Humanities has messed with my reading - with 100 student papers to score, I'm finding less time than I once had for reading at home. On the bright side, I'm getting caught up and ready to pick up the pace. I started the year with an AP classic, The Invisible Man, the one classic given as a summer reading option for AP IV that I hadn't read. I tried to start it back in May, but with summer approaching, I wasn't ready for such a heavy duty read; I was ready for beach reading. At 581 pages, it took me three weeks to read the book, and I'm not entirely ready to blog about it. As I tell my students, some books require a little processing time and maybe some consultation with "expert" sources (hello, SparkNotes). Using those sources isn't cheating in my mind...unless of course people use it to replace reading the real book (kind of like people who think the movie version serves as a replacement for reading). Also, though I waded through passages in the book that I struggled with, that effort took me to beautiful passages that I wanted to mark and return to and reread. Reading can be frustrating AND invigorating, all in the same book. At home, I was reading The Sociopath Next Door, a nonfiction title that immediately caught my thirteen-year-old's interest, so I figured I better preview it before I sent her off to 8th grade with such an edgy title. Since it has only 218 pages, I finished it pretty quickly and decided she can definitely read it, though it may leave her feeling as creeped out as I am by the idea that 1 in 25 people in the world around us operates without a conscience. Think about that. Look around you. 1 in 25.
Instructions Part 2 - Respond to the text, don't summarize. Discuss what stood out to you, how the information changed your thinking, what it made you wonder about. Include at least 2 text references in this section, including page citation, that are at least 50 pages apart, and make sure you explain the effect/value of the text sections you quote.
Martha Stout, the psychiatrist behind the sociopaths, calls conscience our 7th sense, and she suggests that most of us can't fathom that anyone lacks this sense, so we are easy targets for the sociopaths among us. Worse than that, sociopaths are often a charming bunch, so many rise to positions of significant power, and according to Stout, "...history shows us that a leader with no seventh sense can hypnotize the group conscience still further, redoubling catastrophe" (Stout 59). For the leader without a conscience, building dependence on his leadership also means building fear (often unnecessary fear), which solidifies power at the expense of the very people who need sane, steady guidance. But for a sociopath who feels no concern for others, the only goal is to win - approval, position, respect, fear, control. Whether a sociopath is a world leader or the local dog groomer, she only seeks to have some sort of control over others, and those intentions may not be apparent to the innocent, conscience-normal people in her circle.
Stout shares many anecdotes to highlight the "winner takes all" strategy of sociopaths: from the man who marries a wealthy woman simply to live off her wealth to the woman who purposely manipulates psychiatric patients to make their problems worse, we see how sociopaths can lurk under the radar and cause significant trauma. What fosters their ability to do so is our own society, which "seems to allow and even encourage me-first attitudes devoted to the pursuit of domination" (Stout 136). We like winners. We applaud the highest-paid CEO and the winningest athletes. We rank and reward students for being at the top of the GPA or test score ladder. We laud and praise the "superlatives" in high school yearbooks - Most Athletic, Best Looking, Most Likely to Succeed. We do little to recognize effort or kindness or creative spirit. So does our society create sociopaths? No, but we sure create a fertile playing ground for their little games.
The same idea came up in my summer reading, The Cheating Culture by David Callahan. With students constantly bringing up the issue of cheating and how much it causes shifts in grades and rank, I was drawn to this title for answers. Callahan doesn't have clear cut solutions to the cheating problem, but he offers an explanation for it that relates directly back to Stout's claims about sociopaths. Callahan suggests that otherwise moral people, people who view themselves as kind and decent, will throw morals out the window when it comes to getting ahead. So if I'm an athlete who wants an edge, I'll take steroids. If I'm a student who wants the top grade, I'll steal a copy of the test. If I'm someone looking to climb the corporate ladder, I'll falsify my resume. The ways we skirt the system are endless, and we justify such actions by claiming that if everyone else is doing it, then we have no way to thrive unless we play by the same dirty tactics. That doesn't make us all sociopaths, but it means the sociopath is bound to win in such an environment because such a person feels no remorse or hesitation about the lies/shortcuts/cheap shots used to get an edge over someone else. And when a sociopath wins in such a culture, we all praise such a person for having the secret to success. We tell ourselves that the secret is motivation and effort, but what if the secret is a cut-throat instinct to cut others down?
Instructions Part 3 - Make a connection to an outside source based on a core idea in the book that caught your interest. Make sure you link the connection, discuss details from the source, and cite it along with the book.
I can't help but relate this idea of "winning" to our position as a country. We all DO want to win. We want to feel good. We want to be the champion or the high scorer. And as a country, we want to be great, to be "city upon a hill" that others wish to live in. We want to vanquish our enemies. We want to be on the cutting edge, leading the world in economics and trade. There's nothing wrong with that. But what if our notion of greatness also had something to do with being kind, decent, humane? What if being "great" also meant being compassionate and generous? Could our greatness be even greater?
As a teacher, I want my students to feel part of a community of learners, to promote each other's success, and to realize that they don't have to achieve by making sure someone else fails. Competition has a limited role in education - mainly an opportunity to compete against our own best performance and seek to outdo it. But competition between kids flies in the face of believing that all kids have unique potential and abilities. Pitting students against someone else's achievement may actually diminish their motivation because as Lucy Clark, an education writer for The Guardian points out, "If they don't win, they lose: they're asked to leave the competition...." (Clark). Her statement refers to common reality shows, and her concern is that in education, "to leave the competition" would mean to no longer be part of the learning process. Her concern grows from watching her own daughter get caught up in the competitive part of education, believing that it is natural to compete in all things, like a child "wanting to win a running race," but Clark disagrees, asserting that while "sport bleeds into all our parts of our lives," the structure of sports is not appropriate for school, where people need encouragement to develop skills, not just "win" at the sport of passing tests (Clark). She goes on to celebrate schools with smaller student populations, less focus on grades, and more celebration of learning for learning's sake. Sadly, our own system can't accommodate that vision, but we can talk about the value of learning, and we can caution against the all-consuming obsession with winning.
Instructions Part 4 - Cite your sources. Use Purdue Owl to figure out citation format. Most of you will need book and electronic resource citations. Pay attention to italics, quotation marks, commas, etc.
Citations:
Callahan, David. The Cheating Culture. Harcourt, Inc., 2004.
Clark, Lucy. "So Who Says Competition in the Classroom Is Inevitable?" The Guardian, 9 July
2016, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/10/high-stakes-competition-in-the-
classroom-can-do-kids-heads-in. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017. (MLA STYLE)
Stout, Martha. The Sociopath Next Door. Broadway Books, 2005.
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