Carol Jago’s Standards

Clara Sturak
Associate editor

   Carol Jago has been teaching English in Santa Monica public schools for 28 years. Knowing what we know — or at least are told — about the life of a public school teacher, one would think that by now Ms. Jago (as her students call her) would be disillusioned perhaps, likely bored, and at the very least coasting her way from school year to school year. But Jago exhibits none of these characteristics. 
   Even while teaching more than 120 Samohi students daily, Jago has become a local voice for quality public education, known for her columns first in the Santa Monica Outlook, then the Los Angeles Times. She is a recent contributor to the Mirror.
   Jago has also written a handful of books on teaching, the latest of which is “Beyond Standards: Excellence in the High School English Classroom” (Heinemann). Seemingly a manual for educators, it reads more like a long version of her columns — clear, well-argued, sometimes funny prose, inspired by her students, and relevant for a wider audience than educators alone.
   “The book is for anyone who wants to understand what’s happening in education [today],” Jago says as we sit in her Samohi classroom one recent afternoon. “We’re living in a standards-based world right now...but it’s important to see standards as only the first step in the big picture of what we want for students.” Using sample assignments and teaching methods honed in her own classes, Jago shows the means she’s used to tackle the knotty problems of just how to teach students to the state mandated standards, while also allowing them to thrive. In the introduction to “Beyond Standards,” she writes; “I am convinced that children will benefit from the focused attention the standards movement has brought to student learning. What concerns me is that some of our children can do much, much more than any standards document describes. We need to make sure that in our push to achieve standards, we don’t forget about inspiring excellence.”
   Reading the book, one gets an inkling of just how good a teacher Carol Jago is. Take for instance, the Goldilocks Assignment,” in which she asks students to present three poems, one too easy, one too hard, and one that is just right. Knowing the students will feel overwhelmed at first, Jago brings in box upon box of books to class — “individual volumes of poetry as well as single copies of every anthology I can find in the school’s bookroom. I check out as many books by single authors as the school and public libraries will let me take and supplement from home. I put out everything from collections of cowboy poetry to the complete works of Langston Hughes, from Shel Silverstein to William Blake, from Billy Collins to Christina Rosetti...I invite students to pick up books at almost at random, drawn by a cover or a quirky title, and then to graze through the selections looking for poems that for whatever reason strike them.”
   The results of such creative and generous teaching are included in “Beyond Standards.” Dozens of Jago’s students have allowed their schoolwork to be reprinted. A high compliment, for both student and teacher, to be sure. 
   The windowsills in her classroom are filled with paperback books, not assigned reading, just pleasure books, waiting to be picked up by an interested teen. Jago proudly speaks of the volumes that “disappear,” and must replaced several times a year. Nikki Giovanni’s love poems, Francesca Lia Block’s “Missing Angel Juan,” “The Guiness Book of World Records.” 
   Teachers must offer access to a lot of books — and offer suggestions — but, Jago says, “every teacher is limited by the books they know.” The state of California has been promising an official recommended reading list for years, and has finally appointed a committee (of which Jago is a member) to create it. After suppressing the urge to “submit only titles that no one else had heard of” in order to “show her reading prowess,” Jago submitted a list with non-intimidating books “that would still cause students to stretch.” (See below.)
   She grew up and went to high school in Chicago, attended St. Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri and graduated from UC Santa Barbara. She subsequently took her MA and teaching credential from the University of Southern California.
   She currently directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and edits the California Association of Teachers of English (CATE) quarterly journal, “California English.”
   Jago spent her first three years as a teacher at Lincoln Middle School (then Lincoln Junior High), since then, she’s been in the same classroom at Samohi. Sitting behind a school issue desk (“my same desk,” Jago exclaims lovingly), I can’t help but feel a twinge of envy. I want Carol Jago to teach me. Well, it’s a little late for that, but Jago has taught thousands of Santa Monica teenagers over the years, which gives her “a kind of power,” she says. “I’ve helped shape the character of this community. I feel that I’ve made a contribution. I’ve touched these lives in ways, steered them to rich inner lives. I ask them, ‘what are you doing for yourself, and what are you doing for others?’”
   Jago feels strongly that for teachers to have the luxury to change their students’ lives, there must be changes in the system, including, she says, smaller class sizes (“If you’re teaching 36 kids [per class] somebody’s going to get lost”); more help for young teachers, which she says could be achieved through a mentoring program in which experienced teachers assist the rookies, and “getting testing under control.” 
   Jago is not against standardized testing, in fact, she calls California’s standards “world class,” but, she insists, there is too much overlapping. If tests were consolidated so “one test could do multiple jobs,” there would be more time for learning in the classroom. Time that should be sacred, she says.
   “I think teachers need to be cheerleaders for their students,” Jago tells me, while showing me the excellent term papers her tenth graders have just turned in. “I will have been an instructional failure if almost all of these aren’t ‘A’s.” 
   In “Beyond Standards, Jago, clearly not a failure, has a lot to share about the real measurements of success.

   Twenty Novels Guaranteed to Give a Teenager  Pause
Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Hunger, Lan Samantha Chan
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetze
White Noise, Don Delillo
Blue Raft over Yellow Water, Michael Dorris
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines
My Son’s Story, Nadine Gordimer
Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, Walter Mosley
Bone, Fae Myenne Ng
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
Sula, Toni Morrison
Imagining Argentina, Lawrence Thornton
Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo
Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth
Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman