Those Kids Could Dream

Stop Stealing Dreams (by M.A. Reilly, 2.29.2012)

 “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”  

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

I.
My father was a dreamer. You know the type. Distracted. Black socks with sandals. A man who studied flowers, represented labor, deeply loved my mother. One summer we trekked across the country and slept each night in a tent.

Each stop was a story. Each stop was an occasion to meet someone we did not know and to listen to them tell a piece of their life.

II.
That summer, my father passed along the capacity to dream to my brothers and me.  It would be his finest gift to us.  He did so by dreaming out loud: finding the wonder in the ordinary and laying it down with words we could follow. My brothers and I were born at the tail end of that generation that Seth Godin writes about:

When the economy hit its stride after World War II, it led to an explosion in dreams. Kids dreamed of walking on the moon or inventing a new kind of medical device. They dreamed of industry and science and politics and invention, and often, those dreams came true. It wasn’t surprising to get a chemistry set for your ninth birthday—and it was filled not with straightforward recipes, but with tons of cool powders and potions that burst into flame or stank up the entire house.
 
A generation dreamed of writing a bestseller or inventing a new kind of car design or perfecting a dance move.

We look back on that generation with a bit of awe. Those kids could dream. - Section 59. Seth Godin.

III.

Garrowby Hill

I can still remember the night when men first walked on the moon.  I was 10 and it was summer and we were driving home from visiting friends, up and down winding hills with all of us tucked into the Country Squire, passing house after house, one after the next, each lit with the soft glow of a television screen.  Years later I would see David Hockney's Garrowby Hill, and think, "Yes, this is like the road we traveled that night."

It would be the first time I heard Walt Whitman's homage to the perfect silence of stars and the first time I

looked up at the moon and saw it as something not made of cheese and myth. 

"Mary, up there men are walking. Anything is possible," my father would tell me.

IV.
In the basement of the house where I grew up, thousands of miles from the Dublin orphanage where I first lived, was an elaborate chemistry set that sat on top of several large sheets of green spray-painted plywood.  It was a complicated concoction that grew year to year as we each took our turn as alchemist.  It was a time when all things could be reused, reimagined, reinvented.

The discarded appliance box was a fort, a carriage, a rocket.
Sheets drying on a line were spirits to dance with, a tent to crawl beneath, a passageway to the East.
Bottle caps were the currency in a game you newly invented.
A stick of chalk and a sidewalk were the opening to possible worlds.

We were bricoleurs, making do with what was at hand. As such, a thing could not be limited by what another had intended. And perhaps that was the deepest secret I was to learn: Do not limit what you imagine by another's definition. 

V.
Tonight, I want to take solace in the moon.  Hoping for full and settling for what is: first quarter. Looking up, I see that we have traveled so very far from that night when we all walked on the moon, from when kids dreamed big dreams and schools, like home, were wonderfully imperfect. Then there was time for getting lost, for wandering about, for doing nothing.

VI.
Now we are told that bigger and better and more precise reckonings of what children need to know and be able to do have been defined.  Each age is the age of the unimaginable and yet now we have the list of things to know. Everything has been defined for us.

We can purchase the list, the clever frameworks, the myriad of tests, the packaged PD, the scientifically-proven research, the white paper, and with all of it, the secret promise to not be left behind.

But know this: beneath those endless products, we purchase certainty at a cost for we have been given a recipe with the intention that we follow it, precisely.

VII.
I think my father would be sad tonight beneath this quarter moon. A man, such as he, who dreamed would find it hard to breathe in this sterile place that we are forever perfecting, where the stuff of school is a möbius strip of endless intent.

There's no way out, the children whisper.

My father would see that with all the perfection and the rushing about that there is no time for dreaming, no time to wear cardigans, to meet the unexpected traveler, to wonder. 

VIII.
In schools, our children practice being very fast, very first, very certain.  They know there will be a test and then another for they are a möbius strip.  And these tests will tell them their worth, their true measure, and fear not--they will tell us our measure as well.

IX.
"We will measure," the new bards tell us.
They mouth this song without sound.
"Nothing else is possible," they sing.

X.
We are without stories. Instead, we have data.

XI.
The distance between the window in my son's room and the moon feels far tonight. It is late when I lean down and whisper, "You must not forget how to dream. When you dream you open a small hidden door."  I whisper it as he sleeps, an incantation of hope from a mother to her son.  A hope that he might hold up to shield himself from the certainty that frames his waking life.

XII.
Long ago men walked on the moon. Beneath them a daughter held her father's hand and knew all things were possible.  The same light that found me then, finds me tonight.

Crowd-Sourcing Dreams

It's not that Seth Godin is saying anything novel.  But it is that he is leveraging via his appeal and his connections a will for others to think about learning and public schooling. I'm half-way through Godin's manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams and want to recommend that you take a couple of hours and read it and then get some others to do so as well and then let's talk about it and see what we can put together and what we can dismantle.

I know that a lot of artists stop by my blog and so I am appealing especially to you.  Godin says that an artist "is someone who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better" (section 39).  I think we know that and certainly I recognize those qualities and actions in the work and heart of so many of you.

Godin writes (from section 39):

The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists
and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into
their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly
pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give
them a platform to do it. 

The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.

I have invited Arne Duncan to a Google hangout I plan to host to discuss the manifesto and what in our national ed plan is supportive of a pedagogy of dreams and what is in the way of children dreaming powerfully.  I'll post the date and time and let you know.

Death, Certainty, and the Common Core

The Cover to a Child's Personal Narrative

1. First a Story

Last week, a ten-year-old boy stopped me while I was visiting his classroom and asked me how I liked the cover to his composition.  He then handed the piece of yellow construction paper to me. At the time he had not added the RIP or the tears.  As I read the title, I stopped unsure if I was reading correctly and reread. It took me a few seconds to find a voice to ask him about his narrative.

He passed two handwritten pages to me and I read them learning that his favorite uncle had died breaking up a mugging, with a bullet to the center of the forehead. He talked to me about how his uncle was his mother's older brother, her favorite too and how he and his uncle use to watch a special TV show together.  I told him that his narrative made me sad and how reading it reminded me that I needed to reach out to both of my brothers, if for no other reason than to say hello.

That's important to do, he told me as he added the tears and the RIP to the cover.

2. Then Another

Beneath the rhetoric of school reform are children's lives--fragile, resilient, and often tragic.  I think about this child and his powerful need to tell this story--a story I imagine he will tell again and again in different ways throughout his life.  Against this, I also think about those who would have us believe that story has limited place at school.  David Coleman, Common Core author joked about personal and persuasive essay when he discussed the Common Core with an audience of educators. Coleman told the audience that narrative and persuasive writing were the two most often prescribed school texts and why that was wrong.  He said:

The only problem with these two forms of writing is they don't get you very far in college and career readiness. Otherwise they're terrific (laughter).  That is it is rare at a job that the boss says, 'Johnson,  I want a market analysis, but before that I want a compelling narrative about your childhood' (again laughter).

An unintended consequence of the Common Core can be found in the certainty that frames so much of Coleman's utterances. He appears to be so sure that his thinking is right--right for an entire country.  With no actual experience against which to measure his remarks, Coleman continues on--perhaps unaware of what his careless rhetoric will displace--a child's powerful need to make sense of a favorite uncle's death through story.  What concerns me more than David Coleman is the audience of administrators and Department of Education folk who sat there and laughed.  Was there no one in that audience brave enough, bold enough to say to Coleman: Wait, you don't know what you're doing.  Let me tell you a story about a child from...?


3. Even in Business, or is it Especially in Business?


Humans, regardless of age, have a powerful need to tell stories.  Stories matter--not only for ten-year- old boys from the Bronx whose favorite uncles die, but also for those earning their keep in various businesses.  Coleman got it wrong in his contrived scenario about market analysis.

Market analysis is informed by story.  One might say it rests on story.

Consider Seth Godin who writes:

I was brainstorming with my friend Jay today and he put this picture into my head.

Most of the time we do the work. The work is our initiative and our reactions and our responses and our output. The work is the decisions we make and the people we hire.

The work is what people talk about, because it's what we experience. In other words, the work tells a story.

But what if you haven't figured out a story yet?

Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn't spread.

On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you're living it.

Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald's? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories... from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations.

Same is true for that little consulting firm down the street vs. McKinsey. While the advice may end up being similar, each firm lives a story in who they hire, how they present themselves, etc.

The story creates the work and the work creates the story.

 Muriel Rukeyser expressed our need for story, clearly, artfully--years ago when she wrote:

Time comes into it.
Say it.       Say it.

The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

We are the stories we tell.  If we fail to tell and receive stories, we fail to be. Ten-year-old children innately know this.  Perhaps, some among us still need to learn it.            

Local Learning: Talking Back to Seth Godin

I was reading Seth Godin's Blog post, Getting serious about your org chart and stopped when I read: "... when geography mattered more than it does now." Godin was asking readers to question their organization charts in order to determine whether the organization leverages the best people to get the job done. He makes the rather broad statement that geography mattered more in the past than it does now.

"Ordinary Angels."  Dun Laoghaire, Ireland. A bit south of where I was born. (Reilly, 2008)

Hmm.

I understand what he is pointing at given the ease of connectivity via the Internet. But I think that is a partial view of something far more complex. I am confident the issue of the local as situated in physical geography ought not to be confused with what technology allows us to do.  The former is about living deeply, deliberately. The latter is not.

The local is about memory and community and land.  Failure to recognize the complexity of local geographies will undoubtedly result in losses we simply may not be able to calculate especially at a time when we are still so dazzled by the novelty of global connections.

Does geography matter less, or perhaps more given the ease with which we may separate ourselves intellectually from the parcel of earth we live on? What happens to the local culture--the preservation of memory of place that is deeply (in)formed by earth or as Wendell Berry (1990) situates it: "the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used" (p.166)?

In an interview with Jordan Fisher-Smith about the dead, Wendell Berry said:

Well, if you didn't know any of the past, you literally wouldn't know anything. You'd have no language, no history, and so the first result would be a kind of personal incompleteness.

But practicalities are involved also. If you had a settled, a really settled, thriving, locally adapted community, which we don't have anywhere, you wouldn't just be remembering the dead. You'd remember what they did and whether it worked or not. And so you'd have a kind of lexicon of possibilities that would tell you what you could do, what you could get away with, and what penalty to expect from what you couldn't get away with.

So the memory that a community has of its dead, and of the pasts of the living would be a precious sort of manual--a kind of handbook, a kind of operator's manual for the use of the immediate place. That's the only kind of operator's manual for the world that we're going to have.

As an educator, I try to relate what I read to what I know about learning and teaching and organizing occasions where one might do both.  I have borrowed Berry's idea of settled households as a metaphor for a place called school and coupled this with the idea of the rhizome-- a horizontal rendering of  communities of settled households.  The languaging that happens in households among seasoned educators, novices, and learners is a "kind of lexicon of possibilities."  It is not that these individuals are the "best at what they do".  Rather, and I want to stress more important, is that they are a collective force who shares and makes local history.  The lexicon is not born simply from "good" ideas, but is made in the physicality of living and remembering.
 
No ideas, but in things wrote William Carlos Williams and I think he might be right.

Whenever I travel to some place new, especially places where the landscape is shaped differently than what I normally experience, I am able when I return home to re-see my own small parcel of earth. This unsettling and resettling is not at first a thinking exercise,  but a "get out and walk about" exercise that reminds me we are of this earth. We are of place. Our self importance is manufactured and at best a distraction.

I want to suggest that given the ease of connecting with others who reside elsewhere, knowing our local geographies may be even more important than in previous times.



Works Cited
Berry, Wendell. 1990. What are people for?  San Francisco: North Point Press.