"The Rocks of Recklessness"

The last day before vacation presents challenges in a building teeming with teenagers.  The writing exercise described below engaged students more than I had anticipated.  

In an upper level literature elective, "The Drama of Math and Science," we had first read Inherit the Wind.  As preparation for Marlowe's Faust, we read the morality play, Everyman.  

To end the week, teams of students wrote a short scene in the manner of a morality play.

A scene from the Moral  Play, “The Rocks of _____________”


After their ship has narrowly escaped shipwreck on the Rocks of ____________,
several shipmates discuss why they almost crashed their vessel and how they can avoid such danger in the future.  (Fill in the blank with a noun that reflects the mindset(s) or behavior(s) that caused the ship to nearly shipwreck.)

Choosing two or three characters from the lists below (at least one from each list), write a page or two of the shipmates’ dialogue.  Follow the formatting used by our text of Everyman.

LIST ONE
KINDNESS
HONESTY
BOUNDARIES
RESPECTFUL RELATIONSHIP
CLEAR MIND
HEALTHY BODY
KIND SPEECH
DIVERSITY
COMMUNICATION
GENEROSITY
PATIENCE


LIST TWO
WASTEFULNESS
RUSHED JUDGMENT
HOARDING
ANGER
ILL WILL
BULLYING
GOSSIP
INTOXICATION
ABUSE
THIEVERY
DECEPTION

Wired for Poetry

 This piece originally appeared in the BAY School of San Francisco's monthly newsletter (April 2009).  Given my recent letter to The New York Times, I decided to re-publish the essay here.


Wired for Poetry

Poetry is an art form—that started a long time ago.  It is still an elder among the creative arts.  We can also say that the essentials of poetry overlap significantly with the basic ways the human brain learns.  According to our modern and blossoming neurobiological understandings, the human brain is a natural poetry machine.  I can’t help but recall the time my three-year-old nephew held up high a peeled banana at breakfast and exclaimed, “Look, the moon.”
In July 2005, after Bay School’s first academic year, faculty members attended a conference called “Teaching to the Teenage Brain.”  Ever since, notes from that week have informed my work with students.  According to the conference leader, Gesner Geyer, an enriched learning environment matches teaching practice to the nature of how the brain learns. Recently, I have come to understand how well humans are wired for poetry.  Geyer’s summary of recent scientific knowledge proposes that, fundamentally, the brain learns in six ways:

By associating (linking, connecting) new information to existing knowledge
By shaping those associations into patterns
By making meaning (e.g., from these patterns)
through emotions (that work as relevance detectors)
through the body
mostly beneath the level of awareness

    As just one example of alignment between poetry and the brain, consider metaphor, a basic building block of poetry.  Through metaphor, we associate something unknown, unfamiliar or puzzling (like love or separation) with something our brain knows (like the scent of a rose or the stacked stones of a wall).  This year’s sections of the Poetry course focused on three essentials: sound, imagery and metaphor.  Through both reading and writing poems, students regularly circled back to each element in order to build an understanding of its special potential.  They read poems from the ancient Near East and Far East, from medieval Europe and from the modern Americas.  They wrote in meter and free verse.  They analyzed published poems and reflected on their own original compositions. Each student was responsible for leading a class on a poet of his or her choosing.  In these sessions, classmates learned about subjects such as World War Two’s effect on Tadeusz Rozewicz (Poland), modern industrialization’s impact on Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (England) and the playful criticism of Billy Collins (United States).  As a final project, both sections of the course produced a book for the school’s library.  These books contain separate chapters from each student.  The first half of each chapter contains two published poems and that student’s analysis of how these two poems “talk” to each other. In the chapter’s second half, each student includes an original poem, as well as an essay explaining plans, discoveries and final reflections from the process.  The samples in this newsletter come from the class presentations and the book chapters.  As always, it has been a pleasure working with the students, as they study and create poetry.

Becoming Our Brain: New Web Browser Unleashed

 Earlier this week I mailed this letter to The New York Times.  Now it can safely appear here.


To the Editor:
Re: “Web Browsing Takes Social Turn” by Miguel Helft (news article, Nov.8)

To paraphrase a main idea in Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows (Norton, 2010), the internet is increasingly doing our thinking for us. This momentum is causing important parts of our brain to atrophy. For example, we learn largely through our capacity to associate new information with prior knowledge. If you ever wondered “what the internet is doing to our brains” (Carr’s subtitle), look no further than Miguel Helft’s article about the new web browser being launched today. RockMelt not only searches the web for you, “but also fetches the pages associated with these results, so a user can preview those pages quickly and decide which to click to.” Beautiful—now the internet browser makes associations for you. You don’t have to exercise that part of your brain anymore. You, the “user,” are now being used, while becoming less able to think for yourself.

Rediscovering Books and booklets

Oh, the power of the pamphlet. (full post forthcoming)

Poetry, Hamlet, Humanities and Heaney

Several months ago, I began writing about Literature and History.

As our sophomore Humanities students are about to meet Hamlet and his play, I find myself thinking of Seamus Heaney's 1995 Nobel acceptance speech, "Crediting Poetry," especially its last paragraph.  Throughout my years as a Humanities teacher, I have had to keep asking myself and articulating to others what literature distinctively brings to the table.  How does the literary enterprise differ from the historical one, and what primary values come from experiencing a text like Hamlet?  Answer: the human experience generated by the text.  While Shakespeare's play, as an artifact (art made), has historical value, it is not primarily an historical text.  It is art designed to be felt and lived.

Enter Seamus Heaney.  I have italicized a portion of the excerpt that particularly resonates for me.  After the passage, a brief explanation.

"Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor.  It is at once a buoyancy and a holding, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.  The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being."  [emphasis added]

As we question the spirit who appears during the night watch in Act One, Hamlet's experiences of fear and curiosity are ours, too.  So is his anger at Gertrude's o'erhastey marriage.  When we act, or imagine acting, in these scenes, "the base of our sympathetic nature" is touched.  The form of the language, says Heaney, touches that vulnerable part of ourselves; it connects us to the experience of another person, and in so doing recognizes us.  Part of our job as teachers of literature is to help young people understand that a play written four hundred years ago and set a thousand years ago CAN have relevance for us today.  Such plays CAN teach us valuable lessons about ourselves as individuals and communities.  Our own vulnerabilities and sympathies DO matter, and literature recognizes this claim.

At times the stars align

At times the stars align, as they did this past week.

During the Writing Workshop class, required of all freshmen at our high school, students were embarking on their first essay of literary analysis.  They were trying to identify a viable main idea for their essays.  This early in the year, many of the new ninth graders struggle to create an interpretive statement on which to base the two-to-three-page analysis.  They start by writing a brief reflection called a "thought piece," which is basically an extended  journal entry about a line, incident or issue from the text.  Our text this time is a recent novel by Markus Zusak, called The Book Thief.  (By the novel's mid-point, the story continues to engage the students, which is welcomed news to my colleague, Ellen Greenblatt, who suggested the novel for this class and who introduced us to the label "thought piece.")

From three of these thought pieces, I read sample sentences aloud in order to show everyone the routes some of their classmates had taken to a workable idea.  I put these routes into three different categories.  Since that demonstration, I have noticed that these categories align with basic ways  the brain learns.  Sometimes the stars align.

The first student's idea grows from a question, so we used the label "Q."  She wonders what the novel's various colors mean, or more specifically, what Death's use of colors means.  This question reminds me of the brain's primary function of handling new information.  As I understand the process, when the brain receives new information, it has to do something with it--put it somewhere.  For example, it tries to associate it with something it already knows--i.e., with prior knowledge.  Or for another, perhaps better, example, the brain tries to make meaning from the new information.

The second student is building her idea on the feeling of surprise.  I offered the label of "Resonance"--with the label "R."  She had not expected the mayor's wife to invite Liesel into her home to see the library.  This unexpected gesture just "goes to show" the reader that people who first appear uncaring may turn out to be a source of comfort.  This essay-start aligns with the claim that human learning involves our emotions.  For this student, the path to an idea and analysis begins with an emotional response to one character's seemingly simple invitation.

The third student has noticed a pattern ("P"), specifically in the growing friendship between Liesel and Rudy.  He sees their relationship becoming richer, and plans to analyze what this growth tells us about both characters, as well as about the nature of friendship.  As for alignment in this case, pattern-making is the connection.  Once the brain has linked incoming information to prior knowledge, the brain shapes those associations into patterns, which, in turn, helps the brain make meaning, or so I learned some years ago at a workshop called "Teaching to the Teenage Brain."

In sum, from student reflections I took three examples that showed successful starts to the process of finding a meaningful interpretive statement.  After having named each path and explained each case to the kids, I see the natural match between those students' successes and cognitive scientists' descriptions of basic ways the brain learns. 



NEXT POST: RECOGNIZING RESONANCE (framed quotes and Seamus Heaney's Nobel speech)

Reading Reflections: Carr's THE SHALLOWS #1

This general series contains personal reflections on my current reading.  

Having recently started Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010), I offer some initial thoughts, several of which came up at this morning's (delicious quiche) breakfast with my wife, brother and sister-in-law. 

The cover of a teacher monthly--I think it was called TEACHER MAGAZINE--maybe twenty years ago or so, featured a sturdy young Marlboro man of a teacher (in jeans and a t-shirt) standing in a desert.  Knee-high sage brush dotted the sandy floor. The camera angle made the man loom large, with the desert vista stretching behind him.  At his feet sat a tiny Mac Plus, tilted slightly to one side as if disoriented or tired.  The He-Man teacher showed viewers that he was in charge--man and his chosen tool.  He would decide how and when to use this machine.

Four years ago, our faculty held a week-long summer institute focused on technology. Our discussions produced the consensus that we best serve students by reminding them that "technology" means "tool," and that we all should develop the habit of first asking what we want to do.  Then, we choose the tools that suit the purpose.

In Carr's opening chapters, he appreciates this popular conviction that we are the tool-users, but he introduces the core of his apparent thesis:  the tools themselves use us.  In other words, they change us.  Specifically, the internet changes how we think, not just what we think.

Our family breakfast discussion touched on social-networking tools, like Facebook.  I think we agreed that such tools are training teenagers (and their brains) to move away from empathy at an important stage in their development.  The appearance of anonymity or distance, among other features, lures them into "communicating" without understanding the receiver.  The technology itself produces the effect.  In the opening chapters, Carr has not addressed this social networking topic, but his main idea seems related insofar as empathy presumes depth and his title is The Shallows.

At the breakfast table, I could not help but put in a plug for reading literature because as teenagers move outside themselves, literature helps them develop skills of empathy by inviting them to imagine other people's lives.