Thinking, Again

I have been doing some brainstorming and some reading in preparation for a series of short workshops on teaching critical thinking that I'm scheduled to begin on Tuesday. I had begun an inventory of the various activities that might be considered to be specific kinds of thought processes: remembering, observing, visualizing, hypothesizing, asking questions, and so on. Once I got done with my first pass at that (coming up with 40-something possibilities), I decided to see what others might have come up with. I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, but I did run across an interesting essay by a forward-looking historian named James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936) entitled "On Various Kinds of Thinking."

After talking in a general way about what he sees as the limitations of philosophical approaches to thinking:

Most philosophers...have exhibited a grotesque ignorance of man's life and have built up systems that are elaborate and imposing, but quite unrelated to actual human affairs. They have almost consistently neglected the actual process of thought and have set the mind off as something to be studied by itself. But not such mind, exempt from bodily processes, animal impulses, savage traditions, infantile impressions, conventional reactions, and traditional knowledge ever existed...(Italics in the original.) Kant entitled his great work A Critique of Pure Reason. But to the modern student of the mind pure reason seems as mythical as the pure gold, transparent as glass, with which the celestial city is paved. 

Robinson argues, in language that is always accessible and often witty, that our mental processes are determined to a much greater degree than we are generally aware of by "hidden impulses and desires and secret longings." (In this sense his work presages the work of a lot of 21st century cognitive scientists like David Eagleman who arrive at some of the same arguments with the advantage of a lot more sophisticated brain research than Robinson had access to.)

Robinson goes on to argue that to his way of thinking there are four basic thinking processes:

1. reverie, or the "free association of ideas
2. practical decisionmaking
3. rationalizing, or "finding arguments for going on believing as we already do
4. creative thought, which "makes things different from what they seemed before"

He's particularly convincing (and entertaining) on the subject of rationalization. After arguing that "the real reasons for our our beliefs are concealed from ourselves as well as from others,"he cites Wilfred Trotter on the subject of sacred cows:

When...we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a nonrational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.

That certainly rings true to me. [I posted that last night. This morning, I came across this passage by John Dewey from the beginning of his book How We Think, saying much the same thing:

Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct belief. They are picked up—we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they insinuate themselves into an acceptance and become unconsciously a part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruction, imitation—all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion—are responsible for them. Such thoughts are prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence.]

Robinson goes on to suggest that "It will become apparent as we proceed that the fact that an idea is ancient and that it has been widely received is no argument in its favor, but should immediately suggest the necessity of carefully testing in as a probable instance of rationalization." And furthermore, that most of our convictions on matters of importance are "pure prejudices in the proper sense of the word... They are not really our own ideas, but those of others no more well informed or inspired than ourselves, who got them in the same careless and humiliating manner as we. It should be our pride to revise our ideas and not to adhere to what passes for respectable opinion, for such opinion can frequently be shown not to be respectable at all."

I take that as the core mission of attempting to work with students in the hopes of getting them to be better thinkers. Let us beseech them, following Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible that they may be mistaken.

Which puts me in mind of the conclusion of the chapter entitled "The Fallen Angel" in Neil Postman's The End of Education. (There's a version of this chapter available online here.) Postman, who has argued earlier in the chapter for a embedding student learning a meta-narrative acknowledging that, well, "to err is human," makes the not entirely facetious suggestion that we replace our final exams in our various disciplines with something like this:

Describe five of the most significant errors scholars have made in (biology, physics, history, etc.). Indicate why they are errors, who made them, and what persons are mainly responsible for correcting them. You may receive extra credit if you can describe an error that was made by the error-corrector. You will receive extra extra credit if you can suggest a possible error in our current thinking about (biology, physics, history, etc.). And you will receive extra extra extra credit if you can indicate a possible error in some strongly held belief that currently resides in your mind.

Recommended

Just a quick notation about some recommended readings tonight, transparently because I've been able to keep posting every day for a while and I don't want to break the string. At some point I will write about them in more detail, at least the Knausgaard, but to do that reading experience justice would be many days' work.

Probably the best books I've read this year have been Book I and Book II of Karl Knausgaard's microscopically detailed and painfully honest multivolume memoir My Struggle. I also really enjoyed Jennifer Haigh's collection of short stories News from Heaven and the novel which set it up, Baker Towers.

In poetry, I was intrigued and impressed with Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and Red Doc>. That's six suggestions, if you're desperate for something to read.

Tune Out, Turn Off, Drop Out

There were a couple of interesting questions posted on Quora today. One was "What does everyone need to know about writing?" (with 109 answers) and one was "Why would someone pay $140M for Jackson Pollock's"No. 5"? (with 27).Both are questions that interest me, and ones that I myself would be tempted to attempt an answer to, had I but world enough and time.

I like the idea of Quora, and have been browsing it more frequently of late, but I don't usually have the time to sit down and scroll through , say, 109 answers. So far at least, I tend to look at the list of questions in the email update I get each day, check out and bookmark the ones that interest me, skim the list of answers (there were some answers to the Pollock question which looked to be very carefully developed, complete with photo illustrations of different kinds of art in sequence), and then go on with my day. It seems silly to print out 25 pages of comments just to be cull the ones I want to think about or respond to, but I am not really adept at or interested in doing a ton of scrolling either. (I was just checking back at the site and between the tools already available on the page and the annotation tools available through Diigo, maybe I could find a way to interact with the site in a way that works for me. Some day. Maybe.

But as of this point Quora hasn't wormed its way into my daily life in the way that Blogger and Tumblr and Pinterest have.(Conservative estimate of those three sites at this point in my life: two hours a day. The only way I get away with it? I don't watch television. Period.) Since Google Reader went down I haven't been keeping up with the blogs I was following either. (There is a site called The Old Reader that replicates Google Reader, and I set up an account there and transferred all my subscriptions, but I fell out of the habit of using it and at this point don't even remember which browser I had it set up in or what my username or password is. Note to self: track it down. ) And I've got accounts with Facebook and Twitter too that at this point I barely ever manage to keep up with, not to mention the subscriptions I've got on Flipboard on my iPad, the print magazines that arrive in the mail, the books waiting on my desk and on my Kindle. There's only so much time in a day. There are only so many things I can keep track of.

One of the things I like value about writing is that it is a kind of forced-choice path away from that mode of processing. It's linear. It's accumulative. It's slow. It's about putting one sentence down on the way to getting to the next sentence and the sentence after that. (Although in fact  there are skips and reversals and recursions. Although chronologically every word I have written has come after the words I wrote before, the order in which you are experiencing this text as a reader is not the order in which I wrote it. This paragraph, for example, was inserted as a second-thought elaboration after I wrote the two paragraphs which follow.) Writing is in this sense at least potentially a practice of mindfulness, like meditation or yoga, and in its analog linearity an antidote to the nonlinear horizontality of the digital realm.

There's been a ton of articles written over the last few years about the deluge of online options competing for our attention, what it may or may not be doing to our brains, and what it clearly IS doing to our patterns of social interaction. Every time I go to the mall to walk I have to be careful not to be run down by people who are texting while they walk and navigating the crowds not with their eyes but with a kind of intuitional proprioception. If I stop to sit down to rest or eat, the odds are that most of the people in sight will be scanning screens. I've seen families at dinner where mom, dad, and the two kids are all on their phones at the same time, ignoring each other.

So where are we going with this? Are we on a parabolic curve that is only going to get steeper?  Will our brains cease to be able to function the way they once did? Will all of humanity wind up being electronically collected to a hive brain that will create a superintelligent metahuman terrestrial entity? Or will there perhaps be some kind of backlash or backtracking or reversion to the mean at some point? Stay tuned.

Or, alternatively, breathe. Tune out, Turn off, drop out.

Tuesday Night: Printmaking

So here's what I was doing this evening:

It's a monoprint prepared on an acrylic plate. Lines incised with a stylus, some textures worked in with sandpaper. Then water-soluble graphite worked into the lines, and watercolor paint brushed on wet and allowed to dry. Run through the press, the wet paper releases and absorbs the pigment. This particular paper is also interesting: it's recycled from an old art book. The number 16 at the bottom is embossed on the paper. I like the mottled effect of the watercolor which pooled on the surface of the plate as it dried.

Sitting Here in Limbo

I can't say what life will show me
But I know where I've been
I can't say where life will lead me
But I know what I've seen
Tried my hand at love and friendship
But all that is passed and gone
This little boy is moving on...

There's a lot of activity in the back of my brain these days—nothing completely conscious yet but a kind of anticipatory subliminal gurgling or burbling—about what I will be trying to do this fall when I return to the classroom for what will in all likelihood be the last time. In anticipation of the small move next week to a new office and the large move in January to a new state, I've been going through my books and files and winnowing them down, and all along as I have been doing so I've been stirring up memories of what I've read and taught and written in the past, and pondering which things I might want to ask the students to try again this fall. At the same time I'm thinking, again in a kind of preliminary way, about what I might want to do that I have never done before.

It's always been hard for me to plan in advance anyway. I once taught down the hall from a woman who had her lesson plan book filled out in August for the entire year, every single day. She would stand up at staff meetings and oppose planned field trips on the grounds that if students were to skip a day it would mess up her entire plan for the year. On the one hand I was impressed; on the other hand I was, and remain, horrified. I really feel like I need to get into the room with the students and get a read on where they are and what kinds of experiences and attitudes and inclinations they have already before I can plan what to do next. Throughout most of my career my "plan book" has been actually filled out after the fact, so I know where I've been, but the plan has evolved in large part from day to day.

Which is not to say that chaos will reign. There are some general curricular constraints: books we've agreed to read as a subdepartment (Joy Luck Club, Othello), implicit and explicit expectations about quantity of writing and the qualitative standards that are to be highlighted, an emphasis on metacognition, my own philosophical orientation to working with students to help them investigate the various ways in which reading, writing, and thinking enrich and support one another. I've been doing this work for forty plus years and have a pretty clear sense of the general parameters of what the semester will look and feel like. But what I'm really looking forward to is the surprises. (May they all be happy ones.)

Why Make Art?

Osiris (Decommissioned)

Moral philosopher Peter Singer's famously provocative essay "The Singer Solution to World Poverty," offers a very readable and straightforward set of arguments which culminate with the assertion that anyone who has money s/he does not strictly need should be giving it away: "I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life-threatening." It's an essay that generates good discussion, and often a fair amount of squirminess, when I ask my students to read it. The squirm factor arises from the fact that while the logic of the essay is quite compelling, its conclusions do not square with the vision the students have of their place in the world nor with the sense that they have that they are entitled to what is their own. That's exactly why I ask them to read it. I want them to at least entertain the notion that there are questions of equity and justice and moral obligation underlying the routines and habits of mind of our everyday lives. The way it is is not necessarily the way it should be. If you see it as a worthy objective to spend your life in a way that creates value, then what sorts of value do you endorse? And how would you wish to spend your time in the furtherance of those values?

The other day I wrote a post about some of the questions that were presenting themselves to me as I somewhat reluctantly went about the process of throwing out a number of pieces of my own artwork. One question that I raised, and promised myself to try to work through, was the question of time/value as in applies to art?

Questions abound. What is the point of art? Does it do anything positive? Does it make our lives better in any way that can be convincingly articulated? Why bother taking pigments and smearing them about on a canvas? Would a world without, say, Rembrandt and Picasso, be any less full or miraculous than the world we have now? Following Singers's logic, given the enormous number of hours it takes a Rembrandt or a Picasso to learn his craft and the lifetime given over to the practice of it, would not that time be better spent in doing work which would be of some direct benefit to others who are in real need of help, rather than in doing work which will only be of interest or value to people with enough wealth, education, leisure time, and expendable income to be able to decorate their lives with it?

These are not new questions. Throughout history there have been those who have, on religious or political or philosophical grounds, argued for the destruction of artwork, the burning of books, the leveling of class distinctions based on wealth. Some of these people have been psychopathic autocrats, some of them have been intellectuals, some of them have been celebrated as saints. A full-fledged review of these questions and how they have been answered throughout history would take me the rest of my life to conduct. And the question would re-present itself with regard to that enterprise as well: why study art or art history? Why not serve meals at a soup kitchen instead, or plant a garden, or work on a cure for cancer, or spend one's hours in meditation or in prayer?

In my own case, the time/value question I was posing to myself was whether the time I myself am spending, as an amateur artist, results in the creation of any sort of value I can endorse, or whether it's simply an act of self-indulgence, the frittering away of untold hours in the creation of work which the world could well do without.

So here, in the spirit of a thought experiment, are some of the things that occur to me as I attempt to justify the ways of myself to myself:


The Value of Attentiveness

Let's start with the idea that it is better to be attentive than to be inattentive. Being alert to, and aware of, and taking care of, our environment and the things and people in it, would seem to be a positive good, just as being inattentive, careless, or oblivious would seem to be conditions of mind to be avoided. So if attentiveness is a habit of mind to be cultivated, if it's something we'd rather be good at than bad at, how might we go about developing it? It stands to reason that practice would help. And what better practice than drawing? Drawing forces you to focus, to take note of what you see and to direct your hand to re-present what you see. Other kinds of artwork as well, even collage and abstract art, demand first of all that you attend to the materials at hand, and then assemble them in some purposeful way. Time that one spends in the creation of artwork allows us to practice and strengthen our capacity for focused attentiveness. The same might be said of other disciplines: writing, meditation, gardening. It doesn't have to be art. But if it is art, there are personal benefits to be reaped from one's engagement in it, even if the products are not at the level of Rembrandt and Picasso. Or even if they are not very good at all.


The Value of Engagement

One might imagine having to pay attention to something but not deriving much pleasure from it. "Engagement," as I am using it here, is the experience of doing something that you enjoy in a way that produces satisfaction and makes the time feel rich. There are some people for whom drawing or artwork might not be engaging. In my case, I really do take pleasure in the physical process of doing artwork. Thirty years ago, I was perhaps most completely engaged when I was playing basketball, another activity which produces not overt social good but which indirectly confers other benefits (fitness, camaraderie, the development of a set of skills). Now that my basketball days are over, I find the same kind of personal satisfaction in the creation of artwork. I don't expect that every piece will succeed. But from time to time there are pleasant surprises, and the in-between times feel like time well spent.


The Value of Appreciation

I never played hockey when I was growing up. In my middle years I taught at a school where hockey was a big thing, and I went to a number of games to see students I taught playing in them. But I could never really distinguish the better players from the rest because I did not really understand or appreciate the skill set involved. With basketball it was different. I spent forty years playing the game and twenty coaching it, and to this day I can "read" a basketball game much more skillfully and with greater appreciation than I can a hockey game. My thesis is this: if you want to improve your understanding and appreciation of whatever it is—hockey, basketball, basket weaving, carpentry, guitar—it's enormously helpful that you have some hands-on experience in that area. As an English teacher, one of the core experiences I try to provide for my students involves learning how to read as a writer and write as a reader. For example, a student who has actually been recently and actively engaged in the writing of poetry is going to bring a different set of eyes to any poem s/he reads than a student who has never even tried writing poems. Likewise, a student who has read a great deal of poetry brings a fuller experiential sense of what a poem might be, how it might be constructed, how it might unfold, than a student who loves to write but has no real sense of the work that others have done before.

I can say this from personal experience: until I began drawing and painting, I did not notice or register the artwork that was in my environment, and even when I did, I very often did not "get it." After five years of working on my own artwork, I am much more aware of and appreciative of the work that other artists have done and are doing. In other words, doing art is educative. As I began to develop my own ways of working, I became more interested in and knowledgeable about other artists locally and throughout the world who share my particular quirky set of obsessions. Appreciation, whether of literature, or of art, or of any other area of human endeavor, is a good thing.

So yes, while I understand the reservations some may have about whether the time I spend, or anyone else spends, producing art is justified, for my own self it has brought, and I hope will continue to bring, real benefits.

The Nothing that Is

The Night, The Porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing —
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

- Mark Strand (via insipidexpectations)

What to say? While I was writing yesterday about leavetaking and self-abnegation, there were some thoughts like ghosts making their presence felt in the corners of my mind—the kind that disappear when you look right at them, but that you sense are still there—and I knew that I had recently read, copied, printed out, and pasted in my commonplace book something that was relevant. So I checked and here was this poem.

I like the way it opens, the two clauses of the first sentence, making parallel assertions that taken together express very precisely something deeply mysterious, an existential paradox: that we are here, in the world, alive and attentive to what is in front of us; but that we are also present to, if not explicitly aware of, another, perhaps more fundamental reality, which is not accessible to us, "something whose appearance would be its vanishing."

I've been reading Jim Holt's book Why Does the World Exist? A lot of the early part of the book is basically a historical survey of the way in which thinkers throughout history have attempted to answer the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" A secondary epistemological question has to do whether Nothing can be said to exist at all, or whether that's a logical impossibility, a linguistic trap of some kind. It seems to me that much of the poetry of writers like Mark Strand and W.S. Merwin is grounded in the assumption that Nothing does exist, as source, as destination, as underlying reality, larger and more transcendent than the world we know, and that its existence is instructive, a portal to wisdom: "There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind." My favorite Merwin poem, Search Party, gestures at some of the same territory: there is that which we know, that which can be enumerated, that which can be accounted for, and yet it is not enough, it is never enough. There's more that we will never be able get at. We can only sense its presence.

Here's Strand coming at the question from another angle:

My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

And here to round us out is the magisterial Wallace Stevens:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Long Goodbye

In preparation for my retirement in January, I've been going through my books and papers and files and making a preliminary selection of what I might want to keep and take with me, and what I want to give away or (gulp) throw out. Doing this sorting a little at a time has been a way of gradually preparing myself for the departure, and has also given me the chance to look back over what has been accumulated and think about what it all adds up to. 

Many years ago, when I was first teaching middle school English in Massachusetts, I had a file folder in which I put photocopies of poems that I ran across that I thought might work in class. Over the year the file grew fatter and I had to break it down into sub-files, which I organized alphabetically by author, eventually winding up with a folder for pretty much every letter of the alphabet. Today I went through files A-F and began the process of culling. Some poems have become old favorites, ones I've used over and over again in class to illustrate an idea, a way of thinking, or a strategic approach to the problem of what to do when facing a blank page. Others, having been used once, have sat in the folder for years. A lot of those wound up in the recycle bin today, and there will be more joining them as I work through the files for G-Z in the days ahead. 

It's a slow process, because it's not just a matter of sorting. It involves at least skimming, and in many cases re-reading with some care, in order to determine why I kept the poem in the first place, and whether it is something that I might conceivably want to use this fall in class, or keep for my own pleasure or instruction in the future. Some of the best poems resist skimming, they draw you down onto the page and into the writer's stream of thought; they invite you in and make you want to stay. So in some ways it's been hard, a process you can't rush.

Even harder has been the need to go through my artwork, much of which I have had stored in cabinets in my office at work, and decide what I want to bring with me, and what I want to let go, either by giving it away, if there are takers, or by tossing it into the dumpster, which is what I did today with about a dozen pieces. On the one hand I really didn't want to toss them. On the other hand, there are way too many for me to take with me—several hundred at least—and what would I do with them anyway once I get to California? There isn't much of an audience for the kind of work that I do, which is mostly abstract collage of one kind or another. Of the limited number of people who do have even a passing interest in any kind of art whatsoever, there are only a very few who would even bother to look at the work that I do, and fewer who would find it interesting. Of that number, those who would go one step further and say, "Yes, that's something I would like to own" is even smaller. And of those, probably not a single soul is left who would be inclined, even if I were to gift a particular piece, to fork over the outrageous amount of money people are charging in order to get the gift framed and ready for hanging. (I recently took a small collage I had purchased from Crystal Neubauer, whose work I greatly admire, to a local frame shop, and the cost of the frame exceeded the cost of the artwork by a factor of three. I don't begrudge the expense. But I can see why others might.)

So, on the one hand, I can't take it with me and I may not be able to give it away. On the other hand, every single one of the pieces I have, even the ones that others would think are a joke, has an autobiography, an evolutionary history, a link to a time and place and a mode of thought that means something to me. Putting those pieces in the dumpster today felt like some kind of ritual of self-abnegation, the cutting of one kind of emotional bond as a rehearsal for the other bonds that will inevitably have to be severed, in January for sure, and then again in the not unforeseeable future. Part sobering, part liberating, part ominous, part joyful.

I'm not complaining. I get it. If there's one thing I've learned about art as a discipline, it's that doing the artwork is its own reward. The time I spend working on something I'm interested in working on is the best part of the whole enterprise. Yeah, I've sold some things over the last few years. And I've also given some away to friends who have taken an interest. There's no realistic scenario I can imagine where a market for my work might emerge that would allow me to sell enough to able to pay for my materials, much less my time. Perhaps once I'm retired I can build a little web site or arrange for a page on Etsy or something. But none of that really drives me. I'm not ambitious in that way. I just like making art, even if eventually it has to be thrown away. That's the way it is.

Now I know that among the (in all likelihood purely hypothetical) readers of this post, a certain percentage of you are probably gnashing your teeth and asking what used to be called, in simpler times, the $64,000 question: given the number of things that need to be done in this world, would you choose to spend your time puttering around and producing work which by your own admission you can't even give away? Why don't you find something to do that you're actually good at, something that creates value in the world, something that has the potential to do good for others?

That's a really good question. I've got some answers, which may or may not satisfy. I may tackle some of them tomorrow. We'll see.

Circuitry

I

Tissue, earphones, ink and brush, notebook, dictionary,
eyeglass case, face cream, wallet, digital recorder.

II

Dining room table, four chairs.
  
III

Two lemons, sweet potato, fan, pencil box, power cords,
electric stove, paper towels, bananas, small painting of mangos,
handmade teacup (Rengetsu), chrome teapot, three knives,
fork, scissors. Dishrack with dishes. Washcloth. Sink and faucet.
Collage: Everyday Transcendence. Detergent, hand soap, toaster,
cutting boards. Dishwasher. Cabinets. Refrigerator. Calendar, pictures.

IV

Three fishprints on the wall. Switch plate.

IV

Scroll: Poem by Li Po. Sword and Bo in black lacquer rack.
Butsudan. Chest. Candle, incense box, greens.

V

Bookcases lined with books. Leitner, Kaven. Occasional chairs
(two). Window, drapes open: view of houses on Round Top.

VI

Television, remote. Two collages: Giglio and Tidwell.

VII

Louvred windows opening on lanai. Solar panels on Thurston.

VIII

Sofa, two extra pillows.

IX

Laptop. Fingers. MS Word, Document 2. A list: What I see.

X

Why? An exercise. Floor. Walls. Breath. Air. Murmur of cars
on Punahou Street. Coming down. Learning to be at home again.

Reading Can Kill You

I spent 16 hours in transit from Florida to Hawaii today, so my brain is a little closed down this evening. Becca sent this along yesterday and I liked it a lot. It is by Barbara Hamby and was published in the Summer 2013 Southern Review. I thought I'd share it as my not-so-labor-intensive post for the day.



Reading Can Kill You

My husband and I are at a restaurant with another couple,
         and after a few drinks the other man and I are talking
about how much we love The Master and Margarita,
         a novel we've both read many times in different translations,
but it soon becomes apparent his wife and my husband are stewing,
         as if Bob and I had discovered we had a former lover
in common, let's say a woman, and we were more passionate
         about her than our spouses because she was Russian,
and instead of no, she said nyet, which sounds like a sexier yes,
         and yes was da, which is so much more yes than yes
but with a twinge of nyet, and it was winter, a freezing Siberian
         blizzard with days that began at ten and ended at two,
and we sat in the dark next to the blazing enamel stove
         and for breakfast drank tea from the samovar sweetened
with jam and talked about Gogol's sentences and Mandelstam's
         despair, and then at night it would be love and vodka,
so when Satan showed up with his entourage, we were borne along
         on his cloud of smoke, joining his diabolical magic show,
flinging rubles into paradise, cuddling at night with his giant cat,
         watching the dawn rise, reciting Pushkin and Akhmatova,
thrilling to Mayakovsky's rants, and in the white nights of summer
         we became poetry, every breath an iamb, our cries of ecstasy
the nyet that is da, and I can see why my husband is silent and sulky,
         so I return to our table, sip my Sancerre, talk about Paris,
because all four can agree we'd rather be lost in that city
         than be found in another, and the steppes recede,
but in the middle of my oysters I think of my great-grandfather,
         who worked in the mines of Kentucky, and one night
was supposed to be watching the furnace, but he was reading,
         and the furnace exploded, killing him, which led my mother
to threaten that all my reading would destroy me, too, and I pictured
         my teenaged self in that dank little room, the fire roaring,
reading a newspaper, a union tract, "Kubla Khan," or maybe
         Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, whose heroine,
Bathsheba Everdene, was so rich and beautiful and stupid
         I could hardly be blamed for not wanting to be anyone but her. 

Still Testy

(Further thoughts on testing.)

Norman Augustine argues (see previous post) that testing has a role to play in "motivating and guiding students and teachers." He seems to be assuming that the existence of the test somehow supplies motivation where it might otherwise be lacking. I don't buy it. In 43 years of teaching, I've had my fair share of students who had issues with motivation. I don't recall that any of them magically became more motivated upon hearing the magic words "This is important because it's going to be on the test."

Students are not generally any less motivated than any other subgroup of the human species. If anything, the opposite is true. Most students have not yet arrived at the levels of discouragement, cynicism, and negativity that characterize a large proportion of the the adult population.  (Don't believe that adults are like that? Pick up a paper. Any paper. Try look.)

Students, unlike many adults, still have the capacity to care, often passionately, and are often ferociously interested in what they care about. In my experience, when students lack motivation it's because they cannot see any clear connection between those things they do care about and the things that they are told they must learn in school. That's the problem with the Common Core Standards, and other such laundry lists. As soon as you tell a student "This is what you must learn," you've done two things. First of all, you've lied to them outright. There is not a single thing I can think of that would qualify as a deficit so dire as to make a happy adult life unsupportable. Perhaps, once upon a time, a stronger argument could be made that you needed to learn something in school, because you'd never learn it anywhere else. But in today's world, even if I can't read, or can't add, or can't solve a quadratic equation, or can't recite the causes of the civil war, I can get ready access to anything I might need to know about those things on the internet in a form that I can understand. Furthermore, I now can leverage whatever I do know and can do much more easily than ever before into a business or a career, provided I have the inclination and the determination to do so.

Which is where the second thing comes in. As soon as you tell a student "This is what you must learn," you've sent a very strong message that decisions about what is important and what is worth knowing come from outside, and that the student's own sense of what might be worth learning or doing is irrelevant. By supplying the answers about what is important, you are actively undercutting the likelihood that the student will ask his/her own questions about what is important. The irony is that this approach doesn't work for anybody. The students who hear it and believe it learn that all they really need to do is just follow somebody else's directions and they'll be good to go. Which is simply untrue (For a forceful argument about why it is not true, and examples of how the untruth of it plays out in mathematics, see Paul Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament.) And the students who hear it and don't believe it are forced to spend a ton of time doing work in which they have no interest, learning material that they in fact do not NEED to know, in preparation for batteries of tests that people like Norman Augustine have decided will "motivate" them. Then when they fail to perform well on the tests, as so many of them will, the Norman Augustines of the world will call for longer school days and a longer school year and and higher standards and more rigorous tests. Doing more of the same thing you were doing before and expecting a different result: that's an operational definition of insanity.

So what's the solution? Should we just throw up our hands and let people do whatever they want? No, not exactly. But I would argue (and have argued, as far as seven years ago), that a good place to start is by asking the students themselves what they care about, what they think they can already do well, and what they want to learn. And once we find out what that is, we can try to help them do THAT, and help them put the work they choose to do in front of others—their peers, their families, their communities—who are in a position to give them feedback that will actually matter to them. It's not clean. It's not easy. And it's not cheap. But it works.

Getting Testy

There's an op-ed column in the Tampa Bay Times in which Norman Augustine of the Washington post  attempts to make the case that the critics of standardized testing "fail to grasp testing's valuable role in motivating and guiding students and teachers." Augustine, who apparently took his high school instruction in essay writing very seriously, argues that opponents of testing offer three (count 'em, three) "basic arguments," which he serially refutes:

• that exams detract from the larger goals of education by encouraging teachers to "teach the test."
• that standardized tests drive educators to cheat
• that high-stakes testing places too much pressure on students.

I'll leave it up to you, gentle reader, to determine whether his refutations of these three arguments are convincing. The point I would like to make is that the strongest case against standardized testing does not seem to have occurred to him. He has, like so many dutiful high school students before him, come up with three talking points which happen to be the ones that sprang to mind when he got started. Either it never occurred to him to ask whether there might be more, or he just cherry-picked the ones that suited his purpose and ignored the rest. Welcome to a very large club, Norman. That's how we teach students to write and think; so that's the way we should write and think. Right? Well, no, I think not.

The problem with testing is not that teachers feel obliged to teach to the test, although, in my experience, they most often do. (I taught pre-AP and AP English for years and often found myself in the position of having to make a tough call as to whether we would have time to pursue some interesting line of thought initiated by the students or allow for a project to develop around a generative idea, or whether—knowing that their performance, my performance, the department's the school's performance, the town's performance, and the state's performance would be judged by the test results—we really had to get back to preparing them for what was going to be on the test. I often found myself saying, that's really a good idea, but we have to get back to the work at hand.) Nor is the problem primarily that testing pressures create conditions where educators—knowing that their performance, the department's the school's performance, the town's performance, and the state's performance will be judged by the test results—are tempted to fudge the results. You can pick up the paper almost any day of the week and see irrefutable evidence that that is true. It's hardly surprising. It's completely predictable. But it's not the real problem. Nor is the problem of pressure. Students, teachers, parents, businesspeople: we're all under pressure of some kind all of the time. That is, more often than not, a good thing. Pressure is what makes some things more urgent than others. Part of learning to be an adult is learning how to respond to pressure. So deal with it.

No. The REAL problem with testing is that the tests that we have available are reductive in the extreme. They measure a very small subset of what it is that good teachers try to teacher and good students try to learn. They measure what is measurable. The omnipresence of multiple-choice testing as the method of choice in assessment has nothing to do with how effective the tests are. It has everything to with the fact that they are easy to administer, easy to grade, and easy to compare. And cheap. They count what can be cheaply counted. And as no less a luminary than Albert Einstein—not a very good test-taker himself, as you may remember—has pointed out, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." 

What do I really want my students to learn? I want them to learn to ask good questions. I want them to learn to be creative problem solvers. I want them to be good at face-to-face communication and collaboration. I want them to have enthusiasms. I want them to be good self-advocates. I want them to be thoughtful and reflective and compassionate. I want them to have some sense of what they value and what purposes they would like to have their life serve. I want them to read well, write well, and think well. And so on. If they manage to learn those things, then I am very confident they will be engaged, productive, lifelong learners able to master any granular subject-area content they encounter. The problem is, not one of those things is easily measurable, and certainly not by any multiple choice instrument known to man. 

Would it be possible to devise assessments that honor those educational goals? Sure. But those assessments are performance driven, project-based, interpersonal, and only really effective or fair at the moment of readiness, which may or may not be at the end of the quarter or the semester or the year. And they take time, a lot of time. They're thought- and emotion- and labor-intensive, both for the tester and the testee.  I'd like to see some of the pundits and legislators who wax so righteously indignant about falling standards volunteering more (any) of their time to participate personally in the kinds of project-based assessments discussed in books like Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence.

I'm not against tests per se. I'm against making tests the final measure of accomplishment. What we choose sends a message to students about what we care about. Do we really care only about what students can do on a Scantron? Is that what the American educational system now boils down to?

Taxonomics

There's a pretty cool resource on Tumblr called Explore which features daily posts on all kinds of subjects having to do with science, technology, art, design, history, literature, creativity, innovation, thought, opinion, and other such stimuli for the mind. Today they posted a listing I've seen a couple of times before, one that always cracks me up and seems like it might serve as a jumping-off point for a certain kind of thinking-writing experience in the classroom. I've not used it before, but I am adding to my list for the fall. It's the Celestial Emporium of Knowledge from Jorge Luis Borges's 1942 short story "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins":

Animals are classified as follows:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Preliminary Remarks:

• This list lacks the logical structure one would normally expect or demand from a "classification." Normally, we would expect that the categories would be divided in such a way as to account for all animals, include nothing that is not an animal, but make distinctions between them that would put them in sections that do not overlap. In other words, leave nothing out, include nothing that does not belong, and count nothing twice.

• This list doesn't even pretend to follow the expected rules. Instead, it begins with a randomness that is accelerated as we move down through the list, the only apparent criterion being that each one should be even more surprising and interesting than the next.

• There are fourteen items in the list.

• The list is playful in a way that evokes playfulness: at least it does in me. This looks like fun. I'd like to play.

Possible self- (or classroom) assignments:

• Assume that the list is incomplete. Write the next ______ items in the list, keeping consistent as best you can with your spirit of what has gone before.
• Taking this list as flawed, draw up a better list, whatever better might mean to you.
• Write another list of about the same length that begins with the line "____________ are classified as follows:"
• Take any one of the items in the list and write a poem, story, or vignette in which one of these animals (for example, an animal that has just broken a flower vase) appears.
• Brainstorm another list on any topic that interests you, with an original logic of its own.

Regimentation

Okay, here I am on Saturday night, writing at this point for no real reason other than I've posted something eleven days in a row and having gotten this far I don't want to break the string. It's actually not a bad reason, and highlights the importance of establishing a regular working rhythm, even when it may not be immediately clear what the nature of the work will turn out to be. I am actually less interested at this point in what it turns out to be on any particular occasion than in setting in place a set of rhythms, behaviors, and habits that will foster the production of work of some kind getting done; my grounding assumption is that if I keep at it from time to time something surprising and interesting will show up. That's proven to be true in the past.

It's not unlike going on a diet, another set of behaviors and habits I'm attempting, after some gentle chastisement from Dr. Houk last week, to adopt. If I diet today and binge tomorrow, I'm not gonna lose weight, or even maintain the weight I carry now. I have to establish a set of parameters and stick it for as long as is necessary, which may turn out to be the entire rest of my life. Another truth, inconvenient thought it may be, proven true from my own experience. The operative question becomes, do I have the self-discipline needed to stick with it? Am I that kind of person? Well, sure I am. Except, of course, when I'm not.

So there's the writing regimen, the eating regimen, the exercise regimen, the art regimen (currently suspended), the work regimen, the prayer regimen, the sleep regimen. And then there's the likelihood that somewhere along the line all this regimentation is not going to sit well with that other part of my brain that resists robotization, that wants to break out once a while, that wonders, in the midst of all the earnestness and self-discipline and willed productivity, the fun is. I'm writing, but hey, I'm on vacation. I'm dieting, but hey, what's one cookie, more or less, going to matter? I need to sleep regular hours, but there's a poker game tomorrow night. If you want to play, you have to pay. Those are the rules.

So consider this my Letter from the Land of Dutifulness. Today I've walked, I've eaten in moderation, I've written. I haven't fallen off the wagon. Yet. Tomorrow is another day.

A is for Ox

Was walking this afternoon and discovered an old-school, high-shelved, narrow-aisled, used bookstore in the center of town. I walked around for a while and pulled a few books off the shelves from time to time. Found one I had not seen before in the art section entitled "A is For Ox," by David Goldman (Graphison, 1987) which turns out to be a profusely illustrated history of letters and typography. On the inside cover paper were these lines from Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Typography":

...the letter
was the mother
of the new banners;
the letters
begot
the terrestrial
stars
and the song the ardent hymn
that unites
peoples;
from
one
letter
added
to another
letter
and another,
from people to people went bearing
its sonorous authority,
and welling in the throats of men
it imposed the the clarity of the song...

There's something odd in the syntax toward the end (I'm not sure what the antecedent for "it" is in the last line, for example; might be a wrinkle in the translation, nor, more significantly, the subject of the verb "went"); but still, I liked it (the poem - especially the part about how the letters begot the terrestrial stars, which you have to admit is an original thought) and bought it (the book), as a souvenir and a spur to further investigations.

The title? Turns out the Hebrew word aleph, which meant ox, and being that oxen were often used as a means of exchange, there was a little graphic of an oxhead that eventually got simplified and turned into the letter we now know as "A." You learn something every day.

One Definition...

On the road today. Here's something pulled from the slipstream:

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being – not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses – but a human being, we call it poetry.

- Ted Hughes

Via 3wings

Still Life

One of the things that has happened during the several years now that I've been following various people with an interest in art on Tumblr is that I've become much more broadly aware of and attentive to still life as an artistic subgenre.

There's a tumblr blog called Still Life Quick Heart which consists entirely of still life postings. Here's one by an artist named Petra Reece that hit my dashboard today:

In any painting, abstract or representational, in doesn't matter, there are a limited number of variables to work with. You've basically got a blank space, a rectangle, and you need to put paint on it. Before or while doing so, you need to make some decisions about shapes, some decisions about color, some decisions relative proportions of light and dark, some decisions about texture and the extent to which the paint is recognizable as paint, or becomes a vehicle of some other content that so fully reaches the eye that the is essentially invisible. This painting is way over to the right on that scale. By way of contrast, this one, by Cezanne is further over to the left:

Cezanne is not trying to disguise the fact of the paint, on the contrary, he's left the brush strokes visible and rendered the whole thing in such a way that the handling of the paint is as much a part what is appealing about the picture as the three apples. 

Taking it one step further, Yuri Konstantinov puts together what at first glance looks like it might be an abstract, except that in the center the colors resolve somewhat gesturally into a tabletop, some roses, a window.

Then, way over on the left, you can find something like Nancy Gruskin's "Tablescape," which comes across mostly as a arrangement of pigment on a plane and only secondarily as a plate and a pear on a table.

I don't have a preference. I like all of 'em. But I'm intrigued by the various ways that individual artists answer the challenge of making a still life that makes us want to keep looking at it.

Flight Plan

So, yesterday. The crow thing. Goes back a ways, lot of angles. Standing at a kiosk at Tower Records in Cambridge (remember them?) one Saturday afternoon in 1993 sampling one track after another on August and Everything After, each one as good or better than the last. Further back, going out in the fields in Hillsdale at age thirteen with my .22-.410 over-and-under thinking maybe to shoot a crow. As if. First of all, they've got amazing eyesight. They have sentries posted, and they talk to one another. Raise a gun, raise your arm so it looks like it might be a gun, and they're in flight and out of range before you get a bead. Impressive. And curious, too, how they evolved the communal brain thing. Then there's the mythology angle. Familiars. Messengers. Harbingers of doom, croaking in a language no one understands. All those ravens bearing messages back and forth across Westeros.

Six years ago now—crows fly, time flies—I wrote a post about a poem: Grace Butcher's Crow is Walking, one I sometimes ask a new group of students to read and reflect upon, often as preliminary step toward Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Once I got going with Pinterest, it occurred to me to look and see if there were any pictures of crows or ravens out there. Little did I know. The thing about Pinterest? If you can conceive of it, there are people out there—probably a lot of people out there—who have boards devoted to it. So I started following some of those boards and accumulating my own little blackbird archive. Which is where the pictures from yesterday's post came from. Something different. A little exercise in juxtaposition.

What first got my attention with Counting Crows was the way their lyrics often broke free of literal sense in ways that felt both exact and exhilarating. When I think of heaven... I think of flying down into a sea of pins and feathers and all other instruments of faith and sex and God in the belly of a black winged bird. Yes. Yes. God, yes.

Counting Crows

When I think of heaven
Deliver me in a black-winged bird
I think of flying down into a sea of pins and feathers
And all other instruments of faith and sex and God
In the belly of a black-winged bird...

One for Sorrow

Two for Joy

Three for Girls

Four for Boys

Five for Silver

Six for Gold

Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told

There's a bird that nests inside you
Sleeping underneath your skin
When you open up your wings to speak
I wish you'd let me in

Lyrics from Counting Crows, August and Everything After
Pictures via Pinterest