this weekend has largely been dominated by the wedding of my father-in-law, thomas, to irene. we had a rehearsal and dinner on thursday night (after which i returned home alone to mililani), the actual wedding on friday, a birthday party for ian (my sister's son) on saturday, and another get-together this evening. all in all, i'm kind of partied out...

it is a beautiful thing for two older, more mature people to find love. it is as though a breeze has suddenly stirred dark coals to fierce life. astonishing. i am happy for both of them, but particularly for thomas, whom i feel is, above all, a decent and upright person. he deserves to be happy.

...

petty, but what has largely preoccupied my thoughts this weekend has been my recent (friday's) observed lesson. i teach a preschool sped class. i decided (somewhat at the last minute) to utilize the theymightbegiants dvd, "here come the abc's", and in particular, the song, "can you find the hidden letter?" in that song, letters are hidden in the pictures. my idea was to use this song and its game as the springboard for having kids identify letters in a variety of contexts. i wanted kids to practice perceiving letters everywhere, not just on the cards taped up on the walls. this, i felt, was an exercise in emergent literacy; empowering kids to perceive letters (text) in a variety of contexts, from cereal boxes, to t-shirts, to (of course) newspapers and books.

i thought the lesson went well. but my observing teacher said, quite plainly, that she "didn't see the point" of what i had done, and that i "was all over the place." after stating her overall negative assessment of my lesson, she had the nerve to ask me how i thought the lesson went. what was i supposed to say? i told her quite honestly that i thought the lesson had gone well. i proceeded to attempt to defend myself, by stating that recognizing letters in a variety of contexts was the beginning of literacy; it was applying letter recognition as taught via cards, etc. to more real life situations. she nodded her head, but in the end, still said that "i hadn't actually taught the kids anything."

okay, so she may have a point. but i ask you: what do you explicitly teach a group of kids how to do? i do a lot of work in smaller groups, and within that context, do spend a lot of one-on-one time to address particular skills that students need: how to correctly hold a pencil, how to write the number 4 with correct stroke order, color recognition, etc. and in larger groups, i have read stories, asking comprehension questions, color/number/letter questions, etc. in all of that, i am not clear what my observing teacher wanted. was i supposed to teach these kids how to read cvc words!?

[while my policy is never to edit my posted work, i realized i was pretty negative and critical in this posting. i apologize for any judgmental comments i may have made, and place my faith in a larger perspective that can understand and forgive, and, more importantly, be humble...]

...

right now, i'm kind of feeling blah. i really slept a lot yesterday into today, and had a string of really disturbing dreams... in many of my most disturbing dreams, there is the image of water, like the rain drainage canals, only, they go down deep, deep, and even into the bottomless seas. and they are inhabited by creatures and nameless shifting rotting things. the interface between the deep abysmal waters and the sewers/gutters is where the "humanistic" horrors live. under that, there is a vast darkness that makes all man, all meaning, all of the middling, contextualize the spectrum efforts of man, completely irrelevant. there are shadowy vast carnivorous creatures that would swallow our whole civilization without hesitation, like so much plankton. an eye so vast that we are but dust motes on the fluid over its all-consuming iris...

jung said that the waters were the symbol of the collective unconscious. and so i always see dreams of waters, even the interface between the civilized world above and the waters below (via the sewers/gutters) as dreams of the relationship between my fragile self and the vast collective unconscious. those who are naive think that the waters can be mastered, that we as rational man can "make sense" of the forces we have superimposed our order over. but they are wrong. we are minute, we are as close to nothing as can be. our "order" is nothing but a chant we have repeated over and over to ourselves, to convince ourselves of its veracity. but it is all made up...

civilization, according to chinese (and other cultural) mythology has been the taming of the floods, by various means, including irrigation. but in our high-and-dry times, we have forgotten our relationship to the fearful waters. we believe in our cities, in our social networks. we believe they can save us all. in fact, we are so confident that we don't believe there is any danger to begin with. but a day is coming, i think, when we will confront the waters again, both externally (results of global warming and the acid seas) and internally (psychological washing erosion of ancient pre-cultural fears)...

ugly thoughts, i know.

...

well, i'd best do my shabby little part to stave the tides. i think i'll clean up this wreck of a house and pretend an order into being in my life... until next time, whoever you may be, oh lost and bewildered reader, take care...