Poetry Friday

Kenneth Rexroth.

All good poets are underrated these days, but Rexroth, though less well known then he should be, hold his own. His books- especially the translations of Chinese and Japanese medieval poetry- sell consistently. These are beautiful books. I would venture to call them perfect. They introduce a reader to a new world, they encapsulate that world wonderfully without seeming definitive, and they speak in a highly personal and moving voice.

Rexroth is one of the originators of jazz poetry, which gave rise to the beats. His was the first American poetry to truly embrace the poetic traditions around the world. In a sense he is poetry's Henry Cowell, another westerner who opened up this country to the world. And he railed against the elitism of the east coast scene. Moreover, he was self-educated and deeply, politically engaged. Perhaps most importantly he was a great nature poet who never fell prey to the impersonal, vadic voice that so often made mid-century poetry obscure and difficult.

Here is neat little overview of his books. And here is a poem, one that combines the voice of the chinese, the specificity of american nature poetry, and a rather beat cadence:

Yin and Yang

It is spring once more in the Coast Range
Warm, perfumed, under the Easter moon.
The flowers are back in their places.
The birds are back in their usual trees.
The winter stars set in the ocean.
The summer stars rise from the mountains.
The air is filled with atoms of quicksilver.
Resurrection envelops the earth.
Goemetrical, blazing, deathless,
Animals and men march through heaven,
Pacing their secret ceremony.
The Lion gives the moon to the Virgin.
She stands at the crossroads of heaven,
Holding the full moon in her right hand,
A glittering wheat ear in her left.
The climax of the rite of rebirth
Has ascended from the underworld
Is proclaimed in light from the zenith.
In the underworld the sun swims
Between the fish called Yes and No.

Achtung!

The science of it...

When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.

These oscillations, called gamma waves, are created by neurons’ firing on and off at the same time — a feat of neural coordination a bit like getting strangers in one section of a stadium to start clapping in unison, thereby sending a signal that induces people on the other side of the stadium to clap along. But these signals can have trouble getting through in a noisy environment.

“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”

We have more than a few kids in school who seem incapable of NOT attending to the random electronic bleeps popping up all around them. They sneak in their cell phones. They text from the bathroom. They are so preoccupied with communication (that is, the girls are) that the facebook/cell phone/own brain nexus hums unceasingly. They boys are far more entangled in video games. All them seem to watch 20 movies a week.

What can we do? Ten year ago TAS' biggest problem was drug use and chaotic home lives. At least those were things one had a chance of growing out of...

another passage from the article:

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

Academic Developments pt II

Later in the day, Jen and I presented some material on Attachment Theory and the way that underformed parental attachment plays out over the lifespan. One of my favorite exercises for the staff is to write all the students' names on index cards and spread them out on a large table. We then organize them into rough groups, for instance, according to which students have what type of language difficulties, or have suffered trauma, or know how to use free time productively. We do not seek definitive answers, but rather use it to stimulate discussion about the well being of our students and our efforts to make their lives better.

What emerged in our conceptualization of attachment difficulties is that many of our students (historically speaking- yesterday we included the names of many past students in the exercise) have or had significant trauma, attachment, and seperation issues that seriously impacted their school careers. We also observed that the vast majority of them become quite well adjusted over time. Our earliest students are now in their mid-twenties. Most seem to be doing pretty well.

Our mix of students is always changing, and always presents a powerful challenge to teaching orthodoxies. Our students learn how to be in relationships of various intensity, complexity, and type. They also develop a significant fund of general and specific knowledge. Where many seem to be less accomplished is in the execution of complex academic tasks. Part of this is an artefact of the kind of kid who comes to TAS. Some of it is the program itself falling short.

It is sobering to assess our work. Overall, we should be pleased that the vast majority of our students are moving towards happy, productive, interesting lives. Yet we may still be failing them in significant ways. There is real danger out there in the "real world" for underskilled adults. I think we are taking steps to address this. But the ultimate question is a complex one: what are the core skills a thirty year old American will need in 2020?

Is that question even answerable?

Academic Developments

Yesterday was a productive day for the teachers at TAS. We began with working out the schedule for the fall term and started looking at some significant problems with the way we approach academics. The question is always: are we challenging our students enough? The answer is always mixed.
It is easy to provide a glib answer. We try to meet our students at least halfway. Some of them are excellent students who have recently left a very stressful school environment. Of these, the younger ones tend to get a little complacent. More mature students find their way and work diligently on the work they deeply care about, and are good sports about the stuff they don't particularly like.
Other students have very patchy academic skills and on top of this, have highly disrupted family lives and emotional development. Few of these kids see hard work as an escape, of course. With them we are always swimming against the tide.
One thing we are considering is replacing the trimester with the semester. It would give teachers a little more time to get into subjects, and might open up other opportunities as well. One possibility is to institute a three week period after Christmas break dedicated to intensive projects like theater and film, music, the winter fundraiser, and writing workshops.

The semester meets another important need. More and more of our students are going to college. Colleges find our transcripts and the multitude of classes coded therein to be difficult to follow. Semesters would simplify this. We would sacrifice some variety, but there would be ways of building variety and student choice into the courses themselves.
The Science and Mathematics curricula seem to be working out well. Our English and Social Studies curricula need to be streamlined and pointed in a clearer direction. Hopefully the fall term will see the beginnings of the Contemplative Education program coming into focus, with retreats and meditation training, as well as stress reduction classes. One wonderful idea was suggested by Jen Fusco-Perry, TAS' therapist: a storytelling class. Learning how to tell one's own story.
The importance of this is something I will follow up on later. It fits perfectly into the larger frame of self-awareness and self-development.

If there was one drug...

that I would dedicate hours to exposing as dangerous and pointless, it would be Abilify:

(from Furious Seasons) A recent conference call with financial analysts by executives with Bristol-Myers Squibb, makers of Abilify--the antipsychotic that will cure your non-psychotic issues--is revealing. Over 10 percent of Americans now take an atypical antipsychotic for depression, according to the company. Much of that prescribing has got to be off-label as Abilify is the only approved antipsychotic for the condition, all of which makes me damn suspicious of how Seroquel's bipolar depression approval in 2006 may have been turned into a proxy approval for major depression.

Forget about Prozac Nation, this is Atypical Nation. Think I'm joking? Antipsychotics are now the top revenue producing class of drugs, topping even statins.

This is so grim, so cynical...even as real progress is being made on the disclosure and bribe front in the journals and medical schools, the big drug makers are pushing harder and harder.

Keep your kids off of this drug.

But in the interest of clarity, I am going to ring up a psychiatrist I know and trust and get his take on it.

Welcome to Monday

The school year hurtles forward...a weekend trip to the Jersey Shore at the end of the month, mid-term reports this week, a prom-like dance in a couple of weeks, and most importantly, the planting of two large and just about ready to bear paw-paws.
Paw-paw? A native tree, resistant to most pests, that produces large amounts of banana-tasting fruit. The swallowtail subsists on its leaves. It was George Washington's favorite dessert, served frozen, from what I understand. We need to raise two hundred more dollars to pay for the trees.

Thanks to our Mr. Garza, ace kid-motivator and verbal buggy whip, the grounds are coming along nicely. A wet spring means success for tree planting.

A couple of weeks ago we had an interesting seminar on Quality Schools, the concept long advocated by William Glasser. Judith Clapp gave the presentation. It was gratifying to note that we already have in place much of what Glasser considers to be requisite for a school that meets our students' developmental needs.

Tomorrow we have another staff day. We will be pulling together the course offerings for next year, as well as planning for the summer, including the possibility of summer camp. Later in the morning, our school therapist, Jen Fusco-Perry and I will be presenting some material on attachment syndromes and developmental/relational issues.

Enjoy the day. This week a consistant posting schedule will be tightened up.