Druids, celts and slavs, oh my!

Today is our school's celebration of May Day. If you want to see Spectacle defined, please come by to see our enormous May Pole, nymphs, Morris Men, and other trappings of Spring. Actually, for me, none of these things says "Spring." Nevertheless, our school loves this century-old tradition, holds it sacred, and clings to everything May Day. Parents and students bedecked in pastels, Newport reds, Lilly Pulitzer dresses, and seer suckers. What is it about May Day that gets us all worked up here? Even more so, what is it that makes traditions and beliefs so powerful?

The other day in my AP Spanish Literature, students discussed the peculiar desire of the inhabitants of a fishing town to transform a drowned man into a kind of town hero. All he did was wash up on shore, and the townswomen began bathing, cleaning, perfuming, caring for and wrapping this massively proportioned shipwreck victim. So physically large is the 'ahogado' (drowned man) that the townspeople re-engineer their small-doored homes and their interiors to be so capacious as to house future 'ahogados' when, not if, they arrive. Finally, once Esteban has wrought his transformative power, the townspeople gather as a community of believers, a 'family,' as they are described, and stage an at-sea burial for their beach refuse-cum-god.

There is an Easter gloss in this story, in that it is the women who begin the traditions in concert one with another to restore the body of Esteban. He is metaphorically brought back to life and then allowed a life beyond this one--the town and its people forever believing in the goodness and transformative power of one man raised (if even metaphorically) from the dead. Márquez doubtless focuses his narrative on the seemingly senseless labors of the women to force the reader to engage in an inquiry of the creation of belief, community, and organized religion. One easily arrives at the conclusion that he considers the process one of happenstance coupled with arbitrary assignment of meaning to events. Lifting--in fact reifying--what is essentially sea-borne refuse to the stature of a worshiped being worthy of one's adoration is truly miraculous. Resurrectionists might take offense at the banal treatment by Márquez of what they consider a holy event, a sacred truth: that Jesus died and was resurrected three days after, ascended into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Lord. Márquez is not being didactic in this story, nor is this a cautionary tale against the beguiling nature of belief. Rather, it is an interesting discourse on myth creation and creation of belief and belief systems. More universally, Márquez is fascinated that indeed every known human culture has constructed a series of beliefs around unknown or mysterious happenings. That this is so evenly applicable to the human experience is the most profound statement implicit in the story.

Back to May Day--not a belief system per se, but certainly this school believes it is important enough to noticeably curtail curricular pursuits at some grade levels in exchange for practicing music and choreography. It is the togetherness for which we as humans yearn--"knowing the script" makes us all comfortable. Not having to predict the next step in what has become a rote run-through of the playbook is relaxing and reassuring. I'm not the biggest fan of organized beliefs or tradition for the sake of tradition--indeed, my own thoughts on the Christian tradition according to which I was raised remain hazy even into my late thirties. But if what this school does around May Day is in the name of increased human togetherness and bonding across and within grades and divisions is the objective, I can support the temporary suspension of curriculum.

What about those new to a belief community, who are ignorant of the plays in the book? In the high school alone, there are approximately thirty outside admits who do not come from the lower grades. When thirty percent of a population every year are neglected and are denied, no matter if it's simply an 'oversight' knowing the purpose of the event or anything of its history or its importance to this community, the event begins to fall into discredit. Either the community pursues indonctrination or something co-created by all members of the community in the interest of inclusion. After all, if the goal is togetherness, and the outcome is a feeling of confusion and exclusion by a significant population of the school, is May Day, then, not at loggerheads with a stated school mission?

What about...

This afternoon, while students readied themselves for a cooking show segment they would narrate for classmates beginning on Monday, I realized what progress they have made thus far in Spanish 3. Tenth graders who could create formal commands, juggle cooking and culinary vocabulary worthy of that of any chef, and dub a Paula Dean or Rachel Ray recipe from start to finish--the year certainly didn't start that way, and their hard work in collaboration with classmates and me has increased their confidence and intuition. Complete with a list of ingredients, measurements and deft manipulation of commands and subjunctive, I am confident that their narrated recipes would yield edible, if not delicious, dishes.

What I have learned in the process of transitioning from higher education to secondary students is that the latter abound with optimism and love of discovery. In higher education, cynicism and 'fulfillment of requirements' begins to set in, and a pursuit of money--or at least other disciplines better-disposed to "utility"--rears its ugly head. High school students think it's fun to create, play and work together in creative, playful ways. Isn't it best to work together to have a good time? to exchange ideas? to make inroads in your understanding of the world in all fields of human inquiry? Sometimes all of this means giving over some amount of charge to the students themselves. After all, if you don't ask them what they need or want, how can you expect to mete out goals of the course?

Fostering student choice cannot happen at the expense of indispensable methodologies or banks of knowledge. For the specter of these anarchic possibilities, choice can be controversial, of course. What teacher, after all, doesn't consider at least to some degree him or herself the proverbial master of the house once the door closes and the period/block/class begins? We're all interested in ensuring that students acquire the necessary tools to express their ideas in a meaningful, respected and respectful way according to the standards of each teacher's discipline. The happy medium is for students to inform our choice of activity by which we ask them to show us proficient language skills. Memorizing scripted exchanges hasn't been accepted methodology for over thirty years. Likewise, pure expression over precision is so very 1995. It seems the pendulum has swung away from purely communicative and back toward a balance: teach grammar--not in isolation, clearly--with a grounding in real-world (or as close to real world as possible) experience.

At my school, we use a video-based curriculum which is very good at grounding vocabulary and prefiguring grammar. Nevertheless, a soap opera-style curriculum has its limits, and students even at this age, sense its lack of authenticity. They cook, eat, download, upload, record and delete with abandon. A language curriculum without these hallmark vocabulary words is "dead to them." Texting is central to their existence--for real (said in a distinctly Ke$ha accent). I am proud to report that some of my colleagues have created an entire tech-centered unit around an out-of-date unit whose most advanced tech-centered vocabulary fails to even mention the 'fax.'

If you're a language teacher, you love your students (or "kids," as so many of us call them), you're reading this because you want innovative ways to teach a living language within the confines of the classroom walls. It's not like teaching the disciplines of science or math or even history or English. We are more like art educators than any other colleague--ours has real-world implications: As foreign language educators, we address the question: "can you really (really?) talk and connect with those around you in a way that is culturally relevant, appropriate and meaningful to your interlocutors? Sculptors, painters, ceramists and illustrators do much the same. Believe me, I learned much from educators in other fields, but rare are those those teachers outside of foreign language or the arts, teachers who understand the many-faceted moments that construct our existence across human experience. We are the new Liberals and anarchists of education. We language teachers disobey the borders between disciplines: we teach Mayan math--in Spanish--, metaphysics and philosophy--in French--, war- and love-making--in Latin--art and religion in Chinese.

Is there anything we cannot do or will not try? I challenge us all to reach outside of our comfort zone: talk to your history colleagues, art, religion, philosophy, literature, politics, psychology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, calculus, biology--we all believe these are areas worthy of human discovery and pursuit. Why can we not complement each other's teaching and become more holistic and inclusive in our fostering of knowledge? Linguists of the world..."UNITE," por favor, s'il vous plaît, xiè xiè, gratias tibi ago.