Notes from observing a poetry class - three things that DIDN'T happen.

As part of my school's faculty development program, we're asked to observe a teacher of our choice outside our department.  In 2015 I watched John Amos's 9th grade English class.  This year, I watched Ansel Sanders teach poetry to 11th graders.  I saw an enjoyable class.  But I also noted three things I didn't see: no soapboxing, no trolling, and no negging.

I'll begin with the same prologue I gave to my previous English class observation.

So many "Physics Educators," and "educators" in general, have the Soviet attitude that if only everyone did things my way, students would learn better.  I disagree.  I've always been open at my workshops and on this blog: my ideas, philosophies, and suggestions are mine alone, developed in the context of my personal strengths and weaknesses, and shaped by the ecosystems of the three schools at which I've taught.  What I do cannot work for everyone.  Yet, it's still worth sharing my thoughts, techniques, and ideas.  Not in the sense of "do these things and you will become a great physics teacher;" but rather, "here are a few ideas you may not have considered; try them, and then either throw them out or adjust them to make them your own."

So here's my extensive reaction to Ansel's class.  I will not be adopting wholesale any of his particular techniques; but I appreciate the exposure to some different ways of approaching my craft.  Many of Ansel's ideas are in the back of my brain now, ready to manifest -- consciously or subconsciously -- in my own classes.  In other words, I bought myself a few new tools.  Whether and how I use them is discourse for a future time.

What happened in Ansel’s class? Ahead of the class, Ansel sent me a packet of about five quatrains to read.  The students had been discussing the definition (or, as students and he pointed out in class, the not-definition) of poetry; they had been discussing how to read and understand poetry, and how that differed from reading and understanding prose.

In class the previous week, they had discussed Dudley Randall’s "Ballad of Birmingham" - discussed meaning, audience, how the audience’s own experiences affect the meaning, etc.  I would have loved to have seen that discussion with this particular group of students, most of whom I know and respect from other areas of school life.

In Monday’s 8:45 AM class, then, Ansel began by asking groups of students to write poetry word association on the board - basically anything they wanted to write to “get the brain juices flowing.”  This led to a review / follow-up discussion about the purpose and not-definition of poetry.

In the last 15 minutes of class, Ansel assigned groups to go deeper into poetry consumption.  We discussed three ways in which people can engage with poetry, and what each means - poetry reporter, poetry interpreter, poetry performer.  Each group was assigned to engage with a poem of their choice in each of these three roles.  By the end of class, my group had reported on the who-what-when-where of "Sadie and Maud" by Gwendolyn Brooks.  One student seemed amused to know that I had TWO great aunt Sadies, one on each side of the family.  That fact, and rareness of the names in later generations, helped us approximate the “when” of the poem.

I particularly enjoyed watching a member of my group read "Sadie and Maud" for the first time.  He did what Ansel said to do - he read it several times, even talking aloud a bit.  He reacted viscerally… “yeah, I’d rather be Sadie, you don’t have to do exactly what your parents say.”  That comment spoke to exactly what Ansel had been getting at… every person is a unique and biased audience for a poem.  This student's reaction was pure, and in the moment. He hadn’t been prejudiced by his classmates’ interpretation, or what the teacher might have said, or the compiler’s essay, or even the teacher’s expectation - Ansel wasn’t anywhere nearby, and the student was treating me like a classmate.  This was authentic.  I’d never seen that before, at least not when I knew what I was seeing.

That's a summary of what happened.  

It's just as important to ask, What didn’t happen in Ansel’s class?  Three things jumped out at me.

(1) No one got on a soapbox to overemphasize the moral rectitude of their interpretation.  At least, not that I saw.  That’s part of why I would have liked to have seen the previous discussion of the "Ballad of Birmingham" in this multiethnic class.  In my college English class, too many of my classmates would have insisted on an interpretation that advanced their political agenda.  Ansel (a white guy in his 30s) mentioned his own visceral reaction to the poem from the perspective of a parent of three daughters… but in my college English class, the response would likely have been, “well, I suppose, but you don’t understand the African-American experience, so let’s stick to what the author obviously intended.”  And that would have been coming from a rich white 18 year old from Princeton, New Jersey.  Ansel emphasized taking personal meaning from each poem, even though each person in the poem’s audience brings his or her own biases, perceptions, backgrounds.  

(2) No one was intellectually dishonest - no one knowingly chose a ridiculous interpretation, then died on a hill with a smirk defending their deliberate but attention-getting stupidity.

I’ve thought deeply over my career about culture building in the classes I teach.  I’ve always focused on building a positive and “safe” class culture, where students can make mistakes and share their thoughts without fear of being put down by their classmates. Nevertheless, especially in physics, we can’t engage in relativism, we can’t think that all ideas are equal.  They’re not.  Right and wrong do exist.  In an educational environment where students have been trained that being wrong is equivalent to being a BAD BOY, it’s very difficult to strike a balance between freely sharing thoughts, and learning right answers from wrong answers.  But that’s the heart and soul of culture building.

In physics, right and wrong isn’t determined by the teacher or by peers - right and wrong is always by reference to experiment.  When a student irrationally insists that his idiosyncratic interpretation of Newton’s Second Law must be correct, I can say, “bet you $100?” and do the experiment.  It’s not mean ol’ Mr. Jacobs telling the student he’s wrong, it’s not his classmates shouting him down, it’s the universe itself.  Hard to argue with the universe.

In English, in poetry, right and wrong so often are in the eyes of the beholder.  Yes, poems can and should mean different things to different people.  But the "Ballad of Birmingham" is NOT a reference to the Odyssey; "Sadie and Maud" (published in 1962) is NOT a deliberate prequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.  

(The more likely trollish interpretations in this time and place would be something like “It’s racist against white people to assume that 'Ballad of Birmingham' might have unique personal meaning for a Black person from the South,” or “'Sadie and Maud' tells us what happens when abortion is illegal.”  Guh.  Don't know how I would've reacted.  Thank goodness I didn't have to find out.)

I know - from hearing students and faculty talk - that Woodberry students do in fact play the troll in class on occasion(s).  And I know that faculty and some students are in fact frustrated with said trolls, but don’t know what to do about them.  Engage their arguments on their merits, and you legitimize them (both the arguments and the trolls); ignore them, and they scream ever-louder for attention.  

My own approach is prevention… no one is generally shouting all-out bold bullcrap to start the year.  They test the teacher with small-scale trolling at first.  So, at the very first sign of a bad-faith comment, I shut it down hard and move on before the proto-troll can argue.  

I wonder, what has Ansel done to eliminate trolls?  Is he just lucky that this class is devoid of troll wannabees?  Has he shut down proto-trolls?  Does he have a different approach, one that I could learn from?

(3) No one put down classmates for their thoughts - not verbally, not with body language.

Just as it bothers me when students take faux-intellectual positions in defiance of reality, it’s disturbing to me to hear about classes who gang up to otherize a teacher or a peer.  I felt this as a student in my own years-ago English classes - if I said anything that peers might disagree with, or anything that my peers had to work to understand, I got withering scorn.  I know some of this was gendered, as 16-20 year olds in a co-ed setting were often as interested in jockeying for social status and sexual partners as in authentically discussing literature.

Obviously discussions aren’t generally gendered at Woodberry Forest.  [It's a boys' school.]  But our boys yearn to belong to the "Woodberry brotherhood."  The social norm of the brotherhood as I see it in many classes is that we take intellectualism seriously but not literally.  That we go through the motions, we get good grades, we have personal interests, but as a group in non-honors classes we don’t engage authentically with authority figures.  (We bro it up with teachers - that’s different.)

But Ansel’s class did engage authentically, with him and with each other.  Sure, one student was falling asleep, but he just stayed out of discussion - and the one thing he said was on-point to advance a discussion.  Pretty much everyone made a good-faith contribution.  I’m aware that this level of engagement doesn’t happen in December without some serious work on Ansel’s part in September.  Does Ansel have any techniques that he consciously uses to build this positive and open class culture?  Are there things in his personality or class structure that naturally build culture?

I see one thing that jumps out at me… Ansel is loud and enthusiastic, his eyes roam the room, fixing on student after student.  And not just his eyes - Ansel roams the room, making it seem like he’s having a one-on-one dialog with a person who asked a question, while simultaneously engaging the rest of the class with his body language.  He has, in a word, stage presence.  In two words, anyway.

It’s clear who the alpha dog is in Ansel’s classroom.  I’ve always said, freshmen are like puppies - once they know that the teacher loves them and that the teacher is unquestionably the alpha dog, they’ll do anything the teacher asks.  Juniors are big dogs… yet, Ansel has convinced them that he’s the leader of the pack, that he’s worth following.  I'm impressed.