music: Ray LaMontagne- ‘Till The Sun Turns Black
At the age of 24, I made the decision to enroll in a teacher training program whose goal was to prepare intelligent, qualified, driven adults for a career in teaching in the inner cities of the United States. I thought at the time that this would be my task for the rest of the time I walked the earth as a competent adult, that I was to work in the service of those who needed it most, that I was to play a hand in achieving social equity, that I was to battle ignorance and injustice on the front lines. I dug into the task with pluck and resolve, and emerged battle-weary 12 months later with a small piece of paper saying I was now qualified and prepared to fight such a fight.
I realized quickly that my approach to teaching in public inner city high schools demanded a certain degree of martyrdom from me. In exchange for doing the work necessary to achieve progress on the front lines, I gave up significant parts of myself. David took a backseat to his teacher alter-ego Missa Toss, who ran the show for 10 months out of the year. Missa Toss achieved things during his two years in Boston and received many high compliments from pretty impressive people and places, but it all came with a heavy personal price. David was left with nothing. David found himself being given Friday nights after a full week of Missa Toss hammering and blasting, being hammered and blasted. All David could do for those two years was put his pillow over his head and hide in the darkness until the unconsciousness of sleep took the pain away.
Somehow this was tolerable to me. I justified my own suffering by the thought of my students; how because of the work I’ve done for them they will be given some sliver on an opportunity that I had growing up, that somehow my endless hours and incredible sacrifices would give them that little edge that would help boost them into a position of opportunity in their life. And those students would make it, some of them at least, and they would find ways to achieve certain degrees of power themselves and then throw themselves into changing the system that had beaten me and countless others into acquiescence, a system that was designed in many ways to keep them down, keep them pacified, keep them poor and disadvantaged. This hope is what sustained me through countless weekends lost to grading and planning and worrying, and hundreds of accumulated free hours spent resorting the insides of my own head in quiet and darkness. By all measures, Missa Toss made me miserable and I did nothing to rectify the situation for a very long time.
Halfway through my 27th year, over three years after I pledged myself to the service of urban America’s youth, I sent Missa Toss into early retirement. I turned my back on my job and life in Boston, packed my things, and drove clear across the country. I reflect now that I drove as far away as I could from my life as Missa Toss. I landed in San Francisco, took a job that felt more like a vacation than work, and immediately felt the difference in my own life. I was told by those close to me that I sounded and looked much healthier than I have in years. I indeed felt better than I had in years. David had his life back, and was enjoying the hell out of it. My first year in San Francisco was one of my best years to date.
However, the lesson was not learned and that part of me that allowed for Missa Toss to exist was not yet quiet. Because of financial pressures, job market pressures, pressures of professional obligation, and internal pressure to not give up on such an important cause so easily, I found myself last spring poking and prodding at Missa Toss to see if he was really dead. Through a series of tough decisions and unexpected twists, I ended up taking a teaching job for this fall, fully believing that this time, it would be different. I believed that this time, because I had two years experience and because of some structural and pedagogical differences with the school, I could find a way to compromise Missa Toss’s relentless drive with David’s basic human needs.
I was wrong on all counts. I quickly fell right back into Missa’s old patterns and practices, and realized within days that this would once again be David’s undoing. Once again my physical and mental health suffered, once again I allowed myself to believe that Missa’s fight was worth the personal sacrifice. Once again I was martyring myself. It was someone else, someone who at the time cared more for me than I cared for myself, who had the empathy and love to point out to me how damaging it all was. Only six weeks after starting again, I began to plan my exit. The second attempt was not working, the lesson was not learned the first time, and I was realizing how much I’d tried to deceive myself into believing it would work.
I began to write this in the middle of December, almost two months after I snapped into admitting that my personal health is more important than the battle for America’s urban teenagers, and all the while I, and my relationship with this wonderful person who cares so much about me, are in need of rebuilding.
Just before my winter holiday, I gave notice to my principal that I would be leaving teaching at the end of the semester in January. I spent a great deal of time reading back some of the things I wrote as Missa Toss from years past, and was struck at how much I suffered under Missa’s direction. I spent a good amount of energy thinking about what my life has become, and am not at all satisfied or happy with my current predicament, but have been too intertwined with Missa’s work to do anything about it. Everyone in my proximate life has, to some degree, given up on me because of Missa Toss. I don’t blame them; Missa leaves no time for himself, let alone other people. Missa is unfair to himself and those close to him. Missa has slowly been wearing me down to nothing. It is for these reasons that I have decided to leave teaching, and with it, bury Missa Toss for good.
Tomorrow will be my last day in the classroom. Tomorrow afternoon I will turn in my semester grades, hand over my keys, box up my personal belongings, and turn my back on Missa Toss after four very hard years of much struggle and little progress. I, as an individual human being, am experiencing a strange mixture of emotions, including relief, disappointment, anticipation, and deflation. The price I have been paying for fighting what amounts to most days as a losing battle is not worth it. I am excited to be able to soon get to things that have been waiting in the wings for over four years. I am hopeful to re-establish contact with my friends nearby. I am praying that I can mend my relationship with those I’ve hurt in the interim. But I am also feeling quite defeated, feeling like I’ve failed in my work to a large degree, feeling quite guilty that those that believed in me and counted on me to do this important work are being let down. I think: if someone like me, who is qualified and intelligent and in all ways cut out to do this important work, if I am unwilling to do this, then where does that leave our society? I worry greatly about the future, and about the inequity that exists in our world. I worry greatly about people growing up and not being able to contribute productively and positively to the world. I know, though, that I can’t begin to address these problems if I am myself not an effective person. It’s because of this that I have to leave, however shamefully and reluctantly. I know that I have to find a way to take care of myself first, and then worry about the rest of humanity, and I can’t take care of myself as Missa Toss. If I can’t take care of myself, I surely can’t take care of the kids I’ve promised to serve.
The kids…again I am amazed by them. As I leaf through some of the parting words they left for me, I reflect on how frustrating they are, how needy they are, how immature, bullheaded, volatile, nasty, selfish, irresponsible they are, how needy, scorned, protective, resilient, damaged they are, and in the end how compassionate, thoughtful, empathetic, supportive they are of their teacher. For all their setbacks, struggles, and faults the kids I taught are good people. And in the end, that’s all I want for them: to be good people.
So this is Missa’s requiem. He is slipping quietly into obscurity, with very little fanfare or ceremony. He is not finishing what he has begun. He is admitting defeat at the hands of the system he worked so hard to serve, not able to cope with the crush of humanity that passes through his life at school every day. He is leaving me worn out, defeated, underfed, underslept, and depressed. But I am still here, ready to start rebuilding my own life, excited about the infinite possibilities and directions I might take, anxious about what the next short while will look like for David. With Missa Toss out of the way I will able to find the time to take care of myself, and by extension, those other things and people I care about.
This time of year carries with it the most darkness, but also the knowledge that light is ahead. It has been gray and raining all week, but there is hope for sunshine in the near future. I have been crying most of this week, but I am keeping faith that the struggle now will ultimately point towards healing. I reflect on some of the moments in my life when I knew that afterwards everything would be different — my last days at camp, my last weeks of college, my final visits with my grandmother before she died — and I know that this week carries equal gravity. By the end of tomorrow it will be done. Missa Toss is dead; long live David. The future is wide open, brimming with possibilities, and for the first time in years I’m excited for it to come.
music: Radiohead- Amnesiac
Was I kidding myself when I thought this time would be that different?
I’m at the end of week 4 of teaching, 1/9 done, for those keeping track at home, and David’s already surrendered significant amounts of himself to Missa Toss. There’s been a struggle, clearly there’s been a struggle. After a year off I’m having to relearn some tough lessons and in some ways am experiencing symptoms of a first-year teacher. Beyond that, though, I’m putting in 60+ hours a week again, forefeiting my Sundays again, noticing other aspects of my life slowly cracking and deteriorating again. I’ve been asked if I’m doing okay more times than I should have been asked in the past month, and those close to me have expressed worry and concern more than they had up until last August. My eating habits and sleeping habits are taking a turn South. The general answer, the honest answer, is that right now I’m exhausted and I’m not having fun.
In some ways, though, I’m still doing better than Missa Toss in Boston. I manage to squeak out two or three weeknights to do something I want to do. I manage Friday evening and all of Saturday for myself. But as before, Missa Toss has the rest. Those who know me know that nobody is harder on me than me, and that I can bend very, very far before breaking. While these qualities may be the secret to certain successes I’ve had, they are also my potential undoing, my classical hubris. I’m reminded of Gaiman’s Sandman again, whose stubborn adherence to his own set of rules on how to conduct oneself led to his undoing. Even though I’m in the thick of it I can see the writing on the wall, and I know I have to proceed with caution. Striking a balance of all that is important to me is proving to be a very difficult thing.
Last year, my first year in San Francisco, was one of the best years on record for me. This year, Missa Toss is back on the scene, and David is suffering because of it. I shouldn’t be shocked or surprised. At some point I have to wonder if all this work, energy, mental and emotional exertion, physical expenditure is worth it. I can’t say from where I am, 4 weeks into a school year, whether it is, but I know that in many cases my work is resulting in kids’ wheels being spun in the sand. Skills are remedial, surprisingly so, and progress (if any) is infinitesimal. Meanwhile, I pay a dear price. At what point do I value my own life over the lives of 110-odd teenagers? At what point do I say to myself that my own time and energy is better spent on my life than theirs? I have already given up three years in my mid-20’s to the teenagers of Boston; was I kidding myself in thinking that the situation in San Francisco would be that different?
music: Miles Davis- Kind of Blue
In June of 2006, Missa Toss hung ‘em up. Two hard years as a schoolteacher in Boston Public Schools was about all he had in him. David left Missa Toss be, and drove clear across the country. By himself. Now it’s the end of August in 2007, about 14 or so months after MIssa Toss said goodbye, and he realizes that it wasn’t goodbye after all. Tomorrow Missa Toss rises from the ashes and takes on a new school, a new city, a new group of kids, a new set of challenges. Missa be mad forcin’ it.
I myself am surprised at my decision making here. To be absolutely and perfectly clear, I am quite excited to be getting back into the classroom. There are so many good things to be said about teaching high school that I often take them all for granted. But there are also enormous challenges, herculean struggles, impossibly high mountains to climb. Teaching takes its toll on all fronts, especially the more sensitive, personal fronts. And after this past amazing year of movement and growth, after many who have been close to me as Missa Toss have said that I look and feel and act measurably better than I did when I was teaching, going back into it can seem like completely lunacy. Maybe it is.
Last March, when I realized that my current gig as a Naturalist in the Marin Headlands was not sustainable nor personally challenging to the extent I needed it to be, I began to consider other professional options. Resumes were e-splattered all over the Bay Area (because one thing is for sure: I’m nowhere near done here), and of the 30-odd probes into sectors ranging from education to nonprofit to consulting, not even a second look from any institution outside high schools. It’s like that in a city like San Francisco, I suppose, with thousands upon thousands of overeducated, overqualified, upwardly mobile young people all vying for the same 15 jobs on Craigslist. This significant reality check crystallized certain sentiments, though, namely that teaching (and more specifically public urban high school teaching) is what I’ve been trained to do more than anything else, it’s something I’ve been told I’m good at, and more importantly, it’s something I enjoy. That the David on paper could only appeal to that for which his resume was groomed made things much simpler and much more clear. And so by no large surprise, I’m back to exactly where I started.
But Missa Toss has come out of retirement to entirely different circumstances. The school I’m in now is a drastically different place: much more progressive in terms of pedagogy, much more collaborative, much more young, energetic, motivated, intelligent. Instead of planning for ten classes a week from scratch on my own, I am co-planning for three classes a week and working from precedent. Instead of traditional drill-and-kill tactics, I’m encouraged to think creatively about assessment and demonstration of understanding. I’ve been in PD for the past three weeks, and for the first time I feel like I’m being treated like a professional. All this, of course, is the backdrop to the real work that hasn’t even started yet. When 8:00 hits tomorrow morning and the kids are in their seats, expectant and restless, everything changes. No doubt it will be hard work. No doubt I will sweat, bleed, and cry over these kids like I did the last group in Boston. But given the perspective gained from a year away and the years I have under my belt already, I think I’ll manage much better. Beyond the job, I’m in a much more healthy place mentally, socially, and physically and I’m quite sure that I will spend far fewer weekend nights staring at the insides of my room by myself.
I’m apprehensive. That much is certain. I’m determined to put David ahead of MIssa Toss this time around, but I also know how David and Missa Toss have this tendency to work themselves into the ground for the things in which they believe. There will be some serious adjustment, and some long hours, and some days where there is nothing I’ll be able to do but come home and faceplant into my pillows. But I’m also expecting moments of exhiliration, transcendence even. Missa Toss is much more grounded, sure of what he’s able to do and how he’s going to do it, and because of this new context is all fired up. There will be time enough for all that in the coming months, but for now it’s time to get horizontal. It’s a school night, after all.
music: Miles Davis- ‘Round About Midnight
I don’t own much stuff by American standards. Besides a couple boxes and drawers full of old relics in Milwaukee, my bicycle and car, and a few assorted odds and ends, I can fit all my worldly possessions into a 9’ × 12’ bedroom. I think that’s pretty cool, as I sit in my room surrounded by pretty much everything I own. I’m rolling on a backpacker’s mentality: only carry what you need (or really, really value) and be sure to use everything you carry. I may not have that much stuff, but the stuff I have is pretty important to me. I rely on it a great deal, count on it being in working order.
I’ve recently been making efforts to take more ownership of the things I own. If at all possible I’d rather fix or build stuff on my own than take it to specialists. Part of this is simple economics. Living where I do and having the job I have doesn’t leave a lot of spare change in my pockets. The other part of this is more ideological. I’m not a big believer in leaving things on the shelf and letting them collect dust if they are meant to be used. My camping gear is worn and patched and grimy at this point (except my whisperlite stove, which is a replacement for the old and grimy one sitting somewhere in a TSA warehouse in Honolulu. Thanks for keeping us safe, guys), but I know I can rely on it because I’ve used the stuff enough times in all sorts of dramatic conditions to know it inside out. I started in on my car under Ron’s tutelage last spring. I’ve been doing my bike for a while. My bed, while creaky, is homemade. Even many of my books are all marked up with notes in the margins. All this has been coming to a head as of late, when some very important material items have been on the outs as far as proper functioning is concerned.
Sometimes we don’t have the tools necessary to do a job properly. This goes for physical tools as well as mental know-how tools. One of the things I use the most and value even more, and the one thing I’ve been afraid to work on is my guitar rig. I’m only a novice when it comes to wiring and electrical work, and only a little beyond that when it comes to woodwork.
After about a year and 3100 miles on the road, though, my guitar needed a setup. This is a mysterious ordeal to many guitarists, even the ones who give a damn about their instruments, where a technician or luthier somehow realigns the guitar to optimal playing specifications. It’s like taking your car to the shop for its 30,000 mile checkup: you aren’t completely sure what has transpired between this skilled technician and your stuff, but you get it back and you can feel the difference. I couldn’t help but think, though, that something was amiss when someone says “oh, well, your neck is out of relief and i’m gonna have to go ahead and get in there and adjust your truss rod. No, no, it’s not dangerous to the instrument but it’s a bit expensive in terms of labor, might have to charge you fifty for it.” Sounds legit, but a quick internet search will reveal that a truss rod adjustment takes no more than two minutes and is as easy as giving an allen wrench a 1/4 turn in the right direction. That someone would charge $50 for this is completely stupid. So instead of dropping off my guitar with some stranger to undergo this magical process of getting set up, I found a excellent guy named Chris on Craigslist who not only does a setup on your instrument, but also teaches you how to do the setup while you sit there. And the whole thing costs $50. Amazing turnaround time, quality work, and more valuable still, a little lesson in self-empowerment. Way cool. I was feeling so empowered that I decided to install strap locks on my Gibson this past weekend, complete with taking an electric drill to its beautifully finished wooden body. There were tense moments, downright harrowing moments for that matter, but by day’s end two small holes were drilled in exactly the right spot, the strap locks were installed, and my guitar became less of a showroom item and more of another tool that I may use in order to make music. (I say that, of course, because I took a big divot out of the back trying to get a stripped screw out of the thing.)
Two weeks ago, my mp3 player finally gave up the ghost. I use that thing almost on a daily basis, and not just for consumption of music. I use it as a portable hard drive, a medium through which I can disseminate my own music, as well as a music player. The kicker is that it was the second one to go in as many months, as the display on my trusty nomad jukebox 3 finally blinked off. As I use my mp3 players for high quality digital recording (production, not just consumption!!) my options were pretty limited as far as what I could go for. Ebay came through: I ended up getting an identical iRiver h120 to the one I had previously. And between the old and new ones, I managed to cobble together a bigger, better iRiver than I had even before, plus I saved the time and headache of transferring all the music onto my new iRiver by just popping the hard drive out of the old one and putting it into the new one. All this, of course, requires that one be willing to open the thing up and tinker a bit. Thanks to “misticriver.net” I was able to stumble through the process with very little difficulty. Add rockbox to the equation and I have ways of customizing a lot on the software end. (And as an aside to any mp3 player user, including iPod users: rockbox is amazing. Look into putting it onto your music player if you can. You’ll be very, very glad for it.)
I employed the same ethic towards truing my rear bike wheel a couple months back. I managed to get it fairly straight, but realized that some spokes were wrenched very tight and others not at all. That all caught up with me this week when I popped two spokes on my back wheel and completely taco’ed the thing. That one, given the tools at hand, was beyond my capabilities and I had to bite the bullet and buy a new wheel. I’ll be giving my bike an overhaul some time soon when I have a minute, adjusting the breaks to be a little tighter on the new rim.
Lesson learned, though: if you’re going to do a job yourself, you need the proper tools. The actual physical tools you use are important, but more than that is the knowledge of what to do with them. Thanks to resources like Chris up in Petaluma, I’m able to take more ownership of the few important things I own. Too often we Americans outsource the care and feeding of all that is important to us, so much so that we lose the ability to deal with it all personally. It gets harder to personally deal with all your stuff in this manner as the amount of stuff you have increases, but it’s very much worth it. Or else, as the line goes, the things you own end up owning you. This sort of education began in earnest at Chowdahaus in Boston, and continues in full force to the present moment. The battle against entropy continues, but not without some of the necessary tools. As always, gettin’ there.
music: Something for Rockets- Something for Rockets
The dust has finally settled. I’m squarely entrenched in a quasi-normal living situation that falls squarely within the parameters of 21st century American social norms. Despite the various ideations and fantasies that have floated through my mind in the past four months, I’m not backpacking the Far East or South America, hiking a seriously long trail (as if the HST-JMT stroll were a short one…), squatting in converted warehouses or industrial buildings, or anything else that deviates too far from what is good and reasonable. No, despite the infinite possibilities, despite the steps I carefully took to ensure that I could really truly honestly do whatever I wanted, I played it safe. I’m now paying rent, receiving mail at a regular street address, buying groceries, paying bills. I have a job, I receive health and dental benefits, I own furniture. I am conscious of my allotment of daytime minutes on my telephone and the number of miles until I need to change the oil in my car. I do my dishes. I separate recycling from food waste from other trash. I am located in a major metropolitan area, with coffee shops, bars, and various commercial chain stores within walking distance. There is a steady stream of email coming into and out of my computer. I have picked up, moved, and unpacked, and in the resetting of my life 3,100 miles to the West I have, more or less, held to the same basic operating rules and assumptions I left behind. And now that the dust has settled, and I am able to survey the foundations I’ve laid here in San Francisco, I realize I’ve played it safe.
I’m sure that from some people’s viewpoint driving alone across the country with all your worldly posessions packed into a Toyota Camry is an enormous leap away from playing it safe. To me it was standard operating procedure. If anything, it was an appetizer, a small taste of what could be. If there ever were a time in my life to stray from societal norms it would be now: I am young, independent, unencumbered, relatively free of responsibilities, have a bit of money saved up…and look what I’ve gone and done. Got a job, a lease (albeit month-to-month), bills to pay, the whole domestic bit. And two weeks ago, once the dust began to settle in earnest, I started to think about going back to school.
Applying to grad school can be a full-time job, and I began to realze that applying to Ph.D. programs would prove much more involved, more intense, more specific and delicate than applying for a Masters was. It would be a minimum of four years, would involve a stipend in exchange for teaching undergraduates or assisting with research, it would culminate in my designing and conducting original reseach and scholarly work, contributing real and unique knowledge to the world. It would be an enormous commitment, as well as an enormous encumberence. Doctoral work and instruction at the post-secondary level is something that I want to do at some point in my life, but over the past couple days I realized that right now is not the time for it. I have always behaved well within the bounds of normal and expected action. I have played society’s game, and by most measures I have played it well: respectable colleges, well-paying jobs, a sparkling credit history, and the like. I have had a vague-yet-concrete roadmap of the likely path my life would take, born and cultivated in the suburbs of the Midwest and tempered in the intellectual soil of the Northeast, but there always has been an undercurrent of dissent, an interest in alternative living situations, a fascination with falling off the grid for a little bit.
After taking a small step in that direction this summer, and a small step back from that direction so far this fall, I have come to realize that jumping back into graduate study right now would be a step away from the momentum I’ve been building since rolling out of Boston and walking through the Sierras for a month. That I have resettled in a big city and almost immediately resumed paying rent and seeking employment is enough. I’ve taken an enormous pay cut for the sake of extra free time (and opportunities to spend my days outside in a National Park!) and pay about $500 per month more in rent than I have to in order to have access to certain opportunities. There are reasons why I have chosen to do what I have done, however passive and automatic, but now, more than ever, I’m fighting not only to maintain a philosophy of freedom but also practice freedom. Now, if ever in my life, is the time for it. And because of this I made the decison today as I was driving back from Los Angeles not to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2007.
There are more practical, mundane, concrete reasons. One, my GRE scores could use a boost. Two, the deadline for applications is in three weeks and I don’t know if I could reasonably get my letters of recommendation back in time. Three, I haven’t adequately researched programs and, more importantly, professors whose research aligns with my interest. Four, on an even broader scale, I haven’t narrowed down exactly what I would want to study and make my profession for the rest of my academic life (potentially the rest of my natural life). I know generally which fields of study I want to dip into, and know that I want my doctoral work (and all work for that matter) to have real-life impact and application, but until I can succinctly state what it is I want to study and how I believe it can impact the world-at-large, I have little reason to apply to doctoral programs. This all began to creep out some time last week when I sat down in front of my computer and began to draft a generic Statement of Purpose.
The Statement of Purpose is perhaps the most personal part of the Graduate School application, and the hardest piece to include. Graduate study is not something you jump at uncertainly in the same way you do when you apply for college out of high school. In applying for my masters, I had to narrowly focus my interest and intents, and as I started to try to piece together a Statement of Purpose for doctoral work, I found that I could not do it. An outright statement of your intentions, desires, goals, and aspirations as a potential doctoral student is a very hard thing to do preemptively. It should demonstrate commitment, interest, tenacity intellectual prowess, and reflect one’s willingness to work very, very, very hard. I realized quickly that I could not claim to possess all of these qualities at the present moment, perhaps because I just removed myself from a professional situation in which many of these qualities were demanded of me in such high quantity that I was drained of them by last June.
So instead of writing a Statement of Purpose that I would submit to graduate schools, I instead find it much more appropriate at the present time to make a simple statement of purpose here and now. And here it is:
I want do do everything I can. And since I’ve focused so much on the intellectual for as far back as I can remember, I want to do something else for a while.
Formal academics funnel you into tighter and tighter spirals; as you move on in school, your field of study gets narrower and narrower. And this is not the direction I need to be moving right now. One of the hardest things about growing up was having to make choices about what I would study, what I would do with myself, because with each decision made there is also avenues not taken, opportunities lost, doors closed. I am very glad to have studied psychology and education, to have taught high school and done biological and psychological research, to have worked in outdoor education. It may turn out that I do some or all of these things again. But I would have also liked to seriously indulge in other fields: music, engineering, river guiding, creative writing, political philosophy, computer science, ecology, exploration, cultural anthropology, carpentry, ethnomusicology…
I still want to do it all. I still have not given into the idea that life is finite and time is limited and that I won’t ever accomplish everything I would like to accomplish. Like Siddhartha(novel) I believe we are necessarily bound to different sorts of experience on the path towards enlightenment: the intellectual realm is only one of many. With the exception of two turbulent years following college, I have been in school for my entire life. So instead of committing to the highest form of intellectual training I could imagine, I instead want to take the near future and do other things. I want to make music, begin to compose more, study jazz theory and push my guitar playing to the next level. I want to hike, meander and saunder through some of the most fantastic natural beauty available to humankind while it is still natural and beautiful. I want to spend time in the ocean I live so close to now, perhaps take up surfing or windsurfing or diving. I want to put more energy into my relationships with others. I want to open myself to possibilities, to not define myself by my job or my formal education. I want to struggle in new and exciting way such that I may progress in new and exciting ways. This involves certain risks, certain deviations from the roadmap I’ve supposedly internalized. This may upset certain sensibilities or value systems in certain people, but it’s not their life I’m living. This is Thoreau finally succeeding. This is the practice of freedom. For what it’s worth, I’m going to let the application deadline for graduate school come and go, opt out of the expected and known, risk a little, and give it my all to try to not let the dust settle on my life too much.
music: Cat Stevens- Cat ‘71-‘75
For the past two years the most important people in my life have been a collection of teenagers. They have, without question, been the recipients of the vast majority of my energy, thought, and time. This has hardly been advertised or mentioned to them and has been largely transparent to the whole stinking lot of them, but it’s nevertheless true. I have put more face time in with them than anyone else. I’ve spent more time thinking about them and talking with them than my own family and friends. I’ve probably received more phone calls from them as a group than everyone else in my life over the past year. I threw everything I had into teaching these teenagers for the past two years, gave so much that I often had nothing left for myself.
They take a lot out of me, suck the soul clean out of me some days, those teenagers. What limited energy I have for social interactions are largely used up after a full day with them. The halls of my workplace are filled with them, teenagers by the dozens, screaming at me and at each other, chasing, singing, wrestling, crying, ganging up, laughing, gossiping, finding excuses, sitting, sleeping, breathing heavily. The unbearable crush of adolescence has been my reality for the past two years. There have been days where I’ve come home and wished the whole thing away because it was just too much to process. Almost every Sunday during the school year, parked in front of a blue binder full of lesson plans and piles of textbooks, I’ve wished I picked something different to do with my time. For the past two years, I have served a collection of teenagers living in the city of Boston, and to be honest I haven’t always been happy about it or because of it.
That all came to an end today. Today was the last day of classes for the school year, and the last official day that I was obligated to teach Boston’s teenagers. And today, on the last day of the school year, I told what students had the motivation to still come to class that I was done. Packing it up, driving West, headed for parts unknown. Despite being the most important people in my life, they were the last to know of my plans that have been hatching in earnest since last August. I’ve known for some time that this would be my last year in Boston, but the news came as a great shock to a lot of them. In true teenager fashion some were indifferent, some angry, some sad, some relieved. And me, outwardly composed, quickly became a blubbering, gelatinous mess as the day wore on and as I told more and more of these human beings that I would be leaving them, moving thousands of miles away, probably never to see them again.
To be fair, the collection of teenagers I taught was the primary reasons why I have remained in Boston for the past two years. In the fall of 2004 it was all anticipation and idealism and curiosity, but now, two very full years later, the story is different. Missa Toss has found his voice and his niche, has established some pretty positive relationships with these teenagers, and by all rights has done some good things as far as schoolling goes. Missa Toss has invested an incredible amount of time, talent, and personal will in eighty-odd young lives, largely to the expense of his own.
I’d like to convienently separate Missa Toss from David but now, at the end of things, I realize that I can’t quite do that. My day-at-the-office has followed me home on a daily basis for the past two years and has irrevocably changed me, probably in ways I don’t yet realize. I’m still struggling to find the words to convey my experience to those teenagers that had the ultimate part in making it what it was, even after I’ll have the opportunity to tell them to their face. As it was with most school days, and despite the weighty news, today’s classes ended with very little fanfare or ceremony. I said some things, wrote on the board for a bit, teenagers awkwardly shuffled out of the room, I awkwardly waved goodbye, and that was that. Missa Toss’s work is done. I am completely deflated.
Tonight was a payoff of sorts-a collection of thirty-odd teenagers from the school in which I taught donned navy blue gowns, traditional mortarboard hats, and walked across the stage to receive diplomas. I had the fortune of working for twenty or so of the graduates this year, and as the school formally sent them out into the world I couldn’t help but quietly celebrate what small part I played in the process. No doubt I’m a minor character playing a bit part in the cinematic sweep of their lives, but looking through the other end of the camera, backwards and inside, the ups and downs of this group of teenagers has defined most of my time for the past two years. The ceremony itself was a perfect representation and celebration of our experiences together: unrehearsed, somewhat awkward, heartfelt, honest, distinctly human. I used to send kids away from camp with much of the same feeling, but this time around, possibly because it was the last time around, things swung into clear and significant focus. Now I can only hope that the time I had with these now high school graduates was spent well, that they all carry even a little bit of whatever message I may have imparted, and that whatever that message will become is something positive. That’s all that can be done at this point. I ducked out of the post-ceremony hobnobbing a little early, unable to confront the crush of humanity at such a late hour. I witnessed students of mine celebrating the first high school graduation of their family, students hugging and clinging to each other knowing full well that everything would change between them after this, students whooping and shouting, students with bleary eyes posing for pictures, students tucking their gown neaty over one arm and walking to the subway alone.
It’s enough to twist your heart clean out of your body and squeeze it until it bursts.
These teenagers, at the end of the day, are very real humans of the highest order, humans with whom I spent much of my time for the past two years. Humans who struggled and progressed, and in doing so enriched my life with struggle and progress. I’ve voluntarily taken the honor of working with such exceptional human beings away from myself, and for the time being I’m going to leave Missa Toss be. He needs to rest. But that doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier.
There are some odds and ends to take care of, logistics to work through, exams to grade, desks to clean out, posters to take down, and grades to submit. But for all intents and purposes, I’m done. I’ve given the past two years of my life to the youth of Boston, and despite the difficulties I encountered I’m very glad I did it. Those teenagers…those teenagers. They are sometimes infuriating. They sometimes have the world working against them. They sometimes have suffered more than any person should, they could always have worked harder. They are worth every second.
This one’s for you, should some of you happen to read this. To Angelica, Jamie, Cameron, Marvin, Neptopha, Michael, Stanley, Mary, Anna, Chris, Asiya, Nateia, Sid Marie, Kenny, Corey, Marcus C, Derick, Oliver, John, Dejon, Ariana, Matt, Asadullah, Irakli, Malena, Susie, Marcus W, Julie, Nykole, Jevon, Kimmy, Cassandra, Justin, Sean, Mick, Octavia, Qing, Charles, Enka, Christine, Shanay, Lena, Kristen, Camille, Kelly, (and to my seniors) Vanessa, Janei, Frederick, Bukky, Erica, Jenna, Manny, Danielle, Keshav, Taisha, Monique, Ashley, Michael, Tella, Galicia, Aleyda, Nkenge, Matt, Andrew, Jason, Angela, and to those of you who didn’t make it to the end: my undying thanks and appreciation. It has been an honor working for you. You will be missed. You will not soon be forgotten. Without knowing it, for the past two years you have been the most important people in my life.
music: Top Shelf- 12/3/2005, Boston, MA
Five years ago this week I woke up, packed all my worldly possessions into a U-Haul truck, and drove them from a barn-like yellow house on 276 George Street in Providence, RI to a funny-smelling yellow house in Jamaica Plain, MA. When I finally returned the U-Haul truck and that monumental day had ended, I can remember siting on the couch-come-cat scratch post in JP in complete stupifying shock. College had ended. The total distance spanned that day was probably less than 50 miles, but in more personal terms, that drive from Providence to Boston was an ocean crossing into a new and unfamiliar continent. Before the final semester of my senior year of college, I’d never really given much thought to what came after. Five years completely removed from such a rich personal pantheon, I realize that I’ve been subsisting on that strange new continent called adulthood long enough to stake a claim to it. This weekend marked the completion of my fifth year of life after college. And to commemorate such a herculean act of survival: an honorable invitation from the old homestead to come back and celebrate the passage of time with old friends.
Because of the manner in which things ended for most of the class of 2001, things were very open-ended. There were very few acknowledgements amongst the faithful of how the events of late May, 2001 would mark a very significant end to the what will prove to be one of the best experiences of our lives. There would, of course, be no going home again, because home was not as much a collection of buildings on campus as it was the collection of people who worked and learned and slept in those buildings. To have a critical mass of those people in that place once again was positive beyond all imagining. There were friends who I haven’t seen since our own graduation, people I’d largely taken for granted during our time in college, and having so many of them reunited in one place was a testament to what we had, as well as a reminder to me that I am a very lucky person to be able to contribute to that environment. I have never experienced so many inspiring and amazing people in such close proximity as I did in college.
This from my notebook on Satruday afternoon:We intersect with others’ lives and often take the time we share with them for granted. Being back here is a blast in the face of how much we share with others and how quicky and completely it can slip away. I’m sitting on Brown’s Main Green right now, on a bench next to Sayles Hall, looking at the graduation stage. Alumni of all ages and experiences walk past me, each reminded in their own way of a time they shared with others here and those experiences and people that defined four of the most incredible years of their lives. I miss what I had here now that I’m back in it, immersed in it. I’ve almost forgotten, and it is supremely bittersweet. Beautiful because of right now, this moment, this weekend; sad that the once brilliant intersection of my life with college has passed.
In a very palpable way this revisiting of the place that was my world, for better worse, allows me to let go of it a little more. Seeing this place, knowing that I can still look in from the outside (and that I really can only look in from the outside) and more importantly realizing that I still can connect with those who have left with me gives me some sense of finality. Brown was the reason why I moved East. This is the beginning of the end of my time here.
One of the highlights of commencement weekend is a highly ritualized and traditional procession that seniors, alumni, and faculty participate in. The procession inverts at one point as to allow you to acknowledge and applaud everybody else that is walking. It is an incredibly meaningful occassion, and above all else ties you into a very disperse-yet-strong community. For most of us seeing the head of the procession lead by what remains of the classes from the early 1900’s is an incredibly moving experience. Alumni are always welcome to participate in the procession, although it is only usually done when your class has a significant reunion anniversary. This year, despite the best of intentions, I did not walk. In its place I hauled to Middletown, CT to witness my younger sister participate in her commencement exercises. It was a beautiful and sympbolically appropriate way to wrap up the weekend to witness one of my family in exactly the same place I was five years ago: saying goodbye to a blissful world and expecting great things from the next, on the brink of a voyage to some unexplored continent. Reunions are for celebrating what was, and for that they are amazing and beautiful, but without starting something new from a weekend of reunion something is lost. Commencement is, after all, a beginning. For my sister, there definitely is a new beginning. And after 5 years of life out of college, perhaps there is one for me as well.
music: Paul Simon- Surprise
The past two weeks at school have been a torrent that surpassed even the biblical rains washing Boston clean of an unnatural winter. Things are picking up steam in preparation for the end of the school year, but most of the recent crunch has been due to my workload redoubling. The student teacher that I have had the fortune of working with this year finished her practicum, leaving me with the work that, in the end, is why the city of Boston pays me the big bucks.
I’ve never heard of a second-year teacher taking a student teacher. At first when I was asked if I would serve as a mentor teacher I declined because I was worried that I would have nothing to offer anyone as a mentor. I am still stumbling through the finer points of this profession, still splashing around just enough to keep my head above water most days. But I was asked again, and agreed. Don’t think of it as mentoring, I was told, think of it as co-teaching. Whatever. On the simplest level I was thankful to have someone in the building to talk with about curriculum. That was last summer, when this school year was largely theoretical.
The first semester of an internship is somewhat excruciating in that there is a lot of observing and note-taking and not a lot of front-of-room action. It’s difficult to be forced to crawl when you’re ready to walk. It was only two years ago that I was the one taking notes in the back of the room, getting restless, waiting to log enough observation hours to be allowed to actually do something. But now I was the one being watched, I was the subject of the observations and notes, and the target of all sorts of meta-reflective questions about pedagogy, grading systems, behavior management plans, and the like. I found something incredible in being a mentor here: in forcing me to be explicit about my decisions, thoughts, and resultant actions, it was actually helping me do a better job. Mentoring became less a matter of me disseminating the answers, and more a matter of me prompting the right questions. I believe that teaching is less about forcing conformity and more about fostering mental freedom, and as such of course mentoring another educator-to-be would not be about creating a clone of Missa Toss. So much of what comes out in the classroom is rooted in personality and style, and it’s ridiculous to try to bend someone to mimic my quirkiness. Instead, it’s better to guide another to find and embrace their own quirkiness, while helping them through some of the trickier obstacles in their formative months as educators.
Darwin teaches us how information is transmitted and refined over aeons by processes of biological evolution. Genes are effective in their mission, but they require a scope that tries any mortal’s patience and lifespan. Instead, Dawkins proposes, that cultural artifacts are subject to many of the same laws governing biological evolution, but with one significant difference: cultural evolution occurs at a greatly accellerated rate, and between people who are not biologically realted. And if you are the one who does the transmitting of information, you send a small piece of you with the information. If Darwin says you live on through your children, Dawkins would extend that to your students. And student teachers.
At camp we had a saying: the counselor from whom you learned the most as a leadership trainee was the one that “made” you. It was a big thing to have an LT acknowledge that you “made” them. Here was cultural evolution at its grandest, and at its most flattering. Last week I attended a congratulatory reception for this year’s batch of student teachers, and for a brief moment found myself in the company of my just-graduated student teacher on one side and my own mentor teacher from two years previous on the other. I think that in any line of work there is a cultural bloodline, but it is especially pronounced when you are in the business of promoting self-actualization. So now I’ve been apprentice, and I have taken an apprentice. It was not always smooth or easy, but in the end everything came together. The process of education has come full circle, and now I’m beginning to fully understand that beautifully paradoxical term “student teacher.”. I think my student teacher and I both benefitted incredibly this year. Now that her time with me is over, I am reeling. From the newly inherited workload, yes, but also from the somewhat knowledge that I’ve added my own link to the intellectual chain. And that’s really what this whole teaching business is all about.
music: teenagers screaming in the hallway
So I have my arms full of books and papers and a mug of tea and i’m struggling to open the door. One of my students asks if I need any help. I issue a stock reply: “no, I can get it.” I’m thinking about something else. Meanwhile I still haven’t opened the door.
She looks at me, rolls her eyes. “Mister, why don’t you ever let anybody help you?”
Um.
I mean.
There are a million reasons that I give myself for choosing to live the way I do, and I believe strongly in most of those reasons. But she’s undeniably right.
These kids…honestly. Someone has to call me out; funny that it’s the people I work for.
music: Fruit Bats- Spelled in Bones
It’s been about a year since Volker pronounced Missa Toss his hero for turning a chicken wing dissection for biology class into a meal. It’s an idea excellent in concept, but harder to really get into in execution. As roommates then would attest, things did not work out all that well stir-fry wise. This year, with the same activity on the horizon, Missa Toss came up with some improvements to the procedure. Today the plan was executed, and by all accounts it was a success.
The biggest change was to pre-cook all the chicken wings before giving them to kids for dissection. This made it easier to peel the meat off the bones, as well as ensured that everything was safe for eating. Then, instead of bringing the meat home and making dinner for my roommates I brought some veggies and a wok into class, borrowed a hot plate from the physics teacher, and did the stir-frying right in class. I went Mexican this time, adding some lime, jalapeno, cilantro, and garlic to the chicken, onions, and peppers. All that was needed after that were tortillas, cheese, and salsa. Easier than cooking dinner for 6 at Chowdahaus. Today biology students did a dissection, saw that everything in nature gets recycled, and got a lunch out of it.
Some teachers even popped by for food once they smelled it, and quite enjoyed their fajitas. I didn’t tell them that their lunch was made from the remnants of a dissection.
There were some ugly moments in there, mostly due to other kids trying to push their way into scoring a free lunch. Who can blame them? Many are forced to eat school lunch every day, which my principal (who has been in Boston Public Schools for over 35 years) says is the worst he’s had. It reminded me that food is really the source of interpersonal capital and the root of a society’s power structure, as well as being an amazing motivator. But to use food as a reward, especially for kids who are signed up for free school lunch, is highly unethical.
The difference between General Tso’s Dissection of last year and Fajitas Con Pollo De Dissection this year is a pretty good gague of how I’m doing this year as compared to last. In Biology at least. The Behavioral Science classes, while exhilirating, are an enormous challenge. It’s incredibly hard to build a curriculum from the ground up, and I find that I’m losing sight of the bigger picture for the sake of what has to get done for tomorrow. The kids are struggling as well, although I suspect that it’s mostly because they thought they could get away with talking about their feelings for a year. Now that they realize they have to learn some genetics and neuroanatomy they are balking; three dropped the class just this week. No matter. Those that remain will benefit greatly, and in ways that extend beyond grade point averages (which might not be that great…). Teaching, I realize, is a lot like cooking. With appropriate amounts of recipe and improvisation you can turn the waste products of a mundane activity into a nourishing meal.
music: Biosphere Sessions - 9/28/2005
I spend a lot of time thinking about improvisation, which is funny because I’m a planner at heart. It’s also funny because improvisation, by definition, is something you don’t think about beforehand. I think I’m attracted to the idea of improvisation because it is a creative act that in many ways rattles the cage of order, safety, and composition, and is a reaction against constraining structures.
When you improvise, you take risks. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t, but when things do click it is complete ecstasy. The more you improvise the more you can get things to work out in some way, but the more you need to keep pushing back the boundaries of your comfort zone.
My own musical endeavours over the past month or so have exploded with improvisation. We’ve been rocking the Biosphere since February, and over the past couple sessions I’ve been able to say to myself that we sound like a band who has played together for a bit and sounds tight, even in our improvisations. We are falling into musical pockets that, as they say in the field, get there. Moments where our improvisations fall into alignment are ecstatic, some of the best moments I have all week. With the most recent addition of a tenor sax we’re pushing in new directions and cultivating an adventuresome attitude towards music making. At the same time, though, our improvisational approach is growing more disciplined. In order to make the improvisation work there are needs for some constraints, some rules. Most of it is because our improvisations are communal; everything is interplay and reaction, and since none of us knows what is to happen next we have to be able to fall back on a little bit of agreed-upon structure. In some sort of paradox, the more we practice together the better our spontinaeity becomes. And strangely enough, some of the best moments of improvisation are when something completely new and unrepeatable slides into something composed, familiar, and recognizable. Our immediate goals, in fact, include expanding our repertoire of compositions and rearranging some of the tunes we already have down.
Music is a safe venue in which I can improvise. The payoffs are huge, and the adverse consequences for something not working out are not that bad. But trying to stretch improvisation to other corners of my life has proved less fruitful. I found that I have had to improvise with my teaching a little more this year than last, and while teaching will never be devoid of improvisation sometimes I think that the best thing to do is to avoid improvisation by planning as much as possible. But Missa Toss is trying his best to have a life of his own this time ‘round, and after a weekend full of friends and short on lesson planning, I found that I had to improvise a little more than I would have liked. It hasn’t blown up in my face yet, and has worked almost enough to convince me that I could get away with a drastic reduction in the amount of planning I do, but over the past day or two I’ve gotten some indication that kids may be suffering academically because of my lack of planning. This is more apparent in my behavioral science classes, the whole of which is, if not an improvisation, a work-in-progress, an uncompleted vision. The course is new to the district, something I applied to do, and since the suits downtown said I could do it I’ve been scrambling to throw things together in a satisfactory fashion. Due to time and energy constraints, it’s been mostly improvisation, and it’s been only me. No dropping out for a couple seconds to listen to the rhythm, get my bearings, and re-tune, no sitting back on the melody and letting the other instruments take over…if I’m not prepared then I suffer a tough day at school and the kids don’t quite click in with the material. A lot of the stuff of the last unit has been disjoint and organized poorly as far as theme. Because I haven’t done the course before and because I’m pulling together so many things from outside sources I’m finding that I’m dropping the ball every now and again. Even though I’m feeling like teaching is becoming more second nature and less performance, I still need to suck it up and spend the majority of my Sundays preparing for the week. In the teaching venue, I’m not the one that suffers if my improvisations don’t pay off. My students are.
Stopping to think about it is a bit overwhelming. I sometimes can’t believe that I’m managing to keep it together at all on the teaching front. But that is the way with improvisation: as soon as you start to think too much you are lost. Miles and Coltrane practiced so much because they wanted to engrave the basics into their heads, fingers, and mouths so much that they didn’t have to think about them. Whatever your improvisation is, your goal is to flow with it, to blur its boundaries and blend yourself into its stream, to skip into some sort of groove with your medium. And at the same time, your goal is to impose enough structure onto any system such that there is a coherent scope and theme, but leave enough room such that there can be some degree of improvisation. Be it music or teaching, or pounding out these weblog entries, I realize that I can’t achieve the level of organization I want on the fly just yet. And when the lives of others are at stake, I’m realizing, sometimes my own improvisational spirit needs to take a back seat to some solid planning.
music: Frank Zappa- Apostrophe
First Sunday of the school year: some serious planning and grading ahead. The Someday calls. Or maybe the Diesel. They say your second year is easier than your first, and in some respects I’d disagree: in my case I have second class to prepare, and one with very little precedent. But in other ways I agree: the first two days went much more smoothly than last year. I know most of the kids, I know what has to be done as far as setting a tone and climate before kids get comfortable enough to challenge it, I know the school and the surroundings. I, apparently, also have a reputation now.
In explaining some of the class policies and expectations last Friday, a kid raises his hand, and with a completely straight face asks: “so if we use the force to do our homework, is that considered cheating?” It was the first think I ever heard him say.
I only stumbled for half an eye-blink. “Only if you don’t use the Dark side of the Force.”
But my kids were working in unison, and half a step ahead. From the back of the room: “What if we’re conflicted, like Anakin in the third movie?” A good question, by all rights. I think that as long as they don’t turn into Darth Students we’ll all be ok.
My big poster of Yoda should be here some time this week. It will go up right over the board.
The new course I’m teaching seems to be the buzz class at school. Every junior and senior is coming to me demanding entrance to psychology, but I’m out of chairs and out of books. As it is there will be some pretty wild conversations in there-kids are already throwing stuff out from their own personal experience that are making other kids do double-takes. But everyone seems to be respectful and seems to listen. I’m most thankful for that.
So the school rollercoaster has finished climbing that big hill and is at the brink of swinging into a triple corkscrew. But when I ask about students’ pet peeves and get answers like “girls who act like they don’t like me when they know they already caught the fever” I know it’s going to be quite a year.
But not wtihout some preperation. Sundays still are swallowed by preparation for the torrent of ridiculousness to follow on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…if I ever get to the point where I can minimize the planning and grading to a couple hours after school during the week and keep weekends free I’ll really have the best job in the world. Someday.
music: Phish- 11/20/98, Hampton, VA
Yesterday was the last day of classes at school. I remember the last day of the year when I was in high school as a loud and raucous occasion with kids tearing down the halls and notebook paper flying all over the place. I expected my kids to be no different when the last hour of the day ticked away but it was really like any other day: kids lingering, hanging out by the window at the end of the hall, some typing on computers, others chasing and being chased (we humans still dance that dance, thank goodness), and a handful of emptying the contents of their lockers into garbage cans. I even had three or four kids stay for around an hour after school patiently penciling their way through make-up assignments. Sure, we have finals next week and I’ll see them again, but the last day of class was so subdued that it was almost disappointing.
It wouldn’t have hit me that the school year ended were it not for graduation. We teachers put on ties and nice dresses and handed out some awards and some pieces of paper and in doing so sent 40 or so human beings out into the ether. The ceremony itself was run just like the school: highly informal, low on ceremony but big on humanity. We are a school of quiet diligence and of overly modest industry. Performance and presentation are not our forte, nor is formal structure and organization. We don’t really speak about the fact that we have two Boston Teachers of the Year on our staff of 18, that two of our staff members (one being the headmaster) are also lawyers, or that about half our staff can drop the H-bomb. I suppose it fits the personality of the public school teacher to be so understated. Nobody in search of fortune and glory goes into teaching. It doesn’t pay all that well, it’s excruciating work, it’s far from glamorous, and it’s a job often taken for granted by the rest of the adult world. Last night, though, as the graduates made their way across the stage, I was reminded that the crap I deal with during the day and the rediculous hours I put in evenings and Sundays is important, and is sometimes appreciated by those that benefit directly.
The graduates are one story; my own students are another. Grades for my own kids this year are more or less in (save the final exam) and things aren’t looking good for the home team. I feel guilty here, as if I could have done more to yank some of these kids up by the collar and smack the sense into them to put forth enough effort to play the school game so they didn’t have to repeat the course and they could get on with their lives. But no, no matter what the Feds say, at some point the kids’ successes and failures are their own. At the end of the day (or year), it is almost all about playing the school game; content is secondary and grading becomes a tool used to sort kids out and ultimately distribute them into society at various strata. The unfortunate truth is that those kids that come out on the top of my heap still have mountains to climb. I shudder to think what might happen to those who can’t muster passing grades. Thinking about the kids I had this year that ended the year expelled, dropped-out, or involved with the juvenile courts (and there were several) still keep me up at night. This teaching thing is certainly an uphill battle, but I’ve always been one to side with the underdog.
Graduation, and the completion of a year of school, is an event worth recognizing and celebrating. Too often these kids get nothing in terms of recognition for their hard work. I’d like to take a moment to recognize and applaud their efforts this year. For most of them it’s a struggle just to get to school every day; that they made it through a year of school and passed is positive. My own academic experience was a foregone conclusion: of course I would graduate high school. Of course I would graduate from college. Of course I would graduate from grad school. Not so for these kids.
There were brilliant moments this year and graduation last night was one of those moments, but for the most part this past year sucked me dry. I managed to scratch out some time here and there for myself, but the majority of my time, talent, and effort went to educating a group of teenagers about the living world. My reinforcement (besides paychecks every other week) was minimal, but I knew it would be. I’m still so overwhelmed by my first year of teaching that it hasn’t quite sunk in that I leave the country for the summer in less than three weeks. I have no perspective. I hope I did alright. I hope that the grades I’m about to bubble in on the Boston Public Schools scantron sheets are not the indicator of my success. The school year, for all intents and purposes, is over and I don’t even realize it. I don’t want money or applause or even that warm fuzzy feeling that you get when you do something good. At this point, I just want my students to be good people. And a decent meal. And a good night’s sleep. And that same sense of closure I had when I was in high school.
music: The Velvet Underground- Nico
I’ve been busy counting squares. It’s that time of year.
I count eight rows of squares, seven per row, until I board a plane to Sydney. I count 37 more squares in which I have to wake up at 6:00 AM and tuck in my shirt. Now that my summer plans have solidified I’ve started counting down to the end of school. To be sure, there’s a lot going on between now and then. I’ve got some frisbee and some music to play, I’ve got some hiking to do up in New Hampshire and Maine, I’ve got to find a summer subletter, and we’ve got a party here at the 1-2. On a more monumental scale, G-Phatty is getting hitched and the last Star Wars movie is coming out. There’s a buttload of school-related obligations too. Fine, fine. But I’m still counting down. It’s that time of year.
The past two weeks have been trying ones at school. Besides being the first two weeks back from a most excellent spring break in Utah, I had the distinct honor and privilege of teaching the most…um…stimulating content ever to cross a teenager’s assignment notebook: human reproduction.
“Aw naw missa, we ain’t goin’ there.”
“Yes. We’re going there.”
Class time was spent stifling giggling (mostly entirely from the boys) and dispelling myths (yes, you can get pregnant your first time; no, birth control pills do not protect you from STDs; no, the withdrawl method isn’t good enough; no, douche doesn’t work either; yes, the female orgasm exists and it serves a purpose). I was embarassingly blunt and honest and played dumb as best I could when kids (kids? these most certainly aren’t children…) asked their hypothetical-i-saw-it-in-a-movie-i-heard-from-my-friend questions. By the end of the two weeks I think everyone had a better idea as to how to keep themselves out of baby and disease trouble.
The toughest part was probably teaching girls about the menstrual cycle. The scientific content was not hard; that I’d never (and never will) deal with menstruation firsthand made things awkward. Still, I was shocked to see that I knew more about fluctuating levels of estrogen than some of the young ladies. It grossed a lot of them out to think about nutrient-rich uterine lining. You’d think that if you had to deal with something on a monthly basis you’d know more about it than someone who didn’t. After one class some girls who were more well-informed said that I did a decent job talking about periods for a dude. I’ll take that.
There were a handful of kids that for whatever reason were completely clueless. Fifteen years old and they still didn’t know where babies came from. I just assumed that they might have heard something about it, even in a locker room from that 17 year old eighth grader somewhere…but I guess not. So I told them. They took the news pretty well. Lots of lightbulb educational moments we educators live for. It was funny to watch happen.
Of all the curricular units I could be teaching when my mother decides to visit…
To give them some credit, the kids handled the reproduction unit with maturity and honest curiosity for the most part. It’s something that they all really want to talk about, which doesn’t happen in school all that much I guess. The kids were really into their project for the unit (designing birth control info brochures for teens) and despite some egregious cases of plagiarism they turned out pretty nice. I get lucky teaching biology; we get free academic reign over the the Big Three topics for teenagers: sex, drugs, and poop.
We moved to the next chapter today, and some kids are sad we’re not talking sex anymore. The history teacher who gets the kids after me is relieved; she couldn’t get much done by way of the Cold War with kids who just finished talking about condoms and mastrubation. I’m glad that things are going to mellow a little again. Reproduction is an important topic but it requires too much energy on my part to keep everything…um…lubricated and running smoothly. At this point, though, it doesn’t really matter what we’re studying. The weather is getting too nice, the college kids are finishing up with finals, and the Boston Public schools has seven weeks left. We’re all getting stuff done, but at the same time we’re all counting squares.
music: Bill Evans- The Secret Sessions d.7
Teachers have to dip into their own pockets a great deal in order to stock their classrooms. This generally takes the form of pens, pencils, markers, folders, and the like, but science teachers have a quirky, different set of needs altogether. I’ve found myself at the grocery and hardware stores with some pretty strange shopping lists this past year. I once bought four gallons of vinegar, one gallon of bleach, and one gallon of ammonia. The checkout girl thought I was going to build a bomb or something. I inevitably bring the stuff home and do some prep at the 1-2. My roommates have been more than cool about all the wierdness a high school science class requires. Besides the infamous dissection stir-fry, my roommates have suffered through a long weekend with 36 raw eggs soaking in vinegar in the back stairwell, a night or two of earthworms in the refrigerator, and now an onslaught of canned goods. The experiment du jour is to build a calorimeter out of a tin can, so during my trip to the grocery store I made a point to pick up 25 different canned goods. Not for the food, but for the can. They did come with food inside, so we now have our fridge stocked with collard greens, stewed and diced tomatoes, creamed corn, fruit cocktail, and four different kinds of beans. I bought generic spaghetti-o’s as well but after heating them up and literally gagging on the smell they went out with the Sunday night trash. I spent a good hour tonight removing food from the cans, putting them in tupperware, cleaning and drying the cans, and cleaning up the awful mess it made. But now Boston’s youth have their cans, the fiber content is high here at the 1-2, and we have the Boston Public School system to thank.
Back to the business of girding myself for the school week to come.
music: Bjork- Homogenic
It’s a quiet Saturday morning at the 1-2. I woke up around 8:30 and lied in bed for about an hour this morning before getting up, listening to the trickle of cold rain and snow just feet from my head and trying to flush the week out of my head. Then a shower, some food, a mug of teccino, and here I am. The Day Of Rest. I’m almost there.
The insides of my head are almost quiet for the first time all week. I spent last night plowing through the last dozen or so papers my students handed in last Monday and despite feeling completely hollow for grading papers on a Friday night it was good to finally put them to bed. It, admittedly, was a horrible assignment: instructions were ambiguous at best and content was low. I’m sure it was a wrenching experience to crank them out, but guaranteed, kids, it was even worse to read 60 of them and see the same omissions and errors every single time. A glaring indicator that I messed up somewhere. The papers were only one of the factors that contributed to a strained existence this week. It didn’t help that the band (err…not a band really…those guys I’m making music with) bagged on our Wednesday night and our Sunday afternoon jams this week. Or that I missed the window of opportunity for Spring Hat League. So trickles away my weekly meditation exercises. The weather was also brutal-slush freezing and bitter cold. To think we are only 10 days away from the equinox…
The strain this week was really no different than other weeks, perhaps less so, but for some reason I was rubbed raw by the nuances of teenage struggle. This week I glimpsed some pretty fresh wounds covering one kid’s lower arms and wrists. I participated in a team meeting that was to decide the future course of a kid’s life in which he was there but spoken about as if he were not. I squelched a venomous exchange (which later, I’m told, turned threatening and violent) in which cases of unwavering homophobia reared their ugly heads. I watched a couple kids realize the odds stacked against them and more or less give up on themselves. I caught a case of plagiarism and handed out 0’s, which will most likely bury students mathematically and psychologically for the rest of the term. I returned work to a student who put more than everything they could into something that wasn’t good enough and watched their eyes water and lip tremble. I talked a kid down from a panic attack and/or a respiratory arrest as the paramedics came. I witnessed a kid reveal that they were bipolar to their class. I witnessed another kid reveal that they were abandoned when they were two and have gone through three families since. I excused absences because of court dates, I did not excuse absences because of oversleeping. I tried to do some educating somewhere in there. Public school: the last great urban social service.
More than anything else, I want these kids to become good people one day. I want them to be able to provide basic needs for themselves, I want them to have an open mind, I want them to be able to solve problems without violent thoughts or action, I want them to give a damn about something other than themselves. If that can happen I’ll be happy with what I’m doing regardless of their understanding of evolution or homeostasis. Sometimes I think that given a backpack, sleeping bag, tent, some gorp, and two weeks on trail I would have a much easier time accomplishing these goals but somewhere along the line I decided that I have to bring the water to the horse. I’d also like to thicken my own skin to it all a little more, to be able to spend those two minutes in between bed and sleep not thinking about the incredible struggle in which these teenagers are engaged. David: please forgive if Missa Toss doesn’t have it in him to function normally on a Friday night.
Now, however, it’s Saturday. The rain has slid into snow. The world is dripping. I’ve slept a good 8 hours but could probably sleep another 8 and not feel rested. I have aspirations to pick up my guitar for the first time in a week and play a little, possibly do some recording. St. Patrick is in town from NYC; perhaps the good graces will lead him to my door some time this afternoon. In the meantime, I have a stack of quizzes to grade and a week of lessons to plan.
music: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones- 4/6/2004
Teenagers are rarely regarded as selfless, industrious, resourceful, or caring people these days. It’s hard enough for teenagers to take care of themselves, never mind someone else. Having to spend most of my time in the direct company of a mob of teenagers can sometimes be a test of my belief in the inherent kindness of humanity. It’s tough being a teenager in an adult world: never being taken completely seriously, rarely being trusted, constantly being told what to do, having more responsibility than power. Teenagers learn that they are but a small whisper in the torrent of humanity all too often, that they have to take what’s given to them, that they can’t really have an impact. Earlier today, however, word came through that a group of teenagers went out and fought for what they believed in…and won. And as shocking as it may sound, their cause, their reason for taking up a fight with the federal government, was their schoolteacher.
About five years ago, Obain Attouoman misread a handwritten note and appeared in court to review his immigration status on the wrong day. It was an honest mistake, but in the xenophobic wake of September 11, he was ordered deported. This is a man who came to the United States in order to escape political persecution, this is a man who has never had a legal infraction (besides the missed court date), this is a man who has dedicated the past 10 years of his life to serving the children of Boston. To deport someone like Obain in the name of national security is laughable. He is one of the good guys. He is one of the brave souls that is eager to work with groups of American teenagers (the despicable lot that, let us not forget, will one day become adults, the people in charge), a job that almost nobody else wants. Forcefully removing Obain from his community here would do nothing for national security. If anything, it would disrupt the lives of a community of citizens who are glad to have him as a mentor, role model, and math teacher.
Obain was saved from deportation (and certain incarceration) by a group of teenagers. Yesterday six students from Fenway High School travelled to Washington D.C. and paid visits to Senator Kerry and Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security. They convinced these two adults that their teacher was too important a figure in their lives to have him deported, and as the sun rose today, Obain’s deportation was delayed, put under review by two of the most infulential and powerful adults in our society. This was only possible because of the good will and hard work of a group of teenagers, the students of the Boston Public Schools.
It’s an important lesson: even teenagers have the power to change the world if they set their mind to it. It’s something I hope I can impart on those 65 souls who sit in my class every day, that what they believe and do matters, that they can have impact, that they can make a difference. Whether students knew Obain is largely irrelevant, whether they believed in his case or not matters less; that they marched, demonstrated, voiced their opinions, and were heard matters. My best wishes and congratulations go out to the students of Fenway, BAA, and their teachers. As someone who has the same job as Obain (and as someone who worked in the Fenway/BAA building last year), I am inspired by my community. The experience of fighting for one’s beliefs, fighting for a member of one’s community, securing some small justice, and succeeding in making the world a little bit better is the most important sort of education a young person could hope to give themselves.
music: Brad Mehldau- Live in Tokyo
I gave my science midterm today and in return received a collosal stack of notebooks and tests to grade. I haven’t even thought about the tests; the notebooks have to be done by tomorrow night. So tonight I’m pounding science notebooks with red pen like it’s my job.
um.
I gotta go.
music: Radiohead- The Bends
I’ve been picking at an idea that’s been bothering me on the education front-it’s a philosophical point that has enormous ramifications as far as how I conduct my own classroom on a day-to-day basis. With the end of the first semester around the corner, I’m driving myself up a wall trying to reconcile this dilemma. Here’s the kernel of it:
There are two major movement being batted around in education circles. The first is the standards movement, which is all about the idea that before kids graduate, they should have to demonstrate skill proficiency and verify a certain degree on content knowledge. Here is where things like the MCAS and No Child Left Behind are spawned. Standards demand that students jump through very specific hoops, and that teachers for the most part are accountable for their students’ success and failure. As in they will be fired if their students fail tests. Standards have resulted in educational decision-making power being shunted from the school and district to more bureaucratic political bodies who have very little interaction with students. Standards feed into the idea of the public school functioning as a homogenizing agent, pushing public education towards an assembly-line mass production of citizens who all are proficient at certain skills and possess certain declarative knowledge. While I think that it’s not an entirely bad thing for students to have certain skills and knowledge before they graduate, the implementation of this ethic is incredibly restrictive. Alternative methods of students demonstrating their understanding and displaying knowledge are not really possible under Standards, nor is an education that does not conform to what society deems to be important and proper. No matter how expansive and enlightening an experience may be, it all comes down to standardized test scores Have those decision makers stopped to consider that it is possible their tests don’t measure anything beyond students’ abilities to take a test?
The standards movement is also hating on me personally. I’m technically not “qualified” to teach my subject under the No Child Left Behind Act, because I don’t have a degree in biology. Standards force conformity on all levels; in students’ content and in teacher’s practice, because in the end nothing matters to those in power except how little Scantron bubbles were filled out.
The second movement, especially in science, is the inquiry movement. This is a more organic stance in which the student is trusted to come up with content-rich questions and use their natural curiosity as a fuel to discover something about their world. Inquiry is grounded in the assumption that students are intrinsically motivated to learn and that the resources necessary for discovery are readily available. I won’t even talk about the resources piece here. This stance also sprouts from research in the fields of cognitive psychology, in which children and infants are compared to scientists in the ways they acquire knowledge about the world around them: developing theories and testing them via experimentation. Indeed, true science models the infant or toddler’s empirical reality, but the sad truth is that at the secondary (and even undergraduate) level, no true science is being done. We are just learning about science. Students are discovering things for themselves for the first time perhaps, but it is very, very rare to find new knowledge about the world being created in high school science classrooms.
Science students are therefore reinventing the wheel under inquiry. They are charged with making discoveries that others have already made. Why assume that given an apple and a tree, each and every student in a given physics class would discover and derive the law of gravitation? Why not just dispense knowledge? The hope, constuctivists say, is that people will remember and intuitively understand content better if they build answers for themselves. Ok. Fine. But actual open-ended inquiry is not really possible in a high school setting. There are not enough resources or time to allow stuents to freely explore and develop their own questions.
It seems clear, now, that these two movements come into direct conflict. On one hand, students are expected to explore what is interesting to them about a given topic and generate knowledge via experiments and possibly research. On the other hand, a specific set of knowledge is expected to be gained by the time they graduate. Through some miracle it’s going to turn out that the topics students choose to explore are the very same ones that will be tested by the State department of education. Inquiry and standards. The two can not coexist. You can’t preach both at once. It’s a lose-lose situation.
If I had to pick one, I would pick inquiry. I do believe that everyone is natually curious about the world around them and given enough access would do a decent job of discovering things for themselves. Unfortunately, the way things are set up in our society and at school, there is no time to fool around and tinker. We Americans feel a burning need to maintain or elevate our current rates of scientific progress, and therefore need to churn out graduates that are ready to assume positions that will promote that progress. To embrace inquiry fully is in some ways to swear off that driving force called the American Dream. I’d personally encourage the slowing of progress wholeheartedly, but I am one in a sea of thousands of jaded, hyperconditioned, institutionalized public school teachers. It’s my first year. I’ve always leaned heavily towards nonconformity. I chose to go to a college with no core requirements, after all. I would be ok with adults not knowing Newton’s laws or the photosynthesis equation (how many remember that stuff anyway?); I’d rather adults have a strong sense of analysis, and a working ability to engage in deductive, logical reasoning. In the extreme stance of inquiry, I’d have to be ok with some adults not being able to read (those that chose not to explore written language would not have to) and I think that I’d be ok with that. If they can fix a car or play a saxophone or calculate escape velocities or paint a picture or contribute to the world in some meaningful way it doesn’t really matter if they can understand Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the same way that it doesn’t really matter if I can fix my car (which I can’t really do), speak French (merci), or play a saxophone (never tried). I think it’s less important for us to have such rigid standards for all students, and more important for us to offer the opportunity for students to explore content of their choosing.
This is all contingent upon one’s idea of the purpose of schooling, which could be as cold as the utilitarian belief that school is a tool used to sort, to disperse people evenly into the workforce. From this perspective, people should realize that not only will some children be left behind, but if we want to keep our society the way it is, some children HAVE TO be left behind. This isn’t talked about too loudly because to admit to it is political sucide, but it’s pretty much true: our society depends heavily on a base of manual labor and service-level jobs. Who with a college degree would subject themselves to factory work or be content waiting tables? And if everyone had a college degree, who would work in the factories? From an economic standpoint, the simple and well-intentioned idea that no child should be left behind is just not feasible without a massive, sweeping restructuring of how our society works. Which, for the record, I would support.
Niether standards nor inquiry are going to go away any time soon and the education battlefield will continue to be a tug-of-war between the two extreme cases of each of these movements. I know this much: asking all of my students to conform to a certain mold is an exercise with very little utility and a lot of headache, and at the same time given the opportunity very few would pursue the acquisition of knowledge from their own intrinsic motivation. I’m currently attempting to cross the streams for the sixty-odd teenagers I have been given this year: a sort of guided inquiry in which I pose a question (almost always with a predetermined answer) and ask them to creatively construct an answer (which had better be correct) using their own previous knowledge (often faulty), limited time and resources, and the awareness that they are being asked to disover something already written in many textbooks. It’s a bit like putting someone in a mind-blowing National Park and telling them that they can go hiking and camp anywhere they want, but they have to stay within one mile and they have to stay on the path and they can’t walk any direction except North. The guided inquiry approach isn’t perfect, but it beats straight lecture.
Even this guided inquiry suffers at the feet of the Standards movement, where all personally constructed knowledge not only has to be “correct,” but it also has to match what will be asked on the standardized tests. How to reconcile this? Do people really need to know this set of content? Will American teenagers, left to their own devices, actually try to discover things for their own sake? Are people stupid enough to believe that you can have standards and inquiry at the same time? What is the real purpose of schooling in our society?
Many answers may appear correct. Please choose the BEST answer, then fill in the corresponding letter on your answer key. Make your marks within the lines provided; any stray marks may be scored improperly. You will be penalized for incorrect responses. Calculators and reference material may not be used. You may begin.
music: Martin Sexton- 4/15/2004, Iowa City, IA
We had an honors assembly at school on Friday. The students who made honor roll or high honor roll were recognized and stood up to receive applause from the staff and student body. It was a nice occasion, and I think it did what it was supposed to, that is, place an amount of social capital on getting good grades. I realized as I watched, though, that many of the students I had were kept from higher categories because of my class. A couple students who otherwise could have had high honors (all A’s) received a B in my class and therefore were kept from the highest category. And some of the students who otherwise had all A’s and B’s earned a C in my class and were kept from the higher bracket.
So what. Right? I’d tend to agree. So what. It’s a certificate printed out on the same printer used to print research papers and xeroxed. I’d tend to agree when construed as such, but after I thought about it I realized there’s more to it than that. Grades in school determine, more or less, life outcome. School is our society’s sorting mechanism; those who do better in school enter the job market at a higher level than those who do not do well at school. College graduates earn more, on average, than those who have not graduated college. same for high school. And college admissions hinge on grades in high school. I have a student who ended up earning a C in my class, the only C she got, and she wants to be a doctor. How is a C in biology going to look when applying to pre-med programs? Am I limiting a young person’s chances by giving them these grades? Am I, in part, responsible for their life outcomes? I consciously chose not to pursue medicine or politics for exactly this reason.
It is undeniably true that what we do today will affect our tomorrow. I can live with that as far as my own future is concerned. I can also live with the standards I set for myself. But now I’m in a position to impose these standards on over 60 young people and evaluate them accordingly. The standards are in part determined by the State, and I just an executor, but I’d like to not shunt off all responsibility. I’m acting autonomously for the most part as a teacher; what I deem important is the determinant of these students’ grades. And for the most part, they aren’t getting there. Two A’s, eight B’s, 12 C’s, 17 D’s, 25 F’s for the first quarter. Standards may be standards, but something else needs about how I’m doing this needs to be fixed. If I’m even partially at fault for these grades, is it fair to have these kids be evaluated by them for the rest of their academic careers? These seemingly small decisions I’m making really have that much impact on these kids’ futures? It’s a question that I’ve tossed around uncomfortably all weekend. It’s a tough thing to begin to reshape the way one goes about doing their job they do. I’m only beginning to think about how.
Perhaps I’m blowing it out of proportion. Perhaps the decisions I make and the standards I hold don’t noticably cast ripples into the future. But I don’t think so.
It is more than a job,
It is a commitment and an excellence in working with children
that will change, guide, and develop young lives.
You have a tremendous opportunity
and responsibility.
-YMCA Employee’s Handbook
music: Blackalicious- Blazing Arrow
I stopped at Danehy Park on the way home today to catch the sunset. I pulled my bike up to a park bench and stretched out, allowing colors to shift from cerulean to amber. It was a nice moment. I heard the group of kids coming before I saw them.
The kid at the front, lost in his hood, all of a sudden peeks out from underneath the fabric like a turtle and lets out a “HOLY SHIT! IT’S TONY HAWK!”
I, being tired and trying to relax, didn’t realize he was talking about me and didn’t really feel the need to point out his mistake.
(Do I even look like Tony Hawk? I have no idea what Tony Hawk looks like.)
He comes up to me, asks for my autograph. He’s frothing at the mouth because Tony Hawk, apparently, is sitting right in front of him. Who am I to crush this kid’s sense of wonder? I ask for his name.
“Malik.”
I pull some scrap of paper out of my bag, scribble a quick message, and hand it over. He’s ecstatic. He takes off, pumped to play some skatebording video game no doubt. I smile on the inside and watch the sun go down. It was a nice moment.
Dear Malik-
Skate Or Die!
-Tony Hawk
music: Ben Harper- The Will To Live
When David came back from his trip this summer he knew there would be some major transitions and adjustments to make come fall. He knew that he would be buckling down and putting in some long hours teaching. He knew that to some extent he would have to put his own interests and pursuits aside and make room for Mr. Taus, his industrious, hard-working counterpart. David knew this going into his first year of teaching, but when it came time to scrub in and get his hands dirty he was unprepared for the full extent of what his job would demand.
I’ve been told that one of my most valuable character traits is my propensity to work at projects until they are complete. I’ve been told that one of my most annoying character traits is my attention to detail and my need to work until everything is exactly as it should be. Finishing what I begin…producing quality…I’m good at that sort of thing. To a fault. I often charge forward and push with blind and maddening force when, by all rights, I should stop, rest, regroup, restrategize. I’m one to put a couple holes in the wall before I hit the stud. I’m one to spend 20 minutes packing my hiking pack, make water and snacks accessible, and hike at a rediculous pace for three hours straight. I’m driven. I work singlemindedly. To a fault.
David has all but disappeared. There is nothing but Mr. Taus these days, and if it’s any concilation by all measures Mr. Taus is doing pretty well. (Mr. Taus’ students are another story…and could that mean that Mr. Ta