The Home Stretch

Well, it feels like the corner has been turned. Tomorrow is the last day of class before Thanksgiving. We've got three weeks of classes once we get back, which is pretty much the home stretch. Then a couple weeks of Christmas vacation, a week of classes more or less mopping up, and the semester is over, and I get a whole new group of students to work with.

This part of the race, if I can stay with the home stretch metaphor for a moment, is where a lot of interesting things happen, or don't. My students are all working on major projects of their own design which will pretty much define where they have arrived at the end of the course with regard to quality. And all of the little messages, subliminal and supraliminal, that I've been pinging them with since day one are either having their effect, or not. But when they do, it's satisfying. Here's a paragraph from a reflection paper handed in by a student today:

As I wrote my Poisonwood Bible paper on the opposites of Rachel and Leah, I found myself writing about Rachel as a teenager and how her attitude was, if you don't like something, then complain as much as you can and try to find a way out of it. While Leah's attitude is try to enjoy the situation you're in even if you don't like it, and try to get something out of it. I then realized that this is what Mr. Schauble was telling us about in a previous class. I remember him talking about getting something out of the time we have in English class. Where you can either hate it or wait miserably for it to end, or learn something valuable... After realizing the cowardice of Rachel and the intelligence of Leah, I decided to try and live with Leah's attitude in mind and make the most of every situation.

With all due respect for the weather forecast and the likelihood of snow in November, I still can't help but be encouraged by this. We began the semester by writing down the quote from Christoper Clausen that I have written about before on this blog, and which I perhaps too often return to as a pointer to True North in my classroom: "All great literature addresses directly or indirectly two questions: What kind of world is this?, and How should we live in it?" I'm glad that Barbara Kingsolver's book, whether or not it fits into the category of "great literature," has this student turning the questions over in his mind.

(Image: http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~hsieh/photos_kentucky.html)

Many Happy Returns

Today is the first birthday of Throughlines. A year ago, I had never looked at a blog. I didn't know what a wiki was. I didn't know flickr existed. I'd never seen a YouTube video. I hadn't used Google as anything other than a search engine, and had no idea what an RSS feed even was. One year, 228 posts, and 15,000 hits later, I'm in touch with via the blogosphere with educators all over the world, I've had my students working on blogs and wikis and Moodle, I've heard from a lot of former students and colleagues, and I've got tremendously stimulating professional development opportunities arriving via Google reader every day in the form of RSS feeds from educators who care about what they are doing and are working at doing it better. Based on how much has opened up this year, I can't even begin to imagine what's going to be going on a year from today. Thanks to all of you who have taken the time to visit, to read, to comment, and to email words of objections, elaboration, or encouragement. It's been a hell of a year.

Are You Serious?

English as a course of study at the high school level sometimes seems to take a back seat to other subjects. Given a choice between whether to show up for math or physics course with a problem set unfinished, or showing up for English with an assigned reading only partially done, or not done at all, many students seem comfortable opting for door number two. The whole question of homework across the board has been a subject of debate nationally and at our school. Last year we spent one department meeting brainstorming some ideas about the role of homework in an English class, and at yesterday's English department meeting we embarked on a followup discussion, and at one point in the meeting I found myself talking about something that has been bothering me lately. It bothers me every semester about midway through, and I usually get over it, but here we are in early November, and here I am again, wondering about Quality, how close our students are to attaining it, and whether we are providing an environment in which quality issues are taken seriously. And so I asked, rhetorically, "What proportion of our students are really serious students of English?" A pretty interesting discussion ensued, and part of what made it interesting is that the question itself clearly made some of us uncomfortable. I had been planning to unpack some of my thinking about this on Throughlines, but my colleague Chris Watson beat me to the punch, and I wound up responding to him on his blog, so I'm basically going to re-present the dialogue here. His post:

Every other week, the English department meets a large group (largest dept. in the school) to discuss courses, initiatives, school business, and overarching questions. Yesterday, we revisited a conversation about homework that's been going on school-wide for a few years. How do we use it? Why do students gain from it? Could we get by without it? And so on. And we ended up discussing what some of us perceived as a move towards a school culture that doesn't foster serious students, specifically in English. Physics and Math maybe a different story?

Many great questions came out of the discussion:

*Is there a difference between being good at something and being a student of something? Waterpolo was the analogy.

*How do we balance encouraging the skills of a good student with the necessary pace of the curriculum?

*Should we expect all student to have passion for English? For example, do we expect all student in orchestra to be serious musicians?

*Is being a serious student, a mastery of skills or an investment in content?

So I left the meeting thinking about these questions, and thinking about how I might present some ideas in a post here at WatsonCommon. Considering myself a serious student of several things, English, leadership, educational technology, surfing, mountaineering, racquetball, marathoning, I thought I'd take inventory of all the things I do as a serious student (maybe learner is a better term).

1. I keep a small notebook with me at all times to quickly jot down ideas, reflections, and observations. This is also where raw ideas are born. Often, what's written here is in the form of lists, pictures, webs.

2. I write in a personal journal, at least 10 minutes a day, for nobody but me.

3. I keep a professional blog and read blogs of people who do similar work, creating a network of creative collaborators. Before blogging, I documented all my work and organized it in binders and folders, ready to reference and share.

4. I try to build a professional library of thought-provoking reading. I think this too is encompassed by the read/write web.

I'm probably missing things. But these are the habits (I wouldn't call them skills) that I believe make me serious. Is this what we expect of students? Or is it something else? Something more?

My response:

Well, I was gonna write about this too, and here you went and beat me to it (not for the first time either.) But yeah, all of the things you mention. Writing figures in three of four items in your inventory, reading in the fourth. It seems to me that reading and writing are critical: reading allows us to broaden our understanding, writing allows us to shape it, extend it, deepen it. I'd add three things to the list:

5. Reflection - staying with an idea inside the mind, turning it over, rotating it, looking at it from different points of view

6. Conversation - talking about something is a way of honoring its importance, and there's something generative about talk as well; putting something words is clarifying and often surprising when it leads you to say things you didn't know you knew or believed

7. Action - putting ideas into motion provides the real test of their validity. A lot of things sound good but don't work in the real world.

I took the position in our meeting that many of our students, including many students who are earning grades good grades, are not what I would consider to be serious students. How many of our students do even half of the things that are on our emerging list? They do what they are told to do, yes. But how many of them write for their own enrichment? How many of them read beyond what is strictly required? (Many of them do not even do that much.) How many of them do we see making any kind of active effort to put the ideas they do care about into practice? How much of their complacency is a result of the climate of expectation we set for them? And if we wanted to change that climate, where might we begin?

So yeah, it was an interesting discussion. Those are serious questions, and deserve serious answers.

I think as teachers we are always walking a thin line. On the one hand we want our students to like whatever subject we are teaching, to like the class, to like us. On the other hand, we want them to push themselves, to work hard, to improve their skills, to produce the kind of work they are capable of. Some of us don't mind playing the bad cop; some of us have trouble with that role. Some teachers argue that if a student writes something that she thinks is good, it is good, and that we should simply praise what is good and ask the student to write more, on the theory that in this way she will come to love writing. Others argue that there are degrees of good, and that if a student's work is not yet good enough, the only way it is going to get better will be if someone tells her what she needs to do to make it good, or, at least, better.

I think a serious student would want to know that. And I'd like to believe that by the time a student is a junior or senior in high school, s/he would have a pretty clear sense of what makes good work good, and a pretty good sense of what it means to be a serious student in any particular discipline. The things Chris mentions in his post seem pretty obvious to me: of course a serious student would read widely, write often, value careful work, and enjoy the time spent doing it. And yet, having written that out, I am once again struck by how seldom I actually see those habits of mind and action on display, even among our best students, how apparently idealistic (unrealistic?) these expectations seem, and how conflicted I feel about the whole business. On the one hand, I'd like to believe that if we were all doing our job well as teachers, our students would being doing their job well as students. On the other hand, I realize that there are a lot of factors—cultural and familial economic and attitudinal and hormonal and developmental and generational—over which we as teachers have little control, and that it's always going to be an uphill battle.

The good news is, it's early November, and in a few weeks at least some of those students we've been holding out on may very well surprise us with work that is just amazingly good. And that is going to be enough to carry us right through until... the middle of next semester.

When The Ship Comes In

The other day we had an all-school faculty meeting in the chapel, one of the only venues on campus large enough for all of us to assemble in one place, and as I was waiting for the meeting to begin I was thumbing through the one of the hymnals on the back of the pew in front of me. This particular hymnal had a variety of separate indexes—by title, author, by theme, by rhythm pattern and so on—and a section of historical notes on each of the hymns. I happened to turn to "Amazing Grace" and discovered two things I hadn't known, or perhaps had been told and hadn't registered: first, that the tune of "Amazing Grace" is based on a pentatonic scale, and second, that the pentatonic scale is the scale that can be played on the black keys of the piano (when starting on E flat). As it happens, I've been fooling around recently, in my somewhat inept and tentative way, with several songs on the piano which are black-key based, and after the meeting I went home and sat down at the piano and sure enough, I was able to play a creditable version of "Amazing Grace," complete with left hand chordal accompaniment, using only the black keys. Who knew?

But as I was trying to figure it out, and occasionally hitting notes I had not intended, I began hearing another tune—obviously there must be thousands of well-known tunes based on the pentatonic scale; I just don't have a strong enough background yet to know which ones—that stuck with me and started rattling around in my head the ways songs do: Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In." (I remember that when I was growing up my mother would often speak of her dreams using the same figure of speech: "We'll go to visit Ireland when my ship comes in." As a child I was for a time convinced that there must be such a ship, and was concerned about what might be delaying it.)

I don't even know where to begin to talk, or write, about Bob Dylan. I've often thought about attempting something, but it's just too big a deal. I could write about Dylan for the rest of my life and only begin to make a dent. Certainly, he was for many years of my life a major influence on my thinking, my sense of the world, my sense of myself and who I was and who I might want to become. There was a period in my life when the appearance of a new Dylan album was the portal to a parallel universe. I'd listen to the album obsessively, over and over, for hours at a time, and when I wasn't listening I'd be running the lyrics I could remember mantra-like through my head. His lyrics were a revelation to me. I grew up in fifties, right? I graduated from high school in 1965, and you know what I was hearing on the radio?

Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin' for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

and

The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.

and

Take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

I mean, seriously? I had done my time; I had gone to elementary school and junior high and high school and done my share of dutiful, dull writing and heard my share of songs, and no one, not even my inspirational sophomore English teacher, had ever given me to understand that it was permissible, that it was possible, to write like that.

Then there was the way he sang: as if the whole standard idea of what a singer was supposed to sound like had been suddenly exploded, evaporated, exposed as saccharine conspiracy. (A figure of speech, by the way, that Dylan taught me to be able to write.) Dylan sang the way he wanted to sing, he sang the way the song needed to be sung. There are those who criticize Dylan for his singing voice; it's a complaint that has always made me jangly and incredulous: there is no singer I have ever heard who has managed to convey a broader or more nuanced range of emotions than Dylan.

Even before the glorious excesses of his heyday as a rock star, even when he was just inventing himself as a folk singer, he had amazing gifts. "When the Ship Comes In" is as good an example as any, I suppose; Dylan in his vatic mode, descrying the shape of the coming day:

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

This has many of the features of a prototype early Dylan song: it presents itself, both in terms of form and diction, as a traditional folk song, and yet has a looseness and flash at the line level that is, well, Dylanesque: the language is compact, it's imagistic, it's formal, and yet it has its own freshness, it's own stamp, as in that third line "the breeze will cease to be breathin.'" The second stanza continues the listing of events, the listing gathering momentum as it grows longer:

Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.

The sequence of line-ending verbs (split, hit, shaking, sound, pound) sets up the last line, which in the hands of a lesser writer (Eleanor Farjeon, say) would come across clichéd and flat, to be read as something altogether more terrifying. On this morning, "break" is gonna be a transitive verb.

In the middle stanzas we see Dylan giving himself, as he always does, writerly permission to bend the rules of nature for dramatic effect:

Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they'll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.

On display toward the end of the song is Dylan's characteristic emotional intensity; for this is a song not about pipe dreams, but about comeuppances. There is a day of reckoning at hand, and when it comes, Dylan warns with something approaching manic glee, watch out:

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.

You have to admire that "drownded," which in its self-conscious ungrammaticality embodies precisely the overall tonality of self-righteous indignation. I heard somewhere that Dylan composed "When the Ship Comes In" as a sort of epistle to his critics. I wonder where they are now. I know where Dylan is. He's still cranking out amazing music, and I suspect those fishes are still laughing.

Writing as a Spiritual Discipline

Maybe it's because I was just turning all of this over in my mind as I prepared yesterday's post, but I was interested to see that over at Working With Words, John Ettorre has posted this quotation today from Harvey Cox on writing as a spiritual discipline:

Is writing more like prayer, or more like life itself, or a little like both? I am not sure. They all seem remarkably akin to me. They all exact something from us, but it is hard—maybe impossible—to know in advance what that something is...writing, prayer, life: they meld and fuse for me, although if I had to choose, I would surely dispense with the writing before the other two. But so far I have not been required to make that choice, so it is hard to think of any one of them without the other two peeping in from the wings. Consequently, I have come to think of writing as a kind of spiritual discipline.

Tai Chi, Aikido, and Writing

For several years recently at our school, Sifu Andrew Lum, one of the world’s most accomplished practitioners of tai chi, led a weekly afterschool workshops in tai chi, an art which involves, movement, breathing, and what might be called centeredness or mental discipline. The word chi in the expression tai chi is usually understood to mean something like “vital energy.” In tai chi, one’s breathing should be coordinated with one’s movements in relation to the movement of chi, which both surrounds us and moves within us. Many basic tai chi movements are large circular movements whose purpose is to stir up the energy surrounding us and draw it into our bodies; these movements are generally accompanied by an inward breath which reinforces or helps to gather chi. Many other basic movements are outward movements of the extremities whose purpose is to extend chi into the immediate surroundings; these movements are generally accompanied by an outward breath which reinforces or helps to deliver chi. The movements in tai chi are thus designed to gather chi, to strengthen and shape it, and then to extend it outward. In this respect the basic dynamic principles of tai chi are not unlike those of many other spiritual or aesthetic disciplines: for example, writing.

The first move a writer generally needs to make is a kind of inhalation, a gathering. It is probably no accident that the word “inspiration” has the literal meaning, in Latin, “breathing in.” Often when I sit down to write and face the blank page in front of me, I quite literally take a deep breath and begin to consider what to write, where to begin. This process of collecting my thoughts is sometimes quite conscious and deliberate, and sometimes simply a quick preliminary to a decision to simply let loose a flow of words upon the page without much conscious deliberation. In either case, though, there is at least a moment of stillness, of gathering, before the delivery of the words onto the paper: the analogical equivalent of the inward breath.

The process of writing, once begun, involves a lot of shaping. As I write these words at this moment, I have some sense of where I am headed. (In fact, I have next to my laptop a notebook in which I have pasted a series of three file cards which I filled out some time after midnight two days ago when I awoke from a restless sleep with many of these thoughts already bouncing around in my head.) But the sentence I am writing right now is taking shape as I type, and I am doing a lot of fiddling around with the wording even as I write. I type a few words, I delete them, I type them again in a slightly different order, I delete them, I try again. The forward movement of the words down the page is not always headlong onslaught, it is more like the movement of the whitewater raftsmen John McPhee describes in his essay “Reading the River”:

When modern canoemen go down a river in a wild-water race, covering distance against a clock, the amplitude of what they do is not so immediately apparent as it is when, at a time of leisure, they stop to enjoy a rapid. They can, for example, go zipping down a braided white torrent and suddenly stop dead in the middle of it, turn around, and hover, like a trout in a stream. Facing the current, they will nose down behind a ledge and let the full force of the river pour upon their bows while they sit there contemplating. They will come schussing through a rip, crash through an eddy wall, rest a moment, poised and quiet, then peel off through the far line of the eddy and drop so fast that soon only their heads are visible from the place where they paused to rest. Darting into an eddy on one side of the river, they will sit steady, facing in the direction from which they came, then slice the canoe decisively into the main current, paddling hard upstream. The result of this maneuver, called a ferry, is that they go skidding sidewise directly across the river, despite its velocity, without moving six inches downstream. To them, the white water is not a chaos of flow and spray but a legible language, and they know how to read it.

For me, writing is like that. Sometimes the flow of words is tentative, hesitant, explorational; at other times the words press forward and flow onto the page as if driven by some sort of internal subliminal logic over which I have little control. More often, there is a sort of dynamic tension between the words as they present themselves to my conscious mind, and the selection and ordering and alignment of those words by my conscious mind, which is guided by a set of rules for the way the language works so deeply ingrained in me that I am hardly aware of them, except in those instances where some particularly tricky rhetorical maneuver—this interruptive phrase, for example, set off from the rest of the sentence by em dashes, which on my computer require a separate three-key entry—demands that I switch from autopilot to conscious control. The entire in-process set of moves involved in drafting a piece of writing is not unlike the analogous set of steps and gestures in a tai chi set, which is also rule-driven and subject to both subliminal and conscious redirection at every stage. More significantly, there is the basic energy-transfer dynamic, in which what has been gathered (chi on the one hand, words and thoughts on the other) is re-shaped and then dispelled, dispersed, distributed into the environment.

My wife is a student of aikido. The root word in aikido, ki, is pretty much the same word and the same concept as the word chi in tai chi, and in fact the disciplines of tai chi and aikido have many other concepts in common. A primary difference is that tai chi is a discipline that is usually practiced individually, whereas as aikido is always practiced with a partner.

The four basic principles of aikido are

1. Keep one point.
2. Weight underside.
3. Relax completely.
4. Extend ki.


“Keep one point” refers to the need for a spiritual and physical center for coordinated movement of mind and body. There is an area of the body just below the naval which is understood to be the center of one’s bodily balance and, not coincidentally, the source and center of bodily energy, or ki. It is a matter of discipline and concentration in aikido to maintain one’s awareness of this center point and to move from the one point, keeping it central.

“Weight underside” refers to maintaining one’s balance by keeping a low center of gravity. By making a conscious effort to stay low to the ground, one is able to move more freely and with greater self-assurance.

“Relax completely” refers to the efficiency of relaxed alertness. One learns quickly in aikido that the body is both stronger and more flexible when it is fully relaxed. One of the core texts that I ask my students to read each year is an excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintentance in which Robert Pirsig talks about the state of mind that comes with being stuck. The worst thing that can happen, according to Pirsig, is that you become impatient and uptight and frustrated with the situation. That’s when things can go very badly wrong. He says,

Let’s consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that that stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn’t the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it’s exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still, and the like… this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated.

In essence, what Pirsig is saying is that we must be able to relax in such a situation, we must be able to be where we are and not expend energy wishing we were somewhere else. In this case, keeping one point and relaxing completely amount to something like the same thing.

Finally we arrive at “Extend ki,” which is where we come back to the energy exchange dynamic that we first began discussing in regard to tai chi and writing, but that applies in aikido and in every aspect of daily life as well. To extend ki is to take the energy inside oneself and make it visible and effective in the world outside. In a martial arts event, one might extend ki in order to move or block an opponent. In music, one might extend ki by producing a tonal vibration in the atmosphere. In teaching, one might extend ki by establishing psychic contact with every student in the room by virtue of one’s actions and presence. And in writing, one might extend ki in order first to push a line of thought onto a page, and second to develop and shape that line of thought, as for example I have been doing here.

There is also, in almost every discipline, the need to submit yourself to a routine, to practice. Each tai chi class begins with a series of slow stretches, led by the instructor, that are coordinated with inhalation and exhalation of breath. Each stretch is repeated several times, and the sequence of stretches is the same from class to class. After the sequence is completed, we begin to work on our sets. A set is a sequence of choreographed movements, always done in the same order, and again coordinated with one’s breathing. The teacher begins by demonstrating a short sequence of movements. For example, one might raise one’s hands in front of the body to the level of the shoulders while inhaling, drop them down while exhaling, raise them to the sides and over the head in a circle while inhaling, and back down to the front in a circular motion while exhaling, and then stop. Then we repeat. Then we repeat again. Each time we move slowly and with close attention to the breath. After enough repetitions to the point where everyone is balanced and in sync, the teacher might add another movement, crossing the arms in front of the body and “separating the clouds” at eye level, then bringing the arms back down to form a basket shape below the waist. Then we start at the beginning and run through the whole sequence again. And again. And again, until we are ready for the addition of yet another set of moves.

This practice may sound tedious, but it is anything but. It’s relaxing, and reassuring, and forgiving. Sifu Lum says we must learn to “Do without doing; try without trying.” There is no hurry. There is no prize for finishing first. There is no penalty for finishing last, or for forgetting a move in the middle of the sequence. There’s going to be another chance next time, in a moment or two. Ultimately, it’s not about moving ahead. It’s about being centered where you are, about doing what you are doing, here and now.

A Few Facts

We're going through our fall submissions to the literary magazine, and having our annual discussions of clarification about what makes poetry poetry and what makes good poetry good.

Here's a quiet little poem by one of my favorite poets, Eamon Grennan, which demonstrates, in its patient, painterly way, how an accumulation of sense-based details can develop a kind of revelatory momentum. It also makes a lot of subtly pleasing moves at the syllable level, inviting the eye and the ear to return, to cycle back, to stay inside a little longer. I like the way Grennan directs our inward eye from one fact to the next, building up his domestic portrait layer upon layer, and the way that the surprises in diction (the rain that "sleeks the street," the "cairn of bulky logs," the "striped napkin in its ring")create their own drama and music.

A Few Facts

The chiming clock. The girl at her desk sneezing.
The hiss of traffic after rain has sleeked the street.
The chime sounding off the silent library air.
Outside, a kind of monumental after-icy-rain
relenting, something loosening and the ground
going soft, glistening, the water on it taking in
the world, the broad sycamore drawing water
up its roots, the huge trunk sopping it. In the room
the vase of Cremone daisies: yellow, white
and flaming orange. Shoes and books, a lit figure
bent to her work, lifting her shoulders slowly
up and looking out, letting a breath go. Smiling
when the child comes in with a question. Outside,
the spreading yellow maple shedding branches. A cairn
of bulky logs. Birds from dawn to dusk at the feeder:
black flashings across the blank window. The cats
dazzled, feeling the old hunger. Now the child
is posing, an arabesque by the stove; now she’s
wrapped in a rug, reading; now she’s sitting up
in bed, a duchess, asking for her cardigan, grinning
at the laden tray—its porridge, milk, tea, striped napkin
in its ring—at light seeping through blue curtains.

Risk

In his classic and prescient book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey has an essay entitled "Industrial Tourism and the National Parks," in which he waxes eloquent—often hilariously so—on the mission of the National Park Service, which was established in 1916 "not only to administer the parks but to 'provide for the enjoyment of same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.'" The problem, he points out, is that the two imperatives are at least to some extent mutually contradictory:

This appropriately ambiguous language, employed long before the onslaught of the automobile, has been understood in various and often opposing ways ever since. The Park Service, like any other big organization, includes factions and factions. The Developers, the dominant faction, place their emphasis on the words 'provide for the enjoyment.' The Preservers, a minority but also strong, emphasize the words 'leave them unimpaired.'

Abbey's essay explores the dynamics and implications of the conflict between the developers and the preservers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he winds up plopping firmly down on the side of the preservers. In one of my favorite passages, and one which I can't resist quoting here, although it is of only tangential relevance to what is to follow, Abbey indulges himself in the rhetorical pleasures of generating the kind of list I have recently written in praise of:

Once we outlaw the motors and stop the road-building and force the multitudes back on their feet, the people will need leaders. A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for Godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches—that is the right and privilege of any free American. But the rest, the majority, most of them new to the out-of-doors, will need and welcome assistance, instruction, and guidance. Many will not know how to saddle a horse, read a topographical map, follow a trail over slickrock, memorize landmarks, build a fire in rain, treat snakebite, rappel down a cliff, glissade down a glacier, read a compass, find water under sand, load a burro, splint a broken bone, bury a body, patch a rubber boat, portage a waterfall, survive a blizzard, avoid lightning, cook a porcupine, comfort a girl during a thunderstorm, predict the weather, dodge falling rock, climb out of a box canyon, or pour piss out of a boot.

That, he argues, is what park rangers are for: to assist these people. You cannot, Abbey suggests, protect people from their own inclinations, nor from their incompetencies. Nor, he implies, should you want to.

All of which is by way of longwinded introduction to what I really wanted to write about, and which I had in fact already begun writing about when the Abbey analogy began seeping down the stalactites of my brain, and from there through my fingers into Googledocs and ultimately, Dear Reader, for better or for worse, to you. I've been thinking about this for a while, and my concern is both local and global. I'll start with my own school, which, for reasons which for reasons which will become apparent later I am not going to name.

Our school president has a phrase he often drops into his conversations about the mission of our school. He says that we aspire to be "a private school with a public purpose." This aspiration seems to me to be a plausible and laudible. And to the extent to which we are able, given the formidable intellectual and physical resources available at the school, to experiment with and develop best practices, it seems pretty obvious to me that as a school with a public purpose that we should share our successes publicly.

However, our school, as a private school, in all the various senses of that word, is also justifiably concerned with, well, privacy, with security, with student safety. While it might be nice for us to, say, archive podcasts of exemplary classes and make them available online, there are issues, there are concerns, there are policies in place. For example, our school, like many others, has a policy that prohibits students from using their names (at least their full names: aliases and first names are allowed) online. One of the reasons that you do not see me use the school's name very much on this blog (if it is a matter of interest to you, you can view it in my profile, a link to which is in the sidebar) is that we have an at least one administrator whose job description includes monitoring all mentions of the school online, and I don't want to make her job more arduous or problematical, nor do I want to give the impression that the school endorses or supports what I write here. Furthermore, there is this sense that I have, this hunch, never exactly communicated out loud but nevertheless in the air, that to the extent that I am going to be blogging at all, the powers that be would feel ever so slightly more comfortable if I just spoke for myself and kept the school out of it. So that's generally what I try to do.

But. But but. But but but: back to square one: if we are "a private school with a public purpose,: shouldn't we be sharing our work publicly? There was a humorous demonstration of the dilemma recently when Doug Belshaw decided on his blog to share a video about a day in his life as a teacher. Which was a cool idea and certainly of interest to me as a teacher halfway across the world. So I'm watching this video, which takes us up to the point where he arrives at school, and he goes into the classroom, and then the screen goes black and he says, "Unfortunately I can't show you me teaching, and that's because of child protection issues: you can't put any image of a child online unless their parents have signed something in blood or, I dunno, done some sort of dance around the school, so no, I can't show you me teaching, which is a real shame, so you just have to imagine kids working and an entire questioning environment and me trying to get them to use ICT and trying to teach them 21st century skills. It's a shame, but that's life."

So here's our dilemma: how do we share what we do well, and what works for us, when we are constrained from actually showing it? I could easily write, and have in fact written, at length about various teaching practices more or less in the abstract. I have shown examples of student work with the names occluded or aliased. That works to some degree. But if you really want to see what goes on in my classroom, you would need to do more than "imagine kids working." You would need to see my kids at work.

Why should we not be able to show kids in classrooms? I pick up the local paper and see photographs of student athletes and scholarship and spelling bee winners all the time: identified by photograph and full name and school and grade. Perhaps every one of the people depicted has had a release form signed by the parents. Even so, if those people were identified and approached by predators or kidnappers or persons of evil intent, how exactly would the signature on the release form protect them? I have to assume that any parent who is not entirely irresponsible must have counseled his/her children not to take candy from strangers, not to respond to unsolicited inquiries from unknown people, not to strike up email or online relationships with people they have no reason to trust. How exactly is allowing Doug Belshaw to see my students working, or me to see his, configured as a "child protection issue"? If I were a predator and I were looking for a target, would it any harder for me to spend fifty cents on my local paper, find a name, and go from there, than to go online and search classrooms worldwide for revealing information about someone to whom I would then... do what? Show up at school and announce my presence? Go to a particular teacher's classroom door and stand outside, hoping to be inconspicuous, until my target came out, and then offer him/her a ride in my car? I'm not trying to be flip here; I just don't get it. Realistically speaking, a student is much more at risk, by many orders of magnitude, to be attacked on the street walking home from school or doing a paper route (both of these things did in fact happen to children of mine when they were in school) than to be approached by some stranger who has seen a video of them on a school web site.

We can't make ourselves invisible. It's magical thinking. (It's certainly not the only instance: magical thinking arose when one crazy person put a bomb in his shoe, as a result of which every traveler in every airport in the world now has to take off his shoes; meanwhile, tests at various airports about the accuracy of screeners in detecting phony bombs brought into airports by U.S. agents showed failure rates ranging from a scary and depressing 20% to a hair-raisingly appalling 75% at LAX. We have spent billions of dollars in attempt to make ourselves more safe. Does anybody out there feel more safe now than you did, say, ten years ago? What are we doing? Anyone who really wants to commit an act of terrorism is not going to go about it the same way that the last guy did. He's not going to doing what you have prepared against him doing. He's going to come up with something nobody has thought of yet.) What is the point of having our schools linked to a global communications network if we are going to deny our students—and our teachers—access to it?

The great advantage of internet access from an educational point of view is that it allows students and teachers to access a much greater amount of information much more easily than at any time in the past. Likewise, it offers students and teachers a much wider audience for whatever it is we produce: writing, photography, art, music, video. Web sites and blogs and wikis allow students, teachers, and schools to share and celebrate best work and best practices. The internet has the power to be a transformative tool which encourages knowledge creation by students and the raising of professional standards by teachers.

The great disadvantage of internet access from an educational point of view is that it allows students and teachers to access a great deal of data that does not really qualify as information, including data that is skewed or flat-out wrong, as well as bad writing, bad photography, bad art, bad music, and bad video, including, most obviously, violence and pornography. Web sites and blogs and wikis allow propagandists and psychopaths to share and celebrate their obsessions.

The solution to the problem of risk is not to shut off access. Students who want to access what is bad on the internet will find ways to do so, on their own time. Students who are looking for trouble will find it, as they always have, and will, with any luck, learn something from that encounter. You cannot protect people from their own inclinations, nor from their incompetencies. What we need is not a set of restrictions on what can be seen, but an emphasis on teaching students how to make wise decisions about what kinds of content to access or post, and what kinds of trouble to steer away from.

Similarly, the solution to the problem of child protection is not to prevent images of children from appearing on school web sites. We have so much to learn from one another, and so many successes to share, and the technological tools to do so are in our hands. We need to use those tools to share and celebrate what we do well, so that we help the next generation of students and teachers to know and understand the risks, and the benefits, of communication and collaboration.

What Every Soldier Should Know

For various reasons both obvious and subtle, warriors and poets are often at odds. Here's a poem written by a soldier, Brian Turner, which made it into Best American Poems 2007. You can here him read it out loud, with a brief intro, here.

What Every Soldier Should Know

To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act of prudence.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon,
it could be a wedding, or it could be for you.

Always enter a home with your right foot;
the left is for cemeteries and unclean places.

O-guf! Tera armeek is rarely useful.
It means Stop or I’ll shoot.

Sabah el khair is effective.
It means Good Morning.

Inshallah means Allah be willing.
Listen well when it is spoken.

You will hear the RPG coming for you.
Not so the roadside bomb.

There are bombs under the overpasses,
in trashpiles, in bricks, in cars.

There are shopping carts with clothes soaked
in foogas, a sticky gel of homemade napalm.

Parachute bombs and artillery shells
sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals.

A graffiti sprayed onto the overpasses:
I will kill you, American.

Men wearing vests rigged with explosives
walk up, raise their arms, and say Inshallah.

There are men who earn eighty dollars
to attack you, five thousand to kill.

Small children who will play with you,
old men with their talk, women who offer chai—

and any one of them
may dance over your body tomorrow.

The Next New Thing

So here we are. It's Monday night, but it sort of counts as a Sunday because this was a three-day weekend. (School holiday, long story.) The first marking period just ended there were two primary orders of business over the last few days: first to get the college recs out to the students applying for early admissions, and second to get the papers corrected and the grades done; they have to be entered on the school computer system by Wednesday. Other than that, it's been almost...calm, for a change. Which gives me a little time to think about the Next New Thing, which at this point looks like Moodle.

Moodle has been around for a while, and when I checked it out a year ago my socks were definitely not rolling up and down, but now my school's tech department has signed us up and we have our own-in-house version taking shape with the usual assortment of early adopters knocking themselves out. What I like so far is that in its present incarnation it has some neat features that are more or less immediately usable, and then lots of other bells and whistles that it's going to take me a year and a half to figure out, by which time it will probably have been made obsolescent by the Next New Thing. But, for the record, here's what I'm playing with so far:

Moodle is set up sort of like a blog page. The left sidebar is for maintenance functions, and the right for whatever you decide to put there: calendar, archive, headers for recent posts, etc. and I've created forums for our class to extend their discussion about what we're reading (The Poisonwood Bible, at the moment). Students can rate one another's posts based on whatever criteria you as the teacher decide to foreground; you can, for example, provide meta-tags and ask the students to label entries which meet certain conditions (cites text; raises a question; explores alternative answers, etc.)


There's also a cool feature that allows you (and/or the students) to create a glossary/lexicon. When we do literature circles, I'm asking the lexicographers to select five of their most significant words and add them to the lexicon. The words can be categorized and tagged with keywords (like the kikongo word below). You can also sort and track entries by date, category, and author (useful for checking to see who has completed the homework).

These words then form a database from which you can display a "Word of the Day" (the Vocabulary spotlight in the lower right in the first picture above). There's also a quiz-generating function which I haven't played with yet, and a whole grading module which basically allows you to use the Moodle site as your complete course-management system. I'm not there yet, and don't know if that's where I'm heading. With grading, as with poetry, I'm still more at home with the ambience and soft-edged indeterminacy of pencil on paper.

I've begun creating forums for other class activities. For example, our writer-in-residence Chang-rae Lee visited our class last week, and so I created a forum (number 4 above) and asked each of the students to report on something they thought was interesting or memorable. I've also figured out how to set up widgets in the sidebar, like the flickr badge in the upper right of the first picture, using regular html coding.

There's a group of teachers from the junior school and the academy (high school) who now meet once a week to share what they're up to with Moodle and help each other troubleshoot. One of the supposed advantages of Moodle is that because it's open source eventually you can get access to other modules and programming innovations from people all over the world. All you need to be able to do that is... time. Right now, I've got a foot in the door, and I'm playing around small kid kind in my own little sandbox. My vision is constrained by the realities of everyday teaching. But so far this has been a pretty easy first few steps, and I'm hoping that I'll find more and better functions on the way.

Spaceman Blues

Brian Francis Slattery's Spaceman Blues. is, well, an experience. It has to do with events immediately leading up to and including an alien takeover of New York City. It's not a book with much in the way of redeeming social value, and I can't say that it addresses anything in the way of deep philosophical issues, but if it's a ride you're looking for, Bucko, have I got a ride for you. Slattery is an impresario of the imagination, or, as James Taylor might have it, a churning urn of burning funk. Here, for example, is a passage from chapter one. A character of some notoriety, one Manuel Rodrigo de Guzman Gonzalez, has disappeared, and his living quarters have exploded, and the word is getting out:

The news spreads in a widening circle of shock, people are talking about it up and down the street, voices crackle across the air and over wires. He's gone, he's gone, it goes in letters, in words flashing across flickering screens, it is written by planes in the sky. It spreads from the city and moves to the end of Long Island, into New Jersey, Connecticut, upstate, across New England; it moves across the continent over the miles of thrashing grain, the ragged heights of the Rockies, down into the deserts and dense forests and to the opposite shore, where men hear it on shortwave radios at the place where the Mexican border falls into the Pacific Ocean, and the waves roll in gigantic and break against the rocks and sand with a force that ensures compliance. It passes along the piers of Eastern Europe, syllables slipped between knife points and rusting rifles; on the shores of Angola they wail at the ocean, beat their feet into the sand, turn back toward crumbling cities. The news burns bodies in the Bronx, things are cast adrift in the deep water of the East River, people depart into the sky, there are meetings in drainage systems, encoded signals broadcast in the flight patterns of birds, machines stir, motors grind into action at frequencies only subterranean people can feel. And people begin to congregate in the places that Manuel loved. They want to know what happened, they want to understand, but being the kind of people they are, all that wanting turns into partying. In Astoria, Egypt Cafe is jammed to the ceiling, people walk over other people to get inside, they spill out onto the street in front of the laundromat, they raid the delis and liquor stores and close down Steinway, they make a party so big that the police see it and just throw up their hands, set up roadblocks, join in when they get off duty. At the Maritime Lounge in Red Hook, some Congolese soukous band appears out of nowhere and plays for two days straight, they have to coat their fingers with glue in between numbers to keep the skin on, and the crowd crashes in and chokes on seven different kinds of smoke and laughter, they pour beer and whiskey all over each other and dance to break floorboards. The place runs out of alcohol after eighteen hours but people keep bringing in more, they toast Manuel again and again, wish to God you were still here. They end up in the water of the harbor, holding their drinks high and setting them on fire until the end of the second day rolls by and they go to sleep in the street, they crawl home in a blind drag. They pass out in subway cars, they wake up feeling like their brains are cut in half. They go home in pairs and wake up naked with each other, their furniture upended, dishes broken, sheets ripped into long shreds, clothes plastered somehow to the ceiling. (8-9)

The passage gives some sense of the hyperbolic intensity, the syntactical exuberance, the sheer delight in the rhetoric of enumeration that carries the narrative all the way through the book. I've been re-reading On the Road recently as well, and often found myself thinking of Kerouac, and of Whitman, as I read Spaceman Blues. Slattery's prose is jazzy, lyrical, bursting at the seams. Later in chapter one, for example, a party jumps into third gear with the arrival of the band, whose name and methodology are apt analogues for Slattery's preferred method of composition:

The Pan-Galactic Groove Squad crashes through the window at eleven-thirty to claps and cheers and stomping feet; there are twenty-seven of them in this band, they have guitars and basses, keyboards, accordions, horns, banjos, and drums, so many drums, and they set up in no time and begin to play, a beat that starts down low and simple, just the kick and some hi-hat with one bass snaking around it. The rest of the band waits, they're letting the groove get in the pocket, hit bottom. It does; and now two drummers join in, they weave a polyrhythm that brings in one guitar and some pops from a banjo, oh this groove is young but it's growing, and people are starting to move. Now a singer steps up to the mike, puts out some blues that two more singers turn to gospel, harmonies deep and wide that make you want to believe. Five more drummers slip their way into the spaces, two guitars, another bass, a single trumpet line, simple and urgent, and those singers are swelling up, they're filling the groove to bursting, and just when nobody can take another second, they break it open in an explosion of horns and keyboards and shouting strings. The people open up their throats and sing, and everybody screams and throws their hands in the air, they're falling in and stomping it down, sweating and throwing back their heads until they are bound together, band and dancers, into a single thing, and this is a party not even the Hand of the Righteous could stop, it is loud and large and full of joy; and then Wendell steps into the room. (25)

Wendell is Wendell Apogee, the book's main character, who, it turns out, is not only the lover of Manuel Rodrigo de Guzman Gonzalez—the book is in large part a quest story, as Wendell seeks to find out where Manual has disappeared to—but also one of the particular targets of the space invaders. His life is all too frequently interrupted by moments like this:

From Wendell’s window come flashes of green and purple light, scuttles and shrieks. Then a howl that sets the dogs barking for blocks, cats fighting and mating in the alleys to ripping each other to pieces. A glow grows, phasing from blue to orange, and with a scream that breaks glass, the window frames shatter outward and four shapes in purple raincoats fly out, mounted on tiny hovering scooters that emanate a fine red mist. They wheel around each other and then shoot off down the canyon of air between the buildings to lift off into the sky; seconds later, an explosion fires from the ruined wall, the flames leap across the street and warp the glass of the apartments on the other side. Wendell’s apartment is then a smoking hole, gaped at by neighbors, the tatters of his possessions snowing into the street: the limbs of furniture, cushion fluff, and books, hundreds of books burning and flopping to the ground, trailing fire and ash. (63)

You have probably noticed there seem to be a lot of explosions in this narrative. Slattery's story thrives on mayhem, and the tonality is that of apocalyptic glee.

There is one more sequence which I cannot resist citing: a description of the mechanics of Darktown, a whole and wholely imagined city underneath the streets and sewers of the Big Apple. It's an audacious act of the imagination carried off with Slattery's characteristic offhanded wizardry:

Catwalks and narrow metal stairs sway and tangle, metal shacks and globular houses hang suspended in the air, floating bars and restaurants throw out heat and steam, thousands of people climb with bundles on their backs and lights lashed to their heads, shouts and whistles fly across the space, animals scramble amok, babies scream, a riot of music threatens to resolve into a deep, smoky rhythm that shudders and moans. High above, the exposed pipes of the city heating system lance along the cavern ceiling, spouting steam. The belly of a subway tunnel shifts as the train rattles by, looses a film of dust that falls through all this, settling on the heads of the multitude, sprinkling through the latticework to rest, at last, on the water below that teems with boats, people rowing, trundling away with grunting engines. They’re selling things from Bangladesh and Brazil, they the teeth of a hundred beasts not yet named, they have rice cookers and machine guns, blowtorches and flares. It smells of fish, oil, and burnt electrical wire, a scent that trails through the people and the light and sounds, to the arms of the city they can only see as a group of yellow lights, like the shine of dull suns in constellation, dim but carrying for miles. (81)

If the genius is in the details, then I guess Slattery is some kind of genius. His sentences are concatenations of details in compelling configurations: rice cookers and machine guns, blowtorches and flares. I often found myself laughing out loud, not so much at what was being said, but at the zest and spirit with which it was being delivered. Check it out.

Information R/Evolution

This video from Michael Wesch is making the rounds. I saw it at Multiliteracies. I'll do my bit to spread it:

Evenfall

In my sophomore class we've been using literature circles as a means of responding to The Poisonwood Bible. In the debrief of our first literature cirlce discussion, the students made note of three recurring motifs, "light" and "garden" and "heaven," the last of which we connected to the motif of "home" from their reading during freshman year of The Odyssey. As I followup I asked to find and place in their commonplace books a picture that illustrated at least one of these concepts in a way that interested them.

On Friday after school I was in the Writing Center for a small reception we were having for Fern Davye, a woman who travels all around the country doing dramatic interpretations of poetry. She had just spent three days visiting classes at Punahou, and during this last hour or two she was spending with a small group of teachers. We were talking, and then she presented some poems to us. She likes to turn the lights down when she presents, so it was darkish in the writing center.

A little after 5:00, just as the afternoon was coming to a close and evening was starting to descend, I happened to look away from the presenter and over to the side, toward the window beyond the teacher's desk. What I saw was a poetry presentation of a different kind: a silent poem made up entirely of light and shadow. It struck me as I was looking at it that it seemed to connect in subtle ways to all three themes we had talked about in class: light and garden and home. I had my camera with me, so I took the picture:

At Large and at Small

I recently finished reading Anne Fadiman's delightful and good-humored collection of "familiar essays" entitled At Large and At Small. In her introduction to the volume she references a "dispirited writer" (her father, Clifton Fadiman) who mourned the imminent death of a genre that was "setting to the horizon, along with its whole constellation: formal manners, apt quotation, Greek and Latin, clear speech, conversation, the gentleman's library, the gentleman's income, the gentleman."

I suppose that it should come as no surprise that I am a fan, as I suppose any self-respecting blogger must be, of the "familiar essay." What are blogs if not essais, attempts, explorations of thought through words? It has often occurred to me as a teacher that in our schools we actually do the genre a disservice by impressing upon generations of students that an essay is, and must be, a thesis-based argument analyzing a text or a series of historical events. It's true that there are such essays, but if that's the only kind of essay we ask students to write, we are confirming their misunderstanding of the genre and denying them access to its considerable pleasures.

For, make no mistake about it, this is a fun book to read, and one gets the clear impression that for Anne Fadiman it was a fun book to write. She has essays on, among other things, ice cream, mail, on the flag ("A Piece of Cotton"), moving from the city to the country, coffee, and Arctic exploration. Fadiman has a broad-ranging mind, a world of memories, a fluid and engaging writing style, and a sense of humor.

I came away from the book with a renewed appreciation for the pleasure to be taken in the making and reading of lists. The first essay in the book is called "Collecting Nature," and it is a recollection of the time she spent as a child with her brother collecting butterflies and other objects from nature. Early in the essay she makes reference to Dickens which includes the sort of list I have in mind:

In Our Mutual Friend, Silas Wegg visits a shop belonging to "Mr. Venus, Preserver of Animals and Birds, Articulator of human bones." Mr. Wegg is there because—could anyone but Dickens ever come up with this one?—he wishes to retrieve his leg, which Mr. Venus purchased, for potential inclusion in a skeleton, from the hospital in which it was amputated. "I shouldn't like," Says Mr. Wgg. "to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself as a genteel person." (Mr. Wegg may thus be the only collector who has ever collected himself. He does get his leg back, though not until later in the book; it arrives under Mr. Venus's arm, carefully wrapped, looking like "a sort of brown paper truncheon.") Mr. Venus shows Mr. Wegg around the shop. "Bones, warious," he explains.

Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-top. What's in those hampers again, I don't quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh, dear me! That's the general panoramic view. (17)

Later, in her essay "Ice Cream," she reports that in her researches that

In 1778, a Benedictine monk in Apulia published recipes for ices and ice creams flavored with coffee, chocolate, cinnamon, candied eggs, chestnuts, pistachios, almonds, fennel seeds, violets, jasmine, oranges, lemons, strawberries, peaches, pears, apricots, bitter cherries, melons, watermelons, pomegranates, and muscatel grapes. (50)

There's something about a list of that sort that just makes me laugh. At one level theres just the delight to be taken in the sequence of syllables, the work of the mouth in shaping the words; it's alphabetically musical. Then there's the movie behind the list: the monk laboring away in the monastery kitchen experimenting with every conceivable flavor, laboring far into the night with tasting spoon in hand, doing his particular version of God's work, trying to get the proportions just right. One wonders about the flavors that didn't make the final list.

Later, in her essay "Mail," we find this short history of epistolary innovation in a one-sentence list:

The Penny Post, wrote Harriet Martineau, "will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise." It was incontrovertible proof, in an age that embraced progress on all fronts...that the British were the most civilized people on earth. Ancient Syrian runners, Chinese carrier pigeons, Persian post writers, Egyptian papyrus bearers, Greek hemerodromes, Hebrew dromedary riders, Roman equestrian relays, medieval monk-messengers, Catalan troters, international couriers of the House of Thurn and Taxis, American mail wagons—what could all of these have been leading up to, like an ever-ascending staircase, but the Victorian postal system? (117)

September 11 brought the flag back into American consciousness in a powerful way; suddenly flags were everywhere, and Fadiman found herself thinking about, and making a tentative inventory of, its multiple significances:

In the weeks after September 11, I saw for the first time that the flag—along with all its red, white, and blue collateral relations—is what a semiotician would call “polysemous”: it has multiple meanings. The flag held aloft by the pair of disheveled hitchhikers who squatted next to their backpacks on Route 116, a mile from home, meant We will not rape or murder you. The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella vendor a friend walked past in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing. The flag on the lapel of a Massachusetts attorney mentioned in our local paper—on seeing it, his opposing counsel had whispered to a colleague, “I’m so screwed, do you have a flag pin I can borrow?”—meant I am morally superior. The flags brandished by two cowboyhatted singers at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on Afghanistan meant Let’s kill the bastards. The Old Glory bandana around the neck of the well-groomed golden retriever I saw on a trip to Manhattan meant Even if I have a Prada bag and my dog has a pedigree, I’m still a New Yorker and I have lost something. The flag in our front yard meant We are sad. And we’re sorry we’ve never done this before. (148)

Later in the same essay, she quotes from an early twentieth-century tract in which the author has worked himself up into a loosely alphabetical frenzy of indignation:

In 1905, an anti-desecration circular lamented the use of the flag in advertisements for "bicycles, bock beer, whiskey, fine cambric, bone knoll, sour mash, tar soap, Amercian pepsin chewing gum, theatres, tobacco, Japan tea, awnings, breweries, cigars, charity balls, cuff buttons, dime museums, floor mats, fireworks, furriers, living pictures, picnic grounds, patent medicines, poolrooms, prize fights, restaurants, roof gardens, real estate agencies, sample rooms, shoe stores, soap makers, saloons, shooting galleries, tent makers, variety shows, [and] vendors of lemon acid." (154)

There is a satisfaction—even if it is only the satisfaction of having adequately enumerated the sources of one's indignation—to be taken in the creation of such lists, as in the reading of them. There is, I would argue, a larger satisfaction to be taken in having written well about what one has experienced and cares about. Sometimes, when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, one gets to write something that takes on a life of its own, that opens up and surprises you. I remember seeing an interview with Jamaica Kincaid who was talking about her much-anthologized short piece called "Girl." It was the first piece she ever had published, and she said that when she finished writing it, she was taken off guard, surprised, stunned. And she said to herself, as she re-read what she had written, "This is really... something." She didn't have a word for it, but she knew it was different, it was new, it was good, it was a kind of gift.

I asked my sophomore students last week how many of them had had that experience as a writer somewhere in their first ten years of schooling. One girl held her hand over the desk, palm down, and wiggled her fingers tentatively: maybe, sort of. Everyone else was looking at the floor.

Discipline and Values

This passage appeared as a column by John Rosemond in today's Honolulu Advertiser. Tough to find anything to argue with here.

I've said it before, but it cannot be said often enough: The discipline of a child is not accomplished by manipulating reward and punishment. Yes, a child needs to understand that behavior results in consequences, but that understanding alone is not sufficient to grow a well-behaved, well-mannered child.

Besides, whereas proper consequences will virtually guarantee proper behavior in a dog, proper consequences do not guarantee proper behavior in a child (or human of any other age). If they did, no criminal would spend more than one, maybe two, stints in jail.

Discipline is the process by which parents transform a child into a disciple, a little person who will look up to them, follow their lead, and subscribe to their values. This is accomplished through proper leadership, not through the manipulation of consequences. The principles that define proper leadership do not change from one leadership context to another. Therefore, if one understands leadership in, say, a business environment, then one understands how to lead children.

The most important of all leadership qualities is decisiveness. All effective leaders act like they know what they are doing. They act like they believe sincerely in the rightness of their decisions. In parenting, this translates to standing behind one's instructions to a child, enforcing rules dispassionately, and proving that "no" means nothing other than "no."

I have taken to challenging parents in my most recent audiences to assess their leadership using this simple standard. "Raise your hand," I ask, "if your children know, without a shadow of doubt, that when you give an instruction, you are going to make sure it is carried out, that when you state a rule, you are going to enforce it, and that when you say 'no,' you mean nothing less than 'no.' " In a recent audience of some 200 parents, only five responded affirmatively.

I then ask, "Now raise your hand if as a child you knew, beyond a shadow of doubt!, that your parents were going to enforce their instructions and rules and that when they said 'no,' they meant 'no,' period." In that same audience, I estimated that 150 hands were in the air. The relative proportion has been approximately the same in 50 other audiences, bigger and smaller, across America.

This exercise tells why today's children come to school considerably less disciplined than children of even 20 years ago (I've never heard an experienced teacher testify to the contrary). This tells why today's parents are having so many more problems in the area of discipline than did their parents, and certainly their grandparents. It is not because they are not manipulating consequences as skillfully; rather, it is because they are not demonstrating to their children that when they speak, they mean exactly what they say.

Yesteryear's parents were apt to simply tell their children to pick up their toys. Today's parents are apt to ask their children if they will please pick up their toys, "OK?" Today's parents, in the face of their children's emotional dramatics, are likely to demonstrate to their children that sufficient displays of emotional dramatics on their parts will result in "no" changing to "oh, all right!"

The du-jour explanation for a child who will not take no for an answer, who tests every instruction and every rule with the full might of his or her free will, is that an inherited chemical imbalance causes knee-jerk resistance to authority. Concrete verification of this proposition is lacking, but as recent audiences of mine have demonstrated, proof abounds that many if not most of today's parents are suffering from leadership deficiency disorder.

Juxtapositions #37

So here's a strange moment. I'm currently enrolled in an informal seminar course called Plato's Republic. There's a teacher at our school who has taught the course for many years, and each year he offers a special section for interested adults—parents and teachers mostly. He'll be retiring at the end of the year, and I wanted to get a chance to take the course and go back into Plato, whom I had not read since college. We're meeting in a traditional classroom around a traditional table reading a physical book written something like 2400 years ago (I just doublechecked the date, not through Google, which might have been easier, but, for old times' sake, in my twice-rebound copy of Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, which I bought in 1965 and have been using ever since—most often, I must confess, to find answers for crossword puzzles), and we're having actual honest-to-God real-life three-dimensional conversations about timeless issues like the nature of justice.

So this evening I place my Plato on the table, turn to my computer, and here in my Google Reader inbox I find a post from Ken Ronkowitz which features this video, the introductory lecture from a Alexandra Juhasz, a college professor who is teaching an online course about YouTube, on Youtube:




I'm not sure what all of this means. I think that Alexandra Juhasz is embarking on a very interesting educational odyssey, the results of which is going to be much less predictable and impact a whole lot more people than our quiet little seminar over The Republic. Interesting times.

Phase One

The school year has its rhythms, and one of the punctuation marks at our school is parents' night. About a month into the school year, just before the first quarter progress reports come out, our school runs a program where parents come in for two and a half hours and go through an abbreviated version of their child's schedule, moving from class to class for ten-minute introductory sessions in which each teacher gives a brief overview of the course.

It always surprises me how fast the first month goes by and how soon parents' night arrives. I've come over the years to enjoy the experience. I like meeting with the parents, however briefly, and getting a chance to try to put the daily events of the semester in a broader context. With my second-semester sophomores, for example—the ones who took the first half of the course in summer school—I think of the trajectory of the semester as a three-part arc. The first month or so consists of a series of shorter readings and exercises designed both to introduce the students to some of the essential questions and process skills that they will be engaged with for the rest of the semester, and to acclimate the students to one another and to the culture of the classroom. I don't do things exactly the way that other teachers do them, and it takes a while for students to get a read on me and vice versa. One of the reasons that first month seems to go by so fast is that there are so many different sets of adjustments that we are making to one another.

Over the last few days, the class feels to me like its starting to come together. Today, the day after parent's night, there was something in the air that hadn't been there before. The students seem to be a little more focussed and a little less guarded. The class is starting to become a community; it feels like more students are looking around and saying "This is going to be okay." And I'm feeling that too.

The middle part of the arc for the sophomores covers the four or five weeks in which we will be reading together The Poisonwood Bible, which is still one of my favorite books and pretty much ideally suited for a course which a primary strategic focus has to do with learning how to shift your point of view, and why it might be important to be able to do that. It's a book which presents an extraordinary richness of opportunity for the aspiring critical thinker. There's food for thought for a reader coming from almost any direction: identity stuff, psychology stuff, political and philosophical and cultural stuff. There's extraordinarily vivid language and a strong narrative line and characters you can learn to love—or hate. And underlying it all there are the questions of how we learn to deal with one another, and how we define ourselves by the choices we make. It's a book you can sink your teeth into, and a book which gets better upon re-reading. Having The Poisonwood Bible in the center of the arc provides a substantive common reading experience that gives a students a chance to test and hone their emerging analytical skills.

During descending arc, which occupies about the last six weeks of the course, students work individually or in groups on projects which a) link to the essential questions they had earlier been asked to identify and reflect upon and b) demonstrate the kind kinds of quality they think they are most capable of achieving.

It's hard for the students to see the logic of the semester at the beginning. Everything they're being asked to do is just a little bit different than what they're used to, and they don't know yet how one thing leads to another, how the work they are doing on their directed assignments or in their commonplace books or on their cycle papers will be useful to them as they move forward. But they're starting to accumulate enough material now, enough work done, that we can start making those connections.

The segment of the arc is just about complete. Now we start reaching higher.

Lowering the Bar

It's been ten days since I've posted anything. I could make lots of excuses, if excuses were called for. The start of this school year, while interesting, while challenging, while incredibly rich and various, has not been easy.

Once upon a time I thought that if I stayed at something long enough, it would eventually get easier. That has turned out to be true in some cases. I can, for example, after three years of practice, now play a C major scale on the piano with both hands without screwing it up too badly. I can throw together a salad in five minutes before dinner, without injuring myself, whereas once it was even money if I could get it done without breaking into the Band-Aid box.

But this is my 38th year of teaching, and I've gotta tell ya, whatever else it is, it isn't easier. The teaching part is always interesting and always challenging in a good way. It's the stuff that's going on around the edges just keeps getting more complex. This week alone I've been teaching classes, responding to student papers, setting up a readings for our writer-in-residence which is to take place on October 4, coordinating the publication and sponsorship of that reading with Bamboo Ridge Press and with the University of Hawaii, meeting with veteran teachers to go over their annual reports and younger teachers to talk about things they have questions about, conferencing with students, preparing a written report detailing how our department is going to move forward in support of the Punahou 2016 Sustainability plan, working with the freshman subdepartment head to strategize about how to use the laptops all the students are now bringing to class, preparing a video report on a learning fellowship with a sustainability focus that took place last year, getting the department ready deal with new course proposals, trying to find some time for reading Anne Fadiman's collection of "familiar essays" At Large and at Small and re-reading Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, as well as for practicing the piano, playing a little chess, and eating a meal here and there. Students are showing up with envelopes full of college application letters they want me to write. Oh, and did I mention that tomorrow night is Parents' Night?

My Google Reader aggregator keeps piling up with interesting stuff. There's a post about essay writing on Ken Ronkowitz's blog that I've been dying to respond to, and I've got interesting new education-related books sent along by Doug Carlson and Eric MacKnight that I want to talk with them about. Not to mention several extraordinarily cool-looking new books, like Writing Toward Home which Christine Thomas recommended on her blog recently.

And then there's Throughlines, with no posts for ten days, which my son was busting me about this afternoon. One obvious and predictable dynamic about not writing is that with each day that goes by in which One Has Not Written, the subtle pressure grows that says that The Next One Better Be Good. Which raises the bar, which creates performance anxiety, which leads to avoidance, which is Where We Have Been.

So what I'm doing here is making a conscious effort to lower the bar. This is not going to be my most memorable post, but it's going to be the post that gets posted today. I've got a lot of nibbles on the line out there.



I was talking with a colleague in a conference yesterday about the course she's teaching and in passing she gave me what feels like an irresistible lead-in for a poem. She was talking about the course she teaches, The Bible as Literature, and a question that arose in the class discussion of Genesis. The narrative demands that we accept that before The Beginning there was God, and that it was only because of his intention that there was a beginning at all. Which raises the question, what does it mean to generate something from intention? The first words we hear God speak are, "Let there be light." So suppose, as a writer, someone (you? me?) were to begin the process of artistic creation by asking ourselves what we might call into being by intention. If you could conjure a reality simply by saying the words, what words would you choose to say?

Of course, it's hardly a new idea. Ian Grant and Lionel Rand noodled around with the concept some 67 years ago in writing the song "Let There Be Love":

Let there be you, let there be me
Let there be oysters, under the sea
Let there be wind, occasional rain
Chili con carne, and sparkling champagne

Let there be birds to sing in the trees
Someone to bless me whenever I sneeze
Let there be cuckoos, a lark and a dove
But first of all, please
Let there be love

So it might look like that. Or like a dozen other songs. Or it might look like something else entirely, after you get done with it, or I get done with it.

Anyway, that was perhaps a ten second snippet of a 40 minute conversation which had easily 100 or two hundred ten-second snippets worth following up on. If there were world enough and time.

So that's the dispatch from the Happy Isles today. Didn't know where I was going, don't know where I've been, don't know what's coming next. Ain't it grand?

Intuition and Presence

Josh Waitzkin's experiences with chess and martial arts have directed his attention to a number of interesting factors in arriving at a state of heightened alertness which he refers to below as a "deep fluid presence." Here are a few more excerpts from The Art of Learning:

Everyone has heard stories of women lifting cars off their children or of time seeming to slow down during a car accident or a fall down the stairs. Clearly, there is a survival mechanism that allows human beings to channel their physical and mental capacities to an astonishing degree of intensity in life-or-death moments. But can we do this at will?

When I started thinking about how I could consistently make my perception of time be different from my opponents', I realized that I had to delve into the operating mechanism of intuition. I suspect we have all had the experience of being stumped by something, eventually moving on to something else, and then suddenly knowing the answer to the initial problem. Most of us have also had the experience of meeting someone and having a powerfully good or bad feeling about them, without knowing why. I have found that, even if a few times it has taken years to pan out, these guiding instincts have been on the money. [When playing chess] I would take in vast amounts of technical information that my brain somehow put together into bursts of insight that felt more like music or wind than mathematical combinations. Increasingly, I had the sense that the key to these leaps was interconnectedness—some part of my being was harmonizing all my relevant knowledge, making it gel into one potent eruption, and suddenly the enigmatic was crystal-clear. But what was really happening?

... In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compass in this world. It is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind, and it is hugely important to keep in touch with what makes it tick. If we get so caught up in narcissistic academic literalism that we dismiss intuition as nonexistent because we don't fully understand it, or if we blithely consider the unconscious to be a piece of machinery that operates mystically in a realm that we have no connection to, then we lost the rich opportunity to have an open communication with the wellspring of our creativity. (136-7)

In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre. In competition, the dynamic is often painfully transparent. If one player is serenely present while the other is being ripped apart by internal issues, the outcome is already clear. The prey is no longer objective, makes compounding mistakes, and the predator moves in for the kill. While more subtle, this issue is perhaps even more critical in solitary pursuits such as writing, painting, scholarly thinking, or learning. In the absence of continual external reinforcement, we must be our own monitor, and quality of presence is often the best gauge. We cannot expect to touch excellence if "going through the motions" is the norm of our lives. On the other hand, if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then life, art and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight. Those who excel are those who maximize each moment's creative potential—for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line. (172)

Waitzkin provides a lot of pretty interesting scenario-based explanations showing exactly how this frame of mind can be cultivated.

Case Study: How to Be a Student

Some time ago I posted a passage from Bob Dylan's Chronicles where he describes his thought processes as he went about studying the music of Robert Johnson. I was reminded of that passage this evening as I was reading from the book by Josh Waitzkin I wrote about earlier today. At this point Waitzkin was living in Europe in a "gap year" after graduating from high school and before entering college. ("The one-two punch of a fame I wasn't really prepared for [following the release of Searching for Bobby Fischer] and a building sense of alienation from the art I loved had me hungering for escape.") Here he walks us through the study ritual that he created for himself in his new environment:

At this point in my career, despite my issues, I was still a strong chess player competing against world-class rivals. Each tournament game was riddled with intricate complications and hour upon hour of mounting tension. My opponents and I created increasingly subtle problems for the other to solve, building the pressure in the position until the chessboard and the mind itself felt like a fault line, trembling, on the verge of explosion. Sometimes technical superiority proved decisive, but more often somebody cracked, as if a tiny weakness deep in the being erupted onto the board.

These moments, where the technical and psychological collide, are where I directed my study of the game. In the course of a nine-round chess tournament, I'd arrive at around four or five critical positions that I didn't quite understand or in which I made an error. Immediately after each of my games, I quickly entered the moves into my computer, noting my thought process and how I felt emotionally at various stages of the battle. Then after the tournament, armed with these fresh impressions, I went back to Vrholvje and studied the critical moments.

...Usually long study sessions went like this: I began with the critical position from one of my games, where my intuitive understanding had not been up to the challenge. At first my mind was like a runner on a cold winter morning—stiff, unhappy about the coming jog, dreary. Then I began to move, recalling my attacking ideas in the struggle and how nothing had fully connected. I tried to pick apart my opponent's position and discovered new layers of his defensive resources, all the while my mind thawing, integrating the evolving structural dynamics it had not understood before. Over time my blood started flowing, sweat came, I settled into the rhythm of analysis, soaked in countless patterns of evolving sophistication as I pored over what a computer would consider billions of variations. Like a runner in stride, my thinking became unhindered, free-flowing, faster and faster as I lost myself in the position. Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood.

When I looked at the critical position from my tournament game, what had stumped me a few days or hours before now seemed perfectly apparent. I saw the best move, felt the correct plan, understood the evaluation of the position. I couldn't explain this new knowledge with variations or words. It felt more elemental, like rippling water or a light breeze. My chess intuition had deepened... (73-4)