#SOL15: Order Like a Net

Stopped (M.A. Reilly, Leonia, NJ, 2012)

“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.” ― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

I.

Lately, I have taken to moving furniture and vacuuming, cleaning countertops and bathrooms with strong chemicals, making my son's bed, stripping and cleaning linens, washing, washing, washing and opening wide windows--even here in December. Especially now the cold air filters in and it brings with it an odd hope.

Each day I set our unsettled house back to an orderliness few here seem to appreciate, perhaps even see. But it is not the aftermath of temporary order I seek or even their appreciation, but rather the slim accomplishment I feel that comes from doing.

Doing, not being.

Here is something I do daily, repeatedly that has a known end.


II.

My life these days is slippery, cracked, broken, lacking an order one might name. (And I want to call forth the right words, for is not naming a truth in itself?)

(Dis)Order.
Clean.
(Dis)Order.
Clean.

#SOL15: Being Present - The Value of the Moment

I.

The first chemo treatment. 10.30.15

It's been nearly 90 days since my husband was first diagnosed with late stage lung cancer. During that time he has spent one-third of those days in the hospital. Most of that time has been spent not treating the cancer, but rather diagnosing and fighting staph infections caused by the insertion of a contaminated port into my husband's chest on the early morning of September 14. 

As I write this, Rob is 30 miles away on the fourth floor of Morristown Medical Center recovering from surgery to remove and clean an abscess that formed in his chest. More staph. He's been there for 12 days. Yesterday he waited for the technicians to whisk him to the imaging center to have an MRI of his brain made. No one arrived. We have been trying to get the MRI done since September--to see if his inability to walk unassisted is due to the cancer spreading to his brain.

Waiting gives rise to counting. 

Out the window of the hospital room we have been living in these last days, a murder of crows lifts from a field, winging sharply in an odd synchronization that forms and breaks. Against uncertainty, quantifying the bits and pieces of life offsets some of what we cannot know.

Early today, the MRI was done and now we wait for the results.

II.

Your body, like mine, has trillions of cells. If cells could be counted like coins, it would take more than 31,000 years to count just 1 trillion and you have far more than that in your body. Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body. In Rob's body, old cells don't die like they do in healthy bodies. In his body, cells grow out of control, forming new, abnormal cells. Some time ago these cells amassed and formed a mucinous cystadenocarcinoma in the apex of his right lung. While the cells amassed, we continued to walk through the days, ignorant, until this August when time folded in on itself like a poor house of cards. 

All around us, life as we knew it began to slowly collapse and we were none the wiser, nor were we able to wake ourselves from this trauma.  

III. 

It was 8:16 a.m. on August 20th when the doctor phoned. I remember later thinking how odd that such news arrived before the morning papers, before the first sip of coffee.  It was a day we had planned to sleep in. Work was over until September and we were planning a quick end-of-the-summer trip to Maine. What makes lung cancer so deadly is that the patient is often asymptomatic until the cancer metastasizes elsewhere in the body. For Rob it was acute chest pain that sent him to his doctor who said, "Let's be safe and get a picture of your chest." That picture led to a CAT scan and then an MRI and finally to a VAT procedure of the lung and a needle biopsy of the lesions that were found on his spine. And that morning, as I paced in our bedroom listening to Rob's voice, i tried not to piece together a possible story of cancer.

It's always a matter of life and death. I had forgotten that.

IV.

Last Friday in Paris, 129 people were murdered and another 352 were injured by terrorists. Ordinary people going about the business of living.

I think of those killed and wonder what each might have done differently that Friday the 13th knowing that in a few hours their lives would end.  It's tricky to live with knowledge of your mortality not as some distant, unformed end, but rather as that which is potentially more imminent, more present. Living deliberately is best expressed in the small, innocuous acts that typify an average day. For example, earlier I bought some tissue paper that I intend to use to wrap the few gifts I've gotten Rob for his birthday. I took time selecting what I wanted, imagining a small pile of gifts wrapped in this rainbow of colour. In the past, such acts were more like tasks to be checked off rather than opportunities to be dwelled in. This deliberateness, this odd gift of being present in the moment, gives definition to the mundane.

Some days it is easier to forget the mortality that signals our impermanence, dogs our steps.  Others less so.

It's how we live in the moment, in the here and now, that matters most.

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.

A Definition of Insanity (#SOL15, Day 20)

I.

Imagine what you might be valuing if you required an employee to halt progress because he or she had accomplished the end goal more quickly than the other employees. This employee has produced more completed work than the others simply because he or she has been present more often and therefore worked more often.  Because you mistake sameness for quality, you require all of the employees to be no more than one day ahead or behind your schedule with regard to production.

But stuff happens that corrupts your schedule.

1. An employee's mother becomes ill and the employee takes a two-week leave.
2. The flu hits a family causing an employee to miss a series of work days, totaling 7 across three weeks.
3. The production is derailed by an unforeseen internal situation and the goal accomplishment is delayed by three weeks.
4. An employee determines a better product can be made and makes those adjustments which adds several days.
5. And so on.

As  result of these delays, you do not abandon your scheme, but rather readjust the schedule adding another two weeks in order for the 'team' to meet the end goal together. Now, what do you do with the employee who has already met the production goals you established?

Halt the employee from moving onto the next set of goals until everyone catches up.
(And we thought Samuel Beckett's Godot was absurdest theatre.)

II.

Most would see this scenario as idiotic, counter productive. But would you see this as amoral if we weren't talking about the product of widgets, but rather were speaking about the education of children?

I recently was listening to middle school ELA teachers discuss how one with near perfect attendance was told she could not move on to teach the next curriculum unit as her fellow teachers at her grade level had not completed the current unit because of absenteeism and lesson adjustment. The administrators require teachers to keep the same pace (within one day) so that everyone is teaching the same lesson or teaching an adjacent lesson in the Expeditionary Learning Module du jour.

Sameness is more important than actually learning.

There's so much wrong with this scenario from a human point of view that I hardly no where to begin.  Prizing sameness over quality has no place in public education. Stripping teachers of agency and reducing them to nothing more than script enactors who act as programmed regardless of who is learning and not is a recipe for failure. Mandating the use of a singular curricular product like Expeditionary Learning that was developed rapidly and whose units could not have been researched using the DOE's gold standard of randomized controlled trials.  Nonetheless these modules have been mandated by states and districts in what is like a modern day version of the emperor's new clothes. Only the brave say this product has limited teeth.

These problems emanate from shoddy leadership--leadership that has been wrought via the new education reformers. You know, the people with little practical knowledge as they quickly skipped or in some cases fully avoided actually teaching and were promoted into key leadership roles in schools and districts by external forces like governors, mayors, and the like.

Sigh.

I hope you want more for your children.
I hope you'll say so out loud.