More from St Patrick's Day

I passed along Jess’ message for Ben: ‘love and hate and an exchange of drastically different wisdoms.’ Also her word for Keri if I saw her, for good measure and since, not expecting to see her, I figured I wouldn’t get to use it otherwise—‘to describe my bosoms in elaborate detail.’ I just said that, instead of doing it, but in this case it was enough. We had the NJ diner experience and hot on its heels the NJ bagel experience. In the distance the St Patrick’s Day parade is still going on, drums and snares and the tented din of people and bagpipes if you listen close. Not many streets away from the ballpark, a kid learning to pitch and still a bunch of people wearing green wandering around, though the serious drinking is further down, all through midtown to the park and fifth avenue where it actually was, the parade seemed to be there anyhow in the confused milling and wandering hordes of young scumbags, in potentia. But even just the train was enough of that, for me, about to fight over some stupid thing that started with comparing hats and shouting with delight. The U-S-A chant and other shitfaced medleys, since apparently no one knew any Irish drinking songs, or otherwise. So that’s something else for the school. And on that, the French classroom, the painted wall and ceiling tiles, the courtyard they fixed up and maintain, and kids saying hi like they know you—all that is something. But the first thing she kept saying and when we were out for Moroccan coffee and deserts, the administration has changed, they’re cutting the French program, and they can’t even sell cupcakes for a bake sale, and by next year maybe she’ll be out of a job and they’ll have to sell their house. But that isn’t even so much what makes Ben worry about going to Boston and paying more and more in loans for the master’s program with the professor whose essays he’s been reading, from research of his own or maybe a tip from the locally legendary priest—what really makes him think twice these days is the suspicion he’s doing evil by asking too many questions of the bible, and might not be believing the right way. But what also used to worry him was that the academic route wasn’t real and stable for supporting a family—which maybe isn’t such a concern anymore, if his family has been edging towards a bohemian-christian anarchy of a kind he can enjoy. We watched Inception and talked a long time about bible stuff, how it seems important to try to make up one’s mind what to believe about it, how to act and argue, since it demands your attention, once you know about it, and the more you start to think about it, the more difficult it is, doors closing behind, dreams within the dreams, the combination of Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, Job and Jonah, the opposition of subjective-relative and objective-absolute truths, and the ways these tend to play out in what you might term in the broadest sense education—colonization, crusades, proselytizing, epistles, gospels, forgiveness, love. Blaspheming against Paul but never against the Holy Ghost, not rejecting the free gift of life and relationship with God, but striving to understand the nature of it, of the fall, of suffering, of how it is possible to understand and have a meaning to life, to act as if, and to be sympathetic to other standpoints. For peace, for the democracy of heaven, instead of kingdom or republic or anarchy. Actual democracy, discussions where people listen to one another because they feel the possibility of being the other, of loving, of seeing themselves again. Nor does globalization have to mean homogeneity, or progress in technology supplant humanity—even if it could be generalized throughout the rest of the world. Somehow the west has something to offer, and America does, and it’s not just facebook and twitter.

Reading Pullman in New York

Exile and creativity? The books on Ramsey’s shelf—Henry giving every movie considered great five stars. The Uruguayans in New York, the neighborhoods around Washington Sq. Languages—how many kinds of Chinese? Saying something in class, even as the teacher, in another language, there’s such anxiety and shame. But the allure of knowing, and the comfort and curiosity of not yet understanding—the men Sally Lockhart admires, and Harriet stilled by the bearded Katz, and the underlying conviction and passions of the author showing through. Some combination of impotence and compelling through the words on a page. Reading the mysteries as a commentary on the energies of art—where the handscrawled note begins things, and the penny dreadfuls, plays, letters move them forward, and the cold or inhuman sorts of greed or pomposity try to slow them down—the interplay of historical and scientific accuracy and invention, self-conscious dramatics and seeking states in which thinking and truth can emerge clear—the wizard’s visions, the spiritualist’s trance, the opium smoke—the villains’ say, even quoting the poet Blake, as the wizard indicates Keats. What is left unsaid, not shown, in the climactic points, the fire in the courtyard the night they made love in the bedroom, and disposing of those villains, or what might have created them. Keeping the books short and fast, sparing the fullest conceits, nor endorsing the novelist’s prerogative to digress, philosophize, or decorate too much—restraint, in the service of the better, livelier delights of storytelling. We can do the reflecting ourselves, later, and try to say it, or not do it, or leave it unsaid—still the essential thing, the story, is there. The creative work we couldn’t do convincingly without all the inspirations behind it, the knowledge and personality and efforts of the real author—and in exchange or which, perhaps, he can never enjoy the result quite the way we enjoy it, coming to it from somewhere else, and with different biases and knowledge of our own going to work on it again. Not the same excitement of a story, but a kind of mystery in it, still, when it is well done. Something more, an arch wherethrough gleams…But having to admit, as Patrick goes back to, the impossibility of generalizing the appreciation of these kinds of things, holding onto all the while that deeper more natural intelligence and character given by more active experience—but this, the reading, is what can be taught. The other you can’t do much about, short of Rousseau’s manner of getting at it. And the reading is finally just a way of bringing to bear some reflection upon it. Maybe some people don’t need it—that’s fine, it’s no good forcing it on them—but society as a whole, for the sake of keeping together and not abandoning its culture, surely does need some people who are concerned with asking questions. So that slavery does not persist, and the grosser inequalities, in the societies where this questioning has gone furthest, in the west. Though at what cost to the people we considered other? That seems to stem from that old blindness James catches sight of.

Shutting down

Something about a Friday afternoon makes it impossible to take yourself too seriously, or it suddenly gets clear that nothing in the whole day matters, viewed from that standpoint. But this is a killing thought on a Monday, with the whole week ahead. Better to put our earphones in, like passengers on a train, and try to ignore it. Or put our head down and sleep. In what way can a kid going to class and doing that be called present? In what way are we providing anything more worthwhile than them getting a couple hours’ extra sleep? And a service job for a few years, in the armed or civilian side, once they wake up, until they make up their mind to prefer being awake.

If you’re firing teachers and want to keep class sizes small, probably it’s time to start sending kids elsewhere too. Obviously they aren’t ready to learn, nor we to teach them. Imagine an emergency measure for high schools that looks like this—school as it stands for kids who aren’t disruptive; work-study for those who are, until such time as they demonstrate a drive to return to school; and bare-bones, small-class-size GED programs for those who return. This is the last chance though, an attempt to save the sanity of teachers and the notion of school as a place of learning, not just a holding pen. It’s almost a trap for a conservative district to fall into, since administering it would requiring facing up to who those failing, disruptive kids are and who has failed them all along the way. And there’s no money to pay them at their jobs, anyway—unless they find it with the voracious military. 

So taking another step back, what about all the elementary and middle schools firing teachers, too? Or the school district Rosa Parks, who lied on her address to get her kids zoned in a better school? But place schools right in the community and staff them with people in the community—require teachers to live where they work, as students have to live where they’re doomed to go to school—keeping them small and drawing in volunteers from among the retirees and unemployed to work with groups even smaller, doing something as simple as reading or playing basketball once a week, and you can rebuild the school and the community together. It can be done—Harlem children’s zone is doing it—and probably it can be done even better and less noisily than they’re doing it. It might not work, but it has to be tried, when what is being done is doing nothing. 

Close the schools, otherwise, and let the kids out, instead of wasting their time and letting them waste yours and your dwindling money. In fact, close the schools anyway, but put the classrooms above storefronts in the cities, and in vacant houses in every suburban development. Let the schools rot, or let the buildings be taken over by tireless charters or barefaced juvenile delinquency compounds, of which you’ll be needing many more once the schools are no longer burdened with those kids. Set aside a good portion of them for psychiatric wards and drug- and alcohol-abuse halfway houses, and centers for single mothers. Then watch in amazement as the numbers of those all steadily go down while the little schools actually teach kids, in communities that actually raise them. Provide some incentive to keep teachers from leaving once they move in, like a good mortgage rate or expanded freedoms to develop curricula and activities; likewise, encourage students to come back as teachers and other places in the community, so there is some continuity and meaning to living in that place. Give students ownership and courage to take delight in their school and neighborhood, rather than being ashamed and careless of it—give them their own books—this is easy to afford once you stop wasting money on textbooks—and journals to write in, and at a certain age they should get laptops or tablets as well, and be shown how to use them for learning rather than just watching youtube videos—though also that, and how to post and produce videos, always concentrating on not the thing itself, but the quality and thought that went into it, and the time being spent well. 

And surely at least part of what makes kids so ungovernable is the sheer mass of them gathered together—against so many immediate centers of attention competing with each other, a teacher has no chance. Especially when the kind of attention is playful or flirtatious—these are kinds of interestingness out of bounds for a teacher. They can only be placed out of bounds for students at the price of curtailing what is natural in them. So what can be done is to sublimate them in more creative ways, and reduce their intensity by reducing the numbers of students hemmed in together, then giving them free play outside of class, so long as students respect the demarcation. Simply laying the ground rules and sticking to them—that in the classroom, certain things will be talked about in a certain way. Just as in a story, too many digressions make you lose the thread and lose interest, or too many people talking at once make it impossible to hear, so in a discussion the class has to listen to each member while she has the floor, and respond appropriately and orderly to get from one idea to another. 

Again, it is the shaping of attention, preliminary to learning. As easy as laying down in ground rules, if the students are willing. And nothing to do with intelligence, since the discussion doesn’t come naturally, but if anything the shouting over each other is more in line with the way kids are—but if they can see the use of listening, and get their turn to talk and respond, even the tension of restraint can be made to feel a kind of pride-worthy thing, and whether you’re smart or dumb you can feel that. Smart kids can be harder to keep quiet, if anything. But like the word implies, a dumb kid partakes of a sort of useless quiet, not a helpful one. And like Eppeldauer was saying, it’s hard to talk to a kid stuck in that quiet—you can’t tell them they’re dumb, though in the long run it might be what they need to hear, to save them some frustration down the line. Not to say to give up, but to seek help of a different kind, with another kind of patience. Who is authorized to say this to a kid, though, or could expect her to take it particularly well? The kid has to decide it for herself, in the face of overwhelming evidence, or perhaps coming up against certain models.

I think part of what Mr Eppeldauer was saying, though, is that a stupid person is the last to know he’s stupid, by definition. Could there be a more blissful ignorance? But it is a public health crisis, really. We can be hurt by others’ ignorance, even if they, by some fluke, get to enjoy it. But all school is, is learning to be happier without it. The new school is not inimical to all but the brightest kids, however—the same ground rules go for everyone, and don’t depend on intelligence or prior knowledge, but on willingness and a certain base level of attention and mutual respect. It has as much to do with kindness and decency as smarts, and promotes the former as much as the latter. 

In the end, I suppose I still believe the highest refinement of learning is only a more self-conscious and hard-won form of the innate good of our nature, which gets in trouble by not being content to abide in itself, but wants to be more, known, exclusive and shared all at once. So that some of us have a harder time learning kindness than calculus. And yet the one is as important as the other, because as deeply instilled in us from the beginning is the capacity to understand and enjoy it, and as steadily assaulted by surroundings that fail to nurture the inward things, but substitute all sorts of externals. Surely there are enough externals which follow from the inward things, we do not need to go looking for more? From kindness flows friendship and gratitude, as surely as from calculus all the applications we drive and live in and communicate by means of. We need friends, but out of something good in our nature, not in the kind of in-group/out-group mutual dependency that takes its place. We need to learn from each other, as much as from things and their relations, and trust in the ideas that come to us about these researches—values, considerations—when they are so clear and harmonious. Things like friendship and the appreciation of values and relationships between people and things are precisely what is impossible to control in any external way—they are false then, but only real when they emerge naturally from our own feeling do they become real—and so they are not what the school system is concerned with. But they are the only essential things, and the rest is worthless. 

There has to be a place set aside for cultivating these things, giving them time and security and support—but there is no test that can be the justification, aside from these things themselves crying out. Keeping kids off the streets during the day is not enough to keep them safe, or the society stable—only letting them grow into their human potential will result in actual peace, rather than this zero-sum stalemate. No knowledge they are tested on reflects this, and no subject or curriculum captures it. No teacher can teach it to a class of thirty kids at once. Yet it can be learned, and a safe place be set aside for learning it with the least pain and risk. There should be fewer suicides, fights, hatreds, broken hearts. The pains and problems there are should be less intense, because balanced against the deeper peace, and the false goods—superficial appearance, surprises, vindications—should be less seductive, when the real goods are placed at the heart. Kindness, calculus. Patience, philosophy, frankness, and the love of sincerity and real things.

The Great Gatsby or the 7 project?

They gave me a stack of papers today. Worksheets students are and are not to write on, schedules adjusted for the assembly, post-its, paper-clips, to carry around like an albatross. But at first when I showed up there was nothing, and for once it looked like I might have to come up with something to do. It’s Friday, they’re seniors, and so just inviting them to read or do work for another class if they might have it, I would wait for the inevitable questions that arise if kids are bored, or read myself in the hum of their talk amongst themselves. If they are willing to ask or answer a question or two, the conversation is open for the whole class, though one or the other may pick it up or drop it for awhile, their curiosity may grow or wane, or I may get sick of the teasing.But forasmuch as we’d both stand to gain leveling with one another, the lesson plans came through, plentifully, and they got to do their quiz instead. The Great Gatsby, probably the most avidly beautiful of American novels, broken down into nine questions on chapters 7-9, each to be answered in a sentence or two. 

Tempted to say that it’s pointless to ask these kinds of comprehension questions—not just the written work, hundreds of pages for a teacher to grade, but even to check for understanding on that level at all—since if they understand it, they’re ready to ask questions of their own or give opinions much more interesting than this level of analysis; and if they don’t understand it, they either weren’t reading carefully or weren’t ready to read this book. Tempted to say, if they’re ready to read it, they’re able to enjoy it, and wouldn’t need assignments like this at all, but to be challenged to articulate what is beautiful in it, what is sad, or tragic, or symbolic, or what they identify with, or what no longer rings true. Tempted to suspect, alas, that giving assignments like these renders unimportant the enjoyment of reading the novel, and encourages students to look up the sparknotes before class and never open the book. But hey, handing out the quiz was a whole lot easier than having to try to talk to the students about me or them or their school or next year.

Then about that assembly—miraculously the class knew where to sit, and everybody got quiet for the opening act, average-looking young people in t-shirts banging on trash cans and cavorting around, clapping on cue, then more videos and music from the speakers in between speakers in red #7 jerseys. They never explained why the number 7, though the chord progressions and subtext were Christian-lite, the speakers looked and sounded southern, and the statistics for people admitting cheating on the test and not thinking about suicide were both 7/10. They outlined 6 chapters including bullying, tolerance, dreams and substance-abuse, and the message boiled down to being yourself and treating others as you’d want to be treated. A former bully testified, a black man made jokes against racism, and there was a poignant story of an alcoholic father and a suicidal friend. 

Whether this can take the place of thought and reflection in building up one’ s better nature, I don’t know, but a majority of kids seemed to be giving it all the benefit of the doubt. The representatives of the sponsoring organization, Students Against Destructive Decisions—aka SADD—made some timid remarks before the show—having fun without bad choices, something like that. And SADD comes out of the even more acronym-tastic MADD, standing for, at least originally, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. But that’s all so emotional and misguided, if drinking and driving are symptomatic of underlying issues, contradictions in our nature or society or both, and if just saying no means it’s already too late. If instead of providing that life-affirming alternative way to be oneself, one spends the morning preaching against stupidity, and the rest of the schoolday curling up back into it.

Suficient unto the day

I didn’t want to write today. I wanted to draw with the colored pencils in that cup there, the colors are so lovely and I hadn’t done it in quite awhile. The more I tried to start drawing, the more I wished I knew what and how, and looking as it were through the page into some distance, some landscape in my own imagination, with a sea and a hill and grass and houses, off into the horizon. I started to draw, but instead of the sea, it was just lines and circles, and though the blue was suggestive, it wasn’t any better than the blank page. I kept going with the lines and circles, following some logic internal to them, but leaving as much blank as I could. Eventually I realized it was a bike frame, when I put the back wheel on, and so I lay it down in the grass, rather than try to draw a rider for it to be going on fast as it seemed to want to. To keep something of the horizon that started me off, I shaded in a sunset above everything, and somehow it’s right now it looks kind of like the flag of Italy or Iran or India. Anyhow, somewhere far away, where people come from to America. And this fooled me into writing something after all. 

Our way of fooling ourselves can really, if there isn’t much else for us, be a healthy thing—Jess was talking about this. It’s sad when you put it like that, you immediately want to fill in that much else there might be, since of course there is much, much else, but then, is it for us? We only can be so much, for so much, with so much. In a time we can’t know for sure unless we ourselves cut it short, and pick up and move. There’s such comfort in being lazy, and how can you call it less natural than the doing and yearning and inspiring part of life? Or how can you make it pejorative, when if there’s nothing that needs to be done, the best thing is to relax? Those energies are all still there, just quiet, waiting—and in the meantime, feeling the fullness of them without the effort of displaying and putting them to work, is a kind of contemplative pleasure—if you’re confident that when the time comes you’ll be able to produce what you want, if you’ll recognize it if it comes, and do the right thing. Otherwise it’s marred, and isn’t it maybe this that causes us to keep busy, doing something, even if it’s not very necessary, just to keep from thinking about it? I would include my own writing in that, though it is me trying to think it out. I would like to give it back for the blank page sometimes.

Maybe this is what Cass meant about intellectual endeavor and killing time so often coming to the same thing. But I don’t want to call anything I’d willingly do killing the time. I don’t want it to sound as pompous and useless as intellectual exploration, either. I do want to learn. Even while doing nothing, I like to think I’m learning and growing into myself. Riding the train so much is good for that. Thinking about the matter and the feelings—don’t they arise from it? Don’t they stress and relax it and give it meaning? Isn’t everything some scale of this movement, and stillness only ever partial, and consciousness only ever its self-reflection? Where is the best place to put all this saved time we find ourselves with, if not into learning and growing and doing nothing? Just doing enough so that those bad feelings of laziness, uselessness, and insignificance don’t come creeping in, but we can be at ease, waiting patiently.

I guess it must be for death, ultimately, until we can believe in something after that—if not for own little consciousness, then meekly wishing well those who’ll come after, and laying up some good thing they might get to use. Maybe I’m just tired today, but I’m maybe just working for a pay-check, too, and in these empty days I’d like to hear them say, that is enough. Put up your sword, Peter. Don’t worry, there’s money in the mouth of this fish. And cast the first stone. To just stop with the tests you know I’ll pass, and give me what you can give me, while I take care of what you can’t and never could, though you’d pretend you did—the learning.

I think if anything it’s what I can understand by spirit, blowing where it lists. Asking for it and wanting it seems to be the only thing I can do, and letting it guide my actions and give some direction to my thoughts. If that’s eternal life, I don’t know. At least it’s saving my life so far, and not killing time if I can help it. I didn’t write yesterday, either. The library didn’t open till noon. So I went t the natural history museum instead for awhile, dreaming museum dreams, looking at Cypriot urns and icons. Then when it was open, with Martin Luther King, Jr gazing from the walls, and all the big windows, I was reading Teresa of Avila instead of writing picture books, and walking over to see Jess, and tutoring in the museum of unnatural history, if you can call it that.