How Many Should We Save?

In my previous high school, like many schools in America, a teacher might start the year off with 40 kids in a class. 3 of those kids might have white skin, 34 of them qualify for free lunch (including all three of the kids with white skin), and 32 of them might test at least three grade levels below the one they are in, in either math or reading. If it is a freshman class, 18 of them might walk the line at the end of their senior year. Out of those 18, 8 will have passed a significant amount of their classes with grades higher than a “C”. In my experience, after teaching about 2000 students, these are the kids, regardless of test scores, that may have actually learned something useful in high school. Sorry but that is the best I can give you, 8 out of 40, 20 percent. I believe that in these big, traditional schools, we give a legitimate and sometimes excellent education to just 20 percent of the students that we are given. And I feel that is being generous. There are many schools who are improving. Taking this same traditional model that everyone is afraid to really change and just doing it “better”. Good for them. I give those kids a 35 percent chance instead. Sound cynical? 2000 students later, I just can’t help it.

Another thing we almost all do in the big American urban school on that first day, is look around for that 10 out of 40 that are going to give us the most amount of problems, either behaviorally or academically, and we start trying to figure out how to unload them. We do this by making the course seem difficult at the beginning, by cracking down harshly on unwanted behaviors (which can be pretty insane, no gory details today), and not smiling until Xmas. There are, of course, teachers who don’t do this. They never give up on any student, they demand high expectations from all and still show that they love them all. They are saints. The rest of us talk openly in the teacher’s lounge about the other strategies I mentioned. Sometimes laughing. Many people hate teachers for this and maybe for good reason, but you can’t hate someone without something of what you hate being a kind of reflection of yourself. I still love those teachers. They are my favorite people because I have been with them in the same trenches. I have learned about myself and my own strengths and weaknesses with them. I was educated and raised by them. But still, I’ve left the traditional high school model and hope never to return.

The school I am at now takes that 10 percent that, by necessity, most teachers weed out of their classroom at the beginning and engages them. No textbooks, no repetitive worksheets, just engaging and challenging materials. And when these kids are engaged, it gets intense. Like nothing I have experienced in teaching so far. I just finished my first three weeks at this school, just got up from a three hour nap and am ready to go to bed early. But it has been great. Not laughing til Christmas? Not a chance. I’ve never seen a group of kids so passionately argue about the economy of the town they live in, or build a giant tetrahedral Sierpinski gasket with such urgency. I’ve laughed out loud with them, been amazed by them, and have been left scratching my head in confusion more than once. I will write more about it in the weeks to come but I just needed to check in with some of my first impressions. I miss my friends from my old school, even miss the school a little. But I just can’t see myself ever getting back.

“There is this saying I hear repeated over and over in American education that confounds me. It is basically that if we can at least save one, we are doing our job. But really, if you only save one, you are a lot like the the Tralfmordians, a miserable race who deny free will while blithely accepting the destruction of the universe.” – Guru Muru

Tell the truth, go to jail. Or, Dear Putin, the Cold War is Over (last I checked)

Really, two years in prison? Just for asking the Virgin Mary to finally do her job? Is it really too much of a stretch to ask her to be a feminist? Another way to look at it is that Pussy Riot hit on a great real-world application for punk rock and art in general. I mean, their music and lyrics are art and they staged the performance of their lives while getting more than just a few people to think about democracy. Bravo. And now they are booked solid (sorry, I couldn’t resist). As for me, I just finished my first week with students at my new school and am fired up. I can’t remember the last time that I have been this passionate about teaching. Maybe never. The work this school is doing with these kids would send all of us to Siberia if Russia could have just conquered us in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s or 80’s like all of our presidents warned us was nearly imminent (was Putin in charge of all of it back then too?). I mean this kind of education is really what it takes to build a democracy. Then why is there so much cultural and political resistance to it? Am I a conspiracy theorist when I say that we don’t have democracy here? Oh, right, we aren’t a democracy, we’re a republic. Whatever. This week I got to teach about infinity and Cantor dust and how we are going to apply fractals to architecture and urban planning. About elements of design and found object art. About how the land and the planning of cities affects the people living there. About improv acting and storyboarding. And I, along with my co-conspiring teacher teams, taught my ass off. On the home front, G and X have been away for a conference (she is starting him early) and I miss them like crazy. I have purposefully left some of his toys out all week so that I can trip on them and imagine him running around and yelling while acting out “Finding Nemo” or “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.” You know, just expressing himself and his passions. A sure sign that he is well on his way to being jailed by some future democracy-fronting leader of a “free country.”

Longest Lesson Plan in the World

I am a math teacher. At my new school, not so much. Since there are no classes or grade levels and students choose their projects it means that they had to choose them today and tomorrow we start the projects. This meant that I had my group of 15 advisory kids from 9 – 4:30 all day. I have never had to write a lesson plan for all day before. Elementary school teachers are saints. Basically I did some introducing of myself, then I went through the new way the school is scheduling (advisory, morning project, lunch, afternoon project, advisory) and then pitched the projects to them. We then had to do some transcript evaluations so that they would know what credits they needed so that they would know what projects would help them and interest them the most. After we picked projects we did some icebreakers and I told them that they would be divided into three groups and each group would be building me a locking storage container (I don’t have anything like this for myself at this school). I had them design the containers before lunch. It was a pretty rough morning because I don’t have a classroom for my advisory so we meet out in the common room where registration was happening and everyone walks by to hang out with my kids. I also had some resistance in the morning since I am a new teacher taking over an advisory from another teacher whom they loved. At lunch I regrouped and realized that some of what I had been doing during the day wasn’t really working. We came back after lunch, did “Next Step Plans” which are sort of inventories on where students are and where they want to go. We then worked on an activity for them to create and solve good problems. I had them write down a difficult decision that they had to make and them put them in groups of three to share those decisions. After that we talked about how to take a decision and turn it into a general problem that people would be interested in solving. My example was of my decision to leave my old school which is a big traditional high school to this new, small, progressive charter. I then talked about how we could reframe that decision making process into the problem of how schools should be designed. I had them take their decisions and helped them form problems from them. Then, realizing they were going stir crazy, we took a walk over to Old Town, had a seat in the shade and hung out. I seized the opportunity to talk to them about what great problems really are and why I like them so much and how sometimes just taking a walk helps you solve them. After that we walked back, shared problems with the group and the big group gave feedback on the various problems and we had some great class discussions. They took that feedback and added solutions to their posters. We still had about 45 minutes left in the school day so I had the design groups check out laptops and go to the Lowe’s website to come up with a materials list for me so that the school construction coach could pick them up and they could begin building. Long crazy day. Feel tired just retelling the story and I didn’t even get all the details in. Tomorrow we start the projects and I know it will be an interesting year. Guru Muru told me that I need to detach myself from my own consciousness so that I can view my energy as connected to all other energies in the universe and realize that it can never be depleted. I told him to shut up and leave me alone while I finish my beer in peace.

What’s the Driving Question?

I have spent the past three weeks working on creative projects. My school has no textbooks or classes. The teachers are project managers and we create projects that serve as our curriculum around the fields of architecture, construction or engineering. One of the projects I helped develop explores how self-similar systems (fractals) can help with urban planning. It is a humanities, Spanish and math project. Students will be reading stories with themes of microcosm, macrocosm and metaphor and then learn how that helps understand what a self-similar system is. We will look at examples of urban planning, including how African cultures incorporate fractals into designs of their villages and why they do it. This idea came from this rad TED talk. Then they will be studying fractals and finally create a floor plan of a home or multi-family dwelling on Autocad which will be a microcosm of the neighborhood that they will design and build a model of. From there they will tell the story of how these designs will inform the planning of their imagined city. The driving question is something like, “How could we design a home that will inform the design of an ideal neighborhood so that we can imagine a plan for a larger city?” The second project that I am on will also be an urban design project. We will be creating a large topographical model of Albuquerque to scale and students will make some short films. All of this will be the first phase of a Albuquerque redesign. We will be reading the book “Albuquerque” by Rololfo Anaya and studying some poetry along the way as well as building and filming. The picture here is the final flow chart we came up with for this project. The past three weeks have been intense and possibly the only valuable professional development I have ever participated in as an educator. Tomorrow the students start school and then the real work begins.

“Learn to collaborate and open your mind to those of people with different ideas from yours. It’s how grown-up problems are solved. Otherwise you are a fanatic street preacher learning nothing and doing nothing while not even being relevant to yourself.” – Guru Muru

What to Write?

I feel like I should write right now, but what about?

About the new job I started today, maybe. No students yet, not for three weeks. Today we were put into groups and given four hours, a couple 2×10’s, 8 2×6’s (all 8 feet long), some power tools and told to design and build aesthetically pleasing outdoor seating. Here is what we came up with:

It was a good project because it made me feel like I was in that Bravo reality show, work of art. I just needed more hair with bed-head and the kind of life that made it normal for me to sleep in and think about art all day.

Should I write about the conversation I had with my hairdresser about how men also undergo hormonal changes during and after their partner’s pregnancy? In case you haven’t heard, our testosterone levels drop. Do I think it’s true, you ask? Notice that I said ‘hairdresser’, not barber.

Maybe I should write about the show I played on Friday. Nate on percussion, Ezra on dobro. We played at the UNM Health Sciences center to a good crowd at noon. We were well received and got paid. I even cussed on some songs, ‘shit’ and ‘pinche’. Made me feel like a real rockstar with plenty of testosterone.

I don’t really know what to write about though. Summer has been excellent and it still is, even though I am working. I am excited about the new job and the stuff I will learn there. And about all the shit it will give me to write about.

“Got writer’s block, or some other block? If it makes you feel better, keep on whining and complaining. Otherwise, do something. That is the whole reason you are here.” – Guru Muru

Speak the Truth

G took off for work travel today and I spent the day hanging out with X and throwing away stuff from the office/playroom to make it seem like I am doing something to get ready for the new baby but there is still tons of crap. Too many toys and books designed to overeducate and no room to put anything away. I was throwing stuff out that I wanted to play with. Stuff that would probably keep me safe from Alzheimer’s if I played with them regularly, like the baby doll drinking milk from a Kleine bottle, the keyboard that plays a background jazz tune and illuminates possibilities for improvisational soloing within the key being played (green for general possibilities, orange for arpeggios), and (my favorite) the magnetic, slinky-legged cage-match wrestling kit. Yes I threw that stuff away because the stuff we kept is soooo much better for their S.A.T.’s. Which just points out the real issue of the achievement gap. How are kids who don’t grow up with this kind of stuff ever going to grow up to compete in the world of unpaid apprenticeships to laid-off journalists eeking out a living on the blogosphere? Seriously though, the New York Times ran this invitation to a dialogue about the system of standards and over-testing that we have in our nation’s public schools and asked readers to submit responses. After I put X to bed I found myself sitting at the computer with no supervision and fired off the following rant. I tried to make it sound pretentious enough for the Times to publish it but since they probably won’t, I will imortalize it here (until I realize how whiny I sound and kill it):

I have taught math in community colleges in California and the Bronx. I taught public school in California and, for the past nine years, in New Mexico. When I started teaching public high school, I was young and made a lot of mistakes. Like most new teachers I had insecurities and overcompensated for them. I had trouble communicating effectively to students and parents and I severely misunderstood where my students were in their mathematical thinking. Since then I have improved. I know this the same way a chef knows she is creating more excellent menus or a saxophonist knows he is extending the limits of his improvisational skills. Teaching is an art. The irony is that when I was new to it, I worked at a school where students on average came from more affluent and educated homes. My students scored well on standardized tests and I was considered to be a good teacher. In my school in New Mexico where I have loved improving my craft over the past nine years, my students have come from much less advantaged homes. I came to this school with a masters degree in mathematics, endorsements in bilingual education and language arts and plenty of experience as a teacher. My students are engaged and work on challenging content. I am the type of teacher that is said to be lacking at schools like this. In fact, many of my colleagues are that type of teacher. Despite all of this, my students still have low scores on standardized tests. I have seen this work the other way as well. Regular teachers working in low income schools whose students score low on exams, move to more affluent schools and their test scores improve dramatically. Value added analysis of standardized test scores is supposed to control for this type of thing but in low income schools the actual amount of data, much like the lives of our students, is unstable. I have been offered many opportunities to work in schools that already have high scores. My career would be safer or at least I would not be subject to as much of the vitriol that has been directed toward teachers in the media. Our current system doesn’t give me much incentive to work in underperforming schools. I have chosen to do it because of my own convictions and because of the differences that I have helped make in the lives of kids, even if it doesn’t show on paper. I do recognize that systemic changes are necessary and because of this I have decided to move to a charter school. It is a school that reaches out to the kids who need it the most but is focused on project based learning, 21st century skills and positive youth development. It is a school that works to make a difference in the student, her family and her wider community. Much of it’s funding comes from private industry with the idea that the students will become skilled, long term workers for that industry. The students are also given the tools to go to college if that is their path but either way, they are given a path and serious guidance. In my experience, our political system does not value this type of education. Politicians are really hopeful that the only thing needed to fix the problem is more multiple choice testing that can be analyzed using statistical algorithms. This would be much easier than dealing with the underlying societal issues so they are more than hopeful, they need it to be true. They need it so badly that they believe it and ridicule anyone who would suggest anything more complicated. So more testing is the solution no matter how demoralizing to students, parents, teachers or principles. From where I have sat, ever since the beginning of this movement, the emperor has been wearing no clothes and is extremely unpleasant to look at.

“Speak the truth, even if its not really the truth. But it’s better if you can say it using fiction.” – Guru Muru

Everything Relates to Everything

Albuquerque’s South Valley is an amazing place with character. I will never forget a party I went to there where the dude who’s birthday it was ordered a huge amount of clams from New England so that he could teach the New Mexicans how to have a real clam bake. One of my friends’ dads yelled to him, “Mijo, how do I eat these? Do I put them in a tortilla?” The party had drunk politicians, giant sumo wrestling costumes for people to fight in and then some real brawls later on. There was also live music and tons of laughter. The South Valley is beautiful with open space and I am always happy to spend time there. Every year I get invited to play at their growers’ market and I did it again this past Saturday. I played with Ron and Nate and for the first set, pulled out a bunch of old songs and asked them to play them country style. After being a country band for the first set, we were a rock and roll band for the second and we had a great time. There weren’t tons of people there, probably because there aren’t any tomatoes yet but it was nice to get out and play some music. I sold one CD for a bucket of sour plums which I brought home and turned into this pie:

I have to admit that I really didn’t want to get up early, lug all my equipment, stand out in the sun for 2 and a half hours and sing. But there is just something about the South Valley, and New Mexico in general. The best stuff happens. I never thought that so many of my songs could be played in such a laid-back country style or that playing music would make me bake a sour plum pie.

“Everything relates to everything. Food and music, allergies and construction zones, sailors and mountain goats. If you can’t see this you need to leave your normal routine, do something that is strange and uncomfortable and then watch all of the things that happen to you. Next, step out of yourself and watch your own responses. If you are doing it right, you will see impossible things connect to each other and, if you get really lucky, you won’t even be able to recognize yourself amidst all that random oneness.” – Guru Muru

Don’t Exercise

Having a kid at least provides me with one more excuse to never exercise. I mean who has time? Also, I get to tell everyone about how much I love hiking and would really do it more if only my schedule with work and parenting allowed it. Its like getting to be a hiker or cyclist or midlife crisis skate rat but not having to do the work. The truth is, if I really want to do any of those things, I need to find creative ways to do them and I have had some success but not long-lasting. Today, I took a step. I got my lazy ass out of bed, made some coffee and let X watch some cartoons while I packed a backpack full of water and some healthy treats. After slathering him with sunscreen, I dragged him to the car where I assured him we would be going on an adventure “just like Diego”. We then drove the hour it takes to reach the 10k trail near the crest at the Sandia Mountains just outside of Albuquerque. I chose this trail because it is moderately easy (except for the 10 thousand feet in altitude) and it feels like you are in another world from that of the desert-city of Albuquerque. When we got there we found this:

We started walking and saw woodpeckers, squirrels and lush plant life. Everything still wet from the summer rain we have been getting. We walked for about a mile (this took almost an hour) and then sat and ate and drank and talked with no t.v., no dinner to make, no annoying playground with caregivers glued to their smart phones. I thought we should probably turn back at that point but he insisted we keep going so we went another half mile, had our first father-son pissing contest and then started the long trip back to the car. Of course he was pretty spent by then and I had to carry him on my shoulders up some of the steep parts but he still ended up hiking about 2.5 miles himself. It was a little slow for me but I learned that I can probably take us farther next time and then let him ride on my shoulders more on the way to the car, which gives me some legitimate exercise. The best part? Trying to see the hike from the perspective of a three-year-old. I never knew there were so many partying monsters, talking mice and magic rocks on that trail before. I guess I just always went too fast to pay attention. Now we’re back to reality, making dinner while he watches a cartoon in his underwear wearing the requisite teenage mutant ninja turtle protective head gear.

“Don’t exercise. Don’t train, workout, lift weights,go to a spin class or ever set foot in a gym. All of these are gross distortions of the one thing any of us should ever do to remain healthy and happy, play.” – Guru Muru

Is that glass half full or just a figment of your imagination?

I’m not going to lie. I pretty much have always thought that anyone who is overtly optimistic is delusional. They must be tricking themselves into believing everything will be o.k. when it clearly is not. Climbing that cliff without a rope, or even with one, is not a good idea. Neither is scuba diving with sharks, riding your motorcycle without a helmet or reporting in a war zone. Optimists don’t see how dangerous the world is and don’t believe laws of the state or physics apply to them. So, why did I marry one?

A couple of weeks ago we decided to go on a family bike ride to the farmers’ market. I suggested we ride to the downtown market close to our house and G asked, “are you saying that we can never go on a bike ride as a family again?” I am a sucker for hyperbole so we put X in the bike trailer and took off west and then north to the Los Ranchos market instead. When we arrived, G commented about how great it was that the wind was at our backs the whole time. It was nice, we got some food, played at the park and then when it was time to go, decided to go north a bit more and take the bike trail loop back home. When we finally turned around we had about 12 more miles to go before getting home and the morning winds we had at our backs became the legendary Albuquerque spring afternoon winds with 50-60 mile per hour gusts kicking dust into our sweaty faces and the trailer that I was pulling with X inside seemed to turn itself into a parachute. After riding for about 1 1/2 miles like this and realizing what we had gotten ourselves into and seeing my wife way ahead of us in the distance, I stopped and cried just a little. Eventually, G waited for us and when we were inching along together again I noticed a sign at a gate in a chain link fence in the middle of the desert that said, “come on in the beer is cold.” I didn’t know why it said that but I just yelled out, “We’re going in here!” It turned out to be the parking lot to Nexus Brewery, one that I had not been to yet. We went inside where they had amazing beer and the best Southern U.S./New Mexican fusion food I had ever eaten. It was amazing, a true oasis in the desert. The next 8 miles home were the slowest I had ever travelled, even by foot, but we made it. X did do some complaining and I had to stop a bit but he was being pretty patient for a three year-old.

As I have had time to reflect on this bike ride, the one thing that kept coming to mind is G’s optimism. It was her insisting on that route that got us to go in the first place and I am pretty sure that if she would have truly known about the wind, we probably wouldn’t have gone but it is her optimism that keeps her from believing that anything like that could ever be an obstacle in the first place. Pretty close to the oposite of me in many ways. Without her I wouldn’t push myself as hard as I do. I would never have rock climbed or gone scuba diving or cooked and eaten cow tongue. I would never have driven across Mexico on a whim and been pulled over at machine-gun point and then find myself hiding out with tax-evading Canadians. My world would be safer and smaller. Having a child pushed us both and it has been amazing but hard. Really hard even though we have it easy. As any parent or anyone who has been friends with someone who becomes a parent knows, parenthood makes one go insane. Everything changed and we were both happy we did it but were comfortable leaving it at that, with just one kid. That is until that infectious optimistic universe again began its expansion inside of her and now we are here:

With this, our first ultrasound for our second child. It’s one of the biggest acts of optimism, I suppose. I mean the world is crazy, dangerous and worst of all, changing and we still decided to bring a couple of kids into it?! What if something goes wrong? What if I teach them the wrong stuff? What if they grow up to be war zone reporters? Life is scary and the scary stuff is real but without it, I am not sure I could still call it a life. Instead it would be more like waiting around for nothing to come along and no one to share it with.

“Be a delusional realist. See everything for what it could be in fantasy and then make real and responsible choices based on your delusions. An apple isn’t an apple, its a fire ball. Eat it and you are now a fire-eater. A hiking trail isn’t a hiking trail, it is a pilgrimage through villages of angels and monsters. Take that path and you will grow to be ten feet tall. But be realistic about it, don’t expect any of the monsters or angels to be nice.” – Guru Muru

Don’t Make Art

Last night we went into San Francisco to have dinner with some old friends. Afterward, G and X drove back to her parents’ place in Capitola and I went to hang out with my brother for the night. He was playing a show at Amnesia and I got to meet his friends and sit in for a couple of songs with the band, here’s me in the background

It was great for me to see how my brother lives in San Francisco as a single dude. It’s a little like visiting a parallel universe. We both had the same parents and same hometown and we both play music and he was even a teacher for a while but everything else is totally different. My brother gets to do all the stuff that I often daydream about like play music all night, take off on surfing trips to Baja and walk to great cafés without needing to ask for a booster seat. So I laughed at breakfast when a friend of his came and sat with us at the cafe we were at and was chiding him about being up so early, “did you guys just stay out all night?” My brother told him that we actually went to bed and just got up early, “what about you, did you rock it all night?” his friend replied, “yeah, there was a lot of puking and a fever and crying by my one year old.” It turned out that a bunch of the guys I met there were also dads so I got to also see how people with families live in the city. One of the things that my brother and I still have in common is songwriting and playing music. He plays a lot more than I do and in several different bands but it’s always something we get to talk about. One of the questions that seems to keep coming up when we do is “why keep doing it?” It is a lot of work for no pay and, strangely, our genius seems to be lost on the general public. I guess my answer is the people I meet and all the stuff I learn. From new musical styles and genres to life lessons about confidence and humility. Like the time my friend Ezra and I played on the street one evening and some frat boys came by laughing at us and throwing empty bottles in our cases. Besides getting to see that college fraternities are still helping to provide society with the most compassionate and brilliant minds for our future problems, I got to practice some patience along with chords that involved the protrusion of the middle finger. Still, I met some great people in San Francisco this week who play cool music and are keeping the delusion alive.

“Do you make art that inspires people and seeks to change the world? Then stop doing it. No one cares. Once you learn that lesson you can finally create something. Meditate on how you are a little bit of a different person every time you write a new poem or make a weird grilled cheese sandwich. Don’t make art, let art make you.” – Guru Muru