Speak by the Card

For many years, I used a close-reading practice with middle and high school English students that we came to call Greatest Hits. We employed many kinds of texts, most often student writing. The object was to help students articulate what made a sentence or maybe two sentences in combination particularly clear, or powerful, or resonant, or memorable, what made them stand out. My ulterior motive was for kids to practice the vocabulary of grammar, syntax and diction, for students to see that, just as in chemistry, knowing the names of the parts and how you can put them together is invaluable, especially if you intend to blow something up.

I mostly used Greatest Hits as a warm up exercise and tried to keep it tight, 10 minutes tops. Sometimes students would bring the material. The previous day's homework assignment might have been: read "Marrakech," bring me three greatest hits and be prepared to describe why they're your greatest hits. Sometimes I would bring it, always student writing from which I would pull a dozen or so examples of great stuff (this required a little light record keeping to insure that over time, each of my students had charted a few hits) and give everyone a copy. We'd curate a little library of these over the year so that I could say, hold on a second, we've seen this strategy before, and we could go back to Hits from a few months ago--oldies!--to see how a classmate had used the same rhetorical trick that, say, David Quammen had. The upshot was to help students answer that perrenial question, Do you think the writer was really trying to do all that? with You're goddamn right she was, and I can too.

I use this same instructional strategy when I work with school leaders to review their essential value statements. And in the spirit of modeling, I'll give you a Greatest Hit I came across recently in an article about the Portrait of a Teacher that Ravenscroft School created last year:

I teach with joy and strive for excellence.

I model lifelong learning and collaboration.

I encourage students to explore their passions and interests.

I create a nurturing and inclusive community where all are valued.

I like the "I" statements with their active, transitive verbs, and jargon-free word choice. The actor in each sentence is the teacher who is doing something to something else, all of those somethings immediately intelligible to a lay audience. All are simple sentences, no throat-clearing, posturing, explainy, qualifying clauses and phrases. I also like the distance above the surface at which it resides, its relative timelessness--nothing about using digital technology, 21st century learning, a global perspective, etc. This portrait feels useful with multiple audiences, from recruiting faculty, to aligning professional evaluation, to helping prospective parents envision their children's classroom experience.

My close reading has an angle: I believe that most independent school value statements suffer from their attempt to be encyclopedic, and further burdened by trying to sound impressive. Somewhere underneath it all is the school's original statement, but every zeitgeist and critical awakening in the last 50 years has been appended to it. Layer on pretentious syntax (In accordance with our Five Pillars and our Founder's intent, yada yada) and insider diction (21st century learning, pedagogy, Project-Based Learning, etc.) and you've got a big mess, exotically unengaging, defying comprehension. Here's an example:

The mission of X School is to provide an educational environment in which the pursuit of honor, academic excellence and intellectual growth is complemented by concern for the physical, cultural and character development of each student. The school provides rigorous college preparation that promotes the student’s sense of identity, community, personal integrity and values for a productive and satisfying life, and prepares the student to lead and contribute to society.

To be fair, this statement avoids some excesses. There is no jargon, no bloviating, and it's mostly in the active voice. It's just overpacked with trudging, bloodless lists, the kind of language that would be excruciating to try to memorize or simply to remember. I was delighted to see that this school has recently and very successfully revised this mission statement.

I encourage you to use this close reading/unpacking strategy with your school value statements. And look around for your own Greatest Hits, in your own writing, in ad copy, in essays and stories, in other schools' value statements. Use them to prime the conversation as you set out on your own institutional revision efforts.