Reply
Reply to Dave's comment and blog post:
Momo,
1) I don’t think your comments are particularly aggressive, or something to regret later. As long as you’ve known me, you know I love a good debate, so I take no offense at our difference of opinion (and on several of your points we do agree). The only part I think you will regret is that last paragraph. Whether you have taught for two years or twenty or zero, your beliefs are equally valid. Experience, of course, helps to inform beliefs, but it doesn’t alter the validity.
2) The parts of Michelle’s blog that I appreciate are, for the most part, different from the parts you most strongly disagree with.
3) The part of the blog that I was highlighting and that I, of course, agree with, is that you have to be strict to be successful at classroom management as a first-year teacher. I haven’t read Skinner so I have no idea if I subscribe to his philosophy. However, I wholeheartedly believe that people respond to incentives, positive and negative. In a classroom setting this means rewarding behavior that you want and punishing behavior you don’t. It’s going to take one hell of an argument, and a lot of data, to convince me otherwise. Michelle was making the point that some (many?) first-years have trouble with the idea of being strict and implementing rules and consequences. Further, Michelle was making the point that while it may seem harsh (key word is seem) it is not actually harsh. Having a well-ordered, safe, classroom with rules and procedures is a sign of caring about the students. I think she is exactly right about this. The main problem you have, I think, with this notion is that Michelle is asking the first-years to “put aside their conscience.” I don’t think this is accurate and I don’t see this reflected in her post. Again, the key word is “seems.” I don’t think Michelle is saying “put away your conscience.” I think she is saying, “examine the ideas of rules, rewards, and consequences before you dismiss them outright as unnecessarily harsh and/or demeaning.”
4) The stuff about chaotic and tragic lives and seeing more violence before school starts than some of the teachers have ever seen is hyperbole. I believe this is the main part you take issue with. You and Michelle can blog this out.
5) The part that I really like in Michelle’s post, and the point I was highlighting, is this: You'll be tempted to think, "I'll be the one who's different. I'll show them respect and they'll respect me for it. They'll want to please me because I'm the first person who's ever smiled at them and shown I care." You will be fresh meat. It won't happen.
Michelle is exactly right about this. This happens every year with a few first-years…
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Comments
"Congrats on being the instigator of the first interesting blog exchange of our tenure. I'm going to put you in for the "Best Job Pissing Off Dave Molina" award next year. Depending on how things go, maybe that can become an annual award."
I'm thinking about a response but want to make sure I stay on the correct side of sarcasm. It's a broad target. And thanks for your support. Hyperbole is a useful rhetorical tool.
(2) there are certainly parts of the post that i agree with (and i also regret not taking time to better establish that fact in the midst of my fuss). it is true that teaching is at times unexpectedly difficult and at times threatens to be a unmanageable and dehumanizing experience (for the teacher, the student, the community)-- and people about to engage in this arena should be prompted in this light. my issue is less with the validity of concern for incoming teachers, it is rather with the rhetoric through which that concern is manifest-- which (and i think that this is where you and i disagree alot) i feel extinguishes the value of intent. my assumption is that you're a little more forgiving in regards to the fact that many of the basic truths and basic intents are not regrettable.
(3) of course systems of punishment and reward produce results. i'm far from disputing that. nor am i disputing skinner-influenced behavioral training as a whole (for those of you who want to raise the issue of "that's not what skinner intended"). rather, i am deeply afraid that a deep reliance on punishment and reward systems can amplify the satisfaction of social results (i.e. kids in their seats, kids walking in a straight line, kids saying "yes, sir") to a point to which the humanity of those controlled gets drowned out. furthermore, the ultimate risk of punishment-reward fetish is that when an individual's sole reason for not doing something "bad" is the fear of punishment, the hope for an ethics substantially grounded in community and empathy is practically lost. it is this sort of control mania-- oscillating between implosion of order (due to the numbness of punishment) and amplification of consequence framework (zero tolerance everything, armed security, constant surveillance)-- that propels so much of our schoolhouse-to-jailhouse/cradle-to-prison pipelines. also, (and we do disagree on this), when i hear a lot of "do it," "ignore that," "Believe us," and-- come on-- "The only way to do it ... THE ONLY WAY TO DO IT in their world is through power. It's what they understand. It's the only coin of the realm here," and no consideration for a return to nuanced and humane engagement with a group of young people (honestly, what follows the "once you've earned their respect" phase is merely a reference to the ease of asserting dominance with a mere glance), then i most certainly feel that the call to examine the necessity of rules & consequences bleeds into "put away your conscience"-- though i agree with you in general that this is not a necessary exchange. it's just kind of awkward when we're actually comparing students to dogs (which, yes, references pavlov and by extension skinner).
(4) i agree with michelle: "hyperbole is a useful rhetorical tool." however, like any tool (e.g. punishment-reward systems) it can be used irresponsibly, and a mere note that it can be useful does not somehow breathe whisk away the problematic consequences of misuse.
(5) yes. i regret not commenting on the "you'll be fresh meat" passage. one the one hand, it is certainly worthwhile to preempt a hypothetical incoming teacher's notion that he/she will be the one that makes a difference in these lives just by the mere notion of caring; that these poor, deprived people are just waiting for a savior of respect and care. however, instead of calling to light the nuance of community and individual, or countering the regrettable notion that in the event that a new teacher would show care, respect, or even a smile it would somehow be the first time these young people have ever experienced it (much the same for civilized this and that)-- the text seems to return to its violent, colonial framework of a struggle between unimaginable chaos and ignorance and the necessity of structure and power to contain/civilize it. while it is not true that a new teacher is going to be the first sunshine in these young people's cloudy existence, nor is it true that his/her sunshine will-- by mere fact of its sunniness-- fix everything, it is also not true that in response to this once should retreat to the notion that "respect" and relationship-based ethics simply "won't happen" because it's a dog-eat-dog world and these people somehow can't "understand nuanced behavior." again, though the intent is fair, the result is regrettably a violent, cynical shadow of an erstwhile conqueror's optimism. it is a failed revolt away from kurtz saying "kill them all."
(p.s.)
re: "the benefit of sarcasm"
can i be on the board who gets to select "the best job of pissing me off" award?
re: "I'm thinking it's Molina from the turgid prose and oh-so-hip lack of concern for language conventions."
am i "oh-so-hip" because i don't capitalize?
My thing is, our students already know how the system of rewards and punishments operate. There's a quote that I see trafficked in a lot of the 2nd year portfolios that states the students "...They need to know responsibility, organization, dedication, and that if they work and try hard enough, there's a better life for them out there." In an ahistorical vacuum, this statement is absolutely correct. Wake up early, go to your job and work hard every day, your kids will afforded better opportunities. Mississippi, however, ain't no vacuum.
And, while it's not broad cultural determinism either--we do have middle class families, fathers who take care of their sons and mothers who work 2 and 3 jobs to provide for their families--everyone is aware of the rules of the game. You can work hard your entire life and still be one medical bill away from poverty. the state can put all the mandatory minimums on possession w/ intention to distribute that it wants, unless there are jobs providing reasonable wages, being a d-boy will always be an attractive prospect.
All of that to circle back to the meta-critical point: why teach in Mississippi? It's the specter that always looms in the background of our conversations and our classes. We bring strong content area knowledge; we get trained to become better classroom managers; we learn innovative techniques to make the mundane interesting; we master webquests. At the end of the day, and this is the question that has to inform the MTC experience, is why here? If we simply wanted to become teachers, there are any number of more organized, more teacher friendly school districts we could have chosen. If it was to be part of a humanitarian effort or some broader Do-Good effort, I'm sure there are any number of non-profit organizations that would have you work on just as serious problems w/o the long hours, the bureaucratic BS (and probably better pay) .
Yet, here we are in Mississippi. Teaching: the boy who spent the whole night clocking before they came to your homeroom, the girl who had baby as sophomores and still scored a 28 on the ACT, the boy who is going to get a full ride to any school in the state despite his mom being addicted to crack, the obese dark-skinned girl with low self-esteem, the pretty light skinned girl with low self esteem, the tall gangly boy who's world just collapsed because he's not going to get the football scholarship and go pro like he always dreamed.
More than anything, we need to find moments of pause-- and for Michelle, Dave, and Robbie, I really appreciate the back and forth--where we as a group take a moment of pause and ask what are we doing here. There are some built in moments along the way: watching Lailee's Kin the first summer, discussing the school district project this spring, the portfolio project at the end of all of this. But we should gather our selves at times and create some critical distance from the pedagogical tools that we operate on a weekly basis and reflect, with some sincerity, on what we want to accomplish as teachers in the most southern place on earth.