Connecting What Has Been Separated

A colleague recently sent me a link to a short audio file on which Jeanette Winterston talks about the importance of art, even in (especially in) times of trouble. I checked online to see if there was a text version of the speech, and, being unable to find one, I transcribed it myself. Here's her argument:

People sometimes ask me if I think that art is a luxury, of course I don’t think that, but then they ask me to justify art sometimes, especially in the light of the recent atrocities in the world, terrorism and bombing. “What can I do about that?” they say, “Doesn’t this prove that art is really a luxury, a peacetime activity.”

I’ve been thinking about that, and I do have a response, and this is it. Again, it’s part of a larger piece, but it’s something that is worth thinking about, I believe.

We have to make a distinction between the acute crisis, of the terrorist attack, an acute crisis that needs medicine and emergency help, and the chronic crisis that lies underneath it. When the crisis is acute, the media rushes in, politicians gather, news programs and documentaries are everywhere, and it would seem absurd to talk about art in such circumstances. But when the acute crisis is past, and the people who have been hurt and wounded and shocked and disillusioned are looking for hope, are looking for vision, are looking past the platitudes of politicians, then art can speak. And it is to this chronic crisis, this underlying problem in our lives, that art can speak.

We urgently need to change the way that we manage our world, our corporate culture, our international relations, our treatment of the natural world and its eco-systems. We know we cannot go on living as we do, and yet we go on living as we do. Books, paintings, music, theatre, are there to prompt us to think differently, and to see life differently. And when we free up our imaginative life, we are free to imagine a very different kind of world, and that is what is needed, and we’ve never needed it more urgently.

In a world economy that depends on separations, art asks us to make connections. President Bush pretends that emissions in the U.S.A. have nothing to do with drought in Africa, that McDonalds’ hamburgers have nothing to do with deforestation, that a U.S citizen using 88 times more resources than a citizen in Bangladesh has nothing to do with environmental depletion and third world poverty.

So how can reading a poem or looking at a painting or going to the theatre possibly help us to see things differently, or do anything about the things that we see differently? Connection is not just about connecting the obvious. It is about connecting things that are not immediately obvious, and this is what art does. Some people make a mistake, and think that if art is going to be relevant it has to be directly political, that its subject matter is everything. That is to miss the point. It’s not a question of subject matter, it’s not a question of what art is about, but what art is, by its very nature what art is. A work of art — books, theatre, pictures, whatever — isn’t just about something, it is something, and the something that it is connects what has been separated.

Think of a work of art that has meant something to you. Now, let it rest in your mind for a moment. You will become aware that one of the things it did was to make a join, to bring things together, to allow your own mind to re-form in a different way. Sometimes we say, “I’ve never thought of it like that,” or “I never felt like that,” or “That made sense of my experience,” or “That made me laugh, that made me cry.” These emotions, these understandings, these realizations occur when what was split off is brought back together. Art’s business is to take all kinds of disparate elements and fuse them into new wholes. This is not an imposition; art is not colonialism. It is a revelation, a sense of things appearing as they are.

Don’t mistake me. I don’t believe in a static objective reality that is out there. I believe in shifting, changing patterns of energy; the shifting, changing patterns of energy that we’ve begun to apprehend in nature and in the very molecules and atoms and DNA of our bodies. Nothing is solid; nothing is fixed. But this movement, this energy, is not chaos. Science is just beginning to unravel the patterns and shifts and connections that seemed so impossible and implausible. But art intuitively understands these patterns and shifts and connections, because that is exactly how art functions too. And I believe that one of the reasons we go back and back to art, why we don’t give up on it, why people go on making it and wanting it, is because through art, we recognize life’s intrinsic quality, that everything is connected.

Sure Shot

Plus One (Deep Purple)

This is the piece I'm working on now. I don't know if it's done yet. It's come a long way from where it began. The surprising part of the process came from an idea I stole from a woman called Mary Todd Beam who has several very useful books on art technique published by North Light. One idea she suggests is to use contact paper on the surface of your painting and then lift it at some point to reveal the negative space. I had started with a large panel (the painting is 24" x24") with a gloss white surface I had painted over with black gesson. Then I cut a large circle of contact paper, laid it down on the panel, and painted over it, mostly in browns and greens. I was actually thinking about letting it stay there, but I was at a workshop on Saturday and my teacher was encouraging me to see what would happen if I peeled it off. What I had not anticipated was that in so doing I would also peel off most of the black gesso, which (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) stuck to the surface of the contact paper rather than the smooth white surface of the panel. That left me with a large white circular space with black flecks on the panel, and a circular black plastic with white flecks in my hand. So I just glued the contact paper back down, wrong side up, and found myself looking at this rather startling celestial presence. I began adding collage elements with torn and cut paper, but there was still a pretty glaring contrast between the circular shape and the rest of the elements in the picture. So I stopped working on it, but kept turning it over in my mind.

After I got home. I started thinking about night sky and pulled out a tube of dioxazine purple that's been sitting in my drawer forever and I began doing thin washes of purple and working back into it with orange and blue and purple watercolor pencils, wetting them down, glazing them over, and doing it again. The whole process brought me back into that intermediate zone between abstraction and landscape. I don't know if it's done yet. I like the deepening effect of the multiple layers of thin color, and I think maybe it needs one more area of focus, one more surprise. But this is where it's at now.

Further Explorations

I'm settling into something of a rhythm with the artwork I'm doing. I've set up a workspace in the guest bedroom, and I'm still playing around in the zone between collage and representational art, using acrylics, watercolors, cut and torn paper, photographs, and illustrations. Recently, inspired by the work I see every day on the terrific web site Urbansketchers, which publishes new drawings daily from sketchers all all over the world, I've been doing a lot more sketching as well.

Here's a selection of work I completed two or three weeks ago. Got four or five more I'm working on now.

Lesson Design III - Willingham

This year I've been subscribing to an interesting and valuable resource called The Marshall Memo. Each week I get an email with an attachment which contains wrapups of current articles selected by Kim Marshall on educational topics. A recent edition of The Marshall Memo featured a couple of very interesting articles by Daniel Willingham, one of which is called "Why Students Don't Like School." I don't agree with everything that Willingham has to say — for one thing, he's death on the very same process orientation I've argued for in many posts — but he's definitely a thought-provoking writer with an interesting angle of vision. Reading the article led me to his book of the same name, which I've been enjoying.

Each of the chapters in his book is phrased as a question. In Chapter 3, entitled "Why Do Students Remember Everything That's on Television and Forget Everything I Say?" Willingham develops a deceptively simple argument, which he summarizes at the end of the chapter as follows:

If we agree that background knowledge is important [a central point of one of his earlier chapters], then we must think carefully about how students acquire that background knowledge — that is, how learning works. Learning is influenced by many factors, but one factor trumps the others: students remember what they think about. That principle highlights the importance of getting students to think about the right thing at the right time. We usually want students to understand what things mean, which sets the agenda for the lesson plan. How can we ensure that students think about meaning?

Willingham follows this summary with a listing of "Implications for the Classroom," which actually winds up reading like a set of guidelines for lesson design. Since that's what I've been considering in several of my last posts, I'd like to proceed by reproducing his list, but with my own commentary.

Review each lesson plan in terms of what the student is likely to think about.

Willingham has concerns about a lot of project-oriented learning, on the plausible grounds that students who are doing projects are likely to spend more time thinking about the process ("How do I make this Powerpoint slide spin into view?" vs content ("What are the implications of Gertrude's marriage to Claudius?"). He argues that well-designed activities get the students to think about the core concepts of the discipline, not the process skills, or perhaps more accurately, moreso than the process skills.

Think carefully about attention grabbers.

This injunction is actually a followup to the first. All teachers are at times tempted to do oddball things to get student's attention. If you show up for a lecture on Ancient Rome wearing a toga, you're going to get attention, all right, but while you are delivering the lecture are the students thinking about Ancient Rome, or are they thinking about you and whether you are wearing pants under that toga? It's going to make a difference in what they retain.


Use discovery learning with care.

For similar reasons. Willingham: "Discovery learning has much to recommend it, especially wehn it comes to the level of student engagement. If students have a strong voice in deciding which problems they want to work on, they will likely be engaged in the problems they select, and will likely think deeply about the material, with attendant benefits. An important downside, however, is that what students think about is much less predictable."


Design assignments so that students will unavoidably think about meaning.

Willingham's example is that if in a unit on the Underground Railroad you ask students to bake biscuits, they're going to spend more time thinking about flour and milk than about the experience of the runaway slaves. It might be better to ask students to think about the question of how the runaway slaves got food, and then try to find out the answers.


Don't be afraid to use mnemonics.

There are some skills and concepts (multiplication, the distributive property) that you need to have in memory in order to be able to think well about the task at hand. If there's no other way to do it than through memorization, it makes sense to give kids memorizing tools.


Try organizing a lesson plan around the conflict.

I'm reminded of a presentation I saw at NAIS last year by Brian Greene, in which he argued that you can teach any scientific concept more effectively if you like it to story. The example that he used, and that framed his whole talk, was to explain string theory as the latest chapter in a long-standing argument between those physicists who see the universe as being made up of stuff, matter, as opposed to those who see it being made up of events, energy. String theory is a way of resolving the conflict by saying that it's made up, at the sub-sub-atomic level, of both, in the form of vibrating strings. I'm not sure if I have the exact terms of the debate framed correctly, but the point was that the lesson was framed around a conflict, a story.

Willingham argues in this same section agains the notion that one of our goals as teachers is to "make it relevant to the students":

"If I'm continually trying to build bridges between students' daily lives and their school subjects, the students may get the message that school is always about them, whereas I think there is value, interest, and beauty in learning about things that don't have much to do with me... Student interests should not be the main driving force of lesson planning. Rather, they might be used as initial points of contact that help students understand the main ideas you want them to consider, rather than as the the reason or motivation for them to consider these ideas."


As I said at the start, there's a lot here that one might choose to argue about. But I am pleased that Willingham has chosen to join the conversation.

Bus

Lesson Design II - The Logic of Sequencing

As a followup to my last post, I'd like to re-present a lightly revised version of piece I put together several years ago, before Throughlines existed.  The argument I made at that time is that the art of teaching resides not just in the design of lessons, but in their sequencing. A poorly-designed sequence will give the students the sense that this happens and then that happens and then something else happens, with no apparent logic or connection. In a well-designed lesson sequence, students will know - or at least be given reason to believe - that there is a logic to what they are doing and why they are doing it. Even if they don’t completely understand the logic while they are engaged in the sequence, if they sense a connection, then each part of the sequence strengthens the other. For example, if students come to know that a group discussion activity is usually a rehearsal for a writing assignment to be given later, they often pay a different kind of attention to what is being said in the group than if their sense is that there will be no followup.

The logic of any particular sequence is inevitably shaped by the assumptions and intuitions of the teacher, which may in turn by shaped by any number of factors including (but not limited to) the teacher’s personality, previous teaching experiences as a student, previous experience as a teacher, and goals for the course, as well as such external factors as departmental or parental expectations, community demographics, and so on. More important yet are the needs of the students and the interactive dynamics of each particular class.



Some grounding assumptions for what follows:

• The most important goals of education are not content goals but process goals. You don’t judge how well-educated people are by what they remember. You judge them by what they know how to do, and how well they do it. As B. F. Skinner says, “Education is what’s left over after you’ve forgotten what you’ve learned.”

• My students don’t need to know what I think. They need to learn how to articulate what they think. A corollary assertion is that direct instruction - that is, lecturing - is the most efficient and least effective method of instruction.

• Students are inherently interested in themselves and in one another. Activities and assignments which are linked to their interest in one another are more likely to go over well.

• Students learn in lots of different ways. Some learn visually, some learn interactively, some learn by talking, some learn by writing. Too much of any one mode of instruction or interaction in a classroom is deadening.

• Ideas don’t appear of out a vacuum. The “aha!” moment doesn’t just happen. (Well, perhaps once in a great while it does, but it’s not the norm.) Ideas emerge from sustained thought, dialogue, and interaction. Some students know how to ask good questions and brainstorm answers. Many do not. All can benefit from regular practice in the process.

• Writing is not simply or most importantly a vehicle for conveying thought. It is also a perhaps the single most powerful for generating thought. Students need to be given lots of practice in learning how to use this tool effectively.

Here, then, is a hypothetical - but not atypical - sequence of events set in a high school English classroom. It assumes that the students have come to class having completed a common reading:

1) At the start of class ask each student write down two relevant, significant questions about the reading.

2) Students share the questions they have written with a partner (or, depending on class size and time available, two partners) and discuss. "Are they the same? Are they different? How? Between them they should agree on one question to share with the class.

3) One student from each pair of partners goes to the board and writes the question.

4) Give the students three minutes to scan the list of questions and decide individually which ones are in their judgment most significant and most relevant. (This is how the class will decide the order in which we will address the questions in class discussion - most significant questions first.)

5) Poll the class. Each student is allowed to vote twice. Write each question on the board; students who have voted for that question raise their hands. Record the votes.

6) Tell the students that at the beginning of class tomorrow they will have a written quiz in which they will be asked to write a clear, precise, plausible answer to one of the questions listed on the board. The question will be chosen at random from among the top three (or four, or five) vote-getters. The class discussion about to take place will be a chance to brainstorm answers, share ideas, think through the possibilities.

7) The remainder of the class is a Harkness discussion in which the teacher does not take part. Students work through the questions, sharing ideas, considering possible answers, looking for passages in the text that might be relevant to those answers.

8) At the end of class, tell the students that if they need any additional information or need to think through the questions further, they can do that work on their own for homework. They have to be prepared to answer any of the questions, but they will actually be asked to answer only one. They don’t just don't know which one.



Day Two:


9) At the beginning of the class, roll a four- or five-sided die to see which question they will answer. (Any other form of randomization would work as well: pulling numbers out of a hat, drawing from a deck of cards, whatever.)

10) Students take the quiz, writing out the answer to the question in class. If economy and precision are currently on your agenda, you might give each student a file card and ask them to limit their answer to what can fit on one side of the file card. This technique has the side effect of making step 17 (below) a little easier.)  Collect the responses and put them aside.

11) Ask the class to return to the text and approach it from another point of view. (One way to do this is to ask them to consider the possibility that while everything they have said so far is true, it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Their task is now to consider how to get to the heart of the matter.) Students work in groups of four for ten minutes to come up with an action plan for their group: what process can the group design that will allow them to go deeper?

12) The groups share their plans orally.

13) The groups now have five minutes to decide whether to use their original plan, borrow one from another group, or come up with a new plan that combines features of both.

14) The remaining fifteen or twenty minutes of class the students try out their plan: they try to arrive at a deeper understanding of the text using the process they have selected.

15) Homework assignment: "Write a reflection paper in which you discuss your group’s work today: what your group did, what conclusions you came to in the group, whether the process satisfied you personally, why or why not, anything that in retrospect you would do differently if you were starting this process over."

Day Three:


16) Collect the homework, and hand out a sheet on which are printed four of the answers to yesterday’s quiz. (In the interests of objectivity and anonymity, it might be a good idea to type these up using selections from another class, and without names on them.)

17) Students must read the four sample responses and rank order them in terms of their overall effectiveness. "Which one is, in your judgment, the best answer? The second best, and so on?"

18) Students then meet in small groups and compare rankings. "Tell which one you picked as best, and explain what you see in the piece that you like. See if the others in your group agree. Then see if your group can agree on the number one choice. In five minutes I will ask your group to report. If you agree, tell which one you have picked and why. If you disagree, report on the nature of your disagreement."

19) Debrief: Ask for reports from each group and collate the results, listing on the board various individual criteria as they emerge.

20) There is now a list of criteria or standards for this assignment on the board. Ask the students to scan the board and decide on which two of the indicated criteria are most relevant and significant. They get to vote twice. Once the exercise is completed, each criterion has a certain number of votes. Number the list in order of votes. Ask the students to write the prioritized list in their notebooks.

21) Lots of ways to go at this point. One would be to hand back their first drafts ungraded, ask them to re-draft the answers in the light of the new criteria, and finish them for homework. Let them know that you're going to grade them using the rubric generated in class.

22) Remember those reflection papers you collected (Step 16)? How might you use those to set up a new sequence of activities for the next reading?


This three-day cycle of activities makes an attempt to integrate reading, writing, thinking, and speaking in ways which are interconnected and self-reinforcing. There is also, by design, a range of interactive modes: small groups, large groups, teacher direction, teacher distance. (Notice there is no direct teacher-delivered instruction about content anywhere in the sequence. The students are doing the heavy lifting.)

There's nothing magical about this particular set of moves; the point is that it's a threaded sequence. Each of the small group discussions, for example, leads to another step in the overall process, at the end of which there’s an assignment which gives the students a chance to demonstrate that they can produce a response that meets the criteria they themselves have established. Sustained engagement in the process is self-rewarding. Students who have followed the whole process attentively should have a very good sense of what is expected, and the grades which will ultimately arise out of the process should be satisfying both to the students and to the teacher. In fact, the grade becomes at least in part a means of verifying or authenticating the process understandings the students have been working to master. Notice that I have said nothing about the content of the reading. It doesn’t matter. Whatever content is at issue will be covered in some depth as a result of the design of the process: having the students ask good questions, brainstorm through the answers, articulate their ideas, set standards of excellence, and then revise their writing with those standards in mind.

Lesson Design I

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

I. Some observations about structure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natura Morte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Thousand Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

The Line Exploring Space

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

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

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

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

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

The Class

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

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

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

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

So How Do You Like Your New Job?

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

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

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

Plus Three

Full Circle

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

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

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

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

That's dead on: clarified emptiness and joy.

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

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

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

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

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

Ars Longa

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












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

New Work

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









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

Forgetting Myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biograph

Biograph

I. The Gathering

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

II. The Gift

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

On Education (Four): Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's what I'm talkin' about.