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.