Lesson Design I

Last week a colleague gave the members of the curriculum committee at my school a document to read, written by one of the World's Foremost Authorities which was an attempt on his part to discuss what we are talking about when we talk about curriculum. While I duly read the document, and liked some of the points it made, it seemed to me to miss many of what I would take to be the more salient points to made about curriculum, and so, I thought I'd have a go at it myself, on the theory that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing yourself. Obviously this is a largish topic, and it may very well take more than one or two posts to do it justice. But I'm gonna give it a shot, a little bit at a time, and see if I can say anything that holds together. So here goes.

I. Some observations about structure.

Curriculum, broadly considered, consists of at least three things: what you and your students do before class, what you do during class, and what you do after class or between classes.

Before class the teacher, and presumably the students as well, need to put some thought into both what the content of the course is going to consist of on any given day, and the process by which that content is going to considered. I'm not going to say too much about curriculum content here, for two reasons: first, because it varies so much from course to course and subject to subject that the sheer infinitude of possibilities would make it unlikely that I would ever get a proper start, much less get finished, with what I want to try to work through here; and second, because frankly, as those of you who have been following Throughlines over the years will be unsurprised to hear, content doesn't interest me that much. Never has, probably never will. What interests me is process. I'm going to try to resist the temptation to go on a big long digression about why that is so. Maybe later.

So let's think a little about process as it pertains to lesson planning. For sake of discussion, I'm going to assume that the lesson we are talking about is a one-hour lesson in a course that meets four or five times a week over the course of a semester. Given that assumption, there are a host of process questions that are worth considering as you go about designing a particular lesson. Among them:

1. Where are the students now, and where would you like them to be?
2. What is it that you are going to ask the students to do during the class?
3. What's the connection between this lesson, yesterday's lesson, and tomorrow's lesson? How does what we are doing today build on what we did yesterday or set up what we will be doing tomorrow?
4. How many chunks or modules do you plan to divide the hour into?
5. What is your role as teacher going to be during the hour?
6. What role(s) will the students be asked to play? Where during the course of this lesson do individual students get to be who they are and say what they have to say? Will they be working individually? in pairs? in small groups? in a single large group?
7. How will you accommodate different learning styles? Is there a visual component? An aural component? A social component? A writing component? A hands-on component? A reflective component?
8. What is going to happen today that is the same as what happened yesterday? What's going to happen today that is different than anything that's ever happened before? For the students? For you?
   
9. Is there a technology component to the lesson? If so, why? If not, why not?
10. Is there a reflective or metacognitive aspect to the lesson? If so, why? If not, why not?
11. Is there an ethical or spiritual component to the lesson? If so, etc.
12. What is the likelihood that the students are going to be able to make a connection between this lesson and anything that they might actually care about? What can you do to increase that likelihood?
13. What will the homework be? What purpose will the homework serve? For you? For the students? How long do you expect them to work on it? How soon will you get it back to them? Will that be soon enough for them to be able to apply whatever feedback you have given them to the next assignment?
14. What is it you want the students to take away from this lesson?
15. How will you determine whether or not they have done so? What options will the students have in demonstrating what they have learned?
16. What choices will the students be allowed/encouraged to make during the lesson?
17. What input have the students had into the process by which you will come up with answers to any of these questions?
18. What's the connection between what your students are doing today and what students are doing in other sections of the same course taught by other teachers? What input have they had into the process?
    

Okay, so that's not a complete list, but you get the idea. Lesson design is a complex topic, and the choices you make as a teacher are significant even when you are not aware that you are making them. Developing an awareness of the pedagogical issues involved in lesson design is hard. Maintaining that awareness is harder. Given the realities of day-to-day teaching, it's easy to just fall into a pattern, set up a one-size-fits-all frame and stay with it. But good lesson design is flexible, multifaceted, interconnected, collaborative, and attentive to the immediate needs of the students.

I'm going to stop here for tonight and let those questions rattle around in my head for a while. If you think I've missed any, feel free to add.

Natura Morte

I. I first encountered the art of William Bailey around 15 years ago when I chanced upon Mark Strand's Dark Harbor, a book of poems which took its title - and some of its stylistic obsessions - from the Bailey painting on the cover, Dark Harbor III. A great many of Bailey's enigmatic paintings are essentially renderings or arrangements of the same or very similar vessels: vases, pitchers, bowls, pots and pans. Taken as a group and studied in the context of one another, the paintings create a kind of alternative universe, a narrowly delimited but internally consistent world of color and light and shadow. The constraints in subject matter, palette, and technique have the effect of making even very subtle variations seem fraught with significance. In the same way that humans moving from group to group are often inclined to "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet," the various objects in Bailey's paintings seem to take on personalities that vary according to the company in which they are placed.

The forty-five numbered poems in Strands book are configured and deployed with similar constraints. Each is sequnce of triplet stanzas, ranging in length from two to eight. Not only are the structural elements similar, but there are recurring words and phrases and images that appear and reappear later, different for being seen in different company, in different light:

"...the wind screams at the moon's blank face..." (II)
"The dogs howl at the moon, and the moon flees..." (V)
"If dawn breaks the heart, the moon is a horror..." (VIII)
"These are bad times. Idiots have stolen the moonlight." (XXIX)
"We stand under the hollow moon and hear/No praising harp strings..." (XXXIV)

Strand encourages us by his repetitions to listen for echoes and overtones, to consider the implications of the re-placement of images. We are expected to notice, and to ask questions about, the logic of the juxtapositions. Bailey's pictures encourage us to do the same. In the picture below, for example, the collection of six objects - salt cellar, candle holder, cup, bowl, container, and funnel - keep my eye moving and my mind asking questions. The family resemblances make the urge to anthropomorphize irresistible. Is the candle holder proud of his height? The bowl seems to be the center of gravity here, the largest and most substantial piece, around which the others gather. Is it an emblem of smugness? Of stabililty? of substance? The rough, earth-colored container hides in the back, close-mouthed, keeping its own counsel. The cup seems dainty and perhaps overdressed. A flirt. The funnel keeps his distance, but is connected by placement and color to his cousins. The salt cellar, on the other hand, stands apart. By choice? Or is he, with his sleek surface and his metal hat and his funny smell, just a little too weird for the rest of them?

II. This winter I was spending a lot of time leafing though art magazines and came to recognize and respond, at some reptilian level in my brain, to Georgio Morandi's similarly obsessive paintings of vessels. Morandi is less literal than Bailey, but no less focused.

His arrangements of elemental shapes pulse between the two dimensions of the planar surface and the implied three-dimensionality of the objects depicted. The slightly abstracted, irregular, out-of-focus quality of many of his paintings encourages me to look less hard at the individuals and more at the group, the way the shapes - rectangles, ovals, rods, and cones - and speak to one another. And again, the constraints of the palette push subtleties forward: that blue, that red, would both be lost in a brighter, louder world. His pictures are composed, understated, calming.

III. All of which is by way of providing a context for the current direction of my own work, such as it is. These two artists got me thinking about the logic of still life, and about the ways in which the narrowing of one's line of vision offers the chance for unanticipated, interesting significances to emerge. I find myself in the middle of a series of pencil-and-ink drawings that obviously owe more than a little to their antecedents, but which are also opening up new territory for me. Here's the one I did last night.

I like these guys. They're each a little different, but they've got a lot in common. They're a lot like us.

A Thousand Words

1. When I first arrived at my school eleven years ago, one of my early mentors was a woman who for a variety of complicated reasons decided to leave the school. Once she was no longer teaching, she started a small business making cards with calligraphic images on them. Recently, she made the decision to go back to teaching and asked me to write her a recommendation. About two weeks ago, I got a card from her telling me she had accepted a teaching job in a school in Africa. The character depicted on the card is “wa,” which means “balance.”

2. Until recently I had never heard of Joseph Cornell, who managed during the middle part of the 20th century to create an impressive body of beautiful and highly idiosyncratic work, much of which was assemblage in the form of boxes. Following his lead, I’ve begun visiting the local Goodwill Store periodically to see what’s around that might be interesting or useful. Last week I found a thin rectangular hinged mahogany box of the kind that steak knife sets come in. I brought it home with the idea that I might eventually try to put together a Cornell-type box. I started by removing the black velveteen contact paper lining the inside of the top of the box. It tore out in one piece, and I was pleasantly surprised by the texture and pattern of the glued surface on the back of the contact paper, and decided I’d use it here.

3. When I am painting I often need to unload excess paint from a brush, and so I often use a sheet of heavy paper as a repository of the leftover paint. That way, each time I clean out a brush, I’m contributing to the ongoing development of a kind of loosely abstract paint collage. I often find later that I can use strips or random shapes from that paper in other pieces I’m working on, which makes for a sort of hidden thread of connection leading from one piece to the next. The circular cutout from the black-and-white portion of this rectangle wound in another piece, which, as it happens, turned out to be a very busy, muddy, frustrating piece to work on (see below).

4. One the second floor our local art store there is a rack of handmade papers that come in large sheets in various colors. This particular paper, which I found last month, is rough-textured, heavy paper, black on one side and a rich blood red on the other. It holds up well when you soak it with water, which makes it ideal for collage, because the soaked paper will lie flat on the panel and adhere well.

5. Another panel from the knife box, this time from the bottom of the box.

6. A very small piece of patterned paper, blue with a gold filigree pattern, from the same rack as the red paper above, but from a more recent trip to the art store.

7. I don’t like most furniture stores. Too much plastic, too much bad design, too much soul-less, history-less dreck. Not to mention that the salespeople are often off-putting. The exception in my town is C.S. Wo, which imports most of its furniture from China. Some of it is antique, some of it is modern, but all of it is interesting to look at. Going there is as entertaining as going to a museum. The salespeople are helpful when you need them but otherwise give you plenty of room. And did I mention that they have free coffee and chocolate chip cookies? Anyway, every once in a while they hold an open house, and on this particular open house they were offering a free set of year-of-the-ox greeting cards to the first 100 people to show up. We were third in line.


8. My father-in-law got me interested in statehood quarters. This is the quarter from Hawaii. I felt that I needed something to go into the empty circle I had cut out of the paper, and since I had the whole balance thing going, I thought that the Hawaii quarter might serve as the symbol serving to bridge the eastern and western influences in the collage, much as the state itself serves as a middle ground between East and West.

9. The second panel from the bottom of the knife box.

10. There’s a huge stationery discount warehouse downtown which sells washi paper in small color-coordinated packets. The packets are sealed, so there’s a little sheet inside which has thumbnail pictures which show what the patterns are on the paper you’d be getting in the packet. I was looking to balance shapes and colors and sizes of the elements I was putting together here, and this little piece seemed to work just fine.

11. The white rectangle here is a leftover piece from the collage I mentioned before that got too busy. I had been looking at an issue of Artnews and I saw a collage which was basically a sort of two-dimensional architectural assemblage made by arranging white rectangles with dark borders in a latticework over a red background. So I made a bunch of rectangles and laid down a background with the same red paper you see here and began working on something that looked pretty interesting at the start, but then got progressively more fussy and ugly until I basically just painted the whole thing over in white, which made it too simple and not interesting to look at, so then I started adding other elements back in, and went through the whole stupid sequence again and finished with something I don’t even want to look at myself, which is, as I said, why I decided to go simple with this one. This white stripe is my little gesture toward giving embedding in this little creation a little fragment of its prehistory.

A picture, they say, is worth 1000 words. I’m done.

The Line Exploring Space

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.
    - Andy Goldsworthy

We have a discussion about arts integration going on at my school, and one of my colleagues in the art department referred me last week to the Artsedge site, where I ran across the Goldsworthy quotation, which has been ricocheting around in my brain all week, and has found its way into a number of conversations, including one I had with Chris today. We were talking about our sophomore critical thinking course and how it has been evolving, and Chris was saying something to the effect that he found it hard to think about critical thinking without thinking about problem solving, and we started talking about the role of writing in both processes. And I started describing an art workshop I had attended last month where the artist, while he was doing a demonstration painting for us, was talking about the nature of the interactive process in painting. He was saying that each move you make as you draw or paint creates a sort of problem or imbalance or issue that generates the next move, and it is your job as a painter to pay attentiont to what was happening in front of you and work, basically, on one issue at a time. "If it gets too busy, or loses grandeur, or gets picky, as soon as you recognize that, you know what to do with it: find the complementary quality; that'll be the answer." It is, he says, a way of working that is explorational. "The only thing you know in advance is to be true to the process of discovery. You work toward a shift taking place every time you go at the painting."

All of which is equally true, of course, of writing, or at least of writing the way I understand it and have experienced it and have tried to present it to my students. What I am doing right now, as I type, is laying out a line of words that started in one place and is on its way to ending in another, and while I have a general notion of what I want to try to get at here, the particular form that it is taking is emerging right in front of me, with lots of fits and starts and hesitations and reconsiderations that will hopefully not be visible in the final product, but which very much determine the outcome. If the essence of drawing is, as Goldsworthy says, the line exploring space, then so is the essence of writing.

Which is unfortunately NOT the way that writing is most generally taught, and certainly not the way that it is experienced by most students. I've made the argument before in other posts and essays, but I'm returning to it again: Properly understood and properly practiced, writing is an exploration. It's a way of working, a process that requires a sometimes intuitive, sometimes explicitly analytical sensitivity. You write a word, you write another, you hear a rhythm, you replicate it, you find a pattern, you push it, you do one thing, you do another, until you decide to stop and do the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. "Composition," my friend the artist says, "is a progression, a movement. It needs to have a rhythm to it. Each element needs to lead to the next without much delay. The more you delay, the more disconnected you become from the impetus of the work. It's not just design and placement, it's choreography."

I would argue that the challenge for teachers who want kids to learn to write well and think well is to talk with them and demonstrate to them the nature, and the allure, of the explorational process, to point them at an open space, to send them out to explore it, and to listen well, when they get back, to their reports of what happened while they were away.

The Class

So I went to see The Class on Saturday. It's a movie that sticks with you after you've seen it. I've been running a number of scenes back over in my mind for the last two days. It's certainly one of the most honest movies I've seen in a long time. It's about one classroom and one teacher's attempt to create a community of discourse with this one very particular group of students. It's very true to life in that way; no two groups of students are the same. Add a student, take away a student, and that changes everything as well.

It's true to life in other ways as well. Nothing about the teacher, the students, the school, or the administration is romanticized. It's about a group of people trying to get along and to learn something from one another, none of whom really have the skills to pull it off. I don't think I've ever seen a film about education which has so many "teachable moments" on display. What's interesting is that in a few of those moments, the teacher, Francois Marin (played by Francois Bégaudeau in a role based on his own experiences as a middle school teacher) manages to find an adequate response, but very often, and very often at the most significant moments, he fails to come through. In fact, I'd say that the film is ultimately about the many ways in which, despite our good intentions, we fail each other every day. It's also about class in the other sense of the word, the hierarchies of authority both inside of the school and in society at large. The question of "Who gets to decide?" is everywhere. Who gets to decide what we talk about in class? Who gets to decide what language is appropriate? Who gets to decide what the consequences are when a student behaves inappropriately? Who gets to decide what happens when a teacher does?

The narrative arc of the film leads toward a defining moment in which one of the students, a charismatic but recalcitrant student named Souleymane, who guards his private life with a formidable array of attitudinal and verbal weapons, winds up, in a scene that in retrospect seems both accidental and thoroughly predictable, putting to the test the entire system and the assumptions upon which it is based.

It's a very good film. I found myself wondering what part of it was documentary and what part of it was made up. One review I read suggested that the movie was not actually scripted but was more or less blocked out by the director and then improvised by the actors. It certainly has a spontaneity about it, and the ring of truth.

So How Do You Like Your New Job?

People ask me what it's like in my new position as Director of Instruction, and whether I miss being in the classroom after having spent my entire adult life teaching kids. What I find myself telling people is this: yes, I do miss being in the classroom. I miss the daily interaction with kids, and I miss the sense of continuity that comes with staying with one primary set of goals with 20 people pretty much every day for a semester. In my new position, I have many more things on the agenda, a greater range of things coming at me each day. I have a number of groups and individuals with whom I meet once a week or once every two weeks, and often by the time I cycle back to one group or issue, I have trouble remembering where we left off the last time, so in some ways it feels like I have to keep starting over.

Which is not to say that I'm unhappy in my new position. I like being in on discussions that help me understand how the school as a whole operates. I like the people I work with. I like the challenge of trying to sort out all the pieces and then trying to put them together into something that makes sense. I hadn't thought about this until just now as I was writing it, but in some ways, the work I've been doing with art is the analogue of what I'm doing during the day: trying to pay attention to what's in front of me, taking found materials and trying to arrange them in my mind, making connections and trying to shape something that has some structural continuity and makes sense. Maybe what I like about the process of making artworks is that I have more of a sense of personal control: all of the decisions are my own, whereas in my daily life I'm interacting with dozens of people all of whom are bringing something to the table. That's not a bad thing, but it does complicate things. I've arrived at a point where if you were to ask me for an explanation about just about anything going on on our campus right now — the one-to-one laptop program, the sustainability initiative, the leadership institute, the service learning program, the entrepreneurs-in-residence program, our attempts to provide support for students with learning differences, the K-1 initiative, the WASC self-study, or any one of a dozen other things going on over and above our regular curricular and co-curricular programs — my answer would probably start with the words, "Well, it's complex..." My job, it turns out, is to be the guy who tries to sort through the complexities and figure out how it all works. Which is fine by me. It's interesting, challenging work.

And yes, it's true, I certainly don't mind not having two or three hours worth of papers to correct every night like I did for the previous forty years. That's the thing that people outside the teaching profession don't get. As a teacher I made a commitment to myself and to my students to get any papers I assigned to them back the next day, or within two days at the outside. I never quite saw the point of assigning work to students and then getting it back to them too late for them to be able to apply what they had learned from whatever feedback I gave to them on the next assignment. I think it's critically important that kids write regularly, but it's just as important that they get the writing back quickly so that they can make adjustments as they go along. So I put that sword over my own head, and, when I go back to the classroom, I'll put it there again. But sure I don't mind that it's not there now.

Plus Three

Full Circle

Well, I've been on a couple of journeys: geographical, intellectual, and artistic. And now it feels like I've come back full circle. I haven't been posting partially because I've been away, first to Maui for three days as a member of an accreditation team visiting a private school there, and then to Chicago for five days to attend the annual conference of the National Association of Independent Schools. So that was the geographical part.

Intellectually and artistically I've been circling deeper into the world of art, which has had the effect of taking me out of the worlds I would normally inhabit: the worlds of reading, and of writing, of playing chess or doing crosswords. Now when I have an hour or two open, I'm breaking out the materials and getting to work. I've also discovered a lot of people who have been out there before me, people like Robert Rauschenberg and Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell , and that has been the beginning of another sort of education.

When I got back from Chicago (where I spent a number of hours at the amazing Art Institute of Chicago ), I found the February 24 issue of the New Yorker waiting for me. Every once in a while an issue of that magazine just hits on all cylinders, and this was one of those for me. There's a terrific profile of Ian McEwan by Daniel Zalewski, for example. Late in the article, he quotes a passage from McEwan's Saturday describing how the main character, a surgeon named Perowne, feels when he is at his work. Zalewski's point is that the description of Perowne's "ecstatic concentration" might serve as the analogue for McEwan's own engagement with the process of writing. But in reading it, I found myself saying, yes, that it pretty well describes the state of mind that I find myself in when I am trying to put together a collage:

For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness. It’s a little like sex, in that he feels himself in another medium, but it’s less obviously pleasurable, and clearly not sensual. This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can’t bring him to this. . . . This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It’s a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted joy.

That's dead on: clarified emptiness and joy.

In the same issue of the New Yorker, there's also an article by Louis Menand about Donald Barthelme. What blew me away about that article was that in his discussion of Barthelme's characterisically oblique and elusive writing style, Menand winds up comparing his method to that of Rauschenberg. Barthelme, it turns out, actually wrote a catalogue essay for a Rauschenberg exhibition in Houston, in which he says "The principle of collage is one of the central principles of art in this century and it seems to me also to be one of the central principles of literature." Menand points out:

The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals only with one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as if they were found objects.

We rarely experience sentences this way, because we're trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That's the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting...

The illogic, the apparent absurdity, of a Rauschenberg collage or a Bartheleme story makes people impatient, because it seems to violate ordinary habits of perception and understanding. But we experience the arbitrary juxtaposition of radically disparate materials every day, when we look at the front page of the newspaper.

Reading this article helped to circle me back from the (art)work I've been doing recently to the work I've done all my adult life as a teacher and student of English, trying to work through and understand the logic of reading and the logic of writing and how they inform one another. So now I find myself, having been away for a while, back here, typing away, looking for the throughlines.

Ars Longa

Okay, so I'm still at it, and the hours are melting away. Here's the current batch. I feel some twinges of guilt about not writing more, but when I've got the time to write I find I'm doing artwork instead. These things come in cycles, I guess. Anyway:












I've got others in the pipeline. But you want to see some great work by somebody who actually knows what he's doing, try go here.

New Work

So this is what I've been up to the last two weeks, or at least some part of it. I've been putting things together. I've been painting and pasting and playing around. I've been, well, having fun. I think it helps that I don't really have much of a sense of what I'm doing, I'm just trying stuff out and seeing what happens. Maybe sooner or later I'll start to set standards for myself that I will prove to be unable to live up to. But right now, it's all good.









More in the works. And no, I haven't forgotten about the education posts. There's more of those on the way too.

Forgetting Myself

"In art the self becomes self-forgetful" - Flannery O'Connor

When I graduated from college as a philosophy major, I found myself, by a process too complex and frankly weird to explain right now, as a Teacher Corps intern in Hawaii. Teacher Corps was one of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, and under its auspices I was working as an elementary school teacher while simultaneously getting my master's degree in education from the University of Hawaii. The best course that I wound up taking in that program, and in many ways the best course I have ever taken at any time, was an elementary arts methods course taught by Dr. Alex Pickens.

None of the people in my class were artists, and none of us were really yet educators. But the course was driven by the assumption that some of us might find ourselves asked to teach art in an elementary classroom, and so Dr. Pickens walked us through a series of units on printmaking, on clay, on making papier mache masks, on guache painting using pigments made from different colors of earth, and so on. His method, which I was only later to discover was the method at the heart of all good teaching, was to break each unit down into constituent parts that were essentially impossible to screw up too badly, even for a bunch of artistic zeroes like ourselves. For example our first clay assignment was to roll out the clay with a rolling pin, cut the rolled clay into a tile shape, and then create light and shadow on the surface of the tile by pressing on it with our fingers. Well, hey, even I could do that. From there he went to showing us how to pound out air bubbles so our pieces would not explode in the kiln, and how to use slip (a mixture of clay and water) to join pieces of clay together. One of our first "major" assignments was, using what we had learned to this point, to make a three dimensional piece which would not explode in the kiln. Well, it turned out I could do that too. Several classes later, when he came in, gave us each a hunk of clay,  and told us to make a human figure, I was by that time confident enough to figure that if he thought we were ready, we must be ready, so I set to work.

What happened next was something of a mystery to me. I lost all track of time. I lost all sense of where I was. I became totally absorbed in the figure I was making. When I finally finished the piece, every one was gone. The two-hour class had ended an hour ago. Dr. Pickens was in the back room cleaning up, and probably because he was too polite a man to tell me to put away my work and go home, already. But I'll tell you what, that human figure was the first piece of artwork I ever completed that was clearly beyond my capabilities and expectations. It was a sort of gift. It was given to me to make that piece. I have it on the shelf in my office to this day.

The reason I bring this up: for reasons that I am not quite sure I understand, I've found myself having the impulse to paint. We happened to have some acrylics and some brushes lying around from when my son was in high school, and I was reading The Gift which got me thinking about art again, and I'd been spending some time in the local galleries, and the next thing I knew I was down at the art store laying in supplies and slapping paint on canvas.

I don't have any pretensions. I don't really have any idea what I'm doing. I'm just fooling around, trying to figure out what I need to learn as I go along. I didn't start out to do a sequence of collages, but that, it turns out, is what I have done, perhaps because I don't have the drawing skill yet to simply start cranking out landscapes. But I have a friend who does really interesting collages, and so as I began to work on the surface of the canvas I guess I was primed to start thinking about what else might go on there besides the paint. The first one was the odd-looking thing in the previous post, and the next two are reproduced at the top and bottom of this one.

I'm noticing three things. First of all, it's a hell of a lot of fun. I find myself thinking about what I'm going to do next while I'm doing other things, like eating lunch or walking to meetings at work. Second, I find myself seeing everything differently. I was having a conversation with Susie Anderson at Gallery at Ward Center the other day and she was describing how not long after getting back into painting after a number of years in which she hadn't painted, she was driving in her car on a wet street and suddenly she could see the colors again. I don't think I can see them yet, but I am definitely seeing everything in sharper focus. I remember back when I was living in Massachusetts and working during the summers by helping a close friend who was a carpenter with various remodeling jobs. I remember that if we had been doing siding, suddenly every house I passed I was noticing the siding. It's been a little like that the last week or so. I'm noticing more about what's in front of my face. Third, I'm amazed at how time just melts away when I'm working on something that interests me. Tonight I started at 5:30 and it was close to eight when I finished up, and the only reason I even stopped was that I had promised myself to get out to the gym tonight.

So that's where I am tonight, at the intersection of art and writing and education, waiting to see what comes next.

Biograph

Biograph

I. The Gathering

First color, in its groundedness, this one and that, tones
in tune, then text, howl gargle gargle howl, spun into what
might be sky. Then gauze to billow in counterpoint, fishnet
frieze. The choir, waiting for their cue. Stela, and a nickel
moon over lava flats. Such blood, such fire. Hot glue. Titanium
clumps drift like clouds, whitecaps: one, two, three, four, five.

II. The Gift

Somebody's life story, maybe mine. Elements in aggregate.
Sopranos seem innocent enough, but we know, they know,
it's only a matter of time. First encounters matter, because
now we have a story (I have a poem). They don't make
stencils like they used to, which raises more questions,
not that anyone cares. Thrice again to make up nine. Peace.

On Education (Four): Process

I recently got back from visiting my son and his family in Bermuda. While I was there I was asked to meet the board of trustees and some of the parents of one of the Bermuda elementary schools, who wanted to know how I felt about competency testing in general and NCLB in particular. As I considered what I might want to say about that issue, I found myself working backward toward more the centrally held philosophical principles which have informed my ideas about education even from the start of my career and continue to do so today. One of those philosophical principles is the Taoist concept of wu-wei, which translates roughly as "non-action," or sometimes "emptiness." The student, or the sage, or the teacher, who wishes to be in harmony with the Tao must first learn that there are times when it is best to do nothing, so that the Tao can take its course. I think the same is true, to some degree, in the classroom. One of my early mentors, the writer and writing teacher Donald Murray, used to say  "I try to underteach so my students can overlearn." He saw it as his job to create an environment in his classroom which gave students room to explore on their own. His motto as a teacher might well have been, "Don't just do something. Stand there."

I've argued in previous posts for the value of creating classroom environments which are 1) process-oriented, 2) project-based, and 3) student-centered. My lament about standards-based education, as it is generally being implemented, is that it is none of these things. The stakes are too high. If I am a teacher and I know that I have 90 hours in a semester with a particular class, and that the students' success, and my own, is going to be evaluated primarily on the basis of a content-based test, that pushes everything else they, or I, might want to do right off the table. We can't take time to talk about and restructure our processes. We can't afford to "waste time" on projects that may or may not be relevant to what's going to be on the test. What individual students might choose to do or not to do to demonstrate what they are learning or have learned is not up for negotiation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to assessment, and I'm not opposed to direct instruction when direct instruction is called for. The image I am carrying in my head for the "balance" that I spoke about in my last post is that of an accordian player. There's a dual dynamic in accordian playing: in and out; opening up and closing down. A well-designed instructional program should have, in my judgement, a similar dynamic: spaces for exploration (opening up), other spaces for direct instruction in skills or content related to that exploration (closing down). Then opening up again, and so on.

I've just finished reading Lewis Hyde's The Gift, (referenced in a previous post ) which is one of the most thoughtful and erudite - and beautifully written - books of our era. It's primary area of exporation has to do with the differences between gift-based cultures and commodity-based cultures. (Digression: one of his side points has to do with why it is that practioners in gift-oriented professions — like teaching — are not paid well within a commodity-oriented culture. He says, for example, "...there are labors that do not pay because they, or the ends to which they are directed, require built-in constraints on profiteering, exploitation, and — more subtly — the application of comparative value with which the market is by nature at ease." (138) But that's a discussion for another post, perhaps.)

Anyway, at one point in the book, during his analysis of the thinking and writing of Ezra Pound, he winds up talking about the role of willpower in the artistic endeavor:

There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active. The suspension is primary. It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition, or image. The materia must begin to flow before it can be worked... (289)

That strikes me as being true to my own experience as a writer, and, more to the point, to my experience as a teacher. First we must find the materia. That is a process that is not fostered by, and is often actually inhibited by, the imposition of willpower. The materia must make its own appearance. Once it has appeared, or arisen, or arrived, then the will — and the critical facilities responsible for shaping and sequencing and re-presenting the materia — can take over.

Earlier in the book, talking about Whitman, Hyde says that the process of creation can be compared to the in and out movement of the breath itself:

These gestures — the inhalation and the exhalation, the reception and the bestowal — are the structuring elements of the poem, the passive and active phases of the gifted state... In sympathy, the poet receives (inhales, absorbs) the embodied presences of creation into the self; in pride, he asserts (exhales, emanates) his being out toward others. As with any respiration, this activity keeps him alive... (222-3)

As with any respiration, this activity keeps him alive. In like manner, a classroom which provides room for students to breathe, which allows them both to absorb and to emanate, provides a context not just for respiration but for inspiration.

What we are talking about here, of course, is process. I have not said a word about content here, about what subject we might be teaching or what is going to be on the final assessment. I'm trying to articulate the process dynamics that make sense to me as a teacher. And I'd like to spell out the implication of all this, which is that while it is all and good that I as a writer and you as a reader, presumably interested in education, if you've read this far, might be able to discuss our process intuitions and concerns deep into the night, it is not enough. It's not enough unless the students learn to think about process issues as well. It's easy enough for us as teachers to set up our classrooms in such a way that all the students need to do is jump through a given set of hoops. But if we set up our classrooms that way, how will the students ever learn how to manage — and to measure — their own thinking, their own learning, their own progress? Imagine a class - any subject, it doesn't matter - in which students are given the opportunity (and, yes, the time, the time, the time) to ask themselves "What have we done? Where are we now? What's are the options at this point? Where are we trying to get to? How might we get there? And, once we get there, how will we be able to document the process?

That's what I'm talkin' about.

On Education (Three): The Balance

Last week we had a visiting speaker on campus who did a series of presentations on creative thinking and entrepreneurship. One of the slides that she used with the teachers made reference to "building t-shaped people." It's a phrase that has apparently been around in the design industry for some years. Here's Tim Brown's explanation:

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that
they're willing to try to do what you do. We call them "T-shaped people." They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That's what you're after at this point — patterns that yield ideas.

I hadn't heard the phrase before, but it kept reverberating in my head as I went through the rest of the week. On Wednesday, I was asked to meet with the new teachers group at my school, and at the very start of the meeting one of the teachers asked what I think is probably one of the core essential questions that has to do with lesson planning and design, which was basically, "How do I find the balance providing time for my students room to explore and be innovative and engage in projects, and also providing time for them to study and master the core course content."

Well, it's exactly the right question to be asking. Students do need to learn core skills; they need to have some degree of "Depth of knowledge in a technical discipline." So there are times when as a teacher when you need to hone in on those skills: how to diagram a sentence, how to solve a quadratic equation, how to do html coding. On the other hand, if they are ever going to develop the broad spectrum of "21st century skills" that everyone keeps talking about, they are going to need time and space to try things out on their own, learn how to question and to collaborate and to brainstorm and to consider possible solutions and to devise plans and to put them into action and to evaluate the results. All of which takes time. And there's never enough time.

The good news is that it's not an either/or proposition. It's certainly possible to design a sequence of project-based, collaborative activities that have the beneficial side effect of helping students to learn content-area skills. That's the ongoing challenge: to come up with elegant, effectively-designed activity sequences that build both content skills and process skills. That also takes time, in the preparation, but it pays off in terms of efficiencies in class.

Sometimes you can't do it. Sometimes you have to say to your students, "You know what, the most efficient way for me to deliver this material to you is for me to talk and you to listen and ask questions. And there's going to be a test tomorrow that will help us both assess whether or not you've understood what I've been teaching you as well as you think you do."

But that's a mode of teaching, and a mode of learning, that I would prefer, if possible, to avoid. Students who are subjected to that particular teaching methodology most of the time will never develop the "breadth of knowledge about entrepreneurship and leadership," because there's nothing for them to do, in that environment, which is remotely entrepreneurial or innovative. The irony is that they're not going to wind up with a depth of knowledge either. I'm fond of B.F. Skinner's formulation that "Education is what's left over after you've forgotten what you've learned." And what my own experience of school has taught me is that you're going to forget pretty much everything that you haven't worked on yourself. I had a lot of well-meaning teachers who tried their best to stuff my head full of what they thought was useful information. But what I remember, what's left over, if you will, has little to do with what they taught me and a lot to do with who they were and what it felt like to be involved in a process that was thought-provoking and challenging and significant.

So that's why I think we have to keep the balance, keep weighing the alternatives: content skills vs process skills, individual work vs collaborative work, teacher-directed activities vs student-designed activities. One of my mentors when I was first teaching high school some 25 years ago had a resource book that he asked me to read called Freedom and Discipline in English. There's that balance once again. You need one; you need the other.

On Education: Two (Education by Poetry)

I haven’t been in the classroom since June, so I was happy to take up Eliza’s offer to come into her Am Lit Nature classes and walk her students through a short introduction to Robert Frost.

Frost is one of our most misread and misunderstood poets. When I was in school I was given to understand that Frost was a nature poet, a pastoral poet, a genial and benevolent figure in the world of American letters. His most iconic poems, like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken,” were interpreted by my classmates and teachers in ways that I later came to realize stripped them of their complexity, their equivocation, their essential darkness. Part of this was, of course, Frost’s fault. He cultivated the public persona of the grandfatherly presence, the crusty New England sage, the repository of genial wisdom, even as his battle with his many private demons were generating some of his greatest poems.

Another of my colleagues, when he found out that I was going to be talking with students about Frost, remarked, “I’ve never quite trusted Frost.” And that’s a good thing, I think. Frost is not a trustworthy character. He’s a shapeshifter, a ventriloquist, a writer who by his own admission is mostly interested in indirection, or what, in another context, might very well be called lies.

I remember reading Lawrence Thompson’s biography of Frost well after I had graduated from college and being stunned by the amount of pain that Frost had experienced, and generated in the lives of those around him. Grandfather, it turns out, was not a nice guy. As with most writers and artists, his poetry represents the best of him. It represents his iron-willed determination to master, to control, to get right on the page what he could could not master or control or get right in his life. I suspect that that is one reason why he chose to set so many of his poems in the world of nature. As an object of contemplation, a tree, a field, or a snowdrift is, first and foremost, exactly what it is, and there is a kind of purity, a clarity, in that. But for Frost, that essential simplicity rarely stays simple for long. He may be looking at a tree, or talking about a walk in the woods, but he’s always thinking hard about something else. This is, as he himself points out, his characteristic move as a poet, and, for that matter, a move he claims for all poetry:

Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

That remark is from an essay called “Education by Poetry.” It’s the edited transcript of a talk he gave at Amherst College in 1931, and in it he makes a number of arguments, the most interesting of which, following up on the line of thought he begins above, had to do with the essential value of metaphor as a tool — Frost argues that it is the tool — for thinking. His clearest and most dramatic statement of that point comes about midway through the essay, when he says:

We still ask boys in college to think…but we seldom tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just putting this and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky.

It’s a nice formulation, especially in the way that he uses an elegant and illustrative metaphor to clinch his point about the power of elegant and illustrative metaphors. Of course, he’s being reductive. He’s telling lies again. There are other modes of thought than the analogical. Frost knows that. But he expects us, as educated readers, to know it as well, and to take his metaphor as what it is, a means of making a point. As he says, in the same essay:

unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere . Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe with science; you are not safe in history…

To the degree that it is true that all thinking is metaphor, it behooves us to recognize both its power and its limitations. And, to Frost’s way of thinking, is the educative value of poetry: it teaches us how to navigate the landscape of metaphor, which is everywhere around us, and all too often invisible.

On Education: One

I’ve been out of the classroom now for five months. I’m still involved in education, as a curriculum supervisor, administrator, and all-purpose utility player, but it’s still a little weird for me to wake up, after 39 years of being a classroom teacher, and begin my day knowing that I’m NOT going to be interacting with a group of students somewhere during the day. I’m driving forward, and the territory ahead looks broad and formidable and worthy of my complete attention, but I do tend to keep glancing back in the rear view mirror, watching my teaching career become smaller and more distant. So I thought that over the next couple of posts I’d try to string together some words that might capture some fraction of what I feel to be true to my experience as a teacher and my sense of what is at stake in the classroom. I’m going to try consciously to avoid going after this in a pre-planned or pre-programmed way. If I were to attempt to frame a Grand Theory of Everything Educational, I’d either be too daunted to start, or too likely to get bogged down in Chapter 74, if not in Chapter 2. Instead, I’m going to set my sights lower. I just want to write a paragraph or two each day about something that seems true to me. If I get lucky, maybe on some days I’ll hit on an idea that will sustain me in a more elaborated disquisition. I’m fully aware that some of what I am going to wind up writing will probably be predictable and ultimately un-enlightening. But hey, ya gotta start somewhere.

One.

Today a former student dropped by my office and we got to talking about his college applications and about his possible majors and about what he might expect to happen once he gets to college. I told him the story about what happened when my oldest son was accepted to college, and we got a letter from the school congratulating us on his acceptance, but cautioning us not to make the assumption, as proud parents, that our plans for him, or his plans for himself, would now be realized. The average student at that school, it was pointed out, changes his major at least four times. And, in point of fact, that turned out to be literally true in my son’s case. The field he eventually got a degree in, economics, was a field he hadn’t even considered when he was thinking about college. He had thought he wanted to be an engineer. He only wound up majoring in econ because there was a core course in macroeconomics that he was required to take, and it so happened that the course lit him up and his professor wound up taking an interest in him that opened some doors that at the start of school he had not even known were there.

So what’s the point? The point, to bend an old axiom, might be stated as “Education is what happens when you’re making other plans.” As a student, you need to be open to the possibility that where you thought you were going is not where you wind up, and that that is, in fact, a very good thing. (It’s a lot like writing, actually. For years I have told my students that if you start out knowing what you want to write and you write it and it comes out exactly the way you planned, you’ve probably got a mediocre piece of writing on your hands. The trick is to surprise yourself, to write your way into what you don’t know. The testimony of writers is surprisingly consistent on this. Robert Frost: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Donald Barthelme: “The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” E.L Doctorow: “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. ... Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Andre Dubus: “I don't know what characters are going to do. I have to work to discover the character, and I do that by becoming the character and experiencing that life. If I say that I know exactly what a character is going to do, then I've killed that character. The character has to surprise you, the way you should have a sincere conversation, not a rehearsed one. If you plan everything, it isn't a conversation.” And so on and so on and so on.)

This element of indeterminacy and unpredictability seems to me to be at the heart what makes for an interesting classroom. It’s at the heart of the problem I have always had with content-based courses and competency-based assessments that assume that everyone needs to do and learn the same things. It’s not that content isn’t important or that basic skills are not basic. It’s just that, ultimately, they're not that interesting; they're not what I value most as a learner or as a teacher. What I value, and what I hope I have found ways to help students to value and understand, is the search, the exploration, the element of surprise.

Gaudeamus Igitur

Throughlines is two years old today. I'll mark the occasion with this passage from Orhan Pamuk, whose essay "How I Got Rid of Some of My Books" appears in Other Colors, one of the books in my current rotation:

A writer's progress will depend on a large degree on having read good books. But to read well is not to pass one's eyes and one's mind slowly and carefully over a text: it is to immerse oneself utterly in its soul. This is why we fall in love with only a few books in a lifetime. Even the most finely honed personal library is made up of a number of books that are all in competition with one another. The jealousies among these books endows the creative writer with a certain gloom. Flaubert was right to say that if a man were to read ten books with sufficient care, he would become a sage.

There are a lot of books jostling for position on my list, but if I were confronted by the candidates in an array, I suspect I would reach first for Cormac's McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. And you?

Inspired

There’s a fascinating article in this week's Sunday N.Y. Times magazine about poet and essayist Lewis Hyde, whom I had never heard of, despite the fact that he’s regarded as one of the most “illuminating, transformative, and completely original” writers of our age. The article was enough to get me out to the bookstore last night to find a copy of Hyde’s extended essay on Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, entitled The Gift. It’s been a while since I have been as blown away by a book as I have been by this one. I’ve been reading with a highlighter and colored pens in my hand, and though I’ve only read 60 pages or so since last night, the book is already becoming well worn.

The other day I put together a post reflecting on elegance as a criterion for evaluating creativity. In his introduction to The Gift, Hyde suggests another, one suggested by the word inspiration, the etymology of which is from the Latin “spiro,” to breathe. Thus to breathe in, or, as Hyde puts it, quoting Lawrence, to have something breathed into oneself, “the wind that blows through me”:

As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him. An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, not does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that "I," the artist, did not make the work. "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me," says D.H. Lawrence. Not all artists emphasize the "gift" phase of their creations to the degree that Lawrence does, but all artists feel it.

Doing the Math

Jason Zengerle has an interesting profile of Malcom Gladwell in the New York Magazine Books Section. (Gladwell has a new book, Outliers, arriving in a bookstore near you on Monday.) In the course of the profile, Zengerle mentioned something from the book that has been rattling around in my head this morning:

Gladwell cites a body of research finding that the “magic number for true expertise” is 10,000 hours of practice. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good,” Gladwell writes. “It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

Ten thousand hours. That’s a daunting statistic, but it’s also a hopeful one. I’ve been breaking it down in various ways in my head this morning. Some examples:

In the context of a nine-to-five job, it’s five years. (40 hours a week times 50 weeks = 2000 hours a year.) Intuitively, that makes some sense to me. I’ve spoken with any number of people who have told me, upon taking new jobs, that they figured it would take five years to get to the point where they were really good at it. And it’s been my own experience as a teacher that when I start teaching a new course, I need to teach it for about five years before I really have it in my head and my heart and my bones. I would also estimate that from the time I started practicing writing as a sort of apprentice (early in college) to the point where I started having a pretty clear sense of what I was trying to do and how I was going to go about it (about 15 years later), I must have logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 hours.

In the context of music or art lessons, and an hour of practice a day, it’s twenty-five years. (One hour lesson plus seven hours of practice each week, 52 weeks a year = 416 hours a year.) That also seems about right. There’s always the prodigy types that pick up a guitar at age 13 and are playing like Santana in six months, but really, how many of those have you known? For most of the rest of us mere humans, the only to cut the timeline down is to double or triple up on the practice time. If you want to practice 10 hours a day, you can rack up your ten thousand hours in less than three years. Chances are you’d have a couple of other problems by that time, though.

In the context of coursework in school, it’s either 55 years, counting just class time (an hour a day 180 days a year) or 28 years (if you factor in an hour’s work of homework between each class). It’s worth noting that even if you start in kindergarten, most people top out at 21 years. On the other hand, if you consider all the hours a college graduate in America has spent in class all told, one would have reason to expect that that student, according to the formula, would have arrived a certain level of academic expertise. (900 hours a year x 17 years = 15, 300 hours.) Which is, I suppose, what the college degree is attesting to.

It seems to me that this particular rule of thumb is something that it would be useful for students and aspiring writers and artists and musicians to know about and reflect upon. Zengerle closes his article with another quotation from Gladwell that sums up why:

We have a scarcity of achievement in this country, not because we have a scarcity of talent. We have a scarcity of achievement because we're squandering that talent. And that's not bad news, that's good news, because it says this scarcity is not something we have to live with. It's something we can do something about."

The numbers are in. Let's get cracking. The clock is running.

Where Does It Live?

Chris Lehmann had an interesting post on his blog Practical Theory this morning. I thought I'd share his post, and my comment.

Chris:

Where Does It Live?

Educators write pretty mission statements. But the problem with so many educational mission statements is that they sound good but bear little resemblance to the real world. This is part of the reason why good ideas get reduced to being called "edu-babble" because the words get invoked but never put into practice, so they lose their meaning.

But ideas have meaning if we let them.

So I have an idea -- whenever we hear or read schools or districts or teachers or administrators make a claim that their school / district / PD session / whatever is about "21st Century Learning" or "Life-Long Learning" or "Project-Based Learning" or whatever claim we may see or read, our first question should be -- "Where Does it Live?"

Educational ideas only have lasting power if they exist within the systems and structures of institutions that claim them. Everything -- every system, every policy, every structure -- in schools represent a pedagogical choice, and we don't take advantage of that. The classes we choose to schedule, the length of the classes, the times they meet -- every possible permutation privileges certain kinds of learning and makes other kinds of learning harder.

So, for example, at SLA, we say that the way we treat each other is based on the ethic of care -- the idea that caring relationships are at the heart of creating healthy learning environments. That idea has to live somewhere or eventually it will get squeezed out or only live within the people who came in already believing it. This is why we have Advisory -- a four year relationship between a group of twenty students and a teacher that ensures that every teacher has a group of kids for whom they are responsible and every students has an adult in the building who will always be their advocate. We had to plan for caring, we couldn't just assume it, and we certainly couldn't just say it.

All schools should be able to point to the places, the systems, the structures that prove that the words we say we believe truly live and are systemized in our schools. If we do this, those edu-bingo words will stop merely being buzzwords and, instead, will give us the rich language we need to teach and learn.

So what does your school claim to believe and where does it live?

Me:

Hi Chris,

That's a great question, one that I suspect most schools are wrestling with — or ought to be wrestling with — all the time. And I think you're right to place ideas in the context of structures, of environments. Right now my school is one year into a two-year self-study in preparation for the visit of the WASC accreditation team in March of 2010, and we're spending a lot of time trying to match up what it says in our mission with what we are doing.

The mission reads

We are committed to provide an environment where students can:

Develop moral and spiritual values consistent with the Christian principles on which the school was founded, affirming the worth and dignity of each individual

Develop intellectual, academic and physical potential to the fullest degree, preparing them for college and for challenges facing them now and in the future.

Develop and enhance creativity and appreciation for the arts.

Appreciate cultural diversity and develop social responsibility.

As we've been working on this, the word we seem to keep coming back to is in the first line: "environments." For most of my career I was an English teacher. And if you were to have asked me at any point, "Can you teach students how to write?" an honest answer would have been "no." I have no idea how to teach kids to write. But I have a lot of ideas which have proven to be pretty effective about how to create an environment in which kids can learn how to write.

Now there's a lot of talk all across the educational community about 21st Century skills. Tony Wagner's list, for one example, includes things like "agility and adaptability" and "initiative and entrepreneurialism." Can we teach agility? Can we teach initiative? I don't think so. Can we create environments in which students can be given the opportunity to be agile and to be entrepreneurial? Sure we can.

So I think that's how I'd answer your question. Where does it live? At my school, and perhaps in many other schools, it lives in the environments we create for students: the classrooms, the quad, the playing fields, the cafeteria, the auditorium, the chapel. It is — or ought to be — less about what we do and more about the kinds of choices we provide to our students, and the contexts in which those choices are made. And so, after much discussion, we have arrived at what I take to be our essential question for this self-study: "How do we create environments which promote flexibility, collaboration, and individual attentiveness." It's a question which cuts in two directions. It gets at what we want kids to do, and also at what we want teachers to do. And it pushes the responsibility for decisionmaking right down to the people in the room at the moment. That's what we're about, or what we're trying to be about. That's where it lives for us.

- Bruce

Elegance

Okay, so Paul and I were talking at lunch today, following up on yesterday's meeting when he posed the question of what the analogue for Richard Paul's Universal Intellectual Standards would be if we were talking about creativity instead of critical thinking. How do you judge creativity? What makes one answer to a question, on solution to a problem, one essay, one piece of blown glass, more creative than another? Is there a creativity quotient to place alongside the intelligence quotient?

I don't know if there's a list that would parallel clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, and logic. (And I would certainly argue for the inclusion of specificity, significance, and plausibility in Paul's master list. He tends to keep playing around with the list.)

But as we were talking, one criterion popped into my mind which I would definitely want to include in the creativity list. That word is elegance.

Elegance is of course a slippery term. It has, like a fine wine, a lot of overtones and resonances. It connotes a multitude of virtues: simplicity, precision, surprise, aptness. Elegance is the difference between 200 lines of kludgy computer code and ten that do the same work. Elegance is the difference between mate in three and mate in twenty-seven. Elegance has to do how you carry off the task at hand, and how you carry yourself while you are doing it. Michael Jordan was elegant. Dave Cowens, for all his virtues, was not. The iPhone is elegant. In speech, eloquence is elegant. Barack Obama's acceptance speech was elegant, as was John McCain's concession speech, in its own way.

I suppose one might be creative without being elegant, but if I were asked to judge the creativity of two pieces of work produced for the same purpose, one of the things I would be responding to would be the which piece was the more elegant response. To come with a creative solution is to solve a problem that is instantly recognizable as elegant, but only after the fact, after all the inelegant solutions have been tried and discarded. There is an element of felicity in elegance, arising from a sense of joyful recognition, the "Aha" moment, the moment of creation.


So now I've got one word on my list. I'm looking for others. Nominations, anyone?

What's the Story?

...even in the most austere scholarly report from the archives, the inventive faculty—selecting, pruning, editing, commenting, interpreting, delivering judgements—is in full play. This is not a naïvely relativist position that insists tht the lived past is nothing more than an artificially designed text...But it does accept the rather banal axiom that claims for historical knowledge must always be fatally circumscribed by the character and prejudices of the author.

- Simon Schama, Dead Certainties

I attended a wedding a few weekends ago. It was a beautiful wedding held far back in a Waiahole Valley on the windward side of Hawaii. There is much I might choose to say about the wedding, about the estate on which it was held, about the ceremony itself, about the excellent Hawaiian food that was served under a tent after the ceremony, and about the cast of characters, which included many of my colleagues at school and several former students. But in line with today’s theme, which will be dealt with more explicitly a little further down the line, I’m going to screen out most of that and focus on one small thing I noticed during the after-dinner speeches, which was that several of the members of the wedding party alluded to stories which could be told but which, given the celebratory nature of the occasion, would remain untold.

Perhaps the reason my ears pricked up when I heard that is that I had spent a number of hours over the previous week or so reading a book called Three Cups of Tea, which tells true story of Greg Mortenson, an American mountain climber who, having gotten lost on his descent after a failed attempt at the mountain known as K2, stumbles into a remote village in Pakistan, comes to love the people there, discovers that they have no school, and determines to build them one. Against incredible odds, he succeeds, and goes on to become director of an institute responsible for building schools in villages all over Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is able to succeed even though he is, to the reigning muslim authorities, an outsider and an infidel. It’s an inspirational story, very well stitched together by Mortenson’s co-author, David Oliver Relin, from conversations he had with Mortenson and from subsequent visits to the area and interviews he conducted with the many characters who figure in the story. I was about halfway through the book before it occurred to me that Relin’s depiction of Mortenson’s life and thoughts and mission was so completely and unambigously worshipful that it began to raise seeds of doubt in my mind. I couldn’t help wondering if this guy had any flaws at all, and if so, when they might ever appear. I began flipping toward the back of the book, and noticed that the last few pages include lots of information about how readers can support Mortenson’s efforts to “dedicate the next decade to achieve universal literacy and education for all children, especially for girls.” There is even a list of nine recommendations for what to do in the event that the book “inspires you to do more,” starting with visiting their web site and ending with the injunction to “Please direct media or Three Cups of Tea inquiries to info@threecupsofea.com or call 406-585-7841.”

Now I certainly think Mortensen’s work is admirable, and, if he is even half the man he is portrayed to be in the book, eminently deserving of knighthood, sainthood, legendhood, or whatever sort of hood one might imagine. It’s just that I can’t help having two suspicions: first, that we’re not getting the whole story, and second, that the story we are getting has been shaped with a particular purpose in mind, which is to generate support, moral and financial, for Mortenson’s mission. By midway through the book I began to feel, to some degree, manipulated, not to say milked. And at that point my enthusiasm for the book began to fade. The bookmark is still sitting there, right where I put the book down two weeks ago, on page 211, and I’m not sure when, if ever, I’m going to go back and read the last 120 heartwarming pages.

Surely it’s true enough that there is no pure story, not Mortenson’s story, not my story, and, and Simon Shama argues above, not history. The stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we bequeath to our children, are I suppose inevitably riddled with significant omissions (some intentional, some inadvertent or perhaps conveniently forgotten) and with embellishments and elaborations that are not exactly lies but what Mark Twain liked to call “stretchers.” Even Hemingway, whose stated writing ethic was to “write one true sentence,” and then another, and then another, was known to indulge in creative mythologizing, shaping his own life story to his own ends. But I do feel more comfortable, I guess, if the story I'm being told has either the appearance of objectivity, or is acknowledged up front as being a work of fiction pure and simple.

Of course, as soon as I make either of these two assertions, I find myself standing at the edge of the kind of conundrum that David Foster Wallace was so adept at articulating. The first one would go something like, if all stories are in essence subjectively rendered versions of events, "circumscribed by the character and prejudices of the author," aren't the ones that present themselves under the aspect of objectivity even more deceptive and morally objectionable than the ones that make their biases explicit? The second one would go something like, "Is it even possible to create a work of fiction, "pure and simple"? Aren't all stories based to a greater or lesser degree (and often to an extreme degree) on lived experience?" In the telling of stories, what is legitimate and what is not? It's a question with very real pragmatic consequences, as James Frey, among many others, has discovered.

Then there's a different kind of perhaps more benevolent manipulation, which is to use story as a vehicle for the delivery of content in the classroom. Two years ago I heard Brian Greene give one of the keynote addresses at NAIS, in which he made the argument that the most effective way of delivering any content in the classroom was to link it to a narrative. In his lecture he illustrated his point by framing a discussion of string theory as the story of an attempt to mediate an argument between Newtonian physicists, whose theories seem to work well at the level of ordinary human experience on planet earth; and Einsteinian physicists, whose theories seem to do a better job of explaining what’s happening when we consider the universe as a whole. As a person who managed to graduate from college having taken only one science course and no math courses at all, I was perhaps Greene’s ideal listener, and the fact that two years later the gist of his argument remains clear in my mind, when so many other lectures and presentations have fallen out of my head, remains for me a convincing demonstration of the educative power of an artfully constructed story.

And of course, the presidential campaign has been in large part an attempt on both sides to create a credible story that resonates with voters, and to argue with or try to discredit the stories told by the opposition. How that story ends is about to be demonstrated, at long last, on Tuesday.