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A Legacy of Le+ers: Using Primary Sources for Classical Mentorship Jamie MacDougall
A Legacy of Le+ers: Using Primary Sources for Classical Mentorship
Jamie MacDougall
Defining the Goals for Gi?ed
“Eminence…contribu5ng in a transcendent way to making societal life be<er and more
beau5ful, is the aspired outcome of gi@ed educa5on.”
-‐ Subotnik, Olszweski-‐Kubilius, & Worrell, 2011
Domain Trajectory
Teaching for Falling in Love
Teaching for Technique
Mentoring for Personalized
Niche
Subotnik, Olszweski-‐Kubilius, & Worrell, 2011
Providing an Environment that is Educa5onally Challenging & Accommodates Affec5ve
Development
-‐ Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development -‐ Asynchronous Development
Gi@ed Kids Need
Gi@ed Teachers
Dewey’s Loves
• A natural love of contact with the young • A love of knowledge • A natural love of communica5ng knowledge • A love of arousing in others the same intellectual interests & enthusiasms
• An usual love of some one subject • A love of learning
Rachel Carson
• Passion • Crea5vity • Persistence
Mentorship’s Relevance to Gi?ed
EducaEon “All I am certain of is this: that it is quite
necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the some5mes crushing burden of crea5ve effort.” -‐ Rachel Carson
Greater Strength than Teacher-‐Student Bond
• The mentor and protégé share passions and interests
• O@en there is a close match between the mentor's teaching style and the protégé's learning style
• A lifelong bond of trust develops as the rela5onship evolves over 5me
• The mentor becomes a trusted counselor or guide for the protégé
Zorman (1992)
Embracing the ClandesEne
ConversaEons Behind the Classics
Ambrose’s Advice for Mentorships
• Staying away from didac5cism, ruling, and governing is important.
• Let them wonder and come to terms with what they need to know.
• Be completely open to their needs and interests.
• Guide them. • Offer direc5on, but let the power of their own voli5on more them.
Ambrose’s Advice for Mentorships • Offer resources, advice, input. • Bring them the perspec5ve you've gained from experience. • And do not forget that you can learn as well; that a teacher
need not always be a teacher. • Be flexible, be open, be respeciul of whatever their style of
learning is. • Expand their perspec5ves by constantly discussing,
discussing, discussing. • Get to know them, hang out, be formal and informal. Open
up. • Treat them as human beings, not as students.
Virginia Woolf to Richard Aldington, 1925
Please don’t think it necessary to apologise for differing from me and saying so outright. I feel that we are
groping in the dark, and the only chance of seeing light is to say whatever one has
in ones head-‐as I do herewith!
The Power of Primary Sources
• Primary sources give first-‐hand accounts of the thinking of and reac5ons to eminent persons as they progress through 5me.
• Students interac5ng with the documents are required to employ high level cri5cal and crea5ve thinking skills to interpret, analyze, and evaluate the implica5ons of these documents.
• They also provide a model for gi@ed students to see how these persons followed their passions, made mistakes & decisions, and responded to the world around them.
• The Library of Congress has now digitalized over 15 million primary sources that can be accessed via the Internet. They con5nue to catalogue daily.
h<p://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets
“You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,
but then you read. It was books that taught me
that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me
with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
-‐ James Baldwin
James Baldwin
• Strong sense of social jus5ce
• Over-‐excitabili5es • Consistent voice
Virginia Woolf
• Wi<y • Sibling rival • O@en out of place • Ques5ons societal
norms
Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-‐West, 1926
Am reading The Constant Nymph with the painful head of a heavy woman in a bog. Have I lost all sense of fic5on? Why does this flimsy trash, with one idea to a hundred pages, convince anybody? Why do we pay Miss Kennedy L, 2000 p.a. (I think of nothing but money) for wri5ng it? Gides memoirs which I read voraciously renew the sense that I can read with pleasure.
Otherwise I am only an eye – yes, I observe the seas incessantly very rough, blue and white, today with tramp steamers pitching, and splashing; and at night they burn the gorse on the moor, and it is exactly like the death of Siegfried: a crimson gauze rising over crags.
Structuring Classical Mentorships in
Your Classroom • Selec5ng Sources
• Engaging Your Current Curriculum • Documen5ng the Mentorship • Applying Skills and Knowledge Obtained
Selec5ng Sources
Employing Cri5cal Thinking Skills • Is it really a primary source? • Rilke transla5on • Who else should be examined from this period?
• Paul’s Wheel of Reasoning
PURPOSE QUESTION AT ISSUE
INFERENCES EVIDENCE/ DATA
ASSUMPTIONS IMPLICATIONS/ CONSEQUENCES
P.O.V. CONCEPTS
*Based on Joyce Van Tasselbaska’s modifica5on of Paul’s Reasoning Model
Engaging Your Current Curriculum
Documen5ng the Mentorship
Langston Hughes
• Sought a@er • Rebellious peace keeper
langston hughes to carl van vechten, may 10, 1925 1749 S Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. May 10, 1925 Dear Friend, I am mailing my book to you in the morning. It has been rearranged and thirty poems have been taken out. It can stand even more cuwng but I can't decide myself which others to take out; however, if you'd like to remove some more for the be<erment of the book, go to it. I hope you'll like the new arrangement. Tell me about it when you write.
Did you get the Frankie song? And have you been to Harlem this week? I met Rudolph Fisher? again at a li<le party over here and he shows no traces of conceit. He is a most interes5ng young fellow, talks and sings well, and can entertain a whole room full of company. Clarissa Sco<1 was there, too,-‐that charming young lady I told you about. And she asked all sorts of ques5ons about you.
Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes,
May 13, 1925 Your le<ers are so very charming, dear Langston, that I
look forward every morning to finding one under the door. I have been lucky during the past week! The poems came this morning and I looked them over again. Your work has such a subtle sensi5veness that it improves with every reading. The poems are very beau5ful, and I think the book gains greatly by the new arrangement and the 5tle. Knopf? is lunching with me today and I shall ask him to publish them and if he doesn't some one else will. Would you permit me to do an introduc5on? I want to.
Frankie came, and thank you. I know the song, but with different words. There are, I suppose, two thousand versions. This is a good one. It's too bad that you didn't take down every syllable that fell from the lips of that holy cook.
I'm glad you liked The Blind Bow-‐Boy. I think you'd be<er read Peter Whiffle next,1 if you really want to read any more; I'll send it to you.
Applying Skills and Knowledge
Obtained
Charles Darwin
Darwin’s le<er to Hooker It is a melancholy, & I hope not quite true view of your’s that facts will prove anything, & are therefore superfluous! But I have rather exaggerated,, I see, your doctrine. I do not fear being 5ed down to error, i.e. I feel pre<y sure I should give up anything false published in the preliminary essay, in my larger work; but I may thus, it is very true, do mischief by spreading error, which as I have o@en heard you say is much easier spread than corrected. I confess I lean more & more to at least making the a<empt & drawing up a sketch & trying to keep my judgment whether to publish open. But I always return to my fixed idea that it is dreadfully unphilosophical to publish without full details. I certainly think my future work in full would profit by hearing what my friends or cri5cs (if reviewed) thought of the outline.—
Melville & Hawthorne
LETTER TO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
JUNE 29 1851 My dear Hawthorne -‐-‐ The clear air and open window invite me to write to
you. For some 5me past I have been so busy with a thousand things that I have almost forgo<en when I wrote you last, and whether I received an answer. This most persuasive season has now for weeks recalled me from certain crotche<y and over doleful chimearas, the like of which men like you and me and some others, forming a chain of God's posts round the world, must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them the best way we can. But come they will, -‐-‐ for, in the boundless, trackless, but s5ll glorious wild wilderness through which these outposts run, the Indians do sorely abound, as well as the insignificant but s5ll s5nging mosquitoes. Since you have been here, I have been building some shan5es of houses (connected with the old one) and likewise some shan5es of chapters and essays. I have been plowing and sowing and raising and pain5ng and prin5ng and praying, -‐-‐ and now begin to come out upon a less bustling 5me, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farm house here.
Not en5rely yet, though, am I without something to be urgent with. The "Whale" is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delay of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-‐kiln of New York, I came back to the country to feel the grass -‐-‐ and end the book reclining on it, if I may. -‐-‐ I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself, for if I say so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world are thinking about themselves ten 5mes as much. Let us speak, although we show all our faults and weaknesses, -‐-‐ for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it, -‐-‐ not in [a] set way and ostenta5ously, though, but incidentally and without premedita5on.
-‐-‐ But I am falling into my old foible -‐-‐ preaching. I am busy, but shall not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bo<le of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together. This is rather a crazy le<er in some respects, I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxica5ng effects of the la<er end of June opera5ng upon a very suscep5ble and peradventure feeble temperament.
Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked -‐-‐ though the hell-‐fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book's mo<o (the secret one), -‐-‐ Ego non bap6so te in nomine -‐-‐ but make out the rest yourself. -‐ H.M.
Edwidge Dan5cat
• h<p://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm
Paris February 17, 1903 Dear Sir, Your le<er arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any a<empt at cri5cism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so li<le as words of cri5cism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsay able than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
Rilke
Applica5ons
• Iden5fying commonali5es • Applica5on for mentorship • Interrupted correspondence • Interpreted works • Influen5al documenta5on • Dinner party • Cri5cisms of the modern field
Ques5ons & Applica5ons
Le@ with Rilke’s Thoughts There is probably no point in my going into your ques5ons now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other things that oppress you-‐: is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough pa5ence to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
