It Starts with a Poem



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A few colleagues have been exchanging poems via our English and Foreign Languages
listserv. The poems have dealt with some less-than-positive learning experiences
the poets had suffered in grade school: bad methods, bad teachers, all producing
bad effects on learning….

The original poem was an unexpected gift from out of the blue—but from
a poet who has led us to expect such generous spontaneity. As usual, a wonderful
read. It was the camaraderie of the poetic response, however, that stimulated
me to plunge—somehow—into this dialogue. What fun….

Continue reading It Starts with a Poem

Difficulty, Toleranance, Love, Survival: Fathers and Sons In, Out, and At War



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"Murderer": A fitting final utterance to Art
Spiegelman’s novel, Maus.

All the brutality one expects in a poignant presentation of the Holocaust and
Nazi evil is present in this book, this "remarkable work" that Jules
Feiffer describes as "awesome in its conception and execution . . .
at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book."
As author/mouse protagonist Spiegelman departs from his father at the end of
Book I (subtitled "My Father Bleeds History")—briefcase in one
hand, cigarette in another, head down—he utters this depressing final
statement, "murderer." But he is not talking of the Nazis. His father
is the murderer, for Spiegelman has just learned that his father long ago, distracted
by grief and confusion over his wife’s suicide, destroyed the journals she had
kept of the war and Holocaust—journals she had intended to be a legacy
to her son.

Thus we end on a mighty ambivalence: the son exploding/apologizing, the father
exploding/apologizing, the father shaken at the son’s disrespect, the son pleading
for information, the son, mollified and leaving in peace but uttering alone,
again, and finally, the word, ". . . murderer."

Of all the powerful dimensions of this work—its compelling stories, its historical
sweep, its psychological layers—and of course all the issues of media, text,
poetics, and rhetoric—it is the father-son relationship that I connect to foremost
of all. Art’s relationship with his father is taut with mixed feelings: of annoyance,
respect, understanding, awe, contempt, despair, pride, grief, and more. In this
sense, the book is probably resonant to every child who had a father, or rather
every child who had a father who was present as the child grew into adulthood.
But there is something about the quality, or perhaps the actual content, of
the relationship—both aspects, the positive and negative—that reminds me of
my relationship with my father.

My father could be a difficult man, but reading a book like Maus makes
me look to the Depression, World War II, and all the other stresses of the twentieth
century as causes of that difficulty. And I should be honest: some of the difficulty
stems from my personality, with its inward ways, much like Spiegelman’s. For
I need but look at my brothers, Joe in particular, who has written most lovingly
and accurately of our father’s uniqueness. Take
a look at his touching and fun memoir here. But there is something in Spiegelman’s
portrayal of his father that rings an eerie bell. The frugality, the directness,
the aggressive care of both men are striking. Nothing of hesitation or shyness
in either of these men. And yet at the same time, the shocking tenderness from
time to time. Can these qualities be attributed, somehow, to the effects of
living through the twenties, thirties, and forties and surviving despite it
all?

Or is it just a matter of being in a family and taking what comes with the
territory? Maus raises questions of family dynamics of incredible and
deep resonance. Spiegelman interweaves tales of marital discord, parental scolding,
and typical family squabbles with episodes of unspeakable heroism, courage,
and good and bad fortune. Through it all there is one given: survival. On the
one hand there is an incredible closeness in this family (all families) that
allows the most extreme circumstances just to be. It all hangs out there—in
"dissolution," I’d call it: an agreement to look beyond the unresolved
matters in a way that is completely natural in families, as it is nowhere else.
On the other hand, there is the opposite of closeness and tolerance and acceptance,
for here are people so different, so uninvolved . . . just so very
different. Part of the magic of Maus is its portrayal of two "aliens"
sharing a space and entering into one another’s world. The father brings Art
into his past—not only the war, but also his youth and life, including
his early romances, his struggles to establish himself, his rhythms of life.
And the son attempts to bring the father into the writer’s/artist’s world he
inhabits. That’s something I never attempted with my father, and I’m not sure
I could, so I envy Spiegelman that expression and honesty.

The depictions of the family ambivalences are not all as poignant and disturbing
as the heart-wrenching final word of Volume 1. Some of the narration is borderline
humorous. There is the episode when Art, at the conclusion of one interview
session can’t find his coat. We soon find that the father—who is a renowned
miser, (a stereotypical Jewish miser, Art fears)—has thrown out Art’s
coat. For the father has (1) bought himself a new coat, (2) decided that Art’s
coat was shabby, and (3) decided to give Art his old coat. Art is incredulous:
"Oh great, a Naugahyde windbreaker!" And here is a case where Spiegelman’s
artistic talent comes to the fore: for the depiction of Art/mouse in the puffy
jacket conveys the archetypal embarrassment every child has suffered at the
hands of parents who find ingenious ways to exert control and inflict humiliation.The
expression on Art’s face as he walks home, slouched in the puffy jacket (it
should be noted he is thirty years old at the time), is priceless, as is his
comment: "I just can’t believe it. . . ."

In the context of such disbelief and anger and frustration, Spiegelman tells
his father’s story. Compassion, awe, and tender love are thrown into the telling
in a way worthy of the complexity of family life and the suffering of a terrible
World War. In all, Maus is a "survivor’s tale" that takes
us into unexpected dimensions of just what survival is. In its seamless interweaving
of tales—further complicated by our own connections to them—we are
often, like Art himself, left incredulous, but we are grateful for the experience,
the honesty of it, the reality of it—all in a comic book about a family
of mice that escaped the exterminator.


Reflective Action or Reflective Living?



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Blogger’s Note: This reflection was written in response to
a class reflection
written by Carol Medrano for one of her courses in the graduate reading program. Carol’s essay may be read by clicking this link.

Carol–I appreciate this opportunity to engage in a little dialectical discussion
with you here, so thanks for asking me to take a look at your reflection. Several
thoughts . . . I’ll share a few (ah, summer, when I can play hookey from the
required task, whatever it is, and diverge a bit in some side roads of thinking
and discussion):


You do a wonderful job countering the myth that reflection is solely a private
activity. It’s social. You summarize many other features from the analysis of
Dewey, but the social aspect is your main focus.

As teachers, the challenge is, "How do we create spaces, opportunities, requirements/threats/cajolings/pleadings
for reflective action? for reflective dialectical action?" It’s challenging,
but I’m beginning to see ways whereby the whole class can be organized–at the
point of conception–around the needs/rewards/dynamics of reflection.

The challenge becomes not merely one of having a single "reflective action"
added on at the end of something, but to have the reflective attitude guide
the process of learning from the onset and throughout. Part of this can’t be
taught, of course. Some people are "naturally" more prone to reflective
stances than others, etc. But reflectiveness can certainly be coached in all….
And therein is the challenge.

There’s a similar problem with group work. How do you shift from an ineffective
and rather typical use of small groups (I’ll characterize this ineffective use
as isolated instances of small group work thrown in randomly from time to time
to address certain lesson needs) to a more effective practice in which the teacher
perpetually supports and coaches collaborative interaction as a genuine social/intellectual
skill and disposition? One solution, I think, is to start your pedagogical planning
(in July) with the principles of "group" in mind rather than the task
they’ll be doing. Our usual procedure is to start with the lesson, and from
there proceed to the method of group work for engaging in the lesson. I’m suggesting
we turn the planning around. Why not start all our planning with the idea of
the group as the pincipal thing? We then ask in our day-to-day planning, "What
activities support, challenge, grow the group….?" We design learning
goals, curricular approaches, activities, etc. with the idea of the group impact/dynamics
invovled. In essence, the group becomes the organizing principle of our teaching
rather than the lesson itself.

The same holds true for reflection. How do we organize things if our main objectives
are rooted in the processes of reflection rather than the external learning standards,

curricula, etc. that are handed over to the teacher (often with a flick and a
threat)?

I’m beginning to see ways of doing this kind of reversal of prioritization.
But it’s really more than merely making a "priority" of reflection
or collaboration. It’s deeper; it’s starting with reflection and collaboration
as founding principles that give rise to all else. And at this point, I’ll close,
and only suggest that yes, I’ve begun to glimpse ways of organizing this way
(and relegating standards, goals, curricula, and other externals to afterthoughts—serious
afterthoughts that exert powerful shaping influences, but that keep their place,
too :).

But I have an exit analogy–on a somewhat negative slope. I’m reminded of
other highly effective organizations that might serve as models for the planner
of reflective/collabortive pedagogies: the military, cults, and gangs. They
start out with organizing principles of the "group," the "unit,"
"loyalty," "obedience," "duty," etc. They build
the organization first, and then apply actions to this or that situation. But
there is nothing "ad hoc" about these groups (unlike us in school
who are often so perilously ad hoc). These organizations are modes of being;
they are so un-ad hoc that, on their surface, their routines apppear to be the
antithesis of pragmatic, efficient action. Rather than dealing with the specific
issue at hand ("today’s lesson") they deal with the organizaiton
itself–its needs, its values, its code. But ultimately pragmatism and
efficiency do get nailed, and big time. But what if–in thinking about how to
coach reflection and collaboration–we look to the rituals and principled modes
of organization of the military, cults, and gangs?


Montana, 1948, Isolation, Adolescence. . . 



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Of the many reactions I had to Montana, 1948, the one that stands
out is my appreciation of the narrator. He’s an adolescent boy, caught in the
middle of things within and beyond him—his childhood, adult crimes and
crises, differing forms of love, punishments, justice, and various kinds of
typical and atypical forces. The boy is archetypally "adolescent"
(I can’t even recall his name at this point, though it was only a few weeks
ago that I read the novel). In him meet all kinds of extreme forces, and his
narration provides a patient and deep view of internal and external turbulence.
He explains, for instance, how he is driven by a type of unconventional "wildness"
(this aspect of him is so internalized that no observer could have ever detected
it through the boy’s behavior or speech); most of all, of course, he is afflicted/affected
by the fierce landscape of Montana, 1948, a place and time whose "definition"
winds up being the full presentation of the novel itself.

This book teaches, in its quietly desperate way, the need for extended
definition. In doing so, it prompts sympathy, the humane outcome of understanding
and involvement. The book takes us into troubling extremes, the real history
of a place, the kind of history that is never written in history books, but
only literature, and here in the form of "sexual abuse, murder, suicide"
(170). Read hastily or inattentively, this extended definition of Montana, 1948,
might well lead us to an easy outsider’s conclusion, as typified in the comment
of the narrator’s wife years later at a family meal: "David [ah, that’s
the boy’s name! I found it in looking up this quotation] told me what happened
when you lived in Montana. That sure was the Wild West, wasn’t it?" But
the more proper conclusion comes from the father’s almost violent and deeply
resonant (to David) response: "Don’t blame Montana! […] Don’t ever blame
Montana!" (175).

Amidst it all—between the wildness and the father’s fierce final defense
of Montana, the boy is there—invisible and serious—and he holds
his world together. Amidst all the extremes swirling around him, he functions
and acts—or rather just functions. Action is for adults. The boy is not
a major player in the unfolding crises, but all the events register with him;
they take root in his understanding, and so we have to ask, to what extent do
they become his understanding? Whatever effect they have, the influence
in one-directional: the boy is a recipient of Montana, 1948, not an agent in
it.

The isolation of adolescence is archetypal, and the depiction of it in this
novel reverberates in my unconscious and in the collective unconscious, one
feels, of all who have survived adolescence. The boy is just part of the landscape,
and he is maneuvered around by his parents and others as they attempt to solve
monumental personal, family, professional, and community problems. Everything
David hears—he hears a lot—is overheard. At one point he wishes,
poignantly, that someone would just talk to him about the goings on—to
have things explained, to provide him his opening, to have a discussion, to
break through the loneliness, to set right some of the upheaval….

The boy remains quiet, and the cauldron simmers, though the lid never blows.
On the one hand, I’m reminded of a quote from somewhere in The Rhetoric
of Motives by Kenneth Burke. Burke says (I’m paraphrasing), as though to
offer a formula for mental health therapy: find the secret; therein
the neuroses lie… This boy is beset with secrets. He learns, even as his mother
and father learn, of the secret crimes of Uncle Frank, the town’s doctor and
a respected pillar of the community. Despite his sophistication and power, Uncle
Frank has committed grievous crimes, and these crimes command redress. The burden
of addressing Frank’s actions falls primarily to David father, Frank’s brother,
who happens to be the town’s sheriff. But a deep portion of the burden falls
to David, who must come to terms with the brutalities and the confusions of
Frank’s actions. And in following David’s narration, we chart a process with
odd resonances to similar times when our characters were tested and buffeted.
For while most of us do not have an uncle like Frank, all adolescents/adults
have been tormented by "the secret"—if not of sexual abuse,
murder, and suicide, at least of sexuality, competition, and
guilt.

Like the best optimistic Young Adult fiction, the story chronicles a survivor’s
tale. What it doesn’t do is glorify the bravado or authority of adolescence
the way so much of our culture so stupidly does. I bemoan the cult of adolescent
superiority that runs rampant in our culture. Adolescent cool, the cluelessness
of adults, the liberations of sex, drugs, and extremes—whatever its forms,
such romantic nonsense gratifies adolescents with an opiate of assurance—however
wrongheaded, dangerous, or just plain irrelevant that assurance is to the real
afflictions at hand. Montana, 1948 depicts a sensitive, intelligent,
virtuous—and yes, confused—child-adult mixing it all up in the quiet
chaos of ordinary life. David is not "cool," but his shortage of cool
and superiority is as relevant to his problems as the shortage of bourbon was
relevant to the problem of all that extra ice on the Titanic. As we read on,
we see that this kid needs the adult world, and he is unapologetic
in that need. Unfortunately, the adult world is just "there" for him.
But truth be told, he is just "there" for the adults, too.

So the story takes root. Individuals, though intertwined, fail to interact—at
least overtly. Deep down, in the secret recesses of individual psyches, the
wounds reverberate. Adolescence is tough, but the realistic portrayal of it,
in literary works like Montana, 1948, brings redemption and satisfaction,
if belatedly. . . .


Towards Shared Planning in Team-Based Instruction



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As far as team-based instruction
goes, I have one main recommendation: I think that the team must find a way
to share their curricular plans in as much detail, in as much advance,
and as regularly as possible. Teachers rarely get into the specifics
of their teaching/learning goals and methods when they work individually. If
at all, such sharing would happen at the department level; it likely happens
with new teachers. But I think in most cases it tapers off, particularly as
teachers become busy managing and organizing their workload. I’d be interested
to hear from those who have worked on teams. Does lesson planning go differently
when a team is charged with the task? Does the team plan themes and goals together?
Specific goals and methods?

For example, consider how a team meeting would go if the English teacher led
off by saying something like, "In teaching Othello, I will lead
the children through an exploration of the notion of ‘women as property’…"
What if the teacher then proceeded to quote lines and share specific lesson
plans and activities on how this issue will be investigated by the students
in her English class? Such groundwork might lead to insights and possibilities
not necessarily possible if individuals planned in the traditional, isolated
way. Might not, in such a collaborative environment, the social studies teacher
get an idea for a unit on gender in different cultures or across the ages? Or
for a unit on notions of monogamy? Or any of the themes…. What if the team
decided on having each member take turns to bring to the fore the ways that
an agreed-upon theme plays out in his or her subject matter? The crucial part
is that the group members all share what their angle in is–so
that every teacher might make references day-in day-out to the various "radiations"
or "spokes" all protruding from (or to) the "hub" of the
theme. It’s unlikely, however, that there is shared ownership of the curriculum
and methods across the most teams, as they actually exist in the real, hectic
world of school teaching. It ‘s unlikely in our posited example–the interdisciplinary
team teaching Othello–that everyone on the team has read Othello….

But consider the possibilities if the Othello brainstorming were shared,
and the planning were consensus based. Consider, for instance, if the group
decided the shared focus was to be on the theme of "manipulation."
Possibilities blossom … in the individual minds of the experts, all supported
by the group dialogue, all differentiated by members’ specialized disciplinary
lenses. The math teacher steps up and asserts: So much of math, which involves
simply shifting numbers and variables from one side of the equation to the other,
is simply the legal, premeditated, deliberate practice of manipulation–taking
what Iago does and stripping it of its moral charge (its negative moral
charge, says the mathematician with a devilish grin)–and getting away with
what you can get away with–because the symbol system at hand allows for (some
would say encourages) such processes–all to the end of securing some
advantage. The language of jealousy (or any human emotion or experience) in
this sense is not all that different from the language of algebra. So many wonderful
lesson plans about manipulation could help children exercise symbolic, linguistic
prowess. But first, you, as teacher, would have to strip the term of its pejorative
sense, and come to appreciate it almost as an art form. Iago’s performance looks
quite different in those terms. Have the class cull examples of manipulation.
Have them engage in one-upsmanship. The prize goes to the best tale of manipulation!
Create a portfolio of nominees of "The Iago Achievement Award." OR!
Shifting things around, what if you had the kids in math class take a "Show
Your Work" episode, and retell it in terms of the morality
of human manipulation? Go Shakespearean on that quadratic equation. Talk about
the scheming of subtracting an entity from your side (protagonist), the left
side, so that your "opposite," the right side (antagonist), had to
do exactly the same thing, lest the equality of the equal sign, that which may
not be compromised, the beloved parallel shafts in eternal balance and beloved
by all (even that right side), should lose its balance and collapse into itself
and in that collapse, threaten that greater collapse, for where might balance
ever be found again, if equality itself was to be made unequal…?

Now this all seems heady stuff, but I have to say–from my recent experience
working nightly with my freshman daughter on her algebra that it was a major
stumbling block getting her to understand the notion of manipulation for manipulation’s
sake that is at the root of so much of algebraic prowess (not to mention Iago’s
highly stylized machinations). She would say, whenever I tried to get her to
"play" with an equation, to manipulate it (according to rule) this
way or that way, she would say with a roll of her eyes, "What’s the point?"
Since she couldn’t see the outcome, she couldn’t take the leap simply to engage
in algebraic maneuvers right there at her disposal. Over and over I pleaded:
So many of the good results of the Solved Problem stem from
the sheer willingness–and ability–to manipulate like expressions simply for
the sake of manipulating them. To know that "5-2" and the number "3"
are exactly the same thing, and that the one can be substituted for the other….

Anyway…anyway…

I think the power of a team approach is unleashed when all the teachers involved
are able to make regular references to what is going on in the other
classes. I am convinced that the value of a team approach does not lie in the
"lessons" per se; it lies in having the teachers all on the same page.
But to make this happen, you really need to insist that your team gets to the
specifics of its curriculum. Every teacher must somehow be
willing to take the leap to be conversant in every discipline. To some
extent. That’s where the potential of the "in-class connecting reference"
lies…. If approached in the right way, this "bringing up to speed"
of one another could be highly collaborative–or it could be divisive and threatening.
I don’t think, however, teams should just assume that the issue is solved or
not an issue–simply because you’re all colleagues and professionals. The most
damaging attitude is the one whereby individuals, out of collegial respect or
personal fears about their competence in other disciplines, leave interdiscipliary
planning to each expert. That’s not collaboration! Just as I think kids in the
classroom have to be taught explicitly how to collaborate, I think teachers
need to be taught (or to teach themselves) how to be teammates. What if there
were some formal team-building activity that oriented everyone to the vision
of interconnected planning and instruction?

I anticipate that one rejoinder is going to be, "Who has the time for
this kind of shared planning?" But anything worth doing is worth doing
well. In this sense, the costs of such an approach are analogous to the costs
of integrating technology in your teaching. To do it right involves excessive
costs; it can take over. But after you let it take over, you’re in a different
place, and you begin to glimpse possibilities you haven’t seen before. And with
the other rewards comes a new, heightened efficiency–and the freeing up of
time in unexpected ways. But this whole process would take lots of administrative
support so that such planning meetings might be continued and supported over
extended periods of time. For I would emphasize that in the shared planning
model the advance planning (before the semester) is not nearly as important
as the day-to-day, in-process team interaction as the lessons are being taught.
The day-to-day activity ideas flow from the in-process brainstorming and discussions
of the team.

So in a nutshell, here is my formula:

  1. Get the team to share specifics of their curricular plans. Be formal about
    this. Assign each team member one day to bring the group up to speed on his/her
    upcoming lessons, goals, activities.
  2. Come to some agreement as a team on the theme of each chunk of time.
  3. Find some way to keep the focus on team meetings during the semester,
    rather than just before the semester. Find some way to achieve agreement
    on the structure of the meetings; so often teachers need to de-pressurize,
    so there are powerful lures just to vent and short-circuit real thinking in
    team meetings. It can be a lot of work to have the kind of curricular-sharing
    meetings I’m talking about, so I think the group needs to be strategic about
    protecting the productivity of the day-to-day, in-process meetings.

Finally, I would simply say that the kind of collegial discussion I have sketched
here does happen and has happened since the creation of the
first school at the very dawn of collegiality. I’ve seen it in various schools
where the faculty members do talk to each other. So I’m not proposing
anything new. But I don’t think the "institutions" of school and professional
life support these practices. People engage in them because they are
professional and dedicated and intelligent, and they see what is needed to make
something work. The question I’m getting at is how can we reform professional
structures to be more "friendly" to the kinds of interactions and
collaborations that are needed to make innovations like team approaches work
in the way they need to work to tap into their potential?