drowninG horseS

Some time ago (years blur, time erodes memory) I bought a book called Making Horses Drink. I'm not sure why, as it's a work of advice for business managers. My guess would be that I glimpsed the title (and cover picture) while strolling through Barnes & Noble. I seem to have a memory of this, actually, but I've lived long enough to realize that sometimes we create memories. (Normal people do this. Psychotic people--and many ex-wives--tailor memories to absolve themselves of responsibility. That's not what I'm talking about here.) After looking at the book I decided that it could be useful in terms of working with my students. In fact, I staged a reading of the opening story with me as narrator and volunteer students reading different parts. The basic message was a rif on the old adage, of course of course. Since no one can talk to a horse (of course), you have to find a way to make the horse want to drink the water. In the proposed business model, this meant setting up a project and allowing your workers to decide how to best fulfill the requirements of said project. The theory was that without being overly managed, the workers would be freed up to use their own talents and creativity to accomplish the project, and that because of this approach the quality of the work would be high. Perfect, right? Maybe. But there are a few caveat emptors here. First is the presumption that the workers give a damn about the project itself. That may be true in the business world (either via the exegiency of remuneration or career advancement . . . or possibly even true love for the work), but it is certainly less true (to the point of being an anomaly) in the classroom. An example. In my Advance Placement English class we were reading Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The students were enjoying it, we were having deep discussions about the work both in terms of analysis and philosophical implications . . . and I just couldn't bring myself to give them a test on the play. It seemed inappropriate . . . like nailing a live turtle to a basketball backboard before playing a game. So I decided to let the horses choose their paths. I told them to engage in a creative response to the work. It could be written (poetry, fiction, drama, epistle, song, or anything else I couldn't think of), artistic (a painting, sculpture, mosaic, etc.), Second is the presumption of intelligence and creativity. I can see how this would apply to the business world. There is some mechanism for selection which precedes the bestowing of a position of employment upon an applicant, and one who has no skills, intelligence, or creativity would not proceed to a position of employment which required some or all of these skills. This is not true of the student population. Now, I realize that this is not an acceptable premise in our current educational paradigm, which assures parents that every child can learn at a high level. This fashionable mantra is responsible for such things as "grade recovery" programs (e.g. no one fails), standardized testing routines which devour at least 10% of total instruction time (e.g. no one learns), and the imputation of failure status on some (not all) hard-working teachers because their students--who have low to no motivation and no culpability whatsoever) because their students do not meet the requirements. This is, by the way, the kind of thinking that has led to special education students--regardless of their functional level or diagnosis--being tested on the Pythagorean Thereom. That's not a joke or even hyperbole, by the way. One of my math teacher friends often talked to me about a special education student who had been placed in her class (along with nine others, but that's another story). This student had some kind of disorder which basically meant that her brain was devouring itself. She would try to work the problems for the class, and would make a dent in it through sheer determination (and non-stop one-on-one assistance), but would inevitably reach a point where she just didn't get it, and would then break down in tears. The truth is that students have vastly different capacities for learning and vastly different levels of intelligence and creativity. Some children cannot learn at high levels. Some can barely learn at all. And some just don't give a shit.