Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

It has been 12 years since I created an exit strategy from my job as office administrator with an environmental engineering consulting team to become a teaching artist, to dedicate my life to my passion and identity as Poet.

I started out in afterschool programs, although I did have some teaching experience with adults and a few forays into working with school-aged children. Afterschool is where most of us cut our teeth as artist educators. It is definitely the "school of hard knocks." I made a ton of mistakes but I know I did a lot that was right too. Some of those students are now in their senior year, if not graduated. At least, I pray they graduated. I cannot be certain.

I also coached for the local chapter of the NAACP ACT-SO program throughout the 90s. Many of those young poets I mentored are now 30. They are adults with meaningful lives and I am so very proud of them all. Some are teachers, some are entrepreneurs, one is a lawyer, some are parents themselves, and some still write, have a love of poetry. This is heartwarming.

As for those young writers I met in Hillbrook Detention Center over the three or four summers I taught there, I have not the same optimism but I can pray some of those teens made a change in their lives. One is dead. I think of him frequently. I know several others had additional run-ins with the justice system.

I do not teach for sweeping outcomes. I teach for the moment and with a hope to sow seeds. If I am successful, I will affect some sort of change, even if for an hour.

Approximately 10 years ago, I had the great fortune of connecting with the arts-in-education community fostered by the New York State Council on the Arts. This was in the glory days of NYSCA AIE. The statewide roundtable network was being built, the grant programs were well-funded and growing, the conversations were vital and charged with excitement. I discovered many people such as me who wanted to combine their art forms, their belief in our youth, and their own ability to connect, to bring something significant and supportive of teachers and students into classrooms. There were researchers, artists, seasoned educators, parents, cultural organization administrators all focused on the power of the arts in learning, all looking to further develop young minds.

This was a large community of educators of every ilk sharing, working, creating, building on 20+ years of foundation in developing a craft, a career path, and a professional field. It was where I had hoped I would land when I took that leap from the day job, among likeminded people from and with whom I could learn, create, and grow. 

There were powerful meetings, terrific initiatives, and a network within the practice of learning and teaching that was vital and inspiring. I met many who I admire greatly and I learned a great deal about many subjects and pedagogies. I made some lifelong friends. The network expanded to and connected with the national field where there was even more evidence of how the braid of learning and the arts could be expressed with success and enthusiasm.

I entered the AIE community at the beginning of this new century...as NCLB was formulating and being passed. The waters soon rippled, early signs of the storm ahead. Like the Gulf when the spinning rage is still far off shore but the tides hint at what is coming.

Politics, funding slashes, the deterioration of so much eroded this movement. The network has been splintered and cast out. Arts councils have been defunded or significantly cut in many states. Key agencies and cultural organizations have been forced to abandon their programs and turn the keys in the locks. Some of us have landed in other nonprofits, others have started independent practices and consulting businesses. We have lost the core that created reasons to be together to plan and implement innovative educational programming and to spur each other with the shared knowledge.

Nationally we witness that our teachers are being demonized. Our children and teens are suffering. Higher education is recognizing the full impact of this erosion. The basic preparation our schools were providing for future generations to take on the task of living a life with stability and independence is no longer possible. Arts and cultural organizations throughout the nation have also withered.

The strength in numbers among creative, competent educators has been weakened by breaking up the network and splitting us off from each other. Dissent is being stirred up within the field of education by whomever is holding the power now (i.e., pitting public schools against charter schools, Race for the Top state-against-state competition for funding to support school districts, etc.).

It is only one part of the way we are failing as a nation and why I feel so much the way I did in 1968. The difference is that I am 58 rather than 15 so I am even more frustrated and horrified, especially because I have seen the costs before and do not understand why we are backsliding so steeply and rapidly. I understand my father's fear when he was in such conflict between his morals vs. his employment during the Viet Nam War. I share his distrust of the political climate. I see why he was threatening to move us all to Sweden in 1968 if George Wallace were to be elected; how he knew Nixon was a seriously bad choice as well. He saw the clouds accumulating along the horizon, the heat lightning, but he was also the son of a Marxist so he had been watching the weather for a long time.

Tonight the AFL-CIO is mobilizing even more humans to stand up against it all in Wall Street, to refuse the eviction. The Senate says NO to putting Americans to work. Peddlers of profit are masquerading as education reformers while they peddle books and charge huge fees for speaking engagements. Banks are moving into charging us for using the debit cards upon which they spent the last 20 years orchestrating our dependence. The news talking heads are squawkin' loud and sometimes sayin' nothin' while Herman Cain speaks for the Right (RIP James Brown...I'm glad you and my dad are both missing this).

I can find no logic in the current political agenda that continues to weaken our citizenry in the interests of profit and/or power but that is where we seem to be. We've been through this before. Complacency must not be accepted. We must be aware, we must continue to educate ourselves and others. We all depend on it.

What's Up with All the Bullying?!

I have started my 2010-2011 teaching season in public schools now that the fall sessions of my university honors course and two adult classes in poetry have been completed. I am working for these first two weeks with middle school students, ten different classes, five per week, and the skill sets for each class vary. This means multiple approaches to language, literacy, reading poems, writing poems, inference, and all the other elements I find ways to include in my conversations with these young minds.

Over the summer, I worked with my colleague and dear friend, Quraysh Ali Lansana, on our book for teachers and teaching artists, Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy, and Social Justice in Classroom and Community (scheduled for release in February 2011 by Teachers and Writers Collaborative). In one of our essays, I addressed a clique of 9th grade young women who managed to disrupt their class day after day, not just while I was visiting but throughout the school year.

One of our peer reviewers asked at that time if we were going to touch on the current issues of bullying among young people, since the essay did not speak directly to that point. I did not directly witness these young women acting as bullies but I did see them as reluctant learners who were much more concerned with their own images and interests than educating themselves or allowing others to learn in the classroom environment; for this reason, I did not want to add that element to the essay.

There is a lot of business being generated these days surrounding bullying. This seems to be the big push in schools and the media, supported with key news stories of bullying incidents, many of which focus on sexual preference and gender issues. Tragic as these cases are, bullying is nothing new. In society, we may recognize more ways to act as bullies, especially in the realm of social networking, where there have been a number of cases that have led to desperation and suicides. It is awful.

In my early teens, instead of Facebook and You Tube, we had slam books. Notebooks with students' names on different pages would be circulated among classmates, who would anonymously state how they felt about those named. With the lack of accountability for one's words, it was possible to say horrid things about another. Then, if the student who was "slammed" got the book, that person was faced with all that malice of thought. It was extremely hurtful and often ran under the radar of teachers and administration.

In junior high school, the punches that I experienced daily for weeks as I passed a certain student in the hall between classes also ran under the radar until I stood up for myself and challenged her with the fact that I was not going to retaliate because I help no grudge against her. I said I did not understand why she was trying to get me to fight or why she had singled me out but I was not going to react. If she felt she had to continue hitting me, so be it, but I was not going to raise my hand in return. She stopped. I don't know why. Maybe I was just that strong. She then became a friend in the hallways and class rows, protecting me from other bullies. We lost touch as we moved into high school.

The business of bullying includes books being written, dramatic performances being created and staged in schools, discussions on National Public Radio and in professional development in-services. Many artists who work in schools are totally focusing on this element. Teachers are being guided to include this element of character development into their core curricula. Administrators are struggling to intervene, as are guidance counselors and social workers.

But I contend that bullying is modeled everywhere in our society yet we punish our children and youth for mirroring it in their actions. Our elected officials bully each other on the floors of the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as in state legislative bodies. This year's election cycle was nothing but bullying. It was offensive and expensive. More than $3 billion were spent on television ads alone in November elections, obscene amounts of money that could have been spent on so many deficit concerns in this economy.

We witness bullying among the pundits on both sides of the political spectrum to the point of insult to our intelligence. And the bullies are very well paid. Most of us are struggling to keep up and there are radio and television opinion makers being paid $22 - $50 million a year to shoot their mouths off.

We see bullying among adults in sports. We witness it in industry. We see it among nations and we see it among gangs in American neighborhoods, driving communities to huddle in their homes while thugs roam with guns. Then we see the NRA bully our legislators and our Supreme Court into turning a blind eye to justice and reason.

We are witnessing hypocrisy and holding our young people responsible for behaviors that are inundating our culture and experience every day. It must stop and children will not stop being bullies if adults are bullying them to "do as I say, not as I do."

Ebb, Flow, and the Full Moon

So here's the deal. As artists who choose to work in education, we are often freelancers, independent contractors, consultants. We have walked out on some shaky limb for one of any number of reasons. And we need to be paid on a timely basis or we contribute more to the mess that the economy is in. But it is worth the frustration to have this work now and this schedule. It just means that the universe has some smoothin' out to do...

Nuff said...nite nite...

Another Post Script

Friday was my last day at the elementary school where I have taught a total of 2 weeks in the past month. I mentioned the student who wanted to give me her own nickname when we met the first day of that residency. While I waited in the wing's common area for a class of 3rd graders to get back from their special instruction for the day (probably art), three of the students from that first self-contained class, a boy and two girls, hurried across to do an errand from their classroom.  When they saw me, they had much to share about what was going on in school but it quickly became time that they needed to get back and I needed to head to my next class.  As the three left, the girls scurried off down the hall, the boy looked at me with a big smile and said, "Goodbye Muffin."