The Heart of the Matter

Yesterday I had a visit from a teacher from Seattle who has been working with a framework for teaching critical thinking about the visual arts. The organization which has developed the methodology is calls itself VUE, which which stands for Visual Understanding in Education. The process that they have worked out, which is called VST (for Visual Thinking Strategies) involved presenting students with works of art and asking them three questions: "What is going on in this picture?" "What do you see that makes you say that?" and "What more can we find?" These particular questions were chosen after much deliberation and experimentation, and the documentation provided on the web site both explains the logic of the sequence and lays out some of the research findings validating its effectiveness. The basic premise seems to be that as students gain experience cycling through this set of questions, their observational skills improve, as does the their ability to think broadly and deeply about what they are seeing.

As I was looking through the documentation, I could sense some parallels between that sequence of questions and another sequence that I have been using for some time in my own sophomore critical thinking course. The three questions that I emphasize at the start of my course, and keep asking the students to keep cycling back through, are "What do you see?" What do you think about what you see?" and "What's another way to look at it?" I've illustrated the first two steps in the process in a previous post. The third step is perhaps the single most powerful move I know in the repertoire of critical thinking, what I sometimes call "the sideways move." The exact wording of the question can vary. "What more can we find?" is one phrasing, "What's another way to look at it?" is another. Or we might ask, "What's another point of view?" or "Let's assume tat everything that we've said so far is true, but doesn't get to the heart of the matter. What are we missing? What's significant that we haven't said yet? How do we get to the heart of the matter?"

I think the important factor, with the VUE methodology as with my own variation of it, is that students need to practice it often enough, and in enough different contexts (looking at a work of art, reading a poem, discussing a passage from a novel, reading a letter to the editor, considering a news story, etc.) that eventually the logic of the sequence becomes internalized, and the students begin to ask those sorts of questions on their own without prompting.

There are a lot of other critical thinking paradigms or modules or sequences of moves that are worth trying. But this is one of the ones that I've found to be most effective over the course of a semester. And I'm encouraged that the people associated with VUE have systematized it and are making an effort to share it.

The Flying Machine

The story that was pushing itself forward in my mind last night even as I was writing about The Poisonwood Bible was Ray Bradbury's classic little allegory, "The Flying Machine." One of the things I like about this story from a teacher's point of view is that it is readable at pretty much every level from upper elementary (I first encountered it in a Grade Six literary anthology) through college. It tells the story of the Emperor Yuan, whose serene contemplation of the beauty of the morning is interrupted by a servant who announces that a man is flying.

Update 7.20.07: The passages from the text quoted in my original post have been removed at the request of Don Congdon associates, Ray Bradbury's literary agents.

This elegant little parable raises what is perhaps the classic and defining questions in regard to sustainability. Because we can do something, does that mean we should do it? Does the availability of new technology carry with it a mandate to use it? Are there some kinds of progress that we would be better off without? Are there some rivers we should not cross?

(Image credit: http://www.gs.cidsnet.de/englisch-online/Grundkurs4/yeji.htm)

Such a River Should Not Be Crossed

A group of teachers at my school have been meeting regularly since last summer to explore ways to build cross-curricular connections between social studies, English, and science. We eventually narrowed the scope of our project down to sophomores, and decided on sustainability as an overall theme, and energy as an area of focus within that overall theme.

So today in class I was talking with my students about sustainability. At its most fundamental level, sustainability is simply about the question of how long we can keep doing what we have already been doing. Stay up late too often, and you won't be able to stay awake in class. Go without food and water long enough, and your organism shuts down. Keep taking water out of a reservoir faster than water flows back into it, and eventually the lake disappears. Exponentially increase the number of cars on the road as the supply of oil keeps diminishing, and you run out of oil. Run out of oil, and Oahu goes dark. (More than 90% of Oahu's electrical energy comes from petroleum.) Keep pumping pollutants into the atmosphere, and eventually human life cannot sustain itself.

In chemistry, all of the students are doing or will be studying and designing projects looking at energy use and energy conservation. In English, as we make our way into The Poisonwood Bible, the issue of sustainability arises in a variety of ways. One is whether, in the early sixties, the fledgling Republic of the Congo is going to be able to sustain itself in the presence of so many internal conflicts and external threats. (The answer, of course, turns out to be "No.")

Another has to to with the time, earlier in history, when the Congolese did have a stable, functioning, sustainable culture. Toward the end of the book, Leah describes that culture:

I've seen the drawings published by the first adventurers after they hurried back home to Europe. They reported that the Africans lived like kings, even wearing the fabrics of royalty: velvet, damask, and brocade. Their report was only off by a hair; the Kongo people made remarkable textiles by beating the fibrous bark of certain trees, or weaving thread from the raffia palm. From mahogany and ebony they made sculptures and furnished their homes. They smelted and forged iron ore into weapons, flutes, and delicate jewelry. The Portuguese marveled at how efficiently the Kingdom of the Kongo collected taxes and assembled its courts and ministries. There was no written language, but an oral tradition so ardent that when the Catholic fathers fixed the letters to the words of Kikongo, its poetry and stories poured into print with the force of a flood...

All food was consumed very near to where it was grown. And so no cities, no giant plantations, and no roads necessary for transporting produce from the one to the other. The kingdom was held together by thousands of footpaths crossing the forest, with suspension bridges of woven vines swinging quietly over the rivers. (520)

She re-creates a conversation that she has with her husband, imagining that they are taking a walk on one of those footpaths:

What happens we we come to the river?
We'll cross it, of course.
I laugh. It's as easy as that! And what if the ferry is stuck without a battery on the other side?
In the kingdom of the Kongo, Béene, no batteries. No trucks. No roads. They declined to invent the wheel because it looked like nothing but trouble in this mud. For crossing the river they have bridges that stretch from one great greenheart tree to another on the opposite bank...

"But what if it's a huge river," I asked him once—"like the Congo, which is much broader than the reach of any vine?"
"This is simple," he said. "Such a river should not be crossed." (521-2)

Such a river should not be crossed. How odd that sounds today, how contrary to the dominant impulse of our own culture, which demands constantly that we go further, build higher, buy lower, sell higher, do more, extend our reach outward as far as humanly possible. How much is enough? How much is too much? What is the price you pay for trying to have it all?

Is there anyone alive on this planet who does not know that petroleum reserves are limited and that petroleum use is growing and is projected to keep doing so? Is it possible that you could know that, you could do even the most rudimentary elements of the math, and not be concerned about what is going to happen when we run out? As I told the students today in class, we're looking at a problem here. If we don't make it our business to come up a solution, either by figuring out how to use less energy or by developing alternative energy sources, bad things are going to happen. How bad? I'd say unimaginably bad, except that people like Cormac McCarthy have already been at work imagining it.

Sustainability is a buzzword. But it's more than that. It's a matter of life and death as well. That's the challenge we all face, whether or not we choose to deal with it.

Speed Painting

A student posted this today on his blog. I think it's pretty amazing to watch, and a good example of how an artist is going to focus on the details until he gets it right.

Feeding the Beast

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.

- E.L. Doctorow

Once a cycle (six school days) I ask my students to hand in a piece of writing on a topic of their own choosing. I've been doing this for most of my teaching career and it's one of the most interesting aspects of what I get to do as a teacher of English. The stack of papers that I just got through reading included five poems, two excerpts from serial short stories, three personal narratives, and self-assignment based on a suggestion I had made in class, that the students might want, if they got stuck for something to write about, to select a passage from The Poisonwood Bible, which we are now reading together, and try to capture the look and feel of that piece of writing in a similar piece of their own.

I enjoy sitting down with a stack of cycle papers more than I enjoy sitting down with a stack of papers arising from a directed assignment. I like the fact that every piece is likely to be, is going to be, different, that I'm going to be able to get a some sort of read on how the author thinks about writing, and, often, about life, that each paper is going to pose a different kind of challenge to me in terms of how to respond, what to direct the student's attention to. I like the fact that I can approach each piece of writing with no preconceptions, no sense of what it supposed to look like or how it was supposed to be done, and try to meet it wherever it is.

Today after school I was meeting with a departmental subcommittee which is charged with coming up with a proposal to present to the whole department with regard to the structure of our elective program. We currently have a required set of core courses in English for freshman and sophomores, but juniors and seniors get to choose from a wide range of semester electives—nearly twenty in all, ranging from "Plato's Republic" to "Identity and Culture" to "Buddhist Philosophy and the Game of Go." We've been adding new electives from time to time, but we haven't been eliminating any, and it seemed like it was time for us to stop and consider the logic of the elective program as it relates to the whole four-year English program at our school. Why these courses? Why not others? Why electives instead of requirements?

Anyway, one of the topics of discussion today had to do with our writing electives: Creative Writing, Composition, Journalism, and Advanced Writing. And one of the questions we were considering was whether or not we should, at one extreme, require every student to take one of those four courses; or, at the other extreme, whether we should eliminate all the writing electives on the theory that writing should be an essential part of every English course the students take; a theory which, if you squint at it just right, makes the writing electives seem redundant and unnecessary.

This is one of those questions about which it's possible to make plausible arguments on both sides. In those situations, I tend to shift over to gut-level feelings, and today I found myself arguing for the requirement rather than the abolition. And the reason has something to do with what I was just saying about the cycle papers. My experience with English courses and with English teachers, not just at my current school but in the other schools I've taught at and the secondary schools I attended, as well as the schools my children attended, tells me that writing as it is taught in most regular English classes is a very particular kind of beast. It is a beast that feeds on literature and demands to be palliated by certain kinds of ritual obeisances, which are spelled out in rubrics and composition texts. I can't really argue that there's anything wrong with that, and I've fed that beast and taught its care and feeding to my students often enough; but it seems to me that there is something larger, something more fundamental, something altogether more mysterious and interesting about writing than I ever seem to be able to get to when I'm feeding the beast.

I think writing, real writing, as opposed to the kind of writing we most often ask students to do, has to begin, as I did tonight, with the writer facing a blank page and, ideally, an empty mind. That's what real writers do. Sure, there are lots of times when writing is a more or less utilitarian act: I need to crank out this proposal, write this explanatory article, reply to this email. In those instances I might very well know both what I am going to say and how I am going to say it. But that, for me, isn't what I think about when I think about writing. Donald Barthelme says, "The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do." That makes sense to me.

Writing in this sense has to do with character, with the spirit: it has an embedded set of ethical principles, and a corresponding set of necessary virtures: Andre Dubus put it this way: "At the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul."

How many of us ever experienced writing in this way in high school or in college? How often do we make it possible for our students to experience writing in this way? Given the multiple simultaneous demands of the average English course—compounded for many teachers my the looming presence of state-mandated "competency" exams, how many of us are able to provide our students with the space and time and freedom and encouragement to become writers, as opposed to students who know how to write? I do what I can. I often feel it is not enough. But I want to keep the thought alive. Just because the beast wants to eat, doesn't mean I have to feed him.

Kailua Moonrise

Sitting with friends on Kailua Beach;
One of them points over my shoulder
To the mooon rising behind the clouds.

These are the times...

Long day today. Got a phone call from a teacher who had gotten an email from a parent expressing concern about possible safety concerns in regard to public access to student blogs. It's a legitimate concern, and one that we've tried to be thoughtful about. I spent much of the day communicating first with the parent, and then with several administrators in our technology department, in regard to how best to address the parent's concerns. But my conversations confirmed that this is a difficult conversation to manage to everyone's satisfaction.

On the one hand, the whole point of blogs, and of the Web 2.0 paradigm, is that it's about connectivity. Blogs and wikis allow students to communicate with one another in ways that enhance the classroom conversation, and also to communicate with students from other classes, other schools, and even other countries, as in the 1001 Flat World Tales Project that Clay Burrell is organizing in his school in Korea and to which our students in Hawaii are contributing.

Classroom blogs and wikis also allow educators nationwide to compare best practices and to celebrate student work with other teachers and students throughout the world, and in so doing extend the work of the classroom into the realm of public service: we are trying to model for one another what is possible and what works. At a purely philosophical level I believe in the power of transparency: I believe that we are all—parents, students, and teachers—well served when we can see what each other is doing. Blogs and other online resources are like windows into the world of the classroom: they allow people to see in and they encourage our students to look outside.

On the other hand, at the real-world level, there is always the potential for danger out there. It is possible that even if we are making strong efforts to safeguard the anonymity of our students someone could glean enough information from the web site to identify and target one of our students, which is something we would all wish to avoid. In an email to the school President, the parent in question pointed to a picture of a birthday party at a restaurant that a student had posted and speculated that someone could infer that this was a child whose parents had money. He pointed to another post in which the student, whose own last name was not posted, referred by name to the president of the sophomore class at Punahou. He pointed to another post with a picture of the author in which the author talked about being on the tennis team. In the parent's judgment, these were all "leaks" that he apparently thinks should be plugged.

I don't have any idea how to evaluate or quantify that risk, or to measure against the risks we take every single day when we get up in the morning and walk out the door. Anyone who saw a student being dropped off at Punahou by parents driving an Acura or a Beemer could conclude that the parents are persons of means. Does that mean we should insist that students arrive by bus? Anyone who picked up a copy of the school newspaper could determine the results of the class elections and the names of the student officers. Does that mean we should eliminate stories about students from the newspaper? Anyone who attended a sporting event at Punahou—girls' basketball, for example—would see each of the players introduced on the public address system, and see the names printed out in the box scores on the Honoulu papers the next day. Does that mean that we shut spectators out of the gym? Punahou has a very liberal policy in terms of students leaving the campus: upperclassmen are generally allowed to leave campus when they are not in school, and a great many of them do. Someone looking to do harm might take advantage of that too. Does that mean we should forbid students to leave?

We are none of us invisible. The question at hand is how to manage the tradeoff between freedom and security, between increased connectivity and increased visibility.

One solution, which the parent endorsed, was to create a blog environment in which the only people who can access the blog are the people in that particular class. That way you would get the advantage of learning to use the technology and of being able to carry on a dialogue without opening the window to outsiders. In certain situations, that might work, but it sacrifices the benefits of having student work placed before a larger audience.

Another solution is to allow parents the option to simply opt out of whatever blog component there is in the class. A letter would be sent home explaining what we are doing and why and how we are doing it, and parents could give permission, or withhold it. That seems to be the direction that we're heading in right now. This weekend I'm going to be drafting that letter, and I will probably post it here tomorrow in case any of you who have been down this road can give us useful feedback.

I'm sure there are other options as well, but I'm running out of gas at this point. I'd be very interested in whatever feedback any of you may have at this point.

Begging the Question

Today I had a student come in for a conference to talk about a piece of writing she had done for the 2007 Hawaii Youth Peace Essay Award Contest. This is a highly motivated, formidably competent writer, one of the most capable and highly motivated students I have ever met, who had stated in her reflection on the paper she wrote that "I think one of my major weaknesses in English and writing in general is writing essays with a thesis or ones with a prompt... I am definitely able to do short stories or write about whatever topics l like. What scares me the most is that when the time comes to process my thoughts into a smooth, clean, strong paper, I crag up and all of a sudden, I feel that I'm incapable of writing such a paper." The student was looking for feedback about how to do better on this kind of assignment, and I found myself in a familiar quandary: having to give advice to a student about how to do something well that may very well not be worth doing at all.

For the record, here's the essay prompt:

Hawaii is a multicultural environment. Hawaiians trace their ancestors in these islands thousands of years; others arrived just a couple of hundred years ago. Many residents are newcomers. How does the mix of cultures and races contribute to the aloha spirit? How do you keep the aloha spirit alive in your family, school, and church? How do you reach out to and appreciate the uniqueness of others who are of a different race or cultural background?

The students are asked to respond to this question (there were other, somewhat similar choices, but this is the one this student opted to answer) "in a well-organized, well-reasoned essay of no more than 500-800 words." The instructions stipulate that "Points will be deducted from essays exceeding the 800 word limit. The word count includes (the, and, a) and quotations."

On the one hand, it's a reality that students are going to be asked to do this kind of writing, in essay contests, on the SAT, in some classes, for college admissions, and in the context of semester exams in college ("You have three hours in which to write essay answers to each of the following six questions.") And since this is a student who has willingly taken the task upon herself and wants to do well, I'd like to be able to give her some useful advice.

On the other hand, the task is at any realistic level a preposterous and self-annihilating imposition. The breadth of the topic combined with the (arbitrary and ridiculous) word limit encourage the students, almost guarantees that the students, are going to wind up writing, well, like this:

The more knowledgable we are of the different ways of life, the more power we have to adapt and easily establish peace between one another. With respect, acceptance, and group effort, I believe that having an immense multicultural environment can further build the aloha spirit that has kept the people of the islands together from the past, to the present, and for the future.

or

As individuals, we must respect and accept one another; however, working together and sharing, as a whole or as a state, is essential to sustaining the aloha spirit for the future. Those who are able to keep the aloha spirit and share it with one another are able to teach and share with those who are new to the islands.

or

With Hawaii's multi-cultural environment, sustaining the strong existence of aloha spirit with the islands requires acceptance, respect, and our own actions. We must accept each other, taking into consideration our individual personalities and cultures. If we are able to open ourselves out to others, we give them a chance to be, and with that, we can adjust to make our life on these small islands a much more peaceful and welcoming environment.

Having written this, the student, admirably, sensed that something wasn't quite right. It wasn't satisfying to her, and she suspected, correctly, that it wasn't going to be satisfying to her readers either.

As I explained to her, I think part of the problem lies with the assignment itself (and the school culture which has produced it). We tell students, all the time to do things that are arbitrary and transparently stupid: to limit themselves, in a topic that demands thought and extension, to 800 words; to complete a "well-reasoned, well-organized essay" in 25 minutes, as if such a thing were remotely possible. And then, since the task is impossible, we teach them formulaic tricks ("Thesis, three arguments, restate the thesis") that will allow them to hobble to the finish line in the assigned time, and we deduct points if they don't follow the formulas. I don't think we should be surprised when the results of such assignments are not representative of what the students know or can do.

That much said, there are also problems with the strategies she employed to meet the challenge. The student put in a valiant effort. But the problem, and the reason the essay doesn't work, despite the her obvious control of the language and her stated desire to make her point clear and convincing, is that the essay never pushes down from the level of large generalities to the level of specifics. And the problem with generalities is that they are of their very nature going to wind up sounding over-familiar and clichéd. As I read, my imagination, the picture-making part of my brain, waits for the movie to start running, and by the time I get to the end I'm still waiting.

So how do we get around that? Well, we need to get that movie rolling. The example that I shared with the student is a short essay in the form of a poem by Stephen Dobyns:

Where We Are

After Bede

A man tears a chunk of bread off the brown loaf,...
then wipes the gravy from his plate. Around him
at the long table, friends fill their mouths
with duck and roast pork, fill their cups from
pitchers of wine. Hearing a high twittering, the man

looks to see a bird—black with a white patch
beneath its beak—flying the length of the hall,
having flown in by a window over the door. As straight
as a taut string, the bird flies beneath the roofbeams,
as firelight flings its shadow against the ceiling.

The man pauses—one hand holds the bread, the other
rests upon the table—and watches the bird, perhaps
a swift , fly toward a window at the far end of the room.
He begins to point it out to his friends, but one is
telling hunting stories, as another describes the best way

to butcher a pig. The man shoves the bread in his mouth,
then slaps his hand down hard on the thigh of the woman
seated beside him, squeezes his fingers to feel the firm
muscles and tendons beneath the fabric of her dress.
A huge dog snores on the stone hearth by the fire.

From the window comes the clicking of pine needles
blown against the glass by an October wind. A half moon
hurries along behind scattered clouds, while the forest
of black spruce and bare maple and birch surrounds
the long hall the way a single rock can be surrounded

by a river. This is where we are in history - to think
the table will remain full; to think the forest will
remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of
good fortune will save us from the night - a bird flies in
from the dark, flits across a lighted hall and disappears.

from Black Dog, Red Dog
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980

There are thirty lines in the poem, twenty-five and a half of which are pretty much straight cinematography. Only in the last sentence does Dobyns reach toward the generality, the theme, the idea the narrative illustrates: "This is where we are in history." The poem presents itself, essentially, as a picture and a caption, and the function of the caption is to tell us how to read the picture.

Dobyns could have written an essay in which he would say things like

Humans have a tendency to be greedy and shortsighted and given over to immediate physical pleasures, with consequences that are already visible all around us, and likely to get worse. We have run roughshod over the natural world, we have depleted our food and energy resources, we have polluted the air and the water and the soil. The more knowledgeable we become about the different ways we are hurting ourselves, the more power we will have to change things for the better.

But that writing would not have the texture, the interest, the emotional or intellectual impact of what he did write. His poem runs a movie in my mind which convinces because of the precision of its details and the authority of its language.

So if the assignment is to write an essay about the aloha spirit, we shouldn't be very far into the essay before we meet our the next door neighbor, Mr. Ka'ae'ali'i, who gets up each morning to sweep the street in front of his house to keep the neighborhood looking good; or hear the story of the junior high school girls who decided to go to the Shriner's Hospital every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas to make decorations and read to the children in the burn center.

The move toward specificity is what keeps writing—whether it be poetry, prose, or fiction—alive. I don't think it's impossible to write write well under the gun. But I don't think it's easy, either. And unless we are careful about how we frame our assignments and how we communicate our expectations to the students, I don't think we should be surprised when they struggle.

Billy Collins at Iolani

Billy Collins was in town tonight, giving a reading at Iolani School, where he has been "in residence" this week. He read his poems with his characteristic deadpan humor, offering comments in between. It was a very pleasant, listener-friendly evening. Here, by way of illustration, are a few of the poems with his introductory comments:

...I'm referring to the outcropping of gated communities and condo developments that are occurring all over America. And apart from just the ecological despoliation involved, I'm always, as someone who's conscious of language, really taken with the names of them, and typically the names are things like "Deer Hollow" and "Badger Meadows" and so forth, and it always strikes me that these are actually the epitaphs for the creatures who have been driven off in order to create these condos. So I wrote this poem on the subject, and I was saying to the students that usually I don't like to know where I'm going in a poem, I find it more interesting to just follow the drift of a certain thought and see where it goes, but in this case I pretty much knew what I wanted to say about this, I had an opinion, which I usually don't write out of opinions, and that's why I wrote it as a sonnet, because I kind of knew what it was and I could fit it into a box. I called it "The Golden Years" because my sense of the speaker is that he is a fellow of retirement age.

The Golden Years


All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasants to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.

Sure, I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I'll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

I was reading, I don't know why it must have been a low point in my life, but I was reading a book on how to write fiction (laughter)—contemplating a career change—and I came across a page of dos and don'ts, a very basic book, and one of the don'ts I had heard of before, I think, and it kind of popped out of the book, and I used it as an epigraph for this poem, and the "Don't" was "Never use the word suddenly just to create tension." And the example that was given was "I pointed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. Suddenly, shots rang out." (Laughter) So it's a cheap way to keep the reader on edge. So I thought, well, that's fiction, but I don't write fiction, so poetry doesn't have to adhere to these dos and don'ts, so the result was the poem, which is called "Tension."

Tension

“Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension.”
—Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and, beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
Another drip from the faucet?
Another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.

The sun rose ever higher.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountain to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats
suddenly fringed with little colorful, dangling balls.

We were talking again in class, or I was running out of my mouth about how, the bigger the subject you take on in a poem, the smaller the approach, that often you need a tiny thing, an aperture, a keyhole, that you can look into this bigger room instead of just bursting through the door. And this is an example, I think, of that, it's a poem that's about something that American children do in the summertime, and it's called "The Lanyard."

The Lanyard

Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

I went to a pretty ordinary camp. I had friends who went to fancier camps, and there was a wider variety of things to be made at their camp. For me, it was potholder, lanyard. I chose the lanyard, "and that has made all the difference." (Laughter). But friends of mine would come back from camp, and they had kilns—I didn't know what a kiln was, but they would make these ceramic things—oh, the third thing you could make was an ashtray of tin, which just meant you took a piece of tin and hammered on it for two weeks, and gave to your father and explained to him that it was an ashtray, instead of just a piece of battered tin—these more privileged children would come home with these cups, they'd make ceramic cups, but they weren't bright enough to put a handle on them, so they were about as useful as they lanyard, and one mother told me, after I had read that poem one night, that these cups are referred to as "lanyard holders."

One little insider tip that I like to give students of poetry is that if you get stuck in a poem, just have a dog come into it, and it will kind of get you out of your self absorbtion for a few lines... dog's just tend to cheer things up when they arrive. But the problem with that is it's a very risky genre because things can get very quickly sentimental, a poem about any kind of house pet, a gold fish, whatever, can get moist, a little maudlin, so again, this is another poem, one of the few poems where I set out with an agenda, I wanted to write a poem about a dog that was as free of sentimentality as I could make it, and the reason the poem is called "The Revanant," which is the word for the day - a revenant is simply a ghost that comes back to pay you a visit:

The Revenant

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you -- not one bit.
When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.
I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair to eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.
I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and -- greatest of insults -- shake hands without a hand.
I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.
You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.
The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.
While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all of my strength
not to raise my head and howl.
Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place
except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner --
that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

D-E-F-G

uring the afternoon, after I get home from school, it's been my habit to sit down with the newspaper, browse for the very few minutes it takes me to get drowsy, and then take a nap for anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour to let my batteries recharge. Over the last two weeks, I've broken that pattern and begun establishing another, which is to grab my camera and either jump in the car and go somewhere, or just go for a walk in the neighborhood and get some air. Yesterday I did both. I went out to get a sandwich around 4:00, and then, when I came back, decided that I wasn't quite ready to settle in with my schoolwork yet, so after I put the car in the garage I took my camera and started walking.

ach time I go out with my camera I have a couple of things in mind. On the one hand having the camera with me is mostly an excuse for being outside with something like a purpose. On the other hand, I like the way that having the camera focuses my alertness and keeps me looking. Sometimes I have no clear sense of what I'm looking for; I'm just there with the camera in case something turns up. (I'm reminded of what Flannery O'Connor side with regard to writing: "Every morning between 9:00 and 12:00 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.") Other times, I am on a hunt, I am actively looking for something. That's what I was doing yesterday. I had been reading a book on photography which had a brief passage about Edward Weston and how in the early days of Polaroid photography he had gone out put together a book of photographs based on letters of the alphabet. It was rainy off and on yesterday afternoon, so I wanted to walk close to home. I decided as a kind of experiment to see how many letters of the alphabet I could find as I walked. Photographs of actual letters were ruled out; I was going to try to find the shapes in the physical objects around me.


inding the letters was easy at first. Some of them more or less jumped out at me, and since I had the whole alphabet to work with, there were a lot of possibilities. Then as I went along and started eliminating letters, it got harder to find plausible renditions of the remaining letters. But I was interested in the way the particular mission I had set for myself was changing the kind of experience I was having when I was walking. Instead of seeing the buildings or the trees or the people whole as I normally would, I was looking at intersections and junctures and shapes and shadows. There were a number of times when I more or less lost track of where I was and looked up in surprise some minutes later. A number of people smiled somewhat warily at me as they walked by me while I was bent over a bit of chain-link fence or the top of a cactus; it occurred to me that I might be cementing my reputation as the neighborhood oddball.


etting the whole alphabet put together is going to take a while, but it should be an entertaining pursuit. It's not a project that has any real purpose or payoff, just a kind of noodling around with an idea. I hadn't actually thought of doing anything with the letters until I started writing tonight's post, and had the idea of using the pictures I was going to share anyway as drop caps. So the whole enterprise this evening is a kind of novelty. I didn't know what I was going to wind up doing until I did it, and now it sort of looks like it's done, or at least this part of it is done, for now. This is the kind of thing I might often have done in my original physical commonplace book, freehand of course, but it's a little trickier to pull it off given the formal constraints of the blog. But this has been an entertainment, a confection, a concoction. It'll do for now.

101 Days

I've been at this now for 101 days. I started Throughlines on November 17 of last year, and have been able to keep up with my initial intention to post something each day, even though yesterday's post, as one of my close friends was busting me about, "shouldn't have counted," because it was essentially just a link to a video. In any case, there's an exercise I ask my students to do from time to time, by way of taking stock, and I'm thinking this is as good a time as ever to do it myself. The exercise is a self-assessment in the form of three questions: Where are you now? Where are you trying to get to? and How might you get there?

Where are you now?

Well, I'm a hundred days in. It's been probably the single most productive period in my writerly life. I started out wanting to find out what the whole point was about blogging, and to learn enough to try to find a way to make it work as a tool in my classes. And that has happened. One of my classes is blogging away happily, one of my classes is using a wiki, I've started a blog for the department, and a number of individual teachers, listed on the department site, have jumped in on their own. I've been able to explore a lot of connections, throughlines, running through my head and my teaching practice. I've started to find my way around the edublog community and have been inspired and gratified by the large number of thoughtful and dedicated teacher-bloggers who are trying to do the best by their students and to sustain a serious professional dialogue online. I've been blown away by the crossfunctionality of so many emerging technical tools: flickr, skype, google docs, google reader, youtube, pageflakes, podomatic, and God knows how many more. Three months ago I knew nothing about any of these things. Three months now seems like a long time ago.

I'm reading more every day than I ever have, but I'm reading differently. I've got RSS feeds coming in by the dozens each day, but I'm having trouble finishing books. I've got a stack of brand new books waiting for me by my easy chair, and there are so many things going on in my head that I don't have time to get to them. I've written very little poetry lately, and I'm not even napping the way I used to. I don't know whether this kind of continuous tech-assisted intellectual stimulation is sustainable. At some point I'm going to have to take a deep breath, back off, make some decisions about boundaries, but right now it's still pretty fresh and exciting, and I feel like I'm learning a ton and like the time that I'm spending is time well spent. I collapse into bed at the end of the day and my brain is exhausted. I'm asleep in minutes.

Where are you trying to get to?

I think this is a real essential question for me, and I don't really have an answer for it yet. I'd like to be able to find a sustainable pattern. I've had arthritis in my body for 16 years and I've been able to keep it pretty much at bay because I've worked out a series of stretches and strengthening exercises that I do the first thing in the morning every day without fail in the darkness on the living room rug before the sun has risen. It takes me about 20 minutes, which is enough to have the desired effect and not so long that I'm ever tempted to skip it. I'd like to be able to find the blogging equivalent of that rhythm. Over the last three months I've averaged probably an hour to two hours a day of blog-related just in terms of the writing, and I don't think that's sustainable in the long run, given that I have other responsibilities as a teacher a student (of piano, among other things), a department head, a father, a husband. Plus I need to exercise during the day as well, mostly by walking. And I need to sleep. Right now I have three sets of student papers waiting for me, and I'd like to have them for the kids tomorrow. So the time that I am spending doing this is time I'm spending not doing that.

In a year, I'd like to have some applications and some templates in place that will assist my students in their journeys toward quality in reading and in writing and in thinking and in the conduct of their lives. The question has been raised in a number of quarters recently (like in this post at Borderland ) about why we blog in the first place, and whether we perhaps shouldn't. To me the answers to that question are pretty transparent. I've always been a believer in the discipline of writing, and the value add in blogging is that you not only get to explore but you are able to make connections with other explorers. I'm aware that there are bloggers out there who are doing what they do for entirely different reasons than that, and some for reasons that I do not admire or respect, but that's not really a problem. I don't think they have any interest in what I am trying to do, and I have no interest in what they're trying to do, so we basically don't exist for one another. But I do think that in a year I would like to be part of, and do what I can to support, the community of teachers who are trying to use technology to make learning more interesting and exciting and sustainable for our students.

How are you going to get there?

A few thoughts, resolutions maybe, in the form of a list:

• I want to use Throughlines as a space to talk to myself, and to anyone else who is interested, about how to read and write and teach well.
• Having come this far, I'm going to give myself permission to take a day or two off, especially when I'm tired, or conversely, when I'm onto a Big Idea that is going to take longer to work out than I have on any given day to spend on it. It's been a good ride, but there have been times when I would have been better off building longer and hitting the "Publish" button less frequently.
• I've gotten the framework set up for my students, and so far, in the first month or so of class, I've pretty much made the preliminary decisions about what's to go up on the sites. But it was my intention all along to invite their input and let them start to shape these spaces in ways that work for them, so that's something I need to do more of, starting now.
• Some of my colleagues, notably Chris Watson, have gotten involved with other teachers across the world and initiated larger projects which at this point almost make my head start spinning. I don't feel I have enough space left in my brain to stake out yet another territory, but I want to keep an eye on what they're doing and at some point try to get my foot in the door.

I'd like to close this post with a sincere thank you to all of you who have been reading this blog and giving me feedback about what you see here. I've appreciated your comments and support, and I've learned just an amazing amount from following what you have been writing in each of your own spaces. The cliché about teaching has always been that it's an isolating profession. What I've learned is that it doesn't have to be.

It's 10:00. Do you know where your legislators are?

Genuinely interesting:



Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Standard Lecture #37

Yesterday I found myself repeating to my sophomores a speech I have made enough times that it's become almost calcified. But it gets at something that I believe to be both true and at least potentially significant. It goes something like this:

You're about to start reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. (A few smiles, a chorus of groans.) You've seen and talked with many other students at your grade level who have already been reading the book. I don't know what the word on the street is, but I do know this: at the end of the semester I always ask students to tell me which one book they think we should get rid of, and which one book they think we should keep. And by a margin of about five to one, The Poisonwood Bible is the one that students tell me we should keep.

Not everyone likes the book, of course. It's a long book, it is a book that is going to challenge some of your thinking, it's a book that is in all likelihood unlike any other book you have read up to this point. So I'm going to ask you not to judge the book before we get started. Think of it this way. Of all the people who have ever read this book (or pretty much any other book you are likely to encounter in school) there are a certain number of readers, perhaps a majority, who are going to enjoy reading it, get something out of it, and look back on the reading as having been a valuable experience. Likewise, there is a somewhat smaller group of readers who are going to dislike reading it, not get anything out of it, and, if they manage to finish the book at all, are going to look at it as being a waste of time. Let's represent the two groups this way:

Now, we have to add another factor into the picture: you. As you consider those two groups, I'd like you to think about the question of which group you would prefer to belong to.

Because here's my argument: you do have a choice. It's possible to be the kind of reader who will enjoy the book and get something out of it, and it's possible to be the kind of reader who won't. And which group you wind up in has a lot to do with how you go about reading the book. I had a teacher once who told my class that most good books teach you how to read them well as you go along. In the beginning the book may be confusing or frustrating or hard to get into, but if you stay with it and pay attention to the cues the book is giving you, you can learn to be the kind of reader that particular book needs you to be.

In my experience most students start with the assumption that a book is good or it isn't, and that whether or not it is good has mostly to do with the book itself and very little to do with them. I'd like to start suggest that you try out a different assumption: that whether or not a book is good for you has mostly to do with whether or not you can teach yourself to be the kind of reader that book wants you to be.

That's the real reason we're in school, and why when we're in school we read books. It's not about this particular book at all. It's about whether, in the course of getting a high school education, you can learn how to be a flexible, creative reader, a reader who can adapt to whatever you are asked to read and do it successfully. If you can do that, everything that you have to study in junior year, senior year, college, and beyond will be easier for you than it will be for the student who is stuck with the reading skills he had in fourth grade.

If you are reading a book and the way you are reading the book isn't working for you, you basically have three options. First, you could keep doing what doesn't work, which will probably be frustrating and angst-inducing and generally a bad scene. Second, you could just give up and reach for the Spark Notes or just try to fake your way through it; the problem is that even if you get away with it, which you probably won't, you will have forfeited whatever chance you had to actually learn something during the five weeks we will be spending on this book. Third option: you try brainstorming some ideas about how to read the book in a different way.

Let me give you an example. (I should warn you that this is my version of the story, and that if you asked somebody else they might give you a different version. But bear with me.) Several years ago, before you arrived at the academy, we had a program at Punahou called "The Book in Common." At the end of each school year, everyone—the students, the teachers, the administrators, the secretaries, the maintenance staff—was given a copy of the same book, with the agreement that we would all read the book over the summer. A different book was chosen each year, and it was really nice because when we came back in the fall there were lots of interesting conversations that took place in class and out of class and at lunch about the book we had all read in common, and it was one way of helping to pull a very large community into the same conversation. And they'd usually invite the author to come to the school during the year and speak at assemblies and meet with people who wanted to talk about the book. So that was interesting, too.

But it was always the English department that chose the book, and at a certain point in time the teachers in the other departments said, "Hey, why don't we rotate the choice of book so that different departments get to choose?" So they put together a committee and figured out a rotation and the department that got to go first chose Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, which is set of essays about famous scientists who studied the origins of diseases. I had actually read Microbe Hunters when I was in junior high school and remembered some of the scientists (Pasteur, Leeuwenhoek) and remembered liking it when I read it then.

But as soon as I opened my brand spanking new copy of Microbe Hunters at the start of the summer vacation and started reading, I went, "Uh, oh." I wasn't much liking the book, and I suspected, correctly as it turned out, that most of the students would hate it. Now I could have done what most of the students did, and simply tossed the book aside after the first few pages. But I said to myself, no, we have this book-in-common program and I think it's a good thing, so I'm going to work through this, and in order to do that I'm going to have to shift gears. So instead of reading this book for information, which is what I might have expected to do, I'm going to read this book in order to find out what is bugging me about it. I'm going to read with a highlighter in my hand and I'm going to mark all the passages that irk me or make me feel angry or frustrated and try to figure out why I'm having such a hard time.

Well, a funny thing happened. First of all, I was able to nail down pretty quickly a few things that were affecting my reading. One thing was the author's sense of humor, or what he thought was funny, that wasn't coming across as humorous 80 years later. Another thing was that he had a kind of unusual, formal way of putting his sentences together, and that took some getting used to. But the most important thing was that I had turned the process of reading into a kind of detective hunt, looking for clues to what was making the reading hard for me, and that got to be kind of fun and got me far enough into the book that I started to be realize that the things that were bugging me weren't that important and that there were a lot of other interesting ideas and stories to pay attention to. The more I read, the more I enjoyed the book, and by the time I was done I was pretty happy with it.

So when I came back in the fall all ready to talk about the book with my classes, everyone looked at me like I must be out of my mind. "Read that book?" "No way!" "I didn't get past the first page!" "That was an awful book!" And so on. As it turns out, the reaction against the book was so strong that the next year they just let the whole book-in-common thing slide. So that was the book that killed the Book in Common.

Which, I think, is unfortunate. Understandable, perhaps, but unfortunate. Because if enough people had been willing to adjust their reading strategies to be able to become the readers that book needed them to be, we all might have been able to learn something from one another, and from the experience. And it seems to me that that is what we are here for.

So as we begin The Poisonwood Bible, try to keep an open mind. If the book is working for you, fine. If it isn't, ask yourself what you might do differently. If you have trouble coming up with something, come and see me about it, or bring it up in class, and we'll try to figure it out. My hope, my wish for you, is that reading this book will be an enjoyable and worthwhile. Let's try to make that happen.

Eros and Eris

Took my camera with me to Ala Moana Shopping Center tonight. Was taking pictures more or less at random, and then startled myself when I got this in the viewfinder and took the shot.

Confluence

This is a poem that I first drafted one night in early January when my son was home on break from college. There was a restlessness in the weather that matched my own (I'm rarely up at midnight) and then I was writing it I heard my son at work in his bedroom music studio, manifesting a different kind of purposeful restlessness.

I let the poem sit for a while and then brought it to Joe Tsujimoto's writing group yesterday afternoon, where I got some useful feedback that gave me a way to go back into it. Probably not done yet, but getting there:

Confluence

The wind is up tonight, tearing at the louvres, sweeping
along the outside walls of our condo and clutching
at the corners with distraught whistles and moans.
It seems to seek a space in which to flow free, a world
flat and frictionless, mirror-smooth beneath the blackened sky.

In the next room, my son stitches syncopated rhythms
and fragments of songs into a beat to back the rap
that even now is on his lips, pulsing forward, words emerging,
surging, swirling in search of a shape that will hold the freight
of his urge to create a sound that is fresh and seductive and true.

Then there’s me, alone in the living room at ten before midnight,
pencil in hand, trying to lay the loose ends of my thoughts
into a line of syllables that will tame the restless currents
flowing through my mind, assume a shape that satisfies
and sends me off content at last into the stillness of sleep.

56 Hours

At the end of yesterday's post I alluded to some dilemmas. My shorthand notation for the primary dilemma is "56 hours." At Punahou we have a modular schedule. Most of our classes meet four days out of each six-day cycle for a total of 14 cycles per semester. 56 hours. 56 hours in which I have some kind of a mandate, stated or implied, to have the students read a certain quantity of books and essays and stories and poems; work on improving writing skills in each of several genres; make progress with such other basic skills as sentence level coherence and accuracy and vocab development and mastery of MLA conventions; prepare for the PSAT and SAT; focus on critical thinking skills; learn how to work effectively with one another in small groups; articulate and examine their own essential questions; complete various homework assignments and individual and group projects; reflect on their status as citizens of the world: you get the picture. I'm very much aware of the time passing by during each month, each week, each class period. Maybe you have more hours. In my previous school it was more like 85 hours per class per semester It still wasn't enough.

Marco's afternoon workshop, which I did not write about yesterday, enacted the dilemma in miniature. There were perhaps thirty teachers present, and we had all been asked to bring a video camera with the understanding that we would have a one-hour workshop in How to Produce a Very Short Film. But before we could begin, Marco wanted to share with us some of what teaches his students about "the grammar of film." He ran us through some basic concepts and showed us some really interesting film clips to illustrate what he was talking about and the next thing you know we looked up and the hour was up and we hadn't picked up our cameras yet.

I didn't have a problem with that. Everything Marco had to say was interesting and relevant. But, as it turned out, as it always turns out, There Was Just Not Enough Time. I've had enough experience with using film with classes to know that whatever amount of time I think I can break loose from the list of things I feel committed to trying to accomplish in my class, it's not going to be enough. And if it involves videotaping, fuggeddaboutit. Videotape projects always take four or five or six times more hours than you think they are going to. And that's assuming things go well: that the software does what it's supposed to do, that the hard drive doesn't crap out on you, that someone doesn't inadvertently record over half of your almost-finished project before you get a chance to burn it to DVD.

So the question is, how many of my 56 hours can I play around with? How much of what we do when we are filming or blogging or Googling or whatever we are doing can be integrated with what we already are signed up to do so that we are approaching core content in a novel but still effective way?

A second dilemma that I have been turning over in my mind, and that I have heard others discussing, has to do with demographics. Marco is working in a poverty area in Los Angeles County, and by his own admission the kids he is working with are not channeled toward academic success as it has been traditionally assessed in schools. So, as I wrote yesterday, Marco is actively seeking out alternative channels which offer students a greater chance of success. But Punahou is private school with a population of students who by virtue of having been admitted are precisely the kinds of kids who have shown they can succeed in a traditional academic setting. So what does that mean for us? On the one hand, it would seem ridiculous to say that because these kids are academically successful, they don't really need the (further?) advantages that technological competence would give them. On the other hand, there is a certain plausible systemic inertia along the lines of "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" Despite their supposed advantages, a large number of my students—well, pretty much all of them—do in fact still have significant things to learn about writing well and writing well and thinking well. So is technology going to help us do those things better, or is it a distraction, a red herring?

And then today I had a visit from a teacher from a private school in Seattle where the students have been using laptops in all of their classes for several years. He had just sat in on a number of classes, and admitted that he felt a certain wistfulness when he walked in and saw kids sitting at their desks with books and pens and notebooks. He seemed to feel that there was a kind of attentiveness, a collected connectedness, in the room which is not always present when everyone is sitting with a screen in front of them, for which he now feels a certain nostalgia.

I'll close this reflection by giving the floor to Tim, a colleague in my department, who sent out this (encouraging) email today to a number of us:

It is kind of intimidating to think that every assignment I ever give may become obsolete due to technological changes. In over twenty years of teaching, I think it's probably accurate to say that at least 75% of the time I've started class by saying, "Take out a sheet of paper." The idea that suddenly kids won't bring paper to class, while not a bad thing -- especially from an environmental perspective -- does make the insecure side of me say, "What the heck am I going to do now?" That said, I think it's important to realize that Marco Torres is not a good teacher because he uses technology; he is a good teacher because he takes his students seriously, because he has a passion to see them grow and prosper, and because he is an imaginative, personable guy with a set of skills that work well in high school classrooms. If Torres happened to be born in a different era, and if his teaching prime came, say, 30 years ago, he still would be a great teacher, though he'd probably be doing something other than using iMovie and GarageBand.

His talk made me realize -- and I found this comforting -- that good teaching is not a result of good use of technology, but that technology can be a helpful tool to enhance things that we already do well...

I appreciate what [our tech coordinators] are doing to get us to think about ways to use technology, and I hope I can take greater advantage of their expertise. That said, I'm not worried that the art of teaching is suddenly changing. In fact art is a good analogy: just because digital photography and new media give artists all sorts of new challenges and opportunities, this doesn't mean there isn't value in learning how to paint with brushes, shoot pictures with 35 mm cameras, and draw with pen and ink. So my overall point here is that we should all feel pretty good about the state of teaching at Punahou, and we should remind each other not to panic too much about how the world is changing. It is in some ways for sure. And in other ways, the more things change the more they stay the same...

Our students will figure out how to negotiate the gaps between "old school" and "new." I can think of small steps I can take into the ed. tech realm that can lead, eventually, to bigger steps. As we share big ideas and as we re-train ourselves to use technology, perhaps we can also share our ideas for small, incremental steps. Eventually the big leapers and the small steppers will all reach the same good places...

I think pretty much all of what Tim has to say is dead on. I'm interested in exploring how we can use web tools and video tools and software tools to help students extend the range of what they can do well. The challenge is to find a way to do that while still keeping our eye on what is central, which is not the gadgets and not the products, but on the students. If we can use the tech tools to help our students to think more clearly or more deeply, to communicate more effectively, to understand their lives and to enjoy their time as students, so much the better.

For a few other reflections on Marco Torres, here are posts by Chris and Lara.

Marco Torres: I Can

Okay. From a distance of twenty-four hours, this is what sticks in my mind from yesterday's morning session with Marco Torres. First of all, Marco is a sort of videovangelist. He's had terrific success with Mexicano kids in Los Angeles County by having them make short films. Marco said yesterday that he thinks one of our goals as teachers should be to provide a space in school so that the students can be who they are.

His predominant educational assumption seems to be that "there are opportunities for learning in how you produce information." It's not news that a great deal of traditional instruction asks kids to be passive recipients of pre-selected knowledge, nor that most assessment that we conduct involves asking students to do something with a pen and paper. That doesn't work for some students, and it certainly doesn't work for most Mexicano kids in L.A. So Torres asked himself, "What else is available to assess student understanding besides pencil and paper?" And one of the answers is film.

It's also not news—and this is one of the Big Questions that I've been wrestling with for the last ten years—that a lot of what we typically ask students to do in school is not connected in any real way with the lives students have outside of school. So how do we help students to make that connection? Marco asks his students to create "projects that have wings, that can live outside of the classroom." The films the students make show the world they live in and allow them to speak of their own lives in their own voices. (If you want get some sense of the nature and scope of the work his students are doing, go to the online site for his I Can film festival, and you can spend literally hours viewing the students work from the film festival from this and previous years, which has been archived. The film festival each year has turned into a major community event.)

He showed us onscreen a paragraph from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and let us look at it for 30 seconds or so, and even then some of us had trouble placing what we were looking at. Then he played a one second audio clip of MLK's voice, which was instantly recognizable. He then showed a short video clip from the speech, and we were all right back there. He cited a civil rights leader who has argued that "people do not give photography and film enough credit for the progress that was made in the civil rights movement." It wasn't until the technological tools became available to give a broad audience a sense of what was going on and what was wrong with it that enough people were mobilized to make a difference.

He then asked us to think of the three most significant events of our lifetime, and then projected on the screen images from the Vietnam war, the assassination of JFK, the Challenger explosion, 9/11, and a few others. He asked for a show of hands if any of those images were connected to the events we had thought of, and almost every hand went up. His point: the most significant events of our lives are almost always things we have seen, not things we have read. And most of them we did not see first-hand, but through the media. Those images were produced by someone, using expensive tools.

Now the tools are cheap and omnipresent. Marco's question: If we can communicate that effectively by sharing, producing, and broadcasting video, why are we still doing the same thing in the classroom that we've always done?

Marco's goal is to help his kids find one channel, one vehicle of communication, that works for them, by which they can do something that is going to get them a pat on the back for a job well done. He showed us several student videos, including one in which a girl filmed an interview with her grandfather telling the story of how when he first came to America all he knew how to say when he went out for breakfast was "coffee and donut," until one day a guy in front of him went up and asked for "ham and eggs." So the next day the grandfather was able to go in and ask for ham and eggs, and that was the beginning of his assimilation into the new culture. The video worked as entertainment, as ethnography, and as a testament to the life of the man himself. Making the film made a difference in the life of the student who made it.

So that's the wrapup. From my point of view, it's hard to argue with any of what Marco Torres is saying or doing. But it does pose us with a dilemma or two or three. So tomorrow maybe I'll try getting into that.

Photo by Marco Torres

The Writing of Light

After two sessions with Marco Torres sandwiched around a breakout group discussion and a department meeting in which we gave a brief overview of Web 2.0 and then turned the teachers loose to play with the new toys we had just showed them, I'm pretty much on information overload. It's going to take me a couple of days to synthesize everything that was going on today, and so I'm feeling the urge to simplify. And maybe, after 14 hours of going straight at it, to sleep. So here's one single pregnant idea, mentioned in passing by Marco in his workshop on the basics of film editing, with an illustration of the concept in the form of a photograph which appeared in my Google Reader inbox today, a recent Flickr posting from Flemming Gade.

"Photography is the writing of light."

Explanations, Explorations

Today was a holiday, and tomorrow is Curriculum Day at my school; the kids are out and we have a guest presenter (Marco Torres of San Fernando High School and Apple Computer), who has done amazing things with high school kids by teaching them how to use video as a primary communication tool. He was at Punahou last year and is back for an encore. After his presentation we have department meeting time, so today I went over to school and met with Chris Watson to shape up the presentation we will be doing for the English department tomorrow afternoon. We're dividing the two-hour session up into two segments: Explanation and Exploration.

In the explanation section we're going to provide an overview of some of the tools we've been working with this year: Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Notes, Del.icio.us, Flicker, Youtube, Podomatic, blogs, and wikis, and so on. We're also going to show our colleagues, for the first time, the stuff kids are actually working on now, including the wiki and the class page (with links to the individual blogs) my sophs have just gotten started on (I finally got the setup I wanted on the school server using Movable Type as a platform), the various pages Chris's students have created, his wife Anita's class pages, and Mark Maretzki's class pages. We'll show them some other stuff too, like Clay Burell's site in Korea and this wiki Chris showed me which is being set up as a kind of general listing of student and teacher blogs. We're in this knee-deep this semester, and it's new for all of us, but it's been pretty interesting so far and I figure it's about time to get the word out.

In the second hour, during the explorations segment, we're going to give the teachers the chance to work individually or in pairs to a) create a blog in blogger2 (I've put together a set of step-by-step directions complete with screen shots, b) visit the individual student blogs and post comments on some of them or c) do a little bloghopping of their own, either by working from the wiki I just referenced or by going from one site to another via the blogrolls on each site, which is more or less how I began to find my way around these lo these many years ago (well, months, actually. But it sure seems longer.) After our meeting Marco Torres is going to be doing a workshop on creating short videos with kids, and after that the school is hosting a dinner for him, so tomorrow is going to be a blur. Wish us luck.

Common Things

Sarah and I have been having a conversation in the comments section of yesterday's post, and as we were talking about photography and art and silverware I found myself thinking about a book that I came across when I was browsing in a bookstore some years ago. There are some books which are more or less strictly utilitarian, a compilation of words and sentences, but there are some books which are also a pleasure to hold in the hand, books which please the eye and the heart as well as the brain, and this is one of those books. It's a collection of Pablo Neruda poems called Odes to Common Things. It's published by Bulfinch Press and has simple, but quite satisfying pencil illustrations by Ferris Cook.

The Neruda poems are of course quite wonderful, but I probably never would have encountered them if my eye had not been caught that day by the understated but elegant drawing of a saltcellar on the cover. Facing the title page is another drawing, this time of five spoons in a glass.

The odes, presented on facing pages, Spanish on the left, English on the right, are about all sorts of ordinary things: table, bed, chair, dog, cat, bar of soap, socks, bread, onion, tomato; all of them with accompanying pencil drawings.

Here is one passage from from the middle section of "Ode to the Dictionary":

Dictionary, you are not
a grave, a tomb, or a coffin,
neither sepulchre nor mausoleum:
you are preservation,
hidden fire,
field of rubies,
vital continuity
of essence,
language's granary.
And it is a beautiful thing,
to pluck from your columns
the precise, the noble
word,
or the harsh,
forgotten
saying,
Spain's offspring
hardened
like the blade of a plow,
secure in its role
of outmoded tool,
preserved
in its precise beauty
and its medallion-toughness.
Also that other
word,
the one that slipped
between the lines
but popped suddenly,
deliciously into the mouth,
smooth as an almond,
or tender as a fig.

And, by way of another example, a segment for "Ode to the Spoon":

Little
spoon
in an
infant's
tiny hand
you raise
to his mouth
the earth's
most
ancient
kiss,
silent heritage
of the first water to sing
on lips that later lay
buried beneath the sand.

This is beautiful stuff: the poems, and the pictures. And I find them both encouraging because they are what they are, nothing more. The pictures, like the poems, celebrate simplicity, and celebrate with simplicity. (There's also a companion volume entitled Odes to Opposites...)