I want to go back to my classroom and see my students face to face.

I’m very fortunate to be a teacher. I’ve got what I consider the best career in the world: I get to add to the lives of others. A young person walks into my room, then an hour later she walks out better than she entered. There’s nothing quite like that.

Students lose so much when we can’t meet them face to face. Mainly, they lose the ability to interact in collaborative learning, or what most people call “group learning.” I’ve seen so much good come from students who struggle alongside each other in solving a complex math equation, understanding a layered geopolitical map, or analyzing a sophisticated piece of writing. Being able to lean in, lend a gentle guiding word or two, and then lean back to watch the students continue to fight to learn is a special joy, and one which will help these students in their lives for many years to come.

So, in short, I want to go back.

The painful truth is, I can’t yet. None of us can.

I take no joy in saying that. It’s not a political statement, nor is it designed to ignore the calls for a return to normalcy from a beleaguered parent population. If you want your children to go back to school, then please understand we all want that too. More than you can imagine. I’m ultimately on the same side as all of you. We both want what’s best for your children--that’s why we went into this profession.

It’s been said that teachers who don’t want to return to face-to-face learning are being scared, are magnifying the threat beyond what is warranted. I would respectfully remind those of that opinion that in our district, teachers returned to the classroom shortly after a deadly school shooting in our own community. I don’t see how the argument of unwarranted teacher fear stands up in light of that brave truth. 

I understand the losses in keeping students from face to face schooling. I understand the burden it is to a parent to keep his or her child at home. I am a parent myself, as are many of your children’s teachers. I understand that we will lose some of the magic that goes into face to face schooling if we keep children at home.

These burdens and losses are lamentable, and we need to work to mitigate them as best we can.

Keeping children at home is a huge inconvenience and a burden. But sending them back to face to face school is a danger. No matter how much I want to see my students face to face again, my ethics prevent me from letting my own desires override their best interests.

In the hybrid/blended learning model my school district has constructed, students will be in face-to-face schooling for less than half the time they would have been in a normal school year. They will be physically present on campus five times every ten school days, and when they are present, they will remain on campus for less time each day than they would have normally. The gains we claim to make from face-to-face instruction are already reduced to less than half of what they would be from this fact alone.

Almost all students find that school is much more than a place where they learn the “three R’s.” It’s a sort of community center where kids can enjoy large gatherings of like-minded peers: athletic contests, musical concerts, plays, pep rallies, assemblies, and the like. If the classrooms represent the “mind” of a school, then these activities represent the “spirit.”
Of course, none of these can be possible under current conditions. Again, then, a significant benefit of face-to-face school must be absent if we are to even consider this experiment.

Add to that that because of very sensible and necessary social distancing requirements--requirements that still put children at risk, but merely reduce the risk--the chief benefit of face-to-face schooling will be lost. Students will not be able to participate in face-to-face collaborative learning under these conditions. Yes, they can collaborate using computers, typing to one another over the Internet in class, but if that is the solution, what would be the benefit from being in the same physical space?

Much has been made of the social harm being done to children by keeping them at home. I agree that there is an element of stress to this arrangement: it’s one of the many reasons I long to return to normal in school. Many psychological studies have been done to show that children need to socially interact with their peers: it’s one of the mid-levels on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

But even more foundational and thus more important on that same scale is the need for safety, which includes health. As much as children may be suffering in their psycho-social development by remaining at home, wouldn’t they experience even more stress knowing they are entering an unsafe environment every day they are at school? Can we subject students not only to a dangerous environment in terms of physical health, but also force upon them the stress and anxiety of such a place? They will enter school only after being medically scanned for a fever, they will see their teachers and their peers in medical masks, they will be constantly admonished to remain six feet apart, they will be washing their hands with sanitizer many times a day, and they will know what it’s all for: there is a deadly virus in the air, and they are being exposed to it. If we claim that children are being psychologically harmed by stay-at-home orders, how can we in the same breath claim they will not be harmed even more so by conditions at a school?

The benefits to children of returning to face-to-face school under the paradoxically necessary yet frankly inadequate conditions we have planned are dubious at best. Face-to-face school will only take place for a small fraction of the time it would normally have and will only include half of their peers at any given time, will not include the activities that fill a school with joy and temper students’ sometimes dry experiences with much-needed flavor, and  it will not allow for perhaps the greatest strength of educational pedagogy, collaborative learning.

What, then, are the benefits?

And we stand to lose so much in this experiment. Even the most ardent supporter of face-to-face learning agrees that the risk to children is higher than in distance learning. The argument is, however, that the risk is manageable and the benefits exceed the risk. I have yet to hear what, precisely, those benefits are.

Often, the argument is framed as a false dilemma--we either return to some form of face-to-face learning, or we “close the school.” I am impressed with the rhetorical skill of those who disagree with my position: they have largely managed to frame this debate around “opening” schools, as if the alternative is to “close” them. 

That is not the choice. 

No one is advocating schools should close. The alternative--sadly, the only one that can be adopted--is to adopt a robust Distance Learning system. I used the word “sadly,” and I did so deliberately. I don’t like Distance Learning when I compare it to safe, unencumbered face-to-face learning. I would submit that every one of my colleagues agrees with this. Given the option between returning to the style of teaching we had prior to this viral pandemic and conducting Distance Learning, every single person with whom I have contact would enthusiastically wish for the former. 

Much has been made of the “failure” of Distance Learning, as if that were an inarguable truth. I would remind those who tout that canard that our district went to that model with virtually no preparation, training, or extra resources and, in the words of our own district superiors, became “rock stars.” We stumbled and made errors early, as any toddler might. But we grew quickly. We are poised now to deliver a much better Distance Learning experience than we did when we were first thrust into the situation months ago. And our students are also more experienced at the style as well.

If we committed now to training and resource procurement, to development of a Distance Learning procedure and system that would meet the needs of all students, we could deliver an exceptional learning experience for the children of our district.

It would not be as good as what we had. Nothing will replace that, and no one is advocating we remain in Distance Learning in perpetuity. The nation, and our own community, is in the throes of a massive pandemic the severity of which virtually no one alive has ever seen. We will one day develop medicines to vaccinate against and perhaps even cure the disease. We will, one hopes, one day decide to make the necessary but relatively minor personal sacrifices to reduce the spread of the virus to manageable levels.

That day is not today, nor is it likely to be on August 11. 

I want to go back. But we can’t yet.

Yours respectfully,

Sean O’Brien
Teacher of Young People

​

Our nation is on fire.

In 1992, the city of Los Angeles was plunged into chaos following the acquittal of four white police officers of the use of excessive force for the beating of Rodney King--the beating had been recorded on videotape and seen by the public, and the acquittal of the officers was inexplicable and unconscionable. The jury that reached the not guilty verdicts (including one hung jury result) was comprised of ten white people, one Latino person, and one Asian person. 

There were no African-Americans on the jury. 

The city burned for five days, during which time there was over one billion dollars in damage, tens of thousands of arrests, thousands of injuries, and dozens of deaths. There were smaller disturbances in other parts of the country as a result of the verdict: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Atlanta, and New York City. 

In 2020, Los Angeles again erupted into disorder following the videotaped death of George Floyd of Minneapolis, Minnesota, after he had been choked by a white police officer while his three other officers watched or assisted. Mr. Floyd was choked by the officer for over eight minutes--the last three of which Mr. Floyd was unconscious or otherwise non-responsive. Minneapolis police took four days to charge the officer of a crime, and of this writing, the other three officers have not been charged at all.

The main uprising occurred in Minneapolis following the murder, but other cities soon followed suit. I am writing this while the uprisings are still happening, almost a week after the murder. Some of the major cities experiencing uprisings include Minneapolis, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Raleigh, Louisville, Atlanta, Dallas, and the nation’s capital in Washington, D.C.

Today, the entire county of Los Angeles was placed under 6:00 p.m. curfew, which includes Santa Clarita, where I live with my family. My wife and I watch the news and are transported back to ‘92: twenty-eight years ago, we were newlyweds, living in Los Angeles and just starting our lives together. We’d both just started our careers as educators, and we saw our city burning. 

And now, I have to ask...what has changed? I know many of you out there are saying, “violence isn’t the answer” or words to that effect. I know what you mean, and I understand the sentiment. You can’t ask for an end to violence but use violence as your method to get there. An eye for an eye and the world goes blind. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. I’ve heard all the homilies. The answer is to vote, they say. 

Donald Trump won the presidency despite millions more people voting for his opponent. The Russian government intervened in our election to assist him. Voter suppression tactics were used by the Republican party to tip the scales in their favor. So why would a person think that voting works? I don’t mean a person thinking “my one vote won’t matter,” but instead thinking “my vote won’t count.”

Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel during the National Anthem during the 2016 NFL season, when he was a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. He did so to protest police brutality. He has been denounced by many on the right for his protest, including by President Donald Trump, who called him a “son of a bitch” and said he should be fired. So what is the message being sent to those who wish to protest police brutality? Protest peacefully, but not that way? This is but one example of people of color protesting peacefully and being told that their methods are wrong. 

What methods, then, remain?

Langston Hughes once asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” He had many poetic possibilities in mind, including that it might “dry up/Like a raisin in the sun” which inspired Lorraine Hansbury to write her masterpiece play, A Raisin in the Sun. But his poem, “Harlem,” ended with a prophetic warning, an ominous question about the result of deferring a people’s dream: “Or does it explode?”

I don’t condone the violence that these protests have wrought. I could go on and on about how much of it, if not almost all of it, is the product of fringe groups using the protests as cover for their own unrelated ends: anarchists and white supremacists and all kinds of other groups who see a chance to inflict harm upon society for no reason other than to do so. But let’s not get into that argument. Let’s just simply acknowledge that along with these protests, there has been violence. I don’t like that. I don’t support it.

But to those who look and wonder, who say, “I don’t understand why these people are being so violent,” let me ask you…

What else is left?

If you can answer that, then you are wiser than I. I don’t know what the method should be to effect change--change that is long, long overdue and which has been deferred for centuries. I can’t say what avenue a protester ought to pursue to achieve his or her ends. And since I can’t answer the question “how,” then I will just watch my nation burn, and hope that this time, this time, from its ashes will rise a better society.

​Be seeing you!

I've been around football in one way or another for most of my life. I've filled almost every role there is regarding the game: I've been a player, a coach, a spectator, a television  and radio commentator, and a public address announcer. These experiences have shown me nearly every facet of the sport, including the dark side of the fan base. 

To be sure, many--if not most--of the parents who watch their children play high school football do so with an understanding of the proper place for the sport. They cheer on their own offspring without denigrating others, they recognize that the sport is a metaphor and not important in and of itself, and have a healthy respect for the rules of the game and for those who arbitrate those rules. These parents are not the focus of this essay.

There is a not insignificant assembly of parents who do not understand. From my place in the press box during football games these past years, and from my place as head coach of a high school program, I've seen parent behaviors that are as confounding as they are dangerous. Nothing, however, puzzles me more than denial.

Parents deny much about their own children. Their own DNA courses through the systems of their child's body, so I suppose it is natural for a parent to see his or her child as an extension of their own life--at least, to a small degree. But parents who cannot see what is plainly and clearly evident, who invent convoluted theories and alternate realities to explain away deficiencies or undesired outcomes, who see plots against their children in every decision that doesn't match with their own wants--I've seen these parents all too often.

There are significant numbers of parents who truly seem to believe that every foul called against their child's team is an unprecedented affront to justice: part of a conspiracy against their kin and kith heretofore never seen on Earth. The vitriol and indignation these parents hurl onto referees is nothing short of deranged. Some of the time, the parents' overreaction to a questionable call is what's noteworthy, but when a blatant foul occurs--one which even I can see from my place atop the bleachers--and parents become apoplectic at the temerity of an official to penalize such behavior, that's when I question the sanity of those around me. To use the vernacular, parents go apeshit when a ref throws a flag against their team. 

Similarly, when a coach makes a decision (a play call, a personnel change, what have you) that is at odds with a parent's wishes, its not chalked up to a difference of opinion. It's part of either a pattern of incompetence or conspiracy against a player and his family that demands retribution. Anonymous letters delivered in secret. Messages to the press. Appeals to higher authorities. In many cases, these methods work, and coaches find themselves hauled before addle-pated superiors who demand to know Just What Is Going On with the coach. 

So, in summary, many parents are convinced that a vast conspiracy is at work against their child athlete. Referees have all met in secret to work against their child's team (that's not an exaggeration--I've heard all manner of conspiracy theories expressed about officials); coaches are prejudiced, racist, on the take, or otherwise disinclined to treat their child fairly; college recruiters who do not offer a full athletic scholarship are likewise part of a grand plot, and so on. 

I can't recall the last time I was at a game where my team lost and those parents said, "The other team was better than we were," or "they played stronger than we did" or other acknowledgements that their child simply lost. With this kind of parent, it's always "the refs were terrible" or "Coach should have put you in more" or "They should have given you the ball more" or any number of excuses to deny what happened. 

I often wonder with these parents--is this behavior confined to sports, or does what I see there represent that adult's worldview in general? Is their life an endless stream of grievances, perceived slights, imagined conspiracies? Do they look at their own divorce (amazing how many of these parents are divorced) and declare "that bitch was crazy" instead of looking inward to see the mote in their eye? Do they mumble about favoritism at work when they were passed over for promotion? Do they rant about police corruption when they get a speeding ticked? In short, do they see the mess of their lives as someone else's fault?

Confronting adversity is not easy. We'd rather not admit the truth that our kid just got outplayed today, or that we're not in a loving relationship because we might not be as worthy of love as we think at that moment, or that we have the career that we do because that's as far as we can go for the time being.

Part of effective leadership is getting those around us to accept that we are all imperfect, and that we must strive to do better. Or that we are in a bad situation which demands action. Or even harder--that we've made decisions that turned out to be wrong, and we must change. Bad leadership plays to our followers' demons of conspiracy, flatters our sense of self-importance, denies the ugly truth in exchange for a beautiful lie. 

We'd rather not believe something awful about ourselves. And many of us will go to dangerous lengths to avoid facing the truth. We deny an unpleasant truth with such force as to create new false realities that are more pleasant to live in--my son didn't catch the winning touchdown not because his skills were simply not up to the task that day, but because the ref made a bad call, or that someone else cheated, or that the pass was wobbly, or even that he DID catch the pass but no one saw it. 

Let me tell you a story that virtually all teachers have. Sometimes, a student receives a grade less than an "A." It's not uncommon for a parent to tell us, "Well, my child has never gotten a grade lower than an 'A' before, so I'm wondering what's happening in your class." We hear this, or some variation on it, rather commonly. The story is interesting for two reasons. First, what is that evidence of? That because they have done well in the past, they will continue to do well in perpetuity, even as material becomes more rigorous? Would one go into one's doctor and say, "I've never had gallstones before, so I'm wondering what's going on with your lab tests?" But more interesting is that on many occasions, we check the student's past grades and find that they HAVE received grades other than "A" in the past. So even if one accepted that somehow this assertion meant something, it wasn't even true in the first place, and can be easily debunked. 

My teacher friends and I wonder at this tactic. What is it meant to say? Does the parent truly believe what he or she is saying? Invariably, when confronted with the reality that no, your child has NOT always gotten "A's," the parent simply shifts to a new line of attack. No mention of the falsehood or mistake. Simply move on to a separate tactic. 

We're in the middle of a pandemic now. We have made mistakes--serious ones--regarding treatment and tracking of the pandemic, and we're now paying the price. That's a difficult admission, but it's plainly true. Our leadership refuses to admit the truth, and is leading too many Americans astray. Trump has denied the problem exists, then blamed others for the problem, then blamed others for reporting on the problem, and I fear will now return to where he started: he'll declare the problem doesn't exist.

I predict that soon, you will see our president and his allies (some in his administration, some in the press) simply deny the truth. I don't mean "express an opinion not supported by facts," like saying "we've done a great job with this pandemic." That's an opinion, albeit an insane one. No, I mean we will start to hear challenges to the statistics themselves. We will hear news outlets and the President himself declare that the number of disease cases and deaths is not as high as reported. "There is a conspiracy against our Leader!" will be the cry, "and these numbers aren't true! Almost no one is dying!" 

It's the crazy parent yelling about the refs. Or the stat sheet. Or the coach. Or doing ANYTHING except accept the reality of their child's current ability. Instead of exhorting their child to work harder and get better, the parent rants about the conspiracy. 

The depressing difference is--this isn't simply a crazy parent, and this isn't a sport. This is the President, and this is real life.

Be seeing you!

You've all heard that old saw, "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" I've been thinking about that of late, especially cooped up here in quarantine. Not necessarily in the way you'd think, or perhaps in the way the aphorism is intended, but still. Bear with me.

See, one of the things we've been charged with doing as teachers is to remain connected on a personal level with our students. That means letting them see and hear us, via some form of live streaming. I even built a green screen for that--a piece of wood, some green paint, and viola. Movie magic. And my lovely wife (who strangely grows more and more beautiful and alluring every day I am with her--I think I am definitely getting the better end of this marital bargain of forced closeness) is quite fond of reality television, like those romance competitions or baking competitions or naked survival competitions. (I've long maintained that the show that needs to happen--or the two shows, really--is Mr. Everything (and Ms. Everything). It would be a show where contestants find love amid competitors, but these suitors also have to win cooking challenges, singing challenges, fitness challenges, trivia quiz challenges, survival challenges, house-flipping challenges, gold mining-, fishing-, tattooing-, drag queen exhibition-, and exotic cat wrangling-challenges. But I digress). She's always been fond of those, now that we're here together all the time, I guess I am seeing it more. Not important. But it gave rise to the following thoughts.

If someone achieves something, does it count if no one else sees it? 

Take my own hobby/side profession, for example. Writing. Now, writing is of course meant to be read. If I write something, and no one ever reads it, does it matter that I wrote it? I'd say no, it doesn't. Writing is performative, like acting or painting. Someone could argue that art doesn't need to exist for an audience, but that someone would not be me. 

But what about, say, meeting your true love in a huge mansion and winning him over against the attentions of a dozen or more women, a la The Bachelor (reverse the genders for the Bachelorette, a thoroughly unnecessary word). Does it count if no one sees it? Does it matter that you survived in the wilderness with nothing but a hunting knife, a pouch, a wireless microphone, a camera crew, a sound engineer, a director, an assistant director, an on-set medic, and a native consultant if no one else saw you do it?

I know many of my wonderful students are conducting themselves admirably during this quarantine, helping local food banks, donating to charity, and otherwise brightening the lives of others. And these young people are doing so in darkness and silence. No cameras, no Internet followers, nothing. Just the act itself. But I worry that in an increasingly performative culture, we have gotten to the point that the deed matters not unless it is witnessed.

And what follows?

Well, if an achievement only truly matters if an audience sees it, then, logically, the more people who see it the more it matters. Ergo, what matters isn't the deed itself as much as the size of the audience.

Does it matter more than you saved the life of a homeless woman--someone whose name you'll never know, and who doesn't even know of your actions--or that you created a cute TikTok video that was seen by millions? I know you're all saying "the life saving act matters more, of course," but are you sure?

We're thinking of reopening professional sports in the United States. Baseball, for example. But if we do it, we'd first do it with empty stadiums. So it would be just the game being played watched by fans at home, but still. The players would be alone.  Some folks have said "it's not the same! Fans are part of the game!" By that, I assume they mean fans in physical attendance. But where in the rules of baseball does it say "the game shall be observed by thousands of living human spectators in nearby physical presence." Isn't it enough that a batter hit a home run, even if no one sees it? Doesn't it still count in the game? 

For my students, think about all that you do just to impress a potential college versus all you do just because it's good to do. Think about all you do for an audience--not things that are inherently performative, like acting in a play or painting a picture--and ask yourself, "why does it matter that someone sees this?"

Yes, Dear Reader, I am very aware that by putting this in a blog post, I might be undermining my own message. But writing is performative, I maintain. Plus, no one reads this thing anyway.

​Be seeing you!

I don't have any children anymore.

That probably requires a bit of explanation.

Because of the necessary and wise step of converting schools from face-to-face learning into distance learning, I don't have physical contact with my students anymore. We meet twice a week (with a third office hours time) online, at which time we interact mostly by text. While I technically have students, and I interact with them, it's not even close to being the same. So in that sense, I've lost those children.

My daughter lives at home with us, but she's twenty-three years old and is a teacher herself, going through the same difficulties my wife and I are. She's a professional just like I am, so in that sense, she's not a child anymore.

My son turned twenty-one yesterday, which we celebrated under quarantine by ordering Mexican food and watching him take his first drink (a very strong margarita that he was not fond of). We also played Munchkin Quest--I secured the victory by flying under the radar for most of the game then with a masterful playing of cards won in the final round. In the morning, we'd awakened him with an air horn and streamers and balloons, and I made a big deal about "being a man" complete with stentorian declarations about What Men Do. It was a fun family time, but it also meant that James isn't a child anymore.

So you see, I don't have children anymore.

I wonder what it means that my dreams last night involved our Californian leader, Governor Newsom, announcing that because Covid-19 had ceased to spread and was on the retreat, we would be reopening schools in mid-May. I think that was a kind of wish-fulfillment that only a few months ago would have made no sense.

It's only now hitting me that I will not return to conventional work for many months--August is the soonest that this will happen, and there's no guarantee that August will be "normal," either. Worse, I'll have a new crop of students then, and the ones I have now will move on to their next grade. I've already suggested that we hold some kind of "reunion" when we get back, but it still won't be the same.

I am sad for my son, who had to celebrate his 21st birthday under these conditions (we'd long ago planned on going to Las Vegas to taste the fleshpots there, but of course, that plan was scuttled long ago), but he was much more philosophical than I. 

He said that yes, initially, he was disappointed that we are under quarantine and couldn't do anything outside the house, but he said that when he takes stock of what he actually has--two loving parents and a great sister--he is grateful.

My son has begun his career as an adult in the best possible way--he's a good man. I love him.

Be seeing you!

HereI don't throw around the word "prophetic" lightly.

But back on March 19th in "Coronavirus Chronicles #1," I mentioned that we were living in a version of 1984. More specifically, the part where the branch of the government called the Ministry of Truth spent its time altering records of the past so that they would more closely match up with governmental pronouncements in the present: if the government said on Monday that the chocolate ration was set to be increased from 10 grams to 15, then on Tuesday cut the ration from 10 grams to 8, the Ministry of Truth's job would be to go through newspapers and records to change Monday's announcement to something like, "we're going to raise the ration from 5 to 8" or somesuch. The goal was to change the records of the past so that the government was never wrong. 

On March 13th, I mentioned that this sort of thing was beginning to happen here in the U.S. with our federal government.

It's now April 3rd, and this happened:

Jared Kushner was inexplilcably at a Coronavirus Task Force briefing where he claimed the national stockpile of medical supplies was not meant to be used by the individual states of the union. Here's the exact quote: "And the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile; it’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use." That's from the White House's transcript of the meeting. It's the government's own transcript.

Well, it turns out that the website for the governmental agency in charge of the medical stockpile said EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. So, in effect, Kushner got it wrong. He was wrong about what the stockpile was for.

Here's what the website originally said, prior to his comments: 

"Strategic National Stockpile is the nation's largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out. When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency. Organized for scalable response to a variety of public health threats, this repository contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously."

So far, this is just another example of the Trump administration being dead wrong on an issue. We've all come to expect that. Kushner said something that was wrong, and he was called out on it with actual quotes from the government's own website.

Then a funny thing happened. And by "funny," I mean "absolutely terrifyingly Orwellian." The government changed the website so that its wording matched Kushner's comments. 

Here's how the website reads now, after his comments:

​"The Strategic National Stockpile's role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available."

In other words, in order to make Kushner's comments be correct, they simply went back and changed the records. He who controls the past controls the present.

So, comrades, curl up in front of the telescreen, pour yourself a nice cupful of oily Victory gin (with cloves or without), participate in the Two Minutes Hate, and settle back secure in the knowledge that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Be seeing you!

I think this time I'll do some random thoughts, brought on by this crisis.

Is it just me, or is the recent complete about-face by Trump (in which he now says from 250,000 to 100,000 Americans will most likely die of the virus, as opposed to a few weeks ago when he said the number would soon be ZERO) just a change of tactics? I'll wager someone in his administration pointed out that if he estimates a really, really awful number of dead Americans, then a somewhat lower number actually dies, he can claim victory? For example, if he says 100,000 deaths, and in fact there are 75,000, he will claim he personally saved the lives of 25,000 people. It's a variation on the Big Brother/Ministry of Truth stuff I posted last time. 

Speaking of that, 100,000 people is a LOT OF PEOPLE. The terror attacks on 9/11 killed about 3,000 people (including those who succumbed to dust in the immediate aftermath, but not including those who died years later from medical issued that were likely related to the cleanup and rescue efforts). Our national landscape was changed almost overnight, and we are in many ways still feeling the effects. We went to war with a country (the wrong one, but still) as a result of 9/11. We created a new governmental agency (the department of Homeland Security). Life in America changed because of those 3,000 deaths. I lived through that time, and I can tell you that although I was never a fan of President Bush II, his response to the crisis was immeasurably superior to the current president's.

We got word today that we would not be returning to face-to-face school in California for the rest of the semester. We'd always kind of suspected that, but now it's official. Distance Learning has been a moderate success, but as many of my high-end students can attest, it's a struggle to maintain a semblance of self-discipline while at home. Before this crisis hit, I was talking to a friend at work and we were both agreeing that we don't like to take work home (as we left school at roughly 5:00) preferring instead to stay late at the site and finish it there. It was never a perfect curtain (I did work from home sometimes) but it was one we liked to pull when we could. Now, that is completely gone, and home is also work. That's a When Worlds Collide kind of feeling.

Having said that, I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with the self-congratulatory messages and images I'm seeing on Facebook regarding teaching. Sure, yeah, it's a little bit harder, but we all still have jobs and paychecks. I think about the millions (the number went past 6 million today) of people out of work because of the virus--people who did nothing wrong, who are good workers, who put in time and effort to their jobs--and I think maybe teachers ought to stay quiet and just do our jobs. Add to that the incredible efforts of everyone in the health and medical fields and maybe teachers should just quietly get on with their work.

I think it's important to look for hidden advantages in all this. For one, we all talk a lot in America about how we don't spend enough time with our families. Well, I'm spending a lot of time with mine, and it's honestly been wonderful. And it's not always "quality time," like they used to say as an excuse for spending small amounts of time. It's great big swaths of sloppy, unstructured quantity time. 

My dogs love it. That's a plus.

I'm learning more about video production (I built a green screen out of wood and paint and it works extremely well) than I ever thought I would, and it's been revitalizing to think in new ways about my curriculum and my craft. If necessity is the mother of invention, then this mother has been fertile.

I do worry about my parents. Both of them are severely compromised with many different health issues. We decided not to go visit them when this all started, out of an abundance of caution. I call often, but it's still not the same. Speaking of which, I think I'll call now. That's good advice to all of you--stop reading this and go tell someone important to you that you're thinking of them. 

​Be seeing you!

There's this Outer Limits episode called "The Architects of Fear" in which a scientist played by Robert Culp agrees to go on what's essentially a one-way mission: he's allows himself to be surgically altered by his fellow scientists and placed in an experimental spacecraft to pull of a tremendous ruse on the whole planet: he'll fake being a "scout" for an alien invasion--probably dying in the process as the armed forces destroy his "spaceship"--and thus uniting the world against this extraterrestrial threat. The scientific group of which he's a part have come to the conclusion that only some external threat, some existential crisis, can possibly shake the world out of its tribal conflicts and unite everyone together.

Alan Moore's Watchmen series used the same trope, and indeed, the idea of a (fake) alien invasion uniting the planet has been used in science-fiction for decades. In some cases, the plot fails: in the Outer Limits episode, it fails because Culp's spaceship goes off course and is discovered by three hunters, whom no one believes. In Moore's Watchmen comic, the plot succeeds until another character's journal detailing the whole ruse  is discovered at the end of the story, with the implication that this will reveal the deception and thus end its usefulness.

The idea seems to be that while unity and an end to tribal conflict is a good thing, it can't be accomplished by trickery. If we want to end our petty squabbles between nations and between ourselves, we're going to have to decide to do it on its own merits. Any attempt to foist a false external threat onto humanity and thus make us unified will eventually fail because the ruse will be discovered.

But, as they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.

I won't say the Coronavirus is a species-ending threat to the human race. It is serious, and we need to take relatively drastic steps to contain the threat, but no one is predicting that the virus threatens the survival of humanity itself. Still, it does represent an external threat, one which in no way respects borders nor ideology. And it is a serious threat.

I would have hoped that in light of this threat, we would have found a way as Americans to stop the tribalism. I would have hoped that there'd be an end to partisan sniping from members of government. I would have hoped that there weren't accusations from the leader of the free world that the news media is hyping the pandemic to hurt him personally. I would have hoped that, finally, with this external threat, we would have put away the childish words and deeds of the past and focused on the threat itself.

That, I now see, was too much to ask.

If I were coaching against some opponent--let's say one that for some reason my school had a rivalry with--and a fire broke out on the field, I wouldn't be looking to see how I could turn the situation into my advantage. The two teams, who had been opponents when the game started, would turn into allies as we fought the fire with our water buckets and squeeze bottles. We'd recognize that the fire is much more serious than the game we had been playing.

What if tomorrow, we detect a fleet of interstellar spacecraft approaching the planet, sending an alien but unmistakable message of warning to us? The Day the Earth Stood Still played on this idea, too. Would our president claim that the aliens were sent by the fake news media to tear him down? Would he tweet in all capital letters, "SAD!"? 

What if Jesus Christ came back--or came for the first time, depending on your beliefs-- tomorrow? Or Mohammed? Or any of the many messiahs claimed by the world's religions? What if they ALL appeared? Would some people criticize the Lamb because he wasn't wearing a MAGA hat? 

In short, what I'm asking in an increasingly desperate fashion is--what would it take to unify us? What would it take for us to finally, finally agree that there is such a thing as scientific truth, and such a thing as universal human ethics, and that despite our ideological differences, we still are one species, and that your fellow human has dignity and value? Is there ANYTHING that could do it? 

Can we humans transcend our tribal beginnings and stop looking at one another as the enemy? Can we look across the ocean, or the mountain, or the plains, and see not a competitor but a friend?

Now we are engaged in a great pandemic, testing whether this nation--and this world--can endure. Not endure as Lincoln meant, but endure as one people. Maybe we never were. Maybe the talk of how it was better in the old times is just that--talk. Maybe tribalism can't be bred out of us, not even in the face of a global pandemic. Maybe we're not better than this, and maybe we're still just animals in fancy clothes. 

But I have to believe we can see what's important. We should always have been able to see it, but if it takes a drastic and horrible spread of disease, then maybe that's what we gain at the end of all this. Please, if you're reading--realize that there is so much more that unites us than that which divides us. Realize that the human race can accomplish wonders as soon as it decides to stop fighting itself. And that our nation can pause the bickering and lies and jockeying for political and social advantage just while we deal with this threat. And maybe when it's over we'll realize we never needed to bicker in the first place.

Come on, humanity. We can do this. 

​Be seeing you!

I will never complain about not having time to write ever again.

See, it never was about that, though I do admit I tend to overschedule myself professionally. This Distance Learning thing--I don't know if it's more work, or less, or the same amount, but I do know that the nine-to-five (or in the case of most teachers, something closer to eight-to-four) work schedule has been completely obliterated. Not only that, but even the concept of "weekdays" and "weekends" is beginning to dissolve. I am still prepping for a Monday lesson and have been so doing for four hours now on a Sunday. The lesson will take ninety minutes. From an efficiency standpoint, that's pretty bad--something like three times as much prep work as actual execution. But it's what's required if I want to do a good job.

Still, I'm working from home, so I don't lose any time in transit to and from school. I can take a break pretty much any time I want for as long as I want. I can do my planning while watching TV (I'm watching St. Elsewhere, of all things, nowadays). And I can pet my dogs whenever they look at me with that longing only a dog can muster.

All of that, I submit, is a nightmare. We need the mild tyranny of the workspace, I contend. My poor students, most of whom are highly disciplined and skilled youngsters, are struggling with the idea of stay-at-home school. All of the convenience of distance learning is conspiring to make the experience far less convenient.

And that's where my personal writing comes in. 

My usual routine, before the Coronavirus changed all of our routines, was to finish school and school-related work and then to go to the gym for a bit, then retreat to the local coffee shop to write for an hour. I'd usually be able to make it home at or around 6:00, in time to make dinner for the family (sometimes my daughter will have made dinner already. My wife, blessed though she is in many ways including a goddess-like body that refuses to age, has not found the culinary endeavors to her liking nor has she developed particularly strong skills in food preparation). Yes, it's true that on many days, I had a school meeting of one form or another, necessitating a change in my routine, but by and large, that's what I did.

One would think, therefore, being released from the inflexibility of a strict schedule, I would have increased my writing output. But I find myself lacking in the self-discipline to maintain a writing routine in the absence of outside factors.

In short, I'm lazy. 

So I am going to finish this blog, take my laptop outside where I will not be distracted (though Rocky and Eddie often believe it is Play Ball! time when I go outside) and continue to write. 

I hope if you are yourself quarantined by the Coronavirus pandemic, you can find your own way to fulfillment despite the lure of laziness.

Be seeing you!

Hello, all!

You'd think that with all this sequestering and changes to school and whatnot, I'd be more active as a blogger. Strangely enough, the disruption in ordinary life has been such that I've felt less productive as opposed to more. I'm hoping to reverse that trend, as it sure seems like we're going to be doing this for a while. So here are some random thoughts as we enter this new world.

I've been thinking about Orwell a lot lately, partially because I've been assembling readings for my AP students and he pops up a lot on AP lists, but mainly because I'm remembering what happened in his most famous piece of writing, 1984.  (He was originally going to title it The Last Man in Europe, but he changed his mind. Why that year? Not because he was making any kind of prediction--as we know, he was really commenting on his world as it was. He simply exaggerated. So why that year? Well, though the novel was published in 1949, he did the writing of it in 1948. He merely switched the last two digits of the year. Neat, huh?) In that novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is a minor functionary at the Ministry of Truth, which is in charge of disseminating propaganda to the public of Oceania. His job is to alter newspaper records so that the past utterances of the leader, a figure known only as Big Brother, line up with the reality of the present. For example, if Big Brother predicted on Monday that there would be an increase in the chocolate ration, and then on Tuesday there was a reduction, Smith would have to change the facts of the past so that Big Brother is and was never wrong. He'd go back and change what Big Brother was recorded as saying on Monday so that Tuesday's reality lined up with Monday's prediction. 

Why does this resonate?

Well, we've been living in the world of 1984 for some time now, having duplicated many of the novel's plot points and ideas. This is a new level of deception--not just lying about the way things are or what's happening in the present, but lying about what the past even was. What strikes me, though--and this is the terrifying part--is that in the world of 1984,  Winston Smith knows that what he is doing is deception. He resists it (not particularly well or particularly heroically, since he's just some dude who has been ground down by the Man) and has to be tortured with drugs and strange devices and eventually a face-cage full of hungry rats before he breaks and accepts Big Brother. (Spoiler alert: "he loved Big Brother" are the final four words). It's the complete and utter domination of a person by a totalitarian government, and it is awful and tragic in a way few books can ever hope to be. 

But...and this is the point...Winston Smith resists. Oh, sure--he can't fight the State torturer (whose name, incidentally, is O'Brien) nor the combined power of the State for that matter, and he loses everything. He loses his humanity, his love for Julia, everything. He loses in every way possible. But he had to be broken. And that's what terrifies me about what's happening today.

Our leader, Donald Trump, is attempting even now to rewrite history and his own remarks about the beginning of the pandemic. Aided by his own Ministry of Truth (Fox News and other affiliated outlets) he is blithely changing what he once said and believed so that he was never wrong. He always saw the Coronavirus was serious. He called it a pandemic before anyone else did. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. So in that, we're duplicating the storyline of Orwell's classic.

But we're going along with it! The number of people who are simply accepting these claims, these falsehoods, these lies is staggering. Orwell predicted the power of a totalitarian government could and would be able to break anyone, given enough time and enough brutality. But even Orwell, as bleak as he was, did not predict that we would go along with our own brainwashing. Winston Smith was destroyed, but he went down fighting. We are willingly screaming "do it to Julia!" before O'Brien has even begun his work. 

That is what scares me. Not losing the fight to a totalitarian regime ("who controls the past controls the present") but not even fighting at all. The State doesn't need Room 101 if we're going to surrender before the fight has even been joined. 

Truth matters. Reality matters. 

Fight for them.

Be seeing you!