Midlife Meditation

Starting in September, I'll be teaching here. I felt it Monday morning when I woke up: a slight increase in the gravitational field holding me to my bed, coupled with a tightness in my throat. The pull of the bed I put down to still recovering from a bad fall I'd had Friday while out on a run, the throat scratchiness to the flurry of floral procreation going on throughout the Willamette Valley. Bruises, allergies--yeah, that's what's up. I shaved, showered, had breakfast, packed my lunch, kissed Amy, and headed off to my last full week of school. Five hours later, the teaching portion of my day complete, I stepped into the cafeteria to do lunch duty, and within a minute, knew I had to go home. I checked with the vice principal to be sure she could handle it by herself, notified the secretary I'd be leaving early, then spent 45 minutes contradicting myself by ensuring everything was in place for my sub, and headed for home. That night, I had a fever of 100.8...

Every class has at least one. Some of them have perpetual chips on their shoulders. They bristle at every perceived offense, whether it comes from a peer or the teacher. "Bristle" isn't the right word, because often the bristling turns into an explosion: shouting, a tirade that cannot be turned off no matter what the likely consequence will be. At times, the shouting may give way to outright violence: hitting, kicking, battery with some convenient object. In the music room, those objects are mallets and xylophone bars; in regular classrooms, they may include pencils. The eruption can only be stilled when the child leaves the room, hopefully voluntarily, but sometimes only with the help of a staff member summoned with an emergency call to the office. Some of them are simply curious. They wander around the room, picking up and manipulating anything that catches their eye, and nothing short of restraints will still them from this activity. Again, consequences ar...

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...

The sign worked: Beaverton passed its school bond.   This is not my school, though I do drive by it daily on my way to work (it's Sunset High School, in case you're wondering). In 2013, Beaverton voters passed a bond measure that accomplished what this parent (also the principal of Sunset High School) hoped to achieve. Class sizes went down, elementary schools restored music and PE, and teachers, students, and parents all breathed long sighs of relief. I work in a district that also features large classes, reduced services, and crumbling buildings. Unlike Beaverton, Reynolds hasn't passed a bond in over a decade. That bond expires next spring, when the district is putting another capital improvement bond in front of voters, expected to pass because it won't increase taxes at all. These improvements should bring class sizes down simply by adding classrooms to buildings like Scott Elementary, where my music room shares space with a computer lab, art classes are...

Sure took you long enough. United Methodist bishops have been paying lip service to inclusiveness for decades. Many have played a convoluted game of pretending not to know some of the pastors they are appointing are gay or lesbian, despite knowing their same-sex partners well: just as long as the pastors don't officially come out, using precise language, to the Bishop or his or her representatives, the charade can go on, much to the disgust of the conservatives who crafted the church rules banning these persons from ministry. It's harder to work around the restrictions on performing same-sex unions, whether they're legal marriages or liturgical commitment ceremonies with no legal standing. The Discipline  prohibits any United Methodist minister from performing any kind of wedding for a same gender couple, and does so in language that cannot be worked around. The best a gay-marrying pastor can hope for is that word won't get back to the Bishop, that somehow this bl...

You may have heard the term "cheap grace" before. It was coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a prophetic German theologian executed by the Nazis just before the end of World War II. Here's a brief definition, from his book The Cost of Discipleship: Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. I yesterday became aware of a corollary cheapness in the form of a courageous-sounding open letter from a Bishop. The occasion for the letter was the defrocking three days ago of Frank Schaefer, a Pennsylvania United Methodist pastor convicted of performing a same-gender marriage ceremony for his son. The conference board that administered the punishment was acting as required by the Book of Discipline, a set of laws govern...

Just in case there's any doubt at all about the intent of my last post, the one in which I announced my availability to perform gay weddings: Yes, I know it's against the Discipline (that's the United Methodist Constitution, for you muggles out there); no, I don't wish to do it in secret (no back alley weddings); and yes, I am not only willing, but eager to face whatever penalties may be imposed on me by the church that formed me as a spiritual being, ordained me as first a deacon and then an elder, and ultimately decided it had had enough of me, an antipathy I concluded within a year or two was and is quite mutual. As Robyn Morrison has eloquently detailed in the blog she shares with her husband, Gerry Hill , the covenant United Methodist elders enter into at ordination is fundamentally twisted. To be true to our vows, we elders must espouse and practice doctrines that few of us believe or consistently apply to our own lives. Elders flaunt their creatively adap...

There are times when ideals have to be seasoned with pragmatism. I mostly keep my hair short these days. Very short. I go in to Great Clips and ask for a clipper cut, 5 comb on the top, 4 on the sides. The reasons are twofold: with my hair this short, shampooing is a snap, and I can do it with any soapy liquid; and more importantly, I've concluded that my receding hairline has finally reached the point at which I just look better with a buzz cut. Any concessions to vanity in the form of longer hair soon takes on the aspect of a comb-over, and if allowed to get too long, can become Hitleresque. Better just to keep it short. Very short. This is in stark contrast with my youthful preference for hair that came down to my collar, and occasionally beyond. I was a frustrated hippie wannabe. I had a cousin whose ponytail went all the way down to his waist, but I never quite summoned up the gumption to go that far. Mostly I went for shaggy. But it's been years since I could pull ...

On the white board in the gym where I teach music I have written a set of four expectations, boiled down to just a few words: 1. One Voice (translation: in the big boomy space that is the gym, we can only have one person talking at a time, and I will decide who that person is). 2. Move--no running or jumping! (Yes, we meet in a gym, but when I'm there, it's the music room, and we will not be endangering each other by jumping for basketball nets or running during movement lessons.) 3. Permission (I will let students know when it's time to play an instrument. Until then, consider them off limits.) 4. Respect (Me, the instruments, each other). There's an after-school program that meets in the gym afternoons. A couple of mornings ago, I came in to set things up, and discovered one of the Boys & Girls Club leaders had added a couple of words to number 4 on my list, so that it now read: RESPECT MY AUTHORITY   I smiled for a moment, knowing exactly what ...