Show and Tell

I am just coming to the end of my first semester teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, known affectionately as NSCAD (pronounced nas-cad).  It has been a happy return for me, a return to teaching, that is, as I had been away from it for three years since leaving The Koç School in Istanbul in 2008.

I haven’t always taught; in fact, for the eleven years I worked as Principal at Alice Street School (four of them) and Uniacke District School (the other seven), I was a non-teaching administrator.  That meant I was free to go into classrooms on occasion, play around a little at teaching, get the students all worked up through making poems, and then leave the regular teacher to pick up the pieces and try to restore some sense of routine.  It was fun, and I did teach those kids something, but I was Mr. Field, the Principal, and I never could have that relationship you can develop by being the teacher who has worked with them over the long term.

When I retired from Uniacke in 2003 one of the parents presented me with a little memento she had made, one I have treasured ever since.  I liked that she included an apple, not just the usual apple for the teacher, but also the apple I would always take to generate sensory imagery words for making poems during my first poetry session with an Elementary class.  The tiny pencil in the blue pot was also significant for me because I am known to always carry a pencil in my breast pocket.  The bell is a nice touch for a teacher or principal, and our local of the Teachers Union gave me a real one with my name on it as well.  And I really like the little stack of books, which includes three titles: Canada, Poetry, and English.  The first was because she knew I was going to be teaching in Türkiye, and the other two were for reasons obvious to anyone who knows me.

The Mr. Field sign was on my desk for the five years of High School English I taught at Koç in Istanbul, and I have a multitude of memories of the great students and fellow teachers I worked with there.  I also have various mementoes, tangible and intangible, of that teaching time there, but the small bespectacled high-kicking little martial arts guy is a more recent arrival on my desk.   

He was a gift from a young Chinese student I have been working with for almost two years now.  It is one-to-one tutoring rather than classroom teaching, but it has some of the same kind of rewards I have always cherished in pedagogy.  This little guy was a gift she brought for me from her visit to China last summer just before enrolling in her freshman year at university.  I don’t know exactly why she chose him, but I’ll pretend at least that she wants to inspire me to be a kick-ass teacher (or maybe even thinks I am one).

On Wednesday I will meet my Design English students, many of them also Chinese, for our last NSCAD class together.  The fourteen weeks of the semester have gone by quickly and it has been consistently a treat to be their instructor.  For our last class we are going to do Show and Tell.  Since none of them attended Elementary here in Canada, I had to explain what it was.  I want it to give a chance for each of us to reintroduce ourselves, after fourteen weeks of learning together, by showing some object or image that tells something about who we are.  We’ll talk about it and ask each other questions and celebrate whatever it is we celebrate (or mourn) in our last class of teaching and learning together.

As for me, I’m happy to be back in the classroom teaching again, so I’ll be taking my two little artefacts to class for Show and Tell.

Two things today

There were two things that brought tears to my eyes and thickened my throat today.

The first was telling Lorraine and JE about the e-mail I received yesterday from XE, the high school student who had moved to Halifax from Beijing three years ago and who had just heard of the substantial scholarships she had been awarded by Dalhousie.  It doesn’t really make sense that it would affect me this way; after all, she had worked so hard, completing pre-IB in her first year here, doing IB A1 English in her second year, and taking every suggestion I gave her and applying it assiduously to her next assignments.  XE was an utter treat to work with that whole year, and I always looked forward to our after school sessions, the serious brightness of her attention and presence, the slippers they gave me to wear, and the huge mug of green tea that her dad kept refilling for me as we worked.

Helping  XE with her scholarship application letters, I came to know a little more about her and what the family had left behind when they brought her here to complete high school and apply to university.  It was that knowledge combined with the experience of helping her navigate a course that was difficult for native English speakers that flooded up in me when we parked the car in front of JE’s house and I started to tell them about the scholarship awards.  JE caught my eye in the rear view mirror and told me it was OK, and it was, but it still took me more than a minute to be able to actually say the words without choking up again.  When we crossed the street to the house, I felt a tear rolling down my left cheek and smiled at the thought of XE beaming with happiness.

The second happened a while later when Lorraine was reviewing the images she had got last night out on the Welland Canal spit.  It was a perfect evening for it with a sky that had cleared off through the afternoon and a wind that had dropped to nothing.  She and JE drove out the Seaway Haulage Road and then hiked out the spit to the small cove that was formed near the end.  She set up the camera while he gathered a collection of flat stones for skipping and slitting the devil’s throat. 

 

He stood where she told him to right at the edge of the flat water that had just enough residual wave action that it seemed to be breathing and skipped rocks out toward the gap between the lighthouse on one side and the Niagara River point on the other.  The night was perfect and the rock’s impact curled up the still surface and sent out a widening circle every time it touched down and then skipped ahead to touch another time and another.  The serious focus and beauty of JE’s stance and throw and the breathtaking poetry of each skip captured so lovingly by Lorraine brought the same welling up in my eyes and constriction in my throat.

That’s really all, a couple of occasions that made me so happy that I couldn’t speak.  Don’t need any more than that to make it a good day.

International Women's Day

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day, the 100^th of such days, which makes it an exceptionally good day, one to cherish.

I had one new message in my G-mail this morning, and it wasn’t an ad from Staples or hotels.com or Amazon, the kind I always delete; instead it was from D., a Turkish student I worked with in high school who is now in the first year of a Masters program in Gender Studies.  I was, as I always am when I hear from D., delighted; it is a treat to get a message from someone who is so intelligent, so literate and literary, so aware, and so fiercely good at what she does.  Susan Sontag once said that she would buy any publication that had work by Anne Carson in it, as would both D. and I, but one day equally wise women will say the same thing about D.’s work.  Having a message from her early today was an especially good omen for this year’s Women’s Day.

I am in the atrium of a university library as I write this, waiting to meet M., an undergraduate student I have worked with before.  M., who is also enrolled in Gender Studies and is, she informed me earlier, the only Chinese student who has ever enrolled in the program, e-mailed me at my Yahoo account to set up a time to get some editing help with a paper she is writing.  I like working with M. because she is intelligent and perceptive and enough of a nonconformist to study something other than Computer Science or International Finance, and because her view of our culture and gender issues in it are always worth listening to.  I also like her quiet and self-effacing humour, her composed sense of self, and her determination to learn and to understand.

I spent part of the morning at the Refugee Clinic working with M.L., a refugee claimant from Mexico who wants to improve her English.  With the use of Babel Fish and her Spanish-English dictionary, she told me that she wanted to learn what was the first thing she should do to improve her English.  I had no answer for her, so we talked and wrote together, and gradually she became more confident about what she already knew and what things she could do to put it all together as a new speaker of English.  It was great to see her courage and determination in her pursuit of greater fluency, the same kind of courage and determination she has needed to build a life here for herself and her family.

I remember in the late 1990’s thinking and saying that the biggest achievement of the twentieth century was the victories of women in their fight for the status they deserved in our world and that my hope for the twenty-first was that we might begin to see the results of that achievement.  It has been a slow and gradual process, one that is far from over, but my experience of today tells me how lucky I am to know women like the ones I worked with and thought about today.

It is now the evening of International Women’s Day.  The bright and sharp-edged new moon I saw a little earlier has dropped out of sight here, but that same moon has shone and will continue to shine on all the women (and men) of this world until the day finally ends somewhere far to the west of here.  When tomorrow’s sun rises we will all embark on the 101^st year of International Women’s Day.  I’m proud to be a part of it.

Paper and Markers

There’s a spot in the front corner of our living room near the windows and next to the big brown armchair. It’s an old wooden box with paper on it and a set of coloured markers, just the right height for the girls to kneel or sit and make pictures.

Today E. has been three for a week, and she made two pictures for me as I sat on the big cushions next to the windows. She showed me the first one, which was a shape in black lines with a concentration of black inside it. Like the Elementary teacher I used to be I said, What can you tell me about the picture? She didn’t tell me anything, just took it back, coloured in some blue and yellow, handed it back, and said, It’s a butterfly. I was impressed and told her I thought it was a great picture. She took it back, flipped it over, took a pink marker, and made a new picture. It’s a picture of you, Rogie, she told me. I was both honoured and impressed, even though the butterfly's body smudges through a little and the likeness is not yet as strong as I know it will be (e.g., no body yet, but she may have given me a hair on my big head). But she’s three this week, and her growth and development are really showing!

She and A. spend quite a bit of time making pictures on the old wooden box. On Father’s Day, A. made a great flower.
And then she made a picture with a story. This one has a cat in a tree, a fire truck, a girl in her firefighter’s red uniform, the upset owner of the cat, and a wonderful firedog. A. asked me if I saw the dog and seemed pretty proud of both its shape and its spots. I thought it was a great dog, and I also loved the black curl of hose and yellow ladder on the side of the truck, the spoked wheels, steering wheel in the cab and red light on its roof, and the detail of fingernails on the two expressive little figures (you can click on the picture to see it better, then use the back button to return). A. is five now, and she’s certainly ready for “the big school” in September!

I consider myself blessed to be able to follow the growth and development of these two bright little buttons so closely, looking at the pictures they make and playing with them the games they make up. Earlier this evening we were checking out the bed we made in the tent set up on the deck for tonight’s campout. E. said, I’m a cocoon, and snuggled down out of sight inside her sleeping bag. Then she popped out, stood up, flapped her arms, and said, I’m a butterfly.

You don’t need better treats than that!

More on Learning

My intention has been to write a few posts exploring some of the more notable events and images from our recent trip, but that will have to wait for the moment because something else has intervened that has pre-empted the news from Türkiye and Syria.

It started when I picked up T. from work on Thursday to bring him to our house for dinner. He told me on the way that A. had received a letter from “the big school”, which is the Elementary school a couple of blocks away where she will start Primary in September, and that she was very excited, running around the house with the letter in her hand and chanting, I’m going to the big school. She turned five in February and there is no question that she is ready.

He told me that she had made her first word, “click”. He said he wasn’t sure how she spelled it, and we figured it might have been “klk”. She has been able to print her name and her sister’s, and to copy other names, but to make a word on her own was pretty significant, I thought, and click was an interesting choice. We found out later from S. that the word was actually “lik”, pronounced lick, which is certainly apt because of the habits of her real dog, Dewi, and of her stuffie, Woofer, who both show their affection by licking. It also could have been her attempt to print "like", always a favourite of beginning writers like A.

Yesterday afternoon A. invited me to make pictures with her using the dry erase boards the girls had got at Christmas. I decided to make a picture that would include a sentence for her to read, so I drew a small boat with a figure in it waving and then printed the sentence: “A. IS IN THE BOAT”. We read it together. At the same time A. was printing her alphabet and numbers up to ten, telling me that she was getting ready for going to school. She has also been drawing hopscotches in the driveway to get her numbers right. Then, while I was helping with supper, she drew a long cloud with a small figure standing on it in the space above my boat and told me it was her sister E. It was a wonderful completion to the picture, and I printed another sentence: E. IS ON THE CLOUD”, which she was also able to read.

It is no surprise that A. should be putting together the pieces that will allow her to start reading, since she has always been read to (right now she is in the middle of Charlotte’s Web) and is a thoughtful and inquisitive individual, but that doesn’t take anything away from the joy of watching her begin to decode the printed language around her as she constructs her own understanding of text. As T. pointed out, she is a bit of a night owl, and we both imagined her in the not too distant future with a flashlight under the covers exploring the worlds of reading. We are privileged to be able to watch it happen.

Numbered thoughts and David Foster Wallace

Actually my thoughts are not numbered – I am nowhere near that organized – but numbers do figure in my thoughts by times. I am not obsessed with them, like some people who cannot keep themselves from counting almost everything in their lives, but I do pay attention to numbers and do sometimes play with them in my head. Any time someone has a birthday, or even tells me their age, I usually comment on the number, like whether or not it’s prime, and what its factors are if it isn’t, and whether any of the numbers are lucky ones (like 3, 7, or 13), and where it figures on a numerological scale of life’s stages, and so on, because there are always places you can go with numbers if you want to play with them.

When I was teaching in Istanbul, an educator named Bambi Betts, who was much smarter and more astute than her name might suggest, reported on some research she had recently read that indicated that doing mental math exercises at the beginning of a lesson enhanced student learning no matter what the subject of the lesson. It won’t surprise you, I guess, to learn that I liked the idea and that it made sense to me; after all, I sometimes do mental math for no particular reason other than that I like it, and that fact alone could suggest that I am bright and alert and open to learning. So my IB English class always started with mental math exercises, conducted sometimes by me and sometimes by my students. Not everyone loved it equally, but it became a ritual of Mr. Field’s English class that we couldn’t start without, no matter how urgent it was to cover the writing of commentaries or what our latest thoughts of 1984 or Macbeth were.

There aren’t really a lot of numbers in my life, since I am mostly a language person, and I’ve never really got started with Sudoku (which is something I figure I should try), and I don’t have people around to play cribbage with (we’re all too busy, I think, except for in the summer when we rent a cottage at the beach), but I do have numbers in the car, specifically in the odometer.

I am not sure exactly how it works, but my eye occasionally happens to glance at the odometer numbers right when there is something significant going on, like a bunch of zeroes, or a bunch of nines about to turn into zeroes. I think it must be peripheral vision kicking in, though it sometimes feels more like telepathy to me, and there is always a small kick of pleasure at seeing a nice display of digits, like when the car turned over 120000 km not so long ago and a sense of surprise when I do catch it.

David Foster Wallace, whose collection of short fiction, The Girl with Curious Hair (W.W. Norton 1989), I finished a short time ago, paid attention to numbers. I will tell you only that right now, though there is so much more I could say about how his writing seems to be a manifestation of his thinking in action, and how wonderful it is to read his work and find yourself moving through his thinking as it is realized in the text. So he did pay attention to numbers – in fact, in 2003 he published Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity — and odometer numbers figured in the final story in the collection, “Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way” in this way:

“Hey, man, three miles,” the clown says, squinting past the furry steering wheel’s axis. “Three more miles, then the odometer rolls over. To all zeroes. That’s two hundred thousand on this baby. That’s a big varoom, when the odom—“

“Shut up, shitspeck.” p 296

and

The odometer gets extremely close to rolling over. p 313

and then

D.L. and DeHaven are watching the odometer finally roll all the way over. It’s exciting and gorgeous. There’s a slot-machine feel about it, which they share, together, and know they share it. pp 317-318

As Wallace said, it was “exciting and gorgeous”, and I know what he means. It was, in fact, one of those ephemeral moments that can happen when you’re driving, something you need to be there for and notice, like when our old Subaru turned 100000 km driving up the west coast of Newfoundland, something you can’t go back to when it’s gone.

I am also fond of palindromic numbers, which come around much more often in the odometer than the big hundred thousand rollovers. The last one I caught was 120021, and it happened for a whole kilometre on Purcell's Cove Road between the Yacht Squadron and Williams Lake Road. I had to be careful as I drove, since I was glancing down at those numbers to savour them before they changed. It was not as bad as talking on your mobile while you’re driving, and it’s not yet illegal, but this odometer number thing could be something to worry about if it started catching on and got out of hand (though I think there’s little chance of this small idiosyncrasy going viral any time soon).

I thought I would get the next one, because the odometer read 121120 when I parked in the driveway, and I knew what a pretty palindrome awaited me when I next drove out. You might wonder why I didn’t turn around and drive just one more kilometre so I could catch it, but I didn’t, probably because it would have felt like cheating or manipulating the system, and I ended up missing it. Maybe it was because I headed out in the morning without noticing or else Lorraine was the next to drive the car, but I did miss it. And you can’t go back. Nothing to do but think ahead to the next one, but I also missed it, 122221, which would have been another nice array of digits to look at, so now I have to wait for 123321.

The reading is 123237, so I just need 84 more km to get there. I hope I catch it because it’ll be a good one. But if I don’t there’s always 124421 waiting somewhere down the road. Or I guess I could take up Sudoku.

Learning and growing

One of our real treats (among many!) since we returned from Istanbul last July has been to spend a lot of time with our granddaughters, including E., who is now two and a bit. When she was a tiny baby a special privilege was being able to hold her and feed her with a bottle, and it is still a treat to have her climb up into your lap with a book to read. However, the biggest treat of all has been watching E. grow and develop over the fourteen months we have been back in Nova Scotia.

Something I have always done with small children, probably going back even to when my youngest brothers were still in diapers, is to play certain nursery rhyme games. These include “This little piggy”, carefully pulling a little on each toe as you say the rhyme, until you get to the tiny weeny baby piggy that goes “wee wee wee all the way home”. E. always kicks off her crocs when she comes into our house, and at some point in every visit she will put her foot in front of me and say “piggies”. I always do it, and she always waits for the little piggy of that foot to run home before she puts her other foot there and says “that one”. So then I do that one.

Usually after piggies have been done, she will put her hand out, palm up, and say “round round”, so I then do “Round and round the garden”, always ending with the underarm tickle. E. maintains a serious composure throughout, and then puts out her other hand and says “that one”, so it gets done too.

These are routine small child activities, like the “horsie ride”, which I have my own version of, ending always with the brave cowgirl from Calgary galloping and galloping until she tips backwards on “all fall down”. There is nothing remarkable really about doing these things with kids, except, of course, for the fun of it. What is truly remarkable, however, and also fun for me is to see how these activities change as E. changes.

“Piggies” has stayed pretty much the same, only tonight I had to do piggies on the little doll that E. has adopted as her own every time she comes to our house. So she watched very seriously while I picked each tiny plastic toe and enunciated the rhyme all the way through. And, of course, she said “that one” and got me to do the second foot. With “Round and round the garden”, the variation now is to have E. do it herself with her little forefinger in my large palm, including the walk up my arm to the “tickle you under there”, as well as having me do “baby round round” in the doll’s tiny plastic hand (and then, of course, the other one).

When E. has wanted a “horsie ride”, she will come up to me and say “Aaaa worsey ride”, and when I say OK (which I always do), she will sit very seriously on my knees for the whole routine. However, tonight, now that she is two and very grown up, she asked me to give baby a “worsey ride” instead, which I did. Then it was her stuffed friend Lambie’s turn, then her older sister A. brought Woofer for a ride, then Biffy Bean, and finally E. asked me to give the baby’s tiny plastic bottle a ride, but I drew the line there. Later, at the supper table, E. had the doll baby on her knees holding its little hands for a “horsie ride”, and sure enough she was going through the motions and saying “nim nim nim”, "jiggy jog, jiggy jog”, and “galpa galpa galpa all fall down”.

Learning and growing is what they do, E. included, and watching them do it, starting to take over control of their own lives and activities, is our particular joy every time we see them. Certainly worth coming back for!

Wondrous things

One of the wonderful things we can do is to pay attention to how small children develop and grow, to watch them exercise their minds and bodies and push at the limits of what is possible for them. People describe the brains of young children as "plastic", and I don't really like the word because of all the meanings it carries in our time, but if you think of it as "plasticity", the ability to flex and stretch, or, to go back to the Greek root, to be moulded or formed, it makes sense as a descriptor of a body and mind that is growing and developing. The wonderful thing, I think, is being allowed to notice that plasticity in babies and young children, because one of their serious driving impulses is to spend their waking hours flexing and stretching and changing what was impossible to what is both possible and miraculous.

One of my sons talked to me yesterday about watching his eight month old daughter in a hands and knees crawling position, ready to go, or almost ready, but stuck in place, rocking back and forth. It is clear that some time soon she will make a move with one of her hands that will allow her to shift forward, maybe because she is trying to reach something, and perhaps a knee will then slide ahead, and, after some experimentation on her part, crawling will happen, and she won’t look back. In fact, she’ll just crawl over to the couch or chair so that she can pull herself up to a standing position and explore the next step. Seeing this process in action is to watch the wonder of growth and development happening.

Of course there is no real news here, because anyone who is around small children and pays attention knows this already. But what prompted me to write this post was the sheet of white paper that I saw after my other son and daughter-in-law took their girls home on Sunday. Our older granddaughter, A., who turned four last month, had told Lorraine, whom she knows as Nan, that she wanted to make a word with R's in it. Lorraine explained to her that her name had two R's and printed it for her, with a capital L and the rest small letters. A. looked at it and told her Nan she was going to print it in "upper case". Lorraine told her that was fine, and A. engaged with the task. Unfortunately her first R looked too much like an A (she’s been printing her own name for a while) so she started again, was happier with the result, and finished it, twice. When I saw the paper on the side table, Lorraine told me what A. had done, including her first attempt at the middle of the page, and I thought how wonderful. Not only did she convert the lower case letters to upper on her own, she persisted in extending the range of what she could do by practicing making R’s that didn’t look too much like A’s. It is always a great delight for me to notice how unstoppable children are in their learning.

It may not be a huge thing really, but it is one of the reasons I love to spend time around small children. It affords me the opportunity to have those privileged insights into how they are growing and developing and taking charge of their world by making sense of it. So I'm a very lucky guy to have our granddaughters to hang out with, as well as our pair of three year old friends in Istanbul, and to watch with wonder as they stretch and grow into their own unique and idiosyncratic manifestations of humanness.