Revelation and Expectation

In 1982 writer/critic John Berger collaborated with photographer Jean Mohr on a book entitled Another Way of Telling, which is an investigation in words and pictures of "the tension between the photographer and the photographed, between the picture and its viewers, between the filmed moment and the memories that it so resembles. Here are some of Berger's remarks from the middle of the book:

One looks at one's surroundings (and one is always surrounded by the visible, even in dreams) and one reads what is there, according to circumstances, in different ways. Driving a car draws out one kind of reading; cutting down a tree another; waiting for a friend another. Each activity motivates its own reading.

At other times the reading, or the choices which make a reading, instead of being directed at a goal, are the consequences of an event that has already occurred. Emotion or mood motivates the reading, and the appearances, thus read, become expressive. Such moments have often been described in literature, but they do not belong to literature, they belong to the visible...

In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning. This expectation should be distinguished from a desire for an explanation. The one who looks may explain afterwards; but prior to any explanation, there is the expectation of what appearances themselves may be about to reveal.

Revelations do not usually come easily. Appearances are so complex that only the search which is inherent in the act of looking can draw a reading out of their underlying coherence. If, for the sake of a temporary classification, one artificially separates appearances from vision..., one might say that in appearances everything that can be read is already there, but undifferentiated. It is the search, with its choices, which differentiates. And the seen, the revealed, is the child of both appearances and the search.

The one who looks is essential to the meaning found, and yet can be surpassed by it. And this surpassing is what is hoped for. Revelation was a visual category before it was a religious one. The hope of revelation—and this is particularly obvious in every childhood—its the stimulus to the will to all looking which does not have a precise functional aim.

Revelation, when what we see does surpass us, is perhaps less rare than is generally assumed. By its nature, revelation does not easily lend itself to verbalisation. The words used remain aesthetic exclamations! Yet whatever its frequency, our expectation of revelation is, I would suggest, a human constant. This form of expectation may historically change, but in itself, it is a constituent of the relation between the human capacity to perceive and the coherence of appearances. (116-118)

I'm particularly interested in Berger's assertion that "In every act of looking there is the expectation of meaning." When I go out with my camera, I am acting on the hope, if not the expectation, that something will be revealed to me, something that lies behind the appearances and manifests itself through them. It's not something that can be forced; it happens or it doesn't. The same is true, of course, when I pick up a book, listen to a piece of music, go to a museum, watch a movie, sit in on a meeting, take a class, or engage in any of the attention-based activities. I agree with Berger when he says that "Appearances are so complex that only the search which is inherent in the act of looking can draw a reading out of their underlying coherence." What is the underlying coherence, the substratum, the thread of essential continuity that lies behind the phenomena of the world?

Take, for example, this 1936 picture, which I ran across for the first time yesterday as I was looking through a book called Walker Evans: Signs (published By the J.Paul Getty Museum). There is something being revealed here. And, as Berger suggests, the "revelation does not easily lend itself to verbalisation." What can be said inevitably feels reductive and of less consequence than what remains. But at the very least, we can say that this is a sort of testament an explicitly articulated set of values ("old reliable," "honest weight," "square dealings") as well as a certain kind of orderly productivity. The store is neatly maintained. There is an abundant variety of fish on sale (catfish, trout, perch, drum, buffalo, eel), and size of the melons is emphasized by the efforts the two young men in the foreground are making to heft them. The picture emphasizes in its composition (and thus tacitly endorses) symmetry, balance, regularity. The people in the picture know that they are being photographed. The boys are clearly posing, and the two men standing shadowed inside the doorway to the shop are looking out at the proceedings with what we can infer must be wary interest. There is also woman, her back towards us, who can be seen, directly in the middle of the picture, entering the house in the back of the store. Presumably she is less interested in the photographer's work, or in being seen as part of the store operations. If it is often true that the world presents us with raging chaos, it is also true that there is something in the human spirit that wants to clean up, take charge, make order. Which is what I take to be at least one of the subtexts of this photograph. It is, as Berger suggests, to some degree already present, and to some further degree evoked by the presence of Walker Evans on the scene (without which the boys would not be posing), by his choice of a viewpoint (it would be a different picture, and a different story, if it were not taken from directly in front), and by his "capacity to perceive."

Picture credit: UBS Art Gallery

Convergences

As I've worked my way back into photography over the last few months, I've been doing a lot of reading about photographers, and spending a lot of time looking at pictures on flickr, and trying to clarify for myself what my photographic aesthetic is: what I'm after, what I'm trying to do. A lot of the time I'm just walking around with a camera in my hand and waiting for something that looks like it might be interesting to show up: a scene, a certain kind of light, a dramatic situation, an interesting composition. But I also sense that there are certain kinds of pictures I keep coming back to, compositional patterns and thematic ideas that keep recurring. Some of them are conscious, some of them feel more like hunches, like I'm groping my way toward something I can't identify yet, a pattern that lies behind the other patterns.

I've found myself thinking a lot, the last few days, about Hesse's Glass Bead Game in Magister Ludi, the point of which has obscurely to do with the search for archetypal patterns in music and literature and history and art. It's been forty years since I read that book, but I remember being taken with the concept of the idea of the search for the underlying patterns behind seemingly disparate phenomena. It's an idea that is also the driving force behind Lawrence Wechsler's recent book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, which I first read about in Scott Esposito's blog Conversational Reading a few months ago, and which recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. In it, Wechsler gives himself permission to "essay", to root around, to chase loose ends and abandon them to chase others, to observe and reflect on artwork and photographs events that mirror one another in surprising ways. It's an uneven, somewhat disorganized, beautiful and fascinating book.

And then there's Carl Larsson, whom I've written about before, an artist who centered his art firmly around the world he inhabited: his home, his family, his community. Part of what I sense I am after when I am taking pictures is documentation, enumeration: this is the world around me, different from anyone else's in its pure incidentals, perhaps the same as anyone else's in its essences. But there's also in Larsson a subjectivity: he's not painting everything. He's selecting, he's shaping, he's telling a version of a story that is unique to his angle of vision and to what it is given to him to see. So there's that as well.

So, anyway, in the spirit of reflection and experimentation, I'd like to do a series of riffs on a snapshot I took on Wednesday while I was at the Ward Center in the area of Honolulu known as Kaka'ako. Here is the picture:

It's not the kind of picture I usually take. There's a looseness about it. It's not that I just took the picture at random, I had been sitting at the table with my camera in front of me looking out over the parking lot thinking about what picture I might want to take and how I might frame it, and when the woman with the cell phone started walking toward me, I thought, well, let's have her in there, as well, and I raised the camera to my eye and snapped the picture off. Loose and random as the picture may seem, the separate elements all have resonances for me, and convergences (Wechsler's word, stolen, of course, from Flannery O'Connor) abound.

The yellow canopy jutting out from the upper left hand corner is part of the highly elaborate color-coordinated design scheme of Jamba Juice. Jamba Juice is a national chain of stores that has turned the making of fruit smoothies into a sort of science. You can go in a Jamba Juice store anywhere in the nation and order, say, a Peach Pleasure 16 with an immunity boost, which is my current juice drink of choice, and be fairly certain both of what you are getting and what you are going to pay. This particular Jamba Juice location is about a quarter mile from the store which use to be just down the street, but was closed down when the building it was in was torn down to make room for yet another residential high-rise (and adjoining shops) in Kaka'ako. Like the one rising into the sky in as you look in this picture toward the clouds in the background. Construction has been going gangbusters on Oahu for five years now. It ought to be apparent to anyone with a brain in their head that a) Oahu is an island and b) there's only so much construction, so many highrises, so much energy consumption, so much fluid and solid waste, that we deal with on an island. And that at some point, in the interests of sustainabilty, and of the health and welfare of everyone on the island, we need to put the brakes on. But that moment has not yet come, not at this date, not in this picture.

Anyway, the Jamba Juice that was torn down had the distinction of being the highest grossing Jamba Juice store in the nation. That place was cranking out Jamba Juices to tourists and kama'ainas alike from dawn to dusk every day. The new store is further removed from Ward Center, and the parking is not as easy to find, and they inexplicably chose to make it a smaller store anyway, so business seems to be slower there. The two cars closest to the camera are parked behind a yellow line with white lettering indicating that the area is zoned for "15 Minute Parking." In other words, get your drink and then get out of here so someone else can park.

Next to Jamba Juice, not in the picture itself but lending its shadowy presence from behind the lens, is Jamba Juice's partner company, the omnipresent Starbucks. I'm not a coffee drinker, and even if I were I might have misgivings about buying my coffee from Starbucks (expensive, overcaffeinated, responsible for the demise of many a local-owned coffee shop), but unfortunately for my ethical principles someone in the Starbucks labs has discovered a formula for a particular kind of chocolate-chip cookie which is excellent all on its own but all but crippling when combined with the aforementioned Peach Pleasure 16. Especially when the cookie has been allowed to bake for a few minutes on top of the wrought iron tables in front of the store (see lower left of picture) in the benevolently intense heat of the Hawaiian sunshine. I suppose that under the right circumstances, with the right guilt trip run on me, I might be convinced to stand outside Jamba Juice and Starbucks holding a sign objecting to the immanence of the apocalypse as manifested by the omnipresence of standardized corporate retail stores co-opting the national character, and so on and so forth. But I haven't heard that argument in a convincing enough form yet, and in the meantime, the Peach Pleasure/chocolate chip cookie is as close to gustatory nirvana as I have found in my short sojourn on this planet. Which is why I was there on the day it was given to me to take this picture. I don't know who the kid with the Pepsi can is. He, like me, was taking a break, and his choice of oral stimulation, high-fructose corn syrup and carbonated, was a just a tad more mainstream than mine

The parking lot itself is unexceptional. Unless you back up one step and say, wait, where did you say you were? Hawaii? What do we see in this picture which identifies it as being Hawaii? Well, if you look really carefully in the middle of the picture to the left, you'll see mountains (hills, actually, but as close to mountains as you're going to get on Oahu), and a few palm trees in front of the office buildings up by Kapiolani Boulevard. But there's not much of the aina on display. Joni Mitchell didn't get it very far wrong when she said "They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot." On Oahu in particular you're going to see a lot of the latter and not very much of the former. The most predominant force of nature in the picture is the immense billowing bank of clouds up along the ridges of the mountains. Those clouds are pretty much always there, shaping and reshaping themselves over the cool mountains, and dissipating in wisps along the edges as they blow down toward the reflected heat of the flatlands below. The weather report in Hawaii is pretty much the same every day of the year: Partly sunny, highs in the mid-eighties, showers windward and mauka (toward the mountains). One could do worse.

The building behind the parking lot is called "Pictures Plus." You can't really see the name in the dinky little version of the picture I can fit in the display on this page, but it's pretty clear in the (30 inch) original, which is one of the. That kind of resolution is one of the nice features of the Sony A100K DSLR I'm using, a birthday gift from my three sons. Pictures Plus. I liked that, that visual joke, and was turning it over in my mind even before I took the shot. But alas, the hope-induding name notwithstanding, Pictures Plus is a basically a frame shop, with a wide variety of frames and a depressingly narrow range of standard-issue schlock art pictures of the sparkling-moonlight-and flourescent-waves school. (If we're looking for deep archetypal patterns here, there's something both predictable and discouraging going on across economics (Gresham's Law) and real estate development ("They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum, and charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em") and art (dolphins frolicking under rainbows). Maybe a better name for the place would be Frames, Minus. At least they haven't screwed up the weather. Yet.)

Which brings us to the heart of the picture, which is the woman the center of the picture, more or less by accident, frozen in this shot for her .15 seconds of fame. She seems, well, intent. She's got a pocketbook on her back and a binder under her left arm and she strikes me as being all business. She's well-dressed, she's focussed, she's got the phone in her ear and a serious look on her face and her index finger is pointed like she's ready to jab somebody with it. She's the one thing in this picture in motion. She wasn't there a moment before, and in another moment, she's gone. One difference between her and me: I almost never carry a cell phone with me. And when I do, I almost never use it. Another difference between her and me: she's working, and I'm on spring break. Another: she doesn't see me. She doesn't know I exist. And probably never will, unless one of her relatives happens on this blog and says, hey, you're on the internet. At which point she will either be interested, or not. Or happy, or not. I certainly mean her no disrespect. She is the surprise guest at this party. She walked into my line of vision and I pushed the button. And then I got to thinking, and kept at it, as I am doing now.

But her presence does bring up a whole series of long-debated issues about public photography and Native American beliefs about not wanting to get their pictures taken because they thought it was having their soul stolen and other questions of propriety. Wechsler on page 33 of his book discusses a photograph by Helen Levitt, and notes, citing Joel Meyerowitz, that "one of the methods by which she accomplished such uncanny capture was through the use of a winkelsucher, a right-angle viewfinder of the sort Ben Shahn was given to deploying at around the same time, an attachment which 'allowed the street photographer to sight along the camera body while standing sideways to his subject, who consequently fails to realize that he is the subject."

One more thing: the poor little tree that seems to be sprouting more or less out of her head, like an idea balloon in a comic strip. That tree, apparently a concession on the part of the parking lot builders to the Joni Mitchells of the world, is having a hard time making it in Hawaii-nei, nice weather notwithstanding. It would probably be happier if it could spend part of the day sitting, like me and the boy with the Pepsi, in the shade, instead of having to withstand the punishing gaze of the Hawaiian sun all day every day.

So there it is: Mission Accomplished. (Topic for a Post at Another Time: Overtones, Undertones, and what you cannot say, or perhaps are just better off not saying, in a blog, in polite conversation, and elsewhere.) A set of reflections, a set of convergences. A reading of one photograph, a slice of time, barely measurable, in my life and the life of the island. Aloha.

What is to Be Done?

Finished What is the What this morning and have been turning it over in my mind ever since, even when I was out this evening taking pictures in Waikiki. (Spoiler alert: I'm going to quote the last paragraph of the book in a minute. It doesn't give away anything of the plot, but even still, if you you're thinking about reading it and don't want to know the last paragraph, stop reading now.) The narrator, Valentino Achak Deng, ends with these words:

Whatever I do, however I find a way to live. I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days, and every person who has entered this club during these awful morning hours, because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, and every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.

It's a powerful ending, and honors in an eloquent way the importance of words, the importance of stories, the blessedness of life itself. But there's a zinger in the last line. Heartwrenching and horrific as the events of the book are, one of the things that is made clear again and again is that those in a position to do something about the situation as it once existed and as it exists even today, like the government—and the citizens–of the United States of America, have in fact done the "impossible" thing, consistently and as a matter of course, a matter of policy: they have pretended that Valentino Achak Deng, and the thousands and millions of people like him, do not exist, that what has happened and continues to happen in Sudan and Ruanda and Darfur is not worthy of our notice.

I don't exempt myself from this. Like most Americans, I live out my days in a bubble of good fortune, and most often do not make it my business to look outside. I try to take care of myself, and my family, and my students. I try to avoid situations that look like they will cause me stress or discomfort, or put me in danger. I am, like most Americans, and most people everywhere, I would suspect, cautious about getting myself mixed up in complicated situations that seem like they are beyond my control. Because it's not just Sudan, right? It's not even just Africa. There are outrageous acts of inhumanity taking place everywhere on the planet on a daily basis: in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Nepal, in our cities, even in Honolulu, where last week a family of tourists were dragged from their car and beaten. There's violence and injustice and environmental degradation and homelessness and greed and stupidity of every conceivable variety on display every time you walk out the door or open a newspaper, more problems than you can shake a stick at, and so how do we go about selecting the ones we are going to try to do something about?

So the question I've been turning over in my mind all day is really the same question I've been asking my students to consider as we've been reading Peter Singer and Ian Parker's essay on Zell Kravinsky (there's a link to the article in this post )and The Poisonwood Bible: what do we owe to others less fortunate? Presumably it's more than nothing, and less than everything we have. So how much is enough? It's certainly possible to pretend that the suffering of others does not exist, or, alternatively, that it exist but it has Nothing to Do with Us. But if we choose not to put our heads in the sand, then what?

What Eggers has done is tell Valentino Achak Deng's story so convincingly and so sympathetically that anyone who reads it can no longer pretend that he does not exist. But that seems to imply that something else should change as well. And that's the question that's on my mind tonight. What to do about it.

What is the What

It's spring break and I've been reading David Eggers What is the What in great gulps. Eggers first novel did not, in my judgment, live up to its overly ambitious (and admittedly ironic) title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but What is the What more than fits the bill. Eggers has collaborated with Sudanese refugee Valentina Achak Deng and created a novel which spells out in excruciating detail—it's a true story—the odyssey of a child whose life is turned to chaos went Arab raiders come to his village in Southern Sudan and destroy it, killing pretty much everyone but young children. Achak becomes one of a group of thousands of child refugees, who have come to be known as "The Lost Boys" who are driven into an exile on foot that lasts throughout much of his adolescence, and the book tells the more or less incredible story of how he finally arrives in the United States, and what happens after he gets here, which in some ways is scarcely an improvement. It's perhaps too easy to use a phrase like "a must read," but in all seriousness I can't think of a more necessary book I've encountered in my lifetime. It's a harrowing story, but it has moments of great beauty and lyricism as well, and I read it with steadily increasing respect both for Valentino Achak Deng and for Dave Eggers.

Leonard Lopate conducts a very interesting interview with Deng and Eggers here, and Deng has a website which gives information and the plight of the Sudanese refugees here.

Whole Language

Doug Noon has an excellent post at Borderland today which considers the "reading research wars" now being fought in the national newsmedia and on countless local fronts. Even though I've been a high school teacher for some years now, I get pretty easily worked up when I have to listen to people who whose vision of quality and accountability in education is driven by their obsession with standardized testing, people for whom the words "whole language" are some sort of obscenity.

I've been at this for a long time. I started out as an elementary school teacher in 1969, and did my master's degree project by designing a series of pre-reading books that were basically templates within which emerging readers were asked to create the content, in the form of pictures, sight words, and, if they were ready to give it a shot, sentences that could either be dictated to the teacher or written out, invented spellings and all, by the student. I also worked with elementary school students as K-6 writing coordinator for six or eight years in the Canton, MA public schools. As one of my functions in that role, I helped teachers to set up student-based writing programs in every grade from kindergarten on up. Some of the programs were successful, some weren't. The ones that were successful were the ones where the teacher did the necessary followup work on the days when I was not in the classroom, making free-choice writing and author's chair and individual conferences a part of the daily routine. The ones that didn't work were the ones where the teacher, all too happy to have me come in and "take over" the class for an hour here and there, would pointedly be correcting worksheets in the back of the room while I was there, and then simply wait for me to show up again the following week.

My program was based both on my own intuitions and experiences as a K-1 teacher in Nanakuli, HI in 1969-70, and on the work of Donald Graves at the University of New Hampshire (I've written about him before), and it was rooted in the assumption that students have a great deal more knowledge of the way that language works than we give them credit for, or that they are even aware of. One of the most revelatory pieces of writing I have ever run across in this regard is Jerome Harste's "Lessons from Latrice," which is chapter 4 in Language Stories and Literary Lessons. In it, Harste looks closely at what appears to be a set of "meaningless" scribbles from a pre-schooler and begins to unpack the competencies already on display. Latrice knows, for example, that marks have significance. If you ask her to "read" what she is written, she can tell the story she had in mind. She knows that reading is done from left to write and top to bottom. If you ask her to read it again, she knows that the marks do not have arbitrary significance; she tells the same story, and points to the same passages. And so on. What struck me about this essay, which I am recalling from memory at a distance of twenty-something years, is that it was based not on a deficit model (what Latrice doesn't know and can't do—and therefore must be "taught") but from an asset model: look at all she can do already, with no formal instruction at all. Latrice, like every other child, was capable of creating meaning before she was technically capable of reading and writing. So when she hits kindergarten, what do we want to start with, her deficits or her strengths. Do we assume that she knows nothing, and proceed with an instructional program that has that assumption embedded in it in such a way that the message is made quite clear to her? Or do we start with what she already can do and ask ourselves what she might be able to try next? That, for me, was the essential question driving the whole language movement.

A friend of mine was in the doctoral program at UNH while Graves was there, and I went to visit him several times. On one of those occasions I visited a public school first-grade class that was conducted completely as a whole language environment. This was in springtime, and it was a warm day. I arrived at 8:00 in the morning to find the door open. The classroom seemed to consist mostly of bookcases filled with children's books, each with a colored band on the side. The bookcases divided the room up into perhaps eight or nine mini-zones, in each one of which there were students were already at work, reading silently on pillows or reading quietly out loud to one another in corners. Some had their journals out and were writing with great concentration. They didn't look up as I entered. The kids who arrived after me hung up their coats and went immediately to the bookshelves, took down either a book or their journal, and found a place to settle down to work. But where was the teacher? It took several minutes of scouting around before I found her in a corner behind a bookcase, conferencing with a student about her book. She would have each student read out loud from the book they had chosen (it was up to the student to select the book). The she would ask some questions, make some notations on a chart she had set up with each student's name on it, and tell the student to get back to work and send another student over. I wound up sitting down with a number of these students, listening to them read and watching as they wrote. It was incredible. I was working in a third-grade classroom at the time, and there wasn't one of these first-graders who was not reading and writing as well as the best of my third graders.

I talked with the teacher afterwards and she shared with me the considerable amount of work that had gone into setting up the structures that appeared to be so natural. The colored bands on the books, of which there were hundreds and hundreds, were an indication of the reading level. Students were free to choose whatever level they liked, but in the daily conferences the teacher would monitor how well the student could read the book and would sometimes suggest a harder, or an easier, replacement. She knew exactly where each student was, what he was reading, and what he would have to learn to be able to move to a more challenging book. Part of the morning was given over to small group instruction to students who needed to have their attention directed to one skill or another. She would meet with the small groups while the other students continued to read, or write, or share what they had read or written. Some students were working from entries in their journal which had been corrected in order to make a book. (Many of the books that were on the shelves had in fact been authored by members of the class.) There were clear expectations that each student would complete a certain amount of reading, writing, and sharing each week, and the students were responsible for keeping their own records. (They also kept their own attendance by turning over their picture in the chart the door when they arrived.) The entire morning, from 8:00 to 11:30 each day, was a reading-writing workshop. In the time I was there, I didn't see a single student goofing off or acting bored. It was, quite simply, one of the richest educational environments I've ever seen. And there were no worksheets, no workbooks, no texts other than the real books the kids were reading—and writing—and no standardized tests.

I've been around the block a few times since then, and nothing I have seen or experienced as a teacher or a parent has led me to believe that young children are better served by a deficit model rather than by an asset model, by batteries of tests rather than by informed interactions with teachers, by skills and drills rather than by focussed strategic interventions, by standards set by state or federal legislators rather than by individual classroom educators.

One further obliquely relevant observation. When I came back to Hawaii nine years ago, after close to 30 years of experience in Massachusetts, including twelve years as a K-12 English coordinator, I applied to the Hawaii Public Schools, which is chronically short of qualified teachers, for a job. One might have thought that with my background, and Hawaii teaching experience to boot, I might have at least gotten a cursory look by someone in the bureaucracy. I was told by mail that before they would even look at my application I would have to take and pass three different Praxis exams. I took the tests, which were monumentally irrelevant in every respect, and never heard back from the public school system. In the meantime, the private school at which I now teach hired me on the spot, no tests required, thank you very much.

There's a point at which our growing national obsession with credentials and "evidence-based" competency simply wipes out anything resembling common sense. IMHO, we're already way past that point now, and it seems that the debate is just warming up. My heart is with the legions of terrific, dedicated public school teachers who have to fight against all manner of bureaucratic stupidity in order to try to do their jobs well under conditions that are just tremendously discouraging. I wish you luck. I'm afraid you're going to need it.

Of Blogs and Substance

Over at The Valve, there's been an interesting discussion evolving that was kicked off by an editorial at n+1 magazine which criticized litblogs generally for failing to live up to what the editors saw as the potential of the medium:

People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think or say. They could have posted 5,000 word critiques of their favorite books and records. Some polymath might even have shown, online, how an acute and well-stocked sensibility responds to the streaming world in real time. But those things didn’t happen, at least not often enough. In practice, blogs reveal how much we are unwitting stenographers of hip talk and marketing speak, and how secondhand and often ugly our unconscious impulses still are. The need for speed encourages, as a willed style, the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested .... The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satisfaction—"The Divine Comedy is SOOO GOOOD!"—or displeasure—"I shit on Dante!” So man hands information on to man.

I have not read back through all of the give and take surrounding the litblog controversy, but I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what the relationship is between blogging and "real" writing. I don't think it's reasonable to measure the thinking and the writing that is to be found on litblogs or edublogs to stand up to the same kind of scrutiny that one might give to an article published in a magazine with even a few editors, whose job it presumably is to (first) select and (second) edit and (third) check sources for what they are publishing. Bloggers don't have that kind of backup. Most blogs, as far as I can see, are written more or less regularly, and more or less in an exploratory mode. Bloggers are often writing in the heat of the moment, or in the cool of the evening, or over a cup of morning coffee, and what shows up on the screen is, unsurprisingly, at least partially spontaneous. And for those of us who submit ourselves to the practice of blogging as a kind of intellectual discipline, a writing practice of sorts, there is, in fact, a need for speed, at least if we are going to post something with any regularity. I've posted something pretty much every day for four months now, and if I had been looking over my shoulder at those who would be measuring what I was writing against the Platonic ideal of an essay, the definitive statement based on exhaustive research and deep critical analysis, it's unlikely that I would have posted anything at all. Often as I write, especially in the evening, I have one eye on the clock. Even if I were inclined to want to stay up writing for a few more hours, I've got to be up at 5:45 to be ready for my day at school, and so I often begin thinking about bringing a post to a close by 10:00, even while ideas for how to extend it are darting about in my mind. So I guess what I'm saying is that I view the blog less as a theater or arena for performance and more as a kind of playground or practice area. I suspect that somewhere down the line I may be able to go back into my posts and pull together some of the threads and try to weave them into something more fully elaborated and more carefully documented, but that's not really what's on my agenda from day to day.

Granted, there are many edubloggers (Doug Noon and Chris Sessums spring to mind) who hold themselves to a higher standard, who choose to post less frequently, but whose posts are more carefully shaped and more fully developed because they have taken the time to make them that way. But even they are most often engaged in a sort of ongoing dialogue which (thankfully) does not have the feel of traditional formal educational discourse. I would argue that that's the compromise all bloggers face: do we post more often at the risk of superficiality, or hold out for depth at the risk of long periods of silence? I think we all negotiate that territory in different ways. But again, it seems to me that it is in the nature of blogs to be more spontaneous and less formal, and that that is not a bad thing. One of the things I most value as a blog reader is the occasionality and spontaneity of the medium.

And I think, at least so far, that the same holds true of student blogs. I have noticed that if I give an assignment to one class and ask them to post it to their blog, and give the same assignment to another class and have them hand it in to me, the ones that show up on paper tend to be more fully developed and more carefully crafted than the ones that show up on the screen. Maybe that's because they're still new at it. Maybe it's because they know I'm not going to slap a grade on it. Maybe it's because I haven't yet insisted on raising the bar. Or maybe the indictment rings true: maybe there is something about the immediacy and informality of the medium that "encourages.. the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested." My challenge with my students, as with myself, is to encourage them to keep at it, while also encouraging them to ratchet up their expectations of what a substantive blog post might look like.

Another Day

Spent the bulk of the evening reading SAT-format essays from my sophomores. As of last year we have a departmental agreement that we will give the students practice in writing 25-minute timed essays twice a quarter during freshman, sophomore, and junior years. By the time they are juniors they should have had roughly 20 "rehearsals" for the real event.

As I've written before, I don't place much stock in the SAT, much less in the idea that one can be reasonably expected to crank out a substantive essay in 25 minutes. And reading the essays, even the ones that are pretty good, amounts to a kind of self-inflicted torture. Even the well-written ones, that only take two minutes to read, seem like they take a lot longer. I read two, then I've got to get up and get a drink or something to eat and then wander back and plunk myself back down into my seat at the dining room table, knowing full well that the likelihood that I'm going to run into an original idea or even an innovatively crafted sentence in the next batch is next to nil.

But, in the last analysis, it's not a difficult writing task. Stupid, maybe, but not that hard. And it's something that parents—and a lot of the students—take seriously, because they perceive it, correctly, I suppose, to be an important factor in college admissions. So we do our due diligence and work the kids through the process. We look at the rubric. We compare the rubric to the more fully developed rubric we use in our department. We have the kids write essays. We have the kids grade other student essays using the rubric, compare results, talk about what works and what doesn't, why a certain paper might be a 5 for one reader and a 2 for another. We give them back their essays with scores and annotations about what they need to do to improve. We focus on clarity and specificity and logic, and tell the kids not to worry too much, given the 25-minute time limit, about significance or breadth or depth.

And I've got to say it seems to be working. The essays by this year's second-semester sophs are by a considerable margin clearer, better organized, and more convincing than the ones I was seeing from last year's sophs, who had not had any experience with the essay freshman year. I can't imagine who in their right mind would want to read the essays that result, but, given that the goal is to be able to demonstrate a certain kind of minimal competence, the essays do manage to get that done.

I used a recent prompt from an actual SAT (the prompts are posted and updated with each new test session on the wikipedia):

Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.

If we are dissatisfied with our circumstances, we think about changing them. But the most important and effective changes—in our attitude—hardly occur to us. In other words, we should worry not about how to alter the world around us for the better but about how to change ourselves in order to fit into that world.

Adapted from Michael Hymers, "Wittgenstein, Pessimism and Politics"

Assignment:

Is it better to change one's attitude than to change one's circumstances? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the students opted for the opinion that it's better to change your attitude. The most frequent, and least effective, argument was that it's better to change your attitude than your circumstances because "it's easier." Most of the students were able to come up with something resembling a plausible argument that a shift in attitude can make a bad situation better. The most interesting essays, from my point of view, were the ones that chose to challenge the Hymers hypothesis and argue that in many situations (the revolutionary war, Gandhi's India, the civil rights movement) real progress was made only when people stopped adjusting their attitude and decided to actually DO something to "alter the world around us for the better.

So, there it is. Nothing startling or educationally inspirational on the agenda here. There are other days, some of which I have written about before, and others which I surely hope I will be writing about sometime soon, where there is something so exciting going on that I just can't contain my enthusiasm. But there are in an ordinary school year, a lot more days like this one. Just another day in the sequence of days in which we're trying to prepare the kids for what comes next.

What Light There Is

Today after school we had an English department meeting at which we spent some time doing a preliminary freewrite and then talking in small groups about the subject of homework. After the meeting, I was walking across the campus with a colleague, chatting with him about some of the ideas that had come up in our separate small groups, when I was struck, not for the first time, by the transcendent beauty of the campus, the clipped grass glowing green under the nearly horizontal rays of sunlight streaming across from the southwest, the dark shadows beneath the monkeypods and palms, birds chittering in the branches. The last few weeks at school have been very busy, and it's easy enough to get closed in by exigencies, to get tunnelled into the piles of papers and correspondence and email and phone messages, to close down and screen out and not even see what's out there. But now we're only two days from spring break, I'm finding time here and there to breathe, and the late afternoon light today felt like a kind of gift.

After dinner I found myself turning that moment over in my mind, and thinking, for the first time in a couple of weeks, that I wanted to read some poetry, just by way of providing a space for that moment of appreciation to expand. And I found myself taking a book off the shelf that I have not read in several years. It's one of my favorites, a collection of poems by Eamon Grennan called What Light There Is. As I was reading the poems after dinner, I thought the one that most closely captured the frame of mind I was trying to preserve was a poem called "Four Deer." For those of you who may not be familiar with Grennan's poetry, I think it gives a fair indication of both the precision of his observation and the artfulness and musicality of his syntax. He's a writer whose syllables are a richness in the mind and on the tongue.

Four Deer

Four deer lift up their lovely heads to me
in the dusk of the golf course I plod across
towards home. They're browsing the wet grass
the snow has left and, statued, stare at me
in deep silence and I see whatever light there is
gather to glossy pools in their eight mild,
barely curious but wary eyes. When one at a time
they bend again to feed, I can hear the crisp
moist crunch of the surviving grass between
their teeth, imagine the slow lick of a tongue
over whickering lips. They've come from the unlit
winter corners of their fright to find
a fresh season, this early gift, and stand
almost easy at the edge of white snow islands
and lap the grey-green sweet depleted grass. About them
hangs an air of such domestic sense, the comfortable
hush of folk at home with one another, a familiar
something I sense in spite of the great gulf of strangeness
we must look over at each other. Tails flicker
white in the thickening dusk and I feel their relief at
the touch of cold snow underfoot while their faces
nuzzle grass, as if, like birds, they had crossed
unspeakable vacant wastes with nothing but hunger
shaping their brains and driving them from leaf to
dry leaf, sour strips of bark, under a thunder of guns
and into the cold comfort of early dark. I've seen
their straight despairing lines cloven in snowfields
under storm, and Indian file of famished natives, poor
unprayed-for wanderers through blinding chill, seasoned
castaways in search of home ports, which they've found
at last, here on winter's verge between our houses and
their trees. All of a sudden, I've come too close. Moving
as one mind they spring in silent waves
over the grass, then crack snow with sharp hard
snaps, lightfooting it into the sanctuary of a pine grove
where they stand looking back at me, a deer-shaped family
of shadows against the darker arch of trees and this
rusting dusk. When silence settles over us again and
they bow down to browse, the sound of grass being lipped,
enough for comfort, they see we keep, instinctively, our
distance, sharing this air where a few last shards of day-
light glitter in little meltpools or spread a skin of
brightness on the ice, the ice stiffening towards midnight
under the clean magnesium burn of a first star.

I like typing the poem out. It slows down my encounter with the words, allows me to fully register and appreciate the many moments in the poem when the emerging logic of a sequence of words is turned with a surprising word ("they've come from the unlit winter corners of their fright") or an entirely new line of thought, like the comparision of the deer first to birds driven across "unspeakable vacant wastes" and then, startlingly, to Indians, "unprayed-for wanderers through blinding chill, seasoned castaways in search of home ports." The poem begins in straightforward description, makes its move toward metaphor and implied social commentary, and ends, again somewhat startlingly, in cosmology. It's a poem is fully alert to, and deeply appreciative of, the here and now; and yet simultaneously attuned to something other, something bigger, something Out There that has not yet manifested itself but is nonetheless present. The poem begins by directing our attention to four deer on a golf course, but by the the end we are looking upward and outward, across the ice stiffening in the gathering darkness to that burning star. It is, typically for Grennan, a poem of great precision and thoughtfulness and delicacy.

Gradewise

It's almost the end of the third quarter, and suddenly kids are showing up in my office in droves in order to meet the requirement, spelled out on the paper I gave them on the first day of class, way back in the second week in January, that they come to see me in conference at least once during the quarter. I'm not complaining; I really enjoy getting to talk with the students individually. But I wish they would spread it out a little bit.

A lot of my conversations with students wind up being about one of two things: their writing or their grade. I've got a standing policy that they can revise pretty much anything they hand in to me for a higher grade right up until the last week of the marking period. So many of them show up with a fistful of papers in hand, wanting to know exactly what all those indecipherable marginal comments that I've written on their papers might possibly say. So we have that conversation. Then usually, when I ask if there is anything else they'd like to talk about, they say something like "Well, could you tell me how I'm doing gradewise?"

I have a number of colleagues who dislike the whole idea of grades. They argue that grades artificialize the learning process and teach the kids to think in terms of a desired grade instead of in terms of what they might be learning, and that grades also artificialize the nature of the relationship between the teacher and the student, encouraging the student to see the teacher as the dispenser of grades rather than a mentor or interlocutor. Some of these teachers prefer to operate within a portfolio system, in which they do not ever put grades on individual papers, but ask the students to keep a folder of materials and then self-assess their performance at the end of the quarter or the semester.

I think I understand the logic of that, and I've tried working with classes that way. I think the portfolio system works really well with certain kids. But it also, in my experience, sets up another kind of kid for a hard fall. The kid I'm thinking of is the somewhat unorganized kid with a lot of outside interests who has a tendency to let things slide until its just past the time when it's possible to actually get it done. They tend to assume, in the absence of other feedback, that they're doing fine, that everything is okay. Then when they find out it's too late and they've let the work pile up too long, and that their grade is going to be a D or an F, they freak out. As do their parents.

So I go the opposite route. I put a numerical grade (on a scale of 1-5) on everything they hand in, and I try to get the papers they hand in back to them the next day so they KNOW how they've done on this assignment before they have to go on to the next assignment. Any time a student asks me he s/he's doing gradewise, I can do a quick scan and give a ballpark response.

Perhaps in the best of all possible worlds we'd all have independently-minded, internally motivated students, and grades would not be necessary. But since we're going to wind up with a grade at the end of the semester one way or another, I'm more comfortable trying to make the process pretty transparent from the get-go, and giving the students the chance to bend their grade upwards if they are willing to work on getting the writing right.

I've also taught in situations where neither the kids nor their parents took much stock in grades, and in that situation you have to find other ways of connecting to where the kids are coming from. But at the school I'm at now, grades are at least a moderately big deal for both the kids and their parents, and so what I'm trying to do is use that concern as a wedge to turn the conversation back to the work at hand.

Image Credit: www.studentsfirst.us

Poisonwood, Again

My sophomores are reading The Poisonwood Bible, and I am once again, for perhaps the twelfth or thirteenth time, reading back through a book that continues to impress me and to satisfy my readerly appetites for style and substance. It's a book with a large narrative sweep, covering thirty years in the history of a family of American missionaries who travel to the Belgian Congo and live there during the brief flowing of its short-lived constitutional democracy. It explores themes of identity and responsibility and complicity at the microcosmic level, narrating events in the lives of the family members as they work through their experiences in the fictional village of Kilanga, and at the macrocosmic level, narrating the all-too-real, historically accurate events involving the CIA's participation in the removal from office and subsequent murder of Patrice Lumumba, and the installation of Joseph Mobutu as absolute dictator.

Concerned as it is with the disparity between the publicly stated goals of American foreign policy and the actual courses of action pursued by the American government in practice, it offers abundant food for thought, whether one looks backward in time (for example, to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy by American business and military agents in 1893), at the present moment (read, for example, Ken Silverstein's sobering but excellent Parties of God in this month's Harper's), or into the somewhat hazy crystal ball at the future, during which we will reap the benefits of whatever wisdom is guiding our current foreign policies, and/or pay the consequences of its shortsightedness and stupidity.

So it's a thought-provoking book at the thematic level. But it's also a remarkably well-crafted book at the sentence and paragraph level as well, and offers subtle pleasures for those inclined to attend to them. Take, for example, this passage:

In the front room our dining table looks to have come off a wrecked ship, and there is an immense rolltop desk (possibibly from the same ship) used by Our Father for writing his sermons. The desk has wooden legs and cast-iron chicken's feet, each clutching a huge glass marble, through three of the marbles are cracked and one is gone, replaced by a chink of coconut husk in the interest of a level writing surface. In our parents room, more furniture: a wooden bureau and an old phonograph cabinet with no workings inside. All brought by other brave Baptists before us, thought it is hard to see quite how... We also have a dining room table and a rough handmade cupboard, containing a jumble-sale assortment of glass and plastic dishes and cups, one too few of everything, so we sisters have to bargain knives for forks while we eat. The cabinet also contains an ancient cracked plate commemorating the World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and a plastic cup bearing the nose and ears of a mouse. And in the midst of this rubble, serene as the Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock, one amazing, beautiful thing: a large, oval white platter painted with delicate blue forget-me-nots, bone china, so fine that sunlight passes through it. It's origin is unfathomable. If we forgot ourselves we might worship it. (61)

Here, Adah, one of the Price family daughters, describes the physical setting of the house in which they are living. The passage is essentially a list: a table, a desk, a bureau, some household objects. And yet the precision with which the objects are observed is impressive. The genius is in the details: the "chicken's feet, each clutching a huge glass marble, through three of the marbles are cracked and one is gone, replaced by a chink of coconut husk," the "plastic cup bearing the nose and ears of a mouse." There's also the gradual heightening of the emotional temperature of the piece toward the end with the description of china platter, achieved by the arresting simile ("serene as the Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock, one amazing, beautiful thing: a large, oval white platter"), the religiosity of which sets up the even more overtly religious tonality of the closing remark ("If we forgot ourselves we might worship it.") This, coming from a preacher's daughter, suggests both the seductiveness of the beauty of the plate and the implied dangers of that heresy. All of which is by way of setting up a moment, later on in the story, when that plate, and all that it symbolizes, comes into sharper focus.

This is writing which gets a lot of work done in a relatively small amount of words. Kingsolver's selection of details is telling and carefully cadenced, and often poetic (sound out that passage about the chicken's feet one more time, or look again at sequencing of the words in the Virgin Mother simile. This is writing that rewards sustained attention. I've been teaching this book since it came out in 1998, and I still think it's terrific.

Myelination and Horizontality

There was an interesting article in the March 4 Sunday N.Y. Times magazine by Daniel Coyle entitle "How to Grow a Super Athlete." The article focuses on training methods which result in superior performance, which is interesting from a pedagogical point of view, but it also includes one of the best summaries I've seen in print of recent brain research involving neuroplasticity, and especially the role of repetitive instruction in stimulating the development of myelin around brain cells. I had heard about recent research involving the the role of instruction in stimulating physical changes in the brain, but this article brought them into sharp focus. At one point in the article, Coyle is talking with Douglas Fields, the director of the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland:

Fields proceeded to explain that myelin is a sausage-shaped layer of dense fat that wraps around the nerve fibers — and that its seeming dullness is, in fact, exactly the point. Myelin works the same way that rubber insulation works on a wire, keeping the signal strong by preventing electrical impulses from leaking out. This myelin sheath is, basically, electrical tape, which is one reason that myelin, along with its associated cells, was classified as glia (Greek for "glue"). Its very inertness is why the first brain researchers named their new science after the neuron instead of its insulation. They were correct to do so: neurons can indeed explain almost every class of mental phenomenon—memory, emotion, muscle control, sensory perception and so on. But there's one question neurons can't explain: why does it take so long to learn complex skills?

"Everything neurons do, they do pretty quickly; it happens with the flick of a switch," Fields said. "But flicking switches is not how we learn a lot of things. Getting good at piano or chess or baseball takes a lot of time, and that's what myelin is good at."

To the surprise of many neurologists, it turns out this electrical tape is quietly interacting with the neurons. Through a mechanism that Fields and his research team described in a 2006 paper in the journal Neuron, the little sausages of myelin get thicker when the nerve is repeatedly stimulated. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates and the faster and more accurately the signals travel. As Fields puts it, "The signals have to travel at the right speed, arrive at the right time, and myelination is the brain's way of controlling that speed."

It adds up to a two-part dynamic that is elegant enough to please Darwin himself: myelin controls the impulse speed, and impulse speed is crucial. The better we can control it, the better we can control the timing of our thoughts and movements, whether we're running, reading, singing or, perhaps more to the point, hitting a wicked topspin backhand.

Coyle also spends some time at the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow. Coyle contextulizes Spartak's success this way: "this club, which has one indoor court, has achieved eight year-end top-20 women's rankings over the last three years. During that same period, the entire United States has achieved seven." So what's going on at Spartak? Well, they're being very systematic about repeatedly stimulating certain nerves in the brain, a process some researchers call "myelinating." Coyle describes what he learned from Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, the woman who heads up Spartak:

If Preobrazhenskaya's approach were boiled down to one word (and it frequently was), that word would be tekhnika — technique. This is enforced by iron decree: none of her students are permitted to play in a tournament for the first three years of study. It's a notion that I don't imagine would fly with American parents, but none of the Russian parents questioned it for a second. "Technique is everything," Preobrazhenskaya told me later, smacking a table with Khrushchev-like emphasis, causing me to jump and reconsider my twinkly-grandma impression of her. "If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake!"

I thought of something Dr. Fields had said: "You have to understand that every skill exists as a circuit, and that circuit has to be formed and optimized." To put it in Spartak terms, myelin is a slave to tekhnika — and so, in turn, was the Little Group. Preobrazhenskaya didn't instruct them on tactics or positioning or offer any psychological tips; rather, every gesture and word was funneled to teaching the elemental task of hitting the ball clean and hard. Which they did, one by one. A few of the kids had located that magical-seeming burst of leverage that makes the ball explode off the strings with a distinctive thwock.

"What do good athletes do when they train?" George Bartzokis, a professor of neurology at U.C.L.A., had told me. "They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, high-speed T-1 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us."

The article has got me thinking about the implications of all this. I would have to confess that tekhnika is not my definition of educational nirvana. I am not by disposition or experience inclined to endorse a drills-and-skills approach to instruction, and yet I have experienced at first hand as a (not very capable) musician—and, in earlier days, as an athlete—how frequent, deliberate repetition of isolated elements of difficult passages eventually leads to a facility that at first seems unattainable. Eventually, with practice, you get better.

So I guess one question would be, "What do good students do when they train?" Should our role as teacher-coaches be to put our students into situations where they are going to repetitively send precise impulses to certain areas of the brain? That begins to sound like an argument for precisely the kind of homework "exercises" that have come under fire from people like Alfie Kohn. Are there some kinds of repetition that are better than others, some that are in fact essential? Are there some sequences of questions, like the ones I referred to in Friday's post, that when asked often enough begin stimulate myeliniation, thereby over time resulting in greater critical thinking ability? How does what we are beginning to learn about brain chemistry help us to make better decisions about instructional practice?

I don't have answers to any of those questions. Yesterday I was at a picnic talking with a colleague about the condition of more or less chronic overstimulation that I have found myself in during the last few years as an educator. I guess I always have felt this way to some degree, but somehow I thought that with increasing age and experience, and presumably, wisdom, that it would get easier. As if. Everywhere I look, there's more think about, and any one of the territories might take a lifetime to explore with any thoroughness. And the fact that there are now internet resources at my fingertips that allow me to go sailing off into the territories of horizontality for long period of time is both a blessing and a kind of curse. Without even stopping to think about, I can say that on campus right now there are ongoing conversations and explorations about sustainability, Web 2.0, constructivist learning, brain research, alternative assessment, service learning, global education, and character education. Sometimes it feels like all of those conversations are essential, and I'm really happy to be engaged in them. Sometimes it just feels like my brain is going to explode. And sometimes, like now, I look at the clock and see it's moving in on 10:00 and if I'm going to be able to get up in the morning what I really need to do is stop writing and go to sleep. So that, gentle reader, is what I am about to do. Tomorrow, as my mother was fond of saying, in her best O'haran accent, is another day.

The Heart of the Matter

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

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

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

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

The Flying Machine

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

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

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

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

Such a River Should Not Be Crossed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed Painting

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

Feeding the Beast

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go... Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

- E.L. Doctorow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kailua Moonrise

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

These are the times...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begging the Question

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

For the record, here's the essay prompt:

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

or

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

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

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

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

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

Where We Are

After Bede

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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