#SOL16: Bone Deep

A road (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Being a widow is not special or unique. Just this year I am one in 800,000. That is the number of new widows and widowers annually according to the Institute of Medicine.

Death happens.
Husbands die.
Wives too.

And with each of those deaths, a part of those who loved them best dies too. 8 million people annually experience death of an immediate family member. Do knowing these facts relieve the pining, the desperate wanting, the guilt for living on, for coveting life?

There are so many different ways of knowing. Here in the States, we tend to rely on demonstrating our smartness by displaying bits of knowledge. We learn this first at school and I suspect it is a lesson that sticks. Such knowledge is safe. It is a territory already defined.

But there are things that can't be known ahead of experience. There the territory is wild, unplanned. Here you could wander for years. This is the place where grief is bone deep.

Knowledge and Reading: What Happens to 4th Grade Readers Who Struggle & Positive Role of Robust Reading Aloud

I was reading Gina Cervetti and Freddy Hiebert's article, Knowledge, Literacy and the Common Core, (Language Arts, 92 (4), 256-269) and thought a lot about the fourth grade children I have been working with who are in the middle of a study of Greek mythology and how their increasing knowledge of myths helps them to learn more about mythology and to read increasingly challenging texts. As Luis and others in the class have told me, we're Greek mythology experts.

In the article, Cervetti and Hiebert argue well that knowledge and comprehension are synergistically related and do so by providing four claims that are all research-supported.  Specifically, they find:

1. "...knowledge of the topic has been found to influence comprehension" (p. 257).
2. "...general world knowledge, not simply topic- or domain-specific knowledge associated with a text has also been found to aid comprehension" (p.257).
3. "...knowledge supports inferring and higher-level comprehension processes, not simply remembering information from a text" (p. 258).
4. "...while knowledge aids comprehension for all students, having a knowledge base can be particularly beneficial for students with lower levels of reading skill...Knowledge about a topic can compensate for reading skills" (p. 259).

Whereas all of these statements are interesting, it is the last claim that most interests me as I think about some of the students and how reading aloud first followed by small group comprehension conversations has proved valuable. In the design of the unit, we privileged reading a variety of Greek myths aloud first, along with independent reading (managed choice of texts) before beginning small group comprehension conversations. As I was modeling for teachers the process for comprehension conversations, I worked with the highest performing readers in the class in one group and the most struggling readers in a separate group. The text I had selected for the children who most often struggle as readers was Joan Holub's The One-Eyed People Eaters: The Story of Cyclops. The text has a lexile level of 400 and also is coded as a guided reading text level K (beginning of second grade). The four students in the group (2 boys and 2 girls) have a history of reading difficulty and all receive special education services.

Comprehension Conversations

A comprehension conversation is a scaffolded method for guiding students' reading.  Students read a text or portion of a text and write answers to a few questions the teacher has prepared. This helps the teacher to ascertain the children's understanding of the text and to prepare for the conversation she or he will have with students. Specifically, the teacher prepares factual, inferential, and when appropriate critical questions for students to answers and then reads the students' responses prior to meeting with them. The student responses help the teacher to determine the content of the conversation, by seeing how well students understood the factual aspects of the text and more inferential understandings. Some questions that help are:

1. What did the children understand about what actually happened in the text? Did anything disrupt this understanding? What are my theories?
2. When asked to infer, to what end were children able to do this?  Did anything disrupt this understanding? What are my theories?
3. When asked to think critically across a text, were children able to do this?  Did anything disrupt this understanding? What are my theories?

Based on the interpretation of students' answers, the teacher then crafts an engagement with the students that will help to explicate the areas of comprehension strengths and challenges the students showed. Usually, I want to anchor a group's reading of a text before engaging in a such a conversation. In this case, I wanted to make sure the children could actually manage the reading before setting them out to read and respond to a few questions. 

The children's significant knowledge of different Greek myths and how they are related has impressed me as I've worked with this small group. Their knowledge of Odysseus allows them to understand the Holub book with greater ease.  Although they had not read about the Cyclops and how Odysseus outsmarts it, they did know about Odysseus, the Battle of Troy and the Trojan Horse.  So when Holub's book opens, we are met with a tired Odysseus who is making his way home after the Fall of Troy. The children's understanding of the text at a factual level allowed me to set a task for them that would help me to see how they inferred about Odysseus based on his actions and dialogue.

Tomorrow, I'll try out the charts with students and then use what they generate to inform the conversation we have on Friday.  In addition, I'll be sharing a collage by Romare Bearden, The Cyclops from his work, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, so we can discuss how Bearden portrays the Cyclops.

Romare Bearden's Cyclops.

Our Use of Education Standards Limits Learning: We Negate the Anomalous by Being Ready

A child following a hunch... (Reilly 2010)

I.

"We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery." - Marcelo Gleiser, 2014

Building a public education system on the belief in knowledge-certainty represents a seismic error--one we continue to make and remake. Even as we know more than we can say, our knowledge is largely (in)formed by our guesses, our hunches, our theory-making and unmaking. We ought to celebrate these stances, not shun them. Tentative theory making represents a main purpose of education and yet, against the narrow world of educational standards the room necessary to think, err, reconsider, fail better is largely absent for the individual learner. We are driven by a logic that says school learning is knowable and testable. We fail to see such logic as damning. In favor of logic, we have forgotten mystery.

Douglas Hofstadter in his foreword to Gödel's Proof recognized this when he wrote, "We now understand that the human mind is fundamentally not a logic engine but an analogy engine, a guessing engine, an esthetics-driven engine, a self-correcting engine." Where in schools do we embrace this understanding of knowing or of our beautiful limitations? How are teachers and children penalized in this high-stakes narrow world of testing and evaluation for embracing such notions?

I would argue that much of what is privileged today in public school education has been built upon a construct of a stable universe, where the borders between teachers and students are permanent, and whereby the signs, signifiers, and signified are linear and stable—resulting in the belief that there are raw materials like stones and timber that can be collected and distributed in order to enact specific commodities called knowledge. Knowledge in this schema is not to be constructed, but rather discovered from a set of knowable and predetermined things.  Further, the stability between effect and cause is seen as constant. 

Consider that "Newton’s first law of motion states, objects at rest stay that way—as do objects in motion—until an outside force inflicts itself.  The cause-effect relationship implied here is an apt metaphor for the modernist concept of teaching and learning: One precedes and causes the other. Teaching becomes didactic, directing; not aiding, helping, stimulating, or challenging natural, self-organizing processes. Machines do not self organize, compensate, grow” (Doll, 63-64). The logic supporting a belief in standards with specified outcomes as measured by high stakes testing can be tied to a Newtonian understanding of knowledge as discovery. In such schema, the builder, as corporate knowledge-holder and the inhabitants, as teachers and students are bodiless entities who can be improved and acted upon by the introduction of different stones and timber. 

We are endlessly substitutable. 

A child following a hunch ... (Reilly, 2013)

II.

“Gaps, breaks, punctures are not only absent from the curriculum, they are seen only in negative terms.  Time itself is seen exclusively in cumulative terms, as a co-relation with what is learned: the longer the time, the more learning accumulated.  Time is not seen as an active ingredient, necessary for developing the creative possibilities inherent in any situation” (Doll, 37).

It is these disruptures that we ought to be courting, rather then the smooth face of certainty. Kurt Gödel's theorems about incompleteness might well inform our reform efforts. Through Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems we can recognize the fallacy of the standards-testing movement we are buried beneath and the freedoms we sacrifice to remain buried. Gödel theorized (1931/1992) that no set of finite axioms could represent absolute truth because an undecidability exists in closed systems. Within such systems, the logic necessary to negate a particular axiom is not present within the system. To know a contextual “truth” requires a metalanguage.  And yet, in public education we are forced to trust the 'truth' produced about our children's knowledge via a closed set.  The same corporations that name what must be 'learned' have design what will be tested and how.  Then the results of these tests that only the test makers and test takers are allowed to see are used to report how students and their teachers faired. Yes, against the judgment of nearly the entire psychometric and education researcher communities (Newton, Darling-Hammond, Haertel, & Thomas, 2010) we use these narrow results to measure the effectiveness of teachers.

from here 

PARCC has indicated that we can now use their closed system that they purport to be a truthful representation of children's learning to gauge how well our child did against other children from "PARCC states."

Do you see how closed this system is?  By purporting to be able to provide you with a comparative view of your child's performance vs. those in Arkansas or Colorado the assertion that these scores actually report some academic truth of importance is assumed.

But what do these tests measure? They measure only what is common, never what is singular or anomalous. And this is a problem.

Children following a hunch... (Reilly, 2012)

III.

Gilles Deleuze notes, "[beneath the general operation of laws, however, there always remains the play of singularities" (1994, p. 25). It is this play of singularities that we must attend to. This is where hunches, guesses, trial and error rises. Yet, there is little room for such musing is the input-output world of standards and testing. Our inability to occasion the anomalous, to celebrate its presence in the utterances of our children and of their teachers--speaks to our lack of vision and commitment to unfettered learning. Allegiance to one set of educational standards and the tests they produce leads us to directly ignore anomalies.

Instead of having open-ended outcomes in eduction where we do not worry about pre-naming what a child will learn, but rather use our energies and talents to co-name with the child what he or she is theorizing, we have a list of things all learners must know and do.

A list is cheap. A list can only be common.

Check 'em off is infinitely less complex than a map one makes. We ought not to sell out our children this way. The talents of students and teachers are being squandered, repressed and ignored in favor of having everyone produce like answers to closed tests. Now, what career or college readiness does that speak to?

A child following a hunch... (Reilly, 2014)

IV.

We know tentatively.

Where in the new models of educational reform is guessing represented? Where in these reforms is self-correction privileged? Where do we allow learners, or their teachers, to follow a hunch?  In what ways do we embrace aestheticism? Are the arts nothing more than fodder for reading materials so that we can teach directly the skills outlined in the Standards?

Multiple ways of (un)knowing are largely missing from the certainty that 'the new generation' of educational standards represents.

We are teaching you and testing you on what you most need to know are the largest of lies we tell our children and we do so daily. We have been fabricating truths about the completeness of knowing since at least Sputnik and in these new times of the Common Core we continue to lie. We know this completeness myth as educational standards--the narrow interpretation of what some now say learners need to know in order to be college and career ready. I find it improbable that a nation could even believe such fantasies, let alone act on them.

Who are these soothsayers who know what it means to be ready?

But, what if being ready is itself the largest of myths? What if being ready represents our attempts to stay complexity and to substitute a poor version of knowing? What if being ready lessens the scope and depth of learning? What if catering to being ready actually undermines learning?

We only need to read the introduction to the ELA Common Core State Standards to notice the belief in a finite world of knowing that privileges being ready:

The Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do (p. 6, 2010).

Really? 

Imagine the arrogance that such knowing was even possible, let alone desirable. Can Standards represent what needs to be known?  By whom? For what purpose? Is it even rational to suggest such a list that can be reproduced is worth our interest? Yet, our schools are limited by and driven to ensure that all students know emphatically a closed set of nameable reading, writing and mathematical skills that can be measured cheaply and profitably for corporations. Driven by the limitations of our allegiance to high stakes testing, we measure what is convenient--what can be cheaply known by the masses--negating the anomalous, missing the singularity. We then say that these results represent a truth about the value of what children know and can do and the quality of work their teachers have done.

It is this closed system of standards, student testing, and teacher evaluation that we must disassemble and do so quickly.

Cited

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.). New York Columbia

University Press.

Doll, William E. Jr. (1993). A postmodernperspective on curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gleiser, Marcelo (2014). The island of knowledge: The limits of science and the search for meaning. New York: Basic Books.

Newton, Xiaoxia A., Darling-Hammond, Linda, Haertel, Edward,  & Thomas, Ewart. (2010). Value-Added Modeling of teacher effectiveness: An exploration of stability across models and contexts. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 18(23). 

To Not Know is To Wander

Birds Flying (M.A. Reilly, November 2014)

I.

Hear that? The call of birds at the end of fall.  Their sounds filling spaces with a cacophony of noise that I can admire and yet, not understand.  For I  know almost nothing about birds and this keeps me sharp, unsettled, cataloging--even though my attempts at each of these is poor.

To not know is to wander, searching for a foothold in the world, a boat to take you upstream.

II.

Before the late fall storm slips in, we feel the air pressure drop and the crows and Jays swoop from oak tree to maple filling the wood lot beyond the side window with an increasing insistence--like a Morse code signaling urgency. Sparrows scour below the feeders in my neighbor's yard eating seed, making that odd chirping sound that grows louder until crows strut close and the sparrows lift as one.

The world before the storm feels busy and the birds pull me from the list of things I will not get done today--knowing that what is left undone is its own catalog, worthy of notice.

The Jays are perched on branches and wires, their feathers fluffed up, keeping them warm. I watch the black crows dart back and forth between limbs of trees, noting that where they have been marks an absence in the overcast sky. I try to watch until the sky grays completely obscuring birds and horizon but I always look away too soon. I know little about patience.  And ever so slowly snow begins to fall covering the sounds of birds huddling now on branches or crowding below bird feeders where seed has spilled.

The world quiets. And then there's only snow--each of us accepted into its stillness.

III.

Early this morning, well after the snowfall had ended, the call of young birds punctuated the silence of the kitchen. Upstairs my husband slept on and in the far rooms at the other end of the house my son and his two friends slept too. I love these settled moments when the the trickle of water though baseboards and coffee perking are the only interior sounds I notice.

Hungry? I wondered and closed my laptop leaving it perched on the kitchen table.  I crossed the floor and opened the draw that holds bread taking out a few pieces and crumbling each. Opening the side door, I noticed that no one had shoveled the steps and so I needed to throw the crumbs a distance greater than I had wished. I watched for a while.  The crumbs lying on top of the snow and all the while I was remembering how my mom forty years earlier would send me outside to do the same.

Then it was a drudgery.  How could I know what she was preparing me for with such a simple and unassuming act as feeding the birds?

In those days our backyard was the size of a thumb and we concocted more ways to feed winter birds and did it daily. Pie plates filled with bacon grease and crushed peanuts and seeds. Homemade suet balls hanging from a fence made from seeds and fat and cut up apples. Days old bread crumbled and tossed out the back door. We were nothing less than inventive in that small house just a few miles from Manhattan.

Each time I feed the birds now I think of the children living in the neighborhood and how the bears come in early fall too to eat whatever has been thrown outside for the birds. But at November's end I think the bears must be slumbering. At least this is what I tell myself as I toss the last handful of bread and notice at how it disrupts the stillness of snow.

Upstairs I can hear the sound of my husband rising as I resettle at the table, opening the laptop.  In some small ways what we repeat most often is what we first failed to understand.

The Problem of Over-Coding Knowledge at School

The Bath (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines.

 (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987, p. 9)

As I read Mikael Holmqvist's (2003) "A Dynamic Model of Intra- and Interorganizational Learning" I was taken by his explanation of exploitation suggesting that as organizations "learn to refine their capabilities; they exploit their existing knowledge; they learn to focus their activities on certain domains; they learn what brings success and failure" (p. 99).  Exploitation is about making use of what has been. It's a means to stability, or at least the suggestion of stability.  Holmqvist tells us, "Exploitation is about creating reliability in experience. It means productivity, refinement, routinization, production, and elaboration of existing experiences (p. 99).

Schools, largely governed by imposed standards and high stakes testing, are most often places of exploitation.

These are spaces where clinging to past success as measured by state tests and avoiding failures as suggested by state testing results lead to an "elaboration of existing experiences."  How might we counteract such hegemony? Holmqvist recommends that organizations  "create variety in their experiences as well, by experimenting, innovating and taking risks" (p. 99). This is the process of exploration.

Schools are striated spaces in need of exploration--of lines of flight.

I think a lot about these potentially clear and striated spaces and the dynamic of lines of flight and over-coding that resituate space as being cleared and/or striated.

Building and collapsing.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) help to name this potential tension between exploitation and exploration when they write:

It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again (p. 20).

Breaking off.
Starting up again.

This rhizomatic world, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is one where exploitation and exploration co-exist and how we shift and move between these spaces, reclassify and clear these spaces are worthy of our notice, our naming, our time.

Cited

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Mineapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
Holmqvist, Mikael. (2003).  A Dynamic Model of Intra- and Interorganizational Learning. Organization Studies 24(1): 95–123. 

Learning from Verbs: The Shape of Knowledge

Knowmadic (2012, M.A. Reilly)

I. Photographing

I read a post, What Schools Can Learn from the World of Photography by George Couros in which he outlines four lessons from the field that he says are lessons we can apply to school. In thinking about how digital photography has altered that industry, Couros makes these insightful claims:

1. The technology is better and cheaper which changes everything. 
2. Communities make us (or force us to be) better.
3. Create a culture where risks are accepted.
4. The more access, the more we have to rethink the way we have always done things

What interested me, apart from the four examples cited, is the significant shift with regard to authority that occurred alongside the rise of the digital image/camera.

Access matters.

Who can make, not only an image, but a worthy one altered alongside the technology. This is a story about an industry that had its sanctioned experts and altered into a growing collective of professionals/aspiring/amateurs whose expertise rests not in sanctioned individuals, but more so in the collective. In opening the field, the idea of image making also changed, broadening in ways that could not have been understood 20 years ago. We have new ways of expressing, knowing/unknowing, and sharing because we can now easily (and cheaply) think through a lens.  It is this shift from lone expert to collective that disrupts authority and resituates knowledge. This shift fascinates me and I suspect is beneath the four examples Couros cites.

II. Schooling

A parallel between digital photography and school then, may well be a story about knowledge being the community (a nod to Dave Cormier) and how that transition disrupts more traditional understandings of authority.

It's rhizomes all over again.

David Weinberger (2012)  in  Too Big to Know makes several related points about the shape of knowledge and how the changing shape is also about authority.  He writes:

Shape matters. When knowledge was a pyramid, when it was based on firm foundations shared by all members of the community, when it consisted of contents filtered by reliable authorities, when we knew what was in and what was out, when it had a form and shape, knowledge had an easy authority... Knowledge now is the unshaped web of connections within which expressions of ideas live.

If knowledge is more a node and nodes are contextualized by that which they connect and are connected to, then knowledge is without a foundation. Such thinking asks us to question many of our most trusted assumptions about what counts as important knowledge and whether any ideas can be valued apart from the context in which they occurred. Weinberger explains:

Architecturally, the Net’s lack of an overall permission system makes knowledge less like self-standing content—bricks, in Bernard Forscher’s sense—and more like nodes that cannot be fully credited or even fully understood outside of the network that connects them. (Kindle Locations 3009-3011).

If schooling has been shaped by our expressions of knowledge as bounded, listable, and transferable-- then is it not expected that a new shape of learning is emerging that mimics a networked understanding of knowledge?

Borrowing from Weinberger's description of networking scientific knowledge, we could think about the shift from schooling as institution to networked learning as being:

(1) huge, (2) less hierarchical, (3) more continuously public, (4) less centrally filtered, (5) more open to differences, and (6) hyperlinked. (Kindle Locations 2104-2105)

III. Mapping is So Yesterday

Now an oddity here is how the list above conflicts with the recent push to standardize, control, centralize, and limit what counts as important knowledge via undertakings such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I want to suggest here that what we see in this gesture (expensive at that) is perhaps a last (?) vestige to a past where knowledge, like authority, remained stable and known.  Modeled from within a perspective of paper-based knowing, the CCSS is a contained world punctuated by stops.  There is little, if any, middle as it is beginnings and ends that dominate. Again, Weinberger characterizes paper-based knowledge in this manner:

We created knowledge as a system of stopping points both because that’s what paper enabled and because it’s a highly efficient strategy.(Kindle Locations 2983-2984).

Stopping points.

The institution of school is filled with big stopping points. Just consider these: curriculum mapping, grade levels, student-teacher roles, school calendar, graduation, report cards, diploma, attendance, seat time, core subjects. The choice of being definitive is a stopping point.

Perhaps a rule to adopt is if you can map it, it may not be worth traversing?








Work Cited:

Weinberger, David (2012-01-03). Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room . Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

Barefoot Knowledge and a Few Birds

Freedom (Mixed Media. 2009, M.A. Reilly)

As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. As a child when I was sent down to Joe Clarke's store, I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Introduction.

 I.

I like to be reminded that that there are all kinds of knowing and unknowing in the world.  

II. 

I have been immersed these last few weeks in studying the Common Core (ELA) and am deeply appreciative of its insistence that knowledge be an important outcome, especially in primary grade education.  We often have emphasized the code aspects of reading acquisition (not saying code isn't important) and in doing so inadvertently devalued factual knowledge.  Susan Neuman (2010) writes:

the true path to literacy is not the procedural skills that stand out in the crowd, but the knowledge of content and concept that underlie its foundation (p. 301).

It is in naming the knowledge and context, which under girds the development of procedural skills such as code-focus learning (alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid naming of letters, print concepts , and writing one’ own name) that is challenging and critical to do. Again Neuman (2010) concludes:

Code-related skills, the essential alphabetic principles that make up our language, are a critical component in learning to read. But while these skills are necessary, they are certainly not sufficient. At the same time, these skills must be accompanied by a massive and in-depth foundation of factual knowledge (p. 304).

 

I think that is an outcome that is sought via the explicit inclusion of informational text and the practice of text-dependent reading, alongside foundational reading skills.  What I want to caution about though is the means by which knowledge is composed and the confusion between information and knowledge. 

III.

Reading informational text is certainly one way to nudge open a door to learning about the world.  But we should not mistake that for dwelling in a world of ideas. George Siemens (2006) states it nicely: "All knowledge is information, but NOT all information is knowledge" (vi). If we think that adding informational texts to the classroom, so that they represent 50% of the library and taught texts, will lead to knowledge--we are surely mistaken. I want to believe that the intent of the Common Core is much larger than the percentage of books that are taught. We have before us an opportunity to reclaim the arts, literature, natural sciences, history, geography, anthropology--many of which have ceased to be potential lines of inquiry as school time has been doled out to studying for tests in mathematics and reading. We have before us the occasion to privilege embodied ways of knowing.

The Weight of Living (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A Reilly)

IV.

Beneath the window where I am writing this I have been stopping, called away you might say, and am listening to and watching birds.  So insistent are some as they use their beaks to move the very leaves that my family and I have neglected to rake from last fall.  They are I suspect in search of worms, insects, food that rests beneath.  They work with an intensity few would not appreciate. There is a kind of knowing, an indwelling here that needs to be learned, embodied, surrendered to.  

V. 

In Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge he explains the need to surrender to what you study.  How possible is that in school when there's so much declared stuff to know?

Polanyi writes:

A true understanding of science and mathematics includes the capacity for a contemplative experience of them, and the teaching of these sciences must aim for imparting this capacity to the pupil. The task of inducing an intelligent contemplation of music and dramatic art aims likewise at enabling a person to surrender himself to works of art. This is neither to observe nor to handle them, but to live them. This the satisfaction of gaining intellectual control over the external world is linked to a satisfaction of gaining control over ourselves (pp. 195-196).

We create environments by the decisions we make--be it in a schoolroom, a boardroom, or a bedroom.  Hauling in a different collection of books will hardly matter if language has been stripped from meaning, replaced with the pre-made 'thought'.  

Contemplative experiences require agency and error.  

Room and breath.

VI.

The birds are insistent. I wish I understood what their varied cries and calls meant. It's a sound-alphabet I cannot decipher, cannot hear well to mimic. I can't seem to ease the birds from my mind. It's like that moment in Hitchcock's masterpiece when you begin to really see the birds because they block the sunlight.

The world cools.

VII.

This morning I am thinking how the birds are always before me so often in fact that I hardly stop to notice.  This indwelling, perhaps, comes with a cost and so I try to distract myself from the ways the birds seem to part the air by turning to Annie Dillard. I read a bit and it worries me that even as I write this someone else somewhere is penning a quiz or a test based on Dillard's "Living Like  a Weasel," as it is now a Common Core exemplar.  I hope they will resist the urge to test.  As Dillard says in The Writing Life, I hope the birds eat your crumbs.

I have lived a half-century and have read and reread "Living Like a Weasel" and perhaps the greatest thing I can say is that meaning still is slippery. With each age, I read it differently, understand aspects less. 

Is there a quiz in which knowing less is an A?

I Found Words (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

VIII.

A task we might try on is one that invites children to name their world--through embodied experiences and text-based experiences.  I know that is hardly the stuff we think about when think about curriculum, but it gives me pause--especially when I think of my own child.  Using what we know to name the world opens us to recast what we first know as simple with increasing complexity, with increasing simplicity.   

This is a kind of knowing we cannot codify for another.

IX.

In 'Total Eclipse' Dillard first mentions a child's bucket and shovel as noticed when passing through a hotel lobby: 

On the broad lobby desk, lighted and bubbling, was a ten-gallon aquarium containing one large fish; the fish tilted up and down in its water. Against the long opposite wall sang a live canary in its cage. Beneath the cage, among spilled millet seeds on the carpet, were a decorated child’s sand bucket and matching sand shovel (pp. 11-12).

Later in the essay, when she and her husband have gone to witness a full eclipse, she tugs on that simple mention of the bucket and shovel.

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives (p.24).

She will return to the bucket and shovel again in this and other essays. It is not that she is tossing facts at us, as much as it is that she understands common objects in multiple and contrasting ways. It is in the space between the mentioning and my recognizing the mentioning that I reach to make sense--there, beneath the codification, is a restlessness that suggests a way of knowing that cannot be taught.

Barefoot (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

X.

Dennis Sumara observes: "Curriculum is a normalizing experience...Teachers become tour guides, showing students which sites must be noticed...As a daily performance, teaching becomes a pointing ritual that seldom pierces underneath the skin of the everyday" (p. 233).

Paying attention to the everyday is a call to the sensual. See how Luis Moll and his colleagues frame this:

The primary purpose of the work is to develop innovations in teaching that draw on the knowledge and skills found in local households...We use the term funds of knowledge  to refer to these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual function and well-being.   Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Norma González, 2005. "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to connects Homes and Classrooms"

For Dillard, like Moll and his colleagues, funds of knowledge are in everyday objects.

XI.

There are all kinds of things purported as knowledge. I wonder if knowledge can exist outside a body?

The birds have quit their rooting with the onslaught of Saturday lawn mowers and blowers.  But they remain.  In trees, between trees, on the deck railing across the street, on the wires that cross, I spot them. Their tweets and calls rise above from time to time the insistent motoring of mowers. I wish I knew more about birds, their songs and such.

Pages (Mixed Media, 2009, M.A. Reilly)

There is much to learn in simply being present.

 

XII.

In a few weeks a friend and I will be presenting at a conference.  At that time we will  engage participants in the closest of readings: the kind you embody.  Through choral reading and dramatic tableaux we will step in and out of text.  

I hope they leave unsettled.

XIII.

As I am not beholden to a system of  learning, I daily grant myself permission to blindly follow 

    lines of flight 

that may     and      may 

                               not lead                          to 

  

                                                 ideas

  insights

  

                                                            blind alleys

                                      buckets          shovels   

       

                    bits of sand

Bloomed Ink and Birds (Mixed Media. 2009, M.A. Reilly)

                                                                                       

 and 

                                birds

Works Cited

Dillard, A. (2009). Teaching a stone to talk. NY: HarperCollins - Kindle Edition.

Neuman, S.B. (2010).  Lessons from my mother:  Response to the National Early Literacy Panel.  Educational Researcher, 39, 301-305.

Polanyi, M. 19581962. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Siemens, G. (2006). Knowing Knowledge.

Sumara, D. (1996).  Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York: Peter Lang.