Whose In Charge?

I keep waiting for my guest to go, but nearly six weeks later, there’s no sign of him leaving the house. He’s eating up all my thoughts, putting his dirty feet on my furniture and every time he’s around, my heart starts pounding in a way that’s making me nervous— this can’t be good for me. If it happens just before bed, I know I’m in for it, jolted awake by my guest’s loud music at 2:30 in the morning.

At the same time that I’m fed up with him, I’m fascinated by this heart-pounding signal. It’s a surefire sign that he’s telling me something profound that I need to pay attention to. It’s entirely out of my “executive function” control. I can’t will it away with rational thought, subdue it with meditation, step to the side of it with Scarlatti on the piano, send it away with wine, whiskey or other substances (none of which I partake of anyway). It helps a little to walk and ride my bike, but not much— he’s right there with me every step and wheel turn.

You know the fairy tales when the evil person dumps a bunch of seeds on the ground and says, “Sort these before morning or else” ? This guest is a seed-sorter and writing, writing, writing helps a little bit. Talking helps as well. But the guest won’t leave until he dances with the right people and if they aren’t following the steps, he sits in the corner and waits. Eating all my food.

If wine doesn’t help, neither does whining and in the midst of pain and suffering, I’m fascinated by these bodily signals (heart-pounding) that have their own wisdom and agenda. We have this illusion that our rational minds are in charge, but the Gnostics, Freud and others suggest that there are many voices conversing in our heads and hearts and Mr. Executive isn’t always the one to pay attention to. Ah, there’s a seed-sorting. Which voice is worthy of our attention and when and how much? If you have an answer, drop me a line. Meanwhile, be still, my beating heart. 

To My New Facebook Friend

Hello Michael,

I saw your name in the “Add 1 Friend” column— and so I did. And you accepted! 40 years since I sang next to you in the college choir and truth be told, can’t remember thinking of you much during all that time. But your name sparked the clear image of your innocent face, not even bearded yet, sitting near me each day on the bus that Pierre drove through the European countryside, aiming for the cathedrals where we strange long-haired hippies would fill the air with the sweet sounds of Dufay. We weren’t fast friends, but I always enjoyed you and we shared some of the same stories during those two months.

I looked at your photo on the page and squinted to recognize your face. After all, we both have turned to sleep each night some 12,000 times since then, Time walking over our bodies and awakening each morning just a millimeter different until we arrived at these faces we have now. Yours seems a kind face, a content face and I’m happy to imagine a life well-lived between Innocence and Experience.

I’m thinking of this driving up Highway One on a glorious California day when Dufay rises up from the i-Pod and yes, that was us all those years back, singing Flos Florum in the church in Ronchamp. Here we are again, dancing in those tones, each note connecting the procession of selves we have been. The road which stretched out so endlessly before us back then is mostly behind us now. But still I am driving forward, there is more road ahead and these faces we have now may one day be the ones we squint to recognize within the weathered ones to come.

So a wave from across the country and four decades, a moment to remember that marvelous time and fortify and re-invigorate ourselves for what lies ahead. Thanks for being my Facebook friend!

Letter to 8th Grade Parents

The end of the school year is upon us. Sometimes it feels like a welcome and well-earned cadence to a symphonic work, those last chords announcing the new music of Summer. But as often as not, it comes as a mild shock and surprise. Already? Wasn’t it just yesterday that we rang the gongs of the first day of school?

And perhaps that same surprise for the longer span of your children’s tenure at The San Francisco School. Whether three years or eleven years or somewhere in-between, the double sense that it was a slow and glorious unfolding and also went by in a flash. (Soundtrack with “Sunrise Sunset” playing here.)

Do you remember that first day when your children entered the school doors? They came in as a question mark. Would they make friends? Would they fit in and be accepted? Would they measure up to the work? Build the pink tower, cook the hurry-up cake, clap to the beat, draw a house? Master the intricacies of reading and writing and ‘ritmetic, weaving, xylophone and recorder technique, dribbling the ball with both hands, putting together a coherent Spanish sentence? Understand quadratic equations, Manifest Destiny, climate change, converse with their Nicaraguan host family, solo in the 12-bar blues and cross-mallet their way through Vivaldi, compete in the Futsal championship, enter the city-wide Science Fair, participate in the Amnesty group?

And here they are at the far-end of the question, a glorious, affirming answer. Yes ! Yes! And again Yes!! Now you see how you needn’t have worried as you begin to gather the threads of who’ve they been to celebrate them so joyfully at graduation. Each without exception an unequivocal Yes!! to the children we dreamed they might become, to the future adults the world needs and deserves. Each in his or her own style and character and personality, but all joined in their common values of humanity, integrity and social justice, their common fearlessness in expressing themselves and affirming what they stand for in the face of pressure to simply conform to some narrow-sliced standard. They are precisely the children we are proud to send forth to represent the deep values of the school culture and precisely the children you are so proud to claim as your own. It was a work we all did together, you the parents in your homes, we the teachers in the school and they the kids, sometimes in harmony with our efforts, sometimes in defiance as they sought to sort out their own dreams about themselves from our dreams about them. We all three made maddening mistakes, but none of them fatal and all of them in service of learning how to do it better yet.

Of course, it ain’t over yet. Graduation is a snapshot moment of the wondrous answers these children have become, but those answers are but a moment’s pause before the next questions. Perhaps it is the very notion that we are all of us questions aimed toward the answers that become the next questions that allows us to send them forth in confidence that they will grow and prosper in each succeeding phase of their lives. When we become fixed answers with no more questions to be asked, we stagnate, get stuck, lose that vitality of the 1^st grade bursting into school with such enthusiasm, filled with the bubbling excitement of life’s promise. That beginner’s mind we invoke in our opening gong ceremony each year, renewed each year through the habit of perpetual questioning.

It’s always bittersweet for me to bid farewell to these kids, but also to the parents. Year after year, I pause and think about the families that have been present for so long, given so much to the school, been such an integral part of our community. I make a list of those kids who represent the last sibling and sigh, think of those who still have other kids here and smile, wonder what it will be like not to see certain faces at carpool. After 38 years of ongoing goodbyes, it doesn’t get easier. But I do know that life flows on and we survive it (until we won’t) and that community is not bound by time or place, but continues in our heart’s memories.

So on the cusp of graduation, an advance congratulations to you all for your child’s grand success and my gratitude for all the years.

Much love,

Doug Goodkin

PS And please read my next e-mail about the Jazz Field Trip!

One-Room Schoolhouse

One of the stranger things we do in our schools and culture at large is segregate by age. The first thing I notice when I travel to more village-centered cultures is that all the ages hang out together. Families often have several generations under one roof, kids of different ages are out playing clapping games, teenagers are working with their elders and so on. Meanwhile, our kids go through some 20 years of schooling hanging out almost exclusively with their peers. The grandparents are sequestered away in old age homes, the newly retired moving to their gated retirement communities, the parents close in age are chatting on the soccer league sidelines. In the long view of human culture, this is just plain weird.

But there is a logic to it. First, that deep-seated drive to be amongst our own. From the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria to the boys on one side of the circle and the girls on the other, to the white-haired folks chatting in the lobby of the Garrison Keilor talk, we are magnetically drawn to those who share some of our experiences and age is certainly a valid category for that. I love hanging out with folks of all ages, but when I start making references to F Troup or the 1910 Fruitgum Company and am met with blank stares, I suddenly crave my peer-group companions.

When it comes to school and a calibrated curriculum, the logic runs yet deeper. My school began with mixed grades—1^st-2^nd/3^rd-4^th, 5^th-6^th. It had a few advantages, but it was difficult to teach a sequenced curriculum and when push came to shove, the pecking order of Nature’s law prevailed and mostly kids hung out with their same age. In music class, there were many activities that worked just fine with mixed ages— folk dances, singing, anything involving creative exploration. But to introduce recorder in a mixed- 3^rd-4^th and yet again the next year made no sense. I think all the teachers ended up being happier to focus on one grade at a time and the kids as well.

However, we did much in mixed groups— the daily singing time, the end of the year camping trip, a few years where we tried out school families across the grades. And I believe because we began with that flexible grouping, the school culture was less obsessed with identifiying solely with one's peers and kids crossed ages at recess and in day care in what felt like—and still feels like— a healthy way.

All this comes to mind because I just had a week of mixed music classes with elementary and preschoolers— 5^th grade with 5-year olds, 4^th grade with 4-year olds, 1^st grade with 3-year olds— and it was simply wonderful. Just sitting in a circle with a young one in-between each of the older ones was sheer delight and as they partnered-up, the pleasure increased. In some activities, the older one was guiding, in some the younger was teaching the game they knew, in some both were learning something new at the same time. The usual behavorial routines in each group were broken up and everyone was more attentive than ever.

So a reminder to enjoy the clarity of the one-grade-per-age school structure while taking care to habitually mix it up. The Japanese screen door model over the firm concrete walls. And bring the grandparents in more often and go the Old Age homes more often. The healthy human community is a snapshot of all our different ages and stages co-inhabiting the same sacred ground, giving a live human model of what lies ahead, a live human reminder of what we’ve left behind and each age contributing from their particular stage of genius.

And on top of that, it’s a lot of fun.

The Way to Ordination

“One can’t make a new heaven and earth with ‘facts.’ There are no’ facts’—there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.”               – Henry Miller: Tropic of Capricorn

It was a glorious 2nd grade music class. We danced. A spirited play-party dance, two lines, partners facing. Bow, swing your pardner, do-si-do, the whole nine yards. The boy who was sullen last class smiled the whole time. The girl often struggling with pattern got all the steps right. The boy with Asbergers, always shut away in his own dream-world, wholly participated the entire dance— and even corrected some other kids! The two kids often at odds with each other were partners and happily so. Like I said. Glorious.

There is no app for any of this. None of it fits on the i-Pad, except to view from afar through the thick wall of the screen. Nothing on the machines we’re infatuated with gets the heart pumping, the hands sweating, the spirit rising with each swing and sashay. Nothing else teaches the children what it’s like to give and receive weight from a partner, what a wonder it is to be lost in the swirling motion of coherent patterns, how to join mind and movement so that thought is active and activity thoughtful. Nothing on our little hand-held devices reveals so much of each child’s character or announces the breakthroughs they’ve just made.

The schools we have known forever have mostly been about a narrow slice of our full, glowing humanity. They began in clear knowledge that this was their job— to teach the 3R’s and leave the rest of it to family, neighborhood, culture. That has changed radically in our times, the whole village raising the child changed to the pop culture exploiting the child for profit, addicting kids to fast food, constant consumption, action-packed video games and the like. With few neighborhoods meeting in the barn for community dances and sings on Friday night, the burden falls to the schools. Which mostly continue the old-factory model of churning out facts that must be swallowed without chewing and regurgitated on the old tired standardized tests. The same old narrow slice of who we are and who we might become.

The school that I have envisioned has always been about transformation, transforming the raw potential of children into the flesh and bones realization as the body, mind, heart and imagination find their way to ordination. 38 years of my life devoted to making a “new heaven and earth” class by class, with as much patience, faith and kindness as I can manage. Today some of it paid off.

Recipe for a Perfect 7th Grade Music Class

1. Put stools in a circle before they enter. (Every stool must be identical.)

2. Wear a new Columbia fleece vest with the tags still on. (Other brands accepted.)

3. Count on someone commenting on the tag. (They did.)

4. Ask them to figure out why. (“You’re going to return it.”)

5. Why? (Multiple theories.)

6. Model the vest so they guess what my wife and daughter disapproved of. (One size too big.) Vote on how many agree.

7. Discuss one student’s comment: “You should make up your own mind and not listen to them.”

8. Follow the thread: “When is it wise to listen to folks with more experience in fashion? When is it time to trust your own judgement?”

9. Share your difficulty in finding vests at various stores because it’s out of season, even though foggy summer in San Francisco is the perfect season.

10. Segue into summer across the Bay and everyone at summer camp in 105 degree heat and the counselor promising ice cream if everyone can play one rhythm for five minutes straight without missing a beat.

11.  Go into the Juba shtick where the campers have to slap mosquitoes without losing the basic beat.

12.  Go to Plan B for teaching the Juba rhythm to differentiate instruction for those who didn’t succeed with mosquito slapping.

13. Teach the song. Ask for comments on relation between the patted rhythm and the text. (one in 6/8, the other in 4/4). Try a variation.

14. Discuss the meaning of the text. (Enslaved folks eating leftovers while the slave masters got the good parts of the food.)

15.  Segue into the song and game Soup Soup and play so that one by one, students peel off to the xylophones and play the “Soup Soup” response on A.

16. When all are at the xylophones, transform “Soup Soup” to the C-Jam Blues. (In this case, the A-Jam Blues.)

17.  With xylos set in pentatonic scale, all solo on C-Jam Blues while teacher plays piano.

18.  Return to melody and end with Duke’s famous tag and all playing tremelo on G.

19.  End at the stroke of 9:00 am, the precise end of the 45 minute period.

20. At the end of the day, go to the other Sports Basement Store and return vest for the correct size.

   21. Take off tag.

That’s how simple the perfect 7^th grade music class can be.

The Procession of Selves

Before photographs, all we had was the mirror to show our gradual metamorphosis from babe to elder. But now— and more than ever— we have the record of our lives in slide show format and we are never less than astonished at the physical changes. Most elders report that they carry the image of their younger selves with them until the brutal contradiction of the mirror or the photo taken yesterday. And why not? All the people we have been indeed are alive inside of us, for better or for worse.

And so on Mother’s Day, I searched for some old slides of my Mom made digital to store on the laptop and came across this one from a rare vacation she took with my Dad away from us kids. There she stands, radiating a beauty that I have to take care not to admire too much before Freud finds me out. Is she the same one sitting in the wheelchair each day I visit? What connects these two people? What greater mystery do we know than the fact that both images carry a Soul born to this Earth to discover why it was sent? Is it proper or grossly egocentric to suggest that part of that mission was to birth myself and my sister, just as part of our mission has been to bring our own children into the world?

A mother is never just a mother, but for some, that fundamental act of creation and all the caretaking that follows and all the blessing of unconditional love that at least my mother continues to radiate to me, is enough. My Mom didn’t build a better mousetrap nor record her story in words, tones or painted images, didn’t teach my kids to garden or knit. She struggled mightily with her bipolar demons and debilitating migraines and did whatever she could to survive it. But throughout it all, she also left the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for me in the milkbox, drove me to gymnastics and left me free to follow my bliss at each stage of development.

Now she is my greatest fan when I sit at the piano, giving me the feedback I crave with her gestures, expressions and frequently expressed wonder that I can do what I do. We’ve processed through our changing selves side-by-side and at 92 and 62, are blessed with the opportunity to continue to do so. And I, for one, am forever grateful.