After the Foreclosure

I wonder about them.
The family that used to live here.


I wonder where they are now.


Throughout the morning, I have been hiking
through woods
and have come upon this house,
now abandoned.

It is noon when I enter. The weak sun high above.
January.


As I walk through the house
I wonder if the marriage
survived the breakup of the home.
Foreclosure stories
seem to end with the leaving,
but here in what surely must have been a home,
I wonder about what it is they have gone on to
and what they have left behind.

With each step, I feel the awful stresses,
the creaking floorboards
and think of all
that must have kept them
from their beds at night
as they attempted to figure out a way
to stay ahead
To stay even.
To not lose it all.


I wonder about the children.
Are they resettled?
Do they recall this home by the lake?
The staircase they surely bumped down?
The afternoons reading
books beneath the eaves?

Do they wonder about what was left behind?
Do they now imagine someone else riding their bikes?
Their scooters?
Were they too young to even catalog such belongings?



Mostly though, I wonder
about the woman
who used to live here.
The mother.
The wife.
Does she recall the rooms
where she and her husband
made love?
The clawfoot tub?  
The rooms
where she cared for her children?
The nights she ran the steam
to calm a child's whooping cough?
The doors that were slammed
and opened.

All the living squeezed into boxes and packed away.

Is she somewhere else
perhaps even now
recalling the way the light
fell through the kitchen window?
 
It's a communion of sorts.
This documenting.
This lifting of the camera
again and again, hearing
how the the whine of the shutter
catching
disturbs
what was settled.

Ledger

Windows

Aerial View of hike from SP to CP

Abandoned house.

Schools as Settled Households: Musings about Excellence and Teaching

The Way Home. Ringwood, NJ 11.6.10

When I was a child, I often wondered about the lives of the people who had previously lived in the house where I grew up.   I recall talk of a boy who battled leukemia and how his father worked off the tension and perhaps some of the fear by restoring every piece of wood (all walnut) to its original luster.  At that time, cancer was a much hushed illness, perhaps similar in tone to the previous generation who spoke of someone going to a sanitarium because of tuberculosis.  

By the time I came to America and settled into that house—the boy and his father were long gone. Yet, the stories I heard and now recall some 50 years later continue to inform the way I live and love, the people and understandings I value and trust. Home is often so much more than location—be that time or space.  Recently I have been thinking about home and what it might mean and to whom.  I was traveling the other day, heading towards home, and snapped the photograph that tops this post.  Home to me has often been both a location and a presence of mind. Even when the location was not as solid as it is today, the presence of mind has never been fleeting, shabby, flimsy or forgotten.  Home allows me to recall what I cannot forget: that every human matters, that the course of actions I take and fail to take imprint me in ways I will not be able to distance myself from at some later moment, and that each small moment offers the opportunity to demonstrate the ideals I value and have learned in the company of others.

In the course of my professional work, I recently have been asked to think about the question, "What is excellent teaching?"   I know instinctively this excellence is not housed in the single body of the teacher. I think we spend far too much time wondering about the excellent teacher and not enough time wondering about the conditions that gives rise to "excellence".  This is not to say there are no teachers doing valued and fine work, but rather, all of the fine work I have been involved in has occurred in the context of a more extended group and that "excellence" has been locally determined.  

Wendell Berry offers a description that is helpful.  In an essay I recently had published ("Dressing the Corpse: Professional Development and the Play of Singularities"), I made use of Berry's concept about the differences between the technical farmer and the good farmer.  Earlier in the article I had discussed observing a fairly new primary school teacher (Ms. Sheridan) in an inner city. Ms. Sheridan had been "developed" by the school system to deliver a product, not teach. This professional development was done to her in an effort to make her excellent.  I wrote:

Months after meeting Ms. Sheridan, I have occasion to think of her again. It’s quite late at night and my husband and son are each asleep. In the quiet of the house, I sit at the kitchen table reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. His description of the technical and the good farmer momentarily distracts me and I find I am thinking of Ms. Sheridan again. The technical farmer, Berry says, can be made by training, while the good farmer, “is a cultural product; he is made by a sort of training, certainly in what his time imposes or demands, but also he is made by generations of experience” (1977, p. 45).
Berry explains that the essential experience of the good farmer is “tested, preserved, handed down in settled households, friendships, and communities that are deliberately and carefully native to their own ground” (1977, p. 45).  In what ways, I wonder, might schools become similar to these settled households; places where teachers, like Ms. Sheridan, are able to learn from generations of experience so as to inform, invent, complicate, question, redirect, and revise their work native to their own ground?

Instead of inquiring about the excellent teacher (I think this is a hold over of the same mindset that believes in superheroes) as if some prototype might exist, I want to suggest that we ask how we might engender schools to function as settled households native to their own ground.  Excellence, regardless of the mania about standards, is a socially compose construct and does not exist in some finite,  singularly "truthful" manner. What we name as excellent is connected to who we are and are not. 

I deeply believe that excellence, as defined by people in a common place and time, rests not in a single person, although it may find expression through a single person, but is part of a collective experience that is locally realized. Those who have come before us and those who teach and learn alongside us influence the work we do.  The culture of a place is more important than any single individual.  We would be wise to not mistake the "excellent" teacher from the place(s) s/he has worked and the stories that have (in)formed the culture of that work.