Later, as a young married person, I stumbled across the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator test, based on Carl Jung’s psychological theories. Amazed at how well it explained the way things looked through my eyes, I asked my wife to take the test. The results indicated that she and I were polar opposites, her ISTJ to my ENFP, she the practical-minded safe harbor to my adventurous soul. (Happily, it also gave advice for how an ENFP might best communicate with an ISTJ, and vice versa.) So, clearly, there was more than one template for a human being, each an equally valid way of perceiving.

Still, I’ve often joked about government, saying that I’m willing to pay taxes to employ people of a governing mindset to argue with one another, so they’ll leave the rest of us alone. The trouble is, they don’t. Especially when it comes to teaching. As I watch administration after administration “crack down” on education, demanding ever more testing of reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, I can’t help but wonder:

• Don’t these people remember what it was like to be a student?
• Don’t they recall how dreadfully boring drilling and testing could be?
• Do they seriously believe they’re better writers today due to grammar study as a child? Do they even remember what a preposition is, or a subordinating conjunction?

Considering these questions, I first conjectured that legislators treat students as if everyone fits a single template. After all, testing tends to check facts more than it does ideas. This would suggest that politicians suppose more emphasis on facts will result in better education. That, in turn, would predict that politicians might tend to be of an ESTJ-type personality: extroverted, fact-gathering, logical, and careful planners.

However, a bit of online research indicates instead that politics draws ENFJ and ENTP types. Notice the intuition and feeling in the first type, and the intuition and “perceiving” in the second (indicating spontaneity rather than careful planning). Neither of these types seem prone to believe in “skill and drill” teaching. Both would appear to be global thinkers, willing to experiment and innovate solutions to any educational problems.

So why the perpetually increased emphasis on testing, from conservatives and liberals alike? Don’t they realize that increased testing forces more “teaching to the test,” which crowds out individualized instruction, impoverishes arts programs, and drives the most enthusiastic educators out of careers in teaching?

Apparently not. I don’t, as yet, understand why. Your thoughts on the matter would be much appreciated.

—Les

That’s all great. I support it enthusiastically.

My purpose here, however, is to focus on “social bullying,” the threat of exclusion from a group, and ask, “What is it about human beings that leads them, within a social setting, to pick on the weak?”

You know what I mean. It’s personified in Stephen King’s breakout novel, Carrie. It’s been treated in countless other novels and movies. It is, in effect, a trope, and that says something about its universality.

The high school setting provides perhaps the most focused example. Nowhere else is such a cross-section of society gathered together in close proximity. Add walls, a ridiculously minute-conscious schedule, and an oppressive (if necessary) layer of adult authority, and voil? —human pressure cooker!

In this vat, bullying reaches its apparent worst. I’d argue, however, that high school is really just a miniature of society overall—that its purpose is not merely to teach content knowledge, but also social context. By extension, I’d argue that the bullying in high school reflects a larger problem with social coercion in society overall.

To put it another way, here’s my theory: There are two opposing forces acting upon every individual in a civilization. One is the force to excel, and that’s the one that gets the most direct attention, with awards given for competitions, financial rewards given for entrepreneurship, power given with political office, and so on. The other, less consciously recognized, is the force to fit in, to be part of the group (the herd), to not rock the boat.

When an individual fails to fit in, whether by excelling or by falling short, the herd instinct is to bring pressure to bear. People who excel learn to do so despite that pressure, but they do suffer ostracism. People who fall short are equally ostracized, but they lack even the compensation of excellence.

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that even the kindest of us grow weary of weaklings. And by this, I don’t mean the disadvantaged. Virtually everyone respects the strength of a person who overcomes hardship. But until and unless that strength is evidenced, the instinct is to cut the person from the herd. It is simply a survival instinct: Keep up or die.

I’m not trying to justify that instinct. Rather, it is my hope is that by becoming aware of it, we can civilize ourselves further. Instead of bullying the different into depression and eventual suicide (I point you to the “Ask the Experts” section of the aforementioned HRSA site), we can build a society in which they are better able to contribute. In the end, that is what civilization is really all about.

He contributed to plagiarism, right?

Okay, how about this: Over the past thirty years, I’ve met several other people who make a living ghost-writing novels. Publishers use house names like Kenneth Robeson and Franklin W. Dixon to provide a sense of continuity for a line of books, but those two authors don’t really exist. Instead, a stable of writers is used to do the writing as work for hire. These writers get paid for helping a publisher that has more money and clout than time to continue a profitable line of stories. The same thing happens when a celebrity with more name recognition than writing skill lands a lucrative book contract and hires an uncredited person to write it. Or, frankly, when the long-dead Walt Disney affixes his name to yet another animated feature written and drawn by a seraglio of work-for-hire creatives.

But none of that is plagiarism; it’s just good business, right?

Scholars, and educators, pretend that plagiarism is a clear-cut issue of moral dishonesty, that words and ideas intrinsically belong to the person who “originated” them (as if anyone ever originated anything “in a vacuum”). But students grow up in a world of copyright, in which McDonalds can ridiculously trademark the phrase “I’m lovin’ it” (like no one ever said those words before)—a world in which a song written by Paul McCartney ends up “owned” by Michael Jackson, if not by some faceless record company, but can easily be passed from computer to computer as an mp3 file. And before we criticize that file sharing too quickly, we have to recognize that many musicians actually encourage this sort of sampling, as a way of reaching new audiences.

Nor has scholarliness always meant citing sources. Medieval and Renaissance writers, for example, were prone to borrow from earlier works with no documentation at all, assuming that their readers would recognize the source, and if not, that the information was simply more important than its origins.

So what are we to do about plagiarism today?

I believe we simply have to treat students as adults. If they grasp the significance of documentation for the sake of ongoing scholarly discussion, they will more likely care about whether they have cited a source or not. If they view themselves as members of that discussion, with a vested interest in its direction, they will have a reason to back up their arguments with documented sources.

On the other hand, if we focus too punitively on “theft” of this phrase or that, we’re just shouting into the growing wind of the Information Age, in which knowledge is viewed as an ever more “open-sourced” commodity and copyright is increasingly perceived as mere mercantilism.

Let’s show students—by sharing our own writing—where, why, and how we give credit to our sources. They are more likely to follow our example than to listen to our words.

—Les

Having just come out of a fledgling career in nursing at the time, I was pretty familiar with how low pay was for that traditionally female occupation. In fact, I’d been told more than once that as a male I stood a better chance of advancement and higher pay even in nursing than most women did. So much for gender equality. As for the issue of race, having been born into a family with working-class roots in the rural South, I also knew something of what overt racial bias looked like. I was eight when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and I grew up hearing grumbling about his “betrayal” of the South. (Prior to Johnson, “Southern Democrat” was a byword. Consider how different the case is today.)

My childhood public schooling and church attendance were in the North, however. “Red and Yellow / Black and White / They are precious in His sight” was simply a given in my young heart and mind. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would don a KKK robe and hood, nor why Malcolm X wanted to fight.

Little did I understand just how deeply unequal things were—in the North as well as the South.

That English 101 course provided a first clue, when one of my students presented a paper arguing “reverse discrimination” concerning college quotas. Unable to conceive that equality must include equal opportunity, and that impoverished neighborhoods do not provide the same opportunities that middle- and upper-class neighborhoods do, all my student could see was that some White males were being passed over by Black males with lower entrance-exam scores. I’ve heard that “reverse discrimination” argument many times since (including a recent Supreme Court ruling), and it’s always difficult to reason against, because it focuses on a couple of scores that are easy to see, rather than a broader social situation that is harder to grasp.

So let’s look at another couple of scores that are easy to see. According to recent national testing, while both Black and White students at fourth and eighth grade levels have made some gains in math and reading scores, the gap between Black and White students at both grades remains virtually as wide as ever. This is true in every state for which results are available, regardless of geographic region.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. I live near Milwaukee, which among its many ethnic groups has a considerable population of impoverished Blacks. One of my daughters teaches in an after-school reading program there, trying to help second through fourth graders catch up to the national standards. Many of her students are children of single-parent homes. Many live in buildings that have the windows boarded up. Street crime is ever present. From an early age, these children learn as a survival skill “Don’t let anyone diss you.” It’s difficult for them to focus on traditional learning with that mindset, especially when the career paths available seem to be either minimum-wage job (for the girls) or street gang (for the guys).

Lest you think I oversimplify the difficulty of overcoming such a background, let me repeat something I’ve mentioned in previous posts: Because of my own lower-middle-class blue-collar upbringing, I couldn’t even conceive of college until age 30. It might as well have been Shangri-la. Once I finally found the path, however, my all-White Midwestern public schooling had prepared me to succeed. On the other hand, for far too many impoverished Black students, even once they’ve found the pass through the mountains into the fabled valley of higher education, it is only to discover that the language they speak doesn’t mean the same thing here, and that they simply haven’t been prepared to survive.

This is racism.

Those fourth and eighth grade test scores say more about our civilization than about the students tested. Those scores say that we do not provide equally for all our children. They say that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was right: America is still in default on its promissory note to the people it once enslaved.

—Les

The main reason I’m by nature a poet rather than a fiction writer is that I just can’t stand the day-in/day-out slog at one long project. My moods swing too often from self-confidence-bordering-on-foolhardiness to despair-at-ever-amounting-to-anything. On good days, I feel a genius in my words; on bad days, it’s all just so much dust. Undoubtedly I take myself too seriously, but on the other hand, Zen placidity produces little art, and certainly none of any length. So I devote myself to verse, to blog entries, to Twitter posts, and to writing or editing chapters in instructional materials. I’ve learned that these are the tasks I can wrap my head around and produce some writing.

If I, as a professional writer for twenty-five years, still have to wrestle with motivation in this way, imagine what it must be like for high schoolers and middle schoolers facing imposed assignments. They know that anything they might write has been written a million times before, and almost certainly better.

Granted, they may find some excitement in discovery when writing a research report about a history or science topic (assuming they aren’t intellectually frightened to death by the rigors of documentation style). Chances are that they’re less likely to see the point of writing a literary critique: Most young people are unable to detach themselves from their received cultural values enough to entertain a theme that challenges those values, and many school systems seem to prefer reinforcing local mores anyway, rather than opening them to question. This may explain why so many writing assignments involve relatively empty comparison-contrast essays of this theme or this character versus that. But ultimately, who really cares how Kurtz and Leggatt are alike in their relationships to their respective narrators, while moderately different in their fates? As my mother would say, “What does this have to do with the price of eggs?”

To remain aware of what writing means to students, to know their struggles with it, to make assignments that mean something more than merely practice in a form (and which teach something more than “writing is boring”), we really need to write along with them. Every time a writing assignment is made, the teacher needs to write to that same assignment afresh, modeling each step in the writing process, demonstrating how messy it all can be. This will help ensure that writing assignments remain relevant and practical rather than merely academic. It’s also the best chance for a teacher to demonstrate the joy of writing.

—Les

Often I feel something similar in sitting down to write. Given the cacophony of voices competing for attention, the bookshelves already full of texts, and the explosion of words and images that is the Internet, what could any individual have to add of any worth?

The more conscious students are of their own smallness in the world, the more likely they are feel a similar reticence, a sense that they have “nothing to say.” High school students may be especially prone to this, and perhaps middle school students to a lesser extent. Of course, in a writing class they have to draft something, or they won’t have anything on which to practice their revising and editing skills.

One way to help students find a starting point is to ask them what they feel “hushed” about. What topic annoys them specifically because they have no say in the matter? If they did have a voice on the issue, what would they expect to be done?

Some school systems may be more comfortable than others in encouraging students to explore their frustrations. This nation being as large and varied as it is, I’ve known of classes in which any expression of irritation toward a parent was forbidden as disrespectful, and others in which virtually anything was considered fair game. In any case, a personal journal can be promoted as a safe outlet for venting and exploring ideas, and those ideas can later be mined for appropriate topics.

When my Chihuahua finally speaks, it is because he wants something—a treat, my attention for play, or to warn someone away. (Chihuahuas are noisily protective.) When I begin to write, it is because I want something as well—generally to convince someone of a point. If we can encourage students to explore their own wants in writing, they may just discover that they also have something to say, and that they care enough to say it well.

—Lester Smith

Here’s the heart of my point: With social media such as Twitter and Facebook feeds, individuals are reminded of one another’s lives in a new way. For example, I have friends in Minnesota, Texas, and Kentucky—to name just a few places—whose feeds I see on Facebook a couple of times a day, which lets me know they’re alive and well. Prior to Facebook and Twitter, I might go months or even years before meeting one of them somewhere and getting an update on their lives.

This ambient awareness is not a trivial thing. Although we may be tempted to feel that our little updates are mere bottles tossed in an ocean, like Sting’s “S.O.S. to the world,” they provide a sense of community even more powerful than the “hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore” later in that song. For unlike a message in a bottle, these little status updates are read by multiple people.

The significance of this new mode of communication struck me this past weekend. As a poet, I’ve had a sporadic mailing list for a several years now, in which I share verse by myself or other people (”Intervallic Verse“). For one reason or another, it’s been several months since I made a mailing. Sometimes I worry about imposing on people’s time with these messages. But this weekend I received an e-mail from an old friend which made it clear that the mailing had made him feel connected in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Although the messages had not been specifically directed at him, he still felt as though they were.

Celebrities sometimes describe a disjointedness in which someone they’ve never met greets them as if they were old friends. In effect, a celebrity’s media presence projects a one-way sense of personal connection toward his or her fans. However, given a world in which everyone is a celebrity, at least for the 15 seconds it takes to read a Facebook status update or Twitter post, these one-way connections become interwoven in a web that supports and comforts us all. I’m not suggesting this as a replacement for face time, but as a supplement to it, ambient awareness is definitely an improvement to our lives.

—Lester Smith

At risk is more than just these students’ reading ability. As the SPARK program points out, “studies show that children who cannot read by this age start to lose interest in school, give up on their education and start down a path that leads to drugs, gangs, and jail. In fact, many states include elementary literacy rates as a factor in forecasting future prison rates.”

Fortunately, the right intervention and assistance can make all the difference for many of these students. Personal attention, a bit of respect, insight on the instructors’ part, and repeated practice can help these children to achieve some surprising gains. Last year, for example, while only 22 percent could read at or near their grade level at the beginning of the year, by year’s end a full 64 percent had reached proficiency.

Recently, for vocabulary practice, my daughter introduced her second graders to www.freerice.com. The practicality of the exercise struck them immediately. This was not just another worksheet with no evident purpose other than memorization and testing. Instead, here was a game—a game with real consequences. No working their way to the bottom of a page just to hand it in for checking. This exercise was effectively endless, waiting to see how far they could go. And instead of a letter grade, they could see rice filling a bowl—rice that they knew would go to feed some hungry person elsewhere on the globe.

For children who themselves may eat only once a day, this earned rice has a powerful significance. That it is their own labor, their own learning, which achieves this global good, gives me a little more hope for the future. “So shines a good deed in a weary world.”

—Lester Smith

Humans are, of course, social animals. We have come to dominate this planet by banding together. In many ways, our societies themselves can be viewed as living organisms. Consider the unique personality of New York City, for example, as Robert Pirsig (of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics) has pointed out. Or think of the manner in which ideas—or memes, as Richard Dawkins (of The Selfish Gene), would say—survive, compete, and grow across the ages, creating and sustaining a culture. Of course, humans are also more than merely herd creatures; they’re individuals, with their own uniquely tinted personalities and ideas, goals and dreams.

Every one of us dwells in the tension between that social bonding and the preservation of individuality. For young people—particularly middle schoolers and high schoolers—this tension is a virtual war. They vacillate between loudly proclaiming their uniqueness and desperately craving peer acceptance.

Cultures also exist within this tension. Consider the history of feudalism in Great Britain. It began as clans banding together for defense against wandering raiders or against other clans seeking to expand their own holdings. Naturally, a band has to have a leader, and the individual for that job is the most forceful personality. Being physically strong helps, but as a band becomes larger, determination, cleverness, and the ability to inspire others take precendence. Eventually, the leader becomes a king with such individual power that his subordinates must invent a Magna Carta to restore some measure of balance.

For a more modern example of this struggle between individual and cultural interests, we need only consider the recent economic market meltdown in the U.S. Left to their own devices—i.e. without sufficient government oversight —a few individuals pushed the banking industry so far in their pursuit of profits that the entire structure began to collapse. At that point, the larger social entity reared its head in outrage, many congressional seats changed hands, and the presidency fell to a decidedly different administration, one with a message of public service.

Without social banding, we would have no security. Without individualism, we would have no invention. The teacher’s job, then, is to foster both. In passing along content, we provide students with the information they need to function in our society. But unless we also allow and encourage students to think for themselves, that society will inevitably wither and die.

Literacy plays a central role in this duality. Reading—a relatively passive skill—permits students to receive hard-won knowledge and ideas from previous generations. Writing—an active skill—provides them the opportunity to wrestle with that information and take possession of it, as well as to contribute their own ideas. Obviously reading is the easier skill to teach, and to test. Reading lies mainly on the receptive, social-collective side of the wheel. Teaching writing requires more talent and dedication on our part because once we get past handwriting, it isn’t about mechanics as much as it is about personal expression. Writing lies more on the individualist side of the wheel.

One grave danger we face in teaching literacy is a tendency to teach writing as we do reading. To approach writing first from its parts—sentence structure, paragraph structure, and writing form, all dressed up in proper spelling, punctuation, grammar, and word usage—is to treat writing as a collectivist activity rather than an individualist one. Contrariwise, to begin from the point of “What do you have to say?” and then work downward through “How can you best say it?” (form, paragraphs, and sentences) to “How should you clean it up and dress it?” (spelling, etc.) is to put the individual first, and afterward point out her or his responsibility to readers.

So, what is the purpose of school? It is to provide a commonality of culture while also encouraging individualism. We might well say that it is to keep the wheel balanced between those two, so that we can all continue rolling along.

—Les

This being TV, of course, those “whole paragraphs” still consist primarily of language understandable to the average person. While the specific genus and species of a flower the Librarian points out might be unfamiliar, for example, the rest of the words in his speech are straightforward. The scriptwriters avoid any tendency toward the bombastic or recondite language that might be expected in portraying such a learned person. The result is delightful. The Librarian comes across as ever knowledgeable but never stuffy.

Often, in the writing of high schoolers and undergraduate students, I see something of the opposite. In an attempt to present themselves as knowledgeable, these writers strain to use language or sentence structures somewhat beyond their comfort zone, and the result makes for fuzzy reading. The blame may very well lie in the texts we assign to introduce them to topics for discussion. I’d argue that far too many scholarly publications have been unnecessarily esoteric (going for baroque) in their use of language, as if the authors sought to protect their circles from invasion by those without sufficiently high-minded vocabularies.

Perhaps that’s changing. For example, earlier this week I read “Writing in the 21st Century,” an eight-page report published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), in which NCTE past president Kathleen Blake Yancey discusses the past, present, and future of language instruction in the U.S. The information covered in this report is relatively heady—I had to pay attention and, in places, reread a paragraph or two to make certain I followed—but the language itself is refreshingly clear. Just as with the fictional Librarian, I felt the authority of Yancey’s knowledge without the pretentiousness of inflated diction.

As teachers, we might encourage this sort of straightforward language in students by not only assigning more written summaries of readings but also asking for critiques of the actual language of those readings. After all, if a student is able to convey the message of an article in simpler language than the original, did the original actually need the more difficult language? In-class discussions of this sort might be especially valuable, both teasing out the meaning of a difficult piece and making students more critically aware of language use itself. As they learn that not all “learnéd” language is necessarily effective, their own writing is likely to improve—as writing always does when the focus is on communication rather than attempting to impress.

—Lester Smith