cohen died (youtube him... seriously) and I thought a great spark of literary genius had gone out from this world.  The air is colder today and darker.  For some of you, this is true for other reasons.  How many of you have sat with me after school and said, I always thought I wrote just fine? I put some words on the page and that was "good enough"?  Then along came this scrawny pompous white Lang teacher who said, "why did you use that word?" and "what do you mean by this phrase?" and you were forced to explain and clarify in ways that you hadn't really had to before.  And your grade suddenly wasn't what it always was and your world was darker and colder.

We both have outlets though.  We put words on the page and it begins to ameliorate us.  We say the things we want to say the way we want to say them.  And in doing that - our style, our voice - we discover that we had the words all the time.  It just took jarring us from our place to make us realize it.

You see, the thing that King Henry never understood was the Thomas Becket opposed him not because he had the power to but because with great power come great responsibility.  To stand in the most powerful position of a country without any checks or balances is the most dangerous situation of all.  You have some of that power: you are educated and articulate and your voice in both your class and school resonates, whether you know it or not.  So here and now we shape it: we make your words a force for good, ones that can be eloquent and perceptive about the world around you.  Pathos. Logos. Ethos. It's not random, do you see?

When Becket was murdered all of England was aghast. A shrine was built to commemorate him and for centuries people made pilgrimages to honor his memory.  It has lasted  The shrine you construct tomorrow with your words and tone will last as well.  So be sure every brick in the foundation is strong enough to support the depth of your "obligations".

Pep Talk #2

Second Pep Talk Email for AP Lang Students 2016-17

This is the story about a boy, a bowl of black eyed peas, and a revelation.

Imagine, if you, will a youth who spent the first sixteen years of his life in Florida.  Not inner-state Florida where the ocean breezes can't penetrate.  I'm talking about the gulf coast.  The water is calm and a consistent 84 degrees.  The breezes blow in and the salt in the air sticks to every exposed surface of your skin.  So close to the water that the sounds of shrimping boats meant it was almost lunchtime.  A place where children have read about this thing called snow the way you've read about this thing called the Revolutionary War.  Words on the page.  But in reality?  It never falls below 60 degrees.  And such a temperature calls for a fairly sturdy jacket.

This boy though has a strange fear.  Call it irrational or unjustified or whatever.  But he fears, deep down inside, the taste of lima beans. He's eaten them on occasion, when he was forced to eat them.  He follows rules after all.  And maybe "eat" is too loose a word.  He places them in his mouth and chews the organic matter knowing that it's important to someone that he do this.  But he doesn't like it.  Not one bit.  Might as well be green eggs and ham.

One day during the last year he lives in Florida he's invited over to dinner at a friend's house.  The family is much more affluent: open air Florida house on the shore.  There's a boat dock out back.  There's wealth here.  And this boy knows that an uncontestable rule when one eats over at another's house is that one is expected to eat the food put before him.  Much of the dinner is wonderful: chicken, corn, a side dish that he's never had before.  But also... there they are.  A bowl of them.  The bowl is beautiful china, like the rest of the dishes on the table.  It's off-center on the table, closer to the boy than the rest of the food.  The black eyed peas that fill the bowl practically stare at him.  Black EYED peas after all.  And they're not just looking at him; they're staring.  With that one beady EYE. They know - THEY KNOW - he can't refuse.  When his friend's mother offers a spoonful the boy will say yes because it's understood.  It's custom.  And to transgress custom is unthinkable.

So he accepts and spends most of the meal eating around them, hedging his bets.  What can he do?  Is there a way out of this?  Maybe the host parents will leave the table early and he can ditch them in the trash when no one is looking?  No such luck: they stay and talk the entire time.  Soon his plate nearly is empty of everything else except the one-eyed devil creature of absolute doom.  So here it goes.  Time to bite the pea, as it were.

This isn't a Dr. Seuss story.  The boy didn't suddenly develop an improbably love for this strangest of all vegetables.  He didn't take a bite and rise from his seat ready to engage in impromptu song and dance.  But here's what did happen: he ate the black eyed peas.  And as he combined them with the other foods on the plate (admittedly to dull the flavor and texture) he discovered that in a tiny way they complemented some of the taste of the chicken and the corn and the unidentified other side dish that at this point will probably never be named.  The point is that while it wasn't suddenly ice cream and cake it also wasn't really that horrible.

What's more is that the boy learned combining foods that he hadn't previously considered combining paid dividends.  Years later he would recall this incident as he tried his wife's beans and rice and found, to his surprise, they were magnificent together.  It was risk-taking and creative combining all in the same sweep.

Tomorrow I will place something on the desk in front of you that will probably simulate the feeling I had all those years ago when I saw those black eyed peas before me.  Maybe the prompt will be easier than you expect; maybe harder.  Maybe it will be a unique combination of rhetorical flourish that allows you to see something about the author or about good writing that you know you have read about but hadn't really seen with your own eyes.  But like this Florida boy who moved north when he was sixteen and discovered, whoa, snow was, like, real you might find that good writing pops up in the most unexpected of places.

The point of this email, though, is this: good writing involves risk taking and creative combining.  Should you build a paragraph about just tone? Or just diction? Or just pathos?  I won't say that's a bad idea but what if you did something more interesting?  What if you wrote about diction by emulating the author's style?  What if instead of calling it ethos you called it an appeal to conscience?  That's what it is, isn't it?  Maybe the writer of the prompt doesn't have a conscience at all and you're horrified by the argument he or she makes.  Can you call that out?  Here's the better question: who has the power to STOP you from calling that out?

Tomorrow has not been written.  Your ability to craft an articulate and meaningful analysis of an author's work does not depend on the score you got two weeks ago.  It doesn't even depend on what you think you knew yesterday.

Your score will be a result of opening your mind wide and creatively combining all those rhetorical tools.  And then?

Take a bite. You might be surprised at the result.

Fishing for Grades

Dear AP Lang Students,

Henry David Thoreau once said, "Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."  You'll hear a lot more from this man over the next few months.  Suffice it to say: he is an important figure in American literary history.  But today he has a single message for us: when you are in pursuit of a goal, be clear about what that goal is.  I think it's easy as a student to be blinded by the academic arms race that most high schools generate.  You get caught up in comparing scores on tests and GPAs and interim grades and you sometimes lose sight of the thing we're supposed to be about.  That learning thing.  Discovering knowledge that we didn't previously have; uncovering skills that you hadn't tapped before.  My hope this year in Lang is that you and I find a way to make learning more important than the points and the grades and the "rat race," as it were.

Many of you have already sat down and had writing conferences with me; more of you are scheduled to do so in the future.  And a hefty number of these conferences evolve into a version of the following question: "Mr. Reid, how do I get an A in this class?"  I completely understand what motivates this question.  I entertain no doubt that the pressures sitting behind (or above) you are formidable: parents, teachers, guidance counselors, peers.  But maybe we can redesign this question with the act of learning in mind.  So the question then becomes: how do I become a better writer.  Because really the greater you flex your writing muscles (is that a thing?) the closer you will get to that A you covet so dearly.

So how does one do this "good writing" thing?  We've explored that the past couple of days in class.  But perhaps we can construct a more practical list.  Let's try:

1. Do you have a hook?  Find 4 or 5 quotes (online or otherwise) that you like that could be used in multiple situations.  Make a copy of them and bring them tomorrow.  Maybe they won't be useful but if you find yourself writing a bland intro, one of those quotes could be the thing that kicks your "lower half" intro in an "upper half" one.

2. Resources.  Tonight, make a list of the resources you plan to have in class tomorrow.  Remember, space is a premium.  Do you want the example essays from today? Or maybe the analysis packet? Or the 9 point rubric?  All are good choices.  But you need to decide what you want to bring.

3. Time.  How do you plan to keep track of time tomorrow? Maybe your back is to the clock in the room so that doesn't help.  Want to set up your phone so you can see it when you need it?  Don't let it be a distraction but as a time keeper it might be helpful.

4. Prepare. How do you prepare for a skills-based test?  In English?  You want the truth?  The honest, no-nonsense truth?  Read good writing.  Do you have a favorite author or columnist or blogger?  Go read something by them.  I love reading Paul Krugman from the NYTimes.  You can read more by that Erik Lundegaard guy who wrote the "Why I Hike" essay if you want (www.eriklundegaard.com).  Find your author; find the person that speaks to you.

At the end of the day, we don't do this for the grade (not really).  What does that grade stand for anyway?  What does it mean to earn an A?  That you're smart? That you've worked hard? That you've made progress of some kind?  In an essay, it probably boils down to this simple thing: you've said something interesting in an interesting way.  That's really all it is.  70+ students are going to write about the EXACT. SAME. THING. on tomorrow's test.  So here's the real question: how will your essay, your voice, your words stand out?

Because it's not really fish you're after when you look deep in those waters.  The thing looking back at you... is yourself.