12.12.2012

I've been thinking about teaching.


This is the teaching statement I wrote for my composition theory learning-how-to-teach-composition class:


I believe in myself because someone else believed in me. I feel intellectually empowered because as I grew up, I was taught by educators who valued, respected, and encouraged my individual voice. I was taught that what I thought mattered, and that I was capable of sharing these worthy thoughts with the rest of the world. I am certain that by the time I finished 6th grade, my teachers had already cemented in me the intellectual self-confidence that I still feel today.
            
Of course, every human being has a unique voice that can contribute something of value to humanity, yet so many students have never been told that what they think is worth sharing. They are – so often these days – taught to listen rather than talk, memorize rather than create, and fit within the lines rather than draw their own. As an educator, my primary goal is to counteract the negative beliefs that the modern, results-driven educational system seems to perpetuate. I will have done my job well if my students come to feel empowered as individuals who have something of worth to bring to the larger human community. Grounding my teaching practices in methods that work to create as egalitarian a classroom as possible helps me to reach that goal.

I recognize that not all students were encouraged to feel empowered as I was from such a young age, and so I seek to create a classroom environment that is inclusive to each student, no matter their background. Inclusion is usually by nature a complex dynamic to orchestrate in a diverse classroom, and most classrooms have some level of diversity, whether physical (race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability) or cultural (ethnicity, socio-economic status, chosen culture). However, my approach is to both honor differences as well as recognize similarities between all of the students in my class. If the class size and the classroom space permit, my students and I arrange the desks in a circle for each class session. If I am not lecturing at the board or walking around checking on group work, I will often join the circle by sitting in (or on the back of) one of the desks. The circle functions in many ways to create the inclusive class dynamic I aim for: the students are physically positioned to interact with each other face-to-face, making engagement much easier; they can easily work in pairs or small groups without having to turn away from other students; and class discussion occurs organically for the same reasons. On a more abstract, perhaps subconscious level, the sort of hidden curriculum that the circle teaches is one of equality. Not only is each student on more of an even plane (there is no longer a real way to “sit at the front” or hide in the back of the classroom) – I am also able to join them on that plane. The circle teaches students that they are all equally valued as participants in the class, and that I value their input as much as I value my own, since I am a part of the circle as well. The board isn’t even the focus of the classroom anymore: the focal point is the center of the circle, which also happens to be the central point of the discussion we generate.
            
This brings up another critical part of my pedagogy: teaching is, as much as possible, a balance between transmitting new knowledge and facilitating engagement with and application of that knowledge. Learning, then, is a balance between absorbing new ideas and putting them into practice with others. Having the focal point of my classroom be the middle of the discussion circle rather than the front of the classroom with all of its traditional teacher’s tools communicates to my students that how they engage with what they’re learning is as important, if not more so, than how thoroughly they memorize the exact details of that knowledge. Active participation in class further emphasizes this value. It doesn’t take very many classes for my students to realize that they are expected to participate in class discussion – if they don’t volunteer to speak, I will call on them to share their thoughts at some point anyway. I sometimes ask students to go around the circle and share what they wrote or discussed with their partner, but the more comfortable they get, the more often they will volunteer to share on their own. To be fair and strengthen the feeling of equality, I am open to participating in discussions where I ask students to share personal information or ideas, so that there is no imbalance whereby I ask for their vulnerability without being willing to be vulnerable myself.
            
Personal sharing often comes out of the practice of freewriting, a staple element of my teaching practices. Writing about personal experience and then getting to share what was written with a group of peers can automatically – in the act of sharing – validate and strengthen the belief that individual voice is important. If a student comes to believe that what they think and write is worth sharing, even in the informal acts of freewriting and class discussion, they will be more likely to have that confidence when they write for other assignments. Freewriting has consistently been one of the most appreciated practices in my classroom. Students comment that freewriting has led to them enjoying the act of writing more, feeling like they can put more personality into what they write, separating the act of criticism from the act of invention, and growing more confident in their ability to write. Separation of the critical from the creative is also, I have found, a valuable benefit of freewriting. So often students begin to judge what they write as soon as they write it, which can quickly stifle their flow of thoughts and sense of voice. Freewriting in essence teaches them to hold off on critical judgment of their own writing until they have enough creative material to work with.
            
The circle and the freewrite, in many ways, have come to embody my classroom pedagogy. Through the circle, regular freewriting, student-chosen topics, in-class time spent on invention and drafting, and a down-to-earth, approachable teaching persona, I hope to encourage students to feel empowered as individuals and engaged as a community. The awareness I seek to pass on to them is the same awareness I learned growing up: their voices are worth being heard, and there are people who will listen. Only with that awareness, I believe, will students have the confidence to truly speak in the first place.

11.14.2012

The strange pull of what you truly love.


            The ocean is calling, its salty fog whispers twining around my wrists, my ankle, my mind. I could stay here in the redwoods, these towering elders that watch over me while I sleep; but the fog tendrils tug and I imagine I can hear the waves breathing in and out on the shore. I grab my helmet and a scarf for the wind chill, my bike lock key and cell phone, a couple of dollars for the bus back and my swim suit.

            Downhill. Calves tight over my pedals, I lean into each curve and only brake as much as I need to. Pretending I’m on a racehorse, or a motorcycle, or maybe I’m flying – I whoop with the joy and the redwood mist gently soaks up the echo as I speed closer and closer to the coast. I am birthed out of the forest onto a panorama that steals the breath of locals and tourists alike when it’s stripped of its blanket of marine layer precipitation: Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Today, the marine layer coats my cheek like a wet exhale, and I grin anyway, cherishing my experience of this place when the fair-weather visitors deem it too gray and gloomy to blow their money on.

            Still downhill, yet more cautiously as I pedal alongside traffic and cross busy intersections, avoiding potholes and pedestrians, the elders replaced with oaks and invasive eucalyptus. Over the railroad tracks, past one of the natural food stores and a couple of taquerias, and I’m there. The Pacific Ocean as manifested by Monterey Bay lies open-armed in front of me, the fog so dense that there’s no way to even guess the city of Monterey bustles directly across the bay. Kelp and sea grass cover the beach I look down on from a coastal cliff. The surfers are dancing the waves just a cove or two over, and an older man watching his dog romp in the sand is the only other person near the water.

            I trot down the stairs and kick off my sandals to be greeted by cold, grainy sand under my feet. Shivering without from the chill and within from anticipation, I strip down to my suit. No matter how many times I find myself here, I can never rush into the water I long for without pausing. Feet firmly planted, arms at my sides or raised to the sky: a moment of thanks, of gratitude, that the ocean is always ready to catch me in expansive arms, that all I have to do is take the plunge and I will be held by a presence as deep as the night sky and no less comforting in its magnitude.

            I breathe once more, fog above me and water before me, grin once more, and run into the waves.


Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull
of what you truly love.
It will not lead you astray.
- Rumi

9.08.2012

A short tableau of summers past.

The smell of sunscreen mixed with citronella: perpetual summer. Sitting on the guard stand, the idyllic teenage summer job - get a tan and get paid! Friends and annoying little kids abound, whistles and straw hats, and if you forget your water bottle I'll hand you a red plastic cup with a healthy dose of shame. Snarf lunch on a twenty-minute break, or if you're lucky an off-duty guard will run to Safeway for sandwiches or sushi.

So much encapsulated above the blue chlorine water and below the blue hot sky.

Pulling tarps as the sun rises, quiet in the early morning. Old ladies wait to do an exercise routine recorded over a tape of Kenny Rogers songs. Trees and birds watch the cycle of the day go by as parkas are peeled off, the old ladies leave, and chipmunk chatterers of children arrive to jump or be dragged into the pool for a half hour of heaven or hell.

Pulling tarps as the sun sets, tired sunned-out skin, lithe happy bodies, high school idealistic chatter: "What's everyone doing tonight?" The never-ending search for thrills on vacation in a small hometown.

5.03.2012

The Holdfast


I live in a home in the redwoods.








Mushrooms blossom after each rain.
But today is not a mushroom day.
The ocean is calling, its salty fog whispers twining around my wrists, my ankle, my mind.








Ahh. Heartbeat of my soul, the breathing of waves in and out.








Sometimes things die.








Sometimes we help them die.

We think it’s just a straw.
If a million of us think that, a million straws settle in the belly of the ocean.
One day, we might be thirsty
and find nothing to suck up our straws.








The part of kelp that anchors it to the ocean floor is called a holdfast.
Let us hold fast to the earth. If we forget our holdfasts,
we might drift in an ocean of straws

forever.








The ocean makes me feel expansive, infinite, philosophical.

Stinging nettle patches, up the road from the ocean, make me feel hungry!








Stinging nettle is one of the most nutritious plants native to North America.
Full of minerals and vitamins, its stinging barbs release
neurotoxins that act like
Icy-Hot
on stiff muscles and arthritic joints.









It’s also very tasty!
(Like spinach on steroids.)
Blanch, boil, or dry the leaves.
Make nettle tea, which can also be used as a conditioning hair rinse.
Blanched leaves blended with
olive oil
pine nuts
garlic
and parmesan
make an incredible, wild-harvested pesto!










“Hope means to keep on living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.”
- Henri M. Nouwen

Keep humming, keep harvesting, keep running to hug the ocean.
Her arms are open. The redwoods keep breathing.
The earth waits to embrace you.

4.15.2012

The smiles linger in my mind, the sweetness lingers on my tongue.

I balanced on the chipping white paint metal of the volunteer house's back porch. Gnawing. Twisting. Jawing on a stick of sugarcane Betty had given me. If everyone had to work this hard to get sweetness in their mouths, obesity would be a flying-pig, laughable myth. Finally I worked a section away from the center, my teeth prying the treasure open and chomping down to release the juice. Mmm. I wouldn't say heaven, but it was close. Watery enough to be refreshing; sweet enough to be, well, sweet. Candy water, just shy of syrup on the tongue.


No wonder all those brown teeth gleam dully out of all those mouths, the school children waving "Hello, mzungu!" as I the white person ride my privilege on the back of a motorcycle taxi. If sugarcane were my after-school snack, cheap as it is, I would set to work chewing it open too. Their bodies stay fit - not enough calories to weigh them down - but their teeth fade from white to yellow ivory before resigning into splotches of rich brown and tan. Even toddlers, even Kymbi who has a leg up on life in Uganda because Betty works for a couple of mzungus, even he is blooming tiny brown blossoms on his two-year-old teeth.


I see these smiles and ache. We high-falutin' Westerners have the audacity to imagine we can "help" these people, by bringing them railroads and English and Jesus and chemicals. We can't even bring them toothbrushes. Or maybe they don't care, and that's my Western fallacy, imposing my paradigm of "teeth-need-to-be-clean-and-people-should-live-to-be-100" on another culture.


The bulk aisle. I stare at the five different brands of packaged raw cane sugar, not to mention all of the other kinds of cane sugar. All those brown tooth smiles, those small hands grasping chunks of sweetness. All these privileged or not-so-privileged, grasping at chunks of sweetness in canes, Cokes, petit fours, you  name it. Is sugar the Pandora's box of our bodies? We know not what we wish for. Our ancestors celebrated bitter as embodying life-giving nutrients. But we lean in, sugar bedazzled, and lift the lid.

11.15.2011

Wise words echo from Tamarack Lake at sunrise.

"Above all, stay grounded. Remember that there is earth for your roots and sun for your leaves. All you have to do is reach down, stretch up, and breathe deeply."

The middle of the wilderness is such a simple place from which to feel certain. The struggle, I find, is to bring the certainty of those wild places into my tick-tock clock-based paycheck routine. To reach up out of everydayness into the visions of something more.

Reach down, into where you come from. Stretch up, to where you know you can be. And breathe deeply, knowing that to breathe is enough.

Taking my own wisdom to heart as I inch towards the river of writing that I long to jump in. Applications to science writing programs in the midst of work is a little like someone asking you, "What is the meaning of your life?" every ten minutes. A practice in groundedness, to be sure.

7.27.2011

Having a heart, no matter where you are, at once takes courage and no effort at all.

"Ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, the path is of no use." ~ Carlos Castaneda

My path has a heart, even if it doesn't have a clear destination at this point in time. I find myself devouring stories of pursuing one's passions despite everything, and clinging to the words of the wise in the hope that they might apply to me.

"To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world's deep hunger."
~ Frederick Buechner

I find deep gladness in words, but could writing really be what the world hungers for? I run back and forth along the trajectory of a writer, searching for that place where it meets the world's deep hunger, poverty, despair, injustice.

"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you avert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you."
~ Annie Dillard

Perhaps I am searching in vain for that place where writing mingles with social and environmental justice, personal and environmental wellbeing, to the extent that I want it to. Because it is up to me. I can read nature philosophy and sustainable op-eds all my life long and admire how they manage to blend science and literature. Or I can bravely step out into the stream myself; take a deep breath, and share my story.