Divided By Zero

Whenever I tell people that I’m a teacher I invariably hear, a) “I was a terrible kid—you would have hated teaching me,” and b) “There’s so much wrong with the education system. And kids these days are so lazy, entitled, and show no respect.”

                Everyone has gone through school, and for some reason that makes everyone an expert on the education system. It’s phenomenon unique to my profession. In learning how to drive a car, I never felt that I had acquired expertise on the finer points of internal combustion; I go to the hospital when I am injured, but I do not point out how I feel a surgeon can improve her methods; I enjoy a lobster once in a while, but I have no idea how to set, bait, or retrieve traps. You get the point.

                But because everyone goes to school, everyone is an expert on education. Sitting in classrooms for twelve years is apparently all you need to know about how education is implemented and modified. And because high school involves two groups that are more often than not despised by society at large for their laziness and pampered lifestyles (namely teens and teachers), when something controversial comes up, the reaction of the general public is often incomparably negative and inconceivably ignorant.

                When it came out last week that Edmonton Physics teacher Lynden Dorval had been suspended for not following his school’s “no zero” policy, the media pounced, and the masses leaped a foot in the air. It’s been everywhere lately, and the enraged surprise has me flabbergasted because none of this is new. Many school divisions have been using no zero polices, or something like them, for years. Dorval has just made a calculated decision—this was all done with intent—to bring it out fully to a public that may have been unaware.

                Unfortunately, because people are already experts on the education system, they attacked this with resounding ignorance, making no attempts to delve into the facts. If this were a Social Studies essay, they would have failed miserably. Bombardment! Facebook, Twitter, CBC Radio’s Unconventional Panel, Calgary Herald columnist Naomi Labritz—everyone has been shooting off their mouths, pens, and keyboards as to how the system is creating a bunch of spoiled brats who don’t know the meaning of working for results. All anyone has heard is “teacher fired for giving zeroes,” and it was picked up and sprinted with.

“Entitlement.”

“Rewarding laziness . . .”

“In my day . . .”

“In the real world . . .”

Dorval’s case hasn’t received the careful sort of analysis we would have our English Language Arts students use in approaching a character’s motivations. If you have heard the man interviewed, he’s not drawing a line in the sand with zeroes on one side and anarchy on the other. He has given his students every chance possible to get in late assignments, but at the end of the semester, if he doesn’t see the homework, zero it is. Personally, I agree with this approach. Dorval is 61, and the higher you go up the pension ladder, the more resistance you see to no zeroes, comment-based assessments, and floating due dates. He sounds like he has tried harder to bend than a lot of those more jaded by years in this profession—just not quite hard enough.

Is he being fired? I think he’s chosen to retire with a very loud bang.

Assessment For (as opposed to Of) Learning is not an “every kid wins even if she does nothing” philosophy, as critics in newspaper columns would have us believe as they dump buckets of dirt into clean wells.

School is there to teach first, to impart knowledge. It is a place for trial and error, so if a kid performs a task and the only feedback he gets is 7/10, where does he go with that? How does he improve? School does not exist only to “prepare kids for the real world”—that preparation comes from the combination and synthesis of the information they get from school, parents, and personal experiences.

And what is this “real world” that keeps getting preached, anyway? This “if you don’t do it and do it right the first time, you get fired” world where no one has even had a mother who loved him and every Boomer is the model of hard work and professionalism?

Is this the real world where we ask for extended deadlines on projects, knowing that the quality of the project trumps all? Is this the real world where you wait half an hour for service from a disinterested clerk in an electronics store? Is this the real world where you order your steak medium rare and get chicken? Do these people lose their jobs? Puh­-lease. I think you’re confusing reality with ideality—your ant-hill utopia doesn’t exist.

Overall, I have a pretty similar approach to Dorval. When every last chance has been exhausted, I do give a zero. But then, my school division doesn’t have a policy like his, so zeroes are a resort I have access to. That’s what they are, though, a last resort. I avoid giving marks as punishment. My job is not to punish, nor to teach that the only valuable pursuit is reward, nor to present kids with some dog-eat-dog depiction of a world that doesn’t exist. My job is to teach, to help kids turn themselves into people who can think for themselves.

Hopefully, they will learn to consider the facts of an issue before firing off an opinion on it, and accept that because they have experienced the results of a system, they may not be experts on how it works. 

Productive Art

                Art. For something mean to be a celebration, a term that is supposed to have the positive ramifications of, say, “joy” or “love,” it certainly is a divisive idea.

                Art brings joy, and it expresses love. We accept that these are good things, and yet they are not quantifiable. Art, on the other hand, is treated with nervous suspicion. It’s as if, as ideas go, Art is some sort of unwashed uncle with limitless untapped potential who just loafs on the couch all day. What good can Art do if you can’t count its virtues?

                I was out for a run the other night when I stopped to speak with one of my town councilors. He addressed our town’s consideration of forming an Arts Council, and the troubles entailed. How can a town of over 10, 000 people justify all the golf courses and hockey arenas you could ask for, but we have no museum, no gallery, and our local theatre group has often been forced to put on shows in a barn at the rodeo grounds?

                Because Art, as I said, is often treated with suspicion, or at least a suspicion of its purposes. People can see validity in entertainment for entertainment’s sake, but Art for Art’s sake they find rather icky. No judgement is made of television, a mindless medium many people dedicate the majority of their evenings to consuming, because it’s entertainment. Art, while it can often be entertaining—and I’d argue, when it’s best should always be—is about something richer, something more fulfilling. I’ve been stuck on Julia Cameron’s definition: “Making [A]rt is making love to life.”

                I suppose, as with most I see wrong in the world, once again it’s capitalism’s fault. Capitalism is just a human version of one of our most basic mammalian behaviours: win. Taken at its most base, that’s all living for money is, a more eloquent version of what monkeys do: eat, fuck, sleep.

                Art for Art’s sake is often viewed with a cocked eyebrow by most people (and by the major levels of government in this country). People who work exclusively for money cannot seem to fathom doing anything without doing it to accumulate capital. If you do something and you make money doing it, you can push the furthest boundaries of morality and you’ll still have reams of supporters. But do something for the sheer joy of doing it, because you’re expressing yourself or because you want to explore an idea and you risk being labelled lunatic, hippie, or—worst of all—non-contributor. Art does not always toss slop into the trough.

                Recently, I completed a history text. I found this overall to be a great experience, unfamiliar and refreshing. As I learned the history of what I was writing about, I also stretched my creative muscles to fit the information into the concept and the parameters of length and design. History writing has a very specific style and a purpose, it calls for careful creativity. I succeeded, I was rewarded.

                I encountered a friend just after finishing the text and told him about it, and he became fixated on the topic of how much I made doing it. When I tried to share my joy with him, or even a historical anecdote which I was packed full of, his brows knitted.

                “Yeah, but how much did you make?”

                This was his only concern, his only interest in the project.

                When you make Art, you struggle with enough inner guilt that you don’t need this exterior stuff. Hell, I’ve struggled with guilt in composing this very blog because I am only a partial—I have yet to abandon my day job, because I need the money. I see my slight hypocrisy there, though I would argue I don’t live for the money.

                I imagine there are no artists who haven’t struggled with guilt over doing what they do. Why? What’s the purpose? What am I saying? What am I accomplishing?

                I had a little epiphany when considering my own Art/guilt struggle, it’s what led to this blog. I’ve been struggling with why I write what I write. I don’t write exclusively to entertain. I suppose there’s some expression of the human condition in it, but that’s always felt like pale philosophy in search of a moral to me. I enjoy playing with language and telling tales. The epiphany occurred—as so many do—while I was playing with my children. They were telling me about their days, in language rife with errors and non-sequitors. The plot of this day mattered much less than the details of a cheese sandwich or a game of tag. The quality of their language, their ability to express joy, sadness, elation and pain, is improving daily. This, I realized, is the importance of what I do: I use language, the triumph of humanity, most significant of inventions, and I push it as far as I can. This separates us from the beasts. Unlike money.