unlike grumet, i have never been a journal writer. i made feeble attempts at certain pivotal moments of my life, when as a writer i thought i "should," but after a day or two, i always ended up in the same place: feeling like my writing wasn't authentic, wasn't really me. i hated the way my voice sounded on the journal page; i even scrunched up my nose at the way my writing looked on the page, so fake and prescribed. and i never knew how to begin: "dear self?"
(i continue to love buying journals: i am a sucker for beautiful things. perhaps one of my children will be a journal writer and inherit my two dozen string or leather-bound mostly-empty journals.)
i came to discover blogging two years ago, when i was feeling lonely as a mom (none of my friends had children of their own yet, and i needed to reach out to a wider community who shared my experience) and as a teacher in an unsupported classroom (my creativity felt stuck: i needed an outlet!). blogging felt so much more natural to me than journal writing; i am a member of the AIM generation; i had grown up typing -- not hand-writing -- and i think that very physical, logistical shift had something to do with freeing my authentic voice.
there are dangers to blogging, though. at its very best, my blogging voice asks really good questions, is thoughtful, hopeful, well-read, and even playful. sometimes it challenges beliefs, or asks its readers to re-think. but at its loudest, my writer's voice can seem didactic, all-knowing, and even judgmental. (that voice was born from loving both anna quindlen and my mother.) interestingly, as a person operating in the real world, i am constantly in flux with my opinion, and although i am willing to share what i have learned at any given moment, i never assume to have the last word. i work to be open-minded and respectful of others' perspectives. i oftentimes mistrust those who seem absolutely certain in their beliefs, especially if those beliefs are polarizing. ultimately, blogging has shined a light on what i love most and least about writing; it has connected me to community and in dialogue, engaged me as a thinker, and, like grumet, provided me with a witness to my life: "i remember it because i wrote about it" (grumet). it has also provoked me to speak in a more certain and sermonizing tone than i usually employ in my daily life; those posts have provoked amazing conversation, but also made me self-conscious.
apart from writing, or perhaps akin to it, as a thinker, i am a brainstormer, or as grumet might say, a "jotter" and "scrap-collector," and my best thoughts come to me in days of fits and spurts, of post-its on my nightstand and phrases scribbled on my day book. this is a real reflection of my mind: the subtle knowledge that there is a pattern there, and that i must be patient to see it revealed accordingly, in its own time. i have always been a proponent of process. what's more 'process' than life?
after i read grumet's piece, i felt both inspired and frustrated. frustrated only at some of her confusing and lofty word choice and sentence structure. but that aside, i really liked her sensibilities about curriculum: that "education implies our presence in the world," that we need "to return the complexity, specificity, rhythm, and logic of the biographical voice to studies in education," that "teaching must also reverse the process of generalization by returning the world to the specificity of lived experience," and most of all, this: "there is no formula for this relation. it is turned to every writer and reader and to the situation they share. and there is no model for its place in our culture and thought that we can borrow from other enterprises." i loved that. i think it's true. we cannot, and should not, go about wasting our energies in comparing schools to other similar fields, let alone hospitals or factories.
as a writer and a creative person, and a creative teacher, my soul feels at home with grumet's argument, which is also echoed by pinar: education is so subtle and alive and nuanced and "requires subjectivity in order for it to speak" (43). teaching to the test and rallying for an assessment- and data-obsessed culture "ignores the intellectual judgment of the individual educator" (43) and sees study as connotating "only test preparation, not self-cultivation or social democratization"(44). i agree that the educator should be a "participant...in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum" (44) that curriculum itself should be "that which electrifies or gives life to a person's energy source" (47). i, too, would like to see a movement which "reconceptualizes curriculum from course objectives to complicated conversation" (47), so that the classroom can be both "a civic square and a room of one's own" (47).
the most striking statement i read in our assignment was this: "the analysis of currere is...one's distantiation from the past and extrication from the future functions to create a subjective - third - space of freedom in the present" (46). and although pinar ends the chapter by saying that "we find future not in the present, however, but in the past," i felt moved by his earlier focus on the current moment on why it matters, and what we bring to it. that idea of being free in the present was really important to me. and i think it's the message teachers need to hear. (i can feel myself slipping into the didactic blogger voice: oh no! :) teachers, i think, need to be encouraged to focus on the teachable moment, which is, really, every moment in the classroom. teachers have so many distractions that pull them away from those moments: charting behavior, e-mailing parents, tracking test scores; i think we need to remind teachers that their job -- and what a magnificent, honorable job it is! -- is to inspire students to think and be critically aware of the context in which they think. there is a reason teachers can recall certain "teachable moments" -- the ones that, perhaps, changed the course of their careers. and i think that reason might be that they were experiencing the freedom of the present. a space where both teachers and students are aware of everything that is influencing them, and are working to make meaning of all of it, despite artificial constructs (time, grades, scores). those moments are what keep teachers teaching, and students learning.
however, there is a perhaps more practical, if not merely logistical, part of me that wonders: how do we know this is working? how can a principal, for instance, know that the subjective experience of the teacher is also positively affecting the subjective experience of the student? and how do we model for teachers who are uncomfortable with "the call to free indirect subjectivity"? what happens to the teachers who won't get on board? does this redefine who is called to be a teacher entirely? and perhaps most of all, what do we hope this currere movement would accomplish? what do pinar and grumet want schools to look like, what would they like america to look like? even within a subjective curriculum, is there an end goal? is there an objective?
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