Midlife Meditation

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...

It's the time of year when kids start feeling their oats. In the gym where I teach, I use rolling plastic risers called "Flip Forms" to organize classes, dividing children among the four colored risers as they enter the room. This breaks up clumps of friends and creates ready-made teams that can compete with each other for quietest, most confident singing, best listening, etc. And yes, I know "winning" a competition like this is extrinsic motivation, but at this point in the year, I will pragmatically do whatever it takes to hold their attention long enough to teach a concept. It works up to a point--that point being when the active boys (somehow, it's never girls) start jumping off the top riser, having their own competition to see who can break an ankle first. I move the children to another part of the gym for the next activity, and now the really active boys are wandering over to the risers whenever I'm not looking to continue jumping off of ...

The gun lobby wants it both ways.  Whenever a child dies of an "accidental" shooting, whenever a disturbed individual takes a gun into a school to kill a dozen children, whenever anything happens that leads to an outcry against our lax regulation of firearms, the response is the same: don't blame us! We're the responsible ones, the ones who take safety classes, always lock up our guns, teach our children to respect them and never ever play with them. That would never happen in our home, my kid would never do that, it's the nut cases and the irresponsible gun owners who are the problem.  That may all be true. In fact, I'm willing to stipulate that the vast majority of gun owners are as obsessed with safety as a Tote 'n' Chip trained Scout with a pocketknife. But here's the problem: even if all the murders and suicides and accidents are exceptional, that's 11,000 exceptions a year, 3 exceptional deaths for every 100,000 people in this...

December 30, 1999: the day I discovered my favorite place on earth. The occasion was my second post-divorce retreat to the desert. In December 1995, I drove to Utah to tour the national parks, something I had wanted to do throughout my first marriage but had never been able to interest my wife in. As luck would have it, though, that trip coincided with the Clinton/Congress budget standoff, and all the national parks were closed. I was able to see parts of a few, but only if they were visible from the highway (Capitol Reef, Zion, and on my way home through California, Death Valley). Within days of my second marriage ending, I knew I would repeat the odyssey, and this time I'd see Arches. On New Year's Eve, I made it. I only had one short winter day to see as much of it as I could. In term of size, Arches is actually one of the smaller western parks. It's possible to see most of the highlights in a single day, and I set about doing just that, visiting Park Avenue, the B...