From “Two Ways of Seeing a River” by Marky Mark:

“Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion: "This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?"

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.”

Ditto, except now substitute conflict for the sunset, metaphor for that slant mark on the water, character change for one of those tumbling boils.

I can no longer read without a second voice inside my head. There are two sets of eyes in my head, one looking to be entertained and learned from a story, the other screaming “Metaphor! Did you see that one?! Did you analyze what it meant in your head? What lexile level do you think it’s on? Would the kids get it?”

It’s strange to have my education as an English major butt up against my education as a teacher and my student’s education as readers. At the college level, majoring in English is little more than majoring in thinking and history, philosophy for people who enjoy thinking but are scared about job prospects and thus study something that will at least look good on a resume to 3% of jobs in the world, rather than the five philosophy positions opening up next year. But what’s significant to me is how much my life as a reader is most deeply connected to thinking and learning, while my students learn skills skills and more skills.

There’s research enough to fill a cruise ship that backs up why this approach works, and yet I can’t remember a time when I was ever conscious of identifying cause and effect or character change in a novel. I learned to read by reading.

I don’t doubt this approach works with my kids. I do doubt that it could ever foster a love for literature. It’s impossible to lose yourself in a story when in the back of your head all you are looking for are keys to foreshadowing. I’m not sure you can fall in love with a character if you analyze the every piece of figurative language centering around her. I fear that my kids might never learn to love books. I fear just as much that I will no longer be able to see them for stories, that by page ten, twenty, one hundred, I still won’t be looking at the picture as it’s been completed so far, but at the way the jigsaw pieces fit together. My students are now always reading over my shoulder, and I’m too obsessed with them to tell them to go away.

There were two metaphors right there. Did you see them? Copy them down in your notebooks and analyze their meanings. Be sure to note the atmosphere they give to the piece. What’s the deeper meaning the author was trying to accomplish?

For their sake, I hope my students forget everything I teach them the minute they leave the class, and then remember it the moment the pass the threshold of my door the next day, as I can’t see how one could enjoy a book without putting out of their minds all that we do. Hopefully, being so young, they can. Myself, so engrossed in this job, I cannot.

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In more exciting news, Jake Malcomb stopped by for a night this week on his way out to California. Reminiscing about our travels together was a needed reprieve from the monotony of school life. By luck, happenstance, and some keen directional sense on Jake’s part, we were able to find one of our homestays with the Maasai on Google Earth.

Finding the area was an accomplishment in itself; the fact that such tiny bomas in a forgotten corner of the arid rangelands in Kenya even show up on Google Earth seems just as fantastic (in the original sense of the word). To see for yourself: 2˚53’16.30 S, 37˚35’11.67 E. Debate goes on over which exact boma was ours. Difficulties in such a task include that at least one house was made of mud, thereby being quite portable.

Teaching is at least getting easier. What began as a struggle to find a voice every day and a constant gnawing at the back of my head that the lesson was failing was evolved into a confidence in the classroom whereby any lesson can be saved, any issue can somehow be tackle. Half of teaching is theatrics, and therefore half of it grows far easier once you lose self consciousness. So many times I’ve found myself lecturing in the back of the room without being conscious of how I got there or what I was talking about. It’s an odd sensation that I’ve not really experienced before save for some times at summer camp. I hesitate to call it losing myself in work. More so it’s that teaching quickly falls into the automaticity of everyday life. I’m always tripped up by TSA agents wishing me a good flight. You too, I say, before shaking my head that that’s not quite right. And yet teaching becomes almost more automatic, like waking up from some deep daydream to forget where you are and what you’ve been doing.

All this is good I suppose in that the stresses of the beginning of the year are beginning to slip away. And yet it seems that in their places has crept a lack of consciousness – which I’m not sure is better or worse.

Did you catch that personification there? Can a lack of consciousness actually creep? Does it have feet? What do you picture, then? What does it mean?

For the past few weeks, I keep revisiting one moment from Kenya in my head. We’d just finished a week long trip with the Hadza, camping in the Yaeda Valley in Northern Tanzania. The group had two options for travel: ride the truck back down a road for a few miles, or follow a narrow trail down from the outcrop we’d been on top of with a few Hadza guides. Several of us took the latter route and meandered down a frustratingly steep and narrow trail, dotted with thorns and rough brush and sand covering the rocks making it easy to slip. After about an hour we emerged from the foliage to the plains.

Living out here, I can sometimes pretend that the brown Colorado grass is the same, but in truth its not. Imagine emerging from a forest to a near endless plain. To the left and to the right was the beginning of the hills that spot the Yaeda valley. Across in the distance the Rift Valley began. But in between was a several mile long stretch of long grass burnt green by the sun and parched from the last rainy season.

Our immediate inclination was simply to run. Put plainly, I’d never seen such a wide expanse of grass, and it felt like a funny vestigial instinct just to set off across – for something on the other side, to get out of sight – it’s hard to say. We walked as a group for a few hundred meters but then suddenly found ourselves splitting off without meaning to and without telling one another. It simply just felt right to keep walking at different angles. After a few minutes we were all just specks to each other, standing in the middle of flatness, the heat and humidity I’m sure blending to feel over 100 degrees. Once you got a bit father out and had the sun hitting you from every angle, for it seemed to be at every point in the sky you turned, it grew to be hard to see, and even to sweat. It felt as those all water had been sucked out of you into the ground, as if the grass and the cattle from the Barabaig nearby needed it more.

It was at this point that, on impulse, I simply took off all my clothes. For no reason at all other than the fact that I was in the middle of the longest stretch of open field I’d ever seen and despite the fact that I was shielded by absolutely nothing, I was nearly invisible, because so far away from any person.

In a high stress, long-hour job, I think, it’s not rare to frequently imagine oneself elsewhere, if only as a mental escape from a physical surrounding. And while I’d done my fair share of day-dreaming over the past few months, it seemed odd to constantly keep coming back to this place. But I’d recently started rereading Out of Africa and came to this: “People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interferences from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of…The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom: it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.”

Such a statement is ironic, too, in the way that so many colonists walked into Kenya with the exact opposite sentiment; the country, all of it, was of their concern, Kenya’s destiny intertwined with their own intentions and aspirations for it. This of course has only been a thought acted upon by an influential few, but influential enough that Kenya appears the way it is today.

But I realized, too, it was exactly this freedom that I’d been missing and thus craving; a landscape created around me without my touch or control. The openness of Africa is unlike the openness of anywhere in the States. Here it can still easily seem as if one has influence, despite the grandiosity of the place, as it is always America, a familiar place, controlled by a familiar and single language that anyone with some rights to power has access to speak, and so to change.

In Africa it is the exact opposite – so fragmented by landscape and language that one is left powerless and in awe of it. It was this freedom of will that I so craved because in my classroom it was the exact opposite, the will of the dictator who had not just limitless control but also the lives (both academic and social) quite literally on his hands. I am my kids lifeline and chance for opportunity more than any other individual; what they dream it is my job to shape. Coming back to that plain was little more than a reverie of escape, a mental buckling of my knees under the weight of such pressure as the future of my students. And should I feel guilty over such buckling? Or is the escape something I need to keep going?

After the truck reached us at the bottom of the escarpment, we hopped on and began the four hour trek back to Arusha. Along the way we past a Barabaig with his cattle, some four hundred at least. Somebody spoke out loud: “That guy’s rich. That guy’s a millionaire.” And in the context and environment in which he lived, he was. And truly, I’d felt the same way not a few months before, not because of the objects I owned but because of the time and lack of will that I possessed.

A Rilke quote that I’ve thought a lot about, mostly in regard to time: "Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better."

I’ve considered Rilke over and over, and agree with it in its fundamentals. I think everyone can drum up a time in their lives when it applies well. But I think the reaction is one of two: you either grow from the experience and look back upon it fondly, or you find that it’s not a position in which you can grow at all.

It would of course be a lie to say I will not grow from this job; in hundreds of ways I already have. But it’s not in ways that I’ve always longed for; it’s not in learning more or changing my mindset, but in acclimating to twelve hour days and in understanding how a twelve year old best understands text structure or fact and opinion. It’s a growth of knowledge at a level that has always remained fundamental to me, and therefore from which I derive so little satisfaction from, as if I’m being asked to repeat high school and just have to do extra work. And while it has its rewards in the day-to-day interactions with kids, I can’t escape the feeling that that Barabaig is richer than I am for he has everything he wants. Give me unlimited money, and I should only ask for unlimited time.

Which is why I miss being on that plain now, because with the rush of heat and light, everything else, including sound, seemed to shut down. The group who had come by truck grew mad at us because it took so long for us to get back to the patchy dirt road, so far away were we that we either didn’t see them or didn’t hear them shouting for us to return. There was nothing else I needed in that moment; it was all the time for which I might ever ask. If I’m going to have nothing in my life but work, I’d just as rather have the feeling of nothing at all.

What I’m really saying is this: all I want for Christmas is a robot who can grade my papers and pack my lunch.

Post #1

To start with:

My sincere apologies for not keeping in touch with any of you, and I mean that without exaggeration. I've hardly spoken to my parents, let alone friends from camp, home, school, etc. When I say I have time I don't mean that I'm working from the moment I wake up to the moment my head hits the pillow (though this does occur at least once a week). More so, in the hour or two of free time I'm lucky to find or make each day, I can't bring myself to talk on the phone. Part of it might be a lack of desire to speak based on being in front of a class all day; another just in the fact that I've so much to tell each and every one of you that I just don't have the time catch you up. So consider this blog my attempts at the two hour long phone conversation that would necessarily preface any relaying of any of my even remotely current news. 

But let me start with this: I came home Friday night, ready to plop down on the couch and read the new book that I bought, when I realized I'd forgotten it at school. It's surprising how much this annoyed me, to the extent that I debated between going out and buying a brand new one, or driving the twenty minutes back to school through dusty heat and heaving traffic. In the end, I biked back to school, despite being so physically beat. Something about the prospects of not having the book for this weekend just bothered me; it might be that, given my lack of recent travel or free time, that book represents my one and only chance at escapism, however brief it might be. 

My school: West Denver Preparatory Charter School, or West Denver Prep for short. If you want more than the brief rundown, history statistics, etc. are listed on the website. For those in desire of abbreviation: opened in 2006, achieves really extraordinary test results, serves a mostly poor, mostly Hispanic middle school population, and is a remarkably exciting place to be working at. In shorter, it's probably one of the more exemplary charter school models in the United States, and I can't tell you how lucky I am to be working there. 

I teach 6th grade reading. It's fun. And not at all fun at times. As a school focused on the skills that students need for college, teaching can sometimes come at the detriment of intellectual exploration, or even discussion. It's this crucial piece I find myself missing so much, particularly coming straight from English and anthropology degrees. At the same time, I feel lucky to be in a classroom with virtually no behavior management issues, with kids who really want to learn. We get to do awesome stuff. We get to have a lot of fun. We get to make Justin Bieber jokes and eat Hot Cheetos. 

Things so far have been terrific. My students averaged a 90% on their first RAP (regular assessment period, essentially a mini-final held six times a year). Outside of the classroom I've been able to start interesting discussions, and a majority of the kids seem to really love reading. But I suppose as I reflect on the past six weeks, I realize I've yet to ask myself what I want my kids to get out of reading class. High standardized test scores? A's on all of their exams? Acceptance into good public high schools and better colleges and universities? All of these, of course. But what I'd love to see more than anything else, is ten years down the line, one of my students biking from their house to work in 90 degree heat and stifling traffic just because they forgot the book they happen to be reading at the time. 

Speaking of which, it doesn't rain in Denver. I feel like I'm in Kenya again - the consistency of the forecast (high-80s and sunny) reminds me of Nietzsche: "How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you...and say to you, 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it...' If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this once more and innumerable times more' would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal." The answer: more disposed than I am, and I'm applying this to weather. The two days (!!!) that it's been overcast for more than half an hour have been true breaths of fresh (cool) air, and I find myself craving winter weather so intensely. Perhaps it's just the guilt of not being able to go outside and actually enjoy the sunshine; I've gone from the college student looking up in pity at the people in big office buildings to the teacher in a big school/his house looking out at the people with 9-5 jobs and craving nothing more than a straight 8 hour work day. Which is indeed my only complaint of the job. My regular hours: 6:20-5:30 or 6. Saturdays off. Work all Sunday. Coupled with random Teach for America training for 3 hours at night. And while the work is true and good, it grows to be scary when you wake up continuing mid sentence the thought you were thinking as you fell asleep, and even scarier when that thought (How can I invest this kid? How can I teach this term? etc.) is the same every night. The blurring of days on vacation is a sweet privilege of free time. The blurring of days during the workweek is how one finds oneself so suddenly be two years older with little recollection of how much or what nature of time has passed. Which is my resolution to myself: enjoying things more, leaving the house more, wanting to do something other than sleep and sit in my free time more (my apologies, makers of the my 500 missed phone calls).

Too pressed on time for coherence, I will end quite simply like this: I may not ever have twenty minutes in which to write again, in which case if you do not hear from me over this blog again, you may try to reach me over cell, where I can guarantee nothing at all.