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Sonar the Sheepdog and Toad the Terror take a personality test!

Posted on by Fig Tree

It’s summer vacation, so it’s time to think about…personality tests!

I was speaking with a colleague a few weeks ago about our Myers Briggs types. I have an interest in the MBTI because I’ve spent so much time with Carl Jung, whose writings on the axes of personality were reduced into the 16 Types structure and then commercialized, a process that found new life with the advent of the online personality test. I humor myself in thinking I can find some deeper, fluid truth behind the rigid determinism of the derivative structure, while also successfully avoiding Jung’s persistent sexism. Good luck, chump! Anyway. I like talking about it.

Another colleague chimed in with a comment about astrology, which, look, fair point, but in the hands of someone who’s like “astrology, fine, let’s talk about it,” that comment isn’t a deterrent. She stated that she got a different type every single time she took the test.

This is contrary to my experience, in which I’ve classed myself as a ENFJ persistently over some 20 years: that is “Extraverted-Intuitive-Feeling-Judging”. I wiggled toward “Introverted” for a time, but I think that was wishful thinking on my part more than anything else (more on our subjectivity toward our subjectivity in a later essay, I think). One way to think of this is that my public persona is best compared to a sheep dog named Sonar who is transparent to what everyone (including himself) feels and so is always trying to gather everyone around him into a herd. The dog named Dug from Pixar’s Up comes to mind. Affable and attentive, on-his-sleeve emotional, somewhat dismissible and unserious. That’s my outward persona and captures some truth of how I instinctually engage the world, and it seems like that’s been true for a long time, despite big changes in my life and the long arc of adulthood.

Perhaps because of that disposition, I didn’t ask my colleague any questions, but rather clocked the emotional tone of the comment (i.e. “personality tests make me frowny”) and went about my day — but my curiosity lingered. And here’s another thing I’ve come to think of as an aspect of my personality through the lens of this MBTI type: if my dominant mode of engagement with the world is “extraverted-feeling,” my non-dominant or shadow mode of engagement with the world is “introverted-thinking,” which Jung seemed to think we would experience as something of an attack when it was active. So my curiosity turned this colleagues’ comment over and over in my mind, and with time my thinking became more and more energetic, until another character of mine, one decisively not in my public persona, came to the fore: let’s call him Toad the Terror. Contra the Wind in the Willows character, my Toad the Terror is not all instinct, but he is a breathless and aggressive thinker whose rationality is tempered somewhat by being a Toad with the title “the Terror”. It’s not that he’s angry, he’s actually pure joy, but don’t get in his way. (Dear reader, I always get in his way.)

While Toad the Terror likes to ride the engine of my mind recklessly, he has his uses (“he chanted as he flew, and the car responded with a sonorous drone…). He is, after all, a part of me, and if I can slow him down enough to hear the connections he makes, he brings me all kinds of food for thought.

So I was thinking about this idea that one can get different results on a personality test over time, which on one hand could be a critique of a personality test as hopelessly inaccurate or subjective, and on the other hand could be a critique of the idea…that we stay the same over time! It can do work for both sides. So I wanted to take a step back and think about what we mean by personality.

I’d start with the question: are there invariants to a person’s character, detectable in their behavior, relationships, and self-reflection? What stays the same in a person as they grow? What changes? If a personality test is supposed to tell you something about you as You, how can it best describe those invariants? If your results to a personality test change, does that reflect a changing invariant (gross), or something else?

I’ll start with a safe claim: there are invariants to a person. There are things they do that make them them. These qualities can have two sources, in my thinking: they are either embodied, having been established early in life as our instinctual dispositions on an unconscious level, or they are spiritual, in the sense that they transcend our earthly, temporal form. When I talk about the former, I have the processes of depth and developmental psychology in mind, as well as baser matters like genetics. We’ve been natured, we’ve been nurtured, and the contour of those influences are established early in our human form. When I talk about the latter, I am thinking of the way the author Catherine MacCoun, following Trungpa Rinpoche, talks about “style”, the essence, what we mean when we refer to a person’s spirit. It is not reducible to material, environmental influence. It’s what’s there there.

To that point: I don’t believe these categories of embodied and spiritual are mutually exclusive or independent of one another; it’s just convenient to think of them along these lines. (Spoiler alert, this is not my first dance with dualism in this essay, nor will not be my last. Buckle up!)

The designation of invariants implies the presence of variables. (Please see the spoiler alert above, I known what I’m about.) There are things that change about you. Let’s call them mutables. The embodied and spiritual categories can do some work for me here: what is materially mutable for you is your ever-changing environment and relations. Major changes in your life can change your patterns of behavior, your manner of relating to others, and your values: becoming a parent, falling in love, winning the lottery, experiencing loss or trauma, getting religion, what have you. And what is mutable for you in spirit is that restless ego-persona of yours: the thinker-doer-chooser, the agent at the center of consciousness but not the center of the Self. This character’s fickleness is famed. Descartes was particularly concerned for this fellow, and implied his capacity for being profoundly deceived.

Same caveat here but now in two dimensions: not only does your material environment and relations influence your conscious agency and vice versa, but your experiences in the material world are a road test for your spiritual-invariant style, and your ego-consciousness is always in a tense standoff with your embodied, instinctual navigation of the world: they are two different sets of values, conscious and unconscious, always pulling in tangential or even opposite directions.

I’m going to need a chart! But developing a transcendent meta-structure for personality is beyond the scope of this post. I’m here to talk about the interesting problems of personality tests.

So along comes our modest personality test, which should ideally raise up the invariants of one’s personality, and will have some explaining power to describe how that invariant character navigates the mutables of its life. As busking street performers say: “that ain’t easy!” Not because an exhaustive taxonomy is impossible (MBTI defines 16 different types of people; the Enneagram has 18 when you account for wings; I suppose the Big Five Traits people would claim something like a continuum?), but because personality has one more salient quality: complementarity.

Complementarity is most commonly associated with quantum physics. In that realm, its origin lies in the work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, or perhaps earlier, when it became clear that when describing light, it was accurate to describe it as both a wave and a particle, two mutually exclusive ways of being, in order to account for all of its observable behavior. Conversely, if you prioritized one aspect of light too much, you would lose essential behaviors as described by the other aspect. At an early stage of quantum inquiry, classical assumptions did not adequately describe atomic and sub-atomic behavior. At that scale, different rules applied. Following the work of Neil Theise, this idea of focus-on-one-lose-the-other is precisely a problem that occurs at any movement from different scales of organization in the world. The positive product of complementarity is emergence, the appearance of a new observable behavior that could not be predicted on the basis of the prior scale of investigation alone.

For our purposes here, it goes like this. That which is invariant in a person, and that which is mutable, are in a complimentary relationship with one another. Look at one too closely and the other, out of focus, behaves unpredictably and your describing power is diminished. I think that this is the tension that personality tests, and their users, are perpetually caught within. Personality tests need some sense of development or growth within them, while also resting on sound categories of invariant character, to really do the job well. We would need to read them in this way to get anything useful out of it as well. Focus too much on the invariant, and we get caught in determinism. Focus too much on the accidents of the current moment or the present whimsy of the ego, we make personality into a mirror of our circumstances — which I suppose is another kind of determinism! (All of this, it seems, is just as applicable to astrology, and I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain etc.)

Finally, then, to the point! Persistent and dynamic, invariant and mutable, body and spirit, a product of its environment and a free agent: our personality is an emergent property of multi-dimensional web of mutuality, unfolding forth unpredictably from along each axis, not collapsible to any one node. To layer on another physics metaphor, our personality is a three body problem, where the third body is the whole of the other two.

We’re a dance! No wonder those personality test questionnaires are so long. And for my skeptical colleague, I would ask, Sonar the Sheepdog jostling politely with Toad the Terror for the wheel — what has the test always said about you? What does it say now? And does it mean anything for you?

Justice/Religion in Culture/Teaching/Theology/Zen

A Classroom has a Soul

Posted on by Fig Tree

When I was in seminary, I had planned my master’s thesis around the title “Psyche and Spirit in the Classroom.” I see now that this was a skew frame, at an awkward angle, that made it unnecessarily difficult to apply the tools for thinking and seeing that I had gathered in my training. From the perspective of complexity: I was observing the wrong scale. From the perspective of engineering: I had drawn an incomplete system. From the perspective of education and progressive pedagogy, I misunderstood the proper field of reflection on my work as a teacher.

From the perspective of theology, I made a category mistake — what I needed to explore was, “Psyche and Spirit of the Classroom.” To the point: the classroom has a soul, that nexus between the embodied, unconscious constituent elements (psyche) and the animating, holistic awareness (spirit); that heart of being, where will and ideal meet and open the way for action, for reflection, for growth, for compassion, for something new in the world.

The classroom has a soul. Psychodynamically, it has a internal culture, a character, a potential space that holds in tension the inner experience and the outside world, that is made stronger by trust or made weaker (that is, fractured, schizoid) by imposition of the “real world” on it. In Buddhist terms, it is a unity composed of vast diversity, that becomes a harmonious, cacophonous community that realizes the Way (Suzuki Roshi said: “things as it is”). Again from the perspective of complexity, the classroom’s inner experience of of itself is an emergent property of its constituent elements (students and teacher) acting according to a fixed set of simple, local rules. From the perspective of progressive pedagogy: the classroom is a community first, composed of interrelated and interdependent free persons, that engage in democratic process to be accountable to one another and grow their collective wealth.

For all my years as an educator, I have wondered about what a classroom is, what it is for, how it creates change; why students do what they do, and what the teacher can contribute; and finally, what the classroom can create in students to respond to our contemporary crises, adapt as a community, and make progress together. As a math teacher I’ve often started with the distinction between narrow mathematical skills (the “what”) and broader habits of mind (the “how”) but its a natural move to generalize this tension to other subjects, and then of course to a classroom’s or school’s purpose in the context of our culture, society, economy, politics, etc. What are we trying to do here? What will happen no matter what given our structure and the incentives students understand, and what can we actually change in them, and in the world?

Helpfully, to ground this, I have returned repeatedly to thinking about the math classroom, over cycles of reflection, over years and years of practice. To articulate the basic tension, I’ve long relied on Magdalene Lampert’s work (particularly in Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching or the essay “When the Problem is Not the Question and the Solution is Not the Answer”) to articulate two goals of my math classroom.

  • Learn the math.
  • Learn how to be the kind of people who learn math.

When I say, “the math” in the first goal, I refer to School Math, a set of procedures and objects that are narrowly defined and even overdetermined in what our society expects of schooling. I say overdetermined, because there are so many factors that narrow what might be called “Mathematics” and its practice to a sequence of “algebra-geometry-calculus-or-statistics” that most people see it as natural; so while educators in literature and history and the languages and arts and sometimes even science can create classrooms with radically different forms and content, while still addressing the heart of their respective content area, math somehow still has to be “the math that I learned when I was in school”. This is the same math whose symbols are used whenever anyone wants to represent the experience of schooling itself: a right triangle with the trigonometric ratios indicated, or an algebraic equation with the omnipresent “x”. Both of these are as natural to some cultural ideal of “schooling” as other symbols that most would recognize as outmoded or traditional, like a diagrammed sentence to teach grammar, or perhaps a book report on George Washington read aloud, more hagiography than history. These images are easy to build upon: red apple on the teacher’s desk; American flag on the wall, next to the clock and the bell; wooden desks in rows, 30 or 35 children directing all eyes at the bespectacled matron at the chalkboard, or frantically scribbling away at an exam, which each will receive back with a circle grade in red pen. (While this collective imagine is familiar even if your schooling didn’t look like it, you will recognize the common experience of all these associating school with being BORING.)

All very evocative; but if I’m thinking of the salient features for my guiding questions here (What is a classroom? Why do students do what they do? What can a classroom do?), I zoom in on a few important details. There’s the top-down instruction, a pedagogy and theory of knowledge that makes students passive receivers of knowledge and the teacher the active possessor of that knowledge, and also the sense that each student is fundamentally making an individual effort (my desk, my test) for an individual outcome (my grade).

The second goal that I have relied upon addresses this while maintaining the individual frame: it asks, what kind of person is a person that learns mathematics? Well, this could be about the qualities of the individual (paying attention, taking notes, completing homework, studying — or even the more progressive-sounding “reflecting” or “taking risks”) but I have always favored an interpretation that bring mathematics forward as an activity practiced in community — we do math when we do math together. So: listening to peers, asking them questions, discussing your own approach, solving problems together, reflecting and sharing in the hopes of moving the work of the class forward. These are communal efforts that, it is assumed, will be reflected in each students’ pursuit of the first goal. In fact, this is often how I’ve framed it for my students when explaining to them the value I find in my discussion-based style of classroom: you will learn the math better here. And on the way, as a nice side result, we’ll do something that looks like how real math is done in community, and will even tie in certain democratic tendencies at the heart of progressive pedagogy.

But truth be told, this doesn’t break out of the persistent individualistic frame that our school’s are created around, and to demonstrate this central truth I don’t have to pull down collective images floating in the ether. On the contrary, I will point out something so obvious that it doesn’t seem to bear repeating: our schools are literally built around a personal effort/reward system. Kids know this in their bones. Any reference to some kind of Good outside of this incentive structure, whether it be a deeper knowledge of math or a comfort with intellectual struggle or some familiarity with democratic process, will always, always be filtered through the individual effort/reward sieve. This is a source of frustration for teachers who believe that learning is something more than an individual effort, and that knowledge worth knowing can be collapsed into the grade-reward — but why? It’s what we’re here to do. It’s a delusion (in the descriptive sense) to imagine schooling as directing its energy anywhere else. And it’s a delusion (in the moral sense) to direct our frustration at students about this! They are doing what we’ve told them. If they think their effort can make the cut, they pursue the reward. If they think their effort cannot make the cut, they reject the reward. This is very rational behavior.

This frustration among teachers makes sense though, because we recognize that this structure that centers individual effort/reward is not necessarily a feature of education, but a human-generated system that has chosen to identify certain priorities at the expense of others. So we can channel that frustration to push back, to say: individual effort/reward is not enough. It comes out of a capitalist and neoliberal system; it is reductive and infantilizing; it is not within the great tradition of human wisdom and its transmission from generation to generation. It reduces teachers to mid-level bureaucrats, petty tyrants of their little domain, demanding obedience and production in exchange for duly-rewarded credentials. Or worse, we become involuntary agents of the market, the point of transaction between “hours of attention begrudgingly paid” and “incremental units of learning”. We lock students in to a economic and political outlook that valorizes infinite growth, bootstrap individualism, constant hustle and all of those consequences we’ve been taught to live with: gross inequality, neverending competition, fossil-fuel dependence, climate change, socialism for the rich and prisons for the poor, the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and all of the endemic social systems that protect the dominant paradigm

However, those priorities are baked in already! Do we award grades? Yes. Do those grade represent what individual students produced individually? Overwhelmingly, yes. These are the only salient facts here. Everything else is moralistic handwringing — or, when done institutionally, marketing. Our school offers what every other school offers, what any school can possibly offer in our system. Would you like your rugged-individualism-for-profit to be democratically flavored? Would you like the artsy variety? Or perhaps the rigorous variety, of an older vintage? It becomes a kind of consumer preference, and its just as empty.

Here I’d point out that the question, “how do we support individuals in pushing back against the unsustainable and cruel dominant paradigm” is one that most religious institutions exist to answer. It’s an important first step to recognize that when we talk about individual reward/effort incentives in schools, the call is coming from inside the house, and with good reason. I think in our current economic-political-social system, we will not get it outside of the house. It’s what built the house. But the practice of religious communities can help us think about how we might introduce students to something different, something ethical, something new.

I should not have been surprised when I came to that conclusion, that schools can learn something from religion, given my background. Nonetheless it surprised me when I came to it, because I came from a different direction entirely. Let me try to summarize that.

A complex system is one in which units interact according to a simple set of local rules to generate a structure at a higher scale, whose properties we could not necessarily predict based on the individual actors and the rules. The classic example of this is an ant colony, an entity whose famous complexity results, not from the direction of some kind of overmind directing the ant’s efforts, but the cumulative action of each individual ant’s response to those simple, local rules. This makes a colony adaptive to changes in its environment, in order to ensure the colony’s survival, even though no single ant in the colony can be said to be directing that adaptation or could even be said to be aware of the changes necessary to thrive. The colony’s features, its structure, its various functions of self-sustenance, are all emergent properties. And we feel it is accurate and appropriate to speak of the life of the colony on the scale of the collective, just as we can speak of the life of the ant on the scale of the individual unit.

We could go even further and describe a kind of complementarity between ant and colony — in that when we focus on one or the other, we necessarily lose sight of something essential about the subject of our focus. This references one of the roots of complexity theory in the development of quantum theory and indeterminacy. Focus on a light as a particle, and you lose sight of the ways in which it is a wave; focus on an electron’s position, and you lose sight of it’s momentum. This is not a feature of insufficiently accurate measurements, it is a practical limit to what we can perceive when moving between scales of investigation. This complementarity, translated to the example above, says: look at one ant and you don’t see it’s participation in the colony, which is essential to understand its way of being in the world. Likewise, resolve your focus on the colony, and the constituent elements are lost. This can be applied anywhere that scales of investigation are significant. A liver pathologist attends to individual liver cells, as well as the whole organ. To describe the behavior of starlings, we have to zoom out to consider their collective action in contributing to a murmuration.

And as teachers, we have to hold in mind our individual students in tension with the whole classroom. As I read about the various factors that act on our students, the ways in which their broadest behavior patterns are dictated by internal and external factors, I found it more and more helpful to think of my classroom as a complex system, one created collectively by my students (and me!) when we acted according to a set of simple, local rules. I wondered: if I can articulate a set of rules that students know without knowing, could I imagine a way to encourage a countervailing set of rules, that created a different emphasis and balanced our insistent focus on the individual and the market?

You can imagine what my first rule was, given my fixation on individual effort/reward above. But the task is developing the tacit, local rules that act on young people (here I imagine high-school-aged students) that align with the broader task of schools in our culture, which I label here the develop of free persons. Here were the six that I articulated:

Local Rules for the Development of Free Persons

  1. Individual rewards come from individual effort only.
  2. Maintain the social hierarchy.
  3. Produce as efficiently as possible.
  4. Pursue familiar tasks.
  5. In absence of stimulus to keep attention, fall back on bio-factors (tired/hungry/restless)
  6. Keep control by any means necessary.

These need some unpacking, but I’ll just comment on two of them. #3 draws up that we’re talking about the output of artefacts that demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about, and these should be turned out in as little time as possible. Academic dishonesty, which is a huge factor in school (especially now with the widespread availability of AI), enters the game for this reason; and the “efficiency” I indicate here is more about “vulnerability-minimizing effort” than actually doing something that takes less time or energy. For instance, a teacher will behold a students wide-ranging efforts to cheat on a paper or test, and will at some point mutter to themselves, “it would have been easier to just learn the thing!” Yes, but more importantly, no. This would mean the student would be vulnerable to failure. They’re vulnerable to failure if they cheat too, but at least then they deserve it. Failure when you’ve tried is indicative of your failure as a person, a nasty little byproduct of the meritocracy (and neo-Calvinism, while we’re at it).

In fact, #3 along with #2 and #6, are rules that are meant to avoid vulnerability, admitting ignorance, or social tension at any cost. These rules exist for a reason. They are not bad. They are defenses, leaky and inflexible defenses, wielded by young people who haven’t developed a flexible and resilient sense of self yet. Our goal here is not to overthrow or ignore these rules, as if by wishing them gone they will disappear. In fact these rules apply to other groups of people in schools — make it a checklist and bring it to your next faculty meeting, and see how much behavior can be sourced to one or more of these rules!

If these are local rules for free persons, we need the countervailing rule, those which imply the communal, democratic, compassionate causes that we espouse. I countered each of the 6 with its antipode, resulted in:

Six Local Rules for the Development of a Democratic Society

  1. Cultivate communal wealth (unity)
  2. Foster difference among equals (diversity)
  3. Attended to democratic process (solidarity)
  4. Open to newness (not-knowing)
  5. Be present to everything happening right now (bearing witness)
  6. Letting go in action (compassionate or appropriate action)

Each here answers to its companion in the prior list. The parenthetical notes are an alignment of this list with the Three Refuges/Treasures and the Three Tenets of Zen Buddhism. One of the advantages of participating in a community of ethical practice is often someone else has already made the list you need! Unity, diversity, and solidarity correspond to that which a Buddhist takes refuge in, and commits to uphold: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The Three Tenets are more like guides to action — they were the first lesson I learned as I began my practice of contemplative care and chaplaincy in hospices.

The relationship to a religious tradition is also salient on the basis of my connection above — how do you pursue the practice of these local rules in a world that incentivizes their opposites? How do you create a concerted, holistic, communal result in classrooms that contributes in some measure to a healthy democratic society, that balances the emphasis on free individuals, hold them accountable and gives them context to grow in skill, compassion, and wisdom?

This would go a long way to answering the question: What can a classroom do? I’ve already presented a breathless argument for what a classroom is and why students do what they do, so now it’s time to see the potential for change by the teacher — an asymmetric member of that classroom community.

I have two thoughts right now, and I intend to test them this year.

First, I have to say the six rules for democratic society every single day in my classroom. Every. Single. Day. By April my students should have these memorized. I don’t care if they roll their eyes when they say them, or mock my very mockable tone — if they have memorized them by years’ end, they will have them and will be able to lean on them when they need them, likely when they least expect it. It has to become a part of them, just by being in that class every time they are there.

Second, we have to have fun. My class is so not fun. I’ve always put so much stock in an open and dynamic classroom that I never, ever, ask myself, “how can the kids have fun with math?” It’s a blind spot, and a mistake. I think games and fun and play in general allows for a unique but fundamental kind of relationship building. It embodies the principles I’m teaching. It lets in some joy, lends some buoyancy to those local rules. If we have a moment where we successfully realize the communal open rules, and we’ve had some fun, I think the kids are more likely to agree that it’s good that we’ve done it this way.

When I was considering this last point, I remembered a line of poetry I was saw at the head of a chapter in a book I couldn’t remember, but I knew it must be important because I remembered it so well. It was:

On the seashore of endless worlds, children play. -Tagore

I cast about for a bit and fumbled on Google for a while, not quite able to compose the line, but then found a result that hit me like a thunderbolt: it was the psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, describing the location of cultural experience in Playing and Reality. Here he described play in children as a mediating, third space in between the child’s personal psychic reality and experience, and the real world. In pathological cases, restoring the collapsed third space in a person is the work of a therapist, but in general, we have all relied on this in-between place between inner life and outer reality to become who we are. And it this space writ large that becomes culture.

Considering this in the light of complexity and emergence, I saw the development of classroom culture with individual students as the creation of a emergent, sentient entity at a higher scale of inquiry. The third space created communally, the place where students explore and play among themselves and with elements in the world around them, is the soul of the classroom. What is necessary to foster this space, to protect it from fracturing into unrelated component pieces, is trust. Winnicott, in his dense and evocative style, says that it is here that experience “creates living” — and so in some sense, the classroom itself is alive, has consciousness, adapts to changes, can grow. The one, out of the many, harmonizing as a community.

So! The classroom has a soul, the beginning and end of my process here, and a surprising combination of my reading of complexity, theology, progressive pedagogy, depth psychology, and the Dharma. I thought to call it “The Classroom as Buddha” or “The Classroom as Sentient Being” or “The Classroom as Cosmos” — but then I thought, it was there at the beginning! I just had to turn it, just so.

Teaching

On listening in math

Posted on by Fig Tree

I met with a student for extra help. Call her K.

K is in 9th grade this year, is new to the school, and has returned her last two math quizzes blank. To her credit, this is her third week in a row visiting me on a Friday afternoon for help. K maintains a healthy distance from her effort, using every cue she can muster to let me know she would rather be elsewhere. Nonetheless, she is here, along with a classmate of hers who is similarly struggling. I’m thinking of two episodes from our 40 minutes together.

First, we were working through this equation,

0 = 9x + 18

and we had established what to add and when, resolving the statement to

-18 = 9x

At this point K answered by saying “x is -2.” She explained that she recognized immediately that 9 times 2 is 18, and since -18 was our goal, the 2 also had to be negative.

When I introduced the way in which she had implicitly used division, she wondered why we would even talk about division here, as she read the whole thing as a multiplication problem. Of course, she is right. I explained the power of algebraic method to work in every situation, even when the numbers are beyond our immediate arithmetic access. I think I offered an equation like 3.181740 = 9.1308x, which you might run into on a lazy Sunday afternoon, as one does. She remained skeptical, which I’m starting to understand is a strength of hers.

Second, we were looking at a somewhat more complicated equation, which it turns is the same equation as the first one (I had my reasons):

4x + 10 = -5x – 8

This task would be filed under “solving a multistep equation” in a textbook or an online math tutorial. K and her classmate are both stumped about a next step here. The classmate proposes “combining like terms” and “moving” terms about, in such a way that the equality is not maintained. I try to explain that this is a priority, though I’m not sure they recognize the urgency behind that particular value.

K makes an attempt and suggests adding 10 to both sides. This would result in

4x + 20 = -5x +2

I respond with what I believe will show them the most efficient route to solving the equation, by which I mean generating a statement of “x = -2”. It’s boilerplate algebra teacher stuff: we want to “get all the x’s to one side and all the numbers to the other side” by “doing the opposite operation of what’s there” and finally “getting x alone.”

The algebra we’re doing here is review, so in class I am less interested in exploring the philosophical implications of the algebra. This is all the more true with students who are struggling to demonstrate their understanding on quizzes and show up at extra help. However, because I am the teacher that I am, and I am generally unsuccessful in having them just “do the math”. And as it turns out, this is the kind of thing kids often do like talking about, when they forget their dyspeptic attitude toward school math for a moment. For instance, both of my 9th grade math classes have already grappled with the ambiguity around, for instance, “-5x – 8” being the same as “-5x + -8” and the implications of that fact for algebraic manipulation, without much prompting from me. And as we’ll see here, extra help doesn’t turn off anyone’s meaning-making capacities.

K regards the problem after I’ve done my bit and says, “But isn’t adding 10 still correct?” Had I been sitting I would have fallen out of my chair, because of course she’s right. Again.

I suspect the word she was looking for was “true” rather than “correct” — it’s true to say that adding any value to both sides of the given equation will maintain the relationship described. The high school textbook name for this is the “additive property of equality”, which if you’ve ever tried to teach directly you know is a slog, because students are both like “what” and “duh” and “why even bother stating that” — all valid responses. But as truth has a tendency to do, it’ll come up in our work no matter what, sometimes to our chagrin.

That she wanted to describe it as “correct” is interesting, since I’m sure that not a few math teachers would respond by saying “no” — simply because adding 10 to both sides of the given equation will get you no closer to resolving the statement to its simplest expression. That my only purpose in working with algebra and equations is to find “the answer” rather than exploring the qualities of number itself is worth some self-reflection.

I try to capture much of this by saying, “Yes! That is still a true statement that maintains the relationship here. Good point. And also, our goal here is to find a value for x. Let’s talk about how to do that.” In my minds eye, I see her shrug wryly as if to say, “what if we just called it a day?”

Conversations with my math students, especially in small groups, often put me in mind of what I learned when I was training as a chaplain. There is this idea that as much as possible we don’t want to impose our own theological perspective on the patient, and instead let them tell their story themselves — a story that on one hand, they can’t help but communicate, but on the other, can be brought to conscious reflection if a proper space is opened for it. Much of the work of chaplaincy is waiting patiently for subtle cues that suggest that you have a green light to explore further, without steamrolling anyone with your agenda.

I was never much good at this. In the lingo, I had trouble stepping into my “pastoral authority”. But I can see that my own struggles with that patience and guidance live on in my work as a math teacher — where listening is so easily bypassed in favor of telling, and where students have stories to tell about how they understand so much more math than our narrow schoolish exercises could possibly bring to the surface.

In math teaching, as in chaplaincy, we have a responsibility to cultivate that meaning-making. For math teachers, perhaps more than chaplains, the struggle is even in recognizing that the meaning-making is happened. But the kids can’t not tell their stories.

Religion in Culture/Zen

American Psyche

Posted on by Fig Tree
“Biden and Trump Say They’re Fighting for America’s ‘Soul.’ What Does That Mean?” New York Times, 10/17/2020

Originally posted on 10/18/2020, thought I’d share it here.

In the ancient Greek used in the Gospels, the word for soul is “psyche”, as contrasted with the word for spirit: “pneuma”. The latter suggests a relationship to wind — and thus Jesus in the 3rd chapter of John could be saying, “the wind blows where it will” just as much as, “the spirit goes where it will.” Both get to the point. Spirit is animating and non-material, and in personal terms, it’s connected to the breath.

Psyche is interesting because it is related to the Greek word for “cold”. It suggests a parallel relationship: soul manifests where the spirit goes, just as coolness manifests where the wind blows. As the spirit inhabits the body, the soul comes into being, an emergent property of the meeting of spirit and matter.

Psyche is obviously the root of “psychology” but also suggests (as modern depth psych traditions have) a broader quality of human being than brain function, closer to the Buddhist use of “Mind” or “Heart-Mind”. It’s the total, embodied, You: conscious and unconscious process combined, everything you know and don’t know about how you are in the world.

Now as I’ve always thought about it, there’s no sense in talking about the healing of the spirit — the spirit is pure energy, radiant, expansive and irreducible. The soul, however, it rooted in material, “fleshly” or “incarnate”. It’s healthy functioning, like the flow of a river or the growth of a plant, can be blocked, warped, or split. In every case, spirit will manifest as fully as it can, filling whatever container it finds.

I get lofty and abstract enough talking about the *human* soul, so thinking about a *national* soul gives me a touch of vertigo, but I guess I’ll say that 2020 brings to light the splits in our national psyche, makes the unconscious realities that many of us white Americans have been unable or refused to see. The Battle for the Soul is not new! The callous Id-hero in Trump just raised it up, and Biden’s bantery wounded-healer offers both acknowledgement of that reality but also normalcy — — and that’s where this article helps, because when the shadow in the soul comes to light, the question is not, “how do we put this where we can’t see it anymore,” but, “this is us, too — what do we do with it?” If this nation has a soul, it’s made of *all* the parts, even those we don’t care to see it those that create *terrible* suffering. I think of the Buddhist warning about anger: “both pushing away and embracing is dangerous, for it’s like a great fire.

“So just “return” is not enough. This article frames the battle for soul with: “what do we want to *become*?” What broader, equitable vision does all this conflict and suffering point toward? I think of the 1619 Project, when it said, America wasn’t a democracy until Black Americans made it one” — out of that oppression came a closer iteration of true freedom.

What is this soul, and what labor will bring forward something new in the world?

Justice/Teaching/Theology

Confronting Whiteness with White Students

Posted on by Fig Tree

In January of 2020, I co-facilitated a two-day workshop on whiteness, race, and racism with a group of white high school students. I had designed the workshop with my collaborator, an English teacher who had long been a partner in discussing racism and our experience as white educators. We wrote that our intended audience was “white students who feel the need to explore their racial identity and become effective anti-racist allies to people of color.” We wanted to look at our experiences of being white, briefly survey the history of race, roleplay situations to practice calling in our white peers, and plan to turn our learning into action.

We had tried before to work with a group of white students, but it never got legs. This time, I felt a renewed urgency for that work.

The necessity of white antiracist spaces

Over the preceding two years, I had worked on a handful of faculty committees focused on racial identity and equity in our school. In that time, I came to see that the onus of talking about race and structural racism at our progressive, independent school fell almost exclusively to students of color.

Every year, the school set aside a day to program student-led discussions about racism and other systems of oppression as they manifest in our community. I was working on the faculty committee to organize it, and I quickly had to reckon with the fact that this day would be the first and only time white students would be gathered in an intentionally white space to talk about their experience of race. As I knew from being in those rooms in previous years, many would check out. Some would just not come to school for that day.

Students of color, on the other hand, would wonder what purpose this one day could serve for them, when they were constantly immersed in this exact conversation. Every other day of the year, in a variety of affinity groups, in their classes, and in weekly assemblies, they were tasked with exploring and expressing racism’s impact on their lives. If their white peers were present, they were responsible for communicating this experience in a way the white students found palatable. And they were doing this work while being subjected to frequent microaggressions, like those documented earlier this summer by the collection of “Black-at” Instagram accounts.

(To address the concerns of the students of color on the day of programming, the affinity spaces for people of color were devoted to “coalition building”, in which students across different racial and ethnic identities could have discussions together. The issue of white students joining this kind of conversation once a year remained.)

This changed my orientation when thinking about race at my school. I knew just enough to recognize the historical irony of people of color having to do all of the work, given that race was invention of white people intent on maintaining their power. This latest manifestation of that system is that race is a problem for people of color, so people of color have to do the work. But this has it backwards: white people are the source of race and racist ideas, and so it’s their work to undo it. To put it succinctly:

“I’m only black because you think you’re white.”

James Baldwin

Some white students, faculty, and administrators would have recognized the dynamic Baldwin names here, but the crux of it was lacking in the general white consciousness of the school community. There were frequent (if uneven) attempts to foreground matter of race and equity in our pedagogy, curriculum, and community practices — but there was no regular, faculty-mediated space for white students to talk about their whiteness, and to build skills to work against it.

It seemed necessary to develop white anti-racist student leaders, who would publicly do the work of calling in their fellow white students, while supporting and being accountable to their fellow students of color. The workshop seemed like a good start.

Our approach to the workshop

That month, I attended a one-day workshop led by the Center of Racial Justice in Education called “Talking about Race for Educators”, and I adapted the general structure and content of that workshop for a group of high school students. My collaborator and I brought in ideas from prior race-equity workshops at our school, practices in our classrooms, and other professional experiences to develop the program. I leaned on my experience as a chaplain resident in hospitals, my training in theology, and my Zen Buddhist practice as well. We prepared to open a space for white students to talk about their whiteness. We also anticipated, as facilitators, being vulnerable and sharing our own realizations about being white educators. We were thrilled when seven students signed up, just enough to justify the workshop. We were finally going to make this happen!

Our general structure was to first focus on our experience as white people: in the context of our families, of society, and in the school community. Then we zoomed out and talked about the historical roots of the idea of race in the modern West, and the different valences on which racism manifests now, from internalized to societal racism. With that set of ideas in mind, we read about microaggressions that students of color have reported in our school, and roleplayed talking to white peers about microaggressions they had committed. Finally, we laid plans for creating a regular organization of white students that would continue to focus on whiteness and racism in the school, hold itself accountable to students of color, and plan for antiracist action.

Theological tangent: The Fruits of Confronting Whiteness

This workshop was a powerful experience unlike any I’ve had in fourteen years working as an educator. I was moved by the students’ willingness to listen and to share. There were moments that were uncomfortable and challenging, and others that were energizing and, frankly, joyful.

There is some suspicion about a group of white people having a good time talking about race. This suspicion is justified! The way I’ve made sense of it is that it is a joyful thing to name the truth of your life, and that that joy has to be earned, by acknowledging the harm in which you’ve participated. That joy denotes an openness to what’s new, to a newly found ability to act. At best, what comes from confronting whiteness is an experience of liberation, by recognizing something that has restrained you.

What is restraining about whiteness? It’s obviosuly not conventional restraint: whiteness is something that gives white people power. But there is a cost to that power. There is a sense in which what you’ve gained, what you claim as yours fair and square, was won by brute force, violence, and cheating. That creates an underlying fear that keeps us in line and working for whiteness because it benefits us, and because we can’t fathom what will happen if we let go of it.

But if there’s a space where we can let go of it, if only for a moment, we get a glimpse of what it would be like to not rely on fear to live our lives.

In some ways, this is a kind of once-and-for-all experience: you can’t undo what you’ve come to know, it’s yours forever, and it suggests the potential for authentic connection within yourself and with others. In other ways, this experience requires maintenance, by constantly revisiting and reflecting on your experience of whiteness. Otherwise, the overwhelming flow of the material realities of our lives overcome what little progress we’ve made in seeing and knowing what’s true. Fear takes back the wheel that it’s held it for so long.

However, we can name the fear as a part of ourselves and move toward wholeness again — which is required, ultimately, for right relation with other white people and with people of color. Until we name the fear, the anger, the defensiveness, the dismissiveness, we can’t own it. When we name it, when we own it, then we can let it go and act against it.

The Best Laid Plans, 2020 Edition

At the end of the workshop, we discussed starting a white anti-racist student group to meet regularly. The students committed to having a discussion with one peer about being white at our school.

The next day I went to a NYSAIS meeting of white antiracist educators in New York independent schools (loosely organizing under the acronym, WARE), focused on structuring white anti-racist spaces. This built on what I had learned from the CRJE, and offered something of a model for regular meetings with white students committed to anti-racist action. Because we were in the middle of busy trimester already, my collaborator and I figured that, if we waited for the new trimester, it would allow us to open the group to the high school community. So we looked to the spring trimester to establish a regular group meeting.

The NYSAIS workshop was on February 1st, 2020, twelve days after the first diagnosis of infection from coronavirus was given in the United States.

Of course, as the winter trimester came to a close in mid-March, the arrival of coronavirus in New York City swiftly upended any normal expectation of what school would be in the spring. We returned from break in early April, and spent that month adjusting to a new online reality for school against the backdrop of dreadful news and the sounds of sirens out our windows.

By the end of April, the community had scrambled to some semblance of normalcy, or at least as much as a society-wide disruption would allow. We suspected that we would be online for the rest of the year. Grade policies for this trimester were established, as were class routines. This gave me space to think about the white antiracist group again. Despite the times, I didn’t want to lose the momentum that this group of young people had found, especially since it took so long to get off the ground.

I reached out to my collaborator to try and start the meetings, but she was now working from home while providing schooling and daycare to her two young children. So I reached out to the students, and in the first week of May we began regular meetings of what I was calling OWAL: Organizing White Antiracist Leaders. A small, regular group met weekly through the rest of the year. Since we were meeting outside of the regular school club structure (and because we were all spending hours on Zoom every day already), I limited the meetings to half an hour each. My intent was to keep the momentum going and prepare for a formal beginning in the fall.

In the meantime, I structured things to keep whiteness front and center in my students’ perspectives.

Structuring White Antiracist Meetings

I followed the guidance of peers doing this work in other schools and the professional trainers who work with the CRJE and WARE in structuring these weekly meetings. My priority was on our experience of whiteness, by which I mean we focused on personal narratives and feelings in situations where our whiteness seemed to matter.

This is powerful, simply because white people do not explicitly think of themselves as “white” — they think of themselves as “people”. “Race” is a phenomena assigned to others. Intellectually, we know we’re white, but the relevance is not immediately clear. Naming our whiteness as a relevant factor in our lives allows us to see that we have been treated differently than people of color, that we harbor racist assumptions, or that we have have hurt people of color in our lives despite our best intentions.

Because I was keeping the meetings brief, I imagined the whole meeting as a share, guided by one prompt: “What has your experience of whiteness been like recently?” Generally, I won’t define whiteness for them, but ask them to think about a time their whiteness seemed relevant. Despite our blinders on this matter, our whiteness is a fact of our existence, which means it’s something we can talk about as experiencing.

Three evasions to talking about whiteness…

This task is hard for the kind of white students I work with, and I think this applies to broader population of liberal white adults as well (including me). White students find ways around it, and so do white adults.

We are conditioned to not see race and not talk about it. Race is always something that happens to someone else. And for many of us, raised in good white liberal households and educated by good white liberal history teachers, we have a set of stories we tell ourselves about what race is and who perpetuates racism. These stories have titles like:

  • “Racism is what Southern bigots and far-right Republicans do”
  • “The Civil Rights movement peacefully and decisively defeated racism”
  • “Racism can’t survive where white people are nice and well-meaning”
  • “Race is a social construct and so it’s not real”
  • “Everyone has to face adversity, but we all have to find a way to adjust”
  • “Obviously racism is bad, but these protests/social media posts/assemblies/classes are not productive”

Although each one has a seed of truth, they are so taken out of context that their relevance is distorted. These are deployed in the same way some Christians will deploy verses or even single sentences in the Bible: as a bludgeon to end discussion. In both cases we can call this proof-texting. In the white liberal version of this, race and racism are ideas that fit into a tidy intellectual structure, one that conveniently places responsibility for racism elsewhere — on bigoted white people, or on people of color. And its cumulative effect is: even when race is the topic of discussion, we white people find ways to avoid a personal accounting of it.

If we can sidestep the temptation of proof-texting and talk about a personal experience where our whiteness is relevant, white students and adults will point out what other white people have done, and usually what they have done wrong. It’s an opportunity for judgment on others (and implicitly a claim of innocence for ourselves). Or, if we do talk about an experience we ourselves had, our account will be inseparable from our rationalization of our actions, without a chance to explore what actually happened. This is kind of the opposite of proof-texting: instead of too little context to sharpen our comment into a weapon, we give too much to use it as a shield.

I’m not asking them for an accounting of either right and wrong, or of what other people do, or of bromides gathered from the history books. I’m asking these students for their experience of whiteness. I’m asking them to swim against the stream of their conditioning, to unlearn a subconscious program that insists: do not talk about race, except along these safe parameters, and change the topic as quickly as possible. My role is to support them so they can break out of the routines of proof-texting, judgment, and rationalization.

So: how to do that? How to get them out of their heads?

…and one way to bypass evasions!

One way to short-circuit proof-texting, judgments, and rationalizations, and to keep the focus on one’s own experience, is to ground ourselves in our feelings, in our actual embodied life. So I insist that the students talk about how it feels to be white. Either I elaborate on the prompt to request this, or I ask follow-up questions about what it felt like to be in the situation described. The effect this has is moving past our ideas of things and get to our actual response to them.

Why? White feelings can often derail conversations about race, so why center them here? This is most painfully true in mixed-race spaces where even a comment about racism or a modest proposal to support students or teachers of color can lead to defensive responses from white people. In that case, white feelings are used as a tool to erase the needs of people of color to protect the comfort of white people.

What I’m talking about here is naming the feelings themselves, in a space of white people listening to and acknowledging those feelings as real. There is nothing right or wrong about a feeling. It just is what it is. A feeling can lead to actions that we can judge as good or bad, or as helpful or harmful depending on our goal. Some feelings should be cultivated for action, others should be restrained. But if we can’t even say “this thing made me feel this way,” we won’t be able to truly reckon with what happened or learn how to respond next time. We’ll fall back on proof-texts and rationalization again, instead of talking about what actually happened.

What is required, and what we’re looking to cultivate

Doing this requires vulnerability, trust, and humility — qualities that are rare in your average high school classroom, but essential to seeing this crucial aspect of our lives. The goal of the white antiracist space is to foster these qualities, so we can actually talk about our experience of whiteness, and then address the ways we perpetuate racism. Once we do that, it becomes more clear what action should follow, and when we hold ourselves accountable to our peers of color, we needn’t burden them with these unprocessed feelings.

So this is what we did each week over the course of May 2020. The meetings were modestly attended and felt good. We were treading water, making it through the hardest and strangest term of school anyone had ever seen. My only plan was to identify a handful of student leaders by June who would help facilitate these meetings in the coming school year. Then we could leave the spring behind, happily.

Nonstop 2020, and 2020 is Nothing New

I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next. That I was surprised makes it clear why I, personally, need white antiracist spaces. That feeling of surprise is something I could stand to reflect on.

Doubling down on a bit of white myopia, I thought it was going to be “Central Park Karen” who made the big splash the week after Memorial Day. I was so busy reading the news and Tweets about that encounter that the early reports of George Floyd’s death sailed right past me. When I met with the white students that week, one of them talked about George Floyd’s murder, and she was the first person I spoke with who used that word to describe what had happened (in case I suggested otherwise above, the kids who are actually doing the work are just as often out ahead of me). The next night, a police precinct in Minnesota was on fire. The night after that and for the weekend, it seemed like the whole country was.

“Now is the time to talk about what we are actually talking about,” was the headline of an article by Chimamanda Ngozi Aditchie after the 2016 election. The phrase occurred to me that week, the last week of school, because suddenly everything we had been discussing since January seemed plain and clear right in front of us: the blinding and binding effect of whiteness, the long, repetitive history of race, the many layers of racism in our contemporary life, and the need for action.

Our last white antiracist meeting of the year was well attended, and there were several other mediated spaces that the school organized for white students that were modeled somewhat on the work we had done in the winter and spring. I was grateful that I had pushed ahead with the work when I did in April — otherwise, we would have been left scrambling again.

But that’s the thing of it, isn’t it? There is nothing so predictable in our public life than racist violence, than racism’s persistent and consistent through-line in our national narrative. When this happens, when suddenly everyone is talking about race, we need to be preparing for the next time it happens. We have to be marching in formation already, not redeploying every time we’re surprised by the grimly predictable.

Staying Present in the Cycle of Beginning and Ending

So the question becomes: how can we be ready in the new school year?

I think the student work should continue in the same way: I’ll ask students to share their experience of whiteness. With more time in a meeting, we can transition to roleplaying situations to orient ourselves toward action, calling in our white peers, and being accountable to our peers of color.

Having the same structure to each meeting is important to me: as one white colleague put it, we are trying to make a routine of looking for and talking about our whiteness, of normalizing that reflection. We could have read all of the books on the anti-racist reading lists and we could have gone to all of the protests; we could have appropriately and authentically reflected on our complicity with white supremacy many times over. But as another white colleague of mine has said: everyday, when we wake up, we still have to recommit to the work. Everyday, we will still wake up white.

I’ve been meeting with different groups of white faculty and staff across my school this summer to support one another in the work, and their thoughts have helped flesh out what my collaborator and I had been pursuing in January. Another faculty member (another English teacher, they’re the best) joined me to facilitate the white antiracist student space near the end of the year. And two white students volunteered to facilitate the white antiracist students group in the fall, and we’ll have a regular meeting time.

Commitment is not the end. It’s the first step.

Justice/Zen

Clouds of Witness

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I was in Austin, Texas for a few days before I really looked up at the sky. I saw churning clouds under a hot sun, a favorite object of contemplation of mine in the summer months. In New York City, the tall clouds create airborne ridges and peaks that put you at the floor of an enormous valley of your own imaging, the lowest layers of which are the concrete and glass facades that give you no long-view vantage other than skywards. It’s all up and down in New York, a continuum from you to the lowest edge of the sun.

Texas was not as flat as I expected, but you are acutely aware of its horizontal breadth when you fly in. Once on the ground, observing clouds becomes less about their stratospheric reach and more about their flow over the surface of the hot land. In a dry climate, those clouds are the most immediate river. But they are a river without banks, a river that floods so comprehensively that it’s nothing but the flood. Clouds suggest a vast oceanic current, alerting us to the easily forgotten fact that our atmosphere is a positive entity, a real presence of fluid, always mixing and changing and interacting.  Clouds just allow this process to catch a little visible light, and pull back the curtain on a tense and temporary equilibrium. 

At this one particular moment that I happened to look up, at a glance I saw a cloud communing with itself, arms expanding and contracting, regions withdrawing and or reaching beyond their capacity to cohere, this continent of vapor giving and taking from the invisible sea around it. A very hot day seems to stifle activity for the land-bound, especially humans, dogs, and the leaves of trees on a day with no breeze. But that direct draught of radiation — light, UV, infrared, all of it —  into the atmosphere has just the opposite effect. The sky becomes an expansive reservoir of potential energy, pushing the balance of countless gaseous exchanges in one direction or another. Midday clouds and nighttime storms and hazes at dawn are all manifestations of this enormous exchange that flows around us all the time.

Ocean of clouds over Oklahoma, 6/2/19

A cloud is not its own. It’s a greeting card from a chemical sea in which you make your whole life. There is no life beyond its boundary. I’m thinking now of the experience some astronauts describe in beholding the entirety of human life curved along the very top layer of a minor sphere of rock, and the terms of frankly spiritual awe it inspires in them. A part of this kind of awe is a sense of contingency, perhaps absolute contingency: we rely on this Earth for every aspect of our being, and without it we are really, truly without refuge. In a turn that is so self-serving that it is other-serving, since it finds that soft vein of reality where self and other, individual and society, human and Earth, are not separate at all, this kind of Earth-reverence becomes a motivation to serve, to act with compassion and energy and skill to protect and sustain that which has protected and sustained us.

In Buddhism, we call this “vowing to save numberless sentient beings.” It follows from the historical activity of the Buddha stepping off of his seat of enlightenment to engage the world. In Christianity, I would identify it as the source of a creation theology, one that names this fleshly, material life and world as Good, if challenging and inertial at times.

What the clouds show is that we needn’t go to space to experience a sense of awe-inspiring contingency. Astronauts might see that terra is not as firma as we think, and is in fact a small shelter of life in a dark cold chaos. Likewise, the realization that we swim about in a chemically active sea that is ever so finely balanced to a narrow band of conditions for this life to be possible, leads me to some combination of gratitude, contingency, and frankly, terror.

To be full of awe is to feel at least a little awful, and in the Bible, we can read a line describing fear of the LORD as awe, as well. To realize that the source and sustenance of your life is contingent is not sentimentality, meant to foster some shallow sense of ease. I experience it as a charge. The religious impulse must address the full range of human contingency, by raising up fundamental realities, the deep veins of our being, the structural truths of our lives. Brought into the materialist context of American life, that means saying basic facts like a mantra, until they start to change our choices — that is, until they start to inform ethical action. To wit:

  • The air I breathe is active and present. It positively promotes my own life. It is not neutral, not background, but only becomes that when I take it for granted.
  • Furthermore, its narrow balance is neither preordained not guaranteed. There is no reason that life should exist on this Earth, and no automatic break if we push our active chemical balance too far one way or the other. Balance — in chemistry, in ecosystems, and in political affairs and social relations — is descriptive and not normative. If things happen to be balanced, it’s not because they’re supposed to be.
  • Once I realize this, life’s contingency comes home to me. I swim in a sea of my own making now, and really of our own making. The deep veins connect us.

“A single garment of destiny” binds us, Martin Luther King Jr. said. His witness is all the more crucial now, as we come into consciousness of how we are changing our ocean of air. To summarize two centuries of climate science: we’ve expanded its capacity to retain energy. Really, it is its own kind of awe-inspiring, to see how our impressive industry, the same tools of skill and effort we would rely upon to save all beings, has influenced so profoundly and so suddenly this sea of air in which we all swim.

And we expand King’s meaning to this whole fluid knit of Earth and air, recognizing we are not somehow separate from them, and all of their material and matter and energy. Earth-and-us are one intermingled system, always influencing and responding in a sequence that is endless in extension, across time and everywhere right now. Our relation to the Earth is itself a complex and active sea, and it’s one that we are, for now, quite lost in. Some among us drown as a result. Our compassion fails when we don’t look to see how our actions play out.

It was skill and effort that brought us here. And it is those qualities guided by compassion, that are our hope.

A single cloud can be a witness to this teaching, to this reality. It has its being in the vast dynamic exchange of the air, water, and dust and is in fact just an extension of that exchange. In the same way, we are a part of all of this. We can direct our actions best when we are clear-eyed, but we can’t always know the outcomes. This leads to a kind of modesty that informs our compassionate action, both to act with some caution and also to recognize that it’s not always up to us.

So I’ll breathe my air a little more deeply, moving the gratitude of such a largesse of life into the foreground of my day. Like my breath, it starts right at the tip of my nose, and is always there for me. I wonder how sensing this atmospheric contingency changes me? Knowing that the contingency of each breath is shared by all, and that we all have some active part to play in its sustenance, the tension in my chest softens, and air in me can once again flow freely.

Teaching

Anxiety and Frustration in the Math Classroom: My NCTM Presentation, Fall 2018

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It’s been a while! Playing a little catch up. First:

Below is the slideshow I presented at the NCTM Regional Conference this past November in Seattle. It’s spare in the beginning because I mostly had teachers speaking in dyads — one person tells a story, and the other person repeats it back to them as closely as they can, and then they switch. Then it goes on to content on the basis of that exchange.

It’s also available at this link.

This was my first time presenting to an NCTM crowd, and my first time getting legs under this longer project of mine: how to think of student anxiety from a depth perspective, as something that we can work with and that requires us to reflect on our own practice.

Surely I won’t feel any anxiety in a workshop on anxiety, right?

People came to it! It was great! Look at all these curious math teachers! They didn’t realize it, but I was going to make one of them talk for a long time, and the other listen in total silence.

I’ll be presenting a broader version of the same presentation to general ed teachers at the PEN conference in Minneapolis/St. Paul this October. I am personally feeling some anxiety about that! Fruitful anxiety! The best kind.

Justice/Teaching

Math as Witness: who counts? who doesn’t?

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I ended the school year with a surprising burst of energy after the students left for the summer. I slogged my way through two straight days of comment-writing. These can be draining (imagine making 58 short but meaningful phone calls with the promise of near-zero response), but if I can create space for it, they become an opportunity to reflect on my students’ actual experience of my class, contra whatever expectations or descriptions I offered at the outset. The natural move then is to think about what I want them to actually experience next year.

Right on the heels of my comment-writing, I spent two days with a group of colleagues from my school developing a pilot service learning program that we would each enact in our classrooms next year.  I took a smattering of ideas and conversations and threaded them together into a strand that I called, “Math as Witness”. In my math classes, and especially my 11th grade Discrete Math elective, I envisioned a program that started with my students’ attentive presence with a marginalized community, and then moved to their study of Discrete Math topics: voting theory, apportionment (and with it, gerrymandering), combinatorics and probability, game theory, and graph theory. On one hand, this would deepen and give real-world urgency to their study of math; on the other, it would open a space for them to offer their knowledge so as to assist a marginalized population somehow. Transcending both of those goals, the students would come to care for the community, and as an expression of that care, know more of it though the lens of mathematics.

That was the plan after a few iterations, and as plans go it sounds grand. But I needed two things: the community, and the math!

There is no shortage of marginalized communities that might benefit from accessing the conclusions of discrete math, and especially those that are related to the day’s pressing issues. Immigration, voting, representation, income and opportunity, all of which can be analyzed along lines of race, class, gender, or immigration status — these would all be at home in a Discrete Math problem set. But after spending two days talking to colleagues from across the disciplinary spectrum, I needed to really get into the math itself.

And so at just the right time, I went to a math conference! The 2018 PBL Math Teaching Summit (organized by Dr. Carmel Schettino) gathered a group of teachers committed to a problem-based philosophy and practice in math education. While not geared to Discrete Math, service learning, or justice-themed mathematics, the PBL crowd is energized, creative, and committed to classrooms that decenter the teacher in favor of non-hierarchical, student-driven mathematical construction. Throw an allied project out there, and you’re bound to get something back.

Also, if you’re working on a problem of your own, I find that spending time with energized math educators talking about problems is a really nice way to get some juice in your parallel process. I experienced exactly that kind of sideways creativity at the PBL Summit. Alongside whatever I jotted down from presentations, I was scribbling marginal notes about math, service, and justice.

What came from this was not a list of learning objectives or a text or set of problems all ready for September, but instead a philosophical center of gravity for the entire discrete-math-as-witness project: Who counts? and who doesn’t?

The topics of Discrete Math all dance around the question of counting: counting to express the popular will (voting), and the problems of doing so in a representative government (apportionment and gerrymandering); counting the available options from a wider range of possible groupings (combinatorics), and determining the likelihood of some outcomes over others (probability); and the condensation of human conflict, competition, and cooperation into a set of metrics (game theory).

In a service-learning context concerned with social justice, this has to be pushed a step beyond what we’re counting or how we’re counting it. Who in our society counts? Which is the same question as, who doesn’t count? How is that counting or non-counting justified? What do different ways of counting suggest about the decision of who is counted and who is not? And then, was it a decision? Who made it? Why?

Math teacher-talk had me all excited about this, without anyone saying a word about it. It was a good couple of days.

That’s where I was at, and then I went to Alabama.

I’d been to Alabama once before, for a wedding, and now I was going again, for a wedding. I’ll spare you the carpetbagger musings on Alabama in June, except to say Alabama humidity is different than ours. New York summertime humidity is ocean-based, but in Alabama it comes right out of the earth and grass and trees. This has good and bad sides to it. At its best, New York humidity (yes I just wrote that) is salty and fresh; it makes you sanguine. Alabama humidity is all-pervasive. Surrender to it and you become one with it and all it embraces, Whitman-like: red soil, pines, ponds greener than the trees, and the trees are green AF.

At its worst, that salty New York humidity is penetrating and corrosive. In Alabama, it is oppressive and inescapable.

After wedding and family time were over in Auburn, we drove down I-85 to Montgomery to see the Legacy Museum. Physical monuments to black suffering at the hands of (and black resilience in the face of) white supremacy are surprisingly hard to find in this nation established on a foundation of slave labor, even in my dear Yankee homeland. When a brick-and-mortar instance of that witness presents itself to you in the heart of the community that birthed the modern civil rights movement, it’s the right move.

I’m reminded again and again these days about the importance of art in learning and knowing — and with art I will include museum curation and monument design (obviously). I would like to communicate to you my experience of exploring the Legacy Museum (“From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration”), which told me everything I know already but immersed me in it in a way I hadn’t felt before — which meant, of course, I was feeling it rather than thinking it — but the words will fail me. Some combination of sadness, horror, self-consciousness, anger, and sobriety.

More poignant than that, more penetrating and overwhelming, was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to remembering the pervasive terror campaign of lynching that many, but mostly black Americans, were subjected to over the last two centuries. I’ve had a fine chance to keep lynching at an arm’s length for much of my educated life, one of those nice that’s-a-southern-thing habits that my northeastern brethren permit themselves from time to time. The Memorial, with its hoist metal blocks, rusting with the same color as blood and that Alabama soil, arrayed so that we have a sense of their number all at once, makes what was for me a distant abstraction into a crucial reflection of our current situation, and it implicates everyone. The arm’s-length attitude is a privilege, one not afforded African Americans, and one that everyone needs to confront, or else that legacy of violence stays underground, in the water supply, wreaking havoc. Since I returned to New York, I reached for Dr. James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, in which he says:

I wrestle with questions about black dignity in a world of white supremacy because I believe that the cultural and religious resources in the black experience could help all Americans cope with the legacy of white supremacy and also deal with what is called “the war on terror.” If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population — slavery, segregation, and lynching — then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others. Black people know something of terror because we have been dealing with legal and extralegal white terror for several centuries. Nothing was more terrifying than the lynching tree.

So, after a week in between two years but also its own moment, I woke up in Brooklyn this morning. The chorus from “Ella’s Song” was on repeat in my mind’s ear and I still had a palpable feeling of lowering my head under a matrix of metal boxes in midair. I’m looking at my notes about Math as Witness from less than a week ago, though it seems like longer. I suppose it’s my first day of summer vacation proper, a time to rest but also to read and write and think.

I’m thinking of voting rights, and the contrary movement to restrict them in this country, under the banner of ending (nearly non-existent) voter fraud. I’m thinking of Dr. Cone’s comment about the war on terror in relation to lynchings, and remembering that ICE was founded not so long ago under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security — so we can begin to see how the present crackdown on immigration is a part of this wider campaign against the shadowy, threatening Other, conceived here as the foreigner, there as the entrenched black community, elsewhere (and perhaps throughout) as the poor and powerless. I’m thinking about the fragility of a democratic republic, how easy it can be for a few powerful interests to play the numbers, to determine the rules of counting, and decide the outcome before the question is even asked.

I’m wondering how I can best help my students use math to start asking, and answering, the questions:

Who counts? and who doesn’t? And what do we do about it?

Theology

Our Aeonic Fire

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Book of Serenity #30: Dasui’s Aeonic Fire

A monk asked Dasui, “When the fire at the end of an aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this destroyed or not?”
Dasui said, “Destroyed.”
The monk said, “Then is goes along with that?”
Dasui said, “It goes along with that.”

A monk asked Longi, “When the fire at the end of an aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this destroyed or not?”
Longji said, “Not destroyed.”
The monk said, “Why is it not destroyed?”
Longji said, “Because it is the same as the universe.

“Aeonic” is such an evocative term.

I have spent some time reading, and reading about, David Bentley Hart’s new translation of the New Testament. His intention has been to return some of the stark weirdness of that text to our modern ears, trying to bring forward the rushed and unpolished voices of the evangelists, the harsh and urgent juxtaposition of the mundane and transcendent among this apocalyptic group that called itself “the followers of the way” before they were “Christians”. He attempts to give us something close to a transliteration, unhindered by the interpretive structure created by later Christians, whether it be the generation just after Nicaea or the translators of the King James Bible. As all of Hart’s critics (and he himself) point out, a non-interpretation is impossible when translating, but I find the results of his effort very satisfying, especially as I read it (dare I say it) Buddhistly.

Of interest here is his work with the Greek word also brought to our attention by this koan: aeon. This word in most or all translations of the NT is given in English as “everlasting” or “eternal” — as in Matthew 25, wherein the nations that care for the hungry, the naked, the sick, the stranger, and the imprisoned are promised eternal life, and the nations that do not, eternal punishment. Timely reading no matter how you read it. Hart, citing sources contemporary to the NT authors (or author-communities, as is more likely), says that this aeon is more properly interpreted as referring to “the age”, as in “The Age to Come”. An age can be any length (from the length of a lifetime, to something approximating the kalpa Roshi has described to us) but are certainly not understood as the endless duration indicated by “eternal” or “everlasting”. They refer to a limited duration. Further, that age can be bounded by meaning than by any definite number of years. It might be closer to how Blake uses eternity and infinity, here:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour….

I wonder then if the “Age to Come” that Christians are thinking about and promising is here, now, and the salvation and punishment are as well — or again, Buddhistly, that the One The Comes Thus, the Tathagata, is always impending, bending our ordinary linear time onto itself. The aeonic fire, that which it burns, and the ash that remains are always right here.

It also puts me in mind of the Ages of the Earth. Enkyo Roshi O’Hara speaks of the aeonic fire in connection with the looming nuclear threat, but the climatic one. Maybe this is a generational thing (speaking of age and meaning). The fire of this age, that comes age over age, makes me think of this XKCD about historical (and beyond) global warming. I urge you to take five or ten minutes to scroll through it — when I first did it, it gave me this aeonic perspective, the scale on which we absolutely must think of how we are so dramatically altering our climate.

It’s true that our planet has changed drastically before, it’s true that it is changing drastically now, and it’s true (97% of scientists say!) we are the source of that change. But that attitude of “we humans, separate entities, have changed this other thing, the environment, over there” is so obviously shortsighted in the aeonic context of climate change. We are so intimately connected to our climate — how can we be said to be separate from it? It is our source, our context, and the boundary of our lives. The cosmically paper-thin surface environment of this Earth is our whole kosmos. No one looking from far away would see humans and the Earth, and see two. It is our thought that those are two that got us in this mess: we thought, we can take without limit from the Earth and not somehow take from ourselves as well.

So the aeonic fire comes from us, comes for us. It seems that we have to think on this level to be able to respond effectively — to see our persistent economic and industrial growth and the material security and comfort it has created intimately linked to the danger and disruption coming our way as the aeon moves toward a dramatic climax. It is all cause and effect: “karma” according to another tradition.

In that sense, we are threatened along with the universe, but are also that aspect of the universe that can choose to act. And here I can scale down from the aeonic perspective into what I do in my own life, noticing at each notch that I am never separate from what’s around me, as I’m never separate from the Earth. Grabbing or pushing away another will grab or push away some aspect of my Self. I’m thinking of Thomas Merton describing an argument made by Augustine:

“that envy and hatred try to pierce our neighbor with a sword, when the blade cannot reach him unless it first passes through our own body.”

When I encounter a person who I feel I cannot tolerate, I remember sewing my rakasu, into which I stitched every aspect of my life. Whatever is offending me that I want to push away is the same as me, not separate from me, and so my responsibility, my reckoning with my own intolerable aspects, my path.

This scales up again, all the way up to this aeon we now call the Anthropocene, and beyond — we face a reckoning of our own creation. What we deny consciously will come back to haunt us, until we recognize we are exactly it. The universe and the fire and the ash.

Jingzun:

Clearly there is no other truth
Only the Way sealed Huening of the South
One saying — ‘it all goes along with the fire’
Sends a monk running over a thousand mountains

Hustling, running, ruining! I’ve run over a thousand words! What about you?

Theology

Living close to my own life

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Book of Serenity #20: Dizang’s Nearness

Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?”
Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.”
Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”
Fayan said, “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is nearest.”

I wrote in my previous post of an experience, early in my introductory training for chaplaincy, that gave me space to act, spiritually and meaningfully. That all happened sometime late in the fall of 2010. Within a month of that experience, I was seriously researching seminary programs; within two months, I had applied. Before the year-long chaplaincy training program had ended in June, I was accepted to Union Theological Seminary and I had given notice at my job. Within a year, I was studying theology, Bible, and depth psychology. It was a heady and challenging and rich time and in retrospect I wouldn’t exchange it for any amount of money. Cross-reference: the pearl of great price.

When I think back to then, just over seven years ago now, it’s surprising how quickly it all happened. However, once I had realized the fundamental shift, once I had found the crack in my own resistance and self-doubt, and could see something else for my life on the other side of it, doing the rest was just a matter of course. It took effort and energy and was sometimes difficult —  filling out paperwork, paying application fees, visiting campus, figuring out how to make the money stuff work, etc. — but I think of it this way: the change had already been accomplished. Whatever seminary and pastoral study was for me, I was already in it, and needed only to find a setting where the outer reality matched the prior inner condition. Whatever Union was, I was shown that the decision to go there had already been made.

I knew this, but it was hard to communicate. Leaving my career and livelihood, pursuing a path that had no precedent in my life or anyone else that I knew, among colleagues or friends or family — it was hard to say exactly why I was going to study. Even if I had the language, I wonder if saying, “I need to find a setting where my outer reality matches my inner condition,” would have satisfied anyone’s curiosity or concern.

The responses to “I’m going to seminary,” ran the gamut. My IT coworkers assumed I was going to become a monk. My parents were vocally concerned about how the cost and debt might limit my freedom. You might be surprised to find that seminary is not high on those annoying grad school ROI lists. My friends, with whom I had been most frank about the changes in my spiritual life and ethic, were supportive and encouraging, and asked good questions which I could not easily answer. These were mostly different versions of: what are you going to do with it?

Great question. It created some tension in me, and to hold the space I often said that I was planning on becoming a chaplain after I graduated. I said it enough that I started to believe it. But if anyone had pressed me on it, I would have said — no, probably not. Chaplaincy had brought the fundamental question of my life out into the open, but my sense even then was that chaplaincy itself wouldn’t take me further than that.

In the meantime, which is where we live our lives, it was a good story, in that it was coherent. It went like this:

“When I left teaching to work in IT, I suddenly found myself with something like a 9-5 job and a lot of extra emotional energy that I was no longer expending on the vicissitudes of teaching math to the Youth of America. It was then that I found a rewarding and meaningful meditation practice, and through it I was introduced to a way to manifest that meaning in my day-to-day life: chaplaincy. So I’m going to study theology and psychology so I can become a chaplain.”

Perfectly coherent! Just not really true in the last part. Its merit was that it made more sense than:

“Paul (yes, that Paul) told me that meditation is okay so now I want to think more about that.”

How spiritual! Its merit is that it is descriptive and accurate — but, alas, not compelling unless you are of a particular mindset.

This makes me think of the koan I quoted above, because in retrospect, I think I could have responded to “what are you going to do” with what Fayan says:

“I don’t know.”

This works on levels that I couldn’t express at the time, though I was experiencing them intimately. Of course, there was the element of literally not knowing what was going to happen when I left my job and studied theology. But it is not a small not knowing, like not knowing when the train will come or what’s for dinner tonight. It’s not, “I dunno.”

The not-knowing I was experiencing then was like the experience when you’re walking through the city, and can’t see very far because of the buildings or the contour of the land, but then you turn a corner or come to a little rise, and suddenly you can see the whole at once. You see this vast expanse of people and buildings and streets, in the bowl of a valley, or down miles and miles of a broad avenue, or in some huge open space or park, and suddenly you see the largeness of what you’re in. You behold thousands of lives, interwoven and in motion together. The sky and the earth are broad and incomparable. You have, in a moment: perspective, possibility, and openness.

And if in the moment you see this, someone says, “where exactly will you go in all that,” or, “where’s the nearest subway station,” or, “think there’s a Starbucks with a bathroom somewhere over here?” you might answer with a little smile: I don’t know.

This, as Dizang says, is nearest. Other translations of this koan have Dizang say, “not knowing is closer to the truth,” or “not knowing is most intimate”. As I look back, all of these capture the sense of wonder, the simmering anxiety/excitement, and the sense of being truly close to my own life, more so than I had ever been, in that time.

If you can find a pilgrimage to go on, I recommend it. It was important for me to live not knowing, so I could start learning what was up.

Religion in Culture/Theology

Paul made me a Buddhist

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I was reading about the apostle Paul over the holiday, and thinking of his participation in a turning point in my life.

Early in my Buddhist practice I was volunteering as a chaplain-in-training in hospice care, under the guidance of Zen monks. Born a Catholic and uneasy about that tradition’s claim on me, I had found a new and liberating energy in the practice of sitting meditation, an energy that brought me to this chaplaincy training program. I recognized that the urgency of being near death lent my patients clarity, and thought that that clarity would help resolve the question of my life.

This was a misunderstanding, of course. Being with the urgency of dying (which is the same as the urgency of living) doesn’t resolve anything. Only humans can resolve, can make resolutions — but in matters that deserve resolutions, it’s only after struggle, with others and with ourselves. The urgency of life and death, when fully realized, clears a space for conflicting forces within one’s self to come to the fore. The struggle that results when we can no longer hide from this internal tension is, to paraphrase biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, a struggle we have to endure until it blesses us.

So chaplaincy work, which I was sure would speak to me about my life in a new way, actually returned me to exactly the same question of my life, the one that brought me to Church and made me leave Church, the one that made me sit and brought me back to Church, and the one that had me sweating while meditating at home one day a few months into my chaplaincy training.

For a some weeks I had been working with a patient, an older Japanese man that I’ll call Stephen. I characterize him now as a charismatic Christian without a church, a man filled with adoration, despair, insight, loneliness — and cancer. He had a tumor the size of an orange on the side of his throat, that he covered with a napkin that slowly saturated with blood when I visited with him. He had an affection for me but also identified my Buiddhist practice as a smoke-and-mirrors seduction whose architect was the Devil. While I obviously didn’t engage him in these claims, I was hopelessly green and couldn’t move our focus back to him. Further, our visits bothered me well after I left him, and in the words of one of my fellow trainees, I allowed him to completely drape his worldview over me. I never would have done such a thing if it didn’t find something to catch on my own view of myself, some crack in my armor, a jagged edge where a projection like his could find some purchase.

What Stephen had found in me, in his suffering and through his significant spiritual insight, was my own doubt and guilt about my own practice. And as good teachers do, he called me on it. Of course, he was not actually my teacher and his assessment was actually a projection, a part of his process of dying slowly and painfully, which arose great doubt and fear in him. However, my work as a chaplain would require me to recognize my own struggle so I could more effectively sit with him in his.

So there I was, at home, meditating, sitting with my own struggle. My doubt was: am I allowed to meditate? Is this a thing that’s okay with God if God exists? You know you’ve reached the question of your life when you keep asking yourself a question that is so completely ridiculous when you think about it objectively, but it will just not leave you alone. It’s because the question itself is just a cover for a subjective reality that has not yet found a fitting expression. I was gripped by this reality but didn’t have the words to confront it consciously, so I struggled with what I had on hand: my sitting practice itself.

Even though meditation had given me new life, I was filled with guilt that it was somehow wrong. And the root subjective experience I had was in fact a feeling that I was wrong: me, sitting there in my me-ness, was wrong. So this was not guilt but shame, more existential and transcendent, that I tried to control by transferring it onto my new spiritual practice. It had been brewing for a while and Stephen gave it the external circumstances to raise it up such that I couldn’t ignore it.

My experience in that moment was: I could not sit. It’s really incredible to write, but that’s exactly what it was. Sitting on a cushion in kneeling position, eyes cast slightly downward, counting my breath, I was so overwhelmed with a feeling of despair and restlessness and doubt that I just couldn’t go on with meditation. I experienced the feelings as a fretting narrative of doubt: What if I’m wrong about all of this? What if sitting it not what I’m supposed to be doing? How can I know what I’m supposed to be doing? Will I be punished for doing things the wrong way? How can this be? What am I supposed to do?

Over and over, this story repeated itself. I couldn’t count my breath to one. I could hardly stay still. The tension became so great that I stopped the meditation. I looked up and thought, what the hell is going on? what is wrong with me? I had found such support in my life from meditation, but what happens when I create a barrier for myself, blocking me from my practice? I was bereft by an opponent sitting exactly in my own shadow, in my own psyche, in my own being. I didn’t know the arc of the struggle, that it was in fact a struggle I was in — as far as I knew, I had just concluded that I couldn’t sit and breathe anymore.

I looked around, despairing. To my left was a small bookcase, and I reached for a book with a big ol’ crucifix on the side of it, John Richard Neuhaus’ Death on a Friday Afternoon. I opened to a random page and found Neuhaus quoting the words of Paul, directed to the Corinthians:

“But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then every man will receive his commendation from God.”

Neuhaus names this as the “foundation of a Christian’s freedom,” as opposed to a source of “paralyzing insecurity,” like what I was experiencing right at that moment.

Reading this cracked my anxiety wide open. At one time, it both absolved me of my relentless self-doubt and recrimination, and it gave a transcedent value to the “purposes of the heart,” my longing to be free and live my own life. Naming this desire, and recognizing the small self-concern that obstructed rather than assisted it, allowed me to trust my own expereince, and my own agency in finding the way to that freedom. “I don’t even judge myself!” I think of this now as, being able to trust my own experience as a guide to the purpose of my heart. This spoke exactly to what I had heard as the teachings of the Buddha: be your own lamp.

This did not answer the question once and for all, but it was a pivotal turning point in my Buddhist practice, and my vocation: it gave me space to act. I was, on some fundamental level, in a way that I had not been before, okay. This was both a place to stand, finally, but also a dynamic force — the purposes of the heart are always changing with the world, and keeping close to them provides a kind of motivating energy that prompted the huge external changes in my life: to continue to practice meditation and to serve as chaplain, to go to seminary, to take my Buddhist vows, to be more vulnerable and trusting with others than I ever had before.

One day I’ll have to write more about the irony of Paul making me more Buddhist than ever, and the nature of conversion, or rather, call. And also the irony that I had this very Augustinian call experience without ever having read his Confessions. Seriously. When I finally read it I said, oh shoot.

This makes me think about shame and guilt, and about New Year’s resolutions as well: specifically, my commitment to write more in the New Year. They’re all related. Looking forward to what comes around, even as the news in early 2018 sounds a lot like the news in late 2017: it all looks bad. Thank God for practice, and good books, and friends and loved ones, in the New Year.

Teaching

Social and Emotional Factors in the Math Classroom (a few initial notes)

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I’m trying this thing where I write a quick blog post after an energizing conversation. Wish me luck!

This year at open school night, I gave my students’ parents an idea about who I was and where I came from, on the logic that my professional narrative informs many of my choices in designing my classroom. Rather than providing them with a list of strategies and tools I’m using, I figured I could just tell them why I’m doing what I’m doing, in story form, giving them a better sense of the class, and of me. That seems the most you can get out of open school night: an answer to the question, “who is this person teaching my child math?” So I thought I’d answer it directly.

One of the things I shared with the parents that I had not shared before was my work in chaplaincy and pastoral care. It felt important to say, but it’s so random that I couldn’t leave it as it was — I made a joke out of it. It went something like this:

“When I tell people about the jobs I’ve had, they usually stop me here and say, how did someone who worked as a chaplain go and become a high school math teacher? Then they think for a second and say, actually, I could have used a chaplain in high school math!”

Har. As Open School Night jokes go, it’s not the worst, and I like to think it gets points for uniqueness. Of course, I’m not so sure that I’ve ever actually had this exchange, but people found it funny, so it tells me there’s a seed of truth there.

As I reflect on it, I think there’s more than a seed of truth — and now I have a bit of misgivings about light of it. But it brings an important point to the fore, which if I had to put in one sentence, would be:

The emotional and social life of a math classroom is fundamental to sound progressive pedagogy.

How so? Well, if you found my joke remotely funny, you know the first point.

Math work is frustrating for students.

Math is hard, and everyone seems to know it, because people can talk about not really understanding math after sixth grade and they will get a round of affirmation at a cocktail party. Meanwhile, if you say, “I stopped learning how to read in sixth grade,” in the same context, the reaction is very different. So there’s good reason to believe that the idea that math work is hard for students has some cultural capital. As a teacher, I suppose you should be ready to deal with the fact that your students will be frustrated, even if you tell them how to do things very clearly.

Let me push this is a bit further.

Math work should be frustrating for students.

Or at least, good math work should be frustrating, for a time. The productive struggle is a necessity for learning math, because that’s what it takes to build one’s own relationship to the mathematics. That is not easy work, and cannot be easy work, because it requires creativity and discipline and risk-taking.

Now a teacher shouldn’t seek to create unnecessary frustration for students — in a well-designed space for math, the frustration will come naturally. But a teacher must be able, not just to “deal with” the students frustration, but to go further — to tolerate their students’ frustration, giving the students space to work out their own understanding. If the teacher cannot tolerate their students’ frustration, and instead gives into it because of their own anxiety about letting young people be frustrated, the student loses an opportunity to create an authentic connection with the math. There are times when it’s appropriate to alleviate a students’ stress around not yet understanding math, but I believe these are far more rare than most people expect.

So let me bring that together into a third point where the emotional life of the math class is essential:

Teaching math requires a teacher to tolerate their own anxiety about student frustration.

Ultimately, we all became math teachers because we wanted to help young people with math, on some level. If that is part of the original impulse, it’s not surprising that we would be highly uncomfortable with resisting the urge to help. But we can see that the desire to give answers or help anxious students can sometimes handicap students from developing their own capacity to tolerate their frustration and find a way to work through it.

“Less helpful,” is the subtitle to Dan Meyer’s blog. If we overhelp, students will be underserved. If students get used to waiting for a teacher or another authority to swoop in and make their math difficulties go away, they become less able to navigate actual real-world situations where not all the information is provided, where conjectures and estimations are necessary, where the constraints are unclear, or where there are many possible answers that need to be adjudicated and argued depending on the question as hand.

Students need to experience the difficulty of this, which is an emotional task, and teachers need to let students experience the difficulty of this, which is also an emotional task.

And a social one.

Students and teachers need to be able to relate to one another about the frustration of math work.

What needs to be communicated, often through actions more than words, is not just that the teacher expects and accepts and tolerates the students’ frustrations (and anxiety, let’s say it), but further — that the teacher believes the student can work through that frustration and learn something. This pushes the emotional work into a kind of social work. School is about relationships, I saw once. There has to be a level of trust established. The only way a teacher could possibly tolerate a student’s repeated frustration and anxiety is if they trust the student can deal with it productively, and then they have to be able to relate this to the student, over and over again.

And it’s not just about saying it, it’s about meaning it. This is harder than it seems, because it requires the teacher to trust that they themselves could tolerate frustration and anxiety and learn math in this way. I had several beloved but not particularly progressive math teachers when I was growing up. When I think of my formative experience as a math learner, it was when I took on agency for my math learning in college, after I recognized I couldn’t coast by with formulas and shortcuts anymore and had to really study to get at the understanding. That experience of coming-to-agency (which, it so happens, I also mentioned in my Open School Night presentation) is the foundation for my own progressive practice — and even still, I often have a hard time trusting that what I say I believe is really true: that knowledge comes from making sense of one’s own creative experience, and that learning cultivates liberation.

I get the sense, and I think you’ll agree with me, that math seems to be some kind of haven for people who don’t want to think or talk about their feelings, or maybe even don’t want to have much to do with the feelings of others. That’s a stereotype, but it seems to dictate what many people expect of math. However, math brings up lots of feelings, and as teachers we have to be ready to name them and navigate them, and help students hold them without us rushing to fix them. Students need to survive that frustration to discover their own capacities and insights, and we need to protect the space for them to do just that, minding their progress and trusting that, on the most basic level, they already possess what they need and their work is in bringing it to fruition. On good days, I can see that flowering of the free exchange of knowledge in my classes, or rather, I can feel it.

There’s something in Gospel of Thomas about this: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” In a theological mode, that captures precisely what I need to create, and protect against, for my math students.

That’s why it’s good for a chaplain to be a math teacher. No joke.

Teaching

Skillful means for math students and showing up for teacher work

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Dear Reader, it is late August! School is beginning soon! For me, that means it’s time to reflect on my goals while I still have the bandwidth to do so.

I ended the last school year feeling overwhelmed with the demands of teaching. Between the changes that I had initiated in my classrooms (trying out different teaching styles, grading systems, and digital platforms), the wide variety of students I was teaching (8th through 11th graders, pre-algebra to pre-calculus), the needs of my students and their families, and the contradictions inherent in teaching progressively in a non-progressive world, it was easy for me to lose sight of the meaning and purpose of my work.

Over the summer, I had a few chances to step back and think. This allowed me to reaffirm my commitment to the work of education by outlining what I want for my students, and how I intend to help them get them there. I made two lists: the first, a set of developmental goals that I have for all of my students; and the second, a set of learning habits specifically geared to their growth as math students, that would help them approach the goals. Here I’ll talk a little about both, in the order I developed them.

Mathematical Habits, or: Skillful Means for Math Students

I developed these early in the summer, at a conference for math teachers at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. My workshop leader, Johnothon Sauer, asked our group to answer the question:

What do you want the kids to focus on in your course and your classroom?

The first thing I wrote was the title for my answer to that question: “Skillful Means,” which I had written about just a few weeks before the conference. Skillful means are a set of “practices and habits by which we wake up to what’s real.” I saw his question as an opportunity to describe the development that’s really going on in my classroom (if everything goes as planned), and how I could focus my energy and my students’ energy on that development.

Here’s the list of habitsI want my students to focus on in my math class:

  1. creativity: seeing freshly, using all of their resources (math)
  2. process: conjecture and evidence and revision (math)
  3. communication: speaking and listening and questioning (us)
  4. collaboration/citizenship: mutual support and mutual regard (us)
  5. practice: consistence and persistence in their work and preparation (you)
  6. reflection: meta-cognition and self-knowledge or meaning-making (you)

This is a list of six habits that I want my math students to focus on and cultivate, a tool box of qualities that allowed students to fully engage in their work in math — in short, skillful means to realizing their mature understanding of math.

After I rattled these off, I labeled each with one of the three parenthetical notes (math, us, you). Math focused on a fundamentally mathematical practice (creative problem solving and the process of developing one’s own ideas in math), us focused on one’s relationship with a community of math-workers (communication and collaboration/citizenship), and you focused on the students themselves (the individual practice of working on math on one’s own, and the reflection on what one has done and how one has changed in that work).

I imagined these being most useful as framing my feedback to the students. While I would offer graded feedback for the understanding they could show me of the various math skills and content we were spending all of our time discussing in class, these six habits would be how I talked to students about the quality of their work. I would write their comments based on these habits, and talk to their advisers and parents in these terms. With a consistent structure, I can communicate to them what I think is important about doing math, with the hopes that it will change how they think about math and what they do to study it.

Thus the Habits — skillful means. But as it turns out I needed something more, and it was going to follow me around until I could articulate it.

Goals for All Students, or: Showing Up for Work with Young People

So I was on a silent retreat, meditating for about six hours a day, and running a lot of stories over and over in my head about how to do what I want with my life.

Ever since I decided to go to seminary almost seven years ago, I have known that my life was going to take a different path than I had imagined, but it’s taken a long time for that to really take shape. When I finished seminary three years ago, I didn’t have a clear picture of the kind of work that would hold my desire to discuss and pursue meaning and development and being — which I’ve taken to calling soul-work. I ended up returning to the math classroom, but it was financial need (read: student debt) as much as authentic interest that brought me there. I’m happy where I am, but I know that there’s a broader project that I’ve only just begun to explore.

And when you’re meditating for six hours a day, you’ve find yourself with a lot of time to think about what you could be doing or should have done. Thankfully, you also have a lot of time to practice, dropping your awareness down below the thought, and below the attached feelings of doubt, or anxiety, or fear, or regret that seem to arise with the thought, and staying with the experience in your body, right at that moment, not trying to drive off the thought but also not letting it drive you off. Just staying with it and sitting with it, not separating from it or giving in to it.

I had about a day’s worth of meditation wracked with some kind of anxiety in the category of how-can-I-do-what-I-really-want, and I kept up the practice, met with a teacher to talk about it, and kept on sitting, until that moment at 6:35 in the morning, with the rising sun tapping me on the shoulder, when I felt a shift within me that broke that whole story I was telling myself wide open. Rather than the same old narrative of how I can I get to something that’s not yet here, I beheld the question:

Where is the soul-work in your role right now, as middle and high school math teacher?

The answer, dear reader, will not surprise you in the slightest, but it struck me like the bright ocher of the wall in front of me, which had been in front of me all that time but I only really saw at that precise moment.

The soul-work I have now occurs exactly in my relationship with my students, where I find them right now, and what I want them to grow into and become. I was reminded earlier in the summer: school is about relationships. And I could make space for that relational work, the central work of a teacher, if I could articulate the goals that I have for my students across the board. This was a way of truly showing up for my work as a teacher, to practice soul-work exactly where I found myself.

Having been cracked open by the August sun and a wall, I struggled mightily to not immediately start making the list of goals I have for all students, since I was still technically meditating, in a room full of silent meditating people. Practice was still practice. So I held off for a bit, unsuccessfully, but relieved that a change had come.

When I finally sat down to articulate my goals for all students over the course of a school year, this is what I wrote:

  1. Intellectual: Demonstrate proficiency/mastery in all of the content-based learning goals of their course of study
  2. Academic: Develop student skills for the effective, organized practice, absorption, and retention of the content
  3. Social: Interact with peers in small groups productively and equitably
  4. Psycho-spiritual: Practice and reflect on your capacity for creative, authentic work

While the intellectual and academic goals are obviously important, they are balanced with broader social and psycho-spiritual goals that are meant to address the whole student. Similar to the skillful means above, these would help me structure how I talk about my students’ work with them over the course of the year — but these are not means, these are ends. These are what we’re going for. I can see where my students are with each of these, and push their growth where they need it.

I want my students to know more math; I want them to know how to study and understand math, I want them to be able to develop math with and support/be supported by their peers, and I want them to realize themselves as mathematical beings, so to speak.

Everything I’m doing with them is bent toward these goals. When I lose sight of these because I have a fancy new idea about pedagogy, or I’ve read an article about trends in education or politics that make me angry, or I’ve had a conversation with a parent or colleague go in difficult direction, I can remind myself that I’m here to move my students toward these four goals by equipping them with the six skillful means listed above.

Then, rather than pushing away the work because I don’t like it, or getting lost in the work and missing the forest for the trees, I can simply meet the work where it is, renewing my vow to help my students realize the fullness of their participation in math, and the part of their being which is fulfilled by its study. Hopefully, I can continue to respond to them with intelligence and compassion, and bear witness to the reality and potential of their lives.

Well-wishes to all teachers, students, and families — and really anyone who will experience some challenging growth this season. You’re not alone.

Teaching/Theology

Teaching and Skillful Means

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The end of the school year is the best time to think about the next school year, since obviously I’ve got nothing else going on. I’m working on a few things to reboot and overhaul my classroom practices, but also looking into ways to stay excited about math and connect it to something meaningful. This can lead to some wide-ranging book-browsing, with some interesting results. For instance:

I was standing in the Strand, reading a copy of Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum and I was wondering why I was reading it at all. I don’t teach quantum mechanics, let alone science, and it isn’t the kind of book one picks up casually. It’s not a beach read — but then again, I’m not much of a beach-reader!

I’ve been interested in quantum physics for a while. I read a lot about it when I was in college, and have become more interested in it again as of late while listening to the lectures of Neil Theise, a liver pathologist and senior student at the Village Zendo, where I practice. He has written and spoken about intersections between modern science and traditional systems of wisdom. I find him most exciting when he talks about Fundamental Awareness, which relates the findings of quantum physics to the primarily Eastern philosophical and religious idea that consciousness/awareness is not an emergent property of matter but in fact fundamental to the structure of the universe. When I first heard him speak about it, it opened a world of speculation in old interests of mine through the lens of my meditation practice.

Initially, though, I was so excited about the ideas that I didn’t see its relationship to mediation. It was all so cerebral and abstract, and I loved it — but what does it have to do with sitting on your cushion? He said: the whole philosophical construct is kind of skillful means, fulfilled and personalized by one’s disciplined practice with the Zen community. He said, more directly, “the universe has made one request of me, that I be aware. This is one way to know that, and meditation is my way to practice that.”

So I read about quantum mechanics now, about the fact that consciousness cannot be removed from consideration in objective observations, and I think about my practice and my participation in the world.

But I wanted something a little more: I wanted something related to my math teaching. Still, I was holding this book, getting excited about its ideas and its math and its spiritual implications, and still I was feeling like, this is related! How?

Standing there reading about spin and the states of quantum systems, and moving through this fog of anticipation and mild befuddlement, the words skillful means suddenly hit me. I think I actually said “Oh!” out loud.

If science and quantum physics is related to skillful means and ethical action, so is math teaching. In fact, every discipline is related by skillful means, the practices and habits by which we wake up to what’s real. So I asked these two questions of myself, as a math teacher:

  1. how can a math class be taught with skillful means?
  2. how can a math class sustain and develop skillful means in my students?

Both questions are related to having some understanding about reality, about “Things As It Is,” as Suzuki Roshi once said. For a long time I’ve wondered how to combine my Zen practice, my theological and depth-psychological education, and my teaching vocation together. These central questions move me toward that.

I remembered a line from a mentor of mine, Ann Ulanov, about why she writes texts that combine theology and psychology to “see how one discipline can feed another, without collapsing or dishonoring one either.” How can we bring one field into fruitful conversation with another?

Anyway, those two questions are the broad questions I’ll be asking as I prepare for teaching next year. Now I just have to get to the summer!

 

Teaching/Theology

Math, in search of meaning

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What does math mean? And what should it mean for my students?

The answer to both these questions is up for grabs and not initially apparent. It requires an interpretation – the technical question is, what hermeneutic do we apply to math? How do we “read” math in a way that makes sense for us?

Math developed over time, and we can say things about who developed it, how they developed it, and can condense and summarize their work in retrospect. It is also utilized now for a variety of reasons. The interpretative question implies that neither set of facts – how math developed, or how it is used now – offer a definitive answer to a question of meaning and norm: what does math mean and what should it mean for us now?

Math, perhaps more than any other traditional secondary school subject, elicits reactions among people that emphasize its universality, objectivity, and invariance – and that these qualities are by far the most important thing about it. Ruminations on math in this key end up sounding grand and cosmic: math is a universal language, math is the underlying structure of natural laws, etc.

In this reading, the context in which math takes place is less important that the content that math delivers. Human disposition and purpose does not impact math’s impartiality. The only important context for math is the one in which it was developed – before now. The work has been done and we are responsible to the edifice that our ancestors have left.

In a million implicit or explicit ways, you can hear the argument that the math we receive now would be the same math no matter who came up with it or when they came up with it. In this frame of thought, reforming math education is unnecessary at best, and at worst obscures math’s universality and objectivity in the name of some lesser purpose (often, politics, or worse, political correctness). This explains much of the resistance to math reform. It is also a sensibility prominent among students. “Why don’t you just teach us the math,” frustrated students of mine have asked (they present themselves as experts of knowing math when they see it – but perhaps not yet hermeneutics).

In other fields of study, an emphasis on the message that takes no account of the messenger or the community receiving the message has been called “orthodoxy,” for better or worse, but that’s not quite specific enough. We’re talking about the interpretation of a text – mathematical statements, objects, and conjectures – so the term I’ll use has more to do with a lens, or a reading stance than a whole worldview.

I’ll call what I’ve described here: Mathematical Literalism. In this reading, the primary meaning of math is its universality and invariance, and students should approach it with humility and with an intention to take in the received wisdom. Furthermore, those students who by talent and effort can approach it are honored as having some special capacity for abstraction, which is often a cipher for general intelligence.

This is one interpretation of math. Another is functional and gives more attention to what math can accomplish when put into real-world applications (I mean this colloquially, as in, talking about math in close relation to stuff, as opposed to the category of math textbook word problems that are not-so-affectionately labeled, ”pseudocontexts”). Here, math is most often seen in service of the sciences, engineering, economics, and finance. Its universality is acknowledged, but mostly in that it delivers reliable quantification and abstraction that makes valuable tasks accessible. The context of mathematics matters, but not the context of its historical development – only the context where math finds its expression in the field. This is often measured in material terms.

Those who speak of math with this frame in mind are attentive to the demands of a modern economy and a computerized, data-driven society, one which the digital revolution is constantly transforming. There are also aware that education, especially in applied and technical fields, opens up career opportunities for students that are selective and profitable. The important context, again, is in the future – and is measured by material gain.

This kind of reading of math I call Mathematical Materialism. The primary meaning of math is how we may use it, and it should be approached by students with a practical and ends-driven spirit. Those who find success in this way are valued for the material benefit they have created – no small distinction in our materialist, pragmatic culture.

Clearly, these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Most people do not think too much about math, and if pressed on the matter will say some combination of: math is math, and if you can do it you’re pretty smart; you will probably be able to find a good job, and the social value of that work will allow give you the means to live a happy life. The broader American values of practicality, hard work, individualism, and material success all participate in promoting these two readings of math.

There is another reading of math that acknowledges the data that Literalism and Materialism start with, but goes in a different direction. We can find a helpful middle route between these two hermeneutics by noting where they locate the most important context for mathematical work.

Literalism puts the important context in the past: the work has been done, and now we have math and we have to absorb it. Materialism puts the important context in the future: it’ll be worthwhile math when it’s put in service of some project with results.

In between these two, we have the context of the present: the important work to be done for students of mathematics is the work that is done right now. Its meaning is in its actualization, and not in its majestic existence or its material expression.

What would we call a reading that makes its present context a priority? It would focus our intention not on retracing past steps or the preparation for future steps, but instead on the mathematical process as it is pursued in your math classroom, or your child’s math classroom, right now.

I propose Mathematical Praxis as a middle-way interpretation of math, between Literalism and Materialism. I think this implies what I intend – that our proper reading of math requires us to engage in mathematical activity, and the activity is more important than the content or the product. The meaning of math is found in its process – the only meaning is the meaning you create in doing it, right now.

This interpretation of math would not dismiss its historical development, or its potential products – but it would approach them in right relation with math as a present and creative intellectual activity, an activity that requires practice, a space for which needs to be cleared in a young person’s developing mind. In fact, without engaging in creative mathematical activity, students can neither appreciate the work and ingenuity of mathematicians past (and locate them in a variety of locations, not just in the ancient Greeks and early modern Europeans), nor can they be expected to skillfully (and compassionately) apply mathematics to its practical ends. Surely some do, but a privileged few. If math is powerful and valuable, it must be shared equitably and made accessible to all.

Math is a verb, something that students do. It’s meaning is not prescribed or premeditated. It has meaning only in as much as it’s free act of creative intellect. Experiencing this, students can start to answer a question they are rarely asked: what does math mean?

Teaching

Math Class for America

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So the election happened.

Today, the students at my school felt scared, sad, angry, anxious, and confused, but gave such energetic and clear expression to so many sides of the matter at hand, and spoke bravely and listened to one another compassionately. They opened a space to share and acknowledge how they were feeling, and started looking for ways to channel these feelings into action.

What they reminded me was, you don’t decide events, and you don’t even decide how you feel as a result of those events, but you can choose how you respond to events and how to use your feelings. Right now, the students chose to speak and share, and when we had spent the morning on that, to return to math class and do some good work. At the end of the day, I’d ask students: how are you? And they go — okay. And give a knowing smile. I was so impressed.

My classroom is 100% where I want to be right now. When we finally got into it after the (important, crucial, timely) whole-class conversations, whole-school sit-ins, viewing of speeches and lots of hugging and passing around of tissues — when I finally got with my students, in a math class, working on math — I saw my work there in a whole new light.

What I want to teach my students is: how to reason together; how to listen; how to argue your point with supporting evidence; how to evaluate and adjudicate contradictory evidence, and how to change your mind publicly, without fear. That’s what math is about, really. Its content is all shapes, numbers, and patterns, but its method is democratic dialogue, the communal probing of understanding and implicitly, the establishment of meaning.

That’s what we need. Math class is a microcosm. If we can’t listen to someone with a different idea of how to plot a range of values graphically on a number line, or are not willing to admit the possibility that our solution is incomplete or incorrect — how do we propose to do such things around the economy, immigration, global warming?

Their work is all in groups this year, but I’ve always been a little hands off in terms of guiding them on how to do this — which is ridiculous, because who knows naturally how to work in a group? No one (cf. the 2016 election, The United States Congress, etc.). So I got into it with them, directing them in ways I had not before. This seemed important today, of all days.

I went from group to group as they tried to build a consensus around their solutions to the homework. Let me tell you, they were not having it. It’s so hard just to listen to one another and go at the pace that your neighbor is going. They bounce around unpredictably in their work. They skip questions that they don’t understand without much attempt to try. They see any kind of extra detail in note-taking, or writing out their reasoning as an impossible and unnecessary expense of energy. Same with suggesting their answers to other students and listening to the responses. But of course when they don’t do these things, all kinds of ridiculousness ensues. Several times I’ve had students present their ideas on a problem to the whole class, only to have members of their own group disagree with them. I’m like — how did you get through 30 minutes of group work without mentioning your differences on this problem, which was one of three you had the task of discussing??

I know why, of course. Listening closely is hard. Hearing critique and mustering a thoughtful response is even harder. It’s easier to let someone just tell you their answer if they speak it with enough authority, and even easier still to be satisfied with your own understanding and not probe any further.

Our responsibility as citizens is all of the hard things, though — arguing our case, listening to that of our opponent, and sincerely evaluating the two along side one another. How often does that happen, I wonder? More practice would be better. Starting with the young is good, too.

Cornel West wrote an editorial last week about the spiritual blackout in America, and I’ve returned to it frequently. Dr. West tells us about Plato’s critique of democracy — its potential for corruption and manipulation by elites and charismatic politicians, its weak spot for ignorance and mob rule — and offers us John Dewey’s response, that a democracy must foster in its citizenry critical intelligence, moral compassion, and a mature sense of history. That’s the purpose of democratic education, and democratic math education (or as I called it today, Math for America, or at other times People’s Math) can do all three.

The ability to make, evaluate, and revise arguments using evidence and in collaboration with others is precisely critical intelligence.

The act of listening and attending to one another’s ideas builds a spirit of moral compassion, because we learn that other minds work like ours, make brilliant leaps and careless errors like ours, and have the potential for growth like ours.

And in as much as a math class encourages students to participate in the creation of mathematics, rather than the rote absorption and recitations of formulas and vocabulary, it brings students into a truly universal, historical human dialogue that can be both humbling and empowering — this is a mature sense of history. I am receiving what was handed down to me, and I am handing it down myself.

Teaching helps. I’m glad when I emerged for my commute today into a sad, early morning cloud and a subway full of people not looking at one another, I knew I was going to a place where I could put my anger and sadness to good political use: teaching math.

Religion in Culture/Teaching/Theology

Theological values in secular math education

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Before continuing to look at math education in the light of, on one hand, a drastically uncertain future, and on the other, values inherent in that work that we would want to endure in our students (that is, values that are somehow ultimate), I thought I’d develop a little scheme for talking about theological values that are swimming around in a math class already. You don’t need the language of theology to describe them, but that’s what I’m doing, to give them some ground beyond the smaller contingencies of our present education system.

For my wider project here, I’m writing secular theology — theology that takes as its goal some coherence with non-theological language, and has some cruciality for situations that are commonly taken as non-theological.

Allied to that goal, having more to do with my own perspective than any necessary feature of secular theology, I’m writing in a dual-belonging frame — making use of both Christian and Buddhist concepts to cast some light on those typically non-theological, secular issues. That these concepts have some analgous relationship is interesting in itself, but that argument will be more implicit in what I write. Think of this as fair use. (I’d like to build more on the idea that a interreligious dialogue must become a secular dialogue, to find common language — but that’s for some other time.)

So, here’s how I’m laying out theological values for my present purposes. Let’s start with the theological virtues of Hope, Faith and Love (c.f. Paul and Thomas Aquinas). As I think interreligiously, triune concepts are helpful markers. Of course Christianity is replete with them, but they crop up in Buddhism as well. I’m thinking now of the Three Pure Precepts or Three Tenets of Zen — Not knowing, Bearing Witness, and Compassionate Action. Putting these two triune structures alongside one another illuminate them both. To wit:

Hope and Not-knowing — this is a fundamental openness to reality, a stance of accepting rather than controlling things as they are.

Faith and Bearing Witness — this suggests a trust and commitment to what is disclosed when we see with the eyes of Hope and Not-Knowing.

Love and Compassionate Action — this is the appropriate response when the previous two are realized. I’ve also seen that last phrase as “appropriate action” or “appropriate response,” which suggests a fundmental relationship with what is really true and love/compassion. There’s nothing special about it — love is actually what’s up. We needn’t reach for it or create it, it’s inherent in what’s happening, and when we respond with it we’re responding in perfect harmony to/with the situation. You don’t have to work too hard to see this play out in the Christian system, either. The other thing that’s important about these is: they’re fundamentally communal.

So there are your three Buddhist-Christian theological values. Now for a more absurd sleight of hand, I move them into the math classroom.

For reasons I can’t quite articulate, I’ve made these axial — each pair create a pair of balancing forces which I’m aruging I want my math students to develop and realize (again, in a completely secular context).

How do Hope and Not-Knowing map onto my math class? As patience and urgency. My students must learn to watch carefully and quietly, but with intention. The tension between these two describe a kind of temper that is always watching and ready. Confronted with a problem (mathematical, theological, or otherwise), this temper is your starting point — before you reach out to work with it, you need to face it squarely. It takes a long time to really understand a mathematical concept, with lots of little and big errors and adjustments along the way. Frequent re-doing means you need to hold that frustration with patience but also feel the internal pull to keep on trying. This is also called active attention.

How do Faith and Bearing Witness map onto my math class? As risk-taking and reflection. More active thatn the previous, this is a commitment, a trust, and a relationship with the object. It is partially a leap, an acknowledgement that we don’t know everything, but it is not reckless or unprecedented. It is based on prior experience, but requires some kind of break with that old evidence because: something new is here. Mathematical risk-taking is trying different approaches, testing with your mind different avenues, trusting that you can learn something by trying, but also trusting that your own experience is not completely irrelevant in this context.  Reflection implies the stepping back and seeing what’s happening, where the problem is and where you are, and where what you know runs up against what it presents as unknown.

How do Love and Compassionate Action map onto my math class? As argument and listening. Love and Compassioante Action are both ethical responses to the situation of the community, and transferred to the community of a math class, our commitment to one another is to argue and to listen. Argue, in terms of presenting statements with reasons that can be contested or agreed upon; listen, in terms of receiving the statements of others carefully and with attention. In math, this grows out of the previous two. If you’re paying close attention to what’s happening in working through a math problem, and if you’re trying things and thinking about what you’ve done, it’s natural in community to simply extend those processes to others: by taking in arguments and responding to them.

We often think of mathematical dialogue as purely intellectual, and place love and compassion in the realm of the heart — but I wonder what mathematical dialogue stands to gain from growing out of the heart-mind? That reflection might lead us to critique the current individualized, competitive system of education, that in my opinion handicaps math education more severely than other disciplines.

So that’s my preliminary Buddhist-Christian analysis of theological values found in a secular math classroom, that math students can be developing and realizing all the time. Note that these are probably values that apply to any discipline that requires dialogue — doing it in math would mean, we’re working with numbers and shapes and patterns. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do it with openness, trust, commitment, and love.

Justice/Religion in Culture/Teaching/Theology

Math for the End of the World (Part I): Rising Seas, Hope, and Math Education

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…or, Eschatonimatics? Apocalyptic Curves? Oh these are truly terrible.

When I last wrote about the PBL method of teaching math, I said that I often thought of this approach as Peoples’ Math (for it’s non-hierarchical structure emphasizing co-creation) and as Not Knowing Math (for it’s emphasis on students producing, rather than absorbing rotely, the math — and the necessity for patience and openness with the struggle to know something for one’s self).

I also think of it as Math for the End of the World, and I think of it this way more often than the other two.

A word or two about what I mean about the End of the World.

When I think about the end of the world, I do not have the literal reading of John’s Apocalypse in mind (though my thought and that text are not as divergent as it might appear at first glance), and I’m not touching on the question of Christian vs. non-Christian, sin vs. salvation, justice vs. mercy, and so on. No — for me, the End of the World is more mundane and less dramatic than that (at least in the single-event sense), and can be described in far greater detail than Revelation expresses. This particular End represents such an unusual and existential crisis to us that it seems to require a different way of thinking together as a human species, a different relationship to the biosphere to which we owe our entire existence, and so requires a departure from our business-as-usual assumptions about economy, industry, politics — and education, including math education.

The End of the World I’m talking about is human-produced, carbon-emission-driven global warming. It won’t destroy the planet in raw physical terms, and it likely won’t be a sudden confrontation with dramatic change, but it will radically alter that human-constructed habitat, the World. A better phrase for it would be the End of History, and this makes more explicit that what we’ve been doing is going to have to be radically different from what we do next, after some point at which everything we’ve come to assume about the Earth’s providence gets thrown into question.

As a wayward student of environemental engineering, and a waywayward student of Christian theology, it might not come as a surprise that I think about my current work in math education through this lens. Climate change presents an existential crisis, one that offers not just a personal end but an Ultimate End — all of humanity is threatened, and this inspires reflection in any and all fields of acitivty.

I first came across this kind of reflection in Roy Scranton’s essay in the Times, Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene. Scranton, an English professor and writer, is an Iraq War vet, so his lens compared the day-to-day threat of navigating the roads of occupied Baghdad to the broader, inescapable threat of rising seas and more severe weather patterns (i.e. Katrina). The connnection is particularly salient — the Pentagon has been pointing out the destabilizing potential of global climate change, as Scranton discusses. But he further develops the idea that this crisis has material and political consequences but also philosophical ones — confronting these changes, we ask what does it means to die? This leads inevitably to the question, what does it mean to live? He presents this as a fundamentally philosophical, humanistic question, one that is as confounding and as likely to capture our anxious attention as how to keep saltwater out of New York City’s very vulnerable subway tubes.

The Janus question of “how to die/how to live” first struck me when working as a hospice chaplain. Patients facing death reflect on the only thing they can in light of the ultimate: their life. In that context, I did not consider this process philosohical (though it can be) so much as spiritual and theological.

The questions are: how do we make meaning in the face of the ultimate, that which transcends but still participates in the smaller narrative of our lives? Why does a forward projection to the End lead us inevitably to a backwards reflection of the Beginning? What part does the Ultimate play in our mundane day-to-day? How does the Ultimate reach out to us, here and now? I think these are theological questions, given cruciality by spirutal experience and reflection, and they have a helpful place in our communal exploration of a world we’ve set on a rapidly changing course.

In grad school, I wrote for a Biblical interpretation class a global warming interpretation of one of Jesus’ prophetic utterances regarding the Second Coming, and the troubles that would precede this final act of God in history. Luke (21:25) says it: “There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On earth, the nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.”

I wrote that our fear of the danger to come should inspire a changing attitude to our world, our activities, and to one another. Less consumption, less material obsession, less exploitation; more compassion, more creative expression, more community.

But my professor corrected me — you can’t scare people into acting justly, even when the stakes are all human life, everywhere.

I was flumoxed, but I see what he was talking about. The chiding moralism of “you’re gonna get yours, fools,” rarely inspires lasting change. Just because science is on your side does not give you a right to be a jerk to your benighted neighbors. 

It seems that Christian reflection on the End Times (bear with me if you’re not a Christian), starts from a place of hope, not fear. Roger Haight summarizes Karl Rahner’s description of hope:

Hope…refers to the fundamental openness of the human spirit…hope desginates a region of human existence from which both faith and love are elicited. Hope reaches back into the human spirit as inner freedom that characterizes reflective consciousness.

This makes me think of the Zen precept of not-knowing — a fundamental openness of being, toward all being, exercised freely. This is a disposition that leads to a renewed commitment (for Christians, faith; for Zen Buddhists, bearing witness) and a guide for action (for Christians, love; for Zen Buddhists, compassionate or appropriate response). It’s nice when these two very different religions seem to agree on a deeper, objective dynamic in human encounter with the ultimate. It suggests a further expansion of these questions into secular realms of knowledge and action.

A question that has pursued Christian theology from its earliest days is: how does this exercise of human freedom influence the outcome of all things? What part of the World’s ultimate fate is our work, and what part of it is given to us freely? This is Paul on circumcision; this is the Augustinian/Pelagian controversy; this is the Reformation question of works-righteousness. More recently, Juan Luis Segundo asked: what of our work will endure into the life to come? How do we know what we do will be a part of the Eschaton? If nothing, then why do anything at all?

Moving from the Christian reflection to a more secular one: if you agree that climate change is real and as bad as it seems, then we’re facing a radically different world to come. It is worth asking: what of our work will endure into that different world? What can we create, in a spirit of openness and hope rather than fear and reaction, that will buoy the spirit of life and the floruishing human community? What part do we play in this cycle of life and death that we influence and receive so intimately and so globally?

That brings me to my math class, a space that is already open to my reflection, and where meaning is always alive, whether I notice it at the time or not. Conveniently, unexpectedly, I’ve already described PBL math as a method that encourages an openness, not-knowing, that corresponds to hope. Does it make sense to practice hope? I think so.

But there’s more here to explore — if we see the world’s situation as it is now, what would we want to instill in our students to survive what seems liklely to bring calamity and chaos, and certainly will affect the poor and marginalized of the world disproportionately. What do we want to teach our students, when we are facing a radical change in everything we know and assume about human responsibility and sustenance?

I don’t know! But I can see two preliminary avenues of questioning:

1) How is math itself related to the project of human flourishing? (problem solving! reasoning from evidence! resilience and community support! listening, being flexible, accepting new conditions, and taking worthwhile risks!)

And 2) what kind of space best communicates this to students, and helps them practice it, such that it sticks — that will communicate a transcendent value that is enduring, that approaches us from beyond our suffering world and helps us face it?

Next time. I need a sandwich.

Teaching

To teach the right answers for the wrong reasons/my own experience is not for all seasons

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(With apologies to T.S. Eliot…)

My students sometimes ask if I actually like math, or what brought me to be a math teacher. I have struggled to answer, and for a long time I thought it was because I actually didn’t like math. But that’s not quite it. I didn’t want to share because I understood on some level that what I gathered from my years of success in math classes was not at all what I wanted them to gather.

What drew me to math is precisely that quality that most people ascribe to it: it’s very neat packaging of the complexities of the world into some lines of scratchwork, terminating in a simple and correct answer.

I was very good at this. It was also bullshit.

I got some hint of this in college, when procedure or example pronblems could no longer guarantee success. I learned dramatically the need for a more open-ended, heuristic approach, which usually went hand in hand with group work. Sure, there were still right answers, but the path to them was not linear, and was not supported by faithfully copying every word uttered in a lecture, either.

Right answers even become dubious in the lauded “real world” problems so commonly proposed in math education. True, in as much as math models the world, you can model more or less successfully, and this is central to all kinds of endeavors. But the path there is not a path you can follow by rote, so much as one you must create by walking it. It is a creative act, both in that you are making something new, and that you are pursuing your own authentic approach in doing so. 

In this way, mathematics is as intuitive and subjective as any creative form. Because it can model the world, it has some value as a clarifying tool, and its basic tools (number, shape, pattern) are such ubiquitous tools to human thought that we can speak of their objectivity. But this is true of the humanities as well — equally subjective and objective, equally intuitive and intellectual, equally individual and communal; and completely, fundamentally creative.

This practice requires a classroom characterized by fruitful disorder, skillfully channeled; conjectures that are open to constant revision; and my student talk, thoughts, and attitudes being the engines that drive the class.

But this is not why I became a math teacher! I became a math teacher because I remembered loving its false order and its neatly packaged right answers! But what I found when I was a math teacher long enough to catch my breath and look around was:

  1. The surprising diversity with which students can understand any topic no matter how simple I assume it is: from trigonometry to linear modeling to fractions to multiplication, if you have 25 students, you have 25 ways of understanding and expressing those concepts. I’m still be surprised by the insights and ingenuity that even my most struggling students can share.
  2. The baffling resistance that students will put up to even the most simplified expressions of some idea. This can be interpreted as some kind of childish willfulness, or it can indicate that there’s something lacking in the approach. While the habit in our field is the former ( the so-called deficincy model of teaching, conveniently pathologizing the child), I think the latter is more generous and closer to the truth.

Both of these contradicted my model of Math-as-Truth-with-a-capital-T. There was more diversity and complexity than I expected, and when I tried to push those differences aside, it only created fruitless anxiety — for both my students and me.

So my idea of what I’m doing and why it’s important has changed — but habit lives in the body, and is not so easily moved. It is not unlike an emotional/psychological defense, which had its place in its time, and must have helped me at some point, but has outgrown its use.

Luckily, habitual patterns can be addressed with practice as well. Intentional, mindful, even humble practice. As often happens, my students are my best teachers, revealing the emotional patterns that I long ago learned to suppress or manage. They will learn to manage them as well, but this can be done a way that affirms their authentic approaches to thought and creativity. Listening to them, giving due dignity to their thought process and their feelings, they can be cultivated for self-possession, a confidence given naturally and not reliant on any correct answer, and found again and again within the support of a community.

That’s a math class, right there. As a math teacher, my role is to embody that practice while handling the tools of mathematics. Even in the most supportive professional environment it can be hard to remember and to return to that practice, because it is at odds with what I value as a math student.

The hardest thing about teaching math isn’t the students, or the math. It’s getting out of my own way.

Zen

Stepping Back

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I’ve been to a handful of silent retreats before, so when my teachers on this most recent one said, “don’t try to get anything out of this,” I knew what they meant. Even just a day or two of zazen and silence will start to yield what feels like results: some emotional problem will crack open right in front of you, or you’ll experience a sense of peace, or union, or deep understanding, that might seem like “the point” of the whole endeavor.

But the teaching is: don’t hold on to it. Don’t think you can pack it up with your luggage and bring it back with you. Don’t try to get anything out of this.

I knew what they meant, but of course I’ve tried to anyway, in the three weeks since I’ve returned to normal life. But holding on to experiences has a particular feeling, a muted panic of, “I need to get myself RIGHT with this,” that I can eventually recognize and step back from. There’s no getting one’s self right with the teachings.

Now, I don’t take this stepping back to an extreme — for instance, on this most recent retreat, I sort of “re-upped” my practice of counting breaths with a little more focus and intent, and brought that into my koan study (a practice in which I focus on a line, poem, or saying from a collection of koans, which are not unsimilar to parables in the Gospels) in a rewarding way. That development of my zazen practice comes with me. Likewise, direction offered by the teachers, either in one-on-one interview or in Dharma talks, comes with me, as does the feeling-sense of the wider community supporting and maintaining me.

Those somehow don’t go away. In fact, they are special in that I don’t have to hold onto them at all, because they live in me now — they’re not separate from me. To call on them is not to reach for something beyond me. They’re not separate from my own sufficiency.

How do I explain this, then — that in trying not to get anything out of it, these teachings instead grew in me? It’s not for lack of effort, because retreat are hard work in their way. The effort is in stepping back from “trying”.

I had a dream before the retreat: I was facing some enemy and battling him with magic. When I tried too hard, put too much energy into focusing my power — my power failed. I was getting hurt and couldn’t protect myself as a result. But when I eased back into the fight, let go of the trying so hard — boom! Magic, power, protection.

This reminds me of something Simone Weil once said about concentration. She said: ask a group of students to concentrate on some point you’re making, and you will see them lean forward and furrow their brows and stop breathing — and a few minutes later, if you ask them what they’ve focused on, they will be unable to say anything. The only thing they’ll have accomplished is contracting their muscles and tiring themselves out, which has nothing to do with attention, or work, as she describes it.

Trying to get something out of a silent retreat is like this. Zazen and silence and the community are all good teachers in just stepping back and letting the experience take up residence in your person. Then, going out into the world, you don’t have to reach for them because they’re there already, and they’re what the world is offering to you, too.

Teaching

PBL: Peoples’ Math and Not-Knowing Math

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Yesterday, I had my first meeting with colleagues preparing for the new school year. I am still happily entrenched in the pace of the summer (the only tolerable pace right now, as NYC sits in the middle of a 5-day heat advisory), so while a meeting like this has that potential to upend one’s vibe, this did nothing of the sort. Just a change of scenery and a nice little ramble through the Village for a burrito afterwards.

My colleagues and I are coming off of a wonderful summit for PBL-style mathematics, where we got LOTS of great ideas from far-flung teachers doing exciting and inspiring work. It took me a while to recognize it, but Problem-Based Learning answers a number of difficult questions I have always had about the meaning and purpose of math education, every since my earliest days as a public school teacher and grad student. It was only after tossing about for two trimesters at my new placement at a progressive school this past year, that I finally started to pay attention to some of my fellow math and science teachers who were engaged in this approach, and recognized its potential to help student actively engage and create mathematics.

What is PBL? Here’s the definition that Carmel Schettino, the summit organizer offers:

“An approach to curriculum and pedagogy where student learning and content material are (co)-constructed by students and teachers through mostly contextually-based problems in a discussion-based classroom where student voice, experience, and prior knowledge are valued in a non-hierarchical environment..” (Schettino, 2013)

The big words for me here are “co-constructed” and “non-hierarchical”. The first addresses the idea that to be actively engaged in math is to create math, and that this is accomplished mostly in community. The second addresses the idea that math is not separate from us, and rather than being accepted and practiced on the basis of external authority, it is developed by (and in turn develops) our own insight, autonomy, and capacity to make sense of the world. Creating this experience for students is exactly what math teaching is about, what I’ve talked about on this blog often, and what I’ve created in the most fleeting moments you can imagine in my classrooms.

What does this look like? Students work on problem sets in groups and present their solutions to one another. These problem sets are the “text” of the class, but they differ from a typical math textbook. The problems are not organized by type of content and no procedures or theorems or samples are offered to address the problems. Instead, these problems are meant to call upon what the students know already, and are authored and arranged so as to guide the students, step by step, through the interconnected web of mathematics. The teacher’s role is purely as facilitator; significantly, her or she does not provide correct answers. Process is emphasized over product in homework and in writing about what they’re doing. There are tests, but they are one of many different forms of assessment — and they are also (ideally) recognized as opportunities to learn (imagine that!).

There is a lot of struggle, but also a lot of student ownership, when this kind of thing works. In my experience, students will come up with approaches to solutions that I did not anticipate, and they grow more comfortable seeing my approach as one way to come at a problem, rather than the “right” way. This kind of problem-based work — open-ended but with a definite end goal, group-oriented but generally relying on individual difference and participation — most closely resembles the kind of work our students will be engaged in in any field they choose in their professional lives, not too mention their postsecondary training to get there. I speak often of my time in engineering school, where it was clear that group work was necessary to stay afloat, but everyone still had to pull their own weight, working on problems that a step-by-step procedure simply could not resolve. It was jarring and disorienting to find this paradigm dominant in my college, after a very different experience in high school. Obviously college is more challenging than high school, but there is nothing about the pedagogical approach that should be saved for college. Rather, it is best to foster this method of study early, giving students autonomy and building the competency in a more authentic way. This is the basis for the entire progressive education movement.

And indeed as I got a closer look at PBL this year in my junior Precalculus class, I began to call it People’s Math. There is a little irony to this, since I work in a independent school which by its nature is elite. But the school comes out of the progressive political tradition of the last century and is committed to a progressive pedagogy. That means different things to different teachers, but for me it means empowering students to own, create, and critique mathematical thinking for themselves. I call it Peoples’ Math, because it draws on a common mathematical capacity that can be cultivated in all persons — and because the capacity it cultivates will benefit the broadest set of persons for everyday mathematical thinking, an essential component for a functioning democratic society. While People’s Math recognizes the presence of experts, and gives their analyses due respect, it does not cede the mathematical lens to them.

This is math for the People, yes.

Universal education is an unprecedented development in the history of the world, but its purpose is not fulfilled just by bringing bodies into buildings. It’s by actually educating universally. In this context, abstraction and specialized language are not necessarily the goal of math education — they are tools, to be applied skillfully, when the time is right, in order to best produce mathematical thinkers who are both self-sufficient and also comfortable in community. The long goal is to produce a society full of people who can reason mathematically together. This is the promise of universal education, and it is also crucial that at this time in our history, we engineer a society that is ready to take on unprecedented challenges.

In fact, the whole class experience that I intend to create is an immersion in small-scale but still unprecedented challenge — I will ask my students to tolerate a level of not-knowing that most adults would not tolerate if they had a choice. Most students and their families understand math as an objective body of content that can be communicated clearly, memorized, and then presented in some rote manner that is open to easy, quantifiable measure. PBL, with its talk of co-creating math in a non-hierarchical environment, throws a wrench in that whole scheme. If you’ve been really good at math and have good strategies in place for a different kind of math class, suddenly you’re standing on unstable ground: there are no textbook examples, no answers in the back of the book, and no procedure to memorize. If you’ve been really bad at math, you suddenly find yourself called upon to engage with this unpleasant content in a whole different way (though these types of students have the most to gain from this approach, in my estimation). Either way, it’s a significant upending of what students usually expect — and the harder they hold on to what they’ve come to expect, the harder a time they have (not unlike life…).

In Zen, the term not-knowing is used to convey a quality of openness and presence that is free from preconceived ideas. It calls upon an authentic response, rather that a reflexive reaction. It is not the absence of knowledge per se, but rather a flexible stance and freedom of motion and expression that comes before the application of knowledge. It is not an idea, but it is the ground from which ideas can grow. It is more given to heuristic rather than procedure and to listening rather than talking. In a Western cast, it might be called wisdom — a quality rarely mentioned in education policy and debate, but a worthy goal of our schooling.

Above, I used the term not-knowing as something to be tolerated, and that sense still holds somewhat true — because not-knowing is a little scary. It is challenging to dispense with one’s pre-existing assumptions, because they are how we navigate the world and protect ourselves from danger. And while it might seem ridiculous to consider the possibilities of danger in a math class, I invite you to see if you can remember a time that you failed to do something expected of you in a math class at any level. What feelings were attached to that? I bet they were pretty strong. It is not easy to open ourselves to strong feelings.

However, when not-knowing is skillfully and persistently cultivated, students can start to let go of their fixed ideas about how math should go and how good or bad they should be at math. If that happens, even for a moment, space is made for insight. When cultivated carefully and encouraged, these moments become more frequent. And suddenly you don’t have students doing math anymore, you have students mathing math. Or, to achieve complete Zen saturation, you have: math mathing math! I imagine this as the goal of a PBL class — creating a space for the creation and expression of math that flows naturally and authentically from the students, as if they were writing poems or singing songs. And it starts with the ability to tolerate, protect, and sustain an open stance of not-knowing.

 

In this way I think PBL, People’s Math, can also be called Not-Knowing Math. This inches into the realm of wisdom disciplines, akin to philosophy, the humanities, and even to theology — where it should be! Math knowledge and content, so often taken to be the whole of math, become accompanied by a mathematical stance, a pattern-seeking predisposition that playfully and pointedly bounces around a group. Letting go of who’s good and who’s bad at math, and in an environment that supports and encourages persistent effort — beauty, truth, and the good can all be created spontaneously.

Here is Bertrand Russell from Education and the Good Life. What I call the mathematical stance he calls the “scientific temper” — and he suggests a middle way utilizing both mind (“intellectual culture”) and heart (the opposite of “emotional atrophy” which I would call aliveness) that is none other than the attentive openness of not-knowing. He says:

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.  What is should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry.  In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act.  This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy.  But though difficult it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper.  Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatists forget the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility.  Both are mistaken, and their errors, when wide-spread, produce social disaster.

Speaking of social disaster, I also call this approach Math for the End of the World — an end precipitated by our societal inability to recognize patterns and work together effectively. (I suppose Math for the Anthropocene, or Math for the Climate Crisis would work as well, but it’s best not to be coy about the end of the world.) I’ll have to write more about that another time.

Zen

Reflections after a silent retreat

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I returned from my zendo’s ten-day silent retreat just yesterday, called a “sesshin” (which means “gathering the mind”). This is not my first time on sesshin, but it was the longest I’ve been on.

The challenge on returning is to express what was going on there, since the practice while on retreat is so comprehensive — every aspect of your day is given to a form of meditation. Obviously there are the times you are explicitly practicing: periods of zazen and walking meditation, the services and ritual meals, the dharma talks and interviews with teachers, and the work-practice periods. But several other aspects of your experience are pervaded by the spirit of meditation practice.

The most prominent of these is the maintenance of “noble silence” which includes not speaking with anyone casually and keeping your eyes kept at a 45-degree angle to the ground. The purpose of this is to keep your attention focused inward. I find this very easy to do where people are concerned (talking and listening are *hard*), but very challenging when walking around outside — who wants to look down when there are mountains and trees and animals and birds? Especially if you live in Brooklyn? But, as in meditation, the real point is not necessarily to do these things 100% of the time or you’ve failed, the purpose is to commit to returning to them as default stances. In meditation, the default stance is — attention to the breath. In noble silence the default is — attention to the breath! So in this context, you can beckon a fellow practitioner to ask about some part of the schedule, or you can look and see the mist rising from the eastern mountain or the woodchuck scampering into some rocks ahead of you — but when you do so, you do so simply and intentionally and gently return your attention within.

Speaking of the schedule — that is another implicit form of meditation. Here’s the schedule for the eight full days of the retreat:

5:30-7:30 zazen
7:30-8 service
8-8:30 breakfast
8:30-10 rest/exercise

10-11 work practice
11:20-12:30 dharma talk and zazen
12:30-1 service
1-1:30 lunch
1:30-3:30 rest

3:30-4:30 zazen
4:30-5 service
5-5:30 dinner
5:30-7 rest

7-8:30 zazen
9:30 lights out

I’ve wiggled the times a little bit — I think the zazen periods were actually a little longer, since there was definitely less space between the end of the last zazen period and lights out. But that’s the idea. This is a pretty spacious schedule as silent Zen retreats go. What’s interesting is that, early on in a retreat, you find that the rest/exercise/free times are much shorter than you anticipate, so you either need to do a fair amount of planning to do what you need to do, or you need to scale back on what you think you need to do. Here are parallels with noble silence: the schedule is meant to foster a sense of intentionality and simplicity.

And especially with so much seated meditation (a teacher at the zendo describes zazen as being like yoga, but you’re holding one position for the whole period!), you begin to give the free times over to taking care of what your body needs. For me, this meant: 1) naps, 2) bathroom and washing, 3) light exercise and stretching, and 4) sitting with a cup of tea and looking at a field. But to be honest, it’s mostly 1) and 2). 3) feels like a gift when it happens (exercise as a gift! what a magic trick that is). When 4) happens it’s like the most enjoyable kind of meditation you can do because: wind in the grass, tall clouds, and bitter green tea.

I would also give 10 minutes to check my phone for important emails and to make sure the world wasn’t on fire — disappointing, since it mostly was. But then I put it on airplane mode and put it down. Would you believe my cell battery lasted the whole 10 days without charging?

That your free time is given to what your body really needs is a great teaching, as valuable if not more so than any of the dharma talks. And in this context so much of the scheduled activity that isn’t zazen involves taking care of the community — cooking, cleaning, serving, and in general keeping your business relatively together so as to give everyone the space to enjoy noble silence. So when you take care of your body, you are taking care of yourself so that you can continue to take care of others, who in turn are taking care of you. Zen implies that this is what the world is actually like, and we go on retreat to see its activity more clearly.

Communicating all of this is hard, and much of it I couldn’t articulate until I sat down and started to write about it. The comprehensiveness of the experience makes reflection challenging while you’re in it — but then, you’re not really meant to be stepping out to reflect during that time. You are stepping into experience. It’s only when I left and was walking around Bed-Stuy and ran into a seminary colleague of mine, that I found that the retreat experience was precisely not given to theological reflection. That is to say, I sounded like a spacey cult person, focusing on specifics of zen form which were most relevant to me (“you see, the koans are about you” etc.) rather than the wider surround of safety, care, and frankly, freedom.

And while I like this “simply and intentionally” label to describe what is happening on retreat, it comes off sounding a little spartan in a way that doesn’t speak to the reality. The experience does not live itself like lack, but like abundance. Food is delicious, people are still people but generally in good spirits, and as anyone who has ever sat quietly knows, there’s no such thing as silence. Or rather, silence is not the absence of sound, which is never a thing that happens, but more of a relationship to sound and activity. In leaning into silence, you somehow dissolve the boundary between yourself and the sounds and activity of the world. So silence is not a absence of sound — silence is just sound.

Theology

The Author of Violence and Staying Awake

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In the midst of my theological education, I came to an understanding of why the existence of evil in our world was so often attributed to a conscious entity, called by many names but conveniently referenced as the Devil or Satan or what have you. Evil didn’t seem like an impersonal force at all, but one that made choices to come at us where we were weakest. As a Buddhist, I feel strange to name it this way — but Buddhism identifies energies with personal characters as well, so it might not be so far from the mark.

My education was theologically liberal and politically progressive, so when I talk about evil, I generally accept the views of theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch, Paul Tillich, and Martin King — that evil is most manifest not in sinful actions but in a sinful social order. “Sin is separation,” King quoted Tillich, making the argument in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that segregation was a moral wrong, a symbol of the human’s existential separation from God.

When I am curious to see evil in the world, I generally needn’t look much farther than my Facebook feed, bringing news of the latest of the many the waves of violence that have washed over the country and the world this year, the titles of which become a numbing litany: Syria, Brussels, Turkey, Iraq, Orlando, Baton Rouge and #AltonSterling, Minnesota and #PhilandoCastile, and now Dallas. There is no shortage of that which is opposed to life in this world, and we see it expressed over and over again.

What is so vexing about these outbursts or campaigns of violence is their pervasive presence, and how they seem so often to grow out of developments that at one point in history might have been considered progressive, even liberative.

I think of the development of race relations and the persistence of racial violence in this country through the years.  As a nation we have haltingly and imperfectly sought to redress some of the more dire wrongs that proceed from the legacy of slavery. Slavery becomes illegal, suffrage is extended, laws are written to protect the rights of the black community to vote and to have equal protection and due process. These victories are won at a great cost of effort, tears, sweat, and blood — especially blood. We honor those who have led these movements and sometimes have given up their lives.

And yet — every solution to the problem that is struggled for and finally established as law seems, inevitably, to have the seed of its own spiritual defeat sown into its fabric. The root of the problem, the hatred we wish to abolish, the violence we hope to prevent, the evil that grips communities and destroys bodies — it doesn’t seem to go away, but instead is pushed deeper, goes underground, becomes harder to recognize and harder to agree upon, begins to work in a way that confuses a clear moral cause. It is because of this, I believe, that people stand beside our present crisis of police brutality and mass incarceration for the black community, and say, “but it’s gotten so much better!”

When I engage these people, I find myself drifting deeper into confusion, like a smoke screen or fog of war has descended. And it doesn’t seem to come from with whom the people I’m arguing, who often speak from a place of wishing to honor those who have given their lives to bring us where we are. No, the confusion seems to include them, but they aren’t its source. The confusion is broader, it includes them and me and the situation in general — it arises in exactly the place that clarity is most urgently needed. An attack right at our weakest joint, as if it knew to go right there.

In fact, weighing the heavy burden of objective evidence that the criminal justice system is racist, AND the consistent personal testimony of black persons — families having to give their children the terrifying “talk” about how to escape an encounter with law enforcement with their bodies intact — it’s surprising that there’s any confusion at all about this. And it’s shocking that we haven’t dealt with it already. And it’s shocking that it comes after so many victories have been hard won by freedom-seekers throughout space and time.

When a problem continues to appear with pervasive persistence; when a problem as clear as day seems so given to confusion; when our weaknesses around race and violence are so frequently exploited to further injustice, as if those weaknesses were chosen for their vulnerability — well, this makes me feel like there’s a Chooser. That there is some conscious entity that is maneuvering to play us against ourselves, giving freedom to the violence that seems to seep up from the ground and use us as its hateful tools. Meanwhile a smokescreen is generated that keeps us coughing and blinking — what is its source?

At this point, I imagine some Christian theologians with (maybe) more conservative training than I would speak with some precision about the Devil. And when I see how persistently we must face evil, separation, sin, violence, hatred — within ourselves and within our communities — I see the appeal of that idea. Evil, it seems, has an Author, a deft Manipulator who plays on our weaknesses if we are not awake.

This is not a historical or Biblical argument. I don’t subscribe to a Devil-as-ontological-reality, and as a theologian I don’t feel I have the wherewithal to make such an argument. What I’m lifting up is quality of violence and anger that makes it seem like we’re talking about an agency that is always one step ahead of us. For me, it helps to think of anger and violence as being arranged by an entity, because then I know to look for its footprints (no jokes about hoof-prints, pls). I suppose this is an argument that draws on an engaged spirituality, dedicated to being clearly present to the world as it is now, and a psychological perspective that acknowledges that the violence and anger we see out in the world doesn’t start in any one of us, but also lives and breathes in each of us, if we don’t keep an eye out for it, in ourselves and others.

It takes up residence in us — but it’s not us. It’s not anyTHING, in fact. There is a long tradition in Christianity that evil is not a positive existence, but a privation of the inherent goodness of creation. This was Augustine’s argument. It is not found whole in any given person or institution or nation or religion, but rather is something that feeds on all of those things — parasitical and often subtle, it feeds on life that doesn’t note its presence.

The value in this perspective is found when we try to argue what the hell we’re up against. Because, sure: there are racist cops, and there shouldn’t be. But the current conversation about systematic racism is not about individual discrimination, even to the point of murder — it’s about a whole system that performs racism. But how can a system perform?? Again, this implies a Performer.

This Performer’s trace is made MANIFEST in the actions of some cops, who might or might not be racist, who might or might not even be white — but they are still performing white supremacy, because they are acting as agents of it — puppets, really. Individuals must be held accountable, but this is not a problem to be located only in individuals. It’s larger than that — it’s unconscious, unquestioned; it’s the assumptions that we make without thinking; it’s the way policing and processing and incarceration and schools and poverty and capitalism (and, and, and…) intersect and CREATE conditions for, in this case, a black community under attack. It’s the thing that shows up where we’re not looking, as it were put there because we’re not looking — there are those fingerprints of the Performer.

And it breeds confusion, making similar things look different. The system that destroyed the lives of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile is also implicated in the murder of the five officers in Dallas shortly thereafter. It’s similar, though I’m sure many won’t receive it that way. The first two incidents were a betrayal of the public, of the power of life and death police are given by our society. The last incident was an affront to our society organizing to protect itself against violence. In both cases, something inimical to our individual and collective well-being was enacted. Our responses will vary with context, but they should fundamentally be the same thing: supporting and cultivating life.

Is that confusing? It’s because evil — anger — delusion — sin — whatever religious language you want to use to describe it — exhibits behavior like it is a Confuser. In the end I think this systemic negation of life is too big for us to fathom and too close for us to see, but when we experience it we experience it as an entity, one that has us where it wants us, and confuses and enrages us and tires us out until we can’t act for ourselves and for our true well-being anymore.

So, right, that’s like the Devil. I get you, Christians. Again, I’m not making any ontological claims about this entity, but I never want to shake the feeling that what I’m trying to see in every waking moment is being obscured by something not wanting to be found, hiding in the shadows of my own person, in my community, and in my wider society.

The first move — the diabolical opening, if you will — is the confusion. Our first responsibility is to stay awake and take care of ourselves, and then awaken others. It’s also to be open to awakening from others — a loving and mutually committed community is essential.

Next up, Universal Restoration and Indra’s Net.

Teaching

Teaching for modes of being — play and monasticism

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I was pretty ambitious, and notably abstract early on. And come to think of it, I will continue to be. BUT, now I have something a little closer to experience.

I spent much of the day thinking about a test I was giving my seventh grade class. It was at the end of the day, but there were so many related considerations to pursue while also doing the rest of my job. A handful of students need extended time, and we couldn’t do it after school, so I had to meet them during lunch and recess. Some students have additional half-time, some students have additional full-time, and some students don’t officially get anything but often they take so long that I feel obliged to accommodate them anyway. I had to find a space in our very cozy middle school — as it turns out, the 6th grade room I chose was going to host a meeting for the sixth grade. Luckily they could do it next door, but almost the entire sixth grade had to walk through our room to get there. With lunch trays. After that, I decided I wanted to make a second copy of the test with slightly different numbers, because our math room leaves little room for spreading out and they’d be right on top of each other. I needed to prepare everything ahead of time, so they could use the full 45 minutes (and then maybe a little after that for stragglers). I often felt some concern and stress, because my students so often feel stressed around any kind of test that I take it on too. I was also feeling a little competitive and jealous of my humanities colleagues, who see my students more hours per week than I do, and how I’ve felt that I’ve lost time to their events over the course of the year.

All this made for quite a stressful day! Luckily, once I’m with the kids, it gets better, because then I’m responding to real people and not just my imagination and projections. I can respond to them and balance their stress with cool, rather than internalizing it. And finally they started to settle in as they took the test — a little anxious, but focused and largely okay.

Then a trumpet lesson started next door.

Now, the students who are easily distracted (a set of students that overlaps significantly with the extended-time students) were quick to cringe and moan over this new circumstance, but I acknowledged that things happen and we can still focus. When other students with a better capacity to center themselves started to appeal to me for action, I knew it was time to do something. So I poked my head into the other room and asked that the lesson move or perhaps be a little quieter — which they were able to do without much hassle. (Of course they had the same problem with space that I did at lunch with my extended-time students — and in fact I had been asked NOT to use the math room for that purpose because teachers would be in the next room discussing class placement for next year!).

All day, while stressing about things, and even through this situation during the test, I was haunted by this concern that I was worrying a lot over something that did not actually mean anything. Testing, of course, draws a lot of criticism these days, and much of it valid, but it has its place in a classroom — still I was feeling like I was spinning my wheels for no kind of good reason for my students. What value was any of this? Why was I so stressed about something that really didn’t have much benefit for my students?

Well, as I returned back from the trumpet situation and the kids got back to work, I saw my whole day like this: I had been fighting like hell to secure for my students a quiet place to struggle a little on their own with mathematics. And once I saw things this way, it felt much better — because I DO find value in that!

I love our little progressive school for its restless activity. There is usually a din in my classroom and in the hallway and in other classrooms and so on. Students are moving, building, painting, drawing, typing, and writing in a variety of configurations that most people don’t see until they live in college dorm. They are talking to their peers constantly, making plans and recording things on iPads and making lists on whiteboards — it’s all very collaborative and often based on something that they are interested in. In my previous placements, that buzz of learning is actually quite a rare thing to hear, and it impresses me every time. I’m trying to think of a name — it’s the discursive model, the dialectic model of learning. Talking, listening, oohing and ahing, playing, creating, moving, sharing. Maybe the play model is better? Or the communal model? Anyway, very important.

But sometimes, you have to be quiet, you have to sit in one place, and you have to struggle with the math — which means you have to struggle with yourself, alone. This is in my mind a monastic model (which is bollocks, monks and nuns are far better defined by their community than their solitude, but the image has power). I think this is the place where one develops focus and a personal relationship with whatever they are learning, and come close to Simone Weil’s discussion of studies and prayer — Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God, in which she says, among other magnificent gems:

The Key to a Christian conception of studies is the realisation that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it….

Although people seem to be unaware of it to-day, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. Most school tasks have a certain intrinsic interest as well, but such an interest is secondary….

Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles….

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it….

Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.

Oh could I go on. This article very near destroyed me when I read it in seminary — I was almost sick with the idealism of it, having been a math teacher in America in the early 2000’s. I could not imagine how this could even be possible.

But I was young. It is possible. But you have to fight for it. The God part is a distraction, don’t get hung up on that — we’re talking about the attention here. If you’re interested in the God part, God’s in the attention. If you’re not interested in it, there’s only the attention.

It is attention of course that so many young people will struggle with today. I am not as bleak about digitalia as many commentators, but it’s clear it has a pervasive affect that students not aware of at all. But all student maintain the capacity to attend to some valuable effort if it speaks to them and challenges them, but not so much that they feel like it’s out of reach (c.f. the zone of proximal development).

This mode of being has value for young people to achieve and it is right that I fight to make it happen. Likewise the play mode, though I don’t have to fight so hard in that institution to make that happen.

It is intriguing to consider structuring my classes so as create these modes of being as often as possible for my students. The usual approach — of creating a certain knowledge or habit in a student — will obviously inform the content that fills the forms of these modes. But the focus on modes brings all the relevance into each day, and brings my attention to my students right now — it make education about the present experience, and not some idea of a future condition or requirement (like: high school, college, employment). It suggests a constellation of questions that a teacher can always pose to him or herself: Are they learning? What are they learning? How do you know? What are they doing? Are they receiving, creating, sharing? Or are the checked out? This kind of attention, I think, share elements of both the play mode and the monastic mode — it suggests a parallel process, where the teacher shares in the experience of the student while also structuring and guiding it. Quite frankly, I think a teacher should be able to enjoy doing whatever he or she is assigning to students. I think this allows a certain psychodynamic permeability, wherein students start to absorb (introject) the guiding qualities of the teacher, while developing their own capacities — but that’s just a theory! I’ll develop that more when I write about chaplaincy as a model of teaching.

But modes of being as the lens of structuring my class! That’s an idea that’s got some life. Play mode and monastic mode are two that are immediately relevant to math education.

What are some others, I wonder? What other modes of being have value for my math students?

Performance mode? Exploration mode (allied to play mode, I think)? General Assembly mode (thanks OWS)?

The question is: what practice (or is it praxis?) do we seek to create for our students, in this very class, at this very moment?

Praxis might me the right word for all of these.

Justice/Zen

More like you than you

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I’ve often felt an affinity for the marginalized. It comes from an early place in my life of feeling marginalized myself — powerless or less important or unable to assert my own needs, because they were less valuable than those of others. And so when I encounter or come to understand some way others are marginalized, I feel connected to that somehow. This is a tricky thing, to be an embodiment of many of the dominant paradigms of our culture (I’m white, I’m a male, I’m straight, I’m cis-gendered, I’m able-bodied and -minded, I’m well educated, I’m affluent) but to still feel some affinity for, participation in, even identity with those who are on the margins — nonwhite, women, gay, trans, disabled, affected by mental illness, uneducated, poor. I want to be modest about the implications of this affinity, but I also want to be true, to speak from the heart.

What does it mean, then, to feel an affinity for the marginalized? It means that the experience of one who is not like me, the other, one who is relatively disadvantaged as a result, still reveals to me some part of me I have forgotten, or lost awareness of. “There is no other, over there,” is what Roshi says. Otherness is an illusion — a convincing one, one we have to grapple with because we live in these bodies and only these bodies — but one we must transcend as we live in them, fully.

At the zendo, we were watching a preview for the film “Wretches and Jabberers,” about two autistic men with significant speech impediments who go on a world tour to engage others and communicate from their experience, to help people not living with this particular disability to understand it in a different way.

At one point, one of the subjects of the film, Larry Bissonette, is saying, “more like you than not,” challenging our own perceptions of what our lives are over and against what a life with autism is. Larry speaks slowly, one word at a time, his tone increasing with each word. This forces the listener to pay attention, to find the meaning in the most straightforward expressions — or to let the meaning be apparent, as it is.

As he moved through the sentence “more like you than not,” I could swear that what he was going to say was: “more like you than you.”

This was pretty astounding — even though he did not in fact say that, and it was a projection on my part, I think it struck at something true for my own experience, and that of others as well.

We can, if we are ablebodied and ableminded and not hindered by disability or some other non-normative situation in our physical and mental capacities, convince ourselves that we can do it all on our own. That our abledness is intrinsic, right, and proper. That it’s statistical normativeness is also an expression of some kind of naturalism — it is that most people are ablebodied, and so it ought to be the case that everyone be ablebodied. It’s right and just that I should be able-bodied and -minded. This can relegate those that are NOT ablebodied or minded to either a “wrongness” or a ” suffering aggrievedness”. Either they’re not right and deserving of separation, or they are forever suffering, deserving of our pity.

Stated as such that is obviously a load of crap, but it’s worth noting further that while very few people would consciously express such notions, and while our society would never endorse either view — functionally, both as individuals and as a society, we follow the path that that idea creates. We are unnerved confronting those with disabilities. We don’t want to look at their struggles. Or if we do, we approach them under the guise of charity, in a spirit of giving to the less fortunate. Societally, people who are not ablebodied or living with mental illness are functionally marginalized. Try to be in a wheelchair and access mass transit. Or go on a date.

Have you ever thought of those things and went “thank God I don’t have to do that?” I sure have, because it doesn’t look like fun. And it stops there, usually. But what if you live that way, and what is my response to you if you must live that way. I probably don’t want to look so closely, engage to closely.

I once took a group of students to visit a nursing home, and one of my students reflected with me afterwards that he was uncomfortable because they were just so sad and he didn’t know what to talk about. Who hasn’t has that initial experience of a nursing home?

That kind of reaction — unconscious aversion and avoidance, experienced as a feeling of sadness or discomfort or maybe even irritation — leads me to believe that something is being revealed to us about ourselves. Nothing terrifies us more than that part of us we’ve pushed away and disowned, projected onto someone else. In our pragmatic, logocentric, transactional society, what is more terrifying than the possibility of being unable to move freely, or being unable to speak clearly to relate and exchange ideas? But of course we all experience that sometimes — in many ways we are unavoidably bound and hindered, and find self-expression hard, and struggle to reach out and touch another person. We all have some elements that are disabled, that are autistic, that are weak.

And I don’t just mean it’s something that sometimes happens to us. These are a fundamental part of us. Nothing is left out. It’s not just that I am sometimes like that — it’s that those things are a part of the universe that makes me. It is just as it is, with me and with others. It’s is closer to me than some idea I have of my able-bodied and -minded self. “More like you than you.”

It seems that, when you encounter someone who you initially understand as different in some way, that experience of difference can be seen with some finality (“they’re just different”, or it can be seen as an invitation to see beyond the difference. This is both personal, introspective work and social, communal work. Here I’ve talked about it along the abled-bodied and mental illness axes, but you can see this extended to other dualism: white-black, male-female, straight-gay, cis-trans, wealthy-poor. Whatever. The other is no other but your self, and we share a mutual responsibility to respond to the other as a revealer and hold of our selves.

We are all holding one another in our lack and our wholeness, and no one, not one single person, is left out of that branched and rooted and intertwined holding, of that compassionate, sustaining structure. How do we live in it? What is the quality of our holding and sustenance?

Justice/Theology

Teaching Math at Sing Sing

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I spent a year teaching high school math at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison some 20 miles north of New York City. I was a graduate student in an M.Div. program, focusing in psychology and theology. Before graduate school, I had taught high school math for several years. I chose to teach math at Sing Sing for my fieldwork requirement.

My students were 24 inmates, all men. Some could have been as young as their late 20s; at least one was in his 50s or maybe 60s. Of the 24 students, 23 were nonwhite. They were predominantly African American, but there were several Latino students, one Asian, and one Native American.

They had all received their high school diplomas or GEDs, and had to take a precollege program to move on to college classes. Some had not sat in a classroom in 20 years.

On the first day, when I asked them to describe their experience with mathematics, most would talk about the last schooling they had. They said things like: “I got my GED inside,” or “I got up to 8th grade on the streets.” At first I thought the latter comment was a boast (as in, “I was educated on the streets”), but I came to realize that the streets actually meant the whole outside world. And inside meant right there.

Early in the course, I was talking about a homework assignment, and one said to me, “that is not my home.” I don’t know where his home was, but it wasn’t inside.

Getting inside as a visitor is a lengthy process. Electronics are deposited in the armory outside the front door, which is also where visiting cops will store their handguns. After a metal detector, ID check, and a thorough search of your possessions, you shuffle at varying speeds through a succession of locked gates to wait for a bus that carries you 200 yards to the school building. Walking across the grounds is not allowed. At any point in this process, you can wait for a while. Maybe the bus isn’t working, or a large group came in right before you, or a high-ranking officer is visiting and using the bus to conduct a tour.

I usually arrived at my two hour class at least 15 minutes late. Once, I arrived an hour late.

The wait gives you time to think. I would usually reflect on my lesson or some classroom matter, but I’d also gaze blankly about the space and grounds. It looked like any other older government institutional space, but with guard towers.

That is to say, it looked like a public school. With guard towers.

The similarity between our public schools and our prisons works on a few levels.

It’s not just the school-to-prison pipeline that’s a problem (though that is a big, big problem). It’s that public schools are explicitly modeled after systems in which control is prioritized as a prerequisite for any other activity.

That is to say: it’s not just that schools fail to prepare students, giving them few prospects and making them more likely to fall into a life of crime and eventually prison.

It’s that school successfully prepare students for prison, by acculturating them to deference to authority, to being policed and disciplined. The public schools can prepare them to frame themselves as somehow wrong, different, and bad — not worthy of anything good.

Especially when those public schools serves low-income African-American and Latino students. Then the comparison becomes more stark, and the systemic forces of racism, poverty, education, and mass incarceration come into sharp contrast. I often mulled over Dostoyevsky’s observation,

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

I only stayed in the school building, and only knew my class, so my viewpoint was not comprehensive.

But I will note that I had 24 students, 23 of whom were men of color. Black lives matter, indeed.

What of the men themselves?

My students at Sing Sing were the most motivated, curious and grateful students I have ever taught.

Many came with an explicit desire to do something they could be proud of, to “make something” of their lives. Many wanted to finish college so they could be better positioned to find a job after they got out, but most simply expressed a desire to “better themselves” or make their families proud — even to atone for past wrongs.

One said he wanted to be able to help his children with their math homework when they visited — so that they knew that learning was important, and they knew they could rely on him as good role model.

The stakes were high. This was math that mattered.

I was there as a math teacher, and never mentioned my graduate work in theology to the clas. But in my personal reflections, I did not have to search long to find the theological themes. My students, confronting a violent and isolated context, spent four hours a week struggling over math, a subject most people with much more comfort and opportunity keep at an arm’s length. Their gratitude, hope, and effort were palpable.

A casual observer in our room would see a normal adult education class with an easy rapport between students and teacher. The men all wore the same shade of green — some in sweatshirt or hoodies, others in work jackets and jeans. They called me professor and apologized for the gruffness of the guards. They wanted to share their work and were excited to answer questions (like motivated students do), but they also had the easy manner that comes when learning is appreciated and not just endured. Some of this came with their age, but maybe they also felt lucky to be there.

I enjoyed teaching the class.

I was also uncomfortable about my power relationship with my students.

My students saw me as the bearer of objective knowledge that they could only learn by my communicating it directly. They were very receptive to what teachers commonly refer to as the “chalk-and-talk” method of teaching, which is exactly what it sounds like. In such a classroom, knowledge is constructed exclusively by the teacher; the student’s participation is limited to passively absorbing that knowledge.

If you’re of the opinion that learning math is a creative and collaborative activity, then this approach is pedagogically problematic. Paolo Freire says, “…teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. This is the mechanical transference from results machinelike memorization.” 

This conformity and coercion is another expression of the prison model of education. No surprise it was so popular at Sing Sing.

The pedagogical critique had a theological component as well. At the college graduation ceremony a year or two before my time, the valedictorian of the class gave a speech in which he reflected on his gratitude for the program. He said,

We deserved nothing. But we received mercy.

This was a play on Mercy College, the institution that provided courses at Sing Sing. It was also an explicit and strong theological statement. No doubt he spoke this word from his heart, and that it flowed from a source of unexpected redemption he found in his life and in the college program.

But I suggest that a black inmate in America in 2016 should not look upon himself as undeserving of self-knowledge and self-development in a higher education curriculum. In fact, he deserved it much earlier than he found it.

If we were committed to actually providing for this — eliminating poverty, educating the youth, acknowledging and atoning for our violent and racist history — if our nation were one in which black lives already mattered — then he would have received not mercy for his undeservedness, but grace that corresponded to his original nature and vocation. I find these words from theologian Christopher Morse:

Christian faith confesses that what justifies our existence is finally not our own efforts or behavior…and not the dominant powers of the present age, which may variously view us with favor or disfavor, and not even the way we look upon ourselves. Faith in justification is faith in the way God looks upon us…as Paul explains to the Galatians, a faith in how we are known by God (Gal 4:9). God sees us as no one else does, as being within the relationships of ultimate love and freedom.

My role called for more than the skillful communication of math content. My task was to develop critical, collaborative, and free learners, to help these men cultivate the Good within themselves and in each other.

Through math! And journal-writing! And having them go to the board and explain their work! And encouraging them to question and help one another!

Whether I was able to successfully achieve this is hard to say, like any question of authentic assessment. How do we measure growth? or autonomy? or healthy skepticism?

The students took their placement test a month after I finished working with them. Of the original twenty-four students, twenty-one sat for the test, (two had been transferred away from Sing Sing; one had his cell-leaving privilege revoked for reasons unknown). Of these, eighteen passed. They continued to their undergraduate work the following fall.

So they learned some math. In fact, they knew a lot of math already. I hope they learned more. At least one mentioned he’d like to end up as a math teacher.

In the last class, the guys shuffled out before I left, and each shook my hand and thanked me. I spent the moment enjoying their warmth and gratitude.

Before they left, I asked them to write letters to their future selves — imagining a time after their placement test, when they officially began they college courses.

One student wrote: “I accept the challenge ahead because…my choices are my own.”

Teaching

Psyche in the Classroom: Teachers and Therapists

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When I first began studying depth psychology, I couldn’t stop thinking about my years of experience teaching math to high school students. It seemed to me then that there were overlaps between the methods and end goals of both teachers and therapists, and that teachers in particular could take a page or two out of the therapists’ playbook.

On a personal level, there would be some value in teachers coming to understand their own hangups and complexes that they might otherwise impose on their students without knowing. As adult role models and mentors, they could learn to listen to students in a very specific way, recognizing student behaviors as indicative of a deeper layer of meaning. On a pedagogical level, teachers could use insight into therapist methods to create classrooms that were authentic and alive with learning.

Obviously the differences between teachers and therapists are important. A teacher’s primary focus is the development of a student’s intellect, while a therapist’s is facilitating psychological wholeness and emotional healing for their patient.

A teacher is concerned mainly with logos, a therapist with psyche. This latter term, psyche, meant “soul” for the ancient Greeks — so psyche-care is really soul-care, though modern practitioners might resist the designation.

Keeping with the Greeks, a teacher in the Western tradition follows the model set by  Socrates, the proto-teacher committed to not-knowing and questioning uncritically-held beliefs. It involves logic and argument, and is primarily about making intellectual sense.

But we also have to notice there is some overlap between the two roles: both teachers and therapists have “helper” responsibilities to their charges. Both are given some kind of power to exercise in their charges’ best interest. Both have undergone the process that they themselves now mediate: a teacher was once a student, and a therapist should have been in therapy at some point. Further, I think that the success of a teacher or a therapist is in part determined by their closeness to the experience they now mediate — the closer a teacher is to the learning process, and the closer the therapist is to their own therapeutic process, the better they will navigate their beneficiaries’ experience.

Further, both teachers and therapists are fundamentally committed to truth. The oath loyalty we hope all teachers might take would be this: I vow to explore and skillfully communicate the truth as I understand it. This work has the end goal of training free and competent citizens, who will not be so easily swayed by falsehoods and unfounded promises (the present national political scene notwithstanding).

For therapists, particularly those trained in depth psychology, the healing power of therapy is “to address the truth of a life,” which will allow a patient or client to ultimately be free within their circumstances1. That could be a painful emotional process — just as students will endure a painful process of not-knowing and struggling their way out of it — but there is value to the struggle so that a person might live in the light of truth.

These are general dynamics. What about the difference in goals? Is there a more subtle overlap between these two ends?

I remember one of my mentors in grad school warned us to not be armchair psychologists. I suppose there was a danger to explain away or pathologize a student’s behavior, and we were more responsible for holding them accountable and helping them improve themselves. Our role, in his mind, was not to look at our students from a psychological perspective, nor to make idle speculations as to why they are acting like they did.

On the face of it, this position is pretty airtight: we shouldn’t do what we’re not trained to do. Teachers are not therapists, and shouldn’t try to do what therapists do. Different mode, different context, different relationship.

However, this prohibition calls for some unpacking. If we hope to address the intellectual and developmental needs of our students, we know for a fact that we’re going to run into aspects of a student’s development, family, personality, identity, and social context that are influencing that process. Once we realize that learning is not purely intellectual, the tools and theoretical underpinning of psychology become useful, because many of these non-intellectual aspects can be understood through the lens of the unconscious.

How does the unconscious influence learning? What value does considering it have for teachers?

Zen

I know they say this tent is waterproof but I’ve pitched it at sea.

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On the meaning of the teaching of Origen of Alexandria, from his Of Tents and Wells1.

And so, contemplating in the Spirit these progressions, he calls them the “tents of Israel.” And true it is, when we make some progress in knowledge and gain some experience in such things, we know that when we have come to a certain insight and recognition of the spiritual mysteries, the soul rests there, in a certain sense, as in a “tent.” But when it begins to make fresh sense again of what it finds there and move on to other insights, it pushes on with folded tent, so to speak, to a higher place and sets itself up there, pegged down by strong conclusions; and again the soul finds in the place another spiritual meaning, for which the conclusions from earlier insights have doubtless prepared the way, and so the soul seems always to be pulled on toward the goal that lies ahead (cf. Phil 3:14) moving on, so to speak, in “tents.” For once the soul has been struck by the fiery arrow of knowledge, it can never again sink into leisure and take its rest, but it will always be called onward from a good to the better and from the better to the higher.

I know they say this tent is
waterproof
But I’ve pitched it at sea.

Will my tent float, then?
Be a boat, then?
Be pulled along on tide and swell?

I don’t see an inch of ground for pegs
or for legs;
No way to progress or higher place to rest.

But still lifting over crest, glimpsing meaning in trough,
the fresh spray of Spirit
rewards a moment’s contemplation.

Before the tent is moved upon, and the soul moved along
Across the circle of the sea
Called by the moon to the next high tide.

 

Zen

Why leave the palace?

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As the story goes, Shakyamuni Buddha was a prince in northern India. Before his birth, it was prophesied that he was destined to become one of two things: a great political and military leader, or a great religious leader. His parents, the king and queen, hoped for their kindgon’s sake that it would be the former, and from the very earliest part of his life he was exposed to only the opulence of palace life, without any religious preaching admitted or suffering in sight. I suppose they reasoned that he would never turn to a religious life if he never encountered suffering — which is not so bad a bet.

Well, he grew up in luxury and married and had a child and never left the palace walls, until one night his curiosity got the best of him and he snuck outside with his charioteer. I guess he snuck out in a chariot, which seems a bit indiscreet if you’re creeping. Maybe this is a nod to the Bhagavad Gita? It helps your sales pitch if it seems that Lord Krishna has a subtle hand in your spiritual path.

Anyway. He gets out while being driven in a chariot, which is going at just the right speed such that he can encounter a sick person, an old person, and a corpse. He had never seen any of these before, so his charioteer explains what they are.

Shakyamuni is horrified and dismayed, until they encounter a mendicant, a traveling monk. The charioteer explains to him that this is one who has dedicated his life to finding the truth about life. Upon hearing this, Shakyamuni resolves to follow the path of the mendicant and seek the truth. He shaves his head, throws away his fancy clothes, gathers cloth from the garbage for his robes, and off he goes.

So the question is, why did he leave?

It’s hard to answer this about Shakyamuni, because this story is so overlaid with mythical elements that it’s hard to make sense of his context, let alone his decision (I mean, seriously, he never got a cold?). Still Buddhists take it as a model for entering the path: “home-leaving” is an important first step in practice. When we tell this story, we tell it about ourselves.

It’s about the Buddha — sure — it’s about the practice — fine — but it’s really about ourselves, only each of our individual selves. It’s about our lives.

So why leave home? Why leave security and comfort, even pleasure, in favor of a difficult journey, with no promise of success, and a decent risk of failure (which in Shakyamuni’s case almost surely meant death — and like, death by tiger. Or dysentery. Not pleasant.)? Why take up the pain, rather than keep it at an arm’s length?

I am quick to answer, “Because the truth is there, and what’s here only obscures the truth!”

To which my teacher responds, “How do you know?”

Which is a good question.

Why risk comfort in service of truth, when you don’t even know if the truth is out there? I’ve been trying to avoid it as I’ve been writing, but when I type, “the truth is out there,” it makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. How could you possibly know? Shakyamuni, you paranoid maniac, what were you thinking? What could you possibly achieve out there, with your impulsive searching?

As I reflect on what led me to enter my own spiritual path, I think it had less to do with what was promised at some point beyond where I was — the truth of liberation, somewhere in a different time and place — and more to do with the truth that had been let in just by my life being my life. We see suffering because suffering is here, and our familiar paths, while comfortable and predictable, seem to promise only a deeper surrender to it.

If there’s suffering out there, it only drives home the point further — there’s no escaping it! It’s inside the palace as well as outside of it. When Shakyamuni saw sickness, old age, and death, did he not have to revisit his understanding of his only healthy body, and that of his consorts and wife and friends and parents? of his child? It’s not that the truth was out there — it was that the truth of this world already lived in him and in everyone and everything he knew. There was no hiding from it. There was no self-deception that could find purchase against such a clear truth, so deep was the penetration of what’s-going-on.

If you can’t hide from it, and if you can’t push it away, what’s left to do than to face it directly and energetically? To hold all things, especially security and comfort, in a permanent state of suspicion? And to trust that it’s possible to be, somehow, free?

Whether its the pull of truth or the push of suffering, I don’t think Shakyamuni would have given a good reason one way or another. He came to a place in his life where it was just time to take another step. Maybe for Shakyamuni, home-leaving came like fruit falling from the tree.

For us, what would obscure the next step? What could possibly obscure the truth, of suffering right here and a path to be free of suffering? And if it’s clear, can we just face it?

Zen

On the “broad and generous spirit…”

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In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away:

…you begin to feel generous toward your own human tendency to be caught in the cycle of wanting what you can’t have and averting from what terrifies you: bitterness, despair. If you are able to extend your charity to aspects of yourself you know cause you pain, you are developing the broad and generous spirit of letting everything be what it is, including yourself.

This puts me in mind of the work of people in the helping professions. I always think of teachers, but it applies to nurses and doctors, social workers and chaplains, ministers and therapists — really anyone who helps.

It might seem odd, because a helper’s role is precisely to not let everything “be what it is”, but to effect meaningful change in the life of another — often someone in need of support, guidance, or even protection. Correcting errors, administering medication, performing surgery, intervening, cautioning — these are all proactive measures that helpers might take correct a deficiency, to take what is and make it better.

(This tempting misreading of Cohen’s line mirrors a common misconception of Buddhist resignation toward the world. Buddhism might not seem the right religion to support an energetic activism, given its emphasis on non-action as its central practice. Meditation can become navel-gazing; equanimity can becomes a hopeless surrender; the teachings on emptiness and no-self can become a dismissal of the lived experience of human persons; and the Dharma is considered as more philosophy than religion (The Buddha can become Schopenhauer, if we’re not careful!))

But this is not the import of “letting things be as they are,” for both helpers (and Buddhists).

Helping is easy to commit to. Who doesn’t want to help? Even if it’s not their job, most people will acknowledge the value of helping someone in need of help. And if it is your job, how perfectly aligned with the universe you can be! Let’s help, and get paid for it — what could go wrong with such a straightforward charge!

Harder is knowing how much help to offer.

A teacher wants her students to learn math, but its clear that her students need help in this — because math is hard, because some of their home lives are a mess, because young people have a hard time focusing and persevering, and so on. So a teacher will give herself over to helping using the tools of her trade — detailed and rich lesson plans, inspiring mathematical ideas, different ways of structuring the class, getting the kids to practice their skills, experimental pedagogy, going on field trips, singing and dancing, whatever it takes.

But is there a point when too much help is offered? When the help transforms into something entirely other — when it becomes fixing? When it starts to treat the students not as subjects in their own right, able to make choices and grow by their own energy, but as objects to be manipulated somehow?

I think most helpers have a preprogrammed danger of falling into fixing those we’re charged with helping. Its the shadow side of our propensity and capacity to help. We tie our ego strength to the improvement of others. And if we’re not in a good place, if no one seems to be improving, and our ego needs are not getting met — then our helping might become curiously urgent, maybe even compulsive, and it’s not clear if its to serve others or ourselves.

This is where letting things be as they are — bearing witness to what they are, letting go of our assumptions and ideas about them, watching them change with each moment — is precisely the correct lens to apply to the world, and to our work in helping. This is the extraordinary power of Cohen’s method — mindfulness, facing the pain, equanimity. If we are so anxious to brush away our own suffering, as we experience it in our own bodies, how could we possibly tolerate it in others? Especially if our stated purpose is to remediate that pain?

When we rush in to eliminate pain, or ignorance, or neurotic defenses, or self-hating theology, we rob those we wish to help of their ability to see themselves and know themselves. We rob them of the ability to recognize the changes in their own pain, and the freedom they have to improve their own lives.

Helping is closer to midwifery — a midwife is in no way controlling the process of birth, she facilitates it. Fixing is a mode borrowed from mechanical contexts, where human control over human creations is a given (though I’m sure any good electrician or plumber or watchmaker will began to get a sense that he or she is helping the mechanism do what it does of its own accord — mystical plumbing! what a thought).

Nurses and doctors and therapists will tell you that there is a certain subjective element in the process of healing. Medicine can do the trick, but the question of attitude cannot be ignored in how a person moves beyond illness. And speaking as a teacher, it’s clear to me that my students are capable of so much more than I regularly give them credit. They need structure and guidance, but by no means do I need to “put the knowledge into them.” Midwifery is an ample metaphor for teachers, and Socrates got it right a long, long time ago.

We learn so well on our own. That bus drives itself. How did we get the idea it doesn’t?

This is how attending to what we find before us becomes a profound practice of helping. And this is how attending to the world as it is can become a great compassionate action, a vow to save all beings, flowing from a “broad and generous spirit” that was cultivated with time and effort.

In this light, the boundaries between knowing and ignorance, healthy and sick, compulsive clinging and expansive freedom, neurotic defense and wholeness, all seem to get a little less linear, and a little more cyclical. Each is somehow contained in the other, and attending to the dance between them becomes the work of a lifetime, many lifetimes.

The Buddha turns the Dharma wheel! And Schopenhauer takes his dog for a walk.

Zen

On entering the pain

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This year I am participating in a yearlong workshop at the Village Zendo called The Path of Awakening, focusing on Zen responses to the Others we create according to race, gender, sexual orientation, and able-bodiedness. We were assigned a reading by Zen teacher Darlene Cohen called “Mindfulness and Pain” and asked to consider an experience of pain. Mindful that emotional pain is quite a different thing than physical pain, but that this story was most appropriate for me right now, I wrote an adapted version of the following:

Zen practice, pastoral work, and my studies have offered me a helpful tool: recognizing the connection between emotions and physical feelings in the body. I can say that before I began my meditation practice, I existed almost exclusively in the more abstract realm of emotions (I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m confused, etc.) rather than in the physical experience that accompanied those emotions. Emotions, we might say with Darlene Cohen (and the Buddha), are aggregates — ideas and disparate experiences in the body all clumped together under one heading (anxiety, joy, fear, depression, etc.) for convenience of naming. It’s helpful to name them, until the naming obscures the experience and we’re stuck on the idea of the experience. Then there’s no motion, no change, and no hope. Cohen offers a challenge based in meditation, mindfulness, equanimity, and facing exactly what is, right now:

What it takes to challenge your own conceptual heaps and piles and consciously replace them with direct experience is being present in this moment and aware.

My partner left me in the fall. This came to light during my first week teaching at a new school. Within a month she moved out. A month after that I made the decision to give up the dog we had adopted — he was too much for me and couldn’t adjust to her apartment. Within a month of that we gave him over to the adoption agency and said our goodbyes. And then I was alone. That was a few days before Christmas.

In emotion-idea world — well, I was often surprised to find that I was, in fact, still alive. I would often speak to myself and say, “I’m not dead yet,” as if it needed to be said out loud to establish its truth. Emotions of sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, regret, defiance, frustration, shame, embarrassment, longing, brokenness, guilt, and all the rest. Once I settled on an emotion, the stories would begin running in my head, on loop, ad nauseum.

When I went to my Zen teachers during this time I was reminded of facing my actual experience, rather than my idea of it. Cohen says: “The vow to return again and again is the ‘settling,’ the ‘being one’ with your pain.” So often, when I noted that I was telling myself for the twelfth time in a row some story about how broken I was, how I’d never love again, how my trust was forever crushed — I would try to stop and breathe and notice what my body was doing. What was the actual sensation like? What did it literally feel like? This was most effective when the feeling was so overwhelming that I just couldn’t ignore it.

I found that it was usually located right in my chest, a deep, sharp pain in the actual heart, living primarily behind the sternum but with a strong, wafting drift over through the left lung, and extending back to almost grip my spine. I never thought of “heartbroken” as being so completely true as when I actually felt my heart like this. It was so strangely deep, deeper than the physical dimensions of my body, like a suck from behind my back such that the heart retreated away from me. When I decided to give up my dog, the most prominent feeling was the sense that I was cutting out and slowly removing my own heart with blunted tools. At times like these I sometimes had to hold myself with my own arms, to counter this undeniable feeling of my chest falling out of my back or torn out of my front.

(Anger, when it appeared, was also in the chest — coiled tightly around the sternum and pointing right out at the world. But that’s for another reflection.)

Sometimes, I would wake up with this feeling that I had a spear put right into my chest, through my heart, and extending out my back — and here I was having to go teach! I knew from experience on meditation retreats that fully feeling a feeling does not exclude functioning. I could feel like my heart was pierced, but also stand up and speak about math and move about and ask questions and listen.

I would just do so with a pierced heart. That’s all there was to it.

And so I would roll up into the classroom and speak a little softer, smile a little gentler at my students and go about the business, one task by one task, and just do what the moment suggested. And as I moved about the room, I felt some warmth return to my chest (oh, that’s right, I was cold!) and some motion too — there was a lightness, and a sense that the piercing spear was not being withdrawn, but was melting back into my body — just another part of me receding as naturally as it had arisen. I could breathe freely again (because, oh right, I was having trouble breathing).

…you begin to feel generous toward your own human tendency to be caught in the cycle of wanting what you can’t have and averting from what terrifies you: bitterness, despair. If you are able to extend your charity to aspects of yourself you know cause you pain, you are developing the broad and generous spirit of letting everything be what it is, including yourself. — Darlene Cohen

That a “broad and generous spirit” can grow out of entering pain is one of the sweet surprises of life. To feel everything we feel suddenly becomes this great gift that we’re given over and over again, if we can let it in, and if we have a little help. And in some cases, it’s a gift when it changes, too.

Zen

On obedience, attention, and freedom

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It’s snowing, a lot, everywhere, so this morning I was reading Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic (obviously). In the first installment of his Talks of Instruction, titled, “On True Obedience” he says this:

True and perfect obedience is a virtue above all virtues, and there is no work however great it may be, that can take place or be performed without this virtue, and even the very least of works, whether it be saying or listening to Mass, praying, meditating, or whatever you can think of, is more usefully done when it is performed in true obedience. Take any work you wish, however minor it may be, true obedience will make it nobler and better for you. Obedience always brings out the very best in all things. Indeed obedience never undermines or forgets those things which we do out of true obedience, for it never neglects what is good. Obedience need never be anxious, for there is no form of goodness which it does not possess in itself.

He sure says “obedience” a lot. I actually can’t believe I’m beginning this phase of my writing, bringing my Buddhist and Christian heritage to bear on contemporary spiritual matters in a secular setting, with this. Obedience has so many negative overtones, is so resonant with the many abuses of religious power, captures so many of the critiques that we apply to religion, and is so at odds with our sense of individual autonomy — that to take that word and talk about it’s value for secular life seems like a non-starter. Obedience is spiritual poison for many. Obedience offered to what turns out to be an unworthy authority causes real harm, and the transgression lies with those authorities that valorize obedience, not those who seek refuge in obedience.

But this is what I read, so this is where I start.

Let me take a liberty with Eckhart’s words, to open a space so we might approach his meaning. In the passage he doesn’t define obedience. Instead, what he does is talk about the arena where obedience is appropriately applied: in work.

A further liberty: Eckhart is talking about spiritual practice when he talks about ‘work’. His examples are prayer, Mass, meditation. My translator here indicates that the German word werk that Eckhart uses can also apply to activity, as in the verb werken. Not just the kind of work that hopefully everyone is taking a break from today, as the snow blows New York City over, but the work of washing dishes and watering plants, of answering emails and paying the bills. Chopping wood and carrying water, Zen says. Work is the activity of our everyday lives. To somehow let this kind of work live in close relation to spiritual practice is helpful and not contradictory. They’re cut from the same cloth.

Eckhart’s message here is: in work, the fruits of obedience are seen. Every kind of work is made better by this obedience, no valuable work can be truly separate from it, and it seems that every kind of good outcome is already contained within obedience. In obedience, everything is achieved already — so there’s nothing to be anxious about.

Hm! What can it be? This thing that we can bring to our work that fulfills our work as soon as we bring it? If you could put it in a bottle and sell it, you’d make a fortune. WAIT — is it coffee? Coffee makes us work better, right? I like this idea: in every brewed cup of coffee, there is the seed of all-our-work-is-done-already. That’s how we drink coffee: somewhere in this cup is the end of work! The faster I drink the more the endedness of work I’ll have! But, no, Eckhart says that bit about “nothing to be anxious about”. Coffee definitely doesn’t do that.

Maybe it’s beer — no, probably not beer.

What is this quality that brings everything to fulfillment, because nothing is left out of it? Eckhart says, obedience to God. Let’s unpack that.

Now, forget the word obedience for a second. Replace it with “quality x” or “special sauce” or “a pinch of salt” or some such in your mind — some phrase that means “the thing that brings the whole together”. Now, when this special sauce is present in your work, any of your work, your work is better as a result — indeed it brings out the best of work, truly brings your work to its culmination, even as you’re doing it. It realizes your work, though it doesn’t finish it.

What should we call this?

Is it intelligence, natural or educated? No, we can think of lots of work that don’t require book learnin’. And it seems that intelligence is more of a helper to work than a realizer of work. Is it imagination? We can see the fulfillment of our work, but this doesn’t bring that about — its sort of a precursor to work. Is it creativity, that Prized Quality for entrepreneurship and startups, etc.? Well, you’re not always creating for some kinds of work, are you? Sometimes you just have to do the thing. No innovation, no disruption. I have to vacuum and then send emails. What’s creative about vacuuming and then sending emails?

I’ve heard broader definitions of creativity that have more to do with authenticity. To do work authentically — that’s getting close to something. But what would it mean to do work inauthentically? It’s working without actually doing the work. It’s like, kinda-doing-it. What would make you only-kinda-doing work?

If you weren’t paying attention, that’s how.

Attention is a big part (maybe the whole part) of spiritual practice — meditation, or prayer, or Mass, all of them are bound by a certain orientation of attention to Something Alive that is both within and without. Eckhart suggests this in saying: “When we go out of ourselves through obedience…then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself.” This quality of obedience is a going out of ourselves, such that what was outside of us is now also inside of us. With this quality, the inward and the outward become, somehow, undifferentiated, because what’s gone out has made space for what’s coming in. Thus obedience.

But isn’t this also attention? In giving attention, in attending to, we make space for something outside to come well within our little sphere of being. We forgot ourselves in our work. Reading a book, sweeping the floor, listening to a friend about their good or bad day, making a spreadsheet — as soon as we make space for whatever-it-is to come in, as soon as we give our attention over to it, all that’s left is doing the work. And in that spirit the work is fulfilled, even if not yet completed. This is not about deadlines and Getting It Done, it’s about the Doing. There’s a fullness to becoming not-separate-from a spreadsheet. We needn’t be anxious about the spreadsheet being done soon enough. Once we allow that spreadsheet in, it’s wholeness is there already. There’s no form of goodness, not even a beautiful and orderly spreadsheet, that attention does not possess in itself. Thus attention.

Eckhart again: “In true obedience there should be no ‘I want this or that to happen’ or ‘I want this or that thing’ but only a pure going out of what is our own.” Once we’ve purely gone out of what’s our own and given our attention to spreadsheeting, there’s no thought of finishing the spreadsheet. There’s just spreadsheeting.

He calls this obedience. We can call it attention. They share this common quality of emptying oneself and letting the outside in. Let’s think of them as spiritual analogues.

Eckhart talks about obedience to God — I’m talking about obedience to a spreadsheet. Given the way obedience can be abused by those who are obeyed, I think it might be helpful to open up this idea of obedience to obeying spreadsheets, and whatever else we’re doing our work with. Obedience then is not a hateful destruction of the self, a self-degradation, because look at what we’re obeying: a spreadsheet! (We can all agree that people can degrade themselves to making a spreadsheet — and we can all agree its a bad idea.)

We’re giving our attention and opening space to bring what seems outside into our selves.

Once we see this relationship between obedience and attention, we can further explore how we’ve let the spiritual action of obedience slip into our common parlance: through mindfulness. What is mindfulness if not obedience to what’s going on around you right now? This also helps draw out what some see as a more menacing aspect of the mindfulness zeitgeist of the last few years. If mindfulness is being offered as a means of maximizing profits by making workers more focused and aware, or in a further extreme, is offered as training to soldiers to make them most effective in their work — well, I ask, to what are they offering their obedience? Remember that obedience in the religious sense is offered to an entity that at least on paper is committed to love, mercy, compassion, and the healing of broken people in a broken world. What kind of obedience is given when mindfulness is used to break bodies and break the world?

On the other hand, whatever Eckhart’s obedience is, it is intimately related to freedom — in his second talk, “On the most powerful prayer of all and the finest work,” he says:

The most powerful form of prayer, and the one which can virtually gain all things and which is the worthiest work of all, is that which flows from a free mind. The freer the mind is, the more powerful and worthy, the more useful praiseworthy and perfect the prayer and the work become. A free mind can achieve all things. But what is a free mind?

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or devotion and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God’s most precious will, having gone out of what is its own.

There’s that “going out of self” again — in this case applied to religious devotion, but not separate from the spreadsheets that apparently I care for so much.

Freedom by going out of the self. Where have I heard that before? Ah!

To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

That’s Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen school of Buddhism, in his text Genjo Koan. In forgetting the self we are actualized by All of the Things. When actualized like this, even the idea enlightenment slips away! And there you are. There’s just that, right there, nothing missing, and the mind is “untroubled and unfettered by anything,” like Eckhart says.

Likewise, there’s no trace of “doing a spreadsheet” when paying attention to it, when you’re really doing the spreadsheet — there’s just the rhythm of keyboard keys and mouse clicks around a gently glowing grid. And I suspect for Eckhart there’s no thought of prayer or God when obedience to God is full. There’s just the sound of prayer and the scent of incense.

Now, while there’s still light — go and (safely) obey the snow!

Theology

Applying the compassionate infrastructure (New Year’s reboot)

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And we’re back.

When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think more often than not I was responding to some idea of what I should write.

Because my work is teaching math in a progressive setting, I always feel bound to return to that theme. There’s good work to be done there, and it’s helpful to reflect on it because it is a lived experience that grounds all of my ideas — but I’m interested in more than that.

I’m inspired today to reflect further on what a theological engineer might do. I admit I chose the title because it had a nice (albeit polysyllabic) ring and captured an aspect of my life story that I don’t think many share: I’ve trained as an engineer and as a theologian. I feel the influence of both. while my undergraduate engineering work was a while ago, because it came first in my adult life it has undue influence over how I approach everything else.

  1. I’ve already spoken about systems, the unity that connects diverse parts into a coherent whole.
  2. I also consider an application of heuristics — not procedures but reliable, discreet methods used strategically to approach complicated problems — a legacy of my engineering training and something I’ve applied often in thinking of theology and psychology.
  3. Engineering thinking is dedicated to efficiency, economy, and design, and I see in this a relationship to poetry (at least analogously) and thus to a major mode of suggestive teaching that pervades both Buddhism and Christianity.
  4. The description and application of dynamics (fluid, thermo-, elctroc-, etc.) in engineering has its mirror in studies of theological dynamics (especially in pastoral work) and psychodynamics (in clinical work) — and these especially describe the relationship between material and energy transfers, in engineering, or the relationship between body and spirit in theology and psyche and body in depth psychology.
  5. Engineering is a reflective human endeavor, focusing on those dynamics between matter and energy to develop products and processes to improve human life — theology is also uniquely human (animals may experience gratitude and intuit the inter-relatedness of all things, but theology needs words), and brings together the revealed and reasoned sources of truth to foster aliveness in a community, even a secular community.
  6. Engineering is a little uncomfortable in an academic setting, or so its seems, given its relationship to praxis, to experiential rather than theoretical learning. Theology, we might say, finds its classical expression in academic settings — but then again, when it is most useful and dare I say authentic, it is never far from faith-as-practiced, from ritual and prayer and meditation, and from the way the transcendent approaches and is present to us in our daily lives.

Theology is reflection on our encounter with each other and the spiritual nature that lives at the center of our lives. The engineering of theology applies this compassionate infrastructure for the good of all beings (and is ready to point out when theology or religion work against this purpose).

So — I’m the theological engineer.

Writing this, it occurs to me that my cross-disciplinary move integrating theology and engineering is accompanied by another, somewhat more common one: I’m trained in Christian theology but practice as a Zen Buddhist. So I will often dance across the boundaries and speak in analogous terms, for instance:

  1. practice/faith
  2. Dharma/Gospel
  3. koans/parables
  4. emptiness/grace
  5. karma and illusion/sin and death
  6. compassionate response/righteousness
  7. not knowing and bearing witness/kenosis and kerygma
  8. awakening and saving/repentance and salvation

So, yes, I’m a Buddhist — but still, that I can even hold up these two systems for comparison, as a result of my Christian training, makes it hard to say that the distinction between the two is the only thing that matters. Their interrelation (and apparent conflict) in my life story and in the realm of practice and faith, are more interesting.

I came to Buddhism with an unconscious set of theological assumptions inherited from Greek and Hebrew thought, the philosophical grab-bag that is Western Christianity. Whether I liked it or not, I read Zen as a (forlorn, angsty, wonkish) member of Christendom: raised somewhat in the Catholic Church, in a post-Enlightenment/secular milieu that is not as separate from Medieval Christian thought as we’d like to think.

My understanding of Buddhism must have been Christian-tinged — but then! as my Zen practice grew as I began my formal study of Christian theology, I accessed Christian ideas through Zen practice! How could the loving immanence of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the giftedness of grace, and the dramatic pivot of repentance be separate from liberation, emptiness, Buddha-nature, and the turning from illusion to the truth right in front of one’s eyes, when the bottom of the bucket falls out?

All of these, not just ideas but experiences — they’re not the same, but they’re not separate, either. The tension between these two still drives me as it did when I first began on my religious journey — just without the stress of thinking I have to figure it out all on my own, that I labor alone for my own justification and salvation. Paul says: I don’t even judge myself. And the Buddha said, I and all sentient beings enter the way together. And my favorite honkadori:

before they realized
they didn’t need to cross —
were helping others across —
did they think you crossed it alone,
the ocean of suffering.

I’m a Buddhist now, but I wasn’t converted, I was called to a deeper personal practice of something more intimate to me than I am to myself, as Augustine says; an intimacy with not-knowing which is closer to the truth, as the Zen story says. My Christian study speaks to me in a language I understand, while my Zen practice speaks to me — just that. My Zen practice speaks to me, and I listen.

So, theological engineering and dual-belonging, Christian-influenced Buddhism: these are two axes I live along, and write about.

There’s a third here and it’s in my work as teacher. I think I can start to describe this as the tension between knowing and not-knowing, of what teachers have to offer students and what students know already, of the kind of space that facilitates learning, and of the relationship of transcendent realities to the every day of the classroom. This informs most of my writing on teaching math, but also my interest in any one who works as a helper — what are the motivations and the dangers? What are we getting out of it, and what should we put into it? How do we best serve others, how do we take care of ourselves? This is my third line of approach.

And just because no system is perfect: I love New York and it is my home. So sometimes I’m going to write about that.

Elaborating on my About Me seems appropriate for the start of the year.

But now — right straight ahead, not-knowing.

Zen

On Columbus and a New World

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So I woke up thinking about the New World, because it’s Columbus Day. The big irony is that his New World was nothing new, that he didn’t discover anything because there were people there already. But because he saw it as New, and therefore open for the taking, the consequence he wrought for those people there (i mean, THESE people HERE) were at least disastrous — and we do a disservice to them when we frame it was anything but that.

But this New World that’s not really New — that’s new only for us, and therefore becomes a mirror for our own assumptions — in it we find a pressing question for today and every day. I wonder: how do I relate to the new, the fresh, the until-recently unknown? Do I accept it patiently, on its own terms? Or do I anxiously fill it with my expectations, taking from it what I want and paving over everything else that doesn’t fit what I want?

When I face this I think what I really confront is myself, that jittery, controlling self that won’t tolerate the unknown to me, that won’t accept the other.

I hope I can watch and listen patiently in the face of the unknown.

I mean, can we just face it? Just turn to look at it, without trying to change it, what we don’t recognize and know already? What if Columbus just stood on that ship and said “Jesus, look at all these PEOPLE,” and let that sink in for a moment. Might he have resisted the temptation to take what was not his and kill what he did not want?

Probably not. Maybe. Anyway, it’s too late for him. His karma is his, and now it’s ours, because we live in his bloody wake, as Americans, and as humans, sharing in the same fear and desire that I suppose drove him. But it’s not too late to make our own choices. It never is.

Can we just face the unknown? Can we just face ourselves? Can we open to the unknown and open to a new way of being ourselves, not separate from that unknown?

In that way of being, we might find that, far from there being no New World, there is actually limitless newness in the world, offered to us in every moment. Everything fresh and unknown.

Passing into that new world, not separate from it and not trying to change it, maybe we can even find our home there.

Teaching

On the power to create mathematics

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This post continues where “the power to create” left off. I’m going to expand on what it means to rely on the phrase “the power to create mathematics”.

Creating mathematics has a funny ring to it, mostly because we assume that math is not something that you create. It’s there already, and you find it — or more likely, someone points it out to you, and you (hopefully) come to recognize it as sound.

We recognize that some math groundwork exists in our students already, otherwise how could they understand? We’d simply be telling them to follow arbitrary rules that had no significance or coherence — oh wait! This is what much math instruction becomes, when we assume our students have no inherent capacity for math. In that model, while we (math teachers) might know for ourselves that there’s a deeper meaning, but rarely does a teacher feel inclined or free to explore that with students.

The deeper meaning that teachers know and students intuit (if given the space) is the starting point for creating mathematics. Math is expression of the deep structure of how we see and experience the world. Mathematical objects — patterns, shapes, systems — have the uncanny capacity to seem so objectively true that it’s most convenient to describe them as outside of us (and so we might speak of mathematical discoveries), but at the same time they are subjective, coming into existence only when a human subject creates them.

Math is objective because it is shared between us in a most subjective way. Following Kant, it’s not something we see out in the world, it is precisely the lens through which we view the world. To borrow a line from Tom Stoppard, math is a mystical experience shared by everyone.

This is a philosophical distinction that has a huge impact on how math students approach math. Math is a creation — an unique expression of deep structure and meaning. When math is created by a student, she or he will likely use their own symbols and structures, but the ideas are so a part of us that I have no doubt that my students can construct them if given the proper resources and environment.

In this setting, my role as a teacher is not to give them, or even to guide them through how beautiful it us — both of those hand over all attention and authority to the teacher. Students have authority of their own in the creation of math. My role is to help the math they create cohere, internally and externally. The former is begun in their interactions with one another (see my next post). The latter is mostly introducing them to common language for ideas they’ve been developing.

Math viewed in this way is precisely a liberal art. Why we don’t teach it this way is anyone’s guess (well, I have a few guesses).

And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that math also has a way of addressing us, of surprising us, and of confronting us. Viewed this way, math bears a striking resemblance to psyche and spirit, some aspects of which I’ve discussed previously. I don’t know, I have to think more about that.

Next time, creating math together.

Teaching

A meditation on the first day of school

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This is a honkadori that I love, based on a story in the Lotus Sutra in which a character doesn’t realize that he’s a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint dedicated to saving all beings.

It goes like this:

before they realized
they didn’t need to cross —
were helping others across —
did they think you crossed it alone,
the ocean of suffering.

I like this for the first day of school, which is such a busy and emotional time for both teachers and students. For my part, I’m excited just to have the youthful energy in the space — teachers hanging out with teachers can be a pretty grumpy bunch. I want to meet my students and get to know them, laugh with them and understand their strengths and where they can grow. I want to try out my ideas for my classroom, and get into the steady and comforting rhythm of work.

In the midst of all that, I feel no small amount of anxiety, that can basically be boiled down to, “will my ideas work,” and “will everyone like me.” I fret, my students are depending on me, and I could let them down. I worry, I’ve worked so hard, and I could let myself down. I get the sense that I’m doing this all on my own, and that my effort will earn a pass or fail over the course of the year. (Is it any wonder I’ve become a teacher? We all find our work!)

That attitude is a little bit of my own psychological imprint (am I good enough? will people like me?), and a little bit of the cultural surround, in as much as teachers are judged individually for their work. We start at A and must get to B, by the strength of our will — and the singular outcome is the measure of (unlikely) success.

So I feel like this guy in the Lotus Sutra, all alone, trying to cross an ocean of suffering — not realizing the crossing needn’t be done alone — in fact it’s done already. I come to my students who have math living in them already — my work is to draw it out. They come to me looking for structure and adult guidance — my work is to hold the space for them, just to be there, really there. Everything else — pedagogy, politics, grading, math ideas, emails, parent-teacher meetings, where’s a damn photocopier that works — they come in their time, and there’s a community of peers, colleagues, friends, that can help me if only I’m willing to ask.

Everything to be done is present from the start. There’s nothing to do but drop all the ideas, pay attention, and respond compassionately.

Teaching

On the power to create

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“What is teaching?”
A Haiku by Bill Maroon

We meet awkwardly
I invite you to walk
I find you dancing

From Teaching and the Religious Imagination by Maria Harris

Could anything better describe the first day of school and lay out the whole task of teaching and cultivating students’ knowledge, so succinctly? I was thrilled with this haiku immediately, and it prompted me to ask myself, how are my students already “dancing” with mathematics?

I mentioned in my last post that my guiding principle in my math classes this year will be cultivating my students’ power to create mathematics together. I was keyed into this particular phrasing by Tim Monreal on Medium, who is building on Paulo Freire’s paradigmatic work in pedagogy. As I reflected on the principles of progressive education, I adapted it — and as I test it against my vision of what a progressive math classroom should look like, it succeeds every time.

I can describe how each part of that phrase suggests what a classroom that uses it as a guide will look and sound like, how it will be structured and what its product should be. Those descriptions will be largely political and philosophical in nature — I will be discussing conscious ideals. But standing right behind those ideals will be a series of fundamental assumptions about what math and my students are in relation to one another, and what my rightful participation in their process is. At that level, I will be speaking of psyche and spirit, because math’s transcendence and immanence, its subjectivity and objectivity, make the affinities between psyche, spirit, and math too powerful to pass over.

This might take a few posts.

So. In no particular order.

Students’ power to create. This little flower is precisely what I gathered from Monreal’s article linked above. He is contrasting this with a broader (and vaguer) commitment to “creativity” in the classroom. The trend to foster creativity in education is popular now, perhaps even a buzzword among the education-reform types. This manifests itself in all kinds of ways; for instance, I notice that an “A” has popped up in the acronym “STEM” in some places, making it “STEAM”. That is to say, when we think about the complex of fields captured by Science-Technology-Engineering-Math, we are also meant to consider the “Art” in their midst. Thus STEAM, rather than STEM.

This is all well and good, and I really do appreciate an attempt to bring together fields that are often understood as disparate. But let’s dig a little. What exactly is the relationship between Art and Science-Technology-Engineering-Math, as those fields are popularly construed now? I’ve seen wonderful visualizations of quantifiable processes or mathematical concepts and no one doubts the inherently art-like beauty of natural processes at all levels.

But something else is lurking about here, and I couldn’t quite put it to words until I read William Deresiewicz’s fantastic article in Harper’s about the neoliberalization of higher education, the slow and steady mission creep of college into an information transfer focused primarily on business. I have questions about some of Deresiewicz’s conclusions, but he gets right to the heart of my suspicion on creativity and that A in STEM. He says:

“Creativity,” meanwhile, is basically a business concept, aligned with the other clichés that have come to us from the management schools by way of Silicon Valley: “disruption,” “innovation,” “transformation.” “Creativity” is not about becoming an artist. No one wants you to become an artist. It’s about devising “innovative” products, services, and techniques — “solutions,” which imply that you already know the problem. “Creativity” means design thinking, in the terms articulated by the writer Amy Whitaker, not art thinking: getting from A to a predetermined B, not engaging in an open-ended exploratory process in the course of which you discover the B.

Yes, 100%. The ‘A’ in STEAM cannot possibly be open-ended self-expression of some truth. It is not a living, speaking thing, not a spontaneous gesture. It is Design, that chimera of hope to anyone with a restless soul that finds themselves working in a technology or corporate setting, because it makes you think you can actually create something — but you can’t. All you can do is to make a product more producty (or maybe less producty, and so more profity).

STEAM shouldn’t have the A for Art, but the D for Design. We’re all being STEM’D to Death, for lack of any Art that is Alive.

And this is what makes Monreal’s instinct so appropriate — really, it’s what make Freire whole program, assuming that all education is political, so valuable and necessary and true. Creativity in pedagogy is not enough. If education is to produce empowered, critical, creative agents in the world, they must have the power to create. A student who has the power to create will engage their world as Creation . They will be able to evaluate and critique the creations of others. This includes political platforms, historical lenses, economic supersystems, (c.f. neoliberalism and capitalism) as well as literature, and scientific claims and (yes) mathematical propositions.

What else can education be about other than this?

Next up, I’ll talk about the power to create mathematics.

 

Teaching

On prepping for the first day of school

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This week and next, I start at my new job at a progressive school in Manhattan, teaching middle and high school math. This is my fourth school setting, right on my tenth anniversary of beginning to teach, so some of the anxious edge of the first week of school has diminished. Week one is important, but it is only week one. The first week sets the tone for the year, and you are not the only one determining that tone. You must meet your students to understand that tone fully. And then you create it with them.

Still there is some prep to do — I’m starting standards-based grading for the first time this year, which will take some practice and forethought. Of course it’s a new building and faculty and institution, so I have to learn the little details like where I can stow my papers and who knows how to fix the photocopier, etc. I’ve spent the last few weeks primarily thinking, reading, and writing about theology, so I anticipate a low-level whiplash as I swing around to the nitty-gritty of the teacher’s craft, but one of my goals in writing on this blog is to bring my study of theology, the spiritual life, and the psyche into my practice in a secular classroom.

A progressive school is an ideal setting for this project. Anyone who teaches gets into it (on some level) to relate an intellectual tradition to young people, and to give them the power to engage with it, even create their own contribution to it. Progressive teachers have a broader scope, one that is committed to considering students’ emotional and developmental needs and to integrating students’ context and community (both in the classroom and the wider surround) into the learning process, especially around matters of social justice. A progressive educator might summarize this as such: we are responding to the “whole child,” whom we are preparing for the appropriate and just use of power in a democracy.

When I am asked to respond to the whole child for participation in our society, I take an even wider scope. I ask, how does the psyche influence these young people in their work? How is their unconscious, both individually and collectively, being expressed in our class and the learning process? And finally, and characteristically most difficult to define (defying as it does being pinned down), how does the spirit move in the classroom? These types of questions I think begin to delimit my responsibility to both student and society, and guide me toward creating a classroom that is alive, compassionate, and fostering human freedom.

Remember, I teach math, so I’m seeking alive, compassionate and liberating math education as I begin my progressive education adventure.

My instinct now is to precisely define psyche and spirit, and to indicate exactly where they exist in a classroom dynamic. More helpful is to evoke what these considerations mean for me in practice. When I reflect on psyche and spirit in my classroom’s progressive mission, I ask:

  • in what situations do I feel that there is aliveness in my classroom?
  • what space exists for students to engage math with spontaneity, creativity, and excitement? how are my student empowered to act with math in mind?
  • when do the students become taken up by a power seemingly beyond them in doing their work?
  • how can students come to interact with the heart of the matter? what opens them to engagement with ideas that are initially opaque but close to the life of the math tradition?
  • when is it clear that we are addressing math as both an objective and subjective phenomena? that is, when are students engaging with math, both as if it exists beyond them, and as if they are creating it?
  • can we say we have heard each student’s distinct and authentic mathematical voice?
  • where is the material dead? is it because of the material, the kids, or me?
  • what are their projections on me, and mine on them? how do I detect these?
  • how am i encumbered by my own complexes? i.e. am I afraid to take a risk in the classroom? do my comments and questions come from a place of appreciative evaluation or desire to find something wrong, or because I’m afraid they’ll ask me something I don’t know?
  • what is my relationship to the power a teacher has? what should be my use of that power?
  • where has power emerged in the room, specifically the power to create math, a freeing intellectual power that uses knowledge rather than simply recites it?

Note that these questions are not exhaustive of the general pedagogical questions that I have to ask myself to fulfill my role. Those questions include: what are my students learning? how can they best demonstrate their learning for me? what feedback do they need from me? how are they involved with their learning process? how am I empowering them to participate in this process? and so on.

However, when I consider psyche and spirit in the classroom, I’m seeking the source of life, community, trust, and creative power that a progressive pedagogy intends to harness and develop. As a result of considerations like this, I’ve chosen the phrase, cultivating my students’ power to create mathematics together to be my watchword, my measure of trustworthiness, my regula fidei (so to speak), for how I structure my class.

More on that, and on specifics for how I imagine my classes looking, to come.

Religion in Culture

On religion in the news, the Republican debate, and reading ‘Fun Home’ at Duke

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I will write about religion in the news. There are two good reasons to do this:

  1. The way some religious people make news misrepresents what it looks like to do something with one’s religion. In America, this often takes the form of conservative Christians weaponizing this-or-that aspect of their faith to gain political leverage, at the expense of some marginalized group. It is worth responding to this approach on religious grounds, not just with claims of the separation of Church and State or the irrationality of religion in general. This can be achieved by responding from the Christian Left, or by responding as an interested and knowledgeable non-Christian. Either way, I don’t like letting hateful speech pass as religious.
  2. The way some nonreligious people react to religion in the news misunderstands the rightful place of religion in politics. Again, in America I think of this response coming from the liberal intellectual class, of which I am a member. This reaction takes for granted that religion in the public sphere looks like #1, and it’s default stance is to reject the religious narrative out of hand, backed by a reference to the nonestablishment of religion in this country, or the separation of Church and State, etc. I will continue to argue that the relationship between our secular state and our popular religiosity cannot be categorically dismissed by an appeal to separation of Church and State. As long as there are Americans whose primary language of value includes religion, Christian or otherwise, religious language and assertions will be a part of political discourse. Engaging them as such, rather than ruling them out a priori, opens up a new space in the dialogue.

Sometimes #1 is more applicable, and sometimes #2 is more applicable.

When I became aware of the fact that a Christian Left, in fact, exists — that is to say, there is another way to respond to religion in the public sphere, not just by fussing about the place of religion in American politics, but perhaps with a “your reading of that Biblical passage is not the only one” — did I recognize the power of #1. Of course, plenty of people have been doing this for centuries (from abolitionists to Civil Rights leaders to the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina over the past few years — notably many of these impressive and memorable religiously-based actions comes from African-American or Black communities). I will add my voice to that chorus to the extent that I am able.

I think #2 was framed rather nicely in the news not so long ago: when the question arose at the Republican debate a few weeks back, if any of the candidates had received a word form God on what they should address first in office.

Now I admit there was a time that my response to this would have involved a lot of dismissive blanket statements about how this was, “an obnoxious example of the fact that theistic superstition infects the nation and is taken for granted by many, including, apparently, the entire Republican party as well as Fox News,” and that, “in a reasonable world, such a question would not be asked of serious candidates.”

I don’t feel that way anymore. If I were a Christian, this would be an interesting and serious question — a lot of sincere, religious people who also happen to be American citizens believe that a personal relationship with God is central to one’s capacity to navigate the world — and I would be disappointed to hear the often incoherent, answering-their-own-question responses of the various candidates. Ted Cruz talks about his dad? Why? Marco Rubio makes a laundry list of blessings, John Kasich asserts that miracles are a thing, and Scott Walker — what are you doing? Reciting the catechism to us? What the hell?

But they have plenty good reason not to actually answer it. This question means: “Do you have some relationship with the ultimate in your day-to-day life? Does it hold you accountable? Does something more than contingency guide your actions? Or have you been bought already? Have you ceded your capacity to freely act for the good? Or do you just make it all up based on what certain people think? Are you a person, or a machine?” These are important and challenging questions, which I think every person should consider whether they’re running for president or not. They are also succinctly evoked in the question, “have you received a word from God?”

My bottom line here: the mention of a religious symbol or value is not a mortal sin in American politics. Sometimes you have to know the tree by its fruit and not whether you don’t like that its a tree. (See what I did there?)

I didn’t have a chance to write about the Republican debate when the topic was hot a few weeks ago, and I sat there thinking, “Man, I missed a good chance to talk about religion in the news!”

I did not have to wait long for another thing to come along. This time, it belongs to #1.

So, Brian Grasso, an incoming Duke first-year has publicly — on a Duke Facebook page and then in that Washington Post article above — refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home for Duke’s first-year summer reading program. He makes a religious argument to justify his refusal.

The response in the media seems overwhelmingly (in my completely non-scientific scanning of Google Search results) to focus on the fact that Fun Home has “gay themes” or is an “LGBT graphic novel”. This is not argument that Mr. Grasso puts forward, and though the coincidence is striking, I find it fruitful enough to stick to the text.

Mr. Grasso states that he morally objects to depiction of sexual acts. Viewing any depiction of a sexual act will “conflict with the inherent sacredness of sex,” no matter who it is that is depicted in the sexual act. He categorically separates image and written word — the same story presented only as text would not have presented him with a problem. He would extend this to “pop culture and Renaissance art”. Because he finds the material morally objectionable and not “offensive or discomforting”, he thinks his professors should warn him if coursework will include any “titillating” content, so he can avoid it. He demonstrates how his public statement has lead to several private affirmations and fruitful cross-cultural conversations, and he goes on to reassert the value of “genuine” cultural diversity, as opposed to losing one’s identity “in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism,” as one of his private correspondents puts it. He then wraps everything up by describing his interaction with “a new friend, who considers herself bisexual and a Buddhist.” They leave their open encounter with “a deeper understanding and compassion for each other.” And so our author present us with the ideal of a collegiate encounter.

Before I work through this a little more closely, let me say that this young man knows how to write simply and succinctly, especially given his age. He anticipates objections, prepares evidence, presents positive consequences, and does so in a straightforward, sincere tone. I doubt that I could write with such clarity at his age, or even now (see above, below, etc.). I have no doubt of his commitment to the Bible, and its clear from his “passion” for economic development in sub-Saharan Africa that he has a strong vision for how to proceed with his career and life, and to act with compassion.

That being said, clarity and conviction are not all that college is about — and neither is claiming your own “deeper understanding” of a peer whom you insist on seeing through your own tinted lens — if you can even recognize the tint. Mr. Grasso is clever to anticipate objections, but his own clarity gives away a few hints that form a basis for our response to him on religious grounds. Here are some quotes that raised my eyebrows:

  • His first line: As a Christian, I knew that my beliefs and identity would be challenged at a progressive university like Duke. For his authenticity, he reveals his savvy right at the beginning. Surely he knows that there are progressive Christians — indeed, that Christianity is one of the most effective launch pads into progressive politics. But he tells us that a progressive institution will only challenge his beliefs and identity, and he doesn’t mean the good kind of challenge. Scene: set.
  • The biblical evidence he marshals in opposition to pornography: …Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29. “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” He offers a curiously narrow interpretation of this well-known text. Jesus is telling us here that the Law of Moses is not being abolished with his ministry, but being fulfilled. He references the commandment to not commit adultery, and makes it substantially stricter, stating that any gaze that is rooted in lust disobeys the commandment — it is considered adultery. His advice? The grasping eye should be cast out, just as in the next line he recommends the grasping hand be cut off. No one, not even literalists, take that instruction literally, so what can it mean? How can anyone be expected to fulfill this impossible standard? It seems to me that the answer is: they’re not. They can try but will inevitably fail. For Christians this is where Jesus comes in to do what humans can’t (remember, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak?). I could go on, but suffice to say that Mr. Grasso will likely defy this commandment anytime he walks across campus, let alone if he reads Fun Home. His argument is weaker than his Biblical citation would suggest.
  • The distinction between words and images: If the book explored the same themes without sexual images or erotic language, I would have read it. Is it not possible for text to “titillate,” or be pornographic? Experience suggests otherwise, but he is young. It seems like he uses this to shore up a claim he makes earlier in his argument: My choice had nothing to do with the ideas presented. I’m not opposed to reading memoirs written by LGBTQ individuals or stories containing suicide. Pushing this further, could a textual description of a lesbian sex scene categorically not excite? Once again, a curiously narrow reading of Matthew 5 — Jesus uses the eye and the hand as human parts that grasp. Can the mind not grasp as well?
  • Morality versus comfort: And I believe professors should warn me about such material, not because I might consider them offensive or discomforting, but because I consider it immoral. Oh boy. It might be more a philosophical question to parse exactly what the difference is between ‘recognizing immorality’ and ‘experiencing offensive discomfort’. It’s clear from above that he could use a little space around how he understands his relationship to media, and its affect on him. I assume he’s trying to sidestep every think-piece that’s come out this year lamenting a (sparsely-evidenced) trend of overly-sensitive undergrads. Now would be a fine time to recognize that in this piece we find a white Christian American male claiming his right to not engage certain offensive material, but distancing himself from the trigger warnings that marginalized communities use to avoid revisiting trauma by surprise and in an unsafe space. He fits all that into his distinction here.
  • The true source of dialogue and growth: Without genuine diversity, intellectual dialogue and growth are stifled. I’m all for ‘genuine’ diversity, though he defines it only negatively as NOT giving away one’s “identity in college in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism.” (Again, attributed to someone who wrote to him.) If I were to define it positively, I’d probably start by being willing to meet people as they are, and allowing them define who they are, with as little interference of my own prior views as possible. That’s what makes this next line so frustrating…
  • …because here it turns out we’re just dealing with a very clever and savvy but still quite conservative, judgy-wudgy Christian: Over the past couple of days, I have received many encouraging messages from a new friend, who considers herself bisexual and a Buddhist. The cheat word here is “considers”. I wonder if it refers to his new friend’s bisexuality, Buddhism, or both. As with his before-the-fact assessment of Fun Home and whatever insight might be gained from a sexual act depicted, I suspect that when he talks about having a deeper understanding and compassion of his new friend, he means he has a deeper understanding and compassion for what he sees as her misguided self-descriptions. That is — he understands her better than she does herself, she who considers herself such things. Does he consider himself Christian, or is he a Christian?

To be sure, he knows his Bible, so no doubt he knows Jesus’ mission instructions at Matthew 10:16: “See, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Mr. Grasso has taken this teaching to heart. It’s worth noting that the assignment of Fun Home was not for a class and did not come yoked to a graded assignment. It’s intention is to give the incoming Duke first-years a common experience to build upon for orientation. Mr. Grasso is destined to be an organizer, so publicly did he utilize this opportunity to create his own common experience to build on, with a community that was (thanks to his efforts) ready to meet him when he arrives on campus. We shall hear from him again.

Which is all the more reason to be ready to respond to religion with religion, and to “always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks your reason for the hope that you cherish,” even (especially) if you are a Christian-trained Zen Buddhist.

Zen

Dharma Combat with Augustine

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On the meaning of the teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo, addressing God in the first paragraph of his Confessions:

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

The restless river and the vast ocean
are different just in how they’re held.

Still, rapids are rapids
And rocks, sharp.

“Honkadori” is a Japanese Zen form of poetry, which means “heart of the poem”. In the 11th and 12th century, after the Buddhist Japanese canon of poems and sutras had been assembled in the Kokinshu, this style of poem arose as a kind of commentary to the revered texts, a way of engaging with the original while redirecting its energy to lift up its deeper meaning — with a lightness of touch and a poignancy often found in haiku and other Japanese forms. A line or scene from the original is referenced, and from that bit the author of the honkadori will choose the mood, or the idea, or the setting, or the season, or even a phrase or a word, and use that as the basis for the new poem, and a way of getting at its meaning, removing a bit of the dross that comes with reverence.

When I first encountered this form from Roshi Enkyo O’Hara on retreat with the Village Zendo, I was excited about playing with holy text and religious teaching, coming as I do from a context of Western religion and Western relationship to text. We understand scripture and its ancient interpreters as literally true, complete, and inflexible. ‘Tradition’ is a noun, the canon is etched in stone, and its word is law. It’s meaning is clear. There is no interpreting — it says what it says. This way of thinking applies equally to the adherents to and detractors from scripture: to fundamentalists who take the King James Bible (a translation created a millennium and a half after the source material disseminated in many versions across the Mediterranean world) as the unfiltered Word of God, and to the atheist skeptic who accepts this assumption implicitly when cataloging all of the ridiculous, impossible, contradictory, and offensive things that happen in the Bible. For both of these readers, the text is dense, full, and final.

But it needn’t be that way. The Bible is written evidence of many communities in conversation with themselves, over a span of hundreds of years. Its manifold self-references and self-contradictions are evidence of that, as are the obvious historical-political perspectives that it implicitly supports. These communities are often not just in conversation with themselves, they are arguing with themselves. Thus the Christian Gospels can’t quite get together on many essential about Jesus’ life and death and life — all four can’t even agree on the day of Jesus’ death, let alone what he did and where he did it and why he did it. Luke begins his text by stating that he desires to put forward an ‘orderly account’ of the Gospel story. I wonder how Mark felt about that?

I also wonder why we feel so limited in telling this same story for ourselves. What is the magical time past which the Western Christian community was no longer in communication with itself about what it was about?

This is of course not limited to Christians, or the Abrahamic traditions, or even the West. A casual reading of the Mahayana Buddhist Lotus Sutra reveals intragroup conflict over the interpretation of right practice. The recorder of what was heard on Holy Eagle Peak is quite clear, again and again, that the ‘lesser vehicle’ of Buddhism (read: old school or Theravadan Buddhism) is simply a sub-form of the ‘greater vehicle’ of Buddhism (which is literally what ‘Mahayana’ means — of which Japanese Zen is a descendant). This political axe-grinding and gauntlet-throwing is so heavy-handed that at times the Lotus Sutra is hard to take seriously. But it’s no different when you read Jesus arguing over and over again with the Pharisees, because we’re not so accustomed to ask, ‘who else would a 1st-century second-temple reformer argue with, but other 1st-century second-temple reformers?’. Nor is it much more elegant than the inexplicable repetition of the Creation story in the first chapters of Genesis. (Once this was pointed out to me, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before, so glaring is the disconnect).

But all of these observations are not warnings against taking holy text seriously. They are invitations to engage them meaningfully. Tradition is not primarily a noun, but a verb — in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, it is the the word “paradosis” which literally means ‘delivering something’ or ‘handing down’. We are not receivers of tradition, we are always traditioning (Morse, Not Every Spirit, 47). This is an attitude toward scripture and teaching that is more fruitful and relevant than, ‘it says what it says’. And no matter our tradition, it allows us to connect.

What honkadori brings to this is that light touch. It maintains the spirit of play, and allows us to bring sacred teaching of any tradition into our context while gently redirecting its flow. Rather than trying to fight fire with fire, you write a poem about the fire instead. There is a danger in all theology of over-intellectualizing, replacing the experience you are describing with your description of it. Japanese Zen poetry is a fitting antidote to this trend. It doesn’t distance itself from what it describes. Dew on the grass is not a symbol for impermanence, it is actually impermanent.

So I wrote the honkadori above. I wanted to start with Augustine in particular, because he did so much to determine how Western European Christians would read Scripture forever after — not metaphorically or (God forbid) allegorically, as was prominent among Eastern Christian theologians, but “simply and morally”. Augustine did not found or endorse our modern literalist movement, but he laid the foundation for it with his hermeneutic (his way of reading). He himself is often read with a kind of iron commitment to the written word that ignores that his writing is a process and not itself the final judgment on the matter. Realizing this, we can speak with him as a one who is traditioning to us as we are traditioning. We can even have fun with him. And if we’re Buddhist, we get to open his extraordinary insight to our posture when we are meditating, to the desires and aversions that cloud our originally clear mind, and in my case, to the restless rivers and deep oceans in which we swim.

I hope to write more of these, to Augustine and to other writers in the Christian tradition, to honor their wisdom and play with their interpretations, as an act of faithful doubt and interreligious dialogue as well.

And to write love poems to the heart of the matter.

 

Religion in Culture/Theology

On a secular theology

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Much of what I write on this blog will be notes toward a secular theology.

The fact that I write as a “Theological Engineer” might already suggest that my theology will be grounded with a scientific and therefore secular worldview.

I don’t see it that way. From engineering and the STEM worldview I gather intellectual tools: systems, heuristics, design, and a focus on efficiency, usefulness, and human need. These I lend to the intention and process of theological work: describing and clarifying the dynamics of ultimate concern, getting “ready to give an account of the hope that is in you”.

Of course, by writing a theology oriented toward humans, I fall squarely within the liberal Protestant Christian theological tradition. (That’s no surprise — I’m a white, politically liberal intellectual, educated at liberal nexus Union Theological Seminary.) Liberal theology was a humanist, intellectual movement within the European Enlightenment. It often spoke of God, religion, theology, faith, and the like through the application of tools from the humanities. To the authority of Scripture and tradition, it applied historical method and literary critique; to the human relationship with God, it applied psychology and modern categories of reason.

Engineering is a human form of creativity, and by applying it to theology I’m performing a fundamentally liberal theological endeavor.

That does not make my theology secular. Its makes my theology theology. What makes it secular is my audience. It is directed to the secular world I have made my home, and I have found its method inadequate to answer all the questions I needed to ask.

These questions are questions of meaning but they are not separate from our lives in a secular world. I think my Zen practice is an expression of this desire to bring the theological into the realm of everyday life. By ceding the ground of the ultimate to “religionists,” to those who use explicitly religious language and seem to inhabit an otherworldly religious arena, we lose a source of energy, a common way of discussing meaning and value, and an image of what human freedom and flourishing can be. To reclaim that ground, a secular theology would be a powerful tool — a “skillful means,” as Buddhism calls it. This theology would be liberal, interreligious, and draw on non-religious traditions as well.

But for its liberality, it would still be a theology — orienting us toward the ultimate, finding the ultimate in others, and recognizing how the ultimate confronts us and charges us to compassionate action.

Justice/Theology

On systems

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Systems are scientific constructs, but I’ll often be talking about them in terms of social justice and theology. I’ll connect them here.

A system is a collection of parts that make up some recognizable whole. That whole can be isolated from its surroundings and considered as its own thing, its parts interacting with one another according to certain rules that you trust are working, and the whole interacting with the system’s environment in a predictable and simplified way. Everything outside can be ignored, everything inside can be ignored — once you have a system, you have the thing in which you have some vested interest, about which you can say something.

In the sciences, some systems seem self-evident. A plant cell, for instance: it has a well defined boundary, a number of working components that have certain rules of interaction, and we can reduce the complexity in its environment to things coming in, things going out. Sunlight and carbon dioxide come in (by natural processes or Divine Providence we know and care not); then an elaborate dance is performed among parts of the cell (that we appreciate but with which don’t really concern ourselves); and then oxygen and energy go out (to a fate we can only dream of, but probably won’t).

Other systems are less obvious, but the observer makes a choice to mush certain elements together as a system in order to simplify things sufficiently and apply convenient rules. This is often the pivot of many a frustrating physics problem. For instance, two blocks are connected by a rope and being pulled up an inclined plane, and given this frictional constant and that force, you’re tasked with determining other forces, acceleration, etc.. You can consider each block and the rope individually, and beat your head against a wall mathematically — or you can consider all three together, and determine more about the system with less effort.

All you do is draw a little dotted-line box around what you want to know about, whether on the page or in your mind’s eye, and you have a system. Whatever’s outside works predictably, whatever’s inside works predictably — our little box is now in hand and knowable.

Science is often perceived as such an objective endeavor that its students are surprised to find that their choice affects what they can find out about a system. I once tutored a student in physics, and drew that little dotted-line box around to create the two-blocks-and-a-rope system that I described above. As I proceeded to do math at this New-Thing-in-the-World, she asked:

“Wait…you can just do that?”
“Yup.”
“…Oh.”

Thus she saw the worldview of science at work for the first time. Much learning happens with a reorientation that is marked only by, “oh.” A single bubble rises to the surface. Continents are shifting in the depths.

On one level, it is completely obvious that a system is determined by a choice. If you’re interested in DNA, choosing the system of the whole cell is not helpful. Likewise if you’re interested in psychology, you likely need to investigate a system much larger than a single cell, or even a group of cells in the brain.

On another level, this reveals an important dependency of scientific exploration on the observer, and can be (glibly) summarized as, you only see what you’re looking for. What you call evidence is not evaluated neutrally, but in a preexisting collection of other evidence. I think many assume that science is just the study of what’s there, but scientific knowledge can only be developed once you’ve made broad assumptions that boil down to the selection of appropriate systems.

That’s why a plant cell only “seems” self-evident. There is nothing a priori self-evident about looking at a plant cell as a plant cell and making that The Thing that described a plant most sufficiently. This has happened, not because of pure Reason, but because of reasons. That optics improved sufficiently at about the same time in European intellectual history that natural systems were viewed as machine-like; that that way of looking at things happened to bear the kind of fruit that the patrons of early-modern empirical investigation found useful; that a scientific worldview and its analytical frame subsequently became the dominant paradigm in the West — these are all accidents of history. It doesn’t make observations about that chosen system less accurate or useful, but it’s not self-evident, either — it’s only evident in a context that seeks exactly that kind of evidence.

Choosing a system is intimately related to understanding the context of a situation, and deciding which elements of the context is relevant, and which can be ignored. It is also fundamentally determined by the observer’s attitude and worldview. Also, as my nod above to the patrons of empiricism suggests, it has a lot to do with self-interest. And money. And power.

So we come to racism.

There are…many things to say through this lens about racism. (Class and other social justice struggles as well, but let’s stick to race for the moment, since we seem to be in a moment for race.) I’ll spend a lot of time talking about them, both as a theologian and educator, but also as a white man living in this country, at this time. But for now, let’s consider this.

What system do we choose when we talk about racism? What context is appropriate when we want to explore the pernicious, persistent influence of race in this country?

Attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham. Police cavalry(!) driving black religious leaders and laypeople into a desperate retreat in Selma. The husk of a firebombed church, a sign that says “Whites Only” with a lunch counter in the background, Freedom Riders evacuating a burning bus. Etc.

Images are powerful, but we can see the context at play in how we choose these images. Confrontations from the Civil Rights Era, between peaceful protesters and overt racists, the latter supporting segregation with violence.

Obviously this is one vignette that I’m choosing intentionally to make a point (J’accuse!), but it is not a hard sell to say that that conversations about race in America, particularly among white people and particularly in primary and secondary education, starts with the common ground of “racism was a thing that started with slavery and then Jim Crow and then the Civil Rights Movement happened and racism is not a problem like that anymore.”

Which is true. Racism is not quite a problem “like that” anymore. But that frame represents a choice. Why MLK, and not Malcolm X? Why the dream, and not the ballot or the bullet (or even the letter from a Birmingham jail)?

What’s the system we’ve chosen there? We’re paying attention to the enforcement of racially motivated public policy, backed by white agents who hold a view of race that compromises the dignity of blacks. We’re focusing on a group of people who “are racist” and their actions that come from their orientation toward nonwhites. These racist people are often conveniently located in the South, with a few notable exceptions. Because racial utterances have also become universally prohibited in civil society in the last half-century (which is a good thing), racist people also mostly exist remote in time, as well as space. The occasional offhand, derogatory comment by your Grandma, maybe some state assemblyman from somewhere. That’s it.

So we’ve drawn the little dotted-line box around racist people and decided that the way this system interacts with its environment represents all of racism.

Which perhaps leads you to a conclusion that racism is no longer a problem, since the activity of that little system is not nearly what it used to be.

Now — there seems to be enough noise around racism today, in the news and on social media, and in every major and minor municipality with a police force, or a school, or a college, or a prison — that our conclusion doesn’t quite match the evidence. What should we ask of our racist people system?

For whom would such a system be convenient? What larger system of evidence does it fit into? What preexisting system of knowledge does it reinforce? Here we could talk about whiteness.

Is it possible to describe the activity of racism without racist people? For instance, might there be racist actions, instead of racist people? Would those racist actions be overt, or would they be subtle, likely unnoticed by the perpetrator? Here we could talk about microagressions.

And if the law of the land no longer abides institutions and laws that discriminate and separate on the basis of race, how might those racist tendencies, now underground and unspoken of in civil society, find outlet or expression? Push it underground, where does it go? Does it find its way into education somehow, through testing and still-trenchant segregation of communities? And then, does it find its way (or continues to operate as it always has) in the decisions made around housing policy, and real estate? Does our capitalist system somehow maintain racism, because it lends objectivity (i.e. “the market”) to people’s subjective and biased preferences? Maybe there’s something happening in the criminal justice system, from the way laws are enforced to how people are processed to incarceration rates to recidivism, and then beyond to drug use to mental health to health care to poverty to the media to public perception to…

When we find that the previous, racist people system is no longer sufficient to describe relevant evidence, we need the system that talks about all the systems. Here we could talk about systemic racism.

Because persons, real living individuals, live their lives in all of the systems.

And it is in that lived context, with all of the systems, that theology must be rooted. It makes theology powerful that it can take the individual seriously, and the overlapping contexts seriously. This is why theology is also dangerous — it is a voice for the powerless, who trust in faith that they are wholly valued, but know in this world that the little dotted-line box either ignores them inside of it, or leaves them out of it entirely.

A theological engineer cannot help but be interested in systems.

Theology

About the Theological Engineer

Posted on by Fig Tree / 1 Comment

I’m a math-teacher theologian Zen-Buddhist New-Yorker.

I have studied and practiced engineering, education, theology, depth psychology, and all of the above applied to the struggle for social justice.

I call myself a “theological engineer.” I hope to take the wisdom of religious traditions and the structures of western theology, and apply these to pressing matters of human need with efficiency and creativity.

I want to talk about transcendence, reality, spiritual practice and spirituality, mindfulness, meditation, and meaning; but also education, racism, psychology, poverty, math and science, and the news. Ultimate concern is not separate from daily concern — the ultimate is found among and within the daily, right here and now.

This blog is primarily interested in:

  1. education and the work of teachers as a spiritual effort, worthy of a theological perspective,
  2. the lessons of depth psychology and the knowledge of the unconscious applied to both theology and education,
  3. the liberating power and the limits of math, science, and engineering and their worldview
  4. marginalization and oppression in its many forms — but in These United States, that will mostly mean race and class — and what education, theology, and psychology can and should do to shut it all down.

…and more. If any of those are important to you, you’re my audience. I want to hear from you.

Thanks for coming by — let’s get to it.