Resisting our usual ways of looking

Despite decades of exploration, tinkering, and, at universities, certainly, implementation at scale, we are experiencing shock as we are plunged, around the globe, into distance learning. 

I’ve been thinking, for many years, about the possibilities here in digital space, beyond the more obvious but obviously significant factors of convenience or accessibility, and outside of conversations about the machinery of distance education, which, necessarily, has taken up so much space for so long. Yet despite the ubiquity, now, of technology, we are so often stalled by it still. Perhaps it is because, as Heidegger argued, technology discloses everything as measurable, orderable and calculable, available at our command and our convenience, and here, where we are entirely encircled by technology, it is more difficult to see differently; our eyes see through the lens technology creates.

I have been trying to find a way to disentangle the technology from distance education to express what often seems inexpressible, its poetic possibility. I am currently reading Peter de Bolla’s beautiful book – Art Matters. He attempts to put in words what he calls the “mutism” of aesthetic experience – when we are moved profoundly by a work of art – by close examination of three pieces of art. He begins with Barnett Newmann’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, a massive painting which stands almost 8 feet tall by 18 feet wide.

The sheer size of Newman’s picture, he argues, poses the question of distance. How do I see it? Many, given this size and the absence of a human figure, see it as cold. Empty. Inhuman. De Bolla sees it differently: “The depicted human form is displaced from the picture plane, only to resurface on the other side, as it were, in the space in front of the canvas.” This displacement, he contends, makes the human more powerfully present. He argues against the common idea that the very size of the painting makes us feel small, insignificant. Instead, he says,

Vir Heroicus Sublimis demands that the viewer resist a particular form of looking…to enter a shared space in which the nakedness of presentation asks one to face up to being here, in the visibility of a communally constructed presence. Here in the hushed sublimity of a shared world.

And in distance education, in our vast shared digital spaces, with the teacher displaced behind the glass, what new possibilities might emerge if we resist our usual ways of looking?

What the house shelters

Except for solitary walks now and then, a trip to the grocery store once a week, like so many across the globe, I am confined to home. I am rereading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. He writes of the protected intimacy of the house we have dreamed or lived in: “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

I worry about the children like a boy I once taught for a short time – he arrived in November and was gone again in April to yet another school, his eleventh before he was twelve. He lived in a small apartment with his parents, four younger brothers, one older sister and her new baby. Most of his stories were about groceries, about walking to get them, about his father coming home in a cab with them, about how they were all going to get them the next day. Sometimes he talked about not sleeping, about the crying baby, his wiggling brother, the noise from the TV. 

What peace, I wonder, does the house shelter for this boy?

And yet, for children, the groceries arrive like Christmas. The noise is the hum of intimacy and, who knows, no doubt when the baby is asleep, and the littlest are watching TV, there is a lull for staring at the ceiling and tracing the crack into daydreams.

How difficult it is to disentangle the common experience – this poetry – from the rest of it, to rest here for a moment before worry blooms again.

Thinking poetically about fear in the time of Covid 19

I have been busy, busy, busy and set aside this blog to hurry, working late and early, promising to come back to writing soon, that old saw.

And now it is quiet.

Strangely, I had been thinking about fear when I left off and have notes in my journal from my recent reading of philosopher Simone Weil who lived through two wars. In her reflections on the needs of the soul, which she argues are as vital to us as our physical needs for food, warmth, shelter, she writes:

Security is an essential need of the soul. Security means that the soul is not under the weight of fear or terror, except as the result of an accidental conjunction of circumstances and for brief and exceptional periods. Fear and terror, as permanent states of the soul, are wellnigh mortal poisons, whether they be caused by the threat of unemployment, police persecution, the presence of a foreign conqueror, the probability of invasion, or any other calamity which seems too much for human strength to bear.

Our soul needs, Weil argues, are “arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance,” just as we need rest and exercise, warm and coolness. Thus it is that, while we need security, we also need risk:

The absence of risk produces a type of boredom which paralyses in a different way from fear, but almost as much….Risk is a form of danger which provokes a deliberate reaction; that is to say, it doesn’t go beyond the soul’s resources to the point of crushing the soul beneath a load of fear.

Thinking poetically, we remember fear, feels its weight, this common soul need for security; we do not measure fear, weigh it, plot it on a graph, find the average and develop action plans and strategies based on this analysis. We do not quantify the “normal” load of fear a soul should be able to carry. 

I have known children whose eyes fill with tears when math books come out, who stare blindly at the pages of a novel and shrink into themselves, who, holding a pencil tightly in hand, regard the blank page as though it were a wild animal ready to spring. And that fear poisons even the games at recess; away from the laughter and play, these children huddle, yearning, in dark corners.

What they need, a colleague said, tall, white, robust, middle-class, a man who found school easy by his own admission, is a push, a prize, a punishment, something to motivate them.

And today, what is all the fuss, someone said to me recently, about staying home during this pandemic and watching TV or reading books. It’s a holiday! This someone, I know, doesn’t have three children under five, bills to pay, rent due, cupboards bare and that gnawing fear that poisons every moment, even the early morning, when the sky just begins to lighten to pale yellow.

The schools that souls need

Poetry is a commitment of the soul

Gaston Bachelard

The soul, Simone Weil argues, has needs in the way that the body needs food, sleep, warmth.  “To be rooted,” she says, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”  Although she died long before our bewildering digital displacement, she identifies the cataclysmic uprooting caused by conquest and colonization, and two more sources that continue to hurt us today: money (“money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive”) and modern education influenced by technical science, pragmatism and specialization:

A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the Earth moves round the Sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This Sun about which they talk to him in class hasn’t, for him, the slightest connexion with the one he can see. He is severed from the Universe around him.

There has been a new focus on rootedness in schools, a turn to and awareness of place, although I worry that it will be “implemented” rather than lived, with teachers penciling “placed-based learning” into their calendars, and children going outdoors to find plants, sketching in notepads, and bringing the dirt of the day back in their shoes yet severed still from the land it comes from. 

Rootedness for souls demands more than a walk in the woods. A friend recently sent me a poem by Brad Aaron Modlin that comes closer.

“What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade”

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listento the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She tookquestions on how not to feel lost in the dark 

After lunch she distributed worksheetsthat covered ways to remember your grandfather’s 

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleepwithout feeling you had forgotten to do something else— 

something important—and how to believethe house you wake in is your home. This prompted 

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailinghow to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks, 

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughtsare all you hear; also, that you have enough. 

The English lesson was that I amis a complete sentence. 

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equationlook easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions, 

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent lookingfor whatever it was you lost, and one person 

add up to something.

Awakening Attention

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridgesaid that poetry awakens the mind’s attention  

from the lethargy of custom… directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

There is, surely, no place where this awakening is more necessary than schools. I have been rereading Simone Weil, a thinker who can shake awake even the most somnolent. She asks, in her essay “Human Personality,” what prevents us from hurting a fellow being:

What is it, exactly, that prevents me from putting that man’s eyes out if I am allowed to do so  and if it takes my fancy?

 Although it is the whole of him that is sacred to me, he is not sacred in all respects and from every point of view.  He is not sacred in as much as he happens to have long arms, blue eyes, or possibly commonplace thoughts.  Nor as a duke, if he is one; nor as a dustman, if that is what he is. Nothing of all this would stay my hand.

What would stay it is the knowledge that if someone were to put out his eyes, his soul would be lacerated by the thought that harm was being done to him.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being…there is something that goes on indominantly expecting…that good and not evil will be done to him. 

Too often, although we now stay our hand, we lacerate souls in schools. Why? Some people, Weil argues, get pleasure from hurting others, but most are simply unaware (they have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand). What is necessary, she says, is an “attentive silence,” because, although the soul blows, too, always provoke a cry – why am I being hurt? – “it is a silent cry, which sounds only in the secret heart.”

The noise of schools, though, is deafening. We hurry down familiar halls to solve the problems we have created, advancing, progressing, pressing forward, organizing our streams of data, our information linked, layered, stacked, prioritized to implement, to achieve, to perform. There is no room for silence. We rush to fill it.

Even here the silence presses in on us until we click our way out of it.

And in our secret hearts, the silent cry. Who, now, is generous enough to attend?

Teaching to Stop

Poetry does not invite readers to consume the text as if it were a husk that contains a pithy truth. Poetry is not a window on the world. Poetry invites us to listen. Poetry is a site for dwelling, for holding up, for stopping. 

                                                                                                                 Carl Leggo 

I have been reading about pedagogies of abundance, the idea that education changes, now, when content and access to it is abundant; we are no longer bound to the school, to books, to teachers. We can access courses, journals and books online, now, peruse the blogs, videos and podcasts from world-renowned experts, connect with a network of others who have the same interests. What we need, in this abundance, isn’t a teacher in a classroom, but the capacity to organize, curate, connect, collaborate, keep up to date.

And yet where am I, where are you, dear reader, in this abundance, still swimming through our own lives, heartsore over the death of someone dear and feeling lonely, lonely, lonely, or juggling, juggling, juggling, because I said I’d get milk on the way home from work and I forgot and now I have to go back and that’s another twenty minutes tacked on to a day that’s already too long and I need to plan, still, for a lesson tomorrow, and must somehow inspire students who have come to believe that learning is something to eat and I’d better make it good.

Isn’t there something more than more about teaching and learning?

What would it mean to provide space in schools, not for consumption, but for stopping, for dwelling?

The Mystery of Trees and Teaching

Wading knee deep in snow, strange here on the west coast, summer suddenly returns as I pass the buried blackberry patch: their hot smell, the children, mouths purple, eating as fast I pick, boiling our meager gathering with sugar in the big jam pot to pour over ice cream. How simple, how sweet, the memory. It tugs on another and Mary Oliver’s poem of a green summer shifts the white landscape once again:

Answers

If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.

That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career:
So to please her I studied - but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year. 

I think of this long ago grandmother smiling at her granddaughter, purple-stained hands scarred from thorny picking, tidying sticky pots, spoiled fruit, the lines in her face evidence of who knows what: sleepless nights, quarrels over money, worries over a wild child who broke her heart, aching loneliness for the home of her childhood.

We long for these green summers of our imagined memories, the messiness blanketed like fresh snow, muffled, muted. We strain to build lives as tidy, to teach so that all confusion is poured out of our classrooms and the children, shining fruit, sitting straight, hands folded, neatly labeled, smile and nod.

Yet the mystery of trees, of grandmothers, of love, of teaching remains.

And it, too, is beautiful.

On Finishing

I work, now, with not-yet teachers at a university and the students often ask me questions as though I know the answer.

What do you do, one of them said one day, when a student isn’t finished?

Is it important that the student finish? I responded.

It was the strangest feeling. The sudden deep quiet. It was like I had set off a bomb in the classroom and everyone was staring in shock at the wreckage.

What did I wreck?

The student finally spoke into the hush. But, she said, isn’t finishing necessary? Won’t students just do nothing if we say they don’t have to finish?

A thousand words pushed forward, rushing to be said, but I settled at last on asking, is what they are doing worth finishing?

And suddenly the hush was gone. The room filled with a rising murmur, students thinking together about worksheets and projects, reports and assignments, about too hard and too easy, about perseverance and laziness, about anxiety and eagerness.

I was thinking about the small taken-for-granted ideas that have deep roots in our classrooms, that despite our planting new ideas, grow and flourish in the warm dark behind closed doors.

I think of all the children I have known who gave up entirely, who sat and did nothing at all, because they could never finish, or at least not in the way that was required in the time allotted.

Poet Rita Dove said, “What a poem does is open something up inside. This is also a good feeling. A poem is an experience, because when you experience, it allows you to become larger.” There is no poetry in closing, in making small, in turning invisible.

I don’t want students to finish; I want them to want to finish, that straining to reach the not quite-reachable summit, the ah, the awe of it, when after hours of cross-outs and almost giving up, a word slips suddenly into place, the sketch, offered with glowing eyes, because even though the tree leans drunkenly, the almost perfect house is perched, just as imagined, upon the hillside. The delight, even here, in this moment (so many deletions later), this small, “yes, that’s what I mean.” Almost.

You must change your life

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. 

You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. 

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms

Kafka, obviously, lived before Facebook, before Twitter, texts, Netflix.

Nobody waits anymore. Every shred of time is spent bent over our screens – in the grocery line, on a bus, in the restaurant, over our morning cup of coffee, at the lake, on our breaks.

Even now, thinking about this, waiting impatiently for the world to unmask itself, I barely resist the urge to click on Facebook just for a minute, to scroll through Instagram to see what’s new, to do anything, anything at all, but wait.

Even very small children are given a phone to play a game or watch videos to fill the smallest gap in activity.

What do we fill their minds with?

And what are we afraid of, we who choose distraction over contemplation? Perhaps we are afraid that we will hear the fires burning in Australia, the war trumpets across America, the cries of hunger in Zimbabwe, and closer to home and in our hearts, the sounds we cannot bear.

Or are we afraid of beauty? That the unmasked world might call to us as the Torso of Apollo called to Rilke.

                Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

                                                                    Rainer Maria Rilke

Stepping in tune with being

I’ve been thinking about “withitness,” that elusive necessary quality of teaching. It’s something more and deeper, I think, than merely having “eyes in the back of your head,” but closer to what Lil’wat elder Lorna Williams calls Kamúcwkalha: acknowledging the felt energy indicating group attunement and the emergence of a common group purpose.

I’ve been observing becoming-teachers, so beautiful in their earnestness, eagerness, teaching their first lessons. Their focus, for the most part, understandably, is on the lesson, on their own next step or misstep. They aren’t able yet to look up, to teach with, to move in tune, attuned.

And here? Is it possible to be attuned to Other online?

Perhaps this explains our ever-increasing focus on data mining and learning analytics, a practice that has spilled, now, into our classrooms, too. Without our students before us, we seek other markers to tell us how we are doing.

But what do we learn from our data? Only more about the virtual worlds we create, the spaces constructed by our ideas. Parsing the data we mine, we find myriad ways to get more clicks, more compliance, more control to perpetuate what we’ve made.

What has data to do with you? With me? With the children? With us?

Data keeps our head down, focused on our own next step or misstep.

How do poets look up to see, to touch, even across centuries? Robert Bringhurst writes:

Poetry is one among the many forms of knowing, and maybe it is knowing in the purest form we know. I would rather say that knowing freed from the agenda of possession and control – knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being – is what we mean by poetry. (Everywhere being is dancing, 2007)

How do we step in tune with being? Even here.

What is teaching and learning freed from possession and control?

The Alpha and the Omega

“To know psychology,” William James warned at the turn of the last century in his Talks to Teachers “is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers.”  He argues:

To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us.  That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

He continually admonished teachers to expect little from psychology, that the “’boom’ in psychology” has fomented “portentous ideas” and given what he called the docile nature of teachers, especially teachers of young children, they are too ready to put their faith in psychology.  

Today, we acquiesce routinely, unquestioningly, in the advice of experts around us: from psychology, still, with its increasing range of specializations, but now neuroscience, computer science, and even business have “portentous ideas” that offer “best practices” for teachers. Yet the amount of science that a teacher needs to know, James argued, “might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.”  This additional knowledge, he says, “fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles, — to get a stereoscopic view.”

We have looked at the world through the lens of science, monocularly, for so long, now, that it’s hard to even imagine different seeing.

When I was twelve, I went to the optometrist and was fitted with glasses.  I remember my astonishment, walking outside and seeing leaves on trees in sharp outline, not a blurry green, after all, but variegated, subtle, sharp, unspeakably beautiful.

What might come into focus for teaching if we viewed it stereoscopically?

What is the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, this happy tact, this ingenuity? Is it different now more than a century later when, increasingly, the student is not before us? How do we then know what definite things to say and do?

But connecting across distance is not new. How is it that a poet knows? How could John Milton, for example, at a distance even our latest technology has not yet been able to cross, pierce my heart in an instant and shake something in me that matters still.

“Every great poet,” William Wordsworth said, “is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing.”

This alpha and omega: to see the unspeakably beautiful other and to touch, somehow, the living connecting between us.

Why I am here

I am a teacher.

Yet despite more than twenty years of teaching at both secondary and elementary schools, as well as (with a great many reservations, because who am I, after all) teachers through professional development, and, now, in pre-service and post-degree programs (online and off) at university, I do not know how to teach. I seem to know less as the years go by.  I yearn, however, as the world changes at a dizzying pace and the range of diversity in the students before me expands beyond my grasp, and classrooms swell to include the until recently unimaginable online space, to find at last a (meaningful, loving) way (or ways) to teach (deeply, beautifully) in our (for a) changed (changing) world.

What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. For years, I’ve turned toward evidence-based research, to the learning sciences, to neuroscience, to developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, to the possibilities unleashed by an ever-expanding array of tools that technology now offers. Yet despite conscientious effort on my own and in collaboration with many others, nothing has consistently worked, and the work only seems more and more exhausting, less joyful.  

Still, I have known success in small but important ways. Those successes, though – moments when eyes have lit up with learning, when a hush of deep thoughtfulness settled on the classroom, when a buzz of electrified conversation swept through it – have not been set off by evidence-based practice at all, but something else. The poetry of teaching, I’m calling it. I have begun to believe that this is the important foundation for beautiful teaching and learning. More, I worry that with our increasingly relentless focus on scientific approaches, particularly in these spaces created by technology, the poetic, this ineffable, inexplicable, mysterious, beautiful something else, risks being extinguished altogether.

This blog is an attempt to uncover the poetry of teaching, to make it, somehow, visible before it begins to fade from our memories like open meadows and clear running creeks in our crowded cities, like the steelhead salmon from the rivers of my youth, the sweet tang of fresh clean air, the flocks of birds that darkened spring skies.

Here in the open, sharing my tentative, unpolished and fragmentary thoughts, rather than thinking alone, burnishing my own ideas to a fierce sheen, a finished piece to set upon the mantle to gather dust, I hope to uncover poetry, or even something smaller, a burning shard, perhaps, that others could take up, or a lit sliver that might light up a way to see teaching and learning anew.

I imagine the possibility that you might join me here, that we might together fashion a torch and see something else for teachers, for learners. Something beautiful.

Let us start a conversation through comments here or via Twitter: @sbeleznay.