Jonathan Lovell has been leading writing workshops for many years.
In this delightful post, he describes his struggle to finish his own dissertation, and the flights of fancy that kept blocking his path.
He uses graphics creatively to reflect his state of mind. You watch his thinking evolve.
Watch a writer at work and lament with him that the Obama administration eliminated the minimal funding needed to keep more than 200 sites of the National Writing Project alive, summer institutes where teachers experience the love of learning without the threat of test scores and VAM. No utilitarian purpose, just freedom to think and create.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sorry to hear that Washington would not continue to support the National Writing Project, which is a model approach to support effective instruction by investing in quality professional development. Here we see yet another instance where funding is diverted from research-based long term strategies, such as ongoing professional development, while support for high stakes testing and other test-and-punish strategies continues unabated.
I’d been wonking along for too many hours now, tracking down the hard and ugly leading edge of the for-profit corporate assault on personal and public creativity, individual and shared joy.
I was tweeting links and tracking roots till it literally hurt, even forgetting what I was fighting for. Redacting down to 140 characters isn’t haiku. This is not poetry. I shut the window because the chill was working up my spine, so I missed the dawn chorus.
Boston Public Schools subsumes History and Social Studies department under heel of “Humanities” CCSS ELA test prep.
Corporate/Federal axis plans to capture $$ control of all Higher Ed next fall with bogus ratings.
Students’ personal data is an “asset” in Connect-Ed bankruptcy proceedings. FTC makes empty gestures about it.
LA School Board member Galatzan blocks appointee critical of iPads from Bond Oversight Committee. Follow the money
Where can YOU “wield” a child’s practice of freedom? Let alone monetize it. Who is the “we” of whom you write all the time?
Why is my union’s staff still shilling for the corporate assault on literature? Teachers pay your salary, not Gates’ grants.
When I saw this headline, I thought it must be about the Smarter Balanced online tests of “listening skills”, and I would have to go disentangle this thread from Darling-Hammond’s mealy-mouthed co-conspirators … Okay, whatever it takes …
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
I opened the window. Instead of ascending the skies, they’re tweeting to each other close up, and answering, and then warbling together from the same trees. Tiny warbles, softer and softer, ascending elsewhere. #yeseverybird #noteverybird
I’m outa here. Later I’ll wonk down the funding for the Writers Project, and I will remember why.
a powerful, moving post
thank you
A lovely response chemtchr. Thanks so much for opening the window and listening to those softer and softer warblings.
Thanks Robert. It’s an honor to me to receive a compliment from you. Very much appreciated.
You are welcome. I, too, developed a distaste and then, later, an appreciation for Rossetti. Of course, doing a dissertation on ANY topic is a sure way to destroy one’s passion for it for a time! And there is a lesson to be learned, there, about extrinsic motivators. They can be deadly. We humans are built that way. When it becomes not about the object of our passion but about something extraneous to that, the passion itself gets squashed. And so, our education “leaders” have made an extrinsic punishment and reward system the primary mode of operation of our PreK-12 educational system. As if it weren’t already bad enough that we had built the thing around grades and moving by cohort to the next grade level!!!!!
Sort of difficult with this set-up to figure out who is responding to whom, but here goes:
I too thought the experience of writing a dissertation would be a certain route to an increasing distaste for one’s subject. My experience, however, was the opposite. Having started with a topic and a focus that was suggested to me by Harold Bloom and by my dissertation advisor Leslie Brisman, I spent three years trying to figure out a way to make myself care about my writing. But here’s where the unexpected cleverness of the dissertation experience kicked in: by not setting a deadline for the completion of my study, and by waiting somewhat patiently for me to come up with my own insights, the hoped for turn-around did occur. Quite unexpectedly from my perspective, and defined against a pretty deep despair. I know this does not happen in all dissertation writing cases: perhaps in only a few. I feel fortunate, however, that it happened in mine.
I was actually responding to chemtchr in that first comment, but I enjoyed your piece very much as well and had thought of commenting but got distracted. So, your error there was fortuitous. There’s all too little of this sharing of people’s intellectual journeys, and I find that sort of thing fascinating, and your piece was a delight. I’m glad to hear that the NWP will receive some federal funding but, of course, saddened by the dramatic cut. NCLB and the CCSS have set back writing instruction in this country by decades.
You write exquisitely, Jonathan. Vividly, with great economy, and about matters worth thinking about. That’s what I would have said.
Jonathan, I, too, appreciate your turn of a phrase, even in your short responses.
You are an inspiration.
Thanks very much, Robert. Now I’m going to have to figure out how to manage with this very large head I seem to have been bequeathed!
And thank you as well Ellen. As Robert says, these sorts of exchanges happen all too rarely, even in this day of immediate and easily available communication.
Jonathan, sometimes I wish a bunch of us could get together and share a discourse over a cup of coffee or glass of wine. I savor stories of famous writers and artists gathering on a regular basis to exchange ideas. (If only I could have been a friend of Mary Shelley on the stormy night when that elite crowd was sharing ghost stories.)
Perhaps Diane could arrange a blog conference some weekend with speakers and workshops and a time of sharing.
I’d love to get together with you and Robert and Duane and TE and NY Teacher and Ellen Lubin and Lloyd and so many others. Even Barry and Harlan. What a hoot that would be.
In the meantime, we must maintain our friendship online.
It was the dream of the Ptolemies who created the Library of Alexandria; of the Arab and Persian and Chinese and Greek encyclopedists; of Diderot; of Mark Twain and H.G. Wells who wrote, respectively, of a worldwide “magical telegraph” for “texts and pictures” and of “world mind” making “all knowledge” available “instantaneously, over wires; of Vannevar Bush who dreamed of the Memorex–that one day we would all be connected and that all the knowledge and wisdom of the world would universally and immediately available. And now we have this. And there are those who scoff and say, well, it’s used just to send porn and LOL cats and to show off on Facebook and to argue meaninglessly about trivia, but that’s not so. Today, there are many, many communities being created online, and many of these spill into the nonvirtual world. There’s enormous sharing. Those battling breast cancer can talk with breast cancer survivors. Everywhere, people can join together to make common cause against tyranny. Prejudices fall away as people encounter those not like them. And that child in Malawi can take classes from professors in Europe or China or the United States or elsewhere in Africa. We are just beginning to see what this change will bring about. It will be very, very difficult to sustain tyranny when we can all talk to one another and when knowledge is there for the gleaning. And a lot of powerful people are worried about that. Thus the increased surveillance. Thus the attempt to end Net neutrality. Thus the attempt to create a national curriculum portal and gateway aligned to a single set of national “standards” and so to make machine-assisted learning into a push experience instead of a pull one. Something very beautiful is about to be born, but we’re going to have to fight for it. The tyrants will lose, but it’s going to be messy getting there. From the point of view of the overclass, things are about to get out of hand, and they know this and are preparing for it.
I’m with you on that, Ellen. Even Barry and Harlan. Maybe especially Barry and Harlan. It’s quite amazing to read the letters Byron wrote when he was having those heady exchanges with Shelley and Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and Claire Claremont by the shores of Lake Geneva. It sometimes seems as if Shelley in particularly could recall whole pages of the most densely written German philosophy. But I’m sure their proximity was key, the same way that players on some basketball teams learn to play as a single organic unit. My guess, however, is that *physical* proximity has a good deal to do with the emergence of this special magic.
A little something to put up on the whiteboard on that first day of the writing class:
“What would the human race have been if Homer, or Shakespeare, had never written? or if any false modesty, or mistake of their own powers, had withheld them from consummating those unequalled achievements of mind by which we are so deeply benefited? I do not compare you with these. I do not know how great an intellectual compass you are destined to fill. I only know that your powers are astonishingly great, and that they ought to be exerted to their full extent.”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley to George Gordon, Lord Byron, September 29, 1816
Oh, what a dream that is, Ellen! I would love this. This group, around a campfire somewhere. That would be a highlight in a life, no doubt, no doubt at all.
You are a wonder, Robert. This excerpt is perfect, and the admiration Shelley held for Byron was shared by the esteem Byron held for Shelley. And to think that at this point in their lives they were, respectively, 28 and 23! And Mary and Claire, as I recall, were only 18. Simply amazing.
This is one of the most extraordinary, most moving pieces of writing that I have encountered in some time. Thank you, chemtchr, for sharing it and for your efforts to counter the for-profit corporate assault on personal and public creativity, individual and shared joy.
I particularly love your observation, so mindfully rendered, of the birds and the speech-binding of their community.
Midsummer, No Fairies | Bob Shepherd
Where have you gone, fairies of my childhood?
Have I grown too blustering and blundering,
Too puffed up with knowledge and opinions?
I seek you in the clearing of the wood
And there find only the luminescence
You have left behind, hanging in the heavy
Midsummer’s air. Is this, then,
What is left me? This ripeness, this
Completedness, this disclosedness,
In the clearing, of things in themselves,
Naked and heavy as flesh?
I seek you by the margins of the lake,
And there find dragonflies and damselflies,
And the silver bodies of mullet jumping,
Breaking free of one world into another,
Again and again, as though they would
Break free for good or die trying.
And these are wonders, surely, but
They but intensify the longing you left,
With your mark upon my body,
When you returned me to the cradle.
How could I see those and not be reminded
Of the shimmering of your wings
By moonlight as we danced? I am wise to you.
This is what you do, is it not?
You return us, you leave us with the world
And the knowing that this richness beyond measure,
This clearing, for all its fullness, is not all,
Is not all at all, at all, at all.
It is a hard lesson, and I am, doubtless,
As slow a learner as the rest. But where have you gone?
I would ask the trees, for those of their
Gossiping, garrulous race would doubtless know,
And the wind is rising, and they are bending their heads,
One to another, on the opposite shore, and
Making a racket. Are they oblivious? Do they mock?
I cannot know, for I haven’t their language.
Perhaps one could learn it, in time.
Perhaps if I sat here and listened long enough,
I could figure it out, for surely the San tongue
Sounds equally incomprehensible to the anthropologist,
Hearing it spoken, at first,
Within the clearing that is their world, in all its fullness,
With its ways of disclosing and of shutting out.
Kudos, Robert. And also to the other literary geniuses contributing to this blog.
>No utilitarian purpose, just freedom to think and create.
Ahh, but wonderful programs like that do have a utilitarian purpose. Maybe it’s not measurable, but I’m sure the teachers who go through it get better at teaching, each in their own way. Their passions grow, and they bring their larger selves into their classrooms, affecting the lives of countless kids.
comrade suevanhattum, it has come to our attention that you are making unauthorized use of the terms think^TM and create^TM, copyrights of the CCSS/NGA America, Inc. Please report immediately to Room 101 for a data chat and behavioral recalibration.
–The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (C^4 MiniTru), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Reblogged this on jonathan lovell's blog and commented:
Nice to have Diane Ravitch’s much larger microphone to help spread the word re my illustrated “Learning to Listen”‘essay. A pleasant surprise to wake up to on this Memorial Weekend Sunday morning!
Thanks Diane. If my illustrated “Learning to Listen” essay did nothing more than lift your spirits during this period of recovery from knee surgery, it would have served its purpose.
Reflects the current attitude or de emphasis towards the arts.
Disheartening!
Dear Ellen,
Not so disheartening as it may at first appear. In the six years since the National Writing Project was “zeroed out” of the Obama/Duncan education budget, virtually all 200 sites have discovered creative ways to sustain themselves. While it may be getting harder and harder to hear those profuse melodious strains of the skylark, we’re getting better and better at “tuning our ears” to do just that!
Jonathan, that just goes to show that creativity and the arts are joined at the hip. Kudos for finding new ways of expression, in spite of the political environment.
And Robert and 2oldtoteach . . .
THANKS to you all for this wonderful read!
I hesitate to post because I am no writer. I am, however, an avid (NOT close) reader and this sings to my soul ❤
I have been teaching social studies for 25 years in the same district. When I first began I was shocked at the atrocious writing of my seniors. Then, slowly but surely it improved. That happened because of the concerted efforts of some amazing teachers and the Ohio Writing Project. Of course it was difficult, but we were TEACHING and kids were LEARNING! In the last few years, as we obsessively clamor for higher math and reading scores I have, with great sadness and consternation, witnessed the gradual return to sub par writing. Real, writing – where my students can expound on what they have learned with accuracy and passion. Nope. Not any more. It's "Do we have to write that in complete sentences?" Sigh…..
Hi Katie, I was actually introduced the National Writing Project through the Ohio Writing Project. I’d just begun my present position at San Jose State, also 25 years ago, and chanced to meet Tom Romano at a National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention in Los Angeles. Tom had recently returned from spending two years with Don Graves at the University of New Hampshire, and was determined to bring what he learned there to his high school students at Edgewood High School inTrenton, where he was then teaching. The book that grew out of his experiences is called Clearing the Way. It’s one I still use with my credential candidates.
Our own writing project has attempted to replicate that groundbreaking achievement with a book published this past fall entitled “Teaching Writing Grades 7-12 in an Era of Assessment: Passion & Practice.” It’s the product of five years of writing and revising by a large number of San Jose Area Writing Project Teacher Consultants, 12 of whom completed full chapters or parts of chapters for the book. While there’s not a great deal one can do to argue successfully against those who believe that the route to improved student achievement is through raising standards, providing choice, and essentially allowing educational entrepreneurs to plunder from the public till, I think it’s important to demonstrate that “ordinary” classroom teachers routinely do extraordinary work in their classrooms, and that this work has the potential of “lifting all boats,” if only the present gaggle of educational “reformers” would get out of the way!
if only
wonderful, Katie!
You can’t blame the Obama administration for blocking NWP funding. The responsibility for that foolishness rests squarely in Congress.
Hi Kathleen,
I wish that were true, but the education budget proposal that led to the defunding of the NWP (along with TFA and NBPTS) did come directly from the Arne Duncan Dept of Ed. One could argue that they were anticipating just such cuts from Congress, since it’s of course the legislative branch that has the authority to fund or defund with federal dollars, but in this case the proposal came from the White House rather than from the legislature. The good news, of course, is that the legislature did approve the competitive SEED grant funding which the NWP has successfully applied for over 2 two year cycles, and on which most of our present federal funding depends. And there is a chance, as I understand from Bob Jobin, that Congress might double the size of this ESEA line item. My best, Jonathan