Have the courage not to adopt another's courage. There is scope and cause and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance.
-- Society and Solitude Ralph Waldo Emerson
I recently had a conversation with my youngest daughter concerning the often repeated and now cliché phrase warning folks against the practice of “drinking cool-aid.” Amazingly she, who is only now 16, knows exactly what the phrase means, but never knew the circumstances of its progeny. And as she is bright, insightful, and inquisitive, I will assume many of her generation, are sure of the content of the phrase, but unaware of its roots. She was astounded to learn the phrase came from the horrible events at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. A self-proclaimed prophet of the Lord, Jim Jones, established Jonestown. He and his followers were members of the People’s Temple community, which had grown out of Jones’s dream of a utopian society in which barriers of race and class disappeared amid an egalitarian religious construct. They moved into the Bay Area in the 1970s and flourished in a political climate that supported the church’s aesthetics. Everyone was considered equal, but Jones operated as its head. And according to reports, People’s Temple initially moved to Guyana, South America partly as a result of Jones’s growing drug addiction-induced paranoia. We know this story very well.
After a visit from Congressman Leo Ryan and his contingency, over a thousand men, women and children (including babies) drunk cyanide-laced cups of cool-aid in an act of what Jones referred to as “revolutionary suicide.” So when anyone quite flippantly admonishes another for “drinking [the] cool-aid” I often cringe in a place very deep inside my psychic memory—because I remember when it happened. I remember seeing the women and children deceased and huddled en masse in the naked, steamy, jungle mist. I also remember seeing the face of a woman I worked with in the late 1990s in San Francisco in one of the old film reels of the People’s Temple. When I worked with her, I didn’t know she’d been a member of People’s Temple. She’d obviously survived, and I wondered how she made it out, and at what point she said to herself, “Hey, maybe I’d better be safe; this is leading to no good end.” It is a simple act. It is also often the sanest action one can take—extricating oneself from an unwise adventure. According to the wisdom of the ages, all answers come from within. And when that iron string within us all singularly tingles with the foreshadowing of grave danger, the unwise will turn outward for confirmation; the wise will turn inward. Though some insist that this is the way, our own experience and soul-teachings tell us it is not. I say, listen to the Soul. In order to do so, one must first acknowledge the voice from within that warns against foolishness in the form of drinking from bitter cups of destruction.
Do not drink of the cup of reformist conformity that in this day insists that more complicated schemes of revision will make it all better. On the contrary, in order to make it better, we must simplify. To paraphrase Emerson, “there is at last nothing more sacred than the integrity of one’s own mind.” When we provide students with clear, simple, consistent pathways to the integrity of their own minds, we win, and they win. We cannot do that, however, when we jump from one educational philosophy to the next, and in the meantime, drag students along with us. Not only is it not working, it is downright foolish. And truth be told, if we were a family, we would be considered dysfunctional, and CPS would definitely be involved. We practice a “foolish consistency” in our inconsistency. For the last 3 years I have had to tell my students, “I don’t know, because I don’t know what things will look like next year.” I have tried to operate as an English Department Chairperson for the last two years and have repeatedly had to say to colleagues, “I don’t know because I don’t know what things will look like next year.” We operate amid insanity, and school districts rather than “implementing” some new foolish promise of success for our “failing” schools, should insist on eliminating toxic habits of behavior—namely, the toxic habit of jumping onto bandwagons, citing “research” as the rationale. Any researcher can tell you that social science research starts with supposition and assumption—also with a goal implied or not. That goal usually has a lot more to do with the desires of the researcher’s ego and pocketbook than with anything else. Doubters may wish to spend time within post--graduate environments to test this idea. And this does not suggest that researchers do not genuinely believe in nor have passion for their subjects. It merely means that research is theoretical, and any theory’s practical application must be proven over periods of time and with sound evidentiary support. That evidence should be gathered by independent operators and not by those conducting the research. Why? Well, put simply, the evidence could be biased. It is biased by the desires of those conducting the research who may wish to prove their latest theory, and sometimes do so on the backs of students who are unaware of their guinea pig status. But theorize on, I say, because theory does not trump experience. Nevertheless, the question remains, how do we improve schools?
Ask me, I say simplify. In his seminal work, Walden, Henry David Thoreau said, he went, “to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived." Thoreau insisted on clearing one’s head of all the noise generated by an overly demanding and busy world. The process of clearing one’s mind of distraction is one we engage in every day, if we are learning. We must be still.
When I, nearly twenty years ago stared out of the humongous open glass window on the second floor of Giles Hall, my junior year of college, first learned of these Romantic artists like Thoreau, I was immediately halted by their clairvoyance.
The air was clean, and the sun was true, and a hummingbird toying with a cherry blossom outside the classroom window distracted me. My professor, who later became a friend, shook me with the words of these men and women: Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. She drew me back into the classroom. She told me how these 19th Century thinkers demanded that we simplify our lives rather than further complicating them in the name of progress. They said that too much complication leads away from the essence of life, and away from spiritual grounding: a state for which we all yearn.
Believe it or not, I had for a long while been distracted by things outside the classroom window. Looked outside the door for something. Walked off of school campuses to find something that would (as my mother would say) “turn my tickle box.” More often than not those things were political, social, and emotional. They were the things that ruminated through my mind as I lay on the warm playground slide, cutting class, glad for the sun and its friendship. Questions about why I was and who I was and how we had come to be and why we were where we were and why he was in charge and why they are so angry and they are so tired and they seem to not care. They were simple questions of an existential nature—a nature of which we all are. I did not want to be in a room wasting my time listening to someone denying my existential nature because they assumed I did not think on these things. These were all things that demanded the existence of a need to give and receive Love. And much of the time the world is in direct action against the notion that I, we, know much about Love. But it is Love that makes the student, teacher and the subject worthy (substitute effective, memorable, inspiring). This is a proven fact. No research needed. No data. History has illustrated this plainly. Experience. It is that simple. Give me a space, a book, a student, and time and I can share my love for this subject in the way that those who love this subject shared it with me. In practicing this profession, this is the essence of living “deliberately, and front[ing] only the essential facts of life.”
The best moment I had all year in a classroom came when I asked a student to complete a comic strip on an excerpt from Angela’s Ashes. He had a great deal of trouble getting started and I shared with him that I thought a lot of students have a hard time doing little art projects because they think it needs to be a certain way. He told me, “Yea, ‘cuz I suck at art.” I said “Oh, no! You can’t. It represents you. I bet your mom would be so happy to see it. Art can never suck.” He said, “So you think I should apologize to my nephew for telling him his work was ugly?” “Yes, I said. That would be really sweet.” Now do not be mistaken, I teach this student ninth grade standards and beyond, but that moment was the best I can recall thus far.
I love my students, so I continue to try to function amid dysfunction. I love myself so I continue to make a living doing what I believe is my best gift to the world, teaching English. Nothing at last, according to Emerson, is more sacred. This is the goal of the educator, finding the sacred in the small spaces granted us. It is a simple formula for success.
Copyright 2010 ©
