Heroes

Yes, I know. It's a little tacky to talk about who one's heroes are. Thing is, today was my first day working at LePort Schools, and at one point we were each asked to name a personal hero, and to explain why said person was a hero. I actually found this a challenging question to respond to, however, because I have a great many heroes. Or perhaps the better word is idols. Or mentors. Or maybe a mix of the two.

You see, I'm not entirely sure what a "hero" is. It's a Greek idea, and like many Greek ideas I think it's gotten both too puffed up and too trivialized in translation over time and space and through the linguistic wringer that is English. The Greek idea of a hero was mythical, magical even, and very strange. Achilleus, Heracles, Antigone... these were heroes. I don't know if they were supposed to inspire us to greatness or to warn us against hubris or what.

So maybe the better words are idols and mentors. I have a mix in my own life. There are artists and thinkers who I idolize, whose work has left enough of a mark that I have had the chance to get to know that work, and be inspired by it. I also have mentors, who are influences of another kind. They have all inspired me on a more personal level, as teachers, friends, employers, or family members.

I could only name one hero today, but there were a lot of names dancing around in my head. So here are my heroes, or rather, my idols and mentors.

Idols

Walt Whitman

I selected Walt Whitman as my hero today, because I think no writer has been more influential for me. Whitman's Song of Myself remains my favorite poem, essay, or writing of any kind. No less than three of the most important moments of my life have been punctuated by reading the poem in its entirety (twice aloud). I have read portions of it at weddings and at funerals, and for a time carried one of its more memorable cantos in my wallet.

What is it that I love about Song of Myself - and, really, the whole of Leaves of Grass - in all its incessant and meandering glory? I love its spirit, its body, and its sound. It is a poem not only about poetry, but about why human beings write poetry in the first place, and maybe even why writing poetry isn't particularly necessary. It's a poem about love, and death, and sex, and independence. It's lewd and wildly inappropriate. It's political (abolitionist, in particular), but deeply impolitic about it. It celebrates contradictions and impossibilities. Above all, though, it's a poem that asks the reader to live without it, to compose his own songs and live his own life. I return to Song of Myself, from time to time, to remind myself to celebrate and sing myself. But it would be a deep misapprehension of Whitman to study him overmuch.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

Like Whitman, Beethoven was a rebel. Whitman was at least partially responsible for what we now call "free verse," and Beethoven was at least partially responsible for what we call romanticism. He personalized and emotionalized music to a degree that was essentially unheard of prior to his work. His symphonies radically transformed the very structure of the symphony (there is a vast formal and structural difference between symphonies written before and after Beethoven).

Beethoven inspires me, though, not because he was a passionate musician, but because his passion was so precisely measured and expressed. He was a master of composition, even after he lost his hearing, and however wild his music was - especially for its time* - it never feels out of control to me. Contrary to the popularized Hollywood renditions of Beethoven which paint him as a mad genius, who translates his anger and lust and frustration to the score feverishly and slavishly, I believe Beethoven was more a master of music than a slave to it. Passion is admirable, but excellence requires mastery of that passion. I idolize this, above all, about Beethoven.

* This cannot be overstated. These days Beethoven seems rousing, but expected. In his own day his music was truly shocking. The length of the Third Symphony alone, not to mention its harmonic and formal curiosities, would have struck any contemporary listener as bizarre.

Thelonious Monk

Speaking of rebels, Thelonious Monk was a musical rebel. In many ways, he's a contemporary version of Beethoven: a true master of his craft whose rule-breaking was always more measured than it sounded. My idolization of Monk, however, is much narrower. I appreciate him, primarily, as a pianist. I do not sound like him, when I play piano, but he is nevertheless my greatest inspiration as a pianist, and especially as an accompanist. If you listen to recordings of Monk playing, what you'll find is that he is an exceptionally soloist, yes, but also an exceptionally good listener and accompanist. Not every one who played with him knew how to play with him, but those who did - Charlie Rouse, for example - play off of and with him in a way that most epitomizes, to me, what jazz is all about.

Langston Hughes

I actually knew fairly little about Hughes until fairly recently, when I read his autobiography, The Big Sea. I knew, of course, that he was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and I had read, as a student, A Dream Deferred. Through his autobiography I came to appreciate more about Hughes, the man and poet, and not just the symbol he has come to be in the traditional curriculum.

I'll leave you to read The Big Sea, yourself. What I most appreciated about the book, and about Hughes, was his commitment to the joy of life. Like Whitman and Beethoven, he celebrates and sings his own odes to the joy of simply being. He is as masterful a wordsmith as any poet, and even his most biting and political poetry has a metrical and rhythmic levity. So, Hughes too is political without being politic, as much concerned with the everyday working man or woman as with the seeming greatness of leaders and decision makers. He shows and indeed lives the silently dignified life of a real person with real troubles and real celebrations.

Mentors

All of the above idols are dead poets and musicians. They give shape to the way I live my life: the humanistic content which on some level defines who I am, how I read, and what I believe. And yet, while I have pretensions to being a musician and a poet, at heart I increasingly feel that I truly am a teacher (even when I was streaming, I was really being a teacher). With that in mind, these mentors are most responsible for teaching me how to learn and how to teach.

Denise Pope

Denise is a researcher and lecturer at Stanford who co-founded Challenge Success, an organization I have been fortunate to work with over the past couple of years. In contrast to many researchers, Denise is primarily focused on using her expertise as a researcher to make a positive impact on education writ large. Challenge Success, in particular, is inspiring because it focuses on a massive systemic issue in our education system which too often gets swept under the rug by more popular celebrated causes. That issue is, in short, how we define success. Too many students (and parents, and educators, and educational institutions) see success narrowly in terms of grades and matriculation records. As a result, students increasingly live unbalanced lives. They spend too much time doing homework, they burn-out and get sick, they don't get enough sleep, they cheat. Denise's book Doing School, chronicles this phenomenon by following a handful of exceptional students, hand-picked by the administration of her partner school. The results are staggering, because these exceptional students are living, by and large, unhealthy and unfulfilled lives.

In my work with Denise, she has shown me what it is to be an ethical and balanced leader who lives what she preaches. Like any Stanford faculty member, she faces a barrage of emails and requests for attention, but she remains ever graceful in the face of such potential stressors. Perhaps most inspiring to me is her position: Senior Lecturer. I suspect she could be a Professor, if she so chose, but it seems to me that the priorities of a full professor are misaligned with her priorities as an educational leader (and as a mother). I suppose it is no accident that she was one of the first people to call me when I went on leave from Stanford to offer me encouragement, and she was one of the first to applaud my decision to find a teaching job when I did so. After all, she taught me the value of using academic knowledge to do good in the world.

Todd Kelly

Todd was my piano teacher growing up, and was of course a huge influence on my musical style. He let me start out learning how to improvise and play jazz, rather than drilling classical theory and technique into me. His own unique style as a composer and musician - I'd say he's a mix between George Winston and Ethan Iverson, an odd couple if there ever was one - certainly rubbed off on me.

But Todd was more than a piano teacher, and was as much an influence on me as an educator as he was on my musical development. I spent more time learning with and from him than any other teacher in my life, and I think a great deal of my own pedagogy derives from the way that he taught me. He treated me like an intellectual and musical equal long before I actually was one, and in so doing pushed me to be a better pianist and better musician. Our frank conversations about what I hoped to get out of music, and how much I was willing to put it taught me how to be self-reflective and metacognitive, and how to set goals for myself. Our co-compositions taught me the value of creative collaboration, a value which I have always sought to impart on my own students.

Sam Reynolds

There are teachers and mentors with whom I've spent much more time than Sam. I've only met Sam in person once, and spoken to him a handful of other times. My chief interaction with him was through a pre-recorded online course of his I took back when I had just graduated from St. John's and still had no idea what I wanted to do (I hadn't even decided on education as a field, yet). Nevertheless, Sam's influence on me is significant.

Sam Reynolds is a professional astrologer who, like me, came from a philosophy background which imparted upon him the value of scientific skepticism. Through practicing and studying astrology, however, he found sufficient evidence to make it his career. This post isn't the place for me to defend my astrological practice (I don't say belief, because I do more than believe in astrology, I practice it), but I would be remiss if I didn't include Sam as a mentor for me precisely because of the way that Sam teaches and practices astrology. Without, to my knowledge, ever studying educational theory, Sam gets pedagogy and curriculum. His course had one of the better curricula I've ever encountered in any class I've taken (and that includes classes at Stanford).

It's also worth noting that Sam is as intellectual a person as I've ever met. He's well-educated and well-read, incredibly wise, with a biting wit befitting a Scorpio. What Sam has taught me, then, besides a thing or two about how to read a chart, is how to stand up for what you believe even when it's unpopular. He brings to bear his education and intellect in defense of what he does and who he is, but he is never malevolent about it. Nor does he brook the malevolence of others. He is, as any good teacher should be, a model professional thinker and communicator.

Sharon Sikora (or "Mom")

My mom is a teacher, and so it should come as no surprise that she's been a tremendous influence on my own growth as an educator. I won't go into mushy details here about the ways in which she inspires me, but suffice to say she is as excellent a teacher as you will ever find. She has modeled, throughout my life, everything that I value in an educator: she believes in and respects her students, knows her content, designs excellent curriculum and assessments, knows how to think about technology (she neither fears nor worships it, but rather uses it as a tool), and communicates well with her colleagues. She, also, has tried to balance her career as a teacher and educator with her life as a mother and wife. Those who know me and my family will know that this has been no small task, and yet it was a task she performed - and continues to perform - with optimism and joy, in spite of all that has happened.

A Lion's Mane

There is always so much to say, and none of it is quite right.  A poet knows this, but his words are not closer to the heart of the matter for that knowledge.  No, they are rather further, because they clothe a fundamental mystery inside an intractable but mundane one.  What good is that?

Perhaps it is best, instead, to shut up and listen?  Ah, but where is the joy in that?  Why read Kerouac, for example, if you'll only ever read him?  Isn't the point to talk, to live?  (Isn't talking living?)

While we're at it, what is a mystic anyway?  Am I one?  I am an astrologer, after all, and while I don't pretend to know why or how it works, sometimes a chart opens up like a flower, or the universe, and I feel aware.

There's no room for such talk these days, though.  Our life unfolds 140 characters at a time, our thoughts no longer ours, but distributed, collective.  Where is poetry in that?  Or is that all poetry is?  Where is Keroac, then?  Where is mysticism and where is the soul?

No matter how hard I try, I can only write about myself.  Whether I write in a private journal, or in an anonymous Internet forum, or on this blog, or even in an academic paper, the words I produce are a reflection of my soul.  A very selfish, myopic, and even arrogant reflection.

What's wrong with self-confidence?  Ah, it always comes with self-doubt, for one thing.  Confidence - the need to express one's own perceived greatness - is flanked by fear that one's greatness is an illusion.  The simple-minded will say "that's not confidence at all, then.  Confidence is silent."  Ah, but a lion still roars, does it not?  And its mane is ever visible.

Who gives a shit about confidence, though?  It doesn't matter at all.  What does?  Heh, that's what we in the question-asking business like to call "a good question."  Problem is, it isn't actually a good question at all.  It's a terrible question, in fact, because it's obvious and totally unanswerable.  Because of these two facts, men throughout history have killed and died because they believed someone knew the answer, and there was never a way to weigh the value of those answers other than through rhetoric, violence, or both.*

* And, really, is there any difference between rhetoric and violence?  One is to the mind what the other is to the body.  I'll let the reader choose which is which.

Of course I, too, am guilty.  Of rhetoric, of violence, presuming to know what is important and what is not.  And yet, as I get older (slowly at first, but faster and faster) I find myself more and more confused - yes, as the cliche goes - but also more and more bored with my confusion.

Oh, I will be forever curious, forever a leaner, forever joyful (forever does not mean what you think it means).  But the "complex" and "outside-the-box" (the most ironic cliche there is) thoughts, when they become commonplace, do not readily give way to something more complex and more interesting or innovative.  Having grasped paradox itself, the thrill of intellectual discovery is, if not crushed, at least transformed.

I suppose the real question is, then, what is my purpose?  Now that I have a direction, a job to do, a path to travel, I must strive to understand why I am traveling that, and what I might achieve (is the wrong word) while on it?

I might as well ask: "What is being?"

Brief Thoughts on Writing Poetry

I'm on a surprise visit to my brother in Portland, hence the gap since my last post.  Regular posting will recommence upon my return to Honolulu.

Writing poetry is difficult.  Anyone who has tried knows this.  Or rather, anyone who has tried and come out at the other end with a terrible, boring, poorly-constructed poem despite the desire and inspiration to write poetry in the first place knows this.  The thing is, there’s no mechanical process by which the writing of a poem is made easier.  Sure, the constraints of the sonnet form, for example, help to structure the poet’s thoughts, to force limitations on rambling by imposing metrical regularity and a rhyme scheme.  But, while in many ways it is thus easier to write a passable sonnet than a passable blank-verse rambling, it is also harder to produce anything at all.

I think, though, that the biggest barrier to writing poetry is a cultural one.  Poetry is written by the immature, by adolescents trying to cope with the wild emotional rollercoaster that they suddenly find themselves on.  Poetry expresses – poorly – their lust, their fear, their sadness, and their pleasure.  Who, having passed the age of 20, still experiences the world in colors as bright, in emotions as intense, as those of puberty?  Who – among those who have written poetry, anyway – is not embarrassed by the poems they have written as a youth?

What is there to write about, as an adult?  So much modern poetry, it seems to me, is either about itself, or about empty themes like the realities of urban life or political frustrations.  In some sense, I suspect, the themes of Whitman and Eliot and Kerouac and Stevens – our more recent “great” poets – have been exhausted.  How much more so the themes of Keats and Yeats and Tennyson?  That is not to say one may not write a great poem, in our modern age, about the fear of aging and death, but how could it compare with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” filled as it is with self-consciousness and shame at its own pretension, with a sense of pathetic lust, with imagery borrowed from the profound to the absurd?  Could there be a better statement of what it is to be a young man knowing that he will one day be an old man?

Instead, poetry has become the work of the clever, and indeed it must be exceedingly so to be purchased at all.  Or, rather, there are no poets anymore, at least not poets who’s primary occupation is poetry, because the act of writing good poetry might be opposed to the act of writing poetry that people are willing to purchase.  Even someone like Eliot, were he not famous, would likely never be read at all because his good poetry is hard to understand.  And hard-to-understand doesn’t cut it in the marketplace.  Why else would so many people go to see Little Fockers instead of, well, anything else?

The mistake, here, would be to think of poetry too much as an outcome, a mistake that is pervasive across our society.  Because we are so inundated with a historical account – of not just art, but science and politics and you name it – that is concerned mainly with the outcome of “great” poets and their great poems, we forget the hundreds and hundreds of poems that even those poets wrote which are not great.  We forget about first drafts, second drafts, third drafts.  We forget about the process of writing poetry, imagining that the great outcome might come from merely trying to write a single poem without practice, without thought, without the ability to write poetry, and not merely to have written poetry.