Parataxis

Web (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

There's this gorgeous moment in a Loren Eiseley essay when the writer touches a pencil to a strand of the web--forcing an intrusion into spider universe. He writes:

...Immediately there was a response. The web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a blur. Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, I could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist. 

I stop, breath closing.
What cannot be named is irrational, extraneous.


II.

My mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Hearing her say it out load was a pencil point inserted into my life.
I was 12.

Like Eiseley's spider, I too fingered the guidelines for signs of struggle--for that something that was bearing down on us,

isolating us

separating

cause from effect.

Does what you cannot name exist?

Shh....It was an irrational time:
my mom closing in on herself,
me learning how to watch, how to grow still,
and as I aged--how to escape out of the house to Brooklyn, to concerts, to parties, to boyfriends.

(Years later my husband would ask: Didn't they notice you were gone each weekend?)

My parents lived an interior life for the next five years.
We lived apart in the same house.
Sat down for dinner several nights each week.
It was a count down of days until the cancer was defeated.

A good war, 

                                            won 

                 even as we broke.

III.

Those days the metaphor of war slipped from our mouths with ease.

There was the war on poverty.
The war on cancer.
The war on drugs.

And there was Vietnam.

When Jack, my oldest brother, turned 18, he was number 2 in the draft lottery.
There was little uncertainty to his future.

My Da talked of Canada.
Jack told me how he and a buddy drank a fifth of Jack the night before they reported for the physical exam.

The average age of U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War was 19.

Jack would be deferred for medical reasons--wire in his jaw.
My mom would be diagnosed a month later.

She told only me about the cancer.  My brothers were not told.

IV.

We kept secrets and we aged across those five years.

Jack bought a VW bug.
Both doors were orange.
The hood was red.

My middle brother took to wearing brown leisure suits with wide ties.
He stopped banging out The Battle Hymn of the Republic on the piano at 6 AM each morning.
There were loud silences.

There were things I told no one.

My parents got high in the backyard with the neighbors.
My oldest brother crashed several cars.
My middle brother left home in a pearl-white 1961 Studebaker Lark.
He drove to Richland Center, WI to pay homage to Frank Lloyd Wright.
I got high on my way to school most mornings, some afternoons.
I made photographs.

V.

We were a study in parataxis.

Nothing touching.            

We were flawed,
circumscribed by our ideas, our fears.

This did not mean I was not loved.
I was, perhaps more.



Cited
Eiseley, Loren. (2004). “The Hidden Teacher.” The Advanced College Essay: Education and the Professions. 4th ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Kristin Dombek. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 9-21.

Reclaiming Public Learning Spaces: The Long Tail Meets the Rhizome

from Occupy Wall Street (Reilly, 2011)

I.

I reread with much interest an older post by Will Richardson from 2011, "How the Hell Could They Let this Happen?".  In the post, Will quotes a section from an Alfie Kohn post.  Kohn writes:

We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education — a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold “reform”; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of “global competitiveness” — that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries. There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, “How the hell could they have let this happen?”

Dem-o-cra-tic public education.
Say it slowly.
A mouthful of words.


II.

I think about this often--how public education is so much more than the content taught to children.  It's what helps us to become (other)wise--to try on unfamiliar perspectives. Amidst the standards and accountability movements, we have lost sight of aims of education. 

We have settled for far less. 

So how do we reclaim what does seem to be slipping from our collective hands? How might we do this reclaiming without colonizing one another?  Without forcing our will?

A way to reclaim public education as a public institution is by leveraging the long tail, the rhizome. The traditional view of education situates schooling as a function of transference from teacher to student of expert-determined content--such as the content specified in state and national standards. As such, U.S. public schools tend to rely on hierarchy as the method used to organize and distribute content and pedagogical practices, most often in the form of sanctioned programs. 

Think assembly line.

In contrast, a rhizomatic learning community is a fluid collective where participants dwell in the middle of things and where learning is a blend of explicit and tacit knowledge. As Dave Cormier has written: the community is the curriculum. Cormier writes:

Rhizomatic Learning posits, among other things, that the community is the curriculum. That being able to participate with and among those people who are resident in a particular field is a primary goal of learning. 

Think an endless sea of middles.
Think affinity groups.
Think choice.

III.

There's no single model of learning that represents wholly all that we are becoming. We are so much more and less. As such, the choices for what constitutes becoming in 2014 are fuller than the the single model we rely mostly upon: the school house. In a connected world, the opportunities to learn need not be limited to what we have done before. 

For example, in this brief video that chronicles the work of Charles Raben, a ninth grader, we can see that the locus of learning is not limited to the place we call school. Raben was able to make use of a passion of his, photography, and apply this passion to framing an urban problem. What strikes me most when I listen to Raben is the agency he asserts.  He is not the receiver of content, he is the maker. 

Charles Raben, 9th Grade Student at Quest to Learn from Institute of Play on Vimeo.

Raben's moment of learning that is actualized via his petition offers us a glimpse at the long tail.  And at the heart of the long tail of learning is the understanding that learning can and does happen anywhere, everywhere, all the time.  

We are never not learning. We are always (un)learning. 

This is a shift in thinking that leaders most need to consider--a shift that asks us to disconnect learning from causality.  I don't need to cause you to learn as you are doing so without me.  A teacher may assist you.  A teacher may help you to shape your thoughts. But frankly, you are learning without the teacher too. You may find that you are learning through chats, social media. You are learning via learning walks. You are learning through play. You are learning through dialogue. You are learning via observations. You are learning through trial and error. You are learning through YouTube videos. You are learning through books. You are learning in connection with others. You are learning by doing and making and reflecting on what you have composed and failed to compose. You are joining and breaking with others and learning during these transitions, these disruptions. You are learning via the courses and workshops you take and give. You are learning though work. You are learning at your dining room table, from the front seat of the car, or bus, or subway.  

It feels rather endless, yes? 
It is.

Learning is not limited to the domain of schools and leaders must embrace this reality and open the doors literally and figuratively.  In fact, some of what gets done at schools in the name of content, standards, and high stakes testing may well limit and suppress thought.

Leaders need to be bold.  Let's open our eyes and catalog the many ways learning is happening and then let's leverage social media to share, reinvent, revise those ways. 

Birds Lifting

Birds Lifting (Reilly, 2012)

I.

I'm driving. Dev, my 15-year-old son, turns in the seat and says to me, "There's no getting to what is needed without first protesting."

I'm silent, thinking.

"Not even things that should just be given cause we all know that they're good. These days you can't get to it without a protest."

I listen, refuse to rush in and fill the space his words have opened.

"It's our interests against the corporations and the only way to get our government to actually work, to do what we've put them in office to do, is to protest," he adds. "Everything requires us to protest."

More silence. More space opening.

"It hasn't always been this way," he says in a voice that feels somewhat younger--almost as if he wasn't making a statement.

Or perhaps that's how I want to hear him.

I feel his absence of faith.
Perhaps, I'm feeling my own as well.

"You're right. It hasn't."

As we almost crest the hill that leads to our home, I slow the car and we wait there in the middle of the road. An unsafe place for sure, just below the crest of the hill. We wait as hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of black birds ascend from tree branches, shrubs, and lawns--darting across the road towards the woods. We sit and watch. The car idles, the windows are down, the roof is open and the birds fly--a steady stream of black interrupted now and then by bits of slate grey sky.

"Wow, a Hitchcock moment," I say to Devon.

We are of few words.

II.

I'm putting away groceries thinking about my son's declaration and I'm reminded of a far earlier time--one where I'm talking loudly with my Da. It's dusk, a half-hour or so before supper and I'm explaining to him how we have a caste system akin to India and he's arguing back, a Manhattan at his ready, saying it's not quite so bad. There are still possibilities.

I think he's being less than truthful, choosing his words with some care. I watch as he takes a sip of his drink, pauses. Yes, he's being careful not to deny that a caste system of sorts exists here or at least that's how I'm hearing it, how I'm remembering it. This is the man who took us across the country to the Painted Desert to see what our government had done to the Navajos.

Love is so inconsistent.

They won't teach you this at school, he tells my older brothers and me.

We head towards Interstate 40 traveling East on a road that is marked only by a thin single grey line on the map. I can still see the face of the girl who looked to be about my age, who stood opposite me in that harsh desert light each us bound by the heat. I can see her hand as she takes the few coins from my palm. Her nails are dirty, mine ragged. I bought a small totem she had painted. I still have it, decades later, packed away in a box stashed in my dead father's' attic. This is the way it is. Regardless of where we store the trinkets we've collected along the way, we continue to bear their weight.

And so, on that late day I'm thinking he should know better. I've been telling him about Vicki Battle and how we're friends on the field, just the field. I play third base and she's our short stop. We know how to work the field, back one another up. We've been doing it for years. My Da has watched us play.  But I'm telling him now with some urgency that she and her family live down by the tracks on a block packed with narrow, attached two-story houses. The train runs behind her home.  He knows the area and nods. And it's just like Caesar's place I add. A boyfriend with a notable name, Caesar Chavez, who lives just a town away, who lives above a bar. Trains run behind his apartment too, rattling the windows that are lit by neon.  Between us is such distance--a möbius strip that keeps us from touching.

We live further up the hill where there are no trains, no tracks, no neon. Here, narrow driveways separate one house from the next.  An odd repetition.


III.

I wonder what stories my son will tell when I am no longer here, no longer alive. We are always moving towards death. I wonder who will witness his tales. Who will hear his voice?

Will he remember a fall afternoon thick with black birds?
Will he tell about the time when he first recognized that the only way for right to happen in the world was to first protest?

Injustice is a constant that connects generations.

I wish I could be more clever, more in the moment. But the moment has gone. What I wanted him to know, but failed to tell him, was that difference has never been an antonym for sameness.

Omphalos, Omphalos, Omphalos

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Reilly, 2012)

I.

Seamus Heaney tells of the effect of saying the word, omphalos, aloud again and again and how the repetition of the word led him to recall, remember.  He writes:

I would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. It is County Derry in the early 1940s ...There the pump stands, a slender, iron idol, snouted, helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle, painted a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket and then another as the man pumped and pumped, the plunger slugging up and down, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.  (Kindle Locations 72-79). 

II.

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

Across the street from the house where I grew up, sat the Corker's home.  A week ago on my way to the Bronx, I passed by it.  The Corkers were the grandparents I never got from family. Behind their home stood the tallest of hemlock trees. This tree remains today, still towering over the roofline of the house. An elegant tree for sure. Sturdy and yet, welcoming.  Many afternoons I stretched out beneath its branches, drawing and writing in a small diary that locked, occasionally munching a few saltines. I did this throughout my childhood. Safe on the soft needles not knowing how drawing and writing would save me. This was my secret place--one I did not visit with any of my neighborhood friends--not even Tommy Lane.  This was a gift the Corkers gave to just me--a secret place.  And in that crowded neighborhood where I grew, a secret place was no small thing.

Early on, Tommy Lane and I would strip from a clothesline, a newly washed sheet some mom had washed, wrapping ourselves in it. Somedays it was his backyard. Other days mine. Somedays, neither. The sheet was always so much bigger than us.  It was prop of sorts that we used as we played. Wrapped in a white or pale blue sheet, I was a saint--a saint who liked to dance. Some days we would snap the sheet above us and rush beneath it. A sky falling. I don't recall what Tommy thought although he joined me as we moved about the backyard, tumbling in the grass.

There was no point to our games, no sought outcome.  There was only the now--framed by the call of voices across driveways, disembodied.  These bits of disconnected sound worked their way into the stories we told ourselves, told one another, until we dozed.

III.

I loved that boy and knew that life in his home was tough well before my ma told me so.

We know more than we can say.

IV.

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

Tommy Lane marked the centre of the world when I was a child.  His ma would screech his name from the top of the stairs over and over and over and we'd run fast from some corner of the neighborhood to see what was the matter for there was always something wrong and there she would stand, leaning her large frame into the doorway, clothed in some old duster that snapped up the front, wobbly, loose-faced and always so angry.

I don't know when we stopped being friends, when our interests vied or how we moved away from one another as surely as we did.  I remember meeting him late summer one afternoon by accident. I was 16, stunned by his height and that he had dropped out of school. We talked like strangers, hesitant, unsure and breached that distance by leaving in his green two-door Plymouth Road Runner for a party he knew on the cliffs.

It's nearly impossible to run from your past.

V.

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

Here. Now. I can recall the sound of his name, always both names,  a steady vibration across my vocal chords like a mantra I repeat.  I can recall his voice more than I can see his face.

There's a temptation to soften the past, to recast it in some soft light, hear it differently. A falling sky. Some cued music. For me the temptation is not to romanticize the past, but rather to intellectualize it--to distance it from my heart, to not say what must be said.  To write it instead in some book I can lock.

The last I heard Tommy Lane was clean and worked as a short order cook at a diner in Jersey City, his older sister had moved north near the Canadian border and married, and his ma had finally gotten sober right before she died.

VI.

There was no room at school in those days for the lives we actually lived. School was not the place to drop the occasional bomb. Causal worlds, like schools and churches, make little room for irrationality. That which is outside simply does not exist.

We kept such secrets--the price of doing school, of doing religion, of doing life at our homes.  I've lost track of Tommy Lane across these decades and I am the worse for it.

I left home at 18, never to return to that neighborhood and I never saw Tommy Lane again.




Cited
Heaney, Seamus (2014). Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

This Moment

Bob Geldof screenshot from film, This Moment

"The paradox of the heart of individualism is that it only works when we act in concert for the common good."   

Bob Geldof from here.

Using Advanced Organizers with 4th Graders

An example of an Advanced Organizer for chapter 5.

At one site where I work, students are having difficulty comprehending the text, The Iroquois: The Six Nations Confederacy (Mary Engler). In addition to a density of facts, the text is not well written and I suspect one might argue does not represent the complexity of the Iroquois people very well. The text is included in the Grade 4 module from Expeditionary Learning.  

In order to help facilitate comprehension, I introduced teachers to the use of advanced organizers. An explanation of advanced organizers, along with organizers for each of the chapters (2 - 5) is included in the slideshare below.  Please use freely.

Advanced Organizers for The Iroquois from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Poetry Break: Bones

Between Here and There (M.A. Reilly, Dublin. 2009)

Bones

  -  Sheryl Luna

Once, as a girl, she saw a woman shrink
inside herself, gray-headed and dwarf-sized,
as if her small spine collapsed. Age
and collapse were something unreal, like war
and loss. That image of an old woman sitting
in a café booth, folding in on herself, was forgotten
until her own bones thinned and hollowed,
music-less, un-fluted, empty.

She says she takes shark cartilage before she sleeps,
a tablet or two to secure flexibility and forget
that pain is living and living is pain.

And time moves like a slow rusty train
through the desert of weeds, and the low-riders
bounce like teenagers young and forgiving
in her night’s dream. She was sleek in a red dress

with red pumps, the boys with slick hair, tight jeans.
She tells me about 100-pound canisters of lard
and beans, how she could dance despite her fifth
child, despite being beaten and left
in the desert for days, how she saw an angel
or saint glimmer blonde above her, how she rose
and walked into the red horizon despite
her husband’s sin.

I’m thinking how the women
in my family move with a sway, with a hip
ache, and how they each have a disk
slip. The sky seems sullen, gray, and few birds
whisk. It’s how the muse is lost
in an endless stream of commercials, how people
forget to speak to one another as our ending skulks
arthritically into our bones, and the dust
of a thousand years blows across the plain,
and the last few hares sprint across a bloodied
highway. Here in the desert southwest, loss
is living and it comes with chapped lips,
long bumpy bus rides and the smog of some man’s
factory trap. And there are women everywhere
who have half-lost their souls
in sewing needles and vacuum-cleaner parts.
In maquiladoras there grows a slow poem,
a poem that may only live a moment sharply
in an old woman’s soul, like a sudden broken hip.

And yet, each October, this old woman rises
like the blue sky, rises like the fat turkey vultures
that make death something beautiful, something
towards flight, something that circles in a group
and knows it is best not to approach death alone.

Each October she dances, the mariachis yelp
and holler her back to that strange, flexible youth,
back to smoky rancheras and cumbias—songs
rolling in the shadows along the bare Mexican hills.
She tells me, “It’s in the music, where I’ll always
live.” And somehow, I see her jaw relax,
her eyes squint to a slow blindness
as if she can see something I can’t.

And I remember that it is good to be born of dust,
born amid cardboard shanties of sweet gloom.
I remember that the bare cemetery stones
in El Paso and Juárez hold the music, and each spring
when the winds carry the dust of loss there is a howl,
a surge of something unbelievable, like death,
like the collapse of language, like the frail bones
of Mexican grandmothers singing.

—“Bones” from Pity the Drowned Horses by Sheryl Luna (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). © 2005 by Sheryl Luna. Reproduced by permission of University of Notre Dame Press.