Odds on Christmas

Q. How do you know it's officially a White Christmas?

A. Ask an Irish bookie.

Here on the frigid Emerald Isle, where the green rolling hills have been buried under several feet of unseasonable snow, whether or not it will be a White Christmas is not determined by the icicles dangling from every tree, but rather by the booking office. It states, in no uncertain terms that it will be White Christmas only if it snows on the actual day, regardless of the fact that the country is experiencing the lowest temperatures in 70 years. The odds currently stand at 4/1 of a single snowflake falling from the skies over Dublin on Christmas Eve (one assumes within the direct line of sight of a booking agent). The odds extend to 5/1 for Christmas Day itself.

The odds of my making it from Austin, Texas to Belfast, Northern Ireland felt considerably higher as I started off early Monday morning. I shudder to think what bookies would have made of my attempt to land at both Heathrow and Belfast City, as my itinerary boldly stated, when the latter was closed outright, and the former was operating at about 30% when I started out. By the time I got to Newark, the flights to London both before and after had been cancelled, but mine was still on the board, flashing "on time."

It was there that I met my Boston sister and brother-in-law (also making their way to Ireland for the family Christmas, though flying direct to Dublin) who got me into the Continental Presidents Club thanks to their status as people who fly a ridiculous amount and only on Continental. Have you ever been in one of these special club rooms in airports? I was amazed. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't the parallel-universe airport I experienced upon entering the unassuming sliding doors right off Gate 120. Here I was, thinking I was a sophisticated world traveler and had no idea that if you had enough money and/or traveled enough on the same airline, you could bypass the long line at Starbucks and the drafty chill of the terminal and instead settle into a comfy chair in a well-heated lounge, surf the Internet (free), while sipping on wine (free) and nibbling cheese, crackers, fruit and chips (free, and I hear some club rooms have a much more interesting spread). Maybe I should have cynically expected as much. But until Monday night at Newark Airport, I was a total innocent in the ways of elite airline travel.

The glass of wine surely did wonders for the flight across the Atlantic. We landed in the eerie dark of a northern European morning. (Seriously...it's weird when it's full dark and 8 a.m. Weird in a primal, visceral sense that makes me empathize with pagan sun rituals.) Heathrow was not the bustling crush of humanity it so often is. In fact, as I made my way to Terminal 1, more and more of my fellow travelers veered off until I was literally the only one winding through the security line switchbacks to get to the guy who takes your in-transit picture and checks on the infrared camera to make sure you don't have a raging fever.

• Him: Where are you going, then?
• Me: Belfast
• Him: Good luck with that.

The odds were steadily climbing as I rolled my bag to the other side of the barrier and joined a short line of other Terminal 1 hopefuls. The lady at the desk took one look at my ticket and waved me through. Two steps later, a guy asked my destination and sent me back. "Belfast City is closed." Sighing, I rolled back, only to be sent on by the lady again. "bmi 84 is going--and it's Belfast International that's closed, not City. Not yet." I tried not to feel the envious eyes of the other people in line as I, and I alone, wheeled my way into the terminal.

Heathrow Terminal 1 is a place I have spent some time. United flies out of there along with all flights to the British Isles and Ireland. So, between visits to family and and my two years in the Middle East, I have become somewhat familiar with Terminal 1, especially the Pret a Manger and the Giraffe Cafe. Let me tell you, on Tuesday morning, Dec. 22, it was a mere shell of its former self. A few pitiful forms stretched out on chairs (who knows how long they'd been waiting?) Some dads and kids browsed in the shops. There was no line at the Pret a Manger (a miracle in and of itself) and the departures board had a long list of red "cancelled" notices with just a sprinkling of "on times" or "delayed" in Christmas green.

bmi 84 was most definitely going out, a fact I hardly counted on until I was actually walking down the jetway. I had a window seat and a prime view of the few planes landing (mostly big 777s from faraway places) and even fewer taking off. So I was hardly surprised when the pilot came over the intercom and announced that, right as he was about to start the plane, he was told that Belfast City had closed (this was shortly after an announcement that we would be taking off, but he wasn't sure if we'd be able to land once we got there. None of us knew if this was a joke or not, though he assured us we had plenty of fuel...) The whole plane groaned in unison, but no one suggested we de-plane. bmi 84 was most definitely going. How long we had to sit on the runway was another question entirely.

Turned out to be only about 45 minutes--the best 45 minutes I've ever spent grounded. There's nothing like the prospect of spending multiple days in the confines of Terminal 1 to put a delay in perspective. Belfast City re-opened; we took off amid merry cheers, and landed into a startling red sunset over an arctic Ireland buried under at least two feet of snow. There were TV cameras waiting for us in the arrivals area, and a lot of families, like mine, relief warring with disbelief on their happy, holiday faces. I got interviewed by a radio reporter who asked me if I minded the delay.

• Me: Mind?! I feel like I've won the lottery!
• Reporter (somewhat taken aback): Oh? And why is that?

Because, dour British person, that's how it feels when you beat the odds, thread a very narrow needle of international air travel and slip into a country on the only plane that's landed in three days. Driving back to my sister's house in the suburb of Ballynure, the fat full moon looked especially stunning rising over the snow-blanketed hillside. I don't care what the bookies say, it looks like a White Christmas to me.

This Train's Year in Books 2010

Not that this will come as any kind of huge shock, but there are few things more enjoyable than recommending books to people. I've recently had occasion to do this for two friends, one who was traveling to Italy and my Secret Santa from school. The experience left me aglow for days and hungry for more.

Then, as if life couldn't get any better, my family has been coming through recently with the Amazon gift cards (really, the only thing I want for Christmas, ever), thus swelling my account balance and prompting mad book-buying sprees. While on Amazon, I read through their 2010 book recommendations, then flipped to the NY Times Book Review to do the same.

And thought to myself...why can't I also release a Best of 2010 book list? The answer, of course, is there is no reason in the world. It's also a great way to re-cap the year in a way that makes sense for me. I'll leave the Christmas letters and pictures to my more-organized relatives with cute kids. Consider this my year in review through the lens of the best books I've read in 2010.

January: No Logo by Naomi Klein

I spent half of 2010 in Abu Dhabi, and in January had just returned from Christmas with my sister, brother-in-law and K in Morocco and Spain. K recommended Naomi Klein's No Logo after we'd both finished The Shock Doctrine (also highly recommended). In No Logo, Klein writes about the endless and destructive cycle of corporate advertising and the effects of selling image (as companies do these days) as opposed to actual products. It's a brilliantly written wake-up call and an important reminder of the dehumanizing forces that perpetuate sweatshops in Asia, the loss of blue-collar jobs here and the bankrupt illusion that we can buy peace of mind.

February: The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English from Shakespeare to South Park by Jack Lynch

I bought this book for my birthday, and rarely have I given myself such a cool gift! I know I've mentioned it before, either in this blog or RR of Arabia, but Lynch's book is by far the best in a long string about the English language I read this past winter. The best part is his obvious enthusiasm for our language as an ever-evolving wonder as opposed something that should be set in stone. One of the ways he does this is by exposing most of these supposed set-in-stone rules as 19th century impositions by Latin grammar teachers (including the split infinitive and whether anyone should end a sentence with a preposition). Of course, I share Lynch's fascination with English's free-wheeling, anything-goes vibe, but his take is far from hippie-dippie. Here is a lucid writer with a lot to say about what is fast becoming the language of the world.

March: The Weed the Strings the Hangman's Bag--Alan Bradley

If you haven't already discovered this amazing mystery series, go out right now and pick up the first installment Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. It stars Flavia de Luce, a scarily precocious 11 year old and budding chemistry genius growing up in her family's rapidly decaying manor house in rural post-war England. These deeply real, often stark novels are anything but twee Brit kid-lit. In fact, they are most definitely are not for kids. Only adults can truly appreciate Flavia's intellectual brilliance combined with her very child-like emotional vulnerability as she struggles to be seen as the youngest in a family of three (all brilliant) girls and an emotionally distant father still reeling from his wife's (and the girls' mother) recent death. As someone who interacts with 11 and 12 year olds on a daily basis, I respect what Bradley does with Flavia as a character, which is both respectful and captivating.

April: An Anti-Cancer Life by David Servan-Schreiber.

My mother, as most of you know, is recovering from lung cancer, having never smoked a day in her life. During the first year of her recovery, she read this book and spent the next months 1) putting it into practice in her own life and 2) recommending it ceaselessly to my sisters and me. When I finally picked it up, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew it contained lists of anti-cancer foods, along with explanations from Servan-Schreiber, a doctor who applied the rigors of science to the study of how changing one's lifestyle and eating habits can truly keep cancer at bay. He himself has inoperable brain cancer, which he has lived with for more than seven years by taking his own advice. His honest and clearly written account of both his own struggles (medical and personal) and the science behind his claims is more about how to live than what to eat (though the aforementioned food lists are also there).

The bottom line is this book changed the way I look at food and exercise and helped anchor the sense of "balance" I wanted to bring to my post-Abu Dhabi life. So far, so good! Even if you don't have cancer or know anyone who does, this is an excellent book about staying healthy in mind as well as body.

May: Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plot Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory AND The Big Short by Michael Lewis

You may have seen both of these books on other "best of" lists (including at least one of the reviewers from the NY Times). I'll add my voice to the hype. Although about vastly different time periods, they both are the kind of nonfiction that read like the best kind of page-turning fiction. They are also both about audacity in action, written by masters who know as much about plot, character development and suspense as any novelist. In the case of Operation Mincemeat, the audacity lead to the success of D-Day and the defeat of fascism. In the case of The Big Short, it nearly led to the collapse of the financial system as we know it. Pick your dose of audacity and enjoy!

June: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

As I was leaving Abu Dhabi, I found a copy of this book (which wasn't released in the States until July), so I'm going to count it as a June book. It was the perfect companion for the transition from the Middle East back to urban teaching in the States. It's all about living in a foreign culture and the ways it becomes home, as well as the ways it never can be, and the implications this has for relationships, politics and daily life. Mitchell is my favorite living author (who wrote my favorite book of all time Cloud Atlas) and this book has everything I love about his work, including a perfect balance of history, character, plot and deeper themes. It takes place in 17th century Japan, on a tiny Dutch colony--the only Western point of contact with Japan at that time. Jacob de Zoet is a clerk with a deep moral center who finds himself adrift in more ways than one. My explanation doesn't even begin to cover it. Read it. If you like it, read Cloud Atlas, Mitchell's less linear true masterpiece.

July: Tongues of Serpents: A Novel of Temeraire by Naomi Novik

This is the seventh installment of Novik's alternate-reality history set during the Napoleonic Wars, which imagines the world exactly how we know it except with the addition of sentient dragons to the political and military mix. As with most books that involve dragons, Novik's Temeraire selected and bonded with his captain, the surprised naval commander Lawrence, shortly after emerging from the egg. The relationship between the two is thoroughly wonderful, as is Novik's familiar-not-familiar world. (Napoleon also has a dragon corps, of course.) Start with His Majesty's Dragon, the first in the series. If you like historical novels and fantasy, you cannot go wrong with this series.

August: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (Also, The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle, which I reviewed already on this blog.)

This book came out on the second day of school in Austin, where I'm now teaching 6th grade nonfiction studies. It's only appropriate that after spending all day with 105 12 year olds, I would stay up until midnight reading the last of the best Young Adult series to come out in recent years. Collins's dystopian, sometime-in-the-near-future America is divided into 12 districts where a vastly reduced population work in near-slave conditions for the benefit of the Capital. To keep the districts in line, the powers-that-be stage an annual Hunger Games, a gladiatorial battle to the death using two children randomly selected from each district. Our heroine Katniss is the strongest and most genuinely written girl character I've ever read. She and her district partner in the Hunger Games unwittingly put in motion a series of events that threatens to topple the Captial's hold on the population. Collins brings it all together in the final pages of Mockingjay. If you are just discovering this series, be glad you don't have to wait for all the books to come out. Buy them all at once, starting with The Hunger Games. You won't want to stop reading even long enough to get the next installment after you finish the first.

September: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

Never one to pass up a book about outer space, I picked up this nonfiction look at how NASA and other space programs throughout the world prepare human beings to live and work in space (with an eye on an eventual human mission to Mars). Roach is a hilarious and brilliant writer who somehow gains entry into the weird world of weightless experiments, space food taste tests and many other riveting and decidedly unsexy aspects of space travel they never show on Star Trek. This book is laugh-out-loud funny and full of information, an excellent combination.

October: Bury Your Dead: An Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny and The Rhetoric of Death by Judith Rock

I bought only two books in October and have to recommend both of them. October is a rough month in the education world. The school year is in full swing, and there is very little time to surface. But I made time to read these new novels by two of the best mystery novelists writing today. The Rhetoric of Death is the first novel by my godmother Judith Rock. Though I'm hardly an unbiased source, I would enthusiastically recommend this book even if I had no personal connection. Set in a Jesuit college in Paris during the Counter-Reformation, it stars Charles du Luc, a young rhetorics teacher who gets caught up in court drama and international politics while trying also to help stage a ballet for the king (Jesuit ballet was a big thing in those days!). The historical details, compelling characters and several exciting scenes set in the Louvre when it was still a run-down palace and home to squatters definitely separate this book from your run-of-the-mill mystery/thrillers.

Louise Penny's newest Gamache novel is not to be missed. Though start with Still Life, the first in the series, if you've haven't read any before. Penny sets most of her books in Three Pines, a Quebec village she goes to great lengths to idealize in a way that contrasts strikingly with the very real characters that populate it. Gamache, the chief inspector of the Surete, is one of the most appealing detective out there today. Though this new installment is only partially set in Three Pines, it features many of the characters from the previous books.

November: At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

What's not to love about Bill Bryson? His latest is about the history of the home, centered around his old historic vicarage in Norfolk, England. It's full of facts you never thought you even wanted to know about the various rooms in the house and how they evolved through the years. I especially liked the chapter on the hall (how that has changed!) and the whole concept of private space. I love my light-filled apartment here in Austin, and had even more occasion to be grateful after reading Bryson's book that I have such a wonderful space to myself, given the ways our ancestors lived in the not-so-distant past. Anything by Bryson is worth your time. I especially love A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Mother Tongue, my second favorite book about English.

Which brings us to...

December and my recent book-buying sprees! Rather than recommend any of these (most of which I haven't started), I'll leave you with a list of what I have recently downloaded. If you've read them, or are planning to, I'd love to hear what you think!

• The Passage --Justin Cronin
• How to Live--a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
• The Sherlockian--Graham Moore
• The Disappearing Spoon: And other Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements
• Songs of a Dying Earth--various authors (sci-fi, not environmental nonfiction)
• Body Work--Sara Paretsky
• Atlantic--Simon Winchester

On Monday, I'm off to a white Christmas in Ireland with the family. I will be taking these books (and maybe a few others) along for the ride. Overall, 2010 was an excellent year--for books and in so many other ways. The peace of the desert has lasted, and though I'm working nearly as hard as I ever did, it has not sent me reeling and rootless. I remain anchored in what feels like a safe harbor and am able to keep the worst of the storms at bay. These books have helped.

Onward to 2011!

Glimpses of a further shore or On being asked to help with a college essay

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

--the last line of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, my favorite book and one you should read immediately if you haven't already.

As the above quote shows, I'm an incurable optimist of the Don Quixote school who will gladly tilt windmills or dedicate my life to drop-hood if it means that maybe, just maybe, I can help fill the ocean. This also explains my love of our root myths like the journey of Prince Siddhartha or the resurrection. Although my cultural home is Christianity, it is the underlining narrative arc of all faiths that I truly believe in. I care less about theological particulars or what happens after we die than I do about the promise that light will eventually defeat darkness, that striving for justice or peace or renewal will bear fruit, that forgiveness is possible, that the ocean will fill with drops, slowly and surely, until the tide changes forever. Never in my lifetime, of course. But in that future Someday. And that my microscopic butterfly-wing-flapping over however many years I'm alotted on the planet will somehow contribute.

When you think about it, this is probably just as outlandish as believing that a 1st century prophet was the result of a virgin birth and the biological son of God who bodily rose from the dead, hung out for a few weeks then was whisked up to heaven through the clouds. But it's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I've been thinking a lot more than usual about these questions since my first class of students have become seniors in high school. In a world where examples of failure, greed and darkness constantly parade before us, I have been treated to brilliant shafts of light in the form of these teenagers. You will be glad to know that there are members of the up-and-coming generation who have tilted and run over real monsters like poverty and homelessness and yet remain on the path to academic and personal success. One even asked me for help with her college essay. As a middle school writing teacher, this is immensely satisfying, even dreamed-of--the equivalent of actually giving the "I'd like to thank the Academy" speech aspiring actors practice in front of the mirror. More than that, though, it bolsters the kind of hope that is only possible if you believe that little victories add up to big ones. This particular student's life is a dramatic case in point, but certainly not the only one. She lost both of her parents and lived in shelters for most of her life until being adopted by a couple from her church, who sent her to a private Christian school in Oakland. She is now applying to college and will no doubt be accepted. She is a senior in high school, a typical teenager who hates chores and a blinding beacon of what is possible.

Naysayers will point to all the not-beacons out there, the kids without a kindly couple from church, without an email list of editors-in-waiting or whatever other advantages that came the way of my former student or those like her. It's true. There are so many of them. And some are also my former students: girls who are now pregnant, young men (and women) who haven't been able to slip the bonds of addiction or crime or whatever else ails life these days. What to do in response to this wildly contrasting reality? Some will throw up their hands; some will batten the hatches and get as much for themselves and those like them as possible. Some will continue to work to squeeze a few more drops into the ocean. It's no secret whose team I'm on, and all of my students make it possible to stay here, hopeful and even happy, that the changing of the tide is coming.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shoreis reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

--Seamus Heaney, "The Cure at Troy (excerpt)"

Get a little closer

If you aren't already friends with NPR on Facebook, you may have missed this post. Even if you are, you may have skipped it, thinking, 'what does being gay and abstract expressionism have to do with me?'

Quite a bit, it turns out. Go on and read it now...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/11/18/131431877/on-being-gay-being-out-and-being-art

The concept of thinking, consciously, about the ways we bring all of the world into focus is just too cool not to share. It happens naturally with art, as Alva Noe (author of the NPR post) points out and is part of the profound appeal of spending time in a museum. The interaction between art, viewer and our own perception is one I've felt many times, but haven't really thought about as such. Maybe you know what I mean. It happens every time you stand in front of a stunning example of how an artist has brought the human experience into focus, and you become inescapably part of it. Taking this same museum mindset and applying it other aspects of life is fascinating in its implications.

The question of how close you bring yourself into that experience--how much you embrace it and make it your own varies from person to person. However, this act of looking into or moving closer is also absolutely necessary because there are instances when keeping your distance is damaging. This is where Bishop Swilley comes in--or comes out, as he did recently in an act so brave it became art, according to Noe. Because it forced people to look and bring an aspect of the human experience into focus--and become inescapably part of it.

I love the thought of creating art--or at least an artistic moment--through asking others to step closer and/or stepping closer to them, whether that be emotionally, ideologically or even physically. I love that Noe has equated this interaction with creativity in both senses of that word. Stepping closer to someone/asking others to step closer is always original and innovative. It also creates something irreplaceable. As she suggests, it allows us to learn more about ourselves and our world.

Recently, I've found myself dealing a lot with the tension that exists when I disagree profoundly with something but want to resist turning away completely. I feel this way when I'm listening to the news or despairing the results of the mid-term elections. Other times, I'm in a meeting and trying to find a way to a compromise when all I can really do is lean in closer and hear the person out. Sometimes I feel this way just because I'm in Texas, where the world runs differently than I'm used to. It makes me feel better--and more inclined to put out the effort--after reading Noe's piece. Rather than stifling a long-suffering sigh, I can imagine stretching my creative muscles, making them more pliant, moving toward that place of courage and immediacy where true human art can happen.

Nothing but time

Dear Santa,

For Christmas, I would like one more hour in each day and two on the weekend. At least. I've been very good all year at using the time I've been given, which is why I'd like more.

Your eternal friend, rr

Even though (sadly) Santa cannot grant my wish, I've felt aglow all day with the gift of time, as if that jolly spirit had, in fact, bent the laws of physics and wrapped me up a personal allotment of hours and minutes. In this case, it wasn't Santa but the powers-that-be at my current school. These enlightened folks came up with something called a content day. During a content day, all the teachers from a certain subject get together for a couple hours in the morning, then have the rest of the day to plan as they see fit. Time. Like all precious gifts, the day has left me feeling warm and grateful, free and mellow. That the day involved six solid hours of work (after the meetings) is beside the point. Or rather it is the point. The six hours I worked this afternoon are six hours I will not have to work this weekend. Six whole hours. The mind boggles, then does a happy dance.

Perhaps you, too, have experienced the warm rush of a free afternoon or hour, the easing of tension, the sudden ability to breathe deeply. Time must surely be our most valuable commodity here in the developed world, surrounded as we are by so many other less fleeting goods (at least for the moment). It isn't that way everywhere. Time in other places is much more fluid. It runs like water through the culture and is impossible to grasp, horde or give away to delighted recipients in six-hour chunks. During the two years I lived in Cameroon, I dealt with a long list of cultural differences. I learned elaborate greetings, how to bargain in French and ways to smoosh myself into half (or a third) of the front seat of a car. I tried every single dish set in front of me, including porcupine and deep-fried crickets. The one thing I never could shake was my Western sense of time. It got me up at 6 a.m. on the "first day of school," and out the door even though I knew...I knew no one would show up and that classes wouldn't start for another week. I simply could not stay in bed when school was supposed to be starting. I had to go see the shuttered classrooms and the abandoned, wind-swept yard for myself. (I like this hourglass because it is full of sand on both sides!)

On a more serious note, it also got me, nine teachers and 45 students arrested on a field trip. Due to bus problems, we arrived late at the school we were visiting in an English-speaking province that was under a strict curfew. Rather than spend the night with our hosts (as all my Cameroonian colleagues suggested), I insisted (strenuously) we return, as planned, because there was no way of alerting the parents that their children would not be home on time. On the road after dark, we were stopped and taken "downtown" to the police station where we were interrogated and forced to spend the night. The next morning, at first light, we returned to our village. The lynch mob of parents I expected never came for me. A mom told me later that they only would have worried had we been a few days overdue.

So, time moves differently other places. This is neither good nor bad (though, given my experience on the wrong side of the law, being able to adjust helps a lot). It is interesting to think about, though, given the degree of happiness and peace a half-day of flexibility inspired. It's made me think about the gift-giving that's coming up and ways I can give the gift of time to others. This will, of course, involve spending my own time--something that, I'll admit, makes my heart flutter with anxiety. But the warm glow wins out because, 'tis the season, after all. If Santa can't come through with a whole day, I should be able to spread around a few hours.

Here is the same clock that walked quietly
Through those enormous years I half recall,
When between one blue summer and another
Time seemed as many miles as round the world,
And world a day, a moment or a mile,
Or a sweet slope of grass edged with the sea,
Or a new song to sing, or a tree dressed in gold

--Judith Wright

We are what we speak

Today in Spanish class we learned about the verbs "to be." Yes, there are two. One, ser, describes permanent states of being, things like character, nationality, professions, personhood. Estar, on the other hand, represents life's more fleeting moments: moods, feelings, the weather, and, interestingly, all locations. You may remember this confusing you in high school Spanish. Native speakers, of course, don't make ser/estar errors, even as young children, just as they never mistake the gender of a noun or adjective. To them, a table is feminine, an arm is masculine, and describing the weather naturally evokes a temporary sense of being. Hispanic kindergartens may misconjugate verbs or mess up pronunciations like kindergartners everywhere, but deeper concepts like gender and ser/estar are burned into their minds in a different way. (At least according to my Spanish teacher.) Noam Chomsky and his linguistic ilk love to talk about how our mother tongue shapes the way we think (rather than vice versa), burrowing passages into our physical brains, so that the neural pathways of, say, a native Chinese speaker are actually different than the neural pathways of a German or Peruvian. It's one of the most fascinating concepts in the world, when you think about it. Language as a universal human trait but the languages themselves making us all fundamentally different. Such a small step from the concrete reality of nouns and verbs into the metaphysical realm of what makes us tick--and the lengths we may have to go to ever truly understand one another.

I love the thought of native Spanish speakers existing in a reality where there is an unmistakable linguistic difference between the permanent and the temporary. When I learned about it today in class, I immediately wanted to translate it into English. It's impossible. If it's sunny outside, I can only say: It is sunny today. I can't imply with my verb choice that it is sunny now but may not be tomorrow. Or later. Or even in the next minute. I could use a lot of words to describe the weather's temporary nature. I could say: It's sunny right now, but who knows, really? Or I could say something that sounds either obvious or depressing, but might be the closest translation of estar by remarking: It won't be sunny forever. This may be why some languages (or people who speak certain languages) are sometimes accused of being dour or fatalistic. In English, the present just is. In other languages, like Spanish, negotiating the present requires a bit more analysis.

English is very concrete. We have so many words--way more than any other language in the world. I still think this is very cool, but I used to think it was cooler. As I learn more about other languages, I realize how much we Anglophones depend on our vocabulary. We need a lot of words to say what we really mean, words that other languages slip into other parts of speech. One of my favorite French words is meme, which is both an adjective and an adverb. It is a damn useful word, one with no English equivalent, or at least none as elegant. Meme means same. But it also can mean self. It can also mean the actual or center of something, a way to emphasize an essential characteristic. If I said something was Texas-meme, I'd mean it was the very essence of Texas-ness. In English, I'd have to explain (That was so Texas. I mean, totally and completely a reflection of the whole state. Seriously.) In French, I'd just say it was Texas-meme, and the implied meaning would be there, built into those four letters. It's just as cool as having the world's most robust thesaurus (as English does) or two verbs that mean to be.

You may think, given my enthusiasm for linguistics, that I'm someone who learns languages easily and with unmitigated pleasure. This is actually not the case. I live so steeped in my own language that learning another is deeply unsettling, like being in another dimension where none of the rules apply. But the traveler in me likes the voyage, in theory: the understanding that can be gained by visiting, even temporarily (go estar!) someone else's world view.

(If you have any cool linguistics elements of a language you speak, please share!)

Learning the Force

Halloween is a cool time to be in close proximity to a lot of children. There is something so genuine about the holiday, despite its emphasis on disguise. Yesterday the kids wore their costumes to school. We had the usual mix of horror movie characters, princesses, witches, werewolves and ninjas. Dressing up is the ultimate playful act and it's fun (and often super cute) to watch kids play when I spend so much time trying to get them to stop playing and be serious.

And, of course, since the kids were dressing up, the teachers did, too. I wore a full-length, black cape my mom made me when I was a teenager. It's the most beautiful piece of clothing I own, but I don't have a chance to wear it very often. So I dressed in all black and put on the cape. With the hood up and a suitably solemn expression, I decided I could pass as a Jedi. (Although the kids came up with other options, most of them having to do with characters in Lord of the Rings, though I didn't have the outfit or the ears to pull off a hobbit.)

I didn't even know if the kids would know what a Jedi was--but they all do. Some even knew about the scene in the original movie when Obi-Wan Kenobi hides R2D2 and C3PO in plain sight by using his Jedi mind powers on two Stormtroopers at a road block. (These aren't the droids you're looking for.) I was joking around in class about that scene, going up to kids and moving my hand, Obi-Wan style in front of their eyes: You aren't tapping your pencil incessantly on the desk; you are studying for the quiz so you get an A. We laughed and moved on, but it got me thinking. Being a teacher is a lot like being a Jedi. And it's not just about messing with kids' minds.

Maybe it was the hood. Maybe it was billowing around school all day in a long, black cape. But hear me out on this one because I'm not trying to be cheesy. (Nor am I really much of a Star Wars fan.) But from what we see in all of the movies, being a Jedi is mysterious. It requires a mix of rigorous training and genuine faith. Sound familiar? I'm thinking of another scene in the original movie when Luke Skywalker has a helmet covering his eyes. Light saber at the ready, he is trying to deflect laser beams being shot out of a small ball hovering around his head. He doesn't know when the laser beams are going to be shot or where. But Obi-Wan (monitoring nearby) encourages him to relax and use his feeling and instincts to guide him. Luke gets shot in the butt a couple times, throws a fit, wants a clearer answer but Obi-Wan is insistent that there is no other way.

If there is a better metaphor in film for learning how to be a classroom teacher, I challenge you to find it. Although instead of one hovering, laser-beam-shooting orb, imagine, say, 25 or 30. True, I don't walk into the classroom every day with a helmet over my face, but, as with all human interaction, I can't see clearly into the hearts and minds of my students in order to provide exactly what they need at all times. I have my tools at the ready and a clear understanding of the goal, and then I have to get on with it, trusting my instincts to channel the laser beams where they need to go. And, despite my best-laid plans and intense concentration, they often nail me in the metaphorical ass. Yesterday, in fact, my last class was mostly laser beams and despite my Jedi-cool outfit, I was no Obi-Wan.

These days, though, classes like that are rarer than they once were. Which brings me to the next way being a teacher is like being a Jedi. Like Jedis, every teacher needs a mentor but, like Luke, one's teaching mentor is going to sound like they are spouting vague, Kenobi-ish platitudes for a long time before anything s/he says really makes sense. In the movie, Luke rips off the helmet and stalks off to pout in a corner of the Millenium Falcon after getting zapped one too many times. Obi-Wan can only watch him go. I was reminded of this earlier in the week when talking with a colleague who is struggling. Her classes are improving markedly (no crash and burn here, and I've seen plenty), but she is in despair. The laser beams are coming too fast and furious. It's very dark inside her helmet, and she's not sure if her light saber is even working. I sat there and felt every single thing she was saying. I tried to channel my own teaching mentors, true Obi-Wans, with their finger on the pulse of the Force itself. But I also knew everything coming out of my mouth sounded like dialogue from a cheesy sci-fi movie from the 70s. It was the equivalent of "trust your feelings, Luke" with some practical logistical advice thrown in. It was the kind of advice I remember hearing and not really understanding from my own teacher mentors. The task seemed too big, and I felt blinded by my inexperience.

Which brings me to the last way being a teacher is like being a Jedi. To maintain their classic cool and draw strength to battle evil, Jedis connect to the Force. The Force is described as the combined consciousness of all living things, a power that can be tapped and channeled, by those who know how to use it. This concept is either cool or ridiculously woo-woo, depending on your point of view, but it does have implications for teaching. In fact, it has implications for any activity that is too complex and emotionally charged to quantify in a spreadsheet or checklist, as education is, despite continued and sometimes worthy efforts to fortify and box it like breakfast cereal for delivery anywhere, anytime. It's something I've known for sure only recently, but one I have felt since July 16, 2003, the date the school where I worked in San Francisco opened. Teachers need a Force. They need others to draw on when things when things get tough or the laser beams are coming fast and furious or the Death Star of institutional racism and educational inequity becomes too much to handle. They need colleagues who believe the same things about the work and are willing to put those beliefs into action repeatedly. Like the living consciousness in the Star Wars movies, these belief-inspired, repeated actions add up to something else, something bigger. Something like a Force that keeps a school, a classroom or a teacher moving when there is nothing else. I would be lost without it, as would anyone, I would argue, who has to feel their ways in the dark for as many years as teachers do.

So I came home last night and hung up my cape for another year. I had a head full of deep thoughts and a vague notion that I needed to buy a light saber as a prop for next year. Take that, laser beams! And may the Force be with us all.

The times between

I stumbled onto something awesome recently in the ongoing quest for a work-life balance. I'm not sure what to call it, but it makes me think of that trick that turtles have of carrying their houses around on their backs. They have everything they need at all times, but can use it or not, as the situation warrants. It reminds me of the running around town I've been doing with my laptop bag, and how much of a life becomes possible when everything you need is right there on your back.

For the past two weekends, I have become a master at using the times in between the things I want to be doing to get work done. I have mapped out free wireless connections all around Austin, scouted cafes and made a mental note of accommodating park benches. As I go about my business, I am never far from a place where I can whip out my laptop or stack of grading and use the time to my advantage. It's been working like a charm. I get a surprising amount done in small intense bursts, then merrily speed off to my next extracurricular activity.

Take last weekend, which was a three-day weekend. Now, I still suffer from the delusion that I'm going to get a ton done on a three-day weekend, so I save up longer-term projects. Not the best plan. In this case, I had to prepare two presentations for a staff meeting, in addition to planning for the week and grading my first major test. Yeah. You can see the problem. I also wanted to go to yoga all three days, attend the Texas Book Festival and go to Spanish class. While Monday was reserved for work, I knew it wouldn't be enough. But I had stuff to do! I mean, really. The Book Festival! Author talks, book signings, yummy food! My personal version of nirvana, for free at the capitol building! The old me would have sucked it up and spent two full days at school. The new me...well, I was frankly flummoxed.

Until I started using those between-times to get stuff done. I didn't plan it--it happened that way because I just went ahead and did the fun stuff I wanted to do. I went to the Book Festival and spent all the time I wanted cruising the booths and eating chicken tacos. Then I took my computer to the lovely Capitol grounds and spent the 90 minutes left before an author talk writing my homework handouts and preparing the short activity the kids do at the beginning of every class. Afterward, I spent the 45 minutes between the author talk and yoga on a bench in front of Whole Foods working on Tuesday's lesson plan. (It was a three-day weekend, remember, so I had Monday off). The next day, I spent the hour before church at a cafe, sipping a cappuccino and grading the last of my tests. By the time I went into school Monday to prepare my presentations and finish everything up, I had done enough in between times to be able to leave at 3 p.m.! Since yoga wasn't until 6:30, I could go home, put my feet up and watch a movie. True, I had to watch the movie to write a lesson plan for our Saturday School film study, but, hey, it didn't feel like working.

This weekend is shaping up in much the same. After Saturday School and Spanish class, a time-sucking double whammy, I went back to Whole Foods and got in about an hour of work before yoga. Tomorrow before church, I'll be back in the cafe.

Now, you, dear reader, might think it's a little sad to be pulling out work to fill every free moment. I mean, here I am, flush with excitement about this brilliant efficiency when I am literally carrying my job with me wherever I go. But I don't see it that way. Maybe it's because I'm most accustomed to working alone in my classroom for hours at a stretch, relentlessly producing the needed materials for the week and hardly blinking until it's done. This new in-between-times thing seems like a vacation by comparison. I can still work with intense focus (and it's true, as the security guard at Whole Foods informed me, I don't blink a lot), but the work occurs in the context of a life that is actively taking place beyond four classroom walls. Which is a huge step in the right direction, or so it feels.

Now, all I need is a name for this time. In-between time is descriptive, but not particularly inspired. Getting-a-life time? Pocket time? My personal favorite is turtle time, though I know it evokes a different image than the one I'm after, the one of me with my job neatly contained on my back, and my life rolling out ahead of me.

Contemplating Superman

We know what works, proclaims Waiting for Superman, the new documentary about one way to reform the public school system so that all kids have an equal shot at success. The Answer, it turns out, happens to be exactly what my colleagues and I do every day, as teachers at a high-performing charter school. According to filmmaker Davis “An Inconvenient Truth” Guggenheim, teachers unions, the practice of tenure and the bloated bureaucracy of school districts are keeping principals from stocking their schools with passionate educators committed to closing the achievement gap through high expectations, longer school days, Saturday classes and mandatory summer school. Sound familiar? The charter network I work for is especially lauded in the movie as a model of the kind of schools that work. We see five adorable Everykids try—and heart-breakingly fail, in most cases—to be accepted to these educational havens. Demand is great. Space is so limited. If we know this model works, the movie proclaims, why aren’t all schools like this?

It is a crime of epic proportions that public education in this country is so savagely unequal. I borrow the word savage from the title of Jonathan Kozol's groundbreaking book, Savage Inequalities, which came out in the early 1990s and takes on much the same issues as Waiting for Superman, albeit with a slightly different emphasis. In Kozol's book, the lavish public schools of suburban Chicago are compared to their practically derelict inner-city counterparts. The word savage is as appropriate then as it is now to describe the brutal consequences of a failed school, a failed education. The next generation is made up of children, after all; children who depend on every single one of us, whether we are their parents, relatives and teachers, or simply taxpayers and voters. We cannot fail them.

This belief put me on my current career path and takes up a great deal of my mind, heart and blog, as you all know. So, I’m the last one to argue with the need to reform public education, along with a lot of other institutions that truly aim to serve the People in all our messy complexity. But sitting in the theater watching Waiting for Superman, my feelings were decidedly mixed. Not about the movie’s ultimate message, but about the way the work I do every day was being sold to the general public. Mainstream documentaries by nature need to be punchy and overly general to stir folks up. I get that. But I’m here to propose a sequel to Waiting for Superman. Because if turning every school in America into one like mine is really The Answer, then the public also needs to be equally agitated to support the excellent, dedicated teachers we need to make this happen.

I’ll call my sequel We Are Still Standing. As the title implies, it would be about perseverance in the face of the constant onslaught that is teaching those longer hours, of never relaxing those high expectations, of insisting that you aren’t going to give up on even one kid and meaning every single word. There is a saying in our network, "The secret is, there is no secret." Meaning, all it takes is time. Lots and lots of time, given repeatedly and consistently day after day. The teacher parking lot at my school is full by 6:15 a.m. Most cars are still there at 6:30 p.m. and later. Working on the weekends--working most of the weekend-- is the norm, even if we didn’t have Saturday School nine times a year. I’m not complaining. This is the life I've chosen, and I love. I’m simply stating the reality. The movie didn’t really touch on that part. In fact, no teachers were interviewed at all. Instead, it was taken as a given that most teachers are standing by ready to throw themselves bodily across the achievement gap if only those dastardly bureaucratic, anti-kid unions and district offices weren’t holding them back. I think that’s what made me the most uncomfortable. Not the image of teachers as remarkably dedicated but the assumption that this happens in a vacuum, or that it should. The president of the biggest teachers' union has said that the movie makes it "cool" to blame teachers for all of our problems. I disagree. Waiting for Superman doesn't blame the vast majority of teachers. Instead, it puts them up on a very high pedestal by assuming that they will--and should--stand alone in the fight to improve our classrooms. The movie pooh-poohed the need for more funding (don't we spend enough already?) and, while it interviewed several dedicated parents, suggested over and over that the saviors, the "supermans" of the film were the reform-minded teachers who were ready to swoop into the rescue. Problem is, there isn't much room at the top of a pedestal, hardly any room for things like families, friends, hobbies, the ups and downs of life. Without changing the current staffing models of most high-performing charter schools, there simply isn’t a whole lot of time for teachers in schools that work to be anything other than teachers. Everyone in Waiting for Superman seems OK with that. I'm not sure how many of the 1 million teachers in this country would say the same. And I wouldn't call them "anti-child" or selfish for thinking so.

Not that I'm throwing up my hands or joining the ranks of the naysayers who say it's impossible to reform something as entrenched as unequal public education. Where such inequity is concerned, there are very few hills I'm not willing to die on. I'm saying, though, is that before we completely dismantle the organizations designed to advocate for teachers, we think about what else it will take (besides the worthy goals of ending antiquated and destructive hiring/firing practices and streamlining district offices) to make sure all of our schools can become the educational success stories we see in Waiting for Superman. We have to face the issues that high-performing charter systems are already addressing that the movie didn't mention. Issues like keeping teachers in the building for more than two years (about 40-45% of all teachers in my charter network have been teaching for under two years. The next big group has less than five years under their belts). And, related to this, supporting all the students who enter our doors to see the program through.

We won't ever have to give up our high expectations, longer hours and zeal for achievement, but if we're going to ask teachers to work the hours of CEOs and high-powered lawyers, we might have to start paying them accordingly, or figure out ways to job share and drum up community support. Even as they are being hailed for their long hours, some schools in my charter network are actually shortening their school days (from 5:00 to 4:30) and rumor has it that Saturday School may be on its way out. These are changes are meant to make the work more sustainable for the people doing it. No one could accuse us of being adult-centric bureaucrats (cause, wow, we really aren't) but it turns out that even the most committed teachers don't want to be Superman. We just want to be able to remain teachers, and we can't do it alone.

This need for balance (in more ways than one) reminds me of a low-ropes course challenge called All Aboard. It asks a group to stand up on a large springboard that wobbles from side to side. The only way to get the whole group up is to step on board one by one and then carefully balance the spring as others climb up. It doesn't take Superman; it takes teamwork and patience and not letting go. Three superheroic qualities that, if put into action, will save a lot more children than the Man of Steel ever could.

We already have so many pieces of the educational reform puzzle. Waiting for Superman is right (good teachers are vital, and every kid deserves one). My charter network is right (every single student can learn). The politicians are right (money isn't going to solve all of our problems). Parents are right (we need more schools that work). Even the president of the teachers' union is right about a few things (teachers do need to be supported rather than pitted against each other). Instead of using our favorite pieces to tilt the springboard our way (and shove everyone else off), we need to step up together to find the equilibrium we claim to want. Sound impossibly naive? Or maybe just impossible? Now who's throwing up their hands. Despite everything that's wrong, we are blessed at this time in history to have a great number of passionate and tireless reformers on the educational scene; reformers who stand unmoving behind slogans like "No Excuses" and "Whatever It Takes." If there was ever a time to move public education toward the ideal, it's now. Our kids shouldn't have to wait any longer.

Leading and leaning

I spent the weekend at a camp in the piney woods outside of Huntsville, Texas, with about 200 students and teachers from schools like mine all over the country. The annual student leadership summit (there's that word again, and, no, we weren't signing peace treaties) brings together 6th graders and 10th, 11th or 12th graders, two from each school, hand-picked for their ability to lead other kids. They spend time completing a series of team-building activities, games and reflections meant to further stimulate this potential.

The students certainly were stimulated. Like most things related to this particular charter system, the day started early and ended late. My kids spent the first 15 hours or so moving from an in-depth discussion about leadership traits to a kickball game followed by an intricate school-improvement process, low-ropes challenges, canoeing, archery and the infamously fun gaga ball (an intense dodgeball played in a circular pit the size of a taco stand). On the second day, they climbed telephone poles and walked across wires suspended 25-feet in the air as part of a high ropes course. There was also a zip line (too fun!) and a climbing wall.

Needless to say, the kids had a blast. I, too, enjoyed the mellow of an absurdly low teacher-to-student ratio. Each duo was accompanied by one teacher. (Usually, even on field trips, we are easily at 25-to-1 if not higher). This changed my typical vibe quite a bit. I dropped what I like to think of as fond-efficient, a sort of smiling Mr. Von-Trapp-pre-Maria-sans whistle. Instead, I went into what I can only imagine is Mom mode, keeping track of comings and goings, taking a ton of pictures, urging them to go off and have fun with their new friends, stopping just short of tucking them in at night. The other teachers and I sat around, talking about our schools and stopping every so often to cheer on the kids or check in. Though we run our classrooms with a clockwork efficiency worthy of any Rodgers and Hammerstein Austrian, we in this charter system are in the habit of doting on our students a fairly ridiculous amount. Like most teachers, we love them to pieces. Unlike many teachers, we are encouraged by our schools to get to know our students in and out of the classroom in a big way (see "Home Visit Bridge" from last month). Trips like this are just icing on the cake.

It is also the only time (to my knowledge) that students are invited to a nationwide gathering of other students. You would think, in this charter system, that people would bend over backwards to fund and plan events like this that gather students from all over the country. It was incredibly powerful to see the ties that bind kids--the common chants, hand motions, slogans, extended metaphors and brightly colored t-shirts. The highlight of the weekend (other than the zip line) was the t-shirt exchange (mad trading of school shirts) followed by a campfire led by the high school students. Seventeen years olds who had been in the system since 5th grade stood up and told the 6th graders (hanging rapt on every word) how important it was to keep going, keep leading and keep striving. Kids who will be the first in their families to go to college next year stood face to face with 11 year olds who are trying to do the same thing. The adults hung out in the back and said exactly nothing. In fact, nothing I say for the rest of the year will have such an impact.

We finished with a stirring rendition of the song "Lean on Me" led by a teacher with a gorgeous voice and a huddle of high school students with a lot of heart. The middle schoolers stood up and threw their arms around each others' shoulders (unless they were, eek, standing next to someone of the opposite sex....) Swaying to the beat and singing with all their might, they walked away from the campfire and back into their lives that much stronger, knowing they had a whole country full of fellow travelers to lean on. More kids should be able to feel the same.

The likes that bind

I haven't yet seen "The Social Network," though I've heard and read many a rave review. Whether you love to hate (or just plain hate) Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook and apparent heartless egomaniac, you have to admit that his invention (or, his ripping off of a series of other people's inventions, depending on your point of view) has changed the way we socialize. Facebook has now reached the point of saturation in our culture where its merits and pitfalls are being debated in the vast public forum of the mainstream. About one in 14 people worldwide are on Facebook, exchanging information, posting pictures, liking each others' statuses and turning the word "friend" into a verb that will likely make its way into upcoming editions of the dictionary. Though some shudder and bemoan the loss of person-to-person contact, it's hard to argue with 500 million people who use it as a way (or another way) to keep in touch.

I'm one of them. This week I've felt powerful fondness for Facebook as a web that connects us rather than an impersonal algorithm that disrupts meaningful interaction. I don't know about you, but I like reading my friends' statuses. I like scrolling through the pre-game, during-game and post-game agonies of the sports fans; I like hearing about the meals people have cooked, their kids' latest adventures, their vacations, moods, workouts, gardens, pets and how glad they are when it's Friday. I dig reading recommended articles and watching favorite videos. I love the commonalities among friends from the same region who don't know each other, but write similar posts. For example, whenever it is over about 80 degrees in the Bay Area, everyone writes about it. It's charming. My sister's best friend from college has an uncanny knack for spotting celebrities. He posts every one of his encounters. It's cool--and has gotten to be hilarious. When would I ever talk to my sister's best friend from college, a guy I like a lot, but am never going to call? But reading about who he sat next to at a Manhattan restaurant is a bright spot in the day.

And that's the thing about Facebook. It's not a long, wonderful conversation with an old friend and never will be. It's a thousand conversations in passing, daily connections with people who we don't see daily. Just like cell phones have allowed us to bring our conversation partners with us wherever we are (again, for better or worse), Facebook allows us to stand around the proverbial water cooler with people who are miles away, who we'd never see or hear from otherwise. Do I need to know that my friend from elementary school closed down a bar on her 37th birthday, or that my former colleague finished four grad school assignments? Of course not. But I want to. This kind of information brings us together in ways that strengthen our connections, as daily interaction always does. It might not move mountains, but it adds up, pulls us closer, gives us a common frame of reference, a thread to follow through the complexity of daily life. When my friend attached to the US Embassy in Mauritania posts running commentary on the fashion choices of African First Ladies, I'm that much more connected to him and the world. When a friend in Abu Dhabi cheers on her Aussie rules football team (the Collingwood Magpies, dontcha know), I smile at her enthusiasm for the sport, even though I no longer see her every day. When my former students complain about homework or broadcast their latest likes, I understand them in ways I never did as their teacher.

Do I really know them any better? Probably not. That's another thing about Facebook critics are quick to point out. It's a very public forum. What you see is what people choose to present to the world. It may or may not be the real story. To which I say, who cares? Why is this different than any other casual interaction? The difference is the interaction itself, the privilege of being able to keep connected, in whatever way works.

When I was little, my mom would come in to my sisters' and my room and, as a bedtime ritual, list all of the people (mostly faraway relatives) who loved us. It was very sweet, a reminder of the ties that rooted us in our family and community. Today, Facebook does the same thing, albeit on a less intimate scale. It makes our bonds visible and updates them constantly. It shows us the web we have spun and sit in the middle of, the web of family and friends, colleagues, neighbors and eras of life.

What's there not to like?

Enough

Enough is such a fascinating little word. In its adjective and adverb forms, it describes an amount or action that is adequate to satisfy a desire or need. As in: I bought five pounds of red, seedless grapes at the store today because one 2-lb. bag has not been enough. (True story, and I've eaten at least a pound of them since getting back from the store.) As an interjection, enough denotes impatience or exasperation. As in: "Enough of this talk about renewing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my life!" Both usages of the word are remarkably subjective. What is enough? When have you had enough and in what situations would you shout 'enough!' to bring an end to whatever was going on?

I've had a lot of encounters with the concept of enough recently, and not just in the produce aisle. In fact, in my professional life, enough is not a measure of mere adequacy but a constant clamor of competing agendas all looking to be satisfied. Because urban education is all about trying to bridge the gap between not enough and enough. We teachers deal with enough on a daily basis: how much teaching is enough? How much writing? How much homework? How much reading? How much test-prep? To fall short of enough is to keep my students from achieving parity with their more privileged peers. Anything less is not good enough. It can't be. There is too much at stake, starting with the 105 students in my class this year and extending out to the big, abiding, complex questions of justice, equality and the value of a child's mind, regardless of their background or circumstance. It's enough to make my head explode, but not enough to stop thinking about for very long.

And then these questions bump up against the other enoughs. Enough time. Enough balance. Enough support. Enough encouragement. When everything you give still doesn't feel like enough. I have had conversations with three different friends this week about when to say 'enough!' and how to carve a space away from the din of enough-issues at school. I spent two years in the desert trying to figure this out, and I feel better about it than I ever have before. The only real 'answer' I have doesn't silence the clamor, though. It simply allows me to hear it in a different way.

Which brings me to church. Not to religious faith in general, which is all fine and good, but to church today in Austin. Because what I heard today made me think even more about enough, and the way I'm trying to deal with it.

The New Testament reading was from 1 Timothy, chapter 6, the Bible at its social justice best. It's the passage about money being the root of all kinds of evil (see reference to renewing the tax cuts above), but there's more to it than that.

"But as for you, man [or woman] of God, shun all this [wealth]; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. ¹²Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called..."

This is a rallying cry if I've ever heard one. And at first glance it might sound as though a person should throw themselves into whatever they are doing, consequences be damned. Fight the good fight--and don't whine about it! Pursue righteousness--cause evil don't take a holiday! But sitting in the pew this morning, I felt the peace of these words in the phrase "take hold of eternal life." And that, of course, is what you do to save yourself from enough while still hearing its call. You take hold of life. You recognize the need of those you serve, and you find a way to build a wall with a gate that opens both ways. And you make a plan to put yourself on the far side of that gate on a regular basis. Believe me, it does take planning. It takes setting very concrete goals and then working as hard to reach them as you do with everything else. You don't wait until you're not needed. You will be waiting forever. You don't hope that someone will drag you away from the clamor, or build your wall for you, or design a cute gate with flexible hinges and give you permission to open it. You take hold of life, to which you were called.

For me, I have committed to going to Bikram yoga four days a week. I also have an advisee this year who doesn't do his homework pretty much ever. I keep him after school twice a week. I go to yoga twice a week (and twice on the weekend). The old me would have kept him after every day. The new me might have, too, except I already had this commitment in place, and, well, that commitment built my wall. The knowledge of what will happen to me if I ignore the wall is what built my gate. The reading from 1 Timothy reminded me today of why it makes sense. Even 2,000 years ago, they knew.

Fight the good fight and take hold of life. Anything less just won't be enough.

A lexicographical moment (in Spanish class)

I felt a little like Hermione Granger today, but I'm sorry. Linguistics really gets me going in that eyes shiny, face-lighting-up kind of way. It happened during my first Spanish class here in Austin, at a branch of the local community college. I was there with my principal and a colleague; we'd registered together because so many of our students and their parents are native Spanish speakers. Plus, Texas is one of the most unabashedly bilingual places I've ever experienced, up to and including Southern California, which, frankly, doesn't hold a candle to the Lone Star State's surprisingly non-strident approach to dual language issues. In public education and everywhere else. More on that another time.

My Hermione moment came during a mini-lecture on Spanish dictionaries. The professor mentioned, in passing, the Real Academia Espanola, the official body based in Madrid that guides and administers the Spanish language. Many languages, especially in Europe, have a similar group of intellectuals and linguists whose job it is to guard and protect a language against all invaders. The French academy, for example, is notorious for throwing a fit at the mere mention of borrowed words like "le weekend" or "le laptop." My fellow Spanish students figured that English has the same set up, so one of them asked about it.

"Oh no," the teacher said. "English doesn't have an academy."

"So, we just go to the dictionary to find out what words to use?" said the student. Cause, certainly, there had to be a central authority somewhere. Right?

And this is where my hand shot up and started waving in the air. My principal looked at me funny. My colleague muttered "teacher's pet" under her breath. But I couldn't help it. My heart started beating faster; my cheeks flushed with excitement. I had to share with my classmates one of the coolest things about the English language.

Because, in English, we don't go to the dictionary to find out what words to use and how. The dictionary comes to us. Yes, us. All of us speakers of English from the northern tip of Alaska to the heart of London, from the streets of New Delhi to the malls of the San Fernando Valley. We define the language we speak, literally. And the dictionary follows behind like a bloodhound on a trail, picking up the pronunciations, definitions and parts of speech and filing them away between its red leather covers. Though it is a handy reference and a big help when confronted with, say, pococurante or syllepsis, a dictionary is really just a snapshot of a language in constant motion.

If you don't believe me, read The Lexicographer's Dilemma by Jack Lynch. Books about English are a nerdy nonfiction sub-genre favorite of mine, and this is the best of the lot. In this book, Lynch explains how dictionaries are made, starting with the mother of them all, the Oxford English dictionary. The story of the OED is the story of English writ large, that crazy hodge podge generational undertaking for a crazy hodge podge language.

Because when the OED folks started to codify English (make lists of words and definitions) what they did was conduct massive and meticulous research into the way the words had been used throughout the ages. And they used those examples to construct their definitions. They didn't decide to define opalescent as 'having a milky iridescence.' They discovered that whenever opalescent was used, that's what it meant. And if we ever start using opalescent in a different sense and keep using it that way, the dictionary will re-write the definition. It won't redefine the word--English speakers would have already done that. The dictionary will merely record the change. That's its job.

Now, I love words a ridiculous amount, from those SAT monstrosities to the newest middle school slang. I love grammar. I love teaching writing. At the end of the day, I love meaning, and how it is constructed. It's one of those endlessly complex and fascinating aspects of the human experience. I can't get enough. So, when the aforementioned Spanish teacher, who was scoring mad points with her linguistics acumen, used irregardless instead of regardless later on in class, I shuddered. I'll admit. But, while I appreciate an excellent vocabulary and have pretty much dedicated my professional life to promoting the well-written sentence, I would not change a single thing about English. If irregardless comes into standard usage (it is currently listed as non-standard and dates back to the 1930s), I will not be one of the (many) people throwing my body between it and Websters. There are those who long for more rigidity in our mother tongue. As much as I love it, I'm not one of them. To try to fit English into a sturdier frame would be to rob it of its greatest strengths: it's responsiveness, its dizzying array of synonyms, its viral slang, its expansive, fascinating messiness.

So I told my Spanish class about the dictionary and why we don't have an academy. I stopped short of the OED, but just barely. I was a blaze of enthusiasm and a possible embarrassment to my friends. But I couldn't stop myself. It's why I'm writing to you now, perhaps a more receptive audience, before I tuck my inner Hermione back inside my head and wait for the next nerdy nonfiction book on English to make the rounds.

A chicken in every...

The keeping of chickens in this day and age, especially if one is not historically from farm stock or living in Iowa, is legitimate cause for comment. In truth, the three people I've met who keep chickens find endless opportunities to bring up the hilarious antics of their useful, eco-friendly pets (no one keeps them for meat, after all). And upon being introduced to the chickens of one's friends, it's easy to jump on the bandwagon (band coop?). Chickens are hysterically funny in their bobbing, strutting, pea-brained way. They might not snuggle up to you like a kitten, but they, like all domesticated animals, certainly know how to capture the fond attention of The One With The Food.

A friend in Austin has roommates who keep chickens, three of the standard orange-y/red feathered sort (though one apparently lays blue eggs). I discovered last night how these roommates come to be chicken owners, and it's a story I had to pass on because it says so much about the world these days (plus, it's the funniest chicken story I've ever heard, and that's saying something...)

Apparently Roommate #1 was driving down a fairly busy Austin street about three months ago when he saw a woman with a cell phone following a rooster down the sidewalk. R. #1 decided to pull over and chivalrously ask if she needed help. Wherein the woman explained that she'd come across the rooster (still heading east toward downtown) and was following it while dialing through her contact list on the hunt for a chicken savior. R. #1 offered to take the rooster. (I thought it'd be cool. And I have a backyard.)

Woman (concerned): Do you know anything about chickens?

R. #1 (totally lying): Of course!

Woman (who didn't own the rooster but somehow felt responsible for it according to the Societal Rules of Engagement circa 2010): Well...as long as you know what to do I guess it's OK.

Thus given permission, R #1 grabbed the rooster and tossed him in the backseat. Instant urban chicken owner.

Enter Roommate #2, girlfriend of R #1. Upon hearing that her boyfriend had picked up a rooster on the side of the road, she requested, calmly from all reports, that he build a coop, which he did. She then purchased three hens for company.

And if it all ended there, that'd be enough. But there's a coda to this story. A month later, after endless 4:30 a.m. wake-up calls, R #1 and #2 got rid of the rooster, but kept the chickens.

Me (eying their enormous lab/Great Dane mix): Umm...what did you do with the rooster?

R #1: I put him on craiglist for $5. He sold in about an hour to some lady who wanted him for breeding.

I love this story so much. In addition to the truly priceless images it evokes (rooster bobbing along the street, concerned citizen playing the part of mother hen at five paces back), it is such a charming example of freedom in action. Not the red-white-and-blue bluster we hear about from the bombasts, but daily-life freedom, the kind we don't usually think about but maybe should.

A widespread (often legit) criticism of American culture is that we have no culture at all. Instead, we are a collection of fragments: fragmented families where once extended clans lived in the same house; fragmented neighborhoods where we once knew everyone around us; fragmented values in this salad bowl of peoples and backgrounds; fragmented friendships conducted over Facebook rather than face to face. But this independence has also made us more flexible and open to the world around us. Rather than worrying what grandma or the Joneses will think (since grandma lives in Florida and we don't even know the name of the family next door), we can do things like follow a rooster down the public street or decide, in the amount of time it takes to pull over, that we'd maybe like to give that rooster a home. There's plenty of room in the backyard, after all, and no one around but a girlfriend, a roommate and a huge dog. It also makes it possible, even preferable, to interact with a cell-phone-toting stranger and negotiate the transfer of a rooster among equals, united only by their concern for the bird and uncomplicated by rigid class barriers, clan affiliation, ethnic strife or gender issues. For instance, in much of the world, this kind of interaction between a man and woman who were strangers would never happen.

Now, you can't market this story. You can't say, God bless America where a man can pick up a rooster off the street, claim him for a time, then sell him on craigslist. I'm cracking myself up just writing it. But it is still an "only in America" story, not just for its ridiculousness, but for the social fluidity of the whole thing, from the first SOS phone call from the rescue lady to R. #1's entree into chicken ownership to the craigslist-surfing new owner driving the rooster into the sunset.

Or maybe its just me...

The intellectual bling of Terry Castle

So, I'm not an intellectual. There are some people who read with interest and awe-inspiring enjoyment academic tomes on their favorite topic or Greek tragedy or Proust. Not me. The bustling literary marketplace always seems to hold something just a bit more compelling, like the latest in an ever-growing list of favorite mystery series, or some nerdy nonfiction (I recently read an ode to librarians called This Book is Overdue. Cool!) You know, something entertaining. Something mainstream. Something written with a general audience in mind. For a bibliophile, I can't claim to have delved very deeply or esoterically into my hobby of choice. A nice, broad survey of the literary landscape is more my speed. Any cred I get only comes from reading fast enough, and often enough, to cover a lot of ground.

But every once in awhile, a gem of a book comes along that is both ridiculously fun and smart (and not science fiction, which is regularly both). Intellectual smart. And I remember that, while I might not be a real intellectual, I love hanging around them, literarily speaking. To me, these authors are like glassblowers or acrobats. They possess a rare, special gift worthy of being ooohed and ahhed by the general public, or at least their adoring fans. This is not to detract for the workaday writers I can't do without. After all, watching glassblowing or high-wire daredevilry would get tiresome eventually. But there is something absolutely rapturous in the combination of true braininess and excellent, lucid writing. As anyone who's been to college knows, the two do not frequently go hand in hand.

The latest jewel in this rarefied collection is The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle, humanities professor at Stanford and apparently hugely well-known literary critic in intellectual circles (hence, not to most of us...). Sure, she's an expert in 18th century literature (ghost stories, according to Wikipedia!), but her command of the English language regularly transforms the page from a literary work (words adding up to something beautiful) into what can only be described as an artistic portrait of word usage. So that you could take the page, frame it and put it in the Louvre titled "The word 'adumbrate' in context." Terry Castle (b. 1953), and everyone would know exactly why it was there. I throw around the word 'page' loosely here. I'm reading the book on my Kindle, and thank God, given the number of times I've had to use the built-in dictionary. I haven't seen some of these words in print since the SAT, if ever. This just adds to the deep affection for, say, the casual use of 'tyro' in the first essay. I remember learning that word around the same time my 11th grade English class was reading The Tempest, and I always thought it'd make a great name for a Shakespeare character: Prospero, Benvolio, Horatio, Tyro. Castle, of course, uses it correctly to mean a beginner or newbie. And she just drops it in, no muss, no fuss. It's thrilling.

There's also the actual content of the essays, all of which are highly personal, even blog-like, reflections on various passions (World War I, music, interior design, rubber stamps, just to name a few) with plenty of family drama, relational angst and pop culture references thrown in. You don't have to be particularly interested in the topic to get sucked in. In fact, it might be better to start without strong feelings either way because Castle, like all good writers, has enough enthusiasm (and opinions) for all of us. I read with fascination her deconstruction of home decor magazines through the lens of the post-9/11 world, where both her love of interior design and her unease with its inherent, perhaps morally questionable, middle-class escapism, come through in equal measure. Maybe I like her writing so much because no matter how refined (or not) the topic, there is always a noticeable dose of heart and self-reflective (even self-deprecating) humor woven in.

Though I can connect with almost none of the topics (not that it matters), who Castle is is very appealing, as are some of her less-explored asides. I'm actually super psyched to find a intellectual woman writer from California who is not Joan Didion (I know some of you are fans, but her writing doesn't have enough heart for me.) Castle's parents are British, but she was born in San Diego and spent all but three years of her childhood in Southern California. She writes about the state with the fondness and honesty of a native, using it as more than a backdrop, but not quite a character in several essays. I love how she captures that "more than just scenery" aspect of living and traveling in California. It makes my own native heart smile.

She also has a (to me) refreshingly and unashamedly post-Freudian view of being a lesbian. She examines head-on some of her more gendered, even 'masculine' ideas without (in my opinion) once suggesting that being a lesbian somehow involves wanting to be a man. She writes (too briefly) about the affection between straight men and lesbians in a way that suggests feminist scholars would swoon dead away at the thought. (She even calls it "the real love that dare not speak its name.") The friendship between gay men and straight women has been examined, even televised (hello Will & Grace), but that a similar fondness could grow between lesbians and straight guys is somehow beyond the pale? I look forward to hearing more from Castle about this, especially since I don't get what the big deal is, despite all those women's studies classes under my belt.

In fact, I want to hear more from Castle about pretty much everything, which is why I'll be looking up her oeuvre and digging in over the next few months. I recommend you do the same, starting with this book. If you do, let me know! We can trade our favorite word-usage portraits and admire the trove of sparkling sentences and shiny insights. Intellectual bling at its finest, even for those of us who aren't intellectuals.