“The lessons you learn in the sport — discipline, self-awareness, and an understanding of life’s rhythms — can be used to hold off the kinds of demons that tormented my father. I held on tight to running because I came to believe it would both bring me closer to my father and help me avoid becoming him.
I also know that running is not an elixir. My spreadsheets give me an illusion of but not actual control, either of this sport or of life. Running every day creates a small tailwind: pushing forward good habits and helping us clear our minds. The sport helped my father during a dark time in his life, but it couldn’t save him.”
Kind of what I’m after with the benchmarks I’m asking my kids to write. Yeah, it’s a review, but it’s also an essay that makes you think about the nature of criticism, the nature of trauma, the nature of writing, and the nature of being a human. All sorts of things. And it makes you consider how everything you read (and experience)– my favorite part is the quote below — might be something you could bring into an essay:
I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to “answer” things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore—often blindly—the huge areas of darkness, and show them better. (Javier Marias).
I went looking for that quote about wants and needs again. Found this tribute that led with these lines:
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.
“…invites solipsistic dissolution masquerading as self-actualization. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.”
Am I lost in myself, dreaming, playing music for my own good, my own ego, my own failures and lost dreams? Or am I slowly, surely, in my own way, making some little art each night that makes me a little bit better as a person? Maybe that art will leave the third floor, maybe it won’t. Does it matter?
The other response, of course, is that at least I’m not smoking crack. As a public-school teacher who is getting rich very slowly, if I want to devote some small portion of my income after I’ve paid for both kids to go to college and ensured that our house isn’t falling down, why not music?
You can feel the tension, too, within this article. Yeah, go see a bunch of guitars. Anyone who can play even a little bit knows the deal: you walk into a music store and play six or seven guitars and there will be one that is magic to you. I wish this exhibit had players hanging out there — much like the videos they publish at Norman’s Rare Guitars — where someone would be sitting on a couch waiting for you to come in so that they could show you what the guitar sounds like.
Mostly we are annoyed by inane thickets of regulation and are suckers for a politician who vows to sweep them aside. Then, sometimes, we are so horrified by death and disaster — listeria outbreaks, nightclub fires, predatory financial scams, collapsing cribs, polluted wells — that we’re suckers for a politician who pledges to crack down.
The regulations surrounding us are obviously not perfect. Many could be written more simply; many really could use more input from working people and less manipulation by economically interested parties. There is a straightforward solution to these problems, but it is precisely the one that is hardest and least rousing to argue for, especially when antipathy to government is rising: not hacking away regulations, but doing the dull work of drafting better ones. This approach does not stir the soul when mentioned in speeches, and it’s unlikely to go viral in short videos; we are rarely suckers for hearing about moderately complex, deftly restrained rule making. It may nevertheless have a lot to recommend it.
We’re about halfway through Between the World and Me.
They read the escalator story for tomorrow.
We’re going to talk about situations where you’ve felt like you had no power.
Then we’re going to talk about the story Coates tells in Between the World and Me.
Then we’re going to look at this excerpt from Rebecca Solnit:
Democracy itself is based in trust in strangers and a sense of having something in common with them (which is part of why xenophobia and fear of crime serve fascist agendas so well). Circulating freely among them – especially in the diverse places most cities are – helps inculcate this feeling; it gives you a sense of confidence, of being able to coexist with difference. It orients you, literally, and it’s very useful knowledge in an emergency. That’s what’s celebrated in those old movies and shunned in the rhetoric and designs of the new technologies.
Then we’re going to look at an excerpt from Garnette Cadogan:
I realized that what I least liked about walking in New York City wasn’t merely having to learn new rules of navigation and socialization—every city has its own. It was the arbitrariness of the circumstances that required them, an arbitrariness that made me feel like a child again, that infantilized me. When we first learn to walk, the world around us threatens to crash into us. Every step is risky. We train ourselves to walk without crashing by being attentive to our movements, and extra-attentive to the world around us. As adults we walk without thinking, really. But as a black adult I am often returned to that moment in childhood when I’m just learning to walk. I am once again on high alert, vigilant. Some days, when I am fed up with being considered a troublemaker upon sight, I joke that the last time a cop was happy to see a black male walking was when that male was a baby taking his first steps.
All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read? For that matter, how will any effort in school prepare them for careers in which, apparently, effort is not rewarded?
This article — Welcome to Stucktopia — is one I’d read with kids:
That’s something else we can learn from stucktopian TV: We aren’t just cogs in the machine because that’s our assigned role. We’re cogs because breaking out from our prescribed slots seems deeply difficult and uncomfortable.
We’re not stuck in our circumstance. We’re stuck in the ways of living that perpetuate it.
Further evidence that I’m the worst human ever…while this is a great, thoughtful piece, my primary takeaway was that I need to get Disney Plus as I’d not yet seen this show Andor, having watched and loved the other three (Silo, Severance, and Fallout.)
And another television review — The Bleak, Nihilistic Show Russians Can’t Stop Watching — had this line:
It’s easy enough to dunk on bad Russian TV, but “The Boy’s Word” has something truly rotten at its core: It is a warning about what happens when our ability for moral reasoning becomes so impoverished that the most straightforward response to any situation is to punch somebody in the face. In a withering online review, the critic Platon Besedin wrote, with classic Russian restraint, that the series “could only be demanded by a sick and miseducated society that walks in circles like a tired, sick pony.”
There have also been two articles in the past month (here and here) about folks (like me) who were colossal f–ups in high school. And both these stories are great reminders of the immense possibilities all humans hold within them, something you must believe if you’re a teacher. (And both rightfully point out that it’s different in 2024 then it was in the mid-1980s.)
The only thing I’d add, though, from a school perspective: life in schools is getting harder and harder, for students and teachers. When you’re being ground down by all sorts of things completely out of your control, it is difficult to keep your eyes on the promise all students possess. And while you do your best to produce positive bulletin board material — you believed in me — you don’t always succeed.
We’ve created a culture where to pull ourselves away signals that we’re not working. I think that managers and decision-makers need to be educated that it’s really important to give people permission to be able to take long breaks when they need them, to take walks outside, to have social interactions with other people, to create a culture where people are not penalized for not answering electronic communications after work hours and before work hours, to give people a chance to really detach from work, to restore themselves. Managers are delegating work to us without considering that people might be exhausted. And they need to understand that sometimes less can be more.
It got me thinking about how organizations, even when the leader is doing their best, allow this kind of culture to exist. Much of school life now seems to be predicated on making sure that detaching or pulling away never happens.
Long breaks? Let’s make sure teachers have two, three, four classes in a row. Let’s ensure that they have multiple preps. Let’s make sure that there are never enough subs so their breaks are consumed covering other classes.
Here’s the story I tell about this: at my old school, for two years, we had a nurse once a month. A kid’d come and say, “I’m not feeling well” and we’d say, “Come back next Tuesday.”
The school district doesn’t have enough and relies on everyone in the building tending to everything. So the kind of extended time and space necessary to do anything creative does not exist.
Walk outside? Even if that was possible — usually the times when that might be possible get consumed early in the week — we’re not supposed to leave the building without clocking in or out. Remember Laverne and Shirley? Or Charlie Chaplin? That’s teaching in 2024.
Kronos waits. Kronos watches. Kronos knows.
Social interactions? When is that supposed to happen? During my preps, here’s what I’m usually doing:
40-50% of the time: trying to have enough headspace to offer timely feedback on powerful assessments kids have submitted.
20-30% of the time: trying to make sure that my plan for the next hour, day, or week, builds on what we did yesterday and on the interesting tangents that occurred today.
10-30% of the time: consulting with students around various things, sometimes academic, sometimes personal, sometimes fun. If I am talking with a colleague, more than likely it’s about another student.
10-30% of the time: operating clubs because our particular roster makes after-school programming difficult.
10-30% of the time: answering emails and Canvas comments.
I’m failing to complete most of these tasks. I’m failing. So I’m filled with anxiety about what’s left undone.
So when’s that fun, water-cooler, how are your kids, what’d you do this weekend going to happen?
To create a culture where people are not penalized for not answering electronic communications after work hours and before work hours.
Ha. The only way this is possible is if you elect not to look at your email knowing two things: either your principal is going to have to defend you from a parent wondering why you didn’t write them back OR you’re doing to have to use that same prep time that’s already committed to ten other things to answer email.
The third option, which a number of teachers now employ, is the Ford Pinto option. Never answer your email. The two to three percent of situations that blow up are better than addressing the fact that you get thirty to fifty emails a day. And you’re free to not worry about email.
To give people a chance to really detach from work, to restore themselves.
There’s one school of thought that teachers have two months to do this. As a result, they should be expected to run in fifth gear from September until December. This might be possible if school didn’t consist of intense emotional work a good portion of the time. If it were only intellectual work I was doing each day, then sure, I could recover.
But I have 140+ kids each day as well as the other 360+ kids I know and care about. If each kid has a tough time once a school year, that’s me managing a tough time every day. And there’s all manner of hidden work that just isn’t accounted for. Here’s a chart I made about special education requirements, which are legal and I do my best to meet:
I could have done the same with a number of other tasks that will require similar numbers of hours — recommendation letters — and you can go back to a fifty-year old book, Horace’s Compromise, for some of the best math around grading.
Managers are delegating work to us without considering that people might be exhausted. This is a little tricky in schools. A good portion of the crud work — work that doesn’t move the school along — is assigned from central office folks whose one goal in life seems to be having a computer work station where they can watch every teacher every day (again see Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times).
But not all of it. Does every administrator truly understand the categories above when they send an email or deliver a new task? Do they know and understand how stretched their staff is?
Irony: as I was writing this, I was also working on my plan for this week in history and posted multiple times on our school chat, creating one more thing for my colleagues to deal with.
All this was part of Rustin’s central understanding: pragmatism and principle intertwine to make progress.
The principles that Rustin held steadfast, though they may seem unexciting in a political culture that loves romantic extremists, are nonetheless time-tested: Work within a coalition as broad as you can make it. Emphasize logistic efficiency. Relish the metaphoric imagination, but don’t let it run away with your judgment. Accept that perseverance is the best friend of freedom. Although utopianism and visionary overreach may be necessary beacons of freedom, they can, left to their own devices, become its betrayers.
The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is what they have seen in us–or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.
