In Honor of Soldiers?

As the flowers rest on the decorated graves and the sunlight shines on the beautiful sailboats, Uncle Sam whispers in my ear about how we should care for the soldiers and remember the ones that have died. Swimming pools open, BBQs fry. Today is the day to think of what they have done for us. There are blurs of red, white and blue marching down the street and flags are lowered at half-mast. But we should always remember and never forget what set us free, from this very day on.

— Memorial Day by Ali M., 3rd Grader, Academy Elementary School, Madison, CT. © 2001. [Online] URL: http://www.usmemorialday.org/write.html


I find myself conflicted about this holiday. I have always wanted to believe in the absolute virtuousness of the sacrifice of a soldier’s life, but I’ve begun to question whether that ideal is, on its own, an appropriate thing to honor. I’m not dragging out a political soapbox here; I just want to get some thoughts out.

What are we really celebrating on this holiday? The answer we all learned in elementary school is that we should remember the soldiers who died defending and protecting our country. OK. What constitutes “defending and protecting”? Is that what our soldiers in Iraq are doing now? I know that’s what we are being fed as doctrine, but I have been offered this fruit before and have learned to distrust it. It’s that lack of trust in the worthiness of the sacrifice, I guess, that is at the root of my conflict. I’m just not sure it’s right and proper to memorialize soldiers who, for example, fight to enforce on others our ideals and causes, especially in the name of defending our country.

We’ve been told since Vietnam (and perhaps earlier, I don’t really know) that it is important to honor our soldiers for their sacrifice, even when we disagree with the cause they champion. After all, they are only doing what they’ve been told, right? Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote that, “…the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” Is that something worth honoring? As someone who has had his faith in his government and fellow citizens shaken and who values his experience and his intelligence, I find myself balking at this as a thing worthy of memorial.

Were soldiers today drafted or conscripted and sent off, as they were in times past, perhaps I would see this as much more black-and-white, but the truth of the matter is that they are not. Our military is composed of volunteers. Some, I’m certain, choose to serve for noble reasons; many do not and it insults me, quite frankly, to have someone tell me that a profiteer’s motives are as worthy of respect as the true patriot’s. Yet, how can I know one from the other? How can I know that the war they fight is an honorable one?

I very much value the nobility of true patriotism. I would not hesitate to give my life to defend my family (and that includes my “family-by-oath”) and my right to fulfill my destiny (and for others I love to fulfill theirs) free of oppression and tyranny. Those soldiers, volunteers or not, whose lives were taken in defense of these I gladly honor. I resent, however, the implication that I must also pay homage to those whose crusades are less principled.

Am I being hypocritical here? Quixotic? Your thoughts, as always, are appreciated.

Heard in School...

The following was overheard during lunch today at school. It was uttered in a single breath, without pause, in the space of exactly 1.34 seconds.

“Maybe I’ll shave my head. I’ll do it tomorrow. Well, not tomorrow. This weekend. I have to go a party this weekend. What was I talking about?”

You go, Brianne! You're amazing!

The Paradox That Is Me

I received recently an email request for random things about me, and it got me to thinking about the strange sorts of contradictions that are part of who I am. Here, as an example, are just some random things…

— I have smoked exactly 3 puffs of 1 cigarette in my entire life. I have never chewed or dipped, nor have I ever smoked weed (second hand smoke from college parties not included). I do, however, have every intention of taking up pipe smoking after I earn my Master’s degree.

— I am left-handed, but my right hand is far and away the more dexterous. Unlike most lefties, I prefer to use the mouse and hold my knife with my right hand. In soccer, I prefer to strike with my left foot, but my right foot controls the ball better and has better feel for it. I tilt my head to the left when I’m listening (so the right ear can hear better), but I put the phone on my left shoulder.

— It’s old news to most of you, but I’m colorblind—very much so. Particularly, I have a form of anomalous trichromatic vision in which all three colors (red, green and blue) are misaligned. I can see in color, but my range is much narrowed compared to most people and there are certain colors that I simply cannot distinguish from others. Brown, maroon, violet and purple are the worst (I have no perception of them whatsoever), but I have troubles with beige, teal, tan and certain pinks and oranges. I found out today that my condition is actually a combination of two separate genetic defects and that my limited blue sensitivity is exceedingly rare (0.0001% of men have it). Anyway, the actual paradox is that I have records from my early childhood that suggest that, even as early as preschool, I could identify all my basic colors, including brown and purple. I can actually do a pretty good job of identifying colors out of context even today. Just don't ask me to know if my tie goes with my shirt.

— I still have baby teeth. That’s right. Two of ‘em. My first molars on the bottom, as it happens. They are perfectly healthy and have no adult teeth pushing up under them. Counting these, I have 30 teeth. I have no idea where the other two went. I think I had the baby teeth pulled when I was young to make room for the adult teeth, and they just never came in. I didn’t have cavities as a kid, as far as I can remember.

— I have to sleep on whichever side of the bed is furthest from the door (Exception: My in-laws house. I have to sleep on the other side because the vent on the proper side blows on me and dries my eyes out. I never sleep well there). In restaurants and other public places, I have to face out, toward the door. I have particular places for my keys, my wallet, cell phone and I put these things only in those places. In contrast, I leave my glasses everywhere and can NOT, for the life of me, establish a routine place for them. I also have to be careful with my wedding ring. I take it off to type and I have often not realized I’ve left it until later. It usually causes my heart to stop when I absently go to twirl it around my finger and realize it’s not there. My office and woodshop are an absolute disaster area and, while I will claim to know where everything is in these places, this does not excuse the fact that I could hide a dead body in either location without fear of it being discovered for quite some time.

— I have more pairs of pajama pants than dress pants and jeans combined, but I have more polo shirts than t-shirts. Hey! At least I’m sharply dressed from the waist up!

— I am an enthusiastic Dungeons and Dragons® player and dungeon master, but I am also an avid fan of competitive sport (3 weeks to Germany 2006, soccer fans!).

— And finally, I have traveled numerous time to Europe and South America and I speak, to varying degrees of fluency, six languages. I have broadband access to the internet, so I have instant access to news, music and entertainment from all over the world. I love this! You want to know what I listen to whenever I can, though? American 80’s pop music.

¿Cuáles de las siguientes afirmaciones son correctas...?

I went to take the Spanish MTEL test this weekend. This test is one of the requirements to gain (or, in my case, add) a certification endorsement to teach in the state of Massachusetts. I teach primarily French at my school, but I routinely teach at least one class of Spanish in a given year as well as math, when the need arises. I already hold a certification for French, which is more than the state requires of me to teach in a charter school but, under the No Child Left Behind law passed in 2001, I am now required as a teacher in a public school (charter schools are public schools) to hold endorsements in every core academic subject I teach.

I went into the test stone cold. I’m not terribly pleased with how parts of it went, but overall I think it might be enough to pass. I figured it was worth the chance just to get the federal government off my back a little sooner and be able to keep my kickass soccer program running. The results are due to be available mid-June. I’ll let you know how I did.

I posted some time ago that I was going to have to take these certification tests so that I will be “highly qualified” as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act. I had a lengthy discussion about these tests with my administration and I complained loudly that the timing of this requirement was to say the least inauspicious, what with me still being in graduate school and all. I got a lot of sympathy, but it was made clear to me that I had no choice in the matter, if I intended to remain at the school. The discussion then turned somewhat heated when my soccer program was placed on the block pending my completion of at least one of these tests (Spanish). I will carry the bitterness from that meeting around for a long while, and I will go on record as saying that I do not appreciate the position I’m being placed in by legislators whose only interest in education is to use it as a political tool.

I take my role as an educator seriously. It is an essential part of my identity, and I continually strive to be as strong and adept at my craft as I can be. I am a skilled and knowledgeable teacher, quite conversant in a wide variety of subject matter and fully familiar not only in general teaching methodologies, but in several approaches specific to the individual disciplines I teach. It annoys me beyond words that, despite this solid foundation of expertise in a broad array of disciplines, I am not valued as an educator because I do not meet the federal definition of “highly qualified”, a phrase that refers specifically and only to an educator’s certification under their state’s rules in each and every core academic subject they teach. I cannot help but believe that, by using this as the standard for teacher quality, the federal government simply reinforces the public stereotype that the only thing you need to know to be a teacher is what you’re teaching.

This attention to content is undoubtedly expected to lead to a corps of educators who are very knowledgeable in their subject matter, but there are some tacit implications of this narrow concentration. For one, it supposes incorrectly that those coming into the profession will be properly dedicated to as well as adequately trained in the art of teaching before they are hired. For another, it states unequivocally that pedagogy is not valued as a separate and equally rigorous discipline.

In my view, superior teaching at all levels properly demands a broad base of expertise in many arenas of knowledge beyond the content of their classes. In addition, it requires considered wisdom, a talent for improvisation and a commitment to people, process and product. The public laments, and students have long bemoaned, those teachers in school who seem to treat their work as simply another job. While this view is, perhaps, stereotypical, most who have endured the trials of the traditional public school experience can name at least one teacher who fits the mold. They show up, hand out books, papers and exams. They give grades and monitor the lunch hall, but they convey no excitement for their material, no understanding of their students as individuals and no appreciation for the intricate nature of the practice of teaching. However technically qualified they may be, teachers cannot be considered to be doing quality work if they lack these more subjective, but equally important qualifications.

I will now step down from my soap box. Late warnings for my students are due on Monday. Good thing that test showed them I’m qualified to write them! Oh, wait. It didn’t. Well, maybe it did, but I’d have to write them in Spanish.

AIM 911

The following instant message was received this evening. It is recorded here as it was written, except that it was lightly edited for length and readability, and that the names of those concerned have been deleted to protect their identities (and their pride).

----: I need help!
----: I just emptied my cabinets with the extension to my vacuum.
Me: I am here. 'Sup?

----: I saw two mice.
----: I’m afraid to put my hands in the cabinets, so I used the extension, then one fell out into a glass, and I poured bleach on him until he didn’t move.
----: My dog is terrified too. He sits across the room and shakes.
Me: He's afraid because you are, I imagine. But he has just seen drown an animal in a glass of bleach. That’s pretty traumatic.
----: I banged on the cabinet doors with a hammer before I opened them, and the mice were still there. Staring at me.
Me: They were probably wondering what all the fuss was about.
----: My dad promised me they are only nocturnal and afraid of noises. He was very, very wrong.
Me: Well, you can be sure that they are not carnivorous. They're likely just looking for crackers or something.
Me: They won't harm anything but the crackers, really.
----: I threw out all my food and put the rest in the fridge.
Me: ok. That might have been overkill, but there you go.
----: They don't go where there isn't food, right?
Me: That's not strictly true, but close enough.
----: He came out, but he's scared of me now.
Me: I would be too, what with you wielding a hammer and a vacuum. Clearly you don't want to share any crackers!
----: I just saw him in the cabinet.
----: I’ll spray him with bleach!
----: I sprayed him with Febreeze before, but it didn't have the effect I wanted.
Me: You deodorized him??!?
Me: So, now you have a mouse that smells like a fresh spring breeze?
----: I think its summer linen, but yes.
----: He's very wet.
Me: Oh boy.
Me: Put him in the dryer and fluff him up, then you could use him to freshen the bathroom. :-)
----: Oh funny.
Me: I hope you'll forgive me, but I'm cracking up over here.
----: Well, I’m gaining confidence. I’m ready for him to show his face again.
----: I’ve turned off the TV so I can hear his pitter patter.
.
.
.
----: Ha! I just sprayed him with bleach!
----: He's on the top shelf, and I’m not tall enough to see where he went.
Me: He's probably wondering why you're out to launder him.
----: My orange cleanser is enviro-friendly. That leaves me with bleach or carpet cleaner.
Me: He's not an ant. You're not likely to kill him by spraying him with anything.
Me: You're going to have to get him to leave, evict him, or trap him. Or maybe get lucky and drown him in bleach, but that's already happened once. I'd say the odds are slim of that happening again.
.
.
.
----: I just sprayed carpet foam all over him this time.
Me: He'll die clean, that's for sure!
----: The foam stopped moving, but I can't be positive he's still in it.
----: Cleaning supplies are the only poisons I have. Isn’t that an obvious solution?
Me: It's only poison if you drown them in it.
----: I can see his little feet sticking out of the foam.
----: I’ve conquered the beast!!
Me: Good Lord.
.
.
.

"Passion Is No Ordinary Word"

I was discussing with a student today what it was like to feel passion. She's working on a piece for her English class that she wants to send to “This I Believe”. She wrote about her first experience with romantic passion, and the conflict she felt when she realized that it left her completely unable to live her life the way she knew was good for her. I've asked her if she'd allow me to publish it here when it's done.

I could totally relate to what she was describing, and it got me to thinking about how the term gets overused and, as a result, has lost some of its meaning. At it's most pure, I think it's a difficult thing to put into words. [Kizz] wrote something recently in a post entitled Reader Opinion [CLICK HERE TO READ] that I thought got there, but I haven't tried to write about it myself. I'm inspired to try but, in the meantime, here's what I know, from my own experience...

It's a sensation that can completely overtakes me. I often become so caught up in the object of the feeling that I simply cannot concentrate on anything else. It makes my heart beat stronger and there is an electricity that surrounds me when I feel it. I get a tightness in my chest in a way that I can totally identify, but is not easy to explain. Sometimes it accompanies anger, sometimes sadness, sometimes ecstatic joy, sometimes wonderful peace. But always SOMETHING and always INTENSELY. I experience passion for many things—certain people, my teaching—but what things trigger it spontaneously, or why they do, I cannot say.

Have you ever experienced passion? I mean REAL passion? What did it feel like? Do you have an experience to share? I'd love to hear it!

When you say you're 'passionate' about [whatever], give me a sense of what you mean. What happens when you're [whatever-ing]? What does that passion feel like? You may say you feel transported. Transported to where? Take me there. Show me—so I can show my student—that passion is no ordinary word.

These are SOOOO my children!

SiSi, my 4 year-old, has just moved up in bicycle sizes, and is putting mileage on those little tires! She still gets a little paralyzed going down hills (damn near went out of control when she forgot about the brakes), but she really likes being able to ride. Ditto the swimming in the pool. Ditto the running and jumping and playing soccer… Contrast this with NiNi, my 2 year-old, who will walk downtown (¾ mile) with me, but is quite content to dig in the garden, play with her babies and generally be domestic. I’ll let you figure out which child takes after which parent.

I find it incredibly interesting just how different my children are. SiSi is passionate, dramatic, active. She likes little bits of lots of things (food, activites, conversations) and thrives on being in control. She’s a jeans and t-shirt girl. She feels things and emotional level and puts up masks and diversions to protect her core (and quite fragile) self. She is compelled to sing EVERYWHERE and is driven to investigate, but not necessarily to interact with, her environment.

NiNi is passionate, but not dramatic. Her emotions run deep and are expressed deeply, and from her core self. She is active, but not sportive as such (though this may just be because she’s so young). She likes one thing a lot, and will often focus on it to the distraction of everything else around her (“Hello? NiNi? Can you hear me?”). She’s wears dresses most of the time. She feels things on a personal level and spends a lot of time looking for and modeling relationships (playing with her babies, being close to mama and papa). She is very into reading right now and loves to talk with people. She is less inclined to investigate her world, but more inclined to interact with it (although she has discovered shyness around some people now).

The thing that cracks me up about them is not that they are intrinsically so opposite in so many ways, but that they work to maintain their differentness when they’re together. They are not competitive about it, but they enjoy the fact that they are distinct from each other and will often give each other the space to be distinct when they know it is important. If one picks A, the other will almost invariable pick B. That’s not to say that there isn’t conflict when they both want the same thing, but I am impressed that they will often avoid banging heads over things simply because they appreciate their differences.

I enjoy watching them interact as opposites, but I have fun with it, too. It is an interesting exercise to tell them that they can select from two choices (this food for lunch or that one, going to this place or that, etc.) but that we will only do one and they must come to consensus on their own. When they get older and really master the art of negotiation, look out! It’ll be like congress at budget time!

S told me some time ago that she and her husband each have one of their children that they connect with more closely than the other. I remember thinking at the time that this was curious because, while my children are almost exact opposites in most ways, Wifeness and I had not experienced that splitting. It looks like this is beginning to happen now. I have a much higher tolerance for the eccentricities of my older daughter than Wifeness. I love NiNi to distraction, but there are times when she drives me absolutely meshuggeneh. For Wifeness, the opposite is true. I think this development in our family dynamic has reinforced for me the importance of giving lots of love and attention to both my girls, and of finding ways to connect and bond with them both that celebrate and nurture their unique, individual spirits. They are certainly unique, but they are both amazing!

Taking some time...

Wifeness and her niece are in the living room, putting together a scrapbook for a mutual friend who is getting married next week. They are watching the movie In Her Shoes. There is a lot of feminine energy in there.

In an effort not to be overcome by estrogen, I have retreated to the bedroom. I’m listening to the Red Sox game on the radio, surfing the net and eating ice cream straight from the container with a soup spoon. With my little island of masculine energy secured, I thought I’d share that I’m reveling in the fact that I have the evening off from graduate school!

Sure, I have a pile of things to do that will fill the time up that normally is reserved for that work, but they can wait a few days. I could be grading papers, but there’s no such thing as a French or Spanish emergency, and the kids don’t really want all the homework back anyway. I could go up and clean my office up, so I can actually work up there, but I’ve already done my organizational work for the day in the form of the bi-annual Great Clothes Switch, so there’s no motivation to file and shelve tonight. Same goes for the basement. My dad helped me do some spring cleaning down there when he and my mom came to visit a couple of weeks ago, but to finish the job I’d have to get supremely grubby. Too late at night for that.

Nope, I’m quite happy just to sit and type for a while.

The Sox are winning. This ice cream is hitting the spot. Right here, right now, life is good.

OK. So it's been a while...

In the beginning, I decided to keep up this blog through March and decide whether it was worth it to continue beyond that. I didn’t make it much into February before I had to set it aside to focus on more pressing and time-consuming things like graduate school, teaching and being a papa, but I decided that I really liked doing it and, when the time presented itself, I would pick it up again.

Here we go.

It helps that I’m on break from graduate school, so I’ve got a bit more free time than I’ve had in a while (my evenings after 8pm are my own again!). I don’t know how long this will last, but I’ll do the best I can to make it worth your time to keep checking in.

I'm On My Second Life Now...

It is tradition for the people of Wayfarer House to go to the Franklin County Fair, which is usually held the first or second week in September. As it happened, it was just Wifeness, myself, SiSi and NiNi this year. Anyway, we went early in the morning and watched some horses being judged, some cows being milked and some sheep being shorn. We took in a couple of magic shows and followed a chap playing the bagpipes for a good fifteen minutes (Soren is absolutely fascinated by the bagpipes). Suzanne took the kids on a couple of rides. I don’t do rides anymore. They make me car sick and I throw up everywhere. After they were done spinning in circles and otherwise thumbing their noses at vertigo, we found a shady spot hiding a picnic table and enjoyed the traditional fried dough and sausage grinder for lunch. It was, at the time, delicious!

We went home shortly after, and everybody took a nap. When I woke up, I felt like I had an enormous gas bubble up just under my right lung. The pain from it was nagging at first, but grew steadily in intensity until, by suppertime, I would have happily given large sums of money to anyone who could figure out how to get it to go away. I had had such pain before over the last couple of years and antacids usually did the trick, or so I thought.

Not so this time.

In fact, I had taken pretty much everything possible during the course of the afternoon, and all that happened was the pain got worse. It had even spread around to my back and put those muscles into spasm! All I could think about while I was dealing with this was that this must be what women who have back labor feel. It got so bad that I actually threw up from it, completely wasting perfectly good fried dough and a sausage grinder.

I didn’t sleep a whole lot that night. I kept waking up to vomit. The next day the pain lessened to some degree, but anything I tried to do just made it worse. I wanted to eat, but nothing would stay down. Even water proved difficult to take. I thought about going to the doctor that day, but it was Sunday. That meant I would have to go to the emergency room, and I simply couldn’t bear the thought of paying $75 to have someone tell me to take two Pepcid and call him in the morning. That just didn’t seem right to me. So, I put up with it through Sunday and into Monday and went to school. If it had been any other day but the first day of classes, I would probably have called in sick. That first day, though, is just too important to miss unless things are really bad, and I had not convinced myself yet that they were that bad.

I was a doofus.

I’m certain that I must have looked as miserable as I felt, because people kept asking me if I was OK. I told everyone that it must have been food poisoning. That was the only explanation that seemed to make any sense to me. You’ll see how smart I was in just a sec. I was running a fever by the end of the day and, by the time I got home at 5:00, all I could do was lie on the couch. Wifeness asked if maybe I shouldn’t talk to the doctor (she is a wonderful and patient woman, my lovely wife!) and I didn’t resist. By this point, I don’t mind telling you that the pain was simply terrible and incredibly difficult to manage. When the doctor called back an hour later, he immediately suggested that it was my gallbladder and that I should go to the emergency room to have it looked at. It wasn’t until he had said the word “gallbladder” that I had even thought about that as a possibility. Once he said it, though, I knew instantly and instinctively that he was right.

Wifeness put the kids to bed and our friends upstairs kept an ear out for them while she took me to the ER. They ran a number of tests to confirm that it was, in fact, my gallbladder and offered me something for the now debilitating pain I was having. I’m not a big fan of pain medication, but I fairly grabbed it out of the nurse’s hands when they brought it in. I remained in the ER overnight for observation and they admitted me to the hospital the next morning. I had an ultrasound done to determine exactly how bad the situation was, and I’ll tell you the picture scared the hell out of me.

I could see my gallbladder on the screen, waaaay oversized and so full of stones that you couldn’t count them on the monitor. It looked like a bag packed tight with marbles. I found out later that the condition of the organ was even worse than that. By the time they pulled it out, it was completely dead and gangrenous, stretched so thin that it would have burst soon. Like in a matter of hours. The number of stones was estimated by the laboratory afterward at more than 500, with sediment filling up the balance of the space inside the organ such that it blocked off all flow of bilirubin, blood and oxygen (this, they believe, was the cause of the pain I was having initially).

I was in the hospital for 3 days leading up to the actual operation and, during that time, I spent all my energy trying to sleep when I could, and managing the pain in the periods when the one effective drug they could give me would wear off. They could only give the stuff to me every 6 hours, but it was only effective at best for 4 hours and, as time went along, it grew less and less effective. I dealt with it until Wednesday night, but finally I told the nurses that they needed to find something to fill that gap because I wasn’t going to be able to do it on my own.

They tried a variety of other things, including Morphine. Morphine, I now know, does NOTHING for me, except make me sick. Nothing else they gave me at first did any better. Damn me and my intolerance for drugs! To their credit, the nursing staff kept trying to come up with something. I owe them a lot for their efforts! I would not have made it through the night if they hadn’t solved the problem for me. The stuff they eventually found that worked was Dilotid. It’s a narcotic that apparently makes Morphine sound like Bayer aspirin. They gave it to me by IV just as the other stuff was wearing off and, I tell you, the effect was INSTANTANEOUS. I could actually feel the warmth of it spreading through my body and IT FELT GREAT!

They should definitely keep regulating that stuff.

I went down to Springfield Thursday for a test procedure before the actual operation later that day, and by that time I was going septic and approaching delirium. Wifeness said I was nearly incoherent and shaking. All I know is that I was running the same fever of 103.5 since Monday and I had not eaten anything since the now accursed fried dough and sausage grinder. They were very clear that I should have nothing to eat once I was in the hospital. Nothing. No juice or other liquids even. Nothing but ice chips.

Fucking ice chips.

The thing was that, by this time, the ice chips were actually starting to taste good. I was thinking as I was crunching them, “I can almost taste them like food!” It was a very strange experience.

I don’t remember anything after the ambulance ride down to Springfield until I came out of anesthesia after the operation. They drove me back up to Greenfield for that, which was probably best since they were familiar with my situation. The people at Baystate kept wanting to give me Morphine. I’m glad wife was there to tell them that was the wrong thing to do. It was a really hard experience for her, I know, but she was so great! I don’t know how she did it, to be honest.

I stayed in the hospital until that next Monday. I got to eat something liquidy—cream of wheat and tomato soup—on Saturday. That’s nearly 7 days without any solid food. I have fasted before. I have even been sick and unable to eat for several days (that’s another exciting story), but I have never had to go through anything nearly like this before. Cream of wheat had never tasted so good!

I’ve been home about 12 weeks now, and have been back to school since about November. I’m still nowhere near my pre-operation levels of endurance. My classes have been left to survive on their own, though I can’t understand why the kids think this is working for them. I think they were just sick of substitutes and handouts.

This whole thing was all too much excitement for me, but I’ll tell you that I feel so much better, and in so many ways. I lost about 12 lbs immediately as a result of the operation and the fucking ice chips, and the weight has continued to melt off even though I have not been able to do anything active since I came home. Actually, just today I was able to do a little Chi Kung, and it felt great even though it wore me out. There were no complications from the surgery, though the nice 8” scar I sport on my front means I’ll never be able to wear a bikini again. That’s just as well. The shaving was a bitch!

I’ll be a while before I can process this to understand just how harrowing an experience it was. Just think about it: 100 years ago, I’d be dead. Hell, if they hadn’t operated when they did, I’d be dead.

That’s too mind blowing right now.

What does this mean to YOU?

"People want so much. We want to be someone else. 'I want to be stronger.' 'I want to be more directed.' 'I want to be Superwoman.' But it's not possible. You must accept your condition. But 'accept' is active. Who you are is active. Passive acceptance--that's the immobile, inanimate Zen. It's not the Zen I'm talking about. There's passion here. Spirit for the quest. This is important: The sincerity of our quest and how we go about it. It's a long path. Are you prepared? Do you want to walk on this path? Don't think about it too much. Just walk! C'mon, let's go! That's Zen."

Jakusho Kwong, a successor in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, the author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, said this, and it is already among the most precious pearls of wisdom I have ever been given. Not because I want to be someone else but because, through this quote, there is a beauty expressed in it about what it means to become who you are. What do you think?

Listen for the Gong...

The Landmark Community School Foundation has decided to write a formal proposal to lease or buy some of this property.

http://www.nmhschool.org/about/future/docs/Northfield_LV.pdf

The committee in charge of reviewing proposals is evaluating a range of campus reuse scenarios. Their preliminary analysis concluded that the most appropriate use of the campus would be for one or more residential educational institutions. We believe that our project is ideally suited to this property, and we’re committed to presenting a serious and thoughtful proposal to the committee for its consideration.

Some of you may be called upon to help with this process. Listen for the gong.

Anyone who is interested is welcome to be involved. Reply to this post or email me, if you’d like to take part in this exciting project. We’d love to have you involved, in whatever way you feel called to contribute! If you don’t really know, we can certainly match your interest and expertise to what has to be done.

What do you do with 12" of snow?

Well, when you also have a "Snowman in a Box" and two
children who simply MUST go outside,
you get this...





Cute! N'est-ce pas?

Eschew obfuscation in your discourse!

I attended a lecture recently by Michael Silverstein, a distinguished professor of anthropology, linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago, at which he discussed “Culture, Conversation and Creativity”. It was simultaneously the most amusing and the most dreadfully boring event I’ve attended in a long time.

I found it incredibly entertaining to listen to someone speak about the art of conversation for an hour while actually speaking straight-faced in the kind of vernacular one usually encounters in graduate school textbooks, flavoring his fairly trancendental speech by remarking frequently on the humor of Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte and telling jokes about the candidates in the 1984 presidential election. Vatti, my mentor and I, sat in the back row and poked jabs at him the entire time. It was great!

It really reminded me, though, of the vast ineptitude in the actual teaching that goes on in both high school and higher education. I appreciate the incredible experience that people like Michael Silverstein (“that’s SilverSHTEEN!”) bring to the world, but I cannot help but wonder if part of the reason education at all levels struggles to be effective has to do with the inability of teachers to speak to people in language—all kinds of language—that they can understand. Perhaps the distinguished professor knew his audience very well, and used the delivery he did intentionally. My money says he didn’t.

I’ll take that back. I think he probably did what he felt was necessary to maintain the carefully crafted image of a superior academician. At his level of education, after all, image is everything. It’s all about looking and sounding smarter and more superior than the average, because that’s how people spar with each other in his world. They don’t use insults or throw money around. They sling obscure references to past popular culture in the most abstruse and recondite language possible.

I can do that, but I really prefer to do my verbal sparring with television and movie quotes. Did anyone get the obscure movie reference up above? Bonus points to anyone with the answer!

I'm sorry for the delay in my posts...

I have stuff coming very soon. Good things are happening. I just haven't been able to put it all on the site. Keep checking...

Orcs and cheese doodles...

Tomorrow, I begin a three week departure from my regular teaching schedule. Our school has a break between the two semesters we call Paideia. The term is from Greek, and means “from many sources”. We use it as a time for students to engage in activities, projects, research and experiences that they would never have time to do properly during the normal school year, but that are nevertheless incredibly valuable to them. It sort of makes up for the fact that our students are in school from 8:30 until 4:15 every day, and would never have time to do these things because of that.

We have many different things going on during this time, some of it taking place on campus, but much of it away from school as well. There is ballroom dancing. Students go to area elementary schools and work with young kids and help out in classrooms. A group practices making clothes in the costume department workrooms. One of my students is working at a homeless shelter, and will write a paper about her experiences (she wants to work as a counselor for indigent and migrant families). It’s not French or Math or History, but it’s good learning and the students really work hard to make the most of it.

What do I do during this time? I play Dungeons and Dragons®.

Well, let me be clear. I teach roleplaying, medieval history, story creation, plot and character development and game theory. D&D is just the archetype through which I teach them these things. We spend a lot of time talking about and exploring the universe we play in, which is modeled loosely on medieval Europe. We discuss what life was really like then, and the degree to which real life should be part of the story we build together. We playtest different ways to use the D&D rules to make the experience of gaming come alive, and the students learn to evaluate improve their own acting and storytelling skills.

We also kill lots of orcs, goblins and evil wizards, and steal their stuff while consuming copious amounts of cheese doodles and carbonated beverages.

Believe it or not, all this does carry an academic component. The students must either write a paper which discusses some aspect of the things we’ve explored or create their own universe through which they can explore questions and conflict of their own design. It’s heavy stuff, and they jump into it up to their necks. I have one of the most dedicated and interested Paideia groups every year, and they turn out some amazing products during the three weeks we work together.

This year, in addition to everything else, we’re going to explore how to put a game up on the internet and how to use technology to improve the effectiveness of the presentation of roleplaying games. I have recently started posting the game we play at home on the web, and it’s proved to be wonderful for both me as the Dungeon Master and the players. They’ve been asking me to cover this so they can continue to work with their projects after we go back to academic classes.

If only they were so devoted to math and French. Maybe I should offer cheese doodles for those classes, too…

The War for Greatland is in its second book now, and the characters are tasked with nothing less than saving the world. It’s publicly viewable, though the posted version of the game only goes back as far as chapter 2 right now. If you’re interested in following their epic journey CLICK HERE.

Who says I can't teach?!

Last week was, to say the very least, a challenging week, professionally. It is the end of the first semester of a school year which has been confounded by a whole host of problems.

I am tired.

I’ve also been told that, because of the No Child Left Behind Act, I will have to take time out of my life to add to my already full professional life to add to my teaching certification list ALL of the subjects I teach. I’m currently licensed to teach French, but I have also taught Spanish, math, physical education and creative writing classes in the last 3 years. Even though the State of Massachusetts allows me to simply take the subject tests in order to add these licenses to my certification, these tests require time and effort to prepare for. Frankly, I’m not inclined to jump through these hoops simply because someone in Washington believes that I must not be qualified to teach because I don’t have a piece of paper that says so.

I cannot wait to start a school that demonstrates a better way to look at teaching and learning than simply through pieces of paper. That’s not to say that I don’t think there is value to things like certifications and licenses but, at least for teaching as a profession, I cannot help but think they create more problems than they solve.

Maybe that’s just me being bitter.

I’ve had problems trying to obtain a teaching license ever since I earned by B.A. because, according to my transcripts, I have neither enough coursework in a single language to say I know anything about my subject nor enough credits in education courses to suggest I even know how to teach. I deliberately chose a degree in World Languages (not French, not Spanish, not Portuguese, not Italian, not German—all of which I know) because I wanted my time in school to be spent on ALL of them, and I chose to focus on teaching because I wanted to learn how to TEACH. It kills me that *I* would have trouble getting a license when I had more time in supervised practica as part of my B.A. than most people do for their Master’s degrees. All because the paperwork doesn’t read the way someone expects it to.

I’ll probably take the tests eventually, if for no other reason than to tell the establishment it can kiss my ass, but it is not a priority for me. I have bigger, better fish to fry.

Here it comes...

Parent: Go to your room.

4-year old: No.

Parent: I'm sorry. What did you just say to me??!

4-year old: No. I'm not going.

And so it has begun...

I Am Blessed

I’m sitting here on the couch, chilling with my oldest daughter (codename: SiSi), and I’m basking in the wonderfulness of this moment. It has set me to thinking about how I got here, and just how wonderful a journey it has been.

When I consider the path of my life to this point, I cannot help but simultaneously shake my head in amazement at the road I have travelled and smile at my unbelievable fortune. I have seen and done in this life so much and, whether I looked at it as good or bad at the time, I have come away from all my adventures with great knowledge and experience. It has served me very well.

When I think about the now, I am no less impressed. I am allowed to live, with little interference from the universe (and a great deal of protection from same) the modest and contented existence I have chosen. I have been graced with the freedom to create a full life. Certainly, it is a life with challenges, but many are challenges of my design and I am supported in them by an entire universe of allies. I have a family that loves me, honors me and shares with me incalculable joy just by being who they are. I have friends that feed my inspiration and creativity. I have mentors who are not afraid to guide me to be my best self. These things are more valuable to me than any money I will ever make, and I am quite contented to have been tasked in this life to help people explore the essential truth that we are so much more, and so much better, with the right people around us than we are by ourselves.

I look forward with much excitement to the future, and to fulfilling the incredible promise that I have seen for me in this life. Moreover, I look forward to sharing that promise with everyone I can. If you’re reading this blog, keep reading it. This is part of the sharing.

And listen for the gong.

I can handle a lot…

…in the way of sickness and trauma. Blood is easy. Psychological distress I do all right with. Seizures, as I’ve discovered, give me no troubles. Even fecal matter is not terribly disturbing, unless it’s found in my kids’ tubby water (there’s a story about that).

I can NOT do vomit. When my kids throw up, it is all I can do not to spew myself. My wife understands this, and it is most fortunate that she has a stronger stomach for it than I do. At least one of us can take charge when the kids toss their cookies.

My children, unfortunately, are not at an age to understand this and, when they vomit, often do so in my presence.

On the floor.

In bed.

On themselves.

NEVER in the buckets provided to lessen the mess. It makes my whole body weak.

My kids got the flu vaccine yesterday and, apparently, had a reaction to it. They threw up all night last night. It was a rough night for everyone, even for those of us who were not feeling queasy beforehand. My heart goes out to my children. I’m sorry they are not feeling well. This one is ALL on Wifeness to handle.

Call me when they bust their lips.