Honesty in the service of someone that uses it to get what they want isn't really honesty, is it?
I think because of the manipulation.
If I blog a story with the intention of pulling you into my way of thinking, persuading you with the story I'm telling-isn't it the truth to achieve an end? Is that honest?
Still sometimes a story seems to better serve a truth.
And that, partially, is why blogging becomes harder for me these last few years.
I've thought about this. Quite a lot.


Someone just told me they want to live honestly.

The last person that said that to me, once, had a whole thing about authenticity, but really struggled with honesty.


I went and found some quotes that spoke to me , personally, about honesty.
I got these from Goodreads. I don't know why, a page opened there. Writers on honesty.
Rather an interesting thought.


“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Intern


I love the image of your name being SAFE in the mouth of someone that loves you.
That they will speak honestly of you remembering all your contributions to their health and welfare, all the thoughts, kindnesses, maybe all the ways they treated you with trust and reverence.



That kind of truth would be hard wouldn't it. Truth would not be "used" in such a universe to serve a retaliatory act or a cover for poor behavior, or the feeling of real connection.

My mother has been unable to talk for weeks -choking and sounding like she's drowning.
This spring (and the end of winter) she battled a horrible infection in her jaw, and became weak. Desperately ill. She gave up a lifetime of smoking trying to recover. At 86 this was good.
Struggles with the dark place of this former addiction haunt her-it always has dominated her time and money. She also started having mini-strokes. She's had a major one, so seeing her lose control of her arm, her face, becoming confused, hearing voices was very hard.
Weeks ago I noticed her ankles swelling. This follows some improvement since the horrid infections, but it is a new nightmare- because she's got problem now of a different kind.
I can't afford her three hundred and four hundred dollar Advair per month, on top of other bills from this. It goes on and on. She has a fever right now, this is a big problem I only figured out yesterday because the doctor found it. I'm taking her, well Jack is,  for a chest x-ray and echo today-emergency kind of. She's so ill now.
The hot water heater blew up this morning in a mess of a garage. Caught.
My new kitten is ripping me up with wild attacking as I type.
My daughter just graduated and is adjusting to a job.
Am I college and career ready? Am I facing the new century?
Am I now, with a third of the nation, a disease?

So, it's a strange time to think about "The New Common Core."

Someone added me to a Facebook group called "Badass Teachers" it has members who I admire and a name I think is tongue in cheek, but probably unfortunate. It looks like they've added (and found) a lot of members in a few days. Since I wrote here on this blog, pieces years ago about these things-being mad as hell over NCLB- that they are working on talking about pathology based education is interesting...it's interesting to read teachers on the Facebook posting there.
Why this, how can we that.
Additionally I just read another Facebook friend deciding to embrace "The Core," a far different tack.

Awhile ago I spoke to being in a place where I was reading these CC Standards and thinking about this new and improved thing we have no choice about and have to do.
I wasn't shocked particularly by the list of standards for 3rd grade.
Aware it was going to be too much for most of my students to do in no small part because of 2nd language-but, of course, lacking seeing how the assessment will "drive" it yet-I was just going to think about it awhile.
Soon that assessment will drive it. Of course it will. And we will endlessly test prepare the kids accordingly having that model in place.

Right now these are the things I need to better understand, at first glances.

College and career ready.

yep.  If you read the Common Core this phrase predominates and if you go to a training it's a mantra.
I literally wish I had ten dollars for every time I heard it in a training I attended so I could get on a plane to Paris tonight. I need to escape reality.
I find it curious as none of the folks, so far, I've seen presenting or talking know much about fortune telling and, truthfully, seem stuck in way "olden days." Yet they are going to prepare kids for the future. Nothing in the Core that I could see adequately talked about a "stance" to approach a future career market, one developing rather rapidly. How to get one (a career), what it might look like.
How long would one last?
The only book I ever read doing that was in the past, Abraham Maslow, in his last book talking about the stance of the artist approximating what might be needed by a teacher working in a rapidly tech driven world. So....one thing I wonder about is how the structure of this CCSS actually helps kids into what they will be doing as work. How exactly. I'd say that a small percentage will be entrepreneurs developing the future on the cutting edge. So....I assume this is a very basic notion- they can focus in their primary and high school ed on "college readiness" exclusively as the only paradigm. Not arts, not vocations, not anything but college entrance in a time many really can't afford it but oh well.......so right now what I see in my mind is a lot of parents and children worried about college entrance exams. I assume this CCSS is about prep for that, starting in K, and then somehow workers sorted out for corporate life.

Do you wonder what the future jobs will be in America?


In 6 months my vegetarian daughter was a blogger for a bacon on-line seller, yes bacon, a frozen yogurt server, and now an assnt editor in a publishing house. I'm hopeful- but what would 6 YEARS of work bring for her? Career, how will that be possible to fathom with at least a new job every three months?
Mostly she's needed skills in getting another job.
Then she's needed skills in keeping a perspective on this, and in perseverance.
So I wonder how the Common Core will prepare students for the artful stance they'll need in an uncertain future.
Meanwhile.....

Going deep on multiplication in 3rd grade? What is going deep?
Lots of talk of deep.



A national database.

One of the things being seriously feared by my friends writing on Facebook is of student data being put in a big place of student data tracking. Interesting. Given recent revelations about whether or not every call you make is big news and tracked...I wonder.
You know an interesting thing happened in my last weeks of school when I was giving tons of tests. A child got Dibeled twice. I don't give the test. It was an accident actually. So on one day he scored a score showing him in need of intensive support. A week later he was Core-or showing he'd passed this area completely. 3rd grade may not yield statistics we'd call reliable- but wtf-we haven't dealt with any of that in a long time.
Which score goes in the database so he can carry the label for life?
What say you?

Up or down. Benefit of the doubt, or,  let's face it?

After listening to some Common Core folks tell me that now the students can be tracked, I remind you that now the students will be tracked.

Expository text

Interestingly my daughter spoke to me about this. The Common Core is all about reading factual information, about non-fiction reading and writing. About students learning a world of critical tactics to support what they might dare to say about a passage they were required to read, by using rather rigid techniques for approaching and presenting that text.

You get in these training on Core sessions where you are told that sentences of 124 words are somehow weightier than those of 6, and how the denigration of culture and sustained thought have fallen to 6 word sentences. I tweeted after listening of course. "It was an interesting training."

My daughter, a reader from 3, and a damn great one, ranking in 12th grade as a reader at 3rd grade-had this to say to me about the new love of non-fiction. She, the neuro-scientist, said, "Yeah except the stuff is not written by great writers, and is boring to the point of tears."

Because, frankly, it is. So the Common Core embraces ultimately the written word as presented by  those with no imaginative or artful clue. It's core.


I've never cared for critics.
Not really, they don't create- they deconstruct.
All I've seen in the Core is deconstruction, and a 101 on writing like a critic,  and ultimately it's a really long game in criticism.
Come again on how this builds the future?

This is creative, imaginative, constructive because?
I see Starfall added a bird book.
And in AR now when you take the "Star" test to get a reading level you can press a button to see a prediction of how your child or student rates on a multitude of Common Core assessments.

Collaboration

Top down, mandated, unable to be discussed, enforced.
Required.
And your salary is dependent on it.
Yeah that's a great model.
Of collaboration.
Coming soon to a District Office near you, a good discussion of whether or not this is yet been tested, is effective with your student population, is something you even want to do. (hold your breath)

Loads of collaboration.
Just look at the thousands upon thousands of teachers that got to be involved in writing the Common Core, field testing it, giving feedback over the ten or more years of collaborative, multi-state development.
Oh.
That's right.

It was developed by those who knew better. Opps. Maybe next time we can collaborate.
We admire it so.


Art

In Ventura a woman with no art training, no art background, "leads" the county team in the arts aspect of the Core. Because?

That sounds about like the understanding of the arts I saw within the CC text.

It's nice to say the arts will return when you have forgotten what the arts are.


Oh I'm sorry. I have other concerns- but I have a mom to try to take to her echo.

In fact I am a human being who has a family, with health problems, things troubling me, things making me joyful, and reasons I think education should be our journey as developing humans. I am leaning heavily on literature, combined wisdom, the stuff of my education, in order to face her death and my mortality, short comings.
I'm basically not interested so much at this point, at 54, in consuming, or in rigor.
I'm facing the rigor of not having the money to buy my mom's medicine.
I'm facing the rigor of watching violence all around us in the insanity of man's inhumanity to man.

I recall a simple poem this morning, far less than 124 words per sentence of a few plums in a bag.
I stay in the moment with William Carlos Williams, and a poem about the here and now. I fade into thoughts of light seeing the impressionists genius in reducing painting to understanding the effect of sun on our perceptions. I stagger over to do wash and deal with a broken water heater- laughing at my kitten ripping me senseless with his claws thinking of Archy and Mehitabel and her line "What kittens?"

I rest my weary head on Langston Hughes for a minute-he was traveling our world recounting that here and there are indeed different realities.

All Common Core seems to me to do is to propose that we can make standard something infinitely varied, unknowable, and as yet unseen.
The art of the profession of teaching-the unique meaning of human connection, interpretation-this is hard stuff to describe. Not in the Core.

But is it ever good to drag around in manifesto's ? I don't know.
The Core reads like one though.
A rather boring one at that.

But, of course, that's just observations.

From A Day In The Life.

This weekend it was my pleasure to attend two graduations in California. Since this is the graduation season this must be such a small sampling of what went on in the country.

The first graduation we attended as a family was to go down to LA ( a place that I have real affection for) to watch my daughter's boyfriend gain his Master's at CalState LA. In physics with honors. He did this in little over a year. And he held down two jobs while doing that. Plus drove my daughter to her job.

Happily I got to see his mother get to see him and we really enjoyed a well run and very visible ceremony. They did that like clockwork. We parked easily, had to walk a minimum amount, got great seats and felt like the pomp was beautiful enough to leave me crying. I loved that they had a huge screen with students giving tributes on video before the ceremony.
Then the next day my daughter graduated with Honors from UCSB. Her ceremony was almost impossible to see, something I don't understand, not made visible, crowded and parking was forever away.
But in both cases I was so very proud. My daughter looked beautiful, and it was a milestone for me personally. It was a milestone in our family too because I started thinking that perhaps for their children going to college will just be normal. Two children of mine exceeding what I did-graduating in fields I admire and respect after working their tails off to get there, that felt great. Given the fact my father attended college on the GI Bill getting his PHD-from a family that came from abject poverty in East Tennessee I was processing as well my husband's accomplishment as a child from Italian immigrants-his parents not going to college.
We put a high value on education because, I think, our parents gave us that.
And, at these graduations, I met and saw families that have done the same.

I recognized sitting there that I have entered another phase of life, truly,  brought home by thinking of life as having various states. If I hadn't gotten it before, I did enjoy a bit of conversation that spoke directly to me about how we change in life. Graduations are ceremonies to mark that we change.
Roles have shifted for me now and I more fully understand that.
My daughter started, the next day, a job with a publisher-big job. It is a very big challenge.
I'm watching her- looking backwards at my life. I can't help but do that. At where I once was-and where progress in our lives took us. She has stated to me she wants to accomplish in her life. I understood those drives as well. For me my daughters represent the women of our families. Represent us.



So a funny thing happened at the graduation.
I had a shift in my perceptions. Just like the adjacent photo as my husband was asked to take a picture of a family and I took a picture of him doing that. When it hit me he was approachable to this man who asked him-he was open.

You sit a long time, you think. (I was toasting in the sun.)
At AJ's graduation the crowd was enormous. We filled a stadium. I do not know the total number of graduates, thousands. Audience-way more. But I do know the institution is public, and the families were as diverse as it gets in America. That was very close to what I do in my job teaching, hoping to lift kids to that very podium. It was interesting to me, deeply important,  and I couldn't help thinking about that-the diversity there.
It seemed to me on display were people that do not have vast amounts of money, not wealth in terms of dollars-but certainly wealth in terms of family, work ethic, sacrifice. The embodiment of our future as a nation was there. You just felt that in seeing who turned out to the ceremony, the wheelchairs, white heads, babies, the groups of people there in honest celebration.
At some point the CalState President -who I guess is outgoing of the University in LA- asked the grads to stand who were the first in family to graduate from college. 
A stadium stood-I'd say two thirds of those kids. 
He could not have made a point more clearly. Since he was retiring I think this spoke to him about What He Is There To Do. If you miss my point this expresses a vast shift in the lives of these families-education as a path to future and not just to employment, but to their quality of life. It seems to me that education changes how we consider life.

That's when it hit me.

For so long I've been listening to so much about the failure of our schools.
What is going to fix them, what they are lacking. About rigor and Common Core, and all the rest of it.

What I saw however spoke to me. It really spoke because I could SEE it.

That's a lot of people who, for the first time, went through public systems, largely, and who are graduating to go on to "be" in our world. Amazing diversity.
That's really not failure. The diversity-that I cannot emphasize enough was the heart of these graduations.
When you elevate thousands into lives their parents did not know, when education is accessible- and a way to make futures, you cannot call this failure of a system. California helped that.

It is conceivable to me that I've been operating with "a big lie."
It is no failure in American education to see so many people, so diverse, in LA graduating, as I did, FIRST in families to go to college and do so. This is no failure in education.

It's an astounding success.

Maybe even a former student or two of mine was there.
That would make it even sweeter. Loves in my life were there.


Really, more than ever before, I am going to chose to see myself, my work, education, in terms of the people who gain because of it. I want to talk about that. About how things work.

We are still in naming phase.

It's very young, yes too young. Still takes a bottle.
But it's a bit of a story.

He's extremely cute, active, affectionate, and had FLEAS-but I'm bathing, combing and killing those and I think we're down to a few, maybe 5. Which will die today.
Poor kitten.
Now it's just all about finishing 6 days of school and preparing to be a kitten momma.
And, boy, these last few days do not fly by....not exactly.

If thinking of a kitten, remember, they are a lot of work.

I was driving in Ventura on Telegraph Road.

It's two lanes and a middle and two lanes in the other directions with lots of these island divider things to cross you over to shops. I was suddenly aware of a car coming right at me driving on the wrong side of the road. I'm in the left lane next to a palm tree median with a curb with traffic on the other side. I CANNOT pull right and I'm thinking rapidly due to the situation I'm going to die. Coming at me at 40 I'd guess. Like death coming was my thought-sh*t.
This was bad. An old woman was driving with no awareness she's on the wrong side.

Suddenly she just turns across two lanes in a turn to my right, her left, saving me from death but she doesn't even register that, seemly oblivious. Onto a street she plummets fast. Really it's a miracle she didn't hit a car beside me as she crossed that lane and that was a split second miss.

What happened after that was I immediately went to finish a root canal on a tooth that has in three attempts foiled the oral surgeon- because of bad infection. And then drove home. But coming home I stopped to get a cake, fruit, and felt amazed to be alive, and just hoping to have more time for my kids. For me to enjoy them and know their lives.

Anyway later in the evening I told one of my daughters, then the other, my son as I slowly crept back into my own skin. It's something you can't explain- but wanted to note here. Mostly for my own cataloging and reflection.
The sheer lack of panic, that calm detachment-it stayed until the next morning. It lingered and was innervating, It was, in a way, exhausting.  During the years and years of the every month CAT scans, slipping away for blood tests, and not bothering others to do things that were hard- but to leave that stuff out of everyone else's awareness,  drinking the gallon of muck, during the weeks where I had blood tests weekly, and transfusions, and infusions, sometimes even weekly, during the times when due to this syrnix I had so many nerve studies, pain, episodic months of mind numbing headaches and pain in nerves,  and MRI's and during the cancer years-that are not gone-I had to make my peace with that detachment.
Because I do detach to make it.

With not knowing what movie was out, a reference people were into, not knowing a lighthearted just fun, easy stance. Because the head on collisions of then were not ones fleeting in a second-many were long-like the 17 days nearly unconscious in a hospital with infection all through my abdominal cavity.
I had to make my peace with no one caring. Or not even being aware to care. Or caring, but I was living it and knowing they might be living their own personal version. Knowing I wasn't helped by another's worry.
I had to make my peace with my not being there for others in that state. With the tremendous disappointment that family didn't realize or help, and I probably do nothing for them in times I never learn, with the fundamental understanding that you go through it alone, with understanding that in our world illness is seen as a fault, made my peace with understanding that  our insignificance and replacebility are our hallmarks. I had to make my peace with being told that because I had experienced tough, hard things someone would tell me I had a victim mentality-or make accusations about my not being a friend up to their exacting standards- after basically abandoning any relating at all because I was defective, or demand my accounting for their own nonsense.
I was away doing all of that.
Re-reading my blog I had to make my peace with who I lost. Often myself, to these times I had to detach in surviving.
I find my blog reminds me of this person I don't know entirely writing her thoughts out in open space.
Which is rather amazingly complex to experience. Good and not so good.

In the state it is hard for me to explain.
It's a calm  place, a state of acceptance. But Thursday provoked a return and jogged my memory of one of the over-riding things about the last 18 or so years in my life.
 I had a lot of days of entering this detachment.

I was preparing myself for the direct blow a full headon crash was bringing Thursday. I knew the person driving was just going to likely kill us both- but it would happen on a physical plane. It was a step to go through.

What can I take from all of that?

Later I was talking to my daughter Sylvia realizing that I wasn't fully here or back to myself. And then, not there fully for her. The regret I feel over that is tremendous. I was struggling to take her life in.
At least that night at ten or 11 I wasn't there for her.
Nor was I pumped up with adrenaline.  I was somewhere- I suppose. A state of emotional abeyance. Not even capable at that time of telling her how much she, her sister, and brother truly mean/have meant to me.
Just glad to have her think to check in on her chat thing with me,  because it had been awhile.


So that's a deeply personal thing to share.
I thought a long time ago that art and writing, poetry, perhaps were the ways to talk to those kinds of things. We experience the unfathomable, mundane, unearthly, spiritual, profane, ordinary often in a system with no mediator, no meter. It's full on one thing, then another. The amazing thing about Thursday was how I went immediately from the event that potentially was my last, to getting a tooth drilled, to buying a couple apricots and fixing a BLT without the b. Doing some wash.
No one to tell it to.

I like that in art you can sit down with a blank piece of paper, some materials, calm your mind, and connect to such an experience or memory of them, respond with creative interpretation and move that experience into awareness, self knowlege, a communication of feeling and emotion  for others and thus reconnect. In childhood I always responded to the fears, pain, abuse, confusion by making something. I found a way in art. It was construction from destruction-it was what I COULD do. And I think at the very core of my being that I believe children need to have the experience of that as a powerful thing to learn to do.

It's true that Thursday night I turned to write, because over the past ten years I chose to explore that venue over drawing. But for me these are the same things-pulling something from nothing. Being open to responding creatively to events.
Metaphorical bandaids.

I suppose it's all some tiny version of PTSD. But this reminded me Thursday that the place I went to literally seeing a head on crash coming at me- was addressed better through the arts than anything else I had as a coping mechanism, or a bridge back to a state of normal. For others I'm sure it's another outlet.

We talk about the time wasted in art with our kids in classrooms-"I have no time for art now," a teacher told me months ago seeming to judge my work through her lens. She's proud of addressing reading and math- and believe me we've got to do that. However my own living tells me -from a lifetime-we have a lot as humans to process and learn from, that might require other skill sets.
It probably is that work we all are doing through the arts.