AUSSIE

Blog entry posted March 1st, 2010 by Dale Worsley

Let’s pick up the string from last week’s blog post, and see where it leads, then. DaVinci’s exhortation to “realize that everything connects to everything else” is surely the answer to the problem of students who “set about forgetting” (as Sancho Panza put it) what they have learned. I made the claim that making the connections will lead us along the golden thread to the pedagogical version of Blake’s “Heaven’s gate” as opposed to the hellish hamster cycle of teaching what will be forgotten.

This idea of the golden thread was famously picked up from Blake by the stalwart and enigmatic poet William Stafford, whose method was simply to set down a bit of language and follow it with further words until they led to a treasure of amazing ideas and images. As he put it in his 1978 book Views on the Author’s Vocation, “Only the golden string knows where it is going, and the role for a writer or reader is one of following, not imposing.”

What does this look like in the classroom? A vivid example from the past comes to mind:

I was working in a second grade classroom at The Dwight School to help implement the International Baccalaureate Organization’s Primary Years Programme. Students were exploring the topic of Japan as a year-long course of study. It was in this context that the youngsters followed a golden thread from poetic form of the haiku to the philosopher Descartes through a can of spam. Bear with me.

Because haiku is a Japanese form, and traditionally trades in natural images, we took the kids to Central Park, arranged them in a circle facing outward, had them close their eyes, count their breaths to clear their minds of any preconceptions, open their eyes, jot down the first things they saw, then run off for a game of kick ball.

Months later, the jottings reappeared from my book bag and the students revised them into haiku, rendered on Japanese models, that created a panoramic view of the park. Here’s one of the student poems, by way of example:

People with red shirts
kicking and throwing white balls.
And they have black shoes.

The haiku led to further explorations:

• Student M. was assigned to determine, from the evidence, the season of the student haiku, which led to a consideration of the potential of seasons on other planets. (Weaving in astronomy from the curriculum map.)
• Student Z. decided to research bullet trains, one of which appeared on a post card of Mt. Fuji that had been used to illustrate a Japanese Haiku. (Fulfilling the Primary Years Programme’s inquiry requirements.)
• Student S. set out on a quest to discover the date and the consequences of the last eruption of Mt. Fuji. (Linking in the curriculum map’s geography section.)
• The whole class crunched numbers to determine the range of syllable counts among typical Japanese haiku, discovering, despite the timeworn practice in the United States of imposing the 5/7/5 rule, that they are written in one, two and three line variations, with syllable counts ranging from twelve to eighteen. (This helped develop the students’ number sense.)
• Student P drew a map of the park based on the images in the haiku. (Fulfilling the requirement to develop community awareness.)
• All of the haiku went to the art teacher to produce images for a brush painting unit. (Further enhancing the year-long theme.)
• Student E. was assigned to search the internet for several pages of modern haiku rumored to have been published in the New York Times in recent days. (Another inquiry project.) This was the path that led to Descartes.

It went as follows: Student E’s search revealed nothing on the rumored haiku collection, but did unearth a piece from the February 15, 1996 edition of a publication called Spanning Spam: The Dead-Meat Poets Society, which contained examples of haiku written on the subject of Spam, one of which read:

Descartes on pig parts
Says ‘I’m pink, therefore I’m Spam.’
Deep philosophy.
(By someone named Chris Fishel)

Two problems of pedagogical significance were raised by this sublime work of art: the class knew nothing about either Spam or Descartes.

Student E. solved the first problem. He brought a can of the gastronomically suspect substance to school and passed it around so all of his friends could admire the famous blue and yellow design. He explained, too, that he knew someone who had actually eaten Spam – his grandmother, back in older, less affluent days.

To solve the second problem, the class studied the English version of Descartes’ famous rationalist declaration, “I think, therefore I am,” put the original version, “Cogito, ergo sum,” in their mouths for a taste of Latin, and for good measure learned it by heart in French to enrich their French Language class: “Je pense, donc je suis.”

So that’s how the golden thread led us to Descartes from haiku, supporting, along the way, DaVinci’s thesis that “everything connects to everything else.”

Where will it take us next? I predict it will unspool us into another elementary school gastronomical adventure involving vinegar, an inspiring story about a troubled teenager who found hope through open-ended explorations of wolves, and a cautionary story about teenagers who lost the thread on their way to the Regents exams. But who knows? In Paragraph Six, we enjoy our ramblings wherever they may take us.