Method or madness?

Can inspired teaching be reduced to method or does it always require inspired teachers? The most influential educational models today duck this question by placing their trust in curriculum and through policing teacher compliance with testing regimes. The best teachers, according to this model, are those who efficiently and consistently get good results in high stakes testing. But there was a time when quality in education meant something different and when the key site of educational debate was method. Now method has been relegated to the sidelines. The old arguments for student-centred education and discovery learning, now bundled up as 'progressive', have been safely stowed away in the stock cupboard to gather dust. As a way of thinking about knowledge or about learning processes they have been shelved. The idea of disrupting power, of education as a critical force or some sort of act of emancipation have gone out of fashion. Education is there as an economic investment in a stable future rather than as a force for social change. You may still hear enthusiastic university lecturers talking about facilitating rather than transmitting knowledge, preferring to be the 'guide on the side' rather than the 'sage on the stage', but that's in the arena of adult learning. Christopher Zalla's film Radical resuscitates this seemingly moribund debate. Here the teacher is inspiring, his method - well, it's radical - and it delivers the goods in test results. The brilliantly drawn teacher, Sergio Juarez, who prefers to be known as Sergio, turns the tables in an underachieving primary school in Mexico, where social forces, crime, poverty, corruption and high stakes testing seem to have the students well and truly trapped. Sergio literally turns the tables (into imaginary boats) and then gets rid of them altogether. He does the same with curriculum requirements - turns them upside down, then gets rid of them. He is passionate, inspired, sometimes frustrated, and maybe even slightly crazy. But all along he is desperate to find ways for his students to realize their full potential. Not once in the film does he express any overtly political views, despite the fact that what he is doing is deeply political - there's just no dogma attached to what he does. He appears to be driven by an unwavering belief in learning and knowledge as a fundamental human right. That's it. Well, that and the internet. His vision is inspiring, but it's not as if there aren't obstacles - the initially sceptical principal, the dismissive colleague, the corrupt official and so on. Also there is the grinding poverty, the oppressive forces that restrict the students, their lack of self-belief - the injustice of it all. Radical the movie is sometimes a little simplistic in its analysis, in its avoidance of politics, and occasionally veers towards the sentimental. But Sergio's passion is brilliantly captured and the evolution of his relationship with the principal is delicately handled and heart-warming. It's based on a true story and that gives weight to the argument that Zalla's film is making. Still the argument rests on method - re-packaged from A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses. It's not exactly Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, more like a neoliberal fantasy - but that would be straying into the politics of education which the movie doesn't do. This is about education and method, but it could just as well be about a very brave and inspired teacher who believes in his students. In the end, it's thought provoking and there's so much to discuss. I wonder how this movie would play in a teacher education course today?
 

Monitoring reading

I've been reading fiction throughout my life and I seem to have developed a number of strategies for evaluating - or perhaps it might be better to say monitoring - what I'm reading as I go along. I don't think they'd have universal appeal or that they might just simply work for anyone without any modification, but they work well enough for me and just because of that they may be worth sharing. So here we go. First of all I want to be won over by a writer, and I want that to happen fairly quickly - in the first couple of pages at least. I want to enter the world of the writer. Nothing too flashy but just enough to make me want to carry on. Maybe it's a gentle hint of what might follow, a voice that appeals, a setting or interaction that intrigues me. Then after the start I tend to apply what I call the 100 page rule. At this point, do I understand what's going on? Do I feel sufficiently hooked in to continue? Do I want to know what happens next? Can I get some sort of purchase on the different characters - can I remember who they are? In the past I've just abandoned what I'm reading if it fails the 100 page rule. Nowadays I'm a little more forgiving and may persevere for a while. And then next, about halfway through, regardless of the length of the thing it's the halfway point - I'm asking myself 'Is it worth carrying on?' or have I just had enough? Life is short enough. My default tendency is to give a writer the benefit of the doubt. I know enough about writing to know how much effort is required and just how hard it is to say what you want to and how easy it is to fall short. Writers should be given the benefit of the doubt. But this halfway point is very significant to me. It usually helps me to distinguish between the very good and what's good enough. Of course, you never really know until the end - that's just the way it is. By way of example, at the moment I'm reading Colm Tobin's The Blackwater Lightship. The first couple of pages are excellent. That's definitely a tick, then. By page 100 I note that I'm completely absorbed. It's certainly got more to give. At the halfway mark I have Declan, a central character, at his grandmother's bleak abode, dying of AIDs. Present, a couple of friends and various members of his fractious family. Is it worth continuing? Well I'm not put off, but neither can I see much in terms of resolution for the family. How will it end? Declan's got a one way ticket - there can be no surprises there. Sad or tragic though it may be, he will die. Things hang in the balance but nothing much can change by the logic of the book's own narrative. Yet the second half manages to open up the back stories of the characters in a way that is so much more plausible than other two parters (Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies would be an example). This gives Tobin's novel additional depth and nuance. It looks like there won't be an easy settlement but as Declan's health becomes progressively worse, the three generations of women move closer to understanding one another. It's as close to a resolution as we're going to get and the writing is very good. There's a small dazzling window when Tobin's narrator captures Declan's sister's despair: 'Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea ....It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glittering of the sea, and the moving breeze happened without witness, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love.' Bleak, but blindingly good - I guess that's what Tobin intended.

 

Let's hear it for the trees

There's a hypnotic, meditative quality to Perfect Days which foregrounds the Koji Yakusho character's quiet immersion in simple everyday life as a Tokyo toilet cleaner. He is surrounded by busy people, but also by natural beauty. A touchstone here is the sunlight leaking through trees, summed up by some beguiling cinematic images of that komorebi effect. Quiet acceptance seems like a template for contentment and it has been suggested that Wim Wenders is taking a stand here. But what do we read into some of the other motifs? The cassette tapes he plays in the car each morning - those lo-fi analogue recordings of a previous generation that haunt the movie? Or the delicate suggestion that his past and his family relationships may not be so straightforward? And all those imaginative toilet designs that we encounter? Critics have tended to focus on the beauty of the film and have celebrated the portrayal of a character seemingly at peace with the world, turning away from, or escaping from the mess. But, perhaps inevitably, there's more beneath the placid surface of the film. It takes us away from toilets, from toilet cleaning and from Tokyo, such a potent symbol of the modern world. It could be argued that Perfect Days makes an uneasy settlement with the modern world, in the same way that the Koji Yakusho character may have made an uneasy settlement with his life. Some parallels can be found in another slow and quiet film - Here from the Belgian director Bas Devos. The central characters, a Romanian construction worker and a Chinese bryologist develop a romantic connection in natural beauty walking through the woodland around Brussels. The trees and the mosses come to the foreground, They are beautifully filmed as modern life speeds by in the background - trains ceaselessly moving rootless people from place to place. Here is another sideways glance at modernity. The character Stefan is more troubled than Wim Wender's toilet cleaner, but his life is just as simple and his motivations are nothing but generous - he cooks up soup and walks miles to deliver it in plastic tubs to his friends. Here may be overlooked because Devos is not so well known and because it may be siloed as art house, but it is still a real achievement. On the other hand Wim Wender's huge reputation has already insured that Perfect Days gets plenty of attention. But both films deserve to be taken seriously, both show what a feature-length film can do, and both have important messages for us. And let's hear it for trees - they don't feature in the credits, but they are major actors in both these wonderful, thought-provoking films.

The reading habit

My reading habit is almost as bad as my writing habit. In fact it may be worse. It costs more for a start and it has the added disadvantage of cluttering the place up with its remnants - books. I usually read a couple of them a week. Sometimes non-fiction but most of the time these days fiction. A long term ambition has been to make some sort of reference to what I read here, on this blog. But that's too much pressure. And the trouble is that I don't quite know what I think about a piece of writing until sometime afterwards and by then I've started on something else and then I forget what I thought before. My clearest thoughts about my reading usually begin to crystallise out as I'm reading, but somehow it seems wrong to write them down before I've finished the whole thing. Wrong and probably unfair. So my first impressions of Checkout 19 was that it was a rather clumsy attempt to claim cultural capital with all those references to her reading. That was until it started to impress me with its deep interiority and its own grappling with the writing/reading process. But all that fell away when I started to admire the jaw-dropping way that it would lurch into full-blown fantasy. Still when I reached the end it had become something else again, another kind of story. Bennet's book is unsettling. It's hard to compare it with anything else and perhaps that's why I can't quite bring myself to say I enjoyed it. OK, it shares some common features with something like Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, but then that's a more conventional form, a memoir with an explicit trajectory, a memoir that dwells directly on its central character and context. On some occasions when I read I just get absorbed in technique and with Checkout 19 I found myself turning back the pages on a couple of occasions to find out how skilfully Claire-Louise Bennett got us from A to B. Quite remarkable in itself. I turn the corner of the page as if I'll go back again which is something I rarely do, because by then I'm on to the next thing which in this case is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Don't lean on me man

Scribbled notes on a scrap of lined paper sold for £89,000 the other day. They were the draft lyrics for Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City – complete with the added revisions ‘Hey man!’, ‘Don’t lean on me man’ and ‘Outasight’. The everyday nature of the materials and the rather unremarkable addition of those words might seem trivial or even banal if it were not for the huge impact of Bowie’s songs on popular culture. That scrap of paper, those hastily scribbled jottings are like visible traces of a creative process in vivo. Those songs echoed around bedrooms and shared houses, bedsits and squats, family homes and student flats. They were sung along to, played, replayed and performed time and again, spooling outwards, as it were, from those hastily scribbled lines. Of course, it wasn’t just the lyrics, it was the voice and the music too, the distinctive sound of that particular recording, distributed on vinyl, in its instantly recognisable cardboard sleeve. And it goes without saying, the RCA supply chain ensured that copies were there, ready and available in the racks and trays of LPs that like-minded people habitually flicked through when they went to their favourite record store, back in the day. Matter of little significance has, over time, become a much sought after collector’s item - the value of that scrap of paper far outstrips the value of the raw materials it’s made from, and the ways in which the words themselves wound their way around the feelings and impulses as well as the hopes, beliefs and dreams of a generation of listeners is difficult to capture because of its inevitable multiplicity. It may well have been the soundtrack of many people’s early lives - but then what lives? How did the lyrics come to mean in different contexts, how were they understood - how were they heard, misheard, disliked, detested? Material history can be a bit like that, for although we might agree on the importance of a particular artefact, its meaning is fundamentally unstable inviting interpretation, re-interpretation and misinterpretation. Music in popular culture seems to inhabit the outer reaches of such instability because of the way in which it is often woven into significant personal events, stitched in to one’s particular state of mind, the recreational drugs, relationships, lifestyles and ambitions of the time. Perhaps music in general does this, seamlessly attaching itself to the memories and affects, the distinctiveness of a life. After all this is key to the success of Desert Island Discs, now 81 years old. The 8 track format is such a convenient hook to tell the story of one’s life - or at least a version of it. With an aspiration to be a writer, poet or wordsmith and a nascent literary sensibility I was drawn to the words that punctuated the soundtrack of my early life. That soundtrack was made of vinyl. Singles and EPs that span around at 45 rpm, LPs at 33.3 rpm. Mostly I first heard stuff on pirate stations, on a transistor radio, on Top of the Pops or round at friends’ houses. But the LP soon became something to own. The record sleeve had the all-important supplementary information. The aesthetic of the art work, the names of the musicians, the way they looked, the way they dressed and how they had their hair - the instruments they played, who sang, who wrote the songs and of course, the lyrics themselves. No longer inaudible or misheard, there they were, nearly always on the back of the sleeve or on a pull-out, and you could read them, sing along or just pour over their meaning, if you could fathom it out. Some were more self-consciously poetic than others, some were just rubbish, but nonetheless huge clouds of creativity billowed out of that early flowering of rock music. It seemed at the time that the lyrics carried valuable messages. If they were not poetic they might gesture towards expressions of lifestyle, of taste, of belief and in doing so fashioned the habits of mind of a generation. Whimsical and romantic, uncompromising and rebellious, conceptual, quirky, hedonistic, we were served up with a range of possibilities, a wardrobe of identities that might distinguish us from the mainstream. Only a few at the time saw how the subtle threads of capitalism were part of this, establishing a marketplace in which even the costumes of anti-capitalism could be bought. And now, just the words remain – like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan (it’s all there somewhere, even if the melody is hard to sing!). Skeletons, threadbare outfits. At an earlier auction the lyrics for Bowie’s Starman sold for £203,500. Unlike Suffragette City, these look like neat copy – presentable handwriting on graph paper with misspellings corrected, probably provided for publication of the official lyric sheet. They don’t have quite the same feel as the Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City lyrics – they’re more polished, more self-conscious, but their market worth is still interesting, and given that an early demo of the song went for £41,000, a fifth of the price, it seems like the material trace of writing is an important marker for the collector, being closer perhaps to an autograph than a ghostlike voice, written by the hand of an icon, don’t lean on me man.

Killers

 

Perhaps Martin Scorsese is playing with conventions, but 3 hrs 26 mins sounds like a very long movie. Killers of the Flower Moon is that long but I can honestly say that it didn't drag, the evening just had to be rearranged to accommodate it, and that's no bad thing. The murders, the casual racism and the downright evil intent of William Hale are dramatisations of real-life events that took place in the 1920s and were explored in David Grann's book of the same name Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The film script is based on the book. But although we get a bit about the FBI, the film concentrates on the strongly drawn characters and the atrocities that they unleash. Leonardo diCaprio, as Ernest Burkhart, is excellent at playing a character who is weak, confused and easily manipulated by William Hale (Robert deNiro) whose charitable mask hides a seething caldron of malice.  Most sources categorise the film as a Western and there's plenty to be said about that - how the genre has evolved and what it means now. I don't find it a particularly useful box to put this film in, but through a series of co-incidences, work on the mostly grim encounters between white settlers and Native Americans has been on my mind a lot recently. Delving into the work of Sebastian Barry had taken me into the brutal world of the Indian Wars - a bloody chapter in American history, which Barry handles so well. In Days without End he manages to weave in delicate intimacy, love and yes, even gender fluidity, with the trauma of human atrocity without lessening the impact or significance of either. I didn't need Faber to include the first chapter of A Thousand Moons in that book, but I went on to read it anyway. Equally brilliant writing. So although reading the two, one after another, was no co-incidence at all, I didn't think of either in terms of a Western - and good for Faber, they don't go down that route, either. Then, in a second-hand bookshop, I picked up West by Carys Davies. If anything was at work it was subliminal. I just wanted something fairly short, something with a lively narrative and a quick flick through suggested that's what I'd get. What a great first novel it is too. It's short, there's a strong storyline and some pitch-perfect writing. Always fascinated by writing about writing I thought she has a particularly deft touch in looking at that particular settler practice from a different perspective. One of her central characters has a Native American companion who dispassionately observes the act of writing 'the dip of the point of one of his half-bald feathers into the ink, the sound that was like the working of the claws of a small creature on a leaf or the smooth bark of a tree.' Wonderful! With a title like 'West' it's easy to think of it as a Western, but it's so much more than that. And again it exposes colonialism and the bloody violence of the settlers, the land grab, the fight for domination, the inhumanity of those who think of themselves as civilised or somehow superior. And then we watch the news.

Why writing still matters, too

 

For the cover of Why Writing Still Matters I wanted an image that conveyed some of the messages that are to be found in the book - and that's quite a big ask. This image of Tom Price's wonderful piece called Network, which is in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was an obvious candidate. It might make you think of writing as it is becoming - writing with technology, which is consistent with the book's subtitle, 'Written Communication in Changing Times'. The fact that I'm in the picture as well is a bit of an in-joke. But in the end we went for the more abstract image which is credited to Nick Oakes but doesn't actually get any commentary. It's a photograph of initials and names carved into a tree trunk near the Alhambra in Spain. I like it because it references an everyday, but unofficial use of writing - using your name as if to say 'I was here, too' - here for as long as this writing surface remains. It will outlast the act of inscription, but anything further is uncertain. It is the trace of an action - a penknife gouging out the crusty bark of a tree. Someone leaves their mark, announces their existence, expresses their frustration, pledges their love or whatever. I like it because it can be read in different ways, and because it might provoke all sorts of different reactions. The specific detail of its origin and author(s) are unknown. The fact that it has been coloured with the primary colours that Miro was so fond of adds another dimension for me. That and the place in which the photograph was taken - I have fond memories of visiting the Alhambra. Visiting and queuing. Once we waited for 6 hours! It can be like that at the height of the tourist season. But, it's always worth it. The Alhambra and the Generalife are a potent reminder of Moorish rule in Europe and an important part of Spain's architectural heritage. A jewel in the crown of Andalusia. Of course, none of this is in the photograph, but it's what I bring to the photograph. And somehow when you put all that together you get more of a sense of what writing is, what writing does and then maybe, perhaps, why writing still matters.