Fighting the Klan in the Ozarks and Teacher Bias in Grading

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!

Cormac McCarthy and SA Cosby Are Masters of their Craft

We don’t know much about Cormac McCarthy. The 89 year-old is a recluse, residing near Santa Fe. His role in the culture relative to his presence in it are in inverse proportion. A while back, a Twitter account popped up purporting to be McCarthy. His publisher quickly explained it was fake because McCarthy doesn’t own a computer.  

We also don’t know much about McCarthy’s politics but the hints we get indicate he’s a Western traditionalist conservative. Sometimes his characters give us a glimpse of his worldview. Both Ed Tom Bell and the El Paso Sheriff from No Country for Old Men seem to be avatars for McCarthy, bemoaning the changing culture and the death of the world they knew and had once mastered.

McCarthy writes his novels and correspondence on a typewriter from 1958 and I swear I read somewhere that he built his house by hand. The dude is just different. McCarthy published Blood Meridian in 1985. He had been writing for at least twenty years by then but the grump didn’t do his first TV interview until Oprah made The Road one of her book club selections in 2007.  

Blood Meridian is arguably his most acclaimed work. It’s a laughably simple story. A group of marauding American mercenaries ride through the West killing, robbing, scalping, and assaulting Comanche and Apache Natives at the behest of the Mexican government. But their spree begins to include killing everyone in sight. They’re called the Glanton Gang, but their true leader is an unaging, grotesque, deeply philosophical, sadist, named the “the Judge,” who spends much of the book naked. He’s like Baron Harkonnen but in 1850. If you’re a remotely normal person, at this point you likely have some questions. 

The plot of the book is limited but what’s notable is the prose. McCarthy writes with a compelling locomotion despite the frequent deployment of slurs by his characters, constantly referring to natives as “savages,” and anyone darker than an albino as the n-word. This is a passage I dog-eared:

What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building — these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

None spoke. The judge sat half naked and sweating for all the night was cool. 

As I said, the story is not remarkable but the writing is. At times, I found myself asking why am I reading this, then coming across a passage like that and saying to myself “oh yeah, that’s why.”  

McCarthy released a new book last year called The Passenger. I tried it but didn’t finish it.  After reading Blood Meridian, I plan to return to it. 

Y’all Gotta Read this Man SA Cosby

SA Cosby is writing the best southern noir books in the game right now

As I’ve discussed prior, I am on a spree of crime and southern noir novels. It’s the genre of Elmore Leonard, sometimes McCarthy, and as of late the giant of the genre, SA Cosby. His forthcoming book is called All Sinners Bleed.  It’s his fourth novel; the first three: Razorblade Tears, Blacktop Wasteland, and My Darkest Prayer are all highly recommended. He writes with an authentic Black voice in a genre often rife with preposterous Black characters and clownish dialogue. 

The Obama Administration’s inability to deliver meaningful policy on matters of racial justice showed us the limits of representation as a force in politics. But representation and cultural competence in the subjects you’re writing are a must in works of fiction.  I’ve read far too many books and watched too many series with poorly written Black characters. They ruin otherwise wonderful novels and make me turn off  shows I otherwise enjoyed. There’s no universal Black experience but inauthenticity and a writers’ room that looks like Augsuta National leap off the page. The “Magical Negro” and the “Black bestfried as moral compass” are among the most tired tropes but there are legions of others. 

I pre-ordered All Sinners Bleed for its June release. I don’t think I’ve ever pre-ordered a book in my whole Blackity-black life but his writing is that good. 

I also mention Cosby here because his name came up in a recent episode of the podcast. I was chatting with Eil Cranor, an Arkansas based writer who also writes in the genre. I asked him who he reads or whose work he admires. The first name he mentioned was Cosby and we shared our mutual love for his work. Cranor is no slouch himself. His debut novel Don’t Know Tough is a slow burn that morphs into a page turner about a hard headed star football player named Billy Lowe and all the trouble that befalls him. I think both the book and my conversation with Cranor are worth your time.