The Learning Laboratory

The pencils are on the desk. The math books open to basic equations. Some of the pencils are in the pages. A few are on the floor. The SMART board is on and humming. But the kids and the teacher are gone. I have arrived early for a speech to find everyone at lunch and I am afforded an unfettered look at the modern learning laboratory of the third grade. The headings South East West North are on the walls. Writing rules float in space and are taped on the walls.  Prepositions. Nouns. Verbs. Subject. Action.

There is a water bottle on the floor. A pencil. Some paper. An eraser. The children were taken out quickly you can see that. There are rules on the wall for spelling. Rules for thinking. Acting. Rules for life. There is the clock. There are the books and the large rocking chair for reading. And in here you can see how hard the kids and the teachers work. You can see all that knowledge flying around the room. And it is serious business. Because they are looking for food. And the room is jammed with the food of knowledge.

And you can just see those teachers in their work. You can see the open laptop under the American flag and the proverbial apple on the desk. So much important work goes on in here it makes you feel guilty. Yes the worlds work must be done but this shaping of young minds does seem pre-imminent. And you hope the teachers stay to their task. Because in this laboratory in the middle of the day in the middle of nowhere are people who are doing the heavy lifting for all  of us.

Could it be any more important?

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Power Band in America

David Brooks of the NY Times just wrote an interesting piece on the power band, although he didn't call it that. He is fond of the term meritocracy and what it means today. Basically it is Brooks contention that the power band has narrowed so far that only a few colleges can promise a stellar career for graduates. The Ivy League of course. After that it is every marketing major for himself. It is what is behind the glut of twenty somethings living at home now after going fabulously in debt. It is what is behind our current economic slugfest.

But back to the power band. The power band snakes up through the east coast and runs through New York, Boston, Washington. It is where the players are. It is no accident that many of our Presidents, Senators, actors, major Wall Street shakers and movers all came up through this power band. Prep schools on to Ivy League. It is a trail of the few who will get all the benefits and most of the money. For everyone else it is the life of the salesman.

But of course we believe in meritocracy. Everyone should be allowed to move up on merit. The problem is that is not the reality. Brooks points out who is hired and from what schools and the depressing statistics is that unless you are coming out of one of these elite schools then you are on your own. So the narrowing of opportunity is coming down to the select few who know about the power band and are able to exploit it.

Or are born into it. For the rest of us it is Tom Cruises famous line in Risky Business....
UOI here I come!

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream in reverse

Social Medias Assault on the Classroom

Do you think any teacher would have ever put up with a student watching television while he or she was giving a lecture? No. Would not have happened. The student would have been sent to the  principal or the dean or at the very least the television would have been confiscated. But that is what has happened now to the American classroom and the students and the teachers and all of education is worse for it. Students now surf, tweet, text, watch movies, television, whatever while teachers try and give them an education. It is probably the rudest and saddest evolution in modern education that has come about from the advent of the digital age.

I have seen this first hand in a Comp Class I am teaching at a Liberal Arts College. At first I didn't really notice the students surfing. I thought they were getting ready to write and using their laptops or phones for said purpose. But then I started to realize I was competing with texts, emails, shows, news, gossip, whatever. And think about it...these students pay close to forty grand a year to go to college and sit there and not pay attention. They just surf away their erudition and get stuck with a bill. And for the teacher it is extremely demoralizing.

I mean I am a adjunct who is a writer by trade, but my God, to be faced with this assault on a teachers very raison det day after day would be  daunting. I have told the students surfing would be met with a grade deduction but still it goes on. I will have to start confiscating phones and laptops to really stop it and I would if my stint was not ending soon. To be fair it  runs at about thirty percent who spend their time in an alternate universe but how terrible to lose a third of the class to cyberspace!

There have even been some people who said students learn differently now and they should be allowed to surf away in class. Let me put this in the patois of my Southern father. Horse shit. These students (eighteen year olds from Chicago burbs) are not digital giants. They did not even twitter until I set up their accounts and none of them had a website or a blog. We set all those up and it was painful. No. They surf the way I used to hide a book in class and read. It is a diversion, something else to do while the teacher drones.

My son in highschool says the teachers there have lost the battle. They say they don't allow students to use their phones in class but the students persist. He said some teachers give up altogether and allow the students to surf or text as long as they get the work done. I get it. Try policing twenty five kids armed with small electronic devices. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Teaching requires concentration and it requires everyone to be present in mind and body. You cannot have some people there and some people somewhere else. It takes away from the whole.

So I will read this to my class and see what they think.  Maybe I'll confiscate every device I see. Maybe I'll have class in a fort far underground where no radio signals can reach us. Maybe I'll finish out my stint and leave it for others to fight. That may be the ultimate luxury of the adjunct.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

Our Mediocre Middle Class Colleges

If you think our public school system is mediocre then a new book out called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses certainly puts the nail in the coffin of American education. Americans have been told ever since the GI Bill came around after WWII and sent all those middle class kids to college for the first time that if you went to college then you had better opportunity or to to put it more directly, you could get a job. Now if you watch Waiting For Superman, the documentary, the message is that our public schools are not good and they are not good because our teachers are not good. But now there is the thought that maybe our colleges aren't so good or that the students going there aren't so motivated or equipped.

Makes sense. You could also make a case that ever since the school of business appeared on college campuses vocational training pushed out Liberal Arts and students have been the lesser for it. In Academically Adrift the case is made that students are able to get good grades in college and learn very little. That in fact they are finding the current crop of graduates unable to articulate their thoughts or possess a critical intelligence, synthesize information into a thesis or write a coherent sentence. In other words it would seem the mediocrity of our middle class learning institutions extends all the way through college.

It really started with the whole go to college to get a job mentality. The fact is that is not even true anymore as the current unemployment rate of 17 percent among college graduates bitterly proves the point. The fact is our graduates are victims of a mediocre culture that does not value critical thinking nor does it see the need. I myself tumbled out of a State College with a Masters then sat down to read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side Of Paradise and I had to keep a notebook because there were so many words I didn't know. This is not a heavy duty novel  by any stretch, but there I was basically unable to decipher a literary novel.

Of course the obvious remedy is to move Liberal Arts back to the front of college curriculums. The people who lead the country and who make the money and who are in the power band are able to think, formulate a thesis, and they do have a critical intelligence and are able to understand literature. The people who go to college to get a job should re evaluate if college is for them. Coming out with a hundred thousand dollars on your head is high price to pay for something that is no longer guaranteed. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

What College Doesn't Teach You About Writing

When I graduated college I sat down and read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and didn't know half the words. This is after I had received a Masters in History. So I started a notebook of words and it really wasn't until I worked the night shift for Gonella Bread on the West Side of Chicago that I received my literary education. It was there that I discovered the secrets of men and women who smithed words.


I worked in the shipping office of the bakery and took the bread orders all night long. The phones rang and rang and I sat in the flour and filth that is a bakery with the long loaves and flat rolls going around the bakery on a conveyor belt much like a roller coaster track. The Italians who worked there (they were all Italians) didn't speak much English and they all swore and gesticulated in the shipping office drinking their coffee with the red stain on their tennis shoes from the ink on the long loaf bags they held in place with their shoes.

Alonzo the foreman could speak English and he would come in and shake his head. What the frick you doing with all them books Jack? What in the frick you going to do with them? You need a job not books. You need a good job. Forget about them fricking books. And then he would head back out into the bakery. Around three AM the bread orders would die down and the route drivers would start to appear, sleepily drinking their coffee in the office.

It was then I pulled a book from the stack I kept on the corner of my desk. The stack was two feet high and had Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Faulkner, Lowrey, O'Connor, London. I couldn't decide what I wanted to read so I brought it all and for the next three hours I read while the loaves and rolls fell off the conveyor with soft plops to the bakery floor. When the sun started to creep into the loading dock I put on my backpack and loaded up my books.

I went to the conveyor belt and picked off the hot rolls and wrapped them in brown paper and stuffed them in my leather coat. Then I rode my motorcycle home through the cold quiet streets of Chicago with that warm bread keeping me warm. I caught my wife just before she went to work and we had warm bread and coffee. That was my literary education.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.