Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Teachers say the school has actually got better in some ways since Deborah Meier left. "Pioneering is exhilarating," said one, "but it is also exhausting." David Smith, a former humanities teacher, now director of the school, brings a sense of calm to the hallways. (The kids, as they do with all of their teachers, call him by his first name.) "Every so often," says Smith, "a student will tell me, 'I don't know how to do that.' And my reply is, 'You don't know how to do that--yet.' That's an empowering word: yet. Our purpose...
...Grandfatherly, with a goatee and longish white hair, Goodman is the quietly charismatic leader of the whole-language movement. "Whole language isn't something that can be summed up in two sentences," he says. "It is a belief system that grounds one's teaching. A pedagogy." Goodman and Frank Smith, a cognitive psychologist, developed the theories behind whole language in the late 1960s. Goodman asked adults and children to read aloud, then studied the ways in which what they said varied from the text. From this work, he concluded that readers rely on context to guess an upcoming word rather...
Rachel Libert and Barbara Parker, winners of awards at various film festivals, including the San Francisco Film Festival, the National Poetry Film Festival and the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, offer hope that poetry can be successfully and responsibly integrated with film. Their representation of Patricia Smith's "The Undertaker," in a film of the same name, is a wildly successful example of how visual imagery can reinforce the spoken word...
...slaying. The undertaker is charged with steeling himself against the gore, the blood and the tragedy in order to reconstruct the destroyed face and "exploded head" of the victim, so his mother's "dreams of her baby / in tuxedoed satin" can be fulfilled. Libert and Parker intersperse video of Smith's recitation of the poem with shadowy figures, discreet images of hands molding flesh onto the skull underneath and childhood playground scenes almost ominous in their innocence...
...Smith's own experience as a seasoned "slam" artist is evident: her delivery of her own piece is remarkable. The viewer quite literally gets chills watching Smith's fury overtake her face during the most powerful part of the poem, when the undertaker fights off an urge to "take [the mother] down / to the chilly room, open the bag" and confront her with the remains of her son, so she can grasp the reality of his death, "wither finally, and move...