No, no last words, just, Be Good

Only that fear, that I would mess it up, or that hope, which consists in keeping something more that you are holding back, something prevented me from trying to be like Michel. Maybe it was only habit. Maybe it is just easier to keep failing, sometimes a little better, sometimes a good deal worse, with the comfortable old externalities--worksheet, smartboard, homework, assessment--than it would be to start fresh. So we didn't have any goodbye party other than reading about Don Quijote in the textbook and watching a little clip from the musical.

Maybe the end it aims at is simply not truth, as the philosopher-bill collector admits? argues? in Lucian, but is keeping the students at least somewhat occupied, so that they have that much less time and attention to get up to really dastardly shenanigans. An argument similar in content to Emile’s early education, but applied very differently. Chiefly in that there are classrooms full, and not a single kid to tutor.

And maybe something like this is the best that can be accomplished with middle-school-aged kids, a kind of consolidation of their early life, a last chance to play and run around as much as possible, and to mill freely in great herds and packs through school hallways, before the intellectual work of learning, not just its experiential phase, takes hold, and they become individuals capable of thought reflective upon and within themselves. It is the social anger and disrespect that happens at this age that comes as the greatest shock to those charged with care or attempted teaching of these not-much-longer-children. The only halfway helpful approach that seems to be available to treat these outbursts and prevent them manifesting is in isolation, putting the student away from others to perform for or to pursue, though even then conversation of reflection can be impeded by all sorts of deeper factors that prevent trust or interest in the process of one’s own inner development, so boring, after all, compared to the mayhem and ruckus that keep breaking out with one’s peers, accompanied by the ineffectual but gratifying annoyance and frustration of the thereby discredited authorities. The very same who then might attempt some halfhearted reconciliation.

Problems that are big enough are brought to the attention of parents, guardians, or the state, however, and these parties might be less lightly dismissed, mocked, and manipulated. That they care is shown less in words, even wholehearted ones, and in attempts to reason and to awaken the unpracticed reason of the sullen interlocutor. Instead they bring to bear who knows what fists and belts, curses and consequences, loss of freedom, loss of opportunity, and suddenly what was fun, or automatic response to provocation, not really in one’s control and certainly beyond one’s comprehension, but in a fun way, produces long-term effects that one can only recognize in the dimmest immediate ways--as bruises on the skin, as the lack of love, as a phone taken away or broken, as the promise that life will become even harder, or as it becomes harder to see oneself as somebody with an intrinsic value, rather than the problem, the failure, that you are in all interactions. Attempts to assert your own personhood, after all, are so irrational that they come out as defiance, as disrespect, as inappropriate, when compliance, respect, and what is needed and right have seldom or never been shown to you in any way that you can recognize.

Even saying all this means nothing, since it is said in words you cannot understand, and your language is mostly one of actions, experience still, and not the luxury of reflective thought. Leadership, in this arena, cannot be quiet, patient words and listening, until it is proven first and probably also consistently over a good while in the act.

All this is of course based on the modern notion of personhood, which though it might appeal to innate rights and responsibilities, really acts as though we are formed from the outside in. That a soul or an identity is not primarily the room of the spirit, between us and God, but a foundation for action in this world, without reference to any other kind of life than what we can access with our senses or appreciate with our reason. A very different kind of outlook is still possible, still dominant even if unanalyzed, among more conservative people, religious, righteous, indignant at times at being ignored, at times because aggressively trying to recover lost ground or to re-indoctrinate a lost world with cast-off dogmas, but also at times and in some godly people shining out with that happiness, beatitude, merriment, that is at once so appealing, convincing, and also unsettling or even repulsive, jealousy-inducing, holier-than-thou while seeming unconcerned that it is attached to ideologies antithetical to peace and diversity, all the values that make modern life possible at all, on the strength of some indemonstrable knowledge or faith, never liable to be pinned down, about some better life elsewhere. And with that certainty that life in this world has been better in the past than it will ever get in the present, with only justified fear and self-fulfilling prophecies of the future, they can repose in the smug superiority of that lost golden age and that pie in the sky whose coming or not is not in their power, after all, to perform.

In this context no other knowledge really matters, no one has any further responsibility to become an individual or to promote any social cause, and so as a teacher the true believer’s only job is to call the lost sheep back to that one truth, to reorient their vision, as it may be 180 degrees, to see the world as a sojourn and their destination elsewhere, their home and hope of redemption in nothing but the old mysteries obscured by these newer dogmas of science and psychology.

If either of these two attitudes in genuine, it probably can make the work meaningful. But so much of hidden self-interest can be bound up in them, so much appropriation and exploitation can take place under the guise of either the technocratic or theocratic paradigms, that the only thing would seem to be to read their sources critically, the moderns and the ancients, so as to be able to make up one’s own mind as to how to chart one’s actions in this world and how to orient oneself to the possibility of those unknown realities elsewhere.

It is a shame then that one of the first things that seems to be placed out of bounds by both paradigms is this ground of reading and interpretation by which they might be understood. The Bible is appropriated by the churches, whether read or unread by their adherents, and the modern philosophy and literature underlying the presuppositions of the secular state are if possible even more unleaved-through, except by scholars who’ve bound up their own identities with some narrow expertise about some handful of authors or works, unread except by other scholars.

Which I would be only too glad to be proved wrong about, but this is my perception: that the population who reads is vanishingly small, and even now is vanishing. That as has happened with the Bible, so will happen with the foundational works of the modern mindset: increasingly unread, certain canons of interpretation will be handed down about them as authoritative, so that what is intended to free the development of personality and society will end up becoming so many hollow creeds in the service of an authority as pervasive as the medieval church, only considerably more concerned with utility rather than beauty, and considerably more powerful because of its advanced technology. That the prospects for freedom in the space between either of these great educational influences will be in the pages of those books, religious and secular, ancient and modern, as long as there are still libraries and readers, but their sphere of action in the world will only dwindle unless their own numbers somehow miraculously or by uncanny organizing should grow.

The work of the friends of the library seems very important, their all-city reads and their generous book sales, and their speaker this year, Anthony Marra, in Spokane gave a fantastic, humorous address concluding with his belief that whatever else reading good books together might or might not be able to accomplish, it does make people better neighbors. Words very close to my heart.

Stress on the Penult

In my dream, I had a room like a grove, kids here and there stretched out in repose of creative activity its nymphs and friendly fauns. The phrase that meant so much was passionate moderation--either we were discussing this or listening to a recording of voices to that effect, and evoking images of the disaster that ensued from passions unconnected with the aim of a virtuous temperament, while for ourselves we had the reality of pastoral peace all around us. A girl lying full length like one of Cezanne’s bathers wrote in a journal, boys play-acted and squabbled like the fairies and mechanicals. But all these dreams are the surest way to make people stop listening, actively and with looks of affronted patience, or diss and dissect with psychoanalysis whatever they did hear.

Yesterday it came to pasting words into the Annotations from the talk on nouns, since at some point we’ll want to see what some of them are writing anyway, and I had nothing new written as we spent all day down in the yard picking, slicing, mashing and containing apples. Miserable rides in the car before daybreak and after sunset, with constant talk of the sisters or repetitive music assaulting all attempts at rest or thought, too dark to read or write or look out the window.

So this is the alternative to such havens of quiet, for most kids their only reality, a loud darkness hurtling fast along.

So this morning, trying to flush the aural parasites with Sufjan’s planetarium and make up for lost time with words, quiet, stillness, that moderation we must be passionate towards or it will go out like a light, a dreamed place. An easy week this time, the penult, and diligent nanowriming up until last night, when I was too full of sleep and depression to try to come up with more words for my convoluted immobile plot. The dream that followed was a combination of worrying I have lost touch with good friends, because Jess was there, and that I’ve missed my chance to enter into communities of intellect, art, and leadership I might have done, as the rest of the group was vaguely important, confident, the doers of meaningful work and enjoyers of life’s deeper pleasures. We were around a table awhile, or they were, while I was off to the side, serving or simply lurking there trying to catch a word, a reference dropped. This owed something to the poetry workshop they held at Spark yesterday, which I could overhear but not participate in, not having signed up and paid, only volunteering my time by chance at the same time as it on my new day. It sounded like they had lines borrowed from other books and their own unfinished work and were trying to connect the pieces into something. I caught the question about word-hoards, personal vocabularies, and couldn’t show off that I knew something about where that treasure was buried in the English language.

The place where we were was also like a hostel or a rented house, which connects it to my more immediate anxieties about teaching Spanish, or only training in how to behave in a classroom. It seems that this latter training has been pushed to its extreme and any further going down that road would be in absurdity at this point, when the respect for authority at the very highest levels is a betrayal of anything good or true. And so I can agree with Mr Farzana that my teaching methods are boring and ineffective, that I am failing and as a result smart kids are getting subpar grades, feeding them into that cycle little by little by which they’ll be spit out of the schools to do their learning elsewhere, on streets or cellblocks. It will be a time to tell them so without mincing words, but without undermining the curriculum or school as such, only rending away my own poor effort to stand in for them, and in their place to try a Michel Thomas lesson. There is nothing to lose at this point, and plenty that might be gained.

I had the transcript all written out in abbreviated form, and below it I mused, sitting in the sun, until kids in the cafeteria knocked on the windows at me, or was that a different time?: Not will this work, but how to present this? Watch the documentary first? Say something about my learning trajectory? About his life? With a couple of students at a time? And is the danger simply that it undermines the respect for school as a whole, or is it the more personal fear of having wasted so much time, fought so many unnecessary battles and caused so much needless antipathy, that you are too invested in the old ways to give them up without losing your identity? What would the corresponding method look like in other classes, of building more and more complex structures of logical connection? Or is it enough to know that it happens best when students learn face to face with a teacher, not as passive listeners to a slow disintegration of small ideas in the soft hands and mumbling mouths of small minds? Should they each just listen to the audio recording, or watch Khan academy videos, or read with the guidance of the computer station?

In passing, what else I’ve been doing in free time at Glover: besides transcribing Michel Thomas and agonizing about implementing it with the 7th and 8th graders: translating Old English poems laboriously with glossaries in the back of the book; watching lots of Signum Seminars and the webathon, though for some reason the part on Stranger Things is blocked by the restricted mode filter; reading Teach Like a Champion and gradually forgetting everything which would have been good to have done. While working on planning, grading, eating lunch or watching kids during detention I’ve listened over and over to Taverner’s Funeral Canticle, watched a video essay by Bernstein on teaching, some interesting Feldman chamber music, etc. Then I check in the intervention room every so often, or they call me to cover classes for which no subs have been contracted that day--or string of days. And I doubt it is legal to post any reproduction of the Michel Thomas Spanish CD, so I’ll not do that with my transcription. Particularly since my students have googled me and found my youtube videos and were apparently listening when I mentioned I write this blog, I had better be a good role model.

Religion and Politics and Fire

What can I say? Slightly fictionalized for inclusion in nanowrimo:

This morning the janitor invited me over to the woodshop for their morning group for Christian fellowship. A few of the teachers would meet to watch a few minutes of a video recording of an old pastor of theirs who had passed away. The talk seemed to be a discipleship class, with other members around the table, but the camera was fixed on the old man. The others would talk from time to time, but when the old man spoke, you could also see their hands moving pens over the papers in front of them, treasuring his words. And what did he say?

It was interspersed with jokes and badinage from the living souls who gathered there to watch the video, and short stories that had to be told. One comes in a few minutes late with a bagel sandwich, apologizing that he’s eating in front of everyone, but his wife has had too much time on her hands since the kids moved out and keeps packing him too much food, food enough each day to last for three days, so that their fridge is overflowing with his leftovers. Another, the science teacher, tells how a student kept drawing on tables and so he gave him community service to help with the murals the art club has been doing in the middle school classrooms. I’ll trump yours with this story, says another one, and they excel one another in wincing laughter at the political pun introducing it, so already you know the sort of thing you’re in store for, but it turns out you’re not quite right. This student keeps asking him to help out with something, not as extra credit, just because he admires the teacher and wants to help. He doesn’t need help, of course, but not wanting to quash that enthusiasm, either, he took the student up on a couple of little projects, washing out beakers after the lab and sweeping up the hallways, which always seem to get cluttered with more odds and ends than the janitor knows how to keep up with, and as they were walking down the hall the kid said to him, “How come you haven’t grown up?” He didn’t know what he meant at first, but it seemed that kid’s dad had a beard, and since he didn’t, he was wondering if he wasn’t grown up. He didn’t seem to understand that not everyone had a beard, and was awaiting the day he would have his. And then he asked, “Are you sad?” He said something noncommittal, no, I’m all right, something like that, but the student said, “You’re really sad. I can tell.” He didn’t elaborate, but he said when he took him back to his English teacher he praised how perceptive the kid was and how emotionally intelligent, whatever his disabilities might be in other regards. He asked her about it and she said, yep, that’s him all right. Attuned to other people’s feelings in a special way.

The video was on complete forgiveness, the emphasis that this must be learned with humility and discipline to such a perfection that it is only possible with God. The pastor began telling a story of his dear mother-in-law’s remarriage to a nice Christian man, them both being up in years, and how the pastor would learn about forgiveness by watching her, for whenever the husband would get cranky and say offensive things, she you could have sworn was deaf to them all. The teachers joked that here was the secret to a happy marriage: ignoring your spouse! And about the license plate “My wife says I don’t listen--at least I think that’s what she says,” and then the obligatory Trump joke passed back and forth. The guys think they’re so funny, the wife said, and got things back on track. She took prayer requests and spoke the prayer to close the meeting when everyone else was abashed, looking down at shoes and folded hands to avoid meeting her eyes; prayers for peace and reconciliation after the election results, knowing the kids might be upset, to say nothing of their coworkers who had other views about abortion or the relative merits of being a crook versus a bigot, prayers for safe families, safe, travel, and thanksgiving.

And all of them voted for him--they asked me but I put the question off, saying that’s what the kids have been asking and I don’t know how to respond. I think they must have guessed my answer, but I couldn’t help saying how surprised I was by the result, where they expressed relief, comfort, a kind of righteousness or beatitude. The wife’s reason was that he was pro-life, whereas the Democrats would kill babies up to the last minute; his, that he was the lesser of two evils, brash and crude as opposed to manipulative. I had the same reason for my vote the other way, so I could at least agree to that characterization, but my Socratisms failed me. I listened to the advice of the old white man with bald old skin and wretched red flesh on his thin neck, huge glasses blurring his eyes in their shadowed sockets. Such a godly man, she said. They thanked me for coming as I thanked them for inviting me.

I wouldn’t be here after next week, at least not every day. In a couple of hours, during my Spanish class, a kid walked out saying he was switching classes, and some time later was marched down to the intervention room by a furious gym teacher I had seen laughing and praying that morning, not entirely rationally declaring after him, “You’re done!”

It echoed the way Trump talks, and that phrase of his, too: “You’re fired.” In this election the two sides didn’t seem to inhabit the same reality: on the one hand, disaster, on the other, the abyss. From my perspective, each outcome fearful and absurd. If Clinton had won, the status quo and progress are interchangeable, the words cease to have meaning; with Trump, leadership and vanity turn the same trick. As we tried to rise for the pledge, one angry girl kept yelling at me to say if I was a Trump supporter. I could honestly say I was not, after the pledge to the flag, which I never say aloud, but still stand for and respect.

But maybe that’s what’s at the core of the disaster and the circumference of the abyss: the loss of respect, even more than the loss of meaning in words or attention to think about them or the things they represent: reason’s eclipse in the frenzy of feeling. Clinton loses, and the mobs riot; had Trump lost, the militias would deploy.

What is the most optimistic thing to be said? Now what? The revolt against political establishment has penetrated the Republican party and put their man in power, while their establishment still holds the legislature, so the conflict of interparty strife is turned to intraparty wrangling for priorities? The Democrats must confront themselves in turn as a party whose base is not yet diverse enough geographically to overcome electorally the minority white vote that overspreads the states, and whose vision of progress is not self-evidently persuasive to that base writ large, much less to the whites who continue to oppose it, even flocking to its antithesis--a bigot, a bully, a climate-change denying ostrich, and any other excoriation you like, but it only makes it worse that he beat you in spite of all? Some such elite mumbo jumbo?

The media are even more thoroughly discredited, all their predictions and cheerleading for naught. Half of the country still sat out the vote, for various reasons and lack thereof. Half of those who did vote, and more than half, are led by the option they voted against perhaps still more than they voted for any alternative, and have nothing to do about it but become engaged in some way still more time-consuming than voting and trying to digest the news.

The effort of comprehending the reality that is, and arguing over what it means about oneself and one’s country, and watching to see what will happen next, when the consequences of this decision begin to play themselves out, but may have happened anyway, or something worse, if things had gone differently and we had chosen the other reality--all this is overwhelming for that reason, and no wonder then that feeling carried the day, or some intelligence too subtle and terrible for my poor comprehension.

Then, trying to get class started again after that little outburst, we smelled smoke. Trying to keep the students in the room and calm, I went to the woodshop to see the teacher running with the extinguisher to spray the dumpster outside that was burning. The janitor thinks it might have been arson: the gate was open. By chance, another fire started at North Central, but they say that was from the welding torch on the construction site there.

On the brink of Nanowrimo round 2

And now Ben’s posted Eliot’s Dante-Shakespeare-there is no third: what was that decree that divided the world between Spain and Portugal? Having just skimmed through Bloom’s How to Read and Why, I’m inclined more than ever, though it’s pointless, to protest, Montaigne! The essay is not touched upon there, though it’s a kind of essay in serial he’s writing, and the genius of the latter of Eliot’s duumvirate expands beyond all comprehensibility.

In our talk about Ambedkar, Michael mentioned a remark about the Gita being deeper than Dante, but then he called the Commedia Bible fan-fiction, which I don’t suppose the clerkly TS would countenance.

Walking in the park with the fallen leaves of yellow with their stems like pink coral, thinking of how long I will get to walk around in the rain thinking and looking at the leaves until I finally noticed the rain had let up and I should put away my umbrella, and I was already almost home, long before coming to any conclusions about the merits of not knowing the duration of a life or what Shakespeare might have been doing in those last three years.

I got up early a couple mornings and managed to write or type something of this long last entry in the series about reading-response, but this next month is November, as good an excuse as any to buckle down and write for an hour every day before school, then as much again after it as may be. That morning writing hasn’t happened yet, instead only nighttime writing on the Annotated Book with that darker tone in the palette now, too.

The one kid at the high school where I volunteer once a week keeps showing up, working at gleaning links from wikipedia about the great video game crash of 1983, which is what passes for a research project in US history. And good for him! He doesn’t think he’s smart in reading and writing, but his entire grade is based on things he hasn’t been taught, 10-point reading quizzes on a couple of pages of textbook condensity. Much better off not reading at all than reading like this, surely.

Or what about a book like The Arrival? There is more Australian history in that than I’d ever learned, and not a single word. The hieroglyphic writing spells Shaun’s name at least once or twice, but the storytelling and art style are much more legible signatures. Four years he spent working on this book?! It reminds me of reading those mysterious picture books by the strange genius Van Allsbruck or however it was spelled. We had to write a story from one of the pictures--I think I picked the flying nuns--classic ekphrasis, and later we got to do one in English where the lighthouse postcard let me bring in the wise seagulls and rowdy pirates.

Another strange reading lately was the illustrious Dream of the Rood, laboriously translating it word for word with all its hypermetrics and prosopopeias up until the heavenly feast, where I ran out of time. A very old picture book, since some of the lines adorn a stone cross with natural patterns, an ancient Vi Hard doodle with a message of heroic suffering interwoven. A very important lesson is buried in there, about memorization, realization of the oral tradition and the ability to represent it in whatever form, recitation or pictorial art--that telling a story, finding the right words, is almost the opposite of sinning, or of being broken down by Socratic questioning, and that confidence, too, is very important, perhaps primary for so many who initially lack it; before they are forced to rethink, perhaps they could think in full sunlight and get to know what that feels like. For many kids it is the performative action not of the stage but of the playing field, and little wonder that is what they like to do. But they do read it and write it, too, in a manner of speaking, if they can be brought to notice it on their own. Having the right words, the retort, the inside joke, is universally prized. All this is something of the message of that victorious tree and its hero-sufferer.

What else? Steph’s sister was in town, and then the other sister and company for trick-or-treating madness, but not maybe as bad since the weather probably kept some kids at home. We’d gone up to the Green Bluffs barn brewery-pumpkin patch and Steph had her heart set on getting some farmland there, setting up shop, whether beer or produce or grilled cheese off a food-truck, it didn’t seem to matter. Her Pa would build the enclosures, her sisters would all pitch in, and I could keep subbing and writing, as long as we got to all be together--a nice goal, I think, in need of much capital, good fortune. We could have field-trips and retreats out there, campers, air-bnb or woofers. But she did have an interview with the home-schools co-op north of here. There might be something to look into there, how they get away with it, chiefly.

Meanwhile, all this language around here of sparking, igniting creativity, as a way for people who like these sorts of things to find work and out of a genuine desire, no doubt, to help others, but also smacking of that crux, that tyranny of love, which is to say, what do you mean by helping? Is it to make yourself feel good, or really to get down to roots and brass tacks? I had this shoved in my face last week at Spark, when I wanted to banish the little Minecrafters after they had a tussle, and then I was rightly made to eat humble pie for it. And this phrase the tyranny of love actually comes up also in the context of Gandhi’s followers mobbing him wherever he goes, so there is a bottom-up as well as a top-down form of it. Is it really in the power of anyone, however well-intentioned, to generate, to spark in any systematic way the learning, much less the creativity of others, or is this only possible in that realm of terrible mystery, falling in love? A radically improper thing for a teacher to do, even an Abelard, unless a messiah; or even a Gandhi, unless balanced by his Ambedkar, and recalled as such; a Jesus only with the whole tradition, and not only Paul, borne in mind? But it certainly says something about us that we wish so badly to believe it can be so, and not only for all these world-historical figures, but for classroom teachers and shoestring non-profits.