People seem very complex, not just one thing, maybe a teacher but also a mom, perhaps a cancer survivor, maybe someone looking to understand things far beyond their capacity.
Designing an education for times we don't yet know, an education meant for building capacities, to enrich and enable growth-this is the stuff in play in debates about public schools.
Closer to home I have my little blog.
It hasn't ever been clear to me what to settle upon putting on it, a bit of the mom, the artist, the witness, the teacher, the separateness, the evolving, the emotions, the affronts, the ordinary.
Just a day by day record. Take it as it comes?
It's poetry month. April. The month of the fool.
(My cat just dimmed my computer pulling out the cord, furious he's a prisoner.
A statement on what I'm doing or just coincidence?)
Every night, or darn near it, in the last few months and then again over the last 30 years I've dreamed of the house I grew up in. On Roosevelt Street in Morgantown.
It entered in again last night when I found my Mom, who passed away in August, sleeping there in her bed, with her brown hair over the white I know she died with, waking to my interruption to tell me that I was a disappointment. But to be honest- though I knew by the carpet (could not dream it correctly) it was a dream-I was so darn glad to see her-the disapproval was just secondary. Her in that house always felt right.
My husband today stated "well you are reaching out to the past."
And that is true.
So I wrote some poems. I put poems here sometimes. In April-always.
I had this notion that teachers ought to actually do something before they taught others to do something. But, in truth, I think such thoughts are seen as opinions-not very useful. I find it harder to try to write poems than to talk about them or teach them. Much harder.
Or to write them in a Common Core unit and proscribe them for "the grade level." Much easier.
It seems to me a process of returning to the past this day. On another day it has been being in the moment, or seeing in a crystal ball. Poetry has verblike qualities.
It affixes time.
In other dimensional ways.
I'm Reaching Out To The Past
To cement foundations laid in 1968
Brick and mortar
1 and 1/2 bath poems
Written in foreclosed April's
Shod through with pecan paneling
Carpeted in gloomy unnameable funk
A place where a mulberry lies buried
Under a concrete block
Rooms that portended and now recall
My grandmother the night her nose bled like a river
Throwing pork chops down the heat vents
A door was hung as my desk in a little studio
Time measured by a kitchen clock devoid of a working battery
Sitting on the deck Nedrow built
When Momma dreamed
And Dad first divorced the locust trees
Years of netting blueberries and black raspberries
Faded into a leaky roof
Bathroom renovations, rhyming with speculation
No, not a metaphorical place
Just a composition of a dreaming simile
Fool's errands of poetic memory.
My Room
In winter my childhood bedroom grew so cold
My room detached and traveled
Far away from anyone in my house
It took me along as a hostage, one no one remembered.
We traveled to an iceland- perhaps Jack Frost dusted
The crystal on the window panes
I rode on the bed with this woven floral spread
On my blue shag carpet installed
In a spring thaw one year
Turn left at the end of the hall, it's probably still waving.
On that island in the indigo sea
The winds would blow from the north howling so loud
Heat could not penetrate from the vent
To warm my lost causes
I was tossed on an Artic circle.
More than once I carved my initials into window ice
A plea if I was ever found
Leaning up over my pillow
Looking for a Prince lumbering with a reindeer
Covered in a furry coat
To yank me to a fiord covered with tulips.
How It Could Have Been
Even after she sold our home
I'd think about how it could have been.
But I was always lost in the furniture, rooms, the structure.
Enlarge the bathroom in the master room to have a bath
Add another garage in the back.
Turn the existing garage into a fantastic studio.
Bury our dead, roof it.
Replace the carpets, the dishwasher.
Get French doors on the back that did not leak air
So that between the panes you just saw condensation.
Equip the rooms with some kind of amnesia
Replace the ceiling tiles downstairs, throw out Mom's letters
From a brother lost in Korea.
Put shelves and divide the basement into real comfy warm rooms.
The list would expand,
but it would allow me to fade into sleep.
Meanwhile my peers
and those I knew, they just lived, bought their dreams,
Negotiated leases, fought demons
Unaware I'd left my inner life on a street
With screaming ghosts and my tomorrows.
Roosevelt Street
One house was plopped on a violet patch
Another was a converted chicken coop
Two painting brothers with two sister wives had two houses
A man with a huge RV parked in the one next door
The GRD's had an unhappy old Victorian
There was the farmhouse in the pines over
Ours was next to Nedrows
Above a little woods, parted out with the rest
Dirt road, blind end
Lovely old lilac, grape vines
A plum, ancient apples
A stone so great to sit upon
To command a reluctant cat into impossible acts of compliance
The daffodil beds, our rose garden
Grandma's daffodils and the secrets
A holly, a larkspur, a columbine
brought from a wood's drive in a newspaper cone.
A mountain laurel, a rhododendron
Shaggy forsythias, the golden bush from Illinois
And the maple.
Pentimento
The past is calling
And I want to go home
To sit on the porch
Watch the spring bring the bunting, scarlet tanager and orioles.
Nothing that came to be
Was like it once was.
Water Pressure
We had a Sears freezer full of corn in plastic bags, cut hot out of three minute boiling
Beans that Mom froze like solid blocks
Freezer jam.
Shelves full of Mason jars of peach, strawberry, jams and jellies
Tomatoes and green beans.
Pickle relish.
Summers and falls I see Mom putting it all up.
Bushels Dad grew and my brother weeded.
63 jars of dilly beans or 78 whole tomatoes
Sloshing in juice
I don't know if I ever helped at all.
I watched her.
Mom would put on her apron, smoke,
Pull things out of hot water with metal tongs, curse
Check the pressure in the cooker I thought would blow
But it never did.
Peaches, Bootsie, and Cally
We buried my cats
Of childhood on Roosevelt street
By our house, in flower beds
Dad knew what that meant
But in the end he didn't give a shit
To quote him
Mom had a stroke
So he could marry again
And again
And again
And get the kid with "his values."
that he knew he deserved.
The bitter taste of the past
Grinds out in the present.
Gone
The round brick edged flower garden in the front lawn is gone
As is the maple planted on my brother's second birthday
It was supposed to see him into his adult life
The forsethias that flew up in the front like a wall to catch dust are destroyed
The mulberry that fed so many songbirds is flattened by a huge concrete slab
The grape arbor, ancient lilac, dogwoods Dad transplanted and the redbud dug up.
The blackberry vines, rose garden, rhodeodendruns
Apple trees, plums, daffodils beds all gone
I'm sure he also descimated the
Columbines, blueberries, the sweet peas
The lovely heaven scented peonies dug out
Chopping away the peaches, pears and other fruit, the rhubarb
All to make it easier to mow.
-
"The 2nd number from eighteen, fourteen, twenty six, one and 29 is?
Three, 17 and nine: the 1st number is? "
White House nonsense
These are several of the questions I failed THIS time trying to sign in to sign a petition. I wish I'd kept the questions last three times as it never devolved to ones I could answer and several I sent out to math minds that told me to stop sending them this nonsense. It may well be that folks trying to sign the petition just gave up. I think so.
The first one today asked me how many appendages, then listed tiger (or elephant I forget), tooth, arm, then two other equally bizarre things. I got it wrong.
And after ten or more of these answered one satisfactorially.
It was exactly what Common Core promises to do.
The irony in this I cannot adequately convey.
Everyone knows tooth counts as, what, zero?
Here is the petition:
We petition the Obama administration to:
Direct the Department of Education & Congress to Remove Annual Standardized Testing Mandates of NCLB and RttT
A President initiated both mandates. Now we call on the President to end the part that harms children.
Ending the controversial annual standardized testing is the first step toward ending the damage done by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
No other country puts students through this incessant testing.
Let the long-established National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results continue to provide a national picture of student academic progress.
Each state will determine the proper role of standardized testing to meet their needs.
Many of us looked to Susan Ohanian, who at one time trained teachers in my District in math, who is promoting signing that petition above, to understand what was going on with the changes under NCLB, and in my case, even before when the standards seemed to be elevating to holy grail.
Her website is a careful record of every article that ever was about these changes. Facts, carefully culled and saved. You could not find anything like it for free anywhere. If you want to research ed. changes, her site has the documents. You can see what happened to public ed. there.
As a teacher I know something else about Susan Ohanian, she wrote you back and took your classroom observations to heart. She befriended teachers like me and held our hands through dark days. It really did put things happening to me in context early on-like in 2004 when I first thought to write. Her books on the destruction of Kinder, the corporate take over and so on were excellent, her background as an extraordinary teacher and writer -just defined teacher-leadership. So here we see a person that stood up because she felt she had to. If Susan Ohanian recommends signing a petition-it's a very good thing to put your name on- even if the White House appears to want to keep you from that with bizarre got ya questions. And, again, I regret not copying the truly odd ones I've gotten so far to show what I mean.
Long before ANY of these voices that now call for change rang out Susan Ohanian wrote and published to bring teacher voice to terrible things afoot.She inspired me to write. I still find rereading her books an excellent thing to do- including ones pre-NCLB on math replacement units, I have one where you see what was going on on a certain date that I still use as a daily activity. And the cool thing is she didn't need an epiphany-didn't work on one side and then see the light. She got it all along. Just reading her book on the destruction of kindergarten has sustained me.
Sign the petition, a mere 4,000 makes it look like a movement is dead.
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