Dear Friends,

In the words of the late Jerry Garcia, "What a long, strange trip it's been."

I am so proud of you all for what you have accomplished over the last two years. As I've mentioned a few times before, taking on this position was, and still is, a daunting task. You welcomed me with grace and kindness, and I am so grateful for that. 

In my day job as a high school English teacher, this time of year reminds me of how often, and how much, we focus on the least important parts of our students' lives and learning. These final few days of the school year, a time that should be spent connecting with our students, is far too often bogged down with Sisyphean box-checking, scolding demands for missing assignments, and the steady hum of directionless anxiety. My simple request of you, as you go into these last few days of the school year, is to remember that more than the equations, vocabulary, formulas, and historic dates, your students will remember the relationships they formed with you. Make those relationships great. 

It would be beyond cliched to say that your students are lucky to have you, but they are. There are many, many reasons not to go into education, and you have most likely been confronted by several of them, but there is always, will always be one big reason to teach: you get to help children become themselves. That is a heavy responsibility, but one at which I know you will succeed. 

As you are undoubtedly sick of hearing me say, teaching is not a job, or a career, or a gig, but a practice, and like any practice, it demands reflection, curiosity, and humility.

You will mess up. Frequently. Sometimes so badly that you don't think you'll be able to show up the next day.

Show up.

Learn from these mistakes; be humble enough to accept that you don't know everything and confident enough to know you can get better. Share your failures with your students so they know that all people, even and especially those they respect the most, mess up all the time. That is a great gift you get to share with those that need it the most.

Above all else, I ask you to retain the sense of childish wonder that your best teachers brought out of you. I often tell my students that people want to be around interesting people, and the only way to be interesting is to be interested. I encourage you to always remain interested, not just in your subject, but, to paraphrase the writer James Herriot, in "all things great and small," especially those things that scare, confuse, or intimidate you. 

While reading Macbeth with my students this year, I was struck by this seemingly insignificant line spoken by Duncan, the King of Scotland, to his countryman Macbeth:

"I have begun to plant thee, and will labor to make thee full of growing."

This, in closing, is what we are tasked with: nurturing our students, (even and especially those prejudged as "bad seeds") to help them grow fully.
It's a daunting, complicated task, for certain.

​It's also a lot of fun. 

You are ready. Go do great things.

As I begin my twelfth year as a teacher, I find myself reflecting on the more absurd aspects of the profession—those practices that are continually implemented despite their demonstrable ineffectiveness—and how they are perhaps most prevalent in the teaching of literacy. The English Language Arts experience is, in many ways, a tale of two classrooms: while we often say that we prioritize the process of literacy, the vast majority of our assessments emphasize the product of reading. Ultimately, and despite our best intentions, we are “teaching books” instead of teaching reading, an approach that often conceals significant developmental deficits among our students beneath the slick veneer of presentations, projects, and papers.

​To be fair, the “teaching books” approach is historically how the vast majority of English Language Arts curricula have been, and are presently, designed. There’s just something so orderly, so comforting, about it, isn’t there? The unit starts at the beginning of the novel, hits its stride around chapter 9, and builds to its arts-and-crafts crescendo as the conflict resolves and the protagonist learns a valuable lesson about growing up and what it means to be family. “It’s how I learned, it’s worked for me for the past twenty years, and gosh darnit, it’s how my students are going to read The Great Gatsby!” you say, possibly to yourself, possibly to your cat. And again, I can’t blame you; we feel a weighty burden every time we approach a text with our students: “This is their one chance to read Catcher in the Rye, or Hamlet, or 1984,” we reason, “and who am I to compromise that?” To do anything less than the book, the whole book, and nothing but the book, seems a disservice to both student and profession.

And with that thought, the absurdity of the situation rears its illogical head. Since we’re “teaching the book”, our students know what we’re looking for: plot, primarily, with some character analysis and theme study thrown in. They no longer have to read the book at all, just act as if they did, and provide the appropriate literary elements when called upon. Sparknotes, older siblings, and Google Docs cheat-sheets will meet these needs with nary a page of the novel turned. They aced the test, nailed the discussion, and wowed you with the quote selection in their essay, so they must have read. But they didn’t, and it’s because the priority in this book-based approach, either explicitly or implicitly, is not reading comprehension, engagement, or fluency, but trivia.
Instead, I propose an approach less adherent to the way things have always been done and more in line with developing literacy skills, an approach that focuses primarily on the process of literacy development rather than merely the completion of texts. In short, a classroom that prioritizes the act, rather than the result, of reading.

Let’s explore a seminal high school text, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, through this lens. This book, to be blunt, is thick, and its physical introduction to a classroom induces a panic among students typically reserved for when the Fortnite servers go down. An absurd approach would be to assume that, since the book is on the curriculum (and the curriculum was ostensibly designed with the students’ competencies in mind,) students will be able to complete the assigned readings, the proof of which will manifest through class assessments. The reality of the situation is that a significant number of students, finding the text too challenging, confusing, or time-consuming, will “hack” the reading using online summary sites (Sparknotes, Shmoop, etc.) in order to keep their heads above water. This “Whole Novel, Whole Time” approach may have been designed for learning, but it elicits sheer student survival mode.

Instead, a classroom that prioritizes reading rather than having read will engage in the reading live, in class. (I’m vehemently against homework in general, and reading homework in particular, for many reasons, not the least of which is its tendency to obscure symptoms of poor literacy from teachers.) Of course, this class could never cover all four hundred pages of Mockingbird, so why pretend? Perhaps students only read chapter one. Or chapter fourteen. Maybe only excerpts of Lee’s narration. Or just her choices with dialogue. Maybe (and this tends to be my favorite approach as of late) the class arrives at a random page (using an online number randomizer, for example) and works through that page together. The choices are unlimited when the teacher removes the expectation of covering the whole novel.

The upshot of this framework, when looked at as a year-long approach, is a significant increase in the number of texts covered, marked growth in students’ reading comprehension and recognition of authorial strategies and patterns, a greater appreciation of writing as craft (books such as Roy Peter Clark’s The Art of X-Ray Reading dive into this further), and, perhaps most tellingly, a decrease in reading avoidance strategies (i.e. “Sparknoting”) among students.

​Of course, many educators will balk at the notion of not teaching a novel in whole as too great of a compromise for their students. While this is an understandable concern, it is based more out of an assumption of what their students are experiencing when “taught a book” and not the reality of the approach. Those students, by and large, simply aren’t reading whole texts any more than mine; they’re just operating under an approach that assumes they are. We must  acknowledge the absurdity of this practice and focus instead on the act of reading, rather than the seductive, but erroneous, belief in our students having read.
I encourage you, in your classes and with your students, to reflect upon the absurdity of an approach that gives children books they will not read in the name of How We’ve Always Done Things. In ending this dangerous charade, and shifting to critical in-class literacy development, we can focus instead on helping our students grow by embracing the process, rather than product, of reading.

πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα
(“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing”)
Archilochus, 600 BCE

Greek poet and hirsute chap Archilochus coined the term; Isaiah Berlin framed his eloquent criticism of Tolstoy with it; even statistician-to-the-stars Nate Silver borrowed it for his site’s logo. We are, one way or another, foxes or hedgehogs. The criteria for these terms has changed to fit different philosophical scenarios, but ultimately the message is consistent: foxes approach new situations as unique and rely on fluid intelligence; hedgehogs approach new situations as familiar and rely on previous experience.

To put it even more bluntly: foxes rely on ingenuity; hedgehogs, instinct.

I’ve been fascinated by this thought since I read Berlin’s essay, despite my hesitation towards binary categorization. Could it be applied to the classroom? Of course, even the aforementioned scholars acknowledge that a “true” hedgehog or fox is rare; we all assume characteristics of both depending on the situation. However, I think it’s safe to say that we lean hard in one direction or another most of the time. 

This categorization also makes for a fun parlor game:
​
The 2016 Yankees, hedgehogs; the 2016 Cubs, foxes.

Beyonce: fox; Adele: hedgehog.

Luke is a hedgehog; Han is a fox.

Tyrion Lannister, Sansa Stark, and Daenerys "Mother of Dragons" Targaryen are foxes; Jon Snow, Jorah Mormont, and Brienne of Tarth are hedgehogs. Arya Stark wanted to be a fox but knew deep down she was a hedgehog. Cersei Lannister pretends to be a hedgehog but is clearly a fox. (How many more months??)

But what about the typical classroom today?

Before we can address that question, let’s establish, for the sake of this exercise, what foxes and hedgehogs look like in our student population. It's important to note that this is not an argument as to whether our students are naturally more inclined towards one side of the spectrum than the other; rather, this is a reflection on how out students have adjusted their approach to survive and succeed within the constructs of our educational system. Our students as people are almost certainly hybrids of both, but it is my belief that our students as students have developed an academic approach grounded in one of these two philosophical approaches. Again, as with the contemporary examples above, very few students would identify as extreme foxes or hedgehogs (although I was well-acquainted with a certain extreme hedgehog back in my day), but they would most likely subscribe to one of these two approaches.

The “Hedgehog” student…

• Steadfastly applies a consistent game-plan that has worked in the past when facing new challenges. Believes that since their approach has worked for the majority of experiences thus far, it should continue to be applied to new experiences.
• Is reluctant to adopt alternative approaches and is skeptical of change.
• Has a “fixed mindset” ("I know what I’m good at and what I can’t do.")
• Believes that others’ input usually distracts from the task at hand.
• Adheres to the following mantras: “Trust your gut”; “Don’t fix what isn’t broken”; “Don’t reinvent the wheel”; “I know what I like”
• Desires to maintain and reinforce established norms and hierarchies in education.
• Often has a system that has been consistently applied in the academic setting.
• Sees most learning as a means to an end.
• Subscribes to a survival mentality.
• Views failure as a weakness and avoids it at all cost.
• Takes information at face value.
• Tries to modify the new situation to fit their established approach.

​The “Fox” student…

• Is an adaptive, resourceful, proactive, and reflective problem-solver. Their experiences in the past have taught them that every new challenge is dynamic and fraught with variables, so one must be flexible in one’s approach.
• Approaches new challenges as a unique experience untethered from the past.
• Has a “growth mindset” ("Even though I presently struggle, I can get better at this.")
• Open to experimenting with new ideas and doesn’t align permanently with any one approach.
• Believes that others’ input usually provides helpful perspectives.
• Adheres to the following mantras: “I’ll give it a shot” “When in Rome...” “What got me here won’t get me there”; “If at first you don’t succeed…”
• Craves new experiences and is relentlessly curious about the unknown.
• Sees most learning as inherently valuable.
• Subscribes to an aspirational mentality.
• Views failure as an opportunity and embraces it when possible.
• Approaches information with a critical eye.
• Tries to modify their established approach to fit the new situation.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that throughout the vast history of American public education, the system was designed for little hedgehogs: “This is what a classroom looks like; here is how to get a good grade; here is how to behave; keep your head down and follow directions.” The homogeneity of classroom experiences both within subject areas and throughout entire school buildings conditioned students to equate physical, philosophical, and curricular uniformity with How Learning Happens in a broader sense. “School”, as has been often discussed, was first and foremost a vessel for societal and economic conformity, and was designed as such. Either hedgehogs entered school and found a system that was conducive to their pre-existing mentality, or students were molded into hedgehogs through the experience.

But if you haven’t noticed, it’s hard out there for a hedgehog lately. Global economic flattening, a lethargic manufacturing economy, the evaporation or emigration of entire industrial sectors, and the allure of hiring labor from emerging markets has rendered many rule-following, hard-working hedgehogs unnecessary. As Glenn Reynolds writes in The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, "How many 19th century business models do you see flourishing, here in the 21st?" The populist angst of this most recent election cycle--on both the left and right--is in large part a result of the betrayal of the promise educational institutions made to complicit students: "Do what we tell you, get good grades, and stay out of trouble, and you’ll have your American Dream."

Instead, foxes rule the realm. The sharing economy and rise of creative technology has created a boon for adaptive, nontraditional problem-solving. Entire industries, such as the livery and hotel sectors, have been upended seemingly overnight by a few lines of code. Robots invest your money, websites buy your groceries, and soon, drones will deliver your toothpaste. Schools that genuinely wish to prepare their students for post-academic success must recognize this fact and adjust accordingly.

Additionally, hedgehogs have never been more vulnerable. Fake news sites, near-subliminal product placement in television and film, and echo chambers on college campuses have reinforced the "hedgehogian" approach of receiving all statements as fact, especially when these statements confirm one's own biases. A recent Pew report found that 62% of American adults get their news primarily from social media; even more damning: 44% get their news primarily from Facebook, which has recently faced renewed criticism that its passivity with regard to bogus "news stories" has unfairly swayed its users' beliefs. By maintaining the belief that "since it looks like news, it must be true," individuals have allowed private interests to compromise their understanding of the world. 

The ubiquity and immediacy of the Internet cannot be understated as well, specifically with regard to its role in the contemporary classroom. The classroom teacher cannot fall back to his or her role as dispenser of information any longer; those that do are undoubtedly setting themselves up for irrelevancy. As the late, great comedian Mitch Hedberg once quipped, “The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.”

Veteran high-school English teacher Michael Godsey recently reflected on his advice to an aspiring educator in his powerful Atlantic article, “The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher”, saying "[I]f you want to be a teacher, you better be a super-teacher."

He continues: