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Assessing iPad Ed
My college is buying iPads for faculty to use in the classroom. We aren’t the first college to do this. We won’t be the last. Our goal is to help faculty explore tools and techniques to connect students more powerfully with their own learning. We call this connection engagement.
iPads aren’t magic. They can’t make unprepared or disinterested students learn. They can, however, offer a toolkit for teachers to design learning experiences that are more personalized, tangible, contextual, and collaborative.
We now have tools to dispel the false belief that learning happens only in the classroom. Most learning happens outside the classroom. Nothing new. That’s how learning happens. Great teachers are able to connect what happens during a student’s few hours inside the classroom with what happens to that student in the many more hours spent outside the classroom. Mobile technologies, particularly tablets, appear to be good tools for making abstract concepts more tactile and, thus, more easily incorporated into a student’s experience of everyday life.
We are at the beginning of our Mobile Engage campaign. A lot of faculty are about to receive and use an iPad for the first time. There will be a lot excitement about the device and learning how it works. There will be a lot of interest in apps — finding apps, getting apps, and using apps. There will be a lot of fun conversations and sharing new discoveries.
I hope there is also a great conversation about assessment. Our faculty are going to try a lot of new ideas in their classrooms. Some of these ideas are going to work brilliantly. Some ideas are going to fail. How will we help each other figure out what works and recognize what doesn’t? How will we celebrate our successes while also making ourselves comfortable with sharing our failures? The ability to share failures quickly is going to make everyone stronger faster.
There will be lots of ideas on how to recognize and track the success of our Mobile Engage campaign. Like everything else, our ability to assess will improve with our experience.
I am excited about what’s happening at my college and am glad I can be a part of supporting faculty as they try new things. We are about to issue a lot of new iPads. For me, success won’t be measured by how many new iPads we deliver. For me, success will be counted in how many new conversations I have with faculty that begin “How can I..”or “What would happen if…”
Time Alone with Words
I woke up early this morning to spend time alone with words. I was careful to mute the alarm before it sounded. I am half-dressed, unwashed and unbrushed. Those things make too much noise. I am stealing these minutes from the front of my day.
My wife and daughter are still hidden away in sleep. I am careful not to wake them. I tell myself this sneaking is a kind of generosity, a concern that they not wake too early and deprive themselves the benefits of a few extra minutes sleep. The truth is I want this time to be secret, my time alone with words.
Would it hurt them to wake up and realize that I have been awake for 20 minutes already and thought not to involve them in the small ritual of this morning? Not so. I tell myself they would be grateful I was good enough to steal these minutes out of the part of the day they are not using, have no use for.
Why will you call this clandestine morning meeting an affair? It is both more than and less than that. I have to be sly these days to meet myself. I have to step lightly and leave no track. I have to be smart if I want to spend my time alone with words. Even if the words are stubborn and churlish. Yes, very much like an affair. The words are an ungrateful lover, dissatisfied with the small gift I have stolen for her.
I am here. I brought myself. We can be together.
Not enough, she says. If you loved me, you would have woken earlier. You would have given me more.
And it is true. These stolen minutes are not enough, just as bodies sweating in a rented bed can never be a marriage. She is impatient and dissatisfied. And yet, it is her impatience, her dissatisfaction that draws me and will draw me again.
And when the heat has cooled, I am left with the fact of my treachery. It is both delicious and crippling.
Yes, very much like an affair.
You will meet me again tomorrow?
I will try.
She is already silent, lost inside her thoughts about the day ahead, the parts of her life that will happen without me.
I am the first to leave the room but she is already gone.
I turn out the light. Close the door. Tell myself this lonely, unsettled feeling is something related to love.
Find an Anchor
We spend the majority of our lives in a kind of dream, believing that things are a certain way and that patterns of events from yesterday and the day before predict how things will be today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Our sleeping selves move through this dream anesthetized with ideas of certainty and expectation. Our dreaming minds build a compelling narrative that we have autonomous lives and that we are in complete control of these lives and can drive them around like cars wherever we like at whatever speed feels comfortable.
And then, an interruption. We are roused from our dream and realize that our lives are not predictable, that there is little certainty and the small vehicles we call lives do not really even belong to us. They are loaned and temporary, like clothes and houses and moods. We can drive them, perhaps, a short distance but, if we are paying attention, we find there is no road.
And then, our waking selves make a choice. We can close our eyes and sink back into the comfort of the dream or we can stand awake with the fact of groundlessness and take comfort from knowing that our lives do not really belong to us but are borrowed for each of us to use for the benefit of others.
And there is comfort in noticing the smallness of our selves and in the work of opening ourselves as much as possible to join with the smallness of others so that our small, shared individual lives become larger, better and more useful to the world.
And there is comfort in acknowledging the unsettledness of everything. In those moments, we can stand bravely while knowing that there is no ground. We are able to work with ourselves as we truly are. And if we can begin to practice walking with this knowledge there is comfort and strength and bravery without the need for certainty. We are awake. We are inhabiting our lives, no matter how small. We have found an anchor.
***
A small prayer that comes from months of working with illness, disappointment, loss and fear. And yet those months have also brought vitality, surprise, bravery, and love. Things are never what we think they are. I hope reading this brings some comfort to someone who needs it. The writing has brought some comfort to me.
413 Words: Dispatch
413 words tonight and PJ Harvey’s “Me-Jane” on continuous loop. I don’t know what this thing is that I am writing but there are bastard children, cruel pranks and a house in the center of the city that no one appears to be able to see.
Sometimes I spend days at a time afraid to write, and then, quite suddenly and powerfully, I am afraid not to write. There are always words waiting on me when I arrive. I write them down, hoping they will make a kind of sense.
The Wrong Goal
I have carried the idea of being a writer with me for more than 24 years. I wish I could say I have spent most of that time writing. I haven’t.
The problem with the idea of being a writer is that it leads me to the wrong goals. The idea of being a writer gave me the idea of writing a book. Writing a book was hard. I gave up. The idea of being a writer gave me the idea of writing stories. I started dozens but rarely finished them through. I have hundreds of pages stashed away in notebooks — beginnings, middles, riffs and improvisations. A mad jumble of glimpses and intuitions. Characters stillborn. Plots broken.
The idea of being a writer does not move me forward.
The idea of being a writer is a very poor thing to carry for so long. Much better to be a person who writes. Instead of writing a book or a story or this thing or that thing, I am ready to declare a new goal. I am writing to find out if I have talent for this thing that I enjoy and, if I have talent, to find out how far I can carry it.
The stories, the characters, the book are vehicles. They aren’t the thing itself. They are reflections of the thing. The thing is seeing how far I can carry this joy and fear I have inside of me. The thing is seeing how much of this life I have on the inside of me to be seen and real on the outside of me.
I am tired of pondering the idea of being a writer. I am working toward being a person who writes.
Routine
Most of us carry the idea that great writers operate like mad geniuses, frequently swept up by sudden inspirations, brilliant insights and compulsions they neither control nor understand. Even though I know this is not true, I often behave as if it ought to be.
The truth is more mundane. Great writers put in lots of time. The act of writing stuff down is a major activity that gets as much time as they can give. It isn’t haphazard. There isn’t a muse standing somewhere just out of sight, waiting to kidnap the great writer when least expected.
Great writers build routines, deep habits of time and effort that can endure the storms, setbacks and sudden distractions of daily life.
I haven’t written in over a month. I’m not beating myself up about it. That doesn’t work. The past five weeks have been a maelstrom. Most parts of everyday have been outside my control.
Here’s the thing: most parts of everyday are always outside my control. They have always been that way. They will always be that way. Developing a routine shapes a space where not writing is more unusual than writing. Developing a routine creates a kind of gravity where not writing takes more effort than writing.
Life always surprises. We are not in control of the things that happen. Routine is a way of building a furrow in the ground to hide inside. Routine is a safe place to protect the things that matter the most. Routine is investment in a belief about yourself, a habit of being who you are. No matter what happens to carry you off course.
And when things get really crazy, we are able to be gentle with ourselves and be grateful for the anchor of routine. This isn’t a rigid, inflexible thing. It is a shape we create inside our lives. A place to put the things that matter the most.
Words. Stacks of them pile up over hours and hours which become days and days. Then weeks and months. Eventually years. This is a decision about how to spend a life. It isn’t a thing a person decides to do once in a while when the mood feels right, the angle of the light is just so or the inspiration has heated our juices. This is decision that gets made about the same time every single day. Write or don’t write. Either way, you are cultivating a habit. You are living your routine.
The Awful Things List
I am starting a list of awful things. This will be a list of things that disturb me, terrify me and unsettle my soul. I’m talking about gut fear. I’m talking about existential dread.
Relax. I’m not going to let you actually read this list. This is the kind of list archvillians use to neutralize their adversaries, rendering them useless to the world. This list is my kryptonite, my darkest closet, my worst bad dreams.
You won’t get to see the list itself. I hope you get to see what comes from it.
Fear is rich mulch for creative work. Fear and dread, when dealt with honestly, are the loam from which great stories arise.
I am keeping this list as an act of faith. I will keep this list as a way to make these fears manifest. It is a kind of conjuration. And then, I will write my way through the center of these fears. I will follow the stories through the center of my gut. I will press myself all the way to the back of the closet and beyond into the darkness that reaches out with no arms.
You will know when I have written one of these stories. It will tumble inside you like a upended chair. It will rise in your gut like an unstiffled scream. It will capture you where you stand and look at you with eyes very much like your own. This kind of story will recognize you and you will recognize it. And you will read but the words will be like glass. And the pages will have disappeared. And I will be standing inside your head. And you will be standing inside mine. And we will be holding each other bravely, giving each other courage and honoring the magic that comes when brutal honesty meets fear.
Flash Fiction: Parcel
I like to play around with words sometimes. Just put on a song and improvise a quick story to capture the sense of the music. It is a lot of fun to write this way. I can’t promise what it will be like to read. It is what it is.
Tonight’s song: Ear Parcel by Lamb.
******
Prompt: Ear Parcel by Lamb
He turned the paper over in his hands, his mind grasping for the unknowable numbers on the lost fragment. He had found the paper under the front seat of his girlfriend’s car. Torn, the paper only showed four numerals written in pencil. Four numbers. Three more numbers on the missing piece made it a phone number. Of course, nine made it an ISBN. One made it a zip code.
He wanted a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked in months but right now he wanted to smoke an entire pack. He wanted to light up and feel each disappear into the hot, bright light of his anger.
He wanted to burn the note. If it was a note. Maybe it was just a random scribble. Maybe it meant nothing. He should throw it away. Or put it back under the front seat of her car where he found it. Neither option worked for him.
So he stood outside her car, waiting. Any minute now she would walk out the front door of the office building with a dozen other people. She would see him waiting for her. She would smile. Then she would recognize that impatient, hurt look on his face. She would see the piece of paper in his hand and her smile would slip. In that moment, he would know everything. If he watched her carefully, in that one unguarded moment, he would know.
People were leaving the office building now. Tired faced men and women chatting as they fanned out into the parking lot to gather their cars and drive off to rejoin the parts of their lives they leave waiting for them while they are working.
And that was the worst part of it all, for him. There were parts of her life which he knew nothing about. There were entire stretches of her day which did not include him. There wasn’t even a boyfriend-shaped hole in that space for her. When she was working, he had might as well not even exist. When he tried to call, she was always in a meeting. When he sent a text, the message went unanswered or, worse, the curt reply: can’t talk now.
People were leaving the building. Some of them were smiling. Some were serious and sad-faced. They all knew his girlfriend, all of them. Knew her in a way he could never know her. She was a colleague. A coworker. A manager.
The way these people knew her. The lightness with which they carried that knowledge with them. The smug air they had.
A dark haired man in a nice suit smiled as he went past. Nodded. “Nice day,” he said in a way that made it impossible to tell if he meant it as an observation or an invocation. Either way, the man broke eye contact quickly and shuffled off to his car.
Guilty. That man had looked guilty. The smile was covering his guilt but the boyfriend could see through it. Suddenly, the boyfriend knew with absolute surety that the man had put his hands all over his girlfriend, had rubbed and smoothed and fondled her. Maybe only just moments ago. Maybe she was still inside, smoothing her dress, straightening her jacket, tucking in her blouse.
Maybe, if he could grab the man’s phone and see the last four numbers he would find that they matched the four numbers in his hand. That would seal it. He would know and she would be caught. There would be no escape. There would be no denial.
Except the man was already gone, leaving the parking lot in his sporty gray BMW. The boyfriend felt angry to be standing beside his girlfriend’s navy blue Camry. This was not the life she wanted. This was not the car she wanted to be driving. He was not the man she wanted to be taking home.
He crumpled the paper and held it in his fist. Somedays it was hard not to want to hit something. Everything was so unfair.
He opened his hand, smoothed the note out on his leg. She needed to see the note. He needed her to see the note in his hand.
The doors opened. There she was, leaving alone, smiling. Content with herself for a day’s work well done. Then she saw him and smiled wider. She actually skipped a step or two as she came to meet him. And then she was standing before him, the note unseen. She kissed his cheek.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she said, still smiling and went to the other side of the car.
“Sure,” the boyfriend said, unsure how this was supposed to go next.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked as he opened his door. “I was hoping for Thai carryout. There’s a new place we need to try. I’ve got the number written somewhere in this car.”
All at once, the air in the car was lighter. He felt his fists relaxed. He remembered the face of each person who had left the building and then, one by one, forgot them. They were strangers. They were inconsequential.
“Sure. Thai carryout sounds great.”
Writing, Running, Meditation and the Inescapability of Time
Being on vacation this week with no specific plans or agenda has given me the chance to reconnect with three activities that always help rebuild my sanity and restore my soul: running, writing and meditation. All three are habitual acts which, when practice, help me crawl out of my head and back into my body. While running this afternoon I was struck by the common thread between them. The practice of each puts me into a direct, inescapable experience of time.
When running, there are no short cuts. You set a goal (either time or distance), you start running and, whether you reach the goal or shop short, the entire time you are running there is nothing else happening. There are no distractions. There is no escape from the fact of what you are doing. When you are running, your body is doing only that. Your mind may be thinking thoughts. You may not be thinking about running but some part of your mind is always aware that you are running. There is an autonomy that takes over the body when you are running. Running does not require careful thought or specific planning beyond the simple, consistent mantra to keep going. The thing I like about running is that direct contact with time. Twenty minutes is not an abstract thing. When running, you feel every part of twenty minutes. There is a focus that comes from no where else. When running, you are doing those twenty minutes and those twenty minutes are doing you.
Writing is the same way. The only way to get words on a screen is to put them there. You cannot simply wait for them to appear. You have to put them there. There is always a first word. Then a second. Then a third. Usually, the words quickly group themselves into sentences. When you are writing well, you aren’t concious of reaching for specific words. You build the page by sentences – one after one, like laying bricks side by side on a wall. In writing, there is no escape. You can”t cheat. You have to hold the seat and do the time and stack the sentences together until they make something that did not exist before. Again, like running, writing requires its own focus. You cannot write while thinking of anything else. You can’t write and do the dishes. You can’t write and pay the bills. When you are writing there is an order and a logic to your life. You are writing and you are only writing and when you are finished writing you are doing something else.
Running puts me into the mindset for writing. When running, I always get the next idea or the next sentence or some other clear, specific gift to help the words get on the screen.
Mediation is much harder. If you really want to be placed in direct experience of time, you should sit on a cushion and do nothing but sit. You realize quickly that the mind is a wild creature, an untamed monkey, constantly trying to escape the present moment and rush forward to some unseen moment that does not yet exist. It is a painful thing. It is unpleasant and frightening. It feels maddening and you are always a bit relieved when it is over. And yet, when you practice meditation and cultivate the habit of sitting with no gaining idea, you find you are able to settle down into the moment. In those few seconds, your body and mind are the same. They share the same purpose. They are relaxed and calm. They belong with you, and you belong with them. This is called mindfullness.
And then moment is gone and your mind is rushing ahead again, careening away from your seat with manic speed and abandon. Why is your mind so desperate to escape? What is it that has your mind so frightened? And even as your mind rushes away and you feel the loss of those few perfect moments, you recognize the distinction between how it felt when you were sitting and mindful and when you are were sitting and grasping, desperate for the ending bell to ring. And that recognition, while tinged with frustration and loss, is also a realization that we are delusional most of our waking lives. That we live and breathe and move inside of time but constantly struggle to place ourselves outside of time. We are always wasting these few fragile moments that belong with us to reach for things that do not yet exist. We are psychotic and time-sick and vow never to sit in meditation again because the experience is so disturbing and unsettling. But then we stand and are grateful because we have once again learned to see how moments connect – how the present becomes the past and also becomes the future. And how neither the past nor future have ever really existed. Only the present. Only this place. Only the place where I am now and the place where you are and so on.
I am writing about three kinds of transcendence. Often difficult. Often uncomfortable, yet somehow, each brings me back into myself. I have a tendency to climb up into my head and stay there like a cat caught in a tree. It is good to know I can always find my way down if I am willing to be uncomfortable and feel the passing of time. The experience of discomfort is always worth it. It always places me safely back on solid ground.
Ubiquitous. Quotidian. 