DragonBlog

I’ll be starting a series of blogs on the challenges and perils that adolescents have to negotiate.  These key issues come up again and again in my work with high school students

The illustration is of course Tenniel’s for Carroll’s Alice, Chapter 9, when she encounters the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle as they wax nostalgic over their schooldays.  As the Wikipedia article (yes, yes, I do use Wikipedia!) states, “He tells Alice his history of going to school in the sea, but cannot understand the school system that Alice describes to him- least of all the poetry she recites. Ironically, she cannot understand it either. This is a pun on the two meanings of ’school’, referring in the turtle’s usage to a school of fish or marine animals, and by Alice to an institute of learning”.    I’m working on punning titles derived from Carroll’s punning curriculum (”ambition, distraction, uglification and derision”, “laughing and grief”).  Here’s the relevant extract:

We had the best of educations–in fact, we went to school every day–’

`I’ve been to a day-school, too,’ said Alice; `you needn’t be so proud as all that.’

`With extras?’ asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.

`Yes,’ said Alice, `we learned French and music.’

`And washing?’ said the Mock Turtle.

`Certainly not!’ said Alice indignantly.

`Ah! then yours wasn’t a really good school,’ said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. `Now at ours they had at the end of the bill, “French, music, and washing–extra.”‘

`You couldn’t have wanted it much,’ said Alice; `living at the bottom of the sea.’

`I couldn’t afford to learn it.’ said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. `I only took the regular course.’

`What was that?’ inquired Alice.

`Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,’ the Mock Turtle replied; `and then the different branches of Arithmetic– Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.’

`I never heard of “Uglification,” Alice ventured to say. `What is it?’

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. `What! Never heard of uglifying!’ it exclaimed. `You know what to beautify is, I suppose?’

`Yes,’ said Alice doubtfully: `it means–to–make–anything– prettier.’

`Well, then,’ the Gryphon went on, `if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.’

Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said `What else had you to learn?’

`Well, there was Mystery,’ the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, `–Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling–the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.’

`What was that like?’ said Alice.

`Well, I can’t show it you myself,’ the Mock Turtle said: `I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.’

`Hadn’t time,’ said the Gryphon: `I went to the Classics master, though. He was an old crab, HE was.’

`I never went to him,’ the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: `he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.’

`So he did, so he did,’ said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.

Look for DragonAcademy. http://twitter.com/

There’s an article in the latest New York Review of Books by Charles Petersen, called “In the World of Facebook,” that you should read. (In fact, you should subscribe to the NYRB if you don’t already—it’s the most literate and politically aware periodical in English, in my humble opinion.) The format, for those of you’ve who’ve somehow avoided the NYRB till now, is that the author of the articles takes a book or two as a starting point for addressing an important issue. In this article, Petersen jumps off from a book about the founding of Facebook, and one about the struggle for control of My Space.

My colleagues and I talk a lot about social networking sites. Writers and teachers spend a lot of time on their computers. I guess every professional in the modern world has to deal with emails, and we have students, and their parents, to answer, not to mention professional associations, administrators, editors, and each other. We spend a lot of time on the net too—researching, reading articles, posting on various blogspots and forums. And of course, we’re writing. I dimly remember the days of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper, corrasable bond and trying to figure out how much space to leave for the footnotes, but no one in her “write” mind would wax nostalgic for them, let alone court hand-cramp. In those moments of reflection, when I used to hunt for matches and draw poison into my lungs, I now attend to the merry pinging of my inbox, type a quick twitter, or let my Facebook friends know what’s on my mind. Amusing, addictive perhaps, but not likely to cause cancer.

There’s another reason to engage in social networking, a more hard-headed and practical one. As the founder and principal of a tiny, innovative school, with a budget to match, I am aware that if I’m to get the word out there, it needs to be through more creative means than taking out a full page colour ad in the Globe. Those of my friends who are on the cutting edge, who know how to be hip and out there, tell me the old forms of raising your profile are as quaint as the set dressing on “Madmen”. So, to the amusement of my son, and with his help, I found myself creating a personal Web page, trolling for people I know who have done the same, and inviting them into what Petersen cleverly suggests originated as a kind of virtual dorm room, my profile.

Like everyone else in the world, I’m keen to express myself. This impulse to make things, which most high school and university educations, not to mention most workplaces, sternly quash, is liberated and delighted by the blank wall of a profile page. You can give frivolous answers to the kind of questions that enliven high school year books and jump-start friendships between room-mates. What are your political views, your favourite music, books, movies, quotations. What are you looking for? “Interested” in? (Men, women, both?) What’s your relationship status? You can put up the twenty-first century equivalent of that poster I used to have of Marlon Brandon in leather on a motorbike, my corkboard covered with a collage of art-book images, snapshots, and inspirational lines from William Blake or Muriel Rukeyser. You can laugh out loud when your friends are clever or indiscreet, and be tempted to be indiscreet yourself. “Facebook appeared as a natural extension of the atmosphere of college, “ Petersen says, “where everlasting friendship often seems as simple as making another late-night dorm-room acquaintance.”

That of course is one of the issues. It’s oddly like traveling with a stranger on a train. In the snug apparent privacy, lulled by the clackety-clack of the wheels or the keyboard, you find yourself confiding, confessing, maybe even making things up. A click of the enter button, and then they’re out there, forever, in the imperishable ether. Turns out, it’s not so private after all. Everyone knows a story about someone haunted and even harmed by a virtual indiscretion. I can barely get onto my homepage, but there are those practitioners of the dark arts who can easily get onto it in spite of me. Or even those we’ve admitted in a careless moment, and forgotten, can get us into trouble. Our indiscretions can travel far and wide. I have friends who don’t admit their students as “friends” (Petersen is very funny on the way social networking has “changed the word ‘friend’ from a noun, something defined by duration, to a verb—‘I friended him,’ a one-off event”.) I have friends who have weeded their “friend group” of supervisors and clients. Or weeded their profile, transforming Facebook pages, as Petersen points out, from college dorms to suburban front lawns.

But the allure remains. There they are, my kids, my real-life friends (the people I invite to dinner or go to the Opera with), my colleagues and students, revealing little bits of themselves, commenting on my thoughts, passing me the virtual equivalent of those notes we used to slide under our desks to each other when the teacher’s back was turned. What it is for me is a seat at a sidewalk café in Paris, a constant parade, where I catch glimpses of people I know and people who intrigue me, moments of gossip and jokes and chance encounters. And like any ringside seat at the human parade, an opportunity to eavesdrop, the writer’s favourite pastime.

It started with Adrian. He said that he was tired of being labeled gifted and suggested we call him “burdened” instead. I admit to being startled as well as distraught. I don’t like to think of someone being made to suffer for who he is, and being gifted is a quality as inborn as the colour of your eyes or the shape of your nose. You can certainly disguise it or I suppose have it surgically altered, but why would you want to? Which is why I was so startled, because I have always thought it made so many things easier, being extremely smart, and it certainly made things interesting.

And then, not long after, I was in English class with my grade 9 students. We are working our way, this year, through the great, disturbing classics of the nineteenth century, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Browning’s My Last Duchess. We were reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a text I favour, like so many of my colleagues. It’s compulsively readable, an irresistible combination of that heavily perfumed, languid, poetic writing and a brilliantly Freudian horror twist. It allows you to talk about two key periods of English literature, the Victorian and the Modern, and the turning point between them. It raises the issues of gender identification and sexual orientation, and it’s still subversive, glamourous, seductive. There is no better text for getting adolescents talking about art and morality.

I was reading the first chapter out loud. “There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction,” Basil Hallward, the artist who paints the fatal portrait, says, “the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. Your rank and wealth my art, Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“He’s right,” Lydia interjected. “I wish I wasn’t so intelligent.”

And there it was, two very bright, creative kids of sterling character, from supportive families, in a school jam-packed with exceptional students, who found being brainy a burden. My first thought was that to live “undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet” would be a kind of hell for me, a suffocating boredom. Why would you want to give up all the gifts that being gifted brings, the heightened sensitivity, the rich inner life, the originality of imagination, the quickness of apprehension? In my experience, Renzulli is right—there is more than high measureable intelligence, there is motivational energy and creativity. Gifted kids move in a world that is sensually, emotionally, imaginatively and intellectually rich. Who would not revel in the experience?

But then I thought, just because it is a difference, and a rare enough difference, it is also a disability in the ordinary world. Being gifted makes it impossible to move through the world undisturbed. Every fallen sparrow, every loud noise, every instance of irrational behaviour, every question left unanswered, the smell of cooked cabbage, the scratch of a wool turtleneck, disturbs you. Being gifted makes it impossible to be indifferent. Any piece of work to which you turn your hand must be perfect. The distance between what you conceive and what you realize torments you. Injustice enrages you. You can’t keep your mouth shut, even when you know you’re going to get in trouble. You need meaning; you need complication. Even small differences are significant to you, because you can perceive them, and understand their implications. And to live without disquiet? Once you refuse the pat answers and come to know what’s going on? John Milton could have been writing about gifted kids instead of Adam and Eve and the apple, “of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe”.

I think there’s another element too, the Frankenstein’s monster feeling of being marked as different, misunderstood, outcast and reviled. I can remember being cruelly teased because of my vocabulary– all those big words– because I was constantly reading, because I knew the answer, and everyone else knew that I did, even if I managed to sit on my hand. My gifted kids all tell me they’ve been bullied, humiliated for being able to do things others don’t find so easy, that they have earned the ire of teachers who found their curiosity rude, rebellious, and infuriating. And at the very same time that they are passed over, as if they are hogging the limelight and keeping others from having an opportunity to speak, they are objectified, made to feel like freaks. Chris told me his favourite movie was The Elephant Man, that he felt like Joseph Merrick, an object of curiosity, isolated from others by his difference, his giftedness.

How do you transform giftedness from a burden into a treasure? The key is community. You have to find a place where your gifts are honoured, where you are honoured, and where difference is accepted. For me, this came only in university, when all of a sudden people in class looked to me for my opinion, instead of groaning when I raised my hand, where everyone was a strong and confident individualist. Which brings us back to Oscar Wilde, who venerated the free intellect, the life of passionate feeling, subjecting all that is conventional, pat, and smug to questioning. There it is, I say to my grade 9 students. It may be a difficult life, but it is an examined life, it is a life overflowing with richly lived and closely analysed experiences. And that’s the gift in being gifted. You can live richly, and understand deeply.

Okay, I admit it.  I’m a Tarragon Theatre groupie.  I’ve been a subscriber for a couple of decades now, the last half dozen of those years with my friend Beatrice.  We love the Tarragon because it is not slick and commercial.  It’s not the place where you would go to see a remounting of some play that got lots of notice on Broadway last year, nor is it aimed to please the broadest spectrum of theatre-goers.  It is a place for new plays, for innovative stagings, for small companies and great actors who are not famous, for Canadian work.  The theatre spaces are not large and not plush, but intimate, and real.  It’s a place for courageous theatre.

Which was the title of the incredible play we saw tonight.  Michael Healey is a hometown boy, a product of Ryerson.  We’ve seen other plays by him over the past ten years, most recently a production of Generous at the Tarragon, where he is a writer-in-residence.  Now Generous was a compelling piece of theatre, but Courageous was something more, genuinely, deeply, humanely funny, presenting us with an unlikely and utterly believable cast, indulging in political and spiritual discussion, and using the institution of marriage to explore whether we are, or can be, happy and what we can do about it.  The play is also about religion, and about discrimination.  At its deepest level it is about human rights and human hopes.  It opens with two couples seeking a civil marriage, a most unlikely, foul-mouthed, young and feckless working class boy and girl, and a very middle-aged and middle class pair of men.  Surprisingly, the official refuses to perform the ceremony for the gay couple because he turns out to be a deeply religious (and deeply conflicted) Catholic, who is himself gay.  And it just gallops on from there.  We are shown the angry confrontation between the official and the lawyer who is one half of the gay couple, the wry, tragic seduction of his long-suffering lover by the wounded and angry lover of the official.  We watch the young couple with their new baby and their hopeless finances fall apart, take compassion on a refugee neighbour, become the object of his charity, and finally break apart.  And the most extraordinary thing is that every actor inhabits his or her character so completely, so believably, free of ego and display.

The strongest member of a universally strong cast is Brandon McGibbon, who plays Todd, the bewildered boy who tells us his philosophy is built around the great question, “What the fuck?”  Usually writers, whether they use the medium of fiction (like John Dos Pasos) or non-fiction (Truman Capote) or plays (Edward Albee), patronize the working class or un-intellectual character, perhaps because writers are anything but un-intellectual, and usually are educated to boot, whatever their family background.  But McGibbon’s (and Healey’s) Todd is feeling and moving without being articulate or smart.  The portrayal was a revelation.  But I think it’s only playing until February 7, so for goodness’ sake get yourself to the Tarragon and see it.

Where the Shoe Fits

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what kind of kid The Dragon fits. Who does best here?  And, selfishly, whom do I like to teach?  I ought to know, shouldn’t I?  The school was certainly my idea in the first place.

When people ask me what kind of student I’m looking for, my first impulse is to say a nice kid.  The worst plague of adolescence, and probably of international politics too, is the bully, the selfish, insecure creep who wants to reify his or her own ego by crushing others’.  Middle school comes at the worst moment, the dark night of puberty, when your body betrays you, your hormones run wild, your emotions have the whip hand, and you also have math homework and a curfew.  Even in very small, supportive environments like The Dragon’s, these overcharged and insecure beings are eying each other nervously.  Inexperienced in the judgement of character, relatively naïve about the projection of image, they struggle to assess each other other, their own social impact, the pecking order of the group.  And then they engage in the struggle for place.  If a student comes to us without the stirrings of empathy, the desire to be decent and kind, he or she can throw a whole class into turmoil.  To be successful at collaborative learning, you have to want to collaborate, not put down.

My second thought is a Dragon student needs to be a reader.  All right, my dyslexic friends, a bookworm, whether you devour books on tape or as a wave file or on a Kindle, or in my favourite old technology.  Because the founder of The Dragon is a great and constant reader herself, because she loves books so much she even writes them, and because books are their own kind of museum, a museum of thought, books play a goodly role at The Dragon.  Books and what’s in them are the foundation for two of our central tenets:  you bring what you’ve found out to a discussion based class, and you want to know the best that’s been thought and said, to remember the soul’s history, Spender says.

So a Dragon student is a thinker. Although it has more than four letters, “think” is a good old Anglo-Saxon word, originally meaning “to cause something to seem or to appear to oneself.” A thinker, then, is an active being, a person who has both the power to think and is engaged in thinking.  All too many students have already learned that the power to think gets you in trouble, and engaging is thinking is not something that you will do on the exam. Eager to please, they learn that the high achieving student displays information, and they have become terrified of engaging with ideas.  What if the answer is wrong? A Dragon student needs to be fearless, ready to enter the scrum of understanding.

And then I think, a Dragon student is a creative soul. Creative is another great word, from the Latin, meaning “to bring into being, to make”.  A creative student is originative, productive.   It’s not about art necessarily or about volume.  It’s about bringing something into reality, of yourself, your ideas, your hopes.  I know this is a challenge, but you can’t participate in a true education through repetition, imitation, or regurgitation.

And then, selfishly, because a teacher has to have a good time too, I’m looking for a student with a sense of humour.  I like to tease people, I like to be teased, it’s wonderful to be able to laugh instead of pull long faces and set punishments.  I love the wits, the one-liners that let you stop in the middle of some earnest explication and see the possibility of delight. (All right, my Aspberger’s friends, I know you’ll have to think about that, but admit that you too like to play.)

The other things Dragon students have been described as seem less important to me.  It’s true my students are no slouches.  But the gifted label can be a burden to carry.  Such strange expectations accompany it, as if it were undemocratic, unsporting somehow, to be smarter than average, while acceptable to be more athletic or better-looking than average.  As if you needed to be taken down a peg or two.  And while lots of successful Dragon students have tested gifted, lots of others don’t or can’t.  What they all have, what they bring, are deeper gifts, the things they teach each other and us, their teachers, every day—about the courage to persist, the other ways to demonstrate knowledge of curriculum content, about trains.

I use “non-conformist” as shorthand sometimes, meaning they are individuals, and not afraid to be, which is not the same thing many people thing of as non-conformist.  A lot of great Dragon students have been square pegs being hammered into round holes in more conventional schools, and yes their sense of costume is quite highly developed.  But it’s not that most of them set out to be outrageous.  It’s that they want to be true to themselves.

And besides compassion, empathy, I am looking for that other aspect of heart: courage.  My best students have been risk takers, and the children of risk takers. There are many things wrong with the great world, not just the small world of middle-class western education.  I am interested in those Young Persons who look around them with clear eyes, and see what is wrong with the world, who have the imagination to see how it could be better, the analytical strength to see how to bring about change, and above all the courage to tackle change.  This kind of transformative courage begins with small changes, with changing yourself, and what you know. A good education will not make such changes in and of itself.  It will not move the world.  But a good education is a wonderful place to stand, for a nice, kind, book-loving, free-thinking, risk-taking, creative individualist with a sense of humour.

Endnote:
In case your English teacher didn’t make you memorise it, here is Stephen Spender’s poem.

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

I Want to Take Everything:  Intellectual Curiosity

At the time half my students were crowded into my office and all talking at once about their elective course choices and conflicts, I took it as the usual craziness of early September and scheduling headaches.  I teased and cajoled and promised to do what I could, and reminded everyone that popular courses would be available next year too, so that I was going to start by seeing that things worked out for the grade 12s.  Sarah Beatty spent most of Friday reworking the schedule (artists are better than algorithms for working out schedules, which is fundamentally a visual task, requiring you to see the solution), and I was ready to take off for the weekend.
On Saturday night, my dear friend Doug Freake, who is a professor of Humanities at York (and with whom I went to graduate school in the late Cretaceous), was hosting a dinner party.  He had particularly wanted to introduce his friends Sol and Bessie Goldberg, who are also academics.  I imagined them to be in their early seventies, the kind of Jewish intellectuals who had been radicalized during the McCarthy era.  They turned out to be handsome Young Persons, on the cutting edge of inter-disciplinary daring, he working on a post-doctoral fellowship positioned in both Philosophy and Near Eastern Studies, she “dissertating” on my favourite novel by Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.  Since the other guest was my colleague Seth who did his own dissertating on political philosophy, you can imagine that the conversation was profoundly interesting.
The moment when the abstract concept of democratic education and the concrete educational incidents of The Dragon Academy came together, I found myself trying to describe the school and the very particular and original kind of learning that goes on there. I was trying to explain that your could teach absolutely anything through discussion.  I argued that it was also the only way to foster free thinking, which is necessary to democratic success, and freedom of expression, which is an emblem of democracy.   We were in a knotty place, where we were trying to distinguish between education and schooling (academic materialism, I think of schooling as being, the collecting of credits and degrees and gold stars).  We also wanted to distinguish between the things you needed to understand in order to participate meaningfully in the democratic process and the things anyone who participated in a democratic education could understand.  People who care about teaching and learning don’t give you much of an argument against the necessity of critical thinking, of bringing philosophical concepts like reason and justice and responsibility into the curriculum.  But they can balk at original texts, and doubt whether untrained minds are ready to consider metaphysical and ethical questions.
Bessie certainly understood that you can’t just put critical thinking on hold, schooling people relentlessly until they’ve stockpiled enough information, and then grant them license to think for themselves, or expect them to express themselves freely.  She talked about how Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park had been spoiled because the moral expectations of his guardians, and his society, were so low.  Seth talked about his first class in Philosophy, and the lively discussion about how we understand the world that sprang from his helping them to define metaphysics and ethics, and to think about which comes first.  Doug brought Kant’s categorical imperative forward, bravely sharing with two philosophers how he would explain it to his second year Humanities’ students.  He was not expecting them to read Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.   But he thought it was important to expose them to ideas, to help them see what a richness of thought there was in the world, to entice them to discover it.  I wanted to illustrate how adolescents could master really complex ideas, although they were usually cheated of the challenge by curriculum fogeys who confused an interest in Green Day with intellectual limitation.  “They can read almost anything, if you’re prepared to walk through it with them,” I said. “Adolescents are ready to rise to Plato’s Republic.”  Sol thought we were talking about selected passages.
“No,” Seth said, “I’m planning to reading it out loud with them in class, all of it, and discuss it.” Sol thought this was a pretty risky project.  We all tried to remember how old we had been the first time we’d actually read the whole of the Republic. Sol revealed doubts about Plato’s reliability, and we made a number of jokes about how annoying Socrates must have been, and why he was forced to drink hemlock.
“A lot of the pleasure of university, for me,” I said, “was that we were finally really reading things, not bowdlerized texts or watered down abridgements or dull irrelevancies, but challenging and important things. Why do we think that you can’t start thinking critically until university?  Why should they have to wait, while we try to stuff their heads with ‘answers’?   I’ve read amazing stuff with my high school students,”  I said.
Seth’s students had understood Heart of Darkness, and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
“I read all of Dante’s Inferno out loud twice last year,” I said,  “once to the Grade 10s and once to the Grade 9s.”
“The kids really loved those classes too,” Seth said, kindly.
“In fact, they were all crowded into my office on Friday,” I said, “wanting schedule changes so they could take Biology and Philosophy, English Literature and World History.”
“And the whole school wants to take Anthropology,” said Seth.
“They don’t want spares or bird courses.  They want a democratic education in another sense.  They want to take everything.” And I thought, I want to take everything too.  I want to sit in on the Physics course, and Media Studies, and take drumming with the grade 7 music students.  I really want to range over world literature with Doug, and read Bessie’s thesis, and hear Sol lecture on the opening words of Genesis.
“That’s what I love about being an intellectual,” Doug said.  “You’ll never run out of ideas.”  Then he read us the quote from Sir Isaac Newton that he was putting on the first page of his course kit for his Introduction to Humanities Course, the one where he was going to explain the categorical imperative, and read both The Tale of Genji and Heart of Darkness.  ‘I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore,’ Newton wrote, ‘and diverting myself now and them finding a smoother pebble, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’”
And we thought for a moment about the great ocean of truth, and how passionately we wanted our students to look up from the pebbles they were fumbling, and out across its wide expanse.  We’re doing something right, I thought, if Philosophy and Anthropology and Biology are popular courses, if our students want to take everything.  And by the way, Doug and Bessie and Sol have promised to come in as guest teachers at The Dragon.

Cooking Up a Storm:  Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia

Everyone has a Julia Child story.  Okay, maybe there’s a mystic in a cave somewhere in the mountains of Nepal who doesn’t, but I wouldn’t count on it.  To make a film about Julia Child’s story of how she mastered the art of French cooking, and then taught everyone else how to do the same, is a brilliant idea.  The next brilliant idea was to put script and direction in the hands of Nora Ephron, whose own Heartburn is an inspirational mix of recipes, musings and touching story.  This is a genre all its own, a very post-modern realization of the rich metaphors of cooking and eating, hunger and satisfaction, creating and giving.  And Meryl Streep as Julia Child?  At the head of a pitch perfect cast, from Stanley Tucci as the improbably sexy Mr. Child, Amy Adam and Chris Messina as the engaging young Julia devotees, and Frances Steenhagen as The Joy of Cooking’s Erma Rombauer?  Genius. It’s also visually delicious, the Kodachrome look of forties and fifties Paris, the clothes and martinis and kitchen utensils of then and now (I loved the jump cut between Julia pureeing in her Molinex food mill, and Julie buzzing the potatoes in her Cuisinart), the Childs’ turquoise station wagon with the wood detailing, the crinolined party dresses, the loving shots of the borough of Queens.  I’m sure you’re going to see it for yourself.

But what about my Julia Child story?  In 1969, my first year at University, I had a Saturday job in the late, lamented Albert Britnell Bookshop (now a Starbucks, how’s that for irony?). I was a sort of general factotum, manning the cash, helping the customers, putting new books on the shelves, packing up the special orders for mailing.  On one such Saturday, I was working with Mr. John Britnell, who was perhaps the great nephew of the eponymous founder, and my boss, to tidy up the shelves and put out new arrivals.  To my horror, he seized a two volume deluxe boxed set of Mastering the Art and pitched it in the dustbin.  He responded to my cry of pain by pointing out that the books were damaged, their spines broken, the box cracked, and that they could not be sold in that condition, nor returned to the bookseller.  “That doesn’t mean you have to throw them out!”  I wailed.  Even then I felt books were sacred objects, and could not be discarded in any less dignified way than ceremonial burial. 

“Do you want them?”

Most fervently, I did.

“Fish them out of the trash, then.”

Now it wouldn’t be true to say this was the beginning of my career as a cook.  My mother happily shared her approach. She did not care to fuss in the kitchen, much preferring to sit at the table with her guests and engage in wonderful talk. She had the recipe for that elusive dish.  Her parties went on late, were very lively, the talk political, intellectual, and spiced with great stories. She was hospitable, generous, her table settings were elegant and spare, and the food very good and made of very fresh, unadulterated ingredients.  This was before “organic” and “all natural” had become labeling ploys, but she was a friend of Adele Davis (Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit!  Let’s Have Healthy Children!), and an environmental activist who worked under the inspiration of Rachel Carson in the League of Women Voters.  So she was aware of toxins and junk.  We lived in southern Pennsylvania, where she could frequent wonderful farmers’ markets. My godmother, Sarah Wepman, by contrast, liked complications and doing it yourself.  She made delicious home-made everything: bread,canned peaches, ice cream, doughnuts, pie crusts, pasta.  The two of them shared a pair of fetishes: for mystery novels and for coffee.  In the days before espresso machines (and Starbucks) were common, they bought their beans in the Italian neighbourhood in Baltimore, roasted the beans at home (now there’s a heavenly fragrance), ground them in little wooden-box-with-a-drawer manual grinders, and raided laboratory supply stores for glass funnels, filter papers, and round bellied glass flasks.  My mother’s mother was a great, classical Viennese cook, but she died before my fifth birthday, so I can’t say I learned to cook from her, although she’ll reappear a little later in this story.

So there I was, the delighted owner of the bible of French cooking.  Unlike Julia Child, I could certainly boil an egg.  In fact I could poach one perfectly.  Unlike Julie Powell, I did not have a kitchen, or a saintly husband.  But it was my first year of university, and I had just entered that new wider world where your friends are more than school chums– they are your tribe, your family.  My friend Kathleen (already!) had a saintly husband, Richard, and lived in a third floor walkup flat on Kendall Avenue.  They had a kitchen, and a dining room table.  Accordingly, I hauled my two broken-backed volumes of Mastering the Art in my knapsack, and unloaded huge bags of groceries worth my month’s wages at Britnell’s, to begin work on my first ever dinner party.  There were eleven other of my university friends.  I had not yet learned the Lucullan rule for the right number of guests: more than the Graces, less than the Muses.  Everyone brought a bottle of wine.  I had planned a very elaborate meal, and the piece de resistance  was to be Homard a l’Amoricain, a lobster recipe of unbelievable complexity. 

I had purchased four live lobsters, who were enjoying their last moments in the cold water in the sink.  Live shellfish held no terrors for me.  This is thanks to my grandmother, paradoxically, given that she was an observant Jew.  My father, who was at one time a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party, was an observant atheist, and there was a kind of sharp, if loving, jousting between them over the meaning and implementation of kashruth.  A staunch trade unionist, my father returned from a dockworkers’ picket line one evening with a string bag full of live Chesapeake Bay crabs.  My mother had a sort of horror of these things, and refused to be involved.  My grandmother and I were in the kitchen, drinking a glass of tea.  My father, rather vaingloriously, dumped the crabs in a huge stock pot, half filled it with cold water, and put it on the stove.  Of course as soon as the water began to heat up, the crabs began jumping out of the pot and scuttling over the floor.  My mother was standing on a chair, my father was chasing them with tongs and my grandmother was laughing and gasping.  When the last crab had been caught and popped back in the pot, and my father stood there, holding the lid down as they hammered inside it, he turned accusingly to my grandmother, such an accomplished cook.  “Hannah, you knew I was doing it wrong!”

“Only by the book, Sam, only by the book.”

So I knew the water had to be boiling, and I had hardened myself for the deed.  My real problem was timing.  Never having cooked anything so elaborate before, and with rudimentary skills in every aspect of preparation (like Julia, in the film, painstakingly slicing an onion while her cooking classmates mince in a efficient flurry), I had no concept of how long it would take to get this meal to the table.  I had done nothing before hand.  I had to begin with the fish stock. I was determined to complete every dish before I let anything out of the kitchen.  I did not understand that one might prepare and bring out the various courses in sequence.  I also did not understand the importance of hors d’oeuvres. In consequence, my guests began to drink the wine they brought, while I laboured alone in the tiny space under the sloping eaves.  They had arrived at 8.  When I finally emerged, triumphantly bearing platters of exquisite food, well after midnight, they had consumed approximately a bottle apiece.  Those who were not singing at the top of their lungs, or crouched miserably over the toilet bowl, were passed out cold.

In the years since, I have become much more adept.  Like Julie Powell, I hear that flutey, breathy voice (so masterfully recreated by Meryl Streep) in my mind’s ear. Her bons mots  read like witty practical advice (“A cook is not on oath in her own kitchen”). But I think we all love her because she is an inspiration.  She invites us to be daring, to believe in our own, often hidden, potential, to be creative, to value and to give pleasure. For Julia Child is a sort of spirit guide in the art, not just of French cooking, but of living largely, intensely, creatively. I think that I too have cooked every recipe in Mastering the Art. Both volumes.  I have never since, however, attempted Homard a L’Amoricain.

Possession of Great Gifts: A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book

I don’t know who gave it to me at the end of the school year, though I can guess. It was there on my desk, along with various notes and gift certificates and a Japanese ink bottle. It still feels odd to me, to receive gifts from my students, when they have already given me so much, but it is no secret to anyone who has been part of my English classes how much I venerate A. S. Byatt. Although she is difficult and literary and not for adolescents, her books and stories insist on invading my curricula. Possession, of course, is my favourite.

In the years since it was published, and, winning the Booker prize, set me reading the Booker list, I have read everything else she has written, before and after. The thing about Possession is that I swallowed it hole, and it has gone on, growing inside me, as I imagined little cherry trees might do when I swallowed whole cherries as a child. It, well, possessed me. So I did love the stories that were like the grim little tales of Christabel Lamotte. And the Victorian world evoked like a memory, not a reconstruction, in Angels and Insects. But I thought, there’s a novel there, a big fat, rich novel, like Posssession, and she hasn’t finished it. The later books felt to me like posthumous publications, as if she hadn’t been given time to finish the larger project.

Then it appeared on my desk. A big, thick (615 pages) new novel, beautifully printed by Knopf, the wove paper, the deckle edges, the carefully chosen font. The cover showed an elaborate art deco dragonfly faery, part illumination, part enameled jewel. Even more wonderful, it was an intellectual historical novel. (I do admire all of Byatt’s novels, but the ones set in the modern world more coldly.)

There is a curious intimacy in the best books. You feel the author is writing particularly for you. Possession was for me because it is about literature at its most literary. It is about Victorian poets, complete with their (Byatt’s pitch perfect) poetry, narrative and quirky lyric, their fairy tales (most unsuitable for tender ears), their passionate letters. It is about literary scholars, complete with their feminist and deconstructionist readings, their clever critiques and conference papers, their politics and ambitions. It is about literary collectors, complete with auction houses and theft, museum cases and grave-robbing. And it ends, for all the very many sad and disturbing things it tells, with knowledge and reconciliation and finding a way, with love.

And now Byatt has written a book tailor-made for a red-diaper baby, whose parents admired Shaw and gave her the books of E. Nesbitt as approved reading, who knew the history of labour rights and women’s suffrage and the carnage of the first world war. Like Possession, it weaves the stories of two generations, in this case, the parents and their actual children. Byatt knows the world of the Fabian parents, not as an academic knows facts and details; she has lived there. Reading her, we live there too. The details are there, of course, the book is fat with them, and is not for the faint-hearted surface-skimming reader of historical novels. There are pages and pages, dense, in which techniques, performances, political events are set down. The speeches and articles are quoted, along with letters and descriptions of artisan’s works, puppet plays and the disturbing, captivating fairy tales that Olive Wellwood writes for each of her children, while supporting her substantial household with the children’s books she raids her children’s books to write.

The characters are as varied and as representative as Chaucer’s, a tapestry of pilgrims on their way to the Great War, a banker and his wife, the German boss’s daughter, a political economist who is also a Casanova, the half-mad genius potter, the German puppeteers, the English theatre producer, the writer of children’s tales who lives in such idyllic rural retreat, who is also the daughter and sister of coalminers, brutally destroyed. New Women and Suffragists mingle with socialists and anarchists. Naturists are brown all over, and give talks about sexual freedom. The pre-Raphaelites leave their mark on the artistic community, and everyone goes to hear Wagner. In the younger generation, girls go to the new colleges, become doctors and scholars and artisans, the boys embrace radical political stances, aesthetic queerness, cross class boundaries in both directions. The ragged runaway boy found in the basement of the Victoria and Albert becomes the potter’s apprentice and then his successor. The German Jewish puppeteer’s son will marry the banker’s daughter. And all of these many characters are real. You know them; they live in your memory.

The book is very dark and disturbing. The looming war is a shadow over the whole thing. You fear that many of the young generation to whom you’ve become so attached are going to come to harm, their parents, who have tried so hard, as parents do, devastated. If you can’t bear the suspense, and peak at the last chapters, you chance on the scenes of their devouring. This is the first aspect of The Children’s Book which keeps me from loving it, warmly, as I love Possession. I know the pointless mayhem of the First World War both set the stage for the Second and destroyed an entire generation. But it is very hard to read the deaths and maimings and losses. I would look out at the sun on Tea Lake and lay the book aside. I would get teary-eyed, but they were not the relieving tears of tragedy. There was nothing cathartic. Somehow a distance was kept, maybe by the sheer numbers of deaths, padded out with those of characters I hardly knew, or by their pointlessness. The end did not redeem the losses, or balance them, either. The last scene, of the survivors, of the new children, around a dinner table, grateful to be together, admitting love, did not bring closure. It too was sad and muted. Is admiring a book without in the end taking pleasure in it a valid criticism?

There is another aspect of The Children’s Book which dismays me. I think of this as the problem which overwhelms the successful author, even when her success has been most of all a succes d’estime. No one thinks to, wants to, edit the successful author, not even the author herself. Cold commercial considerations, I expect, are what lead publishers to print every word that drops from a popular author’s keys. But once an author is established as a Genius, the same reluctance arises. It’s not necessarily conscious, the putting things in print which are not yet refined, are less than the best they can be. But it leads to sloppinesses, moments that jerk the reader right out of the dream of the novel.

I’m not talking so much about the moments when the monographs on the Victoria and Albert, or techniques of firing and glazing in the early industrial era, or the foundation of Newnham College appear like lumps in the porridge. Rather I wonder why there are two suicides, both by drowning? Or why the nightmare of incest, so hauntingly suspended over Purchase House, so frightening, so believeable because we know and don’t know, appears again in the crude out-of-character fumblings of a second father, and one whom the author, moreover, means us to keep on liking, and indulging? Why does a single man, whose unattractiveness the author emphasizes, seduce and then immediately disgust three of the most important women in the book, and with one brief act apiece impregnate two of them? Is the brutality of public school enough to turn the wits of a boy who has the strength to run away home across the breadth of England? Or is his mother’s cannibalizing of the tale she wrote for him enough to deliver the coup de grace? Can someone who is knowing about the sexual nature of his schoolboy crushes, and the sexual undertone of the Cambridge Apostles, get over being gay, just like that? How many people are there in England who have white blonde hair? Why is the suffragist daughter a snitch and fanatic, and why does she turn into Florence Nightingale overnight? Why is the wonderfully imaginative, brave, enduring mother, who after all is the breadwinner for a large family, visited with the sorrows of Niobe, then abandoned in an alcoholic haze?

The Children’s Book is a remarkable performance, alive, powerful, knowledgeable. It captures the reader, haunts, disturbs, hunkers down in the memory. But the author admires the artistry of Anselm Stern’s marionettes too much. She thinks they are more perfect than human actors. But she is wrong. We can suspend only so much disbelief when we can see the strings.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip:  Teaching the Doubly Exceptional

Selfishly, I find them the most interesting ones to teach, these kids who are “gifted” and at the same time “learning disabled”. I use the quotation marks just to make it very clear that these are not my labels, and that in fact I am suspicious of labeling altogether.  Since these labels are frequently attached or bandied about by us all, perhaps I should offer some definitions.

The label “gifted” is attached to a child who can score more than 130 in a standard intelligence test, such as the Wechsler or the WISC.  They usually display other talents too: they have exceptional memories, and learn new material quickly and easily, scoring in the upper 1 to 3 percent of achievement tests, and demonstrating the ability to perform various tasks or master various skills at a level noticeably beyond what would be expected at their age level.  Because of these exceptionalities, they have very high academic potential. 

Of course, you’d think any teacher would prefer to teach the “gifted”, but you’d be wrong. Gifted children tend to be more questioning, and therefore less compliant, than their less gifted peers.  They pick up mistakes in assigned material and what is taught, and reason independently of their teachers.  They often have rather a lot to say.  They commonly have heightened sensitivities, both physical and emotional.  The tag on the inside of their shirts annoys and distracts them; undercurrents of anger and unfairness make them anxious and distraught. They strain and tug to get off topic. Even on topic, they may wish insist on their own interpretations.   This doesn’t surprise me either, given that gifted children tend to think quite differently about most things, which makes them, by definition, free thinkers. 

If giftedness is evident in being able to perform beyond age level expectations, children with “learning disabilities” perform, at least in certain areas, below age level expectations, including having difficulties with understanding and remembering new things, and in generalizing what is learnt to other situations or uses.  There may also be associated difficulties with social tasks, from communication to self-awareness.  For this reason, children with perceptible learning disabilities have difficulty with academic achievement and progress, not to mention achievement tests. 

As an aside, I would like to remind you that hyperactivity, attention deficit, and perceptual coordination are behavioural symptoms, not kinds of learning disabilities, although these behaviours may make academic achievement more challenging.

You would think that learning disabilities and giftedness were opposite qualities, but in fact learning disabilities are quite distinct from the kinds of impairment that are measured by a low I.Q.  The defining characteristic of a learning disability is that there is a significant difference between a child’s measureable intelligence and his or her achievement in some areas. You can imagine the frustration of a child who cannot express what he or she understands in the ways conventionally demanded and rewarded. So, a person may be very “gifted” but also have difficulties with written language, or in organizing ideas, or in performing arithmetic operations, or remembering information and instructions, not to mention keeping track of details and appearances. The learning disabled child may find him or herself acting, in short, like the stereotypical “absent-minded professor”, an unintentional figure of fun who walks around in mismatched socks and a distracted haze. 

Which brings me to the interesting idea, once suggested to me by Dr. Till Davy, an eminent Toronto pediatrician, who said, “Come on now, Meg, there’s a sense in which all gifted children are learning disabled.”  So the gifted child misses social cues, fails miserably to fit in, not understanding why he or she should disguise actual preferences in order to echo popular. “normal” choices. The gifted child knows the answers, or worse, knows things that aren’t even on the test.  Where other kids are bored by algebra, the gifted child is bored by “Family Guy”.  Their teachers are annoyed and embarrassed by their constant frantic waving of hands whenever a question is posed.  They are never cool.  And sometimes they have trouble doing well in conventional classrooms, and get into trouble too. 

In much the same way, many disabilities bring gifts with them.  Obsessions with single topics can result in brilliant impromptu presentations, failure to foresee consequences can promote a willingness to take risks, difficulty in following instructions can prompt a teacher to clarify things for everybody, disorganized thinking can lead to inspired connections, and excitability can make it much more fun for everyone, while slowness in completing work can promote careful, polished and very impressive final drafts.  The very disabilities themselves can produce results which suggest insight, originality, unusual knowledge: in short, giftedness.

I know there are programmes and schools for the gifted child in Toronto, which separate the sheep from the goats through comparison of I.Q. scores, standard achievement tests and competitive consideration of marks.  I have been in, enrolled my children in, and taught in such situations.  The problem is these kids are the ones who can perform under these conditions.  They are organized, able to delay gratification, keen to please, able to withstand competition with equanimity.  Their programme is usually enriched by covering more material in a shorter time, and by compensating for that speed by assigning more homework.  This is not a very gifted idea of what a gifted programme might be.  It ignores all the truly special capabilities of the gifted, in order to dish out larger helpings of conventional material.  Freedom of thought, boisterous discussion, a serious consideration of social issues and the underlying justice of the status quo, creative approaches to problem solving or just about anything else are disabilities in such a programme.  If gifted kids do perform in this setting, it is often only because of the support and understanding of their peers.  They force themselves to do the expected because they want to stay with all the other nerds.

I know there are programmes and schools for the child with a diagnosed learning disability in Toronto, which also separate the sheep from the goats through a comparison of test scores.  Because there is a chronic paucity of spaces (an estimated 10 percent of the population is learning disabled), these programmes are crowded with kids showing every kind of difference that could keep them from academic achievement.  These programmes usually provide accommodation by covering less material in a longer time, and by compensating for the thin content by rewarding compliance.  Here too, freedom of thought, boisterous discussion, consideration of social justice and creativity are disabilities.

Not coincidentally, these are the very qualities which are valued in progressive education: creativity, freedom of expression, collaboration and commitment to social justice. Progressive education champions a pedagogy and methodology, a knowing how to teach and a set of strategies for teaching which foster these qualities through discussion-based, object-based, experiential learning.  I would argue that most of the important research in developmental psychology, pedagogy, and cognitive science of the past century supports the progressive educator’s claim that this is a more effective, a more satisfying and productive way to teach and to learn, for every kind of learner. It certainly suits the outliers, the exceptional ones.  And what if giftedness is a more critical consideration than difficulties in reading or math or organization?  What if the difficulties incurred by thinking differently (and gifted kids don’t just think more, they think differently) interfere with standard academic performance?  Are we not wasting the potential of these children by our insensitivity to their learning styles?

The first time I set foot in a class that really fit my learning style was in a graduate school seminar, where we marshaled our facts and prepared our ideas, not just our problem sets, at home, then sat around tables, and discussed broad-ranging issues and big concepts.  I’m still hypersensitive to physical sensation (I have to unpick the labels from the seams of my clothes, strong perfumes make me nauseous, sirens hurt my ears, a dead bird haunts me, and I’m irritatingly fussy about wines) and even more to emotions (I become debilitatingly anxious in the face of anger, and enraged by bullying and injustice, while a Botticelli Madonna, a Verdi aria, a poem by Yeats all make me weep).  I have trouble with rules, am intolerant of frustration, and my desk is a post-nuclear zone. I love learning, I weep for the sorrows of others, even fictional others, and I still dress rather eccentrically.  Not surprisingly, the way I think, and the way I learn, determine the way I teach, which is not exactly conventional.

So the kind of school that fits my way of teaching is in fact the kind of school that fits the doubly exceptional child, where (can you stand to read this list one more time?) freedom of thought, boisterous discussion, a serious consideration of social issues and the underlying justice of the status quo, creative approaches to problem solving or just about anything else are valued and encouraged.  

Why do I love teaching the doubly exceptional learner?  I’m never bored—remember that low tolerance for frustration?  They are, and they like their teachers to be, spontaneous and creative.  They are wonderfully forgiving of organizational glitches.  They are so relieved to be understood and supported. Their poor social judgement allows them to be nice to everyone, no matter how odd.  They reward your belief in them.  It is very beautiful, as well as gratifying to your vanity, to feel you can help someone else.  They have so much potential, and they remind their teachers of our own potential too.  Maybe I have learnt something from all these kids who have such difficulty copying from a model.   I know that every time I share a class with them, I see things differently, through new eyes, and I am stretched to help them do that too.  I give up didacticism for openness.  I remember just how extraordinary it is to learn.