29 minutes on one sentence…

No, there have been no blogispodes for over a week…it was one of those weeks where going to get a haircut proved too time-consuming until this morning. The conveyer belt, or perhaps, roller-coaster of KA life, just sped up a little this week. In fact—and you can see this sit-com reference coming a mile away—I felt so much like Lucy when she and Ethel tried their hand at candy making in that classic “Job Switching” episode. I laugh every time as Lucy gets overwhelmed and starts shoving the undipped chocolates anywhere she can squirrel them away! And then when that foreman lady comes in, okay, I think I even know her name—I think it is Verna Felton—whether I am right or not is just kind of weird that I might know her name, and yet, things like physics and car repairs elude me…anyway, that great moment when who I think is Verna yells out, “Splendid. You’re doing fine!” And she calls out, “Speed it up a little!”

Actually, I didn’t know that reference was coming until I typed out the words “conveyer belt” up there and then I laughed because that’s when the inevitable reference hit me!

Oh, my…this day off is needed today. Obviously!

So in the last week I started a play, and while it is a play I have directed before, I discovered that I did not have in Jordan my “bible” of the play, with all my blocking in it, so I have to re-do that work. It’s fun work, but what with the added time crunch of rehearsals and a spate of disciplinary brouhahas this week…it was a conveyer belt of preparing for class, teaching class, meetings, play preparation, rehearsals, and trying to manage the disciplinary issues. Each moment was squeezed for the maximum benefit. Not complaining—I just felt like Lucy!

My friend and colleague Steve went to the US for a conference recently and I taught one of his classes for a week. I had visited them before to teach for 2 days a few months ago, on Greek art, but this was an extended visit, and it was a challenge, and refreshing.

First of all, the course is not an AP course, which just means you do not have to keep one eye on the clock and one eye on the calendar the whole time (I know—the image doesn’t really work, I may just want to have an eye on the board, and the students too, but hey, I do have four eyes after all). This is an introduction to world history course to 9th graders who are in what we call an “EES” program (say it aloud and you get the point). It is “English Enhancement Seminar,” and it is meant for our students for whom English is still a struggle and not as natural for second-language speakers. The goal is to really focus on the skills of language acquisition so that the courses are more manageable, and they can eeeeeeeeeeeeeease (EES) into English and KA better.

This class for a week took me back to my first year at KA. In the last two years I have had to go much faster since I was teaching them AP classes. But these guys are still adjusting to so many classes in English. For many of this class of 18 before coming to KA they might have had only one class a day in English (that would have been English class) and now they have all their classes save Arabic and Theology in English. The amount of reading and writing and speaking and understanding and processing must give those neurons in their brains a work-out!

So I walk in and many of the guys yell out, “Habibi!” the guy-talk that actually means, “dear one.” Mr. Steve had assigned them a five-page excerpt of a textbook chapter for the week as we explored Medieval Life in Europe around 1000. First of all, they wailed and moaned and smiled and agonized over the assignment of five pages for a week. Mr. Steve must have been out of his mind, they guessed!

He had asked them to start the packet and read the first page. Many of them had written over dozens of the words on that first page with Arabic so they could get a handle on what the chapter contained. I didn’t doubt that they had spent time on it, but I remembered back to days where I had to do the same kind of spade work in French and German, and even if you have all those words there as helpers, somehow the actual meaning of a passage can elude you.

I asked a couple questions about the “feudal relationships”, explained in the chapter, and in their sweet way they looked so frustrated, and I realize we needed to do that spade work. I asked Laith, this eager sharp young man to read the first sentence. Here is the first sentence of the chapter:

As the Carolingian Empire disintegrated and as attacks by invaders devastated the lands, a new political system known as feudalism developed in Europe.

As he read the sentence, I read the mood in the room. They just didn’t understand this combination of words. They had read the page, or at least most of them—I could tell these two boys in the corner did not intend to read, ha! they remind me of the Middle School colleague at Hackley who refused to read any books I assigned the History Department to read! I digress…

They had translated the words, but it was like saying just sounds really. That sentence was so dense. I really wouldn’t have thought about it, but if you read that again, if you don’t know it well, or understand the context, that sentence—that first one of the chapter—is a dead-end for the whole chapter, for the whole lesson, for the whole week!

So since I didn’t need to watch the syllabus as hawkeye-like as in an AP course, I decided we couldn’t proceed, we daren’t proceed, until we all understand that first sentence.

So, as you would surely have guessed from the title of the blogisode, we spent 29 minutes chewing apart every noun, verb and adjective in that sentence. The one thing they knew for certain was where Europe was since Steve had just done a unit on geography. We worked with what they knew, and figured out that sentence. I told them stories about Charlemagne (he, of the opaque adjectival word Carolingian), I explained how and when Charlemagne came to dominate Frankish Europe (they knew that phrase from the whizbang geography lesson of Steve’s). I used a chess board to explain how the game of chess actually mirrors feudalism, and we started to tear down and build back up that concept.

I asked them if they knew the word terrorism. I asked it nicely. I didn’t accuse them of being terrorists, but really, if the word comes up in the Middle East, it’s not unlike talking about communism in the USA—a metaphorical cold breeze suddenly chills the air. I explained about the Vikings and their intrusions, or rather, terrorist intrusions to Frankish Europe over the course of centuries and we discussed the fear that would underlie a society subjected to such terrorist attacks. They explained to me how such fear would prompt the adoption of a system that protected and created a structure to manage the fear.

After 29 minutes, at the end of that first class, they understood that first sentence. It was clear. They knew the words, they embraced the context, they waved those verbs around, they welcomed the Carolingian era, and they understood that first sentence.

It was good work, hard work actually, trying to move carefully and not insultingly, but thrillingly to make that strange passage familiar. They were amazed that they could understand a sentence so well! (I didn’t have the heart to remind them they had many, many more sentences to go—I couldn’t touch that amazement!).

In the aftermath of that first day with them, I thought about the sensation of being amazed. I was talking to a writer last night who came to be a teacher for one year here, and he asked me why I didn’t teach in a college. I said, “They don’t radiate amazement as much. I watch a student at this age, and they will allow themselves to be amazed.”

Theologian Dorothee Soelle once wrote, “To be amazed means to behold the world and, like God after the sixth day of creation, to be able to say again for the first time, ‘Look! How very good it all is!’”

Last night, when this conveyer belt slowed down finally and I could watch a movie, I picked one I had watched last August, I picked Julie and Julia (in honor of Meryl Streep’s Oscar nomination!). This movie is a delicious comedy about two women who have an amazed response to food and cooking. La Streep plays Julia Child, who is living in Paris in the mid-1950s, going to cooking school and beginning to write the cookbook that will make her famous. Amy Adams is Julie, a New Yorker who 50 years later decides to cook the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days and write about her experiences in blogisodes. Both story lines show the process of finding one’s calling through creativity.

I love this movie’s spunky celebration of the spiritual practice of enthusiasm—both characters are exceptional mentors of this quality—and its portrait of personal transformation arriving in the midst of everyday activities. Both women allowed themselves to be amazed, even at something so simple.