Faith, Iconography and Power or Decay and Glory

 

Maybe I should have just taught some art that relates to Halloween today. I don’t know, I don’t think I taught  very well today, and that bothers me, but it is always a, shall we say, delicate balance to figure out how to teach well, pedagogically, content-wise, at the beginning of the week, all filtered through our own personal neuroses and miasmas. Good, Heavens!  Indeed, maybe that ghoulish painting on the bottom, a 1973 work by contemporary Austro-Canadian Otto Rapp, entitled, The Deterioration of Mind Over Matter would have been more successful.

The work on the top, a 6^th century very precious and rare icon of the enthroned Virgin Mary, was at the centerpiece of today’s art history lecture. Okay, sure, which one of these art works would probably have generated more heat and action in the classroom??!!! But, in a survey as expansive and rushed as the AP Art History curriculum, we really don’t have time to stop and just “have fun” like with the diabolical, surreal Rapp piece. And that icon is from the coolest monastery in the world—St. Catherine’s at the base of Mount Sinai, in Egypt…yes, I have been there!

So, why didn’t it go well today? A parade of Byzantine icons is always a difficult “sell” to any audience, yeah sure, but there is an exciting urgency to this week. This week I call “Our Encounters with the Divine” week and in this four-day week (one day is given over to a school-wide PSAT test, yeah, great)  we careen through the visual imagery of Byzantine Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. I try and frame the art as a way to reveal the beliefs and practices of each faith, also hoping the quick-connect-the-dots students will see universalities among and between these major world faiths. But today I saw more yawns and anxious looks at the clock (hey, it was right before lunch!) than in a month of Sundays (slight religious pun intended!). So I thought it might be fun to write a blog entry about a tough day in class and a day that did not engage as well as I had hoped.

Gee, writing about a bum day in class…sounds like interesting reading, huh??!!

But actually, this period of art is fascinating, and I wanted to reclaim it for myself tonight, so read on dear reader! Byzantine art has been described by one of my textbooks as “about paradise—meaning it is everywhere and nowhere.” That alone is a fascinating assessment. If you check out one of the study guides for AP Art History they reduce almost two millennia of these images as simply, The Four F’s: flat, frontal, formal and floating. Okaaaaaaayy…well, that works as a mnemonic device in discerning a Byzantine work with a cool  little F trick, but oh, there is more beneath the surface!  Like really all religious art, these images are meant to serve as a refuge from the real world. Increasingly in this historical time (which would be from about 550 and for the next thousand years, but even continuing in many contemporary Orthodox churches) there would be no art images in their real world, and one would visit a church as a refuge and solace from that everyday world. You step inside one of these churches, and the gold backgrounds and the jeweled colors and the images of an all-mighty Divine One would envelop and embrace and stun you.  But beside the image as refuge, one can’t escape how the works are not made in a vacuum—they are against the landscape of the tumult of real history. That dichotomy ought to set your pulse racing!

From Crete to Moscow to Constantinople to Cairo, these icons faithfully represented the same reality. This reality was not depicted by the image but contained by it: icons held the “presence” of Christ or the Virgin or the saints, as if in a kind of limbo, waiting to be activated by the fervor of the faithful. That is why they are difficult for us…if they seem “boring” it is because we have not stepped into its world of infinite reflections and crossed that threshold into what you fervently long to get, that glory beyond the glory that you see. You can see how easy it is for our 21^st century eyes to resist such a vision.

Let’s add on top of this the “tumult of real history” I tempted you with earlier! In 726 Byzantine Emperor Leo III felt the tremors not too far south of his capital in Constantinople the incursions of a new faith, Islam. As I mentioned in class that this is one of the first instances of a Christian reacting to the rising surge of Islam, I fumbled to find the right verb, and Rami, a student far more engaged today than maybe I deserved, Rami said, “This is when Christianity and Islam first collided.” Great verb Rami!

I noted that Leo worried that Islam, with its rather daring ban on representations of human form, decided that the faithful in his empire should therefore destroy the icons like that one from Sinai above! Some obeyed and some did not. Ohhh, it gets rather interesting and kind of class warfare like: the rich defend the precious, expensive icons, and the poor have at it and destroy away! For 150 years there is this debate over icons, their use, their veracity, their idol-like control, and that is why the icon above from St. Catherine’s is so precious since very few survive from this time. We have a Christian icon, a source of refuge, that is very much caught between the storm of Christianity and Islam. Wow! And still I managed to be on the dull side today!

Yes, I suppose the ghastly Rapp painting would have been more fun today, and it also stands for some of the same feelings of iconography and power, but I like the little lesson on icons as well. Faith—and its ability to inspire the most soaring of visions, the most rarified of craftsmanship, as well as the most zealous attacks on non-believers, is the underpinning of this week’s exploration. The icons tax our 21^st century attention spans, but they also allow for a peek at the tumult of history and the way it can lead to an astonishing cross-pollination.

On Friday night, the night our school celebrated Halloween, I was on my way to the school’s Haunted House. A student, a captivating, compelling, quixotic young man came to my door, and wanted to talk about good and evil in the world. Great. One trip would have been easy (um, to the Haunted House) and one taxed my mind as he explored whether or not history has been inevitable about evil…oh, my, nothing really weighty is ever easy, and so I think about today’s class, look at how it is a difficult lesson, and kind of chuckle as I ponder Ralph Waldo Emerson’s semi-Halloween saying, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  Let’s just leave it at faith and glory.

Wunderkammer!

 

Last night I returned from a quick week-long trip to New York. Of course it was marvelous. How could that glimpse and taste of my old life in New York not be wonderful? And as I thought about the trip on the plane ride back across the ocean, I realized it was just that: wonder-full. My time in New York is always exciting and invigorating because of the friends I see, the old haunts I visit, and the curiosity and energy of that metropolis. I had a lot of time to think on the flight back since the computer system had malfunctioned and there were no movies or maps to watch during the long flight. Oh well. No matter! I thought of several upcoming blog entries! But most of all, I decided that New York, for me at least, is like this delightful old German word, a wunderkammer. Hmmmm…say it a couple times to yourself, ja? And make sure you say a ‘v’ sound on wunder and not a ‘w’!!

What is, or, was ist, a wunderkammer, you may ask? It is literally a cabinet of curiosities, of wonders, about art and the world. In Renaissance Europe such wunderkammer became quite popular—each nobleman aspired to have an encyclopediac collection of objects whose eclectic categorical boundaries were hard to define. These charming curios of curiosities conveyed symbolically the patron’s control he had of the world around him. These “cabinets of wonder” are the precursors to our modern museums.

In reaction to my usual verbose self I decided to sum up in a phrase or two why I love New York so much. I decided that I go to New York to refresh my sense of awe with the world. (Now since I have devoted a whole blog entry to this discussion, I don’t suppose I have avoided verbosity in the least!).  As corny as this sounds, when I am in New York, I find myself gasping in wonderment at all that is around me—the theater, the restaurants, the friends, the museums, Central Park, and I find lessons that can be gleaned so easily from all that is around me in New York. So I decided to look back into my wunderkammer of last week’s trip to see what curiosities dazzled me especially. Art, like the heart, can sometimes defy logic, and it is often the most ordinary things in New York that remind me of beauty. Beauty is often where you don’t expect to find it; that it is sometimes we may discover and also invent, then reinvent, for ourselves; that the most important things in the world are never as simple as they seem but that the world is richer when it declines to abide by comforting formulas.

Christy, my intrepid partner-in-wonder-for-all-things-New York, and I went to an unusual theatrical event together. It was part improvisation, part walking tour, and part detective procedural show. In the Lower East Side we met others in a dingy bar and learned about an unsolved crime of a brother and sister in 1873 “Five Points” in New York. We then had a map and a bag of clues, and set out to find the suspects, all of whom were walking around the neighborhood, and we questioned the suspects about motives and alibis, always trying to crack this case. After a couple of hours each group got to state who they believed the murderers were and why. What an exciting way to spend an afternoon exploring and researching and reliving a bygone era of New York. The actors did a remarkable job fielding our questions, speaking in long ago idioms and prejudices and reminding us of the social history of the late 19^th century Bowery.

On another day I went with my former student Talal to the Met. I had looked forward to this since Talal is one of the most exciting students I have had in art history. How fun to go through and see some of the works we studied. But I also wanted to look at a work that is rather new and contemporary, one we hadn’t studied in class, and that might excite a certain amount of wonder. I chose a work by contemporary Japanese artist Kohei Nawa, an artist under the age of 40.

Nawa has developed an original technique and term called “Pixcell” in which he works. The term Pixcell is derived from both “pixel” and “cell”—the most basic building blocks of the digital and the organic. Mr. Nawa has been working with his unique artificial glass medium of Pixcell beads since 2000, using them to address the discrepancies between exterior and interior, what is perceived and what is actual. Take a look at the top of the page at art work Talal and I encountered. What do you see? 

Hundreds of crystal clear beads coat a once living, now taxidermied deer, complete with a full and proud rack of antlers.

It is a strange sight!  The Pixcell Deer stands in a room, surrounded by ancient Japanese screens that are coated in natural imagery. Nawa’s Pixcell Deer (from 2011) is a solitary figure emanating a cool, silvery light in an otherwise warm, golden room. But its magnetic attraction becomes weird when I realize what lies beneath the bubble-covered skin. A deer, once living, breathing and feeling, is now stuffed, frozen and silent! From afar, the stag deceives viewers into believing that it is simply a sculpture, an inanimate object that was made from nothing into something. The realization of being tricked, as well as being confronted with what is essentially a carcass, is very strange.

But strange is okay. Strange is usually also about wonder. Nawa invites us to look, to wonder, to learn, and then to be a little more confused. It is obvious that the Pixcells reflect what is around the room—but every image is upside-down!!?!

From the wall text I learn that a deer is traditionally considered a messenger for the deities of the Japanese Shinto faith. Nawa repurposes the ancient Kasuga Mandala (the compositional motif of a white deer turned toward a mirror that sits on its back) to create his own harbinger of deception, which communicates the release from physical reality in preference for images. Kawa is quoted in the wall text:    “By covering a surface of an object with transparent glass beads, the existence of the object itself is replaced by a ‘husk of light,’ and the new vision ‘the cell of an image’ (Pixcell) is shown.”

His focus on the space between perception and reality, or what might be called illusion, inspires ominous feelings. The outer layer of things, the skin, is the most immediately attractive portion of the work, but it also physically and metaphorically distorts what lies beneath it. A single bead, similar in size to a fortuneteller’s crystal ball, rests in the slope of the deer’s spine. As the largest Pixcell it is the easiest to peer into, but grotesque fun-house-mirror images form within it. My own twisted and bent reflection mixes with the contorted features of the deer into a vortex of light and color. The glass eyes of the stuffed animal are near human eye-level; a dark and piercing stare hangs beyond the fractal divide.

Reflections force a viewer to both look and be looked at. But this often leads to forgetting the divide between what is presented and what is seen. Knowing that I was both staring at, and being stared at, forces me to reevaluate the relationship that was forming between this art object and myself. Is then this deer that lived into adulthood before being killed, stuffed and sold, still a deer? No. Now this animal exists solely as an image—pixels made of light and color created by its new, artificial skin. The living animal was translated to an image on a website, repurposed into a sculpture, and then recreated as a hybrid physical-image. Nawa’s use of the Pixcell beads on everything great and small, living and dead, imposes a sense of wonder that breeds uncertainty in my mind. What is nature in the technological age? Are we people or are we images of people? And finally, will the human eye eventually lose the ability to tell the difference? I wonder…

I could go on and on, because it seems every episode in New York lends itself to a beauty and wonder for me. But just one more little drawer in my wunderkammer will I share today…about another play. Christy and I went to see a new (only days since it had opened!) and splashy musical on Broadway called Big Fish.

I approach the art of theater in the spirit of an amateur. I mean amateur in the original sense of the word, as a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, whole-heartedly. Big Fish was a delight! I went to see it simply because of four names attached to the show (It was a 1990s movie by Tim Burton, but a film I never saw). The three leading actors and the director are well-known in the New York as consummate pros and outstanding theatrical animals.

Big Fish is a musical built around the tall—or at least well-stretched—tales  of an Alabama-born traveling salesman, Edward Bloom who has a penchant for embellishing his life. With his stocky build, short stature, and thinning hair (wait! Am I starring in this???), lead actor Norbert Leo Butz is an unlikely leading man, but he has the loose-limbed energy and charisma of a young Dick Van Dyke.  For the most part, though, Big Fish finds theatrically inventive ways to reel audiences into its central love story. In this case, it isn't boy-meets-girl but father-hooks-son. And Edward Bloom is quite a catch. But not every critic took the bait (stop me!!! I could on and on with the fishing puns!!) One critic wrote last week: “A lot of loving craftsmanship has gone into this musical, and it delivers satisfying entertainment for those who don't mind being emotionally manipulated.”

Don’t mind?? I have no problem with something that tugs on the heartstrings!

Wholesomeness gets a bad rap on Broadway these days, usually regarded as the kind of unbearably sweet and inoffensive entertainment that sophisticated theatergoers must endure while taking their conservative grandmas out for a night on the town...But Big Fish displays no fear in plopping its unabashed wholesomeness right in your lap. Its spirit is steeped in Rodgers and Hammerstein decency that propels an evening that's adventurous, romantic and, yeah, kinda daring. It was an imaginative and heart-tugging evening, just the kind of wonder I adore.

 

I guess what I love so much about my wunderkammer trips to New York is that I find art really everywhere in that city. There is the accidental masterpiece in lunch with Kate, catching up with Harrison, visiting with a friend who has suffered a tragic loss, enjoying a walk in the park. The art is certainly on display in one of the gazillions of museums in New York, but it is the wonder of discovering it, enjoying it in an Irish suspect in old New York, in a dead deer, and in the hopes of catching a big fish. Time to close the drawers of the wunderkammer but boy I can’t wait to open the cabinet again!

Immeasurably More

Yesterday I turned 50 years old. I kind of whispered it at first, since it is somewhat hard to believe, but then since my boss, John Austin, yelled it out at a senior staff meeting on Thursday morning, and longtime colleague Fatina screamed it out in a History department gathering on Thursday afternoon, the cat is out of the bag anyway.

As some of you may know, and chuckle about, I haven’t always been entirely truthful with my age. When I was 23 I decided that I would age myself a few years so that I had a little more credibility in my first school. I thought if I came across as 26 or 27, then I would appear that I knew infinitely more than I did. Then when I moved to my third school in 1996, I thought, hmmm…let’s turn 30 all over again. People always act like that’s a fun decade to turn into, so let’s do it again! So I shaved a couple years off the actual age. As time went on, I had to keep straight in my head who thought I was what age…good heavens, what a ridiculous charade to maintain!

So, now that I have reached the half-century mark, I would rather someone think I looked all right for my age, instead of, “Oh, well, he looks fine for his mid-40s,” and I guess I just don’t care what people think if I know more than I do, or less than I do. Whatever I am, whoever I have become, whatever I know or do not know, it is simply the summative achievement of this particular moment in time. Oh, how very Zen I am at age 50…

Yesterday was one of those birthdays people wish for all the time—a day not at the workplace, a day that could actually be totally lazy and self-indulgent (meaning no grading of papers, no writing of college recommendations, no meetings, just a slowed-down, self-indulgent day…). My King’s Academy friend Lubna and I always go to the Dead Sea to celebrate her birthday (two weeks from yesterday) so I decided that we should go on my semi-centennial birthday. While lazing around in the spa I looked back at these other birthdays that mark the beginning of a new decade…very interesting the trip down memory lane. As I looked back, I realized I was kind of “king of the hill” for the beginning of the decade and then changes and unforeseen things happened in the journey. I know, I know, that is exactly what happens in life, but very interesting to look back at the beginnings of each of these decades.

10^th birthday I spent my 10^th birthday in a funeral home. I had looked forward to this birthday for the obvious reason that I would finally have two digits to call my own for an age! How would I feel to have two hands completed in numbers? I was this much closer to the teen years! And then my Aunt Ann Griley died. So here I was in the funeral home, moping around, not so much because my aunt had died fairly young (you don’t think of 46 as young when you are turning 10!) and my rambunctious cousins had lost their mother. No, I was disappointed that this was how I got to spend my 10^th birthday. Wow. Childhood had kind of lead to this day, I assumed, and then I was stuck in a suit in a funeral home. My mother had arranged that I could go to my friend David Freeman’s house later on. His mother had made stuffed peppers. I didn’t like stuffed peppers. So she made me some hot dogs. So that was the birthday dinner the night I had two digits to claim as my age. Big whoop. Of course, who knew what lay ahead of me at that point. I hadn’t yet had Miss Wilson in 5^th grade, the teacher who transformed my thinking. I hadn’t yet gone to Gamble Junior High and played in the orchestra, the band or sung in the choir. I hadn’t yet learned French. I hadn’t yet gone to Western Hills High School and discovered their music and theater programs, and the great friends I would make with those groups, no discovered Mrs. Michaels and Mrs. Schneider…I was excited to turn 10, but I had no idea what lay ahead of me as an adolescent.

20^th birthday On this birthday, the day I left behind the childish dreams and notions of teenage-hood, I spent as a sophomore at Denison with all my cool college friends. We probably played “Tears For Fears” and “Men At Work” (and yes, probably “Air Supply”) on a stereo and hung out with our clique, our very independent, non-Greek clique of smart, mostly Ohio-public-school friends. This was the era of big glasses and Bill Cosby-esque sweaters. We had survived the freshman year with panache, and as sophomore year began, frankly, we were king-of-the, well something. We weren’t juniors or seniors, and we didn’t have cars, but we had already entered some junior and senior seminars due to our high school AP grades and our top performances in freshman year. I had joined the Denison Singers as a freshman (with a European tour, no less, the second of my not-yet-out-of-my-teens-life) and had decided that I would become a history professor. In fact, I plotted out my life, or the important stuff, you know, up to your 40s. I would be a history professor like my idol, Amy Gordon, start a family, teach at Denison and then assume the presidency of Denison in lovely Granville, Ohio. The same month that I turned 20, the current-president of Denison, Robert Good, a former ambassador to Zaire, announced that he had an inoperable brain tumor and would most likely die within the next year. The student body soon after surprised Dr. Good with a party, all 2000 of us in sweatshirts emblazoned with “The Good Years,” to celebrate his tenure and his life. In fact, he did die the next September, and I remember thinking in that year how he had packed a great deal into his 60 years, and that was a pretty good way to live life. But on the birthday, we were forever 20, excited about college experiences and our friendships. I had no idea yet that I would study abroad the next year, would accidentally miss my grad school deadline as a senior forcing me to re-think the plan to immediately  become a professor, that I would become a high-school teacher instead, move to the south, finally get on with graduate school at Brown, hate grad school so much that I knew I had to return to what I loved, the high school classroom, and direct plays. None of that would have made much sense at that long ago party on the west quad at Denison.

30^th birthday   This birthday came in the middle of preparations for my most complicated and audacious play EVER—Noises Off.  So my life plan was a little off-track. I probably wasn’t going to be the president of Denison, but I owned a three-bedroom house on a quiet street, in a beautiful section of an up-and-coming metropolis. I had been at Charlotte Latin for three years, become unbelievably happy teaching AP Modern European History, directing plays for a school with a generous budget, and teaching students who were amazingly committed, brilliant and fun and kind. Noises Off  requires a two-story set that revolves and the structure was there by the birthday. The blocking was done. The cast worked like the finest Swiss watch! I taught students who loved being in class—I mean, can it get any better than this?? Is this what my 30s, heck, the rest of my life, would be like???? My sister had found the man of her dreams—hey, he loved me! She was planning a wedding to celebrate family and love. We celebrated my birthday on the set (I joked that the set of Noises Off was better decorated than my house—no joke actually, and then I made a sick joke to a friend after the success of this play. I said that I might as well kill myself since I couldn’t see how I could top myself!). Who knew that I would soon apply for the Klingenstein program in New York, get whisked off to a sabbatical in New York, bid a sad farewell to the brilliant Casey Brown, incur the wrath of headmaster Ned Fox, and look to move back to New York and start all over somewhere else, selling my house in under 48 hours. I remember wondering to Catherine Justice, “Maybe this has all been a fluke. Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing,” just a few weeks before I packed up the car and headed to Tarrytown, New York. You can see why I might have shaved a couple of years off the actual age…

40^th birthday   By now, the age thing had become much like legendary entertainer Jack Benny—I would perpetually stay 39. But this birthday is celebrated with a surprise party in Manhattan at Christy’s house. My visionary-but-not-well-organized-friend Christy had planned a party with Hackley friends and other friends to celebrate my new decade. This was a quintessential 40^th birthday—all of us at perhaps the “peak” of our careers, celebrating in an apartment on Central Park West, near all my favorite things in my favorite playground on earth—New York City. I raced out of Hackley School every Friday afternoon, escaping by way of Metro North into the City for a weekend of theater, camaraderie, art, good food, walking, laughing, music, church, and eventually heading back north those 18 miles for Sunday night planning for the next week. I headed home to Cincinnati several times a year for the important re-connections with my family. Ahhhh…could life get any sweeter? I felt intellectually challenged at Hackley and with New York at my feet, I directed several plays a year with marvelous actors, I worked with Chuck Edwards, my former student from Charlotte, and now an incredibly strong teacher and remarkable colleague…go ahead, let life continue…Who knew that soon there would be a trip of bad students that created bad feelings that set the stage for me to know I couldn’t stay at Hackley forever, forsaking the “gargoyle” I hoped to earn with 40 years of service.  Who knew a magazine article spied by the wondrous Anne Siviglia would lead to a dinner out at swanky Le Bernardin with Eric Widmer, an old friend of the Siviglias now founding a new school in Jordan. Who knew I would leave the hearkness table of my room, the exceptional students at Hackley, that I would bid adieu to Manhattan and come to the plains of the biblical kingdom of Moab?????

50^th birthday   So here I am—at my semi-centennial, towards the end of this most self-indulgent blog, in the most self-indulgent media of our self-indulgent world. I teach a course I love, direct a play once in a while, live in a challenging place, sometimes lonely since it is not as full of people and activities as other chapters of my life. Doris Jackson, another angel of a friend, prophesied that I would find clarity in the desert. That is true. I help run the school, help develop the talent of teachers, and have learned an enormous amount from people around me about how schools work and how other groups in the world survive. In some ways, I feel successful. But it is always, or should be, always about more than whatever success means. Have I lived up to the talent and potential of when I turned 10 or turned 20? Have I internalized the integrity and sense of fair play and generosity and hard work that marks my father’s contribution to this earth? Have I imagined and executed things in the precise and enthusiastic way that my mother operated and contributed to this world?

So I chose a painting, a Chinese painting, the one at the top of the blog entry, to mark not only my 50^th birthday, but how it feels at the turn of a new decade. This is a work by Song Dynasty painter Ma Yuan, called Mountain Path in the Spring. We see a scholar looking out at the world in front of him, rather obscured in the way Chinese artists loved, not sure what lies in front of him. There is a young charge near him, helping with the journey. The scholar sees a bird in flight beyond him, intersecting that activity with his contemplative stillness. I imagine he looks back in his mind at what the other decades have been like, but certainly in the misty stillness before him, even with his scholarly pedigree, he has no idea what still might lie ahead.

I suppose that is the beauty of it all and the risk of it all in this journey of life. Doris Jackson loves to send me devotion books, and yesterday, on that semi-centennial since my birth, the title of the day’s devotion was “Immeasurably More.”  The piece refers back to a passage in Ephesians where Paul thanks God for all He has done, “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.” My goodness, even Doris, in all her wisdom, couldn’t have guessed those perfect words would appear on my 50^th birthday.

I talked to some of these people mentioned in the blog last night, the ones who have loved me and blessed me through these 50 years. I probably should have closed with the words of Paul, but since he got the title of the blog, I can’t resist going back to the final words of one of my favorite TV shows of all time (you didn’t think I would have a blog entry about my entire life and not mention a TV show, did you???????!)

The Wonder Years ended its run the year I turned 30. I loved the words then, and I showed this clip at a drama banquet in May, 1993. But the words are even better now, with a half-century under my belt:

“Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you're in diapers; next day you're gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul. I remember a place...a town...a house like a lot of other houses... A yard like a lot of other yards...on a street like a lot of other streets. And the thing is...after all these years, I still look back...with wonder.”

 

The kind of September

As the last seconds of September, 2013 whizz past us, I am reminded of the iconic and wistful song from the Mad Men-era theatrical fable, The Fantasticks, in which “El Gallo” sings,

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.

Wait a second! (I slam on the brakes in my mind and scream mentally again) Wait a second!!!

Slow and mellow??? September?????

In my always increasing days on earth, I don’t know if I have ever experienced a slow and mellow September! I know, I know, it’s not a reality-based show, and it beautifully sets up the line to come: when you were a tender and callow fellow. But as I was driving into Amman for dinner with lovely former colleague Annabel and her husband Tim, I hummed the tune, thinking about the end of this month, and the image of a slow and mellow September just made me laugh. Thinking about Septembers past then made the 30-minute drive go a little faster!

In my lifetime, four of my Septembers have been in a brand-new school for me, eagerly trying to adjust to a new building, new policies, new children, new colleagues, new curricula, new sets of politics and lingo. A first month in a new job setting is hardly slow and mellow!

In my lifetime, two of my Septembers have been as a brand-new student in graduate school, both stuffy Ivy League universities which are not by nature terribly welcoming, even though both schools have officially been welcoming students for nearly 300 years each. The graduate school life is intense, and each time I had to adjust to missing the teaching-school life. You feel 8 again as you look for new friends with whom to eat lunch and hope it will turn out as well as life in the 8^th grade did.

In my lifetime, 26 of my Septembers have been the first month of a new teaching year. September is always like “New Year’s” for teachers, but that first month is crucial as you diagnose each student, attempting to gauge exactly what each one needs from you so that the rest of the year can be spent tailoring every single thing to meet particular needs and help each child soar beyond where they were on that first day of said “slow and mellow” September. Exciting? You bet! But fraught with the painstaking work that something major is at stake—September is the crucial month of the year to earn trust and respect in the classroom. Slow and mellow??? Ha!!!

In my lifetime, well over 40 of my Septembers have been spent in school, in general, going from pre-school all the way up—and while “back to school” always means new clothes and new possibilities, think of what it also means: the loss of old friends or old colleagues, new settings where you just don’t know every nook and cranny, the resumption of old habits and old grudges, the very real possibility that 6^th grade might be demonstrably and impossibly harder than 5^th grade, the fear that those 9^th graders really do beat up the 7^th grade boys every day, the fact that as President of Studio Choir in 12^th grade might be more than you bargained for, the fact that each year you assume a little more responsibility….hmmm…slow and mellow…in what universe?????

In my lifetime, 19 of my Septembers have witnessed the beginning of plays I am set to direct. Ahhhh…directing of plays, one of the most delightful and tense things I have done as an adult. The thrill of picking the perfect play, planning the rehearsal schedule, casting those very fragile egos, fretting over the sets, crunching numbers to try and buy enough costumes, hoping against hope the theatrical stars will align, and watching your baby unfold…a nail-biting and thrilling exercise, and the antithesis of slow and mellow!

In my lifetime, 31 of my Septembers have meant being away from my home base of Cincinnati. I have not lived full-time in Cincinnati since graduating from Western Hills High School in the Reagan era, but I am never spiritually far away from my family. Each September is a reminder that after a beautiful summer, there is that jab of pain to leave my family and go to Denison or North Carolina or Brown or Columbia or New York or Jordan.

In my lifetime, four of my Septembers have been in a position in charge of the faculty at a young school. Sure, it is like the beginning of sleep-away camp as you plan for their excited arrival, but then that first month with the ex-pats, as they adjust and speedily or not unpack from their long journey, they chafe and assimilate, and no, it is not mellow hoping that they all fit in and do well and figure out the life of a KA teacher.

Even in childhood, which of course as the song plays in your head is supposed to be rosy, the words sing,

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.

But even in childhood it wasn’t that wistful. Each September brought about new lessons and new situations and new hardships. But…but…but…while the words to the song promise that
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow

there are so many exciting things about this first month of autumn. For one thing, September is full of important birthdays for me, from childhood friends on upward, but two notable birthdays are the days of my iconic teachers, Miss Wilson and Mrs. Schneider. Each September, just two days apart, are the birthdays of two of the greatest teachers I have known. Miss Wilson taught me in the 5^th  grade and Mrs. Schneider taught me choral music in high school. I called each of them this past month, on their day, thanking them for the millionth time for their influence, their gifts of precision and care and deep meaning, and their legacy. Thank goodness for a September for the opportunity to thank them.

I don’t know if a September has passed in the last quarter century when I have not been thrilled and grateful to get to be a teacher. I think it is the fact that it is decidedly not slow and mellow that makes me enjoy the process. The other day at sit-down lunch, a senior asked me if since I have been at KA for a long time, am I bored here now?? "Never, my dear!" School and the process of figuring out school is never boring, and never slow and mellow…

Soooooo, if the Schmidt and Jones ditty from The Fantasticks is totally wrong about September, then what song might fit? What is the mood of September? How should we regard September? Is there a good song for September? As I drove back to campus after my wonderful reunion dinner with Annabel and Tim, I thought about what my mother would say about September. She would probably have mentioned the importance of harvest, that we are in the season of harvest before a long winter (hints of the “Deep in December” line from “Try To Remember”).

But everything with my mother was deeper than just the surface. Every lesson was more than an expedient end of a moment---everything was setting up a better way to live. No wonder I learned so much from her about the beauty and ephemeral nature of life itself. So I am driving back to campus thinking of the concept of harvest, of the fruits and bounty of harvest, and I can hear my mother asking, “So what have you harvested lately? What kind of September is it for you because of your own personal harvest???” Oh, she would definitely have asked that one! And she would have launched into the beautiful metaphor about harvesting and reaping, nodding in a wise way about how we “reap what we sow.”

Instead of the plaintive “Try To Remember,” my mind darts to another song, much less slow and mellow, but the upbeat, old 19^th century gospel hymn, “Bringing In The Sheaves.” So as I drive down the airport road from Amman to campus, I am humming and singing the old words:

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

That is a more fitting song for September! Nothing slow and mellow about sowing and reaping. The writer was inspired by the words in Psalm 126:6, "He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.”

That’s a pretty good kind of September…

Knitted to the world

“So what’s it gonna take, Ken, to get your boy outta there?” asked a well-meaning acquaintance of my father last week at the Tuesday night buffet gathering at The Farm in Cincinnati.

A week earlier my father coyly commented to me during our telephone visit, “Lots of people are asking about you and hope you are okay.”

I know the news reports are dire about the situation in Syria. Yes, the situation is bad in Syria, that ongoing humanitarian catastrophe that has claimed perhaps 100,000 lives and forced almost 2 million Syrians to flee the country. And yes, Jordan borders Syria, so every time one of the maps flash across the news screen, it looks as if we in Jordan must be in imminent danger.

However, it is hard to convey how normal our lives continue here at KA, just a couple of hundred miles away from the not-so-simple civil war in Syria. It must make us look blasé when we say to our families that no one is worried here. I hadn’t written anything about the ferocity in Syria since I didn’t want to fan the flames—the news agencies in the United States do enough of that for us. But I thought it might be important to look at what some of the things in the last week have been like, and that, for those of us in Amman, and south of Amman (Syria is to our north) we see no evidence of these struggles, no one speaks in guarded tones about their fears for the future of Jordan—and it really is normal school life going on.

Wait, a minute that is not entirely true! Last week a glimmer of my old life visited me. As many of you know, in the last chapter of my life, the New York chapter, I saw on average 2 theatrical productions a week, seeing up to about 150 productions a year all told (I can do the math, on average it was 2 in many weeks, and a glut at some other times). So since I moved to Jordan in 2007, outside of the theatrical events on the campus at KA, I had seen one lone theatrical event in the kingdom. One!!! One—EVER!! It was a dance story about the founding of Petra, in Arabic, but opulent costumes and projections of Petra. So when a colleague said that a West End touring production was coming to Amman with The Sound of Music, I could hardly believe it!! A show, a Broadway show coming to Amman??? And, to top it off, it would be presented in a great location, al fresco, at the oldest site in Amman, at the ruins of the Roman Citadel high on a hill overlooking downtown Amman. A show???? And I don’t have to fly to London or New York??? So a group of faculty (mostly new faculty—they have no idea, this might be their last show here for years!) gathered to go and see the fun.

It hardly mattered that I know the show forwards and backwards. If one of the nuns had fallen ill at the last minute, I could have gone on! (“Gloria patri et filio, et spiritui sancto!” and of course, “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?”  A flibbertigibbet, a will-of-the-wisp, a clown!”) or if Rolf, or Georg, or Max, or heck, even Baroness Shrader had gotten delayed at the airport, I could have filled in!

They built a temporary staging with seating for several thousand outside, right on the site of where the Romans had built a temple a couple thousand years ago, and they had cameras projecting onto a big screen intimate images of the stage production, and then right to our right, down from the Citadel is the Roman amphitheater. The gods of the theater must have been happy!

The production was efficient and well-done. Actually two of the Von Trapp children were from Amman and did a fabulous job. The book still gets laughs in all the right places, and Maria did her best, although how can we ever erase Julie Andrews from the performance? Captain Von Trapp was appropriately a fuddy-duddy, and Max was almost dull, but the children—all they had to do was march on or off stage and the audience cooed and applauded. The show worked well. I relayed one of my favorite memories from seeing this show over the years when I saw a semi-professional production but the Mother Abbess couldn’t quite reach the notes. As the notes ascended in “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” the actress began to pull at her habit, and tried (in vain) to pull the notes out of thin air and her costume. As she reached those long-held, high notes at the end, she grabbed on to a nearby column from the set, hoping against hope that the stability of a fake column might lend her a little traction in holding those notes. Alas, as I recall, the audience just looked down, almost in prayer, that the actress might end the song with a little dignity left in-tact.

But the Amman night was beautiful. Above and below the actors, all around, were the lights of Amman, and it even looked a little like Salzburg, the setting of The Sound of Music. The abbey in the show is on top of the Festung in Salzburg, and overlooks the Austrian town, and it looked a little like the twinkling lights of Salzburg. And of course, seeing the show reminds me of my time in Salzburg, in my junior year of college, lo those many years ago.

So that was on my mind last weekend—enjoying the show and hoping the Von Trapps could keep away from the Nazi menace. That’s about as close as I came to the Assad menace of Syria.

But this past week was just one of those serendipitous weeks of school pleasure—probably not the stuff of blog entries, but enjoying teaching about the Greeks (I mentioned in one class that I was glad I lived another year to get to teach the Greeks again…I think they thought I was a little batty!) and the potential of the Greeks and their fascination with the human project. I shared with them the wisdom of Maxine Greene, who when I had her as a teacher at age 80 [her age, not my age!] said she loved the phrase, I am what I am—not yet. How Greek of Maxine!

This week my colleague Lilli and I embarked on our annual fall blitz-tour (I probably shouldn’t use a German word this close to the Von Trapps!) of visiting 80 classes in 16 school days. As the Deans of Faculty, Lilli and I visit classes, offer some feedback, and take the temperature of the school academically. It is always fun (and a little exhausting) to see so many classes. I started with English classes and I was treated to a lesson on topic sentences and what one should expect from a good topic sentence. Another English class scrutinized thesis statements (did she know I love this???) and how we can write more effective thesis statements. Another English class asked the class to respond to this quotation from C.S. Lewis: “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He thinks he is ‘finding his place’ in it, while it is really finding its place in him.”  The class had trouble with some of the vocabulary words, so the teacher skillfully helped them understand the words so they could understand the meaning of the quotation, and wondered how, and by what we are knitted to the world.

Another day I visited two of the big guns at the school as they taught: Julianne, the Dean of Students, and John, the headmaster. Julianne is teaching the “History of Freedom” course that we created at Hackley, and she does a bang-up job exploring the nature, vagaries, and changing nature of freedom. This day she was looking at ancient Rome, and the apostle Paul, and gauging the freedom found in the Empire, and in this new Christianity. The class looked at issues of control and freedom, and freedom and slavery, studied Paul’s words to the Romans, and compared Zeus and Jesus. John had his class discussing a piece by Malcom Gladwell about how one measures excellence.

You see, just a thrillingly mundane week here at a school that is working hard to prepare students to read and write and speak well and maybe, maybe solve some problems in the world.

Yes, there are problems in Syria and I do not deny that. But none of the Jordanians that I know is worried about imminent danger. We have close to 50 students from the USA here and not a single one has been asked to come by a parent. It is life as usual, business as usual, education as usual here at KA.

But for the entire world the Syrian issue is worth pondering, whether action or not against Assad is advisable. Ask 20 people, you’ll get 20 differing responses. What is certain is that the rival rebel groups are turning on each other and Assad has a “rump” state left to him around Damascus. As my wise friends wonder, if President Bashar al-Assad clings to power, will this civil war lead to a major conflict between Sunnis and Shiites throughout the Muslim world, and then that might divide Lebanon, destabilize Turkey and Iraq, and empower Iran.

Still, the world can’t afford to passively await the outcome—should we negotiate with Assad to accept a transition from power? It does seem likely that Syria will become a “failed state” and we do not want the al Qaida-affiliated rebels to get the chemical weapons.

In what ways are we knitted to the world? Each of us is knitted to our surroundings, to our routines, to our place in the world. I appreciate my father’s friends who worry, but I think too much of their worry is more partisan, or it seems that way from the Fox News reports about the debacle of the situation for President Obama. As I explained to my father that I think the news reports of the danger for Americans is fear-mongering, he did say, “Shall I tell them to stop keeping you in their prayers?” Indeed, just as Maria needed it, those prayers are crucial.

Life is never as simple as the plot of The Sound of Music—and indeed, some of the historical inaccuracies of the movie make the Salzburgers cringe (the little trip over the Alps at the end would lead right into Hitler’s German “Eagle’s Nest,”) but there is that wise moment when the Mother Abbess reminds Maria that when God closes a door, he opens a window. How are we knitted to this world? Do we do the knitting or does the world? How do we find those windows? When my window opens, will I be waiting in the hall???

Wonderful things to think about as this perfectly wonderful and mundane week comes to a close.

"Johnny Steak-head"

A month ago today I landed back in Jordan and then immediately set to work: two weeks of meetings and orientations, and as of yesterday, 13 real school days. September is a glorious and exhausting month—back to school, but also soooo important to diagnose all the needs of students and colleagues.
 

September is a month to think of all the changes: departed colleagues out, new people in, changes in status and job—oh, so many adjustments every September! I remember at Hackley, one colleague would say every single September: “Oh, this is the hardest September ever!” I would always remind her that she had said the same thing the year before, we just forget how hard of a month it is. Don’t forget I said ‘glorious’ as well.

 

As I said, one of the things September requires is an adjustment to a change in jobs. In some ways, this year is so similar to last year for me. I am the Dean of Faculty again, reside in the same apartment, have the same courses to teach—but there are some changes for me. There are three things I am giving up, and while each was a voluntary and sensible thing to hand over, there is always that transition of not doing some of the things one has done and adjustments. I am no longer head of the History Department. No, there was not a coup, although a colleague last spring hoped I would be all right after the take-over! For seven years I was the head of the History Department at Hackley, and now for the last six years here. But our head last year suggested that it would be wise to let someone else lead since I needed to spend more of my time on the whole faculty and not just my favorite, pet department. I didn’t want to run the risk of department members feelings I didn’t give them enough time, nor did I want the rest of the faculty to feel I spent all my time with one department. So that made enormous sense. Lyman, a terrific colleague, is doing a great job running the department. I get to go to meetings, and for a change, I don’t have to run those meetings!

 

I am no longer doing the choir at KA. For two years I did my best with an enthusiastic bunch of students who hadn’t benefitted from the wonderful background I had with the music program of the Cincinnati Public Schools. We met only once a week (try building a program with 45 minutes a week! Ha!) but had a fun time. I tried some Handel, some gospel, some 80s pop love songs, some Broadway, and some choir and flute music. Their favorite piece was the 1940s hit “Sentimental Journey.” We hired a great young man from Yale to teach Philosophy and run the choir. He is very talented and will do a grand job, I am sure. But it is an adjustment from what I have done to pulling back from that.

 

And perhaps most notably, I have retired for the time being from directing plays. When I visited Chuck last month in Charlotte, he could hardly believe that statement since it has been such a major feature of my educational identity for 25 years. Yes, but I travel a good deal attending job fairs, hiring faculty, and the pressure of time and money, appropriate scripts, inadequate set and costume possibilities, it all seemed like a good time to let someone new and younger take over. In the spring I directed a play called, The Exam, but since the students knew of another, far-inferior play with the same name, I re-named our work, The Final Curtain. It made sense on several levels: a ghastly character called “The Exam” (the embodiment of every fearful exam you have ever taken) sang part of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” and taunted how this exam might be those students’ final curtain. It was also the last play of some lovely seniors involved in drama last year, and secretly, I knew it was my ode to my semi-retirement. I told Chuck for the first time ever I wasn’t burning to direct a play. He didn’t believe me. I confirmed that it was true. He still didn’t believe me, and I conceded, well, maybe I just thought I would take a break, and he made me name a play I might just burn to do. Okay. Okay!  I would like to direct (again) Defying Gravity, this great play I remember seeing in 1996 in a small theater in New York and I knew I had to direct it. Actually, that was my swan song directorial effort at Hackley, 7 years ago this autumn.

So there are some changes. Three things that have been a part of my identity and brain space have been let go to three new people. The new drama director is a recent college grad with whom I had an exciting conversation and interview last spring. He is beginning with one of my favorite plays ever, the Steve Martin comedy about Picasso and Einstein, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. All three of these “successors” will do fine work, but it is always a little strange to think about how much input they might want, but I want to give them the space to their work, make their own mark, and improve the school still further.

 

Just in case you are worried that I don’t have anything new, well, my dear colleague Julianne made sure that I had something new to sink my teeth into. It’s different. Yes, it is a stretch. As Julianne worked on her assignments for the after school co-curricular program, she wrote me a note that she had a doozy of an assignment for me. In her email to me, she wrote, “You are slated to assist during the weight training minor for three terms. I am sure you will poke fun at me for this for a long time, but I appreciate you being a great colleague and agreeing to do this. After 25 years in the school biz, I finally get to be a jock!! I am in charge of weight training!

I don’t think of this as a punishment, and Julianne didn’t intend it as such. She gives me a whole new persona! She concluded her email, christening me with a new nickname as well! Your new nickname is “Johnny steak-head” (a steak head is bad name for a dumb jock)!"  So there you have it, out goes the History, Music, and Drama, and in comes the Weight Training Johnny Steak-head. I want to make Julianne proud!

This is a year in which I decided I need to decide if I truly love managing faculty. The appraisal system will get into place, my work with the Teacher Fellows is entrenched, and my challenge is to inspire the faculty adopt a growth mindset. And I get to be Johnny Steak-head! In spite of my new jock name, I am reminded of a Emily Dickinson quotation that I think is appropriate at the start of this important year: “The sailor cannot see north—but knows the needle can.”

Sometimes the project of school, and well, life, feels like one is lost in a sea of complex challenges, conflicting expectations, and vexing problems—compounded by the expectation that I am always supposed to know what to do. But just as I felt that first year when I came to Jordan in 2007 and clarified so many things for me about education, it is about finding your own compass. I may not always remember every policy in school, but I do know that treating people with respect is an excellent start. My job is very much about listening (whoa!!! What other changes for me the Big Talker!?!), being a good listener with new teachers, with veteran teachers, angry and unhappy teachers, and noticing and appreciating the good deeds being done around me. The tide of stories I hear in a given week, sitting on my couch in my air-conditioned office, is an astonishing array of human stories of pain, bewilderment, exhilaration, pride, loneliness, fear, and hope. Somebody angry may at the root be simply afraid of changes or diminishing status. Someone whose move has rendered them overwhelmed in spite of years of teaching under their belt might create someone both arrogant and helpless. There will be a student whose troublesome behavior is a mask for sadness or the anxiety that school is a nightmare for them. Everyone has a story to tell, and one of my jobs is to listen and respond meaningfully to these stories.

This might be why the blog posts are fewer than in days of old. There is hardly a shortage of things to share or reflect upon—I am in the middle of a region fighting for whatever “The Arab Spring” might have positive left in it, working at a school whose mission is so noble and captivating that it provides daily inspiration, teaching students so enthusiastic and willing to work that it is never boring, mentoring young teachers who have graduated from the best colleges in the US and now are working to figure out how to engage adolescents. Never dull. And, by the way, never scary…well, not in the “scary that many of you might worry about.”

The lack of “scary” is due to several peerless colleagues, the headmaster and Julianne, and hey, there is always a new duty, a new nickname. This year I get to be Johnny Steak-head! I wonder where that will take me??! And while Dickinson’s words ring true, “The sailor cannot see north—but knows the needle can,” I also have the assurance, as Julianne mentioned in her email, unveiling my new name that “We joke about being here all the time, but we both know that this is where we are supposed to be.”  We joke about it only because we wonder how in the world we ever got here!! Oh, yes, that’s right—our friend Anne Siviglia! When our car is stuck behind a herd of goats or sheep, or goats and sheep, Julianne raises her fist in the air and exclaims, “Thanks, Anne!!”

But Julianne is right—this is where we are supposed to be. Here’s to that crucial, diagnostic month of September!

 

Convocation 2013

 

It has been three weeks since I left Cincinnati—and not a single blog post? Oh, dear readers, if you are a longtime blog follower you know that coming back to Jordan and the resumption of the duties and meetings is a juggernaut! But, seriously, in this beginning of our seventh year at KA, things have been smooth and well-run, from the first senior staff meeting, to the workshop with heads of department, the new faculty busy-ness, returning faculty, and finally the student orientations, both old and new. There might have been blog posts, but when things run smoothly, somehow it seem less interesting! I have re-read some old blog posts from the beginning of the school in 2007—when it was all new and untried. Admittedly, those make for more compelling reading. But while things are sharpened and tightened and more stable every year, I should not fail to discuss the wonder they still provide.

Anyway, here we have the first blog post of this school year. I am cheating a little bit since the bulk of this prose is not a blog post but a speech I gave last week. The speech came last Wednesday afternoon, at the conclusion of our first real day of school. And by real I mean that on Wednesday we have a complete day. The day before we have mini-classes where we run through a school day with 10-minute classes so that everyone can have a good dry run at the dress code, walking the halls, finding rooms, having intros to classes, and get an overview picture of the day.

John Austin had asked me to speak to the school and formally inaugurate the school year. What a pleasure! While a little daunting and scary to speak to the school, I do love enjoy exploring what kinds of things might help us better frame the next nine months of work. So when I stood in front of the 481 students and 100 faculty and administrators, here is what I offered them:

 



"Way, way back in June, just a few days after I got back to the United States from Jordan, I went to my college for a reunion. One night, some friends and I stayed up late, and one wondered, “What was it that was so great about our time in college?” Another friend quickly said, “There were no rules!” My group of friends decided that after a couple weeks, that really wasn’t that big of a deal anymore. One wise friend said,“It was so great because we felt empowered! Our teachers helped empower us to tackle hard projects and do incredible thinking and work.” As we savored the nostalgic memory of those college days of feeling empowered, another friend turned to me and said, “Hey, John, you teach grades 9-12. Are those kids empowered? Can it happen in high school, or do you have to wait until college for that kind of empowerment?”

I loved the question. And having taught for a quarter century now I can say, it can happen in grades 9-12. It doesn’t always happen. But it can. This concept of empowerment, of you seizing control of how you learn, and mastering a subject is possible in high school. And it is so very important for you all to know that empowerment is the key to success.

I want to show you an art work that I teach in my course around the end of February, but this is a great image for each of us to ponder today. Let’s look at this painting… [above the blog post you will see Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above The Fog]


When this comes up in my course, we discuss how it fits into the historic time, but my favorite thing about teaching this painting, is promising my class something: I promise them that if they work hard, study, and take risks, on the day of the AP test, and more importantly, for many days after, they will feel like this man! Take a closer look at him. He has just trudged up a mountain. He is standing at the summit, taking in everything around him. He is above all the work, the labor, the hard times he endured to get to this peak. You know, we can’t see his face, but I would imagine sweat drips off his face. He has just trudged up a mountain—he probably has sweat stains! This has not been an easy task. But I promise my class that if they seek ways to grow and learn as scholars, they will earn the right to be on top of the mountain.

Last year when I taught this painting, a student said something quite remarkable. I have taught this art work for 10 years, but students who try hard are always saying things that I still haven’t heard before! The class commented about this man’s accomplishment and how he had empowered himself to get to this point. The student last year said, “But look, even as he takes in all he accomplished—he sees there are more peaks yet to conquer!” Think about this—this man is going to go back down the mountain and do it again, and rise even higher at another peak.

On our first formal day of class this year, I not only encourage you, but I urge you to work for your empowerment this year. And I am talking to the faculty as well—when your teachers feel empowered to seek excellence, to seek more effective techniques and strategies in the classroom, and if they continue to seek their empowerment, you will only do all the better.

I have an office in the math wing upstairs. I encourage you to come by and talk to me about your own personal empowerment. Come by on days when you feel empowered and tell me how and why you feel empowered. And come by on days when you don’t feel empowered and tell me how and why you do.

And all this talk is not just about grades. One could say that the fate of the world is in the balance of your empowerment. That’s a dramatic statement, I know, but His Majesty founded this school so that you might solve the problems of Jordan. The only way you will ever do that is if you feel empowered, if you can climb up those mountains of yours and then set your sights on reaching another, new peak. If your teachers are empowered, you will be more empowered. If you are more empowered, you will find those other peaks around you in Jordan, and I daresay the world, and your empowerment might solve some very real problems.

I want to share a few lines of a poem that I like a lot. Here are the opening lines:

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured…

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.



Are those not the most depressing words ever???????

Suffer! Torture! History says, life will be bad! But it is reality isn’t it? We don’t have to travel very far to find suffering and torture. Okay, here is the next word of the poem:

But

 


What kind of a word is that?? What does that ‘but’ do????? That word can turn everything on its ear. That word can change the course of suffering and history’s proclamation of despair.

Let’s read four more lines in that poem:

 

But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

There it is! That last line is what His Majesty wants in us. He wants us to look at the world around us, see all the disasters that there are, and he wants us to say, “But!” and when we are like that guy on the mountaintop, that empowered man, standing with the world at his feet, we might accomplish what the King wants. We might in that beautiful phrase, we might be empowered enough to make “hope and history rhyme.”

Let this be the year when each of us works harder than before and each of us trudges up a mountain. Nine months from tomorrow, on Graduation Day, I hope each senior can feel like that guy in the painting. Let each of us work for that empowerment this year. Let us work so that we not only endure the year, or passively do work, but that we have empowered ourselves, triumphed, and look excited for the next peak. Let’s take the next 9 months and seriously work on that empowerment."