Pen > Sword

Interventions by Carla Brooke

chelseatatum:

After a morning of yoga, my body is stretched to take in the ocean view. Still, I can feel my chest muscles tighten as I drive along Hwy 1 to teach Intensive Intervention, an afternoon program at an elementary school near my home in Half Moon Bay. I give myself an hour to set up for the nonstop whirlwind of students who are pulled out from their classroom for literacy help. Many are the children of migrant workers who have come to California to make a better life for their family.

While setting up the classroom I often find myself in a frantic blur – beautiful moments with a child interrupted by a wildfire of distracted behavior I need to address. I wrestle with how I can best help these at-risk children with complex emotional and academic needs.

Recess is a rowdy and sometimes frightening world out on the playground. When the students come to my classroom, D-2, I want them to see it as a safe sanctuary. They run in eagerly, “Can I go on the computers first?” I don’t answer until we sit in mindful attention for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the singing bowl. “What do you hear now?,” I ask. Feet stop knocking against chairs and the gradual silence envelops us all. It helps me as much as the children to do a mindfulness listening practice before beginning class.

One day, during a particularly stressful time in my life, I enter D-2, a shared teachers room, and see the skeleton of a shark on the table where my attendance sheet and singing bowl are normally kept. A group of 4th graders sit in rapt attention while a man with an Australian accent talks loudly about sharks. A few of the kids recognize me and wave in my direction. The man says, “No they rarely attack people on shore. The movie ‘Jaws’ isn’t true. Are there any more questions?” Apparently, it is Ocean Week. I wait outside by the children’s education garden until the presenter is done, reminding myself of the anchor words I teach the children, “breathing in, I feel my belly rise, breathing out, gently releasing.”

As soon as I return to the classroom the school bell rings. Cesar, a nine-year old boy with a peaceful, lilting voice arrives first. Our class celebrated Cesar’s birthday last month writing appreciative adjectives to describe him. I took dictation on a poster board while each student described their classmate. “Cesar is calm, considerate, a good friend.” I framed each word inside overlapping circles and handed it to the birthday boy afterwards to take home.

Since then, Cesar has been the first to arrive. He cut his recess short today to help me set up. The metal door jam squeaks against the cement as he comes in. “Is there anything you need help with today, Mrs. Brooke?” My back is towards him, my eyes are riveted on the defiant computers that refuse to turn on no matter how may times I try. The Sesame Street look-alike software is not my friendly neighbor after all. I vent my frustration in Cesar’s composed direction. “The computers won’t start. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” I turn around and realize that this four foot tall boy who writes poetry about endangered seabirds has come to rescue his floundering teacher. “Maybe the computers need to relax, Mrs. Brooke.”

I look at Cesar with reverence before letting my tension turn into a ripple of laughter. He is my mindfulness teacher today, this son of a gardener who has learned about patience. Cesar, is the one who, after the singing bowl stops ringing, raises his hand politely and says, “I hear flowers growing.”

After this I decide to augment the federally funded literacy curriculum by bringing in a hyacinth bulb floating in a glass vase, guaranteed to bloom in two weeks. Keep the water clean, the directions remind me. Sometimes I forget to clean the water and one of the children reminds me. As part of our mindfulness exercise at the beginning of each class I pass around the hyacinth to each child. “What is different today? Each child makes a fanlike folding book that honors each stage of growth; the bare bulb floating in water, the first show of green, the leaves and finally a purple flower growing like a regal crown.

Feeling that I too have grown roots, I bring in a children’s story I have written. Next to the singing bowl on the formica table I lovingly place the photo of our dog, Hanai, sitting with me on the beach when she was a puppy. It was taken soon after my husband and I brought her back from Hawaii. We had found her, a skinny black dog who had been wandering around homeless. We were in Hawaii because what I knew of my past had literally gone up in smoke nine months before – our house burned. One turn of a dryer cycle had forced us to let go of the past. We were fortunate that our house didn’t burn completely, the firemen had said. If they had arrived five minutes later it would have been a different story. After the restoration, my husband John and I went to Hawaii to celebrate and we found, and rescued, Hanai. As I read the story of Hainai to the class, I realize that rescuing Haini was a life-changing event, but it is not clear exactly whose life changed the most or who rescued whom?

The 5th graders, my most challenging group of students, have been asking about my dog ever since I read that story. Later, while facing my group of 3rd graders, I added some information about the origin of Hanai’s name. I put a syllable breakdown of the Hawaiian word on the board behind me. “Hanai” means adopted family. As I read to the 3rd graders I become aware that over the past six months this diverse group of children have become my Hanai.

Later that week my initial fear that first generation students won’t understand my heartfelt story is transformed by a series of colorful illustrations they make at the art table. Cesar makes an expressive felt pen rendering of Hanai playing in the grass, while Osvaldo draws the stars overhead and several rainbows captioned by, “Hanai’s dream of finding a home.”

With just a few more weeks left to the end of school, I realize it has been a privilege to work with these children. As my heart opens wider, healing opportunities find their way in. Since that day of the shark’s guest appearance, I find myself in a calmer state of self-acceptance.

Among the stuffed folders where I keep student’s writing and artwork is a separate file for my attendance sheet. It took me nearly six months to say their names without a mix up. A quiet 4th grader would patiently remind me, “I’m Alberto,” after mistakenly calling him Alfredo. I look at my pencil marks in the various columns on the attendance sheet. What the marks don’t show are the life lessons that came to me through these children.

For example, Francisco, a referral from Child Protective Services, is one of the boys I have to send to the office frequently because of out of control behavior. A skinny boy with a perceptive, sharp wit, Francisco’s comments jump out of his mouth in repetitive, sharp bursts through the flannel hood tucked over his head. Over time, his impulsive outbursts have quieted down long enough for him to draw a picture of his feelings. One day, when he stayed after class to help me clean up, I noticed him with a drawing that he hid from me. With some coaxing I got to see part of it. I most remember the urgency in the wild repeated strokes he made with a dark green marking pen, and his shyness at revealing his emotions to me.

An other student, Filiberto, asked to show me his work. He pointed to a wildly rendered warm yellow line crossing through the center of a deep red field. “This is my anger,” (pointing at the red field), “and this,” he pauses, “is my happiness coming through.” I feel grace settle right here where our eyes meet. In the silence that follows, Filiberto continues to draw, adding starry yellow dots in the few empty spaces that remain.

On the last Friday in May we talked and drew about bullying. Eric had been acting somber and uncommunicative lately. I asked Eric to read out loud from a book that tells a story about bullying at school, No One Knew What To Do. As Eric read he seemed to be getting the message. A happy ending results when the story’s main character summons enough courage to reach out for help from his teachers. The teachers provide a supportive intervention that helps transform the cycle of violence at his school.

After reading the story, Eric lights up with passionate resolve and tells me how much bullying he has witnessed at our school and at his home. Eric then makes a poster on the biggest paper we can find. He puts in bold lettering what he just read. “The first step: to ask for help from an adult; not being afraid to speak out, and fearlessly banding together with others who witness bullying and want to help.” Eric adds his own commentary and illustrations to his poster. “This planet is in trouble because people are mad at one another. People fight and they don’t want to tell somebody big.” He signs his full name at the end of his statement. Now Eric helps ring the singing bowl at the beginning of our class and continues to write about nonviolence during our final weeks together.

The hyacinth flower bloomed at last. Instead of the two weeks promised, it took 3 months. During that period of attentive care the bulb became our class mascot. When I brought it home to freshen the cloudy water, the children always noticed it was gone and asked where it was. We were so pleased when it bloomed we had a birthday party for it. I laid the vase carefully on a violet colored tablecloth. In the picture I took, Eric, Jennifer and Flavio are smiling like proud parents beside the flower that seems larger than life. Near the vase is a handmade card from a student that says, “You rock, Mrs. Brooke.” Beside that is a zen-like poem written by an eight year old girl, Viri. She wrote it one afternoon while playing with a language game. The pieces she puzzled together speak of the hyacinth and of our year of interventions together, “Flowers will grow silently.”

dailymeh:

I don’t carry a sketchbook to write down ideas. I don’t write drafts in notebooks. Instead, I write and rewrite ideas in my head. I’m not talking about general ideas here; I assume everyone, or at least everyone who cares, thinks about what they want to write before they sit down to write a serious text. Even those who say they think by writing, I assume, don’t sit down to write with literally no idea at all which direction to go. Writing is premeditated: despite what some may say, the right words do not come delivered from heaven by an angel or a muse. No, I don’t mean general ideas: I mean I write long texts, word-for-word, in my head. Then I rearrange them, tweak them, rewrite or reject them. This text, for instance, was originally written on the way to the grocery store, the writing occasionally interrupted by oh my god this is chilly as my immediate senses for a moment direct my attention away from thoughts and into the concrete world. In this case, the latency between writing the text in my head and writing it into a text box was short: I just got back and started writing. Other times, I’ll mull a text over for many days before committing it to paper or bytes.

The texts I write in my head are often nothing like the ones I end up publishing or archiving. So far, this post contains almost nothing of my “mental drafts”, but I’m convinced that it’s better because I “wrote” them.

If you accept that considered writing doesn’t occur simply at the moment a person writes it, it may seem obvious that you do something like writing a mental draft of the text beforehand. This, I think, stems from the assumption that when we think, we think in one of the languages we speak. “What language do you think in?” is a question sometimes posed to bilinguals. I think that question presupposes a major misconception about the nature of thought. I don’t think thought is formed in any given natural language in general, although we obviously do think in natural language at least sometimes — when we’re deciding what to say or put into writing. The question, however, is whether the thought processes that occur prior to our decision to put it into language are in the same language, or if they are in some kind of “mentalese”. Do you think in English, Japanese, Spanish, Basque, Ojibwe, Inuktitut?

There are a number of reasons why I think that’s not the case. The first is introspection. It doesn’t really feel like I’m thinking in any specific language when I’m thinking. Not to mention it would imply a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, one that says the limits of our thoughts are decided by the limits of our language, and that the categories and ways of speaking of our language determine the categories and ways of thinking of our mind. The evidence, such as it is, doesn’t support a strong version of this hypothesis (although it may still fit weaker, more specialized variants of it: after all, it would be strange if language did not at all affect patterns of thought). My own introspection doesn’t have access to anyone else’s experience, of course, and clearly some people do feel they think in a language, since they say they “think in Spanish” or “think in English” and so on. But a very common occurrence seems to rule this out: when we can’t put something we want to say into words. We may feel it, we may think it, but we don’t know how to put it into words. In addition to all of this, it would seem to make little evolutionary sense. As far as we know the human brain was fully developed, or close to it, before we started speaking. Humans must have had thoughts, complex thoughts as evidenced by the use of tools, by social organization and rituals related to death, before the advent of language, and so our brains must include a fully developed mechanism for thinking without language; it would be grossly inefficient if language suddenly came to replace this mechanism for thinking in general.

For all of these reasons, I think our thought in general isn’t mediated by natural language. The precise extent of thinking in natural language, the nature of whatever mental language we do think in, and so on, are interesting issues, but kind of beside the point. This whole aside was simply to ground the idea that it isn’t self-evident that if you think about a text before you write it, you must have already written a kind of mental draft.

You must, then, consciously decide to write a draft in your head, word-for-word. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. The human mind has limited working memory, and not everything in that working memory stays in long-term memory, and when it does, the reproduction isn’t particularly accurate. But what you lose in capacity and accuracy, you gain in flexibility. I’ve heard that some recommend using cheap paper to sketch ideas, so you aren’t afraid of putting down bad ideas, but mental drafts are absolutely free. And they’re instant: there is zero lag between the moment you think of a phrase and the moment that phrase appears in your draft. You can write anywhere, without having to worry about bringing pen and paper: in the shower, sure, that’s classic, but also on the bus, on your way to the store, when your mind wanders and you should be doing something else, when you’re trying to get to sleep, when you’re fishing, whenever you have some spare attention. You’re not wasting any storage, and therefore, writing and rewriting is free. And you’re free to mix and match “mentalese” and English: if at some point you know what you want to say, but can’t figure out how to say it, you can just leave a hole in the English text and a note to translate the mentalese later. If I was a good drawer I’d put in an illustration about here of neurons and words flying between them, a vast network of them with words flying over synapses at record speed, and in the middle, a section of the network where the words are replaced by indecipherable symbols representing the language of thought, the one that cannot be communicated from one person to another except through a translation to natural language. (At this point, you could insert a fascinating discussion about whether the nature of thought is ultimately symbolic, which seems to be a common assumption these days, or whether thought is or could possibly be nonsymbolic, but that would take us too far afield.)

By having to store a copy of the text in your brain, which is an unreliable database at best and has limited capacity for adding new entries, you lose textual accuracy. Sometimes you lose brilliant ideas because you didn’t store them outside your brain: when you have an epiphany right before falling asleep, you often don’t remember a thing in the morning. If a quarter of the ideas that seem world-changing in the half-wake dream-state that happens before you really fall asleep but after you’ve lost waking consciousness were as good as I imagined them to be, and further, if I could only remember them, I’m sure I’d be rich and famous or at least moderately successful in whatever. Those ideas are lost. But what you lose in textual accuracy, you gain in understanding. While you may lose the perfect wording, or a complete thought, when you do remember a thought, you will usually understand it fully, which may not be the case if you had to translate it from mentalese into English and put it into writing. The general gist of something is very hard to lose if you have some recollection of the memory; however, if your only memory is a piece of writing, you may have the words exactly as you wrote them, but lack the understanding that gave birth to them in the first place.

This process of deliberating over words before you write them, of “writing” them before you actually write them, must have some effect on the final text, but I couldn’t say exactly what that effect might be. As you can gather, I’m not one of those people who insist that their best thinking is done as they write, but what I do is writing, not mere typing. (Truman Capote famously said of the Beat writers something to the effect of, “What they’re doing isn’t writing, it’s typing.”) I don’t sit down with a clear plan and then execute it to the letter. Looking over this first draft, which is not the first draft of this post but the first digital draft, it contains few of the words I thought up on my way to the store. That whole aside about mentalese was something I thought of on the spot. Most of the individual sentences were formed just before or even as I typed them.

Maybe it’s all an excuse to avoid editing, which, you’ve got to admit, is terribly boring. Editing in your head is so much more pleasant: if you can tell yourself you’re already on draft forty-five by the time you commit something to paper or computer, you don’t have to clean up and edit so much.

Or maybe I’m just weird.

Rules for Writing Well

meltinyourmouth:

26 Golden Rules for Writing Well

1.Don’t abbrev.

2.Check to see if you any words out.

3.Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.

4.About sentence fragments.

5.When dangling, don’t use participles.

6.Don’t use no double negatives.

7.Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.

8.Just between you and I, case is important.

9.Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.

10.Don’t use commas, that aren’t necessary.

11.Its important to use apostrophe’s right.

12.It’s better not to unnecessarily split an infinitive.

13.Never leave a transitive verb just lay there without an object.

14.Only Proper Nouns should be capitalized. also a sentence should begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop

15.Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word phrase.

16.In letters compositions reports and things like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.

17.Watch out for irregular verbs that have creeped into our language.

18.Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

19.Avoid unnecessary redundancy.

20.A writer mustn’t shift your point of view.

21.Don’t write a run-on sentence you’ve got to punctuate it.

22.A preposition isn’t a good thing to end a sentence with.

23.Avoid cliches like the plague.

24.1 final thing is to never start a sentence with a number.

25.Always check your work for accuracy and completeness.

it’s all happening, all of it!

missmlady:

yourwrite:

Doesn’t it ever alarm you to think about how there are billions of people existing out there right now, right this moment, and they’re all the creators of so many thoughts and ideas whizzing about? At this very moment in time there are people making love and having babies and putting their dogs to sleep. There are husbands leaving their wives and wives leaving their husbands and drunken binges and religious fanatics converting former doubters. There are children dying and being recruited as soldiers, people being evicted from their homes, people falling in love for the first time or maybe even the very last time. There are wallets being stolen and girls crying and boys trying to win back their lost loves and people starving themselves and schemes being plotted. There are sinners and saints and phone-calls home and irreparable damages being made to family living room carpets because there are one too many who showed up at the party and everyone’s a little too drunk. Someone is thinking about you and they may not even know you yet, and someone loves you, and someone probably hates you with a passion as well, but it’s just what happens, there’s nothing you can do. Doesn’t it boggle you?! People finding god, and renouncing their faith, baptisms and pagan rituals and house shows and songs being written. There are boys discovering pornography and girls bleaching their hair white-blond and famous pictures being taken and someone’s mom is dying right now, but someone else’s is having the greatest day of all time. Proposals and love poems and death threats scrawled on walls and stomachs being pumped and people dropping all of their groceries in the 5th isle down from the deli. There are people hoping on planes for the first time, and people finding out about terminal illnesses and and and, doesn’t it blow your mind clear out?! There are books being written—right this moment—and one of them is going to be your favorite; it’s going to mean the world to you. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I just let my brain get so ahead of me, but it’s comforting to know that anything can happen and right now everything is happening, and it’s amazing and beautiful and and and. It’s all just happening right now.

(-what’s mine is yrs.)

What California?

lieslieslies:

I’m almost done with my collegiate victory lap (LOL) and essays like this still make the grade. I took a course on California Culture and a big topic was ‘what represents California?’, etc. Obviously, I wrote about THE OC and its representation of the real life counterpart. Whatever!

Typically written off as a prime-time soap opera, Josh Schwartz’s The O.C. has become a defining document of our generation and a widely accepted representation of life in the palm-lined and idolized region of southern California. Using the county of Orange as it’s picture perfect backdrop The O.C. is a show about being an outsider. Each member of the fictional Cohen family must cope with certain differences realized in the sun drenched beach town of Newport.  Many Orange county natives balk at the idea of the show being in any way authentic. However, from the view of an outsider, The O.C. is a generally accurate representation of a certain, distinct California lifestyle.

The core members of the Cohen family each represent a specifically removed point of view of Newport Beach. The father, Sandy, is not only an outsider in his way of life, but quite literally. He’s a New York transplant, married into the upper class elite, a bleeding-heart liberal, and perpetual crusader against all capitalistic evils of ‘the O.C.’. According to the California Secretary of State, in October of 2008, 72 percent of Newport Beach’s voting population was Republican. To an Orange county native it may be easy to find leagues of Democrats, or any other varied political views over the landscape, but to a transplant like Sandy the political make-up is daunting. It’s no surprise that young adults across the county (those who so often criticize the show for it’s lack of ‘realness’) were shocked to see the area pass the controversial Proposition 8 a year ago. Sandy again helps us realize the actuality of the show’s backdrop by bringing in the Jewish perspective. The religion of the Cohens (half Jewish, half Protestant) comes into play often and contrasts with the stereotype of western Orange county being a nest of WASPs.

His wife, Kirsten, daughter of a housing mogul and overall ‘well-to-do’ family, manages to still feel left out in the community punctuating by upper class pleasures such as daily pilates and Botox. While being privileged and representing the 92 percent white population of Newport, Kirsten manages to stand in a different category. She is uncharacteristically smart, practically runs her father’s business, and is infinitely more hands on in the rearing of her children and day to day doings than her velour-clad counterparts. While there are probably plenty of mothers just like this in the area, to Kirsten, it feels as if she is the one square meter of sod in a field of astro-turf.

The Cohen’s biological son, Seth, a neurotic Woody Allen-ish comic book nerd, views the town from a cynical distance. Perpetually outcasted in high school, Seth finds the generally Republican and white make-up of Newport suffocating. He is artistic, literary, and heartfelt. Something one may not find in at water-polo practice. But we know that there are probably plenty of poets and dreamers speckling the beaches of Orange county (the closest we get to this side of Newport is a brief foray into smoking marijuana, quickly smoothed over by the censors). Though it’s all too familiar, especially as a teenager, to feel isolated in one’s own emotion, to feel  so foreign to your own environment that you might one day have to charter your own boat to Tahiti (and what a distinctly Newport way of escape).

The premise of the show is that the Cohens, breaking stereotype as always, adopt a kid from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’. Arguably the main character of the show, Ryan Atwood lands on their doorstep fresh from the tough streets of Chino (one of the largest television exaggerations in history, coupled with the episode in which they must drive a day, through the desert, just to reach Brea). Ryan represents every almost the exact opposite of a Newport native. He is unrefined, comes from a broken home, and has no money. Counter-arguments to the notion that the show depicts anything similar to a real existence in Orange county are quick to mention that not everyone in Newport is as rich as they are portrayed on the show. Of course that’s true. But moving from the Inland Empire to a city ranked by a Coldwell survey in 2009 as the 8th highest for housing prices (in America) wouldn’t seem that way.

It should probably be mentioned that the entire count of Orange itself is vastly different. One can drive ten miles and experience three different cities, all drastically different in culture. Maybe the show should have been called Newport rather than The O.C. But we must view it in the terms the show was presented and with that it takes place primarily in the coastal region of the area.

So what do we gain from characters that contrast so starkly with the statistics of the show’s setting? We get that what every native has been saying, “Orange county isn’t really like that!”. When they’re referring to the stereotypes of the background characters and landscape, they are right. Exactly. There are exceptions to every rule, minorities to every majority. And from the point of view of an outsider? An outsider in many different ways? Then the stereotypes ring true, are amplified even, and completely accurate.  For a show so often mocked and maligned, compared to day-time TV trash, and peppered with fleeting pop-culture anachronisms and cheesy dialogue, it really does an amazing job of portraying a very specific, albeit small, California lifestyle. The show is wholly Californian. Whether we like it or not.

Oh, leggings.

6od:

realrealsoft:

You are not pants,
You can’t pretend
Though you accentuate
Cute girl’s rear ends

But do not front
As if you are
A pant like denim?
You’re not on par.

It’s not like I
Don’t like to see
A girl with leggings
In front of me

But would you go pantsless
To your work?
When leaving the house,
Do you forget your skirt?

If to these questions
You answered
‘no’
The there’s something
You should know

Your leggings, girls,
Are a public foe
For I can see
Your camel toe.

-love melissa