The Circus

Here's the ugly truth: The circus is packing up and getting ready to move to its summer quarters. We'll be back next year, putting on the greatest show on earth, but for now, we're tired and we could all use a couple months' rest. Maybe it's not the best metaphor to describe the school year, but it feel apt from down here in the trenches. We've given the state-mandated comprehensive tests, boxed them up and sent them to Sacramento. We should be getting those results sometime in August. The kids know this. The teachers know this. The parents know this. This last couple of weeks is all about patience and staying power.
That may be why I bristled at the sight and sound of Michelle Rhee coming from my television this past weekend. It could be because she refers to herself as an "education reformer" rather than an educator, in spite of the fact that she was chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools from 2007 to 2010. She moved on to education reform in 2010, forming Students First, a political advocacy group that works to reform public education. As a part of this machine called public education, I'm the first to tell you that it needs reforming. On their website, they ask us all to sign a pledge for all California kids to have a great teacher. I'll get behind that!
Unless that means you want to end teacher tenure. They didn't ask me to sign a pledge to end teacher tenure. They asked me to pledge that every kid in California has a great teacher.
That's what reform does, I guess. It asks for change by offering logical outcomes to big questions that haven't been answered for decades. I'm not going to make big excuses for all teachers achieving tenure. I don't believe that should mean that the teachers in question suddenly become "great." But they have survived. They made it through a number of years, navigating the maze of observations, curriculum, meetings with parents, meetings with administrators, meetings with each other. And then they go do their job. Some of them aren't going to do a great job. Some of them start out doing a good job and then slip into a haze of delirium that comes with staring at the same room and the same text for years at a time. These are the tough cases. They are also the ones that cost the most, because they have climbed to the top of the pay scale. If we could just get rid of that "dead wood." I checked to see if there was a pledge on StudentsFirst.org that I could sign to get rid of dead wood. Nope.
That's because they won't say it. I know it's a problem, and I have been in that position. Happily, I was given an opportunity to refine my practice and reinvigorate my own career. And after fifteen years I'm making a living wage.
I don't have the answers. I know that it will take a good stir of the pot to get all the good ideas to rise to the top. I know this because I am a teacher, and that's what I do. And until it's time for the circus to reform, I'll be busy getting ready for next year. It's what I do.

Casualties of the Feud

When I heard Richard Dawson had passed away, I did not mourn for the host of "Family Feud." I never held him any kind of esteem for that job. He was an overbearing lounge lizard by that time. His insistence on kissing every female contestant was the definition of harassment before there was such a thing. He lolled from one side of the stage to the other, reading cards as if they contained the lessons of the ages, when they were merely the top ten responses to the question "what do you take with you to the bathroom?" Between his attitude and some of the worst suits ever worn by a human being, it was not an admirable time for Richard.
What did make me sad was losing Newkirk. When I was much younger, I spent hours reenacting entire episodes of "Hogan's Heroes" with the other kids in my neighborhood. Though I often picked the cherry role of the irascible Colonel Hogan, I was always somewhat drawn to that shady character played by Mister Dawson, Corporal Newkirk. He was the safe cracker and the confidence man. He was also supposed to have trained in both knife throwing and bow and arrow while traveling with a circus in his youth. Go ahead and put him in the cooler. He won't be there for long. And those sideburns.
But a job is a job, even if it's being a quizmaster. That's why there was some measure of redemption in Richard Dawson co-starring in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "The Running Man." He played Killian, the host of a life-or-death game show hosted years in advance of Stanley Tucci in "The Hunger Games." He was slimy before slime was cool. And so I won't really have to miss Richard, because he will be back, but only in reruns. Aloha.

The Word On The Bird

Even though Harper Lee taught me that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, I want this one dead. Like the proverbial doornail. Over the past week or so, this feathered monstrosity has made it his mission to sit in the trees just behind our house and practice his peculiar abilities. For a while he sounds like a whippoorwill. Then he's a bluebird. Then he's a car alarm. Then he's a car starting up. Then there are long, looping symphonies of original and imitated sounds that stretch from sundown to sunup.
I have become accustomed to sleeping through all manner of urban noise, from the neighbors across the street who keep their reggae raves roaring past midnight or the passing traffic in various levels of urgency and repair. Even the occasional next-door domestic disturbance can be ignored with a shift or a flop of a pillow. I live in a city, after all, not the wilderness. And maybe that's the problem. I've become so unaccustomed to the sounds of the woods that I can scarcely catch a wink between all of nature's wonders: the mockingbird's song.
For the record, I don't sleep through gunshots or earthquakes either, one being a more naturally occurring phenomenon, but I don't know if I will rest easy until this bird has flown. As for Ms. Lee and her admonition about keeping Mimus polyglottos safe and sound, I say this: Taking the Lord's name in vain is a sin, but every time I drop a something heavy on my toe, that's exactly what I do. Time to pack your bags, Mister Mockingbird.

Generation What Me Worry?

No one is currently asking to see my birth certificate. Even Donald Trump seems pretty much content to allow the facts of my entrance onto this plane nearly fifty years ago. For the record, I wouldn't dispute the birth of Donald Trump. His hair, maybe, but not the Donald himself.
Which brings me back to the data in front of us currently: Fifty years of Dave. Some days it seems impossible that I have been at this business of life as long as the Beatles have been recording. I came about just about the time that prayer in the classroom was declared unconstitutional. Feel free to make what you want of this synchronicity, but I prefer instead to look at my life as a much larger canvas, spread across six decades. There are plenty of artifacts left from that era, many of which can be found on YouTube. I have arrived at a fairly comfortable acceptance of my age.
Until I opened my mailbox last week and found my membership to AARP. Not just a mass-mailing to "Resident," but a personally addressed envelope with a membership card with my name printed on it. What a great opportunity to take advantage on the travel deals and benefits offered by this august institution. Or not. I'm as pleased as I can be for Bruce Springsteen getting on the cover of not just Time and Newsweek once upon a time, but the AARP magazine a few years back. He's over sixty and all. I'm still lagging behind the Boss. Of course, my knee slide isn't as practiced as his, but I get around all right. I exercise and run with the kids on the yard and ride my bike to work. I also find myself lurching toward the ibuprofen on a little more regular basis. I'm guessing that Bruce might toss back a couple Advil after a three hour show, too.
Am I ready to be a part of the American Association of Retired Persons? Well, not yet. According to the powers that be at the school district, I've got at least ten more years to grab that brass ring of a pension, and I'm guessing it will be more like fifteen before I can truly afford to do just that. And just when I was getting comfortable with that whole "Springsteen is sixty-something," along comes AARP's new spokesmodel: Betty White. I'm not ready for that yet. 

Painted Sky

Along with a few hundred thousand of our closest friends, my family and I attended the big Fireworks Extravaganza that accompanied the seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. When I say that we "attended," I mean that we stood along the shore some miles away and watched the bright flashes in the sky. It was, as these things go, impressive.
Why so dismissive about aerial shells and erupting volcanoes of colored sparks and flames? I suppose that at this point in my life I feel as though I've been there and done that. Not that there aren't some surprises left  now and again. The ones that blow up into the shape of smiley faces or cubes are a nice addition, but they are still working with the same basic palette. Maybe that's why the folks in charge of the Golden Gate display hauled out a bunch of lasers to spice up the mix just a little.
And that was cool, but from where we were it looked a little like someone shining a flashlight up into the prevailing clouds of smoke. I do sound a little jaded, don't I? But I have stared up into the night sky enough to become familiar with the patterns and colors. There is something that keeps it fresh to me, however: The explosions. This wasn't an option for us along the shore that night, but on those occasions when we can get up close enough to hear the bang and feel the concussion, then it's all new again. As a little kid, my son loved fireworks, but hated the boom. If we were half a mile away or more, he was happy. Any closer, and my wife and I would take turns holding our hands over his ears as we all winced in anticipation of the next barrage. Maybe that's why he suggested, before we found our spot on the shore, that maybe the best way to take in the spectacle would be on YouTube. Or maybe I can just close my eyes and remember all those fireworks shows I've seen over the past fifty years.

Dubious Distinction

It's Award Season in the world of Elementary School!  However, the mother of an eight-year-old Arizona girl who was presented with a "Catastrophe Award" for apparently having the most excuses for not having homework believes her child was humiliated by her teacher. "I think it's cruel and no child should be given an award like this. It's disturbing," she said, adding that she was not aware her daughter had a problem with homework, and that the girl had been enrolled in an after-school homework assistance program.
Wait a second. Back up the tape. Did she say that her daughter had been enrolled in an after-school homework assistance program and she was unaware that her daughter had a problem with homework? That's a little confusing, isn't it? I'm not going to side with the teacher on this one, since an eight-year-old probably isn't going to get the layers of sarcasm that are involved in presenting such an award. He or she might get the humiliation part, which is a vein that had been mined each time that student had appeared in the morning without homework. I can relate to this, since my son has been struggling with a similar experience this past year as a freshman in high school.
He didn't got through that one alone, however. His mother and I have doubled our efforts to find the holes in his filing system and poked through his backpack on an increasingly regular basis, looking for those stray assignments or missing worksheets. Initially we cursed his teachers for not giving him the attention he deserved, and then became aware that the gap in the fence was the locus of control. He had made it all the way to fourteen without fully understanding that homework was his job, and that his teachers and parents were there to help and facilitate, but turning in papers and projects was his responsibility. Not ours. But if he brought home a Catastrophe Award for his efforts this year, I would share it with him. It's my job to get him ready for the work he's got in front of him and to get it where it belongs. I guess I would thank a third grade teacher who gave me the heads-up just so we could have had a jump on what was ahead of us. For him.

Smoke And Mirrors

Given a chance, I would take the opportunity to vote against R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris. Not the guys themselves, since they're not running for anything, but they are campaigning against Proposition 29 here in California. In our play, R.J. and Phil are the bad guys known as "Big Tobacco." They are the ones who oppose this suggestion by our legislature that we raise a bunch of money for cancer research by raising the taxes on buying tobacco products. The cool thing about this one is that you don't have to pay this tax if you don't smoke or chew or snort or ingest any of these products. The products that cause cancer.
Then I hear my wife's voice. The one that reminds me that the industry that is in charge of finding a cure for cancer is capable of just as much waste and corruption as our pals R.J. and Phil. She makes the argument that this cancer-curing industry has nothing to gain from eliminating their source of funding: the disease itself. It's a pretty scary conspiracy theory, but not out of the realm of possibility. If there was a cure for cancer, what would all those folks in white lab coats do? We can't afford to put all of those highly educated people out of work right now, can we?
And what about that idea that only the addicts have to pay for finding this cure? Aren't they the victims in this tragedy? It's pretty easy to sit back, without a pack-a-day habit, and suggest that the ones who are puffing away are the problem, and they somehow deserve to pick up the tab on all this science that will benefit them. Well, them and all the other people who get cancer from any number of other sources aside from tobacco. And what about taking care of them when they do get sick?
It seemed like such an easy question when the conversation started.