Cornered

Once, a bully chased me around the neighborhood. He was older and he was bigger than I was.

It was twilight and I needed to get home when the streetlights came on. Somehow that worried me just as much as what he might do to me.

I was carrying a plastic "briefcase" that my dad had given me. I think it was full of toys and probably drawings of Star Trek scenes. It never occurred to me, as I was running and crying, to drop it -- which is good, because, thinking I had evaded the bully, I hid up against a friend's house under a pine tree. It would either be a great hiding spot or it was "a corner."

It was a corner.

Rocco vs. The Moronic Teacher

Behold: me. Look upon my might and despair. I am He-Who-Achieves. I am a reader of books. I am an Internet philosopher. I went to college -- longer than most people do. I have sat at Whitman's grave and at his Crystal Spring composing lines. I have made pilgrimage to Grasmere, for I have learned to see into the life of things -- to read and to respond with insight; to apply both soul and mind to unfurling the sublime work of the great writers. I know them, and they will know me when we meet in the Great Beyond and we shall have tea and biscuits and we will converse about how much smarter I was than everyone around me. Even The Bard will give me that gentle little chin-punch of fatherly approval as I enter through the White Gates and greet him -- and call him "thou" -- for I have known his Truths; felt them in my heart more deeply than anyone ever did. I am an authority in my field. I'm gosh-danged legendary in my own estimation...

...which is why it is nice, sometimes, to be reminded that I am and always will be, a complete moron.

Oklahoma Wants to Change the Programm(ing) of Its Students

So, Oklahoma politicians want to ban AP US History. This a blatant attempt at thought-policing and its bold-faced, out-loud attempt at changing the "program" of our kids' thinking is evidence that we live in a pre-Orwellian world.

For those who might not know, AP courses (advanced placement) are college-level courses taught to the best high school students. If these students score a certain number on the tests, they may be offered college credit in the university of their choice. I happen to teach AP English Literature and Composition and I am also the AP coordinator for my school, so I know something of the challenge-level and rigmarole of the program. 

One of the things that people seem not to care about is that these courses are designed also to foster critical thinking and perception in the students who take them. They are meant to teach kids to think well. But, typical to modern American thought, all anyone seems to care about are practical results: credit for college; higher GPA points... (Don't get me started... Wait...I already got me started... Never mind.) 

Now, it's about "patriotism." All of a sudden, we care about more than grades and college discounts and class rank. "All of a sudden," of course, when the "wrong" political or social perspectives might be getting fostered because, well...think of how that might change voting results!

Not a fan of memes, in general,
but -- how much of this is true? 

Those who seek to ban the course have decided to do so because they claim the new guidelines are not patriotic enough and that they dwell more on the negatives in the country's past than on the positives. The conservative opposers of the course have leaned upon what I am always suspicious of as a crutch meant to carry a prejudiced limp: no mention of King or Rosa Parks. (Too many truly prejudiced people speak too highly of those two, if you ask me. Those two are the historical equivalent of "I have a lot of black friends.") In fairness, they also oppose the fact that the Founding Fathers get no mention, along with the Declaration, the Constritution and the Emancipation Proclamation. 

As the College Board responded, however, what the Oklahoma politicians are responding to are guidelines -- guidelines -- put out by AP for teachers which are meant to help those teachers to prepare the students for success on the test. That's it.

"Offer it up!"

I don't think this is St. Theresa, but you get the point.

It's easy to trash religion as a negative force in the world. If you look at the headlines, it is a negative force. If you look at the historical headlines, even, it is a negative force. But those who were raised in sane religions with love and peace at their foundations know that religion can be profound, comforting and spiritually (go figure...) uplifting.

For instance, there is this Catholic thing we Catholics do. I'm not sure if it is prevalent in other Christian faiths, and I -- a public school kid -- didn't hear it much until I started teaching in a Catholic school. I have recently found out that the idea is often attributed to St. Theresa of Avila:

"Whatever you do, offer it up to God and pray that it may be for His honor and glory."

She uses it in the broader sense, of course. Hers is a prescription for living for God, first, but I find Catholics tend to use it more as a mitigation of and to make meaning out of suffering, either minor or major.

Dear Grandmom (Mont Alto, 1986)

A series of mental trails, today, have lead me to a memory; one I feel a decent amount of shame about. It's a bittersweet shame, made up of the sweetness of how loved I was and of the shame of having been a young, egocentric kid (like all kids) whose intrinsic sense of honesty often led him to believe that people were literal in what they said; or that, even if they actually were being literal, that I had no obligation to give them any more than they asked for...

Me, lower right, blue shirt, white sleeves. 1986.
Probably not thinking about Grandmom. 

I went to college at Penn State's Mont Alto campus, during my freshman year. It was a small campus of no more than 800 students. The setting was rustic and beautiful and it was all nestled against a "mountain." In the 1800's it had been a forestry school and, in fact, there were still forestry majors there, all flanneled up and bearded.

There were some older dormitories and some newer ones, all built between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The little building in which we got our mail was tiny -- maybe the size of your living room. Every few days I would go down there and check for letters. Pre-email, the box usually contained nothing but campus life memos: pizza party here; don't put your bikes there; stop calling the pizza place and ordering fries to be delivered to the chapel... I'd get a few real letters, but nothing consistent.