Beyond School

On Blogging in the Late Weimar Republic

Crisis? What Crisis?

Reading the headlines of Alltop.com’s “top education” sites‘¹ brings to mind the cover of the old Supertramp album, showing a man sunning himself in a bathing suit on a lounge chair, surrounded by grimy industrial waste. The album’s title? “Crisis? What Crisis?”

Economically, American banking deregulation has dragged the US, and the rest of the world, into a crisis creating comparisons to Depression Year 1937.

Politically, the McCain/Palin campaign is whipping up hatred that makes such sober and respected political commentators as conservative David Gergen openly express fear that civic violence could be the result – and others worry that the unthinkable return to political assassination is now possible.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues its assault on the constitution by violating the 200-year-old law of Posse Comitatus, which protects US citizens from being oppressed by their own military, by deploying an Army Brigade to police American streets, and be answerable only to him. Soldiers disobeying, say, an order to arrest members of Congress, or citizens protesting Wall Street, would be court-martialed and serve prison time for serving their democracy instead of their dictator.

And Sarah Palin, the naughty librarian (who can’t name anything she reads, and who may as well gyrate while she winkingly chants “Drill, Baby, Drill”) doesn’t care about the causes of global warming – a position I’m sure would not be shared, could we ask them, by the 25% of mammals now endangered worldwide.

Everything is Political – Except Edubloggers?

So how many education bloggers show the slightest indication, on their blogs, that they find addressing these crises worth “suspending their edublogging campaigns”?

Answer: a whopping 17 – out of the 130 blogs with over 600 posts on Alltop’s education page.

So without further ado,

The “I Didn’t Wordle as Rome Burned” Award

1. The Chancellor’s New Clothes (Our Political Role Models: recommended)
2. Iterating Towards Openness (Scary Sarah: recommended)
3. ODonnell Web (McCain’s hate speech: recommended)
4. History is Elementary (close reading of rescue bailout bill: recommended)
   
5. Borderland (always recommended)
6. Stephen Downes’ OLDaily (economy: recommended)
7. Joanne Jacobs (on Ayers as still-revolutionary)
8. NYC Educator (McCain’s anger issue)
9. Piloted (teaching campaigning)
   
10. My Wonderful World Blog (foreign policy debate)
    
11. Assorted Stuff (on This American Life’s Wall Street podcasts)
    
12. Facing History and Ourselves (educating about campaigning)
    
13. Factchecked (gasoline as political issue)
14. Education Week (Ayers smear)
15. ASCD: In Service (education debate)
16. The Fischbowl (debates 2.0)
17. MindOH Blog (vote)

A Maverick’s Plea for Reform

I’m aware of the many reasons that educators might not openly advocate their political views. I can only hope it’s ye olde self-censoring fear for your jobs that causes this silence, instead of indifference or worse.

All I know is, for this month at least, there are more important things to spend time on than writing about classroom blogging policies, PLNs, global collaborations, Moodles and Nings and Wordles.²

A bit of reading on the Weimar Republic’s failure, and replacement by a famous military dictatorship in the midst of an economic and military crisis – accompanied by extreme racism – might be a good place to start.

I’ve also enabled Diigo to post my daily bookmarks and annotations here. I’m on sabbatical this year, so decided to share what I have time to read. Feel free to check out my Stumbleupon bookmarks too.

I hate feeling like some silly Cassandra.

But I’d hate even more to be one of the Trojans who laughed at her.

~     ~     ~

1. and we all know what a debatable claim that “top” is [↩]
2. Anyway, haven’t they all been written into the ground by now? [↩]

“Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read!”
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy song,
Every child may joy to hear.
–William Blake, Songs of Innocence

“And I stained the water clear”: look at that line a few times, and see the beauties of that exquisitely ambiguous modifier, “clear.”  It’s a line to cherish.¹ And it has to do with the thoughts below – after which, in the next post, we’ll get to an also exquisite sacred sex scene (and I’d like to call it a love scene to avoid the appearance of sensationalism, but it’s not a love scene) from Gilgamesh, along with laughs, I hope, about trying to teach it to today’s teens, in today’s classrooms. But first, an interlude:

When “Corrupting the Youth” is Good

“Good people” can be dangerous.

Socrates and Jesus, for example, in the eyes of the “good people” of their times,  were both criminals. ² They were criminals because they challenged those good people’s conventional views of religion, of the sacred, of moral right and wrong.

How do you know?

They both attacked the gods of their day. Socrates questioned both the truth and the righteousness of the Olympians; and Jesus (though less consistently) similarly questioned the teachings and the righteousness of the Hebrew priests and the “good” church mosque temple-going Christians Muslims Jews around him.  Both were reviled by the good people back then, and both paid with their lives for the same “sin”: critical thinking. The good Athenians killed Socrates with poison, the good Hebrews – the Romans, actually – killed Jesus on the cross.³

Today, we do well to revere Socrates and Jesus for pushing human thought forward.  We would also do well, though, to see their examples as reminders of something else we tend to forget: namely, that good people of any age often appear, in historical hindsight, to be the opposite of good. Again, good people – pious people – killed these two men.

Socrates today is held up to students as the model of that practice called “critical thinking.”  But in his own day, that very act, critical thinking, led to criminal charges against him for this :  “Corrupting the young by teaching new gods.”

Look at that. Socrates was killed why?  Because the adults in his society didn’t like the questions he was entertaining with their kids – about religion.  He was killed for asking, around young people, what we all see as a common sense question today – “Why do we believe in Zeus?”⁴

As a teacher who loves common sense, finds it less common than we think, and loves the idea of giving more of it than of grammar to the young in my classrooms, that story has always made me nervous.

I love critical thinking for many reasons, but the biggest one is this: it requires, always, an honest awareness in the thinker that he or she may be wrong.  Socrates, while less a hero of mine due to recent readings I’ve done about his politics, still wins my respect with this classic one-liner:

I only know that I know nothing.

Scientists understand the wisdom of that statement, and so do philosophers.  Priests and their “good people” followers, though, show no understanding of this wisdom. They assert truth-claims without evidence, and worse, they attack modern-day versions of Socrates and Jesus for thinking critically about their beliefs.

Schools are very bad places for a teacher to promote critical thinking about anything important.  The cliché “critical thinking” in schools is only allowed for safe subjects – an oxymoron I’ve mentioned many times in these pages.  Touch a subject that will offend a single parent or student, and your job is at stake.  That’s why so many classes are so boring.  They refuse to acknowledge the many elephants in the room, or to state that the emperor is wearing no clothes – especially when it comes to whichever god and flag are flying above your country.

And that’s why so many types of hugely influential beliefs that make no sense persist today.  Kids go through twelve years of school without those beliefs ever being touched by a serious question, they graduate, and bam: the beliefs live on for yet another generation: Bush really is communicating with God, while in the same universe, Bin Laden, in another country’s school system, really is obeying the Word and will of Allah.  McCain and Obama consent to be interviewed on national TV with Rick Warren, and thus legitimize a man whose ministry supported a “Left Behind” video game in which post-Rapture Christians kill non-Christians on the streets of New York – and they’re the good guys.  To question these things is not important?

I say it is. We see the Crusades of the 11th Century  being re-played now in the 21st.  Maybe questioning will reduce their chances of continuing into the fourth millennium, if we make it that far.

*    *    *

Critical Thinking as a Litmus Test

Reading the comments on my last post (the first Gilgamesh essay), and of the people who also commented on it on StumbleUpon,⁵ it occurs to me that critical thinkers serve as litmus tests for the people who disagree with them.  They fall into two categories:  those who challenge the thinking, and thus pass the test and prove themselves fellow critical thinkers; and those who attack the thinker instead of the ideas, and thus fail the test and show themselves to be non-critical thinkers, like the poisoners and crucifiers of old. Thank goodness free speech is now protected by law.

If the first Gilgamesh “lecture” had happened in a classroom instead of here, those non-critical thinkers would have been demanding my resignation – because they don’t want their children to think beyond what they, the parents, believe. ⁶ It’s funny how parents don’t care if their kid goes more deeply into, say, math than them; that’s fine. But have my kid go more deeply – and more critically – into religion than I ever did?  Into politics and my country’s history?  That’s a different beast altogether.  As a rule, parents aren’t okay with that at all.

So that’s the challenge to critical thinking in so many of our classrooms today, and a reason for its boredom-inducing absence. If only teachers felt secure in speaking their minds, there could be incredible discussions in classrooms.

And for the record: I share my questions about sacred cows not because I delight in doing “ee-vil.”  We may as well accuse Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Voltaire, Darwin, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and millions of other reformists dead and alive of “loving evil” for imagining – and speaking of – better visions of the Good or more sensible versions of the True.

I share these questions because first, I love asking them; second, it’s my way of supporting others who are asking them; and third, imperfect as all of us are, I believe these questions have vital value for happiness, intelligence, well-being, and, um, education. In my eyes, as much as your preachers or your parents, I am trying to do good. I’m just doing it by my own lights, instead of by the teachings of childhood.  I left those teachings long ago, by reading more than the preachers showed me. (I also discovered, in the cult of the early Christian leader Valentinus, an extinct version of Christianity I actually admire. It’s almost Buddhist. See Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels’ eye-opening, and very readable, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas for more.)

How can we think? Magic-based science (Creation Museum, Kentucky, USA)

And then there’s the issue of fairness. Millions of preachers clog the airwaves daily with their claims. Creationists attack science and infest science classrooms and textbooks.  It’s only fair that equal time is given to those of us who want to challenge them with critical thinking.

My last point:  Critical thinking can “corrupt the youth” on one condition: that youth fail to think critically themselves, as they read.  As long as the young think – chew – before swallowing this, or any, adult’s words, they’re not “corrupted” at all. No matter what those adults say.

I don’t know if any of this helped “stain the waters clear.”  I hope it did.

*    *    *

Now on to more fun with Gilgamesh, one of the wisest and – in the “sacred sex” scene that is the next post’s topic, also one of the most beautiful – books I’ve ever read.

Wait a minute. It just hit me.  My god, I’m about to discuss the oldest sex scene in the history of mankind.  Not a bad way to spend an evening.

It should be up in a day or two.

Please keep the comments critical, and thanks for doing that in such a friendly way in the first post.  And sorry for the length.  This was no fun to write, but I had to get it out.

–

Photo credits: Human Questions by AmberflyKezzie ; Creation Museum by rauchdickson

1. See the word as an adverb modifying “stained.” [↩]
2. They were both considered something like “bums” by the good people too – Socrates wore tatty clothes, Jesus was a homeless guy – but that’s a different story. [↩]
3. Since this crucifixion episode, by the way, has been used to justify Christian Antisemitism and the slaughter of Jews for over a thousand years, I have to add this point to keep my conscience clean: Jesus may not have been crucified at all; he may not, in fact, have ever lived at all, according to many serious scholars. (A comprehensive discussion of the evidence is laid out, among many other places, in a long chapter of The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, by ex-minister and professor of New Testament Greek Tom Harpur, who seems to want to radically reform Christianity the way Jesus, if he did exist, wanted to radically reform Judaism.)  It’s a fascinating question for those who care to think critically about important things. If it’s true, after all, that means the Jews were framed and persecuted by the Christians for an execution that never happened, and that American voters today are electing leaders on the basis of faith in a phantom. [↩]
4. It goes deeper than this, really, since many used it as a pretext for other grudges. But the interesting thing is that this pretext still held in a court of law, and it’s what he was convicted and killed for: teaching common sense. [↩]
5. and for the record, as I’ve already said, I agree that the tone in that post is lame at times, and will work on that, and find such feedback helpful, when polite [↩]
6. My own resignation was demanded once by a pair of parents – from a long line of preachers – for including the ideas of Bishop Spong as a contemporary descendant of Martin Luther in a history unit about the Reformation. Maybe I’ll tell that full story one day. Right now, I’ll just say that my assistant principal at the time commendably held firm and told them they were free to leave. Instead, they pulled their son from my class and put him with another teacher.  No chance he think beyond his parents’ beliefs that way. [↩]

[Since my students just finished reading Nabokov's Lolita, I thought I'd give their responses to the notion that it shouldn't be taught in upper secondary. This is the third in the Why We Should Teach Lolita in High School series. See Number One here, Number Two here, with many interesting comments. If you want to comment, please read those posts - especially the comments - first. The 21st century, social media/web 2.0 context is important here.] Just one for the Long Tail: I posted the question below in a forum to my AP Literature students – all 17-18-year-olds, all, except one, ethnic Korean but Westernized anglophones:

I blogged about teaching this novel, and my readers were split on whether AP Lit students should be allowed to read it. What do you think? Should it be banned from high school “college level” literature classes? Why or why not?

Below is every response in the forum, in the order they were posted. I didn’t cherry-pick, and I only removed names. All said AP Lit students should be allowed to read it; two suggested making an alternate available for those uncomfortable with the premise; one expressed discomfort (not as bad a thing in a classroom as it could be elsewhere). Several addressed the benefit of exposure to this before they hit it in solitude in college. And many were plain puzzled that people think the book is any worse than nighttime television or movies. (A few made me scratch my head. Follow-up discussion time approaches.)

It just seemed right to put their voices here. Here they are:

Student Responses to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

3.1. I don’t think it should be banned. There is nothing to ban about really. I don’t understand why we have to protected from great literary works just because it has inappropriate concepts like sex. I think AP Lit students should be definitely allowed to read it though I’m not so sure about just the general seniors or other grades that aren’t mature to handle it. It really depends on the maturity level and how the students can handle that inside a classroom. Besides, for AP classes, which are supposed to be “college prerequisite” classes, should be handling students that are ready to take the advanced material for college and should level up to the college level. Out of the shell, I say.

More under the fold . . .

Read the rest of this entry »

Extending my last post on why I think Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita should be required reading at some point in high school language arts classes:

In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus kills his father, then marries and impregnates his mother: we teach this parricidal, incestuous, antique “classic” to 14-year-olds.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince’s uncle murders his brother and marries that brother’s wife, enjoying her in “incestuous sheets“: again, we teach this 400-year-old Renaissance “classic” to 15-year-olds.

And let’s not forget the sentimental favorite about a 12-year-old whose father is trying to marry her off to a prize bachelor of at least 25, and in which instead the 12-year-old heroine elopes with her maybe 14-year-old lover, and spends a night of tender love-making a few paces away from her iconic balcony. Their pillow-talk the morning after their love-making is something we have 13-year-olds recite by the millions in our annual, usually painful, front-of-the-classroom recital days. Yes, I’m talking about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet would be a middle-schooler today – and her father would be in jail for pandering her to his cellmate Paris, the noble pedophile.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 40-year-old pedophiliac professor of literature marries an over-sexed 12-year-old’s mother, who shortly thereafter dies in a freak accident, plunging the professor and the 12-year-old in a morbid love affair that ruins both their lives. Often brutal, as often tender, more often laugh-out-loud funny, but never vulgar or graphic, this acknowledged masterpiece and “classic” of modern, 20th century literature – “the only convincing love story of our [20th] century,” according to Vanity Fair – sends educators running for the hills.

It’s a tragic irony and a very telling double standard: teach controversy from old, safely removed times? No problem. (Well, maybe just skim over Paris’ age, Juliet’s loss of virginity, Oedipus’ and Gertrude’s incest.) But teach the same issues about modern schoolgirls? No, no, no. That hits too close to the real world. Let them learn about that, if at all, from their sensationalistic prime-time TV’s at home: To Catch a Predator, anyone? School is not the place for unsafe subjects. We only think critically about safe ones here.

That we should think about these subjects in our classrooms – our young females, in particular, but our young males too, as is shown below – can be supported by a few statistics (USA only):

• Teens 16 to 19 were three and one-half times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• According to the Justice Department, one in two rape victims is under age 18; one in six is under age 12.
• While 9 out of 10 rape victims are women, men and boys are also victimized by this crime. In 1995, 32,130 males age 12 and older were victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• Nationally, nearly one million young women under age 20 become pregnant each year. That means close to 2800 teens get pregnant each day.
• Approximately 4 in 10 young women in the U.S. become pregnant at least once before turning 20 years old.
• In the U.S., 1 in 4 sexually active teens become infected with an STD every year.

Some comments from my last post, and from the thread on Bud Hunt’s post that splintered this discussion (not your fault, Bud – you asked them to come here), give us some main reasons we choose to be (un?)witting accomplices to daily contemporary tragedies by only teaching the ancient, irrelevant ones. PaulC, who started the meme, commented:

Do I want to take a chance and have the Parents’ Club down my neck for teaching an ‘inappropriate’ novel? The principal has enough fires to put out.

Of course, the censorship debate arises occasionally for many different reasons, sometimes over trite reasons. It’s worthwhile to take a stand, but is it worth it for the study of Lolita? For that reason I think the novel should be left for post secondary study.

As the above statistics show, the damage is too often done by the time of “post-secondary study.” The principal might be enjoying a no-alarm day in the fire department, the parent enjoying a nice day in denial-land, and the teacher enjoying a nice cool neck, but at what cost to the latest quiet statistic sitting at one of the classroom desks, trying to make sense of this thing that happened last night, and that her school never warned her about in the daytime? This latest example of “fear and irrelevance in education” gives one tragically twisted twist to the term “hidden curriculum.” (Update: But Paul, I hear you: other ways than Lolita exist to educate about this – but are principals and parents using any ways at all, by and large?)

Charlie Roy gives an interesting angle in his comment, largely sympathetic to the idea of teaching the realities of over-flirtatious teens playing with fire and getting burned by unseemly adults via Lolita, when he writes,

I don’t think Lolita would fly at my school. At far as age appropriateness goes it is a hard one to nail. Some argue adolescence has been extended into the early 30’s. If that is the case then it might be an inappropriate read.

I can only respond that, if adolescence is now delayed into our 30’s, as Charlie states, isn’t that because schools perpetuate the situation by infantilizing teens? (See Dr. Robert Eptstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen)

New York librarian and teacher Diane Cordell nails an irony by now cliche, but no less pernicious, about American “family values,” I want to say, when she comments:

Re. teaching Lolita: about 5 years ago, our HS (grades 11-12) English teacher used “In Cold Blood” as the basis of a class unit. The principal asked me to find examples of other schools using this book, and I did so. No parents objected to the choice of text. When we get back from Spring Break, I’ll ask the present teacher and our HS principal what the reaction would be if “Lolita” were listed as required reading. I can almost guarantee that murder would be deemed more suitable subject matter than sex!

–and Corrie Bergeron, the “crunchy conservative” foil to my own more liberal viewpoint, does the conservative view a good deed with this bit of fresh air:

5th graders are having sex. 1 in 4 American teen girls has an STD. (1 in 2 if she’s African-American.) Not that this is a good thing, but it’s reality, today. Literature deals with the human condition, makes it accessible, gives you a proxy to explore ideas. A safe place to talk about things without getting too personal.

Teach Lolita in high school? Maybe not such a bad idea.

Oh-and-by-the-way… worldview-wise, I have a fair amount in common with the Puritans. But ignorance makes poor armor.

Meanwhile, over on Bud’s offshoot from my post, Joe, a principal, weighs in against my view:

Clay – we are public servants. We work for an elected school board, under the twin rubrics of the state and federal governments. You said: “I shouldn’t have to ask a parent’s permission to teach it any more than I do to have students read James Joyce, Huck Finn, or D.H. Lawrence.” I disagree with that line of thought for the potential pitfalls it could cause. We have an adopted curriculum for a reason. A process exists. Obviously you have a set of values that are important to you. I have a set of values that are important to me. I can almost garuntee that you would not want some of my personal views taught in the classroom. Public education should not be a free for all!

Miguel Guhlin joins the discussion over there with too many interesting lines for me to snatch, but this remark is noteworthy for a connection I want to make to Joe’s, above:

Far better the teacher who, like the local Fireman’s Halloween Haunt House, enjoys the trust of the community that nothing found in that House will be judged objectionable by anyone….

–and that connection, namely, has to do with notions of democracy, and of “public values.” With all due respect, Joe’s invocation of public education being no space for a “free for all,” no place for conflicting “values” to come under the scrutiny of critical thought and inquiry, just strikes me as un-democratic. Miguel’s ideal of ideas not “judged objectionable by anyone” seems (though I think unintentionally) similarly contrary to what democracy is. The public, to state the obvious, consists of wildly divergent and often conflicting viewpoints. If nobody finds an idea objectionable, then how relevant and engaging – at least in a humanities classroom – is that idea? And why are we devoting time to safe ideas, when the health of a democracy consists of citizens informed about those uncomfortable but real controversies demanding civic resolution? Those viewpoints can, and I would argue should, in a healthy democracy, receive scrutiny and debate in our schools. That authentic critical thinking is the remedy for the biases and prejudices that plague every democracy.

Joe, I would argue, mistakes indoctrinating students – teacher teaching what to think – with teaching students to think. Uncomfortable? Yes. But so is the uncritical, prejudiced alternative. And call me idealistic, but the possibility now, with online forums and other ways to include parents and communities in classroom debates about real-worldly issues instead of unreal schooly ones – that possibility, to me, points to schools as true centers of learning, not just for students, but for communities.

Back to Lolita. Most people, first of all, probably haven’t read it, and so are arguing from a position of misinformation, at best, or at worst, of ignorance. I just finished it for the fourth or fifth time. It is every bit as disturbing as it was the first time. It shows the dangerous consequences of young girls not conscious of the effects of their fashions and attitudes; it shows how deceptively normal and respectable pedophiles can be; it uses no curse words, no vulgarities, and generally does not dwell on carnal scenes. More interestingly, though, its fictional editor, in the preface, claims the novel contains a “moral apotheosis,” while Nabokov himself, in the cagey Afterword, claims his novel has no moral at all. That contradiction alone opens up a discussion.

And in the meantime, our students, increasingly out there blogging and tweeting and face(book)ing the ever-more-porous public world, are learning, in the safety of a modern classic, a few lessons that might save them from becoming an addition to the statistics above.

I suppose I could stick to the safe, and teach them to identify oxymorons so they get higher SAT scores. But I’d rather help them learn not to be world-ignorant morons period. Significantly, the word “moron,” according to my Leopard dictionary, originated in “the early 20th century (as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about 8–12): from Greek mōron, neuter of mōros ‘foolish.’” We can keep ignoring the realities of life after age 12 in our schools at our own – and our students’ – peril.

The funny thing? My students are a matter of months away from being legal adults. Doesn’t that underline how weird it is to treat them like children until the very last minute of their minority? And doesn’t that set them up to be quite the naive young adults when they walk, all vulnerable, into the real world after graduation? It’s all so unreal – and we’re talking schools here, so that’s hardly surprising – but sheesh, it’s bewilderingly surreal.

Photo by macropoulos

{Update 15 April: After reading this and the comments, be sure to read this follow-up post and the comments there. Interesting stuff in those comments.]

Constance incarnate Diane Cordell tagged me for this literature-themed meme begun by Paul C. at quoteflections. It’s a fun one for me, for a couple of reasons. But first, here are the rules

• Select and briefly review one teen novel, classic or modern, which is a sure antidote to the daze of high school.
• Title your post Meme: High School Daze to Praise.
• Include an image with your post.
• Tag four blogger colleagues.

Why Fun #1: I Think I Wrote This Blurb Years Ago (A Pedagogical Parable)

Before I started blogging, I piddled around in an AP Literature list-serv. I wrote a little post to share with other teachers there, and somebody emailed me and asked me if he could add it to his Huck Finn resources site, because he liked it. Why fun? It was the first time anybody (outside of a teacher or somebody I’d written emails or letters to) ever noticed my writing. It was only around five years ago, so I find it both pedagogically pregnant and psychologically cute that I, a 40-year-old professional literature teacher, spent the rest of the day floating a couple inches above the earth like the tooth fairy had just slipped a million under his pillow. Somebody out there in the world plucked something I did with words, and told me it had value.

Do I have to spell it out? Phi Beta Kappa (okay, from a state university, but still , Magna Cum Laude (is that supposed to be capitalized?), Yadda Academy Yadda – all those “honors” didn’t hold a candle to this simple act of spontaneous recognition by a real reader whose bizness wasn’t grading what I wrote. When I saw the little thing posted on his website, I felt like maybe I could try being a Writer.

And this is why at least our excellent student writers should be blogging. End of Parable.

Now here’s the funny part: I searched for the Twain website that housed my little (weedy) rose, and it’s gone to Website Heaven, I guess. I couldn’t find it on Google, anyway (and yes, I tried Wayback Machine). But I searched a little more, and found this:

Some Passed-Over Classics
Rule Of The Bone, by Russell Banks

Arguably one of the funniest books in recent history. A contemporary retelling of Huck Finn, Banks has turned Huck (named Bone) into a 14 year-old stoner from upstate New York, who drops out of high school and eventually meets the Jim character (called the I-Man) who is a 40 year-old Rastaman living in an abandoned school bus in Plattsburg, NY. Together they make a pilgrimage to Jamaica where Bone believes his father is living, and where I-Man can resume his life as marijuana dealing shaman. Although the premise might sound a bit sophomoric, the story so neatly and creatively translates Twain’s classic into the modern world that you can’t help finding the time to read the whole thing in a day or two.

Why do I find this funny? Because the author is not attributed, and I’m not sure if it’s what I wrote – but I’m almost positive it is. If it’s not, is this plagiarism? You tell me.

I also find this interesting because of the name and thrust of this meme: “From High School Daze to Praise.” If I get that thrust right, it’s aimed at how soporific most assigned, schooly novels are for students (for students, mind you) who are living today and reading things their grannies read – and would still “morally” approve – in high school. Sanitized by either time or content, the novels we feel safe assigning are the ones that steer us clear of the rocks of parental complaint. Graphic depictions of sex? Challenges to Church or State (it’s okay if it’s a challenge to another country’s state, by the way)? We want to keep our job, so we keep these novels out of our students’ hands. And the upshot of this schooly bowdlerization of the taboo-probing nature of literature at its most powerful is this: “High School Daze,” to quote the meme. The students switch off of literature and switch on to pop culture, letting Marilyn Manson or Tupac, Quentin Tarentino or the Daily Show fill the shoes that real literature could fill for them. The Banks novel above? It’s a real depiction of teenage life for so many of our students – drugs, crime, a chilling pederast, a teen Hero’s Journey through that real world we so fear in our classrooms.

Why Fun #2: Case in Point

I took an AP Literature workshop from the queen of AP Literature – she wrote the book for the College Board – and the final assignment was an AP Literature syllabus that would win the approval of the College Board bureaucrats.

I included in the syllabus a novel that, besides being one of the most mesmerizing displays of prose artistry in the English language, was also guaranteed to pique the interest of that most difficult of audiences – high school seniors. I’m talking about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

The AP Literature Queen’s reaction was predictable, but no less disappointing for that: “I advise you,” she said (and I paraphrase), “not to teach Lolita. Think about it. The protagonist is a 40-something literature teacher like you, and he becomes sexually involved with a school-girl younger than your students.”

I thought long and hard about that advice. AP Literature touts itself as a “college level course,” yet it’s advising me to teach it like my students can’t handle adult content. It’s encouraging me to perpetuate the Daze. So we’re reading Lolita this month.

I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it – and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.

Now more than ever, with social networking and blogging and Facebook and so many other global entryways into our students’ lives, Lolita is relevant. It raises the questions we need to raise. Are there predators out there? Should minors shut themselves off from all adults because of that? (I’m thinking of my introduction of my students to my Twitter network of educators who have been so helpful in their learning this semester.) Or should minors instead learn to distinguish the adult angels from the adult devils out there, and to conduct themselves wisely and react wisely to any bad apples among the barrel brimming with good ones?

And besides this tangential benefit, there is the purely literary one: by teaching Lolita and similar mature works, we introduce our students to the world of real literature – shocking, unsettling, disruptive, paradigm-complicating if not -shattering – and give them the opportunity to discover why we adults read it.

Or else we trot out the same old “safe” novels breaking the now-safe old taboos. The Scarlet Letter, anyone? AP Literature, were it alive when Hawthorne’s novel was new, surely would have advised against teaching it then. But we can teach that one now. In its exploration of now-quaint adultery, can’t we admit that now, in content and (archaic) style, this novel that once dazzled today only . . . . dazes?

I’d love to hear students in comments here.

Now who do I tag (I don’t believe in “whom”)? Okay: Nathan Lowell, Bud Hunt, Jeff Wasserman, Doug Noon.