Sex in the Classroom Part V: Conclusion and Examples

I will now illustrate this truth by presenting examples, briefly describing ineffective and effective approaches for teaching kids to read a popular high school novel, A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. Here's how a typical blunt instrument attempts to involve students. Please notice its lack of force:

After Finny and Gene jump from the tree, Leper reacts to the events. The author says Leper chooses a side in a "dispute" that he foresees. What is that "dispute"?

What on earth does a kid learn from this? He learns to get together with friends and find the answer on the Internet, that's what he learns. Google it. Do you get any answers? Of course you do. This is a blunt device, obtuse, to tell you the truth. What kid is going to read the book when he can find the answer in about two seconds on his computer screen?

If you want kids to become good readers, you need to force them to approach such a question in the appropriate manner. Make them read and put narrative details together first. Then you give them this question. Let's take a look at such an instrument. Here's a series of questions from my close reading study guide of A Separate Peace, Chapter 1:

16.  Gene claims to have been through a prolonged period of “convalescence,” a period of recovery from illness or injury. Speculate as to the nature of the affliction from which Gene has had to recover.

17.  The New England elms are called “those most _________, bankerish of trees.”

18.  Speculate as to how Gene feels about the trees. Is he comforted by them, or is he intimidated by them?

19.  Speculate as to whether Gene himself is inclined more toward being a Republican or a Democrat, or, if you prefer, a “liberal” as opposed to a “conservative.”

20.  What is “The Cage” at Devon?

21.  Gene crosses the playing fields. He plans to look at something there. What is it?

22.  Of what people does the tree remind Gene?

23.  Why is Gene glad to have seen the tree?

24.  The story will be about violence. What three things do not endure by violence?

25.  The story is mostly a flashback. It begins with the “sarcastic summer.”  What is the year?

26.  With what year is “Upper-Middler” comparable, grade 9, 10, 11, or 12?

27.  Who were “draft-bait”?

28.  What is Finny’s height and weight?

29.  Who is next to jump from the tree after Finny?

30.  Before this person jumps, Finny seems to read his mind. What does Finny say to suggest that is the case?

31.  Why is it extraordinary for Upper-Middlers to jump from the tree?

32.  According to Gene, for what reason does Leper (Elwin Lepellier) claim Gene’s jump was better than Finny’s?

Google them. Go ahead; make my day. Google until your eyeballs fall out. You'll read so much junk looking for the answers that you'll throw your computer out the window. Then you'll be forced to sit down with the book and answer all these questions in about 15 minutes or less.

For 15 minutes, your students will be doing close reading, with their minds entirely unstuck from sex.

It will be a forced reading of exactly six pages, specifically (in the edition I'm using), from the bottom of page 3 to the bottom of page 9. It doesn't take too much time before your kids begin to realize that they now have a new choice: They can read through twenty or thirty or forty Google hits and spend an hour or more on the Internet, or they can sit down and read six pages out of the book.

Yes! Now you're starting to understand! It's easier for them to actually do the work they're supposed to do than it is to cheat. But read the warning labels first, folks. We're not here to kill skills. With overuse of any instrument, whether it's blunt or sharp, you can kill them off. So keep the periods of required close reading short, to start. Force them into it once or twice a week, and only during class. Encourage them to close read outside of class, but don't require it.

And it's OK for them to get together inside and outside of class to help each other; in fact, if you encourage them to do so, they will begin to share the actual reading skills they're developing. They won't be able to use the Internet to cheat. They will have to show each other what they have read in order to discern meaning! So a little collaboration is all right.

Please, give my methods a try. Yes, I know they're not perfection, but if you want to teach your kids to read for themselves, you'll need to use them or something very much like them. Go ahead.

This is not the whole story. Please download and read my free product at TeachersPayTeachers.com:

Reading Fearfully Close (Are Gene and Finny Gay?) Common Core Essentials

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Reading-Fearfully-Close-Are-Gene-and-Finny-Gay-Common-Core-Essentials

Here's another free one that discusses writing, in case you're interested in dealing with that weakness in our educational system:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Dealing-with-Writing-Common-Core-Skills

Best of luck. May Force be with you.

Sex in the Classroom Part IV: Arguments Summarized

To review the argument before you then: Sex is a delightful, involuntary physical reaction wired into the nervous system. It provides climactic emotional explosions in the pleasure centers of the brain. Humans have a natural urge for sex.

Reading is not a natural urge. No teacher of reading is going to overcome biological needs and appetites developing in the bodies and brains of adolescents by attempting to make reading look sexy. Reading is not sexy.

Reading is a disciplined intellectual skill requiring mental focus. It either becomes a permanent habit of mind, or a weakness. The majority of people, even so-called "educated," "literate" people, permanently remain weak readers, all because sex intruded at a critical moment in life. Some of them hold highly responsible positions in fields such as law, business, government, and yes, even education. They commonly admit weaknesses in both reading and writing, mistaking them as "talents" they were deprived of at birth, rather than skills they failed to practice while they were preoccupied by sex.

Poor, poor bewildered people!

That period in life vitally important for development of the physical body is also a crucial moment for development of the intellect, and children fortunate enough to be raised in a free country tend to become obsessed with their natural urges, and thus, tend also to learn very poorly how to read. Generally speaking, the more freedom kids have, the less effectively they will read, all because of sex.

Yes, it's that simple!

What is to be done? How do you pry the adolescent loose from sex long enough to teach him or her how to read? Reading can't stimulate the adolescent brain as sex stimulates the brain, body, mind, and soul. It doesn't always "open up a person's life to new and wonderful possibilities." Stop telling kids that stuff!

Instead, answer a simple dilemma with a simple solution: Resort to force.

Yes, I'm a conservative in most essential ways. I believe in force. But I don't believe in brute force. I don't believe in putting a book in front of a kid and whipping him until he cries. I have serious problems with those who do. So although I admonish educators to avoid taking a liberal view of "force," I also plead with them not to behave as iron-willed conservatives. Don't punish your kids into using their minds, because if you get too harsh about it, they'll shut down.

A firmly grounded conservative then, but just barely conservative, and by no means pessimistic, I am mistaken by many of my conservative friends as a liberal. It's understandable because, in fact, I cozy up to liberals pretty often. I even admire them at times, and particularly at those times, I yearn to be like them, but I'm not. I don't have enough faith in the goodness of humanity to embrace idealism and true optimism.

It may sound strange for you to hear me say it, but I know exactly where I stand. I'm a gut-level conservative stuck near the borderland of uncertainty, but not in it. I'm very certain about the uncertainties I carry with me, if that makes any sense. Searching through history and literature, I find others who were similarly comforted by this perspective on life. Shakespeare, I believe, was one baffled by life, but he was very content being so. Another was Benjamin Franklin.

Further elucidation upon my philosophical tenets can be set aside for the moment. If you desire to find out more, you can look through my other writings. For now, however, my purpose is to point out the advantages of embracing uncertainty long enough to comprehend reality, at least this one time.

As Franklin put it when he admonished the colonial representatives to "doubt a little of [their] own infallibility" and maybe even admire the moderates on the other side of a very vague dividing line, the time comes when we must embrace an idea that seems antithetical to our life principles in order to advance as a society. He was appealing for unanimous confirmation of the newly written Constitution of the United States, a document they all found wanting in some way or another. But they compromised, allowing themselves to see for a brief moment as Franklin did. They all signed, and the greatest nation in the world was born.

So, grounded on facts, and yet sheltered in comfortable uncertainty, let us doubt a little of our own infallibility now and admit the reality that students must be forced to read.

I'm not asking for a signature; I'm only asking you to recognize that we have very few ways of delivering this skill: We can compel them to practice by observing and applying frequent embarrassing or even emotionally painful reminders to keep them on task; we can give kids drugs to kill off those other urges inside them (with the physical urges reduced, reading and other intellectual pursuits might seem more of a pleasure), or we can use a sharply focused educational tool, as described in Part III, to pry our way past kids' sexual obsessions and provide a path to the brain. We need to stab it in there like a tire iron and pry it loose - but ever so gently!

Sex in the Classroom Part III: Distracting Them Long Enough to Teach Them

The natural track of an adolescent's mind is through the valley of the shadow of sex. It's not "death," and it's not "evil." Oh, it may be wise to train young people to deny their nature and to put other things ahead of it, but that is an argument for moralists, theologians, and philosophers.

I'm an educator. This is not about "rightness" or "wrongness" of adolescent sexual preoccupations. It's about reality and finding a way around or through it. Our duty is to teach sex-minded students to read. We must do so without drugging them or intimidating them or making them feel guilty, and we must also refrain from deflating them. That is, we can't deny these kids the right to think about things they must think about, like sex. They're designed by nature to be preoccupied for a period of time in their lives, and we aren't going to change it much.

Before I reveal and describe an educational tool capable of compelling obsessed adolescents to develop their reading skills, it is extremely important that I make this point clear: We must be careful how we use it. A tool that can exert the amount of force necessary to dislodge the adolescent brain from its sexual preoccupations is incredibly powerful. We must not torture them with this thing by using it too often. Their reading skills have been neglected far too long. Intruding past the sex only for brief moments, we must open a channel to their brains just enough to gain access. We must force them to practice for a limited amount of time and then let them go. Excessive use of this instrument at this stage will kill the skill, not foster it. Be careful! Force your way past nature into their minds gradually, and don't intrude for long periods of time.

So, now let's have a look at this educational instrument.

I call it a close reading study guide, but it might as well be called a "cognition scalpel." I'm refraining from using that moniker publicly at this time. Perhaps someday it will not prompt the obvious questions and misunderstandings it would now, and I will feel better about using it then. This scalpel does not cut brain tissue, but it most certainly forces the mind open. One might say, "cuts it open," but of course, again, that suggests some level of violence, and, although it is a pretty good metaphor, this instrument is by no means violent.

It forces its way into the cognitive processes by requiring students to read and interact at a high level of alertness. It doesn't cut brain tissue; it finely slices the mental operations of reading, decoding, deciphering, and discerning. As it probes literature, it probes the mental activities of the students' minds. It does not compel them to reflect on five or ten or twenty or one hundred pages of reading they supposedly "have done." It does not demand lengthy written or oral explanations from them; it demands READING. It does not require the writing of "mini-essays" while they proceed through a work of literature. In fact, it even refrains from requiring complete sentences in answer to questions.

The tool is very, very sharp. Be careful with it!

The tool forces students to pay attention to what they're reading RIGHT NOW! It opens their eyes to details. It requires them to answer probing questions, but formulating and recording an answer requires only seconds, and the operation does not disrupt the train of thought an author is building in his narrative.

You need to preserve that aspect of the instrument. Don't go tinkering with it by requiring occasional sentences and/or paragraphs in answer to the questions. If you're going to use a question as an essay topic, do so, but don't force kids to write essays while they're engaged in a close reading session. During every one of those, most of a student's time should be spent READING.

Nearly every answer will be a word, a number, a "yes," or "no," or a brief phrase. Half the time, the answers will focus upon rather simple details of the narrative. Students will constantly be asked to speculate, but in many of those cases, a wide range of responses will be allowed. The only wrong answer for any speculative question is one that is entirely off topic. When combined and reviewed, all the details and speculation will naturally flow to logical junctures of reflection and interpretation of developments.

But because this tool is very, very sharp, even at those junctures, answers will be brief, and the story will continue to move along quite fast. Again, the emphasis is on the READING, even when the work requires students to analyze, interpret, reflect, and speculate.

At this point, if you are reading closely, you have already developed an internal dialogue with me, the author you're currently reading. Within that conversation, some conservatives among you are saying, "Get that liberal lunatic out of here!" On the other hand, if you are a liberal, you may be saying, "Stay away from my kids with those sharp instruments of yours. You're not going to torture my kids, you fanatic conservative!"

Relax. We won't be performing any wild experiments, we will not hurt anyone, and we won't be waterboarding anybody. The kids might even develop a taste for this. (Reading is an acquired taste, you know.)

Our job is to prepare our students. These kids routinely take many high stakes standardized tests that presume their reading skills to be at a higher level than we demand of them. How long are we going to wait before we expose them to reality? I say, they're overdue for something like this, even if you insist upon calling it "lunatic," or "torture."

You might be one of those who say you'd rather pique your students' interest and get them to respond to an inborn curiosity; show them the delights of reading, and they will naturally gravitate toward it. Teach them to appreciate the work of a great author, and you will create an appetite within them for more, and they will be drawn to reading closely.

More liberal nonsense, and at the very least, poppycock! People have urges that are far more natural and more powerful at twelve to twenty-five years of age than reading. Your so-called "natural" intellectual appetites are going to fail both them and you.

True liberals think like that, however, and education is a-clutter with too-far-left liberals. They've got an idealistic path to success all mapped out in their brains: Do this, and that is what will happen, and we all will live happily ever after.

True conservatives are even worse. They developed "No Child Left Behind." That's a whole story in itself. I've registered my distaste for it sufficiently elsewhere, however. We have other fish to fry here.

Sex in the Classroom Part II: The Common Core, Adolescence, and Skills

Is it any wonder we see a trend of kids' reading and comprehension skills staying pretty high in elementary grades and dropping off right around the time of puberty? It's because of all the sex! Their minds are being hijacked by it!

Prowling the rows between desks in our middle school classrooms, we wade past flirtatious girls studied in the art of pop culture fashion, dressed in clothing that just barely conceals their fast-growing "charms," as the Romantic poets used to call them, and responding to these provocations, the less mature boys, who "show off" and strut around at every opportunity like a bunch of little roosters.

Our kids' minds are elsewhere! On sex! Is it not obvious? Who or what can disrupt their attention long enough to make them read? No one? Nothing?

Easy to give up, isn't it?

Seldom do we actually impose upon them challenging reading assignments (poor dears, struggling with all those hormones). We spare them out of pity. It's too often true. In fact, I have heard from students themselves, that the only time they ever read is when they "follow along with [audio] recordings," of the plays or stories or poems assigned.

So I ask them, what goes on during the rest of class time? And this is what they tell me: "Oh, we get vocabulary lists and stuff like that, and speeches, and art projects, and next week we're dressing up like the Canterbury travelers. And we get extra credit for it, too!"

They get immersed in experiential and declarative knowledge with so-called "enrichment activities," but they don't learn how to read because THEY DON'T READ!

We teach kids not to read. Vocabulary lists give them opportunities not to read. So do exercises in editing practice and grammar. Their class time gets filled with anything but reading. Reading gets relegated to situations other than class time, like when they have to take the ACT, for heaven's sake!

We rationalize about it. We insist that we can't have them struggling in our classrooms with language they don't understand. Are they better off waiting to encounter the language later, during a high stakes test? Are we doing them a favor making sure they don't experience the pain now? Is it easier on them and us to play a recording of someone else reading aloud, making sure they have their books open while the machine is running? Then we can tell their parents and our colleagues how scrupulous we have been about having them all "read along!" There! What a lovely scenario we can produce! But of course, it's also a good idea to wade through the sex occasionally and make them put away their cell phones behind those open books, isn't it?

To some extent at least, I can understand your situation, and I commiserate. It's not even practical to make kids read every play or poem or story or novel assigned. What with all their other class work, the math, the science, and the social studies, it's overwhelming! We haven't even begun to consider football practice and part time jobs.

Surprise! I agree with you!

Yes, I know you use quality study guides that probe the meaning of a story and require higher level thinking skills, but how many literary experts have already plowed that ground? Hundreds? Thousands? And how many hits do you get after typing those questions into a Google search engine?

Are students becoming skilled readers, able to draw inferences of their own from a text, or are we just handing them declarative knowledge about Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huck Finn? What on earth are they going to do when they get a passage from Othello on the ACT? They certainly won't have recordings to listen to or videos to watch; they won't get any credit for showing up for their ACT dressed like Desdemona or Iago! They'll need to read and interpret for themselves when they get there. Are we giving them sufficient practice to face that reality?

No! We are not! In class, we teach our kids how NOT to read and MAYBE still get by in life! Shame on us! And the sorts of instructional tools we commonly use in conjunction with literary studies are very blunt instruments. Our kids are used to being beaten with them, and they've found ways to avoid them or numb themselves to the pain. Time for something new, don't you think? It's time that we TEACH, and FORCE THEM TO EXERCISE, true reading skills.

Sex in the Classroom Part I: Cheaters Doing Research

When I was in high school long ago, we students were given "worksheets" (not "study guides"), and we were told by our teachers to do them independently, and most of us, honest as we were (also lacking a computer connected to the Internet, and, let's face it, perhaps lacking initiative required to cheat effectively), simply read the books and did our work.

But those study guides were, and still are, blunt instruments. They didn't serve us well. They didn't foster the skill of close reading, and they still don't. Their intent is good, and the questions in them are legitimate. They are necessary and useful, but used to excess, they kill reading skills instead of building them. The questions disrupt the flow of narrative. You can't read Humpty-Dumpty and keep track of it while doing one of those!

So did close reading die in me? Of course it did. I never learned how to read well from my high school English teachers. Oh, they helped me appreciate literature, yes. But not one of them helped me to encounter it and appreciate it for myself. It was a college instructor who helped me by demonstrating it every day and forcing me to encounter language in an entirely different, more natural manner. He did lectures on the great works, just like all the other profs, but he had a special ability to refer to critical details and developments by formulating questions instead of declarative statements. He would force us to read and then ask us what we thought. We'd kick it around a while, and then he'd show us the author's intent. He'd show us by combining our answers to previous questions (and his) with the current, critical interpretive issues in question, and we'd all see where the author was "really going."

(Yes, you can use my study guides to do that too. That's where they come from, from that Professor. Go ahead!)

Our kids today don't read; they cheat. In school, their primary interest is one another. Their minds and bodies are so full of sexual energy (let's be frank about it - that's exactly what it is) that they can't concentrate. Walk into any classroom of students, grades 6 through 12, and you'll find yourself wading in sex! That's what's on their minds, not learning! They'll find out where authors are "really going" all right; they'll find out by searching the Internet later at home.

We have a generation of teachers today who are great at fooling themselves. Too many of them have chosen to believe that all of their students will follow instructions, do their work, and turn it in, exactly as they themselves did in the past. If kids do cheat, well, "They're cheating themselves. They'll just have to live with it, and I tell them so!"

That used to be known as a "copout." Still a pretty damn good term to apply, I think. Teachers who offer that little statement have chosen not to care. They do not teach essential reading and interpretive skills.

I dare you to have a frank discussion with your class. You'll discover that most of them don't read anymore. Their ability to find answers to your probing questions without doing the work of reading the literature can only be exceeded by the greatest criminal minds of history. The Internet not only provides what they need to cut and paste; it has also taught them the art of conspiracy in the form of networking and collaboration. At the very least, their ability to divvy up work, "research" answers, and report back to one another about their findings is astounding.

We're mostly teaching kids to be great cheaters, or, if you prefer a euphemism, great "researchers" as they exercise the fine art of cutting corners.

I've always been a skeptical old bastard, and I'm conservative, not too extremely conservative, just a little conservative, but deeply so, and mistrustful, way down inside my soul. I have to be shown, in a court of law, that kids aren't cheating. Until that moment, I simply assume that they are doing so.

Yeah, it's a pretty nasty attitude, I know. Here's how I lost the vestiges of my trust:

When I began teaching AP kids back around 2000, I reasoned, they must want to learn! There can't be too many cheaters in a roomful of AP kids! They want to do this! So I followed the lead of former AP teachers and did what they told me. I copied their styles and substance. I assigned a popular novel, 1984, by George Orwell, as a summer reading project. The bulk of my students' summer work was reading that novel and writing interpretive essays in response to my (very traditional) questions about it. During that summer, I traveled to Michigan and met in a session designed to "train" high school teachers in the art of delivering Advanced Placement English Composition. I received confirmation that my method of using questions provided by past veteran AP teachers was nothing short of exemplary.

On the first day of school in the fall, I got many suspiciously similar written responses from the kids. Being a skeptical old bastard, I began Googling quotes from their work. I came up with a rough estimate on the percentage of plagiarized essays. I confirmed at least some plagiarism in about 70% of the work handed in. I suspected far more. Later, I followed up by giving my students reading quizzes and forcing them to do close reading study guides. The results there indicated that almost none of them had actually read the novel.

We're teaching our high school students, even our AP kids, how to escape reading!

I'm convinced a significant portion of our students purchase essays regularly, and being a skeptical old bastard, I believe some sophisticated computer programmers have designed robots that plagiarize and sell such essays by accessing obscure sources on the Internet.

I'm not absolutely sure how the robots work, but here is the impression I'm getting: The individual hired to provide an essay finds one on the Internet that fits the bill exactly. (That is not as hard as you might think.) Then his robot (which, for purposes of narrative, we will call "Gigolo" here) searches for all essays about the topic containing some of the key words and the substance of a given passage, say, fifteen words out of this particular essay, that fits the exact needs of the client. When it finds a source, it conducts a Google search to see where it leads. If it leads back to the same document, that exact phrase is not used, but if it leads nowhere specifically, the exact phrase is incorporated into the product for the client, and what do you end up with? You end up with a plagiarized essay paraphrased.

The key part of clever plagiarism, however, is finding obscure sources. Have you ever Googled a suspicious phrase from a student essay and ended up with three or four hits? Then you go to one of these websites, and you discover that it requires certain credentials to become eligible to use it. Perhaps it is a collection of graduate papers at The Ohio State University, or all of the language arts doctoral theses at Stanford. But you ain't gettin' in there! Entry to those websites is privileged! Yes, sir. And guess who has privileges? That's right; a certain computer robot named Gigolo. Gigolo has privileged rights to enter many, many, many collections of papers at colleges and universities all over this country.

So when you conduct a Google search, you find obscure references to the sources, but you don't find the sources or the plagiarized passages themselves. And when Turnitin.com gets a hold of the essay, it confirms plagiarism, but it can only track it to other plagiarized papers from high schools in Knoxville, Tennessee; Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; Norman, Oklahoma; Schenectady, New York; Eugene, Oregon; and dozens of other places around the country.

Well, that's my theory, anyway.

But when a student protests that the plagiarism pointed out by Turnitin.com is only coincidental, and that these dozens of identical passages found in other essays mean nothing, what do you do?

Well, here's what I do: I tell my kids that they can have up to 15% on their Turnitin.com plagiarism scores, and I won't penalize them. (I know that's inviting sucker punches from them, but I don't care. I'll take a few blows to get education done.) Then I show the 0% "Similarity Scores" Turnitin.com offers for (perhaps only "the few") students in my class who I'm convinced actually did their own work. And I give all my students one extra credit point for each point they score below 15%, up to 15 points. Next, I invite the students with unacceptable scores to go through their essays and reword those passages that they've plagiarized, giving them a little additional exercise in reiteration, a skill they badly need. (When I confirm expert sources, I require extra citations also.) I tell them to re-submit their essays as many times as they want, until they get their scores back down to 15% or below.

Next time they write, they're a whole lot more careful about "cutting corners."

And when they read, well, I can't control what they do outside of class, but I sure as heck can control what they do with their class time! In class, I FORCE MY STUDENTS TO READ.