72/365 Say More, Talk Less

We talk a lot in classrooms. We talk a lot in schools. We talk a lot in education.

We talk a lot.

Sit in any traditional classroom in America and you’re likely to hear much talking. Traditionally, this will be the teacher. Oftentimes, it will be in lecture mode. If you (and the students) are lucky, the class you are watching will feature a lecture from the teacher and then time for the students to practice…alone…no talking.

If fortune turns his back on you, the lecture will last the entire class period with the expectation that notes are taken the whole way through.

In the schools we need, we say more and talk less.

Improvisational theater gives us an appropriate structure for considering this approach – economy of dialogue. In her book, “When I Say This…,” “Do You Mean That?” Cherie Kerr explains, “What this means is the improv player can say only what is absolutely necessary during any scene in any show.”

An economic approach to talk in the classroom, well-deployed can increase the value of what’s being said. If a student no longer has to filter out the excess speech, it stands to reason those words he does hear will have greater value.

From a practical perspective, respecting the economy of dialogue also helps to adhere to Dan Meyer’s directive, “Be less helpful.” With fewer words to instruct them, students will find themselves the chief technicians of their learning, needing to parse out the meaning of the judiciously offered information from the teacher.

This only speaks to one segment of the classroom population – the teacher – but the rule applies to students as well.

When we ask students, “Why?” after they’ve answered a question or offered an opinion, we are creating a semantic implication that there is a right answer for which we are looking. Sometimes, there is. Much of the time, there is not. What we are after when we ask follow-up questions in class is more information from our students. We literally want them to say more to help us understand their thinking and help themselves to play out their nascent ideas.

If this is what we mean, then this is what we should say. In the cases where students have offered information and our instincts tell us there is more to be mined in their minds, rather than narrowing the scope of what they might say next, we can simply invite them to “Say more.”

You will note a discrepancy between the application of this principle to teachers and its application to students. It is true, teachers are being asked to talk less while asking students to “say more” and thereby talk more. As it turns out, this is intentional.

By and large, I’ve not noticed a dearth of teacher words in the classrooms I’ve seen. Students, on the other hand, are given little practice using those voices teachers are so quick to purport wanting to give to their students.

First, let us ask students to say more, get comfortable with playing with ideas out loud and finding the meanings they intend to make. After that, once teachers have practice themselves, let us begin teaching economy of dialogue.

Things I Know 153 of 365: We have different nows

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that “individuality” is the key to success.

– Robert Orben

Saturday evening, I listened to the salutatorian, valedictorian and student-selected faculty addresses at my sister Kirstie’s graduation.

The final speech from retiring physical education teacher, Mr. Butcher, made me want to get into an argument.

Though it wasn’t all particularly moving, the rhetoric of each of the preceding speakers hadn’t made me want to argue with any of them.

“Don’t ever fool yourself into thinking that life is not a competition,” Mr. Butcher told my sister and her class.

He went on to explain their competitors would always be waiting for them to make excuses for why they failed. Their employers, though, wouldn’t care how or why the failed.

I got the feeling that Mr. Butcher took a hard-line approach in his teaching. I’ve known and been taught by several iterations of Mr. Butcher. Maybe you have as well.

I don’t dislike Mr. Butcher.

I disagree with him.

I don’t want to call him names.

I want to ask him questions.

I don’t want to compete with him.

I want to engage him.

I don’t see life as a competition. Further, I’m not preparing my students to compete. Perhaps I am, but without the goal of competition.

Either way, Mr. Butcher and I differ in our pedagogies.

That’s ok.

Though highly unlikely, if Mr. Butcher and I were to meet someday, there’d be many conversations worth having.

Retiring this year after 30+ years of teaching, he has more first person historical knowledge of teaching than most people I know. I’d enjoy learning with him.

Mr. Butcher’s speech and my disagreement with it also led me to think of the 140 Characters Conference next week in New York.

The tagline for the conference, “the state of now” excites me in the same way my mind starts churning when Chris writes about building modern schools. I like the idea of knowing where we are now.

We spend so much time talking forward and backward about then, that now gets little attention.

I wish I could be in the room at the conference next week.

Mr. Butcher’s speech highlighted the difference of my now and his now. My now is wrapped in learning with students toward the possibilities or interdependence and collaboration. Mr. Butcher’s now is one of competition and winners and losers. Both really, both felt passionately, both at odds with one another.

In the same way I wish I could sit for an hour and record a conversation with Mr. Butcher, I wish I could track the differences and similarities of the perceptions of nows that take the stage at the 140 Characters Conference.

I wonder if they would be so similarly different.

Things I Know 98 of 365: The way we talk about the way we talk matters

Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.

– Benjamin Lee Whorf

My sister Rachel is working toward her degree in English education and her minor in linguistics. She asked me tonight to take a look at a paper due in one of her classes later this week. It’s one of those moments that keeps me feeling useful as a big brother.

Rachel’s considering Zora Neal Hurston’s adherence to dialectical English when she was working as an anthropologist documenting early African American folktales.

I’ve not thought so much and so academically about the topic since I wrote my own term paper on African American Vernacular English (called Ebonics at the time).

This got me thinking.

Every once in a while, I’ll hear a student correct or chastise another student for saying “toof” instead of “tooth” or some other dialectically attributable difference.

Whenever I witness these moments, I take them as opportunities for discussion – the chance to show how understanding language and its connection to culture matters. They’ve been some of the richest culture-based conversations I’ve had in the classroom.

I wonder if waiting for the odd teachable moment might not be underserving in my role as an English teacher.

Colleagues in the Spanish department help their students understand dialectical variations across multiple Spanish-speaking countries and even regionally within those countries.

English teachers, though, remains tremendously staid in our approach to helping our students explore language. We not only ignore the international variations across English-speaking countries, we teach as though intense variations do not exist across America as well.

There is what is right and there is everything else.

Much of the time, the everything else is what our students are speaking in their homes, and intentionally or not, we make it seem wrong or less than.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of formal academic language or the prestige dialect as many of my undergraduate professors referred to it.

Instead, I’m suggesting room exists at the linguistic table to help our students understand the variation and complexity inherent in language.

To do so would be a radically complicated shift in approach. For one, classroom teachers would need to better show the cultural sensitivity we so often pride ourselves on when selecting texts.

Teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for its authentic dialectical style is far from building lessons and discussions around the dialects students walk into our classrooms practicing and then building bridges from those dialects to the academic English we’ve been preaching for generations.

If we want our students to interact with the world – to be global citizens – we might need to help them become better national citizens first. To do that, we might need to help ourselves do the same.

Language is complex and intensely tied to culture. America is complex and intensely cultural. Perhaps we could be better diplomats.

Things I Know 9 of 365: Words have power

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can kill my soul.

Leaving the locker room after P.E. in the ninth grade, Brian and Travis would call me faggot under their breaths.  I wasn’t sure how they could tell, but I learned to be ashamed of what they saw. Though I made sure to avoid P.E. for the rest of high school, I carried remnants of their words and the shame it caused for many years.

When my sister Rachel was in middle school, she came home in tears one day because her teacher refused to acknowledge that I was Rachel’s brother. “Half-brother,” the teacher insisted to my sister who could not understand why this woman would be so cruel.

December 18, the United States Senate debated the DREAM Act. Those opposed to its passage spoke in angry and fearful voices of the threat those affected would pose to our country. Casting about blanket statements, they maligned my friends and my students. They put politics ahead of the future of children.

In 1884 Mark Twain published a book. Originally intended as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, this new book changed course around “Chapter 7” and became an imperfect navigation of Twain’s attempt to reconcile the slavery he witnessed as a child and the abolitionist views of his childhood.

As it is as imperfect as anything a person can create, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been the cause of much controversy as of late because it also carries within it one of the great imperfections of America’s past. Some would remove the remembrance of that past rather than see it as a signpost denoting the road ahead.

That road was lit by the terrible light of tragedy Saturday as a gunman opened fire at a Tucson supermarket causing a grief the extent of which we will not know for some time.

If reports are to be believed, the gunman was heeding the words of those seeking power. And, while I need to believe their intent was not to incite violence, I cannot yet forgive their ignorance that their words carried power.

It was the terrible power with which Brian and Travis were experimenting in ninth grade.

It was the extraordinary power my sister’s teacher unknowingly wielded in her determination to be right.

It was the backwardly fearful power with which the Senate cut short the dreams of those striving to make a life in a country of their fate if not their choice.

It was the hateful power Twain chronicled when he invoked one of America’s most poisonous words.

This was the violent power wielded by those who would have power without recognizing the catastrophic effect potential in that which they already command.

In the intervening hours, much has been written about the harmful political rhetoric. We are fooling ourselves if we do not concede government’s representation of its citizens ends with the casting of votes. This rhetoric lives in our schools, our businesses, our friendships and anywhere else words hold sway.

Tomorrow, I will return to my classroom and attempt to further fortify a green zone of words with hopes that I am preparing those in my care to act as ambassadors of speech, using words to build while ever-mindful of their ability to destroy.