#SOL16: Covered with Stars

Free Verse (M.A. Reilly)

  "...Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
                Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I'll stand in the doorway
   stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
             my shoulders
                 covered with stars."

                                 Mary Oliver, "Walking Home from Oak-Head," Our World, p 45.

I.

Across these last three months since Rob died, I have cried some days a little, other days more so. But the tears last for a brief duration and then they end. What feels like months of crying is in essence thirty minutes or so.  It is hard to calculate time as these waves of grief feel more out of time than in. And alongside these tears there is also laughter.  My 28 years with Rob taught me to enjoy life, to find absurdity a comfort, and to laugh often.

Bereavement isn't a singular feeling. Like so much of life, bereavement is complex. Yes, sadness for me is potent, and so too is humor and laughter. There is solace in finding small joys in the everyday things that help to frame my life with my son. Devon continues to amaze and delight me and I notice more how many of his mannerism and gestures resemble his dad's.

Losing Rob has not rendered me apolitical. I have strong feelings about the upcoming presidential election and look forward to casting my vote in the NJ primary later today and casting my vote in November. During the last few months of Rob's life we discussed the upcoming election often.  I can recall the many times Rob raised concerns about a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz presidency.

Losing Rob has not stopped me from living each day and now I can anticipate a future albeit quite fuzzy, but nonetheless oddly present and at times exciting. I am learning that I am resilient in ways I simply had no need to test before or to name. Beneath that resiliency is unrealized strength that I am learning to use mostly out of necessity.

II.

Live brilliantly, my husband told me before he died. And at first I thought that meant entering into the largeness of life and being somehow dashing. I thought about the job I passed on in Afghanistan.  Is this what Rob meant?  Is that the brilliant living?

But now I know that isn't it.

In the same conversation when Rob told me to live brilliantly, he also told me,"You draw people to you. You attract others."  At the time I was so disturbed by the diagnosis that his cancer was no longer treatable, that I didn't dwell on his words.  But I remembered them.  It's an odd thing--grief. So many events I don't recall, and yet I can relive the last 6 months of Rob's life in slow motion. When I think about his message to me, I think Rob was telling me that I love easily, that I love fully. There's a brilliance to that. I rarely temper passion and this leads to an optimism about life. I deeply believe in the goodness of people, the goodness of life.

Living brilliantly is more about love and less about doing any particular thing. It's about being present, being a good parent to our son, loving without constraint and remaining open to possibility. In many ways this is how we made our life together.


III.

I offer these words, as slim and incomplete as they might be, in order to say that each person's grief has its own signature, timetable, need and response. For me there are no stages of grief, just as there are no sanctioned ways to feel or be.  I think of grief more as strange attractor, than a stage. For it is oscillation, not linear movement that better describes the last 9 months. And like strange attractors, there is organization to the chaos. In the chaos of grief, love is the force that organizes.

And it is out of love, that understanding develops. In the last week, I am awakening and noticing joy and an optimism I had not named before. The most important gift Rob and I made during our marriage was a deeper definition of love, imperfect love. For it was our imperfection as beings, as husband and wife, as parents that most allowed us to love so boldly, so bravely. We were going to err and there was beauty in letting that happen. It is within the ordinary bits of living and loving that who we are best finds expression.

IV.

Dear Rob,  I have finally arrived home once more, red-cheeked from the roused wind, my shoulders covered with stars. Somewhere in a parallel world I know you are cheering.

#SOL16: Ice Cream and the Widow

(M.A. Reilly, 2014)

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. - Wallace Stevens

I.

It was just a spoonful of ice cream. Häagen-Dazs--coffee--to be precise. I had reached in for ice and stopped short as a rush of anxiety waved over me. For a bit of time, I just stood looking at the container, studying it as if it might reveal some hidden truth.  And then, I was seeing beyond it, recalling it was the last thing I fed Rob three days before he died.

You want food? I asked Rob, so surprised to hear his request and oddly overjoyed. It was midday on Sunday and friends were over. Even though I knew that not eating was a normal part of dying it was so hard for me to honor this.  If you came over next Sunday, one sure thing I would do would be to offer you food and drink. 

I looked at him and noticed that he was nodding his head. I knew he hadn't eaten for more than two weeks and I worried how eating now might make him vomit and then thought about what food he could even swallow. He had a spoonful of ice cream the week before.  

How about some coffee ice cream? I asked knowing it was his favorite. 

Excellent, he told me in a voice that may well have belonged to a British Lord. 

And so I fed him tiny bits of ice cream and he ate just about a large teaspoonful before signaling he was done. 

When Rob came home from the hospital it was mid February. He stopped eating food by the fourth day. He lived another two and a-half weeks.

Simple acts are ladened by memories.

II.

Last night, I closed the freezer door soundly knowing I could not eat, nor could I throw out the pint of ice cream.  For now it just sits there. This is what it is like these days.

To be a widow is to be confounded.

Yet, the difficulty I find in making most decisions is tempered now and then by a stronger need to put my emotional house back in order. I want to decide on this pint but know that tonight this is a battle I will not take on. And so the ice cream remains in its spot in the freezer and I once again am feeling grateful to know somewhat--the limits that test me.

III.

It might surprise you to know that the average widow here in the United States is in her early 50s. I imagined I was much younger than the average and now find that this commonness of age I share with so many others is oddly comforting.

Tonight, as I walk away from the freezer and out of the kitchen shutting the light behind me, I stop for just a bit knowing there are other women, elsewhere, widows just like me, staring into freezers unsure of what next to do. This is a sisterhood born out of death. This is a club no one wants to join, but most will.

Death of the man you loved--the man with whom you marked decades, raised children--this heartache cracks you open while demanding a new birth.  And it is the complexities that cannot be unravelled regardless of effort that humbles me most.

I know so little.

Beauty is born from such vulnerability and love finds expression in that which perplexes us most.

On Brilliance and Necessity and the Problem with an Autonomous Model of Literacy (AKA Common Core)

Empty Lot (M.A. Reilly.  Harlem  2012)

"I love those who yearn for the impossible." - Goethe

I received this tweet early this evening from Heidi Siwak (@HeidiSiwak) that included a link to an important post, Creative Solutions are No Accidents. (Please take a moment to read.)

I stopped what I was doing and read the post and then reread it and then thought: There's such scholarship and generosity--inquiry and curiosity in Heidi's work as a teacher and learner. What I so appreciated in the work and processes Heidi describes is the occasioning of thinking and problem solving, alongside community that she composes. Complexity cannot be caused. At best, it can (sometimes) be occasioned. Such understanding, especially when actualized, represents a major shift in teaching. We move from what should and ought to happen to what might or could happen.

We dwell in possibility (A fairer House than Prose...).
Heidi's work exemplifies such a shift.


Her work reminds of this important shift we also need to be thinking about when working with teachers:

The overt (and perhaps even tiresome) obsession in the U.S. with the Common Core has redirected professional attention and critical resources almost exclusively on the endless naming and renaming of content to be learned. How many ways can we say, "Pay attention to text while reading and writing"? (You can hear the drone even from great distances sounding: Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text. Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text and so on...)  These words and phrases are empty as they are fashioned out of a belief of an autonomous model of literacy instead of recognizing literacies as being inherently ideological.

Brian Street who first coined those phrase (autonomous and ideological) explains:

The ‘autonomous’ model of literacy works from the assumption that literacy in itself – autonomously – will have effects on other social and cognitive practices. The model, however, disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it and that can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal ... The alternative, ideological model of literacy ... offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another. This model starts from different premises than the autonomous model – it posits instead that literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill ... It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, being. Literacy, in this sense, is always contested. (Street, 2000, pp.7-8).

Discerning key differences between autonomous and ideological models of literacy helps us to understand situating teaching as a causal act and understanding teaching as attempts to occasion learning.  Heidi's work (as described in the post) illustrates the creative scaffolding necessary to occasion learning that happens within social practices of the classroom--where 'conceptions of knowledge identity, being' are present and contested.  It's a messy, complex place.

Forgetfulness (M.A Reilly, 2010)

When I read about the intellectual and social spaces Heidi's work with children opens, I remember what it means to teach as a learner, not merely as a player cast in someone's already determined epic. What passes as teaching excellence in these CCSS days is paltry stuff--something akin to cheap magician tricks. How could such mimicry ever escape the paralysis that comes with the philosophical belief that literacies are neutral, universal: Repeat after me: Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text. Close reading. Evidence. Rigor. Complex Text? It is as if meaning of these terms remained universal, unmoving, untouched--not something emerges as it is being made. Bakhtin described such phenomena well when he wrote: “[d]iscourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word” (1981,  p. 292). In so many ways, the resurgence of CCSS certainty is as Bakhtin (1981) describes epic: a poem about the past” told by “a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible” (p. 13).  
In contrast a living impulse describes well the classroom Heidi shares with students as they create and deconstruct--test constraints that confine and liberate. The means to thoughtful inquiry is composed, not copied.

No simulacrum there.

This is the great stuff of teaching--learning.
The trial and error.
The making of failure and more failure and within that the opening of  big, big space where ideas bloom wild and becomes named alongside critique.

Oh, to be a learner there.

Cited Works:

Bakhtin, MM. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Street, B. (2000). ‘Introduction’ in Street, B. (ed.) Literacy and Development: ethnographic perspectives. London, Routledge, pp. 7–8.

As I Lean Back in Josephine's Lawnchair: Design Work, Complexity and School

Please Come Back (M.A. Reilly, 2014, Newark NJ)

Today there's distance in my head. I have been recalling the conclusion to Thomas Friedman's column,  How To Get a Job at Google and thinking about learning and schooling as they are played out at places where I work. Friedman writes:

in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

Each day as I work in inner city school classrooms, the space between Google's template for job hiring success and what gets dished up at school feels continents apart. Perhaps galaxies.

This past year two former teachers left classrooms to work with me in my company.  Each worked at a different public school. Each was considered highly successful, the type of teacher you'd most want for your own kid.  In the last week both have remarked that the work they have composed with teachers and principals since September marks the most significant intellectual work they have done in many years. One tells me:

With the daily mandates to do this or that, the endless scripts, and the control taken from me as a thinker,  I stopped wondering, thinking during the last 5 years I was a teacher. The work had changed so much from the beginning of my career.  My ideas were not valued, nor sought.

As we continue speaking, I realize that many of those Google 'soft skills', including permission to err are part of the work we now do, but interestingly was most often not part of the work required when teaching.  For each, there is considerable loss, not dissimilar to the pain Steve Kowit's captures in "Some Clouds."  Kowit's speaker laments:

I am busy watching things happen againthat happened a long time ago.as I lean back in Josephine's lawnchairunder a sky of incredible blue,broken - if that is the word for it - by a few billowing clouds,all white & unspeakably lovely,drifting out of one nothingness into another.

Like my colleagues, I too have felt a loss when I left college teaching to return to NJ to be a district administrator. The intellectual work, especially the design work that I had done as a professor and previously as an admin was significantly reduced and rarely valued.  Rather, my work more resembled that sad factory worker in Chaplin's Modern Times. I was caught in an input-output model.




So when teachers and admins pause do they not hear from the standards makers, the test makers: "Quit stalling. Get back to work."??

And perhaps that is the shame of all of this.  We have passed on complexity and seized an education that at best tangles every now and then with something slightly complicated--something far less human. We are missing the larger gestalt of learning in order to focus on narrow output of faux-academic success as measured by an endless repetition of similar school reading-writing and mathematics tests.

A möbius strip of sorts.

Update about the New Journal, (Re):Mix

I had a couple of emails from different people interested in the new journal, (Re):Mix.  As this is a work in progress, I wanted to update everyone.

1. Some selections for the journal will be blind peer reviewed (traditional academic text). Authors should indicate a preference for blind peer review in their submission. The article when published will indicate, blind peer review. Academic text will be reviewed by two people.
2. Some selections will not be peer reviewed, such as visual art submissions, poetry, vignettes, and articles where the author requests that it not be peer reviewed.  Also as the magazine emerges, I am thinking that there may be some columns that become standard and these would not be peer reviewed.
3. Recommended length for academic text: 2500 to 10,000 words, APA.
4. The magazine does not have a website as of yet, simply because I hadn't thought that far and I don't know how to do it. If anyone would like to volunteer....
5. The journal will be printed in English.
6. Several wonderful reviewers and editors have been selected. I will be announcing who in about a week.



Call for Submissions for Issue 1.

Call for Submissions for New Progressive Education Journal: (Re):Mix

Updated Information

I am pleased to announce the arrival of a new progressive education journal, (Re):Mix - A Transnational Journal of Artful Teaching & Learning.  (Re):Mix seeks to explore, question, (re)present and challenge depictions of teaching and learning in order to uncover the emerging complexity of artful practice. At a time when teaching, leading, and learning are often situated as simple input-output models, this journal seeks to challenge that understanding by showcasing and juxtaposing works that illustrate artful practices by learners.

(Re):Mix is an on-line, open access journal. Print copies will be available at a cost.

Call for Submissions: Issue 1: Exploring Uncertainty within Artful Practice

For this issue, contributors are asked to consider how uncertainty is elemental to the artful practice of teaching, leading, and learning. Contributors are invited to submit written and visual works (single images and visual essays) that explore, question, (re)present and challenge the idea of uncertainty being a necessary element inherent in artful practices.

Some questions to consider might include:

• What does uncertainty look and/or sound like in your work?
• How does uncertainty influence the work you do as a student, teacher, administrator, activist, mentor?  
• How does meaning emerge in your work?
• What conditions give rise to uncertainty? What conditions inhibit uncertainty?
• What does it mean to be uncertain as a teacher? As a leader? As a learner?
• How do you privilege uncertainty in your work, in colleagues' work, and/or in students' work? 
• Is there a cost to being uncertain?

All who are interested in submitting work for this issue should do so by emailing written (word documents) and/or visual works (please save as jpg) to: maryann.reilly58@gmail.com no later than September 5, 2011. Please indicate the issue in the subject line of your email.  Any questions may be directed to me at the same email.

Submission of Artwork:

1. Email jpg images to maryann.reilly58@gmail.com
2. Include CONTACT INFORMATION:

YOUR NAME
ADDRESS
EMAIL and Twitter contact (if you have one)

3. Include title of work(s) submitted
4. Indicate if your submission is only for cover consideration or if it can be used in the journal.
5. Submit work no later than September 5, 2011.

I look forward to exploring this topic with you and learning from you.

Mary Ann Reilly

A mock up of a possible cover to issue 1.

The Slow Fuse of Possibility: Why Race to the Top Is a Maimed Thing

Occasioning learning is not to be confused with causality. Whereas simple matters can often be attended to through linear methods, complex learning resists such methodology.  This in itself was not a new "discovery".  What was an "ah-ha" moment  (thanks to my colleague, Kelly Harte)  was the hypothesis about why some of us continuously teach "basics" and resist/refuse to "teach" more complex content and how this same constraint of thought informs educational policies at the federal and state (at least in NJ) level.

During my 25+ years as an educator,  I have heard some colleagues explain that they cannot move on to more sophisticated concepts and processes as the students have not mastered the simple understandings that are seen as prerequisites to more complex understandings. Teaching students how to solve a simple algorithm, requires something pedagogically different from creating a set of conditions or engagements whereby students are able to compose more complex expressions, that may well (and often do) include simple algorithms. Occasioning requires a very different set of thinking protocols on behalf of the teacher as there is no single outcome. Occasioning produces possibilities, not certainties.

Teaching the "basics" and situating the basics as simple, not complex learning-- dulls possibility. That is the true educational crime; the long term horror. Emily Dickinson wrote, "Imagination lights the slow fuse of possibility."  If we were serious about an educational revolution we would privilege the imagination and dwelling. Our metaphors to describe our intentions might well include these words, rather than words like, "race" or "top."

In these new times, when we are posing questions (I hope) and composing answers to educational challenges I would recommend we listen to poets more so than education tsars, like Arne Duncan, who are replicating input-output systems such as Race to the Top.  Duncan's rhetoric posits educational issues and couched dilemmas within the confine of causality. Problem x can be solved by "scientifically based research" solution y.  The predetermined constraints, such as accountability systems based on value added analysis, determine the parameters of the field well ahead of any reality. In many ways this rhetoric rests on the same logic that informs teachers who only teach "the simple basics".

Input.

Output.

These methods work well for simple situations.

The costs of teachers only teaching the basics are well discussed, especially in popular press. Just see last week's LA Times for an example.  Less discussed is the immeasurable costs associated with Race to the Top.  I would suggest that both situations (teaching only the basics and Race to the Top) are simply too much to bear.

Rather than listen to the educational pundits, like Duncan, I would offer we turn an ear to the poets and philosophers. Consider William Carlos Williams who admonished the poets in "Deep Religious Faith." He closed the poem, writing: "Shame on our poets:/they have caught the prevalent fever/impressed by the "laboratory"/they have forgotten/ the flower!/which goes beyond all/laboratories./They have quit the job of invention./The imagination has fallen asleep/in a poppy cup."

These are wise words--words we could hold close, and ones that might inform our decisions. Imagine educational policy that privileged the imagination?  How different schools might be.  Or perhaps, John Dewey's wisdom might be dusted off and offered for our consideration. In response to the question about What is the matter in education? John Dewey answered:

It lies, I think, with our lack of imagination in generating leading ideas. Because we are afraid of speculative ideas, we do, and do over and over again, an immense amount of dead, specialized work in the region of "facts." We forget that such facts are only data; that is, are only fragmentary, uncompleted meanings, and unless they are rounded out into complete ideas-- a work which can only be done by hypotheses, by a free imagination of intellectual possibilities--they are as helpless as are all maimed things and as repellent as are needlessly thwarted ones" (Dewey, 1937, Philosophical Review, 36, 1-9, from an address to the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, Harvard University, 15 Sept. 1926).

If we were serious about redesigning education we would understand that the role of the federal government and state government is to occasion local brilliance, not constrain it.

Shame on our politicians. Impressed by the laboratory, they have forgotten the imagination.

Your Mirror Lies. August, 2010.