My son, the swordsman

Almost every afternoon after I come home my son grabs his shoes and sword and heads out the door.

Sometimes we pass each other on the driveway and he gives me that 10-year-old head bob that reminds me even though he is not a teenager yet he knows that using too many words in an acknowledgement isn't cool.  Sometimes he stops at the door and tells me about his day a bit before he heads out.  But eventually, once his afternoon work is attended to, he heads up to the cul-de-sac in front of our house, usually running, to face the monsters that inhabit Pokeys Creek.

I write that with a dual tinge of nostalgia and envy.  In fact, I often watch him a little from our front windows.  And there he is in the center of the road, holding his sword at a slight angle behind his head while sizing up the enemies before him.  He'll hold that position for a few moments and then dissolve into a flurry slices, thrusts, and jabs in the air before him.  He'll utter battle-like noises complete with the clanging of steel, cries of the men and creatures felled before his blade, and cheers from whatever crowd might be watching his heroic efforts.  He is unabashed about it.  Cars will sometimes cruise slowly around the cul-de-sac and he will dutifully step aside, into the grass, for safety but even there he is defending himself from opportunistic enemy forces that mistakenly think he is off-balance having moved from the concrete to the grass.  They soon learn better as my boy parries and dodges the advancing hordes.  People - real people - in the passing cars sometimes watch, sometimes smile.  A few give him odd glances that seem to say "glad he's not my kid."

And I think: "Damn right he's not your kid.  He's mine.  And he's amazing."

I have more than a few memories of being permitted to play-act around my yard in some of the more epic adventures I could construct.  Depending on my theme of the month it might be a science fiction adventure that was culminating in the last few moments of a galactic space conflict or a fairy tale quest to rid the world of the last evil creature known to man.  Whatever the case, I was never taught to be self-conscious about my make-believe world.  Swords, lightsabers, pirate hooks for hands... it was all fair game in my world.  I remember friends coming to visit me and they enjoyed the physicality of fighting or battling but never seems really engaged in the story of what we were living out.  Leave it to the future English teacher to care more about the story arch of what we played outside than the actual physical conflict.  But what's my motivation here?  Galactic domination?

So it is with my boy.  He tells me often about his friends who have one kind of sports practice Monday, a different one Tuesday, conditioning Wednesday.  And while I don't begrudge these children or their parents (both my children do gymnastics one day a week currently) I am proud of my son for not getting pressured into that world of constant go-go-go.  Do more.  Be involved in everything.  No time to rest now.  I love the fact that he spends thirty minutes to an hour spinning and jumping around the street out there engaging not just his muscles but also his imagination.

I hope, silently, that he never feels the need to suppress or conceal this creative and wonderful sense of fun and expression.  Some of the neatest teenagers I teach are ones who takes risks when they write in my class and allow their sense of fun and inspiration affect their sentences and paragraphs on paper.  Grow up that way, your way, I think.

Right now outside he's leaping over a horizontal tree branch in a rather heroic way.  I want to ask him what the story is.  Goblin stole his kingdom's treasure?  His princess?  His magical cloak?

Whatever the answer: I know I'll love it.

India Introduces America to Faith

In the high school English class that I teach, I frequently enjoy challenging my students' preconceived notions about literature, stories, and writing in general.  Often they come to me with clear likes and dislikes.  Alexander Dumas: like.  Ernest Hemingway: dislike.  Yann Martel: like.  John Steinbeck: dislike.  So I make them prove their "likes".  Why does Dumas, in Count of Monte Cristo, effectively convey revenge for you when Hemingway, in Old Man and the Sea, through the character of the beaten and battered Santiago who has finally caught the fish of his life and then is robbed of it, does not?  Why?  Some of them articulate what they see well; others struggle.

I'm about to do that to you.

In the opening lines of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the main character tells us that this story, his survival story on the ocean and subsequent adventures, is one that will make us believe in God.  Without going into too much detail, I finished that story with the exact opposite reaction.  It made me believe that faith and religion were just choices.  Choices that people make for very idiosyncratic reasons and sometimes reverse for inexplicable reasons.  It is, in the end, unpersuasive for me.

But last weekend I went to see The Hundred-Foot Journey, another movie-from-book, by Richard C. Morais and while I have not read the book yet, I think I have a good sense of why this story is a more powerful and persuasive argument for faith and spirituality than Martel's.  Interesting, by the way, that both are stories of boys raised in India who move somewhere else.  Pi is moving to Canada and ends up in the U.S.  Hassan and his family flee India after being attacked and end up in France.  I have to acknowledge my prejudices here: am I more moved by European sentiments of faith than American ones?

Early in the story, Hassan narrates his family's arrival in France: "When we arrived, the sun was setting, like a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon..."  Some of my students are not moved by similes but good ones, for me, are straight-up poetry.  Comparing the horizon to food doesn't hurt either.  But this was the first line that caught me as particularly spiritual.  There are plenty of moments in Life of Pi when Pi contemplates a sunset or sunrise or moonscape over the ocean from his makeshift life raft but all of those descriptions are detailed, by which I mean scientific.  They involve pointing out angles and shapes.  So it strikes me that in Journey we have a simple comparison to a particularly tasty dessert.

Is that it?  Food?  Is food essentially spiritual to us?  To me?  A month ago or so I went to see Chef and while I don't sense any underlying spirituality in that film it was an interesting and convincing riff on family.  In that movie, there is a scene where the main character takes his son aside after the son has suggested that feeding people okay food it just as good as feeding them great food.  The father tells the son that half-cooked food is unconscionable.  It's a crime.  It's obscene.

I had the same sense in Journey.  When Hassan arrives in France with his family he is the first one to sense the power of food in the area.  In this way he reminds me of the better moments of Pi who early in his story dabbles in different faiths.  (He tries Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all at the same time.)  Somehow Hassan's desire to learn more recipes feels more spiritual, more authentic, than Pi's search for a religion that fits him.  They both involves conflict: Pi versus the tiger, Hassan versus those around him who hope for his demise.  That hope, by the way, is manifested both outwardly, as one of the chef's in a luxury French kitchen across the street attacks and burns part of Hassan's family's restaurant, and inwardly, as Marguerite (Hassan's love-interest) vies for the same position he receives under Madame Mallory in the kitchen.  I don't mean to diminish Pi's struggle, for it is important to the story, but just as that horrible ending admonishes us to choose "the one we like better" so Hassan's struggle is not one he can choose.  It was ordained the moment that his family put the down payment on the restaurant in France.

So here's the part that convinced me.  Late in the story Hassan has predictably risen above all the chef's in this little French village and gone to Paris to train with the best of the best in the culinary world.  His new boss at this Parisian restaurant repeated "innovation" in all his scenes as though he is the Steve Jobs of the French food world.  And it is there, amid the science and technicality of those kitchens, that he loses his love for food.  This isn't much of a revelation and I'm not saying it's impressive storytelling.  What I am saying is that it makes a stronger argument for a human's sense of faith: the food that he knows and remembers (from his deceased mother, from his distant father, from the woman he stomped on to get to this position) is a more persuasive argument for God.  The taste of food, the dripping mango sorbet itself.

Final Speech - Public Speaking 1st Period

June 2014

Superlatives bother me.

When someone labels a thing or a person “better” or “best”, I often find myself asking what their point of reference is.  What is the scale?  What is the standard deviation?  In the end, I look for a way to disagree with the designation.  At the very least, I tell people, “It’s only the best so far.”  My pessimistic attitude reigns supreme.

But sometimes fate has a funny way of making hypocrites of folks like me.  So it is with a healthy dose of irony and humility that I dub this The Best Public Speaking class I have ever had.

I don’t wish to leave such a comment unproven so I offer the following examples in support of my argument:

1. If I asked Peter to come up here right now and perform an impromptu storytelling, everyone in this room would get pretty excited.
2. If I asked George and JD to reconstruct their semi-inappropriate performance of “The Graduate”, everyone in this room would sit up just a bit straighter in expectation.
3. If I asked Meredith the simple question: “how are you today?” we would doubtlessly get a 15-20 minute diatribe about her driving adventures in Lynchburg prior to school.
4. If I asked Sam McCorkle to come up here and run his prose one more time, complete with that awful Yoda voice - dude, it really is bad - you would all enjoy the nostalgia one final time.
5. If I asked Mckayla to come up here and deliver the most devastating dramatic interpretation she was capable of, we would easily be in puddles of inconsolable tears by the end.

I could go on; the list is long.  But maybe this reason is stronger than the rest for proving this is the best Public Speaking class I have ever taught: when I add my own thoughts, a quick comment, on something and I look out over the faces and intellects of this room, I see every face and every eye and every mind paying attention.  And I am humbled.

I didn’t always know this was what I wanted to do.  I had intimations early on, though, that being the center of attention was something special.  In third grade, I contracted the chicken pox and was homebound for three weeks.  I was bored out of my mind so I purchased and listened to the new hit release album, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and, without seeing his music video, I constructed a dance routine complete with backup dancers.  When I returned to school, I entered the yearly talent show, found some backup dancers, bought a white sequin glove ($2.99 at Sears) and won second place.  In eighth grade, I read a biography of Walt Disney for a class assignment and instead of giving an oral book report in class, I rearranged the desks in the room to create a Space Mountain-like roller coaster, complete with pop-up cue cards detailing important events in Mr. Disney’s life.  At the end of my senior year, two things happened in short order.  I won the VHSL State Forensics Championship in Extemporaneous Speaking and I was selected as one of three graduation speakers.  Each of those were amazing moments in my life and, in their own way, prepared me to do this today.  Teaching, for me, is half content-related (I have to know what I am talking about or why should anyone listen to me?) and half presentation (I have to say things in an interesting and worthwhile way or I’m just an automated delivery system).

I truly don’t know what kind of teacher I am.  I look out at your faces, at your eyes, and I find myself crushed between two thoughts.  One, my words might be the only interesting ones you hear today or all week; this moment might be the one that I can say something that years from now affects someone in this room to change their life for the better or decide in their own way to give back to a community and a people to which they feel indebted.  Second, my words the scant minutes on the clock are all keeping you from being able to go home or least leave here and if I could hurry both of those up, that would be great.  So I’ll settle for somewhere in the middle.

I do this thing, this teaching, which really is just trying to present the truth to teenagers, trying to help them not be so miserable, downtrodden, misbegotten, deflated human beings because I refuse to think of the future in those terms.  For every day you came to school and didn’t want to, for every subject that you took a test that you felt uncertain about, for every class that you finished in June and thought “it can’t really get harder”, I want you to realize: you’ve beaten them all.  You’re still standing.  You’re still breathing.  You’re the sum total of your successes not your failures.  And as you bask - rightfully so - in your individual and idiosyncratic power, know that somewhere behind you sits a teacher of public speaking that can’t help but be incurably and sensationally proud of you.

As a wise hobbit once said, “I am glad that you are with me - here - at the end of all things.”  I wish you the very best ending and bright, happy new beginning.