Tom Kim

Went to see Isabella, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure by the Pig Iron Theater Company as part of the Live Arts Fringe Festival. Pig Iron is probably the most esteemed regular of the Fringe Festival, Philadelphia’s performing arts and experimental theater festival, and they’re known for intricate shows that have evolved from physical improvisation. This is, I think, the first time they’ve worked from an established play.

I’ve never see a Pig Iron production before, and I’ve always wanted to — so when I heard they were doing a Shakespeare adaptation, I made sure I bought tickets for Dana and I. Then last night I noticed that the latest podcast from Radio Times was an interview with the director, associate designer, and lead actor of the play. How cool, I thought, and looked forward to listening to the interview on my morning commute.

I nearly fell off my bike laughing this morning when I listened to the podcast and realized that 1) the play was going to be staged as the fantasy of a lonely coroner getting carried away with the corpses in his care and 2) most of the actors were going to be nude…naked. What’s more appropriate here, nude or naked? Necrophilia as comedy — I should have known. Now I’m just waiting to see how Dana will react when she realizes what’s going on. Too awesome.

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Kids Off the Couch has a great suggestion for reading John Feinstein’s new young adult book Vanishing Act, which is a teen mystery centering around the U.S. Open, while watching the actual U.S. Open on television.

I must also say here that I’ve never really liked playing tennis, but received a new-found respect for the sport once I read a few of David Foster Wallace’s empassioned essays on competitive tennis. See “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” or read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

An excerpt from “Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery” by Parker Palmer

Good teaching is an act of generosity, a whim of the wanton muse, a craft that may grow with practice, and always risky business. It is, to speak plainly, a maddening mystery. How can I explain the wild variety of teachers who have incited me to learn — from one whose lectures were tropical downpours that drowned out most other comments, to one who created an arid silence by walking into class and asking, “Any questions?”

Good teaching cannot be equated with technique. It comes from the integrity of the teacher, from his or her relation to subject and students, from the capricious chemistry of it all. A method that lights one class afire extinguishes another. An approach that bores one student changes another’s life.

Faculty and administrators who encourage talk about teaching despite its vagaries are treasures among us. Too many educators respond to the mystery either by privatizing teaching or promoting a technical “fix.” The first group uses the variability of good teaching as an excuse to avoid discussing it in public — thus evading criticism or challenge. The second group tries to flatten the variations by insisting on the superiority of this or that method or subtlety. In both quarters, [?] the far-ranging conversation that could illumine the mystery when we think of it as a “black box,” something opaque and impenetrable that we must either avoid or manipulate by main force. Mystery is a primal and powerful human experience that can neither be ignored nor reduced to formula. To learn from mystery, we must enter with all our faculties alert, ready to laugh as well as groan, able to “live the question” rather than demand a final answer. When we enter into mystery this way, we will find the mystery entering us, and our lives are challenged and changed.

Good teachers dwell in the mystery of good teaching until it dwells in them. As they explore it alone and with others, the insight and energy of mystery begins to inform and animate their work. They discover and develop methods of teaching that emerge from their own integrity — but they never reduce their teaching to technique.

The new director of our middle school shared with us this article.

“Role of the Educator in a Friends School” — developed by the participants of “Educators New to Quakerism,” Winter, 2000

1. To be an authentic role model.
2. To guide, nurture, and enrich the mind and spirit of children.
3. Peaceful listening.
4. Patience.
5. To use silence — to allow the student time to think and reflect.
6. To know yourself and to bring that self to the classroom.
7. To be fully present.
8. To think about other people.
9. To take the time to see the spirit in every child.
10. To make the students accountable for their actions.
11. To seek the “Truth” and to take joy in the seeking.
12. To honor your own integrity.
13. To remember learning takes place in laughter, too.
14. This is all one moment in the life of a child.
15. To trust in your students’ abilities and in your own.
16. To model and encourage leadership as service among students, teachers, and staff.
17. To question, reflect, discuss, question, reflect, and discuss.
18. Actively look for ways to express Quaker testimonies and beliefs in the curriculum.
19. To acknowledge and appreciate commonalities and diversity among students, family, and staff.
20. To demand of myself what I expect of others — trust, passion, commitment, love, justice, and equality.
21. “Education is an exercise of hope; equity is an act of courage.”
22. To live and teach through the eyes of a child.
23. Accept the mystery.
24. To focus on process above outcome.
25. To help children understand that one must fall in order to get to the next step. Mistakes are OK.
26. To encourage bias awareness and bias busting.

The most recent episode of the Contrast podcast has an earworms theme.

Speaking of, I’m sure I’ve been driving Dana batty by constantly reciting snippets of the following skit from the Potter Puppet Pals:

Totally missed this:

Tonight First Person Arts is having their monthly story slam at L’Etage on 6th & Bainbridge. The slam starts at 8:30 but I hear seats fill up quickly, so you might want to get there early. Tonight’s theme is “Trespassing.”

I’ll try to make this one. See ya there.

[Update: It was a lot of fun. Marisa liveblogged the whole thing, so read her post for a good recap of the experience.]

Locust St. has put up an astonishing post on driving complete with lots of great driving-related mp3s.

Look also within the post for a link to Richard Foster’s short story, “A Nice Morning Drive.”

To celebrate the waning days of summer, and the announcement that MTV has elected John Ashbery as its first poet laureate, I give you this poem:

Popular Songs
by John Ashbery

He continued to consult her for her beauty
(The host gone to a longing grave).
The story then resumed in day coaches
Both bravely eyed the finer dust on the blue. That summer
(”The worst ever”) she stayed in the car with the cur.
That was something between her legs.
Alton had been getting letters from his mother
About the payments — half the flood
Over and what about the net rest of the year?
Who cares? Anyway (you know how thirsty they were)
The extra worry began it — on the
Blue blue mountain — she never set foot
And then and there. Meanwhile the host
Mourned her quiet tenure. They all stayed chatting.
No one did much about eating.
The tears came and stopped, came and stopped, until
Becoming the guano-lightened summer night landscape,
All one glow, one mild laugh lasting ages.
Some precision, he fumed into his soup.

You laugh. There is no peace in the fountain.
The footmen smile and shift. The mountain
Rises nightly to disappointed stands
Dining in “The Gardens of the Moon.”
There is no way to prevent this
Or the expectation of disappointment.
All are aware, some carry a secret
Better, of hands emulating deeds
Of days untrustworthy. But these may decide.
The face extended its sorrowing light
Far out over them. And now silent as a group
The actors prepare their first decline.

I’ve been chewing over Borderland’s post on Emergence, in which he makes the point that the classroom is a complex system.

A good (long and crunchy) introduction to complexity theory can be found here.

Another blog I frequent that’s intensely interested in complex systems is Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World, and, as it happens, he’s also recently put up a post on emergence.

I remember the importance of systems thinking first hitting me when I read Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline. His book Schools That Learn has been sitting on my “to finish” bookshelf forever. The big takeaway I remember is the importance of finding and (gingerly) applying points of leverage — with the attitude that living, breathing dynamic systems are like spinning plates, requiring constant observation, reflection, and vigilance.

Important to remember as I put together my grandiose plans for the year. You prep and prep, think and think, but then you just have to let it fly and let it go.

Now let’s consider what I dare to envision the actual classes to be like.

Blah Blah Blogs

For me, Language Arts is fundamentally about improving the quality of input and output. I guess that could be true of most subjects, but English emphasizes the medium of language. Everything in my class is about improving comprehension and literacy on one end and communication and expression on the other. I take comprehension to mean basic fluency in language and normative understandings of literal meanings. Literacy is a more sophisticated affair involving the critical discernment of meaning and context within a specific genre of communication. I take communication to mean articulate conveyance of intended meaning. Not necessarily easier or harder, but different, is creative self-expression which, for my purposes here, I’ll say involves employing rhetorical techniques to unexpected or ambiguous effects that somehow seem aesthetically or emotionally truthful.

Now most English teachers, myself included, generally teach these four areas as distinct skill sets. We read a text bit-by-bit, all the while going over major events and characters, perhaps tossing in a few pop quizzes. We then have our wonderful discussions about what the book is really about and go over themes and motifs. We have lessons on how to write the five-paragraph expository essay and include essay prompts with our multiple-choice tests. Finally, we assign a project, perhaps involving some creative writing or a small-group presentation. Vocabulary and grammar are sprinkled throughout as a kind of close study of the medium itself at its finest granularity.

This is not a bad way to go, and it’s worked for me for the past few years. I teach specific skills that fall under the broader ideals of my discipline. I cover the stuff that everybody else will continue to recursively cover, like a spiraling Babel to the heavens. Slowly and surely, brick-by-brick, most students handle inputs better and produce better outputs. At least in institutionally required ways.

But I think I may be missing an opportunity here. The literary texts we study are artifacts and models of these processes. They themselves “read” life and culture and then challenge us with newly artful levels of technique and meaning. They give us not only the occasions, but also the examples, to learn the communicative strategies they employ — so that we can understand and do the same. All writers start as readers — and students of what they read — and then at some point decide to jump into the conversation.

Conversation. Because what’s missing is what’s between the input and the output. The urge to respond, to engage. It’s the grail of all communication, including teaching; you want to say something that effects a change. You want to add something to the transcript that has a bearing on what follows after you. You want to be slashdotted, dugg, and deemed del.icio.us.

You might see where I’m going with this. I’ve been trying to incorporate blogs into my classroom ever since I was hired at this school — usually with fairly piddling results. They seemed so perfect in addressing the shifting literacies of our culture with their power to publish and interact, and yet they never found a comfortable fit with everything else I had going on.

But I’ve been re-thinking my entire approach, and I think I’m getting close to being able to articulate a new model, one that I hope will get me closer to the fundamental aims of my calling.

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