Wendell Berry, "Some Further Words"

Although I set up this account to serve as my student-teaching journal, I also thought I might post some literature that has shaped my understanding of life, truth, and education.

This poem by Wendell Berry speaks truth that I cannot reduce to a synopsis.


SOME FURTHER WORDS



Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places
is an "environment." And a house
for sale is not a "home." Economics
is not "science," nor "information" knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a "leader."
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
"Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore."

The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this "progress."
So is the cowardice that calls it "inevitable."

I think the issues of "identity" mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a "fetus" is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?

I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself of life impoverished go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don't like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world's body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
"Get out of there!" as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body's life is its own, untouched
by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time
to the old. I don't want to live
on mortal terms forever, or survive
an hour as a cooling stew of pieces
of other people. I don't believe that life
or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it

"Intellectual property" names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved. We
who do not own ourselves, being free,
own by theft what belongs to God,
to the living world, and equally
to us all. Or how can we own a part
of what we only can possess
entirely? Life is a gift we have
only by giving it back again.
Let us agree: "the laborer is worthy
of his hire," but he cannot own what he knows,
which must be freely told, or labor
dies with the laborer. The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air.

I don't believe that "scientific genius"
in its naive assertions of power
is equal either to nature or
to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions
of the nuclei of atoms and cells
and this world's every habitation
have not brought us to the light
but sent us wandering farther through
the dark. Nor do I believe
.artistic genius" is the possession
of any artist. No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not "human genius"
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead--
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but --
to those who have it more dear than life.

And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and their homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them, and fewer
of us learn them, year by year.
These affections are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds,
like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals,
every one truly what it is:
gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made
of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how
to live in the places where they live.
And so I would like to be a true
human being, dear reader-a choice
not altogether possible now.
But this is what I'm for, the side
I'm on. And this is what you should
expect of me, as I expect it of
myself, though for realization we
may wait a thousand or a million years.

Testing. And lots of it.

The mornings this week at good ol' WCHS have been testy. And by that I mean full of tests. On-Demand Writing, pre-ACT, other random writings, and assuredly four or five others in this place of assessments bouncing off cinder-block walls. And today we ended up meeting for the two afternoon classes only.

After assuming my hallway post, I cracked open a folder-full of journal entries that my 6th period freshmen had turned in the day before. In addition to exploring "The Gift of the Magi" and some of their insights, I gave them the opportunity ask me a question if they desired. Most of the questions were simple: What's your favorite color? What's your middle name? What position did you play in baseball? But one of them stuck out from the rest and gave me a chance to practice what the State calls enrichment; the student, after composing one of the better journal entries in the class, asked, "What are your thoughts about the story?" Here's what I wrote to him:

What are my thoughts? That's a great question: so here they are....

I like the irony of the name "James Dillingham Young." The name sounds like it could belong to a millionaire, and the narrative tells us that he once was financially successful. Perhaps his family well-to-do, or perhaps he merely aspired to wealth and privilege and was at one time on his way. Either way, he is now stripped of all worldly success.

In addition, I find it significant that the name is fading from the inside-out. Worldly ambition -- the desire for fame, riches, and privilege is ultimately a problem that comes from the center of a person -- from the heart. It seems, then, that the fading name is a symbol of a fundamental change in his heart; and we can see that change evident in his selfless love, care, and sacrifice for his wife, and his surrendering of worldly possessions. Because of this heart-level change, he is no longer "James Dillingham Young"; rather, he is Della's beloved "Jim."

A day of (slight) rest.

After the maelstrom surrounding my first day of observation subsided, I went to school eager to knock out some homework; but as it turned out, all the work that I did in preparation for my observation lesson plan was the homework for the week.

Needless to say, I was relieved.

So, during the morning testing (through which I sit in a desk while hall-monitoring), I got to work on some grading and planning for the rest of the week. Most days, sitting in a drafty high school hallway for two and half or three hours is not my cup of tea. However, after a weekend of less than the daily recommended dose of sleep, a day trip to Atlanta for recording, and a couple of days trying to figure out (with limited success) the finer points of KTIP lesson planning, sitting was grand.

In the afternoon, I was in the classroom again. During 5th period, Mrs. Manning's plans to continue with the dramatic reading of The Crucible were thrown off by several students being absent. Several students adamantly expressed their desire to continue with the story. I've been with the class almost as long as they have been working through the play, and their minds and emotions are piqued by the story; they are emotionally and intellectually invested in the characters and the narrative. Although Mrs. Manning stops occasionally to clarify or ask students to recall previous events, she basically lets the text speak for itself.

According to Charlotte Mason, people (including children and teenagers) tend to connect with truth when it is presented in a literary manner. She maintains that God has designed the human mind to digest knowledge in the same way he made the stomach to digest food. Just as it disastrous to a person's physical well-being to eat fastfood every day, it is disastrous to the heart, soul, and mind to "eat" a steady diet of intellectual fastfood. In contrast, it is vital to nourish children and students with what Mason calls "Living Books," stories that pull you in with rich language, truth, and even controversy. It is a healthy diet of living books that is so desperately needed by students who have cell phones for fingers and XBoxes for eyes.

Living books feed living souls and breathe whispers of what it means to be human in a fallen world. And that's what I saw again today. The students hungered -- they wanted more of what they know to be a good thing -- and I know it may take time (years, even) for the seeds of truth to grow within them and bear fruit. In this class, at least, they are being nourished.

Observation, the First.

Today, It hit. My first observation. Originally, it was scheduled for Thursday, and I felt confident that Mrs. Manning and I would have no problem sifting through all the pre-requisite paperwork on Monday and Tuesday, and that I would have it all ready to turn in to Dr. G sometime Tuesday evening (pre-observation paperwork must be turned in at least two days prior). No big deal.

And then I realized that there would be testing each morning this week and that there would be no 3rd period class on Tuesday for Dr. G to observe. So, on Sunday I contacted her, and she informed me that the only other option would be Tuesday, and that I needed to get the paperwork turned in ASAP. As I began trying to fill forms that have long and very official state-sanctioned names, I soon realized that I had been wading near the shore, ventured towards the middle of the river, and summarily stepped off into a sink hole....and the current.

It was at that point that I, more than somewhat bewildered, called my supervising teacher. Although she herself has not had to work through the same forms as I, she was quite helpful. Helpful and patient. We were able to work through the A-1 and a good portion of the A-2 lesson plan (we had already discussed it quite a bit throughout the previous week); however, there were documents and PowerPoints we were planning to use that were at school, so I couldn't finish until the next morning. Concerned that the problem we encountered would affect the observation, I sent an email to Dr. G explaining the situation, and she replied and said I needed to get them to her ASAP on Monday.

So, Monday. I was able to finish the lesson plan in the morning, and I sent it to Dr. G for her approval; when I received it back from her, it turned out that she had torn it to shreds. Apparently I had left out a good amount of necessary information and had included a decent bit that wasn't needed. Due to the hour at which I received the email from her, I couldn't work on revisions until the morning.

And Today. Tuesday. By the grace of God, testing was going on all morning, and since student teachers are(per state edict) barred from the classroom during testing, I spent the better part of the morning sitting in the hallway in a desk on a laptop revising my unfortunately deficient KTIP lesson plan. Again, by the grace of God, I was able to finish it to the best of my knowledge and ability during the two hours of testing. And then at lunch I was able to attend to a couple of last minute details, print all the different forms and documents I had, paperclip them, stack them, and place them neatly on the sign-in desk at the front office for Dr. G's arrival.

As the afternoon progressed, my nervousness increased. Although I feel comfortable in the classroom and always have since my first days teaching ESL at Cumberland, I had never been officially observed and evaluated. Scary, right? And in the classroom today were Mrs. Manning, Dr. G, and a substitute teacher (Mrs. Manning had to leave in the middle of class to take her infant son to the doctor). The need for a substitute teacher really threw me off. Apparently the State says that a student teacher cannot substitute; so, even though Mrs. Manning only missed the last 15 minutes of class, they had to have a sub. The thing that baffles me is that although I have a bachelor's degree, have completed all the classes for a master's degree (save Student Teaching), and have been fully qualified to be hired as a fulltime teacher since I began my graduate degree two years ago, I can't be in the classroom for 15 minutes without a substitute -- a substitute who has less education than I do and possibly has never even taken an education class. Of course, I wouldn't refuse to comply even if that were an option; I submit to the policies the school must uphold; however, I don't understand the reason(s) behind them. But I digress.

As the 9th graders began filtering into class, I already had the bell-ringer projected on the Smartboard, and I began walking around the room learning the students' names (yesterday was my first day with that class). The bell-ringer (which happened to be a Daily Oral Language exercise -- a sentence with missing punctuation and capital letters and errors in syntax and parts of speech) went smoothly. Some prompting was needed, but they did a satisfactory job fixing the sentence.

Next, I asked for a student to volunteer to come to the board to be the scribe as the class reviewed different forms of irony. Again, the class answered well. After that I had prepared a pre-reading journal entry for them, but I forgot; it completely left my mind, and I jumped into introducing the story, which happened to be "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry. And then I plowed right into to reading the story as a class. Soon, I realized my mistake, but it was too late. I couldn't go back. My omission did nothing calm my already bristling nerves. What would Dr. G say? She had my lesson plan right in front of her, and very clearly indicated pre-reading journaling sandwiched between review of irony and story introduction.

My lackluster memory notwithstanding, the reading went well. Some of the observations students made as we read pleasantly surprised me. One student commented that John Dillingham Young's middle name fading on his mailbox is an ironic symbol of his eroding social standing and economic security. I don't remember her exact words, but that's the gist of her comment -- and from a freshman! I have been worried about the need for me to possibly tone down some of the critical aspects of literature and language; however, her response, in addition others, suggests that they can handle more than I initially anticipated.

At the end of the period, I confessed to the class my mistake. I apologized and gave no excuses for myself, but I suppose I managed to have a positive and humorous approach to my own failings, so they seemed to be amused by it. I was glad for their response. After the students had gone, I headed sheepishly to the back corner desk where Dr. G had set up shop for the period. To my surprise and comfort, she was very understanding about my missing part of the lesson plan. And she was encouraging and helpful overall. We reviewed her notes and assessment thus far of rubrics I have to fulfill, and she offered praise as well as constructive and specific criticism of some aspects of my teaching that need work: areas such as assessment, and engendering more student-centered instruction. In addition, she walked me through some trouble areas of the KTIP lesson plan I completed, and I now feel much less in the dark about requirements and expectations.

That said, my only regret is that there was no way for me sit down with her (or be in a real classroom with her) to talk about the KTIP before it was due and before I had to teach from it. There are, of course, notes and exemplars on the class website; however, I learn significantly more through in-person interaction, whether individually or in a group. I find it a terrible shame that UC only offers the MAT online. The interaction I have had with my professors in person has been nothing less than excellent. I also find it ironic that in a time when designing instruction to accommodate for multiple intelligences has never been greater, that classes addressing the subject by their very nature alienate and limit those who thrive on personal interaction.

But today, I got to spend some time with Dr. G, and I believe I will teach more effectively because of it.

Monday.

Although this first experience I am going to mention didn't occur in the classroom, it does pertain to class reading. One of the suggestions from Teaching with Love and Logic that has struck me is giving students limited autonomy: giving students free choice of equally acceptable options. I tried this method while leading children's Sunday school at my church. At the end of the hour, I asked the kids if they wanted to pick up their toys by themselves or if they wanted me to help them. Both options were fine with me. They chose for me to help them, so I did. The work was quickly completed, and all parties were happy.

Today, I assumed teaching responsibilities for my first class -- 6th period English I. Because I had spent 6th period with the Drama class last week, today was my first time meeting the students. I began class with a DOL; after allowing about 7 minutes for students to work on it, I asked for a volunteer "scribe" to man the Smartboard. As students gave their responses, I led them in connecting their correct answers with underlying grammar conventions. Following the DOL, students paired off and swapped rough drafts for peer-editing. For students who already had completed a final draft, I read their letters and gave suggestions on problems to look for as well as effective ways to correct those issues. Any time I can work with students individually, I feel like I am at my best; it's in one on one interaction that I feel most alive in the classroom.

Although I feel comfortable and competent in the classroom, there is one aspect of teaching that has begun to cause an enormous amount of stress in my life: KTIP lesson planning. I understand the need for vision, preparation, reflection, objectives, and standards; it is absolutely essential. However, the language of state standards, the litany of documents and forms, and the overall systematic and bureaucratic coldness of the system weighs heavily upon my heart and mind at all times -- in the classroom, at home, reading assignments, in bed, at church. That's not to say that the system does no good, nor that I strive to give anything but my very best; at the same time, I wonder if there is a better way: a way that "conforms no longer to the pattern of the world." I want to be transformed by the renewing of my mind and for that transformation to overflow into my teaching and the lives of my students.

D-Day+3 (Friday)

Throughout the week I have been leaving the tutelage of Mrs. Manning to help Mr. Sweet with the WCHS Drama class. Mr. Sweet is one of the pastors at my church, and I have known him for going on five years. Currently they are working on their fall production, Jack Tales, which is a collection of short stories from Appalachia derived from Grimm and other middle European folk sources. The stories traveled with the original settlers from Europe to the New World and became part of the place just as the people did. After simmering in a pot of oral tradition in the mountains for a couple hundred years, they were recorded in the 1930s in the previously mentioned volume. The production is an ambitious effort to reconnect students with a lost piece of their Appalachian culture and heritage.

This week I have collaborated with Mr. Sweet in minor ways; however, most of my time has been spent in observation of Mr. Sweet "blocking" (adapting the short story format to the stage) a couple of the stories. He wanted me to observe in order that I might block one of the stories on my own at the end of the week. And today, that's what I did. Mr. Sweet assigned to me the story "Fill Bowl, Fill," a tale of magic, trickery, faith, adventure, and wit; he also gave me the task of coming up with an alternate ending due to a somewhat abrupt and puzzling end to the original.

So, today I walked with the Drama class to the WCHS amphitheater (they have no indoor stage nor theater), notes in hand, ready (as best as I could be) to be director for the day, and wondering if the students had any idea that I had never been in drama class nor blocked a play before. I was just a bit on the nervous side. But when we arrived, I took center stage, called out the actors chosen for that particular sketch, and started directing: "You go here, now you enter stage right, exit here, now take him off stage and cue the screaming and chopping sounds!" (it's a rather bloody production, all in all).

And it all worked out.

The students liked my directions and stage adaptation of the narrative, and we all had a good time. During the blocking session, the teacher was backstage (but close within earshot) doing some necessary prop work and organization; he commented later that he was thankful for all the help that I gave, especially today, and he approved of the direction I took the actors.

I had never thought I would be able to direct, but now I have another way that I can contribute to the school outside the classroom.

D-Day+2

Today was a good day. For starters, I was blessed with a whopping 6 and a half hours of sleep, so I was feeling a bit more alive when I walked into school this morning, my first 7:15 early duty notwithstanding.

What I noticed most today is that many of the students are beginning to warm up to me (not that they had been at all cold during my first two days). For example, a couple of the classes today had to report to the gym for about 10 minutes each for yearbook pictures. As I walked with the classes during their respective class periods, several crowded around me and wanted to know all about me -- everything from how old I am to how long it took me to grow my beard (just leave it to freshman boys to ask that question; and after I answered, one of them piped up that he could grow one too; it was hilarious!). Walking back, other students wanted to know more about the music I play (my ST informed some of them that I am a musician) and some fellow musicians shared their thoughts on music, the instruments they played, and one even asked me to play guitar at his church. I am sure they would treat any student teacher in a similar way, but it's nice to feel welcomed and liked. I suppose the honeymoon will last until I'm assigning homework!

These experiences throughout the day led to a conversation with my ST about the importance of "getting students on your side." She has clearly done so with her students, and through my time in her classes, I hope I will be able to do the same.

Another bright spot today was my involvement in the classroom steadily continuing to increase. During the 5th period 11th grade bell-ringer, one of the tasks facing students was correctly punctuating a group of words. After they correctly placed all necessary commas, I asked them if they understood why they were correct. Surprisingly, they didn't know why they were right! So I took a minute or two to explain (trying to use as little technical terminology as possible) the idea of reordered adverbial phrases: when an adverb phrase is moved from its natural position to the front of the sentence, that change is denoted by placing a comma between the adverbial phrase and the independent clause.

I love teaching grammar, and I believe it is my strongest content area. So, that experience in class led to Mrs. Manning and I talking about the possibility of my unit being focused on grammar. And I think it sounds pretty promising.