So, What Do You Do?

“Hello, ladies,” says a man’s voice. I look up from my menu to see the manager sliding up to our table. I guess that excludes me; at least I hope it does.

I am the only man in the middle of four women at this table, which is not necessarily a bad place to be. And as an elementary teacher, I’m certainly used to this. The manager puts his hand on the edge of the C-shaped booth behind Katie’s head and begins to make small talk with the other teachers, but I can’t stop thinking about the conversation he interrupted.

We had been talking about Kristen’s civil engineering husband. “Josh said the other day that he might like to get into education,” Kristen had said. To me, Josh seems like an extra character in a movie, and I think this is because I have no idea what a civil engineer does.

“Where are you from,” the manager asks.

“Chattanooga, Tennessee,” Heidi says.

The manager, a white-haired man with a goatee that spreads along his jowls like the pointed wings of a jet plane, steps closer and takes a drink of water. “I used to own a restaurant near Atlanta, Georgia. Back in the ‘70’s. Lost a lot of money there.”

I cannot imagine what it is like to have or lose a lot of money. How do you lose a lot of money?

The manager goes to do whatever it is that restaurant managers do, and Katie continues the conversation by mentioning her husband, who is also a civil engineer. “Thomas’s job isn’t what he thought it was going to be, either.” I ask Katie what Thomas’s job is like and how it isn’t what he expected. “Well,” she says, “He works for a wind power company, and it’s turning out to be a lot more construction.”

This does nothing for me, since I don’t know what I would do for eight hours at a wind power company, let alone eight months. What happens, though, is that I get a mental picture of a big, burly man with his sleeves rolled up and a hard hat tilted back; his gigantic Toyota truck is just off center in the background, gleaming in front of a skyscraper. No, wait; not a skyscraper. A skeletal Don Quixote windmill. He’s pointing at something and calling something out.

“Move that thing! …And that other thing!” And it takes me a minute to realize that these words, this construction-worker civil-engineer monologue is really a voice over from The Princess Bride, because I don’t really know what a civil engineer would shout out. “No more rhymes now, I mean it!” Thomas says, and Josh calls back, “Anybody wanna peanut?”

We leave the restaurant and walk back to the hotel. Since we’re going to attend a Lucy Calkins workshop on writing in the morning, I decide to go to bed early. With the lights out, I flip on the TV to the History channel to drown out some of the city noises, and I watch a dramatized version of people groups migrating to North America over the past 3,000 years. When it shows the sophisticated techniques Native Americans used to hunt buffalo, it tells it through a little story scenario. A 15-year-old boy gets to hunt with the men for the first time, but he gets spooked by a rattlesnake that slithers up under his wolf skin cloak. He freaks out and sends the buffalo running, ruining months of planning for this hunt. His punishment is that he must go back and work with the women and children.

I sit up in bed. I can’t believe it. My job in an elementary school is equivalent to Native American emasculation!? What does this say about me? What does it mean that I chose to work with the minds of children, Post-It Notes, and highlighters in a job dominated by women instead of power tools, power lunches, or wind power in a world of men? What does it mean that I love the decision that I’ve made?

In the dramatization, the boy earns back his manhood when he saves some children from a runaway buffalo by killing it at the last possible second. He goes off to hunt with the men; I go to the writing conference and listen to a gut-wrenching story about a mother that makes her eleven-year-old daughter wear a bra on the outside of her clothes to remind her to wear it at all.

But I hear something else, too. Lucy Calkins quotes, “What we do with our time is what we do with our lives,” and I think back to that fork in the road when I turned towards education. How I wanted a job that would make a difference in the lives of people. But I think of people like my colleagues, their spouses, and my own beautiful wife, and I realize that it isn’t the job that makes a difference in people’s lives—it’s the people. People that are truly awake and compassionate and intentional.

And it’s not until this moment—this very moment in which I am writing this out and wondering how I am going to tie up the ending "with a little bow"—this moment when I scan back to the beginning to see if I can connect to it full circle—when I realize what Kristen really said. Josh, the civil engineer, the man who took a manly job, is thinking about being an educator.

I’ve got just one thing to tell him: Using the basal reader is for wimps.

Impromptu Laundry Day

Everett, our two year old, gets up at 5:30. He pads down the hallway to our room and climbs in bed with us. Usually, I scratch his back for a while to keep him still so my wife can keep sleeping. Yesterday, I was too tired to scratch his back. So he scratched mine.

Sort of.

He'd scratch for two seconds and take a ten-second break. Then two more scratches followed by another break. Repeat for several minutes.

After a while, I said, "Hey, Everett. Watcha doin'?"

"Pickin' my nose," came the reply. Ten seconds. Two scratches. Ten seconds. Two scratches.

Hmm.

Think About It

It came to my attention that one girl in my class advised another girl in my class that she could be more popular if she wouldn’t act as smart as she is. I don’t even know where to begin.

How in the world did the slacker image become something to aspire to? Surely it is some backlash against some generational work ethic, but still. In Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, he describes an event he attended in China several years ago. The event was in a sports arena, I think, and the crowd was going wild. The crowd was not excited over some sports play or rock star; Bill Gates had just come on a stage to address the throng. Friedman realized that in China, Bill Gates is Brittany Spears; in America, Brittany Spears is Brittany Spears.

How is it not cool to think? How did intellect and social status become mutually exclusive in the minds of our kids? And that’s not even the right question. How did we get to a point where we would rather not be thought of as thinkers if it costs us the perception of being socially relevant?

I mentioned John Stonestreet in my previous post. He talked about a book that I would like to read: Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the book, the author delineates the differences between the prophetic writing of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both seemed to believe that technology would create a non-thinking society and not a utopian state. Orwell predicted that people would be oppressed externally—by Big Brother. Huxley predicted the oppression would come from within the culture. Orwell predicted that government would control and limit the information that people would have access to. Huxley believed we’d have a glut of information, an onslaught of news so entertaining, non-stop, and overwhelming that people would not have time to think about any of it. In Huxley’s version, society is so healthy, comfortable, and care-free that no one would risk challenging any of it.

Sounds like Huxley was closer.

And that’s not all. Carl Bernstein wrote “The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information, misinformation, misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.” Our low culture has become pop culture.

Rainbow Dreams—a blog I enjoy—posted some of the new Dove commercials about beauty. While I question their motives (they didn’t seem to have such a broad definition of beauty when the Baby Boomers were in their twenties and thirties), they do address the caustic nature of beauty thrust upon women and girls. You can even download their self-esteem kit for young girls so that you can help prevent them from swallowing the beauty industry’s kool-aid. Is that really going to work? If we’re not thinking and we’re not teaching our children to think, is a self-esteem kit going to do the trick?

How do we then live? …to borrow from Francis Schaffer. Paul writes in Philippians, “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Stonestreet used several authors to suggest that as we approach culture, we approach it this way. We should use our minds as we appreciate art that is excellent and well-done; that we look for art that speaks truth; that we hold art that is noble. This is, of course, only the beginning of a great conversation.

I use a lot of poetry with my third graders. A couple weeks ago, we were talking about the difference between poetry and songs. On a whim, I offered a quote I heard. (Is this Mark Twain? I’ll have to look it up.) “Anything too stupid to be said is sung.” They thought that was funny and tried it out on some songs. They stood up and with great oratorical presence began to speak Hannah Montana lyrics. It really was hilarious. I asked the kids what the songs were really saying. The response: We never thought about it before.

I hope I never hear that again.

The New Agora

So I’m blogging again. I say that with a present participle as if I am now back in a constant state of blogging. The thing is, blogging began to feel a little too much like navel gazing. I mean, I just talk about myself, which I find to be a dull topic.

A week or so ago, the staff at NPR’s Morning Edition were trying to get Daniel Schorr to sign up for a Twitter account. He said, "It really is another generation. I'm agape as I learn about how people can communicate with the outside world. It somehow reminds me ... of something in ancient Greece, the agora, the marketplace. You come out and you say things at the marketplace and everyone can hear. And every person now seems to be a network."

However, he was quite resistant to it. He asked why people can’t just sit and listen to a President speak anymore without letting their thumbs fly over phone keypads the entire time. He asked why people twitter. Tweets came back within seconds.

bdmckeown: I tweet to circumvent the usual obstacles to staying in touch.

susanellingburg: I tweet for the same reason I read — to know I'm not alone.

mat: No offense, but that's kind of a dumb question. Rephrase as: Why do you communicate at all? Just one more method of doing so.

ultrafastx: because talking to oneself is generally frowned upon these days.

thc1972: why do you go to a good cocktail party? Conversation, viewpoints, gossip, jokes, interaction

MarilynM: for conversation, community and connection. (there's also a lot of humor here.) :)

ckuns: Twitter is the new "water cooler" ... where you read the things you have to know but wouldn't find out otherwise

dirkfitzgerald: I tweet because I am might be missing out on the largest (and possibly) most interesting conversation ever.

EvaCatHerder sent in this tweet: "Given Dan Schorr's long history w/the evolution of news media, what does he think we are losing in web-based media? Gaining?"

"What we are losing is editing," Schorr said. "I grew up and nothing could be communicated to the outside world that didn't go through an editor to make sure you had your facts right, spelling right and so on. Now, every person is his or her own publisher and/or her own editor or her own reporter. And the world is full of people who are sending out what they consider to be news. It may be, it may not be, it may be made up and it doesn't matter anymore. That, to me, is the worst part of this. The discipline that should go with being able to communicate is gone." (NPR)

It reminded me of a comment my beautiful wife made back when we were dating in college. She had just been witness to a long, drawn out circular argument among several communication majors in her dorm. As we walked to dinner, she said, “Communication majors must spend all of their time learning to communicate and none of it learning to listen.”

And this past week, I was trying to convince about 100 teachers to sign up for classroom blogs because of the success I was having in my classroom with them. Many were not even sure what a blog was. “The word ‘blog’,” I said, “is short for ‘Web log’. It’s like a journal; a diary. But instead of writing in it at night and locking it up and hiding it in the night stand, you publish it on the internet for the whole world to see and you let them write in it.”

To which one teacher said, “And why do I want to do this?”

Daniel Schorr and I don’t agree on a whole lot, but I think I agree with him on this. His view was fairly balanced. Sure, it’s amazing that the right to publish now rests in anyone’s hands. But now we’re shouting our heads off. We’re all going out in the marketplace and yelling our stories, and our thoughts, and our ideas, and our vulgarities, and our insults, and what we think is news, and who is listening?

My wife and I were at a nice restaurant a couple years ago and a group of teenagers occupied the table next to us. They all had earbuds in their ears and were hooked up to iPods. One person pulled out the cord from the iPod and say, “Listen to this: I love this song.” Ten seconds of the song would play before the amateur DJ would switch to another song and then another and another. Soon they were all doing it at about the same time. No song got more than 10 seconds of air time. Who’s listening?

Watching these teens, my thought was “They don’t have the capacity to pay attention!” I remember buying a CD and bringing it home. Some aunts and uncles and cousins were there, and they were curious about my purchase. I put it in, and we all sat in the living room and listened to the entire album. Can that happen anymore? Should it?

John Stonestreet—a man that graduated from Bryan College with Marcy and I—came from Colorado to speak to our church this morning. He talked about culture and how Christians have a responsibility to be active in understanding culture, to uphold art that is excellent (not low culture) and true and noble. He referenced William Jennings Bryan, the man whom Bryan College is named for. Bryan was a three time presidential nominee, though he never won. He was a skillful orator who would talk for three hours without amplification to crowds of 5,000. Tell me that would happen today! John told us something that surprised me, though. He said, “Attention span is a choice.” Pay attention.

I wrote in an earlier blog that I often don’t know how I feel about something until I write about it. Writing is reflective and it is helpful to me. I wrote in another blog that I am writing for myself, not for others. (If that’s true, why am I publishing online?) There is something about the formatting and the published-look of blogging that makes it fun to write. And I do like it that I know of five people who check this blog, one of whom I am related to, two who are friends in real life, and (wildly) one in the U.K. that I’ve never met (Hi, Katie!) So I am guilty of adding to the shouting-in-the-marketplace noise. And to be fair, I love reading the blogs of these people. I like to hear their thoughts and their ideas and their fears and their hopes. When I check their blog each week, I am disappointed when nothing new is up.

Perhaps I should have started with a present perfect : “So, I have blogged again” instead, because I have. And, I will again. But it might not be this week.

The Drums at Coolidge Park

The downtown park—the one next to the river,
The once abandoned shipping yard—has metal drums.
Discarded drums from some dump truck or tractor trailer,
Brake drums tempered by heat and service and abuse
Turned percussion by an artist, arrayed in two tiers.
Find a twig (if you can)
Or use the heel of a shoe and tap-ting-tong a song;
They, too, sing America,
Like this park, this city, the people here.
Today, a complicated polyrhythmic beat
Performed by an octopus of adolescents;
Later, a simple phrase of Bach
Worked out incrementally by my dad
While my children played welding bells cut from gas cylinders.
The phoenix’s blaze and birth have nothing on these
Reticent triumphs of endurance and transformation
And value.