Fighting Words
We have the moral disease of domination, with which we must struggle for our souls. Power has become our national obsession, as it has for many nations before us and around us. We have bartered moral suasion for brute force.
-from For Everything A Season (Orbis Books), by Joan Chittister
I’m an old debater. I was the first girl to ever win Best District Speaker in our debate league. I supported the Common Core standards move toward argument writing and away from personal narrative as the primary form of writing students practiced in school. “People don’t really give a shit about what you feel or what you think,” David Coleman, architect of the new standards, said. Yet there he was building his career, and the daily lives and choices that our children would experience, through which they would absorb the priorities of the world, on what he felt and what he thought.
Maybe his problem, which became our problem, was that he didn’t recognize the extent to which his work was permeated by his own subjectivity and ambition? Although the personal writing of my sons consisted of tedious accounts of playing with friends, “and then, and then” over and over, it strikes me that they’ve grown up to have a good sense of where they begin, their own inclinations and biases, and the boundaries of the outside world. Yet I have my own doubts about their early education.
Schools are now being roiled by another reform: the science of reading. And there is no doubt we need to establish a much stronger foundation for teaching reading in the early grades. I spent years working with teachers in middle and high school addressing a silent tragedy: the many students who arrived in, say, ninth grade reading below third grade level. I had hired a tutor to teach my first son to read. She said he was one of those students who needed explicit practice with the sounds and letter correspondence, and I wondered how many children didn’t need that. There is no question in my mind, after thirty-five years of teaching and coaching, that we need much better reading instruction–not just exposure to books–in our schools. I’m cheering for the Reading League and all the serious literacy researchers who’ve been trying to get this message out.
And yet. The medium is the message, a long-ago literacy researcher told us. And our current medium, a word which also denotes a connection to the spirit realm, is a form of discourse that has become so binary, so othering, so violent, that it ensures that many people will strongly resist the brutality of the delivery and completely miss the value of the original message content.
The shrill bleating on social media, “so and so must be held accountable,” is followed by “yes, and also the other so-and-so.” A strong argument can be made that the damage done to people’s lives is so harmful (do you know how clearly illiteracy in 4th grade predict future prison sentence?) that this is a war, that the problem is so urgent we need to use the language of war. And yet the language of war, the language of violence and revenge and wiping out the enemy, will never build a new society.
Public discussion these days resembles the Salem Witch Trials. “I saw Goody Proctor using 3-cueing.” “I saw Abigail Goodman with a phonics workbook, boring children to death.” Treating reading pedagogy like fundamentalist religion and identity politics is what got us into this mess.
For the past two decades, at least part of the problem in schools has been an increasing fragmentation, an endless process of bureaucratic directives, often contradictory, for how the shrinking amount of teacher planning time must be used. Adult learning, the ongoing reflection and learning that teachers much do, always but especially now, requires a capacity for holding multiple ideas in mind (the Reading Rope is complex), for weighing and sorting and prioritizing, for assessing how well our previous decisions worked out, discussing and, yes, arguing. To create and sustain the culture of adult learning to support student learning, leaders must have time to think beyond binaries. They must model true learning: reflection, admitting where we may have been misguided in the past, and how we can synthesize what we now know into the hourly and daily life of a school.
In order to lead people with hearts of flesh rather than stone, hearts soft enough to be open to new ideas and practices, we cannot use the language of war and division, of us and them, of violence and brutality. There will be resistance enough anyway, from exhaustion and cynicism and genuine though misguided generalizations about how children teach themselves to read. Powerful moral suasion, without which we will never get systemic change, does in fact rest on what–and how–we think and feel and talk to each other.
Sense & Nonsense, Dada or Data – Dispatch from deep in NYC Education bureaucracy sometime in late 2021
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like to divide the world in two and those who don’t bother. I’ve always been among the dividers, loving to make sense of my world through categorization, which is probably why I loved school so much. When I arrived at college, I was puzzled by a division on many of the syllabi in my humanities courses: between enlightenment and the irrational. We even had to read texts about the Irrational, which made no sense to me, probably because as C.G. Jung told us over and over in different ways, we cannot see our own unconscious, that iceberg lurking in the deep waters below consciousness; no matter how quickly we jump, we cannot catch our own shadow. We can only observe, if we are willing to look, the harm it does in the world, trailing in our wake.
In my mind’s categories, the opposite of creative play–and letting the irrational bubble up through chance and improvisation and apparent nonsense–is step-by-step procedural thinking. Articulating a step-by-step procedure is a way of making the invisible visible, able to be looked at and thought about, allowing the uninspired among us to apprentice themselves to a creative–or at least productive in some way–process. The 20th century honed the procedural approach through assembly lines, time and motion studies, algorithms, morning routines, punch cards of a million binaries which add up to something apparently whole. Perhaps that drive toward clarity and the reduction of any process down to the smallest bits before reconstituting them into the safety of a recognizable totality, a dependable routine that will bring some kind of success, has its roots in and around 1913 when art blew up recognizable images into a million bits, or the trenches of the first world war when bombs blew up people into a million bits, or Hiroshima and the ovens when scientific knowledge of atoms and states of matter simply eliminated millions of people. And yet, play and games depend on a series of rules, not unlike a procedure. The challenge of play is how, within a rigid constraint, can you perform a sleight of hand, a jailbreak, to get around–or through–and capture the flag, or steal home or the bacon?
These questions haunt me now. I’m a mid-level bureaucrat in a gigantic school system, where everything and everyone seems to have broken down to a new low during the pandemic and its waves of domino effects. Supply side shortages–of people–have me wondering what is truly essential for our students. So many pieces have been added to the list of demands made on school leaders, which they must somehow pass onto teachers or do themselves. And I ask myself if we’ve gotten to the Dada-point, where all the tiny but onerous steps each with bits of data requested take up so much time and mental bandwidth that what we are learning is not the original forgotten goal– which I think had something to do with meaning and empowering our students– but how to be absurd, how to improvise and perform some sleight-of-hand alchemy to create the appearance of compliance.
With no time to actually think and reflect, teachers turn the page on new complicated curriculum materials, which are meant to be used as a collection of resources not as step-by-step daily plan, but nobody has time to read that part. Or do the analysis and synthesis and prioritization required to select and prefer. So kindergarteners are being drilled on whether they are using all the counting strategies the textbook names, and given a low grade if they can do the counting itself but not use all the suggested strategies. The list of procedural steps, meant to be used as an apprenticeship structure on the path toward understanding and performing a skill independently, has now been mistaken for the learning goal itself. Mental leaps, sudden understandings that move from linear process to epiphany, are no longer allowed.
Maybe this is not accidental. But maybe it is simply a by-product of misunderstandings about learning, the way the Common Core standards listed some important big ideas about thinking and learning, but which led to terrible teaching — as when a first grade teacher asked her class after reading a book aloud, “What conclusions can you draw?” Because that was the language of the standard and the related content and directives given to the first grade teaching team. “Where are the markers?” a first-grader asked. Children will almost always make sense.
A similar bastardization has happened with the skill of inference. We used to learn infer as the opposite of imply. Which led me to think about times I implied something because I didn’t want to say it directly, and to wonder about whether others were implying, and what they were choosing not to say, adding nuance to my thinking and mystery to the world but not demanding a right-or-wrong answer. Now it’s a skill we measure, like a simple procedure. Inference is such a huge and complex task, and a hundred people might infer at least a dozen things from the same text, but no matter. It has been decreed by the checklist from above that third-graders will infer or they risk being labeled as “developing” and possibly held back.
Is it possible that at a certain size, systems must generalize and abstract so much that their directives have to be absurd? And that even people like me who have loved school and its systems for shelving books and organizing materials–as a student, a teacher, a mother of students, and an instructional coach–now feel compelled to break out and disobey? To just try to do something meaningful and interesting? To make something real? There’s a show now at the Met called “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” because there is currently a surprising revival of this art of the absurd and irrational. Peter Schjeldahl quotes Man Ray saying that original art is “a creation motivated by desire” and then Schjeldahl explains surrealism in a way that even a person like me who prefers sunlight, clarity, and a good To Do list can understand: “dedicated to anarchic motives that brooked no institutional authority. Each work is a jailbreak, successful or not, from a civilization that could be held responsible for spirit-crushing conformity and, in the annals of war and injustice, systemic lunacy.”
Existentialism in the 20th century pointed out the way bureaucracies and governments, whether totalitarian or simply military-industrial complexes, do violence to the individual. It’s not personal, you’re not personal, just a cog in the machine that must run for economic productivity, or the whims of a billionaire. In the 21st century, post-pandemic (or not? nobody is sure) pundits wonder why people, especially teachers, are quitting their jobs. I have no grand explanation. I just know that no matter how much time I spend synthesizing all the directives–trying to make sense of them for the leaders and teachers in schools who are too busy to read all the documents and follow all the links and watch all the recorded robotic webcasts–I’m not sure how to proceed in a way that doesn’t harm the people I’m supposed to help.
We’re not allowed, it seems, to make a leap toward purpose and meaning, to find a shortcut to what’s most essential, to just get to the goal. The point of the game seems to be that we must clock in at every mile-marker, so that people above us can issue reports, dada or data, on their accomplishments and thus prove their qualifications for moving up a level. The work must continue, no matter how little gets done or learned along the way, no matter how many of us collapse along the road or simply sit down at a rest stop and, staring dumbly, shake our heads and refuse to continue in spite of the mindfulness and social-emotional assessments done to us. Finally, perhaps, the only choice, like Bartleby’s, is the choice to refuse, to say “I prefer not to.”
Year-End Books–and Questions
The problem is, it’s so hard to connect a cause to an effect in a large body of flowing water.” -Wendell Berry
At year-end, on the cusp of change—with a vaccine being distributed and an elemental shift from earth to air in the heavens—I’m reflecting on 2020 through the reading I’ve done, believing as I do that I can discover what’s really going on inside me through observing the unconscious byways governing the movement of my attention and obsession.
In the mid-90s, a colleague asked me about my summer reading and then said, “I guess you are trying to figure out something about marriage.” I had not noticed the theme. And I soon separated from my first husband. When I chose those books at the library—Two-Part Invention by Madeline L’Engle and a big biography of Charles Lindbergh and his writer wife Ann Morrow Lindberg, two books that would turn out to be based on deceptions of self and others—I did not know I was trying to solve a problem. So my question now is: what am I trying to figure out?
My 2020 reading –books I finished:
Free Food for Millionaires
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World
The Yellow House
Train Dreams
The Great Fire
The Sympathizer
Girl, Woman, Other
True Grit
Police Procedurals: A collection of novellas
Patsy
The Dutch House
Forest Dark
The Green Road
Austerlitz
The Maytrees
Brooklyn
Cassandra at the Wedding
The Vanishing Half
Cave & Julia
The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China
Things I haven’t finished yet (out of lack of focus, agency and energy not interest)
War and Peace
The Art of Mystery (Graywolf art of writing series)
Exciting Times
Ninth Street Women
The Third Rainbow Girl
Born a Crime
Feel Free: Essays
The Living (I was re-reading this having read it in the 90s, but it was too death-centric for a person living in NYC in the Spring of 2020. I had to abandon it in order to stay afloat.)
I’d love to hear from you–what have you been reading? And what themes are developing for you? What are you trying to figure out?
March 19, 2020
Home. Yesterday I found better rhythm. Also, my team got official permission to work at home, though accompanied by micro-management details sent from a supervisor who has been working at home all week. We are allowed to start working at home tomorrow, Friday. For this week, our union says we’ll have to take sick days or vacation. In spite of the frustration, it’s a relief that as of tomorrow, I am allowed to do what I am doing.
What is sinking in today is how many students and families may lose contact with their schools. And vice versa. In Sunset Park, where so many families are economically fragile all the time, the collapse of the economy is catastrophic. Food banks need help from all of us who have secure and reliable incomes. Another principal told me she hadn’t slept in 90 hours, that a parent tested positive: the parent had been in the school on Wednesday of last week, chaperoned a field trip on Thursday, and picked up her kids on Friday, casually telling the teacher she’d tested positive. Of course, the staff, many of whom are pregnant or live with medically vulnerable people, inched closer to hysteria, quite legitimately. And the principal was absorbing all this emotion while trying to establish remote routines for meetings and support and actual teaching. Their people are amazing, they say, rising to the occasion, showing previously unknown talents with technology. And at the same time, so many principals said something like, “What no one is addressing in all these staff meeting agendas is how much anxiety and emotional response there is. We have to first just connect and reassure and find out what people need.” The principals I am in contact with are true leaders. They are present for their people, truthful and courageous, having to parse under extreme pressure a gush of advice and direction and regulations.
Hysteria is a woman’s word. Or actually it is a word men coined to label women.
It comes from from Greek husterikos ‘of the womb.’
Last month, I read Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney. And I’ve been thinking about this passage: “A linear narrative won’t do; what’s needed is something closer to the way that women in southern Africa discuss an important event in the life of their community. They describe it and then circle around it…constantly returning to it, widening it out and bringing into it past memories and future anticipations…the Talmud is organized in a similar way.” Another reason for a feminized history, Spinney notes, is that it is generally women who nurse the ill, register the sights and sounds of the sickroom, lay out the dead, and take in orphans. “They were the link between the personal and collective.”
Home and womb. Things feel much more elemental now, about care. Shelter at home. Last night as I tuned into my favorite yoga teacher on Zoom (who knew?), a man who has seen me through a frozen shoulder and all kinds of other transitions in the last fifteen years, I realized I love my home. I love the rug I was lying on, listening to his soothing British voice. I love the sage green walls, the curve of the chaise, the art books standing in my husband’s childhood rocking chair.
The coughing from downstairs continues to float, somehow, into our space. We’ve never heard any sounds from our downstairs neighbor before. “Should we go down there?” my husband asks, “and see if she’s okay?” We consider. It’s late and how weird would it be to knock on the door and say something like, “we hear your personal sounds.” We decide not to, for now. I resolve to email people in our building to set up something. My friend in Westport texts me. They have a signal system of colored papers in the window: green means you are healthy, red means you need groceries or medicine, yellow means you are sick. The connection between the personal and the collective.
One of the big questions with school leaders and teachers and my team is how will parents of babies and toddlers or three homeschoolers of different ages, and/or caring for an elderly mother-in-law, how will these people host a class online for their students?
This morning, I read that Australia has closed its borders. My oldest son is living in Australia right now. He was supposed to fly home in May for a few weeks. Last night he contacted me on WhatsApp. “I found you,” he messaged. I hadn’t know my WhatsApp name. Quantas will let him change his reservation without charge, but he has to do it by March 31. “Soccer is shutting down for 3 weeks,” he texts, “but my job seems secure, we have a contract through December.” His girlfriend has lost her restaurant job, when it closed. Both her sisters have been let go. He’s the only one with income. My other son, who came by for dinner the night before last and lives just a few blocks away, posts an Instagram video of a colorful pot of vegetable and chicken curry, next to a big pot of rice. #QuarantineCooking, he adds. These former residents of my womb are now making their own homes.
Home. Womb. So much care and swirling emotion, sheltering in place, incubating some new order. That’s where the day starts and ends.
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March 17, 2020
Got up way too early, 3 a.m., worried. Make lists and research projects for teachers and leaders and students. Start emailing at an ungodly hour. Tweet out announcements for schools and families. Spend very long morning in zoom calls and phone calls and sharing google docs with various teams of people. Two laptops open, one for Zoom calls and the other to look at documents and emails being referenced. Switch charger cord between them. Tweet out announcements for schools and families. Have back spasms. Add thick meditation pillow to chair. Eat lunch while watching a webinar. Have indigestion. Put on Kool and the Gang, Celebration, and dance madly for five minutes. Sit back down. Get on zoom call. Tweet out announcements for schools and families. Make phone calls to school principals, checking in. Enter into spreadsheet for district team. Watch mayor’s daily press conference. Consider the phrase “shelter in place.” Get on zoom call with my work team. Cough. Sneeze. Call principals. “My families need food,” one tells me. Resolve to donate to the food pantry in Sunset Park. My husband comes home at 5:30 pm and when I get off the phone with last principal of the day, he says, “Have you been in that chair all day?” Ask him to handle dinner. Leave phone home and go out for walk. Keep six feet between me and other people. Conversations with principals fill my mind, all their worries, and all the ways they’ve already gotten complicated plans into action. One principal said we sent chrome books home and trained staff last week. We knew this would happen. Get to park. Try to enter into calm of the lake, the muted landscape on the other side of water, the blue sky and white clouds reflecting on water. It’s too early for the golden sun glinting off the building across the way, which usually mesmerizes me. But there are too many groups of people too close together and I’m angry at them. Listen to conversation by a nurse, complaining about a colleague’s complaints about buzzers and alarms bothering her patient. A nurse! She should know better than to be sitting so close to another person on the bench! But maybe it’s her husband or boyfriend and they’re already sharing whatever they’ve shared. Turn to walk home, ever more vigilant of keeping space between me and others. Every muscle in my body is tense, in spite of the two mile walk. Dinner, early bedtime, hoping for a full night’s sleep. Listen to downstairs neighbor coughing though floorboards.
Today, 6 a.m. another day of working at home:
Coffee at 5, writing in journal, taking time to write on a piece I’m trying to make progress on. I need a schedule. What else do I need before I start with the Zoom, phone, google docs? Yoga at home? A walk? Breakfast, for sure. I need to read twelve pages of War and Peace on my phone for an online book group that will begin posting today. Of course I don’t have an actual book of War and Peace. I have my favorite, Anna Karenina. In college, when I was supposed to read W&P, I skipped all the war sections, flipping through looking for the love story. So I checked a copy out of Brooklyn Public through an app on my phone that connects to libraries. I keep telling people about it, I used Libby, I say, excitedly, aware of my nerdiness but also wanting others to know we can still use libraries!
Two days ago, Monday, the first day schools shut down and my first day with a sore throat — I know it’s nothing, it’s allergies, but still better safe than sorry — I received this email from A Public Space and YiYun Li:” In these unsettled times, like many of you I have been looking for substance in my bookcase. One doesn’t need to look far—there sit the books by Tolstoy, “the master-recorder of realities,” as Stefan Zweig describes him. I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide.”
So today, I plan to try to be a bit more balanced, to move more, to pause more, to consider more carefully what we need to nourish ourselves and each other, ever aware that I don’t know what will unfold.