More on Prophets

I am enjoying reading the Brueggemann book, but it has had an unexpected effect on me. It has led me completely away from, and then right back in to, my original feeling about the Hebrew Prophets.

I don't like them.

Now, I like studying them very much. I think they are astonishing case studies in history and psychology, and also to some degree in theology, but something always bothered me about them as religious role models.

Studying the Brueggemann book has shown me much of what was good about them. I appreciate that they were trying to transform the societies in which they lived, and Brueggemann makes a compelling case that we ourselves are living in royal times. Royal for Brueggemann is not a good word. It implies both complacency and despair, as well as numbness, and all of these, in his view, are deliberate on the part of the royal establishment. Hope for anything implies a need to change, and the royal establishment wants things to stay they way they are forever.

Brueggemann sees the primary mechanism of complacency to be consumerism. I have felt for many years that the modern day slave owner is the credit card. If you give people what they want temporarily, they really will sell their souls for it, and then spend the rest of their lives digging themselves out of the hole they themselves created. Credit card companies are insidious, especially in how easy they make it for college students to get credit cards, knowing they won't care about interest rates or finance charges, and are only looking for a way to live beyond the means their parents are able to give them.

So the prophet speaks against this consciousness. And the primary means available to the prophet are criticism of the establishment, and energizing people toward an alternative that they don't realize exists. However, the energizing is not based on something unheard of, but on something very traditional and grounded deeply both in the past and in the collective psyche, which is what makes it resonant. And the energizing comes from hope. Brueggemann is wonderful on this:

...we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. ... Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.

I love this, because I have often felt that facts are overrated. I believe what we call facts are really just the limits of our blinders, and we use these to confine ourselves to "possibilities." So-called "realists" urge us to live within these limitations, mocking any who would stretch outside of them. But the greatest and most essential ideas have always arisen from those who refuse to accept current limitations. Relativity and quantum physics came from a daydream about what it would be like to ride on a light beam, and this after the president of Harvard had announced that there was nothing fundamental in physics left to be discovered.

So I share the suspicion about facts. But where the prophets and I start to part company is that they seem merely to be replacing one royal mentality with another. This is something that always bothered me about the Exodus. The escape from slavery was an escape directly into a forced servitude to a new master.

Now, I understand the story psychologically, and I understand (and believe fervently) that true freedom only arises from submitting ourselves to something greater. The only way to transcend the ego is to admit our frailty. It is only through humility that we can recognize our place in creation. So understood metaphorically, I believe the Exodus is pointing us toward the universal truth that only in submission to God can we really find freedom.

But the story itself, when examined rigorously, doesn't really support this. The Israelites have not chosen this God; he has chosen them. And he is so volatile and jealous that they really are given no freedom of choice whatsoever. The list of prohibitions may indeed be a covenant, but they enter the covenant from fear rather than willingly. And they transgress these prohibitions so often that the book of Judges seems like one redundant disobedience after another.

Of course, if we go back to the metaphorical and psychological interpretation, we can see this as a simple description of the truth of how the individual ego chafes at the effort for submission. If every Israelite is seen as a cell of my body, then once my mind decides to transform, many of the cells will rebel out of habit until new habits are established. And if we saw a society in time-lapse, we could see this in the macrocosm too of how a society progresses through the civil rights era, for example, or in the current debate about gay marriage. Seen this way, the entire Bible is a guidebook for spiritual and psychological transformation - all the ups and downs and traumas and victories and defeats that can be expected on the spiritual path. And that is how the Bible has always made sense to me - as an guidebook for understanding God and our neighbors by first understanding ourselves, in all the messy complexity this necessarily implies.

But Brueggemann denies this:

The prophet employs no psychological gimmicks and no easy meditative steps because the issues are not private, personal, spiritual, or internal.

I am still working through this, but what that statement implies to me is that what the prophet is working toward is societal transformation, and specifically the dismantling of the royal consciousness which Brueggemann (and I) find so debilitating and dangerous. And again, we are still on common ground here.

But where we really diverge is on the issue of hope. Brueggemann says that the royal consciousness wants time to stop - for the emphasis to be entirely on the present so that we aren't thinking about alternative futures. The prophet, he says, is the one who "knows what time it is." And he reinvigorates hope, which is how change happens. He does this through criticism and public grieving:

The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.

Maybe I've spent too much time with Buddhism and Taoism, but I am more inclined to agree with Lao-Tzu when he says that hope is as hollow as fear (13). I am also inclined to agree with T.S. Eliot, when he says, "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" (East Coker). Hope keeps the mind focused on the future, which can help us escape some of our present circumstances, but will never help us escape the present.

From one angle, it could be argued that what Brueggemann calls the royal consciousness shares a lot with Buddhism - particularly in its focus on the now. But keeping the mind trained on the present is not necessarily a form of oppression. Buddhism does not merely replace one monarch for another one. It abolishes monarchy altogether. It abolishes oppression as well, for as Thich Nhat Hanh shows in his talk to prisoners, titled "Be Free Where You Are," we are only chained to our circumstances if we give those chains our consent. This is an oversimplification, but you might say that the prophets look for ways to break the chains, while the Buddhists seek to realize that the chains do not exist. Both lead to freedom, but the freedom of the prophets is temporary, while the freedom of the Buddhists is permanent.

We can certainly see this in the way that the prohibition of false idols seems so impossible for the Israelites to obey. Asherah and Baal seem unable to be suppressed, and Jung connected this to the cult of the Virgin Mary in Hispanic countries. No matter how many times it is torn down, the mother goddess crops back up, and if it can't be an Asherah on the hill, it will sneak in as the mother of God crying tears of blood or popping up in a toaster. Even Moses created a false idol in the bronze serpent, and perhaps even in the ark of the covenant itself. The entire Hebrew Bible is an attempted genocide on all of the false gods which, like the hydra, refuse to die.

The Israelites left the chains of Egypt for the freedom of the desert, and immediately felt chained there. They transgress their covenant so many times and so quickly that it becomes difficult to believe it was entered into willingly. And then once they get into Jerusalem, they continue to worship false idols - even David and Solomon. The prophets and the rabbis see this as weakness on the part of the Israelites, who apparently lack any modicum of faith. But when it is such an epidemic, we have to start to wonder if there isn't something wrong in what is being asked.

The Israelites are going from one set of chains to another. Some break free with each prophet, but then they are enchained again. Hope is followed by despair and numbness, and then another prophet arises to offer the necessary grief, criticism and hope to break the chains again. This, surely, is what the Buddhists mean by samsara.

So the royal consciousness is indeed the poison of complacency and consumerism that leads to despair or numbness or apathy, and is the wasteland from which a hero must arise. But the hero who merely lifts the veil for a moment, only to have it descend again, is not the hero we need. What the Buddhists offer, and why I still find them more compelling, is a shift in perspective. Certainly, living in the royal consciousness does not work. And a change is vital. But when we shift our attitude toward it and realize that the "facts" of the situation are simply illusions we ourselves have created, we can escape the chains once and for all, and it won't matter what king tries to rule over us. We will have taken responsibility for ourselves rather than needing a savior.

This is all still very new, and I am grateful to Brueggemann for stirring all this up in my brain. And I still believe firmly that the Bible is one of the best spiritual guidebooks around. I just have never placed a lot of faith in its historical or sociological powers. To me, it reigns supreme in illuminating the messy chaos of personal and collective transformation. Jeremiah represents the voice of my conscience, as does Elijah. Ezekiel is a peek into my most fevered nightmares, where my subconscious is speaking to me in broken images that my conscious mind fights to understand. And of course, once the spiritual transformation has taken place, I need to take that understanding with me into my interactions with those around me, so the ethics are of supreme importance, and society can indeed be transformed at the base.

But I'll do all that without hope.

More on Prophets

I am enjoying reading the Brueggemann book, but it has had an unexpected effect on me. It has led me completely away from, and then right back in to, my original feeling about the Hebrew Prophets.

I don't like them.

Now, I like studying them very much. I think they are astonishing case studies in history and psychology, and also to some degree in theology, but something always bothered me about them as religious role models.

Studying the Brueggemann book has shown me much of what was good about them. I appreciate that they were trying to transform the societies in which they lived, and Brueggemann makes a compelling case that we ourselves are living in royal times. Royal for Brueggemann is not a good word. It implies both complacency and despair, as well as numbness, and all of these, in his view, are deliberate on the part of the royal establishment. Hope for anything implies a need to change, and the royal establishment wants things to stay they way they are forever.

Brueggemann sees the primary mechanism of complacency to be consumerism. I have felt for many years that the modern day slave owner is the credit card. If you give people what they want temporarily, they really will sell their souls for it, and then spend the rest of their lives digging themselves out of the hole they themselves created. Credit card companies are insidious, especially in how easy they make it for college students to get credit cards, knowing they won't care about interest rates or finance charges, and are only looking for a way to live beyond the means their parents are able to give them.

So the prophet speaks against this consciousness. And the primary means available to the prophet are criticism of the establishment, and energizing people toward an alternative that they don't realize exists. However, the energizing is not based on something unheard of, but on something very traditional and grounded deeply both in the past and in the collective psyche, which is what makes it resonant. And the energizing comes from hope. Brueggemann is wonderful on this:

...we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. ... Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.

I love this, because I have often felt that facts are overrated. I believe what we call facts are really just the limits of our blinders, and we use these to confine ourselves to "possibilities." So-called "realists" urge us to live within these limitations, mocking any who would stretch outside of them. But the greatest and most essential ideas have always arisen from those who refuse to accept current limitations. Relativity and quantum physics came from a daydream about what it would be like to ride on a light beam, and this after the president of Harvard had announced that there was nothing fundamental in physics left to be discovered.

So I share the suspicion about facts. But where the prophets and I start to part company is that they seem merely to be replacing one royal mentality with another. This is something that always bothered me about the Exodus. The escape from slavery was an escape directly into a forced servitude to a new master.

Now, I understand the story psychologically, and I understand (and believe fervently) that true freedom only arises from submitting ourselves to something greater. The only way to transcend the ego is to admit our frailty. It is only through humility that we can recognize our place in creation. So understood metaphorically, I believe the Exodus is pointing us toward the universal truth that only in submission to God can we really find freedom.

But the story itself, when examined rigorously, doesn't really support this. The Israelites have not chosen this God; he has chosen them. And he is so volatile and jealous that they really are given no freedom of choice whatsoever. The list of prohibitions may indeed be a covenant, but they enter the covenant from fear rather than willingly. And they transgress these prohibitions so often that the book of Judges seems like one redundant disobedience after another.

Of course, if we go back to the metaphorical and psychological interpretation, we can see this as a simple description of the truth of how the individual ego chafes at the effort for submission. If every Israelite is seen as a cell of my body, then once my mind decides to transform, many of the cells will rebel out of habit until new habits are established. And if we saw a society in time-lapse, we could see this in the macrocosm too of how a society progresses through the civil rights era, for example, or in the current debate about gay marriage. Seen this way, the entire Bible is a guidebook for spiritual and psychological transformation - all the ups and downs and traumas and victories and defeats that can be expected on the spiritual path. And that is how the Bible has always made sense to me - as an guidebook for understanding God and our neighbors by first understanding ourselves, in all the messy complexity this necessarily implies.

But Brueggemann denies this:

The prophet employs no psychological gimmicks and no easy meditative steps because the issues are not private, personal, spiritual, or internal.

I am still working through this, but what that statement implies to me is that what the prophet is working toward is societal transformation, and specifically the dismantling of the royal consciousness which Brueggemann (and I) find so debilitating and dangerous. And again, we are still on common ground here.

But where we really diverge is on the issue of hope. Brueggemann says that the royal consciousness wants time to stop - for the emphasis to be entirely on the present so that we aren't thinking about alternative futures. The prophet, he says, is the one who "knows what time it is." And he reinvigorates hope, which is how change happens. He does this through criticism and public grieving:

The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.

Maybe I've spent too much time with Buddhism and Taoism, but I am more inclined to agree with Lao-Tzu when he says that hope is as hollow as fear (13). I am also inclined to agree with T.S. Eliot, when he says, "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" (East Coker). Hope keeps the mind focused on the future, which can help us escape some of our present circumstances, but will never help us escape the present.

From one angle, it could be argued that what Brueggemann calls the royal consciousness shares a lot with Buddhism - particularly in its focus on the now. But keeping the mind trained on the present is not necessarily a form of oppression. Buddhism does not merely replace one monarch for another one. It abolishes monarchy altogether. It abolishes oppression as well, for as Thich Nhat Hanh shows in his talk to prisoners, titled "Be Free Where You Are," we are only chained to our circumstances if we give those chains our consent. This is an oversimplification, but you might say that the prophets look for ways to break the chains, while the Buddhists seek to realize that the chains do not exist. Both lead to freedom, but the freedom of the prophets is temporary, while the freedom of the Buddhists is permanent.

We can certainly see this in the way that the prohibition of false idols seems so impossible for the Israelites to obey. Asherah and Baal seem unable to be suppressed, and Jung connected this to the cult of the Virgin Mary in Hispanic countries. No matter how many times it is torn down, the mother goddess crops back up, and if it can't be an Asherah on the hill, it will sneak in as the mother of God crying tears of blood or popping up in a toaster. Even Moses created a false idol in the bronze serpent, and perhaps even in the ark of the covenant itself. And the entire Hebrew Bible is an attempted genocide on all of the false gods which, like the hydra, refuse to die.

The Israelites left the chains of Egypt for the freedom of the desert, and immediately felt chained there. They transgress their covenant so many times and so quickly that it becomes difficult to believe it was entered into willingly. And then once they get into Jerusalem, they continue to worship false idols - even David and Solomon. The prophets and the rabbis see this as weakness on the part of the Israelites, who simply lack any modicum of faith. But when it is such an epidemic, we have to start to wonder if what is being asked is not really what is needed.

The Israelites are going from one set of chains to another. Some break free with each prophet, but then they are enchained again. Hope is followed by despair and numbness, and then another prophet arises to offer the necessary grief, criticism and hope to break the chains again. This, surely, is what the Buddhists mean by samsara.

So the royal consciousness is indeed the poison of complacency and consumerism that leads to despair or numbness or apathy, and is the wasteland from which a hero must arise. But the hero who merely lifts the veil for a moment, only to have it descend again, is not the hero we need. What the Buddhists offer, and why I still find them more compelling, is a shift in perspective. Certainly, living in the royal consciousness does not work. And a change is vital. But when we shift our attitude toward it and realize that the "facts" of the situation are simply illusions we ourselves have created, we can escape the chains once and for all, and it won't matter what king tries to rule over us. We will have taken responsibility for ourselves rather than needing a savior.

This is all still very new, and I am grateful to Brueggemann for stirring all this up in my brain. And I still believe firmly that the Bible is one of the best spiritual guidebooks around. I just have never placed a lot of faith in its historical or sociological powers. To me, Jeremiah represents the voice of my conscience, as does Elijah. Ezekiel is a peak into my most fevered nightmares, where my subconscious is speaking to me in broken images that my conscious mind fights to understand. And of course, once the spiritual transformation has taken place, I need to take that understanding with me into my interactions with those around me, so the ethics are of supreme importance, and society can indeed be transformed at the base.

But I'll do all that without hope.

The Prophetic Imagination

I am currently reading Walter Bruegemann's The Prophetic Imagination at the recommendation of two priests (or one priest and one soon-to-be priest). I spoke with them about the Bible class I teach and they said he was the pre-eminent mind at work today concerning issues of the Hebrew Bible. Certainly this may be true if you look at it from a Christian priest standpoint, which both of them are, and the book is really geared toward the current church community rather than toward the secular world, as much of the work I have already done is (Karen Armstrong, Jonathan Kirsch, Elaine Pagels, Stephen Mitchell, etc.).

Bruegemann states his hypothesis in the preface:

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

And he also acknowledges his general paradigm when he says "I have brought to the text my own hermeneutic of suspicion." This is valuable to me, as is his emphasis on criticism, because it prevents the argument from becoming too dogmatic. In fact, I might argue even at this early stage that his work is the opposite of dogmatic, though, since it is concerned with modern prophecy (not equated with fortune-telling for him, though distantly related), it opposes any oppression by the status-quo.

Here are some passages I found intriguing:

...texts--in particular biblical texts--are acts of imagination that offer and purpose "alternative worlds" that exist because of and in the act of utterance. ... Imagination is indeed a legitimate way of knowing. ... biblical texts, in particular prophetic texts, could be seen as poetic scenarios of alternative reality that might lead to direct confrontation with "presumed, taken-for-granted worlds."

Since it is a book for the ministry, he brings home the current need for prophecy in America:

...consumerism is ... likely the foremost circumstance of prophetic faith in the United States.

Contrasting our situation in America to the much worse situations of torture, war, and famine in other parts of the globe:

Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity. ... Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric. ... Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope.

I find this personally compelling, and have often felt that the demons of our day are far more subtle than the ones of biblical times, or the ones going on in other parts of the world. The credit card is really the oppressor in America today, and politicians typically do everything they can to continue the status quo rather than effect any radical change. Bruegemann looks both forward and back here:

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface. That is, the prophet is called to be the child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.

The other great oppressor today (and I say this as an English teacher) is language. But my job as an English teacher is to help students examine the underpinnings of their language and recognize words for the false idols they are. Only then can language become a catapult into a deeper reality, rather than a hollow container for an even hollower fiction.

Bruegemann sees that the task of dismantling the current system of oppression will be difficult, as it always has been:

...the dominant culture, now and in every time, is grossly uncritical, cannot tolerate serious and fundamental criticism, and will go to great lengths to stop it.

He then heads into his examination of Moses. In the past, I have felt highly conflicted about Moses, since on the one hand, he liberated the Israelite slaves, but on the other hand, his compassion and sense of justice extended only to his own tribe, and even then only to the faithful. I have seen the Hebrew Bible as three main narratives that serve as a progression. Genesis charts the journey to spiritual maturity of an individual (culminating, after many mis-steps in Joseph or Judah, depending on your viewpoint), Exodus shows the spiritual journey of a tribe, and the story of David is about creating a nation. One could go one step further and see Jesus as transcending national boundaries and making spirituality something intensely personal again (as in Genesis), but extending the compassion universally. The journey for him is both inward and outward - but that's a subject for another time.

Moses - in my view a stepping stone in this process - has always been problematic since his compassion extends only to his tribe. Even in his punishment of his tribe for its manifold transgressions, he is acting from compassion since he wants to bring them closer to God.

But Bruegemann takes a different view, looking at the Exodus entirely from the point of view of the dismantling of Empire. For him, the Egyptians are equated with Pharaoh, and I suppose as long as we view the Bible as literature rather than history (which I do), then this is a useful viewpoint. In my mythology class, we study the Mahabharata, and since the work is so fantastical, it is not even tempting to discover the historical impulses behind it, so the Pandavas and Kauravas become alternative metaphors rather than individuals. The Bhagavad Gita was Gandhi's favorite book, which is mind-boggling until you realize that for him the characters are not human beings, but rather qualities within ourselves. As a spiritual seeker, nonviolence is paramount in dealings with others, but we need to attack our own inner demons with all the vehemence we can muster. As one of my favorite modern gurus - Lama Marut, who lives in Las Vegas and posts daily on twitter - once said, "We should not be playing footsie with samsara under the table. We should be kicking samsara in the groin."

So Bruegemann seems to have no problem with the destruction of the Egyptians, even the ones who weren't in the government. In addition, he sees the royal reign (Solomon in particular) as a return to the ways of the Egyptians, proving the impossibility of institutionalizing what is essentially a nomadic God. He says,

Moses dismantled the religion of static triumphalism by exposing the gods and showing that in fact they had no power and were not gods. ... Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion [though again this is only for his tribe]

He makes clear why theology is important in a concise sentence that I find profoundly important:

Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology.

I can't say how often I have felt that to be true, but since we leave our theology unexamined and unquestioned, we end up being slaves to it, even though we don't really pay any attention to it. It is those who accept religion uncritically and pay lip service to it in church on Sundays who are in the most precarious position in terms of their faith and in terms of their relationship with those around them. One tragedy can destroy such an unexamined faith, but at the same time, it influences our tiniest actions, which are entirely unconscious.

Bruegemann is truly compelling in his examination of how the need for a prophet comes about.

...the real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right--either in the dean's office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.

He brings this home to the Israelites, and makes a point that counters my traditional view of them. I had always viewed them as unbearably prone to complaining. I think perhaps the biblical authors intended it this way, but Bruegemann sees a virtue in complaining:

...it is characteristic of Israel to complain rather than lament; that is, Israel does not voice resignation but instead expresses a militant sense of being wronged with the powerful expectation that it will be heard and answered. Thus the history of Israel begins on the day when its people no longer address the Egyptian gods who will not listen and cannot answer. ,,, The grieving of Israel--perhaps self-pity and surely complaint but never resignation--is the beginning of criticism.

I wonder how the complaints of Israel against Moses and Yahweh figure in to this vision...

Jon Stewart on Healthcare Reform

The whole healthcare reform thing is getting ridiculous on a number of levels. It was great to see Obama finally stand up to some of the parading and shameless tactics that have been passing for debate. I especially liked seeing him destroy Eric Cantor in this clip from John Stewart. If you're in a hurry, skip to around 6:00 in the video.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Bipartisan Health Care Reform Summit 2010
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Vancouverage 2010

And here's another moment from the summit when Obama chastises Cantor for his theatricality. I direct plays for a living, and so I recognize the difference between a prop and a reference material. Look at how the books are stacked on Cantor's table. They have nothing to do with reference or substance. They are merely a visual image to prevent the conversation from moving anywhere. I'm so sick of politicians who play to the lowest denominator without any real substance in their arguments. While I disagree with what McCain had to say, at least his arguments have substance to them and are legitimate concerns. Cantor, on the other hand, is just grandstanding. My favorite quote: "These are the kind of political things we do that prevent us from actually having a conversation."

Sidewalk Chalk Guy

These photos have been circulating in an email, so I thought I'd post them in one place. Amazing!

http://bit.ly/cWS1HU

Classrooms of the Future

I wrote this in response to an email from our Head of Upper School about plans for building the school's Academic Commons (our school's name for a new type of library) and classrooms of the future. The question really revolved around what technology should be included, and how to maximize innovation for teachers. What I wrote is opinionated and idealistic, and I certainly don't claim to talk for all teachers, but the issues raised are definitely worth thinking about.

***

My main feeling is that the whole thing needs to be mobile. What I love about our current Audio Nonfiction class is the flexibility of sending students out for an interview at any time, because they can carry a whole recording studio with them (they use an iPod Nano and a Belkin Tune Talk microphone). We can also listen to pieces at any time with the projection and speakers in the classroom, and the fact that everything can be stored is on a laptop. The software we use (Audacity) is free and can be downloaded on any computer. However, I wish our classrooms were more flexible. The desks in the science and math rooms help this somewhat, because they are more like tables, where things can be laid out, like you would to see the whole structure of a journalism project, and the desks can be combined to make a large table for a conference room feeling. They are conducive to work, because you can have a book, a notebook, a set of pens, and a computer on them all at once without it feeling crowded. The old desks in the English classrooms are really only good for sitting, and they're not even very good for that. The math/science desks are bulky, though, and take up a lot more space, so it's more difficult to clear out the room if you want to have space to move around. My mythology class does Budokon once a semester - a form of yoga and martial arts - and I believe this type of experiential learning will become more and more important in the future. The more flexible the spaces are, and the more adaptable the technology, the more effective the teaching can be. Projection screens are useful (I mainly use smart boards as projection screens now), and it would be interesting to explore if a single projector could project in more than one direction, with screens on each of the walls. I'm not positive how I would use this, but it would offer the type of flexibility that really lets teachers and students improvise.

That's the main word I think is necessary as we move into the future with technology and innovation - improvisation. In my opinion, the smart board is a great technology, but ultimately is more limiting than a white board and projection screen. For one thing, you can't take it with you between classrooms (most rooms in our school have them, but not all of them), and it also reduces the amount of white board space you have. I know that they make pocket projectors now that work just as well as a big projector, and maybe that's the way of the future. These can be plugged into iPhones or iPods or Netbooks. To my mind, the technology we use needs to get smaller and more personalized. For the nonfiction class, the whole recording studio fits easily in the palm of your hand. This allows a spontaneous improvisation - a student at a basketball game can suddenly interview the winning coach without having to set anything up. Teachers need to have the same freedom in their classrooms.

For the Living Epic class I'm going to do with our Academic Dean next semester, our goal is to turn the students into experts. In this case, we need maximum flexibility to create any type of space that the students may spontaneously need. Some students may want to work with blueprints, and so they need desks or tables to accommodate that. Some may want to teach the class martial arts, so it needs to be able to be completely cleared out. Some may want to build something in the room (like a huge lego tower), and some may want to create a film. It's amazing how easy green-screen technology is getting to be, so having a good video camera, a big green screen that can be pulled down on a moment's notice, and good editing software on a laptop will allow students to create the next Star Wars right in the classroom itself. But we don't need to plan for the technologies - we can presume they will be small, personalized and portable, and so what we really need to concentrate on is planning for the flexibility of the space.

I think the Academic Commons also needs a few bigger spaces as well. A space that can accommodate a true class meeting will free up the complete traffic jam that is our theater for real instruction in classes like Senior Seminar. But a room for a class meeting needs to be completely flexible as well, so that it can be transformed into a medium-sized performance space for instrumental and choral music, student-directed plays, senior project presentations, etc. Since they will be used for a variety of purposes, these spaces need to be sound-proofed and have flexible lighting - in other words, a great deal of natural light that can be blocked out completely. And these spaces need to be sacred for work with students. Our current so-called Student Activity Center is anything but. It's used for so many meetings with the Trustees and Parents' Committees that it is rarely available for classes to meet in, and almost never used by students in their spare time, as far as I can tell, which is why they spend their free time in the library, and why that space becomes a difficult place to get any studying done.

The Academic Commons also needs both quiet spaces and spaces that really encourage socializing and collaboration. The sound proofing needs to be good enough that students can hold recording sessions in small rooms - both for instrumental and choral work (to make audition tapes for colleges, for example) and for projects in classes like Audio Nonfiction and the Film course. And there need to be enough of these to accommodate multiple projects happening at the same time, with no real need to schedule the spaces in advance. What we want to capture is the ability for spontaneous improvisation. There need to be smaller spaces that are just large enough for a group of students to collaborate on a project, but which don't become too casual. Access to technology should be readily available (speakers, projectors, video cameras, laptops), but should be as hidden as possible, and again - the technology needs to be small. I think the iPod Touch is a perfect model for what the technology of the future will be, especially when the pocket projectors arrive on the mass market. Even better for me is the Android phone, which allows an overlap of applications, so that one application can piggy-back on another one. The GPS technology is especially exciting, because a teacher can plug curriculum into a set of coordinates and send the students off on a quest. The folks at MIT are already working on this.

So in my opinion, we would make a mistake if we made technology the centerpiece of the Academic Commons - especially technology that is big or expensive, or which figures into the design of the buildings or rooms in any way. It's all changing way too fast to predict what it will be, except the one trend that seems definite: technology is becoming much smaller and more personalized, and soon, everything you need will be able to be carried in your pocket, and inexpensive enough to be owned by everyone. Instead, the Academic Commons needs to be designed for maximum collaboration. It needs places where students can gather to socialize, places where they can work together on a project, places where teachers can meet with students, and places where classes can really roll up their sleeves and get to work. And there need to be enough of them that one is available in a moment of spontaneous inspiration. Horizontal space (like the math desks) is essential, but it must be easily removable so that the space can be completely clear for exercises or work on the floor. Now that Barnes & Noble is releasing its version of the Kindle with more flexibility and capacity, it's only a matter of time until textbooks will be electronic, which will not only save many adolescent backs, but will let us pick and choose the physical books that really matter. I could easily see all of my classes buying an eBook reader freshman year, and then downloading all their English books for half the price they would normally buy them for. Most classics will be free, thanks to Google, and that's a large part of what we teach. The only thing that's holding me back now is the inability to scribble in the margins, but that is only a matter of months. I strongly believe there will always be a place for a real library, but the reference section will become obsolete. To me, the library will become a center of collaboration rather than a place for reference, and we need to design the space to accommodate that. Rather than making it a place for silent contemplation (we need a different space for that, like graduate carrels), the sound in the library should be geared toward group collaboration, so that sound does not carry generally throughout the room as it does now, but also doesn't make students uneasy about their excitement.

The idea that innovation can happen in a single mind is an old fairy tale. True creativity comes from the excitement of shared ideas. A classroom of the future will require the ability to focus on a variety of different projects, the flexibility to follow the whims of spontaneous inspiration, and the feeling of freedom that is essential to a playground of the mind.

Wind Talkers

I direct plays at the school where I work, and the students are always asking for clues as to what the next play will be. I put up some clues on this webpage, and thought some of you might like to try your hand at them. Two of my students cracked the clues last night. Let me know if you want any help?