I had a surprisingly positive middle school English experience. I remember my teacher holding “A Separate Peace” aloft, asking us to consider the names John Knowles chose for his two main characters: Phineas and Gene.
Phineas, or Finny, is handsome, athletic, and trusting. Gene is envious and competitive and (spoiler alert!) indirectly causes Finny’s death, shaking a tree limb from which Finny topples. He lives on but with crippling guilt. Finny, our teacher pulled from us, comes from the Latin root “Fin”— meaning ending; and Gene, comes from Gen — birth and beginning.
“Finny must die,” he said, “for Gene to live.” I lost my breath.
I don’t think that moment could happen in my own sixth grade classroom in Brooklyn. And the reasons for that are leading to the exodus among teachers in New York and across the country. Even those of us who stay are switching schools at a fast clip. According to one study, more than one in three teachers planned to leave their current school, a form of “musical chairs” that I have seen harm school communities. Teachers are setting out for something more satisfying, but we’re still ending up on the same block.
I want to be able to find joy and revelation in my classroom. I want to be surprised by how my students respond to questions. Yet in my own evaluations by school leadership, I’ve often been asked, What is the answer you are looking for, Mr. Levin? But what if I don’t know? What if I want my students to disrupt my own ways of thinking — not just meet a couple dozen reading proficiency standards my state requires? What if I want to teach English, where we explore literature, not teach ELA, where we analyze passages? Who wants to take a class called English Language Arts anyway? I wouldn’t!
There are a number of ways in which our classrooms have become increasingly joyless, but to me, all paths lead back to the state test, the annual assessment that measures how well students in grades 3–8 are mastering the learning standards. For charter schools, like the one where I teach, these tests are crucial criteria for renewal and expansion. For New York City’s traditional public schools, they influence a school’s profile on websites parents frequent, such as InsideSchools.
For students, state tests mean absolutely nothing except stress. But the state tests, especially ELA because math has always been more easily measured by numbers, skew the way students learn in classrooms, including in mine. But we now grade writing on a five-category rubric, with each category having a 1-4 rating; the cumulative number is the grade. I sometimes feel I might as well be a computer.
I’ve noticed myself grading these writing assignments: hunched over, constantly referring to a rubric, losing any sense of the whole. I can’t tell you how enervating this process is. If my student writes an ingenious hook that pulls me in, that’s great, but if it’s not related to a rubric category, it won’t help their grade. I mentioned to my colleague how disorienting and dehumanizing our checklist system of grading feels. Their response: “It’s true. But it’s taken exactly from the state test.”
This approach is a recipe for hyper-programmed students and burnt-out teachers. Who benefits? As far as I can tell, it’s the test creators, the makers of education software, and the data-specialist administrators who are hired because they are known for raising school testing data — hence the cycle.
Then there’s the reading material itself. It is often not even an actual book. Few students are reading “1984,” but they might be reading a passage about the ills of censorship. Afterward, they are tasked with writing CERERs, or Claim-Evidence-Reasoning-Evidence-Reasoning paragraphs, where they make an often-generic claim, like censorship is wrong, and support it.
Why do we read and write about passages and not books? Passages are what’s on the state tests. This teaching to the test is pervasive, far beyond my school. My own seventh grader is in a traditional public school in Brooklyn, and during our conferences, I asked his ELA teacher (whom I like very much) what books they read this year. At the time, they weren’t planning to read any books. “We read passages that are related to a central theme — like conformity,” she said. Noticing I’m crestfallen, she explains that ELA now prioritizes writing proficiency over exploring literature. I nod.
This then means that there are students entering college with little experience reading books cover-to-cover in middle and high school. The Atlantic recently explored this phenomenon, explaining how many teachers have “shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea — mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.”
Growing up, I don’t remember many of the essays I wrote in my eighth grade English class, though we wrote many. I do remember “Catcher in the Rye” and the trial of Modern Man. Our class staged a mock trial, and my side had to present evidence defending Holden Caulfield. We argued that his targeting of “phonies” and his asking taxi drivers where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter were justified in a modern world so insane that only absurdity made sense.
I think that trial, along with the revelation from “A Separate Peace” and a hundred other non-assessed moments, pushed me to become a lifelong lover of literature as well as an English major in college. And while that last part might be of dubious value, those strange and wild conversations we had in English class are most certainly not.
To be clear, I believe in my school — its students, educators, and leaders. I’ve seen the school’s commitment to improving lives, whether that’s teaching kids about their rights in a frightening political environment, helping them empathize with each other when conflicts arise, or, as I’ve witnessed in my role as a learning specialist, adapting lessons so different types of learners can thrive. The grading rubrics we use have worthy goals, such as eliminating biases and improving equity. Even so, something has been lost in the way we are teaching literature and writing to kids.
There’s the line in Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World:” “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow/ They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.” A teacher’s job is really to show a student how to teach themselves. We need to get back to a fundamental belief in wonder and leave behind the failed idea that reading and writing should be guided by and graded on a five-category rubric.
Teachers and students should be passengers on a common literary adventure. There are claims and evidence, to be sure, but those only come after gray areas, layers of meaning, irony, symbolism, and story. Phineas and Gene must continue to tumble and do battle, and when one idea dies, another should be born. According to this vision, you can’t always tell who is the teacher and who is the student.
Daniel F. Levin is a writer, educator, and father living in Brooklyn. He teaches middle school ELA and Humanities at a charter school in New York City. Previously, Levin taught for five years at Saint Ann’s School, where he wrote musicals for his students, and spent a decade running programs for ArtsConnection. When not lesson planning, he writes grown-up musicals and plays and always is happiest when diving into the next great story.