Chris Osmond PhD

My friends and I have cracked the code
We count our dollars on the train
To the party

Probably the most chilling lines in Lorde’s monster single “Royals.” It’s a repudiation of a version of herself that she sees being sold to her. Cataloged in the chorus, a weaponized hook you’ll have lodged in your cranium after one listen:

But every song’s like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin’ in the bathroom
Blood stains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room,
We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams.
But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece.
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash.
We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair

But despite the startling ease with which she reels off these totems of hiphop excess, it’s this moment of realization, stated declaratively as a mere fact of the nature of her engagement with the world, that changes everything from now on. We will celebrate who we are, not who you tell us to be. Our few dollars, our train, our party: not yours. Echoes of Johnny Rotten, asking his last audience, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Yes, the song says – but we’re not mad about it anymore. Living well is the best revenge.

This weekend my sons scooped me (and The New Yorker, by a day) with this tune. I heard it once through the earbuds – after-market ones with better bass response, thankfully, a key to appreciation of this joint – and was swept back to first hearing Adele’s big record under similar circumstances a few years back, and before that Amy Winehouse, PJ Harvey, Alanis Morissette, Veruca Salt, Sleater-Kinney, even Patti Smith. All the foregoers who temper my ears for a big female voice, a rumbly velvet one that winds around your legs like a cat.

What did Lorde listen to before laying this down? What are her – ahem – “influences”? A crazy question for a sixteen year-old maybe, but also not: our youth are more “influenced” than any generation before, the world in their pocket to peruse, reject, Like. Apparently, she’ll have none of that. She likes spare electronic beats, and the sonic cathedrals on “Royals” give her more space to wind around the pillars than anything since, I don’t know, Miles Davis’ “Tutu.” With it’s pared-down aesthetic and multi-tracked self-harmonies, it’s a Garageband song, maybe this generation’s answer to Springsteen in his own bedroom laying down the harrowing tracks only accessible from that apercu of remove. It’s a solo act, despite the solemn sidemen that apparently accompany her live.

I can’t stop thinking about the song, asking others to think about it with me. Trying to understand the power of the sweeping rejection of what an industry has given a young woman to love and respect and buy: the star maker machinery of the popular song, the rhetoric of the videos, the insistence that she (we) attend to the doings of the beautiful and rich, wait for their singles, follow their trysts and feuds. “We don’t care” – it’s repeated, in a falling figure into the fourth that gospel and blues reserves for the heightening of lyric tension: the place where things change, before redemption in the fifth. That comes, I think, with “We’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams,” not an aspirational statement so much as an insistence that their “Cadillacs” are bigger than an Escalade, perhaps because they are smaller.

Is anything so sweeping, so maddening, so terrifying as the dismissal of a teenager? “We don’t care,” insouciant and complete. “What are you rebelling against?” comes the question: “What have you got?” responds the new generation, impossibly far away already, perhaps irretrievable, or just gone to better shores. (And don’t start with calling this statement “inauthentic” because it had to partake in that same machinery to be released and promoted on this platform: it’s a bogus argument, especially as it’s leveled disproportionally against female artists, brilliantly stated here.)

She’s not the first to goof on the excesses of pop, hiphop especially. The Lonely Island said a lot here, to the young adults I work with, as did some of the more self-aware practitioners of the art since back in the day: Flava Flav, Tribe, Outkast, Salt’n’Pepa, a few clown princes and princesses here and there who get the power of the grotesque and comic as part of delivering the message (Forevah EVAH evah?). Gangsta brought the sternness, the seriousness, collapsed the gap between Signifyng and signifier (or, perhaps, changed the register to one a lot less forgiving of breaking character). That was the forebear of the present expectations of “gold teeth, Grey Goose, tripping in the bathroom:” bleak, monolithic, one-note of so much of what comes over MTV and the radio. Repetitive compulsion that finally deadens the palate. Who can taste it when it’s so much of what we’re fed?

Not sure yet what to do with the growing cry against the song that it’s racist at core, dismissing an expressive language that’s impossible to unwind from the poverty and prejudice that informed the first hiphop assertions of wealth, power, money. Mainstream press is swarming the story – who doesn’t love a good race war – predictably giving more heat than light. Though I’ll agree with MSNBC that hiphop has jumped to mainstream culture too completely to continue to file it simply and neatly under “black.” I am not really persuaded there, seeing the original hiphop aesthetic of stealing the symbols of unattainable luxury to subvert them (literally breaking hood ornaments off Benzos) as more punk than appropriation. From Lorde’s remove – New Zealand (!?) – the white agony at regarding a black man in power that Coates explores so powerfully is perhaps tempered. And Jay-Z is not the President, though maybe the same anxieties about access to power – the same anger that underpins my white students when they try to understand affirmative action from the perspective of not getting the financial aid they need either – do obtain. Money is the new power.

Race doesn’t play the same way in the generation behind us. Of course the kids see race – I strive in my class every day to help future teachers understand and work against the treacherous reproduction of status quo that comes from affirming otherwise – but in some real way, their battles aren’t ours. SES plays so much harder as a personal entryway into understanding privilege with my overwhelmingly white students than race. And not because of whatever the rest of the world makes up about going to school in western North Carolina, being Southern, whatever story you might be making up about who “my students” are.*  It’s that their world is so much browner, so differently expressed, than ours was at the same age (check out the National Geographic’s awesome “Changing Face of America” photo essay on this.)

I do not think Lorde is talking back to hiphop’s performance of privilege as raced. To my ears, half a planet away, it’s just too remote from her world. She gets the marketing of it, the come-on of what she is supposed to care about, and says no. In this she’s twinning with my other darlings, Arctic Monkeys, whose fully-realized milieu gives a lot more to work with than Lorde’s stark sketches. But both dismiss inauthenticity as the most cardinal of sins. “Get off the bandwagon, put down the handbook,” the AMs say – “we don’t care,” tosses off Lorde, and if a teenager with a microphone doesn’t care, nothing – nothing – can save you from the dustbin.

This could probably all be said better (hoped to work in some of John Taylor Gatto’s critique of compulsory schooling as designed from the ground up to create a new consumer class), but there’s no time, and I need to get something off about it now before the moment passes. What do you think about the song, about the issues it raises? Really?

*Assumptions in turn informed by the rampant “redneckspoitation” boom on TV, Duck Dynasties and Honey Boo Boos and Handfishin’ and Turtlemen. That topic needs to wait for another day: but there’s more casual dismissal at the national level of who we are around here than Li’l Abner ever got away with, so you better recognize.

Thanks to allthingssd.com for image. NO image of the artist because photos of Lorde are everywhere, sheesh.

(N.B. – This is going to be sloppy, but it’s a blog, not a paper, and I will continue to use it to work out stuff that’s not-ready-for-prime-time, with your indulgence. Also, if you read this through Facebook, you’ve probably noted that I am on a Facebook sabbatical these days! Which is serving me well. But I would still love to hear from you about this – or anything – through the comment section or email, osmond (at) appstate (dot) edu.)

So titled because I fear that’s the tone I am going to strike here: the crotchety old fart fussing about kids, and how back in the day … but that is not my intent.

What I want to do is figure out, really, what is going on with the way kids learn in the generation I am teaching and, further down, parenting, and what the role of pleasure is in that learning. Some of my colleagues are super excited about what kids’ interactions with computer games can help us understand about curriculum, and I think they are on to something – but that something feels like curiously less than what they say it is, or maybe more.

I think that the way we make and enjoy art has something to say here, because art is the thing we do that we don’t have to do: engage with beauty, balance, aesthetic satisfactions. Unless you are a filmmaker or rock star under studio/label contract trying to grind something out on deadline, art’s not work – yet we find time to be with it no matter what, even at the expense of other things. There is always time to do what we really want to.

Shouldn’t we want desperately to figure out how to bottle that genuine desire to engage and sprinkle it over the things we THINK kids should be engaging in as well?

And then at the core of the whole perplex is how kids nowadays don’t ride bikes the way we did when we were kids, and how that bothers me, and how I don’t understand why. Maybe that’s where I should start.

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When I was a kid I loved my bikes, and still remember each of them with pretty amazing clarity.

Eighth birthday: a yard sale find with outdated (now vintage) frame curlicues and additional struts gets macked out for me with a banana seat and a light that runs on the power of the spinning wheel and an odometer. Dad tries to explain the value of an odometer, and I am unconvinced. I do not want to know how far I have gone: I want to know how fast I am. I want to see a needle move, and the glacial pace of the odometer wheels turning does not satisfy, at all. “How far I was allowed to go” was the obsession: in the street, or just the sidewalk? To the end of the street? to the High’s, to Gillette’s Market, to buy Marathon bars and baseball cards at first, then litre-bottles of orange and grape Nehi? You could carry two on a bike, one in a bag slung over each handlebar; four empties (two and two) when returning them for the deposit. But it was tricky going: no turning to speak of, really, just balance and grit to get you there.

I am twelve: a friend agrees to sell me a bike he no longer needs. It is painted matte black, but has the characteristic piece of sheet metal in the front frame angle with a perfectly round hole in it that I associate with the coveted Mongoose brand. Mongoose and Diamondback: these were the only two brands that were worth spit in Rome, New York’s bicycle hierarchy, and I had neither. The banana seat frankenbike was now passé: I needed to trade up, and this is was my ticket in.

It came rideable, with second-rate parts, and I set to figuring out how to make the thing what I wanted it to be. I had a bike repair manual and learned how the gears worked, how to make the action smoother and change the tires. I got some more appropriate handlebars, but the front fork looked all wrong: it had a graceful bend to it, not the sawed-off shotgun stubbiness that the cool kids’ bikes boasted. I couldn’t work out how to fix that – or the single handlebar joint that looked so puny next to my friends’ beefy double ones – but the Mongoose-brand pads I put on the thing made it pass, so I could join my friend at the vacant lot where they had cut jumps and banked turns into the dirt.

It was incredible to be out there tear-assing around that track – getting (what felt like) crazy air, the occasional fall leading to scuffs and ripped pants and a little blood but never head trauma (it hadn’t been invented yet, maybe, and neither had helmets). I bent the cranks from landing on them too hard, learned to fix them. I do not want to exaggerate my handiness, but in that year I was probably the most mechanically savvy I have ever been in my life. Not because I really cared about it but because I needed it to work and only I could do what needed to be done. Coming home when the sun went down, hot and dirty and thoroughly blissed-out.

That bike became my ride to school, too – about a mile each way (just Google-Mapped it – sure felt like longer), and to friends’ houses, and to the woods behind the park (where I did NOT join in BB gun wars, but desperately wished to). With the bike and a little stamina and a modicum of geography, I could pace almost the entire ambit of my world under my own power, and largely on my own schedule, years before a car was even a possibility. My bike was power. I locked it up and took care of it, kept it out of the rain and the tires full.

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So why my bike reverie here? Why does it chap me that under all the porches of our kids’ friends sit beautiful bikes (Mongooses and Diamondbacks, real ones sometimes) and no one ever rides them?

Many of us in the High Country live at the top of pretty steep hills, and dropping down to the main road and pressing further afield would inevitably mean a ten-minute climb with / walking of one’s bike back up the hill, and apparently that’s sufficiently prohibitive. But what’s at most two miles away from anyone’s house seems so worth it to me: the General Store (much cooler than the High’s), the school, the gorgeous park, each others’ houses. All these kids could have any of that whenever they want, on their own schedule, free of their parents’ willingness to drive, in exchange for a mildly rough five-minute walk at the end. But it does not seem a good trade-off to any of them. No one ever rides anywhere.

It’s on us too, on all the parents. We are all concerned about the narrowness of the country two-lane, the dramatic blind turns, snakes and bears, drunks in pickup trucks: who knows what could happen out there. This from a generation of grown-ups who routinely remember being turned loose in the evening by their parents sans cell phone or even flight plan, told only to be back (this is universal) “when the street lights came on.” What gives? What has changed?

Please know that my kids, and their friends, do not want for adventurous spirit. They are bolder than I was, from one POV. As I drove a bunch of them home last night from a birthday celebration (at a contained fun pavilion – laser tag, video games, bowling, no sharp corners anywhere, secure perimeter, natch) I had the precious opportunity to be invisible and hear them revel with each other in the rich history of their shared virtual exploits, while each simultaneously played a “casual game” on their Apple device of choice and offered periodic updates on their progress. Most of the talk was about Minecraft, the low-res MMORPG that even I know about.

Or thought I did (digital Legos, right)? I had no idea. The detailed strategy and passionately-remembered victories were Homeric, as was the pathos of battles remembered, won, lost. If I can remember – apologies if they ever read this for mangling the specificity and detail, I am a stranger in a strange land here:

• So I was in a boat in the middle of the ocean, no land as far as I could see in any direction – it was impossible to get to land from there, from the island that Jim and I built out there for that very reason, so no-one could find it – and I had built a defensive bulwark on the island shaped like my head, made out of wool – I had nothing else to do so I just did it (So did I! offers another (???)), and my eyes were gun nests and the mouth was a cave – so I am out in the middle of the ocean in my boat, trying to get to land, and suddenly here comes this other boat, floating along completely empty, and it just drifts by me and disappears.
• Kyle, when I got to our outpost you had finished building the stairs, but they looked completely wrong! The wood was completely the wrong color, it doesn’t match any of the rest of the house. (But that’s the only wood I had, protests Kyle weakly. No matter: aesthetic foul committed, ten points from Hufflepuff.)
• And then I found this amazing sniper perch in the original world, from back in the day? (I think he actually said “back in the day.”) And this was when you could get rank just by saying “oh, I am not a noob don’t-know-what-I-am-doing guy, really,” and they would just give it to you? Anyway, I would just sit there and pick off all these Diamond warriors, and they wouldn’t know what was going on. It was awesome until one day this whole troop of Diamonds came and one looked up and saw me; he had a platinum bow with darkness AND invincibility AND roundhouse kick, and with one shot I was dead.
• For a few days we built underwater tunnels out of glass, just because we had the time, out in the middle of the ocean, and no one could find us, it was awesome – and then I went back after a few days and (my sister) had built…a PIRATE SHIP on the surface, right above it! (Everyone DYING laughing, who could be so stupid?) So of course we got found right away: the Ninjaz came in through the bottom of the ship, and everything got looted and destroyed. (Round of murmured commiseration: the Ninjaz, poor man, they are some tough customers.)

Do you hear it? A spirit of adventure and curiosity and industry and ambition that puts my remembered exploits to shame with its detail, its intrigue, its strategy, its confidence and power. The stories were already lore, becoming more so in the telling as the sun set out the Honda’s windows and we labored up the mountain.

These are the moments that will define these kids in affiliation and differentiation with the people around them; these are their Mongooses, their dirt tracks, their BB gun fights. And it is all in their heads, and on screens, mediated by invisible servers and experienced alone in darkened bedrooms.

I do not mean to suggest their whole world is digital or imaginary. These same guys play hours of soccer together and Ripstik around the park on Friday nights and still clobber each other with Nerf swords. But the seamless flow between the real and the virtual is stunning: the passionate commitment to the unreal as much as to the real, to the created 3D hideaway as much as the contested goal on Saturday morning.

None of my students get my Neuromancer references any more: William Gibson perhaps losing his SF credibility as the world actually becomes a place where we are “jacked in” to virtual connection as seriously as we are real ones, or more. I’ll check it anyway: but for a bristling nest of memory sticks under their right ear, my lost boys are become digital men, making their own Pleasure Islands and Skull Rocks out there, somewhere, in the interwebbed ether.

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So what I am saying here? That I think there is something awry with the sublimation of childhood’s ambition and energy and wanderlust into digital exploits. That I think something has been lost when our kids stay in and log on instead of going out. Yeah, I do.

I have a suspicion that what is lost is somehow imbricated with the abundance of what is “accessible,” sort of, online. That the rampant lack of curiosity about the way the actual world works that my colleagues and I perceive among our students is connected with their native knowledge that they’ll be able to access the Youtube video that tells them about it when they need it, and so don’t need to concern themselves with it prior. In one way, this is the promised dream of technology in education: when the propositional knowledge base is immediately accessible online, students will be freed up from having to learn it and, therefore, will be able to spend their curricular time on developing the process and conceptual chops: the “critical thinking” that everyone crows about. But that’s not what seems to be happening. In fact, quite the opposite: lack of need to know seems to be turning into lack of curiosity. And lack of urge to get up and go do something about it. Really, why bike the hill when I can get what I would be looking for right here?

Gaming offers so many opportunities to tap into the energy of doing what we want to do in the service of doing what we need to do. It offers chances to make mistakes in low-risk, high-rep situations – trial and error, an intrinsic part of artmaking and puzzle-solving. Games offer built-in reward that incentivizes perseverance, and the networked ones offer social affirmation and the benefits of propinquity and joint mutual activity that we have known matter for decades but can’t seem to make curricular priorities. Maybe games are a way in for those important aspects of teaching.

But is what has been lost worth what has been gained? And does virtual adventure do for our kids what real-life adventure does?

This is way bigger than what I have started to think through here. It’s not just about computers and bikes. It’s connected with overprotection of our kids by my generation’s parenting – though, in our defense, we also protect more because we are the first generation to live consciously with the legacy of abuse that we were not protected from. The world was never safe, and we wish our kids a more nurturing passage through childhood than many of us had. It’s connected with an exponentially greater role in our childrens’ lives of a broadly-advertised version of childhood to which they conform their expectations – and we ours, of them and of ourselves.

So: how do we take advantage of technology to help our kids cultivate confidence, self-efficacy, intrepidness, self-sufficiency, while saving them the pain of the mistakes visited upon us? That’s all I am trying to figure out. That’s all. What do you think?

Thanks to Mongoose for most excellent image of most excellent bike. 

This is nice: an essay of mine was selected as winner of a writing contest sponsored by Et Alia Press. It’s about my scars, what they have to say about the caring professions of teaching and doctoring, how they call us to more compassionate practice. The anthology should be published sometime next year.

Gentle reader, my apologies: very little blogging from me this summer! Been working on other projects. More to come.

Dear Morning Edition:

Claudio Sanchez lost all credibility with me Tuesday June 18 when he decided to air a straight story about the dishonest and misleading hack piece that the National Council on Teacher Quality dropped that morning. A quick look at the internet should have told him better: Deans of Education, real national thought leaders, and the attentive public agree on the harm wrought by this transparently ideological attack on teacher education. A quick look at the NCTQ’s board would confirm that it’s a right-wing scare machine taking aim yet again at the institution of public schooling in order to supplant it with market-based reforms and business-friendly privatization schemes, all wrapped in ostensible concern for the children (or, in this case, the hapless first-year teachers supposedly being exploited by teacher educators’ laziness and refusal to “evolve”). And the Geraldo-style “gotcha” bit with the Dean of ETSU’s College of Education was way beneath the standards I’ve come to expect from NPR.

As a teacher educator and a citizen who believes in public education, I’m appalled. If Sanchez can’t vet stuff better, please replace him at the Education Desk with someone who can. The stakes are way too high for this nonsense.

Chris Osmond PhD

Here’s a plenary paper I gave this weekend at the annual meeting of the International Association for Human Caring. I may have played the history a little loose to make the point to a non-curriculum audience, but I think the larger argument stands: medicine IS doing a better job than we are of focusing on the role of individual stories in caregiving, and the “black leather jacket” boys remain in full sway. Looking forward to some discussion of this one from my colleagues among their ranks. Enjoy your summer!

Good morning. It is a pleasure to be with you today, though I am a stranger in a strange land. I believe I am the only educator attending this conference who is primarily concerned with K-12 school settings. Although I have spent many years in healthcare settings, my caring context is the school, not the hospital. Nonetheless, the extraordinary nurses I share the dais with today have helped me understand the textures of practice in my world, as I have theirs. We have so much to say to each other.

Today I would like to open our time together by trying for the first time to explain the ways I think the practice of narrative lets the worlds of education and healthcare inform each other.

First, I’ll tell you a story from my discipline about how we have decided what matters most in caring educational practice, and how I think we got it wrong. Then I’ll explain how the use of narrative in healthcare settings has given what education had lost back to me. And finally I’ll suggest what this evolving nexus means for both of our practices.

I’ll start with a story of internecine conflict. Sayre’s Law dictates that the reason academic battles are so fierce is because the stakes are so appallingly low. But I feel the stakes were very high in this fight, dealing as it did with the very core of why we do what we do in school. So let me sing you the song of my people. I think you will recognize the tune.

Almost fifty years ago, one of our most audacious curriculum dreamers, Joseph Schwab, pronounced the field of curriculum studies “moribund.” Stasis was attributed to unquestioned applications of single-perspective theories to education. To revitalize our work – to make ourselves more than simple doers of curriculum prepared for us and assessors of whether or not we had met established objectives – Schwab called for renewed interest in “the practical,” by which he meant a deliberative, interdisciplinary process that was attentive to reality: situated, relevant, responsive to experience.

In the wake of this call, curriculum studies was “reconceptualized” as a site to critically engage the values and practices that describe school in our culture. Two main strands of reconceptualization emerged: first, a materialist critique, which embraced neomarxist understandings of the role of power in education as underlying the observed tendency of institutions to replicate the existing social order. And second, a phenomenological, autobiographical, and psychological critique, which sought to understand curriculum as currere, a “course run” by successive retrenchings in one’s own experience and projection of that experience into future action.

Currere understands curriculum as chronological, situated, a constant reinterpretation of past experiences that reorients us toward what is not yet the case. These two forces struggled for a few years for ideological and epistemological dominance of the newly reborn field, and finally the materialist critique ascended. Gradually, critical curriculum work became synonymous with neomarxist analysis of power, while the more reflective work of currere paced the field’s edges through its own journals and conferences.

I trained in the currere tradition, and so confess to having personal skin in this game. But what most interests me for this audience is why things went the way they did – and that “why” might ring some bells. Because the materialist critique was outward-focused: concerned with structures (even through post-structuralist lenses), with social justice and the end to hegemonic maintenance of existing power relations as its clear goal. It was a muscular critique, and tended to be masculinist and even sexy in its rhetoric: a memorable skirmish caricatured its practitioners as “the marxists, who identified autobiography with bourgeois idealism, a retreat to interiority by those unwilling to don their leather jackets and storm the barricades, or at least picket General Dynamics.”

Currere, on the other hand, suffered dismissal as not only bourgeois, but navel-gazing, irrelevant, esoteric. To stake a claim for the role of individual experience and dyadic connection in curriculum was to be consigned to the basement with the other misfit toys: to be the shadow. Camille Paglia drew the dichotomy beautifully in Sexual Personae between “apollonic” and “chthonic” impulses in literature: the first clean, visible, attainable, the other hidden, murky, imprecise.

So the critical day in education was won by what was observable and measurable: psychologic, phenomenologic, and autobiographical perspectives were abjected. To work in education meant either joining a mainstream educational milieu that was as concerned with setting objectives and measuring their attainment as ever, or an equally well-boundaried critical stance that tried to dismantle it through analysis of the observable workings of class and power. By disposition and training mine became the voice of a minority report, and my work the writing of an unread amicus brief.

You know: of course this is how things played out. Common sense always feels better dealing with the observable. The high modern notion of care, in education and health, values noting what is observable and making coherent, replicable responses to it.

And here’s where your story crosses mine. Healthcare strives to manage quality outcomes through measurement, and its critics tend to focus on observable structural impediments to quality care, both administrative (cost and waste management, handwashing checklists) and social (race and ethnicity, language barriers, “cultural competence” efforts, etc). Medicine – the most scientific of caring practices – is way out front on observing and responding to the objective data. Stories are secondary, nice-to-have not have-to-have.

But when I joined the faculty of a medical school for five years and went searching for other caring practitioners who shared my conviction that interiority and self-reading were essential parts of sustainable practice, I was amazed to find that medicine also fostered a rich subculture of story-telling and story-listening in the name of compassionate practice.

I found the literature and medicine movement, most notably Rita Charon’s articulate and passionate argument for a concept of caring practice as requiring “narrative competence.” Also the Maine Humanities Council’s “Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare” movement, which supported reading groups of physicians, nurses and other providers that allowed them to read together stories of human suffering and caring and thereby find voice to share their own. I was amazed to find that the doctors and the nurses knew as much about honoring stories as my people did – and more. To be sure, the narrative impulse in health care haunted the dominant version as well. But it was a much hardier ghost, and getting stronger by the day.

The contours of my field’s twinned stories are limned in Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller.  You probably know that Frank advanced three modes of understanding suffering: the “chaos” narrative, with its obliterative “no-time” of endless suffering; the “restitution” narrative, which seeks to remedy suffering by overwhelming chaos with order, managing experience according to scientifically-verified algorithms that identify clear problems, then regulate and solve them. And finally, Frank’s critique of the “restitution” narrative’s tendency to do violence to the selfness of the sufferer, abandoning her at the moment her symptoms do not match the algorithms or her suffering is not healed by their fixes. He offers the “quest narrative” as an articulation of a caring practice dedicated to hearing and witnessing the unique qualities of individual suffering; as a way to walk the path of illness with the sufferer.

Here was the deepest hope of currere as I longed to practice it in my own work, and to see it practiced in the work of my students. Aspiration for communion in care that heals both parties by letting their stories meet each other out on the field beyond right and wrong. And I had to come to medicine to see it articulated with a passion my own field had disavowed. It was both an acknowledgment of the co-creative nature of healing communion, and a way to articulate education work as also healing, as a site of care.

The fruits of this narrative nexus between healthcare and education are only beginning to flower; my colleagues will share some of the insights emerging from our shared inquiry over the last three years. In closing, I’ll preview three of the most striking.

1. Institutions are not external to us; institutions are us. I mourn for our culture’s wounding institutions: schools, hospitals, and prisons, each with their own fiendish Procrustean beds of regulation that create habitus of self-control. These are all sites of trauma, but school most tragically, as emotional, mental, and intellectual damage is unthinkingly wrought upon students even in apparently benign classroom settings (to say nothing of egregious physical and sexual wounds, all too commonplace as well). I think healthcare is working harder than education right now to name the ways, in Ivan Illyich’s words, that “the functions of a profession are not necessarily those of the institutional structures that house it:” that the regulating, impersonal, measure-it-to-manage-it way of being in hospitals is maleficent as surely as the rising tide of outcomes-based assessment was in schools.

And the solution to both, it seemed, has to do with a recommitment to finding the individual story in the data; to shaping institutional life to the present need of the patient or student by being that kind of caregiver. Foregrounding narrative gives us permission in our own practice to “talk back” to dominant versions of how we are to be and upon what index the value of our efforts are to be reckoned. The ways that medicine taught me to use narrative – and my grasp of the stakes if I don’t – have shaped the way I practice education.

2. The personal is not merely personal. Professional empathy is not the same thing as personal empathy: to practice as a caring professional is to be “in role,” and to accept the essentially divided nature of our professional attention. As Terry Holt notes,

As I lean against the wall, tears are coursing down my face. I am being very quiet about it, but in a very quiet way I am sobbing as freely as I know how. And meanwhile I am thinking: If this is over by twelve-thirty, I’ve got a chance of getting lunch before I replace the art line in twenty-four. The tears are streaming down my face, and I am utterly sad, haunted by memories of my father’s nearly identical death ten years before. But somewhere a voice is also thinking: Maybe today I can sign out by three.

This splitting of attention is not abandoning our patients in their need; rather, it is enabling us to actually give the best to care to all who are in our charge. This insight has deep consequences for the role of empathy in our preparation of caring professionals. In the New Yorker last week, Paul Bloom noted that natural empathetic responses might cloud our professional judgment about where the greatest need lies. Wondering at the warehouse filled with unrequested plush animals that stands in Newtown, Connecticut today, the millions of dollars that rolled into that affluent community, while twenty million American children go to bed hungry each night, he reached for a similarly professional deployment of empathy:

 Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same values of those we love. That’s not a call for a world without empathy…the problem with those who are devoid of empathy is that, although they may recognize what’s right, they have no motivation to act upon it. Some spark of fellow feeling needed to convert intelligence into action. But a spark may be all that’s needed.

 Story-making and story-witnessing is where we stay in touch with that spark, and cultivate our capacity to catch fire. We need a more complex notion of empathy that both meets the world’s bottomless needs and gives us a structure within which to make complex prioritization decisions.

3. Self-care is other-care. To ably hear another’s story – to be capable of leaning-in to witness and hold another’s experience in your attending – requires commensurate self-care. In our institution’s Honors seminar on “Narrative and the Caring Professions,” we bring together future teachers, nurses, physicians, dentists, veterinarians, and allied health students in a joint exploration of stories of caring and professional formation. As we discuss their perceptions of the nature of the professions that await them, so many of them equate their capacity to care with their tolerance for self-denial: “I won’t have time to eat or go to the bathroom until 1:00;” “I’m not in it for the money, anyway”; “I’m just there to love those kids up.” Each of these statements echoes with the way that status is assigned and taken away in our culture to caring professionals, and they reveal a tendency among students to set themselves up as the unfailing source of energy and nurture: a tendency we know predispose young professionals to burnout. How best to support these students in treasuring the impulse to give and love that brings them to this work, while also exercising the self-protection and self-care that will guard them against exhaustion, exploitation, and compassion fatigue?

We start with the sharing of stories of others who have walked their path. Body of Work by Christine Montross and Educating Esme are two autobiographical narratives of professional formation – the first through a year-long gross anatomy class, the second through a first year of teaching. What vivid stories these authors tell of the importance of self-care and the consequences when it’s not practiced! And as we discuss their stories, we see the uncanny capacity of discussing someone else’s story to draw out one’s own. Students are amazed, then grateful, to see how their own profession’s deepest values can be better articulated by a member of another. Interdisciplinarity becomes the gateway to a deeper understanding of sustainable compassion as a human practice, not merely a professional one.

So, thank you, colleagues in caring, for teaching me my own work better than my own field could; for helping me reconceive an energetic narrative practice that embraces the ambiguous and the subjective as the engines of practice, not their obstacles. I am in your debt, and will work to strengthen the connections across our fields that our small collaboration has begun – to the good of both, and most of all for the students who place in us their confidence that we will train them up in the way they should go. Thank you.

I am thinking about Kermit the Frog this morning. Noble, long-suffering, earnest Kermit: puzzled by the ways the world around him makes life more complicated than it is, but committed to working within it anyway. This mix of energy, compassion, and bewilderment is what made him the anchor at the heart of The Muppet Show. He was the John Entwistle that rooted the whole chaotic thing to the ground no matter what blew up in rehearsal, ensuring that it would get to the stage ready for the big show regardless. That’s the core of our love for him. He’s the ultimate order Muppet, and while we love to laugh at the chaos compadres that surround him, we want to live in the world he facilitates.

Kermit’s on my mind because of what my Governor had to say this week about the need to “rebrand” my state’s storied University system, to make it more responsive to market demands and therefore better suited to meet the needs of my state’s young people (or, as he might have it, “emerging workforce”). Kermit had a brush with branding in his second feature film, when he finds himself in a marketing office on Madison Avenue and is asked for the opinion of the “common, ordinary frog on the street” regarding a proposed campaign.

“Ocean Breeze soap: for people who don’t want to to stink.” What do you think? Be frank.
(after a pause): I don’t like it.
(exasperated): you don’t?
Well how about, “Ocean Breeze soap: it’s just like taking an ocean cruise only there’s no boat and you don’t actually go anywhere?”
(pause): Seems a bit long. Have you tried something simple, like: “Ocean Breeze soap will get you clean”?
Wait a minute! Wait just a second! You mean, just say what the product does? No one’s ever tried that! It’s crazy! It’s nuts! We…love it!

UNC faculty (and others, nationally) have been trying to do exactly that – actually explain what we do, its value as it has been demonstrated on a much longer arc than the current market cycle, straightforwardly. It’s increasingly a hard sell, and to some extent, “our jobs are on the line.”

Ten years ago I was writing curriculum for an education nonprofit that worked aggressively to find its place in the market, and we (like so many) consumed Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great,” wherein he details how successful organizations develop their “hedgehog concept” (the thing that, in hard times, they curl up around and protect) at the intersection of what they care about most deeply, what they are equipped to be best in the world at, and what they need to drive their economic engine. He gave us lots of buzzwords (the “Flywheel Effect” stuck with me, and probably dates me when I drop it in conversation with business types). But as I recall he did not talk too much about “brand” as an outcome, as something that needed a place at the table when an organization was making its most essential, even sacred commitments about What It Would Do.

Of course not: Collins was about finding the place where passion, competence, and economic sustainability meet, not about capturing market share through recasting yourself into the mold of whatever the market is perceived as buying this year. In this he echoes my best career advice to any student who asks, and the wisdom of many others. Branding, as Kermit sagely senses, is about identifying the fear and insecurity within the consumer and convincing them – by any means necessary – that what you are selling will alleviate it. Currently, we are terrified as a people of economic insecurity (and other insecurity, but the two tend to co-occur, as I read history). As we have for decades, we displace our fears as a people onto the schools: the places that are supposed to fit our next generation to handle the world’s threats better than we perceive it did us. This fear makes us particularly vulnerable to branding efforts that cast schools as needing to produce graduates with measurable, marketable skills, and makes any entry into the marketplace that does not scan as “hard,” evidence-based,” “workplace-ready” as soft at best or dangerous / unpatriotic / wasteful at worst.

So educators are particularly vulnerable to the language arts of branding now. But it’s still not a fit for what we are doing. “Brand” is perhaps a necessary component of determining what we teach in our schools and universities – the third leg, the “economic engine” part – but it is not sufficient. “Brand” does not exhaust the responsibilities of education: to engage the student in her world, to help her locate herself within it in intersubjective relation with those that share it. These are concerns that include the necessity to support oneself and one’s family, but they do not end there. And the fact that asserting these self-evident facts about education’s role in existence makes me seem out-of-touch with market realities only attests to the success of the branders who have been hard at work to make it so. Their efforts do not change the essential truth.

To be clear, identifying and working with synergies is not necessarily craven. I am aware that my campus is committed to sustainability principles, and thrilled at how that alignment supports my own passion for helping new teachers avoid burnout and develop the capacities necessary to thrive in this work. But sustainability can’t merely be our “brand” at App: if that’s all it is, then we’ll twist what we do every which way to make it fit whatever we think folks are buying. If it represents what we are essentially terrific at, care deeply about, and can get us the financial stability we need to do our work, then full speed ahead. I think it can, and look forward to working on teacher sustainability issues in the context of institutional enthusiasm I anticipate we’ll enjoy.

But work on sustainability in education will inevitably lead to critique of the state and national principles upon which our ideas of teacher education are increasingly being built: policies that seek to eliminate job protections and tie work security and remuneration to student testing outcomes without concomitant enthusiasm for restoring sustainable working conditions, reasonable compensation, retirement and other social supports, commensurate with those accorded other professionals. The “Finland model” is exciting, indeed – wow, look at their results. Are we similarly prepared to select, train, and support our teachers at levels exponentially greater than we currently do? These are the types of questions that honest exploration of teacher sustainability will beg. It’s certainly about individual teacher capacities, but not only that – any more than student achievement is only about skilled teachers and not about the social and cultural milieu in which school happens.

Branding-speak tends to be short-sighted and ultimately cynical, in the “vote your fears not your hopes” sense: it rarely includes discussion of what really matters most in what we do. One would think, it should ultimately include discussion of how to protect the public educational trust from the vagaries of the market, not how to better tie the two together. The fact that the opposite is becoming commonsense in my state is beyond troubling. Like Kermit, I am puzzled by the world I awake to today. Like Kermit, I’ll continue working for change and speaking truth. Hopefully, the show will all come together by curtain time. It always does.

Image from Muppet Wikia, with thanks.

Being fevered notes in advance of my participation next week in my campus’s “Great Raft Debate,” a mildly gladiatorial affair in which I and my colleagues from other fields are to harangue and berate each other for our students’ amusement (and small edification, hopefully) in support of why our discipline matters most.

Why should education make the cut?

Consider the apple.

We have always had apples in education, it seems: the apple as the symbol of the profession, a leftover from turn of the century frontier schools when itinerant teachers were given gifts of fruit and vegetables by their students’ parents to supplement their unlivable salaries. How much has changed!

Not a thing, really. We still depend upon the largesse of those we serve to approve bond measures or grant us the security of a living wage, a margin of autonomy approaching that of the humblest civil servant, the security and respect we are taught not to feel entitled to. The apple, well-polished, is still offered to evoke in us a sense of obligation, gratitude for the acknowledgement of those we serve, thanks for noticing me, thanks so much. A gift offered that could be taken back, of course – could just stop showing up on our desk, if we don’t please.

But beyond all that policy muttering: what’s in an apple? What will this symbol of domesticity offer us on our desert island? By what lights should the discipline it represents be selected as the Thing We Bring, the thing that will best guarantee that what we most care about will live on as we rebuild?

Seeds and stems, is what. Seeds and stems.

Hear me out.

Education is not really about the What. Education is about the How.

Foul! you cry. As we are talking about it in the last years, education sure seems to be all about the What! What shall the children learn, and what shall we do to them to be sure they’ve learned it? Curriculum, the common core, is all we really hear or think about these days, as if education were really about how well-furnished your mind is at the end of the process, how much you’ve crammed in there and how well you can show you’ve got it. How many shiny apples in your basket, anyway? How high your scores, how fancy your degrees?

The truth is that What is secondary to How. Did you know the fruit of the apple – the shiny, sweet part, the part you see and polish and desire – isn’t really part of the plant? It’s a “false fruit,” by which botanists mean (as far as I can gather from Wikipedia) that it doesn’t actually come from the germination of pistil and stamen by a lascivious bee. It’s a by-product of that fertilization, is all, a fortuitous result. It doesn’t even grow out of the same place as where the fertilization action happens, doesn’t really serve any purpose for the furthering of the species, except as something tasty for a predator to eat and excrete and disseminate the seeds of.

The How is about seeds and stems. It goes like this.

First, the stem is the the thing without which there can’t be an apple. Everything that matters to the apple must come through this hard, dry little thing – doesn’t look like much, but without it there’s no getting anything else downloaded from the tree. Without it, offering the little false fruit all the sun and water and dirt in the world won’t matter. And see this little dried-out flower at the bottom? That’s what’s left of the blossom – shoved down there, hidden in this obscene little dimple, a birthmark apposite the navel that you’d just as soon forget. But without it? no fruit without it, no seed, no nothing. Giving tree indeed: the poor provider in that dreadful book ended up a stump, at least, something to sit on. This, this here – this is just a bit of grit to be picked from between your teeth, stowed down here at the bottom the better to pretend it was never needed.

And the seed, neglected in this disquisition so far and, lets face it, by all of us, always. The seed of course is what comes of the apple, eventually – what becomes its own tree, making its own apples. But did you know how profoundly its “own” the seed really is? Apples seeds are “extreme heterozygotes”, which means, quote: “rather than inheriting DNA from their parents to create a new apple with those characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents.” You can plant an apple seed and get apples, sure – but they will always be different from the apple that produced the seed. So different that commercial apples aren’t grown from seeds, because that would cultivate an unruly, heterogenous crop: they’re grown from grafts, short-circuits of nature that feed part of the tree back into itself to force it to make more of what it is. Actual creation, for the apple, is about deep self-abnegation: the forced willingness NOT to recreate yourself in what you create. As Sweet Honey in the Rock taught:

Your children are not your children
They are the sons and the daughters of life’s longings for itself
They come through you but they are not from you
And though they are with you they belong not to you

So what does all this tell me about education? Fierce lessons; essential lessons that we’ll need as we start again on our desert island.

Mainly that if we lead with the What – ANY What – we’ll just be stockpiling apples, putting our trust in something ultimately false, because it will be something ancillary to our truest and deepest being. We’ll have lots of lovely fruits to polish, certainly – some of them nutritive hopefully, some of them delicious. But they will all fade away in the light and wind of time, as certain as textbooks become irrelevant as soon as they are published.

Esteemed colleagues: your products are delicious and shiny. But they will not endure, and will not be what we most need to begin again. The apple teaches us that if we attend to our Hows, our Whats will take care of themselves. I alone up here represent the discipline of How first, What second. Education – those little old neglected seeds and stems that made all your false fruit possible. Take me with you. If you have me…God only knows what might grow. If you don’t…nothing will.

 image from Wikipedia, as above.

As both a product and a champion of public schools, I confess that I am sometimes coy about where I got my K-12 teaching experience. I think it’s because I know how teachers determine your credibility by a quick sniff test, and it starts with how you answer the question, “where did you teach?” No list of fancy degrees or slick professional development programs will rescue you from the wrong answer to that question, and my answer is, to many, wrong.

I taught in private schools, folks. “Independent” is the term of art, actually, in an effort to more specifically distinguish the values and goal of such schools. And, along the way, get some distance from Dead Poets Society, A Separate Peace, and all the public imaginings of private schools as places where blue bloods marshal social capital to the next generation in ivied halls. The fact is that I have never taught a day of public school in my life. I taught full-time 7-12 English, Spanish, and performing arts at The Field School in Washington DC from 1993-1999, with a few summer stints at Beauvoir (the National Cathedral Elementary School). Coming clean about that – and asserting that my experience is singularly relevant for future public school teachers – is what I am up to here.

What an odd way for things to play out. I had never set foot in a private school until the day I interviewed at Field. I was an Air Force brat, shuffled among elementary programs through several moves until Dad became a reservist in upstate New York and I spent seven years in their mediocre and underfunded public schools. My family moved as I started tenth grade, and I suddenly became the beneficiary of a spectacular (and spectacularly tax-based) public high school in Newt Gingrich’s district outside Atlanta. (The contrast between the schools is another post for another day: suffice to say the lunch options in my new high school cafeteria were more abundant than any restaurant I’d ever been to, and I think I saw my first BMW in the senior parking lot.)

This was how a career in education worked out for me. It wasn’t by design – if I could have figured out how to do it, I’d certainly have taught public, because that was the warp and woof of my own experience. But I decided to become a teacher late in my college career, and didn’t have time to pursue certification before finishing my BA. After spending two years in Spain I had passion for teaching language, and took two foreign language pedagogy classes that cemented that desire and helped me develop teaching chops. The first thing private schools “buy” with their independence from state certification requirements is the right to keep their own counsel about who is qualified to teach their students. In my case, Spanish fluency, a prestigious undergrad degree, two classes in teaching, and what my Dean of Faculty came to call a “put me in, Coach” attitude was enough for me to land my first job at funky little Field School.

I get a moment of uncanny thrill sometimes in my current position, wondering if what I mean when I think “school” is what my students think. Am I preparing my students for the correct world? I need to be deliberate about stuff like this, as all teachers do: we teach from our experience, after all, unless and until we make deliberate choices to do otherwise. What does my unconsidered experience have me “teaching from,” anyway? How does my experience contrast with those that await my teaching students?

In three ways, I think.

First, the nature of the teaching work itself. The level of autonomy I was granted to figure out how to organize and run my classroom, connect my students’ “real” interests to those of the curriculum, build the culture of respect and risk-taking that my students needed. I am worried sick about the long-term effect of a generation of teachers whose ultimate judgment about whether or not what they did worked has been usurped by external accountability measures. My doctoral work tried to understand how teachers negotiated tensions between their obligations to external pressures and their own inner compulsions to teach and connect. I found hopeful stories of that negotiation – successful examples of folks “rendering unto Caesar” what Caesar needed to affirm accountability and returning to their closed-door classroom to practice mostly uninhibited.

I wonder at how that world has changed in the eight short years since I completed that work. Indications are that it feels very different to teach now, and that the locus of judgment about whether or not they have succeeded is almost entirely abrogated to external powers. That’s a tragedy, for the teachers and their students. While I was of course observed and mentored and evaluated at Field, those accountability measures always returned to hopeful, “appreciative inquiry” models that sought to build my strengths on the way to ameliorating my weaknesses. Can that happen in a standard-six world? Can it happen in a PLC? I don’t know, but I know community is grown into, not assigned, and community is the ground in which new teachers thrive.

Second, the ways that community grew at Field were so essential to our development as teachers. Lack of space forced shared offices and classrooms; we were piled on each other like puppies most of the time, and the virtue of that necessity was a lot of idea-swapping, profligate cross-pollination between our classes. We spent a lot of down-time with each other on the way to meets, performances, practices – a lot of what Roland Tharp called “propinquity” and opportunities for “legitimate peripheral participation,” interactions that built competence and confidence in organic and highly-stable ways. A lot of happy hours down Connecticut Avenue in Dupont Circle, too; the social fabric of the place was intimately connected to its intellectual and social values, and it all added up to a marvelously supportive setting in which to get one’s teaching legs.

How can that community be emulated in a public school setting? More easily than we might first think: lots of hanging out, lots of opportunities for sharing and celebrating each other’s successes. I see the challenges of creating this community in the institutional spaces of our public schools, but it can be done. Leaders who value it make time and find resources for it, and it’s more a “low-load / high-rep” thing than an annual event anyhow. Competition is inimical to it; collaboration and celebration is conducive. Kirp’s description of school success in Union City, New Jersey barely made a ripple when it was published last month – perhaps because community-building and real, relationship-based accountability like what he describes doesn’t boil down to the bold action that reform seems to have to mean these days. But it’s what he’s talking about, and it’s what I experienced. It’s what works.

But the last difference has to be the expectations we have about what goes on in the classes themselves. I taught for six years in rooms with about fifteen students – and that was a big class. I was comfortable as heck in that environment: the great boon of my undergrad study was how much time I spent in small seminars, so I came to value the genuine back-and-forth of respectful, engaged discussion between instructor and students, students and each other. It’s What School Looks Like To Me.

My present classes are just small enough to be run as (admittedly aerobic) seminars, and I continue to be gobsmacked by how many of my students tell me ours is the first class where they’ve been given opportunity and expectation to have something to say to each other and to me. Students must know they are seen, heard, read, answered. What does it mean when so many of our future teachers come through their own public school experience and undergrad training in mostly large rooms, where their accountability for learning is more based on measurable outcomes than the dispositions developed through relationships with each other and with professors? I think I DO mean something different when I think of a classroom than many teachers do, and I think my idea – smaller, discussion-based. everyone seen and heard and attended to – is what we need. We need our teachers to develop these values and instincts for what well-administered classes look like: the buzz of intersubjective connection, not the well-regulated models of atomized experiences.

So, there are three places where my private school experience comes up against my public school commitments:

• the level of autonomy I expect teachers should be able to have as they grow into their practice;
• the depth and vitality of the school communities I think teachers should be welcomed into;
• the quality of the engagement that I think teachers should be engendering in their students’ experience, and the expectations for connection that I think they should hold of themselves and their students.

As I said, I think these three values represent our best aspirations for public education, and it is an indictment of our public school investments that we have been unable to commit the resources (physical and emotional) necessary to make them a reality. Bill Ayers stirred the rhetorical pot beautifully upon the President’s re-election, and is worth quoting here at length:

Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all…

In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).

Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

In so many ways, Field emulated the best of our public desiderata of what all children should have. The fact that not all our public schools do is an indictment of our civic priorities more than our private school culture – bake sales and bombers, mindless embracing of educational “reformers” bent on their own gain in heretofore closed markets.

I don’t repent of my independent school past. Rather, I seek to carry forward the values I learned to enact in private institutions into the public school setting, where the vast majority of our need lies. Good enough for the privileged, good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere.

Thanks to earthhouse.com for the image.

I don’t want to write about money. Would much rather write about how to help teachers thrive in their work, or how to bring them the frameworks other professions have developed for sustainability, or how teaching work is beautiful and understandable through our other experiences of beauty.

But here’s the thing about teaching in North Carolina: it’s a tough way to make a living.

That’s the inescapable reality, and it has been heading that way for the last several years. I’ll let the NCAE break it down:

North Carolina’s public education system continued its five year decline in the NEA Rankings & Estimates report released on Tuesday and now holds the 48th (out of 51, including DC) spot in both teacher pay and per pupil spending.

According to the study, North Carolina teachers earn an average salary of $45,947 annually compared to their national colleagues earning $55,418. North Carolina — once a leader in the southeast — is now ranked 11th among southeastern states only besting Mississippi in average teacher compensation.

However, Mississippi ranks above North Carolina in the per pupil spending category by investing $9,427 per student and climbed to 36th in national rankings from last year. North Carolina now spends $8,433 per student and is only beating Texas, Utah and Arizona.

North Carolina topped one list on the report as the state with the steepest decline (-15.7%) in teacher salaries from 2001-2012 after adjusting for inflation. (Contributing to the decline in pay includes the loss of ABC bonuses/”merit” pay, reduction and elimination of mentor pay, retirements of teachers earning higher salaries without being replaced, and other factors.)

We are reaping a whirlwind here: the inevitable piling-up of all the ways in which teaching work has become nearly impossible to do well in the current climate of measure-to-manage and drill-and-kill (here’s an articulate casualty). But also of the impossibility of North Carolina teachers organizing for their own self-protection, and their resulting vulnerability to the steady drip-drip offensive against the nature of the work.

Exhibit A: witness the speedy demise of the radical idea that knowing more about one’s subject and one’s craft lets you do better by your students. Bill Gates and his local friends question the value of graduate study for work that, in their eyes, seems simply a matter of following “best practice” instructions accurately. Who needs a thought in their head to do what they’re told?

The national swirl of suspicion of teachers as this generation’s welfare queens reached a peak with Waiting for Superman’s hateful, false, and well-produced broadside (and the latest effort from these folks happily died the death a bad movie should – no, I’m not linking to it). Attacks on organized teachers seemed irrelevant to our state’s non-organized workforce, of course – but the charter school rhetoric sure rang true, as we eliminated the cap on the number of charter schools in NC in 2011, opening the floodgate for a complete restructuring of our most cherished public institution under the flag of competition and market-based reforms. These changes are bad for access and equity, and lead to resegregation as well as a host of other ills (others have debunked the pro-charter school argument better than I, but the bunk is plentiful and toxic, so I’m pitching in best I can).

How about this? The most dangerous idea in teaching seems to be its most sacred truth: that we teach because we love the children. The sense of vocation I work to nurture in my students – a sense of calling and purpose, a deep knowledge that they are doing something crucial in the way that only they can do it – is regularly perverted as a rationale for denying them fair or livable compensation for doing it. If you love it, why in the world would you want to be paid for it? Witness this simpering example; the rhetorical gambit is everywhere, and is expertly debunked here.

The way these exploitations and systematic de-fangings align with old, seemingly intractable, gender inequities is clear and present. Most teachers are women; this issue is a gender issue, and “77 cents on the dollar” doesn’t fully reach the issue of teacher compensation, I don’t think. This week’s terrific history of feminism on PBS recalls for me Grumet and others’ explications of how the desire to be with kids becomes a liability in a culture that resiliently associates nurture with weakness and turns the deep desire to care among our (still) overwhelmingly female teacher force into a weapon used against them.

So many others are making this argument better than I can, actually. Here’s Dave Eggers in 2011 in the New York Times, bulletproof stats from the NEA, a heartbreaking but certainly typical vignette from the Huffington Post. It’s left to me today to fume and try to speak the truth I can best tell: that a sense of vocation must not be seen as an obligation to give up the best of oneself without hope for recovery. I am still troubled by The Giving Tree and its presence in the imaginary of many of my students as an icon of powerful, lasting love: the tree ends up a stump, folks. Is that sustainable practice?

More than half of early-career teachers in North Carolina are gone before five years are up. Certainly our issue is not only new teacher retention; attrition affects the profession at all levels, and the loss of an experienced teacher is a different and equally-damaging tragedy than the departure of a new one. But those are the folks I work with every day, so their plight most consumes me. Where do they go? Do they do the calculus of how little their most sacred impulses are valued and respond by leaving to seek a more amenable setting?

I yearn for a change of heart among policy makers in NC: a renewed understanding that public school teacher salaries are not a place to find needed savings. That the political absence of institutional power afforded teachers does not justify the steamrolling of their interests. Our state’s education leaders get this. Why don’t our legislators?

The first rumblings of similar changes to my state’s university teachers are being heard in the responses to the current UNC system strategic plan. Students of the history of educational policy see where things are heading, and many of us are not happy. The difference between our plights – among many similarities – is that we are disposed to organize and talk and write and be heard. Next month will see a state-wide conference (watch this space) to expose, decry, and organize against these moves; we’ll see its outcome. Teachers can’t do this kind of mobilization as easily, by law as well as by disposition, tradition, and culture. Who will speak for them? We hope to help them find voice to speak for themselves, of course – but we also should speak in their support.

I have a personal dog in this fight, as my kids are taught every day by excellent, committed members of the North Carolina teaching cadre. The people the students I’ll teach today hope to become. May they, and all my state’s teachers, not believe the hype that their best impulses can and should be exploited as the reason why they should not be paid their worth.

So: An ugly post for an ugly topic. (Here’s a beautiful piece on a similarly ugly topic, btw – so good, go read it). Now what?

image from opensecrets.org, apparently from bigstock; no infringement intended.

(This post might contain descriptions that are disturbing to a non-medical reader. I can’t really judge their effect, which is sort of the point. Caveat lector.)

In my five years doing curriculum work at a large state medical school, I saw unimaginable things which somehow became quotidian, part of the fabric of the day. Their strangeness only pops again in memory, looking back there from here. I’ve been hit by these memories a few times in the last month, probably because I am teaching the “Narrative in the Caring Professions” course again this semester, which takes many of its texts from medicine and medical education (especially Christine Montross’s excellent meditation on the role of gross anatomy in physician formation).

My office was in one of the older buildings. The med campus is a Habitrail of structures, built in the fits and starts of annual budgets and bond referendums and patched together after the fact by improbable tunnels and covered bridges. My building stood almost at the center; part of its oldest construction, a three-sided “C” of a building hidden behind the new Health Science Library wedged into the courtyard between its legs.

A surgeon colleague was also an historian, and she turned me on to a terrific history of the place, from which I learned that my office was directly beneath the original animal lab. Dogs used for research were exercised on the roof above my head.

There was a kerfuffle during my time there: the human anatomy lab was to be moved to its historic location at the end of our hall while its more modern and antiseptic home was closed for a few years of refurbishing. Suddenly, curriculum committee meetings were consumed with the practical questions resulting from that change: where will the students change out of their street clothes into the coats and cover-ups needed for the grisly business of dissection? Is the refrigerator in the hall by the entrance large enough – and reliable enough – to manage the storage of tissue samples that will be required? The staff in my office were concerned that the smell of formaldehyde would permeate everything, how the floor’s bathroom sinks would be left when they were used twice weekly by med students scrubbing up after being elbow-deep in cadaveric chest cavities. This is where we rinse our lunch Tupperware, after all. Oh – and where would they put their backpacks?

Maybe the most disturbing thing I saw, though, wasn’t gory or smelly in the least. It was the curriculum of the course that met right across the hall from me, which on some days would make study of several dozen lunch tray-sized Plexiglass slides. Each slide encompassed, I was told, a micro-thin slice of a human cadaver, on the transverse axis, like the way your wear your belt. I was told this was a sample set prepared and acquired at great expense – the preserving and cutting and mounting of such samples required very sharp saws, very precise measurements – and that the entire set, stacked one on top of the other, would yield a visible man perfectly sliced for inspection. I awoke this morning with a dream remnant of such a slide (thus the writing): a torso sample, I think, looking for all the world like a porterhouse steak when perceived straight on, organs and muscles and bone and fat offering topographies unrecognizable as human unless you knew what you were seeing.

This was all disturbing and shocking to me. Like my sink-concerned colleagues, I was an educator, not a physician. I had not been through the dissection ritual myself in my training, and was therefore not inured to the involuntary physical and emotion reactions to the presence of so much death: not trained do do things that, in another context, would be considered pathological. It really messed with me for a while.

I became worried about what I might bump into in the elevators coming in and out of the office, what gurney, what dolly, carrying what unimaginable horror. Any unexpected smell startled me during the semester lab was in session, and I made a wide berth around the corner of the building where it was located whenever I needed to go somewhere. I remember working to ape the tone of mild annoyance that my physician friends brought to the thing, as if the mudroom were locked and everyone had to leave their coats and boots in the hall. Inconvenient, but no more. In hindsight I see I was having a reaction to trauma, albeit a mild one, but at the same time I spent lots of energy on managing it, getting on with the day. Typing scope and sequence charts while pretending I was just in an office, nothing going on down the hall but more typing.

So why blog this horrorshow? I am not sure. Thinkers about the role of narrative in medicine note that there can a confessional nature to it – a desire among those who do and witness horrible things to tell their stories. Maybe for the prurient zing of it, maybe for absolution, maybe just to “process it” and make the unmanageable no-time of memory into reality by rendering it in the time and place of story. Probably all true here.

The main thing it has me thinking about is what we lose in the process of learning to do what we must for someone else’s gain. I am coming to see that the process of preparing to be of most use as a caring professional inevitably requires the putting away of – or at least changing of – some parts of who we were before beginning the transformation. To become allopathic physicians, regular humans must put off their native abhorrence of human gore, must learn somehow to objectify the structures of a body in every way identical to their own so that they may better regard it analytically, critically, diagnostically. And perhaps manipulate it in ways unimaginable to the layperson: rebreak an arm, re-open an infected wound. We give ourselves up to inhumanity, the better to practice humaneness, goes the logic.

It’s a logic that permeates K-12 education too. We must learn as teachers to detach from our assumptions about what what we are seeing in our students’ learning difficulties and be able to break our perceptions down into verifiable observations (trouble on reading comprehension quizzes, say), which we might account for through any number of hypothesized causes (attention issues? receptive language processing? dysgraphia? memory?) the better to choose interventions and accommodations. In education, we hope that dispassionate analysis of the outcomes of what we do leads to the sophistication of our hypothesis, and therefore more accurate selection of differentiation strategies. Put another way: we have to dehumanize the kid to see how she is really doing, unobscured by how she reminds us of our niece and therefore we are kind of sweet on her, because our sweetness will get in the way of what we have to do.

Even the specialized language of our tribe serves sometimes to distance and scientize. See how easily I slipped into it a few lines back? Shop talk like that is protective of the people who use it. The precision of technical language is of course enormously helpful, but we rarely acknowledge how we sometimes brandish it to obscure our own uncertainty about the causes of what we are seeing, murmuring big words to convince ourselves that we are competent to meet the challenge because we have done the reading. We hide behind our big words from the core truth of how little we can really know about what someone needs to be able to learn. We hope the big words will conjure certainty and precision and success for our efforts to support what, at the end of reckoning, remains the irreducibly singular and unknowable experience of learning for any single person.

Are we in education ever capable of horror toward the effects of our dispassionate gaze? We should be, I think – especially as we persist in the fantasy that by slicing the outcomes of our work thinner we’ll somehow be able to see more. Data-driven “best practices” and airtight cause-and-effect reasonings for instructional decisions blind as frequently as they reveal. Data and logic used compassionately, subjectively, in institutions that allow time and space and support for individual teacher attention to the needs of individual students: that’s the ideal combination, what we really need. We must subordinate the empirical finding (and subsequent indication for “best practice”) to the ultimate judgment of a well-trained, well-supported, well-respected teacher.

We’d expect no less for our physicians, or other caring professionals: we acknowledge they hold life and death, happiness and suffering, in their hands, and give them what they need to reckon it. But we’re increasingly willing to see our teachers as mere end-point delivery agents of products we force into their hands, and demand measurements of their effectiveness that mock the complexity of their task. This disparity of professional regard harms the professional, of course, but the damage to a generation resulting from this misguided approach to what teachers do is yet be calculated.

So let’s acknowledge the horrors that can accompany dispassion, and make space to hear the stories of what learning really looks like. Then we’ll use our energy best and meet the needs of our students; we’ll sustain our own practice with authentic connection, not the estrangement borne of trauma.

I stole my title from Marisa Silver’s terrific short story about trauma, which I originally discovered in the Maine Humanities Council’s excellent anthology Imagine What It’s Like. Image from somewhere online – sorry, I lost the attribution.