Me, as a Writer

Me, as a Writer

                I write because it’s easy. The pushing I have to do to make it past the stuck word is like scratching an itch or stretching my legs after a long car ride. There’s relief after it arrives, and I don’t worry at all if it will come. It will come. It always does.

                I don’t value my writing because of that. I don’t sweat over it and fight it. I simply let it out and there it is.

                The only real criticism that I’ve ever received was my junior year of high school. I’d just come from another session of a creative writing class in which I’d been commended and treated as an expert. I was the creative writing student of the year for two years running and saw no particular challenge for a three-peat. I sauntered into my journalism class and our laissez-faire instructor, Mr. C. His hands off approach meant that I had no actual idea of what he was like as a teacher. He’d look over our shoulders every once in a while, but the editors ran the class. I was an editor.

                I had a poem in my hand when I walked through the door – one that the creative writing teaching had oo’d and ah’d over just moments before. She’d clucked about this literary magazine and that one and publication and imagery, and Mr. C could smell the smugness when I walked through the door.

                “What’ve you got there, Jeff?” he asked.

                “Latest poem,” I answered.

                “Lemme see…” I handed him the poem.

                It was about winter. Something about snow and frozenness, I’m sure. It probably included the word “crystalline”. I watched his face as he read it, and my concern started to grow when it didn’t begin to glow with wonder. His eyes didn’t widen and refocus as he read something that – boom – demanded to be read closely. That was life-changing.

                “It’s pretty,” he said.

                “Thanks,” I reached to take it back.

                “But what does it mean?” he didn’t move to give it to me.

                I stopped short hand in my grasp. Mean? “What? It’s…winter, you know…cold…nothing…” I trailed off both offended and worried. I felt naked. He’d uncovered my fear all along. Yes, I can put these words together, make it sound like meaning and sense, but what did it mean?

                He put the poem back in my hand and turned to go sit back at his desk. I wasn’t angry at him. If anything, he’d pulled back a curtain I’d known was there all along.

                I remember watching a home improvement show much later, after I was married, and seeing a designer hang curtains in a room with no windows. He’d walked in and said, “This room needs a window.” And instead of the major construction of putting a hole in the wall, he simply hung curtains where one should go. I remember thinking, ‘Geez, at least paint a window behind it. Maybe an African savannah or something.’ But I think my writing in high school was like that window. Decorations of nothing. I stopped writing for anything but assignments.

                But I can feel myself wanting to write – I’ve been feeling it for the past few years – and I feel the worry now of pulling back those curtains. Twenty years later, I realize that I have to write to find out if I have any meaning, if there will be a landscape behind those curtains or if I’ll pull them back to find a blank wall staring back at me.

Me, as a Leader

Me, as a leader

                I’ve been hearing lots of different models of leadership lately. In college, William Jewell seemed flooded with “servant leaders,” leading humbly and without the kind of drill-sergeant persona many associated with leadership. It was gentle and caring.

                I’ve also heard people talk about “leading from behind” as a way of deconstructing that posture of leadership that seems to suffer when it glorifies the leader. As a teacher, that plucked a string loudly at the core of my being. My worst days of teaching were those that I walked away from feeling as though I’d only been focused on myself – the days I’d felt the most on stage. “Leading from behind” sounded like what I needed to do – get off stage and let the learners do the leading.

                Recently, though, I heard a soldier describe his commanding officers in Iraq. I could hear the disdain in his voice, the bile it raised in his throat, when he described one of his commanders as “leading from the back”. It struck me hard. How could I make the assertion that I was leading if I wasn’t willing to charge the front lines with my students? Keeping myself out of the fray seemed noble on paper, but when my students were in the midst of the intellectual battles I drew up for them, was sidelining myself unfair? How could I charge directly into the maw and put myself at risk as well?

                I think of teaching as leading. I think of it that way because I teach at the consent of the students. There are too many of them and they’re too big for me to force to do anything. They take a risk in deciding to learn from me, and I have realized in recent years that that means I have to risk something too.

                In terms of building leadership, I am at the absolute beginning of that experience. We are in our infancy as a district encouraging teacher leadership, so my opinions are inexpert at best.

                I know what my worries are, though. I worry that I’m waiting to be tapped. I sit in meetings and trainings and sessions and think to myself that I have the ability to facilitate, to engage participants, to challenge respectfully, and to partner with teachers as they think, but I’m not sure how to become that person. I have no psychological or emotional explanation for the egoless-ness I find myself having. It’s not that I don’t believe in myself; it’s that the moment I begin to push myself into a spotlight, I am completely filled with guilt. Who am I to push myself out there? Why should anyone listen to me?

                At the same time, when faced with opportunities and chances I perceive something in the way I present myself to the world that sabotages me. Am I too funny? Too critical? Too self-deprecating? Too fat?

                I’m beginning to believe that the people who have blown by me on their way to positions of “power” didn’t do so because of their merit. I think they grabbed the idea that they are leaders by the throat and created that reality.

                Now the question is whether or not I’m a throat grabber.

Me, as a Learner

                I remember sitting in the station wagon in the garage returning home from somewhere. I was in middle school, and my high school sister’s Algebra book was in my lap, open. She was in the front seat. I was reading it.

                “What are you doing?” she asked.

                “What is this?” I asked, “Is this math?”

                “Yeah,” Jami replied, “in high school it gets harder. You start using letters in with the numbers.”

                She didn’t say it like it was scary or anything. She was nonchalant, matter-of-fact. I walked into the house in a daze. What was it about letters that I didn’t know? Why was this being hidden from me?

                I remember this as the first time I grappled with an idea. There was a physical feeling in my head as I stretched and strained my brain to try and find the meaning of this cryptic message – “You start using letters in with the numbers.”

                I heard a blind man on the radio describe the feeling of being lost, alone in a hotel room. He described “groping” the walls try to understand and conceptualize the layout of the room. Though I’m not blind, I related to that in the way that I felt as I wrestled with big ideas. I groped and fondled and grasped but lacked the ability to conceptualize the entire picture.

                I’ve always loved this feeling. I read books and authors about subjects I have no expertise in; I ponder philosophical mysteries I haven’t done the coursework for. Not because I can understand the answer but for the lovely feeling in my head that comes from knowing that there’s something too big for me to grasp.

                I think that what I’m fascinated by is the feeling of possibility when I ponder a topic I can’t grasp. When I read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe about the nature of string theory, I walked away with a flawed and rudimentary idea of string theory. I couldn’t teach a class in it. I don’t understand the equations involved. Yet I find myself searching for that feeling all the time. I want to hear and read people who know more about a topic than I’d ever considered. It proves to me how much is out there, how little I know. It also reinforces to me the vastness of the human capacity to understand.

                I have a former player and student who went on to Lindenwood University on a bowling scholarship. When Brad was a junior in high school, I pulled him aside for “the talk”. If he was interested in going to college to play soccer, I needed to know where he wanted to go so I could start the recruiting process. That’s when he broke the news that he wasn’t going to play soccer. He wanted to focus on bowling. From there on out, I quizzed him every day about bowling. Why is it scored so weird? Why are there so many different balls? I learned about oil patterns and lane strategies.

                I got the same feeling in my brain listening to Brad conduct a master class on bowling that I got from reading about string theory. 

Me, as a Reader

Me, as a Reader

1. I read fast, sometimes too fast.

2. I know what’s going to happen in most fantasy novels, yet I read them anyway.

3. I read every book by Piers Anthony that I could find in high school.

4. I almost never re-read a book.

5. I can talk about books and their deep meanings all day. Any day.

6. I read every book by Tom Clancy (at the time) my sophomore year of high school.

7. I worked in the school library during one hour of high school. The librarian took her lunch during that hour, so I was alone in the stacks every day.

8. I love to read books about science and math, especially when I don’t have the background knowledge for them.

9. I mispronounce words that I learned from books all the time. Assuage.

10. When I read an article, I often find myself fighting the author and arguing in my head even if it’s making a point I agree with.

11. When I was six, I “read” a book about Paddington bear at the circus to my grandmother. She was very proud of me. I had memorized it from making my mom read it to me over and over. I still feel guilty about this.

12. I skim what I’m assigned. If I don’t choose it myself, I find it hard to engage past just floating along the page.

13. I like a book in which I dislike major characters. I’m a big fan of flawed heroes and anti-heroes.

14. I think Stephen King gets a bad rap as I don’t think he’s a horror writer, he’s a fantasy/science fiction moralist. And a brilliant user of language.

15. The first book I ever wished that I’d written was Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot by Al Franken.

16. I read Catcher in the Rye well before I was ready.

17. “I understood without understanding that there was nothing to understand.”

My Favorite Tanner Colby Quotes

Some of My Best Friends are Black by Tanner Colby

p. 77: Most every city in America has a Troost. In Chicago, it’s the fourteen-lane Dan Ryan Expressway that divides the South Side from the Bungalow Belt. In Detroit, it’s Eight Mile Road, a jurisdictional barrier excluding city residents from county services. In Birmingam, it’s a mountain you have to go over. Kansas City’s Troost Avenue is unique in that it’s not an elevated thruway or set of railroad tracks – it’s merely a street, like any other, running down the center of the city’s flat, open grid. Yet everyone who lives here knows. East of Troost is black; west of Troost is white. A local newscaster once dubbed it “the Berlin Wall of Kansas City.” The name stuck.

p. 91: Underneath all that, the bedrock of suburbia’s appeal, as Nichols framed it, was the idea that a certain kind of physical space was inherently more virtuous than another. The right kind of leafy green cul-de-sac – and the right kind of neighbors – were essential to raising children with proper Christian and American values. A man’s choice of home said something about his moral character. Is your family a Mission Hills kind of family? What kind of man lets his children live on that side of town? In billboards and newspaper ads, Nichols drove his message home again and again:

Wouldn’t you and yours take pride in a home built in the Country Club District . . . where your children will get the benefit of an exclusive environment and the most desirable associations?

Children’s lives are affected by the atmosphere in which they are reared. Give them the advantages of out-of-doors living, pure fresh air, desirable associations and beautiful surroundings.

                Desirable associations. Subtle. But when translated into legal terminology on Nichol’s property deeds, the meaning of the phrase is perfectly clear: “None of said land may be conveyed to, used, owned, or occupied by negroes as owners or tenants.”

p. 122: Gene Hardy was quite right about the 49/63 Coalition: the biggest thing they accomplished was proving that “you could have black and white living in the same neighborhood and it didn’t go to pot.” Which sounds good, but “not going to pot” is pretty much the baseline of what should be expected from a functional human society.

                Blacks and whites in 49/63 shared the same zip code but they didn’t share much else; it would be a stretch to call them “neighbors” in the true sense of the word. White social life oriented west, toward the university. Black social life oriented east and north to the churches and clubs that had always sustained the black community. The races coexisted; they did not coalesce. And even though the left-wing intellectuals were running 49/63, not every white person on the block was nearly so progressive. There were more than a few Archie Bunkers still hanging around.

p. 125: Once school busing moved from the small towns of the South to the major metropolitan areas of the North, it stopped making sense. The Supreme Court’s mandate for America’s schools was to eliminate the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation “root and branch.” But the root of the school problem was always the housing problem. Since nothing was done to fix the housing problem, by the time school desegregation plans became law, everybody was already running for the exits. Trying to corral the suburban stampede with a bunch of school buses was like herding cats. Actually, it was worse than herding cats. It was herding white people, earth’s only species with a greater sense of entitlement than a cat.

p. 128-129: In the mid-1980’s, Kansas City was beholden to HEW’s racial balance mandates, but the city had long since run out of white kids to go around. The courts ordered the city to ramp up its desegregation efforts even further, pushing a busing and magnet school program that would ultimately cost $1.7 billion and leave the district on the verge of bankruptcy. By the time the Supreme Court invalidated the plan in 1995, the population of white students had declined even further, and pretty soon black flight was under way, too. Integration fatigue. Black people were tired of chasing white people. Whites went west to Johnson County. Blacks went east into new, middle-class black suburbs like Raytown.

p. 138: America has lived for decades with this myth that mixing races lowers property values. In fact, the opposite may be true. Some studies from the 1970s showed that mixed-race neighborhoods, if they could stabilize, held their property values better than homogenous ones. If anyone can live in a particular neighborhood, then it has a larger customer base. On top of which, quality mixed-race housing is an incredibly scarce resource. When demand is greater than supply, prices go up. Joe Beckerman bought his place at $25,000, furnished, and now he’s sitting on a quarter million in equity. Other residents attest to home values that have increased five- and tenfold as well. “Best investment I ever made” is a phrase you hear a lot around here. “If I put up a sign listing my house for $140,000,” Calvin Williford says, “I would have an offer in a couple of days. If I put it at $130,000, my phone would ring off the hook. My neighbor sold her house in forty-five minutes.”

                Capitalism: it actually works sometimes. If only America would let it.

p. 140: There’s only one way America’s neighborhoods will begin to integrate people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need on the market. It’s the only real solution to segregated schools, for one. So how do you sell that idea to a country still beholden to outdated stereotypes and fears? The same way J. C. Nichols did. You advertise it.

Read and annotate the article using the following symbols:

? = confusing

+ = agreement

- = disagreement

V = unfamiliar word

C = personal connection

As you read, think about the conversation we just held about our community, who we are and who we want to be.

After annotating, answer the questions below as preparation for a discussion about how to improve our school community.