Set in Stone

good one ty for sharing a 10 for you

Gerry - I might need to spend some more time to get all the intricacies here. I can relate to dreams of Education officials changing perspective and eating the crow of their past. I'm not sure I get the love of deadlines. Is it the thankfulness of being finished? I fear I am missing your message. The stark language, though, is perfect for the bleak reflection I sense you are addressing.

Gerry, I remember my teaching days when you express your angst over the deadlines. I began losing all joy and the enjoyment in teaching as each lesson became a statistic, a chronicled 'progress made by the teacher' in so and so month, days, weeks....!!
Once I left, I missed all my students and the interactions and sometimes I wonder--is it getting any better or has it become worse?
God knows!
Your poem says the guys who go off into ' hinterland of apology' are still making life tough on teachers. Well written!
By the way, I really liked that line...hinterland of apology.

Thank you all for reading this; I fear this was too powerfully negative to be comfortable. I don't know, Minnie, it might be worse, and Tom, I don't think you're missing much. The love of deadlines is about a weird kind of relief with the coming of a deadline, to see if I'd survive the grand curriculum inquisition. Our school is going through a big five-year 'school improvement' process that makes everyone crazy. Now they are dictating that everyone has to not only have a written curriculum but also enter it in as computer data, which means ungodly amounts of work. The assumption is that no one will ever change or innovate anything again, I guess. Heaven forbid that a teacher should change anything from one year to the next!

As a foreign language teacher, the state department of ed has not really figured out how to put us in little boxes, at least not yet, and my work is unlikely to face much scrutiny, so I opted out of most of this work. Yesterday was a big day of solid curriculum, and I did none. My principal even sent me to town for new recycling bins and came out to help me run the forklift when I was moving some big boxes of materials. He helped inspire this by saying "As far as I'm concerned, the best thing that could happen would be abolishing the state department of education and spending all that money somewhere where it's needed."

So even though I largely escaped, I have to live in the environment and watch everyone else suffering much more than me, see the drain on creativity and morale and all the waste. So I let off some steam.

Ed, I feel for you. In my district, we are required to have painstaking written curricula for all classes. Many of them are 10-15 pages long! I am currently going through about 40 of them to evaluate for Credit by Exam at the local community college - a good way to drive students to take these classes as electives. We are also in the middle of WASC and school improvement - all with a our 3rd principal in the last 4 years. At least I don't teach Leadership anymore. Every time I realize that, it makes me smile. LOL.

There won't be any of that Saturn-square-Education energy left soon. I'm kidding, sort of....
What I mean to say is that Godys / matriarchal knowingness + WildWood energy is moving in faster than curmudgical fuddy-duds could imagine, moving in through the Dreamtime, and the Winds of the Metaverse are whispering heaven into all the students' heartminds.

And multiverse linguistics must have their daynightday, after all.

Oops, I meant Gerry.

Tom, it sounds like you've been through at least as much as I have and probably much more over curriculum.

Carolion--I love that thought! I haven't heard the term "WildWood energy" before but it's a good one. And this line is a poem in itself--"the winds of the Metaverse are whispering heaven into all the students' heartminds." I believe you are right, despite the day-to-day chaos, or I'd be really discouraged about this. Thank you for brightening my day!

Gerry, this is a wonderfully formed and balanced poem, from the light first line of dream to imagined waking and changing of positions, to come back to the ravens, graves, stony. And it's full of urgent currency, the needs and goals of learning labored over as if they were somehow incomprehensible. Because actually is political accountability and careers that are the subject being taught. And into this you bring each day your light, whatever you can.

John, you nailed it! Of course, learning is far from incomprehensible, and all that these state procedures do is turn it into nonsense. Learning is easy and unstoppable in the real world. It's only in schools that it all gets lost in process. Thanks for reminding me of that, because I wasn't thinking along those lines when I wrote this. I also appreciate your generosity because I wasn't thinking of this as very good work but more an exercise in letting off steam.

If this was just letting off steam, then it shows how your aesthetics have become second nature, because it is quite formed and graceful but with complete freedom to let any line be what it wants to be.

I got out of the California school system after 6 years teaching elementary school bilingual just after Bush came on board, but the description of the deadweight of the politicos and the bureaucratic administrators in the apparatchik who represent their pressuring applies far back beyond the current insanity of No Child Left Behind; the race toward the classroom as a rocket to the standardized test score began years ago, and has only climaxed with Bush. This poem has the elegance and critical distance of Gogol in Dead Souls; it is strange but it reminds me of dissident Soviet poetry. ¨These dreams I dream of dreaming¨is a line Danilo Kis could have written. Marvelous compression and irony here, Gerry.

John Beck--if I'm getting better at poetry it's because people like you keep feeding me...

John Walter--I haven't heard of Gogol or Danilo Kis, but thanks for getting them onto my radar screen. Compression...I'm going to fall asleep tonight thinking about that. Thank you both so very much.