Teaching poetry as an outlaw and heretic

February 02, 2008

The powerful place of poetry in education and life

BY ALLAN ROY ANDREWS

[This is an updated and slightly revised version of a column posted in May, 2003]

ANNAPOLIS, MD -- Were I permitted to do so, I would teach my high school students nothing but poetry, not only during the month of April (national poetry month) but throughout the academic year.

I wrote this reflection in the wake of National Poetry Month in the United States in May 2003, and I still recognize that teaching nothing but poetry sounds a bit heretical, even to the literati among my colleagues at the private Christian school in which I teach.

In 2003, high school English and Journalism, along with “Creative Writing,” were my assignments as defined by the curriculum for 9th- through 12th-graders, and, frankly, there is much poetry that can be taught under the rubrics to which I’d been assigned. My English-teaching colleagues and I make forays into the worlds of British, American and international poetry. For these poetic opportunities I’m thankful.

But it isn’t enough.

We live in an era that masks and hides its poetry; in a time that disdains its poets; in a culture that dispatches poetry to the margins of consciousness generally classified as “nice” but not truly relevant. Poetry, while seemingly tolerated and accepted as a tradition worth visiting, appears to our culture as hopelessly irrelevant. To be sure, there is a subculture of poetry, mostly associated with a tiny portion of the academic world, where poetry slams and literary readings abound, but these fit better into entertainment calendars rather than into mind-shaping cultural movements and events.

In our world, finances, wars and personal relationships come and go with meteoric speed. The slowness that poetry demands often is perceived as ill-fitted to a modern mind. Poetry’s structured meanings often are seen as needlessly convoluted. For many, poetry--like its literary cousin, theology--has nothing to say to a post-modern world. Unfortunately, while many thinking Christians would balk at saying theology is irrelevant, they join the cultural mentality that relegates poetry to a category akin to dodos or unicorns.

Many educators, even those who love and teach literature, would begin to see problems with my suggestion that modern secondary instruction focus only on poetry. College preparatory curricula demand disciplined lessons in critical prose analysis, fact-finding, vocabulary and grammar as well as in a variety of writing styles and genres of literature. Our curricula are driven by an academic competition that cannot permit students to slow down, pause or take time for reflection in the midst of their studies.

This is where my notion of teaching only poetry becomes a bit radical. I endorse the words of contemporary Hispanic poet and teacher Alberto Rios, who in an interview called poetry an “outlaw” and noted that the art of poetry is “almost heresy.” His words are best quoted:

“And that’s in some sense what makes poetry exciting. It’s outlaw-like. It’s almost heresy. It’s saying, ‘Don’t go forward. Stop for a moment and understand where you’re standing. Just understand this moment.’ ”

Poetry makes us stop. Its brevity and its artistic presentation are to be savored and not raced past. Almost every teacher and textbook of poetry that I know suggests that poems must be read at least three times. I’d say at least five times, but that’s not the point. Good poetry should be read unceasingly, a suggestion akin to the Apostle Paul’s admonishment concerning prayer.

In the driving, hectic, achievement-obsessed world in which I live and work, brevity is known prominently in ads and sound bites. Savoring the lines of a good poem simply does not fit easily into a world occupied with Instant Messenger, video games, calculators, cell phones, reality TV, put-down comedy, lacrosse Moms and competitive athletic scholarships. There is no contemporary equivalent of Bart Simpson quoting poetry; there is no Bill Gates of iambic pentameter.

The poet and critic Robert Bly once curtly concluded that Americans haven’t grown up and are still singing nursery rhymes. Newspapers long ago gave up publishing poetry with any regularity, generally suggesting it lacks news value (Contrarily, The New York Times in 2003 began running poetry in its Sunday magazine once more, and if one currently searches The Times carefully, one can find news about poetry, but not a great deal of poetry itself). Aptly, poetry is an outlaw; it has become a form of heresy among the techno-economic worldviews that motivate much of modern culture.

Even in the evangelical Christian world in which I have worked, poetry largely is disdained unless it runs toward greeting card verse with some sort of evangelistic witness to a sinful world or chronicles the sinner-ego emphasis of a contemporary praise chorus. Check the popular literature of contemporary evangelical Christianity. I can’t recall the last time Christianity Today published a contemporary poem (in any of its stable of publications) or that World magazine interviewed a working poet. This seems a rather disjointed phenomenon, given that The Bible, the book on which evangelicalism asserts its rootedness, contains vast sections of poetry in its Old Testament. And some of Christianity’s most theologically rich poetic words crop out of the New Testament.

To be sure, there are Christian poets at work; however, their forum of expression lies in obscure little magazines. There are not many homes with copies of Image or Christianity and Literature on the reading stand. There are not many graduates of Christian schools looking for creative writing scholarships. Even in the wake of the so-called evangelical publishing boom of recent years, poetry gets little attention. The commercial success of pretribulation apocalyptic literature has not translated into more widespread exposure for poetry. Christian educators, I fear, have mishandled badly the importance of poetry in our lives.

Don’t read me wrongly; I’m not trying to be a Luddite calling for a return to pre-technological education (or to pretribulation education, for that matter). The famous poet W. H. Auden once made that mistake when he claimed the camera and the internal combustion engine had become the bane of modern life. What would he have thought of plasma TV and NASCAR? Nor am I on some pop-cultural crusade to have our culture recognize and appreciate the poetic voices hidden in rock music and rap (instructive though this might prove). This path, I think, may represent the poetic immaturity that Bly has identified with Americans.

Rather, I’m calling for recognition of poetry’s power to shape the mind and spirit. Therein lies the “outlaw” nature of poetry that Rios perceives. Poetry, I’m arguing, may be our culture’s neglected path to knowledge and wisdom. Poetry is the arena of philosophers and world-shakers, not the stuff to be banished to the “Kids Korner” like some ersatz Sunday School materials.

When I began teaching in a public institution many years ago, a colleague who taught philosophy insisted that his students read regularly from an anthology of poetry. The instructor had no interest in rhyme, meter or any of the traditional elements associated with poetry; he wanted students to grapple with ideas, and he found the most accessible grappling was with those who wrestle with words--the poets.

A journalist colleague of mine once told me that as a youth he read everything he could find written by Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and e. e. cummings. Their poetry had a tremendous influence on his life, he said, especially during that critical search for identity that marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Unfortunately, he confessed to not having read poetry in several years.

This exposes a problem in our teaching of poetry. We treat it as a canon of wisdom that all must be exposed to in youth, but we neglect its power to challenge and shape our current thinking and opinions. The conventional wisdom seems to suggest we outgrow our need for poetry once we’ve moved beyond nursery rhymes and the so-called schoolboy poets, or once we’ve been force-fed Britain’s bards and poet laureates.

Or perhaps we fear poetry’s power.

When a group of poets scheduled to read at the White House early in 2003 were dis-invited because they suggested they might read words of protest to policies of war, we may have witnessed an unwitting nod to the power of creative poetry. Can poetry actually influence political and moral decision-making?

You bet your sweet sonnet it can! (And, by the way, the nation’s press that so diligently reported the dis-inviting of the poets made no effort to uncover what the poets planned to say. Their poetry couldn’t possibly have news value, the editors must have decided.)

In 2002, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Ruth Walker made a gentle plea for a “marketplace for poetry.” She said, “ . . . I somehow want to connect Shelley's reference to poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ with Jefferson's preference for newspapers without government over government without newspapers. Would we be more wisely governed if we had more poetry in our daily papers?”

Walker points to a power in poetry beyond art.

In Rios’ words, poetry can force us to stop and understand where we are standing. Furthermore, we can learn from analyses such as that of former White House press secretary and PBS documentary journalist Bill Moyers, who in his book The Language of Life called poetry “the most honest language I hear today.

“Poetry is news,” Moyers asserted, “news of the mind, news of the heart.” So powerful is it, Moyers said, echoing Walker’s conviction, that “democracy needs her poets.”

My conviction holds that poetry is a way of knowing, an epistemology, for those with a philosophical bent. Poetry probes the mind and the heart in ways that science, technology and economics cannot.

In 2003, Margo Jefferson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said under the headline “News from poetry”:

“As for the question of poetry's role in the public realm, why does the United States seem to be the only country in which artists still argue about whether politics can coexist with aesthetic complexity? It can. And poetry can be the only sure conduit to emotional truths that politics has done its best to shut down.”

One could easily substitute education or religion where Jefferson wrote politics. (One could easily substitute economics or journalism or science or social science, as well.)

Just to set the classroom record straight: Is there a better way to learn vocabulary than to be exposed to great poetry? I think not. The syntax and punctuation of poetry demand an understanding of the structure of English sentences. One can learn an immense amount of grammar from studying poetry--and lots of other stuff taught in textbooks, too.
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Allan Roy Andrews taught journalism in the high school at Annapolis Area Christian School in Maryland when he posted this essay. He can be contacted at aroyandrews@gmail.comReferences:

a) McInnis, Susan. ‘Interview with Alberto Rios,’ Glimmer Train. 26: Spring 1998. 105-121. Accessible at http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/interviews/page6.html

b) Walker, Ruth. ‘The marketplace for poetry,’ Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2002. Accessible at http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-84026550.html

c) Moyers, Bill. The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

d) Jefferson, Margo. ‘On Writers and Writing: The News from Poetry,’ New York Times, May 11, 2003. Accessible at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFD61F3DF932A25756C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=

Challenging a Christian notion of excellence

January 27, 2008

Challenging a notion of excellence

The Pride of Excellence: A Christian View of a Better Way

A key point in any comprehensive Christian worldview consists of engaging the culture and the world around us without unnecessarily seeking to mock it, destroy it, or conquer it. We want to transform it, perhaps, but do so without adopting its faulty values.

Many Christians of my acquaintance in the field of secondary education believe the adoption of a comprehensive Christian worldview compels them to the highest order of competition and a demand for unrelenting excellence. The notion of Christians striving to be the most excellent in all they do is often promoted as the acme of any Christian worldview and surely the goal of explicit Christian education.

It would appear, however, that the apostle Paul decried this attitude in his listing of the gifts of the body of Christ (I Corinthians 12). After cataloging the evidences of Christian excellence, Paul writes, “I will show you the most excellent way” (I Cor. 12:31). These words form Paul’s entrée to the well-known and often recited love chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, where he argues that without love the Christian’s life is nothing.

Paul could easily be echoing the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 64:6), who—if I may be permitted a paraphrase--warns: “All your excellences are as filthy rags.” Paul, in another epistle, echoes this sentiment with his observation, “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). If anything, Paul’s words place humility before excellence in a Christian worldview.

To espouse excellence—be it in education, athletics, politics, or business--as the crowning Christian virtue is to misconstrue the gospel, I think. Christians are not called primarily to excellence; they are called first to love.

In our modern, materialistic, consumer culture, a call to excellence carries subtle and intriguing overtones, especially regarding human pride. Without love, such an emphasis on excellence can be harmful to the gospel of Jesus Christ by placing a premium on human enterprise and effort.

What does it mean and imply, for example, for members of a Christian athletic team competing in secular arenas to assert that they must be excellent? Most, if not all, teams will be striving to be the best. What is the more excellent way for Christian athletes? Paul and other biblical writers insist that love must trump excellence!

To argue, as many do, that Christian athletes, in order to be effective witnesses to their faith in the surrounding culture, must be the best in all that they do is to court the deadly sin of pride. Frankly, a Christian’s performance in any arena has little or nothing to do with his or her witness to the culture.

Isaiah has it nailed: “All our excellences are as filthy rags.” Christian athletes are not called to mock, to belittle, to disdain, or to outstrip their opponents.

Christ has nothing to do with winning championships in athletic competition. He has everything to do with an athlete’s pride, humility, greed, sacrifice, and love.

At the Christian high school where I work, a young athlete once boldly asked, “What does Jesus Christ have to do with lacrosse?”

If our answer to his query has anything to do with winning or with excellence in athletic endeavor, we have missed the heart of the gospel. Perhaps an answer arises when his question is revised and restated this way: “What does Christ’s love have to do with lacrosse—or with any athletic endeavor?”

Often one hears Christian athletes and coaches couple this demand for excellence with some form or experience of piety, as in this assertion: “We play to glorify the Lord.” The glory of God, implied in this viewpoint, is often upheld or lowered by the excellence of our performance or the lack of same. Sadly, such a view gets measured by success, and implied in its premises is the conclusion that only victory or success can bring glory to God.

Frankly, this viewpoint leans dangerously close to a subtle heresy that encourages a Crusader mentality. It strikes me as a subtle form of the non-Biblical gospel of success espoused in many quarters of our capitalistic, consumer-oriented society. It implies that God needs our victories, our successes, or our excellences to demonstrate his love and grace or that God signifies his acceptance and approval of us by giving us victory and success in our endeavors.

God doesn’t call us to higher GPAs and SAT scores, to better won-lost records or to larger bank accounts and stronger stock portfolios. My conviction is that God cares no more whether we win or lose in athletics—or succeed in business or politics--than he cares whether males are circumcised or not circumcised. To act in love is to understand Paul’s words about Christians’ circumcision of the heart (Romans 2:29).

The real question for Christian athletes—and business persons--becomes this: How does Christ’s love become expressed in the field of competition? In a culture filled with pride, mockery, belittling, and disdain for one’s opponents, what can it mean to play any game as a Christian? Certainly it has little to do with excellence and much to do with the “more excellent way.”

A supposed Christian worldview that exalts excellence—the key word here is exalts—risks turning the gospel of grace into a gospel of works and of pride.

Returning to my opening reflection and putting athletics aside, let me note again that engaging the culture is not intended to be a form of triumphalism. Too many who call themselves Christian adopt a non-Christian attitude of mockery, conquest, and destruction into their engagement with contemporary culture. Such an attitude smacks of smugness, pride, and triumphant disdain for one’s “enemies.”

What did Jesus mean when he exhorted his followers to “love your enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;” (Matthew 5:44)?

Love, the apostle Paul said, “does not boast.” It is not, he continued, rude, self-seeking, or easily angered. Any cultural engagement by a Christian who forgets or disregards these words can hardly expect to be a witness for the body of Christ. In other words, our witness to the culture doesn’t lie in our excellence, which can become a veiled form of our own righteousness; it lies instead in our transformation by grace and our expression of Jesus Christ’s love.

Allan Roy Andrews taught high school journalism and coordinated the Web site at a Christian school in Maryland when this essay was first posted. He is a retired newspaper editor and columnist.

Andrews can be contacted at: ara@allanroyandrews.net

As newspapers seek profits, where are the prophets?

November 03, 2007

This column was originally posted in 1999 in
The American Reporter
July 9, 1999
________________________________________
IN A PROFIT-CONSCIOUS JOURNALISM, WHERE ARE THE PROPHETS?

By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON - The words have become a mantra of modern journalism: "Keep the readers in mind; we work for our readers; we must give the readers what they want."

I confess I sometimes take a cynical view of these admonitions, believing that for many in the newspaper business the term "reader" has become an acceptable euphemism for "sale," as in "keep the sales in mind; we work for our sales."

In fact, it's become quite natural in the growing economic jargon of journalism to slip into speaking about "customers" instead of "readers."

Quite recently, I heard a well-known newspaper designer making an eloquent plea for editors to keep readers in mind. His ringing personal charge in this direction was expressed when he said, "I am a slave to the customer."

Well, that may be fine for designers working to satisfy corporate clients, but it's a worrisome stance for an editor to be taking.

Surrounded by and pressured by the fiscal realities of the newspaper business, editors can be forgiven if they slip into a mentality that appeals not to intelligent readers but to units of the market subsumed as consumers (or customers, if you will).

Editors who slip may be forgiven. Editors who commit to such a mentality must be challenged at every turn.

In the business offices of many newspapers, the question of whether or not the newspaper (aka "the product") is read becomes secondary to the question of whether or not the consumer has plunked down his or her money to carry off the product.

In the business of journalism, the product, like so many bars of soap or models of automobile, becomes generic; its packaging and marketing defines the mission of not only the business office but of the editorial staff.

Perhaps I speak for a minority, but I think modern journalism's suspect credibility has less to do with our ethical lapses than with our mimicking of promoters and advertisers. We've barked so much about our product that we've fallen in with the snake-oil salesmen and the carnival con artists.

In our compulsive concern with "giving our readers what they want" we've redefined our readers as persons who do everything with a newspaper except read it.

Modern editors have begun to put more stock in the judgment of consumer focus groups than in the editorial judgment of their professional staff.

In a frightening irony, many modern editors are worrying more about readers they don't have than concerning themselves with supplying the readers the publication does have.

I know the financial arguments against my case: Newspapers are losing circulation. We live in a visual age. Young people want pictures not words. The modern digital age of computers is sounding the death knell of the printed page. No customers, no advertisers; no advertisers, no newspaper. News is changing. It's no longer gathered; it's created, shaped and spun.

Which leads me to my premise, a perhaps overshadowed and forgotten premise, but the most important premise nevertheless: News is not a commodity! It is vital information to the defense and growth of pluralistic democracy.

Just as politicians alienate constituents when they begin to perceive the people merely as votes, so editors alienate readers once they begin to perceive readers as customers.

It is the job of newspaper advertising departments to go after readers the newspaper doesn't have; it is the job of editors to educate and inform the readers a newspaper already has.

Faithful readers don't want news as a commodity; they want good stories and reliable information.

Editors who allow their mentality to tilt toward customers who are not buying the paper are doing a disservice to established readers. A slave to the customer cannot be a servant of the reader. In trying to build circulation with gimmickry and condescension, many newspapers are taking faithful readers for granted and feeding them more style than substance.

My corollary is that while editors may determine what is news, they don't do so in order to sell newspapers. The best editors work to inform and educate the public; they do it to keep the public from becoming the sorry and silent sheep that marketers, bureaucrats and manipulative politicians often assume them to be.

My argument flies in the face of the philosophy of modern corporate media moguls. I'm sorry if my premise represents a dying, minority view; it may well be that the editor's voice has become a voice in a profit-wilderness.

Treating news as a commodity delivers such bastardized information categories as "celebrity journalism," "sensational journalism," and "news you can use." It also turns over responsible editorial judgment and criticism to accountants, bookkeepers and amateur journalists.

It's not newspapers that are threatened by our devouring "bottom-line" mentality; it is the very core of democracy that depends on the free flow of information that newspapers should be pressing for and providing.

I'm not attacking newspapers as businesses. That's why newspapers have advertising, marketing and circulation departments. I'm attacking editors who surrender their editorial vision for the sake of customers.

An editor's calling is to keep the prophets among us in view, not the profits.

We lose with 'News You Can Use'

November 7, 2007

WE LOSE WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON - In a world enamored with McNews and Infotainment, there has emerged among many of the nation's editors a subtle conviction that readers must be given "news they can use" if the newspaper is to survive as an alternative to headline scanning news on television.

This seemingly harmless and pragmatic argument and slogan is a danger to freedom of the press and an unwitting ally of forces that would control our lives.

Of what "use" to readers is news that Serbs and Kosovars are mercilessly killing each other?

Of what use to readers is news that a world leader in Africa has died or that an angry man with a gun went on a rampage in Atlanta or that three promising people perished in a private plane crash?

The cold truth is that news is not something we use except as we recognize, as John Donne reminded humankind a few centuries ago, "No man (or woman) is an island."

We don't use the news that 45 people died when a cross-country train ran off a track or that more than 20,000 residents of a distant country died in a killer earthquake.

What these words do is challenge our comfort zones and remind us of the frailty of human existence.

Such stories should arouse compassion in us and move us to acts of charity for the unfortunate victims of disaster and crime.

Much news is in this category. We report the horrors of war in a faint hope that future wars can be averted.

News of railroad accidents and airplane crashes alerts us to human error that can cost lives and motivates us to urge regulations that will guard against such errors.

There's an old journalistic claim that news is anything that threatens one's life or one's pocketbook.

Those advocating news-you-can-use buy this argument and reduce journalism to two motives: to increase one's lifespan or to increase one's income. Read the news and live! Read the news and get rich!

But threats to life and wallet don't exhaust the definition of news. Much news threatens the heart. Much news stretches the narrow mind.

Much news lifts our level of anxiety for those we love. Much news alerts me to those who threaten my freedom of inquiry, my freedom of movement, or my freedom to pursue a life of joy and peace.

When I read of neo-Nazism or rampant ethnic cleansing, I'm reminded how important it is for me to defend the open airing of ideas and opinions and to provide a voice for the oppressed and disestablished.

The genius of democracy is that the majority is compelled morally to defend the rights of the minority.

When I read of elected officials caught with their hands in the till, I'm reminded that my being free in a democracy means more than chanting "We're number one" at a basketball game or doing everything I can to grab a deduction on my income taxes.

Democracy means the citizenry is responsible for its leaders; much that threatens democracy seeks to turn this responsibility on its head.

You don't owe your president, senator, representative, mayor, or county commissioner anything; they owe you, and the press is your eyes and ears - your lifeline - to their behavior and policy making, seeking to make sure they pay what they owe.

Sure you can use news to make money, but quite frankly if you're reading the newspaper to keep track of your investments, you're about two days behind the market and have probably already lost your chance to get in or out as you wish.

Most of what you read in the news is out of the ordinary - hardly "useable." It just isn't news to say that 5000 airplanes crossed the country last week without incident or that 8 million New Yorkers went to work yesterday and came home without being shot at.

I regard editors who advocate a news-you-can-use approach to journalism as unwitting bedfellows to those who abhor and attack a free press. Their view smacks of commercialism influenced more by MBAs and PR gurus than by the First Amendment. Their view equates news with a consumer product that can be collected, dressed up with color and pictures, packaged, promoted and profiteered: When it stops selling, it can be upgraded.

If I write like an idealist, I've been understood, because American journalism is rooted in an ideal.

News-you-can-use is based on pragmatism, which is exactly the logic and motive behind arguments that favor ethnic cleansing, suppression of the news for national security or government intervention in the media.

News-you-can-useism sees news not as ideas and actions demanding reflection and thought but as a breakfast cereal of the mind that can be sweetened, packaged, delivered, and consumed.

News-you-can-use is a notion developed in business schools, not in newsrooms. It owes its genius to heartless accountants and bottom-line barkers not to courageous and crusading editors.

If they had newspapers in ancient Rome, they would have advocated news-you-can-use to go along with the bread and circuses that kept the population happy and ignorant.

Allan Roy Andrews is the former editor and weekly columnist of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Tokyo, Japan. He most recently served as Publicity and Web site Coordinator for the Annapolis Area Christian School in Maryland.

This column is a slightly altered and updated version of a column that appeared originally on April 3, 1994, in Pacific Sunday Magazine, published in Tokyo, Japan, by Pacific Stars and Stripes.

Relaxation in high-achievement high schools

November 03, 2007

Too much stress in high school:
Achieving at a hidden cost

By Allan R. Andrews

I’ve added to my list of people I admire the principal of Needham High School in an affluent suburb of Boston, Mr. Paul Richards.

According to a story in The New York Times last month (“Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress,” by Sara Rimer, October 29, 2007, www.nytimes.com ), the principal is attempting to change a high-powered high-school culture built on high achievement by advocating--the story’s headline tells us--“less homework, more yoga.”

Mr. Richards wants Needham’s students to be trained in relaxation techniques, and he doesn’t want it done in an extracurricular fashion. Relaxation should be part of the culture and curriculum.

The principal is suggesting regular yoga classes, and he is urging teachers to schedule weekends and holidays when students are totally free from having to do homework! He’s suggesting the school hire relaxation consultants.

The startling revelation of the story, however, is that Richards’ efforts have met strident criticism. As part of his culture-changing approach, he stopped publishing honor rolls in the local newspaper at the end of marking periods, suggesting the lists had been turned into an accountability issue by some parents.

As a result, Richards and Needham High School have been accused by none other than Rush Limbaugh of coddling students in order to be politically correct. Jay Leno, who lives off news-story-induced humor, mocked the school for its stance, and Richards has been the recipient of hate mail from across the country.

Richards argues that he’s not trying to change the elements of high school that encourage achievement but simply wants to get there in a healthier manner. He insists there is an irony in the students’ responses: they say they appreciate the relaxation time because it helps them catch up on schoolwork.

Richards, who holds a doctorate and has made himself something of an expert in research on stress, argues that many students are so stressed about grades, test scores, and getting into prestigious colleges that they can’t engage with life at school. He told The Times such students “are being held hostage to the culture.”

A key point from his stress research that Richards emphasizes is this: while a certain amount of stress is necessary for learning and growth, too much of it interferes with students’ learning and their maturation.

David Smokler, an English teacher at Needham High School, buys into the principal’s call for a change of culture. He told The Times, “The culture has always been about rigor,” but the principal is trying “to make sure it’s not just about rigor for rigor’s sake, but that it’s meaningful throughout the school.”

Since I removed myself from a newsroom about a decade ago and stepped into the classroom of a private high school, I’ve struggled to understand what is amiss in American high schools (and make no mistake, I consider high school teaching to be the most difficult job I’ve ever had--and the most rewarding.)

Paul Richards and thinkers like him have begun to convince me that the problem is not necessarily a “school” problem as much as a “culture” problem.

The sad side of the story, of course, is that so many teachers, administrators, parents, educational planners—as well as Congressmen—have bought into the achievement-at-any-cost culture.

A former colleague of mine, Steve Larson, who spent more than a decade as a private school superintendent before returning to teaching, used to say often, “We’re doing lots of achieving, but we’re not teaching the imagination.”

Steve and I had lots of conversations about maintaining rigor while encouraging relaxation, though we may not have used that phraseology. We also agreed such a program was an uphill battle, not because of student resistance, but because of the misunderstandings of colleagues, administrators and parents; indeed, because of a gross misunderstanding of the nature and meaning of educating adolescent minds.

I found it heartwarming and telling that when Steve decided to leave our school after just a few years and move his family south, he was voted by his colleagues as faculty person of the year, an honor traditionally reserved for faculty who were long-term employees of the institution.

Apparently, somewhere, there’s still an appreciation for relaxation.

Be at leisure, my friends.