Native English speakers only need to learn around 9,000 words to read proficiently (Nation, 2014; Qian & Lin, 2019). This, out of a lexis of over 170,00 words (and growing!)
Hence most of us walk, eat and talk on a daily basis rather than shuffle, feast or murmur.
We’re creatures of habit. The words we use frequently become top-of-mind, and therefore likely to be used again. Our routine vocabulary shrinks like a puddle in the sun.
One way to prevent, indeed, reverse, this trend is to play with words.
Reading, crossword puzzling, etc., can build our word banks but having a fine working vocabulary means being able to summon novel words and express ourselves in new ways. Like play piano, or basketball, this skill requires practice.
The following drills are designed to be pen-and-paper; no reference to outside sources required. Use the back of an envelope, a napkin, scribble on your hand like a teenager, draw in sand on the shoreline.
The goal is to tap your linguistic aquafer. If you feel inspired to augment your vocabulary through reading or dictionary browsing, all to the good, but no pressure.
Straightforward: choose a prefix, root word or suffix and list as many words containing it as you can.
Prefix suggestions: ex, dis, im, dis, pre, un
Root suggestions: auto, corp, derm, lum, tele
Suffix suggestions: ism, ity, ment, ness, tion/sion
Word transformation
This is a game I designed to improve upper-level ESL students awareness of parts of speech (POS) and the flexibility of English vocabulary. It’s simple, take a noun or verb, then come up with all the permutations of it you can, including words that contain it, collocations or sayings.
It works best when you think systematically about POS. Let’s use like as an example.
Verbs: to like, to dislike
Nouns: like, likelihood, liking, dislike
Adjectives: like, likeable, likely
Adverbs: like, likely, unlikely
Preposition: like
Conjunction: like
Collocations/sayings: eat like a horse, go over like a lead balloon, off like a shot, like water off a ducks back, look like a million dollars, etc.
Here, the goal is to list informal language terms that either
contain a particular word (as in the example above)
relate to a particular subject (e.g., work, money, travel)
Take ‘time’ as an example. The first category might include
time and tide way for no man
a stitch in time saves nine
once upon a time
time is (not) on their side
time out of mind
The second
to take a rain check
down to the wire
from here to eternity
jump the gun
Rome wasn’t built in a day
Single-word prompts
This drill was the result of being bored of my journal. Left to itself, my squirrelly brain chews over the same topics like its storing fat for winter. So I wrote a random word at the top of each page then, each day, wrote something inspired by it.
Try this for five, seven, 10, 14 days. See what fun your mind has.
Alphabets
Another fast, fun list drill. Jot the alphabet vertically on a sheet of paper then fill it in with words from a given category: adverbs, cities, animals, desserts, compound nouns.
Warm up with a big category like plants or household objects then get esoteric: can you complete the alphabet with shades of blue, pre-20th century literary heroines or 80s song titles?
What do you see?
Prior to writing my novel Ibiza Noir, I wrote 700 words of pure description a day for 30 days. No attempt at narrative, simply drew the most vivid word-pictures possible.
Set a time or word-count goal, e.g., write for 10 minutes without stopping, or write 500 words.
Choose an object of reasonable complexity, a flower, or your living room, and describe it in as much detail as you can muster. Imagine you are describing it to an artist; you want their rendering to be as close to reality as possible.
Challenge yourself to apply this descriptive writing practice to real-world scenes. Go sit in the park, or on a bench at the mall, and write your allotted words. But remember, no narrative, just images.
Write a lede (the first sentence or paragraph of a news article) that contains all 5Ws.
Example:
You went to the dentist and got your teeth cleaned.
When: 11:30AM, where: dentist office (43 Main Street), who: hygienist David, what: tooth cleaning, why: six months since last appointment
Lede: At 11:30 this morning, dental hygienist David Smith faced off with a six-month old plaque formation on Patient X’s right rear molar, a struggle that resounded through the office at 43 Main Street.
Bonus game! #semanticfieldgoals
Yes, I just wanted to write #semanticfieldgoals.
It’s also a good game.
A semantic field is a set of words related by meaning, for example colors, plants, foods, senses, etc. For the sake of this drill, any category will do.
Choose a category
List all the words you can think of related to that category.
Choose one of those words as the starter for a new list.
Artificial intelligence promises to augment our collective processing capacity. But on an individual level it is a neurotoxin that promises learners only artificial ignorance.
We are all familiar with the fact that unused muscles weaken, then atrophy. If one were to permit a developmentally normal, able-bodied child to rely on mobility scooter for transport they would, over time, develop physical incapacity where none had existed: an induced disability.
Thus, it shouldn’t be difficult to grasp that permitting children to rely on artificial intelligence ‘assistance’ such as ChatGPT will weaken, then atrophy, their intellectual capacity: an induced disability.
Writing a better brain
Writing is not just the product of thought. It has a unique ability to generate thought.
‘With each of the new [ancient] writing systems, with their different and increasingly sophisticated demands, the brain’s circuitry rearranged itself, causing our repertoire of intellectual capacities to grow and change in great, wonderful leaps of thought.‘ ~Maryanne Wolf, Director of the UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice.
As Wolf explains in her 2007 book Proust and the Squid (from which the above quote is taken) there is neither gene nor discrete neurological structure that enables humans to read and write. Literacy relies on complex, non-axiomatic collaborations between a variety of perceptual and cognitive systems.
Put another way: preliterate and literate brains are structured the same. What changed human history was not a novel biological development but the recruitment of extant neurological capabilities to perform a novel task.
Does that bend your mind a little?
It should.
Writing is not just a means of expression, like speech. It is a process and practice that improves cognitive function; it rewires the brain.
Put another way: it isn’t that smart people are better writers, it’s that writing makes people smarter.
All of us who care about children’s long-term well-being, whether they are our students or offspring, should be anxious to help them develop their fullest intellectual capacity.
We are on a hot rock spinning towards oblivion. Life for kids who are in today’s classrooms will be complex beyond the wildest imaginings of us scions of the analogue order. The will need to be wily, resilient and resourceful AF.
Being laissez-faire about kids substituting artificial intelligence for study makes as much sense as being laissez-faire about children playing with live hand grenades: cool, if you don’t mind the maiming.
There are three key reasons I won’t use generative AI and emphatically discourage its use by students.
“Practice leads to improvement in and refinement of performance… and this dynamic behavioral process is associated with altered brain activity…. Besides functional brain changes, practice also induces structural changes, such as alterations in regional brain grey and white matter structures.”
A brain that does not practice complex skills fails to grow, just as the disused muscle slumbers undeveloped. The brain becomes stunted compared to what it could have been, could be, with training.
A less-developed brain with fewer neural connections and reduced processing efficiency does not just affect reading or writing skills. If affects a person’s ability to learn, communicate and adapt.
Every time a student outsources their thinking to AI, they are sabotaging their long-term mental flexibility.
Educators and parents bear responsibility for this, insofar as we perpetuate a results-based learning environment. When we prioritize the ‘right answer’, kids get the message that process doesn’t matter. It makes sense for them to use any means necessary to get the answer that gets the desired grade.
We grown-ups need to rewire our thinking and explicitly focus on the learning process. This is not going to be easy, given the baggage of 150-odd years of rote education, but we have to begin. This might be as simple as grading the steps of an essay instead of the final draft, or doing away with grades altogether in favor of a feedback system. (For more ideas: Ungrading with Anthony Lince)
Late-capitalism has succeeded in concentrating financial capital into the hands of a vanishingly small number of individuals. The grotesqueries of this are felt every time an ordinary US citizen needs insulin or an EpiPen, or wants to go to college. There are felt a thousandfold-moreso by the 650 million people living in extreme poverty around the globe.
This concentration accelerated wildly during the Covid-19 pandemic: ‘Billionaires’ wealth has risen more in the first 24 months of COVID-19 than in 23 years combined,’ Oxfam reported. ‘The total wealth of the world’s billionaires is now equivalent to 13.9 percent of global GDP.’
Put another way: those of us not born to oligarchy face ever-slimmer chances of rising to the top. Financially, anyway.
Until now, those not to the manor born could at least, to paraphrase Britpop’s finest cynic, Jarvis Cocker, use the one thing we’ve got more of: our minds.
Unless we allow kids to consign their thinking skills to artificial intelligence.
To be clear, I don’t believe there is a conspiracy among Musk, Zuckerberg, et al. to make the rest of the population dumber so they can rule in full-blown, unchecked Bond-villainesque splendor (mwah haha).
But there is a real danger of that dystopia becoming a reality through lack of vigilance on the part of educators, parents and politicians.
Big tech does not care about us. Does not exist to serve us. Is not our toy.
In the same way wealth-accumulation takes on a life of its own, with money begetting money, intellectual capital accretes to the intellectually adept. Students who read, write and think critically enhance the neural circuits for these skills, gaining efficiency, automaticity and self-confidence.
This enables them to tackle bigger challenges, be more creative, rise to the top. The better they get at learning, the more dauntless they will be; the more quickly they will evolve to meet new demands.
Students who let AI think for them will cultivate artificial ignorance, sap their innate learning abilities and dull themselves into ever-shrinking spirals of incompetence and self-doubt.
They will be victims, not victors, in the knowledge economy.
Diminishing returns
Generative AI is trained on scads of data.
Perhaps one of the reasons it shines is that current tools were trained on the laborious output of human brains. Right now, the machine is well-nourished.
Like any other extractive technology, AI’s potential is limited by the quantity of quality raw material available. As AI is increasingly used to generate blog posts, articles, images, etc., it will, perforce, eat itself. Like a hideous, post-post-modern game of telephone, machine learning will digest its own output to spew forth content that is increasingly bland, distorted and derivative: a garbled self-parody that will further diminish culture and conversation.
This is not an abstract concern. There are AI tools I recommend to students on a limited basis, such as Grammarly, for English-learners or novice writers who need grammatical training wheels. I discourage competent writers from using it because it flattens good writing.
Neither it, nor any AI tool, can distinguish a truly beautiful sentence nor appreciate the work of (to borrow from Salinger) an experienced literary stunt-pilot. Creative word usage, neologisms, daring sentence structures all fall foul; the machine brain cannot cope with linguistic audacity.
This is the chief weakness and biggest threat of artificial intelligence: it prefers the commonplace to the extraordinary and the predictable to the audacious.
Our world needs bold solutions and novel ideas, which it will not get from a conservative technology.
There are plenty of things to outsource to AI: reviewing medical data, tracking undersea tremors, preventing fraud. But not education.
The children whom we want to see thrive need every iota of intellectual capacity and creativity that dedicated teaching and rigorous practice can bestow. Otherwise, we doom them to artificial ignorance.
What are your views on AI in the classroom? Share in the comments?
Imagine my delight when editor John Clarkson gave me the nod to write about Suede on the occasion of the band’s 30th anniversary and mind-bendingly good LP, Autofiction.
Writing this brought me joy. May reading it bring you joy.
(Below, an excerpt. Full article here. Photos are illustrative, not of Suede.)
In 1998, I walked into a record shop on Philadelphia’s South Street to return a damaged Bush Sixteen Stone CD.
No refunds, the proprietor said, pick something in exchange.
Crouched on the wooden floor, I scanned the bottom shelf. The London Suede rang a bell. I studied the androgynous/ambiguous nude puddled in ghastly underwater green. On the back, the name ‘New Generation’ popped (it was on a mix CD from my brother). Sold.
This was the start of a semi-obsessive love affair, a fact I offer as an excuse for my inability to present a concise career appraisal of Britpop’s most reckless proponents. This will be a true hagiography, with the irrationality and ellipses that veneration of a saint implies.
Suede shook my foundations the same way some people have: not love at first sight, exactly, but recognition – an undefinable, undeniable, life-altering entrance into the presence of one who is known and knows in return.
Brett Anderson was the first person I heard pronounce ‘mascara’ mass-kah-rah; I had no idea what a pebble-dash grave might be nor, for that matter, an estate car. But Suede stirred my emotions and imagination long before any first-hand experience of strobe-lit nightclubs, ecstasy-blown pupils or the grey lassitude of Home Counties Sunday mornings.
It is hard for me to see beyond the moments of delicious chaos to which Suede was the soundtrack to consider its oeuvre. Nevertheless, stepping back so the wheat field emerges from the golden streaks, yields an equal reward. Suede’s motifs are plainer at arm’s length; Brett Anderson’s lyrical fixations and vocal affections more obvious; but they are the beloved particularities of an old friend.
Listening to the albums chronologically, it is striking how well Suede wire walks between internal consistency and rote predictability. The Suedeness rarely drifts into play-by-numbers or self-parody. While contemporaries like Blur and Oasis lean on nostalgia or WWF-style public spats to generate attention, Suede stormed into its 30th anniversary year with the irresistible Autofiction and a tour that had the oft-contrarian music press singing from the same hymn sheet:
“Brett Anderson is absolutely mesmerising. You can’t take your eyes off him” (Taylor, The Mancunion).
“If this really were an unknown new band with no reputation to trade on… you’d tell your friends they’ll go far” (Lynskey, Guardian).
“Perhaps it’s possible to will a transcendent experience into existence, but this Suede concert fulfilled 25 years of dreaming” (Harris, Spectrum Culture).
Suede (Nude) 1993
That Suede managed to live up to the hype preceding its eponymous debut is impressive; as is the fact that the curse of the Mercury Music Prize has yet to catch the band, three decades on.
Suede invited its audience into a claustrophobic, chemical-laced neverland built on the post-Thatcherian ashes of Britain’s social contract. There is no overt politicking; the lyrical bleakness speaks for itself: ‘in your council home/he jumped on your bones’ (‘Animal Nitrate’) to ‘in the car he couldn’t afford/they found his made-up name/on her ankle chain’ (She’s Not Dead’).
Brett Anderson embodied a sleazy-sexy interface of frustration and hedonism, offering a Wildean aestheticisation of ennui, deprivation and dead-ends that is as hypnotic – and apropos – in the 2020s as it was in the early ‘90s. ‘The Drowners’ is an apt term for the generation coming of age to Brexit, Covid and Toryism. As a debut single, ‘The Drowners’ is also an effervescent blast of indie power-pop that, for its four-minute duration, erases everything except what matters: sex and music.
Like Wilde, Anderson intuited that power aligns against truth, beauty and self-expression. Defiance ain’t much, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got. Hence the avant-garde sexual ambiguity, charity shop-chic shrunken white shirts and midriff-baring pleather and gilt pirate hoops framing diamond-cutter cheekbones. Live performances from 1993 (check out ‘My Insatiable One’ from the Casino de Paris; ‘Animal Nitrate’ from Brixton, London) are fresh and daring. (It is hard to imagine that The 1975’s Matty Healy doesn’t owe at least some of his hyper-emotional, dissolute, sexually fluid stage persona to Anderson.)
Track after track, Suede rings true, powered by Bernard Butler’s starry guitar, bassist Mat Osman, drummer Simon Gilbert and keyboardist Neil Codling. From the wistful ‘Breakdown’ (‘if you were the one/would I even notice, now my mind is gone?’) to the menacing glam stomp of ‘Metal Mickey’ – a song that deserves to be danced to in gold DeHavillands if ever one did – it retains a zest and urgency that belies its age.
Dog Man Star (Nude) 1994
This was my gateway Suede album; ‘New Generation’ on repeat, chasing the dopamine rush of its glittering opening riff (cherish those riffs – this was Butler’s last proper album with Suede; nobody did it better). ‘New Generation’ is the highlight of a record that suits melancholic adolescence but, to my adult ears, could do with rigorous editing. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate (fairer) to say that the range of situations in which Dog Man Star’s emotional tenor feels relevant and urgent has narrowed with age.
The excellent ‘Heroine’ is more than a track, it’s an atmosphere. Anderson’s drug use has been chronicled ad nauseam, so I shan’t bother, but chaos and indulgence cast distorting shadows over tracks like ‘Daddy’s Speeding’, ‘This Hollywood Life’ and ‘Asphalt World’ – the latter a sublime four-minute ballad that meanders for more than nine minutes. (Nick Duerden called the album, ‘the most pompous, overblown British rock record of the decade.)
When restraint is exercised, the results are timeless: the raw snarl of ‘Introducing the Band’, whose Winterland reference introduced me to a seminal moment in punk history; ‘The Wild Ones’, a downbeat beauty that sound-tracked a number of my heartbreaks; and the hauntingly sweet piano lament ‘The 2 of Us’, which makes you want a broken heart, just to enjoy it properly.
Considering it appeared just 18 months after Suede’s debut, Dog Man Star attests to the raw brilliance of a band that was driving with both feet on the accelerator and only the occasional hand on the wheel.
…
Autofiction (BMG) 2022
The image of a nude with back turned to the viewer is a throwback to Dog Man Star but there are important differences: the lens is closer so the body fills the frame; the lines of muscle and bone are clear and vigorous; instead of awkwardly bent, the arms hug the torso in a gesture of comfort or reassurance. Instead of disaffection and despair, the black-and-white shot evokes vulnerability tempered with strength; containment rather than dissolution.
Suede’s ninth studio album delivers on the implicit promise of its striking cover: intimate, strong, self-contained, vulnerable, bold. Opener and first single ‘She Still Leads Me On’ took a few listens to worm into my neurons; it is now embedded there and generates the same dopaminergic kick as vintage favourites like ‘New Generation’ or ‘Killing of a Flash Boy.’
True to form, the next two tracks keep the intensity at a killing pitch: ‘Personality Disorder’ is a cocky, raucous snarl that pulls off the not-easy feat of wedding spoken-word verses with an arena-sized chorus. Then Anderson snaps into ‘15 Again’ with the whip-crack lyric: ‘Nothing is as bad as the time we kill/ sitting in the bathroom in kitten heels’.
Praise be. The band is back, as and how and when we need it most: dripping sweat, spitting defiance, yielding and pushing, feeling with us how it feels ‘on the black ice with no headlights/ with our hands off the wheel’ (‘Black Ice’).
From the soaring ‘Shadow Self’ to the full-throated stomper ‘That Boy on the Stage’ to the pensive ‘Drive Myself Home’ the album flows between moods and moments with cohesion and conviction. If the first act of adulthood is renouncing childish ways, the second is realising that the kid inside never goes away; maturity is integrating all the aspects of self without apology.
Anderson and co. have done so and created a truly mature album, buoyant with the shimmer and swagger of youth yet sober with the wisdom of years. ‘I’m not the kind of person who never feels uncertain/ so many ways to do what I do wrong’, Anderson muses (‘The Only Way I Can Love You…’) but – however many ways there are to do what he does wrong – he does none of them here. Autofiction is, quite simply, a triumph.
After spending several weeks immersed in Suede, two things remain to say: 1) if Autofiction were the last album, it would be the pièce de résistance of a luminous career; 2) I’m pretty sure it won’t be. And that is good news.
What’s the band that changed your life? Share in the comments!
Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.This interview was split into two posts to do justice to Madenski’s generous sharing of time and wisdom. Part 1 covered her biography and writer’s origin story. Part 2 focuses on craft and teaching.
How does one identify the seed of a piece of writing?
Surprise. My Achilles heel is that I get too sentimental. The more sentimental writing gets, the greater the distance. When you write universally, describe, and keep those emotions out, you open it up.
What questions should a writer ask themselves at the beginning of a piece?
Know?
Don’t know?
What to know?
It’s about finding [one’s] curiosity.
What should a writer consider, and disregard, when beginning a piece of writing?
The first step is not creating a story. The first writing, what we used to call free writing, is first thoughts. It frees you from having to be worried about the things you might worry about in a final draft.
One of my small rants is that free writing became a thing, and teachers sit children down and make them write. Once something becomes institutionalized, it’s difficult for students to feel safe with it. If you look at writing as a place to explore, to find meaning, it becomes a different thing.
Why is working through first thoughts important?
A student I loved told me she wrote about a problem she had for five days in a row. The first version was awful, full of blame; after five days, she’d narrowed it to what she could change and what she couldn’t. That was never going to be published, but that is the writing process.
As an adult, I started [writing] the first day after [my husband] Mark died. Those journals were useless – they were just questions. In two full journals, there are probably two salvageable sentences. But it helped me to be a better parent, to get through that.
How important is defining an audience?
I never do until the end; maybe not even then. I write what I’m curious about and if I have that intuitive sense, if it feels good, I’ll keep working. After I finish, then I’ll think of where to send it.
How can writers get better at finding seeds? And drafting?
They get better as they practice, as with anything else. Writing, and maybe this is true of dancing and photography, offers lots of rewards when you start to use it across the arc of your life.
What opportunity does writing bring the writer?
The chance to see things more clearly. The opportunity to notice, to slow, to look. I wrote a poem called ‘Ode to Black’, during the Black Lives Matters protests. I was walking one day and there were crows everywhere. And I walked to the creek and the ducks have this black so black it’s almost indigo on their faces. So much of what I love in nature is black – trees in winter – so I wrote this poem.
Writing has given me knowing what I want to get good at; stability, better understanding of myself, much better understanding of students. I love publishing, but it wouldn’t stop me writing if I didn’t publish.
Madenski recommends
The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?
‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe, which I memorized in sixth grade. And Robert Frost, ‘The Road Less Taken’, reading them, something shifted in me.
The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?
Early Morning by Kim Stafford. It’s a very personal book [about his father], but it’s universal. It helped me see people as complex and beautiful. You can struggle with someone or something, but still see the beauty in them.
A classic you would love to teach?
My Antonia by Willa Cather. I don’t go around thinking of myself as a feminist, but I am a feminist. Willa Cather cut her hair, wore pants, got a job as a journalist. It is beautifully written and would be a perfect thing to teach. To have [students] read the book first, and not know about her, then fold in her influences as a woman writer when it wasn’t easy to be one. That would open up some wonderful conversations.
A contemporary work you would love to teach?
Happiness by Aminatta Forna. It’s about two characters in their late adult years, their children are raised. They have experience; they’ve lived hard lives, and that is part of the story too. The book is complicated: it’s about where we are in the world, our relationship to animals, the divisiveness that pulls us apart. It’s about aging, what it means to have loved, to have a long career. It is about a different type of happiness.
A book about writing every writing student should read?
The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop Vols I, II & III by Diane Lockwood. I wish I’d found these [books] years ago.
A visual artist/musician/film maker who inspires you?
Greta Gerwig. She’s a great example of how we can come to stories about love, friendship, culture, with a different lens. She started out independent with Lady Bird and Little Women, then the Barbie movie, which I wasn’t going to see because of my assumptions. But I went and I loved it. [Gerwig] has a different voice, a way of storytelling that is the opposite of what I thought it would be.
A book you buy copies of to give to friends?
Who Dies? and Unattended Sorrow, both by Stephan Levine. They are about grief. At this time in my life, people are losing big things – parents, children, partners. Levine writes about compassion, in its true sense. Looking through a lens at the hardest things in our lives. I soak up instruction in how to endure difficult things. It’s not an exercise in denial, it’s an exercise in facing.
What’s next?
Inspired by Ada Lemon’s linked sonnets in The Lucky Wreck, I am working on seven verses that began with a walk on the Columbia River. I saw an asylum of loons and that’s where the poem started. It’s not ready to read aloud yet, but it’s going somewhere good.
I’m also working on an essay about ageing, and pulling together poems for a reading with Andrea Carlisle at Broadway Books on 5 September.
Not least, I walked Neskowin Creek [near my old home] from the headwaters to the coast. I had been teaching all summer, couldn’t afford to travel and needed to do something, so I walked. I collected about 80 pages of field notes. [My daughter] Hallie and I, will go in the fall and she’ll photograph it. Then I’ll publish that, maybe.
Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.This interview will be split into two posts to do justice to Madenski’s generous sharing of time and wisdom. Part 1 covers her biography and writer’s origin story. Part 2 will focus on craft and teaching.
Full disclosure: Melissa and I have known of each other since I was growing up in Lincoln City, Oregon; her children attended my mother’s day care. About a decade ago, I reached out and shared some of my writing. She responded with characteristic generosity and has become a dear friend, mentor, exemplar.
Photo: Hallie Madenski
“I’ve had everything in my life I wanted, but not one thing went according to plan.”
Melissa Madenski delivers this statement with poise that belies the extraordinariness of the claim.
White hair frames dark tortoiseshell glasses and silver hoop earrings. A boho-chic bob to make Anna Wintour green. The kindled joy in her eyes refracts through the the kitchen-dining-living space of her Portland, Oregon home, which is as spare, chic and elegant as she: drip coffee-maker, glass-fronted book shelves, black-and-white prints on crisp white walls.
Elsewhere, these might be bland markers of commodified good taste. But they are Madenski’s tools: functional and essential as carpenter’s adze or blacksmith’s tongs.
Born and raised in Portland, Madenski moved to the Oregon coast as a young woman, taught school, married, had children. One imagines a life rich in the delights of partnership and parenthood: time-poor, perhaps, but abundant in laughter. A time to make one say, “I’ve had everything I wanted.”
But: “Not one thing went according to plan.” The rosy narrative ended in a thunderclap moment when Melissa’s husband, Mark, died, aged 34. Their children, Hallie and Dylan, were one and six years old; their hand-built wooden house in the Siuslaw Forest unfinished.
“My healthy, athletic husband had simply stopped breathing,” she wrote in her 2015 essay, ‘Starting Over.‘ “We would soon learn that an arrhythmia shook his heart until it stopped.”
Such an unthinkable, unspeakable loss can drive unbelievers to their knees and turn Christian soldiers into atheists. How many people, in that crucible, muster the grace to craft an original response?
Madenski mustered — no — created that grace.
“That’s when I started to write every morning,” she recalls. “I missed Mark very, very much; I held onto writing for my sanity. I’m not an early riser, but I’d set my alarm for 4:30. It was a wood-heated house, so, freezing. I’d stick my head under well water – also freezing – make a latte, then shut myself in my office.”
Though Madenski traces her deliberate writing practice to the cataclysm of loss, its roots reach across generations and oceans.
The youngest daughter of a traveling salesman and a homemaker, Madenski grew up in Portland, happy to daydream alone beneath a spruce tree in their yard. Her grandmother, an immigrant from Norway, lived with them. “I credit her with raising me. She told me lots of stories.”
They were the stories of a vibrant and spirited woman who “hiked, rode horses, lived in logging camps.” A woman who knew, too, what it was to be struck by fate.
A burst appendix led to an infection that ruined her grandmother’s hip. In an era before accessible replacement surgery, this irredeemably altered the last 30 years of her life.
“She lost everything that she loved.” Madenski sits with her memories for a moment, then continues. “My grandmother been a seamstress, so my mother would bring her thread and fabric. She sowed until the last three days of her life. It was like writing: the one thing no one can take away.”
Another thing no one can take away: the example of a woman who chose not to be defined by suffering, but to — Penelope-like — stich and unpick, stitch and unpick, until the stitching and the unpicking became a new tale.
Though “drawn to stories,” Madenski didn’t want to be a writer. “As a kid, I only wanted to imagine. I would go to bed early, lay there and create stories where I was always the heroine.”
Madenski was a voracious reader. But it wasn’t until high school that writing began to glow as an idea.
She was the first person who said I was a writer; the first person to believe in me as a writer. There was no big lineage: I kept a boring diary, which thankfully was lost in a house fire, but what I’ve come to believe is that so much of writing is story. We are wired for narrative. We’re wired for beginning middle and end.”
Despite the brush with inspiration, Madenski began “a traditional path”, earning a degree in elementary and special education from Portland State University.
Her first job, age 22, was teaching second grade in a public elementary school. “It was hell,” she says. Disadvantaged students. A teachers’ strike. The inevitable tribulations of being green and unschooled. “It was trial by fire. I witnessed things I’d never seen. I had to learn to report abuse. Teaching wasn’t teaching, it was trying to keep people’s head above water.”
The steeliness of her working-class Scandinavian ancestry flashed when she refused to sign a contract for the following year until the principal promised things would change.
After fulfilling her childhood dream of moving to the beach, Madenski taught at Oceanlake Elementary in Lincoln City and at a private school in Neskowin. Although she calls the freedom and miniscule class sizes of independent schools “heaven,” she is quick to say, “I believe in public schools.” Only there did she find the diversity that stretches and challenges.
Mark’s death precipitated her out of conventional classrooms. “There are single women who could raise kids and teach, but I couldn’t. I had some insurance money and the house, and thought, I’m going to piece things together.”
Her next first job was driving to Hebo Ranger Station to teach English to migrants employed in the local dairy industry. “It was a good time to not be alone. I was in grief, but so were they,” she muses. “Dairy milking is a hard job, they were sending money home to Mexico, but they had the most wonderful stories.”
Teaching English became one of the legs of the “three-legged stool” required to stay afloat in the Oregon Coast’s parlous tourist economy.
It was then, too, Madenski began the cold-water morning writing practice that she maintains to this day (“I wake up at 5AM, come to the table and write. It’s home to me. It’s stability”).
Her most lucrative year as a writer brought in $6,000. (“It wasn’t enough, but it was a leg.”)
Other legs included teaching at the NW Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, founded by friend and fellow author Kim Stafford; running adult literacy programs in libraries; leading writing programs for children; teaching citizenship classes to immigrants; mentoring young authors; and creating her own writing workshops.
“These jobs I pieced together didn’t give me a big retirement or benefits,” she says, matter-of-fact, “but they gave me a lot of experience.”
To anyone who says, experience don’t pay the bills, Madenski’s life is an emphatic beg to differ.
Experience can make the difference between between resilience and collapse.
A couple of years ago, Madenski had hip surgery, then broke her femur in a fall. Cue months of pain, compromised mobility, physical therapy; Covid and long Covid. A downward-rushing torrent that could sweep a person away.
“I was trying to keep going as before, and I kept falling. So I learned to say ‘no’ so I could say ‘yes’… yes to friends, family, writing. I don’t expect to grow old without pain; it doesn’t shock me or surprise me.”
The simple lucidity of the statement is a gong.
It doesn’t surprise me.
The voice of experience.
“I am at peace,” Madenski adds, stating what shines in every plane of her face and every gesture. “That’s a skill for life: not to take things personally that are not. Life teaches you what is personal. Death is not. It happens to everybody. The world is completely sorrow woven with happiness. I’ve learned not to forget that all day long.”
Two weeks ago, I signed the papers to buy my first house.
One week ago, Le Sallay called, said they couldn’t afford two literature teachers, and that I was not it.
This week, I’m moving my cats to their new home.
Let’s just say none of this was foreseen.
But it has reminded me to hold fast to what Michael Downs remarked: “The unexpected doesn’t have to be dread inducing. The unexpected can also be the reason you get up in the morning.“
***
Though I’m prickly about getting the sack barely six weeks out from the start of the school year, the words of Epictetus come to mind: “Everything has two handles, one by which you can carry it, the other by which you cannot.”
The cannot handle holds the unpleasantness, loss, unsaid goodbyes to my lovely students. All of which are real things.
What I can hold this reality by is trust that there are other opportunities, gratitude for those heartbreakingly great kids who shared their stories with me, affection for the colleagues who enriched my life in many ways.
Goodbye to all that
What’s next?
Who knows
Not I.
I’ve got cats to move, pictures to hang, boxes to unpack.
Everything is open. Anything is possible.
What I can say is the blogging will continue. The learning will continue. Once the moment is right, the teaching will continue.
Coming up soon on the blog, an interview I am thrilled to share, with the poet, educator, gardener, creator, wise woman and dear friend Melissa Madenski. She is a hero; one of the most generous, warm, fully alive human beings I have the privilege to know.
It is a huge honor to share her words and stories.
Stay tuned!
How do you face the unexpected? All advice welcome! Hit me in the comments please — I deleted my Twitter account because, X.
Among the notable words I learned in 2022 was hyperlexia. Burrowing into articles about autism, the term popped up. Hyper = excessive, lexia = related to words. That rung a bell, personally and professionally.
Defining hyperlexia
In 1997, Aram described hyperlexia as, “the developmental disorder in which children decode words early but have significant impairments in aural and reading comprehension”.
Nation (1999) defined it as, “advanced word-recognition skills in individuals who otherwise have pronounced cognitive, social, and linguistic handicaps.”
Four years later, a meta-study by Grigorenko, Klin and Volkmar (2003) concluded “that hyperlexia is a superability demonstrated by a very specific group of individuals with developmental disorders.”
A few years further along, the definition had grown more nuanced: Ostrolenk et al. (2017) wrote that it is, “the co-occurrence of advanced reading skills relative to comprehension skills or general intelligence, the early acquisition of reading skills without explicit teaching, and a strong orientation toward written material, generally in the context of a neurodevelopmental disorder.”
The final clause of that last sentence is significant to the discussion/debate around hyperlexia, which has been running since the mid-20th century. Is it a disability or, as Grigorenko et al. argue, a ‘superability’?
Hyperlexia and developmental disabilities
The answer starts with statistics. Ostrolenk et al. (2017) found that 84% of hyperlexic subjects were autistic.
This does not mean there is a direct correlation between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and hyperlexia. In a 2021 study by Solazzo et al., “9% children with ASD showed early hyperlexic traits”.
So, while autistic individuals are not necessarily hyperlexic, there is a good chance that hyperlexic individuals are autistic.
This makes hyperlexia a significant issue for teachers, especially those who teach gifted students. Arguably, especially those who teach gifted girls.
In Aspergirls (2010), Rudy Simone writes, “this early ability to read and comprehend above our years (hyperlexia) gives some young Aspergirls an air of intellectual maturity that tricks people into thinking we possess emotional maturity as well. It also hides autism by shielding our deficits.”
Conventional education is built on a foundation of reading and writing. This fundamental bent of our educational system privileges students who appear to read effortlessly and above-grade-level.
As a teacher, it is natural enough to be wowed when a student sets down their book 10 minutes into an assigned reading period and says: “I’m done. What do I do now?”
Since we associate literary skills with intelligence and competence, it is tempting to stereotype precocious readers as super-competent or super-smart.
It takes discipline to stop and ask ourselves: “What is this student really absorbing? What needs might this apparent super-competence be masking?”
Knowing that north of 80% of hyperlexic kids are on the autism spectrum, we need to treat hyperlexia as seriously as we would treat dyslexia. Otherwise, we risk overlooking significant intellectual, developmental and social-emotional needs.
What hyperlexia is not
Key to academic success
Proof a student has it all figured out
Sign of high executive function
Substitute for social and emotional skills
Let’s look at these one by one
Academic success
According to Zhang and Malatesha Joshi (2019), “originally the term ‘hyperlexia’ only referred to those readers with low IQ but precocious decoding skills”. Though, as we’ve seen, the definition has become more nuanced with time and research, the significant fact of hyperlexia is that it is out of sync with the child’s other capacities.
Whipping through a textbook chapter or an assigned story is an accomplishment, but it doesn’t mean the student is equally precocious in other areas. Hyperlexia should be treated as a sign that a student potentially needs more, not less, general academic support.
Proof a student has it all figured out
Rapid reading does not mean improved comprehension. In 2010, Castles et al. published research that found “clear evidence of a dissociation between reading accuracy and comprehension of the same set of irregular words in hyperlexia.”
In the classroom, I’ve witnessed students who read with astonishing speed and fluency but struggle to offer a simple summary of what they’ve just read. Their decoding is phenomenal, but they are not grasping the significance of the words they skim so easily.
It is vital that teachers do explicit work on comprehension (including explicit and implicit details, descriptions, inference, word choice, etc.) with hyperlexic students, not assume, they read it = they got it.
Sign of high executive function
Author Cynthia Kim was diagnosed with Asperger’s (now formally included under ASD) in her early 40s. In her 2014 book, Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, she reflects on her schooldays:
“Doubly-exceptional children have an advantage in their intelligence.
Unfortunately, part of this advantage is that we can mask a big portion of our disability with coping strategies and adaptations. And when we fail to hide something, people assume we’re not trying hard enough. Or we’re being deliberately obstinate. Or that we’re lazy, defiant, insolent, shy, ditzy, or scatterbrained.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ they ask incredulously. ‘You can memorize the batting averages of the entire Major League, but you can’t remember to put your homework in your backpack?'”
Research shows up to 80% of people with autism have executive function difficulties. Again, as educators, we need to avoid the category error of assuming that a hyperlexic student will be as quick in other aspects of their life and studies. Rather, we should be alert to the fact it’s likely the opposite: hyperlexia means greater likelihood of executive function challenges.
Substitute for social and emotional skills
Being able to read texts about sophisticated social and emotional realities does not equal understanding or being able to navigate those realities.
Precocious reading is more likely to be a refuge than an aid to an autistic child. Books are safe, comforting and non-judgmental. They have predictable narrative arcs. They are readily available and don’t demand emotional reciprocity.
Books are marvellous, natch, but as teachers we have a responsibility to support students’ holistic development. That means supporting social and emotional skills through appropriate collaborative or group activities, encouraging them in discussions, and not singling them out for their hyperlexia.
Ideally, we help our hyperlexic students leverage this strength to support weaker areas without making too much or too little of it.
Every student has unique capacities. We need to be aware of the blind spots in our educational system, and ourselves, to ensure these develop in full, and avoid privileging specific (dis/super)abilities that fit our narrow definitions of what is useful or laudable.
What is your experience with hyperlexic students? Questions? Comments?
Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.
All photos courtesy Michael Downs
Light filters into Michael Downs‘ basement office, as if it were underwater.
Twin decorative dragonflies, backlit on a windowsill, and a red goose-neck lamp stretched into a honk, heighten the effect of a numinous natural space. It is, he says, the best writing room he’s ever had.
And he’s had a few to compare.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Downs rode economic currents with his family, first to Vermont then Arizona. After graduating from college, his journalism career took him back to Hartford for a spell; he met a woman and fell in love, moved with her to Montana; later, they moved to Arkansas, where he attended grad school, then to Baltimore in pursuit of work.
Downs nods in recognition at the mention of the 1960s-70s cadre of hard-drinking, fly-fishing Montana writers: ‘Tom McGuane, those guys, sure.’ Though a former sportswriter, Downs doesn’t need to prop his ego with tales of a trout [this] big.
His body of work reveals someone who lets nuance speak for itself; someone who illuminates and distils the details, then leaves them to do the work.
As befits his journalism background Downs, now a professor of English literature and director of the Master’s Program in Professional Writing at Towson University, regularly publishes short stories, essays and reportage. As befits a scribe, he also turns his hand to ghostwriting and editing.
Gathering words
The TV Guide, cereal boxes, the Bible, historical romance novels, Of Mice and Men, comics: ‘I read everything,’ Downs said. ‘I loved words; wanted to understand them.’
His precocious reading meant he struggled to keep pace with their sounds. ‘I’ve learned so many words just by reading that my pronunciation, throughout my life, has been terrible. “Inchoate” — is that in-ko-ate or in-cho-ate? I can never remember, but I know what it means.’
There is something to be gleaned from this primary engagement with writing as text. Technology has gifted the writer, or would-be, many ways to engage and construct, but there is power in being able to seed words on a page and watch the lines grow into a riotous harvest
Downs relishes the labor of it, the physicality of writing (more on that in a moment). His most influential teachers were the ones who, ‘demanded more of me than I thought I could do. And did so unapologetically. That helped me understand my capacities.’
The purpose of literature
Exploring his capacities took Downs to the University of Arkansas MFA program in the late 1990s. This was his grounding in Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Don Quixote, and teaching. ‘I wanted my tuition paid,’ he says with a grin. ‘But it was a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons.’
Foremost, teaching (as any teacher who gives a damn will tell you) demands the kind of close study many students elude. ‘I had to break down stories, novels, sentences; I had to do the craft aspect better than I would have otherwise.’
The process of deconstruction facilitates a deeper understanding of construction; clever writer/teachers seize opportunities to teach authors they love, or genres they want to better understand. Downs, for example, taught a historical fiction course while writing a historical novel.
Teaching writing is about more than just craft, though; Downs increasingly focuses on a less-discussed aspect of literature:
This generation has had a lot to deal with. It’s clear in their stress, their anxiety, what they talk about. What I want to do is use literary work – either the writing of it or the reading of it – to help them understand that the world is worth it, that it’s beautiful, that the unexpected doesn’t have to be dread inducing. The unexpected can also be the reason you get up in the morning. I spend more time now talking about beauty and how to use literature to help yourself get along in the world.
For all the joy he’s found in 30-odd years of education, Downs is transitioning to full-time writing. ‘I’m rich in former students, but I’m not as rich as I’d like to be in books.’
During his recent Fulbright Scholar year in Krakow, he encountered a quote by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski stencilled on a staircase: ‘it is not time that is lacking, only focus’.
‘Like so many other writers, especially writers who teach, I say things like ‘I don’t have a lot of time, I’m trying to find the time to write, etc.’ he says. ‘I read that quote and thought, ‘I need to change my focus.’ My focus has been students, for decades. I’ve been grateful for teaching at a university and having the summer to write, but I’m old, I’m a slow writer, and I want more.’
Part of how Downs accesses ‘more’ is through what he playfully refers to as ‘method writing’. He was kind enough to share examples and insights on this element of craft.
On Method Writing
Q: Why is it important for writers to get out from behind the desk and get their hands dirty?
A: Emily Dickinson didn’t do that, and she pulled off some good stuff. So I don’t want to say it’s a moral imperative, but for some writers, young writers especially, it’s important to get out of your own belly button. There is a world out there, experiences, things that are tactile, not just in your head. We take in experience through our five senses, then meditate on them. If you don’t have experiences, you don’t have stories. You can have think pieces, but you don’t have stories.
Q: What is your first memory of tangible experience that led to, or was integral to, a piece of writing?
A: When I was an 8th grader, I had a paper route. A stray dog used to follow me. I’d stop at a convenience store, buy some food, share it with the dog. It followed me for weeks, until it followed me across a road one morning, as the sun was rising over the mountain. Someone came along, driving fast into the sun, and hit the dog. And it fell to me to pull the dog off to the side of the road – still breathing, but clearly dying, and to stay with the dog.
Some time later, I went to a writing camp for kids, and a college professor told us to explore stories by writing about the parts of our lives that confused us. And I went back to that moment. It was a successful story, because I remembered the weight of the dog, what it felt like to touch it; that it was still breathing. That was the first time physical experience worked itself into my writing.
Q: How does tactile experience operate as a research mode in fiction versus non-fiction?
A: When I’m doing narrative non-fiction, I’m experiencing the world as me, so paying attention to my five senses. When I’m doing it in fiction, I’m trying to be someone else. So if they have experiences that I haven’t, I have figure out how to get close to those experiences. I try to save my imagination from doing too much work, or from getting it wrong. The imagination isn’t always right.
When I was writing about a woman who was burned in the Hartford circus fire, I drew from this wonderful Red Cross pamphlet about how people were treated after that fire, because it was groundbreaking. But also – I‘m going to sound a little crazy now – I needed to know what it felt like to be burned. I put my hand over the gas ring [on my stove], and held it as close as I could, for as long as I could. I did not hurt myself, but I got an idea of the feeling of a sustained burn. And that’s what I wrote.
If I hadn’t held my hand over that fire, I could not have imagined how it felt. It was cold.
Q: How do you incorporate method writing into second or third person POV?
A: It’s about coming to a place of focus where I can combine my engagement with the world and my imagination to say. If it’s working, it becomes transcendent. The words end up there; I don’t know exactly what brought them, but they are right, and I could never find those same words again.
Q: How do you know when to stop experiencing and start writing?
A: It’s always time to sit down and start writing.
It’s time to start experiencing when – in fiction – I don’t know what the character is experiencing. The character is in a situation and it’s time to figure it out. When working on the Horace Wells novel, I was struggling with the fact the main character wasn’t an enjoyable person to be around. He wasn’t super successful, he was whiny, he wasn’t that bright. I had to figure out a way to make him palatable.
How it happened surprised me. I went to a museum that had his tools, his notebooks, his death mask. They brought out the death mask. I put on white gloves and picked it up. His face was small, surprisingly small. I started touching his face. And I decided that his wife had touched his face. That though he betrayed her, and made her life difficult, she loved him. And if she loved him, I could love him through her. That changed him as a character, from a nebbish to a person who was loved by his wife.
Q: What is a rookie mistake writers make when attempting this?
A: To think their experience is how the character would have experienced it. John Keats said that Shakespeare possessed this amazing quality of self-nullification; he could stop being Shakespeare and be someone else. That’s how so many [of his] characters are who they are.
I encourage students to work at not being themselves. As a writer, your job is not to ask, what would I be doing if I were them? You have to become that character and know. Andre Dubus talks about studying Zen and becoming the word as he writes. It has to do with focus.
Q: Which writers do this particularly well?
A: Andre Dubus, absolutely. He was a man who wanted to be out there in the world, make stuff, experience stuff. Alice Munro, you know she’s out tromping the fields. Louise Erdrich, a favorite of mine, she doesn’t just sit behind a desk. Joan Didion, of course.
Q: What is an assignment or exercise you use to teach this to your students?
A: A terrible thing happened near my campus more than 100 years ago, before campus was there. A black teenager was lynched. I wanted the students to write about it. We walked to the site and sat for an hour; looked at the trees and the jail, which is still there, and touched the walls, looked at the sun. I wanted them to imagine how it was then, and see how it is now.
Downs Recommends
The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?
The Lord of the Flies. It completely freaked me out. I hadn’t know that boys could be so cruel. I was a shy, awkward boy who wore glasses. I could have been Piggy.
The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?
William Kennedy’s Ironweed, a profound and magical novel. Kennedy – a former journalist who never stopped thinking of himself as a journalist – wrote a novel set in a small north-east city, Albany, NY, that nobody paid much attention to. I wanted to write about Connecticut, about a small town no one paid much attention to, and this [novel] gave me the blessing.
A classic you love to teach?
‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor and ‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin. If I could only teach two stories for the rest of my life, it would be these two.
I love what Baldwin writes about art in that last scene; he’s writing about music, and Sonny’s blues, but … I’ll blow the quote, they were doing it at the risk of their own lives, but they had to do it, because we need those stories, and we need to make them new. It’s a gorgeous description of why we need stories.
‘Good Man’because it is such an inexplicable story. Students have no idea what’s coming. Their mouths drop open. It’s a perfect story for proving to them that you can’t say what a story means.
A work you love to teach from 21st century?
Lydia Davis Varieties of Disturbance – she blows up the idea of what a story is, disregards everything anybody says. There’s a novella in it, which purports to be a sociological studies about get well cards written by a second grade class; it is just heartbreaking, funny, and reveals so much. She also has one-sentence stories in the book. Literally one sentence.
A book about writing every writing student should read?
Colum McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer.
A book + film adaptation combo you love?
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which was turned into a TV series with Ethan Hawke.
A living writer you’d love to hang out with?
Olga Tokarczuk.I’m fascinated by the concept she discusses in her Nobel Prize speech of the ‘tender narrator’ – a new approach to narrating fiction. A different point of view.
Your perfect writing space?
If space and time are related, it’s more about the time than geography. If I create the time, the place doesn’t matter. I can be on a park bench, a balcony, a windowless room, sitting in the front seat of my car.
What are you working on now?
I’ve written about six essays and would like to write another four to six and put together a collection. I have some ideas that have been – there is no other way to say it – that have been strong in me lately. They are wanting to come out.
The following presentation on culturally responsive teaching was written for, and delivered at, Le Sallay Academy’s January 2023 conference on blended learning.
The term culturally responsive teaching was coined by Geneva Gay. It entails crafting and delivering curricula that is relevant to students’ lived experiences. The aim is to engage students with material that is “personally meaningful” in order to pique their interest and motivation to learn (Gay, 2002).
My interest in culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy (which I didn’t have the time to get into in this talk) springs from the cultural homogeneity of my own education. As a high school student and undergraduate I read, mostly, books, stories and poems by white male Europeans.
Students deserve better. They deserve to be introduced to a rich, multicultural world of literary experiences and they deserve to see themselves represented in what they read. As a teacher, its my job to think about students’ intersecting identities: nationality, language, gender, ethnicity, class, faith, etc.
This presentation focuses on language as a form of cultural and self-identity, and the importance of representing multiple Englishes within an English Language Arts curriculum. This was highly relevant because the students in this class hailed from several countries and spoke more than a dozen languages.
Including world Englishes within a literature/language arts program is something I feel strongly about because, 1) it’s good for students and 2) it’s fun. Some of the fabulous things about the English language are the richness of its vocabulary (much of it borrowed from other languages), how its (relative) grammatical simplicity sparks creativity and the way it has been adapted/refined/altered by linguistic communities around the globe.
There are more great presentations from the conference available at the Le Sallay website.
Culturally Responsive Teaching in Blended Learning: A Case Study
Share your thoughts and ideas on CRT/CST in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke
Recently, I binge-watched Netflix’s relationship reality show The Ultimatum: Queer Love.
If you haven’t seen it, the show features five lesbian couples that split up and reshuffle. One partner in each wants to get married, the other isn’t sure; the show is a chance to figure out now, forever, or never.
The premise is whatever but it was transfixing to watch a show where queer was the default. There was none of the usual exception signaling or tokenism of shows with only a few queer participants/characters; no hetero normativity. Instead of being Other the participants just were.
Soapy plot-lines aside, it was cool and refreshing to see queer women flirt, do their make-up, argue, shuffle around in slippers, make romantic gestures, walk their dogs, pitch fits, drink too much.
It should NOT be revelatory that queer people are human too, but, watching The Ultimatum, made it clear that what we are presented with as normal is in fact (hetero)normative. This doesn’t reflect reality but constructs an image that we are taught to accept as real.
Resisting the norm
Michel Foucault’s concept of normalization, the process by which ideas or ways of being come to be taken for granted, is pertinent. As educators, we are immersed in normalizing messaging, as are our students. They can be as invisible and pervasive as the air we breathe. Like tainted air, they are dangerous. Sociocultural imperatives about normalcy or (worse) naturalness — often deployed around subjects like sex, gender, social roles, economics, etc. — have the potential to do massive harm. Even when they seem innocuous, they put a subtle curb on imagination.
Resistance is the only antidote. According to Foucault scholar Dianna Taylor, “Refusing to simply accept what is presented as natural, necessary, and normal – like the ideas of sex and the norm itself – presents possibilities for engaging in and expanding the practice of freedom.”
Positive normalization
Humans are neophobic, shying away from the unfamiliar. This calls for conscious effort to challenge unhelpful or restrictive norms with positive normalization, i.e. not of a particular way of being but of an open, curious approach to life.
Replacing an old norm with a new norm simply shuffles the exclusion tiles. What we need, and we as educators should model, is normalizing acceptance, inquisitiveness and respect towards what is unfamiliar but not harmful.* Nobody is obliged to embrace someone else’s way of living, but a good education should provide them with the self-awareness and self-confidence to live and let live.
*By all means, resist and reject ideas and actions that harm oneself or others.
Making mistakes: Students are under mad pressure about grades, achievements, performance, etc. This fuels counterproductive perfectionism and alienates kids from their greatest learning tool: mistakes. As I wrote in ‘On Screwing Up‘: “You can’t learn what you already know… Existing expertise may gratify the ego, but it doesn’t grow the intellect.”
Asking for help: Along with making mistakes, it is critical to encourage students to ask for help. Teachers are not (or shouldn’t be) remote judges, hovering only to instruct and assess: we should be there to solve the problems before we grade the answers. We have to resist the Anglo-American individualist tradition and remind kids that asking for help is a sign of intelligence, not weakness.
Discussing problematic language: As a literature teacher, problematic language is an all-the-time issue. How do we understand Jean Toomer’s use of the n-word in Cane? Is it ever acceptable to use the r-word? What about swearing? How do we get better at remembering people’s pronouns? Teachers cannot protect students from problematic language, nor prevent them from using it. What we can do is explore why words or phrases are problematic, how they got to be that way, and what using them really means. We can educate students about the power of words and help them understand what their word choices say about them, and how their use of language affects others.
Talking about intersectional privilege/disadvantage: There is no contradiction in urging students to treat everyone they meet as a unique individual and teaching them about how individuals are shaped by intersectional privilege or disadvantage. It is fact, not indoctrination, to articulate that white females have different experiences than white males, cis people different experiences than trans people, people of color different experiences than white, etc. Yes, people are more than the sum of their identities, but those identities matter and by understanding them we gain greater understanding of those around us — and ourselves.
Fluid gender and sexual identities: The majority of literature portrays a limited range of gender and sexual and identities. There is no getting around that, although the canon is growing joyously year by year. What I can do as a teacher is A) bring in as much LGBTQ+ literature as possible and B) teach texts in context, i.e. the couple in Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ are a man and a woman not because that is ‘normal’ but because it reflects the gender roles and romantic partnerships of that time and place. Typing that, I see how reductive it sounds. Yes, it is an imperfect approach, but it at least opens discussions about how gender roles and sexual identities have changed over time.
What would you like to normalize in your classroom (or world)? Share in the comments!
Cila Warncke Writer 