Our student's first semester ended on December 22 (teachers had to report, albeit briefly, on the 23rd). We return on January 3. This 10-11 day period is one in which we recuperate, reflect, and plan for the next semester. At least in theory. This year it has for me become something more - a time in which I must ask myself serious questions. These affect not only my role as a teacher, but also as a blogger, as one asked to help prepare for Yearlykos. Thus I post this not only on my personal blog, teacherken.blogspot.com, but at dailykos and myleftwing.
The reflections that you will read below are provoked by many things.
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As anyone who has ever taught realizes, there is much that is thought-provoking and challenging in what occurs in one's classroom and school. As a teacher of government and an active blogger I read a great deal on current events, and what I encounter cannot but remind me of the supposed Chinese curse "may live in interesting times." And there is also my membership in Langley Hill Monthly Meeting (Quakers), with our ongoing involvement with the kidnapped CPT members, including our own Tom Fox.
This is the second, and fortunately last, year in which we will attempt to complete the first semester before Winter break. It makes Fall semester courses too compressed, and puts far too much pressure on students just before Christmas, especially for seniors desperately attempting to improve the records they will submit along with their college applications. For teachers we lose the ability to have major papers and projects submitted before the break so that we had time to properly evaluate them. In the final two weeks of 2nd quarter I was living on 5 hours or less per night (one reason I rarely posted). My time was even more compressed by my decision to step in when musical theater was suddenly without a musical director: having being heavily involved in musical theater in high school and college, including serving as musical director and rehearsal accompanist for a production of Threepenny Opera our bi-college theater took to New York, I felt "called" to this responsibility, even though it placed additional burdens on me, first and foremost to learn the score ( I had two days to listen to the Original Cast album before tryouts, and then only 1 weekend with the piano score before rehearsals started).
As I look back on the first semester, I see many things I wish I had done different. I wonder how much of the time I spend in blogging is in reality stolen from my students .. is it time and energy better directed to giving more feedback on their papers, or could have taken more time to reflect on the needs of individual students? Might then I have realized more quickly some of the needs of individual students that did not become apparent to me until part way through second quarter? MY time in the Fall is already cramped because of two or more hours per day devoted to coaching soccer. That makes me unavailable for extra help after school, and many of the 10th graders I teach this year already take a "zero" period before school to take an extra course, and thus cannot come to me before classes. How can I find a way to better assist those who are struggling with their work? As of yet I have no answer.
And then there is Yearlykos. When we first learned about the project, I suggested that education was an important enough issue to be included. Gina and the others agreed, and pointed out that I was probably as visible as any Kossack on the subject. Thus I have had on paper a commitment to help organize a session (or more) on educational issues. I have continued to blog on education as one can read at http://teacherken.dailykos.com. You will find a link soliciting input for Yearlykos, and 9 diaries down from that is my most recent cumulative annotated list of diaries ("All you wanted to know about education"). I am trying to be of assistance on this project, even as I acknowledge the many others here perhaps better suited to this role. There are so many themselves involved with and concerned about education, and in naming those like Folkbum and Mi Corazon and sheba and jmart and kidspeak and so many others (sorry I cannot list you all) I realize that there is far more wisdom and insight about education than I can hope to bring to any discussion. And while I have organized groups presentations at professional conferences and done presentations of my own, I begin to have doubts as to the utility -- for myself and for others - of my continuing in such a leadership role. I will try to explain this a bit more anon.
My blogging about education has lead to several other things. Two people, one on this list and one not, have sent me their books asking me to read and offer comments and suggestions about how to promote the books. I have read one, am reading the other, and trying to figure out why anyone either values my insights or believes that I have any particular expertise in promoting a book, especially when the only monograph with my name on it was distributed for free and not that widely, and many of my posts on education simply scroll into oblivion. I will fulfill my commitments over this break (I promise, Peter), although I have grave doubts as to the value of anything I might offer.
Further, as regular readers of dailykos know, my blogging lead me to participation in an ongoing conversation about education and education policy with Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, who is also the current chair of the DLC. One result of that conversation can be seen as part of the recent PDF of grassroots ideas on education (about which you can read in the diary that will be 4 down from this on my teacherken.dailykos.com page, the one with the word "Toyota" in the title). As I have noted before, I found the Governor willing to listen in a way I have rarely experienced from politicians (and I have known quite a few). That comment does not represent an endorsement of any future political ambitions he may have. But he has expressed an interest in continuing our conversations about education (and my blogging has not included all of these). Further, I have similar had several other candidates for high office discuss education with me, and express some interest in further discussions, or in my reviewing their ideas about education.
Things like this can be appealing. I might be able to facilitate meaningful examination of educational policy, and thus leverage whatever insight I might have far beyond my own school and classroom. Perhaps I can help political figures get beyond the surface issues to more fully understand what we confront with education. That takes time. It is not so much that my ideas are necessarily what they need to accept, but that - and here I remain very much a teacher -- I can pose questions that help them clarify their own thinking, and begin to realize the implications of possible actions. I continue in my primary role as educator, but now I educate the policy makers. Yes, that is not only appealing, and also very gratifying to one's ego, it potentially can be of great benefit to our nation and thus to many more students than pass through my 6 periods per day.
Since Thanksgiving my students have been very tolerant, knowing I was distracted. When the Saturday after our holiday 4 peacemakers were seized in Baghdad, those of us at Langley Hill Monthly Meeting had our lives irrevocably altered. Because the American, Tom Fox, is our member (and our former Clerk), because 3 of the 5 members of his support committee are from our Meeting, because we all know him (although I know him less well than many others, even as we had in common having played music in the Marine Corps), we have had to talk with press, work with the American Muslim community, support his family, hold vigils, prepare ourselves for various possibilities even as we tried to maintain hope.
I knew about the kidnapping early that Sunday morning, but because CPT was attempting to work quietly for their release, my primary involvement to begin with was attempting to "walk back the cat" to keep details out of public discussion. This consumed most of that day and when I returned to school on Monday I told my students that something had happened that was likely to have me distracted, and that my phone would be on in my class I would explain to them what I could when I could, that there were few things in life that would ever take away from my preparing for helping them learn, but that this was a greater priority.
Tuesday morning, while I was teaching 2nd period AP Government, my phone rang. CPT was calling me. I stepped out of my room for the conversation, then was able to tell my students a bit more, that CPT was going public with their identity (by then fairly widely known to the press, because they were one of only two NGOs still active in Baghdad), but still attempting to keep Tom's identity not public. By Thursday all of the information was out. I had been especially concerned because Tom's 20+ years in the Marine Band could easily be misunderstood -- he auditioned right out of college as a way of staying out of the draft and Vietnam (which he opposed). Most members of that band are NOT regular marines, but professional musicians. As Tom once said, the only thing he ever killed in the Marine Corps was a piece of music. He never went to boot camp, nor qualified with a rifle. As I pointed out - to press, to my students, on line, by contrast I was a Marine who went through Parris Island, qualified with a rifle and did infantry training, and then got assigned to the Band t Quantico.
In working with the issues around Tom's capture, I was forced to address many things. My wife had known Tom before I had, from their common involvement in opposition to capital punishment in Virginia. My own position was not as firm, but I will not fully how and why my attitude has changed in this post, except to note that I have come to agree with Justice Blackmun that one can no longer tinker with the mechanisms of death. It should suffice to note that this was one of many areas in which I was finding myself forced to reexamine my attitudes, assumptions and beliefs. And I found that if I were to to that reexamination completely and honestly, it had serious implications for those parts of my life involving blogging and teaching.
My primary course is government. I have chosen that course because I have always been fascinated by it. During most of the adolescent and adult periods of my 59+ years of life I have been politically involved. Living as I do in Washington it is easy to know political figures, and to have intimate knowledge of how the government and political processes work in actuality. And because government affects everyone, even those who attempt to ignore it, as a subject it is far easier to connect to the lives of my students than many other social studies courses. And I have begun to question whether I can continue to teach government.
I had thought it impossible for anything to shock me anymore about people in government and related fields. My level of being astounded is off the charts at the revelations of recent weeks. I wonder if it is already too late to make a difference. I teach on the premise that by turning my students on they can have a meaningful effect on what happens in this country. I want them empowered to help shape the future in which they will live. That presumes that they can know how government and politics really work, and have some means of influencing the political choices and thus the governmental actions.
But if the nation's newspaper of record withholds information it has before a national election that would in my opinion have clearly changed the results of that election, how can the people exercise their franchise in a meaningful way? If the mechanisms by which the people are supposed to record their choices are corrupted, what is the point of encouraging people to participate in what becomes little more than a meaningless farce? When putative national leaders of the party not in power are willing to support legislation that denies Americans their basic rights, or places our nation in the position of rationalizing torture and denial of rights to those we can classify as others, what moral basis is their to our governmental actions? How can I in good conscience spend time with high school students encouraging them to be involved in a process on which their actions may have no influence?
I have had several thoughts that have run through my mind repeatedly in recent weeks. One has been a Talmudic story, about a man planting and caring for an olive tree. He was an old man, and he was asked why he cared so much for a tree whose fruit he would never see. He responded that he was planting it for his children and his children's children. Go me teaching has been, for the 10+ years since I embraced it as a full-time career, very much like caring for that tree. I may well never see the fruit, but I have wanted it to be available for the children for whom I do care, those who pass through my classroom.
Another thought has been a prayer, from a religious tradition (Catholic) I have studied but to which I have never adhered. It is from Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Here I note that often one will read that last line as "in dying TO OURSELVES"
My own "religious" beliefs are complicated. Let me merely offer that I do not concern myself with issues of an afterlife. What I do must be for its own sake. In my younger days I had my hitchhiker's view of life: when I had a vehicle I would usually pick up those seeking a lift, in the belief that when I needed a lift there would be one more open space for me for each person I had picked up. I suppose this was something of a late adolescent view of the Golden Rule. But even this now seems insufficient.
It has been the combination of realizing that I was still capable of being shocked and disillusioned and the recognition that in dealing with Tom's situation that I had still not brought my own life to integration and wholeness that leads to the writing of this posting. I am not despairing, nor have I reached any final position on the issues with which I wrestle. The thoughts are still not clear.
I have recently received criticism for offering comments which suggest that broad criticism and condemnation of whole classes such as all Republicans is not particularly worthy and is also counterproductive. I suppose were I to respond to those who implied that I was being too soft, or too generous, or too peaceful, I might well refer them to the prayer of St. Francis as part of my answer. I can think of many other things to which I might also want to refer. I am not willing to destroy the village in order to save it. I am unwilling to start down the slope so slippery with good intentions that the goal I seek is worth temporarily abandoning all I hold dear - for me the means must conform with the end, or the end is thereby debased. As I learned in another context when I was visiting Mount Athos (the peninsula that is an Orthodox Christian monastic republic in N Greece, and has been for more than 1,000 years), pilgrimage is not so much the arrival at the destination as it is the journey to that destination.
And as I look at how I journey, I also find that I must look at my reasons, my justifications. That requires me to be willing to examine the principles by which I operate, even in small day to day interactions. I have for years realized that I could not compartmentalize how I live. In a sense this recognition presents me with a possible conflict. I strongly believe in separation of church and state, perhaps because so often I have been affiliated or identified with minority points of view, whether in my Jewish background, my 14 years in the Orthodox Church or my current Quaker identity, but also because of my recognition that without respect for our differences we will inevitably find ways to justify our demeaning of and discrimination towards those different from ourselves. And to me this is but the first step towards demonization and destruction, something with which I refuse to have any part. m How then do I answer those who claim that it is their very refusal to compartmentalize their deepest beliefs that lead them to want what they consider a Christian nation? Since I do not believe the end justifies the means, I would ask them to use the system as it is -- if they can persuade the necessary proportion of the nation through truly free exchange of ideas to amend (and I think thereby destroy) our Constitution to become perhaps an American equivalent of Iran, that is their right to try, but should they succeed (and I think were they to abide by the current Constitution they would not) they would discover two things. One, many people might choose to leave the nation. Or greater importance, they would have a hollow victory because they would no longer have America, but something as yet not known.
I do not know what purpose my teaching government serves in a time when it seems as if the ideals and operation of our Constitutional system may already be disappearing. If the press and political figures are not willing to address key issues and to confront those who would destroy our Constitutional protections for whatever reason, then how does teaching government to adolescents, or writing even like this post electronically, or helping organize a session on education policy at yearlykos make a difference? At one of our recent vigils for the CPT captives, I found myself drawn to Romans Chapter 12. Even if you are not particularly receptive either to Christianity in general or Paul in particular, you might want to read the chapter. To me there are several key points: that we have diversity of gifts that we do not share equally, but which together make a difference. Thus perhaps for me the question may be not that of withdrawal, or even feeling that what I do is in this time of crisis too small, not enough. I am also reminded in that Chapter to "hold fast to what is good" even as I am to hate that which is evil. As a Quaker I cannot accept that any person has the power to place herself beyond redemption, and that it is my calling, even as I reject the evil action to seek to answer that which is good in every person. And I am also told in that chapter not to flag in zeal. Thus as tempting as despair and depression may be, they are insufficient reasons to totally abandon the tasks before me that seem so hopeless, so pointless.
And yet, I cannot do them all. And I do not know what difference I make - by teaching, by blogging, by organizing, by praying.
And yet, I go on. It is a form of pilgrimage. The old paths on Mount Athos were often overgrown on my last trip there 16 years ago. How easy it would be instead to flag down a truck on a logging road and hitch a ride, rather than walk through the woods by oneself, or perhaps in silence with one or two others. But in walking I realized that arrival at any one monastery was never the end of the journey. It was but a temporary respite on a far longer journey, one not constrained by the boundaries of the monastic Republic. The guide book would say it was a 4 hours walk from one monastery to another. That is if one looked at one's watch. It could be an seemingly endless trip if one's only concern was one arrived. Or it could be far too short to absorb all of the diverse and beautiful natural environment through which one was traversing.
Perhaps one might take a wrong turn, and have to backtrack. No matter - from the standpoint of pilgrimage one was still on a holy journey.
And perhaps that is the only insight I can, after all these words, offer. We are on a journey. We may take wrong turns, and confront the sheer drop of a 1,000 foot cliff down to the rocks and the sea. But we can turn around, go back, and take another path. If are willing to walk with integrity, to be sure that the means we utilize on our journey are commensurate with our goals, then there is little reason to despair.
I often refer to George Fox's maxim of walking gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person we encounter. Far too often we forget the first part -- walking gladly. Being joyful that we can still attempt to move towards a goal we value. That is part of the pilgrimage, the journey of life.
When I write and post like this, does it serve any value? It is a form of teaching and sharing, and one can never know the complete results of such actions. And like much of the teaching experience, the one who learns the most is often not the audience, but the performer / writer. When I begin a piece like this, I can never be sure what form it will take, how it will appear when it is complete. It is like the experience of rising to give a message in meeting. I know something of what I am moved to share, but I know neither completely what I will say, nor to whom it will speak. The decision to rise is not the end of the journey, neither is it the beginning. It is a part of a journey that is continuous. For me my participation politically is like my teaching . it is much a process of my own exploration as it is offering to others a chance to experience their own exploration. As a teacher I know that the answer to the questions I pose to my students may be quite different than those I would offer. That difference broadens me, and encourages me to go on.
I do not know when I might next post. And I cannot say how I will respond to comments, or the lack thereof, to this posting. I knew, as I know in Meeting, that this was a message I had to deliver now. I also know that my own words and insights are insufficient, which is why i always await any response that my words and actions may invoke.
This is an ongoing process. So I will end with words that seem appropriate to me, that in part give me hope to go on. They are from the end of "LIttle Gidding" the final of the "Four Quartets" of T. S. Eliot. For 30+ years they have been an essential part of my journey.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentations,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.