DEREKLEIF.ORG

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

4/24/2019

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.

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

4/23/2019

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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.

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

4/22/2019

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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.

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

4/21/2019

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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

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

4/17/2019

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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.

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

4/13/2019

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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.

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

4/12/2019

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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.

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11 APRIL 2019 (THURSDAY), 4:39 AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT

4/11/2019

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This morning, even writing with the idea that I will post it for all to read fatigues me.

There’s this subtle difference between the journal entries that I used to post, and the ones that I post now. Ever so slightly, I think about whether or not to include parts of my life in what I share with the world.

I need to mute things. Yesterday, in one of my classes, a student was teasing another student, to the point where the other student was in tears. In my journal, I could be a lot more visceral in my description of how angry this made me, and the desired fate of the student who was harassing this other student, laughing wildly all the while; because I’m sharing this with others, I will simply say that my mind was not in the brightest place when it contemplated the desired fate of this young man.

If this were a journal entry that I didn’t share with everyone, I wouldn’t be thinking of the consequences of the words I write quite so much. Alas, it’s not so much a question of concerns over hurting people with my words (I think I’m pretty good about making sure I don’t do that); instead, it’s concerns about those words coming back to haunt me.

We live in a time in which it’s more difficult to put words and actions behind us. There are things I’ve said, written and done in which I’m happy that those things are gone forever. Now, everything can be saved as a group of ones and zeroes, forever there on a network somewhere. Lurking. Waiting.

I like to think there’s an opposite to this. I like to think that there are things that we can post that will come back to help us, or help someone else. It seems that most of the time (actually, it feels like all the time) those pictures and words are all about someone pointing out that another person did horrible things. Just once, I’d like to see someone pull an image or set of words out of the past that highlight something good about someone about which none of us knew.

I wish, for example, that there were some way that I could have recorded the experience of the time, back when I went to The University of Massachusetts, that I hung out with my friend Bob.

It was October, I think. I was incredibly homesick, and didn’t feel as if I had a friend in the world. I would eventually have great times at this place, but I wasn’t yet aware of the places in which I could have those good times.

To many people, Bob’s room was something of a clubhouse. He worked at Moondance Comics, a store in the Hampshire Mall on Route 9, which runs just south of the UMASS campus. Frequently, he would bring comics to people who wanted to buy the latest issues of whatever comic they followed.

Bob was the one who turned me onto Frank Miller, who’d just written “The Dark Knight Returns.” This was the comic book series that ushered in the new portrayal of Batman with a depth that made its way to Christopher Nolan’s films two decades later. He also turned me onto “Watchmen,” Alan Moore’s groundbreaking series that, when bound into one volume, earned a spot on Time Magazine’s list of the best books of the 20th Century.

I don’t think that Bob, until now at least, knows just how much that day in October meant to me, when I hung out in his room and he turned me onto Nancy Griffith. I shared my newly discovered love of Tom Waits with him, and felt this surge of happiness that comes from sharing something with someone who you hope will be your friend, and finding out that the person enjoys it.

Because of Bob, I felt as if I belonged. I found my way through a massive school, made other friends, and began to find my place in the scheme of things.

Bob, in turn, introduced me to Tom, who would become the arts editor of the college newspaper, The Collegian.

I loved working for Tom. In a subsequent semester, when there was a kind of election for arts editor--one that Tom lost to another person who was more than a bit obnoxious--I vowed that I would never write for the paper again until someone more like Tom became the arts editor, and I didn't (eventually, a lovely person named Jennifer took over the reigns, and I started writing for the paper again).

Tom would later tell me that I was the best thing about his tenure as arts editor. That meant a lot to me.

Much later, after I graduated--and encountered the post-graduate depression that most people encounter--I lived in Los Angeles for a while, and hung out constantly with Laura, who worked at the youth center I frequented back when I lived in New York.

Every other day, it seemed, we went on a road trip somewhere. One time--and we still speak about this time fondly--we just packed up my drums and her guitar, drove to Joshua Tree National Park, set up my drums in a clearing in the middle of this desert landscape, and just started playing.

People stopped and took our picture. Somewhere, I hope, there is still one of those pictures. I’d love to see it; it documents when a good friend made me happy.

I still have faint scars on my left earlobe from my 25th birthday, when Laura suggested that we drive to Tijuana. And so we did. I got my ear pierced there, and bought cheap stiletto knives that I gave to friends.

“How am I going to get these across the border,” I asked the kid (yes, he was a kid, with a scary scar above one of his eyes) who sold the knives to me.

“Just stuff them in your pockets,” he said, “they don’t check.”

They didn't.

I mailed these knives all over the place, including one that I sent to Megan, who, at the time, was studying abroad in England, and who had gotten a piercing of her own, in her nose (hey, she was dating a punk rock biker at the time). Also, she was smoking on and off at the time, so I sent her a lighter and some lighter fluid.

All of this stuff--the knives, the later, the lighter fluid--got to their intended recipients.

It was a different world.

Also, when I lived in Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time with my friend Jim, and my cousin Angela. Jim and I saw a ton of movies together, and discussed them passionately. Angela showed me around Los Angeles, and would become like a sister to me.

And one good thing about my writing about this is: now people reading about this know more about these people. Bob, Tom, Laura, Jim, Angela...they did lovely things, and I’ll cherish them forever.

Now you know.

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10 APRIL 2019 (WEDNESDAY), 5:03 AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT

4/10/2019

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The day before yesterday, I was helping one of the gym teachers, Steve, with his class. It was tough.

The kids just weren’t into self-discipline. Again and again, Steve had to stop the class, just to be heard, just to give simple directions. They sat there, most of them clearly eager to get on with the activity. Yet they couldn’t get to it; a whole lot of them just kept talking, moving around, just not settling down.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes, we got them into groups, and started the activity. It didn’t go on for too long. Some of the kids were wild, and Steve had to stop everything, because it was clear that there was a real possibility that one of the kids was going to get hurt.

So again, he we had to corral them back to the far wall, where they all had to sit while Steve tried to (calmly) tell them that a number of them just weren’t listening to what he was telling them. He mentioned John Wooden’s excellent quote (also attributed to C.S. Lewis) that character is what a person does when no one is watching. A number of the students were clearly listening, but still, a whole lot of them weren’t.

It was just depressing. Out of the fifty minute period, the kids got to play for maybe fifteen minutes.

And as I watched, I thought about my classes, where I just need to spend an equal amount of time just getting the kids rounded up, and on task.

During those times, I’ve always felt as if there’s something I’m doing wrong. Obviously, I’ve thought, there’s some sort of skill that a better teacher has that I just don’t. If I were to get observed while this is happening, I’ve often thought, my administrator would no doubt think that I should find another line of work.

But here I was with Steve, who’s worked there for fifteen years, and he was going through the same thing.

After the class, I went up to Steve.

“Boy,” I said, “they just didn’t have it today. Something in the water...I don’t know.”

“Oh, yeah,” Steve said. “that’s what it’s like here. Sometimes, they’re the way they were today, and other times, everything goes right. That’s the thing about working in this place. You have real lows, and real highs...sometimes the same day, sometimes in back-to-back periods.”

Boy, is he right.

Yesterday, I took over a first grade class for the librarian, Sue, who needed the time to shelve a ton of books. She gave me a list of films I could show to the kids.

The kids just weren’t having it. They were in the tech lab, and they wanted to use the computers. Of course, they wanted to use the computers to play games.

There’s something about kids playing games on computers at school that depresses me. No doubt some of this is the typical instance of someone who’s now grown to middle age (past it, actually), lamenting kids who are acting the way that he or she acted when they were a kid, completely forgetting that they were the same way. And honestly, I get it; if I had the choice between doing a computer activity and playing a game, of course I’d prefer the game.

And again, I get this. I let the kids play games for the last couple of minutes of the period after they’ve done their work.

But watching these first graders, well, as I said, it depressed me. There’s this feeling that I have when I’m offering other activities that sometimes makes me feel as if I’m offering a healthy meal to a room full of addicts, and there are those games, the second or third cousin to a mound of crack, right there in my classroom.

I know, I know...I’m sounding like one of those ultra-conservative parents groups that wants to ban every single video game from the planet, and censor any music that’s even slightly offensive. Still, though, the way those kids were...jeez. When some of them couldn’t get into Roblox, they were practically screaming; some of them even seemed to be on the verge of tears.

Eventually, I got things set up so that they were all playing a game of some sort...and once again, I saw that zombielike haze to most of their eyes. Some got so into the game they they started screaming.

And I honestly thought: why am I even doing this? Why am I even here? It’s obvious that when I try to teach them any computing skills they’re just going to scream about wanting to play video games, and won’t even stay on task for five minutes.

So this class that I was babysitting ended, and I had a fourth grade class coming in.

It was like night and day.

I put them on the Code.Org site, and all of them were on task. And this was a class that isn’t one of my easiest classes. This time, it wasn’t as if something was in the water; it was as if the planets were all aligned in the right positions.

And when that happened, I suddenly remembered: there has honestly been many classes that have gone like this.

It’s just so difficult to remember that classes go in this life-affirming way during those periods where nothing is going right. When things aren’t working, it just feels as if that moment is every moment, as if no one at all is going to learn anything.

Yet there are those moments of hope as well, and when those moments occur, it’s about as good a feeling as any I’ve ever felt.

I’m finally beginning to adjust to this new paradigm. It’s a school where the bad classes are canyons, and the good classes are the summits of the highest mountains. It’s just the way things are, and to shake off those dark times when things aren’t working...all the while cherishing those times at the mountain’s peak.

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9 APRIL 2019 (TUESDAY), 4:39 AM: MY LIFE AT THE MOMENT

4/9/2019

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So I have about 45 minutes to write this morning. Generally, I wake up at 4, mess around with Facebook and The New York Times--columns and editorials, mostly--and then get to Google Drive, where I open my journal file, and start writing.

Stories aren’t coming to me at the moment. There was a time, a few years ago, that they came to me almost every day. I’m partial to flash fiction, having written close to 200 stories, virtually all of them under 500 words.

Right now, at this moment, the words come slowly and fitfully. I’m always thinking about how I can better teach technology, trying one thing after another. In a way, I feel kind of bad for my students, because it means that I’m incredibly consistent this year, lurching back and forth as I try to figure out the best way to get them to learn something.

I notice that most of them can give me about 30 minutes before they want free time. During this free time, most of them play Roblox. They enjoy this a great deal more than they enjoy doing any of the things that I want them to do. I find this disheartening.

During this free time, I offer advanced instruction to the students who seem to really be into computers. Often, there are no takers, but every once in a while, it restores my faith.

Last Friday, while most of my students were playing Roblox, a handful of students stood around the whiteboard while I explained how to count in binary. That was great.

I’m trying to figure out what parts of Code.Org curriculum work in my class, and what parts don’t. So far, I notice that students bridle when I teach what Code.Org calls the “unplugged lessons;” that is, lessons in which you learn concepts without using the computer. At first, I honestly thought that the students just wanted to use the computers so that they could play Roblox for the entire period; then I saw, fortunately, that they were on task, and just wanted to use their computer class for, you know, using computers. .

Now all I need to do is figure out how to keep them on task for a bit longer. I also would love it if more students were interested in those little advanced pieces of instruction that I offer.

“For those of you who are interested in learning more and actually making a lot of money off of this, I’m going to be talking about operating systems,” I’ll say.

Perhaps I need to be more exciting when talking about this. I’ll work on it.

Right now, I just want the year to end. It’s not that I’m burned out as a teacher; it’s just that I’m burned out this year. I need the summer to figure out exactly how I’m going to teach all this stuff. Right now, having stepped into a position that had absolutely no curriculum, I feel like I’m driving a train on a track in which I’m building the track as I’m driving it, always in danger of running out of track.

Images of a train hurtling off the track and me hurtling toward my doom come with this image.

I am taking a Code.Org class in two and a half weeks to learn how to better teach all this to the elementary grades. Then, for a week in July, I’m learning how to better teach it to the middle school grades. I find myself looking forward to this in a big way.

I’m still getting used to the paradigm shift from where my life was to where my life is. Not too long ago, I was looking at retiring in 2024 with a full pension. Now I’m looking at working for another ten years, perhaps even fifteen. I’ll start collecting a modest pension to supplement what I’m making at my new job, which is 40 percent of what I was making at my old job.

Still, though, I’m just so much happier here than I was in New York. Near the end, I hated where I was working, and I hated Long Island. I love where I work, and I love Massachusetts, so that counts for something.

I notice that at the moment, I write in snippets, each paragraph often feeling like a separate thought, independent of the paragraph that came before it. My thoughts are often the same way, snapping from one place to the other. I’ll dart away from writing and check my Facebook post, and then check out the lesson plans on Code.Org.

Such is the life of someone who has a lot on their plate, I suppose.

A few days ago, I had a lovely conversation with my friend Laura. She had a well-paying job teaching English and theater on Long Island. Then she just chucked it all, and is now a yoga instructor in Los Angeles.

Laura’s amazing that way. She’ll just set her sights on doing something, and then do it. Also, she always does these things well.

I’m still not sure if I’m doing what I’m doing well. All I see are the things that I’m doing wrong, and I’m sure my students see it even better than I do.

I live in constant doubt of my abilities and my ideas for teaching and living better. At the same time, though, I never trust people who say that they have no doubts. Based on my reading and viewing of documentaries, it seems that doubt has plagued the best minds in history, and that some of the most evil minds had a chilling certainty of purpose, with no doubt whatsoever.

I was talking to my friend Joe on Sunday, and he said that as he gets older, he becomes convinced that one of the true enemies of decency, kindness, and civilized thought is zealotry. I think he may be onto something.

I doubt everything, including my own doubts.

Still, though, there are those exciting times when, after wading through one idea after another and dismissing them, I stumble onto something that works. Yes, I continue to doubt myself, but there’s also the feeling that what I’m trying just may be working.

So I keep trying, stumbling through life, trying one thing after another. Most of them don’t work, but some of them seem to.

I love when someone reads my writing and tells me that they can relate to it. I especially love this when it’s a close friend whose opinion means a great deal to me. Sometimes, they tell me that I’ve expressed the exact way that they feel, and when they tell me this, my heart lifts.

I look at everyone else from the outside, of course, and just about everyone else seems so sure of themselves, so certain of their path. How nice, then, to find out that there are people just like me, struggling through each day with the feeling that they are wandering without a compass on a cloudy day where the sun offers no indication of which way is east, and which way is west.

On those days--which is to say, on most days--I take stock of where I am, and try not to spend too much time looking behind me as a walk, because then I might crash into something. There is where I am now, and where I’m going. For now, that is a far better set of things to think about.

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New ESSAYS QUITE OFTENNEW STORIES AND SONGSEVERY now and then

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