Speak Truth Plurally

On the heels of my previous post, I read an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with Scott L. Newstok which led me to his 2016 essay in that publication, "How to Think Like Shakespeare." He urges many of the rigors of the Renaissance (precision, inventiveness, and empathy) as a template for present-day habits of the mind: communication, collaboration, and creativity.

In explaining the complete meaning of rhetoric he writes:

In the Renaissance, the rhetorical tradition encouraged such "play of the mind" through the practice of disputation. Students had to argue from multiple perspectives rather than dogmatically insist upon one biased position.
Once you are familiar with Shakespeare’s training in disputation, you can easily see how it would lead to the verbal give-and-take that constitutes the heart of drama. As Zadie Smith marvels: "Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing. ... In his plays he is woman, man, black, white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim. ... He understood what fierce, singular certainty creates — and what it destroys. In response, he made himself ... speak truth plurally." Now that’s the kind of critical thinking you should aspire to: speaking truth plurally.

I think that aligns pretty well with Chimamanda Adichie's avoiding the danger of only one story.

His reasoning for the value of rhetoric:

Antonio Gramsci described education in this way: "One has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts." You take it for granted that Olympic athletes and professional musicians must practice relentlessly to perfect their craft. Why should you expect the craft of thought to require anything less disciplined? Fierce attention to clear and precise writing is the essential tool for you to foster independent judgment. That is rhetoric.


Renaissance rhetoric achieved precision through a practice that might surprise you: imitation. Like "rhetoric," "imitation" sounds pejorative today: a fake, a knockoff, a mere copy. But Renaissance thinkers — aptly, looking back to the Roman Seneca, who himself looked back to the Greeks — compared the process of imitation to a bee’s gathering nectar from many flowers and then transforming it into honey. As Michel de Montaigne put it:
"The bees steal from this flower and that, but afterward turn their pilferings into honey, which is their own. ... So the pupil will transform and fuse together the passages that he borrows from others, to make of them something entirely his own; that is to say, his own judgment. His education, his labor, and his study have no other aim but to form this."

The Danger of a Single Story

Even though I am well past the 21-millionth person to watch Chimamanda Adichie speak in this video, it arrives for me just in time; as I imagine it did for them.

Holiday greetings

I am using my own chap-book video to make up a short gift-book of poems for folks who supported our poetry reading in November. Doing the assembly in the library has prompted plenty of questions from students passing by.

Book talk about a book talk

I was reading this recent book review in the New York Times; Lakota America by Pekka Hamalainen. The reviewer, Parul Sehgal, pointed out two characteristics of the book which intrigue me and draw me in as a reader of histories:

The challenge of writing this history, Hamalainen notes, was making iconic events and figures unfamiliar again, which is never more necessary than at the twilight of the Lakota empire.

I like that idea; making the iconic events unfamiliar so that we have the chance to reorient our perspective; becoming more open, hopefully to new ideas.  And then this other:

In retrospect, history often seems preordained; vulnerabilities seem garishly announced, outcomes a matter of course. Hamalainen seeks…to infuse a sense of chance and contingency in the narrative, to remain “alive to the ever-present possibility that events could have turned out differently.” He sows this feeling of uncertainty into the composition of the book, replacing a traditional arc with “a more unpredictable narrative structure that is full of triumphs, twists, reversals, victories, lulls and low points, big and small. If the book’s Lakotas — haughty and imperial at one moment, fearful and vulnerable the next, prudent and accommodating the third — seem strange and unfamiliar, this portrayal has succeeded.

Chance and contingency frame so much of our lives, it seems entirely appropriate and strategic to frame a history the same way.

Gotta get me this book.

From reading

Every couple of months, my wife's friend gives us a small pile of New Yorker magazines. They make a fine nice night's browsing and reading; cartoons, poems, book reviews, articles.

A few weeks ago, I was going through a recent stack and read a poem by an author I did not know. The poem was, Claude Monet, "The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil, 1880", by Ciaran Carson. I really liked it. In fact, I hopped on Thriftbooks and ordered two of his books, blindly.

I have been reading his prose book, Fishing for Amber; alternating essay/chapters of pub myths and Annie Dillard-like esoteric dives into nuggets of the world. Frankly, I have been skipping the pub stories and deeply enjoying, and quoting, the others - all of them loosely connected like Nabakov coincidences.

So he's writing at length about marigolds, Genus calendula in Latin: colors, medicinal properties, etc. And that word, the sound of it, rings a bell. It was my Aunt Clara's "real" name, her Italian name, Calendula. So she was Marigold. Which, poignantly, was the affectionate name my caretaker/brother called my Mom, Marijane, when they were joshing - Marigold.

And then yesterday in the Sunday New York Times an obituary for Ciaran Carson. Of course, his words and books remain, but there is something of the passing serendipitous stranger in this (perhaps one you might meet in a pub), one who you meet once, but who somehow touches you deeply, changes you in an intimate way.

And so, I keep reading.

Inspiring stuff

"I don't know what to write."

A colleague shared this rich resource from the New York Times: hundreds of themed writing prompts for personal and narrative writing. A great tool for those who think they are uninspired.

Screenshot from The New York Times: https://nyti.ms/2PK4nT8

Rockin' the Garden

Going to try to extend the lesson of our school-wide rock-painting experience by incorporating them into some hallway posters.

Nurturing poetry

I collaborated with a colleague on a poetry unit where the students were creating concrete poems, black-out poems, and paint-chip poems. I suggested that they teach us how. The results of their creativity (posters, board games,slide shows, and...well concrete) are on flanking displays in our library foyer as well as having been exhibited in yesterday's Student Fair.

 

February Coffee House

Working up my stuff for our February Coffee House:

* Let me know about typos!

Or maybe this:

Communicating

Although this event will be only one small (warm) ripple in school events, I cannot help but think that the thought and skills behind my campaign to #getthewordout would provide a fine internship for an upper level student inasmuch as it leverages writing, design, and the flexibility of digital resources to a purpose; in this case a casual event, but a also perfect fit for sharing a research project.

First, I designed a poster that went through 3 or 4 versions. Once created as a document, I made image and PDF versions of it that became handbills, postcards, email graphics and tabletop displays.

Next, I composed a signed invitation letter to for staff mailboxes. This also went through several edits to get the tone and purpose focused. I composed two versions; one for MS/HS, one for Elementary.

I then created a more contemporary version of the information as Keynote slides, which I exported as images. These became tabletop displays, posters and mini-posters, as well as my screensaver, and foyer flatscreen display.

Then I wrote a script for a short video about what a coffeehouse is. I posted on our website so that I can email the link to students.

In all, it has been an exercise in determining who my audiences are, creating prideful initial documents that I can then output in a variety of formats to become digital and print resourcs that help build engagement for the event.

Imagine a student preparing a research project to share and not just settling for one format, but flexing the digital possibilities with a few extra keystrokes to become so much more.

battle-sweat and bone-houses

Enjoyed this NYT Magazine article on the virtues and possibilities of Old English; especially the of kenning; the mashing of two nouns to create a new one (blood / bodies). It reminds me of Robert Penn Warren inventing words when he need one.

1/10/19 P.S. Cool beans! I dropped off a copy of this article to our MS ELA teacher this morning and he said they had just been looking at antique compound words!

#coffeehouse

Class act

Gee, I just received some swell thank you notes from students for my recitation of "Casey at the Bat." What a nice way to go into the weekend!

Overlook installation

Installed my six large author drawings for ELA Celebration Week on the gym overlook window at the top of the main stairwell. Also posted QR codes foe each that lead to books in our catalog. Above the drawings I created eight quick-hitter little handbills.

A New South Wales connection

Had a great start to my day! An ACS colleague now living and teaching in Australia emailed me to COLLABORATE on a task, "New South Wales is implementing a new English syllabus. One of the main concepts is "Reading to Write", and how we need to introduce various texts on writing and styles of writing.  I immediately thought I would pick your brain as to some different books you might be able to suggest about authors and the craft of writing."

Cool. Collaborating at day-away to the southern hemisphere. 

BTW, I reponded with:

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau. It's a classic from the 1940s. Queneau tells the same short anecdote in 99 different writing styles! I think it would be very accessible for students.

And The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner. Both of these are from my days working at Broome College. Gardner, of course, was the revered guru of teaching writing at Binghamton University.

Exhibit Curator

My exhibit remarks for a wonderful student art show in our library.

40 books

Creating a Chapbook

Well done

Received a very nice thank-you poster from the 6th grade class that visited our WWI exhibition in April. Beyond their gracious gesture, I applaud the teacher who saw in our exhibit an opportunity to fashion a prideful writing assignment around a real-world experience where their writing effort carries actual meaning, not just the prospect of a grade. Well done.