Beyond School

I get a good number of emails from people asking me to plug their book, blog, project, etc, and normally I just delete them (okay, I save the doozies like, “I’d like to give you the opportunity to let me guest-post on your blog” for laughs on blue days).

But this one was hard to delete:

Hi. My name’s Joe Solomon & I’m a blogger and social media consultant for nonprofits (EngageJoe.com). I’m currently helping to spearhead Social Actions Labs (a grant funded, not-for-profit initiative) – where we’re building web applications that help people connect to actionable opportunities across the web.

More specifically, we’re about to launch a revolutionary DonorsChoose.org Wordpress Plugin. You know the WP feature - “Possibly Related Blog Posts”? Imagine “Possibly Related Classroom Projects.” Our plugin will match relevant classroom projects from the DonorsChoose database of 10,000+ projects – and enable you to share them with your readers below your posts.

As a leading education blogger who uses the Wordpress platform, would you be interested in test-driving this Plug-in? We would really appreciate your feedback and are eager to share your blog as one of the first to raise awareness for DonorsChoose projects using this new technology.

We set up a campaign on ThePoint – It would be awesome if you could pledge to test out the plug-in upon launch.

We think this could be *huge* and I hope you’ll make the pledge and help raise awareness of classroom projects that need help across the US.

I checked it out, expressed tentative interest, and then Joe sent me a screenshot of how the plugin would generate causes based on a McCain post I did recently.  Check out the “oops” factor:

Hi Joe,

It’s an interesting idea. I looked at the screenshot, and blast the luck, saw that I would be promoting Abstinence Education donation requests with that post you sampled.

That’s a red flag. Is there a way I can delete any causes for which I’m unsupportive? If so, I’m willing to play.

(Regular readers might remember my Friday Funny post about Abstinence-Only Sex “Education,” and its hilarious tendency to make sodomites of our virginity-obsessed teens - and let’s not even start to talk about the creepiness factor in the incest-tinged “Purity Balls” - no pun intended - these smarmy dads take their daughters to, complete with Hymen Pledges and other whacked insanities. So, um, support Abstinence-Only? Over my dead body.)

But Joe replied:

Hah.  Yes, our algorithm still needs some tweaking.  Many posts we’ve tested have had impressively spot-on results –  from political posts that then recommend projects that help students develop critical thinking skill for the election — to a post about Steve Jobs bout with cancer that then recommends classroom projects that cover the tough issues surrounding cancer.

Currently, though, our developer has added a feature that lets you add “%NORELATED%” and this will remove the classroom projects from your post. [emphasis added]

I hope this answers your question…

It did.

So, without further ado, I’m happy to help classroom projects find funding by matching donors and causes with this plugin. Check this bottom of this post to see how it works.

Oh. My. God. With all the scandalous words on this post, we might get some whacked results. But it’ll be an interesting experiment, and I should be able to delete the links if I don’t like them. We’ll see.

(And for the record, Joe allayed my reservations about any profit motive on his part with this info:

I totally understand about the making money.  Social Actions is a not-for-profit initiative and DonorsChoose.org (which supports this project) is a non-profit as well.  Check out my website to learn more about my work — engagejoe.com.

Finally, the method of using The Point website to encourage the “Collective Action” that Shirky mentions (and many of us have discovered) is so difficult is worth noting itself.  The idea is, you announce a cause campaign there, invite people to commit, and promise not to launch this campaign until X number of people do commit, giving you a “tipping point.”  (I notice Alan Levine of CogDogBlog is the only other e’blogger I know who’s also supporting this particular campaign.)

For more info about the plugin, this is from the WP Plugin page:

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” enables you to share relevant classroom projects from DonorsChoose.org based on the content of your posts.

DonorsChoose.org is where teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn and succeed. Anyone can then choose projects to help bring to life. DonorsChoose.org usually has over 14,000 active proposals.

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” makes it super easy to connect your readers to relevant classroom projects in need of help.

You’ll be amazed at the relevancy of many of these classroom projects to your posts (as well as the awesome and imaginative projects that are happening in classrooms around the US).

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” is a project of Social Actions Labs.

For more info about the WordPress plugin, please see our project page.

For more info. about DonorsChoose.org, please see their Help section.

Okay. I promised, I waited, I tipped. I hope some of you will consider joining the cause.

(Now let’s see if any kinky links turn up about hymens, sodomites, or other whacked “classroom projects.” :P)

Dates: 1996-98
Surface Culture: Arabs as ‘the Enemy’
Deep Culture: Language; Culture; Religion; Society; Values; Proxemics; Diet
Knowledge Bases for Diversity: Foundations of Racism; Socio-cultural Contexts

Salaam Alaykum: Peace be with You

I graduated with a B.A. in (Eurocentric) Humanities in 1996. Though a liberal secular humanist at heart, I had experienced increasing disenchantment in my final university years with the radical, theory-based dogmatism (for so it seemed to me) of my very left-wing academy: besides the aversively confrontational, shrill, divisive, and often uncivil tactics used by the radical community, I also harbored skepticism toward the theoretical basis of the ‘knowledge’ I was taught by an overwhelmingly white, middle class, existentially sheltered faculty. I wanted direct experience of life as a standard of comparison with the theories dominating my education. I was particularly alienated by the academic attack on the traditional literary canon, which I had devotedly studied and treasured for the prior fifteen years (an unwitting subject of/to the traditionalist philosophy of curriculum). Suddenly this new breed of professors seemed determined to demote Homer and Shakespeare and all my other heroes to politically suspect or simply irrelevant authors. I was so aghast at the prospect of becoming a professor who loved this canon among an intellectual community that didn’t that I abandoned my plans to earn my doctorate in literature and become a professor.

I was also nagged by a feeling of educational incompleteness owing to my lack of a second language, of knowledge of any non-EuroAmerican history and culture, and of direct experience living outside the United States. Finally, being shouldered with over $30,000 debt in the form of college loans, I saw a future of economic insecurity—as a joke at the time had it,

I have a liberal arts degree…will that be for here or to go?

Lo and behold, I stumbled across a solution to all these nagging misgivings in the unlikely form of an army veteran who told me of the possibility of becoming a linguist in Military Intelligence. If I passed the linguistic aptitude test and the security background check, I could be sent to full-time language school in Monterey, California, then stationed in Europe or Asia, have my student loans paid off by the army, and have the direct experience of the most academically demonized institution in the United States. I would be able to climb into the belly of the beast only theoretically known by my professors and fellow-student ideologues. That experience would round out my formal education with an existential reality-check. (The prospect of experiencing military life itself was to me, with my romantic infatuation with Homeric epic, not unappealing at all. I saw it as an opportunity to compare the modern military ethos with that of Homer’s ‘Heroic Age.’ It was an anthropological opportunity to experience that very foreign culture we call the U.S. Military.) My academic friends and most of my professors thought I was either crazy or immoral or both, but I trusted the Clinton administration not to compromise my morality—and anyway, I reasoned, in a worst-case scenario, I could always disobey orders. I only hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Three months later I had finished basic training (aka “Boot Camp,” which strictly should only refer to Marine Corps basic training, if I recall correctly), and my shaven-headed self was beginning his 64-week, full-time study of al-FusHa (fus-ha)– Modern Standard Arabic. My instructors were all native Arabs from diverse Arab nations, and they all had stories to tell. They also were walking cultural artifacts themselves, representing the civilization that produced them. Overall I found them intensely likable and fascinating.

Studying the language itself was a labor of love. Arabic is a largely ‘pure’ language, uncorrupted by loan-words and structures from other language families. Consequently, the language is itself an artifact of its ancient origins in the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian interior. The desert environment in which the language was born is literally perceptible in the language itself. The Arabic word for mustache, for example, shariban, is based on the verb “to drink” and given the dual suffix “-an”. In other words, the meaning of “two drinks” is embedded in the noun. The function of the “two-sided” mustache as a collector of water to “drink” (by sucking on it when thirsty) points to the presence of the harsh Bedouin life of nomadic travel across the parched deserts of the Rubb al-Khali, the “Empty Quarter,” from oasis to oasis. Similar  examples abound, to be discovered by the student of Arabic.

The irony of this experience is that I was being taught this language implicitly as the language of ‘the enemy.’ Yet the unintended consequence of introducing me to my Arabic professors and the beauties of Arabic language, history, and culture - its propensity, shared with the USA, to attribute the creation of the universe to a mythic superhero who “wrote” three conflicting and conflict-causing books several millennia ago notwithstanding - was to convert me into a person who greatly (yet in certain instances critically) respects, sympathizes with, and reveres ‘the enemy.’ ¹

Pedagogically this experience is relevant in many respects. Our Anglophile tendency to glorify the richness of the English language, while justifiable, should not blind us to the probable glories in other languages. Students of all cultures should have the opportunity to share their pride in their language with non-speakers of it, and to learn about other languages from those who speak them. On a more humanitarian level, the most important thing we as educators can do today is counter any national propaganda that tries to dehumanize ‘enemy’ nations with direct encounters with people from those nations. The best way to convert an enemy to a fellow human being is to give him or her a name and a story.

—

¹Learning the history of that “enemy” since those days, from the Crusades to the Imperial politics of of Palestine and the birth of Israel in the WW I and WW II eras, and of the Cold War politics after that (especially concerning Iran which, while not Arab is still a Muslim Middle Eastern nation: the USA and Britain overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953 to impose the brutal Shah as a puppet serving the interests of Western oil corporations, which led to the anti-American Islamist Revolution under the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, and leads today to the Bush/Cheney administration’s eagerness to again topple an Iranian government for geopolitical advantage) — all of that has only increased my understanding that the Arab resentment against the West has deeply justified historical roots.  Here’s a nice little video lesson on that Iranian story, which all Arabs and Iranians haven’t forgotten, though most Americans (if they ever knew it at all) have:

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Photo credits: Soldier in Al-Anbar, Iraq by Jayel Aheram; Arabic Calligraphy by twocentsworth

___

The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The College Years, pt. 2

(or, The Marlene Dietrich School of Human Relations)

Artifact: Ear Plugs
Date: Early 1990’s-Present
Elements of Culture: Kinesics and Interpersonal Relationships; Proxemics; Values

Commentary:

I thought, therefore I smoked. (Not me in photo.)

During my final years in college I went into study overdrive. The printed page accompanied me everywhere. I usually studied at a coffee-house near my university that was always packed with other students, often friends or acquaintances, who would usually sit around a table in loudly talkative groups. I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t want to join them. I didn’t want them to join me and interrupt my reading. So I took to wearing earplugs so I could study. They were my salvation.

People would see me in the courtyard and approach to say hello, and rather than say, “Sorry, I’d rather read,” I could simply point to my earplugs to give them the message. I could obliterate social invitations from other groups sitting at nearby tables who addressed me by simply pretending that my earplugs prevented me from hearing them. Within a month or so, my earplugs had succeeded in communicating to one and all that I preferred my books to their company. People no longer approached, groups no longer tried to include me. I was happy.

I was happy. I know this sounds sick and truly could be argued so. They were my generation, my fellow human beings, and I rejected them all for the sake of the printed page. How could I be happy?

It mostly had to do with a radical disconnect with the culture of my generation. I had roamed the centuries of thought and music, explored the decades of film for so many years that I was no longer interested in the popular culture of my generation. I had become, in other words, an incredibly elitist snob inadvertently—I hadn’t intentionally set out to find my generation’s tastes distasteful and lose all cultural connection with them. That was just the centrifugal effect of a life of study: extensive exploration of art and print across time and space had simply flung me from the dominant aesthetic culture of this year’s hits.

Of course there were other students similarly orbiting far from the solar system of alternative rock, tattoos and piercings (we’re talking the grunge ’90s in the Pacific Northwest here), living writers and artists, and newly released films. But their centrifugal paths had taken them in other directions: even though they may have drifted the same distances as I had from today’s tastes and values, every mile from the center they and I traveled only increased our mutual separation. Picture individual sunbeams shooting off from the sun: the farther they travel, the more separate they are from each other and their common origin.

I was an extreme case of what print literacy and knowledge-based values can do to an individual. Physically I could join individual friends and family, but not culturally. I couldn’t go home again. I was an atom.

Pedagogically, I had reached this state in part due to an education that valued knowledge and rational thought over emotion and human relations. At the university level, the career track for future Ph.D.s promotes this centrifugality and its resultant cultural atomism: scholars are encouraged to find an uninhabited niche in the ivory tower, and to furnish it by themselves.

The competitive nature of university success also encourages academic personalities that are scripted to define success as knowing more than the rest. This is to me in sadly ironic contrast to the expectation I think most novice scholars have of the fruits of their intellectual labors. I know I, as a freshman, pictured the friendly and passionate exchange of ideas in an intellectual community, which was the norm in that early stage of survey courses, as only becoming richer and more communal as I rose up the ranks. But hitting graduate level was like reaching Oz: behind that august curtain of rich expectation, I discovered people who as a rule seemed isolated and fearful of being exposed as less than omniscient. Would more group-work and constructivist team projects in the academy have produced these results? (And of course, there are exceptions to this stereotype, bless them.)

—

Photos: Smoker by RO-BOT.  Iranian statue by salehoffline.

—

*The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1

*

In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males

Artifact: Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Dates: 1980-present

I escaped high school and the American South the summer after I graduated. I arrived in Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus, educated in comic books, Tolkein and Frank Herbert, album-oriented rock music, the Ten Best Reasons to Escape the South, and the effects of a few popular recreational drugs. I also had the high school diploma I’d earned by not quitting school. I’d never seen a big city before. I’d never even been out of the South.

It took me a year to settle into Los Angeles enough to enter college. Midway through my first year I left class one day and didn’t go back. I don’t remember why, though I’m sure life got in the way somehow. So much for higher education.

My education in the literary classics actually began, true to pattern, outside of school. Beth, a girl in my apartment complex, was infatuated with an English grad student who to me seemed pretty infatuated with himself, judging by the reading list he gave her. Next to his entry on the list of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” he had written some cryptic note to the effect that if Beth understood this story, she would understand him. She thought he was so important that she asked me to read the recommended books with her. Maybe I would help her unlock the mystery of this sage’s being.

I didn’t have anything better to do. Looking back, though, it’s hard to imagine Hemingway as a grad student.

Anyway, first on the list was Kerouac’s On the Road. This was fateful for me–fateful. I read it in complete, unguided isolation. Beth was too star-struck to read anything on this list critically, and all I knew, equally uncritically, was that I was reading a classic, I was reading Literature—and classic literature meant wisdom to me, and wisdom meant truth. So my first taste of truth and wisdom came from the seductive pen of this drug-addled hedonist’s glorification of the great speed-freak Neal Cassidy, as the two of them hitch-hiked across America seeking alternately mystical or sexual kicks. I bought it. Soon I was dressing like a French Beatnik unstuck in time, and writing narcissistic free verse poetry bad enough to make the angels weep.

I shared Kerouac with John, an L.A. surfer dude I worked with who had never read anything. But he enjoyed my influence (and I his), and off we went. We devoured the Beats that year and, as soon as I wrote his final junior college essay for him and he was out of school for the summer, we strapped on backpacks and hitch-hiked across America. And back. (It was the first of many such summer trips that decade, usually alone.)

Hitch-hiking didn’t work so well in the Yuppie ‘80s as it did in the post-War Beat ‘50s. The first day out of Los Angeles, we covered about 100 miles to the Mojave Desert, where we spent the next two days stranded on the side of the highway under the desert sun, sunburnt and sandy-eyed, watching hundreds of cars pass us with no interest at all. We were Beat alright. We split up at that point and crossed the rest of the country solo to meet on the other side. I was amazed at how many male drivers of blue and white collar backgrounds—husbands and fathers as a rule: a Mormon preacher in Utah, a real estate executive in Omaha, hard-hatted tobacco-spitting construction worker in Kentucy, truck-drivers from Nowhere and Everywhere—took me as a safe opportunity to slip out of the closet and suggest a little sex of one sort or another. Kerouac never wrote about that. Luckily, in the end they were all gentlemen who took no for an answer. (I was especially glad this was true of the rodeo cowboy in Colorado who wrestled bulls and broncos for a living. At 6’5” or so of steel-framed beef, he could have lifted me over his head and snapped me in two if he’d wanted to. Instead, he began sobbing, apologized for any offense, and told me that he would be rope-tied and castrated by the other cowboys if they ever found out. I wonder how many cowboys would actually have embraced him instead.)

At any rate, two or three years went by delving deeper into classic Beat wisdom. John and I starting smoking cigarettes as a stamp of culture. We were bona fide existentialists. We started reading different stuff—introductions to Buddhism, Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and such. Each book was wise and right and we had no doubt about it. We were young enough (only 20) to know that we knew everything.

At about that time, I sat one night in a Ship’s coffee shop (the closest thing to an intellectual French cafe L.A. had to offer at the time),  chain-smoking with a bottomless fifty-cent cup of coffee, and improving myself through literature by reading, I believe, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In walked a striking young African-American man (who turned out to be a fashion model, the son of a famous singer from the Jazz Age, and brother of another famous R&B female vocalist), who noticed me reading and struck up a conversation.

“No, no, no,” he said, “you’ve got it all wrong. Why are you reading all this 20th Century crap when you could be reading Homer and Shakespeare, the Bible and Spenser and Milton?”

“Tell me more,” I said. And he did. And did. And did. For several months he did. (He finally dismissed me to find a pupil who wasn’t straight, essentially.) He gave me a copy of Homer’s epics and we discussed them (rather, he talked and I listened). He gave me Plato, which was such a revelation and a joy that I took immediate action to create the maximum free time to study his works. I moved out of my apartment and into my beat old VW bus—it had a comfy bed in back and good closets and sound system—and I reduced my schedule at the restaurant I worked at to provide just enough money for gas, food, coffee shops, two types of smokes, and the complete works of Plato (plus savings for the next summer’s hitchhiking). My Beatnik influence was powerful enough to sanction this unconventional move. I parked on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu every night and read, and woke in the morning to emerge from my van onto the literal sands of my prime beachfront property. (It really wasn’t bad–I had a cooler and a beach chair. What more did I need?) I got through the complete works and left hazy marginalia on every page. I had a couple of mystical experiences becoming one with Plato’s forms.

My elitist mentor/suitor also gave me Beethoven symphonies, Mahler, Wagner (“Why are you listening to that modern, plebeian rock crap?” my mentor said. “Really, Clay.” He literally clucked as he shook his head). I sponged them up, and passed them on to John (who lived with his parents but often spent the night parked next to me in his own van). We discovered that Beethoven and Mahler - good god, Mahler! - were gods. We listened to them on the beach with double headphones in one Walkman. The finales would crank us up so much we’d normally run into the surf and clash like sumo wrestlers. We couldn’t imagine how our culture had cheated us of these treasures all our lives, and given us Ozzie Osborne instead. We pretty much abandoned rock and pop at that point, and I’ve never been able to get into it again since–though Jazz has long since eclipsed classical for me.

The awareness dawned on John and me that, if literature roughly began with Homer around the 7th Century BCE, we should be able to start there and just read right through until we reached our time period (thank god for the ‘Dark Ages’). So we tried it. It wasn’t easy, of course. It was impossible. We finally surrendered and admitted that we needed a framework and an experienced guide to give us context and titles so we’d get ‘the’ ‘whole picture.’ This gave us a reason to go to college. John changed his mind and decided to travel around the world that year, but I had no savings so I couldn’t join him. I went back to college alone.

I loved it. I finally had that love of literature—not just comics and science fiction anymore. It made me want to study literature and want to write about it. (It is worth repeating that it was not the university but rather reading as a shared social act that made me value the classics.) I loved meeting students who also wanted to study literature, who were there voluntarily like me. We did little else but read, talk, write, and dream literature. We were all still goofy young boneheads, sure, mistaking traditional authority for truth and beauty, but by god it often was at least profound, and as often stunningly beautiful.

I took a Survey of Western Philosophy course under a woman of mystical bent who led us from the Pre-Socratics to Kant over a full year. She was hip, smart, enthusiastic, and beautiful. When she assigned papers on these philosophers, we all leapt to the task because we saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of the internal argument of the philosopher. We were proud to be able to demonstrate this because I think we were all surprised that middle-class students like us could ‘get’ this stuff. Never mind that one week I fully agreed with Thales that motion and change didn’t exist—I remember riding my bike home from school one day convinced that everything was an illusion and all was a changeless monistic One, so my getting hit by a truck was not really my getting hit by a truck—and the next week agreed with Heraclitus that we can’t step into the same river twice and all was flux. Never mind that Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s materialism were both true. Let Augustine prove God’s existence and Nietzsche announce His death.

The redemptive fact in this comedy of confusion is that we boneheads were unconsciously preparing for the moment when all these contradictions would impress themselves on us consciously, and we would recognize the historicity of all human knowledge and values. I am so thankful that this professor didn’t do what later, and to me misguided, professors did: introduce these texts as tools of oppression to be mistrusted and opposed. Instead, she let us suckle these creeds outworn and search for truth through them, trusting all the while, I suspect, that their collective incoherence would speak for itself eventually, and we would reach that conclusion ourselves through experience.

John came back from the world the next summer and we took a ride in my van so I could fill him in on the history of Western philosophy. That fall he enrolled in college as a philosophy major. Again we were off.

Eventually we both transferred to the University of Oregon. I loved too many subjects to consider abandoning any of them, so I declared Interdisciplinary Arts and Letters as my major. The first year in the program required survey courses in at least four disciplines, all chronologically taught. This meant that all five of my classes in term one were devoted to Greece and Rome from different angles (eg, literature, philosophy, history, art, religion); the next term treated the Middle Ages in the same interdisciplinary way; and the final term surveyed the Renaissance to the Modern Age. I had found that framework for ‘the’ big picture I was looking for. (At the end of Term 1, I wanted to be first a Classicist, then a monk after Term 2, and finally a Marxist revolutionary by the end of that year.)

I didn’t realize it then, but the curriculum at the time was embattled by feminists, Marxists, traditionalists, and post-Structuralists. I’m glad it was a hidden battle, because the inclusion of Other perspectives in our canon—primarily Marxist and women thinkers and artists—was not surrounded by controversy. Instead, we students experienced that inclusion as natural.

By the time I took my upper division classes, however, the tone changed radically (literally). Ideologues of every sort in the most extreme cases unapologetically bashed the works we had earlier studied with the categorical baseball bat for “Dead White Males.” This type of generalization was unspeakably thoughtless to me: were Oscar Wilde’s homo-eroticism, Defoe’s feminism, Blake’s liberalism, Nietzsche’s ecstatic critique of Christian history and metaphysics all to be tossed because of their sires’ gender? Were the wisdoms of only late-20th century far left thinkers to be studied, when their knowledge too is historically constructed and determined? (Wasn’t I still smoking because of the classic modern wisdom of the Beats and Camus and Sartre?) Was indignation to be the only respectable motive for research and exploration? Was all of that pleasure of the mind I’d so come to love from my earlier studies suddenly invalid and unwelcome? Couldn’t I do good simply by being a conduit for Keats to all students who want to love him? Was aesthetic rapture banned by the new regime? I know these are gross generalizations. But that was my impression of American intellectualism in the mid-‘90s. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I graduated as quickly as I could and left academia.

Looking back on this now, it seems to me that the problem I had with the new –ists was not with their –isms, but with their pedagogy. Simply put, they were uncivil. They showed no concern for, and made no attempt to learn about, my background. Instead they attacked what I loved and consequently as much as told me I did not belong. They were radical Gradgrinds in post-modern hard times. They often employed the same traditionalist pedagogy they theoretically opposed by deciding for me what they must teach and I must learn, when constructivist explorations could well have succeeded in bringing me to see and experience something probably close to their perspective. They often seemed to accept that all truth was constructed - except their own.

In short, they forgot about the learner in their zeal to be teachers. This is why their teaching failed to win me. And this makes me reflect, while looking at the Holistic Circle of Learning, that a teacher can be dazzlingly interdisciplinary, can teach for all the multiple intelligences squared, and can be impressively perspectivistic and multi-modal and multi-cultural until the cows come home—they will still probably fail. Unless…they start with knowing their learners, with respecting and esteeming them, and whatever cultural scripts those learners bring into the class.

—

*The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years

Of Jocks and Fags

Dates: 1976-80 (-present)

Picture a boy growing up in the same home from birth to the end of Junior High at age 15. The friends he made in first grade remain his friends, and his world, for the next nine years. He is blissfully secure in this world, in which nothing social or environmental abruptly changes and everything and everyone is familiar. He academically excels in grade school and in junior high, he plays Little League Baseball, then junior high baseball, basketball, and football.

His teammates are his friends. They are and always have been teammates in life as well as sport: together they begin as shiny boys playing spaceship and avoiding girl-germs during elementary recess; the seasons roll by until, suddenly, their voices crack; they experience an unexpected stirring at their cores until puberty rips from its cocoon like some mad, winged demon and deranges them all; they read the troubling runes of new hair on each others’ bodies as they shower in the locker room after football practice, and they laugh and kid each other to beat back their fears.

The demon drives the boys to haunt the local mall in search of girls. The boy meets a girl from a distant suburb. They exchange phone numbers and spend the next months talking so late into the night that they usually fall asleep with the receivers next to their ears. They see each other at the mall on weekends only occasionally. It doesn’t matter: the conversations intoxicate them for months. Then he—or she, it doesn’t matter—meets someone else and life goes on. The break-up doesn’t hurt.

Because the boy doesn’t realize it, but he is blessed. Yes, he is backing into the future with no view of the road ahead, and it’s unsettling. But his friends are doing the same, and they are all there for each other. Their camaraderie steadies them, like soldiers joking in the trenches, knowing that, at any minute, the order to charge the enemy lines will come.

That order comes when the boy’s family decides that it is in his son’s best interest to move to a new community in order to go to an all-white school, rather than the desegregated, predominantly ‘black’ school he is currently zoned for. The boy dutifully packs his belongings—his comic books, his varsity jacket, his “Most Popular” award from junior high graduation—and unpacks them in his new bedroom in the suburbs.

The only person he knows in his new community is the girl from the mall. It has been years since they have spoken.

Summer football practice begins two weeks before he starts classes at his new school. He signs up. He doesn’t know a soul. But on the first day he sees the first girl-friend’s best friend and she is excited to hear that he is joining their school.

Football practice poses problems for him. He has never been a new kid. He has never had to introduce himself to others. He knows nothing about the rituals involved in gaining acceptance to a group. Somehow neither his parents nor his school equipped him for this. So he does nothing, expecting acceptance to just happen.

He doesn’t understand why an upperclassman walks by him before practice and throws such a powerful roundhouse punch to his shoulder that it immediately forms a knot. The boy has observed that the attacker, the fierce star line-backer on the team who always has a lower lip swollen with snuff, is very popular. And that this line-backer seems to be the best friend of the other team star, who is held in almost godlike esteem by all the players for his bodybuilder’s massive, well-sculpted frame, for his two State Championships in wrestling, and his two state records in football rushing yardage—all while a freshman and sophomore. This god is now only a junior, so he has not one but two years remaining at the school to add to his miraculous record. The boy, having come from his old school, which ends at junior high and has no high school, has never seen or known that high school boys could look so much like grown men. He still feels like a boy himself. He has no script for dealing with this new social breed, the high school upper-classman.

So when the god, muscles bulging and lip trollishly stuffed with tobacco (the disfiguration of the face from this was a new visual experience for the boy, and it triggered gene-deep fears) approaches him in the locker room and says with no smile so you’re the new guy, the boy says yes and offers his hand and gives his name. The god looks at the boy’s hand and back into the boy’s eyes and offers no hand in reply. The boy doesn’t understand what is happening but he begins to fathom that it is not good.

The god says I hear you know my girlfriend. The boy doesn’t like the god’s slow, deep, emotionless drawl. The boy says and who would that be. The god pierces him with a gaze strangely menacing and pronounces his girlfriend’s name. It is the name of the girl from the mall that the boy had known in sixth grade. The god gazes deeper into the boy’s eyes as he pauses for effect. Then he says, and I don’t like you, faggot, and walks away. The boy watches him go, and notices that all the rest of the team has stopped to watch this encounter. They all look at him with the same impassive expressions as the god. At that instant, inside the boy a new cocoon breaks and a new demon emerges. It will fill his high school years with one ceaseless chant: Escape. Escape. Escape.

The boy doesn’t quit the football team. Nor does the football team quit sucker-punching and insulting the boy—except for one player, a wrestler and student council member who the boy would learn many years later was gay. This player treats the boy kindly. But he cannot help the boy. The boy is too busy over the next two years with his daily strategizing for survival: how to pass from class to class without crossing the athletes’ turf in order to avoid the choruses of faggot they would hoot. How to disguise his depression and act normal when girls he likes try to get to know him. How to prove himself to the football coach he overhears at practice telling the one friendly teammate, who had nominated the boy for a position, you know that boy doesn’t want to play football, and saying this in the midst of a huddle of almost the entire team. How to care about geometry. How to care about his sudden decline to a C and D student. How to skip school. How to find the students who sell pot and quaaludes. Whether to fight the group of tens calling him faggot every day. How he can alter his face by maybe paying someone to pummel the prettiness out of it. How to find an adult who can help (he never does). How to express himself in art class with a block print of a boy hanging from a noose. For which he earns a B, and teacher feedback suggesting how he can improve his technique, and praise for the print’s title: Escape, Escape, Escape.

Where are the boy’s parents? They are working more hours than ever in his life because the economy has taken a downturn due to the OPEC oil embargo. Interest rates for home-buyers have skyrocketed, his father’s real-estate sales have dried up and threatened the family with foreclosure on and loss of their new home in a safe suburb with all white students. One day, however, the boy’s father seems to get wind of the boy’s troubles, and pulls him aside and offers his solution: we’ll just go up there together and whip those boys’ tails. This was a noble possibility in the time of Odysseus and his son, but the boy is not interested—there are dozens of them, and there are laws against such things too.

“Self-medication” and a few unpopular country-boy friends get the boy through the first two years at the school, and the god graduates. Maybe the final year will be easier.

It is, somewhat. The god’s devotees in his class are still around to carry on the tradition, but the boy is not so scared of them. One day he picks a fight with one of them in the cafeteria. After his suspension ends, the boy returns to school and the best friend of the guy he fought invites the boy to join the jocks at lunch. The jock means it. All of his group seconds the invitation. The boy realizes that this must have been the ritualistic key to acceptance from the start. But he hates these boys now, and their type. He declines that sick ceremony. He also decides against playing sports with these fools his senior year.

In the first month of his senior year the guidance counselor holds a transitional session with the boy. The counselor congratulates the boy for scoring the highest SAT score of all the boys in his class, but regrets the boy’s GPA is in the bottom third of the class. What does that matter, the boy says. Look at my SAT. The counselor explains that GPA is as important for scholarships and admissions into good schools. This is the first the boy has heard of the practical value of the GPA.

It doesn’t matter anyway. The demon has decided the boy’s future. As soon as he graduates, the boy will escape, escape, escape, on a one-way Greyhound bus to Los Angeles and never look back. He will never again live near his family and his friends from childhood.

He will he never again find it easy to like athletes and popular, group-oriented people. He will like the solitaries, the dreamers, the readers, the rebels. He will always, often unfairly, harbor a certain skepticism sometimes bordering on scorn for officials of all stripes and people desiring power. He will always be somewhat aloof and never assume goodwill in others. He will always be uncomfortable in groups, and feel that he never did learn the social skills that other people use to escape that discomfort. Often he will find himself wishing that he had.¹

But he will go on to study, to discover a home in literature and philosophy and history and art and religion and classical and jazz. He will make his way into college, despite his guidance counselor, and even graduate Phi Beta Kappa. He will go on to experiment with his life, to see lands torn by war, to see Michelangelo in Florence, Mahler in Prague. He will kiss Wilde’s tomb in Paris and lay a flower at the graves of Abelard and Heloise. He will play hacky-sack with saffron-robed novices in Laos, swim a species-bridging five-second spiral with four wild dolphins off the coast of New Zealand, hike bamboo forests in Thailand with a simple Buddhist guide who seemed the most perfected human being he’d ever met.

This boy from a respectably middle-class, all-white suburban high school in Tennessee will even go on to trust a few people, though awkwardly.

In his 38th year, he will meet a woman beautiful and intelligent and kind beyond his wildest expectations, and be unable to understand how she could agree the following year to marry someone like him. He will follow her career path and become, like her, a teacher.²

And he will come to understand, late one night in Spain while writing a story about a boy, that he owes it to that boy to always watch over the new student, and the one who doesn’t fit because he is too pretty or she is too large, and the one who doesn’t fight, and the one who doesn’t know how the present shapes the future. And he will try to help them learn what he was never taught.³

The Spanish Moon

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¹Funny, five years later he has found that comfort, that confidence, that pleasure in good society.
²The marriage ended in benevolent divorce; “irreconcilable difficulties” indeed.
³This was written years before the “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story” podcast post. It was my first attempt to write the story. I’d change the tone now.

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*Earlier Years:
Legacy 1: Baptist Childhood
Legacy 2: Comic Books