The Bar

It's January 19th, which means that it's Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Which means schools are closed. Which means across the country, teachers are relieved. And I think at this point, I can safely say that if you want to quantify teacher happiness relative to student happiness on a day off, it would be the positive quadrant of a parabola.

But school resumes on Wednesday, so I figure after MLK day and the inauguration on the 20th, this is a uniquely appropriate time in history to teach about Martin Luther King Jr. My students know surprisingly little about him, but I guess they know about as much as I did when I was in 7th grade--that he was a really famous black guy who gave a speech about a dream and somehow, he magically brought white and black people together so that they could finally hold hands and smile.

So I looked up his "I Have a Dream" speech online, and after reading it, I know one thing for sure.

Martin uses some big words.

Lesson planning is weird. There are, however, 3 basic rules that pretty much happen every time:
1. No writing actually begins without the requisite 4 hours of dread staring at a blank page.
2. No writing takes place without wishing you did it yesterday.
3. In general, lesson plans become more economical with words as the week progresses. In other words, the word count of Friday's plan is inversely proportional to the word count of Monday's.

But Martin uses some fancy words. Which is a problem because reading through fancy words involves a lot of fancy reading. This is tough to do as a class because when you stop every third word to define it, this causes boredom and sometimes chaos and if chaos, then sometimes, an ulcer.

So I went through and thought of what I could do. I thought about changing some of the words and just as I was about to substitute "chain" for "manacle," I felt a little sacrilegious so I stopped. I thought about finding another article, but at this point, I'd been staring at that blank page for just about 4 hours, so it was too late to turn back.

They say kids will only meet whatever expectations you set for them. This is true, except for a few circumstances, such as organic chemistry, but that's only because science happens to be really really hard.

So on Wednesday, we are going to learn what a manacle is, we are going to understand segregation, we are going to need to define prosperity, we are going to dramatize the word dramatize to understand the word dramatize, we are going to learn the meaning of degenerate (and hopefully use it towards each other just a few times), all the while hopefully preserving our dignity--even if we yes, languish, doing it.

And we're going to try to figure out what Martin's purpose for all this rhetoric was in the first place.

Because if kids do indeed only rise as far as the standard that is set for them, then I suppose the common sense conclusion is to set it as audaciously high and terrifyingly daring as humanly possible.