About the Exhibition

The exhibition An Artist + A Poet runs in the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery of the Boston Athenaeum from February 10, 2010 through April 10, 2010. This exhibition is open to the public. The Boston Athenaeum, 10½ Beacon St., Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

I had never heard of George Nama nor Charles Simic before seeing an announcement for a joint exhibition of their works at the Boston Athenaeum. But after spending time in the exhibition, I am glad that I know them now. I wish that I had known about them sooner.

The opening reception was last night, one of the Boston Athenaeum’s event open to the public. I was not quite sure what to expect.

The Athenaeum puts on a lovely reception. The reception was an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with these two artists. A nice selection of cheeses; two nice wines — Trapiche Malbec and Ca Donini Pinot Grigio; and orange punch. A jazz trio played throughout the evening.

I liked the way the work was presented. About two dozen poems by Charles Simic were presented on the same page with etchings by George Nama. These were no ordinary pages, however. If I were to hold each page by its short edge, it would be about the width of my shoulders along the short edge and the distance from my shoulders to my knees along the long edge.

George Nama did versions of works as both etchings and paintings. Several paintings were on display. Many paintings hung near the page that included the etched version.

The presentation of Charles Simic’s poetry reminded me of the work The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras. When you get close enough, the poem takes up your whole field of vision. I felt the world slip away, leaving nothing but me and the poem. Even the etchings faded away.

One poem, in particularly, called to me. It seemed to sit inside a larger world than some of the other poems.

The Vices of Evening

It’s the way the light and shadow
Pair off at the corner
While the night crowds to see
Behind our backs,

Perhaps catch us by surprise
With a single burnt matchstick
Left in someone’s hand,
Who forgot why he lit it

Unless it was for a lost dog
To find his way home
Through weedy lots
And past the painted women.

Charles Simic

There’s a good sampling of figuration and variations on figuration in George Nama’s work. I thought of the progressively more abstract sculpture series by Henri Matisse, The Back. In some of Nama’s works, you could see where he began with a human form and then created something abstract from it. I would hate to admit this to my art history professor, but I was more interested in Charles Simic’s work than I was in the abstracted figures of George Nama.

As I was leaving the lobby, I noticed a bas relief portrait of Dante that I hadn’t noticed before. I could not help thinking, “Abandon all hope, ye who exit here.”

Form Your Own Opinion.
Buy works by the artists from Amazon.com.

• The Book of Gods and Devils by Charles Simic
• That Little Something by Charles Simic
• The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras (Barbara Bray, trans.)

In This Essay

The Class

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

My friends have been very supportive of my goal of becoming a teacher. Most of them have offered words of encouragement.

One recommended a movie.

The Class sounded as though it would be relevant to me. I was excited to watch it. François is French teacher in Paris, teaching inner city kids about language, literature, and life. Change that only a few things, and you have me: Matthew wants to be an English teacher in Boston, teaching inner city kids about language, literature, and life.

Too bad I didn’t much like the movie.

Real Life on the Silver Screen

The Class is an adaptation of a French autobiographical novel, Entre les murs, or Between These Walls by François Bégaudeau.

The screenplay was written by François Bégaudeau as well.

And in an instance of art imitating life, François Bégaudeau plays himself in the film.

After earning a degree in Literature, François Bégaudeau taught for a few years. He worked with inner city kids in Paris, mainly African immigrants as I understand. From this experience, he wrote the novel.

Too Much Time on My Hands

The movie lacked what Aristotle called “Unity of Time.”

Well, strictly speaking Aristotle’s “Unity of Time” requires that the entire action of a drama takes no more than twenty-four hours. What drama besides those of Sophocles meet that requirement? Not even Shakespeare faithful complied with Aristotelian “Unity of Time.”

Successful films create their own sense of a unity of time. The Departed takes place over several months, for example, but the transitions are such that it creates a sense of flow. As a scene begins to unfold, we know that time has passed since the last scene, and we don’t know how much, but we also don’t need to know.

But The Class failed to create this unified sense of time. The movie begins with François walking into the school for staff introductions prior to the school year beginning, continues with François greeting the students, jumps to some weeks into the school year, and then ends with François asking his students what they learned throughout the year.

The jumps are jarring. I found myself wondering when scenes were taking place, wondering how much time had elapsed because here the time in between seemed important.

I felt the lost in time. When the final scene commenced and François was asking his students what they learned during the course of the year, I wondered how we got to that point. I could not enjoy the content of the scene because I was busy trying to piece together the story’s time line.

A Mini-Series Crammed into One Movie

The movie tried to do too much as well.

Two interrelated principles of art are point of view and selection. In creating a work of art, whether visual arts or literary arts, the artist needs to exercise discretion in the amount of material included in the work.

In quickly recalling the movie, I can think of three or four distinct stories he tries to weave together. I might find more if I were to watch the film again and take note of each storyline. François Bégaudeau did not succeed in focusing the work. These stories could have stood alone as separate movies.

One story involves a student named Khoumba refusing to read. No one else in the class read the tract that François had assigned; so, he asks Khoumba to read aloud. She feels singled out and fights with François in front of the class. He asks her to stay after the bell, he writes her up in her discipline notebook, and demands that she apologize, which she does so that she can leave only to tell him it was an insincere apology once she exits his classroom. She writes François a letter, telling him that he crossed the line and stating that she will not participate in his class.

Yet, without revealing how he reconciled the situation, within a few scenes of him reading the letter, Khoumba shows no ill will towards François and is participating in the class as if the previous incident did not happen.

Lessons to Learn Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

One movie jumped immediately to mind when I thought about how time was covered in The Class.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is a South Korean movie about the life a Buddhist monk from his childhood through his old age. Much more time is covered in this movie, but the handling was much more graceful. The director focused on a few days during each period of his life, the most significant days in each period, and clearly demarcated the different chapters of the movie with a title in between.

If The Class had employed a similar technique and had dropped one or two of the stories, the film might have seemed a complete work. As it was, The Class dragged. I found myself asking, “What is the point of this scene? Where did this come from?”

…And Yet

The Class did receive high praise and did win awards, both as a novel and as a film.

I wanted to like the film. Though I have never been an urban classroom, I feel like I know something more about what to expect than I did before I watched the film.

I will not frequently watch this film. After a year or two of teaching, I will give it another chance. Perhaps I will have aged enough to more deeply appreciate the film.

What’s Your Opinion?

Have you seen the film? What was your opinion?

If you haven’t seen it, buy The Class from Amazon.com. Form your own opinion. Share it here.

Disclosure
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In This Essay

Why School? : Reclaiming Education for All of Us by Mike Rose

Letters to a Young Teacher by Jonathan Kozol

I first learned about Why School? : Reclaiming Education for All of Us while listening to Marketplace on NPR back in August. I ordered it from Amazon.

I tore into it immediately. I have been thinking about it since then. I had been a bit afraid to review it too quickly.

Mike Rose covers a lot of topics in his slim 169 pages. But his essays are broad, each like an introduction to the topic rather than like tightly argued persuasion piece. And therein lies the value of these essays.

Let’s Think Together

I think that many of the great teachers lead us to knowledge, not so that we can necessarily share their opinions, but rather so that we can develop our own.

This is clearly Mr. Rose’s philosophy, one he shares also with Jonathan Kozol. In Letters to a Young Teacher, Mr. Kozol writes that the best sessions he had involved arguing with students who disagreed with him, “I revel in their oppositional mentalities. I know for sure that they’re not bored, or acquiescent, and that they are actually thinking.”

You can tell from the essays in Why School? that Mike Rose also revels in opposition. He believes in democracy and in the advancement of knowledge through conversation and compromise. He tries to find value in the project and ideals underpinning No Child Left Behind, for example, even though he disagrees with the execution.

The essays in Why School? are conversation starters, jumping off points. Mr. Rose has presented us with a number of questions and he gives us the freedom to think our way to our own answers.

So, for the rest of this essay, I will pick up a two of those conversational threads — the two that I think about the most when I think about my future as a teacher — and add my thoughts.

A Conversation on the Value of No Child Left Behind

In his essay, “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education”, he points to an aspect of No Child Left Behind that is often overlooked.

A further bold move is that the states have to report at the school level test results along a number of student criteria, including race/ethnicity, income level, English language proficiency, and disability. Continual improvement by these targeted subgroups must occur, or schools will be put on notice and, eventually, sanctioned. …

One undeniable value of [No Child Left Behind] is that it casts a bright light on those underserved populations of students who get lost in averaged measures of performance.
–Mike Rose in Why School?, page 44.

Whether you agree with its implementation or not, used properly No Child Left Behind could provide us with great, raw data, a great assessments of the states of different schools and a record of the attempts of the districts to improve education for their students. My fear is that the data will be used — just as the book The Bell Curve was used — to support future racist arguments.

Though I have not read The Bell Curve, I am familiar with its controversy. The book posited that IQ is a predictor of future financial success, criminal activity, unwed pregnancy, and other behavior. The book pointed out that there are lingering racial differences in IQ and, according to Wikipedia, the authors write, “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.”

That last sentence is dangerous, as it can lead to scientific racism.

At least they note that environment is one factor that has an impact on learning. I fear people generalizing from the data collected by the tests, especially if they compare the students of different class years as opposed to measuring the progress of each student against the student him- or herself. The former assumes a homogeneous nature of students in classes from one year to the next that is not realistic.

A Conversation on Standards and Learning

In his essay “Standards, Teaching, Learning” talks about the meaninglessness of standards that apply to a district but may not be agreed upon outside of that district. He tells the story of Vince, “who received a PhD from a prestigious psychology department,” (page 99) who went through a standards-based English language curriculum that was designed to help students score well on the SAT. His classes were called “college-preparatory” but when he took the English placement exam at his college, he was placed in remedial English.

How do we agree upon national standards? This is a huge task and one I cannot even fathom how to begin. If we create a tiered system — a graded system, if you prefer — we run the risk of sorting people and rather than assessing where they are at a particular point and designing systems that help them advance, we may fall victim to stating that is their level of achievement.

Something I have found strange is that Americans hold up this ideal of social mobility, of the infinite potential of humans to achieve given the opportunity and yet we are obsessed with grading, sorting, and ranking and using those grades or ranks as obstacles to future achievement. What is the source of this mentality? When I was first reading Vince’s story, I remember thinking, briefly, “A student in remedial English, remedial anything, is doomed.” Why should that be so?

I am not against standards. They are useful heuristics for measuring things. But they have their limitations and their dangers, as Mike Rose points out:

As people on many sides of current educational debates are saying… standardized measures can limit the development of competence by driving curricula toward the narrow demands of test preparation instead of allowing teachers to immerse students in complex problem solving and rich use of language.
–Mike Rose in Why School?, page 103.

Vince’s college-preparatory English consisted predominantly in doing grammar exercises, with a little reading and writing of book reports (page 99). What value is that in a vacuum? Would doing grammar exercises in contextual vacuum in a Spanish class teach you to speak Spanish? Would writing a book report or a book review of a work of literature help you develop critical thinking skills? Perhaps if you were asked to cite sources and read literary criticism as part of the book report; perhaps if you were asked to read two similar books and compare and contrast them.

“Instead of these static measures of attainment,” writes Mr. Rose, “our focus should shift to the dynamics of development.” I think of the colored belts of martial arts or the models of apprenticeship I have from art history: a boy — and in the days of the Italian Renaissance, they were almost exclusively boys — would begin learning to how make paint and brushes and then advance through tasks of painting sections of a larger work until he attained mastery and could design his own works.

His rank referred what he had learned and how capable he was of executing a work of art on his own. While, perhaps, some unfortunate individuals were stuck as journeymen forever and were never given the title of “Master”, their idea was more fluid than ours seem to be.

Summary

This is a book I will revisit many times. Since first reading the book, I have had a lot to think about. I am reading through it a second time, taking notes on the essays, but also jotting down my own reactions to passages.

Mike Rose writes in a very optimistic tone. This is refreshing: there is a lot of frustration and defeat, and a lot of cynicism in writings about education and education policy. He also tries to see the best in the opposition. Although I wonder if he is being overly rosy, there is something uplifting in his refusal to be jaded.

Anyone who is considering becoming an educator, read this book as an entry into current debates raging in education. Anyone in education and burned out on the arguments and screaming, read this book to be reminded that even No Child Left Behind, though flawed, was underpinned with ideals. Anyone in public policy, read this book to see what is going on in schools and to remember to think broadly about public education’s role in citizenship and the public good.