Thoughts on My Students

My students are troubled by freedom. They gripe about what they are expected to do in my colleagues’ classrooms; yet, when I tell them during the first week of school that they have to come up with their own topics, I am met with cries of frustration: “I can’t think of anything to write about,” or, “I don’t have anything interesting to say, nothing has ever happened to me.” Yet when they sit and talk to each other, and are unaware that I can hear what they are saying, my students tell incredible stories: full of import, meaning, depth, and humor. However, the prevailing attitude is that what they have to say, because it is about them, cannot be of any value. So they write simple narratives that lead the reader through a series of fairly inconsequential events: “and that was my day at the water park,” or “. . . my new car made me so happy.” They have had the native sense of storytelling beaten out of their writing by teachers who demand their students follow a formulaic writing style which the teacher and the student thinks is the correct way to write an essay.
From the time I went back to become certified to teach in the mid-1980’s, the “five-paragraph theme” and its permutations has been derided, yet it thrives like kudzu in the high school classroom and beyond. After my professor, in a well respected East Coast graduate program, explained what he expected in an essay, I argued with him telling him that he was simply asking for a more glorified five paragraph theme. To my horror, he agreed, and did not see anything wrong with that description, even though in the composition classes next door the profs contradicted his view. Virginia Wolff described the essay as a mind tracking itself. The writer is engaged with exploring the topic before her. The essay is a way for ideas to be developed and for the writer to discover meaning in the topic that they did not see before they began writing. The essay is not a pre-determined form to fill with gooey words, wait for them to solidify, and then show it off like some easy bake oven cake.
And that is the problem. It is not that my students don’t have deep concerns, nor are they as ignorant as some of my fellow teachers think. They have very rarely been given the time or the occasion to write, think seriously about, or to make meaning out of the world they see around them. They have been enmeshed in what Paulo Freire calls the “banking system” of education, where we teachers deposit bits of trivia and formulae into their heads, then they spit it back out like ATM’s on a test. One of the constant gripes one hears in the press about the school system is that our students aren’t prepared, they can’t problem solve. Yet, the solution that is offered is usually more-of- the- same: more of the same kind of education that has led us to the very problem people complain about. Fixing a problem by increasing the amount of activity which caused the problem in the first place is not a solution.
Learning, real learning, where students engage with the subjects they are expected to learn about by engaging in the type of activities people in those fields of study actually do is a solution. (Situated peripheral learning) In English Language Arts, my field, students are expected to learn to read and write. Once they have moved past decoding letters and words, students need to read and write. Real readers and writers, read and write and think about reading and writing. The ability to make meaning from text and to create their own meaning through writing should be the goal of every high school English class. This is not done through endless worksheets where students underline “tone” words, or reading a book out loud to the whole class (because “they won’t read it on their own”), or having the students memorize a list of random words for a vocabulary test on Friday. The students must read and write.
And that is the problem. My students are troubled because they don’t know how to choose a book to read, because the teacher has always told them what to read; or they have become stuck in a single genre. They see writing as a way to feed back pre-fabricated ideas and opinions to the teacher who gave them the ideas in the first place.

Inquisition, or Look at Me When I Talk to You

What do I think do you think? This is a poem. It means what it says. It doesn't mean what it says. What do I think I mean do you think you mean? Is the word a key or a lock? Is there meaning in silence? Is the word the meaning? Is there meaning? Is a rock a rock when it's a word? If you kick that rock is it there? Does space between words mean anything do you think? Is a shape a cow because we call it a cow? I mean do you think that A equals B like B equals A because A and B mean the same I think? What do I mean you mean I think? Do you think there are spaces between words when we speak? I mean do we speak the same language when we write do you think? I mean what I say. I mean what I don't say. What is the mean do you mean I think? Is meaning an average between silence and sound? Do questions have meaning like statements I mean? Are all the words included when we mean what we say? What can be said? What can be unsaid? I mean my cat sniffs my finger when I point to her food. What do you think she thinks I mean? What do you think I mean? I don't understand the meaning of what you think I think I mean. I think I mean do you think? Yes or No? But only if you mean it.

(Summer 1990)

The Spiral

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned
-William Carlos Williams

Again the slow expansion
across the bottom of the fall
I feel an emptying of my being
a bruise beyond my baser self
a part of a universe too vast
to fill with my scribbles tonight

Yet I write anyway not like Rimbaud
flinging pages defiantly into the abyss
more like a fourth little pig
building a house of words to await
the wolf’s slavering tread

Advice for the Day

Step out, however meagerly,
from the mouth of the cave.
Hug the outside wall, one foot
still within shadow’s safety.
Feel the wind, the first spiral
assault of green spaced vertigo:
the conventional falls away
from all that held you secure,
like a leaf trembling at twig-tip
before letting loose, grasping
nothing but air; no ideas
to prop up sacred beliefs,
only the wind, the currents,
and your ability to fly free.

Trust

our tenuous hearts
unfold

an iris in spring
unfurls

purple fractures
the green carapace

our hands close the distnace
between us

Lies I Tell Myself

in some capacity
I have a voice
in some capacity
I have control
In some capacity
I have ability
to live
to decide
to be

On Being Smart

Today a fellow teacher asked, “When did you know that you were smart?” My honest, yet glib answer was, “I don’t think I am smart.” Yes, that was a deflection. My second answer, “I’m not smart, everyone else is stupid” was just a smart-ass answer.
I do think that I am smart. Yet I think that somewhere along the line I missed something. I never felt that I was all that smart. I’m not sure even now if I am all that smart. Yes, I was in the excelerated classes in middle and high school. Yes, I was in the Junior and National Honor societies. I made A’s and B’s without trying through out public school. In college I received my B.A. again without trying that hard and doing the usual amount of drinking and partying, and skipping classes; and sometimes more than the usual amount.
When I look back at various events in my life, I think wow that was really a weird gecky thing (translation: smart). I had what I realize now was my first philosophical encounter with language in third grade. I thought, “Nothing has to be something or it wouldn’t have a name.” I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings for the first time in 3rd and 4th grade. I didn’t think that was unusual, my older sisters had already read it, and they were what I had to compare myself to, the norm I had at hand. It befuddled me in elementary that others were not as interested in the books I was interested in, or that they took longer to do the assignments in math or social studies. I never thought of myself as smart however.
By sixth grade I met two of my oldest friends, Nathan and Jimmy. Finally some people who had read the same books as me, who were interested in, what I now realize were odd, obscure, games and were willing to spend hours and hours playing them while we talked about the books we were reading. We would embark on projects and have a blast creating sets for the skits or plays we were doing for class. But this was all normal. Normal, not smart. Smart was something else, something beyond what I was able to do.
As a nineteen year old undergraduate, I worked as a dishwasher at Clarksville Wine Shop. I listened to the customers, and the waiters (graduate students) talk about various subjects from wine to art, to music, to politics; and I came to an early cynical idea: pretension is half of the game. With being able to back it all up the other half, thus negating the pretension. I started working on being able to back up what I had to say; being able to do more than just bullshit. I have always read a lot. When some author refers to some other text, and that text keeps coming up, I go and read it. I don’t read someone else’s ideas about that writer, I go read the source. I guess my Lutheran upbringing comes out there: don’t rely on the priests to tell you what the book means, read it yourself. I’ve noticed that most people do not make their own decisions about ideas, they tend to read what others say the ideas mean. When I read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” for the first time, I was surprised that the infamous quote, “God is Dead.” comes rather early in the work and is not really that important in the work as a whole. Yet that is the line that I would say the majority of people know from Neitsche, if they know any line at all. I read and study because I don’t understand much of life; and for the most part, that simply leads me into deeper confusions and cause for further reading.
Others always seem to know what they are doing, what all the answers are. I don’t understand the world. I am not that smart.