What Calls

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dendroica/6589686663/

Rustling, then a high-pitched “Eeet!”

I crept into the living room and spied a brown towhee (house finch) skittering on our TV set. A flutter of wings! My eyes followed its wingline to the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator. I whispered for my daughter to come see, and she did. Immediately we opened the windows: the poor bird’s eyes had blackened and its chirps had increased. My daughter was tempted to catch it. The bird seemed vulnerable, helpless in the hard-edged world of human compartments. This urge to contain the wild -- a kind of longing for something lost.

But the bird knew the rush of fresh air was its way home, and it was so summoned.

There was no hesitation.

My Three (Disheveled) Homes

Home.

Teachers have two homes: the classroom, and the place we live. Often – especially for us English teachers – the two spaces converge. Student essay piles swarm the living room table; the grocery list post-it flaps on my work desk like an eager dog’s ear. I enter grades from my kitchen table; I call my daughter’s dentist during my prep. I grab time in fistfuls, always alert for the next interruption. No task is inviolate. Fragmentation marks much of the day.

I wonder, then, if this is why the gleeful precipice from full-on teaching down to summer vacation carries some angst. I sit here on my first day of official vacation and I’m wandering the house like some directionless pinball, halfway wiping the table, picking up a book and reading a page, sitting on the stairs with my daughter, who I then follow upstairs so we can dance in front of the mirror awhile, back downstairs to fix a partial lunch, which is then interrupted by the washer buzzer telling me the load is done. And yet nothing has been done. No dishes, no vacuuming, no file drawer updated. It’s all been so – breezy. Flitting about little bird, I am. Looking in the mirror again, I adjust my hair and check my neck. I put a toothbrush back in a cup.

There are teachers who make summer reading lists and organize their days into neat plots. I imagine they are time-farmers, cultivating fertile rows with their hidden rewards. I envy them. I think of them and feel immediately inadequate.

 I will read some books this summer, but I do not rely on lists. One of my chief summer joys is Library Serendipity, or Hey, That Book Looks Good. The book I’m currently reading, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom (by Qanta Ahmed) was just such a prize. I can’t put this one down. I saw it on a shelf and was immediately drawn to it. I don’t know why. And I love this. I love, after spending my whole year devoted to the reading and writing lives of others, strolling through the dusty shelves for me. Call me selfish. But oh, the wanderlust I feel in the quiet rows of those written lives.  It is how I discovered that Paul Cezanne would stand with an empty canvas on a gravel road for days, and paint nothing. It is how my daughter and I “discovered” Bad Kitty, and why, in my 20s, I wrote down the (still-cherished) words of Marcus Aurelius.

The library becomes a kind of third home, a secular retreat, a touchstone. Unlike my classroom, I do not systematize my life there. There are things I look for, of course, and there is work to be done, but I need my time to unravel and to allow simple impulse – or dare I say it – whim­- to resurface. It is a small voice. I want to hear it.

Heavens, Child

Teaching forces us into the role of giver. We become source when at times we feel none. We give our good mornings and the sustained good will of our days. And like the sun, our role offers warmth but also burning. And also like the sun in yesterday’s eclipse, we sometimes fall into shadow.

And there is turning, and there is night.

And there is rest.

I think of my little girl’s face. She is asleep now, upstairs, her eyes upturned crescents in the darkness.

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/AP-Photos-Millions-view-ring-of-fire-eclipse-3572652.php

Metaphor as Holodeck

Tomorrow I teach the metaphor.


I know of few more powerful linguistic tools for conveying experience. Imagine, I will ask my students, that you must describe a candle flame to a blind person. Imagine that the person has never been able to see. Avoid using color words. Avoid "looks like."  They will struggle to resist visual terms, get a little frustrated, try to pull the language from the experience "as if" -- and that is exactly where I want them to be. I want to take them through the full arc of that tire swing, from experience to page, because metaphor, if it is anything, offers the chance to live through language. To live through someone else's life through language. It is a verbal simulation. And I want them to try to share their experience with the candle - and ultimately their own lives - with someone who will never, ever be able to know it as they do.


(I think of lines from Marge Piercy's "Simple-song":
We are not different nor alike
but each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands)


Here's the layout of my classroom as I left it this evening.( Forgive the foggy image; I am learning how to use my new iphone.)

After debriefing the candle flame introduction (writing down student descriptions, probing word choice, discussing what difficulties emerged in trying to describe the candle), I'll talk about what students have just done. That they've tried to convey an experience to someone who can't possibly experience what they, themselves, know. And that's when I'll introduce the actual term: metaphor.


In metaphor, word choice is essential. The layout of my board invites comparison. To the left, I have pre-written a list of trigger words: freedom, love, boredom, loneliness, fear, and various states of being. On the far right, in yellow, I have written a list of concrete terms like river, fire, stone, and mountain. These words are by no means random. I tried to select words familiar to students. The choice of colors is also deliberate: the yellow paper is an attempt to highlight that, in writing strong metaphors, the comparison word is the more critical one. Everyone has an idea about what "love" means, for example. But what will you compare it to? Is it a window, a pitcher plant, a panda or a zip line?


And the blinklight questions: What are their shared characteristics? How are the two ideas related?


And the literary questions: What words best convey my experience? Why this word, and not another?


And the existential ones: Why is metaphor such powerful tool? Why share experience at all?


And here is where my blog entry will end. This day has been a road, and I am home, and the door must close (for now).


(Receding footsteps.)

March, Marching On

It is March.

It is the third month, and it is dark, and it is raining, and I am tired.

This morning my car battery died and I was frazzled and late to class, and I walked in and my students had already begun reading Beowulf. Beowulf. Despite the stress of the morning, I could not contain my glee.  I love this story, love the suspense and I love the hero's journey.

Tomorrow we meet Beowulf himself, complete with sound effects, some great new words, and enthusiastic reading. I can't wait.

Song of Myself on Location

 

We have a class mascot, and he is a chicken. Fear his toothless maw. Hear him sound his barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world. *


(*Forgive me Walt Whitman.)
(Faux chickens are great realia for teaching prepositional phrases. For example, one can put one's poultry in a cauldron, on one's head, across the room, inside a hoodie. Many years ago, a friend of mine kept one in her purse. For self-defense? I'll never know.)

Another Lens

A document camera, an LCD projector, and a laptop: these comprise my personal technology trinity. At any given moment of the classroom hour, I’ve got one, both, or all of them on.

My work in navigating the uses, applications, and maintenance of these three has been largely self-taught. And thanks to two wonderful colleagues – one a teacher, the other our tech support guy – I’ve been able to cobble together some pretty decent projects.

But I’d like to go deeper. I’d like to explore what media choices I make for what lesson, and to explore the reasoning behind those decisions. Education is fast on taking up the call for technology. But before I take, use, and ultimately own any tool in my teaching practice, there are two questions that need an unequivocal “yes” answer:

1. Will it enhance or improve student understanding?
2.   Will it help me more effectively and/or accurately deliver content? 

Take the document camera. Like most of my experiences with state adopted ed-tech, it was simply put on my desk. No note, no training. That’s not necessarily a complaint, by the way, because the lack of mandates allowed me to toy with its applications on my own. (This device replaced our overhead projectors, and in my more wistful moments I imagine them waking from sleep, like the Star Wars Imperial Walkers, hot bulbs, lenses, and whiny fans slogging through the backrooms of Institutional Obsolescence.)

I love the document camera. And if the medium is the message, then here’s what the document camera enables me to do more effectively:

*    Demonstrate the writing process. Both my own, and that of my students. More importantly, I can do this immediately. With the overhead projector, I’d have to make student photocopies, transfer them onto a transparency, and wait until the next day. And once a piece of writing is photocopied, it settles into permanence. The document camera offers a window into the stop-check-rethink- continue process that good writing requires, and I can have students come up and talk through their writing choices as they are writing.

·         Take pictures of primary source paintings or photos that I can’t find online. I can use these to supplement presentations.

·        Have student present graphic illustrations of new concepts they’re learning. When I use the word “graphic,” here I mean it to refer to a “visual impression in words.” Connections between literary characters, cause-effect relationships, feudalism – these are some examples of concepts I’ve required students to create graphics for.

·       Unlike a powerpoint or projected word doc, the document camera is far more immediate and alive. There’s a sense of real-time to it that permanent text can’t quite capture. In that sense, I find the document camera to be one of the more resonant and meaningful pieces of technology I’ve used.

Things I can’t do with it:

·         Have a permanent, static list of concepts or words. The document camera is mostly a device for demonstrating process. It is a temporal tool, and a little anarchic. (Cool.)

·        Get mobile. I can’t stand in the back and circle, highlight, or underline words. The kids and I are stuck up front.

·         Use sound or motion.

·         Use any kind of digital overlays. Possibly there is an app for that somewhere, but I haven’t seen it. 

Some mediums just match content more effectively. I plan to grapple more with the uses and applications of other devices in future posts. 

Throwing the Line

To paraphase Dodie Smith from I Capture the Castle, I write this sitting near the sofa, next to a stack of CDs and a lukewarm cup of tea. Pardon the paper piles and Barbie detritus. Welcome to my blog.

I’m a middle school English and history teacher in a suburb of the Bay Area. I’ve been teaching for over 10 years and love – I mean love – my job. Its ceaseless demands notwithstanding, teaching is a condition of my being.

My commute to work is a lovely drive through rolling hills and a welcoming, eastern sunrise. This same spare early morning highway has opened my mornings for years now. And I’ve found myself thinking more and more about moments in teaching that I want to explore, open up, pause, redo, and mostly write about, as in life. So much flashes by unprocessed and unexplored. I sometimes imagine my teaching days as an upspiraling flourish of windblown papers, some heightened gust circling the room, cue Flight of the Valkyrie, I stand in the center, pencil in hand, choreographing the entries and exits, the adolescent arias and tragedy, until the denoument, when I (and don’t we all?) surrender to the inevitable, bell-ringing, uncollected snowfall.

Forgive the melodrama. I want this blog to be about my mistakes and successes. I hope to write about teaching practice and technology, pedagogy, and – this is where this thread leads me, I think – the humanity of our work. It is in the accord of both educational ideas and human experiences where I want to sit awhile, ask questions, throw out the fishing lure and  - honor the wait time, let the child be - hope for the pull.