An Amorphous Enclosure

hints, inklings, traces
drift toward the edges
of our walls, then disperse
before contact, defining space,
like eddies of cigar smoke
floating in a closed room:

here next to this window
to divine an answer for it all,
I sift the particulates
which cling to the words,
to the daily conversations- -
is that what I heard?
Am I but a whisper
puffed against these walls?

Nothing, Much

Many of the more profound moments in my life are a matter of happenstance. And what is more, they often achieve a level of profundity after much time has passed since the original event occurred.

We reshape the past to better justify our present, which in turn creates our future.

“Look Mr. Neal,” Nick announced, laughing for the first time since Christmas, “I found a dime.” This comment had nothing to do with anything we had been doing in class, which was not a surprise. Nick thought about football. However it was the best literary comment from any of my students that year.

On my wall at work:

“Sometimes all it takes to be happy
Is a dime on the sidewalk.”

-Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser


I don’t have a clue what I am teaching.


The old saw, you have to have a plan or you plan to fail does not work in my classroom. A better saying would be: You can never be lost, if you don’t know where you are going.


My more persnickety colleagues have accused me of teaching nothing. I can accept that: as Jane Yolen wrote, “Nothing is always.”


What bothers me the most about workshops where they sell you prepackaged teaching programs is that there is always a specific goal, an answer, to what they are selling.

There is never an easy answer.

I teach nothing, but I work very hard at it.

“It must be nice to just sit around all day, read, and not teach anything,” the history teacher said to me as she walked by my room and saw me sitting on the floor with my 12th grade students silently reading different books.

Yes, it is.

Can We Build It: Yes, We Can

Finished “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann yesterday as I waited to go through the jury selection process (talk about a socially constructed reality, the justice system is definitely a “reality” outside the norms I inhabit: but that is for later on in this post, or for another day). I read the book because it and the phrase “Social construction of reality” are tossed about quite a bit in the books I’ve been reading and in the doctoral program I was participating in, sort of on the same level as Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development.” And like Vygotsky, actually reading the text from which the phrase originates(?), was enlightening and I discovered more to it than is often discussed. The book was published in 1966 and was a discussion of the origins and shaping of “knowledges” in sociology. It takes the view, like James Gee, that everyone is functioning from an ideology, either tacit or implicit, that determines how that person views the world. Furthermore, these ideologies are created and constantly recreated and modified by the people in these social groups, affinity groups Gee would call them. The belief systems are laid down and created by a society, and are inculcated into children by their primary socializers (parents, significant others), and then further modified by secondary groups. Everyone is involved in an overlapping and nested series of groupings which lead toward the individuals identity inside of all of the groups combined, the identity being slightly different depending upon which group is formost at any given time. As I read the book, I saw connections to Shirley Brice Heath’s “Ways with Language,” Gee, as I already mentioned, and in his use of discourses (both big and little D’s), much of what I can glean from my post-modernist readings, as well as in, “Communities of Practice” by Etienne Wenger, Och’s “Living Narrative,” and Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:” three of the other books I have been plowing through lately.