What Is It About the Olympics…

…that we can’t turn away?

Give me an opening, and I’ll share everything I know about the Olympic Games. Even in the off years when only the athletes are paying attention, I will follow the updates on the host city’s preparation or watch previous competitions on the Olympic Channel. So when the Opening Ceremony begins and the city, its culture, and its people take center stage, I get excited to see others jump on the bandwagon and cheer for this moment.

This time, the moment felt bigger and more inclusive than ever before. Half the athletes are competing in women’s sports. 205 delegations have fielded at least one athlete to compete. An American rap artist has become the hype-man for the Games.

Paris 2024 landed differently, yet the traditions and commonalities among each Olympiad’s stories and contests somehow connect it with the games of the past. We still watched the Parade of Nations, as excited and rain-soaked athletes floated down the Seine. We still saw culture and art on display, some of it recreated as a backdrop or played out on a makeshift stage. We still witnessed icons of the past and present carry a torch from Greece to Paris, conveniently ignoring how Hitler’s team of propagandists created this spectacle in 1936, to watch it light a cauldron that floated into the sky.

That’s exactly what I love most about the Olympics. The Games evolve but they also remain the same.

Commodore Cochran, 1924

One hundred years ago, my great-uncle boarded the S.S. America and sailed across the Atlantic to compete in the 4x400M relay. His family, living on a farm in southern Mississippi, knew little about what Commodore Cochran was doing or what it would mean. Even the news of winning gold took its time getting back to his hometown.

Today, we can turn to social media, news outlets, and NBC to watch athletes-turned-celebrities wow us with flips and tumbles we’ve never seen before, compel us off our couches to see who touched the wall first, and impress us while they knit in the stands and dodge tidal waves in the sea.

Maybe it’s the fact we have to wait four years to reignite Pierre de Coubertin’s dream again. Or maybe it’s the possibility some underdog from an unknown corner of the world will capture our hearts. Or maybe it’s the probability that we’ll get to watch history unfold as another record is broken. Certainly there’s something that keeps us invested and interested in what happens at the Olympics.

Roy Cochran, 1939

My grandfather Roy Cochran, twenty-four years after his oldest brother, sailed across the Atlantic in a ship of the same name, headed toward London this time. War had spoiled his dreams in 1940 and 1944, and age had almost guaranteed he would not qualify. Yet, he did. He also won gold in the same event as his brother. I have seen some video of his races, yet they stop right after he crosses the finish line or passes the baton, and I have to imagine how he must have reacted achieving his ultimate goal, winning for himself and for his team.

That explains why I keep watching the Olympics–because I assume his smile, his body language, and his triumph looked almost the same as what I’ll see over the next two weeks. For everyone else, my guess is they watch for similar reasons–to remind them that the surprise of change also reminds us of what has stayed the same.

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week….

When I was thirteen, decades before Taylor Swift made it cool, my mom returned from a conference with my junior high theater teacher and told me he believed I was learning but I “didn’t realize it.” His lessons were like sneaky vegetables, steamed and pureed and hidden in the spaghetti sauce so I never knew the nutrition I received. Needless to say, I rolled my eyes, hard, at this theory. I had sent her to talk to him because his teaching methods and general demeanor were weird. Who knows why my mom indulged me except she’d never had a kid who cared about school like this before.

That same school year, I solidified the idea I wanted to be a teacher. Not so I could hide knowledge, but because my math teacher Mrs. Wilhite could stand at the blackboard, writing proofs and formulas, and make me see all I was discovering. Some evidence points to the fact I had wanted to be a teacher as early as 5th grade, but this was the year I could step outside myself as a student and recognize what my teachers were doing, not just for me but for all my classmates, and I wanted to have that kind of power and influence.

A year later, the film Dead Poets Society and Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating inspired me to become an English teacher.

Fast forward another two decades, my career well established, I found myself spending more time talking to teachers about teaching. At the height of the “evaluation movement” (where everyone believed we could just assess teachers into being great), one of those colleagues, a man who was almost too hip to be a teacher, told me he thought we needed to be more realistic about the quality of the teaching profession. His argument: there are three million teachers in this country; how could they possibly all be great, life-changing, transformational figures in our lives?

In other words, how could we all be Mr. Keatings?

I took offense at the idea. I had been taught by excellent teachers. I had worked with excellent teachers. My children had been blessed with excellent teachers. Of course there were mediocre apples in the bunch, but in a profession like teaching, didn’t most of us come to this like a calling?

Now I sit at the end of Teacher Appreciation Week, my least favorite week of the school year, and I wonder if I’m the only one who got caught by the Cult of the Mr. Keatings. Did anyone else believe they would stand on their desk, spout Romantic poetry, and ignite a generation to make their lives extraordinary? And if my students don’t line up to silently protest my firing (okay, thankfully that’s never happened to me), does it mean I’m not as great as I thought I was going to be at thirteen? If my students don’t shower me with gifts, thank you notes, and promises to visit next year, does it mean I’m not excellent enough to be appreciated?

Let’s hope not.

Today, I want to celebrate the decent teacher. The teacher who gets it done without complaint or fanfare. The reasonable teacher who lets that kid slide because it won’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The teacher who genuinely believed I was learning something, even if I didn’t realize, or appreciate, it at the time.

Not the great teacher, but the good teacher. Try to remember them this week.

Happy 50th Birthday, #TellurideFilmFestival

Fall begins for me a few weeks ahead of schedule when I make the trek to Telluride for its annual film festival, a four-day reprieve from three-digit temps and the daily humdrum of home in Denver. Once I stand in line to wait for screenings, feeling the crispness of the impending season already upon me, I remember how movies in the mountains herald more than changing weather.

This year’s fest, the 50th of its kind, both special and familiar, offered its signature glimpse into the state of art and culture and ideas at a particular moment, this time the pandemic having slid past our rearview and something less known but inescapable waiting ahead.

While festival director Julie Huntsinger curates a program based on her own tastes and vision, each of us who makes the trip also crafts our version from the timetable of offerings and activities on hand. For me this year: sixteen films, all 2023 releases, that starred big names who were primarily absent from the birthday celebration (solidarity forever…).

If last year’s selections represented various directors’ personal journeys into and out of the pandemic, often coming to terms with decades of unprocessed loss and change, this year also ended up a directors’ year but for very different reasons. And with so many diverse offerings again, I relished the challenge, as always, to find my thread, a commonality, that strings together what I watched and what I witnessed into a larger texture of how artists are viewing their world right now.

In this year’s celebration of film in the San Juans, every creative wanted to show off how the form is highlighted by the form itself. I walked out of each screening with the sense, only in film can that happen, only in film.

Thanks to #TFF49, I got to see a few of Georges Melies’ restored movies projected in stereoscopic 3D. Since then, I have wondered periodically what he might say about the form today. He would be surprised but mostly delighted in the eventuality of what he and others spawned over a century ago. Musician, and star of documentary AMERICAN SYMPHONY, Jon Batiste explained about music what I would bet Melies might say about today’s films: “We don’t love music because it feels good. We love music because it feels inevitable.” In one moment of the film, we watch Batiste dig into his heart and create an original song that inexplicably, yet inevitably, sounds like something we’ve heard before. Great movies can do the same for us.

Melies might have been confused by the giant parrot with its deep baritone, but twenty minutes into the film (TUESDAY), he would have said, “Of course. How else do you talk about loss?”. He may never have seen the motorcycles of the late 60s (THE BIKERIDERS) or visited the barren savagery of the Outback (THE ROYAL HOTEL), nor might he be prepared for the violence–really, the brutality–of those two films, but he would have recognized how movement of humans and landscape can communicate something.

Several of this year’s selections tapped into the zeitgeist of parent-child relationships, mostly on the screen but also behind the camera. Guest director Ethan Hawke traveled to Telluride with Maya Hawke, his daughter and star of the film WILDCAT, a biopic that weaves the fictional stories of Flannery O’Connor with the realities of her writing life. Proud papa Hawke gushed over Maya (and Laura Linney who plays O’Connor’s mother and a few of her stories’ characters) in the film introduction, and exposed how an artist’s work will blur the line between their lives and their art. Watching these actors change from real-life character to fictionalized one cemented how film may be the only form capable of showing that connection.

Two films relied heavily on surprise endings, ALL OF US STRANGERS and SALTBURN, but it was the former directed by Andrew Haigh that parlayed its final shock into a clever but affecting exploration of parental loss, especially when one’s parents never get the chance to see who their child has become. As you would expect, Paul Mescal turned in an exceptional performance, but it was Andrew Scott as Adam and Claire Foy as Adam’s mum who made the film my favorite of the festival this year.

I saw several others that did not disappoint, some even rekindled my love for what cinema can do that no other medium seems to: RUSTIN, the true story of almost-unknown organizer of the March on Washington Bayard Rustin who finally receives his due recognition after being sidelined for decades as a gay man who believed civil rights meant all civil rights; DADDIO, a two-hour conversation between a NYC cab driver (Sean Penn) and a young woman returning home from Oklahoma (Dakota Johnson) as they navigate traffic on the streets and in their complicated lives; Silver Medallion recipient Wim Wenders debuted two films, including PERFECT DAYS about the mundanity and the beauty of a Japanese toilet cleaner (only Wenders, a quintessential German filmmaker, could pull off such a lovely tribute to the culture and people of Japan and it’s obvious why Koji Yakusho won Best Actor at Cannes); THE HOLDOVERS bringing director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti together again for a sweet and funny take on the classic student-(Dominic Sessa)-becomes-the-teacher and teacher-learns-from-the-student riff; the anxiety-inducing THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE left me wondering whether I might start having beginning-of-the-school-year nightmares again after watching a fresh-faced, well-meaning teacher make every mistake in the book; and, the sumptuous, eye candy of Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS from Yorgos Lanthimos who somehow reimagines Frankenstein as a prurient satire about women’s roles in a society hellbent on making them proper.

In every one of those movies, I can still see long-held close-up shots of actors who made the audience stop and pay attention to everything we should not see but somehow can.

And there was one film, more than any other, that epitomized why seeing movies in Telluride can be different than in any other setting. I woke up early to get in line for Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST, but I was lucky to have time to stay for his Q&A afterwards. Glazer set out to make a film about the Holocaust that no one had ever seen before. Based on the novel of the same title by Martin Amis, Glazer turns his camera to a home on the perimeter of Auschwitz where Commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig raised their family while smoke from the crematoria lofted in the air and dogs barked and guns blasted in the distance. Glazer’s explanation of using cameras with remote crew to create an authorless story and making sound the counterpoint of the images of typical family life to avoid fetishizing the horrors we’ve all seen at Auschwitz proved how revolutionary it was to focus “on making a film you couldn’t see.” Instead, we heard it and we wondered about it. Only in a film where the atrocities are left off-screen could a filmmaker show us how more connected we are to the perpetrators of the crimes than their victims.

Every time I sat down in a theater and wondered if I could sit through another two hours, the lights would dim, the sound would roll, and I would forget how tired I was. There’s something about the full-bodied experience of watching movies, even at 9000 feet, that keeps me thinking and wondering and connecting. These films did not offer an escape from life but a deepening of it. I can’t wait to go back next year.

My Telluride

  • SALTBURN-3 stars
  • PERFECT DAYS-4 stars
  • AMERICAN SYMPHONY-4 stars
  • TUESDAY-4 stars
  • THE ROYAL HOTEL-3 stars
  • THE ZONE OF INTEREST-5 stars
  • THE HOLDOVERS-4 stars
  • WILDCAT-4 stars
  • THE BIKERIDERS-2.5 stars
  • DADDIO-4 stars
  • RUSTIN-3.5 stars
  • JANET PLANET-2 stars
  • ALL OF US STRANGERS-5 stars
  • POOR THINGS-4.5 stars
  • BALTIMORE-3 stars
  • THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE-4 stars

Back At It Again….

My formative years in teaching happened at a small, alternative high school, a public school in a large suburban school district that served at-risk students mostly who had decided the traditional, large high school did not work for them. Those students, who saw the Matrix behind the veneer of large classes, stressed-out teachers, overachieving classmates, opted for the leap of faith. Others had no choice. They all taught me how to be the teacher I am today, and sometimes I forget how that experience still shapes me, my philosophy about learning and about teaching teenagers, and how I expend my energy on all of it.

Over the span of 25 years, there are two things that resonate with me still–the permission, even the encouragement, to take risks because whatever had been tried before had not worked for these kids AND the necessity to make what I was teaching relevant and meaningful for them.

Taking risks has always taken the form of trying something new, something different. I have always read education journals, explored some crazy pedagogical theories, and spent two years studying experiential education at a non-traditional college where I bought into a multitude of ideas from sustainability to progressivism to gender equity. Every quarter, I taught a new group of students in a new collection of 5 or 6 courses, all invented by me. Sometimes we just read and talked about my favorite books. Other times, we went to the bookstore on a shopping spree and every student was required to find a book that would interest them. At some point, I started teaching film as well, putting to good use my undergraduate courses in cinema studies.

On many occasions, I bombed.

And sprinkled in there were a few moments when magic happened.

Listening to America Ferrera on Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast recently, she had this wonderful thought about her role as a leader, a director, and I would argue it works as a teacher too: “How do I create an environment in which the unknown gets to happen?” Too often, teachers feel like they should plan for every second of every class period or block of every day. When we do that, we don’t make room for the “unknown,” for the unexpected gifts that come from hanging out with young people every day. I promise the unknown has popped up in my classroom more times than I can recall, and I know they were never written down in my planning book.

Even more important than the risks, though, was the need to answer my students’ “why.” I’ve taken a few personality tests over the years, and I know I always focus on the “why” because I also need it for everything I do. I don’t need some longwinded explanation of when I will use this (I actually discovered while looking at the COVID curve that understanding functions that move can be quite useful!) nor do I need some promise of application for my future. I just want to know why you think it’s important, even essential, for me to be exposed to a particular concept.

I had a quirky theater teacher in junior high (quirky would be the kind term I now use as an adult but at age 13, he was weird, really weird, and I didn’t like it) who asked us to do all kinds of crazy games, strange exercises, and seemingly pointless activities. At one point, he met with my mother because I was struggling in his class and he explained to her that I was learning things, but I didn’t know what they were–as if the secrets of his teachings were too deep or too elevated for me to comprehend on the surface but were being absorbed nonetheless. Needless to say, I call bullshit on that nonsense, but not because I did not “get it” but because he never took the time to explain why it might be useful for me to make up ideas on the spot, to respond to the actions and feelings of those around me, to cut loose and try on someone else’s personality for a while.

So when I started teaching students who made John Bender look like Alex P. Keaton, I knew I would not get far without some sort of nod to the “why” of things. Today I teach in a large, much more traditional high school than where I began, but I still spend some time, probably too much time in the eyes of some, on trying to figure why am I even teaching this and why do I think you might benefit from learning it.

I can’t explain why I’m even thinking about this these days, especially when you consider all the other frustrations I could yammer about, but maybe that’s it? When the world seems to be spinning out of control, when everyone is screaming again about going remote or not going remote or requiring masks or not requiring masks, it seems to help to go back to where I started.

#memorablemomentsineducation #132

I’m finishing up my National Board recertification work this week. I had big dreams of finishing it our last week of school so I could really begin break without much hanging over my head. That didn’t happen. Then I thought I would finish it while we were visiting family and my kids had cousins and aunts and uncles to keep them entertained. That didn’t happen. With a just a week left to meet the deadline, I don’t have much choice but to make it happen.


In the midst of this, I’ve been at school all week for Nationals for speech and debate and some other work. My daughter tagged along, and she’s been helping me clean and organize my office with a little inspiration from my officemate Emily. As I’m digging through countless notebooks, I came across a huge binder of all the materials, assignments, and work from my first teaching job at D.C. Oakes High School–7 years worth of stuff. I got waylaid by the stories I’d forgotten I taught, kids’ names I hadn’t thought of in years, cool projects we’d done like the time we sent kids to present at a national conference on designing and building a sustainable school. (I know I have something comparable from my second teaching job, which lasted 9 years, but all of that is hidden in electronic folders on various drives, and I never find the time to go through any of it.)

One item stopped me in my tracks–a handwritten reflection I wrote after my first year of teaching. 23 years ago, I would have finished that first year. I was young, and frankly, my handwriting looks like I was still in high school. The reflection was not especially profound or insightful about curriculum or pedagogy, but I do comment how hard and exhausting it was and how fulfilling it was to love those kids. I mention some frustrations with my (in)ability to discipline, and I shudder to recall some of the stupid things I tried that year.
But that year, just like this year, I got through it. In the reflections I’ve been writing this month, I have struggled again to pinpoint all the instructional implications because I’m more focused on the intangible ways teachers and students showed up for each other, embraced our faults and one another, and created real meaning out of our experiences. I have always been grateful to have started my career where I did–with colleagues and students who made sure I knew the point of all this was not the content, but the kids. I think this year of pandemic teaching and learning has reminded us all of that.


So two things to take away: 1) I will stop making fun of my brother for holding on to every CD, DVD, VHS tape, and book–there’s something to be said for all that physical evidence of the years you’ve lived and learned. 2) I will keep reflecting regularly and religiously–there’s something to be said for embarrassing and inspiring your older self.

A Eulogy (sort of) for My Father

I’ve adapted the following from words I shared to celebrate our father’s life.

When my sister and husband (honestly, I can’t remember who joked about it first) suggested we celebrate our dad’s life at the Olathe Ford dealership, we agreed it would be both funny and fitting. If you never met our father, you wouldn’t likely know his obsession with Fords, and Lincolns, and Mercuries, and even the lesser-known German Ford imports called Merkur. I would also bet that if you had met him, you still might not grasp this odd hobby, a preoccupation that took up space in our basement and a kind of religion that sustained him for 70+ years. Like any good midwestern man, he believed fervently, but he also believed in keeping it to himself. Such was the case with all things Ford.

After my father died, I found a folder in his closet that included the window stickers and sales invoices for almost every car he’d ever purchased. Not all of them came from Olathe Ford, but there were at least thirty of them dating all the way to the early 70s including a Mustang II my brother swears is the worst car Ford ever built. (I think he’d forgotten about the Pinto.) My dad had a unique arrangement with his employer of 4-plus decades. After driving a car for a couple years, wracking up 100K miles or so driving the width of Kansas, he would trade it in and get a new one. Add those vehicles to the ones my mother drove, and you’d be amazed that one man owned that many different Fords in a lifetime, but he has the paperwork to prove it.

So, when I started thinking about my memories of our father, they invariably involved a car.

Every Saturday of my childhood, my dad would take me to the downtown library. He would sit in the magazine section reading Car and Driver or Motor Trend while I perused the shelves, first among the children’s books and later in the literature and fiction sections. We drove down the oak-lined streets, past the familiar old homes, and I would hold tight to the treasures I’d found. On Sundays, save for the year when I opted to attend church by myself, my dad would often take me to work with him. He’d catch up on paperwork upstairs while I sat downstairs at the secretary Vickie’s desk and played on what must have been the world’s first Mac computer. I’m sure it was my mother who took me almost everywhere–like sports practices and Girl Scouts, but the drives with my father are the ones I recall, especially when we’d swing through the Ford lot after hours just so he could see what was there.

When I was 11 years old, my siblings long gone and my days as an only child ramping up, my parents decided to take me out of school for a couple weeks so we could see the fall color in New England. My dad wanted to rent a Merkur Scorpio, some Ford product built in Germany and imported to the U.S., probably because he thought it would be fun to see how it drove or he was looking at buying one for himself. This was the first of many driving trips where I took up my rightful spot in the backseat, lounging across the spacious row, no siblings to contend with. We saw all the sights from whales off the coast of Maine to the rolling mountains of Vermont. We stayed in bed and breakfasts, visited my Uncle Bob, walked the Freedom Trail, and most importantly, survived the largest snowstorm to hit the area in 70 years. My father got us through the whiteout conditions, finding refuge in a church basement until the storm had passed. I don’t recall if anyone was ever worried about whether the car could handle it, but I do know I have warm and comforting memories of that entire adventure.

A couple years later, after having reunited with my mother’s side of the family, we drove our own Scorpio (it had passed the test!) to visit her aunt Piny in Kentucky. This car had a digital display and a computer that calculated how many miles you had to empty. Let’s just say my father was an “early adopter” when it came to cars, as long as they were Fords, of course. As we approached the Owensboro exit, and the mileage gauge dropped further, my dad decided he would test out the accuracy of its calculations. Surely, zero had some kind of hidden buffer?! (And, yes, I know this comes straight from a Seinfeld episode, but the Pendletons did it first.) Needless to say, we learned the hard way. When the gas mileage meter dropped to 0 so, too, did the speedometer. A mile or so to go, and we were stranded on the shoulder of the highway. It didn’t take long for a car to stop and pick up our small family–my fuming mother, my embarrassed father, and my terrified self. When I got in the backseat of this strange man’s car, I saw a few religious pamphlets and an umbrella. That flimsy, albeit mostly psychological, protection would have to suffice. The drive to the gas station was short enough we didn’t need it, but then we were left trying to find a gas can to refill the tank. My dad had found someone who had a can at home, but he’d need to ride there with him to get it. Perhaps I would not have been so worried except the stranger was missing an arm. If my childhood of reading and my 1980s, D.A.R.E.-programmed education had taught me one thing it was never to get in a car with a one-armed, strange man. But my dad was braver than that, or at least stubborn enough to prove his foolish obsessions never tumbled into real danger.

That never stopped my father from seeking out a challenge, especially while driving. When I spent a semester in Dublin, my parents traveled outside the United States for the first time to come visit me. Ireland is a small island so driving across it seems like an easy task. We rented a car and set out to drive on the left. The autoroute across the center of the country was simple enough to navigate, but the West of Ireland, the real Ireland, poses tight turns, narrow roads, and low rock walls inching in just below the eyeline of the driver. I’d already attempted to drive these parts weeks earlier, and my roommates and I managed an accident while crossing the street from the car rental place and clipped a couple other parked vehicles in small towns. I knew the hazards of Irish roads designed for sheep and cattle, cars are just a nuisance on this classic way of life. But true to my father’s nature, he believed driving a manual transmission would be simple enough, and he’d never driven a car he couldn’t handle. My friend Brian, who was also studying abroad at the time, joined us for this tour and famously told his own parents he wasn’t sure he’d make it back alive. While my mother always complained of my father’s driving, I’d never noticed until the three of us witnessed his gleefulness at trying to corner a prehistoric road at 40 mph while dodging actual sheep!

By the time we made it to Paris, we thought returning to the right side of the road would prove easy enough. Of course, France offered its own hosts of challenges from the start as we entered a knot of cars tangled at an 8-way intersection, my dad frozen at the wheel while I attempted to read the map and the non-existent street signs. After 20 minutes of honking and yelling and no moving, a Frenchman decided to take matters into his own hands, jumping into the heart of the knot and beating on cars to “Allez!” as the strands began to unwind. The midwesterner, used to his grid of streets and logically numbered avenues, came face-to-face with old-world, civil engineering, and he didn’t like it. Lucky for all of us, we were headed to the peripheral highway and then driving south onto the toll road, something as close to the Kansas Turnpike as we were gonna get in Europe. After some miles and some getting used to the sticker shock of French tolls and European diesel, my dad spotted a sign for the Golden Arches. Is there no more familiar sight in the world than a McDonald’s? Finally, he thought, I can get a real cup of coffee!. We pulled off the highway into a rest stop, and he went to order the largest black coffee he could find. My father didn’t go for cream and sugar and all that crap. He wanted volume, and he wanted it dark. Surely, the “McDo” would come through for him. But it was as if the gods had planned this moment of amusement specially for my mother and me when my father emerged from the fast food joint with the tiniest, cutest cup of McDonald’s coffee you had ever seen. Imagine taking the classic styrofoam coffee cup and rendering it into an espresso version. The disappointment on my dad’s face said it all. The next time someone tells you the French make the best cafe, just remember at least one American was not impressed.

I also remember a few fights with my father over cars. In the last couple months of his life, the tables were turned, and we argued over whether he should be driving himself to and from dialysis in the wee hours of the morning, but every other disagreement always centered on what car I was allowed to drive. When I graduated from college, my father had just replaced his used company car, a candy-apple red Taurus SHO (if you don’t know, that stands for Super High Output as in the engine’s power), and gotten himself something brand new. This was not the first time my dad had bought one of his old company cars, having purchased an old Mercury Cougar for my brother to drive when he finished college. He had already declared he was selling the car I’d driven in college (the Scorpio!), and I had already proclaimed I was moving to Denver, hoping to find a teaching job. So, I thought it made sense–I’d just get the Taurus. But, my father refused. Too fast. Too nice. Too red. He preferred I be saddled with my first set of car payments like all the other working stiffs. Maybe he thought it would teach me a valuable lesson, but all it taught me was how pissed I was that my brother, not I, could buy it and drive it. So, when it came time to look at new cars, I knew the best way to register my anger would be to consider a non-Ford car, and not just any non-Ford but that upstart, GM-built Saturn. Remember Saturn, the different kind of car company? Well, when you worship at the altar of Ford, the birthplace of cars and car companies, you don’t want nor do you need something “different.” For days, he refused to take me to the dealership, but I’d just been offered my first job and I was moving to Denver in a couple weeks. He relented, but he didn’t like it. He was nice enough to the salesperson–I mean it’s not like we were looking at Hondas–and no one had to suffer his complaints about the interior or the handling because they let us test-drive on our own. But when we finished kicking the tires, we drove back across the highway to check out the competition at Olathe Ford. And if you couldn’t guess, I signed the paperwork that afternoon for a red, four-door, manual transmission Ford Escort. I thought my $250 a month car payment was going to bankrupt me on my new teacher salary, but it was mine and my dad was pleased.

I hate to admit it, but I’ve never driven anything but a Ford since. Even better, I’ve never bought a car anywhere but Olathe Ford. Say what you will–yeah, I know the joke about “Found On Road Dead”–but I do see a difference. Maybe my preference is just colored by the legacy of my dad, but I also know it could have been a helluva lot worse.

#memorablemomentsineducation #131

A couple weeks ago, I made name placards for my beginning debaters. I take the time to write their last names on the placards, mostly because I’m a little OCD and I can’t handle it when they write their names in small letters or poor handwriting so no on can read them! When I passed them out, I was informed I’d spelled one of my students’ names incorrectly. This particular young woman does have a Russian name, but it’s not a complicated spelling nor is it difficult to pronounce. I just added a letter that shouldn’t be there.

Now, those who don’t enjoy new names like I do or those who don’t take pride in their spelling as I do (you may not recall, but I have won a couple bees in my day) may not recognize the significance in the spelling of a name. Most of us probably don’t care when the Starbucks barista gets it wrong on our cup. But, I was both mortified and proud in this particular moment. Mortified because I got it wrong, which also led to a bit of anxiety my mishap might signal some serious cognitive issue. Proud because this quiet student asserted herself, which also led to a feeling of vindication that getting one’s spelling right does matter.

Neither my first name nor my last name are spelled in a conventional way. When people ask me, I usually explain that my mother is responsible for my first name and my husband is responsible for my last name. I don’t expect people to spell it correctly the first time around, but I do think an unwillingness to get it right on subsequent tries starts to feel a little microaggressive. In recent weeks, I’ve had a couple encounters at work where men via email have repeatedly spelled my name wrong. Now, maybe it’s an oversight or they’re terrible spellers, but I can’t help but wonder if they just don’t care to get it right.

I went back and remade that placard. I apologized to my student for my mistake. I insisted we all work on knowing each other’s names. And now I hope she doesn’t take it as a personal affront, though I’d imagine my flub represents one of many moments when her immigrant-sounding name along with her accent-laden conversation has elicited requests for her and her name to assimilate.

I know it’s minor, but I also know it matters to some of us.

#memorablemomentsineducation #130

Teachers like to be in control. My financial planner husband would tell you most teachers are averse to risk, and some administrators say teachers by nature don’t like change, but I’d say those are just symptoms of the root cause–we became teachers because we like to be in charge.

I’m sure most of my teacher friends and colleagues recall their stint at “playing school.” I would convince the other kids in the neighborhood to come hang out in my (unfinished!) basement where I could command the room, bark out instructions, and basically boss people around. In sixth grade, I wrote a note to my teacher (which she held onto for 20 subsequent years) explaining how I would have led our class differently and how I envisioned what “my” classroom would look like one day.

Now that I am a teacher, I can assure you I’m not alone in my need for control. Everything from our addiction to office supplies which enable color-coding at every turn to setting up desks and chairs in increasingly confusing configurations (6 ft. apart nowadays) only to be mildly annoyed when others don’t see the logic behind what we’ve done proves to me that we enjoy our fiefdoms.

So, you can imagine how teaching through a pandemic where every day brings new information, changes to plans, quarantined students, a surprise schedule, a different technology platform, or even the arrival of a therapy dog, could send some of us over the edge. The truth is, though, we’re all Wile-E.-Coyote-beyond-the-edge these days, and each of us has been forced to face the reality that our belief we’ve been in charge is all a farce.

The educationese word of 2020 has been GRACE. Every email and every conversation seems to include some reference to teachers having grace, parents having grace, students have grace, either for themselves or for each other.

Grace is a lovely thought and much needed in 2020, but I’m ready to move beyond grace. I think what we really need is SERENITY–you know, as in the Serenity Prayer. For years, I facilitated a professional development course about managing student behavior. Early in the course, we taught a lesson about examining all the parts of your job that were in your control and out of your control, and about determining what could actually be changed. The exercise was important because so much of what teachers face cannot be altered no matter how insanely stupid a directive or a standardized test or a state mandate may be. Recognizing the limitations of our control, our need to be in charge of almost everything, marks the first step towards our serenity.

As I approach the end of the first quarter of the craziest, most overwhelming school year of my 23-year career, I’m going to accept that I do not have control over everything, or even most anything. Control has been an illusion, a comforting one, that must give way to my serenity.

In the words of George Costanza, “Serenity now!”

#memorablemomentsineducation #129

As a teacher, a debate teacher at that, I don’t think we can refer to any part of the “debate” between Trump and Biden as such without using air quotes. Many of my teacher friends already commented on the grade school mentality of both debaters, mostly instigated by Trump but followed by Biden in his need not to be out-shouted. If you haven’t been on a school playground in a while, you may not know children these days aren’t even this ridiculous.

In the last week, my students have begun Congressional Debate, a competitive event where students participate in a mock Congress. After weeks of preparing, researching, and writing legislation and speeches, we take a moment to discuss parliamentary procedure. Our parliamentary procedure follows Robert’s Rules of Order as a guide, but I’d tell you the specific rules don’t matter as much as the thinking behind them and the respect we hope our students have for them.

If you’ve ever sat through a HOA meeting or bothered to stop on C-SPAN for ten minutes, you might find parliamentary procedure cumbersome and counter-productive. The truth is, though, once you understand the intention behind the rules–to ensure fairness, to provide equal speaking time for all sides, to balance the will of the majority against the need to honor the minority, and to deliberate thoughtfully before finally agreeing to move to the previous question of passing a motion–you might understand why Chris Matthews attempted to remind Trump of the ground rules his representatives agreed to in the first place. Following the rules might cramp Trump’s style, but they might have afforded the American public a slightly better idea about what’s at stake.

The truth is no one respects rules created for the sake of having rules. But when my students understand the values underpinning those rules, they usually choose to comply. I can’t say the same for our current president who believes “law and order” is something we mandate and enforce without any real regard for why members of the community may question the values that underpin our laws. If my students can understand why it’s important to recognize and respect society’s rules for the sake of the greater good, then there might just be hope for the rest of us.

Beyond my critique as a debate teacher lies my general disgust as just a teacher of young people. I commented to a few of my friends that I hope all of Trump’s teachers are dead (I realize it’s likely given his age) because every teacher puts their faith in the next generation, hoping each student makes good on the promise of their education, and I worry the president’s teachers never saw the fruits of their labor.

I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to say you taught a man (or woman someday soon) who became president? The pride I feel when one of my students wins an award, gets something published, or earns a promotion at work always fills me up. So, I guess the correlation would be to feel utter shame if one of your students becomes a murderer or creates a Ponzi scheme. Maybe not, because I don’t feel responsible for those outliers, but if I had been one of Trump’s teachers and watched that debate, I would have been ashamed to admit he never learned how to be decent, how to be humble, how to know when to stop. Because above it all–the reading, the critical thinking, the public speaking, the computing–we do no service to our communities if we can’t figure out a way to teach our students to be better human beings, human beings who recognize the rules to respect and the ones to rage against.

#memorablemomentsineducation #128:

Summertime for a teacher represents a unique moment in the school year. I think of it as a hibernation period where I usually hunker down for a bit of time, eat too much, sleep more than normal, and restore my energy for the next school year. Restoring my energy often takes the form of spending time with my family, getting out of town, reading lots of books, and even taking some classes or planning lessons.

For so many reasons, this Pandemic Summer looks different. I’m not hibernating. No, I’ve been forced out into the wild to forage for scraps of school funding, to find ways to keep my cubs and community safe from a virus, and to give voice to my power as a leader in my sleuth (yes, that’s really the word for a group of bears…who knew?).

This particular moment, really a jumble of thoughts about this weird moment, has been inspired by Vampire Weekend’s line in “Harmony Hall” that keeps running through my head:

I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die….

I don’t wanna finish my continuing education classes, but I don’t wanna lose my teaching license or the couple hundred bucks I spent to take them.

I don’t wanna see my kids miss out on their 9th and 12th summers, but I don’t know what you do with kids whose medically-fragile, 78-year-old grandpa lives downstairs.

I also don’t wanna miss my kids’ 9th and 12th summers, but I don’t wanna step back from a duty I just started.

I don’t wanna spend a beautiful summer morning reading emails, but I don’t wanna miss the information that might help us develop a better plan for schools this fall, or ignore the needs of my colleagues in the middle of a stressful time, or not respond to a question for which I surprisingly DO have an answer.

I don’t wanna skip my weekly yoga sessions, but I don’t wanna take a breath in of COVID-19.

I don’t wanna plan for 3-hour classes, but I don’t wanna return to school and suffer through 3-hour blocks without being ready.

I don’t wanna Zoom, but I don’t wanna lose the chance to see people’s faces.

I don’t wanna answer that phone call, but I don’t wanna miss the story she’ll tell or the laughs we’ll have.

I don’t wanna move all my class resources to an online platform, but I don’t wanna scramble to do it in the fall.

I don’t wanna teach online, but I don’t wanna stress out over air filters, mask-wearing, social-distancing, over-sanitizing, and temperature-checking.

I don’t wanna miss all the great summer reads, but I don’t wanna think somedays.

I don’t wanna ignore the social awakening happening around me, but I don’t wanna drown out someone else’s voice that needs to be heard more than mine.

I don’t wanna get up three days a week at 4:30 am, but I don’t wanna see my dad struggle to drive himself.

I don’t wanna cook dinner every night, but I don’t wanna spend that money.

I don’t wanna understand why schools have no money, but I don’t wanna look stupid when someone asks me about it.

I don’t wanna rebuild my curriculum, but I can’t NOT meet the changing needs of my students.

I don’t wanna stare at the ugly patio chairs in my backyard anymore, but I don’t wanna find the paint and tape to fix them.

I don’t wanna go begging voters for more funding, but I don’t wanna watch my friends and colleagues or my kids and students suffer for lack of funding.

I don’t wanna live this, but I don’t wanna die….