Old Man Mosie

“Old man Mosie, sick in the head,

 Called for the doctor and the doctor said.

 Please step forward, turn around,

 Do the Hokey-Pokey and get outta town!”

I take all my advice from children’s rhymes. Alert readers of recent blogs may have noted my struggle to pull myself out of a downward spiral. Be it men or machines, the fickle finger of fate was poking me time and again and it wasn’t a joyful dancing Hokey kind of Poke. So my inner doctor and my schedule coincided and I decided to get the hell out of town!

But first a joyful jazz romp on Saturday with my fellow Pentatonics at SF Jazz Center, kids and adults alike feeding chickens, eating banana splits, sitting in saucers and playing with Old Man Mosie’s wife, Grandma Moses. Happy people all singing, dancing and playing hip 5-notes solos on Orff instruments. Home to pack and just time for a short walk with my wife to the cherry blossoms in the park on a gorgeous Spring day. Then off to the airport and some 14 hours in my portable flying movie theater— Captain Phillips, Intolerable Cruelty, A.C.O.D. and a repeat of The Heat (interrupted by the inconvenience of landing before the movie was over—how rude!). Lo and behold, my ride awaited me without a hitch and off we went into Santiago, Chile.

Perfect weather, dropped at my hotel, delicious afternoon nap and then out in the early evening air to stretch my legs. Past Paddy’s Pub, where green hats abounded and live music was coming from folks sitting around a table— fiddles, bodhran drum, Irish flute, guitar, an informal jam session playing tunes familiar to my ears— and they were good!!

Further down the street past the sushi place, the Holiday Inn, the Scotia Bank, the Intercontinental Hotel and of course, not one, but two—Starbucks! Intercontinental it is here, there and just about everywhere in the urban centers of our shrinking planet. On one level, hard to get out of town and fully soak up the sense of being somewhere unique and that’s a loss worth contemplating. On the other, so many cultures co-present in the music and food and films and books in all big towns is at least an interesting new development. Less happy when it’s the corporate squeeze of MacDonald’s and Starbucks, but when Chileans are happily playing Irish music and Scots are dancing to the drums and bells of Samba, it’s a slightly different feeling.

Dinner at the hotel of perfectly cooked chicken with brown rice and vegetables, the restaurant filled with Brazilian sports teams in their yellow shirts and green jackets, the latter a coincidental nod to St. Patrick’s Day. Back to the room to plan my day of classes, the Irish slip jig, The Butterfly, that our kids performed in Salzburg, drifting all the way up to my 12^th story window. Tomorrow’s 5^th grade class will be seeing if we can play four songs from four continents on three instruments using five notes in 45 minutes. My contribution to the future of mixed cultures.

Feels good to be out of town. Just what the doctor ordered. 

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Every year at my school, the 8^th grade performs a Shakespeare play. This year they chose a charming little tale called…Macbeth. Murder. Mayhem. Treachery. Trickery. During the question time with the elementary school audience, a boy asked, “Who were the good guys?”

Of course, we’ve come so far from those dark times. Or have we? Behind the have-a-nice-day exterior, it’s Macbeth all the way. Midnight assassination at the water cooler, the climb to power up the corporate or political ladder with heavy boots stomping on the heads of fellow workers. Macbeth and Macduff meet at MacDonalds with a professional mediator to hear where the other is coming from and then go home and plot the next plunge of the dagger. Hands stained with blood that the “New! Improved!” cleansers can’t quite wholly wash out. Something wicked this way comes in the guise of the next upgrade on our machines brewed in the Apple cauldron to give us more instant distraction, seduce us down the dark, downward spiral of our handheld devices, away from attention to World and the person next to us.

Still fighting with machines and my Macbeths and my own vulnerability to electronic addictions, I’m in a dark mood brooding on an updated soliloquy.

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time.

  And all our yesterdays have screen-lit fools,

  Marching their way to dust-free death.

  Out, out, o screensaver! Life’s but a changing desktop image,

  A poor player, that struts and frets his 15 seconds of fame on the Facebook page.

  And then is heard no more.

  It is tale told by Fox News idiots, full of texts and trivia,

  Signifying nothing.

Have a nice day!

Life on the Tilt-a-Whirl

I enjoy the boardwalk as much as the next person. The thrill of the roller coaster, the view from the ferris wheel, the dizzying speed of the Tilt-a-Whirl. But I can only take so much before I want to steady my feet and sit down on a bench looking out at the ocean.

Life as a perpetual amusement park is as good a description of any as contemporary culture, but this week upped the ante as the stop button on the Tilt-a-Whirl malfunctioned and the two-minute ride keeps going and going. I’m dizzy, nauseous and longing for the pace of my own two feet strolling.

What’s going on? I was punished for my faithful allegiance to my old laptop. It was heavy to carry, slow to work, way behind on software updates and refused to accept certain files, but hey! it mostly did what I needed to do and it worked. Until it didn’t. And then seven years of being content with what I had came back at me with a vengeance. Not only did I literally pay the price of recovering a month’s lost data (no, I don’t back up every day!) and then the price of a new computer, but now I’m being punished further as the simple act of transferring files from the old to the new is complicated by all the old versions of things I was using.

In short, my 1,000 person mailing list on Filemaker Pro 6 cannot be read by the new Filemaker Pro 13 nor be used as it was on my new MacBook Pro. With some help, I got it recovered to Version11 for a 30-day trial and then, that will be $350 for the new version, thank you very much. The new Sibelius is laughing at my Sibelius 3 and it’s not clear yet whether it will ever accept the 100 or so scores I wrote out meticulously note-by-note. The new Pages ap is different enough from Microsoft Word that the instant font conversion that was so effortless as I posted these blogs is now compromised.

And on it goes. The updated Skype format is completely different and harder to navigate (for me), the i-Photo and i-Tunes remain to be seen—or may not be seen, or heard, as the case may be. People in India are huddling around trying to figure out how to download AOL (yes, here again, I remain stubbornly faithful) so I can access my address book. In short, everything I was accustomed to, familiar with, clear how to use and happy with its dependable look, is up in the air, either to land in a new format or require more money or make me re-do hundreds of hours of work. All because I resisted the culture of planned obsolecense. (a word that I know I just misspelled and can’t find the dang Spell check!)

High predictability means low anxiety, low predictability means high anxiety and that’s where I am now. I know as a teacher that the art of a teaching is negotiating the delicate territory between the comforting familiarity of the known with the exciting novelty of the unknown. The ratio has to be just right, familiar enough that the learner feels secure, interesting enough that they’re willing to take the next step into the unknown. But when the unknown requires 20 new steps in different looks and formats, the fun stops.

I know I’m smart enough to finally figure it out (with a little help from my friends and the paid-for Apple Support) and things will settle down and I’ll get used to these new formats (until they change again in six months). But right now I’m not a happy camper. And don’t have time to figure out how to restore this font on the blog to the more friendly size it was. (Well, the guy at the Apple Store showed me one way which required re-doing every paragraph once it's posted. I did it this time, but I need to find another way.)

May I vent just once more about this First-World Problem?

AAAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!

Stations of the (Double) Cross

After a week of rain, a glorious sunshiny day. Perfect for the promised bike ride with wife, daughter and long-time family friend, a chance to pump ourselves to bliss through the beauties of Marin County. Yet just the day before, I fell a victim to the next volley of slings and arrows of outrageous action. So while the sky was bright outside, it was storm clouds all the way in my mind. By the end of the trip, I was restored to a healed heart, but fascinating to see the steps along the way. We all have our cross to bear and our own way to pass through the stations. Here was mine.

Station One: From my house to the Golden Gate Bridge, my mind whirred in its whiny mode. This was the “Why has thou forsaken me?” stage. The way I’m put together, I go into lawyer for my own defense role and list one by one all the transgressions. Survival is the brain's first concern and when putting up shields or pulling out arrows, it's incapable of noticing the eucalyptus trees swaying in the breeze.

Station Two: Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, five police cars were stopped on the other side and policemen were gathered at the rail. I looked across and thought I could see a person crouched on the other side of the rail and indeed, found out later that there was a jumper they were trying to talk down. Strong stuff. And a reminder to self to get out of my own complaint about world and shift the conversation. And so I moved inside from lawyer to philosopher, analyzing the larger issues inside the smaller ones and trying to articulate what was really at the center of the conflict separate from personality.

Station Three: Flying downhill to Sausalito, that devious mind kept falling back to whine mode and needed to be de-railed. So I checked back into my poem memorization project from a couple of months ago to see how much of Shakespeare, Yeats, Frost, Wordsworth, Hopkins and others I could still conjure up. Not all, it turns out, but the trick worked, got the neurons firing in another neighborhood of the brain and one that was helping restore me to the day before me.

Station Four: From Sausalito to Mill Valley, rode side-by-side with my daughter and was finally enough out of my head to engage in conversation. As an adult, she’s one of my favorite people to be around and always interesting to talk to. I was emerging out of my self-enclosed cocoon and starting to butterfly myself into the day.

Station Five: From Mill Valley up to Four Corners was a long steep uphill and now the body took over from the brain, energy shifted to muscles and breath. Then down to Muir Beach, attention on the downward swoop in company with cars— no room for thought and blessedly so.

Station Six: Lunch at the Pelican Inn. Now I was wholly available to enjoy the conversation at the table and savor the tasty (but overpriced) lunch. Afterward, all the fellow bikers gathered on the lawn in the sunshine with their large mugs of beer. That shared pleasure of well-exercised bodies enjoying a moment of rest stretched out in the sunshine on a day that was singing back, “Enjoy! Savor! Partake of the beauties before and around and above and within you!” We were tempted to sit a bit and digest in their company, but the clock was nudging us with its reminder “Two and half hours still to get back. Get a move on!”

Station Seven: More uphill and a narrow-shouldered road above Green Gulch Zen Center and now for the first time, I could attend to World. Notice the morning glories, Indian paintbrush and California poppy wildflowers, the upward swooping purple agapanthus flowers, the green on the hills from the recent rains, the hawks soaring overhead. Out of my chattering head into my attentive mind and opening heart and active body and what a pleasure that was. Resurrection.

P.S. And yet that engine of problem-solving was still chugging beneath it all and I finally got the whole show condensed to one or two simple points that will need addressing. I’m sure you’ll hear about it in a future blog! But for now, my upstairs neighbors are away and a rare chance for me to play piano far into the evening. From Shakespeare and Yeats to Morning Glories and Hawks to Mozart and Monk. It’s a glorious world.

Loss

It started with my Memo book. That little notebook I carry in my front pocket that carries my lists, phone numbers and inspired ideas. Never lost one in 25 years and then I did. But that was just the warm-up. Two days later, the cursor disappeared from my computer. I shut the computer off manually, re-started and got the dreaded flashing question mark. Off to the Apple Store and the bad news— after seven years of faithful service, my hard-drive was failing. One window of hope at a recovery service, where the wheels are in motion to see how much can be saved— including the 30 pages I wrote this week of my new book, backed up exactly nowhere else. If it’s recovered— good news. I won't have to try to recreate inspired sentences that will never be written as they were. If it's recovered— bad news. It’ll cost some $500. And then, of course, the cost of a new computer.

The way our minds work, one loss leads us to the others until we’re deep in the muck of self-pity. The loss of communities I belonged to do that still talk the talk, but the walk they walk is limping and wandering off the mark. All the people who once cared for me that care for me no more. All the people I used to care for whom I find hard to forgive for betrayals, transgressions and disappointments. The loss of a dependable body that wakes up without mysterious aches and pains and chronic spasms in the neck that come from nowhere.  

And so I decided to carry my pity with me on a long walk home from downtown, through Union Square past where Borders once was, where the San Francisco twin sisters used to parade before one passed away, past where Café Mozart used to be, past the Fairmont Hotel outside elevator dormant for 10 years now and up to Grace Cathedral. Walking in a light mist, the world drenched through with impermanence. Sit on a bench and see the doorway of Cathedral School, where I once huddled away from the rain and told someone the story of another great loss in my life.

Down the bench from me, a couple drinking beer while the woman tells a story about Pearl’s Jazz Club, now closed. In one corner, a mother pushing her child on a swing. In another, a man with some apparatus tied to a tree doing exercises. In the middle, people walking their dogs. And off to the right, an elderly Chinese woman dancing to taped Chinese pop music. A combination of Tai Chi and mild Zoomba, feet hopping, hands gracefully circling, arms opening to the heavens, completely unselfconscious, neither dancing for show nor feeling self conscious out in public. I sit and write in my journal, trying to make sense of life’s great questions and breathe myself through to the other side of acceptance and gratitude. The mind knows these losses are small in the big picture, but they work on the same doubts and sadnesses as the bigger ones and therefore are as real and valid.

Meanwhile, the swing still swings, the exercise ropes stretch, the beer gets drunk, my pen keeps scratching across the white pages and this lovely woman keeps dancing dance after dance. If she can do it, well, why can’t I? Dance through these changes, joyful, determined, sending the message to the gods that I’m still moving.

Hopefully to better music.

Serendipity

Here’s the highlight of my day:

I was working on my book while listening to a Brad Mehldau CD. I had just written the sentence, “Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were masters of the variation form, the Japanese artist Hokusai did a series of paintings called ‘36 Views of Mt. Fuji,’ Wallace Stevens wrote a poem titled ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’” And just as I typed that word “Blackbird,” Brad started playing a Beatles’ song called…?  “Blackbird!” Whoah! The timing was amazing!

Proof that there is still magic afoot and a mysterious order in the universe.

Accentuate the Positive

I’ve always had a good nose for what is rotten in the state of Denmark. But lately I’m thinking that it feels equally important to be able to smell what’s sweet over in Iceland. By feeling so deeply what’s wrong with the world, I’ve arrived by a “via negativa” at what might be right. But these insights can only go so far— my sense of what's right has been built class-by-class with children and adults and if critique is essential, then so is affirmation. 

As a writer, head-shaking disappointment and even outrage often lead the charge as I fill the blank page. Having come recently from a set of workshops where I heard the stories about ignorant educational policy, I set off to write my new book as revenge. And that sets a certain tone, as shown in this first draft introduction:

“Common Core. Understanding by Design. Race to the Top. No Child Left Behind.

Brain-based learning. Project Zero. Multiple Intelligences. Emotional Intelligence. Cooperative Learning. Cultural Literacy. National Standards. Portfolio Assessment. Great Books. Math Our Way.

A cursory look at this list of the “latest and greatest in education” from these past few decades reveals the constantly shifting sands of American education. The above policies, theories and practices range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but all share in common the sense of schools unable to find a solid ground that can be depended upon as effective and inspired education theory and practice. Each new idea has a shelf life of one to four years before it is swept away by the next and everyone buckles down to learn the new key words, memorize the new acronyms and buy the new supplementary materials. Hurricane winds bring the next innovation sweeping through the school halls, blowing everything and everyone off their feet yet once again. (Gandhi once said, “I let the winds of all cultures blow freely through my house, but I refuse to be blown off my feet by any of them.”)  The result is teachers who feel disheartened, dispirited and confused, unable to trust their own intuitions and practiced experience and spending far too much of their time jumping through hoops handed down from above. And as soon as they learn the proper moves, new hoops and jumping procedures replace them.”

It’s all true, but is this any way to invite the reader in? I thought of Johnny Mercer’s advice: “You’ve got to accent-uate the positive, e-liminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.” And so I re-wrote as follows:

“Suppose we set up in schools the same social improvements that we are so proud of achieving? Let us feed the children, give them playgrounds, clothing, freedom of speech… These small things will be a beginning, but will not suffice and  to learn what greater remedies are needed, we must study the nature of humanity as revealed in the first years of life. Then we shall know with certainty what is needed.”

                                            Maria Montessori  (p. 83 To Educate the Human Potential)

What is the nature of the child? How does the mind work? What is the role of the heart in learning? If we dig down to the bottom of such questions, we rise up with a clearer understanding of how to teach. We start to organize education around the actual needs of children, start to plan our classes around the kinds of experiences that motivate and inspire, affirm and challenge, actual kids. To be a great teacher starts with a great story about who we are and what we yet might become, a story born from patient observation of children’s nature and an unshakeable allegiance to the child still within us as adults. Once our feet are planted firmly on that solid ground, we’re ready to consider how to proceed, guided in the day-to-day by the north star of what makes children happy, what gives them what they deeply need.

The story that has guided my work with children and adults these past 40 years is that we are luminous beings capable of extraordinary things. with elegant and expressive bodies, compassionate and feeling hearts, dazzling and imaginative minds and soaring spirits. These potentialities are given to us at birth in seed form, awaiting both our own efforts to realize them and our culture’s efforts to encourage and support us in that task. Education is one of the ways a culture nurtures or shuts down, cultivates or lets go to seed, feeds or starves our possibilities. At its best, it fulfills its etymological root by leading out and drawing forth the full range of our promise. When teachers choose the things that help children train their body, open their heart, cultivate their mind and feed their spirit, we are on the right track. When we blindly follow the next trend to sweep through the schools, look at numbers instead of faces, leave the children out of our notions about what schools should be, we are lost.”

You’ll notice I slipped in a little critique in that last sentence! But in general, it feels like a more inviting tone for a book about the details of how to make children happy in school. Comments on my blogs are few and far between, but if you want to encourage me to continue in this direction or convince me to stick with my rotten-Denmark default setting, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Meanwhile, back to work.