Apollo vs. Dionysus: Is teaching (and teacher evaluation) an art or a science?

"The universe divided
As the heart and mind collided
With the people left unguided
For so many troubled years
In a cloud of doubts and fears
Their world was torn asunder into hollow hemispheres"
                                   ("Hemispheres," by Rush)

I failed a college class once.  I was a high-school senior, sixteen at the time, and for some reason I decided to take a typing course at a local community college (Ohlone College in Fremont, California).  I was pretty sure it would be an easy A; I mean, it was… typing.  Duh.

I know, I know, shades of Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club. [Note: If the video doesn't work, the script's key lines are beneath the viewer. Sorry. If anyone finds this scene online, shoot me a link?]

But after a couple of weeks of “A-S-D-F, J-K-L-sem,” I couldn’t take it anymore. I started to lag on my touch-typing practice assignments.  I couldn’t focus.  Other students in the class were racing ahead of me.  I was… I was… struggling.

I stopped coming after week 6 or 7 and never went back. I got the “F” on my grade report in the mail. It was strangely surreal.  It almost felt like a rite of passage.  Or perhaps that’s all in historical retrospect.  Yeah, when it happened, at the time, I was pretty rotted (bit of Newfoundland slang courtesy of my Newfie wife).

I’m a pretty decent typist.  Even then, I wasn’t terrible.  I would clock in at around 40 words per minute (I think I’m probably around 50-55 now). My error rate wasn’t too bad either because I would always look at my fingers when I typed.  “Hunt and peck,” my teacher called it derisively.

I always wanted to be able to touch-type without having to look at what I was doing.  My mother, when I was in intermediate school, had a secretary who was an absolute whiz at typing – she could type 90-100 words per minute, and she didn’t even need to look at her fingers.  It was mesmerizing to watch her, much as I felt when would watch early MTV videos of Eddie Van Halen playing guitar. I was watching a master at work.

Try as I might, I was completely incompetent as a typist if I tried to do it the “proper” way.  But somehow, I had gotten it drilled into my head, in the short time I was in that class, that the “proper” way was what mattered.

I feel much better about myself now, and am a happy 50-wpm hunter and pecker.  Oh dear, that didn’t come out quite right…

I bring this up because I currently tech in a discipline – Composition – where process is everything, perhaps equally as important (to some, more so) than product.  But when I was an undergraduate, I never learned the Writing Process. In fact, the process of writing I developed for myself and subsequently engaged in would be scorned mightily by any modern-day college Comp teacher.  I think back to my Psychology 415 seminar at Cornell University, “Concepts, Categories and Word Meanings,” with Frank Keil, in which one 5-7 page paper was due each week.  We would be assigned a mountain of reading – good stuff too: language acquisition, philosophy of language, epistemology.  And then we would have to write a summary/review/critique, of sorts.

My “writing process” at the time consisted of the following steps:

•    Do the readings;
•    Think about them for a few days;
•    Go to a computer lab in the morning of the paper due date (class was at 1:15 pm);
•    Sit comfortably and spread my sources our around me in a grand parabola ;
•    Take a deep breath, reflect, and crack open a Snapple Cherry-Lime Rickey (why did Snapple ever stop selling sodas, anyway?);
•    Crank out a 5-7 page essay in 3-4 hours;
•    Go to class;
•    Get an A!

Somehow, my mind, on its own, always seemed to have conjured up a general sense of what I wanted to write, and an organic flow; my essays all had what I now recognize as the basic chunks of an essay: introduction, body, conclusion.  My transitions were seamless, and my wording punchy, erudite and with a definite personal "voice." How did I do that, without actually deliberately doing that?  I recently paid someone a small fortune to crack the corrupt hard drive on an ancient computer of mine, and I recovered all of my essays from that 1989 class and re-read them, as well as my 25-page final essay, "Towards a more defined theory of children's responses to transformations upon natural vs. artifactual kinds: A literature review and research prospectus," also written in the same fashion.

Not bad!

If you had asked me then, I might have told you that all of the traditional formative steps in the so-called Writing Process – organizing the information, brainstorming, pre-writing, even drafting – I did in my head.  I would never teach one of my Composition students that this was okay.  Do as I say, not as I do?

One size does not fit all.  So is talk of "process" just bunk?

Another anecdote.  When I lived in California, I used to frequent a particular Borders Bookstore in Milpitas (just south of Fremont and north of San Jose). One day, they had students there from a local massage school offering free massages, in what I can only imagine was that particular institution’s version of fieldwork for credit. I selected a practitioner and flopped down on the table for 10 minutes of bliss.

It was awful.

At various times during the “massage,” I signaled (first subtly, then eventually not so subtly) that it wasn’t working for me. It was mechanical, brutal, unpleasant.  She dismissed my concerns, and said she knew what she was doing.  As most of my massages up to that point had been of the, uh,  “amateur” type, I gave this “professional” a little leeway.  But soon, I had to terminate the massage.

The woman became upset with me, saying that what she was doing was supposed to feel good because her textbooks had told her so.  She had learned a fixed way of performing massage, and clove to it, and in the process, had formulated the opinion that if a client didn’t like it, it was the client’s fault.

I’ve seen this behavior many times since, primarily in two places: 

1.    In the delusional behavior of floundering chefs and restaurateurs (let me be very clear – there is NO SUCH WORD as restauranteur) given emergency attitude adjustments by such culinary heavyweights as Gordon Ramsay and Robert Irvine to save their failing establishments;

2.    In the equally delusional behavior of high school administrators who observe and evaluate teacher performance, and who seem to feel that: if teachers do not have exquisitely detailed daily lesson plans that indicate exactly what they plan to do; if teachers do not have their chalk/white boards partitioned into exactly the same prescribed sections (date, "essential question," objective, do-it-now, agenda, key terms, ticket-out-the-door); if teachers do not, over the course of a 50 or 55 or 75 minute-lesson, physically behave the same (usually, in lockstep adherence to whatever the administrators believe “the research” tells them teachers should be doing); then that teacher is de facto a “bad teacher,” and is evaluated as such.

With regard to the former, I will only say that despite the assistance provided by Chef Ramsay, something like 90% of these failing restaurants fail anyway. Why? They hold fast to their illusory prescribed norms instead of listening to the customers, the community, and common sense. With regard to the latter, I can only say that this madness is allowed to continually be perpetuated because it is imposed top-down by administrators who are desperate to “demonstrate” accountability.

Please note that “demonstrating” accountability is actually not the same as “being accountable." High school administrations concern themselves only with the most superficial indicators of teacher performance (does a teacher appear to be following certain prescribed “recipe” for teaching performance, whether or not s/he is actually producing good teaching is irrelevant), much as they concern themselves only with the most superficial indicators of student performance (test scores). When my evaluators would come to the classroom, they would not attend to the lesson itself; they barely even listened. Instead, they would have a lengthy checklist of clearly visible indicators to look for. If they were all there, that was all they needed, and they could comfortable make the leap of assuming that since all of the required components were there, the teaching was robust.

In 2000, I was observed by an assistant principal in my Spanish III class. The class was taught entirely in Spanish. The administrator spoke no Spanish. He had been a math teacher for 20-something years. Oh, we had a Spanish-speaking administrator on-staff – in fact, she was credentialed in the same three areas I was: English, Spanish, ESL – but staff evaluations were assigned by some mysterious process and that was just the way it was. Being a 3-level Spanish class, I conducted the entire class, start to finish, in the target language. The class went pretty well. Student participation was good. We reviewed homework. There were some class notes and discussion, a little guided practice. I assigned homework.  Everything went smoothly. I was pretty pleased.

Not my observer. Because I did not have clearly written objectives and an agenda on the board, he says, he was never able to get a clear sense of what that day’s lesson was. A lesson had to have a discrete start and finish, with some kind of assessment, and those phases had to be clearly discernible. Each days’ lesson should accomplish one defined measurable objective. Mine did not, as far as he could tell.

“Uh, but Sir, you do not speak Spanish. The whole lesson was in Spanish.”

“Good teaching is good teaching. It’s evident. I know it when I see it.”

Like pornography, huh?

If you are not familiar with the awesome and wonderful scene from Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams's Mr. Keating first meets his class, now is a good time to familiarize yourself.  Go ahead, view for a few minutes. I'll wait right here.  Good teachers are Mr. Keating. But Common Core, NCLB, Race to the Top, and the school administrators mindlessly enforce their mandates and embrace them as gospel are all Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, PhD.

Hold on, now.  Maybe I’m going too far, being too simplistic.  

Jeffrey Hammond, Professor English and George B. and Willma Reeves Endowed Chair in the Liberal Arts, deflated some of the out-of-contraol romanticization of, and schooled me but good in, my post Dead Poets' Society teacher-worship when he wrote in 2009: “In the end, the extreme rationalist and the extreme romantic are more alike than they know.” Damn. I hate to admit it, but that's sage advice right there.

“The great pendulum is poised to swing back from the heart to the head, but as this movie confirms, we poets and nonpoets alike are “dead” inside unless we honor both,” he added.

So there is, or must be, some kind of middle ground. There must be some science mixed in to the art of teaching, and by extension, teacher evaluation. A little bit of Apollo mixed in with the Dionysus.

But how?

I’m just A.S.K.ing…

Cinco de Mayo revisited - Mexicans weigh in, and one other fellow...

As Cinco de Mayo approaches, many Americans (both of Mexican and non-Mexican extraction) will get drunk without every really knowing why.  As I mentioned in my last post, Cinco de Mayo is largely celebrated by Mexican Americans (not to be confused with Mexicans still living in Mexico).  I had made the assertion that this was ostensibly to feel a closer sort of connection to the homeland from which they find themselves separated. (The Mexican Americans, anyway; the non-Mexican Americans just want to get drunk.)  I got some feedback that made me think, however... much of it from Mexicans who were of the opinion that Americans’ celebration of Cinco de Mayo is, in many ways, a big joke.

One poster responded:

My wife is from Mexico City, she knew the historical significance, but said that maybe they do something in Puebla but it isn't celebrated by anyone she has ever known in Mexico. As an American, I wouldn't say it is celebrated here either, just an excuse for people to get drunk. People have to know what something is to celebrate it, right? and Americans know nothing about Cinco de Mayo except "Mexico" "holiday" and "drinking". In other words... nothing about what it really is. What they are really celebrating is getting drunk in the name of Mexico.

This seemed to be a common theme, a Mexican contempt for the over-the-top celebrations (and the ignorance that fueled them) of Cinco de Mayo north of the border. For some, the reasons are historical.  One offered, by way of local knowledge, a "balanced" analysis of the history involved:

Puebla es (aún hoy día) una ciudad netamente conservadora. En la época de la intervención Francesa, la sociedad Poblana (y gran parte de la de la ciudad de México) estaba a favor de que un país tan avanzado como Francia tomara el poder en México y nos gobernara. Esto era visto como necesario por parte de quienes creían que no había otra manera de pacificar el país (que llevaba 50 años enfrascado en guerras civiles). Los liberales de esa época, consideraban que esta actitud era una actitud vendepatrias y a todos los que ansiaban un gobierno Francés, traidores a la patria. Nomás hay que recordar que, mientras que la alta sociedad Poblana era pro intervención, las clases bajas apoyaban al gobierno de Juárez y murieron en gran número defendiendo la ciudad (que finalmente cayó). Así que sería más justo decir que la Alta sociedad conservadora Poblana si puede ser acusada de traición, mientras que el Pueblo poblano tuvo una actitud heróica.

Another was less equanimous:

Hay un refrán: "A perro, perico y poblano, nunca le des la mano." 

Todos por acá recuerdan que durante la invasión estadounidense los poblanos recibieron con los brazos abiertos y hasta alimentaron a los gringos, tanto así que el desgraciado del general Scott armó con poblanos la "Mexican Spy Company", para usarlos de ayuda en la guerra (gracias a su ayuda, los gringos luego atraparon a los del Batallón de San Patricio, en la batalla de Churubusco). 

Nunca olvidaremos, nunca perdonaremos.

Yet another poster addressed the article  directly, with a more mature criticism (that still stung a little bit) but a wistful, almost poetic, look at a severed population, and what s/he calls "the mythology of the expat":

Este artículo falla en desentrañar los aspectos más obscuros y profundos del aparentemente inocente "Cinco de Mayo". Es verdad que corresponde a una nostalgia por la patria abandonada de los ancestros, y que es la desconexión casi total con la cultura madre lo que lleva a los Mexicanos-Americanos a celebrar este día con el fervor del día de la Independencia. Sin embargo, esto es un análisis superficial de los móviles socio-psciológicos que crearon la fiesta en su manifestación actual. 

La masa no se moviliza sola, sino que corresponde a empresas, sobre todo en EEUU, moldear y explotar la necesidad de mitología de los expatriados. No debería llamarse Cinco de Mayo, que como bien apuntan, no es celebrado en el interior de la República, y no significa nada históricamente, sino "Corona Day", porque finalmente fue un "día festivo" planeado por ellos, para su beneficio, y que al final del día solo representa "cultura light", donde celebrar consiste en tomar Corona y tequila, y creer que por hacerlo estás honrado, recordando, etc. a una cultura que se te escapó para siempre.

Lastly, two short posts that were informative, to the point... and in English:

WE, born and raised in Mexico, know exactly what Cinco de Mayo is. The most that we would get close to celebrat[ing it], is holiday at school, meaning NO SCHOOL. I felt actually embarrassed when I moved to the US, and found out that even Mexican-American[s] celebrated in a bigger way May 5th, rather than September 16th [Mex. Declaration of Independence], and even angry, when nobody even acknowledged November 20th (Mexican Revolution). Most Mexican-Americans come from born-and-raised Mexican parents, and it's a shame that they have forgotten to teach their children about Mexican culture.

And simply:

Ahem. Mexicans know about their own history. You are confusing Mexicans with Mexican Americans.

But I reserve the place of honor for the response that actually fried my cookies.  I might well deserve snark from Mexicans, who ostensibly know a thing or two more about Cinco de Mayo than I, but when a (non-Mexican) MA TESOL-holding ESL professor who cut his teeth teaching adults in Southern California (no shortage of Mexican-Americans there, last I checked), and who has now become an expat teaching English in the Middle East, wrote the following, not on my blog page, not in reddit.com (where people will write anything – one Mexican poster wrote, in response to my blog, “[¡]Señor escritor, usted es una verga parada!”), but on the page of a members-only professional ESL discussion board, the following:

"I think it's offensive that a country that dumps its worst criminals and low lifes [sic] feels entitled to tell America how to treat them. Why don't you ask Mexicans to celebrate holidays in El Salvador? Do you know what kind of response you'll get?  Better yet, try teaching Mexicans in the slums of Long Beach or Compton. People like you are the reason America is losing sovereignty."

I just had to respond in kind.  Call it a pathological weakness.

"People like you are the reason America is losing sovereignty" ????  You and I, sir, are going to have a problem.

I taught Mexicans in the slums of the San Francisco Bay Area - Oakland, San Jose, East Palo Alto, Hayward... for 15 years. I know that of which I speak. "People like you," sir, to use your ignorant turn of phrase (did you even look at my profile to see my experience before you called me out for what I have and have not experienced in my professional career?) are the reason why "people like me" blog. If you are so concerned about America's sovereignty and the state of its national integrity, why don't you come back from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia [Note: poster has spent 2 of the last 3 years teaching English in S.A. and Kuwait] and be part of the solution, instead of hurling firebrands at the stonework from a distance?

Further, with regard to your opening salvo ("I think it's offensive that a country that dumps its worst criminals and low lifes [sic] feels entitled to tell America how to treat them..."), your ability to compound logical fallacies is truly staggering. "A country that dumps its worst criminals..." implies volition which is unfounded, is a grotesque straw man hyperbole of Mexico itself as a nation, and an utter non sequitur in that it is completely irrelevant to my thesis. In fact, if you actually read my blog (which I'm pretty sure you did not, since your retort is so completely off-topic and irrelevant) you would have read the part where I acknowledged, "the Mexico of the 20th and 21st centuries did/does not appear to have held up the glorious promise of its inspiring foundational period..." but why ruin a perfectly good rant with inconsequential irrelevancies like detail, precision, clarity, accuracy, and nuance?

Your follow-up ("Why don't you ask Mexicans to celebrate holidays in El Salvador?") is equally silly and irrelevant. First of all, Mexicans would not celebrate a holiday *in* El Salvador. Perhaps you meant to ask "Why don't you ask Mexicans to celebrate Salvadorean holidays?" Ahhh, now that's a relevant question, to which I have two answers: 1.) If the E.S. holidays are relevant/germane to the historical legacy of Mexico, then sure; 2.) Again, further proof that you did not actually read my post, you missed the part (right at the end, in a paragraph all by itself) that read "Is it appropriate to recognize a non-U.S. holiday in the U.S.? Does it set us down a slippery slope? I dunno, I’m just [asking]"

So you see, the very purpose of the blog was to stimulate discussion. You sir, are clearly not interested in discussion; you prefer the name-calling approach. That's fine, I have thick skin. I see that you have a few years of ESL experience, mostly with older learners, in California, so I won't accuse you of not knowing anything (despite evidence to the contrary) but I will merely say that my 15 years teaching English and Spanish and ESL in largely Chicano areas in California, plus my Spanish, English and ESL teaching at the college and university level, plus my experiences as an adviser for Latinos Unidos and MEChA, plus my work as a Department Chair in Spanish and ESL, plus my curriculum work in developing Spanish for Native Speakers programs, plus my research in the sociolinguistics of Hispanic speech communities, plus my extensive community outreach during my secondary teaching years, plus my MA TESOL and Linguistics degree, plus my three teaching credentials in English, ESL and Spanish, plus my postbac studies in Mexican and Latin American History, plus my social and professional relationships in the Chicano community, plus a couple of other things, all add up to something you should consider not dismissing so cavalierly, and in spectacularly embarrassing fashion, if I do say so myself.

Stay in the Middle East. I'm sure you won't have to deal with any Mexicans there; they are obviously anathema to you. Good luck in your career. I hope you are able to find a corner of the world for your intolerance to relax comfortably unchallenged. 

How dare you.

I’m actually (surprisingly) very conservative when it comes to immigration issues, certainly more conservative than most ESL professors, I’d wager.  But I also don’t think that my initial post had anything to do with immigration reform, nor did it have anything to do with ceding anything to a Mexico that this fellow seems to think “dumps its worst criminals and low lifes [sic] [and] feels entitled to tell America how to treat them.”  I simply pointed out that, at its roots, the Mexican Constitution of 1857 (the beginning of their first truly long-term stable period as an independent nation), and the Declaration of Independence share a lot more than most people would ever guess, and that the heroics of the Battle of Puebla should remind us of our own selves.  We are so used to seeing difference in others (refer to my blog post on just this very issue); when we have an opportunity to see affinity, we should seize on it.

So did I overreact?  (I do tend to do that.)  Was my response too much?  I dunno, I’m just A.S.K.ing…

Cinco de Mayo – A uniquely American holiday, courtesy of… México!

Outside of areas with large Mexican populations, Cinco de Mayo as a holiday is largely ignored.  Allow me to suggest that this perhaps is a mistake.  In schools, certainly, the history of this critically important day provides a valuable historical lesson, not just about our neighbor to the south, but about the intangibles that once defined us as a nation.

When asked what Cinco de Mayo is, most people – even, I learned after many years of teaching in California schools, many people of Mexican extraction – automatically report, erroneously, that it is Mexican Independence Day.  (That would be September 16, sorry.)  It is always sad when a people is disconnected from its heritage to such an extent that no one can even recall the significant formative moments in the formation of that culture’s psyche; can you imagine an American calling him- or her-self a “patriot,” but not knowing why there were 13 stripes on the flag, or not knowing why we recognize certain presidents’ birthdays, or what “the shot heard ‘round the world” was? 

In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is acknowledged, but not celebrated as a national day with any real fervor on a national scale; official recognition of the day varies regionally, with individual states (yes, Mexico has states) deciding how the day is to be commemorated, if at all.  The occasion is celebrated with much more vehemence, pomp, circumstance and ornamentation in parts of the United States – those with a significant Mexican population, understandably – than in Mexico itself.  This makes intuitive sense, perhaps; people separated from their cultural center, if they have any desire to commemorate or celebrate their heritage and cultural identity, or any drive to maintain the same, will strive wherever possible to forge connections through ritual.  Islands of Mexicanity within the borders of the United States can therefore engage in these celebrations and feel a closer connection to their homeland, their distance, like absence, having ostensibly made the heart grow fonder. 

However, many American celebrations of Cinco de Mayo have degenerated into generic and heavily commercialized cultural celebrations; Cinco de Mayo is, in many American communities in the West and Southwest, merely an undifferentiated outpouring of nostalgia for a missed fatherland, a contrived concatenation of music, color, dance and food, with little – if any – acknowledgment (or even understanding) of the historical occasion which the day is meant to commemorate.  I recall that once a Mexican-American administrator in a school at which I spent an early part of my full-time teaching career, in an attempt to voice an elegant encomium to Mexico over the loudspeaker for Cinco de Mayo, informed the student body, perhaps a quarter of whom were Chicanos, that “today [was] the day we celebrate the Mexican declaration of independence.”  ¡Carajo, hombre!

That is a shame, because despite the occasional flare-ups of grotesque and arbitrary anti-Mexican sentiment extant in many sectors of the current American political landscape, Cinco de Mayo is, above all things, very much a holiday in the American spirit, and a significant movement in a critical historical period in our hemisphere worth getting to know.

The period between the 1760s and the 1860s was a momentous era in Western history. Thanks in no small part to Schoolhouse Rock, everybody knows the phrase “taxation without representation,” and has a vague idea that the American colonists were spurred on by outrage to fight for independence.  Anybody who cares to dig a little deeper quickly gets past the easy potential misconception that the outrage the colonists felt was simply petty, petulant and trite, (a la Occupy Wall Street – don’t get me started on that; it’s off-topic, just move along… ), like a child protesting his “unfair” bedtime and throwing a fit; in fact, the Revolution and subsequent Declaration of Independence (I’ll pause for a moment while you go look it up – yes, the war started before the Declaration was penned) were the inevitable end product of a principled line of thinking that had its seeds in the Enlightenment.  But the story does not end with the surrender of Cornwallis.

Proper historians may cringe at the truncated treatment I am about to give a rather complex series of political upheavals, but this plays better from 30,000 feet, so broad strokes only for a while.
 
The French Revolution, which lasted from 1789 to 1791, was directly influenced by the American Revolution, and the French National Constituent Assembly’s The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen paid generous homage to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  One wonders if the last thing that went through Louis XVI’s head in 1793, besides a guillotine blade, was the idea that maybe signing the Treaty of Alliance with the American colonies in 1778 wasn’t such a hot idea after all.  The French Revolution stimulated the people of Haiti, then a French colony, to revolt, and for thirteen years, war raged in that tiny country.
  
Then, a few short years later, nearby Mexico caught the revolution bug but good, as Napoleonic War-era France distracted Spain for long enough to disrupt their attentiveness to their own colonies, giving Mexico an opening to follow Haiti’s lead, which they did.  This chain reaction of wars of independence cascaded down the spine of Mesoamerica into the South American continent, and by mid-century, 1849, to be precise, almost all of the modern-day Spanish-speaking nations had declared, fought for, and won their independence from Spain. 

Mexico, as a newly independent nation, had what one might understatedly call growing pains.  An almost constant state of civil war existed over the three-and-a-half decades between 1821 and 1857, with a shocking series of revolving-door presidencies (Santa Anna alone was named President some ten or eleven separate times) while that nation saw not one but three separate, distinct national constitutions implemented.  The anti-theocracy capitalist reformer Benito Juárez played an important role in the creation of Mexico’s 1857 Constitution, a document which set forth guidelines that included freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a reaffirmation of the ban on slavery [Note/edit: Thanks to the poster at /r/mexico in reddit who alerted me to the fact that Mexico had banned slavery actually in 1829], the right to bear arms, and the familiar notion of “the consent of the governed,” captured in the Constitution’s Article 39:

Article 39, The Mexican Constitution of 1857:

La soberanía nacional reside esencial y originariamente en el pueblo. … El pueblo tiene en todo tiempo el inalienable derecho de alterar[o] modificar la forma de su gobierno. 

“[Our] national sovereignty resides in and originates with the People. … The People at all times have the inviolable right to alter or modify the form of their government.”   

Compare to the American Declaration of Independence:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”

Juárez became Mexico’s next president, in 1858.  He borrowed funds heavily from European powers – England, France, Spain (yes, Spain) – to rebuild his war-torn country, but after a short few years, his creditors came calling, led by an extraordinarily zealous Napoleon III of France, who in response to Juárez’s non-repayment, invaded Mexico in 1861, driving Juárez into exile, and succeeded in installing Hapsburg stooge and eventual fall guy Maximilian I as the puppet Emperor of Mexico in 1864.

The Mexican people did not go gentle into that good night, however.  While the elite French forces generally made short work of whatever Mexican resistance stood in its way, there was one battle, at the village of Puebla on May 5, 1862, that, while not a key or decisive battle in the larger conflict, came to become the best known (at least by name) battle on Mexican soil – the Battle of the Alamo was technically fought in the Republic of Texas – in that nation’s history. Reports vary on the precise troop strength of the opposing armies: on the Mexican side, estimates run as low as 1,500 and as high as 4,500; on the French side, estimates are fairly consistent at around 6,000, though I have read some as high as 8,000.  What is certain is that the Mexican fighting force was perhaps one step up from rabble, while the French forces were arguably among the most formidable, well-trained, and well-outfitted in the world.  David, however, defeated Goliath, sending the French temporarily into retreat, the number of their casualties three to four times that of the stalwart Mexican defenders.

True, the French did come back, this time with an army several times larger, and they completed their national conquest by 1864. But it did not take.  By 1867, Napoleon III had withdrawn both his interest in Mexican involvement and his troops, leaving Maximilian without a lifeline.  Maximilian was overthrown and captured in 1867, where a repatriated Benito Juárez sentenced him to death by firing squad. 

In commemoration of the Battle of Puebla, which despite its ultimate futility showed the rest of the world a nation of unexpected guts and grit, and provided an emotional flashpoint – like the Alamo, the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the defeat of the Gunpowder Treason – to kindle a resurgent sense of national pride, Juárez declared May 5th a day of national celebration.  It never, however, really became an official federal holiday in Mexico:

“Battle of Puebla is not a general public holiday, as per the "artículo 74 de la Ley Federal del Trabajo", but is included as a public sector holiday (Las dependencias y entidades de la Administración Pública Federal, cuyas relaciones de trabajo se rijan por el Apartado B del artículo 123 Constitucional) in the separate "Decreto por el que se reforma el Artículo Segundo del Decreto por el que se establece el Calendario Oficial"

However, the symbolism of the strength showed by an isolated and outnumbered band of ragtag underdogs surrounded by adverse hostility became a go-to font of patriotic pride for displaced Mexicans within U.S. borders.  Non-Mexican Americans would do well to acknowledge this day as of equal significance to America’s own Declaration of Independence, for while the Mexico of the 20th and 21st centuries did/does not appear to have held up the glorious promise of its inspiring foundational period (for that matter, The U.S. seems to have betrayed its legacy in a number of ways as well, but that too is a topic for another day, another time, another blog), the day itself, and the battle it commemorates, are sterling examples of the spirit that once made America great. This is something that students – all Americans – need to understand.  Let Cinco de Mayo be celebrated in our classrooms nationwide.

Pride is not a sin.

Is it appropriate to recognize a non-U.S. holiday in the U.S.?  Does it set us down a slippery slope?  I dunno, I’m just A.S.K.ing… 

                      [Note: Read the follow up to this post here.]

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed...

[Updated August, 2017]

Students cheat so darn much!  Well, some.  I myself have seen a significant uptick these past few years, in students who are willing to go to great lengths to turn in a finished product, by hook or by crook.  The operative word being "crook."

But what happens when it’s the professionals who cheat?  Or, in this case, plagiarize?

Take Prof. Santiago (“Yago”) Colás, professor at Oberlin (formerly University of Michigan).  No, he’s not a cheater. He is a victim. 

I had the pleasure of meeting Yago online and (virtually) talking shop with him a little bit some time ago; we share a deep and abiding love of one particular short story. While geeking out and Googling information on said story, I came across Yago’s web page.  On it, Professor Colás describes a Julio Cortázar short story called “La Autopista del Sur” (English translation, “The Southern Thruway”), one of my favorite pieces. In this story, a traffic jam on a country freeway, a snarl of epic proportions, uncountable kilometers in length, lasts so long that an ad hoc society forms within and among the people trapped in their cars in the terrible jam. Time magically slows down. Friendships, kinships, romances form. There is death.  And then, suddenly, traffic starts moving again, and people go about their merry way, rather like nothing ever happened. I cannot believe no one has bought the film rights.  It seems ready-made for cinema.

Check out Yago’s web page, with his original content and analysis. [Link dead] 

Harvard Law School dean Martha L. Minow seems to have borrowed liberally from Colás’s decade-old online musings when constructing her 2010 Law School Commencement address (or when someone constructed it for her, to be fair, because Important People often do not do their own speechwriting). I have been a high school and college English teacher for two decades, and Minow's “liberal borrowing” MORE than crosses the line into out-and-out plagiarism. See the image below, which shows color-coded matching chunks of text. I have given students zeroes on essays for less obvious transgressions, and no professor I know would stand for (what appears to be) such blatant theft. 

Out of a sense of fairness, I have marked, with an underline, the lone acceptable paraphrase. Plus, the following Minow line is really nicely crafted, and, it seems, original: "The tendrils of connection forged in the crisis stretch and strain as the cars speed ahead." (See below for the context.)

For the record, I have corresponded with Yago Colás, and shown him the offending document. He recognized it for what it was, I think (I don’t want to put words in his mouth), and was pretty zen about it, telling me I basically could do with it what I wanted. This was around 2012. I held on to it for a while because I figured, what would be the point?  It would probably bode more well for my long term cardiac health if I could be more zen about it as well. But repeated goings-on at the other universities have just made me decide not to hold on to it any longer:

·         Harvard: Read about it here or here;

·         Atlanta City Schools: Read about it here or here;

·         And this scandal among med school students at Syracuse University.

I hope, as Harvard University comes down hard (deservedly so) on its students for such offenses, that they are consistent in their outrage at such behavior, and will investigate/respond accordingly. A Law School Dean should know better. As an English professor, I am personally outraged.  Same thing with the students in Atlanta – if they’re guilty as charged, throw the book at them (not that they’ll actually read the book once it hits them, though they may copy from it).  As for the Syracuse scandal, well, you can read about the fallout.

I hope Martha Minow did not write the speech herself; I really hope it was handed to her to read.  Politicians have most of their speeches written for them, so it's a distinct possibility.  Maybe then Minow has plausible deniability (“I didn’t write the speech myself.”)  Well… I had a student recently turn in a paper that he “didn’t write himself.” Guess what happened to him?