Borderland

Artichoke’s post about metaphor and education, and creativity, has me thinking about the lines and tensions in teaching. She notes the contradiction for art teachers working in schools with “The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words.” Her post was provocative, as usual.

Most notably, this time, she sent her readers off to read a deliciously descriptive story, Lost in the Sahel, in which Paul Salopek tells about a journey to Africa. He wrote:

The Sahel is a line.

But it is also a crack in the heart—a tightrope, a brink, a ledge. See how its people walk: straight-backed on paths of red dust, placing one foot carefully before the other, as if balanced upon a knife edge. The Sahel is a bullet’s trajectory. It is the track of rains that fall but never touch the sand. It is a call to prayer and a call for your blood, and for me a desert road without end.

The Sahel is the transitional region between Africa’s Sahara, to the north, and the savanna to the south. It’s a troubled and troublesome place that embraces both beauty and brutality. It’s a boundary, a borderland, a place that is home to “Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, more disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there.” Read this piece. Thinking about lines, tensions, and metaphors, it evoked some connections with school for me that I want to record here.

The classroom is also a line. Lines separate as well as join. In school we divide knowing into discreet subject areas, and we move from one to another on a schedule defined by the clock, and signaled with a bell. Curriculum is also a line. It has a scope, and a sequence. It defines a finite body of knowledge to be presented for consideration and consumption by students in the various grade levels, which are likewise linearly ordered. And evaluation, that is also a scheme in which graded judgments are attached to student performances in order to report and record their “progress” down the line.

Lines impose structure and order. Cause and effect, too, is a linear kind of knowing. Lines are used to explain and to predict as we come to recognize patterns in sequences of events.

There is a line, too, between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. And this line is a boundary that, like the Sahel, both separates and unites. This point was eloquently made by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who describes the neural meltdown she experienced on a December morning in 1996 when she had a stroke.

Taylor explains how the right and left brain hemispheres are very different places. The right hemisphere is about the present moment. It thinks in pictures and sensations. It is conscious of the energy that flows throughout the universe. The left hemisphere organizes that information by associating it with everything we’ve ever learned, and it uses language to do its work. It helps us to construct the common shared reality that we use to orchestrate events in the world, creating meaning from sense impressions. Taylor tells what happened when the chatter in her left brain went silent, when she said goodbye to her life, and experienced nirvana. Her realization that this experience is a gift within the grasp of each of us at every moment motivated her to recover and encourage people to “run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres” and perhaps create a more peaceful planet. Her message is a powerful story of transformation and a window into a frontier that the world desperately needs us to explore and navigate.

This line, the fissure that divides our left and right brains, I see now, may be the most important boundary in all of creation. For teachers it is a zone of vital importance. We need to learn as much as we can about this place, and how to navigate it, because too much of our work is located in left brain isolation.

A good place to begin would be the Brain Rules principles described by John Medina. “If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom.” – John Medina.

Medina says that schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home, and when I think about what “home” is for some kids, it’s scary to think about what that might mean. The Brain Rules site is a promotion for Medina’s book, but it is also exceptionally informative. He lists 12 “brain rules,” or principles derived from brain research, and each principle is linked to a short video. The topics he discusses include exercise, attention, memory, sleep, stress, and exploration, among other things. Kids would enjoy this, teachers should be familiar with this research. Good lessons for us all, as we work to make classrooms interesting and engaging places for kids to learn things that matter.

I’m also thinking that compassion meditation is something to begin learning more about as we explore the possibilities for running that “deep inner peace circuitry.”