Time for Rabbit Holes

Pandemic time is time for dreaming. Pandemic time is time for remembering. And pandemic time is time for remembering dreams and being open to their possible meanings. I used to say exactly the same thing about summertime, especially those unstructured, obligation-free stretches of summertime.

Those stretches of summer seemed to roll out the way bolts of fabric did: by the motion of hands that turned, pulled, slid, and smoothed, then repeated those motions until enough fabric had been unfurled from the bolt. 

 

The shears sealed the deal. A hushed sense of excitement always surrounded those crisp, audible, authoritative snips: they signaled the anticipated fulfillment of two dreams: the dream of the finished product the fabric would become, and the dream of the self that would transform the fabric into the finished product. That self, aware of summertime’s finitude, knew that its time might be brief: at the first demands of fall, it would probably be relegated to the shelf, where it would wait for next summer.

Alas, pandemic time isn’t endless summertime, though it often feels endless. The living isn’t easy.

Pandemic time is time for turning and returning, which cannot be separated from remembering, especially in Jewish tradition. And pandemic time is time for journeying—not across physical miles and boundaries, but down rabbit holes and other avenues inviting thought, feeling, and memory. Public libraries may be closed except for scheduled pick-ups, but web search engines make it possible to go down some rabbit holes easily and painlessly. Be forewarned, though, if you’re standing in a field marked by multiplying rabbit holes:  that field may be a metaphor for your pandemic-stirred self, in which case the web will be able to help you only so much.

During these last months, I’ve often found myself standing in such a metaphorical field while I’ve been sitting at my dining room table, where I’m apt to be at my laptop. Looking out the window at the upper floor of my across-the-street neighbor’s house, the pyramid hip roof above it, and the three tall, leafy trees that rustle and nod beyond it, I’ve been wondering about the wordless images, many from dreams, that have been parading before my mind’s eye during pandemic time.

So vivid, and so simultaneously puzzling and comforting are these images that I think of each of them as a rabbit hole, and I suspect there are tunnels that connect them. I keep thinking that putting them into words will help me to explore them. 

That’s why lately I’ve been wondering about the etymologies and backstories of words: I want the language I choose not just to capture the sensory aspects of these images, but to suggest something of their significance, which I’m trying to understand. So currently there are two varieties of rabbit holes* in my field: the wordless image rabbit holes that baffle me with their mysterious promise of meaning, and the language-related rabbit holes that respond well to internet exploration.

Today, though, I am writing about what began last Friday as my factual foray down the rabbit hole of “rabbit holes.” Not because you can’t hop onto the internet and find out for yourself whether the metaphorical use of “rabbit hole” comes only from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass: it does. But because I was surprised by what—or whom--I found down that rabbit hole when the internet and I started searching.

My first stop was the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. The word meant exactly what I thought it meant—“a complexly bizarre or difficult situation conceived as hole into which one falls and descends” . . . “especially: one in which the pursuit of something (such as an answer or a solution) leads to other questions, problems, or pursuits.”**

In addition of confirming that our current associations to rabbit holes come solely from Lewis Carroll’s imagination, the dictionary provided some sample sentences that used “rabbit hole” correctly, along with the following disclaimer: “These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'rabbit hole.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors.”**

"Seer" by Scott Ketcham***

One of the randomly selected sentences—“While trying to find the picture again on Google, I fell down the Cosmo rabbit hole, scrolling through a gallery of swimwear, then through ‘How to Be Sexier-Instantly’ and then through all 23 slides of ‘Sexy Ideas for Long Hair.’”—was attributed to someone with a name I recognized—which I’m changing here to Ava Zembel.

Was this the same Ava Zembel who’d been a quiet, serious student in my “Reading and Writing on Human Values” class roughly twenty years ago? The course’s final writing assignment was always a spiritual autobiography, a focused memoir that represented each student’s evolving sense of identity and purpose as related to a value, belief, attitude, series of events, or transformative experience. The students read their papers on a day-long field trip held at the home of one of them: a potluck breakfast was followed by reading, which was followed by a take-out lunch, which was followed by the reading of the rest of their spiritual autobiographies. I loved these days!

I will never forget the spiritual autobiography Ava wrote and shared with the class the year her class went on that field trip day. I would be violating the norms of the day if I shared even the outlines of her story here. But I can say that she bravely made herself exceedingly vulnerable in her choice of topic and story, and that she was rewarded with love, admiration, expressions of understanding and appreciation from her classmates—and I believe an experience of her own strength as a function of her willingness to be candid and vulnerable. The group held her and one another: they shared new understandings of common experiences. I had the feeling a new chapter had begun for a number of people in that room.

By now, I had the answer to my “rabbit hole” question, but I decided to keep going down the rabbit hole. Now my questions were about Ava. I Googled her—did the image search, the “all” search. Now I was almost certain this Ava was the Ava I was remembering.  Currently, she identifies herself professionally as a writer and cartoonist, and her web site, which lists her the founder and editor of a now-defunct web site especially for women, also provides links to articles she’s published in myriad places and publications—some with thematic connections to her spiritual autobiography of long ago.

Descending further, I turned to Facebook for further confirmation—if I could see what Facebook friends Ava and I had in common, if any, I’d know for sure whether she was “my Ava.” Twenty-one mutual friends, most from the late 1990s: yes, she was.

There’s s something wonderful about going down a rabbit hole and not only finding someone who is a pleasure to remember, but finding her still writing bravely and sometimes autobiographically for a public audience. And to think I found her because of some internet-powered random selection of a sentence she’d written!! I just love this kind of serendipity that reminds me that the world’s a bountiful place, even though pandemic time is often time for losing and grieving. Pandemic time is seldom time for smiling. But Friday, it was.

The field of rabbit holes I’m standing in as I sit in my dining room is a field of dreams. It’s not as simple as “If you build it, they will come.” For that reason, I love that Lewis Carroll’s Alice**** falls slowly enough down the rabbit hole that she’s able to keep thinking, talking, looking around, and making sense of what’s she’s seeing. She notices cupboards and book-shelves as she falls, and I see plenty of them from my dining room chair. It’s pandemic time. The dreaming, remembering, turning, and returning have already begun, as has the search for the words to express them. There’s no telling where they may lead. Pandemic time is time for . . . who knows what else just yet?

* Photo accompanying McTague, B. (n.d.) Life, rabbit holes, and reality [Web log post]. Retrieved August 9, 2020, from http://brucemctague.com/life-rabbit-holes-and-reality

** Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Rabbit hole. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved August 8, 2020, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rabbit%20hole

*** Scott Ketcham painting at https://www.scottketcham.com/image/146269919807

**** "Down the Rabbit Hole" by IrenHorrors. Published May 7, 2014 https://www.deviantart.com/irenhorrors/art/Down-the-Rabbit-Hole-452600463 

The Words We Use for "Schoolchildren"

So already, recently I have noticed several educators and elected officials using the word "scholars" instead of "students" when talking about the children they teach or set policy for in their schools and districts. 

Last Monday morning, the Boston Globe published a coronavirus-related opinion piece co-written by several members of local school committees.* It persuasively and constructively critiqued Massachusetts' not-yet-final plans for the re-opening of its public schools in September, while acknowledging the educational and social-emotional costs of keeping school doors closed, especially for some student groups. As a former Cambridge Rindge and Latin School teacher, I read the piece with special interest and enthusiasm because of my great respect and affection for two of its authors, one a CRLS graduate and the other a current CRLS history teacher.

I thought this group of school committee members got it just right and summarized it elegantly and forcefully in their concluding paragraph:  

"Our school communities deserve better than compromise in search of normalcy. They deserve real leadership and robust action in place of vague directives and abdication of responsibility. They deserve a plan that carries its own weight instead of setting it on the shoulders of underfunded, overworked school districts. Until that plan exists, we will speak — as educators and as elected officials — in defense of the students and staff in our schools."**

But what momentarily--just momentarily--distracted me from their arguments was a word in the following sentence: "We also lack what we need to plan for the educational attainment of our scholars, especially those with disabilities, those who are learning English, and those who live in poverty."** 

Several questions occurred to me as I realized "scholars" was being used as a synonym for "students":

• Had a special subset of students in our schools been designated as scholars according to some set of criteria? 
• Could and should first graders be called scholars? 
• What do we, adult educators and officials, mean by the term "scholars"--and do we have a common understanding of it? 
• How do the students in our schools understand the word "scholars," especially when hearing it applied to themselves?
• Is the term "scholars" considered preferable to the term "students" for some reason? (This might be a question I'd have the answer to if I were still teaching.)

Students? Scholars? Both?

I know: it may sound like I'm overthinking this. But just to say that when I see the term "scholars" used to describe schoolchildren ranging in age from 4 to 18, I have to wonder if it's more an aspirational term than a descriptive one. I worry when when we educators label children as something that they are not yet in order to motivate them to become that thing: in the absence of our contextualizing and discussing our deliberate use of a particular label and our transparently shepherding students toward the goal designated by it, we may inadvertently cause them to think they've already achieved that goal. More about this important topic later, since our students are all entitled to educations that make it possible for them to become scholars.

My questions sent me first to the Oxford Online Dictionary*** to understand the difference between "student" and "scholar." One Oxford archaic definition of "scholar" was "A person who is highly educated or has an aptitude for study"; another was "A student or pupil."*** Since these two definitions didn't quite overlap from my perspective, I now had some new questions:

• Are "student" and "scholar" synonyms?
• What does it mean "to study"? What kinds of learning come from studying and what kinds do not? Can scholars learn from something other than studying--for example, from playing, as many little children do?
• Are "pupil" and "student" synonyms? And therefore, by extension is "pupil" a synonym for "scholar"? Have these words become synonyms, or were they always?

At this point, I realized I better start consulting the Online Etymological Dictionary****--and I wished I'd studied Latin as well as French. But there was that word "studied" again: I had to think back to all those times I'd planted myself in front of a book or something else and tried to fill my brain with certain facts and constructs in hopes of being able to apply them in the service of knowing and doing later. Surely that wasn't the only way to learn, but it was one of the ways to learn.

So here's what I found out about "student," "scholar," and "pupil":

Scholar:  

'Old English scolere "student," from Medieval Latin scholaris, noun use of Late Latin scholaris "of a school," from Latin schola (see school (n.1)). Greek scholastes meant "one who lives at ease." The Medieval Latin word was widely borrowed (Old French escoler, French écolier, Old High German scuolari, German Schüler). The modern English word might be a Middle English reborrowing from French. Fowler points out that in British English it typically has been restricted to those who attend a school on a scholarship.'****

Student: 

'late 14c., from Old French estudiant "student, scholar, one who is studying" (Modern French étudiant), noun use of past participle of estudiier, from Medieval Latin studiare "to study," from Latin studium (see study (v.)). An Old English word for it was leorningcild "student, disciple." Student-teacher of a teacher in training working in a classroom is from 1851, American English.'****

Pupil:

'"student," late 14c., originally "orphan child, ward," from Old French pupille (14c.) and directly from Latin pupillus (fem. pupilla) "orphan child, ward, minor," diminutive of pupus "boy" (fem. pupa "girl"), probably related to puer "child," probably from a suffixed form of PIE root *pau- (1) "few, little." Meaning "disciple, student" first recorded 1560s. Related: Pupillary.'****

The following thoughts arose for me from these etymologies:

The 2016 Kimbrough Scholars

• If "scholars" is a word we choose to use simply to mean "children of all ages learning in schools," our decision can be justified by the above etymologies. However, if we choose to use it only as a synonym for "students," we may undervalue its potential to motivate students to become scholars--and we do want them to become novice or apprentice scholars as a result of their K-12 journeys. 

That means we too need "real leadership and robust action in place of vague directives." And if those are already there, please let me know. Only with the support of parents and the community, and with strong curricular leadership in place, will K-12 educators be able to support all students in developing the inquiry, literacy, and performance skills; the senses of self; the habits of mind; the work ethic and commitment; the interpersonal communication skills; and the flexible knowledge that purposeful scholarship requires. Furthermore, the district will have to ensure that students have sufficient and varied authentic opportunities to further develop as scholars. The CRLS Kimbrough Scholars Program provided such an opportunity for a group of students for several years.

• Given the "leorningcild" part of the etymology of "student," there's a sense that those who are students can learn from others who already have the knowledge and skill they are in the process of developing. So there is a place for listening and learning from adults. Though much classroom education has rightfully empowered and encouraged students to express themselves, to make their voices and truths heard, the students in those classrooms, in the name of scholarship and mutual understanding, must engage others' perspectives, voices, and truths.
  

• The "'orphan child, ward" part of the the etymology of "pupil," took me aback.***** From it, I grasped the feeling of expulsion from home that might accompany the home-to-school transition of our youngest schoolchildren--and understood that learners definitively become "pupils" when school is the place they do their learning, under the supervision of people who aren't family members. Several of my elementary teacher colleagues refer to their students as "my babies"--I'm guessing this comforts their very young students who are much experiencing themselves as "pupils"--hopefully in far more cheerful classrooms than the one depicted here.

So what should we call schoolchildren when we aren't calling them "schoolchildren"? I'm going to recommend we call them "students", not "scholars." Aspiration is terribly important for both teachers and students. But aspiration without teeth--aspirations without plans and methods for realizing aspiration--won't amount to scholarship. Students always know when the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

So what can we do to help our students merit being called "scholars"? 

First, we can move away from curriculum that emphasizes student skills at the expense of other educational areas. The framework offered by Gholdy Muhammad in Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy ******  focuses on four areas:

• "Identity Development—Helping youth to make sense of themselves and others
• Skill Development— Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplines
• Intellectual Development—Gaining knowledge and becoming smarter
• Criticality—Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression"*******

Please note that skills development is only one component of this framework that also insists that students be supported

• to explore and understand the self-of-the-moment each of them brings to any kind of inquiry into themselves, others, the worlds closest to them, and the worlds farthest from them; 
• to recognize, develop, and pursue the knowledge that's important, meaningful, and interesting to them; and
• to sharpen their capacities to recognize forces, behaviors, and dynamics that do or could threaten their and others' abilities to live free, empowered, and respected--so they can respond effectively for the sakes of themselves and others.

Skills may be essential for scholarship, but they're not sufficient for scholarship.

Second, we can create assessment tools and opportunities that encourage and reward student persistence, growth, inquiry, reflection, performance, and risk. One possibility might be student portfolios built over students' secondary careers in which they represent those moments and experiences that they and their parents, teachers, and mentors recognize and associate with their successful development of their scholarly capacities.

So yes, let's call our students "scholars"--but only when they understand that their learning behaviors have earned them that designation. It's a perilous moment for sure as we wait to see how much of our students' learning lives will need to be online. And, of course, I know there's much more important stuff to worry about than the distinctions that I'm drawing here. Still, however the school year plays out, we owe it to our students to be as honest with them as we are encouraging and optimistic.

I have a friend who always introduces me as a "singer" because I've sung in choral groups throughout my life. I am a very respectable amateur singer, but I always correct her, explaining to those present,"I sing, but I'm really not a singer." Frankly, I don't work hard enough at singing in an ongoing, disciplined way to call myself a singer--which isn't to say that I don't work at it at all. I want to reserve terms like "singer" and "scholar" for those who really do the hard, dedicated work I associate with both, and with the wonderful results I also associate with both. When we educators call our students scholars, I want them to glow with a sense of achievement and growth that both they and we recognize and applaud.

* Screen shot of web page version of Wilson, A., Read, L., Lipsett, A., Foss, C., Young, R., & Mosca, L. (2020, July 20). The plan to reopen Mass. schools compromises too much and provides too little. Boston Globe. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/20/opinion/plan-reopen-mass-schools-compromises-too-much-provides-too-little/
** Wilson, A., Read, L., Lipsett, A., Foss, C., Young, R., & Mosca, L. (2020, July 20). The plan to reopen Mass. schools compromises too much and provides too little. Boston Globe. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/20/opinion/plan-reopen-mass-schools-compromises-too-much-provides-too-little/
*** Oxford lexicographers. (2020). Definitions, meanings, synonyms, and grammar by Oxford dictionary on Lexico.com. Retrieved July 26, 2020, from https://www.lexico.com/

**** Harper, D. (2020). Online etymology dictionary: ORIGIN, history and meaning of English words. Retrieved July 26, 2020, from https://www.etymonline.com/ 
***** Photo from the New York Public Library included in the following blog:

McCarthy, E. (2016, January 7). 11 Ways School Was Different in the 1800s [Web log post]. Retrieved July 26, 2020, from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58705/11-ways-school-was-different-1800s  

****** You can listen to her Muhammad discuss this framework in this video entitled "Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools."
******* These words are quoted directly from the Amazon web site.

Rampage

When Coronavirus met Heat Wave,
It was love at first sight,
Bonnie and Clyde-style--
Life cheap, compassion nil.

Daytimes,
They’d joyride around town,
Honking their horn, jeering,
Flaunting the heat they packed,
Testing the patience
Of those waiting for testing
In idling cars in sunbaked lines.

Nighttimes,
Consuming and consumed,
Drunk on the day’s gains
In death and despair,
They’d couple feverishly,
Breaking old bedframes
And new records.

They needed stopping. 

So we marched and masked,

Demanded, tasked.  

But we had no leverage.

There was no deal to be cut:

Those who’d paved their 

     ways
Were above the law,
And we knew it.*

* This poem was revised on July 27, 2020, after I considered some comments and questions offered by a discerning poetry reader who's also a good friend. It's former title was "Rampage: A Pandemic Poem;" its third stanza formerly began with the following three lines: "They needed stopping./ We had the will and the means,/ But not the leverage."

Photos:

"Bonnie and Clyde in March 1933 in a photo found by police at an abandoned hideout": Photo accompanying Bonnie and Clyde. (2020, July 16). Retrieved July 17, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_and_Clyde#/media/File:Bonnieclyde_f.jpg 

"Cars line up to enter SeaWorld as it reopens, on June 11, in Orlando, Fla. The park had been closed since mid-March to stop the spread of the coronavirus."  Photo by John Raoux/AP accompanying Allen, G. (2020, June 16). Florida Officials Spar Over Rising COVID-19 Cases. Retrieved July 17, 2020, from https://www.wbur.org/npr/878932911/florida-officials-spar-over-rising-covid-19-cases

The Trees That Bind

So already, I think lots of us have trees that we love, that we look forward to seeing, even go out of our ways to see. Every time I drive up to the Eustis Estate Museum, which is on my way to and from my parents' senior living community, I always spend some time looking at the tree that's right next to the house.

 












As this smaller picture of my mother standing next to it in 2017 attests, it's a tree to be taken seriously. Its trunk resembles the leg and foot of a mega-elephant. If anything happened to it, I doubt I'd be the only one who missed it. 

I think that in the time of coronavirus, it's especially reassuring to see such trees, to be reminded of what endures, even to see it enduring. But trees are living things, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as well as the natural journey through life to death. And so we sometimes experience losing them, depending on when we encounter them.

A few weeks back, a good friend who's a current Jamaica Plain resident and my frequent socially distanced walking partner suggested that we walk through the Moss Hill Road neighborhood where I grew up. So we did. I pointed out to her the home of one of my childhood friends who'd had the best toys of anyone I knew because her father worked for Mattel. Aleta had every Barbie outfit and accessory, and her mother let us eat the kinds of candy my mother refused to buy because, she said, it would rot our teeth.

"Spring Tree #1" by Scott Ketcham*

Even better than Aleta's toys was the immense, towering tree in her backyard--her house was one of at least four that backed up to it. We'd play under its ground-scraping branches for hours. I loved that tree so much that I went looking for it one afternoon about twenty years ago while I was working at English High School: above Aleta's old house, I spied a dead treetop that I thought might have belonged to that tree. A few weeks ago, there was not even a dead tree top, so I had to believe that that tree was now truly gone. As I had twenty years ago, I wondered if my childhood perspective had made it seem larger and more spectacular than it really had been.

Too Young to Play "Under the Tree" Without Supervision

That's why I was thrilled that when I told my younger sister that I'd been on Moss Hill Road recently, she immediately asked, "Do you remember the tree behind Aleta's house---the one that had the branches that went down to the ground, so that when you were under it, it was like you were in a room?" Suddenly, I got that tree back; by sharing her similar memory of it, Lauren had ensured that at least between us, that tree would always be.

During the American Academy of Poets' late April #ShelterInPoems Virtual Reading, Rita Dove read (at minute 22:02) and commented on (at minute 23:45) Joanna Klink's "On Falling (Blue Spruce)." It's about a tree, a nearly hundred-year-old blue spruce next to Klink's house in Montana, that fell one night in a storm. It was a big loss for Klink: as she explained in the blurb next to the poem on the poets.org web site, "We bought the house because of the spruce."

Klink's poem quietly simmers with so much feeling that we're forced to recollect our own grief as she grieves. The poem begins with a meditation on the ordinariness of falling in nature: the falling of dusk, of needles, of pine cones that, in her case, "dropped every hour/ on my porch, a constant// irritation." But, to be irritated by things and people, we know, is not not to love them, is not not to count on their presence in our lives. So we understand that the realization of ordinariness will not protect us from feeling loss, especially the loss of what or whom we've chosen.

"Green Sifted" **

While Klink talks about not being able to understand how alteration of such magnitude could have transpired so suddenly--

. .  .. Every day
of my life now I cannot
understand. The force

of dual winds lifting
ninety years of stillness
as if it were nothing, . . ..

I experience her as seeking not to feel the overwhelming grief that she's feeling. But she's no less angry at the situation than she is at herself for being surprised by it: the tree had the audacity to fall "Before it was possible/ to imagine my life/ without it."

Is it too late to come to terms with the loss? In some ways, yes, but really not.

• There's the wisdom accrued: "What is beyond/ task and future sits right// before us, endlessly/ worthy."  
• There's the sense of what can't and shouldn't be replicated: the speaker plants a small linden tree in a different place since "Some change/ is too great."  
• And finally, there's a tree like the blue spruce in a field somewhere "made entirely of/ hovering" that, thanks to this poem's vivid portrayal of it, Rita Dove explains, reassures us that

"our memories, our sense of where we are in a moment, and how we felt in that moment, can never be taken away from us. They exist inside of us, maybe existing entirely as hovering, and yet they are there, in that field, that white and quiet field."

Rita Dove's complete comments about Klink's poem and pandemic times generally are well worth listening to; her poem in the current issue of the New Yorker is well worth reading.

I hope and believe that writing "On Falling (Blue Spruce)" comforted Klink and that reading it, having it to go back to and read again, comforts not only her, but also her neighbors. As she further explains on Academy of American Poets web site,

" . . .  [the blue spruce] rose above all the other trees in this area of town, and had its roots underneath a corner where people paused to talk.  After it fell, in a windstorm so violent that fires broke out across Missoula, I received more than a hundred notes at my door—a few people wanting to work with the wood in a way that was equal to the tree, but most expressing grief. Even now, six months later, strangers will stop me to say, 'It was something.'"

Some things that belong to most or none of us legally, actually belong to many of us in some way. This is true of the doum tree in Tayeb Salih's "The doum tree of Wad Hamid":  "So it is, my son, that there is not a man or woman, young or old, who dreams at night without seeing the doum tree of Wad Hamid at some point in the dream" (8).***

My sister Lauren and I are now planning a trip to our old neighborhood: we need to look one more time for our childhood tree. If we need to explain to the current owners of the nearby houses why we're standing in their yards, we will. Interestingly, Lauren, who has vivid memories of the tree's smooth, grayish bark, believes that it was the same kind of tree as the one outside the Eustis House: a copper beech. Maybe we'll discover that I was wrong, that our childhood tree is still there, standing broad and exult. Or maybe we'll find ourselves in the presence of a tree "made entirely of/ hovering."

* https://www.scottketcham.com/post/119541798937
** https://www.scottketcham.com/image/158869712282 

***  "The doum tree of Wad Hamid" in Ṣāliḥ, A. (1994). The wedding of Zein and other stories (D. Johnson-Davies & I. E. Salahi, Trans.). Three Continents Press.