One Day

1. Awakened by a sweet little four-year old asking for a banana and an episode of "Little Einsteins"
2. Got up, made coffee for me; made scrambled eggs, biscuits, and bacon for The Wife and Things 1 and 2 (no solid food for me yet, since I'm recovering from Round 3 of Oral Surgery Hell)
3. Took Thing 1 to his trumpet lesson, with Thing 2 in tow, to let The Wife get some rest
4. Took the boys to a nearby park to fly kites, ride bikes, and swing on the swings
5. Lunch at Coco's, my boys' all-time favorite place (for reasons that elude me)
6. Took the boys to a nursery to buy a tree for Thing 1, who wanted to plant one in honor of Tu B'Shevat, and a flowering plant for Thing 2, who just wanted something of his own to plant.
7. Naptime (whew)
8. Planted trees and flowers with the boys
9. Set up the garage so the boys could cut up old cardboard boxes and make spaceships
10. Watched half an hour of an old Steve McQueen movie with the wife
11. Dinner, courtesy of my mother-in-law
12. Gave the boys a bath, read them stories, sang them songs, put them to bed
13. Crappy TV with The Wife, and a little ice cream to soothe my sore gums

Repeat as necessary.

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

Here's an interesting article on why we need the arts. Sad that such defenses seem to be necessary, but there you are. When high school or college graduates cry out with relief, "I never have to read another book!" (and yes, I have heard them do so), and when politicians bray that public monies should not have to support any artists or works of art that cannot survive in the marketplace, I guess someone does have to come to the defense of art as something besides, or beyond, immediate stimulation of one's nerve-endings.

Here's a quote to inspire to you read further:

The arts build the sets for that interior theatre and fill the stage with vivid, memorable characters who mingle in memory with the people of our lives. Even if we are otherwise lonely, we go through life in the company of this ever-expanding society of artists, characters and images, each of them chosen by us.

You could easily say in rebuttal, "Why lock yourself up in a dark room with imaginary characters? Why not go out into the real world and be sociable--meet some real characters?" And there is certainly a stereotype of readers and art-lovers as introverts who shy away from human interaction. But it doesn't apply to everyone, and it doesn't have to. One does not preclude the other.

And there's a difference. Be as sociable as you like--schmooze, party, mingle to your heart's delight--there is still a role for those imaginary characters and images the author describes. They provide an alternate narrative--a different world. Sometimes it's a long-dead world; sometimes it's a never-was world; sometimes it's a what-if world. But if we cannot see different ways of being in the world, if we cannot say, "it doesn't have to be like this--life could be like this, instead," we cannot work towards change.

And that's not a liberal versus conservative issue. I'm sure there are plenty of conservatives out there who read Jane Austen and say, "why can't the world be like this again?" There may even be some cold-hearted Scrooges who read Dickens and say, "quite right--lock up the orphans and put them to work." They'd be missing Dickens' point, but it wouldn't be the first time that a reader used an author against his own work.

Entertainers throw meat to the ravenous hordes and keep them happy. Artists are supposed to blaze a trail into unexplored territory and say, "follow if you dare." And we get to choose which pioneers we feel like following, into which dark wood. And, of course, the truly great ones--the Shakespeares, the Mozarts, the Picassos, show us worlds we've never imagined before and entertain us.

This trail-blazing function is why autocrats have always persecuted artists--and the more public the art, the easier it is for people to mingle and discuss and share ideas, the faster the tyrants shut it down. In a democracy, which is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, we are not supposed to fear art, or the ideas that spring from it. We are supposed to be strong enough and capable enough to counter any noxious idea with a better one--to compete for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens with a more compelling alternate world to inspire us.

But, of course, we don't do that. It's hard work. And anyway, as we all know, the twin Sodoms of Hollywood and New York have access to media all sewed up, and won't allow any voices to be heard that aren't pre-approved by the gay, Jewish, communist cabal that controls All Media In The World. So instead we just rant and rave on talk radio, or issue threats and boycotts, and argue about which Reality we should allow to be portrayed.

Perhaps things will change as the Internet generation grows into adulthood. Because these days, it simply can't be argued that access to media is controlled. Anyone can make and distribute a movie now; anyone can publish articles, editorials, or books. Obviously, I can't distribute a book ro a movie the way Big Companies can. But it's getting easier every year. Distinctions between entertainers and the entertained are rapidly dissolving. We are all, now, both providers of content and consumers of content. It could make things very interesting in the future.

But in that world, will there be any common language anymore? Will we be able to assume that everyone knows who Hamlet is, or who Holden Caulfield is...or what Beethoven's Fifth sounds like...or what the Guernica is? Or will the future of "narrowcasting" lead us to a world of a million mini-republics, the inhabitants of each speaking a hermetic language of imagery and association that no one outside will understand, care about...or trust?

And if that's where we're heading, what will the words "public education" mean? Will there be a body of knowledge that we, as a culture (if we are, indeed, a culture anymore), can agree to pass on to our children? Or are the education wars we're seeing today just a foretaste of an even nastier battle to come?

Or--here's another possibility--will the homeschooling movement (aided by online education) grow even larger, allowing people to avoid the public education fight and just walk away, to do things the way they want to do things--either individually or in small, like-minded groups? If the idea of public education just shatters at some point, will anything hold us together as a culture besides television?

It's an intruguing question, and it's hard to know where things are heading or what things will look like fifty years from now. All I know is, there's no reason to assume that the shape of things to come has to be the shape of things today. The way we learn, the way we communicate, the way we access entertainment--all of it is changing so rapidly, it's impossible to know, and difficult to imagine, what things will be like.

Ah, well. Maybe someone will write a story about it.

And Here's One of Me in Front of...Well, Everything.

(in case you can't tell what this is, it's a self-portrait of an astronaut, taking his own picture while looking down at the earth. The earth--and the camera--are reflected in his spacesuit helmet)

One of the most interesting things about being a parent, or a teacher (or, really, just a moderately aware and sensitive human), is bumping up against the fact, from time to time, that your perception and understanding of reality may be radically different from someone else's. My elder son was born in 2000. He has never known a world without cell phones, email, the Internet, DVDs, TiVo, and so forth. And okay, yes, that's just a bunch of gadgets. But the way they affect and inform his dealings with the world around him, especially as a given, a from-birth assumption, make him somehow different from me--maybe a little bit; maybe a lot. And if I talk to him from inside my own assumptions, without taking his into account...do I know that we're actually communicating? I know what I'm saying, but do I know for sure what he's hearing?

It's not a new issue. After all, how do I know for sure that what he sees as the color red is what I see? How can I ever get outside my own perception to see things really-truly through another pair of eyes? I can't. So I assume. And we both talk about "red." And until or unless a conflict of definition comes up in conversation, I may never know that we're not seeing the same thing.

I remember being awakened by my parents to join them and all their friends in the living room to watch, on a tiny black and white TV, the fuzzy and amazing footage of the very first moon landing in 1969. I remember everyone crowded in the room (it was summer, and we were off in the woods where not everyone had a TV); I remember the looks of awe and amazement. I remember blinking away my sleepiness and sitting on the floor, watching Neil Armstrong step down onto the surface of the moon--something no human had ever done.

But this is a nice picture, too. I'll download it and email it over to Thing 1. Maybe he'll print it out and hang it up. Maybe he'll just look at it and say, "cool." Maybe he'll even realize that it's not a computer animation--that's it really, truly, real.

Whatever that means.

Metaphor?

Oh, gosh, I guess so, if you really want it to be, I mean, and if you can relate it to something else in the world that's not, you know, an actual, literal traffic jam...of automobile traffic, I mean. Go ahead, give it a try.

From Frostfirezoo

On Sticking Your Neck Out

I am in Hawaii for most of this week, doing teacher training at a small middle and high school on the west side of Oahu--a school that needs serious help in raising student performance. The school is nestled at the bottom of a bowl of beautiful, lush mountains, with a view from the football field of the Pacific. God knows, I wouldn't have done any school work in such a place.

But distracting beauty isn't really one of their problems. Poverty is. There are ragged tents lined up and down the beach on the west coast--makeshift homes for homeless families. It has to be hard to convince your children to do their homework when you have no electricity. And island culture isn't exactly conducive to academic striving. The weather is beautiful, the surf is up, and there's no one else around for thousands of miles to compare yourself to or compete against. How hard do you really have to work just to get along?

The state superintendent is trying to change that, and many school administrators are working hard to help. They are bringing speakers and consultants over from the mainland to try to break the sense of isolation. Last year, they brought hundreds of Hawaii teachers to Washington, DC, for a conference on where teaching and learning are, and where they need to be heading. They are trying to get their teachers to feel like a part of the larger--and shrinking--world, so that their students don't have to merely "get along" if they don't want to--so that they can be competitive and successful wherever they want to go.

I haven't traveled broadly to visit many schools in the islands, but at the one school where my company is working, it's been a hard sell. The principal certainly feels pressure to raise test scores, but the teachers don't seem to (though they claim that they do). They say that they don't have instructional materials to help them remediate where they see profound skill gaps (one math teacher told me that she had an 8th grader who didn't know what a half was. "Half of what?" I asked. "No," she said, "the concept of half."), but when we bring them an online lesson bank that gives them instant access to thousands of lessons from grades 3 through 11, none of them use it. Not one of them. In five months. Have used it even once. When we offered two math teachers the chance to pilot an intervention program for free, they said yes but then never used it, or contacted us for help, or accepted our offers of training.

Now we're back to talk about the challenges of standardized tests--how students need to understand the ways in which these tests are different from what they get in the classroom; how students need clear, step-by-step methods for tackling different kinds of challenges (in life as well as in school), and useful problem-solving strategies to keep them from throwing up their hands and saying, "I can't do it." This is my company's core business, and something we've done well across the country for decades. It works. It helps. Whatever you think about the wisdom or usefulness of standardized tests, learning how to take them (if you have to take them) is empowering. And God knows, these students need to feel more empowered, more capable.

And the teachers were...polite. I would say "receptive," but I don't think they really received anything. I have no confidence that they will teach their kids these strategies--or, if they do, they'll do it with rolled eyes and exasperated sighs, and an introduction of "I guess we have to do this." They'll communicate with their tone and their body language that a) this is all crap, and b) it's not going to make any difference, anyway, because you're all stupid.

They're not evil people. In fact, many of them are quite nice. They're not mean. They're not child-haters. And they probably like most of their kids well enough. They've just given up hope, that's all. It's a little thing. Unfortunately, it's everything.

You can keep teaching without hope. If you're not in the business, you might not think it possible, but I've seen plenty of people do it. They do their job--or what they define as their job. They teach their lessons. They may even do so with some enthusiasm. But they no longer expect much. They expect to keep getting what they've always gotten, and they've made their peace with it. "There's only so much these kids can do, and I'm not going to make myself crazy demanding more of them." Their benchmark for student performance is whatever level they've always managed to get, not what they need to get from students based on state standards, or college entrance requirements, or modern workplace requirements. This is how teachers become babysitters and entertainers, instead of teachers.

But what can you do? How do you talk to people who have surrendered hope to history? How do you reach out to them and say, "I know, I know, but I need you to hope--just one more time. I need you to risk it, just one more time. I need you to stick your neck out." How do you de-turtle-ify someone who has learned through bitter experience to keep her head safely in her shell?

Because it's easy to criticize teachers for giving up, just like it's easy to criticize the Afghans who allow the Taliban to destroy any hope for building a sane nation. Just like it's easy to criticize the Iraqis for giving in to their bitterest, most sectarian impulses. But we don't live there. We haven't experienced what they have. And what right, really, do any of us have? What right do we have to say, "Come on, guys, try harder. Give it another shot. It might just work this time"?

Except we have to say those things, don't we? Because so very much is at stake. Someone has to say it--and we happen to be in a position to be able to. But words aren't enough. If we're going to say these things, then we have to stick our necks out, as well, and stand by them, and help them. We can't go into schools, sell a bunch of books, say "good luck," and go home. We have to say, "I'm right here. I'm not leaving. I'm going to help you get through this and it's going to work." We have to say, "It's not enough to have chased out the Taliban. We're going to stand by you and help you build up your nation, and we're not going to run away to fight some other, meaningless war, and we're not going to abandon you the minute it's politically inconvenient, or the minute we get bored."

And, of course, for the most part, we don't do these things. For the most part, we ask other people to stick their necks out, and we wish them luck, and we run home as fast as we can. And those who dare to hope get killed for it, and those who do not dare to hope survive, and say, "You see? I told you so." And we say...what? "Poor dumb savages. They're just not capable of democracy." "Poor dumb kids. They're just not capable of doing the work that the rich kids in the suburbs can do. They just don't have it in them."

Revolutions don't occur when things are at their worst; they occur when things have already started to improve. They occur when the people say, "Gee, maybe things can change around here." You need a little evolution--slow, gradual, painstaking--to spark the revolution. You chip away at the edifice, a little bit at a time, and at some point, in a single movement, it all comes crashing down.

I show teachers data from other schools like theirs. I read them quotes from teachers. I say, "They're no different. Their kids are no different. We really can do better." They nod--a couple of them. They think about it. Maybe one or two will give it a shot. It's too soon to know for sure.

I leave the training and say something about this to the principal. I say, "It's hard to ask people to stick their necks out when they keep getting their heads chopped off." He says, "Ha, ha--that's true. I stick my neck out and get whacked so many times, I'm three inches shorter than when I started in this job."

That's the spirit.