From a 2019 article on the makerspace. I’m the bald guy.
Note: I’ve put together my own answers to an opening-day questionnaire that students are often asked to complete. Read them here: Opening-Day Questionnaire.
Imagining Sisyphus Happy
I started teaching in Brewster in 2005. Before New York, I taught in North Carolina, where most of my family still lives1.
I have a wife, a son, and a daughter at home. My wife and I were both teachers in the English Department at the high school when we met, so our kids obviously spend most of their time learning the difference between James Joyce’s early and late work2. The best children’s show, when they were younger, was obviously Little Einsteins, while the worst was just as obviously Caillou.
Our daughter, Josephine, is in third grade. She is still young enough to provide a unique kind of balance to you, Brewster’s senior class: She is still at the start of a process that seniors are about to finish3.
I have been lucky enough to teach every kind of English course: Media Studies, an elective I built in 2005; 14 years of Honors and AP classes; alternative courses like the ones Brewster once offered through Clearpool; and many more.
Sisyphus was always the metaphor4, and I have always tried to innovate within an institution that desperately needs to change its habits, as Ken Robinson put it in 2008. Brewster, as its Strategic Coherence Plan demonstrates, supports that desire to change.
In 2009, I was profiled as part of a Harper’s article on the future of the Humanities in public schools that was written by Mark Slouka, a Brewster native and parent to a student in one of my AP classes. A year later, I won one of New York’s first national Milken Educator Awards. There is a video, if you’d like to see what pure shock looks like.
That recognition led to a period of intense innovation and student advocacy for me, particularly in the area of assessment. The central focus was (and remains) on grades, inspired by the 2009 documentary Race to Nowhere and, more practically speaking, Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades,” which you can read in full here.
I was actually given Kohn’s article by Brewster’s Superintendent in 2011, who had gotten it through our district’s work with the Tri-State Consortium. The Consortium has influenced much of what I do in the classroom, especially in terms of metacognition and performance-based assessment. I try to go on at least one visit to another district each year, and I led a team that evaluated a school in Long Island.
I also partnered with BOCES and LHRIC’s Model Schools program to explore makerspaces, project-based learning, and flipped instruction. (Here is one of two webcasts for Model Schools featuring me. It takes me a while to figure out how to use a microphone.) I designed and iterated on several instructional websites that bring the flipped classroom into English. I wrote about that process here, and it’s led to the central site in use today. I also began building and iterating on several unique systems for assessment and feedback, focused primarily on how to eliminate (or come close to eliminating) traditional grades.
In 2016, I won the LHRIC Pioneer Award, since renamed the TELL Award. I also moved into a classroom dedicated to a new kind of makerspace — one built around the Humanities. The furniture has since been taken and repurposed elsewhere, but the philosophy remains unchanged.
At the center of that space is grade abatement, a student-centered system that comes as close to eliminating grades as possible. Alfie Kohn himself wrote in an email to me that this system takes “giant steps forward in [the] classroom,” and that it may be as close as we can get to complete elimination in a public school.
The next three years saw every kind of student, from students in the Top Ten to students struggling to graduate, come through the space and provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Their investment let me refine instruction, assessment, and feedback in order to create a first-of-its-kind space that reimagines how students experience the Humanities in a high school.
These advancements have been spotlighted through district- and region-wide committees on innovation, including the Innovators Collegial Circle that one of our Superintendents ran from since 2018–2020.
Now we know that the paradigm shift works. Grades can be overhauled. Instruction can be shifted. Feedback can be reimagined. It faces the same hurdles all innovation does — resentment from folks used to the status quo; lack of information, leading to low-information criticism; a steep learning curve for adopters — but it works. It receives its fair share of coverage, and, more importantly, student testimonials and feedback grow every year.
Still, when I was first approached about teaching English 12 in 2019, I hesitated. So much of the innovation — and so many of the glowing student testimonials — come from AP Language, and taking on five sections of English 12 would obviously end that success. Why put a new cohort of students in the space after nearly a decade? Why the change?
What I realized quickly, however, is that our English 12 students are the students who most need a paradigm-shifting makerspace like this one. English 12 is the only English class without a self-justifying outside pressure — the only one without a state test, national test, affiliated school curriculum, etc. English 12 students are outside of the tautological logic of traditional schooling, including the internal feedback loop of a high school.
I think we have to be more frank about this sort of thing. Better teachers than me have written about the flaws in the system, from John Taylor Gatto in 2003 back to John Holt in 1967. One of the best essays on the subject is this one by Gerald Graff and Steve Benton, which highlights the need for systemic solutions for systemic problems — because it’s easy to recognize individual teachers and encourage pockets of innovation. It’s harder to talk about shifting a paradigm entirely.
So, as each year begins, the seniors and I will take care of our outstanding obligations to the overarching system — college essays, summer reading — and then focus on the skills and traits necessary for success in life. We will explore essential questions and issues from a place of true risk-taking and experimentation.
This is what animates the Humanities as a discipline. It’s our district’s Strategic Coherence Plan adapted for the Humanities, in fact, with renewed respect for the Humanities’ true origins and real strengths. As the syllabus and other opening salvos put it:
The problems students face are the problems all of us face, and they are exactly the problems that the Humanities exist to solve:
What does it mean to be a human being?
What does it mean to coexist in a society?
What are my beliefs?
How do I want to live my life?An English classroom is also the home of soft skills, including self-awareness and self-efficacy, which raises a few more questions for the makerspace:
What does it mean to be educated?
What is the purpose of school?
How does each of us learn best?
What are the most important skills and traits for our futures?Like any makerspace, we experiment to find solutions to these problems and answer these questions. We collaborate, ask experts, do research. We try to think outside the box. We sometimes try to dismantle the box to build a better one.
The teaching will be iterative, too, and I will keep experimenting to find the best way to help students. The space and its work will also be as transparent as possible, with planned updates to the dustier corners of our online presence, like Twitter and Medium.
One of the more important explanatory essays, by the way, is posted to that Medium account: Molecular Learning. It’s a pretty good introduction to the way instruction works in the course, and it reminds all of us how important it is to take risks and ignore the naysayers.
This is only the second time, by the way, that I’ve ever tried to write an “about me” component for the course, because I try to make the space its own thing. I am proudest, in fact, of how infrequently student testimonials mention me; they more often talk about the course and the space, which I believe is a better indication of lasting impact.
While I’m here, though: Sisyphean High: TL;DR. That’s the original attempt to put a face to this work. It’s illustrative of how these innovations continue to evolve, as well.
In fact, when I look back to what this space was just a few years ago, I notice how I keep taking risks and trying new things. If I can model that for students, so much the better. For instance, the focus back then was on using rubrics to give feedback to student writing. Now there is a universal writing process that eschews rubrics entirely: The Writing Process.
That’s worth highlighting, because writing is the most central creative act — not just in English, but in becoming a better and more empathetic person. Writing is how we get to the truth, capital-T and otherwise, and how we articulate ourselves to the world around us. Students need something that persists, because rubrics and guidelines and high-stakes tests struggle for authenticity.
That persistence is in everything we do in the space: We look for the core efficacy of the work, experiment with how to make it more authentic and meaningful, and then repeat the process. Seniors will be able to take those lessons directly into their lives after high school, whether that means college, the military, a career, or a gap year.
I’m looking forward to doing whatever I can to help them get there.
I have deep roots in the South, so the occasional “y’all” will slip out. ↩
This is not true. No one has actually read Joyce’s entire works. ↩
Like it does for many teachers, having kids of my own changed my perspective — and that article is about primary school, not high school. There is a poetry to life, sometimes. It rhymes in an interesting way. ↩
There are a lot of metaphors and allusions, actually, and I’m not really sure if that’s a good thing. The most fun is always the tardigrade, though. We once listed out animal metaphors as class. ↩