Packing Up the Rickety Ladder

The puppies and I were running through the woods above the Top of the World yesterday when a thought unrelated to anything arose that it's time to pack up this rickety ladder.  This will be the last post.  What's worth saying?

Maybe it's worth describing my writing circumstances.  Out the screen-less window of this treehouse, the morning forest sings and squawks and hums and buzzes.  The knotweed below is lush and green but notably not occupying the expanse of yard we've rid of it over these 12 years.  The tent we pitched last night to practice camping with Tucker before heading up to Baxter State Park next week is drying. Jordy is up on the deck drinking coffee and reading on his Kindle. Cove and Kauai figure out how get up and down the ladder to the treehouse.  An occasional cluck reminds me of the neighbors, six chicken ladies in their swanky digs built by Duncan Ira and Jordan Casey this spring during lockdown.  The garden behind me teams with squash, tomatoes and sunflower stalks getting ready to bloom, while the lettuce, carrots and onions grow without thriving (RIP the cabbage starts Helen gave me).  I'm swatting mosquitoes as I hunch over my laptop on a homemade child's play table with fading hand-drawn chess squares, relics of kids' play at my feet include swords and other medieval weapons made of foam, PVC and duct tape from Camp Half-Blood days in Brooklyn, a snowball maker, whiffle ball, parachute with plastic man figure, and soccer ball.  I look around at the walls dad built from wood shop scraps, centuries-old beams reclaimed from the Baptist church in the village, and the snow-fencing railings Tucker clutched above his two-year-old shoulder height in the era of the famous photo of 3 green boys peeing off the deck.

The treehouse rope ladder that could be retracted once climbed was replaced over time with a fixed wooden ladder, angled just enough for dogs to join the troops.  Barrett Companion fell flat on his back when a rotten rung ripped out of the old rope one at Duncan's third grade sleepover party (when little Charles Palmer also got a tick on his scrotum).  The treehouse has never been the western frontier defense like our Fort Apache in Greenwich in the '70s or dad's equivalent in New Canaan in the '50s.  Good/bad guys battle it out in outer space or cyber space now.  A retractable ladder was hard to climb and not strategically necessary.  

Yesterday we put in to the Connecticut river at Sumner Falls with the intention to float to Cornish landing, 8 miles or so.  We got a late start, proper inner tubes are scarce (supply chains interrupted by Covid), and our inflatable vessels (including a slice of pizza) weren't particularly aquadynamic, and, the water being low, there wasn't much current.  So we decided to stay put and splash in the falls.  The boys found a "spiral of infinity" where a split in the flow reverses direction, then hits a rock outcropping such that the current catches, creating a large circular pool.  If you position your slice of inflatable pizza just right, it will rotate infinitely.  Reeve lay back, arms folded under head resting on the crust, eyes closed to the sun, and drifted in forever.

The thing about the blog form in the worldwide web is that the world itself becomes a possible audience, so you write as if anyone could read it.  It's helpful and distorting.  I wanted to put this public accountability to use to force me beyond lazy journal writing, the way I make declarations of marathon running or run for charity to shame myself into sticking to the training regime.  Just imagining them out there waiting for my next post would make me do it.  If I did it, maybe one day I'd get good, maybe even great, or at least good enough to matter.

I looked back to the date of my first entry – June 13, 2007.  Thirteen years and a few lifetimes ago.  I remember typing, one-handed in the dining room in Brooklyn while Jordy was in London and I was home alone with two toddlers, as if my life depended on it, as if that one post might be the last evidence of my being when the existential forensic team went looking for me.  

Since 2007 we've all been living as if the world were watching at all times, because it is (kind of).  Everyone's a filmmaker, photographer, writer.  Everyone is performing for the darkened room of infinite possible observers.  It's chaotic and relentless.  Every experience is already being edited for presentation in the happening.  The audience is mostly imagined, like the infinite armies of computer-generated orcs our heroes battle in the Lord of the Rings.  An apotheosis of cultural narcissism.  Almost no one is paying attention.   The sad truth is the liberation.

But you, dear readers, are paying attention and have been all along.  Thank you for showing up for this blog, all five of you, these 13 years, you, the same people who show up for family birthday parties and are available on the other end of the phone when I'm cooking dinner and need to vent.  You are the true audience who made sure I didn't go missing after all.  

I've tried on a lot of voices here, all and none of them mine, some of them yours.  I'd like to say I've "found mine," but I don't think I have just one.  From now on, new metaphor – I aim to be an adept rider as of so many wild horses.  I want to leap confidently from one to the next and ride where we will.

The ladder has got pretty gosh-darn (as Reeve would say) rickety at times, swaying and cracking under wind and strain.  I came at the project of my life with a lot of missing or broken rungs.  I knew it but hid it, often from myself most of all.  I thought I chose the rickety ladder, even glorified it, but it just was me, the only one I had to climb.  Worthy neither of blame nor glory.

I thought I was climbing up, as if there were somewhere to go.  Ambition, striving, affirmation, worth, achievement, success – always out in front, always above.  A railing above shoulder height I was reaching for.  Safety, I thought, I was taught, is above, out there.  

But the ladder leads also down to the ground.  This is where my soul was leading all along.   My ego is finally letting go the desperate grasp.  Silver linings of middle age, a pandemic, and the jubilee year of integration.  I have a lot to learn about the ground.  I like the feel of it.  The puppies are teaching me about it.  They show me how security lets you settle down and rest deeply.  The garden is teaching me about it.  I like the fact that the sunflowers will bloom because its their nature to do so, not 'cuz anyone is watching.  

I find the inevitability of my body one day sleeping in the earth, as Lola is below me now, comforting, not scary. As long as the wind keeps blowing and new leaves bud each spring.  I feel the company of Mr. Jimmy, Judy, Memar and Gar, John Morgan close more often, hear their voices saying "Samantha, in retrospect, this, not that."  I feel at peace with my parents and our journey into being together.   I long to live more kindly, walk more lightly, make less noise, and create whatever ephemeral beauty is mine to make beside the sunflowers, as is in my nature.  Grace comes in finding my own nothingness in the spiral of infinity.  

This feels like solid enough ground to build on for now.

Educating in Outer Space

What a year to attempt re-entry into public school teaching. 

In 1992, diploma fresh in hand, I packed my car and drove from California to Mississippi to take my first job as a high school English teacher.  I joined a wave of young idealists who believed we could renew American society through progressive public education via programs such as Teacher for America or the Mississippi Teacher Corps.  

Or so I came to understand.  Typically, my draw was more mythic or romantic.  Faulkner and history pulled me south where I was seeking some elusive understanding of our true national identity.  I landed at Ole Miss among teaching cadets with varied backgrounds and goals.  Some were Southerners, black and white graduates of Mississippi state colleges and universities making lifelong commitments to teaching careers; others were arriving from the Peace Corps, Ivy League colleges, etc. filled with the fervor of reform and racial justice.  Like everyone else, I wanted to change the world through teaching;  I just wasn't immediately sure yet of my place or how.  (First I had to survive.)

Over my three years teaching in Mississippi with mentorship from Stanford historian of education David Tyack and political scientist Elisabeth Hansot, I gained context.  In our young faith in public school reform as a lever to transform society, we were participating a long and very American tradition on the progressive flank of the battle for societal reform; to our right, corporate school reformers (led at the time by the first President Bush) aimed to privatize public education.  Whatever one's agenda or vision, our shared faith that changing schools would change society united us as Americans, even as our differences frustrated effective change.  

As Professor Tyack lays out in Tinkering Toward Utopia (with Larry Cuban, Harvard Press), reforms of the last century mostly revert to the durable "grammar of schooling" we recognize as "real school" – graded classrooms, divided disciplines, single-teacher led classrooms, etc.  Held in interlocking economic and political structures, college entrance requirements, and cultural expectations, schools have a way of resisting willful re-design.  Stagnation serves an underlying logic that eventually makes reformers moderate or leave the field, as I did.  

Twenty-five years (gulp) after leaving the public school classroom, however, I went back.  I took a long-term sub position at a Vermont high school this January (2020).   I was beginning to question the reasons I left and whether I'd made a mistake.  I wanted to catch up with the field, dip a toe, see if my older, more moderate self could fit back in.  Long-term, I was forming a vision of getting re-credentialed and teaching abroad again or back in Mississippi, maybe after the kids go to college.

I found the "grammar of schooling" predictably, if disappointingly, in tact, easing my re-entry.  I was assigned first period tenth-grade English, a full-circle return to my first job.  I gave writing and reading assignments.  We had posters on the wall.  Class discussions and poetry recitations, etc.  In this middle-class, mostly white rural community, racial and cultural diversity were more theoretical than lived.  Class differences were apparent, but behavior wasn't a challenge.  This teaching wasn't going to change the world, but I was satisfied trying to serve the status quo as a substitute for another teacher's curriculum. I was here to learn and catch up for now.  I enjoyed the chance to share a frame of reference with our oldest son, now a freshman at a neighboring high school.   It was all manageable, predictable, and so extremely normal.

Until March 13.  

The governor's order to shut down all schools came so quickly, I never returned to the classroom.  I was running a fever the last day the kids attended to gather their books, so I taught remotely from the class TV, directing our last in-person reading of Romeo & Juliet from the wall like Big Brother (fittingly, as one of the book groups was also reading 1984 at the time).   As I heard the bell ring through my laptop speakers, I waved goodbye to my students, their images glitching as they slung their backpacks, checked phones, and disappeared from view, my ground control going off duty.  

In an instant, we were thrust into outer space.  School without gravity.  Tables and chairs drifting away.  Pencils and chalk floating like so many pieces of space dust.  Time itself, as theorized, became relative.  "Sychronous" or "assynchronous" instruction?  That was the question.  My first instinct was to tether.   Our social bonds must hold us, a web through the Web, friendships and book groups and text chains, whatever it took.  Our temporal bonds too, through daily poems and morning messages reminding students of today's date, routine group and individual meetings.  "Remote," "virtual," "live" instruction ~ a rich time to explore the force of language to shape reality and reality to re-shape language.  Our microcosm mirrored millions of other teachers and students adapting new methods, "meeting" via Google, sharing screens, peering into each other's bedrooms, questioning the old curriculum's relevance to the new world that will emerge on the other side of the pandemic.  

May 31.  Meanwhile, back on planet Earth a white police officer put his knee to Mr. George Floyd's neck, taking his life in 8 minutes and 43 seconds.  Already the virus was disproportionately killing black and brown people through the compounded factors of class and secondary health risks.  Broadband was revealed as the new railroad tracks dividing school children.  It's all too much.  Protests broke out in the streets, despite the risks.  Until black lives matter, none do.  

How to teach to this moment?  More to the point, how to learn from it?   Do we have the luxury of tinkering toward utopia?  Or is that crashing we hear daily the sound of our civilization collapsing?  

Amidst the wrenching pain, I feel moments of relief.  Finally the underlying logic serving stagnation is laid bare.  Public schools have limped along, holding together the order and rebuffing change, because they serve the status quo.  Individual's efforts, leading to individual successes but inevitably to individual exhaustion, were doomed to fail.  The enduring "grammar" of schooling serving the order of race and class hierarchies would always be stronger.  Those who benefit from it most will keep in place, whatever their rhetoric.

But the pandemic is cracking that order, from the college admissions game down to the subterraneous footings of our economy.  I never imagined I'd live to see seismic shifts of this magnitude. Do we live to work or work to live?  What is the value of human life?  How do we teach toward a meaningful and sustainable existence on this planet for all living beings?

I won't return to the formal "classroom" (virtual or physical) in the fall.  I don't know what I will do next.  I don't know what kind of education will matter most for my own children, much less this entire generation, when the future of our country and the planet now seem impossible to predict.  The storyteller in me doesn't know what story to seek, to tell, what's true.  I don't know whether anything I think matters, like this post for starters  (though I hear Rabbi Finley – "everything matters" – and keep trying).  I don't even know how to wrap up this post.  

So for now, I will remind myself that learning begins at the edge of the unknown and go join the boys to explore this day.