DEREKLEIF.ORG

19 OCTOBER, 2019-MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT: AN EMAIL TO MY DAD ABOUT AN INTERESTING POINT MY FRIEND JOSH FOSTER MADE ABOUT DONALD TRUMP

10/19/2019

Note: a few days ago I sent my father a copy of the letter that Donald Trump sent to Turkish President Recep Erdogen--a letter that Erdogen reportedly threw in the trash--which was as follows:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington
October 9, 2019

His Excellency
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
President of the Republic of Turkey
Ankara

Dear Mr. President:
Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy — and I will. I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.

I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.

History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!

I will call you later.

Sincerely,
Donald Trump

...to this, my father, with his talent for brevity, replied:

I hope you'll recall what I said last year. The man is dangerous to this country. he is without a doubt the most stupid being on this planet. Or may brilliantly evil. He has no regard for this country. He is only concerned with his fat self. by the end of the upcoming week, I hope the Democrats have sufficient evidence for impeachment. We'll see. The corruption 45 has visited on this nation defies description. Love ya meeses to pieces.

Dad

...yes, he did indeed write "meeses to pieces."

And believe it or not, it actually figures into my reply:

Dad,

Josh Foster, a good friend of mine from UMASS with whom I've reconnected on Facebook, offered an interesting theory:

Besides being sociopathic--that is, having no moral or ethical sense--he shows all the signs of having a serious learning disability.

Think about it: he doesn't read, his vocabulary is limited, and he has had to compensate with what seems to be a complete lack of academic acumen with the sort of glib, populist style that makes his approach work crowds in the basest way. At his military school, he was horrible in academics (remember that he paid to have all his school academic records suppressed), but apparently excellent in non-academic matters, such as military discipline (in other words, he did fine when someone gave him easy to learn, simple orders that he could master, and then execute in lockstep). This would also explain his fondness for authoritarian leaders.

It also makes sense, because if you think about it, Fred Trump was apparently exactly the sort of father who would be a nightmare for a person such as this. No doubt, if Trump indeed has a learning disability, his father, as opposed to viewing him as a son he loved unconditionally and therefore accepted as who he was (which would have led the way for his overcoming or adapting to his disability), no doubt viewed him as "damaged goods," and probably sent him to military school with the idea that such a place "would toughen up that stupid kid of mine."

I know it's incredibly difficult to do this, what with him having done so much damage and spewing hateful, hateful things, but if I turn him into, say, one of my students, and try to find some humanity in him, I honestly see him a sad, sad person. I really do see him as a person where, if I were to have gotten through to him and had a one on one conversation with him after a class, he would have burst into tears, and talked about horrible, horrible experiences with his father saying that he was no good, that he was a waste of human life, and that his father was ashamed to have him as a son.

This would also explain why he's so desperate to win people's approval, and why he needs, so badly, to believe that huge crowds of people come to see him. Having no sense of self-worth can create a void in someone that they desperately need to fill with others giving them the love that they never got when they were young...and therefore don't have for themselves. This would also explain why he needs to surround himself with expensive things, and why he so needs to put his name on everything. Having those obscene accoutrements of wealth and privilege--the buildings with his name, the gold toilet, the trophy wife--allows him to say to the world "hey...I'm worth something. Really. I'm worth something. Don't you see I'm worth something?"

Again, I know that attempting to have compassion for such a person can make any self-respecting person roll his eyes. Dick Cheney (okay, maybe not self respecting, but...) after all, said "while conservatives want to deal with terrorists, liberals want to analyze them." And my response to that, though, was always: well, why not both? Yes, when they grow up and become monsters, we need to deal with them, but it's important to remember that they all were children, and that only a select few--the truly sick--come out of the womb as monsters.

And even here, just about every time, in almost every case, true sociopathy traces itself to some horrible trauma suffered at an incredibly young age, perhaps as early as six months. Perhaps Fred abused him as a baby...perhaps even sexually. It's really not out of the realm of possibility.

In other words, someone, something, usually made them who they were.

If you remember the film "Manhunter," there's a telling moment that honestly reminds me of Trump. As Will Graham is "saddling up" to confront Dollarhyde, the murderer, Jack Crawford (Denis Farina's character) says something to the effect of "it almost sounds as if you feel sorry for him." And Graham says something to the effect of "yeah, I do. He started out as a kid. He was probably a sweet kid. Then someone did horrible things to him, and turned him into the sick, twisted psychopath that he is now. And now he have to take him down."

Again, about trying to understand all this as opposed to merely being enraged by it: I'm reminded of that line in the Netflix show "Mindhunter" that we watch, which is about the establishment of the FBI Criminal Psychology Department, and shows two men solving crimes by talking to serial killers: "In order to catch crazy, you have to know crazy."

By the way, getting back to the whole military thing, Trump's love of all of that--the authoritarian regimes, the glorification of Stalinist/Hitleresesque military parades--reminds me of something you said about the military in general: they take care of you, and give you a sense of self worth.

"They clothe you, they feed you, they tell you what to do, they give you approval they give you these really neat things that you wear on your lapels...it's everything a child wants," you once said.

Also, when I think of the affection Trump has for military parades, I'm reminded of the way you said you felt when you were a ROTC Wing Commander, and had hundreds of guys saluting you, and how, when you then went into The Air Force as a lieutenant, you felt a rush when 40 year old enlisted men saluted you. Of course, for you, having been raised with love, it was the sort of thing you could walk away from, hence your decision to rejoin civilian life.

At the same time, though, imagine someone who didn't get that love. For them, those salutes are the only thing close to love and approval that they get, and consequently, they can't do without it. It brings new meaning to those people who say "I love The Corps." For some of these people, the "love" of their superiors and the "love" of the organization may be the only thing resembling familial love that they've ever received, and that they will ever receive.

This also explains, by the way, why people such as Trump react so savagely not just to humor, but to pity, even sympathy. Of course, the humor part is easy to explain--at the core of many bullies is a deeply insecure person who can often be reduced to tears by mental bullying--but the pity part (and here I mean genuine empathy of the "Oh, my God, you went through hell" variety, as opposed to the vindictive "you're a little man, not in size, but in stature" variety) is a bit more complicated.

Think of that part in "Good Will Hunting" where Will's therapist, Sean (Robin Williams) is looking over his case file, and sees all the gruesome photographs of Will's abuse. This, or course, leads to that classic "it's not your fault" moment, and it's important to remember that before Will breaks down in tears, he gets violent. It's truly as if Sean is finally getting to the core of things, something so painful, so horrible, that it's agonizing to confront.

And unfortunately, most people just can't face that pain. It's just too horrible. They cover it up with rage and money, and it slowly hollows them out.

I know I'm sounding like Dr. Phil here, but it just explains so much, even the sad, pathetic correspondence with Erdogen, which, let's face it, reads like the sad, semi-literate scribblings of a second grader. When we strip all of it away, we see, at the core, a truly sad, fat little boy, sitting on the stoop and crying because his father abused him yet again an unloved person, probably abused as a child...and now, because of that abuse, we're paying the price for it.

Thankfully, there are people in world raised with unconditional love, which in turn fosters an inner strength, and consequently, leads to the creation of a deeply compassionate and empathetic person. And it is from this love and kindness that I draw hope. Yes, he has done horrible damage, but he still has not crushed the incredible kindness and decency that we saw in Obama, and, I think, see in Warren, and, yes, in Sanders, and, yes again, in Biden.

It's easy to think that this is The End of Times. At the same time, I draw faith from that moment, in "Watchmen," when Adrian Veidt says "I did it. I brought it to an end," and Dr. Manhattan smiles sagely and says: "Nothing ever ends, Adrian."

Or to put it another way: even if Houston wins, there's always next year.

Love you, man.

0 Comments

October 12th, 2019-MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT: INTRODUCING THE SONG "THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND" TO A GROUP OF FIVE YEAR-OLDS

10/12/2019

1 Comment

I’ve always said that if I can bring home five good minutes from my job each day, I’m happy. Just five minutes where something happened where I was happy, and felt as if I was doing something worthwhile.

I got about thirty minutes last Wednesday. And in fact, it was probably thirty of the best minutes I’ve had at any job, ever.

It goes like this: part of my job involves teaching kindergarteners and first graders computers. As a specials teacher--that’s what they call the folks at my school who are either not elementary school classroom teachers or the folks in the upper grades who teacher English, Social Studies, Math, and Science (there’s also phys ed, art, World Cultures, library, and music)--I get fifty minutes every other week with these kids. Fifty minutes is just way too much time to expect a kindergarten or first grade student to continuously sit in front of a computer, so I looked for something else I could do at the beginning of the period.

So I started teaching basic songs to myself on my four-string tenor guitar (which, with the way I’ve tuned it, is basically a steel string baritone ukulele) that I could play for the kids for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of class. I began with simple ankle-hugger faire, such as “The Wheels on the Bus,” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” I have since moved on to teaching myself songs such as “The Garden Song (Inch by Inch),” and “The Erie Canal.”

I’ve also been listening to the music of Dan Zanes. Zanes was the lead singer of The Del Fuegos back in the 1980s. For the uninitiated, The Del Fuegos were a garage style Boston-based band that achieved critical acclaim in the 1980s. When the band broke up, Zanes settled down and started a family.

Then, when he was shopping for songs for his child, he was disheartened to find that most of the music was saccharine and, frankly, bad. So Zanes began a second career as a performer of children’s songs. He has since produced a number of albums that combine catchy original songs with lovely interpretations of classic numbers, many of them with such guest artists as Lou Reed, Amy Mann, and Suzanne Vega.

Here's Dan Zanes, with the help of Suzanne Vega, doing a rendition of "Erie Canal:"

Anyway, I started teaching myself some of these songs for my classes (they’ve been a big hit), and I thought about how, at our school, 8:00 to 8:30 is sort of an extended homeroom before classes begin that we call “morning meeting.” I offered to come into the classes of the kindergarten teachers and play on Wednesday mornings, as I have a free first period on that day, which gives me the time to prepare to teach my classes. All of the teachers rebuffed my overtures, except for one, Kim..

“You’re welcome to come to my class anytime,” she said.

So I came into her class two weeks ago, and the result was the picture at the beginning of this post. The kids treated me like a rock star.

That, of course, was a great thirty-minute part of my day, but the best thirty minutes came last Wednesday.

I had taught myself “This Land is Your Land,” and after playing the basic stuff last Wednesday, I said “okay, now I’m going to play a song that I’m sure you all know.”

I gave the title, and a large number of students looked at me blankly.

And I thought: wait. Of course a lot of them have never heard of this song. They’re five.

It just sort of feels as if we were all born knowing that song. There’s just something about “This Land is Your Land” that’s so iconic, such a part of what we know, that it’s actually easy to forget that there was a time in all our lives that we didn’t know it.. And considering that so many of my students have parents from all over the world, it’s even more likely that they didn’t hear that song in their household.

This led to a genuinely profound feeling: of all the people in the world, I was going to be the one who turned these kids on to “This Land is Your Land.” Me. If they liked this song, for the rest of their lives, when they talked about it, they would say “oh, yeah...one of my teachers, Mr. Leif, turned me on to that song when I was in kindergarten.”

So I played the first line a couple of times and taught them to sing along to it, and then the second, third and fourth. Then I played the song for real.

Of course they sung with uncertainty, but after we came around to the chorus the third time, a number of them were singing. It was pretty sweet.

Then, another realization came over me.

I teach in a school that’s diverse in a big way. There are kids with parents from African countries (a lot from Ghana and Kenya), Asian countries (Lowell, Massachusetts, where I teach, has one of the largest Cambodian populations in the country), and Spanish-speaking countries (a lot are from The Dominican Republic). So here were kids with parents from all over the world, and they were singing “This Land is Your Land.”

And I thought about the current political situation, and how there is so much talk about how people who come from other places are terrible people who are coming here to do terrible things. And here were the children of those people, smiling and singing their hearts out. Then I thought about how Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” as an angry retort to the jingoistic “God Bless America,” made popular by Kate Smith, which he couldn’t stand (and recent news stories about some of Kate Smith's other recordings show that her earlier work was very much in accord with many of the current political sentiments of today).

And all those lyrics that I’ve been singing all my life took on such a profound meaning as I say these kids joyously singing them. Honest. Though I’d always liked the lyrics, I’d never had such a deep feeling of the truth of them.

Last Tuesday, the day before what would be the little session where I introduced Kim’s students to “This Land is Your Land,” I had asked Kim if I could stop by on Wednesday morning.

“Derek,” she said with a smile, “let me just make this clear so that you don’t have to keep asking: you’re always welcome in my class on Wednesday mornings. I don’t know why the other teachers don’t take you up on your offer, but as long as they’re not going to do that, it means that I have something great going on in my class every Wednesday mornings. Just come in.”

I will, Kim. I will.

1 Comment

25 July 2019 (Thursday) - My Life at The Moment: Playing my Beloved Vorson Electric Ukulele with Baritone Tuning

7/25/2019

1 Comment

Jeez, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything.

I’m afraid it’s just going to be that way for a while. Long stretches of nothing, followed by a furtive entry that I dash off in a few minutes. That’s just the way my life is at the moment.

So much of my headspace involves teaching. Last week I went to a Code.Org workshop, which gave me all these ideas for teaching coding to my middle school students. I’d already attended the workshop that involved teaching to the younger grades, and now I have to nail down lesson plans for all this stuff.

In addition to this, my big brother passed away suddenly at the end of May, and it became immediately obvious that my father needed to live closer to me. So I spent the end of June and a good part of July helping him pack up his house down on Long Island (he rented, fortunately, so he could pull up stakes quickly) and move everything up here to Massachusetts. Now he’s a two-minute drive from where I live, and we’re checking out a Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway tonight.

When I have a free minute I mess around with my electric ukulele (you read that right). I restrung it from G-C-E-A (standard soprano tuning) to D-G-B-A (baritone ukulele tuning), so now I basically have this tiny instrument that sounds like a wailing electric guitar.

“That’s so you,” said my friend Avery.

Yes, I guess it is.

I picked up a cheap tripod so that I could start recording myself playing songs. I will then upload these to YouTube. Perhaps a dozen people will watch them, if that.

This is fine by me. I just want to have proof that I’m still creating things. Most of the time, I’ll film them in front of my garage.

Sometimes I’ll film them in exotic locations, such as the cemetery a block away from where I live (that would be Megan’s house). At the same time, I like the grungy feel of just recording these grainy videos in front of the garage door. My goal is not so much to have people listen to my music as have them see me playing this incredibly simple instrument and saying to themselves “hey, I could do that.”

Hmmm….maybe I’ll post a video today. Yeah. That’s a good idea.

Many times, these videos will feature me looking at a music stand, which contains the chords and lyrics to the song I’m singing. I always have a problem remembering the chord progressions and the lyrics. I’m hoping that someone watches it and says “hey…I don’t have any problem remembering chord progressions and lyrics. I could buy a Vorson electric ukulele, string it with electric guitar strings (use the four thickest strings, by the way), and play something a lot better than what he’s playing.’

To which I say: yes, that’s what I want you to do, particularly if you’re between the ages of, say, 13 and 25. Buy an electric uke and string it like a guitar that doesn’t have low E and A strings. In a week, you’ll know enough about how to play the electric uke to play simple, catchy songs. Then you can find a bassist and drummer, and start a band.

Anyway, all this writing about the electric ukulele is making me want to pick it up and play it. I’ll post something by this afternoon. That’s what I’ll do. Yeah.

1 Comment

24 APRIL, 2019 (WEDNESDAY), 4:57 AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-THOUGHTS ON MARVEL FILMS AND VIDEO GAMES

4/24/2019

0 Comments

So I sit here and write. At the moment, I can’t think of anything worth posting.

The words stumble out of me. They do not flow. They are choppy and lumpy.

When I write in the morning, I feel as if I’m writing on a sort of deadline. I want to post something, and I have until about 5:30, when I need to get ready for school.

I look for something to write about.

Still nothing.

I check my email. There is something in there about “Avengers Endgame.” This makes me realize that I have practically fallen off the earth when it comes to pop culture.

Yes, I am aware that “Avengers Endgame” is a big deal. Yesterday I watched a news story about how some people went to a marathon of all the previous Marvel films before watching this one. It amounted to 56 hours of viewing. The movie theater provided showers outside for anyone who needed one, along with yoga instruction, presumably during the Eric Bana version of “The Hulk,” which wasn’t that great.

Okay, so I wasn’t completely in the dark with the Marvel thing.

I do, however, always feel as if I fell behind in the whole comic thing, and never really got a chance to catch up. There are whole swaths of characters in these films I don’t know at all. When I’ve seen a couple of them, people around me have started applauding when characters turn up unexpectedly, especially during the end credits.

At school, I struggle with mixed feeling about the game “Fortnite.” On one hand, some of my students are thrilled that I loaded it onto my phone, and some were talking to me with more enthusiasm than I’d ever seen. On the other hand, it’s a fiercely addictive game with disconcerting violence, and some of the students playing this game are as young as eight years old.

I’m going to check it out this weekend, but I’m already expecting that, surprisingly, I’m going to be bored with it. Okay, I get it...100 players roam around a landscape, finding weapons and supplies so that they can pick each other off. This just doesn’t seem that exciting to me.

It also seems way too complicated for my tastes. Most video games these days require, it seems, more effort to learn them than I expended learning to edit audio and video. So I think to myself: I can spend time creating things, or I can spend time running around in a virtual world, virtually killing people.

Yet I do want to play this game, just to see what all the fuss is about. If there are big issues and concerns with it, I want to be able to discuss those these things as someone who’s familiar with the location of them.

I’ve just checked out the game on my phone. It just seems like a chore to learn how to play it. It is difficult for me to imagine this being any fun.

At the present, I would much rather write blog entries, stories, and songs.

Maybe I’m just not cut out to be all that much into video games. I had an X Box for a while, and loved “Skyrim” and “Resident Evil.” At the same time, I found “Halo” and “Bioshock” kind of boring.

Maybe I’m just not made for these times. I mean, I do love pinball, particularly the newfangled machines that Stern and Jersey Jack are turning out. They, too, are incredibly complicated, with computer chips creating a complex series of tasks in which I find myself occasionally scoring millions of points for unwittingly doing something right.

For now, though, when it comes to video games, I’d just rather learn to play major and minor seventh chords on my guitar.

0 Comments

23 APRIL 2019 (TUESDAY), 4:29 AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-WHAT MY FRIENDS ARE DOING

4/23/2019

0 Comments

So it’s early, early morning, and I’m writing. Once upon a time, in my head, I had ideas for many, many stories. Perhaps I still do, but they’re buried somewhere.

For now, what I write about is just what’s going on in my life, which means that I spend a lot of time writing about work.

I have an easy day today. There is a fifth grade field trip, which means that I don’t have a class first period. This is already my easy day, when I have two back-to-back preps second and third period, which means that I have a raft of free time this morning.

Of course, there is always a chance that this raft of free time may go to subbing for other classes. Time will tell.

If I don’t sub, I’ll spend more time with the Code.Org stuff, deciding which parts of it will work for the next eight weeks, and which parts of it won’t. I’m taking a professional development seminar on it this weekend, and I actually think that it’s going to be a whole lot of fun.

There’s this slight, subtle difference between the writing that I do for myself--the writing that stays in my journal--and the writing that I do when I have an eye toward posting it in my blog. It’s a little less personal, and I don’t engage in the same relentless self-analysis that accompanies my journal entries.

I just write differently at the moment. I almost feel, when I write this way, as if I’m writing a letter to about ten people, those friends who read my blog. I know that if they wrote stuff like this, I’d want to read it, so I guess I’m writing for them.

Let’s see. My friend Laura now manages a yoga studio in Los Angeles. I’ve written about Laura before, and how she chucked a high-paying job teaching in New York, and pretty much moved to L.A. without a net; I admire that in a big way.

That’s her on the right.

“So I’m this fifty year-old yoga instructor working with a bunch of kids,” she said. “Who’d have thought it?”

Then there’s my friend Beth, who retired to California and now spends a lot of time making incredibly cool art. One of her major projects involves making dioramas out of books in which she hollows them out. Every time she posts one on Facebook, I smile.

My friend Yvonne is leaving behind a high-paying job in New York and moving to Florida to teach engineering at a branch of FSU in Panama City. She’s a Southern girl, and wants to move back home; she also wants to surf more. She said my moving to Massachusetts without a net inspired her; this made me happy.

I study aikido with my friend Joe, who’s one of the wisest people I know. We keep talking about creating an audio version of Choose Your Own Adventure. Perhaps we’ll do that this summer.

I realize as I’m writing this that I’m kind of skipping around, which is the way I write when I’m writing a letter to someone. Often, when I write a letter, I tend to ramble a bit, the way I’m rambling now in this paragraph. When I do that, I tell people that they can just skip over the paragraph, but of course, I usually tell them they can do this in the last sentence of the paragraph, which means that they have to read it to get to the point where I tell them that they can skip it if they want.

Perhaps it would be better if I began a paragraph by saying “you can skip this paragraph if you want.” Then I could just ramble for a while, creating a sentence that’s really long, one with a lot of commas, semi-colons, and ellipses; I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, because I’d have warned the reader that they could just skip over that sentence...and that they could move to the next paragraph. That would make more sense.

Whatever. All I know is, I’ve written something that’s over 500 words (that’s my minimum for posting length), and I’ve posted it. That counts for something.

0 Comments

22 APRIL (MONDAY) 2019: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-STRUGGLING, AS ALWAYS

4/22/2019

0 Comments

So it’s morning, and I’m writing.

I’ve had a week of vacation, and as is always the case, I don’t think I did enough work for school this past week. I have eight more weeks to go before the end of the school year, and I still teach week to week, feeling my way through the curriculum.

I sometimes wish I could just stop time for a year and lay out an entire curriculum for my students. There are things in the lessons that I currently teach that I don’t like, and ways in which I think that I could better teach the more advanced students who fly through the exercises that I give them.

Some students clearly know a lot more than I do. One of them is already working on Python, and has set up a Raspberry Pi in his house to run as a vintage Sega gaming console.

On my bookshelf are my summer project books. One of them is about using Scratch to teach programming (as opposed to just giving assignments that involve creating games), another three or four are about Python, another two are about learning Linux, one is about Javascript, and another is about using The BBC Microbit, a cool bit of hardware that hooks up to a computer and allows students to learn basic hardware programming.

It’s yet another example of something that I do all the time. I buy books about things that I have to learn, and take solace when I see them on the shelf, all these resources there to help me. Of course, for all of this to really work, it is necessary to read those books. That’s the part with which I have trouble.

Lately, I think about setting up a before-school class in which I offer advanced instruction to the students who want it. It’s actually easier to adjust my classes for the students who struggle. The hard part, I’ve discovered, is designing exercises and activities for the students who are way beyond the particular content that I’m teaching that day.

I spend time struggling with my ambivalence about kids and technology in general. Again and again, I read about how the heads of tech companies--the folks who brought all this stuff into our lives--don’t want their kids anywhere near technology. I see my students staring at screens (they’re going to do that when I’m teaching them technology), and I think about how they’re interacting with a machine instead of interacting with a human being.

And then, always, there is the constant fight between the things that I want them to do with the computer, and the games that they want to play. I walk around and hear a quick, furtive keystroke as a student hits Alt-Tab to switch from whatever screen on which they’re playing games or listening to music to the screen on which they are (supposedly) doing work. A number of them don’t even try to hide that they’re spending the period playing games.

Teaching has changed since I was in school. It used to be that the teacher stood in front of the class for the period and lectured. Now, the teacher will talk for a few minutes, and the rest of the class involves students working amongst themselves while the teacher walks around and checks on their progress. In education speak, this is the act of turning away from what they call “sage on the stage” teaching to “guide on the side” teaching.

“Studies have shown that student attention flags after a few minutes,” one young teacher told me smugly a few years ago as he critiqued my teaching.

And I thought: yes, but should we be accommodating this? And did the attention of every student flag? And couldn't the problem have to do not with an antiquated style of teaching, but with a disturbing dwindling of student attention? And shouldn’t we be working on increasing their attention spans so that they can sit and listen?

I struggle with all of this as I continue to put one foot in front of the other. It’s just not easy. At the same time, teaching never has been easy.

0 Comments

APRIL 21st (Sunday), 2019, 7:18AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-WHY I DON’T POST EVERYTHING

4/21/2019

1 Comment

Just sitting here in The Hot Chocolate Sparrow cafe in beautiful Orleans, Massachusetts, writing. I just visited my friend Jim, and had a great time hanging out with him.

At the moment, I’m thinking about whether to post the essay that I wrote yesterday.

No, it’s not hideously offensive or anything, but it does have a part that’s decidedly PG-13. I wish I didn’t have to even think about whether I should publish my writing, but alas, I work with kids, and some of them read my blog.

It’s an odd feeling when one of my students says they read my blog, and even odder when one of them comments on it. Toiling away in obscurity as I do, I just never imagine that someone other than myself and perhaps five of my friends read this.

Let’s see. There’s Megan, Bob, his wife Sally, Tom H, Laura, Beth, Joe, his wife Laurie, and...really, that’s all I can think of at the moment. So okay, eight people.

Oh, wait, I forgot my friends Loann and Avery. Okay, ten people.

Apparently, though, there are more. Occasionally, I’ll check out Google Analytics, and see that someone from some flyover region of The United States checked out my blog for a while. I usually think that this person has somehow figured out how to use my blog to access personal information and steal my identity.

The absolute oddest incidents are when total strangers write comments. This happens every couple of months, perhaps twice a year. I honestly don’t know how people find this stuff, because I know nothing about search optimization, and therefore conclude that any previous blog entries are gone forever.

Whatever the case, I write something that the world can read, and I need to be aware of that.

It bothers me a bit, because when I think about the fact that anyone can read this, my mind usually turns to ways that this could turn out badly. Many years ago, a first year teacher at my old school posted photos of her going out drinking with her friends, and lost her job.

Everyone else said she got what was coming—my union president at the time sent us an email about being careful what we post, including the words “the district can and will prosecute”—but I couldn’t help but feel uneasy. I mean, jeez...she was really young, and she was doing what a lot of really young people do on weekends. Okay, it was stupid to post that stuff, but did they really need to fire her?

I could spend a good amount of words discussing this further, but the point I’m trying to make is that I’d like to be able to spend more time thinking about the positive things that could happen when I post my writing. Granted, were I to write about going on an epic bender (which I have not done) and were I to post pictures (which i do not have, as I have not gone on an epic bender), I would probably eventually have a lot to answer for at school.

All I’m saying, though, is that it just seems as if we’ve become a society in which people lay in wait for someone else to do something wrong, and then pounce. We don’t seem to spend a lot of time combing through someone’s life for good things, and pointing those things out. We spend a lot of time condemning people, and not a whole lot of time praising them.

So for now, I will not post what I wrote yesterday. May some other time. Maybe under an assumed name

1 Comment

17 APRIL 2019 (WEDNESDAY), 4:51 AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-SLOGGING THROUGH

4/17/2019

0 Comments

I sit here and write, and at the moment, it’s like wading through cement.

It’s such a paradigm shift for me. Not too long ago, I was looking forward to an early retirement, with plenty of time to write. Now, this just isn’t the case.

It’s not as if I’m miserable in my present situation. Quite the opposite. My job is rewarding; I love what I do.

It’s just that...well, it’s demanding.

I’ve chronicled the many hours that I’ve spent preparing lessons, and as I write this, I’m preparing more of them. I’ve been combing through all the lessons that I teach (and the many that I plan to teach next year) on Code.Org, and came to the conclusion that the only way that I could truly teach these lessons was to do the activities in each of them.

Each grade has perhaps 20 lessons. Some grades have many more. I teach K-8, so do the math.

I’m seeing that there are plenty of lessons that I can skip, which is good. A recent email from a colleague revealed that my students really don’t understand the basics of sending an email. Also, it’s necessary for them to have keyboarding skills; the state standards call for students to type five words a minute multiplied by their grade (ten words a minute for second grade, fifteen for third grade, and so on).

Sure, I have to teach this stuff, but it’s downright boring. I’ve always said that there are four types of computing: office worker computing (basic office software, email, and keyboarding), graphic design programming (photo editing, website design), multimedia programming (audio and video editing), and straight programming (computer languages).

The trouble with the office worker programming, however necessary it is, is that it’s boring. I can teach it, and yes, they’ll learn it, but when I think of the limited number of classes I teach each year, I want so much to move on to the other types of programming, which are so much more interesting.

Teachers go through this all the time. In the same way that there are things that students dread learning, so are there things that teachers dread teaching. As I plan out, this summer, my full curriculum for the following year (and the years to follow), I think about how I’m going to strike a balance between the vegetables they have to eat and the dessert that I’d like to serve them.

And through it all, there is the grim truth that many of these students would much rather play video games than do any of these things.

I’m looking forward to about three years from now, when I will have designed a curriculum, and when I will have waded through these countless lessons to decide what to keep, and what to discard. I’m also looking forward to a time when I’ll have everything lined up, and can start looking for ways to tweak what I teach so that I can make it more rewarding.

For now, though, there are so many times that it’s a slog. I feel as if I’m driving in a deep fog, only able to see what’s perhaps five feet in front of me. I plan my lessons from week to week, often throwing out whole swaths of things when I realize that the lessons aren’t going the way I want them to go.

Strangely, though, I write more than I used to. When I had more free time I spent a lot of it in my head, and found myself paralyzed. Now, I just don’t have time for that.

In a way, my working life has permeated my writing life. When I teach, it doesn’t matter what kind of mood I’m in...I have to have something to teach, and I have to teach it. In the same way, I find myself writing, even if I’m in no mood to write. It’s just something that I have to do.

Last weekend, I wrote a song. It was just so nice to produce something again.

So I lurch forward, feeling my way through blind alleys, teaching what I can, and writing what I can. That’s just the way things are right now, and probably the way things are going to be for a long while.

0 Comments

13 APRIL 2019 (SATURDAY): MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-WORKING IN A CHARTER SCHOOL

4/13/2019

1 Comment

For the past few days I’ve been posting what I write in my journal. It’s kind of like sharing a snapshot of my life.

Let’s see. I slept late today, and I needed it. Yesterday, I worked every period of the day. That’s the way it is at a charter school; often, they’re short on substitutes, and when my principal asks if I can cover a class, I do it.

I honestly don’t know, when he asks me, if he’s asking me or telling me. The truth is, he’s such a decent guy--and seems so stressed when he’s desperately looking for someone to cover a class--that I can’t say no to him. So, once again, I said yes, as I always do, by smiling at him and saying “hey...anything for my godfather, Randy, you know that.”

Yes, I know...if I did this in a unionized school, I’d be paid for this extra work, so I don’t think about it too much. There are plenty of things I don’t like about charter schools--it’s actually more accurate for me to just say that I don’t like charter schools--but this one gets it right, and I love working here. Often, I’ve said that I don’t like it because it’s a charter school, but in spite of the fact that it’s a charter school.

I had a great conversation with Jeff, the director of technology. I was telling him about how I had moved a whole lot of stuff (a storage cabinet and a file cabinet, for example) to the front of the classroom, leaving the back with space to install things for students who want to take computing to the next level, such as Raspberry Pis.

“Anytime you’re ready,” he said with a smile. “And by the way, I have a 3-D printer whenever you’re ready to use it.”

I love that guy. I have a lot freedom to try things out here than I ever did back at my old school.

Right now, I’m celebrating the fact that I got to spring break. As I’ve written before, when I came to this school, there was no curriculum for tech instruction, so I’ve been putting it together as I move along. Right now, I’m sold on the Code.Org curriculum, and have printed up all the materials for it.

There are separate lessons for the primary grades, and a six-part program for the middle grades. There’s also two separate curriculum guides for each of these groups. That’s fourteen binders worth of stuff. I’m going through it, page by page.

I have a fourth grader in one of my classes who knows about ten times more about computers than I do. He steered me towards a whole program that allows the instruction of computers by using Minecraft. Alas, it involves each student having an Office 365 account, so I’m seeing how it’s possible to maybe have this without that.

This week, I’ll be going through the Code.Org lessons, one by one, starting with kindergarten. My plan is to sort of go through the next eight weeks by giving the students a sample of the program when I have it fully set up. I’ll be spending the summer taking care of that.

I teach a lot more than I did at my filthy rich school district. At my previous school district, there’s a nine period day, each period lasting 42 minutes. Teachers teach five periods, have one period for meetings, two free periods, and one period for lunch. Where I teach, the periods are 50 minutes long, and on a number of days, I teach six of them. On my easiest day I teach four...or 200 minutes, just about the exact amount that my colleagues at my old school teach on a regular day.

I get thirty minutes for lunch, but often, it’s only fifteen or twenty minutes. At my old school, there were four minutes between periods for students to go back and forth between classes. We have that here, but there’s no such thing for the lunch period. Fourth period ends at 12:05, and fifth period begins at 12:35.

It can take a while to line the students up, so there are times, particularly with the younger classes, that they don’t leave the classroom until 12:15 or so. That’s just the way it is.

Yesterday, I spoke to a colleague who was chaperoning a trip to Providence.

“We’re not going to get back till eleven or so,” she said.

“How many shekels are they paying you for this extra time,” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

And, of course, through it all, there’s the fact that, unlike at a unionized school, I sign a contract that says that I can be fired without cause. This is a delicate way of saying that I can be fired for any reason, with no explanation. With a snap of the fingers.

Hey, there are probably a lot of people who think this is the way things should be. Many people believe that a teacher’s life is cushy, and that they should work harder. These people also tend to think that it should be easy to fire teachers. Here, I work a lot harder than I did, and it’s easy to fire me; that’s the way it is.

Yet it’s deeply satisfying. The administrators are decent, dedicated people, and as I said, I have a lot more freedom here than I did there. In truth, I'm about ten times happier here than I was at my old school, which was a dull place filled with spoiled, entitled kids (okay, not all of them were entitled--there were a number I adored--but you get the idea).

Yes, some of the students drive me to drink, but the vast majority of them are good kids, and a number of them are great. In truth, I love them all, even the rough ones.

For better or worse, this is probably the future of education.

1 Comment

12 APRIL 2019 (FRIDAY): MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT-A REVIEW OF THE "TWILIGHT ZONE" EPISODE "REWIND"

4/12/2019

2 Comments

Yesterday, I saw the best Twilight Zone episode since those in the original show. There had been some attempts to remake the series, notably one attempt in the 1980s that yielded a couple of okay episodes. And though this new attempt spearheaded by Jordan Peele (“Get Out,” “Us”) yielded two so-so episodes at first, the third time was indeed the point at which they got it right.

I’m going to give spoilers, so please feel free to skip the next few paragraphs.

THE SPOILERS START HERE

The episode is called “Rewind,” and it’s about an African American mother who is driving her son to college. She has an old-school video camera, and realizes that she can rewind time.

Along the way, a cop flags down her son for holding the video camera and filming his mother while driving. In truth, the reason for pulling the kid over is irrelevant; he’s looking to harass these two, in the hopes that one of them will get angry so that he can hurt them, perhaps even kill them.

The mother keeps rewinding time as things turn out horribly, but no matter what she tries--including one iteration of things in which she introduces herself to the cop, and ingratiates herself to him. It doesn’t matter. Each time, things come to a tragic end.

What’s great about the episode, though, is that, unlike previous reboot episodes that took an interesting concept and didn’t know how to take it to the next level, this one takes it a deeply satisfying conclusion. Near the end, there was a point was where I just found myself exclaiming “this is great. This is truly great.”

OKAY, THE SPOILERS ARE OVER

What made the episode “Rewind” great was that it was the first time that I saw a new “Twilight Zone” episode effectively do what original “Twilight Zone” episodes did: discuss difficult political issues with a truly interesting, engaging story. Yes, there were some previous instances in which there were some "Post Original Twilight Zone" episodes that tried to do this (including a lackluster sequence in the “Twilight Zone” movie from the 1980s, notorious for being the sequence in which actor Vic Morrow--best known for playing the monster kid in “Blackboard Jungle”--died tragically during filming), but they never did it right.

It figured that the Jordan Peele “Twilight Zone” would finally get it right with an episode that dealt with a key issue in the African American community: the disturbing, predatory behavior of the police.

Before I even go on, I know, I know. Right now, if a single police officer is reading this, their blood is boiling. How dare I criticize the police.

Look, I know. I’ve defended the police constantly, and I know that a number of those videos on YouTube leave out the full context of what happened. Too often, in those videos, there’s some sort of sequence that we don’t see, one that shows that the cop’s use of force may not have been as unjustified as the video made it seem.

And what I just wrote is the problem. Being a liberal, I always, always acknowledge that the other side may have a point.

Trouble is, I never hear the other side acknowledging that I--and those who think the way that I do--may have a point.

And in the case of this episode, the point is this: there are a disturbing number of cops who prey on African American men, and cause the African American community to live in fear of the police. There just are.

And of course, and I write this wearily, I know what the reaction will be from just about every member of the law enforcement community who reads this. Look, I’ve heard cops talk about Black Lives Matter, their faces darkening when they do, the angry words coming out of their mouths like spittle. To them, all violence against African American men is justified.

Given the way that Peele’s “Get Out” dealt with issues like this--but wrapped these issues in a truly entertaining horror story--it made sense that “Rewind” would be the episode in which the new “Twilight Zone” truly found its way.

Perhaps there will be consequences for my daring to acknowledge that African Americans may be justified in their criticism of the police. So be it.

2 Comments

<<Previous

New ESSAYS QUITE OFTENNEW STORIES AND SONGSEVERY now and then

New ESSAYS QUITE OFTEN
NEW STORIES AND SONGS
EVERY now and then