Month: June 2014

The beauty of teaching is that you get the entire gamut of students, from long time readers and analyzers of literature to people who don’t really belong in the class they’re in. Lately i’ve been in a good headspace about the type of students I get. I still am, but recent challenges have left me questioning the lines and responsibilities of a teacher.

At what point is writing –especially bad writing– a cry for help? We instructors ask students these deep any meaningful questions. We cast them out into the void like tiny lights, hoping depth and understanding will seek them like tiny moths. Sometimes I don’t get moths. I get angry fireflies who cast a light of their own and have no time or patience for the larger light of understanding. They shut their eyes against meaning and poke fun at understanding.

Teaching and learning is a relationship. I provide part of the relationship, but the student has to meet me halfway. They must want to open their eyes to understanding for actual understanding to occur. If that doesn’t happen, all that can come of the class is frustration and a reinforcement of the ideas that they came in with.

I wonder if that is what some students are looking for in the first place.

Today’s moment is an extension of this weekend’s momentum. We played our second game of basketball at the 8-9 level against a team much taller and on average more talented and better coached than my own. To begin, I coach a 12 person team of kids who, for the most part, have played less organized ball than I have (read less than 10 games). Most of the kids are short –very short–for their age and at least half just recently turned 8 in a league where a lot of their opponents are turning 10 during the season. The teaching needed could not be accomplished in the short window of time that we have and the result was two brutal losses, the second cemented by the fact that our top two scorers were unavailable to play.

At least the rotations were easier.

Now we have one practice left before the next game–one against a coach I truly want to beat. I’m thinking up ways to get my players to remember two key points. (1) spread out (2) crash the boards. I haven’t figured either out yet, but I am going to keep working through the night.

My children react to fatigue in very different ways. One sits on the edge of delirium, spastically happy until the smile is broken by some challenge to his world view. At that point He descends into a stubborn rage much like a bull supposedly does at the site of red. My youngest starts in rage mode, yelling and screaming and mad at the world. He too winds up in a bucket of his own tears once someone meets his rage with disappointment or rage of their own. The middle one cries from the onset, a rage filled wail of despair and injustice punctuated by claims that he is in fact, ‘not tired!’

The beauty of this is that they see none of it. To them, their behaviors have not changed. Instead the world has crashed down on them bringing with it several steamy flavors of injustice. This inability to reconcile with reality can be funny to watch or it can make you want to kick a kid, depending on your own mood. I admit to having felt both moods–sometimes minutes apart like emotional contractions seizing my brain and then body.

The key, of course, is to avoid situations in which they exert themselves past their limits or to institute a napping policy, though the latter course of action is likely to result in a self-styled mexican standoff wherein I represent two of the three ‘oponents’ offering the choice to sleep or to push them towards working extremely hard to the point where they are going to fall asleep on their own.

Today we had a Beyblade tournament. The excitement shook the walls. The excitement wore off near seven PM and was replaced by the wall of despair and rage. Having not fed them yet, it was impossible to put them to bed. Instead I was forced to endure the headache (actual–not figurative) of 3 ‘pissed up’ and tired little boys with no sense of their own behaviors.

10 minutes wasn’t enough to calm down.

I only became aware of the dad letters blog this very day because of a woman who is a wonderful writer and will one day make a wonderful mother. For the moment she is lending her skills to dads as a guest blogger, writing quite true and interesting things about this broken order of copulating men I belong to. Read it. The work is sure to inspire, as it did inspire me to channel the site into my own 10 minutes of writing. The Dad Letters is a straight-forward concept. Men write letters to their kids. The following words are my brief effort to share something with my own kids.

To My Sons:

It is most important to speak of my love first. This is very real, even if you cannot see it often enough, even if the screams that pierce your disobedience on occasion seem the only sounds my lips can make, the love is there. I learned what I know of fatherhood from a man who was my father in spirit, and thought, but never in legal name. I can count on two hands the number of times I cried after he died. It is uncountable the number of times I felt safe enough to cry when he was with me. Mothers are warmth and love and giving. Fathers are safety and growth and forgiveness, so I hope you can forgive me the moments of failure when I become too angry or the moments of weakness when I break down and let you slip a rule or several. I also hope you love as I do.

 

 

I’m supposed to play pickup football at 8 AM on Father’s Day. Already my heart is telling me not to do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love football with a sick passion. I love the watching and the playing and the coaching–being involved at every possible level. In truth, a large part of why I want an xbox one all of a sudden is the realization that the new madden will be awe-some. Still, after the tragedy of last week’s basketball game, I’m not sure I’m ready to be dismantled in yet another sport. I’m a person whose entire identity has been predicated on speed. I am a person who is no longer fast enough to hide the glaring defects in technique and, as a result, is just bad at all that physical stuff now.

We can rebuild me. We can make me better.

But when will that start? At what point do I crawl off my butt and decide to be again. At what point is it too late? I watched Jerry Rice crumble 20 years into an NFL career, and I’m no Jerry Rice. I have not the level of skill or physical determination to share a paragraph with the dude, but I can say that even he fell off. I’ve fallen completely off and man, it is a long way down to bottom. So, what do I do?

Tomorrow is nothing. Tomorrow is everything. It represents a choice. Either I will be the guy who sits on the couch and talks about getting right as his belly swells, or I’m going to be the guy who humbly steps out unto a hot football field and says, ‘age is not going to beat me.’

Stay tuned for results.

It is high time to admit that we, as a nation, cannot fix the problems of the middle east. It is even more prudent to admit that the problems they face are not only not our primary concern, but more importantly, do not have the types of solutions we intend to impose. This nation and others before it has spent my entire lifetime (and even longer) battling over land that is not ours and is governed by ancient rules antithetical to the American way.

Critics have been quick to blame Obama for the latest crisis in Iraq. Somehow this one man, Barack Obama, didn’t do enough over the last 8 years to prevent this from happening. In truth, this was going to happen all along. We know this from the experience of our previous engagements in Iraq (yes, we’ve been there before with the same results) and Afghanistan (the Russians were there even before us, with the same results). This is bolstered by the events in Syria, which Obama was interested in become entangled in, but the American voters (wisely) put the kybosh on that one.

I gave up on politics a long time ago. I quit the moment I recognized that politics is about money, personality, and ego. This world conflicts boil down to conflicting ideology and the ‘who gets the girl’ mentality of teenage boys. Too bad ‘the girl’ in this case is a nation full of people who are struggling to live their daily lives without being shot in the face or stoned because they like a boy who their daddy says they can never touch. Sure, this is a minimalist reduction of the regional problem, but I continue to believe that everything can be boiled down to who has the power, how they try to hold on to that power, and whether or not that power is enough to make them happy.

Here’s a hint: It never is.

I’m full of epiphany lately.

The latest installment came moments before this blog as I finished what I thought was a fairly amazing round of Mass Effect 3. I scored second highest in my multiplayer session. I returned to the game lobby to discover that 2 out of 3 players had opted to kick me out of the session. I didn’t get it. I still don’t get it. The effect was just as shocking as taking a look at your ratings on ratemyprofessor.com, but without even the limited sense of reasoning that site offers. Here’s my takeaway–my epiphany for the day:

The world is not the way you see it. 

A few friends of mine have been hammering that one into me for a while now. I’m starting to peak in on this ‘other’ reality they claim exists instead of the one I’m content to live in, and I don’t like it. That one makes no sense. Mine is ordered and built around a sense of getting what you deserve and want out of life. I like mine better, even if it isn’t real.

Some Thoughts:

1. Just played my worst basketball game ever. At one point I air balled a free throw. I’m going to put this out there simply to acknowledge I’ve hit bottom. My athleticism has sank to depths so low that all I can do is get better. I’m going to the gym tomorrow to start that process.

I was reading a student paper when I had what Jay-Z would describe as a moment of clarity. I saw in the student this deeper level of joy and understanding about her daily life that opened me up to understanding what makes me happy and what does not.

Here is this thing: Not all people are suited for all things. I learned straight away that I didn’t have the patience for Wall Street, the temperament for Law School, or the raging desire of a professional athlete. However, I stopped there. I didn’t make that quantum leap of understanding to realize that this rule applies to more than our professional lives. In every aspect of being a person in this world there are things we are suited for and things we are not. To be complete means having all of those needs met/bases covered in a way that allows you to grow as a human every day. Conversely, to be incomplete means to be trapped in doldrums, failing to advance yourself in any positive way. I’ve fallen into this sense of incompleteness time and time again, wasting hours sitting in front of a TV flipping channels in search of a sense of completion.

I am not terribly self-aware. I notice tendencies in others long before I recognize that I’m seeing a reflection of what is missing in myself. When that student wrote about the beauty and joy she felt in the simple activity of making snacks for her kid’s soccer team I thought, wow she is really right for that role. Then I thought, who fills the roles I need in my own life?

The people in our lives complete us in some way. If they don’t they tend to feel extraneous or even cumbersome and slough off like so much dead skin. Those who we need burn like lighthouses on a stretch of sea. Moreover, I fear that people can come into your life in the wrong role or that roles can change over time. Reality is not static. It shifts and jumps and rolls and bubbles up beneath you in ways too hard to predict. I think the key for me is to always be evaluating where I am at, what I need, and how all of that comes together. In a sense, I feel like people need to be more like businesses, always working to find what and who works best for them in order to allow them to grow.

Before the Gun Rights Hacktavists come for my server, let me be clear: I respect and support the second amendment right to bear arms. I fear the document is being used as the focal point of the conversation when the conversation should be about the people who use guns and a culture that often glamorizes mass shootings. Today another High School shooting unfolded–this time in Oregon. This is at a time when schools are investing in bulletproof whiteboards instead of books; when people are more concerned with arming teachers for a horrific confrontation than creating an environment where guns are both understood and excluded.

When I was a kid we had fights all the time. Twice was there a concern about someone bringing a gun to escalate the situation. Today escalation is the norm. Nobody knows how to lose a fight or to deal with being picked on. Worse still, we have moved towards ‘understanding’ the killers as if to remind the world that these are isolated incidents carried out by crazies when the reality is that there are more than enough crazies to go around, but only a handful get their hands on guns or have the ‘courage’ to carry out their acts of violence.

We have a policy in place in sports to never show the streakers who slip on to the field in order to create havoc. The camera’s turn away and the announcers talk about how much of a disappointment and a waste the act of streaking is. How easy would it be to avoid the senseless media coverage of the shooter, instead giving coverage to the victims?

What kids don’t know can hurt them–especially when it comes to that special social dance between parent and child. They push our buttons and we discipline or we don’t, always sure to test the limits of our willingness and understanding. I’ve been thinking about what kids ought to realize about us parents and our understanding and our limits. Even the best of us have a button labeled one step too far. So here it is, my list of things kids ought to know from parents who ought to tell them:

1. Screaming fits are not an acceptable form of negotiation. I don’t know why kids think it is. Does something flash through their brain pan whispering, “If you scream it they will let you do it…” If this is the case, that wayward ghost thought needs to be eradicated at the cellular level. I’ve never had to lift my child off the floor of a store, but I’ve seen it happen time and again. I always want to step in and tell the child a few things. Things in bold print, mostly.
2. ‘I’m taking a little me time’ is parent code for I’m about to snap and go completely biblical on your ass, so I better step away. This goes down more often than you might think. I believe I went gray after the second kid. #2 meant rabid infighting. #3 meant all out war over the air they breathe. In all of this I a considered the referee–a job I don’t begrudge to anyone. Without stepping away, someone may day.
3. ‘I won’t hate you if’, is not an acceptable form of emotional currency. In truth there is no acceptable form of emotional currency, but that rule doesn’t apply to the baby of the family. Ever.
4. Bringing home weird boyfriends doesn’t make me trust you more. I’ve been on the other side of shock value. In Iowa, bringing home a black boyfriend is an elementary fuck you to parents.

There are more rules. Rules for bedtime is a good one to talk about. I’ll save it for a later post.