Lullaby

15 January 2011 Leave a comment

Don’t be afraid, for it’s only the night,
Stealing around us, holding us tight,
Like water surrounds us, this warm moist night,
Soothing our bodies, but bringing on fright.

Don’t be afraid, for it’s only the night,
Brought with the kindness of those who adore,
Powerful masters who dreamt up the night,
Whose wealth of mild dreams gives us soothing delight,
Whose soft, patient hands hold back the cruel light.

Don’t be afraid, for it’s only the night.
The dreams that it brings are beautifully pure.
You dream the strangeness. You make the fright.
Yours are the monsters that prowl through the night,
Stealing your pleasures, stealing delight,
Stealing and stealing as always tonight.

But don’t be afraid, for it’s only the night,
Brought by the wise ones who mean you no harm,
Who know you would perish without any light,
(Who know you would perish, a warming delight,)
If they don’t protect you in the dark of the night.

No, don’t be afraid, for it’s only the night.
It isn’t they who give you this fright.
You dream the terrors that prowl through the night,
Turn masters to monsters, where there’s no light.
You dream the evil they do to your soul,
Imagine the menace that lurks down the hole,
Make up the terror that seethes from the gloom.
You are the one who’s alone in the room.
You dream the peril that skulks ‘neath the bed,
Phantasms of your mind make up your dread.
Yes,
You dream the terrors that prowl through the night.

These are not dangers.
There’s nothing to fear.
Those are not strangers,
Those voices you hear.

Don’t be afraid, for it’s only the night,
The masters of darkness will make it all right,
Quelling your fears, and calming your fright,
Controlling what’s there in the absence of light.

Don’t be afraid, for it’s only the night,
Stealing around us, holding us tight,
Like water surrounds us, this warm moist night,
Soothing our bodies, but bringing on fright.

October 2009

 

 

Filed under Foolery, Philosophy, Poetry, Reflections Tagged with , , ,

Embrace your cultural identities

17 September 2010 Leave a comment

The connection between culture – heritage and history – and individual identity is definite. We are our histories, our experiences and how we have been given to understand values. We may reject or deny, but rejecting or denying something still brings it into our existence. Only ignorance can create that which is not. Knowing and understanding our own personal and familial histories is clarifying, if not actually defining of our knowing and understanding of self. Discovering more of our history, the historical context of the place we grew up and spent our formative and the stories of the people who surrounded and influenced those years, expands our knowledge and understanding of self, who we are and how we got to be us. More knowledge and understanding comes from knowing and understanding the further back history of the place we grew up and the histories of the people who came there, those histories that created the historical context of or childhood and youth and peopled it with people such as they were.

All this knowledge and understanding of where we came from and how we came to be who we are, for good or bad, forms the layers of our culture—personal, familial, associative, local, regional, national/ethnic and global. We are to a greater or lesser degree a product of all of this, and the better we know it, the better we understand it, the better we know and understand who we are as an individual in all of this. And the more empowered we are to do something about it if we wish, or not, possibly depending on how comfortably fitted all the parts of our self are.

This knowledge and understanding is also very empowering for changing our relationship to others. We may walk away from some things and toward others. We may capitalize on our strengths and bolster our weaknesses. (Yes, I used that word – humbling, yes but not humiliating and not euphemistic.) We may share what we know with others to help them understand us, and we can better understand others and truly appreciate their differences, differences that can teach and enrich us as encountering new histories and new people do, when those encounters are equitable. Self knowledge is self empowerment. Shared knowledge cast light on the shadow of ignorance. Ignorance, observed a nineteen year old sociology student, leads to fear and fear leads to hatred. Then doesn’t knowledge lead to security and comfort, and don’t security and comfort lead to acceptance and love, love in the sense of loving thy neighbor, love and the binding force in community?

We should study and discover our on histories and heritage and the histories and heritage of as many others as we practically can, certainly those with whom we must live and work and learn. And I think this is particularly true for those in the dominant positions in a society. Whiteness has no privilege when we know its history, class has enormous, too often unmet responsibility when we know its history, and affluence has a counter balance whose history suggests to possibilities of a future price, a consequence. What we don’t know is perhaps what is or will be hurting us. We can start to make a better world when we learn everything we can about the individual piece of the world that we are.

Filed under Education Policy, Racial Issues, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Speech to Edison High School NHS Induction Banquet, 26 May 2010

31 May 2010 Leave a comment

The four core values: Service, Scholarship, Leadership and Character.
    Of these, I think I came to scholarship the soonest. Early on, though not in high school, I took pride in being smart and knowing more than other people. I wasn’t very smart though; most of what I knew more than other people wasn’t very useful to know, and I didn’t catch on that knowing more than someone else didn’t mean much anyway. As I look back now, I realize that I had kept right on learning because learning felt pretty good. I enjoy the ah-ha! And I like how knowledge leads to more knowledge and understanding to more understanding. Scholarship is about life long learning, and intellectual humility – understanding that the more you know, the more your will realize how little you know. I know I still have a lot to learn. Like Faust, I want to know everything. I just hope I don’t end up like Faust.

    In the second half of my life, I realized that I could lead. My leadership didn’t come from a role as a leader, or any fame or celebrity, or any strength or power that could compel people to follow. I discovered that leading was just believing that a thing could be done and then setting about doing it. When I did that, people followed and helped. Leaders inspire others, and leaders listen. Leading is serving. Leadership is helping others get where they need to go; it’s building the bridges so that others can cross. If you lead for yourself, you go alone and all your accomplishments with fade when you leave them to move on. When you lead for others, you get support and fellowship, and your work lasts against time.

    These days, as I listen to you talking about the service projects you do, I think I’m not doing enough to serve other, to meet needs, to fill the gaps in life. I should be serving, volunteering, helping. Service builds community. It is not the work of an individual, but of the whole, and it is a kindness. Kindness of itself is a reward. But it increases because as each one contributes, we all win. I see now that I have lived a life of service as a teacher. I understand now why teaching has been so satisfying to me. I could not have been more fortunate. My life has been so rich because I have made a few lives a little better.

    I hope that my life as been lived with character, yet I know how hard it was to come to a place where I could say that I try always to act with integrity and honesty to others and to myself, understanding and accepting everyone for who they are and accepting myself for who I am too. Of all the values, character is the hardest to come to. It must come from within. It must be the core value that shapes all the other values. It is the standard by which we judge even our thoughts. There is probably no greater praise than to hear that one has been a woman or man of character.

    A friend once said to me that he believed that everyone else was his responsibility. I thought about that for some time, and I too came to see that all of us, now or ever, have this one chance here on Earth. All of us now, all of us who have gone before and all of us who come after.  All of us together, one humanity, one big, interconnected life. All of us must take responsibility for one another. We all depend on one another. We are just many parts of one being—humanity.

    I have given a lot of thought – over the fifty or so years that I have given thought to anything much worth thinking about – to this idea of being responsible. And what has it meant?

   • It has meant out with the in’s – injustice, inequity, insensitivity.
   • It has meant teaching, because teaching is giving, and giving makes this a richer world for everyone, including me.
   • It has meant taking care of myself, forgiving myself for failures and caring about myself enough to try again, so that there is always something there to give.

And this is my advice for you as you participate in the National Honor Society, and in your life in the world beyond.

   • When you serve, you serve yourself. When you leave someone in need, you have abandoned a part of yourself.
   • When you learn, you learn more about yourself. Failing to learn, thinking you already know enough, you abandon yourself to ignorance, to fear and too often to hatred.
   • When you lead, we all go together. When you try to get ahead of the others, you just isolate yourself from some of the best parts of our greater self.
   • You are most yourself when you stand with others. You are at your best when you are part of the whole.

    More and more we are moving into an era of One World. Will it be the story of globalizing a society of greed and need, haves and have-nots? Or will it be the story of understanding that we all live in this world, together, not alone among the billions. We will make it in this world all together, or we will have lived for nothing.

    The story of humanity depends on all of us together. And so many will depend on you to know that, and teach that understanding, and lead them to a better life, through Service, Scholarship, Leadership and Character.

Thank you.

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections

In education, broke or not, fix it different

21 December 2009 Leave a comment

All right. I know it’s another rant, but hey! this is edumacation……  It’s really part of my individual growth plan for the year—a bastardization of merit pay where they withhold the pay part. Well, whaddaya know?

In trying to advance the reading of my students, I have taken to heart the writing of Frank Smith, the research of the Institute for Learning and the concepts of using existing knowledge and understandings to comprehend what is being read and expanding that foundation through guided effort.

Reading is a cognitive process, the visible manifestations of which are measurable–factual recall and recognition of text, inferential conclusions, and even stylistic connections between text and some notion of author’s intent. But in this last manifestation, I see questions of the validity of these “measurables”.  As I write this, I am vague in my own mind about the intent–certainly to complete a task for TAP, probably to clarify my own thoughts about a lingering conflict, and possibly to take a stand in opposition to authority, thinly veiled as recommendation. In sum, my conclusion is to use the manifestations to reveal the areas of process that need development.

If identifying factual matter in the text is not happening, then I need to determine what lexical knowledge and syntactical habits need development and redirection. Both of these are slow to happen, but respond well to direct instruction and multiple repetitions. Many poor readers are in this predicament.

If inferring conclusions is flawed or absent, then the neural patterns that carry this process can be developed, again with well structured direct instruction–modeling leading to frequent, applied practice–learn it from a worksheet and immediately begin applying it to reading. At least once a week throughout the year, year after year. And this is easy to apply to all the reading that is going on in rooms.  Verbally annotated read alouds help students understand how to understand texts in discipline-specific ways.

If stylistic features are as yet unlearned, they need to be taught and demonstrated and the students need then to practice finding examples. Formal style is the realm of criticism, not composition. Personal style is the coloring (and clarity) of composition and may not yet have been codified by the scholars. Certainly, our students’ styles have not been identified. This is all by the book learning, and only appropriate in preparing students for post-secondary literature studies. Realistically, we’re wasting our students’ time if we are trying to teach them all to be English majors.

Author’s intent is most often questionable and seldom clear enough to be apprehended by the vast majority of readers. How many of us simply avoid the discussion of this point, much like the discussion about the definition of a sentence, leaving it to others to believe they understand? Probably much more important (to the reader at least) is a impact the piece or writing has on the reader, and that is what is actually most often tested for in our dumb-data driven education culture.

And herein is the conflict I have with the current trends in education policy: the powers, driven by politics and public finance, measured in votes and dollars, have the desire of raising the numbers of “passing” students on large scale tests. All very measurable. A who’s-better-than-whom competition that will always have a top and a bottom. And all tied tightly to public dollars–taxes. We have pit the common good against common greed, and in this, I am on the wrong side of winning.

I am not interested in raising a number; I do not care so much how many pass a test devised to further divide people into haves and have-nots. I care about every student who passes through my room, even those that our leaders, national, state and district, are willing to consign to penury and hopelessness. I don’t want to manage them or control them or change them; I just want to give them enough to have hope and the ability to scramble over that line into a life worth having happened. Am I not obligated as a fellow human being to serve “even the least of these my brethren”?

So what I’ve learned again is that someone will tell me to stop what I’m doing even if it’s working, and do what they want because they know better and have a well-made package to show it, and I will agree as faintly as possible, and keep doing the best I can for the students who need my help.

Filed under Education Policy, Reflections

The Nature of My Truth

22 November 2009 Leave a comment

I’ve been reading The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien, 1990), which is a sort of Viet Nam war novel, but of O’Brien’s own admission, not really. I agree with that. I’ve also been reading On Writing Well (William Zinsser, 30th anniv. ed., 2006). Both of them are really writers writing about writing, and both are writing about truth. The first questions the unquestioned understanding of truth, while the second promotes the clearest presentation of that same unquestioned truth—well maybe not the same unquestioned truth, but an unquestioned truth all the same.

Questioning truth is perilous. However, it seems to me that a solid fundamental belief such as the existence of truth should bear up under serious scrutiny. Trouble is that pinning done “truth” is pretty hard. Bit like proving the existence of God. Truth is after all a belief and axiomatic. We believe we can recognize truth by assembling facts that we consider true themselves. We really extend and create truth from accepted truth. Connecting facts using reasonable logic we consider as representing true relationships. We use truth to define truth. Think of a trial. The factual evidence, considered true, is connected and thus extended to arrive at a truth about a crime from which truth we create a verdict.

Yet even that verdict is defined as being beyond a reasonable doubt. The truth upon which we might incarcerate or execute a person whose life is a truth contains an allowance for, and therefore a portion of, doubt. I assert that we arrive at truth then through doubt. Truth can only exist in contrast to the absence of truth, just as light is defined by not darkness. Darkness is not a lie. The absence of truth is not a lie. A lie is an avoiding of or denying of a truth that is recognized by the liar. No, the absence of truth is doubt. In doubting then, we bring truth into existence. O’Brien brings real truth, not Zinsser’s assumed truth into existence for his readers by firmly establishing doubt. When we doubt, we must process what we think we know to arrive at a truth that is all our own.

Yet, think of how we celebrate this understanding of the nature of truth. “Too good to be true.” We should doubt goodness? That’s coldly cynical.

  • If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. [Francis Bacon]
  • Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. [William Shakespeare]
  • Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. [Andre Gide]
  • Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Most of the writing that my students will do will need to adhere to Zinsser’s words. They will need to write about what many accept unquestioningly as truth, and they will need to reason those in a recognizable logic to an arguably and plausibly true conclusion. In this process, they will need to use good writing technique. Good technique is accessible, accurate, complete and assessable. Achieving these will get most students through most classes successfully, but not spectacularly. To get through spectacularly, a student would need to bring up the kind of writing that O’Brien espouses in The Things They Carried and in an interview with

So now the question I pose is whether the source of truth is outside of us as Zinsser might suggest or is it created through the doubts inside of us as O’Brien seems to be saying. Do we define truth by a set of agreed upon observations, representations and emblems? Or do we define truth by that look in the eyes of our fellow humans as we look into their eyes and know that they know as we know? Maybe truth is accessible to a sense we are little aware of, unevenly developed though varied exposure to truth as we grow and live. Maybe the truth about truth is exposed by memory and longevity.

I have an enduring truth in the memory of my father teaching me a lesson by allowing the Delaware ocean draw my 50 pound child’s body out to perish among the jelly fish and hammer head sharks. The image of my father standing ankle deep in the backwash of the wave that pulled me far away and made his fully grown image only two inches high. The awareness of an elastic bond of love stretched to the point of snapping before he moved. The truth is he never rescued me.

I have an enduring truth about the onset of true, deep love that arose in the moment of a kiss in the balcony of a darkened church in Evanston, Illinois in 1963. The surge of energy that ran through my body. The words, “You should have done that.” The truth was I should. “I know,” I said. That truth has remained in me for forty-six years, and that sixteen year old girl is still here with me as truly as she was then. Truth is that she died many years ago and with her took part of the truth of love.

I can’t think of one externally established, generally accepted hard truth. Maybe sunrise and sunset. Taxes and death, though I’m not always sure what is tax and what isn’t, and I have nothing concrete about life after death. Yet the truths I know are truths that none of you readers have ever known and never will. But they’re true.

I wonder how I would tell the true story of teaching in Minneapolis. Or the doubtful story of years of my life when I was people different than I am now.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Reflections Tagged with ,

Autonomy

19 June 2009 Leave a comment

gustave dore, the body of elaine from tennyson's idylls of the king

I had a dream last night that my principal called me in and told me that I couldn’t do my own thing in classes, but had to do as everyone was being told to do. We would all teach the same things at the same time. In response, I told her that she would have to come up with the curriculum for all four of my classes then, and went on to waking up.

Yet, here I am this morning, worrying about what I will teach next fall, how I will survive planning for four preps. I contemplated how I would get the writing in, and the reading. Half dressed, I’ve been looking through anthologies of short stories and essays. And I realize that I can connect the writing to the readings by pairing the genre – read persuasion; write persuasion, and I have a lot of short pieces I already know about and have used, so I can do this. I need to relax and plan it out by objectives and goals, plug in the texts, and recycle plans and Power Points and I can do this.

So why do I feel so intimidated by a dreamed threat? Why do I see following a curriculum scripted from above as a script. Because it threatens my autonomy, and my autonomy is now, and has always been of great importance to me. In high school, Marty Lunquist and I branded ourselves Rebels, we listed to popular music, AND jazz and folk music. We didn’t hang out with the popular set, much as we might have wanted to. Like them, we rolled our Gant shirt sleeves up, but we rolled ours to the inside. We stood apart, but only enough apart to make clear that we were not less in status or other qualities than the group, but apart enough to show that did not gain those things from membership in the Group. We could travel with the Group. We could be recognized as valid participants in the Group. We could even attain a level of leadership within the Group. But we were Autonomous. We were most completely us apart from the group. We were who we were because of who we were, not because of our membership.

I have carried and cherished that sense of autonomy in so many ways ever since. That I could determine for myself what was fair, right and equitiable became a sort of doxastic that could be construed to entitle a range of disrespect, defiance and debauchery. I could use moral and ethical logic, as did the laws and mores of society, to place myself outside of but no less than those laws and mores. Indeed, I rose above the social code; I was not a blind, mindless adherrent. That I had arrived at this Code Civil independently of, though of coursed based in, 3,000 years of thought made my code better. A horrendously arrogant display of self-entitlement? Well, maybe not horrendous.

Of course, it was only better or even acceptable in a local sort of logic. In a more, literally global sort of logic, one would ask what right had I to step outside the regimentation of society for no other purpose but to serve myself.

   “What if everybody threw paper out of the car? What kind of a world would this be?” Mom asked in the lilting semi-whine of maternal chastisement.
   “Everywhere would look like Arkansas,” I replied, but pulled my hand back into the car.

So, is my cherished autonomy really civil or moral litter?

Still, when someone tells me what I will think or what I will feel if they…, I am indignant. By what right or power can someone rob me of the opportunity to think and feel for myself? Does it suggest that I am ignorant of my own mind? That I cannot properly control my thoughts and feelings? That I am mentally or morally defective? What possible mental condition on my part could account for someone else knowing my thoughts and feelings before they can even happen? What pathetic mental state must I be in to have someone not only feel the power to predict my feelings, no matter the accuracy of that prediction, and then respond to my possibly, even probably, erroneously predicted feelings?

Wait. I may have abused my autonomy, even reached beyonds its legitimate limits, but it is still mine. It may be weakly founded and falsely elevated, but I have a full right to my own autonomy. Even if I choice to follow the dictates of a completely benighted state, and even if that choosing is flawed or unsound, it is within my power to choose, and anyone may challenge my choice, not never my right to make it. My autonomy is absolutley mine alone.

Of course to remain autonomous, I must survive.

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary

Fresh start/Fresh stop

10 June 2009 1 Comment

Sitting at my desk, in my denuded Edison High School, Minneapolis classroom, at the end of the school year, reflecting on the past year. This year has been bad and good. Perhaps not the worst year; that would be 2002-2003 when I worked as the alternative compensation plan coordinator, a bureaucrat. Certainly not my best year; that would probably be one of the years at Sanford, maybe 1983-84, or Ramsey, 1988-89, or Seward 1996-97 or 1997-98. But these were all good for the students I had and classes I taught. If I calculate in administration and colleagues, the picture becomes more mixed. It becomes hard to say what are the best really, and it’s a pointless exercise.

The bad this year: As a school that has been “fresh started”, as in reconstituted, Edison was a wounded bird trying to rise. The damage was not as severe here for the remaining staff as at Washburn, but it was bad enough. “Most” is most in one’s perception, and for the survivors, this was probably the most painful experience. Whether that damage carried over into classrooms and to kids, I can’t really know, but if the relationships among teachers does impact the classroom and kids, it did have an impact.

Most pronounced in the relationships was the stationary front lingering between the high pressure zone of new faculty to Edison and the low pressure zone of remaining teachers. Certainly there were crossovers and even whole areas where the productive blending took effect, in the English department for sure and the social studies department apparently and perhaps in others. Between departments was a wholly different matter. I asked, suggested, advised and all but begged through the second half of the year for meetings between the English and social studies departments to discuss novels and other readings thus avoiding duplications. To date, no joint meeting. The physical education department’s passive/aggressive complaint about using a rarely used gym half way through the fourth day of our use of it. Walking up to a group of established teachers to ask a question and being invisible. The barrier becomes a little more solid.

The good this year: As a school that has been “fresh started”, Edison found many new teachers and a hopeful attitude among its students. That students at Washburn had walked out and demonstrated over the loss of teachers last year, I was probably leery and certainly unprepared when students complained about their teachers from last year. It didn’t help that they tried to paint me, as a declining returnee to Washburn, with the lousy teacher brush. Yet, by the end of the year, I liked even the most difficult of them, they seemed to like me, and many made good gains by the middle or end of the year.

I like kids, and I pull hard for the disadvantaged, marginalized and disenfranchised. I know that they may be ungrateful, unsuccessful and obnoxious, but I have to try and I don’t need much success feel rewarded. Not the best year, it was a pretty good year for caring about kids; they needed it. I am no less amazed at the love kids are capable of and their clumsiness in expressing it. Maybe I’m as bad. I am not at all amazed that the thing that makes teaching good is spending my time with kids. I am getting old though. I just don’t have the energy for it any more. I think it is only the kids that will bring me back here. The adults are too busy being about being adults together. Maybe I’ll just dub my room the Hermitage. Kids won’t get it; so they’ll come in. Adults…no they probably won’t get it either, but they don’t come in now.

None of this should be taken too seriously, you know.

Filed under Reflections Tagged with , ,

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