Hands-Free Honors

hon·or   /ˈɒnər/ 

–noun


1. honesty, fairness, or integrity in one's beliefs and actions: a man of honor.

2. a source of credit or distinction: to be an honor to one's family.


3. high respect, as for worth, merit, or rank: to be held in honor.

These are just a few definitions of honor.  How could these apply to high-level classes in high school?


-Journal question for LA9BH
 
 
Friday morning, and twenty-seven students are taking notes on the eight questions I've put up on the overhead.  The questions, all loosely related to the latter half of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis, offer a range of responses.  Some refer directly to the novel, asking for reflection on changes in the main character or prediction for the fate of her family.  Most are on a far larger scale.
 
"The veil, once a religious symbol, became a symbol of submitting to rules and avoiding conflict.  What is the 'veil' for you?"
 
"If your country was at war, would you leave to avoid the conflict, or stay to try to make it better?"
 
"Is it morally right to rebel against the government, as Marjane's family does when they have parties, or as Marjane does by buying banned music?  Explain."
 
The students, now jotting down answers, also wrote the questions. 
 
Yesterday, I handed each group an index card and asked them to contribute one discussion question.  I offered assistance in rewording and clarifying, but the questions are all theirs.
 

*   *   *

 

Small and thoughtful, holders of the Best Debate Ever in October, Period Two caught my attention early on.  Their class, ten minutes longer than others, usually had twice that time to spare when they had diligently worked through their lessons.  Their collective discipline, along with slightly higher reading scores than an average section of Language Arts 9, gave me the evidence I needed to make my claim: Period Two should be an honors class.

 

Getting permission from my department and administration proved easy.  Asking the students their thoughts on the matter was touching.  I read them an excerpt from the blog entry I'd written about their debate, told them that they were one of the most motivated and thoughtful classes I'd ever taught.  We talked about status and getting the most out of their education.  Up for the challenge, they wrote that they would be proud to be in an honors class, even if it meant more work.  A changed course title, a few more students, and Period Two and their teacher were transformed, overnight, from Regular to Honors.

 

*   *   *

 

I was an honors student. 

 

What started as honors Math and Language Arts in ninth grade grew by the end of high school to the four-AP-class schedule of a neurotic honors addict.  I'd like to say I'd entered each class with the same commitment to challenge and learning that I've asked of my current students, but the truth is that I didn't take AP Calculus because I wanted the best math experience available to me.  Honors classes were automatic, not an honor at all but a necessity, an entitlement.


We were the students who cleverly wrote our way out of corners, then were surprised when the unresearched essays came back with D grades.  The ones who spent a quarter lighting methane bubbles on fire and mixing glowing solutions in the AP Chemistry lab, then were jolted to reality by a threatening B on our quarter report cards.  


Motives aside, we did learn.  A great deal, really, from committed teachers and students who brought unique and often bizarre gifts to each subject.  I could fill an essay about Dante with allusions to Hamlet that Matt found annoying, even as he compared the Inferno to a Nine Inch Nails album.  I may have left the Calculus test trembling with confusion, but I could be sure that Rachel would explain that last wretched inverted cone problem in a way that didn't make me feel like an idiot.  In our auto-pilot, all-honors scheduling, after a while the whole of our cohort became greater than the thirty or so parts that made it up.

*   *   *

In many ways, Period Two isn't the Honors that I knew as a student.  Neither, for that matter, is it the Honors of the other three ninth grade sections, taught down the hall by another teacher.  There is no entitlement here; of these thirty students, only a few are reading at the college level, and virtually none of them have done nine laps on the advanced-class track.  Half of the students speak another language at home, and possibly a third were born outside of the United States.  Western mythology hasn't been built into their childhoods the way it was in mine.  In a very real way, we are all aware that this honor means effort, that it will require time and energy to achieve.  Writing thesis statements and outlines, reading this Azar Nafizi article about the future of Islamic law in Iran--it's unfamiliar territory.

And yet the deep value of community holds here, as it did in my own education; as a whole, Period Two is a unmatched collective of past experience and future aspirations.  While at Ballard we brought our idiosyncrasies and tastes to create diversity, here the students contribute entire continents of self and well-articulated hopes to change the world.

"As a Muslim, I think this whole issue of enforcing the veil is hypocritical," says a young woman, herself wearing a hijab.  "The Quran says you can't kill anybody, so how are they doing that in the book?  Threatening to kill people for not wearing the veil, that's messed up."

A few hands go up and then down again, as the students remember that we're experimenting today with "hands-free" discourse.  There have been long pauses, but so far no one is complaining.

"So why can they do that?" another student asks her.

"I don't know," she shrugs.  "It's wrong.  It's not Islam."

"It's... it's fundamentalism," another girl adds, gesturing in triumph to the list of vocabulary words on the wall.

"Right," I say.  "Remember, it's why Satrapi wrote the book in the first place.  To show that not all Islam is like the Ayatollah."

"So, what is the veil for you?" a boy across the room asks, redirecting his peers to the question at hand.  "If they are trying to stay out of trouble--'avoid conflict'--what do we do?"

It's out of my hands, this conversation, and I'm thinking about the privileges inherent to these advanced classes.  A tenth grade teacher at my school, who's also "promoted" one of her regular sections to honors this semester, has talked to her students about the "status" of honors classes, how without necessarily meaning "smarter" these classes imply seriousness and motivation that will open future doors.  Today, honors means hands-free and student-led discussion, as we connect literature to politics, history and the future.

It won't be easy, we know.  But the honor of the challenge, the freedom it's given us to explore and reach, may just be worth the risk.

God in Diversions

I just gave one of my students a Bible.

A controversial move for a public school teacher in Seattle, I’m aware.  It wasn’t my intention, when I woke up this morning, to go handing out scripture to my pupils, but honestly these days seldom unfold to line up with my every intention.  More often someone—me or them, a fire drill or assembly or, as with today, a Gideon representative—knocks the plans askew, and we learn more or less, but always different things than I expected.  The best-planned lessons prove to be abstract dead ends; the diversions lead us to vistas of meaning that no one saw coming.

It wasn’t a Bible, entirely, in the sense that it was only a New Testament.  A tiny New Testament, bound in orange faux-leather, stamped with the two-handled jar of Gideons International.  A student handed it to me a moment ago, tossing it with the same gesture that kids sometimes give each other empty candy wrappers as “presents.”

“Here, Ms. D, I’ve got something for you.”  Students are packing up in these last two minutes of class, and I cross the room to collect the proffered item.

“Oh hey, thanks,” I laugh, taking it and walking away.  The atmosphere in the room is a cheery buzz.  No one is listening to me, nor should they be as they write in planners and zip up backpacks.  I open the miniature book, which reminds me of being in high school and the mixture of defensiveness and safety that I used to feel on the days that these “witnesses” came to give God’s word to the students of our school.  I wasn’t embarrassed then, nor am I now.  These aren’t salacious or exploitive tracts, the ones whose worldview have earned Christians—in Seattle at least—a reputation at best of narrow-mindedness, at worst of deep hatred for anyone “outside the camp.”  They are orange New Testaments, tiny but transformative.

“This has the Psalms and the Proverbs,” I exclaim aloud, mostly to myself, as I flip through the pages and marvel aloud at the size of the text.  “This is good stuff.”  I don’t imagine anyone is listening.

This moment—never mind the Bible-giving it precedes—reminds me later of how far I have come as a Christian teacher in a public school.  I spent the first few years of teaching in a state of silent anonymity regarding my own beliefs, feeling that honesty here would be an intrusion or compromise any “relevance” I’d come to have.

I don’t know what changed.  Perhaps a growing desire to be transparent with the students from whom I asked transparency, or the sense that since other staff members spoke freely about their faiths I could do the same.  In any case, though I don’t spend time preaching from my desk, at this point all my students are aware in some sense that their English teacher is “religious.”

A student is watching me read Proverbs to myself at the end of class.  It’s not the eye-rolling watching that I generally receive for doing something decidedly uncool, but a serious and thoughtful stare.  He’s a quiet student I still don’t know as well as I’d like.

“Do you want this?” I ask lightheartedly.

He nods, and in a moment the orange covers are lost in his large hand.

When it comes to legality, to First Amendment issues, I have only a hazy concept of my parameters here.  I know that I don’t teach a Bible class, that I’m required to balance and not to editorialize.  I also know that “religion” as we know it crops up everywhere in English class, like it or not.  I can’t talk about the Islamic Revolution without examining its religious roots, nor can we get terribly far in The Merchant of Venice without explaining the biblical references planted among themes of mercy and justice. 

In a discussion of political rebellion last week, we came to a standstill in one class because students couldn’t explain where human rights originate.

“So, if your government doesn’t give you the freedom of speech, do you still have it?” I asked.

“No,” a few kids shrugged.

“No? Governments are the ones deciding what’s right and wrong?  Governments are always right?  Consider that for a second.”

They consider.

“Well… no,” they sigh.  “That’s not true, but… It’s just right, that’s all.”

Only the students who believe in God, whether Jesus or Allah or Yaweh, can give more specific replies.

“Those things are from God,” one of them states, after a few more rounds of confusion.  “That’s what I believe, anyway.  That it’s God that gives people freedom.”

I never expected the conversation, designed to be innocuously revolutionary, to turn to matters of God or moral law, which ultimately keep us occupied for several minutes.  While I feel compelled towards greater honesty and approachability about faith, at the same I time I respect our differences, remembering the intense discrimination I felt in high school from some of my more “devout” atheist teachers.  Yet here we are.  Truth out in the open, for us to examine together. 

And an orange New Testament from teacher to student.