Midlife Meditation

A monk, a priest, a rabbi, several ministers, and half a dozen nuns walk into the governor's office... So it's Indiana that takes the ball and runs with it. The Supreme Court opened the door for the  "religious freedom" excuse for state-sanctioned discrimination last summer with the Hobby Lobby decision.  At the time, Court-watching pundits warned that the decision would empower right-wing Christians to write their bigotry into law. Then came the waiting game: which state would be the first to extend a sanctimonious middle finger to the gay community? The answer came this week, as Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a bill giving business owners the right to refuse service to persons who offend their religious sensibilities. If you've followed this blog since its inception two years ago, you know I've had some very harsh things to say about Christianity. I've railed against the institutional cowardice that holds denominations back from impleme...

The silver hairline of a 54-year-old. The wrinkles came with the package. Happy birthday to me! Cha-cha-cha. Waking up at 5:00 is handy for getting to school on time. It's not as helpful for getting a full night's sleep. This morning when I could have slept in--it's Spring Break, and it's my birthday--I was wide awake at 5:00. My body clock is stubborn in that way, something I attribute to my age. I spent a few minutes snuggling with Amy, then eased myself out of bed, put on my sweats, and headed downstairs to start on my birthday breakfast: pancakes with maple syrup. Normally I add blueberries to the mix, but I forgot to stop by a supermarket yesterday, so I settled for sliced bananas and the chopped macadamia nuts that were a present from my mother. By the time Amy came downstairs, the last of the pancakes was on the platter. We were able to eat together, and then she left for her BPA note-taking job in Portland. I took Sarah to the gym for Body Pump, t...

Foot abduction brace similar to what I wore in bed in kindergarten. My feet weren't right at birth. It wasn't full blown  congenital talipes equinovarus (commonly known as club foot), but it was severe enough that, for six months when I was in kindergarten, I had to have my feet shackled together at night. The image above should give you an idea of both what that was like for me and what was wrong with me feet. As my mother likes to say, they were "turned in." Six months of struggling to sleep in that contraption (which, I distinctly remember, made middle-of-the-night bathroom visits next to impossible, especially as I did not yet know how to tie my shoes), coupled with many years of wearing orthopedic shoes, corrected my feet to the point where I could play Little League, walk to and from school, even backpack. Unfortunately, I somehow got the message through all this that I should not run like other children, and so, except for those rare occasions when I ...

Terror is a wonderful aid to memory. I mostly loved eighth grade US History. On day one of the class, Mr. LaFordge introduced himself with a clever current events joke, pointing out his name should be easy to remember, since it contained (and after writing it on the board, he underlined) "Ford," the name of our brand new (he'd been sworn in, following Nixon's resignation, just two weeks earlier) President. He then passed out our brand new textbooks, and I had the delightful experience of being the first person to crack mine open, luxuriating in the smell of virgin paper and ink. It was going to be a wonderful year, I thought. That feeling lasted--in this class, anyway--until we wrapped up the unit on the Revolutionary War, and began learning about the Constitution. The final exam on this unit was to be an oral recitation, from memory, in front of the entire class, of the Preamble. Yes, that's the same text that Oprah Winfrey's character recites at...

I felt the first warning signs at 10:45 yesterday morning: a slight gumminess in my throat, a huskiness in my voice. By 1:30, I was practically inaudible. And I still had to teach a kindergarten class. I catch a lot of colds. It's one of the less glamorous parts of my profession: teaching music to 500 children, most of whom are infrequent hand washers, I'm exposed to every virus that enters the school. Once I feel one coming on, I can usually tough it out for a day or two, sometimes even a week, but inevitably, just as I think I'm past the worst of it, it moves down into my throat. My cough worsens, deepens, becomes more frequent, and simultaneously, my voice starts to fade. It usually takes longer than yesterday to completely vanish, but then, this cold has been moving more quickly than most through my system. If I'm lucky, my voice will be back before the end of the week, and I'll be back in my classroom wrapping up my hip hop unit. I teach with my voi...

The periodically blown-down and re-erected beach cross at Camp Magruder. There's nothing like a good picture to start an essay. When I sit down to write a post for this blog, my first task is finding an image. This helps me stay focused on the thesis for the essay. It also gives the post a good visual hook for the tiny bit of publicity I do on Facebook and Twitter. Finding the right image usually takes just a couple of minutes: if I can't think of any photos I've taken myself, I just go to Google and search a few keywords. I find one that grabs me, copy it to the blog, and I'm off. There are times, though, when the search for an image alters the focus of the essay. Such was the case today. I knew I wanted to write about a racial incident at United Methodist Camp Magruder in 1996. When I Google "Methodist Camp Magruder," the result of my search was dozens of campers, young and old, splashing in the surf, playing tug of war, riding in canoes, sing...

I wish it was as simple as that. The alternating gender seating arrangement probably dates back to the earliest days of coeducational primary schools. It exploits the developmental tendency of young children to prefer playmates and conversation partners of their own gender and, frequently, to be repelled to some degree by children of the other gender. Separate Dina from Denise, and put Dina next to Dean and Denise next to Dennis, and you break up two sources of classroom disruption. Standardize the arrangement across the classroom, and when it's time for students to listen to the teacher, there should be no auditory distractions at all. In an ideal social matrix, with all boys alike and all girls alike, all problems of classroom management could be solved by this simple tool. But as I implied in the opening sentence, it's not that simple, for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, the same-gender preference of children is a tendency, not a given. At every age, t...

A thank you ticket. It took me a long time to warm up to the concept of the thank you ticket. Thank you tickets are a PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports) approach to school discipline: find a child acting appropriately in a given situation, and write and present him or her with a ticket in as public a manner as possible: "Thank you, Tina, for walking so quietly down the hall!" "Thank you, TreSean, for sitting so quietly in the circle while I pass out instruments!" Other children see the presentation of the ticket and quickly respond by imitating the rewarded behavior. Handing out another ticket or two should, according to the theory, get an entire class quieted, and any lingering disrupters--instigators for whom the personal rewards of misbehavior outweigh any benefit of getting a ticket--can be more easily addressed by the teacher. And why, you may ask, should the tickets be a reward? For some children, the ticket all by itself is rewar...

I was seven when I first saw Spock. My family was visiting my grandfather in Seattle. For some reason--probably because it was summertime--I was up later than usual. The TV was on, and I saw a few minutes of a Star Trek  episode, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday." It's the episode in which the Enterprise  is hurled back in time by some kind of anomaly, resulting in an Air Force pilot being beamed aboard to save his life when a tractor beam causes his jet to come apart. I saw him materialize in the transporter room where his first sight was of Spock. And that's it: I didn't see another episode until the show hit syndication in 1970. But the image of the pointy-eared Vulcan, so different from every other member of the cast, yet clearly part of the crew, let me know this was not just any science fiction show: it featured diversity at its core. And that's what I found to be true as I hurried home from school each day to watch what quickly became my favorite piec...