Consortium schools oppose high stakes testing by instead requiring students to create a written portfolio of their work across all subject areas which are then presented to a panel of teachers, peers, and other community members for evaluation. Sound familiar, Hampshire folks? This was my new dream: I needed to work in a consortium school. So I did some research and found a list of the 28 consortium schools in New York City. I went down the list alphabetically sending out my resume and cover letter to each principal. I had gotten just past the D's when I received an email from a principal in the C's. I walked into the school at 2pm on July 13, 2011 and was greeted by a smiling school safety officer. While the school safety officer took my ID and signed me in at the front desk, I thought, "This is the friendliest school safety officer I have ever encountered." I watched a young Asian man talk to a teenager sitting in a red chair about his bike a few feet away in the lobby/gym. The man rolled the bike back and forth across the light gray floor tiles a few times before handing it back to the teenager and walking towards me. I whispered to the school safety officer, "Is that him?"
She nodded.
"Are you Jamie?"
"Yes. Are you Alan?"
"Yes." We shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and I followed him through the maze of hallways covered in student murals. We sat at his desk, he pulled up my resume on his ipad and we talked. I took what felt like too long to think answering certain questions and he just smiled and said, "Take your time."
Then he asked me, "If you could design and teach any class here, what would it be?" I knew this one. There was no pause. No thinking time needed. "A zombie film class."
Six days later I came in for a follow up interview with the assistant principal. When she asked why I wanted to leave my current school I told her, "I want to be in an environment that matches my educational philosophy and allows me to advocate for students." And she told me, "That's extremely important to us. Our teachers are advocates. It's not looked down on. It's expected of them." Where was I? I felt all my stress and anxiety worked up into tangled knots from the previous school year just melt away suddenly. This was where I needed to be. This was my dream school. After she gave me a tour of summer school, I turned to her and said, "I really want to work here."
And when September rolled around, I was rolling out my first Social Issues in the Zombie Film class. Shortly thereafter I became known as "The Zombie Teacher". During registration for classes, I was approached by students I had never seen before, "Are you the zombie teacher?" At parent teacher conferences, "So, you're the zombie teacher?" And when we hired new staff, "Oh, I heard about you. You're the zombie teacher."
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| Zombie Teacher. Halloween 2013. |
Last summer I received an email from one of my former "Zombie" students filled with kind words. The subject line, of course, was ZOMBIES. She wrote:
Hey Jamie! So I've been watching the Walking Dead nonstop these days, and I just wanted you to know that your class actually taught me a lot. As I watch this series and observe society in general, I find that a lot of things we discussed in class are SO relevant/applicable. Whether it's our society's growing mindlessness and general disconnect, or our constant use of euphemisms to represent our fears (instead of directly confronting them), I've been realizing a lot of things about myself and humanity as a whole. Only thing is I don't know whether to remain hopeful or lose faith in humanity. I dunno.
Anyways, the point of this email was to thank you for teaching such a cool class and for giving me things to think about.
Hope you're having an awesome summer!
Stay safe out there O.O
<3
Emails like that might be the nicest thing a student can do for a teacher. Often it's a job where you wonder if what you're doing is really helping anyone, whether it has an impact on any of the thirty-something bodies on your roster (of which maybe fifteen or twenty showed up for class, if you're lucky). It's an incredible feeling to know that one class could keep a kid thinking about it months later. It only reinforces my views on how important alternative education and performance based assessments are. I'm getting emails that kids can't stop thinking critically about the world! That's incredible.
Around the same time I received this email I was taking a workshop, "Teaching the Academic Paper" at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking. For my final paper, I wrote about alternative approaches to academic writing, specifically research papers. In my own experience as a teacher I have come across academic research papers where students write full page introductions setting the scene for the paper and later analysis. Students often times are “conscious of constructing alternative text” for the readers they imagine, who may be quite different from rational academic readers, who like to stick to the rules. One student wrote an 11-page paper for my class, Social Issues in the Zombie Film, where she spends the first 2 pages describing the setting of the zombie apocalypse in the second person narrative.
“17 days , 6 hours. You keep track of time since what you lovingly refer to as “The End” occurred, although it serves no purpose to you. Night and day are now completely related to survival advantage. In the day, you can move, you can see. In the night, you are nothing but a target. A target to them, those moving corpses that feed on the living and turn the faces you knew into targets.
You run from the moving dead, or not-so-dead-anymore, and you try to scrape together the scraps of knowledge you have related to basic survival. Too bad you didn’t pay more attention in school, seeing as not once in your dull, day-by-day existence, did you ever consider preparing for a world-wide apocalyptic event, because really — what were the chances of that happening? How many times has “the End of All Days” been predicted now? What is the world now? An image of its original savage state? You don’t want to get all Nietzsche or Jung on yourself, but man do you feel like you’ve time traveled back into the Paleolithic Era.”
“The struggle of survival and weighing the worth of continued life is a recurring feature in zombie media. A contender for one of the most paralysing fears in existence is being confined to an inescapable fate. In the context of a zombie apocalypse, it is the constant threat of danger combating the innate human desire for survival, in an unforeseeably bleak future.”
This student demonstrates a clear understanding of the conventions of academic writing, yet she is able to create a piece of writing that ventures outside this box and allows for a more creative writing process. She displays a strong voice, a sense of writing style and experiments with different writing genres. This student was so engaged in the topic that she was able to write a paper twice as long as required. This one example demonstrates that when students are given the opportunity to think outside the box and use an “alternative” approach to academic writing, the results can be astonishing.
And so I wonder, by following the rules of scholarly writing, by following a traditional approach to education and teaching, are we, in fact, losing our humanity? Are we giving up a part of ourselves? Our voices? Our morals? Are we, as educators, giving up who we are in order to follow the norm? Are we simply mindless drones, following an academic path that stinks of rotting flesh?
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