Serendipity

At the end of every school year I find myself thinking back over not just the events that transpired in the last seven or eight months but the events that make up the sum total of my teaching career.  Students, co-workers, successes, and failures.  And among these assorted ramblings I am reminded of the reasons I got to the place where I am and why I am so absurdly happy doing what I do.  For you see when I graduated from E.C. Glass in the spring of 1994 I wanted desperately to get back but I kind of fundamentally knew, as the Moody Blues son goes, "you can never go home again".  But wish I did.

So something serendipitous happened exactly ten years ago that set me on a return path home.

I had just finished my first and what would become my only year teaching middle school under the principalship of Jay Sales.  I joke rather frequently with people that no amount of prescription medication has thus far helped me in blocking that year from my memory but truth is it wasn't that bad.  The middle school creature is a... different sort.  A friend of mine was fond of saying, "middle schoolers should just be put in deep freeze for three years and then thawed as 14 year olds."  I worked with a lot of great people at Sandusky Middle - Kenya Fowler, Calvin Buck, David "Moose" Pierce - and had some fantastic students.  Coming from a rather exclusive high school background I found myself often backtracking in my lessons to cover skills and details that I didn't realize middle schoolers hadn't mastered yet ("What do you mean the definition of a noun confuses you?").  But I survived and more importantly I think that year helped make me a better 9th grade teacher.

Thus, toward the end of that year Jay Sales called me in his office for an end-of-year chat.  He rather honestly asked me how my year had gone.  I often wondered if he picked up on my happy-yet-not-that-happy sense of being a high school teacher in middle school.  He was perceptive in that way, I think.  Because I suspected he already knew what my honest answer would be I decided to be honest in an out-loud way.  I told him that I was fairly content, that I was teaching English and worked with some good people, but I felt a bit like "a round peg in a square hole."  (Sidenote: as someone who has come to ABHOR cliches, I sure used a crap ton of them in my younger days.)  I don't remember much more about that conversation except that my Principal had the look of a man who was pleased I had told him the truth.  I left his office without expectation but also a little sadder for having articulated my frustration out loud.  It was now a real thing, hovering about me like the rings of Saturn.

But that man, for whatever reason and against whatever sense he had of keeping me as a teacher in his school, called up the Principal of Glass all on his own and said (I learned later) something to the effect of, "I have someone over here that needs to be over there.  What kind of English teacher openings do you have?"  And the ball rolled.

Perhaps that is just his nature: I've got someone here who needs something different, something else.  He's a good worker (now I'm just putting words in his mouth) but he's better suited for you than for me.  Perhaps he would have done it for anyone else; I'd believe that.  But the fact he did it for me and allowed me to in so many ways return home is an act for which I will ever be behold to him.

It is right and good to acknowledge the people in our lives that we owe something to and I have many.  From family to colleagues to even students.  A boat can't sail, after all, until the main lines to shore have been cast off.

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.

This I Believe

Note: I wrote this as a response to NPR's ongoing "This I Believe" series.  I shared it with my students today but thought other folks would enjoy reading it.

*******************************************************

This I Believe

One of my idols in this world is a professor of literature at Yale University, a man by the name of Harold Bloom.  Before I understood anything about metaphor, pathos, or verisimilitude, I was reading books by Dr. Bloom on things like Alice in Wonderland and Rudyard Kipling.  What I was coming to terms with was a very simple question related to the act of reading and learning (which might be two words describing the same action): If I claim to have no time to read this now, then when?  And If I don't attempt it, who will?  My answers to these questions form the basis of the kind of teacher I am today.

Sometimes I look upon my profession and status as a kind of last line of defense (though I am not given to war metaphors).  Hence my answer: I have to attempt this thing, this teaching and helping students become better and deeper writers in their own vein, because I have no certainty that anyone will ever perform this service again in their lives.  Also: How can I claim I have no time to do now what I have to do (grade papers, plan my lesson, talk to students about their writing) when tomorrow brings me a new set of demands on my time?  These questions and answers invariably bring to me some of the most famous words by the late Dr. King when he spoke of “the fierce urgency of now”.  Today is the day you will get feedback on your writing and style and today is the day you will realize that thing or trick that makes you a better writer.  Today is the day that a minor, humdrum sentence becomes through the skill of your pen and the wit of your mind something amazing to dazzle others in a blinding rhetorical light of articulate prowess.

One of my favorite movies is Pixar’s “Ratatouille”.  In that story, we are reminded on several occasions that the most mysterious thing about cooking (or any creative artistic endeavor) is that anyone can do it.  “Anyone can cook!” Chef Gusteau exclaims.  And that anyone which is everyone also refers to you.

I believe that you want to be a better writer and I believe in it so whole-heartedly because I want you to be a better writer.  In short, I believe in you.

The Personal Side of High Stakes Testing

Dear Son,

You are eight years old, soon to be nine, and tomorrow you go to school to take the first of what will unfortunately be many, many, many state level high stakes tests that too many people believe say everything about not just you and your mental acuity but everything about your teacher, your school, and your community.  Sadly, this couldn't be further from the truth as these things are just tests.  They are a single snapshot from a single perspective of how well you seem to grasp some academic concepts: reading, math, science, a sense of history.  As such, I would never tell you not to care about them, just as I would never tell you to not care about school.  Learning and education are the single most important thing in your life right now and should be for a good long while.

Yet the world around you has chosen to blow the importance of these tests so far beyond normal that now we must add artificial weight to them.  And because I do not possess the tools to change that, I am sorry.  I am sorry that as you went to bed tonight the only thing you wanted to talk about was how many questions might be on the test.  Because, you see, I care what the test asks about because that's the nature of learning and growing.  Will it ask you questions about ancient Egypt or modern China?  Those are wonderful and important things to know.  Know your world; know math; know the planets and ask about gravity.  In fact, let's learn about gravity together because, damn, it still confuses the hell out of me.

But it kills my soul when we talk about whether the multiple choice questions will be in this format or that for that is truly irrelevant information to the cosmos.  So don't get me wrong: I hope you do well this week.  I hope you walk into all 6 days of this test (Monday through Monday) and find it easier than you expected.  I hope each afternoon you look over at me when I get home and ask, "What's the big deal about these things anyway?"  And I hope if you do hit a snag, a question that seems really obtuse, that you stop, take your time, think it through and answer it to the best of your ability.

I hope you do well not because I want to see perfect scores.

Not because I want to compare you to others.

Not because I think it says something about you or your teachers.

See, I want you do to well so you can grow up and end these things for your children.  Survive this hideous hydra-like beast so that when you are done and out and grown... you can slay it once and for all.

Dad

Just An Ordinary Tuesday Miracle

Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Several weeks ago, before Spring Break, several teachers in the English department with me got together to brainstorm how we should structure this coming 2 single week remediation blocks of time our school was putting in place starting April 15th.  We had a lot of options combined with a lot of restrictions.  Make it fun! But don't let kids get out of hand!  Make it educational!  But don't let kids be bored or fall asleep!  Relate it to state standards and the testing format and the individual student needs in your room and the school climate as a whole and whatever you do don't - don't - ask for help funding any of it.  Typical edu-babble stuff.  But the heads that came together settled on a pretty good plan: take the AP Language students in my classes, for whom the end-of-course reading test was a breeze and ask them to help work in a one-on-one fashion with some of the kids in other 11th grade English classes, for whom the reading test was a literal barrier to graduating high school.  Create the best and most powerful form of teaching and learning known to man: the personal kind.

I have to admit that I worked for a good week on how I would approach my kids to ask for their help.  I didn't want to deceive them into thinking this would be easy or every minute would be barrel-of-monkeys fun but at the same time I thought this was an opportunity in the most up-close-and-personal way anyone could ask for that we could bridge the single biggest divide at school.  Once I realized that my kids would benefit from this too, the appeal wrote itself.

It was melodramatic in places but never dishonest.  "What if that hour a day," I remember saying, "is the longest period of time in their entire day that someone listens to them in a positive way and helps them?"  That might be over-the-top but no one who works in a public school in this country could refute its essential truth.  See, in the end, I hoped to dispel the stereotypes that tend to get built up in schools on both sides of the divide.  I wanted to tear down the sense that some of my students labor under ("Well, they're all just lazy over there") as well as misconceptions other students have about them ("Well, they're in AP classes because they're just plain smart").  This goal would be combined with the more academic one: helping students who otherwise might not pass this standardized test to actually pass it.

And that was my greatest appeal.  To my kids: "You hate this standardized test and you have every right to.  But you are not the ones it is out to get.  So what if you foiled not just this test but the suits and ties in Richmond who made this test and sit so smugly in their offices thinking no average level English kid could pass this test?  What if through your effort and your attention and your work you helped that student whom the test knows can't pass it... to not just pass it but blow it out of the water?"

It worked.  I had double-digit signups in all my classes.  Then I got nervous.  What if it didn't go well?  What if personalities clashed?  What if a series of infinitesimal things added up to a gigantic failure?

worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum

So this week we started.  Monday I spent 5 minutes with my kids fielding some questions and generally going over how things would work.  It was all very structured: icebreaker activities, a little bit of reading comprehension but nothing deadly dull.  The first half was the getting-to-know-you bit and it went... well.  Actually, better than that.  It was like kids from different sides of the country or even other countries were meeting for the first time and finding... they had a lot in common.  There were some great conversation starters.

One question went like this: Which administrator really gets on your nerves?  Two students from different classes would pair up and something like this emerged:

"Hey I'm Kylie."
"I'm Jaron."
"So, what answer did you give to this one?"
"I said Mr. Brown."
"Oh, really, like, why?"
" 'Cause he always up in everyone's business when he don't need to be, you know?"
"You mean like dress code?"
"Yeah."
"He busted a friend of mine last week for that.  So stupid."
"Yeah, one time he told me..."

And there they went.  Two students who normally wouldn't even look at each other in the hallway much less smile or converse found pretty neat common ground.  Those kinds of conversations typically morphed into ones about classes and subjects and friends and family and home and...

It was working; it was really really working.

Tuesday was the next test.  Would these somewhat forced friendships stand up over more than a single hour?  Would the kids want to work together again?  Tuesday was a bit more academic with tiny bits of test prep thrown in.  Average level kids read a passage, got some help with pronunciation and vocabulary, then together with my AP kids banged away at some main idea and tone questions.  There was prodding and questioning in the right places: "Why do you think he phrased it that way?"  "What point is she making?"

I rewarded the kids who got top scores with candy (always a winner with teens) and dangled the reward before those who came close.  Another chance; another little passage and this time, you can do it!  90% or bust kids!  All of that went really well.  I don't know that we changed comprehension levels or reading skills or anything so grand.  But the average level kids spent an hour working on skills without the fear that an adult was watching of grading or judging.  It was just two kids with a common goal.  (That goal being candy; I mean, let's not kid ourselves here.)

As the period closed down, I let them stop about 5 minutes early.  "Take a break," I said.  "Chat it up; bell will ring soon.  Enjoy your candy."

Then, as I was passing a pair of students, I overheard them talking, probably picking up the fragment of a conversation from earlier.

"So, you were saying..." one of my kids prompted.
"Yeah, like she was all screaming at me and I wasn't gonna take that so I walked out 'cause don't no body scream at me."
"Where did you go?"
"Naw, it was late and I didn't want to go like all the way to my aunt's house so I slept in the back seat of the car while my mom cooled down."
"Just like hung out there?"
"Sorta.  I mean, her boyfriend showed up so I didn't go back in the house until like 2 in the morning but whatever.  Ain't like she never thrown me out of the house before."
I snatched a quick glance at my kid and her face, her expression will be forever imprinted on my brain.  I will never forget because it spoke volumes.  It said:

My God.  It's you.  I know all about you but only because I've read about you or heard about you from my teacher's.  I'm a doctor's kid and I've never not been allowed in my own house at night.  But you're here in front of me and not in the words on a page or in a newspaper article.  I'm not trying to visualize you or imagine anything about you because you are here in front of me telling me this story and I can't believe my god you exist here in this school in the classroom right next to mine and somehow I never knew and you're here.  It's you.

My student didn't say any of that out loud.  The bell rang a few moments later and the other girl smiled and hurried out.  Another bell to another class to another teacher.  Nothing this kid hadn't dealt with before.

Except someone sat and listened to her in the most positive and re-affirming way for possibly the longest period of time anyone would that entire day.