by Fitz | Sep 2, 2014 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
For the past twenty years this night has always been a bittersweet moment. I have never been hobbled by boredom or a lack of “things I love to do,” so whatever supposed free time I have is rewarding in whatever I choose to do. The flip side is that I am teacher, and I also love the start of the new school year, for it signals another round of figuring out what makes for good teaching and what makes for the best possible experience for my students.
This year my mantra is simplicity.
Over the past few months I have put in tens–if not hundreds–of hours into creating my own custom classroom that emphasizes four things: Read. Write. Create. Share. All of it is, I hope, optimized to take advantage of the fact that my school is going one to one with iPads, and all of my curriculum and relevant content is all right there in my student’s iPads. The irony of technology, for me at least, is that it can simplify almost everything I do in class; moreover, it extends the classroom in a way that keeps students engaged in reading and writing, while it also allows for dynamic possibilities to create and share with each other–and the world at large.
And there is nothing else they need to bring to class.
It seems absurd to me that my older children, who attend a different school than where I teach, dutifully fill their backpacks each morning with several bulky textbooks (the majority of the pages are destined to languish unread) AND a school supplied iPad. Given the massive amount of resources on the web, the reams of apps that enable custom content creation, and the ready availability of interactive etextbooks, it doesn’t seem like that two-inch Algebra II tome really needs to be lugged back and forth every day to and from school. I even know a few teachers who are proud to the point of self-aggrandizement that they don’t use the iPads in their classrooms, as if they have locked on to a pedagogy that will suit him or her just fine until they retire. They feel, too, like they are doing their students a favor to have them learn like “they” learned.
Thankfully, most teachers are not opposed to new ways of doing things; however, many of them have simply not learned to use the tools in their shop. Their iPads are like lathes in this shop: they will only be used when a bowl needs to be made or a small trinket can be turned. The iPads rust in place because they are not seen for what they can do; they are seen for what they have done: kids playing games between classes, airdropping idiotic selfies to each other, texting, surfing non-academic websites, or gaming with some Clash of Clans partner in Slovakia; hence, in a very real sense, we throw out the baby with the bath water where the good is lumped together with the bad and everything important is lost..
The solution should be to either have the kids on a surfboard in set of big waves or gathered around you on the beach. A lesson plan should look less at common core and more at uncommon action–action that you guide as the teacher out there in the waves with your students. If it so important for them to learn and do, it should be equally important for you to model and practice–even if you fall off the board time and time again. And, in the long run of the school year, it is really, really fun to be the “guide on the side” because you do get to know your students in a deeper and more meaningful way, and maybe that will even translate into a shared empathy profound enough to be remembered by you and your students, and that is why, too, there needs to be time on the beach; time away from the iPad; time that reminds kids that remembering and reflecting on how and why they did something is as defining as that something they created, composed, compiled, and curated.
The wistfulness of experience warns me even now that I need to be ready to shift directions when my best laid plans lead into dull waters, but still I’m pretty pumped about the year. Will this slim vessel of polished aluminum have the bits and bytes needed to transform a summer dream into a fall and winter reality? Come spring, will I be tweaking or revamping? Will I be an endless source of disdainful gossip in the teacher’s lounge?
I am inspired by a memory from a scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Jack Nicholson tries to get his fellow inmates at the asylum to rip a large sink out of the floor and throw it through a window high above to help them all escape. No one will help him, os he tries it alone and grunts and steams and screams trying to do it himself–but he can’t. In the end, he simply walk away and says, “A least I tried, goddamnit, I least I tried.”
I want to at least be able to say that.
by Fitz | Aug 31, 2014 | Poetry
They are building a world
and the plastic is fading:
Margaret and Eddie’s
buckets are split,
pouring out the warm Atlantic
as they race
along the tidal flat,
filling pools connected
by frantically dug canals.
Tommy squats naked
and screams in guttural joy
at the solitary horseshoe crab
donated by a stranger
with a large belly
and a huge smile.
Charlie thrashes through the shallows
chasing crabs
and impossible minnows.
Emma is happy
to let only the wind
fill her net.
Pipo steps warily
and warns us sternly
in his broken English
to anticipate the massive toad
lurking in the undertow.
Kaleigh stands far away
toes lapped
by the edge of gravity.
She is almost a teenager.
I see her
framed in a setting sun,
stretching out her arms,
holding back
the inevitable tide.
by Fitz | Aug 28, 2014 | Essays, Journal
I loved the rain last night. Last week, in a bow to reality, I reclaimed my gardens and made them into yard. Four of my kids got poison ivy in the process and I (and more “they”) got an extra ten feet of width to add to the soccer field–for really that is about the only purpose they use the backyard: hours long games of World Cup, one on one, two on two, one on three and every other permutation possible given however many kids happen to be around.
After fifteen summers of tilling, planting weeding, and fertilizing in my gardens, I realized that I did precious little harvesting, for I am rarely home in the summer, while the rest of the family is never home–at least for the two months we spend working and going to the camp up at Windsor Mountain in New Hampshire. At the end of the summer I am left with a massive bed of weeds, brambles, and the tenacious will of my neighbor’s black cherries to invade my yard, and that is what ten hours with my tiller, hoe and rake have cured. I take a bit of pride in how well I can rake smooth a bed of loam, a practice honed in years of landscaping, farming, and gardening. I get into a zen-like zone as I search for the perfect level–but only as perfect as need be. I am not working with screened loam, so I don’t stress about every little root or stone that sticks through the soil: I simply want to grow grass, and I know it will grow well in the space I made. The soil is rich and the sun is strong.
The only problem this week has been water. As luck would have it, the big heat wave of the summer came and had me stretching a 150 foot house around the yard to keep the seeds moist–for that is all the seed really needs: a gentle bath for about ten days, not a deep soaking, but a constant tending–much like a child, but this week at least several times each day. Once the roots are in, then I let nature rule the earth and by hook or crook a decent lawn grows, and though you would probably need a PhD in botany to identify the diversity of grass and weeds in my yard, the end result is a pretty tough field in which I enjoy watching my kids grow more so than the grass.
Yesterday, Charlie was looking particularly bored, so I told him to invite a friend of his over from Concord, the rich sibling of our town of Maynard. We arranged for pickups and such and later on Charlie observed how beautiful his friend’s yard was–and it is beautiful, like a glamour magazine cover–but then he also noted in his malleable innocence that he had never “played” with his friend in that yard. As we drove away past the maze of estate, through a flotilla of landscaping services, I appreciated the rugged utility of our yard, even more so, the rugged utility of our life here.
As the school year starts, our bank account is precariously low, two engine lights are on, the porch roof is leaking, the backdoor sill needs to be replaced, and the chimney needs to be relined before I can install the wood stove, and six of my seven seem to need a new pair of something that we always seem to find second-hand, but still, I am as “happy” as a man can be, and they, too, seem as happy as kids can be–and I know now from watching Kaleigh graduate from college, find a job, and settle in to her own life without asking for a bit of help that she is as rugged as our backyard and that this life worked for her and because of her. What she didn’t get, she got. She tends to her life the same way as I needed to do with the lawn by simply focusing on what is essential, to do what needs to be done and then to embrace whatever grows from it. It is a mix of stoic wisdom, permeating love and boundless persistence from which we all can learn.
So today I do not need to play rainmaker. The skies did that for me, but still I will head out back to peer into that dark soil and see if my seeds are starting to sprout and pray and trust that this small metaphor is real and true.
by Fitz | Aug 26, 2014 | Dawghouse, Songs
Rain’s falling outside of Boston—
Thank God I’m not working tonight.
I’ve got six of my own,
And a stepdaughter at home,
And a momma keeping things right.
I wonder if they’re at the table
With their puzzles, their papers and pens?
When I get off the highway
And pull in that driveway,
Will they run to the window again?
Daddy’s home, daddy’s home, I can hear you,
Though I’m still eighteen miles away.
This old station wagon’s
Got a muffler that’s dragging,
But everything’s going my way.
Momma put your head on my shoulder;
Let me hold you tight to my heart—
You’ve had a long day at home;
You’ve been working all alone—
Everyone’s doing their part.
She says, “Kaleigh is up in her bedroom.”
But she can’t really figure out why.
I find her upstairs
In an armload of bears,
And she looks at me softly and cries,
Was I sad with no dad to come to?
Did it hurt he was so far away?
Did I sit by the phone
And wait for him to come home
Like Margaret and EJ today?
Little girl, you can cry on my shoulders,
Though I can’t really say how it feels,
But if one thing is real
It’s this love that I feel,
And it’s one thing nobody can steal.
You had Nana; you had Papa; you had Mama—
And your momma was with you all day.
With her Ram pickup truck
And a boatload of luck,
You found me and you asked me to stay.
Now you’ve got your brothers and sisters.
You’ve got a step-dad trying to write songs;
You’ve got a momma who knows
How to make that love grow
Like them summer days coming along.
So, how about tonight we go dancing
Through every store in the mall.
If the kids don’t make scenes,
We’ll have food-court cuisine,
And wind up having a ball—
And if the kids don’t make scenes,
We’ll have food-court cuisine,
And wind up having a ball.
How about tonight we go dancing….
by Fitz | Aug 25, 2014 | Journal
There is always a hard shift for me at the end of the summer, and today is that day for me. I miss the freedom of last week: I’d wake in the morning, come out to the deck to write poetry or work on my novel–but now today, I feel like I should be preparing for school, which looms around the corner next week. Wise thinking tells me to disregard my school thoughts and focus instead on the pile of wood that needs to be split, the back of the house that needs to be painted, and the yard work still unfinished.
After lying dormant for a few years, I started working again on Hallow’s Lake, a short story/novella/novel that shows more and more promise to me. The idea for the story (as opposed to having a plot) is to capture the truth about a certain place in a certain place in time. There is no antagonist aside from the cruel and unrelenting vagaries of fate. The characters deal with the common struggle to forge an identity and shape their lives as best they can. The common thread in all of there lives is the voice of a narrator–a voice who simply retells the sketches and scenes from the community that lives on Hallow’s Lake–a place loosely based on Stinson Lake in New Hampshire–which was so pivotal in my life as I grew up, and even after I “grew up.” The narrator is a young man who simply helps people out and, in a sense, is simply there to record the words, actions, and interactions of the characters.
If there is any strength in the writing, I think is in the sketches of ordinary people with ordinary demons consciously and unconsciously helping each other survive in a somewhat isolated community. Nobody’s life is anywhere near perfect and in the unfolding of the scenes, I am trying to imply that each character’s life is incredibly complex, deeply emotional, and surprisingly intellectual–with the implication being that there is no such thing as a minor character in life.
My big issue is–and has been–how to wrap up a story that does not have a linear plot or a easy to recognize conflict around which to focus my readers. My most recent thought is to simply call it poem, not a story–which would solve a lot of my uneasiness surrounding how to “release” this piece. In many ways, it is similar to Dylan Thomas’s approach to writing “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” though he at least had an abiding and enduring theme around which to hang the images, actions, and memories of a child’s Christmas–his Christmas, perhaps.
So, yes, I will put off school for at least another day…
