On Slow Cookers and Sabbaticals: Reflections at the End of the First Month of "Retirement"

So already, it's been a full month since my last day at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS). While I really miss daily encounters with colleague-friends and students, I don't miss early mornings standing on the Wollaston Station subway platform or late nights grading at my dining room table. I love that I have time to read. My period of adjustment continues. I am having to push myself not to push myself. You see the paradox.

Wednesday morning, after a long, uninterrupted sleep, I woke up to a day with no plans and appointments -- and to an attack of the "shoulds."  They often accost me when unstructured, unclaimed time rolls out in front of me:  I should go for a walk. I should go to the grocery store. I should mail the hat. I should write my next blog post. I should vacuum.  I should . . ..

My bed was deliciously warm; the wan gray daylight edging my window blinds reminded me that snow flurries were forecast for this unseasonably cold morning. Bed was the perfect place to be. But the shoulds weren't having it: Should I walk now, or walk later? Should I go to Stop & Shop or Hannaford? Should I mail the hat from the post office or the UPS store? What order for all of this? Should I do it all today?

Somehow, this last question pierced my brain-frenzy and essentially slapped me upside the head. None of the shoulds had to happen that day. And so I pushed them away. Just like that. I breathed in. I exhaled. I made coffee. I read the newspaper. 

It's funny how easily "should" metamorphoses into "want to" when the pressure of expectations--my own? other people's?--is removed.  Liberated from the claims of productivity, enlightened purpose, and duty, I decided I wanted to begin my day with a trip to the UPS Store to mail the hat, to be followed by a visit to the Stop & Shop to buy the ingredients for the slow-cooker dish that was going to be Friday's dinner.

As I was driving to the UPS Store, I was filled with thoughts of how easy it was, now that I was no longer going to CRLS every day, to mail back to a friend the favorite hat that he'd left it in the trunk of my car several days earlier.  Had I still been working, finding the time during the work week when I could actually get to the UPS Store or the post office when it was open would have been its own feat of balancing, juggling, and re-organizing time and obligation:  such is the lot of school-based educators whose lunch less-than-hours, generally a combination of eating and dashing, seldom involve leaving the school building. Suddenly, as I weaving my way around Adams Street's ugly pothole obstacle course,* I felt so happy and so free that I wondered if there was a beracha I could say, some blessing to sanctify this moment, to give thanks for being able to take care of something that needed doing so, so easily.

Early retirement is so much about adjusting to the non-regimentation and general increase in time and choice. But because there's so much time, the most elusive commodity in a teacher's life, it's so easy to feel guilty about squandering it. The word "squandering" probably needs a connotation transformation for new retirees. Rather than signifying a lack of responsibility and a disrespect for what is precious and fleeting, it might signal a permission to experience time not as a commodity dedicated to this or that, but as a thing in of itself:  to wallow in it when it lags; to marvel at it when it races unstoppably; to note when it has vanished discreetly, surreptitiously, completely.

For me, it's about wanting to be in slow-cooker mode for a while.  My slow cooker, which does most of the work when it and I cook together, continually reminds me of the generative power of long hours and sustained low heat. Through my slow cooker's glass cover, I get to observe the visible but still mysterious process of discrete ingredients' melding over time to become a "dish." I have lots of time to spend looking, wondering, . . . and looking forward: since I generally set my crock pot on the low-temperature setting, there's an 8-10-hour period during which I can check in periodically on what's happening, and also do plenty of other things, always with the satisfying, centering knowledge that a nutritious, aromatic transformation is in process.

So what's stopping me from embracing slow-cooker mode? The answer: a highly active sense of duty that's easily stimulated.

Beyond my kitchen are many who believe that new retirees, especially those under the age of sixty-five or even seventy, should not--must not--step back, rest up, and recalculate before embarking on "whatever's next." They argue that the world is so broken and needy that those who can help to heal it must not exit the struggle, even temporarily. While I agree that skillful, committed people must respond when the world cries out in need, I also believe that there are many more and less effective ways to do so.  So, there are important, thoughtful decisions to be made. Personally, I don't want to make such decisions without taking some time to rest, recharge, reflect, and re-envision. But how to balance these simultaneous inclinations toward social and personal need? Is the solution to keep my slow-cooker aspirations, but to adopt the high- rather than low-temperature setting?

But then I confront another complication: slow cookers generally live in kitchens, the historical female domain; and since I have retired, I have read four books about uncommon women who always saw beyond the kitchen for themselves, other women, and people in general. Of the two uncommon nineteenth-century women, both of whom lacked the extended formal educations bestowed on their male relatives, only one managed to become a voice -- a public intellect and reformer. The non-fictional twenty-first-century uncommon woman, from a background that did not mark her as predestined for future national prominence, parlayed her first-rate education and exceptional personal qualities into a position of judicial leadership. Finally, the fictional twenty-first-century uncommon woman, though seemingly on the brink of self-destruction as the novel about her begins, created something magnificent and praiseworthy at an earlier point in her life. It's hard to stop laboring in a profession when having a profession was not an option for most American women not that long ago. When I contemplate what others have done to ensure women's right to participate fully in American political, economic, professional, and civic life, stepping back and slowing down even temporarily can seem like acts of ingratitude and lost possibility.

But even Margaret Fuller periodically recognized her personal need to slow down, rest, and re-evaluate. There's a fifth book that I've been reading: Rabbi Chaim Stern's Day by Day: Reflections on the Themes of the Torah from Literature, Philosophy, and Religious Thought.  Organized around the Jewish liturgical year's cycle of Torah readings, each chapter focuses on a significant theme drawn from that week's Torah portion. During the recent week of Vayakhel (Exodus 35:1-38:20), the daily meditations were on the theme of "Work and Rest" because in the Sidra, God commands the Israelites to "have a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the LORD" (35:2)** after six days of laboring to build the Tabernacle. God decrees rest. 

Rest is important, especially after a period of intense labor. In the Torah, and often in our lives, it creates the circumstances under which work can be undertaken for its highest purposes.  Stern provides a quotation from Claude G. Montefiore for contemplation: "The Sabbath is one of the glories of our humanity. For if to labour is noble, of our own free will to pause in that labour may be nobler still"(151).*** A minister friend put it to me a different way yesterday morning: "Sometimes the work is to rest." And only one day earlier, another old friend, to whom I had described my chronic attacks of the shoulds, had said something similar: "'I should rest' would be a good kind of 'should' to have right now."

It's very comforting to me to see my own struggles with the work-and-rest relationship echoed in comments and observations from many wise persons and traditions--but especially comforting to see them echoed and explored in the sacred texts and teachings of my own religion. I am so grateful for the experience of feeling and being supported by something large, deep, wise, and deeply caring during this time of transition.  I also give thanks for finally understanding that this time that I am taking at the beginning my retirement to rest, reflect, and rejoice is a "sabbatical." As such, it promises that "There will be time," as the lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" say, for contemplating "all the works and days of hands /That lift and drop a question on your plate." There are lots of questions and answers, lots of possibilities and plans, to entertain in the months ahead, and plenty of time to wonder about them, set them aside, and wonder about them again. There are also lots of slow-cooker recipes I've thought about trying but never had the time to actually make. Slow-cooker mode, here I come!

* Screen shot of image from the following blog - and it's a good blog post, too: http://pathtowellness.com.au/should-is-a-dirty-word/
**Plaut, W. Gunther. The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. Print.
***Stern, Chaim. Day by Day: Reflections on the Themes of the Torah from Literature, Philosophy, and Religious Thought. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Print. 

The Challenge of Stationery and Stillness: Reflections from the Third Week of Retirement

So already, don't be fooled by this photograph.* I'm not on vacation in some warm, tropical spot. But I am thinking that perhaps the best way to have avoided drowning in the contradictions and disequilibrium of the first weeks of retirement would have been to have walked out of the front door of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and to have headed directly to Logan Airport.  If I had embarked immediately on a three-week vacation, I would have been required only to be a tourist--to look at things, learn about things, navigate new locales; to sleep in beds that weren't my own (not to make my own bed and lie in it!); perhaps to understand how to use a new currency; to puzzle over exactly what it was that I had ordered and was now eating; to chill out with a new view--or multiple new views.  In my mind's eye, as I imagine this kind of a retirement beginning, there's a lot of sunshine and no snow, lots of sandals and no boots.

But that's not how I started retirement, so despite the still wondrous and welcome novelty of afternoons that unfold rather than gallop, I'm very aware of the challenges of adjusting to retirement.

During the first full week of my retirement, I acknowledged in a blog post that retirement would require me, in due time, to develop a new self-definition based on a yet-to-be-developed sense of purpose or direction. I also asserted that "constructing that new, purposeful identity prematurely would be a mistake," and that I was "feeling dedicated to not making decisions for the sake of eliminating uncertainty."

So here are the two challenges I'm facing as I try be guided by my pronouncement and my related aspiration:  the world and myself.

So many things that look stationary aren't still at all.  Take this stream that flows toward the Housatonic River often imperceptibly enough to seem still. This photo could easily make you think that you're looking at a shallow pond, not a tributary. But maybe there's such a thing as enough stillness. All around us, the world moves forward, giving and asking. Enough stillness could support enough reflection to inform a coherent if provisional response to that moving world.

I found this out last week when a former student teacher contacted me for a letter of reference.  No problem, I said. And suddenly my stationary problem became a stationery problem.  For the last ten years, I've written professional communications on Cambridge Rindge and Latin School letterhead that bore my name, title, and contact information. What letterhead now?  No problem, I thought.  Microsoft Word.  Stationery templates. No doubt I could find a template that I liked and insert my new professional information. Wasn't it just for this moment that, at the prompting of my good friend and mentor, CRLS' instructional technology support coach, I had created a new e-mail address specifically for post-CRLS professional communications?

I checked out the templates, found one I liked ("Formal Letter"), customized it a bit--and confronted the next problem:  what should I say I was? I experimented with several descriptions over the next couple of days. "Educational Consultant and Writer" earned a quick thumbs-down because I hadn't been paid to write anything since 1989.** "Educational Consultant and Blogger," my second attempt, was a little more acceptable:  I do have a blog; anyone can have a blog.  But in my experience as a school-based person, too many educational consultants had arrived with packaged if research-based solutions and stale anecdotes -- and with a tendency to talk at rather than listen to the educators whom they had been hired to help. Hoping to communicate my willingness to thinking flexibly with and across groups, frameworks, organizations, and schools of educational thought, I tried "Independent Educator and Blogger" next.  But I feared that "independent' might suggest a career spent working in independent private schools, not district public ones.

Finally I found an encapsulation that's good enough for now:  "Educator and Blogger." Since "educate" etymologically derives in part from "educere [meaning to] 'bring out, lead forth,'"*** "educator" seems the best term at the moment.  The most respectful, dignified forms of bringing out and leading forth always require the collaboration of the so-called leading and the so-called led if their common goal is empowering the led to direct their own learning and work with confidence, hope, and skill. That often means more listening than speaking, more discussing than presenting on the educator's part. No panaceas here; just thoughtful processes that embed materials, tools, and stories of change, ideally shared at the precise moments when they're most wanted and needed.

So as much as I'd felt the world was pushing me to define myself before I really wanted to, there was something liberating in choosing some labels for myself -- especially given that I can revise them in the months ahead.  As to the balance between "educator" and "blogger," who knows?

I generally seek certainty and clarity at moments when being open, flexible, comfortable with not yet knowing, even downright relaxed and completely distracted would be more helpful. I either want the answer, or I want to feel no pressure to have any answer. I've selected another Berkshires image (more evidence of the compulsion to know?) to orient me, to anchor me just enough. Here, pooled water and flowing water live side by side, parts of the same stream. There's no avoiding the overall flow or the periodic exchanges between the stationary and the moving. As a result, the reflecting pools are bright and still, but not stagnant.

*Screen shot adjacent to this text from http://moderndestinationweddings.com/UploadedFiles/lp_12_Sandals-Negril-Sandals-Cafe.jpg 
** In 1989, I received a small stipend for writing a column for a periodical called New York Teacher.
***Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=educate

The Deeper Learning MOOC: Personal Reflections as Week #4 Begins

So already, 7:00 tonight Eastern Standard Time, 4:00 Pacific Time, the Deeper Learning MOOC will offer its fourth live panel discussion, this one on the topic of student voice and choice.

So far the MOOC -- the Massive Open Online Course currently being offered by High Tech High, the M.I.T. Media Lab, and several other progressive partners -- is fascinating, overwhelming, and valuable.

Those of us who have signed on have now completed the first third of this free nine-week journey the course potentially offers to us.  I say this because we are not obligated to participate in every week or every activity of the course.  The course designers have encouraged us to participate only when and how our participation will align with our own interests, needs, and purposes.  

I signed up for the MOOC for four major reasons. 

First, all of the course's topics --  listed at the left -- interest me.  The MOOC is allowing me to re-assess and deepen my understandings of familiar topics and to enlarge my repertoire for putting them into practice. "Academic Mindsets" is a whole new area for me; "Deeper Learning for a wide range of students" always benefits from others' latest insights and experiences.

Second, many of my newly-former CRLS colleagues are taking this course, so we can be learning together without having to create the learning experience ourselves.

Third, I'm always curious about the way technology, particularly interactive technology, helps and hinders deep learning.  So this MOOC offers one more opportunity to think about that question. Not all online learning may be equally suited to eliminating global educational inequities, despite the hopes that accompany it. And does tweeting really help me learn, especially to learn deeply?

Fourth, and finally, I've been very curious about what it would be like to take a MOOC -- to participate in a course with -- if I judge the course enrollment by the number of people in the associated Google+ learning community -- 1701 other people.  This means that the number of people in the course is roughly the size of the student body of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the public high school from which I retired in late January.

Have you had the chance to hear and see Eric Whitacre's virtual choir sing his "Lux Aurumque"?  Just the idea of this choir reminds me of the admirable, generally effective, and ongoing efforts the designers and facilitators of this MOOC to make this course a coherent, focused, communal, yet personalized experience. There are definitely ensemble moments -- around panels and protocols -- for those who want and seek them, but there's also a great deal happening within smaller subgroups and for individuals exploring the resources and using the online communication tools the course recommends.  When all is said and done, we are a much larger group than Whitacre's 183-person choir, and we are not trying to merge our multiple voices into a single musical message under the baton of one conductor; nonetheless, we cherish the feeling of doing something together with intentionality and positive educational purpose.

So how's it been for me?  I'll begin with an anecdote that Tina Blythe, co-author  Looking Together at Student Work,** often shares at the beginning of face-to-face workshops.  As a young teacher attending a professional development workshop mandated for all members of her department, Tina noticed that a veteran colleague, an unofficial mentor, wasn't sharing in the general grumbling surrounding the required participation.  When Tina inquired about her colleague's more sanguine attitude, her colleague explained that she considered any professional learning experience worthwhile as long as it offered her one valuable takeaway -- a piece of driftwood. And she generally found her piece of driftwood.

So first about the valuable part of the MOOC. The great news is that the MOOC offers so much great driftwood to be gleaned, collected.  I've collected quite a number of pieces from the first three week's online sessions, provided resources, and associated online Google+ community.  I've  learned how various schools configure student and teacher time, particularly to support learning through internships. I've been reminded of the wide range of purposes for looking at the student work, not all of which have to do with deeper learning, and I've re-appreciated the degree to which ongoing teacher learning and ongoing student learning walk hand-in-hand. I've heard a number of stories of student experiences that took theoretical ideas and made them not only real, but intellectually and emotionally compelling to me. I expect this driftwood-gathering will continue.

Now for the overwhelming part of the MOOC. The challenge is -- and the problem is -- knowing how much valuable driftwood there must be out there -- and knowing full well that exploring every part of the beach is impossible. Sometimes I feel as if I'm on one of Washington state's Olympic Peninsula beaches where, in order to be safe, one needs to be fully aware of the collective power and movement of the many big, magnificent pieces of driftwood that are afloat. When that driftwood does deposit itself at least semi-temporarily on the shore, it never is as organized and centered as it is in the photo to the right, so it creates another set of navigational challenges.  All my way of saying I've had to remind myself that for the sake of my own learning, less driftwood is often more in an environment like this.  I need to stop; I need to focus on those one or two pieces of driftwood that seem to have a place in my learning at this moment.

And it's not just the driftwood that threatens to proliferate excessively.  The online Google+ communities are also numerous enough to potentially overload the "learning together" circuits.  While multiple ones of these seem interesting enough to join, my mind starts to get tangled at the thought of all the conversations, resources, connections. So I've been consciously reminding myself to pull back, pull back, to what's manageable.  I also remind myself of the various kinds of search functions available on Twitter and Google+ that might make these online places useful more specifically at a later time. I appreciate the course facilitators' gentle acknowledgments of the potential for overload and ongoing encouragement to avoid self-expectations that foster overload.

Now finally, for the fascinating part of the MOOC -- and that's the huge community of "us" who have signed on to take this course.  For how many of us are all, or almost all, of the deeper learning topics completely new?  For how many of us are most of the deeper learning topics somewhat familiar -- or very familiar? To what degree have we signed on primarily to connect with others who share our educational values? How many of us have been looking for a place to share our own thinking and work because we've been largely thinking alone -- or not daring to share our thinking in environments where it would be viewed as "not being with the program"?  Whenever I'm in any kind of online learning environment/community that's about educating for the present and the future, I always wonder about the degree to which participants feel comfortable questioning the value of the ideas that are being presented (vs. the how-to or history of those ideas), especially when so many others are expressing a great deal of excitement about them.

In general, I feel that there's only one inherent contradiction in this MOOC -- and I actually think it's an unavoidable contradiction, given that the course is designed as a multi-course banquet to nourish participants with -- or at least encourage them to taste -- some good ways to get started and/or to continue fostering deeper learning successfully. But here goes anyway.  

Again and again, we are reminded that taking risks, experimenting, and even failing are essential to deep learning -- but we keep hearing beautiful and very inspiring deep learning success narratives that sound more linear than I suspect they actually were.  I know that whole-group online time is limited, so every panelist cannot lay out the significant well-intended missteps along the deeper learning road or the improvised moves that saved the deeper learning day when things began to fall apart. But I would sure like to learn about moments when the plan needed to change significantly or a completely unanticipated significant learning resulted from a more circuitous path. I think such stories offer reassurance as well as inspiration to people daring to foster deeper learning, especially in schools that may be less focused on deeper learning. Perhaps MOOC participants could be encouraged to post about deeper-learning-generating "failures"?

Very much looking forward to Session #4 tonight, and very grateful to be participating in this MOOC! Still unsure what I think about the technology-deeper learning connection, but thus far I have gained so much to use and think about as an educator.

*http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080907001907/color/images/6/64/Driftwood.jpg
** Tina is a co-author of Teaching as Inquiry:  Asking Hard Questions to Improve Practice and Student Achievement and The Facilitator's Book of Questions:  Tools for Looking Together at Student and Teacher Work, and the primary author of The Teaching for Understanding Guide.
Organized Driftwood Photo:  <http://www.creativityfuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Gabo-2-driftwood-by-John-Dahlsen.jpg> 

Good Endings and Strange Beginnings: Snow Day Reflections on Retirement's First Days

So already, this morning at 4:45, I received that same robocall that the entire staff of the Cambridge Public Schools received:  No School Today, February 5.  Just more evidence that I'm squarely, firmly established only in retirement limbo -- not in retirement itself. The Information, Communication, and Technology Services Department has yet to delete me though I am no longer on the district's payroll.  While I was warned that my CPSD e-mail account would be disabled right after I officially exited the school for the last time (and stepped responsibility-free into the January sunshine, which was the part they didn't mention), I am very much still connected. There's a peculiar thrill that comes with seeing all those unread e-mails amassing and feeling no obligation or temptation to open and read them. I can't deny it:  sometimes I feel like Gregor Samsa's little sister in the last paragraph of The Metamorphosis*:  she too wanders into metaphorical and literal sunlight with a jubilant sense of relief that is deserved, and also heartless.

But, of course, today's there's no sunlight: just snow and more snow, and the occasional light tapping of sleet on the windowpane. Retirement limbo thus far is an alternation between the euphoria of mid-day sunshine and the begrudging acknowledgment of winter's ultimate claim on the world and the spirit. When the winter sun shines bright, as it did last Thursday in Johnson, Vermont on the day of Scott's Beauty and Darkness gallery talk, retirement beckons like an adventure; when winter's gray and white layer and proliferate, retirement feels like everything else feels:  thwarted, challenged, burdened, blank, pointless. 

My feelings are real, but my talk is a little silly: it is only Day 3, and Days 1 and  3 have boasted accumulating snow -- a lot of snowfall for one week even for New England. The truth is that I'm alternating between enjoying my new freedom (consciously needing to remind myself that I don't have to wake up at 5:15) and feeling strangely, uncomfortably untethered. Some years ago, my friend Diane Tabor, a former CRLS assistant  principal, remarked that retirement is like adolescence except that one has better skills for navigating it.  I can see the identity crisis looming on my personal horizon -- but I also have the adult wisdom to understand that constructing that new, purposeful identity prematurely would be a mistake, and I'm feeling dedicated to not making decisions for the sake of eliminating uncertainty. A couple of consecutive days of very good weather would probably go a long way to helping me embrace my freedom . . ..

But on a more positive note, I'm coming to understand why I left CRLS feeling primarily peaceful and positive, even though at a number of points in the last seven years I've felt disappointed, dismayed, dismissed, discouraged, unappreciated, sometimes even enraged. Scott's gallery show helped me understand why.  Exhibitions -- of paintings, of teacher learning -- make statements that their creators choose to make.  To exhibit is to assert oneself, to claim turf, to dare to think, to value unapologetically.  Exhibitions celebrate and empower.

At one of my lowest moments as a CRLS educator, one of my former principals, Ed Sarasin, gave me a piece of advice that became my survival mantra: "Be the educator you need to be." As my own beliefs about how best to improve teaching, deepen learning, and foster the achievement of all students diverged increasingly from those being both imposed on and cultivated within CRLS, I had one consistent outlet for following Ed's advice: the Project Zero/Making Learning Visible Project-supported Wednesday Afternoon Teacher Learning Group, the group of CRLS teachers who have met every two-to-three weeks for the past eight years (our group has core members and new members every year) -- and who annually create CRLS' exhibition of teacher learning. (The photo here shows the Teachers' Resource Center ready for an opening reception some years ago.) My role was to facilitate this group's ongoing inquiry into teaching and learning -- and to support the group's creation of our annual exhibition.  Every year, members of the group did right by one another as educators and human beings -- and also managed to share something of value with members of the CRLS faculty who chose to check out our exhibition.  Every year, I felt proud of who we were, how we worked together, and what we shared.  Hardly the stuff of anger and bitterness; more the stuff of love and authentic learning community.




Out of this work grew a particularly significant and defining personal teaching-and-learning experience. Re-assigned to teach one English class during the 2010-2011 school year, I finally could experiment with cultivating a "pedagogy of listening" in my own classroom. Carla Rinaldi describes the practices and principles  associated with a "pedagogy of listening" with passion and commitment in Making Learning Visible:  Children as Individual and Group Learners -- and they are the practices and principles that are dearest to my educator heart, the ones that I believe have the best chance of improving teaching, deepening learning, and fostering the achievement of all students because they refuse to define students and teachers by their "deficits" -- and insist on defining them as people rather than problems. The end result of my efforts was "Grappling with Greatness:  Negotiating Different Points of View in AP Literature," one of six learning portraits featured in Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools, written by Project Zero researchers Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Melissa Rivard, and Daniel Wilson. I feel so honored and so validated by the inclusion of my work in this book.  And what fortuitous timing of the publication of this book -- practically on the eve of my retirement!

In fact, the Wednesday Afternoon Teacher Learning Group, has had the chance to go public with our work beyond CRLS on a several occasions -- at the Documentation Studio at Wheelock College, at the Project Zero Classroom summer institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, through an article Jennifer Hogue and I were invited to write for an issue of Theory into Practice,** as well as on the pages of Visible Learners.  Like Scott, we've had multiple opportunities to be creative and responsive, to push ourselves and support one another to take pedagogical risks, to wear our educator hearts on our sleeves, to feel the affirming sunlight that goes along with exhibition and the authentic dialogue, community, and growth that it promotes. 

The snow is still falling; and the skies are now darker than they are in this photograph. For me personally, retiring happily required more than feeling I had done right by the students in my care.  Given my professional development role, I needed to feel that the efforts and achievements of my colleagues -- my co-inquirers -- also were adequately explored, understood, and honored.  This kind of recognition and validation, which depends on open, deep, flexible looking and listening as well as on more conventional forms of program assessment, did not happen for the CRLS Instructional Support Coaches, another group of CRLS teacher-leaders with whom I worked closely over a number of years. That group has done and continues to do important, meaningful, seldom fully examined, and thus seldom fully understood and appreciated work in supporting teachers and students -- and this does make me sad.***  But the great work of the Wednesday Afternoon Teacher Learning Group was acknowledged, respected, and celebrated, thanks to Project Zero, and the Making Learning Visible Project in particular. Maybe everyone who retires should get to do an exhibition of precious, important work -- kind of like Scott's M.F.A. show.

*http://www.online-literature.com/franz-kafka/metamorphosis/3/
** The article, "From Display to Documentation to Discourse:  The Challenge of Documentation in a High School," was published in the Winter 2010 issue.
***The rage exhausted itself a few years back.

Two Days Left at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School

So already, only two days left as a public school educator.  It's an extraordinary time -- especially sweet and intense given the prospect of Scott's gallery talk at Johnson State College on Thursday. But it's also a disorienting time, both wondrous and unsettling.

If you read my blog post of about a week ago, you saw pictures of the sculptures that Scott has included in Darkness and Beauty, his M.F.A. show at JSC.  The sconce you see at the left, which Scott recently gave me as a gift, is related to that work in terms of materials, subject matter, the presence of duality.  It rounds a corner and looks in two different directions.  Its two faces exist cheek-to-cheek, like close sisters or kindred spirits who sense each other through peripheral vision, actual or spiritual -- or like one person with two different orientations. And it feels to me like a near-perfect expression of my current situation: I am rounding a corner, but with such a strong sense of connection to the person and places I have been.

Today I had as nice a final day of "teaching" as I could have asked for. Too many carbohydrates for sure, but so many expressions of appreciation -- and so much wisdom and caring as my students shared their thoughts on a number of topics. I love how this group of students has come to value one another over time -- as human beings with particular perspectives, as sources of particular kinds of knowledge, as possessors of particular talents that have been developed and then shared for the pleasure and enlightenment of all of us. "Only connect" doesn't always come easily for worried, over-committed seniors.  But we connected.

I suspect our "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" VoiceThread Project clinched it:  so many students, in the asynchronous conversation that VoiceThread makes possible, articulated how much their own understandings of the poem developed as a result of others' comments and choices of images to represent particular stanzas. After that project, the students collectively and individually seemed to have surer knowledge and a keener appreciation of sensibilities, experiences, and knowledge each one of them brings to the endeavor of interpreting literature and life.

Speaking of "Prufrock" and in honor of the many wonderful students I have taught at CRLS who have encountered "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and embraced the chance to learn with and from one another, I am publishing in this blog four essays and one drawing created by students in my "last" CRLS English class who connected to "Prufrock" in personally important ways.  Klara's, Solomon's, Rachel's, and Sam's literary personal essays were written for our class; Elizabeth's drawing was created for her art class.  

Two days left  . . . 

Klara's Literary Personal Essay: "The Lovesong on All of Our Minds"

[Please note:  this essay is completely in italics as a reminder that it is Klara's work.  Klara, who is eighteen years old, gave her permission for her work and picture to appear here.]

After a few days of devastatingly chilly temperatures, a soft rain had drizzled away the remnants of snow and I was biking to school. Even though it was still dark, the air felt warmer and there was this beautiful fog on the streets and in the air. It wasn’t a lively yellow fog like in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but more of a soft gray. As I was biking down Bay Street I remember thinking about how normally fog only exists when you look at it from far away; it seems so tangible but disappears when you get close. This fog wasn’t like that, though. I saw it on the road ahead of me and expected it to disappear as I grew close, but it didn’t: it was there right up until I was in the middle of it. There are so many things we don’t understand until we’re in the middle of them. You could say life is like that, but we’re all on the middle of it, and none of us really has any clue what’s going on. How can we measure our lives? Do our little, everyday moments make us who we are, or is it the more important, decisive actions that define us?

I can imagine Eliot coming home after an evening out on the town, thinking of the prettiness of the fog even in the dreary streets, the weariness of his routines and regularities, the way people age and let their destinies fade. Already he struggles to recall the complexity of that feeling. He writes  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in an effort to record it. I thought of the line from the poem in which the narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, contemplates the yellow fog as he journies through a deserted city:  “And indeed there will be time/for the yellow smoke that slides along the street...there will be time, there will be time...and time yet for a hundred indecisions/ and for a hundred visions and revisions” (Eliot 23-33). Prufrock’s walking down the street, thinking about the smoke and his life and probably a real jumble of things, and I was too, riding to school with this fog around me and this poem in the back of my mind. 

When I look at this line now, I know that I felt the same as the narrator. As I watched the smoke sliding along the street, I was mentally preparing myself to go back to school after a long vacation. I thought about all the little decisions and the actions that would fill my day before I get to the ever-distant lunch B, my version of Prufrock’s “taking of a toast and tea” (Eliot 34). Even as he ponders all the tiny things that make up his life, Prufrock takes solace in the knowledge that there will be time: time to make hundreds of little choices and hundreds of huge ones. His life stretches before him, all of the glory and the boredom and the indecision, all before he even has lunch.

As one gets older, the days seem to get longer but, in a funny trick, still manage to pass more quickly. A week is the work of a moment, a month is easily passed, three months are foreseeable. I think of years as cycles revolving around school, starting in September and ending in August. The school year is divided by strips of colors; the beginning of the year, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the winter, all of the vacations until it’s summer and then the whole thing starts up again. This year is different for me and my friends. We don’t know what’s coming next. Most of us don’t know where they’ll get into college, much less where we’ll end up. We’re contemplating the future, for we have so many choices ahead of us. There’s a lot of wondering “do I dare?” in my life right now. 

Arriving at his destination, Prufrock hesitates, asking himself, “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” (Eliot 45-46) What he’s really asking himself is; can I leave my neat little orbit; can I upset the balance of things, if only slightly; can I change and make change? Do I dare do something other than the path that’s expected? I recognize Prufrock’s gravitation towards action as well as his fear of failure and the unknown. The universe is right there, do I dare disturb it? I love the diction Eliot uses there, because the word “disturb” is so powerful there.  If he had written, “Do I dare change the universe?” or “Do I dare upset the universe?” the meaning would have been so different. The alliteration with the two “d” words aids the flow of the poem, but more crucially the word “disturb” suggests the image of a small, fearful child prodding something much grander despite their fears. There’s no idealistic chatter about changing the way things are, or stirring them up-- the narrator is questioning if he, in his small way, can muster the courage to act.
 
I have the comic version of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Julian Peters taped up on my wall. My favorite panel is the one captioned “Do I dare disturb the universe," because I find it fascinating how Prufrock reaches out to something which is somehow both the door and a vast, starry universe. This duality is found everywhere in life. The universe manifests itself in monumental things like firemen saving a family from a burning house or somebody‘s being found innocent after a trial or an astronaut’s walking on the moon or an earthquake or the explosion of a far distant star. The universe can also be found in the smaller things: a baby’s speaking her first words, a friend’s biking to your house in the middle of the night, your favorite song on the radio or a new pair of socks. The universe is vast but it’s also a nervous man mustering the courage to knock on a door. [Image]

I dwell on the fading of life, the jadedness and the ennui. Prufrock claims, “I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...so how should I presume?” (Elliot lines 49-54). Prufrock has made the choice for himself-- he chooses to look at his life in terms of the coffee spoons, of the plodding times. I know it’s important to cherish your average days, because that’s what you’ve got in the end, but I don’t think that’s quite the answer. I eat the same thing for breakfast every morning: toast and butter. I take the same route to school every day. I sit in the same seat in class. I have an expected rhythm. 

*Variety is the spice of life, and I make an effort to season mine, but I worry sometimes that I can measure my life in Iggy’s bread. I close my eyes and think of the rows and rows of toast that I’ve consumed in my lifetime, and I worry that I have known them all, the evenings, mornings, and afternoons. I worry that I’ve experienced my best moments already, that they’re all pictures I tape to my wall and stories I tell, that I’m reaching my peak, and soon will start the gradual demise. My hair might not thin like Prufrock’s, but will I start wearing a “simple pin” instead of a kitschy necklace? I’m afraid of letting my best times slip by me; I’m afraid that these are my best times.

The only thing that you can guarantee about life is that it has no guarantees. No one can promise me that I still have my best times ahead of me, because that might not be true. There’s no way of knowing if I’ve already felt everything that I’m going to feel, or if I’ve already surmounted my peak. The only way that I can really ensure that I still have greatness ahead of me is to believe that I do, and live my life with that in mind. We are our great times and we are our feeble times, we are what makes us cry and what makes us laugh, and most of all, our lives are what we value in within them. 

* As an initial exercise in developing our understanding of the poem, each student creates a visual representation of a line, image, or stanza from the poem that makes a strong impression on him/her.  Our class hangs these images on the wall in the order in which they occur in the poem and listens to the poem being read aloud while looking at them.

Solomon's Literary Personal Essay: "Eliot"

[Please note:  this essay is completely in italics as a reminder that it is Solomon's work.  Solomon, who is eighteen years old, gave his permission for his work and picture to appear here.]

I was in my sophomore year of high school when I first read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. However, after reading it again senior year, the poem took on a new meaning to me and rose to the top of my list of thought-provoking, relevant, writings of a deeper level. The words flow beautifully together and ring true to my understanding of the world. I am not sure whether a strengthening of my convictions at such a young age might end up closing me off to new ideas and reducing my open-mindedness... But I don’t care, because this poem rings true to me in so many ways, beyond the allusions and context, into a realm of deep enlightenment. The passages that made the deepest impressions on me will be explored and heartily praised for their effectiveness at conveying truths about human nature. 

“There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces you meet.” How beautiful. How maddeningly true. In this day and age, it seems an individual is rarely accepted for who he/she truly is. Our society seems to scream, “Come you extroverted fast-talkers. Come and be successful, for you will surely thrive in this here Eden.”

The quiet and the introverted must put on a “face” if they wish to be a “success.” Indeed, even silence is unwelcomed by our society. A time spent quiet is time spent not collaborating, we are told. The prevalence of this societal dogma is astounding. I enjoy sitting alone in Starbucks for lunch, drinking a coffee and reading a book. However, this clashes with societal norms, and my “friends” flock to me like ovulating dogs, disturbing my silence with sympathetic, unnecessarily kind barks of, “Oh, you’re all alone” and “Here I’ll sit with you,” as if I couldn’t possibly be enjoying my time away from Them. That bothers me. Sometimes, I believe that I must be feeling incorrectly! Yet these lines of poetry remind me that I am not the one acting. It is those who greet me in order to rescue me from from the loneliness I must be experiencing who are truly putting on a face.” And to meet me! In a way, conformity is a sad habit, yet, if there was no conformity, then would not we all be conforming? And so I wonder: “Do I dare.” Do I dare to be myself in a society that values a behavior few possess, yet many strive to attain? It has been said that Henry David Thoreau sent his clothing home on the weekends to be washed by his mother. Perhaps I could live two lives, as he and Prufrock did. Perhaps I myself can “prepare a face to meet the faces that [I] meet” at times, but also be my true self at others, reflecting, much as I am now—as Thoreau did in those famous Concord woods when he wasn’t picking up Tide cleaner for his mother—when I am not among those who value the sort of outgoing, expressive, achiever that I am surely not. 

*Eliot captures my fear. He captures my dissatisfaction. He captures my acceptance. My unhappy, defeated acceptance. “Would it have been worth it,” he asks. And so I ask the world: “WOULD IT BE WORTH IT? To be different? To be myself?” I am “not Prince Hamlet” either, “nor was I meant to be.” Indeed, I am even driven to question whether or not greatness itself is simply a creation of society, propagated by those women who “come and go,” speaking of the “great” Michelangelo. No. It cannot be. Greatness surely transcends the banal culture that they reside in. Prufrock seems to mock their pitiful attempt at understanding the great artist. He recognizes Michelangelo’s greatness. Perhaps it is Prufrock’s true observation of greatness in the artist that drives him mad as he watches the old women nip and yip at the other while they ponder this “greatness” over a pleasant afternoon tea and scone. Perhaps the “human voices that wake us” are actually the voices of the conformers, and they cause us to “drown” because they detract from the truth and wisdom innate in all of us, that we ignore in order to be accepted. 

As Prufrock was, so am I also stuck between a rock and a hard place. Conform, and I am lying to myself. “Demur,” as Dickinson proclaims, “and [I] am “straightaway dangerous.” And I am different. Fear not reader,  for I am no tortured soul. The inner faces of others do emerge to greet my inner face. Perhaps Forster’s “Only Connect” was in reference to that which resides deep within us all: a wisdom and beauty, easily deemed “useless” for many activities and professions, that forms a relationship, like a butterfly to a flower, with the innermost truths of others. 

In misery or bliss, Prufrock utters, “I grow old… I grow old…” I have many interpretations of this passage. And what is so wonderful is that they absolutely oppose each other. He is blissfully liberated from his youthful fears of being an outcast, or he is utterly resigned and defeated that, even in his advanced age, he is unable to escape his insecurities. Perhaps a combination of the two, or perhaps neither, were intended. 

The most beautiful part of this poem resides in its potential to be interpreted in extremely different ways. Another individual could read this poem and understand it to mean something so remarkably different that one would believe we had read different poems. That is the power of this poem. It is personal, yet it is applicable and understandable by all who choose to examine it. And so it goes—life, that is.

* As an initial exercise in developing our understanding of the poem, each student creates a visual representation of a line, image, or stanza from the poem that makes a strong impression on him/her.  Our class hangs these images on the wall in the order in which they occur in the poem and listens to the poem being read aloud while looking at them.