Reaching The Unreachable Star

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win” -- Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

It's part of my philosophy in general that some fights are worth fighting even if you know they're unwinnable. This is true of life, the most important unwinnable fight of all -- after all, nobody gets out of life alive -- and it's true of many impossible things that are nonetheless worth trying to do. (As the admittedly somewhat cheugy proverb goes, "Shoot for the moon: even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.")

I'm still young and idealistic enough to believe that every student is in principle reachable, even if I'm far from expert enough to reach every student myself. The fact is that I don't know for sure which are the students I can reach and which are the students it would take a more expert teacher than I to reach, so I need to try my best to reach every student.

But even if that weren't the case, even if I knew for sure that some students are unreachable by me or anyone else and I knew exactly what students were the unreachable ones, I would still be inclined to try to reach them anyway.

Of course, there is a tradeoff here -- every minute I spend trying to reach an unreachable student is a minute I'm not spending on students who are engaged and ready to learn. I fully recognize that at a certain point, it becomes necessary to cut your losses and concentrate your effort where it will help.

Not Suffering, but Joy, Heroism, and Excellence

For all its merits, one problem with teaching Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is that it is a story of Black suffering inflicted by white villains, written by a white author, from the point of view of a white narrator, with a white hero. Reams have been written elsewhere on the subject that minority stories should be told by minority authors with minority voices, and that point need not be belabored here.

Instead, I criticize a different flaw in teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, and virtually every other text found in the traditional English classroom in February (It should -- but of course does not -- go without saying that every month should feature Black History, and women's history, and queer history, and disabled history, and Latinx history, and Jewish history, and so on. Addressing the myriad of issues raised, ameliorated, and worsened by a singular Black History Month are beyond the scope of this post) -- Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker's "The Flowers", Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way, and so on: they're all primarily about Black suffering.

To be sure, the history of race in America is largely a story of Black suffering, so it can hardly be said that this focus is inaccurate, but it's certainly depressing: it bludgeons and beats down the soul to read only of suffering. The last thing 7th to 12th graders need is to have their souls beaten down. Especially Black children, who are already intimately familiar with, and beaten down by, the suffering inflicted by America's systems of oppression.

Instead, the curriculum should feature Black joy, Black heroism, and Black excellence. Indeed, when any minority is foregrounded, the focus should be on that minority's joy, heroism, and excellence. In short, I absolutely would choose to teach Marvel's 2018 film Black Panther over To Kill A Mockingbird or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Critical Literacy

Every text is propaganda for something, whether the author intended it, or even realizes it, or not. Each text is propaganda for its own assumptions. "See Spot Run" is propaganda for dog ownership. The Jungle Book and Little House on the Prairie are fine stories so far as they go, but they have certain colonial assumptions baked in. To Kill A Mockingbird seems a fine anti-racism text -- but if the author, the viewpoint character, and the hero are all white, what kinds of (potentially racist?) assumptions are baked in that you might not get from a Black author writing a Black hero from a Black point of view? I encourage students to interrogate every text for everything it's bringing to the conversation -- and especially for what it's secretly smuggling into the conversation.

Students, moreover, should treat everything they encounter as a text. The theory goes that if I teach critical literacy vis-à-vis classroom novels and stories to such an extent that it becomes second nature to the students, they will tend to apply it more broadly in their lives -- to what they encounter on TikTok or Twitch, in sports or music, on social media, when talking to their friends or family, in textbooks and even when I'm standing at the front of the room, telling them ostensible facts. Thereby, perhaps they might be forged more resistant to the depredations of the Algorithm showing them deliberate propaganda for worldviews which have, at best, been rejected by polite society.

The idea, of course, is not for me to teach students what to think; the idea is that they get into the habit of thinking about these sorts of things at all.

Brightening Everywhere

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -- attributed to Isaac Asimov

It doesn't matter much that Asimov probably didn't ever actually say that, because it is true -- it's true of science, and it's true of education more generally: it benefits everyone for anyone to be educated.

It benefits me, and everyone, to live in a well-educated society: I want everyone to get enough education to have an intellectual conversation with, to understand public good enough to e.g. get vaccinated against common diseases (barring genuine medical reasons not to), to (if they choose) advance science, technology, art, or literature to make life better for everyone.

Educating any person directly benefits me in a way that, say, healing, housing, or feeding a person does not. Healing, housing, and feeding everybody are, of course, objective goods; but educating everybody is both an objective good and a subjective good. It benefits a hypothetical me (in a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance sort of way) for everyone to be healed, housed, and fed; it benefits actual, literal me for everyone to be educated. If I were a purely selfish person, I would still want to teach.

It may benefit me more for my neighbor in Buffalo to be educated than it does for my neighbor in, say, Lagos to be educated, but both benefit me. I'm not competing to make my students better than students in Lagos, I'm trying to make my students better than they were yesterday.

Education is not a race to the top, it's the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats. If it were a race, it would be a race against the Blob -- I want to escape the Blob, but I also want you to escape the Blob, because if it eats you it becomes bigger and stronger and more of a threat to me.

The Virtues of Not Knowing

In the The West Wing episode "Galileo", the President plans to do an event televised to schools nationwide centered around a Mars lander called Galileo V. The lander runs into trouble, disappearing from communication, probably destroyed, and most of the staff assumes the event should therefore be canceled. CJ, the Press Secretary, objects:

We have, at our disposal, a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don't go to the blackboard and raise their hand 'cause they think they're gonna be wrong. I think you should say to these kids, 'you think you get it wrong sometimes, you should come down here and see how the big boys do it'. I think you should tell them you haven't given up hope, and that it may turn up, but in the meantime, you want NASA to put its best people in the room, and you want them to start building Galileo VI. Some of them will laugh, and most of them won't care, but for some, they might honestly see that it's about going to the blackboard and raising your hand.

As I have grown gradually more adult over my lifetime, I have grown more comfortable admitting "I don't know", increasingly cautious of ultracrepidarianism*. Some advisors have suggested I could stand to express more confidence about what I know, but others have agreed with me that it can be a powerful thing to say to students, "I don't know, but let's look it up together!" It's okay not to know; what's really important is wanting to know and the skill of finding out.

*Meaning "beyond the shoe", from a story from Pliny the Elder where the god Apollo paints a painting, and a shoemaker notices he's messed up painting a shoe, so the shoemaker points it out, and Apollo recognizes he did it wrong and repaints the shoe, so the shoemaker comes back the next day and is emboldened by his previous success to point out what he thinks is an error elsewhere in the painting, but that one is not actually an error, so Bad Things happen to the shoemaker because he just criticized a god on a non-error, leading to the admonition, "shoemaker, not beyond the shoe" -- do not opine on matters outside your expertise.

Dungeons & Dragons

I have long experience with tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), and I make frequent comparison between D&D and teaching, and draw skills and techniques from D&D to use in teaching.

For example:

Old-school gamers, of the bygone era when Gygax and Arneson invented the genre, often subscribe to the school of thought that D&D is, and should be, adversarial: the Dungeon Master (DM) seeking to kill and destroy the player characters; the players seeking to survive the DM's depredations and emerge victorious.

The newer school of thought, in which I am a believer, is that D&D is collaborative: the DM seeks to challenge the players without killing their characters; the players seek to overcome those challenges; and through this everyone cooperatively has fun and tells a story.

Similarly, many students (and, if you believe those students, some teachers) think that school is adversarial: the teacher's goal is to fail the students, and the students' goal is to put forth the minimum effort possible to pass. In fact, school is, or should be, collaborative: the teacher's goal is to help students grow into more complete human persons, by, among other things, putting surmountable challenges in their way; the students' goal should be to overcome those challenges and thereby grow as persons.

For another example:

As a DM, I have often espoused a technique of "Yes, And" (a technique itself yoinked from improv comedy, where it is used to always build and never impede the momentum of a scene). Whenever a player asks if they can do something, telling them "yes, and" if possible -- giving them a positive answer and building on it -- it is most fun and interesting for everybody; a straight "yes" is fine, and "yes, but" (you can do it, if you succeed at this dice roll, or else at some cost) can also be interesting; any variety of "no" is to be frowned upon, but "no, but" -- you can't do it, but here's what you can do that's close -- is least bad.

Similarly, building on everything students say ("yes, and") boosts engagement and makes class more fun and productive for everybody; finding a way to point out something good or correct in anything a student says, even if what they're saying is not overall correct ("no, but"), boosts confidence and builds rapport. 

Neurodivergence and Disability

Full disclosure:

I am a number (somewhere in the vicinity of two) of overlapping flavors of mildly to moderately neurodivergent. I like to think I generally pass as merely eccentric; more rarely, offputtingly weird.

After getting hit by a car as a pedestrian in late 2020, I left some of my brains on the pavement (not quite literally), never completely recovering from the traumatic brain injury. I estimate I'm at about 95% of my previous capacity; most of my remaining difficulties lie in finding the right words when speaking, resulting in conversational gaps as I try to find words.

This can make me seem like I know less than I actually do, or like I'm even more awkward and less confident than I actually am.

Or, in situations where I can't come up with a $1 word but a variety of highfalutin' $10 words come to mind (e.g., if I can't remember the words "near" or "close" or "next to", but "proximate" and "juxtaposed" spring straight to mind), it can make me seem like I'm trying too hard to appear smart -- which can have additional pitfalls with schoolchildren, who naturally have a less expansive vocabulary, and so are less likely to be familiar with such $10 words.

In the context of the classroom, I turn these apparent misfortunes into a strength: informing the class that, despite having been equipped with a brain which was not quite standard-issue to begin with, and which has since become dented and dinged up, I am nonetheless successful in life, and so can they all be if they set their willpower to it, no matter what handicaps they might be faced with.

Moreover, by being low-key but unapologetically weird, I can, in theory, deflect hostility away from the "weird kids" and onto myself. When necessary, I'm happy to be the weirdest person in the room, if it helps me tank bully aggro away from the squishies (if you'll forgive this use of MMORPG vernacular), on those occasions my attempts to build a classroom culture of overall respect might fail.

Free-Reading

A huge portion of my consistent ability to maintain the ruse of being a smart person stems from having consumed an inordinate quantity of books in my youth, filling my head with ideas, vocabulary, and the grammar, syntax, and spelling of Standard American English (of course other Englishes than this are perfectly valid languages spoken by many smarter people than I, but mastery of SAE is key to the ruse of intellect). In the desire to pass on that benefit to the youth of today, some class time ought be devoted to quiet free-reading.

During planning for every lesson, the question should be asked: Would the students do better and learn more if I just shut up and had them read books of their choice for 40 minutes instead? If yes, scrap the lesson -- and it's a much higher bar to clear than one might suppose.