Empathy and Teaching
Posted on September 6, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: Satisfied. Hot (It’s 114 degrees in L.A. today! But Why?!)
What I am listening to today: Phrenology – The Roots
What I am reading today: When My Brother Was an Aztec (Natalie Diaz)
***
Last week a student emailed me asking if she could interview me for a project for her government class. I happily agreed and we talked this afternoon about American values in 2020, the use and abuse of power in politics, the pandemic, and even the ongoing protests in Portland.
I was, however, struck the most by her final question to me, and I wanted to share it with you, as well as my answer.
As a teacher, do you feel that you have a voice in U.S. government and politics?
[I think, yes, in a way I have a voice. Through my students I have a voice.
Which is not to say that I try to indoctrinate anyone in the classroom to my own politics, but rather that I have a quiet purpose beneath my pedagogy.
What I mean is that as a teacher, especially as a creative writing teacher, I believe that my job, in addition to teaching curriculum, is to teach, promote, and foster empathy in the classroom.
I believe that sending more empathetic and divergent thinking people out into the world is going to have a positive impact on the way in which those individuals conduct themselves as citizens and residents of this country.
That I feel more than anything is my true voice in politics. Contributing to more empathetic voters and maybe even future politicians.]
That’s interesting. Why do you believe that teaching empathy to your students will have an impact on the world, as it relates to politics or things like that?
[Well, take creative writing for instance. Or any writing for that matter. At its core it’s all about communication. Communicating some thought, idea, or feeling. It is a relationship between composer and reader. Writer and audience. It allows the reader to see your perspective. And vise versa, reading allows us to understand other views of the world. It’s ultimately an act of empathy.
I think that people are a lot more alike than they realize. We tend to want similar things when it really comes down to it. Love. Safety and security. Comfort. Entertainment. Happiness. A nap.
But we forget that sometimes. We forget that we are all connected and a part of one another. We spend so much time in our heads that we forget how expansive and beautiful the world can be. And how expansive and beautiful a person can be. If given a little understanding and a little love.]
I don’t know how much of this she will end up using but….hey I was on a roll so I just kept talking 🙃
Week One Completed!
Posted on August 21, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: Exhausted. Joyful. Fulfilled. Exhausted.
What I am listening to today: Big Thief – Masterpiece
What I am reading today: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
***
Welp. I did it. I completed the first week of teaching classes for the Fall 2020 semester. Strange days. I am happy that I am fortunate to work from how and teach remotely. However, it is a bit to get used to for both myself and the students I have had in classes. There have naturally been plenty of tech issues. But we progress forward and do the best we can. (What are our other options?)
The trainings we had last week did well to prepare us for the use of the distance ed platforms, but unfortunately, they did not prepare us for the crazy manic energy of kids back in school after a summer in quarantine. Because I have mostly 9th graders this semester, I have a lot of kids who are also brand new to our school and its hippy dippy ways. Some of which have been home schooled up until this point. I can only imagine what it would be like to transition from that to a performing arts high school, in the middle of a global pandemic no less. My heart goes out to them and their tenacity to forge through. But this is of course wishful thinking on part. I do hope that they are to acclimate well enough.
So, the three best things about teaching on zoom: 1) I can secretly wear shorts (what I have heard my colleagues refer to a “zoom mullet”, 2) Attendance and participation are much easier to gauge, 3) I can mute the entire class with one click.
The worst things about teaching on zoom: 1) When I am staring at a void of black screens with names on them. No sound. No color. Only zoom, 2) All classes are recorded, so students can goof off and just watch the lecture at a later time, 3) You lose that in person magic of the classroom; I’m a walk around the room while lecturing kind of guy.
Ultimately what I have learned this week is how incredibly adaptable the students and myself are in this new reality. And that is something worth celebrating.
All right. I’m going to take a nap. Bye for now.
The Summer Chills
Posted on August 14, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: Great. Thanks for Asking.
What I am listening to today: Feng Suave – Warping Youth (Full EP)
What I am reading today: Not Elegy, But Eros by Nausheen Eusuf
***
Today ends a five-day gauntlet of teacher trainings via Zoom. It has been a lot of new information and my brain is fried. Beginning the Fall completely remote is a gift to be sure, but also it requires an entirely new way of conceiving of education and the classroom.
For instance, as a teacher in a zoom classroom I cannot require my students to turn on their cameras or the microphones. In theory, when classes start next week, I may be teaching to a couple dozen black screens with student’s names on them. And the task is doubly precarious given that I teach many introverted writers with an aversion to public speaking and class discussions. I love class discussions, though, as a teacher. I enjoyed them as a student as well in college, but in high school, I do not think I would have been as brazen in front of my peers.
All I can do is stay up to date on the technologies and prep my curriculum as much as possible. Only time will tell, I suppose. In any case, I am excited for the semester and look forward to having students I have had before, as well as new students. I found out this morning that I will have seventy-five students total between my four classes. Sixty-nine of those students will be 9th graders. I’m still processing that. I usually have a mix from 7th-12th. Tis should make for an interesting semester to be sure.
I will be teaching…
Core Short Story (the fundamentals of crafting short fiction)
Environmental Perspectives (the relationship between humanity and the natural world)
Travel Writing (two sections of this class exploring how exactly you tell the story of a place)
That is it for now. I leave you with a picture of me after my morning walk the other day looking all happy and like the relaxed and squirrely morning person I am.
Food Stuffs and Lesson Planning
Posted on July 19, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: Not too shabby
What I am listening to today: The Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs – (Live in Somerville)
What I am reading today: Method and Madness: The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante
***
Wow! The last few weeks went by super-fast and I am at a loss for why I have not posted yet this month. My life has been full of lesson planning and reading for my Fall classes. I am very excited for these courses (One of which I just found out about yesterday).
In truth it is not the most riveting of things to discuss in a blog post, so I have resigned instead to share the food stuffs I have made while in quarantine. Because food is universal, right? Maybe?
In any case. Here are a few items I have made recently.
As you can see, I love potatoes. I also love lesson planning and being as prepared as possible for the Fall so I will leave you for now. Stay cool in this heat. Okay I love you. Bye.
Overcrowded and Underfunded
Posted on June 27, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: exhausted and productive
What I am listening to today: Wajatta – Casual High Technology
What I am reading today: Poetry (July/August 2020 issue)
***
Here we are almost at the end of June and I am ready for July. Really, I am just ready for the public to get their sh*t together wear their masks so we can flatten the curve. I am hoping that happens in July. In any case, though, it has been a solid week. My daily walks in the park are refreshing, except when people are not wearing their masks. I am finding, too, that I have to change walking locations to find more and more secluded areas away from these mask-less people. I tried the LA Arboretum and that has been great. However, in June the amount of people there with their little kids during weekdays is a bummer. But life goes on and so do I… to a new walking location.
Other than the walks, I have been working on my classes for the fall. It is unclear whether we will be going back strictly distance ed or if it will be hybrid. I’m thinking it will probably be hybrid, so now that plays more into my syllabi and lesson plans. That being said, luckily, I teach writing and not dance, voice, or visual arts because my heart goes out to my colleagues that will have to adapt to teaching their classes that way. As my grandma has told me throughout my life (and still does almost weekly), “where there is a will, there is a way.” I am certain that these teachers, and hopefully all teachers, will find that way to best teach their students coming back this fall. Even more so, I hope they have the support of their administrators through all this. It would be great to see some of that support as a pay bump, as well, for all this extra unpaid time spent adapting and developing hybrid curriculum. Only time will tell, I suppose. As for now, all I can do is keep developing my own courses and keep checking my email for updates from those in the know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
P.S. Check out the new issue of Poetry that comes out next month. The cover is a gorgeous acid trip of wavy characters done by Julie Murphy, and the poems inside are some of the best this year. Eduardo C. Corral’s poems alone are worth the price of admission.
All right. See you in July!
Summer Solstice 2020!
Posted on June 20, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: cosmically cool
What I am listening to today: Disco Volador – The Orielles
What I am reading today: Esoteric Empathy: A Magickal & Metaphysical Guide to Emotional Sensitivity (Raven Digitalis)
***
We have arrived at the 2020 Summer Solstice for the northern hemisphere. It will happen in a little less than twelve hours and I couldn’t be feeling better. Now I am not usually one to be terribly invested in “woo woo” stuff like astrology or new age stuff, but even I have to admit this is an interesting moment cosmically. Today is the solstice, tomorrow is an annular solar eclipse, and Mercury is currently in retrograde. Tomorrow is also a good friend’s one year anniversary where I served as the best man, so revolutions, cycles, and patterns are all buzzing on my mind this morning.
Putting aside whatever you religious or spiritual beliefs may be, this is a time for serious contemplation in our world and I feel it overwhelmingly. From social media, to friends and family, to the news, we all seem to be in this great transitional period. Historically, when major events like these occurred it wasn’t uncommon for those going through it to look up at the night sky and wonder if there was any great purpose behind these “trials”. There are of course scientific reasons behind the happenings of the past six months, but even so, why not let it also be an opportunity for introspection? Why not let it be a call to radical empathy? Why not use it as reason for opening instead of closing (figuratively, I mean. Please stay inside and keep your doors closed)? I don’t really care if that sounds naive or blindly optimistic because the truth of the matter is that this transformation of our daily lives is more than significant, it’s unprecedented. And yes, that makes it terrifying, but it also means that we haven’t been here before and we have a choice in how to respond to it. And that is also more than significant.
P.S. As you may have noticed above, as well, I am reading a book concerned with magik and mysticism this week, and honestly I am loving it. It is nice to not do a close critical reading of text, and just sit with a book and the author’s voice and let it steep inside your mind. Okay, that’s it. Happy solstice! Go drink mead and eat sweet breads, and make love or something.
“Brown”
Posted on June 14, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: Content
What I am listening to today: The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced?
What I am reading today: Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (J. Scott Bryson)
***
Sometimes there are days like today where it feels like being a writer, being a poet, are so intrinsic to your identity that it’s difficult to fathom a time in your life when you were not writing and thinking of the world in terms of narrative (or opening a blog post with such a pretentious first line). Anyway, this morning as I was doing some reading for class planning for the fall, I thought about my own journey as an “artistically-minded” person and when exactly that whole worldview began. Does creativity have a genesis? Well, I do remember being a sophomore in high school and being dumb struck by Fahrenheit 451, especially it’s strange and hopeful ending. This really got me reading and writing (and thinking about what it would be like to be an english teacher) frequently for the first time. I had always been attracted to stories, sure, but never to the extend of my post-451 high school career, when I began consuming novels and poems weekly.
As formative and significant as that moment was for me, that was really more the initial spark of my writerly imagination than the beginning of when I would make things out of nothing. I mean, that wasn’t even when I started writing. The first piece of “proper” writing I ever did was nearly a decade before.
I was one of twenty first-graders huddled together on the unfriendly tile floor of a classroom in Glendora, California in the mid-90s. It was arts and crafts day and everyone was beyond exhilarated and animated; the bowl cuts, the horse girls, the twins in mock turtlenecks, the unkempt kids in over-sized Disney princess T-Shirts and Velcro shoes; even the kid who would walk around pretending to be a cat was mewing. The entire cohort had been gathered around to be given finger paints. But it was more complex than that. We were told to choose a color to finger paint with and then write a poem about the color we chose. We had spent the previous week reading rhyming poetry storybooks. Needless to say, my notes were extensive.
As you might imagine, red was VERY popular. As was blue, among the more pensive children in the class. Yellow also came in as a big hit. Summer, sunshine, school buses; no one was surprised. As with most things, I wanted to take my time and weighed the possibilities. There were only these three primary colors to choose from. I remember feeling confined by my options. Despondent even. They all seemed equally fine colors to me. What about the poem? How could I convey red or blue, or even yellow in a poem? AND it had to rhyme? The pedagogical motivations behind the assignment eluded me.
Unable to make a decision, and with time against me, I took all three colors and combined them. I don’t know what I was expecting. I knew the combinations of any two of them, but all three? Well, as you no doubt know, the result was the color brown. It was a muddy brown, but it was an honest brown. And writing a poem about brown seemed much less daunting a task. After all, brown was familiar, warm. My arms and legs and face were all brown (still are), and I liked the idea of writing a poem about the things I had observed in the world that were also brown. In the midst of the fertile writing process, however, my teacher walked over to check on me. She saw what I had done and (gently) told me that I needed to start over again and choose one of the primary colors. I was a shy boy who abhorred conflict, but also not one to be mismanaged, so I nodded, smiled, got up from my seat and walked over to another part of the classroom to finish my poem.
The original titled was “The Love-Song of N. Dante” but the teacher requested I change it and edit the body of the poem from thirteen pages to one. So I settled on the title, “Brown”. Below is that very poem. My first written poem and first published (and only laminated). Harold Bloom once remarked that it, “brings together the ecstasy and the ennui of a six year old boy on the precipice of the twenty-first century and the loss of his own innocence”. Please enjoy.
Summer Reading Begins!
Posted on June 3, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: Pretty good
What I am listening to today: Jorge Ben – A Tábua De Esmeralda
What I am reading today: Something from the image below most likely
***
Well, it is a few days late, but today I officially begin my summer reading! These are all books recommended to me by friends and colleagues to read this summer. This is exciting because although I have heard of many of these (a few of which I definitely should have read by now), I would probably never have pursued reading these on my own. The book I am perhaps the most curious about is The Brothers Karamazov. One of my high school history teachers remarked once that I reminded her of the character Alyosha from the book, and so I am curious to see what exactly she was talking about. Beyond that, though, I am also generally looking forward to reading it because it is such a well-known book by a prominent author. We shall see.
Making a Literary Life
Posted on May 23, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: capricious
What I am listening to today: Flamingosis – A Groovy Thing
What I am reading today: Making a Literary Life (Carolyn See)
***
I have once again picked up an old standard: Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life. One of the better books of it’s kind on pragmatic suggestions for surviving day-to-day life as a writer in the early 21st century. I remember first reading it in grad school for a class called Aspects of a Writer, where we discussed how to cultivate a writing life that shattered the Romantic conception of the writer’s life as merely something full of spending all day at cafes and bars writing amazing first drafts. It was, and still is, certainly a text needed for all first year MFAs, and perhaps even those more precocious undergrad poets and authors.
While the deepest seeds of mysticism will never truly drain from my writer’s soul, I still found this text quite enjoyable and edifying. It is true that being a writer is about more than the words on the page or screen, and that in order to survive and be relevant in the writing world, let alone the artistic world, you need to be think of it as a bit of a business of skills. But I HATE the idea of having to market myself or create a writer’s brand (he says as he writes a blog post on his website created to do just that). Sadly, to an extent, it would seem that you need to strike a balance between writing in isolation and self-publishing (which is perfectly fine for some) and selling your soul to a publisher. It of course all depends on the kind of writer you want to be in this world.
For myself, I know that I should submit more writing to magazines, and even contests, but it isn’t always a priority. At least, not as much as honing my craft more and more. What I send out needs to be of the best quality it can be. This might seem obvious, but really it’s a frustrating endeavor for a perfectionist. When I look at a batch of poems that are all fifth or sixth drafts, ready to be sent off to magazines, I can feel a bit like Ken Watanabe’s character, Lord Katsumoto, in the Last Samurai as he looks at the tree of blossoms and says, “the perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.”
On the other hand, (spoiler!) it does take that character being moments from his death to realize that all the blossoms are perfect. So maybe it is time to let go of that false belief in the elusive perfect poem, relish in the discovery, and just put together a few chapbooks with all the material I have from the last few years, and send them off to contests already. Because if something I write and believe in doesn’t get published, I would rather it be because an editor tells me no, and not because I did.
Green Leaf Volatiles
Posted on May 17, 2020 Leave a Comment
How I am feeling today: languorous
What I am listening to today: Men I Trust – Headroom
What I am reading today: The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)
****
Well, as expected it took me a few weeks to post another blog post. However, to be fair the world is going through some growing pains at the moment; especially here in the U.S. Which, I suppose some people might offer as even more reason to be prolific with one’s writing and digital presence. I think those people are wrong, though. At least as far as I a concerned because I have never been one to write a lot when there are major events going on in the world or in my life; terrifying or otherwise. And I think that is fine. There is a lot to process during these days in the void of quarantine. I imagine a million and one blogs are discussing this at the moment so I won’t go on restating the obvious, but I will say this: I think it’s okay to create art in your own time. It’s not always healthy to be racing to finish projects in an attempt to stay productive (read: distracted) during a pandemic. Sometimes you need to just walk around your yard barefoot, lay in the grass, and get itchy.
Nick Dante 