Chickens & Life Lessons

When we moved onto an old farm property, we were sure chicken-raising would be an instant part of our agricultural activity.  But we discovered that there was so much else to do, chickens didn't move into our lives for three years, when a friend who was anxious to get rid of a mother hen and a few chicks urged us to take hers.  Our children were eager to have them and I brought them home without more than a cat-carrier and box for them to sleep in.  While the kids were excited, my husband was less so as it meant he had to challenge his under-developed carpentry skills to build a coop in his few spare moments.  Those first layer hens had names, like Maple and Blackie and they were held and hugged often. I delighted in their bedtime routine so unlike that of my kids.  Come dusk, they'd find the coop and tuck themselves in; all we had to do was remember to close the doors.  I'm embarrassed to admit that a night did come when we forgot to close the door and came home the next day to find a feather trail and a dead hen or two, oddly not eaten. We replaced those within a few months and my children again gave them names.

Since then, three years later, we've had multiple batches of hens, our recent one consisting of several castaways from families unable to care for them for some reason or other.  By now,  my kids have stopped giving them names and stopped picking them up to hug, with the newfound knowledge of life and death that comes of living with farm animals, be it so simple as chickens.  We had a chick that turned into a mean attack rooster that frightened many visitors; when a friend said she'd come over and help us turn him into to stew with her fail-safe axe method, we took her up on her offer.   Some time later, I tried nursing back to health a hen that was attacked by the neighbor dog; but when its stench filled our living room as it failed to recover,  that hen fell to the same ending on the chopping block before getting buried deep in the woods.  Just last week, we had an eagle land on our porch railing then dive toward the hens.  My husband scared him away just in time, but we feared for our cat for days after that.  

One might rightly ask why do we choose to tie ourselves down to such duties as the feeding and care of hens just for a few dozen eggs a week, especially now that grocery stores are more likely to sell affordable eggs labelled such things as "free-range" and "antibiotic free."  I must admit I love seeing our hens free-ranging around the yard (well, yes, there's a down side to that too); I love giving my kids a firsthand knowledge of where some of their food comes from and what it takes to make that food appear before them.  Perhaps it simply comes down to habit; it's hard to imagine now buying eggs that come from a source we don't know.  

Whatever we've learned from this endeavor, it's fairly messy and ambiguous, in contrast to the knowledge coming to us through Google where, according to Nicolas Carr "intelligence is the output of the mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized."  Sure, we've googled "how to get rid of the mean rooster" but I like to think that raising chickens will keep us from turning into "pancake people" that Carr describes as "spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

Starting a blog requires the change of old habits, making way for a new practice, and an addition to old routines.  As a lifelong learner, I enjoy this opportunity for a mental retrofit; as a sometimes writer, I particularly enjoy the nudge to write more.  As a "digital immigrant," I feel the awkwardness of this new medium.  I still keep a handwritten journal that I can curl up with in some cozy soft spot when night and stillness have finally descended on the household.  I enjoy that in-between bardo space of reverie that Gaston Bachelard writes about  (Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos) when I am first sorting out what I think and what I see through the writing lens, before I share it with the world.  When do students in the classroom get this kind of space to dream, to reflect and to then determine what is worth pursuing and turning into a form of writing to share?  As a mother, I haven't seen nearly enough of this.

Watching Frontline's Digital Nation (thank you, Ken, for assigning us this to view), I am both troubled and intrigued by the challenges and opportunities of the digital life.  (Well, I am actually deeply troubled but refusing to say the sky is falling and always hoping that with the right educational pathway our youth can rise above the addictive nature of electronics.)   As I hear the reports of researchers who have found the negative impact of multi-tasking our way through the day with multiple electronic devices, I feel how much of an immigrant I am to this new way of writing.  Aren't my entries supposed to be brief and catchy?  Do I have the right tone?  Are my sentences too long?  Some of our assigned reading on blog-writing addresses these questions of best-blog-writing practice I know--but how does it apply to me, my writing habits, the creation of my "blog identity" and "blog voice?  And I ask you out there in my class who are educators, (how) is this taught in the classroom?  Are students now learning several ways of writing--including one for the internet interface and one for the academic assignment?

In my recent readings, I've been excited to find educators promoting the role of wonder in learning, something I promoted through Born to Read at the Maine Humanities Council as an important component of the read aloud experience. In Living the Questions, the teacher Andrea Smith, writes about "The Power of Wonder Questions," describing her successful experience with a focus wonder in her science unit with three-four multi-age classroom students. On today's early morning walk, I thought about the many kinds of wonder (and hence 'wonder questions') there are, as I wondered what it would be like to have built a mini-mansion on the Belfast waterfront with 50 steps down to the shoreline, then I wondered why I was hearing the traffic on the bridge one mile away this morning when I haven't heard it other mornings, and then I wondered if I should change my walking course to take in some of the hills of the town before calling it quits. All of these questions can lead to more questions, all of them could lead to more in-depth inquiry and even possible research, but some of them are closer to the exploration of an idea than others are. But the beauty of wonder is that it places us in that place of being open to our own lack of answers; it opens us to a happy experience of cognitive dissonance and bardo.

I also think about the link between wonder and inspiration and the pivotal role inspiration can have in learning. Once my son Luke is given the opportunity to wonder how high Rajon Rondo can jump or how many miles he runs in a week and how that affects his basketball playing, then Luke is inspired to apply these calculations to his math education. Wonder combines the power of emotion with the power of the intellect, transforming "doing what the teacher says" to self-motivated inspiration ie., it solves the problem of "how can we motivate a student to learn."

I was sure Will Richardson (willrichardson.com)  wrote about wonder in his blog, but cannot now find the reference. Much of what he says resonates with the concept though (see blog link in sidebar). See his refreshing thoughts on education generally and on the "uncommon core" when he says, "We don’t give kids time to go deep, we don’t honor failure, and we’re not about “learning to learn” as much as we are about “learning to know.”

As I read Living the Questions for my other graduate class, "Teacher as Researcher," I am fascinated to find descriptions of the research process that resonate with the concept of bardo.   I see this when the authors (Hubbard/Power) talk of "mining tensions," defining tension as "both an act of stretching and a state of uneasy suspense."  They go on to state that "Each definition of tension applies to teaching and research. ...[with] the best research questions....a taut spot between two points."  This place of uneasy suspense is, I think, bardo, where the desire and the need for a solution comes and the opportunity for new insights. 

The book also contains descriptions from teachers about their research process; in one of them titled, "What's Coming Apart So It Can Come Back Together?" by Ruth Shagoury, a poem by Mckeel McBride is used to describe how tensions in the classroom can be the beginning of valuable research.  The poem, "Inspirations Anatomy" ends with "It is one of the conditions of inspiration that things must/come apart before they can be put back together."   Ah...I see the state of bardo again described, that place of being in the unknown, the uncertainty that is needed for the creative solution to emerge. 

Confessions of an education junkie

"Confessions of an Education Junkie"  is really the subtitle of my blog title (and when I can figure out how to change the title, it might even become the new title).  For now I've chosen "In Bardo" as my title because it's a concept that speaks to what I think is an important, overlooked component to education.  Described by the Buddhist Pema Chodron as "an intermediate state....the period between death and the next rebirth" or "the in-between," I also think of it as that period of cognitive dissonance, when what we once felt to be true is in question and we need to experience that uncertainty to get to the next perspective, when we adjust our thinking, we pause and reflect and adapt.  I think this happens whether we're learning how to create a blog,  how to parent through every changing stage of developing children, how to become fluent in multiplication tables, or how to sail when the wind suddenly comes from an unexpected direction.

As an education junkie, embracing or I should say accepting the reality of bardo, I am constantly trying to learn and believe that learning is what keeps us growing and alive.  I will  use this space to talk about my learning adventures in life--be it as a graduate student, as a parent, as a reader or writer, be it as a gardener, an owner of an old farmhouse, community member or any of the other many roles I, or any of us, take on in our lifelong journey as learners.