“not for a lack of feeling, but for want of words”

I always say the wrong thing, am always searching for the “right word” to say what I’m trying to say. Countless notebooks with margins filled with more precise words: peripheral, heuristic, illuminate, gaunt, chasm, chimera, phalanx, epoch, reify. It’s not that I don’t know these words. It’s that I am afraid that I will forget them. I want to remember to use them in the moment that they are most apt to convey the meaning I am attempting to convey to the listeners that are, through no fault of their own, perhaps hard of hearing. See? Again. I’m using the word convey twice because I can’t think of a better word or another word that means nearly the same thing. 

According to Bakhtin, “Language is not a medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated–overpopulated–with the intentions of others.” The speaker’s intentions. Can the speaker know her intentions? Joan Didion on writing: “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.” Nothing makes me feel more stupid, more inept than language. Few things frighten me more than the slip of tongue that causes me to misuse a word. Most commonly used computer application on my computer: dictionary/thesaurus. Most commonly used? Isn’t there a word for that? 

A note to the reader: The length of this post is inhibited by my lack of language and so I leave you with this wondermous masterpiece that will certainly leave you speechless.

The Grocery Store

A globe of not
plastic, not glass, but
of light and rubber:
a balloon––
boisterous, mysterious,
floating in a summer’s
salon of heat and cash registers.
Bobbing against halogen lights,
escaped from
the child’s sweaty fist.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard, dies young.

These words, the Fashionable Anne Sexton’s words, gave me permission to share my recent news of joy. I have made my first teeny-tiny baby step into the world of the published. Just three days ago, I screwed my eyes shut and turned my face from the computer screen as I tapped the button that would send off a topic proposal for an article in an anthology. Yesterday, I got word that the topic was accepted (with a note to let the main thing be the main thing). Of course, they could still reject the article itself, but here’s hoping they won’t.

In other news, Sun Belt has finally started back up again and I have the time once again to follow Donald Murray’s brilliant advice:

remember, if you want to write, the rump has to meet the chair on schedule. The rear end is the writing muscle that makes the difference between the writers who want to write and don’t, and those writers who want to write and do.

Murray also writes about the importance of developing a “writer’s attitude,” pointing out that the product produced [is] as much the result of attitude as it [is] of skill. With that in mind, I have taped these words to the top of my computer screen today: 

I think the reason I’m important is that I know everything. (Gertrude Stein, the writer, not the cat.)

 

So far this summer, my reading list includes Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems and Joan Dideon’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I am reading Mrs. Dideon for pleasure but also to study her craft of creative nonfiction. 

The piece I’m working on for the anthology will require the kind of working it up that Dideon does for her own writing. If anyone has advice on materials that might be particularly informative about boll weevils, I’m all ears (and eyes). 

If you’d like to see what we’re doing in Sun Belt this summer, step over to the blog for a look-see. It’s being maintained by yours truly and one John Guericotti. The book groups have really taken off as well, if you’re an educator and interested in reading some of the discussions that have been taking place there. 

 

 

And now for comething completely different…

On this, my second day of Spring Break, I found myself in a situation that made me remember the very best version of myself in college. I was driving down Dean Ave with the windows down––it’s in the 50’s today in Auburn–and Jack Johnson blaring on my stereo (tracks 8 and 13 on his new album). I called one of my dearies from college who used to copilot with me on such outings that generally led to country drives way out Moore’s Mill Rd. and at least a half a pack of cigarettes on my end. Jack Johnson will always be the musical score to my Springtime.

As a result of my finally springing into Spring, I have begun my Spring shopping. For you, my friends, I have developed the Spring Enjoyment List––it might be better than the O List, but sadly, as I am an educator with a two year old, I cannot afford to give any freebies away. Instead, I will direct you to the websites where you might purchase them for yourself if you so choose.

10. Gardening gear

9. Timeless tumblers for a toddy or a sweet tea on the front porch

8. Pajama pants that you can be seen wearing in public

7. New place mats to brighten up our kitchen/dining room

6. A Corona with lime

5. A Springy wallet that doubles as a purse in Wasabi.

4. Jack Johnson: Sleep Through the Static

3. Nanette Lepore sling backs (These are still on my wish list, but they are oh-so beautiful!)

2. Votivo candle in Honeysuckle

1. New nail polish (and a pedicure to boot!)

Add to this list a brilliant novel that you’ve been putting off until you have “more time” (mine: The Amber Spyglass and The Year of Magical Thinking), a new handbag (preferably the one by Marc Jacobs that I was eyeing last weekend), and some fresh fruit, and you’re set to go.

(Re)Considering Disney Classics

For the past 6 weeks or so, my homelife has taken on the musical scores of The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and101 Dalmations. How did this happen? Well, like most of my parenting mistakes, I all began at Target. I was moving down the DVD aisle, looking for the Doodlebops (an educational show about three young people: 2 boys and a girl, one purple, one blue, one orange. Disturbing? yes. Harmful? not if you don’t count my singing along to the theme song.), when I came across The Little Mermaid. “OH!” I cried. “I used to love this movie! Ruthie, looooook! You and Mama are going to watch this as soon as we get home. Kay?”

After the first 40 minutes or so, I realized that I had made a mistake. My background in gender theory has problematized every encounter with popular culture in the first place. In this case, I was completely and utterly horrified at what I had subjected my child to. Main issues with the film:

• Ariel trades her voice for a body.
• Ursula is the ultimate excessive woman (who lives in a vagina, no less)
• There is no mother
• The Law of the Father is explicitly introduced in the second song in the film when the daughters of King Triton exult in their names “Great father who loved us and named us well…”
• Ariel marries at 16.

With each viewing (by now, Ruthie was incessantly inquiring after both Ariel and Ursula), I became more and more engrossed by the representations of gender and gendered relationships. Now I know some of you readers are probably saying what nearly everyone says to me when I go off on the Little Mermaid tirade: “But do you really think Ruthie gets all of that from the film? I mean, c’mon! It’s a kids movie.” This vignette is for you, wary reader.

Ruthie is eating mac and cheese with us at dinnertime. She leans in real close to me, grabs my cheeks with both hands very gently, and says with conviction, “I’m gonna get married like Ariel.” I might have choked. Adam started laughing. I was incredulous. Who told her that she got married?! I was already upset by the fact that Ruthie paid particular attention to the parts when King Triton was mad and by her obsession with Ursula, who she says is “not very nice.” I was equally distraught by her newfound interest in princesses and “pretty” things.

I’m not entirely sure what we’re going to do about this Disney catastrophe in our household. On the one hand, I don’t want to teach Ruthie the age-old binary that insists good is pretty and bad is ugly. I also don’t like the assumption that women need to be saved (as seen in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and many other children’s stories). And the absence of mothers in many of the Disney movies is especially disturbing. However, I was brought up on Disney movies and seem to have turned out alright (for the most part anyways). Several other people whom I esteem and admire have admitted to having favorite Disney movies.

This being said, I have not restricted Ruthie’s Disney movie time. While I remain vigilant over the screenings, I have decided that withholding the movies might not be the best thing either. When she’s old enough to have some idea of how brainwashed she has been, she can unlearn all of the idea that she comes to think of as “natural” as a result of her socialization. Meanwhile, we continue to praise her for being “smart” and “funny” and “pretty.” We notice when she does a good job drawing and we affirm creativity and imagination.

One day I came home from class and found Ruthie and Adam outside looking under a rock. When I walked outside to see what they were up to, Ruthie stuck out her little finger, pointing to a creature that resembled a maggot or something equally disgusting, and said, “Look, Mommy! A gggrrrrruuubbbb. Is he a sweet little boy?” I can say with some certainty that none of the “princesses” featured by Disney would be depicted searching for grub (although Timone and Pumba do have a healthy appetite for such tasty morsels).

In the end, Disney movies will probably not take too much of a toll on her innocent existence… perhaps the best we can do as parents is educate our kids about the world around them as it is rather than censor every single thing that they encounter.

A Human Profession

If you are an educator and/or a human being, you need to order this book immediately: Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau. Lareau is a dynamic ethnographer/sociologist who looks into the extent to which parenting ethics affects/effects the way that a child will perform in a given institution (namely, school). She follows lower and middle class families (Black and white from both socioeconomic levels) to discover patterns across social strata with regard to child rearing. Her findings are astounding and enlightening. I promise.

Pierre Bourdieu says that individuals from different social locations (i.e. lower class vs. middle class) are socialized differently. Seems obvious, right? Now, think about this: Susie teaches her son how to talk to adults by engaging in conversations with him (”What did you do today, Johnny?” …”Well, why didn’t you explain that to your teacher?”…), whereas Sally rushes home to fix dinner before her next shift. The only words Sally has time to say to her boy are “Billy, don’t touch that.” and “Eat your dinner.” Now, if Sally were Susie, she would have said, “Don’t touch that because I need it for work tonight, so I don’t want it to get messy and your fingers are dirty.” So what’s the big deal? Johnny will expect his teachers to explain why when he is disciplined and he will also be able to engage in discussions about why he doesn’t understand the material because his parents have taught him how to do that by showing him that he can speak to adults and encouraging him to explain himself when he is not understood. Meanwhile, Billy is uncomfortable speaking to adults and he becomes so used to responding to directives, that he doesn’t argue back when he doesn’t agree with something a teacher disciplines him for and he doesn’t explain how the teacher’s judgment was wrong. He merely goes along with it, perhaps displays an attitude, refuses to explain himself when the teacher asks him “what’s wrong?” and holds the general assumption that school is “unfair.”

Now, these are highly generalized examples which I have constructed to convince you to read the book, but Lareau’s findings confirm that the way that children and parents interact with the institution of school have an awful lot to do with their social positioning. Furthermore, Lareau draws on Bourdieu’s theory that the way that a person is socialized determines what a person deems comfortable and natural. So, why haven’t we considered that parenting is different across different social strata? Because we assume that everyone is brought up the way that we are… OR! We assume that if a person is brought up differently from us, they must have “known better” at least. (It’s important for me to mention here that Lareau’s study finds pros and cons for both lower and middle class ways of parenting… this made it an especially interesting read for me as a parent as well.)

As educators, we have a responsibility to know our students… and their parents. We often label parents as “uncaring” without considering the possibility that parents care for their children in different ways. Lareau and her researchers make some very interesting observations about the ways that teachers interact with children of different social classes and the ways in which families interact with the school (and teacher as extension/part of the school). Learning will not take place in an environment where we assume that everyone has had the same socialization that we have had.

Bourdieu argues that what we consider natural is relative. Parenting is historical–– it changes across time periods and it varies from place to place (i.e. people parent differently in America than they do in Germany). [Foucault did a similar theoretical jog when he began writing The History of Sexuality, should you be interested. In fact, should you not be interested, you should read Foucault. As an educator, Discipline and Punish particularly resonated with me.] Since parenting ethics has changed over time, we know that there is no “natural” or “more natural” way to parent.

Unfortunately, the institution of the school requires us to make assumptions about students based on their performance on tests that they may or may not have the cultural tools they need to succeed on. We ask for students to display their knowledge in a manner of ways that confirm whether or not the child has been socialized properly (according to… whom?) This is becoming scarier and scarier as we fall deeper and deeper into the cracks of NCLB. It seems that in our effort to “close the achievement gap” between groups of students, we are actually falling into gaps that are much more fatal. We are actually reinforcing and amplifying gaps between social classes by placing such strong emphasis on arbitrary tests. As educators, we are forced to spend so much time “documenting” that we often fail to focus on the more humane question of who we are teaching and what their individually specific needs are in terms of preparing them for a world that might go against their norms. We need to focus on providing our children with the cultural tools that they need to experience success in a business-driven world, but we need to do this without subtracting from the personal culture of that student. We need to confront our classrooms with the mindset of Annette Lareau and with an awareness of how society works.

NaPoWriMo? Anyone? Anyone?

NaPoWriMo is the Physical Challenge of the poetry world, from what I gather. It is approached with the same angst and anticipation as the Physical Challenge was assigned following four harrowing double dares. You only half expect to pull it off and you know that it will probably result in the ridiculous, like that time when the blue team had to fill up a cup of slime affixed to the mom’s head while the rest of the team scrambled around on the shiny blue floor wearing roller blades and goggles. So last week, when I eagerly pledged to write a poem a day for National Poetry Writing Month, Emma Bolden soon became my Marc Summers…

Well, it is April 3 and I’m already behind. I have written three poems, but I cheated and wrote two of them today. Emma has been especially kind in giving me ideas to write about and teaching me about the history of haiku (which involves urination and a guy named Basho… more on that later). I’m only just beginning to discover poetry, and thus my attempts are timid. I’m not really looking for praise, just trying to put my writing “out there” in the same way that I challenge my students to do every time they share their work to the class or even turn it in to me.

So the Art of Writing project assignment for this week was for the students to write a poem about their hometown in four couplets, with six syllables a line. I chose to write about Valley, since that’s what the kids will be writing about. This was written on a clipboard next to a list of “No Breakers” as I patrolled the classroom during the SAT today for three hours. I wrote another one too, but this is the best of the two I think.

beyond the carpool line
wrapped in manila siding,

a house. the children run,
book bags flung side to side.

they charge the concrete stoop
painted gray, in full view:

the yard marked by scarlet
tulips, glowing in relief

in just–

When I was in high school, we didn’t read any of the kinds of poems that I use in my own classroom. Now that I’m working with the amazing and talented Emma Bolden in the Art of Writing Club, I’m learning that my secondary English education was sub-par at best with regard to poetry. The only poem that I can really remember from high school is “Two Roads Diverged in a Wood” by Robert Frost. I’m pretty sure that we had to memorize it. I learned more poems in French than English. So now that Emma and I are collaborating on this project, I have been drinking poems each week, amazed and appalled by my lacking knowledge of this world of words painting other worlds with their sounds, their shapes, and their strange new meanings.

When I started teaching high school English, e.e. cummings soon became my favorite poet. His beautiful invention never ceases to fill me with a sense of awe. I simply relish the following poem, which captures the day that I spent with Ruthie collecting all of the flowers that have bloomed within a 2-mile radius of our house. By the time we were finished, she was covered in fresh cut blooms. Her favorite was the big pink one with pollen in the middle. She kept pointing at it with a serious countenance, warning me: “Make you sneeze, Mommy.”

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything

e.e. cummings

testing, testing: 1, 2, 3

It’s that time of year–– again. The time when teaching becomes a bore, the students become hostile, and my life has lost any semblance of fruitful creativity. I spend the day trying to get my students to care about a test that is meaningless to them. These tests that the state designs and employs to hold everyone “accountable” are arbitrary enough as it is. Expecting a bunch of 8th graders to be responsible about taking a test that carries no consequences or incentives for their performance is ridiculous to say the very least. To use those test scores (which couldn’t possibly be accurate measures of the child’s knowledge if he/she isn’t even trying) to justify my ability as a teacher is just disgusting. I don’t believe that the answer is to raise the stakes; rather, we should be using alternative modes of assessing that are not forced-choice tests to determine whether or not a student is learning. A student’s ability to “pick the best answer” is limited by the answers that they are choosing from. How can you ask a student to choose a tone of a poem from four answer choices? To be honest, there are questions on the practice tests that I’ve been giving my students that I have to really stretch to find evidence for, and I have a graduate degree!!

A sample sentence from one of the passages: “Snow is fluffy when it falls, but when it accumulates without melting, it becomes granular and eventually compacts into solid ice.”This is a test for eighth graders. Accumulates? Becomes granular? Eventually compacts? I think this test designer thought that perhaps if the sentence started with something really dumbed down like “snow is fluffy,” ending the sentence with scientific terminology would be somehow justifiable. It’s not that these words are too hard for the kids. It’s that these kinds of technical terms are embedded in every sentence of a two-column page-long writing sample about something random… like glaciers.

Some context: It took me the entire first semester to get my students to read something, anything. I allowed them to pick out their own books and told them to get rid of the book if they didn’t find it interesting any longer. These kids are smart, but they are not prepared for the kind of testing that the state imposes on them. Their academic background is spotty when it comes to reading. Our culture is becoming markedly less textual: we simply don’t read anymore. Most of us get out news online (I get mine from the radio). We expect our kids to enjoy reading, but how many teachers are reading with their kids? How many classrooms are stocked with fun books? Kids become better readers by reading more. Period. It doesn’t matter what they read––they just need to read.Here’s what I know about the kids who perform well on these kinds of tests:

1. They come from homes that have books in them.
2. They will do an assignment “because the teacher said so.”
3. They usually do their best work even when you don’t ask them to, no matter how meaningless it is to them.

I was not one of these students. When we took the writing assessment, I just wrote something down. When I took my AP exams, I half-assed them because I knew I was going to retake the class in college for an easy A. Now, the ACT? I took that one 3 times and studied for it. I didn’t sleep through that one. I was wide awake and rested for it. Same with the GRE. Why? Because I cared about the results because I knew that they would have a dramatic effect on my own personal interests (which happened to be going to college).

Bottom line: Testing is stupid. I wish I could articulate it in a more profound way, but when it comes down to it, everyone’s pissed off about the testing because it’s stupid. Today I happen to be pissed off about the testing because I’m working my ass off to get my kids to care about something that I don’t care about. The students’ scores are more mine than theirs. At the end of the year, those scores will come back to me. Being evaluated by something you don’t believe in makes about as much sense as an atheist giving all of his money to a church in hopes that he will be let into a Heaven that doesn’t exist.

Margaret Spellings makes about as much sense as Brenda Dickson.

Googled

WordPress tells me that yesterday, someone in cyberspace tapped in rabid coon what to do and pulled up my blog. I am both thrilled and dumbfounded by this interweb connection.