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.

Gentleness & Emotional Literacy

One of my chief inspirations in my teaching philosophy is not, strictly speaking, an academic, but I venture to call him an expert philosopher of education nonetheless. Fred “Mister” Rogers, creator and host of the children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1968 to 2001, exemplified gentleness and espoused a philosophy of emotional literacy. As Rogers said to the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969,

We deal with such things as the inner drama of childhood. We don't have to bop somebody over the head to make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively. [...] This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’ And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it's much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger -- much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.

I have encountered a concept non-academically called the Two Rogerses principle of masculinity. I once had a philosophy professor sum up one way of doing virtue ethics as “pick somebody you want to emulate, and emulate them” – the most famous example being the concept of ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ The Two Rogerses principle is a simple matter of virtue ethics in that sense: consider, on the one hand, gentle children’s television show host Fred Rogers, and, on the other hand, Marvel comic book and movie superhero Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America, who frequently uses his great strength to defend the weak and to defeat bullies and Nazis and is often held up as an exceptionally moral voice among superheroes. If neither Mr. Rogers nor Captain America would do whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t do it; that thing is probably toxically masculine, not healthily masculine. (There is, of course, a great tension between Fred Rogers’ oft-stated distaste for violence in children’s entertainment on the one side, and Steve Rogers’ habit of solving problems with violence on the other. I focus my own emulation on Fred Rogers – ‘Are you being the kind of person Mr. Rogers knew you could be?’ has for years been a core component of my ethics – but I suspect that Steve Rogers would find a more receptive audience in today’s schoolchildren.)

See Also: Vogt, G., & Monroe, A. (2021). What Mister Rogers can teach us about teaching. The Phi Delta Kappan, 102(8), 46–51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27083858

Lessons From Leo

In the final semester of my formal schooling, for my MSEd in English Education 7-12, for a class project, I embarked upon a quest to shore up my most serious deficit as a teacher: classroom management.

I took as my inspiration one of my cats, The Right Honourable Leopold Tiberius, 2nd Viscount Fluffypants – Leo for short. Leo, though normally a very good boy, sometimes decides to act out – scratching at random doors, chewing on charger cables, getting the zoomies (running around hectic and pell-mell), fighting with our other cats, occasionally biting guests, etc.

Ineffective techniques for getting misbehavior to desist include raising our voices to call his name or scold him, hissing “psssssst”, picking him up and moving him away from whatever he’s messing with – when presented with these responses, Leo will either not desist, will promptly go right back to whatever he was doing wrong, or will switch to some new misbehavior. Even if we lock him in the bathroom for ten minutes, he’ll frequently resume the behavior once released.

Techniques that do turn out effective involve redirecting Leo from the behavior: making a kissy noise to call him over to be petted, lavishing him with affection, giving him a treat, throwing a cat toy to play with. It could be that he’s only misbehaving out of boredom, and being given something more interesting to do quells the boredom; or perhaps he genuinely enjoys his misbehavior but he enjoys affection, treats, and cat toys more; or perhaps he knows I might give him affection, treats, or cat toys, and is misbehaving for the purpose of acquiring these things.

I embarked upon a campaign of research, observation of other teachers, and interviews with teachers and students, to answer the question: are there some effective techniques, perhaps equivalent to the techniques effective for redirecting Leo’s misbehavior, that a teacher can use with students who scratch at doors (metaphorically), chew on cables (metaphorically), get the zoomies (in some cases literally), or fight with other students (physically or verbally) – to descend from the analogy: to reduce behaviors such as getting out of seat, talking during quiet work or when the teacher is instructing, or staying out of room for excessive lengths of time on trips to bathroom?

Obviously human young people are somewhat more cognitively complex than cats, but analogy with Leo inspired pedagogical contemplation nonetheless. Just as it is not always clear why Leo misbehaves, human students come to the classroom carrying their own individual backgrounds, histories, identities, experiences, and even trauma, all of which swirl together to drive them to behave in various ways the teacher does not want. They might misbehave out of boredom; because they enjoy the misbehavior; or because they want to get something from the teacher; they might behave in a way that’s normal in their home or in their culture, but which is not conducive to learning in the classroom; they could be neurodivergently stimming; there could be other, more complex reasons.

To return to the Leo analogy: yelling and physical redirection are obviously ineffective, not to mention cruelly unconducive to learning itself (plus a risk to the teacher’s job – and correctly so); sending a student out of the room (to some disciplinary location) leaves them missing out on content, is a squeeze of the pump of the school-to-prison pipeline, and then the student is likely to resume the behavior as soon as they come back anyway.

Are there some teacher analogues to giving Leo affection, treats, and cat toys – ones which ideally do not invoke the moral hazard attendant with rewarding and incentivizing misbehavior? Perusing the literature led to the conclusion: If misbehavior is occurring, it's already too late. This conclusion was borne out by my observations and interviews: prevention is much more effective.

Successful means of prevention that are within the teacher's control include, primarily: establishing relationship between teacher and student; and implementing structure and consistency.

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.

Speaking English Correctly

If an idea originating in your brain successfully ends up, more or less intact, in my brain, then you have used language correctly -- regardless of such niceties as formality level, spelling, complexity of grammar, or number of emojis you use. If the idea ends up mangled or isn't transferred at all, then you have used language incorrectly. That is the only valid metric for correct and incorrect language use.

Language may be used suboptimally, in that e.g. failing to modulate your formality level to your audience can reduce your audience's opinion of you. (Which goes both ways -- the problem looms equally large whether you're speaking lolcat at an academic conference or using $10 words and academic jargon to trash-talk your Fortnite opponents.)

High-stakes standardized exams, colleges, and many employers all expect a certain level of mastery of formal Standard American English (SAE). I, as a teacher, am expected to prepare students for standardized tests and job and college applications. There is some tension here between this expectation and my personal beliefs.

Personally, my natural mode of communication is somewhat formal (even, some might say, highfalutin') SAE, occasionally meshed with the jargon of Internet memes, so I can naturally teach SAE by modelling it, and by assigning readings of SAE, and I can teach code-meshing by modelling it. Reprimanding students for 'improper' informal English serves more ill purposes than good ones, and vocabulary words and quizzes are well-established in the literature as being of limited value.

Not every assignment should require formal SAE writing -- it is effectively a foreign language for some students, who may more naturally speak, for example, African-American Vernacular English. To require mastery of SAE exclusively privileges some students (mostly white) over other students (mostly Black and English Language Learners), regardless of whether or not they have good or creative ideas, and regardless of what we're actually interested in assessing: whether or not they understand the content. Requiring mastery of SAE to the exclusion of all other Englishes is not just testing the fish against the squirrel on their tree-climbing abilities (as the quote commonly misattributed to Albert Einstein goes); it may be tantamount to requiring the student fish and squirrel to first walk to the tree they'll be tested on climbing.

The Lion

"The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep." -- Tywin Lannister, Game of Thrones

When students verbally bully one another, this is the best advice I can give to the victim: reacting gives them power over you; it makes them think you care about their opinion, which only entices them to bully you more. The opinions of bullies should, in fact, be beneath you. (Of course, when I witness bullying, I do try to step in and request everyone always be respectful towards everyone. But the above advice for students is for situations where I'm not present.)

Similarly, when students attempt to say disrespectful things to or about me (whether the disrespect is intended or accidental), I tend to react with, at most, gentle bafflement.

In the same vein, it does not concern me whether I am students' favorite or least favorite teacher; really, I'm basically indifferent to whether they even like me at all. As long as I am doing my best to be both kind and effective (I aspire to the "warm demander" archetype of teacher), some students will love me, some will loathe me, and most will be somewhere in the middle. I do not feel any need nor desire to be these teenagers' friend, though I always try to be their ally and comrade.

Generative AI

For starters: No text portion of this portfolio or teaching philosophy, nor any cover letter or resume from me, was generated by, went through, or came within any distance of ChatGPT, or any text-generative AI, in any way.

I have used ChatGPT (for hobby purposes) enough to be generally able to recognize its distinctively beige output, a useful skill for an ELA teacher. But, ultimately, I am (or imagine myself to be) a much better writer than ChatGPT is, so I have no need to debase my voice by delegating any writing to ChatGPT.

And I would take that same mindset into the classroom: encourage students to understand that ChatGPT can deliver only samey pablum, and they have so much more interesting voices and things to say than ChatGPT does.

I am, on the other hand, an atrocious visual artist. I could, in principle, spend the proverbial ten thousand hours to become a competent visual artist... or I could ask generative AI to spit out something half-competent, and spend my hours on something I enjoy more. Which, though it merits more deep cogitation on the similarities and differences between literature and art, I recognize as probably hypocrisy. Especially given that part of the job of an ELA teacher is making students invest some hours towards that ten thousand on writing.

Ethics and Law

As far as my research and reasoning can conclude, training a large learning model constitutes educational fair use, ethically and probably legally. I don't necessarily think that current LLMs are fully persons who fully deserve educational rights ‑ but neither am I willing to dismiss the possibility out-of-hand. I'm certainly not inclined to endorse etching in legal stone any precedent of machines as automatically non-persons.

I'm also not inclined to abandon the right to teach a text to humans without explicit permission ‑ that would be an impetus towards using primarily public domain texts, ie, back towards the old days of the Old White Man Canon's dominance. The closest thing I've done to getting permission to teach a text was when Michael Okuda tweeted about an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I mentioned to him in a reply that I had (the previous year) used that episode to teach high schoolers about AI ethics. (The episode in question was, as one might expect if one is very familiar with TNG, "The Measure of a Man".)

Out of supererogatory courtesy, I would not personally teach human students with a text that the author has explicitly asked not be used for teaching. Beyond that, all texts are and should be, ethically and legally, fair game.

Considerations and Concerns

The biggest actual problem with generative AI that I see is that, given a choice between paying a small amount of money for an adequate result with generative AI, or a moderate amount of money for a good result with a human artist, corporations will tend to choose the former, making it harder for artists to make a living, ultimately strangling culture. This is, to be sure, bad ‑ and I admit to the possibility that I could be contributing towards this end by using generative AI for personal purposes, thereby normalizing it.

Other Twilight Zone/Black Mirror futures are foreseeable ‑ e.g., a world where every job-seeker uses ChatGPT to write their cover letters and resumes, and every hiring manager uses ChatGPT to sort through cover letters and resumes... why even have humans involved at all? (To reiterate: I do not use, and have never used, text-generative AI for job-seeking. You bet your sweet bippy every word of this logorrhea is artisanal and hand-crafted.)

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