A Day In the Life

This is my first attempt at Blogging...I am a public school teacher, artist, mother and I write from perspectives as all three to things that seem compelling....with a hope it creates community and cross-communication in a busy world and life. I value human connectivity greatly. Please feel free to comment and say hello.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Take This Broken Wing And Learn To Fly

The toughest part of having taught twenty some years ago in South Central was kids died.
And other kids knew it.
Even as young as in the 4th grade. Younger.

But I taught 4th at 93rd Street School, and it came into my overcrowded, underfunded, bookless, supply-less daily job with 38 kids as stories of what was happen' out to the brothers.
Kids died of drugs and gang violence.
Our leadership demanded we "not talk like that." In fact the Assistant Principal an inch off my face told me shouting, after an intruder with a knife in my room departed, that this was not a gang issue -that was what happened in the valley she bellowed, she seemed at the time an irrational being. I was looking at it.
But the kids did know. And when they told you it was with a fury and accuracy and a voice unlike any you could deny or squeeze back into silence. If you would listen, you would learn.
I had no choice, my job was to teach. And to do that I did not have the luxury of illusion, distance, denial, or scripting. I worked within the reality that the children were in a war zone.
And sometimes I couldn't understand the kids in my class, their language was so distorted.
Or so a part of the neighborhood I went into to teach. Everyday we learned about one another.

I was young then, and had no children's library of my own, and my room had nothing. But if I could have a book to take back to then I really would like this one. It's called "Bird" and it's a good book.

Bird

by Zetta Elliott (Author), Shadra Strickland (Illustrator)

I can imagine it on Reading Rainbow. Except they eliminated the show from PBS instead looking for something they call letter skill or whatever that was. It would be perfect for LeVar Burton to use. I can see it followed perhaps by a piece on birds, or on bird keepers, or on artists that draw from nature or children doing a bird study. I can hear and see a show in my mind. From 'back in the day, when we wanted to talk to children or hear them in their lives. When a story ran through it.


It's a smaller picture book, Bird is, and in it a child is facing the loss to the forces of the streets of his brother Marcus, and his Grandfather two months later dying perhaps from the strain of it all. What you learn as you read is that the narrator, "Bird", likes drawing, and drawing is helping him define himself, helping him to understand a very tough reality where he lives, and a kind of sanctuary for him too. He is younger brother to a kid who really was an artist-slowly we see him grieving his brother-honoring him-talking to him in pictures, he looked up to that boy who fell into the cycle of drugs and lost. He, "Bird", tells his loss simply, without a lot of gorier detail that might not fit a kid's picture book format, but he does share his sadness, hopes, and his naivete, his lack of understanding of what was happening-that's there too, as well as his understanding as it grew of what drugs does mean there. Things like Marcus needing a "fix" lead him to ask how they can "fix" Marcus. Things that I might have liked to say long ago to those kids, or have a format for discussing, this book gently allows this.

I suppose what I like is that the book examines the choices that this narrator has, how art helps him, informs him about himself, and how he has to carry on with this incredibly sad situation. It's funny but there is something in the way it ends, talking of the flight of birds, souls, broken dreams, possibility, that would have been very useful to me then.

In that time, long past, (that drives me even now both to care and to see), I recall the power of art, making, creating. I recall the times I spent a little of an almost nothing salary given the cost of my living, and the seeing things the children were able to express creatively and how little they had by way of creative experience. No crayons, coloring, museums, books, no connections to their own cultural beauty. It was so harsh, so scarred, so defaced, so war-like in that place at that time. It was so fulfilling to have arts for them. Music meant so much.
I wish I'd had this book. When I look at the pictures of the makers-they might have been infants then.

"Bird" is named Bird because of how he looked as a baby- but he does love birds, sees them in his hood, he watches them with his now semi-guardian Unc Son. There is something in that. I don't know how to express this, I find myself where I work now in a pretty ugly prison over school, sad looking school-hopeless, often looking at the birds. There is something of the metaphor of flight, soul, spirit, hope that the author and illustrator are touching.
When left to so little, in such circumstances, looking to these animals as they inhabit free in a way, symbols, in some kind of relationship to speaking to how we are as we are there-it brings some message. I find myself wanting kids to do bird studies, watch birds, understand nature with the nature flying into to watch us. I do a lot with this, my husband at his school does more. The book connects to something in me -that I felt down in very difficult situations a very long time ago-this connects to tying that to some hope there, always some undefinable possibility.

So it's a book that can be added into classrooms and libraries, shared with children to talk not only about their reality, but the reality of other children, and I cannot say this enough this is why we read, to understand one another and to introduce children to this.

I would have reviewed on amazon, but I cannot. There are folks there that place unkind comment, votes, notions that twist meanings, and have political and personal agendas of intolerance and greed, race and lack of real world work or understanding, that review for rating and ruling, and frankly I don't think good books should have to be looked at with those that might fail to get this book would help children. So it is too what I do reviewing is share personal experiences and I am blasted for that at times by folks that are intolerant of whatever it is they won't allow me to do. And I've been ganged up on there, and having taught in climates of that, seeing that, knowing that in the real lives of kids-I cannot put this book and what I have to say there.

Think of donation to a library, reading with your kids, including in your classroom, sharing with budding artists. Talking about birding. The truth is, I think children that are born into poverty, and difficulty, and isolation-it is an issue, but misunderstanding it is too. And that seems to be an epidemic right now. Teach children with material like this to care about one another so they might never shove another down. And not admit to the hurt they are doing.

If I had not worked within the schools and situations I have worked in, I might hold many of the narrow and faulty assumptions I see spouted like founts so often....anyway....just thinking I suppose.... this book would have helped those kids, then, who must be the parents there now, oh my, and I hope that the fact "Bird" exists means that there has been much forward positive improving. Of that I don't know nor understand well enough, being removed, hoping always for kids there. I hope that over these past 25 years things improved. That lawsuits like the William's Act got them some text books, that class-size went down, that they got AC to cool 109 degree rooms like I experienced. But then I know what's coming down in CA now, class-sizes are soaring, massive amounts teachers-friends- are losing jobs, supplies are cut, budgets are being hacked,here at the UC level it is a gutting. What I know is a 6th of our population lives in this state's economy and our rank to 48th in the nation in spending in ed, means that the poor here then represent a very huge number of folks that will be cut further from opportunity and hope.
I know that.

I'm a teacher. I've worked in a lot of situations in my career, seen a lot of dangerous, difficult, damaging reality. Gave my time to it. My health and heart. Seen kids born into this.
And we've seen the generational issues, the issues for poor immigrants arriving into it, seen the issues for children coping with economic, social, racial, and other troubles. Seen the outrageous violence and crime. I am a teacher that took all that on as just a kid too. Just wanting to make a living, try to build a life.

Now I'm out on leave with a severely broken, herniated back.
I think of kids I taught that make me cry that remind me of Bird.
I remind me of Bird.

It's a good book. For a troubled soul.



I notice it recieved a Coretta Scott King Award, good choice. I made a decision recently. I think I'd like to recommend it, we could try it together. Every month ( no stress if it's every season) I'm picking a book, kid's book, buying it, taking it and giving it to the PUBLIC library. No fuss-just when my kids visit. I'd like to donate similarly to a school-but the new systems seem resistant to reading books with kids. Especially outside a script.
So at least there a child might, possibly, connect if there is someone like Unc Son in this story, talking to them, connecting, taking them, and showing some interest in their lives and in story.
I see that in my neighborhood sometimes.

An article my Mom recommends reading

It seems almost amazing this is a "discovery"
But it is an article to read
The New York Times
Their Future Is Ours

My Mom handed it to me insisting I read it.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Recovery and Resilience, Falling Skies

Fallin' Sky

It broke, my back
In pieces like the Legos
My nephew has in piles on his bedroom floor
Tucked in plastic containers like fly fisherman ties
Heads, arms, weapons
Pull to find what you need,
I need the drawer marked
Spines

All from lifting the books of Native American poems
Turkeys, pilgrims and all
I want to share with my children in class
My back broke
I had to waddle
To the front and leave
Like a falling burning star
It hurt so badly
Snapped

My class looked at me
Ran around, I stood stiffening, Frankenstein,
Asked about the chrysalis' in the aquarium
Wouldn't settle
And write about salad
I left them to think about what salad they would make
It went in their journals
They were happily
Drawing the mix in bowls
After writing

Their drawing was so insightful
When my husband finally got there, to remove me
I couldn't move
Except I did.
Electric pain ran the length of me
My legs felt numb
But he said the kids were engaged and
Their work was extraordinary
It was him coaxing me
To come
Home

Now I'm trying to find a way to heal
It's a pill for pain, for muscle relaxing
One for nerve support, inflammation
A heart pill
Another for the stomach to move the food
Through a partially blocked intestine
And I wash it down
Three times a day
Losing focus
Creation

Kids draw to express their meanings
Like their song
Something else is there, hear it,
Something at the level of gesture
Neuron
Synapse, connection
That holds the group bound in the activity
Mind
It is a golden thing this way of seeing
Becoming human
Through
Art.

Just a few days ago I dreamt a way
To start healing, by seeing a shawl to make
And now I'm dreaming ways to show place, time, space
Seeing ideas, releasing from the person
Inside me, foreign feeling, almost given,
That I am getting
When I am doing something
That matters
It helps
Me heal.

In some debate about what narrowing in schools
Does or why to maintain the arts
I find the word Healing
I find the Dream
I experience the real Truths
Of its power of positive
The reason is in the Connection
Allowing us to be vehicles for vision
For making
Seeing.

Why would I think everything should be bound up
In the arts?
It is in the saving that I find in that
medium
The shawl that holds me
The image that possesses me
The music that I hear
That has to be sung
It transforms my being
into the butterfly.

I am a butterfly now, one that is falling
The sky that held me is falling
The lead and I go down
Broken flight
Held in gravity, pulled down
Heavy and hurt
Flapping wings, breath
Flight stolen
Body snapped
The sky has fallen.




Somehow in the last two weeks I lost.
For one thing my back was so injured I couldn't walk or get up, or go in to teach. I think it must be a pretty severe herniation of my disc, but combined with the syrinx and spinal stenosis perhaps enough was done to explain the pain. So until Thanksgiving my job is to "heal."
If you know me I'm not very good with being in a bed unless I pick it; I'm lousy at sitting around; I feel compelled to be in my classroom; I am basically oriented to be working. Chicken Little stuff, the sky is falling. So any blog I write let's get that out right away.
The sky is falling.
I drew a drawing yesterday. I see it now as the "Sky is Falling" but today I'll try another.



When this first happened on a Friday, and for the next three days, I screamed to move.
Boy was that hard on me. I'm pretty stoic about pain I deal with it often.
Jack had to lift and push and roll me around. What worried me most, besides the pain, was I stopped using the restroom. That was a five day issue so I thought perhaps I'd be finding surgery on my "to do" list. With bad back pain you do"roll" and getting up inside the whole body feels like it isn't. You feel things so differently. Lifting the lid on the toilet kills me, just that little bend. For some reason the men in my house in the last two weeks are getting religious about putting down the seat. Amazing.
But I guess the MRI (which I did with Versed and didn't panic too much), anyway, it showed a herniation, worse one than before-same place L4/5. Somehow this week a just back vacationing surgeon looks at that somehow if we transport the films, and I get epidurals- IF they ever get satisfied about how a now 8 day paper transfer from my doctor to that doctor goes. Anyway, I've gotten to the point where I can hobble a bit. I had a bad night last night. Bad night.

I had a dream where a man was drawing a field in Monterey and with each new drawing, drawings the size of my house, he further pulled himself up into space-kind of like google earth works. He called the dummies he did of this his "reverts" in the dream. It was amazing when he was at the dirt and insect level, amazing in the fields level of the plants and then the view of mountains that hem those fields. It looked a little "mappy" at the stage where he was up at the highway level, road and overview like a plane might see, which is when I woke up. Once again.
Dreaming in terms of art. Such a cool idea.

This is something that has been coming to me over and over this time, this recovery, this time- I have to make my way through a difficulty.And art just keeps appearing.
Others have their thing. I just get psychic reminders to make something.
In this case specific reminders. Like real things-dream things.

The other night buried in some dream I saw this navy crochet shawl.
Not exactly like this, but kind of:



I was feeling especially lost in this hurtness. In severe pain, unable to move. Struggling. In my sleep though I saw a rather beautiful crocheted navy shawl -I thought waking, "Man, that was a nice looking shawl. I'd like to make that for one of my kids." And in a way that gave me a forward thought. I decided to make it. Or make ones trying to create it.

DSC04799 by you.
So then I made Jack against any sense at all take me to the craft store. I could barely walk the aisle. The yarn was all 2 dollars. That just reminded me of another era-I'm guessing the effect of the economy.
So I got some. Then I got some more.



Delightful yarns were inspiring.
DSC04811 by you.
I'm hoping she likes it. i'll do one for Sophia but I got coral and olive and a ruby peach for that.

And I've been drawing.
Because pretty much if the scale is small I can lay to make it. Collage would work but I found these wonderful pens:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31xZoJaRuhL._SL500_AA280_.jpg

And I've been seeing what I can do with these incredible new markers. On-line they were 5 dollars cheaper so I ordered them for my kids. All the kids draw so well when they do it!
I really like them. Very close to pen and ink without the drips. I made this but it looks a bit uneven. I'm drawing Jack's pots and they are a bit like that.

DSC04814 by you.



So I'm trying to find ways to get through the time distracted from the pain, to heal.


It's just in this time I realize how much I can only talk through making and doing and thinking of new things to make and do and new ways to do the next picture.....or try to start another project. When i'm asked or I read things about the arts in schools I really wonder about those that would remove the application of creativity, the model making, the artifact building. Such a low level understanding of learning is hardly worth addressing.
It's just ridiculous.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

War and Peace

I've been thinking about war.
For one thing several important decisions are about to be made. And my friends have children facing war. Kids already having made sacrifices in service. I admire my friends in their silent holding this worry. We just passed Veteran's Day, never an easy day, and on this day I honor my parents service, both were once in the Air Force, of course honor the service of so many, and honor among other family members the loss of my Uncle Marshall. My son has clearly intimated he wants to join the services. And he has been reading about war and about some of the reasons we fought the last few years.

I was a kid that grew up during the Vietnam era, after the war my mom went to work as the Veteran's Outreach worker in our hometown. I recall any number of very hurt and very confused men coming to fix and repair things in our home, because the jobs center lacked jobs for her to send them to do. She had nothing to pay but she did think up a few things. On one occasion a man and his son kind of took over residence in our garage while supposedly refinishing our cupboards. Rather a mess this turned into as it drug on months, and clear to me at 18 or so that he was more hurt on the inside than could be fathomed. That man lived facing demons.

And then there is the collection I have of thoughts, memories, insights, from having a husband be a Principal to a navy base school where I also then worked during 9-11. I've see things that showed me the life of the wife or family of our soldiers. And at least gained some understanding of the high cost families have paid.

I recall my French teacher in high school so well, like yesterday talking to us, her father went in during D-Day. She would tell of this-she adored her father-he did somehow survive this. I recall her telling of what that day meant. And then popping into my mind is something that changed me around the age of 16 or so when footage shot in the German prison camps was shown for the first time on TV that brought to my eyes exactly what happened to 6 million Jews during WW2. And seeing that reality-I'll just never erase it, nor fail to find it unfathomable.

My husband's Uncle Jack has shared with us his stories of how being a dentist in the service during WW2 kept him from the battles but what he saw going in to the aftermath of that war, that he shares, he sort of followed into places where major things had happened, on the periphery he none the less gained great perspectives of the war.
My mother was raised during WW2, and she has often talked of what that meant, and of course the Korean War claimed her brother Marshall.

So I've been thinking about war.

I'm sure a lot of the nation has been thinking about it too.
In many ways I find it so hard that the one thing we all hold so strongly, the admonishment not to kill is pulled from us in war times just like that.I can barely hold that.
It's a hard, hard reality.

Jack decided to look at figures about America and war, so he pulled a bunch of things from The New York Public Library Desk Reference, 3rd Edition- I think I'll share.
I'm immobilized with a serious back issue and I can lay her and type it a bit.

Since 1775 to 2009
The USA has had 77 years of war or 33%
We have had 156 years of peace or 67&
For a total of 233 years.

That astounded me.

We have had 15 "periods" of war
14 "periods" of peace

The average "period of peace" was 11 years
The average "period of war" was 5 years

After WW2 Peace has been 29 years or 46%
War has been 34 years or 54%

6 periods of war, 6 year average
5 periods of peace, 6 year average


He is looking at this with the idea he'll continue to think about the conflicts and the country.
And recent times.


I think about songs like Blowin In The Wind and "War" because of when I grew up. I recall the brothers of friends of mine serving in Vietnam, sometimes dying, and certainly I recall marches and protests. In one memory Dad couldn't get a car through campus to take us home one night I think after my art class, and got into a yelling match with some students. He shoved I think and his glasses were knocked off. It was when I was young, but Dad represented to that student the "establishment," plus Dad wasn't too happy to be blocked, and on a day of a rather huge student massing he got caught in it in my hometown and it didn't go so well. Yes, his glasses were broken and he was furious. I recall being pretty young, sinking down in the seat of our Ford Station Wagon wondering what to do with my kid brother. Somehow we did get out. It's funny because altho Dad may have been identified by that student that way- Dad was a very progressive man. And he wasn't sure that Vietnam was in anyway worth the lives it was taking. I recall thinking at the time that my father, who served many years in the Air Force, was intelligent enough to look at things as they were- and yet till here he was getting slapped.

We would talk about war in my classes in those days, but inevitably the teaching stopped at Korea. I never recall a teacher that went on even into the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a time too close to the events I think. I never practiced for drills in a nuclear attack in school, but I did think about all of that. It was the backdrop of my growing up.

A number of years ago I had to be out three weeks. Like now. The reason I was going to be out was severe bronchitis. For three or so years I seemed to carry constant bronchitis that finally got to the point that I could not breathe. So the Dr. I had at the time, a Dr. Lee, stated I had to miss three weeks. Now I am under that same restriction but recovering rather poorly from a herniated disc waiting to get epidurals, see the surgeon. I had a sub. He was older and I thought/think the world of him, Charles. Anyway it was around this time of the year, a bit closer to Christmas. He said to me that what he was thankful for, we were doing large thankful murals I was sharing with him as he got ready to take over, he was thankful for peace he said-because at that time America was at peace.. This was before 9-11 and in a time I wish I could restore. He said to me that the Mid east then was relatively calm. It was all he wanted for Christmases each year-peace.
I se myself looking at him-he was about to tear up and it made me tear up.

That resonated with me.
In 6th grade I had a Mrs. Hamilton. She required us one day before the Winter Break to share our Christmas "List" about 1969, I didn't have one for various reasons, but she required it and she was the kind of person that would not allow you to have private thoughts or a different "way." So I stated I wanted "world peace." I really meant it sincerely, but she took this as my showing off -or trying to be somehow self righteous or something -so she loudly demanded I list something. Paul Bowers had listed a motorscooter, she stated then demanded I list something "like that." But I really couldn't. I wasn't a big asker for one thing, and I just didn't want anything. I appeared to her to be a stubborn mule and lost recess for it. And was teased mercilessly.
Somehow that came to mind when Charles, my sub, echoed the thought many years later.

It's hard right now to control how i'll be taken, but I still pretty much have the same wish.
I wish for peace. In a time of conflict.