Category Archives: creative solutions

Most public high school classes have relatively large numbers of students, which challenges a teacher’s ability to learn names in the opening days.  Independent school classes typically have fewer students.  Even so, I find it hard, at each new year, to match names with faces.

Last year, for example, I had several sets of twins in my classes–identical twins.  In one case, two brothers looked exactly alike–from my untrained, unpracticed, unaccustomed eye.  Literally all year, I tried to master the distinction.  Through this struggle, I eventually discovered that I could tell them apart from their writing–i.e., from their authorial voices.  Though these twin faces frustrated me, I could hear the differences in boys’ sentences.

This year, partly because I have more students than last year–though still only half of what my public school colleagues face–I worry about how quickly I will remember names.  We are forging ahead with writing right away, so that I can get to know the individuals as writers and thinkers.  Eventually the face recognition will happen;  it does every year.  In the meantime, if I think of each of them as hummingbirds, I want to keep quiet and still enough to feel the wind from their wings as they approach.

Recently at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, we saw beluga whales–beautiful, graceful, snow-white swimmers.  The wall plaque explains that they use echolocation.  In other words, they see with sound. They send sounds from a focal point in their head–the name for this point I forget– then they listen to echoes entering through their jaw.  In this way, says the plaque, they learn about objects that surround them.

Isn’t this what writers do?  We send out sounds, while listening for echoes that bounce back from our environment?  Camus says that art exists only in this relationship; without it, we have made something other than  art.  Art, like us–or because of us–is essentially social, Camus claims.  I tend to agree.

These reflections remind me of the book I am reading, Revolution 2.0–a memoir by a young Egyptian, Wael Ghonim.  He explains how the movement opposed to Mubarak’s regime used facebook to build support.  Most interesting to me at the moment is the incremental way his (anonymously administered) facebook page built its membership.  With previous marketing experience, he strategically sent out sounds to other young people who had had enough of brutal authoritarian rule in their country.  In the early days, his page had 100,000 members, seventy percent of whom were under age twenty-four.  The echoes returning from his posts, in the form of tens of thousands of “likes” and comments  per day, taught him about the political environment.  Formerly inactive students slowly built confidence that their voices were being heard and that their ideas mattered.

Finally, I am reminded–again–of one of Whitman’s poems that continues to resonate with me.  Here it is–because it seems to touch on the beluga’s echolocation and Mr. Ghonim’s experience:

A NOISELESS, PATIENT SPIDER

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

postscript 1. Artists see and forge connections; that’s what they do.  The threads of this post remind me of  the napkin game I learned from friends during our days in Buffalo, NY.  While waiting for our dinner at a restaurant, Susie drew three lines on a paper napkin.  The person sitting on her right had sixty seconds to draw something that connected these three lines.  Though I do not remember the line set-ups or complementary renderings, I recall the game.  This game represents something that artists do well–they see connections, and, if hard to see, the artists forge them.  I think novels satisfy me partly for this reason.  The last one I read, for instance, John Wray’s Canaan’s Tongue, threads together several aspects of American culture–by weaving a fictional tapestry around a gang of slave traders in 1863 Louisiana who are led by the historical person known, in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, as “The Redeemer.”  Imaginative fiction, especially longer work like a novel, makes connections by creating an entire world of characters.  Through the process of composing these worlds, the writer finds and reveals connections among threads we might not have discovered by ourselves.  

postscript 2. As a teacher, I feel a bit like the beluga whale.  I use echolocation to learn about students’ spirits, which, in turn, helps me help them.  I  help e–duc-ate students (lead them out–of themselves), as I learn more about who they are and what they care about.  Assignments and exercises send  sounds, and my assessment reads the echoes.

photo credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Beluga_whale.png

Magnolia blossoms

Opening to warmth and light

Like those who show love

Growing near my parents’ new home, as well as in our own backyard, are magnolia trees–with their gardenia-like, sweet-smelling blossoms about the size your two hands make, when you shape them into an open cup.  The first line of this poem belongs solely to these magnificent flowers.  The second line describes the main forces that produce these beautiful blossoms.  Once we see the poem’s last line, the marriage metaphor works.  The beauty of ourselves in a loving relationship blossoms, when we remain open to warmth and light.  These things, in natural fact, make us more open, more sweet, more fully ourselves, which, in turn, enriches our time together with each other.

This poem is as much an invitation as a commemoration.  It honors my parents’ sixty years of marriage, while  inviting all of us at the table to remember the grand flowering of the magnolia.  Line two uses the progressive form “opening,” rather than the past “opened,” in order to strike this inviting tone.

The last line uses the verb “show” to make the point that feeling love is one thing, but showing it–so that others see it–adds extra light and warmth.  Unless I am a mushroom or a creature miles deep on the ocean floor, I need these things–just like everyone else.  I need to show them, too.

Talking together

              Here and now makes a difference

                             Over many years

This haiku grows straight from a conversation with my wife shortly before the anniversary dinner.  Since the dinner celebrates a marriage, the impulse for this haiku fits.  Although some couples talk more than we do and some less, I value our ability to communicate openly and often.  Therefore, the first line represents the object of my appreciation.

In another run-on, an effect which I am starting to enjoy in haiku, the second line extends the general process to the present moment, making the abstract concrete.  Sometimes talking with your partner is difficult, awkward or even scary, but, in my experience, always valuable.  The reference to “here and now” grounds the lofty idea of communication.  Talk here and now, rather than wait for a “better” time–this is the spirit of line two’s opening.  Then, as it happens (I love the surprises that surface from composing, and from reflecting), the second half of line two not only completes the specific thought that conversation in the present matters, but it also produces an independent line two that says, “what you do now matters.”  This independent line creates a nice symmetry because it returns the poem to a general level.

Line three, then, moves back to the specific occasion of a sixtieth anniversary–with the phrase “for many years.”  While reminding us of this particular celebration, the last line also describes the accumulated value of openly communicating in the present.  The present is also the future.

Unlike the other haiku so far, this one has no central image–from nature or anywhere else.  In this sense, the poem stays more abstract than the others.  This feature may explain why I spend time noticing the layers of generality.  The experience of talking does not inherently produce a memorable concrete image; it is almost like live theatre, insofar as you have the conversation, then you have your memories of it and your associations with it.  The event itself has passed; only the impact and meaning remain.    In a way, this haiku #4 holds my memory of that conversation between me and my wife, Ann.  In particular, it captures my appreciation that we can have such talks, over many years.