Musical Chairs and the "Real World"

"I recently read an commentary from the Teachers College Record on the importance of empathy in education/life.  (Because, really, can we separate the two?  I mean, I know we've tried to take the life out of education, and to look at the lives of students as being devoid of educational experiences...but seriously?  You can't separate the two.)  The author, Nadine Dolby, writes persuasively about the importance of this socio-emotional aspect of learning that, as I've noted, we've paid too little attention to.  


After attending a conference this summer on Mindfulness in Education, I've become increasingly aware of something I've always known:  In terms of getting anyone to think, they first must feel safe and emotionally secure.  We've overlooked this for too long and too many of our practices are actually harmful towards those ends.

For instance, in my school, on our second teacher day before the start of the student year, we had a rousing discussion about grading and failure.  Is failure a useful construct, or are we simply playing a "gotcha" game with students we feel refuse to comply?  Are we "teaching them a lesson about the real world" or are we irreparably harming them and indelibly marring their view of the entire system of public education?

From my point of view, we have to think about education and its associated grades as linked to teachers' particular world views.  Think of it from this perspective:  Are we educating children for the way the world was, or are we educating them for the way we want the world to be?  If all we ever do is the former, we do our children a massive disservice.  The world is not a static place.  It never “is”.  It either was, or is in the process of becoming something else.  We ought to be educating our children to drive and direct the process, not to take their place in a world that will not “be” when they graduate.  

You can gripe and argue all you want about teaching kids lessons and preparing them for the “real world.”  Seriously, I don’t know what the real world is because I’m not out in the “real world” every day. My school is a sheltered life.  I mean, sure, I read about the real world, I am friends with people who populate it and work in it.  And, yes, I live in it, my students live in it.  But as used by teachers in the construct "We're preparing you for life in the real world." I truly have no idea what that is.  I am, for all intents and purposes, sheltered from it.  However, that does not mean I cannot understand it or that I cannot strive to change it based upon my perception of the harms it inflicts on the people who populate it and the natural world upon which our constructed "real world" sits.  Thus, the world I want to prepare them for is a world where they get to make the choices and design a better world.

I gave a presentation in Boston in August at the National Conference for the Industrial Designers’ Society of America.  In it I quoted journalist John Hockenberry from this TED talk.  Hockenberry claims that we are all designers now, that we have at our disposal the power to make our world and shape it in ways we never had before.  Because of that, Hockenberry says we are all now confronted with a fundamental question:  “What will we do now in the face of the chaos we have created?” 

Don’t think for a moment that you, as a teacher, are simply preparing your kids for PSSAs/Keystones/Insertnameofnextstandardizedtesttotakehere.  You are not.  You are preparing them to take over the reins of the democracy, to enter into and become a vital (rather than redundant) part of the economic engine that is the foundation for our success, to learn enough about themselves and their potential to awaken their genius.  Only students prepared for those eventualities will be capable of facing the fearsome question “What will we do now in the face of the chaos we have created?” and not cower or run for cover but rather, design a better world by challenging and changing the systems that create the chaos. 

Some things are for sure:  They won’t face that question alone.  They won’t answer it by racing to the top. And they won’t answer it by winning at musical chairs and learning all about the triumph of social Darwinism.  So we need to ask ourselves, what are we doing in our classrooms that will help students face that question, and what are we doing that is simply musical chairs.  


The commentary:

Empathy, Education, and Musical Chairs

by Nadine Dolby — September 04, 2012

This is a commentary on new research on empathy in neuroscience and related fields, and implications for education. 

"Let's play musical chairs!" The young, inexperienced teacher of my daughter's Saturday morning dance class was clearly having great difficulty getting a room full of four and five year old children to listen, never mind follow her dance moves.  Musical chairs, I assumed, was the first thought that came to her--a way to get the children focused on one activity, or at least in the same part of the room.

My then four-year-old daughter stopped, looked at me, and asked, "What's musical chairs, Mommy?"  "Well," I said, "it's a game children play at parties or in school. All the children run around a line of chairs as the teacher plays music, and then when the music stops, the children sit down in a chair. The trick of the game is that there is always one less chair than there are children, so each time, one child does not get a chair. Whoever is left at the end is the winner."

My daughter thought about this for a moment, and replied, "So what's the point of the game Mom: is it fun?"

 It was then my turn to think. No, I thought, it is not fun. The child who fails to get a chair inevitably collapses in tears.  No, there was no point---at least not a good one. Quickly, I scurried across the room to the dance instructor, explained that my daughter would not be playing musical chairs, and tried to suggest that perhaps a more inclusive, cooperative game might be a better way to restore some peace to the room.

"Musical chairs," of course, is one of thousands of games, diversions, and unquestioned ways of life that are so deeply embedded in our culture that is difficult to see them clearly. While it was beyond my daughter's comprehension to understand the larger place of "musical chairs" in the world of children and childhood games, here are a few of its lessons:  humans are inherently competitive by nature;  you need to fight for everything you get;  there is scarcity in the world; and only the strongest and most ruthless will triumph. Anyone (including me) who remembers being pushed out of a chair and onto the floor by a bigger, older child knows that Social Darwinism is at the core of this seemingly innocent game.

I can imagine that the other parents at the dance class might have two reactions to my analysis of musical chairs, either that I am reading too much into a game, or well, yes, that is true, but that's how we are as humans, the world will always be that way, and children need to learn that early, even if it comes with a few tears and bumps.

As it turns out, however, recent scientific advancements in the field of neuroscience are showing that actually, these parents--and everyone else who believes that people are onlyinherently competitive--are wrong.  Instead, human brains are actually primed for bothcompetition and cooperation: which side of us emerges as more dominant is dependent on our culture.  Our brains are not separate from the world around us and how we are taught to interact with others: instead, our brains are embodied in that world. The fairly new discovery of "mirror neurons" (Iacoboni, 2006; Ramachandran, 2006 ) furthermore begins to strongly indicate that as humans we are naturally able to empathize with others. This empathy is there in all of us from birth, just waiting for our culture to nurture it.  Empathy, it appears, is not just a moral or ethical good: it is a biological part of every person, and as research also demonstrates, of virtually every animal also -- even mice demonstrate empathy.

But of course, right now, our culture does not nurture empathy and cooperation. Instead, in schools, our homes, in the media, and in every aspect of our lives, we value competition. From the earliest lessons of musical chairs, to the fierce competition brought on by excessive testing, to battles for college admission, jobs, and the greatly diminished access to the "American Dream" we teach our children that this is just how humans are.  The consequences of accepting that all of this is "natural" has been devastating for our planet.  As George Lakoff (2008) points out:

Economic man produced global warming and chemical chickens. The unbounded pursuit of self-interest that was supposed to be moral, which was supposed to produce plenty for all, is bringing death to our earth. If it continues, half the species on the planet will die within a century. Economic man was an idea--a claim about human nature. Empathy and real reason, as we shall see, reveal its fallacies. They also reveal how ideas can be destructive (p. 121).

Multiple fields of scientific research, including neuroscience, primatology, evolutionary biology, cognitive ethology (the study of animal behavior in naturalistic settings), social psychology, and subfields in philosophy have produced enough evidence over the past two decades to confirm that our greatest hope for the future rests in understanding the real possibilities of human biology, and beginning to translate these findings into our culture (de Waal, 2009). As educators and educational researchers, that means that we need to resist the current threats to education, while proactively building new realities: ones grounded in an understanding that a more peaceful, cooperative, humane, empathic world can emerge if we nurture it in ourselves and our children.

In The End of Growth (2011) Richard Heinberg underscores that the old ways of thinking about how we as humans structure our world must end. This is not a choice, but a mathematical necessity, as the world's resources are finite. Questioning and eliminating games such as musical chairs from our children's lives may seem silly -- too minor to have any impact on the future of the planet. But "musical chairs" is not allowed in my daughter's Montessori school, and for good reason: only practices (that includes games, toys, etc.) that lead to the development of a peaceful, empathic child are allowed. I would suggest that we need seriously to consider the daily practices of our own, grown-up lives, and ask the same question. I think we will find much to get rid of, and many more joyful, cooperative, productive ways to fill our days, and remake our world.

References

de Waal, F. (2009). The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York, NY:Harmony Books.

Heinberg, R. (2011). The End of Growth: Adapting to our new economic reality. Vancouver: New Society Publishers.

Lakoff, G. (2008). The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-century Politics with an 18th-century Brain. New York: Viking.

Ramachandran, V.S. (2006). Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat. Edge, January 10. Retrieved on August 4, 2011 at www.edge.org

Albert Einstein, Lewis Hyde, and the Gift of Teaching

Ok, so I've been doing a good deal of writing of late and it pleases me.  I've known this about myself for awhile...I like what I write.  I don't mean I look at my writing and say, "Oh!  That's good.  You're a great writer."  I mean that I enjoy hearing myself speaking back to me out of the past.  I don't know if that's so unusual.  I imagine most writers do.  I imagine most artists experience that sense.  Whatever the case, I'm pleased by encountering myself this way.

So I'm going to be populating this blog with posts (mostly on education and ideas related to education) I usually send out to the middle school where I work.  Below is the first such piece.  My wife says I used to send her similar pieces of writing and that I called them, "Brain Drippings."  So be it.  Here, then, oh Zombie Friends, is the first such brain dripping of the year.  Consume.

"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs." --Albert Einstein

I thought this bit from Prof. Einstein might offer some way of illuminating part of the discussion we were having in my school about the purpose of grades and how we use them.  So let me frame it this way:

I'll begin with an assumption, namely that parents don't send our children to school with the solitary belief that after 12 years and college they'll land a solid job and make more money than we ourselves do and thus perpetuate a sort of social mobility that, for a large portion of the population, doesn't even exist anymore.  We send them to school because we believe, whether we know it or not, that a public education will provide the sort of well-rounded, liberal education that will help our children grown into good people.  Thus, when a teacher tells my oldest child, as his kindergarten teacher did once, that school is his job, well...I bristle and my wife has to hold me back from making a scene and assuring a dire future for "the children of that man."

As regards Einstein's observation, the assumption is couched in these words: "Never regard study [read, "school"] as a duty [read, "job"] but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the sprit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."  Too often students do see study as a duty and only that.  It is our job as teachers to change that perspective, to enlighten them, which is, so far as I'm concerned, the ultimate end of education--light:  light for ourselves, but also light for the community.  Education, then, is not about racing to the top and "winning" (whatever that means/looks like it probably has something to do with grades and test scores), which so far as I can tell is a very solitary thing...solitary, competitive and hardly healthy for our children, our system, our world.

You see, I agree with Einstein's framing teaching as a gift.  Several years ago I attended a one-day conference at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking called, "Why Write?"  Which was, of course, about why we (teachers) write and teach writing.  The common text we studied for the conference was a book by Lewis Hyde  called, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.  Hyde's premise is that there are some human endeavors (the arts, obviously, but I include teaching in that group) that escape the traditional exchange economies of "I give you money...you give me a good or a service." Teaching, as I mentioned, is not, or rather, ought not be thought of as part of an exchange economy.  Rather, it is part of a "gift economy" (I defer now to Wikipedia's explanation):  For Lewis Hyde, the gift is an object that must continuously circulate throughout a society in order to keep its gift qualities. In this way the gift perishes for the person who gives it away, even though the gift itself is able to live on precisely because it has been passed on. He calls this the "paradox of the gift": even though it is used up, it is not extinguished. This gift exchange is responsible for establishing connections and emotional ties between people which in turn serve as a basis for community and social cohesion.

"The gift lives on because it has been passed on...."  Tell me that's not teaching.  I don't impart knowledge.  No.  It is not that that "perishes for the [teacher] who gives it away."  Rather, I impart a way of being in the world, a way of approaching problems and paradoxes and conundrums and to say (paraphrasing Einstein again) that the mystery is the most miraculous thing we can experience.  Teaching is a strange gift, though, in that I feel no sense of loss , nothing perishes with the gift I offer, perhaps because I truly offer nothing.  I'm simply revealing themselves to themselves...Awakening the genius, if you will.  And it is that sense of genius that is part and parcel to this "way of being" over which I wax so poetic.

Back to Einstein, then:  "Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift...."  It is, for many of us, a perspective flip that requires great effort...to view teaching as part of a gift economy and to view the student as something more than a repository for all the weighty hopes, fears, lies, dreams, wishes and anxieties we ourselves have about the future and "the real world."  When we teach that way, we rob children of their own lives and potential in the name of some perceived future which, in all truth, we can never see with any clarity.  But when we offer ourselves, our art, as a gift, then we offer them the chance to know the "liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit."

I know the difficulty of the perspective flip that precedes the offering and the truth of the gift economy that, one need not ever accept a gift.  Thus, just as in the capitalist economic model, a student need not "buy" what a teacher is selling, the same is true of the gift economy--the student need not accept the gift.  But oh!  How much more simple it is to accept when nothing is required in return.

Revisiting "Teaching, Learning, and Jazzing on the Standards Movement"

It's been almost five years since I first penned this piece.  I've been digging around in the archives of an old blog, doing some early spring cleaning as it were.  

Now...I've been teaching for almost 20 years.  For most of the second decade of my career I've dealt with and endured the standards movement as a misguided response to all that ails American Public Education.  

Like all great jazz, what appears below sounds as fresh and lively as when I first wrote it.  I wish I could say the same for much of what has happened to my teaching.  Anyway...here it is:

"I’ve chosen a title here that I’ve used before, and I’ll admit, it’s not original.  I first encountered the analogy between teaching and jazz in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer several years ago.  I had just begun to sound the depths of Miles, Coltrane, Bird, Ella and all the jazz greats, and the analogy sounded so apt to me.  In the years since, I’ve found nothing that can touch the appropriateness of that analogy, especially with the advent of NCLB and the standards movement.  Jazz music has standards, too, but no one interpretation of a standard is the same as another.  Jazz is rhythm--lively, original, pulsing, moving rhythm.  

Oh! if only the masters of the standards movement understood such a thing.  But they don’t, and so instead of classrooms with teachers who devise themes, set tempos and then guide the students through improvisations on vital rhythms, we get monotone, mechanical, classrooms filled with the sounds and voices of neutered storm troopers--stillborn music, dumb, mute, ordinary.  It’s the perfect tune for an outdated metaphor of education.  This is the music of the assembly line model of education.  I had hoped it had died after the 60’s, but it’s back.  Now conducted by the maestros of capitalist conformity, education becomes the factory for standardized groupthink, churning out production-line models of a proletariat weaned on “proficiency”.  

When we allow business and its drive for accountability to become the impetus for education, when success is measured in dollar signs, when we go to school to get a job and not an education...when we do those things, we bury our humanity, our opportunity to transmit what is good and right about our civilization.  Certainly there is an economic purpose to education in a capitalist democracy.  But economies are selfish, wanting only to feed themselves, and they are ignorant of the socializing, democratizing, humanizing functions of education.  Fear of a US decline as a world economic power has given rise to a system of education driven by accountability, standardization, and false promises of wealth and independence for those wiling to play by the rules of a game whose goals they can’t even begin to divine.  (Explanation for that statement would take too long.  Understand it as yet another riff on the ulterior motives of the standardized test movement.)

What we’re perpetrating upon students is the ruin of imagination, curiosity, wonder, and joy.  There is a pleasure to finding things out, to discovering.  Why else would we leave our homes in search of better lives, new lands, adventures, opportunities?  ‘Makes me think of Miles Davis’ classic album, Kind of Blue.  Miles and his band walk into a studio and start improvising, discovering, riffing, playing off each other, learning from each other, discovering where the music can take them. It’s pure, unadulterated discovery--it’s life.  Where in school is there room for such opportunities when we are driven by standards, when joy takes a back seat to mandates, when the motivational drive of new discovery is stalled by the weight of what’s been discovered? (I’m mixing metaphors and catapulting new conceits--jazz, assembly lines, cars???  Forgive me...I’m improvising here.)

And what of us, the teachers?  Where do we get off leading our students to the drudgery of the days spent advancing towards the ends already defined for them?  Forget for a moment the crimes against humanity committed upon the future of this country.  Why is there not an uproar from our ranks for the crimes committed against us?  When teaching becomes standardized we become automatons, our professional certificates worth no more than the paper on which they are printed.  Wither our creative drive?  We demean ourselves when we accept that we are merely robots who run programmed curricula.  At that point, our presence, our knowledge is reduced to admonishing those who won’t “Buckle Down,” and to coercing compliance through fear of failure.  Would that we had taken our own Hippocratic oath to do no harm, because I can’t find any good in the medicine we’re making these kids swallow.  How many  times have I heard, “Study Island?  That’s just one less lesson for me to worry about teaching.”  I’ve said it myself, and now, in retrospect, I wish I’d been shot for it. Such abdication of my role is treasonous to the cause of education.  

I might be off the deep end in my thoughts, I know, but the deep waters hold mysteries, and their stillness bring a peace and clarity to my understanding which my vitriol belies.  Regardless. . . shouting? Screaming? Why aren’t more of us doing it?  NCLB, standardized testing...we are witnessing the murder of the art of teaching at the hands of these, their knives slipped slowly into the heart of each and every one of us...and no one screams.  What horror when we assist our own murders?  What horror when we ourselves silence the music of discovery?    

"What do you need?": Buy Nothing Day 2001 Revisited.

On my facebook page, I just linked to a news article that questions, "How did Black Friday come to this?"--referencing pepper spray, pushing, shoving, etc. that occurred this year (and many other years for that matter).  In 2001--egged on by a president who told us that, in order to get back to normal after the 9/11 attacks, we had to get back to shopping ('cause, um...that's what we do, right?)--I went off the deep end and launched my own attack.  The rationale and lengthy explanation for this protest is found below, but in short, I was sickened to the point of action.  Picking up on the culture jamming ethic I'd been introduced to by a group of high school students I'd worked with in an after-school arts/writing seminar, I armed myself with a series of poems emblazoned with the brilliant logo of our group (see picture above), designed by Jesse Miksic, a wicked smart kid who's an even more intelligent and thoughtful adult (read him at his blog and you won't be sorry), and I sat myself, and my wife of two weeks, outside the King of Prussia Mall "Lord and Taylor" entrance.  The rest?  Well, if you want to read it, it's below.  Suffice it to say that I do not shop on Black Friday. I do not protest any longer.  Not in the way I used to.  Say what you want, question the motive, argue for the bargains...whatever.  I've heard it all.  The more you defend the day and the unquestioned consumption upon which it feeds, the more you feed my argument and motive.  There is a branch of science that has been growing over the past few decades.  Some call it complexity, some chaos, some emergence.  In nature, it's more or less the study of "swarm mentality." (And those of you who will be clamoring that this is all about personal responsibility?  Yeah, go read up on Swarm Mentality and check out Stephen Johnson's Emergence.)  Whatever you call it.  It applies quite clearly to the actions of shoppers on Black Friday.  Sharks in a feeding frenzy or shoppers on Black Friday?  Ain't no difference to me.

Here's what I wrote about my first experience in culture jamming, back in 2001.  I did it one other time, in 2002 in a different fashion.  I'm sorry to say I could do it again...things haven't changed.

(Understand that this e-mail was originally targeted for the teachers in my district, thus the ending paragraphs....  Also, I had to edit out the line breaks because I pulled it from an old e-mail and I don't have a text scrubber, other than myself, handy.)

Last year, on Black Friday, I arrived at the King of Prussia Mall around 6:30 AM and sat on a round concrete object whose purpose was, for allI could tell, to be a round concrete object. But is served well enough as a bench, and so I sat upon it.  In my right hand was a large, two sided sign, some 21X 37''.  The sign asked a simple question, "What do you need?"  All I wanted to do was sit there the whole day and ask this question.  I had heard my president, in a post 9/11 speech tell us that America had to get back to business, and that we shouldn't be afraid to do the things Americans do, like shop.  (That's almost a quote, but not quite.)  That turned my stomach.  Being an American means a hell of a lot more to me than shopping and I'll be damned if I'll let any president, democrat or republican, insinuate that part of my expression of patriotism should be to shop.  So there I sat.  About 15 minutes later four mall security men stood like the famed "four horsemen" in front of me asking me what I was doing.   Well, after no discussion whatsoever, I was told that if I wanted to take up my case with the police, they would be happy to oblige me. ('Seems I was trespassing on private property.)  So I asked if I could talk to someone about what I could do. They directed me to the mall manager.  Well, I took my big sign and, quite happily, walked into the mall, searching for the manager.  When I found him, I asked if I could sit with my sign.  He said I could not, that if they allowed me to do so, they would have to allow everyone who was soliciting to do so.  I pointed out that I was not soliciting.  He still said no.  I said, "What if I just stand outside and ask the question to all the people who walk by?"  He said I couldn't do that.  "What, I'm not allowed to ask a question?" I said.  "No," he replied, "it ruins their shopping mood."

Well, I had no comeback for that, so I walked out, dumbfounded.  The manager of the mall had, quite openly and shockingly, admitted to me the mantra the King of Prussia mall--and, I suspect, all malls--want their shoppers to repeat:  "Don't think, just shop." 

I want to note here that I am not against consuming things...I'm not against buying things.  I fully understand the integral part I play as a consumer in this country.  However, as an American I represent less than 5% of the world's total population (according to 1999 estimates), but I am part of a world minority which consumes over 20% of the world's natural resources.  I have a problem with that.  When we buy simply because we are told to, when we buy because it makes us feel good, when we buy because we are, consciously or not, trying to fulfill some image, then we are blind consumers, and we are robbing wealth from the rest of the world for our own indulgences.  My conscience leads me to believe that there is something wrong with that.  To buy just because I can and because I want/desire to...there's something wrong with that. Even Christmas has been changed by these market forces.  What was once a celebration of the hope and joy represented by Jesus Christ (and you don't have to believe in the Bible to understand the mythic import of hope and joy to a civilization), has been perverted into the hope and joy that buying can bring.  One joy is existential, other worldly, and nourishment for the soul.  The other is ephemeral; it disipates like breath in a chill wind.

What's more is that as educators, we are in a perfect position to get students to question their consumption, to question the cultural forces at work that mold them into the kind of blind consumers whose idea of a good time is a day out at the mall.  Henry A. Giroux, Penn State professor of secondary education, writes that "if democracy is to carry us forward into the next century, surely it will be based on a commitment to improving the lives of children, but not within the degrading logic of a market that treats their bodies as commodities and their futures as trade-offs for capital accumulation. . . . Critical educators . . . need to create a cultural vision and a set of strategies informed by 'the rhetoric of political, civic, and economic citizenship.'"

And so it begins...

The start of every school year finds me the same as every other day of the year...searching for new ways to think about and practice education.

This year finds me prodding my colleagues, entreating them to reconnect with their own passions and the passions of their students for compulsion only leads to coercion which rarely produces any kind of positive, long-term results.

Here's my plea to start the year, sent to all the members of my school e-mail list:

The other day I ran across this quotation:


"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author and aviator (1900-1945) 


I've read a lot of books on creativity and creative thinking and about how it helps students develop flexible, adaptable habits of mind--a key component for success in an ever changing world.  Quotations by Antoine de Saint-Exupery fill those books.  

One might argue that they ought to fill the minds of all the adults who work in our schools as well, for we are, in a sense, engaged in building a ship--the ship that will bear us into the future.  If we wish to be successful in that endeavor, we ought to heed Saint-Exupery's words.

I'm not saying that students don't need work and assigned tasks.  We all need those things.  But they must be meaningful.  They must be things that, by knowing, will create in the child the confidence and freedom to explore  the immensity of whatever seas she wishes to navigate.  

Of course, many of our students don't know what seas they wish to explore.  For too long they've been told what seas to explore, how to explore them, and how to report out on the results of their explorations, which, by and large, are the exact same reports that generations of children before them have churned out. 

Let us strive to listen to our students' passions and inspire our students towards the immensity of their future...even if, in such striving, we must (together with our students) fight against currents that seek to bear us ceaselessly into the past.



Bon Voyage!

WWMD? (What would the Muppets do?)

I'm just positing the question.  I've got nothing else to say on this.  Really...

The Tragedy, The "Shirt", And Fires of the Mind

Tomorrow, March 25, 2011, will mark the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City.  The fire killed 146 workers, mostly immigrant women.  The horror of the event cannot be understated (see these photos) and the effect of the tragedy on labor rules and workers rights in America ranks the fire among the most important events in the labor movement.

But if you ask most Americans about the fire, they won't know what you are talking about.

Such is history.  Stories can be forgotten, and history is nothing but stories.  And we know what they say about those who forget history....

So here's a tale about my own history with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, poetry, and the magic of connections.

Somewhere in my past I learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.  I don't know where or when.  But I knew enough that when, in 1996 I heard Robert Pinsky (soon to become the Poet Laureate of the US) read his poem "Shirt" at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, I knew exactly what he meant when he referenced the "infamous fire".  Immediately my mind opened and somehow my knowledge of that fire flooded back to me.

My point here has something to do with learning, something to do with poetry, and everything to do with our freakin' awesome brains.  How did I remember this fire and why?  And what's it got to do with poetry?  Everything.  If we are to read poetry well, we must allow ourselves two things.  First, we must allow ourselves to actually hear it out loud.  Robert Pinsky is, perhaps the most vocal proponent of poetry as an art of the body.  I once heard him define poetry as "The art of the sound of the language", and his book, The Sounds of Poetry  is one of the finest, most concise books on the subject.  So to "read poetry"we must hear it aloud.  Pinsky is a master of reading, gifted with a deep, resonant voice.  You will not forget the experience.  You will learn, if you listen to him, the importance of the best words in the best order, and how poetry can teach you in a way nothing else can.

But I said that if we are to read poetry well, we must allow two things...and so to the second.  That to read poetry well, we must open ourselves to connections.  That is, we must allow our minds to reach out to all that we know and have experienced in order to make connections, for the content of poetry is nothing if not an attempt to connect the way words "mean" things with the felt meaning that is our life.

Pinsky's "Shirt" is a masterful example of this act of connecting.  As a whole, "Shirt" is a musing on material culture, on how the objects in our lives have histories.  Pinsky is tracing the history of the shirt in much the same way James Burke (of PBS's "Connections"series and such books as The Pinball Effect ) has done in his wide ranging riffs on the histories of things as varied as a particular shade of green in a woman's dress to the carburetor.  But where Burke is detailing the histories, Pinsky is using the tropes and techniques of the poet, rhythm, alliteration, allusion, to weave a web of connections.  Where Burke's work reveals the incredible coincidences and connections that make our things possible, Pinsky's poem reveals the genius of the human mind at work as it leaps from one word to the next, one association or synaptic connection to the next, pausing to expand on an interesting fact (the Triangle Factory Fire, the kilt) and then listing again until a new association occurs.

While Pinsky's poem is remarkable for the histories he chooses and the manner in which he arrives at those stories, such associative discoveries are not unique to his poetry.  In fact, the way one arrives at meaning in most poems is by following the association, the allusions, the connections (both literal and metaphorical) within the text, its sound as well as its sense.  I think here of Billy Collins' "The Lanyard" in which he makes an overt bow to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (and the infamous madeline that started that cascade of memories) as a way to define his own mind being sent into the past by a word ("lanyard") and the flood of memories the word triggered.

And the examples wouldn't stop there:  Robert Frost's "Birches", Yusef Komunyakaa's "My Father's Love Letters" are just two more that come to mind.

And while, yes, this is a post about a tragic fire and a poem, even more it is about the power of poetry to ignite memory, and the manner in which we recall things.  And finally, as a teacher, this is my philosophical musing (only one of many) on learning and teaching.  It's all poetry, all associations and allusion.  It's all about "the back, the yoke, the yardage...the labor, the color, the shade.  The shirt."