Core Beliefs: 2

What does it mean when students talk about graduating from college and entering "the real world?" Where exactly have they been living all these years? Where have they picked up the notion that what goes on in the early years of their lives is somehow un-real or un-important, less relevant or less significant than what will be going on at some time in the indefinite future? It's true that because they are still young they are shielded from some of the worries and responsibilities of adulthood. But it's also true that an hour in the life of a child is no less real and no less valuable than an hour in the life of an elderly person. An hour is an hour is an hour.

I think that as parents and teachers we make a mistake when we act in ways that confirm our children and our students in their assumption that life doesn't really begin until you get to the real world, and that what they are doing in school is therefore not really significant, but merely a kind of rehearsal or preparation for real life. So that's core belief number two: Students already live in the real world. The challenge that presents to me as a teacher is to help students find ways to connect what they are doing in school with the things that they do really care about, and that are central to their sense of who they are as individuals right now. If what we are doing in the English class does not connect with or help the students to understand better the lives they are living right now, then we are all wasting a tremendous amount of time. I think it's critical that we invite the students to bring their worlds, the ones they live in right now, into the classroom.

Several years ago Everett Kline came to my school to talk about authentic assessment. He challenged us to think about ways of organizing our end-of-semester assessments (which for most of us meant either exams or papers) that would give the students the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise by doing something that mattered to them. I decided to try his ideas out by turning some time over to my second-semester sophomore students to do allow them to work on independent projects of their own design. I gave them about six weeks to work on the projects. I cut back on the other work I was assigning them, and I gave them time in class - a total of about ten hours - to work on their projects and meet with me in conference about them. The only two constraints I put on the assignment were that it should represent the best work the students thought they could do at this point it time, and that it should link to something they really care about. I also asked them to hand in a reflection paper in which they would talk about the process they went through, what they think they did well, what they enjoyed or had trouble with and what they would do differently if they were starting over.

The first year I did this, out of sixty sophomore students there were about five who did what I considered to be a terrific job. But, in one of the moves that looks really good only in retrospect, I asked those five students if I could keep their projects to show to the next year's students. (I asked those who wanted to keep them for permission to photocopy them.) The following year, I showed the students in my classes the previous year's projects. The second year I wound up with 15 or 20 first-rate projects, and I held onto those as well. Many of the students invested substantially more time and effort on the projects that I could have reasonably expected them to do if I were simply assigning them work of my own choosing.

Over the last five years I've continued with the sophomore independent projects, and I've been amazed at the results. Students have written collections of short stories and poems. They've written novels. They've done autobiographies and family histories and ethnographic research. They've done documentary videos, like this student's documentary on World of Warcraft. They've made physical objects and documented the process: surfboards, Hawaiian drums, necklaces, pottery, hand-crafted computer cabinetry. They have been able to apply the thinking and writing and problem-solving skills we've worked on during the year to the lives they are already living. Now I've got an archive of perhaps 100 terrific project (I'm strategizing now about how to make more than the small sample in the link above online available online) and the proportion of students each year who are come up with projects at least as good is up around 80%.

In an earlier post I talked about my belief that when we put too many constraints on what students write, we actually make it harder for them to write well. The same might be said about teaching in general. The teaching activities with which I have had the most success, the ones which I felt best about and which have allowed the students to do the best work, have by and large been the ones where I essentially set up a framework and then got out of the way. Most students are more capable than they think they are, and more capable than WE think they are. Donald Murray at the Univerisity of New Hampshire used to say "I'm going to underteach so my students can overlearn." In the context of everything I've just been saying, that makes complete sense to me.

And one might take this set of ideas one step further, from the pragmatic to the programmatic. What would a school look like that started from the set of assumptions we've been discussing? Norman Kolb has an interesting essay that was published in Independent School in the spring of 2006. It's called "A Map to the Future," and it begins like this:

What memorabilia do you still have from your school years? I remember having several cartons of the stuff—report cards, book reports, science projects—that at one time or another were important enough to save. But then, as the years went by, first one carton and then another and another somehow disappeared. In the end, the only survivor of all those years was a map of Long Island Sound I drew as a senior in a high school cartography course.

Why has this one artifact managed to survive all of the packing and unpacking I've done in moving through college and then from apartments to houses in three states on two coasts? The answer is probably the most prosaic one—the map, quite by accident, simply happened to make it through four decades of purges. Even so, I prefer to think that the map refused to be discarded because it represents an important moment in my educational biography: possibly the only time in high school that a teacher encourage me to work on something I actually wanted to do, something other than the required curriculum.

Kolb goes on to talk about his vision of what an education might be as opposed to what it too often is. He elaborates on his vision of education in the year 2016:

The school of 2016 should give students as many opportunities as possible to be knowledge workers. These opportunities include offering electives that are suggested and possibly even designed and taught by students; scheduling interim programs that encourage students to explore topics of their own choosing (and, ideally, without being graded); encouraging mentoring relationships that take students beyond the school's physical and programmatic boundaries; carrying out sustained problem-based explorations; promoting travel-study opportunities, and requiring that students plan and conduct substantial independent projects during the junior and senior years.

In other words, let's recognize that the lives the students have are the ones they are living now. And let's find a way to make what goes on in the classroom draw upon and enrich those lives.

Fuel for the Fire

Will Richardson has a post today which reinforces the point I was trying to make yesterday. He quotes the executive summary of a report on the Skills of the American Workforce which says:

“This is a world in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life, in which high levels of education–a very different kind of education than most of us have had–are going to be the only security there is.”"Too often, our testing system rewards students who will be good at routine work, while not providing opportunities for students to display creative and innovative thinking and analysis.”

And I certainly agree with WR when he speculates that "2007 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in the school reform discussion." It's becoming clear that the No Child Left Behind act is a disaster. And it's also becoming clear that technology is changing everything. It always had the potential to change things, but the tools just keep getting better and better.

Yesterday, for example my son walked into the room where I was working on uploading some pictures to Flickr and showed me Google's latest toy, a web-site design program that is, like Google Docs, fast, clean, easy to use, and free. It took my son about fifteen minutes to create a home page that links to all his other web projects. The new Google module is one of a growing collection of tools—along with wikis and whiteboards and blogs and aggregators, not to mention this blog engine and gmail and Google itself—that have the potential to change how we communicate and how we teach.

This fall, the freshman at Punahou will, for the first time, each be arriving in classs with a laptop in hand. A year ago, the individual departments were wracking their brains trying to figure out what we would ask our teachers to DO with those laptops in class each day. For me, at least, that's changed. In the last three or four months alone, I've been swimming in a sea of ideas of the kind that Will Richardson keeps talking about, like the one he references in another of today's posts, where he points us to Pat Aroune's site, where technology is changing the way things work in the classroom.

So yes, it's an exciting time to be a teacher, and 2007 is shaping up to be a big year.

Core Beliefs: 1

I spent 27 years as a teacher in the Canton, MA public schools. During the last several years of my tenure there, the school system hosted a fundraiser called the Academic Olympics. Local businesses and civic organizations were invited to send teams—each team had to make a donation the the CHS scholarship fund—to participate in the Olympics. The teams sat at tables on the stage of the Canton High School auditorium—there was a microphone on each table—and competed to answer questions in several categories including world geography, current events, and vocabulary. Each correct answer gave teh team a certain number of points. If a team missed an answer, the next team to the left was given an opportunity to answer and receive partial points.

On one of these nights, long about the year 1995, the team representing the Town Library flubbed the answers to the first three or four questions. As guardians of the local repository of knowledge, were a little embarrassed to be unable to come up with the goods. When it came to be their turn again, they were asked "What's the name of the longest river in Paraguay?" The members of the team conferred with their hand over the mike, with much whispering and gesticulation and rolling of eyes. Finally, the head librarian leaned into the mike and said, "Well, we don't know the answer to that question. But we know where to find the answer to that question."

That got a big laugh from the crowd. But the reason it stuck in my head is that it confirmed me in something I have believed for some time, and believe even strongly even more today. Education is not, or should not be, about instilling information. Students today don't have to go to library, or even to a book, to find information. Information is here at the tip of my fingers as I type on this screen. Google and the Wikipedia and the New York Time are one click away. Thousands upon thousands of other resources are there for ready reference. MIT is in the process of making ALL of its curricula available on the web.

I've been thinking about basic principles, about what my core beliefs are after almost 40 years in the classroom. So here goes. Core Belief Number One: Real education is not about content. It's about process. If I'm teaching history, my goal should not be to teach students facts about history. My goal should be to teach my students how to think—and act—like historians. If I'm teaching science, my goal should not be to teach students facts about science. It should be to teach my students how to think—and act—like scientists. And if I'm try to teach students how to write, I should be teaching my students how to think—and act—like writers.

In the late 1970's I was teaching middle school English and became acquainted with the work of Donald Graves, one of the central figures in the process writing movement and its often-maligned and even-more-often misunderstood love child, the whole-language movement. I read everything he wrote, heard him speak (brilliantly) on a number of occasions, and completely reshaped my classroom practice based on what he had to say. I remember one presentation I attended where he said, "You can do all the technical things right as a teacher, and if students don't believe that you care about them and are interested in what they have to say, they will underachieve. Conversely, you can do all the mistakes in the world and if the students know you care about them and are interested in what they have to say, they will go way beyond your expectations." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that was the message. It's a message that makes both intuitive and experiential sense to me, and nothing that has happened in my classrooms in the twenty-five years since I first heard him say it has made me think he was wrong.

That's the problem that I have with the whole standards-based high-stakes state testing model that has come to dominate the marketplace of educational ideas in the last ten years. As I said in a recent post, the problem with the tests is precisely because they are content-driven. And when teachers know that they and their students are going to be judged by how the students perform on the test, everything else that a teacher might want to go after—like listening to students, like establishing relationships based on the how rather than the what of learning, like leaving room for exploration rather than regurgitation—gets pushed right off the table. There's just not enough time. It's a kind of Gresham's Law of education, with bad practice and bad ideas driving out good. It has even, sadly but utterly predictably, led to abuses like teachers and administrators changing answers on the tests to bring up the scores.

B. F. Skinner once said "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." He was right about that. We all forget stuff. We all forget most of the stuff we have learned and experienced in our lifetimes. But, if we are lucky, we emerge from our education with a set of habits of mind and a set of processing skills that allow us to read the situation and react. The Marines teach their recruits to "do your oodaloops," (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act: Repeat). That's a set of processing skills. I teach my students to ask themselves "Where am I now? Where I am I trying to get to? How can I get there?" That's a set of processing skills. (One of many.)

What's the longest river in Paraguay?

I have no idea. But I know where to find the answer to that question. It's a processing skill I've picked up.

Uncommon

During my second-semester sophomore course, I have for many years asked my students to keep, for at least one quarter, a commonplace book. I guess the distinction between a journal and a commonplace book is that one would expect a journal to consist mostly of one's own writing, and perhap drawings. A commonplace book might contain those things, but might also contain quotations from one's readings, clippings from the paper, interesting photographs and tidbits, whatever. I've kept my own commonplace book for many years as well, primarily as a place to collect my thoughts about issues in my teaching and in my life.

This blog got started when Chris Watson, who teaches in my department, asked if I had ever considered keeping my CPB online in the form of a blog. So I tried that, and he we are, two months later, still figuring the advantages and limitations of this digital space as opposed to the analog space of the CPB, which I am still trying to up with as well. (I've used pages from it as decorative and structural elements in the sidebar here.)

Anyway, here's a poem by Billy Collins that I pasted inside the front cover of my commonplace book last year as a kind of touchstone, or mirror of my best intentions then. And I suppose, it works just as well as an articulation of my best intentions now, in keeping this blog going. It's a typical Collins poem in that it's clear, it's accessible, it's funny in a self-deprecating way, and it delivers more, in the end, than you think it is doing when you first read it. His poems stand up to repeated readings very well. I've always admired the way that Collins makes this sort of conversational tonality look a lot easier to carry off than it really is. (BTW: Collins, having completed his stint as poet laureate, has recently edited Best American Poems 2006, and that volume contains, not suprisingly, a lot of poems that are also accessible, funny, and smart.)

Journal

Ledger of the head's transactions,
log of the body's voyage,
it rides all day in a raincoat pocket,
ready to admit any droplet of thought,
nut of a maxim
narrowest squint of an observation.

It goes with me
to a gallery where I open it to record
a note on red and the birthplace of Corot,
into the tube of an airplane
so I can take down the high dictation of clouds,
or on a hike in the woods where a young hawk
might suddenly fly between its covers.

And when my heart is beating
too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe,
open it up to a blank page
and try to settle on the blue lines
whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Net I tow beneath the waves of the day,
giant ball of string or roil,
it holds whatever I uncap my pen to save:
a snippet of Catullus,
a passage from Camus,
a tiny eulogy for the evening anodyne of gin,
a note on what the kingfisher looks like when he swims.

And there is room in the margins
for the pencil to go lazy and daydream
in circles and figure eights
or produce some illustrations,
like Leonardo in his famous codex -
room for a flying machine,
the action of a funnel,
a nest of pulleys,
and a device that is turned by water,

room for me to draw
a few of my own contraptions,
inventions so original and visionary
that not even I - genius of the new age-
have the slightest idea what they are for.

Boggled

Today I met with Dan Gaudiano, a grade seven science teacher at Punahou, who showed me how he's been using Google Docs as a collaborative workspace with his students. So I started playing around with it tonight, and I've got to say I'm blown away. Not only is there a terrific variety of editing tools that allow you to do things that are much more labor-intensive in Blogger—like being able to designate colors for your text—in a nice clean workspace, and not only can you work with others in real time to create a document or project—and track the changes as you do so—but as soon as you're done you can publish to your blog with one click, which is what I have done here: this post was composed in Google Docs and then just zapped over to my blog.

I'm starting to plan, right now, to set up a blog for each of my second semester classes and then have them use this space to work together on what shows up there. It beats the way I used to do things, trying laboriously to maintain a web site of my own, six ways to Sunday. This is pretty cool stuff. If any readers out there are way ahead of me on this, and have already implemented this with your classes, let me know by adding a comment below. I'd like to visit your site.

Six Hats

Some Background

My sophomore English class recently finished reading and discussing (in literature circles) The Poisonwood Bible, and we spent a lot of time in discussion talking over the issues of complicity and responsibility that arise in the novel. Kingsolver says in an interview on her website that “This novel is asking, basically, “What did we do to Africa, and how do we feel about it?” We might, of course, ask the same question about Vietnam, or Iraq, or the Phillippines, or Native Americans, or, closer to home for these kids, Hawaii itself.

The Poisonwood Bible is narrated in a sort of spiral sequence by Orleanna Price and each of her four daughters, and each of them at one time or another raises the question of what responsibility we should be prepared to shoulder as individuals, and as American citizens for what is being done in our name. In the final chapter, Ruth May Price sums it up in the last chapter by saying, “Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history…Everyone is complicit” (538).

For the past few years, I’ve been following up TPB by asking the students to read first, Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” and second, an essay entitled “Kipling, The White Man’s Burden, and U.S. Imperialism” which appeared in The Monthly Review, a socialist journal, which attack’s Kipling’s thesis and links it to imperialist and racist tendencies associated, the authors assert, with capitalism. (I do not initially tell the students anything about TMR, although the source of the article is given on the handout. But the question of the point of view from which the essay arises, and the assumptions that govern that point of view, are very much part of the point of the exploration.)

The Lesson

So the kids’ assignment was to have read the article in preparation for today’s class. As it happens, yesterday a colleague came into my office looking for a handout I had on file explaining a exercise designed by Edward DeBono called The Six Hats of Critical Thinking. It was sitting one my desk this morning when I was getting ready for class, and, in one of the hundreds of little zigzag maneuvers that take place during the course of a week at school, I thought to myself, “Hey, why don’t we try using this approach to the Kipling article?”

So when we went to class I spent a little little time putting this particular exercise that we were about to do in the context of a number of other metacognitive strategies we had been playing with during the semester (this English class is designed to fulfill a critical thinking requirement in the overall school curriculum.) I reviewed the roles as explained in the handout, and then assigned each student a role and asked them to take seven minutes and review the article from the point of view of their assigned role and make notes on what someone wearing that hat would be likely to say in response to the article. Then I divided the class into groups of six, with each group having one person wearing each of the six hats.

The group conversations wound up being a lot more focused and intense than they sometimes are. And when we opened up into a large group toward the end of class to share ideas, the students were able to get to number of central points very quickly.

Of course, there are a lot of ways to use the Six Hats exercise. The more usual way is to ask the students individually to make notes on all six points of view, as a means of moving toward breadth and depth in their thinking. One of the themes for the course over the whole semester has been the central importance of being able to shift your point of view when you are thinking through a problem. I often begin the semester by asking students to write a short essay in which they address a question that has come up in class, but I tell them that somewhere in the middle of the paper I want to see a move that begins with a phrase like “But there’s another way of looking at it,” as an introduction to part two of the essay, which will be an exploration of that other point of view. But I liked the way the Six Hats exercise worked as a way of framing that skill in the context of a class discussion.

John Adams

Cruising around and found a site that had posted this picture by John Adams, which stopped me dead in my tracks. There's a lot more on his Flickr page. Check it out.

Department of Provocation

Here's Donald Hall, currently our Poet-Laureate, writing in APR (March/April 05) on Slam Poetry:

There is also performance poetry, which tends to be performance and not poetry, when the words—reduced to the page—provide no juices for the mouth. I've been to the Nuyorican and other castles of slam, and I have laughed and applauded—but I was never responding to poems. I heard no line breaks; I heard only thrust and energy. I heard no vowel and consonant play, only drive and good timing and jokes or outrage. In print the work remains inert. Nothing in the marks on the page, those jagged lines to the right, carries the vigor performance supplies. Slack language is disguised by delivery, and dead metaphor finds its emptiness papered over by force and voice-tricks, by gestures and facial expression, by signatures of singular personality...

In slam poetry speed is valued over slowness, as humor and attack are valued over emotion and thought. The beauty of sound—which exists independent of feeling or idea—is absent. Performance poetry is entirely social—which is the virtue of the form but also its limitation. It cannot exist without an audience. Keats existed without being spoken. Performance poetry flames out like a match. I have a slammer friend with whom I write long letters of combat. He writes me an argument which he thinks will be a winner. He bets me that I cannot find a poem written in Poetry or The New Yorker which, read aloud at a slam, will win first prize. I could not agree with him more. To me, the notion of the argument reveals its poverty. What the hell do I care, considering a poem's virtue, about the votes of a bunch of cheerful self-chosen enthusiasts in a bar?

Comments? Anyone? Anyone?

Going With The Grain

My father was a complex man. He worked as an engineer in New York City designing the cracking furnaces which break crude oil down into its useful constituent elements like gasoline and kerosene. He wore a coat and tie to work every day and spent each day in brain-breaking technological initiatives. But he had another side to him as well. He saw himself as a kind of nature guy as well. He was an avid hunter and fisher, kept meticulously maintained scrapbooks with pictures and stories about the out-of-doors, and had a wood shop in the basement of our house in which he built all his own furniture for his "den" off the dining room: bookcases, his desk, a gun rack. When I was old enough to have my own little bench he built one for me, and gave me scrap wood to work on. By the time I was eight I knew how to use a hammer, a coping saw, a rasp, a chisel, a plane. By the time I was ten I was allowed to use his electric table saw, his band saw, his drill press. My father loved working with wood, shaping it, sanding it, finishing it with stain and shellac or varnish or carnauba wax. He did not like working with cars. He had no tools for cutting or shaping metal. It was wood he was drawn to.

Perhaps that's why I've always been comfortable with wood. It's not entirely accidental that when I decided to customize the template for this site the first thing that I looked for was a woodgrain pattern for the background. I recognize that there is something a little bit discordant about a web site, of all things, going for the pastoral, but there it is. It feels like home to me. I've written elsewhere in this blog of my affinity for writers like Ted Kooser and William Stafford and for artists like Andrew Wyeth. All of them have come in for their fair share of criticism for their folksiness. Edward Hirsh made note in the Washington Post that for many readers Kooser's poetry boils down to "the abridgement of a region into seventy-five synonyms of 'homespun'; something about the way the word "heartland" seems to embroider itself in six-inch sampler letters across the covers of his books." Similarly, writing in the N.Y.Times, Roberta Smith complains, "Mr. Wyeth's fear of pleasure, his plodding diligence, his elevation of the rural and his nostalgia for a past that never existed are among the signal traits of our national character."

What is one to make of this kind of criticism? These are artists who have chosen to limit the field of their vision and to adapt their technique to what is simple and close to home rather than to what complex and beyond their reach. Why should this necessarily be seen as a failing? Is it not hard enough to learn to be present to what is in front of you?

Which brings us to Carl Larsson (1853-1919), the Swedish artist whose painting is at the head of this post. Larsson essentially made a career out of painting his home and the members of his family. I first ran across his paintings when I was starting my own family, and I envied him then, as I envy him now, in the way he was able unite his home life and his work life, in the way he was able to take the mundane and elevate it by virtue of the quality of the attention he was able to bring to it through the discipline of his craft. A lot of what I see artists doing, and see writers doing, conveys a kind of manic dissatisfaction, an attitudinalized alienation, and frankly, I don't need it. The artists I respect most seek the center.

The book which has had in my life the most profound impact on my thinking in my lifetime has been the Tao Te Ching. I was raised as a Catholic and went to Catholic elementary school, two different Catholic high schools, and a Catholic college. By the time I reached freshman year in college, I had had it up to here with the cherubim and the seraphim and the thrones and the dominations and with heaven and hell and purgatory and limbo and with mortal sins and venial sins and indulgences partial and plenary. There was all this imaginative superstructure of belief and not a shred of evidence to support any of it. Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened Lao Tsu and read

Heaven and earth are impartial;
They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The wise are impartial;
They see the people as straw dogs.

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form:
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.

More words count less! Hold fast to the center! This was a new kind of good news indeed, a way of thinking and speaking about the world was, well, non-assertive.But what about sin? What about structures? What about the Garden of Eden? What about the ten commandments?

In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In daily life, be competent.
In action, be aware of the time and the season.

No fight. No blame.

I could go on for a very long time with illustrations of this kind. But—and I guess this is the point—I don't need to. Even in its vestigial form (and there are many similarly simple interlocking ideas in the Tao Te Ching), this is not a way of thinking that requires, or rewards, convoluted thinking. It's simple. That it could be that simple came as a revelation—and a considerable relief—to me when I was 20. But I still aspire to find a way toward that kind of simplicity. Given the choice, I'd prefer my life to be simple, and my teaching to be simple, and my writing to be simple. And it's not easy, particularly in a culture that floods us with information alternatives and chrome-plated high-octane technologically sophisticated enticements of every kind every moment of the day. They're out there all right. We all live in that world. But we all have access, should we choose to direct out attention to it, to the world of wood as well: wood which grows at pace so slow we never see it happening; wood which like us, bruises and bends; wood which over time matures to give us what we need to shape and plane and build the places we come to know as home.

Is Larsson's painting sentimental? Nostalgic? Manipulative? Or is it simply a careful observation of what was around him as he lived his life? I understand, I think, why some people—the same ones who dismiss Kooser and Wyeth as lightweights—might choose to dismiss it. But it speaks to something that I honor and value in my life, when I can find it. Which I guess is what my father was doing as well.

Some years ago I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of the Easton Martial Arts studio in Massachusetts, waiting for my son to finish his lesson. It was a warm late-summer morning and I had been reading Field of Vision by Seamus Heaney. I lay the book down and just sat for a while, and this poem began to take shape in my mind. I wrote my first draft there in the parking lot. I think it about sums up a lot of what I've been trying to put my finger on here:

Presence

If you gaze in one direction long enough -
it doesn’t matter which, so long as you
do it patiently, reflectively - an inkling
of the mysterious begins to assert itself:
majesty of tree against sky, reaching
after itinerant sun with imperceptible in-
clination; painstaking progress of shadow
on clapboard; faintest touch of wind
stirring the golden elasticity of living
branch and bough. Enough, after all,
to do nothing more than breathe, bear
witness, be present to such clarity.

Reading as a Writer

Bob Dylan, in Chronicles, commenting on how he learned from Robert Johnson:

I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition. The songs were layered with a startling economy of lines... I started meditating on the construction of the verses, seeing how different they were from Woody's. Johnson's words made my nerves quiver like piano wires. They were so elemental in meaning and feeling and gave you so much of the inside picture. It's not that you could sort out every moment carefully, because you can't. There are too many missing terms and too much dual existence. Johnson bypasses tedious decriptions that other blues writers would have written whole songs about. There's no guarantee that any of his lines either happened, were said, or even imagined. When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue...it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that...I copied Johnson's words down on scraps of paper so I could examine more closely the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn't have any of those dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them.

Mentor

As I reflect on the challenges facing teachers and the question of how one goes about teaching well, I find myself thinking about the great teachers that I have had, and how they have influenced me. One of those teachers is Alex Pickens.

In 1969 I had just graduated from college and been accepted into the federally sponsored Teacher Corps program, something like the Teach for America program that now exists. I did not know when I signed up that they had a program in Hawaii, but was pleasantly surprised to find myself in Wist Hall on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, taking an art methods course designed for elementary school teachers. Alex Pickens was at that time the head of the Art Education department, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man with an air of genial authority.

There were twenty minutes left in class. I was sitting in front of my easel, staring at the gouache painting that was becoming muddier and soggier with every stroke of my brush. It was no use. The picture was a mess, and so was I. Time to start cleaning up and get ready to go home up. I was just reaching to pull the paper off the easel and throw it away when Dr. Pickens spoke to me from over my shoulder.

"You know, Bruce, that's very interesting, that effect that you have right there." He pointed at one corner of the paper, at the edge of my gigantic lake of mud, where a yellow wash was just peeking through from underneath a scratchy brown brush stroke. "It kind of reminds me of the surface of a lake seen in the sunlight. Why don't you take a clean sheet of paper and try doing some more of that?" He patted me on the back as he moved on to the girl beside me.

I looked at the painting again. Sure enough, that one spot was interesting. I pulled the paper off the easel, tacked up a new one, and began work.

As I think about my college and graduate school education from a distance of nearly 40 years, I really can't remember much about the classes, or even the names of the instructors. But I remember Alex Pickens.

What made him different? Well, he knew his subject matter. I learned about techniques in elementary art, and to this day I remember them all: how to work with clay making architectural tiles and pinch pots, how to make animal masks out of cardboard, how to make linoleum prints, how to make your own pigments for gouache painting by grinding different colors of dirt in a mortar and pestle. But with rare exceptions I have never had the opportunity to use any of these techniques in the classroom. As it happens, I moved from teaching elementary school (for four years) to teaching middle school (11) and high school English (22 and counting). And yet Alex Pickens is with me every time I sit down to conference with a student over a piece of writing, every time I correct a paper, every time I try to help steer a student discussion.

I don't always live up to the standard he set for me. I don't always have his light touch, his ability to identify what is going right when the student is convinced everything is going wrong, his way of finding just the right words to give a student a way to re-enter his work with fresh insight and energy. But I have his example, and even today, when I find myself with twenty minutes left in class and my students' eyes beginning to glaze over, I know to look around for what is going right, and try to work with that.

Dilemmas II - Freedom vs Authority

I was just browsing through Doug Noon's terrific blog Borderlands, and found myself reading, for the third or fourth time, his post on The Line Between Freedom and Authority.

It's a dilemma I have written about here, and thought about in a number of different contexts. The question of how much I need to direct my students vs. how much I need to support them is a throughline in every day's work. Do I choose the books, or do they? Do I design the responses, or do they? Do I decide how we're going to process the book (by using lit circles, or reading logs, or Harkness discussions, or book reports (God help us), or do I ask them to design a process? Do I give them directive feedback about a poem ("You need to cut the first stanza" or "That image is unclear, try another.") or do I let them figure it out on their own? Do I give them homework—a power play all on its own—or do I allow them to make their own choices, and learn from the consequences? Do I grade the papers, or do I ask them to design their own rubrics and evaluate their own work? Do I answer a question with information, or with another question? We make decisions about these matters every single minute of the classroom day, often on the fly, and relying less on articulated philosophy than on nonreflective teacherly intuition or baserock assumptions we may not even be aware of. How we answer these questions—and whether or not we even think much about them—goes a long way toward defining who we are as teachers, and what our students will learn from us. It's a dilemma. Here's Doug's summary paragraph, and it's about as eloquent a description of what we must do as I have seen or could well imagine:

We have to engage students in discussions about things that matter to them and act as guides and interpreters to the world they are living in. Choices, yes absolutely. It’s how students learn. Authority, yes as well. It’s our duty. Kids need all manner of guidance, and they look to us for leadership. They also trust us to keep them safe. We owe them the benefit of our experience and our knowledge of the world. The balance between responsibility and the need students have to take a risk is real, but it’s not a static limit. It shifts and moves with each individual. None of the institutional barriers restricting access to information will matter if we are truly engaged in honest dialog with our students. I don’t believe there is a choice for us to make between one extreme or another. I think we have to be both ally and authoritarian, depending on the circumstance. Dialog is key. When we speak from our hearts to theirs they know we care. Our challenge is to help students imagine a better future than the one that will be handed to them by default. How we do that is a creative process that nobody - to my knowledge - has mastered.

Authentic Assessment

I am reading, on the recommendation of a colleague, a historical novel set in Denmark in the 1760's. The Royal Physician's Visit, by Per Enquist, tells the story of the goings on in the court of King Christian, who takes the throne upon the death of his father King Frederik in 1766. The most interesting passage in the book so far is testimony by one of the young king's tutors, who has been brought in by the ministers of the court, theoretically in order to teach the prince foreign languages, but in reality to become part of a conspiracy to cripple the young man both psychologically and intellectually, so that the ministers will be able to rule the country according to their own whims and inclinations. The tutor observes:

I saw how they were ceaselessly trying to break my pupil's spiritual fortitude so that he learned nothing of his role as a monarch or what came under his authority. He was given no education in the civil laws of his country; he knew nothing about the way the governmental offices divided up their work or the details of how the country was ruled; nor how power emanated from the Crown and was distributed among the individual officials. No one had ever told him what relationships he might fall into regarding neighboring countries; he was ignorant of the kingdom's military and naval forces. His Lord Chancellor, who oversaw his education and each day supervised my lessons, had become Finance Minister without giving up his position as headmaster, but he didn't teach his pupil anything about the duties of his office. The funds the land contributed to the monarchy, the way in which they were added to the Royal Treasury, and whta they were to be used for—these things were completely unknown to the person who would one day rule over all. Several years before his father the King had given him a countery manor; but there the Prince had never appointed a lodgekeeper or personally handed out a single ducat or planted even one tree.

As a teacher I would like to believe that anyone in a position to be able to educate someone would in fact do their best to give a student what that student needs. Part of the reason this passage interests me is that I had never really thought much before about how one might going about arranging an education that would be actively harmful to the student. The notion seems monstrous, and the presence of such hard-edged malevolence is one of the elements that pulls one into the plot of the novel. What is going to happen to this child? Will his tormentors get what they have coming to them?

But the passage poses another question as well, which is how we go about deciding what our students really DO need? Much of what can be found in current curricula, especially curricula developed around them mandated state tests and the No Child Left Behind initiative, seems to have been selected precisely because it's the sort of thing that can be tested with multiple choice questions. It has always seemed to me that the things that I think are most essential and most important for the students to be learning—things like learning how to ask good questions and how to develop the habits of mind which might allow one eventually to find answers to those questions—are the things which the tests do not and cannot measure. Assuming that King Christian had had better instruction, what would his final exam have looked like? The test would have been his ability to rule the country wisely and well: authentic assessment at its best.

Planet Neptune

Happened to check in on Maud Newton's site this morning and saw a photo there with a link to the site it came from, Beyond Monochrome, put together by photographer Walker Pickering. There are some wonderful images in the archives, including this pretty amazing one, which looks to me a lot less like an aquarium than a dystopian fish-filled sky:



Pickering works in a variety of formats, and he's got a terrific touch and a sense of drama:



There's something about both these photos, and about a lot of the others on his site, that is more than reportorial. There's a feel to them, as if a question hanging in the air, and all of the answers are right there, if ony we could fully apprehend them.

Pueo Poetry Program

Today we hosted about sixty public school kids, sixth and seventh graders, for a poetry program. Twenty academy students had volunteered to serve as mentors for the younger students, who are part of the Pueo program run by Punahou Social Studies teachers Carl Ackerman and James Kakos. PUEO (which means "owl" in Hawaiian) stands for Partnership for Unlmited Educational Opportunity, and the mission of the program is to identify and attempt to encourage public school junior high school students who might otherwise not think of themselves as potential college students.



We set up the day so that the students participated in an initial warmup activity baed on an exercise suggested by our visiting speaker, Imai Kalahele, who shared with us his thoughts on composition, and read a poem entitled “Where I Live.” Program organizer Andrea Lum led the students through an exercise where they wrote down descriptions about their own neighborhoods.



We then had the Pueo students rotate in small groups through three half-hour workshop sessions led by the high school mentors: one for writing a memory poem, one for writing a poem based on close observation, and one for writing a poem which creates a picture. We had a booklet of model poems prepared, and asked the mentors to read the model poems with their groups, and then lead the students through a three part exercise that involved getting words on paper, selecting and sequencing some of those words, and then drafting a poem.



We closed off the morning by returning to Thurston chapel for a slam poetry presentation to the whole group by Mari Turk, one of our senior students. She explained how slam poetry competitions work, read us a slam poem of her own, and then led the students through a brainstorming exercise on the them of being thankful. Using the words which had been brainstormed into a word bank, the students wrote their own poems about what they were thankful for, and then volunteers stood up to read in front of the entire group.



After lunch, we asked each of the students to revise work done in the morning sessions, with help from the mentors. We also provided materials for them to do illustrations to accompany their poems in the anthology that we will be publishing.



The day ended at the chapel once again, with a formal reading by volunteer writers from each of the six small groups, after which everyone went over to Case Middle School for pupus and refreshments before heading out.



Writing is a curious, magical thing. This was a day in which Punahou students who have learned to enjoy and value writing gave a group of younger students the chance to get a taste of the satisfactions of thoughtful attention and the sharing of ideas and feelings through writing. I'm not always optimistic about trends in education, or in the world. But on this day, I was. I'm proud of all of them.

Wikispaces

As a teacher I've become interested this year not only in blogs, but in Wikis, which I assume most of you know are like blogs, but collaborative: people can work together to make and edit pages, and add to them over time. There is a pretty cool organization called Wikispaces which is giving away 100,000 free wikis for use in classrooms. It's really easy to sign up—it literally takes only seconds—and the site is set up to be terrifically functional and easy to use. I showed it to my senior seminar class today, because I wanted them to try out an idea I have about how students at school could use the wiki as a kind of archive for work that they are doing individually and in their classes in regard to the sustainability discussions that have been ongoing. So I was asking them to do some of the setup for the wiki, using a set of discovey questions that was developed at the Luke Center as a starting point. I showed them how to set up a couple of pages, and their assignment over the weekend is to build some more infrastructure.

Not only did the students immediately "get it," but they decided to create another wiki of their own so that they could share and comment on one another's work. If you haven't looked into this vehicle, check it out.

The Reality Principle

I may be the last person on the planet to get wind of this, but there is a company in Texas that is riffing off the motivational posters you see everywhere with a series of Demotivators.

They feature the usual color glossy prints on a black background, with a concept in bold and a demotivating statement in small print. Among my favorites:

Limitations: Until You Spread Your Wings, You'll Have No Idea How Far You Can Walk.

Despair: It's Always Darkest Just Before It Goes Pitch Black.

Individuality: Always Remember That You Are Unique. Just Like Everybody Else.

Incompetence: When You Earnestly Believe You Can Compensate For A Lack of Skill By Doubling Your Efforts, There's No End to What You Can't Do.

Adversity: That Which Does Not Kill Me Postpones the Inevitable

I don't know why these particular sentiments strike me as being apt. Maybe it's just that it's Friday.

Maoli

W.S. Merwin has been for many years one of my favorite poets. At one point or another he has lived all over the world, but for many years now he has lived and written in Hawaii, and many of his poems seem to arise from or connect to Hawaiian traditions of awareness of nature and respect for the land.

“Search Party” is a poem that has always resonated strongly with me. It’s one of a fairly small number of poems that I have made the effort to commit to memory. In it, Merwin finds a way to articulate with oblique efficiency a number of ideas that I personally feel to be true, and which are in fact connected to throughlines in my teaching. I often share this poem with my students at the beginning of the semester, more or less to set a tone. If I don’t do so at the beginning, I do so at the end, as a way of pulling some threads together. Here’s the poem:

Search Party

By now I know most of the faces
that will appear beside me as
long as there are still images
I know at last what I would choose
the next time if there ever was
a time again I know the days
that open in the dark like this
I do not know where Maoli is

I know the summer surfaces
of bodies and the tips of voices
like stars out of their distances
and where the music turns to noise
I know the bargains in the news
rules whole languages formulas
wisdom that I will never use
I do not know where Maoli is

I know whatever one may lose
somebody will be there who says
what it will be all right to miss
and what is verging on excess
I know the shadows of the house
routes that lead out to no traces
many of his empty places
I do not know where Maoli is

You that see now with your own eyes
all that there is as you suppose
though I could stare through broken glass
and show you where the morning goes
though I could follow to their close
the sparks of an exploding species
and see where the world ends in ice
I would not know where Maoli is

The question the poem raises, the questions student gravitate toward, is “Who or what is Maoli?” I think it’s possible to understand the primary intention of the poem without having a literal answer to the question. Maoli might be taken by many readers to be word invented by Merwin to denote the object of a spiritual quest, That For Which One Seeks. It turns out, however, that if you look the word up in a Hawaiian-English Dictionary, you will find that “maoli” in its adjectival form means “native, indigenous, aborigine, genuine, true, real, actual.” All of which, taken together as a cluster, seem an appropriate set of descriptors for the character of Maoli as it appears in the poem.

This is what we know: that the deepest mysteries of what is real, what is actual, what is genuine and true, remain inaccessible to us most of the time, obfuscated by “summer surfaces of bodies and the tips of voices like stars out of their distances,” and all the other things that may be mundane or may be beautiful or may be interesting, but which ultimately are distractions from the search for Maoli. And that even though the search may never be completed, our participation in it—or our choice to decline to participate—defines who we are.

Reader Response

I am, among other things, advisor to Ka Wai Ola, the Punahou literary magazine. We have six editors and a staff of about 20 readers, and we publish two issues a year, for each of which we receive anywhere from 100 to 300 submissions: writing, artwork, and photography. We print 2000 copies of each issue, and each issue has about 80 pages. It’s a pretty labor-intensive process.

Because Ka Wai Ola prints only about one in five of the submissions it receives, it comes in for the usual kinds of criticism from those students whose work is not chosen. There is, perhaps inevitably, a perception out there (it’s been around for longer than the eight years I have been advisor) that the choices the editors make are either arbitrary at the one extreme or prejudiced at the other.

We’ve worked pretty hard to create a process that is fair. We’ve refined and codified it so that it at least aspires to objectivity. Each submission is printed out, without the name of the author, given an ID number, and stapled to a sheet of heavy paper with spaces for five readers to indicate whether they think the piece should appear in the magazine or not, and why. After each piece has been read by five different students (who must sign off on their comments), the entries are sorted into three piles: a small pile of pieces with unanimous support, a somewhat larger pile of pieces with no support at all, and a rather large pile, perhaps 75% of the total, which are getting a mixed reaction. A lot of the reading takes place in the reference room of the library, where the folder of submissions is kept on file. Ten or twelve or our meetings are given over to discussion of the maybes. I shrink the entries on a Xerox machine to the point where they are just barely readable and then paste up sheets with as many entries as possible on each sheet. We run off copies so everyone at the meeting can see what is being read. And then we read each one out loud, talk about its plusses and minuses, and then vote on whether to accept the piece. Once the pieces are chosen, we lay the magazine out using inDesign, proofread it about six times, and then send it off to the printer.

The discussions are the most interesting and problematical part of the process. It is unusual for all of our staffers to be able to attend any particular meeting, so the mix of students varies. Sometimes we have people who are new to the process. There’s a mixture of older and younger students, and often no real common sense of what makes a piece of writing good. Some students very quietly make amazingly perceptive and helpful comments; others loudly make completely evaluative statements that flatly contradict the evidence of their senses. I have heard students praise a list of abstractions for its descriptiveness, and criticize minute description for its vagueness. I have heard students praise the structure of pieces which had none, and criticize highly organized pieces for their lack of logic. I have, on one memorable occasion, listened as a student complained about a poem because it had the word “ladder” in it.

I go into every meeting promising myself that I am going to stay out of the conversation and let the students work things out on their own. In previous years I have broken my promise more often than I kept it; if students were willfully misreading a piece or being manifestly unfair in their judgement of it, I felt I could not in good conscience sit there and let them deep-six the piece. And I would like to believe that in my capacity as advisor I may be able to help our student readers learn something about reading well, and perhaps try to move them along in that process, rather than confirm them in their sometimes bizarre notions of What Makes Writing Good. (There’s been a longtime conversation in the department at large about WMWG. At one end of this conversation is the principled position is that if a student thinks what he has written is good, it is good. At the other end of this conversation is the principled position that there objective indicators of goodness in writing, that we know what they are, and that we need to help students interiorize and aspire to those standards. But unpacking that conversation is a blog for another day.)

This year, so far, after three meetings, I’m doing a little better, mostly because we have a large quotient of seniors on the staff and they’re doing a pretty good job of helping to shape the discussions. But I’ve been tempted. And so that’s one dilemma I’ve been thinking about: how long do we as teachers let students flail around and go down false trails and get themselves into awkward places before we step in and say, “Hold on.” In the classroom it’s one thing. As the teacher I reserve the right to step in and do some instruction when it’s called for. With the literary magazine, it’s a little dicier. I don’t see the literary magazine as my magazine, and I don’t want the students to see it as my magazine. But left to themselves, they will often make bad decisions based on bad or careless thinking, and those decisions will result in unfairness to the students who have submitted their work. There have been any number of occasions when I have taken a piece the students have already rejected and done something as simple as reading it aloud myself (the student readers are often flat-out terrible oral readers, which means that the piece is not going to be judged on its merits, but on the basis of a garbled reading which does not put the piece in its best light). At other times I have simply overruled the editorial board, a move which (again, predictably) some editors seem to understand and accept, and others go into a seething fury over. But I figure, this magazine is going out with my name on it, and there are some kinds of things that I’m not going to endorse.

Traditionally, Ka Wai Ola readers tend to respond positively to a certain kind of writing: a short piece, readily understandable on first reading, with some sort of hook or joke or clever bit at the end. They tend to be impatient with longer, more complex, or more highly textured pieces, as well as with pieces that resist their readerly inclination to resolution. If they don’t get it right away, they tend to assume that the piece is not good.

Yesterday, there was a particularly interesting test case. It’s a poem that some of the students really liked, and some of the students really disliked. After the discussion was over, the vote came out exactly even: 4 yeas, 4 nays, with several abstentions.

Devo Andare Adesso

My lips are red as Chinese lacquer
(they say Chinese lacquer is an aphrodisiac)
Scream, don’t sing, sweet-smelling sour
Poisonous, my candy apple

My voice is licorice aftertaste
The Cheshire Cat ate licorice as he watched the Aurora Borealis
His smile lingering like an aftertaste that never went away
Well, one day it went away

If you want some brownies
Let me know, and we’ll get hyphy—
Something about the powdered sugar messes with your dopamine
The life and times of a lipstick librarian
(probably a lesbian)

I will brave the coast of Cote d’Ivoire
And glamorous African men will love me as you love Yoko
But that will never do
Because you can’t love anyone fully in the 21st century
Everybody knows that

Devo andare adesso,
(I must go now)
Fluorescent lights gossip and whisper,
Winking at mirrored walls and mirrored floors,
And in the reflection there are lips
Red as Chinese lacquer.

This really is an interesting case. It’s a poem which is highly organized but almost willfully obscure. At times it seems to be suggesting a sort of plot line, at other times it seems to be undercutting that expectation. Is the hopscotch logic playful, or mere self-indulgent? Do the syntactic leaps (“Scream, don’t sing, sweet-smelling sour poisonous, my candy apple”) create an interesting field of energies for the mind to play in, or are they just pointless and confusing? Is the offhandedness (“something about the powdered sugar messes”) evidence of calculation or carelessness? There’s certainly a sense that the author had a strong sense of what s/he was doing—especially for a high school student—but what does it do for us, for you?

So I’ll put the matter in your hands, gentle reader. Is this a poem that interests or satisfies you? Would you vote yes, or no? Why or why not? Comments accepted below.

Dactylic Hexameter

I recently discovered a site I like called BookNinja. The three founding editors are all writers and there's a lot to like about the site, both in terms of content, which is wide-ranging, and design, which is very clean and sharp.

One of the editors, George Murray, is also a cartoonist, and he has a number of pretty funny cartoons posted. In one of them, two guys are in a bar. One has had way too much to drink, and is telling his drinking companion about a conversation he had with someone else in which they were apparently arguing about prosody. The speaker has cast himself in the role of the triumphant hero in the verbal conflict, and has just arrive at close to the climax of the story as he says, holding the bottle with one hand and jabbing with his index finger with the other, "So, I say to the guy, "Listen pal, you don't know JACK about dactylic hexameter...!"

The cartoon cracked me up when I first saw it, and then I began thinking about it. I know it's dangerous to even attempt to explain what makes something funny, because by the time you get done whatever humor was there will in all likelihood have been crushed under the weight of the analysis. But I found myself thinking about the cartoon in various ways, trying to grok it.

One thing that's funny here is that the speaker seems to be attaching so much importance to a subject that most of us would find laughable. But there's a second stinger here, because this is a cartoon that wouldn't be as funny to someone who didn't know, and perhaps care, about dactylic hexameter, as it is to writers and other academic types who know all too well how exercised our compadres can become about seemingly arcane matters. So the cartoon is a caricature, a satirical portrait of a certain kind of person who might just be found looking at us in the mirror.

Another thing that's funny is the expression on the face of the person who is being subjected to the onslaught. HIS very small glass of wine is still mostly full. He is looking away, sideways and backwards, subtly rolling his eyes, as if to express to an implied or perhaps merely wished-for neighbor something like "Oh boy, here we go..."

Another thing that is not exactly funny but interesting is how much work the artist has gotten done with so few lines. Murray won't be winning any awards for draughtsmanship, but he's got a very neat, efficient method of shorthand sketching that works really well and contributes to the offhand, idiosyncratic tonality of the cartoon.

As a teacher of critical thinking, (former Punahou Academy principal)Win Healy often asked his students to consider the elements of point of view. If I were to attempt to follow Win's lead and design a CT exercise based on this cartoon, I might ask the students to identify all the points of view expressed or implied in the cartoon, and to identify at least two assumptions embedded in each point of view. So what would happen if we tried that?

Well, for starters, there's the explicit point of view of the speaker. He's assuming a) that he knows more about prosody than the person he's talking about does, b) that his listener will agree with him and be impressed.

There's the explicit point of view of the listener, which is conveyed mostly by the facial expression. We can infer that he assumes a) that the speaker is overdramatizing the situation and b) that it would be fruitless to reason with him.

There's the implied point of view of the person being spoken about. That person probably assumes a) that he knows as much, and probably more, about dactylic hexameter than the speaker, and b) that the speaker is in error.

There's the point of view of the artist, who is assuming a) that this situation is entertaining and that b) depicting it is a satisfactory use of his time, and that c) posting it on his web site will allow it to reach a wider audience and provide them with some comic relief as well.

There's the point of view of the reader, which is to say, in this case, me. I'm assuming that a) it's worth my time to be doing this exercise, and (more dubiously, I suppose) that b) there is someone else in the universe who might be interested in reading any of this.

And still also yet already there is at least one more implied point of view, which is yours. You are looking at a blog being written about a cartoon being drawn about a guy giving a drunken speech about a conversation about the significance of dactylic hexameter in a poem which is presumably about, well, something else entirely. I frankly don't know what your assumptions are, except that if you have read this far you are probably assuming there is going to be some kind of payoff to this whole line of reasoning, an assumption which may or may not turn out to be mistaken. We shall have to see.

This preliminary dicussion opens the door to a lot of other interesting questions ranging from the mundane (Who is George Murray anyway?) to the psychological (Why do people drink and get belligerent in the first place?) to the cultural (What kind of world is the world in which this cartoon is funny?) to the philosophical (Is there any reason for us to to take ANY artistic principle seriously enough to fight over it? If so, which one(s)?).

So where are we? I guess the point of an exercise like this is to provide some sort of scaffolding for the thinking process that will allow us to focus sustained attention on the object in question—in this case, the cartoon—in order to put yourself in a situation where you might actually arrive at a new idea, something you didn't know or had not yet thought about.

In that sense, this post is a kind of analogue to or elaboration of the point I was trying to develop yesterday in looking at the Wyeth painting. One of my grounding assumptions—one of the throughlines in my own life experience—is that writing itself helps to generate and deepen thinking. That's news to most of my students, who tend to think about writing, to the extent that they think about writing at all, as the more or less mechnical process of spelling out what you have decided to say once you have figured out what that is.

Teaching the Ape to Write

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn’t have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then they tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
“You look like a god sitting there.
Why don’t you write something?”

(James Tate)

Sometimes I think that teachers make the whole business of teaching writing too complicated. We put a whole lot of effort into lesson design and scaffolding exercises and rubrics. We feel like we have to provide and require students to work within predefined structures (like the 5-paragraph thesis essay) without which we assume that students would be at a loss.

I’ve written abut this topic before, as for example in “Essaying the Essay,” which Dan Mindich published on Faculty Shack. But I’m feeling the urge to say it again. For most of my teaching career the best writing my students have produced has been in response to a completely open-ended assignment: I simply ask students to hand in to me, once a week, a piece of writing that represents an hour’s worth of time on task. That’s it. No special topic. No special form. No set length. No constraints. Just write something. It can be something self-contained, or something which is a start or a continuation of something longer.

Whatever the students hand in, that’s what I deal with. Some students write personal essays. Some write short stories. Some are entirely made up, some are based on their favorite video games, some are thinly-veiled dramatizations of situations they have been in with their friends. Some write poems, often quite badly at first. A number of students have completed novels over the course of a semester.

It’s not that I don’t ever give directed assignments. I do. Students write in response to directed assignments as often, or perhaps a little more often, than they do on their own. But I also make space for the free-choice writing, for a number of reasons. First, because about 95% of the most interesting writing I see from students comes from those pieces. (Hasn’t every English teacher at one time or another faced a stack of essays to be graded with something like despair, putting off the process until the last possible moment and getting through it only by setting up a complicated system of self-rewards involving at the very least chocolate chip cookies and some kind of caffeinated beverage, and in more extreme cases carefully spaced infusions of grain alcohol? I certainly have. I know what I’m going to find, and I know it’s not going to be pretty. But I actually look forward to reading through a set of free-choice papers. Part of it is probably just the element of surprise: I don’t know what I’m going to find. But often there’s more to it than that.) Second, because I get to know what’s going on in my students heads much faster and much more deeply when I turn them loose than when I tell them what I want them to write. Third, I believe that we do our students a disservice when we take the decision-making process away from them. Every writer knows what it’s like to face a blank page. It’s intimidating. It’s challenging. It’s where becoming a writer begins. Students often get to the point, after a few weeks of free-choice papers, where they complain of having run out of topics. Now there’s a teachable moment. What do you do when you don’t know what to do? That’s a great question, and once it’s been said out loud, the student is in a position, with your as the teacher, to begin generating a list of answers.

Is it too obvious that one of the answers is simply to look at something? I tell the students to direct their attention somewhere. At an object, at a book, at a person, at a sunset. It doesn’t matter. Just look. Then write about what you see, and then write what you think about what you see.

Here, for example, is a well-known painting by Andrew Wyeth. (It’s not here entirely by accident. As I’ve been turning over in my mind what I thought I’d be writing about this week in the context of this blog, I found myself thinking about Wyeth, partially for aesthetic reasons–I thought the painting would look good on this page—and partially for thematic reasons—I’ve already written about my admiration for William Stafford and Ted Kooser, and it seems to me that Wyeth is part of a thread or throughline that connects all three to each other and to some other principles which I will eventually get around to articulating more fully. ) And here am I, in the position of our hypothetical student writer, wondering what I might have to say about what I am looking at. So here goes.





What I see: It’s an a scene with two parts, what’s inside and what’s outside. Inside is what seems to be a country house or farmhouse. In the foreground is a table with a white tablecloth on it. On the tablecloth is a plain white ceramic plate. On one side of the plate there’s a knife. On the other side is a cup and saucer, again plain white ceramic. The plate and the cup are empty.

The table is in the corner of a room, near a window. The walls of the room are covered with a yellow-brown wallpaper with an understated, or perhaps faded, floral design. The sun angling in the window is casting a parallelogram of light onto the wall next to the window. The windowframe itself and the wainscoting beneath it are painted white.

Outside the window is what appears to be a yard: the grass is cut short and there is a fencepost visible in the foreground. To the right of and further away than the fencepost are two large logs, perhaps two feet in diameter, lying on their side, from the trunk of a tree that has been chainsawed and cut into sections. The nearer of the two logs has a metal circle of some kind nailed onto it. The sharp edges of the wood where the tree broke are sticking out and pointing from the cut surface of the closer log.

There is a lot of brown and beige and white in the picture. The grass itself is uniformly brown but not covered in snow. It looks like it might be late winter or early spring.

Compositionally, the whole picture is a study in geometry. The rectangle of the picture itself in is subdivided into smaller rectangular planes seen from different angles: the table top, the walls, the window, the window panes themselves. The rectangles are mostly inside. Outside is mostly circles, or perhaps more accurately cylinders: the logs, the fencepost. The ground itself presents pretty much the only irregular element in an otherwise tightly controlled visual environment.

What I think about what I see: I like this picture a lot. It has a kind of quietness to it, a stillness, that is, well, Zen-like. At first glance it doesn’t seem to be about anything special; it’s just the corner of a room and a window. One gets the sense that Wyeth could paint a pretty interesting picture of anything at all, just because he is such a precise observer of what he’s looking at; the object of his attention is transformed and enriched by the quality of the attention he is paying to it. Which is, of course, now that I think of it—and I promise you this wasn’t a setup, I just came to this idea while I was writing it—the point I was trying to make in the first place. Students need to learn this. What goes on a blank page isn’t going to be good or bad simply because the subject or topic is good or bad. It’s going to be good or bad depending on the quality of attention they choose to devote to it. So one answer to the question of what to do when you don’t know what to write about is to do what Wyeth has done, and what I have tried to do here: look at something. Talk about what you see, and what you think about what you see.

Of course, that first move may well lead to more. That first glance is deceiving. Look again. That single table setting, for example. This is a solitary house, and it implies a solitary life. It’s a life of elemental simplicity: a rural life, not an urban life; an old-fashioned life, not a modern life. The painting presents itself simultaneously as a report on and an endorsement of this life. The inside world—the world of man—and the outside world—the world of nature—form within this picture a single whole, a unity. Those two circular shapes outside the window are mirrored by the circular shapes on the table. The flowers on the wall echo the grass on the ground. Even the knife on the table has its geometrical analogue in the fencepost outside. The sunlight bathes and illuminates and connects all of the corresponding elements.

One could go on. I have enough experience as a writer to know what the next move might be if I were inclined to continue, and if I didn’t know, I am confident that I could bust a move: make something up. But I would hope to have my students come to understand—to experience—how even the most modest observations can open up into richnesses, if only we can bring ourselves to begin.

How We Need a New Poem

The other night when I bloghopping I ran across this poem at the site for Taddle Creek Magazine:

Two Thirteen-Line Poems on How We Need A New Poem

But only a good one. Hammer, mine the day.
Have other poems dropped like depth charges
to break something loose, picture a tight-lipped
brigadier, reciting a roll call, “Acorn, Akhmatova,”
loaded—fired against the circle of whiteness
surrounding the city—reload—and again.
And old women, helping the effort, walk
the streets beating pans to flush out a poem,
report that an old Chinese man looked into
Wah Fook Seafood Trading and smiled, lifted
the stick of an arm and waved gently like a king.
I need something more, comes the reply, more than
police cruisers sailing the streets like sharks.

The young man on the street corner is always there,
growing the thin film of hostility on the inside
of his frame, that much extra weight in a bucket—
heart stamping each day like a blown tire,
not speaking because he knows his voice would sound
like an angry dog—his pet rats lined up on his arm
even seem frightened, as though on a sinking ship,
the sign reading, “OUT OF WORK, OUT OF HOME, PLEASE
HELP. THANK YOU.” Nobody from the passing
stream stops to think if he were God, quietly there,
even a dollar would get you into heaven.
He knows, instead, the fussing crow wing
of a broken umbrella, waving him away.

I like how this poem moves from impulse to execution; how the details in the first stanza accumulate and begin to establish a kind of authority for themselves, and then how the poem shifts direction and the figure of the young man comes into focus, again as the result of patient accumulation; how the whole thing taken together becomes the embodiment of the concern expressed in the title.

I also like the way that the title suggests that we are looking at two poems, but the presentation—the fact that there is one title for the two stanzas—suggests that this is one poem in two parts. That in itself is, well, new. At least to me. So you can read it as one poem, or as two poems, or as one poem again. Kind of like how when you were small you could close one eye, then the other, then the first, and make the world hop around.


The poem is by Alex Boyd. His web site has additional poems and a link to an interesting essay on writing.

Classroom Blogs

One of the reasons I am keeping this blog is to familiarize myself with the conventions of this type of publication so that at some point in the future I can use it as a tool in the classroom, either as a regular part of the English curriculum or as an option for tech-savvy students. So while I am moving from blog to blog, as I did last night, I'm keeping an eye out for models of classroom practice that look promising. Will Richardson's blog continues to be an amazing source. He has a link in his November 27 post to a sixth grade classroom page which looks really good. There is a home page for the class, and individual links in the sidebar to each student's individual blog. What is even cooler is that they have been able to use the Google Reader package to aggregate every student's most recent post on one page, so you don't have to click from page to page to see what's new for each kid, and to navigate to the individual pages from there. The whole thing is very clean and elegant. On the home page there are links to some other classroom-based blogs, including Darren Kuropatwa's great-looking one for a pre-calc math class. Click on his name in the sidebar and you find that he has set up several other pages as well, including one for an AP Calc AB class.

And as long as we're in surfing mode, take a look—especially you soccer fans—at this whop-jaw photoblog. It plays as a slide show, but you can select images to view by putting your cursor to the very right or left of the thumbnail bar at the top, which will cause the bar to start scrolling.

Teachers Without Borders

Dr. Fred Mednick of Teachers Without Borders was on campus today and I got to sit in on a lunch conversation with him at the Luke Center. He had some interesting observations about the potential of technology to provide "High-touch, high-speech" connections between donors providing microcredit to poverty-area businesspeople in other parts of the world. So if you are perhaps, like most of us, more inclined to give money to a cause when you can see the result, tecnology is being developed—like the now-controversial $150 laptop—that will allow you to do that. (For a fascinating overview of the microcredit/microfinance initiative in global economics, read Connie Bruck's "Millions for Millions" in the October 30 New Yorker. Muhammad Yunus, the originator of the concept of microcredit, has just been named as recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006, and is featured in the PBS Series The New Heroes)

During the conversation (Punahou president) Jim Scott mentioned emerging plans for the school to establish, as part of a redesigned capstone course in Economics for seniors, an endowment which would allow Punahou seniors to each provide four or five hundred dollars in microcredit to a selected recipient. Students would be encouraged to develop a sense of social entrpreneurship by doing research and making intelligent decisions about where to invest the money.

Perhaps the most interesting area of conversation that we got into while I was there had to do with a new platform for Open Education which Cisco Systems has helped him develop. It is a kind of open-source program which will allow teachers from all over the world to collaborate on creating online texts that can be used anywhere by anyone.

This new platform will give teachers the chance to learn from one another within the disciplines they teach, to develop curriculum collaboratively, and to share global best practices. Interested in plugging in to this project? Explanations and procedures should be available at the Teachers Without Borders website in a month or two.

(See also this article which references both Fred Mednick and Punahou School.)