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Failure Growing Beautiful
Failure Growing Beautiful
We begin to think about return from the underworld. In myths of journeys to the underworld, the protagonists must always figure out how to return alive. So, what’s the trick to allow you return safely and bring whatever treasure or knowledge back with you to use in life on the surface, in the sunlight?
Today, we spend time with a part of the college that depends on constantly engaging attempt and failure and revision and new heights: our college writing classes.
Our guest is Michael Kennedy, new hire in the English Department, and an instructor who is deeply invested in teaching students where they are. Michael talks about writing as a chance for learners to fall in love with their own mind because through writing (and writing again and again) we come to better understand our own ideas and thoughts about complex subjects. If students are willing to explore the darkness of uncertainty through writing without fear that they’ll be judged or given a failing grade for trying, what might become possible?
We also explore another guide for our season in the underworld: scholar bell hooks. Her ideas about ethical relationship to one another could be another way to face failure in the classroom and turn it into resilience.
Listen to Episode 12
Listen to Episode 12
Stream the episode here or listen through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Our Guides: bell hooks and the Practice of Love
Our Guides: bell hooks and the Practice of Love
As we think about resilience and return from the underworld, Michael's lapel pin leads us to talk about the scholar bell hooks. hooks spent much of her career considering the place of love in our society and puzzling over why we hold such narrow definitions of it.
We ask Michael, what is love in the classroom? In her seminal work, All About Love, hooks explores the many facets of love not just as an emotion but also as a practice. hooks believed that practicing this "love ethic" in every aspect of life is transformative. Her description of love sounds like an ideal classroom: the consistent and visible values of honesty, openness and personal integrity. And the understanding that our lives are entwined when we meet and learn together.
A class is a tiny ecosystem inside of and interwoven with the larger ecosystem of the college, within the larger system of the community and the state. And on and on. To go into teaching with the appreciation that we are responsible to the people we teach is powerful: to appreciate that our choices every day as we teach can echo in everyday lives. And to decide to deliberately behave in loving, ethical ways to those we teach and those we work with is also powerful. It’s not enough to feel we hold these values: hooks (and Dr. King) insists we must also act as though we hold them. Each day, moment to moment.
The excerpts you hear on this episode are from hooks' 2001 book, All About Love: New Visions.
Two Poems on Failure and Possibility
Michael reads a poem by Bill Holm, from which the episode draws its name. He also quotes a poem by Rilke, which famously calls the reader to change their life. Here is the complete text of both poems.
August in Watertown, Alberta
August in Watertown, Alberta
Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon.
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful.
-Bill Holm
Archaic Torso of Apollo
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
-Ranier Maria Rilke
Bird By Bird
Bird By Bird
Can we call it a season of Instructional Ecology without bringing up Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott? I hope not. Once again, the CTE and others recommend this hilarious and profound book about writing and life. You don't have to do a lot of writing to appreciate all of Lamott's humor and wisdom about how we make meaning out of our lives and decide how we want to talk about it. As Michael reminds us, we try and try again to tell our stories to each other and each attempt is important.
And there's always another chance to try again.
Dead Poets Society
Dead Poets Society
Michael also brings up another standby in the world of English teaching: the 1989 movie, Dead Poets Society. In this luminous, hilarious, and tragic movie, Robin Williams' portrayal of a loving and ethical English teacher still inspires. Enjoy the original or watch this video that explores why Williams' portrayal is so powerful because the teaching depicted is so authentic and active.
Michael Kennedy's Scholarship
Michael Kennedy's Scholarship
Teaching at MTC is his current central focus, yet Michael's academic work often intersects with and considers some of the topics we discuss in this episode. To explore his published papers and other thought work, find him on Academia.
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