After I learned that my grandfather had my grandmother sterilized without her knowledge, after I investigated multiple aspects of that story, after I met up with my 84-year old mother and her slightly older brother (they had no other siblings due to the sterilization), on that final night in Billings, Uncle Stan declared at the end of a long family story about a moonshiner great-uncle, “And that’s why Kenneth became a serial killer.”

I set out to fact-check Uncle Stan’s statement, following my nose and, and no matter how clear my plan, each day I get lost down some research rabbit hole, court documents or family tree branches, enthusiastically chasing clues. Not finishing.

I used to be a demon finisher. In a time of hyper-ranking and measurement of children–the 1960s–I was in the top percentile, the 2nd fastest girl runner in my grade, good at everything school-related except self-control. SRA was perfect for me: read someone else’s paragraph and tick off the multiple-choice answers. Finite, do-able, no need for any creativity. If, out of my peripheral vision, I saw Gary Mills begin to stand up, I stood up. Holding the SRA card and my pencil, race-walking against Gary’s longer strides, I completed it on the way to the box.

There’s no Gary Mills in my creative life. And competition never helped me meet deadlines that mattered, whether it was delivering a baby or an essay. Wondering and speculating–about motives, causality, fate–is part of the game. I don’t like it. It’s the opposite of finishing. Languishing, lollygagging, lie-a-bed.

Enthusiasm means a lively interest, a desire to be deeply involved in a particular activity or topic. Etymologically it’s literally to be filled with god, the ultimate creative wind. Maybe I’m doomed to wait for that powerful energy source and to trust that form will come, just in time. Stay tuned.

Answers to Questions I May or May Not Have Been Asked

On a pollinator garden discussion board, someone asked if she can deadhead the orange flowers of Asclepius Tuberosa (butterfly weed) to encourage more blooms. I considered asking, either with or without a FFS thrown in, if we could just, for once, let nature do her thing. I held back the snark, and someone else commented they’d considered the same thing but didn’t want to disrupt the lives of any Monarch caterpillars growing on the plant. A kinder more informed answer.

I’m new to gardening. It’s my context for learning in old age. (Friends say “you are not old!” Reality check: 63 is old, even if I may luck out and live 40 more years.) I’m becoming a tryer, out on the edge of not quite knowing what I am doing in the context of the very material world, dirt and worms and snakes and thorns and dragging hoses up hills and lifting rocks and 40-pound bags of composted manure. And I love it.

Until two years ago when we got this house with an established classic garden in front (peonies and roses and various shrubs from Japan) and a newer wildflower meadow garden in back (Black-eyed Susans and coneflowers and bee balm), I’d never used the word deadhead for anything but the people who followed the Grateful Dead. Upon gaining this garden, I added it to my list of things I needed to learn to do–when and on what plants and why. As with pruning, I was afraid to act without knowledge. What if I made a mistake? I had been a good student for a lifetime, learning the rules from books and teachers, then following them until I was knowledgeable enough to improvise and become a teacher myself. With gardening, somewhere along the way in my book and blog and youtube-video learning, I encountered the idea that maybe, and especially if I was trying to restore my land to something that supported the maximum amount of life, just maybe I didn’t have to to do all this maintenance designed to artificially extend peak ripeness, to force the plants into maximum performance.

I suffer bouts of shame. What do my neighbors and passers-by think of my undead-headed blossoms? Shouldn’t I be trying to have a more attractive exterior?

These periodic crises force me to review my purpose. Why am I tending to this land? And how can I be more responsive and receptive to what this partner, the land, is telling me? Native life-supporting plants seem willing to return, given a bit of space and minor tending, mostly just cutting back the invasive bullies that are trying to take all the sun and moisture. I’m not naturally inclined to patient watchful responsiveness. Receptivity came hard to me. Raised by tough parents born in the depression in Eastern Montana, I did not expect the world to provide. At least not for me. I’d have to earn, through self-sufficient hard graft and nose to the grindstone, anything. But the garden, a gift in itself, is reinforcing the experience that breastfeeding my babies began to teach me: if I am attentive and if I respond rather than enforce, I can come into rhythm with a system that is more than sufficient. 

I have bouts of doubt. Shouldn’t I be doing more to extend life and performance, both mine and my garden’s? I compare myself to others. Shouldn’t I be trying to have a more attractive exterior? To find my footing when I fall into this self-absorbed frenzy, I return to my goal, which is, as I tell my husband, is to see a fox in our yard. And an owl. Last week, at a community event a few blocks from our house, we were sitting on a bench looking at the river, when we saw movement at the edge of the woods. A fox ran across the grass and back into the woods. Not yet in our yard, my husband said, but close.

Can I allow the beauty of the world to be enough? In this season of ripe peaches, can I be content with my daily intake, juice running down my chin, without scheming to take steps to–artificially and with violence, because that is what enforced peak fertility requires, as the cows attached to milking machines illustrate–always have this gorgeousness available to me everyday of the year? 

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 here 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, something he seemed to regard as objectively outside what he internally felt and though, was permeated by his own subjectivity? Although the personal writing of our children, my sons at least, consisted of accounts of their play dates with friends, “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: how many students 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 teaching of reading–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 means predictor of the future, 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.” Arguments are 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–and 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. In the past 35 years, my career, 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 complicated), 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 real 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. 

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.

In order to lead people with hearts of flesh rather than stone, 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 we think and feel.