AUSSIE

Blog entry posted December 17th, 2009 by Dale Worsley

Promised update on The Question that Ate My Writing Unit: Tom McMurrer, the second grade teacher at PS 124 whose unit was in peril, has decided to contact the United States Postal Service to see if he can organize a class trip to answer the students’ questions. We have trepidation. What if the recession has caused the USPS to cut back its educational programs? What if security regulations keep us out? What if the workers are depressed from job losses and the usual holiday glut of glossy catalogs? We had a vision of a Mr. Rogers-like personage greeting us a the door of the local branch to show us the bins and sorters, help us stamp our envelopes, and take us for a ride in one of those spiffy mail trucks with the stylized, aerodynamic bald eagle heads adorning the panels. Will our vision survive? I will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, his students are beginning their letters to each other. They have been assigned classmates they don’t know very well. They are telling something about themselves, and asking questions about their classmates. Sitting with them while they worked, I was moved by their kindness. Several began with compliments: “I like that purple sweater you wear to class.” “You have a friendly smile.” “I think you’re nice.” Tom, in his mini-lesson, hadn’t mentioned compliments. The students seemed to have an instinct for them.

I wondered if this wasn’t evidence that humans aren’t as wicked, selfish and war-mongering as Thomas Hobbes thought. In his recent Science Times article “We May Be Born With an Urge to Help,” Nicholas Wade reports on research in Michael Tomasello’s book Why We Cooperate that demonstrates that helping behaviors may be innate in human beings. They can be seen in 18 month-olds. Hmmm. Are we kind by nature, or by nurture? If we’re kind by nature, what is it that makes people become unkind? If by nurture, how can we up the supply of the milk of human kindness that the planet seems so thirsty for these day?

Time out. Let’s go back over the last two paragraphs to more closely examine the questions lurking therein. First are those the youngsters will be asking each other in their letters: “When’s your birthday? What’s your favorite food? Do you like animals?” These, presumably, will have simple, easy answers. But they are not simply questions. They are stitches in the human fabric that makes up the community of Tom’s classroom. They are queries that generate good will. In the other paragraph are the kinds of questions that lead to wonderment and long-term scientific research and possibly ultimately to public policy and political action.

So many kinds questions, so many questions about questions. Enough to give you a headache. Lucky for us we have the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice on this problem of questions that overwhelm: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.

Elie Wiesel, in his memoir Night, seemed to agree when he wrote, “Every question has a power that does not lie in the answer.”

Next blog, I will update you on what’s happening in Tom McMurrer’s class, and The Question that Ate His Writing Unit. Maybe we’ll be able to revise that to read, The Questions that Fed His Writing Unit. I hope so.

I hope also to get around to the story of the Socratic seminar that began with the question, “How do I get rid of my wife?” But I’m making no promises, though I do swear I’ll get to it eventually. I can assure you beforehand, though, that the wife continues on in good health (a least she did when I last checked).

Meanwhile, I have a question for you and Rilke: Just how do we live the questions? Enjoy.