Postscripts on a Whiteboard (part 2 of 2)

In last month’s blog entry, I offered some ideas concerning the roles and responsibilities of teachers and students in American schools today, particularly in the state or Maine, where I taught in middle-school and high-school classrooms for more than half of my 33-year career. This time I hope to shed at least a shard of light on the state of things among school administrators and parents.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” — Lao-Tzu

Recently I was struck nearly dumb by a comment made by Eileen King, director of the Maine Association of Superintendents, on the MPBN radio show “Maine Calling,” hosted by Jennifer Rooks. One listener, William, a former teacher, had written in to say that his recent retirement had been hastened by “…Allowed behaviors of students in the classroom. There seems to be no acceptable means of effectively squelching the disrespectful behavior of some students. This spoils the whole stew” (Maine Calling, Sept. 19, 2023).

In reply, King acknowledged that disciplinary issues in many schools had certainly increased last year as students returned to their classrooms after the pandemic, but, she said,

“I believe the students throughout last year have settled in, have remembered what it’s like or have learned what it means to be a student. What I’m hearing right now…is that schools have opened with incredible joy this year, with students really focusing on being students… Many schools have removed cell phones as students have come into classrooms, allowing students to focus in the classroom, participate in classrooms, participate in being learners. We do have behavior concerns in our schools. I believe there are several programs in our state, such as the multi-tiered levels of support, that are working across many school districts to really have educators work together to support these students that have these challenges, and I hope that William’s experience is one rare experience, based on all the hard work that our educators are doing in our schools to support all students.”

Stunning really, for a number of reasons. Aside from its usefulness as a prime example of fatuous double-speak, it reveals a pattern which most seasoned teachers know very well: the classroom teacher makes an observation, illuminates a problem, and expresses his concern to an administrator. And how does the administrator answer?

With claims that lack evidence: “…Schools have opened with incredible joy this year, with students really focusing on being students.” Which schools? All of them? Some? And for heaven’s sake, please, tell us what they are doing right.

In generalities: “I believe there are several programs in our state, such as the multi-tiered levels of support…” What programs? How do they address student behavior?

And lastly, and worst, by suggesting that the teacher is out of step, must somehow be mistaken, or perhaps is the cause of his own grievance: “I hope that William’s experience is one rare experience, based on all the hard work that our educators are doing in our schools to support all students.”

The sad truth is that William’s case is far from rare. Furthermore, the swell of disciplinary issues in schools began long before the pandemic and has now strained many schools to the breaking point. Even in quaint, sleepy Gardiner, Maine, where I taught in the middle school for seven years (having worked for twenty-six years in high schools, both public and private), over the course of my final year, 2022-23, three of my sixty-odd students faced expulsion hearings, and numerous others served long suspensions. Others habitually ignored simple instructions, refused to complete homework assignments, routinely disrupted class with clownish behavior and inappropriate remarks, and were often disrespectful toward their peers and instructors. Just as William noted, I had little recourse. Our principal and vice principal - both devoted and capable professionals, by the way - were typically too busy frying bigger fish, chasing vandals and bullies, and holding down the proverbial fort to deal with lesser infractions. The threat and imposition of detention had little impact, and in fact was frequently ignored by the offenders.

And still…I liked the kids, all of them (well, hmm…okay, yes, all of them). I think it is very hard for teachers not to like their students. That is one reason we enter this profession: we love young people, their innocence and natural ebullience and curiosity about the world - the bad and the good in it. We see ourselves in them, and we have hope for them, just as some of the adults in our own lives had hope for us. To be fair, the majority of my students have been ordinary adolescents, goofy, kindhearted, and in a few cases, in possession of excellent manners. Again, William’s wisdom is manifest: without meaningful consequences, it only takes a few - sometimes only one - to spoil the stew.

And when the stew has been spoilt, the strength and character of an administrator becomes crucial. Just as there should be an implicit trust between the student and the teacher, a similar trust should exist between the teacher and the administrator. This trust has been eroded over the years, mainly for one reason: many administrators have learned to fear angry parents, especially when they threaten litigation. I have seen grown men and women tremble at the mention of the phrase “my attorney,” so much so that school districts now keep their own attorneys on retainer (your tax dollars at work). In the end, only the attorneys win.

My concluding point is a simple one. I wish that administrators were not necessary, just as I wish that when I was selling my house, I’d had the chance to sort things out face-to-face, and fairly, with the buyer, and had not had to hand over 5.75% of the money to a realtor. Education was always something passed between individuals - from Plato to Aristotle, from Mentor to Telemachus, and from Jesus to his disciples. For some strange reason, human nature seems no longer pure enough for such intimate, often holy transactions. Apparently we need moderators in our lives. We need policy and protocol, and we need handbooks - faculty handbooks, student handbooks, evaluative-process handbooks - and we need multi-tiered levels of intervention and videos made by lawyers to tell us what will and will not get us into hot water when teaching our students. With all those things, Socrates might never have allowed himself to be executed by the Athenian court in the name of truth.

“Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.”  ― Anne Frank

I can affirm from experience that parenting is hard work, as is teaching. Still, if I had never been a parent, I certainly would not presume to tell other people how to raise their children (and even having been one, I’d still be extremely reluctant in that regard). The same does not necessarily hold true for some parents who have never been teachers; some of them seem very much inclined to tell teachers how to do their jobs.

But before we get too far into that, a disclaimer: most of the parents whose kids I have taught have been extremely supportive and trusting. I have even counted some of them among my friends. However, I have also known a few who allowed their protective instincts to devolve into a kind of zeal that could only be counter-productive. There is today an even more zealous version of this, though I have not known any of those parents personally. A handful of them are even willing to disrupt school-board meetings or belittle instructors during parent/teacher conferences because they disagree with something in the school’s curriculum. In my view, there is no point in arguing with those people.

No, this appeal is to sensible parents who may feel a bit uneasy about something they’ve heard from another mother or father, or something they’ve read online. If you are concerned about a particular book or unit of study, in any subject area, approach the teacher first. Chances are he or she has a very sound reason for incorporating it, and the intention is not to corrupt the child. Context is everything. I cannot recall any colleagues I have had over the years who were covertly “peddling a liberal agenda” or “grooming” young people for some diabolical purpose.

Or course, a parent has every right to ask that their child not be made to read a book they find objectionable, but that is an individual choice and not one that should affect the entire class and/or curriculum. As best I can remember, that has happened once in my class (I’ve forgotten which book it was), and I created an alternative, individualized unit with a different text, and everyone was happy.

Youth is inevitably a time for growth, exploration, and oftentimes rebellion. That is nature’s way. Our children can never be exactly like us, nor should we want them to be. Their beliefs will likely differ form our own, just as their experiences will. Certainly my own parents made their share of mistakes, but they had the good sense to allow me to find my own way, pursue my interests, read the books to which I was drawn, and all of that led to a life enriched by literature, art, and music, and in turn, that shaped my identity.

There is another parenting “style” I have not discussed here, but it is the one that ought to disturb us the most. It is really one of no style at all, which is to say that it amounts to non-involvement. Quite frankly, the opioid epidemic, alcoholism, and other forms of substance abuse are often at the heart of this tragedy. I’ve had students, particularly in recent years, who have witnessed terrible things in their own homes, things that are far more destructive of childhood innocence than any book could ever be: heroin use, needles, violence, poverty, misery… Some have seen their parents taken away in handcuffs or have visited them in prison. The effects of such trauma on these kids becomes more evident as time goes on; although, as I’ve said, children must be allowed to find their own pathways, we must also remember that they are great imitators. They very closely observe the actions of the adults around them, absorb them, and in many cases perpetuate debilitating cycles of abuse.

In expensive private college-prep schools, such as the ones where I taught for the first sixteen years of my career, these particular sorts of problems are not as pervasive (although addiction surely does not discriminate among social classes). Nonetheless, these environs can present the teacher with a wholly different set of challenges. Because the parents are likely to be financially invested in their children’s education, some of them begin to believe their tuition fees also buy them greater influence in matters of curriculum, as well as certain opportunities and advantages for their kids and for themselves, whether earned or not.

I will illustrate my point through an anecdote. I taught for eleven years in a very fine private school in Jacksonville, Florida, and we would always assemble at the end of the year for the presentation of academic awards - awards that carried weight as decorations for student applications to prestigious universities, and parents came out in herds to applaud for their talented offspring. A young colleague of mine, a science teacher - we’ll call him John - approached a well-dressed mother wandering among the rows of seats typically reserved for faculty.

“Excuse, me, ma’am,” John said. “The teachers usually sit in this section. Parents’ seats are there, closer to the stage.” He smiled and pointed the way.

Suddenly her demeanor changed; she became like a bellicose airline passenger who is unhappy with the wine list in first class. “I’ll sit where I wish,” she told him. “After all, I pay your salary.”

Standing a few feet away from John, I found myself too stunned to walk over and say what I ought to have said, which was that her tuition money did NOT pay for John’s meager first-year salary, but rather for a desk in a top-tier school, access to the best materials and equipment available, to an entire stable of distinguished teachers, and to a chance to be considered for acceptance at the country’s best colleges…and that was it. The kid had to do his or her part. Mom’s money was not enough.

In public and private schools alike, each party must play a unique role. Students, teachers, administrators, and parents are called to do their various jobs. Each is equal in importance, but they vary dramatically in methods of execution. The problems I have observed, as complex as they are, will not be easily untangled. Nonetheless, in another sense it all boils down to two simple guiding ideas: mutual support and trust. As a teacher, I never aspired to be an administrator - I loved the classroom too much. Sometimes I was even incredulous that I was able to make a living talking about great books from day to day (okay, there was also the 25,000 or so essays I graded over more than three decades). In the same way, good administrators - and in all of my time, I only had one boss that I considered to be ‘great’ - also know when to trust the teacher’s expertise and instincts. Parents must do their very best at parenting, and sometimes this means trusting that first and foremost, their kids are learning to be critical, analytical thinkers who, from the time they are very young, must begin to think for themselves.

We must remind ourselves that education is a fundamental right in the United States, and it has tremendous value…and I’m not simply speaking of intrinsic value. Check out this chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website:

It tells a simple story, does it not? There are exceptions, but for most of us, more education equates to more money and greater opportunity. And perhaps, most amazingly, in the United States, it can be had for free.

Are we wise enough to see the gold at our feet?

Post Scripts on a Whiteboard

A few years ago, I wrote several pieces about my experiences as a teacher. That trail of thought was obstructed by certain events in my personal and professional life, but I am ready to pick up the scent once again, I think, having now ended my 33-year career in education. It is a discussion I have been having with myself for quite some time, and I’m certain it will continue in some form or another now that I have more time for contemplation.

I do not like to use the word “retired” because it makes it sound as though one has gone to bed for a good long while. Maybe that is what I ought to do after more than three decades in front of students in high-school, middle-school, and college classrooms, but now that autumn is near and the lights are on again in school buildings near and far, I find myself still dwelling on these matters. So, let us just say that I have willingly “stepped away” from active duty as an educator. Perhaps I will teach again one day; I suppose I could pull a Tom Brady and show up someplace in a different uniform, with an erasable marker and the Oxford English Dictionary in hand instead of a football…but I expect no one would really care.

In the meantime, I am collecting my thoughts about what I have witnessed and experienced and about things as they stand now in my profession. As you might imagine, much of it is discouraging. In fact, it is fairly easy to identify our failings in the teaching of our children but extremely difficult to render workable solutions. Nevertheless, I will throw some of my own ideas into the wind, so to speak, however idealistic, futile, or redundant they may seem. Please bear in mind that the schools where I have worked have varied pretty widely in character and approach: I taught in private college-prep schools in Florida for sixteen years (also spending a handful of semesters teaching evening classes in freshman composition) and then in the Maine public school system for another seventeen years. Each environment came with a different set of problems, but I should hope that I have gained enough insight to help illuminate some of the big-picture issues.

These issues converge in messy tectonic shiftings. The land mass has broken apart, and the continents are adrift, but often they collide with one another. Nonetheless, I think it is reasonable to address four specific areas where challenges, meaning what we used to call “messes” (I think the army uses the acronym SNAFU) are evident: the changing roles of teachers, students, parents, and administration.

This will be a two-part blog - teachers and students first. Please look for the third and fourth sections next month.

"Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system." (Sidney Hook)

I agree with this quotation from the pragmatist Sidney Hook. However, I will also point out that Hook does not make note of the various reasons a teacher might be remembered. If a former student of mine were to say, “Oh, I remember Mr. Trippe. He told us funny stories,” or “Yeah, I vaguely recall that guy. So boring,” then I would begin to wonder why I had wasted so much of my time and theirs. On the other hand, if a student were to remark, “Trippe? Yes, that was a hard class, but he knew his stuff, and I learned a lot,” then I would say that I must have done my job. Friends of mine have found it hard to believe me when I’ve declared that I’ve never cared whether the kids liked me or not. Oh, I suppose that when I was a younger teacher, I enjoyed feeling accepted by a younger crowd, but in time I grew to understand that it is more important to be respected - and I mean respected not only as the person in charge of the group, but as a master of a subject area (literature and writing, in my case) who is willing to impose the discipline and skills necessary for them to do a difficult thing: to use the English language effectively as writers and speakers and to analyze the strategies of those who have done so already. The teacher should not worry about being liked; if he or she does the job with devotion, enthusiasm, curiosity, fairness, and love, then everything will be fine.

In my view, a teacher’s first responsibility is to promote and further scholarship, but herein lies a difficulty faced by every teacher in every American public school today: one’s ability to fulfill this responsibility is impeded by pressures to perform in other roles which are not strictly academic. For example, on countless occasions in recent years, I have been asked for input on students’ mental and emotional health, something that is certainly a key factor in any student’s progress and success, but one that I am ill-equipped to discuss, since I am not a child psychologist.

Consider this scenario:

“Does the student ever seem sad or anxious?”

“Well, yes, sometimes, because he is human. Some days, I feel fairly sad or anxious myself, but we are starting a unit on poetic meter today, and I have to get through it somehow.”

I certainly do not wish to seem insensitive, but I have sometimes wondered whether we are unwittingly giving students new reasons to doubt themselves, when to dive into their schoolwork - in many cases anyway - might be just the ticket, the cure for what ails them. To learn something new, in an academic context, means a degree of control, and best of all, to become well-versed in something, to really know something inside and out, and to have ideas of your own about it and the ability to articulate them…well, that is a kind of currency which cannot be stolen from you.

This is not say that all kids acquire that sort of control, that ownership of concepts and skills, in the same way. As the ancient proverb contends, there are many paths up the mountain. Those phrases and terms that teachers routinely hear in professional development sessions - “learning styles,” “differentiation,” “multiple intelligences” - are critical pieces of the vocabulary toolkit for teachers today, and with good reason. Although like many other educators at the time, I was skeptical thirty years ago about the idea of varied learning “styles” and the need for accommodations, today I can attest to the truth of their existence. My concern now is whether the individual public-school teacher, already assigned to lunchroom duty, bus duty, after-school detention duty, morning duty, and expected to attend a host of meetings throughout the year with parents, students, administrators, counselors, psychologists, and various sorts of specialists, while serving on various committees for curriculum, discipline, enrichment, scheduling, and so on…all on top of planning for daily lessons and grading written work - actually has the time to keep up with new trends in special education. Some days, it seems that just being prepared to stand in front of a class and say something coherent is difficult enough.

I am by no means saying that the teacher need only stand there, talk for a while, give some notes, a few names and dates, and then expect osmosis to take care of all the rest. On the contrary, it is imperative, absolutely requisite, that today’s teacher find new and creative methods, gleaned from all kinds of sources, to engage the interest of his students. Yes, I do mean internet sources (take a look at the rich literary collections and lessons available on gutenberg.org, the Purdue OWL, or poetryfoundation.org, and the myriad of classroom-activity sites such as edutopia.org and pbslearningmedia.org, for example), but I also know that the teacher must generate his or her own strategies, plans and schemes, intertextual connections, and assertions regarding meaning. Thus, because I wanted my classes to be focused, and because I also wanted make anything we read personal - that is to say, an intimate exchange of ideas between the writer and everyone in the class, including me - I became very selective when it came to online exercises. In order to balance all of those things, a teacher must be as scrappy as Joe Louis, as fast as Muhammad Ali, as determined as George Foreman…if boxing analogies do anything for you. If not, suffice it to say that the teacher must be a chameleon, a changeling, interested in a thousand things at once, willing to admit deficits and ignorance at times, and yet at the same time he or she must be stalwart, confident, well-read and well-versed.

I was not an education major in college; my degrees are in English, and I have always been thankful for that. I studied literature and writing, and after a stint as a journalist, I became a teacher because I am a lifelong reader and writer, and I believe there is value in that. For me, it has made my life far richer than it might have been otherwise.

Now, I know very well that most of my students have not and will not become literary scholars, and that is as it should be. However, when kids entered my classroom, they learned quickly that to me this is very serious business, and that for fifty-five minutes or an hour or an hour and a half, depending on schedules, they would indeed live the lives of budding literary scholars. We were about books, stories, poems, reasonable arguments and discussions, and writing; we were not about laptops and cell phones.

I have passed through the vortex in my career: when I started teaching, I had no computer, and all grades and comments were written by hand; yet now that I have come out on the other side, I believe that I have, at the present moment anyway, a pretty broad understanding of the ways in which technology can be used in an English classroom (although digital artificial intelligence, which I will address in another section, now presents us with a brand-new set of unnerving challenges). Undoubtedly, the days of the charming, bespectacled scholar who can quote from Xenophon’s Anabasis but who cannot turn on his own laptop have passed. One cannot survive in this profession without a decent measure of “tech savvy.” However, the COVID pandemic showed us quite clearly that living human beings are an extremely important component in the successful acquisition of an education.

Ultimately, I would say that If you wish to teach, you should be forewarned: the average kid has never been less interested in your class nor, for that matter, less like you were as a student; the average kid is not bookish, not particularly inclined to study or read, and if you expect ever to reach a few of them, you must expend tremendous energy and effort finding ways to make them believe, really believe, that what you’re telling them is important. And you must really mean it, because one thing they surely can do is expose a fraud when they meet one. It’s a tough crowd.

To put it plainly, teaching has become a very difficult, high-stress profession, but is it worth the money? I think we all know the answer to that question. You will eventually ask yourself, “Why didn’t I go to law school, like some of my friends did?” On this point, however, I will risk triteness and remain firm: all teachers know that their most satisfying rewards will never come through direct deposit. There remains a kind of glory, a heroism even, in the ability to convey something of the magnificence in a work such as Hamlet to a bunch of 16-year-olds. I will go even further and say that for a few, teaching is truly a calling. They are rare, but there are some natural-born teachers among us. I was not one; it was a long trudge for me to learn to be a decent teacher, but along the way, I have known one or two people who, without question, were simply born to teach. It is indeed a gift, and trust me - it is a beautiful thing to witness.

“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.” (Frederick Douglass)

I really believe that every American ought to read a book called Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. If you happen ever to have been one of those people who have entertained the idea that the Civil War was actually fought for any purpose other than the eradication of an evil institution, this book will cure you of that. Douglass’s courage, independence of spirt, and brilliance enabled him to do something that would have been impossible for most of us, which was simply to tell the truth about his own experience.

And when you do read his book, you will be alarmed and ashamed - not only because of the broad, deep scar of slavery upon our nation’s conscience, but because you will see that a similar (though certainly not equivalent) scourge has already descended on us: in many quarters, our educational system is failing to produce independent, analytical thinkers who can detect and dismiss inconsistencies. In too many of our schools, the “power of reason” is indeed being annihilated. Just as the institution of slavery, in Douglass’s time, demanded that the contented slave feel that slavery was right, and thus sought to “darken his moral and mental vision,” today’s students are subjugated to their masters, whether those masters are technology, trending political postures, the ambitions of those in power, materialism, or mindless conformity. Most appallingly, the cancer grows within the system itself.

In an earlier blog on education, I argued that students now have too much choice, and some readers took exception to that. Of course, such objections serve to illustrate the obsession we all have with the idea of choice (“It’s my choice! It’s my right! You can’t tell me what to do!”), but I was simply trying to say we have to understand that there are occasions when someone else may know far more about a particular subject (a teacher, for example) and ought to be allowed to pick the best thing - best book, best essay topic, best online resources - to enhance learning. For instance, in high school, if I had been able to choose, I would never have taken algebra because I wasn’t much good at it; now I see that my struggles were worth something. I was learning how to think, how to approach (if not solve) a problem, and how to survive with a C-.

As always when I think about my students’ needs, I begin to see that it is all fairly simple. I am merely talking about fundamentals: resiliency, perseverance, endurance, the willingness to consider differing opinions, common sense, civility, integrity…all those things the parents and educators of my generation strove to teach to us and then expected from us. It was good and just and natural to do so, as it should be today, because once those qualities have been integrated into one’s identity, many other things become possible, and the student begins to understand why he or she is at school in the first place.

I would be the first to admit that school is typically the very last place any kid would like to be. The same was so for me. But another important lesson the pandemic afforded us is that being in the place itself, physically, is far more conducive to academic achievement than lounging at the kitchen table in front of a screen, wondering who is on instagram (substitute whatever social media platform is in vogue). I have always embraced Robert Pirsig’s idea about this from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which became an essential read for would-be scholars and amateur philosophers when I was in high school). He writes that any school is really a collection of ideas, a body of knowledge, a realm of questions, theories, problems, and solutions. The building itself is not the school. Yet in my own experience, the mind generally follows the body, of course, and so a shift in consciousness can result from a shift in environment. It doesn’t have to be a building necessarily - it might be a lakeshore or a hiking trail or a cafe, but one’s physical environment affects learning, unquestionably, and especially for younger people. The trouble is, more and more often in recent years, I have encountered kids who DID NOT KNOW WHY they were in the school building. Walk through the hallways of nearly any public school in any town, and you will see it, too: faces that reflect confusion, anxiety, lostness, sadness, anger, even desperation, when they should be filled with the light of curiosity and possibility.

Why? For many reasons, all of them worth close examination - the trauma of having been exposed to violence and/or mental illness at home, substance abuse by parents or siblings, a dearth of role models and strong authority figures, an emotional hole where there ought to be love and affection, and so on, but I would like for the moment to zero in on students’ over-reliance on specific technologies - namely, their phones and computers. My eyewitness testimony is that our values and sense of purpose have been skewed and and distorted by the misuse of these objects, and this is true not just for young people but for all of us. The trouble is that once you have given someone a cell phone and allowed him to play with it and to feel the rush of gratification it provides, it will be impossible to take it back. So, you also have to give him the tools to manage himself, just as his parents teach him to bathe himself, and just as my parents made it very clear what the consequences would be if I didn’t turn off the television and go to bed when I was supposed to.

Unbridled access to the web has contributed to rising levels of anxiety among youngsters, and I don’t just mean the distress caused by online bullying. Is it any wonder that a child struggles to form a sense of identity (and I am not speaking of gender or sexuality here, but rather of character and an internal moral structure) when he or she is bombarded by images in a world where the criminal has the same notoriety as the hero, where a brawl on a boatyard dock generates far more interest than any act of simple kindness? Who do I want to be? asks the child, who is then met at every click with a myriad of examples, many of them far from healthy, with thousands of voices shouting different answers to the child’s question.

Anxiety and fragmentation ensue. Anxiety is now pervasive in public schools. Young people who should be robust and strong, gritty, willing to take all sorts of intellectual risks and to test themselves physically, with lively minds that move them to openly question senseless rules, mindless authority, useless tradition - the independent and creative thinkers, those who would move us all forward in the most unexpected of ways…are difficult to find these days. Where have they gone? In too many places, they have disappeared from our schools’ hallways and classrooms.

I used to argue that we ought to view a computer simply as a tool, just as the typewriter became an essential tool for writers over time (even though, in the late 19th century, some decried it as an evil machine that would corrupt and destroy the writing process). Of course, I was stupid: computers are far more than a tool. A laptop and a fast connection to the internet amount to many things: a window into cultures around the world, an astonishing array of news sources, a place to learn to tie a fisherman’s knot or bake the fish once it is caught, a soundboard with switches for every sort of music known to the human ear, and an entry into the world’s greatest library, to name just a few. The irony in all this is that it begins to numb us to the joy of discovery; the awareness that google holds the answer key for every test, that you are not the first to have stumbled upon a singular idea, that every note your teacher writes on the board can be “fact-checked” within seconds, that you don’t actually need to learn a foreign language because translations appear magically under your fingertips…it weighs you down eventually, and you can reasonably ask, “What is the point? Why should I even be curious about anything? Why should I be responsible? Everything is right here on this little screen.”

How do we restore the integrity of the scholar’s search for answers, then? One thing we can do is limit their choices. Make them do the thinking. Make them cite sources. Restrict certain sources. Wikipedia is not an academic source. Neither is Breitbart. Nor is the HuffPost. I’m not suggesting censorship, as there’s nothing terribly dangerous about reading those publications; in fact, discernment and critical, analytical thinking are a part of one’s education - perhaps the most important part. The student must become a force in his or her own education. Think of your favorite science teacher from back in the day: in my case, if Mr. Wetzel had simply written a definition of, say, the Doppler Effect or the Butterfly Effect on the board, it would immediately have become just another scrap of abstract information. But when he had us participate in actual demonstrations of these planetary wonders, when we got our own hands dirty, so to speak…then the magic happened.

In general, in discussions with my English classes, I always knew the answers to the questions I intended to put to the students. Occasionally, though, a kid would give an answer I had never thought of, or even better, pose a followup question that I could not readily answer myself. Twenty-five years ago, I’d have found that terrifying. Today I realize that those were some of the most thrilling moments of my career.

Next month, please look for a post on the shifting roles of administrators and parents in education.

On Leaving

I get attached to places. I have only realized this about myself in recent years. For a long time, I tried to see myself as a restless, romantic figure, a careless traveler, a roustabout always ready to dash off to some new place just for the hell of it. A rolling stone.

In truth, however, it is quite difficult for me to leave a place that I have grown to love. For instance, at present my wife and I are trying to sell the house that has been our home in Yarmouth, Maine, for the last seventeen years. The entire procedure is a kind of purgatory that Dante could have imagined in his most fevered dreams. These days, “showing” a house (much less selling one) is a major production the likes of which you might find only on the HGTV network (“No, that bowl of bananas has to go there, you idiot, and for God’s sake, hide that toilet paper, will you? We can’t let on that people actually have bowel movements in this place!”). And that is all just a prelude to actually removing yourself and all of your crap from a home you have come to know well, with all of its dents and dings, its quirks and creaks, its harbored joys.

The other day, as I was cleaning out the garage, throwing away half-empty cans of deck stain, stiffened paintbrushes, metal fasteners and handles whose intended purposes were forgotten long ago, bags of sand that had turned into concrete blocks…I was convinced that my house was speaking to me, imploringly:

“What have I done to let you down? Why are you going away?”

“You haven’t done anything, house. It’s just time.”

“TIme? Why? Haven’t I kept you warm and dry? Didn’t I give your children safe, soft beds? Weren’t my floors sturdy and my ceilings high and full of hope? What about all of your daughter’s birthday parties, and the songs you sang here?”

“Yes, house. You’ve been everything a house should be.”

“Then why?”

I have no good answer. None that rings with any truth.

I’ve been through it before, of course, as we all have. There was our old house on Brookwood Road in Jacksonville, and for years I would sometimes even drive past my boyhood home in Arlington, on Ligustrum Road. And I remember that morning when I left for college; for some reason my mother had boxed up a crockpot for me - maybe she thought that I would find that I despised cafeteria food and would take a sudden interest in making soups in my dorm room. I don’t really know, but I recall getting into my buddy’s car with that fucking crockpot on my lap, and as we turned the corner bound for university life and the unknown, I burst into uncontrollable tears. Fortunately, my friend and I knew each other well enough that neither of us ever spoke of those unendurable minutes. And I never did take that crockpot out of the box my mother had taped so carefully.

Oh, I know, I know, you say that it is not so much about the places themselves as it is the people in them, but I say there are places that breathe with their own selves, that wait smiling for your return, that greet you when you arrive and miss you when you are gone. Quiet places or places where rivers roar beside you and trees nod and wave…a little table and a book and a yellow lamp somewhere.

So, like my soon-to-be-former residence, I ask, Why? Why do I go back to see places where I have lived? What do I hope to find? Will some mystery I hadn’t even known existed suddenly be resolved? Are there ghosts there with messages for me? Will the awkward, introverted boy whose heart was full of unspoken yearning, even then, have something to hand me? And finally: why did I ever leave in the first place?

Thus, absurdity rears its lolling head again. We - most of us anyway - will finally come to understand a place and fill it with our secrets and our sufferings, our loves, the truth of ourselves tucked away in junk drawers and basements…and then we will leave. Furthermore, we raise our children, do their homework for them, sit with them when they are sick, allow their joys and triumphs as well as their heartbreaks to become our own, and then one day…they leave. What in God’s name is it all about?

My dog, Toby, is a silly mutt, but he has that animal wisdom about him. Long before we begin the actual preparations for even the shortest of trips, even simply a ride to the town dump with the official, town-approved, eco-friendly blue garbage bags, he senses it, adheres to my side as I walk about the house, and when the door finally opens he bolts for the open tailgate. Wherever we are going, he is all in. Then there he sits, looking at me as if to say, “C’mon, man, get a move on! We ain’t got all day!”

For him, it really is about the people, but then again, he was a “rescue dog.” Born and  weaned under a trailer in Mississippi, he came to us when he was tiny, walking like Bambi on the ice-covered pond, with no inkling of how lucky he really was. Certainly he’d had to fight for every ounce of food, but you know…maybe his earliest weeks had had their pleasures, too - sucking his true mother’s tit, the animal warmth of his littermates around him. In either case, he is not disturbed by dreams of his old life, and I envy him for that.

When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

Our moral framework is fragile. Judging from my reading and from conversations I hear, many of us worry that our sense of our humanity and the sanctity of human life is crumbling ever more quickly, like cliffs of wet sand tumbling into the sea. When a mass shooting is not the lead story at your preferred news “outlet,” when most of us simply sip our coffee and shake our heads over such events (unless, of course, it happens in our town), then we can be sure that something has happened in the collective conscience… and it can’t be good.

However, the op-ed piece that has occupied my mind the most these past few weeks appeared in the New York Times on May 2nd, 2023. Writer Dennis Overbye takes the bleakness to a cosmic level as he contemplates the long-term (to say the least) effects of dark energy on the universe, including the token snuffing of humanity and all human achievement:

The End is coming, in maybe 100 billion years. Is it too soon to start freaking out?

“There will be a last sentient being, there will be a last thought,” declared Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College, near the end of “A Trip to Infinity,” a new Neflix documentary directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi.

When I heard that statement during a showing of the film recently, it broke my heart. It was the saddest, loneliest idea I had ever contemplated. I thought I was aware and knowledgeable about our shared cosmic predicament — namely, that if what we think we know about physics and cosmology is true, life and intelligence are doomed. I thought I had made some kind of intellectual peace with that.

(Overbye, “Who will Have the Last Word on the Universe,” NYT, May 2, 2023)

Sad? I suppose so. Truly we have no word for the kind of loneliness that derives from the consideration of a world in which there is no trace that you were ever here - that any of us were here - and where no one is left to care either way. The greatest of us will have been no better off than the least, and Shakespeare or Einstein or Beethoven or Picasso will have been no more significant than the spot on the rug where your dog wiped his ass. Furthermore, murderers will have been no more or less than saints, and the laws against the most horrific of crimes will have had no dominion over the crimes themselves.

But…I know people - really smart people - who would have a good laugh at this news. “A hundred billion years?” they’d scoff. “I’d say the world is more likely to end sometime in the next few days.” Not merely evangelical Christians, but deeply spiritual people of all faiths, believe the end of things as we know them will be the beginning of that rare sequel which is far better than the original installment, in which heaven (is there another word?) is not in the clouds above us nor anywhere else in the physical universe, but in a realm that we pathetic dwellers in three dimensions cannot begin to predict or comprehend.

By contrast, the scientific certainty that our existence will end with slabs and chunks of meteors and finally subatomic particles drifting endlessly through a self-destructing cosmos, long after the world we know has been scorched like an overdone French fry, is the ultimate in Determinism - the theory that all events are determined by pre-existing conditions and causes, and so there really is no such thing as free will, or sudden change, or spontaneous creation. If we are doomed, (and we are), then that’s that. Hence, all of our laws, written and unwritten, are pretense and must be merely evolutionary adaptations - the stilts, as it were, that hold up the One Law that binds all living things: survival…or extinction.

As it happens, I am not the first to pursue this line of thought. It is an important pursuit, though, because if our survival instinct is not the real source of our ideas about justice, fairness, equity, and so on, then we must think about other sources. Natural Law, which can be traced back to Pluto and Aristotle, emerged as a possible answer over time. Natural Law professes that in a just society, laws are by no means social constructs or adaptations, that our understanding of good and bad, right and wrong, is intrinsic. Under this theory, every human being is granted certain birthrights and a sense of those behaviors that are inherently correct. This is why most of us feel repulsion, shock, or great sorrow when we witness human suffering or acts of brutality. It is also why we are capable of feeling guilt. Simple reasoning then leads us to a question: if these birthrights are “granted,” then who or what granted them? It makes sense that some theologians, moral leaders, and philosophers - the ones that believe in a divine Creator - have also been believers in Natural Law.

However, to hold such beliefs is complicated; it requires us sometimes to do things we don’t wish to do and to give up some things we don’t wish to give up. Determinism dispenses with these dilemmas, and If we are doomed (and, again, we are), then we need not fret about such tricky concepts as accountability or Free Will any longer. Being good will not help us.

Yet I’m not at all sure the Determinist point of view is entirely applicable in this case (but then again, maybe it was pre-determined that I should say so). According to Forbes contributor Jamie Carter, a handful of researchers now argue that the prevailing theory about our universe’s beginning, the Big Bang, cannot explain such fundamental concepts as the order of the galaxies or their abundance of elements. While I understand the rationale of a big bang (I think), this seems to suggest a tremendous unpredictability.

So, let’s get to the meat of this matter. Predictability in the universe must be based on what we have learned through the science that exists at any given time. Remember: once, Galileo’s views were deemed to be hogwash, and though many of Einstein’s spectacular visions seemed to derive from an over-active imagination, they continue to become acknowledged truths. I am not a physicist or astronomer, but I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s remark that “in some respects, science has far surpassed religion” - that is, so long as we understand that religion, like science, is simply a method for seeking truth. Each is a guidebook, or perhaps a lens through which we sometimes glimpse the real power, the brilliance and majesty that brought about such a world.

And in regard to our place in it, Bill Bryson, in his ambitious and extremely informative tome called A Short History of Nearly Everything, wrote:

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting storms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope), these particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under-appreciated state known as existence.

(Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Doubleday, 2003)

This passage is written in a scientific context, obviously, but someone might argue that is it actually a compelling illustration of (dare I use the word?) the miraculous.

Now, a miracle is, by definition, a supernatural occurrence, an event that happens beyond or outside of the bounds of nature as we know them. But clearly, there is far more that we don’t know. I suppose I ought to go ahead and confess that am stumbling toward the notion that the rise of human life and the Big Bang itself were miraculous - rather as they are described in the Book of Genesis. It is very good to remember that all myth, including creation myth, carries its own weight of truth…but that will have to be a discussion for another day. If even my suggestion that human evolutionary theory and religious faith are not opposed to one another (as Pope Pius XII acknowledged back in 1950, by the way), we must admit that predictability is still not certainty.

A lot can happen in a hundred billion years, after all.

Trap Doors and Memories

So many of us live inside our own pasts. More aptly, we re-live events, relationships, experiences both great and small, distinguish the beatific from the blasted. Some recollections are tinted with gold, but others carry curses long-affixed.

There is a danger in lingering for too long in the realm of memory. Some of us - and I am often one - prefer the company of the old friends and kin who still wait for us there, who knew us when we were young and blessed with charm and affability. But be careful; they are illusions speaking to us from the vaults of the past as real life pulses around us, carrying us too quickly toward the only certainty we have.

For me, social media has convoluted our general perception of the past. There is no way in heaven or on earth that the bald, sixty-something year old fellow who has ‘friended’ me on Facebook is the same one with whom I labored in the trenches of glory on a high-school football field. In the same way, he looks at me, sees the wrinkles and thinning gray hair, and says to himself, “It cannot be.” But here is the thing: when we think of ourselves, neither of us sees the aging man or woman who really is. We see the boys and girls that we were. Have you  ever caught sight of your reflection in a storefront window and thought, “Who is that old fart?” If so, then you know what I am getting at.

I experienced this jarring collision of past and present again three years ago when a friend from college days, Quynh Ngo, reached me through those ubiquitous, invisible filaments. Of course, it is always the face that first gives us pause. Could that really be Quynh, the 18 year old kid with the easy smile and the quick, dark eyes that missed nothing? And then, after a moment or two, I saw him: the boy was in there, looking back at me, and I heard him saying, “Trippe! Whatchu doing?”

I first met Quynh in 1983 in Gainesville, Florida, when I wandered (almost on whim) into the Cuong Nhu Center for Oriental Arts on University Avenue. I was a graduate student at UF, working hard most of the time and drinking too much the rest of the time, and I felt myself falling into poor physical condition for the first time in my life. Quynh was a young black-belt instructor from Vietnam, and after just a few minutes talking with him, I knew that I would become an unlikely student of karate and that Quynh and I would become good friends.

His family - his parents, two brothers, and a sister - were from the city of Hue in Central Vietnam. His father, Ngo Dong, had been an officer in the People’s Defense Force of Hue and spent time in a “re-education camp” after the war. In 1977, in a daring effort that has been well-documented in the Gainesville Sun and other publications, Dong formulated a plan that would drastically alter the future that had seemingly been laid out for them by the new ruling communist party. On a dark night in June, all six family members secretly boarded a small fishing boat and left Saigon behind. Many days later, they were picked up by an Indonesian freighter in the South China Sea and eventually made land at Djakarta on June 27th.

Somehow, months later, through the same tenacity and resolve that have long been characteristic of immigrants to the U.S., the Ngo family was well-established in Gainesville. The children were doing well in school, and Dong was a doctoral professor of etymology at the university. He was also the founder and creator of the Congo Nhu style of martial arts, which has ultimately grown to include more than seventy-five schools worldwide. He became somewhat of a legend in Gainesville and beyond, a man who had seen combat and yet professed peace, a philosopher with the spirit of an ancient warrior. When he died in 2000, his second son, Grandmaster Quynh, was named the head of style for Cuong Nhu.

At this point, I should inform the reader that Quynh Ngo died from the COVID 19 virus on September 1st, 2021, at the age of 56. Many of those who knew him best, including his younger brother Anh, himself an accomplished practitioner and instructor of martial arts, have said they knew of no one who was in better physical condition, of any age, than Quynh. A lifetime of training had also made him mentally tough and resilient in the extreme. As a child, he had survived not only a bloody war in his homeland but also a dangerous bout with malaria. Without question, his death was tragic, unjust, unnecessary, and infuriating; but I do not intend this piece as a lament or elegy, or even simply as a sad, true story, which it certainly is.

I have two purposes here really. One is to say that, although life as it occurs is certainly not much like any of the best stories I’ve ever heard or read, in that much of it seems random, accidental, meandering, senseless - there are stories that we can discern only long after their context has expired. The meaninglessness of the present and recent past gains clarity with time’s passage. We may only learn years after an event what has really happened to us. Stories, like any worthwhile craft or art form, must be told only when they are fully formed in the mind, and this process can take decades. To reiterate, then: we must not live too much in the past. To do so means that we miss too much of the raw material that is all around us at any given moment. We must not let the portal of memory become a trap door. To my second, perhaps even more cryptic point: those who inhabit our memories are static; they cannot - they must not change. But to be fair to their humanity, when we meet our friends again after many years, we must accept the people they have become, the ones who dwell in the present.

I am not shouting “Carpe diem!” This is no rehashing of the “Live for the Moment” mantra that comes and goes with various generations of young Bohemians. Memories of ourselves and of others as we may once have been are well and good (except when they become nationalized nostalgia and thus potential fuel for political agendas, as though simply moving backwards through time will make us all “great again”). Quynh the boy was an alluring figure. He gleams in my thoughts, and the things he had endured as a child - war, malaria, a long journey to freedom - made the spark all the brighter. But Quỳnh the man also exuded the kind of love that defies the bonds of time as we know them.

If you were to ask me whether I would go back, would return to those salad days, that academic life of reading and writing and discussion and then afterward the warm intensity of the dojo on University Avenue, the camaraderie of young people strong in body and mind, all in our white gis, snapping obediently to attention at the barking of Quynh’s voice: “Left side! Left-hand block! Right-hand punch!”, when my only responsibilities were to myself and to my friends and I had no other real ambition because I had opportunity and ability and things seemed to come to me easily, I would probably say…yes. I would go. But…what would I stand to lose? What of the wisdom that really does come with time, and the long arc of joys and sorrows mingled more poignantly than the best of artists might conceive?

Ultimately, when I had earned my master’s degree at UF, I had risen to the rank of brown belt, but I soon left Gainesville and drifted away from Cuong Nhu and the Ngo family. Yet when Quynh contacted me online, I truly felt that I was speaking to a member of my own family. When I learned of all that he had achieved both in the business world and as a master and instructor of martial arts, I felt the pride that one might feel for his own brother. Past and present, memory and awareness, were no longer divided.

I am lucky to have known Quynh and his family, even though when I was around them all, which was nearly every day during the early eighties, I was oblivious to my own good fortune, of course. How could I have known that the Vietnamese meal that Quynh’s mother, Chau Thanh, made for me when I visited their home, would stand the test of time and rank against the finest meals I’ve had in Paris and New York City? How could I know that Dong’s calm voice would return to me in times of personal turmoil? And how might I have guessed that any meager understanding I may now possess of human relationships in the context of time, as it shoves the days and weeks and months and years between us, would one day be changed and deepened by a friend named Quynh?

Quỳnh Ngo (image from cuongnhu.com)