subtext

Many of the more profound moments in my life are a matter of happenstance. And what is more, they often achieve a level of profundity after much time has passed since the original event occurred.

We reshape the past to better justify our present, which in turn creates our future.

“Look Mr. Neal,” Nick announced, laughing for the first time since Christmas, “I found a dime.” This comment had nothing to do with anything we had been doing in class, which was not a surprise. Nick thought about football. However it was the best literary comment from any of my students that year.

On my wall at work:

“Sometimes all it takes to be happy
Is a dime on the sidewalk.”

-Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser

I don’t have a clue what I am teaching.

The old saw, you have to have a plan or you plan to fail does not work in my classroom. A better saying would be: You can never be lost, if you don’t know where you are going.

My more persnickety colleagues have accused me of teaching nothing. I can accept that: as Jane Yolen wrote, “Nothing is always.”

What bothers me the most about workshops where they sell you prepackaged teaching programs is that there is always a specific goal, an answer, to what they are selling.

There is never an easy answer.

I teach nothing, but I work very hard at it.

“It must be nice to just sit around all day, read, and not teach anything,” the history teacher said to me as she walked by my room and saw me sitting on the floor with my 12th grade students silently reading different books.

Yes, it is.

In a writing workshop we were told to pick a rock from a container of rocks then write about it. After a quick quandary over which rock I should pick, my indecisive nature coming fully into play as I fingered them all, I took the one I had first picked up. Much of my life is reflected in that moment in choosing my reflective stone. I dither over everything I do eventually following my first impulse, even if I actually pick up the trail I chose much later than the moment of choosing. So I slowly move along in a kind of shambling twirl of a dance in a direction I am unsure of and to rhythms, which often seem contrapuntal to everything else in my life.

I pick up this rock again. It has been a long time since I last wrote for this space. I found comfort in it before so I decided to make an effort and write here again.

Work (not school, because I work there) is now into its third week. I was given an AP class this year much to my chagrin. When peers hear that I was not thrilled, they think it is because of the second prep. When I try to explain why I don’t like the AP program they look at me uncomprehending. Don’t get me wrong: the students are great, smart, insightful, articulate, literate; everything one wants in students. I just hate the unending focus on testing, when the focus should be on the students and their interaction with language.

I re-read an interaction I had with the texts we read in Urrieta’s Identity class in the spring of 2007. I really did like that class and still think about it a lot. here it is:

“L.S. Vygotsky, to the limited extent he wrote about personality, was like Mead in his view of self as a complex emergent phenomenon, continually produced in and by individuals in their interchanges with others and with the culturally transformed material world” (Holland and Lachicotte , in press, p. 4.)

We make the world we live in, or at least the way we see and understand the world, through the exchanges we have with others and they have with us. We are both transforming and transformed by the people we come in contact with in an ongoing continual process. Our identities are shaped, as well, by the world(s) we inhabit (Figured Worlds), as are the world(s) shaped in turn by the identities we take on. We “self-author” our roles, which are provided us in the worlds we enter; at once being determined by the social world and improvising our “selves” in the role.
I want to start singing the Beatles, “Within and Without You” as I read this stuff. The self is formed by the social world, yet at the same time the social world is formed by the interaction of various and divergent selves in interaction with one another. The “world” is always already there, yet we can somehow through our agency (the stories we tell?) instigate change in this always already there space. I imagine an intermeshing complex of world and self, kind of like a lava lamp, in what Lenot’ev called “a reciprocal transformation between the subject-object poles” (Leont’ev 1975, p. 9), where most of the change happens along a permeable border/skin that allows an intermingling of the two “poles” in an ever-changing symbiotic whole.
As an English teacher and a student in the Language and Literacy program, in addition to the Vygotsky, the Voloshinov article resonated with my interests in composition, voice, and storytelling in creation of the self and the “figured worlds” we inhabit through language. “Their restructuring was based on experience with native language as the medium through which consciousness and ideas are generated” (Voloshinov, 1929, p. 83). I try to encourage my students to see themselves as writers who can use the experience they already have, and the “natural” way they have of speaking to create meaning in and around the texts they are reading as well as meaning in the world they inhabit. I want them to see that they are an integral part of the linguistic exchange, not merely poor recipients of a monolithic language. The “word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant”(p.86). In addition to hoping they see themselves as being engaged participants in the language, whether they be native speakers or second language learners, but they have an ability to effect society through their active engagement with the language.
Because of the mediating power of language between the individual and the social situation, whether it be in a classroom or the society as a whole, it becomes important that my students see language as the tool it is, both to shape themselves and the world. “It is a matter not so much of expression accommodating itself to our inner world but rather of our inner world accommodating itself to the potentialities of our expression, its possible routes and directions” (p. 91); and since the flow of changer and changed is reciprocal, in order to change the world, which would change the self, one must, as does the society in which one finds oneself, change the word.

The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never obliged to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language the lie must reign.
-Guy Debord p. 9 Panegyric (2004)

Many of my students come to the school with a language, even when they speak English, which is different than that which is spoken in the classroom (Heath 1984). Additionally the language, or discourse, that is dominant among the school administration and state mandated TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) is more often than not disconnected from the language of the students’ discourse community, as well as that of the classroom. I am conflicted over the importance of either the students’ own language or the importance of “helping” students into the discourse of the dominant language community. Lately I have been thinking that the focus of my class should be on language, as in rhetoric, as perhaps the key, since whatever discourse a student comes from, or whatever discourse is applied upon them by we patronizing school officials, using the tools of the language of rhetoric would allow the student to analyze both their own language and the language of power. Perhaps. Or maybe it would simply indoctrinate them into a different (not synonymous with better) discourse community.

“Invisible substrate for the constitution of the visible.”

“Irradiances that imperceptibly illuminate.”

-Luce Irigaray

For years I have wondered what it is I actually accomplish at my job. The state and district mandates a series of increasingly higher stakes tests, where the students by the time they come into my classroom are forced to pass the test or fail to receive the holy grail of basic education: a high school diploma. A couple of days ago one of my female students was informed that she still had not passed the science or math sections of the TAKS and as a result would not graduate high school. “My life is a failure,” she moaned, “I’m not going to college, I’m going to have crappy jobs my entire life.” She, of course, blamed her former math and science teachers, and to her credit her inability to remember anything. She wanted to know how she could be classified special-ed so she didn’t have to pass TAKS (a mistaken belief on her part), as if she simply had to fill out a form to declare herself learning disabled. If she acted in her previous math and science classes in the manner in which she did in my class: staring into space, not very subtly texting behind her purse, whispering loudly to anyone who was in proximity to her, skipping class; then it would not surprise me if she could not remember the Pythagorean theorem or the difference between a base and an acid.
Reading and writing are, of course, different. They are processes rather than a constellation of facts and formulas, which to the students seem random and disconnected to anything. They do read and write however, no matter how poorly, constantly in their daily lives. Their level of literacy, and their kinds of literacies are often disconnected from the kinds of literacy we often demand of them in the high school English class, but they do read and write a plethora of different texts through out their day: ranging from text messages, e-mails, video games, to simple to do lists and instructions from their managers at their part time jobs. Once they have moved beyond decoding sounds from letters and have begun, no matter how hesitantly, to flow with the written text, the process of reading becomes more and more a matter of doing it: read to read better.
Which brings me by a rather rambling path back to my original sentence and the two extractions from Luce Irigaray: I think much of what my students learn they learn through the process of doing what I have them do. I question the validity of the test results my students receive, at least as a measure of what they learned in my class. English is a recursive process where something they might have first encountered many years ago finally comes to fruition in my class, not because of anything I directly taught them, but because I created a space where they had the time to work with texts. They were able to embody the “invisible substrate” and bring it into the visible world, not that they could or even should be able to articulate what it is they did; but that they were able to do it should be enough. It is the way the students come to use language as a result of being exposed to literature and through their own encounters with language which lead them to “Irradiances that imperceptibly illuminate.”

I was given the morning off to grade the short answer portion of the CBA (curriculum Based Assessment) my students took a few weeks ago. We had to do the grading on campus, I guess because the administration doesn’t trust us to do our jobs. It took about an hour to read through the four or so sentences each one wrote comparing two articles which where on the test. The students for most part succed in providing the kind of prose required for the test. They did not have to think all that much, the two articles followed a familiar narrative of hard work and determination in sports. Most of the students’ answers were fairly stock responses to the articles with the addition of quotes from the articles to ‘prove’ the students assertions. But since the articles were cliches of sports narratives, the students simply had to scan briefly to find appropriate cliches in the articles to back up the cliched assertions. The best part of the process was that it did not take all that long for me to read them so I had a couple of hours to get some other work done that I could not do if I were in the room with the students. I used to wonder why they rarely let us work on planning and grading, or thinking about what we do as teachers. The administrators always seem to want to control what we do with our non-classroom time, as if we were not to be trusted to be interested professionals. Of course I know that many teachers are not interested professionals, and would not use the time in any kind of productive manner related to teaching. Yet, I think that if you treat people as if they are untrustworthy then they will become that way. At least that is how I operate with my students: I trust them to be intelligent curious young men and women and they usually show that they are that way. I have been asked how do I get my students to read the two books I require them to read each six weeks: my real answer is that I expect them to read two books each six weeks. I don’t tell them it is hard, I don’t make a big deal about it; it is simply what they are supposed to do, and most of them do it, mainly because I give them time in class to do it. Reading is after all a leisure activity, which we rarely give them time to do. Every year my students tell me they have never read so many books in their entire lives. This both thrills me and saddens me. Thrills me because many of them discover that there is something worthwhile in books, and saddens me that it has taken until their last year in high school to discover that reading can be important to them personally.