Ludwig Richter's Blog

"[O]ur ways are utterly remote from these rules . . . "

2012-01-22T19:21:00.000-08:00

In his sixth essay, Montaigne reiterates his point that the ancient rules of honor on the battlefield have long given way to experience: combatants are always untrustworthy, even, or perhaps especially, when parleying. His view of war would be more modern if the modern view didn't, superficially, hearken back to a medieval one. Our international conventions on war are based on a theory of justice that goes back at least to Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. But as W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction reminds us, such conventions were abandoned in a state of total war, in which, for example, the allies purposefully and systematically sought to demolish Hamburg's civilian population in what was called Operation Gomorrah.

Some years ago I led a task force of researchers from our local university in an effort to convince Congress to authorize a comprehensive study of the long-term health effects of exposure to depleted uranium (DU) on our own veterans. We succeeded in getting the legislative passed, which resulted in the Department of Defense turning the matter over to the Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM spent two years on a feasibility study, which concluded that there weren't enough data or a large enough sample size to conduct an epidemiologic study of veterans exposed to DU. In short, if we want to conduct such studies in the future, we will need to expose more of our soldiers to DU and then begin collecting data right away. In order to ban DU in munitions, we will first have to harm a larger sample of soldiers to demonstrate scientifically the danger of their collateral effects.

That, too, is utter remote from ancient rules. War is always remaking itself, and it is surely not done with its changes.

"Whether the governor of a besieged place should go out to parley"

2011-12-26T19:15:00.000-08:00

The question, I suppose, contains within it a kind of inverted echo of Machiavelli, who might have asked instead "whether a ruler should give his general leave to parley with the governor of a besieged place." Montaigne's concluding answer to his own question—

I put my trust easily in another man's world. But I should do so reluctantly whenever I would give the impression of acting from despair and want of courage rather than freely and through trust in his honesty.

—suggests, perhaps, that he is less interested in the political question than the personal one. As am I, though I am less capable of separating the two when the acts of legislators directly affect my day-to-day work as a teacher.

The observation that John Dewey's great insight in Democracy and Education was the social nature of education cannot be repeated enough during these dark days of rapacious capitalism. The argument that public education needs more competition—an argument advanced by education policymakers from President Obama on down—makes about as much sense as saying that religions or families need more competition. In religion, as in education, I could do with a lot more cooperation and a lot less competition. And while I am not at all certain what an ideal family would look like, I'm fairly certain that increased competitiveness is not the optimal way to achieve it.

Not surprisingly, the ideal that policymakers now invoke for education "reform" hails from Finland—a country whose education system features the kind of wrap-around social services we can only dream about in our state. One can only marvel at the ability of reformist apologists to point to the Finnish example as a justification for privatizing education. I suppose that if Coca Cola can co-opt the peace movement with an advertising jingle, then some of the world's richest capitalists can co-opt Finland's tiny socialist experiment in education.

A colleague recently argued that we should try to "build bridges" to a state legislator with a long record of favoring privatization of public education. As a citizen of a besieged place, I have no interest in going out to parley with the enemy. I would not want to give the impression of acting from despair and want of courage.

False Objects

2011-12-24T11:51:00.000-08:00

But we shall never heap enough insults on the unruliness of our mind.

I take it that here Montaigne concludes that "the soul discharges its passions on false objects when the true" object, the unruliness of the mind, is unregarded.

How odd the praise of a well-ordered mind sounds now. Indeed, we are suspicious of well-ordered minds. They are too much like machines. They lack creativity. They repress too much. They are fascistic in nature.

While I don't feel any need to heap any more insults on my own unruly mind—it's very good at chewing itself up, thank you very much—I concur with what I imagine is Montaigne's buried point. I long for a season of quiet deliberation, one in which I repair to my library to consider my life and mind, in which I reacquaint myself with wiser natures. George Eliot comes to mind. As does Montaigne's forebear, Lucretius.

I teach history, but I am only a historian in the very limited sense that I'm interested in where forms of thought have come from. Or in the present case, where they have gone to. One of the topic titles for this year's Theory of Knowledge essays in on the question of faith and religious knowledge. Although I enticed a professor from a local Jesuit university to visit our class and lead a stimulating discussion on Paul Tillich's ideas of faith as ultimate concern, my students still cling to the view that faith is a way of knowing that precludes deliberate thought or what we quaintly call "reason." What happened to that long tradition of Thomas Aquinas, that elaborate project to reconcile Aristotle's logic with biblical teachings?

Now that I've asked the question I feel a little silly for invoking such an anachronism. John Locke, quietly following in Aquinas' path, made the case, one more time, that revelation should be confirmed by reason, but the Enthusiasts have, apparently, outlasted him. My students cannot imagine how reasoned argument might strike even an uneasy relationship with religion. It's a matter of faith or reason, and the religious choose faith and everyone else chooses reason. No wonder they're struggling to get 1200 meaningful words out of this topic.

In the supposedly secular liberal politics of my state, the Enthusiasts are also winning, at least when it comes to public education policy. Our wealthy political elite have organized a small army of do-gooder "reformists" who want to privatize public education for the children. Counterarguments against such policies don't matter—it's for the children. Montaigne, speaking of the collective nature of foolish actions, said that they

are vices that always go together; but in truth such actions spring from presumption even more than from stupidity.

What a pleasing thought. The idea that minor vices lead to great ones sounds like a subject made for Montaigne.

"Our feelings reach out beyond us"

2011-12-17T16:36:00.000-08:00

Indeed they do.

We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be.

Montaigne's advice is Plato's: "Do thy job and know thyself."

Each of its two parts generally includes our whole duty, and likewise includes its fellow. He who would do his job would see that his first lesson is to know what he is and what is proper for him. And he who knows himself no longer takes extraneous business for his own; he loves and cultivates himself before anything else; he refuses superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and projects.

All good advice—if you live in early 16th century France. Which illustrates L.P. Hartley's maxim that the "past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." I should very much like to cultivate my garden. But my garden, though part of the public trust, is decisively subject to the shifting pressures of capitalist global integration and disintegration. Isn't it obvious that the logical conclusion to the commoditization of labor is the commoditization of education?

One of my nerdy ninth graders has told me that he keeps Clausewitz's On War by his bedside. (And, dear Montaigne, I keep a copy of your Essays by mine.) I'm reminded of the insight that Clausewitz never had: "Politics is war by other means." Our wealthy ruling class is not going to send in the tanks to occupy and loot public education. It engages in politics instead, with all the advantages of immense wealth. And the rallying cry is, "It's for the children!"

I almost like the idea of the unreasonable and unruly Greeks, who know a thing or two about war and history, refusing out of nationalist pride to be solvent. In the end, Marx may have been right, but for all the wrong reasons. Let what will come come.

Perhaps because I'm not a mathematician, I find the profoundly mathematical nature of the universe to be astonishing. Except when it isn't. I find little that is mathematically graceful in the unrelenting complications of human interaction. It drives me to want to shut out the world at every chance I get. My feelings range too much beyond me, and I seek a still point of calm in a still moment—a moment in which, if I can't know myself, I can at least know my own thoughts.

Of Passions

2011-12-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

The titles of Montaigne's essays remind me of the titles of James Tate's poems only in that they often have a tangential, if any at all, relationship to the subject matter of the piece—that is, if the piece can be said to have a subject matter.

Montaigne's second essay, "Of Sadness," starts innocently enough, like a wry joke, with his claim that he is "one of those freest from this passion." In an indication of why he is sometimes identified with the Stoics, he calls it a "harmful quality, always insane," adding that as it is "always cowardly and base, the Stoics forbid their sages to feel it."

With this bit of irony, Montaigne launches into a catalogue drawn from history and literature of extreme reactions to extreme passions. His victims of grief and sadness are characteristically stunned by their losses, and only afterward do they relax into tears—that is, if they manage to survive the initial force of their devastating news. The last paragraphs of the essay are devoted to those who dropped dead from extreme joy or shame. As almost an afterthought, Montaigne comments dryly that he is "little subject to these violent passions."

My susceptibility is naturally tough; and I harden and thicken it every day by force of reason.

We don't seem to much believe anymore in the idea of rational thought, much less some capacity called "reason" that can restrain emotion. Thus, the wit of Montaigne's essay, like the idea of wit itself, is mostly lost on us. Indeed, "passionate" is mostly used as a term of praise, one that has, sadly, been applied to me from time to time. We would not think to call it "always insane," though I'm not sure what we should call it when, on a societal level, mass feeling drives off any remnant of rational discourse.

A couple years ago, in a meeting with one of our most powerful state senators, I remarked that I found his argument for standardized testing as a means of assessing teacher effectiveness to be "deeply irrational." He blew up at me. That is, he declined to restrain his passions and make the case that his argument was reasonable.

I recently asked my sophomores whether processes or people make history. The clever ones replied "both," and constructed an argument around the interaction between human agency, and societal and environmental forces that shape and are shaped by human actions. Of course, there is always at least one in every crowd that has to say that the study of history is entirely a human construct and therefore it is entirely the product of human agency.

In the meantime, I have a running question about how the course of events in our time is being shaped by rising passions. I don't know what good or bad will come of them, but I do know that I am wearied by them and would prefer to be less subject to them.

. . . Lord,
I'm so happy I woke up in my right mind today.

A Marvelously Vain, Diverse, and Undulating Object

2011-11-26T10:55:00.000-08:00

In his first essay, Montaigne, after describing the various ways that the conquered respond to the conquering, remarks that truly man

is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

Thus Montaigne sets the tone for essays that show a inexhaustible delight in the variety of individuals and peoples. A Catholic, whose devotion to Church dogma is nowhere to be seen, he draws out from under the wide shadow of Thomas Aquinas and beholds the slipperyness of human beings. Marc Foglia, in writing about Montaigne, alludes to Claude Lévi-Strauss' praise of him as the "progenitor of the human sciences, and the pioneer of cultural relativism." When Isaiah Berlin fondly quotes Kant's uncharacteristic characterization of humanity as the "crooked timber" from which "no straight thing was ever made," I hear the echo of Montaigne in his words.

Montaigne did his stint in politics as the Mayor of Bordeaux, and now that I've done mine as a grassroots organizer, I have a few words to say about the unpredictability of my fellow citizens. This year four of seven School Board directors were up for reelection. These four had controlled our school district's agenda for four years, slowly and steadily instituting the corporatist policies of the region's wealthy political elite. A loose coalition of activists and teachers, who had been fighting against their policies and mostly failing, rallied behind various challengers taking on the incumbents. In addition to supporting the challengers, I'd been trying to recruit a candidate for my own region. Just before the filing deadline, a sitting Board director, not up for reelection but on our side, secretly informed me that we had a candidate and asked me to help. I contacted her and thus began the improbable campaign of a single mother with drive and intelligence but no political experience whatsoever.

In the early days of summer, she worried that her opponent was lining up the entire political establishment behind his campaign. He had deep ties to the community and even deeper ties to wealthy campaign donors. I told her that we could out-fox them. Over the course of months, she built up a cadre of highly dedicated campaign volunteers, raised what money should could, relied on free social media, and out-maneuvered her opponent every step of the way. In the end, he out-spent her by four to one, and on election day he came in at four points ahead of her. The local newspaper, which had backed the incumbent, called the race.

Those of us familiar with the dynamics of vote-by-mail elections knew that if the late votes turned her way she could win. Day by day the margin narrowed, until she pulled ahead and kept going. Her opponent finally conceded to her last week, and she'll be sworn in this coming Wednesday. Our local paper has been almost completely silent about her victory.

In the end, we won two of four seats, enough to shift the balance of power on the School Board. It is lovely to win one occasionally, even if the general trend for public education is bleak. I enjoyed being surprised. I wouldn't mind being surprised again by that marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object.

Why Mankell? Why Wallender?

2011-02-26T20:14:00.000-08:00

Rohan Maitzen's recent article on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö reminded me that the fourth subject I could have covered yesterday was my interest in the Wallender novels of Henning Mankell. I have not read much fiction this year, but I have managed to read five Mankell novels. Why do they appeal to me?

As one of Maitzen's readers has pointed out, the Wallender books are in the tradition of that "peculiarly European mood of melancholia." Wallender himself is a man aware of his limits, beset with self-doubt and a sense of failure. In that respect, I identify with Wallender and find that his dark moods corroborate my own. Yet, in another, more important respect, the bleak world of Kurt Wallender has almost nothing to do with my world. His country is different, his family is different, and his work is different than mine. As I read his novels, I can almost forget the weight of worries that constantly presses on me. Unlike the reading I do for professional reasons, I don't have to take notes on what I read and consider how I might incorporate them into my lesson plans and lectures. I don't feel responsible for retaining what I read in his novels. As soon as I finish them, I'm happy to forget them.

I am reading them, in other words, for the pleasure of escape. It's what I do instead of drinking, now that I've given that up. His novels are a poor substitute for a good Italian wine or a glass of Scotch, but they'll have to do until the weather warms up again and I can spend my free time hiking in the mountains. I certainly don't read to improve my mind. I do it for money or escape, and when I don't have to make money, I go hiking.

Circus Animals

2011-02-25T10:05:00.000-08:00

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

My problem isn't that I can't find a theme. It's that I have too many. All the circus animals are crowded into the tent at once, the noise is cacophonous, and I don't know how to start the show.

Let it begin, then, with silence. It's what I often do with my students, when they continue to talk excitedly after the bell has rung. I've had classes of silent sullen students, and a roomful of chatty students is better because it means they've come to class with an energy that they and I can make use of. But first I have to have silence. And then I can begin. Sometimes I begin while they're still talking and I stop mid-sentence. They know they won't get the rest of the sentence until they're quiet. If necessary, I repeat the half-sentence and stop again. It creates a kind of tension that draws their attention and makes them just curious enough to leave off what they're saying to their friends. It's a small drama that leads to that satisfying beginning. Silence.

My silence over the last two months was due first to the heavy workload I carried from Thanksgiving to the day I turned in my first semester grades at the beginning of February. Now that a student teacher has taken over my three 10th grade Honors World History courses, I have a more reasonable schedule. With just Creative Writing and Theory Knowledge to prepare for, I have something now that resembles a normal job. I have time to write. But now I have too many themes.

As a union leader, I could have much to say about what is happening in Wisconsin and elsewhere. In my state, our teachers' union has fared relatively well, though you would have to be quite naive not to see that the opposition—a wealthy political elite supported by demagogic politicians and throngs of willing dupes, all working toward, whether they realize it or not, the privatization of public education—is formidable, influential, well-organized, and awash with cash. Locally, we are seeing the demise of our long-time enemy, the superintendent. A corruption scandal that is about the worst in recent memory in this state is days way from forcing her out of a job and out of town. Teachers are gearing up for the coming School Board elections in the fall, and for the first time I feel that the momentum is with us. I'm planning to sign up to testify before the Board next week, and I will lay much of the blame for this scandal on the directors themselves—especially the ones up for reelection.

I could also write about a curious cohort of 10th and 11th graders who have a lively interest in philosophy. In past years, our school had a multi-age cohort of poet and fiction writers. Their interests were undoubtedly nurtured by a local non-profit writing center housed in an old funeral home. At our school, that cohort has slowly died out and a new cohort of young philosophers has cropped up. Perhaps we need a non-profit philosophy center for them—call it the Foucault House. Although I don't know how well they've processed what they've been reading, I've had to do some reading myself to keep up with them, starting with Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In my never-ending quest to study up on the subject matter for my Theory of Knowledge class, I should have read Lyotard in any case. My students have created a healthy discomfort in me by exposing to myself my own ignorance. Part of my job is to challenge them, but in the process they have challenged me. One of my adjustments to this cohort will be to become less of a self-presumed expert and more of a collaborator. I should be grateful to them, and eventually I may well be, but for now I'm scrambling to adjust my approach to meet the intellectual needs of an exceptional group of students.

My last theme could be my ambition to type up my grandfather's letters from World War II. There aren't many of them, but they are interesting to me both personally and historically. This year I'm teaching history for the first time, and I see my long desire to preserve these letters in a new light. My department head has suggested that I keep a separate "think-aloud" journal as I type them up. This is good advice, and I can see turning some of this material into blog entries. What is a blog for, anyway?

So there you have it: three themes, any of which could have been an article in itself. With the tent cleared of animals, perhaps I can begin again in earnest with my next article.

Remembered and Disremembered Selves

2010-11-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Today's a snow day. All the schoolwork I could be doing is locked up safely in my room where I can't get to it. I have some student recommendations I could be writing, but I have all day to work on them. I haven't had a day off in nine days, and the previous two weeks I worked 65 and 70 hours, respectively. It appears I may be forced to take some time off. In fact, if I'm locked out of school tomorrow, I may have to take not just Thanksgiving day off but the whole Thanksgiving weekend. I haven't done that in years.

Even so, I can't ever entirely remove my mind from school. Today I'm thinking of Szymborska's poem "Teenager," which begins,

Me—a teenager?
If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she's strange to me, and distant?

Thus she enters into the perplexing thought that were we to meet our earlier self he would seem strange to us, even though we maintain an internal sense of having a continuous self from childhood to present. I understand that there are many people who make deep internal breaks with their earlier selves. Perhaps it is a peculiarly American phenomenon. I know something of the psychic costs of cutting oneself off from a part of one's past; I can only imagine the psychic toll on those who make even sharper breaks from their personal histories.

My grandfather, for example, had always maintained that he was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania because that is what he told the Army when he enlisted at about the age of fifteen or sixteen. He not only lied about his birthdate,—presumably because he was under age—but he also lied about his birthplace. All the time his children were growing up and all the time his grandchildren were growing up he maintained he'd been born in Pennsylvania instead of where he was actually born—the Ukraine. His six brothers and sisters knew otherwise, and I don't know how this happened, but my father only learned the truth at the end of his father's life. I've had many years to think about what it might have done to him to have lived this lie for most of his adulthood. What kept him from the truth? Was it fear of what the federal government might do if some official found out he lied on his enlistment papers? Was it just too hard to admit to everyone he'd been lying all those years? Had he created a new continuous self that it was just too difficult to break from?

Most American families, I suppose, have these tales. Even stranger is one concerning my great-grandfather—to be precise, the father of my father's mother. Some time before World War I, he ran out on his family in Indiana and arrived on the West Coast. Years later my father's parents joined us on the West Coast, and my grandmother, acting on rumor that her father lived out here, looked up his name in the phonebook and called him. What a shock it must have been to pick up the phone and hear, after perhaps fifty years, an adult voice say, "Hello, this is your daughter L____." What my grandmother learned was that her father had a whole separate family on the West Coast. He'd married a second wife, worked as a printer or pressman, bought a house, raised a family, and retired. And now the daughter from his first family wanted to make his acquaintance.

As a child, I knew about none of this. We visited my great-grandfather and great-grandmother in their home a number of times, and when he finally died, his wife continued to visit us at our home. I never knew until years later that she wasn't my biological great-grandmother. Every day, on my way to and from work, I drive within blocks of where he and his wife lived for fifty years, going back, according to city records, to 1921. My great-grandmother continued to live in her home until about 1976. After her funeral, I finally met her son, my grandmother's half-brother and my half-great-uncle, I take it. I never met him again, and as my grandmother is long dead, I can't ask them what it must have been like to have one's sense of the past altered by the revelation of one's father's hidden past. I remember that when I learned some of the details of my grandfather's past, my own past, through some kind of process of reimagining my historical and familial self, seemed richer, deeper and, at times, stranger to me. What was I to make of my grandfather's Jewish-Ukrainian journey to America and into my life, and what was my relationship to his past?

Years ago, I seemed to remember a story my mother had told me about her cousin's first husband. His brother had disappeared, and he, in his absence, adopted his first name. After many years, he returned to his family, but his brother refused to give up his brother's first name. Thus, both brothers went by the same first name. After I recalled this story, I couldn't believe that I hadn't made it up. So I called my mother and asked her if it was true. She said that it was. Perhaps I should have taken notes, because I now feel as though I've imagined calling up my mother to confirm the story. Although we stayed with my mother's cousin and her husband when I was a kid, I still can't internalize the reality of this story. I'm distantly related to him by marriage, and even I can't make this real in my mind. How strange it must have been to everyone in the two brothers' family. Or did they just get accustomed to it? At Thanksgiving, when someone wanted one of the brothers to pass the mashed potatoes, how did she distinguish him from the other brother? Did it ever seem natural to anyone to address them by the same names? Or did they revert to childhood names, despite the one brother's refusal to give up the other's name?

Szymborska dwells on the discontinuity between her aged self and her teenage self. Near the end of the poem, she claims to feel nothing when her vision of a teenage self vanishes. Nothing, that is, until she sees the scarf her teenage self has left behind:

A scarf of genuine wool,
in colored stripes
crocheted for her
by our mother.

I've still got it.

In effect, what binds the young and aged selves is a shared physical object that, in turn, connects them to their mother. Other people, particularly the people we've known the longest, are what corroborate our sense of continuity with our remembered selves. In the absence of those people, we have the objects we associate with them.

My grandmother spent the last month of her life in a nursing home. When I visited her one Sunday, she told me, in evident frustration, that she should "just die."

"Why do you say that, grandma?" I asked.

"Look where I am," she replied with exasperation, as if it should've been obvious to me.

We held hands, and when I left, she kissed me on the lips, as she'd done since I was child. Once out of sight, there was no one, and almost nothing, to tell her who she was. What was left was her long-term memories, and even those were becoming muddled. Her self was losing its connection to time, and within a couple weeks, the connection was broken altogether.

I recently asked a friend for advice about an issue that was keeping me awake at night. His initial response was to offer to send me his list of things to worry about. He would be happy to trade my middle-of-the-night worries for his. I took his point. Sometimes our worries are in response to a genuine risk to our sense of security and sometimes they're in response to an imagined, overblown risk and sometimes they're a case of anxiety fastening itself on an imagined risk in order to avoid thinking about a much deeper risk.

I can imagine few things worse than to feel one's sense of sense slipping away and know it's happening. It's a form of madness that many of us will not avoid, and to see it in a person close to us is dreadful. Anyone with aging parents knows what I'm talking about. That is what I'll put at the top of my worry list.

Faces

2010-11-13T10:01:00.000-08:00

"The Human Face," hosted by John Cleese, is a four-part BBC series on the science of the human face. It is, as one might expect, amusing and entertaining. It also reminds us of the biological miracle of that highly expressive and individualized medium of communication and identity that we spend so much of our lives focused on.

I've shown parts of the DVD to my students, and they invariably find it thought-provoking, as do I. At the movie theater the other night, while we waited for the previews to start, my wife and I commented on Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets." I realized some time afterward that it might be interesting to show an episode of "The Human Face" to my Theory of Knowledge class, and then juxtapose it with Szymborska's poem. It begins with a thought-experiment:

Faces.
Billions of faces on the earth's surface.
Each different, so we're told,
from those that have been and will be.
But Nature—since who really understands her?—
may grow tired of her ceaseless labors
and so repeats earlier ideas
by supplying us
with preworn faces.

Those passersby might be Archimedes in jeans,
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharaoh with briefcase and glasses.

The poem amuses us with its account of known and unknown faces showing up again on the ordinary people in the crowd. This poem, like so many others by Szymborska, carries its burden of time and history, but it does so here with a playful tone that is only shed in the last two lines:

Billions of faces on the earth's surface.
My face, yours, whose—
you'll never know.
Maybe Nature has to shortchange us,
and to keep up, meet demand,
she fishes up what's been sunk
in the mirror of oblivion.

The seriousness of the poem, which had always been there, is revealed in the poem's final image. There are, of course, various ways to read it; I imagine a calm surface of a pond in which we see our faces, perhaps as we always do, slightly distorted. Sunk beneath that mirror is time's repository of all the faces that have gone before us—countless faces now lost to oblivion. If one comes up from the surface and is mirrored in our face, it only reminds us of the innumerable faces, all once carrying their internal emotional lives in their eyes, mouth and dozens of tiny facial muscles, that are now blank as death.

The fantasy of returning faces ultimately leads us to the fantasy of our own returning. If someone else wants the burden of my face after I'm gone, he can have it. It won't console me. I, too, see oblivion in the mirror.

Renewal

2010-10-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

In the New York Review of Books, I recently came across this poem by Wislawa Szymborska:

Vermeer

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn't earned
the world's end.

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barańczak

I don't read much poetry these days,—except, sadly, the poetry of my Creative Writing students—but I stopped on this one. I've long appreciated Szymborska's sense of historical irony, and this poem appeals to me in my post-poetic phase, if such phase is, indeed, what I'm in.

My response is inchoate. I think of the rally that is taking place downtown even as I type this article. The rally is to restore sanity; I didn't go because I thought I would better restore mine at home. I'm not confident that art or beauty or the exquisitely done thing somehow restores rationality to the World. But I would like to think so. In any case, I share Syzmborska's historical pessimism, and I look to ways that I might drive out that pessimism from my daily life. If art won't do it, what will?

In the library last week, I ran into a minister I know from my activist days. His younger son is graduating from the high school where I teach. He said he did not have much hope for the world, but added that seeing his son grow up into such a fine person and seeing his friends do likewise gave him some small glimmer of hope. I understand what he means. The aging look to the young for some reassurance that the world can renew itself. One might suppose that great art—the art that lasts—is forever fresh, and there is a kind of renewal in continually finding it so. For Syzmborska, Vermeer suffices. And for the rest of us? What is our Vemeer?

These questions will drive me out into the weather and down to my local bookstore, where I'll pick up Here, the new translation of Syzmborska's poetry. The poem has left me unresolved. And so I read on.

Which Way?

2010-09-19T11:23:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I went doorbelling for a pro-teacher candidate who's running for an open seat in a state legislative district in the southwestern part of the city. My opening line was, "Hi. I'm _____. I'm a teacher and a supporter of ______________, who's running for the state legislature." The responses were invariably positive, and I found that my word as a teacher gave me credibility. Despite the onslaught of teacher-bashing by those teacher-haters in the ed reform movement, I experienced nothing but good will on the part of my neighbors. The ed reformers may want us to think that they control the media and public opinion, but they do not.

I don't mean to be Quixotic. I fear that things are about to get much worse with the imminent release of the documentary Waiting for Superman. However, I do think there is a way to counter the ed reformers, their immense resources, their manipulation of the media, their growing influence in the Democratic Party, and their attempts to mobilize public opinion with their incessant propaganda. Teachers must learn to get out in front of their unions, meet the public where they live (literally), and influence key elections.

You would think, for example, that the four-thousand teachers in my city would be eager to defeat a professed ed reform candidate, especially when his opponent carried the primary by five-hundred votes. Yet, so far as I know, I am the only teacher in the city who has directly supported his campaign. Perhaps there are others, but I'm not aware of them. This must change.

In 2012, I will have to make a decision about whether to run for Vice President of our union. If elected, I would have to leave the classroom for a full-time job of organizing for the union. I happen to like the classes I'm teaching right now. I enjoy my students. In many respects, teaching has never been more satisfying. It would be a sacrifice to take on political organizing for our union. But so far as I can tell, I am the most qualified person for the job. And if teachers' unions don't start electing politically savvy leaders soon, the ed reformers will eventually bust the unions, privatize schools on a massive scale, hand a great democratic institution over to the corporations, and turn the tradition of a liberal arts education into a technical education for an unthinking, docile workforce.

I am with Martha Nussbaum on this one: the destruction of a liberal arts education in this nation will imperil democracy itself. How do I fight this: as a teacher or as a union leader? Which is the right way?

This Week in Education, Politics and Philosophy

2010-09-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

This week my evil ex-supervisor stopped by my classroom to pay me a short observation. Old habits die hard. Later she told me that I must have taken some kind of vitamins over the summer because I was so animated in my teaching. She said that my demeanor had completely changed. I wanted to tell her that what had changed was my supervisor.

My newfound confidence and self-assurance is not merely due to the feeling that I'm safe from unwarranted attention from an unbalanced evaluator, though it certainly helps. My students, at least for the first week, are making me look like the teacher I've imagined I could be. Funny how that works. Except for my Creative Writing class, I have all honors students this year. So far they've come to class prepared, alert, eager to learn, responsive and genuinely appreciative of their teacher. And my Creative Writing students, oddballs that they are, bring their own kind of off-beat, lively energy to class. My attitude may have changed, but so have the attitudes of my students.

The current laughable mantra of the ed reform crowd is "a great teacher in every classroom." For a while in my classroom, I had on the board the slogan, "Down with slogans!" You want to instantly turn an average teacher into a great teacher? Give her honors students. There is nothing harder than teaching unmotivated, "reluctant learners," and even very good teachers sometimes look bad doing it. I should know. These are the kind of students I taught for three years, and I think I was fairly good at it. Helping students who are in desperate need of guidance can be deeply satisfying in a way that teaching honors students isn't. However, what wore me down, in the end, was not the students but the system. In my own experience, the system is set up to punish teachers who are unable to perform daily miracles with struggling students. If an unwise supervisor, having drunken the ed reform cool-aide, happens to walk into your classroom and finds a bunch of unmotivated students, it must be the teacher's fault. I would have gladly stuck with the job I had last year, and this year I would have been better at it. But I'm too old to allow myself to be hounded by misguided, deluded nincompoops. So there.

In the meantime, I'm using my position as a union representative to take on some of the politicians who have sucked up to the ed reform establishment. The School Board and the superintendent are on the defensive, and I plan to make the most of it. I chewed out a couple Board members in a speech at a Democratic meeting last week. I'm in the process of bringing out a Board member to our school for a meeting with the teachers, who are very ready to give him a piece of their minds. I'm organizing teachers to support a legislative candidate who is opposed by an ed reform Democrat. And I'm doing what I can to prepare for next year's Board races. I will consider it a major victory if I can persuade our district's Board member to decide not to run so that he can spend more time with his family, etc. My tactic is to convince him that the traditionally genteel air surrounding School Board races will be replaced by an atmosphere of unrelenting viciousness. I am not kidding. I'm very angry about what's happened to public education and teachers, and I want politicians to pay a dear price for drawing on the seemingly endless piles of money that the ed reformers have to offer its spineless lackeys. Needless to say, my retirement from politics has ended.

And what do I do for myself? I get up to the mountains as often as I can. My wife, who keeps track of these things, says we've hiked 260 miles since July 1st and 425 miles since the first of the year. I love nothing more than that feeling of starting out in the morning in the high clear air, with the whole day ahead. After thirty-three years of mountain hiking, I still find alpine country to be a place of wonders upon wonders.

For intellectual amusement I'm rereading Robert Nozick's "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" What a hoot. He argues that this seemingly unanswerable question deserves "extremely weird" approaches. I think that's why I so enjoy the essay. "Extremely weird" is right. Somewhere buried in this question is the question, "Why Am I Something Rather Nothing?" Perhaps we're under the illusion that if we can answer the more general question we can answer the particular one. As my haircutter (a woman named "Liberty") told me today, only teenagers and philosophers seriously try to answer such questions. And teenagers, she said, are "little philosophers" themselves. I think I'll have to go back to this haircutter. She's a lot smarter than the politicians I've been speaking to lately.

It begins.

2010-09-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the first day of classes. You may have noticed that I'm no longer The English Teacher. This year I'll be teaching three classes of Honors World History, one class of Theory of Knowledge, and one class of Creative Writing. So just call me The Teacher. If they want me to teach math, I'll teach that, too.

I start the year by thinking about an opinion piece by Robert Samuelson. It begins:

As 56 million children return to the nation's 133,000 elementary and secondary schools, the promise of "reform" is again in the air. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has announced $4 billion in "race to the top" grants to states whose proposals demonstrate, according to Duncan, "a bold commitment to education reform" and "creativity and innovation (that are) breathtaking." What they really show is that few subjects inspire more intellectual dishonesty and political puffery than "school reform."

And it ends:

Against these realities, school "reform" rhetoric is blissfully evasive. It is often an exercise in extravagant expectations. Even if George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program had been phenomenally successful (it wasn't), many thousands of children would have been left behind. Now Duncan routinely urges "a great teacher" in every classroom. That would be about 3.7 million "great" teachers -- a feat akin to having every college football team composed of all-Americans. With this sort of intellectual rigor, what school "reform" promises is more disillusion.

That about sums up the education reform movement. If you want the details in the middle of his piece, you can find them at Real Clear Politics.

All—despite the reign of lunacy—is not lost. I live in a city whose teacher's union may have been the first in the nation to beat back the education reformers. Our superintendent is on the Board of Directors of the Broad Foundation, one of the funders of the reform movement. Despite the superintendent's attempts to shove "reform" down our throats and control public opinion, our union outsmarted the district at the bargaining table. In the end, the district gave up almost all of its demands, and the union conceded very little.

Of course, this is not over. But if we can fend off the reformers in our city, others can do it elsewhere. On to the new school year!

Louisiana Story

2010-08-04T12:26:00.001-07:00

Over the past one hundred odd days of the BP oil spill, I've thought more than once about Robert J. Flaherty's "Louisiana Story." I finally rented the DVD, and as I watched the film last night, I felt more moved by Flaherty's work than ever.

"Louisiana Story" is part anthropology, autobiography, history, documentary, and fable. It takes as its theme Flaherty's long interest in the interactions between nature, humans, and the machines humans use to control nature. Flaherty's vision of these machines is ambivalent. As in "Land," his film for the Department of Agriculture, Flaherty views machines as having the potential to help people out of poverty, but he also recognizes how the presence of machines in our daily lives can disrupt a way of life more in harmony with nature. In "Louisiana Story," we constantly see juxtapositions of the wondrous workings of nature with the imposing machinery of an oil-drilling derrick. Yet, we are only too aware that Flaherty's brilliant visual masterpiece comes to us by way of machines, most notably the camera which he directs as a mystical object reinvesting the world with mystery. Indeed, one could say that the most fundamental subject of "Louisiana Story" is the film's capacity for letting us see the world afresh, for reteaching us what it is to see.

A friend of mine is hard at work on his second documentary film, and his new subject is our need to shape narratives in our lives to make meaning for ourselves. He is keenly aware, in a post-modern sort of way, that he will be creating a narrative through his documentary on narratives. Again, I'm reminded of "Louisiana Story," in which Flaherty deliberately created a narrative with the boy from the bayou as its focus and eyes. I'm not sure whether the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey had intended a documentary when it commissioned the film, but what Flaherty gave them was something that defies the label of any particular genre. With its lingering lyrical shots and charming boy-hero, "Louisiana Story" is a kind of Cajun neo-realism, something akin to Rossellini and De Sica. Martin Scorsese has spoken of how some filmmakers, in need of corporate funding, make art by subtly subverting the intentions of their patrons. So it is with Flaherty's "Louisiana Story," an art so magnificently subtle that it leaves us, in Flaherty's own words, "groping" for the sources of its mystery.

The Ancients

2010-07-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Studying up on the ancients and recalling my reading of Thucydides some years ago, I dug up this old poem:

Missing Teeth

Early in Thucydides' history
Pericles makes a long set speech
Warning his fellow Athenians
Not to undertake new invasions
While they're still at war with the Spartans.

Two hundred pages later, after Pericles
Is dead and forgotten, what do the Athenians
Do? They invade Sicily.

I see what's coming.
With three hundred pages left,
Thucydides will recount error after error,
So that by the end
Of his unfinished narrative,
We will wonder how anyone
Managed to survive the constant terrors
Of siege, slaughter and starvation.

Yet, somewhere off the map
And outside of Thucydides' history,
An old grizzled goat herder
Far up the rocky mountain
Has managed to miss the entire show.
He is like a god
Who hasn't been paying attention.
Or maybe he is a man
Thinking about the woman
He saw last week at the well.
Why wouldn't she speak to him?
Does he smell that bad?
Or is it his missing teeth?

Off the map and outside of history,
They worry about such small matters,
As they should.

Success

2010-06-20T08:23:00.001-07:00

In education, success is simpler than failure. I'm thinking of my Theory of Knowledge class, and while I've yet to receive most of the final essays, I'm ready to declare it a success. Almost all of the students learned a great deal, and they enjoyed themselves while learning it. Within a year, the class has developed a good reputation, and it will draw a large number of eager students next year.

Why did this happen? Why is this class different than my 10th grade English classes? And is it true that anyone can teach an honors class well?

One major reason the class was a success is because of the quality of students I have. They're intellectually curious. They enjoy learning new things. Generally speaking, their parents and older siblings are educated, and they regularly discuss intellectual things. So do the friends in their social circle. These students know how to share information about the classes they're taking. They study together and talk about what they're reading. They develop enthusiasms for intellectual and artistic subjects outside of school, and they read books for pleasure or for intellectual stimulation. They know how to take notes, to study, to discuss issues, and to ask the teacher for help. Most of them know how to work and to concentrate for extended periods of time, and they take pleasure in their academic accomplishments.

In effect, successful students and unsuccessful students belong to two different academic cultures. Ability—or skill level—doesn't have much to do with it. I've had many immigrant students who've worked very hard to learn English and master multiple subjects. They progressed rapidly, and while most of them didn't catch up to their most accomplished American-born peers, many of them have been accepted at major universities, with scholarships. If you want to close the so-called "achievement gap," you've got to do more than subject students to endless standardized testing, bust unions and fire teachers who don't "produce" students with good test data. You have to change students' academic cultures.

Can anyone teach my Theory of Knowledge class and be successful at it? No, I don't think so. I have no doubt that there are many teachers across the globe who are better at teaching this course than I am. If given a chance, I'd love to learn from them. However, I also have no doubt that there are many teachers who are not capable of teaching this course well. They haven't the intellectual background, the enthusiasm, the alertness, and the aptitude for it. I also work very hard at it, and the students generally recognize my dedication. Of course, I enjoy the work, which often seems like play, especially when I'm engaged in the intellectual play of class discussions. I'm reminded of William Blake: "Energy is Eternal Delight." The best teaching has that kind of energy to it. The best classes have knowledgeable, creative teachers passionate about their subject matter, matched with students who are ready for it. I'm suited for teaching Theory of Knowledge (and philosophy in general), and my students know it.

Failure

2010-06-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

I keep wondering why so many of my 10th grade English students failed their final exams on The Catcher in the Rye, and I keep wondering why I keep wondering. The ostensible reasons are obvious. Many of the students didn't read the book. As a result, they either gave up when they were handed the exam questions or they tried to fake their way through (how Holdenesque!) by relying on what they learned from class discussions of selected passages. In most cases it didn't work, though I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the more clever students managed to pass the test without actually having read the entire book.

Other students who read the book didn't take careful notes. Still others didn't study for the exam. The end result is that about half or more of the students failed it. I knew this might happen. All year I've been teaching to the middle and the lower end of my classes, and in the last month of class, I realized that I'd neglected my better students and hadn't really prepared them for 11th grade. Some of them are planning to switch to honors next year, and I decided I would attempt to prepare them for the more rigorous class ahead of them. I did this knowing that most of my students wouldn't keep up. The final was not heavily weighted enough to cause students to lose more than a grade overall for the semester; most, in fact, will have exactly the same semester grade they would have if they'd passed the test. Perhaps a few of my students made that calculation. In any case, most of my students behave as though grades are something that happens to them, like the weather. Their priorities are elsewhere.

The high failure rate, then, is the result of students not reading the book, not taking notes and not studying. That is, they don't have the habits of a student. This seems fairly obvious—so why do I keep wondering about it? Because I've internalized the "blame the teacher" rhetoric that has been pouring down from on high so much lately. Most of the students in my classes don't have the habits of students, and I failed to convince them to adopt those habits. But then so has every other teacher—which is to say, so has the entire system, educational and otherwise. I've written ad nauseam about why failing students fail. The causes are multiple and complex, and to single out any one cause is intellectually dishonest. Unfortunately, most public "debate" about education is marked by intellectual dishonesty. But should we be surprised? How intellectually honest was the recent "debate" on health care and how intellectually honest is the current "debate" on Afghanistan?

Be that as it may be, I think it's worth considering how hard it is to change the social habits of teenagers. (I don't say "study habits" because such a term veils the reality that study habits are social habits.) For example, suppose one of my students suddenly told his friends that he couldn't hang out with them after school to watch the World Cup because he needed to read his book and study for finals. His friends would ridicule him, and he would feel that he was breaking off from them to do something of questionable value. His actions would, in effect, call into question theirs, and they would resist such an implication by questioning the value of reading and studying. In other words, if he really wants to study like an honors student he'll have to make friends with honors students; otherwise, he'll end up without friends.

I thought from the beginning of the year that if I taught my class like an honors class, three-quarters of my students would fail. I've just had confirmation of that. This has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. I have some very good black students, and I have some very bad Asian and white students. The students from Somalia are a good case in point. Some of my best and worst students are Somali, and it almost always has to do with the families they come from. I don't know what goes on in their families and their communities, but I notice that when older siblings, with the backing of at least one strong parent, do well in school, their success provides an example for younger students, who usually follow suit. This is what works. What doesn't work are families who don't know how to create the environment in which their children internalize a drive to be successful in school. I wish, as a teacher, I had some wisdom as to how I could overcome this obstacle, but I do not.

I don't want to be blamed for the failure of my students, but I also don't want to resist the question of how I could have helped them to change their bad social habits. What I've been told since I was in my teacher training program was that I needed to adapt my instructional methods to meet the needs of my students. I've been trying to do this, and in most cases I'm dissatisfied with the progress my students have made. If I were to teach these classes again, I'm certain that I could improve on my instruction. However, I'm not sure that I could do much better at changing their habits. My student with the lowest level of English will receive an "A" in my class because he has superior study skills; an Iranian immigrant, he's also almost completely isolated at school. Perhaps I should set aside his copy of The Catcher in the Rye to show future students. It is filled with yellow stickies on which he wrote notes. Not surprisingly, he aced the final test.

Beyond that, my English class would also have to be a kind of study skills class. It would be no small feat to convince a large percentage of students to change their ways. In my experience, most of them would prefer to fail the class. After all, my efforts to change their habits would instinctively be taken as pressure to change their identities. About the only way to make that work would be to have a free hand in choosing materials that my students can identify with. Unfortunately, our district, as so many districts across the country, has decided to standardize materials, and so next year I would be stuck trying to convince my students that, let's say, Maus is relevant to their reality. I would be trying to do this even as I worried that what they were learning would not be reflected in the standardized tests that they'll be taking three times year and that the district will want to use to measure my "performance" as a teacher. I've used the conditional in this paragraph because, in fact, I won't be teaching three non-honors English classes next year. I'll be trading them for three honors history classes.

If there are failures next year, they will not be the kind I experienced this year. That is, I will have temporarily escaped the practical consequences of an education policy designed to quantify student achievement so that public education can be commodified and, in the long run, sold off to the private sector. I will have also escaped the practical consequences of trying to teach students who don't know how to be students. I will have escaped, that is, but my former students will not have. I feel a little guilty about abandoning them (or, as the case may be, their younger siblings), but I don't believe that teaching should be a suicide mission, and I don't know how many more years I could take like this one.

"I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there."

2010-06-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

I recently thought of this line from section 33 of "Song of Myself" when I learned that two of my students live on their own in apartments. I'd had them for almost a full year before I learned of their living circumstances. Both students are from Mexico. One of them recently wrote that he was homeless when he first moved up here, and he found it difficult to relate to students who cared about grades and school when he was just trying to survive. I don't know what job he has now, but after a recent class discussion about what separates adolescence from adulthood, he told me that you know you're an adult when you get your paycheck and pay bills—and nothing is left. The other student who lives on his own said that he first lived with his cousin when he moved here. However, when he began working, his cousin took all his money and left him nothing. So he decided he could do better by living on his own. Both of these students are sixteen.

I think about them when I hear of so-called "reformist" proposals to impose yet more standardized testing on students and tie teacher performance evaluations to these test results. In this blog, I've explained ad nauseam why this is a deeply irrational idea. Let me just add here that no amount of standardized testing will help me to do more for these students than I'm already doing. The problems these students and others face are larger than the unimaginative, morally vacuous policies now touted by Democrats and Republicans alike. There are days—today is one of them—when I feel like it's the teachers against the world. Mostly for defensive reasons I've decided to become a school union representative for the second time. My contribution to holding the union together as it's assailed on all sides will be modest, but I'm willing to try it again. Right now, all causes seem like lost causes—except the ones that bind us together in this age of small-mindedness and greed.

"Doubt"

2010-06-08T20:16:00.000-07:00

One of the possible essay topics for my Theory of Knowledge class next year is:

"Doubt is the key to knowledge" (Persian Proverb). To what extent is this true in two areas of knowledge?

Because ethics is the one knowledge subject area that doesn't have a class dedicated to it at our school,—and most schools, for that matter—I want to round out the semester with some additional discussion of it. In addition, my students' essays-in-progress have indicated to me that our thinking about knowledge issues has been too abstract. For that reason, I also want to discuss ethics in the context of our common contemporary world, with its achingly human problems and dilemmas. Thus, I've decided to show the film "Doubt" in my classroom next week.

In preparation for the film, I recently read the Pulitzer prize-winning play "Doubt," whose author, John Patrick Shanley, also wrote and directed the film. The preface to the play is a kind of mini-essay on the question of doubt and knowledge. I'm tempted to make it required reading for students—or at least those students who take up the Persian proverb for their essay topic. Shanley writes that it is

Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he's on the verge of growth.

To whom, exactly, this applies in the play is an open question. In a brilliant opening monologue, delivered as a sermon, Father Flynn tells a parable (which is what Shanley calls the play) about how a man lost at sea sets his course by the stars and then comes to doubt his course after the skies cloud up for days on end.

Had he set his course right? Was he still going on towards his home? Or was he horribly lost and doomed to a terrible death? No way to know. The message of the constellations—had he imagined it because of his desperate circumstances? Or had he seen Truth once, and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance? That was his dilemma on a voyage without apparent end. There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

In next scene, when Sister James and Sister Aloysius discuss his sermon, we may be led to believe that Father Flynn is the one stricken with doubt in the play.

SISTER ALOYSIUS: What do you think that sermon was about?

SISTER JAMES: What?

SISTER ALOYSIUS: This past Sunday. What was he talking about?

SISTER JAMES: Well, Doubt. He was talking about Doubt.

SISTER ALOYSIUS: Why?

SISTER JAMES: Excuse me, Sister?

SISTER ALOYSIUS: Well, sermons come from somewhere, don't they? Is Father Flynn in Doubt, is he concerned that someone else is in Doubt?

SISTER JAMES: I suppose you'd have to ask him.

Yet, in the play's dramatic last line, we learn that Sister Aloysius herself has been plagued by doubts. She'd accused Father Flynn of an improper relationship with a boy and driven him from the school. She'd acted with a rigid certitude that had not only divided her and Father Flynn, but also divided her from Sister James, who could not share in her certainties. If, as in the opening sermon, doubt can bind us together, so certitude can separate us. In the preface, Shanley had suggested that when "trust is the order of the day, predators are free to plunder." That is, the certitudes of trust can protect the predators, and if one were to mount a defense of the unlikable Sister Aloysius, one could argue that her kind of lonely, divisive certitude is what is sometimes necessary to expose a criminal trust. One could argue that, except for the complicating revelation at the end of the play:

SISTER JAMES: I see. So now he's in another school.

SISTER ALOYSIUS: Yes. Oh, Sister James!

SISTER JAMES: What is it, Sister?

SISTER ALOYSIUS: I have doubts! I have such doubts!

(Sister Aloysius is bent with emotion. Sister James comforts her. Lights fade.)

END OF PLAY

All of my years of teaching have been years of doubt, but this one has been particularly difficult, as I've had to fend off the harassment of a mentally unbalanced supervisor whom the district just can't seem to rid itself of. I've had to call in the Union,—all praise be to the Union—and I suspect that I'll have to call them in again soon, when I receive my evaluation. However, things may turn out for the better in the long run. As of this week, I've been moved to the Social Studies department, where I'll teach three sections of 10th grade honors history. I'll retain my Theory of Knowledge class and my Creative Writing class. Because four of my five classes will be in the Social Studies department, I will have a different supervisor next year.

Four of five of my classes will also be honors, and my fifth class will be my much-coveted Creative Writing elective. That means I'll have a much different set of students to teach next year. I have had some wonderful students—some memorable students—the last three years, but I've also had countless numbers of students whose terrible personal lives have tested my capacities for compassion. This year I wondered, many times, how long I could keep doing this job. It is deeply frustrating to try to give an education to students whose internal and external lives are structured to keep them from getting an education. I sometimes enjoy reading Stanley Fish's column, especially when he takes a position so contrary to my own. In his recent Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving, he criticizes the political educational theories of Paulo Freire and Arizona House Bill 2281. Fish concludes:

The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize history and social studies.”

But what if the students of our persistent educational underclass really are the victims Freire says they are? What if the structures of their thought really have been, as Fish quotes Freire, "conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped"? Then what? Does it really make sense for educational policymakers from President Obama to my supervisor to blame teachers for the existence of our educational underclass? Isn't there just a little irony in the blame-the-teacher policies of the Broad and Gates Foundations?

How is it my fault, for example, that one of my best students tried to commit suicide last week? How is it my fault that one of my students ran away from home to escape a warrant for her arrest? How is it my fault that one of my students is still traumatized by her step-father's murder of her baby brother? How is it my fault that my one of my students is still struggling with his experience of gang violence in which he took a bullet for one cousin and saw another cousin shot to death? How is it my fault that one of my students has stopped coming to school so that he can hold down a job and bring some income to his family? How is it my fault that one of students got his girlfriend pregnant and dropped out of school to support her and their newborn baby?

After taking this job, I learned that I have reserves of compassion that I didn't know I had. But I don't have an endless capacity to suffer the blame that the system is now heaping on teachers who struggle every day to help their students see why it's important for them to learn math, history, English, science, art and everything else we call a liberal arts education. I care deeply about my students, and so many hours of my waking and sleeping life are dedicated to their welfare that I don't believe the way I'm living is even remotely healthy. So it is with some relief that, within an unprecedented four years, I've managed to land an almost all-honors schedule. I will miss the students I now have, but I will not miss the blame that, doubly unfair to them, came with them. What an irony that I've been allowed to escape administrative blame by getting what is, in effect, a promotion—a promotion facilitated by a department head and colleague who was good enough to recognize my worth as a teacher, despite my own doubts.

Deep Irrationality

2010-05-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

I'm only about 100 pages into Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, but I'm more convinced than ever that we're living through a time of deep irrationality when it comes to public education. One might argue that deep irrationality is prevalent in all times. Perhaps so. Yet some eras are surely more irrational than others. (Pick your own convenient example.) Be that as it may be, allow me to ask one of those very simple questions that turns out not to be so simple when one thinks about it carefully: why do human beings fall into patterns of thought and behavior that consistently cause themselves and others unnecessary harm and suffering?

I've just read an account of a mother who is upset because my school district recently "flagged" one of her twin daughters as needing to attend summer school. This may be unremarkable on the face of it until one considers that her twins are in kindergarten and the sole criterion for recommending that the one daughter attend summer school was a standardized test. As the mother explained it, her "poorly performing" daughter hates computers, on which the test was administered. The other daughter doesn't mind computers and did very well on the test. No teacher input was sought or was factored into the recommendation.

This account brings up a whole host of questions, not the least of which is what kind of summer school will the district be hosting for kindergarteners. Knowing something about the practices of our school district administrators, I shudder to think. But beyond that, I wonder how anyone can rely entirely on a standardized test to make such a recommendation. Anyone who has thought even a little bit about standardized tests knows that they aren't reliable for many reasons, the least of which is that it's impossible to control for important variables. One kindergarten-aged twin doesn't like computers and scores badly on a computer-based test. Almost anyone ought to be able to understand that it's a mistake, for this reason alone, to rely on one test to make a judgment about the academic skill-level of a six year old.

Why would anyone in education do this? There is one factor that I've failed to include in this story. The superintendent of our school district is on the Board of Directors for the company from which the district buys the standardized test services. In the meantime, our district has just sent out lay-off notices to 36 teachers, some or all of whom could have been retained if the district were not buying services from the superintendent's company. School Board directors have been asked about the obvious conflict of interest, but they've flatly replied that they don't believe there is one because the superintendent's Board position with the company is unpaid. Never mind that the success of the company advances her career—that, in their minds, apparently doesn't constitute conflict of interest.

One might argue that the superintendent's actions are in her rational self-interest. However, I don't see how they're in the rational self-interest of the parents who ultimately decide elections of School Board directors in this town. It remains to be seen how long this superintendent or particular Board directors will retain their positions. However, Diane Ravitch's book gives me no confidence that the voters will see it this way. Her accounts of the San Diego and New York City school systems make it clear that the American people are easily manipulated by mainstream media and the politicians whose campaigns are funded by business interests.

Is the widespread deep irrationality I see in education policymakers' decisions and the public's acceptance of them really, when one strips away the propaganda that passes for news in this country, just the greed and selfishness of a few who have the means to deceive the many? If so, what are the means? Like Gore Vidal in "Cue the Green God, Ted," I think of David Hume's Of the First Principles of Government:

Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular.

Vidal's argument, derived from Noam Chomsky, is that in our era the media "manufactures" Humean opinion—opinion, that is, that serves as the means by which the few manipulate the many. But my interest goes deeper than that. Why, for example, do we commonly accept rather than question what we're told? To what extent are we guilty of trusting the authority of opinion-makers? To what extent have we failed to cultivate systematic doubt for—or failed to understand the role of doubt in testing the validity of—the knowledge claims made by putative experts?

I Have a Job

2010-05-05T18:21:00.000-07:00

Today I learned that I haven't lost my job this year. I'm relieved that the waiting is finally over. The next question is whether I'll be able to transfer to the Social Studies department. That remains to be seen. It's a little strange to know that you'll be teaching next year without knowing what it is that you'll be teaching. I just hope they tell us before the school year is out. Unlike last year, I'd like more than two weeks to prepare for a year's worth of classes. More later . . .

A Note to my Readers (Few That They Are)

2010-05-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't stopped blogging. I am, however, burned out. I've reached that point in the school year when I'm tired all the time. No matter how much sleep I get, I wake up tired every morning.

The good news is that I now have a student teacher who has taken over my three 10th grade English classes. Over the next three weeks I hope to gain back enough of my reserves to finish the year strong. Maybe I'll even write something in earnest.

In the next two weeks, I'll find out if I'm going to get laid off. Sad to say, I worry more about making it to the end of the year in good health than I do about losing my job.

My supervisor continues to be a lunatic. No surprise there. It appears that I've now earned my Social Studies endorsement, which will allow me to move out of the Language Arts department and change supervisors. If I retain my job, I don't know that there will actually be a place for me in the Social Studies department. Alas.

What am I reading? Not much. Catcher in the Rye will be in my future—that I can be sure about. After my student teacher leaves for a well-deserved break, I'll teach it as my last unit of the year. Or so I imagine.

I've ordered a copy of Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I've also ordered from our public library system Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True. I'm finding that I need to read up on the evidence for evolution and address the psuedo-scientific theory of intelligent design in order to be prepared for what my students might say in future discussions in my theory of knowledge class.

I have an ambition to read all of Plato's dialogues by the end of this summer. They're now at the top of my list of "stuff I want to read before I go blind." I'm a little worried about the state of my eyes, but I'll save that topic for another day.

Quantifying Education

2010-04-18T12:59:00.001-07:00

The last month or so I've been overwhelmed by my workload. In a couple weeks, I expect things to get better—at least for awhile. Lately I've had very little time to devote to my own reading and writing, much less thinking. However, in my rare spare moments, I've been pondering a question that goes back to my graduate school days. This question has become increasingly relevant as the so-called "reformist" movement in public education has seen its agenda increasingly put into action with the support and financial backing of the Obama Administration. The question I allude to is the extent to which learning can be quantified.

This is a large philosophical question that I've touched on before in this blog. My hope is that I'll revisit the question in a serious and perhaps even a systematic way by this summer. Right now, I only want to sketch out a few relevant issues that I could explore more deeply in the future.

The first thing to note is that education researchers do not themselves expect all observed phenomena to be expressed in quantitative terms. Qualitative data, of the sort common in, say, ethnographies, is very much accepted in mainstream education research. Those who seem to be relying entirely on quantitative data—and not necessary scientifically derived quantitative data—for policymaking are the "reformists." Why? Why is qualitative data increasingly out of favor among education policymakers?

To what extent would we agree with Pythagoras that "all things are numbers"? That is, to what extent can all things be meaningfully recognized as having mathematical value? If something does not have mathematical value, is it meaningless nonsense? Or is it just invalid for the purposes of education policymaking? If so, why?

Most of us would agree that representing bodily temperature or weight in terms of numerical value is very useful. It's useful to know whether someone's temperature is 101° or 104° (F), or whether someone has gained or lost 10 lbs in the last month. However, most of us would agree that it's not very useful to represent a poem or painting in purely numerical terms. Is learning more like body temperature or poetry or some combination of both?

If both, when is it most effective to represent learning in quantitative or qualitative terms? How does it affect one's vision of public education—and hence one's priorities—if only quantitative data is considered?

Suppose that among some student populations the learning objective of most importance is dispositional. To what extent can dispositional changes be represented reliably in terms of quantitative data? And if they can't be, does that mean that among education policymakers such considerations will be ignored because they can't be expressed in quantitative terms?

Questions, Again

2010-03-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Last week my students began reading self-selected books in small book groups. To say that things didn't go well would be an understatement. Part of the problem is that last week followed the week of their state exams and preceded the week of their spring vacation. Most of my students by about Thursday had little motivation to do anything at all, much less fulfill the assignments I'd given them. One class showed open resentment that I wasn't showing a movie "like other teachers."

One of the assignments they refused to do was writing a letter to a partner in their group about the book they're reading. Some months ago I heard about the assignment from Rohan Maitzen, and I tucked the idea away until I thought the time was right for it. Apparently the time was not right for it in my classes; a wiser teacher would have waited until after spring vacation to assign the letter-writing. At this point I have dim hope that many of them will make up the assignment over break.

Art Young, in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, demonstrates how letter-writing can be an effective way for young people to write about literature. He makes an excellent point about the relationship between knowledge and questions:

Fundamental to every discipline is figuring out how to ask important and germane questions that continue the advancement of knowledge within that field. You must be knowledgeable to ask good questions (and I discovered that my students were knowledgeable), and good questions beget good responses.

One of the reasons that my students gave for struggling with the assignment—apart from their general unwillingness to do any work before spring vacation—is that they said they didn't know how to ask questions about what they're reading. This came as a surprise to me. The assignment, as I designed it, called for them not only to share their initial reactions to the books they'd been reading, but also to ask their partner some open-ended questions about passages in the book. This is something we've practiced intermittently since the beginning of the year. I understand that asking good questions is still difficult work for many of my students. Yet, the lowest skilled student in my first period class—a young man who just came here from Iran—had little trouble completing his letter on time. It's not that my students—or any students, for that matter—are incapable of difficult work. Something more complex is at work.

Here are some ideas. Some of my students are tired of being told what to do and when they're supposed to do it. They want more say in their own education. In addition, some of them feel entitled to do nothing in their classes the last day or two before spring break because that's what they do in other class. Finally, many of my students don't expect much out of themselves as students because they gave up on themselves a long time ago.

My first period class is close to being in open rebellion. All year it has been my strongest class, but this week something came unraveled. I will probably hold a class meeting on the Monday after break. I will give them an opportunity to air what they think is working and not working in the class. I'll also ask them for constructive suggestions. If I show myself willing to compromise, I might gain the cooperation of at least a majority of the students.

I also have some things to say that I want them to hear. My job is to keep the big picture in mind, and I have an idea of what it is they need to learn and why. I've see how far they've come this year, and I know, from experience, they'll feel very good about themselves at the end of the year if they believe they've learned a lot in my class. I care about them and their education. However, if they don't want to be in a class like mine, I will allow them to go see their guidance counselor and ask to transfer into the other non-honors class at the quarter. I will imply, without saying it outright, that they might be able to transfer into a class in which the teacher (who shall remain nameless) doesn't care about them or whether they get an education. My guess is that no one will take me up on my offer, which is, in fact, a bluff—I doubt their guidance counselor would allow them to transfer this late in the quarter. My point is to give them the choice between staying in or leaving my class—a choice, in fact, they've always had, because no one can force them to attend my class. I want them, ultimately, to understand that if they decide to stay they will be subject to my expectations that they will apply their talents to learning how to be more thoughtful readers and writers.

What they can't see that I can see is that 10th grade is a crucial year. Most young people mature rapidly in 11th and 12th grades, and they become more serious students. This year I've had students whom I taught as 10th graders come back to me as 12th graders. At first they came to me for letters of recommendation for their college applications. Now that they've received the exciting news that they've been accepted at various universities, they're asking me for letters to help them get scholarships. These are the students who almost make the job worth it. The ones who make me question whether I really want to continue in this job are the 10th graders who are on the verge of giving up and dropping out.

There are many reasons why students drop out, but one of them is that they don't know how to ask themselves intelligent questions about their own lives and futures. Some of my students don't think they have a future, literally. They've shared with me their conviction that the world will end in 2012, as is widely reported on the internet. (Here is an article from ABC News, for example). Not coincidentally, 2012 is the year my 10th graders are supposed to graduate. I guess if the world is going to end, then there's little point in passing your English class, is there? The students who invariably fantasize such nonsense are poor, religious immigrants. Art Young suggests something of the paradox of how knowledge is linked to questioning. To construct a deeper knowledge in a given field, one must be capable of asking incisive questions, but without that deep knowledge, one is incapable of asking incisive questions. My end-of-the-world 10th-graders, completely ignorant of the Mayans whose calendar they purport to follow, don't know enough to ask even the most rudimentary of questions about what they read on the internet.

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: one of the tragedies of this job is that it requires unlimited compassion for the suffering and ignorance of the young people in our midst. I don't have unlimited compassion. I'm depressed by an ever-present sense of failure and loss of control, and I keep going more out of habit than anything else. I want to be laid off from my job this spring because it will give me the opportunity to make a much-needed change. My first choice would be to teach in a different school. My second choice would be to substitute for a year while I figure out what to do next. And what will I do if I'm not laid off and I'm unable to transfer into the Social Studies department? I don't know.

The Purpose of Education Is to Produce Wealth

2010-03-15T20:15:00.000-07:00

In a recent radio address, President Obama outlined what he thinks is the reason we need education reform in the United States:

Our prosperity in the 20th century was fueled by an education system that helped grow the middle class and unleash the talents of our people more fully and widely than at any time in our history. We built schools and focused on the teaching of math and science. We helped a generation of veterans go to college through the GI Bill. We led the globe in producing college graduates, and in turn we led in producing ground-breaking technologies and scientific discoveries that lifted living standards and set us apart as the world’s engine of innovation.

Of course, other nations recognize this, and are looking to gain an edge in the global marketplace by investing in better schools, supporting teachers, and committing to clear standards that will produce graduates with more skills. Our competitors understand that the nation that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow.

In an economy driven to turn anything and everything into a commodity, we should not be surprised to hear even supposed liberals speak of producing "graduates with more skills." The idea that we should reform education so that we can compete in a global marketplace has been repeated so many times in so many ways that we barely recognize what we're being told anymore. Even university humanities departments are having a hard time justifying their relevance these days. Professor after professor struggles to make the case that her subject is valuable and even essential. However, unless these professors can find a way to convince policymakers that their subjects contribute to the economic well-being of the nation, they can argue all they want to and they will convince no one who matters—no one, that is, who controls the purse strings.

An economy that turns everything into a commodity will eventually turn children into commodities. The reason behind the obsession with quantifying student and teacher "performance" in terms of standardized data is that it facilitates the rationale for privatizing public schools. If education can be turned into just another commodity to be produced and marketed, then what is the justification for government-run schools?

In a such a system, children are inevitably treated as a means to producing data that can be used to justify the investment of capital in a profit-making industry. Public education has been slowly undergoing a process of dehumanization. In school districts across the country, superintendents—including now my own—are being given wholesale powers to fire all teachers at "low-performing" schools. State legislatures and district school boards have signed over such powers to superintendents in order to qualify for Obama administration grant monies. Never mind that "low-performing" schools are typically populated by poor students who suffer from a lack of stability in their lives. For education policymakers from Obama on down, the solution to instability is apparently more instability.

If Barack Obama is the best we're going to get in the United States, we are in for some dark times, indeed.

Schlimmbesserung

2010-03-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

In studying up for a seminar on language for my philosophy class, I was reminded of the German word Schlimmbesserung. It is formed from schlimm ("bad") and Besserung ("improvement"), and it roughly means "an improvement that makes things worse." I'm sure we can all think of delicious examples of Schlimmbesserung, but I would offer the current trends in public education policy as a rather spectacular illustration of the irony that zealous efforts to make things better can often result in the precise opposite of their intended effects.

A case in point would be the decision of a School Board to fire all 93 employees at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. Arne Duncan, Obama's Secretary of Education, "applauded" the move for "showing courage and doing the right thing for the kids." In order to qualify for a grant from the Obama administration, the Board fired "74 classroom teachers, plus reading specialists, guidance counselors, physical education teachers, the school psychologist, the principal and three assistant principals." President Obama also praised the move in a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability. And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests - 7 percent.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama doesn't know what he's talking about. Diane Ravitch, author and New York University professor, has likened the Board's action to firing all the police in response to the rising crime rate. As Ravitch has pointed out in a piece in The Huffington Post, the situation at Cedar Falls is far more complex than the President's account of it before his newfound friends at the Chamber. Ravitch concludes that our nation's education leaders—including, it would seem, our hapless President—ought to recognize that

that teachers are not solely responsible for student test scores. Other influences matter, including the students' effort, the family's encouragement, the effects of popular culture, and the influence of poverty. A blogger called "Mrs. Mimi" wrote the other day that we fire teachers because "we can't fire poverty." Since we can't fire poverty, we can't fire students, and we can't fire families, all that is left is to fire teachers.

This strategy of closing schools and firing the teachers is mean and punitive. And it is ultimately pointless. It solves no problem. It opens up a host of new problems. It satisfies the urge to purge. But it does nothing at all for the students.

Across the country, other school districts, anxious to receive grant monies, are considering similar actions. Our school district, faced with a teachers' union which, by national standards, is relatively intact, has elected to take a more gradual approach at its worst performing high school. Teachers there will merely work under the close scrutiny of district officials and will be subject to data-based performance reviews of their effectiveness at implementing a standardized project-oriented curriculum. The superintendent, who is attempting to transform this "low-performing" high school into a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) school, has stated that she wants to attract strong early-career teachers to staff openings there.

Some time within the next sixty days I expect to receive notice that I have lost my job due to a "reduction in force" (RIF). This year I look forward to it. The RIF will give me an opportunity to get out from under an incompetent and vindictive supervisor without actually having to quit my job. There is a good chance that I will eventually be "recalled from RIF" either this summer or next, and when I go back to work, I'll have the option of making a fresh start at another school. Would I choose the district's STEM school as a future place of employment? I'm not sure I would. My experience with our district's central administration is that everything they do is ill-conceived and incompetent. A school laboring under the superintendent's scrutiny sounds like a nightmare to me.

A phenomenon we've long known about in public education is the tendency of teachers, as they gain experience, status and seniority, to move away from teaching struggling students at "failing" schools and into teaching successful students in honors programs or at elite schools. There are some rather obvious reasons for this. Teachers who teach motivated students typically feel successful and see tangible results for their efforts. They have the opportunity to teach subject matter in an area of interest, and their jobs tend to be satisfying. They receive praise and recognition for what they're doing.

Teachers who teach unmotivated students typically struggle every day with problems that are less about education and more about social work. Too often such teachers have to wait a long time to see results from their emotionally draining work. The work they do is often at a very basic level and has little to do with the subject matter they were trained in and were once passionate about. Too often their achievements go unrecognized. Too often what they hear is unconstructive criticism, on the part of students who think the education they're being offered is "boring" and "stupid," and on the part of administrators who are frustrated that these teachers aren't getting better results.

There are rare, socially committed teachers who inspire their struggling students to achieve great things in public schools. But these teachers are the exception. In my first two years at my current school, I taught in a strong reading program that was recognized in the district for its effectiveness. I was regarded as among the best—if not the best—reading teacher in this program. Due to budget cuts, the program is slowly being dismantled, and this year I took on three new classes, three sections of which were a Language Arts course for "non-honors" 10th graders. I went into this job with the ambition to help these students to learn to think, read and write more skillfully, carefully and incisively. The work has been difficult, all-consuming, and very stressful. Yet, for the most part, my students are making progress, and while I've made my share of mistakes this year, I think I'm getting better at my job.

And what is my reward for this demanding assignment? Of course, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I've helped many of my students. But I also have the increased pressure and fault-finding of the district through the medium of my unbalanced supervisor. I've concluded that the reason that I'm one of several teachers at our school under the microscope is because (1) I'm an early-career teacher, (2) I'm a Language Arts teacher, and (3) I'm not teaching honors students. The increased stress has made my job so difficult that I've decided to get out of the business of teaching poor, low-achieving students. I've seen the light. It isn't worth it to me because the personal costs are too high. I leave the job to younger people. My first priority is to find a job, if I can, in a private school. My wife has worked for years in private schools, and I've formed what I hope is a fairly realistic appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses. If I get a chance to escape the public school system, I will take it.

The problem is that there aren't a lot of private-school teaching jobs available in my area, and the competition is stiff. For that reason, I'm also working on my social studies endorsement. If administrators feel compelled to scrutinize English and Math teachers, then I will avoid those subject matters. If I finish my social studies endorsement before the end of the summer, I might be willing to come back to my current school next year. By moving to the social studies department, I will also get a new supervisor—one with whom I'm already familiar and with whom I have good rapport.

The upshot of all this is that the zealous "reforms" of education policymakers, from Barack Obama on down to my assistant principal, are creating an incentive for skilled and talented teachers to move away from teaching the very students that the "reforms" are meant to help. Schlimmbesserung, indeed. As a run-of-the-mill left-wing liberal who once ardently supported Barack Obama, I'm deeply disappointed in this President, his administration, and the Democratic Party. My wife and I frequently discuss the possibility of moving overseas again to teach in international schools. Every day the incentive to abandon my country and its ruination grows.

Found Poem (7)

2010-02-20T08:37:00.000-08:00

Wild Boar

Use only very young animals,
A year or under,
And prepare as for: Suckling Pig, 478.
Use only very young animals.
If older, prepare by a moist-heat
Process for: Pork, 479-482.
Use only very young animals,
A year or under.

from Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (16)

2010-02-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

The first two sentences that Ophelia utters in "Hamlet" are questions:

Do you doubt that?

And:

No more but so?

Ophelia slips in these questions in the midst of Laertes' long lectures regarding Hamlet. When her father interrogates her on the same subject, he does all the asking. She is allowed some trifling questions with Laertes but none at all with her father, whose primary ways of relating to her are to command her, draw information out of her, and manipulate her as a spy.

During the nunnery scene and "The Mousetrap" scene, Ophelia responds to Hamlet's excited talk with various questions. Hamlet, like Laertes, is of her generation. Ophelia will join Hamlet as the other character in the play who's lost a father and is seen to be driven mad by it. Hamlet, the murderer who brings Ophelia to her grief, is absent when Ophelia first appears in her madness before the Queen. Ophelia, who up until now has never asked a single question of her elders, including the Queen and King, once again utters her first two sentences as questions:

Where is the beauteous Majesty of Denmark?

And, singing:

How should I your true love know
From another one?

Like Hamlet, Ophelia is mad because she no longer knows her role. And like Hamlet, she speaks her grief in an extraordinary language of her own.

His beard was white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll.
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God mercy on his soul.

In conventional terms, Polonius' words to his daughter now describe her distracted condition—

. . . You do not understand yourself so clearly . . .

—as well as his own, in death.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (15)

2010-02-14T10:11:00.000-08:00

The Oxford edition, edited by G.R. Hibbard, leaves out most of what the Arden edition, edited by Harold Jenkins, includes in Act IV, Scene 4. The excised lines come from the Second Quarto, which Hibbard otherwise calls the "good" quarto. He argues that the lines

do nothing to advance the action, nor do they reveal anything new about Hamlet and his state of mind.

I have argued that after the murder of Polonius, the play steps swiftly to Act V, which brings a new mood and outlook to the play. There is no longer any reason for Hamlet and Claudius to dwell on and probe what is in each other's mind, because once their murderous intentions have been revealed to each other, there is nothing relevant left for them to learn about each other. Act IV, Scene 4 pauses the inexorable passage to the new world Hamlet finds himself in when he returns to Denmark. And yet, is the pause entirely without value?

I would not like to do without

. . . Now whether it be
Bestital oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th'event—
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing's to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
to do't. . . .

This passage contains the best comment on the reason for Hamlet's lingering in thought before making an attempt on the life of Claudius in Act III, Scene 4. However, what sense does it make for him to suggest that he has the "cause, and will, and strength, and means" to take revenge? What is he supposed to do at this point? Turn around and head back to Elsinor? Well, why not? What kind of play would we have if he had?

Much criticism has been expended on

. . . Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. . . .

To take these lines at face value, which Dover Wilson apparently did, would make the thesis ("Rightly to be great/ Is not to stir without great argument") too trivial for Harold Jenkins. He suggests that to make the antithesis ("But greatly to find quarrel in a straw/ When honour's at the stake") turn on honor "enfeebles" it. Why? To what extent does this note foreshadow the question of honor—or, say, an acceptance of the fated consequences of acting in accord with one's honor—in Act V?

Does Hibbard's dismissal of the final lines in the scene—

. . . O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.

—because "his determination to do better inspires little confidence" miss the point? His thoughts are bloody for about as long as it takes to dispense with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. These are lines that Hamlet, after his "sudden and more strange return," would never speak because, in contrast to what he is now, he is a different character.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (14)

2010-02-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

King. Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial safety—
Which we do tender, as we dearly grieve
For that which thou has done—must send thee hence
With fiery quickness. Therefore prepare thyself.
The bark is ready, and the wind at help,
Th'associates tend, and everything is bent
For England.

Ham. For England?

Hamlet has known since before Act III, Scene 4 that he is bound for England, so his question can't be an unironic one. Sir John Gielgud, in an old audio recording I have of "Hamlet," exclaims the line in an uprising tone that conveys little other than that he's apparently glad of the news. That is certainly one way to play it. Another way would be to infuse just enough of an ironic tone to indicate to Claudius that he knows what he's up to.

In Act III, he'd told his mother that he would trust his traveling companions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as he would "adders fang'd." Hamlet knows what is in Claudius' mind: he will try to have him killed. Could Hamlet be aware of this and not echo back his "England" in a tone that lets the king know he knows what he intends?

King. Ay, Hamlet.

Ham. Good.

King. So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.

Oh, but he does.

Ham. I see a cherub that sees them. . . .

This is the last move in the old game between Hamlet and Claudius. When Hamlet returns, a new game will be in play.

"I am as good as looking at you now"

2010-02-06T20:21:00.000-08:00

Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

This week I dared to teach Walt Whitman to my students. To provide them with some historical and personal background, I relied on various segments of the PBS documentary American Experience: Walt Whitman. On Friday, during the film presentation of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," I was moved, all over again, by Whitman's deep yearning to transcend time and touch his future readers directly. It's long been a dream of artists and writers to defeat death through their work, but Whitman's seeming achievement of transcendence in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is uncanny. As I listened to the narration of passages from Whitman's eerie poem, I was suddenly struck with the thought that I, as a teacher, have my own potential to reach into the future by the way I influence my young students.

It's a thought I've resisted. I don't really want to know the full implications of the responsibility I carry as a teacher. I would rather deal with the tasks—and the people—at hand. I prefer to plod along in the present like a dull ox. I'd just as soon leave the future to itself. However, for a brief moment, I saw what might be possible in what I was doing. Then the narration ended. I stopped the video, and I asked my students a simple question: who is the "you" in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Perhaps I'd taught them something after all, because they replied variously, "future readers" and "us" and "me."

We understand then do we not?
What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

I am a good teacher!

2010-01-31T12:20:00.001-08:00

No, I haven't been reading a self-help book or started uttering affirmations to myself every morning or just come back from an expensive weekend retreat where I experienced a psychological makeover. In fact, I spent most of the weekend getting ready for my 2nd semester classes. My epiphany comes after months of gnawing, agonizing self-doubt. Most of the time I do not experience myself as a good teacher. Mostly I extend extreme effort and sense devastating failure. But this morning, in thinking about what I've accomplished—or better, what my students have accomplished—over the last two and a half years, I was suddenly struck with the thought that I'm actually a good teacher.

My supervisor has taken a strong dislike to me lately. This woman was, some years ago, a principal but was demoted for incompetence. Since then, she's bounced around the district from school to school, alienating staff and colleagues as she goes. The fact that she hasn't been fired by now testifies to the strength of the principal's union. I find her to be erratic, with a dubious grasp of reality. She is rigidly dogmatic, forgetful, prone to formulas and fixed ideas. She is the most negative person I've ever seen in administration, and in two and a half years I have not received one sincere complement from her or any recognition for what I've accomplished. She is among the worst managers I've ever had. On Friday, after she made, yet again, some bizarre comments about my teaching and training, I stood up to her, and she stalked off in anger because she said I'd "insulted" her. Underneath that bullying, bossy style of hers is a fragile woman—a mentally unbalanced woman.

The strain of the last month has been almost more than I can take. I don't sleep regularly anymore, and I often wake up to nightmares and night sweats. Yet, I keep going, going, going. Mostly my students like me. Mostly they appreciate what they've learned in my classes. My philosophy students, more than any other, recognize my dedication to helping them develop their thinking and writing. Perhaps it's the antidepressants talking, but suddenly I realized that I'm the kind of teacher that some people remember their whole lives. They may not remember what I taught them about, say, Walt Whitman, but they remember how I helped them to realize the dignity in their own struggles as students and as human beings. Why do the humanities matter? Because education and life are not separate.

Once again I'm telling myself that this is the last year I'll be teaching. I despair at the insanity of a system that can't, for example, expel a supervisor who would be unemployable anywhere but in my district. All winter I've felt the darkness of the world closing in on me. I feel at the bottom of a well I can't climb out of. One of the more surreal things that happened this semester was that I was teaching the idea of character traits to my students, and in listing possible examples I mentioned the word "joyous." One of my students asked me what that meant. I explained that a joyous character would be one full of joy—a joyous character would be happy all the time. I asked her if she knew anyone like that. She replied that I was like that. She said I was always in a good mood and that sometimes it bugged her. I was astonished. I asked the students at her table group if they agreed. All but one did.

I mentioned this conversation to a guidance counselor, and he said that he thought that I have some sort of switch that I turn on when class starts. It's not something I'm aware of, but I think he has a point. However, when class ends and I'm alone in myself, I find myself dragged down by hopelessness. I have been here before, and I will survive it. About April, when the days start getting long and warm, I'll feel pleasure in my own existence again. Behind the facade of joyousness will be joyousness. I will scratch my way up the sides of the well, crawl out onto the grass, and stand in the full sun.

In the meantime, I am a good teacher in need of a good teacher.

Dear President Obama,

2010-01-29T20:43:00.000-08:00

I realize that education is not at the top of your agenda right now. Perhaps I should be writing your Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. I imagine that you're far too concerned with health care, Afghanistan, and the banks to busy yourself with education policymaking, though you did make it part of your State of the Union speech earlier this week. However, Arne Duncan, in my view, is part of the problem with public education these days, and you have said that the buck stops with you. So I'm going over his head, straight to the one man who has some influence over the Secretary.

Arne Duncan—and almost every education policymaker from top to bottom—are guilty of some very simplistic assumptions that will prevent any improvement in public education for perhaps decades to come. These assumptions are founded on a kind of mass delusion—a groupthink, if you will, worthy of an Orwellian society but not of a democracy that I still hold out some dim hope for. These assumptions are: (1) student achievement, the end of public education, can be measured by standardized tests; and (2) teacher performance can be measured by how students do on these tests.

These assumptions are not difficult to challenge, and so I can only conclude that the reason they're not being challenged in public is that anyone with dissenting views has been marginalized by an almost perfect conformity of thought among the keepers of public influence. The obvious irony is that one of the purposes of education is to equip us with intellects that enable us to question conventional wisdom and engage in incisive discussion about a range of issues. The fact that we're not having spirited discussions about the prevailing assumptions of education policymakers is, in itself, a damning comment of the very system they seek to make policy for.

Student achievement, as measured by test scores, is not the purpose of education because it is not the purpose of life. When I recently asked my students what the purpose of life was, they offered a whole range of answers, but not one of them suggested that it was to pass student achievement tests. Such an answer would have been too small a conception of life, as it is too small a conception of education. In Democracy and Education, John Dewey wrote,

Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside.

One could argue that achieving "a life of rich significance" in our society is fostered by having a certain minimum level of skills that some of us associate, nostalgically, with a liberal arts education. The problem is that standardized tests do not measure what students aren't tested on. For example, standardized tests do not measure the ability of students to choose something worthy to read, and then to ask and answer questions of their own formulation. They do not test the ability of students to choose a topic to write about, and then to ask and answer their own questions in writing.

Any teacher whose performance is measured by her students' performance on standardized tests will be tempted, whether consciously or unconsciously, to steer clear of curriculum that doesn't prepare the students for the tests. Such curriculum does a disservice to students. No one reads or writes well without the ability to ask and answer his own questions. I would go so far as to assert that the ability to ask incisive questions is the basis of intellectual freedom, and anyone who hasn't developed that ability has abdicated her freedom as a thinking, choosing human being. Nothing could be more serious in a democracy than to steer a curriculum away from the attainment of intellectual freedom. And nothing could be more unjust.

I've taught students that are commonly thought of as being at both ends of the achievement spectrum. It's dangerous to make generalizations about these students, but I will venture to suggest that one key determinant is whether a student takes responsibility for her education. Successful students tend to ask more questions of themselves and the teacher, read and write on their own, invent projects for themselves, and take on new intellectual challenges. Unsuccessful students tend to be passive—they wait to be told what to do, and then they react by following or not following directions. Their experience of education is one of being ordered around. Not surprisingly, these students are often frustrated, depressed, apathetic, rebellious, angry, unmotivated and/or sullen. It's not that these students are incapable of taking responsibility for their own education. It's that they haven't been taught.

There is a long history of the most experienced and capable teachers moving, over the length of their careers, into classrooms with the highest achieving students. If policymakers had consciously decided not to waste talented teachers on struggling students, the effect would be little different than the system we have now. Unless the federal government sends more education monies to the states, schools will be facing another round of layoffs, and the lowest achieving students will tend to be the ones who lose their teachers. Those who will bear the brunt of the endemic instability in public education will be those who are most academically vulnerable.

Into this climate of instability your administration would implement systems of measuring teacher performance based on test scores. The obvious fallacy of such systems is that, as in an invalid social science experiment, there is no control for variables. Imagine that one very experienced teacher teaches all honors classes—in fact, this lucky teacher teaches the same class five times a day. Now imagine an inexperienced teacher who mostly teaches struggling students and has three different kinds of classes a day. How does an administrator compare performances?

One answer is that the administrator compares teachers in comparatively similar situations. Again, how does the administrator control for variables? One class might have a high percentage of Special Education and English language learners. This class might have a skill-level range of eight grades, from readers at a third-grade level to an eleventh-grade level. This teacher's challenges might be compounded by a difficult schedule and additional responsibilities. How can the variables in this situation be accounted for in any standardized system of performance measurement? The complexities of a given teaching assignment are well beyond any system designed to quantify teaching ability, and yet education policymakers are almost universally pursuing this pipedream. It's as if they believe, like Pythagoras, that all things are numbers, and by god they intend to measure them.

There is a mountain of evidence that the best way to help students to learn more is with intervention programs and summer programs. However, such programs require the hiring of teachers, which school districts can't do now for lack of funds. In fact, some teachers have been laid off or displaced because the funding for these programs has dried up. The one thing that hasn't dried up is funding for standardized tests and for performance management data systems. That is, the monies that go to the teachers who teach the struggling students are shrinking while the monies that go to companies that produce database management software and equipment are set to increase.

The working theory behind such expenditures is that class sizes don't matter, that good teachers can teach well under almost any circumstances, and that the way to improve student achievement is either to put more pressure on bad teachers or to drive them out with performance reviews. In the meantime, I recently learned that the superintendent of our large urban school district—a superintendent whose policies are perfectly in keeping with those outlined above—also sits on the Board of Directors of the very not-for-profit company that has sold to the district the standardized testing system the district intends to use for measuring teacher performance.

If this weren't bad enough, she also sits on the Board of Directors of a non-profit that supplied a consultant to advise the School Board on her own performance review. After she received a positive review from the School Board, she then hired a consult from the non-profit to serve as a highly paid member of her staff. One would think that the School Board directors and the supposedly liberal voters of our fair city might have a problem with such obvious conflicts of interest. But as long as the one remaining daily newspaper in our city is solidly behind a superintendent who spouts the language of student achievement and performance management, the general public remains ignorant of the creeping corruption in its midst.

Meanwhile, President Obama, the struggling students in my classroom are a long way from the private school your daughters are privileged to attend. My students instinctively understand the injustice of the situation they find themselves in. One of the consequences—whether intended or unintended—of making student achievement and performance management the only real topics of public discussion is that the entire idea of what role public education has in the pursuit of social justice has been dispensed with. This may not be what you intended, Mr. President, but the practical consequences of your administration's policies is to maintain an education system that preserves and promotes the interests of the privileged. After all, the affluent will always find a way to get their children educated, no matter how much the system fails everyone else.

And failure is exactly where we're headed with your education policies. There is no getting around the fact that teachers—not database management systems—are required to teach students who are struggling, and the more complex the job is for teachers, the more difficult it is for them to teach successfully. Think of this situation as a variation of Complexity Theory. At some point, a system becomes so complex that the addition of any new element, even one designed to make it more effective, can't possibly make it any better and may even make it worse. That is a management problem, not a teacher quality problem. It may well be that the teachers we have in our nation aren't, on balance, good enough. But any additional effort to, for example, train them to be more effective will fail until the system is simplified.

What NCLB did, in effect, was make the system more complex by adding a whole new layer of regulations on top of existing state regulations. State legislatures, thanks to your "Race to the Top," have gotten the message that they need to institute yet more policies, procedures, regulations, and systems to "improve" their chances of receiving federal monies. The only people I can see benefiting from your policies are the companies in the private sector that will provide the consultants and computer-based tools needed to implement the change you dream of. The one change we won't see, however, is the improvement in the education received by the children at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy in our country. If anything, it will get worse.

Some weeks ago a Vietnamese student approached me at lunch and asked if I'd attend the school art show in which she had several pieces. She explained that she was supposed to bring a guest and the assignment was worth 100 points. I asked her about her mother, and she replied that her mother had to stay home with a baby. I didn't ask about her father, because I don't think she has one at home. In any case, I told her that I hadn't slept well for two nights and that I was too exhausted to stay late for the art show. She said she understood, and then burst into tears when she left the room.

Later in the day I saw her in hall and stopped her. I asked her how long I would have to stay at the art show, and she said from 5:00 to 5:30. I then looked at her for a long moment, and she finally said, "Well, are you going to go?" I said that I would, but if I did this for her, she would have to do something for me. "What?" She replied skeptically. I said that she would have to come to my class every day. That was the deal. If I went to her art show, she would have to stop skipping my class and come every single day. She agreed.

The following week, as I was rotating around the room, checking on my students' work, she said, "Mr. E, I wasn't going to school this morning, but then I remembered . . . Oh, yeah." A fellow student asked, "Doesn't your mom care if you go to school?" "No," she said, "my mom doesn't give a shit if I go to school." And naturally—predictably—I said, "I care. I care."

The point of this story isn't that I've turned this student around or that I'm such an amazing teacher. The job requires a combination of skill, experience and heart to do well, and most teachers are better at it than I am. My point is that the job is far more complex than most policymakers realize. President Obama, you and your Secretary are in no position to decide education policy until you understand the complexities and difficulties of what I deal with and my students deal with every day. You do not know what you are doing and won't know until you talk to people like me.

The children of this nation deserve better educations. You believe that, and I believe that. Mr. President, I ask you to use that considerable intellect of yours to imagine what you don't know about what goes on in classrooms across this nation. Imagine it, and then find out about it. To knowingly act in ignorance of the effects of your policies is the same as acting with abject indifference. Mr. President, you are better than that.

Sincerely,

The English Teacher

What Are the Humanities For?

2010-01-26T19:45:00.000-08:00

In a series of articles here, here, and here, Rohan Maitzen has been considering this question over at Novel Readings. I'm afraid I don't have the background or expertise to add anything insightful to the discussion; my own reasons for "studying" the humanities are personal. To me, it's a little like asking why universities should have music programs. The answers seem obvious: people take pleasure in listening and making music, and a lucky few can even earn a living at it, either as musicians or teachers. I suppose one could make the argument that music is useful—that people who can play an instrument or discriminate between Bach and Mozart have the kind of training that __________________ (fill in the blank). But really, who cares? We don't support music programs because they train students to have skills that are applicable in other fields. We don't defend them with economic arguments. We believe that music is good for us, that it gives us pleasure, that it's part of, as John Dewey said about education, "a life of rich significance."

So it is with the humanities. As I've been writing this piece, I've developed an itch to reread Anthony Hecht's "The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee," one of his last lovely perfect poems. I hold it up as a kind of ideal. It makes me want to write poetry again. And maybe I will. With bewildering frequency, I've been waking up early to nightmares and night sweats. Maybe I should just get up and write a poem the next time that happens. Why not? What else am I going to do at 3 am when I can't get back to sleep?

"The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee"

Psalms 139:12

Like trailing silks, the light
Hangs in the olive trees
As the pale wine of day
Drains to its very lees:
Huge presences of gray
Rise up, and then it's night.

Distantly lights go on.
Scattered like fallen sparks
Bedded in peat, they seem
Set in the plushest darks
Until a timid gleam
Of matins turns them wan,

Like the elderly and frail
Who've lasted through the night,
Cold brows and silent lips,
For whom the rising light
Entails their own eclipse,
Brightening as they fail.

I could not have learned to value a poem like this one if it hadn't been for some very good teachers I had long ago.

Winter Light

2010-01-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

December 22

Dawn, coffee in hand,
I wait for the first grey-light.
Look! Crows in the fog!

December 23

Faint layers of rose
and blue in the sky. Seagulls
call, call at the Locks.

December 24

The mountain floating
blue in the distance. No wind.
I long for summer.

December 25

Frost on the rooftops.
Bright sun lights the drops on the
glass. No snow in sight.

December 26

Liquid lights on the
lake. Hills blink red, white, green as
we drive by, singing.

December 27

Yellow sunset on
the canal: the sky ripples,
a half-moon downstream.

December 28

Faint light in the east.
Black branches silhouetted
in cloudy greylight.

December 29

Fog's orange glowball—
dull glimmer on asphalt ice,
winter's small seeing.

December 30

Flags flapping at the
marina, the waxing moon
slips behind the clouds.

December 31

The tulip tree's white
buds bouncing in wind—inside
them awaits the spring.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (13)

2010-01-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

In Scene 3 of Act IV, Hamlet speaks circles around Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who, seeking the body of Polonius, have in effect taken his place as the foil for Hamlet's quibbles and paradoxes. The one at the end of the scene has undoubtedly inspired a mountain of criticism:

Ham. . . . The King is a thing—

Guild. A thing, my lord?

Ham. Of nothing. Bring me to him.

The interpretation I prefer to focus on is the sense that derives from Psalm 144:4, in the translation found in the Prayer Book of the Church of England of Shakespeare's time.

Man is like a thing of nought: his time passeth away like a shadow.

One could take this as foreshadowing, as it were, of what is to befall the king. Or one could take it as the first note of a theme that Hamlet will pick up and play again, in increasingly elaborate variations.

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

Hamlet has given up the epistemological problems of how to determine the validity of the ghost and how to discern what is in the mind of Claudius. The problem he has shifted to now is what do to with the knowledge that death comes to us all swiftly. We can anticipate, with certainty, our coming nothingness, even if, as he says in Act V, we cannot know the exact hour of its coming.

Stevens, again:

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

And again:

Seventy Years Later

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain. . . .

Robert Alter translates Psalm 144:3-4 as:

LORD, what is a human creature that You should know him,
the son of man that You pay him mind?

The human is like unto breath,
his days like a passing shadow.

As Alter points out in a note, the existence of a human being moves from something insubstantial, breath, to something even more insubstantial, shadow.

—the rest is silence.

Found Poem (6)

2010-01-17T10:05:00.001-08:00

Raccoon

Skin and remove glands in small of back
And on either side of spine,
And one under each foreleg of: 1 raccoon.
Remove all fat, inside and out,

And on either side of spine.
Soak overnight refrigerated in: Salt water.
Remove all fat, inside and out.
Blanch, 154, for 45 minutes.

Soak overnight refrigerated in: Salt water.
Add: 2 tablespoons baking soda.
Blanch, 154, for 45 minutes,
And continue to cook uncovered for 5 minutes.

Add: 2 tablespoons baking soda.
Drain and wash in warm water.
Continue to cook uncovered for 5 minutes.
Put in cold water and bring to a boil.

Drain and wash in warm water.
Reduce heat and simmer 15 minutes.
Put in cold water and bring to a boil.
Preheat the oven to 350°.

Reduce heat and simmer 15 minutes.
Stuff the raccoon with
(Preheat the oven to 350°)
Sweet Potato and Apple Dressing, 374.

Stuff the raccoon with
(Bake, covered about 45 minutes)
Sweet Potato and Apple Dressing, 374.
Uncover and bake,

15 minutes longer,
Each foreleg of: 1 raccoon.
Before serving,
Skin and remove glands in small of back.

from Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (12)

2010-01-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

The lingering quality of "Hamlet" ends with Act III. The queen soon informs Claudius that Hamlet has stabbed to death Polonius, and the king's intuition about what is in Hamlet mind is confirmed.

O heavy deed!
It had been with us had we been there.

His plan to dispatch Hamlet to England is now quickly set in motion.

Gertrude, come away.
The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch
But we will ship him hence. . . .

Hamlet, for his part, already suspects what is in the king's mind, and he is prepared to improvise a plan to meet Claudius' attack through Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Near the end of Act III, he tells his mother,

There's letters seal'd, and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd—
They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;
For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard, and't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon.

In effect, the long chess-like maneuvering, the spying and the strategizing to reveal what is in each opponent's mind, is over. Their intentions are now out in the open. The play will move more swiftly to its tragic conclusion from here on out.

One of those Greg-like problems that scholars have puzzled over is why Shakespeare didn't change scenes at the beginning of Act IV. The queen is left on stage at the end of Act III, and she is still there when the king, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, enters at the start of Act IV. However, the effect of having the queen on stage is to start the act in mid-step, which sets off the play's quickened pace. We already know where the queen is and what has just happened. Not a moment is wasted in orienting ourselves to new circumstances. The queen's first words are "Bestow this place on us a little while," and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent away. There is action all around. In short order, it comes out:

.

. . In his lawless fit,
Behind the arras hearing something stir,
Whips out his rapier, cries 'A rat, a rat',
And in this brainish apprehension kills
The unseen good old man.

That sense of ponderous possibility has ceased. The play clicks with purposeful steps to the end.

Poetry, Birds, and the Death of Students

2010-01-16T09:31:00.000-08:00

The recent death of a former student has brought to mind a couple poems on the subject. I suppose that many poems have been written by teachers about the loss of their students; for the moment I can only recall two that made any impression on me.

The first is Theodore Roethke's "Elegy for Jane," subtitled "My Student, Thrown by a Horse." In my early twenties, when I decided I wanted to be a poet, Roethke was the poet I wanted to be. Of course, I would never have admitted that to myself. I would have said that I wanted to be my own poet. But my vision of what it was to be a poet was modeled on Roethke. As it happened, I attended the university where he had taught and where he was still a kind of legend. When they taught his work, my professors shared personal memories of his teaching, his antics and his famous breakdowns. Years later, I ended up marrying the daughter of a younger colleague of the poet. Over the years, I've heard my fair share of stories about Roethke, some, coming from my mother-in-law, not terribly flattering. Even my wife claims to remember him—or, to be precise, his long legs, since she was a toddler when he died in 1963.

I've long since lost much of my interest in his poetry, though I have, against my will, a deep familiarity with much of it. I recall class discussions of "Elegy for Jane," and while it was never my favorite Roethke poem, I once counted it as one of his masterpieces. In rereading it, I now find the poem somewhat irritating. I realize that such poems are not really about the deceased but the poet's reaction to her death. The problem is that I don't like his overly poetic response to the death of his student. It's as if he merely saw her end as more material for his poetry, without the slightest regard for her humanity. My objection is not so much that he turned her into a Roethke poem, but that he turned her into a kind of bird, singing and flitting about the trees, all rendered in the overly stylized, overwritten poetic language of nature.

. . . And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

All things considered, I prefer Frost's more ironic approach in "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same," a poem that clearly influenced Roethke's.

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

This poem is so much of a piece that I couldn't resist quoting it in full. "Be that as may be," Roethke can't leave the bird alone.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.

And:

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

After this, I do not find the poem redeemed by, as one professor characterized it, its "outrageous" ending:

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

One of my teachers at the university was the Welsh poet Leslie Norris. I remember him reading his poem on the death of a former student, "I.M. James Chuang, M.B., B.S., M.R.C.S, R.N., Died April 23, 1978, Aged 25." This poem is every bit as crafted as Roethke's, but the tone is personal, careful, without the indulgences of Roethke's declamatory style. Norris was, of course, the younger colleague of Dylan Thomas, and he certainly learned something of the craft from him. However, his style is more relaxed, even informal at times. Here is the opening of his poem:

Last Thursday morning, watching a haul of barges
tug their blunt ropes under Chelsea Bridge,
I saw two swallows, hot from Africa,
flick and scream across the delighted river.

I suggested that Norris was influenced by Dylan Thomas. But poets can be influenced in odd ways, and in his choice of the word "blunt" I see Shakespeare's sonnet 19, which I distinctly remember Norris analyzing in class for its sonic intricacy.

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood,
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood,
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets. . . .

In Norris' poem, Devouring Time has outrageously devoured a man well before his time.

Jim, I can't understand how anyone as young
and generous could go so swiftly into death.

One of the terrible ironies of this poem is that the deceased was a healer, on whom others counted for his medical expertise—an expertise which, with its resources of science and art, is meant to keep the body in order, but which was powerless to keep at bay the unpredictable flukes of nature.

On Thursday afternoon I knew you the full man,
conscious of healing, able to keep death at bay
down there near the river. Images of your childhood
were not wanted. You had become my contemporary,
although you were young enough to clap your hands
with the children, and I stand in an older body.

(Conscious of certain wreck, Jim, I had meant
to ask about arthritis, how my fingers stiffen;
but had not thought to know the pain of knocking
these words out.) To think a starling's nest,
untidy tangle of instinct pressed messily
into an air vent, could have killed you.

Birds in Norris' poem are both culprit and symbolism.

Two Canada geese, those heavy winter birds,
grey on grey sky, beat overhead, trailing
silence behind their ponderous flying.
A cold evening has come back to the country.

I can't think of this ending without recalling Keats' "To Autumn."

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river swallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In a poem in which he declared that "Death is the mother of beauty," Wallace Stevens, too, could not resist the allusion to Keats in his ending to "Sunday Morning."

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Why do birds occur to us in thoughts of beauty and death? As Norris says about the swallows, they are both "emblem" and "omen." They have been with human beings from the beginning, and they have found their way into our religious symbolism, our poetry, and even our dreamlife. They represent the "sweet brood" that Time devours; the art of eternity in the moment; the spirit freed from the "dying animal" of the body; and the swift passing of our lives.

I keep three books on my bedroom bookshelves at all times: Montaigne's Essays; Yeats' Collected Poems; and Wallace Stevens Collected Poetry and Prose. The first reminds me that it is "an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully." The second reminds me of the dream to live on in the eternity of art, a bird "set upon a golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come." Third reminds me of the gaudiness of our imagined end.

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Like Prospero, my every third thought is of death. The other two, of life, are the ones I have to bring to my students. In my 10th grade classes, we'll soon be ending a disappointing semester. The next will begin with Whitman—the Whitman of robust variousness and pulsing life. The Whitman of battlefield hospitals and the mourning thrush can wait for another day.

A Former Student, Murdered

2010-01-14T19:44:00.000-08:00

Today I learned that one of my former students was shot to death in an apparent robbery. He was at home when three men broke into his townhouse and gunned down him and a friend.

I remember this student, a member of the local Latvian community, for his kindness and gentleness. I particularly recall how he took a fellow student under his wing—a student whose parents and older brother had been recently deported to Mexico. He tried to get him to class on time and prodded him to pay attention. He was consistently big-hearted and good-humored—a rarity among adults, not to mention teenagers.

The newspaper said that after graduating from high school, he went to work for his father's construction company, which he hoped to take over some day. He had a future. And now he doesn't.

Found Poem (5)

2010-01-10T10:47:00.000-08:00

Bear

Remove all fat and bone from bear meat.
The fat turns rancid very quickly.
If rendered at once, it is prized for cooking;

if held, it is good only for boot grease.
All bear is edible.
Remove all fat and bone from bear meat.

Tough, strongly flavored bear
may be improved by refrigerating
(if rendered at once, it is prized for cooking)

at least 24 hours in an oil-based
marinade before cooking.
Remove all fat and bone from bear meat.

Cook, after marination, as for any recipe
for Beef Pot Roast or Stew, 459.
If rendered at once, it is prized for cooking.

Bear cub will need about 2½ hours' cooking;
for an older animal, allow 3½ to 4 hours.
Remove all fat and bone from bear meat.
If rendered at once, it is prized for cooking.

from Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (11)

2010-01-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

Queen. What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help ho!

Pol. [behind the arras] What ho! Help!

Ham. How now? A rat! Dead for a ducat, dead.

Pol. [behind] O, I am slain.

Queen. O me, what hast thou done?

Ham. Nay, I know not.
Is it the King?

[Lifts up the arras and discovers Polonius, dead.]

Suppose that Claudius had been behind the arras. Would we have ever regarded Hamlet as sick with melancholic paralysis or nauseated with the apprehension of truth? Would we have noted instead that Hamlet waited until he was fully ready to enjoy his revenge by sending Claudius to eternal damnation?

What kind of a play would we have if Claudius had been stabbed to death and Hamlet assumed the throne? How would he have answered the court, if at all? Would he had have justified the usurpation with his story about the ghost and the proof of the play-within-the-play? Who would have believed the usurper?

I imagine Laertes, Hamlet's natural rival, returning from France. Polonius, who had quickly pledged his loyalty to young Hamlet, whispers to Laertes about Hamlet's madness. He'd already regarded Hamlet as mad before the murder, and his lunatic stories about ghosts and plays have done nothing to dispel his views.

Laertes and others fear what rash and bloody deeds Hamlet may commit next. Laertes secretly organizes a rebellion and appeals to Fortinbras. He convinces Fortinbras to join forces and overthrow the mad usurper King.

The play ends with a different kind of tragedy. After the death of Hamlet and his entourage, and the marriage of Fortinbras and the much older Gertrude, we wonder about the veracity of the ghost.

Was it, ironically, a devil who'd drawn Hamlet down a path of self-destruction with the truth of his father's murder? Or was the ghost his father, who, tragically, brought about his son's destruction and his wife's third marriage through his failure to anticipate the consequences of calling young Hamlet to revenge?

How have we not noticed that the play is also King Hamlet's tragedy?

Found Poem (4)

2010-01-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

Armadillo

Under its shell this
small scaly creature has a
light meat, porklike in

flavor. Draw and cut
free from the shell: 1 arma-
dillo. Discard fat

and all but the back
meat. Wash thoroughly in cold
water and soak o-

vernight refriger-
ated in cold water. Drain
and dry. To cook, cut

into pieces. Brush
well with: Butter or vege-
table oil. Broil

until the meat is
a rich brown. Season to taste
and serve it at once.

from Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Found Poem (3)

2010-01-07T18:56:00.000-08:00

Opposum

If possible, trap
'possum and feed it
on milk and
cereals
for 10 days before
killing. Clean,
but do not
skin.
Treat as for

pig
by immersing the unskinned
animal in
water
just below
the boiling
point. Test frequently
by plucking at the

hair. When it slips out
readily, remove
the opposum
from the water
and scrape.

While scraping repeatedly,
pour cool
water over the
surface
of the animal. Remove
small red glands in
small of the back and under
each foreleg
between shoulder and
ribs.

Parblanch,
154,
about 20 minutes
each,
in two or three changes
of water, then roast
as for
pork,
477,
or use recipes for
rabbit.

Serve with
turnip greens.

from Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (10)

2010-01-06T19:56:00.000-08:00

Why doesn't Hamlet kill Claudius in the third scene of Act III? Can we read this scene without A.C. Bradley's sick-with-melancholic-paralysis or Nietzsche's nauseated-with-the-apprehension-of-truth interpretations?

What if, like Samuel Johnson, we were to take Hamlet's desire for revenge at face value?

This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered.

But read it we shall.

The king is kneeling in prayer when Hamlet enters his chamber.

Now might I do it pat, now a is a-praying.
And now I'll do't.

He draws his sword, but a thought interposes itself between him and the action.

And so a goes to heaven;
And so am I reveng'd. That would be scanned:

Hamlet, true to himself, will forego action to think "too precisely on th'event."

A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.

The ghost, whom Hamlet, with the proof of the play-within-the-play, now believes was his father's, had expressly called him to revenge.

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

And Hamlet, upon gaining knowledge of this murder, had promised swift action.

Haste me to know't, that I with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love
May sweep to my revenge.

But Hamlet, in recalling his father, doesn't see revenge in killing Claudius while he's in prayer.

A took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought
'Tis heavy with him. And am I then reveng'd,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No.

Hamlet and Claudius have been in a kind of duel to learn what is in each other's minds. Hamlet, at the moment he seeks revenge, is presented with another confession of the king's conscience, in the form of prayer. If we take Hamlet's words at face value,—certainly one possibility to throw up in the air—then the revenge he wants is complete and eternal.

Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th'incestous pleasure of his bed,
At game a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't,
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes.

We, who no longer believe in hellish damnation, cannot feel the horror of such a wish upon our enemies, but it would have been apparent to Shakespeare's audience. The other side of this horror is the utter satisfaction of imagining one's enemy eternally vanquished—true, delicious revenge, indeed.

The precise thinker has imagined a more precise revenge.

What we don't want to see in Hamlet we don't want to see in ourselves.

Found Poem (2)

2010-01-05T17:30:00.000-08:00

Woodchuck

for H. D. Thoreau

After field-dressing
woodchuck
and hanging it for
48 hours,
skin
as for a rabbit, but
watch for and remove
7 to 9 small
kernel-like
glands
under the forelegs.
Soak
refrigerated
overnight in
salted water.
Drain
and wipe
dry.
Cook by any
recipe
for rabbit or
chicken.

from Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Found Poem

2010-01-04T19:15:00.000-08:00

Beaver

Use young animals
only. Remove
all surface fat
when skinning, but
avoid cutting
musk glands,
which must be removed
from beneath
the skin
in front of the
genital organs.
Also remove
kernels
in small of back
and under each
foreleg.
Hang
in the cold
for several days.
Poach,
150, in
salted water
for 1 hour.
Braise
as for beef,
447, until
tender.

from Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Toads

2010-01-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

It's back to school tomorrow.

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Apparently not,

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
It hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Happy New Year, ironic spirit of Philip Larkin. Now let's get back to work.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (9)

2010-01-01T13:40:00.000-08:00

When I began writing these notes, I had not intended to revisit old controversies. However, when I reread Stanley Cavell's chapter on "Hamlet" in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare, I found myself drawn into the question of why Claudius doesn't react to the dumb-show's portrayal of his murder when he reacts so decisively to The Mousetrap's portrayal. I had forgotten that Cavell takes up W.W. Greg's "Hamlet's Hallucination" on his way to his own Freudian analysis of the play. I had assumed that the controversy Greg had sparked with his 1917 article in The Modern Language Review had been safely buried by more recent scholarship. I found Cavell's serious regard for Greg's interpretation of the play to be annoying. However, I had never actually read Greg's article, and so I felt obligated to track it down, read it, and decide for myself how to take it.

Greg begins innocently enough by considering the question of how ghosts are treated in Shakespeare's plays. He concludes that "Shakespeare's attitude towards ghosts may be described as "frankly sceptical." He goes on to say that belief

in the genuineness and objectivity of the Ghost in Hamlet has been almost universal. It is the natural view, based on the obvious and naïve interpretation of the text.

He summarizes the "orthodox, and the obvious, interpretation of the action" in "Hamlet," and finally turns to the central problem that, for him, undermines the naïve view of the play.

The King, we have seen, when he beholds his secret crime reproduced before the assembled court, loses his nerve, and retires in evident agitation. How comes it then that he sat unmoved through the representation of the same action in equal detail in the dumb-show?

He dismisses what a friend dubbed "the second tooth theory"—namely, that Claudius manages to endure the shock of the dumb-show, but finally gives way during The Mousetrap. He maintains that the "text clearly shows that the King, though disquieted by the play as it proceeds, does not recognize in the dumb-show a representation of his own act." He concludes his analysis by stating that there is

but one rational conclusion: Claudius did not murder his brother by pouring poison into his ears.

This inference appears to be as certain as anything in criticism can be. But a far more important inference follows immediately, and as certainly, from it. If the facts of King Hamlet's death were not as represented in the players' play, then the Ghost was no honest ghost, but a liar. In other words, the Ghost's story was not a revelation, but a mere figment of Hamlet's brain. [Emphases Greg's.]

Greg details all the implications of his insight and finally presents us with a picture of how we're to take his more sophisticated view of the play in relation to the conventional view.

To the bulk of his audience Hamlet would just be another—and the greatest—of the Senecan revenge dramas. But may we not believe that for himself, as for other humaner minds among his contemporaries, such crude machinery would appear as a blot upon a noble piece of work? For such minds he would appear to have designed an alternative explanation, and as a warning of his real intention to have introduced the dumb-show. This piece of business does not obtrude itself on the attention when the play is acted, but in reading and upon consideration its absolute redundancy and its extraordinary results should immediately become apparent. It is then seen that the obvious interpretation of the action, which satisfied the generality, makes Shakespeare an astonishingly perverse bungler; while the alternative shows him not only a skilful craftsman, but likewise a considerable master of innuendo.

Thus, for about four hundred years, the play has lacked the humaner minds that would recognize the alternative explanation of the play that Greg has, at last, graciously restored to us.

Long before there was W. W. Greg, there was Hamlet, who had a general opinion of dumb-shows. In his lengthy instructions to the players, he says,

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise.

The players apparently disregard his disapproving words because at the outset of the play the audience is treated to none other than a dumb-show. Immediately after the pantomime, Ophelia, who rarely asks a question in this play of questions, asks, "What means this, my lord?"

Whatever anyone else may think of the dumb-show, she finds it inexplicable. A lot has been made of Hamlet's answer,—

Marry, this is miching malicho. It means mischief.

—but suffice it to say that Hamlet affirms that there is mischief afoot and that it is, as it were, the means of his playing Claudius. Ophelia recognizes that the "dumb-show imports the argument of the play," and when the Prologue enters, Hamlet suggests that he will tell what it means. As if to underline that Ophelia still finds the dumb-show inexplicable and, in effect, play the straight man to Hamlet's wit, she asks, "Will a tell us what this show meant?" To which Hamlet replies with another one of his indecencies:

Ay, or any show that you will show him. Be not you ashamed to show, he'll not shame to tell you what it means.

If you feel like we're not getting anywhere in finding an explanation of the argument that the dumb-show was intended to portray, then the three-line prologue will simply make it worse.

For us and for our tragedy,
Here stooping to your clemency,
We beg your hearing patiently.

Which is why Hamlet responds, "Is this a prologue, or the poesy of a ring?" Ophelia comments that it's "brief," which sets up another of Hamlet's ironic retorts: "As woman's love."

And now that we're exactly nowhere in locating a motive for the dumb-show within the text of the play, what do we make of the absence of any reaction on the part of the king? There is no indication in the text that the king doesn't recognize his murder in the dumb-show [W.W. Greg]. There is no indication in the text that the king has failed to pay attention to the dumb-show [John Dover Wilson]. And there is no indication in the text that the king has restrained himself from reacting to the dumb-show [Harley Granville Barker].

Harold Jenkins, whom Stanley Cavell dismisses for dismissing Greg, writes in a long note to the Arden edition of play:

It is surely not an oversight but Shakespeare's dramatic tact which leaves the King out of the dialogue at this stage: how he reacted to the dumb-show is a question the play not only does not answer but is careful not to ask. And though it reckons without the critic in the study, it counts on the spectator in the theatre not to ask the question either.

As Jenkins points out, "Hamlet himself seems always to be asking questions much bigger and more searching than those we ask of him."

To be, or not to be, that is the question. . . .

Is the dumb-show small stuff we shouldn't sweat? Does it present the kind of question we should give a Rortian shrug to, and then move on to more interesting questions? Or are we bound to take it up because, as Cavell suggests, it is "one of the most extraordinary theatrical strokes in our drama. . . ."?

Greg treats the question of the dumb-show as a kind of mathematical problem that requires a proof in order to bring coherence to an understanding of the play. His article is full of such words as "objectivity," "reasons," "data," "theory," "logic," "rational," "inference," "evidence," "hypothesis," "self-contradiction," "unreasonable" and "reasonable." I'm tempted to say that he would have done better to see the play as a Gödelian arithmetic set that can have consistency or completeness, but not both simultaneously. However, that would be falling into Greg's fallacy of interpreting the play as if it were a problem needing a solution. How we interpret the play depends on what patterns we see it in. "Hamlet" is not the kind of play for which we should expect consistency. It's a play that very much includes, for whatever reason, significant discontinuities in the pattern of its presentation. I would argue that it's a mark against any interpretation of the play that purports to resolve its major inconsistencies.

For his part, Shakespeare seems undecided whether Horatio is in Elsinore as a visitor or a denizen; he describes Fortinbas as a hot-headed rebellious youth and then permits him as a dignified commander fit to inherit the realm; he allows 'young Hamlet' at one point to be thirty.

So says Jenkins, to which I would add that Shakespeare also allows about four or five hours to pass in 145 lines in the play's first scene.

I started these notes by focusing on how "Hamlet" was a play of questions. It goes against the grain of the play to insist that its questions be neutralized by tidy interpretative solutions. Rather, the play's "means" is mischief—the mischief of a clown who keeps throwing to a second clown one object after another to juggle. The play's questions are meant to stay up in the air as long as we can manage to keep them there.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (8)

2009-12-30T09:46:00.000-08:00

In the last lines of Act II, Hamlet speaks out his strategy—his play—to provoke the king into confessing his crime. However, in their first lines of Act III, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern understand that their role, as written by the king, is to get Hamlet to confess his reasons for putting on "turbulent and dangerous lunacy."

Ros. He does confess he feels himself distracted,
But from what cause a will by no means speak.

Guild. Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,
But with a crafty madness keeps aloof
When we would bring him on to some confession
Of his true state.

"Madness" and "lunancy"—these are words for Hamlet's refusal to play his role, to accept the king as his father—

Ham. . . . Farewell, dear mother.

King. Thy loving father, Hamlet.

Ham. My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother. . . .

—and himself as son—

King. How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Ham. Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun.

Hamlet would "catch the conscience of the King," but in his most famous soliloquy he names "conscience" as making us "cowards," that is, as causing "the native hue of resolution" to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," to "lose the name of action." His burden of skepticism about the reality of the ghost drives him to adopt Polonius' strategy, which is also the king's strategy, of playing his adversary with indirections. That burden ("Who would fardels bear . . .?") is to think "too precisely on th'event," to give the name of action to the play.

There is a play tonight before the King:
One scene of it comes near the circumstance
Which I have told thee of my father's death.
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
as Vulcan's stithy.

Hamlet's alienation from action, his burden within thought that the king would have him confess, has been there from the beginning:

. . . These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

His unwillingness to show what keeps him from his role—even after the king and Polonius have loosed upon him Ophelia as a kind of spy in the nunnery scene—is what drives Claudius to plot Hamlet's murder, a plot that is revealed in response to Hamlet's suggestion that Claudius himself will be killed: "Those that are married already—all but one—shall live. . . ." For a moment the king senses a method in Hamlet's madness:

Love? His affections do not that way tend,
Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,
Was not like madness.

Claudius correctly detects that were Hamlet to confess his thought it would be in the form of a threat to him.

There's something in his soul
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood,
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger; which for to prevent,
I have in quick determination
Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England
For the demand of our neglected tribute.

The "neglected tribute" is, as we later learn, his method for having Hamlet executed.

This Year's Classes in Review

2009-12-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

Although the calendar year marks neither the end of the school year nor even the end of the semester, my opportunities for stepping back and reflecting on my classes are few. As long as I'm in the thick of teaching, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep things in perspective. Therefore, I'll take some of the precious free time I have over winter break to assess where I think I am with my classes so far.

When I was finally hired back by the school district late last summer, I was ill-prepared to teach the three new classes I now have. I had two weeks to get ready for an entire year's worth of curriculum for 10th grade language arts, creative writing, and philosophy courses. On balance, I did the best I could with the situation I found myself in. I could not have worked any harder. In fact, I may have worked too hard. By the time the end of December had arrived, I was exhausted, pessimistic, impatient, short-tempered, and irritable. My attitude was not one conducive to encouraging teenagers to do their best. I had reached the point that any more effort on my part would have had diminishing returns.

The problem is not so much my creative writing and philosophy classes. These classes could certainly be improved, but on the whole I'm pleased with how they've turned out. The problem is with my 10th grade language arts classes, which have tainted my sense of the value of my work. I find it painful to expend so much effort on students who seem to be learning so little. However, I need to keep in mind that the school year is not yet over, and there is still time to figure out a workable system for my 10th grade students. In the meantime, I have to remind myself not to lose sight of my other classes.

Philosophy
Although I was thrown into this class with no training and although philosophy is not my area of expertise, I'm reasonably satisfied with my students' progress so far. The students seem to enjoy the class and value what they've learned in it. It's the one class that I would gladly devote more time to if I had more time.

The only problem that I see on the horizon is that second semester I will probably have many more students. This is a one-semester class that begins with juniors in the second semester and culminates when they're seniors in the first semester of the following year. Thus, for second semester I'll be getting a whole new crop of students. I very much look forward to starting fresh with these students. However, with the increased load of students, I will have to cut corners. I anticipate using a lot of sick leave to plan and respond to papers. In addition, since this is an after-school course, I'll probably have to end class early on a regular basis and even cancel class on some days. This sounds terrible, I know, but it's what I have to do to survive the last half of the year. Teaching shouldn't be a suicide mission.

Creative Writing
I'm very proud of the way my students have taken responsibility for teaching each other and for running the school's literary magazine. This class has the most innovative students I've ever had. Enough of my students are taking the class second semester that I'm hopeful that this spirit of responsibility and innovation will continue.

The downside of Creative Writing has been that some students have wasted more class time than I'm comfortable with. In the end, they get their work done, even if it's sometimes in the middle of the night. However, I'll have a larger class second semester, and too many of the students have been placed there because they've failed one or more language arts classes and need to make up the credits. Creative Writing has had a reputation as an easy slacker class that students can cruise through will little or no work. That ends on February 1st. I've figured out how to tighten up the class, and I'll make it much harder to pass. My chances of teaching next year at my current high school are perhaps slim, but in the event that I do teach Creative Writing next year, I want to send a message to the student body that they shouldn't take my class if they expect a free ride. If they want an easy way to make up language arts credits, then they should take night or summer classes. In Creative Writing, they will work harder than they ever imagined they would.

My best students will respond to the increased rigor of the class. Others will rise to the occasion. More effective than teacher pressure is peer pressure. When the least disciplined students see most everyone else working, they'll either join in or seek an easier route for making up credits.

10th Grade Language Arts
The overwhelming fact of this class is that students have reading and writing skills that range about eight grade levels—from lower elementary to about 10th grade. I started out the year with plans to teach one book at a time. I quickly figured out that wouldn't work. Mostly we've read short stories and poetry, both of which lent themselves to detailed readings that benefited students at all skill levels. (The Harlem Renaissance unit has probably been the highlight of the class so far. My students very much responded to poetry by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Gwendolyn Brooks, and to "The Rockpile" by James Baldwin.) My big concern now is that students aren't reading enough on their own and aren't developing fluency as readers. As a result, I've switched to a model based on stations: one group reads individually chosen books; one group reads and discusses non-fiction articles with me; and a third group works on writing assignments. Halfway through the class, the groups rotate. Over the course of a week, each group does each activity three times. I've only had my students doing stations for about two weeks. I'll probably continue for about two weeks into January, and then I will decide whether it's working well enough to continue.

The upside of the station model is that small-group reading and discussion have been reasonably effective. For the most part, my students enjoy the "adult" issues that the articles have raised, and they appreciate the opportunity to express their opinions. (The discussion of an article on high school Gay-Straight Alliance groups was an eye-opener. My students also have had interesting things to say about James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, which serves as the preface for The Fire Next Time. I can now speak, for example, with some authority on how various students view the word "nigger" versus "nigga.") In addition, the independent reading segment has given my students the opportunity to select and read books that relate specifically to their lives and interests. I'm gratified to see students responding to books they've chosen themselves. One of the goals of independent reading is a dispositional change—I want students to stop experiencing reading as a hateful thing and begin to experience it as an enjoyable thing. I'm still hopeful that, with enough time, I'll see this transformation in some of my students.

The downside of stations is that the students who dislike reading the most may end up fake-reading. It's not too hard to skim a book, fill out a reading log, and do a half-assed review of it. In addition, some readers may choose easy books because they don't want to expend the effort to improve their reading. To make independent reading work, I'll have to tighten up the requirements. My plan is to have students determine the Lexile rating for the books they choose; I'll veto any selections that are too easy for them. In addition, I'll counsel them on what Lexile level they need to reach in order to be ready for their graduation exams. My hope is that I'll do better at challenging them, and they'll do better at challenging themselves.

The other downside of stations is that my only opportunity to instruct them in reading strategies, literary elements and the like is in small-groups. If I continue with the station model, I'll have to switch to reading short stories in small groups to make sure they're learning to read fiction the way they're expected to in high school. Probably I would take up stories from Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros; my Latino students have not had much reading in class that they can identify with. Her stories would afford me an opportunity to bring in some literature that might engage them more.

Ultimately, if students aren't learning what they need to in stations, I'll probably have to modify the independent reading portion to something like a lit circles model. The earliest I could see that happening is in early February, though it would mean a lot more work for me. Probably I would be better off waiting until late March, after their graduation exams. The only rational reason I can see for switching to lit circles would be if independent reading were a complete failure. (The books I've been thinking about for lit circles are Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and The Sound of Waves by Mishima.) It will be some weeks before I can assess the success or failure of the independent reading segment of stations with any confidence.

Final Thoughts
I have to keep reminding myself that I'm doing the best I can, that I care about my job, that I want my students to succeed, that I can't really do much more for them. At some point, their education is up to them, their families, and their communities. I'm doing my part. They have to do the rest. I wish we lived in a more just world. I wish the school district weren't phasing out the reading intervention classes so many of my students need. I wish that administrators and school board directors would take the time to listen to what teachers like me have to say. But I don't have any control over all that. I only have control over what I do, and if what I'm doing isn't good enough for now, then I'll have to hope it gets better in the future or I'll have to give it up altogether.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (7)

2009-12-25T12:20:00.000-08:00

The second scene of Act II is almost too long to be scene. So much happens in this scene, so much that is crucial, that Shakespeare might have broken it up into smaller scenes, except that variety, as Dr. Johnson wrote, is a "particular excellence" of the play. The scene begins with Claudius addressing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

. . . Moreover that we much did long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending. Something have you heard
Of Hamlet's transformation—so I call it,
Sith nor th'exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was. What it should be,
More than his father's death, that thus hath it put him
So much from th'understanding of himself
I cannot dream of. I entreat you both
That, being of so young days brought up with him,
And sith so neighbour'd to his youth and havior,
That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court
Some little time, so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasures and to gather,
so much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus
That, open'd, lies within our remedy.

Claudius is very clear about how he intends to "use" these acquaintances of Hamlet to spy on him, but the claims and assumptions he makes in the process of delivering his instructions reinforce much of what we know about the king. For example, he knows that the both the exterior and inward man are changed, but he claims not to have any idea of the cause of this transformation. Later in the scene when the queen says that she doubts "it is no other but the main,/ His father's death and our o'er-hasty marriage" we can assume that they've already discussed the possible causes of Hamlet's transformation, and Claudius is ingenuous when he says that what "hath it put him/ So much from the'understanding of himself/ I cannot dream of." On the contrary, he dreams so much of it that he has to send for the tedious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose real father ought to be Polonius.

Hamlet is not the first to be accused of not understanding himself. Polonius accuses Ophelia of the same for spending too much time with Hamlet. To be from an understanding of oneself means to fail to act according to one's designated role. By being "most free and bounteous" of her audience with Hamlet, Ophelia is not acting the way the daughter of Polonius is supposed to act. And Hamlet, with his inky cloak and dark, suggestive comments, is not acting the way the guilt-ridden Claudius would have him act. Hamlet asks, "Who would fardels bear . . ? The answer is Claudius, but he would bear them, bear Hamlet's reminder of his guilt, only up to a point. If Polonius can prick his conscience with a mild speech—

. . . How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience.
The harlot's cheek, beautified with plast'ring art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
O heavy burden!

—then Hamlet's direct assaults require action, not mere words—or to be more precise, action in the form of words meant to play Hamlet. If he will not stick to his role, then through indirections Claudius will learn what has kept him from his role, what motive for affliction he keeps in his mind.

Within a few lines of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's greetings, Hamlet reveals that he knows he's being played.

Let me question more in particular. What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?

Even with direct questioning they won't easily fess up that they've been sent by Claudius, and so Hamlet must "conjure" them. In the end, they manage to sidestep the question of why they were sent for—

That, you must teach me.

—and shift attention to the imminent arrival of the players. To which news Hamlet replies,

He that plays the king shall be welcome. . . .

And there you have it. The king has played him, and now he will have the players play the king. Claudius' word for Hamlet's refusal to accept Claudius' role as king and his own role as son is "madness"—a madness Hamlet plays to play the king. A madness that, arguably, nearly drives him to madness.

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion! Fie upon't! Foh!
About, my brains. . . .

If he, as an actor, is impotent to catch the conscience of the king, then as a playwright he'll create the conditions for his confession.

In the Frozen Food Aisle

2009-12-19T20:04:00.001-08:00

Rebecca Goldstein, in Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel:

I once found the philosopher Richard Rorty standing in a bit of a daze in Davidson's food market. He told me in hushed tones that he'd just seen Gödel in the frozen food aisle, pushing his food cart. I went tearing through the aisles, but the phantom of logic had vanished.

"What was he buying?" I asked Rorty, for the rumor was that the man ate next to nothing. Rorty shook his head lugubriously and said he'd been too stunned to notice.

"But I guess we can assume it was something frozen."

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (6)

2009-12-19T17:42:00.000-08:00

In the first scene of Act II, Polonius instructs Reynaldo on how he is to spy on his son. He is to make inquiries of Laertes' behavior, and when he's learned as much as he can from inquiries alone, he is to use other methods.

. . . [A]nd finding
By this encompassment and drift of question
That they do know my son, come you more nearer
Than your particular demands will touch it.

Elsewhere I have touched on the close link between questions and demands. Polonius understands that the spy's questions entail a demand for knowledge and that there are limits to what knowledge can be gained by questions. The method he recommends for extending his knowledge of Laertes' behavior is for Reynaldo to suggest that he's seen him engaged in the relatively minor vices of youth—

Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing,
Quarrelling, drabbing—you may go so far.

—and see if his interlocutor confirms the charges.

. . . Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.

Marcellus gets the line "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," which anticipates Hamlet's various lines on Denmark, including:

There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark
But he's an arrant knave.

Polonius, the only fool the play has until the gravediggers, one of whom reminds Hamlet of Yorrick, the King's jester, who, like a father in place of his father, bore Hamlet "on his back a thousand time," is not the only arrant knave compelled to employ indirections to find directions out. It is a measure of how rotten the state is that not only are Reynaldo, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern used as spies, but even Ophelia is sent to elicit a response from Hamlet that Polonius and Claudius, "lawful espials," may observe "seeing unseen."

Elsinore is a kingdom of questions in which the knowledge gained from questions isn't enough to satisfy inquirers. The steps from questions to demands to espionage are small and quick, when inquirers see themselves as "lawful espials" in need of knowledge. Hamlet, of course, has his own need for knowledge, and the play within the play, The Mousetrap, is his form of indirections finding directions out.

. . . The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Indirections, in other words, are a method for eliciting behavior that reveals what is kept secret in one's mind.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (5)

2009-12-15T19:26:00.000-08:00

After Hamlet has spoken to the ghost, he says to himself:

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!
My tables. Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.

Later in the same scene, after Marcellus and Horatio have caught up to him and they've taken their oaths, he says:

But come,
Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd some'er I bear myself—
As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on— . . .

Much has been made of The Mousetrap, the play within a play, but the entirety of "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" is a play within a play, with every actor an actor. Hamlet's "antic disposition" echoes Horatio's earlier "truant disposition," but Hamlet has something more serious in mind. As he's been played, he will now play others.

In Act II, Hamlet, finally fed up with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's attempts to play him, tells them:

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak.

They would play him in order to make him speak—that is, to answer questions that would reveal his mind. They are, of course, spies for Claudius, so it is ultimately the King who would know what is in his dangerous nephew's mind.

By Act III, Hamlet has "much offended" Claudius by playing him with the play within the play. More than that, the "antic disposition" is now an overt threat:

I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range.

So he would have him killed through the instruments of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who, in the end, are given a new script:

Being thus benetted round with villainies—
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play—I sat me down,
Devis'd a new commission, wrote it fair—. . .

In short, as Horatio puts it, ". . . Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't." To which Hamlet replies: "Why, man, they did make love to this employment."

The play is full of players, which is why I say again that the relationship between Horatio and Hamlet, however unequal they are in "faculties," is like no other. Knowing a piece of what was in his mind, Horatio only could speak for him:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (4)

2009-12-13T10:40:00.000-08:00

When the ghost first appears to him, Hamlet exclaims:

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. . . .

As I've said before, in "Hamlet" to speak is to question. The ghost's shape is "questionable" precisely because, as Harold Jenkins points out, it "invites questioning." Thus, Hamlet would speak to it.

However, the ghost will not answer in the company of Hamlet's comrades.

It will not speak. Then I will follow it.

For the ghost to answer, it must speak—that it, it will have questions of its own for Hamlet. Those questions Hamlet will turn inward—questions, we may say, which define Hamlet's inwardness.

But what is that famous inwardness of Hamlet's? Why do we talk about what is "in" us, but not what is "out" of us? Davidson's behavior is what is visible to us, and it's what we have to go on when inferring what is in other minds, what is inward. Why aren't we completely transparent? Why isn't everything inward written on our faces and manifested in our behavior?

Is concealment something we learn? If we didn't learn concealment, would we be entirely transparent? If we don't learn concealment, aren't we considered mad? Is concealment a necessary component of consciousness?

Is questioning concealed—turned inward—what makes the inwardness of Hamlet's consciousness?

Imagine a culture in which all thought is spoken aloud all the time. There is no silence; even in sleep, people speak out their dreams. Consciousness exists. Questioning exists. But concealment and inwardness do not.

At Elisnore, the only example of openness that I can think of is between Horatio and Hamlet. All else is concealment.

What makes Hamlet more inward than everyone else the play? Whatever we think of Hamlet's murderousness, isn't his inwardness his distinguishing characteristic? I imagine that Falstaff could keep up with him in repartee. Lear's speeches are magnificently exhausting. Who speaks more closely to the intricacies of his own consciousness than Hamlet?

Teaching to the Gap

2009-12-12T10:53:00.000-08:00

This morning I caught the tail end of what I believe was an interview with Beth Fertig, author of Why cant U teach me 2 read?: Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test. I will not be rushing out to the buy the book. I have my own tale to tell, which, from time to time, I've been telling in this blog.

My wife teaches a smart bunch of fourth graders, and she occasionally shares with me some of the writing of her students. This morning we laughed over a passionate essay one of her students had written on why cats are better than dogs. Soon after she finished reading it, I reflected sadly that her student is a better writer than almost all of my tenth graders.

To check the accuracy of my gloomy outlook, I decided to check the data we have on the reading skills of the ninth graders at our school. These data are most the complete we have for any grade level. What I found is that more than twenty percent of our students read at a fourth grade level or lower, as measured by Lexile grade comparisons for students in the US reading between the 25th and 75th percentile.

At first blush, one may not be surprised at these figures. The student sample includes, for example, recent immigrants. However, when I looked at just the regular ninth grade classes—classes that include neither recent immigrants nor honors students—the percentage was, oddly enough, still over twenty percent. That is, our school has about an equal number of ninth-grade honors students and recent immigrants.

What is left are the kinds of students I'm now teaching. I have only sample data for my classes, but I find that my figures are comparable to the ones for ninth grade. My students include immigrants whose skills are high enough that they don't qualify for English language learning programs. They also include special education students. And they include urban teenagers who, for one reason or another, don't read and write well. For the better part of a semester, I've seen them in action. It is no exaggeration to say that the reading levels in my classroom range from lower elementary to about tenth grade.

Why this happens is so complex that there is no easy way to talk about it. Reading skills, for example, are not unbundled. They tend to come in packages. All that has to happen is for one part of the package to be insufficient or defective, and a student struggles to read. In addition, there is something strangely self-reinforcing about poor reading skills. More often than not, low-skilled readers tend to be disorganized and lack study skills. They hang out with students who share a disdain for reading and writing. They often come from families with low literacy rates. They are often emotionally immature. They're deficient in the kind of imaginative thinking we associate with reading, and they are often some of the most insecure and openly biased students I have. Frequently their interests range little beyond themselves and their immediate circle. They're poor at organizing themselves into functioning groups. They seem unambitious about their futures, and many are angry, depressed, alienated, passive, or fatalistic.

A colleague of mine recently pointed out that teaching in an urban public high school is only stressful if you want to do a good job. It is possible to set things up so that the job is fairly easy and stress-free. The catch is that you have to not care about your students and what they learn. I take my job seriously, and as a result, I often wonder how I'm going to get through the rest of the year. The budget situation is so bad that I keep telling myself that I just have to survive the next few months, and then I'll be blissfully unemployed. Right now substituting doesn't seem so bad. As long as my wife's job pays for health care, what have I got to be worried about? (Don't answer that question.)

In the meantime, the adult in me—the one who accepts the responsibilities I chose for myself, who thinks it's a good, mature thing to endure hardship, help other people, and look to a better day—that adult in me is constantly trying to figure out how to engage his students and help them to become some semblance of liberally educated young adults.

One of the tragedies of the job—something I never seem to tire of recounting—is that it requires an immense store of compassion. Some days I find a particular student's malevolence or bigotry or homophobia or selfishness to be so revolting that I can barely stand to be in his or her presence. I often know enough about the background of a student to understand what's behind his or her attitude. That knowledge, in itself, is a burden, and many days I feel worn down by the cares of the job. I'm not the only person in the world with a heavy workload,—some of it dreadfully dull—but I don't have the kind of position in which one can be a grouch and expect to succeed. Thus, part of the work of an adult is to save the melancholy, anger and disappointment for one's off-hours. Half an hour before class, I may brood on dark things, but when the students start showing up, I have to at least fake a mood of serenity and good cheer. If I don't, the students will reflect my mood back at me tenfold.

I can see the attractions of a religious cosmology. For example, I would reserve a special place in Hell for those administrators and policymakers who blame teachers for the intractable problems of public education. One of my recurring non-adult fantasies is that when I'm substituting next year, I'll use some of my extra time to attend Board meetings and begin reporting on some of the unreported shenanigans of our district's administrators. A more mature thing to do would be to reacquaint myself with some of the subjects I'm supposed to be teaching. Yet one more irony of my profession is that I'm so busy with my job that I don't have the time to keep practicing the disciplines I was hired to teach.

Last weekend my wife and I went hiking at our local National Park. There is skiing at the passes, but at the lower elevations there still isn't snow on the mountain. The winter winds had brought down some large trees over the trail, but no matter. For a few hours, we could forget the troubles of the world and imagine another life. I don't see how we can keep living the way we're living right now. Somehow we've got to get to that other, and I would hope, better life while we still have the energy to live it. That's what I keep telling myself.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (3)

2009-12-10T19:52:00.000-08:00

. . . In few, Ophelia,
Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits,
Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds
The better to beguile. . . .

On the basis of Ophelia's account of his "many tenders" of affection to her, Polonius, like Laertes, has decided what is in Hamlet's mind. As a result, he commands her to cease speaking to him:

I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.

His command is meant to protect his daughter, but it brings with it a cessation of questioning who Hamlet is. Polonius has made his judgment as to who Hamlet is—a judgment that can't last long in a play of such questioning.

Besides, Polonius can't resist spying, a practice that he shares with Claudius and that he employs on his own son. Spying is yet another technique for gaining entrance into another's mind. The first method of the play, questioning through speaking, is not much use with Hamlet, who can talk circles around anyone and who makes good sport of Polonius, who talks in circles himself.

Both Polonius and Laertes want to prevent the loss of Ophelia's "chaste treasure," but where Polonius has imposed silence on her, Laertes recommends a kind of aloofness:

And keep you in the rear of your affection
Out of the shot and danger of desire.

Which is two words away from

And keep the rear of your affection
Out of the shot and danger of desire.

I've long taken Laertes' lecture to be partly motivated by sexual jealousy, a suggestion that adds another dimension to the anger he later feels toward Hamlet with respect to his sister's death.

Be that as it may be, the silence that Polonius would vicariously maintain with Hamlet cannot last long. If ever there were a Shakespearean character not meant for silence, it would be Polonius. The only way that anyone could ever shut up Polonius would be to kill him.

Some Notes on "Hamlet" (2)

2009-12-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?

Taken by itself, the "it" in the queen's question sounds almost trivial. Why should it seem so particular with Hamlet? He's just admitted that it's common. Of course, the queen has missed his irony. And in this ironic play, we've almost forgotten that the "it" is the death of King Hamlet, Hamlet's father.

Later, in the same scene, Hamlet will ask Horatio, who has just referred to his father's ghost as a "he":

Did you not speak to it?

In responding to Hamlet's question, number 20 of 29 in the second scene, Horatio switches to Hamlet's pronoun:

Horatio: My lord, I did,
But answer made it none. Yet once methought
It lifted up it head and did address
Itself to motion like as it would speak.
But even then the morning cock crew loud,
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away
And vanish'd from our sight.

Hamlet: 'Tis very strange.

Horatio: As I do live, my honour'd lord, 'tis true;
And we did think it writ down in our duty
To let you know of it.

And as long as they do live, they are not an it, which can't, as Hamlet is at pains to say, be so easily trivialized.

The queen has asked a good question, though not the one she meant to ask. Hamlet pivots:

Seems, madam? Nay, it is.

The question of what it is, the question of what is and what appears to be, pervades the play. Hamlet speaks of "actions that a man might play." As King Claudius must determine of Hamlet: is he mad or does he play at madness? As Hamlet must determine of the ghost: is it his father or a demon? That is, the question of appearance and reality in this play is the question, "Who are you?"

Hamlet answers by saying that you can't know.

But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and suits of woe.

Davidson draws our attention to the problem of knowing what is in other people's minds. Behavior, apparently, is all we have to go on. In saying that his "inky cloak" is just seeming, Hamlet would seem to be letting us into his mind. To speak, in this play, is also to ask "Who are you?" To say what you aren't, what you seem only, is also to say what you are.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.

This, too, he did not tell the king and queen, as the king and queen did not tell him what is in their minds. The problem of the play, "Who are you?", is the problem of knowing what is in other people's minds.

Davidson suggests that the minimum number of minds we must know to triangulate with reality is one.

Horatio: Hail to your lordship.

Hamlet: I am glad to see you well.
Horatio, or I do forget myself.

The only times in the play Hamlet seems to come back into sanity is when he is in the presence of Horatio.

Indeed, we do forget ourselves when we lack the one mind we can know, to the extent we can know it. At Elsinore, his prison, Hamlet is constantly surrounded by minds he must guess at, and the one mind he knows, in the absence of Horatio, is his own, the mind that compels all others to guess at it.

Some Notes on "Hamlet"

2009-11-28T10:11:00.000-08:00

"Hamlet" is not Shakespeare's only play that begins with a question, but it begins with arguably the simplest question—at least on the surface of it.

Who's there?

Like the only other tragedy that begins with a question, it hints of the otherworldly.

When shall we three meet again?

In "Hamlet," the question is not one of timing but of identity. Barnardo is asking the identity of the sentinel he's supposed to relieve. The order of questions is reversed, which is why Francisco replies, "Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself." Which is to say: "Who's asking?"

Barnardo has seen a ghost for two successive nights, and he understandably asks of the first person he sees on the watch, "Who's there?" It's a question that could equally be asked of the ghost.

In fact, the reason that Marcellus has brought along Horatio is so that he can "speak" to the ghost and determine his identity. When the two arrive, the first question that Francisco asks them is

Who is there?

Horatio, skeptical philosopher, thinks the ghost is but their fantasy. Marcellus, scared out of his wits, has presumably brought along the calmest, most rational, most scholarly person he knows. He explains

Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

Much is made of the importance of "speaking" to the ghost and Horatio's ability to do so. "Speaking" and "questioning" are closely linked in this scene—a scene in which, by my count, at least twenty questions are asked.

Mar. Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio.
Bar. Looks a not like the King? Mark it, Horatio.
Hor. Most like. It harrows me with fear and wonder.
Bar. It would be spoke to.
Mar. Question it, Horatio.
Hor. What art thou that usurp'st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee speak.

The identity of the ghost is in question—a question the play does not shake easily. At the end of Act II, Hamlet says

. . . The spirit I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.

Here is one reason for Hamlet's supposed hesitancy.

Who's there?

Sometimes a question seems to create a mystery, but the mystery of the apparition in Scene I proceeds the question. The question names the mystery, like the second line of a knock-knock joke.

The entire first scene is a kind of knock-knock for Hamlet, who will inherit the burden of asking, "Who's there?" In his last speech of the scene, Horatio says

Let us impart what we have seen tonight
Unto young Hamlet; for upon my life
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.

Now we know where we are. We're in a play where to speak means to question, and where to answer is to unfold yourself, to reveal who you are. There will be little safe ground in a play where most every utterance is a question, and most every answer avoids an answer—either with another question or with silence.

On Reading Davidson and Dabbling in Philosophy

2009-11-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

When my colleagues at work ask me what I'm reading these days, I say, "Donald Davidson's Subjective, Intersubjective, and Objective." They almost always respond with a blank look. It's as if I've made some terrible faux pas, and they quickly change the subject to what they're reading. I've seen enough of these responses to wonder why it is that contemporary philosophy is so outside the range of interests of my circle of coworkers.

I'm not suggesting that there is no one on campus who might be interested in hearing about some of Davidson's ideas. In fact, there is a math teacher I converse with about philosophy whenever we have a chance to talk. However, he teaches in a building on the other side of the campus, and we rarely cross paths. Rather, I wonder why otherwise intellectually engaged teachers with a wide range of interests don't include contemporary philosophy among them.

It's not a question of time. I work as hard as almost anyone on campus, and I still have time for philosophy. My interest in Davidson isn't merely the result of having to do research for my philosophy class. Actually, I don't need Davidson to teach my class, and to the extent that he just confuses me, I'm probably better off without him. For years I'd meant to read Davidson, ever since I read Giovanna Borradori's interview with him in The American Philosopher. My philosophy course, if anything, has finally given me the excuse to explore Davidson's ideas on language and triangulation. His writing is a little difficult at times, and I find that I need to read him slowly, but I don't think his essays are beyond the capabilities of the majority of my colleagues.

What it takes to read philosophy is a little training in college and a tolerance for continuous high levels of abstraction. As with any moderately challenging intellectual endeavor, patience helps. I also think that an aptitude for analytical thinking and a long history of intellectual curiosity about the traditions of philosophy have contributed to sustaining my interest in the subject. Perhaps this is a roundabout way of saying that, as a reader, I'm a mile wide and an inch deep. I dabble in philosophy, but I've dabbled in many other things, too. I'm the only person I know who can—or once could—do a plunge cut with a chainsaw and translate the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi.

On Wednesday, my students—or all but five, who are in deep yogurt for missing the deadline—turned in the first drafts of their big essay for my theory of knowledge class. They chose from among ten prescribed topics, and because I like a good challenge I also wrote a first draft on one of the topics my students didn't choose. Sometimes I do my own assignments to see what it is I'm putting my students through. What I found with the philosophy essay is that writing the first draft was enjoyable, but I would dread having to reshape it into an effective piece that would meet the requirements of the assignment. Which is to say: reading philosophy may be difficult, but writing it—at least writing it according to prescribed requirements—is painful.

A Reader has suggested that I post my essay on this blog. There are two overwhelming reasons I won't do that: I don't want to provide material for students across the globe to plagiarize and I don't want to embarrass myself any more than I already have. I admit that it's tempting to try my hand at a form I haven't dabbled in yet—philosophy, though it has its own distinct tradition, is just one more literary form among many. However, I remember the play I wrote some years ago, and one of the reasons it was so awful was that I have almost no experience in the theater. The same goes for philosophy. It's a field too far outside my experience for me to do anything but play at.

Of course, that's what I do. I'm a dabbler by nature. By rights, I can write whatever I please. I don't have much use for prescribed topics—I'm no Rousseau responding to a subject proposed by the Academy of Dijon. If I fall into the mood, I may return to my Wittgensteinian mode, as A Reader has characterized it. More likely, I'll start another series on a subject I've been thinking about for several years; I think I've finally figured out a way to approach it. But that will have to wait.

The sky is clear, and the sooner I read and comment on some student essays the sooner I can get outside where I belong. All things considered, I'd rather be walking.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, —who had genius, so to speak, for sauntering. . . .

Some More Inquiries

2009-11-18T20:16:00.000-08:00

In a previous article, I set aside ironic questions when I considered the nature of questions.

"What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"

"Do you admit that there are such things as heat and cold?"

"Hath the rain a father?"

What do ironic and unironic questions have in common that make them both questions? In the first case above, Thoreau's question is woven into a subtle and complex texture of thought that gives it its characteristic style of irony. Does the question anticipate a response?

The demon is the dullness of unexamined custom.

Or is the best response a smile?

In the second case above, the question does unambiguously anticipate a response.

"Yes, I do."

Which is meant to lead to another question.

"Do you think they are the same as snow and fire?"

Socrates asks chains of interlocking questions: each question is designed to elicit a particular response in anticipation of another question until Socrates has covered all the ground that Plato wishes him to cover.

In the third case above, the question is not meant to elicit a yes or no answer. The question, as part of a series of questions, is meant to humble Job with God's terrifying, boundless mystery. The proper response is prostration, which is why I take God's opening question and command out of the whirlwind to be ironic.

Who is this whose ignorant words cloud my design in darkness? Brace yourself and stand up like a man; I will ask questions, and you shall answer.

God's whirlwind has knocked him down, and now God tells him to stand up like a man. He commands him to answer, but he asks questions that can't be answered. God is an ironist, but in a different mode than Socrates.

What makes the questions in these three cases questions?

You're going to the mall.

Said in the right tone this is a question, as is the convention in other languages. Take the statement: Fred bought the bread at Safeway. Now add the question mark: Fred bought the bread at Safeway?

What changed?

I suggested previously that a question inhabited a space between certainty and uncertainty.

"What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"

"Do you admit that there are such things as heat and cold?"

"Hath the rain a father?"

A question may not request an informative response regarding a presumptive unknown, but does it interpose an uncertainty into previously presumed certainties?

What about questions in response to questions?

"Who's there?"

"Who wants to know?"

What about uncertainties balanced on uncertainties? Is there always a ground underneath them?

Imagine a deck of magic cards. The act of stacking them into the form of a house causes the foundation on which they rest to pass away and be replaced by a different foundation. Sweeping the cards away doesn't reveal the foundation. The foundation disappears when the cards disappear.

A system of reality structures the kind of questions that can be asked, and the questions structure the limits of the system. The limits: the demarcation between certain and uncertain.

When do we accept the limits (as defined) and when don't we?

J.S. Bach and Gerald Dworkin

2009-11-14T07:29:00.000-08:00

I never get tired of Bach. Here is my good friend the Professor playing Bach's English Suite No. 6 in D minor:

And if the music doesn't cheer you up, try Gerald Dworkin's Short Takes.

Some Inquiries

2009-11-09T20:46:00.000-08:00

Wittgenstein imagined a language consisting only of questions. Harold Bloom named Yiddish as that language.

For the moment, consider only questions that aren't ironic or exclamatory, or aren't uttered out of politeness. That is, questions not in these forms:

"You call that a wedding ring?"

"What the hell?"

"Could you pass me the potatoes?"

Imagine now a language that excluded questions—a language whose speakers acquired new information in response to demands.

"Tell me your name."

"Give me the price of that doggy in the window."

"Define what truth is."

If statements demand, rather than request, informative responses regarding presumptive unknowns, can they still be considered questions? For the statement to count as a question, must it honor the recipient's freedom to choose whether to answer it? To what extent is the idea of consent implicit in a question? Can an individual seek information from himself using this kind of language?—

"Tell me what I'm going to do with my life."

Imagine now a language in which inquiry honors the idea of consent, but comes indirectly, not in the form of a question:

"I wonder who made the pumpkin pie."

"I did."

"I wonder if you would give me your recipe."

"I'd be glad to."

In this language, a person can plausibly inquire of herself:

"I wonder what I'm going to do with my life."

How are the internal lives of people changed by the structures of inquiry open to them?

Imagine now a language in which it's not possible to make a direct inquiry. Speakers in this language have the habit of constantly offering up new information, and speakers who want to know particular things respond by saying "more about this" or "no more about that" and suchlike. Through a process of trial and error, speakers of this language acquire new information indirectly. Yet, how do they inquire of themselves? How can they constantly offer new information to themselves and respond with "more about this" and "no more about that" when they want to direct the course of their own thoughts?

Inquirers in the language of indirection can only select more of, or no more of, the information they hear from others or themselves. But what mode of inquiry isn't selective? One student today said he couldn't start writing because he had no questions, and another said that he had too many. Everything can't be questioned all at once, and so inquirers must select if they are to inquire. What determines what is and is not asked?

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

There are contexts in which these questions get asked, and contexts in which they don't. The questions may be treated in an English class, but not in a budget meeting. Why? What drives the functions of contexts, and how do they exclude some modes of inquiry but not others?

Imagine a language in which there is no inquiry. This language might be the first words of early humans. Then someone invented the form of the question. The language went from simple descriptions of where the buffalo roamed to inquiries about where the buffaloes were roaming. What changed? Does an awareness of the structures of inquiry increase an awareness of variables and unknowns?

Suppose that the capacity to inquire were located in one particular language center in the brain and a person suffered a brain injury that destroyed only the inquiry language center. What could that person learn?

Suppose that a discrete brain injury destroyed a person's capacity for feeling or recognizing uncertainty. When would this person ask questions? Now suppose that the therapy for this person consisted of asking him questions. This therapy was based on the theory that questions suggest the existence of variables and unknowns.

Now suppose that the therapy didn't work and doctors gave the patient a pill that caused an overreaction. Now the patient regards everything as uncertain. Does the patient now ask questions?

Suppose now that the doctors reduce the medication until the patient reports feeling certain about some things and not certain about other things. Does the patient now ask questions?

Traditions

2009-11-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

On a shelf by my desk at school, I keep my old copy of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. I don't often refer to it. There are better sources for the kinds of things I need to look up for my philosophy class. Mostly I keep it there for symbolic reasons, to remind me of something, though I'm not sure exactly what that something is. At some point in high school, I realized, mostly through discussions with an older friend, that there were artistic, literary, and intellectual traditions going back thousands of years—traditions that no adult had ever bothered to tell me about. This was an astonishing discovery to me. After I read the copies of The Last Days of Socrates and The Republic that my friend had given me, I went out and bought Russell's book. I'm not sure where I got the money for it—mowing lawns or dealing drugs, I'm not sure which. In any case, I immediately set out to read the book from cover to cover.

I don't know at which chapter I gave up and turned my attention elsewhere, and it's no longer possible to read it cover to cover because it no longer has a back cover. I do remember my favorite lines, from the chapter on Nietzsche:

His general outlook, however, remained very similar to that of Wagner in the Ring; Nietzsche's superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek. This may seem odd, but that is not my fault.

The book only goes up to the pragmatists and what Russell calls "The Philosophy of Logical Analysis." I had to attend college before I realized that there were philosophers after, well, Bertrand Russell. When I was in high school, the biases of Russell and the limitations of his account of philosophy didn't really matter to me. Philosophy was just one new sudden interest I'd taken up among many others. I went to a high school where I was the only person I knew who had such interests. It certainly didn't come from home, and while I'd had some exposure to the intellectuals in my extended family, I don't think my hunger to learn about newly discovered traditions is explained by influence alone.

Because I'm a high school teacher, I spend a lot more time contemplating my own years in high school than is probably healthy. It can't be helped. I've been told that it's no coincidence that I've ended up teaching high school. I have a simpler explanation: I couldn't make a full-time, adult living when I taught college, and after years of doing one thing after another I ended up doing what I'm doing now. Every year I think this will be my last year of teaching high school. Oddly enough, I was recently offered a part-time job at a community college, but by then I'd been hired back by my school district, and I couldn't very well walk out on my students for the pittance they would have paid me. Be that as it may be, I still marvel at the lack of intellectual curiosity of the vast majority of the students I encounter. I know the standard response: they have other things on their minds, and some of those things are very difficult.

I want to say this, if I can, without anger. So did I. I did not have the worst of all possible childhoods, and teaching where I do has made that exceedingly clear. However, it was bad enough. I remember, for example, when I developed an interest in studying economics in tenth grade. It was after my mother had been committed to a state mental institution the first time. I'd grown large enough that my father no longer felt sure that I wouldn't hit him back if he took his belt to me. There was a temporary stay against terror in my household—my father was busy with his graduate studies at MIT, and we were left to the care of a college student. Here's a poem I wrote some years ago:

Alexander Hamilton

During one of my mother's stays
In the mental hospital,
My father hired a nanny,
Though we didn't call her that—
We didn't call her anything.
She was just there one day,
A college student, dark hair,
Trying hard to be kind.

The only thing I remember she did
Was type my history paper,
"Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury."
His banking policy was beyond me,
But I wrote as if I knew what I was saying.
I wanted to be an economist then,
Probably because I'd heard about my dad's class
With John Kenneth Galbraith.
The nanny thought I was smart,

Little consolation for a fifteen year old
Who missed his mother and couldn't say so.
I don't remember the grade I received
Or what the paper strained to be about.
A B would have been charitable.
The words weren't right, and I knew
It had nothing to do with Alexander Hamilton.

This is a long way of saying that at least part of the time I tried to escape my considerable troubles by learning about how intelligent people thought about the world. I was desperately trying to make sense of mine, and for years afterward I pursued one artistic and intellectual endeavor after another. My point is that I don't understand why the troubled teenagers I know don't see the course I took as an option. Okay, I can think of one—a student from the alternative school the superintendent closed. This student feels very out of place at my school, something I understand perfectly. Not only do I feel out of place at my school, I feel out of place in my own classroom. I realize that this sense of alienation will eventually go away. Either I will cease to feel it, or I will no longer teach where I am teaching.

One would think that I would be a good teacher for troubled teenagers, and I sometimes think I am. However, I am faced every day with need that outstrips my capacity for compassion. No teacher I know has it unbounded. To the administrators and policymakers obsessed with "data," I say: quantify that, fuckers.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

John Rawls' A Theory of Justice

2009-11-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

Some years ago I tried to read Rawls' A Theory of Justice and only managed to make it about a third of the way through before I gave up. I read past the chapters on the original position and the veil of ignorance, and I figured that was good enough. This year, in odd spare moments and during a few long stretches on weekends, I ground my way through the book in the month of October. Rawls' book, for me, is one of those rare works I will remember for having changed me—or at least for having changed how I see social justice and how I understand what philosophy can do.

I'm not capable of offering a serious critique of his major work or even offering an introductory assessment of it, as Martha Nussbaum has done in The Enduring Significance of John Rawls. However, I will say that I find it remarkable that a theory so generally abstract so readily invites us to apply it concretely. One sees this illustrated in Nussbaum's article where, for example, she refers to same-sex marriage and care for the aged. Indeed, when writing about his failure to address global issues, she seems to recommend that we extend his ideas into areas he couldn't or didn't cover himself.

I think we just have to say that it remains for others to use the core idea of Rawls's views in a way that productively addresses the current global situation.

Yet, as Nussbaum moves toward the end of her article, she moves away from Rawls' "core idea," questioning the usefulness of applying social contract theory in "thinking about choosing basic political principles."

Instead of a Kantian image of people, which stresses rationality and reciprocity, we may need to move more to an Aristotelian image, which sees dignity and need as subtly intertwined.

While Nussbaum thinks she's detected a flaw at the core of his work, she doesn't go so far as to repudiate it, but rather suggests that in

moving away from Rawls, we are fully engaged with him. Surely that is a sign of his work's depth and enduring significance.

It's easy enough to point out where, according to one's own perspective, A Theory of Justice is lacking. For example, I might contend that he doesn't say nearly enough about the role of education in a just society or how we might view education in terms of the difference principle. However, his theory is so systematically, comprehensively and flexibly conceived that it is easily applied to any number of fields.

One of the results of reading his book is that I've realized how contemporary talk of education generally takes place along very narrow epistemological lines. What should children know how to do? What is the best way for them to learn how to do these things? How do we assess whether they know how to do these things? How do we know whether teachers are effectively teaching them how to do these things? These are the kind of questions teachers, administrators, and policymakers ask and attempt to answer. Problems in education that lie outside this framework are left uninvestigated by the people who make and implement policy. As a result, we're not asking, for example, what part education plays in a good life. We're not asking about the nature of education as a primary social good. And we're not asking about the place of education in a theory of justice.

In his preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote:

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

I imagine that Rawls would want the same for his books. Perhaps the best that I can say about A Theory of Justice is that it has left me my own thoughts.

Response to "Everybody's Protest Novel"

2009-10-31T12:42:00.000-07:00

In my last article, I wrote that before

discussing the book [Uncle Tom's Cabin] with A Reader, I hadn't given the novel any thought since I read James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel" about twenty-five years ago. Between me and any consideration of the novel has stood Baldwin's essay . . .

As if in answer to my excuse for not reading the book (no, we didn't plan this), A Reader has responded to Baldwin's essay in his latest article on Uncle Tom's Cabin. He characterizes "Baldwin’s attack on Harriet Beecher Stowe" as "a power essay that is difficult to come to terms with." The word "vehement" could be used to describe any of Baldwin's essays, but "Everybody's Protest Novel" struck me as unusually vehement by the standards of his other essays. As a stylist, Baldwin was already a master by the time he wrote his attack on Richard Wright through the medium of Stowe's novel. However, "Everybody's Protest Novel" is not representative of his mature style, with its leaps of thought and bold juxtapositions, its complex qualifications and distinctions, its biblical undertones and echoes of the black church, its dramatization of personal revelation, its high art of the Jeremiad. "Everybody's Protest Novel" is a whack on the head.

As evidence, I would quote the same passage that A Reader quotes:

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart,; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

Is this an attack on Stowe's novel or the sentimental novel or sentimentality in general? As a reader of Charles Dickens, shouldn't Baldwin have known better? I seem to recall reading somewhere (perhaps some generous reader can jog my failing memory) an accusation that Dickens was cruel in his treatment of his own characters. Perhaps—or perhaps all good novelists are cruel in what they put their characters through. Be that as it may be, Baldwin was not deterred by Dickens' sentimentality when he wrote, in his famous forward to The Fire Next Time in the form of a letter to his nephew, that

these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago.

(And if you think things have gotten better since Baldwin's time, please consider that your grocery shelves may be stocked by and your take-out pizza may be prepared by and your office trash cans may be emptied by and your lumber may be milled by teenagers working full-time jobs and attempting to learn something in my English classes. But that is my Jeremiad.)

The conventional wisdom is now, I believe, that Baldwin the writer needed to destroy his early model and exemplar, Richard Wright, and "Everybody's Protest Novel" is one more means to that end. His subsequent history with Wright lends credibility to that charge, but it's a history I'm not much interested in. Whatever room Baldwin was trying to make for himself as a novelist, I hold with those who regard his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain as his best achievement in fiction. I wonder—and now it is far too late for me to ask him—what he thought of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a very different kind of novel avoiding all of the putative traps of the protest novel.

I had intended to take up Zora Neale Hurston's novel in my English classes, but, once again, I've had to modify my plans to fit the realities of my students. Hurston's book would simply be too difficult for them. I'd already planned to make the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance a part of my unit, and, as it happens, I'm thinking about using "The Rockpile," Baldwin's forerunner to Go Tell It on the Mountain, as my fictional follow-up to the poetry of the era. As I mentioned in my previous article, the Harlem Renaissance unit began ominously, but the last four days my students have been engaged in research and creative projects, and they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. They may even have learned something. This is the second time I've done this unit, and I'm impressed all over again with the rich far-reaching influence the arts movement exerted on music, painting, literature and, as A Reader has alluded to, photography.

Will I share my own impressions of James Baldwin with my students? My young students have little interest in what relates to me personally; they're much more interested in what relates to them personally. I may have more to say about this phenomenon in a future article. In the meantime, I note that in an online archive of DeWitt Clinton High School's Depression-era literary magazine, The Magpie, one finds the drawings of James Baldwin and the poetry of Richard Avedon. One also finds Baldwin's interview with his former Junior High teacher, Countee Cullen. It reminds me that we really only see each other in snapshots.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Not Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin

2009-10-26T20:26:00.000-07:00

I wonder what my good friend The English Teacher thinks of requiring high school students to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Would he like to see it as part of the core English curriculum, or an AP course? Would he introduce students to the work of Hawthorne’s “scribbling women” and offer a feminist critique of the academy’s rejection of 19th-century sentimental literature? To understand the novel, would students need more than half the class time devoted to Antebellum history? Wouldn’t Uncle Tom’s Cabin better be offered as a segment of the school’s American history course?

So A Reader begins his article on Uncle Tom's Cabin. I must admit that not only have I not thought of requiring high school students to read it, I haven't read the book myself. Perhaps I should. Before discussing the book with A Reader, I hadn't given the novel any thought since I read James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel" about twenty-five years ago. Between me and any consideration of the novel has stood Baldwin's essay, which, now that I reread it, seems a kind of protest itself. Be that as it may be, I take A Reader's point that "the distance between the world the novel depicts and us is not quite as great as we would like."

By coincidence, I began my unit on the Harlem Renaissance in class today. In struggling to explain just what is meant by the term "Harlem Renaissance," I relied on this passage from Nikki Giovanni's Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate:

"Renaissance" is actually a very unusual term to use for the flowering of the arts in Harlem between 1917 and 1935. To say there is a renaissance is to say that there is a rebirth or a reflowering, and there would be certainly those who would question, well, where was the original flowering? If you go back to 1619, with Africans landing in Virginia as slaves, and coming through that kind of wilderness, where would the flowering be? . . .

If we are going to be cosmic, we would have to say there were golden ages in Africa. If that was the case, then the Harlem Renaissance was connected to the great kingdoms of Songhay and Mali, and to the kingdoms in Egypt, but it would also be connected to the great kingdoms that came out of the Sudan, that came out of Zimbabwe—all of these great flowerings throughout history. So the Harlem Renaissance was the first American flowering of the black people.

In attempting to explain this passage three different times to classes that contained African immigrants and the descendents of African slaves, I felt that I, a white man, must have been out of my mind to touch on the issues contained in Giovanni's passage. The problem wasn't my intentions. The problem was that I was raising a host of complex issues without any idea of what to do with them in class. My only hope is that this passage meant something to someone in my classes today.

At one point in class, I asked my students, "Is this really boring? No one seems to be paying attention."

Finally one of my students looked up and said, "Huh? What did you say?"

That made me feel better. If my lesson was bombing, at least no one noticed.

Postscript

The Chair of the English department at my school recently cleared out some unused texts from the "book room." I grabbed a couple dozen books for myself, including the quaintly titled 16 Books that Changed the World (1956). I will leave it to you, dear readers, to guess what books one Robert B. Downs thinks changed the course of history. I will merely point out that today, when I perused its contents for the first time, I discovered that one of the sixteen was Uncle Tom's Cabin. The chapter begins:

On a single point only do the pro-and-con critics of Uncle Tom's Cabin agree. Without exception, all recognize the book's tremendous impact on its time, and its immense influence in instigating the American Civil War.

Well, there you go!

"Nigga"

2009-10-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

For the second time this year, I've had to talk to a student in the hallway about his use of language in class. And for the second time, the student claimed to make a distinction between the word "nigga" and the word "nigger." The first was a girl of mixed parentage. The second was a boy whose family came from East Africa. The boy considered the word "nigger" to be wrong, but not the word "nigga." I didn't have time to pursue his distinction; I merely let him know, in my soft-spoken way, that both were unacceptable language in class. In the case of the girl, I did explain to her that I understood that students use their own kind of language on the street, but that often street language is not appropriate for the classroom. I think the girl understood what I was saying. There isn't much point in trying to get teenagers to give up their street language; however, things have not deteriorated to the point where the teacher can't enforce the limits of speech in the classroom. At least at our school.

I don't think my students were just trying weasel out of criticism from the teacher. Last year my classroom opened up onto a hallway where, because of the student group that had staked out territory there, I heard the word "nigga" about ten times a day, at least. Mostly I heard American-born black students calling each other "nigga," though I note that its usage is becoming more general. There are white "niggas," too, because the word has come to denote not so much skin color as street smarts. Words don't have much meaning ripped from their contexts. (Wittgenstein argued, correctly I think, that philosophy invents difficulties for itself by pulling words from their working contexts and by using them in peculiar ways.) Rather, they mean according to their functions within contexts. In the case of "nigga," I observe that I've heard it used in two ways: as a greeting between two people, male or female, who mutually recognize each other as having street smarts; and as a come-down meant to remind the person so-named that he or she is no better than anyone else. Thus, sometimes the word is used in friendly way; other times it's meant to deflate a superior attitude on the part of someone who belongs to the street.

I've heard the theory that black people effectively seized possession of the word "nigger"—a word meant to subjugate them cruelly—and undermined its historical meaning by ironizing it. That may be true, but I'm hearing something else at work among the teenagers at my school. The unspoken dichotomy is between those with street smarts and those with school smarts. It would be inaccurate to say that all students fall into these two categories. Urban schools as diverse as ours are very complex socially. However, one more of the many reasons that reform movement after reform movement has failed to close the so-called "achievement gap" between poor students and everyone else—one more of the seemingly innumerable impediments to improving their educations—is the fact of defensive, and ultimately self-limiting, identities. Students who've had long experience with humiliation and failure in school feel that they can't compete with the honors students. However, what they lack in school smarts they more than compensate for in street smarts. By comparison, school-smart students are naive. Street-smart students know the score, and they pride themselves on their knowingness.

Yesterday, in conversation with a colleague, I said that when we ask street-smart students to take on academic aspirations, we are challenging their sense of who they are. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. Rather, I'm saying we ought to be aware of some of the complexities involved in such challenges. We need to think about how we can show them that they don't have to give up their senses of who they are so much as expand them to include intellectual ambitions. Easier said than done, of course. On the whole, I haven't felt very successful at it lately. Think of it as an economic problem: these young people live in a world where their demands for attention and compassion have outstripped our supply of it.

I think of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The adherents of the Ptolemaic system of planetary dynamics and the adherents of the Copernican never did find common ground from which to discuss their competing paradigms. They operated from two different common grounds. The shift to the Copernican system was established as the old followers of Ptolemy died out and were replaced by new followers of Copernicus.

Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestly never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on. . . . And Max Planck, surveying his own career in Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

This is a long way of saying that I fear I may be someone's distant memory before a generation of reformers succeed in actually making public education something closer to the great leveler it should be.

Stanley Fish and Theories of Knowledge

2009-10-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

Today A Reader asked me if I was using Stanley Fish as a source for my philosophy class and gave me a pointer to this article from his blog. My first response was: Stanley Fish has a blog? But to answer the question: no, I haven't used Stanley Fish as a source. When I teach the first half of the class in the spring, I might have a use for one of his articles on language. Or maybe I'll just have my students read Philosophical Investigations. (Kidding.)

With regard to the article A Reader was kind enough to send me, I've wondered if it was really worthy of the brilliant Stanley Fish. He's on solid ground in challenging the facile assumptions of his readers on science and religion, but his readers—at least the ones he quotes—are easy targets. They might as well be straw men. What would he have to say to Quine and Putnam's views of science as our best theory of knowledge? It's not an argument I would make,—I leave the field entirely to them—but I think if you're going to make epistemological challenges to science in order to shore up the claims of religion, you might as well take on strong arguments rather than weak ones.

So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion—it is an inferior way of knowing—is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism.

I tend to react to these kinds of statements with the shrug of a pragmatist, and then try to change the subject. I don't have a theory of knowledge to defend. I leave those kinds of arguments to others. (Yes, I note the irony that I'm teaching a class on the theory of knowledge.) However, if I were I forced to make an epistemological argument, I would say that I reject the idea that there is some neutral ground from which we can objectively measure the knowledge claims of science and religion against a common set of standards.

What communities of scientists and communities of religious practitioners do is very different. Fish can pull terms like "faith" and "evidence" from their contexts if he wants to, but these terms don't mean much pulled from their contexts. The faith of scientists and the faith of religionists take their meaning within the contexts of communities and their traditions. The counterargument, I suppose, is that historically science and religion have made competing claims of knowledge in particular areas. We can examine the relative success of those competing claims,—for example, in planetary dynamics or evolutionary biology—but that does not make distinctly different communities of practice somehow commensurate.

Mostly I'm going to ignore the knowledge claims of religion because I don't find personal revelation or interpretations of sacred texts to be effective ways of knowing—if, that is, I'm forced to consider ways of knowing at all. I'm willing to start with the standard definition of knowledge as "justified true belief" and say that "belief" is something we think is the case, that "true" is the endorsement of the success of a belief, and "justified" is the thing we ought to be spending our time on.

On Monday, a chemist who was a guest speaker in my class made a distinction between the way science is taught in school and the way it's practiced in the "real world." In school, science is typically taught as if it were a collection of theories and facts—that is, as if it were a body of knowledge. In the "real world," science is an activity in which scientists form hypotheses, test them, and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. My first thought was that science, as it's practiced, is more like a verb than a noun. But that is too simple. A scientific paradigm is certainly a noun, and, if Kuhn was right, a working paradigm defines what counts as legitimate problems about which scientists form hypotheses. Scientific justification matters within the context of what matters to science. The Co-President of the Muslim Student Association at my school can say, if it makes him feel better, that "science is just guessing," but he betrays (to borrow from Fish) "incredible ignorance."

This student doesn't need a theory of knowledge; he needs instruction in what science does. Likewise, Fish's readers don't need specious grounds for comparisons between science and religion; they need a better understanding of the provisional nature of scientific claims. Otherwise, in matters where science has nothing to say about religious claims of knowledge and religion has nothing to say about scientific claims of knowledge, I say nothing.

Why Public Education Will Continue to Fail the Poor

2009-10-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

While studying up on complexity and chaos theories for my philosophy class, I had an epiphany: public education will not get better as long as the system continues to be overly complex. If any district administrator or policy-maker ever bothered to ask any teacher about the complexity of her job, she could tell him that she is constantly overwhelmed by the countless tasks that teachers have to do just to keep up with the requirements of the job. Teachers are so burdened by the these tasks that any new task that is supposed to improve the system only displaces some other task that the teacher should be doing.

An obvious example is district-mandated teacher-training. It sounds like a good idea to require teachers to take classes that will help them to improve their practice. However, every minute I'm in class is a minute that won't go into planning instruction. As it is, I don't spend enough time planning because I'm overwhelmed by having to develop curriculum for three new classes. The reason I'm in this position is that because of unstable funding in my state, I was laid off in the spring and then rehired with new classes just weeks before school started. I'm constantly improvising, and I don't have time for important tasks like contacting parents about the good or bad things their children are doing in class or conferencing with students about how they're succeeding or failing.

The end result of this situation, multiplied many times over in countless ways, is that the system is so complex that it can neither be managed effectively nor improved substantially, unless policy-makers and administrators are willing to undertake the arduous work of simplifying and funding the system. Unfortunately, they will not undertake that work because they are like a bunch of World War I generals so far behind the lines they haven't the slightest clue about the reality of the trenches and battlefield. If the war is going badly, it must be because of the troops. It couldn't possibly be because uninformed generals are managing it badly—or so policy-makers think these days. Everyone—that is to say, teachers—are at fault but them. And if teachers are at fault, why bother to ask them what it would take for them to do their jobs better?

In the meantime, the affluent still manage to get good educations for their children, and so the failures of the system fall most heavily on the poor. When one considers the innumerable ways the system is stacked against the poor, one can only conclude that it's a small miracle that any of them manage to beat the odds at all. Most don't. Is this situation by design?

I think of Rawls' original position behind the veil of ignorance. Suppose the obverse of his thought-experiment. A relatively small group of people who knew they were to be born with extraordinary advantages wanted a system that would sustainably maximize the wealth of a few. In the long run, the system couldn't depend on wealth generated by limited natural resources, as in Saudi Arabia and Russia. In addition, the system would have to be stable enough that it wouldn't be subject to revolts and revolutions. The majority would have to be placated by the illusions of self-determination and a modest share of the wealth. If the system did produce a perpetual underclass, the members of that class would have to be deprived of the tools to change the system: namely, an education that would enable them to question the assumptions of their society, analyze its unspoken features, and organize themselves to challenge its structure. What they would get, instead, is an education that holds up the ideal, whether attainable or not, of liberation as wealth. Teachers would primarily be tasked with teaching the skills most necessary for the current demands of the economy. The disadvantages of having to fund the incarceration of large numbers of unskilled men and women would be outweighed by the presence of a large pool of cheap labor for the service sector. The mechanisms that perpetuated poverty would go unchallenged because they would be to the advantage of the wealthy few. In short, the system our would-be elitists designed behind the veil of ignorance is the one we have.

The huge financial costs of students not getting an education are well known and documented. There is no mystery here. We know what successful high schools look like. We know the return-on-investment of effective intervention programs. We know the majority of us would be wealthier if a much larger portion of our students succeeded in school. But public education is not rational for the majority of us. I do not say this with any pleasure: we are already spending enormous sums on the long-term incarceration of criminally uneducated men and women, and I fear we'll have to spend even more before we begin to see a serious examination of what we're doing to young people in our schools. Real reform in education, if it ever comes, may only come with even more crime—that is, with the imponderable ruination of countless more lives.

Education as Liberation

2009-10-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

Now and then something comes to my attention that causes me to reexamine my practices and assumptions as a teacher. Last week I asked my students, in preparation for reading "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, to make a list of both the physical and emotional things they carry with them to school. I made a point of telling them that I would be reading their lists, and if something was too personal for me to read, they shouldn't list it. That, of course, did not stop many of my students, who trust me to degree that always surprises me, from sharing very disturbing concerns they carry around with them. For example, one of my students worries about getting jumped or shot on the way to school. Another feels bad about a friend who was shot. Others, living with relatives or foster parents, are separated from their siblings. Some see themselves as taking care of family members. And so on.

I have taken up the question of questions in a number of articles on this blog. I have stated that I regard the ability to ask incisive questions as the basis of intellectual freedom. Drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry, I've described how torture makes a mockery of the true form of a question. Indeed, Henri Alleg, in naming his book The Question, was referring to the euphemism for torture that was current at the time he was tortured by French paratroopers. I've argued that torture is never intended to elicit information, because torture renders its victims speechless and incoherent. Rather, it's intended as an attempt to legitimize illegitimate power. I've suggested that there is no inborn capacity for asking incisive questions and that students must be taught questioning as an intellectual habit. In this article, I want to add a couple of (for me) new points, starting with this observation from Judith N. Shklar's Ordinary Vices:

Cruelty, to begin with, is often utterly intolerable for liberals, because fear destroys freedom.

I want to couple this idea with the observation that systematic questioning renders the claims of the thing questioned provisional at the least and doubtful at the most. Questioning, in other words, functions to unlock an assertion's certitude. This is a very good thing from an intellectual point of view, but from the point of view of teenagers whose lives are filled with instability, the idea of inducing yet more uncertainty is repellent. Here, it seems, is yet one more example of how poverty and one of its many attendant social ills, corrosive fear, destroys the freedom to get an education. Yet, I would argue that in an English class teenagers can find a safe space in poetry and literature for exploring and interrogating their deepest concerns. We want teenagers "to connect" with what they read, but I would also argue that it's important that what they read be more than just an exercise in projecting personal concerns on to barely understood texts. The distinction I would make is between projection and corroboration. When a teenage reader finds her concerns corroborated by the genuine concerns implicit in a text, she has the opportunity to examine her own concerns in an indirect way.

My original plans to have students write letters to each other about Tim O'Brien's book were derailed by an incident that forced my instruction in a new direction. (I'll use this assignment when we take up Their Eyes Were Watching God in December or thereabouts.) At the end of an introduction to the Vietnam War, I mentioned that when the war ended in 1972, Americans had suffered about 58,000 casualties and the Vietnamese has lost an estimated 3 million civilians and soldiers. One white student blurted out, "Too bad for them. That's their problem." I have students of Vietnamese descent in every class, and with this comment, one of my Vietnamese girls began crying and asked to leave the room. I will spare you, dear reader, the details of how I handled this troubling situation. In the end, however, I decided to limit our reading of O'Brien's book to three stories and to take up Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams, his collection of essays dealing, in part, with the experiences of Vietnamese refugees. I am very deliberately introducing this book as, more than anything, corroboration for what some of my students have experienced themselves or have heard from their parents or relatives. This book isn't just for my Vietnamese students. It's for the students who've witnessed civil war in East Africa and who spent too much of their young lives in refugee camps.

At times I've caught myself wondering why students who most need an education sometimes seem to resist it the most. Then I recall that from almost the beginning they have experienced public education as one humiliation after another. No learning can take place without the consent of the student, and my job, first and foremost, is to restore a sense of dignity to the classroom. It shames me to think that I've too often fallen into the trap of thinking that my classroom is for increasing "student achievement" instead of offering students an education. And not just education as a collection of marketable skills—Adorno reminds me that in our drive to make everything a commodity, we have even attempted to make of education a commodity, which can only lead to making commodities of children—but education as the liberation of whole minds and hearts.

What Is Education For?

2009-10-03T20:35:00.000-07:00

If I weren't an atheist, I'd thank God for the student sent to my first period class. Instead, I'll thank her mother, a professor of Russian literature who's spending her sabbatical in our fair city. The student is Korean, and she's told me that her Russian is better than her English. That may well be true, but her writing skills in English—her third language, mind you—are far better than those of any other tenth grader I have. And her ability to discuss literature is not far behind. What she has to say in class is conceptually beyond my other students, even if she does speak haltingly. My only problem with her is an ethical one: at what point am I bound to raise the possibility of moving her to an honors English class? I've already lost two of my better students to honors English, and she's smarter than either one of them.

In the meantime, I'm appalled that my tenth graders don't have the slightest clue about how to write an analytical paper. No teacher, apparently, has ever asked them to write one before. They seemed to be trained in what I call the fairy-tale view of literature. First this happens and then that happens and then this happens, and moral to the story is . . . They know how to write summaries and book reviews, but the idea of analyzing theme or character or symbolism or imagery or mood or tone is foreign to them. They don't know how to write a thesis statement, and they don't know how to use evidence from a text to support their ideas. How did they get to be fifteen or sixteen and not know how to analyze literature?

That will change in my class. They will learn a literary vocabulary. They will learn to examine texts closely. They will learn to ask literary questions of a book. They will learn to write something that resembles a critical paper. Or least most of them will. Who decided they couldn't learn this stuff? Who decided it would be too hard for them? A couple of my colleagues—and one university professor who recently visited my class—were surprised that I'd given them a writing assignment this early in the year. One colleague was surprised I'd managed to get them to draft their papers multiple times. They shouldn't be. It's not as hard as it appears to be. I prepared them by having them record their own question as they read, and then they brought these questions to structured small group discussions. Even before they went into the discussions they knew what their writing assignment would be. The discussions were a way of sounding out ideas for paper topics. I then gave them four full days to work on their papers in class. During that time, I taught mini-lessons on various writing problems they were having. Otherwise, I worked with them individually to bring their drafts along. I know that the quality of papers I receive on Monday will greatly vary, but they'll be on their way. I told them in class on Friday that I was encouraged by their progress, and I assured them that in six months they will be amazed at how good they are at writing papers.

Actually, I believe what I'm saying. Last year I had a class of fourteen seniors who had repeatedly failed their graduation exams. My class was their last chance. Almost all of them were working in their second or third language. In one semester I taught them the skills my current students are learning now—and more. I told them that my class would probably be the hardest class they'd ever taken. But when they saw the results, they would be very happy with themselves. And it all came true. Every one of my students passed their graduation exams. A few of them came back in September to visit me and to tell me where they were going to college.

The professor, who'd brought along about ten graduate students to observe my class, asked me what my secret was. "Patience," I said. I will teach the same things, over and over again, in as many ways as I can think of, until even the slowest student finally gets it. Or so I hope. How hard is this for some students? Let me put it this way. My brilliant Korean student wrote a five-page draft over a weekend. My lowest skilled student, after a week, is still struggling to write a paragraph.

In the meantime, I spent a large portion of my Saturday preparing for next week's philosophy class. In the early part of the week, we'll be taking up questions of art and in the latter part of the week we'll discuss a couple thousand years of intellectual history in the philosophy of ethics. Yes, I know, it's absurd. For the discussion on art, I'm planning to spend some time defining a series a questions, and then I'll have them choose which ones to discuss. It's something I've never tried before. Also, because I want some portion of my seminars to be experiential, we'll be doing some finger painting. What fun! Here is my preliminary list of questions:

What determines what is art? (The intentions of the artist? The quality of the work? The response of an audience?)
Do artists in each discipline determine what, in the long run, is art?
Has art improved over time?
Are there universal objective standards for judging art? Or is it a subjective or cultural thing?
Do people who know more about art better judges of it? Is it possible to know art too well?
What is art for? Is it a mirror or a lamp?
The Roman poet Horace wrote that art was to benefit us and delight us. To what extent is art an education in sensibility? To what extent is it for pure pleasure? Can art be harmful to us?
When is art discovered? When is it invented?
When is beauty a sign of truth and when can it mislead us?

I understand that these are not the most brilliant questions ever, but I'm not teaching a seminar on Adorno's theory of aesthetics. I'm teaching high school philosophy class. Of course, I have nineteen of the best students in the school, one of whom is surely among the smartest in the district. At the beginning of the day, I'll find myself trying to help a student write his second sentence of the week, and at the end of the day I'll find myself discussing with a student the paradox of Schrödinger's cat. Only public school teachers understand the immense gap in educations that our most and least successful students are receiving. It is very disturbing to me. It is so disturbing to me I don't even know what questions I should be asking myself.

Today I Read a Book

2009-09-26T18:27:00.000-07:00

For the past month all my reading has been for the sake of three new classes. Today I finally managed to find the time to read something for myself, and I feel like singing that old Jimmy Durante tune:

The book is The Old Man and the Sea, which I chose because I'd had a hankering to reread it and because I knew that I could finish it in one sitting. I haven't anything useful to say about it, but one of the points of reading for myself is that I don't have to say anything useful about it. Not so with the books I read for school. It's my job to say useful things about poetry, literature and philosophy, and now that I've found the time to read something I can stay silent about, I'm rather enjoying my own reticence.

Whatever I read next I will be, directly or indirectly, for my classes. The possibilities are beyond what I'm actually capable of:

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
The New Science by Giambattista Vico.
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker.
Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.
Entries from my new best friend, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, including "Kant's Moral Philosophy," "The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics," and eventually, I imagine, chapters on Popper, Habermas and Davidson.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
Poetry by Yusef Komunyakaa.
Poetry by Nguyen Thi Vinh.
Poetry and literature from the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
Poetry by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
Various poems and short-short stories for my Creative Writing class.
Selections from Three-Minute Fiction.
"Julius Caesar" (again).
"Antigone" (again).

And heaven knows what else I'll find necessary in the coming months.

Such is the reading life of a high school English teacher. How fitting that I've ended up—for the time being—in a job that requires that I have eclectic tastes in reading. Some days I even enjoy myself. If the district can find the money to keep me on for another year or two, I might actually grow into the job. But here I'm getting ahead of myself. Public education, like history, is one damn thing after another. Today I read a book. One of these days I'm going to do it again.

Questions, Questions, Questions

2009-09-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

For my "regular" (that is, non-honors) language arts classes, I've made it a course goal that they will develop their ability to ask incisive questions of the poetry and literature they read. Some teenagers seem to question everything, but that is a very different thing than knowing how to ask good questions of what they read. It's a skill they have to learn. Ten years from now, I not only want my students to read habitually for personal and professional reasons, I also want them to question what they read. We graduate untold numbers of students who don't know how to ask good questions. Why is that? The state and district will see to it that my students will be tested ad nauseam on, say, their ability to identify symbolism in a short story, but they will never be tested on their ability to question the assumptions underlying that symbolism. I can't change the system, but I can't tolerate the idea that my young students will leave my classroom without ever having been challenged to ask themselves probing and difficult questions.

Over at Novel Readings, Rohan Maitzen has responded to, and dissected, the questions offered by the publishers of Julie & Julia. Most of my students won't be writing literary papers ten years from now, but some of them, I dearly hope, will be participating in book groups. I'd like to think that if I've done my job, my former students will skip the publisher's idea of good discussion questions and formulate their own. One can always hope. After last week's discussions of Raymond Carver's "Fat," I'd say that my students have a long way to go but that they're off to a start—a clumsy start but a start nonetheless. Most gratifying were the students who detected associations I'd missed after multiple readings. One student touched on the implications of Rudy's name, and some students in every class entertained the plausible theory that the waitress' talk of children, her identification with largeness, and her anticipation of change suggest an awareness of the possibility of pregnancy. This theory sent us back to the text, where we reexamined the passage in which she looks in the fat customer's sugar bowl and says that she now knows that she was looking for something, but she didn't know what. We also explored the associations of a "waitress" who "waits" on people with her talk about "waiting" at the end of the story. We even talked about the idea of "August" as a month of waiting before the fall change. Some of the girls in the class suggested that she might have been counting forward from August. Also very interesting to me was the way that students simply moved beyond stereotypes of large people to the possibility of affection between the fat customer and the thin waitress. Most of my students seemed to shove off to the periphery the cruelty of the other characters in the story and seize on the relationship between the customer and the waitress. Well, why not? They have the most intriguing interchanges in the story. Their conversation sets up Carver's remarkable, laconic ending—an ending whose open-endedness initially bothered some of my students but eventually engaged them in ways they hadn't anticipated.

After school on Friday, I conferred with a colleague who also taught "Fat" that week. Her students had come up with many of the same ideas my students had, and I had the eerie feeling that our students had discussed the book outside of class with each other. If that were true, I would be most pleased and very proud of our students. It's not beyond possibility. After all, the students read a story in which a waitress serves an obese man, they fall into an oddly considerate conversation, she goes home to her rude boyfriend or husband, and while he's on top of her she imagines that she's become very large and he has become very tiny. Later, she says that her life is going to change. What's up with that?

I feel most in my element as a teacher when I play Socrates with my students. Part of my job is, as we say in the teaching business, "to model" how to ask questions. I enjoy the Socratic mode of irony: the leading questions meant to draw students into unfamiliar lines of inquiry. In a more perfect world, I would simply assign reading, start a class discussion with an open-ended question, and then release them to their own questions. There are days when my advanced philosophy class is not far from that. Unfortunately, I'm obligated to cover some content next week. Absurd as it sounds, I have to cover the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science in one week. I took philosophy of science in college, and I feel reasonably capable of teaching it to high school students, but the philosophy of mathematics is out of my league. Maybe it's just as well that we're skimming it. That's all I'm capable of doing right now. I have a student who is writing an extended essay on applications of fractals, and if he wants any more insight into the philosophy of mathematics than I can give him, he'll have to do his own research. But isn't that what we teachers hope for—that our students will move well beyond us?

Why Read Dickens? Why Read Anything?

2009-09-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

Last night about 9 pm, as I was packing up to leave school, a custodian came into my room to empty the trashcans. He was an elderly Asian man, and he asked me politely, "How are you?"

I had just finished up a fourteen-hour day and I was contemplating the amount of work I had ahead of me this weekend. "I'm tired," I said curtly.

"I'm tired, too," he replied. He then went on to explain that he had already worked a full day and was well into his second job. Did I feel a little ashamed? Yes. I feel even more ashamed when I realize that some of my students were still working when I headed home at 9 pm. One of them may have been stocking shelves at the grocery store I planned to stop at on my way home. Another one may have been making the pizza I'd thought about ordering. Still another one may have been emptying the trashcans in a deserted building downtown.

Why read Dickens? It is a testament to the willed ignorance of my countrymen that so many of them don't realize that child labor laws are routinely ignored in the United States. My wife works at a rich private school, and she observes that one of the things that immense wealth buys you is a wonderful insularity from the effects of your actions. But the lesser wealthy that make up the middle class are really no different, except by degree. We all want to buy a little insularity. In our sentimentality, we're much more comfortable feeling our compassion for the poor and working children when they come mediated through books, films and television. This is not, mind you, a reason for not reading Dickens. I'm simply juxtaposing the fact of teenage labor in the wealthiest nation in the world with the great interest in Dickens. As Jon Michael Varese recently wrote in The Guardian's Books Blog,

It seems that you cannot turn a corner this year without bumping into Charles Dickens. So far we've seen the release of four major novels based on the Victorian icon's life: Dan Simmons's Drood (February), Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens (March), Richard Flanagan's Wanting (May), and Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress (July). Earlier this year BBC1's lush new production of Little Dorrit was nominated for five Bafta awards in the UK, and 11 Emmys in the US. Newspapers and magazines have run stories on his relevance to the current global economic crisis. And with the Christmas season now only four months away, it seems that there is no getting away from him any time soon.

However, as any high school teacher knows, teenagers live in a different world than the rest of us. Varese goes on to write:

As someone who teaches and writes about Dickens, the question of why we still read him is something that's often on my mind. But that question was never more troubling than one day, nearly 10 years ago, when I was standing as a guest speaker in front of a class of about 30 high school students. I had been speaking for about 20 minutes with an 1850 copy of David Copperfield in my hand, telling the students that for Victorian readers, Dickens's writing was very much a "tune-in-next-week" type of thing that generated trends and crazes, much as their own TV shows did for them today.

Then a hand shot up in the middle of the room.

"But why should we still read this stuff?"

I was speechless because in that moment I realised that, though I had begun a PhD dissertation on Dickens, I had never pondered the question myself.

As much as I admire—and rely on—literary scholarship, I don't believe it helps much to explain to teenagers why we should "still read this stuff." Once again I asked my students to think about their goals for my classes. They have a vague understanding of what I want them to accomplish, but students don't really learn anything without consent. As a teacher, I have to keep in mind the big picture of what the class will be about. However, only the students can say where their immediate needs lie, and only they can identify their anxieties and ambitions for themselves. I was not surprised to learn that my students want to get good grades, pass their graduation exams, and improve their reading and writing skills. The one surprise was how many students said they wanted to increase their vocabulary. I should have known that this desire is always with foreign-born students, even when they've "graduated" into regular language arts classrooms. The students in these classes have an unstated reputation for lacking the desire to learn that honors students have. The desire—or the ganas, as Jaime Escalante put it—is there, though you may have to look for it under a layer of frustration, disappointment and pain. One reason I would stay at work until 9 pm on a Friday night is that I'm worried by the overwhelming responsibility of teaching these students. Can I do it? Can I help them? Will I, as so many others before me, disappoint them? I can't stand the idea of letting them down. In the face of pressures that I'm ill-suited to handle, I, too, have to find the ganas.

Not one of my students said she was in my class to cultivate a love of poetry and literature. Yet, my students are as capable as any of cultivating it, if only they can learn to ask and answer questions of literature and poetry for themselves. Varese:

My search for an answer continued but never with success, until one year the little flicker came – not surprisingly – from another high school student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing contest. "We need to read Dickens's novels," she wrote, "because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are."

Grandest way possible. That is a phrase I never expect to hear from my students. They will have their own answers. I intend to find out what they are.

Hedgehogs and Foxes

2009-09-06T11:01:00.000-07:00

I've been working like a fiend to prepare for my new courses. I'm trying not to get burned out before the school year starts, and so I'm allowing myself a day off today. This morning my thoughts have come to rest on the book I'm rereading mostly for pleasure but also as background for my philosophy class. Years ago, when I took a philosophy of science course, the professor introduced to us Thomas S. Kuhn's theory of how radical shifts in scientific "paradigms" come about. I was so excited by this theory that I bought a copy of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and read it on my own. Now that I'm rereading the book, I wonder at my youthful excitement. The book is enjoyable enough, and I don't doubt its historical importance, but it seems rather formulaic to me. I hope to take up at some point Karl Popper's critique of Structure, but my intention here is not to analyze Kuhn's theory. Rather, I want to comment on how the young sometimes respond to books in ways that almost seem alien to us in middle age.

For the last two years I've taught readers who are typically two to eight years below grade level. These are students who, for the most part, came to my class without any experience of feeling excited about the ideas in a book. Most of them had little history of literacy in their families, and many of them faced the added difficulty of having to learn their second or third or fourth language. As I've described before, when you're struggling to make sense of what's on the page, you're generally too consumed with sorting out the language to get excited about the content. However, by the time most of my students had left class, they'd changed the way they felt about reading because, as they became more fluent, they found themselves responding emotionally and intellectually to the content of books. This is a miraculous thing to witness over the course of the year, and I will miss these students. Through an odd sequence of events, I've been assigned a new set of classes, one of which is a philosophy course that will have some of the most capable students in the district. I remember such students from my days as an intern. These students will, by and large, arrive to class ready to be excited by ideas.

One pleasure of youth that I clearly recall is the mental construction of systems of thought that addressed all sorts of questions and created new ones to boot. I was enough of a Romantic then to feel wonder at the world—that is, when I wasn't deeply depressed—and I was drawn to explanations of things that created yet more wonder. This is the stuff of youth. After the inevitable series of disappointments that come from unfulfilled ambitions, I'm learning to make peace with the work before me. I've only read Middlemarch once, but I remember it as a book, perhaps more than any other I've read, that speaks to the question of what we do with thwarted ambition. I would say very simply now: we work, we love the people in our lives, and we hope for good health. That's about it. I can't get excited about big systems of thought or elaborate theories of everything. I've learned to live with a great deal of doubt. I don't have time to crawl into Descartes' stove, and so I just get to it, whether I exist or not. In Russian Thinkers, Isaiah Berlin described Tolstoy as a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. In my youth, I was a would-be hedgehog, but when I couldn't settle on what "one big thing" I knew, I acquiesced to being a fox. I know many things, among them that I don't know many things. How odd that someone so skeptical of epistemology—thank you Richard Rorty—should end up teaching a course on epistemology.

Then again, maybe I'm not such a bad choice for the job. I'll be little tempted to favor one particular theory of knowledge and foist it on my students. In the eyes of my students, I may be quite old, but I still enjoy intellectual play for its own sake. I have no "one big thing" to steer my students toward, and I'm perfectly content to keep, for the sake of discussion, all epistemologies provisional, including the epistemology of epistemology. When class ends each day and I leave my students to their lives, the pragmatist in me will get on with it—"it" being the habits of work and the practices of affection.

Asya and Bjartur: The Road Not Taken

2009-08-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

I had thought that it would be interesting to compare Asya of In the Eye of the Sun and Bjartur of Independent People. What two characters could possibly be more different? Yet, the Egyptian intellectual and the Icelandic sheep-farmer have one thing in common: their relationship to received traditions in literature form an intricate part of their internal lives and influence the course of their characters. I could examine the way that Don Quixote, a famously bad reader, is and is not a predecessor of Bjartur, just as Madame Bovary, herself a famously bad reader, is and is not a predecessor of Asya. Alas, this line of inquiry will have to wait, because I'm now deep into preparing for my philosophy course.

A Reader, after too long a silence, has posted a brief article on empiricism in American poetry. Let there be more! I'm not a trained philosopher (no kidding), and there are many teachers who are undoubtedly more capable of teaching my philosophy course than I am. However, I was asked to fill this hole in the schedule, and rather than bemoan my deficiencies, I'll relish the challenge and take it as an opportunity to expand my teaching repertoire. One of the requirements of the course is that students are to examine questions relating to the interrelationships among various intellectual and artistic traditions. As a long-time reader of Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, I'm intrigued with what the students and I might do with poetry and philosophy, and film and philosophy. A Reader's allusions to Frost and Williams are good material for a discussion on empiricism and poetry. I might add Stevens to the mix. Who but an American would feel such tension between things and ideas in poetry? I take Stevens' late poem "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself" to be his answer to Williams' "No ideas/ But in things":

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Something tells me I won't be taking up this poem in class. The unstable, ever-shifting relationship between ideas and things is everywhere present in Stevens' poetry, and I would be hard-pressed to pick one poem to illustrate that dynamic. Among the other authors I imagine not taking up in class, but which A Reader might have covered in his course called "Things," are Thoreau and Emerson. In any case, I'm slowly gathering a mental list of ideas and quotes to spring on my students to help them explore the nature of various "knowledge" traditions and their interrelationships. I know that motivating teenagers is about half the job of teaching them, and I'm hoping that my own excitement about the subject matter will start us out on the year with some momentum.

In the meantime, Asya and Bjartur will have to wait. I'm reminded of that old joke we used to tell in the Forest Service:

"Ranger, can you tell me where this road goes?"

"Sir, this road doesn't go anywhere. It's here all year round."

Epic and Mock Epic

2009-08-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

So. Instead of preparing for my new classes, I've been rereading Halldór Laxness' Independent People. Actually, I've not been rereading it, because at a certain point in the novel I suddenly realized that what makes it so darkly comic—what makes the 20th century Icelandic epic a mock epic—is that Bjartur of Summerhouses is really an ancient warrior-poet stuck in the life of a sheep-farmer. My edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics informs me that the "basic fact in the history of Icelandic literature is its unbroken continuity." English literature is not so continuous; Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, I imagined, would come closest in our tradition to a serious modern regard for ancient alliterative poetry. Although I knew of it by reputation, I'd never read his translation. I figured that reading his Beowulf would give me a better feel for Bjartur's poetic fantasy world. At least that was my excuse for allowing myself to be distracted by Heaney's exquisite translation and for ignoring the overwhelming amount of reading and planning I should be doing over the next two weeks.

Now that I'm done with Beowulf, I can either return to Independent People or I can devote my attention to any of the three new courses I'm to teach this year. I'm not quite ready to commit myself fully to what will surely be a year of ceaseless demands on my time, though yesterday I did manage to create a wikispace for my Creative Writing class and to read American Born Chinese for my Language Arts classes. Soon enough, however, I'll give myself over to what I have to do. The anxiety that comes before work will pass away the moment I'm willing to submit to its demands. This isn't as bad as it sounds. Most of us need engaging work, and I enjoy work's routines. In fact, I crave those routines—call them momentary stays against confusion. In the process, I find some satisfactions along the way. Teaching, like reading, is a roundabout way to self-revelation. My job starts with teaching myself to teach my students, and to do that I sometimes have to grasp aspects of myself that I'd just as soon avoid. Teenagers do that to you—it's part of their job.

This year I'd like to finish in June without feeling in ruins, physically and intellectually. I wish I knew how to avoid the exhaustion that slowly sneaks up on teachers and seems to stick to them for months. Anticipate and resist it as we may, every year we fall into our own personal mock epic. In the summer we resurrect a life for ourselves, and in the fall we begin the school year again, knowing, despite all our preparations, that we'll soon feel beset by all-consuming struggles—struggles that we seek to dignify within ourselves but that all too often seem trivialized by our sense of what others would make of them. It may be a meager defense, but the best one I can think of is to write my way into a more authentic reckoning of what the work of teaching is for me.

Art, Self-Reflection, and Teaching

2009-08-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

In an early passage in Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun, Asya's poetry professor at Cairo University questions the class on the nature of poetry. Asya, the daughter of English professors at the university, remembers this day in class as "the turning-point." She doesn't say what it's a turning-point for, but here it is:

'Ladies and Gentlemen, you are here to study poetry.'

The way he says 'poetry' makes it sound important, resonant, colossal, terrifying.

'Ladies and Gentlemen, what is poetry?'

'. . .'

'What—is—a poem?'

'. . .'

'Is it a donkey pulling a cart?'

'. . .'

'Is it a piece of cake?' A few nervous giggles. 'Perhaps you think it is.' Giggles subside. 'I will repeat my question. What, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a poem'

Eventually Asya raises her hand and ventures an answer:

'Is it an expression of emotion?'

The eyes focus on her. He knows her. He has known her since she was born. He has taught her mother before her. But nothing in his look betrays this and Asya is grateful. Above all she wants to belong. To belong to the body of students. If she is to be singled out let it be for merit. Merit that no one can mistake or deny. Not for her parents.

'If I scream, young lady, is that a poem?'

'N—no . . .'

'And yet it is an expression of emotion?'

'Yes.'

'So, what is a poem?'

A formalised expression of emotion? A lyrical expression of ideas? A this, a that and nothing would do, and at the end, 'A poem, Ladies and Gentlemen, is—simply—what it is. We can ask no more of poetry than that it should be.

In the last passage of the novel, Asya is led out one night by a boy to see an idol half-buried in the sands near a village outside of Cairo.

Asya had sat down on a rock to look at her. Lying face-down in the sand, uncovered now after what? Three thousand years? Her forehead resting on three bricks—the very indignity of her posture makes the pride and grace of her expression—of her bearing—all the more remarkable. Who was she? A dancing girl whom the great Rameses took a fancy to and elevated into a Sister-Wife? But she has none of the arriviste about her. The composure, the serenity, of her smile tells of someone who had always known who she was. The mummy of Rameses the Second, which they had finished delousing in Paris around the time Khalu Hamid was in London, was but a paltry, shabby thing, small and shrivelled, hardly recognisable as human. Since she had seen it Asya had looked at the pharaoh's statues with new eyes. But this woman who had in some way belonged to him, and who now lies here in the sand—she has indeed found a gentle grave; for here she is, delivered back into the sunlight still in complete possession of herself—of her pride, and of her small, subtle smile.

What happens between these two passages is really the subject of the novel. But here I want to focus on Asya's interpretation of the idol. In a sense, she has come to her own answer for what poetry—or art—is. She sees in the idol a kind of corroboration of what she has become. By novel's end, Asya is more possessed, more in command of herself. In the idol is reflected her hard-won knowledge of herself. One of the many questions she had to answer for herself was what the relationship of books to life would be for her. Her mother, her husband, her lover—all had accused her at one time or another of relying too much on art or books for her outlook on life. When she begins her affair with Gerald Stone, she compares herself to characters in novels she's read:

You've committed adultery, you've done it, you've joined Anna and Emma and parted company forever with Dorothea and Maggie—although Dorothea would have understood—would she? Yes, she would; she would not have approved, she would have urged her to renounce, to stop, to send him away—but she would have understood; she had a great capacity for understanding.

In a later exchange with her husband and mother, Asya answers the latter's charge that, as in a novel, "you can't sit around being in a dilemma."

'You keep saying, "This is life, not a novel"'—Asya turns on Lateefa—'as though somehow life were more serious—but what it really amounts to is that you don't think people should devote as much time to considering questions of character, circumstances and motivation in real life as you would expect your students to devote to the same questions in a work of fiction—'

Before Asya can return to her own students at Cairo University and take up this question in practice, she must first finish her linguistics dissertation, in which she engages in an excruciatingly technical analysis of metaphor that manages to strip poetry of all considerations of emotion. Eventually, she leaves husband, lover and dissertation behind and returns to a very different Cairo University than the one she'd left. She finds that her students are not much interested in poetry for its own sake.

The first time she'd gone into her Seventeenth Century Poetry class she'd asked the sixty-three students to write a paragraph explaining why they had chosen to enter the Department of English. 'And, ladies and gentlemen, I would be grateful if you could give me an honest answer. Please do not write "because I love Wordsworth"—particularly if you have never read him. I don't mind whether you like literature or not. I just want to adjust my teaching as much as possible to your needs—so it would help us all if you could give me a true, and brief answer.' And the answers came back, depressingly predictable—every single one of them to do with learning English in order to get a job in a bank or one of the new agencies or important companies—every single one jaggedly constructed or scarcely legible or managing to cram four grammatical errors into one sentence—and one had stood out by its simplicity. 'I want to learn the language of my enemy.'

I don't want to give the impression that I think this novel is about the making of a teacher. Rather, I'm interested in how her thinking about literature, art and teaching is related to her understanding of herself. I'm interested in these things because they're on my mind, too. I sometimes gravitate toward books that aid me in thinking about questions I'm pondering in my own life. A few days ago I learned that a teaching position had opened up at my old school, and I've been assigned to it. I'm between books, and I wanted to read something that would help me to puzzle out what I'm about to undertake this year. Then I realized that I'd just finished a book whose protagonist was, among other things, a teacher from a family of teachers. I married into one of those, and while teaching is perhaps less emotionally complicated for me than it is for my wife, it's complicated enough.

A paradox of teaching teenagers is that the job demands a high degree of selflessness, but it also reveals aspects of ourselves to ourselves—aspects that are sometimes pleasantly, but more often unpleasantly, surprising. We don't have to be perfect to teach. We merely have to be willing to confront ourselves ceaselessly. It's a job I would recommend neither to perfectionists nor to those who would live an unexamined life. If I often look to poetry and literature to restore myself and find corroboration for my own struggles as a teacher, I hope I might be forgiven my less than scholarly approach to analyzing texts. I read for intensely personal reasons. Right now, with none of my classes decided, I can envision the year with a sense of open possibility. I'd still like to entertain the hope that my students will find their own intensely personal reasons for reading and writing about the poetry and literature we take up in my classes.

Recalled

2009-08-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

I've been recalled. No, I haven't been called up for military duty. I've been recalled by my school district to teach language arts for the coming school year. Just when it looked like I would never work again, the district decided it had enough money to employ me after all. I don't actually have an assignment yet, but someone in Human Resources will let me know early next week. I could end up back at my old school, albeit in a new capacity—my position as a reading teacher now belongs to an employee with more seniority. I could also end up at a middle school in the worst neighborhood in the South End of the city. I'll just have to find out. It would be lovely if Human Resources applied some logic to how it assigns positions to me and other recalled teachers, but I'm not hopeful. Ever the pessimist!

In any case, I have a job for one year—that is, unless someone in the district suddenly changes her mind and rescinds the recall. That has already happened to ten social studies teachers this summer. Let it not happen to me! I'm weary of looking for work, and the job opportunities out there were few, indeed. On Thursday night, I'd actually looked into a forest firefighting program with the state. It was something I'd wanted to do when I was young but never got the chance. Along about February, if I was still substituting, I would have enrolled in the program. It appears this year will not be the one that I return to working in the woods. But there is always next year.

I say this because I know full well that I could be laid off again next spring. Some of the stimulus money that kept more teachers from getting laid off will run out. The governor—bless her steely heart—is already talking about further budget cuts in the coming session. And a school board director has told me the district's financial outlook will get worse next year when some expenses they put off will come due. I could not only get laid off again in the spring, but I could also get recalled again a year from now. Of the many things wrong with public schools, let me add this to the list: unstable funding.

So The English Teacher will be back to work in late August. That is, unless we go on strike. Our union—possibly more corrupt and incompetent than the district itself—is negotiating a new contract, and I hear that leaders on all sides want a strike. The district wants to break the union, and the union wants to show that it can't be broken. If we strike, I figure it will be by mutual consent. Everyone will be pleased—everyone, that is, except the parents who will have to keep their kids home.

A protracted strike in a town north of the city resulted in the voters voting out members of the school board. Would that it would happen here. I fear that we're years away—perhaps decades away—from seeing any significant improvements in public education in my state. With one in three students dropping out of high school, I stand by my description of our Dickensian Era. For one more year, I'll be the teacher for some group of teenagers. I hope I can help them. If not, I can always try out for that firefighting crew. With global warming, it should be a growth industry. Maybe they'll even take me.

Journeys

2009-08-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

Perhaps because the necessity of looking for a job has kept me home all summer,

I dream of journeys repeatedly . . .

But unlike Roethke in "The Far Field," I don't dream

Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

Rather, I dream of hiking long distances in the mountains. In my fantasy, I start at Chinook Pass and head east, into drier and drier landscape. I keep going into desert and I never turn around, the hike never ceasing, on and on without end. Or as in the film "The Gods Must Be Crazy" (which, to the delight of my students, I once showed in class) I hike towards the ends of the earth, only with no intention of ever returning. In these desperate journeys, I'm always alone, and I meet no one. Everything is left behind, with little thought of what's ahead. I'm consumed and satisfied by the constant motion of walking, the sensations of heat, sweat and dust. I imagine the trails I might start out on and I wonder how long I can walk at a stretch—thirty miles, more? What a long, glorious solitude of uninterrupted thought would be mine!

Much safer journeys this summer have been Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and The Maine Woods. Even Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun is a kind of journey—a journey into a consciousness and culture faraway from mine. I'm about halfway through the novel, and I struggle to orient myself in it, despite its similarities to and contrasts with Middlemarch. At one point in the book, I suddenly felt grounded, when Asya, the protagonist, remembers her first teenage horror of death.

Once she had spoken to her father. She had been fourteen and she had gone into his study and asked him seriously whether he thought there was anything afterwards and he had said no. So she had asked him how he could bear to go from one minute to the next knowing that it would all end, and he had said that that was the only choice he had. And she had asked, but how could he get it out of his mind? How come he was not constantly thinking of the dreadfulness of it all? And her father had eventually had no answer, and she had seen his eyes go red, and that was the only time she had ever seen that, and he would not look at her any more, so she knew that there really was no answer and no secret comfort and that it was indeed as terrible as she thought it was and she didn't speak about it any more.

Some pages later, when Asya is taking her college exams, we come across this quote:

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

I'm under the impression that Ahdaf Soueif's work is more well known in England and Canada than in the United States. Novels that portray human beings from the Arab world as actually having points of view are not likely to gain currency among my ever-bigoted and easily manipulated fellow citizens. In any case, Canadian and British readers may not be aware that this bit of poetry from Asya's exam comes from the last stanza of Wallace Stevens' early masterpiece "Sunday Morning." The poem, whose most famous line, for better or worse, is "Death is the mother of beauty," continues from the exam passage to end:

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

There is, as others have pointed out, no escaping Stevens' relationship to Keats' "To Autumn":

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Be that as it may be, the woman of "Sunday Morning," at home instead of at church, is enjoying the

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug . . .

but she still must contend with a world without a divinity conventionally imagined. She, too, "dreams a little" and finds "comforts of the sun," but she also knows we live "in an old chaos of the sun," with its inescapable dependencies of day and night. The poem seems a rich allusion for In the Eye of the Sun, an allusion which has slipped away from me as I've read deeper into the novel. I've written before of incompetent reading, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if we're struggling to find ourselves in an unfamiliar literary landscape. This must be my summer of incompetence: I don't know what I'm reading, and I don't know where I'm going.

At the end of "Chesuncook," Thoreau's middle essay in The Maine Woods, he portrays the Poet as the one transcendent figure who binds together and resolves cultivated nature and wild nature, each by itself inadequate in its own ways. The Poet, Thoreau's idealized version of himself, is the one being with the sensibility to appreciate properly the two incompatible faces of nature.

The partially cultivated country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets, such as compose the mass of any literature.

And:

These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.

Thoreau's elevation of the Poet is bound to be lost on those who look to his writings for affirmations of the proto-environmentalist. The last paragraph of "Chesuncook," which I refuse to quote, forms one of the sacred texts for wilderness preservationists. Don't get me wrong. I want more land—a lot more land—to be officially designated as Wilderness Areas and duly regulated by the Federal Government as such (irony intended). However, as quaint as I find Thoreau's figure of the Poet to be, I'm more sympathetic to his imaginative approach to the wild than my cynical tone might indicate.

I've been hiking the Park and the Wilderness Areas of the Cascades for over thirty years. Last week, in the middle of a twenty-five mile day-hike up the Carbon glacier, I came upon a group of older men backpacking the Wonderland trail from Sunrise to Lake Mowich. This is no easy hiking, and the oldest of the group, carrying a full backpack, was eighty. I figure I have another thirty years of hiking the mountain. That's thirty more years of memories layered on the thirty I already have. The wilderness is not a cause for me. It's a place of imagination and memory—a place of dreams, sometimes dangerous dreams, but my dreams, nonetheless.

Several More Lives

2009-07-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

In the final chapter of Walden, Thoreau writes that he "left the woods for as good a reason" as he went there, and perhaps had "several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." For a writer, every book is a kind of life. In the case of Thoreau's time at and after Walden Pond, the books he would write were several. While he was at the pond, he worked on both A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. Although he finished A Week by the time he left the pond in 1847, Thoreau worked and reworked Walden throughout the early 1850s. Contrary to our image of Thoreau residing steadily at Walden Pond for "two years and two months," he actually left in the middle of it for a trip to the woods of Maine. That excursion led to an essay he originally published in 1848 and later revised to form the first part of The Maine Woods, appearing posthumously in 1864. In effect, Thoreau lived his several more lives at Walden Pond and continued to live them even beyond his own death.

I'm currently rereading the prosaic The Maine Woods, a book I've never managed to finish after several attempts at it. By the time Thoreau gets to the peak of Mt. Ktaadn, I usually give up. However, this time I remembered Roderick Nash's comments on Thoreau's account of that climb. In Wilderness and the American Mind, Nash states that the "wilderness of Maine shocked"—shocked!—"Thoreau." Nash argues that Thoreau, accustomed to "exultation in the presence of nature," had to contend with a vast, inhuman image of Nature, devoid of any tender mercies for mere human beings. In my view, Nash misreads Thoreau's reaction to the heights of Mt. Ktaddn, which, in fact, was quite conventional for its time.

Long before we get to the American Romantics, the sublime included not only the loftier feelings inspired by Nature's beauty, but also those inspired by her strange, horrible magnitude. After his blow-by-blow account of scrambling to the top of the mountain, Thoreau reflects that

we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful.

Terror and awe were as conventional a reaction to Nature as joy and exaltation. In fact, Thoreau not only used "awful" in this paragraph, he also worked in "awe" three times.

I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers made there, the form and fashion and material of their work.

And:

We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had smart and spicy taste.

And:

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me.

Nash has made the all-too-common mistake of failing to recognize when Thoreau's response to Nature is literary. In the case of Mt. Ktaadn, his account falls well within the tradition of the Romantic sublime. The source of Nash's mistake, I believe, is the belief that Thoreau's writings are some kind of window to the actual person. I'm not denying that Thoreau the man had strong reactions to Nature or that he was genuinely knowledgeable as a naturalist. Rather, when we read The Maine Woods, we're reading the work of a writer with literary aspirations. Thoreau the writer didn't create a book to serve as a window into his soul. He created a linguistic artifact to be brought alive and re-imagined in the minds of his readers.

With that in mind, I'd like to take a closer look at the context of the third "awe" quote. Thoreau wrote of Nature on Mt. Ktaadn that it was "that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night." It was not the more gentle landscapes with which we're familiar—"not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land." Rather, it was like newly created "Matter, vast, terrific, . . . a force not bound to be kind to man." In the climax of this paragraph, Thoreau suddenly recognized the raw stuff of original matter in himself. He began a sentence that could have been taken from Whitman, "I stand in awe of my body," but continued, in a way that was unusual for Thoreau, by speaking about how

this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, —that my body might, —but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature, —daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, —rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

In a previous article, I remarked that Thoreau rarely mentioned the work of the body, much less its pleasures and functions. Thoreau wrote vividly of Nature captured through the senses, but those senses often seem, peculiar as it sounds, disembodied. In the passage I've quoted above, Thoreau suddenly discovered his own body and was terrified by it. Disorientation is nothing new in Romantic literature, but the cause of it here is: Thoreau's fear of the stuff of bodies. The actuality of the actual, the solidity of the solid, the sensuality of the senses—all in himself and others—was a revelation that threw him into confusion.

What kind of writer writes this way? In "Chesunook," the second part of The Maine Woods, Thoreau asked,

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine, —who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane, —who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it, —who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand.

As I alluded to in a comment on my previous article, Thoreau went to Walden, in part, to work out what kind of a writer he would be. He'd had ambitions as a poet, and in A Week, he extolled the poet above all others. Yet, he also concluded that great prose,

of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet often only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman, and settled.

In "Chesuncook," based on his 1853 trip to Maine and published first by James Russell Lowell in The Atlantic in 1858, Thoreau revived the figure of poet, complete with all the superior powers he'd possessed in Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads:

He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

In American history, Thoreau has been made to represent the causes of civil disobedience, environmentalism, the simple life, and wilderness preservation. It would be news to many backpackers, I imagine, that they will be unable to appreciate Nature properly until they become poets.

My point, of course, is that Thoreau's emotional responses to Nature are largely structured by his literary education. I would argue that one purpose, among many, of a literary education is to have one's emotional life structured in sophisticated ways. I seriously doubt there is anything original in my own reactions to the alpine country I so enjoy hiking in the summer. It doesn't concern me in the least. What is original is my own history and memories of hiking these places. If the day comes that I again write about my experiences in the mountains, I have little doubt that my responses will be shaped by my own literary education. One would be mistaken, indeed, to identify what I write about an experience as the experience itself. If I have a comprehensive soul, you won't find it in my words.

It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.