Obvious Hiatus

This blog is going to go on a brief hiatus while I get my life situated in the Philadelphia area. And figure out what to write about now that I am not teaching in a classroom.

Stay tuned for another reincarnation of a blog focused on "where the edges meet" and maybe, possibly, just perhaps a new and fancier URL.

Thanks!

Angelina

Letter to the Land

For her final project in Environmental Science, Annelise is asking everyone to write a "letter to the land" about their learnings from, and connection to, Woolman's 230 acres of forest, scrub, meadow, garden, and buildings. This is mine - slightly edited for a wider audience.

Dear Woolmanland,

When I first came here, the dryness of the land in August was totally different than the lush humidity of my home back east. I was accustomed to four dramatic seasons. Here there are really… two. I had read about madrone and manzanita long before coming here and was glad to finally meet them in person. (For the record, madrone looks a lot like the rhododendrons of my childhood in the Delaware Valley.)

I was called out here by a leading (as Quakers say), by a vague vision of a garden in a forest (I would later learn the word permaculture and its resonance with this vision and my life), by archetypal evergreen trees that still crop up in my art, and by the ghost of Utah Phillips (whose spoken word I loved when I was a teenager, and who, I learned after I arrived here, loved Woolman.)

This place has helped me to understand and become clear on many things. Through learning about the history of mining in the Sierra and seeing its effects – the canals, tailings and erosion in our woods – I have (re)-learned that even most seemingly wild places have been touched and changed by humans. This is an important lesson for a woman from the built-up suburban East. Learning about mercury poisoning in the Yuba and its tributaries, minerals in our out-of-commission wells, and the invisible ozone that comes to settle here in the summer all helped me to understand that our ecological work can no longer be focused on purity. We’ve lost that battle. A lot of damage has been done – to the natural world, and by extension to our bodies (connecting environmental issues with health care is another lesson learned here). Instead, we need to focus on regeneration, restoration, and resilience in an altered landscape. I am grateful to Woolman, the land and its people, for helping me to understand this, and for inspiring/reminding me to stay grounded in love, ingenuity, and creativity.

The culture around sense of place that is so strong at Woolman, and that inspired this most excellent project of Annelise’s, has also been an important lesson for me. Talking about relationships with the land – awareness of watersheds and foodsheds, wildlife, human and geological history, etc – helped me to understand that I am actually rooted elsewhere. And that rooted-ness is rare in this day and age, something to be valued, protected, and cultivated. So I am hungry to return to the Philadelphia area with tools and awareness sharpened at Woolman, to thoroughly embrace and love that place that I am from, to be its conscious denizen.

So thank you, Woolman, for calling me out here, for offering up your lessons (which have been many more than are listed here). And thank you, Woolman, for sending me home. I will always remember the sound of the wind in the pines, my wild neighbors (dear, quail, turkey, lizards), the stars and quiet at night, and that view of the mountains while rolling down Woolman Lane. This is where I learned to be a teacher - that I am a teacher.

May future generations hold this land as the laboratory for teaching, learning, nourishing, challenging and growing that it has been in my experience. May the healing continue, may it long be a sacred space.

With gratitude and respect,

Angelina Conti

Peace Studies Teacher, Fall ’09 – Spring ‘11

Beautiful and devastating things

As I've refined Peace Studies these last four semesters, I've gotten clearer and clearer (and more in love) with the fact that my class invites students to surf the space between the personal and the political. Readings in sociology, history, and political science? Uh-huh, of course. Reading and writing memoir? You bet!

Increasingly, the writing assignments they do for me are short (500-800 words) and personal. As in, What is your gender? Are you conscious of it and how it influences your interactions? Do you act differently around men or women? Are there implicit or explicit expectations of you because of your gender that you like or don’t like? OR: Is feminism relevant for you and your generation?

My motivations for this personal tact are fairly shameless: at that age, they tend to be good at writing about themselves (and if they're not, it's good to start them in the hopes they cultivate a lifetime of introspection). And, because I think the concepts will mean a lot more to them, and penetrate a lot deeper, if they personalize them.

But when they bare their souls to me.... how do I grade that as an English assignment??

I've had boys reflect on their experiences with masculinity and having to be tough, and girls talk about how their sexuality alternately empowers and disempowers them. Later in the semester I will have them write a story of an experience they had in which they were aware of their race. These kids consistently write the most beautiful and devastating things.

The most appropriate response is to honor and thank them for their story, and to be humbled by their sharing it with me. I am often humbled.

So I write them long comments, ask them lots of questions, and offer them lots of praise. But I also circle their typos and grammatical mistakes, and beg them to be more careful about paragraph breaks and run-on sentences. I do it all hoping they don't get stuck at the grade as my judgement of them, but instead hear me saying (whispering, across traditional teacher-student lines) I see you, I honor you. Thank you.