Dreams of Old Uncles

   At breakfast, the old uncle wants to tell you his dream. You groan and plot your escape because nobody's dream makes sense but your own, but the uncle drives on because his dream says something important he can almost grasp. He wants your help.
   
    Permit me to be that uncle. Some of this is fantasy, some memory, and some hope mixed with regret, because that is how old uncles talk.

    My dream shows my parents around school on what was then “open house.” Of course, this school is large and strange, with ladders and grottos.
   
    I mix that here with four levels of reality: taking parents to school when I was a child, becoming a teacher myself on parents' night, being the fly-on-the-wall school board member observing this “from the outside,” and being parent to my daughter for “conferences,” or call it what you will. Each level illuminates the others, and that is key to an old uncle's dream.
   
    In the fantasy, as the official event closes, I will not leave because I want to show my parents the rest we've not yet seen. We walk around the fantastic school again. This time we dare take off our shoes and feel worn, rain-soaked bedrock under our feet, and we cajole teachers to do the same. This time we visit even those whose names we can't remember, because this face shows love and that one wisdom. This time teachers show us things they can't reveal in “real” parents' night: the things they know and love.
   
    When I brought my toddler daughter home for the first time, she had experienced only the concrete ground, bare floors, and threadbare shoes of an orphanage. The first time she stepped on grass, she hesitated in surprise and fear. The ground truly revealed itself through the soles of her feet, and both her ground and her feet had been protected from that knowing until then.
   
    God help any child in school today who takes off her shoes. The surprise and fear of that first step on grass will never happen in school, and punishment awaits those who try.

    Yet we enter summer now. The shoes come off, the injuries are slight, and only now children learn dirt.

    Strange: A book I read only this week urges us to become grounded...to look to the chemistry of soils and earth to help us fend off ecological catastrophe, yet my daughter cannot take off her shoes in school. She can only feel earth under her feet privately, in secret.
   
    In my dream, no teacher has a name. I try to remember names and cannot, and finally I stop trying.
   
    As a child, there was acute embarrassment when names of people or objects failed to hop to the tongue. Sometimes it came when choosing groups, and the name of a treasured friend got lost for a moment in the jumble of spoken classmates, and yet the face and person was intensely real all along without a name. Sometimes names of people, feelings or objects were lost in stammers, or sometimes things perfectly well known had not yet been named and so did not exist for school.
   
    The problem persisted through teaching—those momentary lapses when rattling off the names of 30 children in a blur and forgetting one—or as an adult misplacing names of dear friends during introductions in line for groceries—and misplacing all means of other words.

    The meanings of faces and bodies before us, the child or the adult, are no less real for lack of names, while objects and feelings have unnamed reality. Names are important, but aspect needs no name, and the child of my dream introduced my parents to vital people without names.

    My students came to me with an understanding of their world without words or numbers, and yet I could only value what they named and counted. Those facile with naming moved to the front, while those with different understandings fell behind. I could only formally test naming, yet I took great joy in the understanding I discovered beyond words. Understanding came with fire in their eyes, though naming itself often did not. Too often, naming drove out understanding, and the fire went out.

    Some of my children did not understand by naming. Some literally could not see, hear or read names, but felt their world through their feet and fingers. Naming did not reach them, and testing them on names forced lies or failure. Some understand mostly the love in the faces of adults around them until we banish that in our naming and testing.

    My daughter's conference was proscribed and scripted. She pulled papers from her “portfolio” and told me...following a “rubric”...why those particular assignments held great meaning for her. Only I knew they didn't. I knew the papers were constructed to please her teachers only and had minimal meaning in her heart. They landed in the portfolio because they “earned” good grades. I asked my daughter in front of her teacher if the paper came from her heart and had any real importance to her, but the question just created confusion and embarrassment. I feigned confusion myself and asked both my daughter and then her teacher to explain to me what a rubric is. Neither could.  I wanted to ask them both to take off their shoes and feel the wet rock under their bare feet.

    So when I bring my dream to the real school, I'm just a crank and a threat. Questioning the lies forces compounded lies, and now I see that truth is driven out of this education. Promote real connections...show children grass between their toes and a world beyond names...and you lead them to failure, isolation, approbation.

    Sometimes the joy in an old uncle's dream is remarkable only in its contrast to the day ahead.