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3,392 words, 18 minutes read time.
Two years after the pandemic, I had a class where I helped Kaylah learn to write a thesis statement. She was unlike most sophomores in standard English classes, in that I was able to explain that there’s a delicate balance between the specificity and generality of a thesis statement. Then I walked across the room to find that Marley’s answer was “no” when I grew suspicious that he didn’t know the answer to the question, “Do you know what it means to indent?”
As I was finishing up with Kaylah, I saw Marley’s hand go up, and a moment later, I sat next to him on a bright blue, tough plastic stool that I moved around so I could work one-to-one with students. He had begun writing the first sentence of his paragraph, and I reminded him that he needed to indent. Marley didn’t respond, so I asked him if he knew what it meant, and he said “no” and waited for me to explain it. He not only didn’t know, but I didn’t sense any embarrassment for not knowing something so basic. Often, kids catch on to that even if they don’t understand the concept; they generally know whether they should have known.
Of course, I had worked with Marley before that, so I was aware that he was not in the same intellectual place as other students. It made me wonder, just how far behind is he? I searched for an effective way to respond because it suggested he was missing quite a bit. I held my eyes still, and I looked straight ahead, working my best poker face to hide my incredulity at everything this one missing bit of knowledge insinuated. If I had expressed surprise, it could have led to Marley feeling shame. If I shamed him for not knowing, I could have lost him for the year.
Why didn’t he know how to indent in 10th grade? Where had he been? I considered whether his 9th grade English teacher hadn’t done his or her job, but we had a strong department, so I didn’t believe that. More likely, they did their job, but Marley didn’t pay attention. That explanation didn’t fly either because Marley was almost always on task, made steady eye contact, and if he had one thing going for him, it was his willingness to advocate for himself.
I continued to consider the documented possibilities. The boy was not on a legally binding individualized education plan, or IEP, and he hadn’t been diagnosed with a learning disability. He was not on a 504, so he wasn’t coping with health or behavioral issues, and he didn’t miss class very often, so chronic absenteeism wasn’t the culprit.
I had to start from the beginning, as in 5th or 6th grades. What did this kid know and how much information could he handle? How much should I simplify my vocabulary to increase his chances of understanding what I would say next? An indent isn’t just space at the beginning of a paragraph for which I could easily teach him the “tab” shortcut. It’s an indicator, a statement about a new idea. It’s a boundary to declare a new truth or argument. Indenting a paragraph has an important function, and Marley doesn’t know any of it.
It was a new problem, trying to figure out where to go with the instruction of a 10th grader who didn’t know what he should have by middle school or sooner. Before the pandemic, I rarely, if ever, came across this problem. Students might be bad at writing, but they knew how to indent. They may know how to indent but not bother to do so.
After ruling out the documentable explanations, the implication was that he didn’t know what constitutes a paragraph, or why we bother to organize it in a specific way. If he didn’t know those things, then he likely didn’t understand the parts of paragraph. Did he get through 9th grade without understanding the necessity and function of a quote to prove an argument? Does he know what an argument is? I had taught these things for 16 years, so I could reasonably assume every student entering my class as a sophomore understood the basics of a body paragraph.
Marley’s lapse could have been caused by the year and a half delay during the pandemic. Nearly every student in America (and likely elsewhere) lied in their beds five days a week for a few minutes after waking up, logged into their online classes, got the information they needed, interacted with no one, scrolled on their phones for a while, went back to sleep, and received a passing grade. Maybe Marley fell victim to the Instagram Reels death scroll through 6th and 7th grades. The counterargument could be that, presumably, he had been in the middle school classroom for the past two and a half years; surely someone had explained paragraphs and why we indent them.
I decided that the pandemic was only part of the explanation, and I had to explore other possibilities, like trauma. Teachers are nominally trained to look for signs of trauma so we can be cognizant of our body language and word choices, lest we trigger a child’s emotional wounds. Marley was a 15-year-old who looked 13 because he still had a layer of baby fat puffing his cheeks. It was still just the first quarter, though, so I couldn’t be sure whether he had suffered trauma or abuse. Maybe he’d been preoccupied with deep, dark, and painful daily realities. Maybe Marley was being, or had been, sexually abused at home and could care less about how one organizes a paragraph in order to illustrate how Edgar Allan Poe builds characters through the use of irony. For all I knew, he hadn’t cared what any teacher had said in years.
But I ended up discounting that explanation, too, because his demeanor gave off vibes of a sheltered child doted on by two relatively stable adults. He delivered the phrases “I don’t know” and “I don’t care” as if being asked what time it was, because he didn’t actually know or care. If anything, his indifferent neutrality in all things indicated the privilege of a soft and simple home life. This turned out to be likely. I asked him who he lived with.
“My mom and dad and little sister.”
I asked, “Are they both your biological parents?”
“Yes.”
His situation was rare, having two biological parents still married.
I considered whether Marley was tired and distracted because he helped support his family by working, paying the electricity bill, and caring for the little ones while his mother worked the late shift at FedEx. But I discounted that for similar reasons; he was too soft and passive to take on a family leadership role of that magnitude.
Maybe he was on his phone every night until 3 o’clock in the morning, masturbating to pornography, and handily losing the battle over his brain’s basic functions, so by the time he got to my class—depleted of dopamine, physically worn out, exhausted by sleep deprivation—he was lucky, or I was lucky, if he had heard one in five words. Since the pandemic, the number of students who sleep and slouch has risen from zero, one or two per class, to several, and sometimes as many as nine or ten. The number of students who would not and could not keep their heads off their desks either from depression or sleep exhaustion has at least tripled in the last 10 years. But again, I discounted this explanation because Marley was alert, even in the face of a 7:45 start time for first period.
In the case of Kaylah and Marley and what separated them, I had to draw a rather uncomfortable conclusion because it wasn’t documentable, it wasn’t common 21st century tech addiction, and it wasn’t any of the speculative explanations either, at least as far as I could discern. My conclusion was effectively taboo to even discuss: the two were on opposite ends of the spectrum of intelligence.
One of them had and abundance intelligence and the other had a lack of intelligence. The documentation might read that Marley suffers from a learning disability and therefore cognitive processing challenges. It might find euphemisms for the bottom line, but in straight talk, some people simply cannot make the connections necessary to do very simple operations.
Kaylah chose my standard English class because she didn’t want the extra work that came with being in an honors or gifted and talented class, where she belonged. She had all the skills of an advanced student and the intelligence to make use of instruction designed for university courses. Conversely, Marley belonged in special education, in addition to a self-contained reading class, because he lacked intelligence. Whatever qualifies as academic IQ, he didn’t have enough of it.
It wasn’t merely that he didn’t know how to indent and missed valuable steps in his education. Half of my students had those same problems. When I explained to Marley the function of indenting and how it relates to the argument in her first sentence, he went blank. I simplified my language and broke it down into steps. Nothing. I asked him how the evidence must support the argument: “If your argument is about diction and mood, what will your quote from the text need to be about?”
He replied, “The claim?”
“No, diction and mood.”
I would not and could not fairly pigeonhole Marley as unintelligent because I am a teacher, not an expert in evaluating raw intelligence. I have not done exhaustive research on the subject, nor have I read definitive conclusions about Marley specifically. In the absence of documented cognitive processing deficiencies or other trauma-induced challenges, however, it was the only explanation I had. I am sure there were factors that affected Marley’s ability to make connections among new ideas and previous knowledge. It’s also true that IQ tests rarely tap into several other kinds of intelligence – numerical, kinesthetic, musical, spatial, etc. – so I can only attest to his performance with English language arts.
What I can say about Marley is that, while he was unable to understand my simplest instruction to which students at all levels have for decades been able, I soon learned that in many ways, he wasn’t alone. Many of my students, it turned out, didn’t know what it meant to indent a paragraph. A large percentage had no clue that an introductory paragraph was different from a body paragraph. “Mr. Flavin? Does the introduction need evidence?”
And when we taught the idea of starting a body paragraph with a sentence that clearly stated the title, author, and argument, it could take two quarters of repeated exposure for half of my students (hopefully) to do it on their own.
Previously, before the pandemic, by 10th grade, there were good writers and bad writers, but they all understood the basics of a body paragraph and a 5-paragraph essay, and by the 3rd or 4th week, many were already well-versed when they arrived on the first day because they remembered what they learned the year before, which was fundamentally the same thing: writing a body paragraph.
Before the pandemic and social media, I could get the same concepts across to most or all students quickly, and the rest of the year was spent learning new concepts and honing skills. Marley was not alone, and in some ways, he was in better shape. His stamina, for example, his attention span, and his willingness to try. Marley could sustain effort for yesteryear’s normal amount of time, which was more than most of my students.
While Kaylah understood the nuances of specificity versus generalities on a spectrum and could apply that understanding to a range of complex topics, indicating that her IQ was above average, Marley’s was below average. By my estimation, and it was an estimation, I concluded he was well below average. And why not? Intelligence is like every facet of human experience. Every imaginable skill, desire, and genetic predisposition lies upon a spectrum. He was able to read the expression on my face well enough to know he had failed the moment, suggesting his intelligence with interpersonal skills, and still not have the intelligence to process the rules of language that are spelled out as clearly as 1, 2, 3 and a, b, c.
On that day, sitting on the bright blue, tough plastic stool, it suddenly occurred to me: I have no idea how to help this person. I tried again and again, using simpler vocabulary, visuals, manipulatives, and breaking down the task into smaller parts, but it was no use. By the time I got to the fourth iteration of instruction, he couldn’t connect the smaller tasks. So, I accepted that I couldn’t help him.
Marley’s situation was not about a lack of information; it wasn’t a learning disability; it wasn’t a trauma-induced hindrance; nor was it a matter of being up too late the night before. Marley needed more time—a lot more time—and he would need 1:1 attention that he would never get. I didn’t have the time, nor did anyone else in the building, especially since he was not confirmed to have a documentable learning or behavioral disability. There never has been enough money–federally, statewide, or at the district level–to hire enough people to commit to addressing Marley’s circumstances.
My choice had become straightforward: Walk away to help another student or neglect the rest of the class for the rest of the period.
It only took a couple of minutes to consider all of those possible explanations because I’d been making those kinds of judgments for 20 years, as all teachers do. It sounds like a lot, and that’s because it is. To speak with clarity by changing our language from Kaylah to Marley, to a student on a 504 Plan, to child with the apathy of stump, all in a single classroom, is the most important skill we have. Teaching 20 or 30 young people how to write a paragraph is not terribly difficult if they are all intellectually, emotionally, and socially similar. And they don’t have a disability. And they haven’t wasted their energies the night before doing whatever they may on the wide-open Internet. And so on.
This depth and breadth of consideration for each child’s circumstances helps to explain why a teacher’s first year is like trying to swim the English Channel with no hands. Perhaps that’s why 44% of teachers leave the profession in their first five years. In that first, second and sometimes third year, rookie teachers must make the same split-second decisions that veteran teachers do, except the learning curve is steep, so there are hundreds of big and little failures that result naturally from the lack of knowledge. They are forced to make uninformed and therefore impulsive decisions in those couple minutes, and they misjudge a lot. It’s inevitable. After a few years, they’ve repeatedly dealt with most of those situations and have memorized the lingo and acronyms, so they make fewer mistakes.
Now, after 20 years of perfecting my craft as an educator, hundreds of hours of professional development, and several dozen graduate credits earned both to remain certified and further my own education, I stand in my classroom like I did in my rookie year: more questions than answers. The case of Marley, whether my assessment of his intelligence was accurate or not, is typical of the scope of different life circumstances that I had to consider before deciding what to say and how to word it.
All of that was true before the post-pandemic instructional lag that will last for years. I think it will last forever since it conspires with the unknown but clearly counterproductive consequences of social media on the adolescent brain.
The Los Angeles Unified School District voted to ban cell phone use during the school day. Australia has effectively banned mobile phones in public schools across the country, and they have banned social media for children under 16, which is the first ever, anywhere. That coincides with the evidence and research which unanimously illustrates that adolescents are increasingly suffering from mental illness.
The bottom line is that teachers are fighting an unwinnable battle over the attention of our students. This is not only because they’d prefer to look at the constant images while sitting in class, but also, they’ve grown increasingly apathetic because of the emotional and spiritual battering from the content, of which most of the children never stood a chance.
In the last 30 or so years, public education has moved in the right direction, going from a teacher-led model to student-centered. The number of conversations about “what’s best for students” has increased, and the subsequent law and policy changes better serve more children, including those with IEPs, learning disabilities, behavioral challenges, health problems, and those suffering or recovering from traumatic experiences. Many schools are moving away from punitive measures to restorative practices to stem racial and gender biases in school suspensions.
In a hundred different ways, public education has improved from 30, 60, and 90 years ago, and yet the structure of packing as many children into a building and classroom with few adults to guide them is still fundamentally faulty.
Since grade-school, children were mandated to attend in 1918, our educational systems have evolved from an unnatural, mechanical, and uncompromising structure that has imposed its will by adapting the processes of Olds’ and Ford’s assembly lines, which, in the late 19th century, was sensibly designed to manufacture millions of identical products.
It was early in the Industrial Age, and those innovations in manufacturing were so triumphant that our leaders thought that that model of efficiency could plug and play in any other context. Note, however, that this was the same time in which leadership added toxic lead to our gasoline to solve engine knock, performed frontal lobotomies to treat mental illness, and allowed child labor to improve profits.
Assembly lines for manufacturing are still an efficient solution for the creation of identical, inanimate objects. No disrespect to Mr. Olds and Mr. Ford, who paid workers a notable $5 a day to stand in one spot and do the same thing over and over until their bodies broke, but it wasn’t meant for educating America’s youth. The assembly line was a success. America won, clearly, as no nation has ever had a more productive century.
In the creation of America’s first schools, children, like automobiles, were outcomes in a gain/loss table. And they still are. Whether you’re 19 or 99 years old, one only needs to think back to their own school experience. Go to school, obey the bell, sit down, be quiet, do your work. Obey the next bell, walk to class before the third bell, sit down, be quiet, do your work. Obey the next bell, walk to class… And so on. How many grown adults could do this? How about for 13 years?
It’s numerical, mechanical, and repetitive. Young people cram into bigger and bigger schools, and when the schools are no longer big enough, they cram them into trailers placed in neat rows, just like desks. Marley may leave my class and go to trailer #6, until 3rd period, and then it’s on to classroom 241. Students are crammed in front of the teacher, and information is crammed into students’ heads. Student assessments are measured by fractions and percentages and translated into letters that make it easier for students to internalize: “Terrell is a D student.”
Terrell’s interpretation: “I’m stupid.”
For over a hundred years, one adult has stood at the head of a classroom with the primary directive being to dump content into the heads of children. All children have been created equally, like parts for a car. Teaching in public schools is and always has been modeled after structures once designed for industrial output.
Is this what’s best for students?
It was on that day with Marley that his challenge became mine. I tried to help him understand what goes in the first sentence of a body paragraph and why we indent. Whichever explanation best applies to Marley, our educational system cannot serve him. For the same reasons, however we understand a teacher’s 21st century challenges, our educational system will not serve us.