Announcement:

I'm done! (Grading that is.) Ugh. It's my least favorite part of this job. If I were a different kind of person, I'd see it as the best opportunity ever to combine grace and truth in a unique opportunity to speak into my student / disciples lives.

Or maybe I meant if I lived in a different kind of world (though, I suppose if I lived in a different kind of world, i'd end up being a different kind of person). Because if I lived in that other, better world....? I wouldn't have 65 different students to speak to. With grace and truth in a ...blah, blah, blah. And I know that I'm lucky. I have it easy. 65! Some of you are thinking...what I'd give for a mere 65 students!

But in this world that i live in, albeit dreamily, with a happy fantasy about the other world, this is what we believe about education:

1. every person has exactly the same needs.

2. every person can use exactly the same information delivered in exactly the same ways to meet those needs.

3. every person starts out on equal playing ground, having gotten no more and no less resources than anyone else.

4. standards used to evaluate such equivalent beings should be rigid, high, and clearly articulated.

5. Because if they are (rigid, high & obvious) then the beings who manage to leap them, and those who don't will all realize that what they've gotten is:

an EXCELLENT education.

Excellent.

I'm going to watch Terry Gilliam's commentary on 8 1/2 right now. And tomorrow I'll catch up on emails. Sorry to all who I owe...

finding a childhood...

the sunlight was broad and fierce this morning on the wide white sheen of snow covering the lawn outside Jaelyn's kindergarten. I carried Addison down the sidewalk next to it.

"Don't step in that, Daddy."

He pointed at the clean clear slate of cold white perfection.

"Right." I said, with my best socializer / moralizer tone, "We only walk in the snow if we're wearing boots, because otherwise we're going to get our feet wet and get cold and maybe even get sick."

(Ahh the slippery slope that parenting justifies....)

"No!" he insists. "Don't step in that else it won't be pretty anymore."



I was astonished. How did he know how important clean snow was? How monumental first footprints were? The shock of great beauty that came with a field of snow? Do we know everything at four that we need to about aesthetics?

....

I stand in the hallway of my house in the middle of the night two nights ago. Everything is bright and shiny just before I continue my bedtime ritual:

(already) brushed my teeth
(next I'll) sneak into each kids room and put my hand gently on their chest and feel the gentle movement of their heart and breath; gaze at the dark indiscernible mass of curls on their pillows.

and i notice that there's something different about the light. What is it?

It's the moonlight on the snow. It lights up the house from the underbelly. The darkness is still thick, but it has an odd shininess to it.

I don't know why, but good light always evokes gratefulness in me.

I am shockingly grateful for my children in this moonlight.

....

As I climb into my bed, I think about what it is like to have the life of Jaelyn and Addison. I wonder what the mistakes I am making right now are. I long to make a perfect world for them. I'm surprised at how little of the daily living that I remember from these years.

My father claims to remember none of his childhood. He has an astonishing memory for estoeria and very little recollection of anything quotidian. He laughs at this vague fulginous past every time I press him for details about his childhood. I am astonished that he can remember *less* than I can.

I'm convinced that everything that ever happened, happened then, and yet so much of it lives only in feelings and hints and intuitions. So little is concrete or recollectable.

and then, as I spoon already sleeping Lynn, guilty that her skin is so warm, mine is so cold, but sure that she likes the touch anyway, I realize:

We dont have childhood at all! It happens to us, but then we only realize it when we encounter children later or return to places and impressions that have no referrent here in the now.

Our children's childhood is our own childhood. Our first childhood. Our only way of knowing the world at all.

And not just our biological or adopted children, but our connections with any of these smaller versions of Who We Were...

.....

Sometimes I feel precious and sentimental and schmaltzy for posting so many stories about my kids, but I'm just astonished by them. I can't help myself. The clean sheen of their newfallen-ness teaches me everything....

Lies in the service of the "truth"

The New York Times coverage on the crisis of "truth" in the military -- is not terribly surprising, but what's agonizing is that the "crisis" is just one more five minute blip on the cultural radar.

I could blog for hours on this:

-the contextual nature of truth
-one's interests in power presuppose their ability to see any kind of "truth"
-what is True in one cultural context may have vastly different implications in other contexts...
-and on...

but instead...back to grading....

Weekend Update

Addison turned four this weekend. We had a little party on Friday night. Grampa & Gramma from the farm came up and gave him a toy which Lynn and I mistakenly called a bulldozer. "That's a *frontloader*!" insisted six year old cousin Keith. Anyway, this frontloader plays heavy metal music and drives all over the entire house when you push the buttons. Has anyone officially labelled one aisle of the store the SPITE aisle? "How to tell the kids you love them, while letting the parents know that you're out to get 'em." Seriously. This is a whole class of toys -- loud, horrifying intrusive, but, of course, tremendously fun, toys.

...

On Saturday night, a premiere performance of one of my ten minute plays, The Smart Ones went up to a packed house. The lead actress was fantastic. The directing was spot on. The other two characters were very solid. All of this is a relief. You feel so nervous giving up your creative children for other people to nourish and develop, but they did great. Ultimately, the performance was so good, that it illuminated the dramatic holes that I couldn't see before. Which is (big picture) very gratifying and (immediate picture: sitting there in the audience, having been singled out as a present playwright) a little bit embarrassing. I'm focusing on the big picture on this one.

....

Saturday afternoon found Lynn and I riding in the Ambulance strapped to plastic boards side by side. It was a genuinely enjoyable experience. Not the glass-shattering, whiplash-inducing, rear-ending, or the split second wondering of whether this car accident will propel you into a different reality, and not discomfort of those backboards (ultimately more painful than the accident), but the opportunity to get a close up view of the near-death experience while not actually being anywhere near death.

The paramedics call their way down through the longest checklist imaginable. It runs through your own personal medical history, social security numbers, through all your vital statistics, and down to the mileage on the ambulance which is like the meter on your cab (which you realize that you will be fighting about with your insurance company in a month, waiting on hold to talk t someone's manager so you can argue that you did not in fact, choose to take the ambulance just for a good time. The numbers dialogue between the paramedics was all so practiced and timed and pervasive, that you came to think that it was a long incantation that was a precursor to starting the ambulance on its quest.

The actual ride was pretty bland. A nice concrete form of limbo. No wonder so many people die in ambulances. It's just that they're kind of boring. You know, holding on to life is hard work. It's difficult to see what's worth hanging on to in this world sometime. Really beautiful flowers or blue lakes or great sex or amazing food, those make you want to hold on to life. If you're just staring at a ceiling with a bunch of awkwardly fitted plastic strips and round repetitive lights. You just start to think: I'm holding on to this?

...

And now? Grading, grading and more grading. Ahhh final exams. Hope you're finding lots of....

peace~