So I’m re-reading Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels and I can’t quite think who I’d want to play Scudder in a film. It’s a futile exercise — they’d screw it up anyway — but I’m at a loss. What actor could make you believe that they spent their time in church basements drinking cruddy coffee?

I still believe that someday, someone will write the perfect Patrick O’Brian adaptation, and that Nick Nolte will play Aubrey and Ben Kingsley will play Maturin.

There’s a silly article in today’s Washington Post describing the conflict over a potential salary schedule. One group — generally younger teachers is portrayed as in favor of it — while another — older teachers — is described as being against it. And the older teachers have a point that younger teachers, perhaps those who haven’t been there long enough to realize that they no longer can leave, don’t quite understand: without tenure, you can lose your job overnight. In an urban system where leadership turns over every three years, and where individual schools have a new principal every year, this is a scary prospect.

The article also offers the usual shots at union leadership — unresponsive, protective of senior members — which are undoubtedly true but seem somewhat gratuitous.

The problem is that there’s no description of how student success and therefore teacher success will be measured. Is it a complex value-added system? Is it purely based on test scores and how, then, will these scores be measured? Do current principals have an evaluative role, i.e., would principles be able to weigh in on a teacher’s performance?

I don’t envy Chancellor Rhee. Designing a system that’s both transparent and measures what it’s supposed to will be difficult.

So I get the regular updates from TCR in my inbox and this morning there was a thoughtful essay addressing program coherence within teacher education. The structural elements preventing this are legion: faculty vs. adjuncts, program designs with multiple vestigial tails, theory vs. practice, foundations vs. methods… there are many reasons why teacher ed programs splinter.

I hope someday to be involved in a high school where teacher education takes place inside the building. Coherence would be provided by the daily rhythm of the building — what do you have to do to succeed as a teacher? How does your practice need to evolve in order to meet the needs of your students? How do the readings you’re doing with fellow faculty members and students help inform your practice?

It’d be an authentic kind of coherence, where students would see an immediate link between their coursework and their teaching.

Keep dreaming, I guess.

Kids and I were listening to Sandinista today. I hope they memorize these words:

It’s up to you not to heed the call-up
‘N’ you must not act the way you were brought up
Who knows the reasons why you have grown up?
Who knows the plans or why they were drawn up?

It’s up to you not to heed the call-up
I don’t wanna die!
It’s up to you not to hear the call-up
I don’t wanna kill!

For he who will die
Is he who will kill

Maybe I wanna see the wheatfields
Over Kiev and down to the sea

All the young people down the ages
They gladly marched off to die
Proud city fathers used to watch them
Tears in their eyes

There is a rose that I want to live for
Although, God knows, I may not have met her
There is a dance an’ I should be with her
There is a town – unlike any other

It’s up to you not to hear the call-up
‘N’ you must not act the way you were brought up
Who give you work an’ why should you do it?
At fifty five minutes past eleven
There is a rose…
Yeah!

“There’s probably little any teacher can do with some kids in some high schools: the poverty and violence of the neighborhoods, the dynamics of particular families, the ways children develop identities in the midst of economic blight. You rely on goodwill and an occasional silent prayer to keep your class from exploding, hope that some wild boy doesn’t slug another, pray that your authority isn’t embarrassed. But here those students were, five or ten years down the line: different life experiences, different perspectives on learning. It makes you think about those sullen high schoolers in a different light, see their lives along a time line.”

Mike Rose. Possible Lives (NY: Penguin Books, 1989), 137.

and

“The error that crops up because a student is trying new things is a valuable kind of error, a sign of growth.”

Mike Rose. Possible Lives (NY: Penguin Books, 1989), 151.

I hadn’t encountered this quote before:

“Philadelphia is the best place to discuss race relations because there is more race prejudice here than in any other city in the United States.”

Philadelphia Tribune, February 19, 1927. (incomplete citation)

I’m reading this novel that’s killing me right now: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It makes me want to teach a course, a course with an enrollment of half twenty year olds and half forty year old parents. I’d like to read a series of novels on parenting, on what it means to grow up, what it means to love your children more than anything you can describe. And I’d want to know how the twenty year olds would respond — whether they’d get it or not.

I can only manage forty or fifty pages of Gilead without being too moved to stop. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road destroyed me in the same way. Would they have done so twenty years ago? Without having spent nearly every day of the past four years with my son, would these books still resonate?

Of course, the flipside would be to read Siddartha, The Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, to see if the forty year olds can still feel the power of the dream in these books, or whether they’d want Holden to chill out.

” A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It become ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon, 76 (London, 1946).

Superhero Mike Rose has a cool blog entry about this topic here. One quote that struck me as crucial:

And because many of our students, like Kevin, did display in their writing all the grammatical, stylistic, and organizational problems that give rise to remedial writing courses in the first place, we did spend a good deal of time on error – in class, in conference, on comments on their papers – but in the context of their academic writing. This is a huge point and one that is tied to our core assumptions about cognition and language: that writing filled with grammatical error does not preclude engagement with sophisticated intellectual material, and that error can be addressed effectively as one is engaging such material.

He highlights the battle I fight every semester with my student teachers…in my experience, almost all kids will respond to real questions and provocative, relevant texts. They may struggle with their prose, they may grow frustrated at their own progress, they may not be able to write all the wonderful things that they can say — but their ability to “deal” with that material is very much present.

I remember showing a group of kids a picture from the war in Iraq and asking them to describe it. All one kid could say what that is was “bullshit.” I could have stopped there, but I knew he was trying to say something deeper, and by gently pushing, he was able to describe how such a situation (a father crying over a wounded child) was beyond words.

Sadly, I think a lot of teachers hear the curse and simply stop trying.

Extended essay here that lays out how a number of districts, primarily in the south, where administrators have attempted to substitute income status for race.

One paper I haven’t seen by Sean Reardon, John T. Yun and Michal Kurlaender made a claim that’s certainly true for Philadelphia and most rustbelt cities:

“given the extent of residential racial segregation in the United States, it is unlikely that race-neutral income-integration policies will significantly reduce school racial segregation, although there is reason to believe that such policies are likely to have other beneficial effects on schooling.”

citation to track down later:
Implications of Income-Based School Assignment Policies for Racial School Segregation
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 28, No. 1, 49-75 (2006)