Poetry Slams
     The power of words

Introduction to Youth Speaks.

Not thinking about what does not matter
     And inviting what does

A garden is quite civilizing, in the sense that it invites attention to the sort of slow knowledge easily forgotten in the zany precincts downtown. An hour or so after work wandering from beauty to beauty, thinking about light and composition in the context of life cycles and compost is sure to leave all those tense puzzles that characterize modern bureaucratic schools seeming more what they are, little puzzles that matter less than they seem, whether they are solved or not.

When I was a very young teacher I argued in various places that as we more and more thought of teaching using metaphors of war—objectives, tactics, strategies—we would lose touch with the central wonder of it all, which we remember best when we think with metaphors drawn from gardening. We cultivate and we nurture, but most of what happens is beyond our understanding. I can garden daffodils but I could never design one. Most of what it does it does because that’s its nature.

My students today in seventh period were particularly beautiful, in that inattentive and careless way that is part of youth’s charm. We were discussing chapter fourteen of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, where the young scholar demonstrates to the old professor how he can make sense out of an ancient text using modern methods. 

It’s dangerous. The new method may, eventually, dissolve the old certainties. We risk getting lost in the chaos. And yet, the young scholar has learned enough to love order, and that’s what he’s looking for. A greater order.

I was more conscious than usual today that I can’t stop the kids from going where they will choose to go, and I don’t have much control over what they will learn either. I can, however, make it clear what I have come to love, which are mostly old truths about keeping promises, working hard to smooth the way, studying to get better at untangling knots.

The big news in education this week is that a study has found that Reading First doesn’t seem to work, and all those careful objectives and tactics may have led to a billion dollar boondoggle. As daffodils start to look a little ragged, young tulips are getting ready to open and peonies are making large round buds and lupines are starting to rise in a slow, implacable jostle for room in the sun. 

Nez Perce Aesthetic
     Rare beauty

Prairiemary (AKA Mary Strachan Scriver), blogging from Valier, Montana, invites us to see the sophisticated and subtle beauty of an ancient buckskin dress, probably of Nez Perce origin. She explains the Japanese concept of “Shibui”, which refers to “the type of beauty that doesnt need announcement; its quality speaks for itself.” The Japanese think of beauty in levels—"from blatant, brash, and bold to the ideal of beauty: Shibui.” The hallmarks of this level of aesthetics are “understated elegance, utility (each piece serves an important function), rare beauty, and unobtrusive sophistication.”

She nominates a pre-1820 dress from North America as an illustration of “Shibui.” Patched and fringed with pale but not white buckskin, the top is banded simply in black and white stripes, “lazy stitch.” which means that a short string of beads is not then tacked down bead by bead, but left to be a little fluid. These dresses are really two deerskins, one as the front and one as the back, pieced at the hem, with the tail (hair on) of the deer folded over at the top under the chin, pinned down with beading. The stripe at the top of the arms alternates black, white and red.

Prairiemarie mentions DNA evidence linking Plains Indians to peoples of the High Mongolian prairies centuries ago. There is a timeless quality to the dress, which for me evokes those moments when we glimpse eternity through the fecund undulations of time.

Good examples of place-based learning programs
     Encouragements to get started in place-based education

The Rural School and Community Trust has published profiles of five place-based learning programs.

The curriculum I’ve been working on this year has kept me farther than I want to be from place-based approaches, but last week’s Montana Indian Education Association Conference restored me to my better self. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the particular place I am teaching, and how far away from much of it young people truly are. In a digital age, it gets harder and harder to get here, which is the only place we have much hope of being real.

There is a two-mile stretch of road along a canal that I used to walk with a friend who has been gone from here for years. I no longer walk there and I can’t pass by without a dual feeling of remembered good times and sorrow that they are past, never to return. Places are places in part because they are haunted.

They are haunted by other selves. We don’t become or stay human by ourselves. Place is mostly mind, a level of narrative perception somewhere between molecules and stars. When todays Salish gaze at the uninhabited mountains, they are gazing into the past, and so the wilderness that enchants with its beauty in the same instant saddens by evoking an awareness of loss. This is the nearest I can come to a definition of “sense of place.” It seems to me that it resonates from loss, intensifying our need for joy. It is part memory, part longing.

We know that we cannot stay more than we know where we really are. We are, as Walker Percy put it, “lost in the cosmos.” A sense of place grows out of a longing for family, for a place in the vastness of time and space at a scale and in a key where we might be understood and loved.

A few weeks after my grandson came into my study, I was there again reading a work of popular physics, something about the illusoriness of time. I went to my window and looked out at the winter night into the thick swirl of snowflakes. In the near distance I saw two cars moving slowly, as it seemed to me, through whatever night they encountered. Matter was, I had been told, vastly different than it seemed. The empty spaces between protons and electrons were a million billion times bigger than the particles themselves. The apparent solidity of things was an illusion created in part by the poor resolution of my eyes but more by the force fields within which the particles existed. Nobody knows what such force fields really are. The electrons and protons themselves were made of smaller particles which emerged from waves of something more original than energy flooding into the universe and pulsing throughout being.

My grandson appeared beside me tugging at my pant leg and looking up, his two-year-old eyes pure with pleading. “I want to see.” So I lifted him to the window where he could gaze at the swirl of flakes and the mystery of light.

A sense of place is a sense of orientation. It is the beginning and end of knowing.

The books to read are Greg Smith’s new Place-Based Education in the Global Age, David Sobel’s Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities, and maybe my own The Power of Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place.

Early tulips restore what faded in winter
     Finally, t-shirt weather

Today was the first day this spring I’ve had time to be out gardening in t-shirt weather. The daffodils and early tulips are in bloom, and peonies seem to be growing several inches per day. The early tulips are the most spectacular event at the moment. They are a form of grace, with “grace” understood as all that is good about life that we don’t and can’t earn.

All gardens are mostly grace, as nature responds all out of proportion to our little efforts. And the more we know the more we are beholden, not just to nature but to other people.

The plants we can now buy at nurseries and grocery stores for a few dollars exist only because of centuries of labor. Whatever motivated various gardeners and scientists, their work was a way of taking responsibility for the earth, increasing its wealth in the most fundamental ways. When I look at my tulips I am seeing the results of efforts begun over a thousand years ago in the mountains of central Asia when some Turkish man or woman saw the wild flowers and decided to grow them intentionally.

The Dutch, of course, adopted them as their own during the 16th Century, maybe because their brilliance seemed so glorious in the bleak landscape of the Netherlands. “What beauty there is in the Netherlands is largely the result of human effort,” observed Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire.

New Montana history text makes signficant contribution to education
     Highlights of Montana Indian Education Conference, April 25-26 2008

Significant progress is being made in Indian Education in Montana. Many of the sessions at the latest Montana Indian Education Association Conference featured high quality content ready for classroom use. To be sure, the important people with important offices were there as well—doing what political leaders often do: speaking in abstractions calculated to affect power and control—but the real work is also moving forward.

Two projects are especially noteworthy: The Montana Tribal History Project and the Montana Historical Society’s textbook project, which will result in the publication of a new Montana history textbook this August.

I attended the session presented by Julie Cajune and Michelle Mitchell on the Salish Kootenai College Tribal History Project. So far this project has published three units in a serial history of the Salish Tribes. They’ve also completed a book about the Lower Flathead River. These are gorgeous productions rich in historical and cultural materials for the classroom.

I also attended the Montana Historical Society’s session on their new textbook, Montana: Stories of the Land. Krys Holmes, the author of the book, and Martha Kohl, Project Director, provided an overview of the publication, emphasizing the extensive presentation of the Native point of view. Having this publication ready at last is an important landmark for Montana’s education system. We have long lacked a high-quality presentation of our history. I think it would be very hard to overestimate how important this project should be to education in Montana.

This book was long a dream of historian Dave Walter, who was the driving force behind the project. He died unexpectedly in the summer of 2006 before the project was completed but not before he had endowed it with the momentum needed for it to reach completion. That momentum came from Dave’s infectious love of Montana and his desire to understand it deeply and truly.

It really is a fine piece of work—well-suited to provide inspiration and direction to teachers who understand the critical importance to young people of knowing the place where they live.

The 500+ page book is loaded with photographs, time lines, maps and other tools to supplement the excellent text. The content has been vetted by a stellar cast of historians and tribal experts, as well as by classroom teachers. Unlike earlier Montana history text, this is designed for teaching. I’ve been delighted by reading through the uncorrected proofs, and I look forward to delving into it in more detail when I get a finished book. The book uses extensive quotes and presents events from many perspectives in language that is evocative and clear.

I’ve been working with high school students on the history of the Flathead Reservation around 1910, when much of the land was transferred to homesteaders, so I focused on the materials included for telling that story. The two maps below tell that story in a vividly graphic way. They are a tiny sample of the sort of treasures the text contains on nearly every page.

Flathead Reservation Land Ownership, 1907

Flathead Reservation Land Ownership, 1922-1935

Before it snowed again
     I was enjoying the white crocuses

The beauty of crocuses arrives suddenly, often before winter is really finished. They don’t last long but their vibrant emergence reminds of the glories of summer ahead.

In Hebrew, the word for beauty is ”yapha.” Originally this meant “to be bright, to glow.” This might be related to an Aramaic term for bursting forth. Flowers represent this luminous, blossoming sort of beauty. Who doesn’t appreciate this sort of beauty? Wealthy Romans used to have slaves strew crocus blossoms through their banquet halls, filling the air with its lovely fragrance. They scattered them along the fountains and streams that flowed through their courtyards.

When moderns can afford it, they quickly purchase such amenities. What would a luxury hotel be without fine gardens? The best suites are graced with fresh bouquets.

We have become a stunningly wealthy people, and our wealth gets expressed in buildings and neighborhoods of great beauty.

Is our instinctive attraction to beauty anything more than an appetite? John Keats famously asserted that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” This doctrine has enormous appeal. It’s a beautiful thought.

Unfortunately it, doesn’t appear to be true, or at least not always, as anyone who’s been deceived by things that appear beautiful well knows. The sirens sing lovely songs. Even hell has its beauties, I imagine.

Still, the persistence of the doctrine suggests that people continue to find it useful. William M. Burke quotes psychologist Nancy Etcoff from the Harvard Medical School, suggesting that “beauty is one of the ways life perpetuates itself, and love of beauty is deeply rooted in our biology” He cites several scientists who link the perception of beauty to the perception of truth, including astronomer John Wheeler, who says that “God or evolution has formed the minds of some of us in such a way that our instinctive ability to recognize beauty is a practical tool for finding truth.”

The trouble is that beauty is made by the perceiving mind. It is never just “out there.” It is all mingled up with what we know and what we desire. Furthermore, a moment’s thought reminds us that if true solutions are often beautiful, false solutions are also sometimes lovely. Such problems led Chinese thinkers, by the eleventh century, to conclude that if bad or dishonest persons could create beautiful literature and paintings, then beauty must exist outside the moral realm of truth and rightness. It could not serve a serious moral purpose.

I think that’s probably right. Aesthetic judgments are of a different order than ethical ones and we can pursue beauty without much regard to what is good and true. Aldo Leopold, an early champion of an ecological world view, urged his fellow citizens to consider each question about land use in terms of what is “ethically and aesthetically right.” In his celebrated “land ethic” he wrote that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” A lovely vision, but not always a helpful one when hard choices need to be made.

Still, when we get it right, one of the things we get is beauty. We would be foolish to pay it no mind. A life or a culture without beauty languishes in a spiritual wasteland; a culture that does not nurture the beautiful creates impoverished and unhealthy places.

To cultivate our love of beauty, we refine our attention, turning our souls toward reality and cleansing ourselves of egoism.

It’s one reason to live in a garden.

25 free tools for elearning
     Working with Web 2.0

A list of 25 “core” tools for using the web in teaching and learning is available here. For the most part, they are the same tools I’ve (for the moment) settled on.

I don’t lean too heavily on the web in my day-to-day teaching, because the school I work in isn’t set up for that. But I do most of my planning and handout creation online and keep a home page so students can get materials they missed or lost and check assignments. It makes makeup pretty simple.

At my last job I published a magazine and led an organization in which the staff were scattered around the map and most of our interaction was via the web. A digital communications environment is normal in today’s work environment, and students should be developing the skills to get work done in a similar environment at school.

Speaking of beauty
     And the mission of schools

I helped the adjudicators at the District Music Festival held in Polson this past weekend. It was like climbing out of a slummy little village into an alpine meadow.

After each performance, the adjudicators talked with students about their music. One older gentleman told the high school kids that that they would not really understand the intensity of love that a person could feel toward grandchildren until they had grandchildren of their own, but that it was that sort of intensity that he felt during their performance.

He went on to discuss technical aspects of their work, and they stood in their gowns listening respectfully and attentively. Awakened by his forthright talk about beauty, my own mind wandered. I began to think of a backcountry trip I had made a few years ago. I was helping with the search for a small plane that had vanished into the Mission Mountain Wilderness in western Montana. We were days past the time where we believed any of the passengers might still be alive, so our mission was recovery rather than rescue. The plane had been carrying three children besides the pilot and his fiancee. I had been in the mountains for several days, bushwhacking through rugged terrain, wearily and somewhat grimly doing what I believed needed to be done.

And then, descending the foothills at the base of Mount Harding, we came around a bend on an overgrown logging road and into utter astonishment.

Western Meadowlark

The air was sweet with the perfume of late May blossoms—so sweet that without speaking all three of us slowed, then stopped. Awakened by the aroma, we suddenly saw that all around us the dense greenery of underbrush was graced by white of service berry blossoms, violet-blue of clematis flowers, and red of honeysuckle blooms all set ablaze by the afternoon sun. Even stranger, the entire scene vibrated with the fluttering of thousands and thousands of butterflies. Above us in mixed conifers the sky thrilled with the pulsing twitter of grosbeaks and rock wrens, the calls of nuthatches, and the piercing throb and receding echoes of waxwings and thrushes.

I have never experienced a moment in nature when all the senses combined in such profound beauty. The three of us without speaking each apprehended in an instant the sublime reality into which we had stumbled, and we stood still and silent, taking it in. What to make of it was hard to think, let alone to say.

Intelligence flowed into us directly, without words, letting us know beyond argument that life and the earth were good.

This didn’t contradict the sad event that had drawn us to this place at this moment. It included it, unifying it in our minds with a reality we could only glimpse that was nonetheless vivid around us. Life was sorrow and tragedy, and the sorrow was suffused with something deeper and higher which was a joy through all our being.

Though we all experience such moments, they are hard to talk about—either we repeat cliches, or we find ourselves wrestling with large and formidable abstractions. And so, profound beauty tends to have no official reality. In the public realm, where decisions affecting our common life are made, beauty is rarely mentioned.

It’s hard to get far at a school board meeting by talking about rock wrens and clematis blossoms when we are up against earnest guys with charts. We can be sure they are safe. They’ll never make anything happen.

Beauty, on the other hand, is dangerous. It moves us to the depths of our beings. It changes us. It changes the world.

It occurred to me watching the program how much students learn from an insistence that performances be beautifully done. I’ve spent time in schools where the unofficial motto for everything was “that’s good enough,” and where everything tended toward shabbiness.

Leaving the festival, I felt that strange combination of hope and sadness that beauty often triggers—hope because we glimpse the realm from which sublimity emerges and to which it is native, so we know that the better world we dream of really does exist. And sadness because for now it is momentary, the beauty unforming as it is formed.

Beauty, after all, is not a value. It’s an intuition. It’s a perception of a higher reality, as when Newton could see beyond the particularities to the order of the spheres in a way that he could express as a formula.

The best scientists know that beauty and elegance are crucial to developing sound scientific theory. They are important enough that beauty sometimes serves as a guide when things get too complex for the intellect. Some scientists believe that it’s better to achieve elegance even if the theory then doesn’t quite fit all the known facts. It’s more probably that the “facts” may contain measurement errors or other abnormalities than it is that an inelegant solution is true. Beautiful and elegant theories can be wrong, but ugly and complicated ones are almost certainly so.

I would like to hear teachers talking more about the role of beauty in teaching. We have too many ugly and klutzy solutions in schools and too little striving for breathtaking beauty. It is beauty that inspires longing for the ideal, and it is in attention to the ideal that critical thought and wisdom become important.  (And they do become important. Very important. Lousy people long ago learned the power of art of to make lousy things seem good. I think of the Third Reich’s preoccupation with music, painting, and architecture, or of much of today’s music created by commercial and cultural spin masters. As I said, beauty is dangerous.)

High schools have the potential to play the central role in the lives of American communities. Because concern for our young is the strongest value that might bind us together, they are the places with the most power to bring us together, out of our various churches and anti-churches, into a common culture.

For them to do the work that perhaps only they can now do, teachers and principals need to live among young people in ways more profound than the purveyors of tests are likely to imagine. They need to ponder beauty. They need to accept Adam’s curse and labor to create beauty. This labor includes the study of ideals

At this time in history we are awash in floods of material goods but often confused by our inability to form strong purposes as to what our lives are for. If we don’t engage high schools students in creating cultural artifacts of enduring beauty, we may be miseducating them. It is in beauty that they may understand their purpose, without which time and money too often become a curse.

Fortunately, we have good programs which can help us think about how to engage students in beautiful performances. Beauty gives them hope, which is the lifeblood of purpose.

April gardening: more winter
     But there's fresh compost under that snow

Spring was doing nicely. My yellow Fritillaria Imperialis (Crown Imperial) isn’t in full bloom yet but it’s getting there. It’s been a cold, snowy spring, and most weekends when I’ve had time to pay attention to the garden snow flurries kept my motivation cool.

But things started well. I’ve just put a new clutch in my old truck and it seemed to be running well, so I loaded a couple yards of compost and began mulching the beds.

The guy with the front end loader at Eko Compost dumped his whole bucket on my little half-ton truck. It looked more like three yards and my rear tires went nearly flat. I made it to Cenex and added air, then drove slowly home. When I finally got there, I was glad for the big load. I have lots of places to put it.
However, I didn’t even finish getting the truck unloaded when the snow began again. It was a nice snow, thick with huge flakes drifting softly through the air.

Within a couple hours, my beds look like this. Neither the daffodils nor the tulips mind much, of course. And in most ways I don’t either.

I was glad I hadn’t yet cleared last year’s Autumn Joy Sedum from the beds. It’s quite gorgeous in winter--for the moment, it’s the most striking thing I see in my April garden.