My Frustration

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?

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

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.

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

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

“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 sitting 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

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

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?

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

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

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

A Long Week

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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.