Being the Teacher: A Few Thoughts

Want (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I've been thinking about what it takes for us to be really fine teachers for the children and teens we teach. Frankly anything less is simply not good enough. For the last two months, my colleagues and I have been working in a variety of schools often co-teaching or in some cases taking the lead by modeling how we plan, teach, revise, and respond to students.  To be sure, we work with many incredible teachers and it is a privilege to learn with and from them.  But we also work with others who are not fine teachers--the ones that the students deeply need.  Some  of the teachers we work with seem to have lost their way.

I am reminded while watching a really super intermediate grade teacher work that teaching well requires a commitment beyond what one thinks one can do and know.  Really fine teaching is edgy, unknowable in some primary ways as it happens in the present.  In such classrooms, emergence is perhaps the only constant leaving teachers to continuously work hard reading/misreading/rereading while on their feet.   Against this absence of actually knowing, is planning--those rehearsals we have as we assemble possible classes in our minds. We know this by the voices we imagine as we plan.    We hear ourselves saying, X and students saying, Y and on and on and we follow these possible conversational crumbs to ends that will not be realized.  Nonetheless, this rehearsing is rather critical.  Really fine teachers rehearse, fully knowing that the life of the learning will take turns and will be disrupted in ways that are difficult to know or follow.  Even though the learning will get somewhat away from us,  great planning helps teaching to be more grounded.  Teaching well requires acknowledging the tension between the possible learning we rehearsed and the actual learning we can't quite fully name.

Teaching well requires response.  It saddens me when I see 1, 5, 10 and more teachers collect student work and not respond or return it.  Nary a happy face, even.  It is as if these inked pages once collected fall into black holes--never to be returned.  In places with persistent failure, students seem to act as if this absence of response is a norm to be expected.  This should be unacceptable, not because administrators say so, but because we know so.  Responding with care and intelligence is a cornerstone to teaching.

Teaching well requires that we remain curious, teachable, and kind.  Wondering why a child has said or done something keeps us in the present, theorizing. Being curious about things beyond the school enriches our teaching life.  Our passions and interests are often a type of professional learning that are not directly connected to who or what we teach and yet can greatly inform both.

Out Past the Sun: 5 Walks in Woods

Walking in woods...

Woods V (M.A. Reilly 2013)

Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn,and you can trace your last homecoming
into the snow or the sun.

 - Annie Finch, "Final Autumn"

Woods I (M.A. Reilly 2013)

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers. 

- Charles Simic "Late September"

Woods II  (M.A. Reilly 2013)

Woods IV (M.A. Reilly 2013)

Woods III (M.A. Reilly 2013)

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being.
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing."

-  Percy Bysshe Shelley

New York City in Image

Images I have made of New York City.

Kind of Blue (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Utopia (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Etta and Butch Go for a Ride (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Counting (M.A. Reilly, 2010) 

Corner, South Bronx (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Pershing Square (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Unholy City (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Wall Street (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Fog Bound (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Washington Heights (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

A Woman Gathering Silence (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Intersection II (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Remembrance (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Bridge in Fog (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Bearings Taken (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Be for Me, Like Rain (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Duty (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Homeless (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Waiting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

The Bridge (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Spanish Harlem, Sunday Morning (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Take the A Train (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Big Moon City (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

 

Suddenly (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

At the 125th Street Station (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Listen (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Over Breakfast (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Christmas in Harlem (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Upper East Side (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

155th Street (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Jerome Avenue (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

The Alphabet is No Language (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

School Reform, Pioneers, and the Heart of Things

American Bus Stop III: No Lemming Left Behind (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

The word “pioneer” betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited (p. 159). 

Biss, Eula (2011-03-01). Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays. Graywolf Press. 

I.

I sometimes think we must have forgotten that schools are inhabited places. There are bodies there. Ones that embody dreams, hopes, quiet fears, small and large talents, silence.

Schools are lived places.  Messy like that.

Waiting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

II.

With a keen, relentless drive to do good, and for some, to profit--school reformers have displaced the bodies of children, teachers, staff, and administrators. More and more the story of education is about them.

The kids are the new disappeared and in their wake the burgeoning bags of the next best thing remains. They have been displaced by best practices, roots and wings, TFA, extended school years, standards-based curriculum, tests and more tests, and most recently anything with the phrase, common core, attached.

One can hardly breathe given the crowd.

Intersection (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

III.

Reform is a fenced field.  Some of it barbed, some too elegant to forget. And all of it is contained.  We begin to die the day we are not permitted to act, to create--the day when we forget to remember.  It's like that scene in O Pioneers!, when Carl Linstrum tells Alexandra Bergsons:

All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things.

Teaching Writing: A Few Resources

Happiness Is The Longing for Repetition. (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I. Repetition

I cannot imagine teaching writing without writing daily . Janna Malamud Smith writes:

I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create—and, by so doing, to rule over an imagined world of your own. (Kindle Locations 66-67). 

How often do young leaners have the time and agency "to rule over an imagined world of your own"?

Steven Pressfield opens The War of Art by describing the rituals of his writing. He writes:

I get up, take a shower, have breakfast. I read the paper, brush my teeth. If I have phone calls to make, I make them. I've got my coffee now. I put on my lucky work boots and stitch up the lucky laces that my niece Meredith gave me. I head back to my office, crank up the computer. My lucky hooded sweatshirt is draped over the chair, with the lucky charm I got from a gypsy in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for only eight bucks in francs, and my lucky LARGO name tag that came from a dream I once had. I put it on. On my thesaurus is my lucky cannon that my friend Bob Versandi gave me from Morro Castle, Cuba. I point it toward my chair, so it can fire inspiration into me. I say my prayer, which is the Invocation of the Muse from Homer's Odyssey, translation by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, which my dear mate Paul Rink gave me and which sits near my shelf with the cuff links that belonged to my father and my lucky acorn from the battlefield at Thermopylae . It's about ten-thirty now. I sit down and plunge in. When I start making typos, I know I'm getting tired. That's four hours or so. I've hit the point of diminishing returns. I wrap for the day. Copy whatever I've done to disk and stash the disk in the glove compartment of my truck in case there's a fire and I have to run for it. I power down. It's three, three-thirty. The office is closed. How many pages have I produced ? I don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it. All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance. (Kindle Locations 70-81)

WHAT I KNOW There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. (Kindle Locations 82-84). 

What rituals do learners make inside of classrooms?  How might these rituals inform/become content we need to learn?

II.  Loss

An odd truth, perhaps, but writing like fine teaching, requires something to have been lost--something beyond our naming and what we think we know at the beginning.  It is in this losing that the work we craft is the work we become. This is not something I think you can learn easily from reading a book about writing.  Rather, it is work that requires more of you and the you you are becoming alongside others.

So before venturing on to the list below, if you are not already writing daily, I hope you will make time to do so.  Perhaps 10 minutes a day to start...

III. A Few Lists...Largely Arbitrary

A Few Books That Inspire Me to Look Closely (Really this list is arbitrary.  Perhaps substitute with those texts you cannot help but put down/pick up/put down/pick up/Turn towards and away... and so on)

Bateson, Mary Catherine. 2010. Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom. New York: Knopf.
Berger, John & Jean Mohr. 2011. Another Way of Telling. New York: Vintage.
Berry, Wendell. 1996. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. Sierra Club Books.
Danticat, Edwidge. 2011. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage.
Diaz, Junot. 2012. This is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead.
Dillard, Annie. 2013. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Revised Edition. New York: Perennial.
Gaiman Neil. 2013. The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Audio CD. New York: William Morrow. (I could listen to hime= read for weeks and weeks.)
Heaney, Seamus. 1997. The Spirit Level: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 
Heaney, Seamus. 2011. Human Chain: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 
hooks, bell. 1997. Bone Black: Memoirs of a Girlhood. New York: Holt.
Morrison, Toni. 2008. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. University Press of Mississippi.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2010. A Field Guide To Getting Lost. New York: Penguin.

A Few Books To Strengthen Your Own Art as Writer

King, Stephen. 2000. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner.
Lamott, Anne. 2007. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Pressfield, Steven. 2011. The War of Art. New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC.

A Few Books To Complicate Your Teaching Practices

Dyson, Anne Haas. 1993. Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in Urban Primary Schools.New York: Teachers College Press.
Dyson, Anne Haas. 1997. Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy.New York: Teachers College Press.
****Dyson, Anne Haas.2013. ReWRITING the Basics: literacy Learning in Children's Cultures. New York: Teachers College Press.
Graves, Donald. 2003. Writing: Teachers and Children at Work –Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Heard, Georgia and McDonough. 2009. A Place of Wonder. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

****Reading now.

Cited
Smith, Janna Malamud. 2012. An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery. Berkeley, CA Counterpoint.

"Sun"day Best

Rising (M.A. Reilly, Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia, 2010)

I Heard He Sang a Love Song (M.A. Reilly, Virginia, 2009)

Faith on the Street (M.A. Reilly, Dublin, Ireland, 2008)

Waiting for You (M.A. Reilly, Florida, 2009)

First Light and Fog  (M.A. Reilly, Morristown, NJ, 2011)

Weak Winter Light (M.A. Reilly, Hudson River, Manhattan, 2010)

Aftermath (M.A. Reilly, South Carolina, 2011)

Sun (M.A. Reilly, Newquay, England, 2013)

Facing West (M.A. Reilly, South Dakota, 2011)

Sunflower (M.A. Reilly, Augusta, NJ, 2013)

Sunrise (M.A. Reilly, Montepulciano, Italy, 2013)