Montalvo and the Big S

It’s easy to forget, because we do it all the time and it’s normal for us, so it was nice of Joshua to drop around and remind me.

He was one of many people who—obviously—I was supposed to remember, and that was clear when he sat down and peered nervously at me; in situations like this, what choice do you have?

“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember you,” I finally said. And he went on to tell me that I had intruded myself on a group of his fellow high-school students who were being coached on their poems for the Poetry Out Loud contest last year.

Here’s my version: I had held back as much as I could, since some of the kids were struggling even to understand their poems, some were consistently mispronouncing words, most were speaking either too quickly or too softly or…something. And the coach? She was murmuring—sorry, make that cooing—the gentlest words of encouragement on them.

And that’s nice, because discouragement? Who needs it? Isn’t being a Latino kid reciting English poetry enough of a challenge?

But there was this thing: if one of these kids was going to go to Washington, DC, to face native speakers from the fifty states, shouldn’t they have a decent shot of it? So there I was, writing and wincing in the corner, and then my father, Jack, dead these two decades, cleared his throat up there in heaven and fixed his gaze down though the clouds at me. His eye is as the eagle….

So I had gently taken over the group, after assuring the coach that she was doing an excellent job, and that I had little, nothing really, to say.

Now for Montalvo’s version:

“Man, you fuckin’ blew those kids outta the water. They didn’t know what the fuh had hit ‘em. Most of those kids didn’t even know what they were saying! You blasted them off the planet, man.”

Well, Montalvo is a youth who measures poetic success with the grade of “PANTIES OFF, LADIES” at the top, so my own performance?

“Jockstraps off, team!”

This, however, was after Montalvo had settled down a bit, because I had made my umpteenth parental blunder by answering truthfully to his question: “did you like my poem?”

When am I gonna learn?

“No,” I told him, and look, you don’t have to be adolescent to hear that as less a word than a slamming door.

The problem? The stuff that seems so obvious to everybody else around me, as they read their poems to each other, I just don’t get. So Montalvo read the poem to me, and then asked: what was it about? My answer, of course, was completely wrong.

“How can you not understand my poetry,” he demanded, “it’s perfectly clear,” and then proceeded to recite the poem again. It’s sort of the equivalent of all the tourists encountering non-English speaking people. What do they do? Raise their voices!

The problem—as I, and only I, see it—is that a lot of the poets are sort of commentators on their emotional fields, as it were. Think talking heads given a news analysis from the wars of feeling. Want an example? Well, I’ve just moved up and looked at one poem, and came upon this:

Our unspoken reason has led me

To understand the world we live in.

OK—looks like poetry, but is it?

So I’ve been telling Montalvo, don’t, please, report in. Instead, break out your verbal paint box, set your brush to work and set my eye and soul ablaze with the colors of metaphors, similes, images, adjectives, verbs that stab the eye. And I had suggested that he might do one short poem, but using an extended metaphor. And since of course—of course!—I hadn’t explained what I wanted, much less shown him an example of one, he had failed. Oh, and then I had panned the result.

There is sadism in teaching. Or rather, there is a time for plain words and honesty. There’s also a lot of bad teachers blaming their students for the bad teaching. So it was time to apologize, and then ask—since the Calvary had come over the hill—if he had read Sonnet 18, by the big S.

“Look, would you just assume that I haven’t read all this stuff,” he snapped, “because it makes me feel like a fuckin’ retard to have to say that I haven’t.”

Right. And so upset is he that he wants me to read it, not him. Is he afraid of encountering a word he doesn’t know?

So I start in:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?


Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,


And summer's lease hath all too short a date:


Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,


And often is his gold complexion dimmed,


And every fair from fair sometime declines,


By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:


But thy eternal summer shall not fade,


Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,


Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,


When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
   

   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

So we tackle it, and, the first question?

“Since when can you drop all the ‘e’s’’

“Since forever, I tell him, “though, in fact, nobody in the last hundred years or so has done it.”

“Can I?”

Time to throw a bone!

Well, if he’s going to write a sonnet, why shouldn’t he drop some ‘e’s just to give it a nice archaic effect? That done, we go line by line, until we arrive at the moment I just love:

“Motherfucker,” he breathes.

That, along with “what a Niggah!” is Montalvo’s Presidential Freedom Medal / Purple Heart / Nobel Prize (you choose) tag line. And what poet is not going to be attracted to the idea of, ‘my words, baby, are gonna blast you into eternity? Panties off!’?

So then it’s time to look and see: what has Shakespeare done? How did he use the metaphor through all fourteen lines of the sonnet? How did he extend it, morph it, tweak it? And isn’t it interesting that the poem works, paradoxically, by at once diminishing the summer day, which can be too hot, the winds too rough, the sun clouded, and anyway, it’s all too fleeting? Yet somehow Shakespeare still suggests all this and makes you feel both the wonder of the summer’s day, and that the object is even more wonderful.

A Niggah indeed.

Well, he’s just called now, since it’s raining torrentially and he’s not coming today; he’s on a motorcycle now, and doesn’t want to get the computer wet. This, I tell him, is a good plan, so we agree, he’ll stay at home, where he doesn’t want to be, instead of at the café, where he does. I go back to writing this, and then remember Joshua—the high school kid who remembered me though I didn’t remember him.

“You really helped us a lot,” he said, and went on to tell me that he’s in the university now, studying computer science, but he wants to get back involved with Poetry Out Loud, because that had been the coolest moment of his high school years. Then he looked at me, and I remembered that feeling that day: the kids had looked at me with all the trust and admiration with which my cats had looked at me, in those terrible moments when they had been asking me to help them to their death. When those moments happen, or when Montalvo breathes in that he’s understood a sonnet by Shakespeare?

That’s when I remember…

…teachers make a difference.  

Falling for JiJi

Confession: I have spent a large part of the day trying to make the penguin JiJi go across my computer screen.

I justify this by telling you a secret: unlike a newspaper, which can pile up the bad news until Mt. Everest looks like a sugar cube, a blog cannot. So this evening—no rants about the Catholic Church (give it UP, Marc); no more tales of the byzantine, tropical political schemes (PLEEEEEZE!); no more jeremiads of any kind. Today is a good news day!

And the good news is that some guy in Southern California has got it figured out: most education is based on words, on language. But most students? Well, a significant portion of kids are learning English as a foreign language. Then there are those who simply learn visually, not verbally. As well, there are kids with various learning difficulties, one of which is dyslexia.

That was the case with Matthew Peterson, who suffers from dyslexia, as did, apparently, Einstein. And it was Einstein who said that words played no part in his math or scientific thinking.

Think back to your school—what was happening in the classroom? Well, the teacher was up front, talking and writing on the chalkboard. He or she was teaching, but were the kids learning?

No—according to the video below. Seventy percent of American kids are below grade level in math. So why not throw everything upside-down? Why not get rid of words? Why not advance a little technologically beyond chalk? Why not have the kids play games, instead of giving them homework? And why not have the games be interactive, so that kids get feedback and learn?

“I don’t teach, I observe learning,” I used to say to my students. Or how about this: “I don’t teach, I create the environment to learn.” And that’s why, in those days when I was working at Wal-Mart, I spent a lot of time learning PowerPoint. Because even something as rudimentary as PowerPoint can be powerful.

“Oh, baby, you are zeee BEST,” said a sultry little animation that I borrowed from the Internet; that was when the student got the right answer. The wrong answer? A bomb went off, or a 16-ton weight got dropped on a kitten, or the computer made a disgusted sound.

The games were nowhere as cool as JiJi, I have to say—but they were cool enough, and the students liked them. But the 600,000 kids in 35 states who are involved with JiJi? The numbers are impressive—in some cases the improvement is double or even triple the rate for the control group.

I’d believe it, because there’s something wonderfully addictive about JiJi. Unfortunately, the company won’t sell the games to individuals, but only to schools, since they believe that the presence of a teacher is important.

Damn—I’m already totally in love with JiJi!

Hmm, if I ran up to the local public school and bought the damn thing, do you think they’d let me play?   

On Music and Teaching

Well, it’s clearly a day not to read the newspaper, since is it really sensible to be taking antidepressants one minute and reading The New York Times ten minutes later? Nah…

So I bring the story of Thomas Sudhof, who shared the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology this year. And who was his greatest teacher? His bassoon teacher who, in Sudhof’s words, “taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.”

You know, it may be true. Anyone playing a double reed instrument like the bassoon or the oboe is openly flirting with madness; at one moment you’re playing music, the next moment you’re squawking. Oh, and you neither have any control nor any warning….

And I’m thinking about teaching, lately, because I did it for a large part of my life. In fact, I still do it, and like it. My problem, however, is that I had and have absolutely no idea of what I’m doing—I am perpetually improvising.

Other teachers know what they’re doing, as I saw yesterday when I was reading a New York Times article on schools which are “flipping.” And that is? Well, here’s the Times:

Students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

Oh, and guess what? Everybody, for once, is completely on board with this idea! From the same article:

The flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on. “It’s the only thing I write about as having broad positive agreement,” said Justin Reich, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard who studies technology and education.

Well, it’s familiar territory: there’s Marc and there’s the rest of the world. Because when I saw the video that a flipped teacher had prepared, I was less than impressed. In fact, I was half appalled. Check it out:

Full disclosure—I am perhaps one of the few people who really enjoys a vigorous discussion of subject / verb agreement. And in fact, the topic drops by for dinner occasionally, usually in the form of Mr. Fernández sputtering about the capricious way that English handles collective nouns. Spanish, of course, is completely logical—all collective nouns in Spanish are singular. But what fun is that?

All right—about the video. First, the teacher states that singular verbs have an added “s.”

Little Marc (seated in second desk, third row—and very cute): I works? You works?

Teacher (exasperated): No, Marc….

Marc: But aren’t “I” and “you” singular?

Teacher: Yes, Marc, but we’re talking about “he /she / it.”

Marc: Oh, the third person singular in the present simple indicative?

Teacher: Ummm? 

Next, the teacher discloses a trick—something he calls the “it / they” rule. Big question: “Tony works” or “Tony work?” Well, we can replace—so sez Teach—“Tony” with “it.”

Yeah?

Marc: But isn’t Tony a “he?”

Teacher: Well, yes, but to make it simpler we’re using just “it.”

Marc: How does that make it simpler?

Next, the teacher suggests that we simply count the nouns, using the example “Marc and Mary”—that’s two, see? Plural.

Marc: What about the sentence “Neither Marc nor Mary?

Teacher (nervous—he sees what’s coming): What about it?

Marc: Well, there are two subjects, but should the verb be singular? You wouldn’t say “Neither Marc nor Mary work in the mill,” would you?

Then there’s the problem—the teacher gives it away when he says “that doesn’t sound right,” in discussing the “it / they” rule.

Marc: But what if someone doesn’t know what “sounds right?” Maybe he’s never heard it right, and so he can’t tell what sounds right? Or what if he’s learning English as a new language?

Teacher: Well, I think we can assume….

I hate to say this—no wait, let’s be honest, this causes me no pain whatsoever to declare—but the teacher in this video doesn’t seem to be too bright. How would he handle the question that I, even as a child, would have asked?

Marc: What is a subject, anyway?

Teacher: Well, the subject performs the action of the verb.

Marc: What about the passive voice? What about, “the patient is examined by the medical team?” Is “medical team” the subject?

Teacher: No, the subject is “the patient.”

Marc: But is the patient examining?

That would have lead to the old and mostly true “the subject is the noun before the verb.” A possibly useful rule of thumb, yes—but it does beg the question.

Maybe it’s time to do two things. First, I seriously think that we need to reinstitute Greek and Latin into our schools, and yes, in grade school, when those young minds can soak up the rigor and the discipline of the languages. Because then kids will be able to decline nouns and conjugate verbs, which means that he or she will be able to give an example of the third person positive singular present perfect active indicative using the verb “to see.”

(“he has seen” is the answer, by the way….)

Second, why can’t all kids learn a musical instrument? You know, I’m back to playing the cello now, and looking at YouTube clips of musicians speaking and coaching. And guess what? We’re a bright, talented, funny and quick group. And it occurs to me—have I ever met a stupid musician? If I have, I’ve forgotten him or her.

The video of the subject / verb agreement has gotten 57,000 hits, and the comments are almost all positive. Some people say that he’s really helped them. But check out the video below, of the legendary Dorothy DeLay. Then tell me…

…who’s the better teacher?

Learning versus Teaching

News flash, Dear Reader—the capital of Washington is….

(Nope, it’s not Spokane.)

There was a time in your life when you knew the capital of the state of Washington. And you had a test on it, and on all the other state capitals.

“What’s the capital of the state of Washington,” I said yesterday to Naia, the little girl whose mother runs the café that is my office. Naia was busy being home schooled by her mother on state capitals last year when I first met them.

Naia gave me the look eleven-year-old girls reserve for silly adults.

 “I dunno, that was last year….”

Well, she may be home schooled, but she’s got the education system down cold. Quick—what year was the Magna Carta?

You may know—I think it’s 1215.

Quick—what WAS the Magna Carta?

Interesting to know—how many people could answer one versus the other?

Here’s the thing about Naia—she has correctly eliminated the useless data of state capitals (she has an iPad, if she needs to know a state capital, she’ll google it….) to create more space or capacity or energy for what she really loves, which is dinosaurs.

She was asking me, the other day, what my favorite dinosaur was, and though I was tempted to say Ronald Reagan, I decided to tell the truth: I don’t believe in dinosaurs. Yes, I know the whole fossil record absolutely and completely refutes me, and no, I don’t hold my belief so strongly that I would die for it. I just can’t get my head around animals that big, that massive, and especially I don’t buy the new theory that an asteroid wiped them out. And if people can deny the holocaust or believe that Obama is Muslim, well, I can not believe in dinosaurs.

Naia, however, took me on. She has a vast, untaught-but-still-very-educated knowledge of dinosaurs, as well as a fascination for the natural world. She knew, for example, that a bird of paradise was a bird—I didn’t. I thought it was just a plant. But Naia instantly informed me that the birds live in New Guinea and some parts of Australia. And she showed me a picture of one—look!

Nobody, you understand, requires that Naia know all about dinosaurs and birds of paradise. (Or is it bird of paradises?) However, it is vitally important to know that capital of Washington State so that Naia gets a piece of paper that will lead in four years time to another piece of paper that will lead in three years time to the acquisition of another piece of paper that will lead to a job. Because you need a Master’s Degree to get pretty much any job, nowadays.

Well, I had a job for about 35 years, and guess what! Not once did I need to know that the capital of Washington is Olympia.

What I did need to know is how to use a computer, that first day in Wal-Mart, in 2004.

I came late to the game—everybody assumed I knew what a file was, or what the desktop was, or what Excel was.

“Show me how to turn this on,” I was saying to Elizabeth, the lady who hired me—as she and I sat in front of the computer. Like so much else I did, it didn’t inspire confidence.

Seven years later, I had taught myself the rudiments of VBA scripting and was the acknowledged expert in PowerPoint. I could do all that because I shared a passion for something. No, not dinosaurs, but the cello. And if I could play the Chopin and Shostakovich sonatas, of course I could learn how to use Microsoft Office products.

It’s always the first thing cut, in the schools. Yeah, they may threaten to cut the football team—a sure way to get people to vote for the school board referendum—but when it actually comes time to start the slashing? That machete falls straight down on music and art.

As I write, there’s a guy pounding the hell out of some wood in the apartment above me. No, he’s not a construction worker, he’s a sculptor. I am writing this, which is an arguably creative thing to do. Below me, people are selling shoes. So two thirds of the building is being creative.

Or maybe the entire building is. Can you be creative in sales?

I think so. There’s a kind of magic involved when you meet a good salesman—how many times have you walked away with something you didn’t need until the salesperson told you you needed it, or implanted in you some desire for it?

I think Sir Robinson (view clip below) is right—we are doing a wonderful job of stomping out every last bit of creativity in our kids. Unfortunately, I think that’s what we want to do. The news that our schools do more deadening than awakening has been around for 40 or 50 years, and have we changed? Have we done anything about it? Are our schools better places, turning out better kids, smarter kids, more creative kids?

Well, at least in Puerto Rico, I would never have had the job I did had the answer been yes. Every child in Puerto Rico graduates with 12 years of English class—how could I possibly be needed as an English teacher? And why—since I had no credentials whatsoever and was going up against the professionals—did I succeed in getting people to talk?

I think most teachers get in the way. I think it’s better not to teach. I never really did, and still don’t, although occasionally I feel guilty for not having a lesson plan and vocabulary and written exercises and metrics for evaluation. I am not a very good teacher.

I do, however, observe learning fairly well.