Reaching The Unreachable Star

"I Saw A Man Pursuing The Horizon"

by Stephen Crane

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can never —”

“You lie,” he cried,

And ran on.

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.

“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

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.

One core element of my personal teaching philosophy has to do with holding a line of defense against an epidemic of harmful and hateful misinformation, by teaching critical literacy to today’s young people; moreover teaching them to apply critical literacy to all texts, defining texts as broadly as possible: each book, story, or poem we read in English class is a text, of course; every movie, television show, or anime that a person might watch are texts; news media is a text; televised sports are texts; when you’re watching YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch, and the Algorithm draws you ineffably into a dark pit of questionably hateful politics, you bet your sweet bippy that’s one or more texts; this goof standing at the front of your ELA classroom trying to teach you critical literacy, that’s a text; the self is a text, on whom the eye of critical literacy can very well be turned; the world can profitably be treated as a text, which overlaps critical literacy with social studies and science.

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. Each lens serves to view each text in a different way, and when the lenses are turned on the text of the self or the text of the world, an increased understanding of truths about the self or the world can be attained.

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.

Precision in Language

"Advanced learners benefit from thinking of the writer as an artist whose grammatical choices represent different brush strokes made to different effects." — Ayanna Thompson & Laura Turchi

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning." — Mark Twain

Precision in language is a hobby of mine: I aspire to always say and write exactly what I mean, in terms of both word choice and syntax (precision of speaking tone is less within my communicatory grasp, but I try to be exact with that, too). By always modeling precision in speech and writing (and grading with precision in mind), I hope to inspire a similar precision in students' writing and speech, and to call upon students to notice precisely what is on the page when reading (regardless of whether the author was or was not being intentionally so precise), with the desired end being improved reading literacy skills.

I am not an expert rhetorician, nor an expert changer of minds; I don't know how to convince people to agree with me. I just use the right word and word order to communicate what I intend to communicate (provided my readers or listeners have the language knowledge and attention spans to be communicated with precisely).

"If you've nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it, then let it not be your fault." — Larry Niven's 5th Law for Writers

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.

Critical Queer Theory

There are two senses in which ELA pedagogy can be made queer: in one sense, we might study texts featuring queer characters or themes; in the other, somewhat more abstruse queer theory sense, it is queer to look at a text slantwise, focusing on violations of social normalcy and norms (especially, but not exclusively, sexual or gender norms) within the text – to look at the text with the queer lens. I would maintain that both senses are good and desirable, and an intersection between the two – looking slantwise at texts featuring queer characters – is best of all.

As a matter of definition, queer is anything that stands outside the ‘normal’, chiefly, but not necessarily exclusively, in terms of gender and/or sexuality. It is good and important to include texts featuring queer characters and themes in the ELA classroom.

But queer pedagogy beyond simple representation and inclusion is also important -- not just for the inclusion and uplifting of queer students, but moreover to expand every student's mind. To read with a queer lens is to read queerly, to queer the text and the self, to internalize the queer. In the same sense as reading with the feminist lens opens the mind to issues of gender, or reading with the Marxist lens opens the mind to issues of social class and wealth, reading with the queer lens opens the mind to the possibility that there might be more to the world than the normal, especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to gender or romantic or sexual attraction.

When the critical queer lens is turned on texts, the self, and the world, some students might come to realize things about their own genders or sexualities that they had not previously understood; certainly may be brought to greater understanding of queer peers; and everyone can just inherently benefit from contemplating the rejection of societal norms, even if one does not actually end up rejecting them oneself.

See Also

Critical Queer and Disability Theory in the Secondary English Classroom

Critical Disability Theory

Disability studies is of universal import: Every human being is fated to become disabled (if they don't die first). Moreover, every teacher will, in their time, teach countless students with mental or physical disabilities – and will therefore have classrooms full of abled students with disabled classmates; abled students who can be persuaded, through the magic of the lens of disability, to better put themselves in the shoes of said disabled classmates.

Disability is common in texts, and, almost as commonly, a shorthand for – i.e., occurs in a character in conjunction with – something else, usually something negative – villains are disabled more often than heroes.

Disability can, most obviously, include physical disability, such as, most commonly in popular media, missing limbs – e.g. Star Wars (It can accurately be observed that over the course of George Lucas’s six Star Wars movies, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader loses five of his four limbs), How to Train Your Dragon, Harry Potter, and virtually any text focusing on pirates (peg legs, eyepatches, and hook hands being de rigueur in such texts).

Disability can also include mental disability, which is perhaps more common in the traditional literary canon – e.g. Of Mice and Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Flowers for Algernon.

What, one might ask, of mental illnesses, such as sociopathy and/or psychopathy? Are they disabilities to be accommodated? What does it say about us as a society that ‘he's a psychopath’ is so often used as the entire characterization of a villain – e.g. the Joker from DC comics and movies?

The lens of disability can lead one to ponder subjects that may prove important in social and legal spaces – is genetic discrimination, as one sees in Gattaca or X-Men, fair and reasonable, or is it good that laws have been passed prohibiting it, or should those laws be strengthened?

What of people with increased ability relative to human average, such as in superhero media (including, again, X-Men)? Is it fair that Michael Phelps is some sort of super-powered swimming mutant? Should such people be brought down to human average – or even, should everyone be brought down to a minimum, so that everyone is truly equal, as in “Harrison Bergeron”?

A disabled lens can bring students to understand more about their own minds, may bring better understanding of disabled peers, and may lead to slightly better lives for the disabled among us – in my experience, many problems faced by disabled people result less from overt ableism than from people simply not thinking (which, of course, has ableist results). The classic example is the maintenance guy who chooses to shovel snow off the stairs before shoveling the ramp, not pausing to think that a shoveled ramp is usable by all students while shoveled stairs are usable only by able-legged students. Perhaps if the maintenance guy had studied critical disability theory in his ELA classes, he would have paused for that thought.

See Also

Critical Queer and Disability Theory in the Secondary English Classroom