Collards (Ferry-Morse): Old package, don’t have high hopes
Swiss Chard (Burpee)
White Chard (Burpee)
Fordhook Chard (Seeds of Change)
Red Russian Kale (SSE)

On third floor now in bright sun!

What makes this life good, ultimately, is that I spend my days thinking a tiny bit of the world into being, primarily by building a school into a sustainable institution, empowering other people through teaching, and challenging my own preconceptions through writing and furniture making. It is unremitting, demanding, repititive work. That goes without saying. The material of the world does not bend easily. Yet it is work that exercises creative muscle, work through which I construct my identity and map the world in a way that fulfills me and finds confirmation in others. Quite frankly, when I am at the school, I am in a place where I matter.

Korn, Peter. Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman. David R. Godine, Publisher, 2013.

(urgh…kindle version — find page number later.)

It feels weighty, real, this book. It’s a re-imagining of a portion of The Iliad as Malouf takes two sets of six lines and imagines a short novel. Couldn’t put it down.

This description of leadership struck me as particularly compelling:

“Holding in his head all the roads that lead out to the distant parts of his kingdom, he feels them at times as ribbons tied at the centre of him, for the most part loose but sometimes taut and pulling a little, according to what is happening out there — events that his body is aware of as dim foreboding long before the last relay of messengers, who for days have been running down dusty roads, burst in to deliver it as news.”

pp.43-44

Malouf, David. Ransom: A Novel. (New York: Vintage, 2011.)

As a family, we started listening to Anthony Doerr’s fantastic novel, All the Light We Cannot See, on our holiday drives. Now every time we get in the car, the kids demand it.

There’s one early scene that stuck with me and reminded me of the work I do (no spoilers, I promise). Werner, an orphan with an aptitude for electronics, has become the mining town’s go-to person for radio repair. At one point, he is sitting before a massive radio, staring at it, thinking through possibilities, and tracking the course of electricity through the box. He eventually identifies the problem and fixes it, much to the delight of his patron, who claims his success came from simply staring at the radio.

Lately I’ve been working on rebuilding my daughter’s closet. I seem to spend much of the time simply standing before the closet, sometimes with a notebook, sometimes with scrap paper, sometimes with nothing. I probably have spent hours just looking at the space, turning options over in my head, identifying potential problems, coming up with design ideas. It might look like I’m doing nothing but without that time, I’d be unable to move forward.

How do we make time and space for kids to do this in school? How do we create classrooms or work spaces that are free from tedium — no worksheets or unnecessary work — and where social pressures recede — most humans (not just teens) will fill space with talk, especially when the task is hard. It’s easier with engagement, I know: Werner loves the radio just as I like working on the house, which is another issue, but I still want to spend some time this year thinking about ways to make the quiet, thinking, staring into space time part of my classroom.

Starting conversation for the day on the whiteboard:

“Why do rules matter? No, I don’t mean headphones or school stuff. I mean things like you can’t run with a basketball or you can’t have a paper with no punctuation. What purpose do they serve? Where do they come from? Why do they matter?”

My students and I tend to rotate through our morning circle activities. Sometimes we read. Sometimes we write. Sometimes we argue. Sometimes we watch a short video. Most days a student runs the conversation and most days a student keeps track of the conversation. Some of the conversations become posters (more on that later) and most end up in our binders.

Today’s discussion points, all of which are student driven:
do rules bring order?
Without rules, everything will be unorganized
Rules help things flow better
You learn from rules (they help you know what you supposed to do)
You learn from watching others follow rules.
Breaking rules to make a point.

Best part of the day was when someone made this comment: “you can’t practice school.” This will become tomorrow’s discussion starter. But all of the points above (culled from my list and our notetaker’s list) matter. They matter today, as sophomores, and today, as a weary 46 year old man.

Why write about this? It’s central to our model for us to discuss why we do things and why we do things the way we do them. I wanted to have this conversation so that they could think about why writing conventions matter (we’re starting to write plays) but it drifted quickly to school. Some of the work is about learning to talk and listen; some of it is about learning to reflect about their intentions for the day.

“Good books make you re-read them. Great books make you re-examine your soul.”

1. Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Novel, (New York: Knopf, 2014).

Watching my tenth graders take the PSAT, I’m remembering the last standardized test I took — the English Praxis exam to earn a secondary English cert. I was prepared by disposition and academic training to blow the doors off that test.

I was pudding afterwards.

How do kids feel when they’re not prepared for tests and have the gaps in their own education so brutally thrust in their face?

Started Dave Eggers’s new book last night on a soccer sideline. One of the characters begins the book with a new career at Google The Circle.

Book may turn out alright, may not. But it got me thinking of how rare it is to begin a job so happy and with all the tools you need to do it; how rare it is to have a job where your “boss” talks about the importance of humanity; how rare to have any kind of moral clarity that isn’t immediately and obviously compromised by the working conditions.

1. Dave Eggers, The Circle,(New York: Knopf, 2013).

Liking this book a lot.

Quotes I’d talk over with students…

“I still have photographs, but I no longer know what my father looked like.”
(p.49)

“Writing is difficult, reading impossible. People are so exhausted after the hassle of a normal Lagos day that, for the vast majority, mindless entertainment is preferable to any other kind. This is the secret price paid for all those cumulative stresses of Lagos life: the ten-minute journeys that take forty-five minutes, the rarity of places of refuge, the constant confrontation with needs more abject than your own. By day’s end, the mind is worn, the body ragged.” (p. 68)

“Why is history uncontested here? There is no sign of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices? I step out of the shop into the midday glare. All around me the unaware forest of flickering faces is visible. The area boys are still hard at work, but I imagine they will soon break for lunch. The past is not even past.” (p.117)

This quote I’d like to leave the opening identifier blank and ask students to fill it in or what it would mean to fill it in:

“______s do not always have the philosophical equipment to deal with the material goods they are so eager to consume. We fly planes but we do not manufacture aircraft, much less engage in aeronautical research. We use cell phones but do not make them. But, more important, we do not foster the ways of thinking that lead to the development of telephones or jet engines. Pat of that philosophical equipment is an attention to details: a rejection of only the broad outlines of a system, a commitment to precision, an engagement with the creative and scientific spirit behind what one uses.”

Is this true of Nigerians? Of Americans? Of Africans? Of urban or rural residents? Of Whites? Blacks? Can such a statement be true? Could you love your country and your people and make such a claim? How would you feel if such a statement were made about you?

Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief (New York: Random House, 2014).

Such “accountability” schemes reinforce ineffective practice because they fundamentally misunderstand the experiential nature of teaching. Children need to study ideas in ways that connect to their motivations and prior knowledge, and teachers need to respond to the challenges and questions children raise (Brown, 1994). Like success in musical composition, chess playing, architectural design, and other creative fields, success in teaching involves an iterative process: teachers evaluate information about students and subjects, anticipate solutions, and then revise plans based on what actually happens in the classroom (Yinger, 1978).

Cool choice of a book for a class on curricular leadership, particularly as her understanding of teaching is so spot-on. As a book published in 1997, the sad part is that it predicts all that has gone wrong in the intervening years as teaching is given less and less respect.

Linda Darling-Hammond, The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work,(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 75.