#SOL16: What Grief Teaches

Rob in ICU last New Year's day. He would die two months later.

Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are. 

                                                 -José Ortega y Gasset

I.

In  the years I taught writing I did not know that it would save my life. I never imagined. I wish I could go back to those many students I taught and say, Listen carefully. Writing might save your life one day. Forget the assignments. Throw away the how-to books. Skip the tests. Write because you have something tugging at your sleeve and you cannot name it. Not yet.

But perhaps I overstate. My love for hyperbole has gotten the best of me. Writing never saved me.

Wrong verb.

Let me try again.


II.

What I did not know as my husband was dying was that writing would be a conduit for opening possibilities. In times of sickness and stress, space collapses. Orientation becomes confused. Last year we lived more like Edwin Abbott's Flatlanders. We were lost in this 3-dimensional world. In those dark days, light could not find us. It could not move up or down, for there was neither. We were more acted upon than acting.

Then, writing helped to reshape, rename, and illuminate the moment where I stood--showing me the top of my own two feet planted on terra firma. Giving me dimension. At first it was the compulsion to name what was happening as my husband's illness, hospital stays, and compounding medical issues gathered weight. Against the myriad of changes, writing helped me to say what I was often too frightened to hear. A lot of this writing I kept private as I did not want to share doubts with Rob. Hope is such a fragile thing. But as his illness grew graver and his touch with reality loosened, I began to record thoughts and share them here on this blog.

I so needed you and you heard me.

You listened when my own husband was too far removed from reality to bear witness. Rob was preparing himself for his own death. He was tinkering at an edge I could not see or visit. The distance between life and death begins well before the last breath is made. As he would later tell me, just a couple of days before his death, "I have figured out how to cross over."

And he did. 

Even now there are moments when his leaving, his death, catches me by surprise. 


III.

As winter edged into spring last year, I wrote because I could see no future. None. I had more energy than sense. Saying the impossible helped to rid my body of pain. In those days, I was more pain than flesh. I wrote to name what was just outside the reach of my fingers. Throughout the spring and summer I was unable to generate a single daydream of a possible life for myself. It was as if I was trapped inside a TV network that had signed off for the night. Instead of a random show playing, there was only a test pattern.

A holding pattern. 

Regularly scheduled life would resume sometime. Later.

I wrote to shatter that screen.


IV.

By fall I could imagine.  Perhaps the many months of painting and drawing and writing helped give shape to darkness. Perhaps the act of making, lit up the corners and bid me to be courageous enough to be present.  

And now with winter upon us I am coming almost full circle. 

The nights in late December are deeper and the wind more biting than I recall from a year ago. It is bracing. Lively. 

When a love dies, innocence dies too. I still write most days. I make marks with paint and pen, pencil, too. And I have learned that this pain I have named is not unique. Grief finds expression in our lives, as does joy and all that comes between. 

V. 

There is no future--just what we imagine and hold up, now and then as truths. And sometimes these truths become embodied. Each day there is a life to make. Each breath says, I am becoming. Like these digital marks I lay down with the press of my fingers, life is more about what we make and less about what gets made. This is what Rob's death has helped me to learn. I am what I make, what I do. 

Years ago, Thomas Merton explained that "[s]olitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it." 

VI. 

Mostly I write to deepen the present. I chose to live deeply, intentionally. Even at my saddest, I knew that running would ill serve me. 

Stand in the pain. Be the pain. Name it. 

On that cold February morning when we learned Rob was dying, he commanded me to not hide myself away. A year later, I am like Thoreau's understudy and I know Rob would approve. This year, I too went to the woods to live deliberately. I thought grief was the absence of a future. What I could not know then as I do now is that what we hold in our own hands is what is most essential--not for what it is and isn't, but rather because we claim it.

I am responsible for this life I am making.  

VII.

I wonder how it was possible that a mere hour after learning he would die in the matter of days, Rob knew the exact words I would most need to hear. Live brilliantly, he told me. For months these words shifted, took on new meaning as I emerged from the hold of grief. Now, I understand that living brilliantly is what I have been holding in the palm of my hand. 

To write is to savor the here--the now--to embrace the responsibility for your life. 

There's Little School (Re)Form without Language Invention: A #Rhizo15 Post

Learner as Knowmad (Reilly, 2012)

I. Learner as Knowmad

We're driving in the car when Rob tells me our son is composing a first-person shooter (FPS) video game based on the science of parallel dimensions. I'm told that he intends to limit the weapons in order to level the playing field. Each player will have the same physical weapon, kitted out in the same fashion.

Why is he doing this? I ask.
He wants to study the sociology of FPS when the playing field has been leveled, Rob explains. 

And as we drive, I begin to wonder what emerges in such play? How does the practice of shifting into and out of parallel dimensions influence strategy? What happens to the nature and definition of team when dimensionality is in play? What happens to the understanding of individual when dimensionality is not just an interesting physics problem but a potential that can be realized? How is it that my 16-year-old who has never formally studied physics knows how to make such a thing? Where has he wandered so that he might compose such understandings of multiple universes? How does he understand such worlds?

I'm thinking about this in light of the #Rhizo15 discussion of late about the nature of content and the role of teacher, and the idea of community. I'm wondering about the play between content that gets produced and content that gets consumed and if such play doesn't help us to understand the co-specifiying nature of meaning making and becoming. I'm wondering how our understanding of teaching and learning is disrupted when we think about our children who are connected to a infinite world of influence, friendships, arrangements--where just asking is as natural as breathing and so they ask often and in doing so learn actively. To live in their world is to experience random juxtapositions where content and form are linked, where community is better understood as affinity groups that form and clear as needed.

Teacher as Time Traveler (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

II.  Teacher as Time Traveler

In our children's world, the instability of our titling becomes clearer--shows us more acutely the limitations of thinking roles, such as teacher or student, held steady. For is my son not the teacher in one instance and the learner too?  Is he not the player and the teammate too? Is he not the boy who abandons what he starts and finishes what he makes? Is it not true that a teacher he may need is one he's never met and one he's tutored and one he'll need for just a moment and himself? Is he not also the producer and consumer in so threaded a tangle that to know one is to be the other? Is he not contrary?

Is it not also possible that the role of teacher is too causal for this world and has limited reach? My son's world is one of connections and learners are teachers who time travel. They are knowmadic, for nothing holds steady, here. This is a world of becoming. There are no traces to follow, just maps that get made.

Thinking about this makes me wonder where inside the classrooms we are composing today does such fluid learning and becoming get privileged?  We must keep close to the heart the understanding that being is not equivalent to becoming. It never has.

Community as Rhizome (Reilly, 2012)

III. Community as Rhizome

Motion slows the passage of time and the titles we used to fix time--hold it steady are less orientable and far less accurate in the worlds our children are composing. There causality has limited play at best. Community is not defined by who joins, but rather by who plays. And play is not limited to participation based on what we can see or what we think we know.

Rather than classrooms inside buildings separated from the towns and cities where they reside--think assemblages formed by plateaus that are interconnected and breakable at every point of contact. We might think such communities are fragile.  They are not.  Rather they are non-orientable and to many of us, feel foreign.  Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain, ‘Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau’ (p. 22).  Learners in such affinity groups move horizontally and by lines of flight that cut stratification, clear over-coded space.

Think middle, not edges.


IV. Less (Re)Form, More Invention

School (re)form requires language invention.  How we name is how the world appears. That which we have no language for does not exist. Language invention will allow us to stop replicating models of learning that are causal. "I teach. You learn," does not serve us, or our children, very well.

And so, when we continue to understand teacher and student as separate roles located in distinct silos, our naming fails us. When we equate content with something set and proffered to all, our naming fails us. When we orient learning time to starts and stops signaled by the proverbial bell ringing, our naming fails us. When we understand physical classrooms and school buildings as community definers, our naming fails us. When we equate success with answering  predetermined and mass produced questions correctly and quickly our naming fails us.

In the learning spaces we most need, learning is already happening. No one is waiting for us to show up, unless we have forced them. There, learners are becoming not through some sequential development toward a stated standard--some state of being, but rather through a dynamic flow with self and others.

Here's the shift we most need to grasp: There's nothing to prove.  Becoming "produces nothing other than itself" (p.238). That's it. 

Being, Becoming: Ed Standards in 2015, Oh My!

Coming through the Rye (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I. Being Well Educated

When we ask, "What does it mean to be well educated in 2015?" there is an underlying belief that being is inherently valuable.  But is it?  Is your understanding of being well educated synonymous with being well informed about present events that are always emerging?  Is becoming knowledgeable a laudable disposition to engender at school?  Given the current push for all things Common Core, is there even time available for such knowing?  Is being well educated a matter of passing the state reading, writing and mathematics high stakes assessment your state and/or country procures and provides to schools to administer to children and teens?  After all the folks who gave us the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and its accompanying tests make a rather bold and one might be tempted to say, laughable, claim. They write:

The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.  (from official site, found here)

Really? Can success at college, career, and life be based on the acquisition of a determined set of skills and 'knowledge'?  Can the complexity of becoming be rendered simple and if so, can one actually still be becoming?  Is success ever predictable based on a single set of test results?

II. Becoming

Okay, such claims are easy to debunk.  So, let's shift our focus for a moment. What happens to your thinking if the word, being is deleted and instead becoming is substituted? Instead of being well educated, we wonder how we are becoming and what that means now and now and now...

Every moment unfolding is the learning. 

Does such a shift in time alter your focus or occasion your revaluation of what is privileged when we think about learning?  Becoming does not deny content, intent, or happenstance.  I think of this shift as an invitation to reevaluate the logic of naming what is to be known, of relying on predetermined bits of knowledge that come from a static list of educational standards proffered by a group of people.

Folks, it's the Committee of Ten all over again.

Is this what we want for our children?  Is this the stuff that leads to informed citizenry, that is representative of learning?  Is such a process really going to ensure our kids' life-long success as the CCSS writers insist?

Does the shift from being to becoming open intellectual, social, or spiritual spaces?  Does such a shift help you linger in possibilities, as opposed to being rooted in named and known certainties?

These are not small questions and they are ones we do not entertain when we offer commentary about what it means to know at school.  For all our bravado, we rarely talk about what must be talked about when we talk about learning at school.

The logic of education standards has no place in this century.  They belong to a time when information was scarce and procurement was the only expression of power.


III. Who's Edward Snowden?

What prompted this bit of inquiry was a retweet I viewed this morning by Will Richardson of  link to a video of John Oliver's 'insanely brilliant' interview with Edward Snowden that Gary Stager initially posted.  I was able to watch the video this afternoon and I hope you do too.  I then sent the link to my 16 year-old-son who I'm pleased to say knows a whole lot more about Edward Snowden and US surveillance via the Patriot Act than those depicted in Oliver's show.

What caught my eye initially after the mention of Snowden,  was the bracketed comment, "Not on the #ccss however." This language gave me pause as I heard the sassiness of it.

But it goes well beyond sassy.

Is it school-worthy for students to be able to contemplate what the US government has allowed itself to do with regard to domestic and foreign surveillance via the Patriot Act?  Is becoming an informed citizenry an apt educational outcome? Why would we ever want to limit such definitions of knowing ahead of time? Whose interest are being served by constructing school as places where children demonstrate that they too can name what has been named for them, most often by a slim elite group of others?

Here in the US, we are spending billions to implement and assess student learning based on a set of reading, writing and mathematics standards that still insist in 2015 on limiting naming what must be learned at each grade level across 13-years (K-12) by every child to what a few people who met in 2009 thought to be important.  Is such naming logical or does the very method of a group of privileged people naming--limit learning to what was perhaps profitable when information was scarce?

The logic of education standards as de facto expressions of what MUST be learned by all students across 13 years as measured by a single set of assessments is faulty and we should reject it and reject those elected officials who support such a paltry stance of learning.

Joy (#SOL 15, Day 22)

Kindergartener's using sound boxes 

I was reminded recently that learning to read and write in kindergarten is hard work. I had the pleasure of working with a teacher, modeling some ways to support emergent readers and writers. Specifically, she asked for assistance with using sound boxes and teaching sight words. She selected two children and I was able to show her how I use Elkonin boxes (sound boxes) in order to slow down kindergarten children's articulation of words so they can segment sounds to facilitate reading and writing words.

Within a minute or so, the children had the hang of it. They were problem solving by segmenting CVC words into sounds and pushing each sound into a box and then trailing a finger under all of the boxes to blend the sounds into the initial word.  We next transitioned to writing words using the sound boxes as needed. The children were eager to try this, so we had a go of it. If they could write the word without assistance of the sound box, they did. If not, they used the sound box in order to hear the separate sounds--most often the short vowel. We worked for about 6 minutes or so and they had a substantial list of words with several short a and short o words,  and two short e (often tricky) words.

This was joyful and successful work. I love to watch children learning.

Noticing What Tugs at Your Sleeve (#SOL15, Day14)

American Bus Stop: No Child Left Behind (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I.

I was thinking about teaching children to write and how very different our expectations are for them as opposed to the expectations writers set for themselves. I was reading an interview with Ian McEwan and in response to the question--'How does a germ of an idea evolve into a novel?"-- McEwan said he's "a great believer in hesitation." 

Hesitation?

Yes, hesitation.

He added:

I think there’s nothing wrong with pausing when you’re not sure how to proceed. And in that rather dreamy, floating kind of mental state (one which I long for once I’ve started a book and can no longer have it) I go where my reading and thoughts and travels take me. 

II.




The ELA Common Core State Standards is rooted in certainty. And that's a problem as life--yours, mine and our children--is clearly not rooted in certainty. For the next few weeks, 900,000 students in NJ will take the PARCC--the single measure touted to be a next generation (whatever that means) examination that will let us know (perhaps by next October) how ready our children are for some imagined future. 

There will be no hesitating on the PARCC.  It's all about extracting information quickly, perhaps even thoughtlessly. 

When I read the Standards and notice how its being implemented in schools, especially with younger children, I cringe. It's ironic that with all the references to being college and career ready, there's no mention in the CCSS of privileging a "dreamy, floating kind of mental state" that McEwan alludes to. 


None.

Nada.

I'm not trying for humor here. I know this is serious. How time is allotted at school and who does the allotting matter, especially if we want children to develop into thinkers, doers, makers.  For  it is often in that dreamy floating mental state, McEwan alludes to, that thinking happens. Equally important, it's the agency to choose that matters too. 

Take a moment and think about schools and how writing is taught. There's often little time, if any, dedicated to floating when the end products have already been determined before young writers have even had a moment to consider words, interests, or notice the phrase that tugs at their sleeve.

Noticing, attending to what tugs at our sleeves ought to be a measure worth a writer's time.

Learning That Gets Made in 2nd Grade (#SOL15, Day 5)

Stop Holding Us Back (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

I.

I spent yesterday teaching small groups of second graders from Newark Public Schools as their teachers and other visitors looked on. These are children I have taught before. We have shared good books together and so the work unfolds in ways that are both predictable and not. During the morning session, one group of children partner-read The Emperor's New Clothes and then independently wrote responses to three questions. The teachers and I reviewed their work during lunch. Rather than traditional guided reading, this type of guidance focuses more exclusively on comprehension. Reading their written responses allows me to see some of the confusions the children have about the text--and it is a complicated text to read--as well as what they seem to understand. This knowledge helps me to plan for a possible conversation the children and I will have after lunch.

II.

It's 1:30 in the afternoon when I meet with the children again and what is most noticeable, and not surprising, is that all of them from time to time offer responses that are not rooted in the actual text at all, but rather represent truths they know and want to apply. We talk for an hour and the children work hard to determine why the emperor continues parading without his clothing after he hears the child say he is wearing no clothes.  Edmund offers that the emperor doesn't believe the child. Juliana says that's not true and is able to locate in the text where the emperor directly states that he believes the child. This prompts all of us to reconsider what else might be influencing the emperor to continue doing something that is at best embarrassing. This is a challenging question and one that has caused each child to ponder what they know, what they know to be true about the emperor, and to consider what might be worse than parading without clothing.

"Why would the emperor do that?" asks James with a certain amount of indignity.
Why indeed? I think.

III.

In all the boisterous talk that follows, it is the quiet utterance that is most important to hear. Marc says the single word, dignity, in response to what the emperor loses. His statement catches the ears of his peers and they begin a heated discussion about the emperor, his relationship with his subjects, and how his actions protect his job, but cost him the respect of his subjects. I physically sit back in the chair as I know they will wrangle with this question and no longer need the language I was loaning them.  Now that language is too bulky, too much in the way. They have found their own words and are trying out some big ideas, such as:

• The emperor is a bad leader. He cares only about himself.
• He cares more about keeping his job than being honest with his citizens.
• The emperor is not courageous.
• The emperor would rather be without clothes than have his advisers think he is unfit for his job.
• The emperor is not honest.
• The emperor knows he is lying.
• The emperor has lost his dignity.
• The emperor has lost his money and he won't say anything to the swindlers because he has to keep up the lie.

IV.

I listen and when there is a lull in the conversation I ask the children, "Do you think if you reread the book tomorrow and talked a bit more about why the emperor makes the final decision to continue parading without clothes that you might be able to write a response to question 3?"  They wear big smiles on top of their confidence and nod their heads indicating, yes. I next ask them: "Would you agree to allow your teacher to send me what you write as I'll be in Boston tomorrow? I'd like to read what you had to say." Again, they indicate yes.

At that moment, it's almost as if their collective confidence was a living thing in the room alongside us. It's big. Present. Powerful. And I know they have caught fire when the school day ends and they will not leave the classroom.  Thirty minutes later and they are still trying to figure out where they can get their hands on copies of the book and other stories by Hans Christian Anderson so they can read it again at home. Juliana tells me she's going to go to the library as soon as her mom can take her.

"You can take out the book and they let you keep it for ten whole days," she tells me as only an 8-year-old can sound.  I listen and make a silent nod of thanks that we still have public libraries in our country.

Others in the group are already planning to borrow the book so they can bring it home to read again. And they look to their teacher who lets the know this is possible.  I listen as they finally leave the classroom and notice that they are continuing the conversation about the emperor and his lack of leadership on their own as they make their way down the long hallway.

V.

Learning requires the space to be wrong--as does good teaching. This shift from more traditional approaches to guided reading to guiding children's reading through conversation is challenging and necessary. When the teachers ask how they might best prepare for such conversations we talk about reading the text carefully, sharing your perspective with another teacher, preparing, asking, and answering good questions, recognizing that the conversation will take twists you did not plan for, and becoming comfortable as the lesson will not turn out the way you may have intended as the lesson no longer rests solely in your hands.

The learning is a made thing that happens among people. This is a liberating truth: the work that is made does not and cannot rest solely in the hands of the teacher. This is, in part, what makes it so powerful.

On Learning: Twitter, College, Frames, and the Accidental

A Certain Stillness (M.A. Reilly, Wales, 2014)

I. 

Occasionally, I read tweets that argue how Twitter can be a source for professional learning.  I too have found tweets that lead to interesting learning. Most often these are to blogs or particular sites. Rarely, though do chats on Twitter require me to think deeply, differently, or to work arduously. When a chat does lead to an A-ha moment, I find these insights fade, quickly forgotten against the rush of the day. Twitter chats are more about being in the moment and there's a beauty to that.  

There are different types of learning with different intensities. 

Sometimes I'll read tweets that accompany these 'chats about PD that state rather emphatically how Twitter is the superior method for learning in comparison to college courses/programs, reading/viewing, and outside-provider professional 'development'. These tweets are often met with a round of retweets--a Twitter form of marginalia that affirms, says, "Yes!" At these times, I wonder about the Twitter-Tops-All sentiment.  What rests beneath these assertions? What assumptions are being made/unmade?  Is the subtext here more about asserting one's agency, rather than quality? When it comes to learning, can there be a single method that is somehow superior to other methods?  Does that even make sense? Are those who send such tweets telling us a truth, a type of truth? 


II.

A few days ago, Rob shared an email from a former student that mentioned an interest in a course being taught at the University of Rochester. After reading the course description, I contacted Professor Paul Duro and requested permission to post the description here. He agreed and sent me an updated version for the course, Rhetoric of the Frame, which appears below: 

The task of any discussion of frames and framing in literature and the visual arts is first and foremost to counter the tendency of borders, boundaries and frames to invisibility with respect to the work they contain. We see the work, but we do not see the frame. It is against this tendency to overlook the paregonal aspects of the work that this seminar is directed. Starting from a close reading of the foundational texts of frame theory in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and Jacques Derrida’s celebrated study The Truth in Painting, we will explore the boundaries of the artwork from the point of view of its material, discursive, and metaphorical borders. Topics to be considered range from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘The Purloined Letter’ to Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ and from Nicolas Poussin’s comments on the role of painting to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s meditation on the limits of painting and poetry to the textual frame of literature in the work of Gerard Genette. 

After reading the description, Rob and I agreed that this was a course we would enjoy taking.  We each lamented the distance from home to Rochester.  I've long been interested in what we (un)frame and fail to frame and how frames alter how we see. Shift the frame and the artwork contained alters too. The uncertainty and ambiguity of it all intrigues me as does the way we see when peering through frames and how we see in their absence. A week ago, I bought a used copy of Derrida's The Truth in Painting and plan to crack it open during the weekend and see what sense (if any) I make of it. This may not be a book I can initially read well on my own as I find Derrida's work dense and sometimes obscure. Sometimes, I enjoy a more knowledgeable other to help me get anchored in a text. This may be one.

III.

I've been fortunate having learned with and from teachers, professors, and fellow students--in and out of school.  As an undergraduate and while earning a doctorate, I was encouraged by teachers and family to learn, not for a specific utilitarian purpose, but more often for the art of it. I can recall my doctoral adviser saying to me to slow down, take my time. "When will you have the time to learn this way again?"  When indeed?

Take courses that interest you was a mantra I lived by and one I could live by as the college degrees I earned were paid for through generous scholarships. The most memorable of these programs were ones where I was able to select the majority of courses and design independent studies as opposed to following an pre-established curriculum. I didn't recognize then how significant such freedom could be. Learning at college has afforded me the opportunity to ponder deeply--to struggle with complex ideas and to compose theory that was most often connected to my work as a teacher, artist, and professor. It has afforded me the interest and opportunities to set into words what these theories mean/fail to mean and to then publish these works. Such study has helped me to coauthor written and visual texts.  Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine learning such depth, such contradictions in an hour-long chat regardless of the participants. The preparation for such study required a very different use of time and resources. I think of this now as I am working with two friends who are each completing their dissertation and I am serving on their respective committees. The work and curve of learning these women do is so significant, challenging, and brave. It is these experiences that make me question the belief that Twitter represents the apex of professional learning.  It so often feels so fleeting.

IV.

Perhaps what I am struggling to articulate here is the idea that a multiplicity of ways to learn may be superior to a single method, and may be more truthful of how we compose ourselves professionally. I think that different types of learning require different degrees of responsibility from us and perhaps we are the better for such differences. What may be more important than method is the privilege of saying yes and/or no to what is being learned.   

I credit a blend of accidental and planned learning for much of the professional knowledge I've composed and forgotten and am grateful for professors, colleagues, teachers, fellow students, friends and family who have taught me and learned alongside. 

I'll let you know how the Derrida book goes.  

Being is Not Univocal: A Response to Jay Belsky & Eugenics 2014

Coming through the Rye (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I. Partial Views

I first met Darren after he somersaulted into our class. It was his first day of high school and this was the manner he entered the class most days. Darren talked to himself, made models out of folded paper, and had little use for homework.  He had a keen sense of humor.

Ryan, I was told didn't speak at school from 2nd grade until 10th grade. He was routinely picked on in grade school his peers would tell me. He was without question the finest writer I would ever teach and I can still recall that last period of 10th grade English in early October when his 28 peers sat in awe as I read (with Ryan's permission) a dystopian story he had penned.  His first words at school would come later that week. 

Then there was Carlos who in first grade also did not speak and interestingly was able to signal to the class that information about a snake we were studying could be found on a particular in an old encyclopedia he routinely studied.  He showed us the drawings of snakes and other reptiles he had drawn in a notebook I had made for him, turning each page and pointing. 

Then there was Tony who had spent considerable time the previous year in the hallway as he had lot of trouble sitting still and had been 'diagnosed' with ADHD. As an 8th grader he learned behind the lens of a camera, documenting learning and in doing so building his knowledge of composing.  It was his idea that we clear the room of the desks.  He so wanted to move. His idea allowed for increased classroom performance space and what got privileged that year shifted, in part, as a result of him.

Ava was a painter and she helped me to create art conversations (nonverbal discussions using paint as a medium) as a way of making sense, making connections with others and texts that we used during English class. It was a method I would use for the next 30 years. Ava often saw the world through design. She had struggled to put ideas on paper. She painted complex compositions that she could narrate.

Steven arrived in fall of senior year in the late 1980s with a full time nurse, a computer, keyboard and a straw he held in his teeth that he used to communicate by hitting the keys on the keyboard and spelling out his thoughts. Steven had never been to school and it was his desire to do so. He attended English and history that year during the warmer months and graduated with the class that June. 

I met Robert when he was 19 and arrived in English class late September after being expelled from a technical high school for assault of his former English teacher. He was surly, unread, and difficult.  Across the school year he began to connect with books and read a trajectory of texts I could never have predicted. He concluded the year with Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being,  a book only he read in the class. We exchanged marginal notes as a way of discussing the text. He was an amazing intellect whose life beyond the classroom walls was increasingly difficult and dangerous. Both he and Steven would be dead just a few years later.

All of these young people I referenced struggled physically, academically and/or socially at school. Each might be understood as quirky, odd, outside the norm, different, even difficult. To not have know each (as best I could) would have diminished my life.

II. I Know Better Than You: The Obedient Child

A history of teaching children young and old has taught me repeatedly that what I think I know about learners is quite partial. Their lives unfold in ways I simply cannot predict, nor is that my privilege. And so it was with this perspective that I read Jay Belsky's New York Times article, The Downside of Resilience after it had been referenced in a tweet by Ira Socol (@irasocol) and in a post by Anthony Cody (@AnthonyCody). Cody quotes this from Belsky's article:

One might even imagine a day when we could genotype all the children in an elementary school to ensure that those who could most benefit from help got the best teachers. Not only because they would improve the most, but also because they would suffer the most from lower quality instruction. The less susceptible — and more resilient — children are more likely to do O.K. no matter what. After six or seven years, this approach could substantially enhance student achievement and well-being.

It's hard to breathe after reading such a faulty and dangerous vision. Belsky is recommending that "..we seek to identify the most susceptible children and disproportionately target them" based on a genotype profile (as if genes were destiny) with academic/social interventions from the 'best' (for whom?) teachers. 

In Deleuze's Difference & Repetition, he tells us, “There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal" (p. 35).  

Being is not univocal. That we labor under this delusion is what I thought about when I read Belsky's article. Beneath his proposition is an unstated belief that there is some closed set that can be named by others that we all (univocally) find desirable, essential.  Really? 

Who determines what is desirable in Belsky's schema? Keep in mind that Sir Frances Falton, the father of eugenics, believed that 19th century British elites represented the model of human perfection. Now perhaps it's because I hail from Dublin, but the idea of 19th century British elites representing human perfection is laughable, as it is tragic. Every bad idea for humanity begins with the proposition that someone with power knows better and therefore can act upon those with less power with impunity.  Is this not the foundation for genocidal thinking?  A sanitized life, genetically and/or behaviorally manipulated, is akin to a life of servitude. 

III. Who Determines?

At the center of this discussion are a few questions, with the first being most central: 

1. Who determines? 
2. What cultural, economic, political, geographic, religious, racial, and gender imperatives dominate? (No decision is neutral).
3. With what agency do children live lives in and out of school? 

A flaw in Belsky's plan is the underlying belief that he and others know best. We see this played out well in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, Brave New World. There we see the tension between beauty and stability. In chapter 16, after the Controller quotes from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Savage reacts, surprised that the banned work has been read. This leads to an inquiry by Savage and then Helmholtz as to why the people cannot view Othello and why the writers cannot write something akin to Othello. The Controller answers:

"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!" He laughed. "Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!"

This doing unto others as a means for stability and as an exercise of power is a root problem. One only needs to think about residential schools where indigenous children were interred to understand the faultiness of  someone knowing best. It is with the omniscient sense of self, that we most often know tragedy. 

A life well lived is complex and impossible to map ahead of time. Small perturbations can create significant changes and it is here that we must lean in and ask what has been lost by our tampering? Whose agency has been usurped? What have we unknowingly sacrificed? What life direction that might have evolved as a result of a perceived 'negative trait' have we shorted? 

Jay Belsky's belief in the use of science to engineer better academicians is faulty at best and dangerous for all. Let us learn how to love our quirks, challenges, and differences.

Readiness is the Language of Servitude

The learning in school should be continuous with that out of school. There should be a free interplay between the two (John Dewey. Democracy & Education, p. 288).

I.

I was reading the post, Social Media and the Law: The Future of Online Defamation, by Aron Solomon and Jason Moyse and it got me thinking about the current aim of public education in the US to make all students college and career ready. Aron writes:

As 1Ls (first-year law students), both Jason and I learned about defamation law. We might as well have learned nothing, as the explosion of technology is about to result in an even larger boom in this area of the law.

Aron and Jason are writing about the changing (and emerging) understanding of defamation as it is being applied to social media based situations.  What interests me here is their claim that their former education lacks significantly in preparation for the new twists in understanding defamation. Applying the law to potential defamation cases that occur as a result of social media renders their former education as incomplete.

This makes me wonder about the efficacy of trying to ensure that all high school graduates are college and career ready. Might such an aim be off track?  Perhaps even, foolish?

II.

The CCSS makes a pretty large claim--a claim that is bold and hopeful as it is sophomoric and delusional.

The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live. 

I do not imagine many can actually believe this claim when they study it, especially given the impossibly narrow focus of the CCSS on school-based math and English language arts. How can the skills and knowledge most needed for children who will be graduating high school in 2028 be known? Consider Aron and Jason's assertion that the highly specialized post-graduate work of legal studies each took did not readily prepare them for the litigious world that has been disrupted by social media. Our world never stands still. The world we partially name from our skewed points of view today cannot be the world we will name in 2028. Getting millions of children ready for a future we cannot know is a fool's errand.

• Is there a set of skills and knowledge that are most important?  And for whom?  In what context? 
• Is there causality between the skills/knowledge selected by a handful of college educated people in 2009 and college, career, and life success in 2028?  
• What are the meanings of success? Which of these matter most?  For whom?
• Was it even possible for this small coterie to know what is most essential for your child to know? For mine? For the Athabaskan child living in an Interior Alaska Athabaskan community? For the child who hears music as a language and uses this as self-definition? For the dancer? For the child in living in El Paso, Texas? For the artist? For the child being held in a detention center? For the child living in Lost Springs, Wyoming? For the tinkerer? For the lost one?  For the prodigy?
• Is there a set of educational standards that can be the key to equity in an increasingly inequitable country? 
• Is learning a matter of what we know? Unknow? Relearn? Not know?

What are we being sold here?  And perhaps most important: What is escaping our notice while we pander to this bill of goods?

III.

The last few weeks have found me teaching at a public high school in the South Bronx, a K-8 public school in the central ward of Newark, NJ, and at a public school in a wealthy suburb of New York City. The economic and safety issues and assets that frame each of these places is not without influence on what is learned, unlearned, and not learned by the students who attend school at each of these sites.

What is essential are often matters of geography and time.

The CCSS claim reminds me of the earlier school outcome via No Child Left Behind Act that 100% of the tested children in the United States would demonstrate school based math and reading proficiency by 2014. Even though such a claim was idiotic, an entire country swayed to its power for the better part of a decade.

What did we stop paying attention to in order to pay attention to this end goal that could never have been realized?

IV.

John Dewey in Democracy and Education told us that "the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth" (p. 85).  Continued capacity for growth. Further he warned that it is critical that the aims of education arise freely from one's experiences or else the aims will be "ulterior aims of others" (p. 85).

And this is the centrality of what I am writing about here and what I have written in too many posts to count. Agency is at the center of learning and the desire to learn.  Doing unto others via impositions of uniformed standards and annual standardized testing distracts us from learning by encouraging our active and/or passive resistance. This happens at the pupil and teacher levels.

We are always staring at something that is at best a distraction, chasing with dollars that which cannot be realized.  Standardized visions of learning pay homage to sameness--to readiness. Dewey warned us:

Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in school. The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils--restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve. Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable correct results. The zeal for 'answers' is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert and varied intellectual interest (p.145).

Kneel down before standards and find yourself unable to see the larger picture. Your vision is boot high. Readiness has always been the language of servitude.

Talking Bird Talk

Raven Talk (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I.

Mr. and Mrs. Rivet were the first ones.

They lived up the block and were childless at a time when most other families in our neighborhood had more children spilling out of their homes than inside space might permit. They were old, too--Mrs. Rivet's hands were wrinkled, blue veined and Mr. Rivet had thinning grey hair.  For reasons I still don't quite understand, the Rivets invited Jo-Ellen--their next door neighbor and my friend and me--to accompany them on a Saturday to watch birds.  A full day outing, Mrs. Rivet told us. I did not know what it even meant to watch birds, but my mom told me it would be fun and sent along some sandwiches as she ushered me out the door on a very early morning in late September.  I was almost 10. Jo, 12.

Jo and I sat in the back of the Rivet's blue late 60s Chrysler 300 white top convertible.  I knew cars. My brother built model cars. More than 300 models were displayed on shelves he and my Da had built beneath the basement stairs in a small, well lit alcove.  It was his private area. Do not trespass. Some afternoons I would steal in there when he was outside playing and lift the red 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air from its spot on the shelf, fly it though the air, and imagine what it might be like to take off in it--to fly like a rocket.

So I knew all about cars and knew the Rivet's convertible was an unusual one to have in our neighborhood--a neighborhood over populated with Ford Country Squires and Plymouth Suburbans. Every now and then some rebellious teen would show up in a Mustang, but sadly that was not very often. We were the land of station wagons, not sleek, white leather-interior convertibles. But the Rivets were different.  And on that Saturday morning, as I made my way to the Rivet's front stoop I secretly hoped Mr. Rivet would put that top down.

II.

We set out north towards Bear Mountain, an hour plus drive Mr. Rivet warned. Jo and I sat seat beltless in the back, while Mr. and Mrs. Rivet each sat comfortable in their own front bucket seats--nary a long bench seat to be found. The AM radio was turned to WNEW and to my sorrow the top remained firmly up. The trip was long--longer than an hour at least by the standards of a young girl, suddenly too shy and car sleepy. I knew I had to be on my best behavior recalling my mom giving me her list of dos and don'ts.  No squabbling with Jo, don't say yeah, say yes and remember to say, thank you.

I barely uttered a handful of words, but I did learn that some observe, see.

III.

In those days there was no nature.  There was just the outdoors--something every kid on my block visited each and every day, rain or not, unchaperoned, with nary a play date to be found. Go outside, was the beckon call of every mom on the street. I climbed trees, ran bases we had chalked on the street, played dodge ball, jumped hard into puddles, had relay races, made forts out of cardboard boxes, and raced about. The day spent with the Rivets though began to alter how I saw, experienced being outside.

When we got to Bear Mountain we had to hike up hill a bit until we came to a clearing and set up camp, as Mr. Rivet called it in what looked like a large lawn. Mrs. Rivet would tell Jo and me that it was a meadow. The grass and bits of dried flowers that were there had grown wild. It was still quite early in the day and apparently from what Mrs. Rivet said, this was later than they normally arrived. We were there to watch birds, have a picnic, and later we would see a beaver dam. What I recall most was that we spent the day being very, very quiet, speaking in whisper voices, staying still, and now and then looking at birds through binoculars ever so careful not to smudge the lens. Apparently running children and bird watching were not ideal partners. And so, bird watching didn't make a lot of sense to me. I wanted to climb trees, not look into them.

But what did make sense was the reverence the Rivets had for watching, noticing their birds. They loved birds and had been watching them for decades Mrs. Rivet told us--more years than either Jo or I had lived. The Rivets talked in hushed, yet excited voices about spying Eastern Bluebirds and arguing whether they had seen an Old World wabbler or just a starling and now and then writing stuff in notebooks each had.  They grew excited by the call of distant birds in tree tops. They squabbled back and forth as to which call belonged to what bird and they oddly sounded much like the bird calls they were attempting to name.

They talked bird and it an unguarded moment I thought I might like to talk bird too.

As we wandered late day down near a lake to see the beaver dam, Mr. Rivet cut a few twigs from a tree, handed us each a twig and told us to chew it.

"Eat it," Jo asked?

"Chew it, like gum."

There, I got my first taste of wonder.

"Tastes like root beer, right?" asked Mr. Rivet.  We grinned at him, the softened sassafras bark stuck to our teeth as we nodded our heads.

IV.

In a day filled mostly with missing the birds the Rivets talked about, my first time seeing a blue heron standing motionless at the edge of a lake stopped me.  There it stood, so still I could see it was just about my height.

A Great Blue Heron, Mr. Rivet whispered to Jo and me.  A special day when you spy a heron.

I had never seen a heron before and it looked so awkward and yet graceful--curves atop two white stalk-like legs. We watched as its head moved slightly, perhaps sensing our nearness, and then it stepped backwards and with a suddenness that surprised even Jo, lifted cleanly into the air, its large wings flapping as it flew a foot, no more, over the water and then climbed out of sight beyond the trees.

V.

Cardinal (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Later after I had been home for awhile, after supper and my bath were done, my mom asked me how the day was.

Did you have fun?

I had no words, I realized later--much later, to express what started that day so I told her simply, "Yeah, a good day. The Rivets are cool."

Learning deeply is rarely about the moment. It's as Edward Said wrote that we recognize a beginning well after it has occurred.

Changing The Current Narratives About Teaching and Learning

Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

I. A Son Imagines

My son plans to shave off a year of high school and graduate in three so that he can get on with what he wants to do. For him school is not preparation for life.

What are you thinking about doing? I ask.

He tells me he wants to redesign computer chips, shifting from the current reliance on silicon to some other element. He adds quickly, that he plans to do this if these issues remain a problem by the time he's able to engage more fully in this type of work.  

If not that, there will be another problem to solve, he says.

And as I listen to him, I think: Problem solving as a way of defining one's work is different than having a career. 

My son is less concerned about being career-ready as that lexicon may be borrowed from an earlier generation when a career defined one's adult life. My father worked for AT&T his whole life.  He was a Bell man, as was his father.  My son does not see his life as a company man. I think about this difference in self-definition and the tag line that accompanies the Common Core State Standards: college and career-ready. This phrase seems less than honest, disingenuous even when I think about the distance between my son's imagined adult life as one who frames and solves problems of interest and that of one who has a career.  

Do we often ask young people what they plan for, dream about, wonder? We are limited by the discourse of standards and accountability. Infusing some youthful perspectives into our understanding might help to at least make us contemporary and not hold overs from our fathers' generation.

The narratives we tell and are taught to repeat matter. 

II. Standards and Accountability: Twin Narratives 

In 2014, public education in the US is largely valued for how well teachers teach a particular set of prescribed English language arts and mathematics standards and how well students demonstrate learning those standards via sanctioned methods of accountability that are controlled by corporations and reported by corporations. (And we wonder why dystopias are so popular?) 

We can say that our thinking won't be overly influenced by the results from a single measure as that would be a definition of lunacy, but that rhetoric is quickly forgotten when state test results are reported in the news. Just a week ago, the New York Times ran a story about the outcomes of New York teacher evaluation scores versus New York students' performance on a single measure from 2012 under the headline: Critics Question High Ratings on New York State Teacher Evaluations Amid Poor Test Scores. Stripped from the equation was the understanding that these two elements can't and ought not to be compared. But, the education narrative we live with says that it is logical to expect the evaluation scores of teachers to be similar to the performance rate of students as measured by a single test. The logic, if extended, suggests that the sum of learning at school can be encapsulated by the scores on the single English language arts test and math test and that those scores 'should be' equivalent to the performance of teachers via evaluations. If 31% of students are not proficient as measured by a single state test, then 31% of the teachers who teach in the same state should be evaluated as ineffective. Forget that there is no research that will make these two disparate things equivalent. Master narratives rarely deal in such details. They are stories that get repeated and repeated until they become your truth.  Scores on teacher evaluations and students' performances on a state test get connected.

We need to ask who benefits from the repeat of these narratives? 

Now recall our young man at the start of this post.  He is not represented in this conflated world of standards and tests. Rather, he is at best a thing to be acted upon. This is the underbelly to the master narrative that has been used to build momentum during the last three decades so that we can eventually learn that career teachers and their troublesome unions are unnecessary in a democracy. In a market-policy driven country, not a democracy, corporations can replace teachers with digital tools or temporary workers who drop in to schools for two-year stints on their way to other work. The narrative works something like:  Everyone knows that a digital tool or a teacher with no experience are better than an experienced teacher (with pension benefits). 

Is it an wonder that our young man has less faith in American democracy and tells us so. But are we listening?

III. Standards are Designed by Testing Companies and The Narrative is that Standards = Knowledge

It's all about numbers and measures, not people as numbers represent truth, especially when used to audit adults and children or so the narrative goes. Peter Taubman (2010) in Teaching By Numbers tells us:

The transformation that has proceeded under the twin banners of “standards” and “accountability,” has over the last decade profoundly affected all aspects of teaching, schooling, and teacher education in the United States, and now threatens public education itself.

Taubman's right. The threat from standards and accountability is sizable--especially to boys and girls whose voices we have not only stopped listening to, but have insured have no place in what officially gets learned at school.  What do kids know? 

A key issue with national and state standards is that the voices of actual educators, parents, and especially the millions of students are missing and cannot be added as standards are an epic construct (Bakhtin,1981) handed down to states and schools by ubiquitous committees who later are revealed to be made up largely by testing company executives such as the case with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We have been told and retold that teachers were involved in writing the CCSS.  Not true. The majority of the 24 people who wrote the CCSS worked for testing companies, like ACT, Inc. and the College Board (See Mercedes Schneider's post for particulars. Here's the list of 24).  David Coleman (who now heads the College Board) and Bill Gates like to talk about teachers' involvement in the development of the Common Core, but actual teachers seem to be sorely missing from the 24. It's like a bad Where's Waldo--see if you can find the teacher.

This is servitude in action. The narrative still requires the presence of teachers as the public expects teachers and so teachers are referred from time to time as needed.  Think of them as stock players pulled out when required. 

Henry Giroux (2014) in The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine tells us:

Education and pedagogy cannot be reduced to the dictates of an audit culture with its rendering of critical thought nil and void, and its elevation of mindless test taking as the ultimate pedagogical practice and the final arbiter of what constitutes quality teaching and learning. (Henry Giroux, 2014. Location 2089 of 4014).

And yet in 2014 "mindless test taking" is "the ultimate pedagogical practice and the final arbiter" of educational quality.  Recall again the August article in the Times equating effective teachers to a single test measure. During the 30 years I've been an educator the questions: What does it mean to be educated? What are our aims? have been replaced with: How do we know students have learned this set of information that has been deemed important by these test companies?  We've moved from the wisdom of John Dewey to the arrogance of David Coleman and we are none the better. These questions are not interchangeable. The first set focuses on the democratic aims of education. The latter skips democracy and substitutes a determined end that can be cheaply audited by the very people who have established the set and repeated the narrative until many believe these connected narratives of standards and accountability represent an essential truth. 

IV. Deconstructing the Narrative of Standards and Accountability

In a Twitter exchange the other day the idea that if there were no standards then teachers would need to "start from scratch" each year was forwarded.  I responded, Yeah! as this seems to me to be a far better place to start--although it is pure hyperbole to ever say that any one teacher begins the school year with nothing. To me this is akin to that rubbish about students being empty vessels. The notion of starting new is a fabrication--part of the narrative we've been sold: Teachers cannot to be trusted with critical, intellectual-decision making as they are unable or ill-prepared to think deeply, broadly, concisely, etc.  So our corporate fathers have some digital tools that they can sell us that will get the job done (better test scores) or some temporary workers to fill classrooms... In these stories teachers are not capable of thinking and not capable of learning. 

The idea that teachers cannot teach effectively without standards to guide the work reveals critical beliefs about what the work of teaching is, as well as what learning and knowledge are and are not. This is a large part of the narrative we have been fed.  Teachers are too incompetent to actually do that job and we know this based on student performance on single measures of school reading and math. That's the whole field of influence.

Those promoting standards often conflate knowledge with lists of the stated stuff to be taught, teachers as mere vehicles who convey the sanctioned 'knowledge' and can easily be replaced, and students as pet performers who demonstrate what's been recalled via the set of sanctioned corporate-made tests. The narrative suggests that we can safely and aptly substitute the word, knowledge, for standards.  This is a critical and costly mistake.

Listen as Bill Gates explains what the Common Core is. Notice how he conflates CCSS with knowledge. Notice that he also fibs about who authored the CCSS: "A bunch of teachers got together with..."



Did you notice how Gates was adamant in March, 2014 to make clear that the CCSS is not a curriculum.  This is an important talking point that Gates repeats.  We also see this point made in the CCSS Myths vs. Facts:

from here. 

Local control is a touchy subject here in the States.  And yet, by July 2014 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded via a $300,000 grant to Constitutional Rights Foundation  in order "to provide professional development opportunities for teachers to further hardwire the Common Core curriculum." Note the last three words: Common Core curriculum. Further Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC in monthly newsletter (August 2014) explained:

“High quality assessments go hand-in-hand with high quality instruction based, on high quality standards,” said Laura Slover, the Chief Executive Officer of the PARCC nonprofit. “You cannot have one without the other. The PARCC states see quality assessments as a part of instruction, not a break from instruction.”

Notice in Slover's comment that standards are the substitute for curriculum. That's no small omission. Notice also that teachers and students are not cast as agents doing. They have been deleted. They are missing in her statement completely. Again, this is not a slight omission. 

The release of sample test questions by New York State in August 2014 clearly shows that it is the Common Core that is the actor, the only curriculum to be attended to.   

The released questions are intended to help educators, students, families, and the public understand how the Common Core is different. The annotated questions demonstrate the way the Common Core should drive instruction and how tests have changed to better assess student performance in accordance with the instructional shifts demanded by the Common Core. (from here)

Can you hear the narrative being fed to you in these lines--telling you how to think?  Notice that the value of releasing test items is to better ensure that the public learns how the Common Core is different.  Here, the Common Core is the actor, more so than teachers, children, or parents.  We should be worried that a set of documents written by test executives should drive instruction for millions of children more so than the actual people involved in teaching and learning. The testing brochure is filled with examples of how to 'master' standards as if such routines represented the whole of learning. 

Now add to all of this that the actual juried research (evidence?) to support the Common Core advocated ELA shifts in learning seems to be absent. For example whose research did Coleman and Susan Pimentel rely in order to determine the precise percentages of narrative and informational texts to be read/taught from K- 12?  (See Peter Greene's post here.) 

Our young man has clearly left the house and perhaps some of us as well.


V.  A Mother Imagines

As I write this my son is at play on his computer alongside a friend who has come to spend the night.  They have big dreams that are fed and nourished by the affinity groups they align themselves to on and off line. These boys have been friends since 1st grade and are each now in high school, edging towards completion and their academic interest in school can at best be summarized as an obligation to be met and then dismissed. This is not to say that they don't enjoy school or enjoy the social time with peers and teachers, for they do.  

But their dreams have less and less place at school and it is increasingly challenging for their teachers to nourish and help them to refine/revise/reimagine their dreams especially at schools where state test performance rates need to increase. The important learning has been pre-determined without them and in many cases without their teachers. Let us recall those 24 people who have set the course of what matters at school via the standards. (Imagine the arrogance it takes to think you know what is necessary for millions of people to know across time.)

These acts of omission are cuts into democracy and its public institutions. And these are not academic concerns alone.  My child and yours are sorely misrepresented in the current narratives about teaching and learning. They are not situated as active determiners of their learning, but rather as things that get acted upon based on how well they perform on sanctioned tests. Their merit is defined by this performance and it drives their advancement or derailment.  (See Loy Gross in a guest post on The Chalk Face recounts this narrow focus of what counts at school well in A Tale of Two Students.)

Our children's imaginations have been forgotten in lieu of things that can be cheaply tested. So what might we do?  Giroux (2014) urges us to 

confront the urgent need to invent modes of pedagogy that release the imagination, connect learning to social change, and create social relations in which people assume responsibility for each other. Such a pedagogy is not about methods or prepping students to learn how to take tests. Nor is such an education about imposing harsh disciplinary behaviors in the service of the surveillance state. On the contrary, it is about a moral and political practice capable of energizing students and others to become more knowledgeable, while creating the conditions for generating a new vision of the future in which people can recognize themselves— a vision that resonates with the desires, dreams, and hopes of all those who are willing to fight for and participate in a community-driven democracy. (Kindle Locations 2390-2396). 

We need to notice the language we use and repeat about education and democracy and ask who benefits from this rhetoric?  We need to replace the teachers can't teach and we know better than you rhetoric with a more inclusive one that addresses clearly the aims for education we have in this republic. Let's lean on one another and stop dealing in absolutes and let's remember to ensure the voices of youth are prominent in these discussions. 

James Gee and Elizabeth Hayes (2011) explain that:

Other people’s language is inside my head whether I know it or not. Looked at this way, language is a communal resource from which we all beg, borrow, and steal. People talk like others and still each of us has our own unique style (Bakhtin 1981, 1986). ( p. 7).

We need to recant the narratives that situate excellence as schools that produce good test takers and teachers as being dispensable. They are not. They never have been. For a democracy to flourish, much more is needed.  We can (re)inform the education narratives by rewriting them. It begins by deconstructing what we are being told and then offering our own voice, our own insights.  It requires us to listen to our children, to listen and appreciate voices that differ from our own.  We can court the silent and in doing so we can generate a discourse of inclusion. 

Recall James Baldwin (1971) who boldly told us in An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis : 

"Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can..."

I'll stop here, waiting to hear your voice.



Works Cited

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Gee, James Paul & Hayes, Elisabeth R. (2011). Language and Learning in the Digital Age, (p. 7). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. 

Giroux, Henry A. (2014). The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine (City Lights Open Media) (Kindle Locations 2107-2109). City Lights Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

Maas Taubman, Peter (2010). Teaching By Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series) (Kindle Locations 490-492). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.