Midlife Meditation

It was just a marble: a small sphere of glass with a ribbon of color in its center. ToysRUs will sell you 160 of them for $4.99. I had bags of them when I was a kid. And when Abel put it in my hand, it felt like the Nobel Prize. I first met Abel as a feral kindergartner. Kinders are developmentally puppy-like: inquisitive, cuddly, playful, unhousebroken. For no reason at all, they will pile on top of each other. They will also hug anything: each other, a teacher's leg, a post. Abel had all these qualities, plus two more: he had the body and face of an anime version of a Mexican child, round eyes, round face, a shock of black hair, a teddy bear physique; and he spoke no English. I assume that was the case, because in the five months I taught at Margaret Scott that year, I never heard him say a word. He also seemed not to understand anything I said to him--or perhaps he chose not to. He'd run across the gym on a whim, forcing me to stop the music lesson entirely and...

Yesterday I said goodbye to Desale. Desale is in the fourth grade. While I can't speak for how he is in his general education classes, I know that he loves learning about music, and is always the most attentive student in the room when I'm teaching. He also goes out of his way to ask me about music outside of class. He's outgoing without being chatty, readily engages teachers in conversation, and is not shy about asking me to play a particular song over the PA during my morning gym duty. Two weeks ago, I started the fourth grade's second recorder unit, teaching them to play "Iko Iko," a New Orleans Mardi Gras song that just happens to be Desale's favorite. Uniquely out of the entire fourth and fifth grades, he began bringing his recorder with him to that morning gathering time (when 2nd, 4th, and 5th graders all wait to be picked up from the gym by their classroom teachers) in hopes of getting some extra coaching from me. This morning, Desale's ...

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...

And what happened, then? Well, in Whoville they say - that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. And then - the true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of *ten* Grinches, plus two! I've been such a Grinch. The original purpose of this blog was to provide me with a platform for venting. Since leaving the ministry in January 2000, I'd been without a pulpit. After more than a decade of being able to say my piece in front of a captive audience at least weekly, I was now reduced to guest preaching, no more than monthly at first, eventually tapering off to not at all. I wrote occasional essays, submitted some for publication, and even made it onto the Oregonian 's op ed page twice (though the second one was only in their online edition). Even when I was guest preaching, I was doing my best to behave, tempering everything I had to say to keep it from shocking my listeners. So when, after thirteen years of bottling it ...

There's nothing like the slow smile of recognition when a child realizes I'm not a stranger, after all. I taught at Margaret Scott School from September through January last year, then changed schools until the end of the year. The plan was for me to remain at Hartley, the other school, until next January, then switch back to Scott for a full year. This way, the PE teacher I was trading places with and I could move just once a calendar year, yet still do full half-years at each school. But then plans changed: the Portland Arts Tax kicked in, and my position was altered to have me at Scott full-time, year-round. It was hard to say goodbye to the Hartley students in June, knowing I wouldn't be coming back at all. It was also nerve-wracking to have no idea where I would be teaching in September: I'd been in the gym, a location that, except for convenience to the administration, becomes more unworkable in my mind the farther I get from it. With PE continuing fo...

6-25-14 I can do without a lot. No private room? Share a bed with a stranger? Same food for every lunch, every dinner, for two weeks? No TV except the World Cup? No good beer? Nothing but instant coffee? I’m good. In fact, I’m great. I can handle being without all sorts of creature comforts, and often choose vacations that take me away from all these things. But take away the internet, and oh boy, am I going to get cranky. It’s amazing how dependent I’ve become on this invention which didn’t even exist for me before 1995, and which I didn’t begin using in earnest until 2003. So that’s really just over a decade of living on the web. But live on it I do. Except in Ghana. My first night, at the Hotel Obama, I had a good strong connection, and was able to Skype with Amy. I expected the same for our week in Dzodze, at the White Dove Hotel—and I was mistaken. There was nothing, no way of connecting at all. Even mobile roaming was dicey. I did manage some time at an i...

6-21-14 It was a week ago tonight that my flight landed in Accra. Since then, I’ve been immersed in the culture of the place I’m visiting more deeply than on any of my previous adventures save one, to Britain, and I was there for two years. Two features of this trip have made the difference: that this is an Orff experience, and that I’m in Ghana. Orff courses are, by their very nature, immersive. That’s the Orff approach: rather than tell students about music, plunge them into it, let them learn it by doing it. It’s how Orff workshops and training courses are taught, as well: not by lecture, but by experience. Kofi Gbolonyo, our host and teacher during this master class, has been an exemplary Orff teacher in this regard, getting our hands on drums, rattles, bells, flutes, and xylophones; and getting our bodies in motion, stomping, thrusting, gyrating. He’s also spent plenty of time helping us reflect, explaining, interpreting, translating. Most importantly, he’s brought Ghana ...

"And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn." (Luke 2:7) In less than a week, we will celebrate the birth of a homeless savior. To be fair, only Luke's gospel places the birth of Jesus in a borrowed barn, and that only because his parents were traveling in a town with inadequate hotel facilities at the time of the blessed event. It is the life of Jesus once he began his ministry that is rootless, roofless, without any fixed address, a traveling man relying upon the kindness of strangers for shelter. I once got in hot water for describing Jesus as "homeless" at a men's prayer breakfast. It was 22 years ago, and one of the men hearing me speak was deeply offended by the thought. It could just have been that one man; after all, many churches operate soup kitchens, food pantries, and shelters for the homeless, and pastors' emergency funds are freq...

Up is relative. We live on a ball spinning in, and moving through, empty space. The direction we call "down" is toward the center of the earth, while "up" is away from the center of the earth, and toward space. Pictures of the earth, whether photographs or maps, seem to have a top and bottom, and up and down, because, as beings whose perceptions have evolved in a world in which gravity affects everything, they are as fundamental as any concepts can be, and as such we apply them to everything we look at. Had we evolved in free fall, up/down and top/bottom would be meaningless. So every map has a "top" and "bottom," even though the reality is that, for every human being located anywhere on that map, "up" would mean "above the map" and "down" would mean "under the map." Our culture, evolving as it has in the northern hemisphere, has tended to think of north as up, south as down, even though to any human...

There's a word improvisers use that I've incorporated into my daily vocabulary: heightening. In improv, heightening is adding risk to a scene by amping up emotions, adding elements that may seem random, or seizing on a player's goof and making it part of the scene that is unfolding. The goal of heightening is to raise the fictional stakes and make the game more real--reality, after all, is chaotic, not scripted--but in truth, the stakes are actually very low for the players. The worst that can happen to them is that the scene will collapse, end on a weak note, turn off the audience, all of which is part of the package when one is in an improv theater. Things don't always work out in a meaningful, hilarious way. Sometimes even the best improv troupes go into territory that makes the audience uncomfortable or just doesn't work. I've been thinking about heightening and stakes because, as my last two posts will reveal, I've had enough time in my new position...

It’s been a hard week. At least 90 per cent of the children I teach live in poverty. Their home lives are more stressful than I can imagine. I’ve had kindergartners pole dancing in my classes, third graders shrinking from a tap on the shoulder to get their attention, fifth graders snapping a “WHAT?” at me for pointing out a behavior that was obviously ill-advised. Many of the classes arrive in the gym where I teach shouting, pushing, running, despite all my teaching and re-teaching of expectations. Attention spans can be microscopic, and even the children who are trying hard to focus find it impossible when their peers act out. This was a week of copious acting out. In class after class, children were loud, aggressive, impulsive, hyperactive, combative, disrespectful; they pounded on the mallet instruments, had to be reminded again and again to listen to what I was saying, to watch what I was doing, to please just pay attention. It wasn’t just me, either: at both our early...