Claws

worry over words
a miser with his money
turning and turning each phrase
each nick and mar memorized
memorialized and cherished
like a prize newly won

What did she say?
What word stressed?

Shades shade each shadow of nuance
What light is cast on what wall



(from Fragments of Water, 2003)

Contact!

Teaching in the Contact Zone is a good cook book on teaching critically. Gaughan provides lots of activities to engage students in a curriculum of "Fight the Power." Many students respond well to these types of activities; it gives them a sense of control over their lives and the world. There is something that can be done. There is a teacher down the hall who does a lot of this kind of stuff; she even started a club where the students collect funds for Darfur and similar causes. It is a great motivator for the students she works with. In addition to explaining the activities well, Gaughan gives good justifications for doing what he does the way that he does it. I totally agree with everything. However, I still am uncomfortable with such obvious attempts at shaping the thinking of the students. Pink Floyd's "We don't need your thought control, teachers leave those kids alone!" keeps replaying in my head. Where is the line drawn between social activism and social control? Is it ok when I agree with the political agenda? Or is it wrong and propaganda only when done by those I disagree with. Yes, there is always an element of manipulation and control: Power is inherent in every human relationship. I wonder how often Gaughan's students simply gave him what he wanted to hear in order to get the grade they thought he would provide. They too know how to use the power to their benefit. Too cynical? Perhaps.

from "Primogenitive Folly"

And where does it lie, this belief in some . . .
higher, something beyond our meager . . .
for food, shelter, sex? What drive coaxes . . .
out along the edges of our lives . . .
to hunt for a definition that . . .
satisfy, like a cat curled purring . . .
a chair? But questions come too late for . . .
. . . sense to make a difference between
the words . . . speak to ourselves and others.
Laughter breaks through the cracks in language; . . .
failure propped up on fragmented nerve . . .
. . . , an audacity which still cannot
stand against the onslaught of the world . . .
The sad remnants of the stories we tell.


(2001-2003)

How to Teach Teachers: How to Know Everything

Reading Smagorinsky and Whitting, “How English Teachers Get Taught,” I become overwhelmed by the difficulty of reducing everything important, and everything is important, into a 15 week syllabus. There is no way everything a pre-service teacher needs to know before teaching can be reduced to a 15-week class. I agree with them that a focused class would be more useful in the long run than a survey course that touches on everything, yet my tendency is to want to include everything. I hope that last week in class a few parameters were laid down, like how many classes per week, how long the classes last, etc. so that I can get an idea about how much I can cram into the syllabus. I am already going to assume that the students will be willing to read quite a bit, but I am not sure what even that means. I remember vaguely my methods class, which was a short series of lessons on various techniques over a few weeks, prior to being thrown into the student teaching classroom. The class that helped me the most was the writing project I weaseled into in 1987 the year before I was first hired. The writing project gave me some things to do, and an outlook that has informed my teaching for the last twenty years. I guess that shows, as Smagorinsky and Whitting argue, for the importance of a balance of theory and practice.

In Abstraction

where we wander
whether through wood or city street
the words call us to task
the very path
the way we walk
the slant of the sun we watch

the air thickens - - we breathe out
as we speak - -the world widens

so talk to me see what we can see
I'm willing to change my speech

action beyond mere acceptance

Rereading the Texts in Our Lives; Our lives as Texts

‘People have no idea what reality is like. Or they’re in their own safe reality.” (Alvermann 2006, p. 23) The problem is that there is no real reality. "Myth exists, but one mus tguard against thinkingthat people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses" (Baudrillard 1994, p. 81). We are all functioning in our “own safe reality.” Even if that safe reality is tainted by cynicism or blind optimism. The touchstone texts these two young people have inculcated into their being play out in both of their adult lives. Simply because one has started to see a text differently than before, does not mean one has any more a sophisticated understanding of the text. It still falls into the turmoil of hermenutical interpretation. If we are written as texts by cultural texts, we are also writing ourselves inside/into the cultural texts. In the Holland et al. text referenced in the introduction, one chapter discusses how people who join Alcoholics Anonymous, adjust the story they tell over time to more fully fit the model of “the story” of the others in AA (specifically the “Book” of the founder). This phenomenon is reflected in the stories El and David tell about themselves. Their stories contain common tropes for the kind of lives they have begun writing for themselves. I am reminded of the Piagetian “Identity v. role diffusion,” where adolescents try on different roles provided by the adult world as they search for their own identity. Identity formation never ends, yet somewhere in the ever changing dance, I believe, there is a core (soul perhaps?) where all the parts we construct rotate. The writing/reading/revisioning/rereading all take part in a ongoing never ending recurssive simultaneous pulse that is us.