Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

Photo from Victor Burclaff , "Egg Dawn" My friend, @minfucious, asked me a really good question about teaching problems and changes occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are lots of reasons for why things go awry in a literacy classroom (online or face to face). I don't want to pretend that what I'm about to offer is a universal solution. It isn't. But maybe it will offer something to begin with. Min asks, "In my efforts setting up remote learning, which is a whole new system for my school, my students and me, I’m feeling the failure of my imagination. So much of assessment had to do with the culture we built in a classroom together." She adds, "Tho not all of it, the physical proximity is foundational. How do I reimagine instead of trying to make a square peg fit in a circle?" I believe, Min is working in a high school context, or maybe it's a middle school one, regardless her question really is one that we all can ask no matt...

Dreaming I often dream dreams I don’t remember. I mean, I know I dream. I wake up and remember for a few seconds sitting in a room with thousands of chairs, and my Nana, who has been dead for more than three decades now. Or I can feel the feelings under the images of my wife and me in a hotel room we’ve never been in, in a city we’ve never seen, and I can hear the feelings of love I’ve never heard slowly recede, evaporating like moisture on a windshield on a hot day. The dream is gone and all I have left is its remembrance. No details. Just the feeling that I had a dream, and a vague sense that it was good or bad or scary or warm, like a handprint on a bedspread that is barely noticeable a few hours later. Photo by Kiyoshi Inoue, "wesandre" I read somewhere once that we have to dream, that dreaming is the way our brains process all the information we acquire during our waking times. Dreams are the filing system that our bodies use to make our lives in our heads. I i...