imperfect offering

test

2006-07-26T11:10:00.000-04:00

test

moving?

2006-07-24T20:33:00.000-04:00

i think i'm moving this site over to wordpress. been kicking the tires for a couple days now. so i'll be over here until futher notice:

http://imperfectoffering.wordpress.com/

social urban art play etc etc

2006-07-23T11:50:00.000-04:00

I'm having one of those convergence moments- you know, when everything you read, see, talk about, dream connects in some serendipitous way? what's truly exciting about this is that it means that my brain has been freed up to play a bit. it was rusty at first, but i'm warming up, baby! and god, it feels good.

that's not to say i've got any grand announcements to make. just excited pointing gestures. like reading the interview on avant gaming iowa review web's latest issue on "space and place in new media writing,"just before picking up darren o' donnell's (2 r's, 2 n's, 2 l's) social acupuncture (1 c, 1 p), and then going out and watching beloved ex-rheo dave clark extend his improvised drum solo into and onto thesocial space of the audience. need to throw in lisa robertson's value village essay into the mix, except I don't have it. wasn't able to get one at the launch, for reasons to tedious to explain here, and have struck out at 2 bookstores now. and coach house seems to have abandoned? restricted? their tip the author policy. no potlatch for you!

also finding a lot to think about in darren's book re: the politics of discomfort. i've been circling around the pedagogy of discomfort for a while now, and after skooled, i've got a fresh perspective on it. jury's still out, though.

saw a lot of very pretty books yesterday at art metropole. recorded a lot of "ooh and ahhh" sounds emanating from our excited selves. took home postcard reproductions of a work by heidi neilson, which was conceptually like this, but looks more like this, and reminds me of this, which I heard about from him.

noodling

2006-07-23T07:35:00.000-04:00

what i'm up to these days

the flaming shitbag icon:

the language of inquiry: community

2006-07-21T09:14:00.000-04:00

I didn't go home from This Ain't The Rosedale Library empty handed. I picked up The Language of Inquiry, a collection of meditations by Lyn Hejinian on potery and poetics, mostly previously published pieces. A LOT to digest here. A lot on and about and around and beside stein. And a lot of helpful stuff about issues that never seem to go away. Wish I'd read the piece called "Who's speaking?" a few months ago, as it raises questions about the formation of communities, the power of speech and silence and silencing within those communities. The text is based on a talk she'd given at a panel in 1983; Johanna Drucker was one of the other participants. Some ideas that got me excited:

"To the extent that humans know about humans, community occurs. A community consists of any or all of those persons who have the capaqcity to acknowledge what others among them are doing."

"The question 'Who is speaking?' implies, then, yet another question: 'Who is listening?' Consideration of how speaking is being heard and what is being heard in and of it involves another address ti power. Listening accords power to speech. It grants it its logic by discovering logic in it. In listening as in speaking, both meaningfulness and meaning are at stake. To trace the lines of reciprocity through which they are established is to map a social space, a community."

the jag & the staggers

2006-07-21T08:12:00.000-04:00

fabulous chat with a.raw yesterday about podcast possibilities, made even more fabulous by sitting at Kalendar, lazily sipping a concoction dreamt up by one of their bartenders called, "the Jag." The main ingredients were chartreuse and a mysterious entity known as "lemon myrtle," which the interner tells me is a herb indigenous to australia, and which i predict will be the new lemon grass. We're going to see this thing everywhere- tea, essential oils, soaps, shampoos, soups and salads. But trendspotting aside, this drink knocks the mojito out of the park for summer drinking pleasure. and as i meandered my way home with a pleasant, heady buzz, I reflected, for about the gazillionth time this summer, how much I miss life during the year, all the little incidental pleasures. Having a second drink when I go out (IF i go out) during the year is a calculated affair: "do I have work to do when I get home?" "do I have an early morning meeting?" etc. A third drink is a pricey transgression. But it's not just having the freedom to kil a few brain cells now and then. Even my weekly day off during the year is parcelled out and portioned off, and planned to get the most out of it.

It's been amazing to me how much time doing nothing takes. Since coming back from skooled, aside from the cottage adventure, I haven't done much. And yet my days have been full. I can go to every reading/music show I want to see, and then sleep in the next day should I need to. I can actually read the book I buy at the reading- not just shelve it for some mythical day when I have time. I can read every post on every blog should i want to. I can reply to every e-mail. I can visit with friends. I can wash the floor. I can get things fixed. I can cook a great meal AND do the dishes afterwards. I can take a walk. I can read the paper. and that's a day. I haven't even had time to play video games.

is this just the cost of any professional life? or is it particular to teaching and other jobs that follow you home when you leave the office? i just about bit the head off a taxi driver yesterday who told me that I had THREE months off in the summer. This is the most relaxed I've been in years, and yet I still had a teacher dream last week. And I know august will bring more, and I'll start my planning then. (though I have extended my self-imposed ban on planning to include the 1st week of august.)

I *have* scaled down my commitments for next year. There is a pressure towards martyrdom in the profession that's easy to fall victim to, if you're not careful. Maybe I'll be able to live in a less frenetic way.

girl rock

2006-07-20T09:59:00.000-04:00

one of the highlights of skooled for me was rock school, where i got to strap on a bass for the first time and kick it old school. (best compliment ever: one of the crew said there were shades of iggy pop in my performance.) part of our transformation from teachers into rockers was accomplished by our lovely stylists, Ditsy and M*ily from Mittens. The picture of them at top right was taken at skooled, just after their own performance. Ditsy and M*ily were such a delight- pure, unabashed enthusiasm of the kind you can only find in a 16 year old girl. They reminded me of a line from a PK Page poem, "Nothing, not even the threate of punishment, can suppress the giggle of a girl." They just bubbled over at everything. I was even more impressed when I came across this line in their bio on another page: "we are probably the girls you laugh at and make fun of, but we don't give a sh*t. It just gives us more to write about."

more girl rock last weekend at Metric's Dog Day Afternoon, which was stinkin hot, so it was hard to truly relax and enjoy the earlier parts of the show. I'd definitely go to see land of talk and holy fuck again. but metric's performance was worth the price of admission alone. They played a track from Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" before appearing on stage, which set me up just right. Watching Emily Haines rock out, I felt eased out of twinge the regret I'd always felt after Sarah Harmer put Weeping Tile to bed in favour of the singer-songwriter mode of the solo female artist. Don't get me wrong- nobody does it better. I just want a little less Lilith Fair. A little more Patti Smith. Got warm all over at the sight of a 12 year old girl in a sun-protective hat, stepping back and forth, completely out of time to the music, a quiet, almost meditative adoration of Haines, while her father ( i presume) stood a few protective rows back.

and then there's girl's rock summer camp.

rock star

2006-07-15T09:33:00.000-04:00

I adore Eileen Myles. I suspect that most people who hear her for the first time are likewise smitten. She read from a long prose work, not yet published, anecdotal musings about a life of poetry, and the opening chapter told of her hard crush on an English professor in college, one of those profs who makes you feel smart just by looking at you, you makes you feel as though you're truly seen when they look at you, and I thought, this must be exactly what your students feel about you, Eileen Myles.. Hell, it's what I was feeling, sitting not even a foot away from her in the small performance space. A completely engaging story teller. She made us feel as though she was so glad to be there among friends, though I can't imagine she had personal connections with many people there. and she had another quality that's extremely rare. she possessed a deep level of cool that isn't predicated on making everyone else around her feel uncool. sitting there in front of her, you sort of felt that you too could have done a poetry reading at CBGB's.

oh, i could go on and on. by the time i pounced on the book counter, every last copy of everything had been snatched up. i do wish she'd read some poetry. would have just loved to hear how she read. yes, i know there are mp3s. will have to do.

Lisa Foad and Zoe Whitall were perfect openers. just a delightful evening from beginning to end.

and it's always being now

2006-07-14T12:14:00.000-04:00

Planet AUTHORity - AUTHOR INTERVIEWS: "Myles: I bumped into a little zen in high school. It was in the air then, J.D. Salinger, etc. It's such a part of '60s non-academic poetry. And I began some sitting about two years ago--I haven't been doing it all lately, but that really gave me a sense of poetry as a practice as one might have a zen practice. Something one returns to continually. There's a Buddhist saying: try, try, try one thousand times. I like the notion of continuing things. I can hardly do anything that I don't think I can continue. Especially if I can pick it up and put it down and still be doing it. Something I can return to. Gertrude Stein is very zen to me.

Pearlberg: How so?

Myles: Stein's zenness refers to her loyalty to 'being.' She refers a lot to that lively thing, the animative quality in a human -- it's what she would be seeking in someone she might be making a portrait of. All in all in her explanation of literature she's obsessed with motion, movement, circulation, aliveness. I see her as connected to a particularly American sense of literature in which the expansiveness of now, not a representation of it, but it, itself in literature is the real subject. That's zen to me."

great interview with Eileen Myles over at planet authority, a new site to me.

back from the brink

2006-07-14T10:58:00.000-04:00

alejandro escovedo's show at the el mo on wednesday night was so good, it relieved the sting of having to miss both calexico and wilco last week. it felt like old home week at the el mo- everyone from the toronto alt country scene was there. seeing yvonne matsel and ted footman in the room made me feel as though i was back in my happy days at ted's wrecking yard, like nothing had changed. the first and only other time I saw escovedo was there- and as I line my dates up, that must have been a tour for "a man under the influence," cause that was one of the last shows I saw there. i'm glad to see that five years later they still haven't renovated the building. it stands an empty testimony to what was. okay, okay, i know. this is all very melodramatic, but we all have those venues that mean something more to us than just four walls, don't we? and ted's was mine.

aaaanyhow. escovedo is one of the best live performers I've seen. his touring bands are tight as all get out, and he must bring his own sound cause it's always perfect. rich, sweet, and loud. and this night, he played with all the pathos of someone who's fought death and won. the only drawback to the night was the fact that for some reason they'd set up a bunch of chairs and tables at the front, which put a damper on the movement he teased out of a frigid toronto crowd. i'd just come from a poetry event, so for me, the atmosphere felt positively unhinged by comparison. actually, to be fair, the audience was warm. in fact escovedo said it felt like texas. he probably says that to all the crowds, but i felt a little heart-stir all the same, and the thought of moving to austin began to announce itself as a possibility again to me.

mostly, it just felt good to hear good music again. and it felt really good to see the artistry involved in a reallly good performance. there've been a few comments floating around the blogosphere of late that give voice to a distrust of the slick performance, as if, i don't know, it's a smoke and mirrors act to disguise the fact that there's little substance underneath? a kind of snake oil sales pitch? most recently i saw it on stuart's blog, and someone already raised a friendly eyebrow at his remarks in the comments section. I'm still not entirely sure if I've sussed out the basis for these kinds of objections properly, mostly because I don't understand them. A good performance is no substitute for poor content. A truly good performance *IS* good content. And I'm gearing up to calling bullshit on this divide that keeps getting articulated, the divide between people "just reading" their poems and people performing their poems. The conflation of the slick and the artful performance is also deeply suspect for me. With these thoughts in mind, I'm looking forward to hearing Eileen Myles tonight at This Ain't the Rosedale. I first heard about Eileen Myles this spring when I took the course in the New York School poets from Stuart, and he positively raved about her. So I find it fascinating that she's blurbed as "a virtuoso performer" of her work and "the rock star of modern poetry."

it takes a village to raise a poem

2006-07-14T10:01:00.000-04:00

quite a substantial crowd gathered at value village on wednesday night to hear lisa even-the-village-voice-thinks-she's-cool robertson read from the office for soft architecture. everyone there was delighted- staff, shoppers, poets... it was hard to tell who came for the shopping and who came for the poetry. everyone i interviewed said they came for both. my favourite part of the event was the fact that robertson read through the PA, er.. what do you call that thing in a store? the store's announcement system. Attention shoppers: here's something profound! a bargain on philosophical reflections on space and the flaneur! my attention drifted in and out of the essay (can't we just call these essays?) much as it does in any reading, but it felt like there was an understood permission to do so here. you could browse the reading as you browsed the shelves- and i mean to use the word "as" here in a double sense: "in the same way", "and at the same time."

an interesting contrast between this reading and the Book Length Dinner reading of/with The Men a few days prior, whose price tag and beautiful people alienated a couple of the people i spoke to, who felt much more comfortable in this setting. still gathering my thoughts about that tension.

you can listen to an audio archive of robertson reading from The Office for Soft Architecture at the recently remodelled coach house web site.

the scream has scrum

2006-07-12T14:17:00.000-04:00

as others have noted, twas a soggy soggy scream, decimating the numbers we're usually used to, but raising that feeling of cameraderie that you can only get with a crowd of strangers in difficult circumstances.

and, as others also have noted, the offerings were mixed, some readings taking to flight through the damp a bit better than others. stuart says that jon paul's style would have been better in a living room. i think it would have been better in the 3rd set. there's a hushed attention in the 3rd set of the scream. the kids have gone home, the darkness brings quiet. the 3rd set is the place for dry wit, for the offhand remark. Goran Simic's reading also suffered last year from being in the 1st set, his wry, mournful humour got lost. i, too, loved the way jon paul hurled his books, a slacker gesture if there ever was one. Afua Cooper finished the first set with a strong though not earth shattering performance, busting through the umbrella sound barrier. As the rhythm and intensity of one of her poems increased, water that had been building up from the rain fall broke through some unseen barrier, and dramatically accenting the poem, rushed down the steps of the raised stage behind her, a gushing kind of climax i couldn't help find a bit exciting.

the 2nd set was flanked by two strong performances. Kevin Conolly's opening poem was perfect, a poem that referenced a peformance situation but told it slant with a surreal twist. he had us at hello. And Darren O'Donnell framed a conversational invitation to social accupuncture with a tightly scripted monologue.

the 3rd set sent us home on a high note. I could listen to Erin Moure read in gallician for hours! and the excerpt she chose to read from the "theoretical" sections of Little Theatres was so apt, given the Big Theatre we were in, you could hear an audible "oh!" from a few places in the audience: "...The message didn't arrive. And now the audience is watching. But it's over. The play starts now: after it's over."

This was the one-two punch of the evening for me. So much to think about in Erin's reading, but then out came angela and her two colleagues, with an absolutely mind-blowing vocal orchestration of sections of wide slumber. the hysteria of those butterflies descending, the "ah" a panicked breath taken by force. the fluttering consonants and vowels. the horrors of the specimen jar. it was nothing short of brilliant. spell-binding. i've often said to my teacher colleagues, when they comment on what a good teacher angela is, that I'd lure her into the classroom if it weren't for the fact that i need her to be a poet because she's writing the poetry I want to read. and now she's performing the poetry i want to hear.

I still had angela's performance ringing in my ears when steven heighton came on, so i was a bit distracted. the richness of his poetry didn't quite carry through his reading. the message didn't arrive. was surprised by his choices from Ecstasy of Skeptics. so many poems in that volume have a livelier rhythm, even a more vivid conceptual energy that would have made good use of the big space you have at the scream. Finally, as others have also noted, Ryan Knighton was affable, his preambles
just as engaging as his work, and i mean that as a compliment to both.

so there's my take,
and you can read others here, here, here, here, and here.

woo'd

2006-07-10T14:50:00.000-04:00

the indisputable highlight of last night's small press dating game was Gary Barwin's poetic attempt to woo Mark truscott, the bachelorette. I asked Gary for a copy of the poem, cause after the line, "through the chest hairs of language," I was laughing so hard, I missed a good 2/3 of it. he's graciously posted it on his blog, along with some reflections about the event.

meanwhile, The Paper is on tv, which is almost enough to keep me distracted from the large thunderclaps that a dragging their heels in getting out of town.

World eBook Fair

2006-07-10T12:42:00.000-04:00

came across this via metafilter this morning (so nice to have the time to follow every link in metafilter if I choose!)

World eBook Fair

"July 4th to August 4, 2006 marks a month long celebration of the 35th anniversary of the first step taken towards today's eBooks, when the United States Declaration of Independence was the first file placed online for downloading in what was destined to be an electronic library of the Internet. Today's eBook library has a total of over 100 languages represented.

The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009."

mefi helpfully pointed out that some Neal Stephenson texts were among the offerings. yum!

rain, rain, go away!

2006-07-10T10:17:00.000-04:00

the forecast isn't great, but it's much better than the current thunderstorm that must be causing no end of anxiety for bill, and all the other scream organizers, who, for the 14th time, are undergoing the nail-biting anticipation of a huge outdoor literary event with no rain date nor venue.

I have faith that it will clear, as promised, and have offered sacrifices to my various gods. I want good weather more than ever for this one cause the line-up is stellar. Some people I'm particularly looking forward to hearing:

Kevin Conolly- whose newest collection, Drift, alternately sends me into hysterical and meditative fits

Afua Cooper- a wonderful performer

Jon Paul Fiorentino- one of my favourite dudes of canadian letters right now, epsecially for his editorial work on matrix, and the post-prairie anthology. can't wait to experience Theory of the Loser Class as performance. wondering what he'll choose

Steven Heighton- many of us who did english undergrads at queen's developed crushes, literary and not-so literary, on mr. heighton. While I've enjoyed hearing excerpts from his fiction, I hope he'll read from Address Book. Like Karen Solie and Ken Babstock, He reminds me why the lyric form isn't bankrupt when it's in the right hands

Ryan Knighton- i was reading Cockeyed, his memoir of his experience of gradually becoming blind, while I was at skooled. not only is it great to have such a great writer communicate that experience, but what I've loved about Knighton is what he teaches me about language because of his altered relationship to it. he's also got a book of poetry coming out in the fall, and i'm very excited about it.

Maggie MacDonald- she's just one of the coolest chics in the lit scene right now. member of the hidden cameras AND cyborg-manifesto influenced writing? I'm just catching up on her, long overdue

Erin Moure- I've always loved Moure (the aspects of her work that I can understand, that is. the stuff I don't? i trust her enough to know that if i worked at it, I would be rewarded. that's all i ask). I love her even more after having read the interview that Carmine Starnino did with her back in 91, i think? that I read in preparation for my own 3 rounds with starnino (which i'm told will, at last be published in CNQ in July). The lady's got class.

Darren O' Donnell- well, i assume won't perform this one with full frontal nudity, as he has so many other times. always outrageous. always thought-provoking.

a. rawlings- yea, I've heard she's good :)
(yay angela!! rock out!!!)

so, yes. I'm excited.
It must stop raining.
and it will.

what happened

2006-07-09T10:22:00.000-04:00

I've come home to find the scream in full tilt, and I've missed so many fantastic events. I've been experiencing them vicariously mostly through angela's blog: here, here, and here
and here.

but also through alexandria bamford, whom I first heard and met at the last lex, and whose blog(s)(here and here) many of us have been reading with great interest because of their generous attention, detail and thought.

so i was interested to pick up on a question about blog reportage and the responsibility of the blog reporter, and the blog audience, as it related to the herpoetics event. i banged on about it at length in the comments box over there, but I'm going to repost my comments here, cause it does underscore for me the importance of rethinking how I teach students to interpret what they read, which will be a project for august.

"i've been hearing a number of people make comments similar to mark, a certain wariness about how an event will be represented in blogland, or other forms of diy media, and, while i understand the concern, I think that once again, this newish form of technology is only revealing something that has been going on for a long time in other contexts. for example, I just went to read the new york times book reviews, and saw that in the opening lines of the e-mail digest which i receive, a certain book got panned, so I scrolled past to look at the other offerings. I let a review determine my personal judgment of the book as not being worthy to compete for my limited reading attention. but it wasn't just any review. it was a review from a source I trust, and whose particular biases are somewhat known to me. if the toronto sun had panned the book, i might immediately go out and buy a copy.

events are always going to be shaped or re-shaped by a variety of filters. even being there in person doesn't mean that you will have a pure experience of what happened, because there's no such thing. a prior experience with an individual author, or with feminism, or with panel discussions, will be enough to have one person come away from the herpoetics event with a very different sense of what happened than someone else.

one important difference for how these things get taken up in blogland versus traditional reporting is that in addition to the near-instananeous reportage, blog encourage near-instantaneous response and dialog, through comments, but also through other posts. if someone feels that they have been unfairly misrepresented, it's just as easy for them to post a reply or start their own blog.

and i think it's only a certain kind of naive readership who will take what is posted on a blog as a pure representation of what happened. other readers will filter what's being said through who's saying it, and that will be part of what informs their interpretation of the post and the event.

don't get me wrong- i think that that kind of naive readership is probably in the majority in the general population. But that's a problem with how hermeneutics is taught, and I'm doing all I can in the trenches to solve that one in my own small corner! But in a population of poets and critics and critical thinkers, a certain degree of interpretive sophistication should, i would argue, be taken for granted, and if it isn't, that's not the fault of the blogger. we should know better."

skool is out... almost

2006-07-07T11:11:00.001-04:00

the second half of the "semester" was so packed that this is the first chance I've had to write about anything. and the reason I have this time even now is that I was one of the five people exampted from exams because of my marks. i cannot tell you what a kick-ass reward that was.

so much has happened, and i wish i'd been able to document it in the moment. i feel myself revising my own narrative of the events in keeping with the narrative structure the director was building. the main arc of the story for me will definitely be the struggles with phyz ed class. it was one of our first classes when we returned from break day, and, as the shooting involves a lot of start and stop, there was a significant break of time between tyler's announcement of the task for the day, and the class itself. enough time for me to forge a note from my mother saying that my doctor had forbid me to engage in physical activity for the rest of the week. the day's activity was introduced as "skooled boot camp" and we were to go through a number of physical workout activities, pushing ourselves to our limit. Ironically, these were all tasks I actually could have done without much struggle: push-ups, swimming laps, and working out in a weight room. But I was still sore from feeling manipulated and coerced, and the task seemed to be all about doing hard things because they're hard- and I've never been a good puritan.

Besides, I wanted to try on this new identity. In my own highschool experience, I never pulled this trick, or any trick for that matter. When faced with something I didn't want to do, I was never crafty. It just never occured to me. I would either comply, or confess straight on that I couldn't do it, often with tearful accompaniment. This time, I wanted things to be different. I wanted to access the power of the trickster, try it on for size. And it did work, to a limited degree.
During class, I felt positively giddy. The bubble was burst by an off camera conversation with tyler, where I realized that he was quite personally upset by what I'd done. he took it as a personal dis to what he believes in and what he stands for. He's a very determined young man, who has overcome much in his life. The value of overcoming struggle is one of his core beliefs, and I began to understand why he was taking my playful snub so seriously.

meanwhile, one of dre's comments to me about my performance in rock school class had hit very close to home. she'd rightly sussed out that I was held back by concerns about looking ridiculous. over the course of the show, in my thoughts leading up to it, in conversations with others, I'd been becoming increasingly aware of how much other people's opinions mean to me, and how they often make me more tentative than I'd like to be, how they undermine my confidence, and my ability to carry through an impulse without faltering. now here was a challenge that I *did* want to overcome. it had intrinsic merit to me. so I seized upon it and made it my homework assignment for phyz ed. to try to get over worrying about appearances and my fears of others' judgments, I went for 24 hours on the show without make-up. some of you will understand what a big deal that can be, esepcially since the stress of the show had gifted me with a fresh new break-out.

through this, I was able to offer tyler a show of good faith, give him something that I hope he realized was a significant act on my part, and way more challenging in some ways than any of the physical challenges I eventually undertook. My identity as someone who can conquer their fear of heights, or someone who can walk up a precarious concrete ledge, means very little to me. But my identity as an attractive person? Taking a risk with that was huge. and it had unexpected gains. It did, ironically, liberate me to a huge degree. i did go into the next rock school classes, where we were working on stage presence and style, a very different person. I had already given up control over my appearance, so it was very easy to adopt a different persona and style without much reservation. also fairly telling was the fact that within only those 24 hours, my skin had completely cleared. when the adorable young stylists (more about them later), went to do my make-up, they went to put on my foundation and looked and me and said, "oh, you're one of those people who don't need to wear a lot of foundation!" I'm not sure exactly what cleared my skin- the fact that I had finished all of my phyz ed classes and so my major stress of the show was over, or the fact that I had so significantly let go. I know that I also felt incredibly relaxed that day- my body felt fluid and limber.

one final irony in this whole experience. as i was typing this post, I received an e-mail alert that someone had made a comment to one of my earlier blog posts. it turned out to be a spam comment, but the title of the post intrigued me, so I took a look at it. guess overcoming struggle is one of my core beliefs too :)

skool is hard

2006-07-02T22:33:00.000-04:00

i'm home for break day, and boy do i ever need it. today we had "mid-terms" which ended up being a "fear factor" rip-off. we had been asked, while we were being interviewed for the show, what our greatest fears were. stupidly, we all were honest, each and every one of us. so my challenge was to face my fear of heights by riding up in a crane, 60 feet above ground.

i almost didn't do it- not because of the fear, but out of principle. i didn't want to do it- i don't care to overcome my fear of heights, and i'm getting a little tired of being asked to do things that have little intrinsic value for a mark that means nothing to me.

but it's more exhausting to not participate in the tasks than to just go along with them. we've all been raising our objections to various assignments- of course i think my own objections are reasonable, and sometimes find the others' tedious, but i'm sure they think the same about mine. most of the marks here are for particpation. it's kind of like being taught by the guy who's the restaurant manager in Office Space, the one who's trying to get jennifer aniston to wear more "flare."

and then the teacher who was to lead me, and one of my fellow students, through the task was none other than mr. chavez, my phyz ed teacher, the guy who's failing me.
so now i didn't want to look like a wuss in front of him.

fortunately, the student who was paired with me is a warm, generous soul, and we supported each other through it. in the end, the task wasn't as hard as i thought it would be. mr. chavez did give us some information before we did it about the reasons behind the fear of heights and that it can be overcome by focussing on one spot.
so i did a lot of deep breathing beforehand, and decided to focus on a very tall tree, so i wouldn't have to change my gaze as i went up. i know the production crew were kind of disappointed that i didn't freak out, but i don't give a shit. i needed to win my dignity back. i broke down a bit in anticipation of the task, and that pissed me off to no end, because i didn't want to look like any more of a wimp in front of that little twirp. the director, who's a great guy, assured me several times that i didn't need to do anything i didn't feel comfortable doing. but even though that was true technically, it really meant nothing because of all the emotional pressures involved in the task.

afterwords, everyone kept asking me if i felt like i'd achieved something. at times i sort of mumbled that i did. but i was seething. i felt defeated. i let them manipulate me into doing something i didn't want to do.

what does any of this have to do with school, you might be asking?
well, it doesn't really. i mean, this incident was such a clear rip off of other reality shows. in the show's defense, i know they were trying to get the students in a position where we weren't so secure, because we keep trying to teach the teachers.

but it did drive home even more for me the concerns i have about coersion in the classroom. why aren't more of my students seething as I was today? or maybe they are and they just express it differently. (and please, i'm not being hard on myself here- i don't think that my classroom is any more coersive than any other, in fact, i do believe that it's less coersive than many... but i've seen how the expectations of these young teachers have an effect on me....) after i got done seething, i just felt apathetic. i don't feel like doing anything for any of the classes anymore.

so even though it's been a pretty intense couple of days, i'm glad i'm doing this. it's good to be on the other side.

skooled

2006-07-01T14:22:00.000-04:00

well, here I am at skooled. i haven't blogged about this because i wasn't sure whether it would be okay with the production crew, but apparently they aren't concerned about spoilers. not sure what that indicates.

but yes. i'm on a reality television show, on day 3 of shooting. the premise is that high school students and teachers trade places. they managed to get a great bunch of teacher personalities together, but despite reality television shows' best efforts to create conflict, the students (us) are all getting along pretty well. as for how we're getting along with our teachers (them), that's another story. we have five classes:
psyche: youth culture
issues: world issues (very loosely defined- the class is really activism 101)
phyz ed (the oh so hip spelling is intentional): overcoming obstacles
rock school: self-explanatory
life skills: debating

the kids are putting us through are paces, but we're giving them lots to handle.
I have to run off to my issues class now, so I don't have time to get into much detail, but I will mention that I am failing phyz ed, and I am the only student to have received an F in anything so far! :)

i am learning a lot. the whole experience certainly highlights how coercive school can be. and how much of that coersion is exercised through social force, and the deprivation of time, and especially reflective time.

feeling tired and a bit bent out of shape.
for the "comfort item" which we were encouraged to bring, i brought terry eagleton's "after theory." and it is definitely proving to be a comfort. course, i let everyone think that my fuzzy eeyore slippers are my comfort item. i'm only willing to reveal the depths of my geekdom in certain contexts.

digital storying telling

2006-06-24T10:13:00.000-04:00

bgblogging: Lessons Taken from the Gathering of Digital Storytellers: "He focuses on visual storytelling. He showed a story by a student on a reservation--the process took three weeks. Josh had to learn a whole new form of communication and teaching--the community didn't want to talk about the issues.
'Why do we even take pictures? How are they used in society? Are they the truth?' These are the basic questions he starts out every class with. The essentialness of teaching image literacy. Every photograph is a self-portrait.
Taking metaphor and turning it into matter--hope, sorrow, confusion, for example. He gives students an image scavenger hunt--he gives them abstractions, and the kids have to go out and take photographs of time, memory, etc."

- ideas for ENG4U, version 2

getting down from the cross

2006-06-21T11:31:00.001-04:00

i've begun re-thinking what I'm going to do in the 12U course next year. Normally, I have the students do a fairly intense independent study unit on contemporary canadian poetry. for many of them, it's the first encounter any of them have had with poetry in their english classes. so we have to build a poetics from scratch.
because of the dramatic absense of other poetry teaching in their classes, I've taken it upon myself to be the self-appointed saviour of the readership of canadian contemporary poetry. the words "if you don't do it, who will?" are lodged somewhere in my gut.

so, i'm thinking about not doing that next year.
I'm really tired of swimming upstream. and i don't think that saviour complex is healthy.

but what started me thinking about this was some excited thoughts i've been having about developing the media portion of the course further. the course's main focus is narrative. i just started thinking about how fun and exciting the course could be if i did something with media and narrative and identity for the ISU...
for a grade 12 course, i want to go conceptually deep. and the problem with teaching poetry in this context is that i can't go deep because i have to go broad as well. i also have to spend a lot of energy converting the dubious.
but television, movies, the internet, they understand these things already. and they like these things already. for a group of students who have no interest in the arts at all, doesn't it make more sense to start with something they *do* like, and enrich their understanding of it?

l e x i c o n j u r y

2006-06-21T11:31:00.000-04:00

l e x i c o n j u r y ended last night.

but, as stein said, the end of a play is not the end of a day.

Pin in the map - mark a spot; attach text; send to others.

2006-06-19T08:14:00.000-04:00

Pin in the map - mark a spot; attach text; send to others.

or, e-mail to your teacher... (the text being an annotation about why this location is important to the novel... something, something...

something....

a long time ago i had a dream about annotate-able websites. something wiki-ish, but maybe more like this..

O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0

2006-06-19T08:10:00.000-04:00

O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0

fro eng4u:
the difference between web 1 and web 2 as a model for postmodern organizing sensibilities?

exam logic

2006-06-18T16:22:00.000-04:00

"By killing Duncan, Macbeth would lose King Duncan's trust."

- written on one of my grade 11 exams.

Who says I didn't teach them how to make a logical argument?

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Creativity and Education: re-visioning teacher education

2006-06-18T09:30:00.000-04:00

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Creativity and Education: re-visioning teacher education

and again...

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Notes on Learning and Motivation

2006-06-18T09:28:00.001-04:00

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Notes on Learning and Motivation

more summer reading

Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog

2006-06-18T09:28:00.000-04:00

learning & video games

more thoughts for summer reading

concept capture

2006-06-18T08:54:00.000-04:00

one of my colleagues and I had a long chat on friday about the use of technology at the school. he's a mac guy, and his relationship to tech is similar to mine: where it makes life easier or richer, he loves it. we're also, as we've recently discovered, both INTJ on the myer's briggs scale, and have a green dominance in the colours personality test (not surprising that these two coincide since one is watered down version of the other..).

so here's the problem we were trying to address.
If we believe that learning and literacy is context dependent, ( which I do) then for our students in particular, who do not share a cultural context with me, the classroom context becomes a very important shared context. So developing a sense of continuity of theme and skill and vocabulry development is crucial.

problem: how to communicate that sense of continuity?
the majority of my students don't keep good notebooks. and training a senior level academic class of 30 students to keep a good notebook? well... i'd just rather not.

solutions i tried this year:

1) keep class notes on big sheets of paper on the wall of the classroom
This would be the ideal way to do it- acrete the knowledge as we gain it, and put it in a physical representation of the prior knowledge.
and if i had a classroom all to myself for one class, this would work, but there simply is not enough wall space.

2) have students create a concept map at the end of each unit
this has some possibilities, but it doesn't facilitate the ongoing documentation very well

something I'm thinking about for next year:
- using a web site

now that my ibook is no longer my home computer, I can use it at school.
a group task could be to take notes on the computer.
it could become a note-taking activity.
i could then download the notes to my ipod (or have the student do it...)
and post them on the website at night.
the website could be in some interactive form- blog/wiki

problem:
- student home internet access is not at 100%.

but maybe...
hrm...
maybe i use it as a more efficient way to use the classroom wall to document what we've learned. if we had hot spots on the 2nd floor...
if i had the laptop on a cart, with a data projector, and it was all my stuff, not to be shared with anyone (until that glorious day when we all will have a media cart and the lion and the lamb will lie down together)
then i could project the accumulated knowledge of a particular task on the wall at a particular time. (ooooh.. what if i had a remote mouse?)

toys: remote mouse, data projector, 2nd hand laptops...

(mini brainstorm- work with j. on a llap top project targetted specifically at the 2p course)

ENG4U - the last stand

2006-06-18T08:32:00.000-04:00

I've got two sections of 4U in semester 1 and after this semester's experience, I'm happier than ever to have it. The course resonates so strongly with unfied themes- i love the major texts we teach - In the Skin of Lion and Hamlet- I love the way I teach them, (Hamlet as film- two comparative studies- branagh and almereyda's version, and then Almereyda's version and the Matrix), and I love the short stories I teach to introduce the course.

And this year, I feel that I was more successful than ever in learning how to deal with a perenniel problem at garneau- a class full f students coming into 4U with weak performances in 3U. These students typically have two main strikes against them:
- weak analytic and communicative skills
- weak work habits

In the past, I have tried to correct both of these, and everyone has ended up frustrated and gaining neither study habits nor insights. This year, I decided to just work on the first two, and lower my expectations about their work habits. I didn't lower my standards for evaluation. I just held their hands to help them get there way more than I ever have.

It was a good decision. The kids have come away with a passion and developed insight into literature and film and they really have developed their ability to organize and communicate their insights. They've also understood something about how much work it takes to do these things well. Whether they'll now put that level of work into their studies on their own is up to them. But at least they've tasted it.

This give me a lot to think about for next year. 4U is a crap shoot. Sometimes, like last year, you get a high proportion of high performing kids. I had two large sections last year, and the majority of them had marks in the 80s and 90s.
Sometimes, you get what I got this year.

In the past, I have refused to spend any time teaching them how to write a literary essay. I reasoned that by 4U, they should know how to do one. So I just give them the opportunity to show me that they know how. But, as my 3U's showed me this past semester, that knowledge isn't solid by the time they reach 4U. And since i have no control (at this point) over how much this skill is practiced in 9 and 10, i've got to play with the cards I'm dealt.

so, plans for 4U:
review some of the more successful exercises i did this year with my 4Us and adapt them for use in a larger class.

needs:
a thesaurus for every group
some way to capture the repertoire of vocabulary/concepts we develop over the course of the semester

burst of activity

2006-06-18T08:21:00.000-04:00

we got our timetables for next year last week and everyone is full of that energy that a new timetable engenders. a new timetable is full of hope and promise and such an easy distraction from today's marking and yesterday's failures. my mind is bursting with ideas and concerns and projects and so I'm going to document them here as much as possible so they don't evaporate.

winding down

2006-06-18T08:01:00.000-04:00

welp. it's over. all that remains is to mark another 150 or so pieces of work, and then we can put this baby to bed.

i've come to the end of term feeling much better about what i've done than any other term- at least when I consider what and how I've taught them. but i still don't understand why my one 3U class learned how to write essays expressively and the other didn't. I did exactly the same things with each of them. and the ones who failed to pick up the ball completely were smart kids and good students. so what happened?
in my masochistic moods, i decide that the class that got it would have gotten it without me, and that it's a sign of my failure to teach the others. in my optimistic moods, i decide that the class that got it were inspired and set free by my wonderful teaching and the other class were lead to water but failed to drink.
i suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
but what am i to learn from this?

I do think personality and class tone have a lot to asnwer for here. the class that got it (herafter referred to as the 4th period class) was smaller, and lively and had a higher proportion of bad-asses it in. that kind of vibe fits snugly with my teaching style.

the first period class was larger, by ten students, in a cramped portable, and less lively as much because it was 1st period as anything else. I think I could have done more for them if i had worked harder to improve the tone- more games, more crazy tasks, rearranging the desks to make things better, more personal communication with individual students.

of course, i didn't have time to do any of these things and that's why I'm dropping another one of my commitments for next year. i'm only going to do the newspaper and the publishing conference next year, and i'm going to get better at getting help with both of these things. I'm going to find someone else to facilitate the poetry jams and work with them initially to get them going.

That scales me back to 1 ongoing commitment and 1 major event.
that seems reasonable.

Uncanny Valley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2006-06-10T11:15:00.000-04:00

followed this link about the "uncanny valley" from a mefi post about anime cosplayers that i will go back to reading in a sec. my understanding was that people feel more empathetic towards non-humanoid AI entities, and that the closer they came to being human, the less empatheic they felt. i mean, who do you like more, c3po or r2d2?
but maybe it's because most of the humanoid AI forms we encounter all occupy that uncanny valley.
i was trying to think about where i'd got this idea, and was pretty sure it was from smart guy with the best job ever clive thompson, and sure nough,

here tis

, with a ref to the uncanny valley and everything.

podcast project - tech woes

2006-06-10T10:50:00.000-04:00

doing a small, unambitious podcast project with my 7 grade 12 students was a very good idea. it's revealed all the complications involved with dong something as simple as recording sound and using one editing program when you're in an environment where YOU DON'T HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR TECHNOLOGY!!!

i've been working off the grid on this one. and i've encountered barrier after barrier. all of the barriers have solutions. but if you don't know how to eliminate the variables when you're problem solving with tech, barriers like the ones i've overcome can seem insurmountable.

what is interesting is how many of my students have everything they need to do the work on their own. one kid is recording his podcast on his cell phone :)

i keep feeling that we're (our society, that is) so close to integrating our tools and toys in some freakishly smart way. I don't think i'm going to make another big tech purchase for a while. the next five and ten years are going to be interesting. and i wonder if it means that we won't have to rely on the board for our toys and tools. if wireless technology keeps developing as it does...
been feeling a litte techno-ecstatic these days.

the end of term

2006-06-10T10:37:00.000-04:00

one week to go, and everyone's brains are taxed to the limit. everyone's forgetting things. i keep misplacing stuff. it's time for a break.

but looking around the office, people don't look war torn. tired, yes. but not beaten and bruised. it's been a good year. and the best news of all is that we get to keep two of the teachers who joined us this year. for at least another year, the dominant tone of the department will be warm, bright, enthusiastic, driven and collegial.

and if the Professional Learning Community model we've developed for next year goes ahead, and admin keeps their hands off those wednesday mornings, we'll actually be able to do something with all this collaborative energy. i've got my fingers crossed.

i'm finishing the term on the most positive note ever. i do feel that i accomplished something in my classes this term. i still see weaknesses. but i'm not going to dwell on them.

i do feel a bit plagued by new ideas i want to pursue. i've actually started a list f things i want to do this summer, because i'm afraid i'm going to ruin the break if i don't focus. since i started teaching, i haven't done breaks well. i try to do too much. and while i work on stuff, i feel like i should be relaxing. while i relax,i feel like i should be working. it's not healthy and sometimes the break leaves me more exhausted than the year.

so. the list. i just need to narrow down my projects.

why i love the innernut, part 246

2006-05-31T06:57:00.000-04:00

doing a bit of last minute poking around the www for what I might be able to gather as supplementary texts/references for our study of the matrix. looking for something short and sweet by someone smarter than me on avital ronell's the telephone book, cause i've always thought that the use of the telephone in the mtarix was fascinating, and under-discussed.

and i come across this little gem.

Slought Foundation: "On Testing, Torture, and Experimentation: The Test Drive" with Ronell, Cadava, et al.

74 minute lecture, free for download, request for donations.

what a world!

erasure

2006-05-21T11:03:00.000-04:00

on Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything podcast this week, I learned about the work of joe david, artist in residence at MIT, and an art project he did in the late 80s:

Davis led a quasi-covert operation that recorded the vaginal contractions of ballerinas with the Boston Ballet and other women, then translated this impetus of human conception into text, music, phonetic speech and ultimately into radio signals, which were beamed from M.I.T.'s Millstone radar to Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti and two other nearby star systems.

The Air Force soon found out about the million-watt Poetica Vaginal broadcast, as Davis calls it, and shut it down. But the 20-minute message was many times longer than the the first deliberate attempt to say hello to extraterrestrial ham radio operators, a string of 1,679 bits that Carl Sagan and Frank Drake beamed from the giant dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, 26 years ago. That message, like every engraved plaque and recorded video disk that NASA allowed on the Pioneer and Voyager space probes, made no attempt to convey what aliens would probably be most curious to know about humans: how we reproduce.

"The images of humans placed aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft show impeccably groomed men that lack any facial and body hair," Davis hoots, "and women with no external genitalia." Poetica Vaginal was in part a response to this curious censorship. "By making this attempt to communicate with the other," he explains, "we're really communicating with ourselves."

from: Scientific American

in a journal entry about their eyes were watching god, one of my male students asks, "why does Joe find janie so threatening?"

why indeed.

all i want is my radio

2006-05-21T10:03:00.000-04:00

i love radio. many of my childhood memories have a cbc soundtrack: joe coté and the metro morning theme song urging me, along with my worried mother, to end my stand-off with a boiled egg before I trudged around the corner to school; the tinny tiny sound of the opening march from the max ferguson show squeezed out of my dad's workroom radio on weekend mornings; the 1 o clock time signal that always made me feel a sense of anxiety, as any global event in the 80s. I myself began to listen to doctor demento and classics such as the shadow every sunday night on chum fm.

so, i was a bit dismayed when I learned that ipods had no built-in radios. I couldn't understand it. i know i share my radio love with like-minded 30 something geek-heads. I can usually depend on apple to know whatever i want before i even know that i want it. where was my radio?

but, of course, apple was too prescient. it knew of my deep disatisfaction with locally accessible radio programs. it knew that i gave up on the cbc a long, long time ago and was sniffing around npr, kcrw, and wfmu online to feed my radio habit. it knew that i would get would i needed, because the future of radio is podcasts.

i love podcasts.
I'm pretty stunned that so early in their evolution, there is a lot of really great content out there. I have already begun to associate days of the week with the pleasure of knowing a new episode will begin my days. Wednesdays are especially good days. That's the day that Wired's Alt Text comes out, filling my geeky heart with delight. I regularly laugh right outloud at this one on the subway. And Wired also offers a podcast by Clive Thompson- one of the smartest people with the coolest job out there.
Slate has a daily treat that's nothing to sneeze at.
And Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything is pretty yummy too.

I find out what's going on in the world from the BBC world service, NPR's hourly update, and the NYT Front page summary. I don't know what is happening in Canada from day to day. CBC has done a great job of getting good editorial content and feature shows out into podcast land, with the best of as it happens, ideas, sounds like canada, and toronto this week. But I have yet to find a daily news update from them or from anyone else. just today i found the Global National News podcast, so we'll see about that.

Of course, rabble.ca was giving good podcast content well before the cbc, and their list of offerings on the RPN network is staggering and impressive. I'm currently subscribed to rabble radio, redeye, needs no introduction, the radio book lounge, and boling frog.

poetry podcasts. well, the landscape is still changing out there. the first one i knew of was mipoesis magazine, which has four kinds of offerings. There are some great extended interviews with the likes of Ron Padgett, Ron Silliman, and Linh Din. Then there's a show called "Good night" which features readings of poems you can find out there in internet land, sometimes read by the authors themseleves, sometimes read by the hosts. meh. Grace Caviellerie's show, now called INNUENDOES, is the first I've heard that's attempting any kind of discussion of poetics. I find I have to get past her voice- she sounds like she's your great aunt, asking you over for tea, which is sweet and comforting, but belies the substance of what she has to offer. she's not usually talking about issues I'm interested in pursuing, nor is she pursuing them in ways I want to pursue them myself, but she offers a thoughtful show.
Finally, there are podcast recordings of live readings. I find i don't enjoy listening to these. I'm glad they're available- and we have the Ottawa poetry podcast giving us a little can con- but i'm hankering after more discussion and interviews in my podcast content.

group 4!

2006-05-13T08:42:00.001-04:00

it finally arrived!!!
my new rating statement from the union.
after having reviewed my various academic and pedagogic accomplishments, i have achieved a group 4 rating, the highest professional rating possible!
what merited this noble leap? ( I went from group 1 to 4 in a single bound)

1. a correction in paperwork- the union didn't know thaat i had in fact achieved my BAH, and not just my BA.
2. my successful completion of the honours specialist course this summer.

don't get me wrong- i don't want to begrudge this. it does, after all, translate into a dramatic leap up the pay scale. it was the letter they sent that got me all reflective about this. the way they congratulated me, like this was some significant professional achievement. (if they had congratulated me for having filled out all the rght forms and got them in on time, that would be another thing. that was the biggest challenge!)

but i could have done this after my second year of teaching. Can you imagine, being told after teaching for two years and taking one course, that you have achieved the highest level of professionalism possible?

i've been teaching for 7 years now. i've completed 2/3 of a master's degree in education, (which, by the way, had no impact on this rating). i've had experience teaching abroad. i've been involved in committees and extra-curricular activities. i've developed courses. i've written papers. i've worked with student teachers. i've gone to more conferences and workshops than i can remember. i read all the time.
none of these things count towards the union's assessment of my professionalism.
but even after having done all of these things, i feel like I'm at the beginning of my professional journey!

no wonder so many teachers don't feel as though they have anything to learn. the union tells them they don't.

play on words: why it would be cool to live in new york

2006-05-13T08:42:00.000-04:00

Free Space Comix: the blog � Play On Words: A Poets Theater Festival

creating community

2006-05-07T11:13:00.000-04:00

**part of my correspondance with Jay Millar this week**

dear jay,

Thank you so much for the statement you made. I really appreciate how you have listened to what I can only imagine is an earful of reactions to these incidents.

I am particularly relieved that you made such a clear statement about Book Thug's position and your support of angela. I have the fortune to know you as a person, and this knowledge allowed me to fill in the silences with what I imagined your feelings were. But the silences were beginning to erode my confidence in my knowledge of you. And I was also concerned for those who don't know you personally. It would be a truly terrible thing if BookThug were to suffer because of the actions of people who abused its good name.*** I know it has already suffered. I hope that those who cancelled their subscriptions did so out of a desire to communicate the need for a public denunciation of this vitriol. I hope that now that you have done so, they will show support for what you've done.

As I said to you before, I don't think the blog was the problem. This stuff is out there in the community. Being part of the poetry community has meant, for me, from the start, engaging with conflict of varying. Nevertheless, I was shocked by the retrograde nature of the mysogyny I've encountered in this poetry community. I'm not the kind of person who looks for gender conflict. I rarely think about gender issues when I'm dealing with my teacher colleagues at work. I rarely think about them when I'm hanging out with the musicians I hang out with. But the lit scene has never let me forget that I'm a woman. And the crap that I've dealt with is minimal compared to what others have endured.

One of the things that had been truly lacking in this poetry community is vocal, public denunciations of mysogyny from our men. When women speak out against such things, it leaves them vulnerable to more attack, and the danger is that it can force them to adopt a position of victimhood. So sometimes we speak- sometimes we endure. I know you haven't specifically characterized the exchange as mysogynist, and I know that these recent attacks have had a wider target than that. I know that the conflicts in our community have also had a wider scope. But the politics of talk and silence in community are loaded with gender concerns. It would really help the women in our community if the men who have been supportive of our work and presence would extend that support to being more aggressive in explicitly challenging sexist statements and acts when they occur. I think this is the kind of thing that Ryan was calling for on his blog. It's the lack of this kind of engagement in Toronto that's cause me more than once to consider moving to Calgary.

This is why I applaud your statement. This is why I was so encouraged by Greg's original post. This feels like a start.
---------

***in other e-mails to jay, I spoke of my belief that when we create discursive spaces, we shape the kinds of discourse that takes place therein, and we bear responsibility for what happens therein too. That's why his response was so important. To me, this is an important part of taking responsibility for the communities that we co-create.***

surving working with poets

2006-05-06T09:17:00.000-04:00

just as I had come through the other side of this wave of conflict at work- humbled, I hope wiser, relationships with many people made stronger by the work we'd poured into them- a fresh outburst of bile erupted amongst the poets I hang out with.

the public documentation of the dust-up has since been removed from the various blogs and comments sections, leaving only commentary after the fact.

so, many of us are again retreading old ground, trying to figure out how to respond to aggressive verbal attacks, to defammation of character, to unabashed mysogny.

it's disheartening. what's particularly disheartening is that amongst the aggressors there seems to be no regard for the emotional well-being of the objects of their attack. This lack of regard, in fact, seems to be the point. Apparently, what the poetry community needs is for certain people to be taken down a notch, for certain people to have the emotional snot kicked out of them to balance out the public regard they are receiving, regard that the aggressors feel is undeserved.

all this coincides with discussions in my classroom about the politics of talk and silence in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

"So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush."
Their Eyes Were Watching God, c. 1937

it's a good thing I spend so much time in my day with my students.
they're so warm and so full of life.

surviving working with humans

2006-04-29T10:45:00.000-04:00

this has been an exhausting week. aside from the joys of new poetry experiences, and the attendant anxieties around organizing even the simplest of events, the committee I'm involved in at the school was making a big presentation to the staff this week where we were proposing a revision to the structure and schedule of the school-wide initiative we've been running this past year.

as any teacher who's done any work leading or teaching other teachers will tell you, the hardest group of people to lead or teach is teachers. and any teacher worth their salt will admit it. we're so used to running our own show- our identity is so bound up in having the answers, in being certain- we don't tend to take well to being in the position where we take direction from others, or where we have to learn from others.
so even now that it's over, just typing about what we did this past week has reintroduced the knot i've had in my stomach.

the whole experience has caused me to confront one of my own interpersonal weaknesses. i used to think that i was bad at working with other people- period. too many bad group work experiences in highschool had shown this to me fairly conclusively. but in my twenties i had a number of positive experiences- musical collaboration in bands, committees at school and church- experiences where I found I really enjoyed working with others. I found it exhilerating. so I learned to readjust my sense of how i play with others. I'm bad at working with others when I don't trust the competence of the others in question.

the committee i've been on for the past two years was initially a very positive experience for me. it's comprised of teachers for whom I have a great deal of respect when it comes to their sense of dedication and vision for the classroom. it was also thrilling, and somewhat rare, to be working with teachers who felt that thinking things through carefully was not the opposite of action. (if only people would do a better job of reading & teaching Hamlet and chuck that procrastination angle out the window, the world would be a better place.) i don't know what's changed. i think our job has become more difficult. initially, we were in the dreaming and visiong stages. this year, we were actually implementing this school-wide initiative, so we were managing the time of 120 very strongly opinionated teachers (is there any other kind). I think our task began to exceed our experience, and it certainly began to exceed our skill level.

the upshot is that i began to lose trust in the group's ability to make good decisions. and when that happens, i get shrill and strident.

so, i'm on a hunt for books that can help me. what i want to find is a book that deals with this problem with some nuance- and since i'm drifting into self-help book territory, that might be a problem. i am going to take a look at covey's seven habits. seems like about time i read that classic.
and then... who knows.

I'm very open to suggestions.

we be slammin'

2006-04-27T06:24:00.000-04:00

so we had our first slam competition at the school on tuesday and what an eye-opener it was. first, we actually had 9 poets perform, and they were all amazing. they all brought a strength to the performance- some kids I knew quite well, some kids who I knew but didn't know they had that in them, and some kids who just came out of nowhere and blew us all away!

and I learned something that day (cue south park music). I learned about the pedagogical merits of competition. I've always felt ambivalent about arts competitions- felt that they tend to push out the margins, that they reward the coventional- you see this on american idol- after a while, everyone whose truly interesting gets weeded out, because they're so clearly looking for a certain type. and there are many other reasons.

but the slam reinforced something that I've been increasingly aware of- if you create a situation where students are forced to make a choice, it engenders rigourous critical analysis. I had an amazing conversation with one of my students after it was over, talking about the judging and the merits of the performances, and the detail with which she (who had prefaced the conversation with "i'm not really into poetry") analyzed the relative merits of each performer was astounding. I also was amazed by the level of attention the audience gave to the poerts- and that certianly was because of the competitive element. They needed to know whether or not they were going to accept the decisions of the judges.

the slam inspired me to take an assignment I was giving that day to my grade 11 class to a new level. normally, the assignment calls on them to write and perform a bragging poem- tying this century old tradition in to the scenes on the porch in their eyes were watching god, where the signifying is as much about puffing yourself up as tearing someone else down. but i just knew I had kids in my classes who could freestyle if given the opportunity. so I let that be an option. and as the assignment spontaneously evolved with classroom input and discussion, somehow it ended up that I'm going to freestyle battle against any student who wants to take me on!

heh... this is going to be interesting. no idea if i can freestyle- though i've always wondered. so I'm downloading some beats- and this weekend, well, this weekend we be practising!

some inky love

2006-04-23T10:42:00.000-04:00

what an amazing month it's been for poetry in the press!
the globe and mail ran reviews of shift and switch (by Christian Bök, our man in Calgary) and the coach house spring line-up (by Sonnet L'Abbé) in two successive weekends. (No point in linking them cause the globe keeps its archives under lock and key after 7 days unless you pony up a registration fee or can access them through an institutional subscription. )

And Damian Rogers is carving out a substantial space for poetry in eye- getting Ken Babstock on the cover a few weeks ago, accompanied by a great article. And this past week, an endearing rumination on our love-hate relationships with poetry readings. Hats off to Ms. Rogers for writing articles about the current lit scene that serve both as an introduction to those on the outside, but also offer something for those of us who call this place home. And last week, Brian Joseph Davis wrote a kick-ass review of Wide Slumber. Brian is fast becoming one of my journalistic heros. That guy can handle a turn of phrase.

and finally, our girl got herself on the cover of the ottawa express! couldn't find a permalink for the cover which has a much friendlier photo than this one.

time to write some letters to these editors. we've made stinks often enough about the lack of acknowledgement of the lively lit scene. gotta let em know we're listening.

what the...?

2006-04-23T10:19:00.000-04:00

SAT Power Tactics for The iPod !
"iPREPpress brings you SparkNotes test prep. Download the SAT Vocabulary Builder with Flocabulary Hip Hop audio as the first in a Series of SAT Power Tactics. "

there's just too much to say about this.

uncanny retro funk

2006-04-23T10:10:00.000-04:00

am I showing up really late to the party? i just discovered that the good ole text adventure is finding new life on my ipod.

is anyone writing about this in blog land?

ahh.
apparently this was news in 2004.

still, i'm surprised i haven't heard mor enoise about this from the usual suspects.

a hoosh a ha!

2006-04-14T09:47:00.000-04:00

one of the things i missed during my own slumber was the long awaited launch of my dear friend angela rawling's gorgeous Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists. I've been watching this work develop for as long as I've known angela. and its birthing has only been slowed because angela's endowed with such a strong sense of community values. she helped fill a huge gap in the toronto poetry scene by creating and running, with bill kennedy, the inimitable lexiconjury reading series, which ends its five year run this spring. she responded to the lack of representation of experimental work in the canadian publishing world by creating, with jason christie and derek beaulieu, shift and switch. and those two projects, huge enough in themselves, represent only a fraction of the work angela does for the community. her commitment is tireless. what's more, she has persisted in her work in the face of some appalling mysogyny from crusty men and acidic slights from threatened women. and who wouldn't be threatened? this chic is hot in every way imaginable. a lesser artist would have packed it in long ago.

so it's a huge huge thrill to see this beautiful work take material form [and i must also lavish praise here on bill kennedy's gorgeous design work. bill's another artist who tirelessly self-sacrifices for the community, untold, unsung hours going into creating beautiful spaces for the work of others. this is true artistry. ]

i'm realizing something about critically appraising the work of friends. I thought it would be difficult to be, you know, objective- not that i believe in objectivity- but i thought it would be hard to base my response to the work of a friend on the basis of the aesthetic principles by which I measure a given work of art, rather than the level of regard I have for my friend, or the knowledge of what went into the work, etc etc.

In fact, it's really easy to know when critical regard and platonic affection are awkwardly out of synch. You feel it in your stomach when you look at the work. You begin to start formulating a response in your head- looking for the strengths of the work on which you will lavish attention, figuring how to talk about the weaknesses, or when to talk about them, or whether to talk about them. and it's all anxious and sweaty.

no such palpitations with wide slumber. it is breathtakingly beautiful. and, as has been noted in the globe, as smart and sexy as its author.

e-mailing it in

2006-04-14T08:55:00.000-04:00

I've been sick for the past week. thought i'd beat it over the weekend, dragged myself in on monday to kick start the novel for the 11's, then crawled back home to take what i was sure would be one sick day. but one day's fever bloomed into two and then three.
it wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that i'm co-ordinating three poets coming in next tuesday, and an unofficial field trip tomorrow night, and the launch of the spring issue of the paper yesterday.
so i quite literally e-mailed it in last week.
and i'm feeling wracked with guilt.

i keep telling myself that there's nothing i could have done. i couldn't have managed a full day of school yesterday. as it was, i was still working on things from home- sending e-mails & making phone calls.

and fortunately, another teacher and her class have been sharing the load of the poetry event.

but i still have a knot in my stomach and anxiety dreams. and a four day long weekend with my marking left at school and nothing i can do about anything but fret.

and then the self-punishing thoughts truly begin.
thoughts like- if you had inspired your students to be more self-motivated and independently directed, it wouldn't matter whether or not you were there. they would take it upon themselves to make good use of the time.

it's at times like these that i think there should be trained therapists assigned to every school for the teachers, (in addition to about 20 available for students).
what a difference that would make, eh?
this profession can really fuck you up.

belated happy announcement

2006-04-02T09:05:00.000-04:00

Gary Barwin started a blog!

working through struggle

2006-04-01T07:57:00.000-05:00

I seem to have lost my last blog post. it's okay. writing it and thinking through the issues has already made an impact in my classroom.
i was thinking about my 1st period 3U's. They're a solid bunch of kids academically- smart and responsible. They're finding this composition thing more difficult than the other class. I've speculated before that it's because they're too obedient. They've learned how to play school too well, so when we do this dramatic shift where they're the ones who have to determine what will work in an essay and what won't, they get paralyzed.

I'm not worried about their ability to eventually get it. i know this takes time. but in the meantime, their marks are in the 70s, and that's going to cause problems at home (for some, it could mean physical violence)- but it's also causing them personally a great deal of internal empotional and psychological stress.
so, i *am* worried about how to keep their spirits up along the journey.

and this thought took me back to ratchet and clank and the sheepinator, an idea which i never did fully post here, because before i could get to it, i found that many people have been thinking about this stuff. so, I've got some reading to do. but my basic point is that in a video game, working through challenges is the point. you don't stop playing once it gets hard. what i'm interested in is the ways that video games motivate you to push beyond the limits of of your skills. in the ratchet and clank games, among other things, they use innovaive and playful weapons as the carrot. i will work my ass off trying to get enough bolts to buy a crazy little weapon called the sheepinator that, as you might have guessed, turns my enemies into fluffy little sheep. it isn't even very effective (at first). only works on small creatures. yet the rewards of pleasure and delight are enough.

i don't think the rewards of writing well are pleasurable enough to motivate my students through the real struggles of thinking and writing. and i still haven't figured out a way to create authentic publishing venues for 50 students without going totally insane with the work involved (and blogs are not a viable option, for reasons too painful to get into here). it's the logistics of the thing that keeps getting in my way.

so i've been thinking about ways to create a meaningful narrative around their struggle. the best i could come up with was the "once more unto the breach" speech from Henry V. i gave them a copy of the speech, with some of the most invigorating words highlighted and bolded (i trusted that most of them could understand the idea of imitating the action of a tiger), gave them a bit of the historical background, (allowing for some of shakespeare's mythologization, but quoting the most impressive yet historically probably odds of the battle), and then read the speech to them. at the end, i had them raise their arms and cry "For harry, england and st. george!" along with me a couple of times, and i think i'll make this a regular thing we do. i want them to see themselves as soldiers in a battle. i want to acknowledge that in order to face uncertainty, it takes courage- because you're risking failure. if they can see themselves as soldiers in a battle, maybe they'll be able to rally their courage.

will it help? we'll see. they seemed to find it fun yesterday. they've started working on their independent study project, where they write a persuasive essay on a topic of their own choosing. the paper involves a lot of working through obstacles. most of them, as soon as they hit a bump, ask if they can change their topic. this is what i'm talking about- as soon as they confront a struggle, they think that they're doing something wrong. struggle in learning is to be avoided, not worked through. so the soldier metaphor will be especially helpful here.

a related issue came up in an unrelated class discussion. we had discussed the different kinds of strength of the characters in the colour purple, saving celie for last, because her strengths initially are more difficult to see. so yesterday we were discussing celie and one of my students was really distressed, because she felt that it was wrong to attribute to celie the strengths that she had gained from the women in her life. since they weren't her strengths to start with, they weren't properly her strengths.

to me, this represents the whole problem in a nut-shell- this is the myth of autonomy. you're either smart or stupid. you either know it or you don't. if you don't have it on your own, it's not yours. people do well in school because they are smart. struggles can't be overcome, so avoid them.

if the words are spoken

2006-03-26T08:57:00.000-05:00

wow.

not particularly articulate, but I don't know how else to sum up my reaction to last night's edition of the monthly toronto slam competition.

i went because i've been chatting with organizer david silverberg about doing a slam event at garneau. David helped to arrange to bring TOFU to garneau last fall, and I was blown away by their performance and writing. Hearing them and hearing Naila Keleta Mae helped me remember what it is I like about spoken word- and that my growing dislike of it has developed because i haven't seen very many good spoken word performers recently to counter the prejudice that's held against it amongst the avant lit scene. And this isn't surprising. where would i have come across them? poetry communities in this city are increasingly ghettoized- and i don't necessarily see this as a problem. we don't complain that you never see toronto symphony seasons ticket holders at the horseshoe, or hugh's room regulars at the docks. why should it be any different in poetry?

but as an educator, I feel a responsibility to explore beyond the comfort zones of my tastes and community. this is a great thing, this literary tourism. so i'd been meaning to check out the toronto slam for some time.

what i saw last night was like a cross between stand-up comedy, american idol and jerry springer. it was fascinating. in slam, more so than in non-competitive spoken word, the performance is everything. what blew me away about last night was the wide range of performance styles and strategies that were adopted by the performers. i confess, i was expecting to hear a lot of what i have come to believe is a standard spoken word rhythm & delivery. the feature artist of the evening kept strictly within this mode. i'm still trying to figure out how to describe it- something about the consistency of the placement of the line break. but this was not the dominant mode of delivery for the 17 first round competitors.

as with the beginning of the american idol competition, the first round had the most variety and held the most interest for me. The judging weeded out:
- the quiet lyricist
- the understated political meditation
- the extended limerick
- the stand up routine that, if the context were different, few would recognize as a poem (which was very interesting for me to consider, because i've been thinking so much about the power of the frame)
- and a bewildered language-y poet.

I talked to the language-y poet after the competition and told him I thought he was doing some very interesting stuff but maybe this wasn't the venue for it. he and his friend and I had a neat chat about what seemed to go over well in the crowd, and why his stuff didn't so much. He didn't seem to know about any other venues for poetry so I told him about the small press book fair cause i think he should be making chapbooks. "All I do is write," he said.

one performer who didn't make it through to the final round, shut out by a hair, was a guy going by the moniker of Electric John. [oh ya! I forgot. everyone has a handle! gypsy eyes, that brown bastard, major, hi-q, etc.] Electric John was a pimped out white dude- white fedora with matching shoes, black pin striped suit- and perhaps it was height and whiteness and baldness, but his performance style reminded me of a cross between Pete Garrett (ex. Midnight Oil) and Gord Downie. This guy had rock styles. i was disappointed that he didn't go through to the 2nd round because i wanted to see whether he had more range to his spectacle. I also wanted to track his words more closely. in an anti- harper rant, he at one point thrashed out a line that had "mathematic" as an end rhyme. in a genre of poetry that announces itself as primarily expressivist, it's very interesting when the logic of the poems begin to break down and sound begins to trump sense. electric john finished by chanting the following refrain:
"the results of cults who resolve to solve"

i *think* i can work out the semantic meaning here... but surely the sound is the point?

while the peformance styles & strategies ranged widely, the content was less surprising- a *lot* of preaching and ranting against the usual suspects: players & ho's, george w. bush, harris and harper, dads (but not mothers), "those people who have the gall to tell me that my poetry sucks", and STDs. There was also some hopeful content along the lines of "i believe that children are the future" and "poetry will save us all." i was surprised that there was no queer content. very little anti-racist content. the majority of the performers were white- two brown, and the only black performers of the evening were the feature and the "sacrificial poet," a poet, not officially part of the comptetition, invited to take the first slot, which is the death spot in any poetry culture. the audience & judges were more mixed.

many of these rants were punctuated with lines clearly designed to shock- this was where the springer factor comes in. for example, the feature's "funny poem," a rant about being in elevators, included a description of a scenario where an old lady backs up so that her depends brush up against the speaker's penis, and "if that shit makes you hard" then you're some kind of sicko freak. that was probably the most outrageous line of the night, but there were others like "squeeze me like a white-head," and many others I wasn't able to get down in my notes. (i didn't go there planning to do this investigative reporting- i just couldn't help it.) the audience, like a springer audience, expressed delighted outrage.

at times, many of the ranters would get to a place in their poems where their voices became shrill. there was a rawness there- it wasn't just the intensity of the volume, it was the intensity of the expression. I think these were the moments for the performers when it wasn't about the slam any more. these were the moments where their need to reveal themselves or express their anger or confess their self-doubt or self-hatred overtook their performance. I don't know if they realized how vulnerable they seemed in those moments.

like many american idol competitors, many of the performers mistook volume for intensity, and there was a lot of yelling. much of it came all from the throat. one of the things you notice when you listen to great orators is that their volume is supported by their diaphragm.

the audience was responsive to more than just the delivery. besides shock, and the popularity of lines would take pronounced shots at the favoured targets, puns & word play were well received. Spenser got some love for, "I wanted to give her my adam's apple as a thank you gift for leaving me speechless," and, my personal favourite, "what if my love is really a simile and I just like her a lot."

phew. i've got much more to say and think about.
this week has been a crazy one for cutural in-take. before i've had the chance to process one event, another comes crowding in.

but before I leave this post dangling, i want to be clear about something.
there was a lot i saw last night that was politically troubling- and i guess part of that for me is because i'm wary of the declarative voice when it comes to political writing. but I do not believe that troubling politics is any more indemic to the spoken word genre than it is in any other poetry genre. i've seen a lot of politically troubling stuff going on in avant garde/experimental/ language and lyric too. even in some sound poetry. troubling politics is a result of the fact that we as people are politically troubled. that doesn't mean that i believe that genre is ideologically neutral. not at all. but i believe very strongly that it is possible to ask politically complex questions within a genre that announces itself to be "more performance friendly than literary friendly," as david put it last night. why shouldn't it be?

the literary narcissist

2006-03-25T14:49:00.000-05:00

verrrrry interesting post on gabriel gudding's blog.
points 1-6 and 9-13 should be read as well.

Conchology: "7. The Narcissist is aware of the economy of disgust surrounding his/her behavior. S/he becomes more and more sensitive to this and consequently begins to demand private declarations of loyalty from those people whom s/he knows consider themselves friends -- even if they have said nothing publicly against the Narcissist.

8. The Narcissist, aware of this disgust, will create a personal mythos in which s/he will be justified and exonerated by the rewards of literary history. The stronger the disgust of others, the greater the energy used to maintain the mythos of exoneration by history.
"

another pedagogy of hope

2006-03-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

"This sense of intimacy, a personal moment in becoming a teacher, an internal drama really, is our second dynamic in the struggle for voice. One of the great surprises in learning to teach is how deeply emotional an experience it is and how quickly one's emotions become fantasies of rescue and revenge. How easily one can move from elation and hope to embrassment and blame, from feeling all is in control to becoming undone, all within a moment's notice. How easily one can become lonely within a crowded room or suddenly wish for solitude and to be let alone. In the emotional life of a teacher, how easy it is to hate and love students, colleagues and the self, to wish a student would just disappear or that an ungrateful student would, out of the blue, become appreciative of the teacher's efforts and send a letter of gratitude. How, even if no other adult is in the classroom, one feels watched and judged, or that one wishes someone would magically appear and help because that other knows exactly what to do to fix a mess. And long after events have occurred, nagging thoughts remain to repeat what the event left unresolved. There is a hope that teaching techniques will stabilize the efforts of teaching, guide classroom control, and so techniques will become experience that can eventually compose a sort of warning system in the technology of teaching: mistakes can be pre-empted, things can go smoothly, and everyone will learn what the teacher proffers. Yet continually, one bumps up against these wishes as they suddenly dissolve into so many dissapointments, missed opportunities, failed attempts. And there is a sense that all of these thoughts and affects should remain hidden, lest the teacher appears too emotional, uncertain, or vulnerable."

These timely words are from the introduction to Practice Makes Practice: a critical study of learning to teach, by the wonderful deborah britzman. I was introduced to britzman by another wonderful mentor who flung me an essay of hers that has acted as a liferaft through many stormy pedagogical seas. I picked up this book while i was looking for a book to get for my student teacher- and ended up getting a copy for each of us. britzman is one of those rare theorists who understands the practical realities of the classroom. and i think her work is so powerful because she takes as her starting point the site of breakdown. she begins with where things get messy and her approach is not, "how can we fix this?" but rather, "what can we learn from this?"

good thing i've got all kinds of mess to study!

the abject teacher

2006-03-25T12:26:00.000-05:00

i'm hiding from my students this morning. specifically the students who I work with on the newspaper. we've been having a rocky road these past few weeks- they've been flaking out on their responsibilities, and i haven't been handling it particularly well. I didn't think I was coming down particularly hard on them, or being unfair. But as a wonderful colleague who helped me debrief after our last meeting ppointed out- it doesn't matter what i think. in their minds, I'm being angry and unfair. i haven't been balancing out my reminders of deadlines and the importance of meetings with enough encouragement and hugs. so they've begun to shut themselves down from me. at our last meeting, they weren't even talking to me. I expressed my frustration over this to them, and my uncertainty about what to do, but they still looked at me like i'd killed their puppy. so we left the meeting with the tension in the air and nothing resolved.

now there are a couple of e-mails in my in box from some of the editors, and i'm really glad about this. i want them to start talking about what's going on and how they're feeling. but i'm afraid to read them cause i know they're going to be upset. and i'm totally ready to apologize for having hurt them, however unintentionally, and to admit to them that i've realized that i've not been a very good leader for them through this time and how much i want to work together to make this better.

but christ, i want just one day off, you know?

this comes at a good time. friday was my student teacher's last day, and so marked the end of 4 weeks of me spouting off continually about how to do this job. i don't want to make any claims to false modesty. i know I'm a good teacher. and particularly in since january, i've been feeling like i've achieved a number of important break-throughs. f. commented on how he'd noticed how many people in the department look to me as a resource, and i'd been feeling that too. but i was starting to get really tired of the sound of my own voice and my pronouncements. so it's a bit of a relief to be humbled in this way. to be confronted so cleary with the limits of my knowledge.

just wish it wouldn't be happening on my sacrosanct saturdays.

two more e-mails in the in box.
ugh.

**addendum**
i bit the bullet and opened the mails. didn't want them to misinterpet my silence.
to my relief, they were a rallying cry to get each other with the program, and humble expressions of confusion about how to make it better. this created a beautiful opening for me to be able to apologize to them and acknowledge their frustration and encourage them and articulate my own confusion. i'm so freakin' lucky to be able to work with people like this. it's very humbling.

hit the ground running

2006-03-23T07:10:00.000-05:00

the week back from the break has been insanely busy- all kinds of stuff generating new thoughts in my head.

i'm taking a course on the New York School of poetry with stuart ross at This Ain't the Rosedale Library and we had our first session this past monday. what a lovely thing to do- sit around with a bunch of peope and read and write poetry. I knew i'd like the reading part- the writing part intimidated me at first, but i knew i was in good hands. and stuart had us do such fun exercises that i very quickly stopped worrying about whether what i was doing was good or not, and wrote just to please myself. very fun.

(more to say on this, but it will have to wait for the weekend...)

on tuesday night, a fabulous lexiconjury- too many bright notes to detail here, but i was knocked down by nathalie stephens' reading from her stunning new book: Je Nathanael. i had never heard her read before. more's the pity.
more also on this later.

and last night, i went to hear a seminar given by Jennifer Jensen on video games and pedagogy. MUCH more to say on this later. but my discovery of jensen, for which i am much indebted to one of my thoughtful department colleagues, is very timely. anyhow, i'm totally enamoured (and a whole lot envious) with this chic and what she's up to. and i look forward to finding out more because it seems to me that she's asking exactly the right kind of questions about this field- or rather, she's asking the questions I would want to ask, which, if we're honest, amounts to the same thing, doesn't it? (not that my questions are your right kind of questions... but... you know what i mean. i hope.)

and yes, i was also at school in the day.
i took the grade 12 class back from my student teacher for the last week as we were introducing In the Skin of a Lion, and i couldn't afford to risk a bad start to the novel with such weak readers. It was the right decision, and i know that f. is happy about it, because he was overwhelmed by the challenge the novel presented.
more on this later too, because some interesting things are being revealed.
i've somehow managed to set up a structure so that a group of students who have demonstrated an inability to understand instructions like "check all that apply," are coming with very sophisticated responses to a work that many people think is too difficult for this age group. and they're doing it with minimal direction from me.

and now.
back to school.

a break from the break

2006-03-18T07:53:00.000-05:00

i thought i'd have more to blog over the march break, but I've spent a good portion of it writing a piece for this publication. I was invited to offer a response to a withering review of Shift and Switch by Carmine Starnino, CNQ's poetry editor. I won't go into many details about that review or my response, as I understand that both will be available online.

It was really great to write some criticism again. And I really loved spending that amount of time with the anthology. I hope to write more about it- it's not without its weaknesses, and it's a shame that so many bloodhounds get stuck on these in their appraisal. By contrast, I really enjoyed reading Sina Queryas' thoughtful response, and I'm hoping that in "art 2" she will say more about the poetry itself.

One of my favourite discoveries was the work of Matthew Hollett
, one of the younger contributors to the anthology. Hollett comes to poetry through the visual arts, which is how he trained, but got lured into the world of experimental typography by e.e. cummings, according to his website. (the fact that he wasn't first exposed to this kind of thing by the work of bp nichol is one of the many reasons why we need more anthologies like Shift and Switch- but also why it's really too bad that the book missed the opportunity to provide a historical context for this work.) Anyhow. Hollett is clearly a developing artist. But his website reveals the exuberance of discovery. Many of the gazillion kernels of idea that he's toyed with could be pushed further. One of my favourites is the collaborative corner brook interactive map (which seriously needs a title!! I mean, I know it was a school project, but, c'mon!) which explores the relationship between official maps and mental maps, oscillating between a published map of cornerbrook, and the drawings from memory of the same by junior high students. There's an interesting correspondance between this and the murmur project... and it also puts me in mind of a ton of stuff i read about virtual space when I was thinking about such things. And yes, yes, Bachelard! and the poetics of space. I want to see this project develop...

anyhow, a lot of Hollett's work strikes me this way. But given the amount of ideas on his website, I think his energies are more laterally driven right now. And more power to him. Been a long time since I've seen anyone bursting with so much playful energy. His website makes me very happy.

test

2006-03-18T07:50:00.000-05:00

test

bon mots

2006-03-14T08:54:00.000-05:00

"when in charge, ponder; when in trouble, delegate; when in doubt, mumble."

- overheard on a BBC radio quiz show.

what motivates

2006-03-10T07:17:00.000-05:00

here we go.
here's some of what I was talking about in the last post.
i heard this guy at a conference a couple of months ago.

Stiggins interview: "Stiggins: I, too, have read that very important research. The key is to understand the relationship between assessment and student motivation. In the past, we built assessment systems to help us dole out rewards and punishment. And while that can work sometimes, it causes a lot of students to see themselves as failures. If that goes on long enough, they lose confidence and stop trying.

When students are involved in the assessment process, though, they can come to see themselves as competent learners. We need to involve students by making the targets clear to them and having them help design assessments that reflect those targets. Then we involve them again in the process of keeping track over time of their learning so they can watch themselves improving. That's where motivation comes from.

"

I'm running out the door here, but at some point, I'm going to need to write more about this, because it seems to me that so much talk about student success and motivation is wrong headed.
I don't think that any kind of assessment motivates students, no matter how involved they are in the process. Or, at least, I don't think that assessment should be our focus if we're interested in motivating students.
All of this talk seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

What motivates students is their perception regarding whether or not the task they are doing is interesting and meaningful.

more on this.
but I will take, as my text, Ratchet and Clank and the Sheepinator.

and my syntax will be less tortured.

the standards we try to uphold

2006-03-10T07:02:00.000-05:00

is it the time of year? we were just having this conversation yesterday in our department. what do you do when your students don't meet the entry level expectations you have for your course. it's a questions that gives us the most grief when we're teaching 12U, aware that we're the ones determinig whether or not they're ready to be sent on.

Jerz seems to do what I do- "adjust delivery and expectations to meet the reality." But I try, (and I'm not implying he doesn't), in my grading, to uphold a standard. So, with a weak class, I don't change what you have to do to be able to get 80% on an essay. But I might give them a few more opportunities to reach that level, do more explicit skills based teaching than I normally would.

This comment interested me:
Jerz's Literacy Weblog (Online & Offline Literacy Links; Dennis G. Jerz): "Whenever I find myself reminding students that 'Plot summary was enough to get you through high school,' I remind the students (and myself) that their high school teachers have to deal with a situation that is very different. Teachers deal with more discipline problems, they can rarely choose their own textbooks, and they may have to deal with 150 or 200 students in a total of six or seven classes each day (on top of advising a club or coaching a sport). I don’t expect high school teachers to have the time to make college composition classes obsolete.
"

I actually found this comment quite heartening. Plot summary isn't enough to get you through grade 11 at our school. And when I think about the kinds of weak students I've taught, I feel fairly confident that we have been able to move them at least beyond this level of interaction with a text.

I sympathize with Jerz's questions, and I appreciate how balanced his post is. I think it's the first thought that goes through all of our minds when we encounter a weak student in our classes. Just what were they teaching him in grade 10?

My student teacher has been doing a lot of marking this past week, and I've been reviewing his assessments. he finds it very difficult to give low marks- he's a very kind, young man. So I've been reminding him that we're the last people who are going to be honest with these kids about their level of understanding. We're not being kind to them if we don't reflect back an accurate picture of their ability to accomplish a task, because if we don't, how will they ever know that they need to improve?

There's a new/old wave of talk going on in the recent conversations about student success, talk about how low marks don't motivate most students, but they instead, initiate a cycle of failure. While I appreciate where this sentiment is coming from, I'm worried about what an unreflective, uncritical embrace of these ideas by administrators and teachers is going to mean.

yeasty!

2006-03-05T10:23:00.000-05:00

and also from Christopher D. Sessums blog: "

A Change Agent Mantra

My aim is to agitate and disturb people.
I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.

-Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)"

professional development

2006-03-05T10:22:00.000-05:00

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Technology and Teacher Professional Development: Notes from a 1995 RAND Report: "“One-shot seminars, an afternoon with an expert, will not bring the [teaching] profession up to speed with emerging school reform” (1). Teacher professional development needs to be placed “in schools’ water supply”(1)."

yep.
let's just expand the focus to include sustained prof. development for everything- not just technology.

two digital solitudes

2006-03-03T07:02:00.000-05:00

Magazine �lectronique du CIAC - CIAC's Electronic Magazine has been in existence since at least 2001, but this is the first I've heard of it. 2001 was when we were all knee-deep in the ether, so you'd think someone in my crew would have ferreted this thing out. There's a weird time-warp going on with this mag when you consider that it's featuring ryman's 253, montford's ad verbum, and neil's jabber engine, all of which were produced before 2002. I think 253 was ryman's only digital foray, but both montford and hennessey have put out new digital work since then- montford just released a new IF piece last year.

well, anyhow. it's interesting to know that some people still are interested in this stuff.
In fact, I feel as though there's been a bit of renewed interest in digital poetics. Don't know which will come first- Pat Benetar as retro-chic, or the next wave of digital poetry. ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

coersion in the classroom

2006-03-02T06:56:00.000-05:00

the other section of my grade 11 class didn't do so well on their cafeteria essays, so I gave them a chance to revise their outines. My hypothesis about why they didn't do so well? they're better at school, and I don't think they trusted me when I told them that they should write what they saw. I got a lot of essays that sounded like a school exercise. And many essays that spoke about the glories of the school cafeteria- what a wonderful place it was, the lovely food, etc. gack!

One student's new draft of his outline still had this vibe: "the school cafeteria is well organized for the benefit of students because of : easy access to various locations, the comfortable setting, and creative food ideas."

From the little I know about this student after 5 weeks, this just didn't sound like him. So I talked to him about it. I told him that if it was really what he thought about the caf, then that was fine, but it didn't seem like his true opinion to me. He finally said that he thought the essay sounded like "a lot of b.s." I agreed. And told him to write what he saw.
So his new outline looks like this:

"The cafeteria is an excellent hangout for students because you can:
learn the latest gossip
sit with any group you want
pig out on caf food"

Now, this sounds more like what hoped for from this student (even though it's still a fairly formulaic 5 paragraph pattern). But is this really what he wanted to write? Or is he still writing this just to please me because he picked up on the kind of writing I was expecting from him?

and from the poetry through ESL department, a couple of beautiful topic sentences:

"Some students were waiting for their turn to vanish their starving.

Some students who were in love talked through their eyes."

canadian poets on video

2006-02-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

ms. a. raw sends goodies in the e-mail: gerry shikitani, margaret christakos, wayde compton, oh my!

LEMON HOUND

2006-02-26T11:35:00.000-05:00

LEMON HOUND: "But it could also be a site that houses readings and performances across the board--where are our sound files?? Aside from a few on UBU and Philly, and now the files that the Griffin Site is adding, there is relatively little out there. Where are files of Dionne Brand, Tim Lilburn, Chris Dewdney, Christian Bok--all the great readers we have and no resource?! How can that be?

I want to use this as a teaching tool. Create please. CBC? Anyone? "

it's coming, sina, it's coming.

the literacy club

2006-02-26T08:53:00.000-05:00

"Here’s the part about the literacy club. While I was surveying this forced march through a magazine article, I thought about how useful these kinds of tasks are for keeping kids busy. Now that they know how to read well enough to look things up, reading can become an end in itself. I could do this continually if I wanted to. What a terrific club literacy is for subjugating and controlling people in school, I thought. It keeps them docile, and allows me to force them look for meanings that I have determined ahead of time. They learn compliance and accountability. Literacy is a useful tool for creating a passive public."

The Borderland blogger muses about the passifying effect of traditional reading comprehension tasks. On our provincial standardized literacy test, students are marked, in part, for "compliance." That's the word used on the evluation rubric. I'm not making this up. Of course, they mean compliance with the instructions. So, for example, if there are three lines given for a student to write their answer, and the student goes over the lines, and writes, says, a 5 line long answer, that would be an example of non-compliance. Clearly, the student has problems with literacy.

The task that Doug describes seems innocuous enough- it's certainly commonplace- and I think most practitioners would not be aware of the hidden curriculum of the task, as he describes it. What gives me chills is the thought that many practitioners, if asked to critically evaluate the pedagogy of such tasks, would equate the idea of a passive public with a law-abiding, well-adjusted, productive public, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

When it's as nakedly revealed in the literacy test, and no one says boo about it...
well, it's these kinds of things that caused John Taylor Gatto to leave the classroom, and begin his polemic against schooling, arguing that true education cannot take place within the insitution we have built.

The borderland blooger and I are still here, seeing what Gatto sees, trying to articulate a different response. I'm not trying to valorize the decision to stay. Every time I read Gatto, I get nervous, wondering if this is the time that I'll pack it in. Normally, I rationalize my decision to stay because the alternatives he proposes are only truly viable at this point for a middle class public. But today, I realize that to stay is necessary.

It's necessary not so you can fight the system from within in the hopes that the system will eventually change. When we talk about the hidden curriculum of the literacy club, and all the other lessons of school that gatto mentions, we're talking about ideology in an Althusserian sense. And ideology is inescapable. The truly liberatory educator does not try to find the ideologically neutral space- such a space does not exist. The truly liberatory educator teaches herself and her students to read the hidden curriculum of the space they're in. They learn to code and then to hack.

I'm interested to see how the borderland blogger frames the next steps for his students.

more q&A

2006-02-25T18:25:00.000-05:00

3. Which teaching methods do you find are the most useful when teaching your class, and which kind of poems do the students find more engaging?

My answer to both of these questions is “it depends.”
With regards to teaching methods, it depends on what kinds of texts I’m teaching, who my students are, and what I’m trying to accomplish. But I guess I could generally safely say that I try to demystify poetry for my students. I stay away from formulas and how-to guides, and try to encourage students to trust their own initial reactions to a poem, and build up a reading from there. For example, the first question I ask when studying just about any poem with any group of students is:
“Tell me one thing you noticed about the poem.”
The beauty of a question like this is that it is impossible to get it wrong. You notice what you notice. It also helps to debunk the dangerous idea that poetry communicates its themes through “hidden meanings.” If we work with what is noticeable, then nothing is hidden. The poem is open to anyone- not just a teacher who has that hidden meaning locked up in their answer key. It’s amazing how far we can get into a poem just by pursuing that one question.
The other question I’m finding increasingly useful is to ask students to divide the poem into 2-3 sections, and then talk about why they made the choices that they did. This question lets us talk about form and content in ways that can be applied to any genre of poetry: sound, visual, concrete, lyric, experimental, even digital.

As for what kinds of poems do students find engaging, that’s like asking what kinds of music do teenagers like! It depends very much on the student. But I’ve had classes respond with equal interest to Paul Dutton, Lillian Allen, Christian Bök, Rachel Zolf, Dennis Lee, Lorna Crozier and Stuart Ross, so...

4. What over all outlook do you want your students to have when they leave your classroom once you are finished teaching your Canadian poetry class?
- to not be afraid of poetry
- to know that poetry culture is alive in the city and accessible to them
- to know that there are as many kinds of poems as there are people

teaching contemporary canadian poetry

2006-02-25T18:12:00.000-05:00

greg betts is a cool guy. he teaches this very cool course. when he surveyed his students, he learned that 98% of them had never read a canadian poem. One of his students is interviewing me about teaching can. cont. poetry in high schools. it's an e-mail interview. thought i'd post some of my answers here.

2. Given the pressures of teaching a fairly new type of course in the high school curriculum, is there enough encouragement given to teachers to advance in this subject? (canadian contemporary poetry)

I’ve been teaching for the Toronto District School Board for seven years, and this year was the first year that I, as a regular English teacher, was offered subject-specific professional development. What this means is that since I graduated from the Faculty of Education, there have been no Board or School sponsored workshops offered to classroom English teachers to help them develop their ability to teach the English Curriculum. We have received support for classroom management, adjusting to the new curriculum, assessment and evaluation, and literacy (which is certainly relevant to the English curriculum, but only a tiny fraction of what most English teachers deal with on a daily basis). So, the short answer is no, there’s certainly not enough encouragement, but this is a problem that isn’t limited to poetry instruction.
The longer answer is that there isn’t a high priority placed on reading or writing poetry in the Ontario Curriculum. I think it’s safe to say that most teachers, unless they love poetry to begin with, do not bring any poetry into the classroom at all.
But I locate the origins of the problem in the undergraduate English programs in Universities. The foundations of most English teachers’ knowledge and understanding of their subject is built and developed during their BA. To my knowledge, very few, if any, BA programs in Canada require English majors to take a course in poetry- so, again, if you don’t like it to begin with, you probably won’t sign up to take a course in it. Of course, you do get exposed to poetry as you go through the required period survey courses, but then poetry is treated as a reflection of something happening as part of an aesthetic or historical movement. More fundamental questions such as “what is poetry” or “what is good poetry” rarely get asked. And these are the questions that high school students are going to ask. And they’re questions you better have an answer for if you’re going to evaluate a student’s poem. Most teachers are perfectionists, and they have a lot invested in their confidence in their subject matter. If they’re not confident about a subject area, they’re going to be even more reluctant to teach it.
Furthermore, many undergraduate programs don’t require a theory course. Queen’s does, and that’s where I was first exposed to poetics. Even though we didn’t always apply the theories to poetic texts, I began to understand some of the issues that poets (and other writers and literary critics) have engaged throughout literary history. However!!! I was taught by Jed Rasula. At the time, I didn’t know why that was important. All I knew was that he was a really good teacher. It was only years later that I discovered that he’s one of the most important and interesting scholars of contemporary experimental poetry around. Somewhere down the hall, Steve McCaffery was teaching. It would be another few years before I would know why it would have been a great opportunity for someone interested in poetry to take a course from him. I’d never heard of the Four Horsemen, or the TRG or bpNichol. While Queen’s requires a theory course, it doesn’t require a course in Canadian Literature in order to graduate with a BAH in English Literature. I think still think this is appalling. Then again, it is “English” Literature.
Finally. It is quite possible that a high school teacher does not have a BA in the subject they are teaching. In order to become certified in a subject, you only need to have taken 3 university level courses in that subject. What’s more, it is not unusual for teachers to teach subjects for which they have no qualifications. In my first year of teaching, I taught math. The last time I had even looked at math was when I was in high school myself.
So now we’re back to teachers teaching based on what they had been taught in high school.
You see the problem? The average teacher enters the profession with a fairly superficial education in poetry of any kind, let alone Canadian poetry. Once you start teaching, if you want to develop your knowledge of your subject area, you have to take it upon yourself to educate yourself. If you don’t have a substantial background in poetry, it’s hard to know how to begin. You don’t even know what questions to ask. And if poetry is not emphasized in the curriculum, it’s hard to see why anyone would make developing their knowledge of poetry a priority. And, if you do take it upon yourself to develop this knowledge, the only professional rewards you’ll get will be personal satisfaction. It won’t count towards any kind of accredited professional development. It won’t help towards a promotion or increase your steps on the pay scale. It's a wonder anyone teaches any poetry at all.

lovely lovelies

2006-02-25T17:03:00.000-05:00

i chaperoned the semi-formal on thursday night, and it was the easiest supervision i've ever done.
no drinking, no drugs, no fights- heck, i didn't even see a messy breakup.
just 150 kids dancing their faces off.
it was pretty beautiful. reminded me why i cross the city each day to work with these kids.

one puzzling thing.
the afghan boys. our afghan population has grown substantially since i've taught at the school- they're now the 3rd most dominant cultural group, after pakistani and indian.
those boys- they're such a force. the way they interact with each other- always gathering in a circle. lots of touching, slapping.
at the dance, about half a dozen times, they broke out into this rhythmic chant, "heh, heh, heh, heh," that would accelerate into a frenzied pitch and then they'd just sort of explode. it reminded me for some reason of the masonic type group in Von Trier's The Kingdom, when they cry "hep, hep, hep." i dunno.
some very particular male bonding going on there. i need to learn more about these boys than the kiterunner can teach me.

unboring

2006-02-23T07:03:00.000-05:00

the inimitable kenny g, no, not that one, was in our town this week, for a special lexiconjury celebrating the launch of the open letter issue dedicated to his work. it was great to see him, and the old and new gang. more later.

too much muchness

2006-02-23T06:54:00.000-05:00

this has been a great but crazy busy week.
at least I feel a bit more settled and the classes are in the group routines- so papers aren't going missing.

my student teacher began teaching the 12s on Monday. I learned just how much I've learned about questioning technique in the past 7 years. I do remember that I wasn't particularly good at it for the same reason that my student teacher isn't.
I wanted to skip the scaffolding and go right to the higher order thinking questions.

so, we're learning about how to do that. And about how the lecture is not pedagogically unsound or definitively boring.

And about how to avoid playing the "guess what the teacher's thinking" game.

I'm really enjoying this. I like talking about teaching. ("no shit!" says my boyfriend.) I'd always thought I'd hate teaching teachers, but now I'm wondering if that might not be a place I end up one day.
maybe I should finished that master's this summer.

comments!

2006-02-23T06:50:00.000-05:00

i finally figured out why my comment notification wasn't working.
there was a typo in my e-mail address.

forgive my delayed responses hitherto!

composition erxercise

2006-02-18T08:51:00.000-05:00

a wiki(pedia) history of the universe

could be morphed into a history of anything.
it's a process essay!
it's a language lesson (nouns)!
it's a friggin' media mark!

ladies and gentleman- success!

2006-02-17T19:52:00.000-05:00

after have taught the grade 11 university prep english course at least 15 times, and revamping it each time, I finally, FINALLY figured out how to teach those kids to a write good essay.

yeesh!

I don't know why it's taken this long. I've certainly thought about it enough- and tried so many things.
but even though i knew in my guts some of what i had to do, I let other concerns get in the way and i would sabotage my own plans.

teaching composition is complex. there are so many factors that make a good essay good- argumentation, organization, rhetoric, syntax, diction- and each of these is complex. my first mistake was to get all aristotelian on the shit and break it down into ever small classifications until my diction unit began with the syllable. I figured I'd build my way up from there.

the results were a number of awkard, stilted essays because the students didn't know *why* they were writing! (we never really got that far)

as I revamped my approach this summer, I knew I had to tackle the big nut- argumentation- earlier- because this was the engine of the essay, where all the fire comes from.

and last semester, i *did* spend a lot of time on argumentation, and made huge leaps there, as evidenced in what the students wrote and how they began to learn to reason.
but when they went to write, they still fell into the five-paragraph model, and I knew I hadn't given them the proper pedagogical underpinning to do any differently.

so, this time round, I began with organization. But I decided it really try to teach it- not just show it.

I figure that the organization of ideas is about the most abstract thinking skill you can try to teach. and when you talk about organization, you're moving from abstraction to abstraction. when i've taught it in the past, I've begun with the abstract, the label. This is what a definition essay is. Here are some examples. Here's why you might write one. Now you go do one yourself.

this time, we started with them organizing things. Themselves, at first. And then items in their bedrooms. And *then* we developed a language for it. ("what's a word you could use to describe the way farah has organized her list?").

then we read essays- but first, we read paragraphs of one essay, and working with the summarise of main ideas developed by the kids, they build their own essay outline. So the first encounter they had with an essay was constructive/active. As we talked about how the essay had been organzied, we added to our vocabulary about how you might organize ideas in an essay (general to specific, chronologically, order of importance)

from there, we read a whole essay. Now that we had begin to develop a language to describe organization, it was much easier for them to both see and talk about how this essay had been organized.

now we were ready to write.
and they did.
and the essays are some of the best writing I've seen out of my students.
and it's only the end of week 2.

frenetic

2006-02-15T20:40:00.000-05:00

fre-netic.
what a crazy few days it's been.
the second term just won't settle in.
we're into course selection for next year, and for my grade 11 homeform class, it's a big deal- planning their senior year. So we're taking it nice and slow.

but it coincides with the literacy test this year - now, for the first time, in second semester.

so there are more pieces of paper and special schedules and things to remember than ever before. Out of the past 10 days of classes, only 4 have had a normal schedule.

and we also had a fire alarm.

but i'm gradually getting on top of things. My students are almost into their group routines, and once that's kicked in, things work so much more smoothly.

and I met my student teacher this week. what a lovely young man. i'm very lucky. he's smart and confident but not arrogant or overbearing. he's open and honest, but has already demonstrated an incredible amount of initiative. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does.

my grade 12s are a fragile bunch.
feel like I'm needing to nurture them so much.

the vocab thing i wanted to try seemed to work very well.

3U nearly capsized on me, but i reigned it in.

on the syndicated broadcast of the west wing this week, they showed the episode where CJ takes over as chief of staff, and feels completely overwhelmed, and then, in true CJ fashion, picks herself up, figures out the game, goes back in and calls the shots.
how i worhips that woman. muttered my mantra under my breath several times this week: "I am CJ. I am CJ."

I made an administratively wise decision for the department today. i think i really might be able to do that job when the time comes.

podcasting a narrow net

2006-02-11T08:55:00.000-05:00

Dear Board Media Expert,

Thank you so much for the workshop yesterday! I really appreciated the way you put the tool in context before we used it- and going through the process with a group, mimicking what the students might do was also very instructive- especially in thinking about developing a timeline.The workshop left me bubbling with ideas about how I might use podcast technology in the classroom.

The workshop also left me a bit puzzled. I must confess I was very surprised to hear you advocate against making podcast content public beyond the classroom/school audience. Believe me, I do understand the dangers/risks involved in doing such a thing- and perhaps within the context of that workshop, there wasn't enough time to deal with the complexity around such issues. But I was even more surprised when you connected your podcasting publishing practice to the publishing practice around essay writing.

I have long felt that one of the main problems with the way we teach the essay is the very fact that so often the teacher is the only audience for student essays. The reading I did over the summer indicated that one of the main problems with weak prose writers is their inability to conceive of an audience, and how difficult this is for adolescents in particular, when they have a hard time conceiving that anyone exists beyond the boundaries of their navels.

Just this year, I became staff advisor for the school newspaper, and to be perfectly honest, I think it has been the thing that has kept me from quitting the profession. It has been such a joy to work with students on writing that has an audience that is meaningful for them. And we're increasingly courting controversy- this means we're constantly having conversations around what our purpose is, what's the different between being critical and being slanderous, libelous or mean-spirited. And what incredible conversations we're having about tone, and argumentation, and diction. And what care they're taking to make sure the paper is typo free.

I'm still trying to find ways to replicate this experience for my classroom students with their writing. It isn't easy- there are lots of practical difficulties. But I strongly believe this is the direction I should take in my approach to teaching writing- and it's certainly the way I want to approach podcasting.

You said that the difference between radio and podcasting is that one is broadcasting and one is narrow casting. Isn't another significant difference to be found in the DIY ethic of the podcast? Isn't there tremendous liberatory potential in showing students that they can be producers of media for a significant audience?

Wouldn’t a negotiating what constitutes appropriate content for a podcast be an incredibly powerful classroom activity?

As for issues around using copyrighted material, I see this as an opportunity rather than a limitation. I have never had students care so much about the way they present themselves in writing than when they have written e-mails to artists. I've had students e-mail visual artists, asking permission to use a graphic in a web page. I've had students e-mail poets, asking for permission to reproduce a poem. In the current climate, where most musicians understand that the nature of distribution has changed considerably because of the digital revolution, I believe it would be very easy to find musicians of any genre who would be delighted to know that a song of theirs was being used in a podcast produced by a high school student. Obviously, we wouldn't be asking for permission from Metallica :)

At the workshops offered by the curriculum team in the fall, I learned about the document Teaching Controversial Subjects. I learned that this document says that controversial subjects will be taught. I was amazed to learn that this statement existed in a board sanctioned document. What are we doing with this freedom and support? If this support exists now, in print, then with all due respect, why are we shying away from practices solely on the basis that they might create controversy?

Sincerely,

happenin fish

PD day

2006-02-10T07:43:00.000-05:00

Today we have a PD day and the english curriculum support team is offering a whole day of PD for English teachers inthe board. they had spaces for 200 teachers. (there must be triple that number of english teachers in the board- at least there are about 120 heads of department...)
This is the first subject specific PD that's been available to all English teachers since I started teaching 7 years ago.
cause, you know, teaching english is easy- after teacher's college, why would we need any professional development?

I am looking forward to it. I decided to sign up for a workshop in podcasting. I hope i got my selection- it's a two session workshop, which means I'll attend 2 rather than three sessions. The other one I signed up for was one on teaching poetry at the 3U and 4U level. I want to see how other people approach it. I promise I'll behave.

there were other more theoretically progressive workshops being offered- I thought it was a good selection- one looking at bringing various critical theories into the classroom- sorry, that's horribly worded. the workshop title is much better. But you have to understand that most high school English teachers think that the way they teach interpretation (formalist, new criticism) is neutral, and innocent of theory. As one of my colleagues says, "interpretation without the isms."
you'd think that with all that's been going on in my head that I would have picked that workshop as my first choice. it's my 3rd. it's just that discussions about theory with english teachers can be tortured. if i knew that everyone taking the workshop had already decided that this was a) what we do anyway b) important to address, and wanted to discuss more of the "how's"- (not uncritically, of course) i would sign up like a shot.
i don't behave very well in workshops.
and jen isn't going to be there for a silent knowing look across the table.
so.

i'm going to play instead.
i'm really looking forward to someone else teaching me how to use a tech tool. I usually try to figure it out on my own.
and i've been dreaming about podcasts in the classroom.
i think it's low tech enough that we could actually sustain it at garneau.

i think i will try to nab the workshop leader of the theory one and ask her a couple questions. i know her. and i know a bit about where she sits on this stuff.

i actually know half of the workshop leaders personally.
that's kind of interesting to me.
i don't know what that means.

teaching senior english students to speak

2006-02-09T18:24:00.000-05:00

so my 12s are still lovely, but today we encountered a massive bump in our conversation:

they have such difficulty expressing their ideas

I see it as a sign of impoverished vocabulary. I can tell what they want to say and when I supply the words, they feel relieved. But there are so many problems with this approach- it teaches them to be dependent on me, and there's a danger of my shifting their ideas towards mine as i supply them with words.

so.
for monday.
an experiment.
i sent them off on their long weekend (we have PD tomorrow) to read two short stories.
On Monday, I'm going to ask each person to make a list of ten observations they made about the stories. Then I'm going to ask them to pool their observations with their groups members. I'm then going to ask them to come up with an organization scheme for the observations. They will then have to describe this scheme in words. What I want to do is enrich their vocabulary for talking about their ideas- the abstract nouns and adjectives is what they lack. we'll then put these up in the classroom- so that they have an available repertoire. that way, THEY can choose the words, not me.

i think that the way they choose to organize their observations is going to be interesting too.

the culture of reading and the teaching of english

2006-02-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

the above subject line is the name of a book that was lent to me by a prof (which i have yet to return...) which i'm now reading on the subway commute.

aside:
i used to restrict myself against even thinking about school on my commute- i'd save it for my personal reading time, in the name of mental health. my decision to break that restriction is also motivated by mental health concerns. i'm treating my mental health the way i treat my physical health- i listen to what my body and mind crave. i'm carrying around a novel and a volume of poetry, the newspaper, and this book on pedagogy. each time, the book on pedagogy is what i pick up.
is this healthy?
i'm glad i'm not the only teacher who struggles with these issues.

anyhow- the book offers a summary and critique of three dominant models of reading: the cognitive model- associated with formalism & new criticsm, the expressive model- aka reader response, and the social-cultural model- Freire, Giroux, Eagleton, etc, etc. The author, Kathleen McCormick suggests that much might be gained from more exchanges between advocates of these different approaches, that they need each other's strength to check each other's weaknesses. some great points she makes along the way, and I find things she talks about being illustrated in my classroom each day.

This is partly because I'm trying something different in my 4U class. (stupid, stupid, stupid me. i swore i wasn't going to do anything different- is this healthy?). Inspired again by a reading of a chpater of e PhD thesis given to me by the aforementioned prof, I've been asking my 4U students to reflect about what different things form the basis of their initial responses to the stories we read:
1) textual elements
2) personal experience
3) literary education
4) the reader's social/cultural/political context
5) the author's personal history and social/political/cultural context

not suprisingly, the students feel most comfortable talking about the text from the first three positions. it isn't that 4 and 5 don't affect the way they read. they're just less aware of it. i've certainly been aware of how 4 affects the way they respond to texts. but in my teaching, i'm pretty straight up formalist. Hard not to be when the curricular expectations laid out by the ministry are so darned formalist, and the exams will ask them to do a close reading.

and that's one critique i have so far with McCormack's book- she seems to address every historical/material situation that helps determine a reading of a given work except for the historical/material conditions of the classroom itself:
the teacher
the teacher's expectations
the other students
the culture of the school
the place of the text within the course context- i.e. if a text is presented as part of a poetry unit, you will read it as though it is a poem
the text book
the photocopied handout
the gestener sheets

...oops. strike that.
chapter 5 does begin to address these things...

still more later

a new start part 2- take 2

2006-02-05T09:14:00.000-05:00

and then my grade 12 class.
12 people on roll.
half of them didn't show- 3 of them i know failed 3U the semester before, so they won't be in the class.

but even with 6 people, i decided we'd get right into it.
after a whole bunch of administrative muck -ups- we ended up having about 40 minutes left for class- so we all sat around one table and chatted. i told them a bit about teh course, and then i asked them to tell me what I could do to help them succeed.
they came up with great things that showed that they really understand what it means to do well in school. they wanted rubrics, exemplars, opportunities to revise their work, time to talk one on one about their progress. nice thing about a small class- we can do lots of revisions.

and then we talked about stories. i asked them to consider why we tell stories and why we read stories. and then we shared our responses. we got into the difference between a fiction and non fiction and one fellow said that when you make up a story, you're being creative. another normally shy young flower who had just taken writer's craft last semester responded that you could be creative in the way you tell a non-fiction story. weee ha. and then another said, in the most beautifully offhand way, well, last semester in philosophy, we read some narrrative theory and this guy Paul Ricoer says that in telling stories we define who we are.

!!!!

i was kind of hoping that maybe by the end of the semester, this would be an idea that they might grasp.

holy friggin crow.

now, i know some of these kids. they are not normally the sharpest tacks in the box.
i also know them to be incredibly shy.

wow.
what a difference a small class makes.

- when i've got kids doing lit circles in larger classes- i should enter the circles more often. i need to hear kids being this comfortable more often.

a new start- part 1- take 2

2006-02-05T09:12:00.000-05:00

well!
2nd semester started yesterday- a full day schedule- which is unusual. usually we have a half day start, where kids go to each class for 30 minutes- just get your feet wet, find your class, put a face to the name of the teacher- etc etc. then it all begins for real the next day. usually this happens in the afternoon, following a morning of a similar schedule for the semester 1 classes, where you hand back the marks and and exams and all that mess. so the semester 2 kids get to meet you after a most harrowing experience. admin thought that staff would be really happy to have this new approach- because it got rid of that stressful chaotic mess. staff, however, on the whole, were saying things like, "can you believe they had us start classes on friday? can you believe they had us start with a full day? what are we supposed to do?"

i decided to teach.
i like getting into it right away. i hate wasting my students's time. and i think when they see the half hour schedule, they think it's going to be a waste of their time.

anyhow.
i had a great day yesterday.
i tried something new with the 3U's. I want to focus on teaching the concept of organizing ideas this semester. I don't think i've really TAUGHT it before. I've demonstrated it, and i've given them feedback when they've done it poorly. but i haven't sat down and brainstormed ways that I could really get them to experience what i mean.
so here begins a series of experiments.

I asked the kids to organize themselves into groups. There could be no fewer than 3 groups and no more than 6. groups did not need to be even in number. and first, they were to organize themselves chronologically. I made sure that they understood it had something to do with time. and then I let them go and told them they could interpret it as they saw fit.

it worked beautifully. both classes went with date of birth as I had expected. but one class was so insistent on there being 5 people in each group that they made the division between groups somewhat arbitrary. the other class divided by seasons.
afterwards, we brainstormed other ways that they could have approached chronological organization- and they came up with lots of ideas.
I then had them do it again, this time organizing themselves geographically. again, they went with country of birth as their first choice.
with the second class, we brainstormed different approaches first, and then picked which method of organization we liked best and divided the class that way.
the overwhelmingly most popular choice was by municipal region- because this was how we were able to identify ourselves as living in Thorncliffe or Flemmingdon Park. this was fascinating. a LOT of energy around this idea. a lot of energy again around the idea of the geography of the cafeteria.

at times, people would offer specific ways of organizing that didn't fit into the general categories to time and space- organize alphabetically, organize by the colour of your shirt (of your skin? someone misheard- THAT generated a lot of energy).
so we then had to go from the specific to the general- what general category would that be?
this was difficult for them. i prompted more than i should have.

this exercise is not only going to be effective technically- it made concrete and palpable an abstract skill that my students find so difficult-
but as i think about it now, the readings i've been doing in freirean pedagogy are animating what i see, and i feel like i uncovered a full semester's worth of generative material in this one activity. the politics of organization- what happens when you have a person who doesn't fit into the categories? do you invent a new category? do you make the person fit the categories you already came up with? do you scrap the whole system of organization and start a new?
how does the way we organize things affect how we see them?
many ties here into language as a way of seeing the world.

flemmo and thorncliffe- these words resonate.
but their meaning is changing.

and the cafe- imagine a descriptive essay on the cafe.
or a genus-class definition essay on the cafe.

yee ha!

generative charette

2006-01-27T08:59:00.000-05:00

poking around on the website of the guy who did the grandaddy video takes me to another project of his, 100 objects to Represent University.

i post it here because I've been reading up on Freirian (sp?) models of the composition classroom, and this project could be a powerful and very playful way to have students respond to a "generative" word.
project's full description pasted below:

Background
In 1977 two spaceships were launched from Cape Kennedy containing material to represent life on earth. The ambition of the project was to make hypothetical contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence. The choice of material was subjective to an American, scientifically educated, 1970s community, with paternalistic attitudes towards the rest of the world. But who consulted us? We were not asked to make a contribution and we must do something about this falsification, especially now as we proceed into the second millenium, when everyone is making lists and taking stock of what has been achieved.

Assignment
Create and curate an exhibition of 100 objects to be displayed in the Atrium Gallery that represent the idea of University..

Collect five (5) objects that you think represent University. Don’t limit your analysis and observations to simply “University of Connecticut” but appreciate the generality of the term. Challenge your first impressions and typical assumptions. Can University be represented by something huge, tiny, intangible, soft, hard, furry, wet? Be thoughtful and evocative in your choice of objects.

Consider as you collect how you will present your object(s), as well as how each might be exhibited. How will you document and represent the very large? the very small?

Attach to each object collected one tag. On each tag write your name, the object’s name, time and location of where and when object was found and a short statement detailing why you consider this object representative of the term University.

Today
Write 10 words large in black marker one on each notecard that you think describe University, then write a short explanation on the reverse of the card stating why.

Monday 27 January 5 objects tagged and ready to present

The Charrette Model
The word charrette comes from the French for “cart.” It conveys a sense of urgency and intensive effort needed to finish a work before an absolute deadline. In turn-of-the-century architecture, charrette refered to the carts in which the finished drawings were placed at the deadline hour for transport to the master for critique. Although it is used in a variety of disciplines to achieve action-oriented results, a charrette’s most notable use is to move a development or redevelopment project through decisive phases of design quickly and efficiently.

A charrette is a highly interactive learning experience; takes the form of a design process in which stakeholders of a specific project participate; is limited within a scheduled time frame; allows a full range of issues and design alternatives to be discussed in order to achieve optimum development; and yields a cohesive implementation agenda, as well as goals and objectives responsive to the needs of all stakeholder
[CLOSE]

pretty source code

2006-01-27T08:45:00.000-05:00

some dancing letters appealing to a 30 something's sense of nostalgia:
this music video for the grandaddy song "jed's other poem," created on an apple II.

my grand daddy taught me a bit o' coding in basic when I was 12 and we had an Apple II in the basement where he and I would alternately retreat from the demands of the world.
so, the part at the end of this thing where the code becomes part of the art makes me all happy. a nice hip way to introduce that idea to the grade 10s if i get to teach it how i want to teach it next year. maybe use in the grade 12 course too- depending on where we go with that.

learning happened!

2006-01-26T07:32:00.000-05:00

and then, we realize that perhaps it *is* possible to teach grade 11s something about composition in 4 months.
I marked one set of final projects last night (18 down, 140 to go). Most struggled, but there was at least a sense of what they were supposed to do creeping in and around there. And then... one student showed me that she had learned what i was trying to teach. She showed me that she understood something about the relationship between audience and argument, audience and structure, audience and syntax and diction.
she did it! and all with a topic that was personally meaningful to her.

so.
it's possible.

damn hard.

but possible.

and then we freak out

2006-01-25T18:03:00.000-05:00

so all those feelings of lightness I was experiencing yesterday went out the freakin window, freakily, after I entered the term marks into the freakin ass marks program the board in all its wisdowm decided to adopt even though it is hopeless underdeveloped for macs which means i must do my mark entry at school which means i do it less frequently which means the students get fewer mark updates which undercuts the only strength that this program has. [/end rant about board technology policies #1]

if you want to get me spitting these days, there are a few sure fire ways to do it. one of them is to bring up the new assessment and evaluation policies set by the last provincial curriculum revision.

the policy states that the student's term mark, 70% of their final mark, should not be an average, but rather a reflection of the student's most consistent, most recent performance.

I love the theoretical spirit of this idea.
It supports the notion that a student's mark shoudl be a story of their progress, not their failures. It allows students to find their feet in a class, and build towards success. It allows them to not be punished for that one bad day that brought their mark down.

and it opens up huge balls of fish and kettles of wax.

because it openly acknowledges that evaluation is a complex subjective process (yes, even in math and science, and I've taught math, and learned that evaluation in this discipline is only marginally more objective), and puts an incredible amount of responsibility on the teacher to be able to discern what is "most consistent." (no marks program we have been given can yet perform this function.)

while I am happy for this shift (after all, I am a trained professional- I feel that part of my training and experience makes me an authority on the success or failings of my students) no documents or talking heads will recognize? openly acknowledge? that this is in fact what this policy does (give us this kind of increased responsibility). Since so many of the other board policies treat us as thought we are only marginally more responsible than the students we teach, I wonder, where's my back-up? If I get into a tight spot with a student or parent over the mark they received because of my discretion, is the admin/board going to back me up and talk about my level of professionalism?

but another more serious problem with the idea is that it presupposes that there is a limited set of skills that the student is being expected to master and that these are practised over the course of the semester- that the student is given many opportunities to develop these skills.
and that's probably true for many disciplines.
but then there's English.

The sheer volume of skill sets that we are expected to teach over the course of a semester is unreal (and completely unrealistic). And it means that I may only hit a few skill areas once or twice. Is it pedagogically sound to evaluate a students' most consistent performance on something they've done only twice? What if they achieved a 50% on one task, and an 80% on the other? What's the most consistent performance?

The suggested solution from the Board support documents is to consider the skill sets more broadly- in English, we evaluate under the following four "strands":

Reading & Literature Studies
Writing
Media
Language

problems #1:

not all of these categories are skill sets.
"Media" isn't a skill. Interpreting and creating what the ministry calls "media works" is a skill, and this is mostly what gets evaluated under this category. (in practice, a lot of poster creation). (but that's a whole other rant).

While reading is clearly a skill, "Literature Studies" to me is a genre. In the act of interpreting a novel and interpreting a film, I see a shared skill set. To me, these designations are genre distinctions.

But even in something so clearly a skill set such as Writing, it is very difficult to come up with a marking scheme that will produce a number that communicates a students' abilities meaningfully. And perhaps that's part of the problem- we are expected to produce one number. That number is meant to communicate so many things.
For example, I have a student in the Grade 11 Univeristy prep course who, like so many of my students, is very bright but lacks the necessary fluency to do well at the Academic level. He has an incredibly poetic sensibility- a gifted orator, understands on a deep level something of the nature of rhetoric and its impact on an audience.
But his reading comprehension and writing skills are deeply impaired by insufficient time spent in the language.

He'll probably pass the course. Going into the exam, he "has 60 per cent." Does that 60 per cent communicate what I just wrote?
Should he "have 60 per cent"?
He has to write the literacy test this year. I'm not sure he'll pass it.
Should he be able to pass a grade 11 university prep course if i have doubts about his ability to pass a standardized literacy course?

the problem.
the problem.

there are so many more problems.

but the main problem, and this is, I do believe , a fault in how I structured the assignments this term, the main problems is that when I look at the pattern of performance on the tasks I have given my students this year- I do not have confidence in what the numbers tell me.
the numbers do not even in the most clumsy way tell the right story.

and this is why i flipped out yesterday.

and then we breath

2006-01-24T06:38:00.000-05:00

last full day of classes for semester one. Got all my term marks done (mostly). Nothing to do but mark the summative projects and exams.

dum dee dum dee dum.

what is this strange feeling of weightlessness?
It's not like I have nothing to do- 80 odd pieces of marking X 2 between now and next monday.

but i feel so light! i realized yesterday that it's because my job is finished. I've done what I can. There's nothing more for me to do for these kiddos. It's all up to them now. And I feel, for the first time ever, it seems, like I've done a decent job in both of my courses. I'm particularly happy with the way I didn't give up on the 10s- with how hard I tried to overcome my feelings of frustration and rescue that course before it went off the rails. nearly lost it. thank god for the xmas break- i needed that distance.
the 11s were a dream- both sections. such lovely kids. and i think we got to some things that mattered in both classes- not just skills, but big questions.

of course, i'm still thinking how i might re-jig it slightly for next term. 11th time's the charm, as they say :)

wish i could carry this lightness all year.
but i think it's impossible for a creature like me. i take the responsibility on too much- weigh it too heavily.

hrm.

poetry & politics 1

2006-01-24T06:34:00.000-05:00

There are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it—be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist Stephane Mallarme praised the poet's central mission to "purify the words of the tribe." And Ezra Pound warned that Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clean. It doesn't matter whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm. . . .If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. Or, as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, "One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . ." Poetry is not the entire solution to keeping the nation's language clear and honest, but one is hard pressed to imagine a country's citizens improving the health of its language while abandoning poetry."
Dana Gioia, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1991

via Beth Follett at Pedlar Press

this anger

2006-01-22T12:42:00.000-05:00

"I don’t want to lose this anger. ‘Reconciliation’ is a word that makes me want to vomit an ocean of blood. “Conflict resolution” is a phrase that makes me want to step on the heads of the snakes that hiss it. I sit in my living room so I can see all the colors that surround me. It is the color of acorn squash. The stairhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifway wall is paprika. The dining room is gazpacho green. Nina Simone is singing “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” on the CD player. I explored, I read, I questioned and I came to the conclusion that everything that happens today is directly related to what happened yesterday. I am lucky to have been born at a time when people were turning the world on it’s head and shaking out the dirty secrets for all to share and see so I could run and pick them up, hold them in my hands and let them burn like fire in my pockets until I find their truths."

from the foot of mount olympus

boys and girls and games

2006-01-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

sometime, somewhere, ( it WILL come to me), I read a fascinating article about a study of the way that boys and girls play computer games. the study revealed that girls are just as interested in playing computer games as boys are- but that they play the games so differently, that in a mixed social setting, they will withdraw from play because the boys' style of play dominates. The study found two significant differences:

- girls tend to be interested in playing *with* the rules of the game- staying focussed on the objectives, playing by the rules. Boys like to play *against* the game- trying to break things, killing thir own men, etc.

- when girls play together, they consult each other before making a move, looking for consensus before they act. the position they adopt is one where everyone is sitting around the computer, on the same level as the one operating the keyboard. when boys play together, one person sits at the keyboard, the others stand around him, yelling commands "turn left, turn left!!!", reaching over to control the keyboard while the player is still sitting at the computer- it's chaotic, noisy and unruly.

as an end of term treat, i brought Nick Montford's text adventure, Adverbum, in yesterday to my boysy grade 10 gifted class. We projected it on the overhead and began to play- sure enough, the above dynamics were in full force. it was pretty funny. many of the boys' answer to everything was "blow it up!" "kill it!" "smash it!" they were delighted by the game's response: "violence is not the answer to this one." I was equally delighted when at a certain point in the game, random hitting & smashing of things *was* rewarded.
Initially, I was at the keyboard to get us started. I left the classroom for a minute, and when I came back, one boy was sitting at the keyboard, with a cluster of other boys around him, just as was described by the study I'd read- and there they were shouting, and reaching, and commanding. very funny.

but it gave me an idear.
what if i was to set up a similar situation- the class playing a game together- and unbeknownts to them, video tape their interactions. we would then watch the video tape to observe the group dynamics.

i know i've never been more consciously aware of gendered behaviour than when i work with people on computers.

something to keep in mind for next year.

getting back in the game

2006-01-19T11:21:00.000-05:00

after what spiraled into a frustrating dynamic in my grade ten gifted class, I found new hope and purpose in playing to their interests, which happily coincided with my strengths- we went cyborg.
after showing them cronenberg’s existenz, and discussing its implications re: subjectivity, the nature of reality, nature vs civilization, etc
I had them for their ISU design a game that would address one or more of the themes of the course.
I just conferenced with them about their game designs, and they’re very revealing.
while in discussions, they did not resist the idea of the breakdown of boundaries between self and other, the real and the virtual, etc, and could not offer any objections to the potential dissolutions of these boundaries- their games, for the most part, reify the boundaries:
you are either a puppet or you’re real
you either follow the rules or you’re an individual
you’re either good or evil

while the task illuminates that i haven’t done a very good job of teaching cyborg subjectivity- it also shows what a powerful pedagogical tool game design is

this is an exciting project- it’s an object to think with
and gives me some ideas about where to go with the course if i

composition pedagogy goodness

2006-01-19T07:13:00.000-05:00

oh my.
there's enough food for thought in the archives of Vitia to keep me going all semester- and this guy is still actively posting.

back when I was actively working on my M. Ed, (apparently I have until august of this year to finish it), I learned about the four C's conferences (composition, computing, college? something, something) and the community of rhetoric and composition pedagogues that meet there. It seems, as far as I can tell, to be a byproduct of the fact that in the states, if you're a grad student in English, you do your time teaching in the Junior Colleges, something for which I think the closest equivalent we have here in Canada is quebec's CJEP. And while you're there, you teach the Composition course that it seems everyone has to take. So here you are- head full of derrida and foucault- confronted with the fact that your students don't know how to write.

what results is some amazing thinking about writing, about teaching, and about teaching writing, as all these young, savvy, politically charged students of literature become pedagogues.

so where are the high school teachers who think about the theory they bring to their practice?
I think I'm right in that the reason this theorizing happens in this context is that it's done by people who have elected to continue on in the academy. most high school teachers are anti- theory. they see it as anti-practice somehow- which is perhaps why in the high school version of Hamlet, he brings about his own demise because he procrastinates- he does nothing! he just thinks.

puts an ironic spin on the maxim, "those who can't, teach."

to name the world

2006-01-19T07:07:00.000-05:00

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. People are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

Paulo Freire
(in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (New York: Continuum, 1981) p.76.)

collected from here:
http://www.muwp.org/mccomas/stories/storyReader$166

where there are more.

my students don't know the difference between education and training.

thinking about having them read walden- or parts of it...
hrmmm

lovely lex

2006-01-18T23:13:00.000-05:00

a lovely lexiconjury last night- warm and light.
particularly enjoyed a poem of Adam Seelig's that played with pitch- reminded me of some of bp nichol'swork, not only for the song like quality, but for the way it was so tenderly playful.

and i adored David McGimpsey-. angela's got this great interview of him linked on her blog, and I'd like to keep track of it.

"Poetry without timing is prose, comedy without timing is The Mike Bullard Show."

and fruit flies like a banana.

I also like his take on current can lit:
"The Canadian model of poetry does not account for humor as much as American models do and one can feel this shouldn't be so, given Canadian success in television comedy, but that's what readers of Canadian Literature actually buy. They have been given the choice of urban, hip and funny but they generally prefer rural, earnest and serious. "

too mind numb to reflect on any of this.
just need to accumulate.

patience, grasshopper

2006-01-18T06:40:00.000-05:00

"The best way to accomplish those things that are impossible today is to do today whatever is possible."

Paulo Freire

me too

2006-01-15T20:31:00.000-05:00

part of the purpose of this blog is to find others out there who are wracked with confusion over the same kinds of questions that plague me, and also finding people who will confront me with new questions, help me re-orient, etc.
it's a lot easier to find those people in the literary world- I know so many of them already, and so many of them are blogging. so the links on the sidebar are growing.

i'm having to be more deliberate in my search for sympatico educators. I just tried searching for "blog" + "education" + Illich, to see what I could find. More hits came back from people looking at the economic implications of Illich's work than the educational ones. But so much of what I found that did address Illich as an educational theorist was declammatory (is that the word i want?) and pedantic and superficial. It amounted to a few posts saying, "dude, you have to read this stuff." while i won't argue with the sentiment, i realized that the reason these blogs left me cold was that they seemed so self-assured.
reading radical pedagogues always fucks me up, exhilarating me at the same time as sending me into a pit of despair, because of the vast gap between what I aspire to and what i do.

so i was completely warmed by the bio of this fellow , who will be making an appearance in my blog roll shortly:

About the author

"Since none of us is ever done discovering who we are, this list is bound to change ….

* I have a MEd in Language and Literacy.
* I’ve taught for 22 years at the elementary level.
* 3 seasons as a migrant field hand convinced me that education is a path to power.
* Maybe I can make a difference for someone.
* I have more questions than answers.
* I test my theories every day.
* Contradictions interest me.
* My beliefs and practices are out of alignment.
* Each day is a revision.
* To me, the phrase ‘reading comprehension’ is redundant.
* This Zen quote seems important lately: “Great doubt, great enlightenment. Little doubt, little enlightenment. No doubt, no enlightenment.”

… for what it’s worth."

oral fluency

2006-01-15T19:39:00.000-05:00

one of my current students is an animated girl with strong opinions who writes reasonably well but is hopelessly inarticulate orally. i haven't helped her at all this year- i've paraphrased, intuited, and formed her thoughts for her when she stops after flailing around, saying, "you know what i mean?" when she hasn't made her thoughts clear at all.
be curious to read up on what's the most effective way to help students become more orally articulate

graphs, maps & trees

2006-01-15T16:17:00.000-05:00

a new mode of literary criticism

subverting the urban grid

2006-01-15T15:54:00.000-05:00

just need to keep track of people who do stuff like this