dor

2003-11-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

I like music, but I love musicality.

2003-10-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a book, the life-changing kind with a humorous twist. It basically says that we are taught to make ourselves unhappy through our attachment to people, things and concepts. The way to God, happiness and true love is through becoming aware of our programming.

Russia and Finland are only words, concepts, but not for human beings, not for crazy human beings. We're almost never looking at reality. A guru was once attempting to explain to a crowd how human beings react to words, feed on words, live on words, rather than on reality. One of the men stood up and protested; he said, "I don't agree that words have all that much effect on us." The guru said, "Sit down, you son of a bitch." The man went livid with rage and said, "You call yourself an enlightened person, a guru, a master, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself." The guru then said, "Pardon me, sir, I was carried away. I really beg your pardon; that was a lapse; I'm sorry." The man finally calmed down. Then the guru said, "It took just a few words to get a whole tempest going within you; and it took just a few words to calm you down, didn't it?" Words, words, words, words, how imprisoning they are if not used properly.

This is a particularly good time in my life to be reading such a book. One of the exercises DeMello suggests is telling something or someone you love that you don't need it to be happy. For me, this would be dancing. I've often thought, like my friend Kermit, that there might be a conflict between dancing and growth, and at some point I'm going to have to choose growth -- or awareness.

Or perhaps the whole point is to be aware wherever you are. "Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors," says an Ethiopian proverb. Or, Emerson adds: "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." Although I think Anthony DeMello would cringe at the use and implications of "great man" -- labels, labels, labels -- he would have to agree with the rest.

2003-09-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

A blues dance on a riverboat. Fondue dinner Monday night. Dancing with other men: being asked by Joachim repeatedly and drawing oohs and aahs from the crowd by leading Chris into body rolls. The museum venue that made dancers forget all about dancing. Dancing barefoot at BB's, the ultimate smoky blues joint. Getting talked out of the five-malts-in-half-an-hour challenge at the Crown Candy Kitchen. Leading Sara for a whole Norah Jones dance with nothing but the top of my left shoulder to her forearm. Frosting on community led by Anna. Sake and wasabe shots. A dance with Melissa followed by a fifteen-second silent hug in recognition of accomplishment. Five-step hugging lessons from Mark. Endless zany dances with Kate, including the application of Mark's lessons. Trading moves with Chris, Kermit and Jake. Writing down hilarious quotables. Amy's haunting eyes. Impromptu steal jams and two-lead, one-follow dances. Having my crepes strike a chord yet again. A worn-out heart after countless emotional blues dances in a row. The surprise of seeing Sayra show up and equally glad to see me. Watching Russ dance with Tina. Reconnecting with Jen on the dance floor and seeing all my friends fall for her as a person, a hottie and a follower. Staying at Kermit's, the master of lindy exchange hosting. Dancing in the stepped water fountain, in the pouring rain. Great live blues music. Great DJ'ed blues music. Getting to know Jake. Strangers who turn out to be kick-ass blues follows. A rainbow under the Saint Louis Arch. Andrea's "But I'm cute!?" Dancing with Mia to music I was making up and hitting every single note. Sensual dances that were not dirty or creepy.

2003-09-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

I was re-reading some of my posts in my education blog the other day, and a few things struck me.

First, the unhappiness. I may be broke and rudderless now, but at least my heart is not in pain. Of course, much of that is due to addition by addition; I have the time to travel all over the place to dance, see old friends and make new ones. But much of it is also by subtraction, as my number one job-related ethical concern these days is, "would she really benefit from the extended warranty?"

Second, the insight. I remember that time in my life, a long ten months ago. I was reading about education, seeing things first hand, learning every day. My mind was boiling with questions and ideas. It is very different now, I am more peaceful but less productive.

Third, the writing. I have always had a dark and sober view of my writing. I am not alone, since whoever read my English Composition AP Test gave me a 3/5. I only know one person who truly enjoys my writing, and I always thought she was alone. Perhaps she was giving me the benefit of the doubt because we're friends and we dance well together? But really, with the objective distance of almost a year allowing me to read these entries as a near-stranger, they are pretty damn entertaining.

To me, anyway.

2003-09-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

This exile.ru article is a rare read.

"Serfin' USA" is about Russian teens who come to America on J1 visas, to take the crappy jobs nobody wants. While that premise in itself is fascinating and makes you care about those kids, in spite of the detached tone the author uses, the key to the article is the little quips, full of truth and venom -- in true exile style.

And what he saw from his vantage point washing dishes in the back of Burger King was the true face of modern America—provincial, obese, and entirely joyless.

“I came here because I wanted to make a lot of money,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I still want it. But now I just think it makes you fat.”

Amen. I was thinking something similar when listening to some golf talk on KNBR 680 - how boring must your life be when that's best you can do for entertainment? I still want their money, but I'd hope to have different fucking hobbies.

Various tactics were tried to keep the machine greased with worker bees—Clinton raised minimum wage slightly, welfare moms were forced to punch clocks in order to get their benefits, multinationals created propaganda to convince employees that they held a stake in the Team—but nothing could keep the lower end of the service industry from hemorrhaging labor. The problem was especially acute in bedroom communities, far from the vast labor pool of black and brown lumpenproletariat of the inner cities.

And then some clever bureaucrat thought up the J-1 visa. Advertised as a “work-travel” visa that gives foreign students a chance to visit the States, the J-1 functions as a way to import cheap temporary labor without offering any social benefits (J-1ers don’t even have to pay taxes) to places with acute labor shortages, where the workers perform what must be, after fruit picking, the shittiest jobs in the US. Low-wage manufacturing jobs fled the country long ago, but the low-fee service sector had to stay put, for obvious reasons. The J-1 allows places ranging from Burger King to summer camps to tap into the global pool of labor rather than the old-fashioned way of luring workers to miserable jobs, by paying higher wages. It is particularly heinous because the workers have to pay their own way for the privilege of working where no-one else wants to. While it’s sold by places like STAR and Council Travel as an opportunity to see the States, learn English and return home with wads of cash, really it ends up being much closer to indentured servitude.

How many so-called progressive news outlets or politicians know about this program and say nothing? Of course, I'm assuming the author is telling the truth, I haven't seen anything myself... Although I'd like to learn more.

In order to avoid paying for food, the J-1s made every day a BK day. They all seemed to be chunking up from their strict fast food diet —or maybe my memories of Russian girls are too generous—and all of them had acne ranging from medium to moon-pocked. The guys’ eating habits were especially repulsive; they’d smuggle out meat patties and pie slices to stockpile for the days off. When the managers tried to put a stop to the stealing by locking the changing rooms, the Russians developed a system in which they’d hide the food among the dirty uniforms and then retrieve it when they were closing the restaurant. It meant that their meals would often spend hours bundled together with sweaty fetid BK jerseys before making it to their apartment. But, hey, free is free.

How sad is that?

It was particularly poignant because most of these kids were coming from a position of relative privilege; not every Russian can scrape together the 2000 bucks necessary. And they were even denied the gratification of spending what little they made on consumer goods because it was mostly tucked under the inflatable mattresses to be used to repay the relatives who had fronted the money.

Yes, we immigrants are a somewhat select group... Like my dad, when he came over he sold our family's second car (if you can call it a car, or a family for that matter) to buy the plane tickets. He got the money by making and selling TV antenna amplifiers, so that people could get either Bulgarian or Russian TV.

Few fates, as these hermits will attest, are worse than being stuck in car country without a car.

That point is driven home by a book I had to read for class, with quotations like "Of course, teenagers don’t have the same kind of access to cars that adults do, so places that depend on the car don’t work well for kids at all. But they don’t really work well for adults either…"

My first night, when I bought a bunch of beer, several of them got pretty drunk, but even then they were remarkably asexual for Russian students. Seryozha has parlayed his cultural capital into screwing a couple of the girls and Viktoria had her exotic boyfriend, but for the most part they were all as prudish as Americans. Maybe it’s the fluoride, or maybe just something inherent in being an American wage slave that kills people’s sex drive.

Or an American wage slave with a Puritan history to overcome.

Now, for the last quotation, the other J1ers are contrasted to Seriozha, the most worldly and most pretentios among them.

The others, living in the long shadows of Moscow, had long known that they were nothing except cheap, expendable immigrant labor and could therefore they could see American provinces for what they were —just another place looking to break you and humiliate you. They had always known they didn’t count for anything and weren’t afraid to admit what was true in Minsk and Vladikavkaz and Mariupol was true in Warrington, too.

It was more than just being broken, though, because they were all broken in a particularly American way. How rare is a Russian who, with a few rubles in his pocket, won’t buy a bottle? Yet these kids were all diligently saving their salaries to pay back abstract loans or spend at some unnamed point in the future. While living in Warrington, they didn’t drink or fuck, they repressed their desires to spend money on a good time, they had long discussions about shit they bought. They hated their jobs but trudged on, smiling when at the register, just like Americans are trained to.

This paragraph bears reading over and over and over again. This was the most important thing I came away with from visiting Romania. My friend Dudu, buying a vodka shot at a "terrace" (outside bar) because he didn't have enough money to buy a beer... My friend Costin, getting his tiny paycheck once every two weeks, and blowing most of it on the trip to the seaside... It's pretty fucking sad, but at least there's no existential vacuum.

2003-09-17T23:58:00.000-07:00

I've always been good -- no, great -- at coming up with plans for staying organized. Exhibit A, my "friends database" which was designed to make keeping in touch with friends predictable and constant. No e-mails on consecutive days, because you quickly run out of things to say. I just set up a kind of rotation, for a manageable daily load of 3-4 friends, and voila! Constant communication. My friend Ben may have been pulling my leg yesterday, when in the course of chatting with me for the first time in about a year, he said he was relying on my database idea to keep us in touch.

And there's the rub... Actually using the contraptions I come up with. Following up. Ha! Would I not be an awesome middle manager? I guess now that I am working as a not-teacher, I'm still working on figuring out exactly an awesome what I'm supposed to become. But I digress...

My newest idea for keeping organized is pretty simple, or should be. Keep a checklist with only five items. Check each item off the list each day, or at least keep track of when I don't do it. After a brief brainstorm, here's what I came up with.

1. Clean. Nothing on the floor on my room. A clean desk and coffee table. Bed made. Clean car (that last one would require constant vigilance, since I so often live out of it).

2. Work out. Why the hell was it so much easier for me to do it while travelling?? Anyway, I figured I should do two of the following three: 500 crunches, 100 push-ups and/or 20 minutes of cardio (erging, running or jump rope)

3. Save. I need to improve my love-hate relationship with the almighty dollar. I've tried scorn, and it doesn't work very well for me. My ambitious three-fold goal is to (1) write down all expenses, perhaps in my well-designed but seldom-used database; (2) save all receipts for said expenses, in case I ever want to return something; (3) make sure I haven't lost any item I'd have to replace, like I so often do.

4. Read/Learn. I haven't done this enough, and it's a good way to make use of unemployment time. There is so much I want to learn about! Today, for instance, I was reading about KRS-ONE online. That counts. So does video editing, grad schools, education books, literature in general, playing with Quark or InDesign, anything really.

5. Write. Write a longish letter to a friend, write in this blog, keep a personal journal about things I can't really discuss in a semi-public forum, do a book review for a book I've just read. I'm actually more and more intrigued by the idea of writing an education book, especially after the great conversations I've had with my friend Brie as we re-read some of my favorite subversive titles. I already have a co-author in Brie, an editor in Ben and perhaps more help in my other dancing friends who do this for a living. All I need to do is figure out how people get started in the book-writing business...

The fact is, I'm in that lazy and lackluster low between lindy exchanges. Just got back from Seattle and Santa Barbara. Only one week until Saint Louis. Damn wireless internet keeps begging me to check it out. Nothing will get by me in the world of Bay Area sports, Apple Computer or progressive politics, but I may be wasting too much time to make it so.

2003-09-17T23:39:00.000-07:00

I met Dennis Kucinich this Monday Morning, during a smallish rally at Laney College, in downtown Oakland. I was hoping against hope that he would impress me with his presence, but instead he slowly grew on me with his ideas.

First of all, it took me a good fifteen minutes to realize that Dennis was standing on a one-foot tall stone bench during his speech. That made him about 6-foot-6, and I wish hadn't noticed the bench. His voice was clear and passionate, but did not project and did sometimes stall. A great orator he is not, though he did state his key ideas repeatedly.

It was these ideas that won me over. Universal health care, cut the Pentagon budget and put it into pre-kindergarten education, repealing the tax cut, the Peace department... He didn't duck any questions, even about things like the prison-industrial complex and the embargo on Cuba (he doesn't like either). He was even funny at times, like the time he answered a question about accepting corporate money: "I don't take it, but given my politics, they wouldn't offer it."

I find it unfortunate, though, that Laney College students were just finding out about the speech as they came in for their classes. That much of the audience had white hair. That the one elderly lady waving a Kucinich sign and telling people in a broken voice about the speech had to mention "Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich" or "Presidential Candidate" only, but never "Dennis Kucinich" only.

I suppose that Kucinich is the Quixotic candidate, the courageous, short, homely Catholic from a poor Midwestern family whom nobody gives a chance. He says he's been there before, in several campaigns against supposedly favorite Republicans, and he's absolutely right. So he has my vote, but I'm more worried about whether he can win the Democratic nomination than about whether he can beat Bush. Too many people would like to feel good about themselves for supporting a so-called "liberal" or "progressive" candidate like Dean, or now Wesley Clark, instead of taking a chance on somebody who might actually stir some shit up. The worst thing might be finding the support of Congress, because if Bush's shananigans haven't yet awakened the giant dormant masses of beer-guzzling Americans, perhaps nothing ever will.

2003-09-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

Three views on WalMart stores.

AlterNet

More than 1,000 people attended a rally a few weeks ago in Connecticut to demand fair trade and denounce the sweatshop buying habits of big retailers like Wal-Mart. The speakers were passionate, the crowd pumped. But this rally differed from the usual fair trade gatherings in one key respect: It was not organized by labor, student, or environmental groups. It was organized by an alliance of small and mid-sized manufacturers.

"The major retailers and big manufacturers are doing us in," explained rally-organizer Fred Tedesco, owner of Pa-Ted Spring Co. in Bristol. "They're destroying small- and medium-sized businesses. They're destroying jobs. They're destroying the middle class. . . That's the dirty secret of this whole thing."

The Onion

Well, well, well—lookee here. If it isn't a small, family-owned retailer. How quaint.

Pretty nice shop you got here. Okay if I take a look inside? Don't mind me. I won't be long. Neither will you, but that's a story for another day.

I'm sure you must be real busy, but if you have a minute to spare, I could use a bit of help. I was hoping to buy the new Alan Jackson CD, but I'm having trouble finding your music section. I'd also like to pick up a bottle of scented bath gel. What's that? Really? Just a hardware store, huh? Well, I'm sorry. I do apologize. Seems like it'd be a whole lot more convenient to go to a single store for all of my needs, but what do I know?

The Exile

But there are some things which make poverty more tolerable. Wal-Mart for one. I’d moved to Louisville with not even a fork or a spoon. Wal-Mart sells all that —hamper, dishes, utensils, dish rack, sheets, telephones, you name it —for prices so incredibly low that I was genuinely grateful. I thought about Wal-Mart’s union busting, its abused work staff of geriatrics and economically desperate wage slaves, its stocks of Third World products which in turn further destroyed America’s manufacturing, it’s aesthetic Sovietization of America... and then I thought about my own shitty fiscal situation. Conclusion: “Fuck ‘em.”

Wal-Mart is one of the few bones with a little meat on it that America throws to its tens of millions of lower-middle and semi-middle classes. Goods that once may have been unattainable are now attainable, almost free, thanks to union busting, employee abuse, Third World slave labor, the destruction of over-priced ma and pa stores, the homogenization of Middle America and every other horrible sin. When I said “Fuck ‘em,” I didn’t mean it in the sense that I’d turned coat and gone right-populist like some David Horowitz. I just meant that I needed those cheap dishes. And I understood how, from the point of view of the economically struggling millions, you could mistrust and loathe all the natty left-wing intellectuals, all the rasta-haired, chin-studded anti-consumerists who want to steal that one bone that you’ve been given: access to goods. Goods that allow you to keep from slipping down yet another terrifying notch on America’s cruel socio-economic fortress walls. You may not have health insurance, job security or a pension, but if you have goods, even inferior imitations of Crate & Barrel, then at least you’re not entirely out of the picture.

2003-09-05T23:48:00.000-07:00

From an article on http://commondreams.org today:

"Two days ago, a Christian nation executed anti-abortion apostle Paul Hill for killing two human beings he insists didn't value life as much as he did. In a Christian nation, nobody pays too much attention to logic."

2003-08-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

Score one for intelligent, structure-challenged kids.

This summer, I have been tutoring an incoming sophomore from my old school in Algebra 2. He reminds me of myself in his willingness to think outside the box, quickness to pick up new ideas and utter inability to stay focused and pay attention. The point of the tutoring was to pass a difficult (and often unreasonable) challenge test to bypass Algebra and get placed into Pre-Calculus.

Well, the other day I got a call from him, saying he passed and got into Pre-Calculus Honors. Yeah!

I'd like to think that everybody can benefit more from 20 hours of individual attention, as opposed to 5 hours a week of depersonalized classroom learning. What I tried to do most with my student was force him to think, and I had a very difficult time overcoming my now ingrained instinct to teach.

2003-07-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

840 pages in a little over 24 hours! Yeah, the new Harry Potter book was pretty captivating, and I also don't have a job. Anyway, I haven't read a book in a while, let alone get captured by one.

Rowling brought up a lot of interesting issues, though I'm not sure how many of them got more than a superficial treatment...

When is it okay to trust the government? How desirable is an "approved curriculum," especially when it recommends theory over practice? How does school look from the students' point of view? Wait, you mean people can drop out and still be successful?! What happens when we find out that our parents can be and have been jerks, at least occasionally? Can you help an underclass (elves in this case) against their wishes, without talking to them first?

2003-07-16T00:02:00.000-07:00

I just saw "Bowling For Columbine" tonight... What a film!

Michael Moore is a master at getting the emotions he wanted out of people. Incredulous laughter at the animated history of the United States, hear-a-pin-drop silence for the Columbine security cameras, shock and awe at the U.S. foreign policy recap, satisfaction at K-Mart giving in on ammo sales -- I could feel these emotions in the theater.

Fear and media is what I'll remember most. The U.S. news coverage was connected beautifully to the murder problems our country faces. Our country... Ha. I guess with only 10,000 gun murders a year, my odds of coming out okay are still pretty damn good, but for some reason I kept telling myself, "You know, maybe Canada isn't all that cold after all."

2003-07-09T01:20:00.000-07:00

I read some Ivan Illich for the first time in months, and it made me think...

I was miseducated -- meaning that I learned some things I now wish I could unlearn. Like how much better my classmates and I were than your average Joe Schmoe. Or how grades form a meritocracy. Or how teachers do a world of good and should get more respect. Or how I cannot learn without the help of a teacher.

If I knew how to run a classroom without teaching those lessons, I could teach again.

2003-07-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

At long last, a useful way to spend time online... French jokes online. Useful because, hey, I'm not procrastinating, I'm practicing my French. The topics are diverse diverse and familiar, except for the language twist.

A sample...

Doboliou (Bush) et Tony (Blair) sont en grande discussion lorsque Chirac arrive.
- Vous semblez très occupés, chers collègues...
- On est en train de préparer la troisième guerre mondiale.
- Ah! Vous en êtes où?
- On n'a pas encore décidé les détails, mais le but est d'exterminer 14 millions de musulmans et un informaticien.
- Un informaticien ? Pourquoi voulez-vous exterminer un informaticien?
Blair regarde Bush:
- T'as vu ce que je disais ? Personne ne nous posera de questions sur les 14 millions de musulmans...

Dubya (bush) and Tony (Blair) are having a conversation when Chirac comes.
"You seem busy, dear colleagues..."
"Oh, we're preparing WWIII"
"Ah! Where are you so far?"
"We haven't yet figured out all the details, but the goal is to kill off 14 million Muslims and a computer scientist."
"A computer scientist? Why would you want to kill a computer scientist?"
Blair looks at Bush:
"See what I told you? Nobody will ask any questions about the 14 million Muslims..."

2003-07-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

I used to beat myself up over an increasing gap between how much money I spend and how little money I make.

Then I realized, hey, if it's good enough for Bush, it's good enough for me...

2003-07-03T04:31:00.000-07:00

Two of my favorite online weeklies both put out awesome editions this week.

The Exile is extremely entertaining to read. You get the feeling that they might be wrong, but they sure as hell aren't wrong for lack of creativity. Like the coach says, theirs may be errors of commission, never omission. And their arguments make sense. John Dolan explains why the academic elite is not liberal, but merely professional -- ass-kissing is an important quality when searching for a tenure-track job. Mark Ames writes about social class in Russia and the U.S. -- elitny versus elite. Finally, the War Nerd gives a brief history lesson on the war in Sri Lanka, taking a break to matter-of-factly rip himself for being fat and Fresno for being Fresno.

The Onion probably needs no introduction, but here are some of their headlines: I Can Beat The Price You're Paying For Sperm, Bush Asks Congress For $30 Billion To Help Fight War On Criticism, It's Not Nice To Be Smarter Than Other People (which was Ames's point), Soldier Hoping We Invade Somewhere Tropical Next, Wisconsin Has Crush On Minnesota, Man Forgets He Has Infant Strapped To Back (pictured playing pick-up basketball), Woman Doesn't Have Single Photo Where She's Not Hugging Somebody and the consistently funny Infographic about Harry Potter-mania and What Do You Think? about The Affirmative Action Decision. The best response comes from the one black guy: "Shit. You know what this means? It's going to be a week of 'So, did you hear about the affirmative-action ruling?' at work." This is especially funny because I was itching to tell my friend and co-worker Greg, who's gay, about the other Supreme Court decision, on Texas sodomy, which could open the door to same-sex marriage. Then I remembered that Greg didn't even know about it until I asked him a few weeks back... So I said nothing.

2003-06-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

It's funny how my focus changes every few months. While I still read AlterNet and CommonDreams, I tend to read MacSurfer more these days.

Why has my twelve-year love affair with Apple come to the forefront? The lazy side of me says it's easy to sit and read tech news, especially when don't make me seethe with anger. The practical side of me says Apple will be opening stores all over the world in a couple of years, and I could find myself working for Apple in Paris or Rio. The artistic side of me says that the new G5 is stunning, and that Final Cut Pro 4, which I just bought, will allow me to do some creative video editing (as soon as I get a new computer, since I sadly just sold my iMac).

But an article I just read gets to the heart of the issue. Apple stands for "precision, simplicity and beauty," which is what life is all about.

To that I would add, in contrast to brute force and power. In the Wintel world, you don't have to make better overall systems -- just squeeze as much brute force out of aging CISC technology as you can. Don't make MS Office applications simple and efficient -- just pour in more features. Power is easier to achieve than grace, but it misses the point.

2003-06-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

So I make DVDs now...

2003-06-11T01:10:00.000-07:00

I read an amazing book recently... Or perhaps I just ran into a good book at a very appropriate time in my life.

How can I begin to describe Viktor Frankl and "Man's Search for Meaning"? Maybe by saying that a friend who knows me well kept bugging me to read it, and she was absolutely right - I did love it.

"Live life as if you've already lived once and made the mistake you're about to make now, and you're now getting a second chance," says Frankl. He also suggests balancing out the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast with a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

I think part of why I've been so unhappy these past few weeks is that I am more and more aware of a huge gap between freedom and responsibility in my life. What a good match I am for this country! I've seen this gap hurt people -- this gap, right, not me, gotta love language.

2003-06-11T00:56:00.000-07:00

I haven't quite figured out the meaning of life yet, but I think it has something to do with doing the dishes when it's not your turn.

2003-06-06T14:27:00.000-07:00

For a moment today, I tapped into my old bad-ass, mind-over-pain cross-country runner and heavyweight rower self.

I was only doing a few sit-ups, which these days is less a joyous occasion and more of an admission that, damnit, I need them, because 21 was so five years ago... At the end, I do these "extendo" crunches which are always tough (thighs at 135 degrees from torso, shins parallel to the ground, arms crossed on chest, hold it for a second). With 5 down and 45 to go, I got that "oh shit" feeling which generally results in quitting early because, hey, there's no coach to push me or team goal to work for anyway.

Still, being in a stubborn and self-adversarial mood for various other reasons, I found a way to break through and crest that hill. In the past, saying to myself something like "Are you about to wuss out, you weakling?" has succeeded only in making me feel worse about giving up. The better approach turned out to be "I know I will not quit, and I can take the pain, because I've already won."

Is there a clear difference between the approaches? Or is it all in my head? It felt a lot less personal - I was observing the pain in my muscles with an outsider's mild interest.

This is a serious issue for me. I've always felt like my will strength is not enough to keep me working out (or doing various other things) without some external pressure like a coach or a team goal. This may be a subtle psychological trick that helps me to either train or overcome that character flaw.

Strangely enough, this idea may have come as a result of talking to my friend Haley about a similar idea from a Tony Robins tape she was listening to -- focus on the positive, pleasurable consequences of the harder choice, instead of the more immediate pleasure you get from the easier, wrong choice. Hmmm... Maybe self-help books are not irrelevant after all.

2003-06-03T01:21:00.000-07:00

A really important thought that came up on a recent roadtrip, when I brought up an older question about agape, or neverending love. The answer to, "How do you love people who are so hard to love?" is simple. You don't do it yourself - you ask God to do it through you.

I am not a Christian, but this idea appeals to me. It implies the humble recognition that I myself am not sufficient, which is painfully obvious whenever I try to be loving towards somebody I can't stand.

This limitation is also a crucial point of distinction between two views that some people hold as antithetical: humanism and Christianity. Humanism is seen as the idea that people can take care of their own problems, which serious Christians seem to disagree with - at least the ones I've been talking to. Only God has the answers and ability to help. I was given a little booklet about this, which rips sociology and Auguste Comte - and while there has been no direct attack so far, I can't help but feel that Emerson, Thoreau and Transcendentalism are also under attack - which would make me defensive, because I love all of the above.

2003-06-03T01:14:00.000-07:00

I have resolved to start blogging once again. The reason is the same as the reason I started this in the first place - because I know I will have one loyal reader who, for some strange reason, wants to read what I have to say.

While reading Jen's recent blog entries, which are almost as infrequent as mine, I was really struck by the difference in quality of writing between her and me. I guess that is to be expected, since she reads and writes for a living, and puts much effort into becoming a better writer. Still, it made me realize that if I ever write a book, it will most likely be non-fiction and with a limited audience who might be willing to put up with uninteresting prose in order to extract the message which I believe I do have, or will by that time.

2003-05-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

What a great article on translations, and lack of U.S. interest in them!

It is detrimental to deprive our intellectual exchange of the rich and varied stimuli that results from the infusion of different views, but, as Americans learned on 9/11, we need to know what is going on in the rest of the world as a matter of self-preservation. It shouldn't be that, as an editor at Oxford University Press remarked drily during a seminar on world literature, 'Everything seems to take Americans by surprise.'

Politically, America has become infamous as the beast that feeds only its own appetite, but this isn't surprising since, given the nature of the US publishing industry, our own appetites are all that we know. And there is much to fear from a global power whose people remain unaware of cultural contradiction, uninterested in the passions of others; contented with mother's milk from birth to death.

2003-05-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

I've been getting melancholic about rowing, with positive updates from Scott about Dartmouth Crew sliding into my inbox one by one. We win against Yale. Wisco and MIT down. Dartmouth beats Brown for the first time in forever.

I don't think about it every day, but it was the most important part of my life for the two years I did it. This also means that I have two years of college eligibility left. Hmmm...

2003-04-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

Wow... I just read a poem that went right to the bottom of my heart. Out of nowhere, I now feel that rumbling inside my chest and behind my eyes, the kind I get when I am deeply moved and liable to cry.

I almost want to speculate on how my current thoughts and circumstances may have facilitated this strong reaction... Aaaargh. Don't think so much, don't explain it.

I'll try to translate this poem.

About the country we come from (by Ana Blandiana)

Let us speak
Of the country we come from.
I come from summer,
It is a fragile homeland
That any falling leaf
Can extinguish,
But the heavens are so heavy with stars
That sometimes it droops down to the earth
And if you get close--you hear how the grass
Laughingly tickles the stars,
And the flowers are so plentiful,
It hurts
The orbits dried as if by the sun,
And round suns are hanging
From every tree;
In the place I come from
Only death is absent,
There is so much happiness
That you're almost sleepy.

I definitely need more poetry in my life.

2003-04-19T22:46:00.000-07:00

I was reading Chomsky again last night, and boy, was it good! At least two major ideas I walked away with.

First, the idea that activism died in the 60s is fabricated. There is almost a conspiracy to convince young people that they are selfish and narcissistic. I've been around kids long enough to know that, yes, sometimes that may be true, but often it is not. But this works as a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when kind-hearted and socially conscious young men and women are basically ridiculed.

Second, I had heard the idea that democracy is a threat to the ruling elite from many sources, but Chomsky does a great job of really hitting you over the head with the evidence. That word, democracy, must be one of if not the most misused term out there. As if what's going on here is truly a democracy, worth exporting to other places like the Middle East!

I should really read more.

2003-04-18T22:39:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I tried to read my book of dual-language Russian short stories. I got through a page and a half, then threw it away in frustration. It's too hard to deal with entire sentences where I don't even know two words.

I also found my tongue getting tied up while speaking French, which is somewhat unusual. I often get French-speaking customers at the Apple Store in cultured Palo Alto, so I have a chance to practice.

I don't often get a chance to speak Spanish to anyone. It's sad, though not necessarily surprising, that in this country with no official language, every Latino seems to avoid Spanish.

If I'm not getting better at "foreign" languages (what's foreign anymore? Romanian? English?), I am getting worse. And that's frustrating. I have a goal, perhaps a childish one, to speak seven languages fluently by the time I'm thirty, and I'm running out of time.

So why does that matter? Most people, in this country anyway, are happy to speak one language, lucky to speak two or three.

I guess when I'm stuck in the United States, the more I can do to feel like a citizen of the world, the better off I'll be. Yes, my taxes may help build bombs, but at least I'm somewhat removed from the situtation - I speak Russian.

Or maybe I just need some intellectual stimulation. I don't read much anymore besides truthout.org and guadian.co.uk -- not education, not sociology, not anything. I dance a lot, which is good but isn't exactly an intellectual pursuit. I sell PowerBooks. I chat with friends online and on the phone, which is great. But practicing foreign languages would at least grant me the illusion of still being part of an intellectual elite.

2003-03-31T01:00:00.000-08:00

When people ask me how I'm doing, I tell them I have no real job, no sense of purpose in life, no money and no significant other. But for some reason, I'm still happy.

Well, I think I know what the reason is. Since I quit teaching two months ago, I have had plenty of time to maintain relationships with friends. I have reconnected with older friends like Joe, Keturah, Mark, Jen, Kyla and Yana. I have made new ones in Sara Jane, Julie, Amy, Kermit, Lora, Phil, Brian and David.

My God, just reading these names in sequence gives me goose bumps. What a great lineup! I'll stack them up against anyone's friends.

I just wish more than two of them lived in the Bay Area. Is it any wonder I keep going away?

2003-03-29T03:50:00.000-08:00

I asked a friend from Tacoma the other day how Washington State felt about the death of its own Rachel Corrie, recently killed by a U.S. made Israeli military bulldozer in front of a Palestinian physician's home. Sadly, he replied, after the initial outrage there was nothing. In fact, much of the blame was put on Evergreen State College, which has the reputation of a hippie school - I mean, what kind of ideas did they put in Rachel's head??

Personally, my first thought on hearing about Rachel's death was, more people need to do what she does. I need to do what she did, risk my life to protect the threatened innocent.

2003-03-29T03:05:00.000-08:00

Okay, time for me to blog again. So much going on in the world... And in the swing dancing / exchange world.

I found a great new website which mixes scathing commentary with the kind of humor I grew up with in Romania.

That leaves Al Gore. Compared to George Dubya, Al Jr. seems almost tolerable. He?s intelligent enough that one even gets the sense that he makes some of his own decisions, and possibly even adds an original line or two to his speeches. He occasionally comes out with ideas that sound reasonable and correct, like his opposition to the privatization of Social Security. There are even times when he advocates policies that are bold and border on the righteous: in an address endorsing poor Hispanic janitors in Los Angeles who went on strike for a one dollar raise, for instance, he made the positively revolutionary statement that ?everyone who works should be paid a living wage.? You couldn?t imagine George W. Bush telling a major corporation that it was morally wrong to deny a raise to a bunch of wetbacks making $6.90 an hour. But you can imagine Gore doing it?and this is why a reasonable person can easily see him as not only the lesser evil in this election, but a choice one need not necessarily be ashamed of.

So you should vote for Gore, right? No way. When you go into the voting booth, and your hand moves to vote for the lesser evil, remember the august words of the hero Ash from *Army of Darkness*, who warned thusly against approaching a seemingly dead killer zombie: ?Don?t. It?s a trap.?

It?s a trap. You think you?re voting for the lesser evil, you actually get the greater. The big blinking neon-lit Number 1 in our list of 50 reasons why a reasonable person shouldn?t vote for Gore is regrettably philosophical?a general postulate arguing that a vote for the lesser evil always leads to disaster. It?s an old argument, but it still makes sense. If your ?lesser evil? candidate knows you?ll vote for him because the other guy?s worse, then that?s all he has to do for your vote?show you that the other guy?s worse. Your actual needs and wishes he can confidently ignore. On the other hand, while the ?greater evil? might do a lot of terrible things if elected, you?ll be able to take some solace in at least one thing?whatever he does, he?ll have opposition.

Wow... As bad as things are with Bush, these same thoughts have been running through my mind. Ever since I heard about how Gore desperately tried to keep Nader away from any debates, vowing to leave if Nader even entered the building, I've had a deep distrust for the guy. And the fact that he now serves on Apple's Board of Directors doesn't change my mind.

Most importantly, I feel like things are getting worse, and before they get better, they have to hit the bottom of the barrel. Well, what quicker way to get there than with our self-proclaimed "Education President" who can't pronounce "nuclear" but is willing to wage nuclear war?

2003-03-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged for a while, because I've been busier living than thinking... After a wonderful New Orleans Lindy Exchange, I took a trip down to LA and San Diego, and now I'm about to drive to the Denver Exchange. Being (mostly) unemployed has its benefits...

Politics and the meaning of life are hard and frustrating. Friends and dancing are easy and fun.

2003-02-12T13:40:00.000-08:00

An interesting juxtaposition in this article.

On one hand, the main story about 17 innocent civilians killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, a vertical advertising banner for a discount airline ticket site built into the column, as close to the text as you could physically bring it.

On the left: "NOW GET IT ALL FOR LESS. I thought they just had airfares. Now they have everything! Cars, cruises, condo rentals..."

On the right: "The people came crying, saying their relatives had died or were missing... Planes bombed again on Tuesday for eight hours... Reuters quoted a local witness as saying that he had seen women and children killed by the bombs lying in a riverbed"

This hit home, because I was online looking for cheap airfare just last night. I am generally aware that I live in the left-hand column of that article, but I'm starting to see the connection between the two. I remember what Michael Ruppert said in a KPFA program: "I did not give my government permission to kill people overseas so that I can have a better standard of living. I choose to share the dangers of this planet with everyone on it."

That is easy to say and agree with in principle, to me at least. How could you disagree? "I don't mind a few hundred thousand civilian deaths in Iraq, as long as gas prices stay low. God bless America, screw everyone else." Is that a position that can be defended, even modified from the strawman I'm turning it into?

The deeper problem is, I do realy want to fly to New Orleans this weekend, and I don't really want to pay four dollars a gallon like they do in Europe. But would my withdrawal from those things have any impact? It certainly would if it were part of a concerted national effort, but nobody is organizing that. Or are they?

2003-02-12T11:15:00.000-08:00

In answer to the two comments to my prior post... Thank you for the dialogue, whoever you are! =)

BMK:

I guess my main point was that concrete relationships are based on the absence of power, so it seems to follow that abstract ones are based on power. I think, in general, if you're planning to change the world for the better, you have to think of yourself as very powerful. Maybe that's not as clear cut as I thought... But as soon as I stop looking at you personally and I start to think about "humanity" in general, I immediately distance myself from you. I don't need to exercise any power to be your friend; in fact, I need to renounce it. Can you imagine manipulating your friends? If you can, they're probably not your friends. But if I'm going to "solve" poverty, I have to manipulate voters, politicians, businesses and the homeless themselves.

Mark:

Illich believed that institutions are not evil in and of themselves, but at some point they start to hinder instead of helping. This is best expressed by his nutrition story: "this amount will carry you, anything more you will have to carry." Our particular society sure feels like an institution, but the early Christian community was not an institution. Not until the 12th century. I can also say that Romanian, and perhaps Latin American, societies are institutions on a far lesser scale than America or Western Europe, because your neighbors are much more important than the government. Inner-city culture is exactly the same way, Jankowski was making that point in the book I'm reading about gangs.

As for agape, I could never "learn" it without experiencing it firsthand through some of my friends, and then taking the time to listen to my own heart in the context of those experiences (and some reading). Nobody could force me to do all this, though God knows my Jesuit school tried.

2003-02-11T10:16:00.000-08:00

Alright... I just installed comments last night, and I already got a question - a request to elaborate on my first dilemma, social justice versus love without power. That's cool. I've been thinking about this dilemma for some time with regards to teaching, but now that I've been listening to some of Illich's speches I think about it all the time.

It really wasn't thinking about it that got me started, but feeling. I started having a negative gut reaction whenever I exerted power of my students. It's easy to blame the system, and I do, but the fact is that something inside me wanted to exercise that power, albeit for what most people, myself included, would consider good purposes. Make them think about social issues, help them become successful and self-reliant. Well, it still doesn't feel right.

The problem is, love has been institutionalized. It's like a messed-up relationship in which you've come to expect love instead of giving it freely and unconditionally. That expectation seems like a good idea, since it leads to obligation, commitment to social justice and the like. The problem, however, is in the approach.

"The most destructive effect of development is its tendency to distract my eye from your face with the phantom, humanity, that I ought to love," says Ivan Illich. This means that in embracing the abstract concepts of responsibility and humanity, I forget all about the personal relationship between me and you. This is not progress! Abstract relationships are based on power. Friendship is based on love, especially when you choose as your friend someone whom your society tells you is not your neighbor. There is no social structure that tells the Good Samaritan to love the injured Jew, yet he does it anyway: personal, not institutional.

So, for a long time I have been looking at the world through the blurry glasses of responsibility. I am relatively rich, U.S. resident, I have to do something to make the world a better place. I would like to redefine that as, I have to be a good friend to everyone I meet. If everyone chose the same vocation of friendship, the world would without a doubt be a better place, and institutions of oppression would crumble. Unfortunately, love cannot be forced -- "dragoste cu sila nu se face," like we say in Romania -- so there is no guarantee. All we can do (all I can do) is have faith.

Faith, hope and love. Why does that sound familiar?

I haven't yet presented this as a dilemma, have I... More like a solved problem. But it is an open question for me, because it is incredibly difficult to change my world view to that extent. I mean, am I really going to do nothing about fixing an unjust society? No revolution to stop mass murder in Iraq?

I take to heart the message of "Lord of the Rings." Tolkien knew what he was talking about. Power is extraordinary and it can change those who have it. Perhaps if I were President of the U.S. I would be making the same kinds of decisions, with the same self-assured and blindly patriotic zeal. I guess we'll never know, because I'll never get the chance.

That's actually another point. Illich's renunciation of power is different than Gandhi's, and I have been mixing the two. One of Illich's main points is that, since 1985 or so, people who feel responsible for others are feeling a huge gap where power used to be. Not only is it not advisable to use power to fix the world, but we may not be able to do it if we wanted to. The institutions are too strong. So perhaps the best advice is to live outside institutions whenever possible - ride a bike, engage in subsistence farming, avoid schools and hospitals and, most importantly, make love concrete and not abstract.

That is the one thing I never realized. Agape, unconditional love, is actually not an abstract concept. It certainly cannot be taught. It is a personal, concrete relationship between me and you, or me and whoever I choose. "Love for humanity" is abstract and misguided. How can I love a billion people in China without knowing them? It would have to be some kind of cold, intellectual, abstract love, and according to Illich that is insufficient. Not just insufficient, in fact; he calls it the worst that could happen. "For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds" (Shakespeare, Sonnet 14).

2003-02-10T15:06:00.000-08:00

After reading the first few chapter of Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, which were dedicated to the plight of poor youth, I thought this would be a good time to go back to Martin Sanchez Jankowski's Islands in the Street, a ten-year personal study of gangs. The potential for connections was there, and it did not disappoint. Here's what a Chicano gang member has to say about ethics:

I act like they do in the big time, no different. There ain't no corporation that acts with morals and that ethics shit and I ain't about to either. As they say, if it's good for General Motors, it's good enough for me... It boils down to who is smarter, you either take somebody or get taken, and General Motors, General Dynamics, all those big cats know that shit. They take the government's money--that's really mine and yours--for some type of ride. Check this man, they sell a two cent bolt to the government for thirty dollars and don't blink an eye. They get caught, but they ain't sorry, they're just sorry they got caught. Who talks ethics and morality to them? They keep doing it because that's the rules, so when I do my business, I just do it and if somebody gets hurt, then they get hurt 'cause that's just the way it is.

Kind of like when Haliburton chose Dick Cheney to be their CEO with no real credentials - they chose him because of his government connections, and now they reap the benefits of defense contracts. Or shady accounting by Enron et al. This was exactly Goodman's point - that there might be a connection between corporate scandals (in the 50s!) and growing unrest among the youth.

Jankowski presents a balanced, unemotional perspective. I thought the fact that he grew up with gangs might bias him, but he is scientific, at times to the point of being dry. Fortunately, this allows him to examine and dispel some myths that we all have about gangs. He alone has the opportunity to do so because he alone was willing to put himself at risk for ten years in order to gather data.

If you ever read this book, I would advise you to take a piece a paper and write down everything you know or guess to be true about gangs. Considering your and my sources for knowledge versus Jankowski's, no discrepancy between your preconceptions and his conclusions would be too surprising, would it?

Before reading the first five chapters of this book, I thought of gangs as something ethnic minorities engaged in, especially Latinos. Now I know that poor whites have their gangs too, and in fact Chicano and Irish gangs are more similar than African-American gangs. I thought gangs were isolated from society and concerned almost exclusively with illegal activities. In fact, gangs have a strong presence in their communities and "would do almost anything to keep from causing harm" to it. Illegal activities do predominate, but most gangs also have less profitable ventures like providing housing or running low-cost convenience stores. I had a notion of violent, volatile people (as did many researchers before Jankowski), but he stresses the calculated risk-reward analysis of deciding to join and stay in a gang.

This book is interesting stuff. It does not try to excuse violence and crime -- it just takes a morally neutral stance in the interest of research, the same stance Jankowski had to adopt in his personal association with the gangs he studied. As a result, I have a better understanding of the environment most of my ex-students grow up in, and the possibilities of effecting change. Actually, Jankowski is a professor at Berkeley; I wonder if I could go talk to him...

2003-02-09T23:56:00.000-08:00

When I was reading Tolstoy a few years ago, within and without the context of a literature class, I was aware of the great change he underwent. My opinion, of course, was plagiarized from teachers and critics. I felt it strange and regrettable that he stopped writing masterpieces, and saw him as a slightly eccentric uncle who had really gone off the deep end.

Now that I'm a little more mature and I place more value on thinking my own thoughts, I see things differently. It feels strange to say this given their relative name recognition, but I would rank Tolstoy up there with Ivan Illich. I think they both had a similar revelation about what life is about - simple, concrete love. They both rebelled against the bureaucracy of Church and government, and they were both marginalized because of it.

It is quite encouraging to me to see this wealth of people who feel the same way about life: Illich, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, Jesus... It gives me hope that I might be on the road to figuring it out. I mean, it's not a difficult message: love is the opposite of power.

2003-02-08T19:36:00.000-08:00

I was talking to Julie earlier about my longing for a simpler life. Here's how Ivan Illich puts it...

Tell your friend the story of Saadi's Golestan, the story you related at the celebration last night: "In the annals of Ardashir Babakan, it is told that he asked an Arabian physician how much food one should eat daily. He replied, "A hundred dirham's weight would suffice." The king pressed him further, "What strength will this quantity give?" The physician answered, "This quantity will carry you; and that which is in excess of it, you must carry."

"Enough" is like a magic carpet; I experience "more" as a burden, a burden that during the 20th century has become so heavy that we cannot pack it on our shoulders. We must load it into lorries that we have to buy and maintain.

What pretty language! The key is, this is Illich in conversation with a friend. He's so much more accessible... In the same vein, here is what to me seems the crux of what he had to say in the latter part of his life: "The most destructive effect of development is its tendency to distract my eye from your face with the phantom, humanity, that I ought to love." I can picture him gently scolding me for wanting to make the world a better place for "the homeless" and "the poor," suggesting instead that I choose to befriend specific people, rich or poor, homeless or not, and follow that vocation of friendship.

That is why I feel the tragedy of Illich's death, more so than John Holt or Martin Luther King or if Noam Chomsky were to pass away. Illich's entire life was about the friends he made, not about the books he wrote... His voice comes across well on audio, but even more stunning is his concern with his relationship to his audience. That approach to life is hard to understand intellectually, which is why I wish I had a chance to experience it firsthand.

2003-02-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

Another thought, about colleges and elitism. I wore my Dartmouth Crew sweatshirt to work Wednesday night... I was running late and it was right there on my bed (well, floor actually) so I picked it up. I regretted that all night, as I seemed to be in damage control all night... I kept thinking back to TG, the first fellow alum to ever warn me about wearing Big Green paraphernalia, which seems to create some sort of a divide. When you get hired somewhere, others told me, being a Dartmouth alum makes you threatening to your managers, no matter how you act, because you might replace them. If I don't feel a gap between us, why do they? Mark knows about it; he wanted to get a non-Dartmouth e-mail address that he could share with new friends.

One reaction, somewhat unusual, from one of my managers as I took my dinner break. "Where did you get that sweatshirt? Dartmouth Crew, you didn't do that..." "Actually," I reply, "it was the best thing I did in college." "Well, I didn't row at Brown, but I had a lot of friends who did." As we continue to chit-chat about Brown's rowing program, I tell myself. "Well good, he gets to save face by informing me he went to an Ivy League school too. Like it matters! Shit, I'd rather walk around freezing than have this conversation."

At other times to other folks, I find myself mentioning my class rank (bottom 12%, baby!) and joking that I fooled the admissions committee. Oops, now I get asked what my SATs were, no way to wiggle out. I explain how I always try to wear a Dartmouth shirt when I'm dealing with the aftereffects of something stupid I did. I tell stories of stupid and boring classmates I had who got in for football or track. I even get into Illich's ideas about top colleges as a mechanism of perpetuating wealth, except for the few of us who win the rigged lottery and cross the narrow bridge.

Oh, and before I sound too self-effacing about this, I am quite aware of those subconscious arrogant elitist feelings that still reside within me. I don't like them, and I try to fight them all the time. Sometimes I win. Sometimes, especially in times of uncertainty like these, I slip into using my diploma as a crutch, and I lose.

A friend just e-mailed me this wise and sarcastic remark about her plans tonight in Palo Alto... "We are going to F&A's for dancing. It is definitely the worst place to go since it is crammed with Stanford guys who are really pumped on the fact that they are just that. Wish me luck."

2003-02-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

Yow... I've got to think happier thoughts. Here's one.

I saw an awesome new commercial by Adidas, which makes me realize that I haven't played a good one-on-one basketball game in ages. In the archives that blogspot seems to have lost for me, I once wrote about Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow, and how basketball is the best example of something I lose myself in.

Describing it just won't do it justice, but I will try. Game on. Best to 11, ones and twos? Okay. Winners take out. I check out my opponent: same height, a bit heavier. Wide shoulders, long arms. He once won a free throw contest in college, probably a more consistent shooter than I. I'm probably more athletic overall, though, and I want it more. Do or die? I'll take it from the top of the key, who cares if I can't shoot. Close.

Okay, defense. Check! That's one thing that the Adidas commercial showed quite well, the gamesmanship of checking the ball. None of that yet, just give him back the ball. Get down low, weight on my toes, one hand feeling for the ball. Defense is all about desire. Force him left, see if he's got anything. He takes the bait, misses a close shot. "Can't go left, huh... Might be a long day." I've got it now, dribbling slowly. One obstacle between me and the hoop. So many ways to get around it. My senses are fully awake, my blood is pumping. Nothing hurts, my muscles and joints are working together beautifully. I take two steps to the right, he backs up. I react quickly, step back in flow, ball bounces between my legs to my left hand, knees bent, jumper on the way, one-nothing.

Check.

What do I do now? Shake-and-bake, around-the-back, jumpshot, fake it, drive right, crossover to the left, post up, make him reach and then cross over... It's going in, I know it. I drive, hesitate, lose my dribble in the lane. Man, he's big. I throw up a lame shot and it's his turn. Defense again.

Bring it...

I remember the best game I ever played in my life. It was against Ryan, a fellow CS major and intramural teammate of mine. He was a bit bigger and a much better shooter, so I knew I had to be at my best. I started shooting the lights out from three-point range (twos) -- I can be streaky. The score 9-7 in my favor, Ryan comes up to face guard me at the top of the key; he can't afford to let me shoot any more twos. The reasonable thing to do would be to drive past him, but when you're hot, reason has nothing to do with it. I grab the ball with two hands like a soccer throw-in, step across my body to the left and heave it towards the rim. My God, it went in...! I am laughing on the inside. His eyes mirror the game I just played as we shake hands.

2003-02-08T17:00:00.000-08:00

This article written by an Iraqi-American Tufts student got to me last night... It was easy and natural for me to identify with her, from her longing for family and native country to the number of years that we have both spent in the United States, twelve. She came in August 1990, a day before the Kuwait invasion, and has only been back home once since.

We left everything in Iraq. I left everything. Our home, our clothes, our memories, and the most precious thing of all. Our family. My grandparents, my aunts, my uncles and cousins. Until my return in 2001, I never had any closure with this abrupt departure. I never got to say goodbye to that country and the people I loved. My teenage years were different from anyone else's because this longing burned so deep in me.

We are thousands of miles away from our family who live in Baghdad, but the troubles of Iraq are what I lived and live until now. For the 12 years I have been here, our family still telephones Baghdad every week. The only time we stopped, was during the Gulf War when the telecommunications in Iraq were destroyed and we waited for weeks of word of whether or not our family was alive.

Thought number one. I don't think I will ever understand how people can turn war into a logical necessity. The more I think about it, the more ill I get physically and emotionally. I guess I haven't always felt this strongly about war and other issues myself, but I now find it hard to think back to that time. So I wonder how someone like Cheney or Rumsfeld can choose cause so much pain, when its mere existence makes my guts churn... I guess I'm soft.

Thought number two. A selfish one. Immigrants like me have enough issues trying to build a concept of home, torn between two countries and two cultures. I guess that's the price we pay for being born in a poor country and wanting a better life, and I was somewhat aware of the situation when I made my decision. But even if America truly was the perfect country it appears to those far away and to those blinded by jingoism, I would still have yearnings (dor) for my small native land. I would still miss Romania's peasants and poets, humor and hospitality and innocent hope, all of which have sorely faded over the past thirteen years of wanting to be like America.

But America is far from perfect. So I have to cope not only with leaving behind a perfectly good mother land, but also with my rich foster parent's selfishness and cruelty. That, I was not prepared for. Here's a poem written by Octavian Goga and translated, rather poorly and without effort, by me. It has been special to me for a long time, but perhaps even more so lately.

Without Homeland

I am a man without a homeland
A drop of fire born on the breeze,
A scattered slave escaped from fetters,
The lowest, poorest man on Earth.
I am a mage of a new calling,
Poor madman, blinded by a star,
And I have wandered here to bring you
Tales from my country of afar.

I am a tear that's been deferred
From moans a thousand years old,
I am the dream that reappears
Among the homefires of the orphans.
I am a travelling reproach
From lands that do not have a voice
And, from a world that's slowly dying,
I am the shout that still remains.

I peeled myself from among the graves,
From mausoleums wet and cold,
Where long-forgotten memories
Are guarding still an age-old thought.
And with the tremor that can carry
Those who believe in brothers still,
I cried at each and every doorway
The pain of the forgotten dead.

Today I feel the night descending
Upon what yesterday was dawn,
I feel my song wrapping itself
In the shroud of eternal silence.
And among you I bear my burden
Tainted by laughter and by mud,
For woe to he who loses homeland
To come and ask it back from you.

Wow, that's depressing! I generally think of myself as pretty positive and upbeat, yet there's always this stuff lying dormant in the background...

2003-02-07T15:01:00.000-08:00

My friend Joe recommends Hakim Bey. Neither the San Francisco or San Jose Public Libraries carry his stuff, but the internet does. One quotation, from the Poetic Terrorism section: "Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty."

2003-02-07T14:28:00.000-08:00

It strikes me that my friendly, non-trivial conversations with Sara, Mark, Julie, Joe, Jen and others are exactly what Ivan Illich had in mind. This is how colleges used to work, but now they have become the antithesis of that "collegial" atmosphere. Illich joked about writing off a few cases of wine as business expenses, because dinner and a bottle of wine were his main teaching tool at Berkeley, Penn State, CIDOC or wherever he went. Friendship comes first, learning second.

Sounds just like the teacher-student relationship in our high schools, doesn't it?

2003-02-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

I love the way my thoughts on any subject crystalize whenever I express them in conversation, especially when the conversation takes the form of argument. It must be the instant feedback from the other person and the immediate challenge of finding a good way to react to it.

In this case, I was chatting online with my friend Sara about teaching. She is planning to go into it, I just got out of it, so there's an inherent, good-natured tension between us on the subject. She says that, no matter how bad the system gets, you are still yourself and you get to make a positive difference in the lives of children. Tough to argue with that, and indeed I feel like I have done some positive things in my teaching life, mainly through small daily interactions with my students.

Indeed, even when you subtract all the negative things that I have done out of ignorance or lack of options, perhaps the net result would be a small positive. That would be the best case scenario. Sara called me a pessimist; could she be right?

To me, it comes down to a very personal decision which has to do with ethics. I just don't feel that I can knowingly continue to engage in those negative acts, even if the net result is slightly positive. I would be like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, though of course on a smaller, less dramatic scale.

Raskolnikov sees himself as a gifted individual, who can be of great service to the world - if only he could somehow get started in life (he is extremely poor). So he decides that murdering an evil old pawnbroker and taking her money is justifiable, because the net result would be positive. In a utilitarian view which denies the existence of moral absolutes, this is justifiable. At the very end of the book, he sees the error of his ways and accepts unconditional love as a guiding principle. So all of you out there who started reading the book and stopped because it was too depressing, finish it up, will ya?

It's funny how I cringe as I use the word "moral absolute." Why does the term feel so foreign and so cold? Has it been hijacked by the religious right, who uses it to express their moral absolutes and cram them down people's throats?

The thought of moral absolutes does not keep me up at night, I swear. I don't like arguing philosophy all that much, I just try to have principles and to live by them. But if I were to express those principles more formally, they might sound like moral absolutes, like "I will not contribute to the deindividualization of kids." Perhaps a better way of saying it is, negative five plus ten does not equal five if you cannot borrow five dollars to make your bet. Also, the ends don't justify the means. Do I mean "don't ever" or "don't always"? Don't for me in this case.

The difference between me and the religious right is that I feel no need to impose my views on Sara. I certainly express them, because I feel obligated to tell her what I learned the hard way. Still, I am either neutral or supportive about her (or anyone else) going into teaching.

First of all, she will do more good than I ever have, because she's already an adult with fewer issues than a 22-year old fresh out of college. She is nicer and less threatening than I am on my best day. She promised me she would read some John Holt before she starts to teach, something I only did two and a half years into my career.

Second, I could be wrong. Part of my philosophy is based on reading Holt and John Taylor Gatto, famous and successful teachers who came to similar conclusions. Well, what if they were wrong, too? If I made a poor choice in quitting teaching, I can live with it in my own life, but what right do I have in making that choice for Sara?

Finally, telling Sara not to go into teaching is poor pedagogy. We spend so much effort trying to avoid mistakes in this world... That may be warranted for things like wearing a seat belt, where you may not get a chance to learn from your mistake. In general though, that which does not cause me permanent tissue damage only makes me stronger. Mark told me a great story once, about a Native American mother who sees her child about to touch a hot stove. You can probably already imagine your mom running into the room to stop you and tell you about how touching stoves is bad for you -- I certainly can. The Native American mom, though, calls her husband over to watch the scene and gestures him to be quiet. The child touches the hot stove, jumps back and starts to cry. His mom goes in: "Did the stove hurt you?" "Yes!" "Well, hurt it back!" And the child kicks the stove, stops crying and most likely never touches a hot stove again.

2003-02-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like I'm not the only one who feels this way about the Columbia disaster... My friend Jen links to this article from the Guardian, which questions the media's coverage of the subject.

The main point I got from this article is the main point that FlashPoints, a KPFA program, also makes: deciding what is news is a crucial job. If the people who do that get their paychecks from certain big corporations, you get what amounts to censorship. This is not unlike the censorship I grew up with under communism, but the threat of going to jail is replaced with the threat of Monsanto suing Fox News and Fox News firing you.

Somebody argued that our empathy is limited, we just cannot care about everyone who dies around the world. I love the two-step response that professor Jacqueline Rose gives: "We are not powerless," and "We have to ask who is selecting where we feel empathy."

It was also interesting to get an e-mail from Adam, who reads my blogs and agrees with my thoughts on Columbia. He links to a thread on a local (swing dancing) bulletin board, where the hero worship was briefly interrupted by one person stating opinions similar to mine, until he was ripped for being insensitive and un-American.

2003-02-04T23:45:00.000-08:00

There is a new wave of grief in my heart over the passing away of Ivan Illich last December 2nd. The reason is the audio file I'm listening to right now, at the bottom of this page.

Illich speaks with warmth and a thick Austrian accent. I am transfixed by his words, as he interprets the parable of the Good Samaritan (Good Palestinian) and speaks of love and friendship.

Illich points out that in his parable, Jesus stresses the visceral reaction caused in the Samaritan's "innards" by the sight of the Jew in the ditch. We are not talking here about "need satisfaction," an emotionally neutral term which expresses something that could conceivably be most efficiently provided by a system, a bureaucracy, an HMO. We are talking about a direct relationship between human and human, neighbor and neighbor, friend and friend.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Lee Stringer. He is the author of "Grand Central Winter," an autobiographical story about his homeless days in New York. A group of us, who had worked at a homeless shelter in Jacksonville over spring break, invited him to speak at Dartmouth as a follow-up activity, and I was driving him to Logan Airport.

We talked about many things in the car, but the one thing I'll always remember is his reply to my silly but obvious question: "What do you do now when you see a homeless guy panhandling on the street? Do you give him money?" He answered that the one thing he does not do is make a policy. Sometimes, especially if the panhandler has a funny or innovative approach, he may give him some money; other times he won't. By having a set policy, he would be dehumanizing those people he meets...

To Illich as well, every instance of help is unique and specific - this Jew, in this situation, in this ditch. Not an instance of a larger social problem, but a personal thing.

I can relate to that... I see service as my personal issue. I can't stand the idea of charity, and one of the reasons is the sense of disconnect between me and the results of my contribution. I won't even mention what small percentage actually makes it there... Another one of my reasons, which Illich comments on, is the somewhat arrogant notion of responsibility - that I, member of a privileged class, have the duty to help the less fortunate. I need to organize my thoughts better before I elaborate on this touchy subject. I wish I could find the article that, incidentally, we were given just before the Jacksonville trip, in which Illich, unknown to me at the time, chastised Americans for engaging in "volunteer tourism" south of the border and causing more harm than good.

And just in case this idea was limited to the particular relationship where one person is helping another... It's not. Consider the technological jargon that creeps into our friendships and dehumanizes them. I "interact" with my friend. We "communicate" like two network servers -- I can even picture the TCP/IP packets flying back and forth...

Compare that with this quotation from Hugh of St. Victor, a 12th century monk who I believe was the subject of Illich's doctoral dissertation:

To my dear brother Ronolfe from Hugh, a sinner. Love never ends. When I first heard this I knew it was true. But now, dearest brother, I have the personal experience of fully knowing that love never ends. For I was a foreigner. I met you in a strange land. But that land was not really strange for I found friends there.

But the land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don't know whether I first made friends or was made one, but I found love there and I loved it and I could not tire of it for it was sweet to me and I filled my heart with it and was sad that my heart could hold so little. I could not take in all that there was but I took in as much as I could. I filled up all the space I had but I could not fit in all I found so I accepted what I could and weighed down with this precious gift I didn't feel any burden because my full heart sustained me. And now having made a long journey I find my heart still warmed and none of the gift has been lost for love never ends.

I recently told a friend that I don't feel like I'm living out my principles. She said, what do you mean, didn't you just quit your job because you didn't believe in it anymore? I said yes, but it goes a little deeper than that... I think, mushy as it sounds, Hugh gives me the model that I want to follow. Some might say that's all well and good for eight hundred years ago, but not today. I would direct those people to my friends Mark, Haley and Keturah, all of whom help me to believe that this model does have a place in the twenty-first century.

2003-02-04T18:52:00.000-08:00

A quotation from my friend Mark:

I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible, with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever. Always, "after just one more war" it will dawn, the new era of love: but first everybody who is hated must be eliminated. For hate, you see, is the mother of their kind of love. Unfortunately the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. (Thomas Merton, in a 1962 letter)

2003-02-04T01:24:00.000-08:00

Once again, I am inspired and awed by the way an author builds on and responds to a concern I have. Or, to put it another way, the dead guy read my mind!

A few days ago, I wrote:

"Lord, give me the ability and willingness to see the world in shades of gray, and not just black and white." I find myself fighting the impulse to embrace or dismiss every theory and theorist, when most likely the truth is somewhere in the middle.

John Holt replies, in chapter 4 of his Freedom and Beyond:

In my story about the children playing I said that the older child felt a tension. I am using this word in a special way. "Tensions" many people might call by the more familiar name "problems." But by "tensions" I mean something quite different. When we call something a problem we suggest, first, that something is happening that we don't want to happen, and secondly, that if we can only find a "solution," we can make it stop happening. Tensions cannot be made to go away. They are built into the nature of things. A friend of mine speaks not of problems, but of predicaments, which is closer to what I mean. It implies, though, that we are in a bad place, forced to choose between evils. In what I call a tension we may be in a good place, forced to choose among things all of which we like and want. It is a little like a dilemma--I can't decide whether to go tonight to the play or the concert, whether to go for vacation to the ocean or the mountains. But we can resolve a dilemma by choosing. In a tension it is as if two hands were pulling us hard in opposite directions. Each is pulling us toward something good, one is as strong as the other, and neither will tire or let go.

Our language and habits of thought make it hard for us to deal with this idea of tensions. When we think of conflict, it is always between opposites, usually one Good and the other Bad. The founders of our system of logic, the Greeks, told us that a thing could not at the same time be something and its opposite, could not be A and not-A, and we have been painfully stuck with this notion ever since. We persist in thinking that in all conflicts, one side or the other must, after all, be Right, and that if we see clearly enough or think hard enough we can find out which it is. Also, we like to get things settled. It irritates us when a difficulty keeps coming up again and again. We think, "Why do we have to go through this, we've been through it before." If we could just find the right balance, the point of equilibrium, between those conflicting forces or demands, they would cancel out and leave us alone. But in a tension, this never happens, can't happen. The conflicting pulls are both legitimate, they keep on pulling, and so the tension is permanent.

What I meant by "shades of grey" is that mythical point of equilibrium which makes the opposing sides go away. I see now that what I am faced with is the much more difficult task of accepting the existence of both black and white. This fits in nicely with what Dale Carnegie (and experience) tells me about changing people's minds by argument: it's very, very hard.

An example. In my classes, I believe in allowing my students to have as much choice as possible, but I am also aware that, given the choice, some or even most of them may waste their time. The easiest way to ease this conflict is to choose one side or the other, total freedom or total control. Needless to say, this is an example of principle becoming inflexible law, and it's not healthy. The next easiest would be to "compromise" and work out the specific areas in which freedom or control are appropriate. This is what most progressive educators try to do, find the equilibrium point somewhere along the continuum.

The best solution, which is what I had been doing and will do if and when I teach again, is to go about my business aware of arguments that can be made for both points of view and thus refuse to allow two living arguments to be petrified into doctrine. This is very hard, it takes a lot of awareness and research and feels too much like chaos. But ask any experienced teacher about lesson plans, and most will laugh. They, and I, can teach matrices without a carefully written game plan; why can we not do the same with more fundamental issues?

2003-02-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

And while I'm browsing the fruit of today's library incursion, here's a great quotation from Jonathan Kozol, another great compassionate educator, who thinks we should warn our students thus, quoting Doris Lessing:

"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accomodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecssors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself?educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."

This is kind of what I wanted to tell my students when they ask why I wanted to leave, adding of course that I can no longer be part of this indoctrination.

2003-02-01T22:05:00.000-08:00

For the first time in a while, I'm reading a book by John Holt, whose "How Children Fail" I recommend to anyway just starting to read about education. Here's an intriguing quotation from "Freedom and Beyond":

More and more it appeared that a large part of our problem is that few of us really believe in freedom. As a slogan, it is fine. But we don?t understand it as a proces or mechanism with which or within which people can work and live. We have had in our own lives so little experience of freedom, except in the most trivial situations, that we can hardly imagine how it might work, how we might use it, or how it could possibly be of any use to us when any serious work was to be done. For our times the corporaate-military model seems to be the only one we know, trust, and believe in. Most people, even in democracies, tend to see democracy as a complicated process for choosing bosses whom all must then obey, with this very small difference?that every so often we get a chance to pick a new set of bosses.

In the preface to one of his books, Neil Postman reviewed 1984 and A Brave New World, concluding that our current society is much closer to the latter. There is no Big Brother manipulating us into submission. Rather, we have chosen to give away our freedom, that troublesome thing, so that we may have comfort. That is such a discouraging thought... If only there were a tyrant somewhere, we could hope to topple him, but how can we win a war against ourselves?

2003-02-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

A thought on today's crash...

I refuse to believe that one human life is more valuable than another. Consequently, while I understand the need for GW's passionate speech, and I know that NBA teams will automatically take a moment of silence for something like that, I personally do not feel a tragic loss - which is another way of saying that I feel an equally tragic loss everytime a human life is lost: illegal immigrants on their way to work, CHP officers on duty, young black men in Oakland, Russians in a theatre, New Yorkers in the World Trade Center or Iraqi children starved to death.

The first assumption that I disagree with is that one human life is more valuable than another. There can be no doubt that our government's position is that American lives are worth much more than foreign lives. Further, the life of an astronaut, or Princess Di, is held in higher esteem than, say, mine, if I were to die, and certainly higher esteem than that of a migrant worker, or a bum. I refuse to believe that my life is worth less than some, and I refuse to believe that it is worth more than others.

The second assumption that confuses me is that human tragedy can even be quantified, and there is a threshhold, somewhere, where honors and moments of silence and presidential speeches are warranted. Why don't the Warriors hold a moment of silence before every home game in memory of last year's 100-plus homicide victims in Oakland? Not sad enough? Why should the astronauts be more important? Because they work for the government? How are they heroes?

If there was a deeper awareness of the pain and tragedy contained in every day for some people, perhaps there would be more of an impetus to build a society that minimizes that. As things stand right now, I can't help but feel that public empathy is channeled into public tragedies such as this, allowing us to feel a nice cathartic moment and go back to our everyday lives.

On the other hand, maybe I'm entirely off the point and it's only natural to get a little emotional when something explodes over Texas...

2003-02-01T21:01:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to get into the kind of unemployed life I imagined. It was actually supposed to be about reading and dancing, but today, after spending most of my time at SFSU and San Francisco Public Library, I just went home for a quiet night, half a Warriors game on TV and more reading (instead of going to the Doghaus for dancing). I guess I'm still in the post-exchange mood, where nothing here will compare.

I guess the excitment of an original idea, a new understanding, is more attractive to me right now than a good night of dancing. And while I might still end up putting what I'm learning to some use, like a book or a degree in education, for now I enjoy learning just for the hell of it.

For instance, this morning I read a critique of the Montessori system, by William Heard Kilpatrick. In this article, which I've just found and read, Kilpatrick (a John Dewey groupie) gets credit for pretty much knocking Maria Montessori out of the arena of American educational debate for a few decades. There has apparently been a revival of the Montessori system, yet nobody inside the academia seems to notice... I look forward to reading Montessori's The Absorbent Mind and The Advanced Montessori Method, and I am thankful to Kilpatrick for his warnings.

Incidentally, as I was reading this book I thought of a good prayer: "Lord, give me the ability and willingness to see the world in shades of gray, and not just black and white." I find myself fighting the impulse to embrace or dismiss every theory and theorist, when most likely the truth is somewhere in the middle. Dewey, too, can be questioned, as can Maria Montessori, while E.D. Hirsch has some redeeming qualities. Drill can be a good thing in some situations, and unrestricted freedom has its problems.

2003-01-29T17:06:00.001-08:00

I finished a great book on education the other night: Carl Bereiter's "Must We Educate?"

I originally picked it up while browsing the SFSU library, a small ugly black bound book with an intriguing title. The author turns out to be insightful and eloquent, though quite unemotional and sometimes too much in love with skills and drills.

His main argument is that schools serve three purposes: child care, training and education. Education he sees as the attempt to purposefully shape how a child will turn out, which goes unquestioned by both conservative and liberal educationists. Bereiter questions it, because he believes in individual freedom. Though he despises gambling, for instance, he holds other people's right to choose to gamble as more basic than his right to try to make them quit.

He thinks we should do away with education, and further separate child care from training, which require different methods and different types of people anyway. I, for one, would love to be the kind of child care worker he describes - charged with providing a rich, stimulating environment for kids, without any plan to manipulate them. I know others who would love to drill arithmetic and probably couldn't stand child care. He's got a point, although I might suggest forgetting drill altogether.

Bereiter buys into Ivan Illich's best thoughts (eliminating credentialing, deinstitutionalizing needs and so on), but also comes up with creative ideas of his own. To allow for unrestricted adolescence for those who now waste their time in colleges, he suggests that everyone get four years of welfare, to be used earlier or later in life, at his discretion. He suggests having stimulating "cultural experience" centers which children and adults would both find attractive. He worries about social options for adolescents, so he proposes letting them just hang around a new kind of purely optional, academic-oriented, college-type school. That's what they mostly do now anyway!

One last thing Bereiter points out is that, in spite of all the rhetoric, schools actually do a poor job of educating — so we wouldn't lose much. Schools do not have a noticeable influence on the moral and intellectual development of their students, he says - certainly not in the direction or manner that progressive educators would like to see. If anything, I believe he may be underestimating the effect that the pointless routine has on the psyche.

As a side note, after reading this book I did something pretty stupid, yet somewhat necessary. I ranked my favorite education books. I did it because several people have asked me to recommend things... I would actually rather recommend things individually after listening to what each person is looking for, but it doesn't take too much effort do do this either.

1. How Children Fail (John Holt, revised 1982)
2. Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, 1969)
3. The Book of Learning and Forgetting (Frank Smith, 1998)
4. Must We Educate? (Carl Bereiter, 1973)
5. Free at Last (Daniel Greenberg, 1987)
6. Education and the Significance of Life (Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1953)
7. Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich, 1971)
8. On Becoming a Person (Carl Rogers, 1961)
9. The Teenage Liberation Handbook (Grace Llewellyn, 1997)
10. The Power of Their Ideas (Deborah Meier, 1995)
11. The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis, 1947)

There are also some authors that I'm planning to read soon, because they are constantly quoted: bell hooks, Paul Goodman, Ted Sizer, George Dennison, Ira Shor, Maria Montessori and a few others

2003-01-29T17:06:00.000-08:00

I was watching one dance video, especially my facial expression and that of my partner, when something struck me: this is happiness. It's not an original thought by any means; of course I'm happy when I dance. But...

The insight is looking at that happiness within the context of the rest of my life. In life, a certain kind of life anyway, we have lots of competing goals: financial stability, independence from family, stable relationships, long-term plans. Well, what if you could be financially unstable, dependent on other people, living from day to day and rapidly changing friendships, yet experience happiness on a more regular basis? Would you make the trade?

I sort of have that general choice right now, and it seems to be between seeking highs (experience, dance, intellectual inquiry) and avoiding lows (financial instability, loss in social status, a less comfortable lifestyle).

I have a friend who is excited about my current situation. He thinks I should take the Greyhound down to Tijuana and keep going down through Latin America. Busses cost $2 a day when you get there, he tells me. Putting aside concerns of whether my Romanian passport would limit my freedom of movement, I wonder why I don't just jump at the idea, which I certainly find attractive. I wonder why I'm considering applying for a computer consulting job in DC.

Perhaps I'm still too scared to make the comfort for happiness trade?

2003-01-29T17:05:00.000-08:00

My friend Mark continues our e-mail / blog conversation, with great insight...

You mentioned that "I think what all these approaches to education have in common is a fundamental trust that human beings are intrinsically good and worthwhile, whereas our current schools assume the worst -...." I've found the same exact thing in my own spiritual studies and explorations! The true, authentic spiritual writers start with the understanding that human beings are not only fundementally good, but have the very seed of divine life (God) resting dormant within them. And that the goal of religion or any spiritual practice is to be an aid in the awakening of this 'Divine Indwelling' within us, so that we can fulfill our infinate potential for unconditional love, healing, and unity with all life everywhere - and then bring peace and healing to our world. Sadly, so many, many religious leaders and so called 'teachers' fit your description of the Jesuits at your school. They begin with the mistaken notion that God is somewhere 'out there' and that the goal is to get people to conform to some set of rules or beliefs in order to please (or even appease!) this (false) image of a judgmental, distant god. Once this false belief is in place, religion (or education) comes to be seen as a matter of 'damage control', trying to limit the harm that we do through rigid rules etc- instead of trusting in the infinate power of good in both people and God.

Funny, I hadn't thought of this before, but the reason you don't feel confortable with the state of teaching/education is the same reason I have never (in my heart) been able to become a priest despite lots of outside reasons and offers. I love God and I love people - but it saddens me the way the main current 'system' is set up - in such a way that religion often interferes rather than aids in peoples' experiencing the Reality I know as God. So I can't in good conscience participate in that approach. I want to help people realize how fundamentally good & powerful they are - I don't want to be in a position where I might, despite my best efforts, further the false notion that God is distant and separate from people.

When I use the term God, I mean not some imagined entity 'out there', but rather the basis of all reality, a unified field of unconditional love that exists always and everywhere, out of which all things emerge and to which all things are drawn and eventually return. One sign that someone has come to a true and deep experience of the God who actually exists (as opposed to our ideas of God that may not be true), is that the person is filled with an incredible love, honor and respect for every human being on earth, and a disinclination towards any form of power over others. Which, once again, sounds alot like your descriptions of what a good teacher is. Funny how truth in various fields/forms always seems to come together!

I really like what Mark says about damage control - that is exactly what our schools are set up to do. They are like an organism stuck in fight-or-flight mode: adrenaline pumping, other body functions suspended, lots of energy burned in order to be ready when something bad happens. I don't know much about biology, but I would guess that such a body would eventually die, unless it found a way to settle down, digest and grow.

Mark definitely highlights the main reason why I don't want to be a teacher anymore, not in this type of school: I like kids, but I don't want to exercise power over them. I don't even know if I'd want to manipulate kids for worthwhile reasons, let alone questionable ones.

2003-01-29T16:55:00.000-08:00

Proponents of programmatic learning fail to understand the amazing powers of the human mind. They are stuck in the 1950s, believing that computers will learn to think any day now... The truth, in fact, is that comparing the human mind to a computer is an insult to human intelligence. A computer would have to be about as large as the Earth in order to do all the computations that we do - things like face recognition or language translation.

The most common symptom of this mistaken belief is the insistence that patterns must be taught explicitly. In fact, our mind is best suited to do just that - recognize patterns. We do it all the time with language, parsing input streams into meaningful sentence structures.

Nobody ever taught me to read—not intentionally, anyway. When I was five or six, I would be riding the bus with my parents, look out the window and ask my parents what the signs meant. My grandparents would read to me. Eventually, I kind of figured out what each letter meant.

In a programmatic learning environment, the first difference would have been lack of personal choice. I have a history of strong contrary reactions to being forced to do something, so making me learn to read would not have been a good move. The second difference is that someone else, a teacher I guess, would have set himself up as the authority who was going to show me the ways of reading. This automatically makes him my superior, as opposed to my mom and grandpa, who basically had consultant status. Which power relationship would make me feel more intelligent and self-confident? The third difference is that patterns would have been made explicit to me, which is boring. Instead, I got to experience the thrill of discovering each letter and sound, integrating this new knowledge into my own personal concept of the Romanian language.

The fourth and final difference is the consequence of the prior three. Because I chose to learn to read, I was treated as an equal and I was allowed to explore the magic of language patterns, I became a lifelong reader. A conservative estimate, verifiable in the books database I keep, is that I have read about 350 books amounting to 70,000 pages - many of them before I turned 14 and came to America. Is it that hard to see that compulsion, subservience and transparency can never achieve the same effect? What they can do is make reading a chore.

Why would anyone do that? This is where I go out on a narrow limb. I don't know that "grey eminences" are pulling strings behind curtains, but I do believe that bureaucratic institutions develop ways of achieving their goals.

I have been listening to a CD of African American poetry, much of it written by slaves. One common theme was owners who did not want slaves to read and write, leading to fascinating detours toward literacy. This makes sense, because reading can be a subversive, political activity—as I found out when my father read an illegal, Xeroxed copy of Solzhenitsyn's "First Circle," translated in French. People who are capable and willing to read are a threat to those in power.

So, these days the easiest thing to do is undermine people's willingness to read. Just make it a chore. In the process, publishing companies can sell their McGuffey-style readers, an insult to children's intelligence but much more profitable than real books. Propaganda for this style is so good that many well-intentioned parents educators fall for it. Still, the truth is not very far away. I believe, like Frank Smith, that most intelligent people can learn to trust their experience and separate learning from programmatic teaching.

2003-01-24T18:43:00.000-08:00

As I was listening to a conversation about Saddam Hussein on KPFA, my thoughts drifted to Ceausescu and the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. Then, much to my shock, one speaker expressed his hope that Saddam could be ousted from within, yet without a bloody civil war like in Romania.

I will skip over the sketchy details of our Revolution, best expressed by the chant "16-22 / Cine'a tras in noi?" ("16-22 / Who shot at us?"), often heard in post-Revolution demonstrations. The thing I wonder about is, how would I have felt if the United States had come in to "liberate" us from Ceausescu, as so many of us naively wished for? What if my little brother didn't have access to medicine because of trade embargoes directed at a dictator who had everything he wanted? What if I could expect tens, if not hundreds of innocent Romanians to be killed by American bombs - dropped for freedom and democracy, of course?

But thank goodness, there was no reason to worry. After all, Romania doesn't have that much oil...

2003-01-24T18:36:00.000-08:00

"As long as there's a lower class I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

This quotation by Eugene Debs is a nice reformulation of the Golden Rule, or empathy in general. Actually, it goes a little bit further, it implies a deeper connection. I mean, how can anyone say, "as long as there are any criminals, I am a criminal?" That takes a whole new level of understanding of what causes fear and ignorance and brutality in people. Personally, I can easily empathize with people who are poor, because I know what it's like to walk into a grocery store with a $20 bill to buy food for a week -- though, admittedly, I have lived most of my life in lower middle-class comfort. But can I really empathize with criminals at that level? Or how about women, who make 73 cents on the dollar? Or African-Americans?

I guess I can always try... But I can understand rap lyrics like,

"If you ain't never been to the ghetto,
Don't ever come to the ghetto
'Cause you wouldn't understand the ghetto.
So stay the fuck out of the ghetto."

But perhaps I am missing the point of this whole empathy thing. Maybe it's not about understanding - that's such a rational take on things! Maybe solidarity is the word I'm looking for. Conviviality, the art of living together in joy. I may not have to fully understand someone in order to listen to her and support his right to a dignified life.

2003-01-24T15:33:00.000-08:00

I'm flipping through a book of essays, mainly feminist, by Jennifer Stone. In between a gory description of female genital mutilation practices in Egypt, and some scary statistics about the percentage of women voters there (half of one percent!), a slightly different passage catches my attention. She speaks about the connection between language, thought and power.

Without a question, we are limited and enslaved by the language we use. Freire, Giroux, McLaren and other radical education theorists seem to harp on that an awful lot. I wonder how this idea relates to their choice of big words and complicated sentence structure, which makes their books so hard for me to read. Why can't they write like Hemingway? Can it really be that their content would not come through in a more legible form?

I also wonder what this implies for my own writing, or should I say "writing." I basically write the way I think, and the way I speak. English is a pretty utilitarian language to me, and I use it as such. I've actually had this discussion with Brad, who loves to use SAT words and flowery sentences. I think I told him something along the lines of, "If I wanted to sound good, je parlerai Français." I admire the practicality of English, but I love the mysterious appeal of Romanian essayists and Russian poets. I guess the answer is to just know all of them; flexibility is the way to go. That's probably what Lord McCanley meant by "A man who knows four languages is worth four men."

The point is, you can't just ignore language. I've been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of days, as I have either read poetry in translation or tried to do it myself. It makes me want to throw my hands up and say, "Screw it! If you really want to understand this poem, you'll just have to learn the damn language." On the other hand, as I read some beautiful Russian verses by Pushkin, Akhmatova and Pasternak, in original with word-for-word translations, I can also feel my Russian language skills awaken and grow.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, it takes some basic knowledge of the language to even begin to appreciate original poetry. Once you have that, poetry can take you further and move that knowledge beyond the basics. I don't think prose does that quite as well, since it rarely pushes the limits of self-expression, like poetry does.

2003-01-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

After seeing this dance I had in Florida, Mike tells me that the St. Louis Blues Exchange was four days of that. I already knew I missed out, but now I can feel it. I've got to go next year...

2003-01-23T13:42:00.000-08:00

Mark seems to have understood what I expect teaching to be like, perhaps better than I did myself...

And it occurred to me that this is what I was trying to say when you asked if I would ever want to be a teacher. I feel really uncomfortable with the idea of being a professor like my parents - just standing in front of people (many of whom aren't interested) and telling them things I know and they don't. Even with creative learning strategies that still seems to be the underlying structure. Seems to me that same structure is what you have struggled with the past few years - and have eventually been unable to give your full heart to because it's not who you are.

What I feel called to become, in time and when I become wiser and more mature than I am now, is a guide. A guide doesn't teach so much as hold your hand to give you the confidence (and, if needed, the tools) to discover what exists (both within you and outside of you). I don't think I could ever 'profess' because what people have within them is so much more profound than anything I could ever tell them. But to help another person in their own journey to discover their true self (and God who is united to the true self) - I can't think of a more wonderful or appealing occupation!

I also re-read some Carl Rogers last night. He talks about how nothing important (nothing that changes behavior) can ever be taught to someone else. Also, where Mark speaks of "giving confidence," Carl Rogers talks about "unconditional positive regard" from teacher to student, which accomplishes the same thing. Same ideas proposed by the Sudbury Valley Schools, and Maria Montessori.

I think what all these approaches to education have in common is a fundamental trust that human beings are intrinsically good and worthwhile, whereas our current schools assume the worst - and not just public schools at that. Mark speaks of finding God, who is united to the true self - but while working at a Jesuit school, I still saw tension between New and Old Testament vision of God. The latter seemed to triumph, though - there was a fundamental mistrust of all of us "sinners," who must be changed from the outside.

I prefer Goethe's view: "Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be, and he will become as he can and should be."

2003-01-22T11:57:00.000-08:00

Wow... I've always thought that work and friends are somewhat mutually exclusive, as in Europe is good for friends and the United States good for work... But I never felt it quite the way I did yesterday.

My first day of freedom coincided with an infusion of contact with new and old friends.

First, I was on iChat with Julie Anne, an interesting new friend I made in Florida. She is opinionated, sarcastic, intelligent - all in addition to being an excellent dancer.

Then, while at school to tie up some loose ends, I had lunch with Brad and my replacement in the computers class, Ian. It was great to chat with both these guys.

As I dropped Brad off at his house, my best friend from college, Mark, called. We spoke for hours, a deep yet warm conversation, as always.

Later on, out of the blue, my Kyla called. I hadn't heard from her in months, but now she's coming to my birthday dinner on Saturday.

Finally, I got an e-mail from Jen... She got her birthday card/gift in the mail and is letting me know that she's replying by snail mail.

So, in one day I communicated by iChat, e-mail, phone and eye-to-eye to people from Vermont, DC, Berkeley, Tampa and San Francisco. Not bad! And it only goes to show, you don't have to go to Europe to be in touch with friends...

2003-01-21T18:23:00.000-08:00

Does this explain why I quit teaching well enough?

He Drew

He drew... the things inside that needed saying.
Beautiful pictures he kept under his pillow.
When he started school he brought them...
To have along like a friend.
It was funny about school, he sat at a square brown desk
Like all the other square brown desks... and his room
Was a square brown room like all the other rooms, tight
And close and stiff.

He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, his arms stiff
His feet flat on the floor, stiff, the teacher watching
And watching. She told him to wear a tie like
All the other boys, he said he didn't like them.
She said it didn't matter what he liked. After that the class drew.
He drew all yellow. It was the way he felt about Morning.
The Teacher came and smiled, "What's this?
Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing?"
After that his mother bought him a tie, and he always
Drew airplanes and rocketships like everyone else.
He was square inside and brown and his hands were stiff.
The things inside that needed saying didn't need it
Anymore, they had stopped pushing... crushed, stiff
Like everything else.

Written by a high school senior from Alton, Illinois?two weeks before he committed suicide.

2003-01-20T11:24:00.000-08:00

Will I be changing careers soon?

One of my roommates at the South Florida Exchange this weekend tells me his computer consulting company is hiring. Although I never thought the Dartmouth alumni connection would ever get me another job, that could do it this time. Of course, it also helps that I have a good technological background, I'm used to explaining things to people, I speak French and Spanish...

I'd have to leave San Francisco, but the money would be quite good. Besides, I would be learning new things ALL the time... I've decided that I make a much better learner than I do a teacher. Of course, there is a trend of thought best represented by Carl Rogers, which claims that there is no teaching -- only learning.

Maybe I'll just weather out the current conservative storm before I rejoin education.

2003-01-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

It's all over. Regrets and what-ifs aside, I will be much happier over the next four months. Money will be a problem, but freedom is priceless. I have never wanted for freedom of thought, but now I have freedom of movement and freedom of action.

2003-01-16T20:53:00.000-08:00

So, tomorrow morning is the day... The meeting that will finally decide whether I stay or go at my school.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out if what i'm feeling is fear of the unknown (and lack of money) or loyalty to my current students and wanting to finish what i've started. There's also the intense mutual dislike I share with my current department head / former landlord, which I think may cloud my thinking, and perhaps his as well.

Do you try to fix something that's broken, or just start anew? At some point, do you just have to stay there?

2003-01-16T12:51:00.000-08:00

What a difference it makes when students consider something their own.

Shukry just called my attention to four AA batteries he was holding in his hand. I was a little annoyed at first in thought and body language - I know the chess timer batteries are running low, what do you expect me to do, you guys are using them all day long.

"No," Shukry says, "I'm trying to tell you I just replaced them..."

Just like they all chipped in to buy the electronic chess timer, now they are helping to keep it going by bringing batteries from home.

In contrast, two years ago I worked at a small school with great intentions but poor results. One of our biggest problems was that students would routinely steal the batteries from the clocks on classroom walls to put in their CD players.

It's not a hard concept to grasp, is it? Shukry feels like the chess club is his, so he cares about it. And I didn't have to ask, although I often walk a fine line between pushing and hoping. For instance, I have lots of AA batteries at home and I considered bringing some to school - but I didn't, not (just) because I'm cheap, but because it's not my chess club, nor do I want it to be. It rightfully belongs to the students.

2003-01-16T12:36:00.000-08:00

Can I finish the year at my school? The new semester starts on Tuesday, so this would be a good time to call it quits.

I am convinced that this style of education harms children. I know there are less damaging alternatives, and I have the feeling that education could be an amazing resource if it wasn't so often confused with schooling. It hurts me more than I can express to say things like "be quiet" and "do your work." I am emotionally exhausted by my struggle against cynicism, against blaming the kids. I need much more time than I actually have to think, read and talk to people about these issues. I don't want to become a "lifer" in teaching, my faith and courage burning low, hanging on just because it's the financially sound thing to do.

On the other hand, I like getting a check for $2300 each month. It would be hard to live without that. I love the clandestine chess club that has flourished in my room. The tournament they asked for is thriving, and I just figured out a way to staple a bunch of scoresheets together, so they can remember their games. I have plenty of ideas for Advanced Computer Applications, too - I would focus on each student's passions and interests instead of Photoshop or Excel, I would treat technology like the tool it is, a means and not an end. More importantly, I've made connections with students that I hate to lose. I think it's a reasonable claim to make that even by merely being here and doing whatever my conscience tells me to do, I am more of a positive than a negative. Besides, if I ever push the envelope too far, what are they going to do? Fire me?

I don't know how I would handle not teaching. Like Charles Aznavour says, "le travail ne me fait pas peur." I'll work any job, construction, whatever. I just talked to my friend Mark yesterday - in the search for an occupation where he causes the least harm, he is now driving a zamboni for a living! I guess that's what I'm really looking for: a quiet job, with little or no responsibility, making enough money to live and not much more, leaving me some time to read and reflect.

2003-01-14T15:35:00.000-08:00

i really didn't need my car broken into last saturday.

fortunately, i decided to take my laptop with me into the dance studio. all they stole was a bag with my AC adaptor and external CD burner, an external firewire portable hard drive that i had my (freshly backed up) mp3s on, my car AC adaptor, my checkbook and, much to my dismay, two of my three yellow atari soccer jerseys. i guess i should be grateful i still have one...

this is another one of those thefts that didn't really do them much good ("hey, wanna buy this external firewire CD-RW drive for $100?"), but it did do me some harm. one of my students observed that i was pretty calm about it. i told her that it's happened to me before, and i haven't lost anything i can't replace. it's only money, it's only things.

still, the one thing that hurts me is that the more shit like this happens, the more cynical i have to become about this world.

on the other hand, with a bit of a reach, i can imagine being on the streets. my government has just cut off my $300 check so gavin newsome can get elected mayor. panhandling is getting tougher. i'm even more desperate than before. i guess i might be more likely to break into cars, hold people up, do whatever in order to eat or drink or feed a drug habit or whatever.

which brings me to a great comment my dad made the other day, as we both rolled out eyes at the NYSE commercial that lauded the integrity of its companies. if you steal $100, you get throw in jail and your life is over when you get out - no job, no housing, no community that will accept you. if you steal $100,000,000 of pension fund money, like the good folks from enron and worldcom, not only do you not go to jail, but you get a fresh start as an executive at some other company.

i guess going to college pays after all. stay in school!

2003-01-14T15:24:00.000-08:00

i love apple, but this new browser just made me lose a lengthy post. i guess that's what i deserve for writing lengthy posts to begin with, huh? =)

the gist of it was - should i try to fix the education system, or try to fix how one school is run (maybe find an existing one)? this is the main difference between radical/critical education (henry giroux, peter mclaren, paulo freire) and liberal/progressive/constructivist education (ted sizer/deborah meier/gary tsuruda/alfie kohn). i've been reading all of the above lately, and i'm starting to see the differences very clearly.

critical pedagogy started with paulo freire, who taught poor adult peasants in NE brasil to read in about 30 hours, using politically loaded vocabulary. this is activist teaching, from people who have read marx and che guevara carefully, though they may not always agree with them. they say that teaching cannot be neutral; if you're not teaching for social justice, you are teaching that the status quo is okay. i tend to agree.

progressive pedagogy is a way of structuring the curriculum so that students are doing, not listening. it is empowering, though nobody speaks of revolution. they foresee more of a slow process, where small autonomous schools begin to flourish and more and more districts see that huge, micromanaged schools are not the way to go. special interests and general inertia seem to work against this idea, but deborah meier makes one very good point: a top-down idea, whether it's a conservative curriculum or an empowering reform movement, is doomed to failure unless the people responsible for implementing it buy into it. still, can a top-down movement meant to liberate and empower teacher and students face that much resistance? or does any bottom-up movement even have a chance to fracture the stranglehold of school bureaucracy?

the personal implications of this dilemma for me are, what do i do next year? i know that a public school with 1800 students is not for me, although i could continue to work there part-time teaching the advanced computers curriculum i'm creating. a smaller school might be good for me, and the aim high academy is actually just opening up in san francisco. on the other hand, perhaps i need to go to grad school (penn state seems like a program i would like, or harvard for the philosophy of education, or even san francisco state). grad school would allow me to tackle issues at a higher level, to understand and eventually try to change the system.

2003-01-14T14:33:00.000-08:00

what is the right way to read poetry? is there one?

this question is becoming more relevant to me now because i've started to experiment with recording voice (and other audio input) to mp3.

a long time ago, on a hiking trip with a couple of friends, we had this conversation while dangling our feet over a wooden bridge. ben seemed pretty sure of his ideas. i was and am kind of a poetry novice, so i mostly listened silently while he and our other friend argued...

i have read a lot more poetry since then, yet i still have questions about how to recite it. a friend heard me recently and suggested more pathos. he may be right, but i'm wondering if i have the right to interpret the poem a certain way for my audience. a poem, much like a novel, is the interaction between author, reader and the circumstances in the reader's life that make the poem relevant. where do i come into all of this? i suppose actors have a similar problem with interpreting plays, or literature teachers interpreting anything for their students.

what really bugs me is this... i recently checked out a set of CDs featuring african-american poetry, read by two different actors. one of them is fine. the other is way, way over the top with his pronounciation. i almost can't stand it, although i still appreciate the poems hidden underneath his overbearing voice.

on the other hand... what white middle-class prejudices do i bring into the equation? maybe the way he recites the poem is appropriate for that cultural context.

it's so tough to say... poetry is such a personal thing.

2003-01-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

it's probably about time for me to try to summarize the main points of my still-changing, loosely-defined teaching philosophy. this will be more of a brainstorm than anything, at this point...

- learning cannot be forced (carl rogers, frank smith, edwards deming)
- learning to teach is also a bottom-up process and cannot be forced (ted sizer, carl rogers)
- a teaching philosophy is much more important than teaching techniques (krishnamurti)
- school should not be about useless trivia (daniel greenberg)
- integration is more important than specialization (krishnamurti, ted sizer)
- school as a system promotes and preserves social inequalities (ivan illich, henry giroux)
- most importantly, schools should teach the meta-skills of questioning, gaining perspective, seeking alternatives (deborah meier, neil postman)
- schools were not set up to serve the best interest of children (john taylor gatto)
- schools may be beyond repair (john holt, ivan illich)
- death by bureaucracy is slow and painful (john taylor gatto, susan ohanian)
- learning can, should and does take place in everyday life (frank smith, ivan illich, john holt)
- traditional schools do not respect kids (daniel greenberg, herb childress, philip jackson, john taylor gatto, alfie kohn, etc.)
- external structure is not the same and cannot replace internal structure (alfie kohn)
- grades and diplomas are detrimental to real learning (thomas jefferson)
- teachers should only be a part-time job (bertrand russell)
- ...or should be forced to take a sabbatical every 3-4 years and drive a cab or something like that (neil postman)
- ...or should be 40 years or older so that they've already had other experiences and learned about life (john taylor gatto)

2003-01-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a little about Ted Sizer, partly because there's a small school starting out in San Francisco next year based in great part on the principles he established for his "Coalition of Essential Schools." Here are a few great passages from an interview published on the web, that are especially relevant to my life right now.

Our faculties need time, support, and encouragement in order to prepare and re-prepare themselves to do what is often for them new work. This is an urgent task for all Coalition schools in the next five years: to marshal themselves, as a faculty, to achieve a much more effective level of schooling. If that's called staff development, three cheers for it--but the words "staff development" and "training" get in our way here, because it's got to be done from the bottom up. Its the faculty figuring out what it needs to know because of the new programs it wishes to start, rather than someone else's decision that faculty should be inoculated with someone's new idea.

This last is closely related to one of the more nagging issues that confronts Coalition school faculties: how teachers may become "generalists" rather than specialists in one area only. Many teachers find this an impossible pill to swallow. They see their strength and merit in a traditionally defined subject area, whether it be physics or auto mechanics, and they feel ill equipped to meet an acceptable standard outside the field. In a sense, these feelings serve as an enormously conservatizing force, endlessly reinvigorating the way the 1893 Committee of Ten construed the high school curriculum.

I have taught physics, computers and all kinds of math. I want to teach dancing, french, spanish, english and social studies (perhaps psychology). So I like what Sizer says about this topic. My weaker students seem to learn better from their stronger classmates than from me, although (because?) I know so much more than both groups. Similarly, I think it could be incredibly useful for students to watch a relatively intelligent adult struggle with acquiring material that he or she is not entirely comfortable with. The adult could keep a journal, document all the false starts and dead-ends encountered along the way to success. As a math teacher, I am setting myself up as a frustrating, debilitating example, way beyond reach. As a physics teacher, I was just getting by; still, when I was asked tough questions I answered, "I don't know, I'll look it up and answer it tomorrow."

I think the ability to learn anything should be sought in teachers, and it most certainly is not. If anything, the ability to follow orders and fill out attendance strips and to take a number of classes in a given subject is what gets you hired. A colleague once advised me: "Don't get an auxiliary credential in teaching spanish! If they finds out you're qualified, they can make you teach only that."

2003-01-02T11:39:00.000-08:00

I want to write poetry.
My sentences: neat, dull
and frightened next to Roethke's.
Should I write in a language I don't speak?

Or invent my own, a collage of
words and phrases,
the dream only of
Esperanto speakers.

2003-01-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

We're in the poetry section of the bookstore. "Who is your favorite poet?" Jen asks. "Theodore Roethke," I declare with certainty. "Why?" Ooh-ah. I stop and think, then give the simplest lame answer I could come up with on the spot. He is so versatile, he can write about everything: pain, love, nature, wisdom... Then I recite "In A Dark Time," a poem which I just found out was written towards the end of his life, during bouts with insanity.

What I should have said is, he speaks the words that are itching to get out of my chest. Phrases like "We think by feeling. What is there to know?" and "My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, is buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?" Langston Hughes is fine, Robert Frost is cool, but Ted Roethke is mine.

And it makes sense that I should feel that way. In "On Poetry & Craft," he says he speaks with the identity of not just himself, but the aggregate of many tortured souls: Yeats, Rilke, me... maybe you.

2003-01-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

I had settled on "the individual versus society" as the number one teaching dilemma I face, both in terms of importance and intensity of inner conflict. With the help of two friends, I have redefined it so it makes more sense to me.

I was talking to Jenn Mui about how I believe in the individual, but I don't want to sound like Ayn Rand, to whom I have an instinctive aversion. She helped me see that "the individual" can be used as an excuse for selfishness and "society" can be interpreted to mean the cream of the crop, the few who control the GNP.

Then, I read this sentence by Theodore Roethke: "This poem is an exposition of one of the modern hells: the institution that overwhelms the individual man." Philip W. Jackson actually used the rest of this paragraph as his leading quotation for Life in Classrooms: "The 'order,' the trivia of the institution, is, in human terms, a disorder, and as such, must be resisted. It's truly a sign of psychic health that the young are already aware of this."

So, what I have is not one, but two related dilemmas. First, the individual versus the institution. Second, selfishness against community. Through a brilliant social engineering feat, schools teach us to see individuality as selfishness and institution as community. And that is exactly what an institution must do in order to survive and grow, isn't it? Ivan Illich and John Taylor Gatto see this as well. Gatto refers to school bureaucracy as "pathologic," by which he means lacking conscience.

2003-01-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

On New Year's Eve, I went running on the beach for the second time. I wasn't planning on it, but the sun was setting when I got home, and I just had to. The waves are always large - "dangerous surf," the sign says. The clouds are dimly-lit in that post-sunset way. The smell and the sound of the sea. It all combined to give me that rare feeling that there's no other place I'd rather be.

On the way back, up Rivera street, I once again took on the hill. I love to feel my calves and quads and lungs pumping and screaming as I push faster. This time it was even better than the first; I didn't feel as old, big and slow.

2002-12-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

I started reading Bertrand Russell last night, and he can relate to my last entry. I had picked up two of his books from the SFSU library a few days ago - "In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays" and "Education and the Good Life."

The two essays I read in the former just floored me. I mainly started reading Russell because Chomsky was influenced by him, and because Brad said he was a good read. Now, I'd have to list him with Ivan Illich and Carl Rogers as one of my favorite non-fiction authors.

I just read a few paragraphs from his "Education and Discipline" essay to my first period students, to explain why I felt so tired:

Unfortunately, it is utterly impossible for over-worked teachers to preserve an instinctive liking for children; they are bound to come to feel towards them as the proverbial confectioner's apprentice does towards macaroons. I do not think that education ought to be anyone's whole profession: it should be undertaken for at most two hours a day by people whose remaining hours are spent away from children. The society of the young is fatiguing, especially when strict discipline is avoided. Fatigue, in the end, produces irritation, which is likely to express itself somehow, whatever theories the harassed teacher may have taught himself or herself to believe.

In the other essay, which gives the book its title, Russell argues that there's no reason why some people should work eight-plus hours a day and others be forcibly unemployed. He also scolds the wealthy for placating the masses with the "work = virtue" ethic, while being idle themselves. Anyway, he thinks that everyone should work four hours a day and re-learn how to enjoy their leisure time actively, not passively. And to think that he wrote before television!

2002-12-19T13:21:00.000-08:00

I've always told myself that when I find myself getting mean, it's time to quit teaching. It might be time. Although I'm still pretty good about not being mean to students, I don't like what the bottled-up frustration is doing to me. I'm certainly learning more than I ever have about schools, but it's also more painful than it's ever been.

I suppose there's always the possibility that my vulnerable young mind has been twisted by ultra-radical authors and, in fact, there's not as much wrong with the system as we like to pretend. Maybe my rebellion is more without a cause than with one, and it just stems from my utter inability to deal with any form of authority -- a strange position for a former straight A student and teacher's pet.

2002-12-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

So, I got reprimanded by e-mail by my department chair/ex-landlord for missing out on that rally: "I thought I made it clear when you skipped out on professional development the other day that you must be here until 3 p.m. every day per your contract. You should be getting permission from a principal, vice principal or department head if you need to leave school earlier for any reason. It appears that you left again yesterday before 3 p.m. without helping supervise the pep rally (even after I reminded you in person about the pep rally and where it was)."

Here's what I wanted to write him back, and probably would have if Brad hadn't talked me out of it.

Thank you for the reminder. Perhaps you could also remind me what my contract says about...
- staying at school until late night to fix up a computer lab
- fixing a deadbeat printer 5 times a day
- tutoring students at lunch period, let alone 5 days a week
- bringing my own cd burner, scanner, camcorder, printer and portable hard drive for students to use, in order to make up for the school's defective equipment without asking for money that doesn't exist

As a former businessman, I know you are aware of what happens to an institution when employees stick to the letter of their contract. If I do just that, my students and the school will be much worse off.

The note probably sounds self-righteous, and it is. Now, if everything else at my school was fine, I would want to live up to my contract. But when the only reason I'm staying with a job that makes me unhappy most of the time is the fact that I don't want my kids to get stuck with a long-term sub... In any case, this is kind of a bluff anyway, since I could never live with myself if I actually did a half-ass job at anything. In fact, the reason why I want to quit my job is that the environment, as much as I alter it, is still very much in opposition to my idea of helping kids.

2002-12-19T09:40:00.000-08:00

Why do I hate testing... Let me count the reasons.

First of all, there is a morbid atmosphere in the room, especially in a class where I don't give many tests. My students act unnaturally - quiet, scared, unhappy. Even if I thought that testing was good for other reasons, the look on my students' faces would still be enough to make me hate testing.

Second, as I gave a bunch of "Mastery Tests" today, written to the lowest acceptable standard for a C, a bit higher for a B and so on, I saw something strange. Three of my top students (all of them TAs) failed the first, C-level mastery test. They were solving much easier problems a day or two ago, but now that it's a test, things change. The idea that test anxiety makes students perform worse than they normally would is not novel.

Third, another one of my students, Guang Feng, failed two consecutive C-level tests only because he circled the wrong word ("cubic" instead of "hyperbola"). His English profficiency is quite low. On one hand, if I'm trying to be fair to everyone else, I can't let him make that one mistake and pass, right? But on the other hand, he is a very strong math student. He made no mistakes in calculations, but he is getting punished for something that doesn't have much to do with math.

Fourth, Brad made a very insightful comment this morning. "They know what they know, regardless of what the test says." As Alfie Kohn points out repeatedly in "Punished by Rewards," grades don't even come close to accurately describing the knowledge a student has, not even on a superficial level. Perhaps they describe what that student knows at that time. Yes, I'm supposed to make sure that my students have mastered the basic skills of Algebra 2 before sending them off to Trig, but just because they know it in December doesn't mean they'll still know it in January, let alone next September.

Finally, I hate the social implications of grades. I don't like to sort kids into above average, average, below average and seriously deficient piles. This violates my human dignity and theirs. And I believe that the kids in the above average pile are just as unfortunate as the others, because they learn that they are separate and better than their peers. This is a hard lesson to unlearn, as I know all too well.

I may sound cynical. I may be cynical. But grading is a pretty cynical business...

2002-12-19T07:27:00.000-08:00

Another gem of wisdom from one of our esteemed assistant principals, from a Holidays Pep Rally that wasn't all that popular: "Don't you know it's illegal to not celebrate Christmas?!"

I personally cut the rally. My department head did, too; last time he got stuck guarding the door against students trying to escape, so now he went away -- just in time to see me heading out the door of my upstairs room. In an attempt to maintain official status he asked, "You know the rally is downstairs, right?" On short notice, I came up with one of my better non-commital yet polite replies: "Oh, is it?" and continued on to my car.

Brad wasn't so lucky. I had left him in our room with about eight kids playing chess or madhouse. Well, another assistant principal was going door to door checking the classrooms for people cutting the rally. Brad tried to raise the argument about kids doing something they're really involved in, supervised by a teacher, but it didn't quite work for institutional logic.

I guess assistant principals sprout up for assemblies, just like mushrooms after the rain. But I shouldn't be so mean to mushrooms.

2002-12-17T09:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was one of those days that you just shake your head at. And I'm not even talking about the fact that I moved into my new room, that registered very low on the radar.

I go to SFSU to get a couple of books (The Right to Useful Unemployment by Ivan Illich and anything on education by Bertrand Russell). On my way down, one of the prettiest women I've ever seen holds the elevator door open for me. We walk over to the check-out line, where they actually don't let her check out her two books. I hear the clerk say, "You have to be registered."

Well, I've been in that situation before, spending hours in the Santa Clara University Library because I couldn't check anything out. So I could empathize. After checking out my own books, I look for the mystery girl and find her putting money on a copy card. I ask her if she wants to check them out on my card, and she's pretty happy with the idea. So, I'm feeling pretty good at this point.

We walk out the door together and strike up a conversation. She has a final exam or paper due tomorrow, so she is in a real bind. I mention that I'm taking credential classes, and she tells me she's a social work major. She's from Trinidad, which reminds me of my college friend Dave Dookeeram. I tell her about Dave and the trip he organized our senior year, working at a homeless shelter in Jacksonville over spring break. Funny how the only two people I know from Trinidad are both into doing good things.

As we're about to part for our different cars, I ask if I can call her sometime. She readily agrees, and starts to take out a pen. I take out my cell phone instead -- scraps of paper are so unruly! Always getting lost. So she gives me her number before we say good-bye, and I'm psyched. She's beautiful, exotic, elegant, intelligent, kind.

Now, that's a pretty good story in and of itself. For the next hour or two I was thinking about it, wondering if I would have made the same offer to a guy in the same predicament, or a less attractive woman. I hope I would have, because giving without strings attached is something I believe in strongly. For instance, I think that getting tax breaks for giving to charity is horrendous, because it turns an act of compassion into a business deal. In my own life, I try to pay attention to the reasons why I'm doing things. I question my own motives whenever I benefit from a seemingly charitable act.

In this case, however, motives be damned. I was quite willing to cross this event off the "charitable acts" list if it meant seeing her again, and I certainly wasn't going to not ask for her phone number just to prove my unselfishness in helping another human being. Twisted logic, I agree, but it did cross my mind.

So, now, for the kicker. Later on, I decide to look up the stored phone number, to make sure it wasn't all a dream. And the phone number is not there!

I instantly know what happened. Whenever I store a number in my phone, I need to press "Store" and then "Done." I pressed the red button instead, which is right below "Done" and much more prominent on my Motorola V60. Man, I hate that phone now... This has happened to me before, but never with a number this important.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry about the whole thing. Easy come, easy go. I put an ad on craigslist under missed connections, though this strikes me as more than a little odd, since she already gave me her phone number! I always thought "Dumb and Dumber" was a terrible movie, especially the last scene. But, like they say, some other lucky guy will end up dating this girl. Man, one of these days I too will get my lucky break.

But in the end, the dream may be better left unfulfilled. Where have I heard that before? Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," (Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair)? Stevie Smith's take on Coleridge's person from Porlock, who interrupted him when he may have been stuck anyway? Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, who gets the girl and finds out it's no big deal?

All of the above.

2002-12-16T09:46:00.000-08:00

A little more by Jennifer Stone. This is a transcript of her radio show, which I've actually never listened to until tomorrow. "Stone's Throw" airs every Tuesday at 3:30 on KPFA 94.1 FM. She certainly sounded just like this in person!

"My favorite game is imagining a world in which each child grows up… oh, on a warm Pacific island, surrounded by affectionate folks, a clan, a place where education is just the willful acquisition of vulnerability, of ever-greater sensitivities. Oh yes. And how would such a child survive if she came to the main land—to what we still call a “man’s world?” Actually, I think he or she might do very well."

This reminds me of my favorite book, or one of them anyway: Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot." Prince Myshkin, the last descendant of a noble family gone poor, returns to Russia from Switzerland, where he has been dealing with some health issues. He is an incredibly generous, loving person, which means he has a hell of a time fitting in with Russian aristocracy, who all seem to like him but, as the title suggests, show him little or no respect. So, Dostoyevsky presents a more complex picture than Stone's cautious optimism. Still, Lev Myshkin is my hero.

And another interesting point... Just a couple of entries go, I was writing about the fitting in versus effecting change. This is a similar debate: fitting in versus being sensitive and vulnerable.

2002-12-15T22:49:00.000-08:00

I went to the KPFA Arts & Crafts fair yesterday. The deluge was on, [note/reminder: at the beginning of this blog, I reserved the right to use foreign words when they fit better than their English counterparts] but the fair was inside, at the concourse at 9th & Brannan.

Although the crafts were really expensive, my eyes were smiling with color the whole day. Handwoven silk scarves and blouses, wool moccasins, beautifully glazed ceramics, paint-over-laser-printer paint-over-laser-printer art (with such goofy ideas as 5 Mona Lisas playing poker) and so much more.

After a cheesesteak that wasn't nearly as good as the rest of the experience, I ended up talking to author and KPFA volunteer talk show host Jennifer Stone at the booth she had set up to sell her books. Talking is perhaps the wrong term, since it implies some give and take, and I was pretty much listening to her hold court on feminism, Bush, Clinton, education and so on. She was full of ideas, had lots of connections, her mind was fresh and wild and impressive. I did not mind being silent one bit, though this make come as a surprise to those who know me well.

I bought a book from her, and also one by Noam Chomsky about democracy and education. Chomsky strikes me as one of those rare authors, like Ivan Illich, who can give me food for thought for a whole week in just one paragraph, though the paragraph may be just as hard to read as Illich's. In this case, I opened the book randomly (as I like to do) and read the following idea, taken from a 1966 article.

It would be too much to ask to discuss current issues in schools; the institutional pro-government bias would never allow that. However, it is possible to educate students to be critical of what they read, perhaps by stressing those events in history where our government was less than honest and conducive to world peace and happiness.

I actually took such a class as a senior Social Studies elective in high school; it was called "Conflict Modern World" and was taught by my favorite teacher, Patrick McCrystle. I learned about El Mozote and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, about Kissinger in East Timor and Margaret Thacher in Belfast. Meanwhile, I was also taking a U.S. History AP class--because we all need our AP tests, don't we? The answer to this rhetorical question is "Hell no!" Anyway, in USHAP I learned all about Manifest Destiny with not a trace of opinion or criticism, I learned presidential trivia and all the wars that we have fought with God on our side. I've never really put the two together until now, but they do paint an interesting picture, don't they? A seminar for 30 seniors who choose to take it, versus a default course that 300 others are placed into. This is at a Jesuit school that is sincerely concerned with social change, whose faculty and students participate in School of Americas protests and so on.

Also, it's worth mentioning that the first chapter in one of my favorite book, Postman and Weingartner's "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" (1969) expresses the same idea. The authors suggest that schools be used to equip students with the best possible "crap-detector" that they may use on all the information they are constantly bombarded. As a future parent, that is certainly what I intend to do for my kids, before I hopefully have the intestinal fortitude to not interfere too much with their lives and decisions.

2002-12-14T19:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw Harry Potter, Year 2. It's really not my fault, I was planning to see 8 Mile but by the time I left home and found parking near Van Ness and Geary, I had to take what I could get.

It was a cute movie, just like the first one. Although it happened much less in this one, they did the same thing that drove me nuts. Sequence of events: Harry and Ron do something noble and courageous. Professor Dumbledore or McGonnagal award 10 points to Gryffindor, or tell them they have just won some special Hogwarts award. Cut to the kids' faces, suddenly lit with grateful enthusiasm...

For anyone who thinks that kind of thinking is not harmful or insulting, imagine you just stayed up until 3am to comfort your best friend, and at the end he says, "Thank you. Here's twenty dollars." The reward makes a good act seem petty and selfish. It becomes a business deal instead of compassion.

2002-12-14T11:26:00.000-08:00

Wow... Two great stories from KPFA, by Jack Kornfield, the author of the book The Art of Forgiveness.

When the member of an African tribe commits some type of transgression, they bring him in the center of the village, unchained. Everyone gathers around him and, one at a time, they each recall in great detail all the good things he has done. The ceremony can go on for days, and ends with a feast of celebration.

A mother attends the trial of her son's killer, another teenager. When he gets sentenced to a few years in prison, she gets up and says "I'm going to kill you." But as time goes by, she starts to visit him in jail. He has no family, so she is his only visitor. When he's about to get out, she asks what his plans are. He's still confused, so she sets him up with a job at a friend's company. He has no place to stay, so she lets him use a spare room in her home. Then one day she asks him: "Do you remember the courtroom, where I said I would kill you?" He replies, "Of course, I will never forget that." "Well," she says, "I did. I could not let the person who killed my son live on. But now that both of them are gone, I would like to adopt you."

Well, Jack wrote the book before 9/11 and it came out this year, but how relevant is it in today's world? I especially liked the first story. It reminds me of a quotation by Goethe: "Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be." I know I could use a little more forgiveness in my own heart, and so could many others.

In real life, though, we throw transgressors in jail. In high school, we suspend them.

2002-12-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

What is the thing you like most about rain?

I have friends who love rain. I generally have mixed feelings or worse about it, but tonight as I got out of my car, it struck me--the thing I love most about rain is the smell. Rain just seems to purify the air... The city air smells like rural New Hampshire, for a little while anyway.

Then I started thinking about other things I enjoy about rain. Back in my cross-country days, I loved running in the rain. It's such a nice feeling when the rain mixes in with your sweat until you can't tell them apart... Your shirt couldn't be any more soaked, but you don't care. Or if you do, you just take it off and wrap it around your waist, your torso dancing among the warm raindrops.

Soccer is the same way in the rain. Getting dirty to the point of no longer caring, practicing diving headers in the mud, sliding ten feet at a time.

And then when it's all over, a majestic rainbow will perhaps tower over us all. Three years ago, I taught my physics students that rainbows are formed from light reflected (or is it refracted?) by tiny drops of water in the atmosphere, but only when the lightsource is behind the observer. One week ago, an Iroquois poet quoted on KPFA taught me that rainbows are made from the souls of last year's wildflowers.

2002-12-10T23:20:00.000-08:00

It's interesting to compare my blog entries with Jen's. I think hers are meant to be read, whereas I'm just writing. I'm just thinking out loud. I know I'm quite unpolished, and I kind of like the raw, stream-of-consicousness format mine take. Still, I don't think I'd find it all that interesting as a reader. I don't even read them again, although I'm sure I will eventually.

I probably should learn how to write someday, when I'm not so busy.

2002-12-10T23:11:00.000-08:00

Jen read one of my recent posts and brought up an interesting point: being unpopular.

Actually, it relates to the last lesson that my credential class teacher shared with us in tonight's last class. He passed out an article entitled "Mother Teresa forgives filmmaker who attacked her," and explained how knowing that there are people who are unhappy with Mother Teresa made him realize that no matter what you do, some people will dislike you. If you try to change to please them, new people who dislike you will come out of the woodwork. So don't sweat it.

In that same program but a different, much inferior class, we had a Saturday class. Our teacher asked us specifically what kind of pizza and what kind of soda we wanted. We voted overwhelmingly for pepperoni and non-diet. So, what did she get, predominantly? Cheese pizza and Diet Pepsi.

The reason I'm telling this story is that the program director, who knows me and likes me, overheard me complaining loudly not necessarily about eating cheese pizza, but about the fact that our opinion was requested and promptly ignored. Anyway, she actually found it refreshing that I make a habit of saying what I think. The other example was me telling that same teacher how bad her class was and why, which didn't make me terribly popular with her.

It would, however, be inaccurate to say that I don't care about being popular. A better way to put it might be that I don't want to be popular for the wrong reasons. This is a fine line to walk, as you might imagine, and I'm sure there are many times when I have gone too far on the blunt side. But with so many people safely anchored into silence on the opposite side, there's got to be someone who tells it like it is, doesn't it?

2002-12-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I think I just got off the phone with my future landlady. I'm excited to the point of giddiness.

I'll know for sure tomorrow, but it's always a good sign when you're on the phone for 22 minutes and discuss things like education, current issues and Romanian history. En franc,ais! It was awesome to speak French again, with a slang-slinging Parisian, no less. It was kind of funny, Nicole first started grilling me in correct but heavily accented English with very direct questions like "can you afford to pay the rent?" But she really warmed up once I started speaking French... There's another French Canadian woman living there - her room-METTE, as Nicole calls her, with the accent on the last syllable. That's cool, we can all bash the U.S. together... =)

It's funny, I feel so energized... I don't know if it's the French or the prospect of living with someone who's interesting and doubtlessly has many stories to tell about France. Since I can't travel to France, this is the next best thing. I can just see my French vocabulary and slang improving daily... I would learn so much more about the world.

2002-12-07T22:45:00.000-08:00

While looking on the web for words of wisdom from A. Powell Davies (a Unitarian minister from the 50s, whose book I found while randomly browsing a used book store), I found some from another Unitarian minister, David Bumbaugh, who builds a sermon on a quotation from Davies: "When courage fails and faith burns low and men are timid grown, hold fast thy loyalty and know that truth still moveth on."

The question implied here is very relevant today: how do we hold on when so much seems to be going wrong in the world? The answer he gives is very, very interesting.

I am required by my engagement in the process to speak for those who have been marginalized in our society, lest, because they are largely invisible they be not included in a social equation too often dominated by the loudest and the most powerful. I am required by my engagement in the process to affirm and celebrate the better angels of our natures, lest altruism and empathy which are precious gifts to us from our ancestors be left out of a social equation too often dominated by a cynical and disparaging estimate of human nature.

If you ask me at any moment whether I am optimistic that all of this will make a difference, I must be honest and say that I can't see how it will. But I remain stubbornly hopeful. Chaos theory teaches that in non-linear systems small efforts can produce dramatic differences. The classic illustration of this insight tells us that a butterfly flapping its wings over Beijing may initiate a process which results in a thunderstorm over Peoria. Certainly the butterfly has no way of knowing the significance of its efforts. It is simply attempting to fulfill its nature as butterfly. Nor can it know the consequences of its action--whether the storm is the event which breaks the terrible drought or bursts the damn and floods the land. But however it comes out, the world will never be the same again because a butterfly fulfilled its nature as butterfly.

That sounds a lot like my philosophy on doing things. I never want to listen to those voices, external or internal, which tell me that I do not matter, that I cannot make a difference in the world. If they're wrong, it would be a sad mistake on my part. If they're right, at the very least I can say, like McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest: "Well, at least I tried, didn't I?"

My credential class teacher, Jamie, tells a great anecdote about how he teaches his students that a little over and over again can add up to a lot. He likes to play music in class, but has a very poor quality stereo. So at the beginning of the year, he asks each of his 5 x 30 = 150 students to bring in a dollar, and buys a nice new stereo for the classroom. At the end of the year, they have a raffle and one of the students takes the new stereo home.

But my argument, McMurphy's quotation and Jamie's anecdote tell a very simplistic point compared to Bumbaugh's, though the conclusion is similar. He says that one person can change the world, not bit by bit but by simply flapping his wings. Moreover, he may not even know he has done anything. So, the reasonable thing to do is to keep flapping our wings.

2002-12-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

Let the blood pressure subside.
Calm down.
Don't get self-righteous.
Don't get overly dramatic.
Think and act like a grown-up.
Consider your mistakes and repent.
Have a sense of humor.
See things from the other person's perspective.
Have some perspective and be patient.
Apply the billion Chinese importance test.
Count to ten.
Most importantly, do not hit that "Send" button!
And while you're at it, delete that e-mail.

Whew.

2002-12-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

Here are some connected thoughts about education that are starting to make sense to me.

Old style math had to do with drill for skill-based, shallow understanding.

New style math, including the CPM curriculum I use this year and the Serra Discovering Geometry book I used last year, uses groupwork and self-discovery methods to promote a deeper understanding of math.

"New" and "old" are relative terms, since the back-to-the-basics movement is resuscitating drill, while programs like CPM are still doing quite well. There is also the question, raised by Alfie Kohn in an article, of whether "new" math ever got a fair shot at changing things or was just paid lip service in a limited number of schools.

I know that many students are frustrated with new style math curriculum, since they don't feel like they're learning anything. Here's my theory for why they dislike it so much.

Things like CPM is written by people who like math. Given the choice, they would or did choose to learn math. I don't blame them; in fact, I used to be like that and a good challenging math or logic problem still excites me.

The problem is, just like a thousand other situations where kind adults make decisions on behalf of teenagers, is that the perceived demographics are not the same as the real demographics. CPM people design a curriculum assuming, like I have for a long time, that of course kids want a deeper understanding of math. I mean, why wouldn't they? If they understand the whole thing, quizzes will be easier. It's fun to know things, even math.

But the kids I know (now that I'm actually paying attention), the kids that John Holt and Philip W. Jackson observed and wrote about, would not pick math if given the freedom of choice. So they're not interested in a deeper understanding. The grading system further gives them the opportunity and excuse to try to minimize effort and maximize the grade. Then, quixotic and necessarily vague new math curricula come in and nobody knows what the hell is going on.

While I do believe that CPM is doing many good things, I think the key is student commitment to wanting to learn math, commitment which by necessity may be more immediate than long-term. If that commitment is in place, the curriculum doesn't matter as much. If that's not in place, once again the curriculum will not magically rescue the uninterested kids.

2002-12-04T01:56:00.000-08:00

While talking to one of my favorite classmates, Arden, about lindy exchanges and being single ("How come you're still single with all the swing dancing?" / "I can't really picture dancing this way and not being single"), he brought up an interesting point which I have given some thought.

He observed that another reason I probably don't want to start a family yet is that I have so many ideas and so much I can do. Having a family and especially kids really narrows down those choices. And here goes a very interesting dilemma...

I suspect that the most significant thing I will do in my life is be a good father. So I wholeheartedly look forward to the day my first child is born, while deciding to postpone it. I'm guessing I would make a much better father at 35 than at 25, anyway. And my only real concern is that I would want to play soccer and basketball with my child, just like my dad did with me. He was 25 when I was born, and even now that he's approaching 50 he can still handle himself on the soccer-tennis court. So, I guess I'll just have to stay in great shape for a longer period of time.

Unfortunately, I've noticed that the more I think, the less I exercise. Alas, I haven't even used my erg in two or three weeks. Maybe when my life settles down a bit I'll be able to both think and work out.

2002-12-04T01:10:00.000-08:00

Ethnographic field study... There's a relatively recent thought that is starting to look more and more promising in terms of things I want to do in the future.

First, I read Herb Childress's account of place in the lives of teenagers in a Northern California city. Although required for a credential class, it was an awesome book, full of unique insight. Second, I heard an interview on KPFA today with Ellis Cose, author of a book about being a black man in America. This wasn't a particularly scientific study, part autobiography part interviews, but he certainly sounded passionate. Third, since dancing at Broadway Studios sucked tonight, I cruised over to City Lights bookstore and read the introduction to Martin Sanchez Jankowski's book about gangs. The author spent ten years and five months studying about forty such organizations in three cities, but assures us that he was only seriously injured twice.

What do these all have in common? The person writing the books took some risks. He asked questions instead of collecting hard data. Moreover, he actually lived life the way his subjects did - Cose too, although not by choice. It's interesting to note that both academic researchers saw initial discomfort evaporate in subsequent stages of the relationship.

So, if I ever apply for a Ph.D., I know how I want to do my research. Or even without the stupid degree... The only reason I would get one would be to open up more doors. The only problem is, what department of what department would I apply to? I'm toying with the idea of writing half-serious letters to universities asking if I can apply for a doctoral degree in Everything. If they tell me I need to specialize, I can argue that knowledge is not compartmentalized, but assure them that after a couple of years of access to different education, anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy classes, I will certainly be able to come up with a thesis more interesting than many of the current ones.

Anybody know a university where they might go for it?

2002-12-04T00:48:00.000-08:00

While reading a few pages from Ivan Illich's "Medical Nemesis" tonight, I stumbled onto references in four different languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese). This puts his work into perspective; as a refined, world-savvy intellectual, his thoughts are not random, but in a way the result of more perspectives than gathered by anyone I can think of.

This also brought into focus my own language dilemma: I kind of speak them, but I don't use them in any significant way. I'm teaching algebra instead, and selling computers part-time. I got so excited on Monday night, when I came back from lunch to hear two customers speaking French. But before I could muster a "Vous avez des questions?", they walked out, much to my dismay.

I wonder if European bookstores have more than a token three shelves dedicated to untranslated literature. They've got to, don't they? The European Community must be quite a trip... Kind of like the U.S. -- if Texas and Virginia were separated by different languages and 3000 years of culture.

2002-12-03T14:30:00.000-08:00

A cool thing has been happening in my classes... People are taking to chess. During my computer classes, as well as during lunch. Now, part of this is Brad's and my lenience towards people being in our room as opposed to, say, French class, where they belong. It's kind of hard to kick out students who are actually choosing to play an intellectually stimulating game. So we let them, and we usually give them a few pointers.

We recently taught two students how to play "madhouse," also known as team or double chess. Richard and I were teaming up against Mark and Brad, meaning that I was playing white against Brad and Richard black against Mark. The kicker is, once I capture a piece, I give it to Richard, and he gets to drop it anywhere on the board, assuming it's his turn to move. You can also store up pieces for later, or you can ask your partner for something (usually a knight) and wait until you get it. It's a lot of fun, and almost all I played at chess club meetings in high school. By the way, we ended up 10th in the nation my junior year, so we must have learned something about real chess in the process. And why not? The position gets much more complicated if you have to take into account the fact that your opponent is holding a queen he can drop at any point in time.

Part of the reason I like this game is that it requires two clocks to be used, and I think the first step to becoming a good chess player is playing timed games. Even cooler, since the two clocks I own are one analog, one digital, I have long thought about buying a second digital timer. Well, just now, my students actually saw that same need and asked about it. I think Brad may have made a comment along the lines of "well, if you can donate $50 to the chess club, we can buy one." Well, people started volunteering to chip in $5, and it looks like we'll have enough to get one.

It was cool to see how natural it all was. They feel like chess is their idea, their choice - which it pretty much is. As much as I'd love to really get into it and organize and (my dream) beat Lowell in a team game, I'm willing to wait for them to bring it up. Like a few days ago... When Richard asked me to teach him how to record games - or even better, to help him fill in the blanks left by the instructions he found on the web.

2002-12-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

It's a sad day for me today... Ivan Illich passed away today at the age of 76. As my colleague Brad put it when I showed him this link, "he died in French." I doubt that many people in the U.S. would care.

This really hurts me. I knew he's been ill for some time, but I was still hoping I'd get a chance to meet him sometime. Only a couple of years ago, he was a visiting professor at Berkeley. After that, he often came to an "Oakland Table" meeting at mayor Jerry Browne's house, along with other thinkers in his circle, to discuss ways of making the world a better place. The last one of those meetings was cancelled because of his health.

It's so strange. I feel like humankind has lost a valuable resource, yet nobody will notice. Maybe 100 years from now, he'll be famous. Maybe 100 years from now, his work will have been ignored and the world will be even worse. Somehow, though, the bottom of the barrel can't be that far away, can it? We just have such a limited historical perspective within our lifetimes... Did people living in the 20s know the Great Depression was around the corner? During Eisenhower's time, could anybody have imagined the 60s? I wonder what we're headed for.

2002-12-02T00:32:00.000-08:00

What's a Lindy Exchange?

A get-together where swing dancers from around the country converge on one city and dance until early morning for a few nights in a row.

I've had to answer this question many times, and I've given the same bland answer. I thought it's about time I wrote a well-thought-out, informative, half-witty or half-witted description of... The phenomenon. The party. The subculture within a subculture. The lindy exchange.

When I think about it, a smile creeps across my face... actually, it's more of a smirk. I think of dancing with my eyes closed. My body hears the music. I can feel my follower's slightest move. I smell her perfume as we dance close. My brain can take a break, I won't need it for a while.

To contrast this with regular dancing, like last night at the Doghouse. I danced with some beginners, some good dancers and a few awesome ones. Since my biggest job is to make sure my follower enjoys the dance, I do my best to lead moves she can follow, and to quickly adjust to something else when she misses a lead, so that hopefully she won't even figure out something went wrong. That may be cool when it happens, but it is a lot of work.

The music last night was... well, not driving me. Too non-groovy, cute but too much so, lindy-in-the-park moved to late night. So, once again, I had to do a lot more work myself. The problem with work is that it saps my creativity. Until I finally let loose after a great dance with Rachel from UCLA, I don't think I led anything new and exciting. I found myself trying to recreate semi-original moves I had led in Austin, and failed miserably.

The exchange soothed my soul. It was like a little kid let loose in the candy store. Regular dancing was, well, better than nothing at all.

In the defense of regular dancing, exchanges are special. People get up for them. DJs and dancers both put their best face forward. If we had an exchange every weekend, it wouldn't be the same.

Ah, but there's so much more to an exchange besides dancing. The Gatorade and energy drinks. The interactions with the host. The 2am dinners with digital cameras, card tricks and the occasional body shot. The romance, both the 3-minutes-on-the-dance-floor kind and the move-to-a-new-city kind. The Sunday-after-hours-to-early-flight routine. The daytime events: roller rink in San Diego, Powell's bookstore in Portland, Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, Mr. Sinus Theatre in Austin, snowboarding in Denver.

When's the next one? See www.lindyexchange.com