Author: Benna

This weekend I took the time to explore articles, chapters, ads, and even signposts that had any sort of letters and words I could manipulate to create #blackoutpoetry. Since I am not so much of a poetic person, I thought this experience would be a bit more difficult; however, after creating 3 of them, I learned some powerful truths on what it means to be a maker.

• power of scarcity: inspires you to create your own using the available resources.
• power of frugality: build something through the means of deleting rather than adding more.
• power of becoming: meaning-making can be serendipitous or the constant state of “not yet” allows you to enjoy the process and takes the pressure of productivity 

This activity taught me the joy of passivity by deleting the through the words. Instead of reading on, I was able to skip, hop, and jump through the words and make rich connections between two, three, or four words that seem distant from each other. In those moments, I found respite and healing from the constant do’s of work. 

In the first one I came up with was:

Children

the passage Left Behind has been narrow

Since this was a dry article on gifted and talented Excellence Gap, it wasn’t easy to pick and choose which words I wanted to let go because so many phrases used in the article were dry. On the other hand, deleting some adjectives allowed me to be inclusive for all children who struggle and the phrase “the passage” had wider connotative implication instead of the denotation the phrase had actually intended.

The second and third experiments led me to an anthropological take on humanity’s wants. When I went to Costco to buy snacks for my daughter, I purchased a box of chips labeled non-GMO that also had least calories compared to that of other chips. What caught my eyes was that the bag also had words and phrases I thought I could use for #blackoutpoetry. When I mentally deleted some words, I thought it would be fun to create new meanings out of the bag of chips. Instead what the activity taught me was it revealed the helplessness of the health-less snacks we’ve been consumed with for the past years. Although they were non-GMO vegetable snacks, I saw the traces of battle against people’s hunger for salt, fat, and colors. Not to mention the subliminal message imbedded in the word words luring away people to buy their products, especially the third one below!

Moist

Free tested .

Squeeze wet, creamy.  ; )

As a former ESL student, I can see how #blackoutpoetry can become a powerful tool to engage students whose English may be a second or third language. It places a tremendous power on the students who might have had less success with usage, mechanics, semantics, and so on. It allows them to delete, manipulate, connect, and make meanings the way these words “speak to them”. The activity can even trigger them to find English interesting and even beautiful because it gives them the power to create meanings apart from prescribed instruction on the language.

For me, this activity has been therapeutic. 🙂

Paideia approach to learning forces us as teachers to admit what crime we have been committing against children.

Dear friends, we are proven guilty.

Accustomed to the western rhetoric of educational pedagogy, we confess to you what penchant we have for control, dominance, and power over our children’s minds.

Constantly emboldened by its desire to conquer, the West has always been in position to press on to dominate any unclaimed terrain. It is always about more, not less. It is always about dividing, erecting and building what we possess. For the West, silence has been a ghost it must put on trial for daring to challenge its dominance.

We have been part of that history. The remnants of western thinking bore deep into our educational world views. And Paideia approach is pushing us to undo that very system of thinking.

The more we facilitate seminars among teachers and children, the more we learn to distinguish silence from compliance. Often times we have been attracted by silence and mistaken it with compliance, but they are not the same. Silence summons strength and builds expectation while compliance attempts to scatter it. Silence makes rooms for ideas while compliance drives out ideas.

“When a teacher waits for a child to figure something out . . . it conveys the message that [the teacher] expects the child to be able to accomplish it. Failure to wait conveys the opposite message. Waiting time also offers respect – a relational property that is the lifeblood of a learning community”

– Peter Johnson, Choice Words

We live in a culture that values opinion instead of listening to the values behind their opinion. Empowered by its aggression and power,  both children and adults are pressured to produce or do something to fill anything that seems to be unclaimed and open. Often times, we feel like wait time is a ghost we must fight to seize, subdue, and conquer.

In many ways, our classrooms have always mirrored this strange and destructive habit of mind of opinionated claims. We catch ourselves lifting up and honoring those who participate rather than those who choose to observe. We praise when a child lets an opinion known but penalize a child whose mind we can’t read. We say “you must participate” or we say “you get a participation grade because you spoke X time”.

We as teachers and adults keep on poking, prodding, and elicit responses from our children because that’s how learning can be quantified based on our standards. We force our students to show something to us, the sole judge and the authority in the classroom. We legitimize our power over our students and constantly “check their thinking” and validate or refute how they should think for themselves. Their thoughts have to be notarized, legitimized, and made right in the eyes of adults.

This is a crime committed against the minds of American children.

Co-leading Paideia approach to Socratic seminars with ELA teachers across all grade levels in middle school, I realize the beautiful role of letting go of control and allowing wait time to be part of our seminar experience.  Silence is an invitation for those who need thinking time, those who need to weave patterns, concepts they conjure up in their minds. Silence is the soft pillow they can lay their thoughts. It’s like a baby cradled in the hands of a nurturer.

Simply put, less is more.

For some adults and children, wait time is a torture. It compels them to start the rescue mission for the whole class by constantly throwing words like confetti. I agree that silence can be a quicksand. Without a framework or guiding questions, it can be a quicksand that would drag all of us down and invite murkiness, disengagement, and distraction; however, we should not be afraid to try it. 

We need to use wait time to gauge where children are in their quiet thinking journey. In that silence, we learn to reset our children’s priorities and help them shape meanings, ideas, and thoughts beyond what words can do.

Even when it’s not a seminar, let’s give our students think time. Let’s count down five to ten seconds before we move onto the next student or next thing on our list to teach. 

Savor wait time. Let’s slow down. 

So when I woke up one morning from an unsettling dream, 

I found myself changed into a monstrous vermin...

- Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis 

Kafka’s first sentence from his novella is the perpetual state of who I am as a resource specialist for Advanced Studies. I embrace this reality.

My district’s abnormally high number of “identified” gifted students whose families live in the college town brings unique challenges to an educator like me who has to operate within the state’s budgetary crumbs. Despite the legislation Article 9B that explicitly states that gifted services be provided through the local plan, by the time allotted monies from the county commissioners are distributed to the local district, they get spent on other crisis that demand attention. And I get to pick on the leftovers.

Because I felt like my round back was laid against the floor with my feeble arms and legs wringing in the air,  all I could do was to spend each day listening to people and their values behind their opinions whenever possible. There were times I tried to advocate on what students truly needed, but my voice came out as a distant hiss no one cared to listen.

".... Education policy creates the rules and standards by which limited resources are allocated to meet perceived needs" 

- Dr. Jonathan Plucker, Johns Hopkins University           

I realized that my entomological existence was the manifestations of the reality of educational policy that has a tendency to focus on the now of the educational crisis where the monies vaporize before they reach the needs of the brightest and the gifted. No matter how much the administrators and the district leaders advocate and support my endeavors, the existing barriers and troubles on advanced studies are deeply connected to federal and the state legislature.

It’s the failure to connect the importance of strong education policy on gifted education that shapes the infrastructure necessary to bring about change at the local level.

There isn’t much I can do to change the state of my being as a vermin. I woke up and there I was, but this is not to say that I am hopeless.

Knowing that it’s really the policy that’s causing the heartache, perhaps that in itself may be the hope that something can be done on my own end. I am not quite sure what kind of ladder I need to climb to effectively bring change to the policy at the state and federal level; however, there are some things I plan to do for the next several months to increase the sphere of my influence as a shareholder.

Here are my notes. I hope to:

Attend 2019 Leadership & Advocacy Conference, Alexandria, VA 

Research how other states are supporting gifted education. (So far, I follow @TXGifted  @NJAGCGifted ) 

Support and sharing gifted education policy resources with classroom teachers who are enrolled in the AIG licensure program LAUNCH via Elon University. 

Join the district’s AIG Plan Writing Team with other Gifted Specialists to revise the upcoming local plan.

Lead a poster session at NCAGT to share out the underrepresented gifted clubs my colleagues and I founded at our school.

Present effective gifted models that work at North Carolina Association for Middle Level Education

References

Gallagher, J. (2015). Political issues in gifted education. Journal for the Education of the Gifted. 38(1). 77-89. doi:// 10.1177/0162353214565546

Plucker, J., Makel, M., Matthews, M., Peters, S. & Rambo-Hernandez, K. (2017). Blazing new trails: Strengthening policy research in gifted education. Gifted Child Quarterly. 61(3). 210-218.

Vella, A (2014). “Metamorphosis” Retrieved from https://www.salzmanart.com/alexei-vella.html