Could you please speak more clearly?

“I was going to tell you about the rattlesnakes.”

Just back from a working vacation at our editor Smokey Daniels’ Santa Fe Rabbit Moon Ranch. He and his more than lovely wife Elaine should be working on their own professional development book titled Best Practices for Hosts. Harvey “Smokey” Daniels is our editor on the vocabulary acquisition book Sara and I are currently writing and our publisher ponied up some cash to send us to confer with him giving the project a booster shot in the arm.

The first morning I was up, still living two hours in the future thanks to hopping two time zones, and took a stroll with my coffee in hand around the Daniels’ spread. Scrub grasses, tumbleweeds, wild sage and prickly pears dotted the desert along with other anonymous flowering flora benefitting from two or three days of uncharacteristic rains. I saw a couple lizards, some cottontails and a few murders of crows while the sun hoisted itself into the big sky over the mountains to the east.

Smokey joined me outside informing me about the aforementioned rattlesnakes. Having been a bit of an amateur herpetologist in one of my earlier incarnations I had already figured we were in snake country and was already keeping a wary eye peeled to where I was stepping. A little prior knowledge can go a long way. Then again, one can know just enough to be dangerous.

Based on past experience I purchased Chuck Palahniuk’s (pronounced like two first names Paula + Nick) new novel Pygmy to read on the flight out. He is the author of the cult classic Fight Club and I have always found his stuff to be accessible plot driven and quirky. This novel promised to be more of the same. Publishers Weekly described it as: A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as foreign exchange students. A perfect set of criteria for occupying one’s mind while being blasted through the sky at five hundred miles an hour in an aluminum tube.

So, the plane begins to nose up off the runway I pull my new book from my backpack read the accolades on the inside of the dust flaps and started in to chapter one. I found the book unreadable. Not that it was written poorly – but rather that the syntax Palahniuk had decided to use was impossible to decode for me. Chuck decided to write the thing in the broken English of his protagonist and in my opinion he failed. Well, let me re-phrase that – he DID write it in the broken English of his adolescent terrorist – unfortunately for the reader this prose is harder to understand than the well intentioned directions of that fourteen year old Bangladeshi trying to walk you through installation of a wireless router.

Here’s an example: "Location former chew gum, chocolate snack, salted chips of potato, current now occupy with cylinder white paraffin encase burning string, many tiny single fire."

It never gets better – I skipped ahead to see. I am not one to shy away from complex construction: I love William Burroughs cut up work, Clockwork Orange is a favorite as is Motherless Brooklyn and Foer’s Everything is Illuminated is one of my all-time favorites but sorry Chuck – as far as I am concerned you owe me twenty five bucks. There is a difference between complex and complicated. Where these other books I have mentioned use malapropos and twisted syntax to add an additional layer of meaning on their work Pygmy’s construction wraps the story in razor wire. Not impenetrable but you’re gonna be messed up once you get inside and I just don’t think the payoff is worth the blood.

I have been rendered illiterate recently while travelling through various countries overseas. Standing on a corner in Almaty, Kazakhstan cocking my head at a Cyrillic street sign – wandering about in the death star of a fabric market in Shanghai or squinting at the oscilloscope like lines of an Arabic menu in a Cairo restaurant – but this is the first time in a long time I have had this experience with English.

This book made me mad. Mad because I felt betrayed by an author who I thought I could count on. Mad because I had wasted time and money and mad because not being able to decode this thing made me feel stupid. But, it did provide one valuable lesson. It granted me a little insight and a whole lot of empathy for struggling readers. How frustrating it has to be for that kid in the class who just isn’t getting it.

I passed the book on to our host Smokey who read a couple pages and apologized to me for enjoying it. This made things worse. I’m no idiot but now I was playing one on TV. I mean if Smokey could understand it what was wrong with me? I felt embarrassed. My ego was only marginally bandaged when Smokey and Elaine’s twenty something daughter – a big Palahniuk fan – gave the book a shot and agreed with my findings. Then again she may have simply been mirroring the considerable graciousness modeled by her heroically empathic mother.

So, Mr. Palahniuk, I will probably pick up your next book but I’ll sure as hell read a half dozen pages before I pay for it because after all – once bitten twice shy.

Fits like a glove

One

day left in the residency I am doing in Houston. This has been a good one. The kids in this high school have been great and the teachers pretty top notch. The queen bee of the crew that I am working with is a tall bespectacled young woman with curly hair that looks like it might want to get a bit wild but knows better. There’s a nice confidence about the staff. If I were to be cliché I might say that the crew is big picture people – but since I am never cliché I won’t.

One of the five classes that I have been teaching is an ESL (English as Second Language) group. I’ve gained an affinity for ESL kids. Maybe it’s all the international travel the last couple years – I know all too well what it is like to be a somewhat intelligent and passably articulate person rendered beyond functionally illiterate by circumstance.

There was the time I was momentarily and most disconcertingly lost in Shanghai.

One of the joys of working with international schools is one immediately has an advocate in a new and foreign place. The teachers working there have got all the scoops on restaurants, sightseeing, bargains and local specialties - all that good stuff and they enjoy sharing this hard earned data with visiting authors. Shanghai has an incredible fabric market.

Imagine the biggest farmer’s market you have ever seen. Think of that layout stall after stall after stall. Now instead of fresh vegetables the stalls are packed with fabric – all kinds of material on bolts and spools, half finished jackets, skirts, blouses, boxes of buttons and snaps and men and women with cloth tape measures draped around their necks like sauna towels. Now remember, you were thinking of the biggest farmer’s market you had ever seen? Now multiply the size by at least a factor of twelve, okay now make this entity eight stories tall and recall the feel of the 1982 movie Blade Runner. Now you’re getting the idea. You don’t shop at the Shanghai fabric market, you assimilate with it.

We got turned on to the fabric market by a student’s mother who visibly began to vibrate when I asked her if the story I had heard about the affordability of having clothing tailor made in the city was true. “You want clothes made?” She was beaming – “Sweetie, you asked the right person.” And we had. This mom took us to and safely inside the death star sized Shanghai Fabric Market and introduced me to her husband’s tailor then she and Sara disappeared.

I got measured for and ordered two jackets – both a cashmere tweed material, one darker one lighter, that I picked from spools in the cubicle – then I picked the silky lining material. The tailor promised that the jackets would be ready for a fitting in three days and I think I paid something like fifty bucks apiece for them. Not bad for completely tailored sport jackets. I called Sara and the mom with the cell phone provided by the school and we joined forces again.

Three days later true to promise my jackets were ready. Sara and I were on different schedules and she had already finished her day and was at the fabric market with some other teachers picking up some stuff she had made and enjoying browsing around without me not understanding what the difference was between this hound’s-tooth and that. The plan was for me to take a cab there after school and meet up with them.

So, I ask the guy at the desk where we are staying to write a note for me to give to a cabbie instructing the hack to take me to the fabric market. He says Okie Dokie and fills a half piece of notepaper with Chinese characters and hands it to me with both hands smiling and a little bow. To this day I have absolutely no idea what was written on that paper.

At the time that we were in China one could ride a cab seemingly for hours and the fare would amount to about a buck twenty five. The ride from the hotel near the school to the fabric market was going to be almost an hour. I handed the cabbie the note the concierge had given me and looked at him like – “does this make sense to ya pal?” He gave me an affirmative grunt and I blithely leaned back in my seat and took in the scenery as we whizzed along. For all I know the note included instructions for the minimum amount of miles between the separate bridges my head and torso were to be dropped from.

We ride along for about an hour and a half and I am starting to get a little worried. I’m trying to mime to the rearview mirror anything that might approximate - Are we there yet? The cabbie smiles and nods nonchalantly passing cars via the sidewalk. Twenty minutes later we pull up to a hulking building that I do not recognize. I rationalize that we may be on a different end of the giant market. Had I any sense I would have asked the driver to circle the entity. Instead I made a fatal traveling faux pas; I paid the dollar and a half fare then got out of the safety of my cab without being absolutely certain where I was with nobody I knew in sight.

I wandered into the building and while it did bear a bit of resemblance to the fabric market it just didn’t feel right. There were stalls filled with fabric on the ground floor but there were also floors with electrical goods, window mount air conditioners stacked like firewood. Another floor, the size of the bargain basement at Macy’s was full of live finches sounding like a test facility for doggie toys – I think I would have remembered that floor. So there I was – lost in Shanghai, a city whose population equals that of the entire state of Ohio. I can barely operate the cell phone, pretty much relinquished to dialing one of the three numbers programmed into it and nobody is answering. I wander out onto the street and head to a corner it seemed like the thing to do. I stood around and watched people go by and looked around for maybe a place to grab something to eat. Strangers are always more friendly if you are spending money in their midst.

Then my phone rang!
“Where are you?”
“Lost.”
“Are you in a cab?”
“No.”
“Why’d you get out of the cab?”
“Because I’m an idiot.”
“Hang on.”

I can hear the conversation going on amongst the folks on the other end. He’s lost – Did he get out of the cab – why’d he get out of the cab – he shouldn’ta got out of the cab. A new voice comes over the phone.

“Michael?”
“Yes”
“Michael, get into a cab and hit re-dial on your phone, give the phone to your driver and I’ll have my tailor talk to him.”
“How do you flag a cab?”
“You’re gonna have to figure it out.”
“Okay, bye.”

I scan the streets – there isn’t a cab in sight as far as I can tell. There are whole bunches of slick haired hipster looking young men lounging about on various makes, models and vintage of motorbikes though. In Vietnam there are many entrepreneurial motorbike pilots who operate as gypsy taxis. They are he quickest way around in the over congested streets albeit not for the faint of heart. I walk up to one of the Vespa hepcats pointing at his bike and blurt “Taxi?”

He looks at me, points over my shoulder and replies, “No, that’s a taxi.”

Sure enough over my shoulder is a checker cab that could have been dropped via black hole from Lakeshore Boulevard in Chicago. I jump in the backseat – the driver looks a little startled – I think he was off duty having his lunch. He’s an older guy, bald and liver spotted with wisps of white hair around his incredibly large ears. I dial the phone, hand it to the driver and soon he and the tailor are laughing heartily giving me a good view of his missing and nicotine browned teeth. He talks to the tailor and scopes me in the rear mirror – talks a bit more – laughs one more time – then he clips the phone shut like he was a lobster snipping his claw - hands it back to me followed by a thumbs up.

One learns a bit of humility when one doesn’t speak the language.

Drop it like it's hot

 

I got dropped like a penny heated by a burn-Z-omatic torch

 

 

Over the last three months while we have been travelling all over god's gray earth I have let my fitness regiment flag a bit. I decided to remedy this finally this past week so I dusted off my running shoes and hit the pavement a couple times.

I can measure the distance I have run by where the pain in my body is emanating. Right out of the blocks – at the end of my drive - I feel a sharp twinge in my Achilles tendons – sometimes both but always at least one like someone has whipped me just above the heel with a snapped off car antenna.  My knee will buckle a little as if I am going to list and fall over into the tree lawn but then the feeling passing just in time for me to gain my composure saving my neighbors from juggling the decision whether or not to call 911.

 

As I progress to the half mile mark the bottom of my right foot begins to feel as if a gulf ball has been inserted into my shoe underneath the arch of my foot.  This pain intensifies until I hit the one mile mark where it magically fades away being replaced by what feels like a coat hanger, straightened and heated red hot, inserted right below my calf then slowly threading up my leg against the bones to my mid thigh. Then at about the two mile mark, when I suppose, everything had been sufficiently lubricated and loosened up, all pain goes away and I feel like I could run for hours.  This will last til I reach the five mile mark where I swear I can taste blood in my throat.

 

Anyway – I decided to get my bike out this past weekend and sans any sense I elected to make my first ride one with a group of riders who were meeting at a new bike shop on Cleveland's east side. The ride was billed as a "Leisurely trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and back at a 15 to 16 mile an hour pace." The round trip was around 22 miles. In midsummer condition I can maintain a pace around 19 to 20mph for up to 40 miles so I figured no sweat. Well dear readers, I done figured wrong.

 

I was barely able to keep up with the 18 to 20 MPH pace this gang took on the way out to the rock hall. Luckily this bunch believed in obeying traffic signals so I managed to hang with them, catching up at red lights as we rode in our spandex splendor. Like a school boy watching the clock before summer break I watched the odometer on my bike, mentally keeping track of the percentage of the ride completed.  Once the pack turned around at the Hall and began climbing the East 9th street hill back into the rusted heart of Cleveland Ohio I knew I was a goner. This ride and pace was exactly twice as long as I should have attempted first time out.  They left me in their dust – the only person I finished the ride in front off was the guy on the Wal-Mart purchased mountain bike who took a cigarette break every five miles.

 

I rolled up to the bike shop a good 15 minutes behind the rest of the riders who were already on their second helpings of bagels and coffee.  They were gracious in suggesting excuses for me and I will join up with this group again – give me a couple weeks and I'll be able to hang with them for the whole ride.

 

 

 

The real winner here though was Bill the owner of Blue Skies Bicycle on 185^th street here in Cleveland.  I left my bike with him to tune up (I certainly would have finished in front of the pack if my bike had been serviced before the ride – yeah right) and then when I went back to pick up my road bike Sara and I purchased a used tandem that he had for sale in his shop. We're going to run errands on our bicycle built for two this afternoon. The pace will be dramatically much more laid-back than my first ride of the season and Sara – well I don't think she'll have to worry about getting dropped.

This is only a test...

People love to pay good money for first-rate advice and then ignore it.

Back in my manufacturing days working as a quality engineer I had the opportunity to see a lot of consultants come and go. One gave me the line paraphrased above. Well, the more things change – the more they stay the same. I may no longer be problem solving in a machine shop, but the idea of shelling out cash for advice that will be disregarded seems to be just as prevalent in the education bizness. Now I’m not saying there is any malicious intent from the boots on the ground per se. Chances are I am critiquing a dance that is only being performed because one’s feet are being shot at but there are trends I am noticing.

I teach writing and public speaking to people from third grade up and through adult. The last couple years I have been hearing variations on a refrain in schools literally around the world – Students ask, "Is there going to be a – or will this be on the test?" Or a teacher might say, "Pay attention this will help you on the test." THE TEST - the ubiquitous inexorable reckoning looming on the horizon like some innumerably armed Hindu demigod clutching number two pencils and pink trapezoidal erasers instead of swords of retribution charging forward – the cloud of dust behind blotting out the sun. THE TEST!!!

Pick an acronym: SAT, PSAT, ACT, OGT, SOL, AP, IB, OAT, MEEP, FCAT, MCAT or any other alphabet soup variation moniker of a high stakes test and there is one attribute that is agreed upon concerning these examinations by high paid expert consultants over and over again- HIGH STAKES TESTING DOES NOT MEASURE FUTURE SUCCESS. How many bios of people prosperous include the line "I wasn’t the best student…?" Of course, many adept test takers are successful in life – that is not the point. The point is correlating and pinning future happiness to these tests – and subsequently making the CEOs of these testing companies, the folks who leach a living off of "preparing" students for the examination with pre-packaged programs or $1,500.00 an hour tutoring (this service does exist and has a waiting list) incredibly wealthy – is pretty much an exercise on the treadmill of futility.

I recently had the opportunity to hear two dynamic keynote speakers at a conference, Dr. Ned Hallowell – an Oprah blessed and Harvard lettered child psychologist and Debbie Silver, former Louisiana State Teacher of the Year and education professor. Both said virtually the same thing: give all the tests you want – just don’t expect the results to mean anything. In fact – the stress given to and created by these rituals may be doing more harm than good. In each audience I saw teachers and administrators nod in agreement and applaud each speaker, and I know these folks went back to their schools and prepared for the administration of the very tests that these highly qualified and compensated consultants told them to avoid like the bubonic infested fleas.

Why are they doing this? Most to keep their jobs I would imagine. There may be a few out there who believe these examinations are real measures of intelligence and ability (usually folks who did well on such tests themselves) but so much of our behavior is conditioned at the basest Skinnerized level of reward and punishment. Teachers and schools who produce high test scores are remunerated with money, either tax dollars or tuition and, possibly more importantly, the parents (when they are engaged) like tests – as long as the scores look good they will not punish the administration or staff at the next PTA meeting. Check out the book Freaknomics for the correlation between Sumo wrestlers and teachers.

When I am asked if what I am teaching will help on the test I always answer yes because what I instruct is a means to more confident communication, so yeah, it’ll help with THE TEST and all the lessons are applicable to multiple standards but it will also aid, more significantly, after the test when the amalgamation of acronyms have fluttered away leaving one standing face to face with another human being.

Listen folks, since I left school I have never been presented with a life decision that came with a pastel pink inked card full of multiple ovals marked A, B, C, D, or E all of the above. I know it is impossible to take testing out of schools and replace it with interpretive dance or juggling but we can look at it with a critical eye. Shouldn’t tests measure improvement, be just one tool used in preparing future adults for life amongst humans instead of this absolute terminus that we fool our kids into believing? We act as if there is no existence after THE TEST when in actuality most have at least 75% of their life to still live.

I have been picked up at the airport by teachers who identify their school by the exit test administered – I’d much rather prefer to hear how their graduates are affecting our world. Perhaps they are researchers, engineers working on desalination in the desert, philosophers, artists, writers, mothers, fathers, factory workers or maybe some of them are highly motivated, highly educated, and highly compensated consultants beating the drums trying to make a difference – hopefully all of them are happy and consider themselves a success.