Singapore American School

Okay the jet lag is slowly wearing off like steam rising from a sidewalk as the remnants of a tropical cloud burst evaporates 137 miles north of the equator. The past month had been my and Sara’s third trip to Singapore in two years our second visit to Singapore American School in the same time. The little island nation macheted out of the jungle is becoming a second home to us.

It’s funny how sometimes folks back here in the States assume we are going to be holed up in grass huts and charging our iPads with a surplus diesel generator cantankerously poofing out black smoke rings. The easiest way for me to describe Singapore is imagine New York City – dip it in bleach – fix the entire infrastructure and update the architecture by a hundred years and you’d be getting close.

Speaking of sate of the art, our second stint at the Singapore American School (henceforth to be referred to as SAS) proved to be even better than our first – mainly because we knew our way around the school this time. Knowing and working with some of the same teachers as we did last year it felt more like stepping into the classroom after a long vacation. We all have those long distance friendships with folks that no matter how long the time intervals between meetings we just start right up again mid-sentence. That’s how we feel about SAS.

Thanks to the second invite from our friend Dr. Nancy Johnson, we have had the opportunity to really push ourselves as writers, teachers and education consultants. We are basically embedded into the 8^th grade classrooms for three weeks, working with each of the three duets of Reading and Language Arts teachers for a week. We begin each week with three hour and half assemblies for the entire eighth grade a hundred or so students in each session. We then would spend the rest of the week with one “side”. Each side has two teachers and a third of the students – A, B and C sides were respectively on the first, second and third floors. If you think this is a bit confusing – I won’t even go into the schedules which require a slide rule and a Home Depot paint chip chart to figure out.

All we had to do was stand in a room and wait for the kids to show up. It is such a luxury to have so much time with the classes. A lot of the time Sara and I get to see a class of kids once sometimes for less than an hour – here we worked with each group of kids twice apiece. Four hour and half sessions and an assembly to boot really gave us an opportunity to go deeper in our instruction and to build on what the other had worked on the day before.

It’s also easy to look good when working with such dedicated teachers – Nancy, Brian and Brian, Erin, Scott, Rebecca and Betsy all embraced and improved our classroom work encouraging us to go ahead and stretch our ideas. I know we leave SAS better teachers for the experience.

JFK High School Warren Ohio

When I first realized that I was booked into JFK High on the first day back from Christmas vacation I figured the day would be shot by kids unable to switch gears from the sleep late and eating goodies mode to the back in a desk mode.

 

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I had a wonderful visit with the students and teachers, meeting with grades seven through eleven. I was invited by a parent teacher alliance called Artcetera who are responsible for bringing all sorts of extra curricular events to the school. I might quibble a bit with the word extra here though. The folks I met from this organization all knew that adding a little extra creativity to the school day is a very integral part of a successful curriculum.

Extra special thanks to Judi and Brian for bringing me in and for their hard work seeing that their students are exposed and participate in the practicality of the arts. Thanks to Judi for the snapshots in this post as well and good luck on the poetry slam they are holding at the end of this month.

NCTE Conference 2010

Just back from the National Conference of Teachers of English conference which was held in Orlando at Disneyworld’s Coronado Convention Center. Several thousand teachers, librarians, reading specialists, authors and publishers descended upon the house that Mickey built for a week of keynotes, break out sessions, cocktail parties and side trips to the magic Kingdom.

Sara and I were there to attend sessions and to speak about our new book HIGH DEFINITION. We were good citizens – trying to travel self contained so as not to cost our publisher extra dough for projector and sound equipment rental by bringing our own equipment. We were set for the fifty or so folks we expected in our session. Lucky thing we decided to scope out our room the night before our presentation – seems NCTE had put us into a ballroom that seated over 300 folks!

We quickly became friends with Dave – the grand king daddy of all things audio visual for the conference and lucky for us, a friend of our publisher’s school secretary equivalent (you know, the person who is really in charge of everything) Lori. So the next day ignoring a minor hiccup by an uncooperative word document we gave a pretty good session to a packed ballroom!

We did manage to sneak off one of the days and visit the Magic Kingdom – my first trip back to this particular park in over 35 years where we did the roller coaster Space Mountain, the Splash Mountain ride, some inscrutable thing featuring the cartoon character Stitch which we still don’t really know what it was supposed to be about and the Haunted mansion. I remember how high tech and impressive the mansion was those many years ago and now – sadly it seemed a bit dated. Special effects that were uncanny when i was 12 years old were now, rather humdrum.

Finally, we stayed after the official conference to attend ALAN The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. Which is like speed dating for authors and educators – two to three authors sit up on a dais for half hour long panels where they talk about their latest books and teachers listen and then cue up in lines in the back of the ballroom to have these books signed by the attending authors. Sara and I along with our poetry pal, Alan Wolfe popped up a couple times in between these panel sessions and performed some of our poems thanks to an invitation from Dr. Jim Blasingame – Pooh-Bah of the organization and a performing cowboy poet himself.

We also got to hang out with a bunch of really cool teachers who we have got to know over the years – mostly friends Sara made during the years she worked and learned with literacy expert Janet Allen. Christine, Kelli, Anne, Beth, LeeAnn, our poetry slam compatriot Elizabeth, our new buddy Jack Gantos, Orlando native Charles Waters, Boyds Mills Press, Heinemann and a whole slew of folks far too many to mention made this one of our best NCTEs ever.

So to paraphrase an animated insect, “Sometimes wishes really do come true.”

Taejon Christian International School

Had a great visit with the teachers and students at TCIS. Extra special thanks to Connie and Sungmee our librarian  and Chantal queen of the High School English department. We spent three days on the campus working with grades K through 12. Once when I was taking a break I even got roped into reading a picture book to an elementary class visiting the library.

 

During our residency we had a family literacy night where Sara and I did some poems for the students and their parents. We really like to have these evening gatherings when we visit a school because it gives us a chance to let the parents know what a couple poets are doing visiting their students. It gives us the opportunity to show the people paying tuition how bringing in a couple teaching artists is a good investment. We get to demonstrate how writing and performing poetry in the classroom has great practical benefits for all their kid’s communication skills. Of course we all have fun and many more times than not – we get a parent to come up on stage and recite a piece that they had memorized from their school days.

Connie warming up the crowd before the start of our Family Literacy Night.

Appreciative audience members.

A couple boys take to the mic to read a poem they wrote in the car on the way to the event (get that paper down from in front of your faces!)

A parent reciting a Robert Service poem.

Sara leads some ankle biters through a poem they wrote about soccer.

A very special part of this school visit was the fact that we stayed with a family in their home rather than a hotel room. This is always a daunting proposition because you never know what is going to happen. Well – if anyone had tried to tell us how welcoming and gracious the Choi family was going to be we would have thought we were being sold a bridge.

It was so nice to be a part of a family in the middle of this long road trip and as much as all the dinners out are special to us – that one meal before the Literacy night of home made spaghetti with sauce out of a jar and the kids around the table is probably the one I will remember most. Thanks TCIS and extra super duper thanks to the Choi family.

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.

For my next trick...

March and the first week and a half of April have been crazy busy. School visits – a couple of teacher conferences, library readings – I’ve been standing in front of groups of folks and speaking from Baltimore Maryland to Dayton Ohio. In the meantime I have been training for the Cleveland marathon (I’m only running the half marathon) nursing a shoulder that feels like I have a knitting needle skewering the joint and doing a bit of side work helping a friend put together some PowerPoint presentations.

All of which coagulates into an excuse for not updating this blog. It’s not that I haven’t anything to say I’ve just been huffing and puffing (at time literally) to catch my breath. Add to that the fact that I have entered the Blackberry universe and haven’t been taking a laptop on the road as a result and well you get the picture.

It’s not that I don’t have some good stories – and I promise once April (poetry month) is about in the books I’ll be back at it.

Get your kicks...

Sitting

in the St. Louis airport waiting to fly back home.

We had a really good time at the conference in Springfield. The Missouri State arm of the International Reading Association is certainly a gracious host. True to their state moniker the attendees sat back a bit and waited to see what two semi sane performance poets had to say to a ballroom full of professional teachers. Luckily, they seemed to like what we presented in both our keynote and our individual sessions. The organizers and attendees all were effusive with praise and were really appreciative of the work we did.

We also got to have dinner with our editor at Heinemann the super smart and shiny Harvey “Smokey” Daniels – perhaps you have seen his posters around, wearing the ranger hat – you know “Only YOU can prevent illiteracy?” Okay, I made up the poster bit – but Smokey is a really tops in the field and I appreciate time spent with him. Between hanging with him and the teachers at the conference I feel rejuvenated and ready to hit the classrooms this school year.

It’s been a rough couple weeks piled onto a rough year as it was going so I take a deep breath and hope this is the harbinger of better things ahead.

Flying into Springfield was exorbitantly expensive ( $159.00 vs over $800.00) so we flew into St. Louis and drove 3.5 hours to the gig. This allowed us to trace the path formerly blazed by Route 66. The best I could figure out that historic road has been replaced with Interstate 44 in this part of Missouri, but some of the tributary attractions are still around. I also took this opportunity below the Mason Dixon to swing off the highway in Cuba, MO to partake in some barbecue. People in the know – know that southern barbecue is completely different than what we call barbecue up north. I do like myself some pulled pork.

So I’m home for a day then off to Houston where I am doing a week long residency in a high school that I have been looking forward to.

Up, up and away!

Stick 'Em Up

It has been awhile since I made a blog entry from an airport lounge. Up at 3am today to catch a 6 am flight from Milwaukee to Cleveland so I can make a 1pm speaking gig at Ashland College.

Sara and I have spent the last three days in Wisconsin working with teachers at the Walloon literacy Institute. The conference is run by our professional book publisher Heinemann. A professional book is what the teacher instructional guides we write are called in the publishing world – the straight up poetry collections would be known as a trade book.

This is probably our favorite conference, all of the presenters are fellow authors from Heinemann and it really is like a family. Our host and resident bigwig is Harvey “Smokey” Daniels – a real heavyweight in the educational theory arena and also on of the most genuinely nice people one could ever hope to know.

So about 25 or so of us presenters and upwards of 250 teachers converged on Lake Lawn Lodge in the Geneva Lake region of Wisconsin don’t ya know. Here we plotted on ways to actually teach and reach students while still jumping through the hoops that have been set up by the policies which make up No Child Left Behind. For those of you out of the loop on national education policy NCLB has proven to be nothing more than a boondoggle for administration cronies to peddle millions of dollars worth of mandatory educational programs which have recently been proven to be ineffective.

Now, these programs and other foofaw that have been foisted on our schools – mainly our poorer inner city schools (private schools don’t have to follow the NCLB guidelines, and this is a subject that I could veer off and vent about but I’ll spare you for the moment) don’t work because they were never vetted, never tested, were put together not by teachers but by text book corporations whose board members are on the government panel that dictated the policies to be set by NCLB. Sound a bit crazy, sound a bit like conflict of interest sound a bit like the wolf guarding the henhouse? If you agree you’re not alone, the government accounting office said basically the same thing.

So, we have a bunch of this administration’s goons – did I mention Neil Bush, W’s brother, is on the board of one of the biggest companies - perpetrating the injection of these non-working programs into our public schools raking in literally billions and billions of dollars. They’ve been at this for almost eight years now, wringing taxpayer cash from our kid’s schools as if they were bar rags. Now – after it is found out that the programs the schools were told they HAD to use don’t work one would think that the companies who shackled our teachers with these useless conglomerations of standardized tests, software and talking cows (there actually is a talking cow) would be held accountable wouldn’t you?

Hah! Fat Chance! You know what happens? These ratfinks get to pocket all the cash they have made selling non-productive programming to the schools AND because the programs didn’t work congress now cuts funding to the schools by the amount that was spent on the defective programming. As one of the Keynote speakers at Walloon Stephanie Harvey said, the schools still need the money, it wasn’t their fault it they were forced to spend it on stuff that didn’t work, stuff they had no option of refusing – but now they are the ones that suffer while the fat cats walk away counting their wads.

Just another example of how this crew attached to the Whitehouse has emptied the treasury – we’ve been the witness to the best burglary in history and they are getting away with it.

How’s that for an early morning rant?

There may be hope though - tell your legislature to support this document:

http://www.boldapproach.org/statement.html

It may be a little too sane for our government - but who knows?

If he can't do it - Ghengis can.

It’s seeming like warm weather will never come to the north coast. Temps have been hovering in that no man’s land of 50 some degrees. Not warm enough for shirt sleeves too hot for a real coat. It’s hard to believe that school is out in about a week. Speaking of schools - I gave a presentation yesterday for an education minister from Kirgizstan. It’s a wacky world indeed. The way this thing rolled out is a little bit convoluted but here’s the story.

I was doing a bit of volunteer work for a local chapter of America SCORES. This crew combines poetry and soccer in an afterschool program for 3rd thru 5th graders. I know the concept sounds like a rejected improve suggestion from the show Whose Line is it Anyways? “Okay you’re a soccer playing poet with an octopus stuck to your face, and ready go…” but it is a good program and the combo actually works well. My charge was to help this group of poet athletes to come up with a group piece that they could perform at an opening ceremony for an international soccer tournament to be held in beautiful Cleveland Ohio this July.


This tournament is being somehow sponsored or helped along by the Cleveland Council on World Affairs who sent representatives to see the kids working on this piece. Now I didn’t know a Cleveland Council on World Affairs even existed but obviously they do. I got to talking to their education director who was part of their contingent and she told me that they were sending some teachers on a cultural exchange to Istanbul and I told her that Sara and I had just got back from teaching there ourselves. Well we talked a bit more, she asking me where I’ve been around the globe and we both told each other we should keep in touch the way one does when they run into an old co-worker at Starbucks.


Well about a week ago I get this e-mail from Josefin – the Swedish, or was it Norwegian intern over at the CCWA asking if I’d be willing to speak to some teachers from Kirgizstan. Okay, this past December I was in Kazakhstan speaking at a teacher’s conference that was attended by some teachers from south of the border – Kirgizstan. Of course these were all English speaking schools and teachers. Even so, I am obviously an expert on communicating with educators from the former eastern bloc. So I say sure I wouldn’t mind.

Turns the folks I am going to “chat “with are not your average classroom teachers – but the highest of level ministers of education and to boot – Josefin informs me the next day that everything is set up and the two dignitaries (official guests of the US state department) will be looking forward to my ONE AND HALF HOUR presentation. When did an informal conversation turn into a full blown lecture?

You know – I highly recommend putting yourself into impossible situations – the exhilaration one gets when that phantom rush of adrenalin careens around your stomach cavity like a ball bearing in a stainless steel bowl has to be damn near the equivalent of a dose of electro shock therapy. One of those so good when it stops kind of moments not unlike the aftermath of an overzealous Thai massage administered in a Ho Chi Minh City alleyway.


So I meet with Dr. Gulzhigit Soronkulov (first name pronounced GLLLZZZGKKKKKT) and Ms. Samarkul Umralieva and their Russian interpreter – oh yeah, did I say they spoke no English? I give them my keynote that I would do at literacy conference – PowerPoint presentation the whole nine yards while the interpreter repeats my every word. (I do tell him he can paraphrase if he likes but he informs me that he must do his best to interpret what I’m saying exactly.) Well, they laughed in the right places, nodded in agreement and asked a bunch of questions.


Dr. Soronkulov, with his big round moon face, it turns out, is a published poet himself – and while he agreed with me that poets are treated with a lot more respect in the former eastern bloc than they are here in the good ole u-s of a, he was quick to let me know they are still traditionally indigent. He also told me he thought that bringing artists into the classroom was a really good idea and that he found my lecture invaluable. I sincerely hope that this last comment was not a misinterpretation by the translator of “worthless.”


In the end everything turned out great and I arranged for this duo to visit the middle school I was working in the following day and that went without a hitch too. Pretty crazy stuff for some boy from Cleveburgh.

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.

Or forever hold your peace

I just finished a residency at McCormick Middle School in Wellington Ohio working with the sixth graders. We worked on writing and public speaking. Another stellar bunch of kids – a little on the quiet side but very thoughtful – take a close look at all their faces – each one tells a story.

This is what I hoped to get across to this gang. We all have stories, ideas and opinions and each one is important. We talked about public speaking being the number one fear of humankind and that the root of this fear is probably just the fear of being embarrassed. I also explained that in over thirty years on various stages I have never seen anyone die of mortification.

I explained that if they don't learn to speak up there are plenty of other folks out there that would be more than willing to speak for them. Of course this second bunch of folks will only have their own interests as an agenda. Silence is tacit permission. And if you let someone else do all your talking for you – sooner than later you just become angry. Quiet – but angry.

Seems there are just a few too many adults out and about that never learned this lesson – people too worried about looking foolish, being embarrassed or "upsetting the base" to speak up when they have something important to say. Others let themselves be shouted down by bullies who exploit this ingrained fear of standing in the open.

Hopefully the sixth graders at McCormick will know better. They're a smart bunch of kids and I'm interested in what they have to say.

Yurt place or mine?

Well, winter has officially smacked the north coast upside the head with a slush ball. The yard is six inches deep in snow, it's windy, and the sun is gauzed over with gray the same color as mold on an orange. Any sensible person would escape – and in a couple weeks we will be doing so. Where are we headed, Key West, Tucson, Jamaica? Not a chance – we trekking to glorious Kazakhstan! Of which the lonely planet guide quips, paraphrased: "If you're a fan of lunar landscapes, hypnotically long train rides and horse sausage – this is the destination for you!" Oh, and it should be colder'n a bejeezus there too! The country (the 8^th largest in the world – who knew?); slapped to the left side of a border between Russia and China is the first of a triumvirate of trips we are making this winter. Our second is to Jakarta in February – a much more climatically timed excursion and Istanbul in March.

Like all folks making a living as poets we are filthy rich and globetrot for amusement.

Right, believe that and I have a bridge to sell ya in Brooklyn. We are lucky enough to have found our way into the international school circuit as teaching artists, spreading the power of poetry and performance as a part of an educational curriculum designed to enhance literacy and comprehension skills at all grade levels. So why do we work in such far flung destinations? First and foremost, we are adventurers – the opportunity to mix teaching with seeing different cultures and locales is an experience that appeals to both of us – we are not homebodies. But secondly – and a bit scary, because the opportunity to do our kind of work here in the US of A seems to be becoming fewer and further between we have to look across the oceans to practice what we preach.

The current climate of public education toward any programming that is not part of a cookie cutter fodder destined for a standardized test oven is as chilly as the wind outside my window at this moment. No Child Left Behind – sounds like a good idea. Of course, the folks who coined this phrase are also responsible for: The Clean Air Initiative – which actually relaxes emission restrictions for industry, The Healthy Forest Initiative – which allows more logging, Free Speech Zones – which are actually cordoned off areas far away from whatever event is being protested, and the granddaddy of them all – The Patriot Act – See a pattern?

Now while NCLB purports to bring responsibility back to the classroom and get back to basics – what it really achieves is can be summed up in this analogy that I have run across a couple times on the web:

No Child Left Behind - Football Version

The football version of what is going on in education right now. (If you're not an educator, this may not make a lot of sense to you. But send it to your friends who are in education. They will love it!)

For all educators in and out of the education system:

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time, even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. This will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind. If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.

Now I don't want to go on forever here – 'cause I could, so I am going to cut to an ending kinda quickly. One question that I can never seem to get answered by the proponants of NCLB is: "If it is such a good idea – why aren't private schools held to the same rules?" You know, those schools where the folks behind NCLB send their kids? I mean it couldn't be that they want an end to public education. What good would an uneducated, demoralized, unquestioning labor supply be to elite robber barons and their inbred progeny?

Kinda sends a shiver down your spine – doesn't it?