Viagra promises…
I am working on a doctorate in philosophy of education and one aspect of my research is to expand the language of knowing and perception in public schooling…
I have had children bring my attention to the very things that we ignore and work hard to silence out of fear of the diversity and complexity that is outside our control…
We have highly attuned language specifically designed to dismiss and suppress different ways of seeing and coming to know…
Little girl, you have such an active imagination…
Oh, aren’t you so cute…
There’s no such thing as dying and coming back again, you must have learned that from video games…
Fairies are pretty but you can’t really see them, aren’t you talking about a cartoon…
He only talks when he wants something…
He couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it…
A little boy couldn’t know all those things…
If you talk louder and more slowly he might get it…
He must be on the autism-spectrum…
Let’s give him a visual-schedule to get him ready for the real world…
He won’t look me in the eye…
Something’s not connecting…
I’ve discovered that what children are telling me they see and know,
these extra-perceptions and experiences that include moments where,
Time slows down for me and I can see things before they happen
have profile in professional sports…
It seems that you can’t really be a Great One unless you grow these capacities…
And it appears that the coaching world,
the fraction that I know about it,
is hungry for investigation into how to develop and support supra-abilities…
We all have the potential for them,
some of us just haven’t been as disconnected from our human wiring…
The wiring we’ll need to survive in surprising times…
Consciousness is always evolving,
it isn’t static…
And inquiry into human wiring and re-wiring is necessary in the public school arena or we are going to continue to lose more and more players…
When these phenomena are revealed in school,
when you see them in your students and your students are telling you all about them,
people look at you with gripping fear,
eyes all crossed and spinning,
and say,
Don’t talk about those things…
Just stick to the basics…
I love the ABC’s,
the spell of language is one of my best games,
but those things are often what separates the milk from the cream,
or the wheat from the chaff…
Or the Gretzkys,
the Luongos,
and the Sedins from all the others…
There is strength,
there is speed,
there is grit,
there are skills,
and then there are those things that are typically beyond what we have words for,
and are open to in conventional environments…
How are those things or meta-skills, or capacities, or abilities, or sensitivities, or potentialities, or exceptionalities recognized and cultivated in sports???
And what can we learn from the sporting world to enhance school experience,
not for the sake of performance and million dollar contracts,
but for the sake of growing a happy,
healthy,
fully potentialized complex human being…
Exactly the kind of person the world needs…
The language of sport commentating shows no hesitation in playing around with other states of awareness and perception…
Other ways of coming to know…
Luongo’s going to have to take things to another level for the Canucks to achieve success in the next round…
Bernier did the right thing…
He let the puck lead him to a goal…
Peter Vint, a researcher for the US Olympic Committee makes a habit of deconstructing psychic plays…”[http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-06/ff_mindgames]
Why is there no fear or demands of legitimization by theory in these departments?
As we blindly allow mainstream media and corporate sponsorship to manhandle our cultural ethics and morals on a daily basis,
selling out for Viagra promises and Pro-Caulk multi-purpose tools that deliver in 4-6 weeks when you order by phone,
isn’t it only ethical to make the space for all that we are and all that we can be in our public schools so that we have the sanity to follow our hearts toward something that is free and alive,
and fully empowered by those things that are real???
I’ve never had a twin fantasy but there is something about the Sedins that keeps me up at night wondering about freaky knowledge…
Throw the third twin, Burrows, into the mix and I’m meeting up with them in my REM sleep,
and the conversations we’re having are out of this world…
Just like Gretzky…
I’ll face off in defiance…
The minute someone blows the whistle with a warning that says,
Stop…
Don’t…
You can’t…
Or you better not…
guess where my attention goes…
Gently,
and firmly,
with no letting up…
I’m willing to drive it through traffic,
with the strength of a power forward,
right into the yawning cage,
where no one is looking,
or feeling,
or knowing,
wrapping around the net and into the dirty areas like a big Swede…
Only I slap my shots in a field where the puck is just a thought…
It is no coincidence that the Sedins look like giant gnomes,
and that they can always tell where the other one is…
The physics of magic is everywhere even if you’re not a twin…
And now that professional athletes and the guys who go on about them,
are bringing martial artistry,
into the mainstream,
a slippery slope,
is at the edge,
of the horizon,
with a storm coming,
this way,
in the form of,
a quiet riot…
But if you’re too busy to listen,
you won’t hear it…
No we're not going to take it... (photo: Starshine)
Hello hockey!!!
I don’t know exactly how it all started,
it may have been about a boy (one that I worked with five years ago when he was in grade one and I was his teacher)…
But last Fall,
approximately last October,
a seed that had been planted sometime ago got some water,
some light,
and burst through the soil…
I was substituting as the handwork teacher for a local Waldorf school,
and while I was knitting under flourescent lights during half-time (recess),
a girl put a stack of books down beside me…
All the books were about hockey…
I asked her if she liked hockey…
She said,
These are my brother’s.
My mom asked me to return them to the library for him…
[I later learned that the brother had “left” the Waldorf school… I wondered about this as I noticed that all the t-shirts the kids wore said, “Waldorf Education… a philosophy of freedom”… what would a kid need to do to be kicked out of a philosophy of freedom… or why would a boy choose to leave… we all know that conceptions of freedom are relatively subjective…]
I didn’t give the stack of books another thought,
but remembered the planting of a seed…
When I was 15 I went on a summer language and culture exchange to Quebec City…
This would have been 1982…
I recall being in the foyer of some building,
waiting for an elevator,
and when the door opened Wayne Gretzky stepped out…
We had our photo taken together with my little Kodak Instamatic,
and then parted ways…
I didn’t see that as a sign of anything at the time,
and I never saw the photo because my camera somehow opened up,
and the film was over-exposed…
In 2003 I’d returned to my post as a grade one teacher after my second maternity leave and I was given a class with seventeen boys and seven girls,
adding up to a perfect number of twenty-four six year olds…
In this class of twenty-four was a boy who loved,
and still loves hockey…
Everyday my students write in their journals…
They have free rein to write about anything,
and this little guy always wrote about hockey…
He’d often come and sit beside me,
while his classmates had moved onto building with blocks,
in their daily Choice Time…
He’d tell me about the Hockey Night in Canada games he watched,
his favorite players,
and his special trips to the Garage for live action…
He told me,
Teacher, one day I’m going to play in the NHL…
and I believe him…
Because he loved hockey so much,
and this was one of our points of connection,
I started to learn about the game so that I could expand my participation in the conversation…
But then there was the lock out,
the Bertuzzi controversy etc….
My hockey boy eventually moved over to the intermediate part of the school,
and my interest went on hiatus,
until the stack of books…
I was sitting there,
knitting away,
when something compelled me to drop my handwork and pick up the book on the top of the stack…
I opened the book up somewhere in the centre to page about Wayne Gretzky…
The first words I read were something like,
Wayne had this ability to see things before they happened…
He always knew where the puck was going to go and made sure he was there…
He knew when his team was going to win even when they were losing well into the third period,
and it looked like there was no hope…
He’d tell his team, Don’t worry we’re going to win this one…
and they would…
His father coached him as a boy,
saying things like…
Don’t go where the puck is…
Go where it’s going to be…
A lightning bolt struck me in that rocking chair,
and I heard a voice in my head say,
Pay attention…
This is going to go somewhere…
Those one track minds that took you for a working boy...
Canuck'd 