Half Truth+Half Untruth=Happy "Liars"

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138

My job is bipolar

Last year was incredibly wonderful and difficult at the same time. I think that's how it is with being a school teacher. For example I LOVED my students. My LitMag staff was the best I've ever had. My IB kids were incredible. My English IV students.. I really liked some of them. (and this is where in sitcoms you hear the needle getting pulled off of the record)

As much as my LitMaggers and IBers made me excited to do my job, the other classes were so difficult. Some of this difficulty was a result of the usual teaching obstacles: Too many students in one classroom; too much paperwork; too many responsibilities that extended beyond the actual job of, oh let me think - teaching; very little discipline; tons of micromanaging; irrational parents; etc.. But some of it was that I had a tough group of kids.

As often as folks get upset about inconsiderate drivers or rude customers, teachers are likely, if not certain, to deal with the worst of the worst every day. You're thinking that in your job this is true, too. However, teachers are expected to be more forgiving. It's like knowing every single day the same punk kid driver in his car that costs twice as much as yours will inevitably cut you off in traffic, flip you off, and then laugh at you while texting his cleverness to his friends. As a teacher you know this is will happen again, and it shocks you each time, yet you still hope that something you do or say might make the rude driver a little bit more compassionate someday. "Maybe tomorrow when he cuts me off and flips me the bird, he won't laugh as loudly," you think. "Maybe if I call his parents (who taught him to drive), I can get ahead of him or show him that what he's doing is abusive and humiliating."

Every year you are guaranteed to have one mean driver in your class. But some years you have twenty of them. Last year I had forty. (40 out of 120 is too big of a percentage) Contrary to public opinion, there is nothing to do about a student's lack of respect toward a teacher. Unless a kid actually becomes violent against a teacher, all she can do is file paperwork and hope for an understanding counselor or principal. Plus, changing a kid's schedule to get him our of a particular class means that you have burdened another on of your colleagues with another issue that they do not need or deserve.

My personality is not commanding or controlling which some might say is part of the problem. The few times I've tried to "rule by force", it comes back to get me and makes me feel horrible. Combatting the rude drivers by being an even ruder one is sort of ridiculous and leads to accidents. I'm more of a mutual respect kind of teacher. In other words, I hope that if I model integrity, patience, responsibility, good will, and generosity, the kids will mirror it. They do for the most part. We have open dialogue in my class. I am a firm believer in inquiry based learning. Sometimes, though, the students don't mirror me. That's when things get tricky.

Monday is the start of a new school year. I will meet my new classes and get a sense of what kind of drivers they are. I'm trying to be optimistic, but there is a whole car-load of anxiety that comes with the start of the year.

Keith Olbermann Special Comment: There Is No 'Ground Zero Mosque' - 08/1...

Tears

I wonder if, along with pivotal, history changing folks like Harriett Beecher Stowe and Fredrick Douglas, my state will also delete the lessons learned from significant people and/or events such as The Trail of Tears in its public school curriculum:

In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the "Trail of Tears," because of its devastating effects. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and exhaustion on the forced march. Over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died. This picture, The Trail of Tears, was painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. It commemorates the suffering of the Cherokee people under forced removal. If any depictions of the "Trail of Tears" were created at the time of the march, they have not survived. Image Credit: The Granger Collection, New York

Sarcasm aside, the conservative right movement in my state is INEXCUSABLE..

I have to move before we excuse slavery by using Biblical references ... again.

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

by Margaret Atwood

The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most. This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.

Media

It's Friday already and time for an LBC post. Unfortunately we've had a difficult week here and were hit with some unexpected curveballs. Until I this morning, I had forgotten about posting entirely and what's worse is today we write about a topic that I suggested! (sigh)

The topic is media. I propsed this topic for a number of reasons. First of all, my friend Mark B. along with several other folks in England has started an entire project regarding the topic. Amazing! is an interactive (a debate follows the performance) theater project associated with the Agon group that was written for and performed by grade school children. In it, the kids ask some very important questions:

1. What is beauty?
2. Should the media weild it's power responsibly, and if so, how?

The Agon project directs attention to the idea that we truly do buy into media's ploys (both figuatively and literally), the outcome of which can be very harmful.

I don't think this is a new concept. Since its infancy, advertising, a small yet defining segment of the media, has been purposefully manipulative. Selling products isn't about people, after all; it is about business. I think most of us understand that this is true about advertising, and still we are swayed. Why?

News channels, internet, connectivity in all forms seems to have adopted the same philosophy as advertising - to manipulate consumers into buying their "products". So much information is thrown at us on a daily basis that sifting through all of it to find truth is almost impossible. Still, I urge my students to ask themselves "How do you know what you know?", along with all of the other questions imbedded in that one: Who is writing/speaking? What is his/her intent? How can you tell? Did you consider all sides?

I don't know how to hold people accountable for what they make public, especially when it comes to opinions that stray from fact. To some extent it seems that I am treading very close to arguing in favor of censorship. Actually, I am arguing for integrity. As a teacher standing in front of shaping minds, I have the responsibility to think and talk in a way that allows my students to draw conclusions using reason and compassion. Isn't that also the media's job?

I apologize for the rant. On a normal, less stressful week I might actually edit/revise/temper my writing.

Larry Allums: America the bold but not so beautiful | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Opinion: Points

My friend and mentor, Dr. Larry Allums, published an op ed in today's paper. Please enjoy:

Larry Allums: America the bold but not so beautiful News for Dallas, Texas Dallas Morning News Opinion: Points

For those who, like me, are pro-American and looking for insights into an uncertain future, Joel Kotkin's optimism in The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 is close to infectious. Amid pronouncements of America's decline or prophecies of its imminent doom, his forecast of our continuing vitality is a welcome respite.

Perhaps the most convincing aspect of Kotkin's claim for our success in the 21st century is that he avoids the sort of triumphalism that has the sound of excess – the hollow vanity Aristotle lists as one of the extremes either side of the golden mean of "greatness of soul." Nor does Kotkin go to the opposite extreme and suggest that America must now discover humility and share its past greatness with other nations. Rather, he really does claim not only a material greatness but a kind of greatness of soul for America, by which he seems to mean a quality not measurable as much by the data he uses so expertly as by a kind of interior, collective character sown into the soil of our founding that continues to nourish new growth, regardless of the massive change our democracy habitually thrives upon.

Describing America's "fundamental strengths," Kotkin ironically but perhaps appropriately employs a non-Anglo word: "These traits provide the United States with what Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya has described as sokojikara: a reserve power that allows it to overcome both the inadequacies of its leaders and the foibles of its citizens."

This rather mythic designation – mythic in the sense that it attempts to get at the essential character of a people – carries strong overtones of an American destiny, but clearly post-colonial and post-imperial. Kotkin believes that simply in following our internal compass and allowing our character to guide crucial choices, our ascendancy during this century will be, if not assured, certainly much more likely and, if we work at it, virtually guaranteed.

Working at it means striking a balance, Kotkin says, between piety toward our "ancient ideals" and openness to future change –in which case "the United States can emerge as a land of unprecedented opportunity: a youthful, evolving nation amid an advanced industrial world beset by old age, bitter ethnic conflicts and erratically functioning economic institutions."

This hopeful prospect hinges upon a momentous "if," because the two factors needing to be balanced are by nature in tension, if not opposition. Having in a sense begun in impiety – revolt against Mother Country – Americans are habitually ready to embrace change at piety's expense.

Notoriously, we find it easy to turn on a dime away from our past, perhaps because it almost never carries immediate consequences. Whether we can achieve the balance Kotkin so easily calls for will depend on our ability to manage another balancing act: between measurable and non-measurable dimensions of education, or between things that matter in terms of material worth and those that matter in terms of moral and spiritual value.

Our natural openness to change is, according to Kotkin, a primary nutrient in the soil of the American character, and for him being open includes embracing not just new technology but the kind of change we are currently experiencing as social and political crisis: what immigrants bring to the full flowering of the American Dream. Kotkin's assertions are, after all, grounded in a demographic forecast, that our population will grow by 100 million during the first half of the century – "demographics as destiny," as he dramatically puts it. Of Scotch-Irish descent and therefore part of a diminishing subset of Americans, I nevertheless found myself easily agreeing with most every point of his pro-immigrant stance.

Whereas "anti-natalists," slow-growth advocates and racial purists would regard continuing immigration as disastrous, Kotkin sees it as our source of ascendancy over the countries most often cited as our potential vanquishers – mainly India, China and the European Union: "Only successful immigration can provide the markets, the manpower and, perhaps most important, the youthful energy to keep western societies vital and growing," he writes. For me this sorts well, if not eloquently, with the Rev. Martin Luther King's image in his "I Have a Dream" speech of the Founders' "promissory note" to which "every
American was to fall heir."

The questions are, where will the next 100 million Americans live, and what will they do in this future epoch that will at once be an extension of the old and an emergence of the new?

Kotkin's answers are consistently provocative and sometimes troubling – especially to those who envision a future of urban renewal and a commensurate shrinking of America's dogged preference since World War II for suburban life. Not so, says Kotkin: "Rather than be forced to cluster in cities, Americans are likely to increasingly opt for communities that blend the single-family housing patterns of suburbia with basic urban amenities."

As a transplanted city dweller from the Deep South, I devoutly prefer urban life and believe in the city-center concept, but Kotkin's scenario doesn't put me off, because it avoids an either-or conclusion. The next 100 million, he says, will be enough for the vitality of both city and suburb. If he's right, and it appears he is, that "we're moving beyond the industrial model, with economic activity diffusing from great population centers," then perhaps we're entering a period when people of varying circumstances can choose not to live in urban areas and still aspire upward as Americans always have.

Until recently, civilizational advances have typically resulted in forced movements toward urban cores. We seem now to have reached a true turning point – when the movement will go back the other way, to the suburbs and beyond, even to the great American Heartland for which Kotkin foresees a dramatic resurgence.

Kotkin's bright estimate of America's potential has great appeal, but there's something beguiling, almost Pied-Piper like, about the neutrality of his predictions. It seems to me traceable to his use of the word sokojikara to define that deeply imbedded, almost mythic quality of the American character. My reservations have to do with two issues he minimizes or leaves out of his equation: education and beauty.

The first, education, is prominent among our national concerns, yet it is almost always discussed or debated only in terms of work-force skills and measurable knowledge. True, these are vitally connected to our national destiny on a material level. But tunnel-visioned as we are with high-stakes testing, we rarely contemplate the importance of a whole curriculum in ensuring our vital future in a changing, threatening world.

Like Kotkin, we seem to assume that matters of character and ideals – the very things that define sokojikara – will take care of themselves, that they are self-renewing and that as long as we remain politically correct, both our native-born and immigrant youth will somehow acquire the values, the moral habituation, that will keep us strong in heart and soul. At best, this is placing a lot of faith in the permanence of American Identity; at worst, it is risking the continued existence of America itself.

The other issue conspicuous by its absence from Kotkin's account is beauty, which has everything to do with education. Beauty is a forbidden subject today, especially in academe, yet the core of our education ought to focus precisely on beautiful things, which certainly include cities and suburbs.

Beauty matters in innumerable and often unmeasurable ways. According to the ancient Greeks, true education involves learning about what is good – the good thought, the good judgment, the good action – and what is good is necessarily beautiful. The Greeks in fact had one word – kaloskagathos – that coalesced the two into an inseparable meaning. Kotkin implies that there are no real distinctions to be made in terms of beauty – no beautiful cities or suburbs; only those that succeed, that is, those we prefer.

Kotkin's omissions don't invalidate his vision of America in 2050. In fact, there is room in his copious forecast for educating future Americans in what is both good and beautiful. Moreover, I would say that such an education is necessary if we are to be, as he predicts, "a beacon and a model," a new version of the City on the Hill of old – "exceptional in everything from culture and science to agriculture and politics."

Dr. Larry Allums is director of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture. His e-mail address is lallums@dallasinstitute.org.

Books

I'm a book snob.
There. I said it.
And it's kind of about time.

I've always loved reading. In fact, when I was twelve I decided that I was literary. I picked up Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and read them cover to cover. I had no idea what they are about. I still don't know. I don't really like either of those authors as a grown-up (except for Hemingway's short stories - they're divine! Oh, and Faulker's.. Nope. I have no love for his writing. I understand why he was so thirsty, those novels stuck in his throat.) The point is I read them. I made definitive decisions about them - "I disliked those particular classics", I said to myself, nose in the air- and I would continue to devour books and judge them as AMAZING pieces of literature or not so amazing ones. All of them continue to be stored on my bookshelves, regardless of my opinions, as sort of trophies. I never had any other kind that I cared about as much.

Caring is the other part. I tend to form relationships with my books. I hug them (in public, even. I'm not ashamed). I lovingly dog-ear them. I underline my favorite parts. I annotate them, personalize them, write in the margins, add poems and pictures to them, and even cry when I finish them because I miss them. I write about them.

When people find out I'm a literature teacher (as opposed to an English teacher, which is my formal, personally renounced title), they often ask me which book is my favorite. That question makes me incredibly uncomfortable because I feel like I'm betraying my good friends by answering it. I can't even narrow it down to a particular genre. All I can do is list some particular books that resonate with me right now.

I'll share a few with you:
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Portable Dorothy Parker
Dress Your Family in Corduroy - David Sedaris
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larson
Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenides
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Cunt - Inga Musico
Slughterhouse V - Kurt Vonnegut
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Morning in the Burned House - Margaret Atwood
American Primitive - Mary Oliver
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
The Miracle of Mindfulness - Thich Nhat Han

This post was inspired by the Loose Bloggers Consortium, a small and feisty(!) global community. We write weekly on a common topic (Books, this week) and post responses - all of us together, simultaneously, from all over the world. (Lovely!) Please visit Anu, Ashok, Conrad, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Judy, Magpie 11, Maria and Ramana for other wonderful posts.