General Epistles of Jacobus the Scribe

Hooray for Texas?

2009-12-04T14:40:00.001-05:00

Currently I'm working on one of the final papers I have falling due with the end of the semester. The assignment has to do with designing an evaluation, and I've been planning to look at the impacts of some kind of state curriculum mandates. This has led me to look around for any states with interesting recent changes in their curriculum policy. Anyway, I stumbled upon Texas as having started some interesting new graduation requirements this year that I'll probably be looking at for my paper. That is all fine and dandy, but why do I express this ambivalent reserved hopeful excitement? It is because of one of the many other things that happens to be buried in this bill.

In a strange mood to fool around with graduation policies, the Lone Star State has decided to run an early-readiness graduation pilot program. Colleges and universities are being solicited to coordinate with school districts to invent an assessment system that can facilitate early high school graduation by giving students an opportunity to demonstrate that they are ready for college, ostensibly at any point during their high school careers. Why is this potentially a ridiculously awesome thing? Because at its base, compulsory secondary education is oppressive and this can create an opportunity for some willing and able people to escape it. This is also cool because it is the first time I've heard of a policy plan that sought to inquire about what people really need to learn from school that can in turn inform future policies about what the schools require. Granted, “need” here is defined as including achievement levels in core-curricula and readiness for continued education. However, as I've learned time and again since I began teaching, successive approximations of the goal are something to rejoice over. Now there are lots of other doubts that hedge up my joy. What sorts of attitudes and expectations are the universities going to bring to the table? If the findings are good are Texans really ready for a radical policy maneuver that would be implicated by this? How would the teachers' unions respond if this proliferates enough to threaten job security? Et cetera. But either way it's something to keep the ol' eye-ball on.

Secrets

2009-11-07T16:45:00.001-05:00

This writing grows out of observations I've made recently in several interactions I've had with other people. There exists in here a principle that I think could be of real benefit to many people in developing their spiritual lives.

The scriptures have it that the works of God are done in the open for everyone to see and know, but the devil uses secrecy to hide all of his efforts. In 2 Nephi 26 we have: “ there are also secret combinations, even as in times of old, according to the combinations of the devil, for he is the founder of all these things; yea, the founder of murder, and works of darkness. … For behold, my beloved brethren, I say unto you that the Lord God worketh not in darkness. He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world; for he loveth the world.” In Acts 26 Paul declares before Agrippa “This thing was not done in a corner.” And one final reference from Amos 3:7 “Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret...”

Understanding this principle Ignatius of Loyola gave some clarification for its application to the work of discernment of spirits.

[The evil spirit] acts as a licentious lover in wanting to be secret and not revealed. For, as the licentious man who, speaking for an evil purpose, solicits a daughter of a good father or a wife of a good husband, wants his words and persuasions to be secret, and the contrary displeases him much, when the daughter reveals to her father or the wife to her husband his licentious words and depraved intention, because he easily gathers that he will not be able to succeed with the undertaking begun: in the same way, when the enemy of human nature brings his wiles and persuasions to the just soul, he wants and desires that they be received and kept in secret; but when one reveals them to his good Confessor or to another spiritual person that knows his deceits and evil ends, it is very grievous to him, because he gathers, from his manifest deceits being discovered, that he will not be able to succeed with his wickedness begun. (Spritual Exercises, Rule 13 for discernment in the First Week.)

Now there are a few things that I would like to point out about this teaching and it's general implications. First, it may be noted that for most of Christianity there is a certain understanding of a need for confession with regards to sin. This is not what he's talking about here. He's saying that the enemy desires us to keep even the ways in which we are tempted a secret and that by revealing the secret to someone else we unmask the villainous plan and obtain some power over the temptation. And this goes beyond just temptation. It includes trials of any kind. How often do people afflicted with spiritual trials in life keep them a secret either because they are ashamed or feel like they shouldn't burden another with their problems? And yet the argument here is that this tendency towards secrecy is a method of diabolical deceit.

The second point to observe here is that the instruction leaves plenty of room for exercising wisdom and judgment in the manner of revealing the secret. There is no injunction to be completely open and make all temptations and trials public. There is no rule that one should confess to persons directly involved in the problem. It simply states a confessor, or another spiritual person. For example if a trial exists around angry feelings towards a family member, it is not necessary to reveal this to the family member if it is liable to create unnecessary problems in the relationship. One may safely choose to reveal the issue to a friend or spiritual leader and thereby gain strength against the enemy.

The third point deals with how it is that this process works. There is something about a secret that it does interesting things to the mind of the person who harbors it. In the case of secret emotions as temptations, it can be very difficult for a person caught up in them to see and understand them with clarity and objectivity. However, the second that one reveals them to another person there is the opportunity where one can hardly help but consider them from an outsiders perspective. It is an automatic human process that we model in our own minds what we expect others to think when we are communicating with them. And should the hearer be sufficiently spiritual, they can provide actual feedback, the sum of which will uncloak the deceits being used against the afflicted and destroy their influence.

A fourth point can be made in the fact that Ignatius does not specify the gravity of the “wiles or afflictions” in question. Though I think it can be seen clearly that this principle applies to help in preventing one from following through with temptations to commit serious crimes, I believe that it can also apply to smaller struggles according to the judgment and perception of the person in question. I read recently that sometimes just having an opportunity to talk to another person about one's spiritual life can be such a relief that what were before great trials seem diminished even to non-existence. It was recommended that when this occurs one ought to reveal the secret anyway and thus more completely destroy the temptation.

Finally I enjoy this passage from Doctrine and Covenants 123:13-14“... we should waste and wear out our lives in bringing to light all the hidden things of darkness, wherein we know them... These should then be attended to with great earnestness.”

Just something to think about.

Metallica's “Wherever I May Roam” as Cultic Hymn in the Mysteries of Hermes

2009-09-23T23:21:00.003-05:00

So far I have not been able to discover an actual mystery cult in worship of Hermes or Mercury. It seems that this divinity may be associated too much with other mysteries (eg. as Corvus the messenger in Mithraism and as the psychopomp escorting Persephone to and from Hades in the Eleusinian mysteries). This seems strange in that this god is associated with many things that are particularly apropos for a mystery religion. His early forms were frequently related to fertility, his images frequently phallic. He often functions as a sort of liminal being, standing as a mediator between the mortal and the divine, the living and the dead, and males and females. He was patron of all sorts of common folk particularly those involved with travel and exchange.

The primary identifying characteristic of a mystery religion is that it consists largely of a set of ritual dramatizations that are kept strictly secret by those who have been initiated into the cult. These rituals somehow functioned to provide the initiate with knowledge and some kind of magical appointment (sometimes by means of a sacred marriage) in order that they might attain some advanced form of afterlife. With such celestial goals in view, several of these mysteries and their antecedents possessed a particular interest in astrology. In the hymn “Wherever I May Roam,” several characteristics common to mysteries can be observed, characteristics which indicate Hermes as a focus for the cult. The first line of the hymn is repeated twice and represents both an element of mystery religion and an association with Hermes.

And the road becomes my bride

Inasmuch as the mysteries were held under great secrecy, very little detail is known for certain about the rituals that were contained there. So, I cannot comment on the likelihood that a marriage ceremony would have been a part of the initiation. However, it is generally considered quite probable that initiations consisted, among other things, of rituals providing purification. The concept of purification appears in a couple of places in the our hymn starting with second line.I am stripped of all but prideIt is interesting that the initiate's bride is “the road” this suggests the embarkation into the cult which may be represented as a road as such mysteries often involved the devotee progressing through a series of levels or grades until they had learned every rite in the whole system. It is also reminiscent of the road that the deceased may traverse into the higher realms of the afterlife. This aspect of the road also indicates the relationship to Hermes whose interest the roads were.

Only knowledge will I save
To the game you stay a slave

In addition to the ritual sanctification, most mysteries seem to have carried a gnostic component to their soteriology. The knowledge of the mysteries is the critical difference between the celebrants of the cult and the population at large. Such knowledge is the mechanism by which greater stations are obtained after death. This type of salvation is also a liberation and in the case of this Hermetic cult the abandonment of home and goods contributes to this liberation. It seems that the freedom to live as if at home, comfortably and on balance in any situation is the measure of freedom and salvation the Hermeist obtains as seen in the following lines.

and my ties are severed clean
The less I have the more I gain.
Off the beaten path I reign.

...

Anywhere I roam,
where I lay my head is home.

One indication that this hymn is related to a cult of Hermes is embedded in a string of epithets: Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagabond. It may be that these terms refer to four grades of the Hermetic mystery cult. However, they are succeeded by the line “call me what you will.” This suggests that the terms may be appropriately tied to any individual in the cult according the will or inclination of outsiders, regardless of rank. This concept of wandering is carried over in the following line:

Under wandering stars I've grown.

This is particularly appropriate in such a mystery on two grounds. First it shows the object of the initiate's emulation in the celestial sphere. It also suggests a connection to Hermes in that his planet is the fastest and most wandering of the lot.

One interesting connection with Hermes is one of the abilities that the devotee claims to obtain from his observance of the rites and their associated asceticism.

free to speak my mind anywhere

One may remember the Lucan account in the New Testament of the Apostles Paul and Barnabas preaching in Lystra. When a crippled man was healed, the people believed Barnabas to be Jupiter, but Paul they thought to Mercury on account that he was the greater orator. The ability not only to speak one's mind, but to speak it well and in strange company would be an ability quite consistent with a tradition worshiping Hermes.

The final evidence for the song “Wherever I May Roam” to be considered a hymn of the hypothetical Hermetic mysteries is found in the final lines. It is the culmination of the system's salvation doctrine and arguably implies the patronage of Hermes both in his role as psychopomp and due to the passage's traveling motif.

Carved upon my stone,
my body lie, but still I roam,
wherever I may roam.

A strange parable that went too far

2009-08-16T18:32:00.002-05:00

March 1996 – Brunhild has been in estrous and seems to have influenced the rest of the troop with her mood because the other females are showing some tumescence. The males, Brian and Borris, have been approaching her. She's allowed them to mate, but has shown real signs of dissatisfaction with them. After one mating with Brian she hit him in the head with her hand then chased him off with a stick. He's gotten to be old enough that he cannot properly defend himself from a female as forceful as Brunhild. Each time Brian solicited her she walked off until he presented her with a small pile of figs. When he attempted to force himself on her, she began screaming and then
Barbara with one or more of the other junior females came running in and the group chased him off.

April 1996 – Brunhild's estrous has come to its end while several of the other females including Barbara, have come to mating. Most of the younger ones have been passively accepting couplings from Brian and Borris. However, Borris has been somewhat more abusive with the females lately. It seems that this may be related to the appearance of a younger sexually mature male from another troupe that has been hanging around. In fact both Barbara and Brunhild have met this male to exchange grooming out of sight of Borris. This has led to both of the senior females mating with this new male, who absconded from the troupe after each event.

Barbara was observed to be grooming Benjamin (the young foreign male) when she walked in front of him displaying her swellings. Benjamin approached as if to mate with her and she sat down, denying him access. He also sat and began grooming her when she got up again and began walking towards the troupe. Benjamin followed her, increasing his pace as if to catch her. Just as he nearly caught her, again she quickly sat down. Benjamin hooted a bit in frustration and resumed grooming her. Again Barbara got up, but this time ran toward the troupe and Benjamin got up to follow. As he ran though, Barbara came within sight of Borris. Benjamin seemed to detect this because when she stopped running he stopped chasing and crouched down in the leaf cover. Benjamin watched her closely as Borris noticed Barbara and approached. Barbara allowed him to mate with her as she frequently turned back to look in Benjamin's direction. At this point Bridget joined them and also mated with Borris. And as Benjamin watched Brandy also approached and mated with Borris.

Late that night, there was sudden commotion, several of the troupe were screaming while at least one male and probably two were going from tree to tree shaking them and beating on the trunks. There was no visibility but at one point there was the sound like a large stone hitting a tree and breaking it and there was the sound of one chimpanzee repeatedly screaming but gradually moving away from the camp.

In the morning, Borris was found dead. He had suffered severe head trauma that seems to have been associated with a large rock nearby that has blood splattered on it. Several of the females were making soft howls consistent with mourning as they touched Borris's body, lifting his arms and watching them flop back to the ground. There was no sign of Brian. However, Benjamin was quite present, always within sight of the females. Occasionally one would join him and engage in grooming.

Over the course of the next few days eventually all the females had substantial time to spend in grooming and mating with Benjamin. Most of them have been at the peak of their tumescence and have proven quite willing partners to this new and apparently able young male.

August 1996 – Just as with Bridget last month, Benjamin attempted to mate with Brandy, who is in estrous. However, Brunhild and Barbara got in between them. Brunhild with her stick chased Brandy off and Barbara, who is currently pregnant, solicited Benjamin to mate with her. Benjamin at first complied, but with slow, seemingly resigned body language, instead walked away. Benjamin sat under a date tree as Buster and Bruno stopped wrestling to practice their grooming skills on this elder male.

December 1996 – It seems that Benjamin has had enough. After months of Brunhild and Barbara interfering with his attempts to mate with the younger females, he's abandoned the troupe. He's been gone for several days, certainly longer than his norm. Though it is uncertain where he's gotten to, it seems probable that he's working on joining a different troupe where his mating opportunities will improve. Most of the females in the group seem unhappy about this situation. Bridget and Brandy sit silently and stare, ignoring their young as much as possible. Meanwhile Brunhild goes back and forth terrorizing the other females with her stick. She even went so far as to attack Barbara with it.

March 1997 – In the past month, two roving young males have approached the troupe, which is feeding much further to the north than they did last year. It is not quite clear how or why but neither male chose to stay, despite the very easy access to females in the absence of any resident alpha male. The first one mated with a few females that presented their swellings to him, including Brunhild and Bridget. After finishing this task, he left and never returned again. The second one, approached Barbara in the forest and seemed to be checking her out, mostly by smell. Then, suddenly he hit her in the head several times, chasing her in a circle. After tiring of this exercise, he rested and ate for a minute, then left. Brunhild has not gotten any less surly with the others since Benjamin left. And the effect of her abuses are starting to show as one of the youngest adult females, Bertha, has left the group with her six-month-old daughter, Beryl.

November 1997 – It has been 8 months since any matings have occurred in the troupe. From April to the present there have been 6 males that have approached them, but for reasons that aren't clear, these males left in search of another option. Though 5 of them left without much incident, the 6th one to come made a scene by lifting and throwing large rocks and tearing branches out of trees while hollering at the females. The day after the second of these visitors, Bridget was observed leaving the group to follow in the same general direction taken by that male. In fact, one-by-one the females have been sneaking off into the forest with their young until now the only adults are Brunhild, Barbara, and Beverly. There are also no males remaining among the juveniles because they all left with their mothers.

There was a big fight. Brunhild and Barbara with their daughters were feeding on figs in the same tree. It started when Brunhild began shaking the branch that one of Barbara's daughters was hanging from. Barbara quickly climbed down from a higher branch with her teeth bared toward Brunhild's location. Brunhild backed up onto a different branch, grabbing her daughter and started to climb down, fleeing the furious Barbara. Slowed by the young one on her back, Brunhild was quickly caught by Barbara and the two of them tumbled to the ground. Brunhild was badly injured and limped away with her daughter. It looked like she may have broken her left leg. Beverly, having no young of her own, coached Barbara's two daughters down from the tree where the three of them mourned Barbara for several hours. Beverly then took the two young ones out to find food, but in a different direction than Brunhild.

Two Stories of the Sword in Retreat

2009-08-09T20:32:00.002-05:00

As some may be aware, yesterday I returned from retreat. The experience provided great spiritual benefits and a pretty good opportunity to train physically. The grounds of the center are large and verdant with great expanses of plush lawn. I don't know how others feel but, lawns are among my favorite places to practice martial arts. The grass provides a contact that is ideal in both softness and support for techniques that involve kneeling or tumbling.

One evening while practicing sword forms I noticed a an observer half hiding behind a shrub he happened to be browsing. The two-point white tailed buck would stare intently at me for a moment and then return to whatever leaves he was partaking. As I continued to train, I noticed that one of his antlers was broken or deformed, and that they were both still covered in velvet. He had been coming gradually closer as he'd been eating, watching me quite carefully.

A lot of the forms I practice these days end with a kind of jumping attack. As I was working I tried not to pay too much attention to the deer in that I didn't want to make a sudden change in behavior and chase him off. That being said, as he got within about 8 or so meters, the jump was sudden enough that he would slightly spook. But seeing that despite my sudden movement and the sound of landing, I was not making any attack against him, he'd jerk back a couple of feet and then approach the spot where he originally was.

This pattern continued for two or three more forms when he seemed to become more comfortable with this strange thing walking around in circles swinging a stick. Eventually he eased his way to within about 5 meters, where he watched as if enraptured by my spectacle, pausing occasionally for a bite of grass. As he walked around to the other side of me from where he was, I came around to another jump. This time, the tension was too much for him to handle and he bolted off. I was reminded of certain American Indian groups that historically forbade warriors from eating venison because they didn't want to be infected with the animal's timidity.

The next evening I had the opportunity to enjoy the company of a different order of wildlife: mosquitoes and horseflies. The reality is that I was a great attraction to such creatures every time I went outside, but at this particular time it had particular significance.

One of the tricks for dealing with flesh-eaters and vampires was to just keep moving. As long as I was moving around and my sword was swirling over and around my body they were more or less deterred from harassing me. This was great motivation to train with alacrity. Combining my efforts with the humidity and heat I found myself quite exhausted at the end of my set of forms.

It seems like I've heard somewhere that insects, mosquitoes in particular, detect their victims by means of body heat. So when I stop and sit down from my exertions, I imagine my body must have registered as a giant infrared beacon promising a hot meal. The sudden swarming I received alarmed me. In order to shoo off my foe I started to swing my sword in a spinning motion over my head and nailed my target. The end of the sword's handle clipped me a bit and left me with that subtle ringing sensation one gets when hitting their skull into a hard object.

Humiliated by my pathetic show of swordsmanship I stood up and started walking back towards the center to shower and move on to my next spiritual exercise. After I got a few steps though, to my surprise I found a stream of blood starting to drip off of my nose.

The pain of my self-attack had not been so bad that I should expect the injury to be serious, it was only a bit of a twinge. All the same, there is something about those cherry droplets that can impose a sense of urgency, especially when you cannot see the source. In fact because I couldn't see the cut, I hesitated a bit before realizing that I needed to put pressure on it to stop the bleeding. So there I was trying to juggle a pair of socks, a sword, and a water bottle, while putting pressure on some random spot where I might have broke the skin, and trying to not drip blood all over everything.

In this state I walked, playing an awkward form the little tea pot, back up to the door where I have to punch in an access code and pull it open. Still though the bleeding has definitely slowed I keep thinking about how I want to get through all this without anyone seeing me. Consciously I didn't want to terrorize some poor old Jesuit with my blood covered face, but really I didn't want to have to explain to anyone what happened.

By some miracle I made it through the door with all of my stuff and without leaving any little rubescent spots on anything. I turned down the corridor and found myself closer to the bathroom than I'd been to the deer when popping around the corner in a slightly Irish accent came: “Good God man! Are you all right?”

“Oh yes, it's not bad at all. I just need...”

“The bathroom? It's right through there. What happened? Did you fall?”

“No, no. It's alright. I just hit myself in the head with a stick.”

A Problem to be Avoided

2009-05-31T10:46:00.004-05:00

This may seem like kind of a strange or perhaps even uncomfortable subject for me to broach but, it has been on my mind a bit lately. Recently a young man that I train marital arts with asked something about my opinion on abortion. He's of a different spiritual and religious background than I am obviously, and in the moment of surprise at the question and a hope to not create offense for him or his parents, I flubbed a pretty feeble response.

In general I subscribe to the belief in the sanctity of life and that with a few exceptions abortion is, in short, bad. At the same time I understand and respect the fact that many people do not share my religious convictions on such things. Also, being aware of infanticide as a low-tech alternative that appears throughout the ethnographic record, I'm somewhat inclined to be sympathetic with the staunchly pro-choice.

Curiosities surrounding my religion are a common point of discussion with my students. This has naturally included issues of sexuality, and the boys have time and again made it quite clear to me that the concept of chastity is too extreme for them to consider seriously. Something I read from Barak Obama recently reminded me of what I had to say to them about abortion some time ago. He referred to the controversy around the Notre Dame commencement saying, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually. It has both moral and spiritual dimension. So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions. Let’s reduce unintended pregnancies.”

In my class, I asked the boys to consider the view point of their girlfriends and hookups. I asked them to think about what a pregnancy means to the person who is pregnant.. In biological terms alone the process is difficult both physically and emotionally. To terminate this process prematurely, for any reason, can only complicate matters by imposing a difficult mix of conflicting feelings. With these consequences in mind I come to the same short answer for the question of abortion that I would give to any young man regardless of his religion or lack thereof. If he has any respect or concern at all for the young woman who loves him or trusts him with her body, he will do whatever is necessary to ensure that she never has to come to the point where an abortion would be an issue.

It is not the culture of my students to think about things in these terms. With a few exceptions, they often regard females as objects to be exploited for whatever selfishness comes into their heads. Some of these students have become fathers, and it's interesting to see how the models provided by their own fathers are predictive of the students' ambivalence towards their children. It's one of the great and terrible feedback cycles of the world. In any case, whether a boy has become a father or has had a scare of becoming one, it almost always comes out that he's been cavalier about the whole business and chose self-interest and laziness over responsibility. Despite knowing better and having all that might be needed available he has still chosen to deal with things conveniently rather than prudently. The idea that some form of foresight or self-control might be a component of true manhood seems too elusive too often. He even fails to get things right in a world with Plan-B.

What I'm saying here doesn't really describe what I think about abortion. It is more a philosophy of action, or if I dare say it: wisdom. Whatever beliefs a person may have about the complex relationships between spirit and body I feel quite safe in commending that every man, regardless of age, who is unprepared for fatherhood should commit himself to never afflicting a woman with the necessity to make such a “heart-wrenching” choice.

I just don't know what to say.

2009-05-26T10:06:00.001-05:00

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_increasing_number_of

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/05/fire_breaks_out_1.html

Mnemosyne is a Fickle Crone

2009-04-28T21:09:00.002-05:00

What a fragile thing the human memory! Lately I'm experiencing a great deal of difficulty with my memory on a couple of levels. First, I'm just not accessing things. It could be the hinted beginnings of age or it could be sleep deprivation, but I cannot count the times in the last couple of weeks I wanted to say something, new precisely the right word for it and yet really struggled to drag it up. I blame this partly on the range of vocabulary I get to hear and use in my work. Let us just say that it seems likely that my lexicon has not been getting its proper work out. I expect that things will improve as I return to school this fall.

The other memory issue I'm having is created memories of information. I have these memories of specific passages I've read that I've wanted to use in some things I've been writing lately. Some of this information I've gone back to look for using computer search engines. I've been careful to choose careful wording for my searches because it was something special about the wording that made me remember the information in the first place. Frustratingly, it turns out that in too many instances I can find nothing. I would like to blame the software, but as I've gone to the labor of rereading some of the texts in question I've not found any support for my cause. It's kind of frustrating in that I don't like being forced to question that I know what I know.

I recently read a book that describes how easy it is to create false memories and to even implant them into the memories of other people. It's a process that's been demonstrated to occur in judicial and clinical contexts. Both of these are quite frightening. In the first, people can be falsely condemned and punished for crimes they haven't committed based on the testimony of a witness with a false memory. In therapy people have created delusions of trauma which have led them to engage in behavior that has created real trauma. It's a pretty serious mess. One of the things I find interesting about it is that often people substantiate their belief in their false memories by reciting a lot of detail about whatever their memory is. Some research though, has indicated that such details are lavishly created from thin air by the person with the implanted memory.

I've observed the process happen accidentally with my students recently. I set to them a certain assignment to find some information and then report back on it. When the students actually looked for the information they didn't find any to speak of. But with the passage of time, they've created memories of all sorts of details that they could never have gotten from their sources and some which don't even exist.

It's also a process I've seen them use deliberately from time to time. Some relatively bright students can retell stories about things that they are in trouble for in such a way that it becomes easy to doubt what you've seen with your own eyes. If you're not vigilant you can start questioning or even recreating your own memories and let someone off with the benefit of the doubt. At one point I was trying to come up with a way that I could use this process back on them to accomplish some useful learning or something but, nothing has really come to me yet.

Random stuff to look at

2009-04-28T19:53:00.002-05:00

http://www.penikese.org/almanac/TidingsFeb09.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpaQ0d4vFDk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTF6uO8z-1w

Back from the Cave

2009-03-24T19:28:00.003-05:00

It has been a long time since I last wrote. I'm not sure if I ought to apologize for the lapse or for bringing it to an end. There are several reasons for this. One is that the major events and forces in my life lately have not been things that I could speak of too easily for several reasons. They either have had to do with clinical issues on the island I haven't felt comfortable discussing, various political issues, or personal spiritual and psychological events.

At any rate, I probably should announce that I have been accepted into graduate school. If it is not exactly what I hoped for more in accordance with my expectation I was accepted for the masters program rather than the PhD. One of the main motives for applying for the doctorate program was that acceptance guaranteed full funding. As it turns out it seems quite likely that I will be able to obtain sufficient funding that I will be just fine with doing the masters. It also turns out in hindsight that this may be fortunate in that I may be better able to revert to an earlier plan where I could get the skills I want from this program and then apply them in a different context of research more closely focused on what I'm interested in at a different school for the doctorate.

On a completely different topic, I've had a recent unfortunate experience that certain people would surely consider me an idiot for. I get health insurance through my work, a fact that I've felt some irritation about from time to time particularly the fact that only the last couple of years I've been required to have it by law. As everyone knows it's not cheap and I've been paying for it the last four and half years and haven't in that time seen a doctor once. I'm a decently fit person and have found that I've got a pretty functional immune system. Anyway, I recently got sick in a somewhat serious way (a strange bug I think one of my roommates brought back from Mexico) such that one of my coworkers talked me into having something done about it. So anyway, having not seen a doctor since I moved out here I really had no idea who I had as a primary care physician, or if I even had one. Turns out there was a doctor that had been sort of chosen at random when I first signed onto the plan but because I had never been seen by her before, she refused to see me until there was an opening in about a month. So, eventually we found a walk-in clinic that helped me out. However it turns out the insurance company may not cover the cost without getting a referral from the primary care physician. I again called her office to ask if they would provide a referral and was rejected again. At the end of the day, I realize that this situation is really my fault for not taking care of all this a long time ago. At the same time I'm more irritated by the fact that I've basically been giving my insurance company money all this time for what may turn out to be nothing in return.

My recent field trip

2008-10-24T20:52:00.001-05:00

A while ago when I was looking for a place to live I looked around on-line to see if I could find any monasteries. No, a monastery was not my first choice or what I was really looking for in a place. I was just getting down to the wire and figured, hey, it worked for me once before. It took a little bit of doing to tell you the truth. I found a few convents without too much struggle but eventually came upon an Episcopal monastery near Harvard and an Orthodox one in Brookline.

After one negative experience in an Episcopal church and a couple of good ones with the Orthodoxy, I developed a bit of an interest and resolved some time ago to try and check the place out. Their website indicated that they were pretty hospitable and allowed people to come join with them for their liturgies. They also sell pretty cool icons. So, wanting an icon or two to decorate my room and a chance to hear vespers again, I took a little trip out there.

Getting there was a bit of a hassle because the train next to my house is pretty inconsistent and the bus connection I needed is pretty infrequent. I ended up walking the distance from the stop where I got off the train because the bus was not on schedule. It was one of those situations where the bus is so late that it was running with the next scheduled bus right behind it.

I was a bit nervous about this situation because I had timed things pretty closely and wanted to be sure to have enough time to get my pictures and still be on time for the service. As all the monks are actually supposed to attend all the liturgies this seemed especially important. Anyway, I arrived and found the monastery on a nice plot of land with some lawns, and a few fruit trees.

I approached to find that it would be pretty easy to sneak up on the place. There were a few monks milling about outside. They had long gray beards and loose black habits that were obviously intended for working in. Also their hearing was not too good. I was obviously out of place and as long as I was unseen I was also unnoticed. In fact I got to the door of the main building right behind one of the monks, almost stepping on his heels who stepping inside wouldn’t have known I was there except he unexpectedly turned sideways to genuflect and kiss an icon of Mary in the vestibule. He asked what I was there for. I explained that I wanted to purchase an icon or two. He asked if I knew where they were. When I denied it he said, “Well go on in then. I knew I’d seen you here before.”

Fortunately there were more monks inside and another seeing the stranger asked what I wanted. He showed me the room where they keep the stuff they sell to visiting public. It was very little like a storefront and seemed more like a kind of small library but in place of books were wooden plaques. After finding the two I wanted the brother said that since it was my first time they would offer one to me as a gift and only ask payment on the other. When I attempted to pay for them both, persisted in his refusal and gave me permission to stay for vespers.

While waiting for the service to begin, a particularly elderly chap in a wheel chair, Father Thomas, approached me about my dress. Having calculated my clothing according to what I’d observed in various churches outside of Mormondom I was a bit surprised to discover that I was supposed to have a long-sleeve shirt for the worship. Father Thomas pointed out a coat rack covered in them near the main entrance. I felt fortunate to find one that fit well enough without any hassle. It was about this time that folks started to gather to the sanctuary.

It was difficult for me to identify the sanctuary at first. I was expecting it to be a much bigger room, something like a chapel. Though it wasn’t a monastery the closest experience I’d had to this was my retreat at the Campion Center. The chapel there was comparable to the Cathedral of the Madeline in Salt Lake. So, I was expecting something on that scale.

In addition to the size I was surprised because it was not a single room but two rooms. If you are unfamiliar with Orthodox churches they position the altar behind what they call a panel. The panel is supposed to emulate the veil in the ancient Hebrew temples placing the altar in the location of the Ark of the Covenant likened to the Holy of Holies. In this sanctuary the panel was proportionately large enough that it made not just a visual but a completely physical separation. The place where one would expect to be space for a congregation there was one row of benches and the participants in the service were in fact spread through a total of four rooms, two of them outside of sight of the panel and the brothers singing the rite.

Now whenever, I visit a religious service that I’ve never seen before, I create a certain set of expectations based on my previous knowledge and experience with that and similar religions. These expectations are frequently violated as was the case with this one. Vespers I had seen before, and wanted to attend because I enjoyed a simple service focused on a kind of singing back and forth between the priest and some selected men in the church. Although these things did happen, the rite here was much more elaborate.

One of the things that surprised me was the similarity between this and the rites in the Buddhist temple where I lived. Certain of the chanting, in tone and repetition, resembled that which is done at Shim Gwang Sa. These monks also performed repeated full-prostration bows that differed by touching their heads to the floor each time. Also their hands were planted on the floor in the form of fists. I, in my ignorance, placed myself in the main room of the sanctuary with the cantors at the front of the panel. It also turned out that this was the room where the icons were to which all the monks cycled through making these bows.

For much of the service I felt a bit in the way while trying vigorously not to be and pay attention to the singing at the same time. In the midst of it occurred to me that it was somewhat difficult (for me at least) to detect God through the elaborateness of everything going on. The fact that I was blatantly out of place didn’t help my perspective much. However, toward the end one kind of cool thing happened. Instead of just standing awkwardly outside of the rites I was invited to awkwardly participate.
At the end of the service a priest, for some reason I think he was the abbot, stood with a cross at the head of a line of monks and visitors blessing each one in turn. Being an outsider and trying to stand out of the way in this cramped space, a gentleman named David invited me to get in the line in front of him. I communicated my reluctance and he insisted, instructing me on what to do. “Kiss the cross. Kiss his hand.” The priest then touched my head with the cross and I stepped out of the room.

You can check them out at http://www.thehtm.org/

Producing the Game

2008-10-09T17:24:00.003-05:00

Well, here goes a bit of a story. Many months ago I had a student who like to play Magic the Gathering. This was rather unusual because this nerdiness made him such an outlier on the Island bell-curve that his post-graduation success is not a shocking surprise. Anyway, with the foul geekiness on the island and the relentless boredom our T.V. and drug conditioned students experience, several of them got to playing it out of despair for entertainment. As they did I observed something quite magical. These guys, however difficult a time they had in school, were learning a bit of game strategy but more shockingly some pretty complicated and weird vocabulary. They learned this vocabulary without even realizing it and without any sort of complaint or resistance. It was tough vocabulary too: terms like Incendiary Zubra, or Archaeo Evangel. Anyway, it inspired me as to a way that I might be able to get students to learn more biology, including the big ugly words. You see, I had observed time and again that often the word was the thing. "Why in the world should I go to the effort to even try to sound out, let alone understand a term like Mitochondria or Endoplasmic Reticulum?"

Along with the learning of vocabulary it occurred to me that a great many biological processes work in ways that a game could be designed to model them. For some reason I cannot understand, the vast majority of science education games are designed like Trivial Pursuit or something where the players merely practice regurgitating memorized science facts. I thought it a ridiculous shame to not accomplish the learning of information as well as develop a comprehension of biological processes.

Anyway, I made an initial aborted effort at a game based on the ETC in photosynthesis. That did not fly at all. Eventually I came around to this card game that models cells competing for resources in the environment with reproduction as the ultimate goal. Anyway, I've been working at this for some time and I'm now on my third major revision of the game. The second revision focused on getting more interaction between players. This third revision has been designed to simplify a lot of the game and make the cards less wordy.

The Place v4.0

2008-08-30T20:00:00.001-05:00

Well, I’ve been living here working at this job for four years and now I’m about to move into my fourth place. The events which have been leading up to this have been making me many things but happy. However, as soon as it is all over I may actually prefer my new situation.

The first major disappointment about this move relates to the fact that we really didn’t see it coming. I think it was pretty close to the last legal day that our landlord decided to tell us that he was going to renovate and not renew our lease. This was a pretty big surprise because he had given us every indication that he was intending to renew up until that point. In May he sent us an e-mail indicating he wanted a reassurance from us that we were planning to stay. He was responding in part to the fact that one of our roommates was moving out and arranging for a sublease to take up his spot for the remainder of the term. When the new guy signed on and moved in he had gotten the word of mouth from our landlord that the lease would be renewed and that the new guy would be able to sign onto it. So…it was kind of a bombshell.

This whole thing hit me particularly hard (maybe not as hard as the new guy) for a couple of reasons. First, I’d been planning to stay here for a while so I’ve sort of been in settle in mode. I’d bought a couple of pieces of furniture and some kitchen equipment. I’d been in the process of planning a refurnishing and redecoration of our dining and living rooms to make them more satisfactory for social gathering. In addition to settling, I had spent my summer in temporally and pecuniarily expensive ways. Taking almost two months off of work to take a couple of classes left me without any vacation time and a handy fifteen-hundred dollars. Oh… well.

The next adventure came in trying to find a place. It took me a few apartment tours before I figured it out but, do you remember that whole housing loan crash stuff? I could be wrong, but I think it might have something to do with the annoying increase in rental rates. Another fifty to one-hundred dollars in this neighborhood would’ve landed me with a room two-thirds the size of this one in a cramped apartment with no storage space and inferior subway access.

After some frustrated hunting around and trying miserably to somehow find a place while disappearing to the island for week here and a week there, I lost one such place (though newly renovated with new kitchen appliances) which I had signed up for including and earnest deposit when my potential roommates insisted the landlady reject me. You see, they called me the night I was leaving to go the island and left a voice mail asking me to show up for a meeting, one which was to have occurred in about an hour of when the phone call was made. I didn’t get the message until well after but, had to get to work. A couple days later I got the call that this precipitated my being dropped. This completely sucked because it left me with one week to both try to find a place, pack, etc.

This led me to discover another reason why my landlord’s timing was less than favorable. Some people might argue with me about this point, but I like to think of Boston and the surrounding area as being kind of like one really huge college town. So… if you are in a college town looking for a new apartment for September 1, well you might be able to imagine what a race that has been. The choices become very slim very quickly. In one instance I went out some considerable distance from my home for an appointment to see a place that had already been rented out before the agent and I got there.

Anyway, I’ve got a place secured now. Strangely enough it may turn out to be a better situation than I could have planned. It’s near a neighborhood that I used to like to hang out in. The rent is cheaper than where I am and includes utilities. A nice point. The apartment has less space but, it should work out. Also, the kitchen has a dishwasher. So… that’s about all I know right now. I may write more about this move after it’s over.

Playing with the Hooch

2008-08-16T21:48:00.005-05:00

I know that this post is only going to be so interesting to most people. In part because it is a report of something that was mostly a failure, a failure that has been a long time in development. For quite a few months I have been collecting the hooch off of my sourdough culture with the long term goal of attempting to distill the ethanol out of it.

For those who don't know, let me explain a little bit about what I mean. Hooch is the liquid solution which rises to the top of a sourdough culture that has been allowed to sit for a week or so. It contains mostly water but also some of the substances that are biproducts of the sourdough fermentation process. The bacteria in the culture produce various sorts of lactic and acetic acids that I'm neither equipped or qualified to identify. This is the stuff that gives the sourdough its sour taste. It also happens to make the culture acidic enough that nasty, unwanted microbes can't live in it. The yeast, of course, produce more water and some alcohol, mostly ethanol to be exact.

So anyway, I've been collecting this stuff for a long time and filtering it (a process that has been a major hassle) saving up to have about half a gallon in order to try out this protocol I found on-line for distilling box wines into sort of Franzia brandy. This method involves cooking the liquid at a very low heat in a big pot. The idea is to keep the temperature low enough to vaporize a lot more alcohol than water. You cover the pot with a bowl or inverted lid to catch the vapors and drop the condensate back into a glass in the center of the pot. The idea is that alcohol and water vapors will collect on the surface of the bowl-shaped lid and drip from the lowest part of the surface of the bowl and fall in the glass. The bowl is filled with ice to cause condensation.

It kind of worked but not really. The failure was all my fault in that I left and forgot the experiment and let it overcook. From the smell in the house I think I just boiled off all of the alcohol. However, a distillation did take place. You should be able to see in the picture posted here that I did successfully separate something from the solution. It just happens to be plain water. The clear glass on the left is the water that came out with a slight bit of vinegar in it. The brown liquid on the left is quite sour. Anyway, I'm a little disappointed but, quite impressed with the contrast in coloring and flavor here.

So, the question is: Will I try it again? Can't really say. The success and reason for failure are encouraging that I could be more successful with another go. But when I think of how long it took to accumulate the hooch... I hesitate. Maybe I could come up with a way to make it faster. Maybe, I'll just move on and find something else to try.

Check this out.

2008-08-14T10:44:00.003-05:00

Watch this video and tell me this isn't both ridiculously amazing and pretty creepy at the same time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7559150.stm

A Little Innovation... Maybe

2008-07-28T20:17:00.004-05:00

A few years ago I read a book that really inspired me with respect to possible research avenues I could pursue in education. It's called "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer. He creates an interesting argument for the neurological basis of religion. A central feature of his argument is that religious myths and ideas are memes that have some tenacity as cultural elements being passed on within a society because they have features that make them especially memorable by creating a form of cognitive dissonance. It occurred to me that there may be a lot to learn about effective education models by exploring the indoctrination practices of religions. One type of religion that particularly interests me is the mystery cult, which indoctrinates devotees through a system of religious rituals and dramatizations. So... for some time I've been thinking about and planning a mystery to induct my students into that would teach them something about biology.

Originally I got two students to learn the ritual who would then help me the next day to induct the rest of them. There was some skepticism and resistance at first. Partially because my co-conspirators anticipated a negative or destructive response to the process. This was of course a major concern I'd been carrying around all along. However, after rehearsing the ritual a couple of times and then showing them meanings of all the symbols, some of this concern was resolved and success seemed more likely.

Anyway, the next day we tried it out and in the effort to give each student a chance to be a direct participant, we tried to go through it a few times. At first it worked out but as they became too comfortable with it, one particular student decided to deliberately mess it up during his turn at participating. The larger group also served to provide lots of opportunities for mutual distraction, particularly during the phase where the symbols were explained.

Anyway, it didn't turn out perfectly. However, it did turn out well enough that I think I need to explore this idea a little bit more and try to refine it.

If you are interested you can link to a pdf of the full text of the ritual here: The Ritual or if that doesn't work you can link to it through here: My Downloads Page

School of Gardening

2008-05-25T16:55:00.000-05:00

It isn’t very often that my students take an interest in gardening. Oh, sure. Most of them ask me if I can teach them how to grow weed. That isn’t really the same thing but, they wouldn’t be able to succeed in that anyway. The problem is that taking care of plants requires attention, patience, and the kind of mindfulness geared towards caring and protecting rather than impulsively destroying. These are traits that very few of my students ever exhibit. Their lack of these abilities is so severe that even if I were to teach them how to grow something as attractive and desirable as their intoxicants, all but a very small number of them would fail.

As an illustrative example, I have one student now who likes to water the plants in the greenhouse. A few times he filled a bucket of water and dumped large amounts onto the pots washing large amounts of soil out onto the ground. Realizing this wasn’t working, he decided to fill containers holding the pots so full with water that the peat pots the plants were in began to turn to mush and several of the plants died. You see, it was easier to just dump large amounts of water into a large container than it was to carefully pour just a little water into each pot’s plant.

We do have one student now, however, who does seem to have some investment in the garden. He has been involved in most of the plantings and has taken a certain amount of ownership for them. The first few beds he planted had sprouted lettuce and spinach, which had impressed him as a real product of his labor. On a certain day he went into the garden to admire his work and check on its well-being when he discovered something that horrified him. Something had been tearing up his lettuce plants.

He was horribly confused that this could happen and determined that the rabbits must have done it. For some reason he did not quite understand the seedlings had been pulled up and left lying on the ground right in front of where they had so recently been growing. He was confused. What could he do?

Taking a closer look at the scene he noticed that someone else had been there before him and after the rabbit, who had attempted to replant some of the uprooted victims. Desperately he tried to continue this task himself but soon gave up in frustration. There were too many plants and he felt uncertain about the survival of those he attempted to save. Those that remained he left sitting in a ball on the garden bed.

Eventually he came in the house and told me the story. He expressed his desire to kill rabbits for what they had done. Finally, he asked me what could have done such a thing. I answered, “I know exactly what happened to your lettuce. I pulled it up.” The energy in the shocked expression on this enervated pothead face was the joy of my day. I explained, “We need to thin the rows.”

My students and their PFCs

2008-03-24T06:43:00.004-05:00

Well, I'm sitting here getting ready for another week out on the island of misfit boys. Our population recently went up to the max and the last week out had me pretty exhausted at the end of it. It is amazing what a difference even one kid can make to the state of things on the island, having three new kids is pretty remarkable. Curiously compared to other times we've had this much change I haven't really seen much in the way of chimpanzee fighting for the top of the heirarchy. This is rather unusual and perhaps says something about the type of kids we have these days.

I'm not really looking forward to going out to the island. I often feel this reluctance, most especially when there are certain risks regarding my proposed learning activities for the week. The last week I went out I thought that I had the perfect stuff planned for one of my most advanced students and he didn't take to it at all. He's one of the few students I've had in recent months who is studying algebra. During previous weeks I'd noticed that he did a lot better when I released the various algebra techniques one relatively small bit at a time. In this particular instance I had found a text that broke up certain work in solving fractions into pieces that were small enough that it would have annoyed the piss out of me when I was in high school, but it seemed to be exactly the kind of steps that he would be able to do and figure the whole thing out. The problem was that it was just enough for him to start having trouble remembering to do all the stuff he'd already been working on. It's that magical point where things get hard and the student starts calling the math work "gay" or "stupid." A kind of irony when it is usually the student who feels stupid at that point. It also seems to be one of two points that my students seem to fairly consistently run into where some kind of real cognitive deficit seems to rear its ugly head. This is the point where we've maxed out the kid's working memory capacity.

I've been reading up on this whole working memory thing lately and it seems that it correlates very strongly with all kinds of intellectual tasks including the sort of reasoning tasks that mathematics requires. The issue is being able to keep simultaneously in mind the ultimate goal of the problem solving venture, a mental roadmap of how to get to that goal, and the performance of the operation immediately at hand. As the road map gets more complex or has more steps added to it, or the immediate operation gets more complex the sort of mental blackboard gets cluttered beyond the individual's ability to read it and they start making mistakes that they actually know better than to make. One way of dealing with this problem is to develop what's called automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform certain mental tasks automatically and without thinking. This is the kind of thing marital artists train for in forms practice. It is also the thing your elementary school teachers were trying to give you with all those timed times tables tests. Really the only way to develop automaticity is to do the same things over and over and over a million times. This is something my students really resent me telling them they need to do.

Interestingly working memory is supposedly trainable. There have been a couple studies that have shown that people who practice at it and work on memory tasks of increasing difficulty can improve their working memory and show improvements in all kinds of reasoning tasks. It is one of the few things that can be taught that demonstrates a good deal of transfer into other tasks. The classis way of training this is the old electronic Simon Says game where you have to remember the sequence of flashing colored lights. Another is the Memory card game where you have to remember the location of matching pairs of cards that have been revealed one at a time.

With this in mind I've started up a regimen of memory training tasks for our evening study hours on the island. Sadly I don't think that it is going to be enough to make the kind of difference that we'd really notice. (This whole business underscores another reason I believe we need to rethink our entire system of education, but I digress.) Anyway, I'm giving it a shot and it seems that it has been effective to the point that the kids were willing to do it for a while. They're getting bored of the old task though and so I'm going to shift over to another task.

I mentioned earlier that there are two points of cognitive deficit that my students seem to be regularly afflicted by. If the first is diminished working memory the second is abstraction of proportional reasoning, or maybe just proportional reasoning. This is something that I don't know that much about. How this manifests itself though is that you can demonstrate to a kid with physical objects the concept that if you cut it into halves and then fourths that 1/2 is the exact same amount as 2/4 and they still don't seem to get it, and they certainly can't generalize it to proportions in general. This is a mystery that has been a nuissance for a long time and I really haven't gotten any closer to figuring it out. What I've found myself doing is teaching kids how to work out these and other sorts of fraction problems over and over. Somehow, I always come back around after enough time to giving students the exact same work that I've already given them, they've worked out all the problems but still can't remember how to do it. It may be that part of this is derived from them not having obtained automaticity in division. It may also represent something related to their behavioral problems. If a person cannot intuit about proportions in math can they understand proportionality in behavioral choices and outcomes?

More than a feeling?

2008-03-01T20:58:00.002-05:00

When I was a kid we used to swim in a series of geothermal pools at the base of a volcanic hill a short drive east of town. The place was called Warm Springs, which seemed kind of inappropriate in that the water almost always seemed really cold in summer time. In winter time, however, it never froze (at least not to my knowledge) and it would frequently fog up half the valley.

Anyway, there were a few summers when it seemed like we went swimming there almost every day. I was a rather mediocre swimmer and I kind of enjoyed the chance to invest some mediocre efforts at some mediocre improvement. I also liked taking snorkeling gear which I inexpertly used to check out the guppies people had released from their fish tanks as well as the rocky bottom with the sorts of things that at the time only Huck Finn and I could have considered treasures. It was also exciting for the mystique of an abandoned mill for processing minerals or gravel or something mined from mountains out on the western end of the valley. From a distance it looked to me like a ruined castle with a giant green hand painted on a little rock face overlooking it. Eventually I learned that the hand was in fact a representation of a marijuana leaf, but I digress.

On one certain bleak summer day I had been out there swimming with my siblings and a couple of cousins. I call the day ‘bleak’ because it was one of those times when the sunlight has a way of coming down that makes everything look washed out and more barren than usual. At the same time every breeze on our wet skins made the water feel that much colder. It must have been one of those summers we went every day because I remember us getting bored with it sooner than usual. The weather may have been contributing to the fact that I just couldn’t get interested.

So we packed up our gear and our towels and what not and climbed onto the back of my grandmother’s little steel-blue Dodge pick-up so she could drive us back into town. My ears were filled with water producing an eerie sense of balance and an otherworldly half-deafness. As we bounced off the dirt road onto the highway I noticed that my shoes were missing. In those days I ran around barefoot most of the time and had developed some pretty terrific calluses so it was really easy for me to not notice the absence. A strange and uncomfortable sensation started to form in my gut because of it and I asked to go back and look for them.

We went back and looked around. I couldn’t find the shoes and the worry in my abdomen wouldn’t subside. There wasn’t much area to check for them so the search didn’t last long and we again left for home. The strange feeling didn’t go away and I started to identify it as a weird combination of guilt and fear. It’s not the usual kind of fear like that of heights or social anxiety. The fear seemed to me to be more of a supernatural kind of thing. Lovecraft wrote that he tried to create fear in his writing that was not corporeal but confronted the reader with a dread for the chaotic possibilities of an infinite cosmos. I think the fear I experienced was something like that, as if by losing my shoes I had somehow angered unknown gods and should shortly fall victim to the torment of their earthly instruments. I imagined some kind of witches with my shoes in hand using them in a ritual to slowly pick apart my mind like a knitter picking apart some mistake in the scarf she’s making.

The reason I tell this story is because it is the first time I experienced this feeling. It comes back to unsettle me on rare occasions and has done so recently. I purchased the Planet Earth series with my favorite wildlife documentary guy David Attenborough. I took it down to Woods Hole. I’d been showing some of them to the kids and lent them to one of my coworkers to see. One of the disks has come up missing. It was a bit expensive and the fact that I lost part of the set has me feeling a bit guilty. But as with the shoes, the disappearance is so far inexplicable. These facts make the connection pretty obvious and provide some context for explaining the dread I feel. Even so, it seems like too much for the magnitude of a problem like a DVD or a pair of shoes. Maybe the witches really are at work.

The Struggle that has been January

2008-01-23T09:17:00.000-05:00

I feel a little apologetic about the fact that I haven’t written any posts in a while. I’ve been busy in some of the most frustrating of ways. I think I heard this concept from Susan: something about paying only the minimum on all of your credit cards of life. That’s what it’s been like for a combination of reasons.

Getting back from Utah, I was asked almost straight-away to cover a half shift for someone on the island. The week after that we had our half-week shift for the magical semi-annual shift-shifting shift. So in the end this has been the first real week off I’ve had since the holidays.

Normally that isn’t such an unusual or problematic thing except for the other things I’ve been pressed to accomplish in my piddly little periods of time off the island. The main point of work and frustration has been getting some lessons ready. I’m in a spot with the maths where it isn’t a problem for me these days. I’ve been doing the 4th grade through Algebra II thing for a while and I think I’ve got a good working curriculum going on. The problem lately has to do with science.

Right now I’ve reached a critical mass of students with really poor reading skills and my usual winter indoor science curriculum is pretty reading intensive. It in fact requires a certain amount of independence in student reading and researching. As far as I’m able to assess right now half of my students are below the third grade in their reading levels and they have serious struggles reading material as basic as a newspaper article. 16-year-old kids can’t read the paper. It’s really frustrating.

This being their situation it occurred to me that perhaps the best service I can do them as a teacher is to try and create my science curriculum for them in such a way that they will secretly be really improving their reading abilities. It seemed pretty reasonable to me. I’m kind of a scientist. Most of the scientific work I do involves reading stuff. Surely there are ways of making them read and learn science at the same time. Right?

I believe there are but I have yet to discover them. There is a perennial problem in teaching special education, something I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog. It is the issue of kids who can’t read good detecting that you know they can’t read good and giving them work that they feel is for little kids. It is the shame obstacle.

For whatever reason, I cannot find literature on biology related topics at a second grade reading level composed for teenage audiences. I’ve spent a few hours at the library. I found a book about integrating literature and science instruction, but in browsing it the suggestions for doing it were all pretty commonsensical and all the suggested readings and activities were for elementary school. Readings recommended as being biology related at the lower levels tend to not have any kind of technical information at all. They are usually cutesy illustrated stories about planting a seed and it growing into a tree or the chicken egg hatches and the chick makes noises and eats grain. On the other end are those that are designed to be for kids with lots of good illustrations and information but the language and vocabulary are still too advanced for my students.

So, I’ve been angsting, stressing, and vexing about this stuff with most of my time off and end up going back to the island with yet another couple of episodes from “Planet Earth” with Sir David Attenborough. (I should add that it is a pretty darn good series though I prefer his “Life of ….” or “Life in ….” videos.) And then I leave the island feeling like maybe the kids learned a little something about biology but their reading isn’t getting better. Furthermore I’m not really helping my more advanced students as much as I should be. It appears that I’m going to be moving on to creating a science curriculum more like my math where I have to work with each kid at his own level. This is going to be so much work.

I have thought many times that the whole field of special education could benefit tremendously from the availability of materials that are sensitive to the delicate egos of students such as mine, that very low level academic skills could be developed using materials designed for an adult’s interest and “dignity” if you will. Whenever I get to thinking along these lines it crosses my mind that I might produce some such material but… wow. I think someone could spend their whole life doing things like that, and it’s not really what I intend to do with mine.

Some Student Poetry

2007-12-04T12:52:00.001-05:00

I'm not poet or critic of poetry but, I was a little surprised by this piece from one of my students. I think he was assigned to write something about Calcutta.

Trip Plans

2007-12-03T09:15:00.001-05:00

I have scheduled the following flights for the forthcoming holiday month.

Boston to Salt Lake City
12/13/07
5:02 pm - 8:35 pm
Delta
Salt Lake City to Boston
12/27/07
9:40 am - 4:12 pm
Delta

Photos from New York

2007-11-25T14:27:00.000-05:00

This is of course one of the so-called needles of Nefertiti. A total misnomer by my way of thinking in that it is a monument to Ramses. Which one I cannot say though it has a sort of interesting formula for the text calling him "Horus the bull" at the beginning of each column of text. I found this in Central Park and at first thought it looked like it was a cement replica but, low and behold it's granite. Upon discovering that it was the real thing I was a little distressed at first because the first face you can see in the little area where it was put up has most of the inscription worn off of it. I feared that it had suffered all that damage by being moved from the nice protective desert to the acid rain of the east-coast of the US. Turns out however that it had been too worn to read on that side since the time it was first placed in NewYork apparently as a sort of gift from an Egyptian government official during the late 1800s. I played a few tricks with photoshop to make the inscription more legible but, I'm not sure that in this size version of the picture you can see that on this side of the obelisk the writing is almost perfectly intact.

This is a huge wooden mask we saw in the American Museum of Natural History. It was a pretty cool mask but I thought I liked it most for the fact that one of the names for it was the "Fun Mask." It's the sort of thing that starts a chain reaction of thought through Peter Murphy's cabaret version of "Fun Time" to the discovery of one of the coolest things I've seen in a while: Special Peter Surprise If only Keegan were here to share the joy of this one.

This here is a photo by Jed of a pond in Central Park. Isn't it lovely?

My obligatory picture of the Statue of Liberty. The smog you see is all quite real. Here I imagine her not so much as welcoming new people to a free country as waving good-bye to all of us as a society for deserting her as a principle.

The Issue of School Choice

2007-11-03T14:17:00.000-05:00

I am frankly very disappointed in the vibe I’m getting that Utah voters are turning around and deciding to revoke implementation of the voucher system. If you are planning to vote on this issue I think that the first thing you should do is read HB 174. It has come to my attention that there are people on both sides of this issue who are promulgating exceptionally nasty and deceptive misinformation in order to lure people their respective ways. I’ve heard that the media debate is surprisingly intense. I’m sure you already know that this is a huge experiment that the rest of the country is watching closely and people in other states have been contributing lots of money to weigh in for which ever side they support.

As for trying to make some kind of fair or insightful argument for why I think you should vote for it… I cannot at the moment do a very good job. As I look at this bill and consider all of my experience working in schools this whole thing looks like a no-brainer to me. I cannot find one honestly good substantial reason for the general citizen to vote against this voucher system. The way I see it is that it boils down to exactly one issue. What do you imagine the role of a school is? If you think schools should be maximizing learning you must maximize the potential for choice. If you think schools should function to control and regulate the behavior of young people so they pop out regressed towards the mean in everything they do, then vote to support the hegemony of public schooling. If you honestly believe in the fact that humans are all unique individuals with unique sets of talents and weaknesses then it should be plain to you that all of these people have different educational needs. No single model of school can meet the needs of everyone. It is not logically feasible. It is a road to assuring mediocrity, which as I translate it means wasted human potential. But, some honestly believe that is what our society needs. We need to put everyone together all the time, at every level, and for every academic task. If we do this, then everyone will suck together and no one will be able to point and say, “Hey it’s not fair, those black kids are doing better than those Hispanic kids!” (I'm going to refrain from my diatribe about race and the obfuscation of cultural relativism.)

Many are trying to put the impression across that the only flavor of private school is the blazer and tie prep school. This is very, super, friggin’, wicked wrong, the place I work being an extreme example. It is also a perfect example of another reason people need to be able to have choice in where they send their kids for school. Some kids have special learning needs. There are many kinds of such needs. The popular thing these days is to try and force every classroom teacher to learn how to work with and provide what’s needed for all of these needs. This is unreasonable. Just as trying to force the same learning situation on every bloody student makes them mediocre, doing this to teachers makes them mediocre in what they can provide for your kids. I have realized in my own development as a teacher that I have the potential of going from absolutely brilliant to bumbling moron in about 7 minutes, the time it takes for the periods to change and for me to get another batch of kids with completely different learning needs. (These days this is more like seven minutes for me to get into my lesson for the day. Different rant for a different day.) Private schools have a power that the public schools tend not to have: specialization and sometimes specialization in providing services for students with special needs.

Part of the magic secret here is something that I think is going to become my slogan or mantra or catch phrase or something: learning is voluntary. You cannot force someone to learn. You can encourage and provide opportunities. You can even encourage to the point of torture but, ultimately learning is an act of will. As much as possible I suggest letting individual students and their families exercise that will, especially when it comes to something that influences a person’s life and happiness as much as their education does.

So… it’s up to some of you folks. What’s more important: maximizing human potential or universal conformity?

Forgive me if certain parts seem kind of hysterical or confusing, I'm famished and not functioning very well. Also I want to point out, this is open for debate. If you think I'm wrong and have some argument that you think is convincing post it up here by all means. Be forwarned that I will gladly listen, discuss, and refute where appropriate.

Casual Update

2007-10-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

What’s going on in my life right now that’s worth writing about? Not much I’m afraid. There are a couple of highlights I could mention I guess.

At work we’ve been low on students so folks have been forced into taking extended time off. Because I’m a teacher and my work is not optional I’ve been kind of protected from this. This is something that has been convenient but I feel kind of bad about. This is especially so because I have enough vacation time that I’ll hopefully be taking a trip to New York City for Thanksgiving and then have three week vacation for Christmas. I could take some time off and let someone cover school for a bit but… I don’t know.

Last weekend the ward had a trip up to Camp Joseph, that’s in the Sharon VT area supposedly the old Smith homestead up there. I had the responsibility of making sure people had tents to stay in which was kind of obnoxious due to folks not sharing info with me about whether they needed space or had extra space. Nonetheless it all seemed to turn out okay.

Sword practice is going okay. I may have mentioned earlier that I’ve moved on from the defense series to the attack series. The attack forms are pretty fun. The last week I was off the island I learned my 22nd form. I like it but it has a couple things I haven’t figured out yet. Between forms 21, 22, and some kind of yoga-ish classes I’ve been taking from one of my sword teachers I’m finding out what kind of problems decades of slouching has caused for me. Somehow or other if I want to make a mastery of these techniques I’m going to have to learn to walk with my back up straight. Yikes.

The plants are doing well. The cashew tree has a whopping 10 leaves with another on the way on top. It also has some nodes appearing that suggest branches will be forming soon. I’ve moved my tomato plant indoors. I’ve of ancient times heard rumors that under the right conditions tomatoes are perennial so, I’m going to see if I can make that happen. Also, I brought home a venus flytrap from work. The kids were abusing it rather than taking care of it so… I’m going to see if I can get it pretty big and durable and take it back out there. So far it’s got about 4 or so of those little gadgets they catch the flies with but it hasn’t caught anything. Some of them are surely still too small and immature to work, and it might be that all of them are still.

In the cooking universe I’m deeply thinking about going back to getting set up to make beer. Oh the scandal, I know. But as for what I’m actually DOING, I’m making a lot of pizza. I’m trying to come up with a recipe for sauce that will cause the taster to faint for its deliciousness. Also I’m getting stoked for all the fall pies. I’m going to go back and try the pumpkin from the actual pumpkin with bourbon… so good. And I’m going to make advances in the apple department. I’m going to try and come up with a caramel curry apple pie. Oh yeah. Delanie’s fancy schmancy curry chocolates may have ruined me. I’ve got to figure out a good way for increasing my caramel amounts though. My mouth is watering thinking about it.

I tried a while ago to develop a contraption for distilling volatile oils out of various plant materials. I was thinking of specifically bayberry leaf because there’s a ton of it on the island and it smells really surprisingly good. It seems like the kind of project that would be cool for the kids too but, I’ve had little luck. One of the things I’m seriously considering in this vein to try now is to modify a stovetop espresso maker. They work by a different principle but I think if I cut a certain piece off and successfully seal the lid I might pull something off. I don’t know, it still seems kind of sketchy. I may just have to give in and buy a glass apparatus and threaten the kids with major fines if they break it.

Speaking of distilling, I decided for personal entertainment purposes to start saving my sourdough hooch until I have enough to distil it. There’s a contraption I saw on the internet using a big kettle and a wok full of ice for distilling Franzia. I figure the same could work for me considering I don’t want it to drink or anything, it’s just taking a while to save up enough hooch. I need like a half gallon or so and I’ve been getting about ¼ cup per week off of my culture.

I think that’s about all I’ve got to report or at least care to right now. I hope you enjoyed.

A Morning Sporting Event

2007-09-22T14:52:00.000-05:00

Do you remember how to play horse? I might have eternally forgotten except that we had a rousing game on the island Wednesday. You see, basketball was something I played a bit of when I was quite young. It was fun sometimes and frustrating sometimes for several reasons, not the least of them my diminutive stature. Anyway, I was in junior high school, probably 8th grade though I forget for certain. At that time a certain something began happening to the bodies of my peers that made the stature issue of rapidly increasing concern. I don’t remember why I wasn’t playing myself but, one day in gym class, I was watching a game from the sideline. There was this kid who was at least a head taller than who dribbled in for a lay-up. When he was about to jump and shoot he crashed into a substantially larger kid who was guarding the basket. Now I say “crashed into” but it was more like “bounced off of” and he fell directly to the floor with the ball rolling slowly across the key. Something about the way little David bashed himself against that wall of human flesh penetrated my mind in a way that few things have and I decided then and there that whatever God had made me for it was not this game. As a consequence I’ve seldom played since and then only when pressed to. That being said I’m sure you have some idea why I might have altogether forgotten to play horse had I not been in fact pressed by my job and played with the boys the other day.

Having not had great skills in the first place and certainly not maintained what I had I was the first person out. This was especially the case as Matt (Yes! I get to use code names again!) was in line before me. I didn’t know this about Matt but it turns out he’s a pretty good ball player who has a pretty good sense for the whole calculus of the game. One of the first things he did was ask if I was right- or left-handed. Telling him was a mistake because then he made every shot left-handed. These weren’t regular shots either. Everything involved some weird angle, or required putting the spin just so on the ball, or shooting without seeing the basket. My only hope was that a couple of times he made them complicated enough that he missed them himself. It was nowhere near good enough for me to last however.

Anyway, one by one people were shot out, mostly by Matt until no one was left except Percy. In order to appreciate the rest of this you have to know something about Percy. He’s a tall lanky kid but may be in the second to last place of all kids I’ve known on the island for motor coordination. In other words he’s about as awkward as they get. But because he had been the last in line and Matt was first he had been protected through the game and had not acquired any letters. It was thus that the competition began when Percy shot from the top of the key and made the basket. Matt failed to duplicate and got his first letter. Percy missed his next shot (not dexterous) but Matt missed his as well. They went back and forth a couple of times when Matt finally chose a shot he could make without too much trouble and against odds Percy made the shot himself. Matt became very concerned about this situation and his shooting suffered for it. The two went back and forth making odd shots but somehow Percy kept up and the two were neck and neck. Finally it came down to the last letter. Who would get the ‘e’? Matt made a left-handed lay up that required bouncing off of the right side of the backboard. Percy had been missing this sort of shot so it seemed to be done. He dribbled up and nearly tripped over himself but the ball went in. Matt’s next shot was an underhanded “granny” shot from very close to the basket but he missed and Percy got a free shot. He stood up next to the key on the left side and made a casual jump shot. In the ball went, and the line of players who were out made slight gasps. “Don’t let it get in your head, Matt” somebody said. He got into position to make the shot and the ball hit the front of the rim rolled off to the other side. Percy won.

A Story About Sword Training

2007-08-31T16:05:00.000-05:00

One of the great challenges in trying to keep up on my sword training since I moved out of the temple is finding good places to practice that are near my new home. There are two main requirements for this: enough open public space, a relatively low traffic unexposed location. From my early days of studying martial arts I learned that there are a lot of people in the world with strange ideas about it, ideas I do not fully understand, that result in them harassing you about it. I think it might have something to do with what people think of as the audacity or arrogance of the martial arts student. Their feeling may be, “How dare this guy walk around claiming he knows karate! He’s nothing special.” I’m not sure what it is. It still confuses me but I’ve learned to try and keep my hobby under wraps as much as I can, at least among people I don’t know or trust. (There’s an additional story about how this complicates my life on the island but that is not for here now.)

So anyway, it took me a little while to figure out some places where I could train around here and all of them are a little bit of a hike from my house. It is perhaps less convenient than I might have hoped but not too bad. Part of the trick with these training locations is not just the place but the time of day. There’s a certain school nearby where if I go really early on a Saturday morning or late on a week night there’s a bit of lawn and parking lot I can swing my sword around in. There’s another place along an abandoned railroad behind and abandoned warehouse that is very private all day during weekdays but becomes a spot at night where underage folk seek that privacy to smoke and drink. Another spot I found is a seldom used park near a highway where most of the time cars are flying by fast enough they don’t seem to see what I do out on the lawn.

One day I went to train in this location and came to realize that the issue of timing applies there as well. I guess it must have been during the afternoon rush hour. The traffic got backed up and instead of flying by a few drivers became an audience. Concentrating as I was on my forms I didn’t notice until I heard someone shouting from the road. I didn’t quite get what he said at first. So between forms I heard more clearly, “You’ve got to be joking! You’ve got to be kidding us! What, are you crazy!?” So there it was, my first heckle and a reminder why I hide to do this stuff. I kind of looked for the guy out of the corner of my eye as I went to do my next form just to be sure he was directing it at me. There he was, with his head hanging out of his window and an angry expression on his face looking at me and shouting “You’ve got to be kidding us! What are you crazy!?”

He drove on and I have to confess this sort of itched in my mind for a while. Two things sort of stuck out for me. First of all, who is this “us” he keeps referring to? Is this guy presuming to speak for everyone else on the road? Did he somehow come to think that I was out there training with the hope of benefiting him with a show? Mostly I was just confused as to why he’d even care enough to say anything at all.

It was as I tried to continue in this confused mental state that my next distraction came. this day. A couple of apparently Chinese folks came to the park with a little kid. The kid was also fascinated with what I was doing but in a much more positive way. “What are you doing? Why are you fighting?”, he’d ask. He kept hanging around me getting sometimes dangerously close to getting clobbered. I had a couple of short sticks with me in addition to my sword and I gave him one to play with. I told him, “You can play with this one but you’ll have to stay at least this far away so you don’t get hurt, okay?” He agreed and what I thought might become a sword for him instead turned into airplane wings. Oh well.

Let us just say I don’t practice there during rush hour any more.

The Retreat

2007-08-02T06:08:00.000-05:00

So… I took the train and made a three mile hike carrying my eight days worth of clothes etc down to the center. I had recently purchased a new bag so that I could fit one of my full sized swords in it. I thought training might be appropriate and having not had a chance yet to talk to my director I took the sword in case. It turned out that he encouraged my sword training and this was a form of meditation that provided a couple of insights useful to the retreat.

The center (http://www.campioncenter.org/index.htm) is a rather large building and is currently used primarily as a residence for aging or hospitalized Jesuits. When it was originally built it was a school for training novices to become Jesuit priests. It has a nice big chapel with a dome and a half dome in the middle front of the building. The grounds are quite large and are used by retreatants for meditative nature walks.

When I arrived the director’s secretary, a woman I had talked with trying to get set up with this retreat, took me up to my room. It was one of the old dorm rooms of the Jesuit school. Eventually I met my director Fr. Mattaliano and he scheduled to meet with me each morning at 10 am. Our morning meetings consisted of him asking how my meditations and prayers of the previous day went and me telling him as I felt it appropriate or useful to do so. We would then discuss the potential meanings and importance of the things I observed in my own thoughts and feelings. Then he would sort of assign me passages of scripture to read and a direction for meditating on them. He would also direct me to pray for what he called a grace, which in Mormonism we might call a spiritual gift. An example of the type of grace he would suggest praying for might be a deeper understanding of some aspect of God’s love in a certain context. He would of specify the aspect and context. Then I would try to do it and we would talk about it again.

I found this interesting and useful for a couple of reasons. First, we discussed things in my spiritual experience that I very seldom have talked about with other people. It was sort of like having someone else there to listen to my thoughts and reflect them back at me in ways that helped me to see what was going on with a bit more clarity than I could have accomplished on my own. In the Zen temple this is not something we got much chance to do as discussing things experienced in meditation was pretty discouraged. Why this is the case has something to do with sacredness but, I think there is more to it than I understand. I have experienced some difficulties in having discussions like this with people who are LDS too, I think particularly of my mission but at other times as well. Part of this I think has to do with a strange sort of cultural corruption of our faith where people are afraid to believe in taking instruction from the Holy Ghost. It’s sort of like a denial that we as common random individuals, “non-prophets,” might have interesting and important revelations. The other part of our difficulty may lie in not having much in the way of training or teaching on how to have these conversations. Not knowing some appropriate method, we may feel inordinate fear or hesitation to having these sorts of dialogues.

The second major benefit I found from having spiritual direction, as it is called, was to be directed. The way I know the scriptures is different from the way that he knows them. Of course he’s trained to do this stuff and has been through a formal and rigorous theological education but that’s not really what I’m referring to. The scriptures that have the most interest to me, that I know well, and the sorts of interpretations I’ve put on them are different than those of my director. So, when he hears about my meditations and assigns me passages, he is doing it from his background and experience. Because it is different from mine it offers me a new perspective on the issues at hand, or his suggested prayers and meditation offer me a new perspective on old scriptures. I found this to be valuable as well.

Now, some may wonder about the Jesuit aspect of this whole experience. Now because of my knowledge of St. Ignatius, the Exercises, the way that it seems Jesuits seem to have a certain thing for schools, education, and the sciences, as well as an evangelical function I have felt a certain kinship or relationship with them. To some degree I wondered if this trip might not further tempt me with the idea that I had played with a little of joining their order. Somewhat to my surprise it did exactly the opposite. Being surrounded by these men, who had so dedicated their lives to the service of God as they understood it, I realized that I could never do it. On the grounds there is a cemetery for Jesuit fathers that they suggest walking through as a sort of meditation where one can contemplate the number of people who have served as witnesses of Christ. However, this is not at all how it felt for me. The identical grave markers in perfect rows gave me a sense of extreme loneliness. These were all men whose lines had ended. They were not with their ancestors, they had no descendants. It was quite sad. As I saw them around the center and overheard them talking in the dining hall I had much the same impression: theirs was in many ways a life of loneliness, grandfathers with no grandchildren.

Now as for the content of my meditations… let us say that I feel the experience was a good one. I learned new things and sort of relearned things I’d forgotten. It has also been interesting spending these last few days in the wake of the retreat because I see with greater clarity the meanings of the things I derived from my meditations and by and large what I have to do about them. I found a lot of my vulnerability exposed to myself and certain of my strengths, things I depend on daily but don’t give much thought to. A greater appreciation of these things and a desire to grow in strengths by allowing myself to experience vulnerability may be a fruit of this experience.

Cashew Tree

2007-08-01T13:17:00.001-05:00

So, it has been over a year since I first got the idea to try and do this and at long last I have had some success. Below is a cashew tree seedling, I sprouted in my room. I'm excited enough that I'm posting this before I talk about my retreat. Normally I'm opposed to naming inanimate things but in this case I'm going to make an exception so, I'm offering anyone with ideas a chance to discuss names for a cashew tree.

Though, I've discussed this with some people I should explain part of the reason I decided to try to grow a cashew tree. First is the obvious: I like cashews. Second: When I first read about doing it, I thought it to be a rather unique, interesting, and cool thing to try. Third: I found out that the cashew tree grows a fruit sometimes called a cashew apple that you can never buy in stores because when it is ripe it is too delicate to withstand any packaging or shipping. You have to have the tree to eat this forbidden fruit.

When I tried this before it failed for a couple of reasons. First New England isn't all that terribly sunny in the summer compared to Utah. My mistaken assumption. Also, I think I may have overwatered them. Apparently these guys like the desert. So, I think I planted 7 or so seeds then and got nothing. This time around I modified a sort of cabinet so that it is covered with reflective insulation on the inside and rigged a fluorescent coil light that comes encased in a plastic device that alters the light spectrum that's emitted to imitate natural light. I planted the seeds in some little contraptions designed to water the plant without human attention (important considering my job) with lots of food and a special chemical called gibberellic acid that stimulates seed germination and stem growth. I rigged the whole thing with a timer so that the seeds (and now plant) get 13 hours of sunlight a day. And.... voila. If you look closely at the picture you can see the two cashew-shaped cotyledons.

It's supposed to be a year or so before it starts to produce fruit.

Before the Retreat

2007-07-20T09:48:00.000-05:00

So, today is kind of a special day for me. I'm going on my vacation in a couple of hours. I need to get a shower and pack a couple more things. But then it will be done. I'm going on a meditation retreat to a little Jesuit center near here. I will be spending hopefully 8 days engaged in religiously oriented meditation under the direction of a Jesuit priest. He is the director of the center that provides such retreats and after talking with me on the phone he decided to direct my retreat personally. I'm not sure exactly why but, I think it may be that I'm a confusing and unusual case.

When I tell people about this vacation I tend to get one of two responses. Either A) "You're a freak. Why would you ever want to waste your time doing something like that?" This is a response that is pretty typical at work. Or B) "That sounds pretty cool. I think it's really great that you are the kind of person that could both want and actually follow through and do something like that. " I have my suspicions that those in group B are polite members of group A but... oh well. I have been wanting to go on such a retreat for several years, ever since I studied the founder of the Jesuit order or Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and his Spiritual Exercises. The very concept of a spiritual excercise intrigued me, and I look forward to giving this a try.

So anyway, I'm hoping to have a valuable learning experience and will be sure to post my reflections when I return.

Answer for Surly Temple

2007-07-07T20:31:00.001-05:00

Why am I opposed to a law which requires kids to stay in school to the age of 18? There are many reasons and so far I’ve not had quite the chance I desire to articulate them in a way that I want to send on to relevant legislative individuals. And even now I’m not sure how I ought to articulate them all. A lot of it has to do with my reasons for thinking that our system is evil and bad in the first place. It follows that I wouldn’t want to require anyone to spend up to two more years undergoing this sort of education than they might otherwise.

A major piece of my opposition is rooted in a belief in good old-fashioned freedom and self-determination. As it is now, a 16-year-old student may with the permission of parents withdraw from school. Students may do this for many different reasons but, one way or another the students and parents make a determination that schooling is not consistent with the said student’s life goals and prefer to do something else with these years. What they do, as long as it is legal is up to them. It could be home-schooling. It could be entering the workforce. It could be any number of things but ultimately it is the exercise on the part of the individual families to pursue happiness for themselves. To pass this not only violates this right, it insults all parents and students in the state by claiming that they are not competent enough to figure out what to do with their own lives.

The case of one of my students always comes to mind when I think about this issue. He had dropped out of school before entering our program. He had some very serious behavioral problems that made it near impossible for him to function in a classroom. Forced to take school, as it was part of our program, he experienced limited success and was frequently a deficit for his influence on other students. In a traditional school, in a traditional classroom it would have been that much worse. Required to stay in school by the law he would be the sort of person to bring drugs and weapons onto school campuses. That is assuming he would even bother going to school at all. Because he is required to go to school, getting a job would be out of the question because any employers would be complicit in his truancy. This means a kid with no self-control and a great deal of free time on his hands.

Part of the assumption posed by this legislation is that it is possible to somehow force a kid to learn stuff. This line of thinking annoys me a great deal. Learning is voluntary and a student who is not motivated becomes both a wasted investment and an impediment to the education of others around him. When you have a kid that has been to school (as all have) and has had little success and a lot of frustration you can expect that he will develop a certain amount of resentment towards the society that is doing this to him. If you take away his last recourse to choose another path for himself and criminalize his potential means for finding satisfaction you have galvanized this resentment and have significantly increased his capacity for deviant, even criminal behavior.

Now, it has been suggested that there ought to be a place in the school system for such kids, like mechanic school, or something. I agree that there ought to be and if more of such choices were available I would be less aggrieved by this bill. The problem is that there are very few, and those that do exist are very selective of their students. Boys like mine (those I might suggest need it the most) tend not to be able to get into such programs because they refuse to enroll kids with a history of truancy, drug abuse, criminal behavior, etc. Now the law in question provides funding for investigating the possibility of increasing the numbers of internships, school-to-work programs, and possibly even increasing the availability of technical high schools. The problem is that it imposes the requirements before the investigation of these sorts of programs is finished. Note that it is the investigation. We aren’t even close to talking about actually increasing the range of services provided. We are merely talking about talking about increasing the services. I believe the saying goes “putting the cart before the horse” or something like that.

Anyway, these are few bits and pieces, odds and ends for reasons I am opposed to this legislation. I am about to read a book that proposes an hypothesis that I’m interested in because I suspect that if it is not on the right track it might represent a perspective in this discussion that doesn’t get much voice. It’s called “The Case Against Adolescence.” The primary thesis is that the social roles of teenagers has been infantilized through history. This means that the competence of adolescents is being under-estimated and that they have not been given the sort of responsibility that both satisfies their changing psychological needs and conditions them to perform as adults. I suspect there is a certain amount of truth in this but I’m not sure how much or what it would ultimately mean in the end. I’m sure that it would not support legislation that only extend this infantilization. However, I don’t know for sure yet and maybe I’ll comment on it after I’ve studied it more.

Call for Reviewers

2007-06-26T12:42:00.000-05:00

In this state there is a bill that has been proposed to require students to attend school till the age of 18. This means that students will not be able to legally drop out at 16 or 17 anymore. I don't know if anyone who reads here will agree with me but I'm pretty opposed to this policy. Anyway, I'm trying to write a letter to the relevant legislators etc. to express the opinion that it shouldn't happen. I'm a little emotional about this issue and I cannot guarantee the quality of my writing. I'm going to have to come back to it but, if anyone is willing to volunteer I would like to e-mail a copy and get some comments before I send it out. Just post here or e-mail me if you are willing or interested. Thanks.

Some recent student artwork

2007-06-17T07:36:00.000-05:00

I think this piece conveys the free-thinking and innovation of current high school math students. Notice the artist's use of color in the flames constrasting the black and white in which the math book and teacher are depicted.

False Curriculum Reform

2007-06-16T17:51:00.000-05:00

The time has come for my latest rant on education. It has been observed so many times (I’m thinking primarily since the ‘80s) that there is some kind of need for us to improve something about the way we teach math and science in this country. Professors have been complaining about the skills students come to college with in recent years. A lot of testing has been done comparing our students to those in other countries showing that as a nation we have certain deficiencies. A lot of people in the schooling process (i.e. students, parents, and teachers) observe that low relevance in traditional and mandated curricula contributes to student apathy resulting in poor learning performance.

In order to respond to this lots of little groups have formed to produce curricula intended to be innovative, and reform oriented. These groups tend to be composed of university professors, researchers, educational administrators and others I couldn’t identify who often have three or four motivated charismatic individuals with the “brilliant idea” for making kids in public school learn the things that they want them to know when they get to college. Often they are people who’ve gotten some kind of government grant to do the job and the materials they produce are supposed to be made available to the public in a non-profit sort of way.

In the last few years I’ve looked at a lot of these sorts of materials and programs. I happen to be reviewing one for potential use in my school right now. The lot of them tend to be terribly rife with a certain set of problems that make them pretty much worthless.

The first and most obvious problem for anyone to notice is the production values of the curriculum materials. They tend to be paper backed at best and are often bound in that cheep nasty spiral binding you can get done at the po-dunk copy shop down the street. They are sometimes obviously printed from type-written material or your typical word processing software fonts and formatting. The black and white graphics are always blatantly the cartoons of an untrained artist or cheesy awkward computer clip art thingies. It’s the kind of thing you put in front of a kid and have already lost them because they can’t take this “fake” school work seriously.

Another problem that comes up pretty consistently has to do with the choice of content. For some reason almost all professors in the sciences think that kids in high school need to know about optical illusions. Why? Is it because they think that the illusions are engaging and will get kids interested? One thing it certainly doesn’t do is lead into any relevant topic that kids need to know in order to pass state-wide tests for graduation. It’s also too light-weight and obvious (having already been used several times in the elementary grades) to make it useful information when preparing high school kids for college. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s a piece of evidence for my “brilliant idea” theory of educational reform. (Maybe some day I’ll write a book about this theory.) If it isn’t the optical illusions it’s something else of similar caliber and relevance with some silly “high interest” hook: breaking rocks, being blind-folded and smelling grass, "imagine you were an alien from another planet", etc.

The thing that I find bothers me most though is something I think of as entrenchment. A lot of theory in educational reform suggests that students should be engaged in learning activities that are highly authentic. That is to say that students should be learning how to do real things in the real world. Almost all of these innovative curricula projects present themselves as being highly authentic and having a great deal of relevance. It kind of makes me sad to sense that these authors have a correct spirit in trying to produce this sort of learning material. The problem is they do not have the right kinds of heads and what they produce is horridly contrived and anything but authentic. For example one math book I looked at had a lot of great activities that kids could learn from. I thought several of the activities were interesting and engaging and I think they might have been usable. The problem is that all of the materials were put together in a way that stripped them from their authenticity because the authors were so entrenched in thinking about the problems in terms of “school.” For example one of the lessons involved students finding out something about the cost of bread in local supermarkets. But instead of contextualizing the exercise in market research, or humanitarian aid, or making a personal grocery budget the context for the project was: “Imagine your teacher asked you to find out how much bread costs…..” Dumb, dumb, dumb.

A curriculum I’m looking at right now is for teaching philosophy in middle school and high school. The way it is supposed to function is the students read a short novel where the characters are kids that encounter philosophical issues in their real lives. The chapters of the novel are then supposed to be used to engage students in philosophical discussion. The problem is the same. The story in the book is all about kids sitting around in school having philosophical discussions. Almost never do the issues come up in naturalized living contexts. Furthermore the characters are totally unrealistic and talk more like college professors trying to teach little kids about philosophy than like little kids trying to understand life and the world around them. It is yet another example of the “brilliant idea” and a curriculum that has the right spirit but the wrong head.

The Place v 3.0

2007-05-31T20:35:00.000-05:00

Well I've been here for a while already so, it seems kind of late to be talking about this now but I suppose I can do so anyway. I suppose I did it without telling a lot of people what was up. I decided to move out of Shim Gwang Sa for a lot of reasons, many of which I will not get into. Suffice it to say that I started to realize that living as a monk was not exactly creating the type of social life I needed or wanted. So, I got a place that is now technically outside of the town of Boston but allows me to get downtown considerably faster. The area is called Davis Square and it's on the edge of Somerville near the Tufts University campus.

The area is pretty good for my culinary obsessions. There are at least three Indian restaurants within walking distance. One is literally around the corner. Add to that a choice barbecue joint, and a couple of Tibetan and Thai places and you can start to get an idea how much trouble I'm in. This is not all however. There's a butcher, a farmers' market, a kitchen supply store, and an Indian grocer (which happens to be closer than the Indian restaurant) as well.

Kind of the sad thing is that in conjunction with my failure to post I've not had much chance for taking advantage of the benefits all of this provides. It has only been this week that I've done any cooking and it has of course been a lot of Indian food and a key lime pie. (I hope there is at least a little laughing and a little cringing when I say that.) I still have a bit to do to get used to my kitchen. That's something that just seems to be the norm every time I move. Every cabinet, every stove, every space seems to have a different feel to it and requires some adjusting.

This morning was kind of exciting. I was baking the pie rather early hoping to have it done before I had to leave for work this morning. Well, the smoke alarm went off. It seems that the oven needs some cleaning or something. Anyway, I was a little worried because I thought I had probably pissed somebody off. Fortunately nobody noticed. Lucked out.

I'm still studying the sword. In fact I just learned my 20th form a couple days ago. With the assistance of a friend I found a nice little spot nearby where I can practice. It's on this abandoned railroad behind an abandoned warehouse. It's this big trashed up place filled with pigeons and I train next to these to big rusty water tanks next to an overpass. It's pretty secluded which is nice so I don't get harrassed by people going by. But I enjoy the environment itself because it kind of makes me feel like a martial artist in a movie. You know the one: where the hero is training in secret to sharpen up his skills for when he's going to break into the bad guy's compound and rescue his girlfriend, little brother, and the sacred artifact that gives him magical martial arts powers.

The sad thing is that somehow I seem to have failed in some way to achieve one of my major goals of moving. I thought I'd have more free time and opportunity for socializing. This is overall I suppose technically true. But at the same time I find myself working for the school more with my time off which makes me feel like I'm not any better off. Ah well. What can I do?

Zones of Learning

2007-05-31T20:30:00.000-05:00

Following is a little piece I wrote for my company newsletter. Kinda lame? Maybe.

According to the educational theorist Lev Vygotsky learning occurs in what has been called the “zone of proximal development” or ZPD. This zone refers to the relationship between a student’s current level of ability and a proposed direction of development. For our boys learning in the ZPD means being engaged in activities that are difficult enough that abilities must grow to accomplish them. At the same time, tasks should be easy enough that students can experience success. By working in the ZPD students can make efficient progress because they are both challenged and reinforced for their exertions.

Although this idea is pretty straight forward, the ZPD is not always an easy thing to find for students and teachers on Penikese Island. Because many of our students have missed out on school for one reason or another, they are frequently behind in their academic skills. Students are usually very aware of this and often feel a great deal of shame when asked to perform feats of scholarship that fall a certain level below that accomplished by their peers. Rather than feel this shame boys will often refuse to participate in school work especially when they believe that the teacher is treating them like they are “dumb.” This can complicate a teacher’s attempts to discover a student’s ZPD and can effectively make that zone smaller.

The story of Randy makes a good example of how with certain students the zone can seem to disappear completely. Randy came to us having ditched a lot of school and spending time in programs with little or no classroom learning. As a result he had fallen significantly behind in his math skills. Although he was of the age to be in 9th grade his math level was more consistent with 5th or 6th grade. Randy was given instruction and work appropriate to his ability level but would at times run into problems that were novel or confusing in some way. Whenever this happened, Randy would feel too ashamed to ask for help and would instead start yelling at the teacher. When the teacher figured out that the difficulty of the math was resulting in this behavior he offered the student an opportunity to review earlier math concepts and develop automaticity in areas that would make the current work less difficult. Again, Randy refused to do work that was easier in order to protect his self-esteem from the implication that he was “dumb.” On Penikese teachers acquire the challenge of finding ways to help students make academic progress despite limitations imposed by the boys’ preexisting perceptions, expectations, and emotional situations. It is among our goals to use this process in school as an instrument for helping students make progress in their overall treatment.

There is another zone of effective teaching that can be diminished on Penikese. In accordance with state and district requirements and with a desire to help our students pass the MCAS and obtain high school diplomas, our curriculum seeks to satisfy the goals of the Massachusetts Learning Frameworks. However, we can see from our students’ failures in other school settings that the Frameworks themselves are inadequate enticement for our boys to exert themselves in learning these skills. As a consequence, Penikese teachers work hard to find ways of meeting state goals in ways that have valence for our students. In other words the zone we try to work in is the overlap between student interests and the requirements of the Frameworks.

Unfortunately our students often come to us with a form of tunnel vision and have difficulty finding interest in any but a narrow range of things in life, let alone school. It has been known for Penikese Island teachers to prepare elaborate lessons loaded with learning opportunities that meet Frameworks goals that die in the classroom due to student apathy. Sometimes teachers create lessons with aspects that are so engaging that the real learning goals are frustrated. A recent example of this involved a teacher’s attempt to use Play-Doh in a lesson about fractions. The modeling material itself was so interesting to the students that they failed to engage in the math lesson preferring to create objects from their imaginations.

In spite of the difficulties Penikese teachers strive to meet these challenges and provide engaging and effective learning experiences for our students. We hope that in doing so we can enlarge our students’ zones of learning. As we succeed minds will grow and our boys lives will obtain chances for greater satisfaction.

"Those who can, do. Those who can't,....."

2007-04-18T13:48:00.000-05:00

Back in the day when I was going through the teacher training program there was a curious and hard lesson I learned about being in the field of education. I don’t really like other teachers. There may be a few exceptions floating around in the world but I can’t say I personally know any. I don’t like hanging out with them. I don’t like engaging them in conversation. I don’t like the way they talk to people around me. It’s pretty comprehensive.

There are a lot of reasons for this but I believe it boils down to one contradiction. People attracted to the field of teaching feel like they have some great knowledge or insight that they believe they have to impose on others but they tend to be afflicted with some kind of intellectual feebleness. Now it may be argued, and quite correctly that this applies to myself. I am as guilty of inflated ego and thinking I’ve got the huge brilliant idea as any other person who’s gotten into this business. Oddly, and perhaps inappropriately in knowing this I do not take discouragement but hope. It is a hope that both grows in depth and in term as I come to realize how much there really is to learn and how possible it is to learn it. (There's a little bit of Zen-ness, if you will, related to this that I will forbear going into for now.)

My critics will have already realized that I did not confess to being feeble-minded as well as arrogant, a point only too consistent with itself. But it is the issue of intellectual capacity and recent experiences I’ve had with it that have motivated this post. Recently my teacher training was resumed in an on-line format to the end of obtaining my license to teach in a special ed context or at least to keep the feds off my school’s back for a while. Personally for myself I don’t have a particular interest in special education. It doesn’t exactly jive with where I’ve imagined myself going over the next few years but as can be seen from my last post, studying it has enlightened me on several levels with respect to what I actually do have an interest in. A really important thing I’ve learned a lot about is the general intellectual quality of folks in education, a sort of reminder of what it was like to sit in classes with would-be teachers.

The first and most generalizable observation I made was that discussion board posting was pretty terrible. Without detailing the gratuitous spelling and grammatical errors, I found the vast majority of participants to be of relatively low quality. The very vast majority of writing did one of two things: state platitudes about the way things are supposed to be done based on the author's wealth of personal experience or regurgitate parrot-like things written elsewhere (either in the readings or other posts to the discussion board). This exemplifies perfectly what I’m talking about. They are so convinced they already know the answer no one approached the discussions with a questioning mind seeking to challenge any assumptions. They are both arrogant and feeble of mind. To flatter one’s self with the belief in being a critical thinker and then to so readily internalize everything the “authorities” say… to me it is among the most bitter hilarities.

Part of the course involved a group project, some kind of writing and lesson planning. During the first week of the class a couple of people posted with their ideas about what to do for the project. Honestly I didn’t like them too much. So, I kind of waited to see if anyone was going to agree or suggest something else. I’m not really motivated to take charge of groups where I don’t know any of the other people in them. Eventually, I had to go to the island. While I was away others posted and they sort of created a division of labor for work on the assignment. When I got back and read about what they were doing and stated my intentions to help with the project, I pretty much got the cold shoulder. This is a somewhat understandable situation but consistent with the usual teacher belief in self-superiority. It was sort of like, “if this guy isn’t going to be to class on time he will get no fruit cup.” The sort of consensus was that I would make final comments and that would be the extent of my participation. I felt a bit uneasy about this until someone posted a portion of the assignment as she had completed it. After reading it I went from uneasy to worried.

Now I want to clarify one thing. I’m a good enough writer to know that content exceeds mechanics in importance. The stuff that I read may have had some mechanical problems but it was the content that had me squirming like an electrified night-crawler. The lesson was supposed to be for a specific content area but nothing in the learning exercises related to it. It’s not that the components were bad per se they were just completely inconsistent with the proposed learning goals and stated function of the lesson. I posted my comments and waited for more to appear.

As the wait for material became prolonged and my group members posted to me about how I should only need to do simple proof-reading my anxiety increased. I feared I was about to be graded on the work of others, work that would make me feel very ashamed for its poor quality. So I posted again, almost begging that people offer their drafts for my comments. I was hoping that I could get early drafts so that major mods could be accomplished in time to produce good papers without unnecessary work. One of the group members wrote back chiding me for my concern and lack of gratitude that “all the work had already been done for [me].” Eventually this individual posted her share of the work commenting that she was very confident that it would at most require very minimal revisions. It was horrible.

First of all, it had many grammatical and spelling issues. There were many parts that were unintelligible as far their meaning. Add to that the fact that much of the language was adolescent in nature. The organization made no sense. It was as if she had taken bits of information from all over and then lumped them into random groups for fun. A lot of the information was very redundant. There were parts where I had a really hard time understanding exactly what it was that her sources had said. I looked them up for myself and my horror only grew. This person had made incredibly childish errors in interpreting the meaning of the texts she had read. She was so screwed up that she thought an essay among her sources was an empirical study.

I wrote my comments. And rewrote probably more than half the paper, still feeling that the thing belonged on a roll in a bathroom stall. It was so bad, I didn’t want to embarrass her by publishing it to the discussion board so I e-mailed it to her privately, warning that my critique was pretty harsh and asked for her response for improving the paper. She was pretty offended and reprimanded me for unwarranted perfectionism. “I don’t know what you think is so bad about my writing. It was good enough to get me my masters degree.” I almost cried.

She told me she had not read the whole revision, was attaching her limited comments, and then was off for a vacation. All of that would have been fine except that she did not attach her comments. So, here I was stuck with a paper on a topic I didn’t like, taking an approach I didn’t like, producing a revision my partner didn’t like. She didn’t even have the wit or grace to tell me what needed to be fixed before she disappeared in a self-righteous puff of smoke.

After returning from her vacation she posted nasty comments towards me on the discussion board and the teacher stepped in to moderate. Meanwhile, there was work to do on the other parts of the assignment. Their work was posted and it was not that bad but needed some real fixes. Although they were much less oppositional about having my suggestions, they were quite stubborn about not taking them. As I said, they already know what they are doing. How could anything I say further improve on their already perfect work? It’s preposterous. Ignore the fact that my comments are about things like internal inconsistency, logical errors, and truly confusing instructions. My observations aren’t substantive enough to pay attention to. Either that or these educators of children don’t understand consistency, logic, or clarity in communication.

So, these are the sorts of people teaching our youth. No wonder the question is seldom asked, “Is our children learning?” How can they learn from people who don’t know how to learn themselves? I don’t believe kids can learn how to read good and do other things good if their teachers can’t read good themselves.

Some Thoughts on Being an Agent of Oppression

2007-04-15T20:06:00.000-05:00

My strange sort of fanaticism towards education reform has likely irritated my friends over the years. On one of my phases in this process I pestered everyone with the question, “What do you think should be the goals of our education system?” This was during a time when it occurred to me that one of the great problems in our education system is the fact that governmental institutions and much of the public want to burden schools with accomplishing a huge range of tasks. Frankly it was a range of things that goes way beyond what ought to be expected of any organization as small as a school is. Consider the task of trying to provide a “free and reasonable” education that will prepare every student within a certain geographic region, regardless of SES, native intelligence, linguistic and cultural background, or disability status to go to college, enter the vocational workforce, and participate in a democratic society. Muse upon accomplishing this under the constraints of arbitrary state mandated curricula, a variety of standardized testing regimens, students’ capacities and inclinations as human beings, and parental expectations. Do not fail to remember the fact that there is nothing in the universe that guarantees overlap between any of these factors let alone consensus. Add to this the requirements placed on schools that they provide not only mere academic curricula but opportunities for sporting, social activities, and counseling. When I think on it, I conclude that it is actually quite natural for schools to have become something that many people feel are garbage. Who could possibly orchestrate this sort of mess successfully? Some authors have claimed that compared to other organizations and cultural institutions schools have undergone surprisingly inadequate reforms appearing in form and function much as they might have fifty or even a hundred years ago. This horrid lack of vision and clarity of direction is perhaps first among a range of factors resulting in this retardation.

Whether or not this is so, the resulting product is a form of oppression inflicted upon the students in these schools and ultimately upon the great community that is released from their smothering socialization. You may ask what oppression I may be referring to when speaking of institutions that facilitate learning and climbing of the social ladder. Part of my answer would be that the so-called learning provided by schools is more illusory than real. Furthermore the career advancement achieved this way, rather than truly qualifying people for the work they do, creates in our society an addiction to the system and reinforces the indoctrination and oppression created thereby. The end results are self-perceived excellence in a reality of incompetence. (I'll talk about this more later when I post a rant about my recent experience with special educators in an on-line class.) People walk away with a belief that they understand their fields and are capable critical thinkers when in reality they've swallowed whole every bit of rhetoric and dogma that has been forced down their throats.

Lately my work with my students, my study for my special education licensure, and my reading from a little theorist called “Paulo Freire” have led me to the conclusion that I am in fact an agent of oppression for my students and consequently for society as a whole. Huzzah!

Part of what has underscored this for me has been working with the IEPs I referred to in my last post. One of the major components of an IEP is a set of goals determined to be appropriate for the given student and his suite of special needs. The goals deal with academic performance, socio-behavioral issues, and reference long term education and career goals. Two things about this process really stuck out for me. First, and perhaps most important in terms of my becoming an instrument of oppression, is the fact that the student almost never has any input regarding these goals. And when they do, it is frequently overridden by the various “agents of interest” who write these plans. Keep in mind that I’m not talking about the second grade here. I’m talking about 17-year-old kids on the brink of legal majority. I’m not only talking about kids too old to be sensibly left out of the process of making their life decisions, I’m talking about kids for whom this system didn’t work. Whether they are disabled or not there is something about them that doesn’t fit the mold and if our objective was to try and help them attain whatever kind of success we can considering their challenges we ought to be more vigilant in consulting with them on what that success should mean. Instead we almost invariably create programs that will try to force them back into the mold as best we can. What this tends to mean is that instead of helping or even letting them develop talents where they are able, we cut off a limb here and a digit there and shave off some of that part over there. And all of this is done under the pretense of what’s in the student’s best interest and providing a “fair” chance.

There’s a principle in this aspect of the IEP that cuts both ways. Just as its nominal function is to provide a mode of education suited to the individual student but in reality attempts to force a conformity, the fact that it is only provided for students with special needs reveals the oppressive nature of the education system. How can it be argued that only one small class of students deserve or can be benefited by an individualized program? Philosophically it is clear that the expectation is for the majority of students to willingly conform to a system simply because they are able. It ought to be reasonable to assume that all students are unique and educational resources should be equally in place to help them meet goals, build on strengths, compensate or overcome weaknesses. But the reality is that the students themselves are not the source of our established learning goals. The political battles for control of their minds is, the battles between business interests, parents, colleges, and government bodies. The debate over teaching intelligent design in schools is an example of this. Though everyone will claim they want children to learn critical thinking skills, when it comes down to it atheists and creationists alike will tend to choose indoctrination to their own paradigm before taking the risk that students may come to believe something else if allowed to study the issue out for themselves. The task of schools is not to develop diversity of talent but to enforce a narrow range and capacity for thinking.

The last bit of oppression I wish to discuss deals with what I see as an issue of human nature. Yes we are forcing all kids to become the same. But there is a reason that it must be seen as forcing in many cases if not most. It is because of the kinds of things we are trying to teach them. Frankly, how many of you in your professional lives have had to solve a system of inequalities lately? No one? Didn’t think so. And yet, one of my students has been working on doing that very thing all week. Can you imagine any reason for it? I can only vaguely imagine certain contexts where it could be used and they are contexts that a very diminished minority of students will ever end up in. So why does everyone have to learn it? Is it because if they spend more time learning algebra they will have less time to study things that would actually make them productive? Or is it to prevent them from developing disciplines of thought that would make them aware of their oppression and move them towards producing social revolution? I recently read in one of the Dune novels an idea about governments investing in learning and discovery. The gist was that governments must always curtail how much they invest in these things in order to maintain a stable society. If they did not, then people would discover or invent things of such magnitude and at such a rate that the government would be unable to maintain control of everything. Is there some unconscious fear residing in our society of letting our kids get too smart and learn too much?

The other component of this "forcing" we do to kids by the things we teach them has to do with their development. Taking myself for an example, in my high school days I felt much the same as my students in many ways about the type of things we were supposed to be studying in school. Using math as a most salient example, in high school I hated it. I believe that I was developmentally unprepared for it. It was not until I was about half-way through college that I reached a point that I could find doing math enjoyable unto itself, and even later that I found its usefulness sufficient to motivate me to study it of my own volition. We do not in our system listen very much if at all to what students are telling us about what kind of learning they can and need to accomplish most during their given stage of development. I hypothesize that the kind of learning high school students need is more about social life, developing independence, and morality than it is about factoring polynomials or identifying the organelles of a cell. That is not to say that there is no value in learning these sorts of things. I merely question the timeliness of it and its emphasis in what a kid is supposed to accomplish to get through school.

So there you have it. I’m an oppressor. I force kids to sit in a classroom and learn a bunch of stuff they have neither the interest nor inclination for. In many cases they lack the ability for it. And to make it all worthwhile, it is stuff they will never use in their lives after they leave my classroom. I’ve successfully created a lower class of individuals whose potential for contribution to society, however limited to begin with, has been completely squandered. And just so you know I did it all correctly, my students suffered through the whole thing. Huzzah!

Bureaucratic Nonsense

2007-02-26T07:30:00.000-05:00

Seems like I’m venting a lot lately but here comes another one. When a student is being educated ‘specially’ his parents, people from his school, and other interested parties get together and create a little thing called an individualized education program or IEP. This IEP becomes a sort of legally binding contract on the school to provide certain accommodations with a set of goals specific to the student in question. It also describes accommodations required for testing the student that allows these students to more fully demonstrate their abilities (in theory) when they take the exam required for graduation.

Some months ago I administered the test to a certain group of students and before hand deliberately checked their IEPs, if they had them, for accommodations I was required to give them. I found that one particular student had a few accommodations but there was no mention of calculator use so, I forbid him use of a calculator on the appropriate portion of the math test. The student was a little surprised but, I told him what I had found and he did not argue the point.

A few weeks later our school heard back from this students parents who complained that he was not allowed to use a calculator. The school admin people called me asked what happened and I explained that I had read the IEP and found no accommodation involving calculators. I also said it was possible that it was there and I had somehow missed it but I did not believe this to be the case. I suggested they read the IEP for themselves and find out if there was an issue.

That was it, or so I thought for perhaps about three months. At that point, I was contacted again by the same admin person asking the same question. I gave him the same answer. I found myself a touch annoyed but having worked for the federal government I was familiar with bureaucratic garbage and wrote it off as such. The problem was that it didn’t stop this time. I kept getting bugged about what happened on this kid’s test and why didn’t he get to use a calculator. For weeks whenever I talked to someone in the office someone brought it up. I kept wondering, “What’s going on here? Have I totally blown something?” The parents were upset. My bosses kept bothering me, and when I asked if they finally checked the IEP to see what it said for certain, I was told that use of calculators was among his accommodations.

So… great. I screwed up and had to worry about this for some time. All the while in the back of my head I have this itch saying I had checked it and I could not imagine the page with the word “calculator” on it. Something isn’t quite right.

Anyway, I was in the office a bit early this morning and remembered all of this and decided I could settle the issue in my mind once and for all. I got out this student’s file and looked at his IEP. Well, calculator use was an accommodation on it, but it was not the same IEP I had read in there before. Low and behold, there were two IEPs in the file and only one of them mentioned calculator use on the test. It was dated as to when it was sent to us. It was dated AFTER I had already administered the test. Thank heaven I trained as an archaeologist.

The Illusion?

2007-02-19T19:03:00.000-05:00

I want to speak to the issue of free will. It is something that a lot of philosophers, theologians, psychologists and others who like to think “deep thoughts” deal with. Though I don’t personally like to be regarded in this group of people there is something about the issue that is very practical and pertinent to what I do in my job. It’s also pretty central to our experience and existence as human beings so, I make myself bold enough to venture.

In one of my favorite cancelled TV shows (the more I find out, the more I realize that this is the fate of almost all truly good television) called American Gothic the main antagonist, some kind of evil mystic named Lucas Buck speaks at times of “the illusion of free will.” Whether or not he actually believes this claim, it impacts people around him in ways that make them more susceptible to his social manipulation.

These days there’s a lot of research being done in the way of behavioral genetics that may seem to support this position and it may fearfully effect people in the same way. A great concern is the possibility that people hearing that there is a gene out there that determines things such as relationship infidelity, over-eating, or aggressive driving may come to believe they have the gene and thereby create a personal excuse for engaging in any sort of licentious inclination that occurs to them. As they do so they might say to them selves “It’s in my genes. I can’t help it.”

This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. I think a lot of psychology has already created this sort of excuse for any kind of behavior you can think of. Though instead of referring to genes, people talk about having “a trauma history” or “a negative upbringing.” Before this was the saying that became a joke: “the devil made me do it.” There was a whole concept of Temptation with a capital ‘T’. But either way it goes, it results in human beings denying culpability for their actions by denying the existence of free will.

Now, I don’t necessarily mean to diminish the way that our genes or our experiences affect us. Nor do I want to deny the existence of powerful temptations on a spiritual realm. I think this is all real stuff but, I think that if we come to “believe” in it too much then we are pretty much screwed and screwing everyone around us. I think it is absolutely essential that we believe in our wills and certain things I’ve been learning from my studies of neuroscience have encouraged this point of view.

The brain is often compared to a computer. The problem with this model is that where a computer’s wiring is pretty hard and fast the brain’s wiring is not. It is a living changing thing. Just as your middle-school teachers used to say, “it’s like a muscle and if you don’t use it you lose it.” This may seem a bit trite but, it’s fascinating to me to think about the mechanism by which it comes about. One theorist compared it to the process of natural selection in that neural connections exist or cease to according to a use-based selection process. Connections that never get used get cut. It becomes biochemically inefficient for them to continue to exist. At the same time connections that are fired on a regular basis are altered to make them faster and more efficient. They also become locations when new ones are made to help carry the data processing load. This stuff is all pretty common knowledge I think but it tells us something about how free will works. We as conscious beings have the power and opportunity to make determinations regarding what neurons get fired, perhaps not by finding and firing some exact cell that we label in our heads, but by choosing the functions to which we put our brain.

To get a grip on this it helps to know something about what the different parts of the brain are and how they work. On the top of the brain, somewhat towards the front is a little strip running across brain known to be the part that processes all the sensory information gained through touching with the skin. There have been several studies involving people who’ve lost body parts that experience sensations in their minds where the lost appendage should have been. What frequently happens is that adjacent sensation processors start to take over using the now-unallocated computing tissue for it’s own uses. The result can be that when still active parts of the skin surface are stimulated the brain will interpret those sensations as being in the missing appendage. This sort of thing has been seen with stroke patients as well. When one part of the brain is damaged the adjacent parts can start to take up the function of the missing part. This happens as long as signals are being sent that demand the connections be formed.

I think this is interesting when considering free will because it says something about the magnitude of neuron change we can induce through use. This then tells us something about how much we can change fundamentally about our demons and trauma induced damages through an exercise of our will to use neuronal pathways we want to and neglect the ones we don’t.

So, how do we exert this kind of will? It is largely dependent on another part of the brain, that which is in the very foremost front, thus called the prefrontal cortex. Curiously the organ that provides us the most in terms of freedom of will has as its primary function suppressing freedom in the brain. The brain stem at the base of the spine and the limbic system in the middle of the brain create lots of feelings, urges, emotions, and other “gut” reactions that serve us well as human beings in many ways. But frequently they contradict greater goals or perspectives that are available to our prefrontal cortex. So, when you are sitting in that meeting at work just before lunch and your brain stem is telling you you're hungry and your amygdala is making it more urgent, your prefrontal cortex is telling them both to shut up and let you concentrate on that super important presentation your coworker is giving. Or maybe not but, I’m sure you get the picture.

A few studies have been done on the function of this part of the brain in Buddhist monks. Why? Because one of the main things Buddhists do is meditate. A big part of meditating is exercising the frontal lobes by monitoring your own internal thinking and telling lots of stuff in your brain to shut up. What they have found about this type of exercise is that it physically changes the inside of your brain to do whatever it is you want. Your prefrontal cortex can tell the part of your brain that likes to think mean thoughts to shut up and the part of your brain that likes to think nice thoughts to turn up the music. Consequently your mean bits eventually get hijacked by your nice bits. (Alas, there’s a bit of a kwixote joke in there.) The same kind of thing goes on all the time dysfunctionally when people wallow in self-pity. The more I indulge in thinking “I hate my life and nobody loves me” the more wired my brain becomes to think that and only that. Every time you add voice to it you increase the number of parts of your brain contributing to processing and working with that idea. Instead of just your emotion bits and your thinking bits going at it, your motor bits, language bits, auditory bits, etc. all join in the party. Increased signal load => increased neuron development.

Now, considering all of this I’m left with some big, vexing, and perhaps amorphous questions. One of the questions has to do with deficiencies in the matter of the prefrontal cortex itself. This is the case in some people who are diagnosed as ADHD. When they’re in that meeting there’s not much to say “shut up” with. So, what does this mean in terms of free will? Is it limited? Does there need to be deliberate work to increase the frontal lobe by hijacking other parts of the brain to do the work? Inasmuch as a person is in this state, how culpable do we hold them for impulsive behavior? It’s a big nasty mess. It’s also a nasty mess for me to think about in the context of my students. If we were to conclude that one ought to work to exercise to increase prefrontal function, do we do this with other problems, like meanness for example? Do we try and get students to buy into this stuff? They would have to for them to exert the effort to do it. How much treading then do we do onto other people’s free will even if its meaning and intent is to increase the amount of will they have?

Now there’s a glaring hole in my discussion here and it’s the one I don’t really want to think about right now because I’m not qualified but maybe someone else will, that is the issue of medicine in terms of chemical prosthesis and even surgery. Ugh, a sticky mess but one that is going to be highly relevant. A major example is the recent discovery of a little patch of brain that when damaged cured someone of their nicotine addiction. Anyway, I’ll leave stuff to someone who’s smarter and more in touch with it than I am.

If anyone would like to have an open discussion with me on these topics I would appreciate it. You can of course publish it here for all to read (something I encourage) but if you’d rather I’m open to just e-mailing or telephoning on the subject. Phew.

Here’s a link to a relevant article out of Time that some might be interested to read.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html

The semi-periodical invitation

2007-02-05T07:37:00.000-05:00

I'm prompted by people finding my blog by doing web searches in recent weeks. If anyone is interested in getting an e-mail alerting you to when I've made a new post you can either post a reply here or you can e-mail me at jacobus_the_scribe@hotmail.com.

Eagerness

2007-02-04T19:37:00.000-05:00

There’s a Shim Gum Do master who sort of runs a school down in Pennsylvania somewhere. I don’t really understand the exact nature of the school. I’ve been wanting to visit it for some time out of a sort of professional curiosity. But, I think it’s kind of like a private school that is heavily influenced by the Buddhism. They have a full curriculum and the students can additionally study Shim Gum Do martial arts.

This last weekend a bunch of them came up for the bi-monthly test. A couple of them tested for their black belts. The principal of their school came up as well. He brought his son who also tested. They often make this trip and each time I find it interesting to see and talk to teenagers who are not my students, and kind of observe their behavior and interactions. I run a sort of compare/contrast in my head in-part because I know that my population doesn’t really reflect the majority of teenagers and I feel kind of starved for a norm reference to organize the way I think about and deal with my students.

On this particular trip something interesting really struck me that I’d seen in small ways before but never really appreciated. These visiting Shim Gum Do students have a sort of eagerness that I almost never see in my own boys. They want to learn the martial art. They want to participate in stuff going on around the temple. They’ll volunteer to do things. They have some of what I think I’ve heard the Zen master refer to as thirst, or hunger. So, the big question of course is “What accounts for the difference?”

One cause could be just a lot of background stuff that I cannot assess. The Shim Gum Do students are obviously not on the island because they probably haven’t done the kind of stuff that gets my students sent there. But I wonder if there aren’t certain factors that can be controlled to advantage.

The island program is philosophically a program of “choice.” That is to say a student cannot enter our school without first having been interviewed and indicated an intent, a desire, a decision to enroll. The problem is that this isn’t a very good description of what actually happens. For one thing the choice is often between the island and jail. It seems to me to be a little hard to make it more compulsive than that. But, other factors come into play as well: some of it real and some of it merely in the minds of the boys. For example they get pressure from all kinds of “grown-ups” including parents, social workers, ed advocates, probation officers, etc., etc., etc. Then sometimes the kids feel that certain aspects of the school were misrepresented and they end up feeling like they were more or less bamboozled into coming. Sometimes they even claim that case workers or parents basically forged their signatures to make them come here. I consider this situation in light of my own experiences as a teenager and I have to recognize that the very fact of compulsion could turn me from being interested into defiant if simply on principle. Those things I invested the most in were things that I felt wholly I had chosen out for myself.

A second controllable factor may be the issue of novelty. It has been reported in some ed psych text I’ve read somewhere or other that one thing that keeps a person interested and motivated to learn something new is when that something truly is new and not the everyday thing. Though they come from time to time the Pennsylvanian students are not here all the time and coming is for them something of a change of pace in their day to day school lives. It may be the very facts of getting away, sleeping in a different place, and seeing and interacting with different people that help to facilitate increased openness for learning experiences.
Part of the experience of learning martial arts is that there are certain goals that one is trying to achieve. Part of the goal is to get to the next rank. But some of the goals are more personal and internal. They might be athletic but they are also often psychological and spiritual. There is something intrinsically motivating about having goals to orient ourselves to motivate us for learning. This is something that is often missing in ordinary schooling. At many levels in traditional academic subjects the precise goals can be rather elusive to students (and frankly the teachers who have to teach them). And where the goals are detached, externally imposed, and ambiguous they do not satisfy the requirements of psychological proximity necessary to motivate engagement. Additionally, I believe the naturally occurring adolescent egocentrism makes the value of personal psychological and spiritual goals particularly salient. It is something that secular educational institutions would struggle to capitalize on and tragically so.

My Frustration

2007-01-04T09:43:00.001-05:00

Normally I'm not inclined to come here and vent in exactly the way that I'm about to. However, I'm in the middle of angsting about what I'm going to teach on the island this coming week. I have a goal, a sort of intent that I place behind every lesson I plan, and that goal is to get kids to think. It is something that from my point of view should be relatively easy and straightforward. There are an infinite number of terribly interesting questions and issues in biology that are worthy of deep and intense critical thought, even at what qualifies in the parameters of high school biology curricula. However.... Another goal is to try and make the lesson material relate directly to my students, make it relevant and interesting. So with these two goals in mind I have for some time been trying to set up my kids and the materials so that we can do a major study unit on the brain. You know, the brain. It has a certain novelty to it that adds to it's interest level. It is something that everyone has so how it works and what it does is terribly relevant to everyone. I would think this to be particularly so considering the fact that most of my students have learning disabilities which implies something that is working a bit outside the norm with their brains. That is also the case when you consider the meds they're on and the drugs they recreate with and are addicted to.

The problem is abstraction. If you want to learn and think about all this stuff in any kind of meaningful way that would be genuinely interesting, meaningful, etc. you have to be able to work with a lot of abstraction. Whenever we cross that line into the abstract I can guarantee that I will completely lose half of my students. Lately I've been trying to use concrete examples to demonstrate certain comparable genetic phenomena but my students don't get it. All they see is: yeah I'm mixing up and counting colored gaming chips and it has something to do with genes. But what they are representing in terms of the genes, the very real cellular, genetic, and population mechanics that this stuff is representing is going 110% over their heads. And despite doing things in a way that is as hands-on as I think it could possibly be made, in a way that would allow for any kind of real-time experimenting that the kids could deal with, it is still inadequate to getting them to cross that barrier and really SEE what in the world it is we are trying to talk about here.

At times, when I encounter this situation, my inclination is to shift gears to pick the whole process apart and get into the gritty details and break it into pieces and chunks small enough that the abstraction is simple enough that they couldn't help but understand it. The problem with this is the invariable outcome that reiteration and lack of context are going to make it all a big boring and irrelevant mess to my kids. How? How in the world am I supposed to make them care? For me it is all inherently interesting and the big picture is valuable and important enough to grind through the details (which sadly are interesting enough on their own). But also, I don't have the difficulty they do in trying to deal with the abstract so grinding through the details is a lot less effort for me. This has been the story time and time again. I can have them engaged doing stuff and not really learning anything or, I can fight like crazy and suffer to get unbelievably picayune but genuine thinking.

So, here I've been trying to put together this really cool stuff on genetics and behavior, highly relevant considering all the research that comes out in the news these days on this stuff, but I'm chucking the whole idea because I know that they can't deal with it. I'm going to go practice some kata and get some of the rage out of my system now.

Am I researching or am I fake?

2007-01-02T19:52:00.000-05:00

Dominance hierarchies. They exist. They are a real phenomenon in the animal world and they are definitely a real phenomenon on the island. Whether it has proven more visible to me in my experience there because I get to live in the mix of it over and over again or because there is something about our students that makes the process more salient, I cannot at the present be sure. Recently I’ve been drawn to reflect on it a little more than usual because in my biology class I’ve been trying to teach about evolution with a focus on primate and human evolution (of course) and I’ve shown the kids a few videos about chimpanzee behavior. I have observed my students resemble our older cousins not only in parallel patterns of behavior but in specific actions. I find these facts fascinating in the extreme and simultaneously a “things men were not meant to know” kind of horror.

I have recently begun a discipline of taking daily field notes on the island. As I have in the past, I find it laborious and sometimes frustrating to realize how much data passes through my awareness that might be of critical value but manages to avoid documentation. Nonetheless I have managed to acquire a certain amount of information about dominance striving on the island in these notes over the past few weeks that I will draw from to continue my entry for today.

There was a certain study by Richard Savin-Williams that came out in 1976 about how adolescents form their social pecking-orders in a summer camp where several of the counselors were complicit in observing meal time, sporting, and other activities among the students. They found that high standing in the pack was most readily predicted by factors such as athletic ability, physical fitness, and chronological age respectively. This is pretty consistent with what can be seen on the island. However, I do believe that it is an incomplete description of what is going on. For one example, the fact of athletic ability is sufficiently subordinate to the perception of athletic ability. One of the most dominant people in the group is regarded as being very athletically able but, his field performance is substantially inferior to this regard. There are other components of his persona that feed his rank and as a result of this rank he is regarded as having all of these other attributes in high levels. Similarly another student demonstrates a certain degree of athletic ability in games and has a certain temporal age that should provide for a higher ranking position in the pack than he has.

So, what do I think is going on? Well there are a few natural phenomena that I’ve considered and is seems to me that the key to this question is intimidation. It should be no surprise but the real predictor of dominance, as with chimpanzees, has to do with one individual’s ability to cow other individuals into submission. It is pretty clear that fitness and athleticism are good markers of an individual’s ability to successfully perform acts of violence and thereby threaten others into complying with his desires. However other factors come into play as well and it is in exploiting these factors that some come to be more intimidating.

In one of the chimp videos we watched there were two brother chimpanzees. One was a little bigger than the other and was significantly more likely to bully around females in the group. However, he was the β because his brother had social tricks to help him always gain the upper hand. One of his tricks was a kind of display of his “power.” Chimpanzees before coming to a fight make a big deal of posturing in threatening ways to try and gain submission of the opponent without the risk of any real injury. This involves a lot of running around, screeching, and shaking trees. This stuff all makes a tense situation and in the state of heightened anxiety less dominant chimpanzees relent. The α in this group had a special trick up his sleeve of splashing around through water and smashing large rocks. Because this chimp was willing to “go there” where no one else would, he increased his intimidation potential to push him into the top slot past his larger more violent brother.

It is in this act of adding the special flavors to their interaction that α boys are able to intimidate their way into not only gaining the upper strata of the hierarchy but are able to change the discourse to increase their perceived athleticism. Now, some students clearly invest more energy and effort into being intimidating than others. It is in part due to this fact that there is the discrepancy that I described with the two students I mentioned earlier. This fact causes me to ask why this should be. How much of this divergence in behavior is the result of natural inclination and how much of it is learned?

One of the island events I observed that illustrated this issue pretty well is a game called “Fifty” that is played on the basketball court. Though I’m not really familiar with all the details and history of this game, I’ve been told that it is a popular one in juvenile detention and I think I might be able to see why. The rules of this game seem almost deliberately designed to facilitate dominance striving through intimidation rather than pure skill. There is nothing in it like team work and though some shooting skill is necessary, aggression is a more rewarded quality. It even has complicated procedures which would cause a kid who is winning, because he is a pretty good shot, loose everything to facilitate the advancement of someone more intimidating.

The thing that is interesting about this game is that it seems to differentiate between the two types of students. Some are more inclined to it than others. Some would choose to play it instead of basketball any day, while others who are equally interested in sports would prefer a traditional game. This preference seems to fall along lines of general interaction styles and social strategies where those who prefer “Fifty” tend to be those who rely heavily on intimidation to get by in life and are like the water splashing chimp more likely to “go there” and cross boundaries that make others in the group feel truly threatened. An element in it seems to be that on the one side boys are interested in who can beat who up and will form their ranks accordingly, while on the other side are the boys who function by really trying to instill fear and insecurity in the minds of those around them. They don’t want for you to merely know that they could, they want you to feel like they might.

So back to the question of nature and learning: In the face of the fact that the kind of fear and insecurity I’m speaking of is inconsistent with effective learning environments that allow for people to develop higher-order cognitive ability (i.e. everything I try to teach and a substantial part of what any behavioral treatment program should want to develop) can students who create such an environment be allowed to stymie the development of other students? Inasmuch as it is something that works for them, how much room do we have in a secular context to say that they should lose their strategies for the sake of others? If we did conclude that they require the corresponding moral education, how would it most effectively be administered? These are big questions and strange problems that I think may be at the root of solving some of the most pernicious and enduring social ills.

My Bourbon Pumpkin Pie

2006-12-06T09:21:00.000-05:00

Yes it is the holiday season and since I've found it difficult to get to writing anything real for a long time I'm using my recently refined recipe as a cheap excuse to fill cyberpages. I attempted several incarnations of this recipe until I think that this version is just about right. If you try it and disagree, offer your suggestions.

Recipe:

Cut the fresh pumpkin in half. Clean out the seeds and stringy material attached to the seeds. Lightly oil the cut surfaces and place them cut surfaces down on a baking sheet covered with aluminum foil. Roast in the oven at 350 degrees until the pumpkin is tender. There will be some slumping of the half-pumpkin domes to indicate that the cellulose is breaking down and the cells are losing turgidity due to dehydration. Use a spoon to scrape the soft pumpkin out of the skin in chunks and puree them in a blender. Leave the pumpkin puree in a strainer or sieve to allow excess moisture to drain off.

Ingredients:
2 cups pumpkin puree
½ cup brown sugar
⅓ cup white sugar
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp cinnamon
1½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp nutmeg
⅛ tsp ground cloves
¼ tsp ground allspice
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
3 Tbsp bourbon
3 eggs
1½ cup of heavy whipping cream

Put two cups of sieved pumpkin puree in a sauce pan with ½ cup of brown sugar, ⅓ cup of white sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tbsp cinnamon, 1½ tsp ground ginger, ½ tsp nutmeg, ⅛ tsp ground cloves, and ¼ tsp ground allspice. Stir until entire mixture is dark brown and cook at medium heat for about five minutes allowing a little moisture to boil off and the spice oils to infuse the pumpkin.

After allowing the mixture to cool for a couple minutes add 1 Tbsp of vanilla extract and 3 Tbsp of bourbon. Mix these in well. You can leave this mixture refrigerated over night in an airtight container.
Blend the pumpkin mixture together with 3 beaten eggs and 1½ cups of heavy whipping cream. Pour mixture into an unbaked pie shell and bake at 425 for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 and continue baking for about an hour until a toothpick stuck in the middle of the pie comes out clean. Allow the pie to cool enough to set before serving.

Bye Brown Betty. Hello Insanity.

2006-08-04T08:04:00.000-05:00

So recently I finally gave up my car. It was something that I’d been hoping to do for some time for various reasons but a sort of final excuse came and I sent my loyal vehicle to great diabetes research funding junkyard in the sky. The car, originally a gift from my grandmother carried me back and forth across the country and all over the desert. It had endured three hit-and-run accidents while being parked in perfectly legitimate spaces. Upon coming to New England the moisture wreaked havoc with the electrical system and induced more rust than I ever thought to expect. One of the doors which had a nice big dent in it started bending at the hinge so that it wouldn’t close properly. One of the rear windows started not working because of ice and a well-intended but foolish passenger in trying to fix it broke one of the gears in the internal mechanism. The ultimate and final offence the car suffered was a burst front brake line. Anyway, the car served me well and far and I’m very grateful to have had it. All the same, considering the cost of insurance and the intensely strict safety inspections in Massachusetts, the rising cost of gas, the insane traffic of Boston, and the desire to improve my fitness a bit, I was glad to see it go.

Since being without a car and having joined the pedestrian class I’ve attained a new perspective on Boston traffic. It is still insane but in a different way. After spending a couple of years in Seoul and it’s suburbs, I became very acquainted with the way the sidewalks can be crowded with people in a big city. Things in Boston have proven comparable for degree of crowdedness. What I wasn’t prepared for was how slowly the crowd moves. It may be an artifact of my memory but, it always seemed that in Seoul people had a place to go, and they were trying to move from point to point in as efficient a manner as possible. But here, it seems like I’m always running into groups of people who fill the sidewalk and move as if they really have no place to go. It has proven rather annoying on occasion to be rushing to an appointment or something and to find myself trapped behind a mob of meandering moseyers.

There has been another effect of not having a car any longer. I have generally long commute times when going to work, it being about an hour and a half drive away. Between this and every other trip I take by public trans my reading time has increased substantially which has allowed me to complete two books of particular interest recently: The Mismeasure of Man by Steven J. Gould and An Elusive Science by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. Now I wont try and explain too much about the details of these books now. Nor will I evaluate them for quality of content. What they have in common is they deal with the way we assess learning in educational contexts. Between the two of them I’ve been forced to severely reconsider a great deal about the way I see both my job and my research aspirations. It has left me in a new state of confusion regarding my own theoretical perspectives on education and I’ve desired greatly to be able to articulate some kind of coherency out of them. So far it has been to no avail and instead I’ve started cramming more on the issue into my head.

One thing that has come to impress (or should I say appall) me is the way in which educators and folks who study education come up with theories which are largely based in other theories, or the common-sense of experienced teachers rather than any kind of empirical understanding of natural phenomena. Ultimately the tendency is to claim scientific authority while violating it’s basic principles and jumping straight into producing practices that are then “demonstrated” as effective in overly controlled, unrealistic school settings. Applications of these “theories” are then attempted in real schools to be met largely with a system too inert to allow any kind of meaningful adaptation that would allow one to see if it was in fact a good idea or not.

So where the process should be: have a cool idea, test it out scientifically, demonstrate the idea is correct, and then finally implement the idea in a school; the actual procedure is: have an idea that a hundred people have published on before you, test it out in the semblance of science, market the idea like crazy to teachers and administrators, stand by and watch all of it go nowhere. I kind of wish my son were reading this because he might appreciate it when I say, sometimes these folks talk about the idea in such a way that makes you think they are more interested in people believing it will work than actually demonstrating whether or not it does. My recent reading from Howard Gardner suggests that he wants you to believe in his theory enough that you’ll persist with it in the face of recurrent inadequate results. Even though there are some aspects of his theory that I think are probably correct his work seems especially guilty of trying to coerce findings to comply with the results he wants to achieve in the process of pushing for people to apply it even though he confesses his classification system is arbitrary in its designations and is as much a victim of cultural value systems as it is based in any kind of natural biology. In other words he’s saying, “Here are my multiple intelligences. I just made them up and can’t really prove they exist in any natural form except that I’ve defined them in such and such a way. Teach to them. They’re not real, but if you believe in them your students will learn more.” Blah!

Curiously I think Jesus gave an apt description of the failure of our attempts at education reform. “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and uses it to patch an old garment. For then the new garment would be ruined, and the new patch wouldn’t even match the old garment. And no one puts new wine into old bottles. For the new wine would burst the bottles spilling the wine and ruining the bottles. New wine must be put into new bottles.” I have yet to discover a time when reform was attempted in some way other than taking some new theory and ripping off pieces try and force them in as patches on the old system. And without fail each time the bottles couldn’t hold it and spilt both good and bad alike leaving a system loaded with diverse theory but completely lacking in clarity of function. If it is desirable to change the system to make it more beneficial to those we educate in some meaningful way, the need to redefine the concept of “school” or abolish the concept altogether seems inescapable.

Variations on the Beginning Zen Exercise

2006-07-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

After you have practiced the Beginning Exercise and can successfully achieve Step 5 you can then start to modify the technique slightly to achieve various goals. These initial variations are pretty simple and though I’m writing about them all together here they can be taken as three separate meditative skills to practice. The applications I will cover are mind training, metacognition, and centering or re-centering.

Mind Training

This is the meditative skill of practicing in your mind something you want to be able to do in real life. This is the main type of meditation practiced by martial artists. The idea is that once you’ve gotten to Step 5 in the exercise you’ve attained a degree of clarity of mind that will allow you to focus your mental energy on training yourself to act. In the void you create a mental picture of yourself doing the thing you want to do. In the case of martial artists they imagine themselves doing forms. I heard some years ago of an experiment where three groups of people made basketball free throws and the researchers counted the number of baskets everyone made. They then had one group practice making foul shots for a certain number of weeks. They had another group imagine shooting baskets in their minds. The third group did not practice at all. Upon having all of them return and make their shots the group that physically practiced made the greatest improvement. However, the group that practiced only in their minds made more progress than those who did not practice at all. This meditation is a similar idea. You can practice anything you like in this meditative state, it could be any sport, musical instrument, or even something like talking to another person in a positive way. I will start the steps for this exercise as if you followed the Beginning Exercise through Step 5.

6. If you want you can close your eyes at this point. It might be interesting to try this sometimes with your eyes open and sometimes with them closed. Choose the activity you want to practice and begin imagining yourself doing it in the emptiness you’ve created in your mind.

7. Many things will distract you from this concentration. If random thoughts or other distractions come to you treat them like you did in Step 4 by acknowledging their existence and returning to concentrating on the thing you are trying to practice. Just let it happen and don’t be too judgmental of letting yourself get distracted because then this will become another distraction.

8. As you practice don’t do it idly. Take the opportunity you have given yourself to sit and focus on perfecting your technique. If you were practicing karate in your head you might concentrate on imagining yourself not only kicking but pulling your knee up properly to snap the kick forward to hit a precise target at a specific height. If you were practicing a wind instrument you would not only pay attention to getting the right fingering but keeping a precise timing and having the correct embouchure.

9. There is no specific time when you should end this meditation. I suggest possibly setting yourself an amount of time you desire to give yourself before starting at step 1 and then working yourself to meet your own time goals. One option you have is to try and teach yourself to be able to meditate in mind training for longer and longer amounts of time by increasing how long you sit for a little every so often.

Metacognition

This is a use for meditation that goes well beyond the meditation itself. To give it a simple definition “metacognition” means thinking about thinking. It is a meditation where you can observe your own mind and learn something about where your unconscious decision making processes come from. This is something that can be critically important if you feel that you are prone to making decisions that have consequences you would prefer to avoid. In order to do this meditation, use the Beginning Exercise and after you get to Step 5 continue here.

6. You may at this point decide to close your eyes or you may try to continue open eyed. Random thoughts will still come to your mind as they did in Step 4. However now, instead of merely acknowledging them and returning to your concentration to your focus make note of what the thought is first. If you want you may even write the thought down so you can remember it to analyze it later.

7. Again don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Merely identify what the thought was then return your concentration to your focus.

8. After you have engaged in this meditation for some time you may then reflect on what kinds of things your mind wanted to do while you were meditating. This may involve reading through a list of thoughts you made while meditating.

This metacognitive meditation is the springboard for other meditative techniques that will actually help you to change your behaviors and actions by changing your thoughts. This is in part because it would be difficult to change your thoughts without first being aware of what your thoughts are.

Centering (Re-centering)

This meditative technique can be helpful to you as you go about your day at work or in school or wherever you happen to be. It is not infrequent that we find ourselves in situations where there is a lot to do, a lot of information to absorb, or just a lot going on. This technique is useful for helping us to avoid feeling overwhelmed and focus on the task we are trying to accomplish. When you are starting to feel like too much is happening and you’re feeling distracted or stressed you can start the Beginning Exercise. If you are well practiced the gray vision of Step 5 may come quickly. Even if it doesn’t come quickly, trying Steps 1 through 4 for just a few seconds (maybe even 1 or 2 seconds!) can help you sort of disengage from the source of stress. This can help you do what you need to do now. Your detachment will give you the space and time you might need to sort through all the “stuff” that is going on. It can give your brain a chance to evaluate all the stimuli for relevance and give you a chance to make "space" in your mind for the objective of the moment. This is a principle many Buddhist teachers refer to as "living moment by moment."

Zen (Meditation) Introduction

2006-06-29T13:22:00.000-05:00

“Zen” is a Japanese word, which simply means meditation. However, it is usually used in reference to a technique, style, or intent of meditation derived from Buddhist religious thinking. The idea is that a person achieves enlightenment by meditating until the mind has achieved a certain quality of emptiness. A story as I was originally taught it by my martial arts teacher, Shelby Hooper, years ago tells of Buddha attaining enlightenment when he sat in meditation for an extended period of time leaning against a tree. As his meditation progressed and he put more and more of his thinking aside to attain total emptiness, his awareness of the minutia around him increased until it was said he could “hear the ants on the tree scream.”

The purpose of this project is not to teach you about Buddhist religion nor is it calculated to help you achieve the sort of enlightenment possessed by the Buddha. However, by applying Zen teachings it is hoped that you will be enlightened about the workings of your mind. The ultimate goal is that you will develop cognitive skills that will empower you to overcome your habits, make beneficial decisions in spite of unconscious desires, cope with stress and the problems of life, and in the end take more control of your life by getting more control over your own mind. Whether or not you realize it, much of what you experience is a product of your own mind. Although you will not always be able to control everything in the world around you, it is usually possible to control the way that you deal with it.

From certain spiritual traditions and what I call “pop Zen” it is possible to read a lot of different ideas about what it means to “be Zen.” I tend to either ignore or disagree with most of these and so if you have some previous education in Buddhism or meditation you may find that my definition of Zen contradicts what you’ve already learned. If you dislike or disagree with my definition in a sort of universal way, that’s fine because it doesn’t really matter. My definition is simply for the sake of this program and doesn’t really need to be applied to the meaning of Zen in any other context.

Frequently people refer to “Zen meditation.” Even though I’ve referred to it that way myself it is kind of redundant because Zen just means meditation. So what we need to explore is what meditation is. Meditation is the exercise of clearing your mind of all thinking to focus on just one thing. Or more accurately it is the exercise of focusing on just one thing in order to clear your mind of all thinking. A lot of people make a big deal of meditative sitting postures, objects of focus, breathing techniques, etc. The bottom line is that none of it matters. The only thing that matters is what you do with your mind. Whatever foci, postures, or other practices you come up with, they should help you attain a meditative state. Whatever you do it should facilitate clearing your mind of all thinking. There are many schools of meditation outside of Buddhism and I think this principle applies equally well to all of them. For example, in his “Exercises” St. Ignatius of Loyola recommends that the meditator choose a kneeling, sitting, or prostrate position for prayer, whichever helps the individual to attain a state of forsaking every thought in favor of obtaining God’s will.

Sometimes this potential for freedom of meditative practice can make choosing a place to start somewhat overwhelming. You might also notice that the variability of practice means that some types of meditation might work better in some contexts than others. It is with the intent of exploring the applications that would be practical for you as an individual that this program is being made.

A Beginning Zen Exercise

The purpose of this beginning exercise is to give people who are new to meditation an opportunity to try out a very basic form, one that will provide a foundation from which all other meditations can be attempted. It is my opinion that this technique is especially appropriate for beginning meditators because it tends to minimize environmental factors that can be distracting as well as supply a coherent focus for meditation.

1. Find a comfortable place to be, probably sitting or lying down. The environment should be pretty comfortable too in terms of temperature, sounds, and any other kind of sensory experience.

2. With your head and neck in a comfortable position (if you are seating this might mean looking slightly down) pick a spot on a surface directly, or as close to directly in the path of your vision as you can manage. The point should be something distinct that you won’t confuse it with anything else you are looking at. I’ve used the grounding prong in power outlets for this, bumps in texture spackling, pin holes, nails, knots in wood paneling, etc, etc, etc.

3. Look at the spot and focus all of your attention on it. Try to make it a part of yourself in your mind and yourself a part of the spot.

4. Many things will distract you from this concentration. You will need to blink. Try not to but if the urge comes let yourself blink and try to resume your staring as seamlessly as possible. If random thoughts or other distractions come to you treat them like blinks by acknowledging their existence and returning to concentrating on your dot. It has been observed that sometimes people can become very judgmental of themselves because of the many distracting thoughts they have. Realize that such thoughts are perfectly normal and that you are going to have a lot of them especially if you are new at this.

5. Continue staring at the dot until your vision starts to turn gray. To describe what this stage is like: as long as you don’t start scanning around or moving your head everything in your field of vision will turn gray except for the dot you’ve been staring at. Once you have reached this state you have attained a sort of meditative trance where you are now able to begin applied meditations.

Update on My Monasticism

2006-06-15T06:43:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I’ve posted. Somehow, it seems these days I always have more to do on my weeks off and the various bits of business are crowding out my opportunities to write. This is especially true whenever I’ve left home on vacation. When I go away, or pick up an extra shift, or have a conference or something there’s always a much longer period of time when I’m trying to pick up getting my grades written, my room cleaned, my lessons planned, etc, etc.

Early in May I made a trip back to Utah that was enjoyable enough. I got to see a lot of folk and bake a lot of bread. But I’ve been back for a while and quite few things have been going on since.

Almost the first thing I did upon returning was have a sword test whereat I received my brown belt. Huzzah. If all goes ideally I will test for my black belt this September. I’ve learned a new form that is kind of exciting because it involves doing a kind of dive-roll sword in hand.

Things on the island have been kind of crazy. It has been unusually emotionally exhausting. We have had a couple students with problems severe enough that for whatever reason they have had really no motivation to earn a weekend home. The opportunity to leave the island is strangely one of the biggest carrots we have to offer. So when a student doesn’t want it we have virtually no capital to get any cooperation out of him.

A few months back my Zen master complimented me as being a person with a lot of compassion. And though I try to so be, the last couple of weeks out working with one particular student seemed to be sapping all the compassion I had. It is rare that I think violent thoughts towards people, especially my students. However, I remember one particular night I had this feeling of wanting to just punch him in the face and the thought that maybe if I did he’d finally get the message.

After my last shift I went to a conference on using meditation in psychotherapy. Some presentations really annoyed me because I had the unfortunate expectation that because this was put on by Harvard Medical School that it was going to emphasize empirical research on the cognitive and neurophysiological effects of meditation and recommend ways of prescribing it for treatments of specific disorders. Many of the lectures were to this effect however, too many were the folks my buddy Jed would describe as those who say, “I’m really more spiritual than religious.” They would turn on their cheesy, new-age, “oooh I’m so deep and mystical”, Professor Trelawny, stupid voices. And then they would over-spiritualize everything. They seemed to have this assumption that everyone in the room shared their values and beliefs regarding the metaphysical. In other words, they were more likely to be fans of the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know” than psychiatric researchers.

I think I may have overstated the bad side of the conference here. For the most part I enjoyed it and even the bad annoying people were illuminating from the right perspective (i.e. how not to teach meditation to my students). Curiously enough one of the best talks was given by a guy who described himself as the “token card-carrying” Buddhist in that he was a scholar of Buddhism specifically and not psychiatry or psychology. Though his presentation was blatantly about Buddhist religion it was frequently more relevant to the issue of how to help people rewire their brains than many of the others.

The main fruit of the conference for me was that I found through many of the examples given for the utilization of meditation in treatment, a new motivation and inspiration for teaching it to my boys. I can see the need most especially with those whose brains have been so mangled that their behavior is driving me to the edge.

This last week I went to a couple of graduations, one on the island and one with a kid who lives here in the temple. I’m not going to go into too much detail but it reminded me quite pristinely how important family is to the development of not only young children but also adolescents. One of the students had a lot of family involved and the other had almost none. It was interesting to see how important and valuable it was for both of them to have friends and mentors willing to take up slack and fill in gaps.

Something about keeping it real and approval needs

2006-03-12T21:13:00.000-05:00

Warning: This is a stream of consciousness piece. Read at risk of becoming as confused as I know I am.

I think it is a pretty basic human need to feel approved of. We obtain great strength of character when we make choices and behave in ways that allow us to truly approve of ourselves and feel approved of God. But very frequently people seek out the approval of other human beings and too frequently throw away or suppress their own identities in the attempt. Unfortunately for such people this strategy almost never works. A couple of particular examples come to mind.

A few years back I had a job in my church where I had some leadership or oversight of the Sunday Schools of a group of nine congregations. In those days I visited to observe lots of Sunday School classes with the intent of advising the teachers on ways of improving their classes. Ultimately I did not visit to say if the class was good or bad, I was just interested in making suggestions for improvement. In all but one or two of the observations I noticed the teachers behave in ways that suggested to me they were trying to get my approval or at least deflect my criticism. It was always fascinating to see what the teachers thought my expectations were for their classes. Where I was interested in content, participation, and discussion the teachers always apologized for how noisy the kids were, how fidgety they were, or in general how well behaved the kids were. Frankly, I didn’t care about these things much. There was no violence or trauma. And however talkative they were, the kids were almost always respectful enough for the teacher to give a lesson, and almost always came away demonstrating that they had listened to and gotten something from it. In other words the teachers would feel like they needed to put on a show. But the shows they would choose were things I didn’t really think were all that important.

Another example that comes to mind was the interaction I observed recently between a student and his family. In the presence of “other people” they talked, and laughed, and joked a little too much as if to show that they were a nice normal family. The reality was that in paying close attention one would notice that it was highly superficial. They would say things that demonstrated a great deal of factual knowledge of one another and an absolute obliviousness to each other’s states of mind, emotions, and inner-selves. It was much like I would imagine a high school reunion with a bunch of people talking to people they hated about old-times of misery with pasted on smiles and forced laughter, all the while people really just wanting to either leave or cut their wrists. In the case of this family it was easy to see the parents continually asserting or superimposing some fabricated identity on the student whose inner world and self-perception they hadn’t the slightest clue of. It was as if they were saying, “Oh, we know who you are.” and pointing at a caricature that was more a compilation of their demons than depiction of the student. Meanwhile the student was clearly torn between trying to be that caricature for the sake of playing along and wanting to rain down fire to assert his own existence. I shudder at the idea of being so unable to identify myself. I hope this student can discover himself soon.

Where are we going and what are we doing in this handbasket?

2006-02-18T19:55:00.000-05:00

This may unfortunately become a stream of consciousness post. I'm getting kind of freaked out and succumbing to my pet conspiracy speculations regarding stuff in the Middle-east. Sharon and his new party were on the path to what seemed like the best hope of peace for Israel and Palestine. It was shocking to hear that Israel, so typically arrogant in their attitude towards the plight of Palestinians would send soldiers to clear their own people out of colonies in Palestinian territories. It was such a risk for Sharon to take with the high possibility of it becoming his political suicide. And now what? Sharon conveniently suffering two strokes and being incapacitated and out of the picture.

Take this and then within a couple of months the Palestinians elect Hamas into control of their parliament or whatever it is that they have. Hamas, regarded in this country as a terrorist organization, after gaining control of their legislature announced that they do not acknowledge Israel's right to exist and inferred that they would take military steps if necessary to eradicate it.

Then there's Iran. Iran determined to get nukes and making threats at the UN, EU, and US if they should interfere. Huzzah.

Now there's this bloody cartoon thing. After riots, people dead, and embassies burned I thought the issue might wind down. But no. Not at all. Now we have politicians in India and Pakistan offering rewards for the death of the cartoonists and more and increasing demonstrations against more and more Western countries and their embassies. There have been three days of demonstrating in London. Protests in friggin' London!

And all the while we as a nation are still engaged in two wars. The last I heard on Afghanistan was that the Taliban have taken to using the rather effective terrorist tactics of the so-called Iraqi insurgency. They in combination with tribal groups have been chipping away at the Afghan government in rural areas by bombing schools and assassinating mid-level government officials.

Okay, so I don't have much of a point. I guess I'm just observing a little thing called escalation. There doesn't seem to be anything turning the tide away from more and more senseless violence. I can only presume that we're going to see more terrorism at home as well as abroad. I fear we'll see things get much worse before they get better.

If my rambling doesn't make any sense try this article: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/20022006/325/afghan-cartoon-protesters-threaten-join-al-qaeda.html

Check out this article

2006-01-24T11:49:00.000-05:00

about Penikese Island from an Irish magazine. It has some good pictures too.
Click to Launch Site, then click on "Features" and then "Penikese Island."

http://www.anothermag.com/

Gift From a Former Student

2006-01-08T22:49:00.000-05:00

The student who made this depiction of me with a sword was last seen in a homeless shelter.

A Long Week

2006-01-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

This last week I spent an unusually long time on the island. Though we got back to the island one day later than usual so the kids would have an extra day off island for the Christmas holiday, I covered the weekend shift for my comrade and worked a couple extra days on the end there. Now, I've found that the extra long weeks can be exhausting but otherwise I don't really mind them. The fact is I like my work enough and I'm starting to get to a point at where I don't feel as stressed about doing it. And of course, the kids we have out there these days are much easier to work with than those I started this job with.

This shift was interesting for me in two major ways. First, I experienced a little bit more bonding with my kids than I have perhaps since I started here. Second, I learned a little bit about the problem of school, or rather made observations about school that reinforced ideas I already have about it. Third, I got to break up a fight. Huzzah.

First thing that happened was in coming back from the holiday I surprised the kids with a bit of a Christmas gift. I picked them up LED book lights that they could use to read at night during our study hour. It was really a simple and not unreasonable thing but several of the kids, especially our newer ones seemed kind of surprised and at the risk of sounding sappy, touched. Later during the week one of them opened up to me about some frustration he was having with another student. Another of the new guys had the first friendlyish rather than contentious bantering with me. Some more bonding happened when at the start of the weekend one of our students who has some kind of mood disorder, likely bipolar, came to me when he got into a serious funk frustrated with some infighting in his family and a sense that he hadn't been adequately acknowledged for some real progress he's made in our program. Inasmuch as it is our goal to help students improve sometimes it's easy for our staff to focus on all the problems while we fail to praise the accomplishments and this was getting to him. The opportunity I had to do a little listening and offer some encouragement may have helped one kid avoid a disastrous day. The last main bonding opportunity I remeber with some salience was with a kid who when he started our program I had a hard time liking at all. There are a handfull of philosophies where the two of us stand in pretty harsh opposition with each other. He also used to be very rash and bullying. But this weekend, we had some good conversations and teasing. I really feel pretty hopeful for most of these guys.

One day in school, I had planned to teach about some of the intricacies of photosynthesis and I had been trying to come up with a way of teaching it that would be in the form of a game. None of the kids were having it. Distracted and even to a point despairing, the tide of "Why do we have to learn this?" was unleashed to clear some muck away for me to see what was really bugging them. For one it was anxiety over being able to get the credits he needs to progress in his regular public school and the dread of being a perfectly bright yet 17-year-old freshman. For another it was the bleak landscape of another three weeks on the island before he can go home again. For the last it was a realization that in some sense his time on the island was a punishment and he was feeling punished. This kind of stuff is how kids feel when they've been off for a while and they come back and it makes getting school work done on that week that much harder. Getting school work done this week was difficult. But it wasn't until the weekend that I got the full measure of it. Usually on the weekend the kids don't have the regular sort of academics we give them during the week. It often involves health class, art projects, videos with discussion, and the like. So, for Saturday's school I planned the easy job of watching a video about animals fighting, discussing it a bit, and having a rousing game of something. In the afternoon when it came to game time the kids could not come to consensus on what they wanted to play. I found it somewhat fascinating that the attitude when things are under the umbrella of school that the boys would revolt against doing something even if it was play a regular old card game. Somehow or other school and teachers cannot but be seen as an enemy. And it is the enemy which must be rebelled against regardless of what it wants to do, no matter how much I might normally want to go along with it.

Uncle So-and-so

2005-12-22T13:06:00.000-05:00

The following story is sort of a sociological observation of something that any of my friends should be pretty familiar with.

So there’s a certain student named Frank out on the island. Over the summer a certain staff member he took to fishing as an afternoon repast. While talking about “the big one” they would hopefully catch and where might be the best place to do it, a story came up about Frank’s Great-uncle So-and-so who caught a record sized bass some years back. The staff member was incredulous and Frank suggested that some documentary evidence might convince him. So, some weeks later Frank brought out some newspaper clippings with photos reporting his Uncle So-and-so’s record bass catch.

A roughish story about how Uncle So-and-so caught the bass was told among the students. Because of his achievements he was referred to as a sort of hero. So, when Frank was lifting weights someone would jokingly say, “You need to channel Uncle So-and-so’s fishing powers into pressing that bar.” When serving the volleyball, Frank was told to call upon “the power of So-and-so”. At one point there was some discussion of strategies for dealing with crisis situations on the island and someone suggested asking, “What would Uncle So-and-so do?” Later a certain South Park song’s lyrics were changed. “What would Uncle So-and-so do if he were here today? He’d probably catch a bass or two. That’s what Uncle So-and-so would do.” Later people would do Uncle So-and-so impersonations as a comic way of encouraging people to do some thing or critique some behavior. These impersonations were rather odd because the voice would assume Hispanic, Irish, Chinese, or some other completely random and ineffable accents. Eventually people started writing up motivational quotes on the kitchen whiteboard attributed to Uncle So-and-so.

During the Thanksgiving break Frank talked to his great uncle and happened to mention what has been done with his name on the island. The response was an underwhelming confusion. I once attempted to explain it to one of Frank’s aunts and found myself at a loss of words for justifying the experience. There was eventually some talk about how as a group we might eventually interact with Uncle So-and-so should he for whatever reason visit the island, perhaps to go bass fishing. The conclusions have agreed that it would be awkward at the least and I believe this train of thought has led to some diminishing of the Uncle So-and-so comments…. though not an eradication.

Much Ado About Nopium

2005-11-25T19:06:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time in a land far far away, there was a kid who was on Penikese Island. He was a self-proclaimed rebel who upon asserting he’ll never comply with the staff’s directions would promptly follow instructions. During a certain two-week period he was so good at his revolutionary compliance that he was permitted to leave the island and visit his home and family for a weekend.

On the trip home from the island he took a bus to South Station in Boston where he transferred to the train. South Station is kind of notorious as a roughish place and, to my understanding, functions almost as a sort of shopping mall for illegal substances. As the clichés would insist, he was a kid in a candy shop with money burning a hole in his pocket. Being more of a recreational drug user than a self-medicator he wanted to know what the flavor of the week was. His curious mind was pleased to discover that it was opium.

Now a couple hundred years ago the streets might have been paved with opium and people might have heated their houses with it. But these days, in these parts, it’s a bit of a rare and foreign treat. So our would-be anarchist picked himself up a bag, and at length he smuggled it out to the island.

Smuggled items from candy, gum, and porno magazines to cigarettes and marijuana are a kind of capital at our school. Though there is a significant trade in such goods, frequently such material can be more useful for establishing alliances and obtaining a form of social dominance. So one day Luke Skywalker shared the baggie of opium with some of his buddies. They smoked it all down and to their confusion and surprise, no one got high.

Later that day a staff member was sitting around during a break talking with the kids about what they did over home pass. Luke talked about parting ways with one of the other students at the subway station and happened to mention “that guy who sells the opium.” A red flag went up in the staff member’s mind and he decided that a little drug test was soon to be in order.

The next morning the boys were all rounded up for a cup peeing party. The realization that their substance abusing antics were about to come to light churned their bowels and demonized their minds. One by one, each student who’d smoked for nothing, made his way to a staff confessor praying that the belated honesty would bring a lighter sentence. One by one they lost their future home passes and received the usual substance abuse fines.

About a week later the drug test results came back to our office. They were all clean. The money, the smuggling, the planning, the smoking, and the confessions were all for nothing. There was no opium, just a piece of cow patty.

Rowing Miss Daisy

2005-10-23T19:16:00.000-05:00

One of my students, Miss Daisy, asked me one day to go with him out to what we call “Gull Island.” That may or may not be the official name for the place but it’s a bit of island a very short distance outside of our island’s cove that ceases to be an island whenever the tide is high. Anyway, Miss Daisy told me he wanted to go out there because he’d heard another staff member talk about having taken a couple students out there to check out seals.

I hesitated to go with him on a couple of counts. First off, I’d never rowed out there before (in fact I’d only been rowing on the ocean once) and I didn’t know how long it would take. It seemed unlikely that we could get out there, check things out, and make it back before our usual break time would be over. The other reason I hesitated was because Miss Daisy has the figure of a chopstick and on the last rowing trip with two other guys he alone failed to do any of the rowing.

Anyway, my sense of adventure and curiosity won over and I decided to take him. It was a choice I do not regret despite my fears having been confirmed.

Compared to the last time I had gone out for some fishing, the rowing out bit went quite quickly and easily. We used a smaller, lighter boat that was a lot less work to propel and it seemed the currents weren’t against us as badly as they had been before. We didn’t make the straight line one might have hoped due to a little more paddling on one side than the other but it wasn’t too bad.

When we approached for our landing one could easily tell that it was of the same glacial deposit as the rest of the surrounding islands. It was a very flat lying pile of large sub-rounded stones covered in pine green mats of moss and algae. We brought the boat to a shallowly sloped part of the shore and threw our little anchor onto the rocks themselves and pulled the boat up a little onto the gravel. First glances revealed some large heavily rusted bits of ferrous material that turned me onto archaeologist mode. I started planning to walk over the island to see what I could find but then Miss Daisy says he wants to get back in the boat and leave again.

“What? We just got here.”

“I know, but it hurts my feet to walk across these rocks. I guess I shouldn’t have left my sandals on the beach back at the dock.”

“I guess not. Well just give me a second to look around anyway.”

I look longing down at a bit of the island that is of sand rather than gravel to walk on. I walk around, searching the ground for a couple of seconds when my student makes some exclamation. “What the @#$% is that? Is that some kind of bird, or is it just a rock and I’m seeing things”, he says pointing at a large rock about 50 meters out from the opposite shore of the island we’re standing on. It was pretty large, gray, and had big white splotches as if it had been the resting spot of a thousand gulls. Then suddenly it flexed. The top third of what I had presumed a boulder was in fact a seal.

Now, in coming from the desert I know exactly jack about the ocean and the stuff that lives in, on, and around it. Consequently I know perhaps diddly about seals. Either way this seal seemed to be about three times the size I expected them to be. Desiring to not chase it away I crouched down, shushed my student and whispered that we might ever so quietly and slowly work our way across to the shore near the seal to get a better look Unshod, Miss Daisy refused but suggested that we row around to the other side. This irritated me because by walking the distance would be so much easier to cross. Furthermore, there would be no way for us to approach unobtrusively by boat making a great deal of noise and motion in the water with every stroke. Seeing that the trip would otherwise be a waste and remembering the ease of our arrival I finally agreed. Continuing to look around before leaving we count something like 15 seals poised on rocks or swimming around. Lamenting as I frequently do, that I’ve not yet bought myself a digital camera, we re-launched and started making our way to the seal side of the island.

As we started to approach them from the west those on rocks flopped into the water and began swimming around, keeping their distance. Through later conversations it occurred to me that this decision might have been a bit rash and unsafe but we decided to row the boat out towards the middle of a big circle the seals made swimming around. While we moved in on them several dived to reemerge behind us. It was during this phase of the game that we got the closest we did to any of them, which was probably about 20 meters. It was all not quite as exciting as I might have liked but it was kind of cool. It was also a bit of a trip to realize that these things were easily big enough to tip us if they were so inclined.

Anyway, having about exhausted our current opportunities at this point and with the hour waxing late I decided it was time for us to start back home. We move along the shore of Gull Island alright and then break for a bit of open water between Gull Island and the cove of Penikese. It was about here that we’re rocked by a wave in a way that makes me uneasy. I look to my right and see a wave coming for us that’s about as tall as I am sitting in the boat. I reiterate, I’m ignorant when it comes to boating in the ocean. Perhaps I needn’t have but I became quite concerned. Then the wave hit us. Not feeling comfortable with the way we rocked I decided to row us so the bow of our boat faced the incoming waves. (I later found out that my student decided to rock the boat with his body when the wave hit significantly exaggerating the effect. Turns out that the effect had made him feel nervous about it as well.) With the next hit we didn’t rock so dangerously but I could see that these had not been isolated. We were going to need to just move as quickly as we could to get where we’d be protected in the cove. I told Miss Daisy as much and as soon as I felt balanced I turned us and started paddling for speed.

It was actually a simple matter. We moved quite quickly and the waves didn’t seem to hit us as hard. And then we started the home stretch. So far on the trip, I’d had some problems with Miss Daisy’s rowing. He liked to drag to get us to turn instead of paddle. This was annoying when we were (at least I was) trying to make time to get in for our regular schedule. On top of it, he would drag on the wrong side of the boat making us veer even further in the wrong direction. He would also paddle on the wrong side for getting us to straighten out our course. When we were able to start going straight, I would get in a strong rowing rhythm we would make some distance, then I would look around to find that we were turned in the wrong direction again. Miss Daisy had either quit paddling or wasn’t strong enough to keep up. Sometimes when this happened, being a bit fatigued I decided it would make sense for me to rest while Miss Daisy paddled on his side to straighten us out. This of course didn’t work. Every time I rested Miss Daisy decided it was extra time to add to his relaxation. At the end I would do the work of both, turning us back to straight and moving us forward. After I don’t know how many loops and 90+ degree course corrections, I started paddling both sides to almost ignore the effects of Miss Daisy.

Eventually we arrived. Having so easily rowed out, I miscalculated the time it would take for us to get back and we were in fact late. My two school students stood waiting on the dock for me to get back making jabs at the quality of our serpentine boat path but not at all disappointed for the excuse to miss a few minutes of school.

Seconds, please?

2005-08-22T19:04:00.000-05:00

The last week I spent on the island one of our students was putting together all the last minute stuff he needed for his graduation. One of the requirements is something we refer to as "master chef." A student complete's his master chef by planning and preparing an entire meal one night. Our soon-to-be-graduate planned to prepare a meal of meatballs and pasta.

Now this kid is kind of shy in an odd sort of way. He doesn't like being the center of attention. He also has a self-efficacy kind of issue. The self-efficacy issue has a real impact on his math performance. Despite his capabilities he insists that he can't do anything and consequently refuses to try. This is a pretty common disease among math student's. In the case of his cooking, he is unwilling to eat his own work. So when he was planning his master chef he was determined that he would not eat his own food. At the same time he was really not excited about being around to get any attention for what he'd done; fear of failure/success etc. So as soon as his dinner was done he ran up the hill to take care of the chickens and hang out, waiting for dinner to be over.

Well, we ate his food and it was of course pretty good and some people wanted seconds. Our rule on the island is that no one gets seconds without getting permission from the person who prepared the meal. The students started asking what to do about the fact that the chef was up the hill. Someone came up with the suggestion that we would have to go out and ask him. The idea was further refined that we should do it all together.

When most of the boys had nearly finished their food in preparation for more, the lot of us walked out the door and lined up. From the rear of the line it looked like a hundred boys each with his plate in his right hand. Arriving in the presence of our esteemed cook someone called "Present Arms!" In near unison the boys standing in a line all extended their plates in a sort of salute. In similar military fashion the request "Permission to have seconds, sir," was made. The cook clearly a little embarrassed and yet smiling assented, and the lot returned.

I tell this story because to my mind it's a little bit funny. More importantly, it was one of the few truly nice things I've seen the boys do for each other that was also positively received. It's a credit to the kind of kids we have out there now.

Has anyone ever heard of anything like this?

2005-08-06T15:54:00.000-05:00

What a church can do with their money.

The implications of this sort of thing are kind of amazing. I hope to hear what you think.

P.S. Let me know if this link breaks. Thanks.

E-mail - Links

2005-08-02T09:32:00.000-05:00

Greetings. This is the pseudoquarterly call for e-mail listing or web site linking.

If you are interested in getting an e-mail whenever I post, or if you have a website or blog of your own that you would like me to link to just respond here or e-mail me at jacobus_the_scribe@hotmail.com

Thanks.

Graduation

2005-08-02T08:49:00.000-05:00

We recently had a student graduate from our program. It was the first real graduation of any kid who I actually worked with and had a relationship with. This particular kid had a bet with one of our staff that he could go a whole day "as a Mormon" as they say. According to the bet this meant that he couldn't swear or drink coffee on that day. The loser of said bet would wear a skirt for a day.

Well let it be said we had a really polite student that day who obligated a staff member to don cross-gender attire. The staff member however repeatedly "forgot" to bring a skirt to the island. So, as a last ditch guarantee of seeing my student receive satisfaction my graduation gift to him was the skirt you see in the picture. I wanted to get a worse one but it was kind of hard to find exotic skirts in men's sizes for three dollars or less. Ungrateful that I didn't pick out a miniskirt, he still threatens vengeance for my foul deed.

A Rousing Game of Basekeekball

2005-08-01T16:33:00.000-05:00

When you isolate a small group of organisms from the larger population in such a way that genes do not transfer back and forth between the small group and the parent group the smaller group tends to evolve relatively quickly due to amplified effects of genetic drift. Random chance has a greater over-all effect on a smaller isolated group than a larger. This causes small variants, sometimes rare in the larger population, to become popular and dominate the smaller group.

This is analogous to what can happen on an island where are group of boys are unable to exchange materials and ideas with the larger population. Little oddities find expression where they might not have normally. In the sporting world of the island a recent example is the game of basekeekball. As you might have guessed basekeekball is a mutant version of baseball. The mutation results in swapping out the baseball for a foursquare or kick ball. Consequent trait differences include getting out on the first strike and being hit by the ball while running bases. The pitcher is to bounce the ball once before it goes over the plate. If the ball hits the plate after one bounce then the batter is out.

It is a game that the staff members have come to plague. First there was the guy who seemed to have a thing against the island fowl. First he hit the ball into a goose then into a Guinea hen. Then he tried to kill one of the chickens. Later on another staff hit the ball such that it burst open and we had to find a replacement. Then there was me and yet another staff member who collided on third base when I moved to tag him out. His occipital and my patella were a bit tender for the next couple of days. I spent the rest of the game limping around trying to field and run bases. This proved to be a little bit of a problem because of the menace the boys could be to the game as well.

The typical island sporting event involves a lot of superficial and yet intense taunting and insulting of other people regardless of team affiliation. During one game our current beta and one of the other students got into it quite a bit. The beta was taking much greater offence than warranted by the comments especially since they weren’t directed at him. He screamed out calling one of the offenders a b-word that gives everyone an itch. (Sorry, I deserve to be shot for that one.) The so caninized and feminized individual walked out into the field to do something about it when I grabbed him to restrain him but due to my painful leg couldn’t hold him. So… he got in a shot or two before other staff members could get across the field and break it up.

This assaulting student doesn’t seem to deal very well with failure in the basekeekball arena. In previous games when his team wasn’t doing so well he would run off on long walks and then eventually come back to get pissed and leave again. In one particular game he was tagged out at second base in a fashion that landed him on his back on the ground. His ego being more injured than his body he faked a severe joint dislocation rendering his arm paralyzed. Periodically he would point to his collarbone on the so wounded side of his body and claim that it was bulging out more than normal. It of course was quite symmetrical with the other side. With his fake injury he left the game but came back when it was his turn, wanting to bat. My colleague playing on his team forbade him on account of his paralysis. “If you can’t move your arm, you can’t bat.” The boy threw a bit of a fit about it but wasn’t yet prepared to come clean on what was up.

After the game, in the staff office the wounded youngling asked to receive medical attention for his arm. He said he still couldn’t move it. We told him to try to move it anyway. As he did, he discovered magically there was no pain. And lo and behold, he could move his hand freely too. It was great.

One of the things that keeps me going: if the kids aren’t making much progress, they’re always doing something hilarious.

Island Spiritual Director

2005-07-10T18:52:00.000-05:00

One of my coworkers recently jokingly suggested that I be hired into such a title and it may not be all that inappropriate where I’ve bizarrely found a new role as the resident Buddhist dharma instructor. Now we all know that I’m not really a Buddhist. But somehow in terms of religion I find much freer expression as a Buddhist than a Mormon.

For example, familiar with the fact that I’m a marital artist our clinical director asked that I teach the boys some meditation techniques to help work on their stress reduction requirements in the school. So far I have taught them a couple of forms of meditation including Zen meditation and Shambala meditation as describe by Chogyam Trungpa. (The Holy Mother Eph knows about this book.) It has produced mixed results. A couple of kids I recommended it to have used it and have seemed to think they were getting something out of it. At least one of my students is too mentally lazy to put enough effort into it for him to get jack. The others who have not really used it have avoided even learning how. I think there is something about it that frightens them from trying it. Maybe they see themselves as too cool for it or something.

Part of my motivation for teaching meditation came from a conference I went to where I attended a lecture on something called, “dialectical behavior treatment.” It is a treatment that has been used successfully with people who have borderline personality disorder. I took the lecture because I think that some of our kids are in fact borderline and they mentioned that part of their therapy involves mindfulness exercises inspired by Zen meditation. I think the meditation is a good thing for people with all kinds of problems because the meditating person is forced to look inward and become more aware of how their own minds work. In cases of emotional dysregulation and impulse control it allows them to learn new behaviors for responding to their emotions. By being more observant of their own minds they acquire the power to choose behaviors that contradict their feelings or their initial reflexes to events. I also believe it requires them to use their prefrontal cortex in ways that it doesn’t usually get used and thereby actually develop the part of their brain that is involved in higher order decision making.

If anyone happens to know anything about dialectic behavior treatment I would love to hear from you.

Anyway, back to the Buddhism thing: You may or may not realize this but there is a tendency for educators to be relatively liberal politically. One of the things I’ve noticed a lot about people who would classify themselves as liberal is there is a very strong trend in the way they interpret their religiosity. It seems that they (and unfortunately it seems like almost everyone right and left does this these days) allow their political views to dictate their religious views for them. What this means among the trendy lefties out in this part of the world is usually a rejection of any form of organized Christianity that adheres to any kind of doctrine and frequently means associating one’s self with Buddhism but not actually committing to profess Buddhism as their religion. As my buddy Jed has cited, “I consider myself more spiritual than religious and I really like to put out because I think men respect that.” That kind of blah blah blah. Anyway, because I too associate myself with Buddhism but haven’t committed to it as a religion but have committed myself to living in a Buddhist monastery I’m the local monk.

One particular guy I work with frequently engages the Buddhism conversation with me, which is cool. Sometimes it is simply me regurgitating something my Zen master has said. But a few weeks ago there were a couple of instances where he interpreted things I said in a Buddhist sense where they weren’t necessarily intended to be. It may be that I’ve internalized some Zen teaching to the point where it is a part of my personality and so it just comes out but I don't know. Either way, I’ve found that at any moment I can unintentionally become the unqualified dharma instructor teaching through parables and casual interactions the path of illumination.

Two Tales of Boats

2005-06-11T07:56:00.000-05:00

Some folks have heard Tale One before by telephone or what have you but not all. I thought it might be good to document it anyway. Also it may be interesting to do a little compare and contrast with Tale Two.

Tale One:

One day while in the middle of class Marcus who was supposed to be doing either vocational or kitchen work came into the school house and expressed a great deal of depression and frustration with being stuck on the island. He made some threats to try and leave the island and basically said he couldn’t take being here. He left the school and one of the school kids, Julius, asked if he could go counsel with the despaired. It is not infrequent that the boys can help each other through their problems better than a staff ever could. There’s something about the authority divide that can inhibit a lot of communication and reception of ideas. Considering this and the fact that Julius is a relatively mature and positive leadership figure among the boys I agreed to let him go counsel his friend.

I returned to working with my other student on his math. After a few minutes Julius came running back to the schoolhouse to alert, “He’s doing it! He’s taking a boat off the island!” The school is very near the area where we used to keep to boats on the beach and I knew that was where the launching would be taking place. Somewhat incredulous that this could actually be happening I jogged rather than sprinted to the beach and found Marcus pushing one of the rowboats across the sand towards the water. My initial response was to simply stand between the boat and the water and then hold the boat so he couldn’t push it any further. I started trying to talk him through the situation but Marcus got angry and walked around to push me off the boat and fight me off. Preferring not to wrestle him to the ground or box with him I formed another plan and stood out of his way.

He continued to push the boat down the beach and into the water. As soon as he put the boat in water he hopped in. Standing on the shore, I then grabbed the stern of the boat and tried to get a solid stance leaning away from the water. Marcus then tried to row but the boat wasn’t moving. I had it adequately anchored. In frustration Marcus got out of the boat and went back up to the house.

Tale Two:

There was another student who thought to escape Penikese by boat. This guy’s plan was a little more elaborate than Marcus’s.

The island has a bit of a hill shape and the main campus of the school is on the east side of the hill. Near the top of the hill we kept a couple of larger heavy wooden boats chained to each other. Mr. Betsy and his assistant Angus slipped one of these boats from the chain and over the course of an unknown number of days hauled it down to the west side of the island where they hid it in a place for convenient and secret launching.

Now with our students it is not infrequent that there are boys that when they start on our program, have a really hard time dealing with a lot of stressors involved. The work is physically hard. They are immersed in a new social environment where people are all living very close to each other. They are usually being sized up and placed on the primate hierarchy. When they are going through this stuff sometimes they run off and hide somewhere on the island to try and cope.

So on the fateful night Mr. Betsy was sitting talking with one of our staff about a task in as little time as it took the staff member to turn to another student and back, the kid was gone. For several hours it was thought that Mr. Betsy had just hid himself somewhere on the island. It was then that our office received a call from the police alerting them to what had really happened.

When he ran Mr. Betsy launched the boat and began to row his way out into Buzzard’s Bay. After a bit, what he was actually doing sort of percolated into his mind and he started to get scared and row himself back. Unfortunately, despite his rowing he was not moving towards the island. He had been caught by a strong current and was being swept further out into the bay.

We don’t really know how long any of this took but, we do know that eventually a boat out of Cuttyhunk, the island closest to Penikese, found the drifting rowboat and basically rescued the kid. Mr. Betsy told them that he’d been washed out from a harbor on mainland but they didn’t really believe him and called the police to inquire. He was turned over to the cops who got in touch with Mr. Betsy’s parents and he was eventually returned to our school. It was said that this was the only time since the school was founded in the mid-seventies that a kid escaped the island by rowboat. Maybe that’s because all the other boys have been smart enough to know they could die. Maybe.

As always, all these names are code. Duh.

Enlightenment and Attachment

2005-06-05T20:03:00.000-05:00

I'm gonna try something new here and have a bit of an essay. If you think it sucks let me know and I'll never do it again... or something. Maybe I'll improve it.

My Zen Master says that to become enlightened you have to have an empty mind and cut thinking. Now what he means by this is not that you should have a mind with nothing in it. Instead it means having a mind that is empty in a way that gives it room enough to fit the whole universe. He says that in order to accomplish this you have to avoid and get rid of attachments. Attachment to something can cause you to think about it in a way that it takes up too much room in your mind and prevents you from being open to receiving enlightenment.

Developmental researchers have demonstrated that the way we form attachment relationships in our childhood has a big influence on our attachments in later life and in turn how our children form attachments. Through studies involving separating toddlers from parents for a time and reuniting them there are maybe three major ways that humans can form attachments. The first is when the child has an emotionally responsive parent who uses consistent non-verbal cues and consistently meets the child’s needs. In the resulting attachment the child is both stressed by the parent’s absence and is easily comforted by the parent’s return. This is considered to be a “healthy, secure” attachment.

Another version of attachment is regarded as “dismissing.” A child forms this kind of attachment when they have signaled needs to a parent who has generally failed to respond. In this case the parent does meet the child’s basic needs but fails to satisfy certain emotional needs. This process results in attachments where individuals establish no expectation that their needs will be met and so, in separation or reunion basically no stress or comforting is evident. These type of adults tend not to remember any details of their past attachment relationships particular during their childhood.

In the third version of attachment the parent’s response to the child’s needs is inconsistent and frequently involves the parent superimposing his/her mental state onto the child’s. For example the child could be having a nice day and the parent alters the child’s state by being overly upset about something when interacting with the child. These are the folk who are distraught when abandoned and are not easily comforted on being reunited with an attachment figure. These adults tend to frequently dwell on attachments of the past and allow the associated emotions to intrude on the present.

It has been shown that the brain requires some kind of attachment in order to develop properly. I have one student and an adopted little brother who are both diagnosed as having a fairly severe disorder regarding their attachments. This condition is the result of children who are so neglected as to have had even their basic needs unmet in infancy. It also frequently involves abuse. They tend not only to not care if the parent is around or not; they are resistant in the extreme to bonding with anyone. Whenever they get a sense that someone is starting to bond with them, their individualist adaptation leads them to unconsciously sabotage the attachment.

To use my student as a sort of example, he was once asked if he would be willing to never again see his best friend if he were offered a large amount of money in exchange. He said that he would say “goodbye” and do so easily because the relationship holds little value. In fact, the insecurity of being in a relationship would make the offer of money like getting paid to not endure torture.

To consider the potential for each of these to achieve enlightenment it is quite clear that the third type is in a very difficult position. They have a tendency for attachments to reemerge as negative experiences throughout life. Thereby these attachments consume the void that should become one’s mind. In some ways the fourth instance may seem the best except that where these individuals are not attached to people and tend to avoid such attachments their survival instincts are in full swing and they tend to form very strong attachments to satisfying physical needs: food, temperature, sex, etc. My student for example became a porn freak without ever looking at any. Those of the dismissive type are not too far off except for the fact that they tend to develop a strong sense of self-reliance and become obsessed or attached with work and career. It may be the best route to enlightenment through abolishing attachments is to start with healthy ones.

The Drama Queen

2005-05-21T07:54:00.000-05:00

Since my last writing I’ve been to a bit of an educational conference that has made me somewhat more inclined to be merciful and less critical of the drama queens in my life. Something was explained about emotional dysregulation and people acting out on very real feelings. The existence of those feelings may not make sense to outside parties. It is in this respect that the attention seeking drama queen behaviors are not necessarily as manipulative and evil as they most likely seem.

Anyway, I will still illustrate the drama queen.

This kid is one of our lowest ranking folks on the social hierarchy and was even more so when he was early on the island. Hence, he didn’t have much of a relationship at all with the other boys. One of the most popular kids was one day kicked off the island. He was a kid with a lot of close friends among the boys and the day he left a lot of people were pretty upset. However, the drama queen was new enough to the island he really hadn’t bonded with anyone yet and certainly had no special ties to the abolished child. Despite this, the most emotionally distraught individual was the drama queen who made the biggest scene in terms of how unfair it was that his super close friend was being run off the island.

A common recurring behavior of the drama queen is to display wounds that have involved bleeding. Every cut, knick, scrape that ever leaked the red liquid becomes something to show grown-ups as if the wounds should elicit a concerned response. One day the 100x magnification of this behavior could be seen when one of the other boys threw a rock and plunked the drama queen in the head. Drama queen fell to the ground under the blow and had quite a bit of bleeding from his lacerated scalp. It was a painful and disorienting wound, I’m sure. However, the hamming seemed to amp up gradually the further we got from the event. First there was the “I’m too stunned to apply pressure to my own bleeding wound.” This was followed by what I could have sworn was exaggerated sobbing. This came in conjunction with “I’m gonna kill him the next time I see him.” This is a reasonably predictable sentiment but really not plausible for this kid and seemed expressed more in acting than in true rage. All of his efforts seemed to come to fruition as a glowing pleasure emanated while the nurse cooingly cleaned and dressed his wound.

Considering the nature of his injury a concussion seemed not unlikely and it was decided that he needed to be seen by a doctor. This was on a Friday so he just took the boat back to the Cape with us. As we just started to head out the drama queen closed his eyes for a second wincing in pain when one of the other staff told him to not go to sleep because that can really complicate a concussion. Within a few seconds the drama queen leaned back as if about to nap when the staff shook him and repeated that he shouldn’t sleep. So, as the boat ride went on, the kid would make more and more fuss about pretending to sleep and getting pissed when the staff person would shake him to make sure he didn’t. He clearly relished the fact that he could get someone to respond to him every few seconds. After a while the other staff went out on the outside deck and the actress faked sleep again. I didn’t shake him awake. I just ignored him. And after the critical few seconds of “oh my gosh he’s falling asleep” wore off he gave up and stopped playing at it.

These are some of the most intense examples. The more day-to-day business from this kid is to act like he needs more help on his schoolwork than he does, throw exaggerated hissy fits over nothing, voluntarily “help” with things you really don’t want him to do, etc. But writing of this kid and considering the way these behaviors recently felt to me like someone scratching a chalkboard, I feel inclined to make a brief soapbox about how a kid gets to this point.

I mentioned in the princess post how it is understandable that so much of what is considered bad behavior from adolescents is simply a form of communication where in kids are trying like mad to get people they should have attached relationships with to acknowledge they do in fact exist and do in fact matter. Kids who might end up on the island don’t get this sort of acknowledgement. When they do it is usually in the wrong way meaning abuse. A lot of them don’t even really have attached relationships.
Sometimes people look at all the stupid, irresponsible, risky, and otherwise deviant things that adolescents do and impulsively criticize them. Instead I like the saying of President Monson in the Priesthood Session of Conference last October that young people need less criticism and better examples.* On the island we want to build relationships with kids. Then when their emotional needs are met they will want to change on their own. I think that it works. Last week I saw marked improvement in both princess and drama queen. It could be a temporary change but I like to think I’m seeing the fruit of what we do.

The Princess

2005-05-04T16:37:00.000-05:00

I was planning to write this bit in on my last week off but didn’t manage it. It turned out to be okay because this week gave me a lot of fodder for writing this up.

It may or may not seem strange to talk about hardened criminal adolescent boys as princesses and drama queens. However, in the last few weeks I’ve seen so much behavior that cannot be described otherwise. It is actually pretty pervasive, this princess-ness or drama queen-dom among the boys of Penikese Island. It kind of makes sense in that many of these guys are here with behavioral disorders because they haven’t gotten their needed allotment of attention etc. growing up. Consequently they often do things based on how much people pay attention to them, and their egos are particularly fragile. To illustrate I will describe some of what has gone on with the two boys I think most typify the concepts of princess and drămă queen.

The princess has a rather high opinion of his own appearance. He is very particular about the state of his “do rag.” (sp?) He was once observed looking at a photo of himself that didn’t turn out very well. He was going to burn it but changed his mind because as he referred to himself in the third person, “Adonis*, is just too beautiful.” This last week Adonis was quite proud of his outfit coming out the island. It constituted of a Lakers jersey and a pair of blue jeans with purple and yellow bands on the legs and pockets. (For those as ignorant as I, the Lakers wear yellow and purple.) It was the matching aspect of which he was most proud and I was most brutally mocking. Where I’m from, teenage boys are supposed to ignore such things and leave color matching to girls.

The princess Adonis is also very clever at spinning reality in such a way as to make you think he must be the most awesome person in the world. Should you ever play a few games of pool with him he will not only remember but also vigorously assert that he beat you many more times than he actually did. In my case I grant that he is a bit better at pool than I am. But due to luck, circumstance, whatever, I’ve managed to scrape by winning about half of the games we’ve had. Curiously though, the princess has only recently started to allow that I’ve beat him once. Another example came up this last week. In a bid for attention the princess invaded the staff sleeping quarters to lob bits of cookie dough at one of the other staff members. Refusing all requests to leave of his own power the staff present determined to perform “a restraint.” (That’s code for man-handling a kid or physically moving the kid to solve some kind of problem. There’s a lot of technical hoo hah about restraints but I’ll spare you for the moment.) Basically what happened was the two guys tried to wrestle him out of the room. He’s a big kid and resisted a lot so I helped them out. Anyway, even before the restraint was over the princess began reinventing how the whole thing went down. In each telling he framed himself in increasing terms of glory. “No what really happened was, I was restraining you” etc.

The princess is also not very good at taking criticism. He is clearly above the paltry needs for correction. To paraphrase They Might Be Giants I’ve said “Is it not enough that we get to walk in the glow of his majestic presence?” Examples of this include throwing fits when getting feedback on his math assignments and smashing lantern chimneys when reminded to do certain kitchen work.

Anyway, this is long and probably boring so… I’m going to give the drama queen installment some other time.

* This is a code name. I use it to protect the identity of someone who will never be affected by the publication of this blog.

The Place v2.0

2005-04-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

So I have at long last gotten myself out of the barn. I still have a few bits waiting down there to haul out but for the most part I’ve relocated myself to the town of Brighton, which is kind of a suburb of Boston. It sets between Boston University and Boston College a little closer to Boston College. The public transportation set up here is pretty awesome. I have a train station about a block away and the bus that goes to church stops right in front of my place.

The glamorous bit is that my room happens to be in a church built a little over a hundred years ago which has been converted into a Buddhist temple. To be specific it is a Zen martial arts temple. The organization is called “Shim Gum Do” which is Korean and translates as the Mind Sword Way. The primary martial art practiced here is Shim Gum Do, which is a sword system where training is done by forms with a bokken. They also teach an empty-handed system called “Shim boep” which means the methods of the mind. For myself, I have begun training with the sword and I am quite enjoying it.

I am frequently asked about “the monks.” In this case there are no traditional monks as I knew them in Korea. That has to do with the fact that this is more a Zen martial arts school than a Buddhist monastery. The monks here are all martial artists and right now include our founding master Kim Chang Shik, and five white people. We have a sort of community living situation where we share certain amounts of the temple maintenance work, take turns cooking, train together, etc. Only the founding master has a shaved head.

I have a private room that sits next to (actually was constructed within) the main training room called the Dharma room that used to be the chapel. So, my room has a stained-glass window and a sort-of relief cast in plaster of a choir I think of as the Levites. There is a baby depicted in the cast with nasty grimace on his face.

If you like you can check out the Shim Gum Do Association website at www.shimgumdo.org

Extra Work

2005-02-25T15:35:00.000-05:00

Greetings folks. There has been a bit less of me up here lately due to the fact that I've been covering on the island for some other folks and haven't had a chance to sit down and write.

A handful of interesting things to consider regarding activities on the island of late. Certain students' behavior has been making a glorious downward spiral and it has forced interesting new social circumstances most saliently on myself but also on one of my coworkers. The kids were caught smoking. They got fined, which is the standard consequence. This somehow turned the staff (first the other guy, then me) into "snitches." This struck me as odd because "snitch" is a term I'm used to being reserved for students who rat to staff. But either way, the two easy going folks doing their jobs became most hated persons 1 and 2.

Anyway, after the first smoking problem event, only one particular student was caught, fined, and absolved of his home pass. A form of guilt and glory-seeking led two other students (previous accomplices to the crime) to deliberately make a scene of smoking in front of staff making a jolly big crew of kids who've destroyed one of our major carrots to encourage rule keeping behavior. This "f*** it" attitude led to the next morning's smoking event in the school house, the one where I became the bad guy. This was all before I began my shift covering mania. (Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention the stand-off on the dock. Oh the stories!)

It was the next Monday to Wednesday where I covered and the real hatred came out and there were the genital exposing events. I might have covered the whole week except that Wednesday I met with some neuroscience folks at Boston University (a great and glorious story I may tell another time.) So then began what may be refered to by some as the week resembling Hell, or "The Abyss" if you are Gandalf. The week could be represented as one crisis after another. One crisis was a student threating people with knives from the kitchen, then an axe in the yard. Then we had the kid who lit a fire of rubbing alcohol in the schoolhouse who upon realizing he would be fined for it pulled the smoke-pipe off of the fireplace and said he was going to fill the school with smoke and kill us all. This was followed by the kid trying to escape the island in a row-boat. All of this sort of petering out into a general state of discontent. One kid was hauled from the island to go to jail. (Another long story.)

A likely assessment I heard was that we have a lot of kids on the island now (8!!!) so the two to one student - staff ratio wasn't getting these kids enough attention. So when each kid would have a crisis they would get all the attention, someone else would feel the lack and in turn have his crisis. (Oh, did I forget to mention the one defecating his trousers?) Anyway, Friday came. I stayed for the weekend shift. And suddenly it was three days of nice, normal, happy behavior. A lot of it had to do with the kid being hauled away. Both the fear of "this could happen to you" as well as his behavior being the source of a great deal of tension. But the weekend went smoothly, gloriously. It was all kind of surreal.

All the New Dudes

2005-01-29T15:07:00.000-05:00

First off, I want to apologize for the fact that this post is not as organized or thematic as I generally like to make them. The last couple of weeks have been relatively momentous but... I don't know, so I'll just tell the story.

Three new guys on the island and one leaving. One of the kids, the Napoleonic kid I mentioned in my last island report, it was decided that our program might not be the right one for him. (That is to say we decided to arrange for him to be kicked out.) There were a great many problems with his behavior but, more importantly all of our treatment plans for him were being sabotaged from his home. The threat of getting kicked out had interesting effects on his behavior. They represent something quite common to most of these boys. Given certain conditions for not getting kicked out early on he began with an attitude that he was going to meet the requirements. However, in his decision making processes he consitently betrayed his stated intentions until a point of crisis arrived. When the difficulty (yet existent possibility) of succeeding in the goal reached a certain level, the boy determined that the whole thing was hopeless. Deciding that it was hopeless he let his behavior run in exactly the wrong course.

The three guys who've showed up: I'm finding that most of the kids when they are new and not yet secure with the situation tend to have pretty good behavior. They aren't comfortable enough to take more risks than they've already taken by just going to the island. Nonetheless, compared with the kid leaving, the kids coming are to me a breath of fresh air. There are of course many problems but they seem a lot more manageable from a sort of teacher type perspective.

The first of the three to come out is a kind of pot-head or at least that is how he presents himself. A lot of it may be due to the fact that he's on a plethora of medications, something someone referred to as a chemical restraint. Sleeps a lot. Hasn't been a stellar student in the past but for my money he's demonstrated the capacity to be. Imagine Brandon Rogers NOT on speed. (That's a joke.)

The second of the three new guys was just previously in a program in Magna. Yes, that's right. Magna, Utah. The place is called Vista and from what he said it sounds pretty awful. Someone might check it out for me. He ran away from there and they put him in the U's mental hospital up in Research Park near Fort Douglas Cemetery if you know where that is. Anyway, he's a great kid so far. Much more mature than I'm used to dealing with out here. Actively involved, hardworking, even volunteering in every part of the program.

I've been made the advisor to the third kid. That means I'll be in charge of helping make sure he meets all the graduation requirements for the program and so forth. There is something about him that kind of creeps me out a bit. He reminds me a couple of kids from the ancestral village. These were kids who had serious issues of substance abuse and physical abuse in their homes. The sign was a slightly awkward means of trying to be ingraciating. There is also a certain fragility to the body and an intangible quality to facial expressions. He's told me of certain anger problems but I think they are founded in some form of anxiety. He is definitely a little over anxious.

Anyway, all the new people have an interesting effect on the kids we already have. For one, they are not getting as much attention as they used to so... they are acting out in some ways to get some. Also, they have different behavioral patterns that are dampened or intensified where they have things respectively uncommon or common between them. All in all I expect a good effect. It seems some infusion of some more positive attitudes.

Due to libraries and timed internet use you will have to wait for the story of my week off island. There's my teaser trailer.

Letter to Anonymous

2005-01-06T16:03:00.000-05:00

Greetings Anonymous,

I should like to respond to your comment. It has not to this point occured to me that the picture I paint of my life on the island here would not come off as a very good thing. In fact it is reasonable to wonder why in the world anyone would want to do this. But somehow, for me the events I've so far written about have been to me more descriptive than evaluative.

I am having a good time. Part of what's good about it is that it is a real challenge.

I had a conversation with someone who used to work here recently. He was telling me about how he was trying to help one of the program's graduates get a job. He had already set him up with some good work before but the kid had flaked out on it. So this former staff member's wife asked him why he did all this, why he bothered. His words were, "to give him a chance."

Giving these guys a chance is about all we can do at this juncture. So that's what we do. Give them a little separation from the kinds of things that usually get them into real trouble so they have time and space to learn what they need to function in the so-called real world.

There's a lot about it that is like doing missionary work. The simple fact is that no person can be forced to change anything about themself except to some extent by nature. The kids are growing up and there is a body of research that indicates the development of the brain's architecture continues well into the late teens. This will force some changes on the boys' behavior. However, we can do nothing to force them.

The result is that you sympathize with undeveloped perspective, rejoice in small changes, plant seeds when you get a chance, and hope for the best. Building relationships is pretty important in all of this. A kid doesn't confide if they don't trust you. If they don't feel like you care, the seeds you may scatter will fall on hard ground. So you earn their trust. For a lot of these kids trust have been a rare thing in their lives where they've been abandoned by parents, their friends have led them into crime and have left them to deal with the consequences alone, and their teachers and social workers have demonstrated that the paycheck really is the only reason they care about them. That is assuming teachers and social workers actually do care.

So doing this job feels kind of like being a life-line. I get to help create a path to a better life for these guys if they will choose it. But whether they choose it or not, the path is there.

Maybe that is kind of an answer.

I think all the negative stories is another part of the answer of why I'm having a good time. I am most at heart an anthropologist. These kids' behavior fascinates me. Seeing what they do and learning about the hows and whys of it is why I started this in the first place. The idea is that by learning more about them better ways of helping them may emerge.

As the island turns... or something.

2005-01-05T17:48:00.000-05:00

This last week on the island a couple of experiences sort of stick out.

One of our kids speaks frequently and braggingly of elements of his life off the island. He talks a lot about his sexual practices. He also talks a lot about drug use and related phenomena. All of this can build an impression that he has by whatever force been pushed into roles that are quite adult if not mature and that he himself has this degree of maturity. But this same kid one night this last week asked to be tucked into bed and told a bedtime story. There was a bit of jocularity in it but, at the same time he really did appreciate it. The experience sent him into a long explanation about how he feels like the program is affecting him and what he feels like he needs to get from it. The insightful explanation also revealed unsatisfied needs in the Maslowian sense, the kind of things that should have been met much earlier in his life.

Another of our kids... As I've been working with and watching him he has developed a perspective on the universe that is quite odd to me. All things must predictably go his way. He seems to be the case which is traditionally called spoiled...maybe. For example, he has a very strong habit of ordering people around. It doesn't matter who, why, or what about if he thinks something should be done he orders it. And I say orders it in the sense that nine times out of ten he yells the order in a most hateful condescending tone of voice. When he doesn't get what he wants 99 time out of 100 (this may be to generous) he uses explitives to vilify the person who refused to comply. A new experience for him is playing ping-pong, since the school recently obtained one. Having never really played it before, he isn't very good. In fact he's the worst of any I've seen play on the island. So, he consistently loses. Now the normal person who takes up a new game and plays against experienced players expects to lose and learn something about playing it. Not with this kid. He knew before he began that he must be able to win without trying. This belief has led to the most interesting tantrums at the table. His commands and orders have extended to ordering his opponents to not play according to their ability. In effect: "Stop hitting the ball back and scoring you f***er." This kid also has the belief that it is perfectly reasonable to ask other people to do for him things that he is perfectly capable of himself.

"Throw a log in the fire."
"Why?"
"Because it's going out."
"So, why don't you do it? You're standing as close to the wood as I am and I'm doing something."
"I don't care. Just do it."
"If it's so important to you, do it yourself."
"F*** you!"

This kind of thing has occured with so many things. "Tie my shoes." "Get my jacket." "Rack up the pool balls."

It will be interesting to see how long it will take for refusals to culminate in his getting a clue.

The good pie crust.....

2004-12-24T17:00:00.000-05:00

Everything works best if things are chilled. Chill the mixing bowl, spoons, measuring cups,as well as the milk, oil, etc. Not necessary to go overboard but the chilling helps.

Mix 1/2 cup of canola oil (Wesson brand is known to work well.) with
1 1/2 cups of sifted flour and
a pinch of salt.

Then add 5tbs of milk (1/4 cup + 1tbs).

You should derive an "oily-like" ball of dough.

As I received it the recipe then allows for digital manipulation in the pan to form the crust. However, what works best for me is to roll it out between two pieces of wax paper. It is then very easy to fix any wrinkles, cracks, or other damage with your fingers after flipping it into the pan.

Bake it empty at 350 for ~10 minutes. You can put milk or egg whites on it to get the nice browning if you so desire.
If you fill it... depends on the filling what you want to do but, the recipe calls for 375 for ~1 hour.

I like this crust because it is easy, has a good taste on it's own without anything in it, and has a nice flakiness to it.

Playing with Fire

2004-12-20T09:10:00.000-05:00

A major theme of the last week's events is "all the stuff I learned about kids and fire."

Lesson Number One - Do not allow the boys to start the schoolhouse fire.

This particular lesson is representative of how slow a learner I am. One particular student prides himself on his ability to start our heating and cooking fires. In all reality the kid has no special skill but a tendency towards stoking the fire to the point where we are cooking birds perched on the roof for lunch. Because of ill-fortune and inadequate supplies, the first time I attempted to build the school house fire, I was not terribly successful. This was not such a bad thing because the weather was not yet that cold. However, this failure legitimized pyro-boy in claiming that I am not capable of building a proper fire. So, the last couple weeks when he has come to school his pattern has been to come to the school house, see that no fire is burning, insist and demand that he be the person to start it, then spend his entire school period playing with the fire instead of working at his math. On another day, another student did the same thing. I have therefore determined that I must be in the school early and have a roarer going before the first kid even thinks of prancing his way down.

Lesson Number Two - Do not allow the boys to sit with the door to the Franklin open during school.

In material this lesson was considerably more costly than the last but was more quickly learned. Once upon a time, I had two of the guys in school. One was sitting in front of the stove and asked that the door be open so he could look at the fire while he was working on whatever assignment he had at the time. Benign enough, I thought. So, I allowed for his wish. The other student in the class, being the type with some real social issues works really hard in awkward and inappropriate ways to obtain the approval of his peers. This student saw the open flames as an opportunity to create amusement for the other guy. Boy, did he exploit that opportunity. In the course this kid has burned the chalkboard eraser twice, a couple of books, and who knows how many writing implements. Now I must confess that sometimes he had to actually open the stove door to burn some of these things. However, the exposed flames have proven too much of a temptation. They even tried spraying window cleaner into the fire convinced that it was flamable despite my protestations otherwise. I usually don't like to argue with the boys over anything because it is almost never worth it. But now, I do fight to ensure that the stove door remains closed unless I'm putting wood in it.

Lesson Number Three - When dealing with extreme behavior problems involving fire, it's probably best to take the fuel away.

In Massachusetts right now it gets dark at around 4:30. I can have my students in school as late as 6:30 on some days so we have to have the kerosene lanterns in the school house. One afternoon a student determined to not do school work took an empty paper towel tube and stuck it in the chimney of his kerosene lamp and lit it on fire. He then proceeded to wave it around like a madman. This waving included getting it dangerously close to my face. Continued refusal to stop and put the thing out prompted me to grab the dust pan from the floor and slap the tube which successfully extinguished the fire. Unfortunately the student took this as a signal that he was to reignite the tube and thrust it into my shirt. It was that nice green army shirt I got at Grunts and Postures. You know the one. Anyway, the sleeve has a few nice little holes burned on the sleeve now. Realizing that extinguishing the fire was going to be inadequate this time, while he was waving the thing, I pulled some judo move where I grabbed his wrist and disarmed him. What remained of the tube found itself shortly consumed in the fireplace, never to be wave in anyone's face again.

The Damage a Little Drug Test Can Do

2004-12-09T16:00:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time there were some boys coming back to the island. You see they are allowed to leave from time to time for important holidays or other weekends and only on condition of adequate behavior. This one time a special group of boys came back and at least one smuggled cigarettes onto the island.

During this week one of the staff had decided to quit smoking so, his sensitivity to the scent of cigarette smoke was significantly enhanced. Several times during the week he caught a whiff and once even thought he perceived other substances in the air.

On one day, a group of boys behaving rather suspiciously in their pursuit of unsupervised time prompted the shift leader to require urine samples for drug testing. The lot lied quite poorly about how they wouldn't be so stupid as to be smoking and they didn't care what the results were going to be because they were all going to come back clean. This event reminds me that at times the students remind me of a certain Claudius but, I digress. Maybe I've mentioned that before.

Anyway, one of the boys later that night asked if we might be plotting to get him. His claimed supposition was that the school staff were going to manipulate his test results in order to prevent him from taking his next trip from the island. I attempted to assure him that his fear was unthinkable, that the staff's desire was to help, not punish him. He remained unconvinced.

Certain that he was basically screwed, he decided to screw himself the rest of the week. He got himself in trouble via excessive inappropriate (non-academic) sexual conversation. One day, he refused to go to school. Other things he did are beyond my ability to publish for their vileness. Anyway, he put himself at true risk of that which he feared.

Convinced of his completely imaginary fate he may have earned himself the penalty. But then of course I'm assuming that his fate was imaginary.

"At least now you know I have them."

2004-11-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

The students on the island have a fairly well established hierarchy. It has been quite easy to pick out where each individual fits in this heirarchy. One of the gammas seems to percieve himself as beta as demonstrated by the fact that he is the most likely to express aggression, give commands to other students, and in general engage in posturing. Testosterone flows freely in this void of seratonin.

The island also has a very obvious omega. Whenever something is missing, this student is accused. All the boys take opportunities to order him around, criticize him for weakness, and in general harrass him. This last week more physical forms of
harrasment increased to the tune of multi-student gangs taking punches or kicking and the victim lying in the fetal position covering his head with his hands.

There are arguments going around about how to help this kid make some personal progress and the social environment now complicates it. He consistently refuses to stand up for himself and tries, sometimes literally to hide behind the staff. The fact is he cannot possibly feel safe. But at the same time he cannot possibly be safe if he requires a constant adult bodyguard. This is something the victimizing students like to frequently point out often as a justification for their abuses. "We're trying to help you learn to stick up for yourself", they say. That claim is of course complete crap. It is quite simply the power-trip. These guys are just getting off on dominating someone, and doing it quite completely.

His cowardice is not entirely unfounded. It's not like this is an average ability kid who's merely psychologically blocking himself. He's kind of tall but he has very little physical strength and poor coordination: products of his background. I'd hoped that my pathetic attempts to participate in island athletics would encourage him to get out with the others and get some exercise. After all, if I can get out there and play as poorly as I do and make it back okay, surely he would see that he could as well. Unfortunately as ill-suited as I am, my abilities are much closer to that of the other folks than the omega's are to mine.

One of both the funniest and saddest events involving him occurred the other night. A few people were in the kitchen where teh alpha started tease the omega by feigning and eventually kicking him. In fact one kick landed right in that special place no true male wants to get kicked. "I didn't mean to kick your nuts", the kicker protested laughing. He continued to apologize profusely while the kicker was bent over in pain. "At least now you know I have them", he said. Indeed he has them. Now if only he could find them.

Proposed Anthem

2004-11-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

Due to my position as Poet Laureate of Flannel Haven I have assumed responsibility for composing lyrics for a national anthem. The said lyrics follow, and I seek a response from the Triumvirate or other interested parties. I have no idea how the music will sound.

You tell me that you love me
That you'll do anything.
But just what exactly
Does 'anything' mean?

Will you give me riches
In money and gems,
The wealth of the earth,
Silken robes with straight hems?

Will you give me your flannel?
Will you give me your flannel?

Will you work, sweat, and suffer
For all my commands?
Will your strength, heart, and labor
Bend to my demands?

Will you give me your flannel?
Will you give me your flannel?

Do you love me more than your mother
Than your gimp little brother?
Would you sacrifice things most dear to your heart:
Your hobbies, awards, and plumbing to start?

Will you part with addictions,
Forsake privacy?
Will you risk precious limbs
For your loyalty?

Will you give me your flannel?

* At the end of the song the singers should repeat the word "Eep" five times in a high pitched voice in succession.
The proposed title of this anthem is: "Will You Give Me Your Flannel?"

Den of Theives

2004-11-09T14:45:00.000-05:00

The title of this post inspired by this last week's events on the island refers to three events of theft.

Event number one: student code name "Delta" was in school with student code name "Iota." As we were leaving school Delta took posession of one of Iota's magazines. When it came up missing Iota accused Delta, he having been the only one besides myself with opportunity to take it. For whatever reason Iota was not inclined to suspect me. Somehow the sketchiness of my charachter has yet to be rewarded. Upon returning to the house the magazine was observed being hidden in a couch by one of the staff and was quickly recovered. The motive for stealing the magazine having not been satisfied Delta proceeded to snatch magazine number two. This time he took greater labors to accomplish his goal by not leaving it in such an obvious location. Delta in fact made the unreadable for future purposes by depositing it in the latrine. Iota responded to this event with a great deal of ire but inquired of Delta his motivation. Delta said, "Because I have no use for it." The total lack of consideration of feelings intensified Iota's ire and he decided to pummel Delta for a breif period before being restrained.

Event number two: Student code name "Epsilon" snatched all three existing pool cue balls from the house. In their absense other students took a spare 8 ball and colored in the white bits with a red marker to use as a cue. Within a day or so a student walking in proximity of the schoolhouse came upon one of the old wells and there spotted at the bottom of the well three cue balls sitting in a row. This same student, code name "Alpha," proposed that he might retrieve them as a form of community service. At the well a variety of things were attempted and proposed. All efforts that would accomplish the job from the surface availed nothing due to the depth of the well. It was then proposed that Alpha enter the well bodily as lowered by a rope. A couple different ideas were tried but the best was that he sit on a type of bouy and hold a rope. However, when lowered into the hole Alpha panicked, refused to release the surface to grab the rope, and was drawn again from the hole.

Event number three: This final theft probably three students code named "Beta," "Rho," and "Tau." How exactly it all came to pass was never fully discovered. After coming in from football one day, the shift leader announced that something had been stolen. The thief was given the opportunity to return the unnamed item or room searches would be done. Noone fessed up so the rooms were tossed. One of the students asked if it had been a something from my person which made me suspicious that he knew something so I checked to find my key to all the island locks missing and then heard from a staff member that someone had broken into the office and stolen his cigarettes. The search found nothing and things went back to something of normal with heightened supervision of students. As this was going on I came down the stairs and apparently walked in on a conversation between Beta, Rho, and Tau that cut off quite suddenly and suspiciously. It seemed that Beta and Tau had been explaining to Rho what they had done. It have been just the night previous that while walking with Beta and Tau on the island that Beta had seemed far too interested in the fact that I had a key.

Later, while in class during the math bit, I deliberately did not get out the calculators that were locked up and the students asked why. I explained that my key had been stolen and as so many times from Beta's response I was reminded of Claudius and the players. Beta and Rho claimed no knowledge and that they didn't believe in stealing 'cause it's bad hmmmmkay! During school Tau visited class. He had been working in the kitchen. A secret not was passed from Rho to Tau. The contents were later discovered to be a plan to return certain of the stolen items. Meanwhile, in asking questions and describing the awfulness of stealing Beta revealed that he knew exactly what had happened and how.

By lunch the key had reappeared along with the package and 5 cigarettes.

The Place

2004-11-06T18:00:00.000-05:00

Hopefully this reading will be worth the while of anyone who bothers to test it.

I am now happily settled into a transitory state. I told many folks that I was going to be moving temporarily into an apartment on the cape until I could get a satisfactory residence within walking distance of a Boston train station. When I first heard of the apartment I was given very little detail except that someone at the school had arranged for it and that the proposed rent was 250/month. This would be rather excellent considering the location. It would also prove incredibly convenient for me in that I would have the opportunity to more fully investigate Boston and have time to pick out the most perfect apartment. That things should not be so rosy should have occurred to me much sooner than it did because the trail of breadcrumbs had been laid out. However, my bleeding optimism and offerings of benficent doubt eventually caught up with me. The morning I arrived for work a couple of weeks ago, one of my bosses asked about my housing plans. I told him that I didn't know for certain all the details except those things that I've told everyone. He concurred that he was of similar information but that the expected rent was in the range of 250-300. I also got some information that indicated cooking was going to be constrained. Later that day I found out the name of the person who'd made the arrangements and in another discussion was told something about a barn. This notion of barn had me a bit confused but I figured it could have been a kind of joke, a rennovation, something other than me sleeping in a hay loft.

Because I had to go out to the island that morning I didn't hear more of it for a couple of days. Wednesday one of the students was graduating and a group of staff came out to the island. The party included the gentleman who'd arranged for the apartment at which time I learned that it was in fact a barn with some modifications. A well insulated bedroom and bathroom had been put in the second floor. Certain windows were not to be opened during the winter because heating issues and potential for freezing pipes and several other things I couldn't commit the details of to memory. The presence of a smart but disabled old lady was clarified and confusingly she was consistently referred to as "my land-lady." That is to say that Mr. So-and-so spoke of her as his land-lady, not as mine. He also mentioned that there was some linen available for me to use in the house. He would turn on the water heater and turn off the dish network and remove the TV for me. All of these things were clues to what I would find but, I missed and ignored their signifigance.

The blessed day arrived. Friday came, I made it back to shore, and my boss was to show me the road to this barn turned apartment. We met the old lady at her house which was next door. Turns out it was a barn of her family's and she's been selling off little bits of a huge lot over the years around there other out buildings being converted into homes over the course of it. She explained that the place was clean but she'd been up there to find a bit of clutter around. On this comment I imagined bare rooms with a few odds and ends left behind in corners or on shelves, something akin to what I've left behind when I've moved out of apartments in the past. The old lady gave me the key. The barn was locked up by a padlock. The three of us openend it and climbed the stairs. What we found there defied all of my expectations. The first room of the second floor was filled with boxes of random bits of a man's past. There was a long pipe along one wall covered in hanging clothes. The floor was covered with bits of hay tracked in from downstairs. The dresser was covered with material on top and the drawers beneath were still half-full of clothes.

I was surprised by this but not too. I had been given the impression that the spaces outside of the bedroom and bathroom were not particularly organized or otherwise taken care of and considered how much work it would take to fix things up a bit as we looked in the bedroom. Someone surely still lived there. The bed looked as if it had recently been slept in. There were bits of paperwork, pocket knives, deodorant sticks, coins, business cards, a million different things that a person needs from day to day. The TV was still there and my boss noticed what she thought was a belt sander. Convenient, if I was looking forward to doing any kind of wood sanding...? We crossed over to the bathroom and found a similar sight. Everything had been newly constructed and seemed to be in working order, in fact as if it had been used within the last twenty-four hours. The vanity was covered with toothpastes, shaving cream cans, after shave lotions, facial moisturizers, and yet more sticks of deodorant. I was stunned.

My boss may have been even more stunned. She apologized profusely protesting that she too had been misled regarding the conditions to be found. She left, and for me the moment of true agitation had not yet come. I climbed back up the stairs and went into the bedroom to get my bearings on how exactly I was going to move in and what I was going to do with my stuff. It was then that I took a close look at the bed and discovered rodent feces. Rodent feces on a bed that looked like it had been slept in the night before. A bit apalled, I looked around at the floor to discover more signs of the passage of mice.

Before I came out here I had determined that I might live in this place as much as 6 months. That would allow me to get my bearings and spend the time to find an absolutely perfect place in Boston. Now, I thought a month sounded like plenty of time and wondered why it shouldn't be within a week. I won't detail all of my responses to this situation but, let me say I continue to find interesting and fun surprises. The belt sander turned out to be some kind of massage device. I found a passport, a fridge full of fungus and something that looks like vomit, bits of hay covering bathroom and bedroom floors, etc, etc. I hope I don't have to be here too long.