A b e c e d a r i a n

Looking for Ancestors

I came to education through literature. It was my encounters with Joyce ("Portrait of An Artist"), the Latin American Poets from Neruda to Vallejo and Lorca, Rilke (because every young aspiring poet must encounter him), and then onto Whitman, Emerson, Twain, and William Carlos Williams, who defined for me a way of observing and reporting on the world, and an aesthetic for attending to and conversing with it. The educators who spoke most eloquently to me were those who were writers as well as teachers: George Dennison: The Lives of Children; Lucy Sprague Mitchell: Young Geographers; Paul Goodman: Growing Up Absurd; Herb Kohl: Thirty Six Children; the essays and articles of Maxine Greene, organic intellectuals in the veritable sense, whose message was clarion: change the world in the name of all that is beautiful and bountiful in the lives of children.

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These essays then blend the double yellow line of personal knowledge and intellectual ancestry. They are not divisible, any more than we are from our names. My method has cohered with Charles Mingus' who was always using his work and its titles as a way to pay homage to his contemporaries and his teachers: Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (Lester Young), Orange than Blue Silk was the Color of her Dress (Charley Parker), My Jelly Roll Soul (Jelly Roll Morton). How he used the past as a way of locating his own voice. This, too, is where I start.