Day 198…
On the drive up from Savannah, past Charleston and on into Georgetown, there are stands set up along the road selling sweetgrass baskets. Each stand represents the work of a different artist. They all look similar - they all use the same materials and the same basic technique - but really, each of them is unique.
The baskets are a Gullah traditional craft that was brought over from west Africa. Originally enslaved women made them for their own use, but they soon became popular with their European captors as well. Now they are a well-respected local craft. An expertly made intricate basket can sell for many hundreds, or even, in the case of some that I saw, thousands of dollars.
While I was in Charleston, I came down into the hotel lobby from my room after dinner to go for a walk. A woman was there and had covered several large tables with baskets She was sitting in a chair off to the side working on a new one.
None of the materials used are dyed so all of the finished pieces have a similar array of natural colors. The long interior grass which looks like very long dark brown pine needles is bundled together by the wider outer grass which is lighter in color and wound around it. When it’s done it makes essentially a thick cable. Sometimes the outer grass is wound right up against itself, so the cable is light tan and sometimes it is wound leaving gaps so that the darker brown shows through. That cable is then coiled from a center starting point and worked outwards and then up depending on the design. Some of the baskets are simple bowls. Some are like round jars with lids and others are like flat platters. Still others have more fanciful shapes with strange and unexpected curves.
We fell into conversation as she wove, and I asked her how she’d learned how do it. She told me that she had come to a difficult time in her life some years before and that a friend of hers had given her the greatest gift she’d ever received - an hour and a half of her time. This friend had shown her how to work the grass.
“As soon as my fingers touched this sweetgrass it was if they’d been doing it forever,” she told me.
From that initial first lesson, she then experimented with different shapes and styles. She looked at what others were doing and borrowed some of their ideas and then came up with some of her own. Sometimes she starts with a particular shape in mind, and sometimes she just starts.
As we talked, she looked more at me than down at the piece she was making. Her fingers were doing most of the work on their own.
As each state starts to grapple with reopening their schools, the questions keep coming up about what education is and what it should be.
The President is advocating for “Patriotic Education” which is really just propaganda designed to indoctrinate the new generation to his way of thinking. Lies, when you get right down to it. That kind of schooling helps nobody except for the oligarchs in charge.
Even an actual curriculum, however, has limited practical usage if the kids are disengaged from it.
My niece and nephew are doing online virtual learning and it is, at best, problematic. Some of their teachers are trying by experimenting with how to do it better, but others are just plowing ahead as if they are in a regular classroom. For the kids, it’s like sitting at home alone in your room for hours on end watching an incredibly boring TV show without being able to change the channel.
Even though the kids are all zoomed in together, many of them keep their cameras off so that the teacher can’t really interact with them. Far more importantly, the kids can’t interact with each other either.
Being effective on camera is a skill that can take actors years of training to become proficient in. These teachers don’t have the benefit of that kind of training and a lot of them are just not that good at it.
In pre-COVID times, school hours were often set around the availability of buses. This school started at this time and then, once those kids had been delivered, another school could start a bit later and use the same buses. There have been myriad scientific studies done to show that the very worst time to engage a teenage boy is first thing in the morning. There is no busing going on but schools are still keeping to the same early morning schedules.
At least when you physically have to go to school you have the time you take to shower, get dressed have a quick breakfast and bus into the school to wake up. With virtual classes, you wake up and the screen is right there. No chance to get the blood flowing before you have to dive in.
Moving through a virtual day at school, there is no walking between classes. There is no hanging out with friends. There is no gym class to blow off steam and energy in. Instead, the only break when class is over is that the kids walk downstairs to the kitchen to get lunch. I fear that we are going to see a monumental rise in childhood obesity.
I cannot imagine how kids in less well-to-do families without proper internet and computers are getting through this at all.
The passing along of facts and figures is just a tiny fraction of what school is all about. In terms of life needs, we learn more about how to interact with people than we do about anything else. As kids we are constantly pushing the envelope to see what we can get away with. I didn’t read Great Expectations at all because I chose to play with my friends, instead. Can I BS my way through an essay? Why yes, I can. B+, I’ll take that.
After we leave High School, we may not remember what a Golgi body is or how to figure out the square root of 18x over 3, but we have learned how to get along with other people out in the world. How to make friends and how to handle bullies. There will always be a few kids who are inspired by what they learn in biology classes and math classes who turn that into their life’s work, but many will simply forget it all and move on to what they really want to do. They will end up taking classes in whatever that is, if necessary, or figure it out on their own.
Tony Hawk is a monumentally successful professional skateboarder. I’m guessing there was a certain amount of cutting school to skateboard in his past. He got to where he is by working at it a lot.
Rachel Perkins is a professional sweetgrass basket maker. She learned that skill from a friend. She became proficient by constantly applying herself to it.
I learned to stage manage by doing it. I worked with people who mentored me, and I made my mistakes on the job. I cannot imagine what that would have been like starting out, were I carrying a crippling college loan debt on my back. With all due respect to my many good friends and colleagues who teach and my many good friends and colleagues who have studied stage managing at school, it isn’t a field that requires a University-level education to do.
Going to school for me, was a gift from my parents. There was much about it that I really enjoyed. I was exposed to many schools of thought in many different areas. While I may not have appreciated them at the time and blown a lot of it off, I have since gone back and filled in the gaps and used what I learned there as a basis for further exploration on my own. While I didn’t train to be a stage manager there, what I learned in school certainly helped me become one.
Would I want to go to school this year with all of the coronavirus restrictions? The question might be better phrased as how well would I have done this year with all of the coronavirus restrictions?
All in all, I was a good student with a desire to learn. The subjects that interested me, I did well in. I got through the others more or less well too. High School for me was highly social. I was in the band and a member of the drama society. I had a regular study group with friends. I participated in an endless amount of after school activities. I even played tennis.
I don’t think I would have been nearly as engaged or nearly as successful if I had had to sit at home in my room alone and listen to my teachers drone on online. Knowing myself, I would have gotten through it, but I think I would have hated it.
When Rachel Perkins told me about feeling like her fingers already knew how to make a basket, I understood what she meant. I had a lot to learn about many aspects of stage managing when I started out, I still do, but even in high school, I felt like I already knew how to do it. In retrospect I’m grateful that my drama teacher saw that and had me do that rather than play one of the poker players in The Odd Couple (even though I had a kick-ass audition).
That, I guess, may be a big reason why online teaching is probably not, ultimately, going to work. We all figure out what we want to do and be as much if not more between classes and after school, as we do when we are sitting at our desks listening to a teacher.
I feel for all the kids who are having to navigate through this strange time, and I applaud the teachers out there who are really trying to make it work.
We won’t tell him, but when my nephew searches online to figure out which fish are which and what habitats they like to live in and what they like to eat, that activity is what we call education. He may not like school much, but he is a really smart kid and he’s going to be fine.
For my nephew this year, maybe it is just better that he goes fishing.
❤️me too
only learned by doing...
doing truthfully under imaginary circumstances
xo