Bye, Bye Bye

This weekend, the professional football team that I follow regularly will be taking what might be considered a well-deserved week off. This is called a bye week, as in: bye to the stress, bye to the strain, bye to the rhythm that has brought us to this point. It is an opportunity to sit back and lick the wounds from previous weeks and prepare for the long haul that will be the rest of the season. My question is this: Why don't I get a bye week?
Professional football players and coaches play sixteen regular season games, preceded by four before that that are exhibition, and if they are extraordinarily successful they might get another three after that in the post-season. If you toss in an extra pre-season game for the primary purpose of getting the year off to an early start, a professional football team will play a maximum of twenty-five games over the course of a season. Twenty-five weeks adds up to roughly half a year. That means that about halfway through that half-year, they all sit down and take a break. In my life, this is known as Christmas Break. For two weeks all the teachers and kids go home and prepare for the second half of the year.
Just like the NFL, sometimes game plans change. The rosters are also up for revision as kids move away or arrive at our school ready to find their place on the team. This year we even have a couple of teachers going out on injured reserve. How will this impact our performance heading into the playoffs? We hope that the third grade equivalent of Randy Moss doesn't land on our doorstep. The waiver procedure in elementary school is a little more complex than that found in the NFL, but if he can bring our test scores up, we will find a way to work with him. I don't think we would let him interview himself, however.

Accidents Will Happen

I know there are not a lot of other ways to go about it. I know that when bad news comes, no one wants to be the person bringing it. I feel this most oppressively in the fall. This is the time of year when I came home and got the call from my mom on the answering machine telling me that I shouldn't call back, but I should just come over to the house. When I got there, I found out that my friend Darren had died in a car accident. Fast forward a dozen years, and I come home from work to find my wife sitting on the front steps of our apartment building. She had just been on the phone and was waiting there to tell me my father's plane had crashed. Though he lived long enough for me to get back to Colorado for one last tag, he was gone shortly after that.
This is why, when our school's secretary came out on the playground to find me before the bell rang last Thursday morning and told me that I needed to call my wife, my initial reaction was to run in the opposite direction. What possible good could come from this interaction? If I had won the lottery, she would have announced it to the world. If there was a problem with the washing machine, I would have expected an e-mail that I could pick up somewhere in the course of the day. No, this one had "emergency" written all over it. Did the house burn down? Is the dog all right? Are all our parents moving around, taking in air?
As it turns out, my son had merged his bike with a car while riding to school. Happily, the sandwich and pear in his backpack cushioned his spine and the helmet he was wearing did more damage to the car than the windshield did to his head. He got a police car, an ambulance, and countless middle-schoolers' attention, and abruptly after that I got the call at my school. When I called back, I was immediately relieved when my son answered and said, "I got hit by a car and I'm okay." Those nine words were all the roller coaster I needed. There was a day of reflection after that, where I mulled over all the things I still need to tell him about life and how to live it, but the fact that he is now telling all of his friends that they need to wear a helmet when they ride their bikes seems to be the most profound piece of wisdom that I could share. Sometimes life can be short and scary. Other times it stretches out for weeks and months when you walk across a playground to make a call home to find out what is happening. That's scary too. The good news is that sometimes the story has a happy ending.

Race To The Finnish

"Finland, Finland, Finland: The country where I quite want to be." - Monty Python
To be quite honest, as a teacher, I'm not sure it's exactly where I would want to end up, since the starting salary for primary teachers is only eighteen thousand dollars a year, but I guess that could buy one a lot of fried Pike Perch in Beetroot sauce. It would also make my son very happy and extremely well educated. This is a country that has a one hundred percent literacy rate. Their math and scientific literacy rates are in the top percentile as well. Maybe it's all that fish they eat.
My wife sent me a report about Finnish education reform. Here's the part that made me look twice: "Primary school, particularly, is, to a large extent, a 'testing-free zone' reserved for learning to know, to do, and to sustain natural curiosity." The only high-stakes standardized test comes at the end of high school. That would be quite a change from the early-and-often assessment program that we follow here. We run on data, and if that means testing Kindergartners in the first week of school to find out if they know their letters, so be it. Here in the United States, it's all about performance.
Or is it? Our literacy rate is ninety-nine percent, so should we bother with why Johnny can't read? Well, if you consider that that one percent difference represents some three million people, maybe we should be concerned. Maybe we should be looking into the "trust-based school culture" that Finland adopted back in the 1990s. But that would also mean addressing our problems with children living in poverty. That doesn't happen in Finland. We have six times as any kids per capita living below the poverty line. That might be why we approach school reform in the United States like a corporation. In Finland, they treat their schools like places where kids go to learn things. Go figure.

Fear Itself

Recent headlines pose this question: Has al-Qaeda become more organized? The bombs found on airplanes in Dubai and Britain are signs of a new, more dangerous wave of terrorism. I guess they want to differentiate from the kinder, gentler waves of terrorism that existed prior to last week. Maybe they're trying to distinguish these guys from the ones who carried their explosives around in their underwear or shoes.
Maybe the folks who make such distinctions about our level of fear have a point. According to reports about one suspect in the most recent attempts to blow things up, suspect Ibrahim Hassan Al Asiri, was described as a young man so ruthless he once hid a bomb inside his own brother in an attempt to kill a top Saudi counterterrorism official who was encouraging jihadists to reform. I'm an older brother, and while I have used my younger brother as an accomplice for numerous despicable acts, most of them centering around getting out of practicing the piano, it never occurred to me to use him to blow up the piano.
That's why they call them "terrorists." If the intent is to strike "intense of overwhelming fear" into the hearts of their enemies, then I believe they are doing their job. It will certainly give little brothers across the globe pause, but I remain less impressed and here's why: entropy.
I know. This is my answer for so many things, but it hasn't let me down yet. Think of every group you've ever belonged to. As it has become more and more "organized," has it become more and more efficient? I, for one, will be happy to see layers of bureaucracy eventually choke off the relative effectiveness of al-Qaeda. Imagine the United States Congress, but with high explosives. How long do you suppose something like that could survive? Be afraid, but take solace in the third law of thermodynamics. I do, and so does my little brother.

Scary Monsters

Zombies are back at my house. Not in a life-threatening, wear protective headgear to keep your brain safe kind of way, but as a topic of parental discussion. It is interesting to note that the walking dead have appeared on the playground at my school as well, as the X-Men and Transformers that used to chase one another around the yard are now, more often than not, flesh-eating corpses. Why then would I have any hesitation to allow my thirteen year old son to own a copy of "The Zombie Survival Guide?" The seven year olds at my school seem quite happy to act out their undead dramas on a daily basis. My son merely seeks a way to protect himself from such danger.
I am well aware of the fact that I think way too much about parenting. It does get a little confusing, when I play the argument that I want my kid to turn out better than I did next to the whining lament, "Hey, I turned out okay, didn't I?" It makes for some very annoying cognitive dissonance. After all, here is my chance to welcome my son into the world of creepy beasts and blood-sucking freaks. But the gore out there these days seems so much thicker than it did back in my day. My night of the living dead wasn't even in color. That was Bosco chocolate syrup all over that little girl's face, not blood.
In the meantime, while I fret and stew about how best to proceed, my son has taken it upon himself to make time on our stops at bookstores to pore over the book, committing sections to memory much the same way he does with favorite Garfield or Foxtrot cartoons. He begrudgingly respects the fact that his mother and I continue to monitor the purchase of his video games based on the rating stickers on the covers. The same kind of stickers that I scoffed at when Tipper Gore tried to keep me from listening to Frank Zappa. Back when I was a free-thinking college student. Now I'm a fussy buzz kill: somebody's parent.
I know it's just a line in the sand, really. There will be plenty of other concerns that will come along soon enough that will push this to the side. Some of them will be more serious. Some of them less. But at least I'm using my brain for something other than food.

Tone Deaf

Forgive my late arrival to the discourse, but digital video recording allows me to generate opinions far past the window of prime time. In this case, I refer to the "Rocky Horror" episode of "Glee." I have plenty of friends and co-workers who are very enthusiastic about this musical-variety-comedy-drama that airs on Fox. I have seen bits and pieces of episodes, and thanks to their efforts, Kristin Chenoweth is no longer singularly responsible for the revival of musical theatre. Here is where I tell you that my wife is a huge fan of muscial theatre. And "Rocky Horror." And Kristin Chenoweth. That is shy I felt the need to set my DVR to record this very special episode.
When it was over, I held my tongue, because I did not want to trample on the feelings of my dear wife. We grew up as band geeks together, and this story of kids finding their way in the rough and tumble world of high school glee club seemed to be a fitting allegory to our youth. And they just got an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for outstanding comedy series, so why didn't it seem particularly sensitive?
Initially, the performances of the songs seemed extremely faithful to those of the 1975 film. Then came the discussion among the faculty and kids, sorting out issues of the maturity of the subject matter, as well as casting the central character, Doctor Frank-N-Furter. The good doctor is, by is own admission, " a sweet transvestite," and though there were several odd feints at certain male characters taking on the role, including John "Uncle Jesse" Stamos, it went to Mercedes, played by Amber Riley. My wife said, "It's like 'what if Frank were played by Aretha Franklin?'" And that would be fine, given the grand tradition of casting against gender, from Shakespeare's time to Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan. Then they started messing with the lyrics. Why couldn't this character, appearing in a very special episode of a GLAAD award recipient show identify herself for the purposes of Rocky Horror as a "transvestite?"
The answer seemed plain enough to me: It's a show that is still being paid for by Rupert Murdoch. This point became all the more painfully apparent when, at the end of the episode, the Glee Club's director decided that "pushing the envelope" of what his kids should perform was asking too much of them at such a young age. So he had them stage it in an empty theatre. Where no one else could see it. Not unlike a closet.
Maybe I just don't get it, but for the record, neither did my wife.

What Are You Doing Tomorrow?

The death toll for campaign staff and election workers during the elections a year ago numbered twenty-one, according to Tabish Forugh of Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission. Another twenty-one people were wounded.
Back in March, the turnout for the election in Iraq was sixty-two percent. This was in spite of attacks that killed thirty-eight people. Contrast that to our last general election, the one in 2008, where we saw sixty-one percent of our registered voters in the the U S of A show up at the polls.
There are a couple of things that struck me about this news: First, and perhaps most obviously, it has been some time since anybody was shooting at potential voters in our country. Violence on election day is limited primarily to those hanging chads. Secondly, how do we reconcile the fact that these fledgling democracies seem to have greater participation than the country that is out there trying to plant and fertilize them?
I know. We've been at it for almost two hundred and fifty years. Representative democracy: ho hum. My boss won't let me have time off work. I just spaced it. This Tuesday? Really? Or how about everyone's favorite: "It doesn't matter anyway. They're all idiots."
The suggestion that we shouldn't vote because it only encourages them was tired before P.J. O'Rourke got to it. It is the opportunity that we have to make a difference in our daily lives in a simple, yet profound way. The stories of our elections have become mundane because of their relative calm and efficient occurrence. Glitches like the presidential election of 2000 are the exceptions that prove the rule. If more registered voters had found their way to their polling places way back at the turn of the century, Albert Gore might never have won an Academy Award.
It is the part of the otherwise nutso rhetoric that flows from the tea-bags of the party of frightened Americans: participation. Maybe it takes a certain amount of anger or fear to become completely connected to the democratic process, but perhaps it doesn't have to be a life or death proposition.
Vote.