by Fitz | Jun 26, 2020 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
Words matter. Words carefully crafted and artfully expressed matter infinitely more. There is something compelling in a turn of phrase well-timed, arresting image juxtaposed on arresting images; broad ideas distilled into clear, lucid singular thought. For the writer, it is empowering to know that his or her words have the capacity to engage and effect change, to alter perceptions and persuade a living audience–not merely to share stale thoughts and shallow opinions, but to articulate what needs to be said in a wall of words that will stand the test of time and speak powerfully to the present generation and inspire succeeding generations.
Words… these damn words clabbered together–they are our gift to eternity. Learn how to use words; learn how to craft them together, and learn how to live the life of a writer. If you want to be a writer, live the life of a writer. It really is that simple: if you want to be a writer, live like a writer. Read. Write. Create. Share. Don’t push a loaded cart up a slaggy hill. Let the engine pulls the train. Learn the craft and the art will follow. You don’t have to be the drunk stumbling down a dark road howling inanities in the night, but even that is better than not howling at all. Howling is the birth before the epiphany, but after the primal howling in the dark, after the grimacing at fate, give the time and the space needed to till, plant and sow a more perfect garden with the seeds of your original cowlings. Nurture that garden as a farmer of words and bring your fruit to the market. It may well that your basket comes home more full than sold, but you are now the farmer of your mind and soul and heart and being, not the hungry pauper trying to fill a crumbling sack, scrounging for cheap seconds at before the shutters of commerce are drawn.
“A stitch in time saves nine,” or so the old adage goes, because a writer is a weaver of tapestries. Everything we write is a new mosaic of woven cloth–an original expression of who, what, when, where and why we are at any given point in our fleeting existence. We are not born weavers, but all of us have some rudimentary concept of a needle pulling thread. We understand the process. Every time we speak, we are stitching something together, weaving together words, struggling to hold together a wretched pattern of thoughts into a coherent conversation worth having; however, our opinions too soon fray and are soon too tattered to wear and are equally too soon forgotten.
But not so for the writer. The true writer goes back to that tattered, convoluted and forgettable conversation–an interplay of words sown, no doubt, with strong seed on thin topsoil where even the heartiest of intent withers on a dry vine. True writer do not give up on possibility; they go back and rebuild those same words and thoughts into a more perfect and palpable tapestry–a living and breathing garden of mind-swollen and succulent fruits worth bringing to market. What starts as a rambling in a journal evolves into something that resembles clarity and, ultimately, something worth sharing. It does not, however, just happen because we want it to happen. It happens because we make it happen. It happens because we learn to weave and stitch, and we learn to till and plant and cull the good from the bad.
The recipe for success is as old as time: learn, practice and persist. As a teacher of writing and as a writer, I am simply one of many pointing my finger at the moon. Your journey is uniquely your own. If you are not thirsty, then every well is the same. But if you are thirsty, go to the deepest, purest well and drink deeply until you are filled or have sucked it dry. To live the life of a writer is to live with an unquenchable thirst for that purity of thought etched upon a page of time. Your journey to the moon itself is distant and dangerous, and even the moon has only a reflected light, but everything you write serve as waypoints to map your journey–these linear dots arcing across the universe prove you have escaped the lure of gravity and the myopic confines of the muddy orb of earth.
That journey proves proves you are a writer–that you have not chosen the easy path with words, but the path of the explorer, the weaver and the farmer…
And that is always worth it in the end.
by Fitz | Jul 25, 2019 | Journal, Teaching
“My teachers could have written with Jesse James for all time they stole from us…”
~Richard Brautigan, “Trout Fishing in America”
My classroom is often a bit of a mess—a mass of sprawled bodies scattered around like casualties of battle, ensconced in various states of slothy repose, on and over the armchairs, couches—and often each other. It may look like sloth, but generally the kids (8th grade and freshman boys) are quietly engaged and productive in whatever dreary task I plied upon them.
Until someone brings up some aspect of school injustice.
Then it spins and turns into collective rants against the injustices cast by us teachers against them. For the most part, it is myopic and self-serving commentary, but there is always some kernel of truth in the sincerity of their complaints, for, no doubt, we expect a lot of them: we steal their time in all variety of thoughtful ways, artfully designed and full of earnest intent to better them in some way, shape or form and mold them into some configuration of a student who makes us proud to be their educators; hence, we teachers get pissy when things don’t go as artfully as the plan.
Somewhere there is a disconnect. Somehow our expectations are not in line with our students, and they are frustrated. And we are frustrated. Something is wrong with the system.
The truth is that we are Jesse Jameses stealing their time–their most precious and fleeting commodity. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, we are “trying to solve the problem with a formula more complicated than the problem itself.” Our schools have become labor camps with an incredible assortment of add-ons: committees they should join, service learning they must do, philanthropy they must engage in, speakers they must hear, and outside projects they must dutifully complete.
And all of it is outside the demands of a rigorous (or so we believe) curriculum— outside the demands of homework, sports, musical performances, outside tutoring, and beyond the expectations, rife with pressure, from family obligations. We celebrate them as individuals while expecting them to be obedient and acquiescent students, and therein lies the crux: we are robbing their last gasps at childhood. There is little time for them to grow like the weeds they are. We raise them and teach them to be crops brought to market and sold to future schools.
Is this the generation we want to create? Is there another way? A better way? Is there a healthy balance between weed and fruit?
Yes, there is—and to quote Thoreau again: “Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity.” Put all things needed in the basket of curriculum. Prune away what is not needed. My students are willing—and they have proved themselves dutiful—to do whatever is asked of them within the curriculum, but they smolder with rancor when they smell the odor of artifice. They intuitively sniff out the good from the bad. If something is worth doing, it is worth being taught within the confines and the expanse of our classes, not as one more obligatory dish to add to the feast of the day, for there is little day left before the night, and the thief of time lurks in the shadows, waiting.
As teachers, we may be willing to sway and even bend, but we seldom break out of our habits; we rarely agree to cut back on what and why we teach, and we rarely admit that less is more, so we teach the hell out of our packs of students and preach that there is still more that must be done; there are more notches to notch on your achievement stick; there are more ways to bolster your fledgling resume, so come early to school; learn to be a philanthropist; stay late and prove that you embrace service; give up your lunch and learn and respect and embrace diversity; skip recess; go to the Makerspace and embrace design thinking; wow your class with up a better presentation—and then go home and do the real work—forty minutes, at least, for each class. After all, we only have you here nine hours out of your day… And the homework is due tomorrow. No excuses. Be sure to do some outside reading, too. Everyone should love reading.
No wonder there is grumbling. No wonder our students feel marginalized. No wonder that the totality of expectations seems—and is—oppressive. No wonder that they cling to the draining minutes and the dwindling vestiges of time to simply be the kids they are. Irrepressible, irreverent, and incredible…
At the same time, kids need guidance. Kids need structure. They need to see the blueprint being built. Kids need to be held to high standards of conduct. They need to do the work they are asked to do, and they need to figure out what needs figuring without some tutor prodding them out of a state of torpor.
We teachers and administrators need to look at the days we design for our students and create curriculums that work in ways that enlighten without deadening the spirit and clogging the drainpipe of time. We need to accept and acknowledge that we are not the totality of their education. Everything does not need to flow from us. School can and should be a more simple affair. Yes! Demanding moral conduct, based on enlightened and progressive values, is a given, but we should not presume to be the guardians of the totality of their ethical lives. We need to assume that moral values are taught and practiced and embodied by our students’ parents and guardians. It is almost an anathema to say, but we hobble our students with constraints more than we unshackle them from insistent drudgery.
What we teach, what we practice and what we cultivate must grow from a thoughtful, embracing and invigorating curriculum, taught by teachers who give a damn and know what they teach, but above all, who know their students and who appreciate and respect that we—the proverbial we—cannot do it all. And neither can our cast of young scholars, but some things we can do incredibly well, and whatever the bent of genius of an individual teacher, I say, “set them free!” In the long run, those teachers are the life-changers and authors of lasting and effective pedagogy, and it is those teachers who are remembered and revered for giving truth to the lives of their students.
Oh, but that is fun and easy and invigorating to pen to this page. I am, though, a curmudgeon at heart and sense the bad as early as the good. Freedom is a fickle beast, and I have an instinctive aversion to progress for the sake of progress, especially if it strays from teaching enduring and proven basic skills. My school is an incredible school, and it has freed me to follow my chaotic genius, which, for better or worse, reveres the old as likely as the new and, like any teacher, I am convinced that what I teach is what my students should and need to learn. And they learn. Or so I convince myself…
Most of my students are raised by parents who are insistent to raise well-educated children, and they are willing (and sometimes barely able) to pay the price for that education. Their children are coddled and cajoled to be good students and good persons, and, by and large, they meet with uncommon success in their future lives. I can’t help but think, however, that it is a part of a caste system, a subtle tool that benefits the few and that the education is necessarily incomplete. We have an increasingly diverse community in my school, but not real diversity—diversity that mimics the reality of the real world; hence, we embrace diversity as an ideal more than we reflect diversity as a messy mix of reality.
I have seven well-educated children. My four boys had a mixture of elite private schools (because I work at an elite private school) and public schools, whereas my three girls spent all their school lives in a small public school in the small mill town of Maynard—a town that is not the envy of the wealthy surrounding towns of Concord or Sudbury or Acton that squeeze its small borders, yet even as a teacher of some thirty-five years, I would say, “Come to Maynard. Here is true community. Here is unabashed and natural diversity. Here are basic skills taught well, though you might not know it through the flopping of disgruntled tongues. For the most part, here are parents that embrace the reality of small paychecks, multiple jobs and tough daily choices. Kids learn grit because it is a gritty life, not because grit is taught as a value to learn, but because they are allowed to fail as readily as they are encouraged to flourish. Still, the odds are always stacked against our kids. It is tough to say to our children (my children included), “Yes, this school offered you a good scholarship, BUT, we still cannot pay for that school, unless you want to hobble your future with debt that will take years to repay,” So, all of my kids (so far five of them) enrolled in some UMass or another, and, lo and behold, they have some slice of the American dream. Their intellects are yet intact, and the future is still bright, and they truly did it on their own.
My apologies: I am a wordy and rambling writer. My own students would admonish my lack of a unified theme, my intrusions of personal bias, and no doubt, my lazy adherence to a singular topic, not to mention my lack of rhetorical techniques.
I actually began this essay as a plea to simplify education, to think outside of the proverbial box, and to find ways to give time back to those restive students who have huge reservoirs of energy, intent and excitement to explore their own potential, their own passions and their own perspectives. I am a traditionalist at heart. I want schools to get back to teaching time-tested skills that lay a lasting foundation that shore up the dreams students can build their futures upon. If I am a radical in any way, it is to thresh the wheat from the chaff and to see with clear eyes the purpose of our pasture. The values and morals we wish to instill should be modeled on the actions and ethos of a vibrant school community and the local community, not as a series of moral scriptures and political dogma inserted into another long day. Schools need to create possibilities, not conformities. Schools need to be launching pads, not factories of conventional thinking. Schools need to trust the wisdom of parents and recognize the parameters of what can and should be accomplished in any given school day.
Above all, we will not survive as a country unless we give students what they truly need.
A paradox of education is that the more you offer, the less you accomplish. We can’t assume that breadth will ever equal depth. There is no reason that schools should sharpen and hone every tool in the shed, for that labor, spread broadly across the table, brings diminishing returns; instead, choose the most useful tools and focus our pride and effort on mastering what those tools can do—and whatever time is left outside the curriculum should be given back to what most interests our students.
Let’s figure out ways to help our students become really, really, really good at something. But that also means we need to give them the time and freedom. It means potentially missing out on all the add-ons that fill out an increasing bulk of the day. It might mean they miss the the walk for hunger; it might mean they miss this or that speaker, or the workshop on sustainability, or conflict resolution, or white privilege.
Or it might mean they lead the walk for hunger, or they are the speaker telling their story of discovering racial inequity. Or it might mean they are part of a movement to unmask white privilege and show us—me—what white privilege really is. Or how we are screwing up the planet. Or how sexuality identity is not a choice.
It might mean they become incredibly good at soccer or archery or chess. It might mean they grow a Youtube Channel with a million hits. It might mean they can rip out every Led Zeppelin riff with blazing speed. It might mean, god forbid, they become world-ranked gamers, fishermen, meme-makers or avatar aficionados.
It will give annoying, over-bearing, hovering (and generally wealthy) parents even more time to mold and morph their offspring into some perfected version of something—some kid with perfect SAT’s, impeccable musical virtuosity, and a portfolio of essays ripe and ready for the admissions process, a history of philanthropy and good deed doing, and athletic prowess in an obscure sport.
.
It will, however, be a huge pain in the ass for working class parents who will shudder at the thought of of their feral, unkempt children being furloughed too early from school—freed to roam the streets, freed to smoke legal weed, freed to have sex, freed to snap, chat or pop for even more hours of the day. For these parents, who are often too busy and frazzled to parent, it is critical that their workday more or less mirror the school day—and a teacher, god forbid, needs to work a full day for an honest day’s work.
So, damn… this is a conundrum. It is great sport for parents to criticize schools and teachers and administrators; nonetheless, it is high treason to question any aspect of how that parent raises his or her child or children, but that trust has to start somewhere; that trust has to be embodied and embraced in some way, shape or form somewhere, and that trust has to begin by giving it to our kids. Some will certainly fail. But they will probably fail anyway. Some will be slow to adapt to opportunity. But that is on them; if they squander opportunities now, they may well learn much from it in the future, and it will guide them in their newly invigorated lives! But some many will soar. They will realize unimagined majesty from their efforts. They will learn about choice, priorities, perseverance and vision.
They will not become punks. They will not become anarchists. They will not squander the magi’s gift.They will, inevitably, become our future, and we need to give them the reins of that future.
Give them that future now. Blemished, broken and bankrupt as it seems.
by Fitz | May 11, 2019 | Essays, Journal, Poetry, Teaching
I am You, and You are me…
Give a damn & figure it out
I feel like one of my students: it’s the night before my big presentation at All-school-meeting, and I still don’t know what I am going to talk about. I just know I am supposed to talk about me…
That’s pretty scary for me because, well, I’m me. At any given time I know myself too well, and at other times I’m like, who is this guy?
I’m the guy whose socks probably don’t match, and one of my socks is on onside out.
I’m the guy whose engine warning light in my van was probably on the whole way to school–and I never noticed.
I’m the guy who forgot to post an assignment on Fenn.org and his students are plotting a revolution and mass protest.
I’m the guy who tries to be a teacher–and so he is…
So, how does one start something like this?
I am John Fitzsimmons, and let me tell you about me…
(No–way to vain and presumptuous)
Hi, I’m Fitz, and I may be old, but I’m slow…
(No–you are not here to hear the truth)
Hi, I am Mr. Fitzsimmons, your new teacher: I just flew in from Chicago and boy my arms are tired…
(Nope… That was funny forty years ago)
Hi… so glad to be here: Last night I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out…
But if you know me, you have heard this all before…
I’m the kid who got grounded if I ever got a B for a grade… Because my mother would think I cheated…
I’m the kid who went to Peabody and Sanborn and CCHS and who warns all you going CCHS next year to wear thick-soled boots to school…so you don’t cut your feet on the broken hearts I left behind.
Not really, because I’m really the shy kid who spent an entire summer after 8th grade trying to find the courage to hold Megan Tassini’s hand–and I never did!
I’m the kid who spent entire dances lurking in the corner of the Hunt Gym fearing that Stairway to Heaven would start, and a whole night would have gone by–and I wouldn’t have asked a single girl to dance…
I’m the kid whose father spray painted his sister’s figure skates black and told me everyone would think they were hockey skates, and I’d walk home in the dark from Greenes Pond, down Plainfield Road to 38 Longfellow road, still wearing my black figure skates…
I lived in and on and through Greenes Pond, Whites Pond, Walden Pond, Warners Pond–The Concord River, The Assabet River, The Sudbury River. I was fish and fisherman, sailor and boat, landmark and explorer–all within this beautiful, precious, magnificent expanse of earth called Concord.
I was an ADD wonder child whose eyes could dart in a thousand directions in a single glance; whose head was built out of dreams; who made sunburned skin a living, breathing whirl and endless dance of motion and adventure…
I was you, and you are me, and our lives are inextricably linked in this adventure called life… We know that nothing gold can stay, so we breath in the best of each day and never let it out.
I was a wrestler and now a wrestling coach. The coach whose only wise words to a wrestler heading out on the mat against a Goliath of a monster–a skinny kid from Fenn facing certain annihilation–and I shrug and say, “do one good thing. Do one good thing and accept defeat with a smile, for you don’t learn anything much from winning, but you learn a lot by trying.”
I was a reluctant, timid student–and now I am a teacher. Go figure… Maybe that’s why I drive my students crazy with answers that are not really answers. I respond to simple questions with things like:
Get through it, get over it. Give a damn and figure it out. It’s your essay not mine. Make it as long as it should be and as short as you can… Give me a pebble and I’ll show you the universe; show me the universe and I’ll give you a pebble… It’s not where you go; it’s how you go… Good writers don’t always make good poets–but good poets always make for great writers…don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
And that list goes on and on because a good question is better than a good answer.
The question I ask myself each day is “Who am I and what should I try to do?”
And that is why my life is shaped and formed, sculpted and forged out of the fire of my mind–a fire that is as bright and intense as it was when I was you–you who are probably dreaming and scheming of what is possible as soon as the old guy finishes his presentation and you can go off to recess.
After 61 years on this planet asking the same question, what then am I?
In short, I am a poet–and everything else are tentacles on the octopus that is my life. So I am also a folksinger, a songwriter, a tinkerer and a maker of meatballs. I’m a father to seven wild and unadorned children, and a husband to a beautiful and forbearing wife. I am everything I ever hoped I could be, and far short of where I still can be. I am you and you are me.
I love teaching, but I equally love the coming summer as much as any of you, for for summer gives me the time to live in the woods of a rustic summer camp in New Hampshire (and also Camp Sewataro in Sudbury were I first met and sang many of you); to swim, fish, sail and hike; to write in my beloved journal and to sing at campfires with piles of weathered, mosquito-bitten kids bunched like starfish on a beach, singing their heads off–even though, technically, starfish don’t have heads…
And so I will end this presentation of me–the immutable me–with the only gift I that is truly me and has never–as in ever–let me down–Song…
by Fitz | Feb 8, 2019 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
~The Emperor’s New Clothes, Hans Christian Anderson
It’s kind of weird—and more than a bit arrogant—but I have this separate part of my journal where I keep all my entries that reflect some primitive sort of thoughtfulness and balance–scrabblings that might even represent and resemble honest and real wisdom. I came here to this “journal” because I just finished reading a school email noting that I am “required” to attend the diversity sessions during our winter professional day. I am thinking and hoping that if I put a response in my “Wisdom Journal,” some kind of nuanced and balanced thoughts will come out of it-—but, I doubt it. My stubborn nature will emerge; I will refuse to see the other side; [but then again, the other side will, no doubt, refuse to see mine] so I am left to dig my muddy yankee soles into the slippery ground of this new, emerging spring and battle the elements in another senseless battle of wits.
This is my intellectual dilemma: I simply am not interested in someone—someone not of my choosing—to introduce me to the world (especially his or her world) of affinity groups, gender identity and toxic masculinity. I am not disinterested in the subject, nor is it off the radar of my life; I just object to being forced to listen to a certain person or persons with whom I have no relationship or affinity at all, or, even worse, I know them and have no interest in their point of view, their personal perspectives, or their politicized point of views. I am a curmudgeon at heart; I distrust any self-proclaimed captain barking orders to go hard a’lee and sail unopposed and against my will and wisdom onto a rocky shoal of a sultry, emerging paradigm.
I am in essence being forced against my will to spend a day of my life immersed in a senseless sea of drivel and doggerel, and if I show my reluctance, I will be vilified and labeled a bigoted perpetuator of myopic thought and white privilege. My relatively simple job of teaching 8th and 9th grade English seems dependent on my agreeing to (or at least appearing to agree to) whatever is on the daily agenda of a middle school professional day presented by mid-level intellects empowered by some bandwagon thinking of superior virtue and noble action.
Where is Socrates when you really need him? Where are the colleagues who might agree with me? Who framed the scaffolding of this now urgent pedagogical priority? What, really, is the point? Has my life been so unexamined as to discard my past speculations of right and wrong? Is there some flaw in my life that needs mending? What have I done to deserve this magnanimous flogging? What seer sees so clearly into my soul, my motives, my ruminating and my urgency to curve the bent of my elusive genius and disrupt the path of my hard-wrought, existential narrative?
I hear the refrain that it is only a day—and a day I am paid well to endure. It is a chance to hear new voices, new ideas and new ways of understanding. If that is the case, how different is it from any other day? I am no dolt to conformity; I do not live to reassure my comfortable self. I box my own ears in a continual search for what is ineffably me! The very notion that I need more hands to bandy me about is insult to affront. I am the proverbial horse being dragged to water, yet I am not so thirsty as to drink the potion prepared for me. Find other mares and stallions to follow your mirage.
But, dammit, not me. Give me back the day. My soil is ill-suited to your seed. See clearly and put clothes on your vain emperor. Send me off to ponder and leave me alone.
At the end of the day, let us compare our respective fruits and see whose basket is full.
by Fitz | Apr 24, 2018 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
In the beginning was the word…
~Genesis
We do not live in Grandma’s world of words, and neither did grandma live in her grandma’s world of words and on and on and so on in a downwards devolution through untold millennia. From primal grunts, whistles and gestures, language—words— were born, evolved and morphed by time, and so we are now blessed and burdened by a burgeoning mosaic of linguistic and expressive possibilities. Precious few of our feelings, thoughts, emotions and wonderings are locked from expression or driven into some illiterate corner. Each new generation slurps from a lexicon that continually expands and emboldens in breadth and scope to capture and freeze the fleeting fury that is life. Words make real what is sensed, and no doubt our first spoken words were once just a simple coupling of sounds—surprised mutual understandings, workmanlike, practical and primeval grunts structured towards survival in a clannish, harsh and unforgiving landscape. Over time, these words became ways to remember histories, to strengthen traditions, to weave parables from experience that gave meaning, direction, substance to the purpose of the mysterious perplexion of life—the viscera of flesh and innards coiled within a skeletal frame and wrapped in a tender skin.
Then, after thousands of years, came our first written words scratched to walls and papyrus that gave expediency to memory, and since then the longer veil of ignorance has slowly, inexorably been lifting—new light shining on dark places, recurring epiphanies too precious to lose, the ravages of time and misfortune placated by remembrances, and the power of reflection to ruminate in fire of insatiable bellies. Humanity and words have coevolved in a steady march, borne in a symbiosis of needs, yearnings, and aspirations. We have become distinct in our utterances; our thoughts made palpable and immortal by a procreative stringing together of sound married to sense. The collective memories told and perpetuated by bards, prophets and seers transformed into individual exhortations, laments, songs and stories open to anyone brave enough to look beyond and within, cadenced and formed from the rhythm of breath—of life.
Rudimentary technology created pages plied to pages in steady iterations of progress: reams of stories and poems, screeds of drivel, letters and journals and diaries, discoveries and dissertations, insults and insinuations, politics and propaganda—all that could be put to page found a home, an audience, a stage, a platform and a purpose. We now live so fully in words that it is unthinkable to be mute and deaf amidst this stunning cacophony we have birthed onto this muddy orb spinning its transitory ellipsis around a warm star. Words equalize the pauper with the king; words kindle genius in every child; the strength of words is passed to the weak, and solace is laced into the tea of aging. Life becomes more an odyssey of meaning than a reptilian adventure of arduous survival.
Folksy phrases now capture our unfolding dilemma: All good things come to pass; familiarity breeds contempt, and every empire disintegrates through its excesses. Our words, increasingly common, dull and predictable are as much a babble of inanity than a heroic addiction to truth. It is a miner’s labor in a hard rock mine to ferret the gem out of the slurry of sifted soil. The greatest irony is that in our present sea of words—a sea imbued with inexplicable variety—we have lost our bearings and drift away from the distant polestar. We are more addicted to a junkie high of email, texts, fake news, real news, and viral blogs than we are to real words wrought and crafted in a forge of deliberate attentiveness. We wake and post to Instagram; we check our Facebook feed and turn out the light. We love words without seeing and feeding on the intrinsic power of words. We are factory workers hammering out cheap parts that live and die like mayflies in a day. Little is left that is truly lasting—a ripple on the water, a shimmering in a fading light. We are more prey than predator. We hide in tangled scrub and are content to merely survive.
This power that erodes us is also the power that strengthens us, but only if we exercise our wills. It’s a new paradigm, and it is neither good nor evil. It just is. Words—great words, worthy words—are simply a click and download away, and any ignorance of our own is a willful decision and a conscious abnegation of a magnanimous gift. Some part of our lives and our days needs a devotion to this gift, to what is buried in the ground before us before we escape to the lesser pursuits of the day. We have a duty to literature, to what has stood and tested the erosions of time and place. Equally so, we have a duty to find and celebrate the enlightened creators of today. But even more so, we have a duty to ourselves to lay a cornerstone of literacy in our own lives, not just to write with words, but to think with words, to reflect with words and to create with words. No pickaxe is stronger than the pen to find the beauty, poignancy and urgency of our own lives. We all have stories to tell and wisdom to utter. Our headstone in a quiet graveyard should be a finger wagging towards a distant moon—a testament to eternity, not a testament to futility.
This is not a call to make quiet bookworms and poets of us all. It is a call to appreciate that words have changed—that the mediums that carry words and create words have changed in the same way we are changing; but we don’t and can’t know the future. Our visions seldom bend over the horizon, and all clairvoyance is sham and a delusion. It is an anathema to even whisper, but I can see a world without books. Not some Fahrenheit 451 dystopia, but some new and mystic way to experience, appreciate and work with words. We have not reached our omega point; we are merely arcing towards it. Reading is not some timeless tradition. It is a relatively recent tradition. It has always been (short of conversation and oratory) the most efficient way to carry words to our minds and to other minds. A good podcast, documentary, Netflix series or movie can well do the same thing. Doctor Zhivago stills my heart whether I read it or watch it. Natures First Green Is Gold relived in memory is as precious as the words on a brittle page. In the end, it is the effect and memory of words, not the conveyance, that wins the day. I can learn any given point in history just as fast—and in a way that is just as edifying as reading—by watching some Ken Burns series. I can experience the sublime in the cinema as deeply as from a classic novel. Words are wed to form, not married to any particular structure. We should not be shamed in our choices or pushed from the path our genius takes us simply by the gravity of inertia.
As Thoreau writes in Walden: “Old ways for the old and new ways for the new,” and so it is with how we learn to use, create and craft words. By and large, English teachers give damn about how and why they teach, and most are pretty damn good readers—great readers, avid readers; gifted men and women who embrace, experience and want to pass on the transformative power of reading. Hell, I am one of them! Good-hearted, gracious, gifted dedicated and wise teachers, they absolutely, fully believe that reading is the cat’s meow and holy grail of any school’s curriculum, for how else the Sam hill can or will anyone succeed in any future endeavor without reading? The funny thing is that almost anything read must first be written, and most English teachers are no great shakes as writers, at least not in any real way. Time spent reading, more often than not, dwarfs the time spent writing.These teachers are, however, damn good graders and critics of writing, but, regrettably, they are more quick and ready to slash and burn most any piece of writing that passes through their twitching hands and under their squinting, critical eyes as they are effusive in their praise for a noble, but ultimately insufficient response to a writing prompt. They cannibalize the young like frogs gorging on tadpoles. They are quick to condemn, but not willing to be condemned themselves. It is a weird thing: I doubt a school would hire a trumpet teacher who couldn’t play the trumpet or a shop teacher that couldn’t build a table. I wonder if more teachers wrote—even just as much as they ask their students to write—that some new breed of mutual respect for the power of words would take root in the classrooms and in the assignments, so that both the boat of reading and the boat of writing, molding and shaping words would rise with the flood of a newly enlightened tide, for it is a rare writer who is not also a fanatic reader.
The idea and promise of a certain pedagogy often supersedes common sense, and we are seldom as smart we think as we weave new meanings into old words and phrases. We fully believe we are creating new paradigms, when in reality we are simply reworking the old—gifting new and catchy words to a time-worn tradition. My school just spent a gazillion dollars building a new makerspace—a new word for Shop. No one will dare say it, but the unbreathed insinuation is that it is a shop—a shop for smart kids; enginneery kids destined to shape and mold our technological future—not for the greasy kids classrooms never served, the kids who gravitated to old-style metal shops, wood shops and auto shops because it was the only place they actually learned and the only place that rewarded their bent of erudition. My school also built a new woodshop along with our Makerspace, so I give kudos to us, but not to the schools dismantling their traditional shops for the flotsam of the future. Much of the blame falls on shop teachers, noble teachers, but often teachers who are not comfortable or fluent in creating new words for new times capture the hearts and minds of school boards and administrations desperate to be on the supposed cutting edge of education.
Our new Makerspace is a marvel of engineering and purpose meant to spark creativity, ingenuity and experimentation. It will no doubt be full of nifty gadgets: 3D printers spinning gears and trinkets; solenoids and batteries tethered to spider-like robots; reams of duct-tape, cardboard and wires cobbling dreams and visions into unlikely inventions. We are asked to wed our curriculums to a vague covenant. I actually like the word makerspace. It has a nice ring to it, and it is easy to coil my imagination around its intent. I’m happy that we are latching onto this vision of learning and creating for a new breed of kids, but I would take the vision one step further, for there is no place in this new makerspace to work solely with words, no makerspace to push new boundaries of expression with the greatest tool and gift we have—WORDS! Every classroom should be a makerspace, equipped as a makerspace, and experienced as a makerspace, for if we cannot make something from what we have learned, we will have lost the palpable touch to the words that tried to teach us in the first place.
It takes no genius of the mind to create an orchard from a fallow field. Fortunately, my school is prescient and forgiving enough to let me follow the bent of my madness. I don’t have desks in my room. I don’t allow backpacks trundled in to litter my floor and remind my students of the baggage of every other academic demand they carry through the rest of the day. I don’t allow notebooks, pens or loose sheets of paper to doodle and dawdle upon. They can only bring themselves, a willing spirit, and an iPad, which in my mind is simply a tool—an incredible tool that serves as their library, workbench and portal into the world of words, and so there, within the confines of a small space, a greater universe can be experienced, toyed with, reflected upon and rebirthed in a panoply of forms all built upon making things with words, appreciating things with words, and sharing things with words—and sharing myself with words! I don’t deny the power of the printed page. I have a huge library of tattered books cornered to a pair of musty couches. At any given time my room, littered with sprawled, unkempt bodies, resembles more of a mob hit than a meticulously furrowed alignment of dreariness. The two closets are home to video and recording studios. When students struggle, I tell them to “give a damn and figure it out”—which, in the end, is the only thing they really need to know! When we gather to share, we sit on stools around a massive wooden table crafted by a local cabinet maker. We laugh at our pathetic mistakes and are equally wowed by uncommon perfection. I don’t carry home any sheaves of papers. I don’t sigh and bemoan the drudgery of grading. I come home and sit on the back porch energized and eager to see, hear, immerse myself in, and experience the fruits of indefatigable efforts. I grade myself more harshly than I grade my students. I stumble and fall, but always try to lean forward onto something that resembles progress. I try to live what I ask them to do—love words and what words can do.
Damn… I ramble on. I am as often as not a parody of what I preach; I am life without conclusion. Points without centers. A diaspora of wandering words sucking manna in a desert. But, like anyone, I am convinced of something wild and ultimately inexplicable and there is yet a word for it. I spill the cart of my head with willful abandon. I collect the trinkets spilled on the page because I can’t foresee or imagine a world without words that mean more than their weight. I am a gong in the night from a distant bell tower reminding myself that words are part of our ancestral lineage and future promise. I am my grandma’s words and the words of my young, I cling stubbornly to the notion that sculpted and crafted words are our only way to move forward and beyond what we ever were or are or will be…
We are blessed by cursed Fate. We live in the infinite and recurring now. We are horses led to perfect water. So drink today before tomorrow—before the rosy fingers of dawn shine once more.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth…
by Fitz | Feb 19, 2018 | Journal, Poetry, Teaching
I am sitting here realizing how hard it is to ask you–a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys–to write iambic dimeter poetry, a form of poetry that is more or less ignored nowadays. I (literally) played around for a couple of hours penning these poems, which are at least minimally worth keeping. (My other attempts were horrid and insipid.
I am sure you will come up with some good stuff, but writing poetry under pressure [aka: last-minute] is like trying to eat Cocoa Kripsies while juggling on a unicycle in beach sand with the tide coming in.
Really–walk around with your phone on record. Get a beat–a rhythm–going. Start talking in iambic dimeter. Sooner or later some words that actually make sense will pop out. Settle for what feels good; otherwise, you’ve made a bad deal–but better than no deal at all.
The crazy thing is that it works. Sooner or later you will have made the world (and your life) a better place.
And then it is worth it after all.
Poems don’t flow out of the soul just because you want them to. They are pried out of the earth with pickaxes and teaspoons…
The Light Within
It’s hard to write
When asked to do
A task this night
That’s hard for you:
The mind goes still;
The light goes dim;
With time you will
Find words within
Here is a three verse one I just wrote with a different rhyme scheme and more use of words that are naturally iambic (each beat does not need to be a single word). Generally, a poem “reveals itself” in the closing stanza or closing lines. Everything else prepares the reader for this moment of insight.
The Jays Cry
The biting cold;
The drifts of snow–
Lone squawks of songs
In sounds we know.
The Jay and me
Both try to see
What’s right and wrong
With poetry.
We scream with words
(To each absurd)
And sing along
To just be heard.
These are not going to win me any poetry prize, but as a poet, at least I have won my own day.
Start with digging…
