Oh running, doth you have a sweet smell?

I ran my 20 miler today in training for the Twin Cities Marathon, and have to comment on just how proud I am of myself that I tuned out my headphones (well, one of them wasn't working anyways so I just said f-it) and I just listened to nature and squirrels and the passing of chatty bikers and slow moving cars. The cars moved slowly along East and West River Parkways, but the bikers moved fast, mostly, gritting their teeth and looking serious. I try to smile at any runners that pass me going to other way, in hopes to commence for just a moment on our doing the same thing at the same time for probably similar or totally different reasons. For a moment, we share a moment, and that is human and that is good. But while I turned off my headphones and tried to more closely connect with everything around me, I became distinctly aware of how little control I have of the smells around me and how much they actually affect me when I'm, say, in mile 19 of 20 and am ready to be done. The smell of rotting fish from the river just doesn't sit well. I can't put on my headphones and tune that out, unfortunately, and it made my stomach turn from it's already close tipping point I had brought it to. Maybe Nike or Apple, in all of their running products wisdom, will create some kind of device that I can tune smells out from my little bubble as I run. I am excited for that product. But I promise I will take it out of my nose or brain or whatever when I am running in the heart of fall. I love the smell of fall.

marching on

I've been thinking lately, hard, about if I should still keep writing here or put it in my past. Furthermore, I've so busy with other writing, musical and academic, its been difficult to rationalize time for this. But then I think, after a while, that I should just keep writing. Odds are, I'm probably the only one that read this, and that's ok. I'm going to keep writing anyway. For some reason, it fills a niche that just isn't quite filled any where else. And so: I march on. If I don't speak my word, it may not be spoken. And I won't have anyone else to blame, but me.

If It Makes You Happy: Thanks Sheryl Crow

Funny how you can get in a funk and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a pop song that you've heard incessantly for years on every radio station you didn't like "pops" into your head, and the lyrics and chords somehow help you commiserate a bit.

Almost scary how quick this song popped into my head, and how randomly. Especially because I don't and have not ever intentionally listened to Sheryl Crow.

But here she is, and she did her thing for me on You Tube, glowing lipstick and all, and now I kind of feel a little bit better. Play it again, Sheryl. I'm getting a little better every time.

Go listen. It's so popular the embedding has been disabled by request.

"If it Makes you Happy" by Sheryl Crow on YouTube

education is my "business"

Some teachers who I talk to are balking at the idea that schools are being compared to businesses, and that putting the business model in education is bad. Bad for education, bad for kids. Because "business" must seem synonymous with the corporate world, which is cruel and ugly and impersonal, yada yada. Well, when this "education as business" talk first started several years ago, I bought in and stomped my feet too. But I'm altering my position now, opening my ears and mind to it a little more.

I'm pretty sure that we already treat schools on the business model in more ways than I can count. There are examples even in our everyday speak. For example, from my experiences teaching in public, charter, and private schools around the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area as well as the other states in the U.S. that I have taught in, I can say I've been reminded on more than a few occasions that "schools are our business" and "our business is educating kids" more times than I can count, by everything from posters on the walls to pens engraved with various versions of the slogan, etc.

Is "business" bad? When I want to look professional, I wear a "business suit." When I start a meeting on a serious note, I say "let's get down to business." When I was little and was going to take a bath and there wasn't time for play time with toys, I took a "business bath."

When we talk about education and making it more "business-like", the cultural nuances associated with this speak might be good for education in some ways, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the human element is gone from education or that children are now products or we're going to start putting price tags and UPCs on people. It is introducing a different kind of attitude that might benefit education in some ways, and I think teachers need to be more open to this concept in approaching new types of reform that might be better for kids. And that's who we're in this for.

teacher collaboration: made more difficult by current culture

Personalities can get in the way of meaningful collaboration, and this is very obvious to me, as a teacher in a current climate of teaching which is bending over backwards with suggestions for how and when and always to collaborate.

I have no problems with collaboration. I do it very, very well. I am humble, I am a wonderful listener, and I love hearing new ideas and better ways to do things. As a side note, I also love my Performance Evaluations by my principals. The opportunity for immediate feedback on my performance as a teacher and how I can teach even better keeps me awake at night, in excitement for the day ahead. Those are some of my favorite days. Anyways.

Teachers have, however and up until today, celebrated their individuality. This is a strong marker of the culture of teaching, and is often protected and defended, most often, especially if you are a teacher. However, and unfortunately, I feel that teaching practices may continue to reproduce this condition, and are going to make the best kinds of collaboration more difficult than they should be.

The more we say that as teachers, our teaching style and practices are distinct and personal and can sometimes feel threatened by new strategies or instructional methods, the more we may be protecting the individual as too distinct and unchangeable. Possibilities for meaningful collaboration are overlooked to protect individuals, and other individuals may end up trying to figure it out on their own instead of asking another for help.

I do not believe that we can continue to celebrate and defend the individuality of teacher styles and practices on one hand and then be exasperated when teachers who have difficult personalities somehow feel empowered to make collaboration more difficult. Unless we can find a middle-ground in the culture of teaching between celebrating a teacher's uniqueness and also adopting an attitude of humility needed for healthy collaborative initiatives, we may continue to see a self-perpetuating cycle, protecting the individual, in which collective collaboration may continue to be made difficult by our very own hands.

email is killing collaborative cultures in schools

I believe that one of the biggest isolators of teachers within school buildings is email usage. We email each other and sit and read emails way way way too much and interact in person in our buildings less and less. It's a recursive cycle that doesn't seem to be getting any easier to be part of. Furthermore, the more emails we send out to others, the more teachers are pressured to be sitting in front of their computers, keeping up with emails, and not interacting with each other or being a part of the overall building atmosphere.

A human-interaction based, collaborative culture in a school cannot be created in virtual space, which we are spending more and more time in while sitting in our own classrooms. The tribes of digital nomads we teachers are being pressured, and pressuring others to become, somehow claiming that email is so much more convenient, is going to slow the creation of a personable, collaborative culture in any building.

Successful educational institutions existed before email, and even though I'm young, I agree with the older teachers that I've spoken with about this that email is getting out of control at the expense of our own time... which may be better spent doing something different, like having an actual conversation with someone.

"to appreciate the otherness of others" - Eli Wiesel

I thoroughly enjoyed this talk by Eli Wiesel which MPR aired today during the noon hour. He spoke at the Chautauqua Lecture Series in New York about what makes us moral. Eli makes me want to be a better person, helps me take a new look at humanity and America, and is the breath of fresh air that I really needed today. I can't wait to listen to him speak again.

During this talk, he pointed out that there are a few things that he has "learned" from Americans that he just wasn't comfortable with. For example, one was to "move on." He asks, why do we always need to turn the page and move on? Can't we learn from our past? I agree with him. What are we running from? He used the example that in America we seem to leave our elderly behind, in nursing homes, or we send them to Florida. Kids are where it's at. But, when he was a boy, when Grandpa came to visit, Grandpa got to sleep in his bed and everything basically stood still in reverence of their time together, because time with Grandpa was special. He laments our forgetfulness and pushing-aside of our elderly in America. So Do I.

There were a myriad of empathetic, insightful, serious, and humorous points made by this man today, among which I appreciated were the oft-mentioned tips that he would make this observation about our culture today, and he would be back in ten years to make it again. I like that he sees that we can be told something, nod our heads, agree in earnest, and keep doing exactly what we are doing. I.e. destroying the planet, discriminating against people different than us, etc. etc.

In the end, I loved his take-home point, to "appreciate the otherness of others." If we can do this, the ugliness of social class reproduction and the reproduction of inequality in society, in our school system, etc. may be deterred. Until then, high school girls will still stand in the hallways and make comments about the shoes someone else is wearing, and we'll still look at the person in the car next to us and try to judge their very personality. Where are we going with this judgmental nonsense? I know its entertaining, America, but seriously. We need to listen more to Eli.

Silence can be so beautiful

I've come to a time in my life when my musical thoughts flow so much more freely and without restraint when no other sounds are happening.

My running, of all things, has particularly benefited from this recent epiphany. I see other runners huff and puff past me with headphone wires blowing and dangling from their ears, no doubt cycling through some 8 gazillion digital song files courtesy of iTunes. The better to not hear anyone else, the better to distract yourselves. Well, you don't know what you're missing, and I'm not going to chase you down to tell you about it. However, you just made my run a little more interesting.

Once in a while I'll grab my mp3 player to see what all of the fuss is about, but I find that I can get so overwhelmed by the emotions of the music while I am trying to control my run (as I tend to listen to extremely passionate music) that I end up getting frazzled; sometimes anxious, sometimes upset. The music takes such a tight grip on me that it is something I have to try to predict, to control for. It's not something to be afraid of however. It's the number one reason I am a musician in the first place.

Losin' you: Valerie June Carter (1929-2003)

If she could stop haunting me with her older, raspy, slight growl and historical American roots musical potency, I could let this more recent recording of June Carter Cash sleep for a few hours. But no, she has no choice but to keep singing to me, whether I am physically playing her album or not. This morning after my walk to the farmer's market, I dug out the recent film "Walk the Line" (which I still haven't returned to my generous parents) so that I could at least flirt with the possibility that I was there when Johnny and June made there mark on time and sound. That was the closest I am going to get, unfortunately, to her, but nevertheless, she is close.

After falling for her in so many ways, I am also trying to learn more about her, almost too easy in this day and age, what with the cultural capital of IT so easily at my fingertips. It looks like her autobiography should be in my hands at some point in time. Put it on the list.

Last fall I decided this summer would be devoted to a particular effort to familiarize myself with a deeper induction into the roots of American music than anyone else had haphazardly let me sniff. It was me that would do the digging this time. Not American Routes, and not my mother's bluegrass sing along sheet 3-ring binders (although they are wonderful). I've rolled the dice a few times, but I keep coming back to June. There is probably a reason for this, for my own sound, and so I just can't get enough of her right now and won't try to fight it.

Worth noting, however, is Justin Vernon (Bon Iver)'s latest effort, which distracted me yesterday from June. Since his music sounds like it comes from the future and the past, he's like a bomb going off in my ears. A good bomb, if that exists. I apologize, June. Now, you were saying?

$ummer Vacation

It's the summer when I feel "small". I feel small as a result of not feeling needed by society. I don't get to teach. So I go from a 50 hour work week to a zero hour work week (or near that) so the students can "rest" and "be fresh in the fall". I have to simmer on low until the school year revs up again and I can develop my students' minds... because our common American (public school) agrarian school calendar dictates that its teachers have to take nearly three months off of school and the school year ends because the students "need a break." Need a break. From what? Thinking, I guess. How much longer is this silliness going to continue?

We no longer have to work in the fields in suburban Minnesota, but I am no fool. Schools do not have to be air-conditioned, and sales are up at the mall and the video stores. Businesses profit from the summer. Cabins are happily populated around the lakes. Roadside gas stations bustle with the closing and opening of doors as children run in to the bathroom and dad grabs a cup of coffee so the road trip, and consuming gas, can continue. Glad everyone is having "fun". But I don't see why learning in school and pushing our potential year-round couldn't be fun. We've just been "taught" that it is not. Plenty of these fun things, like road trips and barbecues could happen even if children were in school year round.

I am human capital on the back burner. And personally, I am not a big fan of it.