The teachers, it seems, are upset with me. I annoyed more than a few of them when I wrote, in my review of HBO's Hard Times at Douglass High, that the educators at Douglass High School in Baltimore "weren't cutting it." The documentary seemed to make that pretty clear; so, too, the school's culture and test scores. And yet, as so many classroom managers are quick to note, I've just missed it all so very badly.
Take this chap, for example, a teacher who in a particularly fired-up blog post tagged me with a rather unflattering sobriquet. He did not like my diagnosis of what ails Douglass High. But as a co-worker pointed out, when one takes to the blogosphere to rain insults upon others, one should, as a matter of course, take pains to do so in a grammatically appropriate manner. Our friend (the, ahem, teacher) has failed in that task through his predilection for inserting apostrophes whenever he deems them necessary, proper grammar be damned--e.g., "According to its author, Liam Julian, it's incompetent administrators' and teachers' who are to blame for the fact that Douglass is failing just like thousands of other urban schools in the United States." I'm just saying.
Our friend also dislikes my prescription for improving the health of an English class, which, I wrote, eschews "having a valuable conversation about Nick Carraway's flaws, say, or the mistakes of old men who fish for marlin." The angry blogger responds: "According to Julian, if we just made these kids read The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick, all would be well. Think about that: if we just make poor black kids read books by white folks about white folks, all will be okay."
This gentleman is ostensibly a teacher, and probably he considers himself a good one. Leaving aside his odd insinuation that black students should not read anything by white authors and his weird statement that Moby Dick is a book about white people (a white whale, I thought)--what are we to make of his substitution of??Melville for??Hemingway? Moby Dick was no marlin.
It is safe to assume, I think, that we are dealing here with a well-intentioned person who undoubtedly knows quite a bit about pedagogical, Marxist theory but next to nothing about anything worthwhile, such as grammar and literature. I respectfully venture that such individuals should not be in charge of classrooms of kids. If I must be pilloried for that zany statement, so be it.
Update: One of the nice things (or bad things, depending, really, on one's post-breakfast mood on any given day) about blogging is the immediacy and interactivity of it. Several commenters, whose gripes are available below, did not appreciate my Marlin/Whale??diagram (which Coby helped to design) or the accompanying words. I must note, first, that such diagrams are clearly necessary because certain persons (see above for an example), cannot on their own distinguish between these two highly distinct marine personalities. And now, about those accompanying words.
We learn that I shouldn't have pointed out the poor grammar and literary ignorance of the blogger in question; such notes are "derogatory" and contribute to a "vicious cycle." Vicious it really isn't--I merely offered some advice about not inserting apostrophes willy-nilly, which is a sound suggestion, any way you slice it. But to insinuate, as one commenter does, that my words are irrelevant is quite wrong. First, they're funny, and humor always has relevance in my book, especially in an education-policy world where stolidly and solemnity rules and if you tell a joke you garner looks as if you'd just broken wind. Second, they make a point: We have someone who claims to be a teacher, who leads a classroom of students, who questions my ability to pass judgment on the performance of other teachers--and he can barely construct a readable sentence. This is a problem worth noting. Third, let it be known: This isn't some namby-pamby, change we can blog in-type operation. I play by old-school rules, which clearly state, in Section 3-B, that if one is called a derogatory name or has his honor in some other way tarnished he cannot, ought not, will not brush it off. He will skewer his attacker, perhaps with wit, perhaps with a rapier (if circumstances and local laws and customs permit). Those who are offended by such rules may suck their thumbs and clutch their blankies, or they may simply close their eyes when coming upon any blog post bylined "Liam Julian."