Two "Off-the-boat" stories

I have been brought to tears twice in the past two days by stories of immigrants newly arrived in America. But these are not the oft-published stories of grand injustices like the tearing apart of families or the withholding of housing, jobs, or rights in court. 

The first comes from Paper Daughter, by M. Elaine Mar. Five-year-old Yee arrives in Denver with her mother, following after her father who departed from China years before. Nixon is in office, we learn for a sense of timing, and Yee joins an all-white first grade classroom. 

The trials of school are almost incommunicable but Mar poignantly and impressively details the difficulty of answering a question in math class: 


Mrs. Tate wrote the equation in big chalk figures on the board. She asked for a volunteer. The more enthusiastic students raised their hands. Mrs. Tate scanned the room, then decided, "Let's give Elaine a chance." I didn't understand a word, not even my new name. There was silence. "Elaine?" Mrs. Tate repeated. I ddin't respond. "That's your name," San reminded me. My classmates started giggling. "Oh," I said. I immediately knew the answer, but I couldn't think of the word for "seven" in English. "Um," I said. The children laughed some more.

Mrs. Tate made a shushing sound, one finger in front of her lips. She drew tally marks next to the numbers. "Now, here we have one, two, three," she said. "And here we have one, two three, four. If we put them together, how many do we have?" She looked at me significantly.

I still couldn't think of the word. I wanted to ask San, but I wasn't allowed - Mrs. Tate would think I was cheating. I'll write it on the board, I thought. I slid out of my seat.

Misunderstanding my action, Mrs. Tate said, "No, no, you can't go to the bathrom now." The class exploded with laughter. San translated the sentence for me. "I want to write the answer," I told him. 

Too late. Mrs. Tate decided to solve the problem herself: "All together class, one, two, three --" she tapped at the lines she'd drawn "--four, five, six, seven. The answer's seven!"



As I read this I think of students who don't respond right away when their names are called - students who have read the text and probably have understood, but who can't speak their words. This is why I so rarely cold call. But I am afraid that I must often not give students enough time to respond to a question that just takes them time to translate in their heads, then translate back into English. 

This isn't the scene that made me cry - that was the scene when the whole class submits forms and money to buy school-logo tee-shirts which Elaine's family cannot afford. Her shame, instead of her lack of English, prevent her from being clear about why she can't submit the form on time. This kind of shame must be the experience of so many kids, immigrant and not. 

“You may have ‘The Lives of the Poets’ under your oxter, but you don’t have them in your head, so go home and read.”

The other immigrant story is this excerpt from 'Tis: A Memoir by Frank McCourt. The excerpt appeared in the New Yorker in 1999 and has been reprinted this week. At first I thought it was just going to be an enjoyable and light read. But the final scene, which is indeed funny, and describes his mishaps in a New York movie theater a few days after he's arrived from Ireland, is also very sad. The pain of having an expectation of how you will enjoy simple pleasures, and having that expectation so utterly smashed, is hard to read about. OK I didn't actually cry, but I felt like crying, and certainly had I been in his shoes I think I would have cried.

Reflection of one culture in another

This morning I started reading a memoir called Paper Daughter by M. Elaine Mar. This is not the first account by a Chinese of her upbringing in China which has enthralled me from the first sentence. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club cast a similar trance with stories of an unabashedly autocratic parenting system which teaches young girls to be obedient, helpful, demure and feminine.

I love the contrast between the parents' stifling tactics and the child's natural impulses, or the ways the child misconstrues some of the parents' carefully conveyed messages, as when the narrator's mother tells her that her grandmother doesn't have to follow the same rules as everyone else only because she's old and has earned privileges.

"Oh yes," the mother says solemnly, "You must respect your elders." The young girl does respect her grandmother immensely, but only because she's allowed to go about without combing her hair. The girl hates her daily appointment with her mother's comb, and longs for such freedom from tyranny to be her right.

Or when the child understands things the parents never attempted to teach, lessons learned through experience and observation. For example, Ms. Mar learns from watching her mother and their female neighbor give each other false compliments to fulfil a social expectation of flattery alongside self-deprecation. Her mother coos at the young child of their neighbor, and the neighbor says

"'Isn't auntie kind! Oh see how much she likes you!'
Moy-moy, who was two, tottered off to fetch her chamberpot for me, prompting laughter from the two mothers. 'See how much she likes you, little Yee?' they asked. Perched on the rim of Moy-moy's toilet, I began to understand the meaning of subservience, a proxy for affection in our culture."

There are aspects of Ms. Mar's childhood which recall significant moments of my own. She recalls that her mother told her the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf every single day. I remember the first time my mother told me that story, and how profoundly that message hit home. The narrator of Paper Daughter says that she shivered when the boy died at the end, eaten by the wolf because of his own foolishness. I think my version was the sanitized American translation, in which only the lives of a few hapless sheep are sacrificed to the moral of the story. But the effect was strong. I think my mother told me that story only once, and she did not follow it with the narrator's mother's daily commentary: "You must never lie."

Yesterday, our second day on Beowulf in the 11/12 classroom, students wrote at the beginning of class about what people in their culture tend to talk about when they get together. The natural division that arose in first period and was maintained in the rest of the day was the generational gap - they students wanted to divide the conversation topics into what Older people talk about, and what Younger people talk about. After they discussed with their partners, we took feedback as a class, which resulted in these lists.

                







Then, we read the opening segments of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. Our question was, what do these people seem to care about? What do they talk about? Several of the same things came up - leaders, how to be "good," how to achieve power and wealth, former struggles, community problems.

I need to find a way to post our conversation topics in the class, so we can keep an eye to what these people are talking about that we also talk about.

Doing things by hand

This morning I am procrastinating while in my own classroom - a rare occurrence, I assure you - as I read from some of my preferred periodicals, before students roam and rouse the halls. 

THe task I am putting off is glueing bits of text to larger pieces of paper that students can annotate on. My reading brought me to two articles about the virtues of doing things by hand, or making work original. Both articles subtly point me towards my work...

The first is about quick replies to emails that gmail now supplies. "Sounds great!" "I'm in!" "Tuesday works for me." I detest these suggestions and even if I would have said what was written, I adjust my wording on principle. It takes us another step away from writing letters, which I cling to as a source of personal fulfillment. 

The other is about making things with your hands, or craftsmanship. Yesterday an English teaching colleague and I test-drove a reading skills test that we have to administer to all our students next week. It's terrible, in part because it's on the computer, which seems like such an unnatural way to read if any pleasure will be gained. (It feels infinitely different from a kindle. Somehow, I don't want to be able to click on and interact with the reading page - I just want to read it.)

So here's to a day of creating hands-on tasks for students, and a weekend of writing, by hand, Christmas greetings on cards that Tess and I stamped and painted ourselves!

Felix Culpa!

My choir is singing Ceremony of Carols, by Benjamin Britten, and in returning to this piece for the first time since I was singing with Southern Maine Children's Choir at the age of 9, I am struck by the lyrics to the penultimate movement, Deo Gracias. 

Adam lay ibounden, bounden in a bond;

For thousand winter, thought he not too long.

Deo gracias! Deo gracias!
And all was for an appil, and appeil that he tok,
As clerkès finden weitten in their book.

Deo gracias! Deo gracias!
Ne had the appil takè ben, the appil takè ben,
Ne haddè never our lady, a ben hevenè quene.

Blessèd be the time that appil takè was.
Therefore we moun singen.
Deo gracias! Deo gracias!

I have learned through a little research that the language here, whimsical as it seems to me, is Maraconic, a mix of Latin and English (makes me think of a musical version of Yankee Doodle: "stick a feather in your English and call it Macaronic!"). As we sang these words probably a dozen times at rehearsal on Saturday, I realized we were saying "Blessed be the time that appil take was." What? Are we praising the fall of man here? This was the first I had heard of Eve's acquisition as anything other than evidence that women are the root of all evil. 

Apparently, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are way ahead of me. Ambrose, of the 4th century, was the first to introduce the idea that this original sin was good because it summoned so great a redeemer as Christ. Aquinas wrote, "But there is no reason why human nature should not have been raised to something greater after sin. For God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom." 

What an interesting idea, that we might be raised to higher heights after sinning. I think I'm going to bring this up in class this next text, while we read Beowulf, who, arguably, commits the sin of hubris. 

Anyway, this phenomenon speaks of a pendulum effect in our own moral comportment.

Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed

 This morning I finished Black Mamba Boy, and am in awe of its geographic reach. A boy born in Yemen who embarks on a journey to find his father after his mother dies. One of the remarkable things about his journey, which starts in 1935, is that anywhere he goes he gives the name of his clan and thus finds people who will take him in, give him work, or at the very least point the way to his next destination. Without the clan network he would certainly never have survived past the first few legs of his journey. 

The book has a map on the inside cover which shows the Arabian peninsula over into northern Europe, divided into the territories and countries that existed in the thirties. I had to refer to it many times, and am also in awe of the vastness and cultural patchwork that characterize those desert regions. 

The hardest part of the book to read, but also the most compelling, related to the British and Italian colonial forces in northern Africa at this time - their brutality, their cultural bulldozing, their unrelenting and heavy handed racism. It was tragic to read the young boy's growing self-consciousness of himself as the lowest of the low because he was dark skinned and poor. His treatment at the hands of white soldiers and superiors shames me. 

 This week I listened to Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. by Michael Eric Dyson, in which he describes briefly his own disillusionment with blackness as he grew up. In the community where he was a boy, he writes, "blackness surrounded me like warm molasses"; as he grew up and encountered more and more of the white narrative about what black people are and where they fit in the hierarchy of life, his own skin color dimmed and that warm  molasses effect turned to something decidedly less sweet and rich. 

It never ceases to amaze me how the different things I read converse with each other in my mind. Dyson's account of his own internalization of black-as-bad followed shortly on the heals of my class's analysis of how Othello begins, in acts 3 and 4, to internalize what Iago says about him, namely that his wife made a mistake in marrying him, that his skin color renders their marriage unnatural, and that his status as a foreigner means that his wife is bound to fall out of love with him. I believe much of Othello's madness is driven not by jealousy, but by a nascent self-hatred that he doesn't know what to do with, so unleashes it on the obvious target, which is Desdemona. The class didn't go that far, but we did talk about how he says 

"Her name, which was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is not begrimed and black
As mine own face."

We spent a good amount of time talking about how for the first time here, Othello uses the word black to refer to something dirty and ruined, (Desdemona's name or reputation) and his own face. 


On Thursday one class referred to the idea of Monsters again (which is the theme of this unit) and one student said that Othello is not a monster because of the actions he takes - he is a monster because of what he has undergone at the hands of Iago. It was Iago's treatment of him that makes him a monster, and his violent lashings out (slapping his wife - at this point we hadn't seen act five and the murder and suicide) were the reaction of the monster to his treatment. I thought this was incredibly insightful, and we connected to another girl's reference to a black man on the U's campus who had shot his girlfriend, then himself, a few weeks ago. Maybe, we ventured, he had heard too much of what the white people said about him, and couldn't take it once he had internalized it.

The Fire Next Time is my favorite book, and this week I had what felt like a watershed moment as a teacher, as I assigned an excerpt from it to my students. We read Baldwin's opening letter to his nephew, in which he tells the boy that his grandfather "had a terrible life. He was destroyed long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what the white people said about him." Many, many students annotated and commented on this line when they read it, and connected it to what seems to be going on with Othello, along with the line later in the paragraph, which reads "You can only really be destroyed if you believe what the white world says about you."

The very next morning, as I was listening to the Dyson audiobook, Dyson referred to exactly that line! He relayed a story at the end of which he reflected, "and I began to understand what James Baldwin meant when he said 'You can only really be destroyed if you believe what the white world says about you.'"

I cannot tell you how gratifying this was. I declared aloud to my living room "I had them read that!" I kind of hope that I get to keep giving them snippets of Baldwin and Malcolm X this year, alongside our readings. I want them to be bathed in the warm molasses of the magnificence of black literary voices.

Laudate Othello!

I just told a friend that this is one of the best weekends of my year. It is the weekend of the fall choir concert. The life-changing piece on this season's program? Tres Cantus Laudendi (Three Songs of Praise) by Mack Wilburg. 

OK there was a long, tearful interlude right there while I went to listen to the full performance of the piece, which is available in practice files on our chorus's website, but here's a youtube video of the first movement in performance. I just can't believe what an experience it is to sing in a choir of 100 people, accompanied by 8 or 10 brass players. I can't even hold it together. Pardon me with the Tribune's review says all was well except the insufferable second alto who couldn't keep from swaying and bobbing this moment, then crumpling into emotional tears at other moments. Thank goodness for dress rehearsals when the first wave of the impact of combined choir and orchestra can be undergone without an audience. 
The dress rehearsal is indeed my favorite night of the year (which is why Holy week was so great last week, with what was essentially a dress rehearsal for the St. Matthew Passion every night) because without an audience I feel less nervous and inhibited. I also love hearing the brass rehearse, stop, try something again, get better. The rehearsal process (and watching Brady be exacting with all the other musicians as well) is so satisfying. 

I just wish that I could believe that watching the concert is anywhere near as enjoyable as participating in it! I feel compelled to buy tickets for anyone who is kind enough to humor me by attending. 

In another context (the classroom), I feel like singing songs of praise to Shakespeare this week. Othello, co-taught with Monica, has been so enjoyable. One interesting tidbit was that yesterday, after the first two periods didn't really get into the piece of text we were studying, I realized I wasn't giving them enough to connect to their own lives. The passage was about Othello's initial wooing of Desdemona, which he conducted by telling her stories of his adventures. Then, she arrives on stage and tells her father, in front of the Duke and Lords of Venice, that her duty is divided between him, the patriarch, and her husband ("I do perceive her a divided duty"). 

Othello, explaining his love for Desdemona to the Venetian court

The issues at hand - flirting, and allegiance to husband or father - are ones that are near the top of the teenage brain. I probably wouldn't say that about the allegiance to husband or father idea if I were at another Utah school, but so many of our students are from more traditional communities where girls marry younger, and where marriages are arranged to one degree or another. 

So for third period we started with two discussion questions ("No writing right now, just discussing at your tables")

1. How can a man capture a woman's attention and interest? 

and, two minutes later, 

2. Should a woman be more obedient to her father, or her husband? 

For #1, it was great to see how differently the young men and women saw this issue. Men said, make money, drift in nice cars, give compliments. Women said be consistent, have a plan for the future, be respectful, include the woman in decisions. 

Desdemona chooses Othello: "But here's my husband."

For #2, many said husband, but many said father, because the husband might not stick around, but the father will always be there. Some articulated that it depends on the relationship with the father, since the daughter may want to get away. 

And, in one of the most interesting moments of the day, L., who moved to the U.S. maybe a year and a half ago, said that the couple can just move, if need be, to another state, to live in peace. I'm so fascinated that she would have understood and sort of taken in this reality of American society, which was likely not a reality in Rwanda: if you don't get along with your family, you can move away from them and start afresh! 

In both 3rd and 4th periods, the discussion of the text which followed ("So, how does Othello get Desdemona's attention?" and "Whom should Desdemona remain close to, her father Brabantio, or her husband Othello?") had much more energy. 

The Raging Quiet

I have been silent so far today. It's only 6:58, but many waking hours have elapsed, and they have been silent, except for the occasional words spoken aloud, inadvertently, or a sigh or burp or throat clearing. 

Silent companions this morning

I like the publication The Christian Century, and a recent issue focused on Silence. Almost immediately after I began reading some of the articles, I thought about how I can bring a study of silence and its impact into my current text study. What happens during the silences of our book? Choose a moment that is silent, and work out what you think is going on in the minds of the characters. What can silence hold? Is it benign? What different flavors can it contain? Certainly the silences in our story so far have been conspiratorial, wistful, disbelieving, frightened, anxious, resentful, full of animosity, and broken. Students would surely come up with more.


Silence had an interesting appearance in Mrs. Dalloway this morning.

The narrative has taken an abrupt turn in tone since Ms. Woolf shifted her attention from Clarissa and Peter and Richard and their extravagant unhappiness to Septimus and Rezia and their attempts to find help on the path toward peace and comfort, which the doctors Holmes and Bradshaw promise them ludicrously.


Septimus struggles with mental illness, but is told repeatedly that there is "nothing at all the matter" and that he lacks only "a sense of proportion," and needs six months "rest" at a house where the nurses will "teach" him the art (of proportion).


The silences in this book rage with past memories, unspoken turmoils, pressing questions that never pass lips. All is either much contained for the sake of decorum (Woolf seems critical of the British reticence and obligation to control oneself) or contained because the person who might express it feels too despondent to attempt the task. That is Septimus. It seems that trying to make his inner thoughts heard has resulted only in upraidings and absurd advices from the likes of Holmes and Bradshaw. Thus he is listlessly silent.


Rezia, his wife, suffers greatly for his silences, and her own are charged with despair.


These seem very different silences, for Rezia and Septimus, than others described for Peter, Richard and Clarissa. Their silences are in full bloom with the outgrowths of their self-centered dramas. At one lunch with Lady Bruton, Woolf lifts the curtain on the silence:

________

“D’you know who’s in town?” said Lady Bruton suddenly bethinking her. “Our old friend, Peter Walsh.”

They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely glad, Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken.

Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard Dalloway, remembered the same thing — how passionately Peter had been in love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of things; and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too. Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes; saw him hesitate; consider; which interested her, as Mr. Dalloway always interested her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about Peter Walsh?

That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so many words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.

_____

What a thing to think in the silence! How much, and how quickly, raged during this moment of lunch! And I could analyse any of a million silent moments in the classroom and become aware at least of my own raging thoughts and my perceptions of what rages chez mes étudiants. I don't use the word "rage" in an angry way - I want to convey swift and powerful, uncontrollable movement. 

Then, my favorite  - the employee Milly Brush has been watching this silence like a soap opera, it seems, because the narrator tells us: 

_______

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences; 

______

The last silence is one in which a great deal of overt communication takes place. I also engage in this kind of communication in the classroom. I give a lot of thumbs up, a lot of nods, encouraging smiles, discouraging head shakes, and sometimes a wheel my fingers in a circle as in to propel a hampster wheel, by which movement I hope to encourage my students to "say more about that". In this silence, the coffee is hurried along. In the silence left behind the narration, we understand, as we haven't (or at least I didn't) that lunch has drawn out undesirably long. 

___

Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a gentleman too. Now, being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or turn her head a little abruptly, and Milly Brush took the signal, however deeply she might be sunk in these reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted soul whom life could not bamboozle, because life had not offered her a trinket of the slightest value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek, nose; nothing whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and Perkins was instructed to quicken the coffee.
______

I love when authors leave silences in the narration when the reader can determine what's going on. Woolf, Hemingway, Colson Whitehead - three writers who immediately come to mind when I think of stories that allow me some latitude to determine unspoken meaning. 

One thing I read this summer about classroom design reminded me that it's important to create spaces for quiet in the classroom. I have been mulling over the idea of a day every two weeks or so during which I could have students move through three stations, one of which would be a silent reading and conferencing-with-me-about-reading station. 

I very much like the idea, because it would be a day without my direct instruction, even for giving instructions, at all, and I have the impression I talk to much to my classes, especially explaining how assignments will work. I drafted some station ideas this morning: 

Station one: In the annex, reading on comfy chairs and having 2-3 min. check-ins with me about reading. 

Station two: On the left side of the classroom, watching a short video related to something we are studying, and reacting to it with your group, your partner, and coming up with questions and comments for a brief, whole class follow-up discussion the following morning. 

Station three: On the right side of the classroom, a Writer's Workshop, where students choose one piece of writing from the past two weeks to edit carefully for spelling and grammar, and then word process. (I need to work on this station, because I know that task will take more than 20 minutes. It could be their job to edit during class, then type on their own time at home or in the library or in my classroom after school.)

These stations would be far from silent, but the teacher megaphone would be turned off for the day, and students would be pursuing their own thoughts. I like the thought.