Equity, One File at a Time

I have a website on Moodle where I post stuff that students might find useful: syllabi, assignments, writing guides, graphic organizers, reading recommendations, extra credit opportunities, useful links, and other fancy stuff. My students know that if they lose their handouts, or if they miss class, they can check Moodle and will find whatever they need. Moodle provides organizationally-challenged students with extra copies while keeping them more accountable and independent. You lose your stuff? Fine. Get a new copy. Just don’t come asking me for it, because you know what I’m going to tell you.

Whenever I make a new handout for class, I save it, print it, and upload it. Moodle has an absurdly clunky interface—it’s a 14-click process from login to uploaded document, and that’s not counting naming the file, writing an explanation of what it is, and all the scrolling it takes to get where you need to be—but it’s pretty easy once you’re used to it, and it saves stuff from year to year, so you don’t have to re-upload unless you make a lot of changes. I do make changes, so I do re-upload, but that’s my problem. Even with all of that, Moodle does save me the time of having to email students (or their parents) gazillions of attachments.

Here’s the problem, though: Henry doesn’t have Microsoft Office.

Henry is an awesome kid. He’s intellectually involved, he works hard, and he’s trying to understand himself as a learner. One thing he figured out about himself is that he’s not the most super-organized kid in the world. Sometimes, he loses stuff. When he does, he sometimes remembers to ask for a new copy. I give him the usual refrain: “Check Moodle.” But then he comes back with, “I did check Moodle. All the stuff is in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. I don’t have Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.”

And really, why should he? Microsoft Word, especially the most recent version, is not only counter-intuitively designed point that you need a gazillion hacks just to make it function acceptably, but it’s absurdly expensive. Why would anyone purchase a bad program for a lot of money when they can get a perfectly good one for free? Moreover, and more to the point, some students’ families don’t have the financial resources required to purchase Microsoft Office. If a student needs access to course documents, that access shouldn’t hinge on their parents being rich enough and/or dumb enough to buy Microsoft Office.

What I told Henry was, “Well, the school has Microsoft Office, so print it here.” That was a bad answer. It’s true that Henry could have—and sometimes did—print at school, but the whole point of Moodle is to give students access. Usually, the time when they need that access is when they’re at home, either doing homework or preparing for the next day’s class. Plus, when they’re at school, surrounded by their friends and rushing from one of their eight classes to another, the last thing on their minds is, “Oh yeah, I need a new copy of that essay organizer.”

So, what would have been a better answer for Henry, and all the other students who don’t have Microsoft’s family of products? PDFs. If you have a computer and internet access, you can download a PDF reader for free. And then, you can open any PDF. My problem was, I didn’t know how to make PDFs, but now I do. It’s easy, especially if you have a Mac, but even if you have a PC.

So now, I begin the process of saving all my files as PDFs, deleting the Word and PowerPoint versions from Moodle, and uploading the PDF versions. That’s a whole lotta clicks. All in the name of equity.

What Does it Mean for a Book List to Reflect Students?

My seventh grade classes read the following books:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, or Cannery Row (students choose one of the three), all by John Steinbeck

I Am the Darker Brother, an anthology of poems by African Americans

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

One by a Latina, two by black men and women, and three by white men.

One question I’ve asked is, where are the Asians and Native Americans? If my students reflect those groups, shouldn’t my curriculum? But a deeper question I’ve been thinking about lately is, what does it mean for an English curriculum to “reflect” the kids? A book by an author with the same color skin as mine, or whose ancestors come from the same continent as mine, or whose sex chromosomes look roughly like mine—does a book by that author reflect me? Why should Alicia feel reflected in the curriculum simply because she and Esperanza from The House on Mango Street are both Latina? A book about a white Jewish female writer with man trouble and self-esteem issues isn’t about me. In fact, I might rebel against identifying with that girl precisely because her outer characteristics are so much like mine. My experiences are as unique to me as everyone else’s are to them; I don’t want to be reduced to categories. (That individualistic stance is itself rooted in white culture, but I’ll save that discussion for another post.)

Some students do prefer characters who resemble them. In general, students do seem to get more into books with kid characters; I've had my students tell me as much. But some students don’t need the characters to share their own traits. In Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie are middle aged male migrant workers in 1930s rural California, yet Grace, a young female from a Manhattan family in the 2000s, felt their pain and longing and frustration because these are human emotions. It’s not that age and socioeconomic class and gender don’t affect Grace’s experiences, but it would oversimplify and insult her human capacities to assume that she’d only be able to identify with those whose gender and socioeconomic class and age are the same as hers.

Maybe what it really means for an English curriculum to reflect student diversity is for the books to present a diverse array of human emotions, struggles, triumphs, failures, and experiences—including race-, gender-, ethnic-, and class-based experiences. That means a white girl like Grace should read Walter Lee Younger’s story, because he reflects her somehow, and she won’t know how until she reads A Raisin in the Sun. It means Adam, a black boy, should read A Raisin in the Sun too, because something of himself is reflected in Walter, though no one can assume what. Making the curriculum reflect my students is not only about finding characters who look like them. It can be about finding the ways a character’s encounters, decisions, and feelings look like their own.

To complicate the question, in our class discussions of The House on Mango Street, the Latina girls were the ones who spoke the least. Later, when we read A Raisin in the Sun, the black boys were the most silent. What messages the kids of color are getting—from me, from the curriculum, from each other, from the school—that they clam up when characters look like them? Are they protecting the uniqueness of their own identities by dissociating themselves from characters who resemble them outwardly? Or is the message that they’re being asked to represent their race? As a white girl, I never faced that. When my classes discussed Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, or Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Taylor in The Bean Trees, no one asked, explicitly or implicitly, “As a white girl, what do you think?” At the same time, I was allowed to claim an understanding of The Woman Warrior and The Invisible Man.

Perhaps Alicia did nod in recognition when she read The House on Mango Street. Perhaps not. Perhaps she saw herself more in Beneatha Younger, or in Holden Caulfield. But even if that’s true for Alicia, the fact remains that it matters, for Alicia and for all students, whether there is a Latina voice in the books we read. And it matters that there are no Native American or Asian voices. If I leave Native American and Asian authors out of the curriculum, I send a message that Native Americans and Asians are unimportant. That’s not the message I want to send, not to Olivia, an Asian student, and not to Alicia, and not to anyone. Reading an Asian author’s story would not mean that Olivia, who was quiet all year, would suddenly have lots to say, but omitting Asian authors sends a negative message, not only to Asian students, but to all students.

As a white girl in middle school myself, I didn’t have to worry about representation. Throughout my school years, the curriculum was replete with white female characters. On the outside, and occasionally on the inside, the curriculum did reflect me. I want my students to say the opposite. I want them to look back on seventh grade English and say, on the inside, and occasionally on the outside, the curriculum did reflect me. If ALL of them can say that, I’ve begun to create an inclusive curriculum. At this point, not all of them can say that.

The Last Day of Classes

On their last day of classes, our students have a special schedule where they see all of their teachers for 15-minute mini-classes. Mostly, they sign yearbooks and said goodbye, but I couldn’t resist a last opportunity to teach them something, so I told them the following story. It’s a version of “The Turnip,” as retold by the Brothers Grimm.

Once upon a time, there were two brothers. One was a soldier who had risen through the ranks and became rich and well-known, and the other was a farmer who remained poor and unknown. One year, the farmer-brother planted turnip seeds, and when the plants came up, he noticed that one was much bigger than the others. It grew and grew, and when harvest time came, he found that the turnip was so big that it filled an entire cart and required two oxen to pull it.

“What will I do with this turnip?” thought the farmer. “Will it bring me good fortune or bad? I cannot sell it, for who would want such a thing? I shouldn’t eat it, for little turnips would be just as good and easier to cook.” After much thought, the farmer decided there was nothing to do with the giant turnip but bring it to the king as a present.

When the king saw the turnip he said, “I’ve seen a great many wondrous things in my time, but I’ve never seen anything quite so wondrous as this turnip. Tell me, how did you come by this turnip? You must be a great man.”

The farmer said, “No, it is my brother who is a great man. He is a rich and well-known soldier whom you’ve heard of. I am just a poor and simple farmer. No one’s heard of me.”

The king felt compassion for the farmer and said, “I will raise you from poverty. You will have gold, and land, and herds of cattle, and your brother’s riches will be not match for yours.” And so it happened that the farmer became richer and more well-known than his brother.

Now, when the soldier-brother heard of what had happened to his farmer-brother, he became envious. He said, “If that could happen to my brother because of a simple turnip, imagine what the king will give me if I bring him the wonderful treasures from the faraway lands I’ve visited in my travels.” So, the soldier-brother loaded a cart with treasures from around the world and went to visit the king.

When the king was presented with the treasure, he said, “What wonders you have brought me! I would like to give you something wonderful in return. And in all my kingdom, I have nothing so wonderful as this magnificent turnip!” And so it happened that the soldier had no choice but to load the turnip onto his cart and take it home.

As the soldier-brother was on his way home, his rage turned to hatred, so that by the time he reached home, he had resolved to kill his brother. He hired some murderers and had them hide by the side of the road. The soldier went to his brother’s house and said, “I know of a great treasure buried near here. Now that we are both great men, let us go together to dig up the treasure, and we’ll divide it between us and become even richer.” The farmer-brother, suspecting nothing, went along. And the murderers fell upon him, threw him in a sack, tied the sack, and prepared a rope to hang him from a tree.

But suddenly, in the distance, they heard singing and hoof beats. Afraid they would get caught, the murderers simply tied the sack up in the tree and ran away. As it turned out, the singing and hoof beats came from a student who was riding his horse back to the university and singing joyously of all the things he was learning.

Meanwhile, the farmer worked a hole into the sack and poked his head out. When the student came riding by, the farmer called, “Hello! Today is your lucky day!”

“Who’s there?” called the student, looking left and right.

“Look up in the tree! Here I am, sitting in the Sack of Wisdom! Why, in the short time I’ve been in this sack, I’ve learned a great many things about the world.”

When the student heard this, he said, “Please, you must let me enter this sack. I too desire to learn a great many things.”

The farmer said, “Well, you’ll have to wait a little while. There is still one more thing I need to learn.”

After a short while, the student couldn’t bear his thirst for knowledge and called again, “Please! You must let me enter the Sack of Wisdom!”

So the farmer said, “If you want to enter the sack of wisdom, you must use that rope to lower it down.” Eagerly, the student lowered the sack, let the farmer out, and began to climb in. “Oh, no,” said the farmer. “You must let the wisdom surround you. You must go headfirst into the sack.” So the student dove into the sack, and the farmer tied it up, hoisted it into the tree, and rode off on the student’s horse.

When I finished telling the story, I said to my students, “So, why did I tell you this strange story on the last day of school? Because I want you to be a little bit like each character and little bit unlike each character. I hope that, like the solider, you will have great things come to you. And I hope that, unlike the soldier, you will never think that just because you have some privileges, you are automatically entitled to others. I hope that, like the like the student, you will always seek new knowledge and take great joy in learning. And I hope that, unlike the student, you never expect learning to come easily. I hope that, like the famer, you will take all new situations—whether good, bad, or ambiguous—and find creative ways to make them good. And I hope that, unlike the farmer, you will never deceive or exploit another person for your own gain.”

What do you think? Too didactic? Or a good lesson for the last day of school?

Gender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

One of my students, David, pointed out how odd it is that after a year of digging deeply into the themes and literary devices in texts, we end the year translating the plot of a shallow love story. David’s right. We don’t do much with A Midsummer Night’s Dream beyond understanding the words. Sure, we act it out, and sure, we use it to learn the concept of subtext, and sure, we talk about how it’s adaptable to different settings. But the level of depth still isn’t very impressive, especially for the motivated critical thinkers I get to teach.

David’s problem with Midsummer stung because I had identified the same problem and hadn’t done much to fix it. I’d thought, it’s the end of the year, so it’s OK to do curriculum lite. I’d justified it further thinking, it’s Shakespeare! Even if all we do is read it and translate the meaning (or, as Kelly Gallagher put it in Deeper Reading, “construct the gist”), the students are learning Shakespeare. But still, I wanted to get a little deeper into the characters—even if that meant exposing their shallowness—and the themes of the play. Quite by accident, or as if fairies had planned it without my knowledge, I came upon a solution.

For the first part of the lesson, I adapted a activity I’d sat in on in my friend Kalin’s classroom. I broke the students into four groups and assigned each group of students a group of characters: the four lovers, the three other main Athenians, three of the mechanicals, and the three main fairies. I put the characters’ names on the board, and as a group, the students had to write three adjectives that they felt defined the character. Easy enough.

Next, each group of students rotated so they had a new group of characters. They had to revise the list. The rules were that for each character, they had to keep at least one adjective and change at least one adjective.

In the third round, when student groups rotated to get a revised list, the students were allowed to circle only one adjective for the whole class to discuss and negotiate. At the end, they copied the lists into their notes.

The next day, I told them we were going to discuss a theme that interested Shakespeare: gender roles. We reviewed the difference between sex and gender, the concepts of gender role and gender identity, and the idea of a gender continuum (which some of them had learned by participating in the YES Institute). In each class, students mentioned terms our society uses to label those who defy gender expectations—terms like tomboy, metrosexual, and yes, gay. We discussed how sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing; there can be a gay man with very masculine characteristics, or a heterosexual woman with very masculine characteristics.

Groups of students then placed the characters on a gender continuum. I asked them to put each character where they, as the audience members, saw the character and not where the character would put him- or herself. As the day before, we rotated groups and revised; this time, the second group was allowed to move only one character, and then the class raised characters to discuss.

Toward the end of the lesson, I wrote the adjectives from the previous day under the character’s names. So Helena, who they’d deemed very feminine, was also insecure, jealous, and whiny. Titania, who they’d deemed more masculine, was aggressive, stubborn, and powerful. I asked the students, what does this reveal?

It was powerful stuff. Some resisted the implications. Some acknowledged that gender stereotypes affect them. Most protested that guys and girls aren’t really like that, and I kept reminding them that we weren’t talking about individual behaviors but about social expectations. I can’t say I changed their consciousness, but they did think about something they might not have thought about in a way that was just comfortable enough.

So for next year, too late for David but worthwhile for the class below his, I’m considering titling my unit Social Justice in Shakespeare. We can talk about the racist language (“Away, you Ethiop!”), the stereotypes perpetuated by framing working-class characters as ignorant and foolish, and the question of whether characters are responsible for their behavior when under the influence of the love flower.

What do you think? What other social justice lessons have you taught using Shakespeare?