Under the Magnolia.

I came across this poem this morning while reading one of my favorite blogs.  It was timely because in my graduate class this week we were discussing poetry and I realized how much I had been missing it lately.  There is no other form that can capture so much with so little and, like the nerdy English teacher that I am, it hurts my soul that it is such a misunderstood genre.  I try to teach my students that poetry is one of the most powerful ways to share their voice--it distills the most power and leaves out the unnecessary that clogs so many texts.  

I've been talking with some people lately--and even in my last post--about living thankfully and gratefully, especially for the intangible.  This poem made me stop and think and breathe.  And it makes me want to write.  














Under the Magnolia by Carolyn Miller

I give thanks because I do not have
a great sorrow. My village has not
burned, my child has not died, my body
is not ravaged. I sit here on the ground
lucky, lucky. Somewhere, villages are burning,
somewhere, not too far away, children
are dying; in this great urban park
painstakingly constructed over sand dunes,
people live in the flowering bushes. But
just here, in front of me, is a bride and groom;
here is a child running with
a red ball; another child is rolling on
the grass. All I have to do is to decide
how much fear to let inside my heart
in this fragile, created place, this bowl of grass
surrounded by palms and cypresses and
shaggy-barked cedars and trees
whose names I do not know, long fronds
falling, clusters of lilac fruits depending like
bouquets. All we can do is trust
that we belong here with the flowers: white
iris and Iceland poppies, a blur
of primroses, beds where flowers are
a crowd of color, where they close in the dark,
where the first light finds them starred
with dew. The trees seem to know
what I do not know; even the cultivated grass
understands some chain of being I can only
guess at, whether it is God’s mind, or
the erotic body of the Goddess, or some
abstract kind of love, or
some longing for existence that includes
the fern trees, the new buds of cones on the
conifers, the white butterflies, the skating boys,
the hooked new buds of the magnolia
that look like claws holding on
to life, the curved thick petals of magnolia
in the grass, some gone to rust, some creased,
some streaked, others freckled, others magenta
at the curved stem end, others cracked,
all lined with long veins branching out
to the petal’s edge.

looking for beauty and remembering how to live.

Springtime is when I come alive again--especially this year when winter seemed to stretch way too far into April.  The blossoms in the park and on the streets and behind my apartment make my heart swoon--and I'm always trying to capture them with my camera as their fleeting nature always gives me a sense of urgency and the beauty reminds me of what is real and true.

I'm currently on page 445 of 605 in A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.  My thought when I picked this one was that I was moving through books so quickly that it would be wonderful to have a long read that I could linger in for a while--I'm definitely lingering.  My nightly exhaustion from unpacking and setting up our apartment left me making about 5 pages of progress a night.  Luckily we are finally feeling more settled and I've resumed my mostly normal reading habits before bed. Then, of course in the past week and a half I've also had to read The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer and Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson for my graduate class.  Talk about a disrupted reading life. Ha.

Through the class I've been learning a lot about myself as a reader alongside how to best teach my students.  We moved in about a month ago now and I can say with absolute certainty that not taking time to write about my reading each weekend--which is basically taking time to reflect on the world around me and where I find myself in it--has left me feeling unsettled and not like myself.  So even though I'm not quite done with the book yet, I feel compelled to write about where my brain has been lingering over the past month or so while reading it.

A Fine Balance is a book about how 4 people's lives come together in India in the 1970s: a woman who was widowed in her 20s after three years of marriage and has struggled and strived to remain independent, an uncle and nephew pair who were bold enough to learn a trade above their caste and left their village to seek work in the city, and a young student who was sent by his parents from their comfortable home and general store in the mountains to the city to study.  What I've been able to get to know the most through this book beyond these characters is an India that I confess I was utterly uneducated about: when in 1975 the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency that allowed the President to rule by decree and suspend elections and civil liberties.

When the student comes from the mountains to study, he is stunned by the way people live.  His new friend tells him: "The problem with you is, you see too much and smell too much.  This is big-city life--no more beautiful snow covered mountains.  You have to learn to curb your sissy eyes and nose," (238).  As a wide-open-spaces lover turned long-time city dweller, over the years my own eyes have shifted into what I find beautiful.  Growing up, I spent so much time in t
he woods or in my midwestern suburban town where everything seemed picture perfect.  Beauty in New York is defined differently than my creekside wildflowers, backyard tomato garden, or street medians with planters.  New York's beauty is mostly man-made, be it in the architecture or the energy, but it is also side by side with rats and urine-baked sidewalks in the summertime and of course, millions of people, most of whom do not live in luxury apartments or take cabs to work.  

The question I've been left thinking about is "what is beauty and how do we construct our lives around it?" The two tailors in the book live in one of the city's slums until the government forcefully removes the residents and levels the slum in the name of "beautification."  Of course in reading the story, I got to know not only the tailors, but the way of life in the slum and see pictures of the people there: and once you know the people, you begin to see the beauty--even if it's amid a mass "toilet" that lies on the other side of the train tracks. Because there is a line that forms at sunrise to fill a few buckets with water from a single pump and the people in it are capturing water for their families to sustain their lives and having conversations and living life together.

So, sitting here in my apartment I've worked hard to make visually appealing and to feel like a home, I want to challenge myself to seek out true beauty this week: to look for it most of all in the spirits of people--be it my students, the deli guys who know my coffee order by heart, the people I sit next to on the train, or the ones I pass by on the street.  I want the spirit and beauty of humanity to be as much of a comfort to me as springtime blossoms or coming home to clutter-free counters and a tea kettle waiting for me.

Graduate School + Moving = Not good for the old blog

I started a new graduate program in January and my usual reading-for-pleasure time has been confiscated by reading-for-school time, which, for the most part, has been really engaging and forced me to spend some time in young adult literature as well as reading some professional books.  I've been reminded of how powerful literature can be for my students when paired with opportunities for response.   I've written about the books I've read for class--Charlotte's Web, Wringer, Esperanza Rising, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, and Chains in my "reader's notebook" for class and  I'm hoping that I'll have the time to write about a few of them on this blog, but with the tempo of my spring so far, I'm a bit doubtful.  

I started packing up my old apartment about a month ago.  I moved in to the new apartment about a week and a half ago.   On top of moving, I had family in town, went out of town to visit family, had stacks of papers to grade and units to plan, and a major project for my graduate school class to complete.














I've read some incredible books in the midst of it all, that again, I hope to write about on Saturday mornings in the near future: Night by Elie Wiesel, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.  Currently, I'm slowly making my way through A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, which was not only recommended by two of my favorite literary kindred cousins, but I was reading it on the subway one evening and a woman came up to me to tell me what an incredible book it is.

My days at home have been spent painting and cleaning and unpacking, so I'm hoping for a day in the near future to curl up and have a few hours to make some serious progress without wanting to just fall asleep immediately.  Here's a shot from this morning.  I'm hoping this is a sign that normal life is right around the corner.

On packing an apartment & Fahrenheit 451

I started a new graduate program and although I am doing one class at a time, it has, as I feared it might, taken a toll on my reading-and-writing-for-pleasure life.  The good news is my current class is called Literature for Older Children, so the books I'm reading and the thinking I'm doing aligns quite nicely with my passion for literacy.  But it also means I have a stack of 4 books I've finished that I want to write about.  I chose today's book based on the other current time-stealer of my life: moving.  

My new lease a few blocks away starts next Saturday, so I spent last night packing and ended up with 20 boxes of books.  I admire when people move here with a suitcase or two, and part of me craves the simplicity of space that accompanies such a move.  But I remember when I moved to New York almost ten years ago now and felt  I needed to bring my books with me so that I would remember who I was in this brand new city. And through 5--almost 6--apartments I have packed and unpacked and added to the stacks.  Handling every book I own last night was an incredible experience in reflection because I began to see my story in the conglomeration of texts: my elementary reading self in my mid eighties copies of The Wizard of Oz and Number the Stars, the eight Virginia Woolfs I read in half a semester and how I was never the same again, the striking poetry contained in the prose of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy that cultivated the kind of book I love to read as an adult.  

In keeping with my New Years resolution to read book I already own, I finished Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury a few weeks ago and it reignited (see what I did there?) my passion for not just reading as much as I can, but for getting as many books in front of my students as possible.  Reading in 2013 the futuristic book Bradbury wrote the book in 1950 was fascinating (and reminded me of reading Super Sad True Love Story a few years back) because though his portrayal of futuristic technological and political powers were close enough to feel incredibly eerie.  

Montag, the main character, is a fireman--and in his time that means they start fires to burn books rather than put fires out.  Books cause people to think and to question--they disrupt ones mental "peace"--so the government has decided to do away with them.  Montag begins to feel restless and decides to quietly figure out what it is about books that makes them so dangerous.  

He is asked by a closet former reader: "How did you get shaken up? What knocked the torch out of your hands?" 

Montag replies: "I don't know.  We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy.  Something's missing.  I looked around.  The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years.  So I thought books might help." 

"It's not the books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books...Take it where you can find it, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.  Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.  There is nothing magical in them at all.  The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." 

Yes. And so upon reading this book I was re-reminded to keep my eyes open for the mysteries and to ask questions.  I was re-reminded that if my life feels off-kilter, chances are I'm forgetting to dwell in the details that make life rich and instead choosing to occupy myself with errands and to-do lists.  Packing up my own books reminded me of the stories that enrich my story and grew my desire to share this with the 100 students I see everyday: that they might question the world and seek beauty and desire understanding.  And I can't do that unless I am living in such a way myself.   

The importance of reading historical narrative, whether you are an 8th grader or not.

I recently started a graduate program and have been reminded of just how much I enjoy nerding out.  My class is on Tuesday nights and for the past three weeks since it started I have spent my Wednesday and Friday nights reading and writing for it--and enjoying it.  I was last in graduate school for English education nine years ago, and I have to say that reading professional books while being an active, experienced teacher is so much more engaging.  Before I was reading all of these theories and philosophies but without a real way into the conversation.  This time around I have 95 current students and 700 previous ones to think about as well as structures I've put into place to grow them as readers and writers--and reading the books is making me think and dream a bit bigger about what a gift it is to teach reading and writing and reminding me that I haven't figured it all out yet.  

{cover of Maus II}

I am currently in the middle of a Holocaust Literature book club with students--I have a group of 5-8 in each class reading Maus by Art Spiegelman and Night by Elie Wiesel over the course of 5 weeks.  (I've written previously about book club experiences with students here: Maus and Night and Harry Potter.) It never ceases to amaze me how 8th graders approach and handle such serious texts.  What I've come to realize while reading great books with small groups of students is that 13 and 14 year old students are aching to talk about and be trusted with serious topics.  Instead of nervous about handing titles like Maus and Night to them, I frame it with the context that learning about difficult times in the past is best done in community and that reading, reflecting, talking, and writing about them is one of the best ways to process through the stories that have come before us and to equip us in becoming educated, sensitive people when we walk out into our own lives.

This is where my reading for graduate school comes in.  One evening after our first Maus book club meeting I read: "History is about people who were products of their time and their own intricately woven value systems.  Literature study enhances our appreciation of history's complexity, which in turn expands our appreciation of present political complexities and better equips us to predict and prepare for the future.  History gives us statistics; literature lets us experience the human tragedy." (Teaching Children's Literature: It's Critical, Leland, Lewison, Harste)

This is especially fitting for our reading of Maus because it is Spiegelman telling not only the story of his father's survival of the Holocaust, but it is also the story of Spiegelman himself grappling with his family's history and how it shaped his present while writing the book.  In turn, the reader is able to contextualize multiple lines of history, feel pain over the fact that this is a true story, and ask questions about their present time and life.  I cannot more strongly believe that historical study must be paired with narrative if students today are to grow into educated citizens who can see nuance and complexity rather, who can ask questions and dialogue, who can be people who understand statistics but also tap into the real people represented by those numbers.

Spiegelman ends the World War Two storyline of Maus with a scene we as readers know from the beginning happens--the reunion of his parents post-Auschwitz.  We ended our conversation by asking why he would end the story in this way and if we were to have any hope as we move forward as people.  What we came up with is that love can still win--and despite the fact that most were not as lucky as Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, and despite the fact that human history still remains quite ugly, that perhaps the threads of goodness can restore and heal the human spirit.  And, perhaps, that by remembering both that and the historical details, readers can imagine a different kind of future.

Charlotte's Web: a tiny, humble hero

I have a lot of fictional female heroes and truth be told, many of them are from television: Tami Taylor, Leslie Knope, Liz Lemon, Brenda Leigh Johnson.  Of course others are from books like August Boatwright in The Secret Life of Bees, Hermione Granger in Harry Potter Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables.  This week I started taking a class called Literature for Older Children and we were assigned to read Charlotte's Web.  For a few years, the 8th grade curriculum included a unit on rereading childhood favorites, and Charlotte's Web was one of the texts, so I've become closely reacquainted with it--and what I believe is E.B. White's perfect writing style.  

Most of all, though, I truly love Charlotte and found a kindred spirit role model in the tiny protagonist.

She is quiet, fierce, unapologetic about who she is, and yet so kind.  She is a fellow introvert, not afraid to tell Wilbur when she is tired and needs to be alone.  I love White’s description of her on page 41, after she has shocked Wilbur with the description of her eating habits: “Underneath her rather bold and cruel exterior, she had a kind heart, and she was to prove loyal and true to the very end.” Sigh.  

What the teacher in me loved the most were the words that Charlotte spoke into Wilbur's existence that came true.  No one else saw Wilbur as radiant or humble or even as some pig--and yet those things become truth by story's end.  It reminded me of the power of words and the opportunity that adults have to speak good truth into a child's sense of self.  I will never forget a time early in my teaching career when a struggling student had an amazing piece of insight during our poetry unit and I just shouted without thinking: "Brilliant! Did everyone hear that? Brilliant!" In that moment I saw the student change: his posture, the look on his face--and as a 23 year old teacher I saw the power of words and encouragement at work.

Of course, in this story I mostly think about sacrificial love—Charlotte possessed the wisdom to know that she was not going to live as long as Wilbur, but she gave so much of herself and her time to prevent him from becoming Christmas dinner, and in turn, for him to see some of the true value in living.  When the reader leaves Wilbur at the end, he is far from the spring pig we met at the beginning:  “But you have saved me, Charlotte, and I would gladly give my life for you—I really would,” (164).  The way that he protects Charlotte's egg sac and loves her children is when we see that Charlotte's love has come full circle.

I hear White’s wisdom in the closing statements of “Last Day” on page 171: “Nobody, of the hundred of people that had visited the fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all.”  Sigh.  And then it’s so heart wrenching that “No one was with her when she died”—and yet, I feel confident knowing that she was strong and secure.   It never ceases to amaze me how much meaning can be packed into a children's book.  And as I look out on a snowy Brooklyn thinking about my upcoming move to not only a new apartment and new chapter of life, I believe I will finish my coffee and reflect a while on all that White had to say in the story about seasons.  Sigh.  

Introversion: not a bad word! Or, reflections after reading "Quiet" by Susan Cain

{cartoon via Out Came the Sun; originally
by Eat Up What's Good For You}

All throughout school, group projects exhausted me.  Besides being kind of type A and kind of smart, therefore often doing most of the work, I always felt like I would have learned more and created better work if I could just do it all myself.  Culture and even my educational studies have told me that is a wrong way to think, though. Collaboration is key to a good learning experience! Because I believe in community and giving everyone a voice, I continued on--as a student and as a teacher.

I remember a conversation a few years ago where one of my friends explained how his company was catering to its different personality types: extroverts were energized in brainstorming sessions with other people while introverts were energized by being given the time to independently work, then share their ideas, then brainstorm together.  I remember thinking: if only my teachers understood this! Everything could have been different!   For years I have joked about my sometimes-anti-social behavior (I love to have either Friday or Saturday night to myself and if someone cancels plans I'm sad to not see whoever I was meeting, but relish the "stolen" alone time), but then my understanding grew to know that extroverts are literally energized by being around people and introverts are energized by time alone.

All of this makes so much sense to my introverted--yet very social self--as I look back on my personal history.  In college I lived in a 4 bedroom house with 7 girls and was involved in a very people-centered mentoring program where apparently everyone thought I was an extrovert because of all the large and small group leading I did.  However, what kept me sane all those years was the long drive back to campus in my car, listening to music.  The down side was that I think I was much too quiet in my classes as a result.

One of my friends who is also a teacher and I were talking recently about what it means to be an introvert and a teacher of 90-120 students each day--and how long it took for us to realize that being involved in numerous groups outside of the school day wasn't life-giving to us in the way it was to people who had less social jobs.  Rather, it was draining.  Period.  But a level of guilt has always accompanied me in that: I grew up thinking that I always needed to be as active and involved in possible.

A few of my kindred spirit-educator friends and I have had multiple conversations about being introverted--and our sometimes-tendency to drop back or stay home or hopelessly try to make ourselves be a bit more extroverted.  One of them came across the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain and suggested that we read it together.  I've spent the last few weeks laughing out loud about all the things she explained about my personality type that I have long thought I needed to try to change.  This book would also be eye opening to extroverts, as well--especially those who manage people at work.  I also laughed when I saw how New York Magazine described this book in their "How to read 31 Self Help Books in Four Minutes" article: "a feel-good book for the silent type."  New York Mag, I love you, but you misunderstand introversion just like the rest of them.  Sigh. Cain unpacks the idea that we live in a culture that celebrates the "extrovert ideal," and her anecdotes and research are fascinating.  I would completely recommend this book to introverts in order to better understand yourself, or extroverts, to better understand the introverts in your life.  She analyzes "mixed" marriages, work collaboration and even how to set up space in a place of business.

So.  This year I've decided to fully embrace my introverted personality.  I'm pretty interested in thinking about my teaching practice, my religious practice, and my own emotional and physical well being in light of what I've learned in this book.  I did not learn to hibernate or to not stretch myself in ways that may seem painful, but rather than fighting up against my natural temperament, I want to see what happens when I use my knowledge of it to live better.

Also, as a side note, and an encouragement to my other introverts out there, Cain shared a number of life changing works have come from introverts including Harry Potter.  So there's that.