crooked letter, crooked letter

bow ties and the venn diagram of all things

2010-03-30T12:02:00.000-05:00

from a recent email to a dear friend

Just got back from a conference in way upstate New York (SUNY Plattsburgh, which is like an hour south of Montreal). Presented some research I'm pulling together around an oral history project I've been involved in. Exciting to frame, package, and present work. In conversations with others at the conference, it seems like I'm not completely off track. Can't wait to press the big pause button this summer and start connecting the dots. And, if nothing else, write.

That being said, it's hard defining one's interests by negation, which is seems like I'm doing a lot of. Walking around with a bundle of ideas A, B, C in my hands, and peering in doors 1, 2, and 3 to see if I want to bring my things inside, and winnowing. Mostly a sense of: no, I don't really walk into the Literature door; no, I don't really want to walk into the Composition door; I'll but a little sticky note by the Rhetoric door but I'll walk around some more; oh, I haven't thought about the MFA door in a while; didn't there used to be a Cultural Theory around here? A Postcolonial door?; hey you, just walking out of the Writing Studies door, what was it like in there? Of course, the fantasy is that the direction would be reversed. That I could stand on a park bench somewhere with a big sign that says: "This guy wants to think about the following things: (a) the rhetoric of community identity and community change (b) social networking, user adaptive databases, and public discourse, (c) Mississippi ethos shifts in the post-segregation moment, (d) public discourse on cultural symbols and the legacy of race, (e) national conversation about governance and social policy and the right wing of American politics, (f) the composition of pedagogical exchange and distribution, (g) et cetera." And then have the occasional person come up and say, "Hey, a bunch of other people and I are thinking about similar stuff. We should hang out. Do you mind teaching undergrads? No? Cool. Sign here."

I'm sure it's somewhere in the middle, as most things. Certainly not a linear hallway with discrete, mutually exclusive doors. Maybe closer to the Library of Babel. Or the Venn Diagram of All Things. And maybe not a park bench, but a school dance. The tying of ties, the two step.

on admiral ackbar

2010-03-04T19:45:00.000-06:00

i was asked to weigh in on the visitsouth.com "points of interest" blog post about the strange and growing campaign to name admiral ackbar the new on-field mascot for the university. thought it was worth re-posting here:

"A sense of humor and a bit of playful irony is pure catharsis for a conversation that usually entails a very complicated negotiation of terms. University symbols (official or not) like Colonel Reb, "From Dixie with Love," the Rebel Flag, etc. are deeply entrenched in both complicated/problematic history and significant tradition. It's very hard, if not impossible, to respect all the interests at hand: tradition-maintainers trend towards suggesting these symbols are so flexible and contextual as to not mean anything other than "tradition" itself in some settings (which at times comes across as a cover for the ability to apply more concrete meanings to these symbols in other settings), and proponents of change trend towards viewing these symbols as being so rigid as to not having any room to grow beyond their more difficult meanings. Ackbar is, in short, a breath of fresh air: a welcome departure from the head-butting of both well-trod "Save Colonel Reb" pleas and of arguments for change that seem to lack the strength of argument about possible destinations that they have for the need for moving forward.

Also, of all the signifiers at play, I personally think that "Rebel" is the most flexible and the most likely to endure. (Even more so than "Ole Miss," to go out on a limb.) And, Ackbar, admiral of the noble underdog Rebel Alliance, is a perfect example of the kind of symbolic rearranging that may help the University turn the corner on the mascot issue (more so than Rowdy Reb, at least). Of course, there's always the possibility of conversations tailspinning into discussion of the politics of the actual rebellion that provided impetus for the school's association with the term "Rebel", but I see more hope for transition on Ackbar-like grounds than I see in things like a Colonel Reb-or-no-mascot-at-all stance. There's something about the spirit of things in the against-all-odds, fighting-the-good-fight, David-and-Goliath realm that has people pointing at Ackbar as a possible avenue for retaining the valuable notions of "being a rebel" in a way that can dislodge the direct ties with the irresolvable local politics of that the Colonel will always be a visual tie to. And, the tongue-in-cheek adoration we see in regards to Ackbar is I think a legitimate commentary on how self-important the Colonel Reb discussion can feel sometimes. It kind of boils down to: weeks of tail-chasing back-and-forth about "Dixie with Love": not-awesome; blowing up the Death Star: awesome. If only it were that simple."

note: i've recently been writing as the oxford insider for visitsouth.com, often finding myself writing (no surprise) about race & history:

prosepost: the house on the empty lot

2010-02-01T23:14:00.000-06:00

for lizzie. a half-fiction about trees.

One-Nine-Seven-Six-Oh South Sagamore Fairview Park Ohio Four-Four-One-Two-Six.

Two were in the front. One a scraggly crab apple thing that filled the ground with devilish green marbles for twisted ankles and bruised arms and which rotted faint and sour. And its neighbor, of the suburban pastoral: sturdy hips at the trunk underneath a robust, leafy afro. Lower branches both imminently reachable and lovingly sturdy. Thick, well-spaced diversions with climbable veins up nearly to the height of the house. The only mistaken branch was a perfectly horizontal hangnail, bark bare and peppered with wormy intrusion--it gave way once while I was dangled on it, considering a pull-up.

Then the immense, shady resident of the empty lot between our house, the sturdy house (with the sturdy tree and the crab apple thing), and the blinding-white-with-black-shades house of the neighbors. Googie and Peg, mother and daughter, lived there. Googie had hair like snow or cotton and seemed to subsist on hard candy and daytime television. Peg was (looking back on it) a smoker and a dancer, with hair kept meaningfully short and gray with knowing. She died of breast cancer after moving to Texas. Googie just sort of evaporated, like sunshine. They kept the most vivid garden, with colors clear and bright enough to be painful, so you always kind of looked beyond the petals or at some buzzing speck. I was behind the garden digging when I chanced upon an odd thing--corpse white, with candy red dots for eyes. It was the size of a wine cork, and looked like an albino bee with no wings and mantis claws. I touched it with my finger and it pinched me hard enough to scream, ripping the thing in half as I yanked my finger back. Its insides were an oatmealy pulp, the same color as its skin, and the candy eyes never looked away.

The tree there in the empty lot was like a gigantic god that you didn't have to think about being there or not, and seemed content to be generally ignored as it went about its business of shade and squirrel-bearing. At the back of the lot was Googie's chalk-white bird feeder that seemed as ancient as she was and in which I thought the coldest water sat. I knocked the basin off the bird feeder once and stood there watching the slimy soot at its bottom glisten in the sun, while the gigantic tree looked down on me and smiled in kindness.

Pines lined the side of the house facing the empty lot. I knew they were pines because of the needles, and the sap that stuck on my fingertips even after washing, and the shale-chip bark that would jump off if you ran a stick up and down the trunk.

Two of the pines went down while we lived there--felled by lightning just months apart. Mom said it was because of the young boy who died of cancer and who lived in the house before we did. He didn't want us to move. I wasn't sure about the lightning, but I was sure about these things: (1) that his name was Michael (like my brother's), (2) that he appeared in my dreams once: lying in bed and someone coming up the stairs very bad. run to parents' room and knock frantically. no answer. try the doorknob and it doesn't turn, except it finally does and open the door to see two people sitting straight up in my parent's bed who aren't my parents. someone coming up the stairs very bad about to turn the corner and back in bed pull sheets over. then the shadow bending above and through sheet two eyes glow electric red. (3) that he helped me once. We were moving out of the sturdy house into another one in the same neighborhood. My sister Sarah was a surprise--she was the last and I was the first--and after Mikey had a hard time sleeping in the room with her we switched rooms because I was able to handle the ceaseless whirr and whine of the hamster wheel when we had a hamster and now I would handle the excited squat-thrusts of a diapered baby when we had a baby. Sarah held onto the crib railing and bobbed up and down and talked to the universe. We needed a bigger house so we moved to one, and along the way lightning hit two of the pine trees on the side of the house facing the empty lot. On one of the moving days, Dad was yelling at me and backed me into the open trunk of the station wagon, and instead of being afraid or sad I became angry back, spitting red electric angry, and told him he better not. After which Dad went back in the house, slamming the screen door, and I stayed in the station wagon still aglow. Some minutes later Dad returned impossibly quiet, and with an absence he finished packing the car for a trip to the new house. Later, Mom said that he had gone up to my old room to get some boxes, and saw that the floor was covered in wood splinters. A baseball bat--bisected lengthwise and upon which was attached some wooden knobs, thereafter nailed to our childhood closest wall for the hanging of our childhood jackets--had been torn off the wall and broken in half. No one else had been in the house, except maybe Michael.

There is a house now on top of the empty lot. It sits uncomfortably, faceless and forced like it's filling in for a dead guitarist. The house is right there where the gigantic tree was, and the bird feeder. The sturdy tree and the crab-apple thing are gone, too--replaced by teenage-looking implants, gangly out of proportion and awkwardly not-yet-full. I still drive past sometimes, when I'm in Cleveland, and try my best to remember. But I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the pines.

you were in my dream

2010-01-13T12:01:00.000-06:00

so in my dream there is a slumber party. it is in the basement of my childhood home, but the ground floor is a beachside vacation condo. i go down in the basement, and my brother mike has woken up in a panic because he saw a spider. he says he just touched it but his finger is bleeding, and the spider--a small thing--runs under a dusty, cobwebby coffee table. we both get down on the floor to try and find the spider, but don't see much other than dust and dead ants. i go upstairs for a bit to watch a car chase explosion action movie with some people in the living room, but then go back downstairs with a flashlight, determined to get the spider. i get down on the floor again, and survey the space beneath the coffee table. seeing nothing, i move the beam up to the underside of the table. there, in a corner thick with spider webs and dead insects, is a spider--but no the one that had startled mike. that one was common and brown, this is stark white, with a body massive in relation to its legs, and covered in something between feathers and hair. i move the flashlight closer, in an attempt to provoke this dangerous-looking thing out of its corner so i can crush it. instead of creeping away from my advance, the spider's body opens up from the center and balloons out into a puffy bulge with bright red markings that evoke the red eye and mouth makeup of a clown. this inflated body rattles and shakes, making an intense clicking noise as it swells violently before suddenly collapsing back into the spider. stunned, i test the thing again with the flashlight. again, the rattling clown face. i push the flashlight even further into the cobwebs, almost nudging the spider, and it suddenly jumps out of the corner and begins to run frantically around the coffee table and floor, expanding and contracting erratically. at this point you come down stairs with a mason jar, corner the spider, and capture it. you show me the closed jar, and tap on it--provoking the clown face.

later, in perhaps another dream, i'm sitting on a sidewalk, talking to some girl. between the sidewalk and the road is a ditch, which trends towards a drainage pipe and a small stream that leads in between some houses. suddenly, you walk out of my childhood house, and toss the spider-containing mason jar towards the stream. the girl and i jump away as the jar catches the edge of the drainage pipe, and breaks. the white spider, collapsing and expanding, now the size of a small mouse--scampers through the brush and onto a fence, heading back between the houses. i pursue it, tearing through fallen branches and leaves. i corner the spider on a fence post, and proceed to crush it with my hands. the clown face collapses in a noxious puff. my fingers burn.

letter to a amherst grad, nervously considering the teacher corps

2009-11-16T14:38:00.000-06:00

my graduation speech to an audience of one. for ameerah.

it seems that this has been your existential crisis for months now. which is understandable, and in a long tradition of anxious/brilliant amherst grads who look towards the wilderness with unease.

all i can say is what i've said before: you're going to figure it out. it's less about the right decision (in your case, "knowing what to do"), than in decisions you can live with.

in regards to the teacher corps, the question is whether you can live with committing yourself for two years to the daily grind of improving the lives of mississippi children, and whether you're willing to commit yourself in full knowledge that (a) you don't know exactly what that daily grind entails, (b) and that all accounts of that daily grind are riddled with exhaustion, suffering, and failure (and rightfully so).

however, there are many upsides to this commitment, some of which you must come to terms with as being selfish, not the least of which is that it allows you to put off the "i don't know what to do [with my life]" dilemma for two years, during which time you're going to flesh out a lot of those unexamined contours of yourself that someone don't get taken care of in a world of valentine, frost, and jchap--and somehow do get taken care of in a world of incompetent administrators, dehumanized youth, and lesson plans. that was, at least, my experience. and i'm well aware that it's not universal: that many teacher corps folks don't have the experience that i had, and that you can certainly develop and grow as an individual in ways that don't involve teaching people how to graph lines.

also, let's return to the anxious/brilliant amherst grad dilemma. you probably have other options after leaving amherst (or, if you don't right now, you will): academic, professional, personal, whatever. and this is perhaps the most troubling part of the situation: people have an almost endless capacity to craft narratives to explain themselves and/or their odd journey. which means that, regardless of the decision you make, it is always within your means to re-contextualize the decision, to re-write the context and to re-write the decision. furthermore, given that you're going to be in some sort of self-definition crisis for at least the next 10 years, the context, the decision, and the relationship between the two are all going to stay in flux until somewhere down the line where it seems we all get struck with a kind of amnesia that leaves us with silly things like college being the most formative time in our lives, with otherwise arbitrary decisions being "meant to be," and a strange fascination with raising children (who will themselves become anxious/brilliant grads themselves in shock with the sheer breadth of adult possibility). in short, it doesn't matter which path you take, because even though they both are equally uncertain right now, someday you'll be saying with a sigh that you took the one less traveled, and are better for it.

so, all of this is to say that this "next step" decision both means a lot, and that it doesn't really matter what you chose. make a decision you can live with, do you damn best to live with that decision, and don't be afraid to change course if things are actually unbearable (but certainly don't change course at first sadness, and for god's sake do not leave a classroom of mississippi children without a teacher). this is also to say that i know that most of what i'm telling you if rightfully meaningless, and has been the last three or for times i said it. which isn't to say it isn't valuable (i hope that it is), but it's a value almost without meaning. because the meaning isn't made yet, which is of course exactly the problem; and i must say that for me it's hardly made just five years removed from my own version of your anxiety. this wilderness has been bizarre, though i'm glad to have my stubbornness chipped away at by way of it: so that i'm starting to get a sense of how young i am, how little i know, and how much i need to listen, and to be patient. along the way, i've been able to teach some math, to help some young people engage in inquiry/dialogue focused on critical citizenship, to support local struggles for reconciliation and renewal, to fall deeply in love with a place (and its many places, often in conflict), and to live alone. i'm glad that i've done these things, both proud and humbled by many of them, and while i'd do it all over again i'm not going to harbor the pretension that these dots were all meant to be connected, and in this order, and at this time.

this has, of course, become a long letter, and i imagine unexpected in response to your message of seven words. but they are massive words, and they are universal (except the dave part, of course): "I dunno what to do Dave...eek!!!!!!!" so, in responding to them, i seem to have wandered down a rabbit hole of my own struggle with things massive and universal. i hope that's ok; i have my own next-step looming (the search for the big phd in the sky), and my own "I dunno what to do Ameerah...eek!!!" it's different this time, and i'm glad for that, but also sobering to be reminded that i'm so thinly removed from that anxiety of graduating from amherst, and that while i've begun to come to terms with the wilderness and the as-yet-meaninglessness, the accompanying pain is not wholly rescinded, nor the fears resolved. so, i don't know what to tell you. i don't know what to do either; my most productive recourse has been to let go of the knowing and the meaning, at least on the front end. (i'm sure i've abandoned my avoidance of the trite much earlier, but this will certainly kill it:) rather, i'm much more concerned with the "doing" part of that anxiety. i've gotten to a point where i just let the "knowing" and "meaning" piece pass some sort of sufficiency threshold, where i know enough about a particular course of action and enough of its potential meanings fit in well with whatever hodgepodge of values they interact with, and i just start to pick away at the doing part. because, and i've learned this lesson well as a teacher and at the winter institute: most of the stuff we start isn't going to take hold, both in ourselves and in others, and the real returns are so poor on meaningful action that it's not worth my while to wait until everything makes perfect next-step sense to start investing. this is a major divergence from the relatively healthier returns of being an undergrad and investing in meaningful action about undergrad things (most of which get a nicely concrete beginning-middle-end arc at the outset, and culminate in an everyone's-a-winner degree at the end). rather, it's imperative that i keep moving, and in many directions at once, and with a long view towards the big threshold, when meaning starts to collect and leans towards a kind of knowing--that what is happening is a good thing. and, as long as i'm growing and shifting and looking for meaning, it doesn't really matter what i'm doing, so long as i can live with the doing and that i can learn from it.

you are, of course, in a different position. it's all happening at once, and it's all happening on the front end. you're trying to make a decision that would involve something you've never done, and because of that there's no way of knowing whether it's a good thing (and, regardless, it seems to be a painful thing). and even if it is something you've done a little of before, the scale and context of it all is a massive departure from extracurriculars and summer internships. i know for sure that there's no amount of writing that will ease this anxiety. but, i can tell you that it's up to you to turn it into a productive anxiety, to make a decision you can live with, and to live with it. whether you come teach public school in mississippi or not, you're going to be fine. you're going to good things. i think that if you weren't going to do good things, then you wouldn't be so anxious. and, even after you make your big-next-step decision, you're going to continue be anxious, and you're going to still have to turn it into a productive anxiety. it is the fire in the wilderness that lets us see ("terras irradient," anyone?), but is fire nonetheless. tend to it: don't let it consume you, don't let it die out. it is often all that we have.

so that's all i've got. 1500 words and all i can tell you is that there isn't a knowing what to do, if there were it isn't worth your time to wait for the knowing and the meaning before the doing, and that the anxiety that you feel is sometimes the only thing that proves you still exist, and through which you can do good things so long as you don't explode or fizzle out (which you probably won't). and, so long as you can hold on to this anxiety about the knowing and the meaning while in the wandering, it doesn't really matter what you're doing, because you're going to do good things. and it's going to be ok. so just let yourself commit to something, finish your damn degree, and welcome to the wilderness.

book review: “The Education of Mr. Mayfield”

2009-10-22T21:45:00.000-05:00

recently wrote a book review for the jackson free press. a surprisingly rewarding experience--the act of reading, analyzing, processing. hope to do it again soon.

At first glance, David Magee's “The Education of Mr. Mayfield” (John F. Blair, 2009, $19.95) gives the impression of a Good Will Hunting knock-off set in the rural South. Race replaces class, Ole Miss replaces Harvard, "Dixie" replaces Elliot Smith, and somewhere down the line we've got an O Brother, Where Art Thou? for Grove-tented book clubs. However, Magee's M.B. Mayfield comes across with little of the psychological complexity or mere depth of character of his South Boston analogue, Will Hunting, though it’s unclear as to whether this is a reflection of Mr. Mayfield, the person (which I doubt), or a consequence of Magee's treatment of what seems to be an otherwise compelling story. Though Mayfield often finds himself at the schizophrenic intersection of black working class and white high society, in the text he is only barely self-aware of the conflicted and ambivalent reward of significant talent amidst the inertia of caste. Rather, Magee keeps him on the naïve side of aloof for most of the book—an “unassuming” and “almost apologetic” figure on a strange journey of history, race, and class.

To best approach “The Education of Mr. Mayfield”, a reader must jettison the notion that M. B. Mayfield---a reclusive, mostly self-taught artist from Ecru, Miss.---is the protagonist of this book bearing his name, or even that Stuart Purser--then chairman of the Ole Miss Art Department and Mayfield's unlikely teacher and patron---shares the spotlight. Rather, over the course of the book a reader must watch Magee abandon the story of these two men in the interest of exploring the book's real main characters: an idyllic Oxford and (always by extension) its symbiotic foil, the University of Mississippi.

Though in the Ole Miss of his childhood "anything colored in red and blue glistened on even the darkest days," Magee abandoned Oxford in his adult years, "frustrated by the university's obvious historical flaws." Recently discovering Mayfield and Purser's barrier-crossing, history bending story, it seems that Magee has found in researching and writing this book his pathway to reconciling with his "small, picturesque hometown."

As a heavy-handed parable of the Jim Crow South, the narrative arc in “The Education of Mr. Mayfield” begins reasonably enough. Purser and Mayfield grow up in not-dissimilar settings; Purser on the white side of a Klan-dominated Louisiana mill town and Mayfield on the black side of a poverty-stricken hamlet in Mississippi Hill Country. In adulthood, both men gravitate toward art as a means of escaping their situation---for Purser, out towards college, the Art Institute of Chicago, FDR’s Work Projects Administration, and finally a plateau of fledgling Art Departments in the South waiting to be created or chaired; for Mayfield, in and away from a troubling admixture of social anxiety, physical toil and lingering poverty.

Mayfield and Purser finally cross paths while Purser is on a search for inspiration in the "less traveled roads of rural North Mississippi," and runs across a house adorned with a prominent bottle tree and large busts of Joe Louis and George Washington Carver. The house, of course, is Mayfield’s—who is living there with his mother and had been creating art as a way to “[channel] his loneliness.” Upon realizing Mayfield's talent, Purser devises a situation in which he can informally instruct M.B.: by hiring him as a janitor, and allowing Mayfield to listen in to lectures (sometimes literally from the broom closet). Two months later, M.B. Mayfield's status at the periphery of both the Ole Miss classroom and Oxford art circles becomes a gentle challenge to the perils of segregation.

Unfortunately, after Mayfield moves to Oxford, attempts at a meaningful relationship with Purser are quickly eclipsed by diversions into a larger-than-life Oxonian menagerie. Loyal Blind Jim Ivy, visionary Johnny Vaught, inscrutable William Faulkner, inflammatory Albin Krebs, and even maverick James Meredith are all there in full caricature, and serve mostly as distraction for the rest of the book. While some inclusions are reasonable---Faulkner befriends Purser and helps purchase art supplies for Mayfield---it's never clear why Magee indulges the reader in the virtues of Vaught's "Split-T offensive formation," or the growing pangs of his "mandated platoon rules" for the university's football team.

Rather, these indulgences in Ole Miss nostalgia serve mainly to gloss over (or reinforce) unexplored assumptions about gender, sexuality, grammar (perhaps my favorite dangling modifier of all time: "[Mayfield] wiped bits of food from the meals he made from the corners of his mother's mouth"). Above all, race gets superficial treatment. In the same vein as a tense trip to the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery in Memphis (a resolvable faux paus regarding segregated operating hours), the author rarely presents racial difference as much more than a jarring anachronism or a nuisance of otherwise-redeemable heritage.

Over time, Purser grows professionally restless and dissatisfied with Ole Miss’ unremitting segregation, eventually leaving to start yet another Art Department, and Mayfield remains relatively undiscovered but otherwise unruffled, eventually resettling in Ecru to dangle on the precipice of obscurity in between occasional re-discovery. What's left is a book "detailed in outline but scant in depth" (to borrow Mr. Magee's phrase about Mr. Mayfield's work), and glaringly uninterested in its own assumptions, outside the occasional right-thing-to-say about the evils of the Klan, the n-word, the logic of segregation, the assassination of Dr. King.

What is more, while it's self-described as "An Unusual Story of Social Change at Ole Miss, The Education of Mr. Mayfield” remains well within the bounds of the usual and the never-really-changing. It indulges so much in the noble premise of Stuart Purser's "discovery" of M.B. Mayfield's "primitive" art that it neither questions these terms nor explores their gaping corollaries, while Mayfield is limited to the promotion from janitor to security guard as his sole significant opportunity for job advancement, Purser seems to have the luxury to pack up and go create an Art Department somewhere else whenever he feels restless. This is, of course, not to suggest that Purser shouldn't have been allowed the accolades resulting from his work, nor that those talented artists previously unknown should not benefit from public recognition, only that so much of the distribution of power (and the power of naming) in this and many other situations in the book is racially and/or socioeconomically obvious. Instead of coming across as problematic, it's coming across as quaint.

Ultimately, it is the comfort of the quaint and the pastoral that drowns out the best interest of David Magee's work, and through which a potentially humanizing and redeeming story barely survives as a kind of historical near-fiction, bloated with allegory and glistening in red and blue.

poempost: buncombe

2009-07-31T11:36:00.002-05:00

an old poem. a villanelle, oddly. was reminded of it during a recent bout of disgust with a mode of writing that promotes a toxic admixture of the confessional moment and the esoteric (self-)reference. twitter can so easily become the world's bathroom stall.

All you anonymous kings
- for a gas station in Buncombe, NC

Caught between the curtains of duty, some
let the moment bring what it brings,
others scribble speeches for Buncombe.

Perhaps, when the service has begun,
the honey-scroll is all ink and wings;
stuck on the feverish mind, it must become.

Or, someone left a whisper in the drum,
and, fear – lest the ugly-horns sing –
yields a toneless whistle for Buncombe.

Maybe it’s truth – bitches crave my cum;
Friday. 11:30. The Real Thing –
crammed a whisper away from someone.

Since dogs hide what they have done,
it could be the dirt and grass they fling
to avert the noble eyes of Buncombe.

But, I am loathe to follow the lonesome
strings of all you anonymous kings,
so fixed to a minute’s naked wisdom
on an awful soapbox in downtown Buncombe.

wellspring article, director's cut

2009-06-24T11:25:00.002-05:00

it kind of saddens me when i think about this, but i've recently gotten much, much better at distancing myself from text once it's sent to an editor for print-ready slimming. i still lack the ability to abbreviate my writing process, much less depersonalize the act itself--but once a piece is out of the nest, it's out of the nest.

at the winter institute, we have a bi-annual newsletter entitled the wellspring, and every summer and winter staff and interns get quasi-assigned topics and articles to write. as it's been one of the rare moments that i'm forced to (a) write lengthy informational prose and (b) share my thoughts about our work, my articles seem to require a sour gestation--riddled with mood-swinging ambivalence and alternating bursts of writer's block and logorrhea. that being said, once i've hammered out a completed piece, its trip from my computer to the printed copy negotiates a minefield of residual pride/vulnerability and territoriality.

after a heated back and forth during the editing process of piece for this past winter's article (reaching crescendo with the suggestion that i "need to expand my skill set"), i have become determined to, essentially, detach myself from whatever i've written (an ironic contraction: writerly addition-by-subtraction)--finding quiet solace in the fact that my semicoloned curlicues can be delightfully unread here in pretentious blog limbo. while i've still reserved the right to try and put my foot down if/when an editor makes an historical overreduction, a rhetorically inappropriate paraphrase, or a grammatical mishap, i've come to terms with the death-to-nuance approach of would-be journalism, and can finally--for the sake of a story being told--admit that i err on the side of: (a) not particularly caring about audience or reading level, (b) caring way too much about word-smithery and/or exhaustive rhetorical precision.

so, an article will be published in this summer's wellspring, and it will bear passing resemblance to the following:

***

Wellspring – From Dialogue to Action: St. Andrew’s “Welcome Table”

In March of 2008, parishoners from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral in Jackson reached out to the Winter Institute in an effort to initiate dialogue about the legacy of race in the Jackson Episcopal community. As is the case with the origin of many community dialogue groups that the Institute works with, those participating were trying to come to terms with what they felt were critical issues in their community for which real solutions required an honest, open engagement in the way race and its legacy play a role—either implicitly or explicitly—in their community’s history, identity, and outlook. In regards to the cathedral community, dialogue participants initially centered on two major spaces of inquiry: the need for a more comprehensive narrative of the Episcopal community’s response to local civil rights and desegregation activities, and concerns about diversity of access to and equity of benefit from the Jackson area’s increasing interest in downtown development and urban renewal—in which the cathedral’s location in the heart of downtown Jackson would make participation nearly unavoidable.

Dialogue centering on race, the Episcopal community, and urban renewal in the Jackson area continued through the fall of 2008, as the group expanded its circle of participation beyond the cathedral community (as well as beyond the Episcopal community), and hosted meetings throughout the diocese—at St. Mark’s, St. Christopher’s, and St. Alexis’ Episcopal churches—as well as St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Through this process, recurrent themes emerged as key areas for further study and action: economic justice, neighborhood organizing, media activism, young people/education, diverse and representative participation, and anti-racism training. Furthermore, by August group members were anxious for action steps to compliment what had already become an empowering and challenging conversation about race in the Jackson area—itself “a sign of hope,” and something “valuable even if we all want to be out there doing,” as group participant Chuck Culpepper, pastor of St. Alexis Episcopal Church, noted in a June meeting.

Thoughts of action gravitated towards both youth engagement and a desire to help ensure that that Jackson equitably maintains its urban fabric—seen by the group as a “unique blend of economic, racial, and cultural diversity”—in the midst of increased downtown development. In September of 2008, the University of Mississippi’s hosting of the first Presidential Debate—between then-candidates Barack Obama and John McCain—offered the group an unexpected opportunity to jump-start this shift towards action. In late August, the Jim Hill Civil Rights/Civil Liberties (CRCL) group, which the Winter Institute was assisting in coming to Oxford to participate in pre-debate activities, reached out to the St. Andrew’s group in search of a potential site to host a Jackson youth viewing and discussion of the debate. The viewing, which was attended by a diverse group of over fifty youth from public and private schools throughout the Jackson area, solidified the St. Andrew’s group’s commitment to youth—as evidenced by the fact that since the debate viewing CRCL members have regularly attended and actively participated in group dialogue and action.

In January of 2009, the commitment by members to develop a single, comprehensive action project that would encompass the central themes of their nearly yearlong conversation about race finally bore fruit. The group, its own composition moving towards the racial, economic, cultural, and faith diversity that comprise Jackson’s “urban fabric,” began to envision an institution that would attract a diverse and representative constituency, serve as an anchoring imprint of the group’s vision for a unified Jackson, and address the group’s concerns about downtown development and urban renewal. Discussions of such an institution’s mission eventually centered on the essential and universal task of preparing and sharing food, which took the form of a non-profit restaurant that would engage diverse constituencies as stakeholders in each stage in its establishment and operation—literally, a “Welcome Table,” as the group would come to refer to itself.

Specifically, the St. Andrew’s Welcome Table project seeks to establish a non-profit restaurant that doubles as a youth mentoring and workforce development site and is committed to the inclusion of local, organic, and sustainable agriculture in its menu. It is inspired by many similar projects throughout the county—most notably Café Reconcile, a similar institution established in New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood. In operation since 1996, Café Reconcile and its accompanying Youth Workforce Development Program (established in 2000) “meet the needs of youth who [have] experienced an array of socio-economic challenges, including poverty, homelessness, arrested educational achievement, substance abuse, and participation in the juvenile justice system.” In its first seven years of operation, the program successfully graduated 400 young men and women between the ages of 16 and 24—many of whom go on to work for Café Reconcile’s many partners and advocates in the New Orleans entertainment and hospitality industry. In February of 2009, a group from the St. Andrew’s Welcome table project traveled to New Orleans to tour Café Reconcile’s facilities and—of course—to try out its cuisine. This trip provided members with both a strong sense that the Welcome Table was a feasible—albeit ambitious—project, as well as an invaluable source of firsthand knowledge regarding the mission, challenges, and triumphs of a like-minded organization.

Back in Jackson, the Welcome Table entered its second year of dialogue and action with a flurry of planning and partnership building. In April, the group completed a mission statement and project proposal, and began to seek out funding and grant opportunities for the establishment of both the restaurant and the accompanying youth workforce training and mentoring program. Around the same time, the St. Andrew’s Cathedral leadership showed its support of the project by offering to temporarily host the Welcome Table on cathedral grounds—with the hope that the restaurant would utilize the cathedral’s beautiful courtyards and full kitchen, and that the youth workforce and mentoring program could utilize its amble classroom space.

Last May, a participant in one of the Welcome Table meetings noted that “hope comes from giving up the things we can’t control, and loving and helping things grow in the way we can.” In many ways, the group’s journey from dialogue to action exemplifies this sentiment: their initial year of honest, open, and often difficult engagement in the history and legacy of race in themselves and in their community can been seen as a meticulous identifying and untangling of those things that they could reasonably control in regards to realizing their vision for progress and reconciliation. Incredibly, what has emerged from this process is a comprehensive, ambitious plan to create an imprint of their vision in the heart of downtown Jackson—through an institution that will provide diverse and representative stakeholders, community members, and hungry customers with a place at the table of a unified, equitable Capital City.

buttons!

2009-06-14T17:48:00.003-05:00

for a couple years now i've been making found-art buttons and collage from old magazines. i've just started up a shop on etsy.com to see if they're of any interest. still testing out pricing, shipping, etc. so only listing a few at a time.

will have a badge on the right of the blog layout. like this one:

what i've been up to recently

2009-06-02T12:43:00.003-05:00

teaching myself the drupal development platform, and setting up the county project site (www.mscivilrightsproject.com) to host and stream media. given that i have a very meager grasp of html, php, css, etc. the work is 70% learning curve, 27% messing something up, 3% blind-squirrel-finds-a-nut.

what should follow is an embedded video that i've been using to configure the video player i've installed. the clip is an excerpt from a interview/oral-history i did with my great aunt, sister mary william sullivan, who is a retired nun and was active in chicago's south side during the 50s and 60s. by "active" i mean engaging in and organizing neighborhoods around issues of educational equity and housing access. so, she's a bona fide OG.

next up on the site development: figuring out image uploading & hosting and image gallery construction. then setting up streaming audio. then teaching interns on how to post and upload. then developing an educational resource template, which essentially will be a wik-ed 0.9 (if you were once a beardy-face vaguely-to-very jewish teacher corps member--or dave jones--you'd know what that meant).

that being said, it's all work perfect for the mississippi summer, which amounts to floating between refrigerators and saunas.

James Meredith begins "Walk for the Poor" on Sunday

2009-05-22T14:59:00.002-05:00

i know very little about this, other than it's happening. just got details today. there is only one james meredith.

an interesting opportunity for some twitter/youtube/flickr-engaged spontaneous visibility. word-of-mouth as web-of-link.

James Meredith's Walk for the Poor James Meredith's Walk for the Poor hennahackles

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Research Books Non-fiction bible walk

teacherpost: rec letter for KB

2009-04-14T15:29:00.005-05:00

an overly-common observation: i have a love-hate relationship with letters of recommendation. most of this is derived from the fact that i can never bring myself to write anything that feels like a template or a re-write (enter margaret with an i'm-dave-molina-i-question-the-very-premise-of-your-question jab); i force myself to construct some sort of custom narrative of personal involvement with whomever i'm writing for (enter jake with a stop-making-it-about-yourself jab), and i often ask people i haven't talked to in a while to send me a couple key moments or experiences that stand out in our work together (enter sarah roth with an actually-you've-just-desciribed-a-template and/or a skip-the-parentheticals-and-get-to-the-point jab). the flipside is that i've always regretted not giving myself a more consistent and/or thorough structure for reflecting on my teaching experiences (now that i'm out of the classroom and have new context) and my work at the winter institute (now that i'm in it and have little or no context), and that shoehorning myself into a place where i try to remember what it was like to meet and/or appreciate someone for the first (or second, or third) time tends to dislodge enough material for unexpected reflective high notes to nestle in the stitching as i pull myself back from the vertigo of half-memory to some sort of near statement of why some young person or other is likely to "change the world," or whatever the accolade, scholarship, or institution begs for.

anyway, i spent a bit of time this afternoon on a last-minute rec letter for a former CRCL member, and in looking it over i've noticed the following:

(a) though the narrative details are particular, much of the nature of the appriciation and praise holds common ground with my experiences with so many of the CRCL leaders

(b) i think i'm starting to get better at unraveling what happened (and what didn't) at CRCL, and

(c) i'm hopeful that (b) implies that i'm going to get better at unpackaging the innards beneath the birth, life, and death of these groups.

***

I first met KB in the spring of 2007, when she came to Jim Hill High School to attend a visit by former Mississippi Governor William Winter. The Jim Hill Civil Rights/Civil Liberties (CRCL) group, a group I helped establish while I was a mathematics teacher at Jim Hill during the 05-06 and 06-07 school years, sponsored the event. At that point, CRCL participation included students from both Jim Hill and St. Andrew’s Episcopal school, and Gov. Winter’s visit provided an opportunity to reach out to more schools in the area. If I remember correctly, KB had heard about the event from her Latin instructor, Mr. J, and decided to attend with her mother. Afterwards, I remember KB staying to talk about CRCL and asking if she could come for the regular group meetings. Though it was immediately clear that CRCL had found itself a new member, it became quickly obvious that the group had gained so much more: a new leader.

Looking back, much of the continuity and growth of CRCL throughout that spring and the entire 07-08 school year relied on the involvement of KB. She was one of those rare young people whose composure, diligence, and intellectual maturity completely masked her age; every year since KB was a freshman I’ve been convinced she’s a senior. Her natural capacity for critical inquiry provided a steady anchor for the group’s youth-directed philosophies, and in time developed into an outstanding and unobtrusive model for other students in their quest for critical citizenship. Furthermore, KB’s clear commitment to intercommunity dialogue ensured that the group would always push to maintain CRCL participation from as many school and neighborhood communities as possible. She not only cultivated a core of Murrah students to attend Jim Hill meetings with her, but in the spring of 2008 KB and some fellow Murrah students attempted to establish a stand-alone group at their own school, which brought even more young people to CRCL despite the group’s short lifespan. For example, a current CRCL standout, Murrah junior HW, found her way into the group by way of KB’s leadership and outreach.

Although KB’s active participation in and promotion of CRCL meetings played a huge role in the group’s continued activity, the most crucial role she played was behind the scenes. That is, KB so valued a space after school to state her own views and engage responsibly in the opinions of a diverse set of her peers that she spent a considerable amount of time—Friday after-school meetings at Cups in Fondren, phone calls throughout the week, endless debriefing after weekly CRCL meetings, etc.—helping the group transition seamlessly through the loss of its original moderators (Mr. Jake Roth and myself) and into a new phase of increased student management and oversight. Through KB’s initiative, manifesting itself in everything from planning and running meetings to typing and printing agendas, the Jim Hill CRCL evolved into a student organization that can constantly reimagine itself—surviving not only changes in adult leaderships, but in its youth leadership as well.

In my current position as project coordinator for the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, I spend much of my time trying to develop a systemic approach to cultivating what KB and her peers at the Jim Hill CRCL have done so naturally: establish, support, and maintain a space committed to critical inquiry and intercommunity dialogue. Through looking back on now four years of the group’s activity, and in meeting other groups throughout the state, I am constantly amazed at what these young people at CRCL have been able to do, and KB especially. Though it is incredibly cliché to remark on children as our future, I can not help but wonder that hope for democracy, citizenship, and civic responsibility lies in young people like KB, who are ready to engage directly in the crucial issues of our time, and just need space to do so, faith that they will, and equal parts challenge and encouragement.

winterpost: SA oral history project + the jackson movement

2009-03-04T16:35:00.000-06:00

for ben guest

1. SA oral history project

over the past couple of months i've been helping out with an oral history project that's grown out of the work of a self-sustaining CRCL group that's started at st. andrew's episcopal school in jackson.

(n.b. for those unaware with the acronym, CRCL stands for civil rights/civil liberties--and these are civil engagement high school groups dedicated to critical inquiry and intercommunity dialogue. throughout its four years of activity, the jim hill CRCL group has had members from jim hill, st. andrew's, murrah, lanier, and wingfield. murrah was the first school to attempt to start up its own building level group, but that didn't stick.)

the st. andrew's oral history project will focus on the school's journey through external and internal changes in regards to race relations and access to education in the jackson metro area from the 1940s to the 1980s. this particular project grew out conversations starting last fall, wherein a small core of motivated st. andrew's students reached out to the winter institute in an effort to spark a critical dialogue on campus that would hopefully lay the groundwork for the development of a CRCL group there. some of the students had at one point been regulars at the jim hill meetings--and wanted to start a satellite at their own school so they could expose their peers to a more accessible CRCL and build a foundation before reaching back out to jim hill. others were students who knew about the jim hill CRCL but hadn't been able to make it over for a meeting.

dialogue around the questions "what is the story about your community that isn't told," and "what is frustrating about the community you belong to" led to a couple realizations:

(1) while st. andrew's is admirably diverse when it comes to race and ethnicity, students felt that economic and neighborhood diversity was lacking. furthermore, there seemed to be some connection between this set of observations and the post-segregation development of madison county, just north of jackson: which made the usual quick transition from farmland to a middle- and upper-middle- class suburb.

(2) when it comes to race at st. andrew's, many students felt that the conversation begin and ends with "we're not a segregation academy," meaning st. andrew's wasn't established during the 1969-1973 emergence of private academies and white citizen council-developed "council schools" throughout mississippi--which effectively re-segregated schools (likewise, maintained age-old channels of social/political/economic capital) in nearly all communities that had significant black populations (i.e. somewhere over 25-30% i imagine; it's a statistical analysis i'd love to take the time to do); in mississippi that means a lot of communities. in many ways, this is the historical retort to the popular red herring that "90% of MS's school-age youth attend public school." that and the fact that white attendance is often front-loaded in elementary and middle school in areas where there is a significant black population; many academies (many of which are still or nearly all-white) don't start until 7th or 9th grade, simply because it's not economically or educationally viable for many communities and parents to develop a PK-12 private institution, though many certainly do exist. nevertheless, the trump card of "we're not jackson prep" seemed to gloss over a couple things in these student's minds: they had no sense of the circumstances surrounding st. andrew's admittance and graduation of its first african american student, no narrative of race relations at st. andrew's through the civil rights era, and no narrative of the relationship between desegregation and the development of st. andrew's school over time--which in the 1980s moved from a site in jackson proper to a site in madison county, a move planned sometime after acquiring "75 acres of open, rolling meadowland" in 1976.

momentum from these conversations--participated in and encouraged by teachers and administrators--lead to the conclusion that these stories should be told, thus birthing an oral history project. armed with flipcams and a .ning site, the CRCL group has been steadily building a vision for the project, training themselves in oral history, and educating themselves on relevent historical context: the history of school desegregation in MS and general civil rights related history in the jackson area.

a project description clip from some of the CRCL members themselves, shot on flipcam and uploaded to .ning:

Find more videos like this on St. Andrew's - Winter Institute Project

2. the jackson movement

on the winter institute end, i've been advising students on the project, and developing oral history training and historical context materials/presentations. this brings us to the "for ben guest" header on the post: a few weeks ago i began to develop a condensed timeline of essential civil rights related history in the jackson area. surrounded by obsessively highlighted and tabbed books, i was on the hunt for any local civil rights activity as well as any national/regional civil events that passed through the jackson area. i had a sense of a couple obvious landmarks (though many of them i'd never really researched): the formation of the white citizen's council, the tougaloo nine, the woolworth's sit-in, the freedom riders arriving in jackson, the jackson state shootings, the march against fear, medgar evers' assassination, etc. what i didn't have a sense of was that there was a bona fida jackson movement, albeit short-lived, intense, and rather tragic--in the sense of organizational territory and politics draining local momentum (and in some way foreshadowing bigger meltdowns in the late 60s), and in the sense of the loss of someone as talented as medgar evers in the midst of an internecine maelstrom. on that note, over time i'm realizing more and more how important medgar was to mississippi civil rights veterans: after asking hollis watkins (the first local mississippi youth to join SNCC’s work in mccomb, and now president of southern echo, one of the best community organizing/empowerment and youth activism vehicles in the state) what he did for inauguration, he calmly replied, his eyes still with memory, "i went by medgar's house."

synopsis of jackson movement:

1961, march: the jackson NAACP youth council protests segregated libraries in jackson. given that they're "the only such group still active in the jackson area and composed mainly of black high school students," and given that direct action isn't usually the NAACP's cup of tea (litigation/legislation and voter registration is) here we've got a local initiative.

1961, may: the SNCC freedom riders come into jackson, refuse to post bail upon arrest, and make the call for more buses to head to mississippi. 328 riders are arrested that summer, and many spend their time in parchman. once they get out of jail, we've got some lingering SNCC and CORE presence in MS.

1962, december: the jackson NAACP youth council form a picket line outside of woolworth's in jackson, and try to initiate a city boycott of downtown merchants. they receive little support from SNCC (now drawn to greenwood), CORE (who feel like the boycott is started without sufficient community organization), and NAACP (again: they don't really do direct action). so, still a local initiative but now we've got some attempted coordination with regional/national organizations.

1963, may: NAACP switches course and makes jackson boycotts a priotity. reasoning: mlk's recent success in birmingham; roy wilkins is worried that jackson will be SCLC's next target. an ultimatum is made to jackson mayor allen thompson, negotiate or else face mass demonstration. after waffling for a bit, the mayor rejects all demands. the next day is the woolworth's sit-in by jackson NAACP youth council and moderator: a three hour, very violent affair. picketing increases dramatically; high school students begin walk outs and marches, with violent police response. we've got momentum, but we've got ulterior motives.

1963, june: increased activism has drawn in staff from national NAACP, but this results in a shift in the movement coordinating committee from an activist, youth-oriented aproach to a more conservative, NAACP/black minister & businessmen-led effort to broker a deal. right when direct action begins to escalate into a snowballing youth movement, mass marches and protests are halted, community momentum is lost, and attendance at nightly meetings declines. june 6: the city of jackson obtains an injunction forbidding further demonstrations. june 8: first day without demonstration or picket line. afterward: a "coalition of national NAACP officials and the traditional middle-class leadership of jackson [agree]... that although the boycott should continue, there [will] be no further mass demonstrations and that the movement should initiate another voter registration drive in the jackson area." june 11, medgar evers assassinated (more below). after his funeral procession, several hundred young people begin singing freedom songs and walking towards capitol street area. they are met with police, and, for the first time, fight back. a riot is only narrowly avoided. june 18, the movement's strategy committee announces a deal struck with mayor thompson, which amounts to a set of concessions previously rejected by black leaders: an agreement to hire six black policemen, a handful of promotions in the sanitation department, and a promise to "continue to hear black grievances." in essence, jackson remains a jim crow city. we've got ideological shifts that cut the legs out from under the movement, which crumbles: taking medgar evers and leaving nominal progress and entrenched segregation.

aftermath: jackson continues as a central headquarters for civil rights organizations in the state, but never again sustains a movement of it's own. we've got a locally initiated movement that gets coopted by national interests, leaving a community in the dust.

medgar:

throughout the entire jackson movement, NAACP field secretary medgar evers "[straddles] the divide" between the direct action campaign of the jackson NAACP youth council and the hesitant involvement of the national NAACP. in the process, evers becomes the "acknowledged leader" of the jackson movement, "the one who [stands] up to mayor thompson, who [negotiates the young people's] bail, who [receives] nearly all the death threats." on tuesday, june 11, the day "john kennedy gave the strongest civil rights speech of his administration," evers is at a poorly attended mass meeting, where "instead of singing inspiring freedom songs and listening to fiery oratory, the audience [hears] staff members promote the sale of NAACP t-shirts." he returns home after midnight, extra t-shirts in hand. as his wife myrlie and his children come to meet him at the door, evers is shot in the back by greenwood citizen's council member byron de la beckwith. he dies that evening.

other stuff medgar had been involved in: investigating the emmett till murder, attempting to enroll at ole miss (and thus setting the stage for legal campaign culminating in james meredith), assisting with organizing on the gulf coast--site of an early mississippi direct action campaign (the wade-ins) and voter registration push, filing a school desegregation lawsuit against the jackson public schools, which culminated in a freedom of choice ruling in 1964: a crack in the wall that leads up to the 1969 forced desegregation victory.

expanded text, with source list, included here.

prosepost: dream: two rats & twenty and sixty snakes

2009-03-02T16:52:00.002-06:00

in line at a movie theater with mother, brothers, sister. have a hard time finding the ticket; stumble through pockets in my jacket and pants, and eventually come upon it: nondescript, red, "admit one." hand it over to the ticket collector, an older black woman, large, dressed as a bellhop, blue and gold. takes the ticket, hands over a styrofoam cup of hot water, and points to the refreshments area.

supposed to use the cup of hot water to make coffee. a week earlier, i went to the movies with my father and brother. the coffee stand only had a fully-automatic espresso machine and a hot water spigot; all "coffees" were actually americanos, and for each drink the attendant would walk from the automatic espresso machine to an otherwise unused industrial-size percolator, which would dispense hot water. told to take one the small plates of food spread out on a cafeteria table with a white table cloth. all of the plates have french fries on them.

reach out to a plate, but my sister warns there are rats on the table. look across and see two portly rats wandering around, trying to get some french fries. stuck now between stopping sarah from petting the rats carley told me she had a pet rat as a child and stopping rats from stealing french fries. little success.

one of the rats--the yellow one; the other is the usual dusty gray--does not have a face. has a mouth, but nose and eyes are reduced to a fleshy twig. try to scare the faceless rat away with a lighter i had failed to get a fire started two evenings in a row but, disinterested, it grabs a french fry and ambles away.

french fry plate in hand and turn to go to the movie. take a sip of coffee: something moving in my mouth. try to wash it down with more coffee. more things in my mouth. purse my lips and pull at something barely fixed between thumb and forefinger. a tiny snake; thin, about three-inches long. fling it away and another appears--tail just breaching my lips. frantically pull about twenty out. look into my coffee cup. just below the thinly brown water: tangled, dormant coils.

later. at a child's birthday party in the party room of a party warehouse. talking to a young latino boy--chocolate hair, caramel skin, t-shirt, jeans. in the midst of conversation, picks up a cup of coffee. warn him of the snakes. doesn't seem to mind; tells me he'll just eat them. after drinking a bit of the coffee, smiles at me with a tangle of purpley snake heads and tails in his mouth. a dramatic munching gesture, smiles again, and says "60."

poempost: another from the hermitage

2009-02-22T14:52:00.001-06:00

cabin: afternoon

the drunk wasps--they

come from under the wall.

the farthest they make
it is the screened windows,
my chair, the light

in the kitchen. i kill them
with my shoe or magazine

and sweep them under
the wall, where they are
reborn. air in the ice

in the bourbon whistles;
it either rains or snows.

US students fight for education rights -17 Feb 09

2009-02-18T08:40:00.001-06:00

well done, al-jazeera.

poempost: two from a january hermitage

2009-02-16T13:17:00.002-06:00

1. highway seven

In the hills, a mountain
fog: each house consumed
despite all anxious light,
and ghosts too soon.

The car ensures the road
beneath—a drive both dream
and ritual: exit right,
three lights, twenty-seven

miles before the turn.
The last match crumbles
cold against the box—its
smoke would last forever.

Between rains, some dogs
beside the road: a cloud
of orphans—delinquent notice
to feed the withering gods.

2. the death of the impatient tree
or: a seasonal poem
or: a poem written in the voice of a seventh-grade literature textbook

The death of the impatient tree,
who thought each sun was spring,
the forest all considered strange—
though hardly a surprise.

“He trembled,” said the oak,
“for every landing bird.
As if each winter rest would bring
an hour more of sun.”

“And hoped in every leaping fish,”
returned the nearest pine,
“an oracle of thaw, so thirst
more than ice would give.”

“So fully did each season love,”
joined his mistress birch,
“that hardly could he sleep,
nor hardly wake, in such

“Uncertain times as winter fades
to spring. We could sit
more calm in ambiguity;
an early bloom, a late

snow were such a mystery
that hardly do I doubt
he worried through more vital truths
than any our roots could tell.”

Throughout the spring, as Nature’s hand
distributed their friend,
each considered quietly
and with different claim:

whether the impatient tree
had rings so tightly wound
as to approach infinity,
or whether he had none.

poempost: untitled night poem

2009-01-08T19:15:00.002-06:00

it is the cuyahoga snow.

it is a whippoorwill--
it is ten whippoorwills.

it is a ranch house bay window,
barely divulged.

poempost: some dogs (fragment)

2008-12-20T12:35:00.002-06:00

between rains, some dogs
beside the road: a cloud of orphans--
delinquent notice to feed
the withering gods.

belated guestpost 2: frederick douglass

2008-12-01T11:23:00.001-06:00

in the wake of the obama election, and in some ways intertwining with my transposing rhetoric post, my dear heart douglas ray sent two textual moments my way. here's the second:

"Frederick Douglass"

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

--Robert Hayden

belated guestpost 1: jim bond

2008-12-01T11:13:00.002-06:00

in the wake of the obama election, and in some ways intertwining with my transposing rhetoric post, my dear heart douglas ray sent two textual moments my way. here's the first, with d ray's voice sputtering about:

I. Apéritif

I love the excitement of a proposal – it’s simulated entrepreneurship for poet / academic. So here’s one for Harper Collins. Or FSG (Oh to be published by Lorca’s publisher! Aye! Wounded Lilies! Sweet dahlias! Flourish the zithers! My orange heart!):

Dear Smartly-Clad Sirs,

For three months, I will practice, religiously, the sortes Vergilianae. But not with Vergil’s works – funeral pyres are not for me. A Mississippian, instead – Faulkner, Welty, Morris, or Percy perhaps. The Moviegoer as guide-to-life is workable. I’d probably go for Williams, though. John Waters could write the forward. Mark Doty could blurb me. Oprah could review me. Gail could edit Oprah.

Regards,
Undersexed Underpaid
Oxford, MS

P.S. SASE enclosed for your timely reply.

II. Meat of the fruit

Faulkner isn’t my usual election day reading choice, but this year I was reading a brilliant article about the “erotics of the gap” (!!!), “an ethically, not ontologically constructed homosexuality,” and “a coming-out historiography” in Absalom, Absalom!. We’re queering the canon, making queer canons, and queering the history of canon-making. But, I felt the need to review the novel a bit before delving into the article. The final chapter (9), I remember being super-charged with the erotics of narration (erotics of confesston, I suppose). I ran across this gem and exploded in the margins:

“Then I’ll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.”

A. Context in the novel

Shreve (Shrevlin McCannon) is talking to Quentin Compson (of The Sound and the Fury fame) in their dorm room at Harvard. It’s 1910, and they’re trying to piece together the mysteries of Sutpen’s Hundred and an experience that Quentin had in Jeffererson with Rosa Coldfield (Faulkner’s representation of a providential view of history).

This passage is the final one of the book – (leading to Shreve’s famous question – “Why do you hate the South?”), and it seems all too prophetic…Old Testament-ish, like the titular reference to King David’s cry for his son. Jim Bond – slackjawed and oafish – is the son of Charles Bon (who fought with the University Grays and died in 1865) and his black wife.

B. Resonance

What Shreve imagines is akin to the picture of SimEve – Time magazine’s rendering of generations of interracial breeding in their Fall 1993 issue on immigration, which casts the United States as the “World’s First Multicultural Society.” Of course, one need look no further than Time magazine covers again – for the face of Shreve’s prophecy made manifest – President-elect Barack Obama (he, like Jim Bond, performs a mixed-race identity). What’s fascinating is that, in Absalom! Absalom! in which he grapples with history more than in any other in his oeuvre, he ends with this flourish of foresight.

III. Gratias Tibi Ago

Well done, Bill. Kudos to you, Shreve. You were right: this didn’t happen quite “in your time” – just 99 years later. Pop the prosecco!

poempost: a quarter dilemma (fragment)

2008-11-24T15:36:00.003-06:00

i am done with vision;
time to stand by this pond
and let a branch reach
out of the water and point:

across many waves,
at many leaves.

transposing rhetoric

2008-11-05T13:19:00.002-06:00

last night,

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

became

"And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright-- tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."

and

"And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land."

became

"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there."

photopost: new england wandering (parts 2-5)

2008-10-28T17:12:00.004-05:00

part 2: amherst walk + drive

in the heart of fall, when the air has the quality of vodka--good vodka--that's been left in the freezer for a long, long time. a place where i can have absolutely nothing to do and be content for days. also, the land of good beer.

part 3: the kitchen cabinet band practice

a detour to the city. made it in time to hang out with mikey's band. stuffed in a columbia dorm room and unplugged except for the bass. beautiful people + beautiful songs.

part 4: nyc to providence

woke up at 8am on john's birthday. every intention of leaving in time to make it to brown for lunch. then, the realization that i hadn't closed my tab at the club we were at last night (where, strangely enough, moby was the dj). had left to walk an old friend to the train, with all intention of returning. had not returned. a morning/afternoon of wandering chinatown, soho, little italy in search for a bowtie for john. ended up with mugs depicting chinese erotic art and a bag full of other treasures from a grocery store eerily similar to one i frequented in beijing. then, to john--on his birthday.

part 5: brown

simply, epic. a poem to follow. these pictures are from the peripheral moments of a maelstrom.

photopost: new england wandering

2008-10-21T10:43:00.004-05:00

part 1: stang's wedding

a rare collection of odd & beautiful creatures; loves that i had forgotten. pictures before and after the ceremony/reception, which is a debaucherous blur.

i have fragments for a lake placid poem, but they're not coming together. strangely, i can't get over the image of these particular railings on the roadside during the drive up and back.

these roads have beautiful hips:
ochroid railings, low and sturdy;
nothing like the floppy-eared,
directionless steel i'm used to--
punctuated with concrete blocks
and Midwestern cities. no, to be
a runner in these hills must require
a conversation with this railing,
appearing and disappearing quietly,
modestly hugging you away from
the adirondacks, their hoary birches
and vagrant ponds insatiable.

and so on.

crcl + jfp + wwirr = mlp

2008-10-09T08:31:00.003-05:00

1. the intro:

the media literacy project (mlp) issue of the jackson free press (jfp) went to press this week (or whatever the phrase is that implies that the thing is on newsstands right now). i'll do very little explaining here, as the mlp members do a better job explaining themselves (which is, of course, the point). bottom line:

The Media Literacy Project-- a collaboration between the Jackson Free Press, the Jim Hill Civil Rights/Civil Liberties (CRCL) club, and the Winter Institute-- is a youth-led agenda to analyze the pathways through which Jackson Metro youth get into local media.

2.the thing itself:

the cover
"eyes on the machine: jackson teens cover the media": bryan doyle (former winter institute intern, current jfp music editor, and coordinator of mlp) discusses mlp's methodology, observations, and suggestions to local media.
"editors speak up": editors from local media outlets observed by the mlp respond to mlp's conclusions/suggestions
"screw friendship bracelets": hope owens-wilson (murrah h.s.) reflects on the project's genesis and development
"yes we can": ambrose tabb (jim hill h.s.) discusses the history (and future) of the jim hill civil rights/civil liberties club
"the mouth of babes" : sarah rutland (murrah h.s.) responds to the rhetoric of local elected officials toward youth
"intentional bias": spencer bowley (formerly murrah h.s., currently princenton) analyzes media responses to two local youth-related tragedies
"now what?": general suggestions from the mlp on how local newsmedia can better serve the community in their portrayal of youth
"lessons learned": bryan doyle reflects on his experience coordinating the project

3. fixing a hole in CRCL:

at some point this past february i was at the willie morris library in jackson for the third jackson-area consensus gathering meeting for the then very preliminary stages of exploring the possibility of a statewide truth commission in mississippi (we're now at a slightly less preliminary but still very exploratory and consensus gathering/dialogue initiating stage). sitting next to me was donna ladd--editor-in-chief of the jackson free press (jackson's free alternative newsweekly)--whom i'm always happy to run into and with whom i'm always happy to chat/dream about youth activism in jackson. it goes like this: i admit (as i often do/did) that perhaps the single biggest failure of jake & my handling of crcl was that we could never pull off substantial summer opportunities for the members; both years we'd get a student or two into the fannie lou hamer institute summer program or set up a handful of internships with the ACLU, but by and large couldn't scrap together anything that would pass as a sufficient bridge between the ending of one year/version of crcl in the spring and the beginning of another in the fall. then, donna mentions that while writing for the villiage voice she covered a media literacy project done by students in the bronx who looked at the portrayal of youth in the new york times, and that she'd always wanted to do a similar project in jackson. fully aware of the fact that the ratio of getting-excited-about to actually-happening is rather low when it comes to interesting projects/confluences like this, i let the idea stew around for a the rest of the spring semester.

then, a couple of things converged, moving a jackson media literacy project from the wouldn't-it-be-nice column to the make-it-happen column: (1) i finally pulled together a weekend retreat for the crcl members in which we could spend significant time reflecting on the group's history and planning for its future; (2) it became clear that this retreat would be a great venue to bring donna in as a speaker, where she could talk about internship opportunities at the jackson free press, her idea for a jackson metro high school journalism association, and float the idea of the media literacy project; (3) a graduating winter institute intern, bryan doyle, got hired by donna to be the music editor of the jfp, and--as the free press job alone wouldn't pay the bills--was wondering if there were winter institute projects he could help with over the summer to help him transition to life in jackson, (4) when donna spoke at the crcl retreat--with the media literacy project now the major focus--jim hill students provided a personal and tragic reflection on the portrayal of youth in local media: the clinical/dehumanizing depiction of alfred hawkins, a jim hill student fatally shot earlier that year, put in contrast to the humane/sympathetic depiction of three madison county teens who died in a car crash around the same time.

so, we arranged for bryan to work half-time for the winter institute for the summer, and donna graciously provided space, flexibility with bryan's time, and a handful of jfp interns/staff who would assist in the project. then, bryan and i spent a few weeks envisioning/revisioning an approach to the project that would provide for significant ownership by the participants and also ensured enough structure for macro/micro analysis of newsmedia; writing, editing, structuring articles; conducting interviews; research and data analysis; and critical engagement in local issues and local media. then, on june 7, bryan, lara law, rob bland and i sat down with some crcl members and area high school students and put the vision and the process in their hands.

now, four months later, the results of the media literacy project have been printed as an issue of the jackson free press. the cover story, the editor's comments, columns and articles--all filled with the products of youth engagement and critical dialogue. in her article, "mouth of babes" sarah rutland notes "it should not be a surprise to discover that there are youth just itching to discuss the direction of their peers and the city, and adults who find themselves wanting to listen." while reading that i can't help but be filled with a saccharine tingling in my arms and a quickening burn in my eyes. though it was long ago that i stopped being surprised by discovering or rediscovering the willingness and capacity of youth, i think i will never stop being impressed, never stop being inspired, never stop being compelled to put the world in their hands.

4. some of us are visual learners

poempost: the universe brought me a martini

2008-10-08T12:01:00.003-05:00

the universe brought me
a martini--

rainwater, ozone,
pieces of leaf, something
fuzzy--

grace in a glass
forgotten.

photopost: MS state fair 08

2008-10-07T18:56:00.002-05:00

camera's been getting action recently. here's another attempt at re-imagining the possibilities of this space (re: another false start). a couple of retroactive photoposts to perhaps follow.

context: free biscuit; cow named "dream"; $20 margarita; beautiful people who give me hope for marriage, make therapy less necessary, ride the rides; other things carnivalesque

approaching an afterword

2008-09-12T09:21:00.000-05:00

amidst a tumultuous summer, picking away at this piece of writing went a long way in preserving my sanity. as my boss is back from sabbatical and as water seems to be finding its level, i'll rekindle the occasional hope that i find a more frequent context to write (setting myself up for the requisite guilty inertia felt thereafter).

in any case (verbal jigging; ms. roth: insert fuss ), this began as an afterword to a book being pulled together by my friend foster dixon (a HS teacher in birmingham, though he's recently moved so he may be a HS teacher somewhere else), and--while still ground in the book (entitled aftermath)-- it turned into an unexpected excuse to consolidate my erstwhile scattershot coming to terms with moving to MS, working at the winter institute, engaging in race and identity, etc.

while i'm certainly excited about "aftermath" being published, and do hope that my afterword is include in some form, the text belongs here as well. whatever here is.

(reminder: most references to "this book," "the texts," and unexplained people are in the context of the as yet unpublished manuscript for the aftermath)

(also: be gentle, sister ray)

****

I’m not from around here. Not from the South generally, and not from Mississippi in particular. I spent my youth and adolescence in the nearly ahistorical, neatly anonymous, and vastly white suburbs on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, and my college years in the academic, intellectual, and free-thinking playground of western Massachusetts. As I write this, I’m now in the midst of my fourth year in Mississippi—my tenure mostly spent shuffling between the Old South pastoral of Oxford and the New South tangle of Jackson (with significant jaunts in the Delta, the Coast, and the Pine Belt). While I possess a sincere and growing affinity for the communities I’ve come to navigate and negotiate while being here, it is nevertheless true that I did not grow up in the South, did not come of age in the South, and—in regards to the internal calculus of identity formed within the crucible of very specific history, culture, region, and conflict—I am not, and perhaps will never be, Southern. However, this is all (and can only be) a process of coming to terms—of identity unveiling itself as far more complicated than a matter of choice or assimilation. I don’t know if being Southern is up to me to decide, really; I don’t know if it’s up to anyone to decide.

So much (perhaps all) about identity—not only regional identity but race, gender, sexuality, class, and so on—is absent without context, especially that initial context of difference: establishing and understanding some as us and some as them. In my experience of the South, the regional us/them difference still holds profound and at times central weight, even in those rare moments when Southern identity is not an implicit commentary on racial identity and racial conflict. That being said, writing this afterword (and being asked to do so with a special consideration to my non-Southernness) is like producing a very detailed transcription of a conversation that I’ve had to engage in, or at least anticipate, nearly every time I meet someone for the first time down here. Any you’re-not-from-around-here moment has its requisite follow-ups, which I’ll deal with in their usual order:

How did you end up in Mississippi? In the abstract, I came to Mississippi because for quite some time I’d been interested in the way things like race, class, gender, sexuality, power, democracy, and community intersect, interact, and inform within the framework of educational institutions—particularly in regards to quality of service and equity of opportunity. In the concrete, I came to Mississippi to teach math in a public high school in Jackson—and came here as a member of the Mississippi Teacher Corps: a two-year, alternate-route teaching program funded by the state and run through the University of Mississippi (known to many as “Ole Miss”). I certainly understand that aspects of what I just described may pique some suspicions; a nervous reminder of ideas like Yankee, carpet-bagger, outside agitator, liberal, intellectual, colonizer, missionary, adventurer seems to haunt the periphery of any moment in which I’ve been prompted to explain myself. In light of this, I should be clear about the critical reasons I came to Jackson, Mississippi (and not Cleveland, Ohio or Montgomery, Alabama or New York City, New York or Los Angeles, California or the Rio Grande Valley in Texas or the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota) to engage in education and educational issues. Quite frankly, at the time the particular program that the Mississippi Teacher Corps offered was more attractive to me than the other programs I was looking into. There was also the impetus to teach in a less urban context than my previous teaching experiences (Manhattan and Beijing)—but this succumbed to the irony of my teaching placement in the only legitimately urban school district in the state (most of my colleagues in the Teacher Corps were placed in the Delta). So, in case you’re wondering, it was not because of some misguided, romantic fascination with/criticism of the Deep South that in May of 2005 I walked off of the graduation platform at Amherst College and into a U-Haul that I would drive directly to Oxford, Mississippi, where I would start an intense two months of teacher training before finding myself at Jim Hill High School with 147 students (all African-American), no textbooks, and only the most naïve notions of how to help young people figure out how to solve linear systems; I did those things because I wanted to begin my commitment to thinking about education (and race, class, gender, sexuality, power, democracy, community) in America, and Jackson, Mississippi, was as good a place as any to start.

Why did you stay? To put it simply: I like it here. I love the work I get to do and the communities I get to work with. I should disclose, however, that while I’m still actively engaging in issues of education, I’m no longer doing so as a high school teacher; now, this engagement comes by way of educational issues related to racial identity, intercommunity dialogue, and truth and reconciliation. That is, I now work as a Project Coordinator for the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation—an institute based at the University of Mississippi that serves the state and region, seeking to equip communities to heal their own wounds and citizens to heal their own communities. Nearly all of the projects I work on are related to education—mainly in the realm of youth inquiry/dialogue groups, education resource development, and education policy. In regards to my reasons for not staying in the classroom after my two years of the Mississippi Teacher Corps, that’s—as Foster Dixon put it in the “Introduction”—“a whole-nother-story.”

Born in 1982, I’m at the younger end of what Foster refers to as “Generation X” (if I’m a member of it at all). However, I am also two-to-three generations removed from the common Civil Rights era, and I’ve certainly spent plenty of my adult life trying to make sense of my identity in the context of race, class, and history. So, in many ways I share Foster’s premise and situation: there is the generation who experienced life under segregation and the end of so many laws and practices that characterized the institutional manifestation of white supremacy, the generation that grew up in the direct and immediate effects of that change, and now a generation or two (or three) living in the aftermath: pushed from behind by historical amnesia and pulled from the front by the post-racial promise, all the while having a hard time making sense of crumbling, all-black public schools; restaurants that refuse to or are reluctant to serve; crowds calling for the lynching of a black homecoming queen; and terminal degrees that are in some ways reliant on the (continued) existence of a poor, uneducated, non-white working class raising other people’s children, washing other people’s dishes, and doing other people’s laundry.

**

When I tell people that I work for an “institute for racial reconciliation,” I’m (understandably) often faced with at least a moment of incredulity: nearly everyone feels compelled to ask, “So what exactly does your institute do?” Well, (and this answer satisfies no one) it depends on the community; there’s not really a set list of things that we do or services we provide, nor (if you’re going to ask the nerve-racking follow up) is there a set way that we measure/define progress. The Winter Institute does not go into a community unless invited to do so, and when we go into a community we defer to local people’s leadership in determining the most important legacies of racial identity and conflict in their community and in deciding how to best engage those legacies—whether in the context of an issue that has racial conflict at its core (e.g. the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner), or an issue that is ostensibly unrelated to issues of race but whose progress is impeded by historical or contemporary fissures in local race relations (e.g. getting a sewer system installed in Rome, Mississippi).

I mention all this because no matter where we end up with communities, we almost always start in the same place with them. In reading the essays in this book I was drawn again and again to that place—bringing a diverse and representative group into the circle, and helping them to start talking with each other. For the Winter Institute, this generally requires two critical phone calls. First, a community member from somewhere in Mississippi will call up the Institute saying that fixing race relations in X-town is long overdue and it’s time to get serious about it, or that something happened in Y-ville thirty years ago and it’s been holding the community back for too long, or that there’s some issue in Z-burg that folk can’t seem to find common ground on—but for reasons grounded in community divisions unrelated to the issue itself. I’ve seen my boss and mentor, Dr. Susan Glisson, on the line with this first phone call a dozen times. She always responds in the same way: “OK. Go out into your community and pull together as many different voices as you can. Especially the voices that you feel may disagree with you on this issue. Gather community members, local leadership, young people, old people. Agree upon a place and a time to meet, and call us back. Then we can talk about how to best proceed.” The second phone call is rare.

When we do get a call back and we do come into a community to facilitate a meeting, we always start with a process we learned from John O’Neal, a SNCC field secretary and co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, Theresa Holden—O’Neal’s longtime collaborator at Junebug Productions and the Color Line Project—and Curtis Muhammad, also a SNCC field secretary and one of the first local Mississippi youth to join the Movement. We sit people in a circle, share some simple ground rules, and ask everyone to respond—from their own experience—to the following:

Tell a story about the first time you realized that race was the “elephant in the room”—something that everyone noticed but no one talked about, something that was big, and there, and affected everything despite our best efforts to ignore it.

Most important to this process, called a “story circle,” is the fact that the facilitators insist that the participants reserve all cross-talk until everyone has told his or her story. No challenges, no corrections, no follow-up, no commentary; all of this can (and is encouraged to) take place once all the stories are brought into the circle, but until that time everyone is asked to tell a single story from their experience and asked to simply listen while others do the same.

The essays in this book are a powerful reminder of how using personal narratives of “elephant” moments as a springboard for reflecting upon the legacy of race and racism in our lives and communities is—quite simply—obvious, natural, and common. Perhaps this is why people are so unsatisfied with my response to “what exactly does your institute do?” Essentially, the only thing we do in each community is help people talk to each other; after that, it’s up to the community in regards to how we’ll egnage. There is no magic wand, no convoluted and acronym-bound process, no two-day workshop, no enumerated steps or cycle. In our work, there’s hardly the claim of understanding what would be sufficient for improving race relations or achieving racial reconciliation in any particular case (again, that would be up to the community); there is, however, a firm claim of understanding what is necessary for those things: that people can talk to each other, can listen to each other, and can bring each other into the circle.

That being said, I feel that it would be improper if I did not bring myself into the circle at this point. I intend on engaging in plenty of follow-up and commentary as I continue and conclude this piece of writing; I should not do so without bringing my own “elephant moment” into the room:

Growing up, I never really understood why we didn’t speak Spanish at home. I mean, in a sense I’m a first-generation American whose father came from Colombia as a child—who grew up half here and half there, with dual narratives of the Kardiac Kids and dulce de leche—and in a sense my performative whiteness is hardly questionable—constructed rather seamlessly in a middle/upper-middle class Midwestern suburb. Even those visual, skin-deep aspects of otherness are—with me—ephemeral at best: my mother’s being Irish-German doesn’t really bring any melanin to the table, and the family of my father’s mother was one of sugar cane plantation wealth and European lineage (the kind of folk who end up on the getting kidnapped and shot by the quasi-Marxists side of a decades-long civil war). My father’s father certainly has some mestizo about him, but without his thick accent I don’t imagine many people would think twice about his racial, ethnic, or national identity. So, my only hope for my skin holding on to the half of me that I hardly access is that perhaps in spare moments it achieves the quality of ambiguity I’ve fantasized about since first reading Faulkner’s description of Joe Christmas as “parchment colored.” That being said, it is hard to express how shockingly pleasant it is in those very rare moments when someone assumes there’s something not white about me.

At some point in high school, I asked my father why he—to put it quite bluntly—whitened. Why don’t we speak Spanish? Why is Colombia something that hangs on our walls but not our bodies? How can my grandmother be so full of sound and color—a tiny, erratic torrent of language and life—and he be so... so much like everyone else’s white, middle class dad?

Then my father told me a story. He told me about a time when he was living in Pittsburg—where he and my grandparents first moved after leaving Colombia—and decided to wander down to a nearby playground to see what was going on. He must have been four or five at the time. Things started off fine—balls tossed, slides slid, objects climbed. But, at some point, my father began to speak—in Spanish, the only language he knew. And he told me that he’ll never forget the way that the other children at the playground just immediately shunned him—my image for this is always a miniature version of my father sitting on one swing under a gray sky as an empty one sways slowly beside him—and he’ll never forget the feeling of shame in having something that was a part of him, that he had essentially no choice in, create such a strong aversion in people around him, people that he just wanted to play on the swings with. My father says that it was at that point that he become determined to stop speaking Spanish, to learn English, to fit in, and never to have to feel that way again.

Every time I tell that story I find myself focusing on something different. In this particular instance I find myself halting my typing so that I can look at my hands and try to see the parchment skin. So many emotions are in that story—anger, shame, sadness, empathy—and so many difficult concepts—passing, for instance. Yet, at its core is my father—a strong man, a good man—and he’s so sad, and so alone. And I don’t ever want him to feel that way again either.

**

The stories in these pages could very well have been lifted from any one of the many, many story circles I’ve participated in and/or facilitated in communities throughout Mississippi; in most of those story circles I recounted some version what I’ve written above. Of course, no one sat these writers down and gave them the “elephant in the room” prompt, but each story is nevertheless similarly haunted with those moments wherein time balloons as the storyteller bears witness to an unmistakable union of race and power—moments at once roiling with confusion, searing with anger, and thick with guilt: Jim Grimsley’s “black bitch” exchange; Patricia Hoskins’ utterance of “nigger”; Dawne Shand in a swimming pool; Ravi Howard in a restaurant; Glenis Redmond in a sundown-town. Present as well in these stories is the sense that so much about who we are or how we view the world is an aftermath to these moments. One can hardly unearth a first encounter with the intense consequences of racial identity without discussing as well the long, essential process of coming to terms: Foster Dixon walking away from Masonry; Stephanie Powell Watts looking back with pride/nostalgia at an early and “ephemeral” moment of racial inclusion; Lynn Waston feeling a deep sense of being out of place; Leslie Haynesworth confronting the “zero-sum game” of race, gender, motherhood, and opportunity; Ray Morton slowly unraveling and re-imagining white Southern identity; me halting my hands as I type.

In “Why it Matters,” after recounting a process of discovering a possible African-American ancestry in her father’s family—which had previously been “explained away” as “Indian blood”—and encountering her father’s constant refusal to have a DNA test to determine his heritage, Patricia Hoskins offers the following:

“That’s when I realized that even in my hometown, where everyone is white, race matters. It’s just that no one wants it to matter because that makes things too difficult; it opens a new can of worms… Race is too abstract, too inconceivable, and at the end of the day, too disturbing.”

Here, Ms. Hoskins demonstrates the all-too-common notion that exploring the impact of race and racism upon our identities would risk unhinging a kind of Pandora’s box—even in a town that assumes itself to be all white (thus setting itself up for inevitable and innumerable historical ironies). Furthermore, this attitude of resistance, in its preemptive fear of letting race “matter,” actually gives it more ways of mattering. Race is not wholly abstract, because we experience it; race is not wholly inconceivable, because we can articulate it; race is not wholly disturbing, because we can find comfort and support in it. What this book embodies is exactly the sort of honest engagement in both individual and collective memory that will take such an “abstract,” “inconceivable,” and “disturbing” a thing as race and illustrate how it can play a central role in the specificity of our lives—thus showing it in the light of experience rather than the shadows of suspicion.

Missing from these texts, however, is the moment after our stories have been brought into the circle. So far, we have been tilling the field—turning up the ground to see what is there—and any dialogue grown within has been implicit as best. What is lacking then in these pages—perhaps impossible to achieve in this medium—is the explicit conversation between story-tellers, wherein we all engage in reflecting upon whatever common ground and insight have been brought forth as a result of the active listening that is structured into the story circle process. In the case of this book, though, is the reader’s task to cast the seeds of dialogue: the ground here has been turned by some outstanding individuals— poets, professors, teachers, elected officials, political operatives. The soil is rich with pain, and wisdom, and hope. Hold it in your hand for a while; see what can grow. Then, if you get a moment, bring yourself into the circle—we will share what is harvested.

the slipperiness of success stories.

2008-06-18T11:50:00.000-05:00

this one (like many before it) goes out to ben guest, as it's a wonderful twist on the old "one child at a time" mantra, especially in regards to the undeniable (though assuredly tenuous, as the following post will illuminate) pleasure of knowing that a young person is achieving the excellence and receiving the opportunities she deserves-- and that you are somehow causally connected to that process. that being said, it's a long road.

previous posts related to R:

R--

i am very disappointed to hear from mr. roth and from margaret that you are considering going to jsu next year. i am in the process of tracking down someone at smith that can talk to you about financial options, and hope that my efforts are not wasted.

it goes without saying that the opportunities at smith college are vastly different than those at jsu. furthermore, if one of your concerns-- as margaret has conveyed to me-- is that since you are a valedictorian than smith college should not require you to take out a loan, i am severely disappointed in this attitude-- since i've always admired your humility, earnestness, and sense of duty.

no one at amherst college gets scholarships-- you're lucky that smith has some. every bit of financial aid at places like amherst, harvard, williams, etc. comes in the form of need-based loans and grants given to students based on their or their parent's income level. there are many reasons for this, one of which is that if a place like smith college wanted to fill its incoming class with all valedictorians-- it could. there are 450 slots for the incoming class at amherst and over 15,000 applicants-- certainly at least 450 of those applicants are valedictorians, or have a perfect ACT score, or a perfect SAT score, or whatever. but-- and i hope you understand this-- that's not the point. no one is letting you into smith college because you're a valedictorian from jim hill high school-- it is a meaningful though i imagine minor qualification given the depth and breadth of your finer qualities.

furthermore, i want to remind you that i was certainly not the valedictorian at my high school, that i certainly took out loans to go to amherst (which i am still paying off, and it's not a big burden), and that i chose the financial risk of amherst over scholarships from other schools who wanted to reward me financially but-- in comparison to amherst-- not academically (that's right, jsu may pay you-- but that doesn't mean they're going to teach you).

in your recommendation letter, i wrote this of you:

"At the end of the [Princeton Review Program], [R] had gained 400 points on her cumulative [SAT] score, and continues to improve as she sits for additional SAT and ACT tests, ever focused on the opportunities afforded to her by academic success, and profoundly conscious that – though many of her peers are and will be satisfied with scores and performances that are “good enough” – she can always do better, and that excellence is rarely satisfied."

R, you've always struck me as someone who understands that "excellence is rarely satisfied," and certainly as someone who would not be "satisfied with scores and performance that are 'good enough.'" however, in light of your current dilemma-- i am concerned that see you are seeking what can only be described as a rather troubling satisfaction (i.e. money) for a questionable indicator of excellence (i.e. being a high school valedicatorian-- which i assure you is both impressive and meaningful today but will mean much less so in ten years) from an institution that is certainly in the realm of "good enough" (i.e. jsu).

i do not want to look back on those words that i wrote and fear that i had the wrong impression of someone that i cared so much for as a student. the rewards and opportunities that you are headed for are neither obvious nor tangible; i hope that you can accept that monetary satisfaction is so trivial in contrast to the potential benefit of a community of academic excellence that you so deserve to be in. smith will not be easy-- academically, financially, personally-- but it will be a space in which you have the opportunity to grow and achieve beyond your wildest imaginations, and to transcend the boundaries of region and community.

please, R, approach this next phase of your life with patience, faith, humility, and strength. know that i will support you in whatever decision you make-- though i will voice be a voice of both criticism and encouragement as you continue your journey to excellence. i can only hope that you make decisions that are mature enough to embrace the complexity of both the known and the unknown.

yours,
mr. molina

paranoid/lovesick: found poems 1-4

2008-05-08T13:24:00.000-05:00

a mixtape and companion poems generated by different methods of extraction.

found poem 1

1.

not sure
if you mind
if I dance with you

2.

now I’m watching
the moon

I’m watching
all turn

electric lights
I think I’m falling

for you

3.

you were out of my league
at a distance that I didn’t want to see

I still believed in the phrases that we breathed
but I know the distance isn’t fair to cross

at a distance that I didn’t want to see
I wanted you nearer

I love the place where we shared our tiny grace
but just because it’s real don’t mean it’s gonna work

4.

it’s a secret
I’ve been keeping from you

it’s a secret
I’ve been keeping for you

5.

tell me that

the temperature is rising
in your head

tell me that
love is not to be

**

this way
the reason why I’m trying
to make it

alright trying
to drive through
girl wish it

**

tonight don’t you expect to
make a phone call

tonight treat me
like a motherfucker
who was right

**

take me to your bed
and show me some trees

6.

then she’s gone and my friends can come along
and it’s never strange just how long she stays

7.

I like the way you hold
your head

let me stay here
for a week on your couch

but I would rather
sleep in your bed or

even better yet we could
run away
and never rest

your mind is filled
with fantasies

you give me
your insanity

8.

so tell me why didn’t I leave
four hours ago at least
I’ve seen your glare

down county road 8
salty lips and whirred fans
shine on

catfish angel
you know they can’t
hurt me like you do

9.

I have your good clothes in the car
I have your dreams and your teeth marks

I don’t have any questions
you were right about the end

you must have known I’d do this someday

10.

fluids of a summer night
a delicate blend of sweat

take my lip between your teeth
fingers underneath
stains and scars I can’t explain

11.

I don’t want to be your friend
I just want to be a part of you

12.

you know I went home
last night sat down on my bed
and cried

**

I woke up to find it
nothing but a dream
that’s why I sing
this lonesome song

13.

tell me
you don’t want me anymore
time don’t matter anymore

if you want to fight
just bring it on
and if the glass will shatter
it’s deeper when you fall

14.

a young man came by
with a beard on his cheek
and a gleam in his eye

15.

I sailed a wild wild sea
beneath a weeping willow tree
afraid to do the things
that I knew I had to do

16.

anyone can see
I’m in love with
how you feel

17.

the sound of the spectacle
everything we ever said

we like to get our kicks
in this way sometimes

you tell me

found poem 2

1.

dancing like heroes would,
it’s sad that you think we were all passion;

it don’t think it’s all flailing limbs, twisted dispatches—

it’s you,
it’s me.

2.

the universe is everything,
I always thought

now I’m considering watching
the trains, and the clouds--

I didn’t have to be all ashamed;
it’s the universe.

3.

I was and you were the sea.

Down to the bottom—bubbles
and twenty-thousand affections—
my depths made a pressure,
and all your fluids the force
underneath my distance.

I wanted you nearer,
and affection floats like a stone:
so close, so all alone.

And you were underneath,
you were nearer.

4.

I’ve been
a secret
for you.

5.

all the little words down
like a spider through the cracks;

all the things I thought
come through a song;

all the glass will try
to tell you: nowhere.

6.

you’ll never see;
I’m happier.

7.

undeclared: a dream
stays vanity.

8.

wild stars hanging there—
they know she floats beneath.

9.

hair and fingernails
arms around arms.

time riots; they
must have known

10.

tongue forced: quoting
what had been devouring;
things left unsaid.

11.

it is so hard to want
just a part of you.

12.

I can’t know the nightmare
when you go.

13.

I remember, bright-eyed,
the light fell:

maybe time don’t matter.

14.

dear, take from me; shove and steal—
brick and barbed wire to beard, cheek, and eye:

to remember a parting, stiff and sore,
from nights heard perfectly and time brief.

15.

wild and brief, the pieces of light;
short is the night, and the sun a young fool.

an escapade sailed beneath some
questions, lay time as short as song.

16.

a shadow swinging in the church,
the trees rumbling in trying fits:
Don Quixote is at the bottom of anyone.

17.

the spectacle wasn’t everything;
everything means ourselves, I guess.

found poem 3

if there’s one thing that I could never confess
that will be the end of everything:

at a distance that I didn’t want to see, I wanted
you nearer—it’s a secret I’ve been keeping from you.

I know we’re going to need a lucky one
that I don’t think I recognize, but

if I had the chance to hold your hand
and I’d know you’re hanging there for me—

out among the missing sons and daughters,
head awash with what had been.

I just want to be a part of you; I don’t care
when you go; I don’t care how long you stay;

time don’t matter anymore. I’m stiff and
I’m sore; afraid to do the things that I knew

I have to do. I will find my nitch in everything
we ever said, everything we might have done:

you tell me.

found poem 4

Out in every song is the back of my mind: expanding
out of clouds, confused and electric; falling
and waving—first at a distance. Nearer, a pressure
punctures the thirst, because it’s real: of the sea
of affection underneath a secret, a kind of trickle
coming through cracks in the sun, through a phone
call between trees: perfect and lost all night. I wouldn’t
hold a dream undeclared; at least hanging stars shine
on, sweet-toothed fans of difference, and everything
must be forgiven by questions of imperatives, trampled
impressions of things unsaid—to see a part of it,
when little shines through. It’s a fight to shatter
the secret, singing with a smile and barbed wire
and a beard and a brick—meeting and parting and sore
from sleeping on suggested time. Distress, though,
like a wild sea beneath my feet, is brief: pieces of this
song now lay broken and short, but starry
pebbles trying to love in shiny fits of everything.

fleche, coule, parry

2008-04-30T09:37:00.000-05:00

ben's comment, and a response embedded

Momo,

1) I don’t think your comments are particularly aggressive, or something to regret later. As long as you’ve known me, you know I love a good debate, so I take no offense at our difference of opinion (and on several of your points we do agree). The only part I think you will regret is that last paragraph. Whether you have taught for two years or twenty or zero, your beliefs are equally valid. Experience, of course, helps to inform beliefs, but it doesn’t alter the validity.

(1) that last paragraph is only there to serve as a coincidental preemption to what i completely agree is a moot point-- the relationship between experience and validity of argument. my only regret is that i did not include a nod to the fact that pissing contests about service are often red herrings (though i'm not sure i'm using the idiom correctly).

2) The parts of Michelle’s blog that I appreciate are, for the most part, different from the parts you most strongly disagree with.

(2) there are certainly parts of the post that i agree with (and i also regret not taking time to better establish that fact in the midst of my fuss). it is true that teaching is at times unexpectedly difficult and at times threatens to be a unmanageable and dehumanizing experience (for the teacher, the student, the community)-- and people about to engage in this arena should be prompted in this light. my issue is less with the validity of concern for incoming teachers, it is rather with the rhetoric through which that concern is manifest-- which (and i think that this is where you and i disagree alot) i feel extinguishes the value of intent. my assumption is that you're a little more forgiving in regards to the fact that many of the basic truths and basic intents are not regrettable.

3) The part of the blog that I was highlighting and that I, of course, agree with, is that you have to be strict to be successful at classroom management as a first-year teacher. I haven’t read Skinner so I have no idea if I subscribe to his philosophy. However, I wholeheartedly believe that people respond to incentives, positive and negative. In a classroom setting this means rewarding behavior that you want and punishing behavior you don’t. It’s going to take one hell of an argument, and a lot of data, to convince me otherwise. Michelle was making the point that some (many?) first-years have trouble with the idea of being strict and implementing rules and consequences. Further, Michelle was making the point that while it may seem harsh (key word is seem) it is not actually harsh. Having a well-ordered, safe, classroom with rules and procedures is a sign of caring about the students. I think she is exactly right about this. The main problem you have, I think, with this notion is that Michelle is asking the first-years to “put aside their conscience.” I don’t think this is accurate and I don’t see this reflected in her post. Again, the key word is “seems.” I don’t think Michelle is saying “put away your conscience.” I think she is saying, “examine the ideas of rules, rewards, and consequences before you dismiss them outright as unnecessarily harsh and/or demeaning.”

(3) of course systems of punishment and reward produce results. i'm far from disputing that. nor am i disputing skinner-influenced behavioral training as a whole (for those of you who want to raise the issue of "that's not what skinner intended"). rather, i am deeply afraid that a deep reliance on punishment and reward systems can amplify the satisfaction of social results (i.e. kids in their seats, kids walking in a straight line, kids saying "yes, sir") to a point to which the humanity of those controlled gets drowned out. furthermore, the ultimate risk of punishment-reward fetish is that when an individual's sole reason for not doing something "bad" is the fear of punishment, the hope for an ethics substantially grounded in community and empathy is practically lost. it is this sort of control mania-- oscillating between implosion of order (due to the numbness of punishment) and amplification of consequence framework (zero tolerance everything, armed security, constant surveillance)-- that propels so much of our schoolhouse-to-jailhouse/cradle-to-prison pipelines. also, (and we do disagree on this), when i hear a lot of "do it," "ignore that," "Believe us," and-- come on-- "The only way to do it ... THE ONLY WAY TO DO IT in their world is through power. It's what they understand. It's the only coin of the realm here," and no consideration for a return to nuanced and humane engagement with a group of young people (honestly, what follows the "once you've earned their respect" phase is merely a reference to the ease of asserting dominance with a mere glance), then i most certainly feel that the call to examine the necessity of rules & consequences bleeds into "put away your conscience"-- though i agree with you in general that this is not a necessary exchange. it's just kind of awkward when we're actually comparing students to dogs (which, yes, references pavlov and by extension skinner).

4) The stuff about chaotic and tragic lives and seeing more violence before school starts than some of the teachers have ever seen is hyperbole. I believe this is the main part you take issue with. You and Michelle can blog this out.

(4) i agree with michelle: "hyperbole is a useful rhetorical tool." however, like any tool (e.g. punishment-reward systems) it can be used irresponsibly, and a mere note that it can be useful does not somehow breathe whisk away the problematic consequences of misuse.

5) The part that I really like in Michelle’s post, and the point I was highlighting, is this: You'll be tempted to think, "I'll be the one who's different. I'll show them respect and they'll respect me for it. They'll want to please me because I'm the first person who's ever smiled at them and shown I care." You will be fresh meat. It won't happen. Michelle is exactly right about this. This happens every year with a few first-years…

(5) yes. i regret not commenting on the "you'll be fresh meat" passage. one the one hand, it is certainly worthwhile to preempt a hypothetical incoming teacher's notion that he/she will be the one that makes a difference in these lives just by the mere notion of caring; that these poor, deprived people are just waiting for a savior of respect and care. however, instead of calling to light the nuance of community and individual, or countering the regrettable notion that in the event that a new teacher would show care, respect, or even a smile it would somehow be the first time these young people have ever experienced it (much the same for civilized this and that)-- the text seems to return to its violent, colonial framework of a struggle between unimaginable chaos and ignorance and the necessity of structure and power to contain/civilize it. while it is not true that a new teacher is going to be the first sunshine in these young people's cloudy existence, nor is it true that his/her sunshine will-- by mere fact of its sunniness-- fix everything, it is also not true that in response to this once should retreat to the notion that "respect" and relationship-based ethics simply "won't happen" because it's a dog-eat-dog world and these people somehow can't "understand nuanced behavior." again, though the intent is fair, the result is regrettably a violent, cynical shadow of an erstwhile conqueror's optimism. it is a failed revolt away from kurtz saying "kill them all."

(p.s.)

re: "the benefit of sarcasm"

can i be on the board who gets to select "the best job of pissing me off" award?

re: "I'm thinking it's Molina from the turgid prose and oh-so-hip lack of concern for language conventions."

am i "oh-so-hip" because i don't capitalize?

rendundant

2008-04-29T18:17:00.000-05:00

clearly, "the occasional bout of fury" and "in rare moments of rage" are redundant, though the sentiment remains infrequent.

to echo myself, few things piss me off more than dehumanizing young people, romanticizing community, and colonial/paternal rhetoric as a vector for talking about pretty much anything.

the occasional bout of fury

2008-04-29T18:07:00.000-05:00

selected by ben guest as an exemplary passage spawned by his annual "advice to an incoming teacher" writing assignment for the teacher corps.

During summer school you'll be told to manage your classroom in a way that seems dehumanizing and demeaning. Do it. It won't seem necessary in your summer school class. Ignore that. Your students in your classrooms come from families that are chaotic and tragic beyond your wildest imagination. They see more violence and fear before they come to school some days than you've probably ever seen in your life. What they don't have is structure. They are in free fall in terms of self-regulation. They do not understand nuanced behavior. I know it seems demeaning, but these students need the structure that gives them an anchor.

You'll be tempted to think, "I'll be the one who's different. I'll show them respect and they'll respect me for it. They'll want to please me because I'm the first person who's ever smiled at them and shown I care." You will be fresh meat. It won't happen. Believe us.

my response follows. as this all came out in streams of being really pissed off, i will most likely regret the aggressiveness of the language.

i take serious, serious issue with this (or at least the part that ben has lifted up on his blog). particularly:

"During summer school you'll be told to manage your classroom in a way that seems dehumanizing and demeaning. Do it."

wherein you actually ask people to push aside critical engagement in the identity/power issues that lie beneath the very real notion that applying a grotesquely skinnerian framework for behavioral control may be problematic, and-- yes-- dehumanizing (which it is). this is not to say that one should not attempt to create a humanizing and rigid environment, nor is it to say that being strict or structure-happy is necessarily problematic. it is to say, that i take issue with the (unfortunately common) implication that people will be better off putting their conscience aside for the moment while they learn the rigoramole of punishment-punishment-punishment-reward-punishment-punishment because the "reality" of the "dogs" that they're going to have to "train" is just so (gasp) different from their own that they can't possibly understand it, let alone engage in it on it's own terms and or let it inform/be informed by whatever previous socioethical framework they are fluent in.

"Your students in your classrooms come from families that are chaotic and tragic beyond your wildest imagination."

wherein you blatantly romanticize and make caricature of (and, to qualify my use of these terms, i point to your use of "wildest imagination") the very community that you are serving. once again dehumanization takes the form of hyperbole: that the "reality" of the living conditions outside of the school building (i.e. in the space of homes) is just beyond rational understanding. i contend that it is in fact not that hard to engage in (let alone wrap one's mind around) the wide range of family relationships that one encounters in a community (any community, actually), and perhaps the real issue is that we're letting our "wildest imaginations" get the best of us, instead of doing the difficult work of engaging in the complexities of power, race, identity, community, etc. and, of course, we can all bring out our "life is tough" list of horrible situations that students have to deal with-- but the suggestion of embedding one's response to that list within a framework that replaces rational, supportive engagement with an arm's length just-make-sure-their-shirts-are-tucked-in and use-your-discipline-ladder-so-they-know-there's-structure is far from good advice. furthermore, the most tragic consequence of this caricature is the absence of family lives that are healthy (though, like all, imperfect). dear future teacher: some of your parents give a damn. more importantly, don't for a second let a class, race, or region informed assumption ignite a functional "imagination" to eclipse the reality of your community.

"They do not understand nuanced behavior."

wherein you actually remove the human element from our students. are you kidding me? they don't understand nuanced behavior? this is not only a grossly offensive homogenization of young people (in the same vein of your previous grossly offensive homogenization of mississippi families), but takes the cake in what can only be racialized undertones in these other efforts to help the unconverted yet-to-be-teacher "understand" the sheer uncivilized context in which they are about to have their colonial trial by fire. by actually presupposing that a set of human beings do not (as a whole, mind you) understand nuanced behavior, one opens the door for a vast amount of abuse stemming from the conclusion that they "don't know any better" or i "know what's best for them," a pair of rationales that have some interesting historical precedent (especially in mississippi: if black folk don't understand the nuances of our fine constitution...)

and, for those who may take issue with my taking issue (and want to play the battle wounds game), a little preemption: yes, i was a public high school teacher. yes, i was a public high school teacher in mississippi. yes, i'm still in mississippi. oh, and if you want to really find a reason for me to not having the background necessary to "understand where she's coming from," i did not teach in the delta (which, i may add, does not corner the market on educational failure).

another spring stanza

2008-04-23T13:35:00.000-05:00

tearing up silence;
throwing ghosts at it--
arms, breasts,
the smell of her neck--
an empty phone.

WWIRR = youtube

2008-04-11T11:35:00.001-05:00

first up: our promo video. we're working on converting oral histories and other video documentation...

simply, amen.

2008-04-03T09:08:00.001-05:00

"fixing education policy," by jim ryan in Slate.com

in rare moments of rage

2008-03-24T14:24:00.000-05:00

few things piss me off more than abstinence only sex education. this of course means that as a public high school teacher in mississippi i would occasionally leap into a fit of rage when faced with stuff like the following:

(1) explaining to a student where her uterus was and how ovulation works
(2) explaining to a student that HIV/AIDS is not created by the mere fact of two men engaging in intercourse
(3) explaining to a student that it is not true that condoms break most of the time
(4) explaining to a student that HIV/AIDS is not passed through tears, sweat, and/or saliva

at the very least, conversations like this push the boundaries of propriety. and yet, when three students carry to term during my two years in the classroom, and with knowledge that many more have children at home and no services or support to speak of for these women-- i quickly stop caring about what is or is not appropriate in the face of absurd and dangerous faith-cum-policy.

pun intended.

also, it always kills me to realize that i went to an all-boys catholic high school and had very comprehensive sex education. of course, sometime afterwards we would walk wide-eyed over to theology class for our daily allowance of guilt, but still...

jesuits: 1
bush administration: 0

oh, we also learned about evolution.

jesuits: 2
bush administration: 0

from "Of condoms, Clinton, Obama and McCain," by Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., in Salon.com, March 24, 2008

As a pediatrician, doing my job well means I talk with teens about their sex lives... That means I'm testing them for sexually transmitted diseases, performing pelvic exams to make sure they don't have signs that can lead to cervical cancer later, and discussing and prescribing contraception -- abstinence, condoms, Plan B and birth control pills.

This kind of comprehensive approach to teen sex has been successful. Teens have been waiting longer to have sex, and teen pregnancy rates dropped by almost 30 percent between 1990 and 2000. If they are sexually active, teenage girls have reported having fewer partners and are more likely to use some form of contraception than in the past.

... Since 2000, teens have faced a rise in abstinence-only education, hurdles to obtaining Plan B emergency contraception and a hike in the price of birth control pills.
... Shortly after President Bush took office, he began pushing abstinence-only sex education, where teens learn that the only way to prevent STDs and pregnancy is to wait to have sex until they're married. If or when abstinence proponents do mention contraceptives, they greatly exaggerate their failure rates to scare teens into believing they are useless. Funding for abstinence programs has grown to around $180 million annually.
... According to the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the nation's largest study of teen behavior, kids who took abstinence vows kept them for just a little over one year. Worse, pledgers who failed at abstinence were less likely to use contraception when they had sex. Further, the study shows that in the past six years, the prevalence of STDs has been similar between pledgers and nonpledgers.

...there was last summer's revelation that the price of oral contraceptives was going up for college students. Traditionally, Big Pharma has given campuses a break on the price of birth control pills. But the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act put an end to that, as the government cut drug reimbursements to pharmacies. Suddenly, an $8 to $12 charge for a month's worth of birth control spiked to between $30 and $50. That priced out a whole lot of young women from protecting themselves.

While a dreamy religious conservative might argue that the spike will also price teenage girls out of having sex, think again. Most first-person reports tell us that women's sex lives haven't changed. Now, however, they're having riskier sex, relying only on condoms or depending on Plan B as birth control, taking it after each episode of intercourse, something it's not approved for.

...There has been nearly a decade of disconnect between Washington and young women. If you have any doubts about the consequences, consider that the teen pregnancy rate recently rose for the first time in 15 years. That prompts the question: Who's going to stand up for teens over the next 10 years?

noticed: mississippi goddamn

2008-03-19T16:00:00.000-05:00

the name of this tune is mississippi goddamn
and i mean every word of it

~ nina simone

from "Communism is not Biblical," by David Thigpen, in The Daily Mississippian, March 19, 2008

The problem of meeting with communist leaders for most political candidates is that they themselves are not communist, but if you are a communist, then what is the controversy in meeting with a communist leader?

The answer is that there isn't any for Obama, because he is a communist.

yes. this was actually printed in an opinion piece in the actual ole miss newspaper. with writing like this, who needs satire?

more adventures in rhetoric

2008-03-18T11:36:00.000-05:00

(1)

i take severe issue with any position that posits "one _____ at a time" as a model or objective for change. "something something something Mississippi one child at a time" is an overly common tag line for education-related groups and organizations, and (i think) used to be in heavy use by the Mississippi Teacher Corps-- though a glance through the new website now brings up much more palatable fare: from the feel-good “Be the change you wish to see in the world” of ghandi to the historically poignant "How can a country like this allow it? Maybe they just don’t know” of bobby kennedy.

in any case, i can't get over a few pitfalls that are assumed within a "one ____ at a time" outlook. first, you run the risk of contextualizing progress within the framework of success stories, which are by definition only visible/notable within a broad structure of failure, and as such couldn't be considered "successful" if these preconditions were somehow mitigated-- and, you know, it weren't a heart-warming surprise to run into a phd candidate who went to public school in the delta; it were just a natural consequence of things like equal opportunity, talent, and hard work (and mississippi--as any population of human beings--is full of the latter two). second, hinging one's contributions to the coattails of success stories is often causally misleading; when the pipelines of economic, educational, political, and social progress are severely absent from an environment, "success" is clearly less a consequence of any common vector within that environment, and more a natural outlier of a population. that is, no matter how much you oppress, uneducate, disenfranchise, impoverish, etc. there will always be a frederick douglass or a fannie lou hamer-- individuals whose achievements may very well have be built in resistance to an environment or despite an environment, but for which the typical channels of authority and resource distribution in an environment have little claim.

that being said, of course every once in a while a kid will come out of jim hill high school who gets into brown or stanford or whatever, but the mere instance of an outlier passing through a school's hallways does not a productive environment make. sure enough, we've all appropriately wept when this or that president or neurosurgeon thanks his or her third grade reading teacher for believing in him or her and that's why education's important, but underneath the kleenex haunts things like teacher attrition, false bootstraps nostalgia, and/or the fact that one teacher in one school building somewhere taught a successful person how to read does not redeem american education; how many of mrs. so-and-so's pumpkins are in parchman?(note, i am not dismissing mrs. so-and-so's impact on president whatever, i'm just saying that we can't look at mrs. so-and-so or dr. human-interest-story and honestly be convinced that our approach to education works. "one _____ at a time," like "it takes a village" or "it starts in the home," is excellent fodder for anecdote, narrative, and memoir, but is awful for--excuse me mr. ghandi-- being change.)

what is more, even if you could create a model that produces consistent, albiet one-at-a-time gain--this is at best a thumb-in-the-dike, and at worst another mode of denying the cracks in the levee. for all the good they produce, even the relatively large-yield charter reform efforts like KIPP are ultimately limited by their own measures of quality control (the whole KIPP network includes 14,000 students; there are 150,000 public school students in the state of mississippi, which ranks 31st in the US in terms or population). for all the success stories of students that got in to an excellent school by way of lottery, there are countless others who never made it off the waiting list (thus the retention of the success story element). so, in the event that the KIPP people (or next cycle's silver bullet analogues) offer little in the way of deep, structural reform--we're just doing a better job helping people swim upstream. which is fine, i guess. i'm just more interested in whether or not we can think about changing course. (how's that for mixing metaphors?)

(2)

last evening, a student of mine called to tell me that she was accepted to smith college with a half-tuition scholarship. she is a wonderful, honest, determined, brilliant young woman who deserves all the accolades she receives. i taught her math in her 10th grade, still moderate an after school program she's a leader in, and wrote her a college recommendation letter; robbie taught her english for the past two years and moderates that same program; margaret assisted her substantailly through the college application process; jake was her teacher in an SAT prep course; and on and on.

i will admit, my skepticism aside, one child at a time certainly feels--as i look back at this student's past three years-- both exhausting and rewarding.

no cure for the libidinous like a rationale

2008-03-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

a day too long in the sun has reminded
me there's some coffee in this cream.

it's warming up quite a bit down here in pastoral oxford, mississippi.

flowers are there that once weren't there;
everywhere cars are yellow-green with the landscape's hopeful ejaculate.

i ran yesterday for 45 minutes at an unnecessary pace.

from "In Most Species, Faithfulness Is a Fantasy," by natalie angier, in the NYTimes, march 18, 2009:

It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.

[...]

Even the “oldest profession”...is old news. Nonhuman beings have been shown to pay for sex, too. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of South Bohemia described transactions among great grey shrikes, elegant raptorlike birds with silver capes, white bellies and black tails that, like 90 percent of bird species, form pair bonds to breed. A male shrike provisions his mate with so-called nuptial gifts: rodents, lizards, small birds or large insects that he impales on sticks. But when the male shrike hankers after extracurricular sex, he will offer a would-be mistress an even bigger kebab than the ones he gives to his wife — for the richer the offering, the researchers found, the greater the chance that the female will agree to a fly-by-night fling.

[...]

Commonplace though adultery may be, and as avidly as animals engage in it when given the opportunity, nobody seems to approve of it in others, and humans are hardly the only species that will rise up in outrage against wantonness real or perceived. Most female baboons have lost half an ear here, a swatch of pelt there, to the jealous fury of their much larger and toothier mates. Among scarab beetles, males and females generally pair up to start a family, jointly gathering dung and rolling and patting it into the rich brood balls in which the female deposits her fertilized eggs. The male may on occasion try to attract an extra female or two — but he does so at his peril. In one experiment with postmatrimonial scarabs, the female beetle was kept tethered in the vicinity of her mate, who quickly seized the opportunity to pheromonally broadcast for fresh faces. Upon being released from bondage, the female dashed over and knocked the male flat on his back. “She’d roll him right into the ball of dung,” Dr. Barash said, “which seemed altogether appropriate.”

public tallying 2

2008-02-15T12:01:00.000-06:00

less misanthropic today. also, i've reminded myself-- while re-reading my "i have a problem with ritual" mess-- that over the past few weeks i've herded various co-workers through a rather fixed loop from the office, to the starbucks in the student union, back to the office-- with specifics paths taken to approach and to leave the starbucks, and a with the same order made each time: a grande iced americano, no room for cream (but in which i allow a splash of milk, if only to watch the inky cloud resulting). this procession is-- at this point-- intentional, and comfortable. and a ritual, no doubt. as with my morning routine: press snooze three times, turn on the espresso machine, shower, dress, drink espresso, leave. this brings up the question: when does a routine become a ritual? what problems do i have with the ritual of walking down the aisle that i do not have with walking by the lyceum?

the public tallying of desire

2008-02-14T09:25:00.000-06:00

i have a problem with ritual. well, i'm not sure that's so much accurate as it is a nice out-of-the-blocks sentence. i have a difficult time coming to terms with ritual; i have a bothersome relationship with ritual. something.

in any case, i often plant myself in a constructivist corner when the importance of a birthday, a holiday, or an anniversary is brought to issue. embrace the arbitrary; do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself; grumble grumble grumble.

from this admittedly overly skeptical vantage point, rituals of common social gravity seem to receive the most flak. marriages, for instance: generally possessing neither rigidity nor sanctity, they are nevertheless serve a reasonable role in attempting to package public acknowledgment for something that already exists. a ring does not a marriage make; a "she's my girlfriend" does not a boyfriend (or girlfriend) make. a marriage exists, and a ring acknowledges it-- but does not create it.

in this regard, i have much appreciation for the catholic church's understanding of the sacrament of marriage-- which is not a sacrament conferred or consecrated by a mass or a priest performing a mass or a father trying not to cry at a mass; it is a sacrament consecrated by the actors themselves (in part by getting it on, yes), in the esoteric and inscrutable intertwinings of their being alive, and the "getting married" part-- i.e. the white dress, the ring barer, and the creepy uncle-- is merely an attempt to say "this thing exists," to give a visible, rigid instantiation to something that requires neither, and at the end of the day seems neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of the thing it is acknowledging to exist (and particularly not sufficient). in this light, the catholic understanding of annulment is also impressive, for it is not an act of canceling a marriage (i.e. a divorce), but rather the acknowledgment that a marriage never happened-- that there was only the finger pointing, and never the moon-- and the blushing bride, the squirming groom, the dancing flower girl, and grandma's china were all-- in a sense-- duped by a massive parade of social signifier that had form, but not substance. this is a ritualistic orientation i like, one that has no pretension of it's causal or necessary/sufficient powers-- an honest attempt at signifying, without being convinced that signifying is necessarily creating.

on the other hand, it is kind of nice to see an otherwise fancy couple sitting together at a coffee shop-- accompanied by an absurd and pink/purple embellished teddy bear, who gets the occasional kiss on the nose.

all this "being limply defiant" burst forth while reading, "of valentines jinxes and packaged gnocci," by rebecca traister in Salon.com, february 14, 2008:

As Valentine's Day approached with all its humiliations and hormones-- the in-class carnations and kissing and public tallying of desire!

[...]
Don't misunderstand. I have never given a good goddamn about Valentine's Day. Only intermittently has it had any emotional impact. Once, in the midst of a particularly agonizing winter breakup cycle, my jaw went slack during a sushi dinner with a girlfriend who was devastated that her swain would be out of town on business for the big day. "I'll know I have a boyfriend, but I'll feel so pathetic when all the women in my office are getting ready to go out for dinner and it'll look like I have nothing to do!" she said, as I quietly wondered if I could drown myself in a shallow pool of low-sodium soy sauce.

I recall a few limply defiant all-girls gatherings, designed to take the sting out of being single on the biggest Hallmark holiday of the year. But most of those ended at a dive bar, gossiping about jobs and boys. Putting energy into hating Valentine's Day is as hackneyed and old hat as hating New Year's Eve. There's no traction or originality there.
[...]

And then I rolled a perfect gnocchi.

taken at the MS state fair, 2007

noticed: misc

2008-02-13T10:14:00.000-06:00

just set up internet in my new apartment, so hopefully that will allow for better writing patterns. oddly enough, i always seem to be either wrapped up in work at the office or on the road, clinging to my ipod (with which i recently discovered npr podcasts).

that being said, there are piles of random "noticed" blurbs that were neither typed up nor was time found to comment upon them. so, a bit of a purge (also, in the next couple of days i hope to do some commentary on community meetings i've been attending):

from "Maternity Fashions, Junior Size," by Katha Pollitt, in The Nation, January 21, 2008:

Teens getting pregnant: bad. Teens having babies: good. If this makes no sense to you, wake up and smell the Enfamil. It's 2008!

[...]

In Juno, the pregnant girl is the central figure, a witty oddball who drives the action, beginning with the sex; neither the boy nor her father and stepmother, a well-meaning but rather oblivious pair, much affect her decisions. Thus, Juno goes for abortion alone, without even telling her parents she's pregnant. In real life, this would most likely have been impossible, because nearly all states in the Midwest (where the movie is set) have parental notification or consent laws.

[...]

Juno is sensible enough to realize she's just a kid and makes the choice that not long ago was forced on middle-class white girls [i.e. carrying to term]. These days, 29 percent of pregnant teens have abortions; 14 percent miscarry; of the 57 percent who carry to term, less than 1 percent give up the baby. Paradoxically, the women's movement destigmatized single motherhood and thus helped make a world in which some of the old justifications for abortion no longer seem so forceful. Now it's abortion that is a badge of shame and "irresponsibility."

[...]

Just to bring the whole reproductive carnival full circle, Florida's "Choose Life" license plates, of which more than 40,000 have been sold, have raised more than $4 million for low-income single moms. But there's a catch: only women who choose adoption qualify. A woman who wants to keep her baby can just go starve in hell. Since only a handful of woman want to give away their babies-- even among pregnant woman who plan on adoption, 35 percent chance their mind once the baby is born-- the money is just sitting there. Maybe someone, someday will make a movie about that.

from "Totally Spent," by Robert Reich, in The New York Times, February 13, 2008:

The underlying problem has been building for decades. America’s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Most of what’s been earned in America since then has gone to the richest 5 percent.

Yet the rich devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, and thus stimulating the American economy, the rich are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

The problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found ways to live beyond their paychecks. But now they have run out of ways.

The first way was to send more women into paid work. Most women streamed into the work force in the 1970s less because new professional opportunities opened up to them than because they had to prop up family incomes. The percentage of American working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 — to more than 70 percent. But there’s a limit to how many mothers can maintain paying jobs.

So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.

But there’s also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third way of spending beyond their wages. They began to borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks by refinancing home mortgages and taking out home-equity loans. But this third strategy also had a built-in limit. With the bursting of the housing bubble, the piggy banks are closing.

noticed: problems back home

2008-01-17T08:54:00.000-06:00

part of my why-i-like-living-in-mississippi-and/or-jackson narrative, or my don't-forget-that-these-problems-are-also-part-of-a-national-dilemma lecture usually involves some reference to the fact that-- in terms of race/class geographies, urban/suburban relations, and unyielding/ungrounded faith in the next great urban renewal-- my erstwhile mississippi home, jackson, very much reminds me of the place i grew up in: cleveland, ohio. of course, when curious listeners ask me to elaborate i usually stumble on the specifics of this structural analysis-- but it's remained all too obvious as i've come to know both places more over the past three years. the broad stroke is this: the white-flight patterns of abandoning the city and building the suburbs (and all the issues that derive from this economic/demographic/cultural shift) was a national phenomenon that took place in major cities across america, galvanized by the post-wwii real estate boom in the 50s and 60s. this shift was postponed in mississippi until the early 70s, in part because the state outright ignored/avoided the "all deliberate speed" part of brown v. board, which was only re-explained as "right now, asshole" in the 1969 alexander v. holmes case. there's a famous-- though perhaps apocryphal-- anecdote about jackson prep forming in the basement of first baptist church on the night of the court decision; the point is, the rest of the country had a two-decade headstart on the re-segregation maneuvers that jackson went through (with all deliberate speed, i might add) during the 70s and 80s, resulting in the predominantly poor & black urban core, shell of a forgotten manufacturing/light industry economy, financial/higher-ed/medical/legal/governmental sectors depending on professionals commuting from predominantly white upper middle class suburbs-- where a cocktail of low population density (minimum lots + building code requirements) and low taxes (leveraged on segregation-inflated property value) provide the excellent civic services that are now the race-free reason for people justifying their move (e.g. we moved to ______ because we want our kids to receive a quality public education...). that being said, there's a fine line between madison, mississippi and westlake, ohio.

some qualifiers on that: one of the reason that i plan on using my free ole miss classes (hooray for university employment) to study economics is so that i can fill in these broad strokes. however, it will nevertheless remain true that one of my go-to answers to the story circle question, "when was first time it became clear that race was the elephant in the room" will be: when i came back from my first year at amherst college-- a profoundly diverse place in many respects (race, class, region, nationality)-- and attended the graduation of my great, childhood friend, sean wilbur, at fairview park high school (fairview park was the suburb that i grew up in), i was struck with the sense that something was missing as i looked at the sea of white faces on the auditorium stage. it was, very simply, other people-- perhaps some in the sea of black/brown faces undoubtedly on an auditorium stage in the cleveland public school district around the same time. i guess it became at that point very viscerally odd that both seas laid claim to the cultural signifier "cleveland"-- but that same term meant such different, and at times contrasting things. now, this would all be fine and well if these terms were in a healthy sociolinguistic engagement (which is probably part of the democratizing possibility of a city-- and all the different, contrasting things it requires to be in the same place at the same time), but they weren't. the same, of course, with "jackson."

here's to being a progressive, snooty, pseudo-intellectual limousine liberal:

from, "A Suburb Looks Nervously At Its Urban Neighbor," in The New York Times, January 17, 2008:

Mr. McDermott was taking a walk early New Year’s Eve when a group of young African-Americans attacked him from behind. They slashed his face, kicked him, and mashed his leg with a lead pipe, the police said. A neighbor banging on a window scared the teenagers away.

[...]

Scott Lee, the acting police chief of Shaker Heights, said the beating was a random crime of opportunity and was not gang-related.

Ludlow is a neighborhood of tidy Tudor and colonial homes with small yards shaded by mature sycamore trees. Part of the neighborhood lies in the affluent suburb of Shaker Heights and the other part lies in Cleveland, the fourth-poorest city in the country, according to the Census Bureau. Children on both sides of the neighborhood attend Shaker Heights public schools. The only way to know which city you are in is to look for the street signs, which in Cleveland are blue and in Shaker Heights are white.

Mr. McDermott was attacked on a quiet street one block south of Ludlow Elementary School, which in the 1950s and ’60s became the center of Shaker Heights’s successful integration effort.

[...]

What has surprised Ludlow residents most since the attack is the reaction of people around the region.

[...]

“So move,” Dick Feagler, a columnist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote after the attack. “But do it like we all have — like the whole three-county area has — don’t call it racism. Call it reality.”

[...]

“I wonder how much ‘tolerance’ the ‘progressive,’ snooty, pseudo-intellectual limousine liberal, socialists of Shaker Heights will show now that the thugs are in their neighborhood too,” a reader wrote on a Cleveland Plain Dealer blog.

[...]

“People in the Cleveland area resent us because we’re a repudiation of everything they believe,” said Brian Walker, 56, who was among the first African-Americans to attend Ludlow school. “We’re proof that white people and black people can live together.”

[...]

“You can’t run forever,” said Tom Chelimsky, co-president of the Ludlow Community Association. The beating occurred on Mr. Chelimsky’s front lawn. “We’re not naïve. We’re tough, and we’re going to stand together.”

to understand the full extent of the constraints of the abyss

2008-01-06T17:06:00.000-06:00

about to relocate to oxford, ms: recalibrate/re-evaluate/re-imagine the work. it's all by inches at this point. lots of learning by mistakes; lots of mistakes

***

in any case, i want to find a way to write more regularly in general, and in this space in particular. i have no idea who currently reads this space, or who would. regardless, the bottom line of the narrative seems to be: i went from the horrors of an environment so structured as to be dehumanizing to the madness of an environment so unstructured as to be paralyzing, and now i'm trying to locate center.

***

in other news, one thing that i have been doing a lot of recently is reading - and if you're around me long enough it's hard not to notice that i can't read without highlighter in hand. i have an obsession with marking up texts that i read (magazines and newspapers included), especially with the basic act of noting passages that i would like to remember. this habit seems neither uncommon nor unreasonable, but my persistence in doing it borders on the obsessive. that being said, i've been trying to find a way to do something with all these phrases and paragraphs that stand out across my diverse readings - and i think this space is a reasonable one to experiment with. blogs seem to be a genre centered on commentary and reference - a leviathan concordance to culture & politics, supremely dynamic and inconsistent. here's to the bizarre sandbox that we've built for ourselves:

from "where wonders await us," by tim flannery. in the new york review of books, volume liv, no. 20:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. It's a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish - seemingly all fangs and gape - with a "fishing rod" affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this discription pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea - until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate's blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

are you kidding?

2007-11-07T15:30:00.000-06:00

from the proposal language of the USDA Farm Bill 2007:

a section entitled "problem":

"Schools use their cash assistance to purchase the large majority (approximately 80 percent) of the food for school meals, but no current data are available to know what foods are being purchased. "

a section entitled "recommended solution" (emphasis mine):

"Conduct a survey of foods purchased by school food authorities with Federal cash assistance once every 5 years. The most recent data on school food purchases are a decade old. These data would help USDA efforts to 1) provide guidance and technical assistance to school food professionals in the implementation of new rules intended to conform school meal patterns to the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans; 2) better manage the types and varieties of commodities procured by the Department on behalf of schools; and 3) assess the economic impact of school food purchases on various commodity sectors."

***

i've just started researching this topic in order to give the CRCL kids some leads. this is crazy...

a short catching up

2007-10-04T22:35:00.001-05:00

things have been many and stressful lately. transitioning to a new type of being productive, with no imposed ritual, and little guidance. be careful what you wish for when you've got big ideas; at some point someone may say, "ok - here's a salary. get it done." life as a series of short adventures.

***

1. at the grove.

from "at ole miss, the tailgaters never lose," nytimes:

The glory of the Grove is legend at all of Ole Miss’s rival schools in the Southeastern Conference and beyond. It is the mother and mistress of outdoor ritual mayhem.
As Charles R. Frederick Jr., a folklorist at the University of Indiana, characterized it in his dissertation on the Ole Miss tailgating event, the call to “come on out Saturday and look us up” in the Grove is as basic, and born to a spot, as a human bond can get. And it is as deep as the root of a tree.
It is also as fresh and green as a leaf.
“I love it,” Molly Aiken, 19, a sophomore at Ole Miss, said on Saturday under a tent, under the trees, a party roar rising and dissipating into the whisper of a warm, humid wind above. “There’s no place like it.”
Ms. Aiken, who is from Chattanooga, Tenn., said of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, “I went to U.T. this past weekend, for the U.T.-Florida game, and I was, like, this just doesn’t compare.”
Ole Miss’s stadium accommodates 60,580 people, and devotees of the Grove argue that the Grove accommodates more. It is every kind of party you can describe, at once: cocktail party, dinner party, tailgate picnic party, fraternity and sorority rush, family reunion, political handgrab, gala and networking party-hearty — what might have inspired Willie Morris, one of Mississippi’s favorite sons, to declare Mississippi not a state, but a club."

so after two years with the teacher corps, and now a couple of months employed by the university of mississippi through the william winter institute, i figure it's due time that i check out this grove thing. ole miss was playing florida, and as the couz is a floridian, he came over to oxford from marks and at a bar on the square we watched the surprisingly close game. since it was an early afternoon kickoff - 11:30 - the grove was active both pre- and post-, and we wandered to campus afterwards; a family from marks had a tent somewhere in the mess - we were determined to find it and say hello.

the grove is, of course, an impressive sort of bedlam.

this sets the scene: a tailgating melee unlike any other in population density, southern flair, and who-are-you-kin-to socializing. the couz and i are following around an older woman from marks as she - dressed up elegantly and with pounds of makeup - makes the rounds. i am wearing t-shirt that says "the jackson branch naacp supports the school bond referendum," with a big naacp seal in the middle (and my membership card in my wallet, to boot). i am - in case you're wondering - white (or more appropriately, half-colombian but not latino-looking at all and claim my upbringing from the caucasian paradise of the suburban midwest). this all becomes very apparent when two ole miss grads (who look the part - khaki shorts, swoosh-over-the-eyebrow bangs, and cheesy sunglasses with that odd "sporty" necklace attachment) are cleary discussing my shirt as the couz and i wait patiently for our escort to catch up with whomever she's run into. of course, i'm not totally surprised that a white guy in the grove wearing an naacp shirt would furrow some brows, but so does dixie (give me all the "heritage, not hate" you want; some heritage is absurd). in any case, a discussion starts, here adapted as best i can remember:

guy 1: hey.
me: hey.
guy 1: are you wearing that t-shirt as a joke?
me: nope; it's not a joke.
guy 2: well, i think you're sorry sack of shit.
me: i'm sorry you feel that way.
guy 1: man, you've got to get your priorities straight.
me: my priorities are straight; i taught public high school in jackson for two years - i care about my kids and i care about their education.

(it continues in this vein for a second)

guy 2: well, i'm going to have to ask you to leave this tent.
me: are you kidding?
guy 2: no; just get the hell out of here.
me: this is public land, and a public forum. i am an employee of the university, and i certainly have the right to stand here and to wear this shirt.
guy 2: just fucking leave.
guy 1: hey man, just walk away.

(it continues in this vein for a bit. the guys never get out of their seats or raise their voices enough to cause a scene - southern gentlemen that they are.)

from "at ole miss, the tailgaters never lose," nytimes:

A boy in white shorts and a polo shirt stepped out onto the Walk of Champions, the brick path where the Rebels would make their ceremonial march through the Grove on their way to the stadium the next day.
“Are you READY?!” he called to the trees, prompting the Ole Miss cheer.
“HELLLLL YES! DAAAAMN RIGHT!” the trees yelled back. “Hotty Toddy gosh almighty who in the hell are we? Flim flam bim bam, OLE MISS by damn! WUUUUUUUUUUUUU!”

who in the hell are we, indeed.

2. in sumner, ms - the evening before the emmitt till commission's press conference:

do not forget these strange things
you take for granted. sleeping in
the mayor's guest room; a town
of 400 - he took the job because
no one wanted to. nearby: a man
with multiple (not tanks, but) APVs
goes riding at night in fatigues -
a pet racoon on his shoulder;
all the 200 guns in his house
are loaded - that is very clear
to his children; an old black woman,
convinced the white sheriff is out
to get her because she marched
in the 60s, had breakfast with
the kennedys; a brain tumor helps
know he's near - looking through
the trailer wall with x-ray vision.
lights over there are tutweiler
jail; over there parchman.
when a family dies - the house
is empty, the business gone.
someday these weekend cottages
will have wonderful histories.

3. in sumner, ms - the day of the emmitt till commission press conference.

the injustice of neglect - an explicit violence: in 1955, emmitt till was brutally abused and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. he was 14 years old, from chicago and visiting with family in tallahatchie county. two white men were acquitted of murder by an all-white jury after an hour of discussion. after the till commission (composed of black and white community leaders) read it's formal statement of regret on the steps of the sumner courthouse (where the trial had occurred) - acknowledging that a miscarriage of justice had occurred and calling for truth and reconciliation in the case - one of till's family members remarked, "imagine having to hold your breath for 52 years."

the injustice of neglect - an implicit violence: in 2007, buses of middle and high school students are unloaded at sumner courthouse. it is a hot day, and the emmitt till commission press conference drags on. there aren't enough chairs for everyone, and the students huddle against empty storefronts. uninterested in what's going on, they begin to talk amongst themselves. teachers are no where in sight. most of the most audible students are black males, huddling around each other in brambles of machismo. many are emmitt's age; i doubt they've been provided adequate context for the historical resonance of the what's going on at the podium, and references to "young people" over the loudspeakers become more and more ironic above the swelling din. i walk over to a group and explain that i can't hear the conference, and get a bundle of sneers, who-the-fuck-does-he-think-he-is looks, and few taunting drugs & violence references. i stand there for a while, and - as i hold my breath - the group disperses: off to find some bottled water, an ice cream cone, some girls.

personal archives

2007-09-30T15:22:00.000-05:00

Under high ceilings (room enough
for light, space enough for time) a change is
easily mistaken for ephemera.

In cornered whispers – principal lies of a bully
archivist, secrets cloaked as retellings
of life – no one had expected blood.

There were always teeth in the kiss, always
a gripping – as if every room were nearly
empty. Had I not returned home,

it would have gone unnoticed – the death
of the apocryphal. Rather, unclaimed
footnotes thrust to narrative, in quick weight

under high ceilings – a history neither
dead nor vacant; one page naked
to what fills the next, and nearly empty.

comment on a nytimes article

2007-09-05T11:27:00.000-05:00

in the midst of my daily dose of nytimes.com and salon.com, i got stuck with a mad craving to comment on a opinion article entitled "engaged," by will okun. the article is by a guy who "teaches English and photography in a Chicago school with many students from low-income and minority homes," and goes like this (i'm paraphasing it because it's only available through times select, which is a nytimes.com service that costs money - though i recommend it): (1) okun recounts a boring moment teaching grammar in his english class, (2) okun sings the praises of mr. price next door, who (thank god) integrates "conscious" hip hop into his lessons to spark interest, (3) okun talks about the kanye west foundation, which "seeks to integrate music and music production into the school curriculum in an effort to combat the alarming drop-out rate of black males in American schools," and does a little back and forth about how it's a bit disconcerting at times as a teacher to be expected to constantly find novel ways to engage students. he ends the post with three questions, which sparked my interest in posting - as much in response to the typical responses to questions like this as in response to the questions themselves:

- What are the most fundamental differences between the American educational system and high-achieving foreign educational systems and what are the positive or negative outcomes of these differences?

- How has the approach to education and learning changed during your tenure as a teacher and do you believe these changes are beneficial or harmful to the American student?

- What has changed in our society and in our educational system to bring us to the point where high schools must now create incentives to “inspire” and “motivate” low-income students to attend classes on a regular basis?

my response:

(1) when casting a desirous glance to the test-score performances of china, germany, etc. - one should always be take into account the aggressive tracking systems in place in their national school systems. as i’m not familiar with the particulars, i’m reluctant to mention this (and since this is the nytimes, i would love it if someone stood up a yelled “but germany doesn’t track its students!”), but it seems that where the US cringes at the idea of a strict/stratified funneling system - student A goes to college prep, student B goes to vocational, student C goes to standard diploma, etc. - other nations seem to have no problem with it, and this inflates their “test scores” because only certain tracking sectors actually get to take these tests (again, someone please correct me if i’m mistaken - or at least provide real perspective). this is of course in the face of the US’s more subtle tracking consequences - the suburban sprawl/minimum lot requirement/property tax collusion that allows predominantly white suburban schools to do so well; the odd relative racial imbalance of AP enrollment, school-within-a-school magnet programs, and such within “integrated” public systems; etc. but the bottom line is that we hold fast to the egalitarian pretensions of a horatio alger tinged education for all (while putting forth minimal effort to ensure that this is the case), while other countries seem to take a more no nonsense (though yes, philisophically compromising) approach to providing educational services explicitly tailored to social and individual needs (which is - oddly enough - exactly mr. price’s well-grounded attitude towards engaging his children).
(2) in regards to “what has changed in our society” - i’m incredibly wary as to the amount of “kids these days” tirades that will haunt the anecdotal cesspool. the myth of nostalgia is a horrible barrier to clear thinking about educational reform. this is not to say that schools have not changed, or culture has not changed between generations - but there is a difference between pretending there was a more simple time when “teachers taught and students learned,” and taking a clear look at post-war demographics shifts, the slowly enforced consequences of brown v. board, title V and title IX, the vogue of skinnerian reward/punish discipline (this - i might add - is why students crave reward/inspiration/motivation - because they spend the school day in a state of oppression), etc. more often than not, veteran teachers going on about the golden age (or even the modest successes) of their own education fall into a few traps: (1) as they are relatively successful products of their own educational system, they can rarely leverage enough distance to imagine the relative failures of that system to serve people who are not like them - and who are structurally marginalized by definition (the “it worked for me [and i’m ok, so if it doesn’t work for them it’s their fault and they’re not ok]” position is particularly thin when it’s a white male talking), (2) many of the schools they currently teach in/experience are actually impossible comparisons to their golden age (even if it was the golden age of hard knocks, as i’ve heard quite a few black nationalists reference while lamenting about the crisis in black communities). even urban districts (please correct me if i’m wrong) are facing issues with transient populations, non-english speaking populations, and shifting job markets that create a school environment that are drastically different than that same area even in the 70s. furthermore (and on a topic i can actually talk about), in a place like mississippi - where i taught math in jackson for the past two years - schools were not even desegregated until 1968 (of course, they were re-segregated almost overnight with the state-assisted creation of a system of private “segregation academies”), and the population shifts that had occurred in other places of the country - like my hometown of cleveland, oh - since the 1950s were played out with much more velocity. all this aside, a high school in jackson, ms today is so incomparable to that same school in the 1970s that it is uncomfortable - and any jacksonian talking (as they are want to do) about how things worked fine when he/she was a kid (so what’s wrong with kids these days) seems laughably out of context. i’m sure the contrast is similar - though less pronounced - with other veteran teachers unloading their war stories.

every once i get the sense that it would be a good thing to sit down and catalog what i've collected as typical barriers to dialogue about education, and establish general positions to counter them. this article seemed to rekindle that - specters of people launching into "it starts at the home," "kids these days," "remember when teachers taught and students learned," "it worked for me, so why can't it work for them," etc.

street cred?

2007-08-12T17:42:00.001-05:00

on her first day at murrah high school, a teacher-corps teacher - taking over dave jones's position as latin teacher and quiz bowl advisor - was advised by her principal to not get involved in the jim hill crcl - as jones was murrah's faculty laison.

also at murrah, the wearing of white t-shirts - tucked or untucked, short or long - is banned. the usual claim of gang signification (i.e. general blackness) is undoubtedly offered. apparently, if the white t-shirt has a coller (i.e. carries the cross of the middle class), it's ok.

photopost 3: steps coalition meeting (july 17 - 19)

2007-08-12T17:41:00.000-05:00

it took me a while to figure out exactly why we were going to the coast. i mean, the obvious answer was that it had something to do with post-katrina community rebuilding, but it would have been strange if we were heading down to gulfport for a coalition meeting just because - you know - coalitions are good things, and the coast is a place where stuff is happening. of course, these are reasonable motivations for investigating whether or not an institution has a role to play in a situation as complex as the post-katrina gulf coast, but as we were heading down to the area for what turned out to be three days of nonstop work, it seemed clear that we were in fact playing a role - i was merely as yet unclear as to what it was.

***

the steps coalition grew out of - as far as i understand it - a post-katrina environment that left pre-existing discrepancies in community empowerment exposed and vulnerable. in a sense, identity groups that were marginalized economically and politically before the storm found themselves acutely aware of their marginalization, wary of the top-heavy consequences of rebuilding efforts, and conscious of a unique opportunity to pool resources in efforts to lobby the flood of organizations that came to the coast to provide resources and support.

the winter institute foothold in the coast - as it turned out - was by way of the turkey creek community initiatives (tcci), a environmental and community activism organization centered on a watershed area settled by freedmen after the civil war, and which has been "facing urban sprawl, environmental racism, and political-economic isolation since the arrival of casinos, airport expansion, and municipal annexation in the 1990s." these issues are of course all magnified in a post-katrina rebuilding frenzy that emphasizes eminent domain influenced development - a casino paradise, condos, townhouses, high-end shopping - in an environment wherein homeowners (yes - as we've seen in takeover conflicts in the ninth ward - contrary to middle class prejudices, blacks can be property rights-conscious homeowners) are left with severely battered structures floating on a crippled infrastructure.

tcci - organized in 2003 - realized in the rebuilding crisis after the storm that it was not alone in its concerns for (1) affordable housing, (2) economic justice, (3) environmental justice, (4) human rights, and (5) the preservation of historical communities. in light of this, the tcci director - derrick evans - worked with susan glisson and other organization leaders to build the steps coalition in 2006 - founded as a coalition of organizations dedicated to the five pillars mentioned previously, and representing various constituent groups in the gulf coast region.

***

while i was down with the institute this summer, steps was in the midst of various identity crises. issues with coalition staff, grant competition, organizational charter and services, and so forth seemed to be stewing about the network - surfacing at one point as what i gathered to be an e-mail based personal attack campaign. with this in mind, steps hired a moderator to fly down from princeton to lead the group in dialogue about various sensitive points - with varying degrees of people participating.

the active role of the wwirr staff during all this was to provide miscellaneous support for tcci and the coalition. this involved researching things like: how much it would cost to buy a FEMA trailer and drive it around the country; whether or not tcci could still submit applications for buildings qualified for national historic registry status restoration grants even though it was at the end of the grant cycle; any information about jimmy buffet's margaritaville resort - which look to rezone a significant chunk of a vietna mese neighborhood.

most of my time was spent - as is typical with wwirr excursions at this point - as photographer and tech guy. the crippled condition of the region's infrastructure was made abundantly clear to me upon the news that a recent lightning storm had fried all of tcci's printers, modems, and routers in both of its offices - partly due to the fact that electricity was spread so thin in each of the places that turning on an air conditioner would certainly make things flicker and most likely freak out the circuit breaker; at the tcci home office, all off the electricity was distributed by way of extension chord from one single surge protector that hangs in the middle of a gutted and water damaged structure. i spent a fan-less/air condition-less mississippi summer night plugging, unplugging, taking apart, putting together, and configuring the remains of a networking fiasco - eventually advising derrick to go to walmart and buy a laundry list of replacement modems, routers, and cables (which most likely came out of his pocket, instead of the overextended tcci coffers). during the steps meeting the next morning, i spent most of my time scrambling around trying to find a jump drive to put a file on, a power chord to recharge the computer that had the file on it, and a printer i could borrow to print copies off for the entire meeting - this as well ended in sweaty half-failure.

what follows are photo sets from week's various phases.

***

steps coalition general assembly of allies - july 18

coalition conversation

[?] and irene jones

don't mess with this priest

all eyes on dr. glisson

waveland - ground zero - july 18

the last tree standing

jordan self-portrait (she took the ground zero photos - i was off having a drink with brent cox of the aclu)

the coast itself - it should be noted that all sand (white sand, that is) in the ms gulf coast is non-native. the area was mostly a mangrove (?) swamp until post-wwi, when a recovery hospital was set up for veterans recouping from biological warfare. somehow in this mix the idea arose that an artificial tourist industry would be a nice accompaniment for the economy developing to support mangled g.i.'s - and later the post-wwii keesler air force base. (of course, i may be getting the story a bit wrong - can't find any articles to verify this stuff - which came from various conversations)

i imagine this view used to have trees and houses, perhaps commerce. it is bizarrely shocking to see a battered mcdonald's arches - frame standing but red and yellow fiberglass mostly absent - next to an empty foundation - presumably where a mcdonald's used to be. there is something monolithic and unquestionably present after branded commodity merges deeply with consumptive identity.

jordy-cakes again with a self-portrait. i guess the photo ops get redundant.

once a good time.

susan and derrick at the gulfside assembly historic marker, which has significance to the movement. in wikipedia, hollis watkins is quoted as saying: ""there were only three places where Blacks could meet in Mississippi during the movement— Tougaloo, Rust College, and Gulfside." also, during the jim crow era it appears that gulfside was the only place in mississippi where people of color could use the beaches or swim. (for the racial-sexual politics of swimming pools, check out the ny times article "unearthing a town pool, and not for whites only," published september 18, 2006. something similar happened to a ymca pool in montgomery, i believe, but i can't find an article).

profoundly uprooted.

tcci headquarters

the home office, in the backyard of the house derrick's mom owns.

turkey creek sign.

back door.

derrick evans - tcci director - doing business.

derrick evans dreaming.

historic house #1

these are pictures of the home derrick's mom owns - eligible for the registry of national historic status. the house is in the rippy road area of turkey creek. after researching the criteria for a restoration grant, i was charged with taking pictures of the structure.

back of the house. derrick's mom currently stays in the fema trailer.

fair enough.

?

exterior.

side exterior.

trailer again.

product #1

product #2

product #3

front of the house.

interior 1: surveying

interior 2: fuses

interior 3: beautiful colors in the bathroom

interior 4: beautiful colors on the wall

interior 5: bathroom light

quixote's ghost

long room

all of the electricity for both houses and the trailer came through this surge protector.

long room 2, and self-portrait

sliver

weird talisman

historic house #2

this house is on creosote road - named after a byproduct from a local processing plant of some sort - derived from either the wood treating process or coal production. from wikipedia: "long-term exposure to low levels of creosote, especially direct contact with the skin during wood treatment or manufacture of coal tar creosote-treated products has resulted in skin cancer and cancer of the scrotum." (politically and financially) disenfranchised blacks provided cheap, expliotable labor for whatever plant the creosote came from (as it turns out, the gulf coast creosote company), and lived in proximity to it - thus the creosote road and the historic house on it.

front exterior.

debris.

looking up from the front door.

used to be music.

back exterior.

interior 1: no floor

interior 2: empty room

weird symbol.

a hole.

historic house #3

fence-hugged.

blue window.

wind damage.

mirrors in the backyard.

utilities.

many doors.

weird talisman.

[man that was a long post. weeks of a bit here and a bit there to finish.]

first draft of wellspring fall 2007 article

2007-07-27T16:28:00.000-05:00

the wellspring is the winter institute's mildly bi-annual newsletter; i've been charged with writing a piece on CRCL and my segue into working with the institute. i was given a 300-500 word range. it should be noted, however, that my writing process usually goes like this:

1. walk around and mutter
2. jot down notes
3. not know how to start
4. write a meta-passage that describes how difficult it is to start writing
5. double/nearly triple the word count i was initially given

so, i just sent susan glisson 1300 words, which i've copied whole at the end of this post - so that it sees the light of day before being drastically condensed. the strongest apology i have for the article's length is what happens in the first part - i ran across a newly formed blog from a student of mine (http://beyebrows.blogspot.com/), and it set the article's text afire. enjoy:

***

"Cultivating Criticism: Two Years of The Jim Hill Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Club"

1.
For a while, it seemed as if I’d never find a narrative vehicle for this article; writes and rewrites have mostly hovered around uncomfortably fast-paced personal histories – texts that anxiously try and get to the point, all the while clear that that point has plenty to do with my work, but little to do with me. This is fitting; my work in Mississippi for the past two years has been dedicated to creating spaces for others to fill, and to assist them in filling it with whatever they find most appropriate. So it is with the beginning to this article: a stage in which someone else is most appropriately the primary voice. This morning, a student of mine – from Jim Hill H.S. in Jackson, MS – commented on a recent blogpost, which lead me to her own newly formed blog, in which she writes: “I have a confession to make: I love Ole Miss. I've only visited the campus once, but I fell in love with the place. I'm a high school junior now, so I'm going to do my best this year so I can get a chance to go to Ole Miss. The reason why I am going to choose Ole Miss as a first choice is because of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. Two fantastic teachers of mine have worked with them and I want to follow the trend and work for them also.”

Just barely beneath the surface of this “confession” are undercurrents of those crucial things I’ve been delighted to assist in cultivating within the Jim Hill community for the past two years, and which I could not have illustrated any better by personal history or anecdote: that the effects of a commitment within teachers and students to engage in a candid process of critical inquiry and open dialogue are deep and far-reaching; clearly, conflicts of race and identity run strong within and between us, and I find it meaningful that a student of mine – currently attending a 99% African-American high school – can engage in the richness and complexity of Ole Miss with a sense of genuine optimism and motivation (as very well she should), instead of the cynicism and hesitance that I so often see in her peers (and even her elders) regarding the University. It should be noted, moreover, that her visit to the campus came as part of a field trip with the Jim Hill Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Club (CRCL), of which I am co-facilitator. During our stop at Ole Miss (en route to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis) we spent time with Dr. Andy Mullins reflecting on the University Grays and the James Meredith controversy, and with Dr. Don Cole reflecting on his process of student radicalization/activism and eventual reconciliation with the University. So it was not just a walk in the Grove that has led this student to declare, “I love Ole Miss” – and rightly so.

2.
My ostensible role for the past two years at Jim Hill was that of mathematics teacher – leading courses in Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus, and the like. However, as many (though not nearly enough) teachers will tell you, the school day neither begun at 8:15 nor ended at 3:30. It was within those spaces before, between, and after school that CRCL was begun. During the 2005-2006 school year, a colleague, Mr. Jacob Roth, and I – both first-year teachers and participants in the Mississippi Teacher Corps – found ourselves quickly and intensely fixed within the dilemma that a teacher won’t get anything done in a school building without engaging in and coming to terms with the community he or she is serving. However, throughout this process of engagement/coming to terms, Jacob and I became deeply interested in complex issues that appeared strongly tangled within our students’ identities and the identity of their community – e.g. teenage pregnancy, a culture of violence/machismo, hip hop and misogyny, racial signifiers and academic success, what Cornel West refers to as the “nihilistic threat in Black America,” etc. Though we wanted more and more to engage our students in dialogue about these and other topics, Jacob and I realized that it would have been wildly inappropriate for us to impose a particular agenda for approaching issues that clearly belonged to our students. The agenda itself had to come from within them as well (if at all), and all we could do was hope to craft and maintain a space wherein interested students could safely and productively engage in a critical look at themselves and their own community. From within this abstracted space – dedicated to cultivating critical inquiry and intercommunity dialogue – CRCL began to meet every Wednesday after school in Jake’s room.

Over a span of two years, CRCL expanded to include active participation from three high schools in the Jackson Metro area: two public, predominantly black – Jim Hill and Murrah High School – and one independently private, predominantly white – St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. We met week after week in either Jake or my room at Jim Hill – expanding to the library whenever we’d run out of space. Topics of inquiry and dialogue ranged from school resegregation, to organic farming, to hip-hop and misogyny, to the importance of voting, to Don Imus/Michael Richards, to global warming; speakers ranged from area hip-hop artist Kamikaze, to MS Supreme Court Justice James Graves, to former MS Governors William Winter and Ray Maybus, to NAACP State Congress President Derrick Johnson, to Movement activists Lawrence Guyot and Rims Barber; activities ranged from Holocaust memorial services at the local synagogue, to young voter registration, to assistance with the 2006 JPS Bond Issue campaign, to community service at a food bank, to participation in the MS Coalition for Racial Justice, to Movement-focused field trips to Ole Miss, Memphis, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma.

3.

Sometime in November of 2006, I – within a moment of deep frustration – gave Susan Glisson at the William Winter Institute a call. I told Susan the following: that I loved my students, I loved the work that I was doing, and I loved the community that I was working in, but that being a full-time classroom teacher was not something I wanted to continue doing; the aspects of my job I was passionate about – everything associated with CRCL as well my growing interest in education resource reform – seemed irresolvably at the periphery of my work. Susan and the Institute had worked with and supported CRCL previously, and I wanted to know if she had any advice as to how I could find a way to make community dialogue and education resource reform at the center of my workday. Seven months later, I am happy to have joined the Institute as a Project Coordinator – working on developing a state network of CRCL-like groups and developing a web-based teacher facilitation model to help integrate Civil Rights data and concepts into the classroom. However, I am all the more excited that along the process of opening up spaces for inquiry and dialogue, young people may value that process enough to “continue the trend” – as my student posted on her blog this morning. It is encouraging to know that even this space – the Institute – is yet another structure that is well filled by vastly different and thus differently effective voices, that I can participate in its development, that I can continue to connect with young people that will become passionate about the role it plays at the University and throughout the state, and that they in turn will continue to preserve the Institute’s commitment to critical inquiry and intercommunity dialogue – continuing it within their own community, and bringing it to others.

photopost 2: emmitt till commission

2007-07-12T11:19:00.000-05:00

on the 40th anniversary of the 1964 murders of james chaney, andrew goodman, and michael schwerner, a multiracial community coalition in philidelphia, ms issued a call for justice in their deaths. despite overwhelming evidence, the state had not indicted anyone for the murder; a federal trial found seven of eighteen men guilty of civil rights violations (verdicts were not reached on two of the defendants), but - as killers walked free - many felt justice was hardly served. in tandem with the call for justice and in an effort to come to terms with its own historical legacy, the philidelphia coalition began the development of a civil rights tour and brochure, an oral history project, and local curriculum development surrounding the legacy of chaney, goodman, and schwerner. on june 21, 2005, former klansman edgar ray killen (80 years old at the time) was found guilty of manslaughter in connection with the disappearance and murder of the three civil rights workers.

***

the success of the philidelphia coalition's efforts has inspired sustained reconciliation practices in that community, as well as similar community action in other parts of the state. tallahatchie county has issued a call for justice and reconciliation in regards to the unresolved murder of emmett till - who, in august of 1955 was kidnapped in the night and subsequently abused and murdered on the accusation that he had whistled at a white women while leaving bryant's grocery and meat market in money, ms. the emmett till commission has borrowed greatly from the philidelphia model - involving a multiracial coalition, a legal strategy (although recent efforts at bringing charges have been dismissed), and plans for a tour/brochure.

***

susan glisson and the william winter institute provided - when necessary - structure, moderation, and guidance in philidelphia, and is doing the same in tallahatchie. we recently took a trip to tallahatchie to observe a meeting of the commission and to take pictures for the brochure. again, i was the de facto photographer - though it was profoundly difficult to take pictures of things that aren't there; so many of the buildings and landmarks involved in the emmett till story are in profound disrepair, and some are merely plots of land. so i took a million shots trying to pull enough identifiable landscape into the frame to make the space recognizable - sometimes managing, sometimes not.

***

belltower at the sumner courthouse, where an all-white, all-male jury acquitted (after a deliberation of just over an hour) roy bryant and j.w. milam of the charge of murder. within three months of their acquittal, the bryant and milam had confessed to the crime.

scare-quotes that fit

in a corner - appropriately serendipitous

the space where justice went unserved

lonely courthouse stairs

sumner courthouse exterior

former site of the delta inn - residence of the all-white jury during the trial

funeral home where emmett's body was embamled

back of the funeral home - gang symbols, a gutted interior, and jordan butler

former site of j.w. milam's house. milam and bryant intially beat up till in the adjacent barn.

glendora gin, from which a gin fan was acquired in order to tie to till's neck before throwing his body into the tallahatchie river.

former site of king's place - where a black reporter, james hicks, discovered information pertinent to the trial. specifically, hicks learned the names of two potential witnesses to the till murder, but who had been incarcerated under false names and charges.

former site of gas station where clinton melton - an outspoken member of the black community in the wake of the bryant/milam acquittals - was murdered. he was shot by milam's friend elmer kimbel, allegedly over a dispute regarding a gas tank. on the day of kimbel's trial (he was later acquitted), melton's widow, beulah, was run off the road near glendora and drowned in the black bayou.

another view of where the gas station used to be

former site of j.w. milam's store

the mound at the end of the path is the site where till's mutilated body was found - the tallahatchie river is about 20 meters behind the camera; it had risen substantially in the weeks surrounding the murder.

body site again - it's the hill on the right. the river is on the other side of the trees.

a meeting of the emmett till commission 1

a meeting of the emmett till commission, 2

susan glisson moderating

[note: the source for most of this historical information is the text of the brochure that's being developed by the till commission]

metapost and photopost

2007-07-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

metapost

i'm not sure what will become of the blog now that i've left the teacher corps; as much as i detested the required posting, it did tie me to a small amount of much-needed processing and communicating. so, without the mosquito-like specter of ben guest's mtc web-2.0-fetish i'm not sure where and when to shit my observations (as i'm no longer officially tied to mtc, i'm going to go ahead and use a wider [and perhaps more effective] range of language and imagery. that being said, i imagine the link to my blog [if it's in fact still up] will be swiftly removed once i admit once again that i'm a sexual being. and i am.).

shit them i must, however. and since i am still in mississippi, and will be working in education and social justice for another year (thanks to the william winter institute for racial reconciliation [wwirr]), this toilet is still relevant. my outlook for the 2007-2008 school year - which will contain the bulk of my 12-month project coordinator tenure at wwirr - is as follows:

(1) develop a state-wide network of student groups dedicated to cultural criticism/intercommunity dialogue/social justice,
(1.i) which will piggyback upon a massive young voter registration campaign, as well as
(1.ii) sustained coordination and development of the jim hill crcl centerpiece, and

(2) develop a web-based teacher facilitation model that assists educators in tying civil rights into any curricular objective,
(2.i) which will be integrated into continuing work at jim hill, hopefully
(2.ii) the instruction of a single section of calculus.

basically, a year to expand upon what had been forced to the periphery. overambitious, i'm sure - but no doubt things will shift and meld and surface and die. hopefully, then, this blogspace will continue to serve as an infrequent reservoir of whatever scrapple prevails.

***

photopost

as the de facto camera guy at wwirr, i've had rather unexpected demands to figure out how to use my new canon rebel xti - with varied success. it's a relief to be able to fall back on the point-and-click full auto mode, but playing around with the manual options is starting to make more sense. here's what i've got, and here's where i've been:

wwirr civil rights education summit 2007: day 1

opening address by suzan johnson-cook

lawrence guyot in a workshop

[?] in a workshop

the workshop itself

chancellor khayat introduces john hope franklin

andy mullins, [?], former ms governor william winter listen to the chancellor's introduction

susan glisson and john hope franklin watch the chancellor as well

john hope franklin tells it like it is

john hope franklin post-speech

a portrait of john hope franklin

wwirr civil rights education summit 2007: days 2-3

angela oh, john hope franklin, governor winter and michael wenger before the panel discussion

the panel discussion

a session with margaret block

a session with deborah menkart

session

people i work with 1: patty cakes and annette

people i work with 2: my boss, dr. susan glisson

people i work with 3: patty cakes and jeremy

people i work with 4: fantastic amy (but she's moved on)

people i work with 5: me

people i work with 6: ms. jordan butler

barack obama in jackson

2007-06-15T23:14:00.000-05:00

part 1: late may

i get a phone call from the local NAACP chapter president - gus mccoy. apparantly, obama is coming to jackson on july 15 for a fundraiser, and gus wants to organize a youth rally - he's frustrated with the intentional lack of publicity and the $2000 extra-special-donor rooms characterizing the event, and thinks that if young people in jackson show enough numbers and sufficient organization, we can use a youth rally to convince the obama campaign to involve a more public element to the trip. what is more, gus wants to use the youth rally/obama visit as a launchpad for a grassroots "i am barack obama" fundraising/promotional campaign.

this is of course an attractive opporunity to get CRCL students (and others) involved in the campaign process, especially because this fall is a big mississippi election year and it would be great to piggyback obama enthusiasm with a focus on local governance and voter registration. the catch is that the situation has surfaced during the penultimate week of the school year (and the last week for seniors), so organizing in the schools will be a problem. i send out an e-mail to interested students and wonder if anyone will show up on a friday at the end of the school year with one day's notice.

five students and a parent show up. we decide to start a facebook event to promote the rally, to plant networking seeds in as many area high schools as we can, and to work with a local graphic designer (my friend darren) to design and print fundraising t-shirts that will serve as a foothold for the rally's bid - that youth in jackson can organize bodies, funds, and enthusiasm for a presidential campaign. participants in the meeting sign up for different responsibilities, and we decide to let things develop for about a week before touching base again.

part 2: the next couple weeks

within the weekend the facebook event has about 150 confirmed guests, and the message board is buzzing with speculation/skepticism. contact with gus begins to become infrequent and uninformative. as of the meeting in my classroom, the rally is only a possibility - hinging on the need to convince obama's people that we've got sufficient numbers. so, there is a hesitance to move forward and tie people in to an event that may not happen (and ask them to buy t-shirts that may not exist), but tying people in is exactly what increases our chances of moving forward. in the interim i learn a little about mississippi's campaign fundraising culture, which has counterintuitively strong financial veins for the democrats - centering (from what i understand) on isaac byrd, a high profile lawyer who was instrumental in "winning a landmark $513 million settlement in a 27-year class action battle over Mississippi’s unequal funding of the state’s historically black universities in Ayers v. State of Mississippi" (source: Trial Lawyers for Public Justice). apparantly byrd had brought obama to jackson some years previous in connection with barack's senate campaign; however, the lawyer's financial muscle was not supplanted by a fluency of organization, and when alan keyes threw his hyperconservative republican hat into the ring for the illinois senatorial race (claiming at one point that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama" [source: Wikipedia]), barack had to back out of the mississippi fundraiser to return to the front, and a mismanaged communication chain had some mississippians showing up for a $100 plate that didn't exist (note: this is what i've gathered from anecdote, and may not be precise). nevertheless, obama's campaign had taken a rain check that was now being cashed in by jackson for the presidential campaign, and both byrd's networking and the financial addition of a prominent mississippi black republican (again: anecdote) was making the return to jackson worthwhile.

momentum for the youth rally stagnates as all information from gus seems nebulous and noncomittal, urging students to continue to pull people into something that certainly
has dismal chances of coming together as time goes on without confirmation from barack's people. emphasis shifts instead to the "i am barack obama" t-shirt initiative, which gets a stronger and stronger green light as the rally goes from a we're-waiting-for-the-go-ahead yellow to a don't-ask-don't-tell red one. apparantly the t-shirt has been loosed (or always has; i'm confused about this point) from explicit connection to the obama jackson visit, and somehow the students are supposed to switch gears from the sinking rally and pool their energy into pushing product (designed by this point, but still unprinted).

as obama's visit gets closer and closer, i start to take the stance of gritting my teeth when people ask if it's actually going to happen and cringing when i think about the students who have put their neck out for something that's almost surely crumbing. the facebookers begin to get irrate on the event message board - noting that nothing from the jackson media or barack's campaign website speak of a rally in jackson, and thus the $25 t-shirt "fundraising effort" is looking rather dubious. to the nervousness of my students in regards to this, i have no answers and plenty of guilt. i essentially close my eyes and hope everything melts away. in the midst of all this, the CRCL receives the president's award at the annual jackson NAACP banquet. our de facto president - charles - and i are seated at the president's table, and i spend the evening making small talk with the wife of a south african pastor while charles stares into space and an ill-positioned jazz band makes communication nearly unfeasible. there is certainly no mention of obama during the banquet or afterwards at the lobby bar, and the south african pastor's outrage at the docility of mississippians in the face of what he can only call apartheid surely resonates as i sit nervously with my martini and little to talk about.

part 3: july 15

i wake up at 8am because my cellphone is going nuts. i've been trying to get up with my alarm at 9ish - half because i'm tired of sleeping through the day, and half because the new zelda on wii is profoundly addictive - so it isn't horrible to get downstairs and make my requisite half-pot of coffee as i check my messages. gus has called; i remember barack's supposed to be in jackson today, and nervously call gus back - half expecting him to ask if the "i am barack obama" t-shirts are ready to go for this afternoon's youth rally, and how many confirmed guests we have again. the news is strangely different - gus has gotten word that obama is going to be at peaches cafe - a historic soul-food restaurant in the historially black section of old jackson - at 5pm and gus has gotten a green light to have 10-15 students gather outside. it's unclear whether this involves standing at a distance from the candidate and shouting approval as he smiles by, or whether it invovles a handshake or an autograph, or whether it invovles a conversation. at this point, i'm rather used to the uncertain terms of involvement, and tell gus that i'll be meeting with some students at the ACLU this morning - the local ACLU branch has stared an informal summer internship to tie CRCL students over between school years - and i'll see what i can do. he says ok and call him back with the numbers (again it seems we need to make our presence worth his/obama's while).

once the coffee's in me the networking juices start flowing and i send a facebook message to hardcore CRCL members and an apology/invitation to the leaders of the failed youth rally. i explain the situation at the ACLU intern session, and by the time i leave their office i've got four confirmed and my phone ringing incessantly with alternating messages from gus wanting the status quo and students wanting to what's going on. charles - the CRCL president - is at the ACLU meeting and he begins working on the phone numbers he has but i don't, and before i take an afternoon nap out of exhaustion, the confirmed number is in the 1oish range and i've tied myself into driving some students to and fro what seems at this point to be the circus.

margaret wakes me up from my living room couch nap at 4, we grab my new camera, and speed towards a student's house as i shake off the remnants of sleep. we make it to the jackson train station - the agreed upon meeting place - in the midst of all of the students rolling in (except charles, who has taken my suggestion that he get a marker and some poster board to make flyers to another level by going to kinkos and blowing up something he made on his computer). i check to make sure that all of the confirmed students are present, and we move (except charles, who is speeding down I-55 at this point) to the next parking lot, from which we walk up to farrish street, where peaches is.

there's a cluster of TV cameras and requisite media personnel outside peaches, but only a handful of bystanders. gus goes to talk to the jackson police/secret service people monitoring the situtation, and we're given directions on where to stand and what to do. at this point it's about 4:45 and barack's expected to show up somewhere between 5 and 5:30pm, so the students (charles has now shown up with huge posters and nasal congestion), margaret and i huddle up against an imaginary line the secret service has told us not to cross, and make small talk with the small amount of other people "in the know," alternately complaining about the heat (a student, desma, leaves eventually because "the heat is sweating out her weave") and wondering if obama is actually going to show up. i meet a civil rights movement veteran who calls jackson home but is an art history professor in texas; he proceeds to give me an attractive perspective on the tension between theocentric and marxist-afrocentric-philisophical accounts of history and power, pointing out intermittently how young i was and how i didn't understand how the civil rights movement is often misinterpreted as distinct from a human rights movment (for the record, i do understand). margaret meets the dean of the mississippi college school of law; he proceeds to heavily court her to apply to mc, unaware of an unspoken conflict between her desire to focus on family law for the lgbt community and the profoundly restrictive concept of family law that mc's law school (a baptist insitutution) may promote.

at some point, a parade of police cars and SUV's begin their stranglehold on time and space. obama shows up and the crowd surges with outreached hands and rabidly clicking cameras and cameraphones. barack spends some impressive face time with those gathered - shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with most of us before going into peaches, engaging in more small talk amidst some photo-op fried chicken, and emerging again to re-shake most of our hands before getting back into the SUV/cop car parade for the evening's big fundraiser.

part 4: epilogue

i have little reason to dispute barack's star status, and no reservations about my being overwhelmed by it (he's more attractive/magnetic in person than i would have thought). despite the complete lack of transparancy in this whole mess, plenty of my student's frustrations were completely mitigated by the knowledge that they have shaken obama's hand. some, i hope, will retain the hard lessons learned regarding the fickle/unidirectional nature of financial politics. most, i think will revel in the pictures and autographs accrued:

www.flickr.com

my good friend laura noted after reading this (and sitting through my struggling explanation of the ordeal) that she still doesn't understand how the don't-ask-don't-tell element surfaces in the narrative, not to mention why it never goes away/is resolved. my only response to this is that i don't know either; one moment we're building momentum for youth mobilization and participation, and the next moment i can't get a word in. at the end of the day, the barack visit seemed equal parts secrecy and mismanagement - but which of these played the major role in dismantling the hard work of my students, i have no idea.

on lesson plans

2007-06-04T21:45:00.001-05:00

regarding the development of a MTC wiki that is intended to facilitate the development of teacher resources: http://mtcorps.pbwiki.com/

this is a slightly modified e-mail to the people developing the site, and may only make sense in the context of the inner politics of the mississippi teacher corps - but hopefully it has some resonance with the dilemma of the classroom teacher in a resource crisis:

this (or any) lesson plan depot will be an excellent way to document the planning process, but it will be a horrible way to share resources. what is the goal of an mtc wiki: to focus on novel ways to integrate web-based documentation into its own classrooms (which is a noble enough goal), or to focus on novel ways to facilitate resource access to its participants (which, i contend, is a different goal)? if it's the former, which is a valid enough reason to create the thing, then i rest my case - and what jake's put together is excellent for these purposes. if not, here me out:

of course, the intent is that wiki will go live tomorrow morning, and so showing them a well-structured lesson plan depot is the obvious route if we want things to start accumulating data. however - since what we're (you're?) developing is a wiki, i would ask the second years - either before or after a crash course in wiki editing - what a successful pathway of resource distribution looks like? that is - if i wanted to get information and materials together for a lesson on adding/subtracting fraction - what is the most useful format that this would be available in? if i'm a teacher, the most imporant thing getting from point A - which i guess we can assume is my initial thoughts/memories about adding/subtracting fractions, as well as my accumulated awareness of the class of students i'm going to work with - to point B - which is a confident plan of action that fits around my teaching style and my classroom composition. BELIEVE ME, this will not be achieved by a well-organized library of lesson plans, which can be printed out as is - or (to those detractors who would mention that a person could weed through and get the handouts they wanted, and write their own plan, which they can of course post on the wiki) whose primary format preempts a depth of navigation beyond its fundamental cover letter restrictions (it is in my mind impossible to imagine that attaching handouts to a madeline hunter approximation is the best way to present a teacher with the opportunity to make a value judgement on the utility of the materials themselves in respect to their classroom; there is too much time wasted in filtering through and contextualizing so much beuraucratic (sp?) filler). come on guys, even in good to great: "We recognize that planning is priceless, but plans are useless" so: how do we cultivate the critical moments of planning without sacrificing to the pitfalls of plans?

the direction should not be: here's a format that basically adds digital and wiki trappings to a medium you're already used to (this is like having early films being glorified theatrical productions), the direction should be: we have a month to build around us the most useful and flexible resource network we can imagine: if we start with the internet and some wiki software, what does this look like? (this is like: i have a narrative and a camera: how can i make it happen?)

of course: my criticism is more than likely too little too late, as i'm out of the proverbial loop and i won't be presenting to a room full of second years tomorrow. also, even if any of you were sympathetic to my skepticism, it's profoundly true that i do not have a better model for resource collection and distribution - nor do i harbor the pretention, contrary to popular belief, that all i need to do is sit down and meditate on this mess for a bit before i have whatever epiphany i'm whining about. however, i think a brainstorming session about how to be adapt a wiki to the needs of teachers in classrooms may offer up better perpective than a top-down here's-how-you-get-to-do-your-mtc-assignments-online sort of thing. having a binder labeled "algebra I" that's full of even peer-edited lesson plans will be another dusty addition to our classrooms. we have never been instructed on the process of moving from lesson plan to classroom teaching (though if you wanted to build a curriculm around this, go for it - it would be necessary for the application of this wiki); we have been instructed to plan for our classrooms and to accumulate a formated cover sheet for our plans in a given format - the format that jake has done a good job of tranferring to the site. lesson plans in this light are byproducts, not stepping stones. my bottom line: we need to keep the measure of success focused on the usefullness of these texts to future teachers (including future use by the contributors themselves), and we need to let the wiki medium form fluidly around our objectives, not just be a new way to present an old idea. if nothing else, let the second years think about whether or not the proposed system will achieve these goals.

i would greatly appreciate thoughts on this matter. i would be happy to include points of clarification if necessary.

two weeks to go and this is what's inside

2007-05-13T20:10:00.000-05:00

the death of required mcblog: my MTC experience

2007-05-10T22:50:00.000-05:00

ben guest productions proudly presents:

...a horrible prompt to put an end to a horrible idea. jake has it right: "The blog was great when it was spontaneous and extra-curricular." i wonder how many sprouts were trampled in the combine...

my MTC experience: an 800+ word effort of condensation and association

spring '05

wherein the protagonist applies to a slew of teaching programs: MTC, Worldteach, TFA, etc. ben guest contacts him and is very persuasive. plans are made to come to mississippi and teach math, rather than go to china again, or to continue the TFA process. primary selling point: intimacy of small program, organizational support, and free master's degree.

summer '05

wherein the protagonist walks off of the graduation platform at amherst, and into a uhaul that he will drive - with roommate - to mississippi. highlight of the trip: crashing into a gas station before leaving massachusetts, and watching the proprietor water flowers while waiting for a fiberglass contractor to come assess the damage on the service island overhead. the summer is spent with roommate and squatter in a subletted apartment in oxford. a cat is involved. on the first day of classes, a bearded fellow in torn bluejeans and a bandana says something about loving america and traveling around in a minivan with a matress in the back and a girlfriend. the protagonist - upon learning that he will be teaching in the same building as the bearded fellow - is sure that this is an unwelcome match. MTC classes - a "toolbox" as advertised - amount to the idea of a lesson plan, the cutting and pasting of paper, and the dumping of the protagonist into a summer school classroom (upon arrival, the veteran teacher dumps four boys and some textbooks on him, and says "they're yours." nothing much happens - except an interesting lesson on the Stackerlee myth, and some textual dectective work with a Stephen King novel). a lot of time is spent chatting with the proprietor of Hot Dog Records, whose store is always impending foreclosure.

fall '05

wherein the protagonist learns that his students can not graph lines, or add fractions, or write fluent sentences - also that they have hardly been encouraged or motivated to value the reward of educational restraint and self-improving focus. he throws the curriculm out the window and tries to find where they are in relation to where they need to be. textbooks never arrive. more and more students are added/dropped from the roll. katrina rolls over jackson, ms as a category 1 hurricane. the protagonist sits on the porch with roommate and watches trees bend over each other. a cat is involved. more and more students are added/dropped from the roll - some from new orleans. calculators are forebidden in the classroom - so that students are forced to think. at this point, it is clear that textbooks will never come (they do, however, show up sometime before winter break). many photocopies will be made. throughout all of this, MTC courses are now at their least academic, least useful, and least believable. one course involves being read to for hours out of a rhetorically corrupt red book, and/or poorly typed overheads. this is punctuated with arts & crafts. classmates duck in the corner to avoid being reprimanded while trying to figure out what to teach on monday, and a nauseatingly misrepresentative lesson plan is coughed up (the death of STAI is demanded, but ignored; the guillotine rests, alone). other MTC events: an old man sits observes the protagonist's classroom, makes awkwardly sexist comments towards his visiting friend, and pats him inappropriatly after giving him a candy bar (must be a generation gap); a class is organized around "tricks of the trade" and learning how to integrate technology that doesn't exist in resource-poor classrooms. in the school building, the protagonist reluctantly offers to help with the cross country team - gratefully meeting a student who happens to be a decent runner -
and plots with torn blue jeans america beard man to give kids an outlet for controversy. this is funded by a local foundation. somewhere along the mix, the protagonist offers his complaints and suggestions to his instructor, and seems to be encouraged to leave the program (i.e. "we will understand if you choose not to return for a second year"); all he wanted was for his saturdays of class not to be a total waste - he did in fact believe in the concept of saturday classes, and the group that met for them. this group - in fact- is the primary source of strength and renewal on these organizational weekends - most cathartically spent abusing hotel rooms.

spring '06

wherein the protagonist suddenly feels like a second-year teacher in the second semester, and wherein the roommate begins to separate from MTC and start doing a lot of yoga to keep herself form coming totally unglued. a cat is involved. courses are finally valid: an ed-law class that plows through important information by means of uninformative lectures and poorly typed overhead; an issues in education class that is actually a class - readings, discussions, guest lecturers, exhausting projects, endless reflection and actually a book to read (not to mention articles and clippings). the decent runner begins to get in shape, and does well enough to make it to the big show; at the same time, things like stealing a car and running it into a ditch spell danger. the outlet for controversy blows up into a full-fleged organization: speakers (governors, NAACP leaders, state judges, etc.), trips, protest, and plenty of argument - capped off with a two-day civil rights tour: ole miss for meredith stuff and memphis for dr. king/museum stuff. in the classroom, the water has found its level and enough resources have been created and/or scrapped together in order to get some instruction taken care of. students can graph lines at this point, and some progress is made in the realm of creativity and interdisciplinary thought. mostly, chaotic though. protagonist and roommate live more and more separate lives, severed emotionally, financially, and productively; sometimes, they do yoga together. girlfriend/love of protagonist moves to MS in late december, and is mugged at the end of an aweful new years eve. she takes up a job doing secretarial work for a law firm, and gradually gets invovled with local free weekly while the protagonist gradually begins squatting at her apartment - only going back to his old duplex for clothes and the hermitage demands of a intense workload.

summer '06

wherein the protagonist finds himself with a bout of teaching summer school when rest was needed. too many world cup games watched at too many bars on too many afternoons; the protagonist should have been getting in running shape. a profound love grows, however, for the people around him in the MTC groups - first and second years. all things seem to fall to the wayside in preference for the promotion of group identity. many parties, a couzapalooza, a bachelor's last stand, and less sleep than should have been required. delightful hosts, however. also: a forgettable in the flesh course, a deplorable online course, and a neverending requirement to sit in a classroom and check off boxes. in july, a body finally rests, a cat dies, a roommate moves away, and the protagonist and his love move into original lodgings. a new cat, and the school year approaches suprisingly fast.

fall '06

wherein the protagonist gets a second chance at teaching/coaching/sponsoring. there are no textbooks again, so he begins the process of making all of his own materials in digital format. a calculus class shows some promise. the outlet for controversy continues to build strength, and is very active in a local bond issue and voter registration. two more schools begin to attend regularly - one a nearby public school, the other a nearby private school. cross country is a waste, mostly involving the protagonist standing in the middle of the field waiting for baskeball shoes to wheeze and moan by. the decent runner had run into trouble over the summer, and spends most of the school year cooped up in alternative school. he calls the protagonist at all hours, but little can be done. MTC offers up its second legitimate course - an extension of the first one, taught by the same person, and focusing on ed leadership and leadership studies. more visitors, more books, more thinking. the other fall course is a well-intentioned ed research seminar, which could use some focus. the biggest benefit of the program is as it always is - devastated hotel rooms, hundred of hot wings, and each other. the complete absorbtion of the school day is in full effect; 11 and 12 hour days roll off without a thought. every night the protagonist and/or the blue jeans america are the last cars in the parking lot. one evening, a driver side window is shattered. no more ipod.

spring '07

wherein the protagonist hits his stride, falters, and continues. students have learned much more than last year (they can certainly graph lines, and some can argue that they don't exist), textbooks are an afterthought, and four girls elect to sit for the ap exam - learning to be proud of what they do know, not ashamed of what they don't. and yet, there is so much withing all of them left unconvinced and untouched. a small meltdown towards the end of it - the protagonist lies on the floor of his bedroom for a couple of hours, wrapped up in failure; blue jeans america
calls for a couple days of rest. it is nevertheless true to the protagonist that the only deterrent for action within so many of his children is the possibility of punishment; the ethics of democracy is a failed project. the outlet for controversy begins to dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. meeting and conferences and so many people telling the kids that the moment that they figure out what they need to change, the moment they will lead us to a better future. MTC is an organizational ghost upon the horizon; however, there are still hundreds of hotwings, and each other - which seem to be the important parts anyway. at the end of it, plenty of required logorrhea, plenty of handshakes, and plenty of exit surveys. towards the end of school, the protagonist has such a hard time staying convinced that education has anything to do with education. a trip to alabama fills his soul however, when the outlet for controversy, having more food than they needed, decide to give it to those that have none, and - unprompted - feed the homeless at kelly ingram park. this is bookended the following afternoon by a gigantic monument to the confederacy - on the alabama capitol grounds.

.... 1805 words. give me my cake.

the end of an era

2007-04-29T22:23:00.000-05:00

mtc has just ended. the school year will end soon. when the dust settles, i'll hopefully have time to recollect on whatever it was i went through these two years, and i hope to use this blog as a forum.

in our end of program portfolio, we were asked to write a self-evaluation. i had been thinking recently in the effects upon my person for being complicit in the decrepitute and inefficiencies of public education - even though i've worked endlessly to carve out a space of love and empowerment for my children (a space i worry will be consumed immediately upon my departure). in any case, i'll put the self-eval text here. if anyone who reads this is interested in the rest of the portfolio, here's the link: http://wik-ed.org/dmolina

Self-Evaluation

Coming straight from an undergraduate institution and entering the classroom as a teacher, one can’t help from growing professionally, even when the idea of teaching as a “profession” (let alone a “vocation”) is something you tried to avoid at all costs. Of course, this is like asserting that on can’t help from growing French-ally when stuck in France for a couple years. I’m not sure I’ve tried to be professional much at all during my two years at Jim Hill - mostly because the assertion of professionalism by many of my colleagues seemed to be the analogue of my students claiming - in their most infantile of moments - that they were “grown.” My main concern - and perhaps the adjustments I’ve had to take to stick fast to it are those moments in which I’ve matured most as a teacher - has been to have a clear sense of how I’m going to get a group of students from the point A of wherever they are when they come in the room to the point B of where I want them to be. Honestly, nothing else really matters: bell schedules, attendance, morning duty, arrival times, lesson plans, faculty meetings, etc - all are easily cast aside by the fact that I want to be focused intensely on my students at all times. Perhaps, then - this is the professionalism I most value: a steadfast notion of what you need to do to get the job done, and what you can avoid because it’s got nothing to do with the bottom line. Staying after school every day because a senior has missed a couple weeks of class due to the abuses her child has suffered at its former day care facility: yes. Going to some office downtown so I can replace an ID I lost sometime in my first year: no. Coming on a Saturday to proctor a mock SAT or chaperone kids at a Civil Rights conference: yes. Making sure I roll by the front office by 7:45 AM so I can sign in on time: no. The irony is that the areas of growth I’ve clung most to are precisely the ones that put the most risk on my employee status: I shouldn’t give my students rides home after a meeting, even though everyone at home needs a car to work a double shift at god knows what, but I should have a lesson plan visible on my desk at all times even if my main mode of teaching involves me sitting behind that desk barking at kids to perform endless rote mathematical operations they have little investment in.

The most nagging legacy of my involvement in the public school system these past two years is most definitely the fact that I have compromised my soul in doing so. I am not speaking figuratively in this regard: the amount of complicity to human rights violations and abuses to our nation’s children that I’ve had to do just to fill my term of duty (not just yearly, but daily) is damning in its effect. The crossroads I face as a consequence are thus: either ignore this complicity and move on, submitting to an irreducible stain, or spend the rest of my life trying to understand - and thus justify - my circumstances of compromise. I am in this regard wedded to the legacy of public education - for its sins have been my own these past two years. Despite the hours and hours I’ve poured into maintaining respect for social justice, educational opportunity, and personal empowerment in my classroom, not a day goes by where I do not fail - where I am to tired too put my foot down, where I am too fatigued to be fair, where I am too ignorant to preempt a rash reaction to one of the many corrupting decisions I have to make. Just this past week I hid in my room during state testing because I was erroneously left off of the proctoring schedule - either for a test or for the students who decided to come to school and sit in the same classroom for four hours. Ironically, I spent most of that time in the corner of an unlit room working on this portfolio. I can hardly enumerate the amount of students I’ve socially promoted (through conscious decision or neglect), the amount of assignments I’ve failed to grade fairly or pass back, the casual lies I’ve told children to stop their persistent questioning, the control I’ve exerted over a population I’ve only wanted to empower with choice. It has proven impossible to remain consistent, unimaginable to stand firm.

Adjusting within harrowing failure - of both myself and those around me - has been my greatest professional achievement. Being able to get out of bed knowing that I’m going to escort 18-year-olds to the cafeteria has been a remarkable task. Learning how to choose when not to care anymore - despite the aforementioned compromise that may result - has been what has allowed me to be so convincing in the moments I’ve dedicated myself to - particularly the moment of academic inquiry, and creative growth. There is no circumstance that will allow me to degrade the fundamental kernel of academic freedom, and gradually reconciling myself with the effects upon this of the draconian behavioral restraints upon my students has been what has reserved my faith in the educational promise, despite my profound and healthy agnosticism regarding the whole ordeal.

Lastly, to speak of influences, I can do little other than point to Jacob Roth. Odd couple though we are, not a day goes by that I do not remind myself that we could not have done a damn thing (or at least I could not have done a damn thing) at Jim Hill without the support we’ve provided each other these two years. It’s not a complex relationship: when I’m slacking, he tells me to get my head out of my ass. When he’s slacking, I do the same. When one of us thinks we’re juggling too many balls in the air, the other either throws one in the mix for good measure, or steps in if the other clearly needs to be carried. I can safely say that I’ve never worked with another human being in such a personal and collaborative context, and I can only ascribe the illusion that I’ve grown so much as a teacher these past two years to the fact that we’ve pretty much grown together. Of course, I can hardly make this paragraph feel any more sappy, but I’m profoundly grateful to have not been alone in adjusting to the conditions at Jim Hill, and can foresee some awkward moments next year when I’m working in MS without Jake, and lack the proximity of so valid a sounding-board.

kidnapping, racial brawl, mississippi

2007-04-18T20:24:00.000-05:00

this seems to be the bottom line. in a brief converation with an area NAACP chapter, which made it very clear that - due to impending trial dates - they could not discuss specifics of the situation, it seems nevertheless clear that what follows is far from made up. while it is moot at this point to mention, it must be noted that while MS has made much progress in the realm of social justice and racial reconciliation, the threat of violence and bigotry is hardly gone:

april 2, walthall county, MS

~ a white public school busdriver allows her white 19-year-old daughter - not a student in the walthall county school district - on the bus for a ride home

~ at some point in the bus ride, the 19-year-old daughter gets in an altercation with a black 12-year-old student - apparantly for getting in an argument with the 19-year-old's 12-year-old stepson. the 19-year-old white non-student eventually strikes the 12-year-old black student.

~ the 12-year-old's black 16-year-old sister moves to defend her brother, and a larger fight ensues.

~ the bus-driver pulls the bus over, and herself enters the struggle. thereafter, she is allegedly heard yelling into her cellpone, "i'm on my way," and takes the bus well off of its intended route, to a house in a rural area.

~ at the house - a huge deviation from the bus route - the white students are ushered off the bus and are joined with other white children and adults who, brandishing bats, shovels, etc. proceed to chant threats and racial epithets to the black children still on the bus.

~ the walthall county deputy arives and takes the 19-year-old daughter into custody, as well a one of the black students.

~ the bus driver resumes her duties, returing students home over an hour later than usual.

april 3, walthall county, MS

~ parents of the black students show up at the school the next morning. the principal refuses to meet with them to discuss the events of the previous afternoon - saying they must issue a complaint with the director of transportation.

~ the black parents notice that their children's bus route has been split into two - one for the black students, driven by a black male busdriver, and one for the white students, driven by the husband of the woman who had driven the bus route the previous afternoon.

~ an altercation ensues - beginning between students, then between parents and students, and then a large-scale struggle develops involving students, parents, and school faculty.

~ in the aftermath: three black students face expulsion, and four black parents were arrested. no white students or community members have faced charges - other than the 19-year-old daughter of the white bus driver - who was taken into custody on april 2.

april 4, walthall county, MS

~ bullets riddle the home of the white bus driver.

notes on walthall county

~ known as the "cream pitcher of MS" - due to dairy production
~ on southern MS boarder with LA
~ racial demographics of county: 54% white, 44% black
~ the 2,600 student school district is about 65% black

sources/links:

http://www.wlbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=6352908&nav=menu119_3
http://www.africanpath.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogEntryID=583
http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070411/NEWS/704110374/1001/NEWS
http://www.wapt.com/news/11640345/detail.html

it is far from over

2007-04-16T20:56:00.000-05:00

"when you are behind in a footrace, the only way to get ahead is to run faster than the man in front of you. So when your white roommate says he's tired and goes to sleep, you stay up and burn the midnight oil" - Dr. King, 1963

The achievement gap is as follows: you take a group of the most promising and proficient students you've encountered in a given school year, and you give them the SAT. These people are clearly and undisputably intelligent people - anyone who is human can, in having a conversation with any one of them, detect those obvious and ephemeral human qualities within that denote functional intelligence. They are, in short, the most impressive individuals you've encountered in a given teaching cycle, and deserve any and all opportinity to develop the excellence within them. So, you and a fellow teacher negotiate with a local foundation to provide them a Princeton Review SAT prep course free of charge (your colleague is a Princeton Review certified teacher) - and you give them the SAT to take before the course starts.

After getting back the results, you call up your younger brother - who's a senior at your old high school - and ask him what he imagines the average SAT score will be for a kid at your high school who is - to put it bluntly - useless (i.e. wasting time and space in the classroom, and showing no initiative or appreciation of the educational premise therein). It is a heartbreaking understanding - as heartbreaking as it is for your colleague who is a Princeton Review teacher, who has never seen scores so low - to know that your most intelligent and deserving students have scored drastically below individuals who are - from an insitutional sense - far less than their peers, yet in another academic environment. Furthermore, it is nauseating to see in this situation something profoundly unstated about the unanimous Blackness of your students (drawn, in turn, from a public high school in Jackson, MS that is 99.9% African-American), and the vaguely unbroken whiteness of your old high school (an all-male Jesuit school in Cleveland, OH). For, this is the thought that surfaces: a bunch of complete assholes will graduate from your old high school having never given a damn about the influence of educational advancement upon their opportunities to participate in the economy, then limp through some undergraduate Jesuit-school dumping ground, and end up comfortably suburban as a MBA wannabe (though perhaps a CPA flag-bearer) doing little to no work for a job secured by the dad or uncle of a friend-of-a-friend, floating on a $150K house and sending Jr. to the self-same Jesuit high school, while your ex-students - all of them so beautiful in their brilliance, self-awareness, and initiative, will sooner or later run up against the glass-ceiling of either their race or (more likely at this point) their intellectual upbringing, and god knows what will happen to them - a service economy cesspool, or - worse yet - "yes, sir" or "yes, ma'm" answering machine to the jerk-off country club middle managers who drank their way through what they will stumblingly recall as the best years of their life. All you can do at this point - the end of a school year, no less - is look at these beautiful, strange little people that you've become so attached to in the previous months, and want so much that their talents be recognized and cultivated to their fullest - all you can do is stare blankly at a leading indicator of their educational future (and look at how unfazed they are by performing in the 60th percentile when they belong in the 90th) and feel absolutely disgusted. This is the achievment gap: that the most brilliant and deserving of my students - all black - are going to get boxed out of higher education by a bunch of jaded shitheads who have taken for granted the undue benefits of a "culture of excellence" they want no part of, and by the time you meet your kids in high school, there's little you can do about it except stuff like pray that their SAT scores will jump about 500 points - pray that they never stop burning the midnight oil.

It is all the more devestating to have this happen two years in a row.

crossroads: the economy of violence

2007-02-28T20:24:00.000-06:00

i will (hopefully) never accept the suggestion that experience can trump analysis. of course, experience is quite necessary to inform, maintain, develop, and support analysis, but any argument butt-ended with an irreducible witness to an existential higher ground gerrymandered upon the axis of you-just-had-to-be-there ( "you just don't know what it's like," "you don't know me," "it's a cultural thing," etc.) is at once violently depraved and unresolvably pretentious - at least as much as a sister argument that is as myopically speculative as this one is anecdotal.

i never in my life have imagined that violence could be such a disease. this afternoon, the civil rights/civil liberties group were dicussing areas - personal, cultural, communal - requiring our critical attention, with a look towards reform, renewal, reimagination, etc. we waded through suggestions that school funding be a priority for reform, that work must be done to improve the national attitude towards mississippi's perceived backwardness, that structures should be in place to promote a healthier cultural exchange and level of understanding between identity groups, etc. however, when the conversation struck upon the issue of violence within culture - in respect to both daily instantiations of playfighting, bickering, and physical conflict withing the school building, as well as a grander manifestations of gang violence, neighborhood disorder, and ghetto survival-of-the-fittest narratives - a wildfire erupted in the classroom. any sympathy for the possibility of nonviolent conflict resolution, or even a turn-the-other-cheek attitude towards minor, mundane confrontation was met with a profoundly loud and profoundly strong championing of the responsibility of an individual to push back, fight back, cuss back, etc. - if only in order to protect one's social reputation, though also to preempt future, amplified harm. to many students, it seemed inconcievable, undesirable, and to some degree embarrassing to imagine a response to agression that was not itself agressive - in either equal or greater measure.

recently, rachael was in conversation with a mother - and pastor of a local congregation - who recounted an instance where she (the mother) went to her son's school building to physically resolve a conflict that her son was having with another student. in regards to any seeming contrast that such a decision may have with the implications of her vocation, the mother responded: "i'm a good christian - but i'm a mother first!" it seems that the students in my classroom were proliferating a similar doublethink. invocations of the social importance of ghandi and mlk were met with battlecries of "my mother told me to never let anyone hit me," weakly allied with the "by any means necessary" stance of malcolm x. eventually, the last frontier seemed to be a deeply entrenched "you don't know what it's like being me" and "you can't change people" stance thrown up against those students who were legitimately concerned that violence would old beget violence, that "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind," and that the everyday violence of the school building was part and parcel with grander social woes. clearly, this discussion is in a very nascent stage, but i'm convinced - by the unexpected and immediate energy that ripped through the classroom - that this is an important crossroads for the group to fix itself to for the time being, and develop a mature and critical response to the whole mess. for me, it's back to breaking up the constant bickering and playfighting in my classroom - only now with the understanding that many of our student leaders - intellectually and socially - both accept and promote the economy of violence as a way of life.

[for those of you who'd like a context for some "you're an outsider and don't know what you're talking about" fodder: i'm a second-year teacher in a public high school in jackson, ms. i teach mathematics to 10-12th graders. the school is 99% afro-american (there are two white kids and and handful of latinos somewhere in the building), and the vast majority of students receive free/reduced lunch. the participants in the civil rights/civil liberties club are predominantly freshman/sophmores from jim hill, and nearly all also participiate in the schools's international baccalaureate programme. other participants in the club come from two other high schools in the district, and one private school in a nearby suburb. the visiting students are predominantly juniors/seniors, and majority white. all the participants in the club are predominantly female, and no male members were present at today's meeting.]

a thought from a morning drive at the end of a long week

2007-02-16T07:05:00.000-06:00

it is upon the schools to be stewards of freedom; if they fail to cultivate an attitude of civil responsibility within the agency of their wards, then they mistake their role in a democratic society - and become a great burden to democracy when they should be its strongest foothold.

i walked out of calculus class today

2007-02-13T19:05:00.000-06:00

setting: i'm in the middle of explaining how to find the equation of a tangent line to a function at a point, and T asks "what is the tangent line for?" because he's the gloriously everpresent pragmatic, and - as i'm about to explain why anyone would care about lines that hit a curve at exactly one point - i realize that R, B, and J are bickering/joking once again in the middle of instruction. at this point, my mood hollows out, and i rapidly bleed through the following conclusions:

(1) i'm going to start yelling at these kids if i don't act fast (and i refuse to yell at children);

(2) it's embarrassing - for me and for them - that i have to even consider giving seniors in high school a detention for disturbing class;

(3) i've lost nearly all faith in compulsory education that extends past what we now consider the 9th grade; a very distant extention of which is the feeling that if a student does not want to be in a calculus class - and R, B, and J have certainly expressed this sentiment to me both explicitly and implicitly - no one should make them be there; in fact, the extensive "classroom management" that must be developed in a classroom in which a degraded sense of "all students can learn" has forced the attendance of a bunch of kids who don't want to be there (and yes, it is possible for a student to not want to be in a calculus course) actively drains a teacher's productive efforts from those students who do want to be there (and yes, it is possible for a student to want to be in a calculus course). the most nullifying rock-and-hard-place of the educational environment is the fact that if i spend time correcting the behavior of disruptive students, i'll risk dening the education of the productive ones; and, if spend time focusing on the learning of productively minded students, gross disruptions will have to be risked and/or tolerated. it is decidedly not the case that the tautology of "everyone can learn calculus" is coextensive with the problematic "everyone will learn calculus," and hardly related to "everyone can learn calculus from mr. molina while they're a senior at jim hill"; furthermore, it is not wholly upon the teacher (nor is it wholly upon the student) that the latter two statements crumble;

(4) an ethical sea-change: a skinnerian punishment/reward model is a moral embarrassment, and it's often the case in the environment i'm teaching in that the only deterrent for a person not to act is the fear/experience of punishment. this is monumentally contrary to a civil, democratic decision-making model, wherein the benefits/deterrents of an action are heavily influenced by their social/interpersonal context; that is, i see growing in my students the decision-making pallate upon which the act of something like stealing is only undesireable in that one may (if caught) get punished for doing it, not in that there is (even if not caught) something unjust or morally corrupt about violating another (hence the nauseating mantra of "look out for your own," or "cover your ass," or "i'm going to get my own"). in this, cornel west's concern about a "nihilistic threat" is powerfully appropriate. furthermore, the perpetuation of a punishment-for-this and a reward-for-that model - sans social, ethical reflection - is entirely complicit with the dehumanizing authority that is infecting a strange diabetes of the soul; we are becoming overwhelmed with consequence, not embodied with choice - and at some point our faculty of ethical distinction gives way to a nihilism of unhinged self-satisfaction and self-concern.

so i walked out.

i paced around campus for a while to blow off steam, refilled my coffee mug, and returned to the class to finish my pre-tailspin statement. they now know how to find the tangent line to a function at a point. to what end, i do not know.

a recommendation

2007-01-21T18:14:00.000-06:00

what follows is an early draft of a recommendation that i made for a student (anonymous in this context) i had last year for algebra ii, and currently have in trig/precalc. in writing the recommendation - as you'll see - i devolved quickly into a rather personal meditation on my own growth in the past year and a half - as seen through the context of my relationship with this student. clearly, the letter needed less of me and more of him to be sent on to a college - and it was heavily adjusted for that pupose. however, the recommendation's original form strikes me as a rather appropriate witness to whatever it is that i've been doing in mississippi.

**

The Players:

Mr. Molina, teacher
Students

The Scene: The first day of the 2006-2007 school year at Jim Hill H.S., Jackson, MS. In between class periods, students are arriving for the initial meeting of a Trigonometry course. Mr. Molina – swarmed with familiar and unfamiliar faces – is frantically trying to keep order.

[Enter J]

Mr. Molina [irate] J: get over here and give me your schedule!

J [smirking] Mr. Molina – you know I wouldn’t enter this classroom unless I had to.

[Exeunt.]

J’s story is a story of growth – else I would not be writing him a college recommendation letter some few months after the encounter above. In fact, I’m honored to be at a point in my relationship with J that I am able to write such a recommendation, because – I will be very honest in admitting it (for the growth I refer to is mine as well) J was by far one of my least favorite students during the 2005-2006 school year - this is definitely not the case now. What is more – despite the conventions that a recommendation letter presents – I find no more fitting a way to honor J than to reflect on how much progress he has made, and also bear witness to the growth he has inspired – and at times forced – within me.

As a first year teacher in a school district far away from my own home (Cleveland, OH) and schooling (Amherst College, Amherst, MA), I quickly developed a very particular definition for a student that I did not like – one that could run my classroom whether I liked it or not. Such a concept was of course a projection of guilt regarding my own vast inexperience; some days all I wanted was for my students to magically sit down and relax, so I could simply process what was going on. This – I quickly learned – would almost never happen, and would most definitely never happen when J was in the room. What is more: he never missed a day, and never skipped a class. I would wake up in the morning afraid of the inevitable J.

I will always tell people that I learn the most about teaching from my worst classes. They never let me skip a beat; I need to be a better teacher every day for them – all I can see in the midst of a boring or riotous room is my own failure, day in and day out. J was the figurehead of my most frustrating class – if he didn’t get a concept, his social force of wit and bravado would derail any intentions I had of moving forward; if a management decision of mine carried any hint of injustice or inconsistency, J would bring the class to a tense standstill. Up against this, I was compelled to do two things: (1) work relentlessly towards consistently effective instruction, (2) figure this kid out – through phone calls home, conferences during class, casual conversation, pump-up speeches during a test, anything. Many messages home ran like this: J is a leader in my classroom – I need him to decide to lead as a positive role model for his peers, not a negative one. J decided to take over the class today, and I’m rather frustrated that he did so after all the progress of late. J is clearly an intelligent young man – if he has a lack of confidence in math, I’d love to work with him after school.

As far as I could tell, the 2005-2006 school year ended in a stalemate between J and me; we had survived the year together, but I hadn’t seen the academic or leadership growth that he seemed so obviously on the brink of. Summer passed, and a new school year began – christened with the humorous/tense exchange that opened this recommendation. However, within the first few weeks of Trigonometry it was clear that some change had come over J – he was much more calm and much more focused, and was easily passing the new and difficult content. Moreover, our exchanges became much more familiar and frequent – developing quite naturally into an ongoing, casual discussion about our shared interest in hip-hop (he recently burned me the new Jay-Z CD; I’m currently burning him Nas’s Illmatic) and politics. It seemed that J was finally opening up to constructive dialogue with a subject matter he found intimating and the people that were responsible for it.

In the middle of the first term, a parent-teacher conference confirmed my observations; over the summer, J had confided in his father about his frustration with math. Furthermore, J admitted the importance of overcoming his weaknesses if he was going to succeed in a challenging college environment, and so resolved himself to take on Trigonometry/PreCalculus – regardless of the consequences. After my third semester of working with J, I must say – with the deep pride that I’ve recently found belonging to a teacher – that he is doing just fine, and is doing better with each class meeting. Of course, he has days when he’s frustrated – but I think that this year I’m better at preventing it and he’s better with dealing with it. Most importantly – however – is that J is well on his way of figuring out just what he’s capable of – even if it’s a painful, personal journey. This is incredibly encouraging; it shows me – a recent graduate of the liberal arts tradition – that J is in an ideal position to continue to mature and strengthen in an academic and social environment that cultivates an attitude of critical analysis upon a foundation of essential knowledge. He has always had the ability within him to grow into a strong thinker and a strong leader; it seems that finally J has followed this up in my mathematics class with the courage to engage in the risks and vulnerabilities that come with strength. So, it is without any hesitation that I strongly recommend J for enrollment at X - a place that I have no doubt will continue to challenge and support him on his path to excellence.

lying on a couch in my living room and watching the sound of music

2006-12-23T20:19:00.000-06:00

cleveland is the place where pretentions go to die.

a restful weekend

2006-10-29T20:40:00.000-06:00

i don't think it's the drug (which is a stimulant), but rather the eventual 30 minutes or so of unmitigated attention that makes a cigar the most calming experience of a sunday night.

one more class to plan. then, another week of it.

notes from a mental health day

2006-10-12T13:28:00.000-05:00

i felt a horrible inertia when my alarm went off this morning, and - after staring, transfixed for quite some time, at the blades of a ceiling fan - i realized it was best that i call in sick today and try and let the swollen knot in my mood loosen up. after logging a good 13 hours of sleep, and sitting on the couch in my living room flipping mindlessly through what i think was esquire magazine - it suddenly occurred to me that i should clean up the office/library upstairs - which was cluttered with math textbooks and fleeting academic concern. a phone call from margaret reminded me i should eat something, and now - after mediterranean food, ice cream cake (bought, not eaten), and a snow cone (eaten) - it's 1:40pm.

i honestly don't know what to do with myself today. there is clearly the desire to let my mood flush itself out via long spans of staring at something minutely stimulating (writing a blog is one of those things), but then again the slow fire from which this mood sprang is still smoldering and flickering - eating the occasional second away with the sour reminder of my long list of things incomplete. i said it last year - sometime a little deeper into the second term - and it's no less prevalent now: all i see is incompleteness. as it stands, the role of a teacher in the education of our children is an impossible one. furthermore, my assumption of that role is dangerously overambitious.

i am not a cynic. that was not a cynical impossibility that i referred to (which is why - i think - i included the prophetic phrase "as it stands" into that sentence). but, i am a skeptic. while i believe profoundly in the possibility of successfully educating these beautiful children, it is nonetheless pathetically evident that the structures - cultural, financial, occupational, governmental, occupational - barely in place to ensure our great egalitarian charge are broken in the most tragicomic of ways. just broken. simply and utterly inefficient. often more harmful than productive. nauseatingly so.

somedays you want everyone to just stop. stop hurting these children. stop yelling at each other. stop this aping professionalism. stop the forms, the formalities. stop ignoring all the holes, the leaks, the crumbling ceilings and the cockroaches everywhere. stop the steady encroachment of control over every aspect of every person in the building. stop taking away all of my planning periods on the week that i need to put together paper-trail verifiable grades for 130+ students and i need to turn in lesson plans for the next two weeks for all three of my preps. stop telling me that teachers are important/underappreciated/martyrs. stop holding unannounced meetings to explain to us that we're not doing a job that we either didn't know we had to do, or didn't know how to do (and giving me a password to an unnavigable web-site and telling me it's my responsibility to figure "it" out does little more than account for the most basic elements of managerial liability - actively assisting your workers in understanding and mastering their required tasks is exactly the primary job of a manager). stop everything.

[then you ask: who to stop? under every rock there's a tiny arrow to a new rock to look under, and under, and under. everyone is failing but no one seems to blame. this is the problem with liability.]

this is a knot too tangled. it is mind-numbingly bizarre that a managerial situation would become so venomously restrictive, top-down, and frozen that a person would just sit by and let children be treated like prisoners, like cattle, like product. of course, as things are - i am sitting by and letting this happen (and so i have mental health days). escorting my 15-18 year old HUMAN BEINGS to the cafeteria - making sure they are in a single file line on the right side of the hallway, making sure they are in a single file line while they wait to be given this or that warm/moist/fried organic container of salt and high fructose corn syrup (food that has nutritional value in name only), making sure they do not leave any empty seats between them as they sit down, making sure we leave as soon as they're done eating so that i can take them back to the classroom after the only 20 minutes of semi-freedom they've had all day and immediatly resume my lesson at the point where it was interrupted by a man knocking at my door (never at the same time) to tell me that i can take my kids to lunch now.

making sure the boys have their shirts tucked in. making sure the girls aren't wearing flip flops or are showing (gasp) skin. making sure i don't give a hall pass to those children who have been denied by the administration that priviledge. making sure they're all in their seats within the 5 minutes they have to move between classes in an crowd of 1300ish kids packing into a building that was made for 800ish.

you wonder if we can't just put everything on pause, erase it all, and calmly, carefully rebuild from simple, unavoidable truths/needs/objectives (what we have now are mao-ish 5-year plans for educational dominance). of course, the concepts of truth and need are more often than not triflingly defficient in cultures so complex and diverse. but there must be primary, apparent, and powerful concerns that we can functionally adapt as premises, and hold fast to.

the problem with this is - of course - that concerns for the education of children are swimming in a minefield of liability-cautious politics. any superintendant, principal, or teacher would be able to (and are able to) mime a sensitivity to any fundamental educational premise you can throw at them ("we are a district that focuses on literacy" says the superintendent whose nineth graders more often than not read on a third grade reading level) . what do you do with a principal that puts a rhetorical premium on student achievement, yet whose every disjointed managerial action is clearly either detrimental to or a non-sequitur for the positive development - social, cultural, and academic - of children. or when one good decision is so tragically erased by a completely unexpected week of schooldays comprising of two 3-hr periods (so that we can let state tested subjects give their students unlimited time to take their tests), at one point claiming that no hall passes could be issued for the rest of the day - and taking 20 minutes to respond to a concern that a student needed to use the restroom (the administrator said that we should buzz the office to get an escort in the event that a student needed to leave the room), only to say that i could dismiss the student to the restroom.

we don't have textbooks. we don't have workbooks. we have to buy our own copy paper (or burn our federal issue Emegency Education Funding on it). our copies are monitored by cost-cut fiends in the superintendant's office downtown (we have to punch in a code to access the machine. a copy quota or pay-per copy system may be on the horizon). the copy machines rarely spend a day without breaking. we don't have calculators. we don't have computers (that work).

we don't have textbooks.

"we are a district focused on literacy."

***

there are no less than three major occupational tasks lumped into our conception of "teacher":

(1) someone who presents material to a group of students, engages students in the process of understanding/analyzing the material, and oversees legitimate assessment of this process
(2) someone who plans material to be presented for student engagement and assessment
(3) someone who collects and organizes the data gathered by assessment

it is becoming increasingly clear - given that i have 130 students and 3 preps - that it is often impossible for one person to complete all of these tasks simultaneously. at least if you have an equal level of concern and accountability for all three tasks. at least if you want teacher to work within 40-60 hours a week. at least if you want teachers to engage in extracurricular tutoring, mentoring, and group organizing.

this assertion of impossibility is not hyperbole. nor is it a cry for sympathy. it is merely an assertion of a certain kind of impossibility. i work 70-80hr weeks. i'm in the school building for 10 hours a day on average - often without break. i choose to do this and i enjoy doing this (though i'm well aware that it would be psychologically and physically dangerous to do this for more than a few years). i barely reach a level of competence with tasks (1) and (2), and i'm merely treading water with (3). i'm almost never more than a week ahead of planning, and usually have no idea what i'm teaching the next day (though i never let myself walk into a classrom without a plan). while i regret this lack of competent preparedness (deeply), and sincerely wish that i could please my administrators by turning in the next two-weeks of lesson plans by friday (tomorrow) afternoon every other week, there's little to no chance that it will ever get done. because - if i want to preserve my physical and mental health in the short term - there isn't any more time left. i will not sacrifice a healthy amount of sleep; and i must force myself to experience at least a small sustained period of recreation each week. this is barely possible as is, and it is only the latter half of saturdays that i am completely free from work.

i would not wish this situation upon any human being, and it is a major part of the crippling tragicomedy of education that teachers are subject to this sort of workload as a given if they have any pretention of being competent/meaningful. i imagine that as a teacher becomes more weathered, competency is preserved at the expense of vital meaningfulness - as survival techniques are frozen into a rinse-repeat cycle of the same lesson plans and activities year in an year out. of course i'll be able to turn in two-weeks of lesson plans in the event that i don't do any major adjusments to my teaching from year to year. this fact illimunates the value of this two-weeks-in-advance system as either (1) meaningless/inappopriate for newer teachers, (2) misleading in regards to the real effectiveness of older teachers. either way - without some other true-management structure to better analyze the act of planning (which can be easily differentiated for the experience delineated two teacher sets). of course, this structure (were it possible to exist) would need to be patient, process-oriented, and active - which means that it - like many other concerns of a administration myopically giving tripartate emphasis on the three teaching tasks - is impossible during school year real-time or on-air time - i.e. when the students's school day arc is taking priority over any time-detached concerns.

****

i hate the teacher's summer. it is a constant red herring for anyone thinking about re-imagining teacher salary (as the go-to whine point of naysayers to raising salaries) or teacher roles (experienced teachers seem to vehemently protect it). it seems to serves primarily as a numbing period during which a teacher prolongingly deflates, and a student prolongingly forgets. it is of no end to my frustration when - upon craving the weekend or a day off - someone near me thinks it particularly witty to chime in that i should not be complaining because i have an entire summer off. i would - without any hesitation whatsoever - trade my teacher's summer for a more humane approach to my responsibilities. it seems that - in an environment hungry for data, proof, and paper trail - the important tasks of a teacher are either multiplying or growing more onerous, or both. so, it seems necessary and/or natural that we either (a) splice off new- full or part-time positions within a building that actually take control of one of these malignant teaching roles: e.g. a dedicated assessment collector and data-analyzer; a dedicated curriculum development specialest and activity creator; a dedicated parent-contact supervisor; a dedicated teacher-performer (jps has these a nominal fashion, but they are barely integrated into the process of teaching and learning. this is because it's silly to imagine that i'm going to magically jump on the literacy train when i've got a thousand copies to make and parents to call), (b) adjust the concept of the school year so that in between periods of teaching-performing arcs (lets say two-months or nine-weeks) there are periods (lets say two or three weeks) of dedicated data analysis and informed preparation (curriculum adjustment and activity creation) for the next arc. the aforementioned hypothetical assement collector and curriculum specialists can operate as consultants to teachers during these collect and prep periods, and perhaps as librarians (to give some relevance to the roll) during the teaching arcs. and what of the kids during these periods? internships, work-study, community service, sports. i don't know. what do we expect them to do in the summer when they're rotting at some fast-food place? and what do teachers gain from two-months of paid vacation? nothing that trumps the immense "but you have the summer off" inertia that coats a cultural reluctance to pay teachers in a way that allows districts to compete as employers. if a summer off were somehow grandly more rewarding than a comfortable salary with an incentive-based bonus system and the ability to actually work 40-60 hours a week, then schools of education would have stunningly competitive applicant pools, and school districts would have no problem filling each classroom with a highly qualified, highly engaging teacher. however: schools of education have the most uncompetitive applicant pools in all of academia; there's a pronounced teacher shortage in the country, even in a state that comparitively pays its teachers reasonably well - mississippi. how do we even pretend that we can provide a quaility education for students if we can neither attract or retain the necessary amount of teachers? i don't care if we're a district focused on literacy. we don't have textbooks to read or enough people to make sure students read them.

****

it's 9:20pm. my bedttime is fast approaching. i spend the last few hours putting together a lesson that looks at the mad hatter's tea party in through the looking glass as a series of word problems, to cap off my small unit on translating from english to algebra. however, since word problems aren't in the official pacing guide for algebra ii, i'm getting criticized from all adminsitrative corners for spending my time on them. it's more important, or so the pacing guide says, to solve linear systems. however, my kid's couldn't graph lines at the beginning of the year. nor could they solve equations. nor could they do anything with word problems. so teaching what a linear system is, and how they could hypothetically solve it would be a bit useless. worse yet - i could give them calculators and show them which buttons to press. but then they wouldn't be learning, or they wouldn't be learning math. they'd be learning about math, about these foreign objects that get put together by the tiny pixels on a ti-82. but they wouldn't be inside these objects, tickling their contours and creating connections between them. they woudn't know where they come from or where they're going. they wouldn't know who died to make them real. they wouldn't be performing math; they wouldn't be mathematical people, passionately wrapped in a pattern-based structural analysis of all things. there would be nothing the parabola could say to the tea cup, nothing a line could do about love. and this would be horrible, and i would never let it happen. if i have to spend a year helping these kids get inside wonderland, then i will do so. when they're there, then we can have a real discussion about a function, or we can do something legitimate with two lines hitting each other somewhere in the descartean void - nothing, intricately drawn nowhere. i refuse to teach them about math; if that takes me putting my foot down and telling them that they will figure out how to solve for x, then that what it takes me. fire me. find someone to march through the state objectives in the worst public educational environment in the country (who are we kidding, anyway? they read a fifth grade level - why are you giving the seniors jane eyre to read for the summer?). if i have to march them down to the cafeteria one-by-one to get their daily dose of diabetes, there's no way that i'm going to sit them down with a bucket of quarters at the zero-sum slot machine of push-button education. i'm going to give them alice in wonderland, and i'm going to ask whether they say what they mean or they mean what they say. then we'll solve some word problems.

lightning bolts

2006-08-09T20:50:00.000-05:00

"hello mr. molina, this is XXXXX. i'm just calling to let you know that [chi-chi] may not be there at jim hill next year. he got into trouble today at the school, and he'll probably be calling you later and i thank you for all your help... goodbye."

**

coach terry told me that when he was a new teacher, someone who had been around for a while took him aside and said, "you haven't learned this yet, but you'll find out that when you start caring about these kids, you have to watch out for lightning bolts." coach didn't see how his situation was making him any more susceptible to meteorological tragedy, and so inquired further. "every once in a while," the veteran explained, "something will happen that will take these kids away from you, and it will be totally out of your control. and they'll be gone forever, and there's nothing you can do. you'll have been doing everything you can to help these kids out, and you may actually be making some progress, and then - suddenly - they'll just be gone."

**

to get to the juvenile detention center, you take gallatin underneath hwy 20. the street fades slowly past dead industrial complexes, and then bends past a strip club, a bar called "hat and cane," the jackson police department's practice range, and unexpected trees. right in the middle of wondering where the hell you are, the center jumps up on you, and a sudden turn is necessary, which prompts whoever's driving behind you to lean on their horn as you barely make the turn off.

the parking lot - trucks and deliveries to the left, and visitors to the right - is always nearly empty, even during the obscure visiting hours - 6 to 7:30 pm on thursdays and saturdays. this is probably because you actually can't ever see the people you've come to visit; you're most likely just going to stand in the half-lit, stone clean room and watch whatever reason you had
to come visit whomever slip bitterly away as the don't-shoot-the-messenger security guard explains to you from behind bullet proof glass the incredibly complex process of getting on the list of people allowed to see someone - which inolves a parent/guardian that may not exist and a detention center counselor who may not be assigned yet, and even if he/she were assigned, keeps inexplicable hours. so you sit there for a minute, feeling a terrible, swelling impotence, and then almost kick through the security-released front door when it makes a loud buzzing noise telling you that it's unlocked, but then doesn't open.

**

i made it about 2 minutes - stupidly lisenting to johnny cash's american v - before breaking down and not knowing where to go, but knowing that i couldn't go wherever i was heading before i panicked and became sobbingly directionless. then it seemed reasonable that - since it was 7:30 pm on the thursday before classes started - mrs. haynes was most definetly in her office, somewhere amidst her hours-long process of wrapping her day up and going home.

all the doors were locked at the school but i could see people talking in the front office, so - since they couldn't hear me when i banged on the door - i sat outside for about twenty minutes watching the sun set over the graveyard across the street, until a college conselor noticed me waving and let me in.

**

i talked awhile with mrs. haynes, who undoubtedly has had to deal many more times with many more things much more serious than a foolish kid who gets arrested for playing around with a bb gun in the auditorium. "how do they do it," i asked (and i still ask), "how do these people give their lives to this profession knowing that their hearts are going to be broken? that they'll fall in love with these strange little people, knowing all the while that - one way or another - eventually they'll be gone? how do they come back to the building the day after they see it for the first time - that if they don't walk away from it right now, then they won't ever; that this love is so terribly profound that you get lost forever in its incompleteness, waiting for that next lovely face to either show up or not show up the next day, the next week, the next year." when i left: the hallways were still full of ghosts and questions; the moon was over the graveyard.

**

chi chi woke me up this morning, banging on the door and prompting the woman on the other side of the duplex to accuse him of trying to break in. his mom waited in the car and had a cigarette while chi chi showed me the 3rd place medal from the 5k he had just come from. he then ate a substantial number of my oreos while looking at pictures of jake's wedding, eventually draping himself over the coach in protest when his mom came shyly to the door to get him - i thought she was going to ask me for the hundreth time if she owed me any gas money for my troubles.

chi chi rode with me up to the jackson medical mall, and his mom followed us. he visited with jake for a bit while i helped his mom register to vote. as she was filling out the form, dana larkin pulled me over into a discussion a bunch of advocacy groups were having about how they could coordinate their community involvement efforts. they were all speaking in pathetically abstract terms about "change," and "community," and "parents"; nothing was focused on definable, tangible outcomes, and as the wheels of people "keeping it real" kept spinning and spinning, i thought of all of the parents who don't get involved because strategic plans mean nothing. when i was finally able to slip away, jake told me that chi chi and his mom had left.

**

when they let chi chi outstide into the fenced in yard at the detention center, he just ran the tiny perimeter hundreds and hundreds of time. the other kids and the guards thought he was crazy. his first cross country meet is in three weeks; he had to get his run in.

bad teaching is letting assholes like me take control of the class

2006-07-13T17:53:00.000-05:00

not only is my online instructor, Dr. Robert Plants, prone to personal attacks (which is highly unbecoming of someone in his position), but he's also letting the class derail week after week...

here's an excerpt:

POST 1: David Molina

couz - i'm starting the chapter and it's long. but...

"For example, the evidence needed to support a set of historical claims is different from the evidence needed to prove a mathematical conjecture, and both of these differ from the evidence needed to test a scientific theory"

is this true? aren't these just all negotiations of an articulated formal-logical system? i have a hard time with these chapters when they just kind of shoot off barely scrutinized claims that don't seem relevant to the text's purpose - but which, upon scrutiny, seem more purposeful in their negation than the text itself.

note to guest expert, we're prone to "critiquing and name calling with a touch of arrogance." it's a little game we play.

POST 2: Evan Couzo

I don't exactly remember the sentence, but this is how I read it. And I don't disagree with you one bit, by the way.

Look at the the verbs used for each discipline: history-support, mathematical-prove, science-test. The best you can do in history is support a claim. History is written and open to various schools of thought. A good historian will acknowledge that. Math conjectures can be proven (well, okay, not all of them) by a closed system. Math can be shown to be true by it's own definitions. Science is interesting in that scientists can disagree with the philosophical implications, but must agree on reproduceable experimental data, or tests. Science cannot make any claims of truthiness in the sense that math can, nor can history.

In any event:

"i have a hard time with these chapters when they just kind of shoot off barely scrutinized claims that don't seem relevant to the text's purpose - but which, upon scrutiny, seem more purposeful in their negation than the text itself."

You have a way with words. This is what I was saying in an earlier post.

Dave, you're a trooper. to the death.

POST 3: David Molina

yeah - i guess understand the idea that these verbs are supposed to delineate their own quality of truth, but i think it's more an issue of the fact that we orient ourselves to the idea of truth differently in these disciplines based on our convential understanding of where these disciplines sit on the old subjective-objective spectrum. but, it seems that math it as written as history (and math does exist in history as much as history exists in math), and that supporting a claim in history invovles the same procedures as developing and supporting a theorem in mathematics. that evan couzo slept with me on june 26 2006 is about as true as the angle-side-angle theorem (inasmuch as they are consequences of a formal-logical system). also, applying the fact of our sleeping together into an analyis of couzo as being awesome is more or less the same as using the angle-side-angle theorem in an analysis of celestial motion.

you + me = us (calculus)

POST 3: Dr. Robert Plants

Well, I hope you two are wearing your hip waders because that's about what one needs when reading these posts. You know both of you are very quick to criticize the text, researchers, teacher education, those of us in Guyton Hall, the world...and of course its obvious how some on this board are very taken with themselves so one begins to question why do the teacher corps at all.

POST 4: David Molina

being critical of a system does not imply the desire not to be in it (i thought we were clear on this). sometimes it's merely an extention of the desire for re-evaluation and improvement of the system itself from within. in my experience with the teacher corps, the program has done an excellent job of responding well to the energies of discourse and criticism, and has improved drastically as an institution - both before my class arrived and while it's been there. however, it has - and will always have - a long way to go, and shouldn't rest on its laurels as long as schools are struggling (not that it is sitting pretty, but it often seems that other institutions are less concerned about the possibilities of their own ineffectiveness).

at the end of the day, these kids in mississippi deserve a hell of a lot better education than they're getting, and if part of pushing for the better education is being an asshole, then so be it. (of course, there are other ways - in their own right more political or productive, perhaps - for pushing for better education, but i'm tired of hearing that "studies" are showing nothing impressive. also, context often perscribes action, and the way i push here is a bit different than the way i push in a school building.)

required mcpost: doing things differently

2006-07-11T23:05:00.000-05:00

second in a straight-to-VHS series of assigned blogs i had to do last month. all hail mr. guest and his 400 word minimum.

it's great to sit around in jackson and just pick away at little things: reading, resting, Jim Hill preparation, Jake n' Dave pipe dreams, getting back in shape, margaret, etc . often i look at a clock and hours have when by for which i cannot assign the completion of one thing, though through which i can account for many small improvements. this is a luxury not afforded to you when you're completely surrounded by deadlines and external responsibilities.

as for the second on that list - Jim Hill preparation - there is indeed a significant amount of things i'm going to do "differently" - both as modifications of past errors and new stabs in the dark (hopefully with a more educated hand).

setting the foundation for the culture of a classroom is invaluable, and - as i'm approaching the start of a second year - that is what i'm primarily going to focus on. i've got to be able to get out of the blocks smoothly and transition into a convincing pace if i'm going to get anything accomplished.

last year i spent i'd say two weeks completely treading water - which seemed an understandable response to supreme acclimitization in terms of: actually being alone in a classroom with 20-something kids, having schedules change daily, complete uncertainty at to when textbooks would arrive, etc. i remember days going by where all i did was go over pre-tests question by question - just sort of filling time so that i could get a bearing on what the hell was going on.

all that will - of course - not be necessary this time around. i've fine-tuned my ability to find out approximately where students are in terms of content knowledge, and have learned to throw expectations out the window until i've been with a group for a significant amount of time. as for pre-tests, i'm sure that i will provide one, but i'm not sure where it's going to come from or how long it should be. i primarily want to test the kids in proficiency in those areas that i experienced as weak-points for my students last year, and which serve as the most necessary prerequisites for the initial objectives in my curriculum. getting a broad pictue seems trivial at this point, because the appropriate reference point for that broadness still eludes me. i'm sure a broad pre-test would be good for data-heads, but i don't think i have a clear enough fluency in the curricula i've been assigned to teach to warrant any personal value for the god-send of data (data is especially useless when there isn't a fixed start or end to my curricula - and i don't want there to be - so pre-testing them on things i'm not going to post-test them on is ludicrous).

as for running up against the crippling uncertainty of textbooks and students schedules, i think i'm going to spend the first couple weeks in all of my classes throwing content more or less out the window and structuring activities that confront students with the essense of thinking mathematically, so that i can try and prompt an abstract familiarity with the performance of mathematical reasoning (which is a highly ubiquitous and transferrable act) in an effort to prime the digestion of a review of prerequisite topics as well as a thrust into "new" material. because, if i can strip away everything but the mere act of being mathematical, than this will be an invaluable preface to any content that i eventually segue into. at the end of the day, i'd rather them perform citicism than be able to define it.

as to what these wonderfully theoretical activities will be, one of my glacially accumulating tasks this month is to define a few of them and develop materials. right now i'm buzzing on the concept of moving from a reading of borges's "library of babel," to a discussion of story of "the tower of babel," to an exploration of the burning of the library at alexandria. this could all be punctuated with some simple abstract math meditations: "Is 7x8 the same as 8x7? Why? PROVE IT! Can you prove it? What does it mean to prove it? Can you prove it in more than one way?" the big focus would be on the humanness of math, whether it is created or discovered, whether or not it has a history, etc. crazy stuff like that.

required mcpost: chi-chi

2006-07-07T18:56:00.000-05:00

second in a straight-to-VHS series of assigned blogs i had to do last month. all hail mr. guest and his 400 word minimum.

chi-chi just called to find out if i was back in jackson. he remembered that jake was getting married (not to me, ben) at the beginning of the month, so he was checking up to see if i was around to go for a run. i asked him how his training had been while he was in oxford, and he said it was going well, but he had to skip a week and a half of it because his shoes were locked in the school and coach harris threatened to arrest him for tresspassing (coach is also a police officer of some sort) if he went there again to run (after chi-chi mentioned that i had told him to do his runs from school because we know the mileage from there, coach mentioned that he "[didn't] give a shit.") after getting his shoes back on wednesday (with his mom to vouch for his non-tresspassing), chi-chi had jumped right back on the training schedule i had made for him in may, and - understandably - his legs were tired. we're going to meet up at jim hill at 10am on monday, where chi-chi will be participating in band camp, and anticipates that he'll be excused to go run with me. let's hope so.

**

chi-chi is the only reason that i coached cross-country and track last year, and the first significant reason i've had to think it would be cool to be father someday. he kind of latched on to me early in the year - as soon as he learned that i was a runner. at that point, i hadn't really had my bearings yet as a teacher, and so i was incredibly reluctant to start committing myself to running with this wierd sophmore who - when not sleeping through my entire class - would punctuate discussion with comments about boobs. however, soon after we hit the streets with the cross country team and immediatly after chi-chi gapped everyone else, it was apparent that (a) he was the only runner for miles, (b) he was self-taught. his trainers were in tatters (i later boycotted runs until he got a new pair), he had little knowledge of hydration and nutrition (crucial in the mississippi heat), and he had rarely ventured outside the immediate vicinity of jim hill (previous training had consisted of running 1/2 mi laps around the graveyard across the street from jim hill). but he was good; a natural distance runner, with an incredibly deep level of self-discipline (which was most obvious in his running; he barely passed my class). although i wasn't ready to spend a significant amount of my energy training him (i.e. developing a workout schedule, working on race strategy, exposing him to form exercises and core muscle development, etc.), i spent many afternoons in the fall on mostly-silent 4-6 mile runs in the neighborhood around jim hill (this was to the amazement and amusement of nearly everyone at the school - a white man running around the district in what appeared to be daisy dukes), sprinkled with a few endurance workouts at a nearby park (which - though only a mile away from the school, seemed endlessly far to the sceptical kids i would try and drag there). chi-chi responded well to the base work we did in the fall, and was in good enough shape to make it to the cross-country state meet. in the spring we were able to use jackson state's track to do some real workouts, and chi-chi went on to dominate the area in the one and two-mile, and eventually make it to states individually in the latter (which is an impressive learning curve for a runner).

**

all of this is to say little to nothing about who chi-chi is (except the vastly appropriate boobs comment), which is a complexity that i've barely made headway in. like i said - most of our runs are nonverbal, except when i get squirmy and start lecuring chi-chi about this or that thing. in many ways, chi-chi reminds me of my younger brother john, with whom - as margaret noticed - i most appropriately spend time by just kind of being near each other. this isn't to say that i haven't gotten peeks into his inner life - the most revealing was when chi-chi showed up to school half-alive after sneaking out of his house the night before, getting high, and crashing his mom's car; legitimately fearing a violent response from his father, chi chi had no intention of going home that night - planning to crash at "a cousin's house" - so jake and i threw together an impromptu one-person field trip to ole miss for a teacher corps weekend so he could get some time to breathe. however, i've gotten the impression that the most appropriate role with chi-chi is not to figure him out, but to just kind of be a positive, stable, and male presence in his life - a craving for which was apparent after those early runs when he would silently copy my every stretch and then later in the year when he would kind of follow me around after school and after runns until i left (even when his mom had already shown up he would insist on mostly silently walking me to my car). that being said, it's more important at this point for him to figure himself out, and me to be there to - well - just kind of be there.

required mcpost: half-baked advice from a half-baked man

2006-07-07T16:17:00.000-05:00

first in a straight-to-VHS series of assigned blogs i had to do last month. all hail mr. guest and his 400 word minimum.

five pieces of advice.

1. become dedicated to reinvention

i hate, hate, hate it when people refer to the first year of teaching as a "trial by fire." it's only hot if you stand still, and your an idiot to imagine that you need to stick to whatever guns you'd oiled for your passionate mission. similarly, those who praise the fire have more often than not become pretentiously numb to their own questionably effective pedagogical immobility. you are not a priest, you are not saving the souls of savages, and this sanctifying onus is most likely the dead weight of your ego. everytime you make a decision in or about your classroom, revisit it and revise it without end. each motion of pedagogy is a rough draft, and of course you'll be burned if you pass it off to print. your imperfection will not change, but your attitude towards it will have to. this is how the fire ends: by never standing still in it, by never considering anything you do as finished or totally consistent, by always hunting down what needs to be changed to make your practice better both the first time and the last time you step in that room.

2. schedule rest into your life

there is a huge distinction between the non-real "fire-trial" and the completely real agony that will eventually well up beneath you. there is an agony; but it is not structured externally (re: the mythic fire), rather internally. it comes from the strain of acclimitization and preservation. once you begin to dance the dance of the constant re-creator (and remember - i tragically left this out of the above point - all this creation and all this practice is exclusively focused on the assistance of the student, but what that means is incredibly ideosyncratic), you will sometime realize that it doesn't end. then, somewhere in the middle of fixating on how to cooperate with the non-ending aspects of the dance, you may loose sight of the fact of its beginning. then, in the middle of a timeless and tiresome dance, you will acquire an agony.

the most important thing to do in order to deal with all this mess is to rest (whatever this means for you; for me it meant reading and/or screwing around on wikipedia/nytimes.com). find the most simple and effective way to create a protected time for rejuvination. personally, i found that it was best for me to stay in the school building until i was done with what i had to do for tomorrow (i.e. leaving the building at a point where i could walk in the next morning and teach). this would often keep me in my room until 7pm+, but even if i had 3 hrs to go home, eat, and deflate, the fact that i had nothing weighing on me allowed this time to be restful. experiments in leaving the building early and then doing some work before going to bed proved to be too stressful.

3. your teacher-mood needs to be consistent

despite the agony, despite the exhaustion, despite the asshole students who spent last period fucking around, despite whatever mess you're dealing with outside the school building, you are still Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Ms. So-and-So, and this is a profoundly de-personalized identity (regardless of whatever quirky accoutermonts you've dressed it in), as it is complelety structured in response to the pedagogical needs of your students. so, whatever your teacher face is - calm, stern, happy, proud, intense, etc. - it needs to more or less stay that way - and only change when it is pedagogically - not personally - appropriate. students (since education is really all about them) react rather violently and personally to the idea that you'd let personal baggage affect them (especially if that baggage comes from a class of other students), and often snap or disengage if they find you "moody." whatever shit has you on the verge of tears or homicide before, during, or after class - when the curtain raises you've got a job to do, and that job requires you to be in character.

4. find someone else

one person can survive as a teacher, but two can succeed. i am unwavering in my assertion that i would not have even thought of doing 90% of what happened last year at jim hill (both inside and outside the class) without the support/criticism/love that i shared with jake roth. we held each other up when the agony was overwhelming, we made sure the other one was eating/bathing/breathing, we bounced idea after idea off of each other, and we were a human presence for each other in the vast shitshow of public education. you can not do alone what you can do with others - and these are things that are done for both you and (at the end of the day, most importantly) your students. so, not only allow yourself to engage in a critical relationship with your own vulneratibility/imperfection as a teacher, find someone else with which to share and refocus this attitude. everyone will benefit.

5. they're kids

this is the bottom line, and it has two faces:

(1) they're human beings. so they're brilliant. and beautiful. and creative. and all those wonderful human things. given their personality and/or background, they may be more or less dependent on people like you for the positive cultivation of their humanness, and/or they may not have had much of a chance to realize/express their humanness. never forget that they're brilliant, and if you don't see it, you either need to (a) wake up, or (b) look somewhere else. more often than not, students not being brilliant is a great indicator that you need to be doing your job better.

(2) they're in a state of radical personal development and identity formation. don't be surprised (surprise is an indication that you've got a flawed/unceccessary expectation system, so fix it) when they do stupid, human things (for that matter, don't be surprise when they do great human things. remember, they're brilliant) - to themselves, to each other, or (most imporantly) to you. of course they're going to curse you out. of course they're going to snap when you reprimand them. of course they're going to treat each other like shit. of course they're going to drink, do drugs, have sex, be in gangs, etc. in many ways, they're in school precisely to gain the personal maturity to deal with all of these things. and they're going to make mistakes, and they're mistakes will often be right in your face. just take it all in stride, and - when you get a chance - remind them that they're brilliant and beautiful and creative and all those wonderful human things.

at home in jackson

2006-07-07T16:07:00.000-05:00

two coasts, two weddings, a last-call in oxford, a drive home. now to deflate and detox.

this month will be the first time i've taken a break in years, and i plan on catering to every inclination to sleep, sleep, sleep.

also, read, read, read (and perhaps write, write, write).

books in my man-purse:

godel, escher, bach douglas hofstadter
the wretched of the earth franz fanon
introduction to mathematics alfred north whitehead

books recently finished:

radical equations bob moses
pedagogy of the oppressed paulo freire
teachers have it easy dave eggers, daniel moulthrop, and ninive clements calegari