I go through seasons where I get deeply fixated on topics. If you’ve followed me online, you likely know this. In quick succession, during the worst parts of Covid, I went in hard on fantasy and sci-fi books. I read A Song of Ice and Fire (the Thrones books) and Dune (well, the first three—Herbert really lost me at God Emperor of Dune). I also read N.K. Jemisen’s Inheritance Trilogy, and the Foundation books (again, up until they became incoherent).
As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I’ve spent much of the last year or so pouring through crime and noir novels. The most recent one I got my hands on is Ozark Boys by Eli Cranor. I’ve talked about Cranor here before. He was a guest on the podcast and is genuinely a chill dude. He cut his teeth reading Elmore Leonard novels and teaches English to incarcerated youth in Arkansas. I like his vibe and his choice of setting for his novels. I am notably not Southern but I have an affinity for Arkansas. I spent several summers as a kid on a farm in Camden living with my aunts & uncles. They were the siblings of my grandmother who had remained in the state when my mom’s side of the family made their way to Washington. They were all born around the turn of the century: Uncle Walter & Aunt Sal and Uncle Peach & Aunt Willamay. I’m sure I was more of a nuisance than a help but they tolerated me. I helped Uncle Walter pick melons and load them in the truck to take them to market. I fed hogs and picked & cleaned collards. On Sundays, I helped make scratch biscuits. I once snuck a pinch of Aunt Sal’s chewing tobacco and regretted it immediately. I really don’t think anyone knew what to make of me when we went into town and to church. I spoke (still do) at a rapid clip and was verbose in a place where kids were supposed to be in the background. But I remember summers on the farm as clearly as anything from my childhood. I realized recently what a stroke of genius this was by mom—a plane ticket was cheaper than summer camp—and shipping me off allowed her to work more overtime (or turn-up, who knows?) without worrying about my giant headed self getting into trouble.
Eli Cranor's new novel "Ozark Boys" is a banger
Cranor’s first book played in a pretty safe sandbox. It was equal parts Romeo & Juliet and Friday Night Lights, set as a Southern Noir. Ozark Dogs is in the same universe but it feels more ambitious and expansive. In this second novel, the setting moves from the fictitious town of Denton in Eastern Arkansas (closer to Memphis) to the Ozarks. The shift in setting creates a change in character vernacular that highlights the regional diversity of the state.
Within the first few dozen pages, stark moral lines are drawn between the warring factions—the ordinary toughs who were meant to empathize with, the Fitzjurls, and the meth dealing-Klan-fascists, the Ledfords. Something that’s important to me in a book like this is that when we meet a neo-Confederate or Klansman, they can't be a sympathetic character. IDGAF—that's non-negotiable for me. Cranor passes this test and I am going to try to stretch this one out until SA Cosby’s All Sinners Bleed comes out next month. If I’ve piqued your interest in Ozark Dogs, pick up a copy and share your thoughts as you read it.
Let’s Wax Pedagogic and Get Wonky About Grades - We’re nearing the end of the school year and many of the conversations at school are turning toward next year. It will be my fifth year here in the Gulf. As a school community, we’re moving to a new campus next year. This brings in other changes. They’re building a new daily schedule better suited to the larger campus and UAE’s recently implemented four and a half day work week. We’re also transitioning to a new tool for managing our grades. Each of these: the move, the reworked schedule, and the new grading system, represent an opportunity to rethink the way we do things but education is a profession that is uniquely averse to change.
The whole point of this week’s newsletter is that I am prone to fixating and as of late I find myself particularly unsatisfied with my grading practices and all the noise and variability inherent to the process. What does an “A” mean to parents? What minimum skills should a student demonstrate in order to earn a “B” in a given course? What are you communicating when you give a student a “B-” rather than a “C+”? You’ll get as many answers as people you ask. All this ambiguity is compounded by other factors including teacher bias. It doesn’t matter how justice-oriented you are, we all have our internalized prejudices and preferences. Anyone saying otherwise is lying. This video and the study that inspired it made the rounds in the past but they’re worth revisiting. If you accept that bias is real and there’s ample research telling us it is, it’s worth considering how we can remove bias as much as possible from our assessment practices.
Yesterday afternoon, I recorded a winding interview with Arthur Chiaravalli from Teachers Going Gradeless that I will link to when it comes out. A point I tried to make repeatedly in that conversation is that we should try to control for our personal and cognitive biases as much as possible and we should also lean into professional practices that remove or limit subjectivity in grading. I think we pay lip service to this in the profession but many of us, if asked to defend a given grade, would find ourselves at a loss. There’s a move against calculated grades in the profession that I think is well-intended but takes us further into the subjective and thus introduces more opportunities for bias.
Look, I’m a Greener—the ideal is to nuke grades and move to wholistic narrative evaluations (written by teachers in cooperation with students)—but until that day comes, we should be wary about how we allow bias, prejudice, and the application of selective benefit of the doubt to creep further into assessment.
I have more to say here but I want to put a pin in this for now. I have a piece coming out on this topic later this month and I will share that and the podcast interview when they come out.
As always, thanks for reading the newsletter. If you'd like to opine just hit reply on the email. I welcome your feedback (especially if you think I am wrong about something) and if you like the newsletter, share it with somebody you love.
See you next week!