Sidney--who I wrote about earlier as a master of 
creative responses--has been accepted to the Art 
Institute of Chicago!  So happy for her!

As I begin planning for a new semester, I am continuing to reflect on and theorize how students create their own expressions from their education.  I witnessed so many creative responses from students at the end of last semester. 

One student wrote about Logic's album cover Everybody and suggested that it reminded her of the School of Athens, though others thought it was more like The Last Supper.  She says, "The following is Logic's Everybody album cover. The only reason The School of Athens makes me think of this album cover is because of the overall balance and the vibrant colors of everyone's clothing contrasting with the neutral tones of the building on either side. Also, one thing I didn't know about this album cover is that it is actually a painting, I always thought it was an image someone had created in a computer program. If anyone is interested, I included a website that shows who everyone is on the album cover.

These are graphic design students, so they are interested in the art work on album covers.  For their sake, I'm going to post this obituary of an iconic graphic designer of album covers who died recently.

I am looking forward to learning more from students this semester! Here is one many interesting posts from Austin, a mathematics major. 

One of the most interesting topics discussed last week was Roman mosaics.  Mosaics are patterns created by organized hard materials of stone, glass, etc.  These mosaics can create stunning visuals like the mosaic below.

 

These kind of remind me of fractals.  Fractals are geometric figures created by taking a simple shape, like a triangle, and repeating it whilst shrinking the shape infinitely.  While fractals are mostly computer generated, they can also be found in nature, although their pattern is not infinite.  Some examples of fractals in nature include snowflakes, DNA, algae, trees, and more. 

 

Below is one of the most famous fractals called the Mandelbrot Set.  This is an example of an infinitely repeating fractal.  If you scroll down on this website, you will find an interactive image of the Mandelbrot Set where you can zoom in and witness its beauty.

The Latin Creare: Creative Responses in Education Regardless of Economics

Anxiety, silence, hustle, and gamesmanship--so much goes on in college classes so it is stunning when there is also joy.  At the end of every General Education humanities course, my classes take a group final where I offer a question and they discuss it without me and a student's name is chosen from a hat to answer for the class.  It is always a compelling experience.  It breaks down the I-just-care-about-my-grade college experience.  Last year I asked, "How is it that we created so much joy in this class together?"

I am interested in joy through the struggle of being a student, but I want to share students' experiences in making a creative education for themselves, those who make creative responses to school activities even as they have jobs and full lives outside of college.  I hope to share their stories here.

One way students make their own meaning is through connections to their “outside” of school discourse communities (as Gerald Graff might say in "Hidden Intellectualism.")  For example, Sidney is in my Humanities 101 class on ancient cultures.  She works at Herbs Etc. in Mt. Pleasant.  Here is a bit of her response to our class (used with her permission) in week two where she tells us about her job and Egyptian oils on the online forum:

I wanted to bring this to light because there are some very specific blends that have been named after several Gods and Goddesses. One of which is the essential oil blend Tjet. I know what you’re thinking. What on Earth does this have to do with this week's topic? Let me explain. In Ancient Egypt there is a Goddess known by the name of Isis (not that Isis)…

Oh struggling but joyful students out there,  how do you connect your job or hobbies to your college learning?

"I spent much of my childhood listening to the sound of striving."  This is the first sentence of the first chapter of Michelle Obama's Becoming.  I love it.  I think the first couple chapters of her experiences in kindergarten and early elementary would be so interesting for pre-service teachers.  

I also like the ways she describes the way she learns "college knowledge" and resilience.
I was learning all the time now...in the obvious academic ways, holding my own in classes...how to write efficiently, how to think critically.  I'd inadvertently signed up for a 300-level theology class as a freshman and l floundered my way through, ultimately salvaging my grade with an eleventh-hour, leave-it-all-on-the-field effort on the final paper.  It wasn't pretty, but I found it encouraging in the end, proof that I could work my way out of just about any hole. (78)

Later, she encourages students to plan ahead, start way ahead of deadlines.  Of course, the autobiography is an amazing inside perspective on campaigning, on being an ambassador as First Lady, on living on the South Side and on being a devoted mom while working for nonprofits.  I've imagined talking with Michelle Obama in my living room, and now at least I got to hear her voice and story in my living room!

I like stories about science.  I’ve enjoyed biographies about Copernicus and Einstein.  Recently, I’ve liked reading about 19^th century female scholars in science in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things about a character who studies mosses and corresponds with Darwin and Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered about a real biologist who corresponded with Darwin. 

In Kingsolver’s novel there is a character who is a science teacher—Thatcher Greenwood.  Though born in poverty without a mother and an alcoholic, abusive father, he helps doctors in the Civil War and one of them sends him to Harvard afterwards.  He ends up leaving Boston to a small town that is run by “moralists.”  He wants to take his students—mostly girls—into the fields and woods for data collection but is not allowed to.  He shares the history of science, introducing Darwin’s “descent with modification.”  Eventually, he is forced to speak at a public debate called “Darwin vs. Decency.”  The local media is all over it.  Though he carefully and patiently debates the principal, he loses and eventually loses his job.

Dana Goldstein starts The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession with the claim that public school teaching has become the most scrutinized profession.  I think it is good for us to remember the very old debates about “content” and also about “pedagogy.”  So courageous.

Here’s a couple of great lines:

“Thatcher himself in daily contest with the baby Jesus as he tried to hold their attention to the so-called imponderables of physics:  light, heat, magnetism, conservation of energy.  He was losing, to the more ponderable Virgin birth.  His fellow teachers advised against trying.”  (254-255)

Time

It is time to dust off this blog.  The grieving has gone on long enough.   Time has gone so fast.  It is November, so it is overcast.  Here is the beginning of Moby Dick. I share it with students to help them know some complex sentences, some parallel structure.  Now is the time that students feel overwhelmed and gloomy.  I hope they might feel connected to others.  For the first time, however, I felt uneasy about the final line.  My "sea," Lake Michigan, feels a long way off, so my substitute is pen and paper, and I hope that along with paint, brushes, crayons, keyboarding, strumming...it is others' substitute as well.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

                                                      Ishmael, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

                                                          a nest made out of this and that

Mother's Day Grief and Gratefulness

In Gratitude for Mira

In gratitude, I thank my mother

for the pain she alone

felt, in a linoleum-floored hospital bed 

as she labored to deliver me into this world,

without many words of English, as a Polish-speaking

nurse came to interpret the foreign feelings and words.

In gratitude, I thank my Mama

for going through this labor again

to bring me home the gift of my lovely sister Eva,

my partner in flower-watering and care-giving;

the gift of my brother Henio, who I sent her forth

to deliver in my innocence and to whom I can wholely attribute

my hero-complex—as I saved him from his driving a rolling Oldsmobile

down the driveway to the ditch,

as I saved his shoe from going down a flooded creek and

thus from the wrath of our mother, and as I saved him

from the alone encounter with the kindergarten teacher in a new school—

and the gift of my sister Jakubina,

whose beauty and gentle spirit,

reflects, as Maria, one of our many cousins who loved Mama, says,

of Aunt Myra herself.

In gratitude, I thank my Mama

for sharing meal after meal with me

from her breast; from the high chair where we learned

of  President Kennedy’s death

and cried together;

from the many vegetables she grew

so that we could grow

healthy and strong;

from the chickens, pigs and steers

she fed and raised;

from the milk she squeezed out of the teats in the cold barn.

In gratitude, I thank her

for each chicken’s head

she felled with her axe on the tree stump,

telling me later that it was a horrible business,

but she did it for us—for our strength, for our education,

just as her mother, Babcia, sold eggs in Poland for her boarding school

education to be a teacher, taking the train to another town.

I thank her

for each chicken feather

she plucked—each and every one—thousands

of them, I give thanks.

And for waking up early and for sending me off

to college so that I could come to her profession as well.

In gratitude, I thank Mum, the Baba of my children,

for her pain when my own labor came,

for taking care of her Rysiu for five weekends in a row,

so that I could do my graduate studies.

I thank her for caring for him and Franiu while I traveled

to conferences and adventures

and for the cards we have from them still

because of the craft time she shared with them.

I thank her for the many sweaters, gloves, and hats

 she made for them and me,

and for the books she loved and

we loved together.

In gratitude, I thank Mum

for her love of flowers and the outdoors—

because as my dear husband, who she was grateful for, says to me:

“You have the expanse of the farm in your soul.”

She was also deeply grateful, as I am, for the uniquely-suited and deeply-loyal

husbands of my sisters, Patrick and Daniel, and their love and care for their flowers.

She let me grow and care for a patch of flowers on the farm,

and at the nursing homes, so that my own garden became a daily comfort

as she was sick, as she died.  And as I pulled dead marigolds off their stems,

my head down in the orange and gold of grief, I saw the Babcias and Stryankas running

towards her in joy with their arms open wide, “Mira!  Mira!”---and of course crying.

In gratitude, I thank Mum

for staying on this earth until I got to know her on a deep level,

past the childhood ungratefulness, passed the teenage angst and selfishness,

past the busy parenthood and career building.

I got to experience her unconditional love late,

beyond the childish love where I thought she was just

demanding and annoying. 

And after her truly annoying initial dealings with doctors,

to a place of accepting their attempts at help.

She waited, she held on,

through despair and pain,

through the humility of others taking care of her

in a linoleum-floored hospital bed.

She let me lose my temper, demanding better care.

She let me have her sit in her wheelchair in the lobby in her private pain,

so that it would shame the sluggish staff to quickly move.

She let me love every chin hair, fingernail, permed curl,

She let me love her stroke-curved toe, her hairy shins, the blackened thin-skin patches,

the crooked arm, the sharp blue eyes and tongue, the beautiful skin,

her suffering soul.

She patiently let me put her to bed, not knowing that I would be the last person

to do so.  Although she often said, “ouch!” she didn’t then. 

And as Eve and I wept about her life of suffering, during what we didn’t know were her

final moments, and came to realize that her suffering gave her such strength for

others—for the many nurse’s aides, friends with children, for us—she then took her last

breath to remind us that suffering is not without heart, without love for others.

As children, she took care of our bodies and souls,

As adults, we took care of her body, and she took care of our spirits.

Wikipedia, our communal knowledge source, says

“Mira” is a giant red star,

that it is a “brightest periodic variable in the sky that is not visible to the naked eye

for part of its cycle” and that there is a disc that is “being accreted from material

 in the solar wind from Mira and could eventually form new planets.”

In gratitude, I cherish that I am a part of her constellation,

I am grateful that we will be able to continue to form new readings

from our gratitude from the deep and rich source,

of light and being and life.