In 1965 George Dennison wrote a classic book about learning and teaching, called The Lives of Children. The book is a description of one year at the First Street School, which he ran New York’s Lower East Side. In it he writes,
“There is no such thing as learning except in the continuum of experience. But this continuum cannot survive in the classroom unless there is reality of encounter between the adults and the children. The teachers must be themselves, and not play roles. They must teach the children, and not teach “subjects.” The child, after all, is avid to acquire what he takes to be the necessities of life, and the teacher must not answer with mere professionalism and gimmickry...
…The experience of learning is an experience of wholeness. The child feels the unity of his own powers and the continuum of persons. His parents, his friends, his teachers, and the vague human shapes of his future form his world for him, and he feels the adequacy and reality of his powers within this world. Anything short of this wholeness is not true learning. Children who store up facts and parrot the answers…invariably suffer a great deal of anxiety. If they are joined to the continuum or persons, it is not by the exercise of their powers, but by the suppression of their needs. Rebellious children are more loyal to their instincts, but they suffer the insecurity of conflict with the persons who form the continuum of life.”
In my teaching, in in our school, we have tried to make a place where the continuum of experience is authentic, where the encounter between adults and children is real, where life outside flows in and learning here flows out. What actually happens when we do this is difficult to quantify in measurable “results” or the “grades.” To see it is really simply to see all of us doing what we do. I have sketched the continuum of experience (about three days worth) and some of the kinds of encounters that arise here, and the ways they arise, and what happens when they do, so that we might see what the experience of learning looks like as it is practiced at NBS.
Early morning: bring in back-pack, unload 27 literature responses about To Kill A Mockingbird, one of which says, “the lesson of TKAMB is we should love. Love each other, love everyone.”
A parent brings in a friend, a NY teacher who has written a book for elementary kids about learning disabilities. She admires our building and compliments what we do…
“We try to find the diamonds in the mud,” I say.
Morning meeting. Anneke’s sister moved from 54th to 31st in a weekend ski race and won the “from the back of the pack,” and Anneke is proud of her. Simon says he loved hearing his classmate Kiley talk about her science astronomy project. Henry mentions his hockey tournament over the weekend and how his team willed themselves from a state discouragement and losing 3-0 to a comeback win. “When a group of people conforms their thinking to a higher purpose, something unexpected can happen. It is the same thing we will need to do when Tal leaves for China. All of us coming together an conforming our thoughts around our bigger goal.”
Miles says he had a good time working with his classmates building rockets on Friday. Jesse says she is glad to have Bryn back, who was sick, because when even one of us is gone it is like having a puzzle with a piece missing.
Tal says he loved spending the weekend with Dina, Calder and three dogs. “I got to spend the weekend watching the Olympics, putting together a baby crib, and eating Chinese food that Dina made.”
Everyone to class. After meeting: into the office to sign a letter. Discussion with a board member over the difficulties of converting the anecdotal, narrative evaluations we write into “letter grades” for the departing ninth graders. The difficulty, the injustice of it, is that we have to de-contextualize and reduce each student to a most minimal form. There is no way to do this perfectly satisfactorily or with absolute fairness to the whole child. Every kids’s experience us unique and multifaceted. To turn their experience into a letter grade is the same as saying the child is a letter when we all know that the letter says very little about who the child is.
Yared is building a model of the Milky Way. He consults with me about the best way to build it. “Describe it to me,” I say. We look at a picture and come up with a method that will use a wooden disk with copper wire arms extending out in a spiral and then stick pulled-apart cotton balls on the arms. In order to cut the wooden disk, we need a jigsaw. I dash home to pick up my jig-saw and a vapor mask as well for Henry, who is spray-painting the inside of a box to make a model of a pulsar. I instruct him on how to attach the mask to his face so he will not breathe highly volatile organic compounds, and then I help Yared cut his disk.
Anna and I discuss The Old Man and the Sea.
“How old do you think the boy is?” I ask.
“Maybe a teenager? He has been with the old man since he was five.”
The seventh graders spill loudly into my room for study. They want to talk about their weekends but I hush them and they settle down to work.
Sophie says, “I am hopeless.”
“Why Sophie?”
“I lost my story. The computer quit and I lost it.”
“Let me see your computer.”
We do a little Auto-Recovery Save and we find “Document 2” in its whole form.
“Thanks, Tal.”
“Ollie has two small balloons for his “Dark Matter” science project. They are currently inside his shirt, giving him a distinctive feminine form.
“Ollie, what are you doing?” I ask.
“I just finished my math homework and I’m thinking about what to do next.”
“Should you read your lit?”
“Well, right now I am “adjusting my assets,” he says with a smile.
“Tal, I think my story is good now,” says Claire.
“I haven’t read it yet, but I did spill coffee on it. Sorry.”
“Tal, don’t write that into the email. It makes me sound like an egotistical person. But Tal, I really do like my story now.”
“I’m glad you feel good about your story. That’s important, that’s great. You should always have a conscious awareness of what you are proud of. You may be a little egocentric but that’s different that being egotistical. Being ego-centric is part of the time of life for you now.”
“Well, maybe I’m not egotistical but I am manipulative because I do that to my parents. But don’t write that, then they will be onto me.”
"Don’t worry, Claire, they most likely already are.”
The end of study degenerates as we examine the constellations in the Zodiac and try to decide whether only twelve signs of the zodia can accurately describe us all, all humans in the world.
This leads to a discussion of Sesame Street, and how we all are unique.
***
In Morning Meeting, Anna reads from the Tao Te Ching.
54.
WHAT is well planted cannot be uprooted.
What is well embraced cannot slip away.
Your descendants will carry on the ancestral sacrifice for
generations without end.
Cultivate Virtue in your own person,
And it becomes a genuine part of you.
Cultivate it in the family,
And it will abide.
Cultivate it in the community,
And it will live and grow.
Cultivate it in the state,
And it will flourish abundantly.
Cultivate it in the world,
And it vill become universal.
Hence, a person must be judged as person;
A family as family;
A community as community;
A state as state;
The world as world.
How do I know about the world?
By what is within me.
****
I try to keep this thought in me the morning: “How do I know the world? By what is within me.”
Henry lets me know that Eric needs the copper wire in the basement for science projects.
Rider pops in to let me know that he destroyed the rocket the eighth graders had built the previous Friday.
“Why?”
“It wasn’t good enough.”
Sophie interrupts: “Tal, I’m screwed.”
“Why, Sophie.”
“My schedule, I am a disaster. I have skating. My coach says if I want to make the next level I need to be skating five days per week. I don’t like the girls. They’re mean. I want to play hockey. But I can’t do it all.” She begins to cry.
“Okay, slow down. Let’s make a schedule for just this week.”
“Reed says, “Oh, I can help! I’ll do it!” and she begins marking out the days on a grid and writing in Sophie’s responsibilities and after school activities.
We spend the rest of break making a schedule for the week which grants time for sleep, homework, chores, dinner, skating practice and watching the Olympics.
The ninth graders roll in for study.
Edgar lets me know that we need to be able to light the stage in two halves. “Tal, do you want me to set up the lights in the basement now we can do that, or wait until we get in the real theater.”
“Wait,” I say, though it is obvious to me that what he really wants to do is go down to the basement and work in his little “rat’s nest.” The kids who have been running the lights in play rehearsal have made a bit of a fort down in a storage room. I have granted them the freedom to do this, knowing that often the building of such nests or spaces or operations within the school is reflective of some larger developmental impulse: feelings and ideas are at play. There is a kind of work going on. If we are going to let the school be a place where the kids grow naturally, there has to be room for these kinds of physical constructions, which are really dynamic social constructions or extensions of their inner emotional lives.
Yared bursts in: “Tal, I have an extra period. You want to help me on my Galaxy some more?”
“No problem, Yared! I have scads of time!”
Isabel asks why the Geometry text book includes questions about the dimensions of a baseball diamond.
I begin to explain, but Cassie says, “Shush” and proceeds to explain the dimensions of the field of play.
Moments later she says to me: “I was explaining better than you.”
In a quiet moment I have my first chance to begin reading the drafts of the stories the kids have turned in. Before I can start Yared begins singing.
“You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time.” I tell him to be quiet and go drill his holes for his Milky Way galaxy.
I get to the title of the first story: “The Perils of Science.” Great title. Four paragraphs in Yared is back. The copper arms of the Milky Science are flopping all over the big room and won’t stay fixed in place.
We make some adjustments. Back to the story. At the bottom of the fourth paragraph, Rider comes in:
“Tal, we need to talk about my story. I’m all jumbled on my story.” We discuss the story. He sketches it all out to me.
“I think I know what I need to do,” he says.
Rio comes in late. He’s tired from his hockey tournament.
“Rio, how’re you feeling?” I ask.
The answer an exhausted monotone: “Broken.”
Edgar comes in with his Golden spiral design. He has used Piet Mondrian as his inspiration. We had discussed Piet Mondrian a few days before in Calder’s presentation on Le Corbusier.
“Hey Tal, should I color these corners black or leave them white?”
The class and I agree: “Make them black.”
Ollie comes in to get his “implants” for his science project, where he left them on the floor with his math book and lunch. He leaves, rubbing the two balloons together, leaving us to discuss who in fact told the most “Uranus” jokes two weeks ago when everyone was studying the Solar system: The consensus is that I did and was responsible for at least half of the approximate 1000 Uranus jokes told.
Miles asks me if we need to add a scene to the play for his part, and then we discuss whether he should change his character or add a scene. “Let’s add the scene,” I say.
Miles and I begin to work on play, when Rider interrupts: “You know what? During the course of the day my veins begin to pop out. It’s weird.” We look at him like he is crazy as he stares at his forearm.
“Amazing, Rider. Now work on your story. We’re writing a scene here.”
I write the new scene with Miles. He says lines, I type them. We insert the new lines into the middle of Act 2, scene 3. Days later, as we look over the script, we discover that the scene did not get inserted. We rustle though all the computer files of the play until we find the scene.
What should the play be called? Some want a French title. Others want something with mystical variation and obliqueness. We review old play titles. We settle on something basic, and true to the play. “The Golden Rose.”
***
Play Practice: Someone rooting through a plastic bin that holds all the props. Leg warmers, coffee cups, gym “weights” which are really metal rods from a copy-machine we dissected last year. In the dark, voices, the sound of stools scraping the floor, bodies shuffling around. Two boys playing acoustic guitars: “Love is What I Got” by Sublime. Hannah and Lydia in costume: yellow-leg warmers, purple hair ties, hair in pony tails, spandex pants.
I am typing changes and blocking direction as the scenes are run. Bold-facing fonts, italicizing the stage directions, trying to get a dead scene to be a little livelier, thinking about how to make there be at least one strain of meaningful true love in the script. “Stop the scene, guys, hold up! We need Cara- and Mel to come in from the left.” “Oliver, can you stand on the back of the bench. Henry, lean over him when you say your line.” “Louder, Simon!” “Everyone, stand still when you say your line. Otherwise it’s like wind blowing by us and we have no idea what you are saying.” “Yes, you all have to try to do the model walk in the last scene. Why? Because it’s funny.” “Nathan, who are you saying that line to?” “No, you don’t need your costume yet.” “If you want to make changes to the script, you have to do it to day—the script is going to the printer.”
When we leave play practice, we are straight into the first class on The Old Man and the Sea. Right off, our questions: who is this boy? Who is this old man? Is he defeated or undefeated? Poor (literally,yes) or rich (figuratively yes, rich with strength, love, knowledge, wisdom, devotion)? He carries the mast like a flag of permanent defeat, but his eyes are young and undefeated. Is he an old dead turtle, or he is a turtle whose heart is still beating. There are those who think him no use, but the boy knows he lives and must keep living and has the world inside him. Is there love for the man from the boy, and vice versa? If so, what is the source of the love? What do they each give each other? Why is the man dreaming about the lions on the beach? What part of him or his life is in those lions dreaming on the beach? How much does he love the world and the sea, which he views as a woman, loving and respectfully. Where is he going? Why far out, why to the depths? In what way is he an artist, as a fisherman, or in what way is the artist a fisherman, sending his lines out, far out, or deep down, keeping the “lines” straight, always holding carefully, feeling the lines with his hands, waiting for the big fish? And what is meant by this big fish, this great motion, or this fearless man who counsels us to have faith? What makes him be the man who would go far out, while others are content to stay close to shore, in the shallows, fishing sloppily and with no discipline, using motor boats, and disrespecting the sea?
What is un-deafeatable in this man, or in any man? It is well to ask after what he gives the boy. But what does he give to us? After all, why else would we read, write or tell stories, or Hemingway write, unless there was something to be gotten, something to be given. The boy and the man make little fictions between themselves that fill up the emptiness. And these fictions they make together, each day, about food and cast-nets and the baseball, they are beautiful. It is all they have, and it is all. Do we then make fictions of our lives as a way of surviving, and living and loving the world? And then: there is something in these fictions that is also true. How can fictions be true? What is Truth, and is this Truth really the body of the great fish from the depths, as rare a thing as there is, something down in the darkness, so great that when it rose from the sea it was unending and never to be forgotten?
***
Another morning: turning on the lights, placing the trash cans in most useful places, cleaning papers off the big table. Then an early morning parent conference. Is my child where she should be? Is what is happening the right thing to be happening? We decide that being adults, parents, teachers and mentors to these kids is something like helping them in a controlled slide in a beautiful place. They have their own force, and we can help deflect and direct it, and protect them from having a catastrophe, and help them land in a good place, but the force they come down with precedes us and is greater than us.
Yared completes the Milky Way: a spiral of cotton, spray painted four colors, held on the rickety framework of copper wire and hot glue. He raises it proudly above his head when he enters the room for meeting. A trophy of his hand-to-hand combat with the stars.
Before meeting, a discussion with Sophie about White Privilege. She has attended a workshop which helped her see the societal systems we live in, and the racial and gender inequities which reside invisibly in that system. She asks if she can add it to her project—“The world, if is like this, in not Utopian,” she says.
Charlie, the old dog, is hungry and is rooting through the garbage. Anneke says, “Charlie is so annoying.”
Three stories are turned in before school. One of the students says: “Tal, here is my story. The ending is terrible, but I am going to work on it. Then when I bring it to you at 8:30 on Monday after vacation it will be a work of art. It will be so holy and beautiful that it will shine with sunlight from angels’ wings. It will be so perfect that you will not even have to correct it.”
Anna asks when the deadline for the 8th Grade Arts award is. We look it up to find the date. Miles comes in and asks if he should cover his model of Andromeda with black paper or paint it.
Luke tells me: “Hey, Tal, I have found the root of Hitler’s evil. It was in his childhood…” And he recounts the early life of Hitler and his relationship with his brother, teachers, father and mother. He will add this to his project on Fascism.
Yared spends the last few minutes of study working on his playing on the acoustic guitar of “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf and “Moon Dance” by Van Morrison. Then he turns “Magic Carpet Ride” into a reggae jam.
By unanimous consent, the four kids in study agree that The Old Man and the Sea is “awesome.” We read aloud the line: “Now I have no time to think of baseball, he thought. Now is the time to think of only one thing. That which I was born for.”
Claire enters study and says, “You know, this year studies have been getting more and more peace-fuller.”
Sophie asks me if I got the email about her wanting the whole school to go ice-skating on the Lemon Fair River. Yes, I say, there is nothing I would want to do more than take the whole school skating there, but I inform her that, alas, we do not have the time in our schedule to take a herd of adolescents skating over flooded farm fields of Addison County
Simon asks about the modern ways of marlin fishing and we look at pictures on the internet. We then discuss the way the Old Man is braced into the boat and how the rope is over his shoulder and the reasons why he wants the fish to rise and jump.
After school I spend time in my office consulting with three kids who are having social issues. Something is expressed that doesn’t feel right. What was said? Why was it said? What is the source of the feelings prior to the saying of it? What wants to be said, or, what is more true that has not yet been said? What wants to be felt? I say then, and I say again in literature class, “To what extent is the passing of gossip an effort to solidify a weak friendship or our fear that we are alone? Is not gossip or complaining about other’s actions the cheapest, most meaningless but easiest shadow version of ourselves. Isn’t gossip, about another person really a way of avoiding ourselves? Ought we not to be revealing ourselves, which requires much more risk and self-reflection. Is gossiping not a form of clinging to someone else’s boat, and possibly swamping it, or causing them to want to crush our fingers as we cling to their gunwale.?
I mention here that part of our love for the Old Man, our respect and admiration for him, comes from seeing his willingness to be able to go out into the depths in the boat of himself. He is alone, he knows how to be alone, he can go into the far depths, out of sight of all land, out of sight even of the glow of the lights of Havana. Can we ourselves find that self-confidence to go into the depths, to look into the depths, out of sight and sound of the rest of the world?
I call down to the basement where some kids are “working.” They go far from me, like planets trying to escape the gravitational pull of the sun, so they can do a more “relaxing” version of work in their study period. I call them up where it is quiet and the impetus to concentrate is more defined.
***
I get an email from Reed asking if he can play a couple of songs in the play. The hunger to belong, to play a part. Yes, of course, I say, and I tell him and the other guitarists to work up a set list of 14 songs and 28 “parts.” The next day all three guitarists have guitars at school.
I collect math homework from Rose for Calder, who is sick. I hand it to Henry who shows it to fellow ninth graders Bryn and Cassie. Bryn and Henry both look at it wistfully and say, “I wish we could do this homework instead of Geometry. Geometry is hard.”
Bryn is working, for the second straight day, on her “phases of the moon” project. She has approximately six hundred separate pieces of paper all the size of a Mongolian pea and she endeavors to glue each one in perfect proximity to the others. "Bryn," I say, "You have put more time into making that Moon Phases project that it took for the moon to be made.” Now she is banging her head on the table. “I know, Tal,” she says, “You don’t usually see this process because I do it home.”
Isabel offers: “I love perfection!” Moments later, as Cassie tries to make her understand what is provable in the parallelogram of their geometry problem set, Isabel exclaims in dismay, “One is equal to two!?”
We burst out into laughter as she explains what she meant.
Cassie is still assiduously coloring her Golden Spiral as a version of a chambered nautilus. It looks as if light is playing over the surface of it, making it appear rounded and three dimensional.
Sophie comes in to ask how she should attach a piece of flexible plumbing pipe to a display box. Nathan offers the advice of using the screw-gun. At the end of the day there is an miniature arched planetarium made of plastic piping screwed to a black-painted viewing booth.
Luke enters and has an announcement; “We are putting together our video and are giving everyone the opportunity to everyone to come do some guest dancing. No cursing, no giving the finger to the camera, and you can dance as crazy as you like.” I excuse Hannah and Lydia to go dance in Luke’s Comet video. Later at lunch their completed Haley’s comet video, including guest dancers.
The eighth grader’s enter for study and I settle them down so they can work. I am asked, for the seventh time today by different kids, if I have read and commented on their stories. I have not. “I am working on it,” I say. “Tal,” says Miles. “I corrected my story, but I am not sure what else to do.”
“Did you correct all the things I said to do?”
He looks at me with pitiful despair.
"Do the corrections, Miles. You’ve just got to tighten it up. Buff up the muscles. It’s got the feeling, the structure, the narrative, the order. Now just perfect. Shine it, sculpt it. Let’s go, man!”
***
I’m reading Aylee’s story before lunch. It’s about her friend from childhood, the ones she has lost and the ones she has kept. She remembers in the story about collecting monarch butterfly cocoons in the fields of milkweed in fall with her friends when she was little. The story ends with this:
“In the spring when the weather is getting warmer a shiny, spotted, green gem shakes and quivers and cracks open. Black legs as thin as a spider’s web drag out a small mass of crinkled orange wings as weak and delicate as wet tissue paper. And there the butterfly stands in the cool morning shade, unfolding its wings. In a matter of time the wings are unfolded and brilliant in the sunlight and the butterfly flaps them and lifts off. It floats up and down in the breeze and then floats back and lands on a flower. It flaps its wings in the sun for a moment as if it is still trying to understand what it has done. And then in the indecision of an instant it lifts off and flies away. Then it is gone and all that’s left is what was there before—the still trees, the breeze and the sharp sunlight. And a memory of this birth into the green, orange, red and purple rainbow of a sea of flowers blooming in spring time.”
****
After lunch before Jesse’s project, an announcement is made by Nathan that we are creating a huge mess in the basement and it is a pain to clean up at the end of every day. I inquire if the cause of the mess is the result of the activity is around the Science project construction. “Yes,” come the exclamations. “People are not putting their tools and their glue guns away.” It is agreed that leaving one’s actual project down there is okay because they are big and cumbersome, but all the materials need to be put away. I have a suspicion that some of the mess is coming from the chaos surrounding the Rat’s Nest.
Jesse presents her project on Women’s Suffrage: First, before she can get to the project, she has to explain that Women’s Suffrage is not about suffering. It is about the fight for equality, for the right to vote, for rights to property ownership. She presents about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wanted the word “obey” out of the marriage vows, Abigail Adams, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. She shows us quotes, which we read aloud. “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.” (SBA). She tells us about Abigail Adams and we read portions of her letter to the (male) delegates at 1787 Constitutional Convention: “Include the rights of the ladies you have left at home…remember the wives you have left home on the farms, who raise the children…” She presents further on Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, in 1872, and who was also the first woman millionaire. She tells us about Emily Wilding Davison: throwing herself under the kings horse…and we see the video. She tells us about Madam C.J. Walker—First self-made Black Woman Millionaire and Elizabeth Blackwell: first woman to graduate from Medical School and first woman doctor. Then she says she wants to play “Respect” by Aretha Franklin (5th best song all-time according to Rolling Stone Magazine).
“Tal, do I have enough time to play it.”
“Are you kidding?? Of course…It’s Aretha Franklin!”
Finally, she tells us that of all the women who were key in the Suffrage movement in the 1800’s none were alive in 1917 when women were granted the right to vote. We discuss what that means and how it is true that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
It came as a surprise to most of the kids in the class that the 14th Amendment of 1867 gave black men the right to vote, and that women did not get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920. They were fairly shocked that women did not have rights to property ownership and equally disturbed by the idea that the woman became the “property” of men.
I tell the class: “If we say that a precept of a Utopian society is equality, then we have to say the right to vote is directly related to the pursuit of utopian society, because if people can’t vote they do not have any power.”
Ollie asks the question: "If it is in the bible that 'Sin began with a woman and thanks to her we must die,' and it has been that man have been the dominant power structure in societies across time and geography, HOW did it come to be, why did it start?"
We all speculate loosely about pre-historic times, but none of us, me included, knows the answer. I suggest that the question is worthy of a lifetime’s work and study.
Her project ends with a debate. The kids are divided into two groups, pro and con regarding the un-passed Equal Rights Amendment. The arguments are presented: Somewhere along the way I want the debate to be real. No more role playing. “Is it true there is gender bias?” I ask. Most of them have seen it or felt it. Some are not clear what it is. What is “equality of opportunity” versus “absolute equality? Eventually, after an hour of discussion we vote to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, 17-1, with a few abstentions and four votes saying they would pass it with modifications.
***
In the morning Reed Me. reads from Gandhi, one of his personal heroes: “The more efficient a force is, the more silent and the more subtle it is. Love is the subtlest force in the world. We notice the love between father and son, between brother and sister, friend and friend. But we have to learn to use that force among all that lives, and in the use of it consists our knowledge of god. Where there is love there is life. Hatred leads to destruction. Prayer is not asking. It is the longing of the soul. It daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
Among other things, this is a version of “satyagraha,” which in Gandhi’s concept means “truth insistence.” Later Gandhi let his term be more fluid in its use and application, and eventually it came to mean “love force” or “soul-force,” a concept Martin Luther King spoke about directly in his “I Have a Dream” speech.
***
After school two girls are upset. It has been chaotic and violent downstairs during clean-up. There s chasing and throwing of school materials. Objects have been launched from the Rat’s Nest/lighting booth by the boys who have been working in there. As I suspected, something else is going on. The girls and I investigate. We find evidence—the basement is littered with various objects of a small-scale play battle. We unlock the Rat’s Nest and confiscate ammo and a couple of Wiffleball bats.
I initiate a conference about the Rat’s nest, misuses of school materials, the rowdiness. In fact, I have known things are getting carried away, but I do more damage to learning when I act like a policeman. When the kids see me as the sole authority they do not learn how to see and discover and use their own latent authority. In this case, I have let it go until it has caused something, a feeling or an awareness. That feeling has arisen in the form of the two girls, who have indicated, finally, that they have had enough. Canaries in a coal mine.
But more than that. It’s not enough to simply say, “Don’t go down there. Stop doing that.” Anything that happens has a generative impulse, a force. So what was behind the bunker, the defensive fortification? Who was in there and why? What was being controlled, who was doing the controlling. And why? What was the emotional under-layment under the chaos. I am going to act on my core belief: there is a reason for everything that these kids do, and our goal is to find what it is, and finding that is our learning.
So I let the chaos go. I watched it and waited. I wanted to let the impulses play out.
So, what is the consequence in a community when one group begins to wall themselves off? Certainly the need to have a home, a safe place, a cozy, enclosed sphere is at play. We do this in making close friends, or creating a safe relationship with a teacher, or finding a new activity with which we become familiar and companionable. But we do it in physical space as well. We once had a music library—the kids started it, anyone could participate, it was free flowing, there were no walls, there were rules, but the rules did not exclude, they simply controlled chaos. We once had some one who colonized a space in the school as a colony of her room at home. What was she doing? She was making a safe place here in school, a place or room of her own. She filled it with images of herself, her loves. But this was only a temporary space, a way of saying, I want to make a place for myself here. And there was no door to the room she colonized. It was open: anyone could go in, and look at what was there. She was inviting us to see her.
IN the case of the Rat’s Nest: the boys have made a fortress. But there were limitations on who could be in it. It had a lock, and codes of conduct in it were not reached by mutuality or consensus but by dictatorial fiat. The boys crowded some people out. It was no longer a light booth but an exclusive fraternity. Not surprisingly, hostility grew up around it and within it. Inside, squabbling over who could come in, who had to leave, how many persons, what was permissible. Outside, those who wanted to come in swarmed around wondering what was going on. Hostility gave birth to mild physical exchanges—projectiles being launched out, invaders trying to break in.
Something was walled off, walled in, walled out.
So what was behind it? I push until there are tears. And what is really going inside the boys here. The tears come. Authentic feeling, beginning with Captain of the Rat Patrol opening himself up to what he was really feeling. His partner crying as well, saying he was only in there because he wanted a friend and it was fun, but then it became something else and it was not fun. They both felt as though, in the Rat’s Nest, they each had a brother, that they each had some control. The head boy was a boy who wanted to be a leader—but in the big class, and he had not found a way. So he found another expression: to be head of the lights for the play, which lead to becoming head of the light booth, which became being head of the rat’s nest, which became a fortress, which became a wall, which separated him and took him away form his class and his goals and his real feelings.
A storm of emotions. An avalanche of ideas and desires, things going inside himself, all too diffcult to bring to fruition. The Rat's Nest became the escape hatch. There he had control, there he was protected, there he did not have to think about his bigger thoughts, there he had a friend and the friend-feeling felt bigger as it formed through excluding others. There he was walled from doing much good and walled off from really bringing out what he was really feeling.
We discussed the whole this in terms of the men in The Old Man and the Sea, who fish in shallow waters, who never venture out, who are content to catch multitudes of average fish. Was he going to the rat-nest a way of staying in shallow water, of being afraid to go out into the depths. Was throwing projectiles outward really a way of fighting back and making oneself be seen and known because one was not seen or known? To the class it appeared that the captains of the Rat’s Nest were not really being deep water fishermen. Further, it seemed to the class, that those projectiles were really messages saying, “See me, see me.” If so, and we agreed it was so, then why did those words “see me” not get said more directly, more clearly.
And when it came out that two ninth grade girls had been writing notes to the Rat’s Nest captain, telling him they loved his cute butt and wanted to give him a blizzard of kisses, what did they really mean to say? In fact, they said, they wanted to have a way to talk to him, but did not have a way to talk to him, and so they resorted to a comical/untruthful way which of saying they wanted to talk to him, which only confused him, and certainly did not bring them closer to each other in authentic communion, except through a comic and untrue flirtation. Communication, stripped of meaning, truth, honesty and directness thus became unfulfilling, condusing and meaningless, floating on the surface, the depths never touched, never known. Tears washed all the subterfuge away and left us looking at the bare bones.
The essence of Satyagraha is that it seeks to eliminate antagonisms without harming the antagonists themselves, as opposed to violent resistance, which is meant to cause harm to the antagonist. A Satyagrahi therefore does not seek to end or destroy the relationship with the antagonist, but instead seeks to transform or “purify” it to a higher level.
I used this concept in trying to deal with this. It would have been easy enough to tell the antagonists to “stop,” to close the Rat’s Nest, to crush the motion and impulse. But I did not want to say ”No,” or punish anyone, or set up arbitrary rules, or get mad. Those are all forms of repression that lead to rebellion and distrust and disempowerment. I wanted to bring to light why it was happening, and I wanted it to be seen for what it truly was. When we do it that way, we come to a state of purification.
Two days later, I went downstairs. The hideout was still there. The weapons were gone. The light switches were still accessible. But the door was open, with a black cloth hanging in the doorway. The door was open, and nothing was walled out or in.
***
“Unendingly:” The word is used in The Old Man and the Sea to describe the great fish when it comes rising to the surface from the depths. “He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides…” We discussed how that word that is not accurate, (because the fish ends, because it is not still rising from the sea with water pouring from his sides…) and yet, the word is right, as it suggests magnificence, nobility, majesty and eternity. Yes, the fish will end. The old man will end, we will end, but the image rises in our minds, in the pages of the book, unendingly. Once there, we can’t forget it. Once we have the experience of it, in the words, in our own minds, as the image passes through our minds and sight, we will have it forever.
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