It wasn’t so much that my needs as an individual student were not met while I attended public school all my life. While I strongly believe that some students have a rougher time than I and schools do need to focus more on individual needs, I believe that the manner in which education is approached also needs to be changed. Education reform needs to address an interdisciplinary approach to academics, which in turn will help individual students become stronger in all subject areas and have their individual needs met.

In my experience, I have found that academics in elementary, middle and high school is not necessarily about a particular subject, but instead about a way of thinking. The reason that we must take a variety of subjects across the board while we are growing up and developing is so that we learn critical thinking skills and logic skills and can later use them in other environments, such as work and home. The problem is that it often happens that students choose one path or another, and their skills and interdisciplinary thinking are limited.

Studying math or English is not just looking at numbers or words, respectively. They are both ways of looking at the world and ways of thinking.  Students are generally stronger in one subject over another, and it is in their weaker subjects that their needs are not fulfilled. If we began to approach education, and trained teachers to approach their classes, in a well-rounded, interdisciplinary fashion which brought together subjects across thinking patterns, students would have their needs fulfilled and their critical thinking skills strengthened.

This across-the-board approach could be done through projects which incorporate math, science and writing skills together, and programs which stress the importance of having all skills, and encourage students to understand why they must take a variety of classes and focus on different subjects throughout their academic development. Schoolwide projects, or collaborations between classes could prompt students to become more involved in all of their subjects, and once they understand academics as ways of thinking, they will be more inclined to have greater interest in their studies, and be more successful in their pursuits.

The Iron Men: Our Pursuit of Understanding

I recently started working near Madison Square Park in Manhattan, and for the first few days, a man at the top of the stairs to the subway startled me. The same man was there every morning, without fail, making me jump suddenly to the side. Every time it only took me seconds to realize that this man was not real; he is made of fiberglass and iron. Still, he gave me a good fright every morning for the first week.

I began to notice other iron men around the park as I wandered around on my lunch walks. I eventually spotted some on top of buildings in part of the surrounding skyline. My friends joked that perhaps part of the public art project with the Iron Men was suicide watch – why else would they be on the edge of these skyscrapers? I got to digging around and discovered that these iron men were part of Madison Square Park’s public art projects, and that particular exhibit is Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon.

I love public art because it adds color and vivacity to a city or a public space – it is a positive addition to a landscape, and it inspires public education instead of a dull view. In the middle of Manhattan, Event Horizon makes you stop and wonder how many other details you’re missing in The Big City as you rush through the normal day and are suddenly started by a man next to you in the square or a man on top of a building. Part of the point of the project is perspective, according to Antony Gormley himself. In my interpretation, these iron men can only look in one direction, and each has a unique perspective from his station in the park or on a building. How does this apply to us in society today? How narrow, or wide, can our views stay or stretch? How stationary are we? From where do we obtain our perspective? What can we look at and find from where we are, and how far can we go from there? Gormley also expresses that his project questions the gaze, meaning the sight of the statues and its scope. Coupled with their stationary position, in which no part of the body can be moved or shifted, viewers are moved to consider their own embedment.

Much of my English degree education was influenced by perspective and point-of-view, but with this project it seems that not everyone needs a college degree to learn about this. All they have to do is pay attention to the works around them. Public art offers a free education to those who would like to grasp it – which seems much like education in the first place: an experience from which you get what you put in.

These iron men on the street corners and on top of skyscrapers around the park are meant to represent us, and inspire us to consider our perspective of the world. The physical body – ours and the iron ones of these men – limit our frame of reference to the world. An event horizon by definition is a boundary surrounding a blackhole, creating a line past which nothing can be affected by events of the universe. Antony Gormley encourages us to think about our own Event Horizon with his iron men. The use of public art in such a fashion enables greater access to education – free education – to those who wish to learn more about the work and its message. Further, one of the purposes of education is to appreciate the world around us and understand its beauty, its troubles, and its limitations. Event Horizon, and other public art works, educate us in just this way. Not only can you get a shake, relax on a bench, or play Frisbee in the park – you can get a free education. If nothing deeper, you can always get, as I heard one girl label it this morning, “a rough education in accurate male anatomy.”

Event Horizon is displayed throughout Madison Square Park in New York at 23rd street and Madison Avenue until August 15, 2010.

I waded through the first few weeks in a muddle of new words and phrases. “Pronto!” my host mom would call upstairs every evening, summoning us for dinner. This word I knew. “Buonappetito!” she would continue. This I knew as well. As she would ladle the first serving of soup or scoop the first serving of rice, she would launch into a stream of Italian, detailing (what I believed to be) her day, her work in her garden, or a visit with her grandchildren. My roommate and I would nod in unison, shoveling risotto into our boche and mumbling, “Si, si, le mie lezioni cominciano alle 10:45 domani.” The days seemed endless, laid out in front of us in a neat patchwork of weeks to study and weekends to travel.

I swam through these conversations, barely staying above the surface. This is about learning Italian, I would tell myself. I started understanding longer sentences with more complex sentence structures. I went to Switzerland for the weekend and returned to Florence craving Italian and new vocabulary.

Every morning I would ride my bike along the tiny river, head towards class and watch the ground disappear beneath my tires. I would ride over large cobblestones, ride in the street, ride on the sidewalk, and look at every person I passed, seeing the physical differences between this city and my home, waiting to see the subtle differences between people. Some people would smile at me as I passed, others would pretend not to even notice my presence.

I can put my finger on the exact moment I started to feel comfortable here, although all the other moments seem to melt together. Buying stamps one afternoon, the man at the cassa asked me for how much I needed the stamps to be. “Sessanta,” I replied confidently, without thinking. “Sessanta?” the man repeated, and I paused for a second. Sessanta. Sixty. Si. The man handed me the stamps and I left, wondering when I had started to allow myself to respond without carefully planning out my words, even if it was just one small number.

I began to focus again and again on conversations, words, phrases, pronouns and tenses. Every conversation, short or long, would be replayed in my head in Italian. The days flew by: a two-hour conversation with my host mom, a presentation in Italian class, a few words exchanged at the bus stop.

One morning, returning from a weekend of travel, I was in a rush to get to my house, change, and get to school as my train arrived at 8:15am, 45 minutes before my first class of the day. The cab driver saw the look on my face as I jumped in and he asked, “Tu sei preoccupata. Perche?” “Ho una lezione alle nove!” I told him. He smiled. “Ma, sono solo otto e venti. Hai tempo.” We talked in Italian the whole time – about the city, school, the weather.

When I got out of the taxi, he tucked extra change from the fare into my palm, helped me to the door with my bags, gave my shoulder a pat and said, “Buonagiornata, bella. Hai tempo.” “Grazie mille, grazie mille!” I called as I rushed to my front door. As I watched him drive away I lifted my keys to open the front door. Hai tempo. You have time.

“Non vedo l’ora!” I used to say to my father before I left. I can’t wait! Or literally, I don’t see the time.  But quite honestly, I had forgotten about it. Forgotten that I had it. In between all of the Italian words and phrases, there still existed minutes and hours that I had long ago forgotten to savor. And I was left standing at my front door, tasting the words with my own tongue, “Ma hai tempo, bella. Hai tempo.”

Upon return to Italy, I knew exactly what I was coming back to. Or I thought I did. As I arrived in Milano, Italian sang in my ears and I readily responded, excited to speak with the woman at the bigliettiera, eager to speak with my host mom, and keen to decode all the signs and news posters in the Metro stations.

On my first day of work at the school, when the kids responded to niente in inglese, I was sure my Italian was going to improve more than their English. (And I am still sure that it did). And even though the days were long, time sped by as I noted my improvements and what I wanted to work on. But something else improved at the same time: My Italian thinking sharpened.

When I was thirteen, and was being introduced to foreign language in school, I told my mom that I didn’t understand how a tree could be anything other than a tree. It’s so simple, I told her. You can’t imagine anything else in your mind when someone says tree. And when you look at a tree, the name is so fitting. How could anyone in the world not recognize this thing as a tree?

One afternoon I was trying to explain to a seven year old the idea of having a photo be in “focus.” I looked up the Italian word for focus. Fuoco. Fire. To put in focus: Mettere in fuoco. I stared at my dictionary.  And then I realized, when they are talking about fire, Italians don’t say “fire.” They say fuoco. And when they are talking about focusing a camera, they don’t say, “put in focus,” they say, mettere in fuoco. Fuoco does not mean “fire,” and it does not mean “focus.” It means, quite simply, “fuoco.”

This is the moment I stopped translating everything I heard and read, because firefighters cannot put out a “focus” and you can’t put a camera “in fire.” But they can put out a “fuoco” and you can put a camera in “fuoco.” This is also the moment that I started paying attention to every spoken detail, every written detail in the language. And this is the moment I realized that once again, I felt like I was losing time while I drank everything in.

Perhaps the taxi driver is right – hai tempo, bella. Maybe ho tempo, but I am still not sure how much time I have. I still, literally, don’t see the time, am not seeing the time.

Time consists of slippery threads – it is a fantastic knot in which we are all entangled. The threads tangle together, unravel, and spread in every direction. My time in Italy and in the US are forever overlapping and ongoing, keeping me here because I feel like I can never have enough of it. But for me, the secret is this: Ho tempo, but I don’t have time. So still I am left, tasting these words on my tongue: Hai tempo, bella, hai tempo.

The car had been behind them for only a few minutes, but from her backseat nest Daisy could tell her Aunt Dee was already convinced they were being followed. The road stretched in front of them for miles, one lane in each direction straight to the horizon. Daisy watched as Aunt Dee’s eyes flicked up to the rear-view every thirty seconds, watching the tan car swerve to the right, then the left, then the right again, as if trying to see around them. Daisy peeked over the backseat but saw only the brim of the driver’s hat swooped low on his forehead, shielding his eyes and making it seem as if he was staring straight ahead.

“Pull to the side! Let them pass!” Aunt Dee scolded Terry, tapping the dashboard and looking over her shoulder. Daisy listened to her aunt’s screeching as she methodically hung shoelaces around her keychain next to the window.

“I’m going the speed limit!” Aunt Terry proclaimed, “And there’s no reason anyone need go any faster!” As Dee ground her teeth and tapped the dashboard, Daisy began to repeat the beat of Dee’s fingers on the dashboard, humming along as she added strips of paper to her shrine, drawing small green images on them and sticking them in the edge of the window. The uninhibited desert sun shone through Daisy’s sandy blond hair, making every strand of frizz stand out. Daisy looked up as Aunt Dee watched over her shoulder. Daisy cast her eyes back to her shrine and then back to her nest, finally resting them on her next addition to the shrine: an extra pair of socks.

“Terry!” Dee snapped, “Pull! Over!” She reached across to grab the wheel and Terry raised her right arm in a block, snapping her head to glare at Dee. Daisy squeezed her eyes closed as tightly as she could so she didn’t see Terry’s left arm jerking as Terry twisted her body, sending the car veering across the road in a whirlwind of screeching rubber and grainy dust. Daisy gripped her green keychain as she heard the other car come to a screeching halt behind them.

When the dust cleared, the man was standing outside Terry’s window, his hat brim still blocking his eyes.

“Terry,” Dee warned, “Don’t you touch that win-”

“Ma’am?” the man interrupted as he rapped his knuckles against the glass. Dee stared at Aunt Terry.

“We have Daisy with us! We can’t just open our windows to a strange man! You’ve heard about the creepy people who roam out here! I just heard about one the other day on the six o’clock news…” Daisy heard Aunt Dee as she was just beginning to open her eyes, still gripping her keychain, and as she unrolled her palm there were marks from how tightly she had been holding it.

“Ladies!” the man called from outside, “what happened back there! Are ya’ll all right? I know I could sure use some help. What’s goin’ on?”

Terry tentatively rolled the window down just a crack. Daisy cupped her hands around her keychain and looked around for the next addition to her alien shrine.

The man pressed on. “Looks like you folks are on a trip!”

“Well, yes, somewhat, yes… a trip…” Terry stammered, not sure how to interpret the man’s booming tone. Daisy peered through her window, the man inches away from her face, and tried to get a look at his eyes under the brim of his hat.

Aunt Dee leaned over her sister’s lap, anxiously squeezing out, “Hey! Everyone’s okay! Great! We should probably clear off the road then and get going, right?”

Aunt Terry giggled nervously. The man did not crack a smile. Daisy continued stroking her keychain, rearranging her shrine, sinking further into her nest of pillows and her duffel. She watched her Aunt Dee, who kept peeking back at her as if monitoring Daisy’s anxiety. The man cleared his throat and all three snapped their eyes to his attention.

“Well… one of my tires may have popped during the fuss back there…” Trailing off, he stared at the women, finally tilting his chin and giving them a peek at his bright, full green eyes. Daisy looked at her keychain, and looked back the man’s eyes. Same color she thought, and feverishly began adding to her shrine anything she could find – a paper towel, her stuffed animals, an old necklace she had dug up from between the seats.

She was so busy building that she forced herself not to notice the man reach to open Terry’s door, forced herself not to notice Terry’s frozen limbs being pulled out of the car by the man’s rough hands until Dee was stretched across the front of the car, grasping for her sister’s arm, hand, leg, jacket, anything.

Huddling deeper in her backseat nest, Daisy could only stare as Aunt Dee threw her car door open, hurling herself out and towards the man and Terry, who were nearly to the man’s car. Daisy peered over the backseat as the man shoved Terry into his car, gripping her arms behind her back and blocking her from coming out. With his other hand he grabbed Aunt Dee’s hair, throwing her into the car behind Terry.

As Daisy gazed out the window, placid with shock and unable to figure out if she should move or not, she noticed the man’s green eyes again, the heavy work boots on his feet, the chest spilling out the top of his shirt, the short stubble on the bottom of his chin.

When she started to move, still in a trance, she reached for the next item of her shrine, the day’s newspaper, and, lifting it, found herself staring straight into those glowing green eyes and one bold word: WANTED.

I began to notice other iron men around the park as I wandered around on my lunch walks. I eventually spotted some on top of buildings in part of the surrounding skyline. My friends joked that perhaps part of the public art project with the iron men was suicide watch – why else would they be on the edge of these skyscrapers? I got to digging around and discovered that these iron men were part of Madison Square Park’s public art projects, and that particular exhibit is Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon.

I love public art because it adds color and vivacity to a city or a public space – it is a positive addition to a landscape and encourages viewers to think more about what is around them. In the middle of Manhattan, Event Horizon makes you stop and wonder how many other details you’re missing in The Big City as you rush through the normal day and are suddenly startled by a man next to you in the square or a man on top of a building. Part of the point of the project is perspective, according to Antony Gormley himself. In my interpretation, these iron men can only look in one direction, and each has a unique perspective from his station in the park or on a building. How does this apply to us in society today? How narrow, or wide, can our views stay or stretch? How stationary are we? From where do we obtain our perspective? What can we look at and find from where we are, and how far can we go from there? Gormley also expresses that his project questions the gaze, meaning the sight of the statues and its scope. Coupled with their stationary position, in which no part of the body can be moved or shifted, viewers are moved to consider their own embedment.

Some iron men are stationed on top of skyscrapers – in fact, I can see two from my office window. According to popular reports, some people have called 911 because they mistake the iron men for suicide jumpers. Perhaps the most unnatural spot for them – if we are calling 911 because they are there, it is obvious that is not a “normal” place for humans – makes me wonder if we belong in the skies at all, which brings me to the question of our physical boundaries and physical definitions.

This morning it was raining as I came up from the subway station, and though I no longer jump out of my skin when these men are at my shoulder, I still notice them. Raindrops were pouring down their heads, arms, trunks and legs this morning. Other days the sun beats on their iron skin, and they still stand on, staring straightforward. While the raindrops dripped off of my umbrella, I complained in my head about the pools of water at the curb and the water soaking the ends of my pants. And still these statues stood on, oblivious to it all. You might say, well of course, they’re not human. But what I notice is that they were human enough to look like a body, and give me a fright every morning for a straight week. 

These men are meant to represent us, and inspire us to consider our perspective of the world. The physical body – ours and the iron ones of these men – limit our frame of reference to the world. An event horizon by definition is a boundary surrounding a blackhole, creating a line past which nothing can be affected by events of the universe. Antony Gormley encourages us to think about our own Event Horizon with his iron men. The use of public art in such a fashion enables greater access to the work and hopefully a greater understanding as well – our appreciation of public art and our understanding of our placement are both deepened.

Event Horizon is displayed throughout Madison Square Park in New York at 23^rd street and Madison Avenue until August 15, 2010.

At first they could not distinguish words from his grunts as he sat on the bench between those plastic walls. Perhaps the girl’s first mistake is that she looked at him a second too long while trying to decipher his syllables. The girl and her sister study the bus numbers on the post above their heads while his voice floats from behind them. The breeze is still warm against their legs and the girl’s hair flips over her shoulder as another gust blows by. She can feel the city dirt in her hair as her fingers run through it.

“Your hair looks great!” The man calls. “It’s not frizzy at all tonight. It looks perfect, don’t worry.” The girl’s hand drops to her side. Her fingers are always running through those strands: when she is writing, when she is thinking, when she is driving. Habit.

She and her sister glance at each other. They stare down the street, searching the lanes for the next bys. Any number. They’d like to be on it. Yes, they just want to be in their beds, it is past midnight. The bars haven’t closed but their night has. The sister pulls on the edge of her skirt, just above her knees, and clutches her hand bag.

“It’s okay,” they hear from behind them. “It’s not you, it’s the rest of the world.” They could hear the taps on the sidewalk as the man moved his cane.

They want to turn around and look, but they can still remember what they have seen: his bag is a plastic grocery bag and his canvas jacket is too large for him. His hat is slightly askew, to the right, and his dark hair pokes out from the sides. His shoes are probably scuffed.

The sister’s shoes are shiny and the leather straps of the girl’s shoes have been pinching her feet as they are standing on the corner. She can still hear the man’s grunts from behind her as her sister spots the next bus a block away. Tilting their heels on the edge of the curb, they crane their necks to see the bus.

“Please don’t let that man get on with us,” the sister mutters, “It doesn’t matter what number this bus is. We’re getting on.”

Bus 71 pulls up to the curb. “Thank goodness, the right one,” the girl says under her breath. They climb up the two steps and the sister holds out a ten to the bus driver before trying to put it in the fare machine.

“Pull that out! Pull that out!” the bus driver cries as the bill is rolled into the device. The sister tries to pull the bill out but the bus driver must grab it and detach it from the mouth of the machine. “Just sit down,” the driver says, and the door swished closed behind the black man from the bench.

The girl and her sister sit behind the bar at the middle of the bus, and the black man places himself behind them.

“It’s okay,” he repeats, “It’s not you. It’s the rest of the world.”

They stare straight forward.

“We get off somewhere on this road,” says the sister, “so watch for the sign for the stadium. We’re staying near the stadium.”

The girl stares out the window. The only lights she can see are from apartments on the upper levels, and the streetlights above bus stops. The street signs are enveloped in the night shadows and the girl can’t make out the letters.

Her sister stares straight ahead, straining her eyes to look through the windshield of the bus. She looks towards the left windows and notices a sticker that says “a little further back please.” She pokes the girl. “What do you think that’s supposed to mean? That doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know,” the girl shrugs. As the man behind her chuckles to himself she can feel his breath blow the ends of her hair. She shivers and tries to look for the stadium.

“Hey, hey, e-mail me when you get through that whole paper,” he says to another man across the aisle. “Let me know what it says, okay?” The man looks up and chuckles.

“Hey, hey, your hair looks perfect tonight,” the man leans forward in his seat and places his hand on the ends of the girl’s hair. The girl leans forward and his fingers slide through the strands. He reaches forward again. “It looks perfect,” he says, “don’t worry. It’s not you. It’s the rest of the world.”

The sister peers through the window, searching for the lit billboard announcing the stadium. She cannot find it, not even on the horizon, not through the brick buildings and the crummy sidewalks. The girl whispers to her sister, “that man needs to move a little further back, please.”

The man leans forward farther. “It’s not you,” he reassures with a chuckle, “it’s the rest of the world.”

As the doors swish open at the next stop he plants the tip of his cane on the ground and stands. The girl sinks back in her sink as he walks down the steps of the bus, tapping his cane as he disappears into the darkness. The sister and the girl peer out the window as the bus turns a corner, still no stadium in sight. Their faces glow in the light of the bus window as their eyes are fixed on the signs of the city. The darkness swallows the city and the bus vanishes in the shadows.