Mission
Heads' Corner
Heads' Corner
Mission Statement discussion
Posted by Dan Coleman on 11/12/08
Dan's latest web diary was a collaborative dialogue with Jane in which they commented on a recent community discussion regarding the CSW Mission Statement.
To read Jane and Dan's full dialogue visit Jane's Two Pence.
Lightning
Posted by Dan Coleman on 11/4/08
I was walking across the quad the other day, looking up to find out what the weather wanted to do next, when I bumped into Gary, one of our newer science teachers, and made some vague comment about how nice a day it was. Gary let me know it wouldn't last: a low-pressure system was gathering over the western edge of the state and likely to generate mixed precipitation by mid-afternoon.
So we talked for a little about clouds (I'd been reading about the Quaker apothecary who named them for us: stratus, cumulus, cirrus, nimbus) and then I asked Gary how his classes were going.
"This chemistry class is the best group of students I have ever taught."
Whoa, I thought. That's saying something. Because I know that Gary—while about as youthful, bright and electric a teacher as I've known—has been teaching chemistry for more than thirty-five years. In fact, I'd just learned that his former school (another independent just down the road) had commissioned a portrait of Gary to celebrate all his time there. So, I asked Gary to tell me more about what he meant.
"It's not just that they're really bright," he said. "Or wonderfully sweet to each other. Or even that they're such a terrifically odd collection of individuals. There's an energy in that room unlike anything I've ever seen. I've got sixteen kids, and four of them love science so magnificently that they can't stop spreading it across the room. And it's not just the other kids that are being affected. This class is leading me into places I've never gone as a teacher."
"Today, for example, we were in the middle of discussion of relativity, when a student asked a question about what we'd been talking about yesterday. She wanted to know whether an object’s internal kinetic energy could be understood without identifying its frame of reference. Man, what a question."
"The day we came back from mod break, they asked me if I'd missed them. And you know what? I really had."
"The Road"
Posted by Dan Coleman on 10/20/08
Last week, I had the chance to lead a group of students in a discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road," the book I “sponsored” this summer. (Each year, the whole school reads one book all-together, and then everybody chooses another book from a long list assembled by students, faculty and staff.)
I chose "The Road," because I’ve never read another book that actually moved me. I’ve loved a lot of books, and felt all sorts of things while reading them. But "The Road" felt different—in the same way that being in a car crash feels different than driving. I wanted to read the novel again to see if it could slam me back into my seat, and I wanted to try to understand a little about how it did that, and I wanted to find out what our students would make of this overwhelming work.
"The Road" is set in a world that comes after some unnamed catastrophe has wiped out almost everything. All that’s left is a father and his son pushing a battered shopping cart that holds a couple of blankets, a tarp, and the last few cans of food along an empty road. The weather is getting colder, and the father keeps coughing harder and harder. The only other people who move through the story are those who’ve managed to survive the catastrophe and its aftermath through unspeakable acts of barbarism.
When we met together, the students said some stunning things about why the characters have no names beyond “the man” and “the boy,” and how time operates in a story when the past has been emptied out and there’s no clear reason for moving toward the future, and where the son’s kindness could have come from when the only person he could learn it from was his father, whose ruthlessness was the only way to keep them both alive.
As we neared the end of our hour, Rada asked if we could look at her favorite passage in the book:
In the morning they pressed on. It was very cold. Toward the afternoon it began to snow again and they made camp early and crouched under the leanto of the tarp and watched the snow fall in the fire. By morning there was several inches of new snow on the ground but the snow had stopped and it was so quiet they could all but hear their hearts. He piled wood on the coals and fanned the fire to life and trudged out through the drifts to dig out the cart. He sorted through the cans and went back and they sat by the fire and ate the last of their crackers and a tin of sausage. In a pocket of his knapsack he’d found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim.
You promised not to do that, the boy said.
What?
You know what, Papa.
He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy’s cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back.
I have to watch you all the time, the boy said.
I know.
If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. That’s what you said.
I know. But I won’t.
The students talked about how the father and son spoke together. These are two people who’ve only talked to each other for a long time. They can say very little, because each knows just what the other means. There’s no punctuation because you don’t need it, and all the ordinary stuff that’s not absolutely necessary has been taken out of this novel.
I told them that the dialogue made me think about the way I speak to my kids, and how none of the things the father in the story says to his son get twisted by impatience, or bent by frustration, or distorted by some other expectation under the surface. The desolation around them has wiped out everything except for a father with his son, and the words between them are like a line of metal letters dipped in acid—until the only thing they have to say is what it means to be truly responsible for someone else, to be their guardian, to take care of them.
Dinner with Awa
Posted by Dan Coleman on 10/1/08
I just came back from a delightful, quick dinner in the dining hall: the air still sparkling with end-of-summer light; the room bright with faculty working late; a scattering of the toddling children of dorm parents; and the blue and gold of students still in their field hockey jerseys. I sat down with our new foreign language teacher, Awa Diop, and heard a little more of her history.
Born in Senegal, Awa grew up in Paris from the age of six. She started university aiming to be a lawyer and switched to Spanish...and she played basketball all over France, before being recruited to the U.S. by a small college in Nebraska. (Awa looks a little taller than my six foot one, and miles more elegant.)
I asked Awa about how she decided to come to the States. “I’ve always loved languages, and I knew hardly any English, so I thought that I should see how well I could do.” She did pretty well, I think: last year, Awa completed master's degrees in both Spanish and French at Syracuse University. And her English is simply elegant.
I guess I’m getting used to hearing about the wild, wonderful things our students choose to do: the college they’ve chosen because of how far it might stretch them past what they’re used to. Or the project they want to do for their Capstone, because they believe it might really change their mind. How fine to be reminded that our students might learn this kind of daring, in part, from watching it in us.
I and Thou, Now and Then
Posted by Dan Coleman on 9/19/08
The philosophy course I’m in the middle of teaching is a lot like one of the first courses I ever taught, right after college. To return to some of the same books, to try and figure out all over again how best to teach them—it’s sort of like going back to the same mountain you climbed when you were just a teenager and climbing it again. It lets me see how differently I do this same thing, and how similarly.
This part is the same: the keen thrill of spending all of an early morning in a deep, difficult book—the way that kind of time can cut through the surface upon which I spend most my days skating. I still love the chance to dive in and feel the essay close over my head: so that the music in the hip coffee shop or the talk of the crowd waiting in line for donuts or the racket of my kids in the kitchen fade into a muffled background, a far shore.
The books I choose, the ones that seem to me most important, are different, too. Back then, I couldn’t wait to get to Nietzsche. The idea that we should be like a taut sail cutting through rough waves, alone on the sea, continually overcoming ourselves: that seemed just right to me. But I’m different now, and Zarathustra doesn’t do it for me anymore.
One book that pulls me back is Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.” I remember how lost I felt the last time I taught it; how scared I was by the thought that one of my students might ask me to explain a book I, myself, still needed to fully work out. But now I read the same book—after living through different jobs in different cities, and almost 10 years of marriage with two kids fast growing up—and it feels like a poem written just for me.
I opened class this afternoon by confessing to my students just how long it took me to feel like I might get what Buber means by lines like:
“If I face a human being as my Thou, and say the primary word I-Thou to him, he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things.”
I asked each of them to write about a moment when the way they were with someone was like the way they are with things. Or a moment when it was like something else altogether.
My students read aloud some beautiful pieces about their friends and their parents and their teachers; and, I read them what I’d written:
Sometimes when I’m telling my kids to brush their teeth and they’re still crazy from the chocolate we never should’ve let them have so late and making each other laugh by almost falling from high places onto hard floors and I’m just about to lose it. Then they feel like things: I insist on they need to do and they refuse and all we are, for a moment, is walls up against each other.
But then, a little later, my daughter has wrapped herself up in the blankets and the quiet light, and I’m sitting down next to her, and we’re reading the book she has picked out. I make the fierce Dragon King whisper out his fury at the Princess who won’t do what she should, and I make the Princess’s refusal tender and wise. I give a soothing voice to the honest young man she falls in love with and add something mean to the voice of his cheating brother. For just a little while, there’s me, and my daughter, and the pictures in the story.
Chapel and Basketball
Posted by Dan Coleman on 9/18/08
One of my favorite parts of working in a school is the sound I hear in the background.
When I first started teaching, I spent most of my evenings in a borrowed office in the basement of the campus chapel. Sometimes, while I graded my way through papers or wrestled with the next day’s reading, I’d hear a student practicing at the upstairs organ, filling the room with careful, solemn notes. It all made me feel so wonderfully profound: deep in serious books and our fine struggle to master them.
Here at CSW, my office is under the basketball court and next door to the dance studio. Some days the soundtrack through my ceiling is no more than a steady bouncing, but when the varsity team has a game, it’s bodies hitting the floor, too. (For the parent of two young children, it’s a sound that gets me out of my seat before I know I’ve moved.) Likewise, it can be woodwinds coming through my open door, or hip-hop, or the corridos against which the Capoeira class practices its choreographies. This afternoon, it was the JV girls soccer team marching into the locker room, chorusing from an old Cheap Trick song and telling each other how tough they’d played.
I do surely miss those evenings in the chapel and the way the organ music could remind me that paper-grading might somehow be cathedral-building. But I love as well the background thumping that fills my nowadays, the way these overheard voices keep insisting that our grand projects weave right into the entirely ordinary—how, as teachers, what we’re really after is to change our students’ everyday: the things they say to their friends when the think nobody’s listening, the next bounce of the ball.
Tomorrow is the first day of school
Posted by Dan Coleman on 9/10/08
Tomorrow is the first day of school, which makes it about the 15th first day of school I've known as a teacher. And like it has on all the others, my stomach's feeling funny in a way that makes me know I'll dream tonight strange classroom dreams: of walking in and over my head, into a roomful of faces I've never seen around a table together, a circle of lightning rods just waiting, the quiet crackle of anticipation.
We all know the charge that belongs to the first day of school, but only teachers live with that electricity running through their working lives; only teachers watch a whole new campus full of families dropping off children who've never been to high school before, watch the return of students who've spent the summer turning into someone entirely different, watch their colleagues return from somewhere faraway tanned and shiny. I realized this summer how strange the school year feels when I spent a weekend with my friend Ray, who sells advertising time to car companies-whose two weeks time off are barely a break in a year that cycles straight through, that turns into another year without any sure sign the last one ended. I think most jobs are like Ray's. But teaching keeps starting over and over again.
And, at its heart, teaching is all about starting over. As teachers, we believe deeply in beginning. If despair is the conviction that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will always repeat today, that the way things are right now is the way they'll always be, then teachers are the most hopeful people in the world. Under everything we do is the faith that something new could always happen next. Deep down, we always believe that the student sitting before us, this child who seems finished and final and fixed, might-if we do everything right, and they do - somehow turn into someone different.
When I think about this strange beginning over, and what it has to do with teaching, I think of what one of my favorite teachers once said about Emily Dickinson: "Anyone who writes seventeen hundred poems must know an awful lot about beginning." And I think about my favorite Emily Dickinson poem:
I dwell in Possibility-
A fairer House than Prose-
More numerous of Windows-
Superior-for Doors-
Of Chambers as the Cedars-
Impregnable of Eye-
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky-
Of Visitors-the fairest-
For Occupation-This-
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise-
Maybe the best thing that teaching gives us is this chance to "dwell in Possibility"-to spend our working days listening for what might come next, believing that all of us have it in us to begin over again.
Contact
Questions, comments or concerns e-mail
twocents@csw.org