Welcome to a Day in My Life

So Why Blog?

Why Blog about Education?

Why Blog About NCLB?

Why Blog About the Role of Teachers in Society?

Why Blog About the Everyday Lives of Children?

Why Blog About the Everyday Lives of Poor Children in America?

These are certainly reasonable questions to ask.

Recently I have observed a noticeable difference in two potential answers to these questions and also a noticeable, and I would say, important difference among some Bloggers.

I would answer the above questions for my self in this way.

I am a teacher. I have been a teacher for more than twenty years and I am committed to the profession and to public education in America. I am committed and invested in the importance of public education as it relates to the American society and culture as well as the individual lives of all children.

Teaching can be an isolating profession, with little time afforded for collegial communication and discourse and blogging is an interesting tool for teachers to talk to each other and to anyone interested in schools (in my mind, everyone should be interested because public schooling impacts and influences every aspect of our society).

Currently, teachers and schools are under siege by politicos. Politicians and industry and a variety of interest groups have commandeered the public discourse on schools and they are dominating the one-way communication with criticism and bashing and blaming and scape-goating. They have assigned the many ills of our society, and the prognosticated future lack of global competitiveness and domination, to causal links directly connected to teachers and schools.

This is hogwash. It is a Trojan horse. It is misdirection. It is dirty politics. It is often, in Blogs and elsewhere, the pathetic (and often compensated, rag for hire) diatribes that desire to aggressively and ruthlessly discredit any voice that is deemed “liberal.” It is about control and power. It is about politics and schooling as war. ( It is about stomping out all things that speak in the name of Freedom.) We can elevate this.

This is not why I blog. No one pays me to blog. I do not and will not intend to attack persons in the name of issues or correctness. My issues are simple. My worldviews are simple. My blogs are simple. They are reportage from the classroom and from the heart.

They are offered to educators and others interested in these points of view. No more, no less.

Blogs are also cathartic for the writer. They are a form of journaling. Getting things out… with the added quality that others might connect and comment and collaborate and share and build a virtual community of sort.

I am a teacher and I am a mother.
I see children, all children, as gifts from God, and the universe. I see all kids as filled with experiences and curiosity and creativity and I see teaching as a complex orchestration of their opportunities to learn skills and develop learning processes as well as accessing knowledge. I also see teaching as a much more expansive endeavor that is all about relationships and human connections.


I am writing this tome as I have recently experienced some Blog bashing. Some stabs and attacks on person and thought. I take them personally and I know I shouldn't. So if you are out there, and you feel the need to bash or criticize thoughtlessly, irrationally, politically, with broad brush strokes, with uninformed research and position, or just bashing for money or political cause…I have hope that your energies will be guided to valuing children, connecting with children, guiding their learning and treating them like human beings. I hope you will make a difference in student’s lives. I hope you will get those calls some twenty years later, from children grown to adulthood, that will affirm your efforts and tell you that you made a difference in their lives.

If you are a teacher or educator or parent, I have hope that your energies will be guided to valuing children, connecting with children, guiding their learning, and treating them like human beings. I hope you will make a difference in students' lives. I hope you will get those calls some twenty years later from children grown to adult that will affirm your efforts and tell you that you made a difference in their lives, and that you believed in them, that you saw them as rich in life rather than lacking in skill, or language, or discipline, or whatever…

I hope you find your place in a community with real people, and relationships, and hope. And I hope that we still have public schools these twenty years in the future that attract great people to teaching who have the skills and creativity, and the commitment to use curriculum and teaching tools in a unique manner, maybe a visionary one, that fits the kids in their classes and pushes them to develop their talents and their tolerance.

If this reality comes to fruition, America will continue to be great. It will continue to be the place of dreams and hope for the world and it will all start or emanate from classrooms in public schools with teachers and students and their families.

Blog on dude…

Rebecca...an Allegory for my class and a lesson I learned....

In room 10 on my apple carpet Friday I had to tell a tale…….first in a month. A situation presented itself within the life of the class and what I am doing that required me to talk to the group. So I chose to tell a story, one from my own life. It fit the situation and it fit the needs of the days.

Sometimes teachers arrange circumstances, sometimes they teach canned Directed Instruction, sometimes they tell a story, sometimes they actually look at their data and create unique and varied responses to kids from their student skill levels (looking hard at individual level especially) those decisions, judgments, and learning developments coming from Standard understanding and Big Picture. Teachers can, if allowed, fit instruction to their own situation in urban poverty so severe they may teach students who are unclean, unwashed and hungry. They may be children that are also beaten and requiring many social service interventions, or so poor living in a car, they may tell of crack and a “druggy Dad that beat up Mom last night.” They may lack English language and knowledge of academics or lack cultural perspectives. They might say that unneeded comment about home ....bird-walking off the Directed Instruction about their own flesh and blood boozing father........ just as you ask they get their white board for some nice skills practice on long A, and we all know they’ll need long A.

And what sometimes you do, is respond to the needs as you call it. That is or was a feature of teaching. And now adays that’s a real risk.

At least I do this.

My daughters(16 and 18) were done with high school finals and off school helping me Friday when I told my story. One had just finished noting, "Mom your poor kids are so tiny and filthy. How can you take this?" when the need for a story arose. It’s an observation, the poverty and smell, made frequently to me even in the school. They are grouped in ways that puts this together in one room over seven, even in this urban population, great needs in one place, less resource to respond.

Well in answer to my daughter… I say ONLY mentally….."" I focus on the Adopted Standardized curriculum which is so effectively holding me accountable, fiscally responsible, and I think of young teachers who are coming into the field who are going to help me get the weekend food backpacks need figured out....and my own spending for the need in these children back under control among many other visions." But out of my mouth I said...”You have to look for poverty and need Sophia. I'm glad that you can see it. Many cannot.”

About this time two children were hauled into my room, centers of a yard conflict. The one with the loudest voice, the strongest will, and the better English was effectively stating her case about the other as being a “mean person” for not “listening to me”, “letting me on the swing I want” and "not sharing".

Who could ever argue against something like that? She went on, her finger in the face of the other child, to say she was being denied friendship, friends, her “chances”, the other child was “nasty”, not fair and saying, "Lies". Pretty much the young yard duty was appalled by these hateful and objectionable things. She wanted justice too, and wanted to be heard too.

It was clear the other child was silent. And to some silence is a sign of agreement or willingness to accept the story being presented as “truth”. This story surely had pieces of truth. The child that was a bit bigger, bit awkward, less pretty much more graceless was “the accused”. She was silent with a tear on cheek looking to me. LOOKING to ME.

Teachers often are for children a kind of judge, an arbiter, a fate.

I looked at the child and we met eyes. And I turned and said, “Gabriela I would like to believe that your rhetoric is completely the whole story, but life experience has taught me some things. “ So I also looked to my other student, who I am calling Autumn, and asked her to speak to me slowly in Spanish and tell me her truth.

But Autumn couldn’t speak for a long while, her mom feels she is on a spectrum of autism, but the family and physicians are dealing on this. At school I mostly notice a shy, quiet, nice child who likes the third swing from the end and who swings most of the recess. She also likes to slide, usually a few times after the bell. And she likes a hug everyday at exactly the same time. But she’s not mean ever and her friends are a few children I sit near her. She shares her crayons in class, often. But she is not quick to speak and to Gabriela who lives in rapid-fire clarity and her own perspective she’s a dullard, kind of a thing to order around ,and best sent to get her jacket.

It’s something I see when I go watch them play, while my peers enjoy time in the lounge. I haven’t made it in there much in the last 20 years…. too busy watching and informing my next steps, with something often undervalued as a teacher assessment, observation.

Anyway I’ve noted Gabriela lacking a swing in the past months, choosing to dump Autumn off of hers. And I stepped in, though Friday I stayed in with my girls to give them jobs to do, and I suspect that was a mistake. I believe Gaby does this to her because Autumn has trouble standing up to her, but it’s a judgment call…I didn’t see this incident and I was willing to listen. After calming Autumn, she said so little I decided to tell a story and go to lunch late.

My two daughters looked up at me.

All morning they had worked hours on my data, testing words, making focus wall pieces, grading papers , pulling out kids for Universal Access, collating reams of measures I keep on each child from number sense data to skills in algebra to initial blends. It surprised them I was shuffling to the carpet instead of “partner share fluency practice time” in the canned ditto books where we all read as “fast as we can” to a minute egg timer seeking the fastest speed words can be said…as is our mandate.

But instead I took the kids to the carpet to share an oral story, part of an older tradition in teaching, one I learned from teachers trained in the 1920’s when women teachers were trained in the arts and sciences in teacher colleges with literature as well as math and science learned in classical traditional models. I decided to tell a story about myself and not use Aesop though I have one of those that fits…and from that see if I could lead the group with questioning to extract something from this about this situation(if they knew of it) not directly but through something called an indirect method. Also I knew the story might help them in personal decisions in school and play because I was once six and certain things never change no matter the times, no matter the pacing calendar, no matter the polemics.

This is the story of Rebecca…and Sarah. I am this Sarah and I was blond, awkward, shy, and a bit of a dullard as a child. I liked tea sets, being alone, reading books and my dolls, as well as one swing on the yard. I had a book bag my mom gave me with a mouse on it I carried everyday and still own. I walked three miles to school and back up the very deep hills of Morgantown, WV streets to school everyday. I was a lone walker and that was true all my life. I like to walk alone. We lived in an old Victorian, streets down from a red headed beautiful Charlie Brown sweet heart girl named Rebecca who had mean older brothers. My mom said to kind of avoid her, as the boys broke some windows deliberately out in our basement. That said, we walked home from our 1^st grade class the same way. She walked behind me and sat behind me in Mrs. Parsons’s 1^st grade class. I first heard her voice when Rebecca told me to write my name on my desk (I had terrible vision not fixed until 12, so I often I looked around at peers not knowing what to do and that was what she said for me to do). That on the first day of school. I wrote my name and the teacher, Georgia Parsons lifted me in the air by the arm and paddled me in the cloakroom that day, after Rebecca turned me in for it. I said nothing. I guess I was rather shocked to learn not only could your Dad hit you, your wider world could, and Rebecca smiled her happy and always happy teacher smile. She read, she raised her hand, she gave the correct answers. As a dullard I rarely did…….walking home Rebecca liked to kick my book bag to make me drop it. I was protective of it and she sensed this. Then if I said stop, she called her brothers over…It went on like this for a very long time that year…until the kicking kind of was a good boot in my behind. At home I could NOT form a way to tell my mom. One day after rains the book bag came in very dirty and I was in trouble with mom for “treating your things like garbage”.

Somehow on this day I spilled out to her, always an issue I’ve had contextualizing for another, that this other child was kicking it. It was so ruined by mud. Ironically the next day Mrs. Parsons called me up front first thing to inform me of my now having no more recess to go on a bench to sit FOR THE YEAR for not treating Rebecca nicely, being a friend to her and never walking home with her. I did not ever get that recess back. That was school then, teacher infallibility I guess. Rebecca’s mom had come in or called about the shunning I was giving her. And I did shun her, my body a physical recoil from her…. so I said nothing. Of what I was accused, I felt I was guilty. I was not her friend, I hatred her actually and I knew enough from Temple and church to know hating was wrong. I really just went home and cried.

Then next day Rebecca kicked me for the last time, as I turned around and in the voice of RAGE told her I was going to beat her face off. And now Rebecca and I were told by call to be at school at 7AM with parents. I had stepped over a line not crossed in 1965. I was bad and I knew it was going to get way worse than a bench. I couldn’t explain to Mom. It was clearly bad. That a ray of hope enters this story was why I told it to my kids Friday and of course for me it’s interesting.

At school I was sitting on my chair in the office about to throw up or pass out my two mainstays in dealing in difficult situations of fear, and the Principal told me to take off my coat as we girls were wrapped up. Rebecca and her mom were ready and articulating instantly my crimes. I sat feeling like dirt. I recall feeling the pain of my wrongness. I still feel it. So I over did it pulling it off over my head like an awkward dullard would, and my back was exposed. My Mom said, “ Where did these bruises come from?”

I had quite a few. I said ,"I don’t know why, Rebecca kicks me on my back".

Had I never said this, had this not happened as it did…maybe I’d have turned early to another relationship to school. But it did happen this way.

Eventually mom did drag from me the story of the kicking. I was called liar and exaggerator by Rebecca and her Mom.. That I held a few bruises seemed to help mitigate this. And the teacher sent Rebecca and her Mom out. Then she and my mom( and I guess me though I’d melted through the floor) talked about this other child as needing friends, a terrific student, modeling her brothers…the teacher asked me to make a real effort to befriend her. I recall this and I recall looking up at her thinking she was as blind as a bat…but in the South one respects the requests of teachers. I did then, I do now.

So I went to school in a day or so and picked up her pencil when she dropped it. When we walked home I asked her to hold my hand. People did that then. Girl friends held hands to go home. She was more shocked than anything else and I’ll always believe this was why she did hold my hand over having her brother Bobby knock my teeth down my throat. I told her red hair was my favorite. I practiced at home with mom things to ask her….”What do you like to eat, what are your favorite animals, where do you get ice cream?” I invited her over to play dolls. And in time I found ways, with mom’s help, to ignore the bossiness and to try and bridge the gaps by needing less myself and listening to her. Mom said, “So what if you don’t say too much, she needs to talk and it’s better than not giving it a try.” But I also had to learn skills to be somewhat there with my power too. The handhold an example. I offered it, which is a form of power. I learned in time in my life to offer my time, my hand, my understanding even when it was against my initial inclinations.

Now on telling this story Gabriela was listening. And the room was listening. So I asked what they thought. Gabriela’s first question…”Do you steel know this Rebecca?” And…"Yes, she remained a friend for much of my life”. Then not able to fully hear that, Gabriela asked out of turn, “Do you hate her.” “No, Gabriela, I like her now, I hated her when I only knew a few things that were kicks in the behind.”

“ Do you think when I am mean to Autumn that she’ze thinking that she hates mes too” asked my Gaby. “….yes, I do think that might be true, “ I answered. “ Do youz’e think that I am not trying to beez her friend.”
“Well you said it Gaby, what do you think?” and then my favorite part ….”I thinks that I will not be taking Autumn’s swing at recess because she likes it.”

And that seemed a good time to line them up.

And so my daughters looked up at me and laughed a laugh I hadn’t heard since days when they attended this school and used to come in from their classes, along with so many other kids and help in the room. A day in the past. I heard the laugh of understanding and the laugh of fairness, a sound one doesn’t hear so much these days in scripted worlds, with no time for a story to help children think about their days.

In follow up one of the things teachers must address is bullying. It happens all the time and takes many forms. It comes from basic dynamics that are a part of humans working in groups trying to get their way or to find power. It’s something one should have extensive work on before, during and ever in becoming a teacher.

One looks to see in oneself if we can control, recognize and address this in self, and stomp it, one looks to hear it in one’s language, judgments, writing and in relating to others. It is a part of the calling of teachers, we are modeling fairness, modeling justice, modeling an ability to find ways to communicate that are not about twisting truth and about kicking the butt or worse name calling and petty derision.

Teachers are all for helping children, for building future, for finding common ground. They are not about racial, gender, slurring and demeaning. If they are….they need to read this link. Because we are models and what we do every day will be filled with enough hypocrisy and mistake, it need not be further filled with the bitter taste of the bully.

This said I have not shared this tale before…. it was one very hard for me, one I internalized as my problem, I’m ever one to think if there is any truth in another it must be my job to change. In teaching I have found this at times can be a position of power.I extend my hand. If I cannot change the child…I can change myself in relationship to him or her.

The Little House

When I was "told" my theme would be "Home Sweet Home" in my 5th unit of study in 1st grade I thought of this book. Though I am not asked to think of anything. We read it for years gone by in primary classroom instruction, and I ordered it again to read when I had a moment for this unit. That time came today as the children in Room 10 listened for our "key vocabulary" and were enchanted as children have been since the 1940's release of a story about a house becoming obsolete, aging, being replaced by future building while in her day representing the best of her times and quite possibly representing a kind of beauty that can only be understood and appreciated within her true and original context.

This is a story of a beautiful Little House written by the genius of Virginia Lee Burton. She sits "way out in the country" built strong and sturdy, never to be sold for generations of a family to endure within her safe haven. She is happy, she is stable, but she “sees” the lights of the city and she is curious. At this point I feel it safe to interject as a young girl growing up in West Virginia far from city and growing up in the peace of country these words spoke to my heart. I wondered about the city too, wanted to know. I saw the changes in my world, saw future, recall first days seeing a tape recorder, recall the ideas of fast food and the movement of our life into the age of rocket and moon. A great story to explore metaphor with children. How are we like the Little House, how am I?

In the story the Little House watched the seasons, learned the cycles of nature and the book does such a lovely job placing the child reader or listener into this rural setting. For me it is a perfect telling of the naive Garden of Eden before the Fall construct, gamboling, rural, naturalistic with the seasons each illustrated and reinforced with charming traditional illustration for the child. But as the story unfolds the lights of city grow closer with changes entering text and illustration. I grew up with many of these changes, but it tells of horses replaced by roads and machine....Time is passing in the story, an age of mechanized progress enters the pictures.

Gasoline, speed, faster and faster are introduced as concepts that drive the forward progress around the Little House. She is now shown surrounded by track homes, darker clouds, and telephone poles. Crowding enters the page. Artistically it is busy, congested, more active visually, less peaceful. Now the Little House can't be sold, not because of the eternity of a family staying on her piece of land, but because a city has engulfed her and she has no worth relative to the expansion. She sits surrounded now pictorially by building. Written as it is, my classroom children found this "sad”, or asked repeatedly if she would "die". I kept saying let's wait a bit and see....but I knew their concern. It would seem headed for sad death. If I were to relate to the Little House metaphorically I feel myself as a teacher as these pages represent, surrounded by the mindless march of time. Looked at as valueless, seen as out of place in a world of "progress”. And the Little House misses her fields and flowers accepts this must be "the city" and wonders if she likes it or not.

I must admit I did stop reading here to ask children if they thought this was the life the Little House was "supposed " to live. One child speaking carefully said, " It is the life that she must accept." Another commented, "I know the Little House wanted to see the city but now she can't go back." Such it is when we leave Eden, such it is when the march of progress strips our naivety. Such is taking on our adulthood. Now we are to reconcile truth, reflect, make meaning and find ways to face what we must. To decide based on our rational mind combined with an awareness of things we could never have fathomed and indeed may not understand fully once revealed. The Little House stands swallowed by city, speed, time, and unable to feel season or know her truths at all.

Buildings are torn, replaced and destroyed around he….r as progress destroys what was replacing it with what is. Here my students shook with, "Oh no's" and statements like this one, "Oh she's going to die and never know her happiness." It is a point of despair, and interesting thing to place before children. Certainly this is the point in the story that I feel speaks with greatest power. And she decides that she cannot like this place that has grown around her. She has no way to relate to it. It is not a city able to even remotely understand what this Little House knew. Not even listening they are of two different worlds. And she admits sadness. She is filled with sorrow and becomes really broken down and lost.

The ending of the story is about hope. A many generation removed child of this house buys her again, restores and moves her far from city, back to country where she takes her knowledge within her walls and in the calm of the beauty of nature silently resumes her peaceful balance. Once more able to be who she is. Understanding in some way where she has been. Understanding now no longing for that other place. She has conquered longing.

To this tale my students sat in silence and in contemplation. I asked if they would like to draw this little house and all students, all, represented her in the country, in bucolic setting and at the bottom all wrote Home at Peace a phrase they asked me to spell. I'll post these when I find the digital camera. It’s a wonderful story fit for any 1st grade as relevant now as ever.

Recommending a book .........one I'm re-reading

You might enjoy reading The Web and the Rock
Thomas Wolfe

The reviews I find for this work are very good. Represent the range Wolfe can inspire. I've seen people get so furious and extreme over his work I was shocked into associating this with art.It can provoke extreme reactions. This work is one of two published after his death, and after his break with Max Perkins, where it's documented in his letters he changed publishers in great turmoil and emotional outpouring. Wolfe always argues his actions into the ground and beyond. This is a source of great volumes of writing. He was always writing. My favorite photos include the rooms he had piled with the papers that somehow 6 feet high came to be collected and edited after his passing into this work. It was then I realized that he really was driven to write and that this compulsion and his voice were so powerful and broad. He was beyond my comprehension. A collection of a life of thought.



When I read this book it's foreshadowing of the 2nd World War, just a fragment wound through the story was so there for me, such a part of the message. I'm teaching now and dealing with forces that I need not explain how they hit me as a vague point of connection related to poverty and injustice, prejudices, something Wolfe dealt with so brutally frank. His writing related to the poverty of the depression is well known. Sometimes his work is so ugly one is revolted into turning inside out. I just realized that after he went to Europe having broken with the woman he loved and knew would never risk being with him set in her life of comfort and her security, in his anguish and his pain, he returned to the feel of America again having seen so much of the world's coming nightmare in Europe. He went to go across this country and died with tuberculosis of the brain. The horror of his health, his death. It's still such a raw part of how I perceive the work. What I know of his health is enough to say he had a life cut short in a way no one would want. This was a man saying the last he had to say. Saying it without the ability to refine and to reflect long enough, carrying the ordinary and the flash of genius.Tales of a man just like he writing of the life he had lived keeping as close to that life as one can while transforming it into a platform to describe life and man. It's so broad and so flawed and just so very much a part of how life seems...it reads as journal. Wolfe was foremost in the world a man seeing society for it's inequities, failures to reconcile truths, for man's flaws and struggle against himself. The hate filled demon that was to come.....he saw that too. No one to me spoke to that quite like Wolfe.

It was a horror to know. I think Wolfe saw what would happen to the Jewish people and he knew, he knew that the intolerance within us as a people had been triggered and turned into a societal force through group mind and group action into what he foreshadowed.Boiundaries were gone, in service to one's truth things that were very mean could be condoned. As long as a group supports itself in these actions, in harming, insulting, denigrating and nods to itself, things are okay. Ironically he rails in anger against his Jewish lover for her religion, yet I think in the volume is revealing what this led to...what I found was someone looking at the ugly filth in self. Few can look their own bile in the face and see it for what it is.Self loathing and insecurity to name two.
I also think the book never leaves me for this reason. It was to speak to me as a young woman,young teacher. Person searching for meaning. It still does. Reading I understood something about the character of people within systems breeding hate and intolerance with scarcity and with means to project reasons onto scapegoats...leadership of cowards and opportunists...., the way it begins, the unleashing of hate, shame, ugliness and condemnation , the group against some. It was there in his writing for me.

Wolfe was hailed by Faulkner as the best, and as a story teller his work remarkable. I was raised in this southern tradition of people telling one another story to relate their thoughts. Through ancedote I find meaning making opportunity. I tell story to seek truth in this tradition learned at the knee of my family. I had the distinct pleasure of reading this work in my teens and reading, how editor Perkins was thrown over for Aswell, of Wolfe's passion filled love affair with his older patroness...letters...a life reflected in his letters.... and in his writing. If you compare the letters to this work the transparency is so evident. The fiction and fact boundary lie just here right against your cheek. It is poetic, rhapsodically, and impressionistic, autobiographical and repeating, wearing, unpleasant at times. Gosh almost a nightmare.....

His writing of Aline Bernstein his lover, turned into the characters he frames for story .... it is hard to look at her, older, a talented theater designer....E. Jack is so hard to love for a reader...especially placed against their letters. She would not join him; he couldn't believe that given the depth of their love that this was her decision.He calls her coward, his heart is crushed. He finds that love must be fought for....or everthing one ever believed is hollow. It propelled him to Europe, away, into darker thought...into this text...and it all winds in and out of the genius of the piece.On and on bringing criticism and derision for repetition and ranting. You sit reading, absorbed, held, and feeling like you are almost as voyeur into the affair and the thoughts of this man about his life love. That they loved so deeply and felt such pain in the realities of their lives is wrenching. Good grief it's a thousand nightmares but I have to recall he wrote it in despair. And that his brain was afflicted. I can barely think well taking the medicines for cancer.

In a way Wolfe removes no rind, he lets the stench and the ordinary and the gray and the grit, the clinging moss sit all over the doings of his fictional cardboard cut-outs of his relating to Aline. But you hear his love too. And you feel this. All I can say is they suffered for their love, but it did not let them go, they loved forever and they loved as the core of their being. Certainly this telling was a life record of how love brought both of them their other half and left them to struggle with this.

It was wrenching for Wolfe. You want to just hold him. You want to take him in your arms and give him comfort.For all of it. For daring to try.



Reading and absorbing this in the volume is rather a long and tortured journey for a reader. Maybe I read this younger learning of relationships. Maybe it was something of that that held me, or that in future would be understood. Older I find myself just crying and unable to hold on through it. It is too much.

And yes, his building of the inner life of his character, the love/hate dynamic of his affair, his feelings of inadequacy, God-like creation and the depth of knowledge of your poverty of mind, of his ability to be cruel, to be provoked, to try, to fail, all told in long story with rich telling. I just can read Wolfe forever and sometimes run away from him too. I loved Don Marquis and Wolfe's disgust with him as a writer is an example of how well Wolfe can show you something from a view you never considered. I have a friend with this capacity. A cutting frankness and a logic structure I could read for the rest of my life, for the rest of my life, and find it challenging and fresh. And the work is ever so completing.



They say this is the poetic work of Wolfe, the passionate work of Wolfe. For me it is the life's mission work. Driven unto death he created and explained. He served his art. He fought a long and hard struggle to see directly and to the core.



I have to agree with a reviewer I read who finds Wolfe America's genius. And agree with another defining him as not for him, a trip throughthe muck of one mind. I think he is acquired taste. One looks to understand him in his context. Original, telling life story, writing directly out of his experiences trying to take this body of life into a place of art, it's amazing to me.

Ten things I don't know...kind of

Things I don't know:

1. How to find four hours of work on a post that disappeared last night along with my patience . Back up, save, write in Word. All three, not done. I still don't know why I can't remember this, this is fundamental practical....and ...enough said.

The now to be called last great "Lost Post" by my archivers..... was boldly titled...."My Entire Philosophic and Personal History of the World and Justification of Self" , it was a treatise on everything (written in four parts and had an interesting adagio. And the coda). Much like Grover's book on the Museum of Everything in the Whole Wide World.......
Wow. I'm just one person , but it was brilliant.

2. I don't know how to take my medicine.

Literally sometimes. It made me dizzy and weak all week. Something in this chemo is harder than it should be.

3. When to teach reading today as the assessment required is about four hours for the children today. Every three stories in first grade.

4. How to help a Mom in my parents today who is living in her car .....having lost everything. Another day story. That one to be called, "What I Really Do"

5. Take joy and infuse it into this piece.

6. Where I put the digital camera, rechargable batteries, Goethe Faust book, financial aid application for my daughter, Heffalump and Wheezle, my keys and the pills for indigestion.

7. What was this about.........

8. Well if this is about anything in under five minutes now that I forgot what it was all, don't know, then I hope that I can teach art today. I always enjoy creating.

And so saying......
.....................off I go to Room 10 to work with my 1st graders.
................................ recalling all the love that takes all the time.
And as they said in art school,
............Art is a way of seeing.................can't wait to see 20 fresh faces who love to know..........

Words of the day:
patience gasoline respect Aretha
Songs of the day:
If I had a Hammer
Our House
I Say A Little Prayer For You


You know what they say (from my daughter this AM) , "Education is not the filling of a pail; it's the lighting of a fire".

Smiles, Sarah

Red Fox ....Just a 20 minute peek into my 1st grade, or what I was doing that wasn't in their script but was in MINE

Hello Red Fox by Eric Carle

I read this book to my first graders today.
(Please take a minute to go here, it's really where I started in creating my Red Fox lesson years ago)
Although it feels like yesterday, I actually have read it since 1989, or enough years to have a fairly good working idea about which day to use it, and how to use it, within the learning environment. I recommend when you have passed the point in the year where you are still pulling for meaning. It's a book I like to read with children who are ready to learn, not always day one in 1st grade, but not necessarily not the 1st day. (little twisted logic there) For me this is January, if I did my work, now we are making connection, discussing, respecting others thinking, and understand we are in a search for meaning making. Such is my room. I hold my breath.

Eric Carle creates books with bits of interactive spark, or a "catch", really for young children, with a creative turn. This was among my most favorite, but my background was a very rigorous training in art, sometimes this is seen as an emotive degree program, full of drinking and dancing, or somehow math and science "soft" , easier somehow or a degree of responding and making from mental states in various stages of discordia. This book then might illustrate even at early level the beginning of the training that is art. Art is a way of seeing.
Nothing to my mind holds the power that this field holds. Not since the beginning of time has access been more direct nor more transcendent. In this way it is a part of my academic work everyday.

Mis-understood by my peers who lack arts training, (even in classical models), it makes me different in my Under Performing School, but not different in the world. This world holds many who have figured this one out. Art just isn't something for someone to do for therapeutic aims, though that is a factor. It has that as a feature, a very valid one to be sure. It's a training, a way of seeing, a discipline. And in first grade one piece of literature a week I use to address this in some manner. Today it was Hello Red Fox.

It's obvious that Carle thinks in new and innovative ways, even in the world of children's books which can be a field with innovation. His collage work alone is to admired. At his best the idea he selects for his focus reinforces obvious primary student skills such as days of week or number pattern, this book is great for the color and color wheel and "after images", and at times exceeds this with connection to understandings at a little bit higher level. He is a writer asking the child to stretch if you will, for those students also listening with you who are divergent or visual, or perhaps learning to think in open ended or visioning ways, he has something more. It might be said primary instruction is easily built around his works many levels. With the right mind-set his work can push your children to think in dynamic ways.

Although currently in my Under-performing school with restrictive basic skill driven Directed Instruction you see his pieces less and less, as they aren't part of basal readers...really. It's just very strange. Tells you something. He's too complex. They want a hammer to the head.

Which brings me to something I really want to say first about this book. I really think it's better to buy the hardback version. As you read you will be exploring the color construct of after images and it works by staring a long while at a color image and then slowly moving your head to see the after image on a white page, the next page. This is so much more sturdy and easier held and handled in the hardback. It's important to know this going in, if buying this for teaching or working with students or your child. This one I'd spend the money for sure. I am using it as a piece in After-School arts programming so I thought I should start speaking to practicality.

The book looks at the color wheel.
Often as a child I thought about color, liking to draw and finding I had a capacity to make images and respond in this manner to my world.I actually loathed the color wheel.....as it was taught to me then in school. It seemed so darn boring.... teachers, I thought then, always dragged it out to start the art year and it was so academically boring. Just their lack of insight into what to say to light up the subject is instructive and may relate to what I see in instruction in peers today...and in understandings of friends about "my world"...I hold to that then, the color wheel can bore you to dust.....(then of course they always started hounding in on perspective).

..SO as you sat learning opposites in colors you wondered what that did for you and passed a note. It's useful in color mixing (often they even forgot to tell you that) but long color wheel dialogs are dull. Kids don't retain it, it's purely "about" rather than 'is'.
so..........
ENTER Carle who gives you a taste of what colorists and physics of light and color classes can bring to you.... science can bring. It can get very exciting, it can be motivating, it can get edgy, it can make your entire class speechless. Mine was today and then later children with a mission to go inform the world, went out to teach their peers school-wide. TA DA...magic.

And it's all from some lessons about how the brain and eye work, with 1st graders on a few minutes no one was watching for the script. Wow. That's cool.

Just yesterday my husband spent hours discussing and presenting to me....much the same way.... sophisticated material on how the brain perceives relative to light and where the 2.0 web is taking us artistically/perceptually or how it is "envisioned" in the new century.....Kurt Kurzweil...things.... I'm hopelessly floundering thinking about with interest.......and it connects somehow to my thoughts here about how color works, the eye, the brain..meaning.


ANYWAY .....this terrific book shows children something about these color pairs we call opposites, incidentally currently my basic skills focus really is on opposites...... How did we create the color wheel? Here is an answer, a bit of the answer. Carle gives you insights....A way to get to the answer. Having to do with how we work biologically.
Well at least for the young , it's a start......

As the story goes..... each animal comes to a birthday party...exquisitely mannered..... they are called by their opposite color name. A dot mid animal is stared at for some ten seconds, eyes are shifted to the opposite page where indeed the animal is now 'seen' as after image in the opposite color. It was fascinating to my students and they recalled the pairings after reading which frankly surprised me. At the start of the year after mixing colored waters they did not recall later which two made which color requiring many, many varied and rich experiences to "get it" and kind of worrying me frankly about what kind of year this was going to be.

I have two things to say. It can really tire the eyes. It causes eye strain. I'd say it's a fantastic book and way to do this, with a warning you will tire their eyes.
This isn't a really natural thing to repeat this many times.
After they really do get the point of the book, they can stop if their eyes are getting too tired, and often they do self select that. We are obviously all different. It's an unusual experience and I think worth it. Magic eye posters used to do this to me, for different reasons the fatigue was there, but I never saw those images emerge myself having vision really just in one eye, so it's kind of like that... my students claimed success.

The other thing I wanted to say was that I think this is best presented quietly, calmly, and follow it with painting. I have a Picasso project which talks of primary and secondary colors, too long for this to describe, but excellent for children to expand the color wheel concept. For me Josef Albers really turned me around about the use of color, the color processes , I studied under Urban Couch one of his students. He turned me on. Color is a theory. There is often more applied science, more math, more calculation and more logic systems at work in creating art than is understood by someone looking at a visual artist who additionally is conveying their personal vision or "message" using media with great process, there is simply in color alone several physics courses of dialog taking place between the artist image, concept, material and viewer..... tho I know many prefer to talk of artistic impulses, moods, mental states.

Later as art evolves into perspective and into representations of symbolic meaning one again is really seeing how we look and understand. A master work such as Picasso creating is the pictorial equivalent of the constructs and conceptions of Einstein. Not ever un-beautiful but not a small thing in its breadth.

And interestingly as I now understand our art medium (of which I am now a dinosaur in understanding) it's moving to technology.... media in rooms lit in Cyberland, hear of chips implanted in brains to alter the brains understandings of what's seen, I sense the functioning of light and brain in much richer way......so much for me to absorb and begin to introduce to our kids..... as taught in my math and science in the dark ages..... and I immediately related to the artistic implications. Imagine a child's book that can take you away to places like these. Art does it for me everyday.Carle did this today.

Some of us, as Carle does so well, relate to ideas through this art construct. It is actually a thinking tool. Buckminster Fuller understood that very well. I don't think artists then "struggle for their art" ......struggling artist....as is so often said...except we struggle just exactly like everyone to find meaning. And struggle to hold on to truth. For meaning...
And to pay bills, and to see and create these relationships which often additionally become a struggle to be understood..... in this process of mind and brain....by those without the connection.

Those who are in a sense idealizing them, artists, projecting Boheme on them, sometimes miss something. And I recall Carle speaking in his way to this too, as did Fuller by relating to their childhood experiences in kindergarten when their making revealed the complexities of their mind. Not given the opportunity to create (as I see happening in my Under performing rigidity of basic skills Direct instruction) I often wonder what we are losing....would we produce genius? I just know these two did have an early grade teacher that changed their world by seeing their mind, as their art pieces revealing their capacity for understanding in innovative ways.

Additionally as Carle relates his childhood a teacher changed him, his understanding of his validity, his victory over what might have seemed a pathology, awareness of the intelligence of his being, in this he was redeemed.

In a world of fewer and fewer makers, we need teachers, literature connections, experiences like this one and so much more...... need those who work with, or who surround these individuals who hold these capacities , we need teachers to respond with some level of understanding of their student's gift. And to structure their learning as a discipline.

And my God the training they will undergo. To become an artist is to work constantly with thought. It's enormous work. It really seems to me using his work, Carle's pieces of invention, with students as a body of literature plugged into the school days it broadens the experience and for some few students is an essential link to someone who 'sees' a bit differently.

My students were amazed by this book today and really were ready to move into discussion of how the eye and brain work. We then looked at Escher and at Pop art-at the Talking Heads album cover-the red and green one from about 76 that danced perceptually to talk about visual field/op art/visual phenomena. We listened to music doing that too..... If you want an awesome site for more (say 3rd up) I'd go here.
Pretty extraordinary discussions for 6 year olds today and much richer than ...this is "red". Thanks to Carle you have an artist teaching you about the science of his world and the practical daily understandings one is applying in rational decision making in work that some often discount as "art" or expression of inner demons or irrational process.Yeah....get real.

Okay I'm a first grade teacher and artist. If you are just a mom or pop, get the book. You'll love it with your young child.


6/22/07 I just tried to edit this, it's hopeless. I apologize. The ideas were so repetitious that I'm concluding it was during a particularly frustrating time. When I struggled to be heard.

If Children Seem Less Engaged in Reading for Deep Meaning are they "Reading" Our Models For Them?

Dad's Zinnia's, when I was 13.........or 1972


I admit freely I was following a line of thought I lifted from Borderland.... Just 'cause its my favorite place to read.... I’m shamelessly fond of saying the site changed my view on teaching and working by showing me there are still lights burning. ....

Could it be that we as a group, or culture, are telling children somehow, someway... that comes through our actions (over our words) about our relationship to reading? Are we less engaged, willing to discuss literature, think deeply, value real dialog in our own reading, do we get excited, feel the joy in reading? Are we models for them, and practicing what we preach? Are we the Nation of REAL Readers?

After listening to George Bush tonight...give his thrilling State of the Union a masterpiece of speech writing in that he said it without too many issues of pronunciation... my 80 year old mother (who suffered a stroke awhile ago) brought me a Faulkner quote that for her applies, both to the speech and my wandering thoughts this evening. Her gift to my work..
For her, Bush is not doing what he is saying.... the quote from As I Lay Dying;

" I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words."

I look at what comes out now as literary hot and I look at that and recall my Southern Writer's class in college... and I see shallower writing hitting shelves -doesn't feel like a time of great writers, though certainly a time of writing...maybe another issue. Is it a time of great reading?
But as a teacher today in my small corner of the world by well meaning people, I was told not to "waste time " on teaching "author intent”, "...it's just not carrying as many "test questions"“, rather, "Use your time wisely and direct it to pay-off tested areas".

Somehow I think author intent, tested or no, is a deeper concept than, " Is it a noun?" and in the end... Author intent is the driving reason that took the author to pick up a pen.
It's what got someone into a cave in Lascaux, or writing a manuscript over a lifetime, or smuggling out of Russia that work to inform the west what was happening in Siberia.
Author intent is just EVERYTHING.
And yet a group of grown-ups today in Oxnard decided and VOTED to teach to the structuring of poorly constructed reading state and reading series tests, and get the "most" from their time. By not wasting it on author intent. Now we are to teach to the things that only deconstructors and non- makers ever really notice, the clauses, tenses, the contractions and the participles. I like to call this the dressing. Only the fringe.

All pieces of a much more complicated puzzle.

But here I am ... driven by a need for expression. To speak, write, express. I suspect kids need this more than anything for it's acknowledging the human inner light, the drive to say, create, make, invent...the need again and again to take a position, have intent and use a form to bring it to light.

In the end what takes my breath away about the 2.0 Web is the need to express.... when I see the sites of Fan Fiction, no matter how ridiculously imitative it is this takes my breath, coming there these kids to make. Coming there to construct. .... It’s a saving thing I think. Really. You can't lose sight of all that it tells me, somewhere in this medium...this machine of connection... lies the potentials of people to find that cave wall again in the great darkness, to paint the images of the age.

Is this the day we read because someone named "Oprah says”, that's to get people to "read Steinbeck", and so, then, East of Eden is re-found? And rather than having a President of poets, writer's and the best of American historians and thinkers so that he shows the importance of literacy by engaging it, visually and intellectually, so it becomes all a part of the fabric of the NOW.... are we are shunning complete thoughts, searches for meaning and possibly accepting less truth for a host of societal reasons?
Did he say with NCLB every child would have a laptop tonight? Did I miss that tonight? Clearly say it out of his mouth? Did we agree to give them all a library? Books? Wasn't Laura Bush the book girl, or was that the accountability takes a test woman? Where is the voice for literature.... is a test related?
Are the children really just our mirror?
Is it maybe, us, with the reading issue?
Do we really read??????

Are we those who have traded for something other than a pursuit of excellence through literature and intellectual development? Is that our culture?
Sometimes I think about this, knowing I feel far less than the generation that preceded me. Look what my mom connected to while I was watching the Nike ads.
Here I was happily thinking of buying loads of new Nike's. She was thinking of doing over saying. It's nice to assert you helped the poor. So why not mention New Orleans the biggest natural disaster that ever hit our country and the most ugly of our failures, and certainly the profoundest example of leadership incompetence. Can we talk, read and deal with this? Where is the art, music the telling of this tale? Is it a good sign, the silence? The sound of silence.

Not to pound my usual three notes but just today in my Under performing CA elementary school we were told (in a meeting to "demo" what a meeting should look like, in case we don't "get it") that quilts might be on tests for 3rd graders, so we should review that 'academic vocabulary' because "these kids don't know or care about quilts, frankly that's just history to them".

This is a far cry from finding quilt based stories like those written by Faith Ringgold who builds into her wonderful tales the reasons for the making, the creators intents, making, interviewing quilters, perhaps at school we need a quilter's bee, getting in demo's, breathing, snuggling and learning geometry and so much more through quilts, which in the end means more than the test ever will...and isn't it true that the test was only to check to see we are doing relevant work in teaching........ we are, in short I think, on our ear about why we do what we do.

Thus embedded in real context, language and reasons to read and engage become more...well..."real".
And so motivating, as really this is a talk about motivation.

I've actually been watching and thinking about something along these lines. At least where I am children don't make prints with brayers anymore thus losing contact with printing process and concepts (negative/positive, reversals, basic printing is how book/word press evolved), they don't melt wax and batik, create candles, no silk screen, no clay, no construction, no need for pulley, no applied understanding of structures, what did Buckminster Fuller.... do.... he made models, artifacts, where was he, out building a dome, hanging on the side of a logistical problem, organizing problem solving in real contexts.... No one today in my meeting of teachers knew what encaustic is, they don't sew, they don't blog, they don't ask to be "connected”, no DNA model builders R us, they know their grandparents can do "old" craft stuff though. It's as if they find it acceptable to be so blithely un making. That sounded to me like the observations of less than deep readers.

So when word gets out to students in my school that there is a teacher that'll teach you to crochet -a line forms so I have to keep it quiet ...too many, hundreds sign up for my after-school art class. And I think, maybe we just aren't making enough. Simple, just I think very relateable to the reading observation.... Maybe there is an active, bodily engagement in those early years of doing that later translates into creating in poetry or engaging in grabbing a book and on your own seeing what it says to you. Visualizing, working it out, integrating it in, needing it to "do" something...no?

Maybe building birdhouses, even baskets which some find laughable, isn't so horrible an idea. Ever look at the CA Indian baskets, geometric masterwork. But in groups where creating is in your hands.... well...maybe this turns on the switch. Passivity, ennui, detachment, non-involvement, strategic engagement...isn't showing a passion for inventing, investing in yourself as an active being that self-determines. I think the most empowering thing for me young was my art teacher, Sharon Goodman, who put the project in my hands and somehow communicated that it was within my power to respond to it uniquely.

Where I am inside teaching now this would be heresy. You can't allow individuals to seek their own truths. Mandates using Directed Instruction require that the teacher look for replication and memorization. No one does a thing "uniquely" and finds acceptance.. I think what we are reaping generationally is maybe the "truths" that we are communicating. I guess something like ...consume, buy, feel good, get fear, conform.

...Somehow reading is always a bit edgy for me. It challenges my frames, it stretches, it hits at the gut, and it creates dissonance. It requires me to make, somehow. To respond, to engage. Well here I mean the things that make me feel alive. Even when I read a recipe though I still engage reading as a process of self-discovery. Art, reading, music can make you engage so many things in new and challenging ways. For me what I see is like that Springsteen song 57 channels and nothing on...all playing the same thing… white screens… school rooms being made mediocre so they are "all on the same page". Every child the same and not behind. Why not the slogan.... Every child happy, reading to maximizing their talents...?? Different message. I suppose it just seems to me that the children need to be helped to risk and to see the genius of literature. It's so exhausting but as a friend said, this kind of instruction is very hard, but so what, it's what we do. And they deserve it. He said, "Just do it, they deserve it." Good advise as ever Steven.

So in a long way around tonight I just thought.... I better get to my doing...Long hills to climb, no? Promises to keep...and maybe.... it’ll make reading mean something "just a little bit more".

My husband writes me a Song/Poem to celebrate my work

MY REPLY WHICH IS NEW FOLLOWS THIS......AND IT IS KIND OF RANTING,SORRY

Song/Poem for Sarah

January 20, 2007 by john puglisi

She’s indignant, if that’s the correct word, (I’ll look it up)

She’s angry, dumbfounded, pissed

She’s outraged, maddened, disgusted

She just doesn’t understand

How people who don’t really do the work

Can be so boldfaced

In their lies and misguided notions

Of the what the work is and should be

She just doesn’t understand

How their limited and controlling

And myopic view of life

Of human nature and classroom culture

Could pass for the truth

Could pass for the scientific truth

Could pass for what’s right to do with children

Most especially

Poor children

Poor, minority, American children

Poor, minority, American, second language learners

Described and defined and contextualized

As broken, empty vessels

Dragging down their classrooms

Dragging down their test scores

Dragging down their adult’s sense of competency and success

Along with their poor, minority, and deficient parents

She just doesn’t see it that way

She just doesn’t understand

How others give it over so easily

To this dark and convoluted construction of reality and society

She just doesn’t understand how the powers that be

Can allow or permit or encourage

All that is being done

In the name of this misguided worldview

This weltanschauung

And she’s mad

And she’s not gonna take it anymore

Where is the love?

She asks

Where is the hope?

Where are the dreams?

Where is respect?

Where have all the teachers gone?

Where are their voices?

Why are they silent?

Trampled and squashed

By the stunningly wrong picture of things

And all in the name of what?

She asks

A true belief in control?

In the mindlessness of mimicry and recitation?

In the Darwinian rightness of poverty?

A true belief in pure “rightness”?

Or rather a carefully crafted

And surprisingly easily implemented

Blitzkrieg of pony show and purchase

Buying and selling

A rarely questioned march to money and influence

Easily predicted and easily collected

At the trough of state and federal hands and mandates

Decries and deals

Omissions and silences

And she’s mad

And she’s not gonna take it any more

And at least

Her students

Her children

Will be allowed and encouraged

To think and create and question

To take responsibility for their own learning

Their own lives

At ask their own questions

And seek their own answers

To pose their own problems

And work to solve them

At least within the nine hundred square feet

Of public space afforded them

Of public and prescribed cinderblock

These students, these children, these budding humans

Will be availed of opportunities

To develop their own worldview

A messier, more chaotic, more challenging world

Filled with chance and uncertainty

And through their agency and effort

They’ll do anything

They’ll dream anything

They’ll achieve anything

And live in limitlessness

And they will call back from time to time

Or email or write

And spur her on

From their twenty year’s past

And recollect the seeds that were planted

And document their growth

Their unpredictable, uncontrollable

March towards destiny and beauty

And when they call

She quiets a bit

And glows a bit

And shouts a bit less

And she’s mad in the moment

And she knows there’s still love

And she knows there’s still hope

And she knows there are dreams

But she’s tired

And she often can’t sleep

And she’s caught up in something for sure

She knows it but only so well

But she can’t understand it

And Monday mornings on page forty two

Back on unit and lesson and page

And to making some sense

Of the nonsense of “N”

Or any other letter

Taught in isolation

Sans context or dream

But she’ll imbue it with meaning

In a paper clip if needed

But she’s tired

And mad

She can’t take it any more

And her flame’s intermittent

Not sure how it ends

Not if it should end

And she’s mad

And she’s not gonna take it anymore

BEFORE THE FALL or how I see NCLB impacting me

MAD AS HELL IS ACCURATE
An answer to a Husband's Poem
From a teacher in an Under Performing CA school:

1. Before NCLB
Reading was starting to be funded in CA with some freed funds for the first time in forever, so that material support to buy room reading materials, to match student need for this stuff, to get one to one help, to fund reading teachers for small group instruction, as well as training for teachers in reading ..it was buzzing.
The term "at their level", early intervention, how does reading happen, ELI (Early Literacy Intervention programs)....at least in CA was a buzzzzzzzz.
As a by-product early intervention was talked about, looking to become real and starting to take shape in so many ways even in summer school for K and 1st or programs to start students off on the right foot. And somehow i equated that with feeding the kids a lunch and breakfast something in a 100% free lunch school matters to me.
(Our District withdrew from these programs entirely with NCLB saying we had no data to support 4 on 1 tutoring teaching summer school as "effective", we had readers and we had artifacts but it wasn't valued so it went)
We even had cute little packs with crayons, glue and scissors as hello gifts, individualization, Reading Recovery, various localized solutions, and District developed opportunities to focus on this aspect of the learning. It was coming into it's own. Let me say this clearly, where I am now if it isn't directly related to, or about an assessment or a test, it's gone. Even when we speak. I had a student very abused, my Principal said, "That's really going to affect her scores." Sure, if they don't beat her to death it will affect the scores, and affect a whole lot more. This dialog...it kills me. We are adults behaving as juveniles.

So....Reading Teachers get booted in our District and were replaced by "Literacy Coaches" who give NO support directly to students which just amazes me, and they function as the Police to be "sure" you are doing the PROGRAM SCRIPT, most of the time they don't know what the hell they are doing. It's not even clear if this "works", or what it is. It is . Called Mentors mine don't know a third of what i do when i try not to listen...so it appears they mostly work on teacher compliance. I find it hard to believe it's that much better elsewhere.
Opps, sorry.
The entire small group reading instruction was torpedoed. I’m a first grade teacher with no reading groups. It's absurd.
Students are a homogenized, everyone learns Long A today, bunch of chanting monkeys. Thanks...

What changed:
Directed Instruction, it has mandated the form by going to the State decision making political forums and successfully mandating this approach into the texts and practices in Reading instruction (and all else) that can be used, at least in CA. Not only this, but especially this wrestled the ART of teaching reading away from the instructor. Hooked onto Phonics and playing the phonics scripted tape, even if you read at the 6th grade level and sit in a 1st grade room. We are doing LONG A today kids. No one is special, you are all robots and I know what you need. Open up that worksheet.


2. Before NCLB:
Art, Music, Science, Social Studies could be taught, even in a poor neighborhoods, even to 2nd Language students. In fact it was often the basis for language-rich environment construction with the dual and very specific purpose of project building for increasing experiences with materials, literature, vocabulary and real things to hook students to "meaning making" in the 2nd language. A scaffold to meaning. Children were integrated together to hear natural language, all levels, to meet peers and work together. Instructors used multiple intelligences and modalities to evolve understanding of content. Content was highly prized. But, then, how can I explain, the value of social community and understanding, big ideas, concept was high.

What Changed:
Districts are now, if Under-Performing, paying agencies to "audit" them, as they must file state plans to "improve”. These auditors make money and are consulting through County Offices for big buck returns where their Direct, Explicit, Science-based jargon dictates.
A District could self-design or seek a wide variety of ways to "fix" scores, but the poor schools get the security net of the BIG BASIC SKILL DRILL through these agents that sell you a report that might even, as Hathaway's did, have another school's name written all through it 'cause, opps, forgot to cut and paste in your name in our scientific process. We said it was "just for you" and proscribed a scripted day EXACTLY LIKE everyone we go to.............audit for profit.

Well.... there is a surprise.

Here DISTRICT leadership or lack of the same is the real fault.
They must stand up and for ONCE CREATE SOMETHING.
NCLB can be modified and it can be done more dignifying to teachers, unless your DISTRICT is lead by followers.
Then you are dead in the water.


So I get to expect for the children and "teach" hour long sessions added into the day on leveled ELD (English Language Development) the most canned and poorly suggested thing I've ever seen at my school even for EO kids.... in something called Avenues ,which reminds me of a text program written by aliens observing children and school from Mars, "We think this is what they do to learn English and it looks nice in the book"......or other pieces of DI.... this means time used to either integrate these subjects (art, science, social studies, music, PE)with literature and experiences, lessons, activities or to God help us "teach them" at the best become scripted Direct Instruction chant-a-thons with no student making, experimenting, experiencing, researching, absolutely not in groups,
or at worse(my case) there is no art, music , science and what you have is , for those who are poor and in areas of low socio-economic need ,yes that great savior, BASIC SKILL instruction. Lots more of it..a day of it.

Let's highlight...say the definition of a term in isolation, now you repeat it.

Or as Mr. Hollingsworth in all his never taught genius suggested as a way to teach 2nd language learners as very essential big news, "Talk slower and clearly"
.... This creates no opportunity for even exposure to the "ideas" of the elite.
Hey, these kids shouldn't get notions like that, that's liberal and that's a social agenda. They need to be "fixed".

In short..after NCLB students are effectively prevented from content in meaning filled contexts, if economically deprived and engaged in the discourse of control their job is to learn their role.

3. Before NCLB:
Students were considered at least in the dialogs of our jobs special, unique, with emphasis on their issues of culture, race, this entered into the learning, it could be said that their unique backgrounds, families, perspectives were valued. They could be "heard”. You were not a “low scoring" pathology, or blight on the school, nor were the "close the border" sayings and other amazingly xenophobic remarks hurled at kids as truth.
I've heard more directly insulting remarks about who I teach and how worthless that is to be doing in the last 5 years to make it clear to me that prejudice is alive, well, breeding and multiplying. It's remarkable what I see and hear now. Even in peer teachers who are buying into NCLB truth.

Now this is disparaged as "special interest" thinking.
Students are now "punished" for not giving me scores and "right" one-size answers. Management systems are now underscoring who can , who cannot, further shaming enters the picture. Ah, a world based on the model we are all lazy and must be forced to perform. Nice.

What Changed:
Teachers that worked on social issues, on caring, on striving to see all as gifted or able, on talents, multiple intelligences, designing in layered ways to create success are either hounded out of business, struggling to defend themselves as rhetorical argument kicks their knees out, or required to read a script doing none of the above.
Then they have to deal with all the fall out of increasing parental belief they truly are worthless. Teachers are forced into systems that shame, compare, create winners/losers and the parents feel great alienation from the instructor. There is no team. There is the all-knowing teacher paper god and everyone must bow.... Students that do well, no matter what school, in what neighborhood, feel really great, superior in fact, everyone else now knows dis-empowerment. Failure. Scores on the walls, please.
Now, a culture of fear is in place. Or at least the structure. This is so yesterday, so limiting, so about the past and not about building future. This is a system built on greed and opportunistic shove. Good grief, can it be necessary to repeat all the mistakes of our past.

Questioning, thinking, inquiry is discouraged.
If you go around on the WEB on some blogs its made into an insult fest joke to imply a student might do well with it. With the opportunity to seek happiness , to become a critical thinker, to make a decision. Further as James Herndon once wrote so well, what really happens is no matter what school, this structure of winners and losers is accepted as a system wide praxis in America. That suits a kind of corporate commerce well. It creates acceptance of wealth, power, ruthlessness, or a competitive world. NCLB was a short track to reinstating something I knew young, I called it then going to "Darwin school" . A time when having the "poor" was a necessary vehicle for the engine of the economy. Nice.... I think that might be unfair to Darwin but the point is understood. It's really Skinner school.

A few sad and very pathetic people who had a very hard few years like Anita Archer Queen Bee of Directed Instruction could pull out of trying their tricks on somewhere like Singapore and surge back into the dollars again here at home. Here we are funding a sorry bunch to "Save the Schools" in poor areas for really lusty fees, without attending to any societal issue that built them into existence, amazing. And these consulting beings had time to aggressively build their data sets. It's all in the data. Must use that.

5. Before NCLB:
Teachers were able to select a piece of literature to support their children's learning and they built thematic, cross-curricular units using their training.

What Changed:
Do as we say.....you are not given permission to design, you might "do your own thing."
just as we see Survivor on the airwaves -the culture is now very OK with doing mean things to even their Motherly old white haired teachers. "Kick them in the pants" I really heard a Fed. Rep. say, "light them on fire", regarding forcing a script on a teacher. They must. "It's time", he said.
Sure...sounds like the Cultural Revolution to me,
but if we aren't allowed to teach it, I suppose students won't realize that there are plenty of times historically when shutting a teacher up served someone in ways with very broad and very certain political ideas. At some point I don't understand why teachers tolerate this perception and rudeness.

In this case, in the case of NCLB going into areas of poverty talking big about the achievement gap.......... teachers, creativity, social justice all must be silenced. Even proof it's failing hits the trash. And that should count.
One wonders why,
of course,
to promote the corporatization of schools.
Just today looking through Education Leadership, a journal ,I counted 24 ads with children holding up signs or in the picture to promote money making school consulting people/figures who "consult" on "scores" and raising them for a big fee.
They want to be the next multi-millionaire.
They surely aren't donating their work for the greater good of America or working on a parson's or a teacher's salary. So they have a lot to say, money affords them a voice, we listen to money, we respect that. They are making their play. I can't understand Superintendents and Ed Leaders seeing this in their journal and not finding it sick. Eating America's young. Advertising away their students rights in public ed...far more worrisome than a Coke ad....anyway you see we all are accepting after NCLB that now we can and we should make our money going global in the schools "market”. Eat the young, there is money to be had. And we can call it the "greater good". What?



6. Before NCLB:
Classroom had artifacts, models, stuff, decoration, literature, books, displays, messy learning...paste , markers, play dough, kitchen sets, blocks, sand tables....

What Changed:

Put up a focus wall, post a Standard, call them "Kid Friendly" put a white board in every hand and chant all day. Art is dead. Thought is dead. Making is certainly dead IF you are too poor to move to where it's still "allowed". NCLB has destroyed school culture, arts and practically childhood for many students.

7. Before NCLB:
Most children regarded school as friendly, happy, a place to grow.

What Changed:
NCLB is about school as a place to be controlled, tested, used, turned into a commodity. Fear rules. Maybe you think I overstate. My own children just spent 14 hours studying this weekend for the Monday exams. As all year. I see at least 5 hours of this a night, I suggested two days in Monterey with us missing a day, they cried in terror over what the school would do to them. Sure that's a happy relationship to learning. Umm. Read Nell Noddings.

8. You had PE. Or at least maybe you had PE.

What Changed:
Someone ought to give Kennedy some basic news, due to NCLB and the lovely the scripts there is no PE going on really, as there is no time to do it. So, umm, how's that working for you Ted? Oh yeah, you already have your truth; nothing in my room dents your beliefs. What a political sell-out ...
He might prior to a renewal spend some time in the classrooms where scripts rule, enough time to walk in the shoes of a poor student, the ones where fun outside games, uncompetitive and charming integrating activity, with math, science and other concepts are gone...gee thanks for listening Ted.

9. Before NCLB:
Your teacher was not ever told to do something as a "mandate" and treated to an alarming amount of brute behaviors. They might have even been asked for their views and supported as leaders. Sure we changed approaches and styles but we were allowed to do this with polite, kind and often reasonable behaviors.

10. BEFORE NCLB:
Technology was reaching the poor.

What Changed:
I'm in a fully "wired" place where all the kids do is one workbook in a can.
Called CCC(Success maker)
It's to get "data", so....no blogging, no 2.0Web, no access to on-line wiki's and other amazing things.
In effect , due to poverty, they can't get it at home and they aren't allowed it at school.
BASIC SKILL DRILL is the only "scientific" thing they are allowed.
How can they be a part of the future? Answer me that?????


11. BEFORE NCLB:
Teacher morale and cooperation, trust and spirit was higher.

What changed:
Well among soooooo much , when the Secretary of Education calls your union a group using "terrorist tactics" after 9-11 pretty much everything was a snowball ride into hell.
Teachers are not valued (as they are in countries that even the Bush says he regards their ed. highly), they are hounded. I think mostly to get higher salaried older teachers out to be replaced and turned over cheaply (save the money) and to stop effective criticism from teachers who have developed voices and passions about their work and sophistications, but whatever ...the result is horrible teacher stress and the denigration of their leadership and frankly, we need their positive, helpful, daily leadership to get over the next years. They are entrusted with our children they need to be happy and the children certainly need to be. Here all I can say is read Nell Noddings.

Well there is a whole lot more, but these were on my mind.
Sorry no editing I'm tired..... this in answer to my husband's song,
yes I am mad as hell.....

De-Skilling Teachers (My Husband's and my Thoughts in typical late night ramble)

I WANTED TO THINK Tonight ABOUT A POST OR A COMMENT ON Borderland I read a good while ago that I have been trying to frame in my mind.

It was triggered through a line of dialog and made by a very thoughtful and often I find quite eloquent blog poster, MarcoPolo and related to the DE-SKILLING of teachers.

I had heard the term DE-SKILLING, read it in the past regarding teacher autonomy. Now I have to really consider what it means to me as I am working in an Under-Performing School, our scores dipping below growth targets due to our ELL(English Language Learners) Population scores, a school called Hathaway in CA where all programs are “scripted”. I’ve never had to just read a script before and it’s very hard to do. Much doesn’t fit the students, some is just plain poorly written and much reminds me of a very poor cookbook. These textbook created scripts are very generic and very flavorless. We might see a person of color on a page, but the content would never lead to a discussion of honest human issues. It’s definitely watered down pabulum. And this makes an experienced, highly effective teacher madder than hell most of the time. So that’s one of my issues, another is it seems so clearly about producing children to ……I think be “workers” or somehow some kind of following non self motivated individual, because the material is so drill and follow it, surely it will not produce thinking ….not as far as I can see. Definitely a reversal of what my first 24 years of teaching worked to do, I’ve been empowering children.

I realize instruction is only “as good as” what they give you, when they won’t give you room to create. But the problems are more complex than this, of course, because I see younger teachers coming out of training programs in Universities who operate under their own form of coercion. In Universities this lies in-accreditation- and other systems regarding their own funding reinforcing training young teachers to be thoroughly entrenched in the following of the script. It’s impossible now really to have too much of a discussion of the value of these state tests, except to hear calls for a national one, such is the buy-in to this nonsense.

Of course I suppose starting my career in art education and rapidly going to work in South Central LA at 93^rd Street School with no books, nothing…. and not much more in the Salinas Valley in Greenfield, I learned how to teach by invention, by using the state and district goals(standards) as road maps.

And of course I had my past education to rely on…. I read too, and I invented. I hadn’t thought about the current moves in NCLB as de-skilling, but of course, it is exactly this, while hauling huge sums of money to those showing up to lead the “trainings” for teachers. These trainings take the form of showing you how to read the teacher manual and read scripts to the tune of mega bucks. It’s really a very sad time..

And of course this led me to ask my husband today for his take , he is a CA School Superintendent and below I had him write out some of his thoughts. I follow this with an article I found which I sent to him to provoke some thoughts. It was pretty enlightening for me. Tomorrow I will try and post what De-skilling is saying to me about TEACHER ROLES redefined in NCLB school programs, at least as I SEE IT.

Sarah, here are my thoughts on the deskilling of teachers and the de-schooling of children and adults...


any endeavor we embark on is based on a purpose.
or more aptly put..., by Nel Noddings, our AIMS (purposes).

Since the advent of the Sputnik era...... as you know your favorite guy Postman has long commented on,

National economic AIMS, have dominated
the discourse on public schooling and with the passage of time has had greater influence on the curriculum, instruction, and most recently the day to day logistics
of schooling.

Within this very limited aim..... having America be the most powerful economic nation,
our schools have clung to the industrialization model that purported to prepare more folks for factory work
helping the nation, helping the individual through trickle down methods......

Meanwhile the economy changed to an information processing and analysis economy
that required new and more complex skills and literacies and schools pretty much clung to the old factory model
changing the books a bit and not much more..

Throughout, it was the teacher that was required and needed to adapt to the new environment and the new types of kids....

Lately, it has become apparent that if we stick to the strictly economic and national concern aim, it turns out that creativity, is likely our greatest economic engine
and now teachers, as many have done for a long time, need to adapt to this new insight and help develop and expand the new creative class-
our new economic engine.

However, in the last 20 years, federal and state government have insinuated themselves to greater depths in the basics how’s and what’s
of what’s being taught... and in this process, they have not only brought a more antiquated notion of learning to the forefront
but they have also brought forces to bear that would like to privatize and corporatize the entire endeavor and make money the easy way...
as you have said Sarah so often, by eating our children.

Schools, like hospitals, roadways, and the airwaves.. are the last bastions of the American
commons, the last spaces of democracy. These neo conservative forces suggest that everything that operates in the so called free market, but what I called privileged class' market,
works more efficiently through a Darwinian sense of natural economic order.

This of course is hogwash.. Our systems, monetary, educational and otherwise, work as we design them.

In this new context, the deskilling of teachers to be technicians, deliverers of canned curriculum somehow emerges
as the rhetorical salvation of our national economic supremacy...not.........
but also tends to oppressively quell one of the last large unions in the nation
and set up a transition from public to private that will likely occur as easily as has happened
with air traffic controllers or other groups.

This done, some folks will make a whole lot of money without very much transitional resistance from the deskilled
teachers and the deskilled kids and their parents.....

However.....what is not counted on... is the obvious fact that this will cause a greater division of class and race in this country
and make people mad..... sheep do awaken after the 20th beating to do some bleating of their own

this same creative class that has emerged as our new money and power engine.. is growing and reaping benefits in plain view of the other 70% of Americans
that want the same but have less and less access....

The 70% know that things ain't trickling down

they know that learning to read and type on a pc isn’t enough

they want their kids to be able to analyze, to think, to create and to muck around in the cultural elements and economic relationships
that the creative class are provided......

all this said.......it is clear that the deskilling doesn't serve the limited economic aim......

moreover... the aim itself is problematic....

educational aims.....need to be founded in both the societal and the individual need
they must be founded in the family and the community....
these are the strengths of the American democracy... our democracy is our strength
although it is under attack.

our aims should be founded in principles and universal truths

once done

and if pursued and accomplished well in schools for the majority of citizens

our economic power (albeit in a new multi national -power context)

and global leadership will likely continue into the future.......

however, if the classroom fails to develop and nurture skills of democracy, creativity, community, and universal human ideals,

than we will, as we are now trending towards, smother the flames of what America really is... it is the human species struggling to
evolve towards principles of equality, equity, justice, fairness, kindness, love, and peace

what has emerged in this schooling and other political processes

as it has many times before in our species' civilizations and history

is the fact that individuals and interest groups, who do not share this sense of the potential goodness of man, but rather who see man as a beast

can take the opportunity in the Machiavellian short run, to dominate and influence goings on ,sway public opinion, obfuscate, confuse, and make a lot of money
garner a lot of power, etc.....

This entire matter and dialogue is circular and complex in that

people need to be educated enough to discuss aims, philosophy etc...

in order to take action democratically...

however... when things become too obviously unbalanced and unjust
regardless of their ability to reflect, they act viscerally and express deep seated things
which cause the rest of us to recontemplate the big issues like aims in front of us.....

Most people have a gut sense that
they want their kids to be happy in the short run
and in the long run as adults..

yet few people have a good touch on how to get this done in today's world
or in any world..
that’s why we have just tended to slough it off onto the folks we call teachers

the young and old women of the past... the saints and martyrs and excellent students

and later the children of middle class

and now a few of just about every class.......

who either see teaching as step up
or a return to a place of safety from their past
or a place to make a difference
or a place to get a paycheck with a short day and a lot of vacation

once in, though, unless they are completely blind or hopeless

they realize that they are earning their check at the crossroads/ and battle fields
of American politics, economics and the survival of democracy

our system is based on Greek notions of education

with some other stuff thrown in

these notions too have their own polarities... differences between Aristotle and Plato etc....

here in the u.s. we have Jefferson and Hamilton to sort out......... among others

So I suggest that the deskilling is an obviously bad thing on every level.

It is destructive

and not what anyone would want for their own children..
We all want our kids guided by the best thinkers the most kind and the best prepared......

that’s why all of the aims stuff is best done at the local level... in community......

where the people in charge should be accessible and truly accountable for the day to day goings on in school as possible.

Why is my kid not doing art?
Why is my kid not reading real books?
Why is my kid not doing science?
Why is everything about the test?
Why can't my kid pass the test?
Why doesn't my kid like school?
Why is my kid not safe at school?
How can I help?

these are the questions of the American citizenry/parents.....

JP

NCLB: Taylor-Made for De-Skilling Teachers
Marilyn Wilson
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and Department of English
Michigan State University

When Reid Lyon, an advisor to President Bush, said in November 2002, "You, know, if there was any piece of legislation that I could pass, it would be to blow up colleges of education" (McCracken, 104), many educators blanched, some were appalled, and others downright angry�but none were surprised by the sentiment. Colleges of education as a whole have been under attack for years�for not preparing teachers adequately, for less than stringent requirements for teacher certification, for methods that have swung with the shifts of paradigms in educational philosophies. The surprise was in the violence of the metaphor Lyon used so soon after 9/11.

And then, in early 2004, when Rod Paige, Education Secretary, referred to the National Education Association as a "terrorist organization" (King), the bashing went beyond generalizations about colleges of education to teachers themselves.

Nothing new here either, of course: teachers have been under fire for decades. They are easy targets because accountability in educating children is more complicated than in measuring the quality of nuts and bolts, the results aren't often predictable, and the variables outside of their control enormous. And the public assumes expertise in teaching because they are products of the school system.

One can dismiss these comments as off-the-cuff remarks and accept the lame apologies that followed, or one can look at them as symptomatic of the general agenda of the Bush administration. Reg Weaver, NEA President, sees this as policy: "This is the kind of rhetoric we have come to expect from this administration whenever one challenges its world view" (King, 2). What is most troublesome is that teacher bashing now has official government sanction--from the public remarks made by the administration denigrating teachers on one hand and from the policies being enacted by the administration on the other.

NCLB and Teacher-Bashing

NCLB is at the heart of policies designed to accomplish precisely what Lyon and Paige are calling for. NCLB has been critiqued on a number of fronts: the problems inherent in a single assessment measure of student performance, issues of equity, insufficient funding, false expectations about alternatives�and the list goes on. These arguments address the nature of the law itself and its problematic application. But what is less apparent in these arguments is the potential effect it will have on teaching and learning. One of the most insidious consequences of NCLB is the erosion of teacher agency and control over instructional decisions.

Ironically, numerous studies indicate a strong correlation between teacher preparation and certification and student achievement, suggesting that strong pedagogical preparation is often what makes the difference between a weak and a strong teacher (Darling-Hammond). And yet the Bush administration has developed policies designed to "de-skill" teachers and to strip them of control.

The "de-skilling" of teachers has been happening for some time, but it's on an accelerated trajectory under the current administration. Even as teachers and educators claim that children cannot be taught like robots and lessons cannot be mass-produced and delivered, educational philosophies that fit the model of efficiency, first proposed by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford for the mass production of the automobile, have strengthened their tenacious hold on the educational establishment. Standardization of assessment leads naturally to the standardization of teaching. Politicians and publishing companies are eager to promote measures that proclaim efficiency and expediency--and as a result ensure corporate profits. All this comes with a price for teachers and learners. As Nelson suggests:

One of the problems associated with the standardization of the teaching profession, is that by its very nature, teaching cannot be standardized. Good teaching is a highly complex intellectual activity requiring keen insight into the world in which students live, understanding of the multiple ways of thinking about curriculum problems, having a strong grasp of developmentally responsive strategies, negotiating the myriad of perspectives associated with the relationship between content and context, all with a command of pedagogical content knowledge aimed at connecting students with the world of ideas in and across subject matter disciplines." (Nelson, 4-5)

NCLB is Taylor-made for the push for efficiency and mass-production of instructional materials and assessments. And it's Taylor-made for the de-skilling of teachers. It mandates that school systems select reading programs reflecting NCLB's narrow definition of "scientifically-based research," empirical in nature and focused on the aspects of reading most amenable to quantitative assessment, while ignoring hundreds of valid studies that look at literacy and reading acquisition in more richly complex ways. The content of curriculum in early reading programs is reduced to narrowly defined skills that can be taught from a script and assessed "objectively." It pays lip service to comprehension and ignores the teaching of critical thinking skills. Teachers no longer need to plan their reading curriculum or consider the variability of their learners; the script must be followed. "Scripted curriculum" says Linda Rice, "has the effect of deskilling teachers who become simple deliverers of content and skill processes rather than those who intricately synthesize content, skills, and concepts to create sophisticated curriculum designed to meet the needs of their particular students." (1)

Consider the comments reported by the Delaware Education Research and Development Center. Says one teacher, "Years ago we used to be able to pilot programs and curriculums and decide [what was best] for all students�now it is district mandated curriculum saying that we must teach on grade level, this specific curriculum, because we want everybody teaching the same thing" (Banicky and Noble, 17). Says another, "We are not being trusted to teach these children" (17).

It's a feeling of being overwhelmed by forces out of your control and about which you are powerless to change, creating as the Delaware report says, "a culture of compliance" and a resignation that teachers are powerless to change things (18). One teacher says, "Well, this is what the state has mandated. This what you have, do it." And another reflects on the teaching profession at large, "Teachers will do anything you tell them to do. Isn't that sad?" (18). With the opinions and judgments of teachers across the nation systematically ignored, teachers no longer feel in control of their own instruction.

Taking Back the Right to Teach

Standardization of the curriculum can result in the standardization of the teaching profession, but does it have to? Must the goals of critical thinking and imaginative thinking always be jettisoned in favor of a curriculum designed to mass produce cogs in the system? Must we allow the efficiency experts, the cog-producers, the test-makers, the scriptwriters, and the federal watchdogs that monitor the Annual Yearly Progress of schools to wrest control away from teachers, or can teachers assume their rightful place as decision-makers?

Accountability systems do not have to be impediments to good teaching. But inadequate accountability systems do need to be addressed and dealt with in sophisticated ways. Good teaching, we must be able to demonstrate, will produce students who hold up well under any accountability system.

One suggestion, advocated by Rice, is that teachers tie the activities they want to use with their students to the state or district standards that will demonstrate the educational value of the activities: "As teachers, we often inherently 'know' that what we have our students do is 'valuable,' but we fail to clearly articulate this value . . .Our failure to clearly articulate their educational value . . . is often the very thing that causes us to appear as though we are working on hunches and feelings rather than deliberately established rationales" (4) We know that when students are engaged in their own learning, and when that learning is grounded in solid methodologies, the learning pays off in higher student achievement. Students who build knowledge and expertise in a subject rather than accumulate bits of information for passing tests are going to perform better regardless of the assessment measure used.

McCracken promotes the use of classroom research as a way of reflecting on teaching and its impact on student learning. Particularly important in this era where informal classroom research tends to be dismissed, as McCracken suggests, is the need for teachers to understand they can provide their own evidence of student success--and failure, perhaps--as they begin their own "kid-watching" classroom research projects: what works (or doesn't) about particular activities, how writing changes as students revise drafts, how self-selection of reading materials influences student responses to their reading, for example. Local research projects that result in the demonstration of student success--student projects that reflect strong writing, writing projects that involve community issues, student-produced web pages reflecting strong literacy skills--can go a long way to convincing parents, administrators and the public that good teaching goes well beyond the narrowness of state-mandated assessment measures. It's a way of recruiting the public and building grass roots support for what English language arts teachers know to be high-quality teaching.

Teacher educators can also make sure that their teacher education students are more aware of the power they rightfully have as teachers. That means bringing the issues of politics and education right into education classrooms. It means providing the kinds of arguments necessary to counteract negative publicity about teachers who question the NCLB initiative. It means working on committees, talking with colleagues, and questioning the rationale of the NCLB and other initiatives based on a faulty understanding of children and learning.

In a sense we are, as Kampol argues, re-skilling teachers by helping them become "both aware of and critical of the multiple forms of de-skilling"--finding ways to subvert narrowly conceived methodologies, challenging reductive assumptions about teaching and learning, and taking back their right to teach their subject matter effectively.

And finally, we need to fight fire with fire. If NCLB advocates keep insisting on the use of "research-based evidence" about what works in classrooms, teachers need to use existing quantitative research data to develop their own arguments (McCracken). All teachers should be aware of the massive review of research conducted by Linda Darling-Hammond as she looked at and critiqued a wide range of quantitative research studies focusing on the relationship between teacher quality and student achievement. Her conclusion is that quantitative studies indicate that "measures of teacher preparation and certification are by far the strongest correlates of student achievement in reading and mathematics, both before and after controlling for student poverty and language status" (2). Teacher preparation in research, teaching methodologies, and classroom practice is essential to good teaching. Excellent teacher preparation matters in the achievement of students.

Teachers also need to publicize the research of Richard Ingersoll, reported by Crabtree that discusses two competing views of contemporary schools and the role that teachers play in them. The factory model on one hand centralizes decision-making with teachers playing a minor role; the professional model, on the other hand, considers teachers as professionals who need and deserve considerable autonomy to teach effectively. Ingersoll's nation-wide panel of 13-17 year-olds clearly underscores students' willingness to work hard and to learn from teachers who are passionate and creative. The prerequisite for passion and creativity in teaching is teacher agency.

Good teachers will understand how the politics of education affects them as teachers and their students as learners. It should help them see that it is their moral responsibility to take stands against institutional practices that see them and their students as mere cogs in a system promoting simplicity over complexity, information over understanding, and numbers over individual human beings.

I had hoped that Reid Lyon and Rod Paige would have been forced to consider the research like Darling-Hammond's and Richard Ingersoll's on the importance of strong teacher preparation and teacher agency, to consider its implications for the teaching profession and for educational policy makers, and to retract--not just apologize for--their silly, but damaging words. Unfortunately, just a few weeks ago, Paige made a comment at the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce's annual Mackinac Policy Conference that NCLB critics are "whiners" (Flesher).

Name-calling, however, is often the last bastion of defense. I think our "whining" is paying off. As teachers, we're taking strong stands against the Taylor-mentality of education policies and practices. I believe we're taking back our right to teach.

Works Cited

Banicky, Lisa, and Audrey Noble. "Detours on the Road to Reform: When Standards Take a Back Seat to Testing." Delaware Education Research and Development Center, July 2001.

Crabtree, Steve. "Teachers Who Care Get Most from Kids." Detroit News. June 4, 2004.

Darling-Hammond, Linda. "Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of state Policy Evidence." Educational Policy Analysis Archives. 8:1: January 1, 2000. http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n1

Flesher, John. "Education Secretary Says 'No Child Left Behind' Critics are 'Whiners.'" Associated Press, June 3, 2004.

Ingersoll, Richard. Who Controls Teachers' Work?: Power and Accountability in America's Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Kampol, Barry. "Critical Pedagogy for Beginning Teachers: the Movement from Despair to Hope."
http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/Documents/the_movement_of_hope_by_kanpol.html

King, John. "Paige Calls NEA 'terrorist organization.'" February 23, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/23/paige.terrorist.nea/ .

McCracken, Nancy. "Surviving Shock and Awe: NCLB vs. Colleges of Education." English Education, January 2004, 104-118.

Nelson, Thomas, ed. "Editor's Introduction: In Response to Increasing State and National Control over the Teacher Education Profession." Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2003, 3-8.

Rice, Linda. SLATE Newsletter, National Council of Teachers of English. http://www.ncte.org/about/issues/slate/115817.htm

On "SNOW"

A perfect discussion of this great book would be like the painting "White on White" a blank to consider as a metaphor for snow, that's really what the book is constructing, a paper representation of a first snowfall.

And it would fit Shulevitz to leave a blank page for "Snow," I think he might "get it."
As a teacher, I have several of his books and each has a particular quality I like to call "internal space," borrowing from the language of my painting training.
They are creations of places that seem frozen and afar, a kind of wonder always over takes me as I read Shulevitz' books to kids. The reader becomes superfluous somehow. It's a very hard thing to find words for, his stories connect in another place, beyond text, "in place." In general if you are a teacher of young children, children coming from a second language as I am, working on the construct of "the setting" with young children, his books will allow you to focus on this in a way where internal images can be discussed. 1st graders after reading this book always tell me they can "go inside" his spaces and find a "reality. Of course they say this in their own way. "I like to see this one, read it some more." "I want to go to the snows, can we read this one today." Or my favorite, " I sees snow when you reads, I really do." But that is always the voice of Gabriela who gots in very big trouble Friday for being too bossy and not "listening" nicely.


Lately I have spent a great deal of time thinking about reality.
Thinking of what that means, what we are often doing in teaching is avoiding deep discussions of our and other realities. Ours and others. Going inside of writing and images and finding a "reality" is a unique construct to work to build with students. It is the heart of literature pieces use in classrooms, something I see being stripped away now. It's unique to talk about with students and this author allows you to go to a "there." If for no other reason I think this thread is one that should exist in classrooms to help bind together a kind of understanding of purpose, meaning, awareness of other's understandings, I suppose it is an expanded sense of literacy not just a phonetic literacy. This is cultural, historical artistic,political, psychological, individual, human and I suppose when I work, literature is the place I go to talk about our "understandings" as plural as that is, and as rich as this makes us as a people. It is there we go to a great mind's eye for looking at our lives and the world we might wish to transform. Build a new education from this place, not economic bean counting.

And in SNOW the there is not a there of this earth, it is a there entirely of literary creation. As a teacher of children in a second language I notice they connect to these images and created worlds in books. Really connect. With "SNOW" they had me read it twice and insisted on writing poems. Insisted. It was a poetic step-stone. Now I wish to be heard, now I have something to share too.

As for "Snow" it is the telling of adult and child perspectives. In snow. When I grew up in West Virginia as flakes fell my brother and I would go out to see, to see if they were sticking, praying of course for their layering our world. Crying out as we first saw them melt, folded over our radio predictions and armed with thermometer out the door we went. I introduced the thermometer with this story Friday. And the rest of the day we charted a fall in temperature from 61 to 43. It was a perfect way to begin to think about "cold". Mum and Dad in my childhood days would of course sit so far from our child perspectives, praying to be left in peace. Their world of inconvenience so much a part of having to deal with it in traveling to work. Two views I now "understand" and now share out with children.


Here in the story a boy, who remains just "a boy", watches the flakes and listens to the adults predict the possiblity of getting a blanket of snow. For my students who live coastal in CA with no possiblity of snow, despite the current snap of cold killing our beautiful tropical plants, these children need to read of this wonderous time in order to experience it. That is such a thing for me to create for them. I find it remarkable to have to construct it through literature. It's amazing. It invites a teacher sharing of experience. I cannot overstate the beauty of the book's illustrations as they show the snows arrival to this world, he is, page by page unfolding this, the place "somewhere" which by "reading" the image grows into an internal space place.
Ah....he is so good.

Snow is a purity so many forget, humans need this. It places us in the world, stills our power, reminds of nature, is other worldly. It is transformative. And this text goes to that. Children know weather. It is real to them in a way I like to call a naive understanding. They are feeling "SNOW" like poets..

When reading this book I always fold and cut snowflakes with the kids. This year no child had ever done this before in my room. Not a single one. There is a champion book of snowflake cutting patterns in a Scholastic book. It's remarkable to cut snowflakes with 1st graders, study the crystal forms from internet images, look inside this text to see the images in "Snow" of snowflakes, gentle, beautiful forms to grace the classroom windows. I really can't imagine not using this book it is that much a part of my program with 1st graders here in Oxnard at Hathaway......
Snow comes. It transforms. It is the silence and white blanket. Beautifully celebrated here in his book. Get SNOW.

And now some thoughts from children's voices...(I mostly corrected spellings)

snows white
and it can bite me on my toes
because it can it does

Snow said my Mom
Falls on the ground
But we don't see it here
So we read it and see it there

Up a hill
Over the field
I pulled a sled
In the snow
So I could
Slide

Yous are sos lucky if you have snows
We dont
We have a new Vons my Mom took me too
I saws a snowman I wanted there
It costs too much

Flake fall
Snow drops
Watrer freeze
Wind blows

I want to see the snow
I want to ski down a hill
I want to snowboard too
But we jive here in the sun

Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

Today I startled, realizing we are just moments away from Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

I feel less prepared this year, and more personally inadequate working towards something I know really matters. This day symbolizes something so very important to public school, the right all children have to a fair public experience. No one contributed more directly to the notion ( that children are deserve and we are called upon to allow each child to find a fair, happy, good start in learning in a school designed to honor them as one of all of us, a nation of the free) than Martin Luther King Jr.

My day as a first grade teacher is so scripted now, and controlled in an Under-performing school a year from “take over”, pieces I used to do to prepare are ram-rodded into tiny corners of our day’s time and left now not well contextualized in rich literature and meaning as they need to be to become a part of the understanding and meaning life of the child (this isn’t the stuff in the scripts for poor children) or it’s rushed in on our lunch breaks. And so I went looking for a book I call a friend to start talking about the experience of being black in America, something some of my students know first hand, and all of us need to honor second hand, by remembering someone I think of as a true patriot. One who lived in my times and whom I honor in my work everyday.

I have used this book, My Dream of Martin Luther King (Dragonfly Books)
by Faith Ringgold, from my book box that my daughter labeled “The Wonderful African American Experience” for a long time and in various settings. I've read it in South Oxnard, CA at Hathaway School where children are mostly Mexican American first or second generation Americans now, and in the smallest of school districts in the San Diego mountains that services two reservation schools where the children and more established teachers seemed oddly (a couple years ago) worried about my month of Black American Awareness teaching but where the children were absolutely intensely involved in the work. I think acquired it when I worked with migrant farm worker children in the Salinas Valley. Teaching children in 1st grade through a piece like this is a very interesting construction. For one thing I talk to children imbedded within a poverty setting and they are talking about things they find rather amazing. Skin color, past histories...it becomes a platform to discuss the way it is, the way it was, in different places, times, with a wide variety of realities to honor and reveal. I so recall my own daughter who went to Hathaway school at five years of age never really knowing about skin colors as they are seen in a greater world of comparisons based on skins…and having been called “olive” for her Italian complexion, always colored her self-portraits so very dark, returned home from Kindergarten to tell me about a book she read on King in the library. She stated, “Mom he was shot for what he did, people were hosed and dogs set on them and some had separate schools. Mom what kind of place is this”…and I had to tell her I recalled these things, it was America’s story, and she just stared at me. Today a class of 6 year olds just stared the exact same way. Try it, get this book, go read to a 1^st grade and see what they tell you. How we go from this kind of truth to the insanity of this world is something I can never fully understand. Then in her childhood, I had to tell my daughter about driving through city areas after riots when I was five. It was a very interesting thing to hear my daughter 12 years ago say to me, “People are just crazy.” Yes, they are.

And as you teach, work on and refine how to talk to these issues and to honor, to learn and to attempt to reach for the truth, you see your limits and you see the palpable ignorance that is what we do. It’s a very important job; I do not take it lightly nor see it enough as a part of the dialogs going on in so much of the “schools of the future “ work blasting on about the global economy. And that’s a crime against all children, an invalidation, this holiday stands to talk to us about much that needs to be done. Education stands with transformative power. It stands as a public responsibility and a way to shape the future. Not make everyone a millionaire and thus be immunized. It is a way to share our history so we are not condemned to repeat it. This book helps in that quest.

In South Central when I taught in Watts, over twenty years ago, my children asked me if I was white....children living so isolated in a gang and violence based poverty wondering if I was really white. I just always remember how sorry they were for me.

But I'm not sorry for me.

In my lifetime I have had the opportunity to see so much. I was able using this book and so many others in literature based instruction today to revisit some of my truths. And in that to honor memories and people, to stand once again upon the shoulders of those who made a difference both known and the thousands unknown to the greater world except inside the leaders and good people who make America what she is at her best.

I was a white student who had a black third grade teacher who spent all but five of her long career teaching in the "black school" in my hometown. One I grew up to learn existed. A better teacher than Gladys Peyton never existed. She taught any child as if they were expected to live an honorable life. Her words to me to honor her role in my life by “doing for others, the children, thinking of me.” And from this I learned. Golden rules are lived constructs not platitudes on plaques. I lived and heard King. I saw these times chronicled by Ringgold. I recall the speeches. I know what it felt and sounded like to live in the 60's. I recall the struggle for human rights and know what the content of character was/is about. I know what it is to teach in places that are more dangerous than you know, for the kids that live there everyday as their reality-and they live in this in this land of the free. I have been able to see the disparity in America. I know all children need to be filled with “the dream”. And I know all children are gifted and all essential to our survival. I know talking to my class of children today about the issues raised in this story of prejudice, hate, separate but equal...with their questions and amazement….I know there is still an unspoken separate and call it equal. I see it done through NCLB, real estate, and corporate control in our country. Today in a teacher meeting I heard a few peers state things about kid’s potential’s as limited by their poverty and ignorant parents not seeing themselves as dream givers but dream enders…I consider myself a person so lucky to teach in so many realities, in Appalachia too. For I know that my life has shown me so much so many lack living a life about getting, holding and securing for self. I know what it is to dedicate myself to the hope for a better day. Because I am a witness, and a teacher. I have worked in poverty and seen what lack of healthcare looks like, what ignorance brings, what it is to lose hope. I know. And that is something with great meaning. And these things come to classroom in the form of leadership. And that is what a teacher does. They decide to lead. Knowledge is power and children need to learn about slavery, history, unfairness, prejudice and hate. It matters so much.

I know that there are ways to make a street in Watts where 93rd Street school sits, seem as if it sat so far from your reality you never worry for 5 seconds about the children without crayons, safety, food. I taught a little girl there Phyllis, never even sure she had more than a pair of flip-flops and a coat. I saw no sign of a home. She negotiated a place to stay daily with other kids. She was 8. I've seen what social service looks like for kids in CA. I've seen what it is like when a child in my room doesn't have enough to eat and after writing a compassionate story about her my brother in law suggests it’s her problem if her family is too stupid to go to a charity. I know that we are a long, long way from the days we can say that this is a fair world.

But I do think a book like Ringgold's helps. It's important to have a way to begin to share our thoughts. It's so interesting how she talks of having a dream herself and this is the thread running through her book a waking dream of memories of the life of King. Children in first grade struggle with the Dream notion...what does this mean…. a dream quest, a vision. She talks of a dream where she sees all the peoples of the world holding bags of their hate, anger, prejudices going up stairs to trade the bags for love and peace. In this she briefly sees shifting through the dream the events often told of King. The rejection of the neighbor child, the learning big words, the teacher of King’s made to stand on the bus, the marches and jailing. I find at my level a need to stop as I read and contextualize a little bit. But I do have very young children. It’s fair to say that I wonder if children up the road in wealthier, affluent areas are reading this book too with their classes to prepare for our upcoming holiday. I wonder.

Ringgold always produces books to hear. And no different today. My students did very much enjoy going along in her first person narrative. I would like to complete this with the children writing Dream poems. Because I, too, have a dream this Thursday in 2007.Tomorrow I will share the poems. I dream of a time when children will go to a free public school where they will have access to technology, literature, math, science the arts and learn about who they are and what dreams we can build together as a society that respects our core strengths and efforts, the content of our character, supported by teachers who are honored, trusted and to whom our country looks to help guide together these precious trusts into lives that are happy, free and meaningful. And I want to dedicate myself again to this vision that King help bring to me.

Welcome 2007, Back to Teaching....

First Day

Never think you know how a day is going to go with children.

A teacher learns they are all “A Day in the Life”, unknown, unscripted, often unplanned, pulled together by the artist weaving her way toward meaning making. At least this is so in my 24-year career. And this first day teaching, returning from the holidays, was as ever, “quixotic”, “enigmatic” and “unplanned”. It had to be; I was running on empty. These were actually my three challenge words for my 1^st graders who always greet these words of the morning with a giggle. I do this word play more for me than for them, but I’ve done it so long now…. just choosing three words from the air and spending time to “sound out” and define, really before the bell rings as I open my day at least a half hour early. . A little oral air. (I’d say they can put this non authorized Sarah activity in their pies and smoke them in District test land where all you can do must be “approved” by the “state”, but it might be fairer to say this activity is not “Proscribed”, and I have to keep a smile on my face and a child handy to start handing out the texts if an inspection looms. I really have to consider this a time when my joking will be taken as something that has to be “corrected”. It’s a ridiculous time in my life.)

So this started my morning as a very quiet and angelic crew cozied up on my apple carpet to eye the New Year and a thinner teacher.

I lost 21 pounds with the flu, and today ate the first semi-solid food in ten long rather trying days. Yogurt. Remind me why we like this stuff? And that in my opinion did not “Go well. “ So applying the logic of first grade, ALL children reported a terrific holiday. The contrary nature of this may be lost on the world. Had I reported the greatest holiday ever, I really do wonder what I might have heard. But this was not so good in our teaching staff, where mom’s were hard hit. Two of my friends with catastrophic news about their momma’s. One teacher friend lost her mom after years of caring for her after a stroke, much like I’m doing, and the other friend having an eighty plus frail mom found with brain tumor after a stroke that has to today be operated on, and on top of this of the few I could visit with stories of broken limbs and father’s passing and the death of the Interim Superintendent of long ago day that promoted my husband, rather frightened me back to my room. I did extremely poorly with the flu but I realized things were tougher, myself needing days rest and I suppose the ultimate insult shots to the touché, but still unable to walk a mile of my five, too weak. Lost much ground. I swayed today. And not just during the singing. My class was fairly kind. I have to remember that sometime.

I decided to make learning more creative, inventive and to ditch some superfluous notion that I’m going to make it through this year doing their “script” alone. So we went ahead full steam into my own vision. I had to invent it in the moment. I kind of live there anyway. I gave the children sheets of nice thick $8.00 paper I bought 24x36 inches that is bigger than they are, huge sheets…and the thing we are doing is making ocean floors - a coral reef- although we will venture around to the waters near us and beyond and make that too. I had a lovely Caribbean CD I was wanting to play and another CD Jack recorded for me too, wanting to sing his version of Here Comes the Sun, Three Little Birds and his wonderful Caracol, a snail song written for my daughter Sylvia who we call the Four-eyed Snail. I had the lyrics for us to read, so it all sort of fit. You would be surprised how much text you teach with music. Teach your child a song a day, repeat them all month, teach them the world of metaphor by six, start with Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash. You’ll never go wrong learning “illuminated’ in that context, or “fiery gems”. We drew, water colored, printed out “ideas” from “research on our web and scooted around in lots of water and paint. It was squishy, warm, mellow and pretty neat cause I got these nice Tropical Cooler snack drinks and plastic cups so we cracked open a few and put in some mango which in the morning, let me tell you I was TIRED getting that all in place. REFRESH. And it was a nice return to Coconut Heaven once I remembered I had this lovely coconut lotion in the cabinet, and we all put a little on. Tomorrow I’m going back to our island and Watching Our Little Island on Reading Rainbow and we are going to see if we can get these pictures into some reasonable shape. Gabriela painted hers with the passion of a large-scale watercolorist. I actually think there is a bit of Elaine De Kooning in this baby. Wow. Kind of looked like first graders with a guest artist in the room. Who knew if you changed the scale you got masterpieces from a child not so successful small? Well, I didn’t know…now I do. Tomorrow we are working on poems. I suppose of the South Sea. I’ll let it blow in and announce itself in the morning when I crawl over. Anyway it started off the morning. A day in the life by Sarah. By recess I felt like crawling under the desk. And dying. This flu blew my whole system to another level; I haven’t felt like this in awhile. I’m really just there…. at the edge. Again.

After lunch it was about 96 in the room. A heat wave upon us. It’s about nine tonight I’m in short sleeves. It’s warm. So envy this world, but you know it’s January and I was raised back east and I come from a line of tradition in teaching….. so guess what we did….if you’re guessing calculus guess again.

I got out white crayons; blue paper and we did the oldest teacher project in the history of life. Yes, January snowmen. I made this a bit more ludicrous, which will be one of tomorrow’s ripe words by giving everyone an ice cube that was a lot of fun as we explored “melting”. Guess what…. ice melts in Southern CA really fast in January and you know what you get…water. At least they acted surprised but I know it was “acting”.

We spent a lot of time today on water. This month is water cycle, weather water, stuff of life, H2O, wet; wonderful water gets to swim into my world. I’m in January re-finding the meaning for these children. I thought I’d start with the liquid splash of all the things of enjoying luscious water, this being among the top things for making me happy. After 10 days, five of them unable to even take a drink I’m plenty happy with this kind of “focus”. I suspect it’ll get out I’m “off page” with scripted instruction when the big fish murals go by…oh well…swim on. Big fish eat little fish, and right now I’m an ocean.

But anyway it was time to make snowmen. Oh that was fun to see. I asked, “How many of you have been to the snow?” Every hand went up. So I said, “How many went last Friday?” Every hand went up. So I said, “Well isn’t that interesting because I thought I saw all of you at Popeye’s Chicken on Saturday” To this my Gabriela said, “No, yous did not sees us at Popeye’s teacher because you was so sick in the hospital being shot in the butt with your shots. “ This of course destroyed my search for truth. “Thank you Gabriela, the word I used was touché which I find is much nicer when talking about my derriere if you do not mind.” This just sent them all to giggle-dom. Here I was having a serious discussion of snow with kids who have never seen it on a day so hot I took off one of my shirts to sweat while doing the traditional January snowman pictures so they could LEARN ABOUT THE SEASONS in a way they have never experienced. These kinds of important things are the jobs I take on in my quest for instructional integrity daily. So after swearing them to truth, again right hands on their noses, “I promise to my nose to tell my truth to my forehead.” We started again. And this time two said they have seen snow. That’s cool. My kids haven’t. And so we had two snowmen colored in tropical colors that looked frankly more like snow cones. Juicy ones.

During the last part of the day as they were grinding away on workbook pages or what I will not call “work” and I call “ mandates” so they call “mandates”, I got out a tape recorder and asked them to tell me what they thought was the reason we make art and secondly what is a poem. I’ll be transcribing these surprisingly wonderful replies over the next day or so. But here are a few:

“Art is the way I see inside of my head when I am looking to see into other people’s minds.”

“I , I, I think art was probably for the people to feel better about the way they were making and the thing about art is that children do it and they like it.”

“ Art is showing your idea inside a feeling.”

“If I was art I would be so free Mrs. Puglisi, like the balloons in the sky.”

“Art is not a words thing.”

And on poetry which I also am starting to now explore with my children…

“Poetry is words that are sitting on pages.”

Poetry is free”

“Poetry isn’t all the inner words just the long and very real ones.”

Or my favorite…

“Poetries is nots for all the peoples, it is for the ones that listens”

….. from my Gabriela who was a welcome sight to me this first day teaching in a great big New Year.

(And the homework was to make your own snail shell, really.)

And as an addendum my District sent out a flyer to offer a Stress Reduction Workshop

…if they allowed us the joy of teaching free of the joke of mandating and scripting…… the poetry that we would write with our children would , believe me, do more to salve the stress than any kind of “training’.

Sharing from my heart

My Son

Somewhere in the abyss that was this December something lifted forward from reading and connecting I was doing. And it was there at the edge of my heart for a while, listening, trying to speak but my ear wouldn’t tune to it. My mouth full of personal nonsense and need. A buzz of almost fearful note, this I could hear. I’ve sat with it for months, building, looking for some edge of awareness until I have snatched it. Something from the ether delivered as the product of a month of disappointment, rejection, destruction of a dream, a kind of crashing month, coming now to me as I really struggle out of flu, an inability to find my New Year wishes, worries and thoughts and there it is lurching to us sitting on the shoulders of my son. A gargoyle of watching warning.

My son, Luca Vernon Puglisi, who I hold most dear to my heart, has a burden that I have to share. And I have to mourn. And I have to turn to one day celebrate. For it is this, which I know is my role, I am his mom and I am a teacher. And this is what I do. But this is a piece of my mourning.

Luca is twelve. He is thin as a rail, thinner than a child has a right to be. He is always a presence in my life, I love him- as all Mothers- more than my life. Much more. I picture him as I recovered from internal bleeding bouts these last seven hard years, peritonitis, and cancer surgeries, just sitting beside me silently resting as I recovered. There with his Mom. My friend. I’ve no better silent witness.

He has contained much in his twelve years. He has held his Mom’s hand on lonely days. He is distinguished in my mind, as I think of him this way. And yes, Luca is so very rail thin, and he feels no hunger. He eats about six foods or so with no variation. This means that noodles, sausages, rice, broccoli, chicken, sweet rolls and doughnuts along with his love of crunchy things and pizza are our foods for him. It is more than six foods, just not much more. I think to taste his Grandmother’s quiche; she who adores him, he who adores her, would kill him. It’s that kind of an aversion. His fears over this are so visceral. First I notice that at 12 he does not eat like any child I have worked with in my 24 teaching career that I thought had seen it all. I’m not sure he has ever tasted fruit and I don’t know how he survived the week at Outdoor Camp, it wasn’t by eating it anyway. I know he didn’t eat.

Luca has his “fears”, he can’t go near a movie, listens to TV with controller in hand so that if anything he thinks of as scary crosses the screen its gone. He wakes at night, he can’t bathe. Well, he does kind of shower, if we insist but often it’s him sitting in the bathroom running water to appease us reading a magazine. Jack has given in to wash his hair. He had to just do this for him. He never allowed his head to be tipped back, even as a baby washing his hair was having a wet thing crawl up your neck and attempt to strangle you. He cannot really be alone in the house, but he likes to be alone in his room with a video game. He is afraid of animals until I thought of growing our kitten farm and now he loves cats and he is more accepting of dogs. That took about 15 kittens. My life is a parade of animals, birds to turtles to fish so Luca has worked through initial fears; yet, he has his reactions to animals. Don’t think a spider will not send him running, but I do know he will return to see if you present the experience in a “scientific” way. He and his father proved this in my lizard catching day. This when I saw the biggest lizard ever and set the two of them to finding it. But to say Luca is on super drive in these times is not to understand the situation. Luca gets…. activated.

Luca can play ball with ferocity, hours and hours. I can’t recall time he stopped for fatigue. He runs like a rabbit, he digs deep, so deep he can fall over with dehydration. He threw a ball against the wall behind our couch for two, three, four-hour sessions tennis ball to wall to glove to wall over the couch from about a year of age on. I knew it wasn’t a great idea and I knew it wasn’t what Good Housekeeping homes were like but I would sit on the couch crocheting with that ball slamming just over my head for years. It was just what we did. He was active. And then, too, he was floppy. I called him Flopsie- Mopsie .Luca is a floppy boy to hug or hold, like a kind of bones and sticks. If you ask Luca to go limp you are almost aware of what a strange thing we are as beings.

Luca has the lowest voice I ever heard in a child, it’s so low I can only wonder what puberty will do to it. It’s funny but he sings beautifully. Loves to play guitar and has taught himself amazing things. He is remarkably imitative. He learned to play ball at two watching Angels in the Outfield over and over and over imitating the postures and poses of the players. It was like watching a mimic. He applies this into guitar, so I really can’t tell if he or his Dad is playing and now he is moving on to play other interests, like…Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. We got him lessons. He can drum. I think music should be his calling. I really do. He can do things even he doesn’t understand, act in plays, memorize long parts, read orally with beautiful intonation. Luca surprises this way.

He didn’t talk until really four. He said no. Mostly, and the first letters of words. Luca came to language so late I was sure that the oxygen deprivation that I knew he had at birth had done damage to his speech. He was born like Caesar, hung by the chord in an especially complicated delivery. But he also had ear infections that clouded knowing the source of the late speech. Luca sprang at three to four into speech. It just was there rather like in January of his first grade year reading hung together and that was done. I never knew he was in pain with his ears young, doctors would “find” it, his threshold and expression of pain far different than my other two children. Luca had 15 antibiotics for his ears by 15 months which always stuck in my head, when he kind of had to stop them as pediatricians decided to hold off on antibiotics directed by their long arm of the law medical group. But the infections would come back, with allergies. He suffered this really a great deal as a child. He didn’t hear.

Luca has had three times in an ER folded over in extreme intestinal pain, I think dehydration related some of the time, twice at the edge of possible surgeries for appendix things which weren’t clear and we waited. And he was in extreme pain, once initiated from a very severe flu. Luca has generally been sicker than schools allow, but I think of him as healthy, fit, a kind of hard go-er.

My son is fearful at times, especially in this pattern of not sleeping which has plagued him since the summer. He cannot sleep with bad dreams in the middle of the night, too vivid for him to tune out. Panicky he comes to his Dad for help and succor, and his father gives him love and support thinking in a corner of his mind of toughing and making him “deal”. It is hard to watch and hard to know. These are the times of parental doubts and worry. The times we see how ill equipped we were for the job, the times we are tested and troubled. This is what we hide and scurry from sight. In this time I am writing. I see my husband having to address male vulnerability and being a Dad. It’s quite a thing to hold.

And I think of Luca as someone who has all of his years done well, achieved, but I worry over this. There seems to me organization he lacks, a kind of forgetting of his need to get to a task, yet I know he is not lazy. He overdraws conclusions, “I’m lazy, weird, stupid.” He can’t talk to these things, he withdraws internally or fits in his room, slams the door if frustrated. But he has not once in his life asked me to buy him something, upset us in a store, always waited for me patiently, never hit another child, never in trouble in school for talking out, not rude, not sarcastic. Very warm and loving. Very kind.

He is able to shove his sister Sophia. She has little Mom-ed Luca. Sophia has taken the brunt of the negative, his frustrations, Sophia coaxes, cajoles, convinces him to make the efforts to clean or to do whatever needs to be done. She sees him ever day through homework. She helps him like no other. She is his rescuer. Sophia is for Luca the voice of reason. It should be me, but it is his sister. Luca is struggling a bit with the academics in junior high, waking at night afraid…and Sophia is there commanding him to “Get in here right now and do this math or you will get it.” And he goes..

I think my son has something called a Sensory Integration Dysfunction.

.

At least this was what I am told. It’s there. I began to look to deal with this. No, that’s not correct. It came forward despite my attempt not to see this. It has jettisoned itself forward. There it is, a name. What I understand of his eating, the bathing, how he is sick in the car, his sensitivity to smell (which is better than any canine, he knows our smells, he hears long before I do cars, knows who is here…) Luca appears to have a kind of over-sensitive or deregulated nervous system thing. No that’s not exactly it. As I’m reading and learning my son is carrying something I relate to this way…

When I was ill with peritonitis the first time, it was a very serous thing. I doubled over drove myself to an Urgent Care then drove myself to a hospital. Jack wasn’t willing to drive me…couldn’t understand the level we were at, thought I was “being dramatic”

I wasn’t home again for over a month. I’ve never been the same, this ….7 years ago after my hysterectomy. My intestine narrowed and I didn’t eat for a month with an IV of Demerol for about 20 days. I wasn’t aware of time and space much of this time, I was hot and cold continuously, in pain, and basically like an animal.

Jack visited every other day saying work and kids prevented more contact. My son then in 1st grade. . I was alone. It was the worst moments of my life. Afraid, isolated, it was undignified, didn’t wash until two weeks passed. That was the quality of Saint John’s Hospital in Oxnard, and only then a black nurse who never regularly worked the floor but was subbing, just allowed it. And I showered. Finally I was becoming coherent enough to insist. I was in a private room. Maybe that was good, don’t know. Finally the IV blew out my arm; they wouldn’t listen to me about that. It swelled my arm to the size of my leg. I found out later it was reaction to the Demerol that was poisoning my system. Used as the company person told me, way too long. I became anxious. I pulled the IV out. I refused any other meds for pain. Something in me understood what had happened. I was addicted to this medicine and I had the most extreme withdrawal, on top of being unable to eat, on top of undetected cancer which would stay in my system 5 more years causing extreme bleeds…it was a kind of illness on top of illness on top of a spinal condition, Syringomyelia. So my nerves eroded furthered.

Going home, and this is really why I interject this story I experienced something like how Luca experiences senses. When I got home I couldn’t process smell. It was somewhat like in pregnancy, times a million. Got in a shower and the shampoo odor just hurt me. Vomited at smells. I’ve seen Luca wrench this way so many times. My poor boy caught with us scolding him for being so dramatic. Caught by us not understanding. The spray of a shower to me then standing having lost 35 pounds and just standing spinning coming home, it felt like ice cutting my skin, the water dripping on my face was knifelike. Eating a cheese sandwich was the most un-food like experience of my life. The taste, texture, the swallowing all beyond my description. Like this I struggled each day forward. At night the vivid real devil of my dreaming lifted into a kind of haunting viscosity. This is how my son talks of his dreams. Each night since age two he has gone to sleep saying, “I pray I have no dreams.” This the little boy who reads affects on faces, who looking at books as a young little boy would say, “That man is angry” or “Shut it, shut it, he’s so mean”. It might be a little green pepper vegetable face leaving me going, “What Luca…”

This is what I see. This is how I see him encountering smells, tastes.

People tell me just make him taste it. Do it. Brute through it all. And I do sometimes, but it’s more than beating your puppy. It calls me back to this time where I crawled out of a hospital bed, away from a peritonitis that frankly almost killed me twice over that fired by drugs I could not process which did damage my nervous and core systems and gave me insight into the kinds of sensations that Luca reports and feels. A day has come for me to recognize this for my son.

And December somehow I am pulled, forced; screaming with my heels in the dirt to acknowledge not everything is really fine today. It will be fine. But it is not fine today. Not to me. It’s not horrible, its not earth shattering, It’s just that I see this is a “thing’. I am a teacher I know it has “implications” for Luca, for learning, for my learning from this to be a better teacher. I know it calls for me to learn. It calls for me to process and to address this as a Mom, as his mom. As the advocate for our boy. It is something so real to me on this fiercely windy day when my daughter has called to tell me of a major gas leak near her school and my Mom tells me that Manhattan, NY is clouded by the smell of gas, I can’t hear them yet.. It is this swamp gas of realization. Of the power of sensation. Of living on an edge. This is where my son lives. And this is where I am today. I can’t continue to reframe it and just compensate around it, this basic innate nature of mine, turn a minus into a plus, keep plugging…this I’m seeing I’ll do but maybe differently, with help. This time I think my son is having too hard a time for me not go out into the world and ask or seek knowledge or find a way to help him tune some of it down a bit, or a name it. So it’s just a day in a life…. to begin, again……for my baby.

Recommending a rare book on writing as a process of spirit....

I am finishing reading a book, Writing and the Spiritual Life: Finding Your Voice By Looking Within, by Patrice Vecchione (on the cover it states she is from Monterey,CA where I really do want to return). It's really excellent and I wrote below a brief bit about it. Followed that with a little more on an anthology of hers I especially recommend, which is at my school and I wish I was reading today. The Anthology is an excellent poetry collection. Both are two things I wouldn't hestitate to give to anyone I know engaged in the process of exploring meaning making. With the caveat that these both soothe. And allow us to feel pain. ........of late I'm realizing how writing leads me into exploring truth, and untruth, it's so elusive, feeling such extremes ....her work answers for me many thoughts of the last month.

Writing and the Spiritual Life:Finding Your Voice by Looking Within
After reading several anthologies by this author, Patrice Vecchione I ordered this writing book expecting, perhaps, to learn a bit more about the voice of someone who puts anthologies together that have a remarkably beautiful flow. They are excellent I really love them. And this book, read while recovering from flu and a time of deep spirit flagging, is rich with compassion for the writer, suggestion, and support. Artistic process explored and explained in terms of internal vision and core creative survival.

There is much to be appreciated in this slim volume which is read and returned to like the poem which fills us with enough for a day, digested, until another is needed. A book for a poet. I am writing of my teaching life, facing difficulties in the directions this takes in the politics of now, writing of past experiences and pains, honestly sharing for the first time out to others as never before. Hard, upending, often making me vulnerable and confused. She talks of this, talks of impulses to hide writing, this being over-ridden by the self's demand to say. She helps me understand and process what is really going on as this voice rises to be heard. And to understand it really needs to be opened, not rejected or closed. No matter what the outcomes. I really had no one to talk to about this. Nor anyone to state to me so fluidly how the internal critic comes into play, or the voices from our external critics that have found a place within our selves, stating the value of doing something else, or wasting time, following rules or reiterating things from childhood days that stuck like glue to our capacity weighing it ever earthward and to the ground. It was so heartening to hear this writer look at this within her writing process and to think about the value that expression of our voice really brings to us, to me. For it does bring a kind of new day, it brings forth the forgotten, the joys, pains, into a light of reflection and integration. It is from this state of creative flow, from this process we are driven into listening, connecting and reaching forward into future.

In a section of this book which holds my thought Vecchione discusses spiritual awareness. As an artist I rarely reveal in words something through my life I accepted, a kind of connection to something, an awareness one encounters working. In drawing and painting it spoke to me of the sublime, a beyond my constructs of knowing, place. Here, again, I found her pages on calling, on this glimpse of wonder so..., just good to read. You touch these kinds of things now and again in writing. It says much you never planned, the words beat. It has life. And carries forth the love, energy, vitality of your soul into the spaces of others hearts. Your time writing maybe then is never wasted or wrong. Vecchione has such good writing on writing. The book contains some writing suggestions, exercise like, but I suppose taken in totality this work is one to support the soul of a writer in process trying to bear the heavy and unique weight of creating. Or perhaps creating to bear the weight of being human.


Truth and Lies:
An Anthology of Poems
by Patrice Vecchione

A really good poetry anthology is so artful.

Each poem leaks into the next, yet holds such unique presence.
Finding the volume again on your shelf. It is a repeat of the surprise in selection, finding the logic of that new reading moment, wonder at the variation, wonder at the voice that now shines on the new day.

Vecchione has selected and written so well to what she was doing here in this anthology, quoting her, " I looked for poems to say things in new ways, poems that could wake a reader up. I chose poetry that would make one give up any resistance; poems that are reminders of the force and strength of human spirit and dignity and of the impulse to speak and make art out of life. The poems demonstrate the hunger for what is true even when it costs us. Some show what happens when we've lost our way from the truth, the moral and political implications of honesty or the lack of it, the rippling effect that lies can have, how to cope with the ones we've told, and how to live with our mistakes."

She has her wonderful voice speaking in the anthology, contextualizing the experience , to deepen it for the reader. I was amazed at how well represented the voice of women were in the book. It was refreshing to hear works that spoke to the necessity to have personal truths, the difficulty of lies, necessity for some of hiding in lies, the way an untruth can be more real, the destruction of trust and the way truth can be both everlasting and impossible to possess. I think ultimately it is very hard for the human heart, or mind, to reconcile the dichotomous nature of truth and lie, the intimate relationship between them, how slippery to hold both together in one paradoxical construct for us as we think. I loved reading Brecht, Herrick, Plath, Bukowski, Levertov , Nye and others within the context of this slim volume. Sometimes buried in books only by the author I miss a particular pieces' power. So many stood out for me here, I had read previously yet over looked. Her opening Levine is so deceptively truth-filled...
" ..Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of the picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves..."

Indeed. This is a book for a day in your life, of time, of love, of thought, with a friend and with time to read and reconcile your truths together.

4 Poems that Came From 2, from pain released

December Yields

Red raspberries
Picked out of the
Chambers of my
Heart

You gorged and spit
Seeds to lie
Awaiting another
Spring with possibility
Of fruit.



Pomegranates

filled with sticky sweet bud
and slime

seed planted to return to dark
underworld

to a being with no light
and form

passion red fruit eaten in December
juice splashing hope of love

given by a thief
a map back to nowhere.

Abandoned

Because you might be
Caught eating in this
Heart field with
Stolen fruit.
A cowardice of retreat

Gorged fruit left rotting.


Parenthetical Relating

( Inside the boundaries of your parameters, held by the words , "On another note" , I found I existed alongside a mark called parenthetically that was easily addend-ed and so, was lost inside another story)


Can You Have Any Label

Love
Can you exist beating on a door that sees you,
"Borderline, dysfunctional, PDD, Mood disordered "
and worse,
"I'm making your situation worse, through our relating."

Love,
Can you connect the sticky fruits of charms
Moments of buzzing discovery to such twist and turn
and vomit,
Vomiting away feeling, away the touch.

Love,
Are you real?
Real never the construction of this love.
and charade,
Living this charade, I can no longer carry my label.


Coward

You sit behind an encyclopedia of mind
feeling afraid.

Of phone ,connection, voice, of real and time.
A kind of scrolling typeface you sit choosing a font.

You ask nothing.Offer a thing spelled LOVE,
A chimera.

Coward. So turn to your "work"

What is the work of a coward?
Oh, the explanation of life.

Stolen Sylvia....My Flu Got WORSE TODAY....

This is writing by my 17 year old... I just grabbed from her, with permission as sometimes I rather like to put on things from the family.

I will say...having lost an uncle in Korea and family serving in America's wars and a stones throes from memories I really can't share of Vietnam days...i hear her worry. Sylvia is worried for her friend. And I understand the complexities. I really do. I have several students in Iraq, former students, one a young momma. ...I tried once months ago to write a letter...all I can say is I'm praying for peace and the safety of all peoples in this mess.

Too Close to Home

Today, a schoolmate of mine, a tuba player, an alumnus, came back and visited our band. He has finished his 13 weeks of boot camp, the following combat training and music training; he is soon to be a fully-fledged member of the Marine Corps band: a prestigious honor, truly, but we always knew he'd make it--he is very talented.

He talked to us in class all day about his experiences in boot camp and so on. The combat training, he hated. The jazz band, he loved. The food wasn't so bad--he actually gained 10 pounds (he was always painfully tall and thin). He is different now; quieter, less cocky, more eloquent. He still tells a good story: he has the kind of wry humor that makes awful tales funny.

Toward the tail end of the question-answer session that was the whole class (and never, ever have I seen our band so dead quiet and rapt; it is quite shocking to see one of your own comrades suddenly very much an adult and a soldier--full uniform, no less), someone asked:

"Could you get sent to Iraq?"

I flashed back in my mind to the year previous, when the same thought had flitted across my mind.

* * *

Staff Sgt. Diaz was giving his yearly video-presentation-and-speech on the Marine Corps Band. The video was the same every year, as were the questions. What do you get paid? What do you eat? How long is boot camp? Is it really hard? Once you sign up, can you get out?

I normally stayed rather silent during this entire recruitment spiel--as much as I am opposed to recruitment in schools (trust me, if you went to high school every day, you wouldn't trust these kids to make lasting life decisions either), I also respect those who choose that route. I know Staff Sgt. Diaz. I think he's a decent sort. I am very happy he is here and not in combat somewhere. This time, though, I couldn't help myself. I knew people who were trying out for this Marine Corps Band thing. I had to ask.

I raised a tentative hand and he called on me--I don't think he even knew my name at the time. "How...how likely is it that a member of the Marine Corps Band will see front-line warfare? That is to say, could you be deployed to Iraq?"

I believe that was how I worded it--when I get nervous, I use awful phrases like "that is to say." There was a sort of collective intake of breath around the room.

"Well, no," he said. "You're not exactly a regular Marine. You can be deployed places, but you play in the band--that's your job. You go through basic training and all...but no."

This was something of a relief to me, since at the time I knew three band members considering joining. It was something.

* * *

Only one of those three went through with it, and he now was standing in front of us answering the same anxious question.

"I take a playing exam," he said, after some reflection, "in a few weeks. If I score 3.0 or higher--I'm at a 2.65 now--if I score a 3.0 or higher, then I get preference." [I hope sincerely I recall the name of these things correctly; I know the gist but not the specifics.] "If I get preference, then I get to choose where I'm stationed--I'd like [some place or another near San Diego]--they don't get deployed to Iraq."

"...so you could?"

Our Marine (How presumptuous to say "our Marine!" But he is our Marine. There is nothing in high school like a band, nothing that remembers you after you go, nothing so like a family in the constant shifting that is each passing year, nothing save our shabby little band with its occasional gem.) inclined his head. "Possibly," he said, and if he was half as apprehensive as I was for him, he was ten times more stoic. "They have bands in Iraq--but if you're there, you play, of course, and you also do security." He paused. It didn't make sense to him, he said quietly, it was not his job: he was not a fighter, he was in the band.

"So," he said, "I'm hoping to get preference. 3.0 or better. I think I can do it."

Ms. Rogers voice was somewhat moved from the back. "That's right; good, good. You can."

* * *

The Veterans for Peace (the sort of anti-recruiters of high school campuses) told me that recruiters can lie, lie, lie through their teeth and no promise they make is worth a penny, so I am not astonished. I do not think Staff Sgt. Diaz has it in him to be too misleading, though. I should not have said "front-line warfare," I suppose; I should have phrased it, "anywhere near somewhere they might get shot." His answer was probably better than I give it credit for, I heard the no and was relieved and relief easily can wash out reservations. That is probably the idea.

* * *

Today the BBC reported that President Bush will soon give a speech unveiling his latest plans for Iraq. He seems to be inclined to take the "surge" position, a.k.a. "go big," a.k.a. "a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces." I trust the BBC's statement that the President will speak about increasing troop numbers. I also believe their statement as to the moral of President Bush's address: "Its central theme will be sacrifice."

3,000 dead and counting; 3.os. It is said that bad things come in threes. I'm not superstitious. Still, I just want to cry. Someone went to high school with all 3,000 of those kids. They went away looking as gawky and nervous and brave as our Justin. They finished boot camp as lean and grown-up and brave. They will never again come home for Christmas and stop by to say hello to their high school bands.

* * *

Dear Mr. President,

I am not a general. I am not a tactician. I am not a diplomat. I am not a politician. I am not a soldier. I am not the mother, or the sister, or the daughter, or the cousin, or the best friend of any service member in Iraq, or elsewhere. I cannot vote this year, nor can I drink a toast to our country's future. My familiarity with history is poor, with war poorer, and with military tactics worst of all.

That said, all ethos completely gone, (for, Mr. President, I must respectfully note that there is no ethos you cannot destroy; no general you cannot force down; no war veteran you and your political machine cannot dismantle,) I beseech you. You have expressed your turmoil over this decision. You have retired to ponder it. You have seen Iraq, you have seen our soldiers, you have seen the Iraq Study Group report, you have seen the American people pull away. You have seen the polls at 40, 35, 31% support for the war. You have seen the polls at 15, 12, 11% support for a troop increase. You have seen the polls for you, sir, at 42, 37, 32%.

You say the polls do not matter to you, Mr. President, and I am sure that this strikes many as an admirable dedication to your own principles and morality, despite the shifting sands of public opinion so easily swayed by a sweating brow or a fumbled phrase. There is a point, though, sir, at which one must recall the inspiration behind our Founding Fathers, which I shall here repeat not to patronize but merely because my few years offer up no more eloquent way to state it: "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people." You, sir, are our leader, our President, our Commander in Chief, but you are ours; like fathers say to their stubborn sons--we brought you here, we may take you out.

I am but one tiny drop in the 89% of this country that would rather you not send more troops to Iraq, sir, until we see one tiny flicker of hope that this will not fail as everything has failed. Would rather you not send more troops to Iraq ever. Would rather you ensure that Justin can practice his tuba and play in your successor's inauguration rather than be patrolling the streets of Baghdad.

Mr. President, you have spoken and will speak of sacrifice. You will remind the American people of the necessity of sacrifice. With all due respect, sir, I believe that the American people know sacrifice. To this war we have already sacrificed 3,000 young people; our trust in you has sacrificed countless more Iraqis--it is literally impossible to count.

89% of us will not sacrifice any more. Perhaps others have lost loved ones or fear to, perhaps they merely feel for those who do, perhaps they have rationally assessed the costs, perhaps, like me, they have put a face to that distant soldier, that human sacrifice on the altar of Iraq and found the possibilities too horrible to contemplate. 89%, Mr. President. Do not shove this poll aside.

You are the decider, sir. You, and you alone, must ultimately decide, and bear the full weight of history's judgment thereafter. But recall, the greatest asset, the greatest aid, the greatest power, the only power a President is given is the will and trust of the American people. We will not be taken lightly for long.

Should we be wrong about this, Mr. President, and you listen to us, history will treat you kindly as a leader plagued by a misguided population, press, and advisers; by incorrect generals; by terrible odds; who could not have helped but listen to the world's overwhelming but incorrect cry.

Should we be right, sir, you had best change your policy swiftly, for I know not what the history books would say of a President who so blatantly disregarded the will of the people, the advice of his generals, and reality. You will recall Lyndon B. Johnson, hounded out of office with jeers of "Hey, hey, LBJ; how many kids did you kill today?" You may be relieved somewhat that "Bush" is not particularly rhymeable.

But please, sir, reconsider this plan. Reconsider it for the scrawny, tuba-playing Marines who would like nothing more than the honor of playing in a concert hall for you; who don't think they are capable of picking up a gun and shooting some one, not yet.


Respectfully,

Sylvia Puglisi

FLU IS NO FUN.....Writing about life teaching in a migrant town 1986-1994

Esters

(this is a little strand I'm thinking about as I'm writing soon about bilingual education and since I was a bilingual teacher for 9 years of my 24 back now in Sheltered Immersion I am thinking about the things I learned along the way-from my journals)

One of the nicest parts of working in Greenfield,CA as an elementary teacher in 1986 or so was that to offset the enormous class-size and the language needs in Spanish, you got help in the form of an “aide”. Instructional assistant is a better label, but a real friendship was my experience. Assigned to Jack’s room was Mrs. Griego and later to my room, Amalia Rodriguez. But we met Ester Mendez and many others in our time there working and having learned of Ester’s departure from this world several years ago I have been thinking about just how much these aides did to educate and care for their community and what a mainstay it was to me as a teacher.

I admit that having very little idea of what I was going to do teaching, until the day came and I did it, made it not too easy for me to think of something to “assign” to another adult. Especially hard because Amalia was to me more authentic, real and possibly more mature and “of the area” than I was.I will give myself credit for knowing what an education is, having the big picture, being well-read, but often times I was flabbergasted by the job. So often I copied and Xeroxed when she could have, we were severely (even ridiculously) limited in what they allowed us to run, and I always prefered to think of her in the active lexicon of working within the classroom. Many teachers liked to use the “aide” as a kind of mule laborer to run and fetch and haul. This was extremely difficult for me and remains true my entire career. If it is dirty work, or mindless, I don’t want to give it to someone else. What kind of human behavior is that, am I so great and brilliant I need a human pack mule to do my work? And I just can’t do it any other way. Besides I figure their working directly with a child has more value than cutting pieces or turning a crank or failing to use a human resource as a human. Amalia worked with my reading groups essentially teaching me what the basal reading system was at the school. Boy was that like present day realities. It was dying that year I came and a good thing too. I never really learned it, there were these pretests and things with computer cards and level materials every story and soon a new text was adopted that was seated in Whole Language. I understood that and for my first year Amalia kept me legal in the reading system with the outgoing material that seemed a filing nightmare to me. She was very calm, very supportive, and seemingly free of judgement. How she and many of the women hired from the community to work as the backbone of the school achieved that equilibrium I don’t exactly know. But it surely helped me to feel able to ask her questions and to find out about the culture and to understand when I was making yet another Sarah faux pas. She often pronounced a name I fumbled with, like Eulalia; I could be a total ass in pronunciation. I could ask and find out what masa was without losing face. It took me time to understand how it feels to learn from a second language perspective. Except that I was just such an interloper into this community that I got a little help along the way with the idea of “dominant culture”. I felt very acutely my lack of Spanish skills and my need for communication a driving force to get me into and through all kinds of ticklish places. Just my sincerity saved me I think. I did have good will. Amalia always translated for me at my parent conferences. Well, she translated some of what I said; often helping me say it more effectively, never translating back to me. She expected me to listen and do that for myself. And I did. She knew I had the capacity to communicate and learn. Amalia never treated you below where you were. Many times I asked her why “white” kids didn’t learn Spanish or speak it when learning it side by side in the rooms. Many times she looked at me silently.

Amalia and many of the other aides helped teachers like myself fit in to the school, relating what school was like for them in California as children, or in her father’s case for their family. I worked with her for eight years and sitting one day together after four years of them, chatting on the bleachers watching an afternoon baseball game, she told me she was the Goddaughter of Ceasar Chavez and that her mom was his sister. This following my talking to her about Chavez, telling her of his impact on me and my basic belief that seeing field workers being aerial sprayed in the fields as they picked as just beyond the pall. That day I was laying it all out to her, I’d just had enough of seeing so much potential and intelligence in the kids go in my mind to “waste”. I’d been told recently by the Principal that perhaps 3 of our 800 would go to college, most would work in the fields.( Something 18 or so years later I KNOW TO BE INCORRECT, many of my kids went) I was fussy about where these kids were going. I felt that the parents were about worked to death and I was seeing poverty and migrant issues up close. Our friend Steve had worked the previous summer in the fields-tomatoes- and she and I were talking about that too. Actually laughed I suppose at the thought. "White people" weren’t going into picking and he wanted to see what the parents went through and I believe walk in the shoes of another. And as I recall it about killed him. You just have no idea how hard that work is, it is chilling. At some point Amalia took pity on me and told me of her background and after so long knowing her I was completely dumbstruck. Very honored and amazed she had lived the life she lived. I don’t think I was a good listener these years or I might have learned it earlier. But to learn that the girl I consider my closest friend for life was from this family was quite an experience. And that legacy wasn’t an easy one for them. It was then I learned that the union wasn’t universally loved, it was dangerous still for those involved and divided the community deeply. My friend always worked in the school an invisible role model to me. This defined exactly how I felt about the ladies from the community who came there and worked as our aides. Most teachers couldn’t hold a candle to them in terms of character and in terms of commitment.

Jack, my husband, worked with Mrs. Griego who as far as I saw worked in silence quietly getting him through the days and strong enough to face her day and stomach ours. I always loved her presence because it was enigmatic. I see her pasting puppets, doing spelling, sitting in the back by the sink at her table creating a warmth in his room. Indeed these classes had incredible teacher transience. More often not really that much competence in the teachers in this migrant farm town, but the children had continuity, strength and a connection to their community and caring adults in these women who were our “aides”.

For me Amalia was a Godsend. She was an interpreter for me of where I went and what I did. She entrusted the teaching of her own children to me, an honor, she trusted me with her feelings too. Also an honor. I lost my ethnicity and I gained my humanity under her care. When you start to understand what learning really is about, you need help to understand the perspectives of those that view you and the system you represent, it’s place in their world and your place in their time and space. Amalia affixed me in my portable and witnessed what I did. Of the people on earth that I say know who I am best and worst, she has seen it and very well could judge it’s merit.

Let's Sing Together of the bloom that awaits, just around the corner......

Please scroll down and read the New Year's Greetings...I had to sing the song I sing every First day of the year...........


Here Comes The Sun
George Harrison

Here comes the sun (du dn du du)
Here comes the sun
And I say
Its alright

Little darling
Its been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling
It seems like years since its been here

Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun
And I say
Its alright

Little darling
The smiles returning to the faces
Little darling
It seems like years since its been here

Here comes the sun (du dn du du)
Here comes the sun
And I say
Its alright

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes (four times)

Little darling
I see the ice is slowly melting
Little darling
It seems like years since its been clear

Here comes the sun (du dn du du)
Here comes the sun
Its alright

Here comes the sun (du du du du)
Here comes the sun
Its alright
Its alright