Curriculum Vitae 1: The Story of Mary and Bob

From my curriculum vitae, here is my teaching philosophy: All kids inherently can draw. It’s the first and ultimate form of non-verbal communication. By showing kids shortcuts to success in drawing skills, you open the door to a world of possibilities and expression. My classes are about empowerment, exposing capabilities, and developing potential.

I stand by that statement. My first class of any drawing session, be it a seminar or the full semester art course I did last year at Kiley Middle school, I start off at a blank bulletin board, and tell a story. This is that story:

“How many of you like to draw? How many of you feel like you are good at drawing? (Get one student’s name-let’s say Bob). Let’s ask a different way-who is not good at drawing? (Get a student’s name from this group-let’s say Mary). Why do you think that everyone in the room didn’t raise their hand when I asked who was good at drawing? Maybe we’re just in a class of especially modest geniuses?

“I know why. By virtue of my own personal WayBack machine, I’ve watched each and every one of your life stories from when you were babies, scooting around the floor in dirty diapers. At that time, your parents maybe put you in the corner with the sharp writing instrument of your choice—a crayon—and said go to it.” So you, being the good little genius, crawled over to a blank section of wall, and started working!

(Start scribbling on the paper. It must be scribbles, formless, messy and without reason. And it has to look fun. While doing this say: )

“And you had fun. You were just playing around, making a mess, figuring stuff out. And before you knew it, you started making something.

(Gradually, over the couse of the board, develop the scribbles into a rough loop, then a cleaner loop, and on until you get to a perfect circle.

“And being the great genius you were, you named it. “This is a (students will say “circle,’ but you should say “Mary! This is a Mary! And I’m s proud of my Mary, it will make me world famous and be an amazing thing to share with everyone and anyone who will look!”

“And before you know it, the first dsy of Kindergarten came, and you were prepared. You had your favorite writing implement, and a world of blank paper. And you walked into that class and couldn’t wait to show everyone what genius you had developed. You walked up to the board and drew a perfect Mary! (Draw the circle).

“Suddenly, a hush fell over the classroom. From the back, up came Bob. (whistle the theme from “The Good The Bad and the Ugly”)



“From the back of the class, Bob walked forward, ‘ching, ching, ching…” And he pulled his piece-another crayon. “That’s nice,” he said, “but can you make a Bob?” And right next to your Mary, he drew a Bob." (Draw a near perfect triangle.)

“Mary approached the board with a trembling hand, and tried to act like it was no big deal, “No problem,” she said. And she drew a Bob. (Draw a triangle that is only vaguely so-looks much more like another circle.) And she tried again. And again. And finally she gave up in frustration. She threw her crayon down, and walked away, and never drew again. (mimick each of these actions for effect.) And today, Mary says she can’t draw at all, and Bob considers that he’s a great artist."

“But what did Mary forget? What was she doing way way back, when she first started drawing? (Point to the scribbles. Continue to press for answers until you get someone to say, or you suggest. The answer is “to have fun.”) When she first started, she wasn’t about impressing anyone, or showing what she could do. It was about finding things out, and exploring, and having a good time doing it. And that’s what she forgot."

"But I bet with anything that Mary is good at today, she has not forgotten that. Because anything you become good at you become good at because of the encouragement, and the positive feedback, but also and as importantly, because you enjoy doing it. That’s Mary’s story. And I’ll bet it’s the story with a lot of you."

"Well, that changes today. Because in this class, it’s not about being the best at making a Bob or a Mary or a landscape or a portrait or a figure drawing. It’s about having fun, trying to figure something out, and finding what is easy and maybe not so easy, but enjoying the journey, not the destination. This is going to be about the art of getting there, not about being wherever “there” is. If you do something you like, that’s great, and I’m sure your parents would love to take a look at it if you want to bring it home. But that’s not what this class will be about. This class will be about struggling and playing and failing and starting over, and pushing past mountains and swimming over oceans and being proud of the fact that you can keep going."

“Is there anybody here that thinks they can’t do that?”

Next: The Story of Can’t.

School starts (for some…)

Both my sons are now back in school, my oldest at a new Middle School and my youngest still at Conway Grammar. I meet the new school year with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was really looking forward to returning back-to-school with them, as an Art Teacher (capitalization on purpose). I was enjoying the vocation. I was in a challenging school district—so challenging, in fact that I did not know how to approach blogging about the work all of last year, and consequently didn’t. The silence stretches back to last February. I started writing some ideas longhand, at lunchtime during school, but soon found that time taken up by classroom needs, outside of actually eating my lunch. And after a while, the story I would’ve told felt like it was so far into itself that the recap became unwieldy. And somewhat pointless. And was eventually abandoned.

In the name of a fresh broom sweeping clean, I then made a plan to incorporate blogging about teaching at the start of the school year. And I prepared lesson plans, and solidified methodologies and documented a lot of what I had not, before. And I called myself ready to hit the ground running.

But, sadly, that wasn’t to be. It turns out that I’m not teaching this year, due to budget cuts which, eliminated the Art teacher position from the middle school I was teaching at at the same time as it increased the class size. I feel sad most for the students at that school, as they had a time testing me, and seeing if I would stay or go. My choice and what I proved to them, was that I was going to stay. Until the district changes the game, and made a liar of me.

Okay, that sounds angry, and that’s not my intention. I’m really just a little sad. I have the work at Idea MechaniX to keep me busy in the short term, as I look to move back into publishing full time, keeping teaching open as an afterschool sideline. And, really, I have no regrets, having had a good experience at M. Marcus Kiley Middle School. I feel I made an impression, and left a mark, if only for a year. And I even helped their overall identity by doing a bit of digital design, free of charge, as well. Here is a link to the Vision and Mission statement posters I developed and designed for the school, now posted on their website. So I’m gone, but not forgotten.

And now, on the other hand, I have a bit more time on my hands. With that opportunity to do a bit of catch up, I plan to take the time to explore my own teaching philosophy in a way that I haven’t done, concretely, in a while. And in doing so, I plan to tell some of my success stories in teaching. A lot of the lessons and stories are applicable to any area of teaching. And, since this is my own subjective, personal blog, I can do with it what I will.

For the next several blog entries, I will be exploring some of my fallback introductory lessons, and the ways that I’ve used these stories in teaching. Please feel free to pass them along, and if they work for you, make them your own.

Next: Curriculum Vitae 1: The story of Bob and Mary

According to Google, Marcus needs...

Another challenge received and forwarded:
Instructions: Go to Google.com and do a search. Type in your first name and the word "needs" after it. Then copy and paste what are the top ten things Google says you "need".

My results:

1. Marcus Needs A Home. (Having recently lost my home-away-from-home in Boston, I guess the one is just not enough anymore.)

2. Marcus needs a father who will guide and teach him the essential to becoming a proud and productive man. (Ouch. Any volunteers?)

3. Marcus needs to talk who he really is. (Also, Marcus needs to talk English learn.)

4. Marcus needs a hug! (Always.)

5. Marcus needs your help to promote CoSponsors for HR 8. (Because they are so unpromoted, even he doesn’t know who they are.)

6. Marcus is very sick & needs our prayers. (Wow. Way to put it out there.)

7. Marcus needs to stop handling people weapons. (No comment.)

8. (Neiman) Marcus needs work. (Well, duh.)

9. Marcus needs to get a ride by rElEAsIng mY whOlE rOstEr tO stArt AnEw tEAm I gOt. (I’m not kidding, this is how the entry came in. Google it yourself and see. I think I need some shift key withdrawal.)

10. MARCUS NEEDS TO GET HOOKED ON PHONICS. (Better than crack, and twice as expensive. And the shift key problem seems to have turned to FULL CAPS LOCK ADDICTION)

Rappin' Singapore

I meant to post this bit a long while ago. Having worked with a group from Singapore, I always imagine them in this music video. Never have I seen a more inappropriate group of suits in a more believable and enjoyable setting. This should not work, but they pull this off beautifully!

Books Read

I got this list from a Facebook friend. It's posted here as I copied it, but the "X"'s are all mine. Given, about seven of the titles below were read as "required" in school. But I like to read.:

According to Matthew Olson, apparently the BBC reckons most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here...

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (not thw WHOLE Bible...)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X- (Not the COMPLETE works)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tart
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My total: 42

Please pass it on!

An Incomplete Work of Fiction (3 of 3): Climax

We shift back to the present.

The mother is dead. Again, it’s not unexpected, but neither is it easy. Hardy is suddenly bereft of his core reason for getting up in the morning. Felix is feeling the guilt of not having done enough, and anger at how she died. Flashback briefly to that night, where the mother dies, and Electra can’t be reached. Someone calls the police, and an ambulance comes. Although the mother has expressed her desire not to be resuscitated to each of her children, it has never been written down. Without such an order in writing, the paramedics are obligated to try. This frustrates and angers Felix, and this anger will alter manifest against Electra.

But for now, we cut to one brief shining moment, as in the face of 9/11, the disparate factions of the family come together at the mother’s funeral. It is an amazing event, and inspiring in a real sense. But in the back of his mind, Felix can’t help but hear his mothers stated (and somewhat selfish) wish not to have a funeral.

And so that brief shining moment is extinguished as, the day after the funeral, Felix demands of Elecktra that she show him the will. Electra moves from stand-offish to belligerent, and delays revealing the will for almost a year. In that interim, there are scenes of anger, and terror, and screaming, and tears as Felix seems, at times, to go out of control. There is raw emotion on all sides, the likes of which can only be explored in fiction. There is one particular scene where Felix, now sole owner of the house, screams at Electra and calls her unpardonable names. His sanity comes into question at this point, as to whether he is merely manic depressive, or truly delusional. But what is unquestionable is that the dissolution has begun.

The conflict escalates. Felix throws Hardy out of the house, his home for the past decade, and isolates himself from the rest of the family. Not that this is hard to do, as the family appears to revel in a dysfunctional disjointedness that seems to increase daily.

The next inciting incident is the filing of the will, nearly a year after the mother’s death, which is followed almost immediately by Felix’s challenge to it, and to Electra’s serving as executrix. The scene is set in a courtroom, as Felix stands on one side and Electra on the other, before a Probate and Family Court judge who clearly could not give two shits about any of the back story, and can’t even clearly hear what issues are being laid before him. It’s an indictment of the system in a sense, and a cautionary tale, but also a family drama beginning to spin out of control. Here we juxtapose the cold, dry, and almost sterile environment of the courtroom proceedings with the tensions roiling just beneath the surface, frustration, and as slow seething that, if not yet hatred, is well along the path toward it.

Maybe we add poignance to this scene by juxtaposing it in time with a family barbecue of decades earlier; a series of snapshots from a family album, committed to memory, and colored by it. Both the father and the mother are alive, and the siblings talk happily and heartily, enjoying good music and laughing conversation and the closeness of strong familial bonds.

Cut to present, as Electra and Hardy are on one side of the courtroom. Felix sits two rows before them, having entered and not even glanced at them. The judge goes through other cases of dysfunctional families, divorce, custody, and angry, bitter opponents.

Cut to the past, as the father slips his hand around the mothers shoulder, both beaming for an impromptu snapshot, showing a tender closeness that is the core of the family unity. But which will not last.

Cut to the present, where Ovid sits on the opposite side, also alone, trying to make sense of how this has all come to this. This scene is somewhat surreal, and somewhat unclean, and leaves the reader with a sense that this entire world and every surface in the courtroom is in desperate need of a shower.

Cut to the past, as the siblings all group, standing, hands on paper plates heaped with comfort food as they lean back in laughter and bask in the warmth of a summer day that will pass in time, and never come again.

The scene ends with the judge giving Felix 30 days to outline his objections to the will, thereby moving the plot forward.

A week later, Ovid is playing phone tag, trying to get Felix to drop the challenge, or, failing that, to at least put into words what his goal is in this action, besides a futile attempt to punish Electra and Oscar. Felix can’t give one, and this fact is not lost in the circular logic Felix expounds to justify his actions. And Electra is no better. In a late night phone conversation, decades of anger spill over from Electra onto Ovid. She calls him self centered, tells him that he always removes himself from taking action, that he is so damned detached as to be almost uninvolved, But at this point, Ovid is no longer in a conciliatory mood, and is willing to strike back.

The situation turns confrontational through a series of phone calls. It becomes increasingly clear to Ovid that none of this is about the stated goals. This is about who is the boss, who the best arbiter and interpreter of the Mother’s last wishes, in spirit or in action. This becomes clear by how often Ovid has to ask the same simple questions: what would it take to resolve this? What is the simple thing you want? Accountability requested on one side, autonomy demanded on the other. The goals are incompatible, and create suspicion and mistrust.

So here is the crux of the climax; what does Ovid do?

An incomplete work of fiction (2 of 3): Complication

We fast-forward a few years to the household where the middle brother, (let’s call him Hardy) is the primary caregiver for the bed-ridden mother. Hardy has always seemed a bit lost—thrice divorced with five kids by the different women, and due to an incarceration for failure to pay child support after being laid off, unable to hold gainful employment without losing all his wages. Let’s make this situation sad, but serendipitous, as the act that saves the mother from having to go to a nursing home.

Let’s throw in a minor climax in this flashback, where all six siblings together agree that the house should be sold to one of their number, as a means of protecting the mothers assets should she ever be hospitalized, or forced to go into a home. The consensus is that the house go to Felix to take care of. The understanding would be that any of the siblings would have the right to buy the house from that brother for a reasonable rate—right of first refusal.

Then, let’s introduce the next twist to propel the plot. Let’s say that Felix, the lawyer, tries to get the mother to sign a power of attorney, giving the eldest authority. There’d be a lot of subtext about the eldest wanting this responsibility, but then also undertones of what the father had said about Felix before the father died. More layers, more uncertainty. Now, Felix does this while he lives far away, so leaves the papers with the mother, to address on his return.

Now, the next twist. On a visit to the mother, Oscar finds the papers and, suspicious, and more than a little angry, takes them. He has them changed, re-written so that Oscar gets the power of attorney, and mastery over all the mothers affairs. On his return, Felix is disconcerted, but does not challenge this change. Again, this is based on the mother’s stated wishes, not his own.

Okay, more back story. The eldest brother, Felix, is followed by the eldest sister (let’s call her Electra) and there is bad blood between them—the kind of bad blood that can only arise from strained familial bonds. Oscar bonds with Electra, and the same fell swoop that gives Oscar the power of attorney, makes Elektra the health proxy.

There’s an inherent conflict here amongst the key players Electra and Felix. They are the oldest male and the oldest female. As the eldest male, Felix took on the role of father to the family as a boy, when the father left the family for another relationship. When he later returned, the boy had functioned as father figure for too long to simply give the role up. Echo this with the role of Electra as the surrogate mother to the family, acting as caretaker for a mother forced to be away from home often, at work as a career woman, and sole support for the family. This is the root of their conflict, with the parents at the core. The key being that the parent’s created the problem, but never took the time or the responsibility to resolve it.

Now the stage is set for a replaying of that rivalry, surrogate father against surrogate mother, Hyper-paternalism against hyper-maternalism, both directing anger and aggression against the other, as they had seen the parents do in the latter years of their married lives.

Flash forward. Electra and Felix say they are doing this, assuming responsibility for their mothers affairs, for the mother’s sake and by her wishes, and that seems reasonable. The only problem is that the yare unwilling to provide any transparency. There is no accountability for the mother’s finances. They adopt a “my way or the highway” attitude. The mother has a monthly check for Social Security, a monthly check from her pension, and a monthly check from the father’s pension. The checks are automatically deposited into an account which the mother shares with Ovid (that is, which the mother put Ovid’s name onto). Because his name is on the account, Ovid has access to the account, but that access is limited to essentially checking on the balance regularly, and seeing the money transferred in, and the next day transferred out into a separate account maintained by Oscar. But Ovid has the ability at least to track how much money is going in. And he has a growing awareness that the money is not being spent on his mother’s care. The plot thickens. What to do?

The overwhelming undercurrent through this part of the story is the mother’s insistence that the siblings not fight. We can cap this and typify it with a heart felt one-on-one scene where Ovid tries to reach the mother, and tries to tell her that if she does not sort the affairs of her life and her children before she dies, these issues will never be sorted. It needs to read as poignant, and prophetic. Very prophetic, as it will be revealed.

At the end of the scene we see the core dilemma. With a single call to action, Ovid would galvanize to action, and be at the ready to demand accountability, and take care of the mother. But he wants—needs, really—her participation in at least the call to action. He needs her to say it is what she wants. And she will not, for the rest of her life.

And the stage is set, as we build to the climax.

To be continued.