Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Back home in small town Pennsylvania after a draining weekend of delayed and canceled flights, impromptu mini-van rentals, closed highways, snow, ice, late night stays in cheap run-down Days Inns, and the complaints of twelve students.

Woo.

Still, my time in Portland was amazing (if not tiring!); the artful learning model they have in place works wonders and has created a school climate I only ever dreamed of seeing. It was a privilege to be there working with those teachers, their students, and even the students from my class.

I've posted the complete album from my trip; enjoy knowing that I've spared you from the three hours of video that I took.

Charley

Tags: Portland, Leonard Bernstein Center for Artful Learning

A few shots from Portland

Just a few images from Portland, where I am until Friday. I'm working at a fabulous middle school here.

Sunrise

Sunrise is the time to feel thaqt you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so. At sunrise everything is luminous, but not clear.

'A River Runs Through It', by Norman Maclean

Murderer

A snippet:

From John Taylor Gatto (1992) via Ayers (1995)

...the real lessons of American schooling, things like hierarchy and y our place in it, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and the need to submit to certified authority. For many students the experience of schooling is just this: Nothing of real importance is ever undertaken, nothing is ever connected to anything else, nothing is ever pursued to its deepest limits, nothing is ever finished, and nothing is ever done with investment and courage. This may not be the intention of policy makers, politicians, or administrators; it is certainly not the hope of most parents and teachers. Yet it is often what children live and learn.

...in effect schools murder the souls and minds of children by design, and that we fight a guerrilla war against genocide in the classroom our entire lives - a war we are losing badly.

--

Refuse to be a murderer! Encourage creativity, spontaneity, self-discovery, discomfort and challenging student centered learning. Teach so that others teach themselves!

LD

Light and darkness are expressions of morality. When I stay true to Natural Law, I am good and all is well. When i violate Natural Law - putting myself putting my uncensored passions before what I know is right, then inevitably nature will return to bite me in the ass.

I'm fairly convinced that humanity's ability to rationalize is why we walk paths destined to lead to hurt and pain.

I love the Taoist concept of order and balance, but how do you reconcisle the balance of good and evil when Confucius places a strict order and responsibility based class-system into the family system?

Yet it is inevitable that mother nature brings herself back to balance, she is only forced to when i cast off one of my wings.

Mother Nature is perfect. My dark side is spittle in the face of creation.

But at the same time, I wonder if our own lives are defined by the challenges we choose to cretae. Is this why wrong feels so good? So that when I have the courage to confront myself I see how empty good is when compared to fulfillment?

To destroy

What woud you say if I told you chose that word very carefully? Writing is, for me, very often (if not all the time) a self-destructive activity. I very clearly understand the concept of deconstruction to better understand something (think of my prior post to you on Pain - it talks about our need to deconstruct pain and accept it), but that's not how I view my writing. My writing destroys myself. It shreds my soul, my mind, my thoughts. It drains me of who I am.

 

What I didn't write about in that entry was that I am then free to be someone, something, somewhere else. I don't need to understand what comes out of my writing, because I don't write for clarity or understanding - I write to destroy so that I might rebuild. Reflection (something which I love) is best achieved when we stretch beyond the analysis of a problem (it's deconstruction) and truly destroy it in critique and weigh its moral and ethical implications.

 

Only then, after I've destroyed can I see what havoc or beauty I wrought and then determine how best to move forward in life, as a person, as a soul.

 

Or are our concepts so tied together - that you deconstruct to understand, and I destroy to see clearer, which then allows me to rebuild in a fashion I choose........

Paper and soul

14 February, early morning, 2007

Rebecca, a valued reader of my blog has the gift of insight. So many of the things she sees or keeps on clean page beg for some day's future reflection.

Rebecca shared her insight with me after another reader of her journal took my comment and did an entry on just a few sentences. After a long entry about her writing, I tried to picture Rebecca hammering out words for an entry a keyboard.

My mind froze because I knew she preferred to honor her words on paper before she shared them with us. So out of curiosity and the need to picture the author's writing process, I asked what kind of notebooks she carried around to observe other people. 'I do that!' I quipped silently as I read her entry, and so I wa to see if any other similarities existed as we wrote. To find them would give me confidence even when it wasn't looked for.

7 March, late night, 2007

So the question remains - what paper do I use to write? The simple answer is that writing for me is a self-destructive process. Every entry, every post drains me of something else to say or think. And then, of course, it is too easy to forget and overlook what it means to put words on a page: conviction. So many people think, but so few have the conviction to write and place the soul on paper.

Voldemort was on to something when he trapped part of his soul in his diary. I look back at the scattered journals I keep and it's so very clear that they don't chronicle my life, they chronicle my soul.

On the practical side, my journal is lined, though only faintly, which is somehow fitting for my dual self. I tend to write in journals others give me, and I write in fits and starts, depending on my soul's need to speak.

For musings of the moment, or random jottings, I use a moleskine; can you really go wrong using the notebook of Picasso and Hemingway?

I have one preference for my journals, however. I always write in cursive and I always use an ink well and stylus. I feel a part of humanity partaking in the great tradition of correspondence when I put nib to paper.

On a side note, what do you do when  you become concerned you are both light and dark? Do you hate one and love the other? Hate both? Love both?