Presences

After a week in which I spent a great deal of time thinking, it was something of a relief this afternoon, to pack up my camera gear and drive downtown a simply wander around with no particular time frame and no particular destination, just putting one foot in front of another and taking the pictures that presented themselves.

Now that I've walked myself out I'm having thoughts again, a different kind of thoughts (second thoughts?), this time about the pictures themselves and some of the implicit logic of the photo-making process. I don't have sophisticated tastes in artwork, but I've developed a few favorites over time. One of first modern painters with whom I felt some sort of tentative, hard-to-articulate affinity was Charles Sheeler. I was taken by his sense of composition, the way he would take something quite literal and present it as a kind of geometrical abstraction. Many of his pictures are in essence a kind colorscape, as opposed to a traditional landscape, and the subject matter is often, as in "Upper Deck," the painting at left, is often technological rather than natural. He seems to be documenting and in some sense celebrating the constructions of mankind.

Similarly, I admire the geometrical precision and balance of many of Edward Hopper's paintings, which seem to be aiming for that middle zone between representation and abstraction. From there it is not too great a step to the more purely abstract paintings of Clifford Styll, Mark Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn, all of whom reside in a corridor in the back of my mind as presiding deities when I'm out with my camera. I'm not really consciously patterning my photographs after them, but they have colored the way I see things through the viewfinder.


Here, for example, is a picture I took at Ward Center today. While the subject matter is literal enough, a corner of the walkway on the second floor of Ward Warehouse, I saw it through the lens as a more or less as a study in form and color. Sometimes these pictures don't work out, but this one has a kind of drama that I like.

Similarly, if less obviously, is this picture I took a few minutes later, looking straight down from walkway at a little girl who was one of several children playing in the little ampitheater area they have there. Here Rothko was explicitly in my mind (those five, tonally related vertical stripes) as I framed the picture, but I was taken with the little girl and the implied geometry: she was looking sideways over toward her father and sister at the same time that I was looking straight down at her. I took several other pictures of the father and his two little girls, whose pure and un-self-conscious happiness resonated especially strongly for me after the events of the week.

I went back downstairs and was walking along when my eye was caught by a lime green t-shirt in the window of an old Ford Pinto. I was first interested in the picture as a kind of study of color and form within the horizontal rectangle, and then as I kept looking back to it I was, and still am, each time I look at it, arrested by the suggestion of a bodily presence which is actually a bodily absence.

(As I was writing this, I found myself thinking of William Stafford's poem "At Our House":

Home late, one lamp turned low,

crumpled pillow on the couch,

wet dishes in the sink (late snack),

in every child's room the checked,

slow, sure breath--

Suddenly in this doorway where I stand

in this house I see this place again,

this time the night as quiet, the house

as well secured, all breath but mine borne

gently on the air--

And where I stand, no one.

Presences. Absences. What it means to be present in the midst of absences.)

Walking a little further, I went into a kitchen-goods store, thinking to buy a wine-bottle opener as a gift for a friend of mine. They did not have the kind of opener I had in mind, but the place was an amazingly stimulating visual environment, and I walked around the store quite happily for several minutes taking pictures until I happened to look up and see the store owner giving me stink-eye.


I ignored him, but the next thing I knew a young woman began following me around. Then she came over to me and told me very apologetically that "There's a rule against taking pictures in the store." Really? A rule? And is that a rule that is written down somewhere, or what? "Well, I'm sorry, but the owner doesn't like you to be taking pictures in the store." Ah. A different matter entirely, to be sure. I told her I'd be happy to refrain from taking pictures in the store—and that the owner could rest easy, for I would not be back in a hurry—and took my leave. (Alas. I wonder what the owner was afraid of.)




I continued down toward Ward Center, the other half of the Ward Shopping Complex, and along the way came upon what will serve as the bookend for this reflection: another little study in line and color.




As I said at the start, I guess I needed this time to wander, and I guess that even in my non-thinking mode my thoughts were, inevitably, very much with me, and more or less insinuating themselves into what I was seeing.

There are many ways of thinking about photographs. I'd like to think of the photographs I've been taking lately as kind of testimony to, and celebration of, the small beauties that surround us everywhere, that we, that I, am so often likely to overlook. The title of the book from which the William Stafford poem is taken is "The Darkness Around Us is Deep." Photography is, in essence, all about the light. In the Geoff Dyer book I wrote about earlier, he quotes Dorothea Lange to the effect that "the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera" (9). I'm down with that.

Art Credits:

Upper Deck: http://www.santarosa.edu/~jwatrous/art-history/sheeler-deck-big.jpg
Chop Suey: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/interior/

Reading as Writers; Writing as Readers

Today I decided to take my sophomores Back to Basics. The other day in class we were discussing our most recent reading, Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of controversial philanthropist Zell Kravinsky, and I had asked one of the small groups to make an effort to "read as writers," considering not so much the "what" of the article as the "how." The group seemed to have trouble figuring out how to proceed, so I thought today we would backtrack and work together to practice reading one particular section from the article from a writerly point of view. Here's the passage we looked at: feel free to skim or skip down to the followup text, since I'll be returning to the example text as we go along.

Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, is a mixed-income community of about four thousand people which tries to maintain a small-town character within the sprawl of housing developments and shopping malls just north of Philadelphia. I made my first visit to Kravinsky in November, parking in front of a wooden-shingled house with a broken photocopier on the front porch and a tangle of bicycles, tricycles, and wagons. A handwritten sign by the door, a marker of spousal frustration, read, "Put Your Keys Away Before You Forget."

Kravinsky came to the door several minutes after I rang the bell. He is slight, and looked both boyish and wan, with pale, almost translucent skin. He wore sneakers, a blue plaid shirt, and tan trousers with an elasticized waist. He seemed distracted, and I realized later that the timing of my visit was awkward: he knew that his wife would not want a reporter in the house, but she had gone out, and two of his four young children were home, so he could not immediately go out to lunch with me. He invited me into a house crowded with stuff, including a treadmill in the middle of the living room. He cleared away enough books and toys for me to sit down on a sofa. His daughter, who is nine, came into the room to say hello, but when Emily Kravinsky came home, a moment later, she walked straight past us into the kitchen, taking the girl with her. Kravinsky followed. He came back after a few minutes and picked up his coat, and as we left the house he said, "She wants us out of here."

We drove to a restaurant in a nearby mini-mall. He ordered a mushroom sandwich and a cup of warm water that he didn't touch. "I used to feel that I had to be good, truly good in my heart and spirit, in order to do good," he said, in a soft voice. "But it's the other way around: if you do good, you become better. With each thing I've given away, I've been more certain of the need to give more away. And at the end of it maybe I will be good. But what are they going to say-that I'm depressed? I am, but this isn't suicidal. I'm depressed because I haven't done enough."

Within a few minutes, Kravinsky had talked of Aristotle, Nietzsche, and the Talmud, and, in less approving terms, of the actor Billy Crudup, who had just left his pregnant girlfriend for another woman. ("How do you like that!") Kravinsky's mostly elevated range of reference, along with a rhetorical formality and a confessional tone, sometimes gave the impression that he was reading from his collected letters. "What I aspire to is ethical ecstasy," he said. "Ex stasis: standing out of myself, where I'd lose my punishing ego. It's tremendously burdensome to me." Once achieved, "the significant locus would be in the sphere of others."

His cell phone rang, and a mental switch was flicked: "You have to do a ten-thirty-one and put fresh money in on terms that are just as leveraged . . . going eight per cent over debt. . . . I think we should do it. It's nice to start with a blue chip."

These contrasting discourses have one clear point of contact. In our conversations, Kravinsky showed an almost rhapsodic appreciation of ratios. In short, ratios are dependable and life is not. "No number is significant in itself: its only significance is in relation to other numbers," he said. "I try to rely on relationships between numbers, because those relationships are constant-unlike Billy Crudup and the woman he impregnated. Even if the other relationships in our lives are going to hell in a handbasket, numbers continue to cooperate with one another."

I began by trying to sketch some ideas based on the assumption that writing is a series of moves. The writer does something first, and keeps doing that until he stops doing that and starts doing something else. "Reading as a writer" involves tracking those moves, figuring out what sorts of decisions the writer is making as the piece of writing unfolds, and then trying to figure out which of those moves might be useful additions to one's own repertoire of writerly moves.

All pieces of writing start the same way: with a blank page (or, perhaps, a blank screen.) And in that moment, the writer is faced with a decision: how to begin. There are lots of familiar off-the-shelf starting patterns: "Once upon a time..." immediately signals we're entering the world of a fairy tale. "Yesterday as I was..." promises a factual first-person narrative. "Dear Grandma..." suggests that a personal communication in the form of a letter will be taking shape. Students generally have no real problem getting started when they write, but the selection processes, the moves they make to begin, are most often sub- or pre-conscious. One of the purposes of this particular exercise is to float some of those subconscious decisions to the surface, where they can be (re)considered.

So I think it's always instructive to look at points of entry. In this case, we begin with "Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, is a mixed-income community of about four thousand people which tries to maintain a small-town character within the sprawl of housing developments and shopping malls just north of Philadelphia." As I explained to the students, I have read something like 342,792 student papers in my career, and not many of them sound like this. So what makes this writing different? What kind of writing is this? What's the opening move?

Well, it's reportorial, for one thing. It starts by reporting demographic facts about a particular town. If we had only the first sentence to go on, we might well expect that this was going to be some kind of sociological analysis of the town itself. But we'd be wrong about that, as the next sentence, busting a new move, immediately makes clear:

I made my first visit to Kravinsky in November, parking in front of a wooden-shingled house with a broken photocopier on the front porch and a tangle of bicycles, tricycles, and wagons.

Now this is a sentence that bears close examination. I asked the students to tell me how many parts the sentence has, and the consensus answer was "two." (Other answers are also instructive, for perhaps slightly different reasons.) The first part of the sentence ("I made my first visit to Kravinsky in November") is interesting not only because it signals more clearly the real intention of the piece (it's not, in fact, going to be a sociological treatise about Jenkintown, but a first-person narrative about the author's visit to Kravinsky's house), but also because it is the kind of sentence that might have appeared in any of those 342,792 student papers. The second part of the sentence, however, shows the writer busting another move, one that I am at more or less constant pains to get my students to practice: the move toward specificity. 342,790 of my theoretical student essays would have continued with something like "and the yard was a mess." But Parker does something more artful, and more helpful, he gives us a selection of details that allow us to picture the yard. The old writer's cliché is "Show, don't tell." Here Parker is showing us how that works. It's also worth noting that the selection of details is not random. He does not mention whether or not the mailbox was open. He does not mention whether or not there was a bird in the maple tree by the front door. Instead, he gives us a selection of details which have a particular significance, and that significance is related to his purpose in the article, which is to tell us what sort of a person Zell Kravinsky turns out to be. The details give us the impression that Kravinsky is a guy who does not pay much attention to his physical surroundings. Parker, in his next sentence, nails that impression down:

A handwritten sign by the door, a marker of spousal frustration, read, "Put Your Keys Away Before You Forget."

This sentence is interesting as the clincher in a series of details that allow us to begin characterizing Kravinsky—as Parker himself is doing as he tries to "read" the situation he's walking into—before Kravinsky has even opened the door. Furthermore, the interpolation of that innocent little authorial inference ("a marker of spousal frustration") suggests that the controversy surrounding Kravinsky and his way of doing things extends even into the confines of his home.

Having walked with the students through the series of writerly moves in the first paragraph, I then asked them to work through the rest of the passage individually, looking for the fault lines, the turns, the places where the author stops doing what he has been doing and starts doing something else. I asked them to pay particular attention to anything they see Parker doing that in the normal course of writing they would have been unlikely to do themselves. After about ten minutes, I asked each student to turn to a partner and share one thing move that they noticed or found interesting. A few minutes later, I asked for volunteers to share something their partner had said that they thought was interesting.

We wound up talking about a number of interesting moments in the piece: the part where Kravinsky orders food but doesn't touch it; the interpolation of the parenthetical expression ("How do you like that!") in the paragraph of indirect quotations, the logic of the selection of the particular direct quotations from what must have been a longer conversation.

At which point, I gave the students the homework assignment which represent the inversion of the exercise of reading as a writer: we follow up by writing as readers, trying to use what we have observed to come up with a piece of writing which is different from, and potentially better than, what we might have written if we hadn't gone through this exercise:

Your assignment: do an interview with someone of your own choice and write up a report on the interview that uses whatever techniques interest you from Parker's article. Your goal is to present a profile of the person you are interviewing, so that we get to know something about that person in the same way that we get to know something about Kravinsky from reading Parker.

So that was English class on Friday February 15. I'm looking forward to reading the students' responses.

This is Really Something

I've recently asked my students to write some "This I Believe..." essays patterned more on less on the lines of the essays on the NPR web site of the same name. As I've been reading theirs I've been turning over in my mind some of my own core beliefs, one of which has to do with the inherent value of writing, not simply as a means of communication, but as something more personal and ultimately self-referential. As I type these words, for example, I am to some extent aware that there is a group of readers out there, like you, who will be at some point be reading them. But my primary motivation in writing has never been to get a message out to you, the readers. Most of the time, as I write, I am not really thinking too much about my readers, real or imagined. I'm thinking about the words, watching the way the sentence takes shape, trying to figure out what comes next. I'm writing first because it's interesting to me, and, at least sometimes, clarifying, and because it satisfies me at the end of a half hour or an hour or two or three hours to have a coherent body of words in front of me that seems to have come from... somewhere.

So yesterday I got an email from a colleague referring me to a recent essay by Stanley Fish entitled "Why Do Writers Write." In it, Fish describes his reactions to a radio interview conducted by Diane Rehm with Irish author Colm Toibin, who seemed to be brushing off comments from callers thanking him for the influence of his work in their lives, and "asking for recognition and empathy." Fish is initially put off by the author's stance, but after listening further, decides that perhaps Toibin was right after all:

I saw that what I had first regarded as a suspect evasiveness was in fact a determination to be faithful to the practice he was dedicated to and a refusal to claim for that practice effects that could not or should not be its objective. If a reader feels consoled or comforted, that’s all to the good, but it’s not what writing is about. Writing is about crafting sentences and building them into paragraphs and building the paragraphs into arguments and narratives. What Rehm and her listeners were proffering was a rationale for the act that was not internal to its demands, a rationale that could take the form of an external justification: I write so that you will feel better or I write so that the world will become a better place.

Fish ends his essay with a rationale for writing which makes a clear case for the writing as a means of achieving intrinsic satisfaction:

If you’ve found something you really like to do – say write beautiful sentences – not because of the possible benefits to the world of doing it, but because doing it brings you the satisfaction and sense of completeness nothing else can, then do it at the highest level of performance you are capable of, and leave the world and its problems to others. This is a lesson I have preached before in these columns when the subject was teaching, and it is a lesson that can be applied, I believe, to any project that offers as a prime reason for prosecuting it the pleasure, a wholly internal pleasure, of its own accomplishment. And if your project doesn’t offer that pleasure (perhaps among others) you might want to think again about your commitment to it.

I think this is pretty much exactly right. I don't know about the "beautiful sentences" part; although I admire beautiful sentences when I find them, I don't think I'm primarily oriented toward producing them. If anything, I think I would aspire to be a craftsman rather than an artist. But the part about "the satisfaction and sense of completeness," and the pleasure in writing, "a wholly internal pleasure, of its own accomplishment," yeah, that I can relate to. Don't get me wrong, if you've come this far, if you're still reading, I appreciate that, and I hope that what I have written holds some interest for you and gives you something of what you may have been looking for when you checked in. But it wasn't my primary motivation for sitting down to write this tonight.

The New Yorker magazine used to have a promotional videotape—I loaned my copy to a student and never got it back—which included interviews with various writers like John McPhee and Ann Beattie. I remember in particular the segment with Jamaica Kincaid, who was talking about the now-famous and widely anthologized piece "Girl." What she said, basically, is that she sat down to write it and when she got done with it she put down her pen and knew immediately that "This was...something." She sent it off to the New Yorker and it was pulled out of the slush pile and that was the start of her career as a writer.

I think that it's important that those of us who are teachers find ways of making it possible for students, at least some of the students some of the time, to come to experience that internal pleasure, the satisfaction that comes from having written something that is satisfying not because the teacher likes it, or because it did or did not get published in the literary magazine, but because it just felt great to have written it.

In the Middle

Well, its the middle of the week in what is getting close to being the middle of the semester, and I'm in The Danger Zone for sure. I've spent way too many hours (15? 20?) the last seven days trying to resolve technical issues relating to getting my students blogs set up the way I want them, and in the meantime the papers have been piling up, and so now I'm wading through stacks of papers and I don't know whether to laugh or cry, or both. On the one hand, I am finding that, left to their own devices (given their own choice of topic and form) they are capable of really amazing writiing. In the last three hours I've personal essays and short stories and reflections that are clear and funny and often witty and entertaining, heartening fare for traversing The Danger Zone.

On the other hand, I also have been reading the papers my students many of the same students wrote in response to a directed assignment, one of my standard early-semester litmus tests: "Type out a passage from a work of literature at the top of the page. Write a two-paragraph response. In the first paragraph, tell me what you see. Make observations, statements of fact, things that you are sure everyone else would be able to agree with. In the second paragraph, tell me what what you think about what you see. What inferences can you draw? What hunches do you have? What do you like? What do you not like? What questions arise in your mind?"

This assignment is trickier than it sounds. First of all, the students have to be able to distinguish between when they are being (merely) descriptive or reportorial, and when they are being speculative or interpretive. Secondly, the students have to have some sense of selection: of the universe of things one might choose to talk about when looking at a passage, some are clearly going to be more significant than others. Some might be hardly worth mentioning at all ("This passage consists of 103 words") unless put into a context that illuminates the significance ("76 of which are adjectives with religious connotations.") The two-paragraph limit is designed to keep them focussed and to encourage them to pare down. (I'm reminded of the story about Charles Dickens, who is said to have included as a postscript in a letter an apology along the lines of "I'm sorry this letter is so long, if I had had more time I would have made it shorter.")

But still, even though the assignment has its constraints, it shouldn't be that hard, should it? It's a formula piece, a five-finger exercise, a test of the students' ability to perform a couple of basic processing moves. They're sophomores in what is reputed to be a pretty good high school and they should be able to do this, right? Especially given their aforementioned fluency in the open field.

As if. In the set of 18 papers I just corrected, only five students were able to pull it off with any degree of success. Which now presents me with a series of all-too-familiar interlocking dilemmas. Do I jettison the lesson plans for the next two weeks and go Back to Basics? Do I point out the error of their ways and ask them to try it again? Do I shrug and say, hell, it was stupid assignment in the first place and the only place they are ever going to have to write something so narrowly prescriptive is in the English class of someone as anal-retentive as me? Do I try to come at the same writerly problems from a different angle on the next assignment, and keep coming at it again on the next one, until eventually I wear them down? The semester is already one quarter gone. How critical is this one dilemma, out of the multitude of like dilemmas?

So the shoe has found its way to the other foot. For me looking at the students, as for the students looking at their texts: so many things to see, so many ways to think about what I see. How do pare it down to what is most important? It's late. I'm tired. Tomorrow I'm going to walk into class and find a way to put a positive spin on the message. Great job on the open-ended assignments. On the directed assignments? Nice try. But not good enough. Let's look again.

Opening the Doors

I've got two platforms set up now for my two sophomore classes to play around with. One group is working with a wiki which we are going to explore as a common space. The second has a home page in the form of a blog, the one where I've been trying to figure out the aggregation questions. It's got a shape now that works provisionally, and I've got two kinds of aggregators, based on Google Reader and Pageflakes. The students have jumped right in with both feet, and I'm pretty excited by what is starting to take shape, not only on my own site but on the sites that my colleagues Mark and Chris have set up. I'm meeting with one of our tech guys tomorrow; he's got an alternate platform set up that we may switch over to. If we're going to do that, I'd like to do it sooner rather than later. But I thought I'd post the links to what we've got, even though the paint is still wet and the furniture hasn't all arrived yet. If you have feedback or suggestions, let me know.

A Poem for Today

Thanks

- W. S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

(from The Rain in the Trees, Knopf 1988)

Jeremiah

Tough day today, for everyone. Showed up at school and was struck by the sober demeanor of many of the teachers and students I saw on campus early in the morning. Didn't really find out why until I had been there almost an hour. Here's the account that was published later in the day in the Honolulu Advertiser:

Punahou School science teacher Jeremiah Johnson died yesterday during a weekend voyage off Lana'i with 98 students.
Johnson, 36, was one of 14 adults aboard the vessel Rapture on an ocean excursion that left Honolulu on Saturday, said Punahou spokeswoman Laurel Bowers Husain. The boat is due back today.

An inflatable rigid-hull boat connected with the Rapture had taken the teacher to a spot about 120 yards offshore from Shark Fin Rock, said acting Sgt. Nelson Hamilton of the Maui Police Department. Johnson entered the water to free dive at about 10:30 a.m. yesterday, and after 30 seconds when he didn't resurface, the crew looked down and saw him sinking to the bottom, Hamilton said.

The unconscious teacher was brought up to the boat and crew members performed cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. He then was taken to Kaumalapau Harbor on Lana'i, where fire and police personnel were waiting. Hamilton said.

Johnson could not be revived and was pronounced dead on Lana'i. The cause of death was not immediately apparent. Hamilton said an autopsy will be performed either today or tomorrow.

Johnson joined the Punahou staff in January 2003 and was a popular teacher who taught environmental studies and marine biology, Husain said. He is survived by his wife and a young daughter.

Plans for a memorial service have not been announced.

I did not know Jeremiah well; we had spoken perhaps once or twice. But he was close friends with many of my close friends, and it leaves all of us feeling pretty helpless. Here's a bright young guy, happy, capable, healthy, with a wife and a young child, and suddenly, it's over. And we have to try to find ways to support one another in dealing with that reality.

Nothing that any of us can think of to do or say feels adequate. Our friends are hurting, and our school is hurting, and the students, also hurting, are taking their cues from watching us.

There is the tendency to want to stop everything, to dismiss our classes, to go home and hug our loved ones.

And there is a simultaneous tendency to want to continue on with something, to honor the life of this world by returning to it with a renewed purpose.

I didn't want to write this post. I didn't want to not write this post. I'd like to acknowledge and honor Jeremiah, to celebrate his life and to draw from his death some lesson that will serve to enrich the time that we still have on this planet.

But I don't feel adequate to the task. I feel sorrow for Jeremiah, for his family, for my friends, for all of us. My words are what they are: words. No more. I have it mind to offer a prayer, which I will do in my own way, as a Buddhist in front of the altar in my home. I invite those of you who are so inclined to join me, in such a manner as may suffice. Jeremiah Johnson. May he rest in peace.

Juxtapositon IV: The Ongoing Moment

So I've been reading Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment, in which he wends his idiosyncratic way through the history of modern photography. His method is to find a motif and explore how various photographers have gone after it. For example, he has about ten pages worth of material about photographers who have taken famous pictures of blind people, and he theorizes on the symbolic significances of that choice. Some of the blind people turn out to be playing accordions, which leads him to a discussion of a series of photographs of accordion players. Later, he looks at discusses photographs of hands. I like the way he follows the associative leads that the photographs present to him: the direction of his narrative is always open to surprising shifts of focus. Dyer says:

This book...aims to... echo the possibilities of simultaneity and random juxtaposition afforded by a pile of photographs. You rummage in the box. You pick up a photograph and then another one and the way they are combined makes you view each of them in a different way...

But I wish that each picture — or the verbal equivalent of a picture: each section of text — was not forced to be surrounded by just two others. Ideally some sections would be adjacent to four or eight or even ten others. As Strand wrote in the introduction to the portfolio of photographs On My Doorstep, 'rather than a linear record, [it] should be seen as a composite whole of interdependencies' .

...this book aims to emulate the aleatory experience of dipping into a pile of photographs as far as is compatible wth the constraints of binding. of its being a book. (38)

Although the pictures he chooses and the stories he tells about them are fascinating, Dyer does have a tendency at times to push his analyses just past the bunds of credibility. Here, for example, is his hyperbolic commentary on Dorothea Lange's "Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona":

In bright sunlight a man covers his mouth was his hand. The palm is facing the camera. It is not a natural pose but it could be derived from the gesture of wiping his mouth with the back of his hand after drinking. He is young, handsome, but the hand is that of someone twenty or thirty years older. The hand seems almost to belong to someone else, poking into the picture from an elbow beyond the frame. His eyes are in deep shadow so that it is the hand that identifies him, that both silences and speaks for him. 'All I have is a voice,' Auden declared at the end of the 1930's; all this man has are hands which are exactly the same texture as the long-weathered wood on which he leans. (This piece of timber is angled in such a way that it could almost be his upper arm.) The hand is criss-crossed by the dirt tracks of the life he has led — which is exactly the same as the life he has to come. The palm is the landscape — the face of the land— through which he travels. You don't need any knowledge of palmistry to understand that his life, whatever its length, will be as hard as the earth whose qualities — dry, capable of epic endurance — it has taken on. The picture's optimism comes from the contrast between the face and the hand, by the way the face, at this stage, is still relatively unlined, untouched by the life of the hand; its pessimism or hopelessness from the knowledge that it is only a matter of time before it becomes just as creased and worn. That is the destiny we read in this palm. (55-6)

On the one hand, I admire the patience and thoughtfulness with which Dyer goes about unpacking what he sees as the metaphorical dimensions of the photo. On the other hand, I can't help but wonder, as I read the last sentence, "Who is this we you speak of, Kemo Sabe?"

There's a lot of this sort of thing in The Ongoing Moment, and I find that even when, as in this case, I find his interpretations hard to swallow whole, they are entertaining and thought-provoking and serve the purpose of making me go back and take a close look.


(Photo credits:
Blind Woman: http://expositions.bnf.fr/portraits/grand/147.htm
Hand: http://www.montville.net/highschool/spflugmoench
/DLange%20-%20Migratory%20Cotton%20Picker%201940.jpg)

Tech Support

While I'm on my little tech odyssey, I thought I'd share this video, (which Louann Reid posted at her Multiliteracies site) which mirrors my own current situation all too closely for comfort:

Report from the Field

Well, I've been exploring the suggestions that everyone has given me in regard to my last post, and have this interim report from the field:

Peter suggested something based in Wordpress, but my early experiences with Wordpress and Blogger had already led me to ask the students to work with Blogger. It's maybe not as flexible, but it's really easy to get started with and since that's been my home base I figured I'd be spending less time trying to find the answers to student questions if I had them work in something I knew well. Next, year, who knows. But three weeks into the new semester with a gazillion other things going on, I wanted to try to keep it simple.

Will Richardson replied to my email request and suggested suprglu. I tried Suprglu a couple of weeks ago. Suprglu does exactly what I want it to do, but it always takes forever to load, and often doesn't load at all. I emailed them about it, and many days later got a reply saying that their server is overloaded and they don't know exactly when it will be upgraded. So until they get that fixed, I'm looking for alternatives.

Doug Noon suggested feed2js, which looked like it would work, but when I started trying to use it by typing in the urls I wanted feeds from, I kept getting error messages saying that the feeds were not correctly formatted. They have a validation page that tells you what's wrong with the feed, but the explanations assume a knowledge of html which is way beyond my current, very limited, understanding, and I couldn't figure out what I needed to do differently. I'll check with the tech guys at school, because, as Doug indicated, it looks like what would like to do is doable, but in the meantime that's on the back burner as well. Doug also mentioned b2evolution, which looks again like it would be just what the doctor ordered, but it's not a web-based app; you need to install it own your own server. So that's another discussion I need to have with the tech gurus.

Mr. H (and Will Richardson, in his followup email) suggested either Netvibes or Pageflakes. These two aggregators look very similar on the screen. (Sample at right.) They allow you to arrange small clickable windows that then bring up whatever feed you have selected. What I wanted was a page display of recent posts. Neither of these do that exactly, but they do give you a page display with little windows, one for each feed, that list the titles of the recent posts from those feeds. They also allow you to add tabs and create other pages with news feeds, search windows, notepads, games, and other widgets. I liked both of these, but found that Pageflakes gave me a number of options that were closer to what I wanted to do: for one thing, they allow you to make your site either public, so anyone can view it, or private, so that only the people you invite can view it. As far as I could see, Netvibes only allows you, the owner, to access your page, which meant it wouldn't work for what I wanted to do.

So for now, I've got a pageflakes page set up that is open to the public. It's only got two feeds on it so far, mine and the one student who got his homework assignment done early. The rest should be showing up by Tuesday, which is the next time I meet with that class. (NB: Pageflakes won't run at all on Safari, they suggest Firefox.)

I also sent an email to Mike Hetherington, who by some magic has figured out a way to use Google Reader to do deliver feeds to a separate page. That's about as close as I've seen to what I had in mind. I've been through the Google Reader menus about 20 times and if way to do it is there in front of me, I can't see it. If I hear back from Mike, I'll post what he has to say.

Thanks to all who responded. I'm pretty sure that by next year, I'll have something figured out. In the meantime, I think Pageflakes will hold the fort.

Driving Myself Crazy

I've spent an unconscionable amount of time the last few days trying to figure this out, so I'm going to post my query here in the hopes that someone out there has done this successfully.

I've asked the students in one of my sophomore classes to each create a blog. And I've created a blog which will be a common class blog as well. What I want to be able to do is to set up a series of feeds so that each time one of my students posts on his/her own blog, the post gets sent to the (common) class blog as well.

Will Richardson in his guide to RSS feeds mentions on page ten a utility called "Feed to Java Script" that looks as if it might work, but the link to it is not responding.

I know that we could get the feeds individually through Google Reader or Bloglines or Blogbridge, but I really want to have everyone in the class be able to see their work in a common space.

Any suggestions?

A Visit from Uncle Walt

Yesterday, Walt Whitman roused himself from his slumber in the depths of my subconscious and knocked at the door of my conscious mind. He made his presence felt at an afterschool faculty meeting at which the visiting speaker was sketching out some ideas he has in his field of expertise, which is cognitive development and brain theory. As I sat, trying hard to stay with the flow of words, I suddenly heard Walt's voice whispering in my ear:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

I've always liked the artfulness of this little one-sentence narrative, the way the first four lines are based on the same syntactical pattern repeated and getting progressively longer, like the accumulating freight of the flow of words in the lecture; and then the turn in the middle, where the narrator gets "tired and sick" and rises and glided and wanders outside, the loosening of the syntax, the apparently intentional awkwardness of the word "unaccountable" (which, in its adjective form suggests that the narrator himself is, unlike the proofs and figures and charts and diagrams and measurements, unable-to-be-captured-by-counting), the overlapping of the meanings of the sequence of verbs (rising, gliding, wandering) which taken in in that order depict and enact the narrator's disorientation; and then the way the whole thing snaps into focus in the last line, with the simplicity and elegance of looking up "in perfect silence at the stars."

Then as our guest speaker went on speaking about the developmental periods that the human brain goes through, and the predictable alternation of periods of earned competence as children grow into their brain functions and then fall behind as the brain physiology changes again, Walt came back to me again, this time intoning the final lines from "A Child Went Forth," in which uses topography as a metaphor for maturation:

The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table,

The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by,

The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger'd, unjust,

The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,

The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the yearning and swelling heart,

Affection that will not be gainsay'd, the sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal,

The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious whether and how,

Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?

Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they?

The streets themselves and the facades of houses, and goods in the windows,

Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank'd wharves, the huge crossing at the ferries,

The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset, the river between,

Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown two miles off,

The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little boat slack-tow'd astern,

The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,

The strata of color'd clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in,

The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud,

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

There's a lot to pause and reflect on in this passage: the polar characterizations of the mother and the father, the perceptive and sympathetic rendering of the uncertainties of childhood (the doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious whether and how), the careful attention to the light in the village. But what I like best about the passage is the last twenty lines, in which we follow Whitman's imaginative re-creation of the the family inside its home, and then move out into the street, then to the wharves, where we look out over the water, toward the boats, and then beyond them to the sky and clouds, to the horizon's edge. At which point we "breathe in the fragrance of the salt marsh and the shore mud," momentarily standing still, watchful and attentive, in the marginal zone between earth and sea, the known world and the unknown world, the past and the future: part of that child who went forth every day, who still goes forth every day, as we all must, looking out in front of us toward whatever comes next.

So then after dinner I opened one of the books I wrote about yesterday, Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment. He begins the book by quoting the wonderful passage from Borges "from a certain Chinese Encycopedia" in which

animals are divided into: (a)those that belong to the emperor; (b)embalmed ones; (c)those that are trained; (d)suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) et cetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.

He uses this inventory as a metaphor for his intention in The Ongoing Moment, which is to sort through and attempt to organize the artifacts that taken together represent the history of the photography as an art form. His second paragraph reads as follows:

While the survey of photography undertaken in these pages can claim neither this degree of rigour nor eccentricity, it takes heart from earlier, well intended attempts to marshal the kind of infinite variety of photographic possibilities into some kind of order. Walker Evans said it was a 'pet subject' of his — how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'. In the case of Walt Whitman there was nothing unconscious about it. 'In these pages of Leaves [of Grass] every thing is literally photographed,' he insisted. 'Nothing is poeticized.' Keen to emulate the 'Priests of the Sun', Whitman created poems that, at times, read like extended captions in a huge, constantly evolving catalogue of photographs:

See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,

See, the many-cylinder'd steam-printing press — see the electric telegraph stretching across the continent, [...]

See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam whistle,

See ploughmen ploughing farms — see, miners digging mines — see, the numberless factories,

See mechanics busy a their benches with tools [...]

By this time Uncle Walt seemed to be intent on making himself at home in the antechamber of my brain. And he was still there, nodding and smiling, and talking to me in his friendly, open way about the convergences between poetry and photography, growing up and getting old, and "the curious whether and how" later that evening as I laid my head on my pillow and drifted off to sleep.

The Danger Zone

Well, tonight was almost the night I fell off the wagon, but then Chris Lehmann gave me a nice pat on the back (Thanks, Chris) and so I find myself strapped into my bucket seat facing the challenge of yet another blank page and blinking cursor. Only now the pressure is on to say something that will live up to the advance press. Gulp.

I guess where I'm going to start is by passing along two recommendations I got from Scott Esposito over at Conversational Reading. In his February 2nd post, he made reference to a couple of books that looked relevant, given my recent renewal of interest in photography. I read his post and fired an order off to Amazon and the books arrived today. I've read the first chapter of each and am eager to read more. The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer is a series of essays on photographs and photographers (Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Alfred Steiglitz, Dorothea Lange, and Andre Kertész among them), and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Wechsler is a compilation of a series of essays on art and photography that originally appeared in McSweeney's magazine. In his introduction, Wechsler describes the origins of the idea:

I...have increasingly found myself being visited by... uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places. At a certain point I began keeping a folder of such visitations—usually just feathering in the images themselves, occasionally including a textual exegesis of my own.... Somehow the politburo over at McSweeney's got wind of the file and asked if I wouldn't mind sharing some of its comments with that journal's august readers. And I figured, what the hell.

This is a process that feels very familiar to me. My file cabinets at school are more or less filled with folders of exactly this kind. I'm often taken, when I read something or run across a picture, with the sense that "Hey, this would go very well with that other thing I was just reading." I had a couple of posts in January about intertextuality (Juxtaposition I and Juxtaposition II) and the opportunities it presents for generating new ideas. So I was intrigued to see that Wechsler has pushed the idea hard enough to make a book about it. Why didn't I think of that? (Maybe I should dust off those folders and take another look?)

Was walking back from lunch today with a colleague who was trying to figure out a way to give herself permission to do a little less work, to shoulder a little less responsibility for what the kids don't know. She was up correcting papers for four hours the night before and the night before that, and as result was suffering from tendinitis in her shoulders. She's about the same age as me, and we are both aware of the fact that we're getting tired easier, that our bodies and our brains don't simply comply when we put them under prolonged stress. She's a terrific teacher, and one of the things that makes her a terrific teacher is that she goes way beyond the extra mile for her kids. But now she, like me, like all of us, is faced with the question of sustainability: how much can I do and be still be able to keep it up? At Punahou, we see our students for an hour a day, four days out each six-day cycle, for fourteen cycles. That's a total of 56 hours. All of our courses are semester courses, so we don't usually get to see the same kids again. She is very aware, and I am very aware, of the time ticking away. We've got good kids, and most of them really want to learn, and there's so MUCH for them to learn, and there's so little time to do it in. Every time we decide that today we are going to do x, we are aware that it means that we won't be doing a, b, c, d, y, or z. And so we tend to drive ourselves, and sometimes our students, a little nuts, obsessing over stuff like this.

Especially when we are entering into what I have come to recognize at The Danger Zone. I love the beginnings of semesters, the first two or three weeks. And I really like the last month or so as well, because at a certain point everyone begins to realize that our time together is coming to an end, we all to view each other through this lens of compassion or pre-nostalgia or whatever you might call it, that warmer and fuzzier set of relations that are aroused by the approach of the End of Something. But in the middle is The Danger Zone. I didn't recognize it for many years, but one year I was feeling gloomy and stressed out in early March, and was questioning myself and my students and the whole idea of having schools anyway—whose idea was that?— and was writing about it in my teacher-reflection journal, the one this blog has essentially replaced, and I said "What I'm writing feels really familiar? Have I written this before?" and I went back to my journals from the previous year and the year before that and sure enough, there it was, all the same stuff, almost word for word. And then Light Dawned on Marble Head: it's a biorhythm thing, or maybe a calendrorhythm thing, that period of time when The Novelty Has Definitely Worn Off and The End Is Not Yet In Sight, the time when even the most capable and experienced teacher, the most dedicated and loving teacher, the most insightful and compassionate teachr, can feel a twinge of self-doubt, even panic: Are we ever going to get through this? Are they going to be able to learn half of what I hope for them to learn before the semester is over? Is there going to be enough time? And it can go on for several weeks.

And then, of course, you look up and it's June and it's like poof!, where did that year go? And you start thinking about how much fun it's going to be in the fall.

It's a weird profession, teaching.

Quick question for any of you technowizards out there: if you look at my archives listing in the sidebar you'll see that the dates are, uh, basically messed up. The archive function is being controlled by robotic drones deep in the heart of Googledom and I can't seem to be able to figure out a way to notify the people in charge. They have this very interesting set of menus that offer you the option to report a bug but when you click on the button to do so it brings you right back into their regular help menu. So apparently they Don't Really Want to Know. Not a big deal, since most people using the archive will figure out that the years are wrong and that December is not usually the first month of the New Year. But if there's something you know that I don't, please share. (The time and date in my computer preferences are correct.) Thx.

The Story of an Hour

Today I showed one of my sophomore classes the This I Believe site on NPR. We looked at and read together two of the hundreds of essays available on that site (by Alan Lightman and Bill Gates). I had planned to have them listen to the authors reading their essays, which worked for me last year, but today the Windows Media player on my greying iBook decided to get balky on me, and to make matters more interesting, when you click on the button to listen to the Alan Lightman essay you get taken to another page where Victor Davis Hanson is reading HIS essay. So we wound up looking at that one and listening to that one, since the Media Player decided, for reasons I am going to assume were probably not political, to allow Victor Davis Hanson to have his say.

Then I asked the students to do a short brainstorming exercise where they had to come up with a list of at least five sentences beginning with "I believe in..." or "I believe that...." Then I had them work in pairs, with one student being designated to be the questioner for five minutes, keeping the other student talking about his/her beliefs by asking followup questions. After five minutes, they switched roles and talked for another five minutes.

The examples from the web site, the brainstorming exercise, and the dialogue exercise, were all by way of setting up the homework assignment, which was to write a one-page "This I Believe" statement and then post it on the wiki I have put together to serve as a common space for sharing our work individually and for collaborating on group exercises. (I'd post the link, but right now, at least until we get going and I am able to get permissions from the students and the parents to go public, it's a closed site. We're just getting started with a schoolwide initiative w/r/t sustainability, and since that is a public site I can offer that as an example, albeit one which is just getting started.)

I look at the wiki as a step forward from the bulletin board program I was using last year for students to share work. The bulletin board was much more sequential and hierarchical and trickier to navigate, and the wiki (one of the freebies available to teachers through wikispaces ) is a lot more flexible, both because it's visually appealing and easy to edit, and because it allows for both individual posts and true collaborative writing.

Bven the wiki has a lot of built-in structural limitations. The page templates are limited, the wiki-language allows only certain kinds of formatting, you can't do simultaneous collaboration as you can, for example, in Google Docs. I'm hoping that in the next year or two or three even more flexible spaces will become available where students can post exemplary work in a variety of formats, collaborate in real time, access archived work by other students, communicate with students in other schools pursuing similar interests, and so on. Sort of a combination web site/wiki/blog/Googledocs/whiteboard/mySpace/database application. If any of you are working within such a framework, or have had success bending one of the current options in the direction of such convergent technologies, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

I did find my way today to a link, sent me a week or two ago by our tech resource person, called podomatic.com, which allows for pretty fast and easy (and free) online podcast creation and archiving. It also allows you to email your podcasts or post them to a blog. I'm still trying to get up to speed with podcasting and its possible applications in the classroom. I actually wanted the students to have the chance to record their "This I Believe..." speeches and post them to the wiki as well, and this may work: starting from scratch with no prior knowledge, I got into the site, registered, got up and running and created my first podcast successfully, all in about ten minutes.

So there it is, in a nutshell: one day, one class, one hour. It has taken me longer to write about it than it took me to live it. Now I get to sleep. : )

English 2.0

In response to my post entitled "Meandering," Tom Hoffman left a comment in the form of a question: "So... it seems like English 1.0 done well is pretty good. Why do we need a 2.0?" That's a good question, and I'd like to use it as a point of departure for collecting some thoughts on the matter. A lot of this is perhaps obvious, but I still want to take a stab at it:

First of all, when I was using the phrase English 2.0, I was borrowing that usage from the other discussions about Web 2.0 and School 2.0 that have been ongoing in the blogging community for some time, which in turn I assume owe their origin to the practice of software designers to designate significantly revised (and presumably improved) versions of existing software programs. In the conventions of the numbering system, a decimal point change (from, say, 1.5 to 1.6) suggests minor tinkering, but a new number (1.7 to 2.0) indicates a more or less complete overhaul, incorporating perhaps the main features that made the program a success in the first place, but incorporating some sort of major structural or conceptual shifts as well.

It seems to me that English as a discipline, is, like the English language, the internet itself, and schools generally, is constantly evolving in ways that are sometimes so slow as to be almost invisible, but also in ways that are so dramatic that they may require a wholesale reconceptualization of the nature of the discipline. Among the more subtle, gradual shifts that I have witnessed during my teaching career, I would include:

• the gradual shift from print-based research to internet based research (For example, I used to use Benet's Reader's Encylopedia on a daily basis, and I used to go the the library when I needed information. Now pretty much everything I need to know informationally is available to me at my computer.
• the parallel shift from oral culture to print-based culture to image-based culture, especially among teens (think first of all of television itself, then of MTV, jumpcutting, picture phones, video games, mySpace, handheld video technology, and so on)
• the gradual but unmistakable streamlining—not to say "dumbing down"—of public discourse, aided and abetted by People Magazine, US Today, TV news and sound-bite culture, and so on
• the decline of reading as a combined source of education and amusement among our students
• the growing irrelevance of 90% of what we wind up doing in English classes to anything that our students might actually know or care about (I just saw "Freedom Writers" this afternoon, and the disconnect between what was going on in that school and what was going on in the lives of the students was the context for everything that happened there, precisely because what Erin Gruwell attempted to do was seen as threatening and dangerous by the school administrators)

These are things we have all seen and experienced and wondered aloud about, and anyone still teaching high school ten years later (which, interestingly, Erin Gruwell is not) has found ways to adjust to and accomodate these realities. But I do also feel that there are now larger, more challenging tectonic shifts taking place. Among them—again, none of this is really news, but it's relevant to the question:

• the near-ubiquitousness of broadband internet access and the simultaneous proliferation of all kinds of powerful portable technologies—cell phones, laptops (including the much-ballyhooed $150 laptop), PDAs, Blackberries
• the sudden explosion of powerful, useful, and free (or inexpensive) software tools: search engines, blog engines, wikis, video streaming, web hosting, yada yada yada
• the flattening of global discourse in response to all of these tools (what I'm typing right now will, if present access patterns hold up, be read on five continents within the next 24 hours)
• the fact that the range of options our students have for how to spend their time, assuming they have any interest in or access to technology, has grown exponentially while the amount of time has remained constant, with the perhaps predictable result that our students compensate by multitasking

I'm sure you can all think of others. Taken together, these trends have resulted, it might be argued, in a change which is no longer merely one of degree but one of kind. If it's true that the context is changing, and our students are changing, and our tools are changing, then perhaps it is time to stop and think about what English as a course of study might look like if we were to attempt to embrace these changes as opposed to resisting them or dismissing them out of hand. That, to me, is the challange of English 2.0, Web 2.0, School 2.0.

I'm a believer in strategic thinking. I often ask my students to stop and reflect on three questions: where are you now, where are you trying to get to, and how are you going to get there? That sounds like a commonsense paradigm, but I learned it in the early 1990s when I was working with a group of facilitators from Motorola Corporation who were trying to help my public school system adapt to the pressures of change. Motorola had just been through a lengthy and painstaking and ultimately very successful attempt to re-shape themselves from a company known for mediocre television sets to a company that could be a world leader in digital communications. They took those three questions, pushed them hard, and kept coming back to them. Where are we now? and where are we now? and where are we now?

English 1.0 may in fact, when done well, be pretty good. But for how long? Where are we now? What do we know about where we're going? Web 2.0 is giving us some tools. How can we use them to reinvent our discipline and make it better? That's the English 2.0 question.

The Gift

Well, I was up early taking photos, it's Super Bowl Sunday, and I've got a poker game tonight—a recreation I find particularly satisfying—so I'm not going to attempt to respond to several interesting comments that have come in, although I will do that, probably tomorrow; and I'm not going to venture further into the realms of theory, although I've got to say that's the direction I seem to have been drifting toward in the last week or so. The reality of blogging is that I have to approach ideas in increments, and some of the ideas we are now tossing around, about Web 2.0, School 2.0, the unschooling of schools and the like, are baggy enough that incremental incursions are ultimately not going to be enough. At some point I'm going to have to try to stitch some of these threads together into something like a blanket. But perhaps not yet, and definitely not today.

Instead, shifting gears from the abstract to the concrete, I'd like to simply post two photos from this morning. This one is of Ala Moana Shopping Center taken from the Ala Moana Beach Park. I brought along my tripod this time and this is the very first picture I took today, and of them all, the one that I'm happiest with. It makes the shopping mall look a great deal more magical than it has any right to be. I also like it as a kind of tone poem, the way the way the whites and blacks and browns and golds balance each other.


The second is a more straightforward scenic, taken just as the sun was starting to come up behind Diamond Head. I wound up taking about a dozen photographs of this fisherman, but in most of them I was behind him and he was obscured by the mountain, but as I was walking away I turned back and there he was, outlined against the sky and water, and so I set the tripod up quickly and got this shot. I'd like to think of this picture, or more accurately, this figure in this landscape, as in some way an oblique commentary on learning, on craft, on the rewards of being alive on this planet and being given the gift of being able to pay attention.

Web 2.0: The Machine Is Us.

Christopher Sessums posted this video by Michael Wesch today. On the chance that some of you might not see it there, I'm posting it here as well. Check. It. Out.

Meandering

Finally got around to reading two essays that I had seen links to, printed out, and put in The Pile of Things I Need to Read When I Get a Chance. The first, Paul Graham's 2004 "The Age of the Essay," is obviously not new, but it was new to me. In it, Graham argues, as I have done elsewhere, that the kind of essay writing most students are asked to do in school (usually a five paragraph thesis essay in response to literature) is not really essay writing at all:

Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.

And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.

At the very least I must have explained something badly. In that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have to change what I was saying as well. But the aim is never to be convincing per se. As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.

The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.

Graham argues for a kind of essay writing based on trying, on meandering:

The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea.

The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.

In a recent post I was wondering out loud, in regard to the attempt to envision School 2.0, how our schools would change if we were to think of them as primarily places where students were creating knowledge rather than receiving it. Putting aside other subjects for the moment, I would argue that in regard to English, the subject I teach, the creation of knowledge can only be facilitated to the degree that students are allowed to stake out and explore territories that are not already mapped for them. To read someone else's map is to receive knowledge. To make a map of your own is to create knowledge.

It occurs to me as I write this—I'm meandering, here, unapologetically—that if we are going to speak of creating knowledge we are probably going to have to distinguish between creating knowledge that is new and perhaps useful to us individually, and creating knowledge which is new and perhaps useful to the community, or to mankind. Graham argues that the former is what drives true essay writing. You are trying to write what you don't know, in other words, to surprise yourself:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.

And from that it follows that good writing, and good learning, in the sense of the creation of new ideas, is in some ways inherently contrarian: it arises out of a rejection of accepted wisdom:

Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.

So, in our hypothetical English 2.0 classroom, if we wanted to allow students to be creating knowledge, we would have to allow considerable room for students to poke their noses into places that they've been told they're not supposed to go.

I had the good fortune, when I was a young teacher, to fall under the influence of both Donald Graves, whom I've written about before, and Donald Murray, whom I haven't. Murray, who died recently, was the author of several books, including A Writer Teaches Writing, on what came to be known as "process writing." His motto, which I think is still instructive in the context of School 2.0, was that "I try to underteach so my students can overlearn." What I learned from Graves and Murray, and what still forms the most powerful part of my (under)teaching, is that you need to make room for what students have to say, what they are interested in doing.

For many years the two classroom activities that I have gotten the most mileage out of have been, in essence, activities that have demanded that I step out of the way. The first activity is is simply a regular open-ended writing assignment. I ask students to hand in a piece of work each week (in School 2.0 it might be each day) that represents and hour's worth of work. No other constraints. Genre, topic, length, degree of difficulty, draft status (rough or final): their choice. I just collect them, read them, try to figure out what they're trying to do, and then try to help them do it better. I learn more about the students through those writing samples than I ever do from the assignments I design for them. And, by their own testimony, they learn more from doing them than from the other assignments they have been asked to do.

The second activity is called "Open Forum." Once every two weeks or so I simply turn the class period over to the students for an open-ended discussion. I hand a file card to each student and ask them to write down a question, a topic, or a statement they would like to discuss or that they think their classmates would enjoy talking about. Then I collect the cards, shuffle them up, read the first one out loud, and we're off. When we get burned out on one topic, or when a student makes a request that we move on (a request that must receive a majority vote to be acted on), we go on to the next card. Again, the dynamics in this discussion are often completely different, in interesting and sometimes exhilarating ways, than the dynamics of other more traditional small-group or teacher-led content-targeted discussions. Often, I am surprised: I learn something. Knowledge is being created, not delivered.

The other essay I read last night was Zadie Smith's provocative article from the Guardian entitled "Fail Better," in which she has a great deal to say about writing and reading. One of her key points is that writing—she is thinking of novel writing but I believe what she has to say is true of poetry and essay writing and blogging as well—is always and inextricably bound up with personality, which is to say, character:

A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth.

She looks at revision as the means of paring away what is predictable, what is already known, what is second-hand wisdom:

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language.

She ends the essay by extending these writerly notions of responsibility to the reader as well:

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park...

The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

I read this lines last night with certain degree of fascination and excitement. Because what she is saying here is the analogue of what Paul Graham is saying, and of what I have been trying to tease out in regard to English 2.0 and School 2.0. It's not about stating and proving your the thesis you decided on before you started writing. It's not about having your vision of the world confirmed by what you write and what you read. It's not about going to school to be told what to do or what to think, to be a passive recipient of knowledge, however important. It's about exploration, it's about finding out what you don't know or haven't thought of yet, it's about surprising yourself with a new idea that is delightful and useful and true.

I'm not arguing that we should abandon skill-based instruction or content-driven instruction. I'm arguing that there has to be a balance. When Paul Graham talks about "the things one has to write in school," he's conjuring up a bugbear that many, if not most adults, would shudder at. In school 2.0, we need to change that.

School 2.0: In Search of a Story

(I started to write this as a comment in response to Chris's comment on my last post, but as I wrote I began to realize that it was going to take a while, so I'm upgrading this from a lowly comment to a full-fledged daily post, in the form of an epistle. Thereby getting that monkey off my back as well.)

Hi Chris,

There's a thin line, I guess, between ambition and arrogance, and this wouldn't be the first time I've caught walking that line and trying not to fall over. But, perhaps because of my years as an undergraduate philosophy major, I do tend to want to connect the dots and see what kind of big picture we're looking at.

Throughout the middle years of my teaching career I often found myself teaching a class that went really well, only to find that the next group doing the same lesson, or the same group doing a different lesson the next day, would be a complete crash-and-burn scenario. My successes seemed to be almost random (and very often came when I had veered so far off the track of my original lesson plan that I had to make something up on the fly), and my failures equally unpredictable. It wasn't until I arrived at my present school, after 28 years of teaching, that I wound up being able to start pulling my experiences and my intuitions together. What was the difference? At this school, in this environment, there was a highly developed culture of dialogue and sharing of ideas, and an understanding that in a school this large (close to 1800 students in grades 9-12), with most students switching teachers each semester, we were going to have to work pretty hard to make their experience have any kind of continuity. As an English teacher and, recently, department head, I've wound up having to spend a lot of time trying to come up with clear answers to the question of who we are and what we are doing.

And that's the problem I think we all face—individually as teachers, and collectively as a group. There are lots of cool ideas and new tools and nifty lessons out there, and we've all had our moments of insight and our moments of success, but unless we have a conceptual frame to put them in, they're like so many firecrackers going off at random: a noise over here, a noise over there, but nothing coherent, nothing satisfying, nothing of music sufficient to soothe the savage beast. I think that as we try to imagine School 2.0, we face the same dilemma. What is our common vision? How do we pull together our various intuitions and hunches beliefs realizations—the sorts of things that are on your preliminary list—and and shape them into a coherent whole? Where do we start?

One way to begin is to make the move I made yesterday, which is to find a point of entry, a single statement or question that looks like it could serve as a scaffold, and then begin laying some brickwork within that frame. The danger there is you're essentially starting to build a house by starting with one room. It might be nice to have a blueprint, a sense of the whole structure, before you begin. That is, I take it, what we're trying to shape over on the manifesto page at the School 2.0 wiki, but a glance at that page shows how amorphous and multidimensional the set of ideas surrounding School 2.0 is at this point in time. A blueprint needs an architect, someone who knows how to connect all the various elements into a whole which is logically coherent and aesthetically pleasing. That work could conceivably be done by a small group, but probably not by a committee.

Another way would be to try to sort out the various core beliefs or assumptions and start elaborating within that framework, which is essentially how the "Who We Are" statement I cited above got started. The limitation of this approach is that whatever schemata you use as a preliminary frame may very well marginalize or omit entirely essential elements that aren't in its angle of vision.

A third way of approaching the problem might be to think of the challenge in narrative terms rather than more explicitly conceptual terms.
A question I frequently ask of myself, and of my colleagues in the English department, is "What is the story we're telling our students?" Or, alternatively, "What is the story we're asking our students to play a part in?" Over four years, is there a some sort of meta-narrative that we can even articulate to ourselves? And, perhaps more importantly, what is the story that the students think they are being told, and does it bear any resemblance to the story we thought we were telling? So that would be one way of posing the question: What story students in School 2.0 be enacting?

There are, I'm sure, lots of other ways to think about the challenge before us. It's clear that the landscape is shifting beneath our feet, and that the arrival of ever-more-sophisticated (and easy to use) technological tools is inevitably going to change—is already changing—how we teach and how students learn. The fact that it is possible for us to be even having this conversation across state and national borders is one measure of how things have changed. It's both challenging and satisfying to be a part of this dialogue, to be able to have contact with people like you and Graham and Will and Doug and the many other educators who are trying to figure it all out. The old complaint that teaching is an isolating profession is, thanks to the increasingly visible presence of blogs and wikis and the like, no longer true, or at least not necessarily true, and I'm grateful for that.

Thanks,

- Bruce

Words of Two Syllables Department

Further evidence, if any were needed, of the dangerous tendencies of bureaucratic minds when they swing into action. I mean, come on.

School 2.0

Christopher Sessums has recently published a set of "theses toward educational reform," that he is hoping might be used as a preliminary toward a School 2.0 manifesto. The list is still taking shape, and contains a variety of statements, some of which are unsurprising generalities ("Schools can change the lives of individuals for better or for worse."), some of which are more hard-edged ("Social software enables a new type of teaching and learning that subverts conventional forms of teaching and learning."), some of which are more overtly political and subject to political debate ("No Child Left behind is not a position. It is a bombastic, under funded mandate cast in a pejorative rhetoric."), and some of which are more clearly embedded in as-yet-unstated philosophical or pedagogical assumptions ("High stakes tests should never be tied to teacher or school evaluations or merit pay.") Some of the statements are cast in the form of questions ("Who needs school?" "If schools are broken and broke, who designed it?"(sic)).

It's a thought-provoking list, and perhaps a necesssary starting point for discussion, but in its present form it is more like a pile of stuff than a platform. In its very bagginess and and awkwardness and redundancy it suggests the difficulty of coming up with a single clear, coherent educational manifesto for the emerging era, a techno-literate pedagogical Theory of Everything.

If I were to take one statement from the list as a launching pad for further discussion, I think I choose this one: "Schools and teachers are knowledge creators. They are more than mere passive receivers of knowledge and information." Now granted, this is not a new idea. It's been around in one form or another more or less forever. But it's a powerful notion nonetheless, and though it is often given lip service in our schools, it is perhaps more often left behind in the classroom and in curriculum design workshops, which are often dominated by notions of rigor that are linked to mastery of predefined content.

If we were to endorse the notion that it is the business of schools to help students create knowledge, and link that to the notion that technology is now providing us with tools that make it easier not just to access knowledge, but to generate and share it, then the question would become, how can we redesign our schools and our classrooms and our teaching practices to make that kind of knowledge creation happen, not just once in a while, but on a daily basis?

I've got some preliminary thoughts about how I would begin to answer the question, but I want to let the question sit in the back of my brain for a day or two before I start working into them. In the meantime, gentle reader, I invite your first thoughts as well.