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Seventeen and a half Inch Neck

Not everyone knows what it is like to be the odd man out. Lacking fit. I am used to it in lots of ways. Outside of education discussions, my most persistent experience with this is when I buy clothes. You see, I am built for speed. Not too high off of the ground so as to incur headwinds. I have been known to hit the gym. So when I need, say, a shirt this is often the beginning of a bit of an adventure. The best method to get around this is to know what brands and what stores make clothes that fit my body type. In the case of clothing that cannot be tried on, like a new Jiu Jitsu gi, I have to call or send an email. It usually goes like this:

What size gi should I order?
Have you looked at the sizing chart?
Yes. I’m 5’7″ and 210 lbs.
Well, which is it?
What?
If you’re 5’7″ you should get an A2.
But I’m 210 lbs.
Oh. Well, I guess you can buy an A3 and try to shrink it.

Now try getting a dress shirt with 32 arms and a seventeen and a half inch neck. This sums up a lot of areas in my life.

You know? I can’t get behind that.

Classrooms are not designed for class activities, they are designed for class sizes. Seated.

I can’t get behind that.

Curricula are designed for tests. Or teachers.

I can’t get behind that.

Teachers are prepared for management.

I can’t get behind that.

Education is designed for compliance and one path is the best and variants are considered failures.

I can’t get behind that.

It is 2014 and we are not required to accept everything that is given to us. To fit. It is time to rebel. We can no longer accept the teacher who is not also an activist and advocate.

Passivity is acceptance. Endorsement. Establish the rule of engagement. Engage. Fight.

Dig into Goodness of Fit. Seek to understand why we do not have to fit.

Sink Swim or Fight?

The ground is my ocean, I’m the shark, and most people don’t know how to swim. ~Carlos Machado

It’s been almost ten years since I began training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and today it hit me. I need to decide to get better or I need to quit.

I get into physical things–no matter what they are–in the spirit of Steve Prefontaine. At first it may be curiosity, or frugality (I do a lot of my own remodeling at home), but the sustaining interest is powered by Pre: to see who has the most guts.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is first about guts. Stepping on the mat places you in a world where few enter and fewer and fewer stay. That is not even considering the levels of success any one may achieve.

In my experience, my learning curves are steeper than some. Over time they regress to the norm as they should. Depending on the domain, they may stay ahead of those around me. I know this about myself and, admittedly, I allow it to prevent me from working hard–norm calibrated rather than criterion calibrated. As a musician I could stay pretty consistently ahead of the curve when in a new situation without any effort.

That is a confession not braggadocio.

It is shameful to think that spending time practicing could have produced a variety of outcomes, some with life changing potential. I did not act.

While an undergrad it became known that I played the french horn though it was not my major instrument. The orchestra director offered to secure an instrument and I requested weekly lessons in exchange for my participation. A golden opportunity to study with a well known musician and to perform both repertoire and some contemporary music. My teacher told me I had a beautiful tone and excellent pitch. I rarely practiced. Made plenty of mistakes in rehearsals. It did not last but I look back and wonder what could have been different if I took hold of that opportunity wholeheartedly.

I am reminded of an Old Testament passage where the prophet Elisha tells the King of Israel to strike the ground with an arrow.

18 And he said, “Take the arrows,” and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground with them.” And he struck three times and stopped. 19 Then the man of God was angry with him and said, “You should have struck five or six times; then you would have struck down Syria until you had made an end of it, but now you will strike down Syria only three times.” (2 Ki 13.18-19)

That being said, I can always say that I could have done more. And further, I am not including all of the other life factors that may have had a genuine influence on how committed I was to the work. AND I was a kid–that was a lifetime ago.

Bringing me back to my practice of Jiu Jitsu and my attempt to maintain an reflective awareness of my practice. When I began studying Jiu Jitsu, I was good. Or, at least, that is what I was told by others. I was able to get to class three or more times each week and was not in tremendous shape. I watched videos and read books about Jiu Jitsu. I was in. Deep.

Jump ahead. Craniotomy. Complete grad school. Have a daughter. Buy a house, work on house, move, keep working on house. Have a son. Shoulder repair. Change jobs. That last few years have not had me on the mats very much at all. Schedules have been rough. Recovery from a recent surgery was slower than expected. I have been on the mats twice since getting the OK from the doctor.

What was most clear today is that everyone has improved. My skills that were competitive a few years ago are not as competitive as they were. Attribute some of that to rust and being a little gunshy with the shoulder, fine. I was constantly scrambling and defending. Out of breath. HOT.

Granted, I managed to get in a full class and three or four sparring matches afterwards. All tough matches for me–I like to train with people who are better than me and I do not mind “losing” at all. I say “losing” because we all know that it means very little to tap or reset a sparring match. Some folks still keep track. I do. A little.

I am tired and sore. Worse than that is that I know what I need to do to improve and have to decide if I am willing to start doing it.

Pedagogy and its Discontents pt.2, Lead me where?

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement–that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Let us not make any bones about the situation. The teacher is at the front of the room and hold the keys. There are places that students cannot go. There are places that students can go. There are places that students may only go if the teacher takes them there. Say what? This is the 21st century. This classroom is flipped. We are unlearning. Delearning. Relearning. It is our new pedagogy. You can’t front on that.

Or can you, Biz? Will you front on that? Is it the content, the context, or the process that is of value in the classroom? Some mix of the three, perhaps. Maybe, even, a fourth entity–the interaction of them all. In the same way that you may not separate nature and nurture, it is unlikely that you may separate the content from the context or either of them from the process that brings them to light. Further, it is unlikely that by explicitly valuing one part of the mix that a teacher or student will be sure to have the desired influence over those components.

Do you follow? If I, as a teacher or student make explicit statements of value, the reaction of students may be to value or devalue or, perhaps, to have no change in their valuation of the component. Some rebel while some draw near. It depends on how that serves their needs for safety, belonging, esteem, or actualization. Remember Maslow? Not to oversimplify, but if you have ever tried to teach a hungry student, you are probably missing more than my point.

Getting back to the matter at hand, students respond to the content, context, and process–along with the demonstrated valuations by the instructor in a given manner. They may follow, rebel, or have no change in their value of the experience. The teacher, assessing the response, may ‘course-correct’ mid-stream-of-thought BUT what may happen is not entirely predictable! Change on the part of the teacher–either re-emphasis, over-emphasis, or a decreased emphasis–may result in a different overall response.

The most significant (read risky) overall response may be an overarching loss of interest should the instructor effectively abandon ship on the premise or the beliefs that were held at first. Any teacher still holding the torch of pedagogy as a method of a priori distribution of information should probably have a widow’s walk built and learn a new lament. The kids are alright.

“And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are indanger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

At Seventeen

I learned the truth at seventeen
that love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired — Janis Ian at seventeen

The words of Janis Ian sting. They conjure images of bullied, ignored, thoughtful, and lonely kids. Seventeen is a hard age to learn those truths expressed in her hit song from 1975.

When I hear this song or when it becomes an earworm for days on end, I cannot help but think of my own time in middle and high school. Or undergrad. Graduate school. So on. Present day. Sometimes.

That is not to say that I was friendless or lonely. I place a mental pushpin every time in my life when truth is revealed. Signposts. Bread crumbs. Regardless of what or when, it always seems too early and too often that we learn a hard truth. In education, that is–as an educator, the pins drop like needles on songs. One after another whether you like them or not. Heavy rotation. Top of the pops. Hits. We take a lot of hits.

awkward teens — awkward teenagers lol
by ~JonathanTheSmex

Remember those veteran teachers scorning our eager, go-get-em attitudes with warnings? Their threats seemed so far-fetched. Trite. “Someday, you’ll be just like me.” We laughed them off. We worked hard. We came in early. We stayed late. We graded and prepped during late nights, weekends, and holidays. Grading parties. Thank God for TiVo. “I’m always a teacher so I always do teacher work,” we say. We learn a truth. Get a peek behind the curtain. See that all those appreciations we enjoyed were more fair-weather than once thought. We thought that we were on top of our game and have our legs cut out from under us. We are seventeen again.

Remember those who win the game, they lose the love they sought to gain

A decision is made. We will continue to do it for the kids. Of course we will. The kids. The only convolution is that we are not as resilient as we were at seventeen. Those wounds heal more slowly. Calluses thicken. Eyes look to the floor. We begin to have regrets. Begin to feel all those eyes that gaze.