Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Review of "A Room for Learning" in EDUCATION REVOLUTION

Reviewed by Ron Miller, Ph.D.

By Tal Birdsey

St. Martins Press (www.stmartins.com)

This is a beautifully written personal account of an alternative school for young adolescents in a small Vermont community. Tal Birdsey is an inspired teacher who reaches out to young people with humor, honesty and wisdom. He describes his students’ struggles and insecurities, often related to their public school experiences, and how they opened deeper dimensions of themselves in the caring, human-scale community they established together. The story is warm and moving; it evokes laughter and poignancy even as it embodies a brilliant critique of standardized schooling. It is no exaggeration to say that A Room for Learning takes an honored place in the alternative education literature with classics like Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Teacher, George Dennison’s The Lives of Children, and Chris Mercogliano’s Making it Up as We Go Along. Like them, Birdsey shows exactly how authentic education, stripped of labels, methods, and standards, nourishes the minds and hearts of growing human beings.

http://www.educationrevolution.org/aeromagazine.html

If the Heart is Engaged the Mind Will Follow

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

—Abigail Adams

Scenes from this week: a soccer match in Waitsfield in 35 degrees, against the Green Mountain Valley School, all dedicated athletes and skiers, meeting up against our rag-tag squad of rabble: ten girls and Nathan in goal and Oliver subbing off the bench: we scrapped for 80 minutes; we took a lead in the first half, we bent and gave up the equalizer with 13 minutes left. We bent some more, but did not break. Then we slotted two more for the 3-1 win, the first girls game in NBS history.

We hiked through the Moosalamoo Wilderness, southering through the fallen leaves. When we got up a few hundred feet we got some crunchy snow; green and yellow leaves in the trees, black lines of limbs, and the white snow dusting all the fallen orange and golden on the ground. WE had to bundle up—it was well below freezing at the top: feet a little wet, many layers, everyone trying to talk to everyone.

WE made beginning collages, in the hopes of making some bigger ones. National Geographics and 1959 Encyclopedias that contain the most amazing black and white diagrams and schematics. Utopian collages of hands hovering over the Grand Canyon (“Hand Canyon”), abstract squares, Buddha heads floating in fiery landscapes, striped frogs riding on 1971 Chevy Impalas, Balinese dancers climbing the periodic table of elements.

There was the completion of the Round Bale (ask your NBSer about the meaning of that name)—all six Utopian societies rendered in topos; one of the Societies, Vita Perfecta, tried to lure Tal to the come stay by claiming they had a Cheetos factory and a stage hosting the American rock band Wilco; talk about Utopia!? Cooking of vegetable soup, apple crisp, and hot cider in the Math Kitchen, Wiffleball play-offs, the symbolic and metaphorical meaning of domestic cats versus bob-cats; mandalas, place descriptions, self evaluations, and progress on Utopia projects:

In the utopia projects department: different material is beginning to surface: the behavior of Meerkats; ads from 1950 that claim you should start your child on Coca-cola in infancy (to build proper character); Emmit Till’s casket; The Declaration of Sentiments; a slide show of the Drop City buildings in Southwestern Colorado; JFK’s claim that the U.S.A. would land on the moon by 1969; George Fox; “The Grapes of Wrath” and Woody Guthrie; The Vermont Eugenics project; Bucky Fuller’s Dynamic Maximum Tension car; “Sad Letter Blues,” and Jacob Lawrence in the Great Migration; and the social good of capitalist enterprises.

All of this is being discovered in the context of the 350.org discussions about what we plan to do. We are going to be making our own GIANT 350 mandala; school wide activities; individual activities; please be prepared if your child ask to eat dinner by candlelight, or wants to not wash cloths for a week, or wants to only eat cold rice. Her at school we may be doing both practical and impractical things, symbolic actions for the week and also, we hope, some long term adjustments to the way we do things here at school.

Amid the rumble and tumble and small frictions and glissades of the day, we are always trying to create and be “animated by scenes which engage the heart.” If the heart is not engaged, then the mind separates and recedes to another room. If the heart is engaged, the mind will follow.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

We Must Take the Current When it Serves


There is a tide in the affairs of men,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in the shallows and in miseries…
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."
—Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene 3, 218–224

On Thursday we were deep in the Ripton woods, on old logging trails, under the gold canopy of tail-end brilliant leaves. The clouds gray and steel, bruised blue and low. We passed through small fields “no bigger than a harness gall,” grasses dry and pale yellow, we walked on leafy paths, under rotting deer-stands, through dense hard-wood groves, over beds of sodden moss.

Three groups set out, each at different pace, each with compasses and GPS units, back packs, mud-boots, and some food. The goal was to find “Stopping By Woods,” a geo-cache up near a beaver pond to the northeast of school. We had been there once before, three years ago, at this time of year, then, as now, trampling through woods and surrounded by our own voices, calling out, “We’re over here!” and shrieking as we sank deep into the mud and cold waters filling the bogs.

The younger students are giddy, laughing, hugging, trampling about like new born lambs. Or, sometimes, or intermittently, they are confused, overwhelmed, and unsure, trying, to find a way in, trying to connect, wondering who their friends will be, trying to fuse into the new scene. Wide-eyed, a little panicked by the brightness of the light, wondering how they might ever imitate some older student’s capable, inspiring ways. Trying to keep up, they hang on.

Brutus’ words in Julius Caesar make me think, however, of what the ninth graders are moving towards. They have been around long enough to understand the difference between the shallows and the depths. This thing of the necessity of taking the current when it serves, of not wanting to lose one’s ventures. The older kids going deeper, leading, venturing, and being able to say what venturing is. They are looking back to when they were first wandering in the woods, first wading in, on their first hikes, not knowing what to bring or how to be prepared for the weather. Two years ago they might have been shivering and complaining and wondering, “What in the Sam Hill are we doing out here?”

Now, they are cycling out into bigger thoughts. There are times when they seem deadly serious. They are less distracted by minute matters, more drawn to larger motions— of their own thoughts, their own aspirations. When we go gallivanting into the woods they know what we are looking for. And it’s not about material goods, or the cache, or a treasure, but about the spirit of motion and going forth with striding glee. It matters not if they get wet. They plow straight forward, in love with the going. Water spills into their mudboots and they exclaim, “THIS is AWESOME!”

Is it just they get out of the classroom in the fall to walk in the woods, or something more? They are aware of so much now. They think about the going more than the prize at end. This is hardcore, they exclaim. I love my school, they call out. Our class is the best, the say to each other. They are aware, it seems, if you press them, of everything: the textures of the land, the reflections of the leaves in the steely black water, the scent and smell of the muck, and of each other.

We climbed over a beaver lodge. We held out our hands to pull each other over the deep currents. We smelled decomposing leaves and made clouds of black silt rise from the waters. We trampled over mosses as green as gold. We stepped over old refuse piles, bent fenders and syrup and oil cans and bald, cracked tires half hidden in piles of leaves, the front suspension of a Model T Ford poking out like a tilting orange-rusted grave-stone.

They get wet, but they don’t get grumpy. They get muddy but they don’t complain. They get cold, but they are so busy chattering and laughing and asserting their hardcore status that that don’t feel the cold. Or they do, but the fun and the motion is more important. The cold and wet becomes part of the reason we are here. They say, afterwards, in the quiet of the class, “I felt closer to real life.” Out of dry caves to where the water soaks through. We will remember this day in middle school, perhaps more than all the others.

Last year we talked what a “religious feeling” might be. What feeling made one feel the presence of invisible power? When one felt invisible power, what was the feeling? Had we ever had one? Was a religious feeling simply seeing straight into certain moments and apprehending the moment’s significance? On Friday, after the hike, some of the kids talked about religious feeling: of walking ahead and the silence they found in the water pooled behind a dam; of seeing geese exchanging the lead as they flew over the mown fields at twilight. Of no longer caring about being wet, of forgetting the materials we toted—back-packs full of manufactured objects—and becoming subsumed in the cold flow, up to the neck, and truly falling in.

This week many of them spoke about having gone to Marrowbone: And we read Aylee’s description of being at Marrowbone when she was four. Then, she was an excited little girl, more interested in the leaves she collected on a sharpened stick than the silly poetry and singing going on behind the trees. Her little sister was asleep in mom’s lap, oblivious to all except the bodily warmth of a parent. A little ways off Aylee was excitedly squirming about, listening, smelling the woods, collecting leaves, peeling bark off small twigs, finding the most beautiful leaf in the world, over and over. She wanted to scamper on, to find more leaves, and to find the next trail, the next path, and find her way into the clearing where there was cider and sun-light. Aylee, at age four, did not want to leave one leaf behind.

And then, in class this week, there were students who’d just gone to Marrowbone, the students sitting in our classroom, talking about being at Marrowbone eight falls ago, talking about being at Marrowbone just days ago. They see themselves growing up before their own eyes. Then, as Bryn said on Monday, at Marrowbone this year she tried to remember words and ideas from every act. She didn’t want to forget what she was hearing. It was so different, she said, from when she was little. She told us she had even begun to write down quotes on her hand, trying to save the big thoughts which, she has learned, are worth keeping. Thoughts are the golden leaves, and she was trying to save every one.

When they are like this, circling ever further out and seeing more, I see them as Orpheus, who was so hungry and devoted to love that he would be willing to go into the underworld to try to sing a heart of stone back to life. There is in my students a similar desperate passion, a growing belief in the power of words, music, images, and belief in, even, treading through bogs. That is a faithful, questing spirit, and in our most exalted moments, when they are shouting in the woods, I believe they still do have the spirit of westering. In The Red Pony, Jody’s Grandfather says he believes the spirit of westering has died out in men. And yet we see it in a hundred ways every day. Adolescent westering. Wanting to find words for the unnameable. Confronting mysterious feelings. Arriving at an impasse together, and stumbling about, trying to find a direction, trying to re-orient, re-position, or reset the coordinates.

Their exuberant surging forth, at the time when the leaves are coming down, just before the snow flies and the swamps freeze over, is a spectacular collision of forces. I feel them trying to wring meaning out, in laughter, shouts, and still, sometimes, through sorrow-full tears. Robert Frost has a small poem in which he talks about a walk late in the fall, called, appropriately, “A Late Walk.”

When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words

A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

Orpheus believed completely that he could sing so well that he could make the dead come back. In another time, in another season, we see the hope inhering in bringing a last aster from the withered gardens of summer, in bringing back the last color in the time of dying. The older kids have looked long enough to know that there are fortunes of faded asters “not far from our going forth.” There are flood currents, and they are making motions towards riding on them, and that is a motion of becoming.

Miles read a poem by Keats on Friday: “The Cricket and the Grasshopper,” which begins with the line, “The poetry of earth is never dead.” In the swamps and bogs, taking our measure by the co-ordinates of going and finding, the poetry of earth is never dead. It flows and flows, and we are deep in it.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Birdsey Chronicles Improbable Start of North Branch School in Ripton


This article was published in the Oct. 1, 2009, edition of the Addison Independent with two photos by Trent Campbell.


“If what’s happening at school isn’t a story, it’s not good enough. What’s happening in school needs to be so good that it is a story, which is a high standard.”


North Branch School founder Tal Birdsey


By JOHN FLOWERS


RIPTON — A decade ago, Tal Birdsey’s dream of establishing his own private school was mere Lego whimsy, fashioned out of the toy building blocks by his two young sons on their living room floor.

But a magical potion of hard work, negotiations, willpower and serendipity ultimately made the North Branch School a reality in 2001. It’s been a miraculous journey that Birdsey is now sharing with the world in his first book, “A Room for Learning.” 

Released just this week, the book tenderly chronicles the birth of the North Branch School from far-fetched idea, to the harvesting of his first class of 10 students, to the search for a schoolhouse, to the excitement of seeing outside-the-box teaching yield positive results for children of diverse backgrounds and learning abilities.

“We said, ‘We’ll build it, and maybe they’ll come,’” Birdsey recalled of the planning stages for North Branch, which now serves 27 middle-schoolers in a converted farmhouse off the Lincoln Road in Ripton.

“Fortunately, they did come.”

Birdsey was a stay-at-home dad caring for his sons, Henry and Calder, when he began thinking about re-entering the workforce. He had previously taught for 10 years at the Paideia School, an independent school in Atlanta. He decided he wanted to return to the classroom — specifically, one of his own creation.

He drew up a list of 10 items essential for a school start-up: two classrooms, a bathroom, two tables, 12 chairs, $500 worth of books, a first-aid kit, paper and pencils, copy machine, plants and a cat.

“It was ludicrously bare, idealistically Spartan and absurdly naïve — the educational equivalent of going into the Alaskan wilderness with nothing but three sacks of rice and a shaker of salt,” Birdsey wrote.

But many fellow parents in Ripton and throughout the county embraced the concept of creating an alternative learning environment for young teens who simply did not “fit” into the traditional public school setting, Birdsey found. Going house by house, he was interviewed by prospective students and their parents about what he could offer.

“I spoke with half hope and small grains of confidence about a school that existed only in a brochure,” Birdsey said. “I had nothing to show, no proof or evidence, no quantitative measures of effectiveness, no testimonials from ecstatic parents. Driving around in my minivan with my two children, I felt more like an itinerant preacher or a bedraggled missionary speaking to doubters and the half curious.”

But Birdsey struck a chord, and soon got his minimum, inaugural incoming class of 10 students. The students ranged from very bright, precocious learners to less inquisitive introverts.

“Entrusting their children to the North Branch School, a school with no defined curriculum or structure, ‘charter’ school status or orthodoxy, at a precipitous moment when their children were entering the critical, tumultuous time of adolescence, could only be seen as an act of utter ineradicable faith,” Birdsey wrote of his students’ parents.

Only months removed from their targeted opening in 2001, organizers of the North Branch School finally located a rental home on the Lincoln Road in which they would operate. With the students’ help, they were able to get the building ready for occupancy that fall.

“I was afraid the first day that no one would show up,” Birdsey said. “I was amazed when they did.”

Birdsey and his colleagues proceeded to teach their young charges math, science, humanities, history and physical education, among other subjects. They did so using techniques that required the students to take ownership of their own education, using props, anecdotes, music and the great outdoors to impart lessons.

Students allowed Birdsey to use their real names in the book; all were given advance texts to verify accuracy.

“They loved it,” Birdsey said of the book, in an interview on Monday. He made six factual adjustments to the book based on feedback from students and their parents.

While the book is a celebration of educational possibilities in a rustic setting, the remoteness of the school building could not shield the students from the tragic realities of Sept. 11, 2001. The students piled into Birdsey’s minivan to listen to radio accounts of the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., as there was no radio in the school.

“I wanted them to be excited, to let themselves grow up and live,” Birdsey wrote. “But I never felt more isolated than I did then, sitting behind the steering wheel with my whole school in a rutted driveway, wondering if I’d ever want to let go of them at all.”

AUTHOR READING

An initial printing of 10,000 copies of “A Room for Learning” have been printed and will be sold at such locations as the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, where Birdsey is scheduled to conduct a reading and book signing on Friday, Oct. 9. from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

Birdsey explained the book represents five years of work, inspired from his regular e-mails to the school community and fond recollections.

“I just started jumping around, and any scene that was memorable … I would write it up,” Birdsey said. “I started to see they could be strung together in a story. That led me to see something that I think should be true about schools — if what’s happening at school isn’t a story, it’s not good enough. What’s happening in school needs to be so good that it is a story, which is a high standard.”

He spent summers, early mornings and weekends writing the 293-page book.

Asked what kind of readers are likely to gravitate toward his book, Birdsey said, “Parents with younger kids who are thinking about the kind of schools their children might one day attend; teachers who know how schools are run and how they might be run differently; and people who want to become teachers but who might be turned off by the narrowness of approaches that are out there.”

But the biggest payoff for Birdsey would be if a reader follows the same path he took a decade ago.

“The dream would be that someone who reads this book and says, ‘I’m starting a school,’” Birdsey said. “That would be the best.”

For more information about Birdsey’s book, log on to www.talbirdsey.com.


Monday, October 5, 2009

Embracing the Situation is Our Only Chance to Be Free


Embracing the situation

Is our only chance to be free

I'll side with you

If you side with me

—Wilco, “Side With the Seeds”

There’s been talk around here lately of great philosophers and mathematicians. Rose once had the kids looking at a picture of Raphael’s “School of Athens” and we often discuss who should be in the NBS Pantheon—Bucky Fuller, Abigail Adams, John Coltrane, Mother Teresa, Aung San Suu Kyi and lately even Joe Strummer. The kids have been talking about Plato’s cave and Socrates. My first-born son asked me about my teaching methods, and I confessed that I do often employ an adolescent-tinged version of the Socratic method, formalized by Plato as the elenctic style.

In this method the form of inquiry is a debate and questioning between individuals with opposing viewpoints in order to stimulate rational thinking and illuminate ideas. The conversation is meant to address difficult, indefinable, or non-concrete concepts—say, justice, morality, artistic expression, courage, love, the soul, or mercy. Theoretically, the Socratic questioner leads his interlocutors towards a new, more refined examination of the concept under consideration, thus leading to greater awareness. Some argue that the Socratic method is a negative form of knowledge acquisition, as it often results in the questioner revealing the ignorance of the interlocutors. However, Socrates believed that this awareness of one’s ignorance was essential to ultimate wisdom—true wisdom being predicated on the idea that there is always more to know and that answers could be continually sought and deepened.

The goal in the elenchic method, or at the end of a series of elenchi, is that the interlocutors should be lead by the Socratic questioner to a state of aporia—a state of puzzlement, doubt, impasse, or an awareness of the inadequacies or inconsistencies in previous beliefs, theories, or assumptions. Aporia was considered by Socrates to be good because it fostered sharpened questioning and renewed hunger for knowledge. By breaking down shallowly considered ideas, theories or misinterpretations, all participants move “beyond” their common, unquestioned knowledge. To arrive at such a point, Socrates believed, was “purgative;” one sees what he does not know, and so the desire grows to investigate and question further.

In a conference on Tuesday, one student, Rider, said that he felt most close to a fellow student, Henry, when they were working together and they were able play and have fun. Further, Rider felt confidence in Henry that Henry had deep down reserves of caring, integrity, and a desire to take their work seriously, and this inspired in him both security and pleasure.

“What is this feeling,” I asked.

“It’s sort of like I can float out on my own,” explained Rider, “To have a little fun, but I always know that I am anchored to something solid.”

“That should be our goal here,” a second student said. “To be able to be free but also float out, but not disconnect ourselves.”

“Disconnect ourselves from what?” I asked.

“We shouldn’t be disconnected from meaning, from what is down deep. We have to stay connected to deep feelings, and not only attach ourselves only to being funny, or making jokes, or goofing off.”

“Why not?”

“Because that only gets you so far. You don’t go anywhere new. And people can only go so far with you with superficial jokes. There is a limit to what you can express and see if you only stay on the surface.”

“So,” I said, “We’re talking about being in a place, really two places simultaneously, where you can have fun and delight, but also know that the meaning and purpose is close by and can be gotten to at any moment?”

“Yes.”

“Because?”

“Because it feels safer.”

“Like when?”

“Like when we have fun doing a science experiment, but we always know what the goal is, and we stay focused on it, and we work towards doing the experiment right, and we are trying to get somewhere.”

“And?”

“And I know that if something important happens, that that the important thing won’t stay hidden.”

Henry raised his hand.

“If I play my guitar only for myself, that’s not enough. For it to have meaning it has to be more than that. If it doesn’t affect other people, then it isn’t as important.”

Someone interrupted: “But it is important to do something for yourself.”

But he continued: “But it needs to have more meaning. The meaning of music comes when it is heard by someone else. I can have fun and meaning alone with music, but it’s not enough.”

“But doing something for yourself does mean something,” a classmate repeated.

“I know,” he continued. “But…”

“But you don’t want to keep your thing hidden. It has to come out and meet others. That’s what you want, yes?”

“Yes,” he said. Someone else picked up the thread.

“I hide the deeper parts of myself when I only focus on what is fun or what I am happy about,” said a girl.

“What’s wrong with expressing happiness?” I asked.

“Well, others will only see a sliver of me. I’m not giving my whole self to them.”

“Is that bad?”

“It is if I don’t show them the other good things in me.”

“Why don’t you show them the other things?”

“I don’t know…because those are more unknown and unresolved? The deeper things are the things I have doubts about.”

“And it’s harder to show those things? Why?”

“Because they are more…unsure.”

“If you don’t bring forth what you are unsure about, and only trollop around with what you’re jolly about, then what?”

“I don’t ever resolve or figure out the deeper things. And I drive everyone crazy.”

“Then you are only a shadow of yourself?”

“And stuck there,” someone interjects, “because you don’t go to the hard things or the things with meaning.”

I held up a crumpled piece of homework, a hastily scribbled math assignment.

“What happens if someone only shows this?”

“Then we are seeing only a crumpled sliver of that person.”

“What if this is the best that person can do. Do I accept it or not?” I asked.

“That’s not okay. Anyone can take care of a homework assignment. They should, anyway.”

“There’s a difference between ‘doing good work’ and ‘doing your best,’” someone offered. “Everyone needs to do their best work, but everyone’s may do different levels of work.”

“What difference does it make if it is crumpled or done fast as long as it is done?” I asked.

“Because it is part of showing that we care about what we are doing here. If we don’t care about it then what is the point of being here?”

“What difference does it make to you whether someone else does good work or not so long as you do?”

“We all have to care about what others are doing,” Nathan asserted.

“Why does it matter to a ninth grader if the seventh graders do their work well or crappy?”

“It isn’t that we are doing our work alone. We are doing it together. That’s what this school is. If one of us says they don’t care then that says it is okay to not care. Which is not okay.”

“It’s like what Rider was saying. If someone doesn’t do their best work, they are apart,” said Yared. “We have to bring them into us. We can’t let one single boat be separated from the big ship.”

“But how do we make that happen?”

“We have to break the thing that is causing someone to not care. But we have to be careful, because we have to be careful of what is inside them also.”

“Okay, fair enough,” I said. “Which is why Rider said he loved working with Henry, because he didn’t have to break anything. He only had to make something. Because he already knew that Henry cared about what he was doing. He knows that there is depth there, and is caring for what we are doing, and in that there is pleasure and purpose. So he feels not alone in his activity and work. So what are we looking for? So he stays with the big ship. So what is it we want?”

Someone raised another hand.

“The root of the root.”

“Huh.”

“The meaning behind what means something. Not just the caring, but why caring matters. WE want to be close to the root that makes them care. The root is an anchor, or a line to the meaning. It’s what makes caring. The essence of what we are doing.”

“The root of the root?”

“And if there’s something we don’t like?”

“We have to get to the root of it. The bottom of what’s the matter.”

“Even if someone does a bad thing.”

“Especially if someone does a bad thing.”

“Why?”

“We have to believe that what someone does has a reason. A root.”

“Okay.”

There was a pause. Then I told a story.

“There was a boy here. He was very strong. We had a large set of lockers that needed to be moved. He brought them down the basement stairs himself, straining and exerting himself He smashed his fingers on the door frame and then dragged the lockers across the basement, cussing the whole way. When it was in place twelve classmates surged forward, shreiking and squabbling to claim a locker. No one said thanks. This sent the boy into a rage. All these selfish teenyboppers not appreciating his work and fighting over the best locker. Disgusting. So, in anger, he went outside to the bicycle of one of the shrieking teenyboppers. With an Allen-wrench he loosened every nut on her mountian bike. That day she rode home, the bike fell apart, and she nearly rode into a passing truck. She could have been really hurt. So what is the meaning of this?”

“He was pissed.”

“Is that all?"

“There was a root to his action.”

“What was the root?”

“No one thanked him.”

“He felt his efforts were unappreciated and rejected.”

“So how did he respond?” I asked.

“With something hurtful, mean, destructive.”

“Did it solve the problem?”

“No, it made it worse?”

“What if I said his destroying the bike brought the issue up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, by screwing up her bike, he got a chance to say what was bothering him?”

“That was a destructive way to do it, then.”

“Why do you think he did it that way?”

A pause. Someone raised a hand.

"Because, it was like what Isabel said. That was the harder thing to see. if he said that he was hurt and rejected when he did a nice thing and that he needed someone to say thanks, that would be him admitting he needed other people. That would make him feel vulnerable, or weak.”

“Meaning he would be showing his feelings,” said someone else.

“Yes!” another girl blurted. “Just like Carl Tiflin in The Red Pony. He gets hurt, or he feels he might show his tender feelings, so he hurts things because he is afraid to show his feelings.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“That’s what the strong boy did. He hurt someone instead of showing his true feelings. Well, he showed his feelings, but not the right ones.”

“Because he felt disconnected or unsure.”

“Yes. But then he disconnected himself.”

“And he disconnected her bike,” Rider said.

“Interesting. He took things apart,” I said.

“So we should be putting things together?”

“Tightening things. Making everything fit together better.”

“But how do we do that?”

“It never ends. We have to just keep trying.”

“So now what?” I asked.

It was 10:30. Time for break. We’d been in the room all morning. We hadn’t gotten to the speeches we’d meant to read.

“Bryn,” I asked, “Do you have a poem for us?”

Bryn had signed up the read the poem that morning. She had been holding her book the whole time of the discussion—her book was The National Poetry Project.”

“I do,” she said, with pep in her voice.

“Fire it up.”

“Miles,” she asked, “Can you read his name? I can’t pronounce it.”

“Rabindranath Tagore,” Miles read carefully. “Gintajali 35 is the title.”

This is what she read.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the

Dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

All around the room all eyes were up, watching, looking at each other.

“Read it again.” I said. “Everybody, think about one line in that poem that connects to we just said, one sentence that is true to us or you today.”

She read it again.

“Bryn, did you have that poem picked out already, or did you pick it after you listened to this this morning?”

“I had one but I decided to read this during our talking.”

“So you were listening to everyone else, and you picked a poem to say what we said?”

“I guess so,” she said. She was beaming.

That’s how we got to break, and to the end of a day’s elenchi.

***

Bread and Puppet is a kind of museum, a record of the activity of a political and artistic sub-culture, and the repository of a life-time of work. The barn which house the old puppets is also very much like a cathedral, with high vaulted ceilings, hand-work of artisans tucked into every corner and towering or hanging above, a pantheon of figures and characters linking present time to past. After our tour, our lunch, our acquisitive, consuming ways in the Bread and Puppet museum store, and our visit to the Cheap Art Museum in a defunct school bus, we headed to the field with our speckled notebooks. I put a quote by Gandhi, whose birthday it was on Friday, on the “hand-out”— “In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.” The quote is loosely connected to our own arduous quest, but also, I wanted them to spend some time thinking in the solitude of the meadow fields across the road from the museum.

Where the museum is dense, dark, dusty, peopled with figures of the past, the field is bright and open, nestled above the valley, a green-golden-orange bounded bowl in the hills. In the cool afternoon we clustered together in the field in the cool afternoon for our instructions, and then we spread out, the cluster of us splitting up into groups, going further into the distance of the field, then in pairs, and finally, singly, disappearing into the pine grove or amphitheater or into the hollows. From the collective the individual, where we were alone in our thoughts for an hour, with no sound but the crows and cars passing in the road. In that large space we found some silence to point where the single most observable fact was the clouds passing in front of the sun, and warmth rising and then diminishing.

***

Later in the week we heard a speech that managed to imagine what happens when we are able to absorb into ourselves the beauty that we see and feel.

A stained white tank top and darker sports bra underneath stood off against my pale skin as I stood in front of my full-length mirror. I held out a hand and looked at my uneven nails and slightly longer fingers. I wore black soccer shorts and as I stared at my hair. It seemed to curl out into blonde frizz above my head as the air became more humid. My face was pale and dotted with some freckles and my eyebrows seemed too blonde to see. I didn’t like this image of myself and I didn’t want to be me anymore. I turned away and opened the door, so I wouldn’t have to pick out my imperfections. I walked down the smooth wooden stairs, walking slowly and biding my time. I reached the bottom, turned to grab my sneakers and left the house. I tied the shoelaces in place and stuck my earphones in my ears blocking out the sounds of everything around me except the pounding of my heart. I scrolled down the music list to podcasts and then to “This American Life”. I turned down the driveway and started to run, trying to forget everything and just listened to the voice of Ira Glass. “This American Life” is a radio show that has different themes every week and there are always different stories about people in America, their stories, stories that fit the theme. I loved listening to these. I had listened to at least thirty podcasts during the summer. It always made me stop thinking about how I felt about myself and whether I could change. Instead it put me in a place where I could think about other people’s stories and problems and what they went through. The sound of my sneakers was a kind of rhythm to keep me moving forward away from what I was always thinking about and what I never wanted to think about. A line of sweat slid down my forehead and I wiped it away with the back of my hand, just listening, trying to forget. I saw the long dirt road ahead just stretching on what seemed like forever and I just kept going because that’s what I had to do, it was the only thing to do. The trees were so perfectly green and true around me and the details that were easy to miss when I wasn’t looking were so clear to me and so amazing and beautiful. The veins in a glossy, wet leaf stood out against the smooth, rough gravel under my feet. A pale yellow and black butterfly perched on a leaf; lightly fluttering it’s fragile, beautiful wings. Wild flowers of the most breathtaking pinks and maroons stood planted in the ground, but swaying in the breeze so they didn’t seem grounded after all. I looked down at my thighs, they were bright red and wet with sweat. I looked straight ahead again, Stop thinking, I told myself, just let go. I turned the volume up higher and the voices of someone else filled my head, all meaningless noise, and I sprinted across the dirt road, my feet thudding on the warm ground, the wind and stones flying with me. And I felt like I never wanted to stop, just my soul running free, my body left in the dust as the rest of me raced ahead, completely free. But not just free, but happy to be who I was and happy that I was sprinting down a dirt road, in the middle of the woods at the foot of a mountain

Here the vision of external beauty is attained only when one can see beauty in themselves. Or, the beauty we see is an analog for what we want o see in ourselves. Maybe we try apprehending external beauty as away to practice believing those things about ourselves. And, in order for her to make her way to a new vision of herself, she listens to the stories of others. So we listen to her story about listening to Ira Glass and the sound of her feet. We see through her vision of the veined leaves to a vision of her.

Plato and Socrates also believed that a legitimate technique of teaching was “myth.” We use myth, or stories, constantly: our stories are really our own myths, or, we look back to common historical moments, past heroes, or the characters in our books to see the mythological forces at work. I use the stories of students I have taught in my Socratic elenchi, and so weave stories into the questioning as a way to elucidate responses or make ideas come clear. When the stories of the students join with the ideas we discover in our discussion, we are very near the best truth we can get.