Not Just a Job: Part I— The Call

Well, the big day of my retirement party came and went and mostly it was satisfying. Once again, I felt good to be given time to speak to the school community, past, present and future, about what The San Francisco School meant to be, but still missed the formal and public affirmation about what my presence there for 45 years meant to the community. My colleague Sofia and my daughter did speak to me and following the packed schedule, kept it short and to the point. Both were lovely and I’m deeply appreciative. Yet because it was two years delayed and I was shared the time with two other beloved colleagues, it fell short — and I knew it would— of what we have given other long-time teachers who left. But I truly am happy it happened at all and absolutely loved putting together the 9-minute slide show with soundtrack by Judy Collins singing In My Life— and as I saw face after face of the kids and teachers throughout the 45-year span, I truly could say “In my life, I’ve loved them all.” That set the mood for my 20 minutes talk and though it’s a talk tailored to an audience that mostly knows the people of whom I speak and the experiences to which I refer, I offer it here simply to consider as both a model of what a workplace can be and a vision of what a school can be, to be translated as you like into your own personal situation and experience. Since it’s long, I’ll share it in parts. 

 

Here at the end of the road, it’s a good time to look back to the beginning. That last photo was my teacher Avon Gillespie. I took a class with him my last semester at Antioch College on a new approach to music teaching called Orff Schulwerk, a world that , would become my home in ways I couldn’t have dreamed of back then. After graduating Antioch, I came to San Francisco in the Fall of 1973. I shared a flat with my sister and brother-in-law in the Upper Haight with a lovely view, for $125 a month. Split three ways. With food stamps. Muni was 25 cents. So was an Uncle Gaylord’s ice cream cone.

 

So I had the opportunity so few young people today have. Take a year or two to try things out and see how they fit. I accompanied modern dance classes, started a Renaissance chorus, volunteered teaching music at a school called Rivendell.  It was in that chorus that one of the sopranos talked about a school where she had just been hired to teach art. Her name was Karen Shultz.

 

One rehearsal, she mentioned that a school parent (Carol Kusmierski) had bought 6 Orff instruments for the school and they had hired someone to give six Monday night workshops to the staff to learn how to use them. Since I was teaching what I remembered from Avon’s class, I asked if I could join the workshop and they graciously allowed me to come. The whole first class was the teacher talking about what you could do with kids while we sat in chairs. Never played a note of music, sang a song, played a game. 

 

The second class, he began the same way and mentioned a game and I raised my hand and said, “Can we play it?” He seemed surprised by that idea, but we did. Here’s how it went:

 

“Windy weather, windy weather, When the wind blows…We all come back together!”

 

After we played, we sat down and back to blah blah blah. So the staff fired him and thank goodness he was so incompetent. I offered to give them a workshop the next Monday drawing from my experience with Avon and we had a rollicking good time creating speech pieces and xylophone pieces based on Uncle Gaylord Ice Cream flavors. At the end, a few teachers came up and asked what I was doing next year. I had planned to teach officially at Rivendell, but they offered me a job (before even discussing it with the Board) and the rest is history. 

 

But I soon discovered it wasn’t a job at all. It was a life, a vision, a beckoning finger from the glimmering Muse inviting me into the sacred grove of trees with golden apples. Like many my age in the late 60’s, I was wholly dissatisfied with the world I was being handed and joined the growing movement to create a new one, both for the health of my own soul and the work to heal the soul of the world. Here’s how Yeats describes it: (I recited this instead of reading it):

 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

 

    And so it happened. That glimmering girl invited me in and called me by name. Not “Hey, you!” mind you, but specifically my name knowing that this was the path I was born to follow, the work that used every bit of my strange and quirky way of being in the world, that threaded together each and every separate thread into a coherent multi-colored cloth.

    I knew it was the path with heart, for class after class, child after child, miracle after miracle, that elusive girl— and she was elusive and made me work hard to search for her— would reappear and kiss my lips and take my hands and we’d pick the ripe and delicious fruit. I was called, I was beckoned, I was invited into a love beyond my imagination with a flirtatious look— and I answered the call. I would have answered it anywhere, but I didn’t. I answered here, right here on this sacred ground where I am standing now. Ain't that something!

Halfway to the Waterhole

I once heard a story about a museum in Australia that was displaying Aboriginal Art Work. 

Learning that in Aboriginal culture, a piece of visual art was a story, a map, directions for a choreography walking “the songlines,” they invited the artists to perform their dance for the Exhibit Opening. But being Westerners, everything was organized according to a schedule and each event on the schedule had a time limit. Five minutes for this speaker, two minutes for that one, ten minutes for the dance, etc. 

 

As the dancers began dancing the painting, all was well until the ten minutes projected time limit had expired and the dancers showed no signs of stopping. The museum officials got increasingly nervous and uptight, thinking “It’s running over schedule!” until finally, fifteen minutes in, one of them got up and said to the lead dancer, “I'm sorry, but the time’s up. You have to stop.” The dancer looked back incredulously and exclaimed, “Stop? But we're only halfway to the waterhole!!”

 

And there you have it. Life run by ticking clocks and life run by Spirit time, when something is over when it’s over. My grandson Malik, at 6 years old, has been craving a watch and this last visit, we bought him one and he became the group timekeeper. It’s charming and cute, but with this story in mind, part of me thinks, “What have we done?”

 

I remember on one of the many memorable school camping trips a perfect day, when the teachers and kids went from one activity to another entirely based on when it felt time for each. We checked in with each other after hiking a while— “Good time for a rest?” Hiked some more. “Are we feeling hungry?” Lolling around post-lunch digesting and then, “Ready for a softball game?” Played for a while and then the group agreement, “I think one more inning is enough. It’s getting hot— let’s go down to the creek after that.” And then after some time at the creek, “Feels like time to return to camp.” It was such a rare day, when the rhythms of our bodies and our attention spans and our needs dictated the timing rather than the tick-tick-ticking of the watch.

 

This is on my mind as I prepare for my retirement party this Saturday. 45 years of service and I’m granted 45 minutes to publicly reflect and share that experience. So I’m putting together the slide show and trying out 2 seconds per slide instead of 3, but feeling it’s not the right rhythm. I’m sitting with a stopwatch timing my speech and wondering if I have to rush through sentences that deserve some space between them. I'm timing my little solo piano piece and wondering if I need to increase the tempo. The event is supposed to end at 4:00 pm and I’m the last in the three hour event (two other teachers honored before me). What should feel like Spirit time away from the clock, following the contours of the moment's artistic and ceremonial need,  has me already uptight if —God forbid!— things start to run late and I have to stop before I reach the waterhole.

 

Believe me, I understand the value of time limits and have gotten much, much better at honoring them. But for this particular occasion, I would wish us to lean toward the Aboriginal perspective and let me get all the way to those cool, refreshing waters. Wish me luck!

  

Leaving Gilligan's Island

 When I was a teenager experiencing adolescent angst, I was trying out my coping strategies. One was to escape into daily reruns of Gilligan's Island and McHale’s Navy.  Gave me some respite and that’s not to be entirely dismissed. But hardly a healing practice.

 

Another was to go deep into it by memorizing all the words to Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row. That was a bit better, owning the feeling, staying with it, feeling it expressed artistically and even secretly relishing my posture as the disaffected youth. (The other day, I listened to it again and could remember all the words in this 13-minute song!).

 

But my trustiest friend during this period was Thoreau’s Walden, a book that helped lift me out of the human world of emotion into a larger realm of plants and animals that didn’t whine about their condition and seemed to be wholly at home in their own selves and wholly a part of something larger. I took his advice to notice, to praise, to connect with the natural world by walking through the woods at nearby Watchung Reservation. I remember one day taking a walk to Surprise Lake there and sitting watching the water and feeling the self-obsessed human worries start to dissolve and float away— a surprise indeed! Walking the path back to my car, I remember a new lightness in my step and smile on my face and as I passed people going the other way, I greeted them with a knowing grin. I felt like I simply had to share the good news that there is more than we think out there (and in here) awaiting us. (I’m sure the Missionary mentality began with a religious awakening or insight that sincerely desired to share it with others before it devolved into a tool for colonial oppression and intolerance of other ways of awakening.)

 

And so yesterday, after a most delightful day subbing, yet again teaching music to kindergarten, 2^nd and 4^th graders, I was so overcome by the delight and the happiness of each class that I felt the need to share it. (Indeed, these entire eleven years of blog-posting is nothing but that desire to share in action.) I was poised to sit down and describe each glorious detail, with special attention to two particularly inspired 4^th grade classes. 

 

But it’s a bit like describing the great meal you just ate. You can give a distant taste of it, but in the end, you just had to be there. 

At any rate, I'm happy to report that I've come a long way from Gilligan's Island and Desolation Row. 

The Imperfect Lesson

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.    

-      Leonard Cohen: Anthem

 

Everything I value about my work as an educator came from this simple fact:

 

I was a kid who hated school and became a teacher. 

 

Meaning I was determined to find a better way to do this. Recognizing that children gathering each day for twelve to twenty years is an extraordinary opportunity,  I took seriously the thought that there’s not a minute to waste. Any moment in a class that is not playful, not deadly serious, not an opportunity to discover something worthy about the world, about ourselves and about each other, is squandering the beautiful possibilities life and learning offer us. 

 

I walked with a seasoned teacher colleague the other day and she was lamenting that the young teachers she was mentoring had to spend so much time filling out forms. Those lists made up by people in offices who haven’t sat on the floor with actual children in circle time for a long time. And some never. They preach the adult fantasy of the perfect lesson that has little to do with how children actually are and why teachers chose to teach. Good teaching is an arrival at grace through the doors of failures. Now it has become a carnival shooting gallery, all the checkpoints of clearly stated objectives, social-emotional bullet points, differentiated education strategies, culturally responsive curriculums and such lined up to be shot down to win the kewpie doll. Aiming for the perfect score, there’s no place for the light to enter.

 

The whole glory of awakening young souls to beauty and wonder and possibility, the whole messy and artful craft of inviting delicate whispers and exuberant shouts into the venture, the deep necessity of a mentor watching the teacher and their posture and gesture and voice and attention and connection and exuberance and passion and love, the need for the teacher to watch for the same in the student, is now reduced to ticking off pre-packaged standards that can be discussed in a bland voice and collated by computers. Young teachers are handed coloring books and told to stay inside the lines. Like people walking through an exquisite forest with their heads buried in their phones, teachers are missing what’s important and administrators are hell-bent on requiring them to do so. 

 

Real teaching, like cooking and jazz, is an art form, not a Google form. It is a dance, a conversation, an improvisation, a sensitively attuned call and response, a playful exploration and experimentation. No two classes are alike. 

 

Like all worthy ventures, it is at its best when love enters the picture. The ancient Greeks knew Eros as a fundamental agent in the formation of the world, using the uniting power of love to bring order and harmony among the conflicting elements of Chaos. We all could use more order and harmony, less chaos in an increasingly tumultuous world. Let us start with the children. If we are to hold them captive for all their years of schooling, let’s keep their wonder alive, feed their curiosity, bequeath them tools for expression of beauty. Let the teachers teach from the depths of their love and passion, ring the musical bells the children need to hear and let the light shine through the cracks. 

Life Is Hard

On my granddaughter’s last night visiting, she was lying on the floor while I cleaned the kitchen and said, “Pop-pop, why is life so hard?” Without missing a beat, I quoted Ramakrishna: “To thicken the plot.” Then added, “When life is hard, it’s calling on us to be stronger and to dig deeper for our happiness.” Someone else came into the room and that was the end of our exchange.

 

The next day, I felt abashed that I had gone right to trying to answer her question, putting on my teacher hat and my fix-it coveralls instead of the obvious more proper response: “Why do you ask? What feels hard for you right now?” And then just listen. 

 

During the week, I imagined all the things that she might be thinking of. We had just seen the Oscars, so maybe she was reacting to the now infamous slap. Or perhaps she was thinking about all the suffering in Ukraine or what lies ahead for her as a mixed-race child or simply the confusion of hitting puberty at 10-years old with the hormones starting to invade the body. Plenty of choices.

 

So when we had our weekly Portland-SF phone call this morning, I apologized for not asking her what was on her mind and asked if she could tell me now. She thought about it for a minute and then revealed the truth:

 

I just don’t like to brush my teeth at night. 

 

PS For the record, I sympathize. I tend to turn toward the bedroom when I’m tired and brushing my teeth always feels like another hurdle in the day that I don’t feel like leaping over at that moment. (But I always do. Dental floss, too!) 

Pie-Eating and Pole-Vaulting

 

Isn’t is curious the little things we remember? Out of thousands of conversations and experiences in our lives, some rise to the surface of memory and announce themselves as significant. Why? Perhaps these are the bread crumbs our invisible Soul twin leaves for us to find the path to ourselves. 

 

Sometime around 4^th or 5^th grade, I entered a pie-eating contest in a summer camp hosted by my gym teacher, Mr. Salcito. Such an absurd event, but I won it and when I went to claim the promised prize, Mr. Salcito couldn’t find it and said he’s give it to me later. He never did.

 

In my senior year in high school, I had a glorious moment sailing over a high bar and breaking the school’s pole vault record. Every day at lunch, the Headmaster would announce the sports victories and losses and pay special attention if anyone broke a record. I was not on the best terms with the school administration, as I was just beginning to flex my social protest muscles. Nevertheless, I looked forward to a moment of recognition I had earned. It never came. He simply said nothing about it and never corrected his mistake or apologized.

 

Now one reading of these two stories is that I’m a bitter old man disappointed in the world because of two trivial incidents that I  just can’t let go. “Build a bridge and get over it!” would be the appropriate advice and I agree.

 

But from another point of view, perhaps this set me off in the direction of public acknowledgment of worthy achievements, be it breaking a sports record or winning the Cookie Jar contest. As an antidote to my trivial disappointment, I created a ceremonial calendar at school that gave space and attention to such public celebrations. I gave daily shout-outs, encouragement and acknowledgments to the kids in my classes when they did something noteworthy, be it a lovely glockenspiel solo, a dynamic dance move, a soulful moment singing or selfless helping their neighbor learn their part. Knowing that we all long to be seen and known, I promised myself— at first, intuitively, without speaking it out loud—that I would praise children, privately and publicly. Not in a random meaningless “You’re awesome! I love you!” style, but sincere praise that comes from noticing something they said or did that revealed yet another facet of their genius and beauty, that they added something to the community that we needed and appreciated. 

 

So Mr. Salcito and Mr. Atwater, I’ve long forgiven you and indeed, thank you for the way those tiny moments of neglect set me off on a worthy path. But hey, if you want to send me that prize, let me know and I’ll give you my address. 

 

Why Trees

A fellow music teacher retiree is cleaning out her filing cabinets and sent me an old program she found. It was the notes to the 1993 Holiday Shows I put on with partners-in-delight Sue Walton and James Harding, titled In Celebration of Trees.  Five stories, mostly folk tales or myths, one for each grade between 1^stand 5^th. One from Japan, one from New Zealand, one from ancient Egypt, one from the West Indies and the overarching story from a book called The Solstice Evergreen, looking at the origins behind the Christmas tree. 

 

In yesterday’s blog post, I referenced a trip to Muir Woods in the company of the majestic redwoods and praised the power of being in the company of trees. So it was interesting to read my thoughts on the subject from 29 years ago. Predictably, not much has changed in the way I think and the way the world thinks and the large gap between them. Here’s an excerpt from those notes, written for the parents attending the program:

 

Why trees. Each day at carpool, I notice the children climbing the arroyo willow tree by the back gate. They intuitively understand the power of trees, the joy of climbing and getting a different view of the world. I think of Theodore Roszak’s book The Voice of the Earth, where he takes modern therapy to task for dealing solely within the context of “ the private life of the patient treated as the self-contained story of an autonomous individual.” He asks for an ecopsychology perspective which “holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well- being,” suggesting that climbing trees may be as relevant to our healing as analyzing our dysfunctional family relationships. 

 

Driving to and from the theater, I listen to the ads on the radio about interactive TV, as gleeful participants express the thrill they get from getting a response from a machine. I think of the Native American who talked about how his great grandfather could feel the tree-thought of his fellow rooted- and- branched companions and I feel the great distance between these two worlds. We spend so much effort attempting to re-create natural processes artificially that we often forget the beauty of Creation. We are amused, but we are not connected. Roszak’s question asks itself again: “Where do we turn to find a standard of sanity that comprehends our environmental condition?” 

 

In a brief flight of fantasy, I imagine the energy spent convincing consumers to buy the next electronic gizmo turning to planting trees. The time spent interacting with machines turned to walking amongst trees. I imagine the old images of dancers circling around a tree coming to life in regular community events. How simple a step towards our collective sanity. To turn down the volume and listen to what is to be heard, to pause in our dizzying motion and feel our roots sink into the moist earth. To finally heed Thoreau’s advice:

 

“Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least.”

 

Enjoy the show!