Hi world. Been away from here and reading a lot of books.
One off-beat book of note that has been kicking around my shelves for a while is a pulp novel from the 60s by Bel Kaufman called _Up the Down Staircase_.
This book is about a young female teacher tossed into a chaotic inner-city classroom, where she is faced with resistant and delinquent students of all types, a deteriorating classroom (things are literally falling out the window), and administration that are constantly sending her stark memos in ALL-CAPS demanding some overly bureaucratic task to be completed.
Sylvia Barrett, the teacher protagonist, tries to reach out to failing students in noble, and possibly first-year teacher ways. She tries to meet them after class, she tries to convince them they are smart, she tries to shield them from an administration that views them as criminals. The litany of teacher-as-savior tactics.
After my first year of teaching, I’ve seen myself make use of a lot of these tactics. Taking students aside and trying to level with them when I feel like they’re veering off the righteous composition track. Accepting more late work than I should. Being lax about people showing up late to class. Being a softie. And so on.
But I’ll do what I can to keep people showing up to class. It’s a struggle I’ve had this past year: what is more valuable: students’ attendance or only the productive students showing up, (and the disinterested students quitting class and possibly quitting school altogether)? For now, I think it is more valuable to keep people coming back, even if they are not participating for a number of classes. If you’ve got them in that room, there is a chance you can still reach them with some sort of energy that is going on in your classroom, and who knows, maybe the faint hope they have of passing Comp One will keep them going to their other classes.
—
In other news, I interviewed the poet Sparrow after a CDFi event, and he’s got some great advice for freshmen in college on how to improve their writing:
