The Outdated Teacher

“Schools ain’t what they used to be and they never was, “ quipped Will Rogers and I agree. Canings, lying history textbooks, desks in rows, daily reciting of the Lord’s prayer (the Christian Lord, that is), sanctioned-through-silence bullying, rampant racist homophobic sexist attitudes— from teachers as well as kids— boring, boring and yet again, boring classes. Shall I go on? It’s important to remember how terrible school could be.

But still. Back in the dark ages of education, there were always good teachers and there still are. But are they recognized? Are they seen? Are they valued? Are they allowed to continue to teach in a way that feeds their passion and makes children happy?

A colleague told me of her son entering the teaching profession who was told by administration that he was “too friendly with the students.” And then subsequently fired as a sub without explanation. Is this the beginning of the end? When teachers, young or old, are considered outdated if they don’t march to the beat of the new educational trend as determined by administration or bureaucrats or policy-makers far away from the children in the classroom? Are good teachers outdated?

What are the qualities of the outdated teacher? From the ditto machine to the i-Pad, the outdated teacher will learn whatever technology helps move learning a bit further, but will never make the mistake of imagining that a Smart board will actually make a Smart kid. The outdated teacher will wear her passion for her subject on her sleeve and infect her students with her enthusiasm. She will welcome questions more than answers, feed the students’ natural curiosity, begin sentences with “I wonder…” She will generate and tolerate and welcome the buzz in the room, celebrate the bit of messy chaos real investigation unleashes. Without apology.

The outdated teacher cares for his students and lets them know it. He names the moments the student did something noteworthy, privately while passing in the hall and publicly in front of the group. He will happily play four-square with the kids at recess or swing on the swings next to them or run out to see the colony of ants one has discovered. He will insist on precision and quality thought and neat work, but never at the expense of the inspired idea poorly spelled or the improvised musical passage that faltered for one beat on one note.

Outdated teachers will be grateful beyond measure for outdated administrators who work to preserve their freedom and protect them from the invasive corporations muscling their products and ways of thinking into schools, religious zealots and political pundits pushing their programs through the doors, educational theorists selling their discoveries made in closed-air rooms far away from children, parents armed with lawyers insisting that teachers solve the disasters of their failed parenting. Outdated administrators who visit their teachers' classrooms, can feel the excitement unleashed in the room and comment on it and value it, take time to ask the teachers, “That was marvelous! How do you do that?”

And then there are the outdated students who find the worlds revealed in beautiful writing and imaginative stories more interesting than the latest video game. Who have more fun playing in a puddle and poking around in the bushes than surfing the i-Pad. Who enjoy clowning around with their friends more interesting than sending texts to them five yards away. Who find pleasure in hard work and focused investigation, appreciate the structure of the classroom and are grateful for the efforts of the teacher. Who meet the teacher at the 50-yard line of their collaborative relationship and even sometimes walk further to take yet more responsibility for their own learning. Who keep their curiosity lit and their sense of wonder alive and their determination to discipline themselves toward mastery fired high.

If enough outdated teachers, students and administrators continue their anachronistic ways, then perhaps the outdated will become the new, cool thing and education can rescue itself from its own worst ideas. Just maybe.

The Crocodile's Clock

Last night I dream of my parents sitting together on our old front steps on a warm summer’s night in our old home in New Jersey. This morning awakened to a crow’s caw, the same crow that sang me awake as a child. Time then was a long hot day punctuated by the bells of the Good Humor truck, sitting on those front steps in the firefly-lit evening with my cat Zorro purring on my lap, all of life before me and all of time inside of me. Mortality was actors fake-dying in the cowboys and Indians show on TV (I remember seeing one get up again by mistake!) or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty lying asleep before kissed back awake by the Prince.

It makes no sense whatsoever to keep repeating to myself “64” and to listen to the clock’s ticking like Captain Hook, terrified that the crocodile of time is back again to devour yet another hand and make yet another body part lame or the grand intelligence and nuances of a hand reduced to a hook. But who can stop the flow of thoughts, good, bad or indifferent? I am blessed beyond reason to have lived these long years and still be able to bike up San Francisco hills, get down and get up off the floor with the 3-year olds, dance up and down the keys of piano more gracefully and energetically than I ever have. But like so many of us flawed mortals, I’m imprisoned by the mathematics of mortality and keep locking myself into the cell of mild despair by counting the minutes and listening for the crocodile’s loud ticking.

Friday I taught a marathon day of classes that by any standard should have left me exhausted—6^th grade, 8^th grade, 8^th grade, 5 year olds, 5 year olds, singing time, 4^th grade, 4^th grade, carpool, Jewish Home. Non-stop from 8 am to 5 pm with barely a moment of rest, different ages, different music, different groups with different chemistries—and yet came home uplifted and ready to make dinner and play piano for another two hours. Then up the next morning to teach a six-hour workshop and end the night with a four-hour marathon movie at The Castro Theater, Lawrence of Arabia. There was a young man with boundless energy, carried by a sense of destiny across impossible deserts, escaping death in the midst of war, only to be brought down back in England by two bicycles on the wrong side of the road as he drove his motorcycle over the hill.

My destiny is not so grand or sweeping, nothing anyone will ever make an epic film about, but filled with it’s own majestic and dangerous deserts to cross, it’s own sense of the extraordinary felt in the little victories of small children, it’s own cast of marauding enemies trying to kill the human spirit through ignorant education and my own army of rebels fighting for freedom— the freedom of expression, of imagination, of community gathering and celebration. Not a story that will shake the annals of history, but my story nonetheless, my destiny without doubt. It is my own soul’s answer to the ticking of Captain Hook’s crocodile.

And so I rise on a hot September day, ready to shout encouragement through a megaphone at our school’s annual Walkathon and then ride my bike around the edge of San Francisco and glory in the gift of being alive and damn the clock’s ticking! Peter Pan lives on in me, that small boy in New Jersey awakening to the crow’s caw and eager to jump into the day with all of eternity with me and before me.

Fiddling the Horse's Spirit

Milt Jackson. Stefon Harris. Bobby McFerrin. Keith Terry. Jackie Rago. Andy Narell. Linda Tillery. Eddie Marshall. Marcus Printup. Rova Saxophone Quartet. Fred Newman. Gee's Bend Quilters/ Singers. Baka Pygmies. Tibetan Monks.

These are just some of the illustrious musicians who have come to The San Francisco School over the years to share their talent and genius with the kids. And now we can add one more.

Tuvan throat singers.

Three Tuvan singers and one American, Shawn Quirk, came to school yesterday and rarely have I seen the 100 elementary children who gather daily to sing so completely mesmerized and moved by what they heard and saw. This group, named Alash, is on tour and graciously offered to stop by. (The next day, they’re going to L.A. to teach Lily Tomlin to throat-sing as part of some Netflix show she’s working on!)

If you’ve never heard Tuvan singing, get thee to Youtube and prepare to be amazed. It is one of the highly-developed overtone singing cultures, with refined techniques that allow them to sing more than one note at a time and make melodies with the overtones above the fundamental pitch. These three also played a Tuvan drum, fiddle and banjo-like instrument. For me, one of the highlights of the presentation was getting to sit in with them on my own banjo and have the kids sing Oh Susannah.

When I introduced them to the kids, I said something like this:

Kids, the world is so much larger and wonderful than you would ever find out just watching TV or listening to the radio. There are remarkable cultures out there with incredible music and stories and ways of living that we can learn so much from— or at least be delighted by. There are also remarkable people that will never be famous in our country that have remarkable talents to share. You are so lucky that today you will get to meet some of these people and their culture. Enjoy!

Nomads who live on the plains above Mongolia, the Tuvans depend on and revere horses. When introducing the instruments, Shawn told a beautiful story about the fiddle with a  carved horse’s head. He told of a boy who witnessed the birth of a horse whose mother died. The rich and greedy man in power told the boy to kill the baby horse, but the boy secretly raised him instead. The horse grew to be beautiful and powerful, but the rich man found out and hunted the horse down and forced him off a cliff to his death. The boy, now a young man, grieved deeply over the loss of his horse, but was visited in a dream. The horse told him to go to his body and make a fiddle from his skin and bones and hair and in that way, the horse would sing on in the fiddler’s hand and his spirit live on in the music. So every time the fiddler plays, the people’s connection with horses and the whole miracle of creation and the bounties of the natural world is affirmed and remembered and celebrated. Beautiful.

 Of course, with the kids, I resisted making a comparison to the Republican debates televised to millions where the American public gets to consider such thrilling high-level conversation as “Obama is a Muslim. How can we get rid of him?” Such ignorance, prejudice, disrespect for our national leader, gets big air time while the beautiful story of the Tuvan fiddle only was told to 100 elementary kids at their daily Singing Time. We seem to be celebrating that story’s rich and greedy man in power who sent the horse to his death without remorse instead of the boy who cared for him and kept his spirit alive.

But if the 100 children who heard the right story pass on its spirit, the world just might continue its slow march to healing.

Trump Is Not the Problem

I don’t mind Donald Trump. Well, sure, the guy is low on the evolutionary ladder, not able to climb one inch beyond the third chakra of power toward the fourth chakra of the heart. He lives in the reptilean brain in a perpetual state of fight, unable to access the mammalian layer of care for the young, never mind the neo-cortex of human intelligence.  He is a racist, sexist, classist raving lunatic son-of-a-bitch who would be referred to deep therapy if he were a student at my school. In a time when we need to get serious about our mutual dilemma on this planet, bring all kinds of minds together to understand profoundly that we’re all on the same side in the fight between human survival and catastrophe, his name-calling oppositional politics are dangerous and outdated.

But hey, that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is the crowds that come out to listen and cheer him on. Well, sure, it’s mildly entertaining and no better way to feel powerful for a moment than ride on the coattails of someone’s rant. That’s how Hitler got the crowds coming. But if this is a portrait of the state of American intelligence, emotional and intellectual, we are in deep trouble. Where did those people go to school? What did they learn about fruitful human dialogue, care, compassion, intelligent and respectful debate?

And why does the media give him so much airtime? Well, that’s simple— the media circus more than ever feasts on the carcasses of disaster. Anything that captures people’s attention in a second, that hits that old reptile brain and cranks up fear and goes to the red zone of extreme emotion, is a banquet for them. That’s why no newspaper or magazine has ever once come in over 40 years to report on what happens in my school when children make extraordinary breakthroughs. No one wants to notice me drawing forth a beautiful xylophone solo from a five-year old. But if I smashed the xylophone on the kid’s head, the reporters would be over in a heartbeat. That’s the world we live in.

Imagine this scene. Trump rents out the Astrodome to do his shtick and ten people show up. One reporter with a pencil who writes a small paragraph on the back page of the paper next to the piece about the python who escaped from someone’s home. Wouldn’t that be heartening? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to show the world about the soul of our nation? Wouldn’t he start to lose energy and realize that his zeal for outrage and insult and stupid ideas and hatred has nowhere to go? Wouldn’t that be just desserts? I guess it takes two million to tango and if Americans refuse the dance invitation, he’s left wandering around the dance floor empty-handed.

Personally, I suspect he’s so hyped up on the response he's getting that he’ll keep getting more and more outrageous and finally step over one line too many and the country will wake up. Let us hope. Meanwhile, all you people going to hear him speak—come visit my school instead. I promise I won't smash a xylophone over your head. 

Found Music

Sounds at 3 am

     My neighbor’s snoring

            A distant car horn

                     A lone mosquito

                                                Whap!!!!

       Deep silence