Teachers Act Up!

New Interview Published in The Napkin Poetry Review:

“According to Dr. Melisa (Misha) Cahnmann-Taylor, poetry “can wiggle its way into so many lives and minds because of its unmarked visibility. Poems are small tastes of revolution that can pass.”  Here, she talks about how poetry can be used as a research tool, particularly in ethnography, and the creative value of bridging arts and sciences—where can quantitative research miss out or benefit from poetry? How can this cross-disciplinary mindset be incorporated into classrooms?” Link below.

https://www.napkinpoetryreview.org/poetry-is-a-form-of-research-interview-with-dr-melisa-misha-cahnmann-taylor

I feel so honored by these translations of my poems in Altazor. So many thanks to Mario Meléndez Muñoz, Khedija Gadhoum, and Helena Alonso.

***Warning***Changing Languages***You Must like Languages and the Speakers of Any Language to Continue onto this beautiful Spanish translation of my bio that I tried to do but was much improved by Helena Alonso and Khédija Gadhoum (mil gracias). Bio and then some thoughts on being translated (oh díos mio, what a feeling).

BIO.

Melisa “Misha” Cahnmann-Taylor, es profesora de educación, lengua y alfabetización en la Universidad de Georgia. Es autora del poemario Imperfect Tense, (White Point Press, 2016 https://www.amazon.com/Imperfect-Tense-Melisa-Cahnmann-Taylor-ebook/dp/B01HPA9RBA), y varios libros de investigación en el campo de educación, entre ellos: Teachers Act Up: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre (Teachers College Press, 2010); Arts-Based Research in Education(Routledge, 2008; 2018), y Enlivening Language Education through Drama & Improv (con publicación en curso en Routledge).  Es recipiente de cuatro becas de National Endowment for the Arts (NEA “Big Read”), El Premio Beckman para “Los profesores que inspiran cambios sociales”.  En poesía, ganó los Premios Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg y Anna Davidson, y una beca Fulbright de nueve meses, para investigar el tema del aprendizaje del español entre los adultos, en el estado de Oaxaca, México.  Es oradora en materia de pedagogía y desarrollo de lenguajes artísticos y consultora en lingüística,. Desde el 2005, se ha desempeñado como editora de la revista Anthropology & Humanism, y ha servido como jueza del concurso anual de poesía etnográfica. Actualmente es embajadora Fulbright de los EE.UU. Es graduada del programa MFA Low-Residency del New England College, y del programa de doctorado en educación lingüística de la Universidad de Pensilvania.  Sus poemas, ensayos y artículos sobre el aprendizaje de idiomas se encuentran en su blog: http://teachersactup.com

The above is the bio that two Spanish speakers helped me to write because even though I can (I think I can) communicate myself in Spanish, there’s a literary eloquence that I never acquired that these two women have. This after Khédija sent me the final translation of 6 of my poems. I read them outloud and I felt like a college student reading a Spanish literary text. It was so beautiful and the Spanish words were often so out of my reach, that I had to go to my own translation to confirm what I had originally written in English. This is not to say that I didn’t understand the Spanish–that’s not entirely true. What I couldn’t understand was how good a really good translator really is. Their combined efforts made me feel like I was reading a different person’s poem, but it was my poem–my ideas transformed by their artfulness in their first language. It’s a strange feeling of exhuberance as a bilingual–to feel seen and deeply understood from English to Spanish. I approximate this when speaking in my second tongue but I still feel so limited in my eloquence, my reach for words, and my intensions truly communicated fluently and personally.

I am so grateful to experience this feeling, one I don’t expect to be lucky enough to have often. Maybe like childbirth and owning my first rescue pup, this experience of having one’s poems translated into another language feels special, unforgettable. I don’t take this experience lightly. I feel the burden of how often I might wish for this level of bilingual expression and how so few of us ever achieve this feeling of self in a second or additional language.

Isn’t this the wish we have for all bilingual youth, to become themselves their own best translators? To interpret this experience to the rest of us so stuck in the habits of a single mother tongue that even years of study and practice later, we feel misunderstood.

Or maybe we are always misunderstood. Maybe the best we can do is to try to find the language to articulate through the limitations of any language. There comes a thrill when writing through a poem toward some newer understanding of what it means to be human, to feel as though you are both predator and prey caught in a web that will inevitable get knocked down.

You don’t know if anyone really gets you.

But maybe, in two languages, you have twice the opportunity to try to be understood.

Nouning, March 2020

V. The process of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns, also called nominalization.

What an awesome

spread!

Said at weddings,

even funerals,

of butter,

gossip,

wings,

two facing

newspaper pages.

What spreads.

We said this

for uncountable

nouns: acres,

days, contagious

smiles, laundered

tablecloths,

for gaps

between sellers’

asks and buyers’

bids. When panic

emptied grocery

shelves, cancelled

parades, rain checked

games, invitations,

we were spread

thinner, worked

from home,

returned, gloved

and masked to old

fashioned

verbing so as

not to spread

too much

of ourselves

around.

Last night a graduate of Clarke Middle School, Nikema Stovall, stood up to ask us to stop speaking around issues of concern and to start speaking up for positive change.  He was with friends, a mom and grandmom, whose young son is repeatedly bullied.  He is afraid to ride the bus.  His struggles are real, recurring, and worrisome.  Ultimately, his mom said to do what he had to do and fight back.  This should not be any child’s school experience.  Because we were at the parents meeting yesterday we were able to meet and I was able to learn more about life from her perspective in the African American community.  She expressed a concern shared by many: we are not serious enough about discipline.  We are not impacting families’ enough to help them change and support children who are respectful in schools.

But the principal did not sugar coat the manure.  He bravely showed us the statistics of just how many “events” teachers have reported from August to February–over 800 incidents in more than a dozen different categories of misbehavior.  He shared with us how these events and students are disaggregated by race.  82% of all events reported concern the African American students* at the school; 92% if you count those identified as multiracial.  Let’s not sugar coat the manure, Nikema’s truthful words.

I feel lucky I was close enough to this family to hear their concerns, to know they are working with a district professional, Kecia, who is helping them plan talks with Black parents in our community.  “Do you want to come?” Yes, I said and gave them my number.  I would like to be the minority in the room, a room filled with Black parents who love their children and want to look at what’s happening.

Instead, we were sitting in a room mostly filled with white parents and over a dozen incredible teachers there to support their well respected principal.  The trigger was that our beloved band teacher quit suddenly, claiming this was about persistent underfunding of the music and arts programs as well as about the verbal and physical abuse he experienced from students on a regular basis in an overcrowded classroom.  This was just after an extraordinary band concert that left everyone in the audience amazed at what one man can do with that many students over the span of 6th to 8th grade, from “hot cross buns” to complicated ensemble pieces.   Many of us were there to grieve the sudden loss of a successful teacher.  Many of us were angry or fearful that what he said was true.  Could it be that we were willingly sending our kids to an underfunded, under resourced and dangerous place?

An entire team of teachers were there shaking their heads, no.  They were disappointed in their former colleague–they value the band teacher as a human, a friend.  But his message undermines their strengths, the entire school.  His public email of sudden resignation added fuel to the fire of distrust in public schools.  We wanted someone to be wrong, we wanted something to be fixed.  Why did the band teacher leave us like that? Real problems unmet? Maybe.  The principal, who is new to his position, said he had already discussed changes to add another teacher next year and reduce numbers.  No support for egregious discipline problems? Not true–the statistics show 100s of cases of disciplinary actions when teachers call for help.  Disincentives from the school and district to report discipline? Too few disciplinary options that don’t just prevent kids from learning (suspensions, expulsions)? There are layers of issues, some that can be addressed in the short or longer term and some are layered in a society still trying to figure out how to live fairly together in a system where cycles of privilege and poverty continue and the split widens.  Public schools may be the only places where we can still see and feel the split.

We puzzled over the statistics provided.  Why are so many of our African American pre-teens and new teens (how many students constitute the 82%* of cases?) experiencing disciplinary action at school? What are some answers?  Because of this meeting I got to meet and talk with a small number of African American members of my community.

Racism and teacher bias? A community overwhelmed by intergenerational poverty and the violence that can often accompany situations of desperation and need? Adolescence and changing bodies and problems no matter what race you are (Don’t I know it)? Single parent households? Subpar housing conditions? Limited work opportunities? One can quickly get overwhelmed by what’s underneath the sugar.

But even after we complained and grieved, I feel better after the meeting. I made new friends.  I have a new level of complicated understanding.  I was impressed by the many incredible teachers at the building well into the night to support their principal and listen to parents’ concerns.  I spent time with people with whom I might never otherwise engage.

I believe the healthy future depends on having many more conversations across different perspectives.  What is the principal experiencing? The teachers? Our kids–all kinds of kids? The parents, a diverse group of humans with different levels of affluence and worry.  I feel it is a civic responsibility to support public schools even if that means asking the hard questions and staying late to figure out what is in our control to change and what is beyond our control.  To name it and make peace with it, some of us with prayer.

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

We are rich in diversity in my community but only if we live with it–sugar and manure, all of it.  This struggle laid bare will make us stronger.

*It is unclear to me how many students make up the different reported events–if 82% of the cases of disciplinary action represent a handful of students who repeatedly misbehave or many more than a handful.  This is a question for the administration.  Another questions is why all other students experience such low disciplinary action. A mother of an LGTBQIA student said her child is repeatedly the victim of bullying by white boys which goes unaddressed. The problems are complicated but can and are being addressed through a courageous new approach called “restorative justice.” One can see a trend that the disciplinary cases are going down each month as the school year progresses and the principal would ask of us: patience.  To see if the proactive practices they have just started will start to yield more positive effects.

I’ve learned that rejection is a part of the writer’s business.  If you are pleasing (accepted) some of the time, this is a sign that you’re on the path to finding an audience for your work. I keep learning not to take a reject personally.  But what to do when the acceptances roll in? Celebrate? Sigh of relief? Move on and wish for the bigger catch: the full manuscript publication? Today, I take stock and celebrate the poems published or in waiting to be published 2019-2020.

I hope they can cohere into my second poetry book and find a publisher, next step for the manuscript.  The book title keeps changing and is currently Gargling Stones.  Here are some poems that will be in this new book in the making:

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (In Press, Spring/Summer 2020). Am I really that Jewish? Poet Lore.https://www.poetlore.com/

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (In Press, February 21, 2020). We’re Always in a Watershed. Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. http://www.borderlands.org/

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (In Press, February 21, 2020). Artist’s Sacrifice. Swimm Every Day. https://www.swwim.org/

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (In Press, January, 2020). Undocumented Pantoum. Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. https://www.facebook.com/journallcf/

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (In Press, January, 2020). Simón Ghazal. Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. https://www.facebook.com/journallcf/

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (In Press, January, 2020). Museum Says 75% of All American Comedians Were Jews in 1975. Anthropocene. https://www.anthropocenepoetry.org/

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) Congratulations Ghazal. James James Dickey Review.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019, published Jan 2020) Poetry Reading, Writer’s House Philadelphia. James Dickey Review.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019, published Jan 2020) “Pora Brought Sewing Needles to the Women’s March. James Dickey Review.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019, published Jan 2020) Activism Dolor. James Dickey Review. Distinguished lines online: https://www.facebook.com/james.review/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARBavs0dSKa9ztX4WdGo1YTVY01jSeWj5qOdhRrWSHcOGVrOgK6YnYvO_dEjFpBdrIfAM-C3BdTM-RUO

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019). US and Israeli Jews are bound.  Poetica Magazine. (Award Winner) https://www.poeticamagazine.com/2018-adrpaward-winners

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (trad. por América Invertida).  Anika says “We are eternal”/Anika dice, “Somos eternos” (76-77).  https://auladepoesia.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/amc3a9rica-invertida-4-def.pdf

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (trad. por América Invertida).  First Grade/Primer Grado (80-81).  https://auladepoesia.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/amc3a9rica-invertida-4-def.pdf

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (trad. por América Invertida).  Teaching Poetry in Georgia Schools/Enseñar poesía en las escuelas de Georgia (78-79).  https://auladepoesia.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/amc3a9rica-invertida-4-def.pdf

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) Sanctuary. Temple Times.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) ” Nothing’s more unfair than to judge the men of the past by the ideas of the present.” http://ninemile.org/ 6(2), 152.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) ” Pora’s Drought Song.” http://ninemile.org/ 6(2), 155.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) ” Would Pora have told?.” http://ninemile.org/ 6(2), 156.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) “Treatment.”  http://ninemile.org/ 6(2),157.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (May 2019) “Postpartum Depression.” www.sleetmagazine.com 11(1).

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) “How Do You Wrap a Poem.” www.sleetmagazine.com 11(1).

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019) “Tel Aviv University Economist Explains the Endowment Effect.” www.sleetmagazine.com 11(1).

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019). Jetlag Ghazal, Middle East to Southeast Georgia. So & So Magazine (issue 9).   < https://www.soandsopoetry.org/magazine>

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019). U.S. Embassy Officially Recognizes Jerusalem as its Capital. So & So Magazine (issue 9).  < https://www.soandsopoetry.org/magazine>

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2019). US and Israeli Jews are Bound. So & So Magazine (issue 9).  < https://www.soandsopoetry.org/magazine>

Cookie sheet

I find this season a burden.  I don’t like being a salesperson and this is why I chose to be something else.  A parent must accompany a girl scout because selling door to door is CRAZY right now when everyone orders on amazon and who knows who will open a door these days! But these are the plus sides so far of selling cookies:

1. Time with my amazing daughter and watching her present herself to clients with her clipboard.  It’s a glimpse of her power.
2. Time with my neighbors.  I never get casual time to just see who is behind blue house or green.  We get a peek inside their mask-ed walls, incomplete puzzles on the table, nuzzles with cats, some chickens.  Lots of smiles and goodwill and some great eclectic design.
3. Time to walk.  I forget how nice it is to take steps in the cool evening at a casual pace, up and down walkways.
4. Girl scout cookies bring up lots of positive memories so time to watch others’ smile, especially young women.  Their sighs of joy are so sweet.
5. Knuckle power.  Many of our neighbors do not have door bells so my daughter is getting her knuckles worked out and I think of this as good preparation should she need them in the future.
6. Time to get over the fear factor.  It was after dark when we walked yesterday.  It was strange and weird.  There are different people walking after dark at 7:30pm then the school children in the dark at 7:30am.  So it’s time to see a different side of public life.
7. Time to talk about what people need and want to know.  We didn’t have change and then we did.  Most boxes are $4 except for two that are $6.  One is gluten free; one is vegan; none are sugar free or fat free; none of them are free.  Yes we take checks, cash, donations. The Girl Scout troop number is 12051. We don’t know when we will be back to deliver them (shoot).  We can leave them on your porch if you’re not home.  Yes, there’s a new cookie, Lemon ups.  Yes, the troops is saving for activities, eventually a hoped-for trip abroad.  And yes, she can take care of your cats and dogs.  It’s a lot of information and my daughter got fluent in all of it, had great answers, and it was nice to watch a ten year old coming into herself.
   

   Cookie sheet

   

   Cookie Seller

Other than that, I find girl scout cookie sales a time that I wish would pass more quickly but for now, day one, it was alright.

Cookie Seller

First, I love the word oxymoron.  I love writing the word moron in a word that means to write something contradictory and the that moron and academic are oxymoronic.  The view of an academic sitting alone, absorbed in books may seem like an oxymoron to an active social media life but what better distraction from writing papers or grading them on a laptop then to drift over to a new tab and check with what our interesting friends are doing on facebook and instragram, posting pictures of Christmas trees made of broccoli, Frozen themed birthday parties or big sighs after viewing Hamilton or Little Women.  I am distracted all. the. time.  I am trying to stay current with the world through the changing platforms beyond facebook: instagram, twitter, snapchat, wechat, whatsapp, whatthef**k.

Backdrop: Judy Chicago painting in the permanent collection at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

And now, I am learning there are more social networking sites on which I am behind.  I thought not clicking endless emails from academia.edu was cool, I was ignoring the fad–reminiscent of when I was a hold out for the answering machine, then the cell phone, then the iphone, then the tweet.  Now I want it all. I don’t want to miss the president’s rants or wars; I want to know when the mayor shoots the canon in my hometown and that it’s not a bomb.  Yes, I want to know what you think is the best date night dinner.  Now, I find that I can also know what you published, where, how many citations you have, what theory you’re reading, and what the most current thinking is on teaching and learning languages.  To play this new party trick I feel I must spend time updating my profiles on these many sites.  And so I have.  I am playing. Are you playing too? I turn to you, oh tech savvy social media friends, to learn how you navigate all of this cybersphere and still have time to cook dinner.

I forgot to add that I am really current now on my wordpress blogging…..

Here’s part of what an academic does at the end of the day when she’s too tired to plan her class further, write her next book, read her students’ papers and books, review that tenure file or article.

ORCID:

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5667-8695

ResearchGate.com:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Melisa_Cahnmann