all the shades of pride

We're pretty stubborn

 All hail the Democrats of Virginia and New Jersey!

Carl Sandburg has a sage comment that seems apropos to the moment, and which also includes boots--which regular readers may remember hold a special charm for me.  I especially must heed Granddad Carl's advice, as must Republicans.



Primer Lesson | Carl Sandburg  1922

Look out how you use proud words.
When you let proud words go, it is
        not easy to call them back.
They wear long boots, hard boots; they
        walk off proud; they can't hear you
        calling--
Look out how you use proud words.
 

The round-up today is with Jama at Jama's Alphabet Soup, always a delicious dive into culiterary treats.  Yes, I just made that word up, and I think Carl will enjoy today's offering of coffee and donuts.

I'm attending next week!  Are you?  Let's get together!

good honest work

After last week's wobble, I'm pleased to say that oh me of little faith has enjoyed election elation of a physical nature!  Here in Maryland, in addition to our reliable support of the Democratic candidate for President (a particularly admirable one, in my view), citizens also voted resoundingly for a DREAM Act which eases undocumented immigrant students' access to higher education, and FOR civil marriage rights for same-sex couples.  This last is particularly momentous, since it is the first time that the people (not the courts, not the legislature) of a state have voted directly in favor of marriage equality for their LGBT neighbors.


Compared to many of our friends, we did only a little to educate and inspire, but there was some work involved.  To see our investment of time, money and energy come to fruition leaves (heh heh "leaves") me with a feeling similar to that captured in this poem from Amy Ludwig Vanderwater, which my kindergarteners are currently building at the Pocket Chart and illustrating in their Poetry Anthologies.  She posted it last year and it went straight into my classroom.  Thanks, Amy...and thanks, Maryland!

If you're a teacher and you want a copy of my "Raking" pocket chart, just let me know and I'll send it to you.  The roundup today is over at Think Kid, Think! with Ed DeCaria--jump in!

hybrid

hybrid storm
hot then cold
fast wind churning slow
terrible  wild
passing to mild

leaves a mess
of mixed debris
schadenfreude isn't right
something luckier
something sadder

and it matters


Heidi Mordhorst 2012
DRAFT

And not only that--the clock fall back this weekend.  Links of interest:
Richard Cohen
schadenfreude

Poetry Friday roundup is with Donna at Mainely Write.  GOTV!

effective

Wednesday I spent 6 hours in a hearing of the House Ways & Means Committee of Maryland's General Assembly, waiting to testify on a bill regarding, predictably, our public charter school law. While there I heard testimony on a bill that would add teacher "ineffectiveness" to the list of causes for dismissal, along with things like poor attendance and moral turpitude (I don't think that term is used any more but I love the sound of the word turpitude a lot).

This would seem to make sense--as in other professions, if you're not doing a good job you should be, as they say in my partner's consulting firm, "counseled out." The problem is that, despite recent focused research and writing about what great teachers actually do on a moment-by-moment basis, no one is still very sure exactly what constitutes teacher effectiveness--or how to measure it.

Personally, I consider good teaching to be an art, much like poetry. So often the sum of a great poem is greater than its parts; while connoisseurs may appreciate the dazzle of discrete elements of a poem, there is an alchemical mystery to the overall effect, as in this one by Howard Nemerov. It is often this way in the classroom, too.

To David, About His Education
~ Howard Nemerov

The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
Or its nose, in a book,to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. .......
........ such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.


Read the complete poem here, and catch the mysterious sums over at The Small Nouns with Ben on this Poetry Friday. He's leading with an homage to Lucille Clifton, also one of my favorite poets during all months of the year.

work song in the key of f

Well. Sooner than we expected, the school system reviewers and the Superintendent made their recommendation against approval to the Board of Education, and in a whirlwind of events our public charter school application was denied on Tuesday. There was no way to catch my breath in time for Poetry Friday--these are the last days of the school year, after all--so here I am today with a poem that reflects (not sure how, but it does) a little of the hollow feeling that lurks beneath a determination to try again.

Work Song
~ Joshua Mehigan

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving--
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We're fired. We worry later.

That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, "Thank you, no."
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.

The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.

That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he's done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.

all that we remember

Happy Poetry Friday: share the love at Some Novel Ideas, a middle-school focused blog that I'm happy to discover.

Since my last post I've participated to my great benefit in two poetry stretches and the public charter school application has passed the Technical Review--and of course, while the district was doing their checkthrough to see if anything was missing, so were we. I-yi-yi we found some glaring omissions! So yesterday I stood in the Asst. Superintendent's office with one of the stalwarts of the project and replaced or added to 20 binders eight pieces that had gone wrong somehow, and crossed out a really important "not" on every page 95.

More interesting for you all in the Poetry Friday audience is page 29. Here is where I included the following perfect poem by Countee Cullen, a move which many considered too risky for a charter school supplication (which may be a better word than application, since if approved we would be the first public charter school in our district ever).

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

~Countee Cullen

This poem leads the section about how, in addition to "what children know and can do," our schools must address what children feel, value and demonstrate as attitudes towards each other and the planet. This, to me, is what reading is for (among a few other important things), and what poetry is particular is useful for crystallizing.

"But, the word "nigger"?!" some said.
I said, "That's precisely the point."

back-to-school thoughts, just for a moment

I have an exciting new teaching job starting in a month (yesterday I had my first official meeting with the Reading Specialist), and in my role as charter school founder I've been having some deep "academic design" thoughts. So this wicked poem that I rediscovered in a book called Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (ed. Gary Mex Glazner, 2000) has been wandering the halls of my inner school...

Backwards Day

Sometimes at school we have a special day

We call it backwards day

Everyone wears their clothes backwards

Or wears colors that clash

I have a modest proposal

Forget your silly backwards hats and tee shirts

Forget this stripes and checks together puppypoop

Let's get serious

Let's really shake school up

In math class, for homework

Describe the associative, distributive, and

commutative properties

In dance

Choregraph it, dance it, show your work

Points off for clumsiness

In Social Studies, for homework

Prepare two Civil War marching songs, one North one South

Sing in four part harmony, show your emotion

Points off for flat notes

In English, for homework

Carve a sculpture that expresses Hester Prynne's solitary courage

The cowardice of her lover

The beauty and strangeness of her child

In Science, for homework,

Bring in a broken toaster, doorknob, or wind-up toy

Fix it

You get extra credit for using the leftover parts to make something new

Points off for reading the directions

On the S.A.T.

Every one of the questions

Will be in haiku

You get two scores

One in whistling, and one in Legos

No calculators

Let's take a stroll down the hall

Let's see who is in the learning disabilities classroom now

Will you look at all those guys with pocket protectors

Sweating, slouching, and acting out

Hey, no care that you can divide fractions backwards in

your head buddy

You will stay right here and practice interpretive dance steps till

you get it right

Will you look at all those perfect spellers with bad attitutdes

Look at those grammar wizards with rhythm deficit disorder

What good is spelling gonna do you

If you can't carry a tune

Toss a lariat

Or juggle?

You are going to stay right here and do the things that you can't

Over and over, and again, and again

Until you get them right,

Or until you give up

Quit school

And get a job

As a spell checker

At the A&P

~Daniel Ferri

P.S. Does anyone know how to make blogger obey my WYSIWYG commands? Grrrrrr.

heigh-ho heigh-ho it's off to work we go

I'm not at my best this morning, but both of us were smokin' last night at the Out for Equality Inaugural Ball. Everybody was already feeling fabulous, even after some frustrating "but I have tickets!" experiences, and music by Dave Koz, Katie Curtis, Thelma Houston and that ever-bubbling fount of exuberance Cyndi Lauper boosted us all way up over the top. (Rufus Wainwright performed too, remarking insightfully that he's not really a party dude, being "rather morose, but I look good, so it all works out.") The evening ended with Melissa Etheridge growling earnestly away; a friend and I agreed that we're fans of her existence if not her music.

One of the unscheduled visitors (Sir Ian McKellen said a word and Jamie Lee Curtis and Carrie Fisher were both sighted) was Bishop Gene Robinson, who spoke the opening words at Monday's We Are One concert (nearly attended by Fiona but not quite) but whose contribution was inexplicably not broadcast. Here is his prayer; to get the full effect compare it side by side with Rev. Rick Warren's. Whether you're Christian or not, religious or not, Robinson's prayer shows a future of faith that I for one can live alongside.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire
Opening Inaugural Event, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God's blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will...
Bless us with tears - for a world in which over a billion people existon less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger - at discrimination, at home and abroad, againstrefugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort - at the easy, simplistic "answers" we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience - and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be "fixed" anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
Bless us with humility - open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world. Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance - replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding thatin our diversity, we are stronger.
Bless us with compassion and generosity - remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable inthe human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States. Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln's reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy's ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King's dream of a nation for ALL the people.
Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.
Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.
Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.
Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.
Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters' childhoods.
And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we're asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand - that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.
AMEN.

the beauty of the blog

This morning on NPR (and let's face it, if I don't hear it on Morning Edition between 5 and 7am, it's not news) I heard how Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of a special award at the National Book Awards ceremonies last night, had tried to get her essay on the election of Barack Obama, a fellow Hawaiian, published in a number of newspapers and magazines and failed. Her response, of course, was to turn to the Internet, and with the click of a "Publish" button, her essay went live.

Also this morning I heard from a friend, the one who moved to the gigantic mansion in Texas; we always knew she was the Erma Bombeck of this decade, and now her blog, Marge Ponders, proves that she has been a blogger-in-waiting since before we knew what a blog was. She writes today that her daughter will turn 10 on Friday and become a "zero-teen." Now here is a concept I had not encountered, nor did I realize that the only gifts for a girl of this age are pricey electronics or pricey American Girl dolls.

This is ever so pertinent, since I informed Daisy just a week ago that there will be no tweenage in our household--you are a child until you are a teen, I said, (just like I said in 2000 that we would never eat in the car, in 2002 that no one would play computer games until they learned to read, and as recently as 2007 that our family would simply never have a video game system, and guess who now has a Wii?)--and then I let her buy the American Girl body book. (Thank the stars she has no interests in the sissy I mean historical dolls or their clothes, and in my defense, I made her buy the book with her own extensive stash of tweenage allowance money.) Anyway, now that Marge is blogging, I can keep up with her family, have a laugh, and get some advice on the state of the economic bailout at the same time--a beautiful efficiency.

Another friend is using her blog to make sure that people like me, whose only news source is early morning NPR, have easy access to the alternative media. At A Nice Gal's Guide to Online News and Politics, she makes it simple for me to keep up not only with her battles against chronic sinus infection, but with the new discourse of the Internet. She and I probably don't agree on everything, but we agree on enough about the world that I can trust her to point me in the right direction--an invaluable public service from my least public friend.

And then there's Sylvia Vardell, more of an acquaintance than a friend, who keeps me up to date on events in the world of shadowy world of children's poetry. I read, I write, I publish (very intermittently), but I do all this in a kind of vacuum, not having time to read all the children's book journals etc etc, so I'm grateful that there's somewhere to go for digestible tidbits of news and more than occasionally a poem to enjoy.

Finally, as a recent convert to Facebook, I appreciate the blog-spirited Status Updates from people I see regularly and those I haven't seen since high school, and let's face it, some of those updates are more worthy of the literature label. It all contributes to the possibility of contracting TMI disease, but this is more of the beauty of the blog--I go get it when I want it and not otherwise.

But le plus beau here is this: I'm sure I don't have anything as meaningful to say as Maxine, and I don't have the financial nouse of Marge or the political savvy of A Nice Gal, nor the connections that Sylvia profits from--and yet I too can set myself a purpose, set up a blog, and click "Publish." If nothing else (and if no one reads but me), it's a way to think, to write, to craft, and to have my say. Without bending too many live ears.

un beau jour/a beautiful day

Ce matin, Duncan crie ses applaudissements. Daisy danse somnolente-réveillée. Fiona embrasse tous ses proches virtuellement. Et moi, je pleure. Je pleure car aujourd’hui je peux avouer que toute ma vie, j’étais embarrassée, j’avais honte de mon pays, meme en croyant fortement en les idéals de notre démocratie. Nous, du « greatest country on earth , » nous n’étions pas un nation de liberté, pas un nation d’égalité, pas (et peut-etre pas encore) un nation de fraternité.

Mais aujourd’hui nous récupérons le droit de dire que nous sommes quelque chose de spécial dans le monde. Il n’existe pas un « greatest country on earth, » mais hier nous avons choisi d’essayer etre grand dans un sens généreux, et d’etre responsable de faire le travail qui accompagne ce défi la.

Donc je pleure. Les larmes sont de la relève, de la joie et oui, de l’espoir. J’adore les mots de Barack Obama, mais pour l’instant, c’est (avec un touche de bizarre) un voix irlandais, c’est Bono de U2 qui chante mon cœur :

Beautiful Day

The heart is a bloom, it shoots up through the stony ground

There's no room, no space to rent in this town

You're out of luck and the reason that you had to care:

The traffic is stuck and you're not moving anywhere.

You thought you'd found a friend to take you out of this place

Someone you could lend a hand in return for grace]

It's a beautiful day, the sky falls

And you feel like it's a beautiful day

Don't let it get away

You're on the road but you've got no destination

You're in the mud, in the maze of her imagination

You love this town even if that doesn't ring true

You've been all over and it's been all over you

It's a beautiful day

Don't let it get away

It's a beautiful day

Don't let it get away

Touch me, take me to that other place

Teach me, I know I'm not a hopeless case

See the world in green and blue

See China right in front of you

See the canyons broken by cloud

See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out

See the Bedouin fires at night

See the oil fields at first light

And see the bird with a leaf in her mouth

After the flood all the colors came out

It was a beautiful day

Beautiful day

Don't let it get away

Touch me, take me to that other place

Reach me, I know I'm not a hopeless case

What you don't have you don't need it now

What you don't know you can feel it somehow

What you don't have you don't need it now

You don't need it now, you don't need it now

It’s a beautiful day

Today, Duncan cheers. Daisy dances, sleepy wide-awake. Fiona’s virtually hugging everybody she knows. And me, I’m crying. I’m crying because today I can admit that my whole life I’ve been embarrassed, I’ve been ashamed of my country, even while I believed to my depths in the ideals of our democracy. We, “the greatest country on earth,” have not been a nation of liberty, not a nation of equality, not (and maybe not yet) a nation of brotherhood.

But today we reclaim the right to say that we’re some kind of special in the world. There is no “greatest country on earth,” but yesterday we chose to try to be great in the most generous sense, and to be responsible for doing the work that comes along with the challenge.

So I’m crying. The tears are of relief, of joy, and yes, of hope. I love the way Obama speaks, but for the moment, strangely, it’s an Irish voice, it’s Bono of U2 who’s singing my heart.