Write Now. Write Here.

The other night, I turned on one of the more conservative 24-hour news channels. A well-known commentator stood at a blackboard and drew a picture of the Washington Monument with a piece of white chalk.  While he drew, he spoke disparagingly of the separation of church and state as a “fictional wall that progressives built.”  This bothered me.  A lot.

I stand in front of a real blackboard everyday.  Every now and then, someone is sent in to replace it with a green chalkboard or a white board to be used with dry erase markers.  I send them away.  My blackboard is black, not green.  The slate may be cracked, but it is real slate and I like to think it came from the mountains of Virginia.  I also like to think of the other teachers who have stood on the very same spot, in front of the very same blackboard, since 1911.  The blackboard stays. I’ve worked hard to protect it.

There is a line I stand on everyday. It is the line that separates church and state.  I have and will continue to work hard to protect that, too. My faith is very important to me, but I know that faith is to be kindled in the heart and home… and not called into question in a public schoolroom.

December brings the line of church and state into sharp focus.  As we share December traditions, there is a part of me that would love to teach my children to sing Away in the Manger. There is a part of me that would love to describe the way the straw shone like gold under a silent starry Bethlehem night.   But I know that my children don’t need the Christmas story from me.  My children need the message that my faith holds in common with all major faiths.  It is a message of tolerance, respect, hope, kindness, responsibility, and love. The line I stand on every day is not a “fictional wall that progressives built.”  It is a line that protects the rights of all.  That’s sacred, too.

Gourmet magazine is folding and I think it may be my fault.

My grandmother told me to never let my subscription lapse; I always kept it going, no matter what.  My husband renewed my subscription to Gourmet every year as a gift. He is the first to say that he benefited from my loyalty to the magazine.

I was told to never let it lapse, but in the end I did. It happened gradually.  I began to view epicurious.com as my personal archive of Gourmet recipes.   All of my favorite recipes for Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas Brunch, and Christmas Dinner were there.  Recipes for muffins for house guests and stews to console friends could be printed out in minutes.   I began to ignore the roux-splattered magazines that lined my cookbook shelves. I wondered if it wouldn’t be “greener” and more responsible to stop the subscription. My husband was reluctant.  He said my relationship to the magazine was about more than cooking, but in the end he agreed (“submitted” is his word).  We finally canceled. We weren’t the only ones.  Loyal subscribers logged on and subscriptions lagged.

My mother spent many Sunday afternoons reading and clipping recipes from Gourmet.  She told me that in retrospect, she realizes that she cooked very few of those recipes. For her the magazine was about savoring possibility.  And she loved the writers: MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, James Beard.  And our favorite: Laurie Colwin.

I clipped recipes, too, but I also clipped travel articles, my own homage to possibility.  And when possibility became reality I knew where to eat and where to stay, no matter where in the world we were.  Gourmet taught me about cooking and writing and a lot about travel, too.

But the magazine’s last lesson to me is this: Reading is meant to be delicious.  Readers savor possibility in the turning of pages.  There is a difference between skimming a screen and reading.

I know it now.  When I began to log on to epicurious. com, I went straight to the recipes.  I never read another essay; I never read another travel piece. Something important was eroding without my knowledge, but with my participation.

You may catch me skimming an article from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Richmond Times Dispatch on my iphone, but you won’t catch me reading one. Really reading a newspaper requires the smell of newsprint, the feel of its thin fibers between your fingers, and the sound of a paper (and story) unfolding.  It also means supporting the writers financially. I know it now and I won’t let those subscriptions lapse.

From Gourmet I learned about the felicitous combination of orange and chocolate; caper and tomato; grapefruit and mint. Now I have a growing awareness of the value of morning coffee paired with my newspaper. It means more time at the breakfast table, help with the crossword puzzle, and ideas shared in random read-aloud snippets from articles, editorials, and letters to the editor. It means reading in company or reading in peaceful solitude.

It turns out that Gourmet wasn’t about the cooking.  It was about the feast.   Now I know–too late, but just in time– and I’m thankful.

We walked across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bright light of the  November sun brought the yellow leaves that fell around us into brilliant focus.  My sister in law, two cousins, and I entered the park’s wilderness known as The Ramble.  We knew where we were going, but wondered how and if we would come out in the right place.  This required some backtracking, but we got there.

Writing is like that.

My students walk in on Monday mornings full of soccer games, apple orchards, newborn baby cousins, and holidays. And they walk in with the young writer’s lexicon:  Cousin. Friend. Sister. Brother. The stories can’t be told without these words and they can’t be lived without these people.

We walked into the Met and a security guard told us to hand over the mirth.  We laughed and shook our heads.  This is family mirth– ours by marriage and birth.   He saw it and reminded us what it was worth.  Sister in law.  Cousins.  Friends.

We made our way through the classical gallery to the exhibit of Vermeer’s Milkmaid.  I was struck by the play of light and the vivid hues of blue.  I read the text on the wall:

… the picture may resemble a photograph. However, the composition is exquisitely designed, as is evident from several revisions …

Vermeer’s painting captures a moment that has been seen and revised until the light of the ordinary shines through.  I’ve been teaching revision to my third graders.  It’s hard, though celebratory,  work.  Last week, as a first step, they combed through their writing to find the moment in their writing life they want to revise… to live twice.

I continued walking.   A woman was explaining a Degas painting to children: “Notice how the arm of the dancer repeats the shape of the handle of the watering can that is on the floor.  Notice the repetition of pattern.”

Writing is like that.  Patterns emerge in the Writers’ Notebooks week after week.  Children begin to see what they care about.

I moved on to another gallery.  A college student stood in front of a Matisse painting and explained it to his grandmother.  “Look at the fabrics in the painting.  He collected bits of fabric in his travels in Morocco and incorporated their patterns into his paintings.”

Writing is like that.  We collect scraps of experience. We incorporate patterns.  We follow serpentine paths to the words we want to say; then we backtrack and revise those words into love notes to a moment and to the people who live them with us.  We revise until the light of the ordinary shines through.

Last year I saw Winslow Homer’s Country School at an art gallery in St. Louis; now a poster of the painting hangs in Room 204.  That teacher in the one room schoolhouse and I are in the same business.  We know that children are not all the same and they don’t all learn at the same rate.  Children have different readiness levels and different gifts. They need different approaches to master the material at hand.  She knows, as I know, that children can help each other. We are a community of learners. We need each other.

These are just some of the old fashioned ideas out there that are too hip to go away.  The current contemporary talk of standards, accountability, and assessment pedals fast in our media, but there is something about the conversation that doesn’t make sense.   Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for standards, accountability, and assessment; those think-tank words are ideas that can help us see and tackle complicated issues. But the language of “policy talk” does not teach or inspire or illuminate the path of creative critical thought for children. Policy is not practice.

In 1871, as Winslow Homer  put the finishing touches on the teacher standing in her schoolroom, there was a 12 year old boy in Vermont who would grow up to think and name how we can make education more effective through practice.  His name was John Dewey and he is considered to be the father of “hands-on” learning. He was passionate about inquiry-based learning and schools as creative communities that foster informed citizenship. People have been writing intelligently about how children learn best ever since.

Right now a lot of people are writing about how to best test state standards in order to measure Annual Yearly Progress.  That’s important, too.  It’s just not the same thing.

Is a storyteller a meaning maker or a truth teller?  Simple facts were not enough for the mammoth hunter who recorded the hunt in broad strokes on the dimly lit walls of  an ancient cave; or the buffalo hunter on the plains who drummed what was coming or what had been; or for Aesop (the Michael Moore of ancient Greece). Facts never got in the way of truth for Homer or Ovid or Virgil.

The stories of ancient Rome, in many cases, are the stories of ancient Greece… old myths with a new twist.  New names.  New backdrop.  Togas.  Story is not just a magic carpet that transports us– it is a red carpet rolled out as an invitation to lead us back in time.  There is enough truth in the wildest tale to help us understand what the Romans were thinking. We stand shoulder to shoulder with citizens in the coliseum as we ponder kindness and gratitude and freedom in the story of Androcles and the Lion.   This story was was told by Aulus Gellius in his Gesta Romanorum. I use it to teach social studies.  After all, he said he saw the scene in the Coliseum with his own eyes.  Could it be true?

Katherine Lee Bates (author of America the Beautiful) wrote about mythology in her 1924 introduction to A Child’s Book of Myths:

“Don’t say these stories are too beautiful to be true.  They are too beautiful not to be true… Let them persuade you that you and all about you, home and school and out-of-doors, the lives you live and the world in which you live them, are made up of beauty and marvel and splendor… The only thing that does not exist is the commonplace.”

My father used to tell us some wild stories about his West Virginia childhood and the people he grew up with (his supporting cast).  “Was that True?” we would ask at the end of each story.  “Did that really happen?”  His answer was always the same…

It’s true enough.

Last week, metaphors tiptoed into Room 204.  They snuck into our third grade last Tuesday with Emily Dickinson, honored guest.  We were reading one of her poems.  Emily Dickinson wrote,  “The morns are meeker than they were; the nuts are getting brown.”  This is straightforward. But then she tells us, “The maple wears a gayer scarf.”  This is less straightforward.  We threw on our jackets and set out to find out what our new friend Emily was talking about.  On the right October day this is not hard to do.  Tuesday was the right October day.

We stood in front of Fox School and I pointed to a maple with a swath of orange color. “There,” I said, “I see a maple scarf, do you?”  A few hands slowly went up.

“I think I do!”

We moved to another tree. More hands went up.

“I see the gayer scarf, too!”

And then…

“Look across the street, Mrs. Campbell!  There is a scarf on that tree, too.”

We walked for a couple of blocks and found more “scarves” on maple trees.

“So,” I explained.  “The maple tree doesn’t actually have on a scarf.  That’s a metaphor for the swath of color on the maple tree in October. A metaphor sounds like it is one thing, but it is really telling us and helping us see something else.”

We picked up fallen leaves from the maple’s pavement collage beneath our feet.  When we got back to school, we slipped into the Teachers Lounge (after I determined that the coast was clear), and made our own scarf of color by slipping our leaves into the laminator.

Metaphors tiptoed in with Emily Dickinson last week.  They snuck in quietly, but we’ve invited them to stay.  We stumble on them all the time, but they are never in the way. Welcome, Emily Dickinson.  And welcome metaphors, we are glad you are here.

Autumn

by Emily Dickinson

The morns are meeker than they were,

The nuts are getting brown,

The berry’s cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,

The field a scarlet gown,

And lest I be old-fashioned,

I’ll put a trinket on.

Do you see what I see?  If we were reading the same book, we probably wouldn’t see the same thing.  Our imagination as we read is anchored in all that we’ve read and seen and experienced. Our experience informs our imagination and our imagination fuels what we see and then understand as we read.   Our experience helps us visualize.

Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin.  Visualizing is essential to both.  Good readers see what they read and good writers show what they see.   Last week we worked on visualizing what we read in our study of Ancient Greece.

I showed scenes from the 1963 Don Chaffey version of Jason and the Argonauts.  We could see the rocky, hilly land of Greece on the sea; and what the early Olympic games looked like; and what Greek ships looked like; and what the relationship of mortals and immortals looked like. We saw.

When we moved on to stories from the Iliad and Odyssey, the children came up with vivid images as we played, “I Was There…”

“How?” I asked, “How could a blind poet who lived so long ago help us see so clearly.”

I love the answer: Homer translated his imagination into descriptive words.  With Homer’s help, we embarked with Odysseus on the wine dark sea in the rosy fingered dawn.

We explored an ancient world that was new to us, and recorded our journey with the pictures we made in our minds.

People ask me how I became a storyteller.  The question hangs in a split second of expectation:  perhaps I know of a book… some little-known home-grown tome of tried and true tips.  There are good books on storytelling, I’ve  read lots of them, but that is not how I became a storyteller.

Starred, but invisible on my storytelling resume, is chance. By chance my father came from the mountains of West Virginia  and had a reverence for the English language. He spoke “story.”  By chance, my maternal grandmother studied  “Literary Arts and Elocution” at a Boston college in the 1920’s.  Her everyday language was peppered with Keats and Shakespeare and Noel Coward.  By chance, she read folk tales and legends and mythology to her daughter.  And by chance, her daughter, my mother, read them to me.   I heard and learned cadence and turn of phrase by listening.  By chance.

This weekend, as I do every October, I went to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.   As I listened, I remembered that craft is not tucked into a book or master class.  This weekend, storytelling was in the crisp fall mountain morning; it was in a red and white circus tent infused with the smell of damp grass and hay.  Storytelling was in the incantations of my favorite tellers.  Once.  Once upon a time.  There was a time and there was not….

I realized this weekend how I became a storyteller. The unwitting mentors were there. I learned to tell Greek Myths by reading Edith Hamilton and Homer, but mostly I learned by listening to Barbara McBride Smith.  I learned to tell African folk tales by listening to traditional tellers like Charlotte Blake Alston and Baba Jamal Koram.   I learned to tell Jewish Folk Tales by listening to Syd Leiberman.  People ask me how I became a storyteller. Now I know: I sit up and listen.

None of us is a stranger to chance.   And chance always leaves a story behind.  Look.  Listen.  Chance left a story for you.

I remember the way classic cartoons used to show time passing: the days were crossed off and the months were torn away. Time zoomed by in the flickering light of the full-speed full-screen flipping of calendar pages.

The month of September flips to October this week and the lazy days of August seem far away.  Of course, calendar pages don’t flip anymore. I click the mouse on “calendar” and the computer’s screen shows the current day.  That’s technology.  I am able to document our time together in ways that slow it down… and that’s technology, too.   The “movie” included in this post documents the results of a conversation about literature that began on the first day of school.  Learning this conversation takes time and even as the September days zoom by, I know the time is worth the investment.

Comprehension skills are the musical scales of deep and careful reading.  I introduce these reading skills through storytelling. We begin by making the implicit skill of making connections an explicit awareness that we take into our reading.  We practice this “scale” as we read, write, sketch, and discuss literature. We connect the known with the unknown.  As we learn to listen to each other’s connections, words like protagonist, plot, allusion, transformation, and motif are knocking at the door, itching to inch their way into our literary talk.

Children ask me if I ever run out of folk tales.  I don’t.  Later this week, as I do every October, I’ll go to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. I’ll go and bring back some more stories to amplify a conversation that we began on the first day of school. We’ll move on to other comprehension skills, but we’ll continue to make connections with books, stories, and each other.

John D. Rockefeller gave the money for the University of Chicago to be built.  Suddenly, there towered an extraordinarily beautiful university in a field. It looked, with its spires, towers, and cloisters, as though it had stood through time with Cambridge and Oxford and La Sorbonne.  Those institutions took centuries to build, but this one was done– just like that. Finished. Complete.  And yet… at the dedication someone noticed there were no paths.  Had this been an oversight? Could the work be complete without the paths?

The architect’s response: “How can I know where the paths will be, when I haven’t seen where the students will walk over time.”

I don’t know if the story is true; I heard it from a Chicago cab driver.  But something in this story is true enough. I remember it every September. And I remember my former classes who have helped create paths that have remained as part of the way we do things in Room 204.

Recently, I got a letter from a college freshman at Middlebury College.  He wrote the letter in alliteration and thanked me for teaching him poetry in Room 204.

Last weekend I was in Barnes and Noble and I ran into a fourth grade teacher.  We stood in the parking lot and talked about books and life and teaching.  It was a conversation we began when I taught her first and second grades in Room 204.

I went to the grocery store and the cashier smiled as she asked about school. She asked if I loved this new class, too.  We both knew the answer.  She had been a student in Room 204.

Last Wednesday,  the children and I were walking after recess.  A VCU student on a bicycle called out.  I was delighted to see her.  I introduced her to the children and explained that she had been in Room 204, too.  I snapped the picture… past and present together– a path through time.

In September, a year stretches before us with the luxury of time.  We take time and make time to build the rituals of reading and writing workshop; to explore the math materials; to play with the maps; to fine tune expectations; to learn the songs; to wander through the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the thesaurus, and the atlas.  Many of the routines in Room 204 are paths created by the way other classes have walked. The first day of school is a signpost: “Begin here.” The paths take longer.  We uncover old ways that work and discover new ways that work better.  We walk together.