Sorry for the lateness but the editorial process is slow in summer. This set of blog posts will appear on the Oakland Schools website. Thanks again for the great experience. Rick Kreinbring Avondale High School Auburn Hills MI 48362 Tumblr.com: kreinbring65 Twitter: @kreinbring_rick Blogs for Oakland Schools Literacy http://www.oaklandschoolsliteracy.org/blog/ The Most Southern Place Blogs Professional Development, PD, over the years I ve seen those letters on many dates in my calendar. Early in my career I looked at PD that same way I looked at dental appointments, not fun, but something I had to do. Sit back, relax, hope for no surprises and it ll be over soon. It wasn t all bad but almost none of it stuck or had an impact on the way I taught or even thought about what I was doing. I didn t understand then how important good PD is, how absolutely vital. A few years back I recognized that I was getting stale, not bad just not good, and that I was becoming calcified in my self assurance. I don t remember an exact moment when I noticed it, maybe I heard myself talking to a new teacher in that tone of voice that communicates WISDOM but is really BORING. In any case, I didn t want to become the teacher who boasts 20 years of experience when he really means 2 years of experience repeated 10 times. I looked around until I found a Seminar given by Columbia University and Theater for a New Audience on teaching Shakespeare. I applied, and was lucky enough to get in. That first experience took me apart, changed everything about me and how I teach and I ve been addicted ever since. In the years since then I ve been all over the country attending just about anything that ll let me in. I never know what to expect from a seminar. The results have varied from transformative, to at least I got a free poster. I like it best when I come away changed, when I feel like the ground has shifted under my feet and I need to rebuild. For me that s the marker of effective Professional development. Sometimes though it s not as much about learning a new approach or finding something to build into my own practice. It s about the landscape and the people I meet. It s about
changing the way I think about myself, as a teacher, a student, a human being. I don t for a minute believe that what happens in the classroom or my practice is about me. It s about the students. I want to be the best I can be for them. That s why I keep rebuilding, and reinventing my practice. I find that being around really good teachers smart, inspired, creative, risk taking teachers is what changes me. I like being in the learning chair, the worst teacher in the room, the least informed person in the seminar. (Lucky me, this is usually the case and I wonder how I snuck in.) It means I ll be learning. I ll be developing professionally and personally. One of the best places I ve found for this kind of development is through summer seminars and workshops. I ve had incredible, ground shifting, head spinning, experiences courtesy of The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute. I ve studied in New York, Santa Fe, and Chicago. The people, the subjects, the locations, I m addicted to these experiences. They push me, renew me, restore my energy. This year found me at Delta State University in Mississippi at The Most Southern Place on Earth. There among outstanding teachers from all over the country, I spent an exhausting week working through everything that the Delta has to offer. I ate a lot of catfish and fried chicken. I met incredible teachers, musicians, cooks, professors, all of them offering a piece of the history. The Delta is a place of conflicted history, and rich culture. It s a region of teachers and caretakers charged with the task of tending a dying region while parcelling out the memory to everyone they meet. This seminar falls in the category of ground shaking, and attitude changing. It was days filled to the brim with experiences designed to force us to think about a place almost none of us had ever been to. Any day could find us moving through a discussion of poverty and its roots to a demonstration of diddly bo musicianship, to a museum or historic spot, to watch ducks (ducks?) being escorted to their penthouse apartment. Everything seemed designed to create a kind of intellectual whiplash. At night over meals with my colleagues or alone in my dorm room I d try to make sense of what I d been through. What follows is a sample of 6 days of what I saw, did, thought and what I think I might do. The Delta is dying place. Like where I live in Southeast Michigan, the Mississippi Delta s economy was based on an industry that wasn t sustainable. The Delta s peak was based on cotton and having an inexpensive workforce slaves to sharecroppers to people to poor to leave that labored and created a rich culture using whatever they had at hand. During these Great Migrations Detroit
received the folks who sought jobs in an Automotive Industry that offered unheard of opportunity but, like big cotton, turned out to be unsustainable. In both places fathers worked hard to create opportunity for their children who seized it and then moved away. Unlike the Delta, Detroit is experiencing a revival of its creative class who are moving into the industrial landscape and taking advantage of the inexpensive property and a renewed spirit. Detroit is trying to come back to life. The Delta slips closer to the other side. Even so there s a spirit here that refuses to give up. The people who know, even a little, about the Delta know what it means, how important it is to our understanding of who we are as a culture, a people. I met a woman of Chinese ancestry who keeps the weeds at bay in a cemetery for Chinese immigrants. It s where her own ancestors are buried and where she will be buried someday, but then, without her to tend it, the cemetery will be overgrown and eventually disappear into the landscape. Like the Black cemetery across the road it will be visited not by family members but by history buffs looking for toppled markers with the letters CS for Colored Soldier. I saw a Synagogue with under 100 people, all aging, that will cease when its last member dies. There s a man in that town, we were told by the Rabbi, who craves the stones in Hebrew for the Jewish cemetery. This man has made his own marker because he s the last one who knows the language and there would be no one to carve it for him. In so many ways the Delta is like this man, writing its own epitaph so it won t be forgotten. These people represent to me what it means to love a place so fiercely, to be so connected to a landscape that they are willing to become part of it. There s a poetry to this place that these people live out. They have a resilience, bone deep and stubborn that compels them to share their stories. For them, making certain that we, the teachers, understand and take it back with us, and teach it means that their stories endure even when they are unrecognizable parts of the landscape. The Delta s soil holds our shared history. Mississippi s tortured history of racism and crushing poverty, and its struggle to come to terms with that history is a mirror for the rest of country. Coming from Detroit I see the reflection of that history here. It might be easy to dismiss this Most Southern Place as an anachronism, a
relic or a museum of what we were, but as we face continuing debates over flags, and still have to declare that Black lives matter, we are disabused of that notion. We are not past the Past that Mississippi struggles with. We living it out. One afternoon my classmates and I were able to participate in a panel discussion of the Emmett Till case. One the panel were the last person, other than his murderers, to see Till alive, his uncle, and an FBI agent who reopened that case in 2004. The discussion took place in the actual courtroom where the original miscarriage of justice occurred. We listened and asked questions and scribbled in our notebooks. Those of us in the Language Arts huddled afterward to talk about connections to To Kill a Mockingbird. Being in the place makes the emotions of the novel more real. It sinks in when you re there. The ghosts are real and the voices seem to seep in from the gallery and I feel closer to the truth of the books I ve taught for years. I have a better understanding of how simply being in the place where something happened can make understanding easier. It s a place of lasts, and goodbyes, but there is music. A Juke, which is often pronounced Jook, Joint is hard to define. It s not a business but you have to pay a cover and you can buy beverages. It s not a bar or a club but there is most definitely music and dancing. It doesn t really have an address but people can find it. According to some historians, Po Monkey s Juke Joint is the last true juke joint in the Delta, and when the man who lives there, Po Monkey himself, and opens his house on Thursday nights to anyone who wants to hear music and have a good time can t do it anymore the people who own the land will shut the doors for good. This sharecropper s shack has hosted family night for more than 50 years but like a lot of other things here it s fading. Monkey is getting on in years. His patrons lured away to bigger cities, brighter entertainment. Tonight could be Po Monkey s goodbye and every person filling this place knows it could be the last time they dance this way. The contested game at the pool table might be the last time anyone fights over the 75 cents it costs to play. The DJ, who drives a tractor all day, know that this might be the last time that what he puts on the turntable will move people to dance, and sing. It might be sad, this background of impending loss but this is the Delta. This is Po Monkey s lounge so we they dance more, with abandon. The pool shooters threaten with more anger, until Monkey and his
assistants convince them to leave. The Dj spins his best music, in the best sequence so everyone moves, everyone sings. In a place where race meant everything for so long Monkey s is mixed crowd. There are black and white hands wrapped around strong drinks. People who ve made this their Thursday tradition for decades ask those of us here for the first time where we re from. There are slumming tourists and scholars and Blues fiends here, all of us ignoring the world waiting outside the walls. We re here to dance, make new friends and swear we ll be back. Some of us will face an early morning a little rougher but no one sees it as punishment. It s a fair price to pay to be part of this Delta Tradition. Monkey s is alive, celebrating the music, planting the seeds for the next visit. Even when everything feels like it can t last there are people who stubbornly refuse to give up. They ignore the sadness of last goodbyes and keep working, playing the music, dancing. Someday... On our last day I make a mojo. A mojo is a little pouch that contains bits and pieces of the places you visited, people you met, and want to return to, someday. You display it somewhere people will see it and ask about it, and everytime you talk about it, the magic of the mojo gets stronger. Nestled in my mojo is a bottlecap from Po Monkey s, okra seeds, Mississippi mud, matzo crumbs, waiting, along with the other ingredients and all my memories for the magic to become irresistible and pull me back. Like that mojo, Mississippi offered a strange mix for me. I didn t walk away with a notebook full of new techniques I did get some but when I see a guest lecturer pick up a diddly bo a guitar made out of a cigar box, broomstick and a single string and pull so much emotion out it while he teaches a class of rapt students about the history of the Blues in the Delta I understand how important passion is to teaching. I see how being able to demonstrate something, and let students try it themselves makes learning so much richer. Even though so much of what I saw showed me something that was slipping away, or already gone I wasn t sad. It s another of those weird paradoxes of this place. All of the people I met teachers, musicians, proprietors they don t seem sad. They have a sense of duty, to the past, but also to the future. They tell us their stories, teachers from
all over the United States, trusting that we will carry them back with us and teach them to our students so that the sound of the Blues, that heartbeat rhythm, won t disappear.