July 2007 Archives

AVALON, NJ - This is a place of liminal passages: the pines give way to dunes, the dunes to sea, the sea to the horizon and an openness of possibility. The elements too pass into one another: heat and humidity give way to rain, wind and storm, now it is cool and calm again, just the sound of the waves, returning, one after another, from the horizon of possibilities.

The threshold is a place of passing, it joins by dividing.

Here too, there is the passing of the generations. Two grandmothers pass on stories, the wisdom of those who came before handed down in a touch, a game played in the waves, the caring cut of watermelon. Two little girls grow into themselves in an old beach house that must still remember the laughter of another girl, now lost. Yes, this is a place of passing, and our time here too is passing, and yet, in so passing, we contribute to the life of this beautiful place.

If life itself is a sort of passage, a path or set of paths, it is marked by moments of poignancy that make up a landscape of memories. Chloe and Hannah, in hats, dancing on the porch … the sky at dusk, a beautiful purple-pink … two grandmothers laughing with their grand-daughters … Hannah in the waves … Chloe laughing with her mother and dancing in the sand ... the hydrangea in bloom … holding hands on the beach, watching our daughters …

To see the a slideshow of our time in Avalon, click here.

In the Poetics, Aristotle says:

To imitate is co-natural to human-beings from childhood and in this they differ from other animals because they are the most imitative and produce their first acts of understanding by means of imitation; also, everyone delights in imitations. (Poetics 1448b7-9)

I delight in the imitations of my daughters. I am sure this delight is rooted in the recognition that, as Aristotle says, their imitations are their first acts of understanding, their first attempts to feel their way into the world. But my delight is also an immediate response to their delightful ways of encountering the world.

Hannah is quite the mimic. This morning I awoke to "Daddy. Daaady. Com'on Daddy" and heard an echo of my own repeated calls of "com'on Hannah" on our walks though the neighborhood. Chloe too, with a roll of her eyes, mimics her mother's playful manner of mockery and shows that she too is hard to impress.

As we were leaving for the grocery store today Chloe and Hannah were going around saying "we're outta here" after I must have said something to that effect. Part of what makes such mimicry so delightful is that it is like the gift of a mirror that allows you to see yourself differently.

But Aristotle does not have in mind only this sort of mimicry, but also the imitation that belongs to the telling and performance of stories, to the representation of actions in the world of human affairs. And it is here, in the telling and retelling of stories, that Hannah and Chloe clearly seek to find their ways into the complex world of human community.

Strangely enough, they both seem obsessed with stories of tragedy and redemption. Hannah likes to tell this story: "Guy ... hit ... fall down ... Mommy ... home," which, roughly translates as:

Hannah was at the library when a boy hit her and she fell down. The boy's Mommy made him say he was sorry and then told him they were going home because he was not playing nicely.

We retell this story often, and there is a satisfying sense of justice in it.

For her part, Chloe has a battery of stories she wants to hear repeatedly throughout the day. There is the story of Joe Pa who broke his leg while coaching, went to the hospital, but is getting better and, as she often adds, "he'll be all ready for the fall."

Or the story of Uncle Hank who was hit by a car when he was a boy, went to the hospital, but recovered in time. Or that of the "old lady" who fell down at a wedding we attended in Chicago last fall and who I helped up to a chair (we tend to leave out the part about her being drunk!). She was taken home and recovered. Or the story of her friend who fell down the stairs of his porch, went to the hospital, but had no significant injuries.

Clearly, there is a theme here, and it has something to do with her attempt to understand human hurt and the capacity for recovery. My first hope for these two little ones is that they never know such hurt, but recognizing this as impossible, my second hope is that a resilient capacity for recovery sustains them through long lives.

I am beginning to think about the significance of RSS feeds and how they might be used in teaching. Google has a number of tools of potential importance for teaching. For example, the Google Reader allows me to aggregate blog posts from my students. The advantage of the Google Reader is that I can post feeds directly to a website. So, for example, if I want students to look as a specific story, I can add it to my shared feeds and add the code to my blog, website or even ANGEL. It would look like this:

The nice thing about this is that I can alter the content by sharing and unsharing items in the Google reader. I can imagine using it to call students' attention to specific issues, and to have them call my attention to things of importance to them.