In the Event That Art and Teaching Encounter

A problem always finds the solution it merits, according to the conditions which determine it as a problem.-Gilles Deleuze (1990, p. 54)Try to love the questions themselves... don't search for the answers... now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.-Rainer Maria Rilke (1934/1984, pp. 34-35)And again I walked into the classroom with syllabus in hand, daily lessons planned, course readings listed, assessment measures outlined, standards justified, academic calendar scheduled, and within days, in other words, a very short span of time, all that I had organized was asunder, rendered obsolete, my structure no longer held, it was out of my control from the twenty students enrolled, from the tangle of personal memories and cultural histories that they brought into the classroom, their particularities of family, neighborhood, community, schools, and other cultural institutions in which they grew up, the experiences they learned to embody, so as they responded to the assigned readings from the perspectives of their lives, all things on the syllabus disarticulated, a breakdown occurred that paradoxically transformed their disparate relations in the class into a dynamic, live assemblage that resisted academic closure, its disjunctive, contiguous ensemble, and engaging discourse in perpetual modulation enabling a breakthrough of seeing and thinking differently. I was once again reminded of what I seem to easily forget every semester that any well-planned, well-intended, well-measured curricula and pedagogical strategies merely serve as launching sites from which to learn from my students, in teaching me what to learn, how to learn, and how to assess the crisis of knowledge that emerges between and among us, the critical interlude between what I painstakingly plan every semester and the manifold experiences and knowledge that they bring with them into the classroom, a cultural muddle and messiness from which teaching is immanent as art...Assessment, accountability, reform, and again... the imperative for measurements to establish higher teaching and learning standards, for high-stakes educational accountability, and institutional reform has been grossly politicized to such an extreme that teachers in today's schools are compelled to teach-to-thetest, to ensure that "no child is left behind," and to guarantee that the United States gains and maintains a competitive edge in the global marketplace of ideas. Given the public's assumption of unmet expectations, punitive representations of American teachers, students, and schools as "failing" and "untrustworthy" have heightened fear to such toxic levels that we now have "helicopter parents" hovering over and checking every pedagogical and curricular decision that teachers are making in classrooms and, to add insult to injury, their collective bargaining rights being questioned (if not repealed) by bigbusiness, antigovernment politicians. Speaking before an audience of teachers and advocates of public education, reform movement critic Diane Ravitch emphasized that:The teaching profession is under attack by those who blame teachers for conditions beyond their control.They want to take away your professionalism and turn you into testing technicians... if they take away teachers' right to bargain collectively, they silence your voice.They eliminate the one force that can stop them.That leaves the path clear for them to cut funding. (Denby, 2012, p. 66)According to Ravitch, attacks on teachers by privatized education advocates presume to ensure that "our children's" educational entitlements are being met, to ensure their eventual claim at the top of the American workforce, and to ensure that parents'dividends on investments in public education as taxpayers are maximized. …