Dear Friend and Reader,
Tuesday morning, in San Francisco, 58-year-old Janine Boneparth of Code Pink attempted a citizen’s arrest on Karl Rove as he sat on a panel for the annual Mortgage Bankers Association conference.
This is an excellent example of a Saturn opposite Uranus moment, which is the big outer planet transit that is casting over everything right now, as if we’re standing on a mountain looking over the nation’s peaks and valleys.
What we’re seeing in this event is a confrontation between a rogue and a member of the establishment, though the interesting part, in this instance, is we’re not sure who is playing which part.
Code Pink, known as a radical feminist protest group, plays the part of Saturn in this scenario, trying to restrict the rogue, Karl Rove.
Either way, it’s a pretty cool piece of news. Watch the video here.
Yours & truly,
Eric Francis and Rachel Asher
I know that this thread was supposed to have ended, but it feels more right to post this little bit here… please forgive me.
It has been an intense day and I am spent, so I will call upon a poem of Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky, to speak for me to all who meet here. Namaste.
The Woman I Love
Because the Woman I love lives
Inside of you,
I lean as close to your body with my words
As I can —
And I think of you all the time, dear pilgrim.
Because the One I love goes with you
Wherever you go,
Hafiz will always be near.
If you sat before me, wayfarer,
With your aura bright from your many
Charms,
My lips could resist rushing to you and needing
To befriend your blushed cheek,
But my eyes can no longer hide
The wondrous fact of who
You Really are.
The Beautiful One whom I adore
Has pitched His royal tent inside of you,
So I will always lean my heart
As close to your soul
As I can.
Brendan:
Here at Planet Waves, we listen and we learn. Your wish is our command. GO upstauirs to the top thread called “Planet Wavers Talk Back (with feeling)”.
Everyone: March on up. We can continue the discussion on that thread built with you in mind.
xxxoooxxooxoxoxo,
Fe
Fe – thank you, I am touched that you share that history with us. My folks were adolescents in the 40’s, and remember those homefront years all too clearly. Your mother had to live them. I am so sorry.
I so want it all to stop. Between comments here, I’ve been doing some research on possible connections to the Holocaust over the last two days. I’m not pleased, as these tenuous connections are on the side of the Nazis, the SS actually. Very distant cousins (if at all), but living parallel lives to my relatives here in the states. One was an out-and-out war criminal, working as the head of the Gestapo in Prague under Reinhard Heydrich. The other was in the Waffen SS, fighting against the US and the Russians in the last years of the war. Not a history to be proud of.
Over here, three great uncles served, two in Alaska, and one in the Pacific. He didn’t come home, dying off Samar Island in 1944 after the Leyte invasion when his destroyer was sunk during a battle against a superior Japanese strike force.
What a century we had to grow up in.
Aword… –
I didn’t mean to leave you out, but I do think we are all harmonizing here. It is both sad and funny that the whole lot of us have been getting back to the emotional aspects of school nearly every time. Observing the emotions of students does give one that little edge in seeing what makes them tick, and when they’re going tock instead.
When you see that tock, when they are supposed to be ticking, watch and see what goes on. That’s when a minute or two of personal attention can shift things to the side of the light, and you and they grow a little bit.
“someone has to rock the boat when the water gets stagnant.” HA! I like that one…
Fe – how’z about opening a new thread on edumacation? One that isn’t hiding under Code Pink… :)) I’m wondering if any others of the PW world would want to chime in with their thoughts. We seem to have hit a vein with a few of us here.
I bring up PTSD because I’ve had it myself, but from a different source.
My mother is a survivor of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. This occupation was not benevolent. The guerillas lived amongst civilians in the provinces and everyone was suspect by the occupying army. In order to keep locals submissive and “trained”, someone, possibly your neighbor or a member of your family, had their head removed and placed on your doorstep. A warning.
When the US airstrikes came and the Japanese were beating a path to escape, towns would be razed in the process. My mother’s town was one of them. Fleeing with her family, they used a series of underground tunnels dug by the guerillas for exactly this purpose, getting everyone safely into the forests and away from the action until things calmed down.
Flash forward twenty years later. America. My mother waking from nightmares in the dark of night. I remember hearing her muffled sobs as a child, wondering what was wrong. She never told us until we were teenagers, but I always held inside my mother’s nightmare of being chased by the Japanese through dark tunnels. I was born with extreme cortisol reaction and my skin was constantly in a state of excemic rash so severe I would bleed from the scratching.
The list of triggers for my panic reactions has grown thin with time, patience and living in the present moment. But getting there took time and communication with enough people to understand what had happened to us, my mother and me, generationally through the stress of war. I was lucky enough to have teachers in and out of classrooms who were there for me to understand and truly listen when I reacted. I was lucky enough to understand that my feelings of anxiety were real, not to be shunted aside, and needed to be out in the open to facilitate their healing.
There are still scars. I think war and violence create cellular damage on a generational level that needs to be addressed. As a society, I think our country needs a bit of a rest from the titilation of violence. Its dangerous stuff to be playing with–for generations to come.
What a magnificent community of people here at Planet Waves.
Stonetotem:
I feel as though we’ve heard you coming from miles away and called you to be here. I’m glad you felt safe enough to share what you have shared with us.
Its important to know we’re neither isolated or alone in our fears or pain.
Great dialogue. I am really enjoying this one! I thought I was done talking, but really do have to say how much my experiences agree with Brendan’s comments.
(Even as a PARENT I had to teach my kids that I am not their FRIEND. Time and place for everything. I regularly engage them in conversation and am genuinely interested in them. I also encourage them to have appropriate relationship with teachers, other adults, kids their own age. Teenagers in emotional need (like – um, all of them?) can transpose those needs to someone who isn’t a healthy choice or simply can’t be available such as a teacher they admire.)
I taught film editing to large groups and also one-on-one. Guess which I prefer? Well, actually, I like them both. I taught adults and I don’t follow rules very well (oops; my bad) so I had a great time with both. Learned so much from each experience, too. On the other hand, I’m not teaching now. Nor am I working for any corporation…..something to do with a need to bend rules, perhaps?
Heh-heh; Someone has to rock the boat when the water gets stagnant 😉
Ack! Even more comments written since I started that last one of mine!
Beautiful, wonderful thoughts and hopes. I am renewed with energy.
Peace and love to all,
Brendan
Wow! So much has been said here, I am having difficulty keeping up. Boundaries: yes, they have slid quite a bit since the 60’s and 70’s. But then, there were fewer family and societal boundaries at the time, now I fear there are far more and they’re made of concrete. Someone has to be accessible to these kids, and a lot of parents (couples and singles) are not truly involved any more with their offspring. I can be friendly to the students, but I can’t be their friend. For me being friendly meant being open, being honest, and respecting the students. I didn’t want to necessarily know what they were doing off-campus away from school (I’m NOT hearing you!!), but they want to tell you, they need an adult in their lives to listen and simply be there because so often no one at home cared.
Structure: the factory school system is dying. I don’t care if it’s a charter school, a public school, whatever, the basic structure of the last 150 years is no longer proving effective at education. There’s a Waldorf school locally, expensive yes, and with a good reputation over the many years it’s been operating. Smaller schools are much better than the large ones in my experience, and smaller classes are much better for rapport and learning. I’ve had classes with 35 students, and one with 8: guess which one I liked best?
Subjects: the decline in what used to be called vocational skills is appalling. Metal and wood shop classes let kids build things, using their hands and minds for productive learning. There is none now, and even if you know you are going to simply work after school and not go to college, you have little choice but to sit out high school and go for more schooling afterwords to learn what you really want to learn. Not everyone will be going to college, but there is very little opportunity to explore anything but the college track, and this emphasis starts in the primary grades with standardized testing.
Stonetotem: I loved your last post. We can’t and shouldn’t shield kids from all the bad, but we can do our best to leaven it and make it easier to deal with. I grew up with ‘Nam going on, and my older brothers were looking at the draft. As twins, they would have both gone on the same day, but as luck had it, never had to respond before war’s end. I fully knew what that meant to me and my family if they gone off to the army (I was 12). Want to start some anxiety in a high school? Just mention the word ‘draft’ and see what happens. Most don’t even understand the word, much less have an inkling of what it entails. I instructed my classes on exactly what it meant, and it was not popular believe me. Those who knew what it was were the most anxious, but by explaining it carefully they became less so. Those who had had no idea whatsoever simply moved to an aware status, with far less anxiety. But at least they knew…
All of the elements for successful teaching, learning, and loving are out there now. The disparate elements have to be put together into a whole that works. Once that happens, we can certainly have a better society.
By the way, I have an astrological observation here: high school kids go crazy at the full moon period. Observing that happening was one of the first things that I realized about astrology after begin to study it. One of those “Eureka” moments. Following that revelation, I started to follow the aspects much more closely.
Too much to comment on, and not enough time to write!
And one more on Edu:
My intent in bringing up the one room schoolhouse and the 3Rs wasn’t to disregard that more/better learning has and does go on in different (and smaller and more enlightened) environments.
It was meant to bring out discussion regarding today’s mainstream educational system in USA and the question — “what is our actual intent as we education our children?” I believe that the original intent was to train children in basics (3Rs) and that we have not changed that intent. Basics are still appropriate – but what else has changed around our children that needs to be addressed by peeling the onion down to the core?
And of course education of the masses cannot be a stand-alone question as the answer also comes from how we view ourselves within and without (personally and in community).
My personal experience says that the qreater quantity of “we” are still “living in the past” as we form our answers.
😉
Patty/Chancey Gardener:
Exactly. There is a path in front of us if for no other reason than the universe and all that is in it existed “before us”. What we do with what is here – while we are here – is, well, the question.
Light,
Linda
I was 12 when JFK was killed. It was such a traumatic event for all of us, much the same as how we felt on 9/11. The kids I went to school with escaped into drugs at high school. I know of some classmates that committed suicide, and far too many others in my generation just simply became bums with no goal other than to get high. Most of that particular group are still dependent upon their senior parents. I’m not saying all of us did, but far too many did. Look how many Viet Nam vets committed suicide too. it is a national tragedy.
I can’t urge parents enough to consider that PTSD evaluation might be needed. My nephew who is about 11 or 12 fits that description, although he’s had other very traumatic things happen in his life. His mother, age 36, has taken him for counseling but there is still the aura of sadness about him.
When you think back to the one room school, you have to remember that there were only 3 or 4 things a girl could do with her life back then – teach, prostitute, sweatship, housemaid/cook. My mom said she and her teacher made paper dolls and designed gorgeous clothes for them when she was in grade school. The school was one room, with 12 students. My mother managed to take physics and chemistry in high school, and get As, so quality of education must have to do with quality of time spent developing the individual rather than the mass. The home schoolers have certainly proved that point over and over again! A friend of mine homeschooled his kids and now two of them are PHDs!
Awordedgewise – I don’t know if everything is pre-determined, it depends who you read and believe. There is a country music song that says that until it is carved in stone (your headstone) you have a chance to change your life direction and do what you can with it.
Blessings and Love to all,
Patty
I thought I’d wind up my part in this particular blog with this:
In Darkness IS the Light. It is in the balance of these things that our Creator lives.
To find Peace, we must know that these things are One and be in Oneness with them.
What we search for is in the “negative space “ between these things that we perceive as opposites.
Remember —
When we have the question, we have the answer.
(Therefore) Changing the question changes the answer.
What questions do we need to find in this moment?
(And I dare say, we are finding many of them together here at PW. Bravo! And thank you Eric, for making the space.)
stonetotem,
Prayers and Blessings.
Do learn as much as you can about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (or Sydrome as it was formerly called.)
The symptoms are common to all of our stress-related disorders of today and can easily be misdiagnosed as ADD/ADHD in children.
Look at nutritional opportunities for better well-being and ways to reduce stress and incourage calm (increasing Magnesium in your/son’s diet for example and learning to Belly-Breathe). I could discourse for volumns — but Google does a fablous job.
There are many of us along-side you in spirit.
Good luck.
I am not a teacher, but I am a mom/artist/confused person who’s not quite sure what to do with her self… My kids are Waldorf educated. It’s a private system, holistic education, spiritually based; there are a few charter schools here and there. It’s very expensive, and we struggle to pay tuition. Waldorf pedagogy has its own rigidity, but it reaches deeper into the soul of the child and educates, not trains. In first grade the children learn to knit, to play recorder, and begin the study of 2 languages (mine learn Russian and Spanish)… it goes on from there as they grow: all manner of handwork (crocheting, sewing, embroidery, felting…), music, farming/gardening, shelter-building, sculpture, painting… along with academic subjects. Ideally, the teacher stays with the class from 1st through 8th grade teaching the academic subjects (minus foreign languages), though my daughter’s class lost 2 teachers over 8 years. It’s a lot about relationship as well as life skills and academics, and the social interactions are held just as importantly as the academic. Each morning the teacher greets each child by name and with a handshake, and a similar encounter occurs at the end of the day as they leave. It’s a beautiful and loving way to learn.
When my daughter went on to public high school, her teachers loved her because she could actually think.
However, it’s my son that brings me more urgently into this space. On 9/11/01, he was 4 1/2 years old. He was not yet in the Waldorf school, but in a local nursery school. We live about 90ish miles northwest of NYC; at the time we lived across the street from 3 NYC firemen. Two of them were at work when it happened; they all survived. But in my son’s class, one of the fathers could not be found for I don’t remember how long and eventually was among (if not) the last to be pulled out alive.
(Meanwhile, at the Waldorf school, I was the one who alerted them when it happened; in their own little bubble, they had no idea… They stayed the day and the teachers had to instantly process the information and thoughtfully prepare the children for the outside world, according to the Waldorf way of protecting childhood and gentle guiding. Younger children would not be told.)
We followed this example at home as best we could. We were worried about our neighbors and cried with relief when they came home. We did not as a matter of course watch tv or listen to the radio, and we never exposed our children to any of the imagery or news coverage. We didn’t talk about it openly as a family but it was nonetheless there. Our daughter was 10 at the time, so she was old enough to understand some of it. We let her lead her own process, based on what she was hearing from people she knew. It seems to have worked for her.
I don’t know how it was handled in my son’s school; based on what I know of the teachers I imagine that it was also handled as gently as possible. But what was happening with this child’s father, under the rubble, whether expressed or not, was affecting every child in that room, though it didn’t seem to penetrate my son’s world in any overt way. And of course, what was happening all around us was usurping our cells’ memory and forever changing us. I don’t know if it was because it was happening to all of us and it became the norm, or because we were too traumatized, but we didn’t notice that suddenly everything was irrevocably changed. Or maybe we did and forgot.
And then within a month an anxiety appeared in my son. I assumed that it was connected with our impending move to a new home and never connected it to 9/11; I believed he had been sheltered from it. I expected him to outgrow his fears as he warmed to his new environment but he hasn’t. Over time he has become more and more anxious, in spite of continued sheltering, healthy food, gentle living and holistic education. No tv, no video games, no movies (though these prohibitions have all relaxed in the last year or so). So in this long-winded account, I finally get to the point that I only just realized a month ago, when I finally brought him to a homeopath to try to help his anxiety, that it all began at that dreadful time, that all this time he has been carrying tremendous fear and this unspoken burden of needing to protect us from terror. Sheltering him did not keep him safe, and I wonder if it has made the damage deeper for this sensitive soul. Had we not been making this major life transition, I have to think that we would have made the connection. But perhaps not.
I believe that we do the best we can as parents… sometimes it’s not so good. It’s my responsibility and my intention to continue to learn to do it better. And I’m a strong believer in karma, not as an excuse but as a tool to learn with/from. What we have created as parents, as citizens and as a society will come back to us again and again, and affect the rest of forever – unless and until we wake up and do the hard work.
Love, of course, is the answer. But it’s not the whole answer. We are imperfect practitioners: we are human, after all. Striving, growing toward the Light and meanwhile embracing our shadow (and sometimes not), striving. And love. And breathing. Risking, opening. Being scared shitless. And striving. And fucking up. And breathing. And it’s so messy and it’s so hard. And love… We are in this together, know it or not, like it or not, or we do not survive.
PostScript on our national and global conundrum —
Until we find different questions to ask (regarding education, health care, war, jobs, lifestyle, relationship to each other) we will continue to find answers that don’t work.
Peace.
I have experienced – through my two children who are both now in high school – that everyone’s hands are tied, teachers, parents, students, administrators. We live in what appears to be a “safe” “middle-class” city/neighborhood and they attend the best-rated (public) school here – yet the larger focus is on shutting things down/off – not turning them on. There are daily drug searches (dog and human). No lockers to store your stuff, ’cause who knows what might be stored in there. All the restrictions we’ve heard of; which ultimately restrict learning.
I will add however; there are a plethora of students, teachers and administrators I have experienced how are doing an amazing job of learning-through-maze. If we can do THIS with the mess we’ve made of our schools – just think what we can do when we clean it up!
Because the basic structure of our system is NOT about LEARNING nor of creating a desire to learn, interest in learning, creative approach to problem solving and learning….we have what I believe is a conundrum: a problem that cannot be solved by looking at it by the common train of thought.
Even in the good ol’ days – what was the one room school house really but a place to learn – by rote – some basic (important) skills (R3)?
My great-grandmother homesteaded (by herself) in N.Dakota at the turn of the century. A teacher of course. Long lineage of that on the female side of many of our families.
What have we done to change our way of thinking since then?
All we have done over two hundred years is devise bigger and bigger band-aids to try to cope with the overflow of bleeding. Once again we see the pattern: it is the same we see glaring in front of us visavis OBwan vs McPain:
Stay the Course and Die Painfully or See/Act Differently and Change (not necessarily painfully — we CAN choose to Change With Grace and Ease. Anything is possible.).
On education:
Being an idealist, I had ideas of my children getting a different education from the one I had. I have taught at the University level as well as privately within my industry and Exec Dir of a vocational school. Also worked with Executive Education at an Ivy Leaglue school. (So all adult education which is different.)
There is much going on at that level which MUST trickle down to our children. The biggest – and yet simplest – concern I have on a broad scale is not one of content (which today is abhorent) but structure. We are not structured to learn effectively in what are supposed to be learning enrivonments.
I shake my head every day to see my chidlren go through the same routines that I did – ONLY WITH MORE SEVERE RESTRUCTIONS THAT FURTHER ENCUMBER REAL LEARNING.
What in the world do we expect? That they will “get it” by osmosis? I wrote a proposal for a video game project some years ago looking for a way to explore teaching/learning differently – and in fact there are some video games on the market today that I swear teach better than our schools (and I do NOT mean educational software. I mean “entertainment” software. And what’s wrong with having fun while we learn? Duh.)
I appreciate all the heavy-duty dialoge (above) on the subject. I’m living in a KIS world. (Keep It Simple) I agree with this point: our schools are a reflection of how much we have broken everything.
Like naughty children, we have broken all our toys — and grandpa isn’t going to buy us new ones. We can keep tossing around the broken pieces and raging, or we can sweep them up and build a few new ones that serve a better, higher purpose.
I was thinking about my cousin, an old school teacher who retired during the early 70s and has been deceased a long time now. Everyone really loved her, but she taught 3 or 4 grades in the same classroom. What I remember most about her were the firm boundaries she set with students. It was a safety net, of sorts, for both her and for the students. The students always tried to live up to her expectations. I wonder if her students were so different from the students of today? They certainly didn’t have the resources the kids have now, nor did they have the information overload – but they had Korea and Viet Nam and the death of JFK. So based on that, I’d have to agree with Janes. My young nephews and nieces are not so different than my children, who are now in their 30s. But in school, there don’t seem to be very many boundaries. I’ve talked to different teachers who feel that their hands are tied by various laws and school board rules, and some have given up teaching because of it. Students can walk in and say “Fuck You” and no-one blinks an eye. Certainly the parents leave a lot to be desired, in a lot of cases, but a student who does that is testing the boundaries. I’m guessing they feel like no-one gives a damn and that their future is bleak indeed. In fact, I remember feeling that way in the mid-60s, when Johnson was escalating the war and everything was just totally chaotic. That must have been the saturn opposition influence in my teens. I think of Gerald Ford as being the president who brought a measure of healing. Maybe Obama is the healing force this time around, although indeed the chaos could be getting worse before it gets better, since the opposition goes on for a few years. It could get a lot worse, if awordedgewise’s vision is accurate.
Gardener:
Thank you so much for your kindness. I hand-picked Luke last year as my guiding Saint (after looking high and low for someone I felt an affinity who was more esoteric 😉 Luke just waved at me and said, “yo, pick me”.)
I definitely will search for connection with Philip whom I am not familiar. Yes, my ‘life’s work’ has not begun. Lesson still learning; life is not a lightening bolt, it is a revealing — a gentle unfolding if we let it be such. There will come a day to look back and see all that has been accomplished.
A piece of the (healing) puzzle seems to be re-forming the pictures I see so that they are not “people dying in the streets full of fear and hate”…….I believe if I can re-form the visuals I get before they are “reality” that perhaps those ugly visions will never materialize and the “heavenly” ones will. It can’t hurt to try, anyway.
And is it Chance Gardener? “Being There” 1979 Peter Sellers/Shirley McLaine is one of my favorite films.
Shalom
The comments here are so beautiful, rich and meaty (in a non-carnivore way) that I need to hop in the tub with all of you.
Brendan:
My sister has been a teacher for most of her life. Now she trains other teachers. For years, I’ve been a bit removed from her gift, which is teaching, because I could never bring myself to do it. I’m a bit of a loner, and more the artist of the family. But reading your story about making your farewells to your students, for some reason, filled me with the most complete love for her. What it must be to directly give of yourself to others who trust you, and how you must handle that relationship. In a sense, you’re co-creating with a new micro community year after year.
I especially loved the comment about treating PTSD teachers first. That’s a bracing slap. I think we could all use a little therapy that’s non-narcotic: physically and psychically. I think that would apply to art and media as well. That springs to mind the early films of Pedro Almodovar after the fascist regime went down in Spain. There was a sense of an entire society waking up out of a sociological prison, and that denied expression was released in the arts.
Janes:
“In kids, the American coma is an act. They’re smarter than we are and have not had all sorts of layers of bullshit encircuited into their beings. Kids are not easily convinced that the shared reality of adults is anything but tentative. They already know the World is not Bill O’Reilley, singing competitions, the great white ship America and lots of pandas on the Discovery channel. Those are our illusions. The dreamstate children display at school is for the benefit of the adults they have learned to be careful not to scare.
Uranus to Saturn: the keystroke deletion of a carefully embroidered reality. This is it. This is crazytown.”
You’re absolutely right. That’s why I felt this time around, unlike my youth during the Nixon-Reagan years, we need to give the kids the handle to make the decisions. This world will be theirs. And frankly there are enough of us who screwed the pooch for them, giving them huge problems that will last into decades–who need to be put in our place. Its a different ballgame, and these kids know how to program the heavy, important equipment better than we ever could. I say, give them the keys and we can get the passenger-rear seats and enjoy the view on occasion.
Fe Bongolan:
Hm. Something like a baby nuke somewhere wouldn’t be the end game of anything. It might signal a retrenchment a new phase of the gradual disbanding of what we see now as our government and society, and all those television pictures in our head that represent The World.
Every once in a while there have been crises in this country, or anomalies that point to some erratic break in our expectations. Most of the time people pat each other and go back to their drugs, hoping that it’s all a misunderstanding that will be ironed out by the proper authorites. But these events are converging into a meaningful pattern even for the walking dead.
My first break with reality occurred in 1993 with the fake television coverage of the seige of the Branch Davidians. It sort of caught my attention because I had recently landed back in the states from Germany and could only get Sky News and AFN for four years. All winter I’d been getting a call every morning at 3:30 AM regarding the almost certain deployment of tank and infantry divisions into Sarajevo. Maybe it wouldn’t have been clear to the average peacetime citizen what was going on in Waco, but it was absolutely transparent to me.
In kids, the American coma is an act. They’re smarter than we are and have not had all sorts of layers of bullshit encircuited into their beings. Kids are not easily convinced that the shared reality of adults is anything but tentative. They already know the World is not Bill O’Reilley, singing competitions, the great white ship America and lots of pandas on the Discovery channel. Those are our illusions. The dreamstate children display at school is for the benefit of the adults they have learned to be careful not to scare.
Uranus to Saturn: the keystroke deletion of a carefully embroidered reality. This is it. This is crazytown.
~j
Fe – First, we treat the teachers for PTSD and then the children. As to subject matter: recognizing PTSD symptoms, what therapies are available, and active treatment as daily lessons. Integrate this all into the daily routine, loosen the constricting necktie/noose of No Child Left Behind, and ease into emotional sharing. Kids know when teachers are being fake, and they know when you are genuine. Too many have been trained by their own set of circumstances to believe that being emotionally open is bad, and it’s all fake anyway, and so on.
I was let go from my first high school for budgetary reasons (or so I was told) after my second year. Being upfront, I informed my students that I was not coming back the next year and why: some of my students wanted to begin a campaign aimed at the principal to have me kept on (the boys). Some of the girls got quite upset and actually cried: I had to tell them all I appreciated their feelings but a) don’t piss off the principal (shit rolls down hill), and b) together we would all survive in spite of this event. Even the seniors I had were quite upset and considered it all highly unfair, and they no longer had much invested in the school as graduation was only weeks away. By year’s end, we all were handling the stress better, and that was because I was open to them. If I hadn’t said a thing, the hurt would have been greater certainly for me, and they would have been a little less aware that it was okay to be emotionally open. Kids I never expected to say anything came up during the last few weeks and gave their thanks for my being there for them.
I was, and remain deeply touched by the remembrance of those kids and their loyalty. It goes to show that stress can be worked past, but it takes time and honesty.
Oh, and your last: I like that mutual pact idea. They behave, make good things happen, and we won’t discipline them without due cause, present chief executives excluded…
Tachikata –
I only called my students any sort of name when they deserved it! Okay, almost never, and only one on one (no witnesses). The biggest tool I had to completely throw students off? Respect for who they are. Respect me, and I’ll respect you and give you the chance to improve on that respect. It all seems to boil down to that: I’m not infallible, so I didn’t expect it from my students and I told them that.
I teach social studies, personal emphasis on the social. Here that includes history, civics, economics, geography, and other related fields. Religion is a historical subject with current socio-political implications, so that was addressed in my classes too. I tried to prick whatever misconceptions they had, and teach them to respect what was held as a faith, even Pagan. Mandatory? No, but if I could teach the hard core evangelical Christians to respect the Muslims, Catholics, agnostics, and all others, so much the better. Whatever little trick I could use to interest the students in what was to be learned I tried, but the real thing was teaching them about the people of the time/place/situation lived and dealt with each other. So often there are similarities between now and then that can be pointed out, connections to be made, that you get those “Eureka” moments that are so precious. Make it relevant to them here and now, and they will learn anything.
As to methods, I do think there remains a lot of current relevance to Plato’s and Aristotle’s seminar system. I taught current events on Fridays and had hour long discussions about damn near everything. I’d pick some topical events, and then just go from there. I even had students from other classes skip their own to come in and take part. My excuse for that atrocious behavior was that it was better that at least ONE teacher knew where they were than NO teacher knowing where they were. I had very few rules: take turns, respect each others’ opinions, and learn something. It worked.
I love your comment about Greek and Latin! The only schools I have attended as either a student or teacher had only modern languages. Not even my university has any of the classicals to this day. Maybe 60 years ago, but not in my lifetime. So far, I’ve studied Spanish, German, and Russian, and speak none of them fluently (typically American). All three have actually proved somewhat useful, Spanish and German the most.
But best of all I like your practical desires: sewing, knitting, and gardening. Eminently useful, always interesting, it is good to have real skills that allow one to live life fully and produce at least something for one’s self. So many of those types of classes are gone now, replaced by mandatory years of mathematics and English, all suitable for going on to university but not for actually holding down a job or living. So yeah, what the hell are we doing here?
So much of education needs to be redefined and I fear we have far to go.
Past midnight here, must sleep. Any more comments out there? I’ll be back tomorrow…
Brendan:
I’m proposing a theme for the next convention of the NEA:
“Teaching in a PTSD Nation”.
What would be taught? What would teachers need to do to prepare?
I loved your comments, particularly: “We need to have an education system that is rational, loving, and without fear. Hell, we need a society with those qualities.”
I once asked one of my political mentors, about two years ago, if we’re ready for an equal partnership with our political leadership. At the time, he said “no, we’re too into father-figures to work things out for us.”
I wonder now, knowing that the fathers we trusted with our nation’s well-being and future left permanent damage, if our collective national family can bring ourselves to go cold turkey without parents in titular leadership and instead demand a mutually agreed upon pact–the scenario similar to kids filing for custody/visitation of their parents – at least for a little while, until the parents grow up out of their stupidity.
Hi Fe and all,
Okay, you’ve asked me a lot here, and I’ll try to answer as to how I feel, not know.
I think you’re right, a decade perhaps for the healing, for all of us. Many parts of public education are good, while other aspects are lame. A Truth in Education Committee might be a good idea, but we have to get every stakeholder there and participating. Not easy, but it can done. As to how we re-form it, I am no expert. It might be good NOT to invite the experts actually. But, whatever happens, it must be done.
I’m all for overhauling our education culture: too many tests and standards, not enough genuine learning as you said. The best teaching I did was often not on the curricula, and life-coaching students was a constant event. It’s all those little things that no one talks about, but are the details of living as an adult, that myriad of untaught facts and figures that allows one to survive. Imposed educational goals really kill everything: ignorance is horrible, and by teaching children only the facts the way we are has lead to a mind set that is quite rigid. Throw something spontaneous at a lot of kids today and they don’t know what to do because they’ve never considered that something might actually be different from what they were told.
Students aren’t alone in their pressures: teachers have them too. I can only teach some subjects and don’t dare teach others (abstinence, thy name is craptastic). If we screw up somehow, we can find out we don’t have a career anymore. Oh, and not to mention keep paying for school supplies and your mandated advanced degree out of your own pocket.
I have a good, close data sample of a child’s view close by: my 9 year old niece. My sister is doing a good job of not living in outward fear, so E. is not typical of her age group admittedly. They don’t watch a lot of TV (no cable), and my sister spends minimal time on staying up with the news. She stays in touch with what is going on but does not inflict her daughter with the import. My sister feels that a childhood should be just that, and not some perverted adult fantasy writ small. No pressure to be something she shouldn’t be. {Don’t get me started about pre-teen beauty contests!}
That being said, E. is now entering the curious/self-aware stage, and is very perceptive of the world around her. I know she is absorbing much more than she lets on, and I do occasionally find her pensively sitting, absorbed with inner matters, and a very serious look on her face. She’s aware that my sister is struggling to survive economically (as am I), and that their life is not a bed of roses. A lot of the families in their neighborhood are in very similar circumstances, so at school there is not a huge gap economically or socially. I try to help out, be a father figure/uncle and all that, and help them both as best I can. Explaining the adult world is one of those helping ways, and I try to paint an honest and yet un-fearful picture for her. {Her own father is only semi-involved: he’s actually homeless, in another city, and only just survives his own battles and addictions}
I did say she is atypical: many other, more ‘normal’ children are far less aware and are being subverted by the wonders of free range consumerism. My sister and I (& four other siblings) were brought up to be skeptics: most people our age were not and now their children are even more caught.
As I said before, this is all a huge generality on my part. There are lots of bright, intelligent, literate young people of all ages out there but the number of unlearned, unconscious proles is even larger. I’m at wit’s end trying to think of a fix for all this: most days it seems we have to start entirely over with re-doing the very basis of our society and how we relate to each other emotionally and intellectually. Teachers are already counselors and we really should emphasize that aspect in the profession. My training in that end was thus: do the best you can and wing it.
Well, as everyone has probably guessed, I’m tired of winging it. We need to have an education system that is rational, loving, and without fear. Hell, we need a society with those qualities.
Sorry for the long and slightly rambling rant, but I can get very wound up about this. It took me a while to write all this and make some sense, so if anything sounds a little weird, go ahead and yell. There is so much to do, so little time…
Just noticed your last comments: so true. To be in a state of other than reality, the “sleepy/dreamstate:” I saw it every day in the classroom. We can’t go on like this and expect to survive as a society.
Now I’m done.
“Either these kids are comatose or hyper aware and trying to shove alchohol or food down their systems to keep themselves in dream-state while walking.”
I mean, to clarify – when these kids are grown up and going to college.
Janes:
What you describe is the end game. And by that, that means the societal and geopolitical backstop that prevents us from going full-tilt into crazytown.
Its the sleepy/dreamstate folks who worry me and worry folks like Karen, who is a teacher and will be facing them as near adults. Imagine kids 9-10 years old whose public opinion and first time outs in the world are colored with the 9-11 perspective. Either these kids are comatose or hyper aware and trying to shove alchohol or food down their systems to keep themselves in dream-state while walking.
Awordedgewise – Peace and Love to you fellow Piscean,
It does feel like a roller coaster right now, but your life’s work is still before you. I prayed for you and received a message. It was Philip. There are two biblical Philips – the apostle, and the evangelist. The evangelist worked to feed the poor and performed miraculous healings. The Apostle Philip wrote the gospel of Philip, a Gnostic work that is not in the bible.
Each of us has experiences that prepare us for our life’s work, so that you know how to help the people you are to heal. You may be working with the poor in a future where the food supply is limited, or where there are too many people out of work.
Does that resonate with your experiences? You can google for info on both Philips. Whichever one speaks to you might hold a key. Since I don’t know you, I’m not making any claims as to accuracy, but my feeling is strongly in favor of Philip the Evangelist – performer of miraculous healings.
Missus Fe:
A nuclear device that might be backpacked into a major city for the purpose of detonation would be roughly 10 kilotons. They didn’t make them much bigger than that merely as a matter of practicality. That means anything within the one mile blast zone would be reduced to a stain. Increasingly outside of that radius, you’d probably survive if you wanted to. If you wanted to, I said. My standard advice: do not be an idiot and gawk at it. Frankly you’ll go blind, and no it won’t get better. We do not need a video of Mahattan being blasted to Neptune posted to Youtube, seriously we don’t. Do not be an idiot, this is my statement on our current position.
I believe that panic is rising and the consensual counter-reponse is a comatose, Ambien-laced denial. We’re all moving into an awesome instability. Whatever was frozen is unfreezing and fresh cold water is running underneath. Whatever buildings sprouted from old, bad ideas are slowly exploding into a fine gray powder. The outer planets want to crash on my white leather couch. Time and Space have forgotten what they ever saw in each other.
Time and space exist in the aggregate as published history and nation states. In human consciousness, they deliver our security and our expectations, the past, and the future. Our media manipulates these in our heads with alarming finesse. Cartoon visuals show us the “world”, and all the crap we’ve dragged behind us and settle behind somehow informs us of a future that has not occurred.
When all this is transcended we get to the present moment, and that, I’m sure you’ve heard, is the center of a blast zone of transcendant creativity. That can be tough on…you know. Everything. At some point you either let go and ride the shock wave or try like hell to go insane in order to avoid it.
Astrologers, statisticians, stock market analysts, and Hazmat teams are all in the business of soothing the Great Anxiety of civilization. Whatever can be built can be destroyed and whatever we expect to happen really only does so as a personal favor to us. A person seems to have caught up with himself when he realizes there is no future to tell and there really never was. You can release your stranglehold on your identity; that’s how the birthchart is eventually also transcended. This tends to be the end of all sorts of fortunetelling careers.
Things that begin to explode generally don’t stop until the reaction has used up all the available oxygen and transformable matter. I would say that every human we meet from now on needs to hear the best truth we know.
~j
Fe,
I suspect if you heard my life story, you would be shocked. I am not yet in touch with what I have “coped” with myself — after all, it’s my life. (And keeping in perspective that I am a “middle-class American” it all becomes a wild wild tale that most people wouldn’t even believe as true let alone understand.) The stories fill volumes. But SOMETHING has always kept me from letting go.
“Letting go” in aother sense, then, has become my challenge.
I often refer to Gandolf at the end of LOTR v.1 — wherein he lets go of the cliff and takes on the/his demon — falling through fire and water and coming out the other side. This is my journey. And for how many of us?
That “vision” my friend saw 25yrs ago? I do believe that was not a vision of an “event”. Rather — my life. Finding a way to create HEALING in a world not yet full of peace.
In my own “visions” I have laid down in my boat (literal) and watched while the world that I knew burned around me – as a volcano erupting and eradicating life as we KNEW it. Not life itself. Life as I knew it. To me this message is very powerful. Feeling Pain for the first time. And making a choice to LIVE – and be around to help life for all be – well, different than what we have created this last time around.
I believe we are in that ‘moment’. Just consider the possibilities for our world to come!
Hm — maybe just for fun, I’ll dress as Gandalf the White this Halloween.
LOL and love and love and love.
“The question/answer as pictured by me becomes — how to ride it? Close your eyes and brace yourself? Or open them wide and put your hands in the air and fluidly roll with it?”
aword:
I want to open that question to everyone, because from what you described, I would find it difficult to cope under the conditions you described.
The last time I underwent a psychic trial, it was in anticipation of my mother’s death. In those days, three years before her death, I was getting physcially sick, enough to the point where I myself was ill enough to die. I contemplated letting my physical body go at that point. A passive form of suicide.
The creative part of me wanted desperately to live. I then sought counseling and therapy to get me to begin the coping and healing crisis. I lost my father 30 years earlier, suddenly and right before my eyes. My child self was still healing at that point, 30 years later. My mind and body did not want to go through that again with my mother. My spirit, as well as my therapist fortunately had other plans.
PS for you astrology minded out there — father is Taurus, son is Scorpio & me? Pisces of course. (daughter is Gemini – just shy of Taurus – she was 6 weeks late; I think she waited!) Our family is small, but Eric’s Personal/Political becomes more and more obvious.
xo
I found myself connected on a higher level with someone during a simple “routine” encounter yesterday.
She and her partner are on their way to Katmandu for 3 months of meditation/spiritual awakening.
That is one lovely opportunity for riding it out (although I do not think this is their conscious reason for the trip.)
I, on the other hand, seem to find myself in the thick of things. A friend connected spiritually 25 years ago and told me she saw me healing the masses in LA. I belly laughed if for no other reason than that I had no intention of EVER living in LA.
Now, after twenty years – ahem – in LA, I’ve ridden my home like an out-of-control roller-coaster while holding two babies (epicenter of the Northridge earthquake).
Was THAT the “LA vision”?
Survived the shooting attack of my children at summer camp by a terrorist. Hm. Was THAT the “walking through the broken masses evoking healing?” vision she saw?
Not that I need to find it, believe it. But these things have a way of finding us…
Two days ago the kids’ father threatened bodily harm to my son and myself – this on the tail of twenty-years-in-DV hell. (He’s got his own hell augmented by prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals.) Hm – has THIS been the roller-coaster ride that needed my “healing” efforts?
An idea that I find useful is “when we’ve structured the question, we’ve got the answer – we only need to open our hearts to it”.
We Are On the Roller-coaster. I think there are few of us left who do not feel that as true.
The question/answer as pictured by me becomes — how to ride it? Close your eyes and brace yourself? Or open them wide and put your hands in the air and fluidly roll with it?
–Prayers and Light.
Brendan:
How should we handle kids who, in their most impressionable years 1-8, were raised in households under the fear of the Bush Administration? This is going to take a decade or two.
My talk this morning with my friend Karen Bradley pinpointed the concern: she said we’re probably going to need something similar to South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, affecting how we govern program wide–particularly in education. Maybe training teachers to deal with nationwide psychic closing of kid’s minds and fear and shame of their bodies is one aspect of this.
The classroom is a petri dish of the society at large, as your post pointed out. Its also one of the most potent areas of regeneration if we get our education system past “passing tests” and back on to learning.
A thought.
Speaking as a currently unemployed teacher, I think the classroom(s) will be busy. In the younger grades perhaps fear and uncertainty, in the older years fear expressed as opposition and anger. I taught at the high school level, and the students today seemingly tend to be far more fear-oriented than in my years (mid 70’s). Most young people have only (consciously) known the Bush years, so there is quite a variety of barriers to overcome and deal with.
This is a generalization of course, not all young people are so driven, but substantial numbers seem to be. It also acutely depends on the parents, school, local economic situation, et cetera et cetera. Where I taught, Arizona, is very different from where I live now, Washington, and what I would call the ‘local society’ is most assuredly not the same in both places. How we adults (I include myself only because I am one chronologically) behave will drive much of their behavior and reactions.
Keeping it sane in the northwest corner,
Brendan
{{{{{mystes}}}}}:
This is an advanced hug system awaiting you as you ponder!!!
I’m sending out a question to all our Planetwave bloggers, commenters, lurkers about the approaching Uranus Saturn opposition:
What do you think healers, psychics and teachers are going to be facing in the clinic? On the hotline? In the classroom?
Are we going to be facing a period of light and transcendance or grieving and rage? If the latter is so, how should we be handling it?
There may not be a prize grilled curried seitan dinner for a best answer, but there will be plenty of discussion and article fodder. Promise.
xxx, Fe