From Sir with Love

The ground running

2012-01-28T12:08:00.000-08:00

It has been four weeks since I sat down to write a blog entry. It has been a busy, busy, busy entry to 2012. I have hit the ground running!

Four weeks ago I moved on to New York for that phase of my winter vacation, and I hit the ground running there. I got off the plane, zipped over to the subway, dropped off my bags on the upper west side, and immediately then went out for dinner with old Hackley friends. I hit the ground running! Throughout that week, I visited and schmoozed and ate and shivered and reveled. I got on a plane a week after I arrived, headed for Bangkok for a recruiting job fair for new teachers at KA. I got off the plane (after 23 hours of travel), took a limo (I actually just thought it was a taxi!) checked into the Sheraton, showered, and within an hour or so, I had the first interview of that week. I hit the ground running! After six days in Bangkok and many, many interviews (as well as some great street food in an alley at a place run by “Mama San,”) I got on a plane in the middle of the night, heading back to Amman. I landed at 10:15 and with the customs and baggage claim, rushed back to campus, took a quick shower, and made it for my 11:30 class. Yes, you get the theme of this blog entry, of the month of January, 2012 (and if you could see my fingers racing over the keys, even the speed at which I am blogging right now!) I hit the ground running!

Oh, there have been so many things I wanted to write about. I wanted to write a postcard from Bangkok, I wanted to muse about the death of Vaclac Havel, and I wanted to look back 150 years to what was going on in the Civil War in January, 1862, the first winter of the war. I wanted to write about the year ahead; I wanted to muse a little more about the year we left behind. But, so far, there have been no blog entries in 2012. There has been so much to report—the four days I got to spend with former student Abdullah in New York, visits with A-list friends Kate and Harrison, great interviews in Bangkok, the idiocy of Edihat airlines and how they charged me an unbelievable amount for a carry-on bag, the visit by my friend Christy to KA in Jordan again, how wonderful my classes have been going with my seniors and my art history students. I wanted to explain about this detailed, long work I am doing with a sub-committee on faculty evaluation and appraisal.

But no—none of those blog entries have materialized. I have—wait for it—hit the ground running and kept running this month.

I might have begun with a more peaceful look into the new year—something like this:The only safe thing to say about the future is that, borrowing from Mort Sahl, it lies ahead. After that, we are all on our own.

Or another thought I had was to provide you with a postcard of my week in New York, where serendipity is always my curator. I might have begun that entry like this: I look around the city and see intentional, and unintentional, works of art. I enjoy the becalmed rooms of galleries as well as the extensions of the art in the teeming metropolis. New York is simply the greatest “ready-made” art work in the world.

But instead, let me not just run run run for a couple of minutes. Let me slow the pacing of my typing down. Let me think about something other than the concatenations of my schedule. Let me be a little more playful. I need to read a little poetry, a little playful piece by Wallace Stevens, called, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”

Anyway, in my desire to slow down a little, I was reminded of the peculiar, bongo-playing, Nobel-laureate physicist named Richard Feynman. As a young faculty member at Cornell, Feynman was in the cafeteria when a student tossed a dinner plate into the air. As the plate spun, it also wobbled. Because of the university insignia stamped on the plate, Feynman could see that the spinning and wobbling motions were not quite in sync. He knew, hmmmm, that the two types of rotation must be related.

After an enormous amount of hard work, Feynman discovered the underlying mathematical ratio. He then proudly showed his calculations to the head of his department, who asked, “What’s the importance of that?” Feynman replied, “It doesn’t have any importance. I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?” It later turned out that these calculations became part of Feynman’s revolutionary work in nuclear physics.

Well, we all do a great deal of running. Perhaps each of us has hit the ground in 2012 running. But I wanted to remind us that we should also not forget to play. Why can’t our happiness, humanity and hope be tied up in the idea of intellectual inventiveness and curiosity? Many ideas across history are products of playfulness, imagination and risk taking.

I just wanted to take a pause in the running and remind us of the joys of play. Of risk taking and imaginative fun. Who knows what discoveries we might make in the year that lies ahead!

Really, where would you keep a partridge in a pear tree???

2011-12-31T04:32:00.000-08:00

Just as Joseph and Mary travelled to their ancestors’ hometown long ago, two weeks ago I made the journey to the emotional, social and spiritual home that has shaped and nurtured my identity. My expectation was the same as every trip to Cincinnati: for joyful reunion and a renewal of the bonds of love.

But this season is of course more than just my return to America, it is a return to that story of Jesus’ birth, a return to the story where we re-discover how deeply God loves humankind—so much so that God took on human flesh to join the human family, to make a home with humankind.

When I come home each December—and I have never missed a December homecoming—there is no ambivalence on my part. While there are no angels or shepherds waiting for me at the Greater Cincinnati airport, it is one big YES on my part to reconnect with missed family and foods. It is the promise of those family and foods which generates such excitement on my part. And I look forward to it for months. When I left in August, I knew that I would be home four months and two days after I left for the fall term in Jordan. I know that officially the season of Advent is four weeks long, but for me, it really is kind of a four-month long anticipation of the joyful reunion. My mother was born exactly four weeks before Christmas day, and so for her, and therefore for the rest of us, the prospect, the anticipation, the excitement, the probity of Advent mattered deeply.

In Christian theology, to live in Advent’s hope is to live in eager anticipation of this homecoming where God arrives to give a living, in-person confirmation to the promises of forgiveness and life, reconciliation and peace. Getting Christmas right is that appreciation of God’s spinning of divinity into human form, to stand in awe of the presence of God.

It is not always as easy as we think—it is not just the anticipation of the easy times, of the triumphs. There is a gritty story here too—like Herod’s rage, treacherous crowds, foolish followers and a dangerous road to Jerusalem. To give into Advent fully, the anticipation of what will come, is to risk being taken into the hands of strangers and carried to unknown destinations.

Advent is about paying attention, being alert through the chaos and marching down that unknown road. Exciting and exhausting.

Do you find Christmas exhausting? I know many people do—especially those with small children, what with the parties and programs and dresses and shopping and hopes—it is a little like going into battle. There is a certain amount of chaos involved in the season.

I guess, I remember my own mother and her reaction to the exhaustion and chaos of Christmas. My mother, perfectionist that she was, aside from the exhaustion, she had an uncanny ability to stand back and get a better perspective on the chaos around her. Maybe it was just in her name, but she would reflect on Mary, the original Mary, at such times. I can almost hear her saying, “Mary certainly experienced chaos and exhaustion too, you know.” Indeed! That Mary rode a donkey while nine months pregnant; without a hotels.com reservation, she and Joseph had to bed down in a stable/cave. There she gave birth in front of a bunch of cows. Then she was visited by strangers both low and high-born after Jesus’ birth announcement was broadcast across the sky. What would we do if we answered the door and found the herders, or the foreign dignitaries smelling of incense??? I am sure Mary was unnerved by all these strange things going on. I wonder what she thought of the unfolding of this divine plan???

But Mary kept her calm—somehow she was able to keep peace, a cool head, amid all the chaos. I remember a moment from my childhood, probably circa 1973 when my sister was to read the Christmas story during the lighting of the advent candle, and our mother coached Elizabeth to read the story with all the wonder and awe she could muster. There, almost forgotten sometimes, at the end of the story, was one of my mother’s favorite lines in the Christmas story: “Mary treasured all…and pondered them in her heart.” Yes, in the middle of the craziness, she reflected on the miracle that had just occurred. There is a quietness to the story that I love, and all these years later, my mother’s guidance still affects me. In the midst of chaos and exhaustion, we need to treasure and ponder.

This year Elizabeth and I sang in our church on Christmas Eve—just as we have done every year for 38 years. We sang a song, “The Cradle of Bethlehem,” for the first time since 2002 when we last had a baby in a cradle, and it put me in my mind of baby Jack, 9 years ago, and the wonder of the amazing little being who came to grace the earth. How Mary must have felt as she cradled her baby and realized her world had changed forever. Think of the peace Mary must have felt.

As we leave the Christmas season behind, perhaps a bit more weary, I would remind us of the excitement and importance of Advent. I would argue that we should operate as if it were always Advent. I mean, we never really arrive where we think we will, or once we do, we learn that in fact, we’re not finished with the journey at all. There is always something to come, there is always a way for us to go further and continue to evolve and grow. We should never just be “waiting”—as we wait and anticipate the unfolding, we should treasure and ponder the evolution of it all.

Lights, please!

2011-12-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

Have you ever encountered someone who didn’t know the Christmas story?

This year at KA I am in charge of a small choir and during December we worked on several Christmas songs. (I asked the Muslim students whether it was appropriate or not for them—I didn’t know for sure. They had no problems.) The students weren’t particularly interested in the traditional Christmas carols—they didn’t know them so had no affection for the beauties of 19th century British expressions of Christmas joys. But a little obscure piece, “And Love Was Born,” just enchanted them to no end. This is a piece from the late 1970s and I believe I did it in Studio Choir at West High, but it isn’t a very complex piece so I am not sure. Anyway, the students loved this piece. One student groused that he couldn’t find a performance of the piece on Youtube. Anyway, as we worked on some of the musical subtleties, a young man asked, “What actually happened in Bethlehem?” I felt a little like Linus in the TV classic chestnut of “Charlie Brown” (except I refrained from asking for “lights, please!” as Linus does!) as I told the story to those in my little group who didn’t actually know what transpired in our neighborhood over 2,000 years ago.

I found myself saying to them “Of all the characters in the Christmas story, the ones we need to keep our eyes on, indeed, come to think of it, the ones most like us, are those Magi, those Wise Men.”

When I posit that those Wise Men are the ones most like us, I am not suggesting that we are either so regal or wise, but let’s consider some of the other characters in this story. Let’s take Mary, the young Palestinian teen minding her own business when an angel of the Lord comes and addresses her: “Hail, Mary!” Like that’s going to happen to us. Consider this: the shepherds are out in their fields watching their flocks by night, when an Angel of the Lord appears to them…speaks to them…and suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appears, praising God. Like that’s going to happen to us.

And on and on—but those Magi—we need to watch them. These are the travelers, the ones who undertake a great and arduous journey. Last week I packed a suitcase, hopped two planes, and via Paris, travelled the 10,000 or so miles from Jordan to Cincinnati. Not really arduous at all, and in under 24 hours I made it from my apartment back to my family homestead. But let’s muse about those journeys 2,000 years ago. Let’s imagine the conversations back home when those magi have agreed to undertake this great trip. “Honey,” says one, “Me and the guys, we’re following a star. Not sure where or what it will lead to. We’ll be away—for months, maybe longer.” Of course, I am just joking a little here. For the magi it was no mere whim, their undertaking. They didn’t embark upon this adventure without careful thought and good reason. They did their best to explain themselves and their reasons to their families. They extracted themselves from various commitments. They planned the route and agreed how to finance it. Journeys of this sort are expensive—the costs of travel, with inns and meals, not to mention a loss of income from being away from work. I guess they worked. (Come to think of it, this sounded a lot like my thought process as I pondered this whole Jordan thing in 2007.)

They probably spent considerable time on what to take, what gifts to bring, and anticipated the exchanges of cultures and rituals and languages they would encounter.
The long awaited day arrived for them. Those magi hugged their loved ones and said their good-byes, not quite sure when they would return. There are tears, second thoughts, probably pleas to stay. Finally, they are on their way—on their adventure. As they spent time together on this adventure they began to learn each others’ moods, rhythms and fears. They learn the sound of each others’ laughter. And they probably needed to ask for directions. You know that since these are wise men they were probably not inclined to ask for directions.

The star gets the magi all the way to Jerusalem, but then it goes on the fritz. It is in Jerusalem that they have to ask for directions. “Where,” they ask, “is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we have observed his star rising, and have come to pay him homage.” This is the moment their adventure really starts. It starts when their accents give them away; when they reveal themselves strangers in a strange land; when they first disclose to others the purpose of their quest; when they admit they don’t know which way to turn; when they are forced to entrust themselves to the good will of complete strangers (some of whom turn out to be possessed of ill will); when they find out that the mere mention of Jesus causes shifts in power, threatens principalities, begs for a re-ordering of the structures that discriminate. Now, they are on their way.

I guess I have thought about these guys this week when I realized they would have been traveling right around where KA is, my home and work in Jordan, not far from Jerusalem. I think about them when I think of the journey that I have taken since January, 2007 when I decided to follow this quest to help start this school here.

So as I look out at those plains to the west of our school—there in those hills where David once shepherded, I reside in the very land where those magi traveled and risked and followed their star. Yep, those guys, those exotic, adventurous, risk-taking, intrepid kings or astrologers, or whoever they were—they are the ones to watch.

We all have journeys, some longer, or farther afield, but we all have journeys in relationships, or new jobs, or simply the life of faith is a life of adventure. I think you will know you are on the right road, that you are getting close to wherever, when it gets thrilling, tense and intense, important, scary, edgy, absorbing and fantastic.

Have a Merry Christmas and enjoy the journey…

In Deo Speramus

2011-12-13T05:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had a parent-teacher conference in the afternoon, and I arrived a few minutes early, so I sat in the reception area blithely looking at the magazines out for waiting people. As I casually leafed through old magazines, a bold cover story from Time magazine caught my eye: “Islamophobia” screamed the cover. I sighed, wondering why someone would leave this 2010 magazine out for the KA public to read. What an ironic twist to have this available at a school that has 80% Muslim students with about 40% of the faculty American ex-pats. I paged through the article, and of course, it was about why so many Americans are fearful of Islam. It is not that the exploration of fears bothers me, but the article probably stoked more fears than it allayed. Of course, I sat there in that lovely waiting area the day after I read about Newt Gingrich’s comments this week about Palestinians (again with the “they’re all terrorists” mania).

As I waited for the family to appear, I thought about not so much what Newt Gingrich had said, but instead the many ways that our worlds are more in common than what we first think. “Allah” in Arabic is “God,” and we share that same God of Abraham. That part is obvious, but I thought about how both the Arab world and western world share some other “gods.” After four years of commuting between both worlds, here are some other gods I have determined that we share:
• Our god is money
• Our god is power
• Our god is fame
• Our god is ending suffering
• Our god is truth

I could add more—what about our obsession with Ivy League schools? And of course, the obsession with landing a highly-paid job? Aren’t those gods as well? I suppose the thing my years in Jordan has taught me more than anything is that there are new faces of old religions, there are many sides of what religion means.

KA teaches a World Religions course, and I have long treasured that we help students better understand the concepts behind these disparate world faiths, help students develop an open mind about what and how and why other religions practice as they do. In my youth and early adult years, these were all just lumped as “The Other” in my mind, and it was easy to develop a discomfort or distaste for strange practices and beliefs.

Let’s look a little more closely at Islam—especially if we do harbor such a “phobia” against it. Each chapter in the Koran—as well as each Muslim prayer—begins with these words: “In the name of God, the beneficent and the merciful.” I learned that the Islamic prophet Muhammad was known as Al-Amin—the trustworthy—and was revered for his honesty, humility, desire for justice, and disdain for greed. And I read passages in the Koran that struck the same ideals as all the world’s great faiths: repentance, forgiveness, and tolerance. Here are examples:

From the Koran: “O Mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! The noblest of you, in the sight of Allah, is the best in conduct. Lo! Allah is knower, aware.”

From Hinduism’s Hitopadesa: “One should always treat others as they themselves wish to be treated.”

From Buddhism’s Dhammapada: “Hatreds do not ever cease in this world by hating, but by not hating; this is an eternal truth.”

From Judaism’s Book of Leviticus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

And from Christianity’s Gospel of Luke: “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”

I am not suggesting that we are all exactly alike under the skin, but treasure these beautiful thoughts and aims! Have mistakes been made in the name of religion? Sure! No doubt, horrible, unjust, heinous things have been done through the corridors history in the name of gods—but is it because of the religions, or because of naivete and ignorance? For me the greatest flaw we have as humans is our ability to lose our compassion. To delude ourselves into thinking we are right and others are wrong. To turn members of different groups only into that dangerous “other.”

A student asked me today if I had heard what Newt Gingrich had said, and wondered if I thought Candidate Gingrich actually believed his words. I replied that I had no way of knowing if he truly believed the scurrilous things he had said about Palestinians and Palestine, but he has certainly figured out that it gets him exposure and support. It doesn’t bring a lot of shame to his words, evidently, and doesn’t that tell us so much! Islamophobia sells magazines and wins hearts and minds of voters.

Religion can bring out the better angels of our nature; however, religious extremists can bring out our worst. In my students’ lifetimes, in Bosnia, Christian extremists slaughtered 8,000 Muslims around the town of Srebrenica. In the Palestinian territories Jewish settlers dismissed Muslims as animalistic. In India, Hindu nationalists raped and slaughtered Muslims, in Sri Lanka, Buddhist extremists abused Hindus. In the United States, Muslims slammed planes into the World Trade Towers.

As we so often tout in a fairly smug way, ours is a globalized world. But indeed it is a polarized world. We are more interconnected economically and culturally and politically, yet in terms of issues of faith, we also seem to be more territorial, suspicious and reactive. Becoming more interdependent almost seems to be making us less tolerant.

But as a teacher I get the chance to talk with students about these media reports. Here at KA I get to meet and know Palestinians and realize how wearying that steady diet of anti-Palestinian rhetoric is, and I get to wonder how we might overcome all these phobias.

I look back at the list of gods that many in both of these worlds share. I teach the same here as I did in the United States, but I think I have become even more deliberate in my aims for my classroom and my students. I exhort all the more for students to be open to the mysteries around them, be compassionate as we learn about The Other, and challenge ourselves in terms of our beliefs and perceptions about The Others.

I had a nice conference with the parents, and in just a few days I get on a plane to go celebrate Christmas with my family and American friends.

SPOILER ALERT: THIS ENDING MAY SEEM SENTIMENTAL AND OBVIOUSLY IDEALISTIC, BUT IF NOT AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, THEN WHEN, I ASK YOU???????

Of all those things that might indeed be tertiary gods, or subsidiary gods, wouldn’t it be nice if we all added to our wish-lists that each group around the world makes hope their god.

Encounters with Ihsan

2011-12-10T01:17:00.000-08:00

One of the delights of this fall here at KA has been a seminar led by one of my young colleagues. His name is Moamer and he has significant ties to the school. He is the older brother of “The Mayor of Awesomeville,” that kid Abdullah that I taught every day for the first four years the school existed (and one of the A-list students I have known in my whole career). Another brother has worked here in our summer program. Another brother is a 9th grader here. The family hosts a party for teachers every June with all seven sons in attendance. This family dynasty has been integral to the school since its inception!

Moamer leads a seminar every week on Islamic Tradition and the History of the Middle East. At times the course has been frustrating—in a good way—and always enlightening. He started the seminar on 9/11/11—an auspicious date I suppose on which to begin the best training and teaching I have yet received on the Islamic world. Moamer explained up front how he went about planning for this course. He decided that three lenses would be used to create this course, three “filters” as he called them. He set up his own parameters and ground rules: the sources he would use must be Islamic, must be western, and must be grounded in teaching. He explained that he would rely on Hamza Yusuf, an American Islamic scholar, a book entitled The Vision of Islam, and his own experiences. How exciting is that to see from the get-go exactly where he would cull his information and insights.

The last few seminar meetings have focused on the concept of Ihsan, a concept of the encounter with the divine, in which the faithful are reminded to make something beautiful of their faith. As Moamer reminded the group, “You worship Allah as if you see him; for even if you do not see him, he sees you.” One spends one’s lifetime, therefore, as a seeker on the path of Ihsan. This seeking will bring true happiness.

What a profound concept—we must see the beautiful, the true, the closeness of God for our lives to have meaning.

As I have done many times this fall in the seminar, I have learned how similar so many of the tenets of Islam are with the tenets of Christianity, but also really almost any faith I can think of.

At first this almost bothered me. Week after week, as Moamer explained “what Muslims do,” my mind would automatically say things like, “Well, we pray too,” or “We also believe in repentance.” As Moamer explained the tenets that Muslims believe that “There is no God but God,” the commandment to bear witness, and certainly the eternal query, “How do we know God?” it was so remarkable to me the comparisons. Now, this should hardly be news! Allah of Islam is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, David, Solomon, et cetera on down the line…and while I have taught about Islamic art before, I have never had the benefit of hearing a Muslim crack open the nut of faith and unpack the theology and the beliefs quite so thoroughly. It had always remained so much “The Other” in all these years both in the United States and in Jordan.

Like many Americans, I grew up with really only one part of the history of the Middle East—an ancient Biblical-era history, and a modern history of Israel as told through the heroic birth of the state of Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. I had studied the Holocaust many times, visited many concentration camp sites, directed Holocaust-themed plays, been to Passover seders, and so what I knew quite well was the history of the genocide and that Israel was a safe haven for the Jews. I knew nothing of the Arab side. For millions of Americans, Jew and Gentile, it was the same. We were all raised with the version of Middle Eastern history as told in Exodus, Leon Uris’ influential and riveting mega-bestseller, then turned into a Paul Newman movie. In Uris’ engaging novel, Arabs are alternately pathetic or malicious, and have no real claim to the land. As is said in the book, “If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it—much less run from it without real cause.” Of course, as devoted readers of the blog will know, I have certainly gained new insights and perspectives in the 53 months I have lived in Jordan. As I have come to see, the actual history of the region is far more complex, richer and interesting.

Since coming here and writing about this from time to time, I have had wonderful conversations with friends and family state-side about the deeper narrative, one that penetrates beneath the headlines and the endless cycles of repeated history, and attempts at explaining how we got to this difficult place.

Not everyone is comfortable hearing the story of The Other. I have had some acquaintances profess that they are tired of hearing about the Jewish/Arab love of the land, and a Kiwanis colleague of my father chastised me for telling the story of the Arabs as a “nonexistent Palestine.”

But most people have listened intently, enthralled at what I have been able to learn here. In many ways what goes on here mirrors the struggles of people anywhere I have lived, the struggles of families as they encounter and embrace faith and each other’s history.

So back to Moamer—in many ways, each week as he unravels the mysteries of faith, I think of my grandmother. My mother’s mother taught Sunday School for 62 years, and in my eyes she must have been phenomenal because of her knowledge, her convictions, and her sincere and life-affirming piety and faith. Moamer is winning with that same combination. As my grandmother must have done for decades, Moamer has helped me get past the canned summary of Islam, and certainly opened my eyes to the beauty and purity of his faith. As I have said, many tenets are similar. The process of revelation, of discipline, of commitment, of reflection—all are similar to the traits found in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism—certainly all the faiths with which I am acquainted.

But of course I know there are boundaries between our two faiths—and how in the world ecumenicalism really works is amazing. In Islam Jesus is deemed a very good prophet, but not the Son of God, and certainly then the supernatural elements of the Resurrection are eschewed. But the divergences are not really what interest me; those I know, and I expect. It is all the things in common, both good and bad. As Moamer discusses the mysteries of faith, over and over I see the parallels in what I know and understand about Christianity. And certainly in the chauvinism that can mark Christianity, that chauvinism of superiority is quite vivid in Islam as well. And why not? It accomplishes the same thing to promote one’s faith, and comes from a certain world view that each respective faith finally got spirituality “right.”

One day that caused me the most agita was the day Moamer explored the role of the intellect in Islam, specifically how faith and science co-exist in Islam. He used the absence of that symbiosis in Christianity as his foil. In my notes from that day I wrote down in my notebook, “It seems as if there is no tension in Islam about science and faith, and must Islam always trump everything else? What about modern science? Where are the Islamic scientists now on the world stage?” It was a provocative class, and Moamer and I did not agree. His understanding of the West seems grounded in many ways like Clarence Darrow in the Scopes-Monkey trial, but of course there is more.

Science and faith are not officially mutually exclusive in Christianity, although there are numerous examples that would create that understanding. Galileo is a great example. And Moamer raised him. But I countered with Pope Julius II who, a century before Galileo, believed he was the one who could bind theology and science together. And there are a host of scientists, on every list of great innovators of science, who were monks! Moamer and I debated, and I wished we could do more history. For a moment or two I thought I should not be a part of the seminar any more.

But of course, this was some of the best part of this opportunity. I get to hear what a twentysomething, intelligent, Arab science teacher thinks of his world, my world, and the mysteries of faith. His explanation of the dogma and the practice is enlightening. I can pair it with my experiences too, of course, and treasure those crossing points, those junctures in which we agree so easily. It also helps explain many world views that seem frustrating to me, or limited, or even un-enlightened. It is not un-enlightenment, it is simply what you have seen and experienced on your own journey.

Moamer tells many stories about the origins of words and phrases, all of which help illumine even more this part of the world, the delicate co-existence of Islam and Christianity, and certainly the keys to their world views. One week Moamer reminded us that in Islam, faith is “always amazing, always good, is it always "hamdillallah,” the phrase uttered when asked how you are. The phrase means, “through God and my faith, I am good.”

We have discussed jihad and terrorism, but again, the simplest and purest understandings come down to that journey in life seeking the divine, seeking the closeness and love of God. Moamer said, “We understand that life is like a prism; it is transitory, but our greatest reward is a closeness with Allah.” From there he went to explain the concept of repentance. At the end of class Moamer turned to me and said, “John, surely you have a comment. What do you make of this?” I had looked at my notes anyway, and realized, yet again, the similarities and challenges as both faiths (all faiths?) embrace the desire of Ihsan, to make life beautiful and meaningful.

To Count, To Make a Difference

2011-12-03T00:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I woke up without any plan at all for the day! Maybe four times in a calendar year is there such a day for me. Now remember, it may be my Teutonic blood which craves a plan, or my mother’s insistence that one gets so much more accomplished when one has a plan—whatever it is, I plan. I plan on days off; I plan when I may relax; I plan when I may be spontaneous. So yesterday was an unusual day. No plan! There was an inkling of a plan in the morning—there was supposed to be a grand going-out last night with a colleague, but that never materialized. So I spent the day plan-less. (I must admit I started to plan this blog entry, but then since it was officially a plan-less day, in the end I decided to wait until today when I knew I would resume my planning. Does the existence of an Official Plan-less Day actually constitute a plan??) I read outside in the warm, afternoon sun, fell asleep lazily over a novel, a book about Jan van Eyck, and a book about teaching. I watched two old movies, Anastasia and Double Indemnity. I wrote a couple emails, made a pot of soup—but there was no plan to the day.

In the afternoon I also caught up on some of the news of the last week. I have been intrigued by the events in Egypt all year, so I took great interest in Egypt’s first real voting since 1952. The results of Egypt’s first democratic parliamentary elections do not matter as much as the drama of the first day of voting, when millions of Egyptian citizens from all backgrounds mobbed the polls and cast ballots for the first time. Two threads in the story stayed with me through my lazy day. One reporter made it clear that the voting was not just seen as a right, but if you were found not to have voted, you were fined! (Think about how weak voter turn-out is in the USA—sometimes under 50% of eligible voters—maybe we should start fining our less-than-patriotic errant eligible voters!). The other story I liked so much involved a quotation from a twenty-something Egyptian who said he wanted his vote “to count” and “to make a difference.”

What an important concept! As I re-read Bill Ayres’ book on teaching for the 5th time, I came upon the end of Chapter 1. In the book this energetic, passionate teachers asks people why they teach given the lower salary and status of other professional careers. Ayres writes that “Teaching is an act of hope for a better future….the reward of teaching is knowing that your life makes a difference.” So many blog entries about counting this week! This statement is not especially novel—but when you line it up with the quotidian act of voting, as in Egypt, and the excitement over counting and the hopes for a better future, it becomes quite a heady thought.

Egypt will not have it easy. There very likely will be impediments in this transition from what has been military rule to democracy, and also likely is that the political parties elected will not deliver exactly what the people want. These disappointed and disillusioned voters will likely return to the streets in even greater numbers than before. But—the people have been transformed in 2011. The date of January 25th is seared into the people’s minds, the date of the first mass demonstration in Tahrir Square, which led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. The mindset, expectations and attitude toward rule has been transformed in Egypt. However, most people guess that the military has not changed and is rooted in the past. In the past couple of weeks tens of thousands of Egyptians have returned to protest in Tahrir Square—indeed, that square has been “legitimized” as the space for “people’s power” to confront the army-dominated regime. Tahrir Square has been the pulse of this burgeoning “people’s power” but now those people must discover what the people want and convey its will. Then they will become more powerful than the army and will insist on parliamentary accountability and that the Parliament will deliver.

Somehow in the midst of my lazy, plan-less day, I went from thinking about Egypt to other adventures in the world. As I basked in a sunny, December day I thought about one of my favorite stories. You probably can guess what story/movie it is: a storm separated her from her family, and her weathered farmhouse was ripped from the earth and spun around like a top. The events happened so fast it is easy to see why the young girl was afraid. But then suddenly, and unexpectedly, the screen lit up in dazzling Technicolor, soft music played in the background, and the girl’s world became one of enchantment. Dorothy Gale was in a multi-colored world far away from her home in Kansas. Dorothy sang and danced her way through her magical new world, caught between a desire for adventure and a hunger for her safe and loving home. Who doesn’t want to follow her, to be one of her new friends, and share in her journey??? When Dorothy sings, “Over the Rainbow,” who isn’t spellbound by the longing and hope she expresses?

So as I drifted in and out of my lazy, afternoon nap, I juggled the books on my lap, the stories of Egyptians, teachers, and the motley crew of The Wizard of Oz in my head. Let’s remind ourselves of a few things about The Wizard: it is the story of a journey, complete with lessons about heart, courage, inclusion, self-determination, and the will to succeed in the face of daunting obstacles. Dorothy also wanted to count, to make a difference. In many ways it is a parallel to the 1930s, the time of its greatest cinematic creation, but also just about any time since then. My, my—whoever thought of this parallel to Arab Spring??

A few years ago, in one of my Christmas letters, I was thinking about The Wizard of Oz then too. I wrote, “Although I haven’t seen any wicked witches or flying monkeys lately, a great tornado of events has shaken our community and our nation. We are emerging from our houses, much like Dorothy, to find that our world looks nothing like it did before. Where there was once predictability and order there is now uncertainty and adventure. But, like the movie, where there was only black and white, there is now Technicolor, adventure and opportunity. We all know Dorothy never actually traveled to a new place. Instead, she had the rare opportunity to see beyond the limitations she and others placed upon herself and her world, and looked over the rainbow to the colorful possibilities that, as she later learns, had been there all along. Our environment has been shaken by economic, political, and social forces that provide us the same opportunity to look over the rainbow and “see” the excitement and adventure in our own community.”

What powerful images and ideas emerge from that chestnut of a movie. As I work on notes for the professional development seminar I will lead tomorrow, and re-read a great book on teaching, I marvel how the 1939 M-G-M classic movie has many lessons for us. The Egyptians have many lessons for us. We can weave together all of these for another reminder of how we can “count” and indeed “make a difference.” And most importantly, we have the opportunity to fashion our future and achieve great things. Like Dorothy, we must recognize that the power to achieve our goals lies not in Emerald City far away, but right at our own feet.

Inscrutable arithmetic

2011-11-28T03:01:00.000-08:00

In the thirty years since I left the domain of mathematics (you have heard that story right? About when I skipped math class for a month as a high school sophomore? Oh well, if not, you should ask about it sometime—it is a doozy of adolescent stupidity!) I have rarely found myself in a math classroom. However, with my new title and responsibilities as…ahem…Dean of Curriculum and Instruction, I have been to every kind of classroom in the last month. It is safe to say that I have seen more math classes this fall than in the last thirty years put together. I have seen Geometry and Algebra and Algebra II and Statistics and something called FST and Calculus, both AP and non-AP. I have seen some excellent instruction, and since I do not have to worry about the content (one could easily say I am content-free in this arena) I can simply enjoy the pedagogy of my colleagues. I have enjoyed going to math class!

So all this going-to-class in math made me think about math and arithmetic in other areas of the world; since I live in the world of the Bible, I often think about the people who trod this area back in Bible times. So I was thinking about the Bible and arithmetic. The story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes concludes with this bit of data: “Those who ate were about five thousand men ….to say nothing of the women and children.” So I gotta ask: Who was doing the counting? I wonder who was counting on the day Jesus produced this miracle. Matthew tells us someone was counting the loaves and fishes: they started with a count of five and two … but then, after all had eaten, they ended up with “twelve baskets full.” And someone was counting the people … or at least someone was counting some of the people: “those who ate were about five thousand men … to say nothing of the women and children.” Whoever counted, only counted the men. They only counted the men because only men counted. So how many were there? How do we do the arithmetic? At this picnic there could roughly be two or three or four or five times as many people, if we count everyone really there. (I need a tangent here—the whole thing about ‘not enough food’—have times changed so much? For what mother leaves the house with her child without bringing along snacks: juice boxes, animal crackers, yogurt, Cheerio’s, string cheese????)

Biblical arithmetic is inscrutable. Jesus said if you own two coats, that’s one too many: give one away. On the other hand, if someone slaps you on one cheek, that’s one too few: invite them to slap you on the other cheek … and make it an even pair.
Biblical arithmetic is inscrutable. Jesus said we are to forgive those who sin against us, not seven times, but seventy times seven times … which is a lot … four hundred and ninety times … The point is that none of us, not even those who make an art of holding a grudge, can count that high.

The moral of the story: stop counting and start forgiving.

Jesus has an unusual way of counting. He said this: If you have 100 sheep and one goes missing, you should abandon those 99. Leave them defenseless against wolves and go chase down that one that was lost. That’s quite a gamble. So, here’s a riddle: What if those numbers are reversed? What if it’s the other way round? What if it is not the one who is lost, but the 99? Put it another way: If the 1% are okay and the 99% are in trouble, what should we do?

Ahhh…do you see a contemporary connection right now?? In 60 cities across the US (as I follow from my Middle Eastern armchair) right now there is a “99% Movement” in the Occupy _____ protests. These movements claim to represent the 99% of Americans and how the 1% of wealthy Americans have grown too rich while the vast majority have been left behind. As these protests grow into their third month, critics keep asking what it is all about? (This question came up the other day in a class of mine and a supper time conversation with students and teachers.)

From what I have gathered it is a little murky, but not really anti-capitalist. I think the source of the frustration and anger is income inequality. Let’s do the math they tell us in the news. I have read that the wealthiest 400 people in the US are now worth more than the bottom 150 million Americans. Hmmm…and three years after taxpayers bailed out the Wall Street gamblers whose recklessness stirred up the Great Recession, the average pay in the securities industry is over $360,000. Gulp! I don’t often quote Al Gore, but the once-inventor of the internet says we are seeing “a primal scream of democracy.”

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

Economist Paul Krugman wrote the other day, “If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.”

Krugman’s article helped me out a little: “The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.”

I read a story the other day about one of the satellite protests, the Occupy Boston protest. There were champions and critics of this protest, like in all cities, but it made me think about the history of Boston as well. Back in another November, the November of 1773 (wow—238 years ago, and no, I was not there) there was incredible frustration about income and tax inequality then too. People we routinely call ‘patriots’ today did some counting and counted the total chests of tea aboard three ships in Boston Harbor: 342 chests. They counted and deeply resented the taxes they were obligated to pay to the British Crown for their beloved tea. So they had a Tea Party. Heard of it?

After the Boston Tea Party, after the three ships had been boarded and after the chests had been pried open and the tea poured into the Harbor—all 342 chests, all 90,000 pounds of tea—Benjamin Franklin, the one and only, counted the cost. No fan of such wanton waste of good tea, Franklin urged the colonists to pay back the cost of the destroyed property (which, at two shillings per pound, came to £9,000, or, in today’s numbers: £888 thousand). I was just in London, so let me do the math for you. More than a million dollars. A tidy sum. But counting is a tricky business … as we know, the counting being in the eye of the beholder.

Like the Occupy Movement, the Boston Tea Party had its many detractors: those who condemned it as the “ill-conceived act of a lawless mob.” And it had its defenders: those who, like John Adams, found it “dignified, majestic and sublime.” The Boston Tea Party was, and Occupy is, fundamentally about money and fairness.

Both movements sprang from a similar conviction: that a small percent of those in charge are playing by a different set of rules than everyone else.

The Boston Tea Party involved trespassing on private property and the temporary occupation of ships belonging to the East India Company … while Occupy involves the occupation of public spaces.

Unlike Occupy, The Boston Tea Party, centered on and depended on the intentional, calculated destruction of property.

Like the Occupy Movement, the Boston Tea Partiers were comprised of more than its serious organizers and activists … there were other elements along for the ride: common thieves, smugglers, hooligans, drunkards, and provocateurs … all of whom attracted the attention of detractors and gave to the committed activists a bad name.
If Biblical arithmetic is inscrutable, it is not alone in that. One of the most inscrutable statistics about Occupy is this: half of the top 1% of earners in this country don’t count themselves in the top 1% … according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

Whether you are counted, and how much you count for, very much depends on who is doing the counting.

What about your arithmetic? How do you count?

The Joy of Pie

2011-11-25T23:46:00.000-08:00

The other day during one of our advisor/advisee lunches, my advisee Mu’umen smiled at me and said, “You know, Mr. John, of all the things I like about you, I think it is how much you enjoy food that is my favorite thing about you.”

The boy knows me well!

The occasion for the comment was a quasi-Thanksgiving meal on Tuesday, on the last “sit-down” meal of this term before exams swooped in and everyone would eat for a week in what we call “walk-through” meals. The chef and dining hall staff approximated a Thanksgiving meal for the students and advisors, and my advisees gamely tried things like stuffing and sweet potatoes. I love my advisees anyway—we six simply enjoy being together—and we love to talk about food, share food, laugh over food. (Other advisor/advisee groups are not as lucky and I heard some grumpiness about “Why do we have to have this stupid American food?” and “Who said we wanted to have an American Thanksgiving meal” and “That orange stuff is awful!” and also “Who would actually want to eat turkey????”)

So of course in Thanksgiving week, if you are far from your real home, a wistfulness creeps in. I have only been home for Thanksgiving once in the five years of this Jordan project, so it puts me in mind of things Cincinnati and New York. And, well food. And when I think of Thanksgiving, in the top 5 food things I think about, I think about pie.

Pie has been on my mind this week in a wonderful way. (Is it ever that far from one’s mind??) On Wednesday night this week, I invited over dear friends Reem and Julianne for mushroom soup and other things fresh from the London trip (like cheeses…yum). Reem knows me well—she eagerly offered to bring a pie for dessert. Oh, Reem—we need to have dinner more often! As always, the mood was light and fun and deep and important when we three get together and break it all down. But then came dessert. Reem made that pie. And it was a beauty. She made a peach pie (how did she know?? One of my Top 10 Favorites!! Oh, time for a little tangent: do you know the story of the joke my mother used to tell about my father and pie? When she did a “This Is Your Life” party for my dad, she had all these quiz questions about Kenny Leistler, and one question was…” ‘Ken Leistler only likes two kinds of pie…what are they??’ The answer: “hot and cold”! Well, our family friend Edna, who turned 94 this fall, always forgot that answer, and we would tease her going over to this veteran pie-baker’s house for dinner, “You know Edna, our father only likes two kinds of pie…I hope you made one of them!” Edna would dither and sputter and flutter and flither (a new word as of this moment) hoping she had guessed right, and then we would slay her with the monumental answer of “hot and cold!” Oh, see how these pies give my mind a flight of fancy!! Back to Reem and her peach pie…) and it was a beaut. Oh, I think I already said that. Well, she had made a flaky crust, and you know how a good flaky crust just takes those flecks of butter and just enough sugar…oh another strange allusion—do you remember the 30 Rock episode where Tracy Morgan’s character loved the cornbread so much he wanted to go out and marry it…well, this peach pie was a beaut.

Maybe I like pie so much because of all the gastronomic things I like to make, I don’t attempt pie much and so I appreciate it. Maybe I like pie so much because my mother was an intrepid pie-maker. She eschewed cakes for the most part and concentrated her efforts on supremely great pies. Meringue pies stunning! Berry pies, and, yes, she made a ribbon-worthy peach pie. Maybe I like pie so much because it takes time and commitment and I love things that require investment and labor and then have all the simple wonders of butter and sugar and…okay blog-writing is not supposed to be so mouth-watering.

So Thanksgiving morning (a work day for us) I get a call from my friend Randa—she has an apple pie for me! She knew Thanksgivings were hard for the Americans away from home, so she wanted me to feel some of the love and care of home…Randa—well, pie can do that, can’t it?!

Reem had tendered an invitation to her family’s home in Amman for Thanksgiving dinner, and even though I would sadly miss the faculty pot-luck Thanksgiving meal, being with a real family on that day beats almost anything. Reem’s mother and father have lived in Georgia, in the United States, for a long time, and just this fall moved back for awhile to Jordan to be with Reem’s grandmother, her sweet and feisty 90-year old Tateh. So Reem’s mother and father know of Thanksgivings.

Julianne and I come over to Reem’s family’s house, and the mother is putting the finishing touches on a splendid meal. She has a schedule on the refrigerator of when to get everything done—ahhh…a woman after my own heart—and has it all mapped out. Soon the guests arrive—Reem’s aunts and family friends for decades spill into the apartment. The dishes spill out of the kitchen, the two kinds of stuffing, an American-style and an Arab-style stuffing, broccoli salad, beets, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, and a beautiful turkey. We gather round and hold hands, and Reem’s father offers a stirring prayer. He thanks God for our blessings and abundance and gratitude for flourishing lives. While I know really well only two other people in the room—Reem and Julianne—I am surrounded by a loving family and devoted friends and a sense of sincere thanks. It may not be my blood family, but in this moment of food and thanks, it fills the void. This is a family that has had to be peripatetic: they had to leave Palestine in 1948 and then they left Lebanon and many have left Jordan to America. But through it all, these ties of family and friends have obviously sustained them. In Cincinnati, at almost the exact same time, my large extended family was eating at Uncle Jack and Aunt Joy’s house (now she is a Thanksgiving cook of your dreams!) reveling in the same ties of family and friends, in awe too at the abundance and blessings.

I did good work at Reem’s mother’s house. I had thirds. And then came dessert. There was chocolate mousse cake and a pumpkin cheesecake and Arab sweets and a pumpkin pie. You know, Libby’s canned pumpkin really does fit the bill well…it wasn’t quite the American pumpkin pie, but maybe that’s just all right. I can still think about and long for that ideal pumpkin pie.

At the dinner I discovered all kinds of ties to my own peripatetic journey. One aunt had lived in Chicago, and I told her about when I lived there as a college junior, and I would take the bus right by her church, and we talked about the North shore of Chicago. Another friend lives in Charlotte, North Carolina part-time, and her church at one time met in the school where I taught in Charlotte; we talked about the explosion of activity and homes on the south side of Charlotte. Reem’s mother and I looked at her hymnal collection, and right there was the same hymnal that my family had used in my childhood in our church.

Another family friend wanted to ask me about the tradition of the US President pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving time. She wondered if it went back to the beginning of our history. I don’t know when it started, but I guess it is much more modern, perhaps the 1930s or 1940s and certainly just a photo op really, but she was fascinated by the ceremony and the official pardon for the National Thanksgiving Turkey. I told her about the great episode of “The West Wing” that also goes over this strange tradition and the lighthearted jesting that must ensue as the President says something like, “Our guest of honor looks a little nervous. Nobody’s told him yet he’s getting a pardon.”

It was a delightful Thanksgiving. I have pie in the fridge and pie on my mind…which reminds me that the title of this blog could go another way as well. The Joy of Pie, could also be understood, by math-o-philes, as The Joy of Pi.

Speaking of math—a phrase rarely uttered by me—I heard a thrilling lesson the other day by a math teacher. On one of the professional development days that I plan, last Sunday, I asked a handful of teachers to give brief lessons so we can watch colleagues teach and enjoy their expertise. I asked Cassie to do a lesson, and she did a lesson on graphing that astounded me. She had graphs and asked us to make up stories about what the graphs might mean. Then she gave us some story scenarios and asked us to “graph” the stories. It was so fun. I loved math again!

Thanksgiving is obviously about thanks. Not just food, of course, but thanks. But as we expand that understanding of thanksgiving (expand? A Thanksgiving pun on expanding waistlines?!) it is also about pardons and therefore forgiveness. And maybe as we make our way out of our food comas, we can go from the pie to the thanksgiving to the pardon to the forgiveness and therein lies the greatest of all gifts…hope. As we remind ourselves of our blessings, think purposefully about forgiveness, there we find the hope to sustain us. An old theologian once wrote, “Hope is fueled by the presence of God…it is also fueled by the future of God in our lives.” We can join in the psalmist who sang, “I shall yet praise Him and thank Him.”

You know, math got a little short shrift in this blog entry. I think I will come back in a day or two and offer some musings on math. I’m serious! I even have the title already: “Inscrutable Arithmetic.”

Time to turn on the Christmas music, and have a pie break.

Postcard from London

2011-11-19T00:19:00.001-08:00

It has been thirty years since I first travelled abroad—and the first city the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir landed in was London on that 1981 tour. London has always been a special city for me (have I revealed that in my youth I even subscribed to a British magazine about the royal family called Majesty???) and I sat and down and counted. I think I had been to London 13 or 14 times. Although, I haven’t been there much in the 21st century.

Anyway, the Eid break in the school calendar came up, and I decided to go to London. In the last couple of years I have gone back to the USA for this break (By the way, to refresh your memories, this Eid break is two moons since the last Eid celebration which marks the end of Ramadan. This Eid marks when many pilgrims will make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. If you don’t go to Mecca, well, Muslim families rejoice and celebrate and eat a lot of lamb.) but I decided to go to London when one of our dearest students from last year planned to attend a university in London.

Well, his college plans changed, but I still liked the idea of going to London. I hadn’t been there in such a long time, and for many of those times I went I led group tours and I got in a bit of a rut of seeing the same things. I also called up Christy, the education genius/guru friend of mine in New York and floated the idea of meeting in London for a fall holiday.

She was in!

Now came the real worry—how would Christy and I meet up in London??? In the 17 years I have known Christy, while she is a genius about education and pedagogy, well, her genius stops short of being a whiz with plans and meeting and times. I could fill many a blog entry about the misfires over plans and where and when to meet (and not just say 8 hours away, just when we are in a museum and we plan to meet at the end—bathroom stops anywhere practically fill me with dread…will I ever find her again even though we had a plan. See here is the difficulty: we were coming from different continents into different airports. Christy—(oh, how can I put this gently???) is not good with maps or times or meeting points. They all run together and fortunately, the angels have conspired to nudge her along in life so that she stays out of harm’s way. Where shall we meet? I was to arrive at midnight and she would arrive the following morning about 10:00 a.m. Hmmmm….have you heard the story about when we both flew into Amman at the same time but on different airlines? The plan seemed so simple—I said to her, just wait for me at baggage claim and we will go back to school together! Such a simple plan…oh, but as the sage warned us, “the best laid plans…” She found a ride back to school and left me waiting at the airport for an hour or more until I guessed she must not have followed the simple plan. So how shall we handle this? I needed a plan. Yes, but a plan with extra plans. I needed a Plan A, a Plan B and a Plan C.

Before I figured out the plan, I also needed to tackle the problem of lodging. London is expensive! Since many of my trips to London over the years have been group tours, I don’t really know how much a good, clean, well-located budget hotel costs. Let me give you a hint: anything under $200 a night is subject to the kind of reviews on-line that run the gamut from, “If you don’t mind peeling paint, cigarette burns everywhere and mold, then this is the place for you!” Another review went, “I believe the breakfast served us at this place is historical. I am sure the bread is left from sea rations from WWII.” Or the many reviews that went something like, “This is the worst place I have stayed in my life.” So…how to find a budget hotel…I finally decided that we didn’t need central London. We had decided to come to London to visit each other too, and so a longer subway ride (the Tube, you know, as they call it) didn’t matter. So I found a guest house in the suburb of Brentford, a suburb in Zone 4. (Central London, of course, is in Zone 1). But the reviews were decent and the price was about $75 a person…far superior than all those other highway robbers. Okay, now to the plan…

Plan A—where shall we meet? How can Christy find me? I decided that we would meet at Victoria Rail Station…okay, but where? I hadn’t been in that rail station in over a decade, but, hmmm…they must have a Track 1! Yes, that is Plan A. Let’s say noon!! Christy will come off her plane about 10:00…oh, and did I say that there would not be cell phones available to us…she knew hers would not work…oh, see, you thought it should have been simple to just call each other. I am one scary step ahead of you! Okay, she would get through customs, get on the Tube at Heathrow, transfer—good heavens, would she remember to transfer???? Then we would meet in Victoria Station at Track 1 at noon. She was not to walk around, go shopping…nothing…if there were any complications…we would meet in front of Buckingham Palace at 2:30, and then Plan C, the scariest one of all, we would proceed to the guest house in Brentford and meet there.

When Julianne took me to the airport in Amman to catch my flight to London she said gravely, “Does Christy understand that the very future of your relationship hangs in the balance here??” I felt like a Secretary of State going into a high level meeting, “I think she does,” I responded.

She arrived at 12:02 at Track 1 looking like the intrepid plan-follower that she was at that moment.

Oh, yes, the blog entry isn’t just meeting at Track 1! I almost forgot…
It was a great holiday in London.We had a glorious visit and holiday! Christy was there for three days, and then I was on my own for three days in London. What a great city. I saw 5 plays, 1 concert, 1 British film, visited a dozen museums (they are FREE people!!!) ate food from around the world, kicked autumn leaves as we walked down our suburban street in Brentford. (By the way, if any of you go to London, I recommend the Hazel Wood Guest House highly—cleanest place I have ever seen, a hearty breakfast, and interesting guests…in fact…at our first breakfast, as Christy canvassed the table, we discovered that there were guests at the table from New York, England, India, China, South Africa, Ireland, and I was the Middle Eastern representative. There were only 8 of us in this guest house (it was full) and look at the around-the-world dynamics.)

The weather report on-line had predicted rain every day, and so I carried my umbrella with me, but after the third day, I left it. It never rained…well, maybe four drops. I walked into bookstores, I lingered in tea shops, I ate many, many good bacon sandwiches, and I just walked. While I used the Tube considerably, I hopped on the double-decker busses, but I walked. London is a walking town.

Oh, and the plays. Christy and I saw “The Pitmen Painters,” a British play in New York I saw last year about coal miners who had a little fling with art and the art world in the 1930s, and then I saw Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in “Driving Miss Daisy,” and I saw “Inadmissable Evidence,” a bitter 1960 play by the angry John Osbourne, a play about Wallis Simpson, a play called “The Kitchen” at the estimable National Theater, and Hamlet with Michael Sheen…wait, that makes six! I forgot—one glorious day was a double-play day!

I went to several museums I had never gotten to before—the unbelievably beautiful Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Cortauld Gallery, and the Tate Modern. I flitted in and out of the British Museum several times, the National Gallery several times, and just soaked in the vast amount of culture in London.
I could hardly have been happier!

London is really everything Amman is not: there is variety in food choices, diversity in people, art, theater, bookstores…lots of music and attention to history, clean streets, abundant maps on the streets and easy to understand signs (and signs, of course in English!) and some very good manners. I made a new friend, Marcey, an old friend of Christy’s who is in college in London. Marcey is also enamored of London. She can hardly imagine living anywhere else. After Christy left Marcey offered me a free dorm room in her college hall—how wonderfully nice—and we sighed over our mutual love of London.

So what doesn’t London have? Well, this week when we started school, and my first class came in, that wonderful 20th Century History class of Dima and Lubna and Mohammed and Moutasem and Jooho and Mounir and Hashem and Zain and Noor and Sumaya and Noor-Eddin and Hussein and Hanna and Divij, I just love these guys. They weren’t in London. I needed to come back and get to work as we deconstruct the 20th century.
My trips to London over the last 30 years have been with most everyone who has made it into my Travel Hall of Fame and also my Travel Hall of Shame. I thought of them as I traversed the city, readying itself for the 2012 Olympic Games. I loved thinking of Anne and Chuck and Tony and Sharon and Mary and my sister Elizabeth and students from all three of my previous schools. What a grand reunion with London, six marvelous days in an exciting, vibrant, fulfilling city!

Capacity to Love

2011-11-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

Since my last blog entry, an important milestone in the history of the world has passed. No, it wasn’t a Golden Girls marathon, or a chili festival, or a musical about my life. (Nothing about me actually!) In the last few days the world witnessed the birth of the 7 billionth person on our planet. I went and looked up and learned that since I was born, the world has literally doubled in population.

Of all the 7 billion people who are alive now, and the billions before us who have passed into the life beyond our profanus, there are two who really stand out to me: my parents, Kenneth and Mary Martha.

And in the next 24 hours a slightly less momentous event will pass in the history of the world—Kenneth and Mary Martha’s 50th wedding anniversary.

Over the years of blog writing you have picked up bits and pieces about how influential on me my parents have been. Right now is a perfect time to re-visit some of those thoughts and think about what they were doing 50 years ago right now.

Frankly, Kenny and Mare couldn’t have picked a better date for their wedding. Maybe they knew that their first-born would be a history-obsessed being, because they chose such a perfect, November 4th, for their wedding day…wait for it..wait, you don’t know? You can’t see how perfect it was that they chose November 4th? Ahh, maybe you weren’t invited on another November 4th, back in 1842 when resolute Abraham Lincoln married saucy Mary Todd. In my childhood I was obsessed with Abraham Lincoln, and I remember one year thanking my parents for having picked the Lincoln’s wedding day for their own wedding day.

Talk of this glorious November 4th wedding in 1961 was never far from us in my childhood. My mother loved her wedding photo albums and we looked at them frequently. There was a beautiful one, bound in red leather, of the black-and-white shots of the wedding. Then there was a more-expensive-looking album full of the color shots. And from time-to-time, my mother was known to take out the reel-to-reel tape recorder and play the recording of the actual wedding. My sister and I would sit right by my mother, and we heard the recording often enough that not only could we recite the vows, but we knew the exact intonation of that wonderful bride and groom. The bride sounded dreamy and the groom sounded no-nonsense—what a pair, what a combination!!

When I was in 5th grade I inaugurated a new way to celebrate my parent’s anniversary: I would cook them a multi-course meal. This was toward the beginning of my obsession with cooking, and I would get out my mother’s cookbooks and pore over the possibilities of courses. In the 4th grade I made a meal, like, you know a standard, bourgeois meal. But the following year, I planned far ahead, chose stuffed pork chops with an orange glaze as my main dish, and then looked for appetizers and courses and courses to make. I decided to invite my friend Kecia Yee home from school, and paid her $5 to be the waitress for all the courses.

At the end of this extravagant meal I wished them well, and wished them good luck in cleaning up, and went to watch an episode of Rhoda. I announced that none of the great cooks in the world cleaned up. Can you imagine what Kenny and Mare talked about as they cleaned up every pot and pan they owned from their multi-course anniversary meal? Oh, my. Eventually, I did learn to clean up after myself.

These days I like to watch the TV show Mad Men just to get an idea of what those days were like in the early 60s when my parents courted, got married, and started a family. My father even looks like Jon Hamm as Don Draper. But while the fashions and the mores are similar to 1961 Cincinnati, that is where the comparisons end. In terms of personalities, smoking, and drinking, Kenny and Mare are nothing (thank Heavens!) like the Drapers.

I enjoy thinking what my parents were like in terms of personality. I know them well. But of course much of our family story could be overshadowed by the MS that took hold in my mother. The MS limited us in some ways, and some people would think it would ravage the dreamy-ness of that 1961 Mary Martha. But no, the MS did not deter the resolute Ken, nor rob the dramatic, dreamy Mary Martha of their love and efforts at wedded bliss.

A couple years ago, in a blog entry, I wrote this about my father: Last summer I read an account of Abraham Lincoln’s rise to national prominence. A New York newspaper characterized the newly minted Republican Party Presidential Nominee: “As for Lincoln, he has all the marks of a mind that scans closely, canvasses thoroughly, concludes deliberately, and holds to such conclusions unflinchingly.” I read that, and thought—that’s my father! Those are the same traits as Ken Leistler. Grappling with my mother’s MS for decades imbued him with strength and human understanding rarely found in people. He has taught us that life-affirming humor and profound resilience will lighten despair and fortify one’s will.

And as for that dreamy-voiced, effervescent bride 50 years ago? Well, they didn’t make it to the 50-year mark here on earth. But they triumphed in nearly 45 years of marriage plus the courtship. Four years ago I wrote of the evening when my father called to relay the news that she had slipped away to Heaven: On that May evening when my father called to relay the news that my mother had passed away, I was on the way to one of my plays I had directed. There were scenes in this play from the myths that Ovid wrote in ancient Rome. My favorite was the last scene, wherein a man and wife begged the gods not to outlive their own capacity to love. In the weeks preceding the performance I had enjoyed this scene anyway, for it reminded me of the love between my parents. In the play, this man and wife stood hand in hand begging the gods not to allow them to outlive their own capacity to love. As I drove to school that night, it was such a natural thing to honor her life by watching this play of mine. She was the one who infused my life to enjoy adventure and excitement, instilled in me a love of imagination and wonder, and taught me that love was the mightiest bulwark. As I watched those two beg the gods, “let me not outlive my own capacity to love,” I knew that I had witnessed the best example I will ever know of a man and wife who never outgrew their own capacity to love.

For many years I would call my parents on November 4th, and ask my mother to remember what she was doing on that day. While her short-term memory became more like vapor, she had a vibrant memory of that day in 1961 when she married her “Special K.” I would ask what she had been doing that November day, who she was talking about, how the plans were going, what she worried about, who she was excited to see at the wedding. I could feel her smile and joy as she re-lived that day for me on the phone.

In a couple minutes I will call my father and ask him some of the same questions, marveling that half a century has passed since he wore that white dinner jacket, dark trousers, and brilliant smile at the end of the aisle. In a couple hours I will be jetting to London for a quick vacation, and who knows if I will get to call tomorrow. I have to relay my congratulations for this momentous event in world history.

In my Christmas letter of 2006, I reflected on the power of my mother in our family’s life and times: My mother’s life and death have been powerful teaching tools for our family. She showed us what deep, abiding faith in God looks like. And yet, she never exhibited a stony stoicism, nor did she cultivate an anger at God for what had happened to her. While some say anger might be appropriate, and certainly understandable, she showed us that we have to imagine other responses. Anger, vengeance, regret, remorse, these only foster a destructive cycle—like Indiana Jones, we may have to make it up as we go along, so in my mother’s opinion, we might as well choose joy. Mary Martha Griley Leistler always looked for something to give thanks for in the midst of what might be troubling and fearsome. She would remind us that we don’t always have a choice about what happens to us, but we always have a choice in our attitude. Refuse to complain. Insist on hope. Expect miracles. Seek peace.

They may not be as famous as the Lincolns; it may not be as earth shattering as the 7 billionth earthling, but what a pair that I have been blessed to know. There is a bulletin from a church service in Tarrytown back in 2004 that I keep in my Bible. The title of the sermon is “The Grip of a Loving God.” I keep it because of the title of that sermon. I look at my parents, the wondrous Mary Martha, the resolute Kenneth, and I think that my whole life has been shaped by that loving grip of my parents’ capacity to love.

What’s absurd???

2011-10-28T13:52:00.000-07:00

I remember when I read Tip O’Neill’s memoir, twenty-five years ago, his dictum the then-Speaker of the House emphasized throughout his book: “All politics is local.”

Oh, in the last week, as I have mused about politics local, regional, global, and back in my old neck of the woods, Tip had a good tip. “All politics is local.” You gotta understand the locals, hear their stories, see their point of view, and then you have a better idea of politics.

Like many of us, I watched the news about a month ago when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave what some consider a deliberately offensive speech describing the United Nations General Assembly as “the theater of the absurd.”

As I flipped the channel from an American news source, to a British news source, to an Arab news source, it was interesting to see who supported Netanyahu’s speech and who blasted him. From two of three news agencies it was clear that Israel has few friends at the UN, and that the world community seems very much united in its support for Palestinian rights.

As I have said time and again in these blog entries that touch on the political, I have no baggage toward either “side” in this debate—and before I came to Jordan, I spent little time wondering about the Israeli or the Palestinian “side.” But having been in the Arab world now for over four years, and reading and watching other news agencies, and listening to the locals, I have at least a more expanded view on the politics of Palestine.

I suppose the bitterest pill to swallow in this stalemate has been the Israeli penchant to build more settlements on Palestinian land, or as one colleague calls them, “illegal colonies.” These settlements keep coming, in spite of their violation of international law. And the sad fact that they are funded by US money.

Oh, let’s go back to Netanyahu’s speech (now that I am thinking about Tip O’Neill, Benjy kinda looks like the former Speaker of the House…anyway, I digress…and if you notice, it was not a sit-com digression…). As I watched the speech, I took in the theatricality of it all. Despite the difficulties facing Netanyahu at home—social upheaval and mass protests—and abroad, Prime Minister Netanyahu remains well-composed, speaking with the tones of an emperor. (Maybe I am thinking of emperors since I just finished teaching about the Roman Emperors…oooh, let’s see, which Roman emperor would he be like? Caesar Augustus? Nero? Titus? Marcus Aurelius? Caracalla? Romulus? Each one reflects a little differently on the nature of governor…)

Oh, yes the settlements. Shortly after announcing plans to construct 1000 new units on Palestinian land, the United States announced it was “disappointed.” And the Israeli anti-settlement organization “Peace Now” called it “the height of injustice.” Did you know there was an Israeli anti-settlement organization?

As we look at the situation, it becomes clearer to me that that the United States has done much to ensure that Israel’s violations of international law go unpunished; heck, worse, it largely funded these violations, and shielded Israel from any accountability. Another colleague once showed me a list she had compiled of words that the United States State Department had used when reacting to the build-up of these illegal settlements. The words and phrases used over the years include: “disappointment, disapproval, not constructive, not helpful, threat to the peace process, and obstacles to peace.”

And Tip O’Neill’s reminder rings in my ears as I hear the stories of colleagues whose families and friends have had more olive groves destroyed and homes demolished. That politics—it certainly is local. We rarely think about this aspect of it in the United States; we simply allow the politicians and lobbyists to bolster and repair the alliance with Israel. Do we think about the local politics of it all?

The Obama administration tried hard, albeit with no success, to get the Israeli government to accept a limited freeze on settlement building to enable direct talks to resume. But it is coming up to an election year and that quadrennial theater game soon goes into overdrive.

Sadly, in the wake of the Abbas Palestinian Authority bid for statehood, I read of a new push by US lawmakers to cut off aid to the Palestinians as punishment for their efforts to become a separate state…oh my, the O’Neill Corollary to Politics is singing a grand aria about the Mitt Romney declaration that “Our friends should never fear that we will not stand by them in an hour of need.”

Theater of the absurd, indeed.

But another note, we hosted a “theatrical” event at KA this week. There was a delegation of about 30 dignitaries on campus, fresh from the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea last weekend. My advisees and I hosted two guests from the government of Rwanda at our lunch table and they were so interesting to talk with. After that, the school went to the auditorium to hear General Tommy Franks speak about leadership. Afterwards, students peppered him with questions, some of them critical of American involvement in the region, and he answered with care and grace. It was another moment of politics being local, both from the Middle Eastern side, and from understanding the American side that every action and inaction in America has consequences with the electorate.

What a great week to think about politics, on the small scale, and the large scale.

As for all the theaters of the absurd, I like Tommy Franks’ question and exhortation to our students, “What are you going to do about these problems???”

Third time the charm???

2011-10-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

I have signed up for Introductory Arabic class…again. I suppose the single biggest regret of this whole I-live-and-teach-in-the-Middle-East thing is that I didn’t become fluent in Arabic. Oh, languages…I used to love learning languages! I remember being in French I class with Mr. Hall at Gamble Jr. High—I loved that class! I was the best! And then in college I started in on German (after a brief foray with Spanish and Latin) and went to Salzburg, Austria to perfect my German. I even convinced a tourist one time that I was a native. What happened to my muse for languages???

If you are a long-time reader of the blog, you will remember the fanfare and excitement with which we all flocked to Arabic class four years ago. Khalil taught us, and our class of 18 met at the end of the week for two hours. That timing might explain why halfway through the year the class had dwindled to about a half dozen. I attended class pretty faithfully, hey, I even made a stack of flash cards. I learned vocabulary—but then something happened when we went to make sentences. The sentences didn’t really form very well. By the end of the year, I attended the class with two other friends—yes, it turned out our class of 18 had reduced to three—and I even cheated occasionally off of their papers. Oh, no I just announced via the internet that I have cheated. Well, I wanted to save face in Introductory Arabic class.

In the fall of 2008, I decided I should go back to Introductory Arabic again. Khalil had a fresh batch of ex-pat recruits, and this time I was going to practice more. I think I lasted three weeks.

Since then, I have learned that one can get by in Jordan without an extensive understanding of Arabic. But still, that isn’t how I wanted it to be. I wanted to be one of the “sensitive” ex-pats, one who enjoyed the knowledge of the different Arabic dialects, and could converse with everyone from the souk bazaars to the boardrooms. I did have a great line every time a parent asked me about the ex-pats learning of Arabic when I served on panel discussions. My ready line is, “I know the three most important words in Arabic: inshallah, wallah, yallah.” Cue the laughter. [Oh, I should translate for those of you who did not attend even rudimentary Arabic classes—those three words mean, “if God wills it,” “I swear to God,” and “Yeah, come on, let’s go!”] Every time I am on the panel they beam and laugh.

I have even bought four books over the last three years about learning Arabic. I am not sure if I have cracked those books very often (“I am not sure,” he asks????? I think we all know the answer to that one!) but they look good on the bookshelf. They make me look earnest. Well, I suppose they also make me look stupid since my level of Arabic is still at the advanced introductory stage!

Last year KA hired a new teacher to help the ex-pats in their Arabic immersion. I heard she made you work. I heard she gave homework and quizzes. I heard she was feared—and good. If you saw her, you would wonder where the “feared” part came from. She is a beautiful, 24-year old who studied in the UK. At the end of last year the adult students did a play in Arabic for the school…wait a minute—no one said there would be a play!! And applause!!!

I heard that our headmaster John planned to sign up for Introductory Arabic class this year. I decided I should probably sign up for it…again. Maybe this time…cue the Liza Minnelli soundtrack please.

Okay, so I looked at the lists of who had signed up for the two blocks of Introductory Arabic class, and I decided to go with the group I thought would be the most fun. So I am back in the game! The first class we all got to pick our Arabic names and practice with the “Isme John,” part—guess what that means…”My name is John…” Yes, I am back at the beginning.

I picked Yahya as my Arabic name. In part because that is the name for Christian John in Arabic (when you go to Mukawir, the site where John the Baptist had that unfortunate tangle with Salome, one sees that name on the signs) and I chose Yahya in part because I love the sound of it. Every time I say it, my shoulders go up with a little bit of whimsy. So Lina, the lovely teacher, told us the meanings of many, many Arabic names, and the adults start choosing names because they want to be “Gift from God,” or “Lovelier than All,” or “Tough Guy,” et cetera. So our class is comprised of the following in their Arabic guises: Yasmin, Hadi, Danya, Zein (whoops! She changed her name to Fareeda because she liked the meaning of it more.) and Sara, Qusai, Ali, Bader, Tarik, Khalil, and Heba…We enjoyed the practice and had fun.

We worked on the guttural sounds that just don’t have a match in English, we learned new words and she put each of us in the “hotseat” for about sixty seconds as she plied us with questions. Lina is an excellent teacher and we are doing well. I will speak for myself—I am doing well. Of course, it is my third time in Introductory Arabic class. So I should be a star.

Last week I learned that one of our classmates jumped ship to the other class because that student felt the other adults were having too much fun and weren’t serious enough. Well, I won’t comment because I do not use the blog to vent, but SERIOUSLY!! We can be a little rowdy and learn too. I suppose he or she will study so hard and be in intermediate Arabic class soon. He or she might not even repeat Introductory Arabic class.

So last week we learned words associated with weather, so everywhere we went we practiced our words for ‘sunny’ and ‘chilly’ and ‘hot’ and ‘gorgeous.’ Oh, as long as we are reciting these words, I am at the top of the class. We haven’t done much writing yet. I am interested to see how Lina does with the teaching of Arabic writing. It’s hard. It takes me back to third grade when there were all these comments and warnings about Johnny’s messy penmanship. Let’s see how this goes…

One day we practiced the, “How old are you?” question and learned numbers associated with age. Well, that is a hoot. The oldest in class is 61 and the youngest is 23. When it came time for me to disclose my age, I looked over at the young, newbie John and said, “I am John Wolf times two.” But it was funny when someone looked at another young ‘un and said, “I have pants older than you!” We have a 54-year old, a 44-year old, a 34-old year, and a 24-year old in class. So we had to muse about the march of time.

Anyway, so far class has been mumtaz (excellent!) and I am getting the gender classifications correct and I am even about to go look for those flashcards.

I mentioned last time that this is a difficult month—it is college-recommendation-writing-hell, or as I have called it for the last 15 years—October. I have stayed on my schedule. I have written 17 college recs in the last two weeks, and I have 3.25 left to write this week. (After I finish this blogisode I should go and finish that last .25 about the wonderful child—what is her name??!! Just kidding!) Then I have to write advisor reports about my five advisees…but the German train is arriving and departing on time so far.

The other day Fareeda asked for a quiz tomorrow—Fareeda!!! Oh, by the way, the other day I walked into Introductory Arabic class one minute late, so I was the first on the “hotseat.” I missed a response to “Good night” (Hey! It has like 6 syllables to it and doesn’t follow the model for “Good morning”!!) so Lina, asked me, “Yayha, did you study?” Oh, see, there is where the feared part comes in. I looked at her and answered honestly, “La!” (Which do you think it was? I was honest, No!). So we have a quiz tomorrow and I don’t want Qusai or Fareeda to beat me. However, the young wunderkind, Khalil, will probably beat me…but maybe if I go study…okay. I will report back later how I do! Here we go again: the third time may be the charm for Introductory Arabic class!

Birthday Leftovers

2011-10-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

Ten days ago it was my birthday. I think the biggest change since the birthday is when I go to the gym and sit on the exercise bike and have to plug in my age, it has to go one number up.

Ten days ago it was my birthday.

I’m not sure if that is especially blog-worthy, but as I looked back over the last four years of blogs, I do mention it every year. Gosh all-mighty! In 2009 I wrote, “Oh, I am glad October 4th and 5th are over. My birthday is October 4th, and frankly, I’m just glad the pressure that something might happen is over, and then the questions about my birthday are over. It was just a non-event, that’s all.

Don’t worry about me—I am not some sad clown crying in the corner acting any more needy than usual. It’s just an interesting thing, the birthday thing, to figure out and reflect upon, but rest assured I am not one of those middle-aged (gasp! when did that happen??) Bah- humbug-haters-of-birthdays. Actually I love the whole birthday thing. It’s just that this year, it was a non-starter.”

In 2007, I was brand-new and dear Elizabeth Berger organized an outing on October 4th—and that was at the time at KA when outings were few. No faculty had cars yet and we had to rely on shuttle buses or taxis to take us anywhere. I remember the excitement of going out then (and no one knew where to go either!) like it was when you were 14 and you went out without your parents…exciting indeed. In 2008 my dad came to Jordan and was here over my birthday. You know the best thing about that birthday was exactly what I don’t like about my birthday anymore—when my dad was here there was no wondering if I would go out. How funny is it that—in the absence of a spouse or partner—you wonder if anyone will ask you out. Any other day of the year, it is no bother at all.

In 2010 old friend Gary and new friends took me out—and Gary is wise enough not to wait to make plans. As another bachelor with the “plus one” status perpetually added to invitations, he understands you just want to know you have a plan.

So as the birthday rolls around, one wonders—who might want to take me out??? It’s okay to laugh at that sentence—I just did after I typed it. It reminds me, in a strange way of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry is appalled that Keith Hernandez would ask for help moving. Jerry reflects, well, comes close to reflection, I don’t know if any of those characters actually reflected much. Jerry thinks about what level, what class, of friendship you must be to ask someone to help you move. Those aren’t the regular friends—no!! It is that special bond of friendship. That’s the birthday thing. One might have many friends, but only a certain level, or class, of friendship is the take-you-out-on-your-birthday, or organize-the-birthday-dinner mate.

So how was birthday #5 in Jordan? Well, my students were tickled at the whole thing. Now remember, students get excited in part because they hope you won’t have class on your birthday, and so everybody wins! I don’t do that. But some of my advisees had told many people so as I walked around all day, many students wished me a happy birthday. At lunch my advisees tried to figure out a way to skip sports practice that afternoon and take me out. I advised them that we would all get in trouble! But they wanted to go out. The only problem is that I had choir practice at 7:00 and needed to be back before that, and since many of my advisees are day students, 8:00 was too late to wait to go out. So that was the end of that.

Mohammad Attar, a student from last year’s AP Art History class, delivered a gorgeous cake, similar to the cake he delivered last year from Sugar Daddy’s in Amman, and, bam, that 20th century class got to have a party for 15 minutes.

As the day progressed, the students were so enthused about a birthday and wished me well. The mail didn’t help out—no mail came, but that is hardly a surprise. So at 7:00 I went to choir practice (have I mentioned this in a blog yet? I don’t think so—I will have to chronicle the progress of the choir in a blog soon) and then went back to my apartment and enjoyed some birthday calls. At 10:30 Tristan came by with flowers and a pecan pie.

Here is where the bachelor status is most noticeable—there just isn’t anyone designated as the One to take you out. Again, here is what I wrote in 2009: “it wasn’t a day for pining, just wanting a little more of something…and then the following day when some people asked, “So, what did you do??” and I tried to change the subject to a less vulnerable topic. So October 4th and 5th ended. Regular life could resume without the pressure and potential letdown of a New Year’s Eve like day.”

This year on October 5th a number of colleagues asked what I had done the night before. I looked non-chalant and replied, “Nothing really. I talked on the phone with some family and friends.” They looked almost upset—see that’s what you want to avoid—and said, “I just assumed so-and-so was taking you out. I’m so sorry.”

That’s exactly what you don’t want at a birthday!! “I’m so sorry.”

So anyway, the days since the birthday are better because that strange pressure is off, and the person you think will ask you out, well, it just recedes into the background. And frankly, I have had some nice offers. Last Friday, the advisees got it together and we went out for a Friday lunch. Friday lunch in Jordan is not some quick affair—this is an all-afternoon event of eating and relaxing and talking and visiting. My advisees planned for us to go to Ren Chai, my favorite Chinese place in Amman. This is a swell-egant place and I had been there just once before but very excited to go again. We arrived at 2:30 (lunch is late on Fridays here!) and didn’t leave until almost 6 PM! The guys were so excited for the lunch and we had the best time. They even came with birthday presents!

Then on Monday this week Randa’s advisory group said they wanted to take me out! Maybe to rival my advisory group! So Randa organized the group and we went in between soccer practice and evening study hall. I had only taught one of the group, Hussein, but it was a delightful chance to go to Haret Jdoudna, my favorite place in Madaba, and have a nice 90-minute meal with a group of tip-top students.

Thursday—about 9 days after the actual birthday—some cards arrived by mail. My family and the Ungers in Dobbs Ferry never forget, but of course, the mail coming here is as lazy as it wants to be. In an age when everything can happen by email, it is invigorating to get a real card in the mail. My sister’s card is about how much fun I am to be a kid with, and the Ungers’ cards are always about the ideal happy life. How kind they are to remember, and how much richer they have made my life since I met them in 2000.

So today was kind of the closing of Birthday 2011—Lubna and I planned to go to the Dead Sea. Lubna is the friend at KA who is a secretary for the Office of Student Life and I am exactly two weeks older than she. Last year I realized the best gift I could give her was a treat for a massage at the Dead Sea. So we made plans to go again this year. Lubna also wanted to treat me to lunch at the Dead Sea and surprised me with a shirt and tie as well. So here we are—two late 40-somethings—giggling over an Italian lunch overlooking the Dead Sea enjoying talking about family, and surprises, and struggles, and joys and pains. When the check came Lubna quickly snatched it and smiled broadly. After that we walked around the lovely pool area over to the Spa for our birthday massages. This was the way to spend a birthday!

Going to the Dead Sea is always therapeutic. The drive down is stunning, and now with 51 months of trips to the Dead Sea under my belt, a great chance to look in the rearview mirror of the KA experience and think about what has transpired here. You drive down the windy road that takes you from Mt. Nebo, where they say Moses died, and you head down past the multi-colored shades of brown to the oooo-la-la resorts, and finally let go of the angst of the real world. As I ascend the mountain at the end of the day, I am a rested soul.

So back from the Dead Sea, back from the birthday angst of 2011, and I decide my last treat for this year’s birthday is to watch the final episode of Friday Night Lights. On my schedule I planned to write a college recommendation, but that can wait until Saturday morning. I need to enjoy that mellow feeling and watch the last episode ever of one of my favorite TV shows of all time.

Sometime if someone learns I like that show they are incredulous…I hear, “But it’s about football?!” I guess these aren’t the people who would know you enough to ask you out for your birthday! Gary gave me the book Friday Night Lights around 1999, and I have been in love with the tale of the small Texas town ever since. It is about making your way through high school, struggling to define who you are and what is truth, it is about relationships and passions, and it is about aiming high and maintaining integrity. Actually watching the final show, watching the team and the characters I have loved—it was the perfect way to close out the birthday chapter for this year.

There is one piece of Mohammad Attar’s rich dark chocolate cake left in the refrigerator…um, yeah, I think it is time to finish the birthday leftovers!

On a final note, October is a terrible month to try and maintain blogisodes current. October is the month when we write student comments, but I also have to proofread about 500 other comments, and it is college recommendation season. I have about 30 recs to write. I have started though! I have done three of them, aim for three more tomorrow, but…that is why there aren’t many blogisodes these days. Stay tuned, I will return.

A Panel Of Experts

2011-10-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday we had our first of five Sundays in the school year that we call “short days.” From the get-go you need to know that these are not short days for the faculty, but short days for the students. Classes begin at 12:30 and are shortened classes a bit and the class part of the day ends, oh I guess at 4:30 before they go off to co-curriculars. For the faculty we spend the morning in professional development activities. We joke and call these “Long Short Days,” or “Short Days for the Students,” or “Anything But Short Days.” One of the new facets of my new responsibility at KA is that I am in charge of planning and executing these professional development days. For this first one Mary Tadros, long-time consultant at the school, was scheduled to conduct a workshop on planning inter-disciplinary units. I also made sure to have a component on educational technology workshops. But my favorite part of the day was a panel I created of six teachers so that they could just talk to the faculty and start our day off.

I love teachers. For all of you, this should come as no surprise. I love what teachers do and I love when teachers wax eloquently about our profession.

I wanted a panel of three veteran teachers to share insights they had gleaned in their respective long careers about the secrets to success in education. I paired three veteran teachers with our three youngest teachers, fresh from college, at the beginning of what may be a teacher career. While the newbies did not have experience prior to the month of September, 2011, I wanted to showcase their expertise as college students and ask them to share what we need to make sure we do for our students in preparation for the KA students’ college experience. They are a resource as well!

In light of the whole morning—a little over three hours—it was only 30 minutes, but still my favorite part, just to get train a spotlight on these six teachers and celebrate their insights and expertise.

The first to speak was Majid, the oldest of our faculty at KA. He has been teaching for 45 years and always has a twinkle in his eye. He spoke in Arabic—he apologized to me for that, and I had no problem with him speaking in the most comfortable language for him—and he began by saying, “I love the work we do.” As Lilli translated for him, he clearly enjoyed reminding everyone that the secret to his success is that he treats them “as grandchildren.” He spoke about his classroom that he wants “to give each student an opportunity to speak and to feel important.” In terms of his classroom management he said, “good eye contact is important. That eye contact makes them feel respected. My job is to engage them and to be firm with them.” As he spoke for his several minutes, he ended with another reminder, “Never forget that we can always learn from our students. I am always learning from them.”

The next in the panel is another veteran from the first year of the school as well, the venerable Tessa. Before coming to KA she had run a girl’s school in Capetown, South Africa, and is, like Majid, an iconic presence on our campus. Tessa began by turning to her right towards the three young teachers and said, “I envy you new teachers. I envy you the chance to do all of this. Every minute is new.” As she reflected on her 40-plus year career in education she said, “It has been more treasurable than I ever expected.” She said her advice was not all that earth-shattering, but simple: “Respect other people and you will be respected. Make sure you get to know the children—know them properly. Know what they knew yesterday. You have the chance to build them, to build fine young people. Tessa is famous for taking faculty on side trips to archaeological digs and anywhere someone needs to go to learn, and reading all the time. But she admonished us, “Make sure what you teach them is relevant for them in Jordan. Relate Huck Finn to them as Jordanians.” She ended her comments with an interesting, “And if you want to see the most spectacular teaching of all, go watch the good teachers of 3 year olds. They will teach you everything you need to know.”

Our last speaker of the veteran side is a new teacher to KA named Mark. I interviewed him last February in Boston and was astonished by his excitement for teaching and what all he had done in his decades of work. Mark began saying, “I am supposed to offer you some pearls of wisdom about teaching. Well, as a science teacher, let me remind you that pearls evolve. Teachers evolve. Pearls never quite get finished entirely. Teachers never quite get finished evolving entirely. Both keep adding and removing layers.” Mark continued to refine his pearl metaphor about how he was as a new teacher and that that “inside pearl” has changed dramatically. I especially liked when he compared pearls and teachers again saying, “And just like the pearl, I didn’t do it all myself.” From there he exhorted his new colleagues that “we must enrich each other. We are all our own pearls and I can learn so much from all the other different pearls.”

Each of the three earned applause—no surprise at all—for the respect they have cultivated as well as the excellent insights about education. It was wonderful when we moved from the three seasoned teachers to the three new ones. They more than held their own. They commanded the panel and spoke with ease and conviction about what they learned about college, about the demands of college, and how one can successfully manage the college years.

John from Yale spoke first. He spoke emphatically: “More than anything, students must be able to write well in college. Besides that important task, students need to know how to deal with failure.” He stated his two choices, explained the importance of them, and spoke excellently about how we rarely allow students to fail in prep school and help them bounce back from failure. He spoke about writing, and not just in the Humanities, but lab reports, and in every class he took at Yale. Thanks, John—I probably couldn’t have picked two more important topics for us to ponder.

But Melissa from Davidson added to John’s list explaining that college-level expectations are far beyond most high school expectations. “I would say the most important things students can learn to do is #1 learn how to think independently and then #2 learn to advocate for themselves and #3 learn how to question things.” Melissa explained beautifully how these things are at the core of the college experience and asked us to consider how we are preparing our high schoolers for such expectations.

Lastly, Katie from Brown smiled and said, “I learned the hard way that time management issues are crucial” and she was shocked in college how “hard and fast the rules are.” She asserted that we must help coach them to work on time management skills and help them set clear expectations for themselves. She concluded that she also hopes students know that the close rapport they may wish with professors in college comes from their own assertions and wishes.

Frankly, I could listen to teachers all day—not the whining part one occasionally hears in a faculty lounge, which I usually just tune out if it is the drab, dreary kind. But I love to listen to what teachers hope for their students, what life-giving force the classroom gives to teachers, and how they would rather not be anywhere else on earth.

Excellent panel. A Wonderful 30 minutes.

So I am an expert after having been on this job for six weeks?

Some things have gone well, but oh, I have learned a number of things that I hope will smooth the future roads for me. I have learned that most questions from faculty are not “innocent,” i.e. when I am asked an opinion, it may be more about soliciting my support for an agenda or a “side” in a battle. And be careful of those opinions and sides. I am not just another teacher now, but my name can be used in a way I may not like. I must also ask, “Did I ask enough questions to get enough of the story to understand a sore point?” Am I seen as intervening on someone else’s territory?

None of these has been tragedies, but I stop and say, “Hmmm…this pearl can continue to evolve as I understand the hazards of my administrative job.”

But all around me are experts, from the inspiring headmaster to the indefatigable Jules to my colleagues from Majid all the way down to those newbies. And by the way, people look at those newbies differently now. They are not just babes in the educational wilderness. They are savvy young educators with talent and vigor and are gonna make gorgeous pearls.

Ridiculous!

2011-09-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

When you live in the Bible Lands (and no, I don’t mean the Bible Belt—I did that 20 years ago!) or rather, the Holy Land, it is not surprising that biblical phrases rattle around in your head a little more than, say, when I live in the mid-west.

So in this last week—where a class of mine misbehaved, and the world watched Mahmoud Abbas address the United Nations—I had a strange commandment from the apostle Paul rattling around in my head. “You owe no one anything … except to love them.” That is pretty good, actually. Let’s repeat it—“You owe no one anything … except to love them.” Can I get an Amen?

It has been a pretty long time since a class of mine misbehaved. Frankly, they kind of know what they are in for when they sign up for AP Art History. But last Thursday, the last class of the school week, it was hot in my classroom (now there is nothing abnormal about how hot it is…) and they just weren’t terribly interested in the art of ancient China. Pity—it really is great and moving art. But several times I asked them calmly to pay better attention—you know you can always level them with, “We have a test coming up and you need to be prepared for this!” But they weren’t having any of that last Thursday. So about 10 minutes before the end of class, I pulled the plug on the laptop, quietly said, “I’m done. You may go.” And I proceeded to unplug the powerpoint projector and clean up. They were all of a sudden totally silent. As I reached the door, I turned and said, “You may go. I’m finished for the day.” And I left the class early. I think I may have done that three times ever in 23 years of teaching!

When I returned to my apartment after visiting Lubna in the gym after the disappointing class, I found a note under my door. I don’t know if it was the work of one student or more (it was signed from “D-Block”) but it was a genuine apology note. It was well-written and very thoughtful. The writer said, “We are all ashamed of ourselves for what we have done. You treat us like adults and today we abused it. We honestly know what we have done is wrong and we will not do it again. You deserve the best and utmost respect. You inspire us with your art and we cannot explain how sorry we are. Again we owe you our sincerest apologies.” Wow. The note blew me away.

Over the next day or so I watched a number of news sources, from Arabic news to BBC to CNN to ABC, all comparing the coverage of the Abbas speech and the impending vote in the UN on the status of Palestine. I am interested for a number of reasons—first of all I live here, and the recognition could not be more important for these Palestinian friends of mine. It reminds me of how important it was to Germany and Austria when I lived there in 1985 when Ronald Reagan visited there and “forgave” them (kind of, but at least diplomatically) for World War II. I also teach offspring of two of the speakers this week, the son of the King of Jordan, and the grand-daughter of Mahmoud Abbas. It is also important to me since this is a subject of which I used to know almost nothing until I moved here.

But back to Paul—I kept having that commandment rattle around in my head. Paul, the man who spouts more rules in his writings than anyone else, the one obsessed with right conduct and right living, here tells the Romans and you and me that all of those rules and guidelines about how we are to live with one another really all boil down to love. Love fulfills all of the law in regards to one another, Paul says. Love is the only thing we owe one another. It is the thing we are called upon to extend to family, friend, neighbor, stranger, teacher, student, ally and enemy alike.

We think we know about love, and yet, I wonder how often we think deeply about or explore it closely. Exactly what love is. In the midst of the brokenness of this world, where pain, suffering, injustice and scandal seem to be the norm, we somehow seem to still trust that we know what love is, what it means and how to give and receive it.

Julian Barnes wrote a stunning book entitled A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. Each of the 10 Chapters covers the reality of life and its consequences—how trouble seems to be intertwined with living. Now the witty, sarcastic, dry and hilarious Barnes may be among the last people I can imagine grabbing a burger with Paul, but what he says about love, though, is something I think Paul would raise a glass to.

It is in that half of a chapter, named “Parenthesis,” stuck between chapters 8 and 9 that Barnes writes about the single most important thing in the history of world. He says that human history is and I quote Barnes “ridiculous without it.” That one thing of course is love. Barnes writes that love is essential precisely because it is unnecessary. He says that love does not guarantee that either you or the object of your love will be happy—love in no way makes everything alright. Barnes reminds us that we can build damns like the beaver without love, we can organize complex societies like the bee without love, we can travel long distances like the albatross without love, we can put our head in the sand like the ostrich without love, and, if we are not careful, we can even die out as a species like the dodo did without love. Love is not necessary, but it is essential. Without love, the world, Barnes claims, becomes brutally self important.

Barnes argues you cannot love someone without imaginative sympathy. You cannot love someone without beginning to see the world from another point of view. It is love, Barnes writes, that “moves us beyond ourselves.” Without love the history of the world is ridiculous. And the future … well it is meaningless … a long slide into self absorption and decay.

Love is essential according to both Barnes and Paul because love is generative. Paul grabs our attention and focuses it directly on right living. But rather than talking about all the thou shalt nots, Paul turns our focus and imagination toward the generative power of love. Because Paul knows love is a power that can never, ever be content with status quo. Love is a force that builds upon itself and one that binds us together. Hmmmm…

It is interesting to live a life of faith here at the contested crossroads of our world and to try and engage in service and justice making. I am privileged to be part of a “taskforce” that has been charged to wrestle with how we may live our way into that kind of life. This taskforce, or rather, this school, has been charged to get this community not just to think about, but to get involved directly with acts of kindness, justice, compassion, service and learning.

His Majesty created this school as a place to be synonymous with mercy and with justice. Yet mercy without love descends into pity. And justice without love? Well, the great Reinhold Neibhur said this, “Any justice which is only justice soon disintegrates into something less than justice.” As I look at the world, I believe we need that passage from Paul to be engraved on our hearts, for we are called not just to serve the world but to engage in love making with our world. We owe the people of the world nothing … except to love them.

Without love even the greatest of actions we might conceive of would be nothing more than clanging gongs or noisy cymbals … they would be ridiculous! But bathed in love the work we are being called to undertake becomes ways of co-loving this world with God. Bathed in love they not only affirm that all human beings are already God’s beloved, they suggest that each of us is a being capable of as yet unimagined possibilities. Each of us is God’s love song waiting to be sung. Service without love is meaningless ... Justice without love is ridiculous.

If we do our work at the crossroads right, we cannot love the world without encountering it and seeing this place and our world and ourselves through a whole new set of eyes. As we look at the differences of the people we encounter through the eyes of love we will end up seeing our own differences through their own eyes. As we love their differences we will have the chance to love our own. And when, through love, we see the unimagined possibilities that God has placed within them, we will have the chance through their eyes to see our own unrealized and unrecognized potential in ways we never could on our own. The truth is we could never be who God has dreamed we might be unless we love others and gain the eyes to see who we might be. So if we are to engage in love making with the world, we will miraculously discover that we will end up saying the exact same thing to those we meet at the crossroads, “You make such a difference in my life that I would not be the same person with you.” Bathed in love, our actions of service and justice will tether us to our brothers and sisters in ways that unleash God’s design for our lives. That is the first miracle of love making.

The second miracle is this—if we truly love the world we will not just give love away—we will create it. As human beings are loved, we have a natural tendency to return love to those who love us. It is a great gift of our creator, it is a tendency hard wired into who we are. Sure, people can and do refuse to return love. Each of us bears the scars to prove it. But that refusal goes against our very created natures as God’s beloved. When we infuse justice with love we cannot help but to foster it in those who we love. Love is a generative thing. We owe the world nothing but to love them.

In the end, Paul says it all comes down to love and Julian Barnes would certainly raise a glass to that notion. Barnes concludes his half of a chapter, that one stuck between chapters 8 and 9, with this observation: “How you cuddle in the dark, governs how you see the history of the world.” How you embrace love in the quiet and stillness of the night affects how you live into the morning.

There will be a vote in the UN as to whether or not there is a new dawn for the Palestinians. But either way the vote goes, I will crawl out of bed tomorrow and face the world in all its beauty and all its pain. Remember: Owe no one anything … except to love one another because love fulfills the law, love brings us closer to God’s dream for us, and without love, the whole world and anything we might do, even in the name of God would be ridiculous. Can I get an Amen?

Hip, Hip Bourrage!

2011-09-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

Not very often does one person earn an entire blog entry…but not everyone is like my friend Tracy. Today is Tracy’s birthday and it seemed fitting to muse about and celebrate this friend who has been a part of my world since I was but an 18 year old in Granville, Ohio!

Two years ago Tracy’s birthday fell during one of the celebrated Denison Singers’ reunions. At the stroke of midnight on September 19th we sang to her and at 11:59 at the end of the 19th of September, we sang to her one last time for that birthday. She thought it was her best birthday ever. The company was good!

Tracy was a senior when I was a freshman at Denison and ever since my induction in the Denison Singers I have loved knowing her. We enjoyed the legendary Europe trip that January singing in churches and cathedrals throughout Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. It was an exhilarating year. Tracy teaches music to young children in an Ohio public school now, and while there was a stretch of maybe 12 years that we were out of touch, for the last decade her friendship and counsel have been among the loveliest I have known.

What is it about this friend? It is always an interesting challenge to decipher the magic of a relationship and point your finger at the source of the love and admiration. Other friends may have their own list of what they most treasure in Tracy, but for me, it is all about a French word, oooo lala—bourrage.

This summer I had a conversation with a friend of mine named Nancy who lives in New York. Nancy had just come back from one of the most unusual trips I have ever heard of—she and her 18 year old daughter went to the south of France to be part of a team to restore a medieval town wall. I had never heard of such a trip—such a quest, but as she explained the importance of the job of wall-building, the care and thoughtfulness in building a wall in the manner done a thousand years ago became fascinating to me. Nancy explained that it is not as simple as throwing big stones together in a big pile. Nancy, ever the interesting wordsmith, explained that the most care had to be done in the part of the wall called “bourrage” in French. The bourrage is the part of the wall that holds everything together, and if the wall does not have the proper or supportive bourrage, the wall collapses. The big, fancy rocks just don’t do the main job—it all depends on the bourrage.

So that idea of the bourrage is exactly what Tracy represents. She acts, nay, embodies, bourrage in every facet of her life. As I came to know her initially in the Denison Singers in the 1980s I quickly realized how important she was at being the bedrock of her senior class. I have long called her the “Earth Mother” of the Singers, the person who made my freshman class aware of the importance and seriousness of the Singers, but the word bourrage fits even more—the glue that cohered the group as I came to know this meaningful group.
As I have come to know Tracy as an adult, or a post-college adult, in the 21st century, I have come to see that she is the bourrage of her family, of her faculty—as far as I can tell, she embodies the significance and potential of what that term bourrage must do. Tracy holds people together, families together, groups together. She is not a showy “big rock”—that is not her style. But if anyone looks closely at a relationship, at a group, at an institution, she is the lynchpin, the cornerstone, the necessary bourrage that ensures that the structure exists neatly, formally, and with strength and dignity.

I would never have given a medieval wall much thought if Nancy had not exhorted to me how much she enjoyed her trip and her back-breaking work to recreate the work ethic and success of a medieval wall-maker. Nancy’s unusual trip inspired me to realize how much like the elegant, timeless, seemingly effortless medieval wall my friend Tracy is. People rely on her to define boundaries, set a tone, and symbolize strength like the medieval wall.

Many happy birthday greetings to Tracy, that beautiful bourrage!

New Guys In Town

2011-09-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

This last week I inaugurated our weekly professional development seminar with a poem I found by John Steinbeck. What better way to introduce a year designed to heighten and/or deepen teacher effectiveness than with these lines. Savor this poem from the 1930s:

Captured Fireflies
In her classroom our speculations ranged the world;
she aroused us to book waving discussions.
Every morning we came to her carrying new truths, new facts,
new ideas cupped and sheltered in our hands like captured fireflies.
When she went away a sadness did not go out.
She left her signature upon us.
The literature of the teacher who writes on children's minds.
I've had many teachers who taught us soon forgotten things,
but only a few like her who created in me a new thing, a new attitude, a new hunger.
I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that teacher.
What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.
---by John Steinbeck

I mean—it is profound what a great teacher can do…and look at two lines especially, lines 7 and 8, and right there is the fork in the road for teachers: Steinbeck speaks of the “many” who “taught us soon forgotten things,” but oh, that important, and sadly, too “few” who created that “new hunger.” Oh my—doesn’t that just inspire you to new heights to try and be one of the “few”???

Well, one of the great features of a new school year, of course, is the introduction of new people. There are new students, new faculty, and you wonder every year from that grand parade who will be some of the great ones you will come to know and admire. I want to introduce you to two new guys, and I have a feeling they will be starring in the line-up of great ones.

There is John, a fresh-from-college-brand-new-teacher-from-Yale, who is teaching Chemistry. When I interviewed John last February at the job fair in Boston, I sensed that he had the goods to be a great one. When you interview college seniors, it is a little difficult to tell which ones might emerge as great teachers since they have had little or no experience teaching. But with John I liked him especially for his devotion to technical theater. I realize that hanging lights and enduring theatrical “hell week”[s] may not mean you understand chemistry, or any other discipline for that matter, but as I talked with this guy, I could tell from his theater work that he had dedication and stamina and grit, three things that mean oh so much in the educational world.

I took John out to Chili Ways after the second day of school, and, well, first of all, he liked my fast food of choice in Madaba. But the real pleasure of the evening was the privilege of hearing him talk about those first hours in the classroom. He had had to ask a young man to leave class and speak sternly to him in the hallway. He said that when they both came back in, he could tell it wasn’t going to cast a pall on the classroom. He had dealt with his first issue of classroom management. Then his mood changed, his eyes got misty as he spoke of the first lab, that introduction to chemistry and when he saw the power in a students’ eyes as the student understood a chemical principle. Watching John explain that wonderful moment, and hearing him realize the power and obligation he had as a teacher, was a genuine thrill. John observes other teachers’ classes, asks questions, wonders about grading and even keeps a journal about how a class goes (Why was a good class good? What might improve a class?). He is excited by the teaching and I look forward to what he all he will add to KA.

The other new guy I wanted to make sure you knew was a young man from China named Li. Li was actually the first new student I met this school year—he arrived a day before the others, and I met him at lunch and was struck by his friendliness. We talked about my 2001 trip to China and I learned that he came here with two other Chinese students, but they had not met before the plane ride. I marveled at how far he had come and his enthusiasm for Jordan is infectious. What a brave soul to come all this way for school. He has ended up in my AP Art History class, as well.

Last Sunday I was quite moved and impressed by a speech Li asked to give to the whole school. Julianne told me he asked her to give this speech, yet was nervous since this was the first speech he had ever given in English (!). I asked Li if I could print his speech and offer it to the world in my blog. Here is Li’s speech to the KA throngs:

Yesterday was a very traditional Chinese festival called “Teacher’s Day.”

In China, teachers are held in high esteem. This day is in honor of all those involved in the teaching profession.

September 28th is the birthday of Confucius who was a great philosopher and a world-famous teacher. In the history of Chinese education, Confucius is a paragon of all teachers, symbolizing the philosophy of “Educate all without discrimination, and teach according to the abilities of ones students.” Using the six arts of rites, music, archery, chariot driving, learning, and mathematics, Confucius had more than three thousand students during his lifetime.

In the ancient times, Confucius’s birthday was regarded as a Teachers’ Day.

Now In the People's Republic of China, Teacher's Day is held on September 10th each year. This year is the 27th annual festival.

On this day, there are some activities for the students to show their appreciation to the teachers, such as holding a concert, making a lecture or presenting gifts including cards and flowers. And the Confucius Memorial Service is also solemnly held at the Confucius Temple to show respect and honor for him. “Teachers Day Celebration” will held by the Ministry of Education and the various local governments, teachers are recognized for their contribution to society.

In China, every day when our class begins, we need to stand up and say hello to teachers and when class is over we also need to stand up and say thanks. Why do we do this? That’s because the teacher plays a very important role in our lives. We all know the population of China is very large. The only way for students to achieve their goals or change their destiny is to get the chance to study in university and have a better education. So teachers may help them a lot. They are very kind and do anything they could to help students.

And I think all the teachers here in King’s are really nice and responsible too. They came on campus two weeks earlier than the students to prepare for the new year. They made many activities for the new students to make sure they can adapt to the school life quickly. They gave a warm welcome to all the international students and always asked us whether we needed help which made us feel at home. They try to make every class interesting and enjoyable to ensure that we learn and be happy.

Since yesterday we were in weekend. Today I want say “Happy Teachers’ day” to all the king’s teachers and thanks for your excellent job!

Teachers are engineers of souls, are the people who tell us ways to explore the world, to give us wisdom and knowledge to create our own life.

I think no matter whether or not we have a teacher's day, we all need to be highly respectful and grateful to our teachers every day. To remember all the things they have taught us and appreciate the person who brings us to a new life.
Thank you!

That evening Li performed a musical piece on the flute for our first “open-mic” night. As he started he said, “I am playing a Chinese piece and I want you to think about a Chinese sailor as he brings his boat back home from the sea.” Li proceeded to play the flute with exquisite beauty. I once took the flute just for fun and I know the breath support and the care it takes to produce the quality of tone he offered us. What will he do next?!

In many ways this was a perfect week to think about John and Li. Both of them are excited about teachers and teaching. Thinking about these new guys came in a perfect week: this past week witnessed the birthdays of two of my greatest teachers ever. I have a list of my 5 greatest teachers (do you? I think you should make on and savor those teachers!) and this week saw the birthdays of Nina Wilson and Mary Schneider, two of my icons on my list. I could write on and on and on about the profound effects these two have had on me (search other blog entries if you do not know them) but Li really said it very well—these two educators are “engineers of the soul,” and every day in their classes was like the excitement of “captured fireflies.”

It really was a beautiful morning

2011-09-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

I remember driving to school ten years ago today quite frustrated about the lesson I was to teach later that morning in AP Art History. It was only my fourth day in this brand-new course of this massive survey of world visual arts, but I just wasn’t “feeling” this lesson. According to my very new syllabus, on September 11, 2001 I was going to teach about these votive figures from ancient Sumer. Ordinary citizens in the city-state of Sumer, oh circa 2500 BCE, would pay to have a statue placed in a temple to pray for them continuously. Usually I had a good sense of the art works, but as I drove to school I remember wondering how I would successfully engage the students on these ancient ancient bug-eyed statues.

As I drove up the hill at Hackley, I remember looking at the perfectly beautiful morning, struck by how gorgeous it could be on that early September morning.

As you might imagine given the date and the tumult unleashed 90 minutes later, I didn’t need to worry about the lesson that day. After my first period 20th century history class, the headmaster called the school to the auditorium to explain what had happened in Manhattan, about 20 miles away, in the previous half hour. There was no formal school for the rest of that day.

Of course as we all know today marks the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on that gorgeous morning. It’s hard to think of that date now without mental images of the destruction, grief, and loss that swept over America and the world following those tragic events. The loss of thousands of lives was compounded by the depth of loss felt by New Yorkers in general, and corporately about the lost sense of security as a country.

There are many, many events and forums today in which to discuss 9/11. You don’t really need one more blabbering blogger discussing or remembering that day. I wouldn’t have anything new to say about the incredulity we all felt about those planes and those smoking buildings…but remembering that art history lesson may offer another perspective about that day and the reactions around me.

All through that day and into the night I spent in one of the common rooms on campus at Hackley, eyes glued to the television set. At various times I looked around the room and the scene was the same all evening—bug eyes at the television and the incomparable disaster it showed in nearby Manhattan. I saw more than one person punch a wall in anger and grief. But mostly I saw people silently watching, straining to take it all on, clasping and folding their hands in a strange disbelief over and over as they stared in fear and wonder and pain and hope. What would happen next? Was this the beginning of more attacks? How do we make sense of it all? What horrific and unexplainable events—how could we make sense of it all?

As I watched students and adults drink in this sorrow, I thought of those Sumerian votive figures that did not get taught that day. Those figures, two of them seen above, are made of ordinary material representing ordinary people. They stare in fear and wonder and pain and hope at the unexplainable forces in their lives. How do we make sense of weather disasters and food shortages and injustices and wars? In that void of sense and logic, artists made these votive figures to stand in for the real people, so they could beseech the gods day and night, seeking solace and answers. As I watched the people around me, they were doing the very same thing—seeking solace and answers. These New Yorkers were bug-eyed too, awestruck at the events unfolding around them. That afternoon those 4,500 year old bug-eyed Sumerian votive sculptures all of a sudden made a great deal of sense to me. That morning I couldn’t imagine a connection to those statues. Hours later I had a connection I would never forget as people around me hoped and prayed for relief from this sorrow.

Today people in the United States will gather together and light candles, read names, lay wreaths, hold hands, cry at the loss of life and innocence, render requiems and pray for mercy. Ten years after that day I live in the Middle East—something I could not have imagined a decade ago—and am only miles away from where David wrote the psalm crying out for mercy: “My eye wastes away with grief, yes, my soul and my body.”

Tomorrow I will teach about ancient Sumer again—this is the 9th year I have taught this course, and I will teach those votive figures again, and I will explain as I do every year, that I was to teach those sculptures on that beautiful sunny morning but the world stopped and I found a poignant and heartbreaking connection to those ancient gypsum sculptures.

It doesn’t provide the balm in Gilead, but it is one of the ways I remember that sunny morning and grief-stricken day.

The Big O

2011-09-09T07:59:00.000-07:00

This was the week that the three weeks of orientation (yes, I know we must be the most and best oriented school on the planet!) finally melted into the first week of school. That first day that is the joy of joys!

But before we get into blogisodes about the new school year, I want to dwell for a moment on this year’s orientation. We went from orientation for senior staff, department heads, new faculty, returning faculty, student proctors in the dorms, new students and finally, returning students. Whew! But the other day came one of the most fun things I have done in our time here at KA. Julianne, the intrepid and fearless Dean of Students wanted to foment a little inter-dorm competition as we got set for school. She came up with the idea of “Madaba Games,” an Olympics-style competition that would accrue points for the top 3-placing dorms in a variety of competitions. Not just physical competition, although there would be that, she came up with a science competition in the form of a Project Egg Drop, and a crazy hair-styling competition, and an art competition and skit competition and music competition and a bake-off competition.

She asked me if I would spearhead the Chocolate Chip Cookie Bake-Off Competition for my Nihal dorm and I enthusiastically agreed. However, on the day of the Madaba Games I started to wonder, what in the world were we doing with a bake-off? What boys would want that choice of competition and how would it work? I guess I didn’t think about it too much, but then Monday afternoon came and all of a sudden I had two hours to fill and two hours to bake award-winning chocolate chip cookies. Julianne got the idea for this partly from a great year at Hackley, maybe around 2003 or so, when the faculty there indulged in several heated food competitions and bake-offs. They were immensely fun as entrants brought their selections and a team of judges picked the best. Our friend Mike always wrote a hilarious commentary afterward about the proceedings, the corruption among the judges, and the rancor amidst the entrants. It was great.

So as the Nihal dorm boys split up into what competitions they wanted to do, I found myself with 12 boys who wanted to help make the best chocolate chip cookies in Jordan. We met at my apartment, the baker’s dozen of us, and I still wondered, “Are they going to just watch me bake these cookies? How should we run this???” As I walked in, cranked up the air conditioning, I thought, “Let’s have this be a cooking class and somehow we all have to be a part of this baking experience.”

First I read them the criteria by which we would be judged—four points,
(1) Taste (2) Texture (3) Presentation and (4) a WOW factor. So we started by talking about criteria factors 2-4. What did they know about texture in a cookie? How should we present our cookies? Then I went on-line and looked at recipes from food.com and suggested we use one that was called “award-winning chocolate chip cookies.” That sounded hopeful. I mentioned that I had purloined a silver tray from the Dining Hall and we could serve the judges the cookies on that. But we needed to think about the presentation later.

As we got going, Mohammed Attar ran into my apartment a little late to join us. He had brought a present for me, an orange tie box from Hermes. A real tie from Hermes! I opened it, and thanked him for the exquisite black silk tie, and then said, “Guys, this orange box—hey, that’s our dorm color. Let’s wrap the cookies up in this box and present it to the judge. Wait—Mohammed, I’ll bet you have a tux, right?” This student is one of the most suave and debonair students I know—I figured he had a tux. He did, and I suggested that Mohammed get in his tux for the judging portion and present the fancy box of cookies in our dorm color’s box.

Okay, okay, we need to get going. I divide everyone up into teams for the baking portion. David I put in charge of the recipe itself—he is to check it over and over and make sure our measurements are correct, the order correct, the temperature correct. As we start I tell them some things about chemistry and how baking works on the principles of chemistry. Unlike what I thought would happen, these 12 guys are excited and ready to go. So I have a team to be in charge of keeping the ingredients ready, a team to measure the ingredients, a team to cream the butter and sugar, a team to chop the chocolate, a team to get the oven and pans ready. Everybody is on board and ready to go. In the recipe it calls for a box of instant pudding—I tell them that might help the texture since that is one of our criteria. I don’t have any brown sugar, but I have about 100 packets of raw sugar for coffee and tea, and so now there is a team to open the packets and measure that sugar. This does produce the first mess! But they actually seem interested to know how the different kind of sugars can affect the texture of a cookie.

In the next hour we measure, we double-check, we cream—someone asks if I have any fancy chocolates to add and I remember some great mousse-like chocolates. A new team is created to microwave that chocolate and add it to the mix. They like how this might be a good wow factor with the fancy chocolate in taste and texture and a new amber-colored glow to the batter.

Then after the cracker-jack team of Asher and Khalook have creamed the butter and eggs and sugar expertly, we start to mix in the dry ingredients. You would have thought we were working on nuclear fission or something from the level of interest and precise measurement and careful stirring and uber-double-checking. I bring out two kinds of vanilla—the imitation kind and the real stuff. I explain to them the difference, and we all pass around and smell the imitation and the real, and my 12 bakers all agree the real stuff is infinitely better and yes it is worth the money., Only the real stuff would go in our competitive dough! Finally, the large glass bowl is full of this glorious chocolate chip cookie dough. Someone wonders if we should taste it—you know, taste is one of the judge’s criteria. Yes, I agree, we need to make sure it is as great as we think. It is…you wouldn’t believe their expert-palate discussion of how the instant pudding and the real vanilla and the fancy chocolates have elevated our chocolate chip cookie dough.

It is time to get the dough onto the baking sheets. We have a little discussion over whether 1 big cookie or regular size cookies were better. If we wanted to use the Hermes box, then we needed to go with the regular size. As I demonstrate how to roll the dough to a consistent size (and why…) they realize it is just like eating their comfort-food mansaf as they take the balls of meat and pop them in their mouth.

The first baking sheet goes into the oven. There is a little nervousness if they will be perfect enough. While that one bakes we discuss the presentation again. Someone suggests that we put a label over the Hermes label on the box and write our dorm name. Walid is elected to practice his penmanship, and after about a dozen shots, we take the perfect label of “Nihal” and affix it over Hermes. Someone also suggests that when tux-clad Mohammed serves the judges the cookies from the fancy box that he first offer to shave fresh chocolate over the cookie for them. So we get Mohammed to practice grating chocolate from a fancy bar.

As I took the first batch out of the oven—I have never seen more nervous and excited and interested bakers in my life—I realized three incredibly great things: (1) I had only instructed and guided them in this effort; all I physically did was put the baking sheet in and take it out of the oven (2) this was more fun than I ever thought it might be and (3) one of the young men in this cohort was someone with whom I had never gotten along previously. This guy had been in another teacher’s class in my room and I caught him numerous times punching my art posters with the thumb tacks. I chastised him and we developed a nasty cold war. But look—here he was, my right hand man, carefully checking on the microwaved chocolate, checking with me on the oven, checking on the bottoms of the cookies so that only the most perfect cookies would be submitted. I realized that this was one of the best teaching experiences I had ever had.

We decided that we would bake all 36 cookies, and then judge them ourselves and pick the 5 best for the judges. Why should we submit all the cookies to them? We would submit 5 cookies in our Hermes/Nihal fancy orange box, with our concierge Mohammed shaving fresh chocolate on them, and then we should eat the rest. I mean, we needed to see if they were as good as we believed. We believed these were great cookies.

So we narrowed down the choices. We prepared the box. Mohammed changed into his tux. We gingerly placed the perect 5 into the box. We left for the competition. On our way out, the boys thanked me profusely for the afternoon—and I thanked them. We just had to win. I mean seriously—we thought about texture, we had expensive chocolate, perfect cookies, a young man in a tuxedo with a designer box…and a spirit of reconciliation with that formerly errant boy.

We get to the competition and I can feel the rush of adrenaline. Every other entry had put cookies on a plate. Sniff. Well, that is a choice. Not a wow choice, but a choice. That evil and wonderful Maria (I love her!) had dyed her dorm’s chocolate chip cookies the color of the dorm. Good move Maria, but was there a tux or gown around??? The others look fine, but we are ready to trounce them in the competition!

The judges are lined up, the students ready for the presentation. Obviously, ours look great. Okay, the judging. Julianne sees me biting my nails. She is having a ball with this.

How does it come out?

Oh dear reader, it is not quite the climax of the movie that I envisioned.

We placed second. Now, this is not sour grapes, BUT the winning dorm, I learn something interesting—no boys in the winning dorm made their cookies. Faculty children—7th grade girls, no less—made their cookies. I silently seethe.

John, the usually-wonderful-headmaster-but-today-the-nefarious-one, says, “Well, there really are layers of corruption here. I am attached to that dorm and my daughter helped make the cookies.” Corruption indeed! It reminds one of the infamous 1820s “Corrupt Bargain” that put the wrong man in the White House. Oh, boy.

So in the end, we did not come in first place. I am getting over the anger. I started an Anger Journal by which to channel my rage and wounded pride.

But the Madaba Games—a success…such fun. In the days since our bake-off, many of those boys have stopped me and thanked me again for a fun afternoon. Two of them now speak to me every time I pass them. And that one guy, well, I took him aside and told him how proud I was of his diligence and commitment and patience. It might have only been chocolate chip cookie baking, but I saw a new kid that afternoon in my kitchen.

Good heavens—I love education! And I guess competition too.

In the shadow of the past

2011-09-04T02:32:00.000-07:00

This fall at KA we are debuting two, yes, two big new courses in the History Department! (Actually, we have more than two, but two big ones, and two small ones.) If that gets you excited—please, dear reader, press on. If that elicits a groan (excuse me, if so, who are you, and why are you at my blog????????!) then maybe this isn’t the blogisode for you.

No, really, it is exciting, re-thinking and re-crafting the first two history courses our students will take in their KA experience. I am sure I will be telling you more of the juicy excitement of the new and improved (don’t you dare even breathe the 1985 phrase “New Coke” here!) 9th and 10th grade courses but one of the elements of the 10th grade course has been on my mind in the last week.

The 10th grade course is a survey of the History of the Middle East nestled in the context of World History. Okay, now the verb nestled is not in the official wording of the course. I always get hung up on titles and what I want them to be. In 2001 when I debuted a new course at Hackley, I wanted the course entitled, “Releasing the Historical Imagination.” The bureaucrat-in-charge, sucked in a little air, and said, “How about we call it ‘History 9’." So, the other day I was musing on what I wanted this called and I suggested, “The Middle East in the context of World History,” and my colleague said, “I think it should be ‘The Middle East and the World.’" Everyone is always trying to simplify me. Do you see why I don’t do Twitter???

Anyway, this is not just a pull-a-date-out-of-a-hat-chronological survey course. We are starting this course in big, bad, happenin’ 2011. Right now! Why not??! The Middle East has had a tempestuous, volatile, interesting year, and why not dive into acting as historians and make sense of this year, the very year in which we live and breathe. I tried this in 1993 when I re-imagined a western civilization course at Charlotte Latin as well, jumping into that current year, and it was wonderful.

So, back to my excitement. We will mine the media websites and see what has transpired ever since this “Arab Spring” began back in January in Tunisia. What do the Middle Eastern media outlets say about this? The American websites? The BBC? What really has happened this year? What might it mean…where it might go? Ahhh…now here is the fun part. The students don’t really know what has happened this year (and don’t act all smug because you are smarter than a 15 year old—who does know what has happened this year?) but they will need more context, they will need more history to have this current year make more sense. Get the verb in there? They will need more history! Once you establish the need, the thirst, they will do anything! Then we will go back in time to the lifetime of their grandparents, trying to make sense of the last 70 or so years…

But here’s the thing about 2011 and the “Arab Spring”—as I have read about the Middle East, mostly from western sources, they kept trying to make it out as a rebirth of the spirit of 1989, a redux-1989, if you will, of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Remember how Jordan was treated in the press? Reporters were looking at Jordan and wanting it to fall, to fit some paradigm of dominos falling across the Middle East. That makes for an easier story, and a fun, let’s-relive-the-80s kick.

But in the last week as I have helped prepare the 10th grade course, it has hit me that it is another year entirely that 2011 has mirrored. Nope, not 1989—although I really did like that year too. It’s 1848.

1848?

Now, who’s interested??! Huh?!

Thinking about 1848 took me back to my days of teaching AP Modern European History (a course dear to my heart—it is the course that tipped me over to become a teacher as a senior in high school. It was taught by the iconic Jean Michaels and was marvelous. When I became a teacher I taught this course seven times before I moved on to other courses, but my heart is still in this great course) and what an interesting and confounding year 1848 proved across Europe.

In 1848 a wave of unemployment and economic woes engulfed Europe and led to spiked food prices. Across continental Europe there were monarchies ruling impoverished masses suffering from this acute economic distress. There were feeble parliaments and brutal police and limited suffrage and limited freedom of expression.

Yes, that was 1848. Take the above paragraph and substitute, “the Middle East” for “continental Europe,” and 2011 for 1848 and nothing else has to be changed. Look at those parallels! Let’s continue…at the root of the turmoil was a new, growing, politically and economically and culturally frustrated middle class. Yes, both 1848 and 2011.

In both times, 1848 and 2011, there were unexpected successes. In February, 1848, in Paris, after the government suppresses peaceful protests, three days of massive street protests and riots follow. The King abdicates, a republic is declared, and a hopeful democratic chaos ensues. Cut to 2011—in January and February, in Tunisia and Egypt, after the government suppresses peaceful protests, 29 and 18 days (respectively) of massive street protests follow. King-like presidents resign, and a hopeful democratic chaos ensues.

And there’s more!

In both years ambivalent armies fraternize with street protesters. Some of both troops even join the rebels. And let’s not think we of the 21st century are the only ones to trumpet technology—new technology helps spread the word of the protests. In 1848 revolutionary news is transmitted as never before by telegraph, steam-powered newspaper printing presses and railroads. In 2011 revolutionary news is transmitted as never before by cell phones, the Internet and cable television.

In both years democratic America is pleased. In 1848 President James Polk congratulated the French on their new liberties; in 2011 President Barack Obama praised the hopes for genuine democracy. In both years rich, reactionary powers in the east meddled: in 1848 Tsar Nicholas I sent troops to help his fellow monarchs; in 2011 the Saudi king lashed out against the “infiltrators” in Egypt. The Revolutionary contagion spread quickly in both years, fanning across many countries. In both eras there was a flood of refugees fleeing the chaos trying to emigrate to the Protestant US in 1848, and the Christian EU in 2011.

So the parallels are dizzying. Now as we begin the 10th grade course this week, I doubt whether we will emphasize this parallel at all…but here is what is exciting about beginning a course in the present. We don’t know what will come of it all…knowing more history will enrich our understanding of how these events got set in motion…but we still don’t know where it is all going.

We do know what happened next in 1848. In France, the crucible of the revolutionary fervor, the radicals pushed too far too fast, provoking a backlash by the end of 1848. By that winter, most of the revolutions had been reversed, and/or crushed.

And what of “The Arab Spring” of 2011? We don’t know yet. And that is part of the excitement of studying this current year, indeed, reveling in that lack of certainty. If we infuse a study of history with that same unawareness of inevitability we will stand a better chance at understanding what it felt like to stand in another era, to imagine what they were thinking. We can predict all we want, but we will have to wait for this next installment of this year to see where this will lead. Will we repeat 1848? How will it be different? What does a knowledge of that year do for us as we muddle through our contemporary times? How might history help?

So many questions…our mission statement of our department reads that we teach to a narrative of inquiry rather than a narrative of conclusions.

Invigorating and exciting, wouldn’t you say?

[new job title]

2011-09-02T02:52:00.000-07:00

A few years ago in New York I went to see a show several times called, oddly enough, [title of show]. This was a musical that developed downtown for a “fringe” musical festival and it is about these two composers, Jeff and Hunter, who create an original musical with two friends, Heidi and Susan. It is a “meta” show in which they constantly reflect on writing a musical for a fringe festival…so everything they say, it seems, makes it into their musical. It is about the joy and thrill and fear of creating a piece of theater. The odd title comes from the fact that when they submit their manuscript to the festival they are filling in the form and when it comes to their [title of show] they just decide to leave it blank the way the form had it as simply [title of show]. Okay. Maybe I didn’t sell the show enough to you.

Anyhoo, I don’t know if I have mentioned in any blogisode that I have a new title and new responsibilities at KA. It came about last spring when our dynamite new headmaster, John, asked me if I would like some new responsibilities dealing with, specifically, coaching and mentoring faculty. He wasn’t quite sure for awhile what the new job title would be, nor exactly what territory I would cover. I was excited since he trusted me to work with the faculty.

So for the longest time, I wasn’t sure what to tell people what the job really was, and so it reminded me of [title of show]. But now I should announce exactly what my email signature will say my new title is: Drum roll please…Dean of Curriculum and Instruction.

I am charged with many things, but most importantly directing and facilitating a professional development program that encompasses much more than I have ever seen in one of my four schools. I am also to evaluate and monitor curriculum, and I am to lead the evaluation of the 80-member faculty. Plus go to more meetings. We love meetings.

Last week I gave a presentation to the faculty during our orientation introducing them to my vast array of offerings in professional development. I likened my program to the Food Court at the Mall, where, hopefully, there is something for everyone! But before I explained the menu, I offered a brief bio as to how/why I stood before them that morning in Jordan.

I proudly announced that it was 25 years ago that week that I first stepped into a classroom to teach high school. Yep, it was 1986, and as a newly-minted college graduate I had been hired to be the entire History Department at Gaston Day School. I had no training, per se, to be a teacher, and I was thrilled to death, and also scared to death. I noted that every August since, as I prepare for the return of school, I am still thrilled to death, and just a little less scared to death. I relayed that in the next ten years I would go to graduate school full-time twice: the first I went to Brown so that I could go and teach college (however, if you know my bio well, you know that all Brown did was confirm for me that I was supposed to be a teacher of secondary school); for the second time I earned the Klingenstein Fellowship and went to finally study the ins and outs of education, learning the vocabulary and honing strategies and structure of effective classes.

In 1996 I started a new job at Hackley School, and I relayed to the faculty about an evening a couple weeks into the school year, when a new friend, a friend my own age who was a novice to teaching, announced with pleasure, “Finally, today I had a good day in the classroom.” Phil’s face then fell as he realized he couldn’t rest on those laurels, but needed to do it all over again the next day. Phil then pestered me, asking, “When do you really know everything about teaching? At what point do you get it all about education?” I said that after my 8 years, I didn’t know and wondered what a good answer was. I went and found another new colleague, the veteran teacher Joan Fox, a woman of such humor and warmth that new standards of humor and warmth need to be created. Joannie smiled and said, “Oh, dahlin’ you don’t really ever get it completely—you work at it but you never quite master it. You come closer every year but that is the beauty of teaching.”

That was my introduction to the plan I have for professional development. Now if you ever say the complete two words, “professional development,” or even the code, “PD” to most educators they roll their eyes, or sigh—at best. Some stare daggers at you. What is the problem??? Well, it is such a low priority in most schools, done poorly in a one-size-fits-all mentality, and no follow-up. Big money is spent on these experts to come in and spend 6 hours telling you what to do.

But our headmaster wants this professional development to be a constant thing, and as he urged us, to seek “continued, sustained improvement” in our teaching. So I have a plan.

Here is the menu of the plan—a week will not go by without an opportunity for professional development—there will be a weekly seminar/discussion group and I have all the topics for the year and the times all set up. The calendar is done September to June! Can’t make it at 11:30 on Sundays? I will repeat the seminar on Mondays at lunch and again at breakfast on Tuesday! The seminar will be conducted in Arabic for those who would be more comfortable with the dialogue in Arabic! No, that one will not be lead by me! There will be a book club each term. There will be two articles provided every week on topics of interest in education. There will be five workshops during the year offering many topics and forum for discussion and learning. My colleague Lilli and I will begin visiting classes—remember I am charged with evaluating about 80 teachers. I decided that I want to visit the “beginnings” of every class first—get into the classrooms and see how class begins. Then after I have seen each teacher’s opening engagement, I will visit a five-minute “middle” of every teacher, and finally go see how each teacher wraps up a lesson. Observation! Feedback! Hopefully real and meaningful professional development.

I have come to see that the [new job title] also means part-time therapist for people too. I have had several people ask to come and speak to me about the nature of teaching, and when do you know you should stay in teaching.

Oh, it is more than the food court. But, these are good and healthy conversations. Life would be strangely hollow if we didn’t ask ourselves, at least on occasion: What exactly should I do with the rest of my life? What is my purpose on this planet? Am I doing the right thing with my days and my energies? Does who I am matter to anyone else?

One guy the other day wanted to sit down and talk because, as he said, “You really think of teaching as a vocation, as a calling. I need some guidance.” He’s right—I do look at this career path as a vocation/calling. Those questions about vocation supersede the quest we sometimes engage in to busy ourselves.

A famous ethicist, William F. May, once pointed out that the words “car” and “career” both come from the Latin word for racetrack—carrera. Hmmm….who wants to go through life racing around in a circle????? A calling is much more considered than that. We hunt for hints and clues as to what the calling might be, should be. On our worst days, we wonder when a voice will whisper in our hearts, and we sometimes mistake the verbal echo of our own desires. We can get confused about selfishness and enjoyment.

But on those best days, we find that sweet spot of what we love to do, do reasonably well (or are determined to do well) and are pretty certain that we have found our niche of challenge and comfort. On those days we notice how God has stitched capacities and passions and potential into our quite ordinary lives. We aim to center our commitments on a greater good than just ourselves.

Vocation is kind of hard to figure out. Discerning one’s calling in life is a complicated business. I remember when I needed to make the decision to come to Jordan back in January, 2007, and I asked my good friend Doris for guidance. “When do you know Doris?” I asked pretty much the same thing Phil had asked me back in 1996. Doris replied, “When those doors all open, your job is simply to walk through the doors.”

So here I am—[new job title]—and 25 years into the teaching profession. We have had two weeks of teacher orientation. Energy is high. I lose all sense of time. The students will now begin returning for their orientation. Admittedly, it is like Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years’ all wrapped together into this time of year at the beginning of school. That great sense of satisfaction is prevalent.

Twenty-five years ago I was not quite sure where destiny would take me. I did not think I would be a secondary school teacher. And not just be one—I need to be one. It is where I belong. I am hoping the same for the [new job title]—the sweet spot where identity and desire and challenge and need converge.

Journey On

2011-08-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about Christmas a good deal in the last week.

Now there could be several reasons for that: about 9 days ago, before I left the United States for Jordan, I spent a couple hours addressing Christmas cards which I will use in four months when I return to the United States. And then a week ago when I bid my family a heartfelt farewell before stepping onto the Delta plane whisking me thousands of miles away to Jordan, I kept saying, “I will see you again at Christmas-time!” That is when a Delta plane will touch down with me on it again in Cincinnati. Last night I was talking to a faculty member here who is staying here over the Christmas break, and I suggested that he invite his family over and they celebrate in Bethlehem.

But it’s not so much looking toward the holiday that has held me captive in the last week, although on hot days I must admit I like thinking of the cold at Christmas—it’s those wise men who have been on my mind.

I guess as I was addressing the cards, I looked at the variety of cards I had, and I was drawn to those Magi. I remember as I addressed a card to my old librarian friend Lynda Morgese, I looked at those Magi on the card, and thought, “Of all the characters in the Christmas story, the ones we need to keep our eyes on, indeed, come to think of it, the ones most like us, are those Magi, those Wise Men.” Funny, how with all the things that needed to be done in my remaining days, I chose to address Christmas cards four months early, and then I have kept thinking about those wise guys all week.

When I posit that they are the ones most like us, I am not suggesting that we are either so regal or wise, but let’s consider some of the other characters in this story. Ahhh….Christmas in August, I suppose. Let’s take Mary, the young teen minding her own business when an angel of the Lord comes and addresses her: “Hail, Mary!” Like that’s going to happen to us.

Consider this: the shepherds are out in their fields watching their flocks by night, when an Angel of the Lord appears to them…speaks to them…and suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appears, praising God. Like that’s going to happen to us.

And on and on—but those Magi—we need to watch them. These are the travelers, the ones who undertake a great and arduous journey. Maybe because last week at this time I was about to embark yet again on the great journey back to the Middle East, but those Magi continue to be on my mind. Let’s imagine the conversations back home when those magi have agreed to undertake this great trip. “Honey,” says one, “Me and the guys, we’re following a star. Not sure where or what it will lead to. We’ll be away—for months, maybe longer.”

Of course, I am just joking a little here. For the magi it was no mere whim, their undertaking. They didn’t embark upon this adventure without careful thought and good reason. They did their best to explain themselves and their reasons to their families. They extracted themselves from various commitments. They planned the route and agreed how to finance it. Journeys of this sort are expensive—the costs of travel, with inns and meals, not to mention a loss of income from being away from work. I guess they worked. (Come to think of it, this sounded a lot like my thought process as I pondered this whole Jordan thing in 2007.)

They probably spent considerable time on what to take, what gifts to bring, and anticipated the exchanges of cultures and rituals and languages they would encounter.

The long awaited day arrived for them. Those magi hugged their loved ones and said their good-byes, not quite sure when they would return. There are tears, second thoughts, probably pleas to stay.

Finally, they are on their way—on their adventure. As they spent time together on this adventure began to learn each others’ moods, rhythms and fears. They learn the sound of each others’ laughter. And they probably needed to ask for directions. You know that since these are wise men they were probably not inclined to ask for directions.

The star gets the magi all the way to Jerusalem, but then it goes on the fritz. It is in Jerusalem that they have to ask for directions. “Where,” they ask, “is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we have observed his star rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

This is the moment their adventure really starts. It starts when their accents give them away; when they reveal themselves strangers in a strange land; when they first disclose to others the purpose of their quest; when they admit they don’t know which way to turn; when they are forced to entrust themselves to the good will of complete strangers (some of whom turn out to be possessed of ill will); when they find out that the mere mention of Jesus causes shifts in power, threatens principalities, begs for a re-ordering of the structures that discriminate. Now, they are on their way.

I guess I have thought about these guys this week when I realized they would have been travelling right around where KA is here in Jordan, not far from Jerusalem. I thought about them when I think of the journey that I have taken since January, 2007 when I decided to follow this quest to help start this school here. I have thought about them as I greet and work with the new faculty here.

In the last four days, I have spent considerable time with the brand-new faculty—22 in all—who have just arrived in the last few days here in Jordan. One is from Peru, one from the Maldives, one from Nigeria, one from Spain, one from down the street in Amman, but most, fresh off the planes from the United States. I see in them all that excitement we had in August, 2007 as we greeted each other and trusted each other to work on this project. We have taken them out to dinners, watched as they saw their first camel, had their first banking experience, talked about politics and food and the students we have met here. We are learning about each other as we embark on the journey of the school year of 2011-12. We have all gone on this adventure, a little clueless about what we will encounter or learn. But just like we were, and still are, we are ready for the adventure. We’re following a star here, too, in many ways, and as hokey as it sounds, that star of excellence in education, or that star of multi-culturalism, of experience, of fulfillment, of understanding.

So as I look out at the plains to the west—there in those hills where David once shepherded, I am back in the very land where those magi travelled and risked and followed their star. Yep, those guys, those exotic, adventurous, risk-taking, intrepid kings or astrologers, or whoever they were—they are the ones to watch.

We all have journeys, some longer, or farther afield, but relationships, and new jobs, or simply the life of faith is a life of adventure. I think you will know you are on the right road, that you are getting close to wherever, when it gets thrilling, tense and intense, important, scary, edgy, absorbing and fantastic.

Tomorrow I will spend about six hours helping to pair advisors and advisees for the coming year; I will meet with the 9th and 10th grade teams to work on our new courses; and then finally, we will have an all-faculty iftar, the nightly breaking of the fast during Ramadan, at about 7:21 p.m. to celebrate the return of the veteran teachers and introduce the newest members of the followers of our star.

Porters All

2011-08-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

I love my Kindle.

When these little digital libraries first came on the market, I will admit that I was more than skeptical—in fact, I kept saying, “I wouldn’t want a Kindle ‘cause I love books too much!” I love holding books, writing in my books, displaying my books, giving books as gifts. Obviously I must like storing books since in my $100 a month storage locker in Cincinnati there are 85 boxes of books awaiting my return to the United States and properly being displayed and loved again with me in residence.

But then my former student Audra showed me her Kindle in the summer of 2009, and for every point I made, she kept saying, “You will love it—especially if you love books!!” So that Christmas my sister gave me a Kindle.

For those of you who might not yet have purchased one of these Kindles, or the other kind of e-book devices, do you know what you get to do??? Well, besides holding hundreds of e-books in the Kindle itself, one gets to download samples of books for free! For free!!!!! It’s like spending time in a book store looking through books you may just want to buy…however, I have downloaded hundreds more book samples than I could ever have devoured in afternoons in a Barnes & Noble! I mean, I gotta tell you, one way I kill time in airports (because of the usually-free WiFi) is that I look through the Kindle store and download dozens and dozens of samples of books I might enjoy.

If I open the Kindle right now, I have 438 samples of books…it’s like a kid in a candy store!!! (Again, for the un-washed, un-Kindled, a sample is about a 40-page excerpt of the beginning of a book, designed to tempt you to buy the entire e-book for around $8-10.) I have about 80 novels (yes, Anne Siviglia, I occasionally read fiction!!) and 200 samples of history books, and then the books on movie history, television history, theater history, food history, art history (yes, I am a history nut) and memoirs and humor books and books on current events. I also have a file on religious history and books on spirituality. Why not download almost any kind of book that might shed some light on…pause for a serious phrase…the human condition…

One of the more unusual samples I downloaded this summer was a book about St. Benedict, considered by many to be the founder of Western monasticism. In the year 530, Benedict composed a rulebook, “The Rule of Benedict,” by which his monks would live an ordered, holy, and monastic life.

When I downloaded the sample, I had no idea what the book would be about, but I discovered that the “rules,” the chapters were oddly interesting. Now, let’s face it, anything historical is always interesting to me. Put sports and history together—thank you to Gary Klein for helping me with this—and all of a sudden I am a sports junkie.

Anyway, back to Benedict. I think I originally downloaded the book because I have joked occasionally that working at KA in Jordan has, well, at times, felt “like a monastery on a gulag.” I mean that in an endearing way! Anyhoo, I thought the book by Benedict and all of his rules might be interesting to compare a real monastic life to my life in a dormitory in the desert 30 minutes outside of an urban area.

Huh. The entire 66th chapter of Benedict’s Rule is devoted to explicating in detail the duties of the monastery’s porter, that is, the gatekeeper or doorman. It seemed remarkable to me that one of the renowned spiritual documents of the Western world has an entire chapter devoted to how to answer the door.

Remarkable, yes, but as it has ruminated in my brain, also understandable.

Among all the brothers in the monastery, the porter alone straddles two worlds. With one foot, he is firmly located within the monastic enclosure: the world to which he has vowed his body and soul. The monastery is a regulated, all-male world—a world of black tunics, scapulas and hoods—a world of silence, simplicity, poverty, chastity and habitual prayer.

However, the porter, alone among his brother monks, also has a foot in the world without: the world as it flows by the monastery’s door, bearing with it its flotsam and jetsam of noise, bustle, color, chaos, confusion, disorder and temptation.

It is the porter’s main duty to exercise the Christian art of hospitality. At the sound of a footfall, or horse hoof, or knock—no matter what time of day or night—the Porter scurries to the door, flings it open and cries out: “Deo Gratias! Thank God you have come!”

For the Benedictine, the art of hospitality is a theological necessity. Genuine hospitality is the warm and practical evidence of God’s love.

For the Benedictine, the art of hospitality is something else as well: it exposes to all manner of persons and experiences. It is a way of living that renders us available to the world.

In the Benedictine world, the job of Porter is assigned to one person. That person alone in the monastery straddles two worlds.

Besides, the “kick” of learning some medieval job description, does this Chapter 66 mean anything more than a little trivial information???

Yesterday the administration at KA welcomed the new faculty for the 2011-12 school year—we have a week of orientation with them before the returning faculty join us on campus for a second week of orientation. Yes, for any school this is more orientation than you have in a decade! Be that as it may...yesterday in his opening address to our new faculty, our (I’ll say it again) wonderful headmaster John Austin read from the 2011 book by King Abdullah II from the part of what he gained from being at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Of all the many things he gleaned, he found that his tenure there helped him cultivate “wisdom and patience,” and understand and undergo an “egalitarian experience.” When Abdullah assumed the throne in 1999, he knew he wanted to create a school in Jordan that would do a similar thing. His Majesty has said often, and indeed wrote in that recent book, that he hopes the students from KA will “create a new tribe in Jordan, a talented meritocracy of lived lives of service and leadership.”

How exciting to work at a place that has that credo embedded in its founding. As John read from some passages of the King’s book, I thought of the lone Porter in the Benedictine monastery, and his importance of straddling two distinct worlds. His Majesty wants our students to straddle two worlds as well, the West and the Arab world, bringing the best of both to create a “new tribe.” If you know anything about the Arab world, tribal stuff is of primo importance. He wants a new tribe that is able to transcend the boundaries of old.

Straddling two worlds is hard—that rule of Benedict provides some insight about how porters go beyond the comfort zone, how they see two worlds and intermingle between and among. Think of how we all straddle various worlds. We all have a foot firmly planted in the “real” world: where might makes right, where wealth rules, where skin color and accent and bank account and education and nationality and ability, define us. Some people don’t like stepping inside another world, retreating from what could be a transforming experience. The borderlands are hard. Just the other day, I crossed over borders. I crossed over national borders. I also crossed over the border from summer into a consuming school world.

I thought about how excited I get every year for the beginning of classes—I am probably as giddy as the Benedictine porters as they fling open the door and announce: “Deo Gratias! Thank God you have come!”

As I listened to the hopes of King Abdullah II for this school, a school entering Year #5, it is clear to me he urges us all to straddle different worlds, cross borders and see what wisdom and patience can be gleaned from the experiences. I have no idea if His Majesty has Benedict’s rule on his Kindle, but I would imagine he would urge us to go beyond the single porter of Benedict’s day, and encourage and inspire that we are porters all.

Anew

2011-08-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

Summer ended yesterday when I landed at the Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris. I now spend a good deal of time in this airport every year. So far, in the last four years that I have come in and out of the Charles de Gaulle airport I have yet to actually go into Paris! I land at the Charles de Gaulle airport on my way to and from Cincinnati or Amman for my summer breaks. When I land there in late June, this signals the beginning of summer, and when I land in August it is the reminder that summer has ended. I have a 5-8 hour layover every time (and by the way, it is just enough distance outside of Paris not really to make the ride into town worthwhile!) and it gives me time to make the mental preparations to put work out of my mind, or to access the work files in my brain yet again.

When that plane touches down in Amman, I am back at work. I wait until the last minute to return, always hoping to keep the jet lag at bay, and I dive into the many, many meetings. Yesterday was a nearly 8-hour spate of meetings with the senior staff, and today I met for several hours helping prepare for the teacher orientations in the next week.

As we began our senior staff meeting yesterday, our leader, the wonderful head of school John Austin, reminded us that each year “we have the chance to create the school culture we seek anew.” Yes, indeed-y, that is one of my favorite things about the school world. You have this break, you shake off the travails of the year, and then you get that chance to start fresh, to begin anew.

But before we bask in the newness of the year, let me just enjoy the summer one last moment as I put it in the memory book.

What was the best part of summer? What did I do? I mentioned a number of things in my blog entry about 10 days ago—remember, the portals I would open into the past/present/future of my life. Besides my encounters with friends and family—simply wonderful and meaningful, the best thing I did this summer was go to a performance of the Broadway play, Warhorse.

Now I don’t want to dwell too long on the dearth of theater in Jordan, but I gotta tell you, when I hit New York, I gobble up theater like a fat kid gobbles up chocolate cake. I try and go every day, and I try and see as much variety. The Broadway stuff is expensive, but there are still ways to go and see many things. Four mornings this July I went down to a Broadway theater to wait in line for a few rush tickets to be sold at $30 (remember the going rate is now $130!!!) and I still got the half-price line available, and Christy still has one of those great services that offer some shows at $4.50 (those are like the remainder bins in department stores, but hey, theater is theater!).

But Christy had gone ahead and paid full price for one show, the British import Warhorse. What did we know about it? We knew it had won the Tony Award for Best Play for 2010-11, and we knew that it had puppets. Oh, gosh. Puppets? Puppets. I mean, I did love Lion King and I found Avenue Q clever, but as a general rule, I am not excited about puppets. But I had read a review that called the play, “swoon-inducing.” Well, now. And it was produced by Lincoln Center—a sign of class and pedigree. So she plunked down the money for us for full price for Warhorse!

This was the most magical few hours of my summer, apart from time with family and friends. Warhorse was stunningly theatrical and charismatic and captivating.

The story is a pretty simple narrative—it comes from a novel for teens set around the Great War in England as Albert Narracott, the son of a ne’er-do-well, liquor-loving Devon farmer and a hard-working mum, yearns for a horse. When Dad, drunk as usual, buys Joey at an auction — an act of sibling rivalry toward his hoity-toity brother — young Albert takes on the animal’s care and feeding with deep enthusiasm. You probably guess one of the pleasures of this story—Warhorse speaks, cannily and brazenly, to that inner part of adults that cherishes childhood memories of a pet as one’s first — and possibly greatest — love. This is a show for people who revisit films like “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “The Yearling,” and “Old Yeller.”

But this is not just a play that registers as agreeable children’s entertainment. Joey, our half-thoroughbred horse, is a puppet. That sounds so one-dimensional, to just write, “Joey… is a puppet.” Joey is summoned into being by a team of strong and sensitive puppeteers. It is a puppet—yet this “puppet” is full of substance and soul. You watch this horse Joey, and admire the love Albert shares with Joey, and then your heart breaks as the father sells Joey to a World War I cavalry regiment.

So what is this Warhorse about? It is about imagination and majesty and love and adolescence and growing up and cold realities and hope and determination.

As the play unfolded, I did what I love to do during live performances—I watched the audience as often as I could. This was a matinee crowd and looked like a typical New York crowd—not the tourist crowd. I saw tears. I saw men take out handkerchiefs and choke back tears. Now come on—let’s get real. For a moment I admonished my inner self to stay observant and see the play for what it really was—a group of well-made, very large horse puppets. Two men can stand inside the puppet, one at the shoulders, and one under the hips and hind legs. A third man is at the side as if leading him along on a stafflike object resembling a lead line. I reminded myself that there were humans operating these beautifully engineered, lifelike horses. But as I watched, the cold reality melted away, and instead it was brilliant how the staff of Warhorse could move these staid New Yorkers to an emotional state.

The show’s storybook sensibility is enhanced by projections of drawings on what looks like an outsize strip of torn paper, which fluidly convey shifts of time and setting. After Joey is sold by Albert’s father to a cavalry regiment bound for France, the production’s look segues from idyll to nightmare, with harrowing images of walking corpses, enveloping shadows and death-machine tanks and guns. And of barbed wire, on which many a good horse met its end during World War I. Though human characters repeatedly bite the dust, it’s the horses on which our deeper hopes and fears are focused. And it’s the visions of their being fatally tangled in wire that are the show’s most unsettling. Albert goes in search of Joey through the hellish trenches of France. I won’t tell you how the story ends—Steven Spielberg has done a movie version of Warhorse which premieres in December.

But it’s not the actual narrative that is so breath-taking. It is the theatrical imagination to take an ordinary thing and make it far more extraordinary that it could have been or should have even been. Every so often, a pair of balladeers show up to sing about how we all “shall pass from this earth and its toiling” and be “only remembered for what we have done.” The implicit plea not to be forgotten applies not just to the villagers, soldiers and horses portrayed here, but also to theater, as an evanescent art that lives on only in audiences’ memories.

And also to the summer where precious evanescent reconnections are made with family and friends.

And also to the fragile beauty and ordinary-ness of school. Warhorse and school seem to intersect in quite a few ways for me, but perhaps in one important lens by which to view the unfolding of life’s adventures: both are about how the dirt that gets kicked in our faces sometimes gets transformed into magic dust.

Here I am—back for year 5 in Jordan…fresh from a summer and ready for the untold miracles of a school year, evanescent memories, cold realities, hope, determination, ordinary things transformed…I’d say that is “swoon-inducing” indeed.

Let’s begin anew!

2-4-6

2011-08-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

It has been seven weeks since I last checked in with you on the blog. I have been on my summer sabbatical in the United States doing perhaps what I do best—talking and eating. I take a sabbatical from the blog on one hand since I am not in work mode, and do not sit at a computer much in the summer, but also because I don’t know if my list of friends I see makes for interesting reading. Not that my friends are not interesting, but we often do not plow new ground, but re-connect, re-live, re-invigorate important relationships. I don’t know if the list of meals and friends makes for profound reading. I mean, in all of these wonderful and soul-stirring reconnections, nothing here is exactly new, but that is why I enjoy them so much. My summer is a collection of “my greatest hits” of relationships, and I enjoy the familiarity of them so much.

The title of this blog entry has to do with the way much of my summer is handled. I spend a good deal of time in the summer with my calendar out, scheduling friends and family for meals and visits. I choose “vacation” spots based on who I get to see, not a new locale, or incredible new beach, or really a new sight at all. I look at where I can go and with whom I can re-connect. Then in a rather OCD kind of fashion, I “schedule” people into time slots of generally 2-hour, 4-hour or 6-hour durations. That sounds so clinical, and I guess even impersonal, but my summer is actually one long personal re-connection with loved ones. This summer my travel companion Anne and I went to the Seattle area not just to revel in the beauty of the Olympic mountains and lakes of the Northwest region, but also to revel in the beauty of relationships with former students. However, even I have to chuckle at how the summer seems to break down into those 2-4-6 hour blocks. I will visit with dear friend Tony for four hours, go to a concert with dear friend Sylvia and enjoy a two hour visit, or since Dawn is always on warp speed, a 2-hour meal is sped by in lightning speed.

Two weeks ago I had a “cancellation,” i.e. one of my former students slotted for a “two hour” had a death in the family and had to jet off to Florida. Into this unexpected free time I went to the movies with Christy to see Woody Allen’s 41st film, Midnight in Paris. What a charming movie! It opens with a couple on holiday in Paris with her parents. The couple, Gil and Inez, are officially in love; he’s at work on a novel about “a guy who owns a nostalgia shop” and at the same time indulging in the virtual time travel that Paris affords a certain kind of visitor. Gil yearns to sit at a table where Hemingway drank wine or meet Scott and Zelda—and imagine that they just stepped out to take the air. Ahhhh…nostalgia…the good old days.

The definitive poem in English on the subject of cultural nostalgia may be a short verse by Robert Browning called “Memorabilia.” It begins with a gasp of astonishment — “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?” — and ends with a shrug: “Well, I forget the rest.” Isn’t that always how it goes? The past seems so much more vivid, more substantial, than the present, and then it evaporates with the cold touch of reality. Some good old days are so alluring because we were not around, however much we wish we were. Midnight in Paris imagines what would happen if that wish came true. It is marvelously romantic, even though — or precisely because — it acknowledges the disappointment that shadows every genuine expression of romanticism. Midnight in Paris shows a Paris both golden and gray, breezy and melancholy, and immune to its own abundant clichés. Paris in the 1920s—now THAT was a time! Pablo Picasso, on the cusp of his painterly brilliance; Ernest Hemingway, hunting wild beasts and churning out prose of inner bravado; Gertrude Stein, at the hub of it all. And the surrealists—Dali, Bunuel, and Man Ray—striving valiantly to live life in the non sequitur.

And then it happens. One night as Gil is out for a midnight stroll, an extended vintage motor carriage comes by and picks him up. This is his magical ride to the Paris of yore, the Paris he's been pining for, the Paris he's been utterly romanticizing. All the luminaries are there. He takes this trip each night, developing relationships with them, and realizing their own human neuroses. Pablo Picasso, the uncertain lover; Ernest Hemingway, the unblinking blowhard; Gertrude Stein, enduring mother hen. And the surrealists—Dali, Bunuel, and Man Ray—striving ridiculously to live life in the non sequitur. This humanization of these icons of the art world is as amusing to Gil as it is to us. The electricity of the time is felt as he makes not just priceless connections and contacts, but friendships. The magic and charm of 1920s Paris is right out in front of everything, but at the same time, the imperfections begin to show, and not just the contrasts, but the comparisons to his present-time situation grow all the more evident. In fact, he realizes that the gift of nostalgia, the present of nostalgia, is actually a better understanding of the present day.

As I watched the film, and enjoyed the delightful return to a certain time period, the 1920s, and then La Belle Epoque, I realized that my summer was like this movie. Over and over this summer I have been like Gil, enjoying a trip into the past, reveling in the excitement of another age and the relationships of that time.
I began the summer with the ultimate trip down memory lane, a reunion of the Denison Singers, an event chronicled in the blog before, when we had met in the spring of 2008 and again in the fall of 2010. This four-day love-fest/song-fest is a doorway to the the 1980s, rekindling friendships and love of music that had been so important to my college years.

But the summer proved to have many doors to my past. This summer I found an old friend from the 1970s, a friend from Kirkwood that had meant so much for a decade, then as time does, we traveled down different paths. This friend David and I started visiting on Facebook, then on the phone, and we laughed about old jokes and fun times from our youth. On a trip to Gastonia and Charlotte, North Carolina, I opened the doors to the late 1980s as I visited with Cookie, and the early 1990s as I visited with Chuck. In my two weeks in the New York area, I opened the doors to the late 20th century and early 21st century as I visited with friends from the Hackley chapter of my life.

On the trip to Seattle, I visited with Stefan and Sean, such important figures in my 2000-2006 life, but then for a day, for a great four-hour slot I got to see Louise again (first time since 1993) and enjoyed the doorway to 1991-92.

Have I done anything new? Oh, I saw theater productions in New York, and especially enjoyed the phenomenal play, Warhorse, but my summer really has been like Gil’s happy adventures in Midnight in Paris—through the portals of a happy past. At the Frick Museum I bumped into Rika Burnham, the greatest museum educator I have ever known, and that little 10-minute slot was a wonderful doorway remembering how she electrified and inspired me in 1994-95. Then two nights ago when my dad and I went out to dinner in Cincinnati, we bumped into my two greatest high school teachers, sisters Mrs. Michaels and Mrs. Schneider. It was Mrs. Michaels’ birthday, and I got to enjoy these two icons and remember my debt to them for 30 years. I had a two-hour slot with Miss Wilson in July, the third in the troika of my greatest teachers of my youth…

As I look back over this summer, nothing here is exactly new, and that is what I wanted in my summer. But—and here is the important part of my summer and the parallel to this gem of a movie—very little is stale either. Woody Allen has gracefully evaded the trap of nostalgia with a credible blend of whimsy and wisdom. The movie makes clear that those good old days are seen through the clichéd rose-colored glasses, but the greatest point is how we live in the present, and the “present” of the present. That a shared love of Cole Porter’s music allows the movie character Gil to forge a connection in the present (and conceivably the future) with a young Parisian woman is a sign that his fetishizing of bygone days has been based on a mistake. Paris is perpetually alive, not because it houses the ghosts of the famous dead but because it is the repository and setting of so much of their work. And the purpose of all that old stuff is not to consign us to the past but rather to animate and enliven the present.

That is how I have felt about my 2-4-6 appointments of the summer! When I visited with Laura Hirschberg at Carmine’s Italian eatery (the scene of so many delightful meals for me in 1994-95) or enjoyed the annual visit with Sharon, it was not a musty trip down the ghosts on memory lane, but a reminder of where we come from, and how that animates and enlivens our present.

Ah, did I once see these childhood friends plain? How strange they seem, and new. And relevant. And enlivening.

Still in Wonder

2011-06-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

In the first and second year of KA it was not uncommon that I would hear things from students like, “This Shakespeare is amazing!” or “I never read an entire book before,” or “Doing a play is more exciting than I imagined,” and of course the ubiquitous, “I never liked history before,” all absorbed and transfixed in the wonder of what they were doing and experiencing.

So here we are, at the very end of the fourth year of the school, two hours away from my getting on a plane that will take me to Paris and then to Cincinnati for summer vacation. What is it like now at the end of the fourth year?? For experienced educators, there can be great danger in losing the wonder. The improvements in the school or students that once thrilled us may become more familiar and academic. We may fall into the lethargy of using our minds but not always our hearts.

I have not found it hard to keep growing in wonder, however. I am still moved by what we have done in these four years, and the possibilities of where our students might go. It is still enormous work here, but very satisfying work. I am reminded of the great Stephen Sondheim song, “Finishing the Hat,” in Sunday in the Park With George when George sings, “Look, I made a hat…where there never was a hat.” Look—we made a school, where there never was a school!

It is not hard to keep growing in wonder when I look at two of my colleagues, both of whom have turned 70 in the last 3 weeks. Joan and Nancy have been teaching since the year I was born, and they are vibrant, warm, enthusiastic, optimistic, necessary, and full of wonder themselves. It is not hard when you work for such a good man as our headmaster, John. He is visionary, intelligent, humorous, considerate, hard-working, and believes in the “hat,” the mission of the school. Julianne has had an outstanding year, tightening up the structure of the school and ensuring that we run a tight ship. The tight ship means we can focus on all the good things of a school. It is not just structure, but a matrix upon which we can rely so we get to do the good stuff, to keep exploring new layers of wonder.

I am still in wonder at what is going on in the Arab world. As I look back on the last six months in this region of the world, at what many call, “The Arab Spring,” I am in wonder. How interesting, indeed, what poetic justice, you might say, that Osama bin Laden died at the exact moment he was made irrelevant by the Arab Spring. None of the wave of democratic uprisings transforming the Islamic world were inspired by bin Laden’s despotic, twisted version of Islam. Instead, they were fueled by waves of well-educated young people, including women, who want the chance to vote in free and open elections. No one in Liberation Square in Cairo chanted his name. I am still in wonder at the possibilities at what may take place.

Of course none of us knows what the four years at KA will actually do/for/to our students. But at the end of this year it is marvelous to look back at a calm year, an invigorating year, a year of great scholarship, of great thinking, of empathy, of respect and responsibility, of bittersweet loss as we graduated our first four-year class.

So I want you to know, I am still in wonder at this project. Now, I didn’t write as much on the blog this school year. In 2007-08 I wrote 90 blog entries, and then the next year I wrote 72 blog entries. In 2009-10 I wrote 63 blog entries, and this school year I only wrote 48 blog entries. Of course the excitement of seeing a camel is no longer new, but the wonder at what our work can accomplish still sets my heart racing and my brain zigzagging.

But it is time for summer. I will now take my annual sabbatical from the blog, with an update in July, but a break from the writing and pondering and planning of the blog. Someday I would love to convey some of the stories that don’t make it into the blog. It would be interesting to describe for you the horror and the humor of this insane teacher’s breakdown. It would be interesting to relay what the loss of a friendship means. It would be interesting to try and sum up what it is like to work with some difficult and inscrutable colleagues. But the point of this blog is not to air dirty laundry anyway or vent my spleen. I write this blog to communicate the wonder I feel as this project unfolds.

So here is to summer…here is a poem suggested to me by Steve Shapiro, a friend I made on the conference to Kathmandu last fall. The picture at the top of the page is the subject of the poem, and a kind of flower seen around in Jordan in April.

Camas Lilies
Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground bulbs
for flour, how the settler’s hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you—what of your rushed and
useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything,
leaving only a note: “Gone to the fields
to be lovely. Be back when I’m through
with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake.
Of course, your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.-Lynn Ungar

So in about two hours I head out for the summer. The first day of work is exactly 8 weeks from today. But for right now, I am going to do exactly what the poem suggests, I am going to set “it all down—the papers, plans, appointments, everything.” I might also do exactly as the poem suggests and when I turn the key in the apartment door lock, I may tape a note on my door: “Gone to the fields to be lovely. Be back when I’m through with blooming.”

Ahhhh…enjoy the summer. Steep yourself in wonder. Go to your own fields and be lovely!

Camping With Henry and Tom

2011-06-18T22:27:00.000-07:00

Back in the day (have I ever mentioned how much I don’t like that imprecise phrase??!) when I first moved to New York with the Klingenstein Fellowship (I don’t like the phrase because as a historian, I like the precision of saying 1994-95 instead of the vague, generic, ‘back in the day…’) among the dozens of plays I saw in that ‘Cinderella’ year was a play called Camping With Henry and Tom. Part of the gimmick of this play was wondering what would real important people talk about on a camping trip. The ‘Henry and Tom’ of the title refer to the real important people of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who actually did go on a real camping trip with the head of state, the President of the United States, Warring Harding, back in the early 1920s. It was a satisfying play, and does allow us to think of leaders of countries and leaders of industries kicking back and going camping.

Last month I had my own version of Camping With Henry and Tom. Now from the picture above, it would look like a strange version of Henry and Tom. No, those two colleagues are Lyndy and Jill, colleagues who work in the University Counseling Office here at KA. Last month we had the opportunity to go with the senior class on a camping trip with His Majesty. I got to go on a camping trip with a head of state! Not too much unlike when buddies Ford and Edison went with sitting President Harding. Ha!

I am not the biggest fan of camping, but let’s face it, the company here makes the difference! His Majesty started a tradition last year of taking the senior class on a camping trip and of course it is an exciting prospect to join His Majesty down in Wadi Rum in southern Jordan for an overnight camping trip.

A couple days before the camping trip I had a call from one of our administrators and she said, “I am going to ask you something weird, but I really want to know. Do you like to ride motorcycles?” Yes, it was strange and random, but I answered that I had not ever ridden a motorcycle and I had once promised my parents I would not ride one. As she inquired, I kind of guessed the purpose of the call. His Majesty is a big fan of motorcycle riding, and she did not want to say, but I figured I was turning down a chance to ride motorcycles with the King. Yes, indeed, that was the case, but I am not sure I should have answered any differently.

Anyway, camping day arrives, and the senior class and a dozen chaperones board the busses for the four hour trip down to this mysterious beautiful desert spot that is captured forever in Lawrence of Arabia. When we arrive we are met by a fleet of about 25 silver SUVs that will whisk us to the camp site. It was impressive since the other two times I had been down there I had taken rides in two of the most battered, uncomfortable pick-up trucks I could have imagined.

When we arrive at the camp site, we meet the team from Protocol from the Royal Court who tell us the program of the camping adventure. We have lunch and then can wander around the craggy rocks of the area, and then we can enjoy all the guns at the shooting range. His Majesty is a big military guy, and I had been told how he makes these guns, real guns, available for shooting practice. As everyone finds tents (and by the way, thankfully, these are tents with floors, electric lights, sunscreen, and hand sanitizer—this may turn out to be my kind of camping!!) we relax in the various venues set up for the kids to enjoy themselves with unlimited soda and candy and the lunch station, the tents, the volley ball area, what will be an enormous camp fire, and the shooting range.

I don’t know whether I should go and shoot or not—it had been since YMCA camp in the 1970s when I had done any shooting, and those of course were BB guns. But when Lyndy and Jill went over to shoot, I thought, I might as well try everything our camp experience has to offer. There were pistols and rifles and machine guns. Real ones! Some gentlemen were there to help us learn how to shoot and how not to get hurt from the kickback of the gun. My parents would be pleased to know that after the shooting experience I would not want to re-live my childhood and shoot more or change my life goals and join the military. But it was an experience to hold a real gun and shoot at a target.

After a little while His Majesty arrived, eager to meet the students and visit with them…and take them on tank rides! He arrived in jeans and a t-shirt, and of course he cuts quite a charismatic figure. He said he loves to take people on tank rides and the tank could handle about 4 people inside the tank, and then about 12 people could ride on the tank as he drove around the desert. As he got in for the first ride, he said to the students around him, “Now I can’t always hear when I drive this thing, so if it gets too uncomfortable, just tap me on the head so I know.”

Let’s just process all of this…a head of state, in jeans and a t-shirt, taking giddy students and teachers around, in a real tank, and if we have a problem we could tap him on the head.

Okay.

Obviously I had to go on a tank ride! The picture above is from inside the tank when Lyndy and Jill and I rode inside the tank. Then we joined the line to jump on top for the ride on top of the tank. The inside ride was hot and not a very good view. The outside ride was exciting, yet incredibly dusty and I held on for dear life as His Majesty zoomed over the sand dunes in the desert. Neither ride is something I thought I might ever do when I ventured into the classroom for the first time in the fall of 1986!!

Before the camping trip the Royal Court had impressed on all of us that we could indeed take pictures on the camping trip, pictures with His Majesty, but we were asked that we use them strictly for private purposes and that we not put pictures of him on the internet. As I have come to see, the Royal Court wants to control the images of the king, and so we were asked not to put them on facebook or blogs. That is why you see a picture of me with Lyndy and Jill, a la Henry and Tom, and not one of me with the king. But if you come over and see me sometime, I will show you this great shot of me leaning up against the tank chatting with the king. Now I have a little sense of what camping with Henry and Tom was like!

That night we had a dinner—and this was a buffet dinner that forever will make my mouth water. Some of the best steak, some of the best food was ‘rustled’ up for us. Actually, I should thank the staff, the staff of about 30 whose job it was to make sure our camping trip was a great experience.

During dinner a student came and told me that John, our headmaster, wanted to see me.
I went over and John said, “His Majesty would like to talk with you one-on-one.” No way! So I walk over and sit down and this man who seemed to like the same foods on the buffet that I did, put his plate down, and said, “I want to thank you for the work you did with Hussein this year. He enjoyed your class more than I can say.” In this chat, what was so wonderful was the look in his eye. I am blessed to say I have seen that look before—the look of a parent so grateful that his or her child had been transformed by something in school. He and I talked about art history, and about writing, and about school, and about adolescence and teaching, and about how he and his wife do not know much about art history but they are amazed at what their son knows.

I have seen this man on campus many times over these four years, as a man proud to have started a school like this, as a man who realizes everyone wants to meet him, shake his hand, have a photo taken, as a man with security guards, usually in a suit and school tie. But here I was, sitting casually with this man, this head of state, and I was talking solely to a grateful and interested father. I guess he doesn’t get to do that all that much—he doesn’t get to do all the parent’s day things and parent-teacher conferences. He and I talked about the incredible leaps Hussein had made as a scholar this year, and he very kindly said, “You will be the teacher he remembers as the teacher that helped him grow the most.” Of course I was trying to tell him about how wonderful his son was, but he wanted to make sure I knew how proud and grateful he was. I said, “I get to teach him again next year too. I know it will be a great year.”

The conversation came to an end. But what a wonderful moment. Stripped of any folderol, it was just a warm parent-teacher conference sitting by a fire in the deserts of southern Jordan. Soon after that His Majesty spent the next couple hours talking with a gaggle of kids about politics and college and leaving KA and Jordan and their families. He was clearly pleased. He got to sit and talk and be as real as any generous man could be. He was obviously happy and in his element.

Of course the senior class stayed up all night. We knew it was in the cards! The adults, well, some of them, took shifts of chaperoning, and shifts of 90-minute naps so we could monitor loosely and make sure everything went well. The following morning had a breakfast buffet and then a trek across the terrain and a climb up the biggest sand dune I have ever seen in my whole life.

My shoes are still covered in the ochre and rust-colored sand of Wadi Rum, and I still don’t know if I am a camper, per se, but what an extraordinary time with a class I have enjoyed so well, and getting to talk to a father about how well his son has done. A satisfying time.

The People In The Picture

2011-06-17T23:15:00.000-07:00

I might have missed this wonderful little art exhibit if I hadn’t been mad at the moment.

Okay, back in spring break I was going to meet Christy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Now if you know Christy, you know that among her many gifts, punctuality is not in that line-up. I called. I texted. She was on her way. I waited. Finally, we met up. What was most egregious to me is that when she had arrived she didn’t even look for me! She just figured no one would wait for her since she was so late. So she went about looking around in the Met while I had continued to wait. Then when we finally met up, and I heard the tale of how she didn’t wait anticipating I wouldn’t wait…well, I was steamed.

To blow off some steam I decided to duck into this small exhibit in the Met and let myself cool down.

The exhibit was something about this Cezanne painting called The Card Players. I figured I would admire the Cezanne and then resume the afternoon plans.

But in this little exhibit on this seemingly mundane painting, as usual at the Met, I was greeted with a world of knowledge, and realized yet again how easy it is to overlook something. Or certainly to forget that there is probably more depth from what first meets the eye.

Look at the painting at the top. It is very typical Cezanne. He paints with a rough texture, reminding the viewer of the painterly qualities of composition and how he loves to explore the “volumetrics” of people and subjects in his paintings.

But there was more. Cezanne had picked a topic in art history (card playing) that had a long history—I kind of knew this, but not to the extent I would learn in the next half hour! For about 500 years painters had taken up the subject of card playing so as to moralize and weigh in on the dangers of bad choices in one’s life. Durer and Caravaggio are two of the famous artists who had added to the debate about how card playing could ruin your life.

But the curator of the show wrote that Cezanne had no desire to sermonize about the evils or sins of card playing. He simply wanted to pick up a thread of art history, the oft-told tale of card playing, and ask the viewer to look at the people playing. Cezanne had no interest in trying to shape the moral life of a young viewer. He wanted us to look at the people playing cards, not the demon instruments in their hands. Cezanne asked the gardeners at his estate to pose for the painting. Of course they must have been surprised—it was common knowledge that there are certain people who make for subjects of art works, and certain people who definitely do not have the status to be the subject of an art work.

As I walked around the room—the Met had put other examples of the moralizing card player paintings and etchings around—I saw what Cezanne was going for. Cezanne was doing what really great teachers try and do. He wanted us to look more deeply, beyond the surface or concrete subject of what was going on. He wrote, and the Met quoted him, that he wanted his hardscrabble gardeners to look important, to have the same kind of volume and value as a pharaoh from Egypt, or a king from Europe, or a banker.

I quickly got over my frustration with the Late One (I have had to do that many times in the nearly 17 years I have known Christy!) and went and got her to show her around the room. As we walked around the room, we realized how easy it is to overlook something, or someone, seemingly mundane. There is always a story there, for us to explore. Cezanne was urging us to get past silly moralizing (I won’t even begin to make jokes about politicians who spout Family Values and then end up resigning amidst tears and shame) and focus on people. Who are these men? What are their stories? What do we learn about them? What more do we need to know to better understand them?

What a lovely lesson and reminder in that quick little art exhibit on Cezanne.

Later that week Christy and I went to see a Broadway show about which we knew next to nothing. We knew it starred the spectacular performer Donna Murphy and we knew the title, The People In The Picture, and we knew we got to go for $4 each. What else does one need to know???

As we entered the theater (the rehabbed old disco palace Studio 54) we saw all these black and white photos up on the walls of families we didn’t know. The stage had been created as one giant picture frame angled out towards the audience with an enormous crack in it. As the musical began a photograph of unknown people projected above the stage. Who were these people? What was the point? It turns out this was a musical about an episode in the Holocaust.

Other than the creation of the state of Israel, the greatest and most profound reaction to the Holocaust has been the extraordinary outpouring of art that has attempted to come to terms with this egregious event, from The Diary of Ann Frank to Cabaret to Schindler’s List and on and on. The People In The Picture, this heart stopping musical, would be the most recent attempt. The People In The Picture asks us to take a hard look at the suffering and loss that resulted from this diaspora and tragedy.

The people in this picture of the show is “The Warsaw Gang,” a ragtag troupe of actors barely surviving, but finding solace and entertaining their fellow Jews amidst the pogroms and poverty of 1930s Poland. Their story is told in flashback as troupe leader Raisel, nearing the end of her life, shares her life’s journey with her granddaughter, Jennie.

In her memories, The Warsaw Gang literally comes to life on stage in all its glory and ultimate tragedy. And even though we know from the start that Raisel survived the Holocaust, it is only at the play’s climax that we learn the terrible toll it took on her and her unhappy daughter.

The triumph of The People In The Picture is that the show insists upon—and earns—heroic stature for even small gestures of humanity. A man loses his life over bringing a doll to a little girl. Another man is knifed to death because he cannot ultimately joke his way out the anti-Semitism of bullies. One by one the good and noble people we have come to admire and understand from the picture are murdered. By the end of the show we know so much more, we feel so much more for the people in the picture.

Donna Murphy miraculously morphs back and forth between robust womanhood and old age. I watched how as one number ended, simply by taking her glasses out of her pocket and rolling up her sleeves, it was as if she aged 40 years. She was marvelous.

Christy and I loved the show. But there were many in the audience who thought it was ridiculous and stupid. At intermission we heard two young, 20-somethings harrumphing their way out of the theater uttering, “That’s 75 minutes of my life I won’t ever get back.” They just didn’t get it. Oh well. At the end of the show there was a “talk-back” with some of the actors and creative team of the show. Christy and I love these things—we always learn more and get more juicy context about a show.

The people who stayed for the talk-back, maybe only about 30, glowed with appreciation for the show. Many of them were grand-children of survivors of the Holocaust, and they always struggled how to better understand the enormous sufferings of their grandparents. The writer of the show said that that was why she wrote this piece. She found a few photographs from her parents and just wondered about their lives, she needed to figure out what made these people in these pictures tick. The grateful audience applauded them and thanked them for humanizing this period in a new way. Christy and I walked home, grateful that in that city we experienced so many moments in which we learned and remembered to consider people and incidences we might overlook. As I anticipated coming back to Jordan after spring break to finish, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, I relished that opportunity to think about those sepia pictures and their lives.

So—one art exhibit reminds us that attention must be paid to even the card players in a painting. And another musical urges us to consider what goes on beyond the borders of a photograph. How stunning to have these reminders—almost like the biblical urgency to “consider the lilies of the field.”

As I pack up for the year, think about graduation and all the hundreds of pictures taken at the conclusion of this school year, it is important to think of those pictures and the people. Decades from now will viewers know the struggles, experience the joys that brought those teen-agers to that moment? Will the men and women look back and see beyond the tossing of a hat, or see that the smile is so well-earned because it was hard to get there? How good to remember to look beyond the borders of the photographs we find and try and re-create the epic battles and triumphs that allowed that photograph to come into being.

Oh, I love learning from art and theater! I am reminded of the great quotation from the snarky writer Paul Rudnick: “Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children.”

She asked, gingerly

2011-06-17T02:21:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most intriguing question posed to me this school year came a few months ago when a student asked, gingerly, indeed politely but delicately, “Why are Americans so obsessed with the Holocaust?”As with everything, don’t you know, context helps us explain and understand things more.

This student, one of that wonderful coterie of students at KA I have taught every day for the last four years, is Jordanian-Palestinian-Lebanese but has lived most of her life in California. She really does understand and enjoy both worlds.

Her question did not come out of nowhere. We had been studying the Berlin Olympics of 1936, and one of the saddest realizations of the aftermath of studying that Olympics designed and executed with German precision and taste, is that many of the European Jewish athletes who attended and won medals in Berlin would later die in Nazi concentration camps. Naturally, our discussion morphed into the meaning and the teaching of the Holocaust.

When this diligent, happy, marvelous student asked her question, “Why are Americans so obsessed with the Holocaust?” many faces quickly looked to see if I was upset with her query. But they were riveted with what my answer might be. Of course I wasn’t upset—one of the greatest joys of my four years in Jordan is that I am often allowed to be out of my comfort zone and learn things, reflect on things, decide about things that would not come up in the United States.

This excellent historian then asked, “Do Americans study the Armenian genocide as much? Do they study the kulaks in the Soviet Union? the Filipinos under the care of the Americans? The Chinese of Nanking under the Japanese occupation in the 1930s? The Muslims of Bosnia in 1990s Yugoslavia?” Again, she did not ask any of these rapid-fire questions stridently. As we all know, Americans have little interest or knowledge about these other examples of genocides or mass killings. In our History of the 20th Century class, we had discussed all those other examples, and as you might imagine, the class sat dumb-founded at the too-many examples of reckless mass killings and carnage of the 20th century. She really wanted to know—why, then, are Americans so interested in the Holocaust?

Here was a great teachable moment—we wondered if the answer is that there are so many people of Jewish descent? No, that is not the case. Nor can it be that so many Americans have known Holocaust survivors. (I met my first survivor when I moved to New York in 1994.) Is it guilt over the Holocaust that creates such zeal to teach about it in American curricula? Off the top of my head I wondered, if in part, Americans have been drawn to the Holocaust because of the sheer amount of evidence left to us by the Germans. The Germans documented things so well—in large part since they were creating a “Museum of Inferiority” which would showcase the Final Solution in a seriously-folks-they-planned-it-for-real-museum which would have been in Prague. The photographs, film, interviews, statistics, etc. all are so available that that makes it so much in the forefront of our brains. There is not much evidence about the Armenian genocide of 1919. Indeed, there is so little evidence that the Turkish government insists it is exaggerated and did not really happen as survivors claim. And what of the movies? There have been dozens of films about the Holocaust in the last 45-50 years…where are the Hollywood films about the other peoples’ plights?

It made for a great discussion, simply trying to figure out why Americans have studied that example of injustice and hatred more than any other world history grievance. And, then I asked, ”Why are Arabs so opposed to any mention or study of the Holocaust?”

I knew most of what their responses were, but it was instructive to listen to each other and formulate an answer. None of their answers really had anything to do with anti-Semitism, although that would be what most of us would assume. Some of the answers lay in the question, simply why can’t there be a balance of all people’s suffering? One student finally cracked open what some wondered would come to light, or at least public light in our class. “The state of Israel has capitalized so much on the Holocaust, and has cheapened it, so that some people are just tired of that being the answer and reason for everything.”

This sentiment is one of the most important to understand about the Middle East, but not just the so-called exploitation of the Holocaust. It cuts to the core of the most searing problem in Jordan—the issue of Palestine.

Let’s go back to all this context…I mentioned this exchange in class today because I wanted to set the stage for why it was daring to produce I Never Saw Another Butterfly here in Jordan. Yes, it is a beautiful play about survival, about family and friends, and a memorable teacher. But the subject makes some people uncomfortable and some would prefer it never be broached. Never. Not in school. Certainly not in the faculty lounge.

I had the idea to produce my warhorse play about the children’s concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, not simply to raise the idea of the Holocaust here. In some ways, the Holocaust does not intrude much on the play. You never see a Nazi, and there is no gratuitous violence. But I got the idea for the play when last autumn a group of student-actors appeared at our school doing monologues about the Israeli occupation and war of 2009. As these teen-agers performed their “Gaza Monologues” I was struck by the parallels between this contemporary drama and I Never Saw Another Butterfly. But of course, it shouldn’t have been so surprising—both were dramas about the refugee experience, the phenomena of having daily life disrupted or shunted due to an occupation force. I couldn’t get over how similar the feelings were. I went to our headmaster and suggested I direct I Never Saw Another Butterfly and pair it with the Gaza Monologues. I made clear that we were tackling a subject that could create controversy. He read the play and agreed that the message needed to get out there.

Again, some context helps enormously to see the magnitude of this play choice. Yes, I had directed the play a bazillion times in the USA, but in this region of the world schools are not encouraged to teach about the Holocaust. Pages are ripped out of some textbooks, The Diary of Anne Frank is banned, and I swear that I heard that Fiddler on the Roof was performed in Amman with all the Jewish references taken out! Seriously????!!!

After I spoke with our headmaster, I spoke with Fatina, my friend and colleague of four years. I go to her with every question I have about the Middle East (“Why do your people do this?” I have often asked, and then she sighs, and says, “My people do this because…”). I told her about I Never Saw Another Butterfly and said, “Do you think we can, we should, do this play?” Fatina said it would create some tension, but that definitely the message of the play was vital. Fatina is so important here, and she does insist on teaching the Holocaust even though few teachers in this region would. She teaches about it so that the students understand the desperate need for a national homeland for Jews after World War II.

That lies at the heart of the problem, the tension, the confusion. When we discussed in class about why Jordanians don’t want to discuss the Holocaust, or want to deny it happened, it again is not anti-Semitism, per se. As one student said, “There is so much pain for us associated with the formation of Israel." Over half of Jordan is comprised of refugees expelled from Israel in 1948 or in 1967. I mentioned in class then about the possibility of doing a play about this. I just happened to have a scene from I Never Saw Another Butterfly, ready to read and discuss…I had anticipated the discussion. The scene was the family scene, and if you changed the names and place of Prague, it could easily have been a scene understood by Palestinian families in 1948 and 1967. They understood the worry and fear that everything they knew would change.

The class was extremely interested in the play. One of my most vocal and dynamic students suggested we didn’t need to pair the two plays—he thought it important for our community to really consider the feelings and attitudes of this Jewish family. Of course when the play schedule was shortened, as I mentioned in the other blog, it became necessary to toss out the comparison of the two plays.

However, it is never as simple as collecting some key person’s approvals. On the day of the play, some people at school became quite upset that I would offer a play that would remind people of the pain of the Nakba, the great 1948 expulsion of Palestinians (or worse, glorify the ones who did the expelling). The headmaster and Julianne steadfastly supported me, but a handful of people were quite hurt that I would want to hurt the community so much. I offered to speak to anyone and explain that the play is not a political play, it is not about Zionism, it is a play about survival, and friends and family, and the refugee heartache. Only one of those so upset would speak to me, and while I know they were upset at me, I also did not want our school to go along with the norm and not discuss the issue. It is not about sympathy for Israel, it is about the triumph of the human spirit. It was about the fact that sadly, these experiences have happened too often in the last century and the experiences seem more similar than not.

I did not want to belabor the point that when the Nazis created their Final Solution genocide was the goal. As much as the refugee experience has been similar, Israel has not had that genocidal goal. But I did feel that the experiences had parallels. It made it all the more interesting to watch young, vibrant, Muslim Farah tackle the part of Raya/Raja.

One last little tidbit about context: I told them of a story about how I formed an opinion and how socialization and stories can help construct our opinions. I told them about how in 1978, I watched the Oscars for the very first time. As an 8th grader I was in love with the movies, and watched and cheered on the movie stars. When Vanessa Redgrave won her Best Supporting Oscar for Julia, she was booed and heckled. I thought, “Who is this awful woman? She must be hideous since all of Hollywood is booing her!” A few years later she wins the part of a Holocaust survivor in a movie, and again is castigated for her beliefs.

At the time I just figured, given the Hollywood reaction, this Vanessa Redgrave must be a horrible person. I later came to understand she came under such fire because she believed that Palestinians deserved the right to return, that Israel had acted improperly in the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians.

We sat in class discussing how our impressions are made, how heroes and villains are born and treated, and reminded ourselves to look for as much context as possible to better understand the many facets of the complicated issues of our time.

One last comment about the play—it was received well, but for some it is hard to get past the pain. A student said to Fatina, “That was the first time I felt sorry for a Jew. That surprised me.” Fatina considered the situation and said, “It wasn’t that you thought of her as Jewish or not—she was simply human.”

Human. Humanity. Maybe we are getting closer all the time…

Butterfly Kisses

2011-06-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

Last month at this time I was busy prepping for the opening of my all-time favorite play to direct, I Never Saw Another Butterfly. This was one of the tightest rehearsal schedules I have ever had. Years ago, when I started directing, I came upon the magic number of 25 rehearsals being the optimal amount of rehearsal time. At 2 hours a rehearsal, those 50 hours seemed to yield a quality production. This time the rehearsal period got squeezed like a, what, like a Florida orange, I guess.

Another colleague was doing a play earlier this spring that needed a bit more time, so he postponed the production by two weeks. The problem for me was given the unmovable boundaries of Prom and Graduation, I couldn’t extend my production dates. And on top of that, we had to take a sabbatical due to spring break and the madness around AP tests …so in order to do the play, I simply had to move everyone a little faster. It’s a little like rushing a 9 year-old in taking the training wheels off the bicycle…I think I did the play in about 60% of the time I usually need.

But I am getting ahead of myself…in case you don’t know this play, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, let me give you an overview, and I want to see if you can tell why this play is a provocative choice for us here in the Middle East. Here are the notes I wrote for the program last month that provides some background for the play:

In the summer of 1942, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia—Terezin to the Czechs and Theresienstadt to the Germans—had settled into a deadly rhythm, fulfilling its role as a great reservoir for Jews in central Europe. These Jews came to Terezin on their way to the “Final Solution” at Auschwitz. However, Terezin became known primarily as a “children’s camp,” and a camp noted for its schooling, and its emphasis on the arts. Music and poetry thrived in such an odd place, certainly an unlikely place for a cultural celebration. In fact, strangely enough, the Germans encouraged cultural activities as the Nazis transformed Terezin into a public relations coup. Terezin earned the name of “The Paradise Ghetto,” for the Nazis created Terezin as a false front camp to deceive an all-too-believing outside world. The Nazis used the model ghetto well, wringing every potential drop of propaganda out of the place. Foreign dignitaries and the International Red Cross paraded through Terezin to view how the Germans treated these refugees, leaving with their stamp of approval for the “Paradise Ghetto.”

Many books and films about the Holocaust founder on the hugeness of its scale: individuals get caught up in, and blur into, a faceless mass of victims and victimizers. But I Never Saw Another Butterfly is the particular story of one survivor, Raya Englanderova, a young woman on the cusp of adolescence who endures the unendurable. Her family is a typical family in Prague, stunned at the news of Nazi occupation, and shocked at all the changes in their lives. The family conversation gives the Holocaust a narrative frame and also a pathos. Papa Englanderova and son Pavel are at odds, both coming from different perspectives about what resistance means, and how to deal with the enemy. Eventually Raya is separated from her family and she goes to Terezin, where she joins Irena Synkova’s classroom, a teacher who has found the will to live by nurturing her children. In I Never Saw Another Butterfly author Celeste Raspanti uses the actual poetry from children at the Terezin concentration camp and thus has found a way of imagining the Holocaust, an event that is commonly described as unimaginable.

Through this memory play, one comes away knowing the workings of the ghetto black market, the threat of typhus, the degradation of camp life, and the treasured moments of working together in the classroom. Children like Raya, Zdenka, Bedrich, Olila and Honza kept alive not only their glowing sparks of creativity, but did not shy away from making their art a weapon, a teaching device—pictures which terrify and engross the viewer, but also elevate and enlighten. Besides the opportunity to study and hear the poetry of the children, I Never Saw Another Butterfly raises large and complex questions about survival, about freedom, about suffering, and about the moral choices that people make in response to these issues. Although the Englanderova story is a somewhat fictionalized creation in itself, one is compelled to consider the terrible relation between history and the real human beings who are history’s casualties. As Celeste Raspanti writes, “this play is history as much as any play can be history, showing the best and worst of which the human heart is capable.”

Oh, doesn’t that just stir the soul?!

If you know me well, you know this play. I Never Saw Another Butterfly is the only play I have directed in all four of my schools, and it has been one I have repeated as often as I felt I could. My debut production of I Never Saw Another Butterfly was way back in 1988 at Gaston Day School. Then at Charlotte Latin School I directed the play in 1991, in a summer production in 1992, and as a farewell production in 1996. At Hackley I trotted out my warhorse in 1999 and then again in 2003. This is a play near and dear to my heart! It is a director’s dream, but also, very, very cheap to produce. All you really need is some battered stools, some rags, some endearing young actors, and, if you can swing it, a great spotlight.

Did anyone notice anything from the director’s notes that seems different?? Anyone who knows the play well? I will give you a hint…check out the lead character’s name…see it? I spelled her name Raya. That was the first time in all my productions I spelled it Raya. That isn’t a typo. When I decided to do the play here in Jordan, I thought it wise to change her name from Raja to Raya. Why, you wonder?? One of my great students here at KA is a guy named Raja (and an exceptional historian, I might add). Pronounced the same way as the character in I Never Saw Another Butterfly; spelled the same way as the character in I Never Saw Another Butterfly. I just thought it smart to let Raja stay Raja, a young man, and change the young woman character name to Raya.

I also made a leap of faith in the casting of this part. This part of Raya/Raja is a huge part with 12 monologues and the actress appearing in every scene. She carries the play, and she needs to be an instinctive, gifted actress. Over the years Kathy Grice, Liz Donlevy, Kathleen Coyle, Liz Asti, Megan Winter, Mandy Cloud, Jennie Nolon, Liz Gunnison, Sam Barnard, and Erin Steiner have essayed this role. When I decided to do the part here, I decided I would cast a non-native English speaker for the part. As a director with many non-native English speakers I wanted to send a signal that I didn’t just cast actors with American accents in lead parts. A lovely young woman named Fakher won the part, and while it took enormous effort (for example, she had some early problems with pronouncing all the words, like ‘barracks’) she performed the part with dignity and grace and humor and poise and eloquence. Fakher takes her place with the other fine actresses I have directed and became a model of hard work and commitment. And she did the part and all the monologues in a second language!

The next part that is close to my heart in I Never Saw Another Butterfly is that of the dedicated and wondrous teacher, Irena Synkova. Each of us hopes to know at least one Irena in our lives, a teacher who transforms and loves and cares for the children around her. This part must be played by someone wise and compassionate, an actress who can communicate all the despair and hope in the world just by sitting down on a battered stool. My adult friend Mary was the first of my Irenas, and now from Jordan, an exceptional young woman named Hana Mufti played the part. Irena has one of the great moments in drama when she leaves the schoolroom for the last time and offers a look like the one Mary Tyler Moore offered in her last look at the WJM newsroom at the end of her sitcom. (I still can manage a sitcom reference!!)

There is a sort-of love interest in I Never Saw Another Butterfly as well. Honza is worldly, kind of, goofy, kind of, strong, kind of, caring, kind of, and must credibly convey the promise of what young love offers. In this part I cast the young man whose own friends have dubbed him, “The Mayor of Awesomeville.” Abdullah Khalayleh is one of the most natural actors I have ever directed, and he has the intuition and awareness—dare I use the German word, gewahrsamkeit—of a pro. Abdullah is also reliability personified. At times when an actor could not seem to make it to rehearsal, Abdullah would step in and play that role at that rehearsal. Abdullah can play heartbreaking and then funny in a heartbeat.

Raya/Raja has a family scene that is gripping and dripping with subtext. The family scene is set in Prague as they await to see what the Nazis will do to their lives next. The parents cling to normalcy as they wait and see. It requires actors with skill and patience and also a tension that must explode and haunt. I gotta say Thaer and Hanna and Suhayb delivered the goods. Later in the play there is a wedding scene that is so simple, but since it takes place minutes before the families must part forever, it must have an unsentimental but raw joy to make it work. Suhayb and Giulia looked lovely as they stood there in the night air of the courtyard showing how love can conquer all.

But the heart and soul of I Never Saw Another Butterfly always will be the sections with the children. I have had as few as 8 children in a production, and as many as 45. It is a flexible amount, obviously, but in the school scenes as we see Irena help them process through the realities of their lives, and we hear the plaintive, poignant words these real children once wrote, it never fails to take my breath away.

I am not tired of this play, perhaps never will be, and this production in the deserts of Jordan in May, 2011, stands as a hallmark of my work here. I remember when at my great Khosrowshahi/Polcari going-away party in New York in 2007, dear friend Adam Kahn said he couldn’t wait until I did I Never Saw Another Butterfly in Jordan.

Tomorrow I will write about why this was not a simple decision and how the impact has been on our community.

Oh, I love suspense…come back tomorrow!

For now, savor the words that Raya/Raja says so confidently and unapologetically at the end of the play as she faces life, “not alone, and not afraid.”

Utterly So

2011-06-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

I have been to many, many graduations. I have been to probably 25 graduations now as an educator. I have been to graduations in the morning, in the evening, with caps and gowns and teachers in academic regalia, with students in suits or white dresses. I have been to graduations inside and outside, in gyms, in auditoriums, under tents, in the open air…I know of graduations.

They all start out pretty much the same, once everyone has been seated. The headmaster welcomes the board of trustees, the parents, the faculty, and of course, let’s not forget the graduates.

But you know it is an uncommon graduation when the headmaster begins with “Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies,…” and then goes back to the usual parade of names. Royal Highnesses and Excellences?? Where might I be? Oh, yes, I am living in a kingdom, near other kingdoms, with students who are children of royalty and children of very modest means. It is our graduation at KA. And even beyond that flashy opening, it is a stunning graduation.

This year’s graduation was so much easier than last year. For one thing, we had done it before. We had a template. We had an idea how to deal with the security, with the 1800 or so guests, how to include the entire school, how to…well, you name it. For another thing, the class of 2011 was a bit more “loved” than last year. I hate to be so plainspoken about it, but it is just true. This class was easier to love. And, in case you don’t know, faculty want to love a class. They sincerely do.

Anyway, we learned a thing or two from last year, but mostly used the well-designed template from last year. We did make it an hour later since the desert sun can still be unforgiving at 5:00 in the afternoon.

The first exciting thing about our graduation is the procession—the entire school forms a double inversion gauntlet. Say what? Our founding headmaster, Eric, loved the idea of having the entire school march in a procession through the rest of the school and then invert and continue into the graduation. He calls it the WIG—the Widmer Inversion Gauntlet. What that means is that the underclassmen are all lined up, and then the faculty march through a gauntlet of 11th graders, 10th graders, 9th graders, then they march through a procession of us, and finally, the senior dean and the King lead the seniors, the graduates through a gauntlet of the entire school. It is a heady experience to see the entire school march and parade in front of itself. The dais is exciting because there is His Majesty, and the chairman of the board, a man who formerly was an Ambassador to the US, and our headmaster now, our founding headmaster, and Alia, the one who will read all the names. There is a royal bagpipe crew that played the entire gauntlet and lead us into the grassy area where the graduation is with about 1500-1800 guests.

Two students deliver speeches, one in Arabic, and the other in English. The two students were chosen from a panel of adults and they do a beautiful job. In fact, about every five minutes like clockwork my eyes well up with tears in this graduation.

I probably remarked about it last year, but the graduation last year was a graduation with no tears. I felt robbed! In over 20 years I had never gone through a graduation without tears. I guess it is like people at weddings. It isn’t just the graduates themselves—it is the moment when we graduate our children from childhood and exhort them to follow their dreams and mine their potential. What isn’t there to love about a graduation moment??? We don’t need to go into it anymore, but this was my first graduation since 2007 then with the usual tears and how-will-I-make-it-through-and-I-am-going-to-miss-them-so-much. Two final awards were given: the student as the Valedictorian, and the student chosen by the faculty for the King Abdullah spirit award. I know both young men well, taught them over and over.

The graduation speakers were the Widmers, founders and role models for the early years of the school. Dr. Eric reminded the crowd that when the ground had been broken for the school a few years ago, His Majesty had remarked that this school was certainly four things and must be these four things: “utterly idealistic, utterly progressive, utterly optimistic, and utterly necessary.” They spoke of the genesis of the school, and now here was the first class to go all the way through four years at King’s Academy. Again, I was very weepy as I thought of these students and what these four years have meant.

The aftermath of the graduation at KA is not my favorite part, however. There isn’t a recessional. We tried last year, but the crowd just stormed over Julianne and me as we tried to do the recessional we loved at Hackley, and then the reception is too crowded and too rushed. And, well…really nothing to nosh on either. The evening party at a hotel in Amman is just too over-the-top and loud to be enjoyable. I think I will skip that in the future. It just isn’t what I want in a graduation party. So actually I thought about what I missed from other graduations.

Since I now have nearly a quarter-century of graduations under my belt, I miss the string quartet playing outside of Gaston Day School supporting the small graduating class with Mozart and Haydn. I miss the academic regalia of Charlotte Latin School. I miss the white flowers on the lapels of the young men’s suits at Hackley. I miss the recessional at Hackley where the faculty recessed and then formed a gauntlet and tearily and happily greeted the new graduates as they marched out. I miss the reception where Anne and I stayed until the bitter end hugging and saying farewell. If you said you couldn’t find us—you didn’t really look. We waited until we were the last. I miss the graduation events from Charlotte Latin and Hackley where you visited with families, had backyard cook-outs, or tasteful receptions at country clubs. I miss the sweet presents and letters given from Hackley students.

But there is one part that has been hard from the first graduation as a teacher. How do you relate to these, your former students now? They are not your students anymore, nor are they your peers. It is always a strange paradox, and one in which they seem almost brand-new to you. I have long told senior classes that when they graduate, they get to call the shots about our relationship. I can’t dictate any more. I act more aloof than usual, waiting for them to decide if we will be more friends, or just a great memory. I suspect it is a little like a parent watching a child go through his or her 20s wondering how they will relate to them as adults. I am reminded of a great line from the musical based on the movie, Big. The mother is singing into the cradle of her son, thinking about how fast it all goes in her ballad, “Stop, Time.” She opines in song:

“Nobody warned you of this parent’s paradox. You want your kid to change and grow, but when he does, then another child you’ve just began to know leaves forever.”

I had thought I might write about a number of the seniors, but I think I am just emotionally kaput! I have written college recs about them that quoted Frost, and Flaubert, and Lincoln, and Joyce and Julian Barnes, etc. and lifted passages from their best works about the Greeks or the Europeans, and spun the top about them in class comments and advisor reports—I fear I am out of words for this lovely bunch.

But there is a very fitting way to end the report on this graduating class, and it isn’t about parties or sunny days or caps and gowns or tears. I am thinking of what His Majesty said about this school: “utterly idealistic, utterly progressive, utterly optimistic, and utterly necessary.” That also neatly sums up this class as I have known them these four years. They have been indeed “utterly idealistic, utterly progressive, utterly optimistic, and utterly necessary.”

Graduation Day, 2011

2011-06-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

It is Graduation day here in Jordan, and in just over two hours I will watch our 100 graduates leave the fold and go out into the world. This is bittersweet, as every graduation is, since this is the last class (of two) who was here on the first day the doors opened to this school in the Middle East.

The Class of 2011 chose me to offer a valedictory address last night at the senior dinner. How very honored I am that I got to speak to them at this beautiful dinner under the stars. Here are the remarks I made about this special class:

I Could Talk About Your Class All Night…

I am not allowed, but I could talk about your class all night!

Many of us here tonight were here when the school opened, and we celebrate our first four-year class at King’s Academy. Before the school opened, the faculty were here for four weeks, and during that time, we wondered, what were you going to be like?? Finally, in the third week here, on a random trip to the Administration building, I bumped into a King’s Academy student, two students in the same day. I met Leen. I met Reed. I finally had met one of you. They smiled. I smiled. We talked. They were nice. I thought—this is going to be okay.

They were my first two! Eventually over these four years, I would teach 2/3 of this class. I got a list the other day of your class and I counted up the number of you I would eventually teach. 2/3 of this class—you see why I could talk about your class all night! And then I would teach 31 of you twice, 12 of you three times, and there is a special place in heaven for those 7 students I have taught every day the school has been open.

In your 9th grade year, I taught 37 of you, but it was not easy at first. I don’t know if you remember, but you couldn’t sit still! I brought in a camera to experiment if you could sit still long enough for me to snap your picture. And then there was the problem that almost none of you brought paper and pen to class! Remember? I called a friend of mine and asked what I should do! She said, “Give them candy if they bring pen and paper!” Within a few days, Karim al Zeine brought pen and paper!

I love to remember the candy story because one year later, I taught 10 of you in the first AP history class here and you earned some of the best scores in the world.

In that first year I remember the day, the class, the lesson about ancient India, when you finally thought in class—the day you rose above just filling in answers and thought deeply and sophisticatedly. I remember walking by one of your rooms at night, and one of you was reading Shakespeare for the first time and you said, “This Shakespeare is amazing!” I remember the end of that first year, when we gathered in the courtyard, and many of you spoke so emotionally about how that first year here had affected you. Some of you cried. I remember who cried. For some, I don’t think school had been very meaningful before. I have watched you find meaning in your work, in your school, in each other, over these four years.

I remember in your sophomore year, the night four boys came to my apartment late, and told me I needed to make up a new exam for the following morning. They explained that some of the juniors in AP history had told them what was on the exam that they had taken that day. Those four guys said they wanted an honest chance to see if they knew the material. Really knew what they were doing.

I could talk about your class all night!

As these stories tumble out of my mouth and out of the scrapbook in my brain, there is a common theme here: I have seen you at your best, I have seen you grow, improve, evolve. All these stories are about your best selves.

But your class is not just about me watching—your class is linked to my life’s path. I have stayed in Jordan because of your class. When I came at the beginning, I think I planned to stay about two years. But during your sophomore year, Jude Dajani, the wonderful Jude Dajani, said, “You couldn’t possibly leave until we graduated!” Jude is persuasive! She was right. Jude offered me a verbal contract that has been binding—I have stayed because I love your class. And you know, I am staying past your graduation because of your class as well. You are what King’s Academy can cultivate. I want to see another class match you. I am staying in large part because of the standard you have set. Thank you, Jude Dajani.

At Graduation time, as you are finding out, no doubt, well-meaning adults like to offer advice. Oh, my. They want to tell you what to do, how to do it, and often how to avoid mistakes that they have made. I don’t have advice, per se, but I have two stories to share about when I was your age.

In the fall of my senior year, I attended a conference, and one of the things we had to do, was take a piece of paper with a word on it, and define that word to our small group, and explain how we might apply that word to our lives. Okay… how very Dr. Phil. I open the piece of paper, and on it is written the word, risk. I think about it. I know what it is, but how do you define it, explain it, tear it apart, apply it…So I defined the word to my group: Risk is when you sacrifice who you are for what you might become. There are a few words in there that are loaded. Sacrifice? No one wants sacrifice something, to give something up. But I suggested that we embrace “risk” and sacrifice who we are for what we might become. That word ‘become’ is a beautiful word—transformative, evolving, graduating. But I didn’t guarantee success in my definition of risk. I sneaked in that word “might.” What you might become…

I don’t have tell any of us here tonight about the power of taking a risk. Each of us here shares one risk in common. Each of us came to an infant school, sacrificing where we were, our comfort zone, for what this school, for what we might become. We know the power of risk-taking.

My other story comes from a few months into my senior year. I had an appointment to meet with my college guidance counselor. It was different in my class of 800—you met maybe once, and they asked if you were thinking about college, and then they gave you a thumbs up and said, “Good luck with that!” So I went in to meet Albert Bross. I sit down, he had my file in his hand, that file with everything important about me in it. Albert Bross asked my plans. I said, “I want to go on to college.” Sure enough, he smiled and said, “Good luck with that!” Then he asked if I knew what I wanted to do. I had thought about it for, maybe, days. I said, “I want to be a history teacher.” His reaction was not what I expected—I am not sure if I thought he would applaud, but I thought it might earn a smile and a thumbs up and a “Good luck with that!” No, he looked perplexed, dug through the file, and said, “Um, John, that is not a good idea. In your file it says you have this speech problem, and as a teacher, you have to talk every day. It would be very unwise to be a teacher.” Then he smiled, and said, “But I see you have good grades. You could be a lawyer who researches and then you don’t have to talk.”

I absorbed his well-meaning advice. He must be right. I mean, if you have talked with me, for a half hour or more, it is clear, that I have a speech problem. He was an adult, he was being helpful and sensible. I should follow that advice.

About a year later in college, I thought about his advice again. I really wanted to be a history teacher. So against that expert advice I pursued that. I remember driving to school on my first day to teach, and it’s as if a ghost of Albert Bross appeared in my car warning me, “Don’t do it John. It would be unwise!” Well, I survived that first day, and I have been doing this now since long before you graduates were born.

My advice is, don’t let someone’s “No,” determine your path. And I don’t mean rules and laws as ‘no’s’ but someone’s roadblock from what you feel you are meant to do. Sacrifice who you are for what you might become.

My hope for all of you is that you find a path, a course, a road, on which you find as much joy as I have known, and especially known in teaching you.

My most frequent excuse!

2011-05-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

"I have been working on a play."

How many times in the last 24 years has that been a response as to why something has not gotten done? Oh, dear reader...many times...

Since "Fiddler on the Roof" in the spring of 1987, I have been busy with high school productions three score times...and that line has helped explain many things from unintended silences, to almost-missing-tax-dealines, to you name it.

"I have been working on a play." That is where I have been, and starting tomorrow, I will be back again.

Just to tantalize any readers left, here are the titles of the the next four blog entries, all hopefully-completed by Sunday evening:

"Butterfly Kisses"

"She asked, gingerly..."

"The People in the Picture"

"Camping with Henry and Tom"

Everything is well, I am relaxing today after a whirlwind rehearsal schedule, and ready to go to a colleague's apartment for dinner in just a few.

We'll catch up this weekend...

“Jerusalem” Bookends

2011-05-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

As I wrote the blog entry the other day on the “bookends” of “welcome home,” I realized there were more than one set of bookends to my delightful spring break in New York and Cincinnati. So today and tomorrow I will devote some time musing about two other pairs of bookends from my trip.

There is a song in England that is more beloved, according to recent surveys, than any other national song—more than even “God Save the Queen,” or “Land of Hope and Glory.” The song is called “Jerusalem,” and at the beginning of my spring break week I encountered the song in a curious way, and then at the end of the week the song “Jerusalem” made another appearance.

On a glorious Easter Day, after church at Advent Lutheran (where I attended for years, oh, and did I mention that Tina Fey sat behind me in church??) I took the wondrous Anne Siviglia to see a play that had opened just days before to rave reviews. We saw Jerusalem, by British playwright Jez Butterworth. I didn’t know anything about the play beforehand except that the play revolved around a magnificent performance by British actor Mark Rylance. As we entered the Music Box Theater (sigh for a moment, as I remember the days when it was not infrequent that I got to go to plays at the Music Box. Okay, end of sigh. End of diversion.) the entire proscenium and curtain was festooned by a monumental flag that looked ancient. Anne and I, anglophiles both, figured out that it was the flag of St. George, a powerful symbol of old Britain. As the play opened, a girl that looked like a fairy or something adrift from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, festooned in green and with wings, came out and plaintively sang a bit of a song called “Jerusalem.” Neither Anne nor I knew the song before, but we learned from the “Director’s Notes” in the program that this “hymn is held very dear by the English people. Its words have helped form an idyllic sense of aspired Englishness.” Oh, my.

Yet when the flag/curtain raised, it was a totally different scene: a thunderous party in and outside of a cheap mobile home with unbelievably stoned partyers. We soon meet the head hedonist, Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a boastful wreck of a man held together by drugs and drink. The time is now, the setting is Johnny’s squalid mobile home in the middle of a gated set of estates in Wiltshire, just a stone’s throw from pre-historic Stonehenge. In Act I you meet Johnny’s mates, mostly teen-age ne’er-do-wells who rely on Johnny for drugs and drink. What a strange juxtaposition of this hallowed hymn and then this story of Johnny’s last stand against the philistines who would evict him from his home.

Johnny isn’t particularly likeable, and certainly is no hero, although the playwright and the actor have created an indelible portrait of contemporary, as some may say, “poor white trash.”

So what in the world does this have to do with the opening? This “hymn is held very dear by the English people. Its words have helped form an idyllic sense of aspired Englishness,” as told to me in the “Director’s Notes”??? Anne and I started to wonder during the first intermission. (Yes, this has an old-fashioned structure of three acts and two intermissions and is a three-hour odyssey of a play.) William Blake wrote this poem in 1804 inspired by an apocryphal story that Jesus actually traveled to England and inspired the Britons to create a new, and perfected Jerusalem. Let’s look at the words of the poem:

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land.

Anne always cultivates a good discussion and we surmised that this Johnny guy, again, a bravura performance by this Mr. Mark Rylance, kind of incarnates the spirit of a mythic England that may never have been but that everyone, on some level, longs for. This is a state-of-the-nation play and Jerusalem functions as a metaphor for a heaven on earth, where people live in peace, and in connection with the land. When Blake wrote this poem, in 1804, the growing pains of the Industrial Revolution convulsed England, and there were many social ills from the new “Satanic Mills.” Blake summons up the spirit of a desired place, an Arcadia, in the hope that it can be created again.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land.

In the midst of the Great War (now we call it World War I since we had a sequel) King George V wanted a rallying cry, a song that would give faith to the British soldiers fighting a terrible war. In 1916 Hubert Parry set the Blake poem to music and it has inspired the British ever since.

The play takes place on St. George’s Day (aha! That is why the flag greeted us in the beginning!) in this nothing-small-town in Wiltshire County. This is an annual fair (since the Medieval times, we learn) to welcome spring. But as we learn in Acts II and III, there is little to welcome with the crowd at Johnny’s submarine-like mobile home. They come to get high because life is one big disappointment. Johnny acts as a Robin Hood-like hero to these cast-offs from society and they reminisce about the good old days when England was good and life was grand. Here is where the play became profound for me, and like many another experience at a play in New York, it is what art can do so well—find grandeur in unexpected places. You don’t like any of the crowd here, but you see how they have been numbed by the resignation of what life has offered. Everyone has a hunger to believe in legendary figures but these are times of shriveled fantasies. Johnny is a loser. Yet they hunger for the mythic. This starved theater-goer enjoyed the play and a performance that I can talk about with glassy-eyed rapture for years.

At the end of the week, the song “Jerusalem,” came up again! I had gotten up at 4:00 a.m. on Friday, April 30. Dear friend Sylvia had invited me over at that ungodly hour to watch the coverage of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Sylvia made scones, and we sat there in the pre-dawn darkness enjoying the veddy British treats of scones and lemon curd and tea, lapping up all the coverage of this royal wedding. I can’t believe how fast those hours sped by as we saw Britain do what it does best—orchestrate a fairy-tale wedding with precision, pomp, and pageantry.

During the wedding the congregation in Westminster Abbey—yes, they may have been invited, but I am sure we had the best seats with the most gorgeous photography and close-ups of this Gothic wonder and all the posh invitees—sang three hymns. The one that had the most rousing sound was the Blake/Parry hymn, “Jerusalem,” the very song that had started out my week at the Music Box Theater. Sylvia and I were watching NBC’s coverage, and as the song ended, Matt Laurer commented, “What was that song? I have never heard such devotion to a song!” Evidently the British crew members sang it reverently and he was overwhelmed. Fortunately, a Brit was there to provide context about this song. We learned that this song is offered at the end of every Labour Party Conference, and at the conclusion of many a rugby and soccer game. Everyone in England, according to the broadcaster, feels they “own” this song. It was also a favorite song of Princess Diana’s, we learned.

Go figure. Here today, on that perfect fairy-tale wedding day in England was the same song that Johnny “Rooster” and his cohorts claimed. The situations and contexts of the play in Wiltshire and the refined wedding before two billion people around the world couldn’t have been more different. Well…maybe it is not such a reach. My friend Tracy texted me at 5:00 a.m. that morning asking, “Why are we watching a wedding of people we don’t know?!” Of course, we want to know them. We want to know William, son of that charismatic Diana, heir to a throne that Americans shrugged off some 230 years ago, but for which we have never lost a fascination! Here was the prince marrying a commoner. Yes, everyone has a hunger to believe in legendary figures and for many, these are times of shriveled fantasies. A wedding is a perfect antidote to hard times. Maybe it will work. Maybe the will be happy. Maybe this will usher in a new era. Indeed, we persist to hunger for the mythic. Sylvia and I enjoyed the wedding coverage and I am sure that I will talk about it with glassy-eyed rapture for years.

Yes, it is a British hymn, a song that just two weeks ago I did not even know, but bookending my spring break I came to love this gorgeous poem and melody. Of course “Jerusalem” transcends ownership because its sentiment is so optimistic, so yearning, so human. Let us all think about the personal struggles we make to improve the world, to create a new Jerusalem.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem…

I still believe in the sea

2011-05-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

It is the beginning of May, and for most of my adolescent and post-adolescent life the beginning of May signals the beginning of the AP test season. Except for my years in college and graduate school, there have been only three Mays in the last 30 years that I have not been preparing to take an AP exam or readying the troops for battle against an AP exam in this week. Whew!

Yesterday the troops rallied and conquered the AP Art History exam.

I am not allowed at the test site (not me, in particular, mind you, but according to the rules of the College Board, no instructor is allowed within 50 feet of the test site) but as the three hour+ exam came to an end, I did hover near the test site so I could greet the happy warriors as they emerged from battle.

I never fancied myself, particularly, such a martial person or educator, but a decade ago, I was honored by a former student at her college in South Carolina, and in her testimonial, she remembered that I “prepared the AP students for battle against the test.” She called her peers “intellectual warriors.” Since then I have embraced the phrase and I note to the students all year that we are preparing for battle! Because of that image, I enjoy having a water-gun fight with the students the night before the actual AP test. We have the battle after listening to Kenneth Branagh’s rendition of the immortal St. Crispian’s Day speech from his 1989 film of Henry V.

I remember in that first year of teaching AP Art History at Hackley, wondering what I should use as the very last art work to study at the end of this incredibly long course. In that year, 2001-2002, of course, the year was tinged with the sadness and horror of 9/11 in the first week of school. I loved the challenging questions, “What should be the last piece of art we study after hundreds of art works this year? What piece has the gravitas with which to end our parade of millennia of art?”

In that first year I chose a work from 1996 by Anselm Kiefer called Bohemia Lies by the Sea. I have used it ever since as well and I love this confounding work. Just look at it.

What is it?????? What has Kiefer depicted in this painting? Is it a landscape?? Can you sense whether the paint is thick or thin? Has it been applied smoothly? Does the technique have an effect on the work’s mood or meaning? Who is this Kiefer guy?How will some knowledge of his life help us decode this painting???? Oh,the many exciting questions one can explore!

Anselm Kiefer is a German born in the final weeks of World War II. Think of what
context, what burden, what stew of history he must endure in this lifetime—as he says, “my work is to come to grips with my country’s past, our Nazi past, and to try and understand the madness.”

The road that leads us into the landscape, a standard device used in many 19th century landscape paintings, here invites us into Germany’s dark past. This is a work which constitutes a rich blend of references including recent history,
ancient history, the distant past, poetry, literature, and the future. Wow…
Once you have unpacked the metaphors, the piece allows for a rich, personal interpretation. Start with what you see…a rutted country road…
and let’s go from there…

But still—there is more…the title is most intriguing, and Kiefer writes the title on the painting in two places, alongside the road, and on the horizon…let’s explore the title…

In William Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, the bard sets Act III, Scene 3 off the seacoast of Bohemia. Huh??? But—Bohemia is landlocked. Well, you see, Shakespeare’s Bohemia is an imaginary place beyond our ordinary sense of geography, a vision in which the extraordinary becomes possible. His ‘Bohemia’ in this play is a place where problems have been solved and life has become beautiful.

An Austrian poet, a friend of Kiefer, borrowed this theme from Shakespeare and wrote a poem which in turn inspired our artist Kiefer:

If Bohemia still lies by the sea,
I’ll believe in the sea.
And if I believe in the sea,
I can hope for our land.
***
I border, like little else,
On everything more and more,
A man from Bohemia, a vagrant,
A player who has nothing, and whom nothing holds,
Granted only, by a questionable sea,
To gaze at the land of my choice.

In the fields beside the road one spies poppies—a flower not lost on anyone European of the last century. Poppies were planted where the millions of soldiers died in The Great War, in the rutted fields of France and Belgium. You may be familiar with the poet John McCrae who wrote during the “Great War” in 1915 about death on the battlefield:

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders field.

What is the symbol of poppies? The well-educated from AP Art History will remember that the poppy is a symbol that goes back to ancient Greece…to the promise of young men cut down by war, and the paradox of death and resurrection.

How do we put together meaning for this painting…is it appropriate for the end of the course?

I love this painting, and last week when I was at the Met, I took my friend Gary and his mother Marilyn on a tour, and used this painting as a point of discussion and reflection at the end of our afternoon. You cannot see this work for just a moment or two. You have to adjust your eyes, you have to see past the clutter and gunk of the paint and his technique. We cannot really see the end of the road, no, that would be too easy, but if you believe in the sea, even the land-locked Bohemia, you can believe in…what? Hope? Utopia? Arcadia?

Educators had better believe in a better day, in a better future, in Hope, that “thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson observes. Each year I send those students in to do battle with this notorious test, and I am so proud of them for their confidence, for their stamina, for their knowledge.

In 2009 I wondered if our KA students could manage the AP World History exam. Manage it, they did. And last year, when it was our first time to attempt the “boutique” course of AP Art History, I wondered a little too if they would hold up against their seasoned American counterparts. But I believed in the proverbial sea, I believed, against sensibility, that Bohemia, land-locked Bohemia, can lie by the sea.

Yesterday at 4:00 the students spilled out of the test site, aglow with how excited they were, and how they trounced the test. One shouted about the Egyptian art work they got, or the Greek sculpture, or the comparison of Manet and Titian, but they were jockeying for a position to tell me which art works they had used on the big essays. One commented that this “exhilarating feeling is priceless.” Bohemia indeed has a port on that sea today.

This afternoon His Majesty the King came to speak to us, as he does from time to time. He wanted to discuss the domestic policies and his vision for the future of Jordan. In his typical candor he addressed the last few months, what he is trying to develop for the future, and the parts these students will play as young leaders in the years to come. He is trying to instill in Jordanians a sense of how to develop political parties that transcend tribal issues and concerns, how Jordanians should develop attitudes and ideas about health care, women’s rights, welfare, and taxation. He discussed how he has been studying the transformation of eastern European governments since the 1990s, studying how to transform the youth of Jordan and help them explain to the “old guard” how changes must work. He discussed how the economic issues of the nation keep him up at night—how do you deal with subsidies and job creation? As usual, he was magnificent, and full of hope.

I have no idea if HMK has heard of Anselm Kiefer and this painting or the poem, but judging from my four years of studying this man, he would certainly buy the idea of belief in a land, belief in progress, a belief that if you wish it hard enough, Bohemia can lie by the sea and you can create an Arcadia that elevates society.

Welcome home

2011-05-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

Is it silly to have a “favorite flight”?

I mean, we have favorites in many categories: favorite TV show, favorite aunt, favorite ice cream flavor, favorite teacher, favorite book from junior high, favorite comfort food, favorite color, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum (if you need answers to any of these, please feel to write and ask for my favorites in these categories). I fly very often, so I guess it should come as no surprise that I have a favorite flight. This flight just seems magical, maybe because it seems to whisk me from one world to the other more swiftly than usual. It leaves at bedtime in one world and arrives with a whole day ahead of it in the other world. And on my favorite flight from Jordan to the United States, that magical Delta flight that leaves Jordan at about midnight and lands at JFK airport in New York at 5:30 a.m., I have two favorite moments in my re-entry to the United States.

When I come through passport control, I give them the passport and paperwork that marks me as a U.S. citizen but a resident of Jordan, the passport control officer asks why I am living in Jordan. I explain that I am teaching there, he stamps the passport, and invariably this officer of immigration control says to me, “Welcome home.” A short, but very sweet, sentiment. I don’t know if they are trained to say this to the ex-pats, and I think not, because I have entered the U.S. in Boston, Atlanta and Chicago too, and I don’t get that lump-in-the-throat-inducing, “Welcome home.” I smile, and head toward getting my bags. And I treasure the remark.

This time when I came home to New York and Cincinnati for spring break, I waited for it. And like the blossoms on the trees every spring, it came as expected, and is more beautiful than you expect. I can’t say why I find this comment so heart-warming, but I do find coming to the United States for breaks more invigorating, and yes, more heart-warming, than traipsing around as a tourist somewhere else new to me. I am sure some people thought I would never tire of traveling and discovering new places, and I am not sure I am tired of it, I just prefer coming back home for a respite.

The other moment I rank as a favorite is about a half hour after the first with the encounter with the passport agent. I have retrieved my bags (never once have they been lost or held up at JFK!) and gotten on the airtrain shuttle that takes me to the place where I can connect to the subway system of New York. As we swing by this one locale, there it is: the next favorite moment—the sun rising over New York City. Again, you expect the dawn, but it can be more beautiful than you expected. Streaks of orange or red or a yellow ball reaching up to welcome all of us to the new day. At this moment the trip feels as it will be perfect—the dawn of a break, the break of dawn.

Two favorite moments…

And the trip did not disappoint. I crammed as many of my favorites as possible into a few days in New York and even fewer in Cincinnati. My breaks consist less of seeking out newness, but greeting old favorites, reveling in the friendships and sights of my American home. As usual, that first day plays out as they always do now from this magical flight. I arrive by subway to my friend Christy’s house, at about 7:30 a.m. with a real New York Times newspaper suddenly in my hand. Christy has gotten up earlier than usual and prepared her monumental oatmeal. (While oatmeal may not be considered a monumental breakfast choice, hers is crowned with walnuts and blueberries and strawberries.) Shave and shower and by 9:00 there is still a whole day in front of us to enjoy! See why that flight is my favorite?? You maximize your time buzzing around an exciting city and not just sitting on a plane! We will look at what plays to see, and by the early afternoon we will have walked through the park, had a trip to the Met, and had the lunch special at Ivy’s Chinese food on 72nd Street.

The rest of the vacation there is full of favorites: lunch with Kate, seeing Gary, visiting with dear Anne and enjoying a fabulous dinner, talking with as many people as I can, theater, walking in the park, heck, just walking around. Amman is a not a walking city, so just walking the blocks in Manhattan is thrilling.

By the end of the visit we will have had my favorite pizza at Patsy’s on West 74th Street (oh, and their olive oil is the best in the world!) and my favorite Vietnamese food at Saigon Grill on Amsterdam and West 89th Street—I must admit I felt a twinge of guilt as I entered since some people were picketing the other day, claiming they don’t pay their workers enough—oh, I felt a little bad, but no one else makes my favorite Papaya and Beef Salad! We enjoyed Easter services at Advent Lutheran Church at Broadway and West 93rd Street, with Pastor Brown--one of my favorites--preaching as eloquently as always. Oh, and this is fun--guess who sat behind me in church?? Tina Fey!! I found reasons to keep turning around and checking that this was indeed the TV star. One time, she just nodded at me, kind of a reassuring nod that yes, indeed, I was seated in front of a TV star. Since I am on the name-dropping part of the blog, I also saw Neil Simon, chatted with the actress who was Paul Reiser's mother on Mad About You, and sat in the airport with TV news hounds Harry Smith, Lester Holt and Dan Rather. I had to find a way to shoehorn in the celebrities with whom I rubbed elbows!

What a rush of favorites on that trip! Then I head out to LaGuardia (driven by that favorite Gary after a breakfast with bacon) for a flight to Cincinnati. There, in the span of a few days, I will indulge in more favorites: my family, of course, how can they not be among the favorites on my Planet Favorite! There will be a buffet at the Farm, a BLT at the Imperial Diner with Pam, ice cream at Graeter’s, and I could go on and on (some will quip that I have!) that my trip is simply my chance to go through the favorites of my life.

I come to the end of the trip, and the trip always ends the same, with another of my favorite comments said so simply and heartwarmingly. When it is time to go, my dad takes me to the airport, and after we have checked the bags and weighed them (he always comes inside in case there is excess stuff he needs to take home) we come to the point of good-bye. Then my dad, with those soulful, wise Andy-Griffith-like eyes, looks at me and says, “Thank you for coming home.”

What great book-ends of a trip! That passport control agent, so anonymous to me but so kind with his “Welcome home,” and then that greatest of men, my father, thanking me for coming home. It is hard to beat those comments. My colleagues went to many places over the break, among them, Turkey, Italy, Egypt, Spain, Africa, Thailand, England, but I went home. And loved every minute of it.

Sad to say, that favorite flight is going away. I learned in the last couple weeks that Delta is suspending service to Amman, and so on June 1st, there will be no more of those magical flights. I will be fine; I will fly either to Paris and then Cincinnati, or Chicago then Cincinnati, and Royal Jordanian Airlines will still fly to New York—it just leaves mid-day and gets there mid-afternoon. Not much magic in that flight!

But I took some comfort in a sight yesterday, when I returned to Jordan after spring break, a new banner greeted me. HSBC, one of my two banks in Jordan (don’t get me started on the inane practices of Jordanian banks!) had a new banner shouting, “Welcome Home.”

It may not be those nice passport agents in JFK in the pre-dawn hour, but it was a kind greeting. I’ll take that!

17

2011-04-17T03:42:00.000-07:00

Seventeen, I have heard, is the most interesting number. Seventeen is superior, say some, and scarier, say others, to any other number.

I remember a talk I heard once in Boston by David Kelley, a math professor, a specialist in 17.

According to Professor Kelley, 17 is the “random number,” meaning the chances are more than random that a random number will be divisible by 17. Here are some other little random things I learned in that talk about seventeen:

• There are 17 distinct ways to fit polygons around a point.

• 17 is the smallest prime whose sum of the digits is a cube

• The book of Genesis records that the Great Flood started on the 17th day of the month, and the ark landed on the 17th day of a different month on top of Mt. Ararat (guess what the elevation of Mt. Ararat is?? Yep, 17,000 feet)

• The Alhambra, the gorgeous Moorish castle in Grenada, Spain, contains 17 different tiling patterns, which is actually the total number of possible tiling patterns using triangles

• The shortest form of Japanese poetry, Haiku, contains exactly 17 syllables

• The White House has 17 bathrooms

• There are 17 miles of corridors in the Pentagon

• There are 17 species of penguins—Professor Kelley pointed out that sadly, among penguins, their divorce rate is 17%

• Seventeen is the number of eyelashes on a yellow pig

• A cow’s saliva increases by 17% while grazing

• The Okapi, also known as the forest giraffe, is the only mammal that can clear its own ears with its tongue, which can grow to 17 inches in length

• At age 17, Jack London wrote the first of his 17 books

• Benjamin Franklin, a 1700s figure was born on January 17, was one of 17 children and moved to Philadelphia at age 17

• The average person breathes 17 times per minute

• Modern Italians view 17 as an unlucky number. Air Italia does not have a 17th row and Italian buildings do not have a 17th floor. Why?? The Roman numeral XVII (for 17) rearranges and spells “VIXI,” which in Latin means, “I have lived,” (meaning “I am dead”) and is used on Italian tombstones

• Tradition holds that Eve was 17 years old when she handed to Adam the forbidden apple. There are 17 sets of chromosomes in the apple.

• Here is something I knew before Professor Kelley’s talk!! Iktinos and Kallikrates, the ancient Athenian architects, chose to place 17 columns on the long side of the Parthenon as part of their equation x = 2y + 1 as their equation to symbolize perfection

• Last but not least: it takes 17 facial muscles to smile (it takes 43 muscles to frown). Seventeen to greet the new day, a new friend, and old friend with warmth and kindness.

So, why does this matter?

Oh, I thought it was interesting on this 17th day of April to remember how fascinated I was by that talk on the power of seventeen long ago. However, in terms of current interest, Seventeen days from now is the long-anticipated AP Art History test for my students (most of whom are seventeen years old).

And in a bit of also-long-anticipated news, on this 17th day of April, on this first day of the week, I look forward to the fact that by the end of this week, I will be on Spring Break. No, the break is not 17 days long—I don’t even think anything about the break will be 17 of anything. The cycle/fascination ends here!

Enjoy the 17th!

Never underestimate the power of little pleasures

2011-04-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

Maybe I just boxed myself into a corner. I mean, of the scores and scores of blog entries I have written in the last 45 months (wow—really?) many felt epic, at least to me. They were jeremiads or sermon-ettes, or inspired by big, big things, and sometimes I forgot about the simple little pleasures that can make a day. I think each blog entry must be Churchill-ian or Orwell-ian in scope.

Yesterday I went to McDonald’s. Now, that is not a big surprise, except that I went on Friday instead of on Saturday night when I usually stop by the big McDonald’s on Airport Road about 10 minutes out of Amman and 20 minutes before KA. I rarely go to McDonald’s while I am in the United States, (he hastens to add!) but here in Jordan, again, almost every Saturday night. I go on my way back from church heading back to school and gearing up for the new school week. I go every week for several reasons, not least of which is that the hot fries are really good. Yes, I have seen the movie Supersize Me and not only did that not curb the weekly habit, it made me hungry for Saturday night. But I go in part to McDonald’s every Saturday night because it gives this world-away-from-home some structure and predictability. That in itself is a little pleasure (maybe even a big pleasure).

I went to McDonald’s yesterday because two guys from class missed some extra classes this week and they wanted to study the art they missed. As we wind down the AP Art History class, I wanted to make sure I didn’t rush too much through early 20th century art, so I added three classes in a segment of the day called “O Block” at the end of the school day. It is a catch-all time when various clubs could meet or AP lab sciences or anyone else who wants to claim it. I wanted to meet and discuss the art of Edvard Munch and Gustav Klimt one day, Pablo Picasso (rather big in the course you might imagine) another day, and then some crazy Russians, Malevich and Tatlin on a third day. Omar and Ramie were already “claimed” by another zealous teacher and were going to miss the extra classes.

Of course they could have just read the textbook and learned a fair amount. I am also so hip now with technology that I post all the power point slide shows on-line so you can zip through the art works anytime you want (oh, my, the changes from when I started teaching this course a decade ago with the slides!). But Ramie and Omar wanted to meet and really discuss the art, so I suggested we meet on our day off for lunch at McDonald’s. Now, it’s one thing to suggest a meeting, and it’s also one thing to intend to want to study more, but it’s another thing for teen-agers to follow through on that! Omar and Ramie really showed up! But then again, I knew they would—these are in the cream of the crop.

We met a little after 1:00 and we decided to go outside to a table and do all the art stuff first. The noise was a little loud inside—McDonald’s is very popular in Jordan—and the “Habibi songs” were cranked up a little too much. (“habibi” is an endearment in Arabic, and to my ears, every Arabic song sounds alike with a heavy emphasis on panting about your “habibi.” I guess that would be like almost 50 years ago when to older ears every “Beatles” song sounded alike!) So we sat outside and looked at the art on the laptop, discussing it, noting how this art broke with traditional expectations and conventions of art, seeing links with older eras of art, and trying to understand what theories they developed. Kazimir Malevich is an especially interesting artist—but you have to meet him on his own terms. His art is called “Suprematism” (oh, the explosion of –isms at this time is daunting and hilarious!) and he imbues his art with theories of color. Black, for example, is the supreme feeling—Omar noted that black, as an artistic value, is actually the combination of all other colors, and so that made perfect sense to him. White is the absence of feeling, a void that has been created. We looked at an art work, White Square on White Square, and instead of the obvious, “Oh, please, that’s nothing!” they realized that Malevich was bemoaning the fate of the world. Malevich fell into the same camp as Sigmund Freud at the time lamenting that civilization had gone so far and would never recover. They discussed the historical phenomena that might allow Malevich’s pessimism to overwhelm him the way he showed the white overwhelming and consuming all the feeling.

After about an hour we went inside, got the fast-food that cardiologists warn us about and we proceeded to sit and talk. I had thought I would be back on campus an hour before I was, but it was such a pleasurable, casual time sitting with Omar and Ramie and talking about New York, about college, about home towns, about teaching and school and headmasters, all those things that just pop up in an organic and enjoyable conversation. At 3:30 I got in the car, stopped at the grocery store and headed back to campus.

Not a life-changing event, no camels, no spiritual or sit-com revelations, just an enjoyable afternoon with curious, hard-working, fun students.

On another note, I had to call Hamzeh and say that I would be late. We had an appointment for a “graded talk,” but I knew he wasn’t in a rush, and I decided not to be the German train I am 99% of the time. This “graded talk” has been a good idea. Another little pleasure this weekend.

In the History of the 20th Century class I had assigned a memoir by a man named Alfons Heck that is entitled, A Child of Hitler: the Days When God Wore a Swastika. Some title, huh? It is a compelling read about a young man in the Hitler youth who, down the road, must come to terms with what Germany did in the Second World War. In the end he pleads for sympathy and understanding, stating that he is a victim of Adolf Hitler as well. I decided on an unusual assignment: I wanted each student to explore a different WWII-era film, so I wondered if they could juxtapose the memoir and the film. Before the paper was due I told the class I had changed my mind about the paper and I preferred that we sit and discuss the assignment, one-on-one, instead. As we come toward the end of the school year, there are fewer times for good one-on-one discussions.

Yesterday I had four of these discussions, all very exciting, very pleasurable, and all different. Each student looks at the book differently given the movie they have watched, and so far, each has found an unusual parallel in the book to illumine something about the war they hadn’t considered before. Faisal watched Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun and found a great parallel of the two lads, Hamzeh watched The Great Escape, Zeyna saw Casablanca and Rob enjoyed The Pianist, and again, each found insights very original from juxtaposing the film and the memoir. I have 10 more of these to enjoy in the next couple days.

Somehow in the midst of all this talk—either in McDonald’s, my apartment, or the Dining Hall or my car—I thought of the biblical image of the Peaceable Kingdom, the highly unlikely scene Isaiah paints for us of peaceful co-existence. I don’t know why it popped into my head, but again, I live in Biblical Territory, so maybe seeing those hills of David just beyond us here creates that open space for Bible images. Maybe it is also perhaps from the images in the news from the Middle East these first 99 days of 2011—we live in a world that reminds us again and again how preposterous the idea of a peaceable kingdom is, and how unnatural. Isaiah lived at a time and in a world red in tooth and claw, a time and a world in which insecurity and terror was the norm, war was routine, natural, inevitable. I would bet that Isaiah was laughed out of many a room for this co-existence silliness. “That Isaiah,” they’d hoot, “he’s mad as a hatter and crazy as a loon.”

Peaceful co-existence. Do you believe it is worthy of our highest efforts? I do. Or at least on my good days, I do. Even on my bad days, I really want to. But of course, courage and wisdom and love are forged slowly and painfully. As I thought about it, this concept of a peaceable kingdom may be unnatural but not foolishness.

Oh, all of this comes from having a 30-minute drive back to campus. I am sure if I had not had that drive I wouldn’t have even wondered about my little pleasures with my students and the chance of a greater peaceable kingdom. Right now the drive is almost like a drive through Ireland with the beautiful spring carpets of green here in Jordan, and that time to wonder and reflect and have my mind dance as I drive to and from Amman.

I resent that drive sometimes—like when I want to go out to breakfast or brunch on a Friday and it is a 45-minute drive to get to a decent place for brunch. But maybe it is the quiet drives that have allowed some of the wonderings and jeremiads of the last 45 months.

Anyway, I pull into the KA driveway, wait for the security guard to open the gate, park the car and put away the musings about the peaceable kingdom for the moment. This is a weekend of little pleasures and savoring of these exquisite conversations.

An Older Star Twinkles

2011-04-08T02:14:00.001-07:00

Last week my 20th Century History class was treated to a visit from a wonderful historic relic—a man who lived through World War II as a young man. Abdullah, surely you have heard me speak about this young man over the last four years—he is the one his friend Faisal has dubbed “The Mayor of Awesomeville”, has a British grandfather, and he had asked him to come and speak to our class.

In the last couple weeks we have studied the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and how in that incredible display of promise of the “World of Tomorrow,” fair organizers indeed pinned their hopes on the Fair as a means to stave off what many knew by 1938 was an inevitable tumble back into a sequel of the Great War. We studied the Fair, and who came, and how the events and activities at the Fair provided a backdrop for the declaration of war that September. As we studied this new world war we looked at various artifacts from the British homefront, during that long time when the Brits fought alone heroically against the Nazi machine. On one of those days Abdullah, my student every day for four years now, suggested he invite his grandfather to come to class and speak.

I may never have explained Abdullah’s background, but it is an interesting one. As I remember the story, Abdullah’s father, a man from Jordan, studied engineering in the UK in the 1980s, fell in love with a British lass (Bridget) whose father was also an engineer. They married, lived awhile in England, and then moved back to Jordan and have raised their seven sons in Jordan. When Abdullah was a little boy in England he was chided as “the Arab kid,” and then when he moved to Jordan, they teased him as “the British kid.” In the first few days of KA fellow 9th grader Jude met Abdullah, sized him up and said, “You don’t look like an Abdullah; you look like a James.” And so Jude has called Abdullah ‘James’ throughout our four years (and by the way, Jude is another of the elite four-year club of exciting students I have taught every day here). Anyway, I digress. A few years ago Mr. Morrison, Abdullah’s grandfather, moved to Jordan to join his daughter’s family here. That is how we came to have a valuable cultural artifact from World War II Britain here in Jordan.

Abdullah called his granddad and asked him. Mr. Morrison first said, “Oh, I don’t remember anything about those days. But I will think about it and let you know.” This past Tuesday Mr. Morrison treated our class to a presentation about his high school and college years in war-torn Britain.

The man was prepared! He came with a power-point presentation, a laser pointer, a script, cues for when Abdullah should change the slides, a hand-out on dates and helpful historical facts, a youtube clip from a British comedy show looking back at the war, and my favorite—sound effects! He had included a sound effect of an air raid siren for us to hear.

Mr. Morrison began by telling us that he was 16 when Britain declared war against Nazi Germany on September 3, 1939. He digressed—a wonderful and helpful digression, unlike some blog writers I know who seem to drift onto situation comedy tangents at the drop of a hat—and explained his school and how he was chosen to attend his public school. He joked about how strange it is that British public schools are actually “private” schools—I knew about the strange twisting of public and private—but he then explained the historic derivation of such a practice. I had never ever heard the reason for the strange twist. He explained about how an ecclesiastical York school in 627 opened its doors to the public, and then, oh, I knew I was in for a good presentation since he provided such good context in the first five minutes!

He explained about how important the radio was as announcements about the war and rationing schedules were made; he explained how as a 16-year old he and his family “bomb-proofed” their suburban London home; he explained how all the young lads his age joined up in the OTC (Officer Training Corps) and the LDV (Local Defense Volunteers—a group so shabby that the real soldiers nicknamed the LDV the “Look, Duck, and Vanish” group). Mr. Morison recounted the story of Dunkirk, one of those seminal moments in the British defense in the spring of 1940, a moment of surrender and retreat, but also a moment as new Prime Minister Churchill claimed was a moment when “so many owed so few.”

It had been a long while since I have gotten to teach World War II with a little bit of time. In world history courses the goal is to give more of a global perspective, and I have not gotten to trot out some of the things I enjoy, the film clips and the documents and the Vera Lynn songs. Yes, I sang for them “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover,” and made sure they knew how much former headmaster Eric Widmer loves Vera Lynn and her “We’ll Meet Again” anthem. But it was also wonderful to have a guest speaker to come and recount his memories of the war time years. I remember that around the year 2000 at Hackley it seemed for the first year in my teaching career none of my students had had a grandfather who fought in World War II—it just felt the world had gotten a pinch older and farther away from those years. Another interesting point is how adept with 21st century technology Mr. Morison is in planning his presentation. It was just 10 years ago that I was showing slides in class about the homefront of WWII, and he had created a zippy presentation with all the power-point bells and whistles!

So our 87-year old guest explained how as the blitz in England continued, how it affected daily life: taking street signs down (I assume to confuse any German bombers who landed??) and the ration books—oh, my he showed us the weekly rations for sugar, butter, meat, etc. and I think I eat a whole week’s worth of rations in a day easily! He explained about black-outs and sentry duty at school and sleeping in the library awaiting the air raid sirens, how the lads were taught to defuse bombs. The new German bombs of 1941 were even more intense and the shrieking sound was horrendous he explained. With an air of someone who had lived through such tension, Mr. Morrison almost off-handedly remarked, “Very disconcerting, those bombs.”

He discussed about driving in the black-outs, the reduction of trains, and the rationing of clothes and everything else—he also provided a table as to when the rations ended, and some of them went on years after the conclusion of the war. He explained about the evacuations for children so that fewer young persons were in the London area during the war. He explained how important the WOSB—War Office Selection Board—was in shaping decisions for people’s lives. At the age of 18 Mr. Morrison’s eyesight was deemed too poor for military service, but the WOSB directed him as to which kind of engineering he should study. His job was to test the new pre-fabricated houses—the houses that would quickly go up to replace the homes destroyed by bombs.

I am a sucker for this kind of presentation—I just love hearing the veterans of life describe what they have seen and how they reacted. Of course Mr. Morrison’s presentation made me think of my own grandfather and his service in WWII. Somehow I never heard any of those stories in my childhood from him, and only after studying abroad in Austria in 1985 did all the war stories tumble out of him. I met friends of his in England, friends that he had made and kept over the decades. The men in the English family were off fighting the Nazis in Africa, and my grandfather was in Bristol, England, awaiting deployment for the invasion of France. In the time he was there he visited this family almost every week, bringing them treats from the GI store, and they providing him a family environment while he was away from his Cincinnati family. I loved the stories and how it took meeting these “strangers” for me to learn so much more about my grandfather.

Anyway, Mr. Morrison concluded his presentation explaining how the Brits were encouraged to dig up their flower beds and plant vegetable gardens—“Dig for Victory Gardens.” As he came towards the end of the class time, I wondered if he planned to touch on the theme of death at all. In the end he did, albeit briefly. He explained about two good friends of his, two lads who had gone off for military service, and while in training, they died, from what we would now call “friendly fire.” It was a brief reminder that this war business was more than just defense and sacrifices of food and gasoline etc. but as he said, “There wasn’t a family I knew who was not touched by the sadness of grief in the war.”

I joked with Mr. Morrison at the end that he had at first told Abdullah he couldn’t remember anything—but then look at what a little reflection had created! It was a delightful talk, a reminder of bonds I once shared with more students, when we had all had grandfathers who served or endured the privations of World War II. I think of my dad’s friends he sees regularly, Chris who fought in the Pacific, Ruby and Harry who met and fell in love during the war in France, and the German couple, Hans and Annelise, obviously from the other side of the war, who join the group at the Imperial Diner every week.

“There’ll be love and laughter, and peace ever after, tomorrow, when the world is free,” promises the end of the “White Cliffs of Dover” song. How poignant, how helpful to be reminded of the many factors and promises and hopes and fears and joys that shape us as we go. Mr. Morrison, a man the same age as my students when that war started, thank you for sharing your memories and reflections.

A Star Is Born

2011-04-01T05:26:00.000-07:00

I must have walked by the laptop a dozen times in the last two weeks to write this particular blog entry. Maybe even two dozen. Writing the blog entry has been on the proverbial and literal “To Do List” every day—what has happened? Where has the enthusiasm gone for me to write my appropriate-for-the-world bi-weekly thoughts down as well as any Broadway, literary, religious and sit-com references…oh, the intention is there, and so therefore, I guess the enthusiasm is there. It is just that Time keeps stealing away itself. Or Devouring? I seem even more busy with committee meetings and, let’s see, what else…while the running of our little project has become so much more efficient and manageable, there is little time left for such blogging pursuits. I still have those “wouldn’t that make a nice reflection for the blog” moments, but I seem to be like the dog chasing his tail to make those observations in the laptop and set our history down for posterity.

Anyhoo, a few weeks ago now, I attended the third of a series of evening events that have been dubbed “Sympo.” The Sympo came about when two students, Abdullah and Thaer, two seniors whom I have taught every day of this enterprise, decided that they wanted to start a speaker series featuring…themselves. The name, of course, is short for “Symposium,” and the guys wanted to emulate the practice in ancient Athens where young people would sit around, speak, wonder, muse, engage, and challenge each other, all for the benefit of imagining a better world. They wanted to create a forum wherein students may feel comfortable making a public address, or wondering about something, or writing a skit, or, just giving themselves an arena in which to invite peers and teachers and hear them. Kind of like a live blog, I guess.

In the first Sympo Abdullah spoke about why he and his peers rarely use the Arabic language for the discussion of scholarly matters. As someone fluent in both languages, he lamented that Arabic was the language for fun and conversation, but not a metaphysical conversation. Several students presented, again, kind of like live editorials, and there was a Q&A period at the end. Of course people applauded their initiative at wanting to create a new forum. There was a second one, and then recently, a third Sympo.

At this third meeting of Sympo there was a theme—the sun and the moon and the stars. One student, Tamara, began with a poem about the moon. The next speaker was Abdullah’s older brother, Moamer, who happens to be a first year teacher here at KA. He teaches physics and offered us “A Glimpse of the Universe.” Moamer’s 15-minute presentation was so masterful—I intended to run home and dash off a blog entry immediately to announce that a new teaching star had been born. The in-joke in all this is that Moamer explained how stars (the literal kind in the night sky) are born. Moamer is one of the teaching fellows with whom I have worked this year and he has been exciting to chart his progress, akin to how one might chart the progress of the gaseous star bodies in the sky. Technology and imagery have become so marvelous that his presentation not only held me captive for his level of engagement, but also for the sheer majesty of the pictures. Moamer attempted to present to us in a quarter of an hour a history of the cosmos and explain how these stars come to be. I wanted to sign up for an astronomy course or physics course or really just sit in his class every day to continue the wonder of what he had presented. Here was a young man so excited about his subject, so in command of his speaking abilities that his presentation was mesmerizing and riveting and captivating. Wow. The Sympo finished off with Mansoor, a student who had composed a piece of piano music. Mansoor had an interesting dimension of audience participation in it. He informed the audience that his piece of music was inspired by the moments just before dawn. He asked the audience to close its eyes and when each audience member felt the moment had arrived in the music when the sun had indeed come up, they could open their eyes. Over his three years here, Mansoor has written a number of memorable pieces, but what a startling and fun thing to do for the audience—what an inventive way to make us listen in a new way to a piece of music, to reflect on something as basic as the morning sun.

At the end of the 45-minutes, after a reflection on the moon, the birth of stars, and the rising sun, I felt rejuvenated to go back and attack the work that must be done to help run a school.

But why did it take so long to get this little blog entry down? Am I running out of energy? Well, we are still three weeks away from spring break, and maybe my body clock is so attuned to the Hackley schedule of spring break in March that that has caused a little run-down for me. Maybe it is all the new committees on which I sit—I try and make sure I know which one I run into after the class day so I know what the tenor, tone, agenda might be. Maybe it is ennui after several years of novelty here in Jordan. Maybe it is the beginning of anxiety at letting the seniors go. Oh, heck, maybe I just need a change of scenery. Doesn’t matter.

I did decide that I should contribute something to the presentation on the sun, the moon, and the stars. On the top of the blog page is one of my favorite paintings, by a German guy named Caspar David Friedrich. It is a fairly simple image with a simple title: Two Men Contemplating the Moon. One of the most endearing elements of this painting is finding out who the two men are. They are a former teacher with a former student. They have donned the “costume” of what they wore back in the day when they enjoyed the stimulation of a shared classroom years earlier. Friedrich writes that they have come back together, picking up the threads of friendship and fellowship, and have taken a moment to drink in the beauties of the natural world and assess their places in the world.

Friedrich is one of the most passionate of the painters of “Romanticism,” that 19th century belief and attitude that we can eschew reason and seek out the answers of life in a natural setting. The goal in Romanticism is to achieve a state of sublime. That word is always so hard to define and explain. I once had an invitation to a dinner party where the dress, it said on the invitation, was to be, “Chic yet sublime.” I never quite figured that out. I hoped the sweater vest I agonized over would somehow achieve that goal!

But Friedrich urges us to find a retreat, either with a companion, as we see here, or on a solitary journey, where the majesty of the world around us presents us with a chance to chant hallelujahs. Friedrich doesn’t use his art to explain the suffering of the world, but in piece after piece he urges us to know that the world is full of suffering. As I just said, what Friedrich doesn’t do is try to explain the problem of suffering—his art suggests that down the road, up the mountain, through the woods, on the hillside, we will find answers. In the meantime, Friedrich wants us to notice the things that give us hope, build faith and cast out fear.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired this piece in 2001, and I remember the excitement at the Met for the acquisition of their first Friedrich. They printed up posters about the mini-exhibition of Friedrich’s works (borrowed works) and his peers. I remember seeing the posters and adding that to my “To Do List” for September, 2001. If you read at the bottom of the poster I have, it says that the exhibition would open on September 11, 2001.

Of course it didn’t open that day. There was little hope and too much fear on that day. Everything was going to be closed that wasn’t helping the situation in lower Manhattan. But in the week that followed, I remember wondering when the Met would re-open and when I could go see that art work. That is probably a very strange thing to be thinking about if you lived in the New York area that week. But I had been to the Met just the week before to celebrate my friend, and former student, and current colleague Chuck’s birthday. When the Met re-opened a week after 9/11, and the Friedrich exhibit did open, Chuck and I went to see the Friedrich. Of course outside the Met there was worry that everything we knew was crumbling and we must assume a brave face.

The Friedrich painting is not far from that same emotion. The former teacher and student, in communion with Nature, are near a gnarled tree. Romantic painters loved the trope of the gnarled tree—it meant disaster sometimes, God’s fury sometimes, anguish over change sometimes, storms and strife always—it was an ominous symbol. But here stood these two comrades—looking out at the simple moon, enjoying the comfort of nostalgia, assessing where they stood at the moment in their careers, and wondering what the world had in store for them.

The painting never fails to help me do the very same things. Where have I been lately? Where am I at this very moment? What do the next few months have in store for me?

I put that poster up every March in my classroom as I teach about the Romantics, looking at the date printed long before the disaster, and remember when Chuck and I stood at the Met, side by side wondering about the world, contemplating the universal and the mundane. Since that day almost 10 years ago Chuck is married with three children teaching in the school where I first taught him 20 years ago. I ended up in the Middle East.

I thank Tamara for her poem on the moon, Moamer for his dazzling skills enlightening us about the stars, and Mansoor, bidding us to wake up and enjoy the rising sun and the new day. Thank you for reminding us of the simple pleasures and the enormous complexities of these fixtures in the universe.

Here’s to your own contemplation at the appearance of the moon on your side of earth.

And now a word from Faisal...

2011-03-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

Earlier this winter term I assigned a document-based-question cribbed from an old AP U.S. History exam about the nature and manifestations of tension in the United States in the 1920s. I gave the students about 10 more documents, including a rather dense article about the concept of the "gemeinschaft," a rural society at odds with the new, urban "gesellschaft." Faisal did a bang-up job and so I asked him if I could re-print his essay for the blog audience. Take your time on this, and Faisal's work will reward you.

Faisal Akkawi
20th Century History
Tension DBQ
February 1, 2011

The culture wars that had played a large part in garnering support for World War I in Europe had, after the conclusion of the war, migrated to American soil. However, the war over American culture and values was slightly different than the one fought in Europe, which was between the conservative old order and the forward-looking liberals. In America, it was more complex. William Butler Yeats summarized, unintentionally, the struggle in American society during the 1920’s in his poem “The Second Coming” when he wrote “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Although initially written to describe WWI, it can certainly be applied to post-war America, where the core of “good ol’ American values” was being torn apart by ideas from the cities and Europe. The tensions in American society during the 1920’s were a result of a fear among many Americans that their traditional way of life would be corrupted by the new customs and ideologies infiltrating the country.

America’s metaphorical ‘center’ comprised of those who adhered to Gemeinschaft society. This sector of society was white, usually Protestant, mostly small town or rural, and claimed to represent traditional America, the good prosperous America that existed before and during the war. They claimed to be the defenders of Americanism and branded anything that challenged the premises on which the built society as un-American. However, the exact definition of Americanism shifted depending on the need and the group defending it, whatever it was. The source of the tension can be traced back to the fear that spread amongst this population after the war. This fear naturally led to intolerance, which resulted in tension between this sector of society and those who espoused different views. These views were often depicted as foreign, un-American, and satanic, stemming from corrupt cities or too-liberal Europe. Communists, socialists, anarchists, unions, feminists, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and the American intelligentsia were all at various times labeled as such. The fight for American values was often used as a cover under which other objectives could be achieved. “Business was frequently able to transfer its own fears of Bolshevism both to a broader public and to state legislators who served that public.” (Sources and Nature of Intolerance) The business community was able to sell its fear of a change in the economic system in the guise of fear for the values upon which they believed America was built, values they also believed were being challenged by those like the textile workers in the Loray Mill Strike. This fear was also propagated by politicians, such as Palmer and Hoover, who were all too ready to step in as America’s saviors. (SNI)

The center’s dissatisfaction with the way they perceived America was heading manifested itself in various ways. This tension amongst the people found outlets through various organizations. Hundreds of organizations resurged or were created in the 1920’s with the purpose of reclaiming America, such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the American Legion, the Boosters, and the Elks. These groups combatted through various means the forces pulling apart the fabric of the American center. The KKK adopted coercion and violence to achieve its goals; the WCTU operated through education and raising awareness; and the American legion funded publications and operated through the American political system. The Klan’s motto, “Native, White Protestant Supremacy” clearly states its goals, and the statement of their leader, Hiram Wesley Evans, that “We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support…a blend of various peoples of the so-called Nordic race,” (Document D) clearly states the source from which the Klan drew its support. This outlook, the close-minded approach to anything new and foreign and unfamiliar, was a great contributor to the tensions of the 1920’s. A fitting modern-day example is the Tea Party that is working to ‘take back America.’ Who took it is sometimes unclear. The Klan and the other various organizations formed at the time struggled against the tide of urbanization, religion, and the changing face of the American family.

As America became increasingly urbanized, rural America began to fear the changes that accompanied the shift to the Gesellschaft structure and the increasing mechanization of life. Ford, who was one of the greatest proponents for the rural American lifestyle, found himself soaked in the same biases as the average American. “Ford’s intense commitment to the traditional American faith led him to suspect and ultimately to detest whatever was un-American.” (The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930) Here, Ford was caught in the same conundrum: how could progress be made if it was considered un-American because it was not part of America’s past? Ford struggled with this and resigned himself to live a hypocritical life, supporting American Gemeinschaft while supplying the means by which American Gesellschaft could progress. But the Klan had no such qualms and openly attacked “the intellectuals and liberals who held the leadership,[and] betrayed Americanism.” They fought this sector of society because they fostered a liberal environment in which ideas could grow, ideas that challenged the views previously held by the American center. This context makes artist Joseph Stella’s “The Bridge” all the more audacious (Document B). In this painting, Stella juxtaposes the sleek, modern skyscrapers with the Goth arch, a symbol of all things holy as a slight reminder that America has built for itself a new sacred mountain. Jazz was another one of these new inventions of the city. Seen as “the Devil’s Music” (New York Times), it was described as barbaric, immoral, and socially unacceptable. The fact that it was created by blacks, played in night clubs and whorehouses, provided for the intermingling between, and allowed for improvisation breaking the strict canon by which all music was written, attracted to it the spite of traditional Americanism. Jazz was viewed as an attack on American culture, and by extension America itself, just as Stella’s futurist-inspired painting could have been.

In addition to the physical changes of demographics affecting America, the internal structure of the family was also shifting. The increase in the number of women who smoke, an activity previously seen appropriate only for men, prompted the WCTU to launch a campaign amongst teachers and Sunday school workers to curb the spread of tobacco use amongst children and women. The women leading this campaign still call upon “the duty of motherhood” which “is till relegated to the women of the nation.” (Document G) The tension in society is still evident within this organization.

Although these women are actively taking a role in public life, their campaign is aimed only at women and it is based on older notions of the role of women. The increase rate of divorce and the decrease in the rate of marriage in the 1920’s suggests that women are taking a more active role in the decision-making processes of their lives. (Document H) As it becomes more socially acceptable for women to marry late or divorce or not marry at all and as their social status becomes less dependent on how well they perform their ‘duties’ as mothers and wives, the entire fabric of the American family begins to unravel and must be re-sown to accommodate changing attitudes. As the role of women changed, so did the role of religion. One challenge to religion was the increasing size of urban areas, which are often more secular or heterogeneous in religious make up. But one of the greater challenges to religion in America was evolution. Because many churches had sought God “in the corners of darkness that have not yet seen the light of understanding,” (Finding Darwin’s God) evolution posed a threat to the religious beliefs of many. The Scopes Trial also questioned the role of religion in public education, an extension of the government. The tension arouse because members from both the religious and the scientific community believed that they contradicted each other. The defense tries to find a middle-ground by stating to the prosecution that “I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.” But an attack on one’s faith only makes one cling even more firmly, even slightly irrationally to it for fear of losing it. And as is evident, fear was the greatest motivator for tension during this decade. Fear of change, progress, all things new and foreign.

Prohibition was one reaction to reclaim America’s morality. But the superimposition of Gemeinschaft values on the entire country proved impractical, and it served as a sign that America as a whole was not too eager to return to the “good ol’ days.”
However, the depiction of the tensions throughout America in the 1920’s as between two forces pulling at each other is slightly inaccurate. The Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft structure developed by Ferdinand Tonnies accurately conveys how many believed the battle was being fought, but the “us vs. them” view oversimplifies the complex scenario. The ideologies opposing the American center were not always working toward the same objective. There were rifts within the USA Communist Party; members of the Intelligentsia feared the militant strikers and their communist supporters; and Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois disagreed on how to best achieve racial equality. Langston Hughes, who benefitted from the programs of Dubois, wrote criticizing the values tacitly encouraged by Washington, “She [Philadelphia clubwoman] wants the artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all Negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist to change through the force of his at that old whispering ‘I want to be white.’” (Document E)This attempt at fostering a Negro identity might not have garnered the support of the white establishment while Washington might have. Examples of these divides in the left can be seen in the novel Ragtime written by E. L. Doctorow. Booker T. Washington, Emma Goldman, Coalhouse, Evelyn Nesbit, and Freud, although all working in some way to shatter Victorian paradigms, often disagreed on the best way to shatter them and what should replace them. However, these various groups sometimes did work to achieve the same objective with different motivations. The greatest example of this cooperation of the left is the Sacco-Vanzetti Case. In a letter to his sister, Vanzetti wrote “Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for intolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as we do by accident…this last moment belongs to us—this last agony is our triumph.”(Selections from the Files on the Sacco and Vanzetti Trial)The Sacco-Vanzetti Case was exactly that, an accident. The conviction of these two men should not have happened, constitutionally, and their rise to fame was as unexpected as Vanzetti thought. But the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti occurred at a time ripe for uproar. Liberal America was looking for a cause, a symbol, and these two men provided the perfect combination of all things un-American: Italian anarchist immigrants accused of militant unionist activities in the struggle against capitalist oppression. These groups “saw in Sacco and Vanzetti an opportunity to protest all the injustices they felt were pervading society.” (Reuniting the Lost Generation: Intellectual Response to the Sacco-Vanzetti Case) These ordinary men had been transformed into symbols by those who wished to further their particular cause. This tactic is similar to what we saw with President Barack Obama in the 2008 elections. A black U.S. senator from Illinois serving his first term is turned into a symbol of hope and change because he fit the criteria for what America needed: a mixed-race minority candidate who was raised by a single mother in underprivileged circumstances. He represented what Americans believed America should be. Sacco and Vanzetti were denied all of that, and so the world rallied behind them. This trial was a manifestation of the tension between the progressive community and the system upheld by the business community and the political elite.

Throughout this time of tension and turmoil, Americans looked for bridges to connect the values of their past with the industrialized, mechanized future. Two of these Ubermenschen were Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth. Both were so acclaimed because of not what they did, but how they did it. Charles Lindbergh’s feat was not that he flew across the Atlantic “But because he was as clean in character as he was strong and fine in body; because he put ‘ethics’ above any desire for wealth; because he was a modest as he was courageous; and because these are the things which we honor most in life.” (Document F) Charles Lindbergh brought the core values of ‘Americanism’ and merged them with the technology that stemmed from the cities.

Similarly, Babe Ruth brought personality to an increasingly mechanized and depersonalized game. These characters brought consolation to the American populace caught between these contradictory forces. Ruth and Lindbergh showed that individual identity and morality can withstand the force of industrialization and modernization. Sister Aimee McPherson is another example of how religion and the contemporary world can coexist. Sister Aimee brought religion into the context of the modern world without tainting dogma. She “threw out the dirges and threats of Hell, replacing them with jazz hymns and promises of Glory.” (Document I) Sister Aimee ‘modernized’ Christianity while still safeguarding its integrity.

The 1920’s were a time of changing definitions. The Proun Space and installation art work by El Lissitsky challenged the definition of art. A sculpture-cum-painting that took up three walls, it hung like a painting, looked like a sculpture, but surrounded the viewer instead of allowing the viewer to circumambulate around it. What was art, socially acceptable, family, religion and its role in society, urbanization, and government? Before the 1920’s America had a reached a consensus on these issues with little deviation, but the postwar world opened America to a flood of new ideas that challenged the old ones. Naturally, these new ideas were not welcomed with open arms and tension was the ultimate result. Some of the definitions were changed; others remained in dispute, creating a culture in America where each was left unto his own. The ultimate release from tension was indifference, but the apathy-induced coma only last so long.

Did you know?

2011-03-13T09:01:00.000-07:00

Did you know that back in high school I subscribed to an import magazine from Great Britain called “Majesty”? You may not have known that…although you think you know me. It was an expensive magazine all about the British royal family. Why did I beg for this magazine subscription? Well, I had just traveled to Europe the summer between my junior and senior year of high school with the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir (you can guess the origin of the group from the name) and I had adored being in England. It was the summer of 1981, and Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were about to be married. I remember being in St. Paul’s Cathedral just three weeks before this exciting event and I could hardly be contained! It was so exciting, all the history, all the glamour, all the pomp and ceremony. I wanted to get my hands on everything about the royal family. Of course, I wanted to be invited, but just as my invitation to a royal wedding seems to be lost in the mail again, the pleasure of my company was not requested! Do you remember the back of Joan Rivers’ comedy album from late 1981? It had the famed picture of the royal family at Chuck and Di’s wedding, and Joan Rivers had had herself superimposed into the picture bearing her wedding gift of a blender with a bow bigger than the hat of any of the royals.

So that fall I subscribed to “Majesty” so I could indulge my love of the royal family. Over the years I have continued an enjoyment in learning about this House of Windsor. Anyway, it would seem that I am the most eager cinephile to welcome the acclaimed film, The King’s Speech. After all, it is about one of my most abiding enjoyments (obsessions?)—that family.

However, when the movie came out this fall—I kind of held my breath when I was home in the United States—I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see it. Well, of course I wanted to see it, but I didn’t know if I wanted to see it with anyone. Moreover, I kind of hoped no one asked me if I had seen it, or what I thought of it—I just didn’t have a ready answer. I just wasn’t sure how to handle the discussion.

Why? Well, King George and I share something that neither of us particularly enjoy discussing (I know I speak of him here as if he were still alive—I am well aware he has been dead for nearly 60 years) nor know how to explain to practically anyone else. One of the stories that ran in “Majesty” that I remember, lo these nearly 30 years ago, was a story about HRH Albert, the Duke of York, and a speech he gave in the mid-1920s and about his “debilitating stammer.” I remember the phrase exactly. I remember wondering what this royal personage had thought about his speech, and if he would like the phrase, “debilitating stammer.” George and I share this phenomenon, and neither of us particularly likes talking about it. I think I avoid the subject in large part, because like Bertie, neither of us likes to think about how uncomfortable it makes other people. I know that I always wish I could just give out a card when someone meets me announcing the stutter so that then they know what is coming. So I avoided the movie when I was home, but when it won the Oscar two weeks ago tonight, I knew it was time I should see the film. But I didn’t want to see it with anybody, I just wanted to see it alone here with my bootleg DVD I can so easily get (sorry any of my blogosphere friends who get upset about that intellectual property stuff). I curled up on the couch last weekend and lost myself in the story of the King’s speech. Do you know the story of the film?

The story largely unfolds during the Great Depression, building to the compulsory rousing end in 1939 when Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, world calamities that almost don’t have a match on the urgent matter of the speech impediment of HRH Albert Frederick Arthur George, the new King George VI (played by Oscar winner Colin Firth). As a child, Albert, or Bertie as his family called him, the shy, rather sickly second son of King George V developed a stutter. As his royal duties grew more important he and his wife, Elizabeth, a steely Scottish rose, (and the mother of their daughters, Elizabeth, the future queen, and Margaret) sought ways to conquer the speech problem.

Albert meets his new speech therapist, Lionel Logue, reluctantly, and only after an assortment of public and private humiliations does he decide to continue with the sessions. In one botched effort, a Royal Court-appointed doctor instructs Albert to talk with a mouthful of marbles, a gagging endeavor that might have altered the imminent monarchical succession. As eccentric and expansive as Albert is reserved, Logue enters the movie with a flourish, insisting that they meet in his shabby-chic office and that he be permitted to call his royal client, then the Duke of York, by the informal “Bertie.” The actors who portray Albert and Logue play a symbiotic pair whose relationship gives each something he hadn’t expected, even as they develop a greater understanding of their own fears and weaknesses.

But it remains Bertie’s story, a story about suffering and enduring something that is so hard to know why it is happening. Bertie has spent his life suffering the pressure of his father, King George V to get his stutter under control: “Relax!” the old man shouts and brays at him, while trying to give him a lesson in addressing the radio microphone. His brothers mocked him for his impediment, yet as we see, he is the most conscious of his responsibility as a royal. Yet with his father aging, Bertie is required to make more public appearances and speak to audiences, something that terrifies him because of the anticipation of humiliation.

The movie opens actually with the event that I remember from that long-ago story from “Majesty.” The director and writer do a masterful job at creating suspense, the agony of the anticipation as everyone awaits his speech, in that first scene in 1925 at a stadium to the Empire about a series of sports events. Everyone around Bertie looks stricken as they plead, “Just take your time.” The director makes the radio microphone so scary looking, as scary as it must have been for Bertie, and Colin Firth is perfect here, his eyes almost bleeding with the terror he feels at any moment of potential embarrassment. As he waits on the words to come forth, Firth perfectly captures the feel of a stutterer facing the gallows or otherwise feeling doomed. It’s just talking. But it is not easy. And sometimes nothing comes out. A horse neighs with what can only feel like an expression of growing impatience. Bertie speaks. It is not his finest hour.

As I watched the film, of course I loved the film—it is a beautiful film that is only sort of about fighting a speech disability—it is about a man conquering his fears. We are too embarrassed to divulge our shortcomings to the world and most importantly to ourselves, assuming it will only invite ridicule. So in this vein, the way Firth loses his temper mostly on himself, every time he feels he can never get rid of the stutter is terrific. As I have already said, one feels his pain and anguish. He feels ashamed of himself every time his father looks at him in the eye with regret. His trauma touches your soul. Helena Bonham Carter renders a heartfelt performance as the loving wife Elizabeth who wants her husband to believe in himself and his abilities. She even tells him, “When I married you, I told myself, he stutters beautifully.”

Everyone makes it sound so simple, they all say, “Relax,” or this expert advice: “Inhale deep in your lungs Your Highness, and you will find confidence.” His wife Elizabeth asks about the marbles-in-the-mouth business and the toady doctor says, “It is the classic approach from ancient Greece. It is what Demosthenes did.” And HRH the Duchess of York quipped, “And has it worked since?” As Bertie begins to gag on the marbles, the doctor bellows, “Fight against the marbles, Your Royal Highness,” and then pleads, “A little more concentration!” Angry and helpless, Bertie spits out the marbles and spits out to Elizabeth, “Promise me no more treatments!”

When the Duchess of York first meets Lionel Logue she does not divulge who she is or who her husband is. She says, “My husband is required to speak publicly,” to which Logue says, “Perhaps he should change jobs.” Elizabeth simply says, “He can’t.”

Watching how difficult it is for Bertie to tell stories to his daughters, it reminds me all too easily how the simplest tasks can be overwhelming—going to the bank teller, a drive-through window, speaking to customer service on the phone—the simplest things, but sometimes the words don’t come out. No amount of “Take your time,” or “relax” helps. Logue puts it very well when he says, “Every stammerer feels like every conversation puts them back to square one.” Logue asks Bertie: “When did the defect start?” Bertie replies, “I can’t remember not doing it.” Logue then asks, “Do you hesitate when you think or when you talk to yourself?” Later he asks Bertie if he knows any jokes, and Bertie responds, “Timing isn’t my strong suit.”

The film's title does double duty. When Bertie assumes the throne in 1937 as George VI, Hitler is consolidating his power in Germany. A nation needs to hear from its king. This reluctant-yet-stalwart king must speak to the Empire and calm their fears. Writer and director create an expected stirring conclusion here, and Logue smiles after the speech and says to his monarch: “You still stammered on the ‘w.’” The king grinned and said, “I had to throw in a few so they knew it was me.” Evidently, as a child, writer David Seidler had a stutter. George VI became his hero. The King's Speech makes him ours as well.

Over the years I have had a number of therapists or treatments. None of them have really done any significant improvement, but here I am, in a career choice where I speak publicly every day, loving my work, but certainly knowing the pain and anguish that Bertie endured every time he spoke. I am very well aware of the supportive family that I have had. It has not been a topic of conversation very often, but I have only felt love and support from my family. Perhaps it is, as I have hoped, just not the most interesting thing about me. As I look back over it all, there have been so few, so very few times in childhood and adulthood where people treated me poorly because of it. It could have been the most “go-to” of childhood taunts and ridicules, but it never overwhelmed interpersonal dynamics. The strangest part for me, unlike Bertie, is that I love public speaking. I would love to have pursued acting, but, well, you can’t make an audience wait or wonder if the speech will come out! Bertie never enjoyed that speaking, and I do, and since I do it often, I simply have to think ahead of myself and check on the words in my brain, and see if this is a day where an L word, or an R word, or an M word, or W word, or a Cr, et cetera et cetera can make its way out fluently. Maybe the best thing my family ever did for me was what Lionel Logue did for Bertie. He says, “I am here so that my patient can have faith in their own voice and make them feel like a friend is listening.”

Take it away Hamzeh!

2011-03-05T04:33:00.000-08:00

In the next few days I want to share a few examples of student work. I don’t write enough in blogisodes about the great work my students do—I am always grading and assessing the work and I should take more time to celebrate their achievements. In this first example, I wanted to share the written speech that Hamzeh offered as his declamation. KA has begun an annual tradition of a declamation contest, as in the old-fashioned sense where one writes a speech and then delivers it. Deerfield Academy still maintains this tradition whereas many old schools have dropped it. Hamzeh decided he would fashion his speech after “Slam Poetry,” a genre that his English class had studied. While you do not have the benefit of watching Hamzeh deliver his declamation, you can read his words. Long-time readers of the blog will know that Hamzeh has been one of the most vibrant facets of my KA experience, I have taught him thrice, lived on the same hallway and advised him. A panel of judges deemed his declamation the best for 2010-2011. After he delivered his speech, in the back row with the teachers, there were more than a few moist eyes as we contemplated his progress and growth in these four years, not just in terms of facility with English, but his poise and decorum as he ascended the stage and mesmerized the audience. Again, more than a few commented simply, “he is such a habibi.”

Blasting Words
The bell rang, the students left like a clang
No one stayed at the class, everyone ran outside
Holding their blackberries, that every time they rang
The teacher got upset, and sometimes got mad
“What a young generation!” Yelled the teacher, “Please no slang!”
Well, that’s probably some story you are accustomed to living
Frolicking on the grass, having fun and already
Getting work done like a diligent student
You open the book, the notebook and try to look so prudent
But underneath that cover, lies the nation’s threat
It’s not about some rubber, once in a fire lit
But about the “Souar” (pictures in Arabic), that the TV perfectly spits
“I am cold, may I have the 7a66a?” asked so politely the American girl
But when approached with a guy and a “Wutz Up!?” The girl prepared for a little flattering curl
Was it a shock that was painted on her face?
Was it a moment of realization that struck her?
Was it, was it, was it…?
I think it was, and even more, for the guy said the impossible, and even more
“Oh, I see, so now you are a terrorist, Haha”
The girl stood there, taken aback
Unable to compare, those words and the smack
How bad are we portrayed? How bad are the Arabs?
Is it really our fault? Or is it that things add up?
I say it’s propaganda, do you know the Chinese panda?
Exactly, I don’t think you know, so let’s get the points jotted down and I
Would like to address, the people and the press
Will you ever oppress, an orphan or a homeless?
The same thing lies here, no difference, no changes, just the atmosphere
Do you always open your ear? And let the slander adhere
To you, are you sincere? I doubt it, you know why?
Because you got used to it, just like new-born babies cry
We live under one sky, we breathe the same air
How dare you call us terrorists, how dare?
How dare you deprive us civilization, how dare?
How dare you run away from us, how dare?
How dare you be afraid from us, how dare?
What do you mean it’s nine eleven?
When Arabs aren’t there, do you call it a heaven?
What do you mean it’s OUR fault?
Did we blow the towers? Did we rob your hours?
Do you know that the world is yours and ours?
What do you know about the Arabs? Or, let me rephrase; what do you hear about the Arabs?
Because nowadays, all you think is what you hear? The Arabs photo is like a sphinx
That is always setting there, we can do nothing, we can’t destroy it, and it just winks
As in every party you have the extremes
That will do whatever to vanish our dreams
“Hmmm, it’s a misunderstanding, it seems…”
It seems??? May be it’s the teens…
And maybe it’s the screens, which show you what it “seems”
Because it’s not only the Arabs, and it’s not only the wooden teeth
It’s not only the Vikings, the horns and the sushis
You are like little children when they swear: “a number with three digits is greater than a number squared”
Because, let’s be honest, get a square, tilt it to the side, is it a square?
Some might say yes, some might say no, some might even say “IT’S NOT EVEN FAIR.”
You know what you know, and little is what you accept
For you are the victim and they are the subject
Because, let’s be honest. A country man at Texas
Busts his time, his muscles and his flexes
Working so hard, dust on his face and his textures
Then comes a running daughter shouting with fright:
“Daddy, they blew the towers, daddy, I’m scared.”
He hugs his daughter, who looks beautiful in white
But he still bites his lips and says “It’s okay sweetie, everything will be all right.”
He knows it’s all lies, nothing is fine, and nothing is all right
What do you expect from him? Hug the person who ruined their lovely evening?
Hug the person who destroyed his nation? Hug the person who caused the people to start fleeing?
Or maybe, invite him to dinner to discuss why he committed such a violation
As soon as that took place, a connection was created
The Arabs became disgrace and the Muslims too, affiliated
It’s funny how we humans, always take the routes that make us animals
It’s not necessarily congruent, but habituation has its effects and originals
Once we hear or see something, like baby ducks, we follow it
It’s like there is nothing in this whole world that’s other than it
What is it? How did we reach the wall that we hit? Is there any way out?
You know, if we could get the TV. To permit
CeciN'est Pas Une Pipe, The Treason of Images
Before you get the creeps, about some Arab cities or villages
You’ve got to go there, for you to know there
Because what sticks to your mind is what you see, not what you hear
But misconceptions will always be there, whether we like it or not
But the change starts here, now let’s go bomb Pizza Hut!

When you get caught between the dominos and Anne Hathaway…

2011-02-28T07:28:00.000-08:00

Wha????? Okay, that title is a riff on the love theme from the 1981 movie Arthur. (substitute the dominos for the moon and Anne Hathaway for New York City!). Wha????? Okay, I am a little tired, yes, I am sleep-deprived and it is not some pitiful jet lag from the two February trips to Boston. No, no. Last night I went to bed at 11:00 p.m. promptly with my alarm clock set for 2:00 a.m. so that I could get up (in the middle of the night in case you aren’t paying close attention) and watch the red carpet doings and the Academy Awards broadcast live from the USA. Yes, I set my alarm, got up, and watched the Oscars all night. I have no one else to blame but myself for my fatigued state today. Actually, I feel great, just a little loopy. You see, the Oscars closed up shop at 6:30 a.m. and of course that is when one would get up and face the new day in Jordan, all ready to go and do God’s work and teach school!!

It was worth it…I loved the Oscar-cast—well, mostly. James Franco was dull as a host, I thought, but Anne Hathaway—good heavens, how gorgeous and funny and like your most attractive best friend. During one of the breaks of the Oscar-cast I realized I needed to get back on the blogisode stick (again, wha?????) and comment about the last month in Jordan. I have made some comments, but those are now a little past the “sell-by” date (is that a reference back to “Yo, Sushi!” from the last blogisode???).

But before I comment on the doings in the Middle East this winter again, I really should share an article my dear friend Sylvia sent me last week. Sylvia forwarded me a column by David Ignatius, who I believe syndicates out of the Washington Post. This was the first article I have read from the American media (at least that I have found) who seems to understand the nuances and differences in Jordan from Tunisia and Egypt. Let me now share that article with you from Mr. Ignatius:

AMMAN, Jordan -- Jordanians are clamoring for reform these days, like everyone else in the Arab world, but what they mean depends partly on which side of the Jordan River their ancestors hail from. Yet both sides look to the Hashemite monarchy for protection, which is one reason it's still standing amid the hurricane that's blowing through the neighborhood.

When Jordanians of Palestinian descent talk about reform, they usually mean freer expression, less bureaucracy and more representation for their community, which makes up about half of Jordan's population. For many East Bankers, in contrast, reform means rolling back privatization (which they identify with corruption), more power for the army and the government, and limits on more Palestinian citizenship and voting.

There have been street protests here over the past several weeks by young reformers. Meanwhile, retired military officers (drawn from the old guard of the East Bank) have protested what they see as improper deals for the business elite and other problems.

In the middle stands King Abdullah II, leaning this way and that as he tries to ride the wave of change. He depends on the entrepreneurial Palestinian business elite for Jordan's economic growth; but he needs the army, dominated by the Bedouin tribes of the East Bank, for security. This balancing act has allowed the Hashemite monarchy to survive for 90 years, through civil wars, assassination attempts and regional mayhem.

Around the royal palace, people speak of "Meds" and "Beds" -- referring to the worldly Mediterranean outlook of the Palestinians and the traditional values of the Bedouin tribes of the East Bank. One young Amman resident complains that people here always ask where someone is from. He muses that he should start a Facebook protest site called "We want to be Jordanians."

Even King Abdullah seems to think that in this moment of Arab revolution, the middle of the road may be a dangerous place to be. He has talked about moving Jordan over the next three years toward a true constitutional monarchy -- with a few real political parties and a prime minister who's elected by parliament, rather than appointed by the palace.

King Abdullah and Queen Rania are the West's idea of what Arab leaders should look like: They're young, smart, attractive and speak perfect English. They campaign for women's rights and broadband Internet connectivity. They frequent conferences such as Davos on a perpetual road show to drum up Western investment for their poor, resource-limited country.

This very success in Western eyes raises eyebrows at home. Queen Rania has become a lightning rod for East Bank critics who think she's too vocal and independent (and too Palestinian, which is her family's ancestry) to be a proper Arab queen. Abdullah, too, is criticized by some as too Western. The royal couple have the vices of their virtues: The more they plug into the global grid, the more they risk unplugging from the local one.

Abdullah's greatest test may be the rumors about corruption that swirl around Amman. The Jordanian capital is a city of courtiers, passing around gossip about the leading personalities here. The Queen's stylish tastes and cover-girl looks add to the intense focus on her.

Gen. Ali Habashaneh, a retired brigade commander and one of the leaders of the retired officers movement, said in an interview that because of deals made under privatization, Jordan's debt over the past 10 years has grown from $5 billion to nearly $15 billion. He charged that some of these deals, especially big real estate ventures, were improper. As for Queen Rania, he complained that she had been pushing for more women in the bureaucracy, including even the intelligence service. "The constant local media appearances make people think she is a partner," he complained. To the Bedouins, that's unacceptable.

Abdullah tried to address the jumble of complaints in a speech Sunday: "Many issues are being raised. Some are true, some are exaggerated, and others are untrue. There is talk about corruption, there is wasta and favoritism, there is talk about failed institutions, about privatization, whether it been a success or a failure." He said he had instructed a new Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate charges, and he's thinking of adding a new panel to oversee the investigators.

Jordan has its problems, and King Abdullah could use a little more of the common touch of his father, King Hussein. He wants to get out ahead of his problems before they get any worse. But he also needs to stay in the political middle, balancing the old guard and the new reformers, and that's a tricky straddle.

What I like about Ignatius’ article is that he does not just jump on the narrative of the domino theory that I have seen in the other American commentators’ assessments. The domino theory is just too easy and does not account for how Jordan really is. Anyway, the other day the U.S. Embassy did warn Americans that it might be wise not to go downtown on Friday at the conclusion of the Friday noontime prayers. Well, my great friend Joan, an intrepid sexagenarian, decided she wanted to see what the big deal might be last Friday. She took a public bus down to the King Hussein Mosque area and waited for the prayers to end. As she waited, she watched the police form protective lines. She said to me later, “Well dahlin," (as she says in her Rhode Island accent), “the men came out of the mosque and it was hardly impressive! The men dispersed, the police waved at them, I saw no weapons, no demonstrations—wait, I did see some reporters and photographers trying to stage a scene for a photo op! It was really a non-event.”

Obviously none of us knows what lies on the horizon, but we don’t feel unsafe here, we don’t feel quite the inevitability that the American press is reporting. What I do know is that there was a traffic tie-up yesterday in Amman for a car show, essentially a big parade, in support of His Majesty. I know that whenever I have heard His Majesty speak, his voice is reasoned and often humorous, didactic rather than dictatorial; at times he seems to be speaking directly to a young audience, befitting his oft-articulated concern with Arab youth and educational opportunity. King Abdullah reminds us his audience directly that Jordan has often held the line against Muslim extremists who have hijacked Islam, the Palestinian plight, and international discourse.

Okay, that about does it for now. I will enjoy my little reverie as I hum away the tune from Arthur.

Postcards from Boston

2011-02-25T08:34:00.000-08:00

Well…I can see that my return is met with stony silence. Well, you see, I have been traveling quite a bit this month, and somehow the blogisodes just didn’t get accomplished. In this shortest month of the year, I have been in Jordan a short time, in the classroom a short time. In fact, I have been absent from the classroom 8 school days this month since I have flown to Boston twice. Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone had just said, “Gee, in honor of all your hard work, just stay over in the USA in between those two job-related trips!” No—no one in the right authority suggested that!

So where have I been? Why have I been so incommunicado? Why when so much is going on in the world and in my school world have I been so silent?

Yes, I have been traveling. Strangely enough, the flight itineraries were both exactly the same! Two flights from Amman on BMI (British Midland International) and two flights from London Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic to Boston and two flights back and two flights back. The best news of the month is that Jet Lag, the phantom terrorist of international travel did not totally vanquish me.

The first trip was as a recruiter at a job fair in Boston. We went to Boston for five days; I came back for six days and then left again to Boston for six days with a delegation of students bound for Harvard Model Congress. Lots of packing and lots of time for grading in the air and lots of time to enjoy the in-flight entertainment on Virgin Atlantic (they have about 50 movies available and about 40 television shows—I might have just kept on flying with all the options up there!). Both trips were exciting and successful and I am happy to have my feet on the ground for a few weeks now.

The first trip came about rather suddenly when a month ago our headmaster asked me to join him and the Dean of Faculty to interview at the job fair in Boston. I have never done that before at a job fair, but I love interviewing people and so enjoyed the invitation. I had no idea how steady the work is, and there is virtually no time away from the job fair. Oh well, all in the name of school improvement!

Sheena and I fly together to London, and there we learn that our next flight is cancelled since the snow dance over Boston had just enjoyed another encore. Luckily, we weren’t stranded, just delayed 7-8 hours. As soon as we figured out our flight status, Sheena grabbed my hand and said, with a devilish look in her eye, “We are going to “Yo Sushi!” I knew that Sheena is a fiend about sushi, but here I saw her in her natural habitat. “Yo Sushi!” is a strange restaurant—part automat, part diner, part sensory experience, part dim sum meal, and partly like a scene in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. You sit at a diner-like counter in “Yo Sushi” and the little plates move right in front of you on a giant conveyer belt around the whole restaurant. It felt a little like being in Oz too, I think. Anyway, each plate is color-coded to a certain price, and there is soup, and sushi bites and chicken sate, and it all rolls grandly right in front of you—all you have to do is reach out and grab the plate! There is a sticker on the side timed so you know the “sell by/eat by” time for the freshness. This transfixed me and I just loved watching. I also loved watching Sheena stack up her plates. This woman can do a sushi room! I don’t know how long we stayed there but I felt like a child enjoying the “It’s a small world” ride at Walt Disney World. Food going by on a conveyer belt. Just take it. It all seemed magical!!

We arrived much later in Boston than we had planned, and sadly that evening was to be our little window of free time on this trip. However, we got to the hotel at 11:00 p.m. When I arrived I discovered that my bags had not arrived yet. Gulp. One of the things Sheena had emphasized about this job fair is that it is very professional and formal with men in suits all the time. I hadn’t traveled in a suit and I hoped my bag would catch up in time. I didn’t really want to conduct interviews in my oh-so-casual-and-comfortable travel Yo Sushi wear. As we drive to the hotel in Cambridge, the winter scene is unbelievable. The snow is piled up in drifts at least four feet high and the Charles River looks frozen solid. By the way, the bags would take over 48 hours to arrive…so much for trying to look professional and formal!

The way this job fair works is kinda like a 1930s dance contest. The ballroom opens at a specific time, and then the candidates have a specific time to try and secure as many interview times as possible. The recruiters make a banner announcing what openings are at the school, and the candidates whiz by (maybe they should be on roller skates??!) and look for their discipline/craft and sign up for 30 minute interviews—as many as they can (is there a prize?). It was indeed thrilling being in this ballroom. There were about 130 international schools—seriously from A to Z—from Argentina to Zambia, and about 450 candidates hoping for one of the thousand jobs available in these far-flung locales. Somehow, well, in my mind at least, it seemed like what the Miss Universe Pageant might be like, as Miss Brussels mingled with Miss Pakistan and Miss Korea and Miss Ghana. Oh, and Miss Jordan. (In a very pageant-like way, people kept saying, “Thank God I’m not from Egypt,” just like you might look at Miss Egypt and feel sorry for her hump!). Somehow this whole recruiting thing brought out all the old salesman like qualities in me when I went and peddled school candy or seeds or Christmas cards—what else did I sell as little boy?

After the dance contest is over, you start with the receptions so you can schmooze with the candidates and see who is interesting over cocktail hors d’oeuvres and drinks. I stood near the gorditas, a great appetizer which is an almond stuffed fig wrapped in bacon. Just wrap it bacon and honey, it’ll go.

Then the interviews began. Oh my. I have been interviewing people in some capacity for maybe 20 years. But I have never interviewed people for everything from art to theology (sorry, we have no Z courses available at our school!). Previously I had scanned resumes like a demon, well, actually similar to Sheena scanning the sushi at Yo Sushi! I looked at dozens of resumes, and as each person came for an interview I tried to be as well-prepared as possible for the interview.

I learned that at this job fair it was well known that many people left the job fair with a contract in hand, signed, and finito, the job search completed! I am one who often wants to mull a person over, but in this environment—again like the 1930s dance contests, speed is of the essence here!! So Sheena and I double-up with some interviews, and on some I fly solo. John, our headmaster, is across town at another job fair, madly going through stacks of resumes and interviewing as well. Each day he dashes over in a cab through the Boston Winter Wonderland to join in for a second interview on people we had liked. Hey, you know I just thought of a good idea for this job fair—maybe we can combine the job fair and “Yo, Sushi!” I could sit at a diner counter and the candidates could roll through on a conveyer belt. That’s how it felt actually!

So I met several couples that I enjoyed immediately. Amy and Clark. Oh—just so nice and interesting and perfect for us. They had interesting hobbies and know the boarding school life well. I think that was one of the reasons I was brought on the trip—I was to be the honest spokesperson about life at KA—I perfected my little spiel of how it is “hard but wonderful” so that no one came under any false pretenses. Remember we are there with schools from everywhere. Vienna—we ain’t! Then we met Diego and Alexa—she is a writer and they have lived in the Middle East before, and I loved their attitudes about school and professional development. And he could be a great counselor besides a Spanish teacher. Then Sarah and Jevon—here was a great young couple, one a math teacher and one a historian. They would all be perfect for us! That evening at the Schmooze Reception I put on my best schmooze persona. Oh, and apologizing for not being in a suit. But still—schmoozing up a storm! And the theme was burgers from around the world!! Oh, please, how great. It didn’t even seem to dawn on me that I hadn’t left the hotel that day!

We made offers to those three couples. We waited. We bit our nails, figuratively speaking. I learned also that the “thank you note” is not a dead art. After almost every interview the candidate would handwrite a note and stick it in our file. Notes on stationery! Well, my, my. The interviews continued. On Saturday I had 17 interviews in a row. With no food break at all!! Thank goodness the breakfast buffet was among the best in my life!!!!!

I enjoyed my interviews with a number of young men and women, eager to teach, eager to go abroad and see what life has to offer beyond our shores. I met this dynamic guy who reminded me of Chuck and Bowman, two of the most outstanding young teachers I have ever known. I met this young woman teaching in inner-city Washington, D.C. who just mesmerized me with her sharpness. I met a guy who studies Chemistry at Yale and was an eagle scout and does technical theater. I wanted all the good ones!! I met this sincere interesting IT guy from the Maldives, and an older man from Maine who wanted to go somewhere new and re-pot himself. Oh, and there was a young woman named Victoria—we decided she may be the most narcissistic person we had ever met! I met prospects for the art position—call central casting—you can guess that they were quirky and a little flaky, but interesting. We put a note up about an intern teaching economics and all of a sudden the frat boys lined up for interviews. These were long days, exhausting days, often 25 half-hour interviews a day days. That is a lot of active listening!!

I didn’t leave the hotel for 72 hours! But I managed a visit each day with a former student. They just had to trudge through the snow of Cambridge to get to the hotel. I visited with three young men, from three separate schools, ranging from the class of 2010 in Jordan, to 2002 from Hackley, to 1994 from Charlotte Latin. One is a freshman at Harvard, one is in Business School, and one teaches at Tufts. They were wonderful visits all. You would think the last thing I would want to do with my hour of free time is sit and “interview” former students. But it was delightful! Ghassan and Dan and Ethan provided me with real joy as I wound up this intense trip to Boston.

So, as the job fair ended on Sunday, we had some affirmatives and some rejections with our offers. We lost Amy and Clark (they saw me and hugged me saying, “you’re awesome, we just want to go to South America”) and Diego and Alexa and Kat, but we signed Matthew and John and Ali and Sarah and Jevon.

As the 1930s dance contest ended, I got back on the plane, knowing there was grading in my future and the repayment of dorm duties, and then I would unpack and pack again.

Perhaps I should just get on the conveyer belt and keep moving!

De-Nile

2011-02-06T04:32:00.000-08:00

For over a week Egypt has occupied the top spot in the headlines of the New York Times. If you breeze by CNN, there are images and reports from Tahrir Square of the uprising and resistance of the Egyptian people against President Hosni Mubarak. It is a deeply troubling (and exciting) moment in history.

The last few days I have been in Boston at an intense job fair interviewing candidates for KA. I will blog about that in a couple of days. I had hoped to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, but alas, this trip offered practically no moments at all away from the work at hand. But if I had gone to the MFA, I would have reveled in the great sculpture of pharaoh Menkaure and his wife, and I would have probably done a little reveling in Egypt’s long history. The better you know Egyptian history, that long history of at least 5,000 years, yes, the better you know Egyptian history, the current situation in Egypt comes as no surprise. The power struggle being played out on the streets of Cairo this week has striking parallels from that time of the pharaohs.

One of the greatest thrills of my trips to Egypt in the last few years has been gazing at the famous gold mask of the boy-king Tut. It is every bit as glorious as you might imagine, both serene and monumental and iconic. That mask resides in a room overlooking Tahrir Square, the scene of so much violence in the last week. But when you see that mask, or think about it, it helps to recover the context, the often violent context of Egypt’s past. In 1322 BCE Tut(ankhamun) died unexpectedly and that void ushered in a time not unlike this week in Egypt. Then as now, transitions from one ruler to the next became fraught with danger, as it presented a rare chance for opposition forces inside or outside the country to destabilize the mighty edifice of state power. Tut’s demise caused more than usual disquiet, since there was no obvious heir to the throne, and the late king’s policies proved deeply controversial…ahhh…as I learned in French class from Mr. Hall 30-some years ago: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Then as now, it was the army that stepped in to maintain order. The General of the Army (if you are dying to know the name to add to your rolodex, it is Horemheb—I wonder how Cole Porter might use his name in one of his “list” songs!) assumed the role as Pharaoh without blinking an eye (there is probably a joke in there since the Egyptian eye with that composite view is so striking and familiar). To justify his coup, Pharaoh Horemheb tapped into the Egyptians’ long-standing fear of foreign interference, pointing to those lousy Hittites as potential aggressors if stability and martial law was not maintained. Hmmmm…yes, just like Hosni Mubarak’s supporters justifying their continued hold on power, spreading rumors of those lousy Americans and their potential interference.

In modern Egyptian history every president has risen from the military. Egypt’s two recently appointed vice-presidents are from the armed forces. Thirty-three centuries ago Horemheb nominated another general as his successor. In doing so, he inaugurated a military junta that ruled Egypt with an iron fist for 13 generations.

Not long after this Horemheb character came the legendary Ramses II, the original Ozymandias of Shelley’s poem, who used his friends in the military to impose Egyptian authority across the wider Middle East. In Ramses’ time his influence extended him from the hills of Syria to the plains of Sudan, and Egypt was feared as the superpower in the ancient world. International prestige and military rule are deeply enmeshed in the Egyptian psyche.

Many in the news have called Hosni Mubarak a “modern-day pharaoh” and there are many other examples of how his rule compares to other authoritarian pharaohs. Other kings have posed as national heroes when chroniclers have noted how behind the scenes the leader is hated. Other kings have faced home-grown insurgencies and have responded swiftly and uncompromisingly. There have been few open rebellions over time given the unflinching brutality of the state.

So over the last 5,000 years Egypt’s rulers have grown used to unquestioning obedience from their subjects. In a country with a longer history than most, there is simply no tradition of freedom of speech or public debate. There simply have been only a handful of events like the last week in Egypt. No wonder that Hosni Mubarak and his inner circle seem in denial of the protest and outrage outside their palace gates. As the old joke goes, “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.” Ahhhh….I have never gotten to think of that joke/pun in such a literal way: DE-NILE!!!

No wonder, given the reminders around him, that Hosni Mubark has cultivated the personality cult like ancient pharaohs did, and he has grown rich from the sweat of their countrymen’s labor, like ancient pharaohs did. So too is their response to opposition like the ancient pharaohs. For thousands of years, uprisings were met with crackdowns. One particular gruesome one is from 1950 BCE (let’s just think how ooooooooooooold that is: almost 4,000 years ago!!) when the ringleaders of the uprising were burned alive as human torches to light the perimeter of a temple. I don’t need to go through anymore of the list of abuses and tortures, you get the picture.

So here we are in 2011…thousands of years into this fetid history of crackdowns. Today, tanks stand guard at the pyramids, certainly the greatest symbol of authoritarian rule ever erected. Don’t forget that the pyramids were the tallest structures in the world for almost 3,500 years, until the Eiffel Tower is built in 1889 in France. If you look back to the building of the pyramids, the almost-500 years of obsession with this structure and monument, that age came to an end with a political vacuum following the demise of a long-standing ruler. Factionalism and paralysis marinated in Egypt, the economy collapsed, and Egypt plunged into a civil war.

Ahhhh…the cycles of history. Will Egypt’s history repeat itself? Can we overcome the past? May we dare to hope we can?

Here is the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley of the ruler Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Is CNN reality?

2011-01-30T12:39:00.000-08:00

This morning as I taught my 20th Century History class about the Russian Revolution, I thought about the current unrest in the Middle East a couple of times. I had shared with the class the model created by Crane Brinton in his Anatomy of a Revolution (some of these students have heard this in every course with me!) about how a revolution unfolds: while a tyrant holds sway, dialogue is often sought, and when that dialogue never happens, moderates seize control and events then get bigger and bigger. Disgruntled radicals then take control and…that is about 30% of the model. As we reminded ourselves of Brinton’s template, I said, “So far this template works exactly for what is going on in Egypt right now, less than an hour flight away.”

But then there was another moment, when I explained to them about the “pre-Revolution” to the big one in 1917, one that occurred in 1905. In 1905 there was an uprising in St. Petersburg, and after a kerfuffle the army came in and shot some of the protestors. Eventually Tsar Nicholas gave in a little bit, just a little bit, and most people thought the worst had faded away.

Then I was reminded in the fall of 1917, during “the big one” when the Bolsheviks staged their take-over, it always seemed interesting to me that while we think of it as a big deal today, it didn’t disrupt daily activities much. I remember one source saying that it didn’t even disrupt the daily movie schedule in St. Petersburg or Moscow.

Hmmm…

I have received several emails and calls in the last couple of days telling me of the scary headlines about “protests in Jordan,” and since the news has been covering the upheavals in Egypt quite carefully, I have had some worried family and friends about Jordan.

So I did a little investigating.

I visited Starbucks in Amman. No one was talking about any protests in Amman. Then I spent the evening at a family’s home (a lovely dinner indeed—the mother made Arab dishes and the father made Italian dishes—I ate enough for several meals, and both cuisines satisfied me immensely!). When I came into their home, CNN was on TV and they had been glued to the news all day about the news from Egypt. I asked them about the protests in Amman as reported by the New York Times. They swiped their hands, and said, “Oh nothing is going on. Everything is fine.” I pressed them about what the news agencies had reported and the concerns of my family and friends. It was so interesting how it hardly fazed them. Among the half dozen adults there, no one was the least bit worried about the so-called protests. One of the guests said, “You know that happens all the time after Friday Prayers. Several thousand men gather at the King Hussein Mosque and then after the prayers they are ready for a little protest march.” She then added, “Besides, the police offered them water and juice as refreshment, so there was no problem. Isn’t this just like your Tea Party demonstrations in the US? I mean, they just want lower prices.”

They were very interested in Egypt, but hardly at all concerned about what had happened a kilometer or two away…hmmmm…

Today I grabbed the newspaper about 8:00 a.m. and looked through it and there was nothing about protests in Jordan. There was plenty about Egypt, but maybe the news is a little censored here, I don’t know. But none of the teachers coming in from Amman talked about it, neither Jordanians or Americans who live in Amman. Everyone talked about the constant rain today—the beginning of the rainy season, I suppose.

I asked at lunch about it, and again, it seemed to inspire only aloofness and practically disinterest. One colleague reminded me that many Egyptians were swarming into Jordan to escape the troubles in Cairo, and one colleague was glad we weren’t a school in Cairo trying to recruit teachers. One student told me that his family was glued to the TV set all weekend since they do not like Egyptian President Mubarak at all, and he didn’t know anyone who did.

Finally, I looked into my email inbox and saw no warning from the U.S. Embassy in Amman. Usually, they have sent out emails when people should be alerted about…well, all kinds of things. Nothing!

So for all of you watching the news and wondering and worrying about Jordan, I’ll tell you, I couldn’t scare up the least bit of story or interest! The newspaper reported that no Jordanian had been reported injured in the protests and clashes in Egypt, and there was a long editorial about how Egypt, and President Mubarak especially, have missed many chances for economic reform over the years, and how stability and security go hand in hand.

There were stories of the celebrations for the King’s birthday here in Jordan.

But nary a story that matches the hoopla I see on CNN as they leave Egypt for a bit and mention the protests in Jordan.

So, I am fine, and as far as I can tell, CNN is making a mountain out of a molehill. That was actually a quotation from one of the important businessmen at the lovely dinner last night.

Evidently in medias res...

2011-01-29T03:33:00.000-08:00

Evidently I am a bit in la-la land...

I just had a call from my friend Gary, and I had an email from my dear Aunt Dot. "Um, John-O, are you watching the news?" Gary asked me.

No, I was finishing a blog entry and working on my syllabi for February.

I quickly go to the website for the NYTimes and find this:

"Thousands of protesters gathered in Jordan, but Yemen and other restive locales in the Middle East stayed relatively quiet Friday as the region’s focus turned to Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, where tens of thousands staged an unprecedented challenge to the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

“It has blown up in Egypt,” read the front page of Al Akhbar, a leftist daily newspaper in Beirut. “Today, all eyes are focused on the mosques in the land of Egypt.”

The collapse of Tunisia’s government and the escalating protests in Egypt, long a pivot on which events in the region turn, sent shock waves across the Middle East, where activists have looked to their examples for inspiration in bringing about deep reform. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, the most influential Arab satellite channels, broadcast nonstop coverage of the demonstrations and clashes in Cairo, from morning until well past nightfall.

“This is a moment, and we’re definitely going to see change,” said Laith Shubailat, a veteran dissident in Jordan, which has been beset by its own protests this month.

Thousands took to the streets there Friday after prayers in peaceful demonstrations. In central Amman, many of them chanted, “We want change,” with banners and slogans decrying high food prices and demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Samir Rifai."

How embarrassing that I need to check the news when evidently I am in the middle of things.

I have been on campus this weekend, but no one has been talking about it, but I wanted to assure family and friends that I am all right. I am fine. I will find out more but have not heard a word on campus about what is happening evidently in Amman and so therefore think everything is managed competently.

Given that a few minutes ago I published a blog entry about my peace-of-mind state over signing my letter of intent, it is good to be watching and attending to the real world as well.

Thanks for the concern, and all appears to be under control...

I will head into Starbucks in Amman to see what I can learn...

Decisions, decisions…

2011-01-29T03:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday as I sat outside grading papers on a typically sunny, blue-sky, 60 degree Jordan January day, I realized this was a very smart time, a very smart month, in which to obligate the teachers at KA to sign their letter of intent about the coming school year some 200+ days down the road…again, I was outside grading papers on a typically sunny, blue-sky, 60 degree Jordan January day and my friends in the New York area had another 15 or so inches of snow dumped on them, and my friends in Ohio are just shivering and awaiting the next chapter in their winter saga. Very smart indeed.

In all my years of teaching, I have never had to declare so soon into the school year my intentions for the coming school year. At Hackley it inched earlier to February, but one could stretch that to March if you were on the fence and biting your nails about your destiny. The first school year here in Jordan we didn’t make our intentions clear until May—everything that first year was a little, “wow, we are really running a school! We better think about next year!”

We knew all Fall that December-January would be the time this year when we had to state our intentions for 2011-12, and when the school year ended last year and I bid farewell to Jordan for the summer, I knew that this school year would be my last year at KA. After all, I had had a contract of sorts brokered by one of the great students here, Jude Dajani, sometime in her 10th grade year. At that time I had taught Jude since the school opened, and she was doing well in AP World History. She decided that I must stay until she and the class of 2011 graduated. I liked the momentum of the new school, liked my boss Eric very much, and enjoyed the work/project of bringing AP history to the students at KA. So Jude and I shook hands, and there was my binding contract. Just so you know—I have since taught Jude in two more courses, so I will have taught her four years, every day of her high school career!

Last summer I had a strange amount of phone calls from American friends asking me my plans after I left KA. It’s as if everyone knew the deal I had with the effervescent Jude, and knew that I was beginning to think post-Jordan. Where would I relocate? What kind of school? Would I do some administrative work? And then there was that program at Harvard I read about—would I really be a student again?? It has been 15 years since the Klingenstein program and my latest Master’s program (okay, that was a little self-serving, since now it is clear I have done more than one!) While I have done 7 NEH seminars over those 15 years since Columbia, it has been since the mid-1990s that I was a full-time student. Hmmmm….the program entices nonetheless…and that seemed a good way to re-enter the USA as a full-time resident. I even went so far as to shell out the $40 for the GRE Test practice book!

As the summer drew to a close, and I packed up the GRE Test practice book to bring back for study purposes, I didn’t want to begin the year with such finality about my departure. That felt like I wouldn’t even give the school my full attention. I decided to get the year up and running and spend the month of November pondering whether I would stay longer than my Jude contract.

As it turns out, the year has been swell. I like the new boss in so many ways. I love my juniors (and seniors) in AP Art History and I am enjoying the work with the youngest faculty. Oh, my. Then I have the added “problem” that a few times a week, some younger student stops and asks if I will still be here when they can take Art History. Then last month, two juniors presented to me a written contract urging me to stay another year. Herewith, or some legalese, is the contract offered to me by these juniors Dima and Divij:

YOUR KING’S ACADEMY CONTRACT OF EMPLOYMENT -POSITION OF BRO, AND LIKE HISTORY HEAD
WHEREAS, HACKLEY—NO, NO, WAIT KING’S ACADEMY is unique in that it is HELLA TIGHT and is committed to maintaining in the framework of Catholic, (oh wait you’re Protestant….never mind then.)

WHEREAS, it is the policy of King’s Academy to employ highly qualified bros and sistas who support the ballin’ history program in pursuit of such high educational standards;

Queen DimaSaad and the wanna-be mayor of AwesomevilleDivijMehra propose the following conditions of employment for the renowned Mr. JLo (Divij’s attempt of a nickname) for the academic year of 2011-2012.

1. The term of this agreement is August something, 2011 until whenever the queen graduates, 2012.

2. BASICALLY, Mr. John Leistler must agree to instruct the queen (DimaSaad ’12) *cough* AP Modern European History *cough* and be instructed in the field of Art History by DivijMehra (because he is a work of art).

3. You WILL (Yeah that’s right) devote a reasonable amount of out-of-class time to curriculum-development (i.e. taking us to Papa John’s), to sponsoring student activities (MORE Papa John’s), and to other duties as assigned by the administrator (Chili Ways).

4. You can’t be a naughty boy or we’ll suspend you and terminate this contract

6. So you’re probably wondering what we can pay you..well the Queen proposes that we tax the students extra money so that your salary can be quadrupled… a la Louis XVI (LOL YES THE QUEEN CAME UP WITH A HISTORICAL REFERENCE, SHE’S SPECTACULARJHHH HHH).
Perks:
• You get to see The Queen and the wannabe every single day of your life next year and that will make your heart dance, we guarantee.
• More pizza in your life. (See condition #3)
• You get to be more badass because you get to tax people

SIGNATORIES:
Prettyboy_Divij Mehra@hotmail.joewr455r _______________
Queen DimaSaad _______________
Mr. BROman Dickson _______________
Zeyna Goldilocks Tabbaa _______________
Mounir -thinks he can play the Piano- Ennenbach _______________
AGREED:_______________________________________________________________________
(Signature of BRO—that’s you…) (Date)

How could I not consider their contract? They are offering me pizza!

So I met with our new headmaster and delivered the news that I would stay another year. It doesn’t hurt that the weather here is sensational in January, but it really wasn’t a hard decision. What was the basis for my decision? I work for a visionary educator, I work with committed educators in my department, I teach subjects that put me over the moon, and I have students stopping me asking, “You will save a place for me in Art History, won’t you??”

Yes, I will miss the conveniences of the United States and the presence of autumn, and I will continue to pay hundreds and ultimately thousands of dollars to rush home for a week of vacation now and then, and I wish I had a better car here and better entertainment options, and more museums and walking spaces nearby…but the project, the reason I came here is alive and well. Here is a poem that Jamil, a senior I taught last year, sent to me saying that he had submitted this to English class for which he had to write a sonnet:

Art History Influence
Tis course of great depth and immense insight
Tis all-encompassing will awe and stun
Didactic and pragmatic day and night
One moment serious while the other fun
Art history is a one of a kind course
Viewing the Parthenon or the Stupa
Looking at the Greek Ephebe with his force
Or at the omniscient and wise Buddha
All in all, a change within me was made
Being more audacious than Claude Monet
Or more creative than Picasso’s shade
Occupied by sublime and Arête
A Sonnet! Said some sober students suddenly
Ay, I have learned to be extraordinary

These students, Jude, and Dima and Divij, and Jamil and of course, others—they have been remarkable, and why not stay and see where this may yet lead?

Something New!!

2011-01-23T07:31:00.000-08:00

You know, I think January is my favorite month in Jordan. There are several reasons for this, not least of which is that my friend and educational soul mate Christy has spent two of my four Januaries in Jordan. She has descended to KA for three weeks each time spreading her TIEL-wheel sunshine and provoking thought among our faculty and providing me with a fun guest to romp around Jordan. When I first started teaching my grandmother, the veteran teacher of 62 years (!!) warned me that January was a difficult month in the teaching profession. She warned me that after the Christmas holidays students might be a bit more sluggish, a bit more apathetic, and a bit more prone to whining. January, of course, is the mid-way point of the school year, and one needs a certain resilience and stamina to sustain oneself through a school year.

But January in Jordan is gorgeous! It is sunny, and many days the temperature peaks in the mid-60s…yes, read that and weep all my dear ones in the Midwest and on the East coast…sunny and warm days. (Now February is a different story, but that is not the month I am savoring or celebrating at the moment.) Each year I have marveled anew at the beautiful days of the Jordan Januaries…this year I was not surprised at all and have sighed and soaked in all the Vitamin D this month has provided me (again, February will be a different story).

So Christy came and cut a wide swath through the faculty as she went and observed classes, offered coaching and tips to faculty young as well as experienced, all in the name of heightening and deepening our teachers’ sensitivities to the cognitive and evaluative development of our students.

Yesterday she headed back to New York, ending the nearly three-week visit in her return engagement to Jordan. As we came to the end of her stay, I wanted to do something different and fun to celebrate Jordan. We had done Petra in 2009, and there wasn’t time for Aqaba or Wadi Rum in this last weekend since she needed to be delivered to the airport at dawn yesterday. So I looked around (figuratively) and realized I had not gone to the Ma’in Hot Springs yet in Jordan. Was there really something new for me in Jordan? I kind of thought I had discovered almost everything in the kingdom (there are some medieval desert castles out east past Amman and nearer to the Iraqi border that I have yet to see actually) so it was exciting to add another place in Jordan for me.

A colleague had suggested the spa at the Hot Springs and avoiding the public areas there (“too gauche and smelly from the sulphur springs,” she said) and so I had Lubna investigate the spa. Hmmm…the “Six Senses Spa” it is called. We thought of over-nighting at the Hot Springs, but since there was a faculty party last Thursday night, I didn’t want to miss the bash, so we set our sights on a daytrip on Friday to the Hot Springs. We had appointments for spa treatments at 1:00 in the afternoon. No one seemed to know how long it takes to get there, (“thirty minutes?” wondered one colleague, and lots of ums, and “I don’t know if I have been there,” said others.) so we decided to give it an hour or so.

“Oh,” Lubna said with more than a hint of warning in her voice. “I hope your car has good brakes. The hill down—well, you won’t believe it.”

That “oh” actually gave me the shivers. If you have read anything in the blog about the car I lease here, I worry about the car on 15-minute drives…so an “oh” from Lubna chilled my blood a little. Let’s leave 90 minutes for the trip. Hmmm…there is no manual in the car, and no one seems to know really how to switch this semi-automatic/semi-standard car into a low gear. Oh, indeed.

We go out of Madaba and about 20 minutes we are on a road on which I have never traveled before (is this a metaphor, or what??!). It is a Jordan January day, and the fields look lovely as we drive past towards some mountains that I have only seen from the bottom at the Dead Sea. I see—they have a road alongside the mountain. How very, south-of-France! After about 40 minutes of easy driving we began on the steepest, most tortuous road I have ever seen. Now, first of all, I am prepared for this. Lubna had warned me with that helpful, “oh.” I figured out how to get this stupid car in low gear, but I am still driving about 15 mph (maybe just 10!) down the windiest, seriously, windiest road I have ever seen. (It must be said—it is a good road, however). But the views are gorgeous—I sneak a couple peeks as I make the hairpin turns. The views over the desert hills down to the fairytale Dead Sea, luminous blue in a valley of browns, are incredible. My friend Joan Fox has been telling me how much she loves the color brown now after having come to Jordan. There are so many browns in the Jordan palette—dark browns, chocolate browns, pink browns, ochre browns, beige browns, yellow browns, et cetera.

The road keeps coiling and recoiling in steep switchbacks until it finally enters the barren, yawning gorge of the lower Wadi Zarqa Ma’in. You keep going until you reach the valley floor—the entrance to the public areas and then the spa of the Hot Springs.

The car made it! I made it! Christy had to cover her eyes during some of the turns—I didn’t have to, well, there really wasn’t much choice as the driver.

We pull into the parking area for the Six Senses Spa—with just a few minutes to spare before our appointments, and as we get out of the car, the door of the spa opens and an attendant smiles broadly, and says, “Mr. John and Miss Christy—welcome!” Now that is service!

So we go into the exquisitely designed spa—it is right in the base of the rocks on the valley floor—and get acclimated (hot towels and all that jazz). Since we are right on time they take us to the treatment areas and we meet the spa professionals. Yeah, there is something beautiful about the luxury and indulgence of a spa day!

After the massages we went to the spring area—what a relaxing place and the natural beauty was exceptional. The waters have been channeled to form two hot waterfalls, and there are hot spa pools, natural and artificial saunas, and surprisingly there are not many people there, so it is easy to find a quiet, steamy niche in the rock all to yourself.

Some nice people at the spa said the hikes around the springs are great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am sure, but who would want to leave the rejuvenating steaming water! One British man told me there were some neighboring archaeological sites with Neolithic standing stones. Uh-huh, that sounds nice, but right here at the pool they bring me fruit and tea, and I can sip the tea while soaking in the spring…yes, it would make an exhilarating counter-point to lying around in the hot water, but oh, not today.

Just for fun, Christy and I checked the weather report for our beloved New York—oh, it was to reach a high of 23 degrees Fahrenheit. Too bad for the New Yorkers as I lazed around Friday afternoon on a stunning Jordan January day in the sunshine amid the stunning rock formations!

While we enjoyed the decadent afternoon Christy wondered why we enjoyed this so much (really? Wasn’t it just obvious?). But I decided to dip my toes in the pool of profundity to provide a reason…we were sitting around marveling at the rocks and water, just as the Daoists in China have done for centuries. Just as the Renaissance scholars did after they discovered the Chinese penchant for painting said rocks and water…Hmmm….

You see, to refresh your Daoist memories, these Chinese spiritualists sought a means to provide order to their chaotic lives. They thrilled to the opposing forces of rocks and water (just think about it and begin your list with all the opposite attributes!) and how these natural phenomena overwhelmed yet calmed them. This balance of the opposite forces, they believed, brought order to their lives. If they achieved balance and order in their lives, they would reach a state of harmony. We like harmony!

So, as we soaked in the hot springs at the valley floor of this stunning place on a perfect January day, we saw ourselves like the Renaissance and Chinese scholars—blissfully savoring the order we had brought into our lives, the balance in our dispositions, and the harmony into our souls.

Lubna had warned that we should not get caught on that road at nightfall, so we hightailed it out of there before sunset, and crawled back up the hills, drifted past the fields and rolling hills outside of Madaba and enjoyed the serene sunset in the rearview mirror.