Geometry assignment; May 27

After the long weekend, we went back to work today with our second coordinate transformation.  We worked on reflections today, identifying the line of reflection first and then making the necessary image from the original.  We went over several examples together in class before the students got started on their homework.

Assignment:  Reflections worksheet

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; Feb. 13

We went through some SMI testing in class today.  After finishing test, the students worked on a review worksheet that we will use as we start the next unit.

Assignment:  inequality worksheet  do all questions except #2, 7, 17, 18, 23

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Saturday morning catch--glory

Some Saturday mornings just about all I can find out here on so much flatland is a broad morning sky--which is not to say that a broad morning sky, one as multi-hued as this one, is chopped liver. This one was an immense kaleidoscopic showpiece. 

I sometimes think of landscape photography out here on the plains as if a what I record is a story. In this broad world, sky is always basically setting, like this. It's what's always there--a big, colorful dawn.

But really good stories require more than setting, right?  So what goes in front of that an immense morning sky is character. That's what I think.  That's what I look for.  Sadly, this morning I couldn't find a character, just couldn't.  

Okay, what you notice here is a single silo, no barn, no house--the morning sun is rising on something that, well, used to be.  Hey, that's both character and story.  But calling that silo a character is a stretch, isn't it? Really, all there is, here too, is setting. Glorious setting, but not much more.

Because the disappearing cloud layer just above the farmstead seems somehow to mimic what's beneath it, I thought this one might get me there.  What do you think?--is there character in this one?  I like the farmstead and the wispy fragments above it, but is it really "character"? Not really. But my word, it's a wonderful setting.

I had some hopes for this one, but last year's brome grass, a not-native species on top of it, is hardly striking. There's just not enough there there to be a character.

This morning, setting, breath-taking setting, was the whole huge story. 

I'm not beefing.  I could have done worse because conflict or not, the morning's glory was immense. The heavens declare, the psalmist says, which makes a dawn like this one into something of a preacher. 

I can live with that.  This morning, out north of Sanborn, I probably didn't create a story, but I was there in the pew for one remarkable sermon. 

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Book Review--Rez Life

This particular chapter of the job was a little racist. I was writing a book about members of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, and the publisher told me that I could choose the subjects myself but I had to include some New Mexico Native. I don't remember him saying that I had to have a real Indian, but I understood the requirement.

I called the reigning head of the CRC mission, a white man, a preacher, who let me know in no uncertain terms that he wasn't going to hand over a Navajo because he was, quite frankly, sick and tired of easterners like me coming around and asking to take a picture of some Tonto. Forget it, he said.  "What you ought to do," he told me, "is write the story of some Indian from the city."  He told me about a Chicago mission for Native folks, I listened, and, back again in the Midwest, wrote a story about a woman, a Pima, from the deserts of Arizona.

"Here's the deal," the preacher told me; "the future of the Indian is not on the reservation." End of story. This from a man who'd spent much of his life on the rez. 

That was a long time ago, 30 years ago or so.

A generation later, it seems to me that what that preacher said was flat wrong.  Already in 1973 at Wounded Knee and Alcatraz and almost every reservation in America, a movement one might call Red Power arose as if out of nowhere. It scared the dickens out of most white people, even made them angry because it sometimes felt like unrequited love--I mean, haven't we been good to you?--you know, that sort of thing. 

But the kind of consciousness-raising that occurred on American reservations gave almost all Native people something they'd lost, self-respect--or at least started them down the road to regaining at least some of what had been stolen, sometimes violently, from their very souls. A Winnebago woman told me she never felt as proud as she did the day in the late 70s, when her father took her along to Washington D. C. to protest.  

Today, most palefaces, like me, tend to think of reservations as wasteland battle grounds, dismal, drug-infested hellholes where misery begets a suicide rate beyond imagination. David Treur, a Ojibwa novelist and, now, non-fiction writer, doesn't back away from sad and violent images of reservation life. Horrors abound, and his new book, Rez Life, doesn't pretend that it's some redman's fantasyland.

But most Anglos might be shocked to discover that Treur sings the glories of reservation life without hesitation. "The truth to me seems to be that reservations are places of surplus," he told NPR in an interview.  "There's more of everything. There might be more hardship, but there's more joy. There might be more pain, but there's more opportunity. There's more of everything."

It seems to me that the preacher's crystal ball was clouded. It seems to this white man that reservations are, even to those who leave, home.

Treur uses the word reservation to define Native American life in a fashion I'd never thought of, a way that helps--or should--a white guy understand the lay of the land.  A reservation is a place that is reserved, he says. Some might think of it as a prison--as the preacher from Navajo land might have; but it's a place that's reserved. When white anglers get incensed about fishing, their ire is understandable--"what blasted rights do Ojibwas have to spear walleye or net 'em by the hundreds, out of season too, when we can't?"

The answer, Treur says, is quite simple: Ojibwas have been doing it for hundreds of years. It's a right reserved for them by otherwise worthless treaties that allow them to continue one custom of an ancient and honorable way of life. The law reserves their right to fish as their great-great grandparents did.

When, just a few years ago, I wrote a book about Navajo families who'd been part of that same Christian mission for generations, I was surprised to discover that all the tribal people I met and interviewed loved their home, their reservation, the sacred land all around. Today, just about half of the Navajo people don't live on the tribe's sprawling reservation, but more than half do, perhaps because, as Treuer says of his own, Red Lake, in Minnesota, "there's more of everything."

There's some history in Treur's look at his home, a good strong helping of American history. There's some fishing here too. And some good yarns, some tributes, some honor. 

But David Treur doesn't create a portrait that isn't real; it begins with the suicide of his own grandfather. Some parts will make any reader cringe. He says his own Ojibwa people overfished the lakes so badly that it took years to renew the walleyes. He is clearly uncomfortable with the absurd machinations most tribes, these days, go through to determine who is and who isn't a member. Casinos have made a few Native people ridiculously wealthy, and brought more education and better health care to reservations; but glittering gambling halls aren't heavenly. Those slots don't dispense better lives.

If you honestly don't know much about Native America, if you'd like to know more about life on the rez and get a good, healthy serving of the kind of history that will not only hold your attention but make you sit up and listen, then you can't do better than David Treur's Rez Life. It's a primer, a thoughtful, heartfelt look at the lay of the land.

More palefaces should read this book. In America today Native folks are far too invisible. They're human beings, not object lessons or talking points, but to know at least something of their story will do this at least--it'll make you humble, and, for a white American, that's a small, good thing.

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; Jan. 27

We spent some time today reviewing solving systems of equations by graphing with our entry task.  We then continued to study how to solve systems of equations by substitution.

Assignment:  Substitution worksheet;  #1-15 odd, 17, 18, 20

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Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (x)

At his burial service up in the cemetery on the hill above Doon, his daughter read a story that was read again, later, at a memorial party he had himself ordered up, a story that later aired on National Public Radio, albeit altered a bit. That story epitomizes the relationship Frederick Manfred maintained with the faith tradition from which he’d come.

You can read it for yourself in his daughter’s memoir, A Daughter Remembers, but I’ll summarize it quickly. When the doctors discovered a rapidly growing brain tumor, Fred was scheduled immediately for surgery. An hour before, a young female hospital chaplain, someone Freya Manfred describes as “wearing a brightly flowered dress with a white lace collar and carrying a small white Bible,” dropped by to see him. Hospital policy.

When she told Fred that she was there to see how he stood spiritually, he immediately asked her about her background. She told him she was Catholic—although only by upbringing; and he told her in no uncertain terms that Roman Catholics had a great history. Do you know it?—he asked. She didn’t. Well, you should, said Manfred, and then, characteristically, began to hold forth on Aquinas and all manner of Roman Catholic history.

When he stopped to catch a breath, she bridged the question again—“But how are you doing spiritually? Perhaps I could guide you along,” she told him, sweetly.

“Have you read much philosophy?” Fred asked her. When she shook her head, he recommended Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Plato.

No reaction.

“What about poetry?” Fred said, booming, I’m sure, and now on a roll.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe I should,” she said.

Manfred created a reading list—“Chaucer, Whitman—and don’t forget Dickinson, my personal favorite,” he told her.

Once again, she tried to broker her mission into the lecture. “I came here to find out what your relationship to God might be,” she said sweetly, stroking her white Bible.

And then Manfred told her that he simply wanted someone else. “My background was Christian Reformed,” he said. “You wouldn’t have one of those Christian Reformed guys right here, would you?”

“You mean a minister?” the young lady said.

Freya quotes him like this: “’No, just anyone who’s raised Christian Reformed. Someone who’s sick here in the hospital like me. Aren’t any of your patients Christian Reformed?”

The woman told her she didn’t think she knew of any, and he told her that if she’d find one to “rustle him up.”

“Rustle him up?” she responded.

“Bring him around here so I can talk to him. I like to argue with those guys—it perks them up,” he said. “Send him over and we’ll talk. It’ll do him some good, and me too.”

That’s a story Fred himself would tell, I’m sure, even embellish a bit, if he could. I feel his own voice in it, in me, as I tell it. I know he’d approve.

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