An orange balloon escaped from the car in front of me. For a second it swirled around and then disappeared from view. Traffic was steady along the scenic highway. I caught the look of shock on the face of the child who lost the balloon. Then he pressed his face against the glass and from the way his eyes rose along an imaginary slope, I knew he was tracing the flight of his balloon. What came next was unexpected. He smiled.
I often see eagles circling and marking their territories above the pines and the oaks along this stretch of the road on my way to work. I wondered if the child saw his balloon soaring toward them. And I wondered if that’s what brought the smile to his face. Perhaps the balloon, like birds, turned instantly into a symbol of freedom for him, free from rules and laws, only the open sky its guiding light. Could it be that such thoughts come unbidden to children on wings of mystery but are as real to them as the balloon and the car and mom and dad?
Some years ago I saw a classic called “The Red Balloon” with my 4-year old. He was so taken by Albert Lamorisse’s tale that we watched it almost every weekend during our private “balloon time.” It ends sadly for the balloon and the boy but I suspect it is this loss and pathos after so much loyalty and happiness that enchanted my son. At the end of a viewing I would ask, “How come you love this movie so much?” He would laugh and re-enact for me all the fun the boy had with his beloved balloon in the streets of Paris, becoming less voluble as he neared the finale. But that would quickly pass as he flung himself yet again into recreating the magic of the sentient balloon, not so much for me as for himself, concluding with “Let’s see it again. Please!”
The car in front changed lanes a few miles down the highway. The last glimpse I had of the child was of his face still pressed against the glass, his gaze fixed heavenward, and smiling the kind of smile as only a child could.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Parity Between the Classroom and the World Outside
I gave the final Algebra test of the spring semester to my college students last week. As they struggled through simultaneous linear equations, factorization and exponential multiplication and division, I used the time to catch up on my reading. It was a growing-up book by Mark Salzman called Lost In Place. Evocative, humorous, poignant. Just a few paragraphs into chapter 8 and the relevance of its content to my class floored me.
I had written about the major drawback of most educational reforms in America’s K-14 public school system: the absence of student perspective. The weighty papers and manifestos and recommendations, written with seasonal regularity by earnest reformers and retired executives and wealthy philanthropists, list almost everything that is wrong with our education system, except perhaps the most important: What do students think about their curriculum and how does it affect their lives?
But here was Salzman, articulating how he felt about what he was being forced to learn in the ninth grade in a public school in Connecticut: “I disliked the ninth grade nearly as much as I’d disliked the seventh and the eighth grade … Why did the subjects have to be so boring? Did adults do this on purpose? They made the world the way it was, and then made us learn the rules so we would make sure not to change anything! If I’d had to sit through a class five days a week called ‘Plucking All of Your Hairs Out and Arranging Them in Stacks of Prime Numbers,’ it wouldn’t have seemed any better or worse than my actual classes.”
Later in the chapter Salzman gets to the heart of the matter. “Adults tell you that school is not about learning particular facts, but about learning to learn. (I winced. At the beginning of the semester I had said something like this to my class). When the time comes that a subject intrigues you deeply, they insist, you will be grateful for having developed the skills needed to master the subject … And they’re right. The problem for all of us, as teenagers, is that until we find that special subject we have to take their word for it. And that’s a lot to ask when you’re talking about memorizing the Louisiana Purchase, the atomic weight of uranium or the plu-perfect tense conjugation for verbs in other languages. How about the chemistry involved in photosynthesis? Yep - could be useful someday. If a sailboat left San Francisco thirteen hours ago against a 5-knot current and a 4-knot breeze (here my palpitation increased because I had dealt with similar problems using linear equations) and is just now reaching Santa Barbara, 312 miles away, what was its average speed? Hey, couldn’t you just ask the Coast Guard? That’s their job, isn’t it? It’s a miracle any of us make it to the drinking age without having gone insane … We fidget in uncomfortable wooden chairs and learn how to learn. You’re told it will pay off one day, but between the ages of thirteen and eighteen you cannot help wondering, What if it doesn’t pay off? What if our parents (and teachers, I may include) and their parents, were all wrong about what’s really important? How will it ever end if no one questions it? And these years are supposed to be the best years of your life.”
Educators must answer these questions if their recommendations to reform our public schools are to have any chance of success. As it is, their recommendations come and go, a national soul-searching ensues for a day or two and then bloggers and pundits move on to the next crisis of the day.
I find the disconnect between the traditional classroom and the outside world scandalous. Students are stressed out by it. When I asked at the beginning of the semester what professions they were thinking of pursuing, my students listed nursing, interior decoration, sports salesman, professional basketball, psychiatry, psychology and writing. I tried to impress on them the value of logical thinking no matter what profession they decided to pursue but most of them were not buying.
Teachers have to do their job as best as they can but it will help if they can humanize their teaching by knowing where their students stand. If you are teaching algebra, say, at least recognize that some of your students may not be convinced that it will be useful in their lives. If you proceed from that premise, perhaps you will connect with them at some subliminal level that will make the course go down more easily. That’s what I tried to do but I am under no illusion that I succeeded. One thing I did do to reduce the disparity between the classroom and the outside world was that all my tests were open book. After all, at work, any resource is available for you to look up to successfully complete your project. Why not some semblance of it inside the classroom as well?
I had written about the major drawback of most educational reforms in America’s K-14 public school system: the absence of student perspective. The weighty papers and manifestos and recommendations, written with seasonal regularity by earnest reformers and retired executives and wealthy philanthropists, list almost everything that is wrong with our education system, except perhaps the most important: What do students think about their curriculum and how does it affect their lives?
But here was Salzman, articulating how he felt about what he was being forced to learn in the ninth grade in a public school in Connecticut: “I disliked the ninth grade nearly as much as I’d disliked the seventh and the eighth grade … Why did the subjects have to be so boring? Did adults do this on purpose? They made the world the way it was, and then made us learn the rules so we would make sure not to change anything! If I’d had to sit through a class five days a week called ‘Plucking All of Your Hairs Out and Arranging Them in Stacks of Prime Numbers,’ it wouldn’t have seemed any better or worse than my actual classes.”
Later in the chapter Salzman gets to the heart of the matter. “Adults tell you that school is not about learning particular facts, but about learning to learn. (I winced. At the beginning of the semester I had said something like this to my class). When the time comes that a subject intrigues you deeply, they insist, you will be grateful for having developed the skills needed to master the subject … And they’re right. The problem for all of us, as teenagers, is that until we find that special subject we have to take their word for it. And that’s a lot to ask when you’re talking about memorizing the Louisiana Purchase, the atomic weight of uranium or the plu-perfect tense conjugation for verbs in other languages. How about the chemistry involved in photosynthesis? Yep - could be useful someday. If a sailboat left San Francisco thirteen hours ago against a 5-knot current and a 4-knot breeze (here my palpitation increased because I had dealt with similar problems using linear equations) and is just now reaching Santa Barbara, 312 miles away, what was its average speed? Hey, couldn’t you just ask the Coast Guard? That’s their job, isn’t it? It’s a miracle any of us make it to the drinking age without having gone insane … We fidget in uncomfortable wooden chairs and learn how to learn. You’re told it will pay off one day, but between the ages of thirteen and eighteen you cannot help wondering, What if it doesn’t pay off? What if our parents (and teachers, I may include) and their parents, were all wrong about what’s really important? How will it ever end if no one questions it? And these years are supposed to be the best years of your life.”
Educators must answer these questions if their recommendations to reform our public schools are to have any chance of success. As it is, their recommendations come and go, a national soul-searching ensues for a day or two and then bloggers and pundits move on to the next crisis of the day.
I find the disconnect between the traditional classroom and the outside world scandalous. Students are stressed out by it. When I asked at the beginning of the semester what professions they were thinking of pursuing, my students listed nursing, interior decoration, sports salesman, professional basketball, psychiatry, psychology and writing. I tried to impress on them the value of logical thinking no matter what profession they decided to pursue but most of them were not buying.
Teachers have to do their job as best as they can but it will help if they can humanize their teaching by knowing where their students stand. If you are teaching algebra, say, at least recognize that some of your students may not be convinced that it will be useful in their lives. If you proceed from that premise, perhaps you will connect with them at some subliminal level that will make the course go down more easily. That’s what I tried to do but I am under no illusion that I succeeded. One thing I did do to reduce the disparity between the classroom and the outside world was that all my tests were open book. After all, at work, any resource is available for you to look up to successfully complete your project. Why not some semblance of it inside the classroom as well?
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Memorable Commencement Addresses
In this season of commencement addresses, I remember the one I endured during my graduation from a university in Pennsylvania several years ago. “Endure” is the operative word. The guy (president of another university) was so earnest that he lost us within a minute of his harangue. It was worse than sitting through a boring class, of which there were plenty in the previous four years and which we were desperate to forget. He meant well, of course, but he was convinced that the only way we could master life’s tribulations was to be armed with his insight and wisdom. Every conceivable cliché was a paragraph in his text, every graduation-postcard sentiment worthy of a mention.
I think commencement speakers have wised up since then, particularly with celebrities working the circuit. Humor is prized. Even if the occasion demands reflection, at least some of them have learned that it is possible to be serious without being solemn. What also helps is to have one or two genuine laugh lines. But what really sets apart great commencement addresses from the merely good are those crafted around one of life's great mysteries: How to find a worthy aim in life? This goes back to what Robert Louis Stevenson said: “An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.”
With this as the criterion, I find these four commencement addresses memorable. In their unique way, the speakers make us believe in their reflection of what makes life meaningful and joyous. Excerpts:
Barbara Kingsolver (Duke, May 2008): I am charged with postponing your diploma for about 15 more minutes, so I’ll proceed, with a caveat. The wisdom of each generation is necessarily new … You could walk out of here with an unconventionally communal sense of how your life may be. This could be your key to a new order: you don’t need so much stuff to fill your life, when you have people in it. You don’t need jet fuel to get food from a farmer’s market. You could invent a new kind of Success that includes children’s poetry, butterfly migrations, butterfly kisses, the Grand Canyon, eternity. If somebody says “Your money or your life,” you could say: Life. And mean it. You’ll see things collapse in your time, the big houses, the empires of glass. The new green things that sprout up through the wreck –- those will be yours.
Richard Russo (Colby College, Maine, May 2004): How does a person keep from living the wrong life? Well, here are Russo's Rules For A Good Life. Notice that I don't say "for a happy life." Keep in mind that Russo's Rules for a Good Life are specifically designed to be jettisoned without regret when they don't work. They've worked for me. Your mileage may vary.
Rule #1: Search out the kind of work that you would gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it.
Rule # 2: Find a loving mate to share what life has in store, because the world can be a lonely place, and people who aren't lonely don't want to hear about it if you are.
Rule #3: Have children. After what you've put your parents through, you deserve children of your own.
Rule #4. If you have one, nurture your sense of humor. You're going to need it ... In an age as numbingly earnest as this one, where we're more often urged to be sensitive than just, where genuinely independent thought is equally unwelcome to fundamentalists on both the left and right, it's laughter that keeps us sane.
Bill Gates (Harvard, June 2007): I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree” … Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity … If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not ... We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities ... The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit … The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease … Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
At the summit of commencement addresses, however, stands Apple’s Steve Jobs. You read his heart-felt words and realize that to make a conscious effort to find life’s calling is all that matters. Driven not by money or fame but by what your heart tells you and having the courage to follow through are what leads you to the only fortune in life worth finding.
Steve Jobs (Stanford, June 2005): I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation ... I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit … I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week ... I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
I think commencement speakers have wised up since then, particularly with celebrities working the circuit. Humor is prized. Even if the occasion demands reflection, at least some of them have learned that it is possible to be serious without being solemn. What also helps is to have one or two genuine laugh lines. But what really sets apart great commencement addresses from the merely good are those crafted around one of life's great mysteries: How to find a worthy aim in life? This goes back to what Robert Louis Stevenson said: “An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.”
With this as the criterion, I find these four commencement addresses memorable. In their unique way, the speakers make us believe in their reflection of what makes life meaningful and joyous. Excerpts:
Barbara Kingsolver (Duke, May 2008): I am charged with postponing your diploma for about 15 more minutes, so I’ll proceed, with a caveat. The wisdom of each generation is necessarily new … You could walk out of here with an unconventionally communal sense of how your life may be. This could be your key to a new order: you don’t need so much stuff to fill your life, when you have people in it. You don’t need jet fuel to get food from a farmer’s market. You could invent a new kind of Success that includes children’s poetry, butterfly migrations, butterfly kisses, the Grand Canyon, eternity. If somebody says “Your money or your life,” you could say: Life. And mean it. You’ll see things collapse in your time, the big houses, the empires of glass. The new green things that sprout up through the wreck –- those will be yours.
Richard Russo (Colby College, Maine, May 2004): How does a person keep from living the wrong life? Well, here are Russo's Rules For A Good Life. Notice that I don't say "for a happy life." Keep in mind that Russo's Rules for a Good Life are specifically designed to be jettisoned without regret when they don't work. They've worked for me. Your mileage may vary.
Rule #1: Search out the kind of work that you would gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it.
Rule # 2: Find a loving mate to share what life has in store, because the world can be a lonely place, and people who aren't lonely don't want to hear about it if you are.
Rule #3: Have children. After what you've put your parents through, you deserve children of your own.
Rule #4. If you have one, nurture your sense of humor. You're going to need it ... In an age as numbingly earnest as this one, where we're more often urged to be sensitive than just, where genuinely independent thought is equally unwelcome to fundamentalists on both the left and right, it's laughter that keeps us sane.
Bill Gates (Harvard, June 2007): I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree” … Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity … If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not ... We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities ... The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit … The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease … Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
At the summit of commencement addresses, however, stands Apple’s Steve Jobs. You read his heart-felt words and realize that to make a conscious effort to find life’s calling is all that matters. Driven not by money or fame but by what your heart tells you and having the courage to follow through are what leads you to the only fortune in life worth finding.
Steve Jobs (Stanford, June 2005): I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation ... I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit … I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week ... I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Anna Quindlen Makes Room for the Young
Anna Quindlen, “The Last Word” essayist for Newsweek magazine for the past nine years, is giving up her column to make room for new and young writers. “I believe that many of our old ways of doing things are out of date, including some of our old ways of looking at, and reporting on, the world around us,” she wrote in her final column “Stepping Aside” (May 18, 2009). “Since the day he delivered his Inaugural Address, when I was 8 years old, people have been quoting the youthful John F. Kennedy saying that the torch had been passed to a new generation. But torches don't really get passed very much because people love to hold on to them.”
The moment of truth finally arrived for her when her eldest child, talking about the reluctance of her aging friends to retire, remarked, “You guys just won't go!”
Well, now she will.
I felt sad reading her adieu. She was one of my favorite columnists, not just because of her extraordinary writing but even more, for her taste in topics. They seemed so relevant and organic! Her perspective was unique. She was an activist whose tone was tempered by motherhood and acceptance of human frailties. She was as intolerant of the crimes of the powerful and the privileged as she was of the absurdities of a system that punished the hard-working and the dedicated.
In a column titled “Write and Wrong,” (July 12, 2008), she wrote of a veteran Indiana teacher who was placed on an 18-month suspension without pay by her school board. Her crime? She was trying to engage her struggling students with “Freedom Writers Diary,” a modern-day equivalent of “Huckleberry Finn.” If you are not outraged by her commentary and instructed by it, I say something is seriously wrong with you.
What was also remarkable was Quindlen’s consistency. Every two weeks (she alternated the column with George Will), she would hold forth on a thought and made a compelling story out of it. Each word was the right word, every sentence invested with a purpose. I don’t know if anyone at Newsweek edited her column but I find the idea far-fetched.
Quindlen is right, of course, in making room for the new. How will we discover fresh voices and powerful minds if aging baby boomers hold on to their jobs, however talented they may be?
But it will be difficult to replace Quindlen. Perhaps the best way her colleagues can pay homage to her is to take her cue and make room for the young as well. That includes her "co-host" George Will and many others whose professional longevity seem to be equaled only by Supreme Court justices.
As for the rest of us, thank you, Anna, for the gift of your insight and intelligence, your wisdom and humanity. You will be missed.
The moment of truth finally arrived for her when her eldest child, talking about the reluctance of her aging friends to retire, remarked, “You guys just won't go!”
Well, now she will.
I felt sad reading her adieu. She was one of my favorite columnists, not just because of her extraordinary writing but even more, for her taste in topics. They seemed so relevant and organic! Her perspective was unique. She was an activist whose tone was tempered by motherhood and acceptance of human frailties. She was as intolerant of the crimes of the powerful and the privileged as she was of the absurdities of a system that punished the hard-working and the dedicated.
In a column titled “Write and Wrong,” (July 12, 2008), she wrote of a veteran Indiana teacher who was placed on an 18-month suspension without pay by her school board. Her crime? She was trying to engage her struggling students with “Freedom Writers Diary,” a modern-day equivalent of “Huckleberry Finn.” If you are not outraged by her commentary and instructed by it, I say something is seriously wrong with you.
What was also remarkable was Quindlen’s consistency. Every two weeks (she alternated the column with George Will), she would hold forth on a thought and made a compelling story out of it. Each word was the right word, every sentence invested with a purpose. I don’t know if anyone at Newsweek edited her column but I find the idea far-fetched.
Quindlen is right, of course, in making room for the new. How will we discover fresh voices and powerful minds if aging baby boomers hold on to their jobs, however talented they may be?
But it will be difficult to replace Quindlen. Perhaps the best way her colleagues can pay homage to her is to take her cue and make room for the young as well. That includes her "co-host" George Will and many others whose professional longevity seem to be equaled only by Supreme Court justices.
As for the rest of us, thank you, Anna, for the gift of your insight and intelligence, your wisdom and humanity. You will be missed.
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