Yesterday, a glimmer from the Class of 2005 of the J. Graham Brown School sent me a note on Facebook to say that today, this morning, the Class of 2017 will be walking to the first floor on the corner of 1st and Muhammad Ali to be partnered with another crop of lil' ones.
One variation of the story as it came to be can be found in the poem written many "moons" ago: The Story of All Stars and Moonbeams. TODAY THE SENIOR MOONBEAMS GET THEIR KINDERGARTEN PARTNERS - THE FIREFLIES! IT IS A MAGICAL DAY INDEED (and somewhere theres a poem about this, too, but I haven't found it).
Jesse was hired as an English teacher at the Brown, her alma mater, and was tasked with the senior class (with all the senioritis that typically comes with the territory - seniors, if you're reading this make note that this year, your final year, is extremely important to your trajectory in life. Take advantage of it and know, what is today, will not be tomorrow. Carpe Diem).
Jesse also receive the AnERip book award with David Harvey during her senior year, a gift bestowed on the funk, spunk, punk, wit, hard work, poetry and creativity that is the school.
I'm so proud to know she's representing the next generation of the Brown School mission and its shared values.
Ah, but her message on Facebook grayed my hairs a little more. All Stars from my day are now Brown School graduates and I contacted the teacher of Fireflies, Barb Doyle, to say, "We have great grandkids together (Class of 2029? Am I right? Oh, Man).
Jesse put an all call on Facebook and suddenly Moonbeams of yesteryear started recalling their experiences with the youngest readers, writers, and thinkers in the school. For a decade, I spent Wednesdays with my senior classes and their little buddies in a wide variety of ways. I think of those days as extra, extra special - the family at the school is irreplaceable.
I am thinking of the Brown this morning and wishing everyone the glow of stars, fireflies and moons. There is a responsibility to such light and I hope they find it; somehow I know they will.
On Sunday, Tunga and I took our DSW coupon and said, "What if we problem solve in our spending so we can take advantage of the discount they're offering?"
He was first to find a cool of rather cool boots that were reasonably priced, and definitely sharp. I then saw the only pair of Saucony sneakers that I could see myself wearing and tried them on. Yup. Sold. I'm such a loyal Saucony customer and they really should do an advertisement with me selling their wares to everyone in America. They also should give me extra discounts on their sneakers. I've been wearing their product since I was 17 years old and my loyalty is getting rather obnoxious.
I am learning that I'm good with a a pair of sneakers for around six months (at most). After the summer, I wore the treads and threads of all my sneakers to a place of no use, but I've still been wearing them. I needed a new pair, so DSW it was.
And I succeeded, even if my shoes match my car and I will look like some sort of freakish parakeet while wearing them. Tweety tweety tweet. It's all good.
Which brings me to my porch. I asked Chitunga to sort his shoe collection to the 'keepers' and 'non-keepers' so I know what to bring to Goodwill and the dump. Then I realized, "Crandall, You're more ridiculous than he is." I admit, although I have departed with a lot of athletic footwear, I've grown partial to some (including too Class throwback pairs of Saucony's I bought while in Kentucky that reminded me of the pairs I first wore when I started running as a high school student. As I told Tunga, "Look. This tread was made to last. They don't make tread like this anymore. That's why I'm constantly buying new sneakers."
Bottom line. I had to collect the sneakers I no longer needed and they will join the pile that Tunga is willing to depart with. I hate saying good-bye to old sneakers, but I know I'm unlikely to wear many pairs. There is nothing left to them, but still they remind me of places in time, 5Ks, moments in my life, and coordination of outfits. "Dude. They're sneakers."
And I have another pair. I'm sure if one was to look at my blogging activity since 2008, they'd see that every time I get a new pair of kicks (about every six months) I once again reflect on the dilemma of newness versus what once was.
Running.
Pace.
Life.
It's all symbolic.
And I have bought an obnoxious yellow pair of sneakers to carry me forward another 180 days before I will need another pair. Already I've put too many miles on them. At 44, I keep thinking that if I use them enough, I just might get younger.
I seem to have unleashed terror in my home, a fear I didn't intend and that has caused total angst in my canine partner. I purchased a few pumpkins at Big Y on Sunday and placed them on the steps of my front porch. Glamis, the wonder dog, who spends a vast amount of her life on the front windowsill, doesn't like looking out onto the street to see these unexpected prowlers.
She barks. Hair stands up, she growls, she paces, and she barks some more.
I tried to take her outside so she could sniff the orange gourds but she will have nothing to do with them. She pulls away on her leash as if they are going to kill her (or at least make her a pumpkin pie).
Glamis has had other incidences where anything out of the ordinary totally throws her universe off balance. Items placed at the end of driveways for trash pick-ups, for instance, can cause her to lock her legs in place, refusing to move forward on our morning walks. She stands paralyzed and I have to really console her so that she will risk steps to walk past the unexpected.
Last night when I was taking a shower, I heard her going ballistic downstairs and I thought maybe someone was at the door. Hope. It was the Great Pumpkin caper, Charlie Brown, and for some reason she thinks these holiday decorations are the devil incarnate.
I'm keeping them, though, hoping she'll get used to them and realize they are simply a gimmick to make our home feel the joy of Autumn. I suppose if she continues to be neurotic about them, I'll have to act. I don't want to cause an anxiety that does her in. That would simply be cruel.
Back in my 20s, when the rituals were weddings (before the divorces), I often showed up with a griddle and pancake mixes as my gift. Why? I loved my griddle. It made Sundays so much more fun.
Fast forward to the maturity of mid-life adulthood and the griddle seems like Romper Room. I now am in love with my CrockPot. It saves me. It does all this magical work while I go on with other items needing to be taken care of (grading, walking the dog, cleaning, writing, Football, catching up with Chitunga and other Sunday rituals). If I am smart enough to keep my freezer stocked, all I need to do is wake up on a Sunday morning, find a recipe, give it a try, and wait 8 hours.
Yesterday, I made pulled pork again, but I found a different recipe that called for Worcester sauce and brown sugar, which seemed more appealing. I set it all up with garlic, onions, chicken broth, and spices and said, "See you later, dude."
I went on with my day. Occasionally I came in the house and said, "Hmmm. Smells like Sunday."
Around dinner time, I whipped up some cole slaw, cut up new potatoes with Rosemary and parmesan, cut up some rolls, and had myself a dinner. In the words of Tunga, "Wow. That was amazing." I knew it had to be because after he hate he did a cleaning spree of the kitchen (what I believe is his way of saying thanks).
I like to cook but it is a huge pain in the a$$. Sundays provide just enough space in the day to actually think about it, and when it occurs to me to think about it, I'm usually satisfied. Now we have at least one more meal for the week (although meals tend to disappear quickly in this house when no one is looking and it isn't me).
I know I've written about my love for a Crockpot before, but this is what has me captivated on a Monday morning, so I'm writing about it again here. I am thinking soup season is right around the corner and the Crockpot will begin complaining to me once again, "Can't you go outside and grill a burger or something."
To do as I do the way that I do it requires a life in the office writing grants, reporting on grants, finding grants, and granting myself permission to check Facebook every once in a while.
Last weekend was writing up research and this weekend is writing up the possibility for supporting teachers and youth in the southern part of Connecticut.
I nickel and dime wherever I can to make things happen and, thankfully, these funders have deadliness to force me to focus my thinking one sentence at a time. You know it is serious when I begin wearing layers on my head to contain my thoughts. Hat and hoodie. Must have been a tremendous idea I had while taking that selfie!
Actually, a day in the office was good distraction before the grading and U of L / Clemson football game. I'm still wrapping my head around their entrance: WWE? Fox News? Cirque du Soleil?
Monday is Rosh Hashanah and I just checked my calendar to see if it is a holiday (another day to get ahead). Nope. I'm at a Jesuit University. I forget this sometimes. It's like being in Kentucky all over again!
Either way, here's to the day of rest. I asked Tunga what his plans are and he said: homework, homework and homework. I concurred, but we set a goal to go to DSW to look at shoes and sneakers. I have ZERO tread left on any of my shoes.
I closed out my Friday night in support of two educators who participated in the 2016 Invitational Summer Leadership Institute at Fairfield University. David Wooley and Lizzie Lewis, writers, teachers and performers, congregated talents in Danbury Connecticut under they code name SWAT to host CHROME, a spoken word jam at a studio that was used to record Lizzie's poetry.
Guitarists, writers, vocalists, poets, and lovers of language took to the mic to share their talents and perform as a community with a drive to resurrect the power of voicing their worlds before one another.
Chips, sandwiches, cookies and soda were sponsored by CWP-Fairfield and the duo demonstrated their expertise of summer work that joined powerful voices in union of words meant to be heard.
It is a true pleasure to invest in visionaries such as Lizzie and David, and to water the seed they planted over the summer with vision of offering locations for young people to share their talents on a weekend night.
Here's to them, and the finger snaps they deserve.
Yesterday, in preparation of a new course I'm teaching, I reread some of the Freire required for the course, revisited the phenomenal journalism of Kristina Rizga in her book Mission High, and thought about the best ways I might teach the administrative progressivism and the student-centered progressivism that began at the onset of public schooling, with the ongoing battle between bureaucrats trying to cash-in on homogeneity, standardization, the mythology of IQs and tracking, and the experiences most of my students had. I'm a fan of Freire, but I'm not a Fan-fan (Fan with a capital F to allude to Paul Gee); even so, his chapter writing on the Pedagogy of Hope hit home with the lesson I prepared.
We began the class listing the three most monumental experiences in our lives as students (moments, people, ideas, or experiences that changed us). We then wrote for five minutes on one of these and shared. We put that aside until the end of the class: after we discussed Freire, made connections with students and teachers in Mission High and found ample textual evidence that the happiness and success of teachers in that school provided evidence of what Freire meant by Pedagogy of Hope.
I also showed clips from My Fair Lady, making the case of 'Enry Iggins power over linguistic traditions, but how having access to proper literacy opens doorways (here, making the case about class given Eliza and Alfred Doolittle's background in the class of "uneducated" England).
We also watched the above video (cartoon) about Pandora's box, deconstructing the masculinity and "Whiteness" of the story, the blaming of evil on a woman (read Adam and Eve), and the notion of what "evil" is in the world --- it is all the strife of life, and all human beings experience it. Ah, but we have hope. I argued, though, that getting an education (which I define as hope) was not accessible to all throughout history. #$#@$! It is still not accessible to all and it's 2016. I think the case became more clear about the traditions that the texts acknowledge - that is, they who govern and control tend to recreate the standards, values, belief systems, and cultures that empowered them to the place of privilege they have. To make the case, I asked each student to name the one book they hated reading in high school (that was a simple task). Not surprisingly, the books were all canonized and represented a viewpoint and time period that was far from relatable to the lived experiences of students. Ah, but my students tend to come from backgrounds where education has always been valued. They all named British texts - how post-colonial can any of us ever get?
I'm not critical of this, and that brings me back to Eliza, 'enry and Alfred. It is the access to the language and traditions of power that I feel are important to offer to all students. No tracking. No labeling. Simple unraveling of what is the language of power and how do individuals find themselves in it.
Of course we watched Star-Bellied Sneetches, too (well, a clip of it) and I discussed TFA and charter schools and David Coleman and the ways that some have found a way to profit in education (especially on the poor). It's crazy.
My solution. A star-bellied Sneetch has much to learn from one without a star and vice versa. Keeping cultures apart from each other as "other" rather than as human is the problem. We read a piece, too, from Dr. Theresa Perry who wrote that many emancipated slaves earned a degree in higher education not for jobs (because they weren't available), but to finally feel human. To be illiterate was to be enslaved by those in power.
Then I came home and Lossine sent me a video, an act with no knowledge of the mini-lessons I had with my undergraduates. It is the cherry on the cupcake. I fault Universities, too, and all the educated elite for creating this mess.
We can do better. All I have is the hope that we can.
