Tinkerings

There are times when life is a lot of fun.  Weddings.  Births.  Birthdays.  Christmas.  You know the days.

And there are times when life is…well, just life.  Like at weddings, births, birthdays, Christmas…

I’ll be honest with you.  (OK, I’m blogging about life here, honesty is probably just expected.  Especially from me).  Lately, life has been a lot more like those other times.  Not so great.  Maybe just south of not-so-great.

I have come to realize there are basically two roads available when life gives you lemons.

Sometimes you can add sugar and create a tart, but sweet and somewhat satisfying lemonade that refreshes as it cools you down.

But most of the time you just have to squint your eyes and drink in the mouth-puckering acidity of a lemon slice.  There’s no sugar.  No water.  No ice.  No glass.  You can’t dilute it in Southern Sweet Tea.

How do we teach that in school?  How do you convince kids who have grown up having every adult in their life squeezing lemons in order to make them the best glass of lemonade-tasting life that they need to just do that homework.  Take the F and lean from it.  Show up on time next time and you won’t have to go back to ISS.  Turn in your work and you can go on the next field trip.

As my Papaw used to say, “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking until you do suck seed.”  Maybe he was talking about lemon seeds.

This past weekend I visited my second, or third, or fourth hometown of Wynne, Arkansas.  When I tell people how many places I’ve lived the question is inevitably, “Was your dad in the military?” or “Was your dad in the ministry?”  No.  As admirable as those professions are, my dad was a simple man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to go from factory worker and night time janitor to Chief Chemist (a difficult feat without a college degree), then Plant Manager (without an MBA), and finally Factory Owner (with the help of a lot of cheap and free family labor!).

Apart from Steve Jobs, my dad may have been the smartest man I ever encountered.  He and my mom come from that generation that sprang up in the Great Depression.  They knew how to get by on next to nothing, save every penny possible, live well within their means, not get sucked into every great advertising ploy on TV, work hard for everything they had, and still have fun every once in a while.  My mom still does.

I was actually born in Marion, Indiana, but I’ve lived in Rochelle, IL, then Richmond, IN, then back to Marion, IN, and on to Bennettsville, SC, and finally on to The City With a Smile: Wynne, AR.  I spent the last two years of high school there.  I was a shy, backward kid in those days (as opposed to the shy, backward adult I’ve become).  Fortunately, I had an “in” at school.  My cousins Jeff (dad’s family) and Robbie (mom’s family) had been there their whole lives and were both in my classes.  Believe me, after a short agonizing ten months in South Carolina, I needed every advantage I could get.

So it was with just a little hesitation that I attended a 35th reunion gathering.  We had no expectations of who would show up.  Some had to cancel at the last minute.  Others may have forgotten.  But those of us gathered around two end-to-end tables in the back room of Kelly’s Family Restaurant surrounded by the classes of ’61 and ’71 talked as if we had just left American History on our  way to English.

The 1976 edition of the Wynne Stinger was passed around.  I was not only amazed at how many people I had forgotten, but by how many I knew.  Lots of memories flooded over me that had been long ago shelved in some forgotten warehouse among the billions of dendrites and synapses of my brain. I used to like math.  Who knew?  And suddenly, high school was more fun than I had allowed myself to remember.  Friendships more valuable than I had considered.  And lessons learned more powerful and life-changing than I had realized.

So, here’s to the Bi-Centennials, the Class of 1976.  Thank you for the part you played in crafting this thing I call My Life.  I am forever changed because of you.

And, yes…that’s a good thing.

Tomorrow my mom and I will get into her car and make the 7-hour trek from Cleveland, TN, to Wynne, AR, for my 35th high school reunion in “The City With A Smile.”  Thirty-five years.  Just being thirty-five sounded so old in 1976!

I only spent two years at Wynne High School, so I don’t have all the memories of growing up there my classmates have been sharing on our group page in Facebook.  But I have to say that living in Wynne for a few years was a great experience in many ways.

Oh, I visited there through the years.  It is the area where my mom and dad grew up and married.  Both of them had family still in Arkansas when we lived in Illinois, Indiana, and South Carolina.  So I had spent a lot of time there before finally moving in 1974.

A lot of my memories are tied to music.  I’m not sure why.  When we moved to Wynne, I was listening a lot to Elton John and Steely Dan.  During my last two years of high school I was bouncing back and forth between the sounds of Larry Gatlin (thanks to my Uncle Don), the Kingsmen Quartet and the Dixie Echoes (thanks to my South Carolina church friends), Alice Cooper (thanks to my own sense of weirdness), the Eagles, Billy Joel, Harry Chapin, Electric Light Orchestra, Cat Stephens, and more.  And nearly all of them on 8-track tape!

I drove the family station wagon on some of my first dates.  Later, it was the pick-up truck we used for work.  My parents finally bought a new car just days before my first prom in the 11th grade: a Cadillac Seville (the original body style…sweet!).

There were nights and nights and more nights of playing Spades and Hearts with Donna, Robbie, and Jeff.  Hours of it.  Those hours came in handy while serving as a Christian Serviceman’s Center Director in Dunoon, Scotland.  They Navy loves Hearts and Spades!

I worked 2nd shift for my parents during my senior year.  Forty hours and more.  I got paid $10 a week.  That wasn’t much even in the 70′s.  But my mom and dad were getting their business off the ground and they weren’t taking much of a paycheck either.  And then, when I finally graduated in 1976 my dad took me car shopping.  He said he had been putting my salary back each week to save it up for my graduation gift.  He bought me a brand new 1976 Cutlass Supreme.  That was one fine car.  I drove 200 miles the first day I had it!

It will be fun this weekend.  I look forward to a lot of laughter and memory lane trips.  We’ll start at the Homecoming Game tomorrow night.  From there… the sky’s the limit.

Maybe I should buy a new deck of cards and crank up a little Alice…

Like most people in America, and possibly around the world, I remember where I was when the towers were hit.

I was doing some free lance work as an Institutional Researcher for Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga.  I was in a meeting discussing some of the data they wanted collected when someone stepped into the room to say that an airplane (not a jet) had hit one of the Twin Towers in New York City.

Our first reaction was that a small private or commuter plane had gone down.  I expected to see something on the evening news later.  We asked this person for other news, but that was all they knew.  A plane had crashed into a tower.  We talked about it for a few minutes and then went back to our meeting.

It didn’t take long for the world to turn upside down.

Our meeting was interrupted a second time to say that it was a passenger jet and that a second one had just hit the second tower.  The floor seemed to drop out from under us as we all experienced this sucker punch to the gut of our nation.

Everything stopped at that point.  People gathered around television sets as we sat glued to the news.  At first we had some hope that this attack would be minimal in terms of loss of life.  The Towers were hit, but they were standing.

The news just continued to get worse.  Throughout that day we saw people jumping from the building; preferring to die from the jump than be burned alive.  We saw the Towers fall.  The Pentagon was hit.  A plane went down in Pennsylvania.  My God! Just how bad was this news going to get?

The news start talking about the 50,000 people that work in and around the Towers.  How many had died in the crushing debris was still speculation.  It could have been like my entire town was wiped out in one swipe of an angry arm on a chess set.  It was incomprehensible.

There was a sadness that settled over us that day.  Over the next few days we watched as the brave men and women known only as the “First Responders” ran toward the danger time and again.  Our hearts revived somewhat when our President stood with them speaking through a megaphone and declared that those who had struck us would “hear from all of us soon.”

Maybe it is a generational thing, but one of the events that helped me see that we could stand strong in the face of an attack on our own shores was when Saturday Night Live brought in the Mayor and dozens of First Responders to start a show within days of the attack.  I wondered how they would handle it.  It didn’t take long to find out.  Lorne Michaels asked Mayor Guiliani if it was OK for them to be funny that night.  Guiliani turned and said, straightfaced, “Why start now?”

That was the night the healing started for me.

I stayed glued to the TV news for weeks, even though there wasn’t anything new to report.  As a nation we stood together.  Building a resolve.  Music started to help.  Alan Jackson made us stand and reflect as he sang, “Where were you when the world stopped turning…”  While some thought it was inappropriate, Toby Keith inspired many of us with his homage to the troops when he sang, “We’ll put a boot up your ass, its the American Way.”

We’ve been through a lot since 9/11.  Too many wars that have lasted too long.  Financial meltdowns.  Scandals.  Politics where the fringe left and the fringe right have the loudest voices while those in the middle from both parties try to keep things on an even keel.  The list is long.

Today, none of that is important.  Today, my thoughts are with the families and friends of the innocent victims of one of the most cowardly acts in the history of our nation.  Today, I again applaud the brave men and women who ran toward the Towers.  Today, I am again reminded that our country is a proud nation with a powerful heritage.  Today, I am proud of all those who have served our country in the face of such severe adversity around the world.

As a much older but still powerful song says, “I’m proud to be an American….”

It has been a long while since I wrote anything here.  My brain has been in high gear (and overload) since the beginning of school.  Blogging takes time.  It requires a space, both physically and mentally, to reflect.  I sometimes do my best blogging in my head while driving.  Ideas take shape there.  A single thought may explode into way more than an outline.  When Jupiter aligns with Mars and peace guides the planets a blog can appear fully written in my head in an instant.

Lately, driving down the road has been divided into two things: staying between the lines and stopping on red.  That’s about all my brain can handle.  I listen to the John Boy and Billy Big Show and miss the jokes.  I listen to NPR and don’t even know what the news story is about.  My brain is holding all it can hold trying to juggle all the software, hardware, and website problems that have plagued us for a month related to student assessment, teacher training, and more.

Even the 3 hours of uninterrupted pablum that is NCIS doesn’t help.

On Monday of this week I decided to go back to working out in the mornings.  I got out my P90x DVDs, got up at 4:30 on Tuesday morning and just “pushed play.”  It felt good.  The people on the DVD would shout out how many military pushups they were going to do: “20!” “22!” “25!”  And I would shout right back at them: “3!”  Good times.

The pain known as my muscles helped distract me from all the work problems over the next couple of days.

Today I woke up to a single moment of clarity.  I suddenly realized why I had liked running this time around.  I’m not a runner.  I hate running.  It is hard.  It is boring.  It takes too long.  But for some reason, after dropping 35 pounds, running seemed like the thing to do next.  And I liked it!

And now I know the why.  It resets my brain.  I go to the Greenway (for long runs) or start out at the end of my driveway and around the two circles of my neighborhood (for short runs), turn on my RunKeeper app, set my TuneIn Radio app to Beatles-A-Rama and hit the road.

Beatles-A-Rama plays old Beatles songs (well, ok, they are all old now), solo songs from George, Ringo, Paul, and John, some stuff from Wings, groups that inspired the Beatles, and groups that cover the Beatles.  Its like being thrown back to 1963 and the British invasion all over again.

And every five minutes a soothing voice comes through my earbuds: Time: five minutes. Distance: zero point four four miles. Pace: ten minutes fifty-three seconds per mile.  I get some immediate feedback on well I’m doing.  Should I speed up or slow down.  I want to finish the 4 mile Greenway track under 12 minutes per mile.  And after some quick calculations in my head, I go back to the zombie mode of one foot in front of the other with Beatles tunes bouncing between my ears.

I think “The Why” is the most important thing we can learn.  It is more important than how.  It is more important than what.  The jury is still out on how it stacks up against the Who, but it is definitely more important than the when and where.

As a teacher, I used to drill it into my students’ heads why it was important to learn to write, or why it was important to learn how to do basic math.  I think I was aiming at the right mark, but continued to miss the bull’s eye.  The question is both deeper and simpler than that:

Why do I need to learn?

It is a paradim shift for me.  As subtle and as profound as moving from “I teach English,” to “I teach children.”  But that small shift makes all the difference.

It is early and I am perched on a chair at the local Starbucks getting caffeinated for the day. I am packing light this morning. Just my iPad and some cables in my backpack. And an apple. Left my MacBook at home today.

I injured my shoulder carrying that backpack loaded down with my Mac, my iPad, my Netbook, power cords, extension cables, speakers, earphones, and more. I know how students feel with 6 big, clunky textbooks in theirs.

The shoulder injury feels like someone has it in a constant pinch. My chiropractor has helped, so I am on the mend. But then, when just getting geared up as a runner (I’ve never been one or wanted to be one before) my shoulder problem aggravated my hip which has now inflamed a nerve. Yeah. THAT nerve. The one that feels like an ice pick has been jabbed into your gluteus maximus. The one that hurts behind your knee even though you didn’t injure your knee. The one I had several shots and finally back surgery on to make sure it didn’t hurt anymore.

So I’m packing light. I’ve finally made a decision to take care of me first. That’s a tough one for me. I’ve given up a lot in my life so others can have what they want. Or need. Or just take.

I don’t mind about people. One thing my personality tests show is that I am a giver. I act to help others before I think about the consequences to me. It is what drives me to work 80 hours a week. To be constantly available by phone. Or chat. Or text. Or email. Or Skype. Or… You get the picture.

But every once in a while I have enough clarity of thought to make a decision for me. Like losing weight. Running. And now packing light. These decisions are not easy for a giver. Or a teacher. But they are important. Life changing. Life saving even.

What decision will you make for YOU today?

I take pictures.  Some days I take a lot of pictures.  Some days nothing.  I am not a photographer.  I’m just a plain ol’ ordinary picture taker.  Some things capture my attention more than others.

I love taking pictures of old things.  Abandoned things.  Lonely things. Solitary things. Black and white things.  You can draw your own Freudian conclusions.  I am learning more and more how to take pictures of people.  Capturing moods at parties.  Oh, and food.  I love to take pictures of food.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with HDR.  I follow some blogs that specialize in this photography type.  My camera has limited capabilities for it, but I’m learning with it before I spend the $6,000 or more on a new camera (yeah, in my dreams).

So, a couple of days ago I drove out to Parksville Lake to take some pictures at sunrise.  I took a few I liked even though I technically missed the sunrise because it didn’t show up over the mountains until long after the weather channel told me sunrise would happen.  Still, I had 5 or 6 pictures of which I was fairly proud.  I posted one on my Posterous site.

On the way back home, I passed an old barn that nearly always catches my eye along this stretch of road.  It sits on the edge of a wheat field.  It is old and run down.  It calls to me for some reason.

And when I passed it on this particular morning it was gorgeous.  There was a thick layer of fog out over the field.  Immediately, I could see the shot in black and white.  Maybe even one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken could come of that scene.  I started to turn around and go back, but….

So I convinced myself I was busy.  I needed coffee.  I was hungry.  After all, the fog would be there again, right?

I got up this morning and drove back out to the spot.  Nothing.  No fog.  Just a barren old barn in the middle of a field. Nothing spectacular.  Interesting, yes.  Eye-popping, no.

How many times has my classroom behavior mirrored my picture taking?  I spot a teachable moment.  I can see it in the kid’s eyes.  She wants to learn.  But what she wants to learn isn’t in my lesson plan and I’m being evaluated.  What she wants to learn isn’t one of the SPIs the state has dictated I spend my time on.  What she wants to learn would mean that I have to get 24 other kids doing something else for 5 minutes while I help her.  What she wants to learn won’t be learned today because I’m busy. I’m overworked. I’m stressed.  I’m…

Now I’m stuck. I will go back to that barn a lot over the next few days.  Earlier.  Later.  Rainy days. Sunny ones. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the perfect fog cover just once more.  I won’t let it slip away from me again.  I’m determined.  I have promised myself.

And I wonder when that longing for learning will show up in the eyes of one of my students again.  Will I be as ready?

What about you?

Its time to bring a brief update about my weight loss.  I know you have all been dying to know how things are going since the shots have stopped.  So here goes…

I spent 2 weeks continuing to eat 500 calories a day as recommended by my weight loss program.  During that time I lost about 2 pounds, which took my total to 35 pounds lost.  After that, they told me to bump my calories up to 1,000 to 1,200 a day in order for my metabolism to start re-adjusting to more food.

Unbelievably, I spent 3 weeks eating 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day with no change whatsoever.  How can you try to so hard, eat so little, and not lose any weight? was the big question in my head.

This is the 4th week I’ve been at 1,000 to 1,200 calories.  It is also my 53rd birthday week.  So, to be honest, I haven’t counted many calories.  I’ve been afraid to!  While I’ve tried to be pretty good at most meals (I eat fish and chicken a lot more than steak and I almost always choose broccoli as my side dish with no fries or baked potatoes!), let me tell you what I know about how I’ve cheated:

• I have no groceries in the house, so I’ve eaten every meal and snack somewhere else
• I’ve had wraps and artisan sandwiches for breakfast at Starbucks.  Not high calories, but more carbs than I’m supposed to have.
• I’ve had a large portion of Chocolate Molten Lava Cake… with ice cream… twice!  And that’s just since Monday!
• Yesterday I had 1 1/2 donuts and two bite sized candy bars during our training sessions
• Let’s not even talk about lunch.

You get the idea.  So, today when I got on the scale I was expecting the worst.  I closed my eyes and stepped on.  I looked down.  Shook my head.  Stepped off.  Got back on.  And then did all that again.

I lost another pound.

And here’s what I bring from that.  While I concentrated so hard on losing weight, I didn’t lose anything.  When I concentrated on living moderately, I did.

And here’s my advice to teachers out of this little “life lessons 101″….

Forget about evaluations and rubrics and law changes and observations and…. well, you get the idea.

Just go into your classroom and teach.

I know you’ve got to write up lesson plans, and a lot of you haven’t done that in years.  I know you’ve got a rubric to follow when you are observed.  I know you’ve got umpteen hundred standards to cover.  I know you are judged on test scores.  I know you’ve got to adjust for rigor and relevance.

But the kids in your classes just want to look at you and know that you are connecting with them.  They want to know that you recognize when they are having a bad day.  They want you to talk to them even if they refuse to talk back.  They want you to put your hand on their shoulder as a connection to their soul even if they act like they don’t.  They want to feel that you are looking into them and not just at them.

And mostly, they want to learn.  They do.  Honest.

If all your time is spent stressing over “teaching right” to show gains you are going to be as disappointed as I was trying to lose weight by stressing over calories every meal.

Close your eyes.  Take a deep cleansing breath.  Open your eyes. Let your mind see your classroom as a place of learning more than a place of observing.

You won’t be disappointed.

Sometimes blog post ideas just come to me.  I see something at the mall and an idea sparks in my head.  Driving down the road a song sometimes implants itself as a kernel of a future blog flower.  A conversation with an old friend.  Dieting.  Work.  Sometimes these ideas come to me faster than I can remember to write them down, and I am left with that nagging feeling that somewhere in a synapse of my brain is a germ of a thought waiting for expansion into new dendrites.

Not today.  Today I have nothing.  Well, that’s not quite true.  I have some things I need to write for the Bradley County Association of Professional Educators blog.  I have a long list of ideas for the Bradley County Schools Technology Blog.  I’m even considering a new blog at an as yet unpurchased URL at www.CookingForOne.com.

But for this blog?  Nada.  Nothing.  Bupkis.

Oh, I could rehash ideas about my diet and weight loss.  I’m maintaining at 35 pounds lost by the way.  I could talk about the start of school, but so far the only stories I have to tell are humorous examples of technology gone wrong.  Not a positive way to start a year.  Better to just stay quiet on that one.

So, in the spirit of Seinfeld, and in a commitment to write, I decided to  post this blog about nothing.  Maybe next time there will be a nugget of educational wisdom, parental insights, technology goldmines, or just interesting fodder.  But not today.  Today this is a post about nothing.

Thanks for reading.

Most of the jokes I remember most are those I learned before I was 15.  Like this one:

A boy is having his arm set in a cast and asks the doctor if he will be able to play the violin when his arm is healed.  “Why sure!” answered the doctor.  “You should be able to play the violin just fine.”

“That’s good,” said the boy.  “I’ve always wanted to play the violin, but I never could before.”

Yeah, its lame I know.  But at 6:00 this morning when I was halfway through my 4 mile jog on our town’s Greenway, it was one of the things that came to mind between songs on Beatles-A-Rama.

I’ve never thought of myself as a runner.  There was always an excuse.  I’m too fat. I want to protect my knees. I get bored.  The list is long.  And it started early.

When I was attending Charles Elementary in Richmond, IN, we had to run in PE class.  I hated it.  Not because I couldn’t do it.  I could.  I was an outdoorsy, skinny, always running around the neighborhood kind of kid.  But I was bored with it.  And I didn’t do it well.  It wasn’t a natural gift for me.  If you had to graph out the results of all the kids in our grade level who ran the mile in PE, it might look like this:

Students are divided into quintiles.  The red line represents the accepted state standard pace which all students are supposed to achieve.  As you can see, there are some kids who just naturally thrive above the line.  There are some kids who are just below the line.  They could easily meet the standard with just a little help from their teacher.  And then there’s me.  That last group on the left. Way below the standard.  Way.

Now, the PE teacher could have helped me with my stride.  He could have helped with my breathing.  He could have had me run more in order to run faster.  I could have been placed in a remedial running group with all the other low runners.

And none of it would have helped.

Why?  Because I quit inside my head.  My body could do it easily.  But my head put the brakes on in a big way.

And it still does.  As I go out to the Greenway to run (or jog or walk really fast, whichever you would like to call it), I can sense my head telling me it is time to stop and walk.  My breathing is fine.  My legs are warmed up.  The Beatles are playing.  Everything is fine.

So I tell myself I will run as far as that next park bench down the trail.  I’ll go at least that far before I walk for a bit.  And then, about 50 yards before I get there I find myself walking.  It is my biggest frustration with running.  It isn’t the running.  It isn’t even the boredom.  My biggest frustration is my brain telling me to quit when I know I can still go farther.

Let’s flip those scores for a moment.  Instead of elementary PE class running times, let’s label them TCAP Proficiency.  With what group of students does a teacher naturally spend most of his or her time?

• Some teachers thrive on teaching those upper level kids because it is so easy and fun.
• Some will focus on those kids just below the line.  With a little push, a little encouragement, those kids might actually make it up into the proficient category.
• A few will focus on those kids at the bottom. They will see glimmers of hope, but experience a lot of frustration.

Those kids at the bottom often get extra help.  They are assigned after school tutoring.  They are put into an intervention class.  There are numerous parent-teacher conferences.  Extra work is assigned.  Easier work is assigned.  Less work is assigned.  Kids are allowed to draw the answer rather than write it.  Some can make videos.  We put them in Glogster, Blabberize, Prezi, and anything else that looks exciting.

And often we see very little improvement.  Why is that?

Because the kid has already quit in his brain.  His mind has convinced him that he can’t do it.  Her brain tells her to answer 6 questions, but quit before she answers the last 4.

Teachers can’t fix this.  Parents can’t fix this.  Friends can’t fix this.  Only the child can fix it.

People tell me all the time, “Once you start running you will love it.  You just need to get out there.”  OK.  I’m out there.  I’m liking it a little better.  I can even imagine myself loving it at some point.  Thriving on it even.  I get images of me in a 5K run. A half-marathon.  A marathon!

And then my brain makes me walk 50 yards before I need to.  And the reality of my frustration floods back through me again.

At 52, I can handle this kind of thing.  I can push myself a little farther next time.  I can push beyond my brain and let my running be guided by my heart.  Its not easy.  But I can do it.

But I couldn’t do that at 8.  Or 12.  Or 17.  Or even 32.  A lot of people can.  Some of us can’t.

NOTE: This is not necessarily an “opinion piece” on students or learning. Rather, I wrote this blog as a way to start a conversation about how to help kids who have already checked out of school.  What are you doing?  What are those around you doing?  We talk all the time about how a teacher has to motivate her kids.  What does that look like?  Is it working?  I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments section below (or on FB if you read this there).