#SOL17: The Moon's Out Tonight

from my art journal (2016)

Concealed within daylight,
the dead emerge to work
the fields of night. 

John O'Donohue, Echoes of Memory (p. 57). 

I.

I didn't need Einstein to tell me time is relative. With sorrow, this understanding becomes embodied.


II.

During the last 18 months, I have forgotten the steady click of a clock, how to anticipate the calendar, the way daylight grows stronger and then wanes.

I have lost track of the moon.


III.

100 days spent in hospitals curved time and collapsed it--until leaving at 2 a.m. and returning with the next spread of daylight was more normal than not. During that last stay, Rob's sense of reality grew tenuous. After a large morphine dose, he thought he was a teenager living in his two family home in Brooklyn. I spoke with the oncologist explaining that one other time when Rob was given morphine, he became delusional. The oncologist asked me to bring photographs and an afghan from home explaining that long hospital stays can disorient a patient and he then switched Rob to dilaudid.

By the time Rob was moved to palliative care, he forgot he was dying. He was so very lost.


IV.

Arriving home to die was sorrowful and joyful. After 50 days in the hospital, Rob delighted at being being among familiar things. I placed his hospital bed in the corner of the family room between two large windows. He would tell me the first morning he was home how it had been too long since the sunlight could warm his skin.

There are all kinds of ways to measure time passing.


V.

The first three days, Rob was able to communicate. Each day I cooked for him and he pushed the food about the plate, sampling a bit. That Friday, he would eat his last meal. I used to know what he ate, but now I cannot recall.

By the next day, I thought he would die. He was in and out of a deep sleep. I fed him water through a dropper all morning and by afternoon, he rallied.

Sunday found him sitting up in bed and singing songs from the 60s with Jane, Robyn, and Jack. He and I held hands as we sang I Want To Hold Your Hand.

He was dopey, alive, and he wanted me to kiss him again and again.
And I did.
I did.


VI.

As February became March, he edged towards death. I had wished for long, long February days in a vain attempt to slow the inevitable. But as I watched him begin to suffer and as I tired, I wished for a swifter end.

It's okay, I would tell him, I will take care of Devon. We'll be okay. You can go.  


VII.

What I could not know then, was that I too was lost and after the memorial service and the shock began to wane I woke to find spring had arrived and gone. My husband had been dead for more than four months and I had difficulty accounting for the time.


VIII.

These days, I wish I prayed better. I wish I might recall a prayer or two from my youth--those I used to know by heart.

Tonight the moon is half gone, half here. In a week, it will be full.

I once told time by the moon.
Now I listen to it.


IX.

Last month, NASA announced the discovery of 7 Earth-sized exoplanets, less than 40 lightyears away and I thought of Rob a year dead.  He would have explained to me the distance, the significance, but for now--I have no yardstick.

Everything feels far away.


X.

With the universe expanding, I sometimes wonder if heaven isn't the dark matter we know exists, but cannot see. Is that where Rob is? Or perhaps he's waiting on one of those exoplanets revolving around that dim single star

          just beyond our solar system,
                             just beyond here.

#SOL 16: Now

Rob showing Devon how to work his first camera. We were in the Redwood Forest in late December.

I.


When someone knows sorrow--sorrow others could well experience, feeling relieved that such loss does not have your name written on it is natural.  I was listening to Kim Snyder, the director of the documentary film, Newtown speak a few weeks ago and I remembered that guilty feeling that arose when the horror of Newtown first happened. I thanked God my then 13-year-old son was alive and not touched by such misery. I was relieved to not be any of those parents. This did not stop me from feeling for those families, wondering across these last four years about them and their slain children.

II.


A few weeks ago, a woman anticipating a first wedding anniversary expressed sorrow about the death of my husband.  Her expression was timid and she explained how she felt uncomfortable about her joy given my recent loss. This surprised me for I so keenly believe in love. To have been loved so well by Rob makes belief in love easy. Yes, this loss is life altering and as such there are now certain closures and openings to my life that are uncharted. No map exists.  But honestly, no map ever did.

Love has a way of shaping reality, softening ambiguity, curbing disappointment, allowing us the pretense of an endless life.  For in the glory of love time functions without borders, curves and folds as we need, as we desire.


III.

We have this moment.  Among those who know such sorrow, the value of the present is not lost.

#SOL16: Time

I.

Watercolor on Yupo Paper (August 2016)

I wonder how long it will be? How much time needs to pass before I no longer feel that sickening shock when I acknowledge that Rob has died. And it is shock--not that he is dead, but rather that he died. I realize that those might seem like the same statement, but they are not. I still can't believe that someone so good, so young has died. Yesterday I was food shopping when I felt my stomach sour as I realize that the package of fig bars I had just put in my cart I didn't need. It was something only Rob loved--something I would routinely buy for him. There are habits of the heart and habits of the body we cannot outrun.

II.

Yesterday, I felt blindsided--unprepared for the sadness that felt so heavy. I was shaky at times as if the adrenaline I felt was an untapped river flowing. I hadn't experienced this since the end of last April--almost two months after Rob's death. And last night I thought how the more time moves along the harder it all seems to feel.

Time passing is hardly reliable.

III.

A few nights ago Devon and I sat together talking about his dad. It was a tough, emotional evening. We made some time to just talk about what Rob has meant to each of us.  I mentioned how intense the feelings of loss suddenly are again and Dev reminded me what I had told him shortly after Rob died. I said then that the intensity of feeling doesn't ebb much over time, but the duration and frequency does.  I was telling Devon how I felt after my mom's death and he reminded me of those words again last night.

Time bends, he said. What's longer: A year? A day? 28 years?  Time is relative. It's how you spend that time that gives it shape.  We're lucky to have had the time we did with Dad.  You've said this to me. You lived so much. You and dad didn't wait to live. 

No, we didn't and I am grateful, I tell him. But truly I wanted another 28 years.

IV.

These days I know that gratitude doesn't remove sorrow.  It may soften it a bit, but sorrow remains like a river flowing. Sorrow is more aquifer than pool. It moves beneath me as I walk through each day, surfacing at breaking points, yet always present. 

#SOL16: What Remains

House in the Country (M.A. Reilly 2013)

I.

How can he be gone when all of his stuff is still here?

I try to avoid this room, but last night I came downstairs to walk a bit on the treadmill next to Rob's desk. And though I have cleaned up many of the things Rob had left, so much still remains, more than I can shoulder, more that I want to bear, but I do. A few weeks ago, I finally folded the acorn-color cardigan with the leather-covered buttons he always wore while writing and working at his desk. The sweater is now tucked away in our closet. Before I put it away, I held it up, burying my face in its softness and I inhaled. And there was Rob--so very, very faint. For months after Rob got sick and could no longer climb down the stairs to his office, the cardigan remained wrapped around the back of his desk chair. It was as if he had just taken it off and perhaps had gone to another room to answer the phone or get a class of water or make a cup of tea. That's how fast the cancer and infections changed our lives.

There is the sharp desire to find the man I have lost, the man who was gone so quickly, to find some sense of him in what remains.

II.

After death, there is the illusion that everything waits. My husband's teak desk waits for his return. The heat of day waits for the cool dusk to arrive. The unstructured summer days grow tired and want to give way to the comfort of routine that comes with fall. But this waiting is a story I have tried to live. The want to live is strong even when grief feels limitless.

Life presses on.  Most days I feel this press with a certain urgency. The distance between Rob alive and the present grows greater, obscuring what I can see in my mind's eye, what I can remember. The faint scent of him in the sweater was bittersweet for everything smelled like a hospital, like medicine, and death. The sweater was untainted and held a brief, slim reminder of the man.

And all of this is another form of loss. It is a loss that lends definition to this unfamiliar life I now call my own.

III.

I must confess that at first after Rob died I wanted time to speed along. I prayed for the rapid passing of minutes, hours, days, weeks, and then months. I wanted to roll time along and feel its healing powers.  Now, I feel the slice born from such desire and want to drag my feet, to remain as still as I can be in the moment before his last breath. In that awful moment when I could at least still say Rob was alive. There is nothing but a body after that last breath. Nothing familiar. Nothing once loved. The tenderness of life is gone. But even before that last breath, he was more absent than present, deep in some sleep I could not touch.

So perhaps I want to dwell in late November when the three of us celebrated Thanksgiving and we could not see what was before us even though we knew more than we could not say aloud. Then Rob still sounded like himself and though I know now that each day the spinal compression grew worse, the cancer wrapping itself around his spine like a boa constrictor, I did not know then that he would die before winter ended.  We simply did not see that possibility.  So not then. Not when life was so quickly ending.

Better to linger back three years earlier when the tumor in the apex of his right lung was finding ground. Then, yes then. That was the time to intervene to rid his body of this awful awful disease. Then we were readying to travel to Italy and on to England.  A summer holiday, so halcyon in memory. Then we lived with no warning of what was growing in his lung.


IV.

There is no return to the past without the full knowledge of what will happen. And such knowledge is a price too large to bear.

Each day that passes distances me from Rob and so I want to hold on to what I can't actually grasp and exist in this in-between world where there is no time, there is no death.

The anchor I have always known as my husband has given way
         and I am drifting
where the current flows.

I tell you even my will has forgotten its name.

#SOL16: Not Knowing

I.

I think I may have forgotten how to be in the world. Since Rob was moved to the Step-down unit and then to the Palliative Care unit and finally home, my life has become increasingly insular. Mostly, I take care of Rob. Tonight I lost it. I made dinner for my family and then tried to sleep. I wanted Rob. I wanted him to do what he has done for 30 years, offer just the right comfort. And there in our bedroom I realized that he was never going to be able to offer what he so freely gave me again.

On Valentine's Day, Rob and I had breakfast together. He was able to get out of bed and sit at a table. I brought bagels with cream cheese and Rob ate all of his and half of mine. He sent me an e-card and personalized as he always have done with a brief poem.

A week later, Rob would no longer be able to hold on to who I am by name.

Rob at Christmas with our dog, Max.

Rob and Devon in the pool.

II.

I have been looking through old photographs from when Devon was 6 months to a year. I look at the pictures of Rob and Devon and think about us at that time and how we could not imagine that Rob would be with us less than 17 years. How could that be?

I'm glad we didn't know. We lived so fully. Not knowing is so much more important that myriad of things we can say we know.

#SOL15: Earths You Here for Real

One Man (MA. Reilly, 2012, Massachusetts)

Your bare foot on the floor

Keeps me in step; the power

I first felt come up through

Our cement floor long ago

alps your sole and heel

And earths you here for real.

                   -  Seamus Heaney from In Time

I.

Late day and the muggy morning gave way hours later to a cool autumn evening. I was alone there on a suburban street walking beneath leaves turning silver by the wind--walking briskly away from the hospital in order to take just 60 minutes to get beyond these hospital walls and breathe.

And as I walked I realized that I had forgotten about the necessity of poetry. So caught up in time, I had forgotten the poetry of breath. I had forgotten how the poem so often shows the conceit of time as if time was a currency we actually hold. I thought about all of this and of you lying still on a cold steel table being cut once again and beneath that fear and certain sadness there was Seamus Heaney--my go to poet. I walked, recalling poorly those lines from "In Time" that Heaney penned. Recalling little but, Earths you here for real. 

I never quite could hang on to that line until Rob was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Earths you here for real is more about love than loss.

And so even though the surgeon told me it would be a quick procedure to extract the port put in two weeks earlier--the very port that was contaminated with bacteria causing the staph infection to run through my husband's battered body--I've learned that doctors, especially surgeons, can be masters of hyperbole.

It would not be 30 minutes. Not even 60 minutes. 
Hospital time is slower than home time. 
And two hours later I found I was sadly correct. My phone has still had not wrung.

II.

It's so late that even in this darkness I know that in two hours I'll be driving to work, squinting against the orange yellow rise of the sun. Three weeks have come and gone and the staph infection seems to have been tamed, eradicated by the daily dose of antibiotic that I dutifully fed into the picc line in Rob's upper arm each evening. 

Some mark time by Vespers; we mark the turn to evening by flushing the picc line.

So on the late night, Rob and I are talking in a house so quiet that there can only be the now; the earths you here for real moment when I see him seated opposite me, know he is here and take solace in that simple fact. 

This night Rob is explaining to me how time is an illusion.  He's been reading Palle Yourgrau's A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein. As I listen to him read a loud I think how so much of our courtship and marriage have been marked by the many texts he has read aloud. 
Sometimes poems. 
Sometimes logic. 

And it is nearing 4 a.m. and neither of us have been to bed when he reads this to me:

"The consequence of his discoveries for Einstein’s realm was not that relativity was too weak to encompass all that is true about time, but rather that relativity is just fine, whereas time in the intuitive sense is an illusion" (Kindle Locations 2303-2305). 

I'm quiet wondering how willing I am to hear those words.  I have so much to unlearn I think as I climb the stairs to sleep.  Most of the metaphors that (in)form my life are time-based--and I sense these metaphors are a delicate trap wrapping me in time and fear. 

III.

The next day when I arrive home, Rob says he has a present for me. I open Alan Watt's The Way of Zen and feel the love in his gesture as surely as I now feel these keys beneath my finger tips.

A Meditation in Five Parts

I've Been to Sea Before (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.                                           from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I.

What is named is most always a fiction.


II.

Rhizomatic tendencies do not come easy even if participation in #Rhizo15 makes the rhizome more commonplace, less happenstance.  I don't recognize myself as becoming for I am too rooted.  A narrative.

Time marches along and I stick to its edges.


III.

Much in the way I live works against rhizomatic tendencies for rhizomes are about horizontal movement and little less. Such mindlessness makes me nervous, triggers an urge to rely on what has been given. Don't tell, but most days I want to know the road is well marked, well walked before trodding. For I am dutiful. A modern girl-version of Prufrock who measures life in coffee spoons--full of beginnings and endings and each time I've glanced away from those seductive middles, I've been rewarded.

Yes, rewarded.  I'm a slave to production.


IV

I've come to understand how ruptures, those sweet lines of flight, are more about trusting what cannot be known than over-relying on what has been coded. And I want to trust. I do. But I live mostly by code. I wish I might be different and of course, sometimes I am--like that day in Dún Laoghaire at the Forty-Foot promontory when the afternoon sun cast shadows shifting three mere mortals to angels and I saw it all as it emerged.

I clicked the camera's shutter to clear space and see.


V.

Some nights I dream myself quiet and wake with the sea at my throat.

Rhizomatic Tendencies and the West

Late Day Light (M.A. Reilly, The Badlands, SD. 2010)

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west,

And my spirit is crying for leaving. 

                               - Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, 1971

I.

In 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner said that the frontier had closed, he couldn't have been more wrong.

Closed for whom?  
Closed in what manner?  

Turner's speech would fuel the imagination of others who were to come as endings are a logic we understand, we want to embrace. Endings are a kind of Get Out Of Jail, Free card.  30 years after Turner, Nick Carraway towards the end of Gatsby would tells us, "I see now that this has always been a story of the West after all" (p.179).  The West is an idealized world, untouched by the greed and despair Nick finds present in New York--greed and despair that touches Nick as well.  35 years after Gatsby, the Catholic senator from Massachusetts would ask us "to be pioneers towards that New Frontier", namely--space.

There are always new frontiers, borne ceaselessly out of the past or forward into some desired future we can just, almost grasp. We want to be the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. And so we seek not what is beneath our heels for that requires us to wade in the middle of things and the middle is undefined as it is always emerging. No, we are far more comfortable out of sync with the now.

Nick and Jack epitomized how the present we actually occupy is so less sexy, so less talked about, so less believed than the reconstructed past and the imagined future. External power rests in such constructions. We live lives where the logic of starts and stops is our chief organizing force. And these forces are more often thought to be truths.

II.

We only need to reread Turner's assertion that the frontier line was "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" to understand how temporary such endings are and how (in)formed our beliefs are by the new frontiers we forge and the beliefs we carry with us. The world is made over to suit ourselves--have we enough power and ego to want to do so.

For even now as I pen this the universe, in which those frontiers clearly sit, is enlarging and if we believe current physicist will continue to do so, infinitely as our galaxy and planet are pulled apart. The universe too, has no beginning. Time, as Einstein suggested, is a fiction. Yes, we may mark time with the Big Bang, but that is more conceit, less truth. Time, like everything about us, is constructed.

Reinventing may well feel as essential as breathing.

Something to Think About Regarding Time

Bowler (Dublin, 2008)

“Humans see time as a straight line. It’s like putting notches on a long straight stick. The notch here is the future, the one on this side is the past, and the present is this point right here. Do you understand?” 

“I think so.” 

“But actually time isn’t a straight line. It doesn’t have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn’t have any form. But since we can’t picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.” 

“But maybe we are the ones who are wrong.” 

Tengo mulled this over. “You mean we may be wrong to see time as a straight line?” 

No response. 

“That’s a possibility. Maybe we’re wrong and the crow is right. Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it’s shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that’s the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven’t found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it’s probably correct.”

Murakami, Haruki (2011-10-25). 1Q84 (pp. 625-626). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

Independent Reading in Primary Grades: The Why and How

Currently I hear considerable confusion by administrators and teachers at schools concerning independent reading with regard to its value as an in-school practice and the types of text that can be used by children to practice reading independently. In this post I clarify:

1. why independent reading at school is a very valuable practice
2. why beginning readers need familiar text that is easy to read
3. why teachers need to manage the book selection process for beginning readers and provide managed choice and why older children need to enjoy lots and lots of choice
4. how much time is recommended for independent reading 

I. Why Independent Reading at School is Valuable

When the National Reading Panel published its findings in 2000, it indicated

With regard to the efficacy of having students engage in independent silent reading with minimal guidance or feedback, the Panel was unable to find a positive relationship between programs and instruction that encourage large amounts of independent reading and improvements in reading achievement, including fluency. 

Many stopped reading at this paragraph and concluded that independent reading was not a practice to be encouraged at school. Had they read on a bit, the Report clarified that it was not the practice, but the acceptable research (only experimental and quasi experimental research was considered) it reviewed that was problematic:

It should be made clear that these findings do not negate the positive influence that independent silent reading may have on reading fluency, nor do the findings negate the possibility that wide independent reading significantly influences vocabulary development and reading comprehension. Rather, there are simply not sufficient data from well-designed studies capable of testing questions of causation to substantiate causal claims. 

Stephen Krashen responded to the NRP by writing:

"The NRP report missed a number of important studies. In The Power of Reading, I found a total of 41 studies of the value of sustained silent reading in school. In 38 out of the 41 comparisons, readers in sustained silent reading did as well or better on tests of reading than children who spent an equivalent amount of time in traditional instruction. I found nine studies which lasted longer than one year; sustained silent reading was a winner in eight of them, and in one there was no difference. The NRP did not cite any of these studies, even though some appeared in very important, widely read journals. Some spectacular omissions include Elley andMangubhai's Fiji study, published in the Reading Research Quarterly (1983), and Elley's Singapore study, in Language Learning (1991). The latter contains a review of several other successful SSR studies that the NRP failed to mention."

Independent reading has been researched and does show that more reading results in better reading comprehension and related literacy skills (see Bernice Cullinan, 1998-2000 for a great summary of research and Dick Allington's (2009) "If They Don't Read Much: 30 Years Later" in Reading More, Reading Better).  In Allington's chapter he cites the estimated annual reading volume of fifth-grade students by reading volume percentile rank from Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988):

It seems hard to argue with the value of reading when you look at the correlation between reading performance by percentile and the number of read words.


II. How Hard Should the Text Be?

Another query I hear more frequently these days concerns the use of easy and hard books for independent reading.  Some educators have learned at CCSS workshops that children should only be reading within the prescribed lexile band as determined via the CCSS.  Beginning readers must be able to actually read the text with ease in order to practice the critical skills.

Marie Clay (1991) described the practice of independent reading for young children in this manner:

When readers are allowed to reread familiar material, they are being allowed to learn to be readers, to read in ways which draw on all their language resources and knowledge of the world, to put this very complex recall and sequencing behavior into a fluent rendering of the text. The orchestration of these complex behaviors cannot be achieved on a hard book (p.184).

Independent reading choices for beginning readers ought to include materials that the children have already read such as the texts children read during guided instruction. Linda Dorn and Tammy Jones (2012) state that the rereading of familiar texts allow the beginning reader to:

• make meaningful predictions that can be checked against visual information
• practice effective strategies on easy material
• read with fluency and expression
• experience the pleasure of revisiting favorite stories
• become more knowledgeable about story structure and vocabulary, and
• problem-solve independently (p. 36).

Independent Book Boxes  from The Teacher Wife "Book Boxes" 

Teachers play an important role in independent reading time for beginning readers. Teachers must  oversee the text-selection process for beginning readers so that they can ensure that the children select books they can actually read. Leaving book selection to chance is a faulty method.  Lindsey who blogs at The Teacher Wife says that she purchased the independent book boxes pictured above from IKEA (5 boxes for $1.99).  Using cut cereal boxes is a less expensive way to provide independent reading collections.  Some teachers use large plastic bags.  The purpose of the book box is to offer beginning readers managed choice by putting in 8 to 10 reading selections that you know the child can read.

As children learn how to match appropriate texts to their interest, the book box can be transformed into common tubs of books and eventually into a library that is organized by the teacher and the students. At this point children need to exercise choice over what they read. The relationship between choice and motivation is strong.

III. Methods

Affording children choices when it comes to independent reading is important.  In addition to text choice, how one reads also needs to be opened to choice. In addition to unassisted reading (reading alone), the following assisted methods can be employed:

• partner or paired reading
• reading along to an audio recording
• reading an interactive text on an iPad
• echo reading (see video example above)

Guidelines for Paired or Partner Reading from Regie Routman (2002, p. 91)

• The reader holds the book.
• Sit close enough so both partners can see the words.
• Take turns reading.
• Go back and reread if you don't understand.
• Turn and talk. (Tell your partner what happened. Both partners should talk).
• Problem solve with your partner.
• If you partner is stuck on a word:
• Give your partner time to think (wait time).
• Go back and reread.
• Read past the tricky word and come back to it.
• Slide through it.
• Put in what makes sense.
• Sound it out with our partner.
• Cover part of the word and ask, 'What does it say?"
• Ask, 'Would you like me to help you?'
• Tell your partner what the word is.
• Enjoy reading.

IV. Time

Kindergarten: 10 minutes at the start of the year and 20 minutes by the midyear
Regie Routman (2002) writes:

In kindergarten, much of the daily independent 'reading' is really time spent looking at books. Students gain confidence as readers by browsing, interacting with and enjoying reading materials they choose to 'look' at. Often these are familiar books, poems, charts, and texts that have been previously read during shared reading or reading aloud or created during shared writing. Many of these texts are predictable and have a rhythm and/or rhyme that supports developing readers' growing phonemic awareness, word competency, and fluency. Independent reading in kindergarten should increase from about ten minutes at the start of the school year to about twenty minutes by midyear (p.89).  

1st Grade and 2nd Grade: 20 minutes at start of the year and 30+ minutes by midyear. I appreciate this blog post, "Rockin' Reading Workshop" and the high expectation for sustained reading by children in 65 minutes. Here is the teacher's 3rd grade schedule:

9:05-9:15 Attendance, lunch count, homework/assignment notebooks check-inWhile I am doing this, the students may read ANY book at ANY level (I learned this from Sharon Taberski's book, On Solid Ground)9:15-Reading Workshop begins with a mini-lesson9:25-Independent Reading TimeStudents are practicing the mini-lesson during private and partner reading. During this time, I meet with three guided reading groups. (2-3 groups for 15-20 minutes and individual reading conferences). The students may also be meeting in literature groups or reading with partners.10:30-Word study/grammar/spelling10:45-Writing Workshop (Mini-lesson, writing process, writing conferences)12:05 Lunch/Recess12:40 Word study/ grammar/spelling12:50-1:20 Planning Period1:20 Bathroom Break1:30 Guided Math2:30 Science/Social Studies/Health2:55 Get ready to go3:05 First Bell3:15 Last Bell 

Time

Moon and Light (Maine, 2012)

A few months ago, my husband was reading aloud to me a description of time from John McPhee's Annals of a Former Time.  It is a marvelous book (actually five books in one) that McPhee wrote from 1978 to 1998 about his travels across the United States with geologists. In this epic text, he explains the natural history of the land we now call United States beginning 4.5 billion years ago. What interested me was the dual depictions of time: geologic and human.

Consider this section Rob read aloud to me:

When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned— the mark invisible at the end of a ruler. If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up— his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed. (p. 171).

Reading John McPhee helps me to better understand how so many human concerns, dramas, and perspectives appear shallow, less substantial when they are resettled alongside the long sweep of geological events. This way of seeing gives me pause--a necessary one and helps me to reconsider those perspectives I cultivate in which my concerns, largely manufactured dramas and needs are given centrality. Yet beneath the drama, some truths remain.

Clocks and Learning

Image by Zoutedrop posted at Flickr here.

I sometimes wonder how students can learn in 45-, 60- or 80-minute periods stacked one atop the next, with little time they can call their own.  I wonder the same thing for teachers who are a bit more fortunate as they are usually afforded by contract, planning time each day. Students don't fare as well, as lunch is often the only time they can call their own. Such "efficiency" smacks of scientific management, which privileged the separation of planning from labor.  

The man who is fit to work in any particular trade is unable to understand the science of that trade without the kindly help and cooperation of men of a totally different type of education, men whose education is not necessarily higher, but a different type from his own (Copley 1923,45) as quoted in Thomas Newkirk's Holding On To Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, p. 14.

Learning requires both planning and labor. School requires only the latter for its students and in more repressed places, separates planning from labor for its teachers who are tasked with "transmitting" prepackaged lessons via scripts. 

The clock is a powerful force. Lewis Mumford knew this. In Technics and Civilization, Mumford wrote, "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age" (p. 14).  He said that the clock shifted how time was represented and understood from a cyclical process of nature to a quantity. With the clock came the regulation and regimentation of life, parceling work into manageable bits of time.

Is this parceling not also true for schools as well? Is the bell not the most powerful symbol of regulation at schools? 

I was reminded of the almost obscene power of bells today while participating in a 3-hour learning engagement with high school seniors from a Symposium class, their teacher Mark Gutkowski (@mylatinteacher), designer Akemi Tanaka, our school's superintendent, an instructional leader, John Madden, our librarian, Debra Gottsleben (@gottsled) and supervisor, Scott Klepesch (@shklepesch). Mark and Akemi had designed an initial engagement for all of us to do involving design, building, and team work that had all of us thinking and doing.  Akemi next explained the thinking and production processes inherent in the industrial design work she does. We all peppered Akemi with questions wanting to better understand how her work originates, how it is modified and by whom and for what reasons.  We wanted to know about the thinking she does when making eco-conscious decisions and the relationship between identification of a problem and the development of design. Akemi then offered critique to students' design presentations as they presented drawings (made on paper or iPad) and discussed how their design originated and what problem it attempted to solve. 

Throughout the morning,the mix of students and educators learning side by side marked a distance from traditional schooling and its roles.  Empowered, engaged the time passed swiftly. And yet, at 11:18 the high school bells rang signaling the start of school-wide lunch. With this, students in dribs-and-drabs left to attend to clubs, make up tests, and other obligations, forgoing all of their found power in a swift acquiescence to the clock.  It was disappointing that closure was not determined by learners, but rather by a bell. 

I was reminded today that deep learning doesn't happen on schedule. Never has. Probably never will.  And yet, we persevere in diminishing learning by organizing school into predetermined blocks of time and signaling the start and stop of those blocks with bells, not intention.

Privileging Beautiful Work: Give Change a Chance

I love how story informs story.  Last week two things happened in the space of three hours that I want to connect here. Each involves teachers, projects, and students. The first takes place off site, not at the high school I have been writing about in former posts, but it does involve the work at that high school. I was at a meeting and present was a parent of a high school student.  This parent, a small group of educators and I were discussing Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students. The parent had commented that her child was in one of the American Studies classes at the high school and was loving it.  She characterized the class and its teachers as being outstanding.  She said her child values the class, as does she. The parent also said that her child was very disappointed after working to create a digital project and learning that the final grade was a B-. As I listened to the parent I thought about the evolution that is necessary as teachers and students shift from more fast-paced product oriented classrooms to studio-based classrooms. The shift between completing work to crafting beautiful work is an uneasy road.

The second story happened after I had worked for 2 hours with tenth grade students in one of the American Studies course.  If you remember these students were going to make images based on a question they wanted to research concerning youth, Holden Caufield, and Manhattan.  Some of these students found expression through the creation of slide shows and single images they had taken while in NYC. I took heart when in the middle of the 2-hour block students refused a break in order to keep working.  The energy in the room increased I noticed as I helped students begin to see potential in their work. I noticed that when I stopped talking as we would review a collection of images, they began to take over and suggest which of the works were stronger given their intentions.  So, I could have posted the work that had been completed, but then the understory which I believe is more important might not have been made: beautiful work requires varying amounts of time and the cultural shift in schools to privilege making beautiful work is a revolution. 

Variable Amounts of Time
Having composed complex and beautiful work with students in former classes I thought about the issue of variable time and the necessary and difficult space we must occupy as a high school culture shifts from one that did not privilege beautiful work to one that may be learning how to do so.  It is the learning how to do so stage that is so uncomfortable given its ambiguity. With the former emphasis on assignment and compliance, there is no ambiguity. The teacher sets the conditions of the work and students honor that contract by completing the said work in the amount of time given.  Beautiful work requires something decidedly different.

Ron Berger writes:

When I was a student in public school I turned in final draft work every hour, every day. Work was generally done in one draft, and we kept cranking it out and passing it in. Even if we cared about quality there wasn't much we could do: we needed to get things done and passed in.

One of the first things a school or classroom can do to improve the quality of student work is to get off this treadmill.  This doesn't mean an end to deadlines—the real world is full of deadlines—but rather a clear distinction between rough research, rough drafts, and finished, polished final draft work.  It means final drafts may take days or weeks to complete. It means a different type of pressure: not just pressure to turn in enough work but pressure to produce something of value...

Students need to know from the outset that that quality means rethinking, reworking, and polishing. They need to feel that they will be celebrated, not ridiculed, for going back to the drawing board (pp. 87, 90).

As a teacher, one way I managed the challenge of occasioning beautiful student work inside a largely traditional school was to engage students in four or five different project-based work situations during the first 6 weeks of school and then asked them to commit to bringing one product from draft to polished work for publication.  Unlike Ron Berger I never worked in a school where the entire faculty was committed to the goal of beautiful work.  As such, I often had to help students shift from being compliant to caring deeply about the work they produced.  I cannot adequately represent the level of fear that accompanies such work.  Students who had been compliant and successful via the awarded grade felt discomfort. They had played the game well and had been rewarded and this shift left them without familiar landmarks.  Students who had "failed" and been failed did not believe in their own capacity to learn or in my capacity to actually teach.  Small, quick and easy successes followed by more in-depth one-to-one conferring/critiquing seemed to help each of these situations greatly.  But I do not want to misrepresent. Often for every step forward there was some backtracking. Assessment happened alongside learning, not at  an "end" of the work.  This deliberate feedback helped to ease student (and parental) worry as I was able to convey places inside the work where a student was successful, as well as specific places where a student needed to work harder and then craft with that student ways of doing so. Be deliberate and weather this is all I can offer. The transformation is significant.   

As the school year progressed, the projects were co-determined by students and me,  and by the end of the year most students had taken over the responsibility for defining their project work.  The nature of the projects were based on student passions and woven into those passion projects (thanks JM for a way of characterizing this work) were skills, dispositions, and strategies I occasioned and at times directly taught. This is not to say that all of the work we did found direct expression in projects, but it is to say that the whole class work we did, as well as small group, and individual work, accomplished three types of work:

1. Some lessons served as seed ideas for larger projects.
2. Some lessons helped students to return to projects and work on the hard aspects of the work—the places where deliberate practice were required. (Note: See David Perkins's Making Learning Whole, chapter 3 for more on this).
3. Some lessons helped students to critique and reflect on their completed projects and establish new and/or revised goals.

The measurement was influenced not only by the finished work, but also the progress made against established goals agreed upon by each student and me.  Public exhibition and publication (beyond the classroom/school) helped us to understand that there could only be "A" work or work that still needed to be revised.

Throughout this process, critique occurred.  I think because I worked from the perspective of studio art, the idea of group and individual critique was familiar. Years later I appreciated reading Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Thinking, authored by  Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, and Kimberley Sheridan in 2007. Their classroom organization of the lecture, students at work and the critique (whole group and individual) would have helped me to better do the work I intended and struggled to do. I mention the text now as it might benefit some who are reading this.

Beautiful Work as Revolution

The calls for school reform at local, state, and national levels are so fast, so furious, at times so mean-spirited, and often sadly misinformed that I find it hard to catch my breath these days. If we step back and think of school reform as an exercise in making beautiful work, the tenor and landscape of the potential redesign shifts. The American Studies courses I referenced in this post are incomplete having begun a mere 8 weeks ago and they are examples of beautiful work in progress.  There is an excitement about these classes that is expressed by students.

For beautiful work of lasting value to be a goal of schooling, our expectations of what beautiful and excellence looks/sounds like, the amount of time required to occasion beautiful work of lasting value, and what is let go in order for such work to be composed represents critical conversations. It is the letting go that is so difficult and wrought with emotion and political positioning.  For letting go of X means that we are letting go of something someone else most certainly values.

Whereas, it is comforting to know that some where I work are engaged in these conversations, regardless of the politics and positioning that always takes place within institutions, it is also difficult to represent a measure of change in light of fear.  For every voice that is representing the possibility of change there is a more insidious voice attempting to maintain the status quo often by inciting fear, exaggeration, and misinformation. Last June I had occasion to speak one-to-one with Larry Rosenstock from High Tech High. He gave me some advice about making change that I am attempting to recall each day: Make something beautiful and it will attract.  I am hoping for the time to do so with others, but worry that may not be possible given these times.

I was thinking about what is needed to ensure the development of the redesign of a high school based on a concept of beautiful work.  In today's NY Times, there is a story about the Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity and or Fear" in Washington D.C.  At the rally, Carol Newmyer handed out bumper stickers that read: Give change a chance.

If only I had a few hundred of Newmyer's bumper stickers to hand out to those who are oppositional. Imagine an entire school community who replaced My Child is an Honors Student bumper stickers with one that read, Give Change a Chance.

Talk about a revolution...

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