Read.

Thanks, Kurt.

Home.

As Kurt said to me earlier today, "You CAN and OUGHT to go home."

Amen.

Certain.

Highly.

I highly recommend Kurt's parasite-free arugula ...

Learn.

If you learn one thing today, take a load off ...

Thanks, Kurt.

Proof.

Kurt's focus on The Philosopher of Phoenix' framing of freedom ...

America still has what we've lost: the reflex to build rather than administer. The founder is a hero there, not a suspect. Success is proof there, not a sin to atone for. That's your treasure. And a treasure is lost without anyone noticing—a form, an agency, a "good cause" at a time.

So don't look for hidden enemies. It's useless and unworthy of you. Look at the figure instead.

Kurt said it decades ago: "Aside from mayonnaise, the French are good for very little."

Maybe they get a pass on sculpture, as well.

Strawberry.

Right about ... now.

Thanks, Kurt.

Fascinating.

Kurt remembers the heady days in Coach Stevens' history class ...

Roosevelt Junior High School was fortunate enough to have Bob Stevens as an 8th grade history teacher. Mr. Stevens would spend each history period walking between the desks of students bringing to life the history of this country. Hands behind his back he would walk and tell the stories of the country.

Occasionally, he would grab the chalk and draw out a battle scheme on the chalkboard, supplementing the drawing with gory and fascinating details.

Several friends and I even decided to bring our own history books into class to “check” Mr. Stevens on his facts. No way could he just roll these details out without at least some exaggeration.

Imagine an 8th grade class with at least four young students feverishly flipping through a stack of books as the teacher told the lesson from memory.

My family moved to Ohio from Michigan in 1977.  On my first day of school at Roosevelt, I had the bright idea to wear a Michigan jersey to school. Coach Stevens noticed it within minutes. He picked me up (in my chair), carried me to his room, placed me in my chair atop his desk and proclaimed to his class, “Look what I found!”

Thirty years later, after a pretty drastic career change, I was blessed to spend time with him in his third-floor classroom as he mentored me through my student-teaching experience.

Through those Roosevelt years, Coach Stevens told amazing stories to engage his students, he maintained the highest standards to set an example for his students, and he carried himself in a way that I still remember today.  I knew he believed in me and all his students.  He was a model of what it was to be not just a good teacher, but a great man.  His sincerity and authenticity were such that you didn't want to let him down.  That responsibility was transformative to a young punk like me.

I’m beginning my twenty-second year as a teacher and there isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t catch me feeling grateful that I was his student. What a fine teacher. What a great man.

Steal.

Kurt points me to an article indicting public education's obstruction of learning ...

It is now preventing young people from acquiring the abilities they need to learn. He agrees with others who have looked into this problem that “attention must be curriculum.”

My buddy prefers brevity and I tend to be long-winded on such things, so here are some bullet points ...

• Schooling imparts the what and how of curriculum very well.  The why was never part of the plan. See Cornel West on the cultivation of the self.
• It's been my experience, as a student and a teacher, that students are told to think, but never taught the skills (it's not in the curriculum ... seriously).  Students are told to study, but never taught the skills (it's not in the curriculum).  Students are told that reading is essential to success, but never taught the fundamental skills required to eagerly experience reading with joy and voracity. If it's not in the curriculum, the perception of importance vs. time will loose everytime to the tyranny of the teacher's planbook.
• The love of learning -- thinking, writing, and reading -- therefore, must come independently from cultures, explorations, and discoveries outside of the classroom.  Stop expecting the flawed experiment of public education's ship to right itself. Henry Miller: "Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."
• Sir Philip Pullman strongly criticizes education for turning reading into a chore. He warns that asking students to write rigid plot summaries, dissect texts for analytical tools, or find synonyms kills their natural love for reading. He argues that the true intention of literature should first be simply to delight, enchant, and console.  Critical analysis can and will naturally come later.
• The days of a school having well-resourced libraries are over. These sacred spaces have been eviscerated and transformed (in both spirit and purpose) into media centers. The library should be the most important room in a school. It should contain a broad, unexpected collection of books, where students are given time to freely browse and discover on their own. (And don't get me started on the wasteland "Book Fairs."  I can't remember the last time I saw a classic literature title offered at one.)

The attitude of the article's author reinforces what I regularly see and hear at school: "I’m forced to think about what it would look like for me to explicitly teach students how to do what they should already know how to do. And this is pretty much the equivalent of a factory worker ‘learning to code.’ I have no idea how to code, and I don’t want to learn to code. I resent the fact that I have to ‘adapt’ to the wreckage.”

Opinions must be earned.  Opponents of the status quo lose the right to criticize what they have no solution for.

THE SUMMER DAY

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life? 

Mary Oliver

Our middle school students (grade 6-8) get half an hour for lunch, no recess.  There is no transition time between classes, the single bell that signals the end of one class marks the beginning of the next, travel time between three floors isn't accounted for.  My point is, from 7:30 to 2:10 these kids are pedal to the metal, time-on-task, working.  

Grinding.  

With little choice or option for how their "precious time" is spent.

I preach an underground philosophy in my Creative Writing class that the students seem to understand and appreciate.  It needs to be carefully taught because it can be misunderstood as multi-tasking. We call it "stealing time," and I guess it's based on the concept of opportunity cost.  The philosophy promotes developing and applying habits like making the choice to carry and write in a journal, to simply stop working and just quietly sit still (and if slightly more daring, closing the eyes) or the ultimate defiance, keeping a book open in the lap, under the desk, taking that book and that journal everywhere you go.  This rebelliousness still lives, but done without tact, it'll get you a detention in our school. So that time needs to be stolen because its been taken away.  Research supports the necessary benefits of all these acts of defiance, but they're not in the curriculum, so they are punished. 

Live fully.  Steal time.

With apologies for my long-windedness.

Refuses.

Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Thanks to Kurt for introducing me to Chesterton and that book all those years ago.

Overthrow.

Steve points to reports of struggling movie-goers.

Remember what Cactus Ed taught us years and years ago ...

How to Overthrow the System: Brew your own beer; Kick in your TV. Kill your own beef, Build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Kurt. 

Listen.

Thanks, Kurtastrophe.

Done.

Done and done.

Done.

Thanks, Kurt

Glow.

Kurt has not-all-that-surprising news ...

[A]ll living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don't.

Guilty.

Some of my instincts are reprehensible.

William F. Buckley Jr.

I'm guilty.

Thanks, Kurt.

Rejoice.

Anonymous, The “Flammarion” Universam, 1888

Kurt suggests a great idea, for which I humbly submit my application for membership.

Our omnipresent sponsor, Sir Roger, offers reminders to such a society ...

[Wine] paints the world before us as the true one, and reminds us that if we have failed previously to know it then this is because we have failed in truth to belong to it, a defect that it is the singular virtue of wine to overcome.

After a glass or two, I find myself able to do what we all should do, and which only pride forbids, which is to rejoice in the success of our rivals. After all, a world that contains success is better than a world without it, and under the influence of wine all success casts credit on the drinker. Wine offers a glimpse of the world sub specie aeternitatis, in which good things show their value, no matter who possesses them.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Kurt has music for the beginning of the Advent season.

Excellent.

An excellent album, essential to the coming week's feasting ...

Thank you, Kurt, for this ancient birthday gift.

Blast.

Thank you, Kurtastrophe. THAT was a blast.