Teaching High School – Mysteries and Manners

Teaching in a time of coronavirus

March 23, 2020

So many of my friends who are teachers are trying to find ways to teach their students well through unfamiliar online platforms, and are rather nervous about doing so. Different schools have different expectations about how you need to manage your time online with students. Some students may not even have internet access at home, or devices that work well with remote learning. And I do not want to be yet another voice pontificating on what you should or should not do–so please take or leave these thoughts as you will.

My background is in high school English literature, so a lot of these thoughts are coming from that experience.

The essentials

There’s nothing like a crisis to get you to focus on what is essential and what is not. A couple of years ago I was asked to help co-teach an Algebra 1 class in March, since sixteen or so of the twenty-four students were failing. We really had to sit down and think about what really matters. What do they need to know in order to have a solid grasp of algebra before the end of the year? What do we need to let go of?

In the time of the coronavirus, this question is all the more poignant. What do kids need to know? What, in your subject, and in an age-appropriate manner, can speak into the abrupt changes in their lives? What wisdom, what love, can you offer?

And what do you have to let go this year? There will be a lot of that.

If you are a science teacher, what things could you be investigating with students that renew and deepen their appreciation of what doctors and medical workers do? In history, what are examples of human beings coming together in remarkable ways to help one another in movements of solidarity and courage?

I’m not saying that you need to bend over backwards in inauthentic ways to make content “relevant”… but, think about how your specific subject area can speak into your students’ lives in this time. I mean, that should always be a question teachers are asking, but the current coronavirus crisis is an opportunity for deeper revelation.

As Flannery O’Connor observed when asked why her characters have to undergo such violent and intense experiences, “It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially.”

2. No busy work

Maybe this doesn’t need to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway. The temptation all teachers have at certain times, especially when trying to manage a tricky class situation, is to “keep the kids busy.” There is some merit to this idea (“get to work!” thank you, Harry Wong) … but not much.

The goal is not to lower your standards, but to consider how your assignments are inviting students to spend their time. Are you assigning a project that requires a lot of online research and scrolling? If so, is that the best thing to do right now, when all of your students’ classes are currently conducted online and many people are spending far too much time on the internet scrolling through New York Times articles in order to have a sense of control over an unpredictable and scary situation? (I’m guilty of this, by the way.)

Assigning practice problems (esp. for Math and similar subjects) is often very necessary — we learn by practicing! — but consider how many problems are really needed here.

Really ask yourself: is this just busy work? Will my kids see it as busy work? If I think it’s meaningful and worth doing, how do I help them see that, to the extent that I can?

3. Assignments that lead students away from the computer and towards the people and world around them (with appropriate 6 feet distances!)

As an English teacher, I would be thinking if I were teaching right now, “How could I get my kids to interview their parents or grandparents on pivotal moments in history in their time? How could I encourage them to have meaningful, truth-seeking, and frank discussions that enlarge and deepen their understanding of the past to give them some context and wisdom for the present?”

Maybe, instead of having them type up these interviews, have them do an audio recording of them to minimize screen time.

If they need to do a writing assignment for you, does it HAVE to be typed? Could they write some (shorter) assignments by hand, take a picture of it, and upload it that way? (If their family has only one computer at home but several kids in school, this might be really helpful).

Are there assignments they can do by going outside for walks in their neighborhoods with their family, taking pictures of beautiful things they see?

I’m thinking about those Italians singing out their windows to encourage one another. What are ways my students could make art to add more beauty to the world right now? Could they write music? Poetry? Draw? How might they share their art with you and one another?

How can your class become a place where engagement with the truly and deeply human things is encouraged?

4. Checking in with smaller groups

As a for-credit assignment, make a sign up sheet for them to choose a time to do a short video chat with you once a week (30m or less) in small groups. Depending on how many students you have, a good idea would be to make these smaller chats with 10 students or less, if possible. (When I had 120 students, this would mean 12 different chats a week… that’s a lot. Do what you can.)

These video chats (via Google hangouts or Zoom or whatever) could be opportunities for them to share assignments with you, discuss readings of course… but more importantly it is time for them to see your face, to see that you care for them, that you are involved and engaged.

If your school is trying to have you record lectures and teach that way, talk frankly with your principal about alternatives. Real learning happens in the context of relationships, of real-time interaction. How might you facilitate that with your kids?

5. Be flexible and gentle

Be flexible and gentle– especially with yourself! Just as you would be patient with a student learning something for the very first time, be patient with yourself as you navigate online teaching.

Be honest with your kids — “Hey guys, this is new for me too. We are in this together to see what works and what doesn’t.”

More thoughts to come.

If you are a teacher, what have you been trying? What’s been working well? What hasn’t? Or, if you are a parent, what have you seen your children doing with assignments?

And for all of you who are teachers, trying your best, making mistakes, spending time trying to teach your kids in new and challenging ways, God bless you.

Country Schoolhouse, 1879 By Morgan Weistling

Reading to Learn and Learning to Read

August 17, 2015

There are lots of assumptions about high school students you have to get rid of when you become a teacher.

The first is that most high school students know how to read.

This group of kiddos, born around the year 2000 (!), grew up with internet, cellphones and an increasingly frantic cultural emphasis on the soundbite, the status update, and the hashtag. It’s sobering to realize that most of them do not remember dial-up.

Even when I was in elementary school, computer typing classes with boxy, green-screen machines were in vogue. Judging by the widespread pushes in education nowadays about iPads for every child, I can only imagine that for many of my kids technology already was a big part of their elementary school experience – Smartboards, Youtube videos, Powerpoints, even “educational” video games… again, useful vehicles for condensing information into small, digestible bites.

Baby food, but not meat and potatoes.

The point is that unless these high school students had parents who read to them every night, access to lots of books, encouragement from their families, and a special type of intellectual thirst that can’t be quenched by television or wikipedia, they inevitably suffer from an inability to read in order to learn.

They are still too busy learning how to read for extended periods of time in the first place.

Unfortunately, in high school, most textbooks assume that you already know how to read. Most teachers do, too. For social studies you might be assigned a chapter about the origins of the American revolution and quizzed the next day, under the assumption that you learned something from reading it (or that you read the chapter tat all). Or in science you read a chapter about mitosis and meiosis and later you’re expected to explain the process yourself. Or even in math, the text gives you charts and graphs and directions – and sometimes even word problems – and you must have both sides of your brain working at once to tackle the problem.

But of course all that kind of reading requires a lot of patience, mental stamina and an awareness (learned in fairytales and other classic literature) that people often do not say what they mean, nor do they really mean what they say. But if you haven’t read about deceptive witches and foolish greedy children who eat Turkish delight, then you come into high school totally unprepared for the biases and hidden agendas sprinkled throughout most texts you encounter.

I find myself, when teaching, trying to find ways to make complex directions and concepts as short and simple as possible. I have even adopted catchy phrases to help my kids remember how to write thesis statements (“A is B because of 1, 2, 3!”) and explain quotes (“remember, quotes can’t speak for themselves!”) and even sit up straight (“SLANT!”). That is what the teacher books tell me to do.

I’m trying to meet my kids where they are, so that’s okay I guess. But sometimes with my own use of Youtube videos, graphic organizes, and gimmicks, I feel like I’m exacerbating the problem and catering to their infirmities rather than helping them learn how to really read.

I’m not saying that all my students suffer from this malady. I do have a few very strong readers – far better than I was at their age. But year after year, that number is growing smaller. And I am faced, as an English literature teacher, with introducing Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Dante’s Inferno to a group of people who need to learn how to read before they can to read in order to understand.

High school teachers are not themselves prepared to teach reading. Our own certification is based largely on our content knowledge – not on our ability to impart basic skills. There are many times when I wish I had been in ACE’s middle school or even elementary English content class so that I would have a better grasp of how children learn how to read in the first place.

It’s very difficult to teach someone how to do something you don’t remember learning how to do yourself. This is true with teaching writing but even more true of teaching reading. All I can remember is being constantly read to and suddenly — seemingly out of nowhere — reading C. S. Lewis for myself. I doubt this was the actual course of events but that is the way I remember it. And I read Lewis in order to learn – because I was curious about miracles and the problem of pain and all the rest of it.

Unfortunately, many of my kids read in order to avoid bad grades. Or to get good ones. Or they simply don’t read.

Cris Tovani, a reading strategies specialist, has been a huge help to me in the last few years in breaking down the complexities of the reading process. If you are at a high school teacher like me, often at a loss as to how to bridge the gap of years of little reading in your kids, check out her books.

You’d be reading to learn yourself – but perhaps eventually you’ll be able to pass that invaluable skill on to your students.

calvin-hobbes-read-dinosaur — source: smilingldsgirl.com

On Teaching Poetry, Part II

April 17, 2015

I taught my annual poetry unit at the beginning of the semester and have already blogged a little about it here. In that post I posted these key questions:

The key to teaching poetry is answering the question how. How can we help our kids get inside a poem? How can we help them admire (even if they do not necessarily like) the games poets play with language? How can we help them respect poetry even if they do not understand it? (“On Teaching Poetry“)

A lot of teachers take one of two conventional (and mistaken) approaches: have the students read easy, crappy poems, or have them read classical poems and force them to try to get some meaning out of it. I have chosen another approach.

Being a UD grad, I’m all about the Western Tradition and legit poetry. But I’m also all about respecting where my kids are and acknowledging the fact that, for most of them, poetry is pretty boring. So instead of teaching what a poem is about or even why a poet wrote it, I teach them to ask the question how.

The first thing the kids need to learn when encountering poetry is the difference between tone and mood. Why? Because recognizing tone and mood in conversation, in writing, in emails, in text messages, in any type of human communication is a basic life skill. If you can’t identify tone and mood, then you miss out on 99% of the meaning in any given sentence you read.

Tone is how the speaker feels about what he is saying. It is his attitude.

Mood is how the speaker is trying to make the audience feel about what he is saying.

I ask them, “Have you ever met someone who has a hard time picking up on sarcasm?”

They always say yes. “That person, who cannot pick up on a sarcastic tone, unfortunately misses most of the meaning.”

I then give a real life example. I walk up to Charlie and I say with sincerity and a bright smile, “Hey, Charlie, you did a great job in class today!”

Then I ask, “How does that make you feel, Charlie?”

“Uh.. good, miss,” he replies.

“Great. Because I used a sincere or kind tone, I created a positive or happy mood in Charlie. But I could easily say the exact same words and create a totally different meaning.”

I walk up to Charlie again, this time with a bored and annoyed expression on my face. “Hey, Charlie. You did a great job in class today.” I make the sarcasm as evident as possible.

Then I ask, “How does that make you feel, Charlie?”

“Uh… kinda bad, actually…”

“Exactly. This time I used a sarcastic tone and that created a hurt or slightly depressed mood.”

So then we start to apply those terms to poems – usually simple Billy Collins poems first. Ask questions like, “Okay, what do you think the speaker’s tone is in stanza 1 – positive or negative? What words or images made you say that?”

Starting with the generic terms positive or negative really helps the kids at first. After they determine if the tone is positive or negative, they can more easily find a stronger tone word like “sad” or “furious” or “calm”.

So then we work on what I call “Tone and Mood Maps.” Basically, the kids get a poem with plenty of space in the margins. Then we go through the poem stanza by stanza and put a plus sign + or minus sign – next to each stanza. Then, once we have mapped out basic positives and negatives, then we go back through the poem again and try to determine a tone word and a mood word for each stanza. Like so:

One of my students’ annotations. Notice the plus and minus signs on the left. Then the tone words on the left of each stanza, and the mood words on the right.

The next step is to put them in the place of the poet. Oftentimes students take for granted how difficult it is to write a poem. So I have them write their own “Introduction to Poetry” modeled after Billy Collins’ poem of the same name. The above picture shows one of these poems that was afterwards annotated by the student for tone and mood. Here is another one. The poem is worth reading!

photo-2 — Again, notice the + and – signs, tone words on the left and the mood words on the right.

And I really like the way this student models her poem after both Collins’ and Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”:

Approaching poetry this way changes the question from what does a poem mean to how does a poem mean.

Which, in the end, is a much more meaningful question. It prevents the student from making assumptions about the poet’s intent, and instead forces him to watch what the poet actually does in the poem.

Even if I present them with (gasp!) a real poem, they can find a way into the poem through the tone and mood. Like this student, who wrote admirably about Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. Here’s his second body paragraph:

Throughout the second and third stanzas of the poem, Frost tells of many similarities between the two roads. However, he twists and controls language in these stanzas using an appealing tone to help the speaker convince the readers that the second road was the correct one to choose and kindle in them a desire for it. After looking at one road for a while, the speaker “took the other, as just as fair,/ And having perhaps the better claim,/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear,/ Though as for that the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” (6-10). This is what makes this poem difficult to understand. As a result of the appealing tone that the speaker uses, the reader is led to experience an intrigued mood and get caught up in the appeal of the second path, but forget that it is the same as the first.

I love that this kid is comfortable admitting that this poem is “difficult to understand”. He doesn’t pretend to get the whole thing and turn it to some carpe diem cliche, like most people do when they read Frosts’ poem. Instead, he just describes how the poem means by analyzing the tone and the mood.

Why I’m Changing my Mind About Grades – Part III

February 20, 2015

walnutcove-grades — source: cse.buffalo.edu

What usually happens when a student fails an assessment?

Does he

a) come to see the teacher to find out what he did not understand

b) get reprimanded by his parents and try to do better next time on a different assessment

c) roll his eyes and forget it about it

In my experience, the answer is usually C. A and B do occur, occasionally. A, of course, is the best option and the one for which all good teachers hope. After all, grades should be about learning and if a student fails an assessment that means he has not learned what he was supposed to learn.

Perhaps this failure to learn is the teacher’s fault. Perhaps it is the student’s fault. Perhaps it is nobody’s fault. But it happens. And what we hope is that a student can gain some helpful information from an assessment, such as: “Oh. I have not actually mastered Parallelism. I should go talk to Ms. Shea to find out what I did not understand for the sake of learning itself.”

Ha.

Under normal circumstances, and under most grading systems, option A rarely occurs because the student, the teacher – nay, the class itself – has already moved on to a new objective or concept. Why waste time laboring over an exam you failed when you have another one looming on the horizon? If a final exam is coming up, then perhaps you will ask the teacher to help you so that you do not make the same errors on the final exam. But this points-based motivation is hardly ideal.

What we really want is for kids to be intrinsically motivated. To care not about grades for grades’ sake, but to care about grades only insofar as they reflect learning.

This sort of virtuous motivation may be 90% grace, 5% parent-influence, 4% peer influence and only 1% teacher influence, but we must do what we can with that 1%.

Assessments can be a learning experience. And if the assessment says, “you did not master this concept,” then, ideally, the student should go back, try again, and then retake (an altered version of) the assessment so that we can measure whether or not he has mastered the concept the second time.

Therefore, I have decided to offer retakes this semester – something I NEVER thought I would do. I used to think that if a student had not mastered the objective by the time of the assessment, then his grade should reflect that. If I schedule the test for Februrary 19th and the student did not study, or studied incorrectly, or thought he paid attention in class but did not… then for any of the those reasons he deserves to earn a low grade.

This, as far as it goes, is true. But the real question is this: what happens after failure? Do we want our kids to fail (or perform poorly) and merely move onto the next topic, hoping for a better outcome next time? (Experience shows all teachers that the kids who fail one assessment are far more likely to fail the next one, even if it is on a completely different objective unrelated to the first.)

Or…

Do we want them to go back to that failed assessment, analyze it, think about it, talk to us about it, and learn from their mistakes? Of course we want the latter. Because grades should not be about punishment, they should be about what a student has learned. And if he can show us he has achieved the objective after all, even on a second (or third!) try, shouldn’t his grade reflect that learning and progress?

Yes? Are you with me?

So how do we make this happen? By allowing retakes for assessments.

This is my new retake policy in a letter I wrote to my kids:

Dear Sophomores, Based on the research we have been discussing in class and that has been presented by [Principal], I believe it is in your best interest to adjust our grading policy for second semester so that your grades will more accurately reflect your learning. However, I also believe it would be best to introduce a gradual change based upon some of the feedback I received in your grading proposals instead of the full assessment-only model. The changes are:

Re-takes for assessments will be introduced

After certain major assessments, and at my discretion after looking at your performance, I will be offering re-takes on certain assessments so that you can learn from your mistakes and show me that you have met the learning objective. The retakes I offer will be available to all students, regardless of your original grade. If you chose to retake the assessment, I will not average your scores: the higher grade will go into the grade book to reflect your mastery.

In order to retake an assessment, you must complete the following:

Two days of NHS study hall with me or with the student mentors to review concepts you missed on the assessment.

A full-page typed letter explaining how you prepared for the first assessment, the mistakes made on the previous assessment, how you prepared for this retake, what your plan of action is from this point to avoid making these mistakes again.

These requirements are in place to ensure that you try your best on all your assessments, and that you only retake an assessment to show me your growth in learning.

Homework will make up a smaller percentage of your overall grade

You will still receive credit for homework, bell work, and other completion grades on a random basis. This will be worth 15% of your overall grade in this class. Late work will be accepted for a reduced grade (70%) until the end of the unit. After this time, late work will not be accepted. The goal in this adjusted policy is to ensure more clearly that your grades reflect your learning of the Archdiocesan standards and objectives. If you or your parents have any questions, please email me. I will be happy to meet with you to discuss the policy. Sincerely, Ms. Maura Shea [email]

Ideally, I would allow retakes on ALL assessments. But since I am still grading some non-assessment work (homework, bell work, class work, etc.) my principal suggested I take a partial approach. Basically, I am trying to offer retakes on as many assessments as I can. Keep in mind that this means creating NEW assessments and grading a LOT more of them. Ahem.

Later, I gave each student a simplified version they put in their binders for easy reference:

Retakes

Sign up for two spots [on the schedule posted by the door] – one so that we can go over your previous assessment, and another so that you can retake a new assessment.

Check in with me to make sure these times are okay.

Prepare your typed letter.

How did you prepare for your first assessment?

What are the mistakes you made on the first assessment – why did they happen?

How did you prepare for this retake?

What is your plan of action to avoid making the same mistakes?

Come see me on the scheduled days!

Thoughts? Suggestions? In my next post, I’ll explain how this new policy (implemented in January) has been working so far.

Read Part I here.

Read Part II here.

7 Quick Takes Friday (2/28/14)

February 28, 2014

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Just this.

-2-

In Creative Writing, we are working on murder mystery stories. What’s so interesting to me about this genre is how particular it is. You just have to have certain strict elements to make this type of story work. For instance:

Objects. Objects are crucial to murder mysteries in a way that they are not to basically any other type of fiction. Obviously “the murder weapon” is often important, but more crucially, the plot itself is almost always driven by the discovery of objects–physical clues that lead the protagonist to the truth.

Think: in the first episode of the new Sherlock series, what object is crucial?

Yup. The pink suitcase. It’s essential. If the murderer had not forgotten leave the pink suitcase with the body, it would have been nearly impossible to prove that the lady had not committed suicide. But since the pink suitcase was missing, and Holmes knew (by the splash of dirty water on her left ankle) that she had been dragging a suitcase behind her in the rain, the so-called “suicide” had to involve at least one other person on the scene–the murderer.

Still not convinced?

Think: In almost every Columbo episode, an object (or objects) plays a crucial role in Columbo’s deciphering of the facts versus the story given by the murderer.

In the episode we watched in class, for example, we see Columbo reading a newspaper while the police scurry about the house and the medical examiner peers over the body. As usual, Columbo gets some weird glances for seeming to be so uninterested in what is most important.

Wait. What? You’ve never seen a Columbo episode before???

But, in his characteristic way, there is always just “one more thing” that Columbo has questions about. In this case, he has questions about the newspaper. The murderer claimed she had not left the house all day and there was no one else who came to see her. The newspaper must have been delivered to the house, she said.

Ah– but only morning editions of the paper are delivered. The evening edition had to have been bought by someone at a drug store or grocery, proving that the murderer had, in fact, left the house even though she claimed not to.

So the challenge for my students is to recognize–and utilize–the importance of objects in their own murder mystery stories. Most really good mysteries rely upon them.

-3-

Speaking of objects, I wrote a paper in college tracing the development of the novel by looking at how objects are treated in four specific works: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Gustave Flaubert’s novella A Simple Heart, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.

The objects I consider in these works are, respectively: Mr. Darcy’s portrait, Felicite’s green parrot, the coffin and Our Lady’s tilma.

What’s interesting is how these four works suggest the increasing importance of objects in novels over time. Jane Austen (1775-1817) and other early novelists (Phillip Sidney, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anthony Trollope) almost never talk about objects because they are more interested in ideas, concepts, conversation, and character. This is why the scene where Elizabeth experiences a revelation about Mr. Darcy while looking at his painted portrait is so interesting; it is very unusual for Austen and most other early novelists. By the time we get to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, objects are everywhere.

The biggest exception I can think of to this rule about early novelists is in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), where one of the best scenes in this early novel is about the main character salvaging various objects from the wreck of his ship. But the story still centers around his inner thoughts and religious conversion. Moreover, in most of these early novels, the narrator (even if she is not directly involved in the action of the story) uses 1st person–giving a sense of subjectivity rather than objectivity.

By the time we reach Flaubert and his parrot, however, objects become a lot more prominent in novels—perhaps partially due to the increasing influence of the Industrial Revolution and advances in science and what is “objectively” real. Think of the significance of the scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous work (1850), or the whale (is it okay to say it functions as an object?) and Captain Ahab’s wooden leg in Moby Dick (1851). Even in very interior and psychologically-driven novels, like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), objects (and characters’ interpretations of them) feature very prominently.

By the time we get to Faulkner, the 18th and early 19th century subjectivity of the opinionated (and often 1st person narrator) begins to be fused with the objective mid-18th through late 20th century objective third person. Faulkner, Virgina Woolf and James Joyce and other adventurers into streams of consciousness and human interiority combine an emphasis on the external world with and its tenuous relationship to the internal world of the human mind.

I haven’t read as much post-modern fiction, but I would guess the relationship between character and object has already begun to change very significantly.

All of this is not to say that objects should “mean” something in a story– but rather that looking at the way an author presents objects tells us a lot about the his epistemology– what human beings can know about reality.

-4-

Obviously my above argument is fraught with holes and exceptions, but I think the general idea holds.

Speaking of ideas with a lot of holes and exceptions, this is a very interesting take on the popular Myers-Briggs Personality Test–a test which, by the way, has always fascinated me.

A taste:

All tests of the Myers-Briggs ilk are tautologies. They are tautological because their results cannot exceed my input. If out of 100 questions, I 100 times affirm that I am likely to grow angry over criticism and confrontation, all my 100-question test-result really says is that “I am likely to grow angry over criticism and confrontation.” Sure, a test may express its tautological conclusions in words that sound like it has digested our answers and excreted some new diamond — as when we tell a test in 100 different ways that we are most likely to look outwardly than inwardly, and it tells us we are an “extrovert” — but closer inspection reveals that this new “identity” is no more than a simplified expression of what we usually do — an “extrovert” is defined as a person more likely to look outwardly than inwardly. The problem with test-takers is that we conflate words which summarize and offer back to us our habits with words that serve as identities given to us by the test. (BadCatholic, “Magic and Myers-Briggs”)

Hmm.

It is true that we should not so easily conflate “habit” with “identity” (although immediately Flannery O’Connor’s Habit of Being comes to mind).

But on the other hand: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Aristotle, anyone?

UPDATE: Or, as Molly pointed out to me, not actually Aristotle, but Will Durant’s characterization in The Story of Philosophy.

#whathappenswhenyouhaveUDfriends

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On the one year (!) anniversary of Pope Benedict’s official retirement, via Catholic News Agency:

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Back to objects.

An excerpt from my essay:

For Felicite, however, this [relationship between a human being and an object] is more complex, and for Flaubert (or at least for his narrator) objects seem to gather more levels of meaning than they do for Austen. The portrait of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is simply a description of him—its meaning lies in its accurate rendering and its ability to convey something of his inner character to Elizabeth. But the picture of the Holy Spirit and the stuffed parrot have a more complex relationship to one another and to Felicite—because that very relationship exists only in her perception: “In her mind, the one became associated with the other, the parrot becoming sanctified by connection with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit in turn acquiring added life and meaning” (SH 35). The picture of the Holy Spirit is not a portrait of the parrot—yet the two objects acquire a kind of correspondence in Felicity’s “mind,” in her imaginative awareness. In Flaubert’s story the object’s significance is also much more subjectively determined; Darcy’s portrait would represent Darcy to almost everyone in Austen’s world (albeit to a lesser degree than to Elizabeth), but we may safely assume that the stuffed parrot would suggest the Holy Spirit only to Felicite. (Shea, “People and Things: Epistemological Possibility and Limit in Austen, Flaubert, Faulkner and Cather”)

Next time you read a really good novel, notice any and all objects presented. Do they figure prominently in the plot? Do they reveal something about how characters come to know the truth about themselves or about one another?

Are objects prominently featured at all?

Why?

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Also, here is the most fascinating article to appear on my newsfeed this week (and, thanks to my very interesting friends, that is saying a lot):

“8 Surprising Historical Facts that Will Change Your Concept of Time Forever.”

This article features sliced bread, Betty White, the pyramids of Egypt, the Chicago Cubs, and other notables.

Excerpt:

Not everyone can be a world history master, especially when we tend to learn about it in specifically segmented classes like “European History” or “American Revolutionary History.” Maybe you have an exceptional grasp on the global historical timeline. But for those of us who don’t, the list below, inspired by a recent Reddit thread called “What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don’t seem like they would have?” puts key historical moments into some much-needed context. (huffingtonpost.com)

Have a great weekend!

7 Quick Takes Friday (1/10/14)

January 10, 2014

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Right before Christmas break, my apartment complex sent out an email warning us about the dangers of frozen pipes. Since I’m a Boston native, this news came as no surprise to me. Here’s a wonderful reflection about frozen pipes… well, really, frozen hearts that you are worried will never change by Simcha Fisher: “How to Thaw a Frozen Heart.”

You think you are probably heating it up, and making that little gob of ice smaller and smaller, but what if you’re not? What if the real trouble spot is icing itself up more and more as you speak, and you’re sitting there like a moron, concentrating all your time and effort on a bit of pipe that is fine?

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Since our school began doing the Poetry Out Loud program last year, and will be doing it again this year, I began teaching my kids a poetry unit. Here’s an interesting fact you may not know:

There are always THREE people involved in every poem you read. Yes, three. And no, they’re not the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (as many of my students guessed). They are 1) the reader / you, 2) the author/poet, and 3) the speaker / narrator. Everyone always forgets #3, or assumes that the speaker IS the author. This is largely due, I believe, to the confessional poetry of the last century a’la Sylvia Plath in which the speaker usually WAS the poet, or at least expressed the poet’s feelings. But it’s a BIG mistake to assume that this is always the case. The poet has the freedom to create a fictional speaker–and, in some sense, ALL speakers are fictional. They are perpetually feeling and expressing the content of the poem, whereas the poet is a historical person who moves on with her life even if she intended to express herself through the speaker.

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Whenever I teach poetry, I also teach mood and tone.

Lots of people get these two things confused. The distinction between them is simple, but also very important.

Mood = the way the reader is SUPPOSED to feel / i.e. the way the author WANTS his reader to feel.

Eg: Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories usually have a suspenseful or creepy mood, because the reader is meant to feel in suspense or frightened.

Tone = the way the speaker feels toward the text / the speaker’s attitude

Eg: The speaker’s sarcastic tone alerts the reader to the fact that he is being mocked.

The nice thing about teaching mood and tone is that the kids usually accept the fact that these are useful things to know. Recognizing the tone of voice of someone with whom you are conversing is obviously important, since meaning depends so much upon how we say things, not just what we say. Sarcasm in particular can make all the difference in statements like this: “Great job today!”

Mood, on the other hand, is the feeling somebody is trying to get you to feel. Thus, tone influences mood. If someone says “Great job today!” kindly, you are supposed to feel encouraged or happy as a result. If someone says “Great job today!” sarcastically, you are supposed to feel ashamed or embarrassed as a result.

Poetry habituates us to tone and mood and can help increase emotional intelligence.

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I know you’ve always wondered why our Solar System is Flat. So here is MinutePhysics to the rescue, to tell you why:

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One of the things that really troubles “conservative” Catholics (for lack of a better word) is Pope Francis’ relative silence on abortion (although he has, actually not been utterly silent on the issue).

Francis Rocca at Catholic News Service just came out with an interesting article on the topic:

“Some people think that the Holy Father should talk more about abortion,” Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston said in a speech to the Knights of Columbus in August. But the cardinal added: “I think he speaks of love and mercy to give people the context for the church’s teaching on abortion.”

In a widely quoted interview published the following month, Pope Francis acknowledged that he had “not spoken much” about “issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” and that he had been “reprimanded for that.”

“But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context,” the pope said. “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” (Rocca)

The whole article is here: “With Few Words on Abortion, Pope Francis Shows a New Way to Be Pro-Life.”

What do you think? Does it bother you that Pope Francis doesn’t say very much about abortion? Pope Pius XII was also criticized for being too reticent about the Nazis–although Rabbi David Dalin and others argue that the pope’s approach to the great evil of his time was actually quite appropriate.

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Throwback to my first year of teaching. This is what I was writing about in January of my first year:

At a few faculty meetings, my principal has mentioned “rigor and relevance.” I feel that though I have been pretty successful with the “rigor” part, I still have a lot to do in trying to help my students connect more personally with these classical texts. I didn’t use to like the idea of “selling” literature as if I were a salesperson trying to manipulate an audience—but I’ve begun to realize that some “selling” is necessary. This quest to make English “relevant” to my students does not have to be superficial or dishonest (as I used to perceive such efforts). The truth is, we do not live in an ideal world and education of any kind can’t simply speak for itself—educators are responsible for revealing the true worth of their subject as much as they can. Ultimately “relevance” is about taking my students seriously where they are and being sensitive to their opinions and interests in order to bring them into a relationship with literature, and more particularly, into conversation with the authors and ideas that have shaped our culture whether we realize it at first or not.

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A dear friend of mine from ACE just invited me to join her in starting a blog that is going to be “a collection of female thought.” I think you’ll be hearing a lot of great perspectives here, so I’ll be keeping you updated and will send you a link when things get going!

Teaching Dreams

August 1, 2013

I’ve been having a lot of teaching dreams lately. Or, perhaps more accurately, teaching nightmares.

For instance, last night I dreamed that I was at my new school on the first day, only this new school looked exactly like the high school I went to back in Massachusetts. And so I thought I knew my way around, (in fact I remember wanting to look into some of the old classrooms and talk to former teachers) but for the life of me I could not find my own classroom where I was supposed to be teaching! The bell rang, kids shuffled to classes everywhere, and I simply could not find where I was supposed to go.

Bewildered, I ran through the halls – upstairs, downstairs, peeking into classrooms as I went by and catching glimpses of my own former teachers.

Eventually I came to a deserted classroom, which was apparently where I was supposed to be introducing myself to my new class. Mr B. (my high school principal, not my future principal) came in and demanded to know where my students were. For some reason I knew the students he spoke of were my Louisiana kids, and so I mumbled something about being late and that possibly they had all gone to look for me in a different room.

“Well, find them!” he said.

Once again I returned hopelessly to the endless hallways. Suddenly I saw my old senior English teacher, Mr. Tallon, who died very suddenly last year.

“Mr. Tallon?” I gasped. “I thought you had died!”

“A lot of people thought that,” he said amicably.

“Could you please help me? I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go.”

“Of course!”

Nonchalantly, and at a very leisurely pace, he walked me through the hallways and we chatted about old times. I felt better since I was with him, but I still felt a gnawing sense of anxiety because I could not find my students.

“Have you ever been up to the fifth floor?” he asked me suddenly.

At my high school, there is no fifth floor. “Um, I didn’t think there was one…”

“This way!” he said. And he went up a tiny stairwell. I hesitated because I really don’t like cramped, small spaces, and because I felt we were getting a little off-track.

Then another teacher arrived and asked us in annoyance where we were going. I felt helpless and sure that my employment was coming to a swift and disastrous end.

And then I woke up.

The English teacher in me is tempted to analyze this dream, to speculate on the significance of me getting lost in my old school, and my quest for my missing Louisiana students, and my encounter with my deceased senior English teacher. And perhaps to observe my own anxiety about starting at a new school this year, which thus far I have (during waking hours) kept at arms-length.

The other part of me, which finds dreams in general to be annoying and rather stressful, wants to dismiss this and all other nightmares about teaching I have had this summer.

If you were hoping that this post was going to come to some revelatory and insightful conclusion about the purpose of dreams, I am afraid you will be disappointed. But here is what I do know, after thinking about my dream:

1) I really miss my students in Louisiana, and maybe I will be feeling a bit lost without them at my new school.

2) I miss Mr. Tallon and my other old teachers, and I wish I could ask for their advice. I wish I could remember what exactly they did every day that helped me learn so much.

3) I wonder why dreams had such significance in the Bible, in both the Old and New testaments. I am thinking particularly of the angel visiting St. Joseph in his dreams, encouraging him to take Mary as his wife, and later urging him to take his family away to Egypt. I mean, how do you know when you should pay attention to your dreams, and when you shouldn’t? How did St. Joseph know?

4) All of my nightmares about teaching have been about losing control of the situation – and yet this is what teaching is! Through painfully embarrassing experiences, my waking self has realized that one of the secrets of teaching is simply accepting the fact that there is so much out of your control. When you are in a room of twenty five adolescents, anything can happen. You just don’t know what happened between student A and her best friend this morning, or student B and his parents, or student C and his lack of sleep. And that’s okay. Somehow, you need to give them the sense that you are in control, but at the same time you should resist being under such illusions yourself. God is in control, and that has to be enough.

What do you think about dreams?

Richard Wilbur writes a lot about dreams in his poetry. Here is one of his very best poems from his newest collection, Anterooms, which I believe he wrote about his recently deceased wife.

“The House” by Richard Wilbur

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes

For a last look at that white house she knew

In sleep alone, and held no title to,

And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?

White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;

A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;

Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?

Only a foolish man would hope to find

That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.

Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

Meeting and Matching Moments of Hope

June 18, 2013

Adopted from a paper I wrote last summer for my Adolescent Development Class

pix_constructivism — Another view of the theory I’m about to describe…

Summary of Theory:

Donald Winnicott says that the role of the educator is “a going to meet and match the moment of hope” (class notes, 2012). That phrase comes to my mind so frequently now when I teach. There are many such moments, but they are easy to miss. Or, even when I see them, it is difficult to know how to “meet and match” them.

Winnicot’s words are a beautiful way to describe the huge challenge of exploring how the human brain develops in order to find the best ways to facilitate student learning.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget presented a genetic epistemology that sought to describe this human “moment” as really a series of moments—an ongoing creation of organized structures of knowledge into which new information is integrated over time (Wadsworth,1989). For Piaget, intelligence is an activity rather than a capacity (class notes, 2012). Think about that for a moment — your intelligence, which popular culture so often envisions in terms of IQ, a static number or given ability — is actually something fluid and changeable. This idea has transformed the way I think about my students. Intelligence is an activity they engage in, not some sort of limitation to their activities.

The implications of Piaget’s theory thereby inform more recent constructivist and cognitive-mediational theories of learning. These approaches stress the role of learners as active problem-solvers (Anderson, 1989a; Lemov 2010), decision-making builders of their own knowledge (Chi 2009; Albert & Steinberg 2011) and adaptors to their environment (Sternberg 1998).

Thus, educators are called to be “great observers” of their students like Piaget was of his children (class notes 2012)—observers who seek to understand the ways in which students assimilate, accommodate, and construct their own knowledge schemata (Wadsworth 1989, Lapsley lecture 2012). Piaget has helped me to see that how you teach is really only important insofar as it tries to respond to the more important question of how students learn. This is how you “meet and match” every “moment of hope” (Winnicott 1956).

Analysis of My Own Teaching:

Sternberg (1998) explains how in education there is “often a large gap between theory and practice,” and so learning theories need to be presented in simpler, more accessible formats. That is definitely true. Maybe even my explication above confused you.

So here is one such accessible format, a book that helped me put these ideas into practice this past year:

Doug Lemov’s response is all about practice–never mind our theories and ideologies, what actually works in the classroom? Yet I think his methods are a great example of teaching practices that directly respond to how students learn. He provides teachers with forty-nine specific and carefully described techniques to use, and has given me concrete ways to recognize and respond to moments of hope with my students.

One such frequent moment is when a student gives an answer to a question in front of the whole class. My inclination (and behavior this past year) was to always find a way to praise that student and find something good about his or her answer, even if it was not exactly quite right. There is a lot of good in this. When I taught martial arts as a high schooler, my boss and instructor always taught us to “praise, correct, then praise.” This is the way I was taught to teach, and it is the way I have always taught. I would make the correction, but gently.

Exteriorly, it may have looked like I was encouraging my students’ thinking, but in retrospect I see that I was missing “the potential underlying cognitive processes” (Chi, 2009, p. 85) that were going on. Lemov’s second and third techniques in his book, “Right is Right” and “Stretch It,” challenged my approach:

[Teachers] will affirm the student’s answer and repeat it, adding some detail of their own to make it more fully correct […] [not realizing that they are ] crowd[ing] out the student’s own thinking, doing cognitive work that students should do themselves. (pp. 35-36)

According to constructivist theory, students learn by constructing their own knowledge—or, in Piagetian terms, assimilating information into schemata and accommodating schemata to receive new information (Wadsworth 1989 and Anderson 1989a). However, when I prioritize affirming students answers over holding them to a high standard of thinking and challenging them to improve their responses, I am inadvertently impeding their own construction of knowledge (Anderson 1989b).

This is really fascinating: in order to promote the development of thought, instruction needs to cause “students to feel some disequilibrium or dissatisfaction with their current ideas” (Anderson 1989a, p. 90).

My easy affirmations of student answers prevent them from feeling this “disequilibrium.” My kids will not be able to identify their mistakes in analysis if I fail to identify them as well.

Therefore, even though I pride myself upon being a very encouraging leader of group discussions, I am going to change my focus on giving much more specific praise and holding my students accountable for complete and thoughtful answers. I will refrain from using phrases like “Right! Exactly!” that might stop their thinking—and instead I will push them with affirming but demanding responses like “that’s a great start, but please provide us evidence for your answer” or “how can we build upon that insight?” These interactions with my students are brief but they are indeed “moments of hope”—occasions in which doors to learning can be closed with easy praise or opened with affirming challenges.

As Lemov insists, “great teachers praise students for their effort but never confuse effort with mastery” (p. 37).

Not only do I want to approach my time with my students as moments of hope—I want them to see that they themselves are able to “meet and match” these moments too.

References

Albert, D. & Steinberg, L. (2011). Judgment and decision-making in adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 21, (pp. 211-224).

Anderson, L. M. (1989a). Learners and learning. In M. C. Reynolds (Ed.), Knowledge base for the beginning teacher (pp. 85-99). Oxford: Pergamon Press

Anderson, L. M. (1989b). Classroom instruction. In M. C. Reynolds (Ed.) Knowledge base for the beginning teacher (pp. 101-115). Oxford: Pergamon Press

Brandenberger, Jay. (2012) Class Notes for EDU60455: Development and Moral Education in Adolescence.

Chi, M. T. H. (2009). Active-Constructive-Interactive: A Conceptual framework for differentiating learning activities. Topics in Cognitive Science, 73-105.

Lapsley, D. K. (2012) Lecture Notes for EDU60455: Development and Moral Education in Adolescence.

Lemov, D. (2010), Teach Like a Champion: Chapters 1-4 (pp. 1-144). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sternberg, R. J. Raising the achievement of all students: Teaching for successful intelligence. Educational Psychology Review, 14, (pp. 383-393)

Wadsworth, B. J. (1989) Chapters 1 and 2 from Piaget’s theory of cognitive and affective development, 4^th Ed. (pp. 9-32). New York: Longman

Love

May 2, 2013

*Note: All student names have been changed.

I’m not a Mom. I hope to be, someday. But I think I know a little bit—a very little bit—of what that kind of love will be like.

My first year of teaching was easily the hardest experience of my life. I won’t go into all the details, but half-way through the year, I was seriously considering leaving my school and the ACE program. Exhausted, discouraged, and completely in over my head, I sat at my desk as my seniors came in to take their final exam.

And then I began to look at them, one by one. There was Maria, who had intimidated me so much on the first day with her bored eyes and sarcastic remarks… and who, later on, asked me to teach her and her classmates what plagiarism really was so that they could be ready for college. There was Jonny, who had a habit of giving up on everything difficult… and who had formed a new habit of actually finishing his essays. There was Lars—big, obnoxious, flirtatious, inappropriate—who had finally decided that Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice was a jerk, and he didn’t want to be like him after all.

There were also the ones who had been easier to love from the beginning: Gary, with his stubborn agnosticism and insistence upon questioning, Selina, with her gentle attentiveness and surprising perspicacity, Peter, with his hunger for knowledge and something to finally challenge him, and Catherine and Ashley—who came into my classroom one day, arm in arm like Austen’s ladies: “Let’s take a turn about the room! Ah yes, it is so refreshing!”

I looked at them all as I sat at my desk, and I felt astonished. So many of my college friends were finding love, getting engaged, having babies…

tumblr_lxaz6viggB1qzili5o1_500 — (Also getting more awesome at grading and lesson planning while driving to school.)

… but I had found a different kind of love.

I think I understand The Reverend Mother’s words a lot better now in The Sound of Music when she tells Maria that she needs to “climb every mountain” in order to find

A dream that will need

All the love you can give

Every day of your life

For as long as you live.

I think I get that now.

Nothing else I have done has required more exhaustion and work and anxiety from me—and nothing else has given me so much love in return. Not thankfulness in return, necessarily—I think really good moms know they will and never can be truly thanked for all they do—nor understanding in return, either. I’m sure that a large percentage of my kinds don’t even like me.

(As I mentioned to my pleading junior class a couple of weeks ago – “I’m not here to be liked. I’m here to help you learn.”)

But I can’t help myself, to be honest. I love them—their comments, their nosiness, their complaining, their messiness, their mistakes, and their little triumphs. And I’m so grateful to God that he has given me my kids to love.

Go listen to Reverend Mother here, and don’t settle for anything less.

Sacramentality and the Short Story

April 25, 2013

Here are my rambling (key word: rambling!) thoughts on sacramentality and short stories, inspired by my students.

I just started a unit on short stories with my sophomores. As an introductory lesson, we’ve been learning about the 6 characteristics of a short story according to Edgar Allan Poe:

1. A short story should be able to be read in one sitting. (About one half hour to two hours)

2. A short story should have nothing in it that detracts from the design (no extra or un-necessary stuff).

3. A short story should aim for truth. Although most stories are fiction, and many of them include fantastical elements (e.g. “The Fall of the House of Usher”) they should nevertheless remain “true to the human heart.”

4. A short story should strive for unity of effect – one ambience or mood.

5. A short story’s effect should begin with the very first sentence.

6. A short story should be imaginative, inventive, and experimental – it should be trying to do something.

Then we read “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” by Flannery O’Connor as a class on Tuesday. I encourage you to read it, too. I tried my own unique versions of Southern accents for the voices of Mr. Shiftlet and Mrs. Crater, to help them hear how funny O’Connor is. They loved it.

But they stopped loving it when we got to the end of the story.

“What? That’s it?”

“What’s that random boy doing at the end?”

“You mean he just left her there?”

“That don’t make any sense, Ms. Shea.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What does it mean?”

“It don’t have no meaning.”

“This is stupid.”

I had, of course, tried to warn them beforehand. On our guided notes sheet I had included this interesting quote (below) by O’Connor about the art of storytelling. But it’s one thing to read a quote that challenges traditional notions of “theme” and “message.” It’s another thing to be put through a whole short story–which you enjoy–only to be disappointed at the end by confusion and–gosh darnit–mystery.

Also, they’re in high school. As much as they protest otherwise, they like to be told the meanings of things by authoritative adult sources.

In this quote I gave them, however, O’Connor pretty much dismantles traditional notions of figuring out the “message” or “theme” of a story, and the very notion that one can simply be told what the meaning of a story is. I can understand why my kids are frustrated, though. Aren’t they expected to explain the message of stuff they read in high school? If the story doesn’t yield that message easily, isn’t it understandable that they be angry or annoyed? After all, we’re talking about my grade in this class, here!

I should just let O’Connor speak:

I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.

– Flannery O’Connor

This is, of course, what our beloved Dr. Lowery of the University of Dallas Theology Department would call “the sacramental view of reality”–or, in this case, the sacramental view of storytelling. The meaning of a story is “embodied” and “made concrete” in it, and as such cannot be pulled out of it. For O’Connor, if you can say in a statement or two what a story “means,” then the story probably isn’t “a very good one” to begin with. It’s a mere moral dressed up in fancy garments.

I gave my students the example of the Eucharist. “What’s the Eucharist?”

“The body and blood of Jesus.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“So I can’t just pray and receive his body and blood in a symbolic or ‘spiritual’ way? I have to eat the bread and wine?”

“Yeah you have to eat it.”

“Okay. Well, O’Connor is saying it’s the same with stories. You can’t get the ‘meaning’ or ‘message’ of a story any other way. You have to read the story itself – you have to eat and drink it. That’s where the meaning is. You can’t just pull it out in some abstract way. That’s what O’Connor thinks, anyway.”

For the typical high school student, this is very hard to accept. Like most people these days, they are Gnostics, and they would prefer to separate body and soul, sign from sacrament, story from meaning. It’s easier that way.

One of my very best students–a devout Protestant–was particularly offended by O’Connor’s view of stories. Not the Eucharist part, but the meaning part. She (very rightly) pointed out that O’Connor was basically saying that not everyone can figure out the meaning of a story. If the meaning is so embedded in the story itself, then it’s almost impossible to get it out. (O’Connor would say that it IS impossible). My student firmly believes, however, that stories should be accessible to everyone. If the message of the story isn’t clear, then why bother reading the story? Authors should make their messages understandable to us. God and Jesus, of course, make their messages understandable. (Do they?)

I did not say this in class, of course, but I was strongly reminded of sola scriptura and the Evangelical Protestant notion that individual Christians should be able to read the Bible and understand it without the mediation of Magisterial Authority or Tradition.

And then there is this, too. In my students’ essays I have long combated their habitual use of cliches–things that everybody already says or believes, therefore there is no point in saying them again–but I saw the other day that they not only write cliches, they look for them in stories. If a meaning is to be found, then it is most certainly a cliche meaning. Mr. Shiftlet, although he appears to be kind of a nice guy at the beginning, ends up abandoning Lucynell and stealing Mrs. Crater’s car. The high school student says, “This story shows us that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover.”

Well, yes.

But such a trite moral doesn’t justify O’Connor’s story.

And that is what the high school student DOES understand. “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover,” “Don’t steal,” “Don’t be a hypocrite” — all of these things they already get. And they don’t want to be put through the emotional grinder of a Flannery O’Connor story if that’s the only thing they are going to “get out of it” at the end.

The hard task is to get them to see that there is more in the story–much more. It is THE hard task because I don’t fully understand what that”more” is. It’s mystery. It’s–as O’Connor says elsewhere– “pure idiot mystery,” and that’s what the modern gnostic cliche mind cannot stand or understand. The high school student in particular struggles with accepting and entering into mystery. It’s frightening.

I think this story by O’Connor is “true to the human heart” as Edgar Allan Poe would say–and indeed there are lots of images of the actual human heart in this story, being cut out of people’s chests and held by doctors–but I’m not exactly sure how to explain why.

But O’Connor told us it would be that way:

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

So, if you haven’t already, you should just go read her story.