Summer Prep Part I

The last weeks of school, in down times during exam week, I always file, make a copy of my syllabus/week by week calendars of classes I'll teach next year, and start tinkering with the texts, order, focus, of what I want to teach next year.

I like doing this because I am able while all the big stuff is in my head, make those changes. Then throughout the summer, as I see things, think of things, I add them, I'm never starting from scratch.


I also use a composition notebook to track ideas, things I want to think about, try, focus on. Eventually, most of these ideas make their way into the week by week or lessons, and I try to highlight them once they move so I know, but some are just the seedlings of ideas, that I revisit, come back to, expand. Again, I start this at the beginning of the summer, and then add to it all summer. By the end of the summer, when I go back to school, it sits on the shelf at home, its purpose done.

Unless something changes, I have two AP Lang classes, two ENGL 9 classes, and two Read 180 classes. The Read 180 is a scripted program, so I have no prep for that, and I've taught it for years, so I know how that should run.

Just this week I watched Wonder, and I get all the critiques disability scholars had, and see them. But I also know it was super popular with my students. It was cute, with the adults having the best lines, but what I really loved was the idea of every month having a character focus in addition to content. So I've added monthly precepts to my week by weeks.

This year I'm continuing to build my classes around hidden figures, texts and people my students may never have heard of. My students tell me every year they learn more history in my class than in history, which makes me giggle. I don't know how you teach literature and NOT teach the historical and cultural context.

In addition, I'm adding a focus on decolonizing and disrupting texts.  I think I did a good job of doing this last year sort of inadvertently, as we went, but not as a holistic approach, last year in AP Lang, and my ENGL 10 world lit. But I haven't taught ENGL 9 in a while, and at first, I was going to teach Lord of the Flies  as our novel, using #DisruptTexts to talk about it, and because I think the issue of power dynamics, bullying, and character and ethics is important. But there are images of kids in camps in the news, and I just can't even. So I've changed our novel to Farewell to Manzanar. New Mexico had two Japanese internment camps, and I want to tie that local history to the students' knowledge, as well as the historical connections to concentration camps, and the camps that currently exist and are being planned.

For Romeo and Juliet  in ENGL 9, I'm also going to start with what New Mexico looked like in the early modern period rather than an Anglocentric approach. I bought a New Mexico history book so I can do this.

I organize my ENGL 9 classes by genre, so we start with non-fiction, then spend a marking period on fiction short stories, then fiction novel, then drama/Romeo and Juliet, then epic/poetry, then 6th marking period we focus on their research project, testing, writing portfolios.
We only ever read excepts from The Odyssey, but this year I put the new translation by a women on my reading list, as well as Circe, and poems by Lovelace, In This One The Princess Saves Herself. I think this will reorient that unit, and I'm looking forward to that.

For my general organization and planning, I'm continuing with daybooks, but have bought some Murray books to see if I can improve, dig deeper on this.
I've always used Google Slides to project my lessons, and make them accessible. This last year, with daybooks, I tried to use it less, as there is a fine line between accessible and students just copying material, not thinking about it, interacting with it. So this year, I'm going to make sure the week by week has all the information, reading, links, but I think I'm going to back away from the use of tech and focus more on my students, differentiated instruction, and the daybooks. One reason for this is because many of my students don't have computers or wifi at home, so I do not know how accessible this is, although students tell me they check it from school.
This shift will also allow me to focus on my daybook. Every year I start one with the students, and then as I have to duplicate it on the slides, I eventually give up on the hard copy and just do the electronic. I'd like to reverse that.

I've returned to Linda Barry's Syllabus again, for inspiration about this. I made some real progress last year with how I presented the daybooks to students, and the scrapbook aspect, but I really want more personalization this year.
My new favorite notebooks are the deconstructed spiral notebooks with cool designs on the front. I got these, and I've already put on my wishlist one with sharks and gargoyles for later in the year.
The visual difference also lets me know, just by looking, which class is which.

For my own summer professional development, I saw a cool thing on Twitter where a school had made a PD bingo for their teachers. I made my own as a way to focus on a couple of key things, and track/have a record of these things so I can maintain focus throughout the year.

I have a lot of PD reading I want to do.
I have to say, most of the time, I buy these books, I read them, and they are either vague platitudes with no practical help or they are a list of strategies any first year teacher would know. Rarely is it something useful.
So far, Other People's Children has been great, but also makes me wonder- educational scholars research disparities and better strategies for African-American students. To a lesser degree there is some on how to best serve Native students. But I'm having a really hard time finding equivalents for Chican@ students, or Asian students. And so, while I can apply some of these awareness, or strategies, I wish I could find something specifically for MY students. So if anyone knows of any, please put them in the comments.
I liked the ideas in Culturize,  but this falls into the platitudes category. Plus, the question I keep asking, is, if you're a lonely teacher, in a school environment that is not on board with these things, doesn't have a vision of supporting students, exactly how much can a single teacher do? It makes me think of the Lone Medievalist- should we start a resource for strategies and moves a single teacher can do to best serve their students?

In addition to my PD reading, I also have some YA books I've picked up.
So far I've loved both. Dread Nation was great, Aru Shah, is the first of Rick Riordan's imprint focused on diversity. I also have The Serpent's Secret, also from that imprint, and I've pre-ordered Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning, which I'm REALLY excited about. For these, once I've read them, they'll go in the classroom library, and I'm trying two ideas I saw online. The first is writing recommendations in the book, and encouraging students after they finish to also write recommendations and the other is to pull off the book covers, and display them on a clothesline in the classroom.

At the end of the year, we had roughly a month of state testing, and we went to a different schedule, with two hour classes. I'd been following Catlin Tucker's blogs, and ideas on Twitter, and one of the things she does that I really wanted to try was station rotation, and the two hour classes were a great chance to try this. It was great! My students were engaged, focused, got everything done, it was just great. I ended up having three rotations, one was whole group that worked with me, usually discussing the novel we were reading. One was independent work, although they often helped each other. The last was on the computers, I have eight in my room, working on their writing portfolios. 

So I really want to expand my use of this for the upcoming year.

My students mostly work in groups. I have desks, but I group them. Each group has a bucket of supplies- markers, Post Its, stress ball, Play-Doh, pens, scissors, glue sticks, highlighters, etc. These makes materials available to all, this year I need to add pens and pencils, and limits transition issues because it's all right there.

BUT keeping in mind that I want to focus on stations this year, I've been doodling class layouts with this in mind. I don't like blocking my whiteboards (green below) because I use them all the time, and the front one is where the projector shines, and the back/bottom wall is half windows, and I hate blocking them, so my options are a bit limited.

I think I've found a solution- if I move my teacher desk to the other side of the room, that frees up a corner that I can make a reading corner. The computers need to stay on that wall, because that's where the routers and power outlets are, but I can push them towards the front more.

I may have to make groups a but larger, since the eight computers sets the group sizes.

The black box is a cement column in my room that I hate. And although I'm usually walking around, I am not ready to completely ditch my desk as Matthew R. Morris has, I don't like my desk to be the focus, because that's not how my classes are set up. When I'm at it though, I do like it to be where I can see the whole classroom, and this doesn't do that. BUT, the reading space is more important to me.

So we'll see once I get in there and start moving stuff around.

Teachers report back 6 August, with students back 13 August, so I have a little over a month and a half left of summer.
I'm happy about the things I've decided to focus on, the stuff I'm learning, and the things I'm going to try.
So, so far, so good!
What things are you trying this summer? What are you reading?
Share!

The Political Devil Pamphlet Chapter Progress

I had a couple of reasons for starting the dissertation to book revision with the new chapter on the role of the political devil in pamphlets during the English Civil War.

The first was that because it was a mostly new chapter, I figured it would take the most work, so wanted to dedicate a full month of summer to it. The original draft of the dissertation had a whole chapter on pamphlets, and I did some cool work, counting, cataloging, and organizing the topics of pamphlets 1500-1667. It revealed some interesting trends, and started some questions I now am exploring, but like the original draft, it identified patterns and trends but did not analyze them. The end result is, I'm using one graph form that work, but that's pretty much it.

The second is, I realized when I reread the diss as prep for this revision, that I was going to completely reorganize the book. The dissertation went chronologically, from Gesta regum Anglorum to Þe Deulis Parlement, to Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV and Macbeth, to Paradise Lost. It analyzed devilish leaders, demonic parliaments, revisited devilish leaders who rebelled, then all those elements in Paradise Lost. The dissertation title, Devilish Leaders, Demonic Parliaments, and Diabolical Rebellion from Malmesbury to Milton proved that I was thinking along these lines all along. It makes more sense to organize the material this way, so Malmesbury is in conversation with Shakespeare for how they consciously and unconsciously construct human leaders as demonic. I can then put these two constructions in conversation with the actual devilish leader of Satan in Paradise Lost. 

Other than reorganizing the book along these themes, the other things I realized was I should retitle it. So rather than Devilish Leaders, Demonic Parliaments, and Diabolical Rebellion in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature, it's now The Political Devil in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature.

I also realized there was stuff to cut because it's not focused.
I remembered a professor saying that the first thing you did when revising the diss to a book was cut all the footnotes. He wasn't serious, well, not totally, but it is an easy way to think of the different work a diss does from a book. A lot of those footnotes are only there to prove I did the work, not to support my argument, so those got cut first.
But too, this new organization means the argument is leaner, so there's a lot of things I'll cut because it's tangential, and not essential to my argument.

Lessons I learned from the dissertation, or on rereading the dissertation:

It's much easier for me to spot, or even stop before I write, poor stylistic tics I had. Weak or passive verbs and constructions, too much "I argue."
While I stated that I historicized these texts, I did not do as much as I thought. Too often I gestured to it, but didn't actually DO the work. So in the revision, the rough organization is: outline/intro, history, scholarship, historicized analysis/close reading.

I've also learned that starting with questions, identifying throughlines, helps me construct chapters from a solid foundation. I work best when I can "see" my thought process, but was traumatized when someone told me not to blog my work, and not to use my whiteboard, so it's taken me a bit to get back to both with comfort.
So my white board looks like this:

After I reread the diss, I wrote the main throughline, and the questions. The red apples are notes of other throughlines throughout the work.
As I'm working on the pamphlet chapter, I've added questions, things to emphasize in this chapter and in others.

Another thing that worked really well with the dissertation rewrite, that my dissertation director taught me, was to outline my project. So I have a rough table of contents, that outlines each chapter. 
Just as I did with the diss, as I get into the work, I jot notes, expand, add specifics, but the outline forces me to think out/plan my cohesive argument from the beginning AND provides a guide as I write so I don't get lost along the way.

Mechanics:
My rough schedule is to pull close readings, draft, add scholarship, revise and finalize, with roughly one week per thing to get done. I believe this is a manageable work schedule for a few reasons. One, I defended in October, so the research is pretty up to date. I've pulled some scholarship, as I've shifted focus, and for this new chapter, but for the most part, there are no groundbreaking or new things I need to make sure I've missed. I've printed things as they've come out the last few months, but there's not really any extra work there. Also, this is all I'm doing this summer. I'm not teaching, I have no other projects, this is it. I've cleared my schedule of everything I can until this is done. That means I have all summer to get the heavy lifting done, but even once I go back to work, I've pulled out of everything BUT teaching, so I have plenty of time to finish.
Also, while I'm laser-focusing the book, it's more about revising/rewriting bits for strength, making sure my argument is at the forefront, and reorienting how I use scholarship. So it's a lot of work, but it's not "new" work if that makes any sense. Also, by now, I can "see" how the pieces fit together, what needs to go where, which is also easier.

I've encountered a couple of stumbling blocks. The first is, as a graduate, I can get a community library card, to take out books, but not as many as before, or for as long (which is not a big deal because reading is my superpower) BUT the bigger issue is I cannot get ILLs, which is an issue since the few things I will need WILL be new, AND I no longer have online article access. The librarian recommended a fix, that I'm working with my dissertation chair to work on, so we'll see.

The other stumbling block is personal. I went to the eye doctor the other week, to get eyes checked, see if my glasses needed to be updated, and told her I was having issues with vision getting blurry in afternoon and at night, not being able to focus or read, eyes feeling tired, and headaches. She did some tests and it turns out about half of my eye glands, in each eye, that produce tears, have died. There is a procedure to unblock what is left, try and save, along with a massive routine of eyedrops and stuff, which SHOULD prevent further gland death, BUT it's around $1000 and not covered by insurance. Other than that, it means that this week, when I'm supposed to be plowing through secondary source reading, I'm not able to. More than an hour or so of reading and my eyes really hurt and I have a headache. But, the procedure is tomorrow, and results should be immediate, so we'll see.

I WAS able to get through all of the above, and happily, while there's an interesting thing or two, for the most part, I'm not missing anything.
The books below are my main sources, and I still need to reread them. One thing I noticed in the dissertation reread was that too often I defaulted to other people's arguments. Not that I shouldn't support my own with previous work, but I wasn't confident enough in my own work so I was hedging a bit. So, I'm using these scholars' work, but reworking HOW I use it.

Despite these issues, I am really happy with how things are going. I feel good about the pamphlet chapter. I'm focusing on what arguments the political devil is making in four pamphlets, two from 1641-2, and two from 1660, and all four are different types of pamphlets. Ending the book with this chapter does a much better job of showing how the political devil continues in the public imagination, and pulls all the elements together from what will be the rest of the book.

Next steps include finishing the scholarship review, then redrafting, revising the chapter. I feel good about being done with the pamphlet chapter by the end of June.
Then in July, my plan is to address the newly designed first chapter, on devilish leaders, so I have time to dedicate to how this new organization/format works. Hopefully that will make it easier to redo the other chapters once I am back at work.

That leaves "Devilish Parliament" for August, "Devilish Speech" for September, "Diabolical Rebellion" for October, " redo intro and conclusion for November, then December for reread, last looks and send off. Originally, I though devilish speech was part of diabolical rebellion, and it may be when I write that's true, that it's not enough on it's own, that it's diabolical BECAUSE the speech leads to rebellion. But we'll see. If not, I'll need another clever "d" synonym for devilish.

The Troubling Rhetoric of Devil Deals

In episode 6 of season 2 of Timeless, the team travels back in the Lifeboat and encounter Robert Johnson, one of the most legendary blues singers ever.

Smithsonian Magazine

My Robert Johnson Vinyl

I remember after the show premiered seeing a Tweet (that I can't find, and yes, the irony of me not screenshotting it does not escape me, so PLEASE if you know the Tweet, pass it along) that argued that the continuation, the forwarding, of the tale that Johnson's musical gifts were the result of a deal with the devil, one of the original crossroads deals, did a huge disservice to the man and his talent.

As my scholarship focuses on how individual people and groups are demonized to achieve certain political and social ends, I started to think about how demonizing specific people doesn't just demonize them to others, usually an in-power majority, but how it also erases their actual story.

The legend of Johnson's "crossroads deal" was portrayed in the 1985 movie, Crossroads, and has the status of urban legend with music lovers. Per NPR's article, Robert Johnson was born in Mississippi in 1911. His playing was unusual enough to not be popular, moved to Arkansas, then Texas, where he first recorded in 1936. He dies in 1937 under "mysterious circumstances" which only contribute to his legendary status.

What is lost by crediting the devil for granting Johnson the gift of the blues?
Well, the first is that it continues a narrative of demonizing the blues, and other music inspired by it, like rock and roll, which most often than not supports racist narratives.
It also erases the narrative of what the reality of Johnson's life was. From his upbringing in Mississippi, to how he came to his unique brand of playing, his influences, how his traveling road life influenced him, who he played with. What was his day to day life like? Where's that slice of life? What made him record that day? 
How do we separate Johnson's narrative from the liner notes made up, contributing to Johnson's mystery?

To erase Johnson's narrative is to continue to erase the narrative of Southern Blacks at the turn of the century. In addition to erasing his narrative, the crossroads narrative also signals that that stories like Johnson's are not worthy of being told. That the only thing that makes him, his story, or his music interesting, is that it comes from the devil.

There are other musicians who have been accused of making deals with the devil for their gift, their inspiration. But except for early patterns of associating the devil with the violin (blame Giuseppe Tartini, not the Charlie Daniels Band's 1979 "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"), the majority of musicians associated with the devil are white men. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, a whole host of heavy metal bands, have all been accused of being the devil's music, which is not quite the same as saying these musicians made a deal with the devil.

It's a difference of rhetoric. Of how crossroad deals are used, and what their purpose is.

The devil's musical inclinations can be traced to his seductive nature, his use of man's vices against him, and her-self. The same logic is what connects the devil to dancing, as seen most notably in José E. Limón 's 1994 Dancing with the Devil Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas. The devil is always the outside, the threat, the enemy, the fiend (from the Old English feond, the enemy). His visual appearance marks him as such. His visual differences serves as both the evidence of his extreme sin, and the danger he represents to humankind. Marginalized groups such as Jews, Moors, women, have historically been demonized through association. Men of color in particular are not just demonized, as we can see from any nightly, racist news story, but are presented as demons themselves. In part, this continues because scholars, and every day folks, don't stop to interrogate the idea that white = good and black - bad. And in large part, it comes from a 1000 year history of showing the devil as black.

Exorcism @GallicaBnF, Fr. 313, 14th c. 

Image from Pamphlet War between John Taylor and Henry Walker 1641

The Taymouth Hours - folio Yates Thomspon MS Manuscript made in England between 1325

Whether the devil was seducing woman, leading human politicians astray, rebelling against nation states, or possessing pour souls, the English devil is consistently shown in this black, animal-like, shape. It marks him as different, as threat, as not "us" whoever the dominant power of "us" stands for in any historical and cultural moment (hint: big surprise, it's usually white men).

This uninterrogated representation and history, is part of what allows for stories like Robert Johnson's to be subsumed by larger narratives. It's not enough that Robert Johnson was a gifted musician, often credited as a father of blues, who survived the turn of the century Jim Crow, which should be more than enough to make him worthy of study and respect. 
But you'd be hard pressed to find that narrative. Instead, what is available for public consumption is the same story, told over and over again. Google Robert Johnson, blues and every single result mentions his crossroads deal in varying degrees of importance. Many acknowledge the myth of it, but even by doing so they are giving space, and authority, to the idea. They are contributing to the idea that a talented black man could not have accomplished anything on his own, in 1936, or apparently, now. Johnson's escape from Mississippi cannot be credited to his own strength of character, but must be the work of the devil. If we follow that thought to its logical end, only the devil can free you from something so evil as Jim Crow, and "good" Christians would just suffer? These are disturbing narratives, that are just beneath the surface of these crossroads stories about Robert Johnson.

Can I appreciate that Timeless introduced a whole new generation to such a master? Sure.
Can I appreciate the fondness the character of Connor Mason has for Johnson? Sure.

But I can also wish that we, the public, would not only recognize what is problematic about continuing to forward these narratives, but also acknowledge what is erased or rewritten by doing so, and try to rediscover and uncover the real narratives, and celebrate those.
I wish we could celebrate the genius of Robert Johnson without crediting the devil.


For More Reading:

Herbert Halpert "The Devil and the Fiddle." Hoosier Folklore Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Dec., 1943), pp. 39-43