Fourier was right!!

As you may recall from earlier posts here, I enjoy the time I have in the summer to read widely and haphazardly. By way of disclaimer I do recommend all the books below. I no-longer bother to finish books that I haven't managed to engage with by 50-70 pages in no matter how well-recommended by my friends.

This summer my picks included South of Superior by Ellen Airgood. I picked up Airgood's book at one of my favorite independent bookseller's Mclean and Eakin in Petoskey, Michigan where I vacation with my family. Wherever I travel I try and read based on where I am located. Airgood's book set in the Upper Peninsula didn't disappoint me for thoughtful summer reading well tied to its/my location. And interestingly, it fit in well with one of the unexpected themes from the books I read-- finding solutions/building our lives by looking outside our hidden assumptions. The other fiction books included  Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Plan, Louise Erdich's Round House, and Patrick Rothfuss' What the Wise Man Fears. Kingsolver is a master of setting, especially in her books set in Appalachia. The main character Dellarobia, like the butterflies she loves is transformed and by the end of the novel well on her way to her own metamorphosis -- all because she was saw wonder in her own backyard. By the way I especially loved the scene in which the northern eco-warrior shows up with the top ten things to save the planet and she makes short work of his list as impossible for her family or anyone in their economic place. This summer I returned to poets I already loved taking Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early and Seamus Heaney with me on vacation. For my soul I worked through the Book of Romans and the corresponding chapter in The Women's Bible Commentary. I also read Henri Nouwen's Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life.  For my non-fiction choices I started with Mary Cowhey's Black Ants and Buddhists and have begun but yet to finish Doris Kerns Goodwin's biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson ( this president was featured very colorfully in the movie The Butler) moved to Cathy Johnson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st century and finished with Roz and Ben Zander's the Art of Possibility. While I read Now You See it my son sat on the couch across from me reading The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr. We had a great time comparing notes and eye catching titles aside we found many things in common.

So what does the French philosopher Francois Marie Charles Fourier have to do with my summer reading? Whenever I have taught World History I tend to keep my students thinking and working at a 10,000-20,000 foot level focused on human interactions with the natural world and with other human populations. However, we do a couple of dives into more detailed looks at human ideas. One of them explores the trajectory from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Karl Marx. Fourier is one of the steps along the way. For those of you who aren't familiar Fourier is best remembered for his ideas on how to create harmonious, cooperative societies and for his thinking on feminism and human love. For him the greatest harm to the human psyche was separating our passion from our productive work. In his utopias people would choose what work they wanted to do that the society needed or wanted accomplished. One of his ideas that my students always enjoyed was the idea that because little boys like getting dirty they would be natural rag and trash pickers. Fourier recognized that for this society to work you needed a sufficiently diverse population to insure that all of the jobs got done. For him that number was 1620 individuals. As I read Cathy Davidson's discussion of the genius of Wikipedia and its truly democratic nature, I was struck by Wikipedia and other wikis and moocs as proof that Fourier was correct. Wikipedia thrives on the way it connects individual passions for any topic imaginable, to other people's love of editing, with those who want to improve the functionality or take on any number of the other hundreds of tasks needing doing and getting done through the Community Portal. All of this happens because people choose to engage. Twenty first century technology created the scale necessary for Fourier's ideas on harmony, collaboration and mutuality to thrive.

The Risk of Creation

I love vacations, for time apart--what Henri Nouwen might call renewal in solitude. I have read new books by favorite authors Louise Erdich and Barbara Kingsolver and discovered a writer I will read more of, Nicola Griffith. This is also a time for cleaning house - reclaiming my space-- and visiting with friends. Throughout this time two questions have been percolating in the back of my brain --What is excellent teaching (and can you measure it) and how do we foster creativity in our students? I will let the teacher question season some more before I pursue it here. However, the second question has taken an unexpected turn today. This morning I read a short piece by Janet Scott in Daily Reading from Quaker Writings Ancient and Modern. She writes that "As we act in obedience to the Light Within, we may become mediators through whom God's love is known. . . it means that we join ourselves to the risk of creation, to the authentic human being."

This phrase "risk of creation" has stuck with me all day, as I watched the snow (on March 25th!),  graded late work, folded laundry, read Griffith's Slow River and cooked for my family. What is so risky about creation? Is creation the same as creativity? As I visited with my daughter, home from her music rehearsal,  I found myself thinking about an interview I recalled in which Ravi Shankar, the late sitarist, talked about his long years of learning to master the traditional sitar technique and traditional sitar music before he ever attempted to create something new. His years of practice, memorization, study, and imitation had been necessary first. I recall a similar story about Izak Perlman traveling in China and listening to a young student play with great technical accuracy a challenging violin piece then Perlman played the same piece and the two were as different as night and day as he bought a life time of experience to creating something new from the score-- the difference between being accurate and authentic. How much mastery of craft (obedience) is necessary for creativity?

By this time in the year, I am actively encouraging my students to push through the boundaries of what they think I want them to know, to pursuing what they want to learn. But how do they share the new meaning and understanding they are gaining for themselves if they are still learning how to replicate and manipulate the forms and medium we use for communication -- essays, class discussions, on-line forum, blogs, debates, movies. Shouldn't it be enough for tenth graders to master skills and forms (and learn some history) and build a foundation for creation when they are older? I have respected colleagues who believe that high school must remain the place for skill and content mastery while college is the place for experimentation and individualized pursuits. I suspect Shankar's teacher would agree.

Teenagers are risk takers, its inherent in their unformed brains, so why not have them take risks within their learning? Why not encourage them to makes leaps from knowing one thing to conjecturing about another. Why not reward risk in the name of creativity. I have always looked at history as a means of teaching a set of skills. Why not create something new within the limits of the forms needing mastery? In recent years, I have come to look on history as a means of moving students from knowing to doing. I don't have an answer for the question I posed myself above except that I keep asking my students to think new and original thoughts and to adhere to the limits of the formal essay or the public blog or the round table discussion.  And sometimes out of this complexity they do venture something new and exciting. Perhaps obedience is about practice and over time practiced creativity leads to a courageous willingness to risk creation.

Summer Reading

Every spring I begin building a pile of books for my summer reading. Some of these are books related to my teaching, others are books I read about, others are recommended by friends, and still others come from books I have selected while browsing at my favorite book stores. Invariably, about half way through the summer, this mish-mash of biography, fiction, poetry, current events comes together around a few themes that emerge as though the books had been selected with a degree of intentionality. By the end of the summer I have built up a wealth of ideas, knowledge and material upon which to draw throughout the school year, in my work and at home. Like Leo Lionni’s character, Frederick I am laying up stores for the long winter ahead.


So far this summer the randomness of my pile remains intact. After all, what could Thief of Time(Pratchett), Switch (Heath and Heath), Shadows on the Rock (Cather) , Except the Queen (Yolen), The Value of Nothing (Patel), The Post American World (Zakaria), A Village Life:Poems (Louise Glück), and The Vintage Caper (Mayle) have in common? Yolen and Pratchett explore what it means to be human even when you are not and both authors bend time all out of shape though with very different effects. The Catholics in Cather’s 18th century Quebec do appreciate the wine that comes from France, one of the characters in the novel remarks that God put the wine in the grapes for man’s enjoyment and Peter’s Mayles’ Caper is paean to all French wine. But in truth, I am embarrassed to even mention Mayle in the same sentence with Cather. The first is really sparkling white wine (I once read a reviewer who called one of his earlier books the froth on Champagne) from Lelanau, Michigan, while Shadows is one of those vintage French wines that lingers and continues to reveal more of its richness with each rereading. As for the two fantasy books I need to abandon the wine metaphor altogether or I will end up with my all too tired rant about the artificiality of separating out fantasy as a separate genre.

Cather, Yolen, Pratchett and Patel all speak to the importance of community and valuing those things for which our modern market has no value—friendship, true opportunity, clean air, the exchange of goods and services among friends and neighbors, the messiness of life. Cather’s Quebec is life affirming even in the deaths she describes while Louise Glück’s cycle of poems set in an unnamed village hint at death and decay even in a poem about childhood friends on a picnic. I think I will be hard pressed to finish her poetry. Gluck’s poetry is replete with beautiful images, clear renderings of people and places but depression and dissolution linger in each poem. As I write I am sitting in our boat in Leland, Michigan. We are here an extra day due to small craft advisories. By the numbers Lake Michigan is massive: 307 miles long, 1640 miles of coast line, maximum depth 923 feet, 1180 cubic miles of water (volume) . When we are cruising, Tom will often remark, that’s a whole lot of water out there. The sky is endless and the dunes along the coast line are massive. All of this geography does make me feel small, finite and totally at the mercy of the wind and weather, but I don’t feel diminished; I am affirmed as a part of a bigger world. I am present in this moment, the characters in Gluck’s poetry always seem to be worrying about what is coming next or regretting what has past. Perhaps that is what I dislike, the sameness of the tone. The poets I love, Hughes, Frost, Millay, Giovanni, Levertov, Heaney, cover a range of emotions, tones, ideas, states of being and modes even within a slim volume of poetry. I will give Glück one more evening and then I may well abandon her , I have a Nikki Giovanni with me and Robert Frost.