The Compelling Factor

Yesterday, I read NYT's piece on swapped identical twins The Mixed Up Brothers of Bogota. It was a compelling and fascinating read, as the comments on the article attest, and there are so many aspects to consider but I keep coming back to why?

What makes something compelling?

Yes, this article has the dream telenovela-ness to it. The story of identical twins who are switched at birth, in this case creating two sets of fraternal twins, is so good that even Shakespeare embraced it as a plot device in Comedy of Errors. Who doesn't love a good mistaken identity story?

But there is something more. Susan Dominus spends a fair amount of the article talking about the science of twins, or the research related to twins. She brings up ideas of nature and nurture along with current thinking around epigenetics. That ability to connect this personal story to larger ideas of science becomes critical in building an understanding of why this story matters. What are the larger implications, which is the fundamental "so what?" question we often draw on. She does this artfully in the organizational structure of the piece. She starts with discovery, encounter, revelation then moves to science. Then back to the narrative of consequences of those revelations and more narrative. It's a similar structure to what Atul Gawande does in his writing, one that I find appealing. A little bit of narrative makes the informational writing go down.

For me, also, this story is so riveting because there are implications about where the root of our personal successes may lie. As a country built on the post-Enlightenment ideals of rugged individualism, we believe that personal success is related to our own individual resilience and work ethic (which is the same idea that makes it so hard to understand what privilege is). We might believe that there is a genetic component, but we rarely acknowledge the environmental.

Here, then, is a story about four men who are encountering the direct effect of fate, as a Classicist may say, in their lives. Would William be different if he had been raised with his "true" mother (and let's let that sit there for a while, that difficulty in understanding what "true" parenthood and family are) in the city as opposed to the crushing grind of poverty in the country. Doors closed because of his environment while for Carlos they opened.

I can't begin to understand the emotions that this news must have brought. What happens when you are faced with the fact that you've been screwed by "fate"? Does it explain things or make you feel rage or both?

To me, that wondering, the sense of what this all means is precisely what makes for a compelling read.I prefer work that brings up questions, about our place in the world or how things work and what implications might be for further thinking. This article definitely brings all of those wonderings to the fore.

I am now thinking about how I might pair this up with other pieces in order to teach. Obviously the Comedy of Errors connection is ripe. But what else might I use? I wonder if it would be good for something on family? And if so what? I definitely will think about teaching it this year.

While in the car with Cathy on our way to professional development today, we had this very involved conversation about the pain of learning and what is necessary to learn. We ended up thinking about two intersecting continua, one that would be a scale of intellectual generosity to intellectual rigidity and the other would be engagement to rejection. I would love to do tons of interviews with teachers and code what teachers think provide successful students. I'm not sure what we might find, but I wonder if it falls along those two continua.

On my way home, then, I began to think more about Maria Popova and her work at Brain Pickings. By reading around her blog, I came to a post on the difference between wisdom and knowledge. In some ways, she describes a "ladder of knowing" similar to Bloom's Taxonomy, but then she gives this lovely explanation

Information is having a library of books on shipbuilding. Knowledge applies that to building a ship. Access to the information — to the books — is a prerequisite for the knowledge, but not a guarantee of it.

Once you’ve built your ship, wisdom is what allows you to sail it without sinking, to protect it from the storm that creeps up from the horizon in the dead of the night, to point it just so that the wind breathes life into its sails.

She goes on to say that the stories offer the opportunity to explain why given knowledge (and experiences) matter, to see the bigger picture.

I wonder if I can find something of hers for my students to begin the school year with?

Text Set: Spanking

I have taught many a unit on punishment or juvenile justice. While the topic is certainly interesting, I find that I am increasingly drawn to stories around punishment that impacts my students more directly, namely spanking.

Full disclosure, as a parent, I do not spank my children. I was, however, spanked or at least threatened with spanking as a child. What makes this a powerful topic to explore as a reader and writer is how decidedly ambivalent I feel.

Digression: for me, the most interesting argument work I do with students is around topics about which I feel ambivalent. In thinking about this, I think, perhaps, it's because argument is best where there is a level of ambiguity, nuance or doubt. Arguing about facts is useless. But arguing about what facts indicate is always way more interesting.

Five Thirty Eight ran a piece on spanking in light of the arrest of Adrian Paterson found here. What they highlight are the changes in trends of people who support spanking. The tables provide an opportunity for students to look at how the support has changed and who has stronger preferences. For a stats nerd, they also provide a link to a regression analysis to see the connection between the various characteristics, which could allow for a quick discussion of causation vs. correlation.

These trends, though, need to be viewed with some more analysis. This Po Bronson article from Time Magazine adds some context. It's an excerpt to the excellent book that he and Ashley Merriman wrote called NurtureShock. This piece is trying to examine if outcomes are better for children who have never been spanked. I think he makes some assertions around progressive parenting that are worth probing.

When I read the chapter from NurtureShock with students, we discussed the question of whether or not children should be spanked. I was fascinated at my students' responses. I think I assumed that they would be anti-spanking, but many made compelling claims that it was necessary to teach children right from wrong. I think when I teach this again, I may try to find one more text (two texts feels like a too flimsy set), perhaps a short story, or an excerpt from Huck Finn that deals with spanking.

Recommendation: A Few Seconds of Panic

My first experience reading a Stefan Fatsis book was truly enlightening. I picked up Word Freak on a whim or on a recommendation of a friend. I love words, I rarely play Scrabble, but I am compulsively competitive. Fatsis looked at this world of freaks and geeks and not just wrote his way in, but also played his way in. I was charmed.

When A Few Seconds of Panic came out, I had almost decided to give it a pass. Not my thing. I do not care about professional sports at all. But after hearing Scott Simon interview Fatsis I was intrigued. Like Word Freak Fatsis did not merely write about the NFL, he became a part of it.

Full disclaimer: my own upbringing taught me the basics of football from the sidelines. Friday Night Lights could have been about my town, minus the Texas-ness of it all. In college, I chose a school that had a weak sports program, nor did any of the schools near my alma mater field a football team at all. My antipathy towards football is, in actuality, more of an abhorrence. Yet this book was fully engaging to me.

What surprised me about this book was the nuanced and even-handed way Fatsis addresses professional athletics. He shows the pre-season training camp as grueling and the general player as a hardworking journeyman with only a few years shot at a career with pay that is not as great as billed. The portrait is extremely sympathetic.

For your students who are convinced that they will be a professional athlete, their minds will be blown by this account. Athletes are shown to be intelligent, hardworking, talented, and, for the majority, vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace. For the record, another way to blow their minds around this topic is to share the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook for Athletes and Sports Competitors. According to the BLS they will make on average $40,000 a year and there are fewer than 15,000 of them in the US. By comparison, High school teachers make an average $55,000 and there are 955,000 jobs according to the same data. Let them sit with that. High school teachers on average make more than professional athletes. Of course, the highest paid athletes make significantly more than the highest paid high school teachers.

For a taste of the book, check out the first chapter which is available at NYT.

Recommendation: Stiff

Mary Roach's book, Stiff, freaked me out. I was teaching middle school at a K-12 span school, and the cover, with it is perfectly beautifully buffed foot and toe tag was just too much to handle. But one of the high school teachers at my school taught the book and recommended it. I didn't read it at the time because I was in the middle of a multi-year run of Young Adult work, but when I began teaching nonfiction, I remembered the teacher and picked it back up.

Mary Roach's books (and her website, which features a cockroach crawling along the page) are not for the faint of heart.

Indeed, Stiff is an examination of what happens to cadavers in our society -- what uses we have for bodies that only the dead can fulfill. In some ways, it's a love note to eccentric and the bizarre and it's definitely not for those easily squicked. It is laugh-aloud funny, though. You catch yourself giggling, perhaps in horror, at her description of maggots or of heads-in-trays. It might make you question your own taste.

Roach is part of the story, though definitely more of a periphery figure. This is a book that unfolds with information and you can treat it episodically. If the chapter on cadavers as medicinal food before lunch seems a bad ideas to you, skip it! No harm in reading around.

If you are teaching this book, consider talking about the modes of writing she uses, how she uses them, and the effect of transitioning between historical information, definition, classification and argument. The best non-narrative nonfiction deals with a variety of modes (narrative nonfiction tends to be almost entirely sequential or descriptive, much like novels). Why do the modes matter? For inexperienced readers, the writers' purpose. With nonfiction, it's not enough to recognize that an author's purpose might be to inform or to persuade. Apt readers also begin to recognize that writers may use definition or classification as a way to establish criteria or to clarify what is being discussed and how. They should also know that explanation, in a larger sense, supports a writer's ability to argue for or against something. Knowing the specific purpose of smaller sections allows students to create a filter to understand what they are reading.

Stiff lends itself to this modal analysis because Roach is so adept at interweaving modes together. Moreover, her entire book is an argument, albeit a subtle one. If you are teaching her book and would like some ideas on what questions to ask, the Norton Reading Guide gives you a general place to start.

Recommendation: "Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?"

Last week I was scrolling through what felt like the entire internet looking for a bit of entertainment. Does that ever happen to you? You feel like you've read or seen everything that there could possibly be of interest, that perhaps you have actually reached the end of the internet?

While I battled back that sense of boredom and despondency that follows this revelation, I reloaded the New York Times and saw Claire Cain Miller's, "Will Portland Always Be A Retirement Community for the Young?" With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this article examines some of the reasons why Portland is an outlier in how cities have grown and changed in the past couple of decades. (Spoiler alert: there is a surplas of college grads, unlike many other urban areas which actively try to seek the same in order to drive their economies).

What I love about this piece is the artful use of structure to help create Miller's argument. She starts focusing on a personal anecdote, then expands to a city-wide perspective, then to a national one. Then she zooms back in, going back to city-wide then back to personal, ending the first section with a rhetorical question. What I love about those first 6 paragraphs is the elegant and balanced way that such a structure emphasizes the problem, allowing for easy comparison. Often, emerging writers will create a point/counterpoint structure for comparison, but here we have the sense of spiraling, of sort of that medieval interlocking spheres as a way of highlighting how enmeshed the problems are.

The shift in the article occurs when Miller posits, "Portland’s residents may, as the saying goes, want to keep their city weird. But do they want to keep it broke too?" Emerging writers often rely on the crutch of starting with a question. They do so dogmatically and often artlessly often asking something as pat as "Have you ever wondered why...." Here, though, you have a writer in full command of how to use that question to turn the article on its heel as well as to advance her own argument.

The next portion of the writing concerns itself with historical trends, starting with national trends then looking at those relating directly to Portland by comparison. This structure is a more common way of handling comparison, yet it's well done here and definitely emphasizes her point that Portland may be at risk of the "the amenity paradox, [which] refers to cities where the same amenities that attract people end up eroding what made a city desirable in the first place."

The article then ends on a tonal note that is, as the College Board might say, complicated. Throughout the article, there is a sense of gentle mockery that Miller tries to lessen by parenthetical phrases admitting to her own personal experience having lived in Portland. While she uses the stereotypes of "designers and baristas" and "kombucha brewing" as coded language for hipsters, she generally sticks to the psuedo-academic tone that relies on studies, experts and statistics. This use of emotionally distant language slips in the last paragraph where she notes that as economic trends change people will be compelled to move to less cool cities, "the ones that people move to when it’s time to become an adult." The implication, obviously, is that for now Portland is a haven for, as her example shows, 35-year-olds playacting at adulthood while holding decidedly non-adult jobs. In some ways, she seems to buy into an argument that the hipsters she decries would inherently object, that is that adulthood comes with decent and steady incomes, health insurance and a tidy 401K.

Moreover, the last sentence which declares that when such a shift a happens, "Portland will find out who the true believers really are." Again the implication is that those who live in Portland now, who are intent on keeping Portland weird are cult-like, or at the very least, irrational in their devotion.

Definitely a fun article to teach since it is easily accessible while still full of examples of interesting rhetorical moves. Most importantly it might serve as a very nice model for student writing with some patterns that would be easy to replicate.

(As a footnote, as an avid nonfiction reader online, I often find myself reading things that elicit hundreds of comments. There is no quicker way to kill your kind view of humanity than to read comments on the internet. Why is that? And why do I still do it? I do find the comments at NYT and to a lesser extent NPR for the most part thoughtful, but at the end of the day, I still think what is wrong with people?)

Recommendation: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In 2010, Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to critical accolades. This narrative nonfiction examines the story of the HeLa cells which are cells that have revolutionized biological testing, been the basis of at least 60,000 scientific studies because these cells dynamically thrive in a laboratory environment. According to the New York Times, if you have taken a pill stronger than aspirin, than you've benefited from the HeLa cells.

The cells originated from a tumor that Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman from Baltimore Maryland, who was diagnosed and eventually died from cervical cancer, had biopsied. Lacks had never given permission for her cells to be cultured and grown and she had never benefited from the growth and sale of these cells.

Skloot covers a remarkable amount of history and science in this book in a way that is conversational (at times) and completely accessible. While I am widely read, my understanding of genetics, cell replication and biological research is limited to what I learned in high school. I was able to follow the science without any problem because I was deeply engaged in a sympathetic portrait of the Lacks family dealing with poverty, segregation and racial politics.

Dwight Garner, in his New York Times review captures the force of both the writing and the story when he states

I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.

Another interesting aspect is that Skloot herself is a piece of the story. She took 10 years to research and write this book and the reader definitely is aware of her telling the story. In some ways she resembles narrators such as Nick in The Great Gatsby, a steady but sympathetic voice. The Lacks family initially accuses her of essentially writing her book on their backs, but she convinces them to allow her to tell the story, which she does with extreme sensitivity, bordering on bias.

You finish this book with an understanding that this has been Skloot's labor of love. It is moving and shocking in ways both large and small.

For an excerpt, click.

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