On building

When I sit and talk with some of my teacher colleagues that I admire most I am struck, at times, by how uncomplicated their advice is for teaching well.

As teachers and as caring human beings they have the desire that I think is present in most people to share the skills of their craft with others. These lessons are frequently anti-climactic or disappointingly simple in nature, at times being little more than platitudes. This is because, I think, what is most real and wonderful about their teaching comes from within.

Something that cannot be expressed through lecture is made manifest through their lessons. It must be felt to be known and, while it's not entirely clear to me where it comes from, it seems to be a profound inner strength and sincere love for what they do and for whom they serve.

All the training manuals and seminars and acronym-laden rubrics in the world may help build structure to teaching but that structure must be built upon a solid foundation of something one cannot acquire through a Ministry of Education conference.

So where the hell do I find it?

And all around the smell of rain

I walked home today feeling very confused. The type of confusion that leaves you without any sort of base from which to start. Even if the base was only of clay or mud at least then you could sculpt a castle or a tiny mud dog and pretend that you had something concrete. But I didn't have that base and the mud dog was off somewhere probably chewing on the resolution to my confusion.

So I tried to make a list of people who I felt comfortable giving me a not-chewed answered. The list didn't satisfy me. I tried to think about it differently - we need to reframe the question in order to know to whom we ought address it!

I couldn't formulate the question.

By this point there was an intense feeling of frustration - but who was feeling it was unclear, where it was being felt was mysterious, and why it was met with a response of amusement and from whom was entirely unknown.

And then the wind woke me. I looked up and caught the moon giggling at me through the late-day clouds and all around the smell of rain.

On my teachers

As I snapped a candid picture of a young woman in Bratislava, one of the girls I was sightseeing with said with a giggle, "Uh-oh! Someone's falling in love!"

I explained to her in my most adult tone that "love" really didn't enter as a motivation, I simply preferred such shots as they catch the person in a moment as they are and not as they present themselves to be. Her following nod and quick jump to a new subject confirmed my suspicions that I had successfully and masterfully used the very adult skill of delivering a bit of a truth in an incredibly untruthful way as to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Ahh, growing up!

This leads us to two conclusions:
1. I am awesome.
2. The world better watch out when that girl discovers just how smart she is.

I did have some feelings for the girl in the photo that I would have enjoyed following up on had the circumstances been different. Though romantics might decry me, I think whatever I felt will have to be likened to the brief moment of shared recognition that sometimes occurs between riders on oppositely departing subway trains. By the time it takes hold of you her train is leaving, you're looking for a seat that is not near the crazy raving man in the corner and, always, the faint smell of urine. Still, it's nice to know there are those kinds of people out there. Like her, I mean. Not the crazy pee-soaked guy.

This post isn't really about her, though. It's about the little girl who called me out. Of all the people I joked and flirted with, smiled at and made moderately inappropriate comments to, the young woman in the photo was the only one who apparently provoked a response from me that was interpreted as anything more than silly Americanism. Moreover, I was expressing things that I was fairly confident I had hidden. Moreover than that, this girl was the only one who picked it up and decided it was worth verbalizing to me.

But the truth has a way of finding its way through. I would not be at all surprised to be told that the girl didn't buy a word of what I was selling but thought it best to let the unrequited young man hide in his justifications. Why am I so consistently thwarted by 14 year olds? Her understanding of and care for others has been inspirational most of the adults that have worked with her and really makes me wonder about the teacher / student relationship. I think it's very likely that we have fooled those poor saps into thinking that they are learning, we are teaching, and the relationship gets no more dynamic than that. But what is REALLY happening is that we have created a magnificently convincing set of lights, mirrors, and smoke machines that disguises us taking notes as they live and act in the honest ways that we have forgotten.

Many of the implications of this little lesson as clear on their face, some of them are less so and I'm not sure how to verbalize them. Some probably haven't occurred to me yet. In any case, teachers like these are what have made my time here so meaningful and what will make it so hard to leave.

Thanks, B.

Against the Current

Some things hurt more than others. Stubbed toes are overshadowed by volleyballs to the nose which are eclipsed by bees in the urethra. But watching a child lose hope in her own skills and passions because the work she did was either not fully appreciated or was "out-shined" by that of another leaves those physical pains in the dust.

Except maybe the last one - I'm hesitant to compare.

A group of students from my school this past weekend competed at the Moldovan Odyssey of the Mind competition and did not score as well as their competitors. Thusly they were not given an initial invitation to go to Slovakia to participate in the Eurofestival. Trying to explain to them that they had won before they even walked in the doors of the competition just based upon their love and passion for what they prepared was met with a (possibly appropriate response to the perceived BS), "Yea, Matt, that's great, but we still ain't going to Slovakia."

Teachers and developmental organizations across the planet will lament the impossibility of objectively measuring the growth in character of youth when they have poured themselves into their work in a loving way. The youth themselves have learned to value grades far more highly than taking the chance to produce something interesting and possibly not pleasing to the teacher. Swimming against the current is only possible for so long and so we curl up in an innertube, grab a beer and sing the Top 40 while we sun burn along with all the other tubers. Swimming in a different pond entirely is a good way to get labeled insane (which is somewhat detrimental to one's standing in the fragile teenage social scene).

Watching a group of kids you worked with for three years throw in the towel because they are still too young to understand (as are most of us) that doing good work after one's passion is reward in itself regardless of whether or not it is recognized falls somewhere in between the pain caused by a bee hive finding its way into one's urethra and getting through this entire sentence.

And that's why I do not quite know how to express my happiness or gratitude to those OM organizers who fought for the team to get them the chance to travel to Slovakia and compete.

The inner strength will come, we hope, with time. Until then, a little recognition can really help a person swim in the right direction.

Thanks, CUC, and all you folks at OM.

On the Flow of Language

Finding myself in a land wracked by debate of the proper tongue and coming myself from a continent historically ridiculed for bastardized habits of speech, the question of language is one that has harangued me for a spell.

Spellings, syntax, pronunciation, phrases and vocabulary vary between times and places and drift with the currents of popularity. When a language has enough drift to warrant talk of dialectal differences but not so much as to demand new classification then the voices of conservative propriety descend to the levels of school children arguing over whose father works the assembly line in the more important factory.

How have these high horses climbed to such altitudes in the ivory towers and who is the poor fool that must clean the stables?

Americans certainly do not speak the Queen's English. They have no queen and the king was abducted by aliens decades ago. But in popular discourse it is rarely made explicit which queen is in question and if all works of language must be rewritten upon succession to the throne and her particular peculiarities of the mother tongue.

Perhaps I am taking that too literally, but I believe the point lies: how are standards of a language established and what gives them a position of superiority over other standards in the same language? It seems to be quite like taking a picture of a particular bend in a particular river at a particular point in time and demanding that at all bends and throughout all time all rivers must adhere to that shape and flow.

The English language today as found in England is not the English of Shakespeare and even his English was not that found fifty miles to the north of him. Where does the condescension of linguistic purists find its foundation?

As a transmitter of human experience language is incredibly useful but has severe limitations. Anyone in the passionate moment of intense love or anger can attest to its shortcomings.

But as poor as language is at expressing reality honestly, the vague shadows it casts do illuminate the figures of societal assumptions. Hierarchical relations in Japanese are far more clearly established than in Romanian which has its own pronoun and conjugations of respect. That in turn is more clear than British English and in American English it borders on being forgotten, shown most often through maximum levels of vulgarity set based upon current company.

I sure as hell don't speak with priests as same way as I speak with you crackers. Not until I've bought him a beer, at least.

I am almost positive that that past paragraph is a gross over-simplification, but the destratification of the former colonies is surely reflected in the diverging flow of its language from that of the colonizers. Slavery being an obvious and regrettable exception. It also evolved in America to meet different needs and circumstances than were found in England at the same time. Where is the outcry against creation of the word "Internet?"

And again I must think - without some set standards, whether implicitly assumed or explicitly defined, we return to Babble. The arrogance of placing one language in that tower in the sky above all others, however, came to the ruin of all. The question of where the line should be drawn is not as clear, I think, as purists would have it. It is clear, however, that the divisions created between neighbours over disagreements how to spell "neighbor" are far more troublesome than just swapping the spellcheck over on your computer.