Teaching Again

July 25, 2024 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

All they did was ask me to do a 15-minute devotional at my church’s drama camp, 3rd-8th graders and young high school and college-aged counselors, but I felt like I was back in the classroom again. The camp leader said I should talk about perseverance and use our verse for the week–James 1: 2-4.

2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters,[ a] whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

I was ridiculously excited to put together this little lesson. Just like in the old days, I tried to consider my audience–a wide range of ages, more girls than boys, artsy theater kids, not easy to engage–a challenge. Yes!

The first think I did was choose a PowerPoint theme with some interesting graphics and give my talk a title. I chose a presentation template called Pheasant and called it “If at first you don’t succeed.” I know what you’re thinking, PowerPoint is so passe, how can that engage? What a corny title, how will that grab kids’ attention? I didn’t know how. I just went with my gut–just like in the old days.

First thing good teachers do is review, right? So, I reviewed the verse, emphasizing how perseverance helps us grow. Then, as an example, I did research on some young actors who went through adversity before they made their breakthroughs and settled on Millie Bobby Brown, who started trying to get commercials and roles at a very young age. She and her family were about to give up when she got the role of Eleven in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, for which she won a Screen Actors Guild Award. My thinking was that trying to get roles and failing would resonate with kids who the day before had auditioned for the little plays we would do at the end of the week. Not all of them received the roles they had set their hearts own. My strategy worked. This rowdy bunch of kids were quiet, listening, engaged.

Next came the question for the audience: Have you ever failed at something? Raise your hand. Many of them raised their hands? Give me one word to describe how you felt? The answers came–sad, depressed, bad, heart-broken, mad. Just as in my classrooms before, I wanted my talk to be interactive. I continued to ask questions of the group as we proceeded.

The camp leader had asked me to share a little about my background as a playwright and writer, so in this context, I decided to share about my failures–how in 40 years of working to be published I had about 30 short stories published and four plays produced at a community college. If that sounds like a lot, I said, it isn’t. After about ten years I quit counting my rejections. I had reached 200 by then and since then had had hundreds more.

By this time, I could have heard a pin drop. I had them! I told them that none of that mattered. That success as a writer, an actor, a musician, is in the doing. I told them that I express my heart through my writing and need to write. I can’t not write, I told them. The striving and the working to become better and better makes the tangible successes that much sweeter.

Now was time for the pièce de résistance

I showed a short video of when Heather Dorniden, now Kampf, raced in the 600m, fell flat on her face, got up and came back to win the race. This part of the talk especially seemed to speak to the older girls; some of them were athletes, some had seen the clip before. But all the kids were mesmerized. You can see the race for yourself:

I had done some further research on Kampf and found an interview where she explained in more detail about the race and some of her experiences, good and bad, that happened in her running career after that incredible race. When I explained Heather’s background and the victories and hardships throughout her career, the point was made. The last slide read:

I don’t know if those drama campers will remember my talk, but I will never forget how this old, retired teacher felt that familiar fire as I looked into those young faces and could see hope and inspiration there. No, I don’t want to go back to grading endless comparison essays in overcrowded online classes or deal with all the bureaucratic and political crap I had to put up with over the years, but I sure do miss that feeling.

It was good to get it back once again, even if just for fifteen minutes.

Please Don’t Be a Helicopter Parent!

July 13, 2024 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

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Twelve years ago, when my husband John and I took our daughter to freshman orientation at Converse College, then an all-women’s college, now a co-ed university, the administration, very wisely, oriented the parents as well as the students, together and in separate groups. When parents met with faculty, staff, and administrators, the first item on the agenda was viewing a little animated film about “helicopter” parents, you know, the ones who are overly involved in the lives of their children. These parents tend to be overprotective and cloyingly attentive, often micromanaging their children’s activities and decisions.

The video was followed by some tips for avoiding helicopter parenting. “Try,” said one administrator tentatively, “not calling or texting your daughter for the first week and limit contact after that.” I felt the collective gasp by the parents in the room. Even though, as an English instructor, I had been on the other end of helicopter parenting for many years, I felt a little quake in my heart. A week is a long time when I am used to talking with my kid almost every day, I thought. I like my kid. I want to talk to her.

But I knew the administrator was right. My daughter needed time to figure out things for herself, to feel the power of making her own decisions, good or bad, and the learning experiences that brings. To deny her that might satisfy me and keep me from worrying and empower me as the one she ran to with all of her questions–me, me, me–but that wouldn’t help her. So, as hard as it was, we kept our distance during that orientation week and thereafter. And guess what? She did just fine without us. SHE did more than fine, actually, even though she had to navigate some pretty rough waters, including loneliness, anxiety, and heartbreak, she also gained insight into herself, conquered some of her fears, and learned how to persist through it all.

Of course, we were still active in her life. We were fortunate enough to live close and were able to attend her recitals and other activities. I loved getting to hear her sing in choirs as well as operas and even watched her fence! She came home for special occasions, and we would go visit, often eating at her favorite place, the Monsoon Noodle House. We didn’t abandon her. When she needed help, she asked for it, and we helped her, but she rarely asked. She liked making it on her own, and we loved watching her mature.

If you are parents of college students, don’t miss out on the wonderful opportunities they have to grow by being too involved. Please! Stay out of their classrooms, leave their professors alone, let them fight their own battles, or not, and let them learn to solve their own problems. Not every obstacle should be removed. Not every path should be made smooth. If you have learned to listen to your children, you will know when you must step in to protect them. It’s scary, but it’s necessary.

And it’s normal.

Herein lies the problem of helicopter parenting, I think. It seems to have become much too common for parents to blame a child’s educational institution for normal human development. Simply put, your adult children, whether they go straight into the workforce or choose college, are going to be different than you imagined they would be. If you are one religion, they may choose another or at least a different denomination. Perhaps they will choose no religion at all. They will likely have a different lifestyle, outlook, or political ideology. This is natural.

It is also normal that loving parents will be concerned if they watch their children take different paths than they had desired for them, especially if they turn away from the belief system in which they were raised. However, I have seen students time and time again turn away from their parents and their values only to turn back again as they moved through the rebellious period of youth. That’s natural, too.

What isn’t natural and is inevitably harmful to students is when parents and some in society blame educational institutions, especially instructors and professors, for “indoctrinating” students one way or the other. Don’t misunderstand me. I know that there are many valid concerns about some educational institutions that stifle certain points of view or claim inclusion but only for certain races, religions, and ideologies. That is an argument for another day.

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What I’m saying is much more basic than that. Increasingly, instructors and professors face interference and even harassment by parents who wish to micromanage their offspring’s education. For example, it is common for parents to not only question course grades but also grades for individual assignments, not just failing grades either. Some parents, especially those of younger, dual enrolled or early college students will demand that their child get an A instead of a B and claim, with no evidence, some wrongdoing by the teacher as a basis for their complaint. Sometimes, parents will question material that has long been part of an instructor’s curriculum, calling it “woke” or claiming that it violates their family’s beliefs. I know of one faculty member who was reprimanded for doing something that some parent told some board member who told someone high in the administration. The faculty member never found out what she said or did but was accused and now has a reprimand on her permanent record.

Educational institutions should value all students and be inclusive of all, no matter their race, religion, gender, or ideology, but if any student has an issue with an instructor or professor, that student should be the one to approach the faculty member, not a parent, regardless of the student’s age. At the college level, parents have important support roles, but the day to day, course to course, grade to grade issues should be up to the students and their teachers. Furthermore, barring serious ethical concerns, the teacher should remain the primary authority in the classroom for the sake of all students’ healthy intellectual and emotional growth–the goal of any college education.

Distractions

May 26, 2024May 26, 2024 / Katie Winkler / 2 Comments

We suffer from distractions. It’s not only the high tech, although that is definitely a problem – our phones and computers and endless entertainment sources and open AI and, and, and. More than anything else, we are distracted by our concerns. No, our worries. Perhaps it makes us feel virtuous to worry, to endlessly bemoan the failings of others and how they are leading us all down the path that leads to destruction. After all, if we can distract ourselves with how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, maybe we won’t have to look into our own souls and search for the true sources of our problems.

Lord knows I’m guilty. If I worry enough about how this current election will affect education and talk about it enough with friends, then I can distract from the fact that I promised myself I would finish my teaching memoir this first year of my retirement and that I would work diligently on making the most use of the Virtual Playwriting Fellowship the Dramatists Guild Foundation awarded me.

Of course, I don’t call it worrying; I am “concerned,” so my worry becomes something good, right? My other distractions, including social media, are being used, I tell myself, to help raise awareness and guide people toward good things. And it is good if I stay focused, but if I’m honest, I don’t. I start out with those good intentions and slip on down the road to you know where.

In Book XII of C. S. Lewis’s great satiric epistolary novel, The Screwtape Letters, the uncle demon Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood about the value of distractions to keep the new Christian, no longer in danger of the fires of hell, from being too effective.

He says:

You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

So, whether it be pleasure or worry that distracts us, in the end all that will matter is that we have not acted as we should have or wanted to. It is right that we be concerned about extremist candidates running for state superintendent, about school board meetings becoming violent, about indoctrination coming from the right or left, about unwarranted censorship or the lack thereof, but it is wrong of us to see problems where there aren’t any or to let our fears and worries distract us from what you (talking to teachers now) are supposed to do–TEACH.

Until the last two years of my teaching, I worried constantly about ambiguous mandates coming down from the administration. Often, they didn’t apply to me but nevertheless distracted from my teaching. I would get upset, argue, discuss whatever it was endlessly with my colleagues in their offices. The thing is I didn’t need to worry because most people in the administration were simply passing on what had been mandated to them, having little hope that, for example, yet another restructuring of developmental education would fix the problems that the previous restructuring just a few years before had not fixed or made worse.

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All my “concern” did not help me teach those developmental classes effectively. The only thing that helped was buckling down and embracing any sound ideas and finding ways around the silliness, or simply ignoring it. For example, when the state mandated that instructors should not use fiction or essays written in first-person to teach reading and writing, I was flabbergasted, ready to fight this nonsense tooth and nail at the conference I went to explaining the new curriculum. However, low and behold, almost every session at the conference included sample readings that were either essays written in fir st person or fiction. These teachers were fantastic, and their lesson ideas were great. I adopted some of them. No one seemed to notice these teachers were ignoring the mandate, including the people who had cobbled together the new curriculum. I didn’t have to fight.

Now that I’m retired, I can see that I wasted a lot of time and caused myself undo stress by allowing myself to be distracted by administrative bloat and broad, ambiguous criticism. All I can do now is say to young educators, please don’t be like me: don’t turn your teaching world upside down with every pedagogical or andragogical wind that blows. It’s not worth it. Pick out the good ideas and incorporate them, change when you need to, learn new technical skills that enhance your teaching, use old ideas that have worked for you before, and trust yourself.

Teaching is a craft. You should always be open to improving it; however, teaching is also an art, most successful when it is creative and engaging, when it takes risks, when it moves onto the fringes and beckons students into the glorious realm of ideas.

Education should begin with education

February 29, 2024 / Katie Winkler / 1 Comment

I’ve probably written this in a post before, but it bears repeating. One of the best teaching professors I ever had said, “The goal of any good teacher is to become increasingly unimportant.” To me, that meant teachers are successful when they help students learn how to be independent, critical thinkers–self-starters who can be trusted to troubleshoot and problem solve yet still ask for assistance when needed–people who aren’t afraid of a challenge or obstacles or even failure. My goal was to give my students tools to meet those challenges and overcome obstacles, to learn from failure and become resilient. I wanted to equip students for all of life, not just work.

But here in North Carolina and elsewhere in our country, education has become more of a means to an end. The general attitude seems to be “get those general ed classes out of the way” (I heard that ALL the time). They seemed to say to me, “Those classes, especially English and math, are just annoying steps a person must take to be pumped into “the pipeline” and “enter the workforce.” Gaining an education that helps people live better lives, no matter what they do for a living, or if they choose to stay home and raise children or pursue their art, has been replaced with training for a particular, specific field with a goal of employment, not life-changing education.

So many of the intangibles that occur when students are truly engaged in an educational experience are lost when the emphasis is on training for local, narrowly focused workforce development based on current trends that will shift and change with every economic bubble that bursts. In the last few years of my teaching, I yearned for the days when so many of my students actually enjoyed going to school, who relished simply learning something they never knew about before. They built relationships with their classmates, studied and ate meals together, listened to music, played video games between classes and had spirited discussions in and outside of the classroom. I remember the days when students would work together, pouring hours of work into extra-curricular activities like producing a play, some of them spending hours in rehearsal on top of all of their classes and after school jobs, but they did it because they wanted to–they had a passion for it, even if they had other long-term vocational plans.

There was a time at the college where I taught when all students in the college transfer program were required to take a literature class. There they had a chance to stretch themselves by reading complex texts that are at the foundation of not only ours but the world’s culture and government. Now, a student can get either an Associate of Science or even an Associate of Arts degree without having to take a literature course at all. How can that be?

In addition, more and more in our community colleges, three disturbing trends have taken hold–asynchronous online learning for developmental English students, high school students earning high school and college English credit for the same college-level class, and so-called accelerated classes. I helped to develop some of these courses and taught them, so you would think that I would be a proponent, but in my defense, I was misled in all of these cases into thinking the situations were temporary or that only advanced students would be taking these classes. I feel like a fool. That’s an understatement.

I am mortified.

In my and the college’s defense, the developmental co-requisite English class that I had developed, which was part of North Carolina’s third iteration of developmental education in less than a decade, was not intended to be an online program. The plan was that all developmental classes be taught in the classroom. Then, in March of 2020, when we were soon to roll out our new co-requisite English classes, the pandemic hit. All classes, including the co-requisite English courses, were forced to go online.

It didn’t go well.

Come back soon and I’ll explain.

Why Certify K-12 Teachers?

February 9, 2024February 9, 2024 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

In North Carolina, as in many other states, those who teach in kindergarten through twelfth grade are required to meet certain qualifications to teach in the public schools. Being a certified teacher means

Receiving a bachelor’s degree, including certain courses in education, depending on the institution. Appalachian State University, for example, requires 44 credit hours of general education for its English Education (secondary) degree, plus 24 hours of education courses, including
Completing, in addition, three credit hours of a foreign language, and of course, to teach English a student teacher must have a significant number of courses in the subject area, 43 credit hours, including six hours of British literature, six hours of American literature, six hours of world literature, three hours of Shakespeare, three hours of literary criticism, genre studies, or creative writing, nineteen hours in language, writing, and pedagogy, as well as two cognate courses, Psychology Applied to Teaching and Reading Instruction in the Senior High School, for a total of 120 credit hours. All of these courses require a C or better to count towards the degree. The average cost of a degree at App State is close to $48,000.
Passing two national standardized tests including the Praxis Core Academic Skills Test (required to enter most education programs) and the Praxis II test for every subject area to be certified. These tests are administered by the very large, supposedly non-profit Educational Testing Service (ETS), which has been widely criticized for the monopoly it holds on testing for teachers and students and for its continued non-profit status despite its huge profit margin (OlixAlex) Potential teachers pay out of pocket $90 to $210 for each exam.
Maintaining Licensure is also required. Every five years North Carolina English teachers must have completed either eight Continuing Education Units (CEUs) or 80 clock hours of professional development to maintain their certification. Most teachers pay for CEUs out of pocket.

Question for the North Carolina Public School System:

Why does North Carolina require certification for K-12 teachers when there are two major groups of non-certified teachers, not counting private school teachers, who can teach freely in North Carolina but are not required to have the same qualifications as K-12 public school teachers?

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The first group I will discuss is parents. Here are the requirements to teach children between seven and sixteen in a North Carolina homeschool, according to the North Carolina Department of Non-Public Education Homeschool Handbook:

A high school diploma or its equivalency, no minimum GPA is mentioned.
A notice of intent to operate a homeschool
Operation under either Part 1 or Part 2 of Article 39 of the G.S. 115C as a religious or
non-religious school
Operation of the school on a regular schedule for at least nine calendar months, excluding
reasonable holidays and vacations. Who checks this?
School disease immunization and annual attendance records for each student, although the parent is the one maintaining these records and there’s little oversight
Administration of a nationally standardized achievement test administered annually to each student. Parents get to choose which test from a recommended list, and not all of these exams require a proctor. There is no minimum score required.
Notification to DNPE when the school is no longer in operation

That’s it, folks! Oh, the state encourages those who homeschool to talk to professional educators from time to time, but this, of course, is voluntary, because, I mean, what do those certified teachers know?

The other group that is not required to achieve and maintain certification is community college instructors teaching dual-enrolled students. I was a relatively rare community college instructor who had taught at the high school level and been certified to teach grades 6-12. At one time or another I was certified to teach English and German in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Colorado, and North Carolina. Although instructors must have a minimum of a master’s degree in their subject area, few of them have had education courses or have studied adolescent psychology and classroom management because most of them never dreamed, not older faculty anyway, that they would be forced to teach 14-, 15-, and 16-year-old high school students.

And yet, more and more, not only are community college faculty expected to teach high school students within their classes on campus, but also online classes, and even in the high school itself. That’s right. More and more full-time college instructors are expected to leave the college campus and go to the high school to teach high school students exclusively, regardless of their level of training, experience, and comfort working with large groups of young teenagers in a high school environment. Believe me, teenagers in groups can be intimidating and even cruel. Not everyone can handle it. I couldn’t.

That’s one of the reasons I left teaching high school and got a job at a community college where I was happy until I was forced to teach large groups of young teenagers again. I retired early for a lot of reasons: teaching more and more high school students who were not prepared academically or emotionally for college-level work was one of the big ones. Don’t even get me started on the pressure from parents and administrators to lower academic standards for high school students.

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One-on-one or in groups of two or three, I did just fine, they did just fine, especially if the parents allowed the students to navigate the course as a college student should, without interfering. I love teaching teenagers under those circumstances. However, I know my strengths, and teaching groups of teenagers is not one of them. Dealing with parents, no matter how well-intentioned, is also not one of my fortes. However, it didn’t matter how many times I talked to the administration about how faculty were more and more frustrated with teaching high schoolers in large numbers and having to go to the high school to teach. Because the college is making money, because high schools and parents are saving money, this dubious educational process continues. In the end, it’s the high school students who lose sometimes two years of life experience they could have had learning to be independent thinkers if society would only think about the students first and find better ways to lower the costs of higher education.

Do you see what the problem is? It’s the incongruity. The state puts so much emphasis on testing and licensure, so much seeming concern about the qualifications it has for teacher education. “We only want the best, fully vetted teachers for our kids,” they opine. Except when it’s politically or socially inconvenient for the powers that be to have standards and fully vet the teachers. Or fully pay them.

Side Note: Of course, certification isn’t the answer either. Little supervision happens with any licensure program because it’s mostly bureaucratic hoops to jump through to provide data so politicians, school administrators, and the public can pretend they care about the quality of instruction. In reality, very few people truly care about the quality of education students receive, says the cynical retired community college instructor.

I can see the political gears turning: “Oh, I know, more people are mad at the schools and teachers than ever. They think their kids are being indoctrinated, so let’s take money away from the public schools that require teacher certification and give it to parents so they can start homeschools that have few standards, where the “teacher” only has to have a high school diploma or equivalent and the students have no minimum score to reach on a yearly national exam that may or may not have an outside proctor to administer it.”

And then there are the dual enrollment programs, Career and College Promise in North Carolina, Again, because it’s convenient and saves money, got to save the money even if it is bad for education, let’s just throw our oh so important teacher education courses out the window and toss our unprepared college instructors into the high school classroom, those who never planned to teach high school and often resent having to teach an age group that they may not have the aptitude, or attitude, to teach.

Oh, we’re so worried about those big bad liberal high school teachers out there that we want to pull our kids out of the public school and homeschool them, but by golly, if I’m gonna save some bucks on the kid’s college education, then let the indoctrination by those free-wheelin’, gender pronoun talkin’ professors begin.

Or not.

“If I don’t want my 15-year-old kid, who is going to bypass her first two years of real college, reading To Kill a Mockingbird, then I’ll just march down to that college and complain to the president.” Or “I don’t want my child feeling bad about slavery, so I’m just going to ask the professor not to make my baby read that slave narrative. The teacher just has to give him an alternate assignment. I mean, we just skipped all the history and literature that made us feel icky when we homeschooled him, and he still graduated.”

Of course, he did. Aren’t you so proud? Let’s just see how everything pans out when your baby wants to become a teacher (you should talk him out of it) and has to pay for and take the Praxis I exam and pass with a minimum score in order to get into the education program. Of course, I hear there are lots of Praxis prep courses he can take, only $399–a steal.

Banned or Challenged?

February 1, 2024February 1, 2024 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

Okay. It’s time for all sides in the book banning debacle to simmer down. If people would just chill, the world would be a better place. (And I am the chief non-chill person, so I’m talking to myself here, too.) I do think that people throw around the word “banned” a bit too freely, especially where school classrooms and libraries are concerned.

Take Florida, for example, where people are justifiably concerned about House Bill 1467 that requires extensive review of classroom materials by members of school boards, most of whom are not educators nor librarians with no training in curriculum development. It also requires principals to take on onerous clerical responsibilities for materials. In addition, only certified librarians, who are already certified in Florida, must go through further training on what is considered “appropriate” before they can review material and if they do not comply completely with the new law, then they risk being disciplined or removed from their positions.

Therefore, the decision by some Florida school districts has been to remove any book that could possibly be considered inappropriate until the librarians can be trained, or indoctrinated, into seeing a book the way those of a particular political persuasion sees that book. On the other hand, people, again justifiably so, are upset when they read headlines about books being removed from the shelves and see photos of those empty school library shelves.

But, here’s my thing, those books that are being pulled from the shelves, they haven’t been banned. They are being pulled for review. Now, I know I don’t know nuthin bout the running of the government and I’m just a little ole retired English teacher, but I’m just gonna say it. This Florida law is stupid. The way I read it is that for political purposes, the Florida legislature has passed this law to placate extremist folks of all kinds, many who could not care less about the true education of children, which involves the continual development of their ability to discern what is right and true and good. Think John Milton’s great speech on censorship, the Aeropagitica.

In reality, all this bill is doing is creating a bureaucratic, unenforceable mess. Already, teachers don’t have enough time in the day to actually teach students much of anything, much less form relationships with them so teachers can match instruction to the individual student’s needs. Librarians don’t have time to lead students in instruction on how to complete research or help them find books that they WANT to read or encourage them to love reading. How is a school board that meets once a month, is not compensated for their time, and more than likely does not have the knowledge of curriculum for all of the different subjects, with usually no training in determining grade level, how are they supposed to review ALL instructional material for the school? AND as I understand it, the law indicates that school boards must do this review in public and allow for public comment and input. It’s a ridiculous notion to think that compliance with this law will be possible.

This is one reason why everybody needs to chill. This is bad law. What needs to happen is people standing up and having a conversation about why it’s bad and challenging it.

Or not.

Perhaps I’m cynical. Perhaps I’m bitter. So, take my words with a grain of salt, but I just don’t think many people really care. In the end, the outrage on both sides will pass and teachers will be stuck with more rules to follow, forms to fill out, evaluations to be made, everything to take them away from what should be their focus, explaining, mentoring, encouraging, assessing, remediating–teaching.

To me, all of the bluster is intended to make people feel like they care about the education of children. To show that they are a true believer in either a religious or secular sense. “See, I go to school board meetings and speak out about showing pornography to our kids.” “Look at me! I go to school board meetings to speak out about freedom and against censorship.”

But the teachers and administration need to chill, too. There’s just too much reactionary activity on all sides. Florida passes a law. The admin and some teachers are worried about being sued or losing their jobs. I know there might be a chance of that happening, but life is risky. Look, I’m not trying to make light of that fear, but is a job at a school that consistently makes you go against your conscience really worth having?

Teachers, look at your situation. How likely is it that you will lose your job? How many times in your career has your job been threatened because of what and how you teach? I know there are some, but it is kind of like a police officer using a gun–many officers go through their whole career never firing their gun except on the firing range. A 2016 Pew Research Center study sponsored by The National Police Research Platform found that only 27% of officers fired their guns while on duty.

It seems to be even rarer for a teacher to be fired for cause. A fact check by 74 indicates that only 2.1% of American public school teachers are fired for cause, mainly for incompetence, not for their ideology, not for what they are teaching. I couldn’t find separate statistics for those directly fired because of the books they have on their shelves and in their curriculum, but it’s less than 2%.

I would never tell a teacher what to do, but I would encourage teachers everywhere at every level–stand up for yourself, stand up for what you believe, stand up for freedom of thought and against censorship. At the same time, admit when a book is inappropriate for your students. Avoid feeling threatened when a parent challenges a book. It’s their right. At the same time, encourage parents to come to you when they have a question about something you’ve said or about a book or some other aspect of the curriculum instead of going immediately to administration.

If you are an administrator or a school board member or a parent, please don’t leave the classroom teacher out. Ask them what’s going on. Have real discussions face to face with the teacher, instructor, or professor. Understand that what a student says about what a teacher says and does is not going to give anyone a complete picture of what is really happening in our classrooms. However, talk to our students about what is happening with book bans, challenges, and removals. They might surprise us with what they are able to “handle.”

So, let’s try not to overreact. Instead of leaping to review every book for any remote perception of something wrong, or more than likely to make our big important political statements, why don’t we allow teachers to make their own judgments while parents make theirs, recognizing that sometimes all we need to do is talk together about books and ideas and feelings, even if they make us uncomfortable. Sometimes, that’s when real education begins.

The Power of the Expert Interview

January 19, 2024 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

I started requiring interview reports with local experts early in my career teaching freshman composition as part of the students’ major research project. I still think it is one of the best ways to help students focus their research. In more recent times, it has thwarted plagiarism and an overdependence on the internet for research. But the biggest reason I always leaned towards a local interview is that it helped students become more enthusiastic about their projects.

I have written about my “process over plagiarism” approach before and included the example of my student from a poor background who became excited about his project after interviewing a florist at the Biltmore Estate, but I have numerous other examples of how students have benefitted greatly from interviewing a local expert.

There’s the time a non-traditional age student and mother wanted to write about breast feeding in public (this seems like a non-issue, but this was over a decade ago, and I live in the Deep South, nuff said). She was a great student and had a good, balanced argument supporting the importance of breast feeding and why women who choose to breast feed in public should not be shamed. For her interview, she contacted the director at the La Leche League in our county. The student was happy to report that not only did she come away from the interview with a more focused topic, she also received valuable print materials to use as sources, made important contacts with experts, and walked out with a job! That’s right, this pre-nursing student was getting help with her research paper as well as gaining invaluable experience.

Another student wanted to focus on forensics (I got a lot of that when CSI was at its peak of popularity), but she was having trouble finding someone to interview. I suggested she reach out to the county coroner, which she did. The coroner turned out to be a woman who was particularly interested in what could be discovered about cause and time of death by looking at skeletal remains. My student met her at her office in the county courthouse where the coroner shared book titles with her and allowed her to take notes and make copies from texts on her shelf. She also showed the student samples of bones, explaining what she could determine from examining them. The student narrowed the focus of her research paper and at the same time found a new interest in a career as a forensic anthropologist.

One of the most interesting stories of the face-to-face interview I had was with a student who wanted to do his research paper on Habitat for Humanity in our county because he was opposed to the organization, thinking the group in our area discriminated in favor of the Hispanic population. My student was a non-Hispanic and of a non-traditional age. His opinion at the beginning of his research was that too much aid was going to Hispanic people to the detriment of the white population. You may be surprised that I allowed the student to write on the topic; however, I warned him that he should not write about it unless he was not willing to change his mind if he found that his assumptions about the project were untrue. He agreed. It was risky but after talking to him, a risk I was willing to take. Sidebar: Being a good teacher involves taking calculated risks. It doesn’t always work, but it did that time.

I can honestly say that in all my years of teaching, I have never seen a person so completely change after one interview. The thing is my student didn’t just interview one person who worked for Habitat for Humanity. Because he was a carpenter, he felt that the best way to find out what was really going on was to volunteer to work on a Habitat for Humanity project house within the Hispanic community of which he was suspicious. When he came to class after his first volunteer experience, he had a big smile on his face and admitted to me with no hesitation that he had been so wrong.

The idea of “sweat equity,” where the person who will receive the house works alongside those who have volunteered their skills, strongly appealed to my student’s work ethic, and he was impressed at how hard the people benefiting from the program worked on the house. After working with and talking to the future homeowners, he was convinced that Habitat for Humanity was an organization that gave a helping hand, not a handout. He became a long time Habitat for Humanity volunteer after that. One interview assignment had changed his attitude, and his life!

Of course, not every interview has been a life-changing experience for a student, some were actually complete duds, but students learned from negative experiences as well. They also learned how to prepare appropriate questions, contact someone they didn’t know, meet with that person, record answers, and summarize the interview in a report, then integrate that information into their paper.

Even if students failed to satisfy the requirements of the assignment, I was alerted to the student’s difficulties and often able to avert problems with the researched essay itself. I would often address these issues in the student conferences that I held before the students began working on their rough drafts.

More about student conferences soon.

Quit Dissing College!!

November 27, 2023November 29, 2023 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

Poor college!!! Seems like every Tom, Dick, and Henrietta is taking a pot shot at you these days. I know, I know, you can be expensive, especially if people get sweet-talked into taking on college loans (Don’t do it unless you absolutely have to!). Also, some classes and professors will be really sucky at your place. People can be downright mean, too. Plus, students can get in a lot of trouble given the kind of freedom that you bring. Don’t forget, you forced me to question my core beliefs. Yes, I didn’t abandon those beliefs, but admit it, I did question them, loudly and a lot.

But…

Is it just me, or did you, along with a supportive family and friends, help me find my way through my late teens and early twenties? Did you help me forge positive, meaningful relationships with people from other cultures and countries with varying backgrounds and values? I think it was you who qualified me for a fulfilling career as an English and German teacher at the high school and college level. During my working years, you helped me provide a strong high school education for my child and made it possible for me and my husband to pay for her now debt-free education (two degrees). You allowed me to contribute to a pension plan that means I can enjoy a financially secure retirement.

Because of you, in undergraduate school at a Christian university, I traveled to Europe for six weeks, studying German and history. I visited West Berlin when it was still trapped within a wall, but somehow still free because of what my country, along with England and France, did for that city. I laid hands on the graffiti-laden free side of that wall and was thankful to be a citizen of a nation that saw the value in maintaining the democracy of a country with which it had so recently been at war.

Because of you, I visited Christians in East Berlin who were trapped outside the wall by an oppressive communist regime that would not let them worship freely. Yes, older people could go to church, but their every movement was monitored by the Stasi, the East German secret police, and younger people were prevented, by law, from attending church. And yet, in those few hours in the East, I witnessed the bravery of those who longed for freedom–an old woman who shook the hands of every student and said in broken English, “Tell them we have no freedom here. Tell them we have no freedom here. Tell them we have no freedom here.” The young people in their teens and twenties who traveled two-by-two just to meet, in secret, a group of American Christians, tell them their stories, and fellowship with them.

Because of you, I was able to spend the second half of my German trip in Tübingen to visit my brother who was studying theology there. I lived in the international dorm and traveled into the city, learning the mass transit system (new to me), eating at the Mensa (student cafeteria), visiting the old castle where my brother preached his first sermon to an intimidating crowd of professors, and sitting in on lectures about biblical archeology, some of which I could actually understand! We punted flat boats on the Neckar River, took walks into the forests, and had picnics with my brother’s friends. We took a train to Munich to hear The Rolling Stones at the Olympic Stadium and hitchhiked the way back (not recommended these days but safe back then).

Only because of you could I have afforded this trip. You didn’t pay for it outright, but you supplemented it, enriched it with quality faculty members who had the knowledge to plan our trip in order to give us the best educational and personal experiences possible. I also learned how to work for what I wanted, taking on two jobs and saving to raise the funds.

I had so many other wonderful experiences during my college years because of the support you offered, and I have gotten so much more out of my experiences since then because of you, but you also gave me a chance to make a living doing what I love to do–teach. The data shows that you give many people that opportunity–people with a bachelor’s, master’s, professional, or doctoral degree still make more on average AND have lower unemployment than those with a two-year degree or less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics using 2022 data. You give so many of us so many opportunities we wouldn’t have without you.

I know you’re not perfect. Far from it. You have so many problems that more and more people are saying you’re not worth it. But you are!! Even though I realize you are not right for everybody–my own husband went to trade school to study x-ray and ultrasound technology, which has led to a great career for him. But for me, you made the difference despite the drawbacks. College, you have enriched my life more than I can say in one brief post. I can keep writing about you and the lessons you taught for at least the length of one book.

Oh, I think I will.

How about that for a segue? I hope to finish the rough draft of my educational memoir “Lessons” by the end of the year. I will keep you updated about the progress and maybe spin some more tales as I’m working on the book.

Also, the journal I edit and publish, Teach. Write., is open for submissions until March 1. The 2023 Spring/Summer edition is to be published on April 1. See the submission guidelines at teachwritejournal.com.

AI and the Changing Composition Classroom

November 21, 2023 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

Many instructors are fearful about artificial intelligence and what it will do to student writing in freshman composition classes. I understand their concern, especially with the recent announcement about changes in Open AI’s leadership; however, it seems to be clear that AI is here to stay and is quickly changing the school and workplace landscape. Composition instructors, therefore, have a choice. Fight a losing battle or change the way they teach so as to meet the needs of students and their future employers.

If I were still in the classroom, I would seek to use AI in constructive ways. Indeed, AI may prove to be a boon to overloaded, overworked, and overwrought composition teachers, helping them deal with the heavy courseloads they are given. The answer, as indeed in most things, is engagement. Have a curious and playful attitude when using AI in the classroom, discussing the ethical implications along the way.

One assignment I thought might be useful is to introduce a common topic that students in general might find relevant to their lives. Work together as a class to come up with one or two paragraphs produced by Chat GPT. Then, discuss the positive and negative aspects of the paragraphs. Also, teachers might want to pursue a discussion of the ethical considerations of students using AI. When would it be appropriate to use it? When would it be harmful? Why would it be counterproductive to submit a purely AI-written essay in any college classroom?

I asked Chat GPT to come up with a couple of paragraphs on the topic of pros and cons of mandatory classroom attendance for college students. At first Chat GPT just gave me lists of pros and cons, which seems to be its favorite style of writing, so I asked it to write the pros and cons in paragraph form. Here’s what it gave me:

College Classroom Attendance: Striking a Balance

The debate over mandatory attendance in college classrooms revolves around finding a delicate equilibrium between engagement and autonomy. On the positive side, compelling students to attend classes can create an environment conducive to active learning. In-class discussions, real-time feedback from professors, and collaborative projects thrive when students are consistently present. The communal aspect of the classroom, where ideas are shared and debated, contributes to a rich educational experience. Furthermore, mandatory attendance fosters a sense of responsibility and discipline, essential skills that students carry into their professional lives. The structure imposed by attendance policies can guide students in time management and the establishment of a routine, skills that are beneficial beyond the college environment.

However, the cons of mandatory attendance are not to be overlooked. College is a time for individuals to explore their independence and learning styles. For some, this involves engaging with course material independently, through readings, research, and self-directed study. A rigid attendance policy may stifle this autonomy, impeding students from developing the self-discipline needed for lifelong learning. Additionally, external obligations such as work commitments or family responsibilities may clash with a strict attendance policy, putting undue stress on students. In such cases, the emphasis on attendance becomes a hindrance rather than a facilitator of learning. Moreover, there’s a risk that attendance policies incentivize mere compliance rather than genuine intellectual curiosity. Students might attend classes to fulfill a requirement, but the focus on attendance metrics does not guarantee a meaningful engagement with the subject matter. Striking the right balance between encouraging attendance and respecting individual learning styles and circumstances is a nuanced challenge for educators.

I would hope some of the following points would come up in our discussion:

Paragraphs are well-written with few writing errors.
A strong thesis statement begins each paragraph.
The paragraphs are well-organized and uses effective transitions.
The paragraph is logical and makes good arguments for and against mandatory classroom attendance.
One issue is the phrase “there’s.” I teach my students to avoid contractions and the use of the expletive “there is.”
The diction in general is too formal and sounds rather pretentious for a college-level paper. Really need to get rid of “incentivize” in the second paragraph. Yuck!
The paragraphs need to be fleshed out with specific examples and details, preferably from the writer’s own experience, some things that show the pros and cons more clearly and make the paragraphs more interesting to read. With good examples, these two paragraphs could be the basis for an entire essay.
Use this opportunity to talk with students about the importance of developing their own unique voice.

Another great thing to do would be to see if any students disagree with Chat GPT. What do students think about the logic presented in these paragraphs? Encourage students to “argue” with Chat GPT or “defend” it. Maybe have a classroom debate about mandatory classroom attendance. What ideas did the classroom come up with that Chat GPT didn’t include?

Another idea is to help students brainstorm ideas about topics that they are interested in, a process that is not always easy, I found. But asking relevant questions like how to pay for college without going into debt or managing mental health without medication might spark a student’s interest and inspire them to THINK FOR THEMSELVES.

How about even being brave and venturing into controversial topics, like the difference between banning and challenging books in public schools, transgender rights, universal health care, and Black history studies. Yes, I know, it can be scary, and administrators may not thank you, but remember that college is meant for adult learners, many of whom are already wrestling in the real world with all of these topics. Furthermore, using AI may help remove some of the fallacious reasoning some students use when writing about sensitive topics. In fact, try using Chat GPT to start a discussion about fallacies of logic.

The main idea is to get them to realize that all good writing needs their real-life experiences and their own critical thinking to add interest, for the reader, sure, but especially for themselves because writing that the writer doesn’t care about will be dry as toast and not worth anyone’s time. Give students confidence in their own ideas through lively, mediated debate, and then ask them to write, by hand, if possible, right there in front of you.

Photo by William Fortunato on Pexels.com

The old-fashioned way.

Comma Lessons

November 1, 2023November 2, 2023 / Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

An excerpt from the rough draft of my upcoming book, Lessons: A Teacher’s Life:

Long story ahead, but it will relate to commas, eventually, I promise.

I know how incredibly blessed I am by having my education provided for me. When I went to a private, Christian university for undergraduate degrees in English and German, I went tuition free because both my parents worked for the university. My mother was a librarian, first in acquisitions and then in special collections, and my father, after he received his master’s in theology, became a representative, which basically meant that he was an itinerant preacher–moving around the southeastern states and visiting people who supported the ministry that supported the university. One of the benefits of working at the university for at least two years was free tuition for your children.

My parents didn’t make that much money, so this benefit made it possibly for my older brother and me to go to college. For the first part of my time there, I lived at home with my parents, but when they moved back to Alabama to be closer to their own aging parents, I lived in the dormitory. My grandmother and great aunt paid for my room and board. I carried two jobs and paid for the upkeep on my vehicle, gas, and books, so I got off easy.

Then, when I went to Auburn University two years later, it was my grandmother and great aunt who paid my tuition. They had both been long time educators themselves who had risen from poverty because of their teaching degrees and knew better than most the value of an education; they helped all their grandchildren, nieces, and nephews at one time or other. At Auburn, I once again lived with my parents, paid for my books by working horrible jobs (more about this later) and never had to take out a loan or apply for scholarships.

My master’s in education at Western Carolina came quite a bit later, but once again, I was blessed. I had been applying for teaching jobs as soon as my husband John and I decided to move to North Carolina, and although I had already become certified to teach 8-12 grade English and German, I couldn’t get a job, even after John started working as an ultrasound technologist at a small hospital south of Asheville. I had several interviews in several counties but no go.

On a whim, I decided to apply for graduate school at Western Carolina University in Sylva, about 60 miles from our home south of Asheville. I was accepted but didn’t think I would be able to go since we were newly married, newly moved–my husband with a new job fresh out of ultrasound school, and me without a job at all. I wouldn’t be able to afford the out-of-state tuition. We were hoping to buy a house soon on top of all of that. I had signed up to do some substitute teaching, $50 a day, and rarely worth it. You know how kids teach substitutes.

But, probably less than a week after I got my acceptance letter, I received another letter from the English department asking if I would come in for an interview. I guess my five years of high school teaching experience and the emergency need for freshman composition instructors made me a good candidate for receiving a graduate assistantship. My out-of-state tuition fees would be waived; my stipend was enough to pay my tuition, books, and the gas it would take to drive from Hendersonville to Cullowhee.

It was settled. I was going to graduate school.

Finally, we get to the commas. Well almost.

The first semester I was required to take a course called “Teaching Rhetoric and Composition”–a down and dirty English composition teaching course. Despite my having taught for five years and having had several teaching courses at Auburn while I worked on my English Education degree, I had to take the course. All graduate assistants were required to take it, and although a bit miffed at first, I soon found the course useful and learned quite a bit.

One of the things I learned, I’ve written about at length in this blog–The Five Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing. Those ideas came from a visiting lecturer in the rhetoric course.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

The other part of that first semester was working in the university’s writing center. My job was to tutor students as they came in to work on their essays. I stayed very busy in the center, especially because of Western’s CC program. I forget what CC stands for, but essays in any non-English class that did not meet basic college-level writing requirements received a CC. If students received two CC’s, they had to take a developmental English course that was notoriously hard to pass, and if the student did not pass, then they were suspended. Quite a few students, therefore, would come in to the Writing Center after the first CC to avoid that grammar class.

The woman who ran the center was one of the best teachers I ever had. She taught by example. I would listen as she tutored students, helpful and patient but never overhelping, even when sorely tempted. Plus, she had all sorts of materials available to help students and gave me permission to take and use any materials as long as I credited the center. One of the most used handouts at the center was the director’s six simple comma rules. I used this handout as the base of my comma lecture for years because the rules were easy to understand, using little grammatical terminology, and the examples illustrated each rule well.

I’m afraid that handout is only in my mind now, but I used some form of those basic rules throughout my tenure as a community college instructor. It was just always the easiest for my students to grasp in the triage-type grammar teaching that I found myself doing. I added the comma rules to my editing workshop worksheet that I gave to my students when they were preparing their final manuscripts for grading. Here’s what they boiled down to:

Use commas

to separate items in a series of three or more
to set off introductory material
around words interrupting the flow of thought
between complete thoughts joined with a conjunction (if two complete thoughts are joined with just a comma, the writer has a comma splice—major grammar error)
with direct quotations
with everyday material such as dates and addresses

Although I tried to keep grammatical terminology to a minimum, I did use some, so at the beginning of the lesson, I would remind students of some basic terms:

Noun
Subject
Verb
Coordinating conjunctions (FANBOYS)
Independent clause
Dependent clause.

After the review, I went through each of the six comma rules, giving examples of each. If time was short, I would just cover the first four.

As a warmup to the lesson, I would try to engage students by using another cool example I learned in grad school. At the beginning of class, without saying anything else, I would write the following sentence on the board:

A woman without her man is nothing.

I asked the students to write the sentence down and add two commas. I gave a minute to complete that and then would ask for volunteers. Often, here in the South at a small community college where sexism is alive and well, students, both male and female, would answer, “A woman, comma, without her man, comma, is nothing.”

Of course, I would challenge them, tell them there was another solution: A woman, comma, without her, comma, man is nothing. One comma, one comma, I would say, totally changes the meaning of the sentence. That’s how important commas are, I said.

Then I would begin.

Rule #1 –Items in a series–First because it was usually the comma rule that students were most familiar with.

I like apples, bananas, and oranges.

I explained that if you have three or more items in a series, then you need to add commas between the items.

I use the Oxford comma and only talked about the option of leaving that remaining comma out if a student brought it up. Commas are confusing enough to students, especially those in developmental classes, so I tried not to complicate things unnecessarily.

Rule #2–Two independent clauses joined with a coordinating conjunction. I would give an example:

The dog ran after the cat, but the cat held its ground and fought back.

It is good to include a compound sentence that needs a comma and another coordinating conjunction that does not need to be separated from the rest of the sentence so that you can explain the difference.

I explained that you have two independent clauses, reminding them that the only seven words that can join two complete sentences together are the FANBOYS, the coordinating conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. In the case of this example, you have two complete sentences (independent clauses) joined with but, one of the fanboys, so you need the comma, I would tell them.

I asked students if they see another conjunction. They would usually find the and. I asked, Why do we not use a comma here? Often times they didn’t answer, so I would ask if there were a complete sentence on either side of the conjunction. No. Then, there is no need for a comma.

Rule #3–Commas after introductory material. I would explain that you need a comma after words, phrases, and clauses that come before the main clause and give examples:

Nevertheless, I left the room and never returned–nevertheless is a conjunctive adverb that modifies the whole sentence, so it needs to be set off by a comma.
In the middle of the night, Julia heard a loud bang. In the middle of the night are two prepositional phrases coming before the main clause, so you need a comma to notify the reader that the two phrases are coming before the main clause.
As John was reading the book, he realized that he had read it before. As John was reading the book is a dependent clause–he realized that he had read it before is the main clause, so you need a comma after the dependent clause.

Rule #4–Anything that interrupts the flow of thought. The next rule is super simplified, but usually this explanation helped students get the commas right without getting bogged down in too much grammar, especially restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. Oh, Lord, don’t go there. I explained that you need commas (most of the time) around words, phrases and clauses that interrupt the flow of thought in the sentence. Alternatively, I said that if you can pull the word, phrase, or clause out of the sentence and the sentence still makes sense, then you need commas around that word phrase or clause. Then, once again, I gave examples:

The new owners, sadly, declined to renew the flood insurance on their house.
The cat, along with its four siblings, were left in a box on the side of the road.
The man, who is standing over there in a red shirt, is my partner.

Note: This lesson is most effective if spread over two class periods, so there is enough time to answer questions, show more examples, or put students into groups to practice. One exercise I liked to do with students is have them write sentences that use the different comma rules but leave the commas out, exchange papers, and correct each other’s sentences.

I guess, I’m weird, but I really loved comma lesson day. It was pure unadulterated, nobody-could-accuse me-of-indoctrination day, except for that “woman without her man” sentence, of course. Might be too engaging for today’s classroom.

Another reason I’m glad to be retired.

Hey, Mrs. Winkler!

Musings and Mutterings About Higher Education in the South

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