A Useful Book That Should Have Been Needless

I had two, recurring thoughts as I read the book that the faculty of our school was invited to read over the summer.  One was that this should be required reading in every teacher-training program.  The second was more of a question.  Why on earth did this need to be published?

Why This Book Was Written

Zach Groshell tells us up front that he wrote Just Tell Them:  The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching because of all the nonsense he had experienced while training to be a teacher.  If you think my calling what transpires in many undergraduate courses in education nonsense is a bit harsh, believe me that Groshell is far more direct, referring to "edu-babble" and what he calls a "virtue-signaling, cringe-inducing, absolute nothingburger of a statement," but you will need to read his book to see which nothingburger he meant.

As in any activity or profession, foolishness has grown in the field of education like so many weeds.   This certainly does not set education apart from any other endeavor.  What I can tell you from more than thirty-five years in this profession is that the foolishness does not stem from an intent to do harm, although its origins are frequently less laudable than its advocates would claim, yet harm it does do, and it is the reason why so many American children seem less educated than those who came before them.

Aeneas Defeats Turnus, Luca Giordano (1634-1705)

Many people have the nagging sense that our children do not know all they should, that they are less capable than we imagine they should be, and that they, in a variety of ways, do not measure up either with children of yesteryear or with those in other countries.  Yes, we have been saying that sort of thing for centuries, and Vergil wrote in his Aeneid of a stone that twice-six of the kind of men the earth currently produced could not lift, but this is not that.  Track the scores on various assessments or look at the assessments themselves, and you will see that quite often our children are not experiencing as robust an education as they once were, and part of the reason is by design.

Some will find fault with this statement, but there is far less that changes in pedagogy than in content.  There was a time when Pluto was considered a planet and an atom was, by definition, the smallest particle of matter.  Content changes as we make new discoveries, correct wrong information, and in the case of history classes, simply live from one year to the next.  Pedagogy, on the other hand, does not change as significantly or as often.  It is true that discoveries in everything from nutrition to social science to neuroscience can and should bring about changes in how we teach, but there are some fundamentals to the particular form of communication we call teaching that have remained the same across cultures and millennia, and one of those is the need to tell people things.

A Shock to Non-Teachers

When I told friends who were not in education that I was reading a book that advocated for teachers directly telling pieces of information to students, a bewildered look crossed their faces.  Wasn't this what teachers already did?  Little did my friends realize, as I suspect is the case with most adults, not only has direct instruction taken a back seat to other methods, it has been for decades mocked, lampooned, and denigrated in university classes preparing people to teach, in professional development sessions and conferences, and in faculty meetings in nearly every kind of school.  Replacing the bogeyman of deadly boring and stern lecturers who speak to hear themselves talk has been the teacher who asks questions and guides students to figure things out for themselves, helping them develop critical thinking skills on their way to becoming lifelong learners.

A popular form of direct instruction

This, of course, sounds good, but Groshell takes issue with these replacement philosophies that have been boiled down to bumperstickers.  "He who does the talking, does the learning."  "Your job is to be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage."  His classroom observations give evidence to what common sense already knew.  Never directly giving information and always opting for an inquiry-based model with its inherent "productive struggle" leads to three outcomes.  Students who already know something about the material do just fine.  Those who do not either copy from the students who know what they are doing or simply check out.

A Very Useful Book

It is regrettable that such a book needed to be written, but fortunately it has been, hopefully to counteract ideas that too often were generated and promulgated by people whose livelihoods depended on generating and promulgating new and shiny things.  Where this book has its place is in university schools of education.  He carefully lays out what direct instruction is, how and when to implement it appropriately, and how and when to pull back from it as students indeed take charge of their own learning and begin asking the questions that will help them become the critically thinking, lifelong learners we all want them to be.  With that in mind, I would offer some words of advice about this book to three groups of people.

A Reading from Homer, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1885)

To new teachers:  If you are within your first five years of teaching, read this book, highlight it, and take copious notes in the margins.  It will help to set you on a path of well-rounded instruction that will serve your students for years to come.

To veteran teachers:  If you have always had a nagging sense that something was off about some of the pedagogical approaches pitched to you, this book will validate what you have likely known all along.  If you are someone who thought that only a question-based, project-based style of teaching was legitimate and yet struggled with the lack of engagement or success in some of your students, this book will show you how you can incorporate direct instruction alongside other methods, thus giving your students a better opportunity to learn deeply.

To administrators:  Groshell writes on p. 75, "When I started my career, 'engagement' was the be-all and end-all of teaching, and to some tunnel-visioned principals, it remains the only lens they use to observe teaching."  Remember that the quiet student may be learning far more richly than the one doing and saying all the things we have come to think are the sole indicators of learning.  Remember that your teachers are experts in their field (and they should be, or you should not have hired them) and let them teach using whatever methods are, in their professional and considered opinion, appropriate in any given moment.

Bridging The Gap

 

Marcene Holverson, me, Bryan McCorkle, my mom

All teachers and students begin with the same type of relationship.  The one knows something the other does not, together they work so that both know the same thing, and for the majority of those thus engaged, the relationship progresses no further.  This is not to say that teachers and students do not care for one another, often quite deeply, but there is a gap existing between them that, while narrowed by this and that, is rarely bridged so that a new type of relationship is formed.  But what happens when it is bridged?

The Pontifical Nature of Teaching

All teaching is pontifical in nature, which is to say, it involves bridge building.  As I wrote in another post, "Matters of faith and religion connect the human with the transcendent, and a teacher, no less than a priest, is a pontiff, which, as the Latin root pontifex reveals, is a bridge builder.  Teachers help to connect students with ideas, with others, with themselves, and at times even with what lies beyond it all."  With Marcene Farley, there was another bridge being built during my senior year in high school, although we were both unaware of its construction or where it would lead.

Marcene arrived as the new Latin teacher for the start of my senior year and was called Miss Holverson back then, having not yet met her husband Mack.  She did the things that a good teacher does and then some, including taking my friend Bryan and me to the state Latin convention.  This, of course, required Roman attire, and Marcene participated right along with the rest of us.  Then again, she clearly had a penchant for dressing up in class, but this was all part of her strategy for helping to build that bridge between her students and the life of ancient Rome.

 

The Other Side of the Desk

When people become teachers, they often speak of moving to the other side of the desk, which is to say they gain a new perspective on what goes on in a classroom.  Nearly everyone knows what it is like to be a student, but the view is far different from the position of teacher.  Fortunately, I had in Marcene a teacher who was also a colleague.  Although we never taught in the same school, we talked many times over the years, often at length, about issues in education and with our particular students.  We shared triumphs and heartbreaks in a way that only teachers can, for teachers are involved in that most human of enterprises, the shared journey of discovery, and like any journey, there are both pinnacles and pitfalls.

I was fortunate to speak at Marcene's invitation on a number of occasions once she had moved back to Illinois was teaching at Pekin Community High School.  Three times I had the opportunity to address the Illinois Junior Classical League convention when she hosted it at her school and performed my presentation of Cicero at the Eta Sigma Phi convention at her alma mater, Monmouth College.  I was always pleased to speak at her invitation, and there was an excitement for both of us.  We were able to reconnect not only as teacher and student, but as colleagues, and it was clear that the bridge was extending far from what it had been when I was in high school

 

De Amicitia

Cicero (106-43 B.C.) wrote a treatise on friendship called De Amicitia, or "On Friendship."  A passage I have quoted often says this.  "Qui esset tantus fructus in prosperis rebus, nisi haberes, qui illis aeque ac tu ipse gauderet? Adversas vero ferre difficile esset sine eo qui illas gravius etiam quam tu ferret."  (De Amicitia, 22).  "How great would be the benefit in good times if you did not have someone who would rejoice in them as much as you?  Indeed it would be difficult to bear adversity without someone who would bear it even more gravely than you."

Marcene was with me when I was named 2014 Indiana Teacher of the Year and she was with me again when my son and I saw '80s hair band Stryper near where she lived.  In fact, she was the one who yelled to leader singer Michael Sweet to get his attention, which led to the first of my many interactions with the rock star.  It was no surprise that she would do this.  After all, she once talked with Dee Snider of Twisted Sister about his Latin tattoo!  Cicero was right in what he said, for both of those moments were all the better for her being part of them.

. 

Dee Snider and Marcene

When her husband, Mack, passed away, I traveled to Illinois for the funeral.  I wouldn't have missed it for anything.  I was there to support my friend in keeping with the second part of what Cicero wrote.

And I was there for Marcene's retirement party at the end of the 2021-2022 school year.  There was a constant stream of people for hours that Saturday afternoon as former students, their parents, and colleagues came to show their love for a woman who had touched so many lives in such profound ways.  My only quibble with the event is about one of the gifts she received.  Someone gave her a mug that says, "I came, I taught, I retired," but that last part only expresses a momentary fact of history.  The mug should have read, "I came, I taught, I shaped lives in ways I will never know."

 

A Teacher's Teacher

Psalm 90 says that our lifespan is threescore years and ten, and if that should be true for me, then I am well beyond the midpoint at which Dante began his famous journey.  Yet even at my age and with my decades of experience in education, I still need a teacher.  I have been blessed since Kindergarten with outstanding teachers, but over the past twenty years there has been one who has gently and carefully guided and shaped my thinking in ways that even he may not know.  Do not bother skipping to the end of this piece in search of his name, for you will not find it.  I doubt he would want the publicity, but I do want to share his latest lesson.

Mine is a logical mind that takes great pleasure in wit and good turns of a phrase, and this combination can lead to the sharp skewering and harsh condemnation of things that are wrong.  To be sure, there are wrongs that need to be skewered and condemned, but there is such a thing as grace, and my friend reminded me of that when we talked today about the expectations we all have of each other during this unprecedented time.  No one has experienced what we are living through in these days of COVID-19.  No teacher has ever taught in circumstances like these.  No custodian, principal, or superintendent has worked in such conditions.  In fact, there is not a banker, barber, mechanic, librarian, elected official, lawyer, doctor, firefighter, police officer, pastor, rabbi, plumber, architect, IT specialist, mother, father, or child who has ever experienced a pandemic and its consequences such as we all are experiencing right now.  What does that mean?

It means that the best leader before this moment and the worst leader before this moment are now trying to lead in a unique moment.  Yes, some will be better prepared for it, and when we say that we are all doing our best, the best by some will serve better than the best by others, but it is perhaps unfair to judge too harshly those whose best is not all we would want it to be.  I have certainly dropped a few balls and thought of some wonderful ideas after the time had passed when they would have been useful. 

We should have high standards, both for ourselves and for those we lead.  Parents rightly maintain high expectations for their children, just as bosses do for their employees and employees do for their bosses, but it is not helpful for the backseat driver to scream at the one behind the wheel who is driving the car across unfamiliar terrain.  If the vehicle is about to go over a cliff, then by all means, yell with the full capacity of your lungs, but if it is merely a bumpy ride, it may be better to sit back and hold on tightly.

A Teacher's Natural Habitat

There is a natural habitat for a teacher.  It is a "sound and sweet and wise place" that is "surrounded by beauty and sanity," a place where "the whole human being, not disembodied chunks of him, is the focus of education."

And what may teachers expect in their natural habitat?  They should expect "the joy of teaching" and perhaps even a certain "happy boyish enthusiasm" as "souls [are] born in wonder."  They can expect "cheerful faces, and plenty of them" and "happy students" who are "not eager to leave, because they [are] having too much fun."

You will likely have one of two reactions to such a description of the teacher's natural habitat.  You may sit back and sigh with a faraway look of longing as you heart yearns for such an Eden.  You may also find a certain anger rising within you, a burning, righteous indignation that someone would even dare to describe a place that is so far from your present circumstance that it could not be glimpsed with the Hubble.

I know both of those reactions, but I also know that the descriptions offered above are about what should be, what can be, and what in some places actually is.  These descriptions come from two articles, one about and one by Anthony Esolen.  Tony Esolen was a tenured professor of literature at Providence College in Rhode Island before moving, after decades at that institution, to Thomas More College in New Hampshire.  In addition to being a teacher of literature, he is also a poet, an acute critic of contemporary culture, and a translator, perhaps most notably of Dante.  I have read him for years and can say only this...if you see his name on it, read it.

From the Kindergarten teacher to the dissertation supervisor, any teacher who has spent more than one year in this calling has known the joy of teaching that he describes.  They have known it at least once, or they would not have returned.  

In one article, Esolen writes, "Then came the joy of teaching. I’m a born teacher. I don’t mean to say that I am great at it—I’m quite aware of my flaws, which I’d rather not enumerate. I mean that even when I was a little boy I wanted to show people things, just because I liked them and wanted to share them. Teaching, for me, has always retained much of that happy boyish enthusiasm; it’s why I find it hard to understand people who turn teaching into politics by other means."

This is what teaching is...raw, unbounded, childlike enthusiasm. And if something like justice should come from it because it has been about the work of the true, the good, and the beautiful, then so much the better, but teaching is not first and foremost about justice or someone's finding a job or gaining a credential. It is not, as Tony Esolen puts it, politics by other means.  It is something much grander than that, taking in far more territory, and, when it is allowed to flourish in its natural habitat, it produces a harvest of many of the best things known to man.

And then in that same article he writes of one group of his students, "They were not eager to leave, because they were having too much fun. They were having too much fun—repeat this sentence three times carefully—reading Virgil in the Latin, with a gray-haired fellow they had never met before. I drove home almost in tears."

This is a joy like no other, and I have been blessed to taste it. Teenagers in a last period class on a Friday, deeply engrossed in their Latin and asking questions and contributing meaningfully to the great conversation...my friends, this, this is what education can be, and we must fight each and every effort to turn education, which, because it is a supremely human endeavor, must be characterized by life, into a zombie, the walking dead version of its true self.

So where is this blessed abode of teachers, this Elysium of education?  Some teachers find it by carving it out of the blackboard jungle in which they find themselves.  They must make bricks without straw as they guide and shape minds all while trying to turn their own schools into suitable learning environments.  This, however, is not as it should be, and while decent-minded folk rightly laud their efforts, families of students and the citizenry at large should never for one moment think that this is good.

There are also those who leave a toxic environment for one in which their teaching arts can be given full expression.  Esolen himself is in this category, and it would be pharisaical in the extreme to fault him for it.  He writes, "Sometimes a single encounter with what is healthy and ordinary—I use the word advisedly, with its suggestion that things are in the order that God by means of his handmaid Nature has ordained—is enough to shake you out of the bad dreams of disease and confusion."  By contrast he observes, "I came home recently from a day at Thomas More College, full of good cheer and energy, and for somebody who isn’t getting younger, those can take you a long way. They can add many years to your life as a teacher, whereas discouragement and disappointment lead to exhaustion."

The Logic of Learning

WARNING:  Direct, possibly rude, certainly philosophical language ahead!

If learning has not happened, has teaching taken place?

If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught.

These are variations on one of the most illogical notions to come down the pike.  It may well be, in the words of Bertie Wooster, "the rummiest thing I've heard in a lifetime of rummy things."  Let's dispense with pleasantries and get down to logic.

Definition:  necessary condition -- A necessary condition for some state of affairs S is a condition that must be satisfied for S to obtain.  (http://philosophy.wisc.edu/hausman/341/Skill/nec-suf.htm)

Definition:  sufficient condition -- A sufficient condition for some state of affairs S is a condition that, if satisfied, guarantees that S obtains.  (ibid.)

A simple undergraduate logic or philosophy class introduces these basic terms.  Let me illustrate with an example.

Oxygen is a necessary condition for me to live.  I must have oxygen to breathe.  If I do not have oxygen, I cannot breathe and will die.  Another way to say it is "without which not."  Since without oxygen I would not live, oxygen is a necessary condition for my life.

Oxygen is not a sufficient condition for me to live.  There is plenty of oxygen in the morgue, and we do not see dead people jumping up to do the mambo.  Another way to say it is "with which must."  It is not true that with oxygen in the room a person must live.  Oxygen, therefore, is not a sufficient condition for my life.

The absurdity of statements like, "If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught," is that they are based on the idea that teaching is a sufficient condition for learning, and this is not the case.  Here are a few of the approximately 1,873,244,952 infinite number of reasons why.

1.  Teacher teaches, student gives outward indication of attention, student is thinking about the cute so-and-so two rows over.

2.  Teacher teaches, student gives outward indication of attention, biological factors* cause student not to remember (*including lack of sleep, lack of food, medical issues, etc.).

3.  Teacher teaches, student gives outward indication of attention, social factors* cause student not to remember (*including relational issues at school, abusive conditions at home, etc.).

4.  Teacher teaches*, student refuses to learn (*teaching being taken to include all appropriate methods of classroom management, motivation, etc.)

I think we get the point.  It is entirely possible for a good teacher to teach well and for a student or even multiple students in the class not to learn.  In fact, I will go so far as to say that teaching is not even a necessary condition for all learning (remember the definition above).  If it were, then no one could learn without a teacher teaching, and that is obviously not the case.  No one needs to teach me that I will feel better if I put on a coat before going out in sub zero temperatures.  I can learn that just fine on my own by going out once or twice without one.

It is true, of course, that teachers and teaching are important.  In many, perhaps even most, cases, teachers provide the most efficient means of learning something.  There are even instances where teaching is, in a strictly logical sense of the phrase, a necessary condition for learning.  For example, there is no way I am going to learn quantum mechanics without a teacher teaching me.  Even then, it is no sure bet, but you can take it to the bank that it won't happen without a very patient, kind, patient, knowledgeable, patient, loving, and patient physics teacher.

Yet it is simply not the case that teaching is a sufficient condition for learning.  Does bad teaching make the learning more difficult?  It certainly does.  Can bad teaching stop learning entirely?  Of course it can.  What one cannot do, ever, anywhere, under any circumstances...EVER...is make the logical claim that because a student has not learned teaching has not occurred.  It may be true, mind you.  A student may not have learned because teaching, or good teaching, did not occur, but that is not a conclusion you can logically draw solely from the lack of learning itself.

Bloody Vengeance, or Why I Love High School

Education is a shared journey of discovery, and that was most evident on a recent evening at North Central High School.  As I have shared elsewhere, our Latin V students, those who started Latin in 8th grade, have spent most of their senior year exploring topics of particular interest to them.  From philosophy to historical linguistics to bees...yes, bees...these intellectually curious and motivated students have demonstrated the best in what we hope for from lifelong learners.

During the final quarter of the year, they decided to work together to pursue something that few high school students even know exists, the tragedies of Seneca.  Tradition has Lucius Annaeus Seneca born about 4 B.C.  Despite his having once been the tutor of Nero, the emperor ordered him to commit suicide A.D. 65.  He is famous for his philosophical writings in the Stoicism and his tragedies, which are decidedly not Stoic.  To quote one of his modern translators, "Seneca's tragedies are intense.  They show us people who push themselves too far, beyond the limits of ordinary behaviour and emotion.  Passion is set against reason, and passions wins out.  Seneca's characters are obsessed and destroyed by their emotions:  they are dominated by rage, ambition, lust, jealousy, desire, anger, grief, madness, and fear."  (Emily Wilson, Seneca:  Six Tragedies, p. vii.)

Into this dark literary world that has influenced Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and has sparked almost unbroken interest for two millennia, a small group of Indiana high schools seniors dared to enter.  They read several of Seneca's works and settled on Thyestes, the revenge story that tells the tale of Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus of Trojan War fame, feeding to his brother Thyestes his brother's own children.  They explored the vexed question of whether or not Seneca's plays were ever performed in antiquity and then set about the task of imagining how to perform this one in the 21st century.  I should add that I had little to do with this.  Other than providing some resources and asking questions, I left the students to their own devices.  The result was the fulfillment of a dream for me.

On the night of their performance, a handful of parents and students gathered in a small auditorium at our school.  The set and costuming were minimal by design, and for twenty-two minutes, four students presented their version of Thyestes, which drew heavily from the translation of Paul Murgatroyd.  Immediately following the performance we engaged in a time of question and answers.  We explored their choices in editing the play, their decisions regarding makeup, and whether or not there was any development or progression in the characters.

So that explains the "bloody vengeance" in the title of this post, but what about the rest of the title?  For nearly twenty-five years I have wanted to see high school students work with Seneca, but it just never happened.  What these students did was beyond my hopes, for they inspired me to think, and that is the reason for the second part of this post's title.  I simply love exploring the world and journeying with students on the quest for truth, goodness, and beauty.  Does that sound a bit lofty?  Perhaps it does, but then again, education is a lofty endeavor.  High school students are curious without being jaded as, sadly, too many undergraduates seem to be.  What my students did with this play raised questions for me that I am eager to explore with students yet to come.  I like to learn.  I like to explore.  I like to seek the answers to questions, and very often, my students are the ones who have inspired the most provocative ones.

I have been blessed to be able to pursue my own academic work as a high school teacher.  Work with high school students has inspired my articles on translation theory, Latin poetic composition, textual issues with Vergil's Aeneid (and here), and the mind-body problem in philosophy.  Without question, I would never have pursued these and other works were it not for my primary work as a teacher.

In the film Without Limits, which tells the story of long distance runner Steve Prefontaine, Coach Bill Bowerman of the University of Oregon tells his runners, "If you can find meaning in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in...life."  I hope my students have found meaning in our Latin studies, for I know that I have.  What I have found is nothing less than life itself.

Teaching Is Not Women's Work

A recent article in The Atlantic looks at why teachers leave and why they stay.  Drawing heavily on research conducted by Dr. Richard Ingersoll from the University of Pennsylvania's education school, it begins by painting the familiarly grim picture of low pay, lack of respect turned disrespect, and the astronomical turnover rate that is the natural consequence.  In the second paragraph, though, we find an interesting quotation from Dr. Ingersoll, who said that teaching "was originally built as this temporary line of work for women before they got their real job—which was raising families, or temporary for men until they moved out of the classroom and became administrators. That was sort of the historical set-up."  I do not take issue with the historicity of Dr. Ingersoll's statement, but would like to suggest that this past view of education, whose ramifications we feel today, was entirely misguided and that any current practice derivative of such a view must lead to devastating consequences.

Education is not women's work, if by that it is meant a pastime to keep women occupied until something else comes along.  It is not a low-skill, unimportant job to be relegated to second-class citizens, a status under which women have long labored.  Nor is it a trivial exercise worthy of little more than disdain wrapped in polite condescension because the principal participants are children, another often disregarded group.

Education takes place when one human being helps another understanding something.  It happens when we share the stories of our past, whether those stories are about a world war or a mathematical formula.  Education is, quite simply, communication, and that is a most glorious gift among humans.  It is true, of course, that other animals communicate, but only humans compose sonnets, write music, and develop theories about the subatomic world, and make no mistake, all these are forms of communication and therefore educate those who take part in them.

We have rightly extolled the efforts of certain groups of communicators, the physicists, say, who are working to understand the fundamental workings of the universe.  We give them Nobel prizes, and so we should.  We exalt groups who communicate musically, often requesting musical communication for the honoring of kings and presidents, and those who have listened to a symphony play Mozart know deep in their souls that it was a learning experience.  There have been cultures, perhaps now fewer than we would like, who revered the individual communicator, the elder who taught the young of the tribe around the fire.

To think, then, that the organized communication that takes place in our schools is anything less or other than a different, yet necessary, component of the human euphony, is short sighted in the extreme.  Like any act of creation, teaching, which is communicating, is a distinct act of humanity.  It is part of our greatness, to be participated in by all who will, and therefore worthy of every honor.