Now, I am good at word search puzzles, so I was excited. So a little while into the exercise, I was surprised to learn that while I may have been good, my buddy was really good. He had already found twice as many words as I had. Because we were friends, right then and there I started thinking of us as a team. I realized that if I started looking for the words he hadn’t found yet, we’d finish the puzzle in half the time. When I found a word, I’d nudge him with my elbow and point at my paper. He’d nod, and circle the word on his own sheet. I have to admit, in a sea of people with their heads down and their “eyes on their own work,” it felt a bit like cheating. But the leaders hadn’t specifically instructed us to work alone, so I knew we hadn’t done anything wrong. A minute or two later, my friend put down his pencil and raised his hand to signal “done.” Someone came down the aisle, checked his answers, and announced, “We have a winner!” She handed him the prize:a $5 gift card to Blockbuster. So we had ourselves a movie night, complete with microwaved popcorn. Victory was sweet.

But There is a “Me”

But it got me thinking: why is it that when we were handed that puzzle and asked to solve it–in no particular way–we all had the same instinct to hush up and work alone. Dr. Peter Gray may have partially answered my question with his recent post, “Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education.” Sin Number Three is “Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance.” Dr. Gray explains:

“We are an intensely social species, designed for cooperation. Children naturally want to help their friends, and even in school they find ways to do so. But our competition-based system of ranking and grading students works against the cooperative drive. Too much help given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper, by raising the grading curve and lowering the helper’s position on it. Some of those students who most strongly buy into school understand this well; they become ruthless achievers.”

It’s a real shame that traditional School methods haven’t been able to adapt with the times super well. When we first imported these methods from Prussia at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, they were perfect for training the next generation of lever-pullers and widget stampers: You definitely should NOT talk to your neighbor in those cirucmstances. You might lose a limb, which would cause the widget line to back up, which might damage some of the machinery, which would totally dent the company’s bottom line. However, modern employers seem to value teamwork skills.

Collaboration or Compilation?

In response, most curricula these days include some group project assignments. But I posit that this is a pale substitute for actually working with other people. In every group project I have ever worked on (with one notable exception), the class is divided into two reactions: the students with low GPAs go, “Great, someone else will be able to do most of the work.” The students with high GPAs go, “Great, I’m going to have to do the work of four people by myself. AGAIN.”

So where are the influences of Schooling? Let’s unpack.

-Again with the ranking. After a few years in school, people know what category they are in: “smart” or “dumb.” And then they behave accordingly. People tend to relax into their assigned roles, unable to take advantage of the opportunity to learn from and help others.

-There is very little real ‘teamwork’ to be found. Generally, these groups meet twice: once to figure out who is doing what, and again before class so they can staple all their sheets of paper together. OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, but it seems that most group projects are merely a compilation of individual work, not real collaborations (which seems counter-productive, somehow). After so many years of being told not to chat with neighbors, we don’t quite know what to do when we are told to work with them.

Consequences for Today’s Employee

These attitudes carry over into the modern workplace (which is why my fellow trainees were so eerily silent). The competition continues as well, but we fight over limited numbers of promotions instead of grades. We become so preoccupied with making ourselves look good that we can’t take the risk of making a co-worker look better. Hardly anyone seems to be able to “do” the teamwork thing properly, so those who do find themselves increasingly in demand. (See Keith Ferrazzi, who is slowly building an empire based on his skill of combining relationships and business.)

If we would stop training our children to believe life is a competition and happiness is a finite resource, we could open our minds to a better way. What Chris Guillebeau means when he talks about “expanding the pie.” What Steve Pavlina means when he talks about “creating value.” What Rumi meant when he wrote:

“The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners.”

I realized that the students I was tutoring knew just as much about math as I did, if not more. I was on the “slow track” for math in school: I did make it to pre-calculus in my senior year, but I have completely blocked it out (are there diagrams involved in calculus? I seem to vaguely remember graphing things). I also never took a math class while I was in college. I had only gotten about as far as they had: junior-year algebra. And yet when they faced a difficult math problem in the homework or on a practice test, they brought it to me and I could usually figure it out without finding the answer in the back of the book.

I couldn’t understand why, if they weren’t able to do these problems, I was. It wasn’t because I had done the problem before–I’ve only taught this course a few times, and there are so many practice problems, I hadn’t even begun to work my way through them all. It wasn’t because I am instinctively good at the SAT style of testing math, the way I am with the SAT style of testing reading and writing. In fact, my own SAT math score was so low, it almost disqualified me from being hired by this tutoring company. When I do figure out how to solve the problems, I can never quite believe I did it. It always surprises me. I wondered what could possibly account for the ability gap between me and my students?

How Math is Tested on the SAT

In order to understand the disparity, you have to understand a few things about how the SAT tests math. If you’ve taken the SAT, you may remember that the easiest questions come first, with each subsequent question getting harder, until you reach the end of the section, where the highest difficulty questions are. Surprisingly, the highest difficulty questions are solved using the same basic math skills that are used to solve the easy questions: no need to know trigonometry, calculus, or game theory to answer these questions. The only thing that makes them “harder” is that there are more steps–more chances to trip up, to make an error, to get confused.

Another surprise is that there are often little tricks and ‘hacks’ built into each problem. I tell my students that if they’re looking at a problem and thinking, “Oh man, this is gonna take forever to solve,” they are probably missing something. See, the SAT rewards those who think flexibly about numbers. If the test designers really wanted to evaluate math skills, they wouldn’t let students bring calculators. Especially when you get into more difficult questions, SAT math is all about strategy and how you think about math. If you can figure out what they’re asking for, and mentally create a mathematical map to find it, you can solve the problem. How you approach the problem is the key.

What Are You Trying to Prove?

I have the luxury of approaching the problems with an open, curious mind. I even look forward to the challenge of solving an unfamiliar high-difficulty problem. I know that if I can’t figure out, I’ll just look it up in the back of the book and walk the student through the book’s explanation. All that my students are able to think about is the effect their SAT score will have on their college admissions, or how disappointed their parents will be if they get a low score. They believe that if they can’t figure it out, the implicit judgement will follow them around for the rest of their careers.

It became very clear to me that other people’s expectations of us affect our performance, for better or for worse. When I look at a difficult test question, I generally think, “Oh no…this one looks really tough. Maybe I should just flip to the explanation in the back now.” But then I take a deep breath and remember: I am the teacher. I am supposed to be smart enough and capable enough to figure this out; that’s why this company decided to hire me. So even if I feel confused or intimidated, that vote of confidence gives me the motivation to put pencil to paper and muddle through. It gives me the courage to try, and keep on trying until I get the right answer (or at least several wrong ones).

My students, on the other hand, are approaching the problem from a very different perspective. First of all, while I know that I am there to help, my students know that they are there to be helped. This may encourage them to view themselves as, well, helpless. Secondly, the process of being tested puts students in the uncomfortable spot of having to prove their own intelligence. When they get to the high-difficulty questions, the test is whispering to them, “Here’s where we separate the smart kids from the dumb ones. So go ahead, see if you can solve it. Which pile will you end up in?”

Brain Freeze

In his book How Children Fail, John Holt talks about the tension we experience when we are trying to finish something without making any mistakes. He realizes that some of his students are making mistakes on purpose to break the tension.

“Worrying about mistakes is as bad as–no, worse–than worrying about mistakes they have made. Thus, when you tell a child that he has done a problem wrong, you often hear a sigh of relief. He says, “I knew it would be wrong.” He would rather be wrong, and know it, than not know whether he was wrong or not…When the paper was turned in, the tension was ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about flunking the [test], but it was a fatalistic kind of worry, it didn’t contain the agonizing element of choice, there was nothing more they could do about it. Worrying about whether you did the right thing, while painful enough, is less painful than worrying about the right thing to do.”

I think this same relief of tension manifests in SAT takers when they leave an answer blank. Whenever the student brings their question to me, the rest of the problems may be marked up, with their work written out, but the difficult problem is always spotless. I admit I haven’t been doing this very long, but I have never seen a student get stuck in the middle of one of these math problems. When I have faced really difficult problems in my student years, it always felt like some kind of mental paralysis: I’d try frantically to figure out what to do, but all I could think was, “I don’t know. I just don’t know!”  I couldn’t figure out where I was going, how to get there, or even how to begin.

Solving a difficult SAT math question hinges on approaching it properly: you have to look at what the problem says, what it asks for. You have to think about how to use the information given to get from point A to point B. You have to clear your mind and let the numbers and figures speak to you. If you can’t get to that open, curious, relaxed-yet-alert state of mind, you won’t be able to figure out how to approach the problem, and you’ll be sunk. You’ll hand me your paper, saying helplessly, “I didn’t know where to start.”

Thawing Out

I think the only thing that really helped me out of my math anxiety was knowing that I’m no longer judged by my math skills or lack thereof. I’ve relaxed enough to be able to treat them as intriguing challenges, fun ways to stretch my mind. I hate that I can’t give my students the same permission not to worry about it so much. Also, since I haven’t prepared the problem ahead of time, I can’t really “lead” the student through it. I kind of turn the problem over and over in my head, and then once I’ve got it, I hand it to the student and say, “There.” I don’t think that’s really the eye-opening learning experience they need.

Have you suffered from math anxiety? Have you ever helped any one through it? What are your strategies for helping students move from fear to curiosity to delight?

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Now, when I watched the trailer, I thought that it seems like a lot of the same old rhetoric: we need to spend more on computers, because that’s the only way they’ll be able to compete with developing nations (to be followed shortly by articles in the Times proclaiming, “If you kid is awake, he’s probably online! They’ll probably be stupider for it! ZOMG!”)! kids are the future! be all you can be! More of a snooze-fest than a wake-up call, really.

I found it especially ironic that Sir Richard Branson was up there saying “There are only two ways to learn entrepreneurial skills…either get out there in the jungle and get them, or (pause for dramatic effect) teach it to them in schools.” As massively successful as he is, which method did he use? Considering that he was a notoriously poor student in school and only holds honorary university degrees, I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t waste any time sitting around in a classroom.

Higher, better education for all is an admirable goal in theory. However, education was never designed to be the great equalizer. Why else would we have professors who only give out a certain number of As, regardless of the quality of the students’ work? The way we rank students, from A to F, is competitive by design. Grades are inherently meaningless: they only have value if there are “winners” and “losers.”

And I also found it really funny that they were showing footage of deforestation and global warming while talking about the need for more education to conquer these terrible things. Do they not realize that the CEO of the company who has hired the lumberjack to cut down those trees is probably college educated, several times over? As well as all the CEOs and managers of companies whose factories and/or products CAUSE global warming. Whereas we didn’t have wholesale destruction of the planet before the institutionalization of education. To quote an old friend, “I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.”

However, Nicolette told me that the film uses a lot of the resources and arguments that she used to write her thesis on deschooling for ecoliteracy, which sounds a lot more radical. Maybe whoever put the trailer together for them just didn’t “get it.” She hasn’t seen it either, so I guess we’ll reserve judgment until the movie comes out.  What did you think of the trailer?  Or if you’ve seen it, do you think it proposes some new, exciting solutions?  Or is it just a rehash of the same old rhetoric?

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This article describes the results of a study which indicate that people tend to feel better mentally and physically on the weekends, when they are free to spend their time as they like.  This holds true regardless of the status of the job, how many hours they work, “how educated they happen to be,” whatever their marital status.

If the feeling of autonomy improves mental and physical well-being for adults, even those with ‘interesting, high status jobs,’ when are students supposed to recuperate?  They are not only told what to do, where to sit, when to eat, and when to go to the bathroom for seven hours of the day, they have to work on all their homework on evenings and weekends, in the free time left over after extracurricular activities. This would indicate, in the terms of the study, a high level of feeling ‘controlled,’ which correlated to negative feelings. As the researchers were surprised to learn, “the analysis also found that people feel more competent during the weekend than they do at their day-to-day jobs.” (Emphasis mine.)

Please allow me a small extrapolation from the results of this study. It’s kind of ironic that although School purports to “educate” children to make them more competent, the very act of controlling what, when, and how they learn, could make them feel less competent. It’s almost like School ends up convincing students that they’re too stupid to ever amount to anything without constant instruction and supervision. I once had an employer who never said outright, “You’re incompetent and would single-handedly ruin my business if I ever took my eyes off of you,” but she implied it. She never let me (or anyone else) make a decision without first consulting her–even if the decision was as small as what part of the store to clean first. She was a kind and generous boss in many ways, but the total lack of autonomy made me miserable.

However, I at least got to escape once my shift was over. School extends its control into one’s “free time” via homework. When I remember my time in school, the strongest sense memory I have was that feeling of my stomach sinking. Yes, the bell had rung and I was out of class, but as soon as I’d had my afternoon snack, I had to finish reading assignments, study for quizzes and tests, complete worksheets, write essays, work on projects that would take a month to complete… There was never, really, any free time. There was always something to do. And even if I did manage to finish everything on my plate–well, you know, a good student always works ahead.

I touched on this briefly in a response to a New York Times op-ed piece that suggested lengthening the school day and eliminating summer vacation. I hope this study helps Harold Levy and other like-minded administrators to understand: Free time is essential to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of all people, “regardless of age.”

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And since my friends have learned to avoid the topic of education around me, I wanted to find another outlet for my enthusiasm, where I could develop my ideas and start conversations with like-minded people.

But who was I to open my big mouth on the topic of education? Sure, I’ve done some tutoring, but I haven’t studied to be a teacher. I wasn’t homeschooled myself, and I don’t even have any children to homeschool now. But some of the most famous and successful personal finance bloggers (JD Roth, Adam Baker, and Trent Hamm, to name a few) don’t have degrees in finance. In fact, many of them started out as the exact opposite of financial experts: each writer I linked to was in a mountain of debt when he began blogging about the topic. They began it because they wanted something in their lives to change, and they felt that blogging was a good way to not only immerse themselves in learning about the topic, but to create a community where others could turn for advice and support.  These men have helped so many people with their blogs, and they inspire little ole’ unqualified me to do the same.

Saying that a person’s opinions on School and education are invalid because they were only a student and never a teacher is like saying that an adult, who no longer practices the religion she was raised in, should not be taken seriously when she criticizes that religion because she was never a member of the clergy.

I was there. I did the student thing for 14 years. I was deeply influenced by the experience. I think it’s important to critically examine the role that Schooling has played in shaping our lives, instead of just believing what are told about it: we’ll never be able to cope with adult life unless we are forced to do unpleasant things; degrees and credentials are the only tickets to success; if we don’t get good grades, it’s because we aren’t trying hard enough.  You know what?  I call shenanigans!

As John Holt said:

“Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value.”

By publishing this blog, I claim my right to “think about [my] own experiences” and “find and make the meaning of [my] own [life].” I’m no longer afraid to say or do things just because I haven’t been certified and judged worthy to say and do them. It seems to me that the root of the mortgage crisis was a population trained in allowing “others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives.” We hadn’t thought we could afford such an expensive house until the man behind the big desk told us to trust him: he’d run the numbers, and we were going to wind up wealthier than ever!  Oops.  I guess it doesn’t always pay to let somebody else do our thinking for us.

As John Taylor Gatto points out,

“Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.”

Paulo Freire further argues,

“Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.”

I should point out that John Holt was a teacher for 20 years before becoming an advocate of educational reform and inventing homeschooling. John Taylor Gatto taught in the public schools of New York City for 26 years and was named New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. Paulo Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in Pernambuco, Brazil. So the ideas expressed on this blog do not belong solely to one angsty, unenlightened college drop-out.

This blog is not where I expound on the infinite wisdom I gained in a few years of tutoring.  It is where I comment on the national conversation about education, share the revolutionary ideas of some very insightful writers whom I admire, and talk about my personal experiences as a student and a teacher.

This blog is not about criticizing teachers. It is about criticizing the institutionalization of education.

This blog does not debate what Schools should teach. It debates the heretofore unquestioned idea that we should allow a complete stranger to tell us what, how, and when we should learn.

I will close with one last quote from John Holt:

“We who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it with very little adult coercion or interference, are probably no more than one percent of the population, if that. And we are not likely to become the majority in my lifetime. This doesn’t trouble me much anymore, as long as this minority keeps on growing. My work is to help it grow.”

I share his belief, and this blog is just my small contribution to helping the minority grow.

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This remix video made my day. It was created by an artist named Pogo, who uses sound clips from movies to create totally original music.

I wasted spent the better part of an afternoon watching all the videos he has posted on YouTube, and this one was my favorite. I love how he retains the spirit of the original movie: the retro vibe, the sense of wonder, the sweet yearning underneath it all. It moved me, both emotionally and physically. (Seriously, try to resist dancing around in your chair juuust a little bit. You can’t.)

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

I loved her over-all point: the emphasis on relentless testing, along with funding difficulties, have elbowed out important topics like art, humanities, music, drama. I agree that literacy and computer proficiency open the world to young minds. (I especially liked her mother’s statement that “If you can read, you can learn to do anything.”)

However, I disagree with her conclusion that “students did not want to think.” They most likely just didn’t want to think about the things their teacher (or whoever designed their curriculum) wanted them to think about. Do you ever wonder how kids could be so entranced by video games? They are visually stimulating, sure, but they also engage the mind in problem-solving. If they weren’t interested in analyzing the world of the game, they wouldn’t play them obsessively until they’d defeated all the levels.

I think schools tend to discourage thinking in children. In class, we are punished for staring out the window, or not paying attention to the teacher. These are signs of independent thinking. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Harrison Bergeron.” In Harrison’s world inequality is illegal. That means good-looking people have to wear masks so they are equal to unattractive people. If someone is physically strong, they must carry weights to make themselves equal to the weak. If they are intelligent…they have to endure a “mental radio” that emits a siren every three minutes. To interrupt their thoughts. So that they are incapable of achieving their true intellectual potential. (Bringin’ it home…) Sound familiar? (::cough::Teachertellingyoutopayattentioneverythreeminutes::cough::)

I recently read a super-cool article in the New Yorker about this group of scientists who are creating robots that can work with disabled people or autistic children, to encourage “physical and cognitive rehabilitation.” On page 4, the author describes watching some tapes of an autistic child working with a ‘socially assistive’ robot. The researchers are trying to improve his ability to engage with humans by having him engage with the robot. For example, if he moves away, the robot hangs its head in ‘disappointment.’ Or if the child presses a certain button on the robot, it blows bubbles. In a later taped session, the robot exhibits such behaviors randomly, not as a result of the child’s actions (like pressing a button). (OK, now I’m getting to the point.)

When the child can’t make the robot blow bubbles, he is disappointed and withdraws, refusing to engage further with the robot. The author goes on to say, “At the end of the session, the child turned to his mother and said, ‘I think the robot is learning-disabled’. “

Before being diagnosed with autism (and, obviously, afterward), this child must have gone through several tests and many different ‘labels.’ And because children can be guileless and therefore brutally honest, he defined ‘learning-disabled’ as he had experienced it: that is what people call you when they are frustrated with you for not doing what THEY want you to do.

It made me so sad for him, and for so many other children out there who are ‘labeled’ in the name of education: learning-disabled, lazy, stupid, ADHD, trouble-makers. These are all condescending and humiliating ways of saying, “You’re not doing what we expect you to do. Therefore, there must be something wrong with you. Because there’s certainly nothing unreasonable or wrong about our expectations.”

I can get behind the statement that students today “don’t want to think” about the periodic table or the Battle of the Bulge or whatever, but tell me honestly: do you? And if you answered no to that question, would it be right for me to extrapolate and say that you must not want to think? To conclude that you must be mentally lazy and therefore will Never Find a Job, which in turn will cause the collapse of our economy and civilization as we know it?

Of course not. That’s not only ridiculous, it’s insulting. Even a learning-disabled robot can figure that out.

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I disagree, however, with his opening claim that “the problem [with standardized testing] is not so much the tests themselves–it’s the people scoring them.” Open-ended questions are inherently subjective and therefore difficult to grade according to a rubric.  Even if the scoring was done “only by professionals who have made a commitment to education,” a lot of the results would still be influenced by personal bias.  For example, take the review of the X-rated “Debbie Does Dallas” which Mr. Farley encountered.  While he described it as well-written and hilarious, normally qualities that would merit a 6 (“genius”) grade, it ended up being given a 0 because it discussed a pornographic movie.  This student obviously possessed a sense of humor, the ability to think independently and question authority, and enough writing skill to craft a “comprehensive analysis” that was “artfully written.”  Yep, sounds like that kid needed to be put in his or her place with a big, fat zero.  Would a “professional who was committed to education” have made a different call?  It would depend entirely on the individual professional.  While one who appreciated the student’s wit and individualism might have given it a higher grade, one who was offended by children and teenagers exploring their sexuality might have given it the same zero.

In another example, Mr. Farley tries to decipher whether a drawing of a child wearing a helmet while riding a bike over a flaming oil spill properly demonstrated “an understanding of bike safety.”  Since the student had just read a passage about bike safety, and most children don’t encounter walls of fire while tooling around the neighborhood, I would say, “Yes, of course.  The kid in the picture is wearing a helmet.  He’s just trying to inject some humor into the lifeless, eternally dull process of taking a standardized test.”  Mr. Farley, however, was stumped as to how many points he should assign.  The experience showed him that “the score any student would earn mostly depended on which temporary employee viewed his response.”  I think that the student’s score would depend, not on the scorer’s background or “commitment to education,” but on the scorer’s “commitment” to enforcing conformity and punishing those who color outside the lines.  The scorers are hired to judge, not to educate.  Because of the way standardized tests are set up, we can’t just ask the student about their intentions with the drawing.  That would require a sense of humor and respect for a child’s thought process.  I’m sure the test designers thought that having the students draw a picture in response to a reading passage would be a creative learning exercise.  I hope that child wasn’t penalized too harshly for being creative in the wrong way.

Ultimately, Mr. Farley and his colleagues had trouble with some of these responses because the rubric doesn’t work if the student refuses to conform, not necessarily because they were only “temporary employees.”  The problem is still with the test and what it demands of students, not with the people who score it.

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When we last saw our heroine, she was about to dive into the underworld of academia, the dirty little secret of many overachieving students: cheating.  Only in order to save her GPA (and her smart-girl reputation), of course.

I wasn’t going to do anything as crass as purchasing a ready-made essay from the internet.  After all, I genuinely wanted to do the work; I just couldn’t figure out how.  I decided I’d check out every book of literary criticism of Kafka from our library.  I’d pick passages relevant to my assigned story, paraphrase them, and cobble them together to form a cohesive essay: my own brand of Plagiarism Lite.

As I read through these books, however, an amazing thing happened: I learned how to think about Kafka’s writing.  I remember literally saying at one point, “Oh, so that’s what my professor wants me to do!”  While reading these other writers, I found myself thinking of other citations from the story to support their claims, sometimes disagreeing with their arguments, and sometimes drawing my own, unique conclusions about Kafka’s words.  At the end of the course, both of the papers I turned in were wholly original.  I never had to plagiarize a single word.

Unfortunately, it seems rare for other students to have the same revelation I did: that writing is an opportunity for me to engage with a writer, an event, or a way of seeing the world.  I am so glad that I got a chance to learn that writing is not about telling a professor what she wants to hear.  It’s about finding out what you have to say.  Of course, when writing, you should consider what the reader wants.  If no one is interested in what you have to say, no one will read your words, and then your writing becomes an exercise in one hand clapping.  But I think having something to say is the foundation of all good writing.

Ironically, that is ultimately what led me away from a major in literature.  Although I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of literary criticism and there are people who turn it into a career, I realized that whatever I wrote in that genre wouldn’t be anything I really wanted to say.  While I believe great literature can be relevant no matter how long ago it was written (that’s what makes it great), I just don’t think what critics say about it matters that much.  Anybody who reads literary criticism probably already has ideas of his own about the text, anyway.  And that’s how the author meant his or her writing to be: an intimate conversation between himself or herself and another individual, multiplied thousands or millions of times over.  I have no desire to get in the middle of that.  Now that I can enjoy books without a professor’s agenda hanging over my head, I don’t beat myself up if I don’t understand why everyone thinks The Brothers Karamazov is so great.  I can just accept that Dostoevsky’s message in that book wasn’t meant for me, and I can move on to something that really resonates with me, like Notes from Underground.

So I was greatly encouraged to see last weekend’s New York Times article spotlighting teachers who don’t assign and “teach” certain books: they let their students choose what they want to read.  Instead of the teacher leading a discussion to “teach” the book, they all take turns giving mini-presentations to the class, talking about the book and often recommending it to their classmates.  Sure, the occasional student picks Captain Underpants, but many students have been inspired by their peers to read major literary works like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, or A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines.  The students may not fully grasp the subtext or be able to “unpack” certain passages, but I think authors have a reason for embedding their perspective on certain issues within a fictional story, instead of just writing an essay.  It’s OK to just enjoy the story, and if you’d like to learn how to peer into the author’s deeper meaning, I suggest checking out How to Read Literature like a Professor.

Nevertheless, it is completely possible to enjoy great literature without being “taught” how to do so.  After all, The Last of the Mohicans sold the modern equivalent of 10 million copies in the early 1800s, long before every man, woman, and child was expected to sit through an English class to learn how to properly appreciate great writing.  Come to think of it, some of them even managed to learn to write that great literature without the benefit of instruction.  Maybe we should give today’s budding readers and writers some of the same trust and freedom.

I have long felt that the only purpose of writing is discovery.  Writing helps me to look at my topic in a new light, to clarify my thinking on the topic, and to explain my ideas to others.  I, of course, have not read the same essays Mr. Fish cites as inspiration for his column: the papers for a “graduate literature” course that had no “clean English sentences.”  But from my personal experience as a college student and a writing tutor for high-school and middle-school students, the real reason students can’t write is because the process of School has disconnected them with the most compelling reason to write: discovery.

John Holt, in How Children Fail, claimed that in Schools, children are distracted from learning their subject matter by the politics of the classroom: namely, their status in relation to the other students, and the teacher’s behavior.  He argues that students mainly learn how to please the teacher.  As I mentioned in a previous article, many teachers spend a lot of class time trying to get students to jump through an exact sequence of hoops so that they can “interactively” learn what the curriculum dictates.  This does not encourage original thought.  Instead, it encourages students to guess what the teacher wants to hear.  By the time these kids get to college, where professors ask them to “choose your own topic” and “develop an original thesis,” they FIRST: wonder what the catch is, and SECOND: become really, truly confused.  They have never had to do this before.  So they fall back on a tried-and-true method (guessing what the professor wants to hear), and they produce this vaguely literary-sounding mumbo-jumbo without actually using proper English or critical thinking skills, because they have no idea what they’re talking about.  They don’t know what original thoughts or ideas they have on their subject, so they have no real motivation to explain these ideas to another.  At least, that was the case with me.

Although I considered myself to be a pretty good writer in high school, I stumbled through my first two writing courses in university.  I used proper English, for the most part, but my professor kept saying that my thesis wasn’t really a thesis, and that I didn’t even manage to support it very well.  I reviewed each revised draft with her, trying to pinpoint exactly what I was doing wrong, but I didn’t get the grade I wanted in that class because there was a fundamental disconnect in our communication: I kept trying to figure out what she wanted, when all she wanted was to know what I thought about the subject.  At the time, I didn’t even know how to think about the topic, let alone what I thought about it.

For my second “writing-intensive” course, I wound up in a class about Kafka.  At first, I thought Kafka was intriguing.  Then I thought he was challenging.  Then I started to panic as I realized the man was completely inscrutable.  I mean, I could kind of understand how the guy turning into the bug was a metaphor for isolation in the Industrial Age, but we weren’t allowed to write about that one.  We had to choose another of his short stories for our essay.  So I did what any desperate-to-keep-her-slipping-academic-status student would do: I decided to cheat.

Find out how well that worked for me next week, in How I Learned to Write, Part 2!