We’ll never tell them…

I will admit that very often I have a rather strange soundtrack in my head playing to my life. But then I have purposefully created strange sound tracks as well for lessons and plays. When I teach World War II, for example, and I have the occasion to show the landing on to Normandy Beach from Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan I have turned down the movie sound and played the 1940s Vera Lynn song, “We’ll Meet Again.” It is a chilling and jarring juxtaposition, to be sure. But, it makes some sense. Those soldiers, making the daring landing onto those French shores before dawn, perhaps just a few hours before, had been chilling out in an English pub and probably heard a recording of Vera Lynn’s iconic song (and by the way, just a quick tangent, Dame Vera Lynn is still alive! She still makes appearances and smiles and looks great for 96!) But that sound track also allows me to set up for the students the World War II song, “We’ll Meet Again,” so that when I play the ending of the Cold War-era film Dr. Strangelove, and as the world-ending bombs go off, the students have a better sense of the insanity of the bombs and Stanley Kubrick’s decision to pair those images with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.”

Oh, I digress from my sound track in my head observation of this week. In the last few days I have had the words and music of a World War I song playing through my mind:

And when they ask us, how dangerous it was,
Oh, we'll never tell them, no, we'll never tell them:
We spent our pay in some cafe,
And fought wild women night and day,
'Twas the cushiest job we ever had.

And when they ask us, and they're certainly going to ask us,
The reason why we didn't win the Croix de Guerre,
Oh, we'll never tell them, oh, we'll never tell them
There was a front, but damned if we knew where.

Now here might be why that particular song keeps reprising in my head: in class I am discussing a curatorial project that stellar student Alyssa Sclafani offered in AP Art History way back in 2005. Her presentation was entitled, Oh, What a Lovely War, a play that I had taught and would soon direct at Hackley, and this song does appear towards the end of the play. But I think the real reason the song has been on a loop inside my head has to do with the teaching profession itself. I love talking about education, studying it, trying to dissect it what makes it work or what makes it flounder, but in a way, like those soldiers singing about the front in “The Great War,” I don’t know if I can tell what really makes it great or what makes it excruciating.

The other day I spent about 10 hours grading mock exams for the upcoming AP Art History test. A mock exam is exactly what it sounds like—an exam the same length, breadth, scope and challenge of the real test. It allows students to tackle entire course for the first time. All year, either in monthly tests, or exams, the scope is never the entire course. Until the mock exam! So my students gathered last Saturday afternoon , and for three and a quarter hours, examined the history of the visual arts against the landscape of the world’s history.

As I graded the exams, some were great and some were lousy. I know, I know, it was just a mock exam! Who cares! It could be a great chance to simply see where you stand, get a grip about the whole course. I mean, it doesn’t count for anything!

But grading bad tests is so soul-wearying…and the way the grades went, really pretty bizarre. As you may know, the College Board grades the AP tests on a curve, and assigns numbers 5 down to 1, a 5 being the superior score. As in a typical bell curve, the middle, the 3, is where most of the scores fall. As I finished grading my class exams, I noticed a very strange phenomenon: there was no middle! Using the scoring system from the AP, I had 5s, 4s, 2s and 1s. There was no middle! I analyzed the scores. All those 4s were very high 4s as well, so a chunk, almost half the class doing quite well. But then the other half, presumably in the same class doing the same work studying the same art. A quarter of the class got the grade of 1, the grade you get for signing your name.

No, I am not new to the game of grading. I have long been aware that there will be bad grades. There will be students who don’t study, gasp—even don’t care, and it has nothing to do with me. But as I grade bad exams, it is harder to explain why they wound the soul as much as they do. I don’t teach to assign bad grades. I teach so that students may be empowered to go out into the world armed with skills and attitudes and values that might transform and improve the world around them!! As I read through some of the answers, oh, the weakness of the prose, the illogic of their reasoning, the insipid word choice…a little chipping away of the soul happens! So that is where the World War I song started playing in my head—I mean how could you tell someone not in the teaching biz what grading bad exams feels like. “Oh, you’ve got it rough, do you? Yeah, tell me that while you are lazing around in July!” It is as if all the hopes and dreams you have for humanity pale and fade as you read an essay with no historical context or precise evidence.

Don’t tell me I’m just being dramatic! If you don’t teach, you just don’t know the pain of bad exams. So, the song loops through my head, and I decide again, “No, we’ll never tell them…”

I teach Art History at the end of the school day on Mondays, so I had to wait until the last period to teach them, return the mock exams, and without revealing my full disappointment help them understand the challenges they had for the next week, hoping that my expectations and the promise of achievement and empowerment would motivate them. They, too, were shocked that just because they enjoy class they hadn’t all done magnificently. One girl, someone who has grown so much this year as a scholar and has worked very hard and done all of her work, saw her 2 on the exam, began to cry quietly, looked at me with wide eyes and whispered, “Maybe I’m just dumb.” Oh, we’ll never tell them what a comment like that does…

So I went from the Art History class to a faculty meeting where we had the pleasant and arduous task of choosing a winner for the most prestigious award at graduation. There were many nominations and for the next 75 minutes faculty members tripped over themselves trying to explain why each nominee was so worthy and outstanding. I knew almost all of the nominees, but chose not to speak that afternoon. In part, as I reach the end of a year, I can get emotional about some seniors, and you know, we never want to reveal how deep our affection and admiration might be. Not a single negative comment during the whole meeting was uttered. Never did someone interject and say, “Well, that sounds fine, but that’s not how I see him (or her).” For over an hour my colleagues articulated the leadership skills, the improvement in English and Arabic, the attachment to the school, the love of learning, the examples of respect and responsibility—each nominee reflected perfectly why this school exists.

I sat and smiled throughout the meeting, marveling at the wonderful examples we witness of change and transformation. And in a sneaky way, that World War I song crept back into my mind and my soundtrack. “We’ll never tell them…” This time it wasn’t about how a bad day, or  bad exam can shake the psyche—this time it was we couldn’t begin to tell non-teachers what those good days are like, what those moments of epiphany feel like as it dawns on someone about a painting, a movement, a moment in history, their own moment in history. That “A” essay isn’t just good—it’s enlightening, exciting, invigorating in a way that I couldn’t explain to a non-teacher.

I can’t decide or remember if there are more high and low moments here than in my previous three schools. I don’t think it matters. Each week has those moments, I guess, the highs and lows I couldn’t really explain. I’ll just have the music swell as the World War I ditty proclaims that no matter how hard we might try, we just couldn’t explain what it is like, so we’ll never tell.

About an hour after that meeting ended, and after I had met with some of the jarred students about their mock exam grades, I walked past the plaza in front of our Dining Hall. On this sunny late afternoon was a little girl, the 5-year old daughter of one of my colleagues. There she was, totally delighted and enraptured that the pinwheel she was holding was moving all by itself. Such wonder she enjoyed! Could we re-capture that same wonder? Could we explain it? Will we meet again with such joy and wonder?