Sunday, April 6, 2014

What Love is Like


             Far too many people accept that God is Love without giving it any thought and those same people assume without reflection that they are loving people when, more times than not, that simply isn't the case.

             True Love always has a cost and that cost is putting someone else's needs before your own. Many people think that "For this moment I will treat you as if you are as important as me" is showing Love, which it isn't.

             I'll tell you a story about Love and how it often costs. I was helping out with Van Decar's The Miracle Worker and he showed up to the show where I was doing the make-up inebriated and ticked off. He walked in and said, "I see that Mr. Paciorek has taken over my show!"

            I spoke to him privately just before the show began and asked him about the insulting comment. He got emotional and shared that the show meant a lot to him and that the cast didn't seem to respect him and that hurt his feelings.

             I left and went to Hallmark cards and bought him a director's gift. I gave it to the kids to present to him at the end of the show. They were a bit confused but did as I asked of them. At the curtain call he went up and accepted the gift from them and then went on and on about how special the show and the cast was to him while the kids passed confused and furtive glances between them.

             When I saw him after the show he lorded over me how the cast cared for him and the subtext, which seemed to please him, was that they hadn't thought my contribution significant enough to acknowledge.

             In a matter of just a couple of hours I had been publicly insulted, I had spent my own money on a man who had little respect for me and I had been shamed for the anonymous gift that I had given - and I wouldn't have done it any other way. I could've revealed where the gift had come from but that would've just put him back into the black hole that the gift had brought him out of. It was better that he thought too much of himself than not enough.

             THAT is what Love is like. It raises someone else up and often comes with an emotional price tag.

Monday, March 3, 2014

What Enlightenment Feels Like



The Sefirot

My dear friend Peter has taught me that what I call the Christ energy, the Power of God’s divine Love, can be called the sefirot in the Jewish traditions of Kabbalah.  For reasons beyond me (which I usually describe to my wife as “the Spirit moved me”) I looked up sefirot on the Internet yesterday.  What I found supports my recent assertions that I must be insane because perspectives and interrelations came flooding into my head as I read about the sefirot, and it became impossible for me to absorb what I was actually reading, that information being constantly overwritten in my consciousness through Da’ath, guided by Ima (Mother) whom I usually refer to as Sophia the Holy Spirit, the female aspect of God.

I read that in the Kabbalah, Da’ath is defined as being a kind of non-existence, a nothingness.  “Da’ath is the crown of the Ruach, the Intellect.”  “Da’ath has a dual aspect; on the one hand it is our knowledge of the world of appearance, the body of facts which constitute our beliefs and prop up the illusion of identity and ego and separateness.  On the other hand it is revelation, objective knowledge, what is often referred to as gnosis.”

Even as I read these words they were being redefined in my mind, which is really an odd thing to try to describe.  What the Spirit ended up showing me was that those seeking Da’ath were going to have a difficult time finding it or experiencing it, for in order to touch upon the Intellect – the DIVINE Intellect – one must first discard illusions, the greatest of which is the individual ego, surrender one’s free will, which means surrendering one’s earthly understanding of all things, and stepping into the non-(ego)existence, the nothingness (in a physical sense) of enlightenment (being able to see with God’s eyes). 

It is only this complete surrender which can lead one to True revelation. 

The Catch-22 quality of this process is that anyone who tries, by their own actions, to ATTAIN enlightenment and gnosis is going to be impeded in their desire of attaining True enlightenment because the very act of CONSCIOUSLY SEEKING reinforces the illusional strength of the ego, and is contrary to complete surrender to the Will and Presence of God.

Enlightenment is a gift stumbled upon through surrender, and cannot be tracked down or achieved through intention or action. 

It’s sort of like the Harry Potter conundrum of no one who seeks the philosopher’s stone in order to USE it being able to find it. 

Actions are the opposite of surrender.

I tried to read about the ten spheres and what they supposedly represent, but I kept getting distracted by other relationships appearing in my head.  I was reading about how there were three groups of three and what they meant, but the “mentoring” in my head showed me other relationships, not mentioned in the essays.  Instead of seeing a group of ten, I kept seeing two groups of five, one pyramid formation ascending and one descending, and then they overlapped and turned from two three-dimensional objects (two four-sided pyramids) into two two-dimensional objects (pyramids seen from the side) – the Star of David. 

I searched the Internet to see if this interconnected relationship of the Star of David and the Kabbalah Tree of Life was generally known and found nothing of value.

The Star of David and the Tree of Life, at least in my mind now, embody one and the same thing.  They physically represent the process of spiritual separation, descent, evolution, ascension and completion, which we are all engaged in.  In my mind’s eye I could see the four aspects of God (Hod [Splendor], Rahamin [Glory], Yesod [Foundation] and Netzah [Might]) combining and descending to the physical world (Malkut [Kingdom]), to become incarnate and seemingly separate from God.  This is the descending pyramid or triangle.  While incarnate, the soul yearns to grow, learn and reunite with that which is greater than itself (ideally).  It learns to appreciate and embody Binah (Intelligence), Din (Justice), Hesed (Kindness) and Hochmah (Wisdom), ascends and ultimately reunites as a completed consciousness with Kether (The Crown), after many lifetimes (but reincarnation’s a discussion for another time).

I respect what other people have learned about the sefirot and I’m not suggesting that my interpretations or delusions are any more important than anyone else’s.  I embrace the fact that God can create structures that represent a myriad of different and related Truths at the same time – wheels within wheels. 

I share this merely to suggest that a complete surrendering to God might be a wonderful choice, and lead to understanding things in ways not previously suspected (which is a thinly-veiled plea to increase the crazy club which seems to have few card-carrying members beyond my wife and myself).

And now that I’ve been faithful and typed this all up, perhaps the Spirit will allow me to dump this from the forefront of my mind so I can get back to the less meaningful stuff my physical world employer would like me to attend to in order to get paid.

Just a thought – and not necessarily my own.
       

Why There is Dis-ease and Evil in the World?


              These days, it is not at all unusual to overhear “How could God allow this to happen?” or something similar, blurted out at some point during a conversation with a group of people.  When the Twin Towers fell before our eyes it was a common utterance.  It wouldn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that it was uttered with tears and desperation in the Nazi prison camps as they watched the smoke rise from the incinerator chimneys.  It was no doubt on the minds and lips of the prisoners of the Inquisition, and could be reasonably and logically traced back to seconds before Cain succeeded in killing Abel, with only one possible exception coming to mind. 
There is only one clear instance of a person subjected to evil who did not blurt out “How can God allow this to happen?” and that was when Jesus was on the cross, because he knew full well what was happening and why.  Although some might suggest that his statement of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” might muddy up the clarity of Jesus’ prescience, his utterance was about God withdrawing from him as his soul became the living repository of all of the sin that would ever be created throughout all of time in that instance, but that’s a different topic and a different tale.  Suffice it to say, it was not an utterance concerning the how and the why of his specific situation.  He did not question God’s “how.” 
Jesus, as the only 100% physical manifestation of the Christ energy, was the only soul who ever knew the workings of the physical world from God’s side of the veil, which is exactly why he admonished us in Luke 6:37: “Judge not and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive and ye shall be forgiven.”  We have been commanded never to judge and never to condemn because nothing in God’s universe is really what we believe it to be, and we, in our arrogance and ignorance, command, judge, and pray for many things that are completely contrary to the mercy and Grace of God, and that includes prayers concerning our own life challenges and illnesses.
What I shall now reveal here is written down nowhere in particular, it is wholeheartedly believed by no one outside of Heaven, and it is not specifically illuminated in the Bible, but that doesn’t make it any less the Truth.  Those taught by men shall be outraged by my assertions, but this knowledge comes from the Comforter, as Jesus said it would be in John 14:26:  “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
In order to understand why dis-ease and evil exist, one must realize that there are certain common beliefs in the world that are old, deep-seated, incomplete, and inaccurate.  The largest challenge for Christians will be to consider that reincarnation is a fact and not a flight of fancy meant only for other religions.  There is only one major verse in the New Testament that seems to point to only one lifetime, and it is Hebrews 9:27:  “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment”, but this verse doesn’t mean what mankind commonly believes it to mean, which has all been according to God’s plan - until now.  The verse means that every soul that wishes to learn to be like God will begin a spiritual/physical journey that includes death, but they can only sign up for this journey once.  Once they have agreed to this path, they must continue on until the end of their personal journey, or until the Judgment, no matter how long or how many lifetimes it takes. 
Can one learn all of God’s perspectives in one lifetime?  It’s possible, but extremely unlikely (according to the Holy Spirit, only 79 souls have graduated thus far since the beginning of time), which is why God allows test retakes (reincarnation).  How else can one explain how God would deal with the soul of a premature baby who lived only one minute?  The baby certainly never accepted Jesus by name, and so, according to limited and befuddled traditional ministry, it is doomed to hell, which would make sense to no one who has a true connection to God. 
God does not grant one chance to avoid hell and ten thousand ways to find it, but rather ten thousand chances to avoid it, and only one way to be condemned to it – through our own selfishness, which, in its ultimate manifestation, is pure evil. 
And the reason God doesn’t make reincarnation clear? 
It is because even with the tradition that there is only one life set aside to find God, almost every living soul spends more time trying to embrace selfishness over true Christ-like Love, which is why there are so painfully few graduates of incarnation/reincarnation school to date.  If a Christian who believes that they have only one lifetime to serve Christ still ends up doing such a poor job of spreading God’s Love (often spreading more worldly condemnation and worldly judgment and God’s Love), imagine how spiritually under-evolved that same soul would be if they thought that they had nearly infinite retakes!     
            Before I get to the three specific reasons why there is dis-ease and evil in the world, please allow me to suggest a number of other Truths to ponder.
            First, although God has indeed made free will the most powerful force in the universe, a force so strong that the demands of a selfish soul can actually stay God’s hand in the giving of blessings, God also knows us intimately and there are very few instances where we wander off of God’s suggested path for our lives.  Before we are born, we’re informed of the life challenges we will face, and we’re shown a sort of brief movie of the probably life we will lead.  We are given the choice to accept that life, along with its challenges, or to wait for another assignment.  There are billions of souls desiring incarnation and so many accept what they are offered when it is offered.  If you live your life in alignment with the brief movie that you viewed beforehand, then you will experience many instances of déjà vu.  If you decided to use your free will to strike out on your own, then you won’t have instances of déjà vu, but your basic life challenges, if not the specifics of what you were shown, will remain the same.  If God says that you’re going to experience the loss of a loved one, that loss will occur, one way or another.
            Every challenge that you will ever face in life, whether it be in relationships, career, or health, can be classified into three categories, and they are:
1.      Life challenges that everyone is destined to experience.
2.      Balancing past karmic mistakes.
3.      Bringing God’s Love into the darkness.

Life Challenges

If one is so poor that they have to search through garbage bins in order to survive, then they might believe, as they look around them at others who have abundance, that God is indeed a cruel taskmaster, but that is not true.  What we don’t collectively realize is that each person, each unique soul, is at a different place on their journey back to reuniting with God.  We think everyone is the same and should have access to the same opportunities, but that is not what is actually in play, from a spiritual perspective. 
As I said before, we have been told not to judge because we have no idea what is happening, from God’s point of view.  A loving family huddled eight to a room and barely subsisting is much closer, spiritually, to God than a wealthy couple that married for power, possessions, or position, even though superficial wisdom would have us believe that one circumstance is desirable and the other is not.
In Heaven, Love is the coin of the realm, and until we realize that, we cannot progress in our journey back to God.
Each and every soul that incarnates will experience: a life of abundance, and a life of poverty; a life of importance, and a life of insignificance; a life of friendships, and a life of loneliness; a life filled with love, and a life filled with loss; a life filled with physical accomplishments, and a life of physical disability.  There are only two possible reactions to these challenging lives, and they are anger and frustration, eventually replaced by acceptance and faith, or anger and frustration that festers and brings further dis-ease, complicating all of the other problems and concerns of that lifetime. 
No life challenge is passed until one reaches a state of acceptance and faith.  Until that happens, the life challenges will repeat over and over again, through innumerable lifetimes. 
You have no idea, as you read this, just how many lifetimes you’ve lived and where you are on the road back to God. 
A poor man curses God for his lot in life and has to be born again into lack.
A mother loses her children and curses God for his cruelty and has to be born again into a life of loss.
A man is given a fortune, only to be cheated, to lose everything, and to become completely embittered, and he has to be born into another life of injustice.
A life of challenges is a common explanation for the life we lead, but it is not the most common energy that we must deal with each day, for dovetailed into our list of necessary life experiences is our karmic balance, which comes from the transgressions we’ve ignorantly committed against others during our previous life challenges.

Karma Balancing 

The violence and evil in the world is, for the most part, the escalation of our present selves meeting up with our past selves to balance karma.
God does not punish – ever!  However, God does allow us to meet previous versions of ourselves on our road back to Him.
A man lives a lifetime where he enjoyed dominating, hurting, raping, and killing women.  Karmic law indicates that he has committed a grievous sin against another soul because he didn’t value them, their feelings, or even their life, in the least.  This soul flaw cannot be tolerated and must be removed.  This is what the Old Testament reference to “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is really about.  Put out someone’s eye callously and you shall live a lifetime where someone, who is just like the person you used to be, will transgress against you and put your eye out.  The male rapist/killer is destined to incarnate as a weak and vulnerable woman, where s/he will be confronted by a male rapist/killer and be abused.  When her/his soul realizes the terror and the injustice of the attack and says to itself “I would NEVER consider attacking, raping, or killing another person ever again” then the lesson is learned and the karma balancing is over.  If they are a slow and self-centered learner, as most souls are, they will be exposed to this scenario over several lifetimes.  It is by the Grace of God that we are allowed to carry a karmic balance, like a credit card balance, for if He vested upon our heads the full weight of our accumulated karmic debt, we would be immediately and utterly destroyed.
A KKK member hates all blacks and lives a life of aggression against them, either through the violence within his soul towards them, or in carrying out physical acts of violence in the “real” world.  The KKK member has no choice (after a lost soul period, which is a discussion for another time) other than to be reborn as a type of person that he once loathed, and the cycle will continue until the hatred ceases, or until God’s clock proclaims that Judgment Day has come.  Until then, for every white that hates blacks and for every Palestinian that hates Jews there will be a reversal and an accounting, either until they are spiritually healed, or until they are publicly rejected from the spiritual body of God. 
Karma balancing also applies to dis-ease, which is, more often than not, self-inflected.  Harbor secret hates and resentments and your physical body will begin to rot and decay from within – a condition more commonly known as cancer. 
Your soul is a minute piece of God’s omnipotence, and that power misused, even as small as it is, is a sobering thing indeed.  Just as the collective power of sincere prayer can positively affect others, so too can the force of selfish evils turn that power inwards towards self destruction.  Even in this, the Hand of God can frequently be seen, if one takes the time to look.  A man who once bullied and demeaned everyone in his life is stricken with emphysema, and so he dies a long and protracted death, at the mercy of those he previously bullied and demeaned. 
God is in control of the universe and there is a just symmetry to His actions.

Representing God’s Love in the Darkness

Very few souls will ever be asked to live a life specifically for others, assigned to the darkest corners of human existence, but there are those who agree to bring God’s Light and Love even to those considered hopeless.  The only real difference between an angelic soul and a regular soul is how much one would agree to suffer for another, with most souls concentrating only upon the evolution of their own being.  Incarnated angels seldom complete their missions without being tortuously killed, but they are souls honored for their loyalty.  No soul, no matter how evil, will ever be able to claim that they never knew God’s Light and Love as manifested through another person on Earth.  The angels know that these are necessary, but generally undesirable missions.
On a less tortuous scale, there are those who agree to additional lifelong difficulties in order to bring other people together.  A boy is born with diabetes, not because he himself needs that lesson or has unbalanced karma, but rather because his parents are, by nature, self-absorbed, and his condition will make them better people, better parents, and move them closer to God.  Many people have taken on additional challenges, in addition to their own obligations, and these are much like angels-in-training. 

These three reasons are why our world seems to be full of dis-ease and evil.

We are learning to be like God at an excruciatingly slow pace, but each day, more souls are at least pointed in the right direction.

Friday, February 28, 2014

As a Teacher, How Do I Carve a Masterpiece out of THIS?


            Before beginning the long process of creating a master work, Michelangelo (the sculptor, not the turtle) would have the block of stone in question placed in such a way that light from the dawning sun would strike it.  He would then examine the stone carefully, trying to discern any cracks, flaws or shadows within the stone that would indicate that it wouldn’t be up to the quality required to stand up to years of chiseling and polishing.  After all, it would be beyond frustrating if he committed to working the block only to realize too late that the arm that he intended to carve was destined to crack off. 

"In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it."—Michelangelo

Sources suggest that he spent two years carving his Pieta and three years carving his David, which wouldn’t include the additional time required to buff and polish the stone.  Michelangelo later fielded questions about David’s unusual stance by stating that the huge block of stone, some eighteen feet tall, had been considered worthless because a fellow by the name of Simone da Fiesole had previously carved a big hole through the bottom of it, but Michelangelo had found a way to overcome the defect.
This is how masterpieces are made, by starting with quality materials, through careful preparation, and occasionally, with some defect removal.

In many respects, being a teacher is similar.
Before I get too far into summing up my lifetime of teaching observations, I should probably share some of my background.  I have been teaching high school students, in several different ways, for about 39 years.  The first day that I faced a class from the front of the room was as a senior in high school.  Our choir director was out with major surgery, and for some reason he felt that I was up to the daily task of replacing him for five weeks.  And so, with several different substitute teachers standing patiently in the back of the room over the five week period, I was an unofficial and unique member of the professional teaching community.
All teachers love teaching, which might seem like an observation so simple as to be irrelevant, but true moments of teaching, of being able to speak seriously and be heard seriously, are few and far between.  We want to make a positive difference in our students’ lives.  The average day is somewhat of a cacophony of sound and action, lecture and reaction about whatever the curriculum declares is important for that year, but there are moments when the machinery of education stops and the process of learning is allowed to take place.  From my probably unique perspective, education is summed up by the grade at the end of the semester, whereas learning is what happens when a thought, an idea, a perspective or a fact becomes part of the conscious database of the student.  Learning is about acquiring units that link, relate, and build.  Education today is too often about flood, flush and refill, as in “Re-teach me what’s on the upcoming test and you’ll have my attention.”  A colleague of mine in the high school English department nearly lost her mind last year when she had a classroom full of 9th graders who couldn’t identify a noun.
Education has gone from, “Feed me, Seymour!” (a reference sure to be lost upon all of the younger readers.  It’s from Little Shop of Horrors) to “Why can’t we just watch the movie?!” (an intense desire by many current students to avoid the process of genuine reading altogether). 
Way back when, when I was a student and we rode dinosaurs to school, traveling uphill both ways, we were expected to learn.  There was no such thing as a Scantron, and the old-school teachers gave out tests with fill-in-the-blank questions with no word bank.  If you were lucky, you might get a science test that was multiple guess, but that was just a gesture to keep the terms from being overwhelming.  Now that’s not to say that there weren’t some terrible teachers.  I recall one fellow who taught Mythology who passed out the books on the first day along with a list of assignments that covered the entire semester.  He then read his paper every day in class while we decided whether we were interested in being self-taught or not, but he was the anomaly, not the norm.
The modern student seems to have grown up with an uncanny ability to process small bites of information quickly, which can be impressive, but in far too many cases this ability is tied to a sort of auto-flush of the CPU, turning their minds into PU if asked for information after the test has been passed and the information mentally discarded.  As a teacher joke in order to make a point that they should try to use their long-term memories, I occasionally tell them that I’m passing out a previous vocabulary test that they’ve already had, instead of the one they just finished studying for.  The almost universal looks of panic tell me everything that I need to know about whether they learn for mastery or just process for the test in question. 
Back in the early 70s our minds might’ve been eight-track technology, but my head is FULL of eight track tapes, arranged like a library.  It’s true that as time progresses it’s harder and harder to get to the back of the library and find information I’ve almost never needed, but my students seem to have a single DVD in their heads, which they keep re-recording over, time after time and test after test.  Although they receive good grades, without re-teaching, their recall is often horrendous and seemingly getting worse with each passing year.  And as for their collective powers of observation, I find myself saying, “I’ve hidden that information in this room where no one will ever find it – in three inch letters!” far too often. 
The attention span of a goldfish is allegedly three seconds, and their memory span about three months.  Normally, these statistics would seem to have nothing to do with teaching, but with each passing year, my students and goldfish seem to have more and more in common.
            A few years ago, I came up against a situation that I had never experienced before.  I’ve been teaching mostly 10th graders ever since joining the high school staff way back in 1994.  One of the terms that I always cover at the beginning of the school year in 10th grade Literature and Composition 1 is the word “vicarious.”  For about fifteen years I was able to make the point that none of my students had ever seen a 6’ paramecium, and that viewing a slide or a video of one was an example of a vicarious experience.  I didn’t have to explain that a paramecium was a single-celled organism that propelled itself through water by the use of a single hair known as a flagella.  My classes knew what I was talking about and they focused upon the lesson, which was concerning the vicarious experience. 
            That eye-opening year, NO ONE knew what a paramecium was!  It was only in my third section of 10th graders at the end of the day that I found anyone who knew what I was talking about.  A further discussion revealed that single-celled organisms including the paramecium were covered in the 9th grade science curriculum, at least that’s what one student thought.
            I was giving a lesson that contained information that I had learned as a science student over thirty-five years ago, and I had reached a point in my teaching career where my students couldn’t collectively remember what they had learned from a mere three months prior!
            Hello Goldfish!
            It was then that I started to notice that my students were quite adept at test-taking, and they could temporarily master pretty much anything that they were given time to study, but when asked to share what they knew without re-teaching or re-learning, their knowledge was pathetically lacking.  Just the other day, I had a number of students who thought it a bit unfair that as part of a test on vocabulary and grammar that they had lost points for not capitalizing the words of a business title because that information hadn’t been recently re-taught!
            While sitting quietly attentive in one education seminar after another, I can’t help but roll my metaphoric eyes each and every time I hear the word “mastery” thrown out into the air.  The truth is, our students aren’t achieving long-term mastery, and so using the word to imply that since the student passed a quiz that they have mastered the material is just a sick joke of cosmic proportion, as evidenced by the momentary outrage at not remembering one of the basic rules of capitalization from the last example, which they were probably taught in third grade.
            An additional problem that has made achieving mastery unlikely is the fact that more than half of my students will now openly admit that they avoid reading whenever possible.  They don’t read for pleasure, and because of this, their vocabularies are limited, their sentence structures are infantile, and their spelling is unbelievably atrocious.  Even basic terms that one would pick up from reading the most elementary fairy tale are misunderstood.  While answering a question for a recent Ben Hur quiz in my Film and Literature class, far too many students couldn’t identify what a spear was.  They thought it was a sword, a stick, or a pointy pole.  During a quiz on the movie Maverick, one student asked what a stagecoach was.
            In an effort to make clear to my 10th graders just where their reading capabilities register, I have them read an eighth grade level version of The Three Musketeers, complete with bigger type, illustrations, large margins, and a text reduced to 300 pages from the original 700+ pages. 
            Before we begin, I pass out the following handout.

            We will be reading the abridged edition of The Three Musketeers in class.  The original story is around 700 pages long and we will be reading a version that is only 302 pages long, is written on a 8th grade level, and has large type and illustrations.  You will be reading in class each day and having a brief (ten questions - 100 point) quiz over the previous day’s reading at the beginning of each class period.
             We will be doing this for several reasons. 
             In my many years of teaching, I have learned that there is a vast difference between mastering school and mastering specific abilities, like reading.  For a person who doesn’t like to read, mastering school would include: watching the movie about the book (no movie actually covers the original story accurately), reading Spark Notes or Cliff’s Notes (which would be confusing because it would have MORE information than what is in our text) only listening to a teacher’s recap of the reading and not doing the initial reading required (there will be no recap before the simple one to two word answer fill-in-the-blank quizzes each day) and getting information from friends or the Internet (which won’t work because my classes are the only classes reading this particular book and the Internet will provide too much information). 
             Although I hope that everyone will find the reading simple and have no challenges, if this class turns out to be like previous classes, approximately 20-30% of you will find that you read much like a scanner – remembering a few pages that you have just read but quickly forgetting what had happened in the chapters that had come before.  I feel that it is important for you to realize if you have this tendency so that you can work to overcome it, since extended comprehension will be absolutely required on important tests in high school, on college work, and in your future work environment. 
             In addition, if you find it difficult to finish 30 pages of an 8th grade book during a fifty+ minute class period, then you should realize that you need to do more independent reading to increase your proficiency, because in the future, major reading tests seem to be moving towards setting a specific time limit for both reading and comprehending material.
             As for answering questions on the quiz, you must learn to discern the difference between important information and general information, since testing trends are moving towards having multiple, technically correct answers to pick from.  Here is a brief story to illustrate the point.  If a fellow got into a motorcycle accident and twisted his ankle, broke his kneecap, and was decapitated, what would be the proper answer to the question, “What happened to the motorcyclist?”  Obviously his dying would be the only relevant answer, the other two choices being essentially meaningless by comparison, although they would technically be true.
             I hope that this clears up any confusion as to why I feel that this process is important and helpful to you as a student.
             Sincerely,
                        Mr. P.

            It is not uncommon for half of my students to be unable to identify the king and the cardinal as the main political rivals in France after reading the first thirty pages of the story.  More and more of my students remember the last page or so of information, but are seemingly incapable of recalling a story of any real length.  I try to bring these problems to their attention, short of having their inabilities cripple their grade in my class, all the while hoping that they’ll get the idea and try to be more capable students before they run the risk of being kicked out of college during their freshman year for being educationally incompetent. 
            They shake their heads when I make my little speeches, but since their overall grade doesn’t really suffer, I have to wonder if their bobble-heading is really sincere.
            My Film and Literature class was watching Gone With the Wind on DVD with subtitles.  Doctor Meade had just completed explaining what Rhett Butler was doing for the South during the war. 
            I stopped the film and said, “Pop quiz.  How does Rhett Butler become rich during the war?”
            Cricket, cricket.
            Not a single student could answer the question.  Rather than spoon feed yet another crop of mental goldfish what they needed to know on the upcoming quiz, I closed by saying, “Well, good luck.  Doctor Meade just explained how Rhett made his money and that question is definitely on the quiz.”
            I feel like I’m handing a crutch to a person with two good legs when I have to stop everything and put information into brains that simply aren’t listening, or caring.  I know how newspapers and the like enjoy pet-naming generations.  I would be tempted to name the current generation of scholars “Generation tXt?”  Their big, sad eyes when they receive a failing grade are easily as cute as any that I’ve ever seen over the last four decades of my teaching career, but they spend far too much time perfecting their excuses and their puppy-dog expressions, and far too little time mastering their lessons for a lifetime of use.    
            When society is selling selfishness and personal gain over all other considerations in nearly every movie, cable show, tabloid headline, and newspaper article, then where is one to turn to find genuine character?  Once upon a time, the assumption would be the church pulpit, but that is no longer true.  The pulpit has far too often become a place of selfishness, judgment, and disgrace, every bit as sad as the headlines at the checkout stand at the supermarket.
            As for our leaders in education, they are preoccupied in the political business of education, and not in making sure that students genuinely learn.  It is enough to make it appear that they are learning. 
            Back in the 70s, there were two kinds of students, those who cared about learning, and those who didn’t.  Those who cared succeeded, and those who didn’t care were pressured until they at least complied, even if they didn’t buy into the idea that it was all for their own good.
            Today’s students are aware that if they aren’t successful, there will be consequences on several levels.  The superintendent wants to declare the glory of the district, and so there are pressures on the teachers.  The teachers want to declare the success of their students, and so they are forced, one way or another, to teach to the test.  The students want to pass the tests and get the scholarship money, and so they cram, filling their temporary memory with everything that they need at that moment to succeed.
            With all of these gears turning and meshing in synchronicity, few seem to notice that what had been assumed mastered last week has somehow become forgotten knowledge this week.
            The test was passed, so the student was pleased.
            The class was passed, so the parent was pleased.
            The standardized test was passed, so the teacher is pleased.
            The district scored above the norm, so the administration is pleased, and yet this system is mostly illusion and built upon feet of clay.  No wonder colleges are complaining that their freshmen arrive woefully unprepared.  It’s not accurate to say that they weren’t given the skills required to succeed when they entered college.  It’s more accurate to say that the goldfish didn’t make the mental space to retain all that they’d been exposed to, so they are more like a single DVD that has been overwritten hundreds of time, as opposed to a library of DVDs containing impressive stores of knowledge. 
            The problem is how to make this point to people emotionally invested into a system that APPEARS to be working?
            I went to my principal once to get his feedback on something I was thinking about trying.  I was considering putting extra credit questions on my English tests relating to things that my 10th graders had supposedly already learned in math, social studies, and science in 9th grade.  Instead of seeing this as a way of promoting long-term learning and holistic education, he informed me that it would be inappropriate for me to do this because I wasn’t teaching my students in those subjects.
            Yesterday, I “corrected” several dozen worksheets relating to answering questions pertaining to the DC graphic novel Kingdom Come.  I use this novel with my 10th graders for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because the story is set in the future of the DC universe where all of the “old” heroes have given up on society and its fickleness and the heroes have essentially disappeared.  The story shows a new generation of super-powered “children” who are slowly tearing up the world.  They are oblivious to the fact that they lack direction, common sense, and personal integrity.  They have no idea how to be a hero, which is why the old heroes have to come back out of retirement and teach them.
            As I checked the short answer responses a thought occurred to me.
            What if I were to mark an answer wrong because it wasn’t a complete sentence, or because it had misspelled words, or because it had parts that were undecipherable due to atrocious handwriting?     
            The majority of my students would then score quite poorly.
            I would be making my point about the quality of their skills and the knowledge that they haven’t acquired along the way, and I would also be establishing a precedent where almost no one in my required class would get an “A.”   If I graded this way, I would soon find myself on the computer or on the phone with complaining parents telling me that I was being too harsh, and then the principal would no doubt call me down to his office in order to give me a pep talk about how I could improve MY teaching.
            This whole house of cards is going to come crashing down someday, and everyone is going to be standing around with their fingers scratching their heads, saying, “How did we get here?” and “Why did this happen?”  The other civilized countries of the world are just going to shrug and chuckle behind their hands while the American “scholars” of tomorrow scream that it isn’t fair that the world is so hard, and that they can’t find a decent, high-paying job. 
            Today, it is likely that the students will attempt to do what they are told, but like goldfish, many have no feet, no solid skill base, so learning for mastery is really out of the question, and so we adjust our curriculum accordingly and process them through. 
            They may be impressive at blowing bubbles in unison, though, especially if all of their Ipods are playing the same song.
And like the faults in Michelangelo’s block of stone, how are things like under-motivation, disinterest, exhaustion from staying up all night with video games and cable TV, mental deficiencies like those found in drug babies, selfishness, and a general lack of personal integrity removed or overcome to produce a masterwork in the classroom?
Michelangelo had it easy.  He’d just say, “I’m not working with that block!  It’s got too many faults!” 
            Although I love a challenge, for as a senior in high school I convinced the principal to allow me to design, manufacture and paint a set of scenic drops for our production of The Sound of Music that worked out to 3/4s the square footage of the Sistine Chapel, there have been far too many instances in the last couple of years when I’ve stared at my students and quietly asked myself –

“God, how do I carve a masterpiece out of this?”

Being an Honorary Black Woman



Being an Honorary Black Woman
 
This letter was written to a school presenter who, over the course of several meetings, challenged our staff of over 100 teachers to rethink our racism - not to rethink if we were racists or not, but to accept the simple premise that we WERE racists in our own ways and to change our views.  I couldn't accept his basic premise or his specific vocabulary and related definitions and created this response to share with him.
 
Dear Dr. Marks,

Although I wholeheartedly applaud the effort to remove the situation relating to low-performing students, I have conflicting thoughts when I read the book Courageous Conversations.  My thoughts are probably not the norm, but I thought I’d share them with you.

Good luck and God speed in helping the world achieve your stated goal.
  
Thoughts on Race from an Honorary Black Woman

            Although I agree in a broad sense with the intentions of the Courageous Conversations program, I find that there are many definitions and assumptions that I am uncomfortable accepting because they don’t align at all with my person experiences with race throughout my life.  Perhaps my life is more “interesting” than most, because the sweeping generalities used in the book don’t really resonate with me.
            Now I’m not going to make any claim to know how any group of people, White or Black, have lived their lives.  I wouldn’t even begin to try to sum up the racial experiences of the people that I’ve personally known for decades.  For myself, I believe that race consciousness, in all of its problematic and negative connotations, is a learned response, and I have never accepted that race consciousness is a particularly good thing.  I don’t refer to myself as White and I’ve only met one Black man in my life, and he was truly a purple-black hue, not that the distinction is important.  I believe that so many aspects of race are distorted and mishandled to the point of it becoming a topic of linguistic landmines and emotional hand grenades by the very nature of the commonly accepted vocabulary. 
            I consider myself peachy-tan, and being a fine artist well familiar with painting portraits, I consider my students of “Color” to have a bit more umber in their complexion or perhaps a more yellow ocher hue.
            I have never met a white person, although I have certainly met people who have embraced what I would call the White Culture perspective of life.
            I have never met a yellow person.
            I have never met a red person, at least not a lasting red person, although I’ve seen some people very sunburned.  That was only a temporary state.
            As an artist, I find it mind-boggling that a caramel-colored person can call themselves Black when speaking about a Latino who is considered Brown, all the while referencing a White man and the dominance that his race gives him, when examples of all three supposed races can be found of almost exactly the same skin color.  It would not be particularly difficult to find a deeply tanned White man and stand them next to a Latino of the same shade, along with a Black man who is nowhere near black in color.
            If I had the time and I thought that anyone would read it, I’d now make a list of the MILLIONS of ways that all of the supposed races are equal and the same in terms of physiology, all the way down to the number of nerves and atoms in the body.
            I believe that when people banter the word race about, they are actually referring to the adopted concept of culture. 
            Race is something a person is born with, and there’s no real changing it.  It is genetic and tied to biological heritage, and it links the owner to a place and DNA grouping.  As we grow up, we are all exposed to the mindset of the culture that we are immersed in.  I agree that the mindset of various cultures have created certain negative attitudes and expectations relating to other cultures.  Unfortunately, the human condition makes us predisposed to favor “us” over “them,” and that condition of self-importance and other-prejudice extends to every aspect of life, from differences between men and women, to supporting different sports teams, to different political views, to different religions, and this predisposition makes it possible to devalue the “not us” group, for whatever reason we choose at that moment in time.
            Although I’m only halfway through the book, I hope that Courageous Conversations also focuses deeper, on the real nature of the problem between people.  What I have read is certainly a valid starting point, but in my experience, the book hasn’t yet looked deep enough, to the heart of the problem.  It becomes bogged down in the upper strata of the argument. 
            The problem is that there is a group of students who are low-performing and we all wish to help them. 
            The argument is that by focusing upon race and our own racial biases, we can supposedly better understand ourselves, and then we will be better able to walk in another person’s pair of racial shoes.
            As I see it, this is a noble start, but by no means the end of the journey because it focuses on, and actually GROWS the mislabeled issue of race (my personal perspective and I mean no disrespect) when it should be focusing upon how the culture that we’ve adopted or grown up within gives people different expectations for their daily experience with the “others” in the world.
            I am in no way trying to ignore or gloss over the negative pressures and near-constant disrespect that various people have experienced throughout their lives.  What I am saying is that to assume that it’s all about race is simplistic, because it isn’t.  Self-importance at the cost of others happens under EVERY conceivable circumstance, so my assertion is that shining a spotlight on the problem and just calling it race won’t make the dramatic change that the world actually needs today as it grows.
            Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked ME, in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to get to a place where I can judge all those around me based upon the quality of their character, and not upon the color of their skin. 
            “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
            Unfortunately, far too often, when I ask a student to consider the quality of their character and their choices, they react as if I am speaking of other things that are not a part of the conversation and that is a distracting problem, and I am purposely NOT referring to any specific race when I use this example.  To one degree or another, ALL human beings are tempted to latch onto some “spin” in a situation that diverts attention and responsibility from a core truth.  The easier the spin, the more effective the diversion of attention, and I have seen some students who consistently defer back to the same overused spin, to the point where it becomes a sort of theme to how they see the world.  Before someone automatically assumes that I am speaking about race, my first mental example is actually about a young woman who was sexually abused as a child and who used the “I was sexually abused as a child” card every time things went awry.  Before it appears that I am callous to the young lady’s circumstance, I add that I was sexually molested by my mother up until the age of eight.  As an adult, I left that guilt behind, to be owned by her, along with the spin excuse.
            I AM NOT WHAT I HAVE EXPERIENCED, NOR WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO ME!  I AM the person that I choose to be, despite what I have experienced or what has been done to me – and I highly recommend that other people reach for the same uplifting statement, instead of a spin excuse.
            Several years ago, we had an assembly at the school where a generally disaffected student decided that he wished to be a little bit of a spectacle by shouting out “I LOVE this school!” and “I LOVE assemblies!” during the program.  I watched as the administration faced the problem of whether to remove this student or not, because if suspended for disruptive behavior, the report would have to indicate that they were shouting out things in support of the school.
            The report itself would make a good defense in arguing that any punishment was unreasonable.
            This student was cunning, as in intelligent in self-serving ways.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  The real core of the problem was not that he was making outbursts during the assembly.  The real core of the problem was that he owned a shriveled character, not that such things can be discussed openly in the school setting today. 
            I wonder what Dr. King would’ve said to the fellow had he been in charge of the assembly.
            I suspect that Dr. King would’ve tried to improve the quality of this fellow’s character, no matter how politically incorrect that discussion might’ve been.
            As for my own racial history, after reading the examples in the book, Courageous Conversations, I couldn’t help but notice how mine was unlike either that I read, although the book presents the White and Black experiences in a way that implies predictability and a degree of universality.
            First off, my family nickname while growing up was “Nigger.”
            My brother is two years younger than I, and from the time he was old enough to talk and learn the meaning of hatefulness and jealousy, he named me Nigger.  When passing in the hallway or whenever I wasn’t aware of his presence, he would hit me in the back of the head and proudly announce my nickname.  He grew up to be a man consumed with prejudice and disrespect for every shade of skin color that didn’t match his own.  If Courageous Conversations was written to strike a heart chord in people like my brother, then it never had a chance, for he would prefer to burn the book rather than honor it by reading it.
            If the Black experience involves being publicly demeaned and called Nigger, then I have some tiny frame of reference.
            My family lived in a little 900 square foot house in suburbia and my stepfather was a carpenter.  My father left when I was five and I come from two violently-broken alcoholic homes.  As I said earlier, I am not making any comparison of the specifics of my life to the typical White or Black experience.  This is just MY experience.  In retrospect, I suppose we were poor.  My young sister, my brother and I never received an allowance.  In elementary school I used to sell drawings of Snoopy characters to a girl in class for a nickel.  She seemed rich to me.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, we ate whatever was on sale at the store.  When I first met my wife, she explained to me that real hamburger wasn’t mostly off-white and that quality hot dogs don’t leave a thick layer of scum in the pot when boiled.  I used to be jealous of my friends who had comic books in numerical order with their covers still on them.  My comic collection mostly came from discount bags sold at the corner store for a quarter.  My first real job was making fishing lures for the family of a schoolmate who owned a local tackle shop.  I was eight years old.  Around that time my stepfather decided to make a bedroom for me in the unheated basement.  It was about 6’ x 11’ and at night I would wake up and brush the centipedes off of the wall next to my bed, hoping that they didn’t fall down into the covers.  At Christmas, our presents came from toy surplus stores and it was a waste of time to ask for a brand name toy because they were never on sale at the surplus stores.
            Viewed from the outside of the house, our family probably wouldn’t have registered in anyone’s mind as poor, but inside the house, my mother was hoarding every penny she could get in order to reach a point where she could boot my stepfather and declare her liberation.
            Contrary to the rest of my family, my stepfather being a drunk and an occasional wife-beater, my mother being generally hostile to the world and its inhabitants, my brother being a skilled “finder of wallets and other valuable things” and my younger sister sneaking out through her bedroom window at night to drink and get high, I was the white sheep of the family and I went to school in an effort to become the best person that I could be.
            As for the racial experience, I never met any other races at school, really.  While in Boy Scouts, our troop went to a jamboree in Metamora Michigan the same weekend as all of the Boy Scout troops from Detroit.  I saw a lot of Black fellows then, hundreds and hundreds of them, but our cabin was broken into while our troop was on a hike and all of our valuables left there were stolen, so we cooked all of our perishable food and left for home a day early.  I noticed that the scoutmaster lumped all of the Detroit scouts together in his angry comments about our loss, but I knew that thieves are individuals, and not predetermined qualities of huge groups of people. 
            A few people without character caused us to leave early.
            When I was older and driving I got lost on the far side of Detroit.  I stopped at an abandoned gas station and asked the elderly Black gentleman sitting in front if he could kindly direct me back to the freeway.  I found his look very puzzling because he didn’t seem to know exactly how to react to me.  I had addressed him as respectfully as I knew how, like I was talking to my own grandfather, and that seemed to confuse him. 
            He finally walked a few steps closer to me and said, “Boy, are you crazy?  Get out of here.  The freeway’s back that way!” 
            I thanked him and left, a bit concerned about the danger to myself that I had heard in his voice that I hadn’t expected or suspected when I had driven up.   
            I got a job running a large auditorium in Macomb County and the school decided to outsource the maintenance staff.  I ended up becoming friends with a young Black fellow who was assigned to clean the auditorium wing.  After a while, he would come and eat his lunch in the manager’s office with me, feeling a bit uncomfortable around the other custodians in the workroom.  He told me how hard he was working in order to get things for his wife and daughter.  At that time, it was a symbol of status amongst high school students to have a pair of the latest designer tennis shoes.  He told me how little he was being paid and how much the shoes cost.  I told him that I had a half-brother who worked managing a Footlocker across town and that maybe I could get a decent pair of shoes for his daughter.  I went to the local Footlocker at Eastland with my half-brother’s discount code to get the shoes.  When I got there, I tried to talk to a Black salesperson and explain to him that I was there to buy a pair of shoes for a young Black girl going to school in Detroit.  I knew how brutal kids were to each other about wearing the wrong thing and I didn’t want my stupidity about current footwear styles to become a reason for embarrassment for the young lady I was buying the shoes for. 
            The salesman never heard what I was asking him, probably because it was at odds with all of his racial assumptions.  His look became angry and he stormed off.  I heard him ask a White salesman colleague to come and deal with me – the racist!
            I bought the shoes and gave them to the custodian.  He even brought his mother and daughter over to my house to say thank you, but I will never be able to forget the loathing that I saw in the salesman’s eye.  I have no idea what he thought I was asking him, but it certainly wasn’t what I was actually asking him, and his hatred was intense.
            After that, I slowly became aware of people working at checkout lines who wouldn’t look at my face or who refused to put change into my open hand.  They made it clear that they didn’t wish to touch me, and it disturbed me that I was being casually treated as if I had offended them in some way.
            When I became an art teacher here in Troy at Boulan Park, I once called home on a young man because of his unacceptable behavior in class.  That the boy was Black made no particular difference to me.  All I could see was a character fault that needed addressing.  The father lit into me with an angry tone vaguely similar to the anger that I had experienced with the shoe salesman.  He accused me of being a racist and for my racism being the reason for the call home.  I indicated that I didn’t care if his son was purple or plaid, and that the call was because his son’s classroom behavior was unacceptable.  Just as the father began interrogating me about what great Black leaders I knew from history, I asked him:
            “Sir, have you ever lived with a White person before?”
            The question caught him off guard and he admitted that he hadn’t.  I then told him how I had been living with a 6’ 8” Black man weighing around 400lbs who used to be a lineman for the Houston Oilers for the past two years, how he was in a relationship with my sister, and how he was the father of one of my nieces.  They were all living in the upstairs apartment in my home.  Thinking back, it was always a surreal experience when Darryl and I would be sitting on the back porch of my house and some coward would yell “Nigger!” from the shadows of the alley.  It would take me a second to realize that the insult hadn’t actually been directed at me. 
            At that point in the conversation with the father, everything changed.  I was no longer a White racist calling to make life more complicated for my Black student.  I had become something akin to extended family in the course of just a couple of sentences over the telephone.
            The father had gone from judging me based upon my race to judging me based upon the quality of my character in record time.  I can’t blame anyone for their social and racial expectations because I haven’t lived their life, but I will admit that it is tedious to be burdened with the mistakes and prejudices of others when those views are not my own.
            I don’t consider myself Color-blind. 
            I consider myself Color-irrelevant when it comes to dealing with others, and so when the book Courageous Conversations stresses race over all other things, I simply can’t adopt that perspective.  I will be the first to note that the ultimate goal of improving relationships, work ethics, and grades has great value.  I’m just saying that in many specifics, the book is referring to perspectives that I haven’t adopted and beliefs, mostly negative, that I personally never had about others.  Now I do appreciate that others have different cultures from my own, but like Dr. King, my personal focus is upon character, and it is in the area of character that I feel that we can make the most beneficial progress.
            And when the next time comes for me to call home on a student, the discussion is going to be, just as it has always been for me, about character. 
            It is my hope that the person on the other end of the phone line will hear what I am saying, and not hear what they ASSUME I’m saying, as evidenced in the Footlocker experience.
            As for being an honorary Black Woman, that award was bestowed upon me by four Black women who were selected to work with me on a project down at Wayne State University.  We worked well together, we joked and sweated together, and there was never any hint of distraction about race or culture because there were four of them and one of me, so I never had any chance of mistakenly trying to unduly influence anything.  I can certainly understand that one Black woman in a group that included four White men would be a potentially different circumstance, so I acknowledge the mistakes and missteps of racial interactions of the past. 
            I think what the ladies learned from me is that not every negative expectation about race deserves a second thought when dealing with a person who has character. 
            What I learned from them is that “goosing” (the rotating of the head and neck while making a point) means “Don’t mess with me about what I’m saying right now!”
            It was completely their idea to make me an Honorary Black Woman, and although it is a title that I share infrequently, it is one that I will always be quite proud of.
            These are just some thoughts for your consideration in your ongoing efforts to bring a little acceptance, tolerance, and understanding to a difficult situation.  If the discussion has to wander through the muddy and stinking metaphoric fields of negative race perceptions to get to a place where character can be addressed, then so be it, but I don’t personally feel that race, economic circumstances, public ridicule, or personal abuse are anywhere near the core problem, having grown up with all of those things myself.
            Like Dr. King, I believe that it’s all about character, and that’s exactly what I would tell a Martian or a Kryptonian if they were misbehaving in my class.

            Sincerely,

Edward L. Paciorek
English Teacher
Troy High School

        

Good Evening Mr. Paciorek!

Thank you for taking the time to share your story and "speak your truth" as it relates to the issue of race and education! Your life experiences have provided you with possibly a unique lens from which to view this work. It has also provided you the frame of reference that you use to form your beliefs. We all use the same source when forming opinions and shaping our beliefs, and that is our experiences (i.e. frames of reference). 

Courageous Conversations is designed to encourage teaching professionals to engage in meaningful dialogue about race and its impact on education. Whether one agrees with the contents of the text is not as important as the conversations that result from reading it. Stay engaged, continue to be reflective, and please, please, please continue to contribute your voice to this conversation. Your perspective is a valued asset as we strive to eliminate the achievement gap.

Thanks again for being courageous enough to contribute to this conversation! Please introduce yourself to me tomorrow...it would be my pleasure to meet the man behind the voice. :-)

Peace & Blessings,
Jay
 
Jay B. Marks, Ph.D.
Educator/Mentor/Facilitator