trying

Under Drumpf’s administration, I have forgotten what I have to say. It’s like, he makes it too easy:

“Dumb fuck.”

There. Now I feel like I’ve adequately critiqued his foul ass.

I’m also feeling writerly paralyzation because so many other folks are already writing fantastic pieces about what’s going on, and I’ve been feeling like, the best contribution I can make is just to Like and Share.

So I’m sitting down tonight to come up with something because I like how I feel about myself when I’m writing. I like the feeling of trying to wrangle the right words onto the page.

At least a dozen people have told me that I should be writing about the work we’re doing at SQ, but it’s hard for me to get outside of it and see the threads of narratives available for the telling.

In the last year, I’ve edited books for two different friends. They make it look so easy. Five- or six-page Word document? Chapter. Ten chapters in a book. They just do it.

And I’m sitting here feeling like I’ve got nothing to say when I’m pretty sure do.

I’d like to start publishing some stuff online maybe.

There have been several instances in the last few months where I think I’ve smelt a tiny whiff of what it’s like to have my depression lifted off of me. For a long time I’ve been fine, but not able to get excited about anything. The first moment came when I was seeing Hamilton with my Mom in March. As I watched, I kept thinking about a clip from a PBS special about the show where you see Lin-Manuel Miranda bringing his draft to a two other guys, and they’re going through it to edit and build. And I’d get so excited and want to do that.

In no particular order, I want to write about

: How white people need to find a way out of their blind rage at reverse racism without losing face. White people need to figure out ways that help white people better understand historical context and systemic oppression without emasculating them. If that makes sense. White people can get so defensive, and then the conversation feels hopeless because they’re not going to back down because white supremacy intersects powerfully with misogyny and hypermasculinity! We gotta do something about our people for real.

: The implicit pedagogy of Creativity Explored. Our former director called it “non-confrontational advocacy.” We do what we can to bring attention to work created by artists with developmental disabilities and know that when folks experience the beauty of the artwork, they a teensy-bit unlearn ableist and patronizing ideas about folks with developmental disabilities. Sentence too long.

But I think it’s much more interesting to think about the pedagogy of the studio, the teachers’ approach to the artists they work with. The lack of curriculum. The variance between giving artists direct guidance, images to draw or paint, and giving artists the paint they need to create basically the exact same piece that they’ve been making for thirty years. Artists are encouraged as they develop their practice, and artists are supported if they decide not to “get better.” Teachers do what they can to make sure that artists can make informed choices and then follow the artists’ lead.  

Makes me think about how my Mom would always say that they needed to stop plotting to make Conor smarter in his annual IEP meetings. Like, he’s fine the way he is. Let’s just make sure he’s experiencing pleasure – delicious food, sunny days, loud music.

: I’m teaching a class at Mills, Introduction to the Humanities, and we just read Whiteness as Property and the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We’ve been talking about what it means to be human (and the students, graciously, are not rolling their eyes the way I kind of am at myself.) What struck me most this time around was the question of whether our humanity is innately individual or innately connected. I’m just now realizing that I think it’s the latter.

And for some silly reason, I’ve been thinking about how much I like the word “folks,” and how there’s not really such thing as a singular folk. Maybe there is, but it’s a horrible word.

Okay now, I’m going to go watch a few episodes of Insecure.

Class notes: Series suspended.

Just for a minute.  I've still got the posts saved, and I'm still writing.

Prison politics.  Playing it safe.

"DAAAG THAT'S DEEP"

We meet on Friday mornings to assess student work and plan the next week.  No class on Thursday meant no work for us to do, so we had to time to start the professional reading group we've been wanting to do.

First up: Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  We only got about five pages into the first chapter because we kept stopping to talk and look up words.

axiology: thinking about goodness, value

ontology: thinking about the nature of being

We came up with a whole bunch of examples from history and from our personal lives that helped us understand him better. It was awesome. We haven't at all gotten to a point where we can talk about what it means for our teaching, but we're all bringing our copies back next Friday so we can squeeze in some more reading time.

---

I want to think more about how we did it.

We all sat around two tables pushed together, nine of us.  Each of us had our own copy, and a couple of paragraphs in, one guy got up to get us pens and highlighters. We read aloud slowly, taking turns without any order, and whenever necessary, we interrupted the reader to ask questions, make connections, or emote. Sometimes we went back to re-read a sentence or paragraph.

A few times, one or another of the guys would silently get up to go somewhere and silently come back to the table (e.g., bathroom, talk to someone outside, I don't know).  The person next to him would point to where we were, and he'd get back into it with us.

P kept reading ahead, highlighting animatedly as he read aloud the things he liked: "Oooh, 'The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior!'"  It was distracting to me and S, so every time he read aloud to himself, we would tell him to shut up and let us get there.  He didn't stop, though.

---

The above is a pretty complete illustration of the academic literacy behaviors that the good teachers I know work at apprenticing their students into:

• read with a pencil or pen or highlighter in hand
• ask questions
• make connections
• note your responses to the text
• stop and go back when you realize you've gotten lost

Together, we constructed comprehension and interpretation of the text, a text worthy of "group work."

We came to the table with an established camaraderie.  Our camaraderie is steeped in a shared commitment to education (others' and our own).  The text at hand is relevant to that commitment. We were each there by choice (and granted, we're all adults).  Each of us had the academic confidence to know that we could make at least some sense of this difficult text.  This was all effortless.

---

At school, I was eventually able to create the conditions for students to read like this, but it was a lot of times really hard work for them and me getting ourselves there.  I've been wondering about that kind of thing for the last couple of years I've spent in prison education: Was it difficult because the behaviors are difficult?  Or do the conditions of "school" make it more difficult than they need to be?

I'm tripping on the extent to which context matters here.  We have so much more freedom in our classroom than a lot of teachers do -- particularly those who teach kids of color living in low-income neighborhoods where surveillance is pervasive.  Mandated curriculum, incessant testing, performance pay, etc.  We in a prison classroom, on the other hand, are free to play with our practice and our theories about how people learn (and others' theories -- like Freire's!).

Prison officials, from my experience, don't much shit whether or not our students earn their GEDs, so they don't interfere with what we do in our classroom.  Ostensibly, school officials do care about student learning, but in their caring, they really fuck it up bad.

In so many ways, school is just like prison, but not in this way, where we teachers have space to think. Barf.

Notes from Class Entry #1 (of many, hopefully)

Anticipating Week 1.

This week we’ll begin our second semester under our reorganized approach.  Considering outer space from various angles, we’ll puzzle over the question, “What’s out there?”

Last week was a work week.  We talked about what went well last semester and what we’d like to do differently this semester.  We chose a pre-test, settled on rosters and writing groups, put together the readers.  We finalized lesson plans for the first two weeks of class.  We made a big calendar for the wall detailing the study opportunities available on days we don’t have class.  

We made table tents so the students will know where to sit when they come in on the first day.  We tweaked our system for taking attendance and collecting homework.  We organized the supply closet.  

C bit the cords off of the two computer keyboards he managed to get us on the sly; having cords attached could get us into trouble because the cord comes with the possibility of accessing a CPU.  And, obviously, we don’t have scissors, hence the biting.  

We made plans for how we want to use our newly approved study hall time, at one point using a March Madness style bracket to decide which book we’d read in the new book club.  (Fahrenheit 451. Not my pick.)  We met with the math coordinator for the college program to talk about possible collaborations.

I wrote letters of support for the inside teachers with upcoming dates with the parole board.  The inside teachers wrote survey questions for collecting information from our students that might be useful in grant writing for my salary.

Last night, the teachers would have walked students through the reader and all of the resources in it, and they would have started our warm-up writing assignment, the classic RAFT.  Choose one of each:

ROLE: astronaut, alien, Pluto, black hole

AUDIENCE: earthlings, aliens

FORM of writing: letter, movie trailer, election speech, play, poem

TONE: condescending, fearful, aggressive, comical, doomsday, apologetic

Tomorrow night, we’ll share first drafts in the writing groups and offer feedback.  Homework: Revise!

Gotta make time.

I keep trying to make time for, and keep failing to make time for, writing up some of the stories of what's happening at the prison.  I'm keeping a list of topics.

• 1,000 mile club
• Pit watching
• X-ray vs. treating on paper
• Police are bad
• More detail
• "I'm a dinosaur."/"The worst thing we had to deal with was racism."
• "Sometimes doing the right thing ain't the right thing."
• "Signed, Every female in the world."
• Dave Eggers guy
• "I'm like Zuckerberg"
• "I beat him on paper because of The BEAT"
• Responding to writing vs. person
• "I want to be a sociologist."
• ADA
• Two soups
• Body receipt
• Lactation station
• Talented men
• Smell flowers
• "Bernie Sanders said I can spell my name however I want to."

enhancing stuff

After watching this piece about California's draconian "sentence enhancement" policies, I went to the GED site to see about getting the test in Spanish.

An official said to one of my incarcerated colleagues at a hearing about his suitability for parole:

"You need to focus less on helping other people and more on helping yourself."

blindspots

The other day, I was inside working with my incarcerated colleagues to set up our classroom, organize, finalize, etc.

I was making a sign for our wall, and I got up to walk over to the supply closet, absent-mindedly saying to myself, "Scissors.. scissors.. scissors."

One of the guys laughed at me, "Ellen, we ain't go no scissors."

Another jumped on, "Yeah, somebody pass me the knife!"

More totally justified laughing at my expense.

for now

I've got two draft posts -- one on my trip home and one the warden's office (also a trip) -- but can't find the time to work on them.

In the meantime, check out the award I received last night from one of my incarcerated colleagues!

Patience.

I'm still banned from going inside.  Still waiting for an explanation.

And worse, because I'm waiting, our students and teachers are waiting.

--

When my mom was here, she came down to the beach with me each morning.  The first morning, on the way down, I pointed out at which house you can start to hear the waves coming in.  The second day she pointed out the arrival of that sound, and on the last day, I said, "there they are." And Mom said, "They're always there."

I thought about that this morning as I sat in my spot and watched.

Kimo has been there practicing tai chi each morning for the last thirty-eight years.  Hasn't missed a day in THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS.  He'll be there.

Because it's the way my English major brain works, I started to construct a narrative, some kind of meaning analogous to what's been going on in my life.

It's dark when I get there every morning, and even though I know the sun will come up -- that soon it will be 7:00, and it will be daytime, and I will have to leave -- most mornings I still feel a half-second of panic about the darkness.  Just a half a second, but I always notice it and wonder about myself.

Blah blah blah the Biblical platitude about darkness and light.  Referenced probably too much, I still find solace:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The Word was with God in the beginning.  Through the Word all things were made; without the Word nothing was made that has been made.  In the Word was life, and that life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

I used to write the above on the inside cover of every notebook I ever used for my lesson planning.  Public schools are pretty fucking "dark" places, and I wanted to have abiding faith that "the darkness does not overcome it."  The school-to-prison pipeline, in the end, does not win.

Then again, the whole thing should be complicated (, as we say in grad school.  "Let's complicate that. Let's unpack it.  Let's problematize that.").  (I know I link a lot here, but click on that one and watch.  Teaser: some Malcolm X!)

Point of all this: the dang sun comes and is going to come (and has always come) every morning.  Just wait.  It's going to happen.  Shitty shit can't last forever.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.  Wait.  Be steadfast.

I haaaaaaate waiting.

Wait.  Be steadfast.  It's plainly predictable that things will get better.

I wanted to come home and write about it, so I left early.  As I was going I noticed that the first step, from the sand to the concrete stairs, seemed a lot taller than I remembered.  I dismissed the thought as another instance of my general failure to notice details, but then I noticed a whole bunch of really rounded, big-ass boulders up at the top of the beach that I know were not there before.

Science or God or whatever: my whole theory got effed up.  I did not expect that.  Never seen those there before.  Kimo had told me earlier that it had been really windy yesterday (when I was at home, sleeping in.)  I wonder what the ocean was doing at my beach.  It was doing something because the whole level of it was a foot lower, and there were all these beautiful rocks that had either washed up or been uncovered when the sand was washed away.

Wait.  Be steadfast.  It's plainly predictable that things will get better.  Be humble: don't rule out the possibility that things will get better than imagined -- or differently than imagined.  Know that you don't know.



--

And in my life and my stupid banned-ness:

Wait.  Be steadfast.  It's plainly predictable that things will get better.  Be humble: don't rule out the possibility that things will get better than imagined -- or differently than imagined.  Know that you don't know. Quit being such an arrogant asshole.

My soul feels tired.

months in the making

Friday morning, B and I stepped away from the meeting in the math room to finish up the pages going into the reader.  C was there, and Ms. G was leaving, so we had to (got to) have him copy it all for us right then.  While C was running our second copy through, and while I was working on the Table of Contents of his computer, B fidgeted and paced.  We both kept glancing over to Ms. G’s office where C stood at the copier.  B said, “I feel like I’m waiting for my child to be born,” and I totally agreed.  My giddy fingers kept hitting the wrong keys, and I kept frantically backspacing.

I let B take care of hole-punching because it has to be exact, and I don’t have the patience for that shit.  Needed an artist’s handling.

When it was time to press the lever that would curl the plastic spine through the  holes, B called me over to press it with him.

A whole lot of high fives were exchanged.

purposed

“So, just so you know, this is a purposed thing we’re doing.”

That’s the last thing B, my colleague who is incarcerated, said to me last week as we got to the top of the yard – the point where I keep going up the hill and he veers off toward the cellblocks. 

When he started our program in 2009, he told me, he’d brought his written proposal to the chaplain and asked her to pray over it with him. 

Notes from a graduation ceremony in prison

One of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had.  I had to keep telling myself, “I’ll just write about it.  I’ll just write about it.  I’ll just write about it.” As if the capacity to get it all out into language could have anything to do with the capacity to make sense of that experience.

My notes, in italics. 

1.  SEX/VIOLENCE

     -------------------

the comeback underdog

As we waited for the ceremony to begin, J, a man I know who is a writer, came in and sat next to me.  We got to talking about the nature of doing our work in the context of a political landscape where Donald Trump seems to be the current winningest communicator.  J explained to me: Sex and violence are always going to win the attention of the American public.  But we also really love to root for the underdog.  That’s us.  The underdog.  We just gotta communicate that better.  How?

2. LWOP’s circle of influence

In the same conversation, I told J that I was having a hard time wrapping my head around offering GED prep to men who are never going to be released (not all of our students, but some).  I told him that I was rethinking what it meant for education to be instrumental – outside of the economic and political ways we typically think about it.  He insisted that I was wrong, that I wasn’t considering the LWOP’s (Life Without Parole) circle of influence.  Just because he isn’t getting out, doesn’t mean his homies aren’t. Doesn’t mean his kids can’t be moved by his example.  He told me about a guy he knew, LWOP, who was taking college classes and whose son was incarcerated at another institution.  When his son read about his dad’s accomplishments in the prison newspaper, he quit gang-banging and went back to school, too.  Pretty cheesy example, but still.  Yeah, I gotta think about that. 

3. “guys in blue”

A jazz band (made up of musicians who are incarcerated) was playing up at the side of the stage.  A White guy, some prison staff member, walked over to one of the guys and said something to him.  One of the guys in the band came to the microphone on the stage and said, “Guys in blue, we gotta return to our cells for count.”

Somebody was missing, so all of the guys in the prison were being sent back to their cells so that they could be counted and accounted for.

Guys in blue.  Fifty or so of the men in that space were wearing black caps and gowns over their prison blues.  They stripped them to go back to their cells.

M, who was sitting with us, reassured us, “Don’t worry.  We won’t be gone for long.  They’ll probably find him.  If we don’t come back, I’ll see you Thursday.”

“Guys in blue.”  That language.  I’ve only ever heard prison staff refer to the men as “inmates.”  Not sure what to make of the staff member passing off the voice of the command to one of the men.  But not sure what I would have made of the staff member voicing the command himself and using “inmates.”

4.  “Hopefully, he’s alive.  Don’t forget we are up in here.”

As the last of the men trickled out, one of the family members, a Black woman, stopped the White staff member who’d passed off the command, “Why do they have to leave?” While he was like, “Ma’am, security measures, inmates’ locations, mumble mumble,” she just looked at him.  Then, with him still standing there, she addressed the others sitting near her, a whole bunch of other Black women, “When they find him, hopefully he’s alive.”  She turned away from the staff guy, “Don’t forget we are up in here.”

Sandra Bland had been found dead in her cell less than two weeks before this ceremony.

The White guy stood silent for a couple more awkward seconds, then walked away.

5.  “You’re a brave woman.”

While the men were off being counted, we were encouraged to get some fresh air, have some coffee.  (Oh yeah, the coffee tasted so much like chicken broth.  It was uncanny.)  We milled about.  I noticed one of the guards was pregnant.  One of the visitors, as she walked past her, told her, “You’re a brave woman.”

Yeah.  What?  Need to think more about pregnancy inside a prison.

6.  color guard’s tucked in shirts

The men came back.  The ceremony started with a colors ceremony.  That means the presentation of the US and Californian flags.  Four guys from a Vietnam vets group did it.  All the usual fanfare: the orders, the synchronous marching, holding the US flag a little higher.  And all four of them had tucked their prison shirt into their prison pants.  What.

7.  “forward thinking prison,” “we have a lot in common,” “empower the people that are within our custody to give them the tools”

Lines from the keynote speaker, a local sheriff, patting this prison on the back – and likening it to his own jail.  As if somehow it’s possible to be both an instrument of incarceration and of paternalistic “salvation.”  This “we give the tools” talk is common in most schools, though, and I’m sick of it.  Blahhhhhhhhh.

Another way to think about what happens in education spaces is that authentically humble educators listen, learn, and tap into the “funds of knowledge” that exist in the communities they serve (not my phrase – Moll’s).  Or, like they say in Teaching as a Subversive Activity:

Contrary to conventional school practice, what [educate] means is that we want to elicit from students the meanings that they have already stored up so that they may subject those meanings to a testing and verifying, reordering and reclassifying, modifying and extending process.  In this process, the student is not a passive “recipient;” he (sic) becomes an active producer of knowledge.  The word “educate” is closely related to the word “educe.”  In the oldest pedagogic sense of the term, this meant drawing out of a person something potential or latent. 

8. “then a supporter of mine when I ran for supervisor,” “campaigned on redemption,” “we were part of that five,” “Bobby Kennedy’s daughter”

Speaker moved on from saving the graduates before him to ignoring them for the sake of just straight up bragging about his own self.  How progressive his jail is. (Oxymoron.) Bobby Kennedy’s daughter omgggg sat on the panel that would ultimately decide whether or not his jail gets some big award.

9. “not just a GED, a high school diploma”

At his jail, the “inmates” can earn high school diplomas, not just these piddling GEDs, he says to a gathering of forty or so men who are beaming with the pride of having earned their GEDs.

Dumdum.

10.  “for us to use your time in the most productive way”

For US to use YOUR time.  Good god. 

Maybe it’s because by this point in the talk, he was pissing me off real bad, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to liken this thinking to the thinking of plantation owners who used the labor of the people they enslaved for their purposes.  I mean, the owners’ use of the enslaved people’s time was productive.  They got so so rich.  And they deeply embedded our system of White supremacy such that as a country, we still, apparently, aren’t outraged at theu se of largely Black and Brown (and poor, and addicted, and mentally ill) labor for “our” profit. 

11.  “Somebody get this guy a baby to kiss,” “Hey, they have hearts, too, okay?”

M, my incarcerated colleague’s whispered comments as the speech rolled out on top of us.

12.  letting family in

This was good.  The speaker went on and on about how important it is for the leaders of carceral institutions to be mindful of the effects of incarceration on families.  As he did so, M whispered to me that the warden at this prison had recently announced that this would be the last graduation ceremony to which family members of graduates could be invited.  And that warden is sitting up there on the stage right next to the podium.

13. reduced phone charges by 70%: “Did he just call us poor?”

Speaker brags about his work to reduce the cost of phone calls for prisoners by 70%, so that the system wasn’t getting rich off of “poor families.”  Okay he does have a point there, that’s some useful (if incremental) reform. 

M leaned over to me and said, with a wry smile,“Did he just call us poor?”

14.  Grey Poupon

Speaker said, jokingly, if it was up to him Grey Poupon would be served in jail chow halls.  Huh?

15. “I’m living as a memorial to him,” “I love you guys, and I’m proud of you,” sitting together, “I apologize to everybody”

Cut to the speech by the valedictorian of the daytime GED class.  I was struck particularly by his dedication of this accomplishment to the memory of his victim, for whose lost life he expressed great remorse.  “I’m living as a memorial to him,” he said.  Dang.  I had a hard time moving past that as he went on to congratulate his peers, to apologize to society.

As we listened to his speech, I looked around and realized that almost every guy in the room who is a part of our evening program was sitting within a few feet of us.  We never talked about sitting together, we just were.  Sometimes, it’s hard to feel like much of a coherent community since we only get to meet twice a week, we’re separated into to classrooms, there’s so much work to be done, etc.  Looking around and seeing us all together really made me wonder.

16.  print keyboards

After the ceremony, L, one of our students, came to me to give me some feedback as he knows that we’re in the middle of planning next semester.  We really need typing practice, he told me, and I know we can’t get computers, so is it possible for you to print out a picture of a keyboard so that we can practice with paper copies?  I know it’s not ideal, he said.

Fuck.

17.  team leader

The same guy, L, suggested that we need to offer some student leadership opportunities.  He knows he can motivate some of his classmates to get together and study outside of class, he said, but it would be way easier if he were somehow “officially” endowed by us with some role, like “team leader.”  Genius.

One of the most exciting things about this work, so far, is how much brilliance and how many deep relationships there are for us to build from.  I know that these things exist, too, in every high school classroom (and every other classroom), but there’s something  particularly… something… happening in this peer-led space.