Dispatches from the Frontier

All right, today marked my fifth day at my Education Pioneers summer fellowship, meaning a week is in the books.  I'm helping a network of schools within the Chicago Public system develop a community-engagement plan for an elementary school that is undergoing a "turnaround" process--year one of five commencing this fall.  It's cool work: different from what I've done, different enough to stretch me and give me new skills, but also not that distant.  Only 15 months ago I was working with parents--and my adult ESOL students--of Boston Public Schools students support their kids' learning.

Unlike some past pursuits, I feel prepared for this.  I've plunged into old jobs headfirst and thrashed; now I feel like I can not only swim, but swim well.  I worked with parents on parental involvement, did community outreach with the Latino and Hmong populations once upon a time in Milwaukee, and took a grad-school class that studied community engagement deeply.  I've got plenty of ideas and a binder full of more at my side.

A large part of today was spent mapping out the strategy behind the community-engagement strategy.  How do I do the work that I do?  My central question is this: if engaging a community (reaching out to parents, empowering them to have a voice, setting a common vision for the students based on both school and community desires) is a process, then most of the work will happen after my placement ends in August.  So how do I make sure my work empowers others to care about community engagement, and then do the engaging after I've likely left?

In other words, I can't just write a handbook, wipe off my hands in August, and take off.

This will be a challenge, and I'm looking forward to it.

***

Another challenge: building an effective team.

What makes an effective team?  Many things: trust, willingness to be critical, industriousness, focus on the work, commitment to the work.

And more ...

Today I was in a meeting of, say, eight people.  All adults.  During the two hours in which we managed to edit--nay, highlight several words for later editing--a single page of writing, the room was awash in distractions.  If it could be tapped, it was being tapped at: iPads, iPhones, other laptops.  A bowl of cherries seemed to present a fascinating byplay, over the course of more than five minutes, for two people.  All right: if the boss or the ops manager looks at the Blackberry occasionally, I get it.  It's 2012.  But virtually every single adult being consistently and blatantly distracted, while others are talking, in a small group meeting, often by not one but two devices?  Sheesh.

Respect is still respect (I hope).

Second City, First Impressions

Picked-up pieces from my first days in Chicago, aka the site of the summer fellowship:

After a day of kicking myself that I hadn't packed my basketball shoes (at least not for this trip), I borrowed my friend Anna's younger brother's sneaks to join a dozen future Derrick Roses honing their hoop game across the alley from my Anna's apartment.  Never seen a court that got nonstop play from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm.  But then, this is Chicago.

Since the last time I'd visited, I'd forgotten just how ... character the El has.  Taking the Blue Line into the city from O'Hare, when the train enters denser neighborhoods the tracks pass through a veritable canopy of apartment rooftops, so close you could reach out and touch them.  The platform at the station I got off at was wooden and clearly past its prime.  Such touches have their own kind of charm; then again, the accessibility is mediocre.

View from the kitchen table of my friend Anna's apartment, where I crashed till I could move into my own sublet: row of potted herbs on a windowsill, in front of power lines, in front of a grey rooftop with its ducts and vents, in front of a main drag of Mexican eateries, in front of ... the spectacular downtown skyline.  So much about urban living captured in a single vista.


Whoever Naty is, she's the Mayor of Anna's stretch of the Ukrainian Village.  Dona Naty's Tacos one block, Naty's Pizza the next.


I now know what a Pedal Pub is, and I'll leave it at that.

I remember the days when Megabus was just getting started in the Midwest, you could only take it to a few cities, and it seemed you could get a $5 ride even at the last minute.  How times change.

It's nice being back in a city served by The Onion's A.V. Club--for my money, still the most efficient, coherent, and informative entertainment listings available in the cities I've lived in.

Can anyone tell me where and when the good open-mic poetry slams are here?

Trying to find an affordable yet quality grocery store in Hyde Park has proven quite the challenge.

This is a city with a lot of good coffee.  And here I am, trying to transition back to tea.  Sigh.

Kudos to the UChicago Marketplace for connecting the lampless man with students giving away lamps.  I am awash in light!

I consider myself somewhat aesthetically challenged, but even I can appreciate how awful a color of pink my new room is painted.  And with all the new lamps, it's hard to avoid.

Glad to Be Done, and ...

I finished my graduate school work three weeks ago—closing the book, not with a bang but with a take-home stats exam—and though it’s taken some time for the feeling of completion to sink in, it finally has.  I first began to appreciate the month-long break I am on during those moments when, over a plate of dinner, a brief flash of anxiety would rise in me and then just as quickly recede.  No, I didn’t have to excuse myself to finish just one more class reading; there was no meeting to schedule, no unoutlined outline, no nothing. 

In the mood of reflection post-grad school, I’ve been most struck by two things: first, the ability to inure oneself to a ton of work, and second, the strong desire to do something truly imaginative.

First, I am struck by how accustomed one can get to a “new normal.”  In my case, it was the new normal of working all the time.  In August, based on advice extracted from friends who had crossed the grad-school bridge before me, I harbored fleeting and wildly optimistic plans to “treat grad school like a job.”  Get to the library at 8, work all day, and leave it all behind to get home by 6:30 or 7.  In my naïve imagining, it would a job with long hours, to be sure, but with relative boundaries.  The occasional evening and weekend would be sacrificed of course, but disciplined work ethic could make those exceptions, not the rule.  By the end of September, I was telling people, “I’m early to rise, and still working on the early-to-bed.”  I never did figure out the latter part.

Much of the time, the schedule represented a joyful immersion in pursuits of interest.  I distinctly recall, several times last fall, lifting my head up from a book and thinking, Wow, I’m being asked to spend all my time reading and thinking—what a privilege!  I felt the joys of the work most strongly in the spring, where I did most of work not alone but in groups, joining with classmates over bagels and coffee, our efforts laced with banter, good-natured needling, and inside jokes kindled in the long, loopy hours passed together at the ed school library. 

At other times, I was reminded of the darker sense of work that comes into English from the French travail, and the emotional something that is chipped away at by too much labor.  I will always be grateful for the privilege of spending a year focused entirely on school—and without having to balance it against a full-time job or full-time parenting, as others have to.  But when the hours were longest, schoolwork sometimes felt more like travail than joy.  Although being a student promised to be less emotionally demanding than previous work as a teacher, I abandoned much of the personal caretaking I’d once steadfastly maintained as a schoolteacher.  A personal rule of 6.5 hours of sleep per night slipped to 6, or less.  Weekly pick-up basketball remained an imperative, but a Thursday run became increasingly optional.  In the fall I’d stick to the calmer waters of tea, not coffee; by the spring I was intaking as much espresso as I needed to fire the engine.

Because grad school seemed to require less emotional strength than my prior work, I abandoned things to preserve me emotionally—and found my emotional strength taking a toll.  The costs were little but added up.  Having to leave dinner earlier than I’d like made me feel less present around other people, always the guy edging for the door.  Sending a personal email felt like a luxury compared to processing the dozens of missives about class, meetings, school events.  There was less time to linger over a conversation, or a beer.  Never before had I so appreciated how the long conversation, the personal email, the curling up with a movie or novel acts as a salve, healing and restoring us between bouts of work.  It makes the work easier to do.  It gives the work its sense of reward. 

At orientation, our faculty keynote speaker urged us students to surrender to grad school, and surrender I did—to the joy and to sacrifice of it all.  At the time, I could hardly appreciate how much I would end up surrendering, or how important it would feel to get back some of what I’d surrendered when it was all over.  Since being done I’ve experienced what feels like a gift: I am so much more appreciative of the little things than I was before.  Discovering an excellent pisco sour at the bar Eastern Standard; losing hours in a Michael Chabon novel; taking photos off a bluff overlooking La Crosse and the Mississippi River.  I am as happy to surrender to these things as I was to surrender to grad school.  Here’s to small things that feel like luxuries.

The second striking reflection of the last few weeks has been the primacy of reading to my vacation plans.  I got my fill of nonfiction and PDFs the last 10 months, but for my down time I mean novels.  It has become a sort of shorthand.  To the question, How do you want to spend your time off? comes the answer, Catch up on reading.  It’s always been that way; as a kid, I was constantly losing a whole afternoon to a book.  But now, the urge to crack open a book seems like a nonnegotiable part of the R-and-R.    

And in, finally, reading again, the most appealing part of literature has been how it allows one to escape into the unknown.  All of the things they say about literature—putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, imagination filling out characters—are so true, and I see that now all the more because of its contrast with my schoolwork.  It is like the contrast between the unknown and the known.  Literature brings us all to the happy precipice of the unknown, from where we take leaps that land in wonderful places.  How the mind’s eye will imagine a character is an open-ended endeavor.  Where the author will take the story may have been foreshadowed, but not telegraphed. 

The unknowns of fiction seem so unlike the decisiveness of the policy program.  Sure, as more than one ed-school commencement speaker mentioned, it’s important for us educators to “hit the ground listening” upon our graduation.  But I often found, in my policy and management program, that wondering about the unknown was far less emphasized than being decisive, assertive, straightforward.  You know it if you’ve seen; we students know it well: The executive summary outlining the three main points.  The imperative to define the problem—hammered into me by my most recent professor’s exhortation to “Have a clear problem definition,” or by my fall professor: “What’s the problem here?”  The unctuous elbowing-in of politics, with its necessary decisive steps and its cool disregard for second-guessing.  The PDF with the three bullet-pointed problems and accompanying three bullet-pointed solutions.  And as students, the policy memos we wrote more often than not hewed to the same dictum of the policy world: State the problem, suggest solutions.

What was lost in that decisiveness, especially given our location within what is (probably accurately) known as the most opinionated ZIP code in America, was, at times, a respect for the unknown.  A policy—anything in education, indeed most things in the world—can only be measured and assessed and understood so far.  There are things we don’t know, or can’t figure out, unless we wait a long time, ask just the right questions.  Maybe there are some things we can never know. 

It’s not just imagination that having a respect for the unknown demands of us, but patience, humility, the willingness to hold one’s guns, rather than fire them off in opinion.  In an essay on American education, as it happens, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.”  In that sense, my graduate program was a mixed blessing, opening up both countless avenues and on-ramps of curiosity while also disciplining a decisiveness about matters that carries danger.  We can debate the relative weight of either of these.  But no question, having time off has been a clear step in the direction of the unknown.