As the closing project for a tenth grade unit, “Relationship to Landscape and Place,” I asked students to write a “visual poem” using animoto.  The topic was “Where I Live and What I Live For,” inspired by one of our favorite chapters from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.  Rich with Thoreau’s passion for the cultivation of an enlightened life, the essay declares, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (H.D. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience. Ed. Paul Lauter. Houghton Mifflin: New York, 2000.  101)   What teenager would not find the latter part of that sentiment appealing?  Chilly nights in a self-built cottage in 1840s Massachusetts may not capture their imagination, but the vital heat that drives his quest never fails to hook even recalcitrant readers of “old” material. 

            Writing about Thoreau can be a different matter.  His prose wends jauntily yet determinedly through the labyrinth of his thinking, thickets of huckleberry bushes, furious torrents of rain and snow, pools of sunshine expanding across the pond at dawn.  Many of my students find a kinship with Thoreau that they don’t with Emerson precisely because of the gentle wit and challenge to decorum that surfaces throughout his narrative; yet, they also get stumped when trying to locate themselves within the vocabulary that gives shape to his mental landscape.  After we had drafted an essay that examined a poem in relation to one key quotation from Walden, a writing assignment that enabled students to generate fresh thinking about Thoreau by applying it to a poem of their choice, we turned to Animoto as a means of exploring what kind of “text” a modern writer might create to make the same kind of declaration: where does one live and what is her passion?

I kept the guidelines simple.  Create a 2-4 minute video that explores the topic through an integration of image, audio, and text.  I had great fun making two very simple samples to share with them, and to be sure that the technology would not get in the way of the “writing,” which we watched and critiqued in class.  Then the girls set to work, spending a week on independent drafting before a writing workshop in which they shared their works in progress and short reflective writing on their process.  They had two more days to finalize their video and polish a 2-3 page reflection that commented on their process in creating their visual poem and/or extended their answer to the question in terms of what they might have done differently or do next.

Immediate questions arose, especially in terms of the medium.  Students familiar with MovieMaker and iMovie asked if they could use those programs.  I explained that my purpose in selecting Animoto was to minimize the technology teaching time, as animoto takes only a few minutes to master and is available in the "cloud" for free with an educator's license.  I would assess the texts according to the criteria that I established: a compelling blend of image, text, music to express a response to the question.  To restrict them to just one application, however, seemed antithetical to the process of exploration at work, almost as if I limited student to one particular word processing program in those longago days of competition to Microsoft Word.  

The results were diverse and thoughtful.  The students invested much time in thinking about the relationship of text to image through their drafting of these pieces.  My next post will discuss their reflection writing and feedback to a short survey on the project.  Here are samples of student texts created in animoto or another application for this project:

Last Thursday, that achy tension returned across back of my neck, acccompanied by the nagging drumbeat that heralds the approach of the semester's end. And I knew. I was pushing my students too fast, not because they should be able to read and process easily the dreamy nuances of The Scarlet Letter, but because they will disappear for a two week `no homework' vacation starting December 16. All morning, as I answered email and began planning the next week's lessons, the doubt grew. What was my purpose in writiing on courseweb to "finish the novel" by the Monday before break? Were they reading closely or..., given the pressure, at all? My classes are student and writing centered, and I rely on the fact that students know they can't hide a lack of preparation easily, but wasn't this schedule tempting them toward the forbidden apple of sparknotes.com (no, I won't link to it!), like God tempting Satan in Paradise Lost by masking his illimitable power? What was the dynamic between reader and text, learner and teacher, that I was fostering with this pace?

Stop. Fortunately, I was in the midst of polishing my lesson plans for a Writing to Learn workshop I was leading that weekend at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking. Everything that I needed to address this problem, to slow down without simplifying, to find a good pace that better engaged the students in the beauty and power of this text on their terms while also moving through the richness of the larger unit, was in my script for the workshop. Written conversation. Image explosion. Collaborative learning questions. Text rendering. Focused freewriting. And all of this would better connect their reading of Hawthorne to the primary inquiry framed by this unit: "Where I Live and What I Live For: Relations to Place in landscape, art, and narrative."

Yesterday, we worked with written conversation in reponse to a passage they had selected in the text and prepared through noticing and focused freewriting. During the lesson, several students stopped to tell me how much they enjoyed reading and writing to each other's comments and questions. Their pencils filled all the white space and roamed onto the back of the page. When we ended with "big brain" discussion, they succinctly honed in on the richest elements of the predatory relationship between "The Leech" and his patient.

Today, collaborative learning questions helped us focus on a key detail in chapter 11, as we wrote and then shared ideas about how the scourge Reverend Dimmesdale beats himself with might symbolize the trap that has snapped around his heart. My students struggled at first with the formal feature question, which asked them to consider how the scaffold scene in "The Minister's Vigil" both mirrors and inverts the scaffold scene in the novel's opening chapters. Their persistance in pursuing this connection led to shared writing that has now laid the groundwork for understanding the final scaffold scene of the novel.  They have a compass to guide their exploration of this text.

And they also now have more time to enjoy creating their visual/text poems using animoto to answer the question: Where do I live and what do I live for?   View a brief teacher model of that assignment from our unit's kick-off trip to Black Rock Forest!

After days of perfect autumn weather, the  morning air crisp like just picked apples, the sun draped lazily around our shoulders by afternoon, the rains returned; with typical good timing, my colleagues and I herded thirty sleepy tenth graders onto a bus for a field trip entitled "Relating to Landscape."  As we watched the weather report the night before, my husband asked, "what part of the trip is indoors?"

"Sleeping," I said.  "Who takes city kids to the country to sit inside?"

A mishap with permission slips delayed our departure by twenty minutes, but soon enough our bus was lurching north along Madison Avenue toward the Major Deegan.  I closed my eyes, listening to the chatter of one uniquely inquisitive girl range from the kind of car she thought different teachers might drive to the unsettling body parts of her hamster.  An hour later, we rolled off the highway onto route 32 and made our way to Storm King Arts Center.  

To help students fully experience the multiple ways in which Goldsworthy's "Storm King Wall" speaks to its location, I asked them to create a concrete or shape poem, using details they noticed as we walked the length of the wall.  The wall itself follows the path of a former stone farm wall, but weaves in and out among the trees, downhill, and then seemingly under a small pond before resurfacing on the other side and meandering up to the property's border which abuts the thruway.  The girls created such lovely poems about the wall in its shape, and many wanted more time to work on other shape poems to express what they were seeing and feeling around them.  

As my last post described, I beat last week's horrid heat, sort of, by spending five days in a classroom in Queens with a dedicated group of DOE teachers and guiding us through a series of writing to learn and writing to read practices. One of the crucial elements of such praxis, I stressed on our last day, is that the instructor write alongside students. I had written responses to all of the focused prompts in class that I assigned, taking my turn with the others to share my words throughout the week, but I did not draw attention to my work until the last day.

As if heaven sent, as only kids can do, when we met later in the morning with the teens studying Language and Thinking in the room next door, one of the first comments a student made was how neat it was that her teacher Dawn Lundy Martin wrote along with them and joined in the risk that we ask learners to take in sharing what Peter Elbow has called "low stakes" writing.  She confirmed, in the clarity of teen talk, what theory tells us: that when teachers share the reason for classroom activities and invite students into a learning process that they have power to shape and direct, students grow more invested in the material. By writing with your students, they see that you do not have a predetermined answer for the prompt, but instead are still exploring the question. That means, when the time to share or work in small groups arrives, you genuinely want to hear the words on their papers rather than wait to see who got the "answer right."

One of the first things teachers and students find challenging about writing-based teaching is the emphasis on reading aloud exactly what you wrote on the page--no disclaimers or editorializing!--and sharing work that lays bare the messy process of thinking. But therein lies the beauty, as more of the rich ideas of first thoughts and fresh connections get out into the "big brain" of the class community before we reach an easy (or, in truth, often an uneasy) consensus on the meaning of a text.

So, in the spirit of low stakes writing, I share below a piece from my work with my IWT class in Queens, work that stemmed from focused freewriting about the kinds of historical narratives that draw us as individuals. We used this writing for a discussion about the kinds of narratives that appeal to us personally and the stakes involved in historiography, before moving into focused freewriting work on primary sources. Our homework that night was to look over our writing from the last three days and connect two loops or extend a scene and bring that draft to class on Thursday for oral peer review. Here is my homework:

Tentative title: When Were You Last Home?             

What is at stake in the historical narratives that we tell?  What values do we weave among the threads of individual lives turned exemplars and fools, of communities now sifting in the dust of memory?  How do we tell these stories and why?  And which ones are we still too afraid to voice?           

 The story of the Irish potato famine of 1845-1850 draws me in because of its enduring legacy that has shaped my own life—the Irish diaspora.  I remember studying the causes of the famine in an Irish literature course in college, moved to tears when I learned that there was plenty of food in Ireland at the time, just no potatoes, which had become filled with rot as a virus crept within the precious soil.  But potatoes were what the poor had to eat.  The British Crown exported the wheat and meat  abroad for sale and profit while children starved and men and women dropped dead  in the road, flesh hanging on their bones and rags covering their feet.   

Ireland has always been poor, until so very recently, and may be yet again; its young leave home to find a chance for more, once for America and now for Australia too.   “Danny Boy,” the still beautiful albeit clichéd lament of this endless personal and collective loss resonates with this story of famine, and of my grandfather who left a land of little promise in his twenties for New York City, where he worked as a manager at the A&P before dying in 1948 of walking pneumonia, and likely the effects of hard drinking, leaving two young children and an Irish-American wife.  

The words, “but come ye back when summer's in the meadows,” shimmer with the story of my mother’s return to Ireland in 1964, a Yankee driving a huge Ford because it was the only automatic she could rent in Dublin, and the brace she wore on her leg meant she could not drive a standard. Down to Cavan she barreled, weaving among the farmers on tractors and some still with horses drawing a cart, where she went to the rectory to ask if the priest knew where she might find Anna Smith, her father’s sister and her aunt, who had never seen her brother again after he left home for the city and then America forty years earlier, and who had never met his daughter Winifred or heard from his family after he had died when my mother was eight years old.           

And "Danny Boy" speaks of my story too, the affinity I feel toward Irish culture, the land, the music, the wry wit and the humor that masks such great sorrow.  When I last visited in 2005, the summer after my father’s sudden death, I traveled the country with my mother, stopping at Tara and Blarney Castle like good tourists in between overnight stays at the homes of our cousins in Hoath, Cavan, Cork, and Kilkenny.  I remembered my confusion when Eugene, my mother’s first cousin, one of the 11 children of Anna Smith, asked me when did we last “come home”?  I thought at first he meant my mother’s colonial in New Jersey, and then I realized that he meant Ireland.  That he saw me as one of them.  As one of us.

            This past week, I had the good fortune to lead a “Writing and Thinking” workshop sponsored by Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) and the Southern Queens Park Association.  Despite the rising temperatures and humidity that settled over the city, growing thicker and sootier each day, seven dedicated Board of Education teachers joined me in a middle school classroom at MS8 in Jamaica, Queens, to engage in writing to learn practices and debate the value of this pedagogy in their classrooms.  The teachers hailed from districts 75, 79, and 29, including the East River Academy on Rikers Island and the Eagle Academy for Young Men III in Queens.  How I wish politicians quacking about test-based standardization for evaluating teachers could have been in the room, listening to the creativity, passion, dedication, and frustration felt by these folks working on the front lines of New York City schools.  Maybe they’d stop wasting time with the theatrics of the debt ceiling debate and get more money to support these teachers and their students as they struggle to prepare students not only for the 21^st Century workforce, the standard mission proclamation for pols mudding the education policy waters, but also to be critical thinkers who understand their world and can claim the agency needed to be effective leaders and citizens.

            We began our work thinking about ourselves as writers, as all IWT workshops place teachers in the position of learners first, asking us to experience the power of writing to learn practices as readers and thinkers rather than solely as teachers.  Throughout the week, we worked with a host of practices to explore our working theme of the “borderlands between alienation and belonging”: freewriting, loop writing, collaborative learning questions, dialectical notebooks, image explosion, pointing and say back, unpacking visual images, poetry as performance, process writing, and radical revision techniques.  We went deep and also covered much, raising good questions along the way that got me thinking about new ways to work with my students at Hewitt.  On the last day of the workshop, we gathered to review all of our writing and to prepare lesson plans for the disparate classrooms in which we teach.  We had built a community, another goal of IWT, among teachers, and I hope to keep in regular touch with members of the class who have great plans to use these practices in the coming year.

Our final day, Friday, the eye of the storm in terms of this deadly heat wave, also gave us the chance to gather with a group of high school students from Queens who gave up a precious week of summer to participate in a version of Bard’s Language and Thinking course, taught by poet and University of Pittsburgh professor, Dawn Lundy Martin.  Teachers and students shared writing from the week and then opened up for an impromptu conversation about their mutual experiences on “both sides of the fence.”  Everyone spent the afternoon talking about this rare chance to have a meaningful dialogue about classroom practice with kids. 

Many thanks to the President of Southern Queens Park Association Roger Scotland, Congressman Gregory Meeks (whose office provided a grant to offer both programs free of charge), and Katina Manko of Bard College. 

This week marked the official kick-off for The Hewitt School's Center for Teaching and Learning through Writing (CTLW). I am fortunate to work in a school actively grappling with the question of what project and inquiry based learning entails for students now and in our rapidly evolving future. And we just announced the holy grail of Manhattan independent schools: the acquisition of a new building, so maybe someday CTLW will have a fancier home. But I get ahead of myself.

On Monday, ten teachers from Hewitt's middle and upper divisions gathered for a workshop inspired by Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking and facilitated by IWT faculty Associate and Director of Undergraduate Writing at Columbia University, Nicole Wallack. This cohort, comprised of faculty from the English, History, Technology, Math, Science, and Classics departments, will continue to work as a group throughout the coming year, with support for individual projects from peer partners and me as coordinator of CTLW. We will meet as a group periodically as well as for two additional days of writing retreat led by Nicole Wallack throughout next academic year; the energy generated by these first three workshop days will provide ample fuel for the hard work ahead.

What I learned from this first foray into creating a center that rests on the shoulders of many, rather than the vision of just one or a few, is essential: if you want to engage the faculty, invite them into the process of building. And why do you want to do that? So often in curricular planning discussions, the daily experience of classroom teachers can be shuffled to the side like a pile of ungraded quizzes. For good reason, sometimes--and I'm guilty of this myself--because the naysayers set up a roadblock and the traditionalists say we already don't have time to teach the "essentials" and the tired just want to make it to their 4pm commute home. However, the understandable desire to 'get things done' driving many dedicated teachers and administrators can lead us to trip on sharp outcrops of rock that teachers hold the map for. When that happens, the best intentions get muddled with the resentment of top down decision making and inadequate communication protocols. Someone must make the final decision, yes, but only after a thorough reckoning with those most affected.

That's why, when I began my collaboration with Nicole as our consultant to CTLW, I felt the best place to start was to invite teachers I knew to be open minded and serious about the value of writing in their classrooms, be they tech or science, English or classics, and hear what they think about writing to learn. The experiment was a good one, and I'm watching email pop into my mailbox with suggestions, questions, concerns and project ideas.  We now have a few more crucial bricks to lay in the foundation of the Center for Teaching and Learning though Writing. Stay tuned for what those are!

I am back at my desk after a morning with colleagues at this year's NYSAIS Education and Information Technology Conference held here in Manhattan at The Heschel School.  Shout-out to fellow English teacher Kate Marlow, of The School of the Holy Child in Rye, NY, for a thoughtful and informative presentation on creating a successful on-line class.  I'm looking to design a virtual journalism course at some point as support for our school newspaper, The Hewitt Times, as we have no time in our current schedule for a journalism elective.  Kate's presentation reminded me, as she aptly noted, that despite students' facility with digital environments, they still need to "learn how to learn on-line."  

Jenny Kirsch, grade 4 teacher, and I presented during the second time slot: Using Classroom Blogs to Enhance Student Writing.  Our enrollment sheet listed six people registered, so I was surprised to arrive to a packed classroom (and Jenny started already, as the timetable got a bit skewed).  Jenny is the kind of teacher I wish I had had more of in elementary school; grounded and calm in her demeanor, she meets kids eye to eye and inspires them to explore, to ask questions, to work collaboratively.  Her class blog demonstrates careful thinking about the kind of writing ten year olds will do in a digital space.  Image placement, a hyperlink to an author's site, a comment--all these elements appear without overloading the writing/reading surface.

We began talking about hypertextual writing in the context of blogging last year, when we both happened to connect with the tech department to introduce wordpress to our classes--Jenny's fourth grade and my tenth grade. The fundamental writing skills involved are the same: sentence level construction, paragraph organization, assertions and examples.  And so are the added skills of hypertext: manipulating the text editor, adding links and images, layout.  One key question stands out: is the goal to teach them to write a blog, akin to learning to write a literary essay or a haiku?  Or does the nature of the medium, the genre of blogging, teach our students in a new way about the fundamentals of writing?

The answer is yes to both; as with all good teaching, the goal is to plan backward.  What are you trying to teach through this project?  Is the primary benchmark to understand the relation between supporting evidence and its source (hyperlinks are a great visual way to teach that essential academic skill). Is the goal to give students a wider sense of audience, beyond their teacher or even their classmates?  Jenny's students have an avid following among parents and extended family members for their regular blog posts, and the girls are thrilled by the comments that pop up on their blog (after Ms. Kirsch reviews incoming messages, an important filter given their age).  Do you want to have students play with representing the associations in their mind as they read?  If so, the hypertext annotations of a selected poem that my tens recently crafted for our class blog capture this process visually, and they delighted in spending time perusing the different "interpretations" of poems by their peers. 

One other thought: on the high school level, process writing as reflection adds an essential layer of critique when working with hypertext writing/reading. I'll be posting model assignments next week along with a few samples.  Stay tuned!

            Last night, two days after presenting my initial research into teachers’ views on writing, their own and in their classrooms, I dreamt that I could not leave a gathering of peers without prefacing my departure with the statement, “Me and her have to go.” 

            Akin to those awful dreams where you wander naked in a crowd of fully clothed people in a mall or those teacher anxiety nightmares in which students clamor on top of desks, refusing to recognize your authority, this dream cut to chase of one my “pet peeves,” to use a popular phrase associated with grammar: the English teacher who must correct spoken English.

            I speak standard American English.  I don’t know all the proper plural conjugations of Latin words, but I have moved in academic circles long enough to say “curricula” or “foci” at the right moment.  I grew up with working class parents who attended college but did not graduate before the navy, a secretarial job, marriage, kids intervened.  I went to a mix of public and Catholic schools, and I loved television as much as reading as a child.  While my father worked full-time at IBM and attended Marist College full-time at night, with two young children at home driving his wife nutty, I would sit on the floor in the study pretending to grade papers while he read his management textbooks. 

The classrooms of my 1970s youth were filled with faces like mine and people who spoke as I did, as were the TV screens, albeit mostly men read the news and debated politics.  When I went to college, I knew how to write in the discourses expected and gravitated over time to the English department, setting myself on a path to a Ph.D. in American literature and to a love of teaching reading and writing.  My only moment of genuine insecurity in terms of my cultural belonging in an academic setting occurred when I first began teaching in a Manhattan independent school, an unease rooted in an implicit linking of class with institutions of knowledge, ones that privilege an “A” school (i.e. Ivy League) over a “B” school (such as, I assumed, the excellent Jesuit institution, Fairfield University, which my parents proudly sent me to, covering my entire tuition and board, and the land grant university, Ohio State, where I was able to pursue a masters and doctorate with full tuition support from the school).  Having graduated from Roy C. Ketcham High School in a class of 500, one in which many students went to community colleges and SUNY schools, if not straight to work after hanging up their RCK Indians paraphernalia, I had never heard of such distinctions among what I considered were all good schools, beyond, of course, the other-worldly Ivies.  In my family, going to college was the dream—simple as that.

            When I taught at Ohio State, I was surrounded by many excellent, and some not so excellent, students whose families also sought that dream.  They came from inner city Cleveland and Cincinnati, farms on the Kentucky border, the suburbs ringing Columbus, and from Indonesia, and Japan, and China, and Lebanon.  And these students taught me that my avocation is teaching and my passion is writing for many people, and not just the few who celebrate, and rightly so, the power of a foucauldian analysis of power in Middlemarch.  Independent schools became my home because they nurture communities that value intellectualism (rare in may quarters of American society) as well as the relationships that are fundamental to opening the windows of the mind to new ideas and experiences. 

            Independent schools, feeders for higher education, also are places the reify the institutionalization of academic discourse and standard English, which brings me back to my peeve.  As the chair of the English Department, I am the face of “good grammar” and “good writing,” I find, especially when I am at an assembly and some poor soul asks everyone to “return the form to Janey or myself” or when a student gamely declares, “if you want to join, just talk to Carrie or I,” a colleague will meet my eyes to raise an eyebrow or corner me afterward at the salad bar to lament the state of spoken English. 

            Yes, I love the beauty of a sentence that rings with the precision of expert word play, and I enjoy flipping the pages of Eat, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.  But I find the superior tone that lurks even in lighter examples of the “grammar rant” genre, such as the Huffington Post’s “Grammar Pet Peeves: The Story of 2010” reminds me of my mother signing up for speech classes while in her late fifties to attempt to lose her Bronx Irish Catholic accent--to, in effect, erase the sound of her working class roots.  What made her think that she sounded “less intelligent” and how did the voices of her educated daughters reinforce that sense of shame?

There is a difference between written speech and the spoken word, certainly, and the clarity of prose expression depends on skilled grammar use.  At the same time, grammar and syntax are living entities--just read an 18th century novel or newspaper to see the changing conventions in comma use, for example.  When we correct grammar, written or spoken, we must be cognizant of our cultural as well as academic positions.  Are we making a correction to help someone communicate better, or are we sending a message that she has misstepped, revealed a lack of insider authority that calls the legitimacy of her words into question.  When we effectively convey: "You can't say that" are we really stating that "you," as a person coming from a distinct dialect, home language, educational background, or region, you cannot speak?

In a chat last week with a colleague who teaches math and physics, I mentioned how my sister tried to teach my mother and me to knit in the days after our father’s sudden death from a heart attack.  He collapsed just after he got off a treadmill in a gym at the local community college where my mother worked, three days before Christmas, and he died, I assume, before he reached the hospital.  I have a feeling he died on the floor of the gym, but I never ask.

My sister is a good teacher, patient and upbeat, and not once did she express the irritation she had well earned by my frequent requests for a redo or an undo or to show me again where to put my thumb.  The three of us sat by the fire and laughed, drinking tea and later wine, inane Ben Stiller-like movies somersaulting on the television screen.  By the time I returned home a few days later, I had a neatly crafted rectangle, the root of a someday scarf, and a plan to keep my tumultuous mind in order.

            Except that I couldn’t knit.  Count the stiches.  Keep track of when to start a new row.  My scarf came to resemble the pie crusts I used to make, uneven edges rolling like waves undulating at low tide, gently rising and falling.  And I had strange holes in spots, despite my dedication to the proper fingering on the plastic needles, so that the lovely green wool looked raggedy before the scarf had ever been born let alone worn.  Six years later, and an occasional half-hearted return, that remnant remains buried in a box somewhere in a storage unit in Washington Heights. 

            My point, in sharing this story with my friend, simply was that knitting’s not my thing.  Cooking, crooked pie crust and all, that’s my downtime calling; as long as the food tastes good, who cares if the frittata slices are a mixed bag of isosceles and equilateral triangles?  And I added, “All these people knitting at conferences or on the train or while watching television, I don’t get it.  How do they know when to stop?” Unless I kept repeating the number in my head, never letting my mind wander to the story in my head, each row was different from the last, either longer or shorter, attractive perhaps in an intentional act of postmodernity but a failure as a fashion statement.

            My math friend, a champion knitter in her own right, cocked her head and said, “Yeah, you know, knitting really is a spatial skill, not just a counting one.”

            And I got it.  I had become lost among the looping swirls of yarn, unable to sense the thing that the yarn was becoming.  I knew the basic steps but I still could not waltz.  After my colleague left, I thought about the spatial dimensions of learning—the way that we see text and numbers and images on a page, a screen, a whiteboard.  How does a student connect a lesson in commas to the elusive creature known as “style”?  When does a student make a link between the study of symbolism and the images shooting down the margins of her Facebook page?  Why should she see a connection between her work in a robotics lab to the way she makes an argument?  How do we help our students to feel their way to the scarf that our courses, knit together, become?

            I teach writing.  And reading.  Culture, theory, and history.  I am a high school English teacher in the second decade of a new millennium.  Like my sister, I am asking students to learn know how to stich simple threads together into a whole that they cannot quite see yet.  I am studying this evolving fabric with them, making mistakes along the way like all good students do.  What I am learning to do is embrace the tattered along with the seamless, as part of a journey that merely passes signposts in the road: senior year, college, grad school.  Learning never ends, and the teacher who declares mastery, yodeling from the top of Mount Everest, is one to avoid.  The avalanche of new information is already building on a nearby peak.  Stay awake and stay humble.