For Us First...

This short piece, written by Luis Poirot about Pablo Neruda, the renowned Chilean poet and political activist, is accompanied by a sepia-colored photograph of a large, white, sea-battered home surrounded by a rickety white picket fence high above the Pacific. I've read each of the short essays written in response to a photograph of the places and people in Neruda's life in the book, Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence dozens of times. In each essay, Luis Poirot has studied the photograph with such precision, he writes as if he were present in the moment it was taken. He "knew" Neruda and the places he lived and died and he invites us in to his well-researched, but imaginary conversations with the poet. He asks us along as he runs his fingers over the worn planks of the fence surrounding Neruda's island home and he permits us to participate in the intimacy he shares with the object of his veneration. In this piece, he writes:

After reading the essay the first time, years ago, I wrote in a cloth-covered notebook:

I read this little piece, thinking of a human quality we share - I don't know how to label it, but know how often, from early childhood, we imagine ourselves interacting with those we most revere. As children we may envision ourselves rescuing, from certain disaster, our favorite cartoon hero who thereafter become our most devoted companion.

Later, we join fan clubs, read every word written about and go great distances to try to come face to face with our idols. In our most private moments, we allow ourselves to fantasize about interacting with them. We sit in the highest seats in the concert venue indulging the wish that the star on the stage will suddenly be stunned by his inability to break the lock between his eyes and our own. Slowly, but with clear purpose, he will move from the stage, ascend the rafters and, as the thousands gathered stare in disbelief, he will finish the song, eyes locked with our own.

Our minds may wander after someone at a cocktail party poses the question, "If you could have dinner with one person, living or dead, who would it be?" We've just declared that our dream dinner would be with Ghandi and we drift into a reverie about the conversation. We imagine that we are seated on rough benches at a simple wood table with no adornments and lean across the table, look into our dinner companion's eyes and pose a question elegant in its simplicity. He responds, "I am quite astonished by your query." He pauses, shakes his head subtly, and says, "I have never been asked that question and you have caused me to rethink my most fundamental assumptions in life. I suspect your insights will influence my work for the rest of my life."

Isn't it that basic human emotion about which Poirot writes, imagining himself eating shrimp pil-pil with the poet Neruda? Doesn't he imagine it with such ferocity that it seems it must, it surely must have happened? He knows himself to be different, a breed apart from those thousands who have scratched and penned messages to the, now dead Neruda - killed by the dictator, cancer - in the planks of the fence surrounding his home. He has imagined himself on the literal and symbolic inside of the home on the Isla Negra with the poet engaged in conversation they both will remember for a lifetime.

But the poet is dying. The cancer is spreading, ravaging his frail body and he knows the conversation with our Poirot is among the last he'll have the strength to undertake. The pain, felt by Poirot as acutely as the poet, will separate them at the very birth of their relationship. It simply isn't fair.

As it turns out, I read this piece and wrote the little sequence about it on an evening when I was supposed to be writing a proposal for a large grant the organization for which I then worked was seeking. The proposal was due the next day and I knew it needed hours of attention before it would be ready. The book beckoned and after reading, I was compelled to write about the piece - I didn't want to forget my thinking while I read it. I shoved my responsibility to the back of my mind, turned up the music and sunk into the words, Poirot's and my own. I don't regret it. The grant proposal got written, but I got my time with words and, these six years later it is the latter I treasure. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, a dear friend, her sister and I were sitting in my library surrounded by the books that are my dear companions. Lindy and I were talking about what we'd read most recently and Carla, a busy mother and lawyer said, in frustration, "When on earth do you read books for yourselves? I read case law at night. I bring home a stack of files and read them until they cure my insomnia." I thought, but didn't say, "Sounds like nearly every teacher I've ever known."

In our diligence, we grind on until well after dismissal and into the night, completing the myriad tasks that demand our "immediate" attention. These hours are not without their rewards - our principals brag about their wonderful teaching staff who "stay late and come early" imagining that our tireless work will yield results for children.

I have come to believe that these industrious efforts may lead us to neglect a form of learning that would benefit our students more than any other task we are compelled to complete. I have come to believe that we must give that same attention - at least occasionally - to our own urgent need for intellectual stimulation. Teachers, principals, superintendents and our instructional assistants need to LIVE the learning we ask of our children. We need to walk our talk.

We urge children to read fervently, scrutinizing the most complex and abstract elements of text and are thrilled when they rise to the occasion. We teach them to how to study writers they admire for clues about how to write their own pieces more effectively and celebrate their successes in extrapolating writer's tools to their own work. We struggle to implement the most promising new ideas and mandates while forgetting the source of our most innovative and lastingly powerful ideas.

When we read and write for ourselves and talk to other adults about these experiences, we can seize the opportunity to scrutinize the learning process - from within! When we make a conscious decision to read something we know will require our most clear-headed attention, something that will require real thought in order to understand, we are making it possible to understand how children feel when they are similarly challenged. When we pause during writing to consider the decisions writers must make - what words to delete, what to amplify - we are doing nothing less than considering a list of potential Crafting Sessions for the writers in our classrooms. When we pause during reading to jot down a concept from a novel or an essay we think is important enough to remember, we are sinking in to a deeper layer of comprehension than we would if we breezed through the reading without pausing.

In these moments of introspection, we have a rare opportunity to consider the learning process up close. If we take the next step - to record our insights about the learning - we are, in effect, planning for our students' learning. It's hard to imagine a more productive use of time.

For example, in the piece about Neruda and in my own writing about it, I realize that, through a few details, a writer can reveal a world in a piece as short as that. Some writers have the skill to provide such intense focus on the small moments in life - real or imagined - that he leads the reader to think about more global human quirks and truisms, like the one I wrote about in my journal that night.

Translated into the classroom, I can focus on a book such as Night in the Country by Cynthia Rylant and design a series of Crafting Sessions focused on how Rylant elaborates on details as minute as a Saturday evening bath and somehow leads us into thinking about how the least exotic details of human life are often those most memorable. I can pass that on to my students in a Crafting Session and invite them to try, in the pieces they're currently developing, to write about some small aspect of their lives, a detail that may seem mundane but that they can amplify so that it will resonate for their readers as a larger truth.

I am willing to bet that our curricula and standards documents don't include a reference to teaching how writers use focal details to create global messages, yet such a skill is essential to great narrative and poetic writing. And, in the Cornerstone Literacy Framework (a document meant to exceed expectations in state standards documents), we do include a deep structure writing teaching intention that reads:

Capitalizing on insights from your own reading and writing permit you to take children on journeys into learning far more relevant to great reading and writing than may be possible if we only teach the standard, prescribed skills. But, how are we to know what those more complex and challenging strategies are?

You'll not find, I believe, the definitive set of strategies writers use to make their work more persuasive nor a list of ways to deepen your comprehension of text until we take the time for our own reading and writing - all the while searching and recording how we go about reading and writing meaningfully when it's just us and the book or the screen or journal page. Those little jotted notes, fresh from our own struggle to learn meaningfully become a curriculum far more rigorous than the one we typically offer.

We have thousands of demands on our time but we need to pause and remember that the choices we make have the potential to lead our children into much more in-depth learning. We don't want to sideline these journeys into our own intellect in favor of the louder demands in our profession - at least not all the time. I would like to propose a way we all might gradually change these habits.

If each Cornerstone teacher, principal, Liaison and Literacy Fellow were to set aside 90 minutes once a week that would have been spent on "school work" and all that implies, in favor of sinking into a favorite chair, giving ourselves the gift of silence and listening to our own minds think as we read or write, I imagine we would rediscover the joy of intellectual endeavor. Not only will we generate a very useable list of Crafting Sessions to share with our children, we'll be building a bank of stories from our own learning experiences that, if shared with children, are likely to be remembered long after they leave our care.

I believe it was Don Graves, the great writer, educator and philosopher who said, "anything we ask children to do must be for us first." We must experience and analyze what we're asking children to complete in our classrooms and, perhaps more importantly, we must bring our own intellectual lives vividly into the classroom.