Streams and Mountains without End

Streams and Mountains without End, handscroll on silk, 1100-1150, late Song-Jin dynasty Cleveland Art Museum. Inscription translation: “The creator has no intentions. Making mountains and streams from pure air.” Added, 1205.

Elizabeth Woody in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts describes her teacher Margaret guiding Woody past her anxieties weaving root bags. Woody is sure she is doing it wrong and disrespecting the traditions of her elders, disrespecting the tule reeds and cedar strands that have been gathered for these inexpert and uneven folds. She is grateful and feels her grandmothers through her hands but also, she’s doing it wrong. Margaret says, “Don’t worry—weave!” The strips pulled from marshes and tree bark stain her palms with a tang of the earth itself, and, she writes, she weaves in herself new pathways to thought.

In 1949 when the Communists drove the Kuomintang Party from power and out of China, the destabilized economy led to a fire sale of art and antiquities; private and temple collections became suddenly available. This was how Richard Hochstadter was able to acquire the twelfth century masterpiece watercolor Streams and Mountains without End, the scroll that now stretches across a wall of the Cleveland Art Museum. Hochstadter himself was in China when his homeland looted its own homes and seized precious art from Jews like Hochstadter, hanging bloodred banners from their museums. During the Cultural Revolution a couple decades later, Shanghai shielded art from Party purges of decadence. The CCP had their own banners to hang.

A former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is now the head of The Kennedy Center for the Arts. In his theater box hangs an enormous portrait of himself with the President. Shows are no longer woke, no more drag, the President bragged. The man in charge of programming staff was overheard praising a musical recently staged at the Center: so good “they could be on a cruise ship.” While ticket sales have sagged, the new head of the communications is correct to attribute the drop in revenues to “liberal intolerance.” Meanwhile, Grenell insists on being called The Ambassador. This is the current embassy of American culture.

I hiked this summer to Vesper Peak off the Mountain Loop Highway. The day was moist and fogged, and the mountains towered over me through a thick mist, every sharp crag, rigid and bleak but softened into folds of a weighty cotton. It was a gray monochrome, and I was similarly enfolded against a dry-brush Chinese watercolor, Vesper Peak, watercolored, my own existence against the towering ridge breaks folded in a mystery artists in China beheld in quiet awe a millennium before.

Recognition from the World Affairs Council

Last night, an organization called the World Affairs Council recognized me with their World Educator 2025 award. They honored me, I think, for much of what is reflected on this blog. Below are my remarks at the event.

              Thank you to the friends and students who have honored me by showing up tonight, to Evangeline for nominating me, and to the World Affairs Council, for being about the kind of connections and community that I am so happy to celebrate in accepting the World Educator award tonight. 

               I want to take this opportunity to speak to what I think we are valuing here together when you’ve recognized my contributions in particular. As a public high school English teacher, my job is to transmit skills, take attendance and answer emails, attend meetings, and pass my students. As long as I do that, I don’t hear from school leadership. But what’s most meaningful to me in our work with children is their sense of self and world, their emotional power to hurt and heal and grow community and understanding.

               I have had the fortune to work with institutions and educators that honor such experiences: The Fulbright Teacher Exchange brought my family to Hungary in a life and culture swap. Hands for a Bridge has built enduring relationships in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Washington state, stepping across difference towards sharpened appreciations of political, historical, and cultural contexts. Margins and Centers, a course that investigates power with an eye towards empowerment, justice, and joy, is built on collaborations guided by one of the wisest, most creative instructors I’ve ever met, Anu Taranath. She exemplifies the kind of open-eyed, open-hearted teaching I most want to embrace.

               What these programs have in common is an understanding that education involves not just the mind but the heart—a hungry curiosity, a generosity of spirit. We can learn skills and pass tests and follow rules; but if we want to learn more than obedience or self-promotion, then we celebrate the communal nature of the classroom; we step outside comfort zones and look beyond schoolhouse walls; we acknowledge and interrogate and honor our emotional reactions to events and ideas outside of us.

               Any time we can elevate students from habituated contexts and ideas, we can do this.

               Consider an afternoon that American students experienced in Cape Town, side-by-side with their Xhosa and Afrikaner friends: We’d read a novel about a fraught moment towards the end of Apartheid when a young American was killed by a mob in the township of Gugulethu. We stood where she was killed, meditating on both the anger of the moment and the truth and reconciliation work that later stared into it and allowed a measure of healing. Our guide grieved the vandalism and decay on the monument before us: important history was either not being taught or not being appreciated. And then we sang, bringing ourselves into a personal mournfulness of the shared experience.

               Later, we would write and talk. The cracked, vandalized monument and Siya’s words made us think about memorials, heroes, shared history when it’s communally remembered: such history and heroes help us understand others and energize around common values. Without these, those most marginalized stay divided; and bigotry is left undisturbed.

               It was the specificity of this moment, this place, these specific cracks, surrounded by these people, wrapped in this song and these ideas, and the unflinching group dialogue that followed, that deepened our thinking about history, our collectivity in it, and above all, our invested feeling in it.

               Again, it’s getting students out of their habitual contexts that accelerates such heart-work. Group travel can do this. Field trips can do it. Eleven p.m. talking circles can do it. But you don’t need to travel across the world or even across the city to do this. Any group experience that students understand as bigger than a classroom and bigger than an assignment for a grade does the same work: We’re already a community—thinking and experiencing, together, in a classroom—and that gets us a lot of the way there. From that collectivity, a learning and cultural encounter that expands a person, both in mind and heart, has the potential for joy and for support from a world outside of our own close needs and interests.

               Tonight, I want to reaffirm what is most joyous, challenging, and human in this work and play of learning, and that’s in the connections and relationships we make to the world beyond the comfort of what we already know and experience. When we step together as communities towards other communities—in reading, in imagination, or in body—we grow, we fortify, we deepen our own humanity. We strengthen our world.

               Thank you.

Bastard Out of Carolina: Why I read a devastating book with young students

               Today my eleventh graders discussed the scene in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina when a stepfather rapes its twelve-year-old narrator, the mother arriving in time to witness the unthinkable abuse held secret for so long and raging at him before, shockingly, comforting him, choosing him, if only to stop the abject beating of his own bloody face. Student anger is always steepest for the mother, betraying her daughter in the hour of her greatest need in the very moment Anney can finally understand and see her daughter fully.

               How does Anney get so bent that she chooses that man over her daughter? Can daddy issues really account for Glen’s disturbed sexual anger? What will it take for Bone, our young narrator, to heal from the years of abuse and the secrecy that curdles them into self-loathing and shame and bitter wrath, and now, this crushing day of annihilation and abandonment?

              In discussing chapters preceding this one, I don’t foreshadow Anney’s devastating choice of husband over daughter. Instead, I highlight the ferocity of her protectiveness towards her children out in the world, and I also point to the tenderness towards what is so hurt and insecure in her husband. And today, when students express revulsion for Anney and also wonder if she will regret this moment, I return them to the many signals of deep regret even in the moment it’s happening; and, most provocatively, I take them back to one of the dedications of the book, For Mama, a dedication to a book written within two years of Dorothy Allison’s mother’s death. 

              Will Bone ever be able to love her mother after this? Is healing possible? 

              This book, though it ends soon after and Bone stays so hurt, broken, and sour, is its own answer. It is brave and raw and honest, and it finds its way to this moment. To tell so baldly of all the fierce mothering that comes to such betrayal may seem a way to justify a continued and hardened anger. But it may well be the way back to love. There is so much generosity in this book—for the rambunctious uncles, the hard and wise Boatwright aunts, even for Glen, who is made so small by his cruel family, for Anney in all her fighting spirit and confused tenderness, and most of all, for Bone, the narrator herself, the child and author’s child within, blistering in rage and shame, who wants to protect her mother and who leans in to her family’s defiant spirit but also her own creative searching and sporadically tended brokenness. One aunt teaches her witness and honesty. Another teaches her empathy and generosity of spirit. And her mother tries and tries and tries to be a good mother, this woman barely older than Bone when she’s conceived, tries, and in this chapter, deeply fails—but even then, trying, tragically and urgently. Bone will find a way to love her mother again and, above all, love herself, two things that I believe are knit together, and she will do so largely through the empathetic powers of writing, where she can understand, recognize, and see and find the dignity and devotion amid the horrors and betrayals. 

              Last week, a student finished the book early; and she is such a sensitive kid, I saw her open face, looking small. She said it was the hardest book she’s ever read, but she’s glad she read it. I told her, I’ve taught this book so many times and every time it shreds me: it takes so much emotional energy to be in that space with good young people day after day. Then why do you do it? she asked. 

              This book does something for a class that no other book I’ve taught has been able to do. The vulnerability it takes to be in conversation together, but also the generosity of spirit and minutely honest portrayal of pain, shame, and confusion, teach lessons in the power of speaking in healing, the power of witness in healing, the power of community in healing, lessons in our power of understanding that makes monsters into men and evil into humanity however broken; and that humanity in its pain and its expansive power is what allows hurt people to come again to love, and to forgive a self, and to welcome and be good to others. In reading this book together, the humanity possible and the humanity demanded is large. 

              When we read The Bastard Out of Carolina, those of us who see themselves in Bone have a sister and are not so alone, and can externalize the poisons. And when we read it, those who feel compassion for Bone learn how to understand her meanness and love her anyway. And when we read it together, as a group of people suddenly soul-to-soul with the sensitive and yearning hearts of others, exposed to each other because we know what they have just read, give grace to what they might be thinking about or feeling or remembering; and when I talk them through the many jagged ways we love and are loved and need to be seen and fight our way from darkness, we learn the importance of opening our hearts, of witnessing, of asking, of making space for pain—our own and our neighbors’—and of growing the welcome of love. 

Trying my hand at visual narrative...

 

If I were to Start a School

              I spent some time thinking about the kind of school I’d open if I could, drawing from current frustration and thinking large thoughts—easier to do when I know I’m close to the end of the job I have. The exercise of imagination was itself so energizing, intellectually and spiritually, that its act of blank-slate creativity became, in message, louder than the interesting thing I’d envisioned.

              It is a potential match to burnout.

              Question: If you had the resources and were unbound from the structures and oversights, schedules, expectations, and institutional weights and routines, what might school do and look like? This allows me to ask even bigger questions, such as this one: What is school for?

              What is school for?

              I think: joy and excitement, curiosity, and civic engagement, community and belonging. I think school prepares us to live in neighborhoods, jobs, families, friendships, country, world, selves, and also, schools should and can also do fundamental work shoring up human dignity and love of neighbor.

              A response to burnout is going to our largest questions and forgetting, for a moment, all the stupidities and obstacles that are an overwhelming reality every day. I believe that, were I to play this game with others, some of the ideas and energy that filter up in excitement and joy may actually be practicable, even in our suffocating present realities.

              This is the widespread reality for many teachers: We are not given time for real collaboration; we are not honored with what it takes to plan and invent; and when we are spread thin, a frequent solution to our grasping or fatigue seems to be to hand us units or to lessen our curricular reach by narrowing what we teach. But the result of not allowing us this imaginative, intellectual richness and the excitement and purpose of building together is a dullness and just-getting-through-it-ness.

              The school I was thinking of is likely not sustainable, but what I was imagining gets exactly to my hunger for intellectual and communal engagement.

              I was thinking of a grade 6-12 school without strict curricular bands around age and terms that reset every trimester or semester around a singular, organizing subject: The whole community—students, teachers, parents, partners—for one week build lessons and experiences and assessments around that single theme.

              Examples of ideas around which to organize for a term: Chocolate. Flight. Hamlet, housing, or happiness. Garbage. Soccer. Weather. Snakes. Seattle. Utopias. Bicycles. Games. And the very first term, the subject, I’m thinking, is school.

              For one week before each term, everyone brainstorms and researches in service to what’s possible, and looks for field trips, projects, speakers, needed lessons, units. The school would have math specialists, science, literature and writing, history and geography, arts of various kinds; and these specialists would imagine the kinds of lessons and cross-curricular projects that might draw from and apply their specialties.

              One week planning is certainly not enough time to build from scratch an entire set of curricula for an entire school, but in my idea, that’s part of the point: We tap Paulo Freire’s ideas of teachers being learner-teachers and students having leadership and knowledge building and sharing roles too. Adults should have lots of wisdom and lessons about how to tap resources and with what trust, but everybody learns together, and students see their teachers at work and play.

              I see some traditional structures for the school. Outside of whatever schedule supports such adaptive cross-curricular work, projects, and opportunities in the school like teachers and out of the school like field trips and apprenticeships, I’d like to see foreign language and math teachers meeting daily. I do see a role for grades. I’d like to lean on a standardized test to let us and families know how we’re doing—probably the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for our 15 year olds. But as for the grades, what I imagine is our different teacher specialists developing field-specific skills that they would want to call out and communicate, so that families can be shown one of two scores for each of them: Developing appropriately or Focus and support needed. And I’m not interested in the traditional grade level classes: Given that we shift our content every term, it’s more important that we batch the groups in rough, wide, and inclusive developmental groups than by age.

              I find the idea of collaborating around an idea every term exciting. But I’m sure it would quickly feel like too much. And when I started actually looking at office space in empty skyscrapers downtown and Stephanie asked what I was doing and I told her that maybe starting a school is what I do next, she said, That’s a terrible idea, and I remembered some of our friends broken starting schools, and I said, Oh, yeah.

              But it helps me think about what happens without the stress of re-building, too: We can cope with our ridiculous jobs; we can go one step at a time, go through the motions and just get through; but it’s ultimately deadening to do so. As a teacher, I am stretched very thin and my job has little time or room for invention and depth of collaboration. This is a real cost. The job is worth something in a closed-door classroom, but too often, it’s just a job and my soul is flat and fallow.

              Teachers need more trust and need more time to reflect, research, collaborate, and plan, full stop. The job is such a human endeavor. And humanity can be a delight.