Teaching My Daughter How to Hock a Loogie

Reflections on a Dialectic

My daughter doesn’t like to cough when she is sick. Instead, she makes little puffs. The puffing keeps her stable and inconspicuous. But as a mucus management strategy, it has limitations.

One evening, she had just snuggled into bed, puffing a little, tired from a good day. Suddenly, the puffing escalated, taking on high notes, until it was a productive cough. “That’s it, love,” I said. “Get it out.”

But she couldn’t get it out. Soon she was red-faced, hacking with all her body. Gasping for air, she threw back her head, and her brain pulled the emergency switch.

She retched.

We parents make our little plans. My wife and I were going to watch The Brutalist that evening, or at least get to intermission. Instead, I was standing at the sink, disassociating as I washed puke off a stuffed penguin.

Clearly I needed to teach her a better way to handle her mucus. But with which pedagogical approach?

I had been reading a book by researcher Jeanne S. Chall called The Academic Achievement Challenge. Chall died in 1999, and the book was published posthumously in 2000. In it, she summarizes her career-long attempt to answer a central question: “Do certain school practices lead to better learning than others?”

Chall organizes these practices into broad categories. According to her, “two educational patterns […] have been competing for supremacy in American schools for about a century–the classic and the progressive, the teacher-centered and the student-centered” (p.170).

“In the ideal student-centered school, the teacher remains in the background, the child’s learning mainly arising from natural curiosity and desire to learn. If the teacher teachers too much, that is, too directly, it may inhibit the learner, diminishing curiosity and deflating creativity. Thus, the teacher is advised to be a facilitator, a leader, or a coach–as opposed to one who talks at length in front of the whole room” […] (p. 6-7).

In teacher-centered education, by way of contrast, learning is seen as the responsibility of not just the student but also of the teacher. […] Through education, training, and discipline, students acquire the knowledge, values, and skills that will guide their thoughts and actions in adult life. In teacher-centered approaches to educational instruction, facilitating in and of itself is not enough, and interest alone cannot be relied upon. We learn, according to this view, from those who already know and from the accumulated knowledge of the culture” (p. 7).

Chall emphasizes that these are “ideal types”; no teacher or school falls completely in one or the other. They form a dialectic, a framework of opposing positions that can be used to understand reality.

I knew all about this dialectic. For twenty years, I tried to synthesize the teacher- and student-centered approaches to instruction. Or rather, I was subject to the tensions caused by an inability to synthesize them. When I first read Chall’s book, in 2009, her framing made sense of my experience. This was why we were still arguing about phonics. Why education professors hated charter schools. Why administrators kept putting rugs in my room. Once I understood the dialectic, I saw it everywhere.

I couldn’t help applying it to my daughter’s mucus problem.

As a teacher of students with disabilities, I was fond of a teacher-centered approach called explicit instruction. The premise is that it’s more efficient to tell students how to do something, and have them practice, rather than let them struggle. If a child doesn’t know what sound “ph” makes, you should just tell them.

But what should I tell her?

I replay the tape in my mind. Puffing. Lying down, coughing. Then big coughing. Barf.

I play it again in slow motion, looking more carefully at the steps between coughing and barfing. She’s coughing. She’s hacking. She throws back her head, and then – wait a minute. What happens when you’re coughing and you throw back your head?

Eureka.

The next morning, I sit down next to her at the kitchen table. She is eating an egg cooked inside a piece of toast, a specialty of her older brother’s. (We taught him explicitly how to make this). “Did you have a good night after all that coughing, honey?”

She nods while chewing. Her cheeks are flushed.

“Well, I was thinking about something that would help. You know when you are coughing hard? Sometimes you put your head back. I think that’s what makes you puke.”

“Your mucus gets stuck,” says brother. She narrows her eyes at him.

We practice. Throughout the day, when the puffs become big coughs, I remind her to keep straight. She coughs and coughs, but she doesn’t gag. The intervention works!

Until that evening. Same routine as always. She puffs her way through brushing teeth, putting on jammies, reading books, and finally snuggling into bed. Seconds after her head hits the pillow, the puffs become a cough. Then a wet hack. She sits up, as we practiced. “Good job keeping your neck straight!” I say. Face red, she looks at me, gives me a thumbs up. Tries to take a big breath.

Barfs.

Washing penguin at the sink, I think about something John Dewey said in 1900. “[I]n the old education … the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself” (Dewey, p. 34).

Maybe I needed to take a more student-centered approach. Think more about her immediate instincts and activities.

The next morning, they are eating waffles. They look soggy. “Did you toast them?” I ask her brother. (We taught him explicitly how to do this).

”Mostly,” he says.

I kiss Florence on the top of her head and sit down next to her. She has bags under her eyes.

I have a theory. “Say love, I was wondering, why do you do those little puffs? Why don’t you do a big cough?”

“Because…” she says, swallowing. “I don’t like to make all that noise. It’s embarrassing.”

Ah. So she has conditioned herself to hold in her coughs. Her brother would never care about something like this. He coughs as freely as the old men who play chess in Plummer Park. But she is a different person.

“Could it be the reason you’re throwing up? If you wait too long to do a big cough, you get more and more mucus, until maybe there’s too much.”

“Your cilia can’t move it,” says brother. Her eyes let him know: she is capable of murder.

“Anyway, I think it might be best if sometimes you do a big cough even if it only feels like a little one. You have to hock a loogie."

“A what?”

“Hock a loogie. You haven’t heard about this? It’s when you get the mucus onto your tongue, and then you can spit it out.”

“Ew!” she says. She and her brother giggle.

“Hey, let’s try it right now. Instead of doing the little puffs, do a big cough and, like, get it out.”

She starts coughing. Harder and harder. She keeps her neck straight. But her face is getting red. I brace myself.

Suddenly, she stops. She looks at me with an odd expression on her face.

“Go spit it out, love. Go into the bathroom.”

She hops off the chair and runs to the sink. From the kitchen, I yell, “Now run some water, please!”

When she returns to the kitchen, I give her a high five.

Alfred North Whitehead said, “Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it, then you will retain it.”

We hock loogies all day.

That night, it’s the usual bedtime routine. Brushing, jammies, book. As she is padding to bed, I say, “Let’s do one more loogie, hon.” She looks at me sadly; all she wants is to be asleep. “I’ll go with you.”

At the sink, she stands for a moment, swaying with exhaustion. But soon enough there is a tickle in her throat. Instead of trying to keep it in, she coughs with gusto, rapidly dislodging the helpful garbage. She spits it out, and I wash it down the drain.

She is depleted. I carry her to bed.

Standing at the sink, I don’t have a penguin to wash–just the dishes. And for once, I am not thinking about teaching, or John Dewey, or Chall’s dialectic. I am not thinking about how the best schools synthesize those ideal types, every time, or how to communicate the problems that are caused by swinging too far in either direction, as our field tends to do. For a few moments, I am at peace with these tensions, thinking about how cozy she must be hugging penguin, feeling only the presence, and the absence, of her head on my shoulder.

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Jeanne S. Chall. The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom? 2000. The Guilford Press. New York, NY.

John Dewey. The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum. 1990. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London.