Hope and History Rhyme

The last month has been one of compulsive reading. Summer always is, for teachers, I imagine. I also imagine that usually it comes without quite so many obsessive updates of news sites. I took off from monitoring the traumatic events in Israel for a few days to go camping, and now that I am back, with a trip to Israel only 10 days away when I can finally be there, I’ve decided to stop worrying the lines of newsprint ragged in hypnotic frenzy. From now on, I will read this war in poetry only. A promise that I know I will not keep, that I do not even want to, but that will nonetheless temper the stories of death with hope.

From “The Cure At Troy” – Seamus Heaney

Human beings suffer.

They torture one another.

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a farther shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,

The utter self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children

Yehuda Amichai

God has pity on kindergarten children.

He has less pity on schoolchildren.

And on grownups he has no pity at all,

he leaves them alone,

and sometimes they must crawl on all fours

in the burning sand

to reach the first-aid station

covered with blood.

But perhaps he will watch over true lovers

and have mercy on them and shelter them

like a tree over the old man

sleeping on a public bench.

Perhaps we too will give them

the last rare coins of compassion

that Mother handed down to us,

so that their happiness will protect us

now and in other days.

By Frode Grytten. En av mitt elever i norge at overlevet Uttøya har postet dette i dag. 

Posted today by a former student of mine who is so much more than a survivor of Uttøya. I translated it below.

orda overlever ein 9mm glock

kjærleiken er kraftigare enn ei 500 kilos bombe

å halde hender er mektigare enn ladegrepet

eit lite kyss er viktigare enn 1500 sider med hat

eit vi er så mykje meir enn eit eg

Words survive a 9mm Glock

Love is stronger than a 500 kilo bomb

To hold hands is stronger than the loading grip

A little kiss is more important than 1500 pages of hate

A we is so much more than an I.

We Interrupt This War

We interrupt this war for doctors to heal,

teachers to teach, and students to learn.

We interrupt this war to marvel at sunsets,

listen to music, and to laugh.

We interrupt this war for poets to rhyme, sculptors to

chisel, and writers to paint pictures with words.

We interrupt this war to plant tomatoes, mow

the grass, and to smell the roses.

We interrupt this war to feed the hungry, build

new schools, and to stamp out ignorance.

We interrupt this war to clean up the air, save

the whales and to find a cure for cancer.

We interrupt this war to rebuild New Orleans,

tickle babies and for world peace.

We interrupt this war for PTA meetings, band

concerts, and high school graduations.

We interrupt this war for Girl Scout Cookies,

church bake sales, and the Special Olympics.

We interrupt this war for Disneyland, the

World Series, and the Super Bowl.

We interrupt this war for Halloween candy,

Thanksgiving Turkey, and 4th of July fireworks.

We interrupt this war for Hanukkah,

Christmas and Kwanza.

We interrupt this war to bring sons,

daughters, sisters and brothers home.

We interrupt this war to hear a message from

Our Sponsor: THOU SHALT NOT KILL

-Cappy Hall Rearick

Countdowns

We’ve all got countdowns going in our lives. Right now, I’m four days away from being able to chew hard food, one week away from a camping trip, three weeks until I fly to Israel, 45 days away from the first day of school, and one year away from finishing Teach for America. However, none of those timelines concern me seriously right now.

The only countdown that I’m really following is this: the countdown on my phone every time Red Alert! Israel tells me that a siren has gone off in Israel announcing that a rocket is on its way over from Aza, and that Israelis have 15 seconds to reach shelter. I pause in my day as I imagine a rush towards shelters, and those caught out in the open (because, let’s face it, who would ever have dreamed that rockets from Gaza could reach Zichron Yaakov? That’s like Cuba bombing New York!) flinging themselves to the ground over their children. I come to, to find myself absentmindedly reciting strange mixtures of Psalms and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems on serenity. My facebook feed is filled with people’s comments about sleeplessness, advice on how to stay safe, and memes about life under rocket fire. My aunt sent us this email:

The kids are fine, they are a bit traumatized and the younger ones keep on asking us if the sirens are a false alarm. (they are not). The first night A slept with M in the mamad (sealed room), that was the only way we could get him to sleep. He's on his way to a tiyul shnati in the north as I write these words. M's school was cancelled today as they are in caravans and there is no shelter there. She will be spending the morning with her abba at work. The metal shutters in our sealed room will remain closed until this is over.  I am at work, looking at all the signs pointing people to the sealed room in my work. In a nutshell, life goes on and we are trying to keep up with the routine as much as possible. It will take a more than a few rockets to get us down. Am Yisrael Chai!!!

Her strength encourages me even as I freak out at my young cousins’ confusion.

So why don’t I turn off my phone, get off facebook, stop checking my email, and just focus on my research on agency in education that I’m meant to be doing? I’m in America, I don’t need to know this. I don’t need to have my day interrupted constantly by alarms (over 200 rockets were fired at Israel yesterday).

But I do. I need to know, and this is how. If I went by the New York Times and Huffington Post headlines, Israel has decided to “Hit Key Hamas Targets in Gaza Offensive”, which has “set off the heaviest fighting between Israel and Hamas since…” No note is made of the fact that Hamas has been shelling Israel since last week. No comment that Israel gave them 48 hours to stop sending rockets over that targeted Israeli civilians, and then another 48 hours after that of bombing civilians without check because they thought there was a chance that Egypt might intervene. In fact, the New York Times is annoyed because Israel warns Gazan targets by phone and leaflets that they’re about to bomb, and the Gazans don’t always listen. You see, “often, as in the Khan Younis case on Tuesday, people die in any case, because they ignore or defy the warnings, or try to leave after it is too late. And, of course, sometimes bombs and missiles do not hit the building at which they are aimed.” Unlike the Gazan rockets, which are aimed straight at civilians. Do you see the hypocrisy? When the IDF misses their mark, civilians die. When Gazan terrorists hit their mark, civilians die. How can the first be condemned and the second ignored? Did you know that Israelis have spent the past few days cowering in bomb shelters, or did you only find out there’s a war on when headlines framed Israel as the aggressors? What does the world mean, proportional response? How about an effective response that ends the rockets for good, ensuring safety for everyone and peace for a stretch of future?

I have seen lots of articles, blog posts, and facebook statuses by people who impress me with their yearning for peace. Muslims who disapprove of hateful comments towards Jews, Israelis posting from their bomb shelter hideouts that they hope that Gazan civilians are fine, Jews denouncing revenge and Muslims condemning kidnapping and Arab teens reacting to price tag vandalism attacks by rebuilding an ancient Jewish synagogue with the Jewish teens from a nearby village and both groups deciding that our shared upcoming fast day, the 17^th of Tammuz that falls on Ramadan, will be a mutual fast for peace. These give me hope; surely most of the world is like this, and not crazed fanatics of hatred?

I’m sure that everyone else embroiled in this mess feels the same urgency I do, to make sure that everyone knows that we and our friends feel enormous concern for the safety of every single human being in the region whatever their identity, to make sure the militants in our identity group know that there are good people in the other group, to make sure that the world knows that our family and friends are being attacked, and to balance this all with obeying the maximum limit of posts and comments and texts and conversations on one topic consistent with politeness. At the end of the day, we all crave the same thing: peace, the peace that comes now, that we were born for, that we've been singing in old Israeli folk songs hackneyed with age and brittle in disappointed meaning. But still, we sing for peace.

Revenge is Wrong and I'm an Idiot for Saying So

There’s a rather special used bookstore in Columbus, that I usually stop at in my first afternoon home for a vacation. Half-Price Books is where I grew up. This summer I picked up my regular $1 novels, classics, the young adult novels I’ve started rereading in an effort to ever-better understand my students, my feminist theory, and also a new genre I’ve taken to reading: teaching books. The one that I’m reading now has me racking my mind as I think back on last year’s mistakes and planning for next year’s work.

Literacy with an Attitude, by Patrick Finn, borrows heavily from Paulo Freire’s ideas to get kids who may have oppositional identities, which lead them to resist mainstream oppressive American culture and the schools that teach it, reading to resist and writing to resist. I read the first half of the book with a neck heavily cricked from nodding; I see my kids in his descriptions of working-class schools and all the working-class pedagogy laid upon their shoulders.

The second half of the book describes what teachers can do to change this. To invest students in school without making it seem a betrayal of their community, to teach students not to be obedient but to challenge. I’m reading the chapters looking back over my shoulder, sighing and grinning at scenes that could have come straight out of my classroom. Here are some of the moments that I found and want to change next year:

Finn discusses gatekeeping—refusing to engage with a student’s content until they have mastered convention. I think I was rather good about prizing expression over mechanics, but it’s the sort of thing one can never stop telling oneself to regard. Gatekeeping can also include telling a student what’s important in their expression. It immediately put me in mind of A, an accomplished raconteur from my first semester, and Q, a kid who can get going like a revivalist preacher when he’s wound up, and how I would hold up a hand and say, “thanks, but let’s get back to the first point you made, the one that was actually connected to our topic…” Obviously those boys were also trying to interrupt the class and grab a laugh, but I do think I need to intentionally ponder what I shut out from class discourse and what I consider valuable.

Something of which I was exceedingly proud was the way I had students bring their own lives into the classroom, discussing how they would have reacted or what they thought of situations that cropped up in history. Yet I think I need to be more explicit in asking them to connect their own lives to the history. Their essays in second semester allowed them to do this, but I need a clearer connection day-to-day. Hm. Also, the fact that I have to come up with brand-new ideas for psychology leaves me a bit wobbly, but I’m working on it.

A moment that I saw clearly mirrored in my own classroom from the book was a teacher whose class went off the rails on debate, but who viewed such expression as invalid. Now, there was a glorious point this past year when my kids erupted into a fantastically passionate debate on immigration, and another class broke into fierce discussion of racism in America. In both cases I kept them raising hands, and did all I could to have them responding to each other, not just shouting their own opinions. Yet, after reading this book, I realize that the fact that I set a time limit on the debates, closing it off after twenty minutes so that we could return to our class schedule, meant that I effectively capped something the kids were passionate about. I should have given them paper and told them to write out their opinions as a way to harness their ideas into writing practice, and allowed them the expression that they were still hungering after from the debate.

There’s something that has been lingering uneasily in my mind only popped into clarity after reading Literacy with Attitude. My students wrote essays last year assessing revenge in connection with the atom bomb. Many of them discussed how revenge is right, revenge is just, it’s only fair. I read their essays with aghast superiority, giving them credit, of course, if they expressed their views well, but internally shocked by what I saw as their moral degeneracy. Later that month, one kid smacked another for breaking his headphones, and told me it was okay, revenge was fair, he’d written about it in his essay. This prompted a response that I still cringe to think back upon. I told him, and the entire listening class, that revenge is wrong, it’s childish, it’s evil (can we ever say it enough? Until the grotesque, inhuman murderers of Muhammed Abu Khdeir hear?), and that those who supported it in their essays would grow out of it some day to be ashamed of themselves.

I do believe that revenge is wrong. I do believe that it shows littleness of human spirit. But the way I denounced it in class completely devalued the expression that my students had put into their essays. It told them that they could write as well and as much as they wanted; my opinion, stated verbally with none of the editing that they had poured into their essays, was more legitimate than theirs. It told them that their community, which they had spoken of as valuing revenge, and their parents, many of whom were quoted in essays in support of revenge, were immature and morally impaired. I cannot think of a better way to tell them that they come from wrongness, and I don’t think, at all, that it made a difference. Not one kid was going to fold their hands and say, “oh, okay, Ms. W thinks it’s bad, so I’m not going to get revenge again.” No, they looked at me and thought, “her white ass has no clue what it’s talking about, and maybe she can rely on all the stuff she’s blabbing about like authority and dialogue, but at the end of the day, this is the only way that works.” If I’d treated their opinions with respect and their sources with dignity, they might have been more open to the questions I asked them while they were writing and in the margins of their essays. But my soapbox shattered the illusion of conversation with one blow—this was a monologue, not a dialogue, and they were meant to be the receptive, docile hearers. Next year, I need to watch for this.

Don’t get me wrong. I made many more mistakes than these. But I’m peeling back the layers of them piece by piece as I plan, and these, connected with literacy and empowerment as they are, strike me as some of the most interesting and what I am most passionately concerned with fixing.

If I drew a graph, this is what it would look like.

By the way, I’ve been at home for the past week, and received a revelation from my father. He just found out, while responding to a question by some guy writing an article about an article that mentions his article, that the guy named a graph he (my father) invented after him. It's cool, he drew one for me, it's a graph with no C4's, C6's, or C10's, but the point is, that we have a family graph. We are very proud. And my genetic geek credentials just shot up a thousandfold.

Teacher Summer

I walked out of school last Thursday pleased to have finished my last day. That’s right; while the rest of you have visions of teachers chilling on beaches during their summers, we’re actually at school planning our curricula for next year, interviewing teachers to join our department, and boning up on content so that we’ll have what to teach when our students roll through the door in the fall.

I left the school fairly ecstatic that my vacation is starting. I imagined a summer that looked entirely like this:

And this:

And lots of these:

Instead, it’s shaping up to look like this:

I’ve got a new prep next year. Psychology, regular and IB. As every member of my family has helpfully reminded me, in high school I stomped up to the Social Studies teacher and told him that psychology was a bunch of new-age gabble-babble, and he should offer AP Euro instead of Psych. But now that I’m preparing to teach it I find a new enthusiasm coming over me. People and the decisions they make are so darn interesting.

My spare time, when I’m not poring through psychology books, planning units and finding sources, are spent on my three summer masters classes in teaching, and writing a curriculum unit on human agency for my Charlotte Teacher’s Institute fellowship. That’s right, most of this summer is actually going to be a welter of research and writing. Teachers have helluva lot of homework. Like the kids, I think I should get paid for doing it, but hey, nobody listens to students—why should they listen to teachers?

Lest that not be enough to keep me occupied, I just had gum surgery. Last summer, while living in Hell, Oklahoma, undergoing the psychological manipulation that TFA calls “Institute,” I picked up the nasty habit of grinding my teeth to siphon off stress. One year away and a blissful two semesters among schoolchildren who have much better human sensibilities than the the TFA Institute staff, I have kicked the stress, but the tooth-grinding habit remains. (Y’all TFAers who’ve told me you share the tooth-clenching quirk, see a periodontist pronto). So now I’m hopped up on pain meds, hoping that my postings in my masters class forums are not in any way exaggerated or psycho.

So, to sum up my summer:

·      New psychology preps

·      Master’s classes

·      Curriculum writing

·      Gum surgery

If one more person tells me how lucky teachers are to have summers off, I will kick them in the face. No worries, I can recommend a good periodontist.