It’s not difficult to reach back and remember the winter: What I felt, what I saw, what I thought, over and over again, questioning until I forgot the question and was left only with the confusion. I prided myself on having a mind like a steel trap and now it had become a sieve. Papers I needed whispered through my fingers, set down, never to be seen again. Like the nightmare where you grope for the thing you need, and it is no longer there.
My bed was cold. I was alone in the house. I was in the beginning of training for another long distance race, a marathon, a process which was familiar to me. I also was in the process of becoming a student teacher. That was not familiar.
It’s not difficult to reach back to those six weeks, because I described it, in painful detail, in my diary – what I felt, what I saw, what I thought. On the surface, I thought I was somewhat of a failure. Or a deeper, far more barbed epithet poised on the end of my pen: A fraud. Going deeper still, I thought I lost my language, my passion, my coins of the realm.
1/23/10
8:34pm Saturday
The end of a long week ... Weds to Friday as a high school English teacher at McCann Tech. The feeling like a fraud thing has come back, not completely, and not in that malicious way of old, but it has returned. This is my professional semester, a full 12cr course load, my first in almost 20 years ... in any case. Friday, one of my cooperating teachers let me lead the sophomore class I’ll be taking over. Words felt false in my mouth. It was someone else’s lesson. Onomatopoeia. A student corrected my pronunciation. Onno-matto-pay-eh, she said, not pee-yah. I felt my sincere lack of an English degree or anything beyond what I bullshat through at UMASS or during my experience as a professional writer. I wonder if I have it in me to make a mini-unit on the English renaissance. I do have what it takes. I guess I will find out ... it’s not essential that the students like me, or even follow me. Trust takes time. I’ve already made mistakes at McCann and I plan to make more. Am I willing to be judged – laughed at – be barely tolerated – go way, way out of my comfort zone ...
1/31/10 Sunday
2:50pm
Sunday. Where marathoners tread and dread – imagine my chagrin at having to run 12 miles this morning, before 10am – yesterday the temp didn’t get above 10F – this morning it was -3F and running in thick tights and wind pants is like running with a cement block attached to me. Even though it’s the weekend I still can’t sleep beyond 5am, because all it took was a week and a half and I’m well trained for commute and school. I was on the treadmill at the gym by 7:30, by 9:20 something I had run 12 miles. So I’m in bed now, watching the blue day as the light changes and slants over the Taconics ... the risk of failure and of exhilaration ... words falling like dead bombs, an empty pantomime. I have yet to feel the connection at McCann. What I have felt is the sense that it is hard for a teacher to take risks, to go outside of the box, to help students care about the world. To help them make their own integration. Eyes heavy now – it is almost sugaring time –
2/13/10
12:35am Saturday
Aah, a February vacation was never sweeter, a long week ... I taught my first unit to the seniors, an English sonnet unit, and when I wasn’t feeling like an actor who stepped into the fire of light and forgot her lines – I was feeling exhilarated – ending the day with the small freshman honors class, teaching the Odyssey. Believe me, I took my lumps, I could feel when the class disintegrated on me. I don’t know the material. I don’t know how to issue a hall pass. I’ve worn many pencil erasers to the nub. I feel like I’m in a wind tunnel, and papers disappear through my fingertips.
3/1/10
11:55pm
My professional semester has gone from bad to worse – if only because I’ve become more disorganized, tired – training for the race – up at 4:50am, out the door by 7am, walking into the cafetorium at 7:30, out the door, dragging my book crate on wheels at 4pm-ish. Apathetic, frustrated, agitated. Yesterday, P and I were in Hyannis, running the half marathon ... crossed the finish line in 2:08:34, my [personal best] for the distance. Drove home, fast, blaring music, in bed, wake up, the dread of Monday back at school. It doesn’t feel right to dread it. And yet it feels like I’m not learning or improving. Not enough preparation. Too many handouts. Not enough organization. Not wanting to deal with the bad grades most of the kids are getting. It’s late and I don’t care. My alarm sits unset. I knew teaching full time wasn’t going to be easy, but then I discovered that the performance work is only the iceberg tip, and the rest is planning. I realized it’s all image with me – oh, here I am, English teacher, and yeah, I love the kids, I see them, but it’s not enough. My whole career, from Littleton House [an assisted living facility where I worked as a teenager] to the Eagle, has been a search for a job I can actually like, a place to belong, and I have not found it...
***
Two days after the last diary entry, in a meeting with my college advisor and one of my cooperating teachers, I elected to drop out of my professional semester. I felt a tremendous amount of relief when I made this decision and shared it with my teachers. I knew that stepping away was the right thing to do. My cooperating teachers also supported my decision; I think they were equally frustrated by my struggling.
The diary entries describe in detail what I felt and thought during those six weeks, but they don’t describe what I knew. During my professional semester, I wasn’t ready to admit the truth. I reacted to my performance during my professional semester with a not unfamiliar mix of self-laceration and leaden disbelief, and much of the disbelief stemmed from what I knew, and couldn’t say. I got close to naming it when, in the last diary entry, I wrote that “it’s all image with me,” and that was true – some of the time.
I knew I wanted to be a teacher – I already was a teacher. Or, to be more specific, I was a tutor – For the past two years, I worked one on one with a few high school students, for a few hours every weekday morning, and although the pay wasn’t the steadiest, I found the job to be one of the most rewarding ones I’d ever had. I reluctantly put tutoring on hold when I entered my professional semester.
Almost every day during my time at McCann, I fought against the simple and painful realization that I did not want to be a teacher in a traditional high school classroom. By traditional, I meant a 7:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., one big desk/lots of little desks, one subject, 180 day calendar kind of classroom. That wasn’t what I wanted, and it took me three years of graduate study to make this discovery.
So, what did I want? In order to find out, I started a new journal. In the days, weeks, and months following my withdrawal from the professional semester, I tried to envision the ways that I could transform my passion for long distance running, illustration, and the learning life into something that inspired me, and could inspire others.
3/19
later 3:08pm
Maybe I should have put training on hold. Run less. Lesson planned more. My cooperating teacher’s words: “I spend all day Sunday doing plans and getting the week ahead ready.” All day Sunday? Sunday is a hallowed day for runners. I can’t give up running, or any of my pursuits. Running is the very air I breathe.
Does this mean I’ll never make it as a teacher? Or are my skills meant for a place other than the classroom? I don’t know if there’s a definition for what I want to do – maybe it’s creative mentoring. In the Spring of 2008, for my Curriculum class, I designed an interdisciplinary unit called “The River as Life Blood, the River as Family Tree,” which focused on the literary, environmental, and geological history of the Housatonic River. The thought of implementing this unit, or anything of its kind, was quickly cast aside while I was trying to survive at McCann.
Now I realize that I could facilitate the “River” unit if my focus could be on managing the students in the field projects, bringing students and experts together, and designing the curriculum.
With the things I truly love, I am willing to invest myself completely in the process. Such is the case with marathon running. The actual event is just the final great gesture after months of practice. Months of Sunday afternoons. Months of 20 mile lesson plans.
Lately I haven’t felt like writing anything. Maybe I’m still stuck in my Eagle deadline past. Story writer was the first life I invented for myself. The last story I “felt” was the Edith Wharton diary I wrote for school in 2008. But I reckon that’s where I’m happiest, in other people’s dreams and lives. Also happiest making films. Also making educational mindscapes.
***
There, my pen paused. “Mindscapes” was not an errant word choice – although I could not have predicted that it would have appeared in my journal. But it gave me an idea.
In this case, “Mindscapes” referred to a system of visual mapping developed by Nancy Margulies, a Bay Area-based artist and educator. To oversimplify her job description: Margulies attends meetings and draws what is said. When finished, her dynamic visual maps represent a matrix of connections that may help her client discover where it is now, and where it is going. Her clients included the Clinton White House, 3M, DuPont, Mobil, and the Women Leading Sustainability initiative.
When I learned about Margulies and her Mindscapes in my Curriculum class, I was drawn to the way she combined her talents – illustration, movement, connections, and pedagogy – into an untraditional career. How did she arrive there?
It wasn’t a linear path to Mindscapes. After studying education and fine art as an undergraduate, Margulies received her master’s degree from Webster University in St. Louis in 1975, where she studied psychology.
“My concentration was ‘the Psychology of Deafness,’” Margulies said in a recent telephone interview. “At the time, the field didn’t even exist” (N. Margulies, personal communication, April 25, 2010).
Margulies learned American Sign Language, so she could translate for her Deaf clients, and her fluency in the visual form of communication served as preparation for Mindscapes. “I learned how to listen and look very carefully,” she said. “I had to be sure I understood the whole notion, and then I had to convey it into a visual-spatial language.”
In later years, Margulies worked as an animator and as the director of an arts organization. When she left the latter job, friends and colleagues thought she was crazy, she said, but she couldn’t shake the idea of “sign language on paper.”
She made a career wish list. She wanted to travel, to be constantly learning, to meet interesting people, “and to make enough money so I didn’t have to work every day.”
Mindscapes got its start when Margulies attended a conference headed by the educator Dee Dickinson. Margulies drew what Dickinson said – her lecture was based on “six impossible things” in education.
“[Dickinson said] ‘no such thing is impossible, and I imagine we can teach children by honoring what matters to them.’” Margulies said. “I loved that.”
Margulies, who was down to her last few dollars and still “casting around” for work, showed Dickinson the drawings, and Dickinson immediately knew there was a market for her talents. Dickinson recommended her to other clients, and Margulies’ reputation grew.
That was almost 30 years ago. “I never had to market myself,” Margulies said. “Someone in every audience always said, ‘we have a use for this too.’”
Margulies is now semi-retired. She is still doing Mindscapes “in various forms,” and when I told her I was an artist and a tutor currently working with an at-risk student at the Juvenile Resource Center in Pittsfield, she suggested that Mindscaping might work as a pedagogical tool for my student.
“Use maps to help him get clear, to describe where he’s at now, and where he’d like to be,” she said. “Maps can show him how to get there.”
Does she see herself as an educator? She does. “I don’t like to be the expert up front,” she said. “I help people find out what they know, and I help them to think systemically, to not always be stuck in a linear modality. Outside of the linear is where the real power is.”
To be able to look, listen, and operate “outside of the linear” seem to be necessary skills for teachers. After interviewing Margulies, I spoke to another untraditional teacher who is at the relative beginning of her career: Jessica Rufo, the 29 year-old owner of Dottie’s, a coffee shop in Pittsfield.
Rufo, a Berkshire County native, sees Dottie’s as “a vessel for community.” Those same words could be used to describe a school and place-based education (J. Rufo, personal communication, May 5, 2010).
Rufo, who also is a co-founder of the Alchemy Initiative, a Pittsfield-based educational program that combines workshops on topics such as recyclable clothing, coffee-making, painting, and gardening, said it’s her job to teach her employees about Dottie’s values. Her employees learn where their coffee beans are grown and roasted, and where the food they serve comes from.
“You need to be passionate about what you’re teaching,” she said. “The heart needs to be lined up with the mind. That’s where my inspiration comes from,” she said (May 5, 2010).
Aah, the heart again. Without it, teaching can only be a pantomime. And without the alignment of love with the mind, and the spirit, have we not lost the coins of the realm? In reality, I had lost my language at McCann. There, I was pushed beyond my limits, all the way around, back to what I love. Broadly defined, it could be called many things: creative mentoring, total absorption in the insurmountable, impossible task. Or me and you, once strangers, now hard at work together on some common thing.
RESOURCES
Mindscapes:
www.nancymargulies.com
“The River as Life Blood, the River as Family Tree” film by Jessica Willis
http://vimeo.com/9418668
“The Secret Diary of Edith Wharton” by Jessica Willis
http://piriformis.blogspot.com/2008/12/secret-diary-of-edith-wharton.html
Photo: "Student, Pittsfield" 2010 Jessica Willis
