Category Archives: challenge

September 9, 2012 · 9:36 am

F F F

These three letters represent a course I have been considering for some time: “Farms, Factories and Facebook.”  In this course, students read literature, mostly fiction, that conveys the rhythms and mindsets of three ages in human history: agricultural, industrial and digital.  We might call the third “informational,” but for now I am simply collecting titles and ideas.  For the most part, this collecting has been happening privately.  Feel free to comment with your thoughts.  Feel free to launch such a course yourself.  I trust we will acknowledge each other, when occasion calls for that.

Meanwhile, an article in yesterday’s New York Times profiles a Korean writer whose work fits my picture of this FFF course.  Shin Kyung-Sook’s novel, Please Look After Mom, has made a lasting impression on my wife, since she read it  about a year ago.  When yesterday’s article appeared, we both said we want to read her other novels, I Will Be Right There and A Lone Room.  The Times article describes the  traumatic change in South Korea from an agrarian to industrial society–within just one generation.  Ms. Kyung-Sook’s stories reveal what this dramatic disruption means to Korean families.  The conflicts at the heart of the society reveal the distinct rhythms and mindsets of both eras. Therefore, one of these novels may suit the course I am imagining.

Other literature I have considered defines an era’s worldview from within–think Tess of the D’Urbevilles or Hard Times, for example–rather than across the “time zones.”  Given my experience with home-grown courses like this, I want to find good stories– ones that engage students initially and years later, for their emotional and intellectual impact.  Stories they carry with them.  Analyzing the eras we humans have navigated is part of the course, but I have learned not to impose too much of my own historical ruminations on high school juniors and seniors.  Those ideas provide a sturdy infrastructure, but individual students need to shape their own conclusions in their own way, largely through induction while reading these stories.

That’s it for now. Concerning this course, the time has apparently come to widen what Seamus Heaney calls the “circumference of understanding.”  If you want to see and/or comment on the google doc of ideas and titles, complete the following form.  Thank you.

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August 26, 2012 · 2:10 pm

signifying nothing 5.5.23

This week, the seniors and I have been working on the difference between a poem’s speaker and author.  The following sequence of ideas arose this morning, while my wife and I drank coffee and talked on the deck,  and while the sunlight  touched the tops of our neighbor’s seventy-foot pine trees.

We saw his pine trees, as well as what used to be an equally tall oak, until a July storm dropped its top half.  During this morning’s coffee talk, I recalled that our neighbor, let’s call him Paul Bunyan, finally began cutting the fallen limbs with his chain saw last night.  Mention of the chain saw reminded me of Frost’s poem, “Out, Out,” which the seniors had recently read.  In fact, some seniors may be using that poem for their first essay about tone; I hope I steal none of their thunder with this post.  (Ssshh, don’t tell any  of them about this post, yet.)

Naturally, at least for us two career literature teachers, Shakespeare entered the conversation–in the form of Macbeth, whose speech after Lady Macbeth’s death includes the phrase “Out, out, [brief candle].”  When I repeated Frost’s title, my wife gave Macbeth’s next thought, “Life’s but a walking shadow” (5.5.23).  At this point, my mind returned to this week’s work with seniors; I often find my mind going there.

Here, I thought, is a fine example of the energy created by the difference between speaker and author.  My first thought on remembering Macbeth’s speech was that I disagree with his final claim that life is a “tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing”–especially as I sat with my wife during this morning’s sunrise.  Then I realized, perhaps in a freshly rich way, that so does Shakespeare.  If he agrees with Macbeth, why bother writing all of these plays?  At this point in the Scottish play, Macbeth has reached the very bottom of his despair and hopelessness.   Ever since he has told himself that he is in bloody murders too steeped to turn back, he has been pursuing an untenable human course.  He has separated himself from his most worthy being, as well as from other people.  His moral coherence, his ethical integrity has been dissolving, unlike the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands, which she cannot remove with her bootless cry, “Out, out, damned spot.”

Shakespeare, the author of Macbeth’s final desperate words, does see human life as signifying something, even while imagining a character who does not.  In fact, through his art, the author tries to lead us away from such despair by enacting the journey that led to it.  He wants to bring the lesson alive on stage.

And here, at this junction of  speaker and author, I am reminded of a critical thinking skill that appeared on my recent blog post’s list of such skills.  In this case, I am thinking of “shape meaningful schema.”  Students who understand the play’s plot, Macbeth’s decline and the speech’s words are ready to combine these understandings with the author/speaker distinction, in order to shape in their minds a pattern that makes sense, that means something, that signifies something.  With all due respect to Mr. Macbeth, I will keep making meaning–even out of his story.  I will keep helping students do the same.

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August 19, 2012 · 9:59 pm

a borrower and a lender

I thought readers of this blog might enjoy a recent assignment described for my seniors.  They have started writing reflections on poems they find in our text, and I gave this guidance for their first piece; these instructions grow from a sentence in Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his Whitbread-Award winning translation of Beowulf.  Enjoy.

For this first reflection, base your writing on a single poem from chapter one of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Gioia’s Introduction to Poetry.  In the previous assignment for this week, I asked you to pick a poem on which you would like to reflect.  As you consider this poem, use the quote from Seamus Heaney, seen in the photograph above.  His brief statement comes the introduction to his translation of the Old English narrative poem, Beowulf, which we will start reading in several weeks.  I posted his passage in a prominent place because I admire and value the thought and feeling behind it.  In his introduction, he describes a particular struggle he experienced during the translation project.  He struggled to reconcile apparently disparate parts of his past.  His perseverance eventually led to a discovery that produced the statement above our door: “my heart lifted again, the world widened, something was furthered” (xxvi).  I would like to use this statement as guidance for your first reflection.

In other words, use any or all of the statement’s parts as guides for writing a reflection of approximately 200-400 words; this will be the typical length for reflections posted on your blog.  Let me explain my thinking about how to use the parts to Heaney’s statement.  “My heart lifted”: Consider a poem that lifts your heart in a small or large way.  Perhaps the poem as a whole does this, or maybe a single line.  You can read “lifted” loosely.  In other words, something about the poem satisfied you, or rang true, resonated, or made you say “yes” in some fashion.  It made you feel fuller.  “The World Widened”: As a result of your heart’s lifting, your understanding of the world, which includes yourself and other people, has widened.  To borrow from Rilke, another poet, your orbit has grown wider.  You see more because of this poem or this line.  “Something was furthered”: This sounds like the previous part of the statement, but it also suggests that the world evolved in some way because your world widened.  Some problem was solved, some insight gained.  Some larger value was added to the world because of this thinking or feeling you are doing.  Admittedly, this last part is probably the hardest to apply, but feel free to give it a go, if you are so inclined.

As you write your reflection, use my explanation of Heaney’s passage as guidance–rather than as a set of questions all of which you must answer.  The fun and beauty of such reflective writings is that they give you a chance to notice and follow your responses.  Let the associations happen, while challenging yourself to be as clear as possible–to yourself and your blog readers.

Have fun.  Enjoy the writing.

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August 9, 2012 · 11:40 am

Regular Writing #1

Making things is harder than destroying them.  Who do you know who is a successful builder?  What does this person build or make—houses, clothes, food, friends or something else?

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August 9, 2012 · 11:16 am

reasons I can’t reveal

For reasons I can’t reveal, I have created a significant number of writing prompts for original stories and essays.  The complete list of these prompts will appear on class homework blogs this year, so that students can regularly use them to start a new piece of their own writing.  Initially, I will likely limit the length, as a way to encourage the habit of writing  and to enable more prompt comments.  The list contains enough prompts that we could write one a week, and I may try to keep this pace at the start of this project.

I mention this project because I plan to participate.  Maroonballoon will host my writings that can model the process for students.  Students will have their own writing blogs, which will house their pieces from this project (for which we do not yet have a name), as well as regular reflections on the course readings.

The project and the student blogs are two more experiments.  Like Whitman’s noiseless patient spider, we need to keep sending forth filament, filament, filament ’til a ductile anchor hold.

 

In my next post, I will start participating in this project–tentatively titled “growing writing” or “working the soil” or “regular writing.”  The last one appeals to me, since it sets up student blogs for a complementary title, “reflective writing.”  Or we could just say “prompts” and “reflections.”  In any case, I will start with this prompt: Making things is harder than destroying them.  Who do you know who is a successful builder?  What does this person build or make—houses, clothes, food, friends or something else?

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June 29, 2012 · 4:18 pm

I wanna care

Before I entered junior high school, my parents sent me to reading camp.  I do not know all of the diagnostic details explained to my parents, but I do remember regularly struggling to read “fast.”  Years after junior and senior high, I find myself telling others, including my high school students, that I struggled to read fast enough to care about the fictional characters I encountered.  Why read, if you cannot care about the people involved?  That became the underlying dynamic of my high school reading–in literature, history and elsewhere.

This remembrance of things past surfaces today, while reading reviews of Gita Mehta’s novel, Raj.  A friend just told me he is considering one of her other novels, A River Sutra, for his Humanities class’s India unit.  While reading about this novel and her other books, I encountered the following excerpt:

Princess Jaya of Balmer, witness to bloodshed and insurmountable political upheaval, realizes that royal India’s demise is imminent. “Although the rich background detail is engrossing, Jaya remains a remote character to whom one never develops an attachment,” PW [Publishers Weekly] said of this novel penned by the wife of Knopf’s Sonny Mehta. Author tour.  (from Amazon.com, emphasis added)

Without having read her books, I cannot agree or disagree with this or any review, but the quoted sentence sparks a memory of my early reading experiences.  The maroonballoon blog has become, especially this summer, a place to remember and recount the dynamics of my own reading and writing.  Time–in the close sense of summer vacation, as well as the broader sense of my career–invites me to reflect on the basic dynamics and associations within my own composing and comprehending.  Awareness of these personal phenomena equips me more robustly, as another colleague might put it, to understand and guide students’ reading and writing.  A heightened awareness allows me to communicate more convincingly, “I’ve been there.”  It also enables me to spot their struggles and deconstruct the confusion they might be experiencing.

Now, as an older person, I enjoy reading and writing, though still struggling to read “faster.”  I look forward, for example, to reading A River Sutra.  I also will be reading Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion in the recent Affordable Health Care Act decision.  I just enjoy reading stuff–of various sorts.

Reading a variety is important for students; they need to be flexible readers.  This wide exposure strengthens–i.e., makes more robust–their writing.  In my case, for example, reading the first pages of Justice Roberts’ opinion helped me write my letter of protest to the GA Dept of Revenue.  Writers write their reading.  Seeing Roberts’ careful wording and conceptual coherence inspires me to greater precision.  So it is with students younger than I .

Today’s title, by the way, is meant to echo the label some people use to identify the law officially passed as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (Public Law 111-148).  I know this blog post title captures a primary principle in my reading experiences, and I believe it reflects the best instincts of most people, as they consider the long-term health of all Americans.

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June 19, 2012 · 4:32 pm

subversive activity

The title echoes one of my early teaching bibles, Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity.  The main inspiration for today’s writing comes from a paragraph in Evangelia G. Chrisikou’s recent article, “Your Creative Brain at Work” (Scientific American Mind, July/August 2012).

After quoting the paragraph, I will comment on the teacher-as-disturber, the openings of Shakespeare’s plays and of Ed Park’s recent short story–as well as the role of poetry.  Shakespeare wrote in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and I did not know him personally, except through his writing.  Ed Park, on the other hand, lives in NYC today, and I do know him, not only through his writing.  For example, my wife and I had lunch with him in NYC several summers ago.

Here’s the quote about brains at work:

Although creativity has long been considered a gift of a select minority, psychologists are now revealing its seeds in mental processes, such as decision making, language and memory, that all of us possess.  Thus, we can all boost our creative potential.  Recent studies show promise for techniques that break down people’s established ways of viewing the world as well as strategies that encourage unconscious thought processes. 

Here are the comments:

Recently, I have billed myself (sorry) as someone who likes to ask questions.  In fact, I am currently reading a book called Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions.  If we are to help students by educating them, which from Latin means leading them out (presumably of themselves), we have to regularly ask thoughtful, thought-provoking questions, while giving students real practice at doing the same.  The questions drive the work; otherwise, what’s the point of all this reading and writing?

I think of these moments in literature: the opening of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with its raucous crowd of Caesar opponents and proponents (consider present-day Cairo); the start of Romeo and Juliet, with its feuding families; the haunted tower of Hamlet, with its disorienting apparition.  In each case, the story starts with disturbance.  So the story of student learning begins with disturbance, questions and subversion.  What one has thought is tested; new theories, interpretations and understandings must be forged, shaped and tested.

Ed Park’s short story, “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” published in the journal Open City (Winter 2010-2011), begins with entertaining uncertainty.  Halfway through a sentence, I realize the need to adjust the “horizon of expectations.”*  The narrator, being ever so generous, helps me adjust my view.  Here is the story’s first paragraph:

When I call my parents, my mom tells me my dad is busy teaching a class on the internet.  That is, the class is in a classroom but the topic is the Internet.  More specifically, he’s teaching seniors–that is, old people–how to blog, write anonymous comments on news articles without panicking, poke their children on Facebook, and get away with not writing h, t, t, p, colon, backslash, backslash, w, w, w, dot before every web address.

The best poetry breaks down “people’s established views” and “encourages unconscious thought processes.”  I like to think of writing poems as a technique for doing this, with all due respect to what recent scientific studies show.  Think of Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” which asks readers/listeners to take a poem and hold it to the light like a color slide, or run their hands along its wall to feel for the light switch.  Metaphors like these, when students read or make them, turn their lens, tip an object or idea this way or that.

So, in practical terms, what do these ideas mean for work with students?  First, let’s acknowledge the role played by “essential questions” in many curricula.  I understand the rise of this organizational method.  At the same time, as indicated by my current reading,  I believe the strongest school results come from students who know how, and are given the chance or responsibility, to ask their own questions, meaning questions that mean something to them.

This year, I have experimented with broad essential questions that serve the curricula I inherited when I changed schools.  These questions have proved productive enough that I will likely use them again this coming year.  I am finding that they generate students’ sub-questions.  Here are the essential ones I have used.  The number shows grade level.

12 Where do we find struggle, internal and external?  Where do we see monsters or demons, and what makes them so?  What influences our responses to these struggles and monsters?

10 Who am I?  What are my primary responsibilities to myself and the communities in which I live?


For context, I should add that the senior classes began with Beowulf, while the sophomores opened with Oedipus Rex.   Imagine how you would apply the questions to these texts.  Also, I should add that Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation–the one we use–includes an account of his personal linguistic struggle, having grown up in Northern Ireland.  In patiently facing this fundamental challenge, he produces a statement that hangs above the entrance to the classroom in which I teach:  “my heart lifted again, the world widened, something was furthered” (xxvi).  It turns out that the linguistic history of the Old English word meaning “to suffer” resolved Heaney’s personal struggle.

So, let’s keep an eye on established views, while asking questions that may disturb.  We can ask such questions of the material students are experiencing, but we can also ask them of ourselves as educators.  For example, what are the “established ways of viewing the world” among today’s teachers?  Who establishes them?  How do we determine that they are, in fact, established?

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June 16, 2012 · 6:31 pm

pattern recognition

I find myself repeating myself.

As I wrote yesterday’s post, I found myself repeating myself.  In other words, ideas or phrases kept re-emerging, floating to the surface of my attention.  For example, the gaps I mean–to echo Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.”  The idea of gaps cycled back through my attention, and I enjoyed its return because that gave me momentum.  The momentum was fueled by the fun surprise of the re-emergence; I did not plan so much as discover it.  A bit like turning over soil and discovering worms wriggling about.  Once the idea of gaps returned for the first time, I began seeing it as a recurring theme that I could intentionally nurture.  A structure of sorts emerged, or a motif.  I could then identify and develop different kinds of gaps.  Sometimes I impose structures beforehand, but at times like this, the frameworks emerge more organically.  In these vacation reflections, I can play around with this organic material.

So what about pattern recognition?  This is a specific skill within the broader ability called problem-solving.  Teachers need to help students develop this specific skill, and literature study provides a tool for this training.  So does reflective writing.  One benefit of my playing around with this organic material–there I go repeating myself–is that I can practice pattern-recognition.  In this particular case, I have seen a concept repeated.  The start of a pattern happened unintentionally, for the most part; I then continued the pattern on purpose.

link to previous post

Students benefit from being able to “listen” to the sequence of their own ideas.  Reflective writing can provide practice at “hearing” recurring concepts in their mind.  Those patterns, I have found, serve as productive launching pads for their individual writing.  Their voices are more likely to emerge in writing that builds from patterns in their own minds.

final comments

I enjoyed seeing the idea of gaps recur.  This recognition had the ring of revelation.  Maybe not to the scale of Joyce’s epiphany, but it had a spark of joyful learning nonetheless, and that’s my main reason for sharing it.  Many writers no doubt have already firmly learned this feeling of pattern recognition emerging from their composing, but–to paraphrase Neruda’s “Ars Poetica I”– I am learning this by working with my own hands, which is the kind of learning I hope for students.

Yesterday, I hung some dill branches in the shed to dry.  Later, we can use the dried seeds to flavor dinner dishes or to plant new seedlings.  In either case, the dill work reminds me of an idea for my youtube series, growing writers.  That series explores connections between gardening and writing.  In the case of dill and yesterday’s post, I have harvested the idea of gaps  for future use.  Since the seeds are drying, I can use them any time I want–to flavor a meal or grow more plants.

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June 15, 2012 · 1:44 pm

leave room, or Raiders of the Lost Art

In this post, I reflect on listening.  If neither title above makes ultimate sense to you, try this one:  Quiet, the bee is sleeping.  On a recent morning, as I was walking near our deck, I glanced inside a small gap–half the width of my little finger–between one of the corner posts and the railing.  In that gap, I noticed a black-and-gold bumble bee sleeping in the pre-dawn quiet, undisturbed.  I enjoyed finding him resting there, and, although I never heard him per se, the twilight atmosphere in which I made the discovery captures a component in the process of listening.  The following reflections on listening grow from a confluence of recent experiences.  Time away from the formal academic year gives me a chance to reflect more richly on such confluences than I usually do during official school days.  I find it helpful to remember this gap vacation and school modes because I often encourage students to reflect, but I need to understand, and take  into account, the various levels and kinds of reflection.  Many school cultures struggle to encourage depth of thinking, especially reflective thought.  Granted the age gap between me and my students makes a difference; I am more inclined to look back on years of experiences.  Even so, my own reflective explorations help me help them.  Somewhat regardless of the depth, I can pull from these writings an appreciation for associations.  How do the chains work?  How, and when, do we most meaningfully notice these links–be they conceptual, sense-related or other.  As I have written elsewhere, and believe as firmly as ever, our mind is powered by association.  We are natural poets all.  Reflective writing opens the window on associations that our brain is making with or without our attention.  

Enough preamble. 

Three days ago, I wrote a letter.  Yes, by hand.  I wanted to congratulate a sophomore whose hard work this past year had produced the most original final exam essay.  When he emailed that essay, he apologized for not having achieved higher grades.  He also, truth be told, said that he enjoyed the class.

In my letter, I asked the student not to apologize because he had faced his challenges with resilience, persistence and unquenchable curiosity.  The final exam asks an intentional sequence of interconnected short-answer questions about The Kite Runner.  Students who were aware of the ideas developing in their answers had the raw material to address the essay question, which they knew would focus on the topic of moral courage in three books: Alvarez’s novel, In the Time of the Butterflies; Wiesel’s memoir, Night; and Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner.   On the top of the short-answer sheet, this student wrote “Finally figured it out!”    Just beneath that declaration, he drew a wide, narrow rectangle in which he wrote: “Main Theme of Book: Guilt: living with guilt and finding a way to be good again.”

Yes, he has struggled this year–struggled to understand.  But that’s exactly the point.  He has not backed away from this challenge.  I am not surprised, but certainly am pleased, that his persistence produced such a distinctive essay.  The writing rings with his own voice, which means his own mind.  He has carved out a meaning that works for him.  Ironically, that meaning involves the ideas of guilt and becoming good.  Consider his email.  This ironic connection reminds me that learning is personal.  While he accurately identifies a major theme in the novel, he also has named a major theme in his course work this year.

How, then, does this episode embody the idea of listening?  In two ways.  First, when I read student essays, and perhaps especially exam essays, which are designed to show individuals’ making new meaning from the course materials and discussions, I listen for their voice, their original interpretations.  Second, this student, with his email apology and exam-sheet declaration, is listening to himself.  He knows that he has crossed over into the satisfying land of understanding.  He is aware of having solved a conceptual problem.  He has spotted the bumble bee sleeping in the gap.

connection

Two days ago, I met a good friend for lunch.  We talked about our families, our jobs–about growing things, making things and trying to figure some things out.  Has has recently written about listening; at least, that’s how my memory of his blog post emerges at the moment.  In particular, he recalls asking William Stafford, “What is at the heart of great teaching?”  Stafford answered, “Find out where your student is, and help him get to the next step.”  Do you hear my connecting Stafford’s response to the idea of listening?  I have always valued listening–in myself and in others.  I am grateful for Stephen’s question and Stafford’s answer because they make me feel good about my work with the sophomore boy mentioned above.  Struggles like his can take a long time to bear noticeable fruit, but we need to remember that the fruit does fall and that it takes time to do so, which is something else that Stephen and I talked about during lunch. (Incidentally, I think of educators’ recent pleas, especially in the context of technology conversations, to meet students “where they are.”  I respect this plea, and therefore want to  understand the various ways in which we teachers can do this.  Some of these ways involve may involve facebook or youtube, while others involve letters and essays.)

another connection

Finally, I have been thinking about Dave Eggers’ book, Zeitoun–an account of a New Orleans family’s many struggles during and after the Katrina disaster.  I highly recommend it.  Pretend America is a person whom you have just asked for a story.  “Tell me a recent story,” you say, “that shows how good you can be, but also how your complicated nature causes needless suffering and indignity.”  Zeitoun is the story America tells.  As for the connection to listening, I am thinking of an image that runs through the book, and appears on the cover:  the main character’s paddling his canoe through the flooded streets of New Orleans.  He is able to help a number of city residents, people and dogs, because his craft proceeds quietly enough that he can hear suffering.  He listens for it and responds.  Part of his reason for staying behind in the city, while his wife and children have evacuated, is so that he can help people.  Listening from his canoe allows him to do this over and over.

Final comments

The title, “Leave room,” refers to my leaving room for students to grow, to “get to the next step.”   Of course, leaving room involves more than just listening, but listening allows me to design the space into which they can grow.  This idea of growing into a space explains the garden photograph I have attached.  You notice that I have left room for the parsley to expand; I may also transplant the tarragon into some of that space.

The title, “Raiders of the Lost Art,” suggests that aspects of today’s culture discourage listening.  At the same time, the title suggests a question: “Who, or what, are the Raiders?”


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March 3, 2012 · 7:07 pm

to live on the hillside

As has happened more than once–ask my wife–while walking through a room in our house, I spotted a book.  This time it was Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words: Essays (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1983).  I pulled it from the shelf mostly because of yesterday’s post–about not wasting chances to grow something.  Passages from Berry’s book have fed me ever since I found it in Durham, NC some years ago.  One of its passages I have framed; it hangs in my office at work. It describes the value of discipline.  Yesterday’s post about saving radish sprouts made me want to review a few passages I had tagged in the book.  I found two to include here.

As some readers may know, Wendell Berry likes to write about farming. In fact, the following excerpts come from his essay called “People, Land, and Community.”  I enjoy and appreciate his descriptions of agricultural rhythms, especially in this our increasingly digital world.  I find comfort and value in his discussion of time.  It simply takes time to grow things, and discipline to stay with the same soil.  I am starting to hear echoes of the teaching profession in passages like these below.

“But to think of the human use of a piece of land as continuing through hundreds of years, we must greatly complicate our understanding of agriculture.  Let us start a job of farming on a given place–say an initially fertile hillside in the Kentucky River Valley–and construe it through time.

“1. To begin using this hillside for agricultural production–pasture or crop–is a matter of a year’s work.  This is work in the present tense, adequately comprehended by conscious intention and by the first sort of knowledge I talked about–information available to the farmer’s memory and built into his methods, tools, and crop and livestock species.  Understood inits present tense, the work does not reveal its value except insofar as the superficial marks of craftsmanship maybe seen and judged.  But excellent workmanship, as with a breaking plow, may prove as damaging as bad workmanship.  The work has not revealed its connections to the place or to the worker.  These connections are revealed in time.

“2. To live on the hillside and use it for a lifetime gives the annual job of work a past and a future.  To live on the hillside and use it without diminishing its fertility or wasting it by erosion still requires conscious intention and information, but now we must say good intention and good (that is, correct) information, resulting in good work.  And to these we must now add character: the sort of knowledge that might properly be called familiarity, and the affections, habits, values, and virtues ((conscious and unconscious) that would preserve good care and good work through hard times” (71-72).

There you are then.  One of my marked passages from Wendell Berry’s book.  Living on the hillside is like living with the students.  Knowledge and memory, affections and patience–we depend on these for results that emerge later, sometimes much later, in time.

photo credit: http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10185

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