Sunday Driving
I am driving through country
split open by hills and roads
cut through them for cars
like my own to travel along.
Sunday driving, the certain swell
and yield of earth beneath my wheels
draws me from idling hours to this passage.
Wandering down isolated roads,
watching cows, black, white, tan as they
gawk at the figure passing, the dust rising
and return to their devotional chewing.
Fencing rolls tirelessly. The horizon
is subject to the prolonged dominion
of sky. Light blue hues meet white,
blue tones at points giving way to
rich, dark blue streaks. A splotchy
moon dots the sky; a casual observer.
Sunday driving to remember my place
in all of this. The symmetry of movement
is perfected in the shadow of nature.
Sunday driving, to forget, to speculate.
The day breaks like a lullaby singing
the toiled sun to rest. And in darkness
I am no longer where I came to be.
Someplace else entirely, I look for
landmarks and street numbers to return.
In the Year 2022
The United States economy underwent a relatively tumultuous, though admittedly favorable metamorphous in the year 2012. The cosmic increase of agricultural product sales represented the sole cause for this turbulence. In that year, the Remote Sensor Lawn Management System was released into the market with Joan Deere (formerly John Deere, though bought out by the niece of the late writer, Betty Friedman) alone claiming 92 percent of the agricultural products sale. For a quarter, Wall Street lunged up and down like a Carnival Cruise ship in a late summer hurricane. However, by the close of the fiscal year, the market had managed to survive the colossal re-alignments of funds except for pork belly stock, which remains to this day almost non-existent. The exact cause for this remains unknown and provides ample material for conspiracy theorists of all sorts and several militias’ in western Arkansas who claim to have been the target of the misfortune.
The Remote Sensor Lawn Management System performed the maintenance of lawn mowing while you observed and directed it from the comfort of your favorite chair. (The picture on the package was actually a man in a hat lying in a hammock) The advent of the Remote Sensor Lawn Management System had profound effects on the retail industry, but the product’s greatest influence was upon American culture itself. It became a symbol of status and progressive living. One analyst, a member of the S.H.I.F.D.L.O.G. think tank coined the phrase, “another British invasion.” This of course, alluded to the screaming popularity of the product, particularly with women and its origins out of a small lab in Southampton, England.
Raphael Paltier, a non-citizen working in England developed the product and sold the technology to a small company outside of Redding for 2.5 million dollars. Three weeks and one World Cup later, Joan Deere had swallowed the Redding firm for 12 million dollars.
Though, no recorded evidence of the technology landing in Joan Deere’s central facilities in Deerfield, Illinois exists, several documented sources reported a police sanctioned fence outside the corporation that bayed hundreds of screaming women looking to get a peek at the new equipment. Conservative reports downplayed the rumors swimming around the product and predicted the United Kingdom fad would be “here today and gone tomorrow.”
Upon purchasing this wave of agricultural technology, the average person who brought it home would open a package the size and weight of a common P.C. printer. They would then take out the Remote Sensor Lawn Management System remote control which was roughly the size and density of a pack of baseball cards (old school Tops cards made from real cardboard, not those glossy plastics they issue out today.) They would then remove a double pack of rechargeable remote control batteries wrapped in cellophane and finally the System( which I shall now refer to it as for the sake of brevity) itself.
The System, at first, came in one size and color only. It was circular, about 14 inches, the average size of corporate pizza. The height of this machine, initially, was around 10 inches making for one very tubby tool. The casing of the product was a type of titanium metal and blue racing stripes flanked its sides with the words “THE SYSTEM” enshrined on its front side, a helpful graphic that alleviated initial confusion over which direction was forward. Flipping over the tool was not laborious as it weighed in at a mere 14 pounds 11 ounces. Exposed, the undercarriage revealed two wheels with built in tread for better traction and a simple blade about the size of a baby’s arm that spun much like the old fashioned conventional gas mowers located between the wheels. The wheel axel was not exposed. There was also an on/off switch positioned in the upper right corner.
After skimming over the unpackaged directions, the new user would set the System down in their grass, having placed the on switch in the on position and step back to start the mower. Pressing the on button located in the top corner of the remote control started the motor. In the middle of the controller was a type of joystick apparatus that allowed for any angle of movement. Turning the machine proved the prime point of positional difficultly with the contraption. A dilemma that was resolved by employing circular rotational patterns of mowing that replaced the archaic horizontal, vertical, or professional diagonal patterns. Later, Deere would put out a model with a diagonal mode, but it was rarely employed for the circular angles left on the yard soon became status symbols associated with sophistication of the System.
An operator could be up to 100 feet away from the System while it operated. However, not paying attention to the System’s path could be detrimental to the machine, oncoming traffic, children at play, or pets in nearby yards. There is a whole anthology of legal cases associated with the System available through Artic Bird Books.
The average yard could be thoroughly cut within ten to fifteen minutes though setting aside thirty to forty minutes to include time for raking and bagging the cut grass was recommended. Deere did not release the Remote Sensor Lawn Management Bagger machine until a full four years after the System came out.
The most innovative feature of the System was its means of energy. Mr. Peltier, originally a bilateral acrobat and traveling cosmetologists, had perfected a chip that would allow the System to run for seventy hours before it needed to be replaced. This feature was as explosive as a love chorus driven pop song in the fifties for two reasons. In no particular order: (1) The fledgling mid east wars of the early 2000s created a temporary oil crisis that was discovered by a group of migrant workers to, in fact, not be a crisis at all. This crisis brought the Schwarzanegger administration to its knees sparking “The Great Oil Debates of the Probates”, the outworking of which of course was the Oil Regulation Laws which nearly obliterated Exxon/Mobil and other leading gas tyrants of the time. Needless to say, alternative means of energy were abundantly researched and reasonably exhausted on test markets. The System was an answer to ungrateful prayers. (2) Joan Deere designed the System in such a manner that only certified operators of qualified tools could replace the chip which in turn created thousands upon thousands of the now famously nostalgic “Deere Repair Shops” throughout North America.
Winter Landscape
Wands of light shoot off the ice
into a thousand shadows, dancing.
Toiled minds turn to vigilant
adolescent play. The red noses of
children are followed by the scraping
of ice skates. Young Fred curls his
fingertips into coat pockets. Yellow
shades of winter loom forebodingly
over the small village halved by the
river turned playground. Branches
chat like icicles in the breezes.
Along the banks, fixed limbs protrude,
fossils from the water. Mary
falls down and calls for time out.
Buildings line the rivers edge, sleeping
giants with ivory stocking caps.
None as large as the church, it sleeps
the hardest tucked up to its windows in
waves of snow. In the distance, the
vague outline of another slumbering
village lays. The sky is quiet, captured.
The shrill outbursts of children do not
disturb the ravens, gathered along the
western slopes, partaking.
The Way We Learn
The nature of learning institutions is to provide the means of learning to students to provide the ends of education. This process dates back far past Western civilization and is innate to the nature of man’s position in the world. More specifically, education exists because ignorance exists. Though not all education is learning and not all ignorance is ignorance, it is sufficient to say that education arises out man’s need for knowledge and is accomplished in stages. These stages are identified differently in varying cultures, but start virtually at infancy. Learning having such a monumental role in the lives of all people merits attention to the means of education, that is to say the learning process. Understanding the learning process is something that most institutions, directly, give little attention to.
There may be classes that within their disciplines look at issues of learning and certainly students of education study them as well, however, sufficient grounds exist to give more facility for the learning process to be taught, theorized, discussed, analyzed and most importantly self discovered by the students.
There are moments of clarity in the lives of students of all education ranges where they have what is referred to as a moment of epiphany. This belief is typified in the classical story of Isaac Newton suddenly coming to his third law of motion as an apple fell on his head from a tree causing him to utter the now so famous lines: for every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction. These findings came on the heels of a man who had a deep hunger for learning.
Newton wrote in a journal:
“In those days I was in the prime of my age for invention and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since…I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the moon and from Kepler’s rule of the periodical times of the Planets
As this example itself illustrates these commonly understood moments of clarity that could be describes as anything from heightened intellectual awareness, keen awareness, acute curiosity or total comprehension. Whichever the case, these moments for learners are looked to as turning points or breakthroughs. These breakthroughs could not exist without the sweat equity that went before them.
Newton, had he not become such a vigorous student of physics would not have all the research to tie his points together about gravity and motion forming theories he did. There is then in the process’s of education moments of epiphany, but these are secondary to the discipline of the studies that come before them. But, before these insights and discoveries comes the acceptance and pursuit of learning.
The processes and consequences of learning are perhaps no better exemplified then in the realm of pioneers of development. This group ranges with the multitude of subjects they entail, but are in no way limited to specific disciplines. The development of instruments, for example, is rooted in mathematical endeavors.
“The Pythagoreans were also the first to think about the relationship between mathematics and nature, investigating numerical relationships in acoustics and musical theory. They discovered that if you halve the length of a string, then you obtain a note an octave higher.”
The Pythagoreans discoveries recount perfectly the ways in which the world of learning are interwoven with starkly diversified fields. This is a commentary on the power of ideas. Ideas are not simply dormant thoughts published in books or regurgitated in curriculums. Ideas have power that stretch past, often times, the subject they were intended to address. Dallas Willard, chair of Philosophy at the
Southern California writes on the potency of ideas in his celebrated work The Divine Conspiracy:
“The power of mere ideas is a matter about which intellectuals commonly deceive themselves and, intentionally or not,also mislead the public.They constantly take in hand the most powerful factors in human life, ideas, and most importantly, ideas about what is good and right. And how they handle them thoroughly pervades our world in every aspect.”
The implications of this are both a commission and an indictment as history weaves the tale of the power of ideas. The allusion, then, is that learning is so important because ideas not only empower and unleash, they can enslave and destroy. The Socialist party that Adolf Hitler led was fueled with a patchwork of ideas that provided catastrophic results.
The creative writing of Susan Griffin pens some of the most powerful questions about the learning process and its evil ramifications. She traced the development of Heinrich Himmler, who was the head of the German army and oversaw much of the Nazi policy and activity.
Griffin writes:
“The nightmare images of the German child-rearing practices that one discovers in this book call to mind the catastrophic events of recent German history. I first encountered this pedagogy in the writing of Alice Miller. At one time a psychoanalyst, she was haunted by the question, What could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death? In her work, she traces the origins of this violence to childhood. Of course there cannot be one answer…nor does any event in history have a single cause. Rather a field exists, like a field of gravity that is created by the movements of many bodies. Each life is influenced and it in turn becomes and an influence. Whatever is a cause is also an effect.
Griffin’s research concludes that childhood development is just one of these determiners, not a single cause. Her questions are powerful and come out of one of the greatest atrocities in record human civilization. What she, Alice Miller, whom she quotes, and countless others have brought out of this experience is invaluable learning. Victor Frankl in his landmark work Man’s Search for Meaning documents his life in Auschwitz and the learning that enabled him to come out of there not only alive, but a whole man, now stronger through his circumstances. Yet another commentator on the power of ideas and their far reaching grasp is the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes in his best known work at the end of the book writes:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful then is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler a few years back.
Keynes was speaking out of decades of research and experience when he penned these words. The prospects he presents are chilling, yet not to address them, not to acknowledge them is the greater threat. The demand for all people to see themselves as lifelong learners is fundamental for the formation of a healthy society. Our government knew this when they drafted the Constitution. They had come out of centuries of tyrrany both in
England and in countries around them. Thus, the value for individual liberties to be protected ‘by the people and for the people’ has been instrumental not only in shaping this country, but as this country has helped shape the world. The age old adage that if we do no learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it echoes these points about the power of knowledge which comes through learning. Paul Johnson writes in A History of the Modern World from 1917 to the 1980s. that “The killing fields of Cambodia came from philosophical discussions in
Paris.”
At the same time learning has in itself the same and power to build, heal, guide, and establish lives that must be tapped into to guide the student into any area of interest whether it be science, socioeconomics, or children’s literature. This process of learning comes more naturally to some than to others, but at the same time for all comes naturally. Darwin did not have to take a hundred classes to race around the
Galapagos Islands asking questions about species and recording his entries. Every discipline came out of schools of thought that came out of individuals pioneering into the unknown, the uncharted, unfettered world of thought and drawing conclusions. It is of necessity then, that the learning process is taught at length in educational settings to encourage, kindle, and release this activity in students. As I have demonstrated, life finds a way, curiosity rears its head and studies go forward, but how great could their impact be if students understood this process? If students were by evaluating the learning process able to discover for themselves what men and women have discovered for themselves for millenniums on millenniums, that learning is thrilling and often its fruits very sweet, how far could that generation of learners go? Who knows what society stands to gain from this?
Paulo Friere in his landmark work on education said that, “Those truly committed to liberation must….abandon the educational goal of deposit making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relationships with the world. ‘Problem-posing’ education, responding to the essence of consciousness-intentionality…” In this statement he is calling for a reform of educational goal. He argues for intentionality in our educational processes so men are merely regurgitating information they have received and so on and so forth. Ultimately, what he is calling for is accountability in the educational process. The teaching of learning as a class or series of studies that is a required part of high school and college curriculums would provide an avenue for such accountability.
Understanding the learning process should not be a luxury of those that seek it out on their own or those who need to take it as education majors. The learning process should be taught to all students starting at a high school freshman level. This class could then be taught at a senior level too and then made a part of a college curriculum. Universities push almost every discipline to be taken once by a student as part of core requirements. The learning process must be one of these classes. The scope of the information studied is so applicable to every student of every discipline that there is not a reason universities should not adopt this class as a core requirement. John Dewey condemned the assumed gulf between thinking and experience and suggested they were intricately linked and that thinking could not be limited to a mental process alone. “…Thinking is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice as something cut off from experience and capable of being cultivated in isolation.” This type of approach to thinking he argues is detrimental to the rest of the education process. By cutting off the normal experiences from education, there is no way to develop a holistic approach to life and as he later proves, making an impact in the world around them.
The common conception that young adults and children too do not favor school is widespread. There is an endless stream of movies that comprise a genre that comically examine these perspectives active in the lives of high school students. There is a whole other genre of movies that do the same thing on a collegiate level. Lying beneath the jokes are some very good questions about education. They are doubtless a commentary on education that has a much higher audience than academic journals on education. John Dewey wrote on this tendency in young adults, he proposes that
“No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions outside of the school, and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject matter of school lessons.”
This question, the stereotypes, the stereotypes brought to life in movies, they are really begging an answer and that answer is a better understanding of the learning process.
Gerald Graff takes the socialization roles of universities to another level calling the schools themselves popular cultures. He writes, “In a real sense, the university is itself popular culture-what else should we call an institution that serves millions if not an agent of mass popularization.” If the university is an agent of mass popularization then the process of this popularization must be critically evaluated and also students should be given the intellectual respect to discover these things for themselves rather than being told that they are true without the due right of process that must, absolutely must, happen for students to genuinely own their education.
Last Rites of Summer
Taking the boat out for the last time,
The sun sets behind a row of trees.
Shafts of light glow through, sparkle against
shadows and fall to the water like leaves
I untie simple knots and step down off
a slightly shifting dock into a small
weathered fishing boat then slowly drift
out from the cove. The wind warps my course
and with a little gas I counter
the leeway. Submitting to a large
channel, my engine tops out at 30
miles per hour. The vessel rides and
breaks with the lake’s movements. The thud of
metal on hard water echoes the
vibrating motor. Noise is not else.
Taking the boat out for the last time.
The summer slips slowly between the
fingers of days and nights. No more fishing
trips with a sandwich and thermos. No more
crisp, dark mornings with the earth on my hands.
No more day rides across the lake, picnics
on the rocks, tying to trees not docks,
peeling off my socks for a cool dip.
Nearing a dam, I turn wide, repent
on the other side. A blue heron
departs from roosting, fishing. I watch
his path of flight as we both return.
