I reflect

 

I'm reflective.

My blog has changed remarkably.

It used to be a joy for me, something compelling, and allowed me to look back over my teaching since 2005. The art projects especially. But then I was hauled in and had to defend a remark I put on Facebook that was put in other's mailboxes in my workplace. And then my blog was inspected by others. Now I am reflecting upon that.

At some point I'll write about it, but not right now. 

What I am going to talk about is something I learned from Thomas Wolfe.

 “He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

How you see a person, situation, event and how you write about it can be very dangerous, difficult, off, it can ring true and be right and be rejected. Even when your intent is to examine it to improve what you do people will not believe that if all they do is sit in judgement ON YOU or see themselves, their flaws as projections on your mirror-not their own work to do. So understand your past, formulate the basis for change, but read You Can't Go Home Again. 

And yet now I am compelled to write.

Several years ago in my blog, and I've closed 3/4ths of it to prevent further trolling, for now, I wrote that I wanted to improve my writing. What I wanted to do was be a more thoughtful and processing person. All too often teachers teach that do not write daily. That do not produce actual content, that are not engaged in a reflective process. It is not infrequently I see teachers engaged in declarations about editing or grammar if someone types out a short email. Yet they have never produced a piece of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, research except in college, and that was done free of the risk of criticism they so readily bring now to another. (college as I recall being free of much in the way of critical commenting)  When I jumped on blogging my thought was to look back through the rolodex of my teaching and into my days and to write. 

I've written daily now for 6 or 7 years. It probably isn't an exaggeration to say I need ten more years to see enough growth, but I have engaged in writing- seeing my ideas and my flaws.

Certainly.

It can be remarkably painful to read a piece from the past but it can also be refreshing, delightful to meet a person there I only know as a shadow.

One thing I started writing fifteen years ago was a story of working in South Central Los Angeles in a violent area. Looking back at the beginnings of my work I think the biggest underlying thing I was mulling over was the violence, the disparity, the death, and the loss of potentials I saw along racial lines and poverty lines. I couldn't and I can't to this day defend this, explain this, contextualize this. All I could do was bear witness to what I saw.

I've written that.

And I will reflect upon all the years in schools I've known as I go forward I'm certain.

2012 is coming to a close. Typically I look back on the year as I start to look forward to a new one. This seems impossible because this was a year of particular pain, loss, betrayal, and times when I knew tough things. I'm not sure what I'm "allowed" to say and what I'm not. Not really. However it also was a year another daughter graduated school; I started another year teaching, and did a few things that I took pride in accomplishing.  

Today I saw an exchange on-line in a thread from a possibly very controversial article about gun control. Terms in it, and the raw premises, offended a very kind woman who would like us to move to other ways of talking. Unfortunately I saw West reflecting in that language the outrage over what has happened well contained in the data on violent deaths broken down by statistics for those in poverty especially in inner cities. She was talking of a new day, moving on, learning, changing, about color blindness, about the need to see the loss of any child to violent crime as the tragedy it is. 

I am afraid to say that I am exactly what she called me out correctly for, bitter.

Not too long ago I went in a drug store. Before Sandy Hook. Somehow in the conversation I was asked if I was a teacher. When you buy things in 20's like glue sticks this happens. In the course of telling her I was buying for my class this woman shared how her son was lost to a drive by killing.  It flowed naturally but I'm not sure why, I think she was recalling buying for him and being a parent volunteer helping his school when he was little. It seems to me that she had moved to our area from LA but I may be adding that in, I can't find it in my notes. It was very hard to stand with her in the short time an exchange in the drugstore lasts to talk about the loss, grief and sheer nightmare she lives. She felt he was not gang involved- but that was how it was "handled." Her son died at 17. He was Hispanic.

It seemed to me standing there that this was sort of the back drop of my years, stories that were shared about the loss of human lives that are so much more important than the betrayal of a friend or the dickerings of a place not caring about the essence of your work.

"Your permission slips to show artwork need improving."

Sadly that day, in October, in a Walgreen's on a corner I felt like all I could do was reach out and hold this mother's hand. I'm a mother too. And I know life is precious and I could see how precious her child was to her. She posed the question in her way, "Does anyone care about my son now?"

I hope that we are reaching times we can think about the statistics on crime, poverty, race, and violent crime. And her son. I am hoping that we can think of solutions and look at how many people are no longer here. 

In the book I originally set out to write I was posing turning the idea of a savior on its ear-in that it might well be in losing one of these children we lose the possibility for great leadership, great minds, great healers, great teachers. They who follow us save us, in memory, in hearts. I felt years ago if we failed to educate we might be doing the same, losing all possibility.

I titled it Teaching Jesus after several students named Jesus I've taught.

One day I will have the skills to finish and refine that book.

And the time, freedom, and apparently the legal support and do so.

But today I'm thinking about the children I taught, where I taught, and the potentials that their lives brought. A woman in a drugstore in a lonely job trying to survive without her reason to go on beside her because of a person that used a gun and killed him comes into my view.

“[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again