Let Us Go To School!

Please support these Morton West High School students, who are threatened with expulsion for their peaceful sit-in against military recruitment inside their school. These are the brave, thoughtful, independent students I am trying to help build!

read about them here and here

sign the petition here

call the school administration here

You Might Be Here. (Field Notes #1)

I'm excited - and a little apprehensive - for the next four weeks. We'll be doing field visits at other schools, spending two weeks each in the classrooms of two previous residents. The schools are different from our own, and more like those - indeed may be the very ones - where we will teach next year. We are given official school "report cards," which I study with a few grains of salt - knowing they are only rough gestures toward a picture of students I can't yet know.



Children are more dynamic than numbers, but these numbers should startle you. They are as telling of their audience as they are of their subject. At CAHS, where we're doing our residency, the students are mostly low-income, but their ethnic make-up is unusually well-balanced for CPS - roughly 40% Hispanic, 25% African American, and 25% White (mostly Polish, Russian, and Eastern European). At the Excel school at Orr High, where I will be on Monday, the students are 97.3% low-income and 86.2% African American. At Little Village, where I will spend the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, the students are 99% low-income and 98.9% Hispanic. These curious statistical pies - composed almost entirely of one solid slice - are the norm for Chicago's schools, if not always its neighborhoods. A city whose public school students are 8.2% White and 85.9% low-income. A deeply flawed city, one I love very much.



Unlike some of my fellow residents, I don't really know what schools like these are like. (The suburban high school I spent my most formative years escaping had its own, very different, racial and institutional dynamics.) Though we've read and talked about them for months, I don't know who these students are I'll be teaching. What I do know is that I can't wait to meet them, and I've decided that's a pretty good start.

Among my instructions for meeting my new students, to be added to the "texts that need a close reading" list: "Don't worry about the metal detector - they don't stop adults."

For the purpose of finding my way, my mother's words yesterday were much more meaningful to me. She told me, "you are a survivor." Reading that, I found myself crying, and realized I was crying with how good it felt for someone to see that in me. That is the feeling I want for my map.


____________

The photos are by Stephen Shames, from his series on child poverty in Chicago, circa 1985. There are fewer photographs from the American ghettos of the 21st century. Perhaps our media is too saturated with images of the terror we are cultivating abroad to make room for the terror of our children at home. And yet the poverty, hopelessness, and violence persist, unrecorded.

on defiance.

Even the school bells, they tell us, have their history. Early public school children, their education aimed at creating successful factory workers out of farmboys accustomed to the rhythms of the sun, had to be conditioned to city time, to factory time. To it mattering that way, the way children and workers bellyache for the stroke of the bell, the way time feels when authority tells your body not you. Can you picture the blinking, barefoot, wild-eyed boy being herded, quieted, etched slowly away into the form of his caste?

But that is not my duty. I am building citizens - humans - not laborers. What I want is thoughtfulness, not obedience. Respect owed not because I am me but because we are we.

Now piece together incongruous fragments from our education: someone writes that "urban" (read: ghetto) children (who look to me much like other children on the inside), unaccustomed to the gentle and forgiving manner of the young white liberal teacher, are confused, their achievement threatened, by this approach and require the kind of toughness associated with love at home. (I won't unpack that sentence now but buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it.) Our optimistic (read: naive) ears abound in progressive euphemisms for "don't smile 'til Christmas," they fall from the mouths of authority and collect at our ankles.

We have hammered into us this idea that you gotta be tough right from the start, to not slip, not accept anything once, not early on, or else there's no hope and you can never reel 'em back in. Sometimes it seems very sensible. I do believe kids need a consistent, solid structure. (I know I do.) But how can we teach them to think critically, if we don't allow them to criticize us? I have seen an entire class cower in silence as they are yelled at for not meeting miscommunicated, and sometimes actually incorrect or spontaneously altered, expectations. It is at these moments that I realize again that the majority of my struggles these days have to do with being made to feel as these kids are feeling. Where's the sense in teaching "open-ended questions," in believing in education as dialogue, but not accepting students' questioning of your self?

If I am making a mistake or being unjust, I want my kids to feel free to point it out to me. Otherwise, what are we teaching them to do when they encounter injustice in the world?

The night I found "A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero,"* by Bill Ayers, I had grown sick of cowering in silence with my students and exhausted at having to teach outside my skin. There was magic in there, words that showed my bruised instincts I wasn't crazy. In it, he tracks the Hollywood image of the teacher-hero, reading films such as "Stand and Deliver" and "Blackboard Jungle" for what they tell us a city teacher should be like, and for that idealized teacher the first principle is always assumed to be "classroom management" (read: discipline). The problem with that picture, as Ayers so eloquently points out, is that "real learning requires assertion, not obedience; action, not passivity." As he talks of "teaching defiance" I curl over the page, circling words and underlining passages, and feel myself begin to breathe again. I think again of how reading is so often about feeling yourself not to be alone.

"Teaching is intellectual work - puzzling and difficult - and at its heart it is ethical work. It is idiosyncratic, improvisational, and most of all, relational. All attempts to reduce teaching to a formula, to something easily predicted, degrade it immeasurably...

...it involves learning how to...embrace students as dynamic beings and fellow creatures. It requires building bridges from the known to the not-yet-known. And it demands liberating schooling from its single-minded obsession with control, obedience, hierarchy and everyone's place in it...

Real teachers need to question the common sense, break the rules, become political and activist in concert with kids. This is true heroism, an authentic act of courage. We need to take seriously the experiences of youngsters, their sense-making, their knowledge, and their dreams - and particularly we must interrogate the structures that kids are rejecting. In other words, we must assume an intelligence in youngsters, assume that they are acting sensibly and making meaning in situations that are difficult and often dreadful, and certainly not of their own making. In finding common cause with youngsters, we may also find there our own salvation as teachers."

Serendipitously, Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were speaking the next day, in another context, a screening of the documentary of the Weather Underground, of which they once were a part. I hold my mother's hand as we watch, then wait shyly after the talk, wanting to tell him, thank you for helping me to breathe. Instead I manage to introduce myself. Nonetheless the day is beautiful and invigorating and I sit in the park, sunny autumn afternoon, blissfully reading the page where he's written "To Margeaux, With admiration for your journey so far and hope for a future fit for children - a place of peace and justice."

There are still only more questions. What does a classroom look like where rigor and freedom both thrive? How do I get us there? And always more words, falling. In a marginal vignette one of our textbooks warns us about the first-year elementary school teacher fired for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance along with her students, who were required to do so. What do I do about the tiny freshman girl in my homeroom who's already planning on joining the marines after high school, like her big brothers? What kind of space will I build with my students, once I am free to choose this for myself? What I found the night I read Ayers's essay wasn't an answer but something more dynamic, an affirmation of my own senses.

Even as I type these words, return to the moments of this reading, I feel myself healing again. Exhausted by the dissonance at my ankles, I had again lost track of my purpose for a moment. Telling you this story brings me back home to my journey.


____________

"A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero" is from the wonderful collection City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, edited by William Ayers and Patricia Ford.

disembodied

Here in Chicago it's what I guess they call an indian summer. There's a July thickness to the air, a sleepy, saturating heat that makes your bones lazy and wants your feet bare. The summer weather is misleading, suggesting as it does that time has not been passing, October already, candy corn in my kitchen. The disconnect's in the fall crunch of dead leaves beneath flip-flopped toes, beach-headed.

This weekend, though, I don't care how false it is, summer ex machina, it tastes like freedom and I dive in, the water's cold and delicious and wakes me back up into myself. All weekend I zoom and pounce around the nighttime city, a hoodlum on my rusty blue bike, tasting it.

During the week I don't own my body. It's not just time, those cruel limits, it's words too, politics, constrictions. Nerve-wracking to be under observation, critiqued/criticized, throughout the day. It stings a little even when it's right, and when it isn't it stings worse. Often what is criticized is so deeply tied to my own instincts that I find myself floundering, a metaphorical amputee with the best intentions. I'm tired of being told I'm kind as if it were a disease that might be catching.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I've got the sort of skin easily penetrated by others' thereness. Well, grown-ups at least. Children don't frighten me. Children don't scratch at those flimsy, fragile edges of self. Maybe it's because they are equally porous, becoming. I think it's because they listen, pay attention, in ways many of us learn to stop doing, don't have time for, as we get older. Last week my fellow resident and I had our first day alone in the classroom without our mentor teacher there. I imagine it should have been stressful, left alone with the monsters while mom's away, but instead it was the most relaxed and natural I'd felt teaching all month.

Like so much of this experience, survival--maybe even happiness--means holding onto what you can from what you're given, always learning, even on the really bad days. For me, the most important thing to remember will just be this: to listen, always, to never stop listening.

Artifacts of My Selves: Reflections on Learning (Still Here #3/Spying on My Homework #4)

Comrades! It's now two weeks since school began and I know I owe you an update on this new chapter. But the weeks have been unbelievably overwhelming, mostly from matters of pure Time. Did I say summer was intense? Foolish, foolish girl! The structure of My Life Now: Monday-Thursday, in the classroom 7:30 am-4:30 pm or later teaching/planning/beingcoached; Fridays uni classes all day; Tuesdays uni classes 6-9 pm. Find the unclaimed hours and fill them with textbook reading, essay writing, class novel reading, reflection writing, homework grading, observation writing, and loads of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting (Has anybody seen my to-do list?)...so my capacity for self-expression is stretched rather thin these days.

I don't sleep more than four hours a night, and my quota for crafting complete sentences usually maxes out by Wednesday. I have brief, tearful panic attacks every few days, usually when I'm writing and revising my perpetual to-do lists (including the daily "MUST-DO TONIGHT") or trying to figure out if I have time to eat dinner or call my mama. Luckily I have Chrysa sending me text messages that say "Sagapo Lulumu. Don't forget to eat." and wise, beautiful Jodi reminding me: "Always call your mother."

The good news is, the wonderful news is, none of these stresses has anything to do with actual teaching! All signs so far suggest that this strange career I've chosen will be home. Sometime very soon when I have a little more time in my hands I'll sit down again and begin to tell you why.

For now, I thought I'd share a piece adapted from one of my assignments this week (a confidential "personal learning reflection" for my Ed. Psych. class). I think it will help sketch a glimpse of the histories of the person stepping into these high school classrooms now. Gulping now too because this essay touches on some gritty wounds and secret things, hoping that the trust I feel within this community of readers can pull me through to publish, remembering the trust I'm building Right Now with my students in each classroom community, wanting to share our voices. Here's mine for today.

____________

Many years ago, while home from college and sorting through the countless boxes of forgotten objects and priceless remnants that fill my closets there, I became absorbed in a faded slip of paper I found towards the bottom of a box of childhood art my mother had saved. I had discovered an official report from one of my earliest teachers on my progress in preschool. The “Margeaux” in the report is a little thing, not more than three or four years old. What’s fascinating is how very much she reminded me of myself then, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and how alike she would seem to me again now, at twenty-eight, for though I no longer have the report in front of me I remember very well its mood, which so deeply struck me by its familiarity.

Three-year-old Margeaux is curious and creative; an independent, self-directed learner; cooperative and intrinsically motivated but shy, sensitive, and withdrawn from other children (my teacher’s only concern); happiest making art or listening to stories; already reading. Transpose “always reading” for “already reading” and you have a remarkably accurate picture of myself today, twenty-five years later.

This parallel challenges the notion of intellectual and emotional development shaped primarily from environmental influences (“nurture”), a notion to which I have typically, intuitively been inclined. Yet the assessment also describes a personality and learning style very clearly aligned with my life experiences. Reflection on the larger narrative of my subjective development seems to confirm the strong influence of our experiences on whatever is present in our “nature” (whether chemical, genetic, or neurological), suggesting a hybrid truth resulting from a complicated interplay of influences.

The report was from a Montessori preschool I had attended in San Francisco. My parents were young when I came unexpectedly into their lives, my mother completing her bachelor’s degree, and my father his master’s, while both held down odd jobs and cared for one, and later two, children. Because they were both quite busy, I attended an assortment of daycares and preschools before beginning kindergarten. Nonetheless, my parents were nurturing, creative, and intellectually committed, and read to me constantly. It seems likely that all of these factors, along with some kind of innate cognitive ability, combined to the result that I had begun to read by the age of three. As a voracious reader and an English-teacher-in-training, the threads between these aspects of my child development and my present self are quite clear.

Along with my innate fascination with reading and a robust imagination (including a dangerous tendency towards “magical thinking” that persists despite my intellectual growth) came a deep interest and natural strength in writing. Not long after I learned to read and had begun to write, I composed and illustrated my first story. I include the text and image of this story here, because I believe it paints a fascinating portrait of my early development.


Figure 1: My first story, written around 4 years old on a piece of cardboard.



Figure 2: The story continues on the other side of the board.



Figure 3: Complete text of the story, transcribed exactly as written.

"There once was a cat who met a dog and first she was afraid because it was big. and then she met a pig. and the pig siad eech eech and then she met a horse and the horse went eeha eeha and then she met a goose and a sheep and the she siad what are you doing heere and the goose siad what are you doing heere to so they ran of in the…"
[text continues but gets tinier and tinier and can’t be deciphered]

The subject matter betrays that innate interest in animals common to so many children, but the story suggests an inquisitive and linguistically advanced creativity as well as a natural command of narrative structure (including the use of a classic “once there was” opening, temporal markers such as then, and relative mastery of the simple past). A surprising number of non-phonetic spellings are correct (e.g. because, horse, goose, and what). Even the misspellings demonstrate a significant knowledge of irregular spelling norms that point to language acquired more likely through reading than through speaking (e.g. I consistently spelled said like “siad,” but would guess that most developing writers would have misspelled it as “sed” or a variant thereof). Overall, this artifact serves as a deeply layered expression of my early development, and a remarkable blueprint for the selves I have become. My love of writing extended throughout my childhood, and served later as a crucial means of self-expression during the deeply turbulent years of my adolescence. Now, as a poet, I thrive in spaces of ambivalent and creative language.

Throughout my childhood I excelled consistently in all academic areas but was particularly skilled in writing, an activity which has always seemed to come naturally to me. I remained a shy, withdrawn, and highly sensitive child but always did very well in school. I sometimes wonder whether my academic success may have somehow been a cause of the bullying and other intense social challenges I faced during grade school, where children’s sometimes deep cruelties remain a relative mystery to me. The social alienation became so intense at one point that I ran away from school one day after my mother dropped me off, wandering the streets of the Upper Haight district of San Francisco alone at the age of eight, until after a few hours a policeman dispatched by my anxious mother found me and brought me home. I still recall that when the other children back at school asked me what had happened that day, I shrugged and told them simply that “I just wanted to go for a walk.”

In spite of, or perhaps because of, this fierce independence, academic achievement seems to have come quite easily to me. I began kindergarten but was moved ahead to the first grade because—as a reader among kids learning their alphabet for the first time—I was deeply bored. Later we moved to Istanbul where I was enrolled in a normal Turkish-speaking elementary school for the third grade, language being another, contingent, strength. Returning to the States the local grade school initially forced me to repeat third grade again, concerned that I had not met the national standards in my foreign school. After a few weeks, however, I was moved ahead again into fourth grade. As the years progressed I grew used to adapting to constantly changing contexts and to mostly being left alone to take care of myself. My little sister’s undiagnosed, degenerative, neurological disorder demanded constant parental care, and as long as I continued to do well in school no one seemed to worry about me.

The year I began high school, at the age of 13, was steeped in tragedy. My mother developed a brain tumor that temporarily paralyzed one side of her body; by the time she had begun to rehabilitate, we lost my sister, whose immune system was already weak, to pneumonia. Following her loss came the loss of my father, who moved back to his native Turkey something like six weeks after my sister died, suggesting that he didn’t think there was anyone left here to take care of. I was barely 14. Despite this emotional turmoil, I maintained my nearly perfect A-average for two more years, learning to smile as a means of deferring attention, a communicative subterfuge. I never spoke of my sadness, but wrote poems fraught with hurt and loneliness, quietly publishing them in my schools’ literary magazines but hiding them from my parents. By the time I was 15, however, the grief and anger I had so carefully hidden from sight surged within the already fertile instability of adolescence.

My emotional fragility, combined with a budding intellectual independence, permanently destroyed my perfect record. I was placed in Honors Physics but couldn’t seem to pay attention or even show up, half the time, to the 7 a.m. class (my worried teacher called my mother, who joined the perpetual chorus that I was not “meeting my potential”). I stayed out all night drinking the night before my SATs but managed a remarkably high score anyway. I wrote a research paper I was extremely proud of, debating the ethics of mandatory HIV-testing for doctors, but my teacher refused to read it and I received an F for Junior English that quarter anyway because I had refused to turn in any of the mandatory steps prior to the final paper (those notecards, outlines, and drafts that are the bane of teenagers and artists). I was restless, wild, and self-destructive. Somehow I managed distractedly to apply to and start college, where I spent my freshman year ignoring Gen. Ed. in favor of graduate-level coursework in philosophy, but finally dropped out in the middle of my third quarter after a half-hearted suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization on my sister’s birthday.

I mention these behavioral and emotional aspects in part to suggest the difficulty of locating distinct teleological maps of our subjective development. Though a linear narrative could easily be written connecting the loss and trauma I suffered with my eventual psychological crises, it is just as possible that even as a baby the threat of these breaks lay dormant somewhere in my chemistry. Perhaps there is simply something different about my brain and always has been, as evidenced by the fact that a simple medicine seems to dramatically improve my ability to function, to survive, and to succeed. On the other hand, I often suspect that many of my struggles were connected to the fact that my intellectual and physical development led people to treat me at a level at which I was not yet emotionally capable of dealing. Forced to attend therapy for the first time at the age of eight, following my parents’ divorce, and continuing unwillingly off and on throughout high school and college, I despised psychologists and psychiatrists because they seemed to want to draw too tidy a picture of me, either entirely from my life story (in the former) or from my brain chemistry (in the latter), both in the end unimaginative and unreal pictures, pictures that seemed to have nothing to do with me.

A parallel can easily be drawn between these complicated questions of emotional and behavioral development and the intellectual patterns I have also begun to trace. Would I love making art so much if I had not been given tons of materials and encouragement from my parents, if my father had not regularly taken me to the Museum of Modern Art in one of those infant backpacks or drawn collaborative cubist drawings with me in his notebooks, if my mother had not insisted on my having the Anti-Coloring Book, or handmade breathtakingly elaborate and imaginative cakes for me each year on my early birthdays? If I had grown up in a banal, happily married household in Middle America, with 1.5 siblings and a dog, would I have still been sad? If my parents had never read to me, would I still like to write?

My emotional dis/order has proved not to be ineffable; there are happy endings to my story so far. Having spent a year recovering and growing at home, I returned to college to graduate three years later with highest honors, finally completing a master’s at the University of Chicago before deciding that if I was going to devote myself to writing I wanted to be writing creatively, with freedom and without footnotes; and that I wanted to teach not in the rarefied air of academia but in the living realm of urban high schools, teaching students whose innocence (like mine) is belied by their lives, whose hopes (like mine) are fragile but fierce. Where transformation is possible, because we are always learning, growing, and becoming.

Yet when I return to the artifact with which I began this essay, and to the stories I have only begun to untangle, I seem to have only grown more and more into my self.
____________

hi! school (still here #2)

i've got to put myself to bed soon and i'm certainly too tired for poetry, but i also know that there are at least a handful of very generous people out there who read this and want to know what is happening, and i want also to share the excitement: i'll meet my first students tomorrow!

tuesday's the official first day of school, when we'll have a full day of regular classes, but tomorrow we'll have orientation, an assembly and then an hour in our classroom with our freshman "slc" ("smaller learning communities," sort of like progressive, character- and community-building homerooms).

otherwise i will be working in two ninth grade english classes (which meet for an hour and a half every day) and one senior ap english class (which i think meets three times a week: twice for an hour and a half and once for 45 minutes--as you can see the school schedule is quite confusing, i'm surprised no one's managed to sell me an elevator pass yet!). there will be two of us residents working with one mentor teacher. our mentor is wonderful, she is witty and wise and she seems to know instinctively which stuff to sweat and which not to, a very important piece of the teacher's survival tool kit. i actually requested to work with her because last year she taught a junior creative writing class, and of course i want very much to incorporate creative writing into my own future teaching practice.

unfortunately she's not teaching that course this year, but i know enough by now to appreciate working with someone who values this aspect of an english curriculum and can give me ideas about how to do it well. but ultimately i feel like i wound up in the best possible environment, with the best possible mentor, for me. she laughs a lot, which is so important. the desks i helped arrange in her classroom don't face forward in neat rows but are clustered together in angled pods of fours, a finely composed, intentional dis/order. i can tell that she works her students hard but and because and through loving them well. and she really loves her job!

we've spent the week at our new high school in training, curriculum planning, and classroom preparation, which has been quite exhausting; last week's reprieve already feels so distant. it seems we'll be expected to take on quite significant teaching responsibilities nearly immediately, which is unexpected and nervewracking but also exciting, and i sense that my mentor will provide me with the right balance of handholding and freedom. (just like a good teacher.)

the dark checkered hallways are waxed to a squeaky shine, lined with those tall human-sized lockers in a glossy deep blue, and the air smells of that peculiar, thick, expectant smell of high school (except when the physics/philosophy teacher is burning incense in his classroom). the other resident and i have our own wooden desks in one corner of the classroom, maybe tomorrow i'll bring a little plant or one of my prints to decorate with.

probably best to go now: i've still got to iron my shirt for the first day of school. wish me luck.

love. (still here #1)

is it possible it's been three weeks since my last post? of course it is. i've written & presented and read & written & presented and written & read and then written & presented, and then written some more. oh, and reflected, i've done an awful lot of that. i've cried many times, both in & out of class. i've stood clammy-handed before a simulated classroom of my peers gulping deep breaths in preparation for giving my very first "lesson"...and i've found myself, 15 minutes later, perched on the edge of my table with my legs dangling beneath my "teacher" skirt, laughing and enjoying the hell out my "class", enjoying the hell out of my fellow residents, who surprise me every day with their HEART and sheer ingenuity.

picture them, my 14 comrades, divided into three groups to defend and recite an interpretation of the plath, and there are the "soldiers" with their hushed-pulse-angry line of attention, the "mushrooms" (unbelievingly, unwillingly victorious! our kind and handsome math teacher) with their internal dissent and unassisted female voice, and finally, the one that had me perched giggling with pleasure, the "snowflakes" with their beat-snapping measured calm.

yes, they are kicking the hell out of us in this program, and no mistake. but i have NEVER ONCE not even for A MOMENT doubted that i am in The Exact Right Place. i've never known this peculiar, heart-stopping feeling before, it's huge.

the photo (HOME RUN!) is the second-best (anonymous) peer review i received after giving my mini-lesson. the first is:

"I HATE poetry and I absolutely loved this exercise. If I had this in high school, maybe I would actually have liked it."

it may seem like i am bragging, but let's both believe that i am going to have my fair share of stumbles, even of failures, in the coming years, and i'd like to hold onto these rare diamonds when they grace me.

IT WILL BE HARD BUT AND BECAUSE IT WILL MATTER. & it will matter because what we are working with is love, and what we are working from is ourselves: "Love is an action, never simply a feeling." bell hooks

ryecatchers 2004

this quiet sunday evening, i'll share a very small, very special story. the text comes from a series of text messages sent to me at wandlitz from davidly, while we were working at two different berlitz kids camps. (are there any other comrades out there listening?) viola was a little blonde girl, maybe 11 years old, who had been in my english class for one or two weeks the summer before. as an accompaniment, the photo is a page from my journal, where i pasted a mama bird and baby bird drawn for me by another camper, sophie, 7.

"i'm here with a homesick viola,
who i've brought back up from evening activity
cause she was crying.
we've been talking about books she likes

and your name has just come up
(along with the 'sun')

she really loved the one word stories
you did in class

i've just told her about my improv wkshop

she thinks she can stay for the rest of camp now

thanx 4 the magic"

Werbellinsee, Germany 26.07.2004 21:02

Community/Dystopia/Utopia: Advice Column #1

i did say that i would be enlisting your help in real ways. now, for example, i am currently developing/imagining a year-long thematic course outline tentatively organized as communities/dystopias/utopias. i'd love your suggestions on anything, fiction/poetry/film/essays/real-life projects, for young adults and regular-size adults, you can think of. i'm hesitant to give examples because i don't want to limit your thinking on this, but if this doesn't quite make sense, think (standard high school curriculum & beyond):

COMMUNITY Sandra Cisneros, Sherman Alexie, Achy Obejas (Memory Mambo), Paul Beatty (White Boy Shuffle), White Oleander,...
DYSTOPIA Lord of the Flies, Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale), anything Ray Bradbury, anything Orwell, Brave New World, It's All About Love, Clockwork Orange,...
UTOPIA Herland, The Giver,...well thinking up utopic texts is always a bit more difficult...

real life utopic projects, large and small, would be particular treasures. of course i expect you to help me, sha, my fellow traveler, my sf darling...and if you're reading mr. barash i want anything you can think of about maps, mapping. bodies and cities. remember that detroit motown street name complex? little england in appalachia? i'm hungry for culture so throw at me what you can, every body. thanks in advance

Mushrooms, or Spying on My Homework #3

There are a few reasons, some better than others, why after a blazing beginning it's now been ten days since my last post. Partly I believed that I had to work through and finish my most recent (from which the preceding was a tangential excerpt) before allowing myself to write anything else. But I cannot seem to finish it, nothing I write seems to be right, our grammar cannot accomodate the syntax of heartbreak. So I keep winding up with a bunch of words and phrases on a page, a list of wounds, a web of (dis)connected, communal failures.

So I've decided to move on for now, keep going, because life does and has and there's always so much more I want to tell you. Julia Kristeva describes depression as being stuck at a moment in time beyond which one cannot move, and this being-stuck is also a being-silent. So it is meaningful that I have chosen to simply continue past my own silence.

The other reason, of course, is that I have just been terribly, horribly busy. Here are the facts: I'm in school five days a week, 8-3. I'm sure so many hours spent in class is itself physically exhausting (good! to know how my students will feel), and to spend that time always thinking, thinking and talking, about difficult things for which there are no answers, only guiding voices that have become already cacophonous and rich. Multifaceted and often contradictory, although there are so many commonalities too that you find yourself remembering an idea without being able to say which book or essay or speaker it came from. Of course, the context is very different, and quite new to me.

Because I am learning about something I will soon be doing, there is a materiality to this learning that I have never had before. Do not underestimate this fact. It means every part of me is tied up in this learning, that those 6 hours of class do not feel like hours at all that when I leave and come home I never stop thinking that even though I hate to wake up and 8 a.m. is killing me I still stay up late into the night, quite still, working, thinking, writing. Of course I have known long academic nights. I couldn't have managed my master's from the University of Chicago without knowing how to read until 4 in the morning only to be somehow articulate and engaged in discussion a few hours later. But this is completely different, a completely different form of engagement. I have said that teaching needs YOU, and I am learning that this means ALL of you, body and mind. You never really stop *becoming*, when you are becoming a teacher. bell hooks talks about education as the practice of freedom demanding a kind of self-actualization, a *wholeness*, of teachers. So that they may make their classrooms a space of possibility, of helping their students attain that wholeness themselves. The kind of saturating reflection required of action meant to truly transform the world. (She learns this from Paulo Freire and Thich Nhat Hanh.)

More materiality: we are managing a full master's and certification coarseload into one summer plus one day and one evening a week during the rest of the year, and seven of our classes begin during the same summer, with some finishing and some continuing on, this madness is called a "spiral curriculum," and I'll have to let you know later how well it works. But it does mean that though I have only finished my third week of school one class is already beginning to wrap up and I will be writing my final paper this weekend. Still, even I forget that it has only been three weeks. I have seen worlds in those weeks. I have listened to, and become, many people, always heading towards this teacher, this person I am becoming, who by some strange magic is both new and familiar. I recognize her.

This was meant to be a brief introduction to a possibly unexciting post, so let me try to get there. I wrote my first real lesson plan this week. Soon I'll have to complete the entire unit it would fit into. I don't know how many of you will find it interesting, but I wanted to offer it to you anyway and will welcome your thoughts as always. The text my students would study for this lesson begins, followed by the lesson itself.
____________

Mushrooms
Sylvia Plath, 1959

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies.
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow.
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible.

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
____________

Course: Junior English (“Communities & Utopias”)
Unit: “Community Poem: Identities in Reading and Writing” (American poetry unit with introduction to Reader Response literary theory)
Topic: “Mushrooms” by Sylvia Plath. Introduce community poem unit, review and practice poetic analysis, springboard Reader Response unit.

Rationale: This is the introductory lesson to a unit on the poetic expression of identity and community, as well as the way in which one’s identity affects one’s reading. The structure and focus of the lesson provide students the opportunity to gain experience in poetic analysis; articulate diverse and multiple conceptions of identity and community through discussion, collaboration, and creative self-expression; and develop a beginning awareness of the way the identity of the reader affects the meaning s/he constructs from the text (this concept will be expanded upon in the course of the unit). Students exercise these skills—vital to their development as critical thinkers, readers, and community members—in an engaging, relevant, and comfortable environment.

Specific Goals/Objectives for Today’s Lesson: Students will be able to...
• Develop strategies for reading, annotating, and constructing meaning from a poem or other literary work.
• Make thematic connections between literary works to expand understanding, including relating biographical/historical background across works.
• Gain experience reading poetry aloud, and acquire an understanding of the way a poem’s meaning can be variously constructed and transformed in oral performance.
• Analyze poetic language and imagery to construct and defend an interpretation, both independently and collaboratively.
• Gain experience in poetic/creative expression of identity and community.
• Begin to understand how the identity of the reader affects a poem’s constructed meaning. (This last topic will be taken up more fully in the lessons to follow this one.)

Activities to Cover Goals/Objectives:
PRE-READING:
1. Entry slips: “Who (what identities and communities) do you mean when you say/use the words ‘we’ and ‘us’?” You may choose to represent these any way you choose (e.g. list, drawing, mindmap).

2. Do Now: Review your entry slips and choose one “we” to share. (2 min.)

3. Introduce poem/lesson by beginning with students sharing their “Do Now” responses. Discuss the variety of “we’s” to which we belong. Encourage students to keep this idea in mind as we look at our poem for today. (3 min.)

4. Distribute poetry reading strategies worksheet (see attachment). Have students take turns reading each instruction aloud, pausing to check understanding. Reiterate the need to read actively, with pen in hand. (3 min.)

READING:
5. Distribute poem (without author or title). Read poem aloud to class while they underline, note, etc. (see strategies worksheet). Students then re-read the poem independently, focusing on the worksheet questions. While students are working, the instructor moves around the room to observe and engage with students one-on-one. (Read aloud: 2 min.; independent read: 12 min.)

POST-READING:
6. Begin with an initial discussion about the last question on their reading strategies worksheets. Students volunteer guesses at the approximate date, along with their evidence. After a few (educated) guesses, the instructor gives class the date. One student adds this poem to our evolving literary timeline, posted across the classroom walls. (3 min.)

7. Guided discussion of students’ initial impressions of the poem, what they think it’s about, who they think the “we” is, etc. Students include some initial “word clues” (textual evidence) for their claims. During this discussion, the instructor writes possible topics/interpretations from the class brainstorm on the board (with a few textual examples) in an informal class mindmap (see attached list of past/possible analyses for instructor reference in guiding students). (5 min.)

8. Give them the author (name is added to the timeline). Review what we already know about Sylvia Plath, based on our reading of the Bell Jar earlier in the course. Quick blackboard revision of students’ topical mindmap – if they choose to – based on how this authorial information changes their initial impressions. (3 min.)

9. Select 5-6 main topics/interpretations from the board and assign one to each student group (somewhat random; students need not be in the group with their own idea, however one “expert” as a kind of team leader in each group would be good). Each group works together to look for textual evidence of their assigned topic/interpretation. Sample textual examples from the initial group brainstorm have already been included on the board to help get students started. Give students the following instructions: In these groups, try to come up with at least 5 examples in the text of your assigned interpretation. Then work together to prepare a dramatic reading of the poem according to the tone and concept of your assigned interpretation. (12 min.)

10. Groups report back to the class about the outcomes of their investigation, then perform their readings of the poem. Students then “vote physically” on which seems like the likeliest interpretation. (10 minutes)

11. Poem’s actual title is revealed. Wrap-up discussion. (2 min.)

12. Discuss homework assignment. (3 min.)

13. Exit slips: Write one question you have for Sylvia Plath. (Instructor to use this input to evaluate student engagement and generate follow-up material and/or focus for the following day’s lesson, which introduces Reader Response theory through an extended/deepened exploration of the same poem.) (2 min.)
____________

Poetry Reading Strategies

1. Listen and follow along as I read this poem aloud. Be thinking about what or whom this poem may be describing. What makes you think so? While you are listening, underline or highlight lines and words that strike you, places about which you have questions, and unfamiliar words or confusing phrases.

2. Now carefully read through the poem again independently, keeping the following questions in mind. If you found any unfamiliar words, look them up now. If you have questions, write them in the margins. Keep looking back into the text of the poem for specific evidence to support your impressions. Your answers will form the basis of our next activity, so be prepared to share your analysis.
a. What is the mood of the poem? In other words, how does this poem make you/readers feel? How does/do the speaker(s) of the poem feel? How can you tell?
b. Who is speaking? How can you tell? What kinds of images do the words call to mind? What kinds of settings and characters do these images evoke?
c. Comparing it to other poems we have read this year, when do you think this poem was written? How can you tell?

3. If you still have time remaining before we begin discussion, you can start thinking about today’s exit slip: What questions do you have for the author of this poem?
____________

“We” Ideas: Past/Possible “Mushrooms” Interpretations
(for teacher's reference)
drawn from a variety of sources, including both student and scholarly interpretations

depression; suicidal thoughts
conformity & individuality
women; female writers; feminists
nature; seeds; trees; vegetation; mold; fungus; snow
carpenter ants; woodland mice; insects; cockroaches
the meek—Biblical allusion
a dream
making a place for yourself in the world
birth; pregnancy/unborn babies
the younger generation
underdogs; the working class; the communist atmosphere
slaves; decolonization/the oppressed
souls
mushrooms
____________

Homework Assignment: “Our Imagined Futures”

Choose from the following:

a. One could argue that Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” describes some kind of transformation or event. (“We shall by morning / Inherit the earth.”) Imagine the next scene, the moment following the event or transformation predicted in the poem. What does it look like? Describe this imagined, follow-up scene using whatever method you choose: a poem, story, drawing, comic, or collage. Be sure to use the text of the poem to inform the scene you imagine. Be prepared to discuss your work and share the textual “clues” that inspired it.

b. Write your own imagined prediction for future transformation, using “we” to represent the voice of anything or anyone you choose. This can be a poem, essay, letter, or story, but it must be written. You will have the opportunity to share these pieces with your classmates.

Metacognition for the Shy: Excerpt From a Future Blog

I had spent the first hour of the morning - tiredheaded from no sleep the previous night - arguing stubbornly but reasonably with the only other two future English teachers in our cohort of 15 AUSL secondary residents. (The other students in the class include several History/Social Studies and Science, one Math, and one Foreign Language future high school teacher.) I found myself arguing in surprise. I had come to class with work in hand and reading done (and an unsolicited handout to share) but sleepless and prepared to spend the day learning in as quiet and disengaged a manner as possible. Plus, the article we'd read for this discussion was written by our instructor and within the generally progressive philosophy of our program, so I hadn't expected this degree of dissent. I also felt this dissent was really based in part on a misinterpretation (the teacher and grad student in me said poor close reading) of the essay, and felt compelled to clarify it as I had read it, even when it became clear that I was not being understood. How strange it is when one is confronted with surprise by disagreement over an idea that seems to us only natural and right!

The essay described a perceived failing of traditional English pedagogy to teach language and grammar in a way that engages, respects, and truly educates high school students. It recommended the following strategical reform in language code/grammar instruction: 1. Support the language each student brings to school. 2. Provide them with input from an additional code. 3. Give them the opportunity to use the new code in a non-threatening, real communicative context.* I found the article engaging and reasonable and came to class prepared to discuss the connection I noticed between the tenets of the essay and the language teaching methodology I had experienced and practiced. I also came with a few anecdotal allusions from my precocious childhood with a father for whom English was a second language.

But my tentative forays into these experiences as related to the text drew an unexpected backlash from my English cohort in small group discussion. There was a general outcry about the importance of charts and rules and redmarked grammar exercises. As a former English language teacher, I should perhaps be ashamed to admit that I was not even quite sure what they meant by split infinitives and dangling participles, but that is simply not the way I taught language! I felt they were getting both the essay and my point wrong and kept responding and rearticulating even though my head ached and even after one girl said like a rude and monotone lash, yrgonnahaftastarttalkinglouder.

It's true I have a tendency to "trail off," a tendency born of innate shyness and bred in insecurity. I didn't swallow thickly and shut up like I usually do or even apologize excessively. I just kept eye contact with her and said okay in equal monotone and kept talking. I guess being forced to defend positions you feel are true, even unpreparedly, is good for the brain. Possibly even the spirit, if I can keep it up. I admit my skin isn't the thickest. (Well, red alarms are going off in some of my readers' heads about needing a thick ol' skin to teach city kids. But I'm beginning to think truly good teachers need a special science fiction multiform transversal skin that can switch with grace and ease between thick and thin skins all day.)

Well, so I'm learning to do all this, aren't I? I remember standing in a wonderful bookstore in beautiful grayed Belgrade, Serbia, with my dear friend Shasta and her saying, well OF COURSE you're going to be a teacher (this was in 2002 and I was standing there holding a thin Derrida volume on refugees and political memory so she may have actually said "professor") and I said but shasta if I was standing in front of a class right now I don't know what I would SAY and her looking at me like blinking an eye you know in books when they say, she blinked at me. well, you haven't even gone to school yet silly.

And what I was going to say was this: metacognitive. that is, I am a student in an education program and as such am learning on three distinct and cognisant levels: 1. I am learning about teaching. 2. I am learning what it is like to be a teacher. 3. I am learning what it is like to be a student.

---
*Refers to "Watch Your Language: Teaching Standard Usage to Resistant and Reluctant Learners," by Mark Larson.

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My apologies for the divergence, which was intended to show you the state of mind (defensive, assured, and tired) I was in, a state of mind which vanished when LeAlan Jones walked into the room.

Hope 101: Looking for Answers in Our America, or Spying on My Homework #2

Two posts in one day! I should be in bed now! Just this one last thing, especially important 'cause you don't have to take it from me...



For Monday: Write questions you might ask Jones and Newman in relation to, ‘how to counteract the negative pull of peers?’

I was struggling to articulate a list of questions to ask LeAlan and Lloyd. I knew that this was not because they had nothing to say—not at all—but because I felt that the answers to such questions were already before us, that LeAlan and Lloyd—as well as their families and community—had spoken generously to us and we should be as generously interrogating the text for the answers. Early on in my reading I came across a beautiful passage of 'Ghetto Life 101' when Lloyd tells LeAlan, “I like the way we treat each other!” Probably because I’m reading now from the perspective of a learning teacher, I found myself dog-earing passages in the book with some sign or suggestion of hope. A moment of beauty. An entry-point for transformation. A need I could attend to. I began with the way we treat each other.

This is an (unfinished) list of possibilities.

1. “I like the way we treat each other!” p. 31

2. (elementary school principal) “…training teachers to look at the gifts that you bring with you.” 39

3. (LeAlan) “Other times we just walk on over to the lakefront, sit on the rocks, and kick it” 47

4. (Lloyd’s father Chilly) “Having fun. Sitting by the lake. Me and her putting our feet in the water together.” 71

5. riding the bus “…just ride to the end of the line…Mostly we just talk about anything that pops up in our mind.” 79

6. “So you can get beside a person. The person you think is the dirtiest, meanest person in the world got a side you can get to—if you know how to do it.” 111

7. (juvenile public defender) “I’ve never once seen a kid who isn’t a little boy…a kid sixteen years…six foot one, been gang-banging for five years, carries a gun, his father’s incarcerated…and I’ve talked to the kid and within five minutes (not because I’m a great person, but just if you take the time) within *five minutes* I see a little boy. And you have little boys over there who have never had a chance to be little boys…They can all be reached. Every one of them—they’re all savable. Every one of them!” 118-9

8. (elementary school council president) “He was very sensitive—he’d flare up and fight in a minute—but I could talk to him and he would calm down and talk to me. And it just seemed all he needed was someone to spend some time with him.” 122

9. “Beautiful day outside. Walking around, keeping my eyes on everything. Little kids out here playing, flying kites, having life…It’s more than just the buildings. You don’t know how it is to take a life until you value life itself. Those boys didn’t value life. Those boys didn’t have much reason *to* value life.” 141

10. “Kids around here have got to have more things to do. They need counseling. Get the teachers to put more emphasis on teaching them how to love and respect one another before they start teaching them how to add and subtract—because if kids are violent and show no respect, how can they learn anything?
Some way, somehow, we’ve got turn this whole thing around into a positive. I got hope though, ‘cause two negatives make a positive. That’s what I learned in math the other day.” 153-5

11. “People out here want to learn, they’re just getting taught the wrong things.” 160

12. (elementary school principal) “The majority of my children are more satisfied with a hug than they are with a buck. They want the closeness. They want somebody who cares about them.” 170

13. (LeAlan’s granddaddy) “Do not stop learning. Learning is the greatest form of happiness known to man.” 176

14. the entire quote “What’s up y’all…I’m not supposed to be positive. I’m not supposed to be educated. I’m not supposed to know what I know. But I do.” 177

15. “can’t nobody change but me.” 181

16. “I think what we need is to get people together and clean up around here so they can feel that they’re doing something good at least for once in their life.” 183

17. “You’d have to live here to see how it really is…” explore this 185

18. “I never go outside. There’s nowhere to go.” 189

19. “I believe we wouldn’t have let each other fail.” 198

20. “a kid…who can barely communicate his feelings (which is almost the usual characteristics of a child from the ghetto) when he asks himself the question ‘What is my reason for being? What is my purpose?’ what can he tell himself?” 200

21. “we must somehow find a way to help one another. We must come together—no matter what you believe in…Not me by myself. Not you by yourself. I’m talking about all of us as one, living together in our America.” 200

All quotations collected from 'Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago,' by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

Margeaux Temeltas, July 1, 2007

Statement of Educational Philosophy, or Spying on My Homework #1

1:16 a.m. i've just noticed a headache that feels as though it's been brewing for hours. i could use a massage. or a bath. i was going to get take-out for dinner to save time, but now i've worked all night and nowhere is open in my neighborhood. i'm nursing cold coffee hoping it will distract me from my hungry belly and keep me awake until i finish my mental list of Things That Must Be Done Before Bed. ah yes, i'm a student again.

so for "materials and methods" class tomorrow we had to write a "philosophy statement," which will be revised as we continue the class and begin collating our 'teaching portfolios.' this weekend i procrastinated sitting down to write this because i felt insecure in my meager convictions and limited experience. i was even going to review all the notes and materials from the past week first to remind myself what mattered, and recall what language was used. but instead, i just sat down and wrote. and wrote. it turned out that i actually had a lot more to say than i expected. so here, without further adieu, and after an exact total of three days of intensive teacher training (but a lifetime of being a student), is my first Statement of Educational Philosophy.

am i missing something? think i got it wrong in places? worry i'm an optimistic, passionate lunatic who will crash click or burn before my committed six years are through? think i should call home more often, mama? let me know what you think, if you please

_____

• The school and classroom environment should be safe, nurturing, and supportive, and students should be guided toward developing a sense of identity, community, and interpersonal understanding and connectedness early on, in order to build both trust and engagement.
• Whatever their subject, educators should address the task of developing independent, conscientious citizens and community members. To that end, classroom interactions should reflect active, positive models of social behavior, and classroom activities should focus on developing the critical thinking skills of all students.
• Students have diverse combinations of multiple forms of intelligence. Teaching practices should reflect this by including a diverse variety of activities and assignments; by incorporating individual students’ unique skills, knowledge, experience, and interests into customized and continuously revised instruction; and by utilizing activities that draw upon each student’s strengths and address their needs through peer teaching, workshopping, and group work.
• Courses, units, and individual lesson plans should be well-paced and carefully structured in order to provide a sound basis and continuously expanding set of knowledge and skills, as well as exposure to diverse applications for newly acquired systems of knowledge.
• As much as possible, students should be guided to construct their own knowledge through exploration, discussion, and reflection.
• Emphasis should be placed on students learning *how* to learn—how to read and think critically, problem-solve, and communicate articulately and effectively—rather than privileging the memorization and accumulation of isolated facts and details. Each new unit should be connected with and integrated into the larger trajectory of the class, so that students’ knowledge can build upon itself. When possible, multiple teachers should work together to create integrated units across disciplines.
• Curriculum and course structure should be made relevant to students’ lives and experience. Students should be given ample opportunity for self-reflection and reading response. Reading and thematic content should be developed with consideration to student relevance, and activities should focus on *making meaning* through active exploration and analysis, as well as *making connections* through comparison, complication, and reconsideration.
• Activities and thematic content should include a focus on students’ immediate experience, allowing them to incorporate reflection and representation of their families and communities into their learning. Students should constantly be given opportunities and encouragement to speak, to contribute their own voices and perspectives to the evolving dialogue.
• Learning should be experiential to the greatest degree possible. Classes should find opportunities both to visit new sites, gaining exposure to diversity and better integrating their learning; and to revisit their own communities through the lenses of their developing critical thinking skills and tools. Where field work is not possible, teachers should supplement their students’ standard curriculum by bringing diverse and authentic voices into the classroom. This can be done through guest visits and the integration of a variety of media. As much as possible, classroom learning should expand students’ awareness and abilities by focusing on what can only be done *there.*
• Writing is a critical skill. In all disciplines, with particular emphasis in the English field, opportunities should be made for students to gain experience writing in a variety of contexts and for a variety of audiences. Writing should include both spontaneous, personal, and ungraded journaling or freewriting; as well as formal, structured, and carefully crafted assignments—both persuasive and poetic. In the case of freewriting, lesson plans should include activities that put the reflective writing to use as a springboard for discussion or expansion. In the case of formal writing, students should be given the opportunity for—and encouraged to learn the crucial value of—revision. In both cases, adequate support and coaching should be provided to clarify expectations and engage students with the activity.
• Critical reading is an equally crucial skill—not merely for understanding literature but for analyzing, understanding, evaluating, and acting upon the “texts” we encounter every day in the world. Reading assignments should include significant time spent in reflection, analysis, and discussion, and teachers should guide their students to return to and use the text as key, support, or critique for their personal response or opinion. Students should be welcomed to interrogate and critique texts under discussion. Units should be structured to engage students actively with the text by providing opportunities to put their learning to use through educated decision-making, discussion, application, and debate. Individual works of literature should be taught within a larger context, with students making connections between works and developing their understanding through comparative and critical engagement with multiple texts, perspectives, and forms of media.
• When possible, teachers should allow a degree of methodological and theoretical transparency, and students should be invited to reflect upon and critique the structures and modes of power, language, and learning at work in their educational and social environments.
• While open and intensive analysis of social and political structures—and injustices—is crucial to the development of educated and independent citizens, teachers should be careful to incorporate study of progressive and transformative practices—both large and small scale—and provide opportunity for practical involvement in community action and service, instructing students in the tools necessary to articulate opinion and effect change.
• It is invaluable to give students the opportunity to put their knowledge, understanding, and unique perspectives to work in practical and creative ways. Units and courses benefit from culminating project-based activities that allow students to prepare and present their accomplishments to the larger community (e.g. a gallery display, public reading, or poetry slam).
• In connection with the above point, alongside the knowledge itself, students should be learning to build confidence in their knowledge. Activities that allow students to utilize their specific strengths, while addressing some of their needs in a safe and nurturing environment, are key to students’ intra- and inter-personal development as well as their ability to succeed academically.
• Methods of assessment should be structured to challenge but also to allow students ample opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned—rather than being “tricked” into revealing what they haven’t.
• Teacher expectations should be set by what a student is capable of, not by what s/he has done in the past, or in other courses. Individual student progress and goals should be consistently re-evaluated to ensure that they are being appropriately challenged. Both students and teachers should allow themselves to be surprised by what they are capable of!

Margeaux Temeltas, July 1, 2007

why a blog?

welcome!

let's begin
the way transformations do,
with questions.

why a blog?

i am by no means the sort inclined to keeping a blog. i'm a sometime technophobe. i'm deeply undisciplined. but most importantly, for roughly the same reasons i'm a poet out of water in a poetry slam. writing has always been - for me - a very private art, a means to express what has not been or cannot be spoken.

at its worst i saw blogging and similar practices as a kind of electronic prostration before a mutually narcissistic audience of people who should possibly have been out running barefoot in the grass instead.

so what am i doing here? at the simplest and deepest level, i wanted a way to share my new experiences with my family - both those i was born with and those who happen to populate my intimate world. teaching is a very personal profession. it needs YOU, & it changes you. after one short, intense week spent immersed in discussion of the theories and realities of urban/human schoolteaching, i am filled with ideas, excitement, impressions, and new & critical knowledge. i am bursting with stories!

but the short and intense first week reminds me that the summer and coming school year will be both physically and emotionally exhausting. in such a state i am sometimes unable to give such stories their due passion, perhaps especially in multiple tellings, and this deprives us both.

this, finally: there are so many incredibly important people i simply do not communicate wih enough. perhaps you might even say that my desire to share this world with you is in its way an act of love.

it's late. i've got to head toward sleep. i missed the sign on the door to the teacher's college that said "Night Owls Need Not Apply." sweet dreams, comrades.

N.B. at this point you're wondering whether i'll use this kind of dense & tortuous language with my kids - and the answer is obviously no (well, maybe sometimes). we all speak not one but many languages, and we possess them each in varying degrees. this is my language of reflection, which sometimes possesses me.

archive: first profile

I'm 28 years old, a poet and a lifetime reader. My affinity has always been towards children, and my political priority the transformation of the institutionalized inegalitarianism of American schools.

I truly believe in the social promise of "paying it forward," which may make me naive - but I'm smart, committed, and creative too.

I've just begun a unique, progressive residency program in urban education. In one year, I will be entering my first classroom in the Chicago Public Schools as a high school English teacher. This is the story of my journey. Well, the story-in-progress anyway...

drawing by nelson, to accompany his journal response, 2007