TASblog: News

SCHOOL IS CLOSED THURSDAY JANUARY 27

2011-01-27T05:27:00.002-05:00

The Farmer's Almanac got this winter right. See you Friday.

I hope you all got a chance to walk around last night. It was lovely.

SCHOOL CLOSED TODAY Jan21

2011-01-21T05:26:00.001-05:00

I love winter, but this is becoming notable.

Spring, only two months away.

School Closed Today TUES JAN 18

2011-01-18T05:53:00.001-05:00

also, graduate school continues to disrupt blogging ambitions...

Three Meditations

2010-11-17T14:52:00.003-05:00

Our school day begins and ends with meditation, and lunch is bracketed by first moment of silence and afterwards a brief meditation. Each has a very different quality. They have evolved.

Morning begins with a brief talk and a twenty minute sit, in which some students concentrate on their martial arts forms and others focus on a basic breathing meditation. Here they are invited to notice what moods, thoughts, sensations, and so on they are starting the school day with.

The afternoon meditation is quite different- they tend to rather tumble into the meditation room, noisy and relaxed. Here they are asked to master a change of state, from the bustle of lunch to some quiet and centered breathing for just a few minutes. It is a change to set the tone for the rest of the day.

At the end of the day, a student usually leads a 5 or ten minute sitting. Here students are left to their own ability to settle in and let the school day go.

Colleges

2010-11-16T11:51:00.003-05:00

Wells College: On the shores of NY state's Cayuga Lake, this school has cross enrollment with Cornell University and Ithaca College. Wells makes an integrated effort to connect new students with all aspects of college and community life. There are many interesting and creative social events that deepen community and balance the academics with fun- among them an eighties dance, a semi-formal, and the Erotic Ball, a themed, yearly dance that seeks to celebrate being comfortable in one's body and with safe sex.

Washington Monthly ranked Wells 30th among all liberal arts schools; Princeton Review put it at 12th for encouraging discussion. The campus is regarded as one of the most beautiful- it sits within a historic district, and is also considered to be haunted. A new major, Book Arts, the history and art of making books, is considered better than any in the country.

Classes are small and seminar style. Students are encourage to work collaboratively with professors and the many internship opportunities are wide ranging.

St. Michael's College: Way up in Vermont is a little treasure of a school just outside of Burlington. The school claims to be the "happiest college in the world", and it does seem to be a thoughtfully conceived experience. Hands-on learning in any of the 29 majors is the major emphasis, and the context is one of the outdoors. All students get unlimited ski passes to nearby Smuggler's Notch for $30 and the school has a wilderness program. There is also a student staffed EMT program, a $30 pass to all events at Burlington's Flynn Cultural Center, a vibrant music scene in town, and 5 other nearby colleges to mix it up with. Washington Monthly, Forbes, and U.S. News all rank it highly for quality of life. The theater program is competitive to get into, and puts students to work next to professionals; the school also sponsors a Mozart Festival.

But this is stratospheric on the Nerdy/Cultural/Literary scale: Harold Bloom, the arch-defender of modernism and almost certainly the most influential American literary critic of the last 50 years, plans to donate his personal library to St. Micheals. A donor has ponied up the cash to build a library annex to hold it all.

Abstract of the Day

2010-11-16T11:50:00.000-05:00

MATERIALISM AND DIMINISHED WELL-BEING: EXPERIENTIAL AVOIDANCE AS A MEDIATING MECHANISM

Todd B Kashdan, William E Breen. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.New York: May 2007. Vol. 26, Iss. 5; pg. 521, 19 pgs

Abstract (Summary)

Being preoccupied with the pursuit of money, wealth, and material possessions arguably fails as a strategy to increase pleasure and meaning in life. However, little is known about the mechanisms that explain the inverse relation between materialism and well-being. The current study tested the hypothesis that experiential avoidance mediates associations between materialistic values and diminished emotional well-being, meaning in life, self-determination, and gratitude. Results indicated that people with stronger materialistic values reported more negative emotions and less relatedness, autonomy, competence, gratitude, and meaning in life. As expected, experiential avoidance fully mediated associations between materialistic values and each dimension of well-being. Emotional disturbances such as social anxiety and depressive symptoms failed to account for these findings after accounting for shared variance with experiential avoidance. The results are discussed in the context of alternative, more fulfilling routes to well-being. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Colleges

2010-11-10T15:02:00.002-05:00

Over the next few months I will be posting little info packets on interesting colleges that seem to offer our students the community and support they've grown to expect at TAS. I will try to cast a wide net, but will largely eyeball schools that are small and supportive.

Ripon College: About three hours drive north of Chicago, with Milwaukee midway between them, this college has gotten praise from all the major reviewers: Forbes, U.S. News, the Chronicle of Higher Education, et al. Washington Monthly notes its It was started in the 1850's and ended its formal relationship with the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in the 1860's. It still has something of a religious character, but probably not more than other national universities such as Notre Dame or Boston College.

The National Forensic League was begun there- a lot of kids these days are into forensics.

It has about 1000 students.

Other tidbits (courtesy of wikipedia): small classes, intensive mentoring, high rates of success in the workforce, high rates of acceptance into grad and professional schools.

Heavy emphasis on volunteerism and community service. And a free mountain bike, helmet, and u-lock if you pledge not to bring a car to campus.

Bates College: A great school, one of the toughest to get into. Founded by abolitionists and more than a few of Bates' first students were former slaves. This is a place with a powerful history, and apparently a great place to learn as virtually all students who apply to programs in the health professions are accepted, and the school sends numerous students to the very best law and business schools as well. There are about 1700 students there.

Bates is about 30 miles from Portland, Maine- a great little city.

Yesterday's Talk

2010-11-10T14:48:00.002-05:00

If you are looking at problem, picture this: A mountain, a river, and your practice. The mountain is the thing you cannot affect or change, the river a force either cresting or falling. When the river is fast and rising, one doesn't cross it, one waits. When the river is becoming shallow, one crosses. There is a proper time to wait and a proper time to cross.

Meanwhile, the one thing we can always count on is our practice: sitting meditation, compassion towards ourselves and others, and focused work.

Why Bother?

2010-11-02T10:10:00.005-04:00

Election Day poses a problem that most voters and (especially) non-voters miss: why does anyone vote at all? Or more specifically, why does an individual vote? A single vote is a simple summation of some very complex processes, like any observable behavior. But at its heart is a paradox. And this can be said about any human endeavor. The paradox of voting is that one vote really amounts to almost nothing, and yet it is also much more than a ritual act of democracy. Lurking in the heart of every voter is this: what if I didn't vote and no one else did either?

Why bother? In this morning's meditation I asked this of the students. Why come to school on time? Why be kind to others? Why do your work well? At our school, we have few punishments or "consequences" (a term I am never comfortable with). We continually nudge a student's acts and words back onto them. Punishment usually only distracts from the serious grappling with one's responsibility. So why bother trying hard at all... it seems so much easier not to.

But, alas, it is not easier. Slowly one's awareness broadens, and along with it, one's conception of self-interest. But within this process- however long it takes- a person wrestles with the question. Or they avoid it. But at some point it becomes clear- in this school- that it is all about relationships. Why bother? The answer is not "because I have relationships". The answer lay within each of our particular web of relationships: to others, ourselves, our ambitions, and our desires.

No one can answer this question but the individual alone. The best teacher can't make a student work or give a damn. But the trust that must be the basis of a relationship- any relationship- is based on previous experiences and our deep inclinations as humans to have relationships. This is what the teacher and student steps into. The student must become conscious of all this. The teacher must manage the trust.

Trust is faith. There is every reason in the world to be nihilistic and not bother much at all. Yet we keep on bothering, most of us, every day. Those of us who can honestly ask the question every day are the best among us.

TBI (traumatic brain injury) and Vets

2010-10-04T05:38:00.001-04:00

Good piece in the Washington Post about TBI, the extent of the injuries, and the hopes for treatment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/02/AR2010100203969.html

Allentown's Veteran's Sanctuary

2010-10-03T21:24:00.003-04:00

Last year, the student body voted without dissent to donate 500 dollars from the student fund to the Veteran's Sanctuary in Allentown, PA. With remarkable speed the organization running it has converted an old Catholic school- a giant one- into a fully accessible treatment center and residence for traumatized and brain injured combat vets, male and female. The program is family and mindfulness based. It is due to open in November.

This Tuesday, we are heading up their to prime and paint a number of dormitory rooms. This is an important relationship...why? Not to get too political about this, but these wars were planned to be mostly hidden. Sure, we have a sense of the financial costs, but the human costs are isolated from us. For those with eyes to see.

Our older students must come to grips with these wars and their costs. Not in the sense of risking overwhelming them and creating helplessness within them, but rather an orientation to life and death, suffering and relief.

My hope is that a few of the many students we have who seem interested in psychology take this injustice on as they grow older.

Post # 214

2010-09-30T21:18:00.002-04:00

At this moment it is raining, raining, raining. Maybe it rained 4 times this summer, and now the Delaware is rising high, figuring out when and how high its crest shall be. There has been a remarkable amount of energy- good and not so good- at school for the last few days, and it is difficult to avoid tracing some of it to the giant weather turnover. But a month into school and a very interesting year is shaping up, one quite unlike any other. 15 years or so after we started this thing I am still astounded at the variety of human community.

2010-09-30T06:40:00.003-04:00

One thing I have noticed over the years is that, generally speaking, the more difficulty a kid is having in school, the more his or her world shrinks around them. For instance, for a long time now behavioral difficulties get shoveled over to special education specialists. There is a logic to this, but one net result is that the pool of children and adults that the kid is exposed to daily gets reduced, interactions become more stilted.

Simplifying the world for a person in trouble is a two-edged sword. Things become more manageable, but the live-giving complexity of genuine and mutual relationships are compromised.

This is one of the reasons that we work very hard at maintaining a very diverse student body- diverse, that is, in terms of ability, experiences, and expectations. The range is a head-scratcher sometimes: a few brilliant students, some kids wild as puppies, others clearly on the autistic spectrum, others still struggling with post-traumatic syndromes, a few others utterly alienated from school, and of course, kids swept up in a family's emotional chaos. A small school with all this variety must return to a basic principal, that of basic needs. And the most basic need is to

speak and be heard, act and be consequential.

Too often it is second of these that is ignored. Schools and special programs all have "groups", and therapists, who excel at facilitating a "talking" arena. But where can a teenager really act, really stretch out and flex their power and direct their energy? Invariably, for the person having trouble, the situation is recognized intuitively: they do crazy things. Action is reserved and approved for kids who get the rules. The rest is pathologized.

At this school, kids do things that effect everybody. That is the virtue of a small community, your own fingerprints are everywhere, and the feedback is instant and natural, whether you want it or not.

This is where self-awareness training comes in. All that feedback is pretty stormy; mindfulness and self-awareness slows the game down, it cuts the reactivity. When a young person can manage much of the input (as it were), the stress of everyday life becomes an experience of efficacy.

Where adults come in is the role of managing the "arena" so mistakes don't get out of hand, but otherwise practicing in themselves being genuine and spontaneous with their charges. Too often, adult control is projected into all the interactions between adult and student. This will drive away the kids who are already rightly questioning the usefulness of adults.

Some Updates From a Busy Week...

2010-09-27T20:42:00.002-04:00

Soon I will be putting together (hopefully) an online chat for people involved in teaching and practicing mindfulness in high school. About a dozen people have shown more than passing interest, which really gives me confidence about the venture. My meditation, teaching, and psychotherapeutic practice will deepen with all that input. I sent out an introductory email that might have made a few people wonder about what they were getting into... but I can't help myself. It is a new field and we need to develop the frameworks for productive discussion. Here is the bulk of that email:

Thank you for showing interest in some sort of formal or informal discussion of mindfulness in high schools. Some of you might be aware of the school we have here in eastern Pennsylvania, Tinicum Art and Science, an alternative, private school that has come to be a preferred resource for our area public schools.

The school has 25-30 students, most of whom have had serious emotional difficulty in school due to bullying, teacher indifference, past abuse, and various identified disorders such as Asperger's, PTSD, depression, and so on. A number of students also have significant learning disabilities. We use a combination of zen, a low student-teacher ratio, a liberal arts curriculum, good food, chores, and a strong emphasis on community and basic decency to bring our kids back into their own lives fully.

Mindfulness is big nowadays. I am confident that unlike so many other fads in psychotherapy and in education, the huge research output in this area will make a lasting contribution. My concern is that schools will adapt mindfulness techniques for students without developing the skills among staff in order to facilitate mindful relationships between teachers and students. Unless mindfulness is part of the relationships within the school itself, it is merely another technique imparted to the student. This negates most of the benefit of the practice, as it is really the complex, fluid, mutuality of relating to others that reinforces the sort of behavior associated with the pre-frontal cortex that schools are seeking to cultivate with mindfulness practice.

In other words, you can't "do" mindfulness to someone, and you can't "teach" it. We have to experience it with another. And sadly, this mutuality is sorely lacking in so many schools today.

TAS practice

2010-09-23T21:56:00.003-04:00

From Dan Siegal in the most recent Garrison Institute newsletter:

The prefrontal cortex does three things. Number one, it allows self-awareness to develop. The amazing irony of reflective practices is that as you develop the capacity to have more attunement to yourself, you actually start dissolving what Einstein called the optical delusion of your separateness and, ironically, the more you become in tune with yourself, you realize the notion of [self] (in my case, Dan) is just an illusion. In fact, we are all a part of an interconnected whole. So, reflective practice is the opposite of self-indulgence; it’s self-liberation. And this, I believe, needs to be taught in every school. We need a program called, ‘No prefrontal cortex left behind.’ The prefrontal region is able to see the truth, because the truth is we are all interconnected.

Number two, this area of the brain (and studies on reflective practice show these areas get thicker) actually can regulate the sub-cortical distress. In people who develop what is called “mindfulness traits,” you actually can show how inhibitory peptides are secreted to calm the lower, distressed areas in the brain.

Third, in middle prefrontal development, through contemplative practice, through reflective practices, [you develop] the ability to see and shape the internal world by tracking and transforming this flow toward something called integration. What I believe happens — and all the studies suggest it is true — is that when people do this, they start making not only “me maps,” but “you maps.” They become more empathic. Then they start making something we can call “we maps,” where they realize we are actually in this together. When you do that, compassion and kindness become integrated and natural to the prefrontal cortex, [perceiving] our membership in the larger family, as natural as the breath is to life. [“We maps”] have the potential to actually awaken our larger human family to the need to preserve the Earth.

These are the postulated neural pathways for empathy, self-awareness, and tolerance of pain and ambiguity that are reinforced by mindfulness practice. This is what the TAS curriculum and school structure continually supports and develops.

The context for Siegal's argument is that developing these qualities make one more receptive to see the big picture, in this case, the vast environmental changes overtaking so much of the planet. It is a leap from science into psychology (a little snark there, excuse it please) but is an interesting direction nonetheless.

But let this be stated clearly: measurable, observable, and enduring changes in brain structure are the results of mindfulness and meditation practice. This is what TAS is based on. We've been practicing this longer and more comprehensively with teenagers than anyone else. It works.

Another item from the world of science that will gratify all you alternative types....deep tissue massage clearly decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol (as well as a precursor- arginine vasopressin). Light massage increases oxytocin, "a hormone associated with contentment", according the the NY Times article.

Get frequent massages and meditate as much as you are able. Life will get better. Or rather, if life seems better, then it is better.

Why Listen to Your Teacher?

2010-09-21T21:13:00.002-04:00

Most mornings at TAS begin with meditation and a short talk. Traditionally, these are called "dharma talks", where a teacher addresses the students and develops on a particular theme, or gives something quite like a performance. For years now, headmaster and principal have either begun or ended morning meditation with these. Young meditators need context and direction, and the dharma talks provide these.

Often I bring my affectionate and mellow water dog, Milton, to school with me. He tends to follow me around for a while, and then settle into whomever it is most tempted to rub his belly and scratch between his shoulder blades. In the morning, as we herd the students into the large room we use for meditation, yoga, and martial arts, Milton follows along. But for some reason, we have decided that animals should not be in that room- perhaps this is a vestige of Catholic upbringing and sacred spaces- and poor Milton is barred.

This brings a few comments of protest from the students, who doubtless agree that the sensation of a nuzzling dog is a fine antidote to the tedium of sitting quietly. A typical koan- a zen puzzle- leaps to mind: does a dog have Buddha nature? And a conflict between convention: no animals in sacred space, and tenet: all beings are interconnected, is joined.

Koan is a long avenue of study in Zen. I have little experience with it formally. Yet any student of philosophy, or deep lover of art, or person deeply engaged with any spiritual tradition recognizes the provoking value of parodox. In koan study, the teacher presents paradoxes that cannot be resolved by rote or by logic, and the student meditates upon it until it becomes completely enmeshed in their subjective experience. And it is the free apprehension of one's own subjective experience that is the topsoil for the sudden insight into a particular koan.

Koans are tests of a uniquely Zen sort. But they are not, in my limited understanding, tests that a teacher "subjects" a student to. But rather, they are the very relationship itself, in instant awareness to the student, an awareness that the teacher has facilitated and exposed herself to. They are also a chance to notice the difference between one's habitual thinking and one's genuine experience. They are mutual, the very "I-Thou" that Martin Buber wrote of, in contrast to the "I-it" of relationships that transfer goods and knowledge, that dominate, or otherwise create distance between two people.

In our tradition, existence itself- everyday life- is a koan, a paradox. And why not? Isn't perceiving life as irreconcilable to one's own dearly held notions a tremendous kick in the rear? Isn't it a great spur to personal growth? This can't be "taught"; it must be experienced. And in a school, a student's primary experience should be between teacher and student. It should be an experience, not easily reduced to a formula, something that strikes both as open ended and filled with risk: something alive.

A koan, then, for the student at TAS is simply "Why listen to your teacher?". There is no particular answer for that question. Every student must answer it for themselves. Obviously, "because I said so" won't work. Nor will "because your parents (or school district) is paying for this education". A student must look deep within and notice what it feels like to be in such a relationship, one fraught with so much risk and responsibility. It is easy to shy away, or to stick in a box, call it "school" and walk away at the end of the day. Our new students often struggle with how disruptive our teachers are: all day long the usual teacher-student, cat and mouse game is undermined. We have few rules and no punishments. In the end, the question is always "why bother, why am I here?".

Why listen, indeed.

A New Week...

2010-09-20T21:45:00.002-04:00

A few quick updates, while I try to figure out a posting schedule that will actually work...

First, we begin the year with 24 students, more than we usually have. Over the last two years we have angled for a younger group- that is, more students who enter as freshman or sophomores. This allows for much longer exposure to the practices of meditation, chores, and good eating.

Second, our four year curriculum is fully underway. The art and all academic programs are moving along nicely.

Third, we have reorganized our teacher/advocate responsibilities. Instead of one teacher being responsible for 5 or 6 students, a pair of teachers looks after the younger half of the school, and another pair looks after the older half. A third teacher makes sure that any students with learning difficulties is fully advocated for in all goings on at school.

Other new items: meditation every Thursday at 6:15- all are welcome; our open house is Tuesday, October 4th at 5pm.

Day One

2010-09-08T05:24:00.002-04:00

The building is more or less ready, a batch of wonderful students will join us today for the first of many interesting days. Of course, several former students will be joining us as well.

Of note, this item from the Times:

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

Basically, forgetting is part of learning, difficult tests make recalls more challenging and thus create multiple pathways for later recall, and studying the same thing in different places creates new pathways as well.

School Thinking

2010-08-22T06:47:00.002-04:00

Kevin Drum, thoughtful as usual, wonders if the memory of his quizzing of a four year old years ago is accurate, as a year or so later a kid who clearly had mastered basic math could hardly do it at all. It turns out there is some evidence that people learn on a "U" shaped curve, that we get a handle on a cognitive skill, demonstrate it well, start processing it deeply, and become confused before the skills become more deeply set.

There's evidence that this U-shaped pattern is common (this paper, for example, compares 7-year-olds and 9-year-olds on certain kinds of math problems and finds that 7-year-olds do better). So is this what happened with my four-year-old friend? Did she learn simple arithmetic, then get confused about it during kindergarten, and then learn it for good in first grade? Maybe. Maybe I didn't imagine the whole episode after all.

If this is true, it obviously has disturbing implications for the use of standardized tests in primary schools to evaluate teacher performance. If students routinely go through U-shaped learning curves, it means that a terrific third grade teacher might produce mediocre test scores if her kids tend to be in the trough of the U at year-end, while the fourth grade teacher who gets the kids the following year reaps the benefits.

I think we all have "U" shaped learning experiences, and for me it is another example of how the exigencies of profiting off of schools both politically and fiscally drive very simple minded "solutions" to educational issues. It also highlights a self-knowledge problem for students: what sort of kid might interpret the middle phase of her own learning pattern as a an end-point and thus evidence of inability and failure?

Something to think about.

Mindfulness

2010-04-26T11:50:00.002-04:00

It is only April, but teachers and students feel year's end acutely: there is a lot to do. The other side of seeing year's end approach is to cast an eye over what we've done.

One of our goals this year was to make the class schedule more rational and predictable. This sounds absurd; of course a schedule should be rational. But ours really wasn't. It evolved over the years out of a commitment to meeting what students considered important, be it particular subjects or class formats. For instance, our classes tend to be small, and our school year is divided into trimesters. As a result, we also tend to have vast number of classes, which can be quite labor intensive, and over all, rather confusing. So we have radically simplified things. Our transcripts now make much more sense. This is important, as most of our students go on to college.

The variety of classes is still significant, but they are embedded in a larger class format such as American History or Science.

That has been one change, ongoing. A second has been quite a bit of experimenting with how to incorporate mindfulness into the curriculum. We begin the day with meditation, have a moment of silence at lunch, end the day gathered quietly. We teach yoga, martial arts, and meditation, and the psychology class is organized around developing self-awareness. Importantly, however, I think a TAS style is evolving regarding teaching mindfulness, and it has emerged from our typical approach: a bit freewheeling, restless, and very student driven.

A mindfulness listserv I subscribe to provided an opportunity for some comments of mine:

All of our students...begin the day with any of a number of mindfulness exercises. It is a 25 minute period that I usually lead, and we begin with a modest ritual (sitting still, paying attention, lighting incense) and then I get a feel for where the group is at. Sometimes I have them do some pretty vigorous warm ups, and then some sitting. Sometimes we shake out our bodies and get pretty ridiculous about it. Sometimes we sit zazen, sometimes with a brief talk, sometimes not.   We may do a group shout, or walking about very slowly, deliberately, and then gradually speeding up to a manic run. This is a favorite of mine, especially in winter, as the kids are often so sluggish and dark. After the run around, I have them lay down on the floor, every which way, and ask them to notice their hearts beating, their breath slowing down, the changes in their body state. We do a simple body scan, noticing changes and warmth and discomfort, eventually becoming very quiet. I often end by asking them to notice what *they* want to do- stretch, lay there, pop up, and tell them they can leave the dojo when they feel like it. Ending in this way is very grounding and empowering. I strongly recommend some version of this.    I feel that responding to their states with a variety of techniques works well, and helps them develop a wide sense of the ways one can be aware, and learn to self-soothe.    We always have a moment of silence before the midday meal, and at the end of lunch we gather in the dojo again for five minutes of zazen to transition to the next part of the day.    At the end of the day, a small group of students lead a final meditation. Again, very empowering.    I suggest becoming familiar with Gendlin's Focusing training- check out Anne Wieser's book The Power of Focusing; it is very compatible with all mindfulness practices and adapts well to teenagers.    Again, I can't emphasize enough how important the vigorous physical movement is, and the grounding in the body. Also, I strongly suggest that when you lead groups do so by suggesting a given technique- for instance, "Now that your body is a little more settled, you might want to imagine a lovely little park, with a brook and sunshine and lots of trees...but if you would rather not, just try to stay still etc etc"   Giving choices like this allows the student to have a more personal and empowering experience. After all, there is no way of evaluating how they are doing, so it is a great chance to help them explore freely.    I also suggest creating a language of exploration, mystery, relaxation, and surprise- that their inner world is very much worth getting to know, that it is theirs alone, and no one can judge the quality of their experience. This is important. Without this, how can they learn to experience without reflexive judgement?

Sleep and other basic things

2010-04-22T11:09:00.002-04:00

If your teenager is having trouble the first things to consider are sleeping, eating, hydration, and safety. Unfortunately, so much of the first three are habits long cultivated in the home, and are very difficult to alter once they become problems and are compounded during adolescence. Nevertheless, these are worth taking a long look at.
It is one thing to wring our hands over the poor eating habits and lack of sleep that characterizes the average teenager, it is another to engage them in a deeper look. Often enough things are not what they seem. Take sleep for instance. The everyday is understudied, and sleep, for all the research that has explored it over the last 20 years, is still not seen by many as all that worthy of consideration. The Times today has an interesting item on the subject, some speculating on sleep itself:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/what-is-sleep/

Counterintuition?

2010-01-30T07:01:00.002-05:00

The psychology class I am currently teaching is mostly about intimate relationships, and the way "attachment" to a caregiver one's early years is such a profound influence. This following item is interesting...but as Ezra Klein asks, how does one regulate one's own attractiveness?

Physical appearance plays a crucial role in shaping new relationships, but does it continue to affect established relationships, such as marriage? In the current study, the authors examined how observer ratings of each spouse's facial attractiveness and the difference between those ratings were associated with (a) observations of social support behavior and (b) reports of marital satisfaction. In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives. These results highlight the importance of dyadic examinations of the effects of spouses' qualities on their marriages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

Posted Without Comment

2010-01-26T11:31:00.000-05:00

As Americans struggle to keep New Year’s weight-loss resolutions, experts’ alarms about obesity ring in our heads. We obsess about portion control, flock to the gym, and can’t get enough of The Biggest Loser. As schools, congressional subcommittees, and even first lady Michelle Obama -- who’s made the issue a top priority -- take on the problem, the focus turns to the usual suspects: fast food, oversize servings, and sedentary lifestyle. For some battling weight problems, those factors are indeed critical. But overlooked in all this is one of the primary causes of America’s obesity epidemic: The elephant in the living room is the skyrocketing use of psychiatric drugs. Many of these, which are used to treat emotional problems including depression and anxiety, cause weight gain -- often of the rapid and massive sort -- as one of their “side effects,” that brilliant marketing term for what are simply negative effects of a drug.

from the Boston Globe

Long time off

2010-01-23T17:22:00.001-05:00

All kinds of things get in the way of constant blogging. But I'm back this week.

News

2009-11-16T09:00:00.002-05:00

I always find the labors of blogging a little surprising. When school is very busy, and family life is too, blogging has to fall away. So much is worthy of comment both at TAS and abroad, that I always feel a little guilty in my neglect. Needless to say, I get over it.

This Friday is our first "Alumni and Former Student" get together. Should we just call everyone "alumni"? Not everyone graduates, and certainly TAS accommodates many various paths. At any rate, we are all hoping for a robust turnout with lots of surprises.

Our Contemplative Ed group had its second retreat the other night, an after school meditation and dinner. Long standing (and sitting) Zen Mountain Monastery student Jinshen came by to lead the meditation.

In other news, news classes have been announced for the winter term (more on that later), and there is burgeoning interest in student lead workshops and older students serving as teaching assistants.

A couple of weeks ago, two graduates of the Developing Virtue Secondary School, a Buddhist High School outside of San Francisco, came by for a visit. Very impressive people. It is a deep interest of ours to develop ties with the two other schools in the country that share a Buddhist frame of reference.

Other visitors: word is that two alumni will be joining TAS as interns sometime this year. How wonderful is that?

Apologies

2009-11-02T11:03:00.001-05:00

Time to get blogging again. Schedule and content soon.

Various Updates

2009-09-22T09:36:00.002-04:00

The Contemplation Ed program we have started at TAS is now underway. We have a weekend retreat scheduled for the October 2-4 in Pine Hill, NY. On the agenda are some lovely mountain hikes, a few instructional meditations, a visit to the source of the Delaware River, and morning services at the Zen Mountain Monastery.
The Arts program is now in readable form. Though far from complete, we are able to say that the program seems adequate to our goals of developing basic skills and historical context in the visual arts.
We have welcomed a couple of new students in the last week.

Drug Free School Zone News

2009-09-17T13:14:00.003-04:00

Omaha, NE - Three Millard North High School students get busted for bringing drugs to school. The school resource officer discovered the drugs Friday.

Two students had marijuana, one had drug paraphernalia and two prescription drugs, Adderall and Seroquel, both are considered controlled substances.

When prescribed by doctors, Adderall is often used to treat ADHD, Seroquel is used to treat psychotic disorders like bipolar disease.

All three students are 17 years old. Two were sent to the youth center. The third was ticketed.

Ho hum...high school students busted for drug possession in a high school. Wait! Seroquel? An anti-psychotic with the usually horrible side effects for many, that earned its maker 4,700,000,000 in sales (yes, that's billion), and is used these days for the highly over-diagnosed bi-polar disorder, is now a street drug.

Like I said, "ho hum".

New Link

2009-09-14T08:51:00.002-04:00

To Pete's Music History class blog:

http://tasmusichistory.blogspot.com/

New Link

2009-09-14T08:51:00.001-04:00

To Pete's Music History class blog:

http://tasmusichistory.blogspot.com/

Some Thoughts

2009-09-11T12:20:00.003-04:00

Generally speaking, I am not against the proscribing of certain drugs for psychological symptoms. They have their place, and to a limited degree, they work for some people. That is about it.
My objections to the way drugs are proscribed to teenagers and children are numerous, however:

1) The safety of the newer anti-depressants in developing bodies over the long term is not
established
2) Many times the drugs are proscribed for reasons that have never been studied
3) Medications do not work better than therapy
4) Most proscribers have a very limited working knowledge of their patients goals,
subjective experience, or social world
5) Interactions with other drugs have not been studied. The all too frequent cocktail of anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, anti-anxiety meds, seizure medications, et al have no basis in empirical research
6) Interactions with street drugs have not been studied, this includes street drugs such as Ritalin, Seraquel, and Xanax. Nor have interactions with pot or birth control pills. Or alcohol.
7) Many doctors, and of course ALL the drug companies, have a vested interest in increasing the number of prescriptions filled.
8) The diagnosis of a mental health problem has never been demonstrated to have any bearing on the outcome of the treatment. The diagnoses themselves- such as Bi-Poloar Disorder, Schizo-affective Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder- are not distinct from one another, often blur into one another, and are rarely agreed upon by clinicians.

Safety, integrity of diagnosis, and transparency. These are the big, big problems with prescribing psychiatric medications to young people. Certainly there are times where there is no choice but to insist on meds. But the dangers are very real and the process is so murky that we should be very careful.

And most psychiatrists are not.

(edit: inexplicable misspelling of "prescriptions" and "prescribing")

Drug Free School Zone News

2009-09-10T08:01:00.001-04:00

(from Furious Seasons) This is maddening: court documents released today show details of so-called call notes made by Lilly sales reps of visits and golf games with doctors in South Carolina, where the company was working hard to get doctors to switch patients to Zyprexa, even for unapproved uses. There were basically payoffs going on, the State of South Carolina alleges in a lawsuit against Lilly, and some of that involved reps making bets with doctors during golf games. One doc agreed that for each time a sales rep made par during one outing that he'd start a new patient on Zyprexa, according to Bloomberg.

And then there was this:

"Lawyers for the state pointed to a sales note from Sullivan in which he tells another salesman to tie a doctor’s Zyprexa prescriptions to participation in a speakers’ program.
"The company paid doctors and psychiatrists to address physician gatherings about the benefits of the antipsychotic. 'If his numbers go up, maybe he can talk,' Sullivan said in the August 2001 note."

The state's case against Lilly could go to trial later this month. Lilly told Bloomberg that the notes were taken out of context. Yeah, right.

At this point a question has got to be asked: why the hell are the doctors who keep taking payoffs from pharma companies--a la last week's Pfizer settlement--not named publicly? Why are they still practicing medicine? Why are they facing no discipline of any kind?

On the Contemplation Front

2009-09-09T12:58:00.003-04:00

Today the TAS contemplative ed program begins. Seven students and I had a hour long meeting to discuss what they are interested and how the group should be formed. Generally speaking, they are highly interested in pursuing their art practice in a more self-learning mode, in various types of body practice and healing techniques, and going on retreats both in school and away. Of considerably less interest is sitting meditation.
Along the way manner interesting ideas were suggested: exploring hypnosis, care of animals, encouraging student teaching, fundraising for the school, exploring "spooky" stuff and how it relates to sprirituality, and finally, the idea of a Zen patch, a tiny, private plot on school property that a student takes care of. This is instead of a rather involved Zen garden.

For me, the most remarkable idea was suggested by one of the students when we were trying to figure out how to actually form (and allow) a membership. Basically, each interested student will pursue a project for a week, and while doing so, will allow those efforts to show them whether or not they want to join the program. For instance, one student, a guitarist, will approach his guitar practice as a meditation for the week. He will share his experience doing so with the others, and evaluate for himself joining the program. Another student is going to spend her week encouraging other students to come up with ideas for their own student teaching and student developed classes.

The beauty of it is their enthusiasm and openness. This is a real opportunity to create a group of "leaders"- not student council presidents, but young men and women who set an example for self-reflection and awareness.

Happy New Year!

2009-09-08T06:53:00.002-04:00

What is ahead?

No one knows. Sure, we have orientation and schedule making and classes to sign up for, and some get to know get togethers and a few talks. And a satisfying meal, of course. There are new students and a new teachers. We must catch up on rumors and news, aspirations and worries. But there is no "year" ahead of us, only endless opportunity to be exactly and totally in the present.

But first, let us tear the devil out by the roots. What devil? Ah, the devil of Multitasking, that handmaiden of mediocrity:

...researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

So strive to do one thing at a time, and do it well. Watch and listen, and concentrate, as if your life depends on it! The link is here

The Big Wrap-Around

2009-08-26T14:01:00.005-04:00

Over the summer a couple of fellow teachers and I have been pecking away at two major consolidations of TAS's programming. One is the Contemplation Concentration (CC), which I put into some context in the previous post. The other is an over-arching Art and Music curriculum.

One way of looking at adolescence is that even in the breeziest teenager these years are somewhat chaotic magnifications of adult life. Many deeply held beliefs and nearly unshakable habits are created during this time, partly as a function of neurology, partly as one of social and familial roles. Strong emotions create something of a whipsaw trajectory; these arise as the limbic system comes into its own. Judgment, perspective, functional empathy, and foresight are somewhat weak; this develops only as the frontal lobe becomes more dense and more connected with other regions of the brain.

None of these regions develop in isolation. The brain evolved to be profoundly shaped by its environment, which is why no genetic explanation for the vast range of normal behavior will ever be adequate. Conversely, this same brain-nature defies simplistic explanations based on social and environmental influences. Teenagers spend enormous amounts of time involved in school, and it is essential that this last, vast shaping opportunity not be wasted.

The word to keep in mind is "integration". This doesn't refer to a curriculum thoroughly determined, vetted and systematically relating one aspect of life to another, but rather a richly supportive emotional and social environment that makes each student's own integration and healing both possible and optimal.

Teenagers crave variety, change, action, movement, trust, emotional charge, stories, and seeing themselves reflected in a world they help create. This is the momentum one must work with, not against. A teenager's brain generally lacks the capacity to hold a stable self-perspective and to then analyze that perspective. This may be why a great variety of experiences seem to slip by your average teenager without comment or thank you. Their brains are furiously processing multiple layers of experience; to speak of them in real time or just after is nearly impossible for most kids.

This means that these experiences are certainly not wasted. Nor are they being stored for later use. They are being integrated below the level of awareness, and this requires time and space that is both nurturing and unobtrusive.

This is where having both a contemplative and an applied art program comes in. Each program has elements of action, academic study, and contemplation; the difference is in the proportion of each and how the student is brought into a new level of awareness.

All TAS students are required to take four years of art. The CC program is voluntary, as it requires a degree of maturity to participate in. Taken together they should frame a student's experience during these years in a powerful, enduring way.

Why a Contemplative Program?

2009-08-25T08:11:00.005-04:00

I grew up in a Catholic family. Our parish was close to the center of our family life and both my parents were deeply involved in various aspects of the church. We were friends with all the parish priests and my father's family had deep ties, well back into the late 1800's, to Catholic Church politics and the political emergence of the Catholic vote in southwestern Connecticut.

I mention this because my own ambivalence about religious practice arises from long and deep experience with religious practice. Long ago I came to the conclusion that, despite some rather profound experiences- call them mystical or deeply moving, call them each a crisis or a bout of religious melancholy, those experiences were largely emotional and arose from things much more pedestrian than "God". But that being said, I was also thankful to have had the vocabulary and syntax of a life-long religious education to make sense of the experience, whatever the outcome in terms of my faith. I had been educated by the Jesuits to be a skeptic and yet would forever be shaped by the Catholic tradition.

At TAS, I teach Zen Sword and lead meditation. I counsel students, teachers, and parents, and try to set the general, day to day tone of our educational practice. No doubt my own quirks and flaws are at play throughout, and perhaps no where is this more evident in the Contemplation Concentration. It has taken some work to get it to this point, and there is a lot more to do.

Buffy (our art, cooking, and yoga teacher) and I, with some contribution from Matt (our reading specialist), decided that it was time to re-ground what we do at TAS in some deeper practices. Jen, the school therapist (currently on maternity leave), joined the school this year, bringing her own deep and daily practice as a lens for the complex problems that arise for our students. Zen practice, we all concluded, is developmentally correct for teenagers. It has the right mix of skepticism, discipline, moral probity, and reflectiveness for that time of life. Ten years of success at TAS has demonstrated this.

America is a tremendously dynamic, cosmopolitan country, with all the world flowing in and out. Religious practice in our country reflects this. Religious practice is so central to so many contemporary and historical questions that it seems essential to a well rounded education to have some direct experience with it. Most of our students do not have any. Merely providing some emotional support, some meditation, and some martial arts and yoga is not enough, however effective this might be.

Big questions- of existence, of love, of the why and what of one's life- must be grappled with in the years between childhood and adulthood. At this age the mind is evolving the ability to consciously involve itself in the world and be changed by it. A point of reference is crucial, as is the understanding that there are many other points of reference, both inside and outside of oneself. That is where the integration of our world view truly begins. Our contemplation program is an attempt to help this process along.

So many people become fearful during these years, and slowly circumscribe their worlds. TAS is dedicated to the proposition that being open to the world makes your life better and makes everyone's lives better, that openness is itself an act of courage.

Academic classes can only hint at what is out there. They are a menu, not a meal. If you look carefully at the CC program, you will notice that intellectual study is only one part. The rest is about seeking whole-life engagement with the self and others, with a lot of guidance. If adults do not actively participate in the spiritual and philosophical lives of the children in their care, then all the great questions of childhood and adolescence will be framed by other children and adolescents.

Please give our new program a good, long look.

Here is an interesting little item from the Times, on proofs of God and one's own journey.

What a Shocker

2009-08-24T11:49:00.002-04:00

CHICAGO — Calls to poison control centers about teens abusing attention-deficit drugs soared 76 percent over eight years, sobering evidence about the dangerous consequences of prescription misuse, a study shows.

The calls were from worried parents, emergency room doctors and others seeking advice on how to deal with the problem, which can be deadly. Four deaths were among cases evaluated in the study.

Kids taking ADHD drugs to get high or increase alertness may not realize that misuse of the drugs can cause serious, sometimes life-threatening symptoms, including agitation, rapid heartbeat, extremely high blood pressure.

"They say, 'It's FDA approved, how dangerous could it be?'" said Steve Pasierb, head of The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, based in New York.

In the study, researchers from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center evaluated 1998-2005 data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers. During that time, nationwide calls related to teen abuse of ADHD drugs, specifically stimulants, increased from 330 to 581 yearly, and there were four deaths. Overall, 42 percent of teens involved had moderate to severe side-effects and most ended up getting emergency-room treatment.

The true number of teen abusers who have bad side effects is likely much higher, because many cases don't result in calls to poison control centers, said study author Dr. Randall Bond, medical director of the hospital's Drug and Poison Information Center.

The surge, from 1998 to 2005, outpaced calls for teen substance abuse generally. It also paralleled an 86 percent rise in ADHD medicine prescriptions for kids aged 10 to 19, from about 4 million to nearly 8 million during that time.

"It's more bad news on an entrenched problem," Pasierb said. His nonprofit group was not involved in the study. Its own research suggests that about 19 percent of teens have abused prescription drugs including medicine for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

link

We're Back...

2009-08-18T09:05:00.003-04:00

This marks the beginning of the school year for me...getting together budgets and curricula, putting some touches (by no means final) on the art and contemplative programs, and reconstructing a morning routine that is a little earlier and a little more focused than summer requires.

One of the best things we do at TAS is allow students to relax, let their guard down, and learn. Who would of thought that those things are intimately related:

Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.

Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.

Executive decision making crumbles under chronic stress? Repetitive, non productive behavior increases as well? This doesn't sound like humans at all, does it? But the good news is the remarkable re-generative nature of the brain, across the life-span. The brain searches for change and connection, that is, opportunities for growth:

But with only four weeks’ vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate and lay off the bar. Atrophied synaptic connections in the decisive regions of the prefrontal cortex resprouted, while the overgrown dendritic vines of the habit-prone sensorimotor striatum retreated.

"...[W]ith only four weeks' vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers...": I like that line. It sounds like how some of students feel after their first month at TAS.

Busy on Vacation

2009-08-06T07:35:00.002-04:00

Lots of behind the scenes work has been getting done- especially on the office management side. The school year has begun, but slowly and invisibly, like the mycelia that establishes itself long before the mushroom pops up. Speaking of which, with all the rain we've had we can expect a great fungi season this fall: boletes, puffballs, bearded tooths, and so on. Look for TAS teachers in the woods and up in the trees.

Parents: make your appointments for a visit and an interview soon. We have had a lot of inquiries over the last two weeks.

I am going on vacation and will turn off my TAS thinking for a week, except for the couple of Kandinsky volumes I am hauling along with me. This is going to be a great school year, with some new programs and a whole batch of new students.

Back to blogging on August 18th.

2009-08-06T07:35:00.001-04:00

Parents: make your appointments for a visit and an interview soon. We have had a lot of inquiries over the last two weeks.

Back to blogging on August 18th.

Busy on Vacation

2009-08-06T07:32:00.000-04:00

Lots of behind the scenes work has been getting done- especially on the office management side. The school year has begun, but slowly and invisibly, like the mycelia that establishes itself long before the mushroom pops up. Speaking of which, with all the rain we've had we can expect a great fungi season this fall: boletes, puffballs, bearded tooths, and so on. Look for TAS teachers in the woods and up in the trees.

Parents: make your appointments for a visit and an interview soon. We have had a lot of inquiries over the last two weeks.

Back to blogging on August 18th.

Hello Tuesday!

2009-07-28T07:11:00.002-04:00

News update: Coming soon, a framework for the arts program...Chrissy has uncorked a brilliant scheme that will somehow reconcile the simplicity colleges want on our transcripts with the jungle like complexity of our course selection...A well known art historian from NYC has agreed to help out with our Kandinsky and Gorky expeditions...Chang Sik Kim, Zen Master, Swordsman, and founder of Shim Gum Do, will be visiting us in the fall...
Those are a few of the developments. There is quite a bit of work to do: the mundane stuff of painting and organizing, curriculum and budgets, but with more than a month left of summer, I for one, am feeling rested and almost ready.
I hope everyone else is moving that way, too. Just keep saying that summer is long; be sure to attend to every moment and it will become so. Don't repeat cliches of "where did the summer go" blah blah blah- it is right all around you, isn't it? When that thought creeps in, simply take a moment to survey all that has happened in the last few days...

No Meditation Thursday July 23rd

2009-07-20T11:24:00.000-04:00

In Boston through the weekend.

Post Slow Down, next two weeks...

2009-07-17T11:21:00.002-04:00

Keep an eye on the Artblogg and on Birds of Appetite, that's where any posting action will be. I am leaving for Boston on Wednesday for a bit of a retreat at the Shim Gum Do temple up there. Regular posting will resume Tuesday the 28th.

Contemplative Education at TAS

2009-07-14T10:53:00.002-04:00

You might want to check out the website for our proposed Contemplative Education Program. The site is called The Birds of Appetite and is open for comments.

If any of our readers are interested in volunteering for this program please let me know. We are looking for speakers, workshops, retreats, trainings, and so on.

Most Posts over at the ArtBlogg

2009-07-13T22:26:00.001-04:00

That is where we are working these days, for the most part. Join us.

Poetry Day, late and small edition...

2009-07-10T16:34:00.004-04:00

What can I say? Been busy gardening and working on curriculum. Here is a poem from a favorite anthology of mine, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry:

The Death of Irish

The tide gone out for good,
Thirty-one words for seaweed
Whiten on the foreshore.

-Aidan Carl Matthews

All Kinds of Difference

2009-07-07T13:53:00.002-04:00

As one conservative friend said after Obama's election, "It seems that America is growing up". By this he didn't mean politics per se, but the mere fact that a black man with an incredibly foreign sounding name became president. The electorate has become, well, pretty cosmopolitan.
That is the main thing, after all. Eighty percent of Americans live in urban areas. Waves of immigration continually rework the demographics of four-fifths of the country. People are getting used to difference. It isn't so scary any more.
There remain many areas of resistance to full rights, access, and representation: one of the more heartening things about being in grad school is exposure to how integrated that awareness is becoming in psychological practice. Race is big, and ethnicity. Permanent injury, trauma, and various disabilities have vast social and psychological implications. So as it is heartening to see
attitudes soften towards sexuality that doesn't fit in a neat little box, it is also interesting to read new perspectives on how we are creeping toward a more open, accepting, helping society.
But there are dangers. To wit:

...with the Human Genome Project finding in 2000 that all humans are more than 99 per cent alike, many thought genomics would put the final nail in the race coffin.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. Shortly after the HGP's finding, several research projects began focusing on mapping this less than 1 per cent of human genetic variation onto social categories of race.

This small variation reflects millions of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), some of which may loosely correlate with geography. Yet the resilience of linking such differences and disparities to biological mechanisms is striking, since most analysis of the data cautions otherwise.

Some uses of new technologies also reflect this renewed effort. Though they explicitly reject the scientific racism of the past, race is given genetic significance in an effort to resolve health disparities, provide a richer sense of ancestry, and aid law enforcement.

If technology is for the moment knocking down old notions about the immutability (or even relevance) of race, it also holds the potential for reinforcing those same notions is the information is misused. True enough.

On the language side, here is an interesting discussion of the language of disability, from the blog Feministe:

Before we go any further, you guys are going to need a quick tutorial on models of disability.

There are a number of models, but the two primary models are the medical model and the social model. These are the two most often discussed because of the particular ways they conflict with one another.

The medical model centers around the individual. The medical model defines disability in opposition to the normal body/brain, as deviating from that model of normalcy, and any problems that arise in your life are seen as arising from your deviation. Thus, these problems are to be solved by addressing that deviation — by bringing your body/brain closer to the normal model.

The social model centers around the structure of society. The social model does not seek to define disability: instead, it proposes that the problem is that society is built such that many people are prohibited from full participation in society because of their differences. Under the social model, the problem is not the difference, the problem is that society does not accommodate that difference. “The problem is not the person” is a common refrain from champions of the social model.

In short, you might say: The cause of exclusion is not the disability. The cause of exclusion is how the rest of society treats disability. Therefore, what needs to be addressed to eliminate this exclusion is not the individual person’s condition. What needs to be addressed is how society is set up in such a way that this person faces trouble when attempting to exercise hir right to participation equal to that of a non-disabled person. What do you change? Not the person. Society.

Enjoy. See you tomorrow.

Give a Thirteen Year Old a Walkman

2009-07-07T10:12:00.001-04:00

...As I boarded the school bus, where I live in Aberdeenshire, I was greeted with laughter. One boy said: "No-one uses them any more." Another said: "Groovy." Yet another one quipped: "That would be hard to lose."

My friends couldn't imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked.

In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

I picked this up at Andrew Sullivan's site- check out the whole story.

A Little Ramble: Industrial Agriculture and Paw-Paws

2009-07-07T10:11:00.000-04:00

West of Riegelsville, where I live, are hundreds of acres of rolling fields, divided by dense windbreaks and small woods. I've seen grey and red fox, bear scat, and eagles, as well as tracks of everything that usually lives around here. There is a thick and palatial wetlands, home to huge populations of peepers and bullfrogs, and a shelter for the Merganser ducks who bounce between here and the river. It seems healthy and alive. In winter it is dramatic: cold and windswept, looking east the hills are cut steeply by the river, exposing the hard, ancient rock that is the heart of the Appalachian chain. Great clouds of mist rise from the river in spring and fall, and the sun glances the fields sometimes a full seventy minutes after sunrise, with bright swaths of frost remaining late into morning as the sun finally surmounts the cliffs of Warren County.
Early summer that
Come spring is the plowing, and then around Mother's Day, just as the lilac blooms, the farmers manure the fields. The wave of shit smell is intense, and not altogether unpleasant. At the very least, it means no houses are being built this year. I run throughout those fields much of the year; I know them well and have come to depend on them.
Then the planting. Field after field, in succession, corn, alfalfa, and in the upper fields, soy. And then, the herbicides. Roundup ready seeds, and Roundup applications. I loathe Monsanto.
Roundup's dangers are largely unknown- glyphospate is dangerous, but the other, "inert" ingredient are kept secret. With a company like Monsanto, which has a long history of playing fast and loose with the law, one should worry.
Worse, these seeds- or more specifically, the pollen, contaminates the gene pool of every other corn, soy, and alfalfa planting in the area. For instance, many think that organic soy is no longer possible, as all commercial plantings of it are mixed up with the Roundup Ready gene, the gene or genes that make the plant unkillable by the Roundup pesticide.

So this has driven me from the fields, and I now run in all directions, the Mariton Wildlife Preserve just north, the woods and old mill just south, the cliffs across the river. Me and the dog.
One sees pristine fields, but in truth, it is no less industrial than a factory. The soy and corn is silage, it is pig and cow food. Cow's shouldn't be eating corn (their stomachs do not handle it well), so one has to wonder about the effects down the line on milk and meat when genes are involved. In a nutshell, its the problem with how we produce food in this country.

But the frogs seems fine, for now. Soon I will be inspecting them for physical malformations, I've heard it happens. Also: the milkweed population is huge, and the colonies of insects seem healthy. I don't know. Maybe the dangers are overstated. I don't know.

Being pushed out into the surrounding lands have led to some interesting discoveries: one, the stand of Paw-Paw trees that some people at TAS tried to keep secret (to be honest, they told me where I could find it). It is a lovely little patch, with lots of little ones and some tall ones. They flower and don't set fruit for some reason. But I have a paw-paw secret of my own. I found a large, fruiting specimen. Very exciting. And I ain't telling where it is. Maybe.

Music and Art Blogging

2009-07-06T13:31:00.001-04:00

Teachers,

Head over to the protected teacher's blog to get access info for posting on the music blog.

Sexuality

2009-07-06T10:26:00.003-04:00

TAS is a pretty gracious place. We treat each other well, for the most part, and the students thrive. Life is more complex than ever for a young person and the TAS approach is that curiosity, relationship skills, and self-awareness will always be relevant, whatever the technological, political, or emotional landscape may be in the future.
For instance, several of us teachers went to the graduation for the Bucks County Community College LPN program. What a varied and impressive group of nurses. Our graduate, Crystal Connolly stood out: she was awarded a scholarship based on her academic quality and was the only one who declared the intention of going into anesthetic nursing. That's a tough field and the life and death dimension is right in front of you. It takes nerve and ambition.

Now, this graduate might not mind me saying that she had everything working against her when she came to Tinicum. School, home, and her social life were extremely problematic. But her own verve and intensity, and our patience, eventually combined pretty well. At the time, she felt that the academic skills she got from us were woefully inadequate. Perhaps that is true. Of course, we can't force a person to study, write, do homework, or get enough rest. Several years down the road, I still haven't figured out how to make a horse drink water. Yet enough room was provided for her character to come together independent of all the other circumstances, and enough support was there for her to take some chances. And look at her now.

She was intense, strong, willful, fierce, and couldn't rely on anyone but herself. This is the kind of young person who makes her own luck.

Towards the end of the school year several boys and girls were lounging in the lobby (or foyer, or hallway...whatever it is) doing what some kids do: a rapid fire engagement of warmth and teasing, with many layers of irony and some pretty sharp jabs. I had to point out, however, that their constant use of the word "fag" could really shut a kid down. What if someone in school was struggling with whether or not it is "right" to be attracted to someone of their own sex, and who had likely suffered a lot in his or her previous school? To their credit, they got it. They hadn't considered that, and they are proud of the fact that our school could be a shelter from that particular storm.

Years ago we had a (nearly) openly gay student. Since then, we've had none. Of course we have had gay students, but even a place like TAS isn't safe enough for that. And the news would get around anyway.

Are we doing enough to ensure that a student who struggles with his or her sexuality is getting the kind of care our nursing school graduate received? Do we realize how much pain he or she carries? Or is what we do just enough?

Buddhism is the practice of dropping categories and letting experience speak for itself. Every person has their own way through the world. It should be relatively easy for a contemporary American Buddhist to drop the fixed notions of male and female, straight and gay. After all, as Walt Whitman put it, we "contain multitudes".

To wit:

The standard model of human development is built on 46 chromosomes, including two that determine sex: XX for female, XY for male. But, as Callahan points out, not everyone ends up 46XX or 46XY.

Variations in sperm or egg, in the mixing of cells from mother and father and in the cell division that follows can all stir the genetic soup into alternative outcomes. The possibilities, Callahan writes, "are as grand and as varietal as the fragrances of flowers: 45X; 47XXX; 48XXXX; 49XXXXX; 47XYY; 47XXY; 48XXXY; 49XXXXY; and 49XXXYY." These variations are familiar to geneticists - the first on the list, for instance, is known as Turner's syndrome - but the general public is still stuck in a black and white, XX/XY world.

New Scientist has an interesting book review up about the intersex world. Over the course of a lifetime we all must realize that the world is far more complex, and far more interesting, than the version of it we carry around in our heads.

This is worth reading too, for the difficult, practical problems of the intersex world:

Now imagine what you do in a Customs line when you enter a country. Imagine you’ve heard from acquaintances who’ve been turned away by the US, or that worst-case-scenario lurking at the back of your head about Homeland Security issuing a memo about “cross-dressed terrorists.” What do you put then? What do you wear then? How do you present?

Imagine how vulnerable you feel. Driving (what if a cop pulls me over). At the bank (what if they think I’m trying to scam my own money). At the doctors. At school. At work. At anywhere they want a piece of ID, anywhere they want you to tick a box that divides humanity into two. Anywhere they want you to fill out a form. Confess, little tranny girl, confess. Tell them what in their minds what you “really” are. Or else. And they’ll get you anyway.

Because it’s not likely to be a problem for most of y’all, this is something that I’d wager the average cissexual person has rarely to never thought about. That tiny little box is the epicenter of governmental interest, of laws, of bureaucratic guidelines. Lawsuits are fought over the right to change the letter in that little box.

Why is this important to TAS? Students fall apart in other schools for a multitude of reasons. We always have a higher percentage of neglected, sexually abused, and otherwise victimized kids that your average school. A teenager who doesn't fit the mold is going to have trouble, and when it comes to enforcing sexuality, violence usually isn't far behind. It is a human rights issue.

Happy Monday!

2009-07-06T08:35:00.002-04:00

So summer is underway, the rains of the late spring a distant memory. The Delaware is finally dropping and those of us lucky enough to have well-draining soil have marvelous things waving to us in our yards.
Interestingly, most of my hybrid tomatoes are doing well, but the heirlooms are struggling a bit. My guess is that the all the moisture trapped CO2 in the soil, lowering the ph and locking out a bunch of key nutrients like magnesium. Some of the plants haven't bounced back, and the earliest fruit to set looks pinched and frightened.
My compost has been incredible: all I keep is a pile, nothing fancy. I have an encroaching patch of bamboo which is home to dozens of birds, and produces endless structural matter for the garden. I have a patch of nettles which I cut and soak in five gallon buckets until they ferment. It stinks like a swamp, or lets say, a strongly biological, living stink. I fed the tomaters with it- nettles are rich in silica (little glass needles cover the plant, when handled, they snap and release an irritant) and brew uniquely. I'm hoping it is the bounce they need.

Today I settle down to work on the music/art and contemplative education curricula. I will be posting both here, and cross-posting to the music blog. Stay tuned.

Poetry Friday

2009-07-03T08:49:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine, poet and filmmaker Vasiliki Katsarou, is the editor of a new and interesting volume of poetry titled Eating Her Wedding Dress. It has some pretty well known and wonderful poets in it, such as Margaret Atwood and Jorie Graham, but is much more than that. It is fun and multi-dimensional (and selling pretty well). It is an anthology of Clothing Poems, which I thought was an excellent idea when I heard about it. Vasiliki has taught at TAS. Here is one poem, by Maxine Susman:

A week before you leave
we're in the bedroom sorting clothes.
Three piles: to take, to toss, to leave at home.
Part of me says I'll do your clothes
forever if you'll stay with us. Part says
here's your own jug of detergent,
don't forget to read the labels.
Part says take the other sweatshirt,
it will come in handy, part says
leave it for me to wear around the house
when I miss you. Some things
in your toss pile I regret, but why
should I save what you don't want?
What seemed a closetful of everything
squeezes into one bulging duffle.
I see you there, your quilt on your new bed,
CD's in their rack, posters on the walls,
clothes piled on another floor,
while I sit here in your old room
sorting the come and go between us.

Family Conflict

2009-07-02T13:31:00.002-04:00

One of the more frustrating and saddening things we see happen to a family are the throes of a bitter divorce. The kids get caught in the middle, and the adults are so stuck, so attached to their anger and disappointment, that their suffering is actually lost in the storm.
On the other hand, a wise and well-planned separation can still be terribly painful to a kid, but it can be a time of growth and deepening understanding of their parents as well, so long as the kid's needs come first, always.

This comes to mind because my favorite law-blog, the Volokh Conspiracy (which is written by a Russian emigre who is also quite conservative, politically speaking) posted the following (if you are interested the comments are quite worth reading):

From Upton v. Upton, 1996 WL 397706 (Conn. Super. Ct.) (emphasis added):

Counsel for the minor children [age 14 and 17 -EV] articulate their strong desire to be primarily cared for in their father's home. Counsel is able to argue that the children are of a sufficient age to tell the court what their preference is, and that that preference is not for a manipulative purpose. The court has some concern as to the identification of these male children with not only their father, but more damaging to them, with their grandfather. Whether or not the children feel economic pressure to side with their father is unknown.

The deed has been done, however, and only healing over time will determine whether or not these children have an adult relationship with their mother. Hating one-half of themselves will not help them into the future. The court orders that counsel for the minor children read the opinion of the court to the children, and the court further requires that the children engage in supportive counseling to assist them in expressing their anger with their mother, and with their father for bringing them into this battle, and leaving them there for so long.

Shim Gum Do and Meditation

2009-07-02T13:29:00.001-04:00

Today at 4:00, Shim Gum Do for TAS students who took the class this past term
Today at 5:00, Meditation until 5:40

Shakespeare in the Park

2009-07-01T08:38:00.002-04:00

Two of my favorite plays are playing at the Public Theater in Central Park this summer. The first is Twelfth Night, whose ending song "When That I Was" is reason enough to consider Shakespeare as one of the very best songwriters in English. Shakespeare's comedies vary in quality, to be sure, but As You Like It and this one are so filled with music and kindheartedness, so suffused with sweet melancholia, that they seem to embody the England That Never Was better than anything else.
Far darker and weirder is Euripides' The Bacchae. There is so much to recommend this play: the western sweep of eastern religions, the conflict between the rational political state and the mysterious upwellings of passion and ecstasy, the crescendo of blind, mob violence...tremendous stuff.
The performances are supposed to be first rate.

Autism and the Environment

2009-07-01T08:31:00.002-04:00

I think the autism/vaccination link has been put to rest but perhaps it is only a distraction from the real problem: the thousands and thousands of new chemical compounds released into the environment without any real safety testing. Here is a series of articles that consider the subject deftly and straightforwardly. It worth reading.

Wednesday...

2009-07-01T08:24:00.002-04:00

For an interesting look at the value of a Masters Degree over its costs, take a look at this Times article. Clearly there are significant differences from field to field, but the perspective of several long time academics and administrators is interesting:

The next bubble to burst will be the education bubble. Make no mistake about it, education is big business and, like other big businesses, it is in big trouble. What people outside the education bubble don’t realize and people inside won’t admit is that many colleges and universities are in the same position that major banks and financial institutions are: their assets (endowments down 30-40 percent this year) are plummeting, their liabilities (debts) are growing, most of their costs are fixed and rising, and their income (return on investments, support from government and private donations, etc.) is falling.

This is a darker perspective, and one I share, but it is interesting, isn't it? The whole industry doesn't seem sustainable. Check the debate out, there are three perspectives to consider.

MJ

2009-06-29T14:52:00.003-04:00

I have largely ignored Jackson's passing, not for lack of interest but for general revulsion at the whole celebrity/tragedy angle. Let me leave it at this, he was obviously and chronically terrorized by his father and exploited by just about everyone else. Then the pharmaceuticals found a home, to wit, his being sued a couple of years ago for 100,000 in pharmacy bills.

as per Furious Seasons:

I was blown away on Saturday when, during cable news coverage of Michael Jackson's death, two doctors offering analysis were very critical of Jackson's reported long-term, chronic use of both painkillers and anti-depressants and noted that they could affect someone's heart health (while that's likely obvious to one and all with painkillers, it's probably not so obvious with anti-depressants). Sadly, I cannot find transcripts of either doctor on Fox News and CNN, but I can assure you they said it and it was a stunner to me, given how the mainstream media ignored the connection between anti-depressant use and sudden cardiac death in women, as reported by researchers in the Nurse's Health Study. It's also a stunner to me in light of how naive we've been as a culture when it comes to using anti-depressants very casually while assuming that there's no long-term impact from using the drugs.

Jackson was allegedly on a staggering cocktail of prescription drugs: thrice daily injections of Demerol; Dilaudid; Viccodine; and 120 mgs. a day of Zoloft and 40 mgs. a day of Paxil. He was supposedly taking the anti-depressants for OCD and social phobia issues. What Jackson was taking at the time of his death isn't entirely clear, since his toxicology report won't be available for many weeks and also since last night his personal physician, Conrad Murray, reportedly told Los Angeles police detectives that he hadn't injected Jackson with Demerol and, in the words of the doctor's lawyer, "There was no Demerol. No OxyContin."

He said nothing about anti-depressants, however.

So we shall see how all this prescription business plays out. Of course, Jackson was known to have used painkillers for many years to treat chronic pain problems and it's entirely possible that he'd become addicted to them. It's entirely possible that Michael was hooked on anti-depressants as well. Certainly, SSRIs can be very addictive (or create physical dependency, if you prefer) for some people.

That said, I want to make it clear that I am not blaming Zoloft and Paxil for Jackson's death. I am not saying that taking either drug will give any specific person a heart attack. But I am saying that, for now, that the two anti-depressants are inextricably entwined and linked to the death of MJ.

The research on long-term anti-depressant use is thin to begin with and there's not a lot of research on links between anti-depressant use and heart problems, but it is obvious to me that there is clearly something going on here and, as I wrote back in March, the nurse's study should be a big wake up call to doctors who've had patients on anti-depressants for many years and for patients themselves.

An Estimable Monday...

2009-06-29T09:28:00.002-04:00

It is a little cool, but my summer begins with my first swim in the very chilly Cook's Creek. Last nights swim was a bit of a shock, but this morning after a longish run in the hills me and my hot pup Milton splashed around until our bones began to crack from the cold.
Whenever I take him running in a new place I leave a long rope on him. It gives me an extra moment to grab him, should we run into anything untoward (like the skunk that pasted us last week). Milton isn't terribly obedient; he is, however, fairly reasonable. Our interests largely overlap.
I noticed this morning something about the processes of information. Picture this: You are running down a steep, narrow, wooded path. It is mostly stones jutting this way and that, green and blue-grey with moss and lichen. The soil is damp, and the small logs here and there are slippery. A large, red-brown, and joyful dog runs ahead of you, dragging behind him an eight foot long yellow rope which drifts side to side and occasionally under your feet as you run.
Your footing is very particular, and a fall would be pretty painful. Yet your brain negotiates the whole complex exercise smoothly, despite very different foot falls being required every running step.
What complicates things is the rope. If I step on the rope I will suddenly yank Milton's neck, which I do not want to do; if I hesitate, I would likely twist an ankle and fall. Unfortunately, the rope is necessary at this stage of Milton's "training", especially in those woods.

While running I recognized three rather distinct and surprisingly non-influencing lines of mental activity. By this I mean that the first two did not effect each other and the third, though a product of the first two, took a while to come to any action:

1) running down the rocky path requires snap experience- and coordination-based judgments that also tap into a feedback loop regarding the body's strength and performance. These tiny adjustments seem to use primarily the eyes, the conforming of the feet on the uneven ground, an awareness of general inertia, and an awareness of general ability to meet each feature of the path safely.

2) tracking the rope and not wanting to land land on it made no difference whatsoever whether or not I landed on it. I was running quite fast, for me anyway, and clearly the judgments about what my feet should do and what I should do were insulated from each other. A safe step trumped skipping the rope.

3) lastly, the awareness of these two processes not only operating, but of their each having an independent time sense. And then there is the recursive aspect of being aware of being aware, etc etc.

Normally, we assume that time is relatively uniform, at least subjectively speaking. Anyone reading this blog probably has some idea of Einstein's frames of reference in his Special Relativity (i.e. time elapses at different rates for different observers of a given event). Interesting to think, then, that within our own brains are very different rates of time.

Think of summer. I can hold these two thoughts simultaneaously: it seems like a long time ago that we had graduation/I can't believe it is almost July, summer is evaporating. Or, when each day seems so long and the weeks shoot by. Time is not uniform even for ourselves.

Fortunately, someone is working on it:

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

Here's a link to the rest.

Milton Erickson

2009-06-24T11:35:00.002-04:00

There are a lot of very interesting Miltons out there. John Milton Cage, John Milton, Milton Friedmen (this is not an endorsement of his economics!), and Milton Erickson. Who?
There are a lot of therapists who consider this self-taught American one of the very greatest clinicians ever. Here is a passage I stumbled over this morning:

At age 17, he contracted polio, and was so severely paralysed that the doctors believed he would die. On the critical night where he was at his worst, he had another formative "autohypnotic experience".

E: As I lay in bed that night, I overheard the three doctors tell my parents in the other room that their boy would be dead in the morning. I felt intense anger that anyone should tell a mother her boy would be dead by morning. My mother then came in with as serene a face as can be. I asked her to arrange the dresser, push it up against the side of the bed at an angle. She did not understand why, she thought I was delirious. My speech was difficult. But at that angle by virtue of the mirror on the dresser I could see through the doorway, through the west window of the other room. I was damned if I would die without seeing one more sunset. If I had any skill in drawing, I could still sketch that sunset...
I saw that vast sunset covering the whole sky. But I know there was also a tree there outside the window, but I blocked it out.
(interviewer): You blocked it out? It was that selective perception that enables you to say you were in an altered state?
E: Yes, I did not do it consciously. I saw all the sunset, but I didn't see the fence and large boulder that were there. I blocked out everything except the sunset. After I saw the sunset, I lost consciousness for three days. When I finally awakened, I asked my father why they had taken out that fence, tree, and boulder. I did not realize I had blotted them out when I fixed my attention so intensely on the sunset. Then, as I recovered and became aware of my lack of abilities, I wondered how I was going to earn a living. I had already published a paper in a national agricultural journal. "Why Young Folks Leave the Farm." I no longer had the strength to be a farmer, but maybe I could make it as a doctor.

Another Glorious Day, this time on a Wednesday...

2009-06-24T06:52:00.003-04:00

And we open with great news for TAS from SCOTUS. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, held that a school district can be required to reimburse a family for private school if the student's need were not adquately met. This includes situations in which the student did not have a prior IEP. Here is a quote from the dissent:

“Special education can be immensely expensive, amounting to tens of billions of dollars annually and as much as 20 percent of public schools’ general operating budgets,” Justice Souter wrote. “Given the burden of private school placement, it makes good sense to require parents to try to devise a satisfactory alternative within the public schools.”

Obviously, that sort of reasoning, were it guiding the majority opinion, wouldn't help TAS very much. But thanks to a combination of conservatives (Alito, Roberts), quasi-progressives (Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer) and the usual swing-vote Kennedy, the interests of individual students are being asserted over that of a school district's management problems. Interestingly,
both pro-voucher and usually reactionary justices joined Souter's dissent. Go figure. I look forward to reading the whole opinion.

Here is a good summary from the reliable SCOTUSBLOG (and here for the NYT article)

Today, the Supreme Court held that parents of disabled children can seek reimbursement for private education expenses regardless whether their child had previously received special-education services from a public school. By a vote of six to three, the Court held that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) authorizes reimbursement whenever a public school fails to make a free appropriate public education (FAPE) available to a disabled child. Interestingly, the Court granted certiorari on the same question in 2007 but affirmed the opinion below by an equally divided court (Justice Kennedy recused himself), indicating that at least one Justice changed his or her vote.

A dispatch from Iran, fascinating

2009-06-23T09:15:00.000-04:00

via Washington Note:

Dispatches from Iran -- sent 7:15 am, 22 June 2009

The Coward -- Saturday afternoon

I come out of the coffee-net and the first thing I see is the row of green and white police trucks lined up perpendicular to the square. I scan away toward the square itself and there behold an impressive sight: row after row of cops in riot gear. All of the maidoon is occupied, the four roads that led in and out marked at their corners by uniformed police wearing dark green. Inside the stone and grass plaza located in the central part of the square, a place where just a week ago Mousavi supporters had nightly gathered to chant and cheer, there are police in Robocop riot gear standing, waiting, looking back out towards the perimeter of the traffic circle.

"Az enqelab mirisim be azadi!" From Revolution we'll get to Freedom! The kid in the internet cafe had minutes earlier made a clever pun, referring to today's march from Revolution Square to Freedom Square. Saturday afternoon was to be a repeat of last Monday's millions but after the most recent Friday Prayers and the Leader's injunctions, the march had been called into doubt. Around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, there came word that another warning had just been issued to not come, that patience had run out. The kid was putting on a strong, defiant face.

Standing outside, looking at this show of force, his bravura and mine seemed silly. Power is about this. It is quickly becoming about place, about who can stand where and when.

Spooked, I walk away from the square and make my way home using alternate routes.

Back at my apartment, I realize that, like an idiot, I had left a newspaper (Karrobi's Etemaad Melli) with notes scribbled all over it (in English) in the internet cafe, source material for these dispatches. I go back to retrieve it, taking back alleys.

I call a few folks along the way, the cell phones for some reason are working, perhaps so that people can tell each other not to go to the march. That is more or less the message I received from my friends. It's becoming less and less worth it, only the fully committed to seeing this thing through would show and their numbers would no doubt be dwindling...

I go back, I get the paper. Time to make the return walk home again. I stiffen my spine, walk right into the circle, the newspaper curled up into my hand. I need to do this. I make a point of walking pass a row of the officers waiting at one corner of the plaza. I need to do this. Some are bored, others are keeping themselves busy with stupid things. They help each other strap and tighten their helmets, one taps his fingers against the top of his plastic shield. I see that one or two of the guys have on fashionable glasses, vestiges of their other life...

As I pass, I look them in the eye. Iranians in general stare. It took me a long time to realize that this habit wasn't antagonistic or "mad-dogging"...Fixed eye-contact is a normal thing, part curiosity and partly a way to size up the person walking towards them. A friend observes that Iranians have been lied to so much the only device left to them for ascertaining Truth is the zaher, or appearance. Like the ancient Greeks, the assumption is that the external reveals true character.

The cops look back at me with little interest.

I receive a very different response from the young basijis coming up the road. They show up after the police, in beige cammie trucks traveling in convoy. Today, under daylight, they emerge from whatever hole it is they hide in wearing uniforms to go with their oversized helmets (think Spaceballs).

Really, it's becoming more and more like the original Star Wars, by the end they were coming up with new uniforms for the same old Stormtroopers just to be able to market more action figures to punk kids like me. In the back of each transport truck a large red flag is flapping, casting yellow and green print of faith into the wind.

When I fix my eyes on them, the look is deadly, menacing.

Basijis. The lesser cousin of the police, they are more the serious of the two. For the cops it's a job, and so far at least their hearts don't seem to be into it. For these basijis, today's a hobby. They bring an enthusiasm to their "work" that only an ardent hobbyist can. A member of my family notes, This is their good time. They don't screw, they don't drink or smoke pot (bet you didn't know that went on in Iran), what else are they going to do with all of that energy? For 360 days of the year basijis don't do shit, but for those
5 days...

Ke chi bishe? What's the point? It feels so unnecessary. Every rally had been peaceful, folks had really done their best, truly taken great care to not antagonize. They deserved better than this. Delam vaghan misooze. My heart aches...

You notice the pronoun? Up until now the stories have been replete with "we" and "they," references to the collective. Feeling isolated, seeing nothing going on, I lose my nerve, I figure it's all over, I give up.

The Shit Hits the Fan -- Saturday evening, not yet sunset

The little guy was cracking himself up silly. "Moo...! Moo...! Akharesh shod...Mousavi!" I sat in the front of the shared taxi ride. The small boy wraps his hands around my headrest and repeats the chant. "Moo...! Moo...! Akharesh shod...Mousavi!" Moo...! Moo...! At the end it became Mousavi! His mom sitting in the back, her voice barely above a whisper, tells him, "Na azizam, aqasare agha ye Mousavi na shod..." No dear, at the end it did not...

The three of us, the adults in the car, groused about everything that was happening. Ba zoor hamichi ra mikhand...Yemosh havoon...They want everything by force...Animals...

We are on Sattar Khan Street, heading south towards Tohid Square, or Unity Square. Tohid, formerly known as Kennedy, was once an up-and-coming neighborhood, a fashionable enclave for young and newly-married couples to make their first move outside of their parents' home. Duplex-style housing from the mid and late 1970s still lines the street, the bottom floors of many now converted into offices and small shops. Later, in a different context, the area around Tohid would be where the first fast food joints opened up, some of the original pahtoghs, or hangouts. Though no longer unique in Tehran, on Thursday nights certain stretches and bends of Satter Khan above Tohid are full of cars filled with families. Tehran has elements of the small-town in America. For want of better options, diversions consist of cruising and hanging out at burger and ice cream joints late into the night.

The traffic was horrific. No one was moving. Cars stop, engines turn off, people get out to see what is happening. There is dark smoke ahead. We can see at least two helicopters circling above. I see families gathered on the rooftops, everyone is looking south towards the square. What has happened?

On the other side of the street comes a pack of protestors chanting. I didn't expect this. I was wrong. It is not over: "Marq bar diktator! Marq bar diktator!" Unable to move, the vehicles have effectively become the fixed seats of a street theater. With nowhere to go, drivers and their passengers get out, they stand up on the edge of their doors to take pictures with their mobile phones.

One of the marchers points across at us, her face screwed up in anger and frustration: "Hemayat, hemayat, Iraniane BIGHEIRAT!" Help, help, Iranians WITHOUT honor!

What's going on ahead? Why aren't we moving? Motorists coming back the other way tell us that Tohid is on fire, they've burned Cinema Bahman, they tell us to turn back, turn back. Our taxi driver, a young man sporting a beard ("I just grew it out so that they won't mess me!"), pulls a classic Tehran move and wheels the old Iranian-made Paykon 180 degrees. He cuts into an alley. Maybe we can get to Tohid this way. He's not the only one with this idea and as he pulls the car down towards the square we get stuck again, this time it's worse.

It's not looking good, cars are backing up and we're off the main road. Our driver gives up. "Sharmandam, I am deeply sorry, but I've got to go back home. Please, forget the fare, I'm so sorry..." The mom and her son get out, she tries to take his hand but he rushes forward between the cars, then stops. Karate stance.

Shit. I get out. Ahead I see a group of basijis. They are lined up against a wall, awaiting their orders. I notice that one holds a lead pipe at his side. The pipe is the length of his leg...

Can anyone help me? I am trying to find a way to Tohid. I want to go to Vali Asr. "Go that way, but I don't think that you''ll make it, Tohid is a mess, they say that they burned a 13 year old girl..." I keep cutting south. Cars that have come off of the main road and into the warren of this neighborhood remain stuck, not moving. I weave my way through the grid, leaning into windows, asking here and there how things are from where they've come. Agha, in var shoolooq e? Sir, is it safe? The answer is always, "Yes." I begin to worry...I don't know this neighborhood, I don't have anyone to take me in just in case, and it's getting close to sunset. I have to laugh. It's like a disaster and zombie movie all rolled up in one. I am Snake Plissken and Candide set off on my uncertain adventure...

I continue to cut south towards Tohid. The black smoke coming from Satter Khan and the square grows thicker, continues to climb into the pale evening light. The neighborhood that I am in is faring no better. At a corner I see an incredible sight, two street battles raging perpendicular to each other. I stand at their juncture. In one direction, at least three fiery heaps stretch out straight down the middle of the street, there is smoke everywhere, and beyond the haze a crowd of men marches towards a line of armed and waiting basijis...At the top of the street is the burned and tinny carcass of a motorcycle, a basiji mount, its rider nowhere to be found...

To my left, at the end of the street, another group of young men face off against the paramilitaries. They show no fear, the chants come faster and faster...

I turn back. This is not going to work, I need to get back home.

Back on Satter Khan, now heading north, it only gets worse. It's really an unbelievable scene. Every 50 to 100 meters there is a confrontation or a fire, people are chanting, they are defiant. And in between there are the cars, in both directions just sitting there, not moving, engines off. Everyone is out and watching. This has become an accidental march. Everyone, without planning to, has taken the side of protest.

What are they going to do with all of these people? What's going to happen when the cops pour in? I wonder. These people can't move. At bus stops I see citizens sitting on the benches and railings, either waiting for the bus or hanging around until the commotion passes. One old lady is peeling oranges and sharing with her husband and the others seeking refuge inside of the shelter. Car horns up and down the road are honking, nearly in unison, "doot-doot-de-doot-doot, doot-doot-de-doot-doot." There is no let up.

Near Patrice Lumumba Street I stop to get something to drink. I've got several kilometers to go yet. Bottled water is out at all of the stores and kiosks. All that is left is Rani, a juice drink (with real but unnervingly way-too-big fruit chunks inside) and Delster, Iranian non-alcoholic beer. It's quite a sight, people kicking back a few brews, watchin' a riot, no
worries at all...

A pedestrian asks me what is happening further down the road, using the alliterative phrasing that Iranians are so fond of: "Bezan bezan hast?" "Na, bekosh bekosh." Is it hitting hitting going on? No, comes the answer from a man standing next to me, it's killing killing...

***********************************

Across from a police sub-station, officers stand poised with their plastic shields in front of them, facing north. Rocks are being thrown at them, one by one, then two by two. The officers stand their ground. I am on the other side of the street, watching. Two young men turn the corner and walk towards me. They are both eating chocolate-glazed donuts. I tell them, Bi khial, Wow, you two are really taking it easy! One of them answers, Come on man, gotta take care of the stomach first...

The rocks now start to rain in by the dozen and the police run. They rush to their motorcycles and hop on, flying south. Protesters pour down the street, a full assault. One of the officers awkwardly throws rocks back at his tormentors. Unable to get off a good shot he wheels towards us and throws in our direction and I, the Donut Brothers, and about 20 other people run away, around the corner.

******************************

This is a glimpse of what is to come. The decision to prevent people from marching calmly and peacefully through the squares and main boulevards has thrown the action into the kuches and mahals of Tehran. It's gone into the neighborhoods, the alleys and corners of where people permanently live, not the public squares and intersections that they occasionally pass through.

You have to understand the importance of the "kuche" or alley if you want to understand Tehran, especially now. Sar e kuche, too ye kuche, boro kuche...the beginning and end of everyday life happens in a kuche, the alley.

"Alley" as it is used here isn't the same as what we might imagine in the U.S., the dark and dangerous spaces of New York, for instance, where bad things happen. Back in the day, neighborhoods consisted primarily of single-family homes, many with a hayat or yard with a central hoz, or fountain (the film "Children of Heaven" is a good depiction of what I'm talking about).

The buildings were close to each other and the kuche served as the shared ground between entrances. You had to walk down an alley to get home and the odds were that you would run into your neighbor along the way. Likewise, the alley provided a crude form of security. If someone had no business being there or was up to no good it would be immediately known...

Neighbors knew who belonged there. Years ago Tehran was like a live version of those black and white Italian movies from the 40s and 50s, neighborhoods were populated by men with colorful names: Behrooz Sibili (Moustache Behrooz), Ali Hezar Dawshi (Ali 10 Cents), Mahmad Damagh (Mahmad Nose), Jangir Khiki (Fat Jangir). Neighbors simultaneously spied on and looked after each other. A patriarchal code of honor, with all of its blessings and vices, held sway and woe onto the young man who wandered into the neighborhood. Hava ye ham digar ra dashtand. While this code has dimmed considerably because of shifts in demographic and housing patterns---more and more people live away from their families in apartment towers, the familiarity remains. As I noted in an earlier post, Tehran, despite its size, remains an intimate big city, the reason no doubt being that the base of social life outside of the family remains the kuche. Even if they don't personally know their neighbor nor care to, residents of a block will come to each other's aid when threatened from without (Asef Bayat's important book, "Street Politics" captures well what I am talking about).

The geography of Tehran's urban life is going to play a big role in the coming days and months. Every time the police manage to squeeze down on protestors on the main road, the kids run sideways and backwards into the criss-crossing alleys. It will be different now...

*********************************

Under a bridge a crowd is chanting. Half of a car is on fire and a host of people has gathered to watch. A fire truck shows up, the crowd hoots and whistles. They rush over and surround the truck. Do they want it to leave? Before I can figure it out the truck abandons the street.

*****************************************************

The walk is many kilometers and it takes me nearly two hours. Along the way there is wonderment. I smell freshly sliced cucumber. A young boy sits on a storefront stoop and sees about the business of eating folded flatbread with feta and cucumber. Kids on bikes race each other. Three boys walk past with me on the sidewalk with ping pong paddles, they are coming back from the park (Tehran's parks, like those of Paris, come equipped with ping pong tables). Satter Khan Park is filled with families and couples on blankets eating seeds and sharing tea. Many are enjoying traditional ice cream, Akbar Mashti made with pistachio and cardamom. There is a guy selling fish, a guy selling meat.

Old men stand outside their fruit stand. The car wash under Satter Khan Bridge continues its business. A father and his daughter come plodding down the sidewalk, three grocery sacks hangs between them, cucumbur, tomatoes, watermelons.

I finally make it to where I need to be. I spot a man selling DVDs. Iranians are notorious film buffs (a topic worthy of its own post) and before this ruckus began if you were to see a crowd gathered on the street in Tehran odds were they were buying up the latest Hollywood film, frequently while the picture was still in the theaters. I flip through the pile of plastic sleeves and choose "Night at the Museum, Part Two" and "Frost Nixon." How's business in all of this haye hoo, I ask the man? Eh, it's not bad, what can I say?

Don't you want to buy more, he asks me. No, this'll do...

******************************************************

That night, with reports coming in of the newly dead and wounded, they sang "Allah Akbar" with renewed verve. "ALLAH u AKBAR!!!! ALLAH u AKBAR!!!!" The calls had never been louder. We sit in the kitchen and listen. A girl's voice leads. Tonight she is without restraint. She doesn't wait for the response. Voices heave, swinging back and forth, call and response.

Natarsin! Natarsin! Ma hame ba ham hastim! Don't be scared! Don't be scared! We are all in this together...

-- Anonymous Student in Tehran, Shane M.

Some Ron Miller

2009-06-23T09:13:00.001-04:00

Within the public system there are now many alternative programs for students "at risk" of dropping out because they are so completely alienated by the impersonal routines of conventional schooling. And there are still significant pockets of progressive educators and related groups--such as those promoting whole language and cooperative learning--who remain determined to infuse public education with more democratic, humanistic purposes. But despite these oases of student-centered learning, the educational climate during the past decade has been affected by ever tighter state and federal control over learning, leading to still further testing, politically mandated "outcomes," and national standards. There is some hope in the relatively new concept of "charter schools," which allow parents and innovative educators to receive public funding with less bureaucratic intervention, although it remains to be seen how much freedom such schools will be allowed if national standards begin to be enforced.

As government school systems become increasingly yoked to the purposes of the corporate economy, it is likely that thousands more families and educators will turn to the more democratic and person-centered values represented by alternative schools and home education. For the past century and half, alternative schools have been isolated countercultural enclaves with little influence on mainstream educational thinking and policy. But in the "postindustrial" or "postmodern" era that appears to be emerging now, the industrial-age model of "social efficiency" is possibly starting to become obsolete.

Perhaps, as Ivan Illich envisioned in his 1970 book Deschooling Society and James Moffett describes in his recent book The Universal Schoolhouse, the idea of a public school system may have outlived its usefulness. According to these and other authors, in a democratic, information-rich society, learning should take place everywhere in the community, and young people should have access to mentors who nourish their diverse personal interests and styles of learning. We have a long way to go before this sort of system is in place, but if our society does in fact move in this direction, it may well be alternative educators who show the way.

read the article

It is Tuesday, and it is not raining.

2009-06-23T08:46:00.003-04:00

Another beautiful day, and like last year, summer began on just about the first day of summer. After all these years of summer starting so early, it is finally fixed. Whew.

One of my goals for TAS over the next year is to create a more formal feedback/criticism system for the students. They do have quite a lot of input into their schedule, their curricula, and in many classes, the day to day direction of the classes. For instance, the first part of my psychology class was very reading heavy. This was objected to on many reasonable grounds. For one thing, it really limited how much certain students could participate. Of course the could do the reading...but on the other hand, we are quite different than other schools and many of our students suffered enormously under the read-a-pile, write-a-pile regime. So we switched to another mode altogether: to watching certain movies in a particular way, discussing them, as well as doing some basic peer counseling training and role-playing. It worked out well. Was it a rigorous class? No. But all the student indicated that they learned quite a lot and now feel more comfortable in helping situations.

Here is an article from Edutopia, a public education reform organization, with a nice little item on using feedback in the classroom:

At the end of the year, the student survey can be your best friend -- that honest and supportive friend that gives you meaningful feedback and leaves you with something to think about. Your job is to set the stage for your friend to perform on, and then listen with an open mind. I've given surveys to every group of kids I've ever taught -- as young as second graders -- and I've found them invaluable in improving my practice.

First, let's consider the purpose of the survey. Though it can be a tool for reflection, primarily, it's a way for students to give you feedback...

This isn't rocket science. But in psychology having a clear and formal avenue for a client's negative feedback is one of the strongest predictors for success. After all, in a trusting relationship negative feedback is appreciated, and in psychology the quality of the relationship is far more consequential than any technique or theory or medication. This is absolutely, quantifiably the case. Why would it be any different for education?

Welcome, Monday!

2009-06-22T09:29:00.002-04:00

It isn't raining. That in itself is news. General strikes may be called in Iran by the reformists, this, and the mourning cycle that is set to begin for the many dead, will be the backdrop for the next phase of the struggle. Absolutely fascinating.

The new school year begins around now, with several of us poking away at all sorts of sundry tasks, both at school and at home. For my part, I have settled on Thursday afternoon for Shim Gum Do classes and meditation periods. Please feel free to drop by. I will have the times set by this Wednesday. Please email me if you have any preferences.

Iran pt 8

2009-06-20T07:25:00.001-04:00

More. via Hilzoy at Washington Monthly:

Carnegie Endowment Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour:

"The weight of the world now rests on the shoulders of Mir Hossein Mousavi. I expect that Khamenei's people have privately sent signals to him that they're ready for a bloodbath, they're prepared to use overwhelming force to crush this, and is he willing to lead the people in the streets to slaughter?
Mousavi is not Khomeini, and Khamenei is not the Shah. Meaning, Khomeini would not hesitate to lead his followers to "martyrdom", and the Shah did not have the stomach for mass bloodshed. This time the religious zealots are the ones holding power.

The anger and the rage and sense of injustice people feel will not subside anytime soon, but if Mousavi concedes defeat he will demoralize millions of people. At the moment the demonstrations really have no other leadership. It's become a symbiotic relationship, Mousavi feeds off people's support, and the popular support allows Mousavi the political capital to remain defiant. So Mousavi truly has some agonizing decisions to make.

Rafsanjani's role also remains critical. Can he co-opt disaffected revolutionary elites to undermine Khamenei? As Khamenei said, they've known each other for 52 years, when they were young apostles of Ayatollah Khomeini. I expect that Khamenei's people have told Rafsanjani that if he continues to agitate against Khamenei behind the scenes, he and his family will be either imprisoned or killed, and that the people of Iran are unlikely to weep for the corrupt Rafsanjani family.

Whatever happens, and I know I shouldn't be saying this as an analyst, but my eyes well when I think of the tremendous bravery and fortitude of the Iranian people. They deserve a much better regime than the one they have."

From NIAC, a translation of a blog post:

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."

Iran pt 7

2009-06-20T06:02:00.001-04:00

I thought I would pass this along, as things there are looking polarized and grim (from The Washington Note):

One of my colleagues at the New America Foundation's Global Strategic Finance Initiative, Douglas Rediker, received this note from a friend abroad. It's illuminating as to how a well-connected Iranian internationalist who has been in Tehran during much of the post-election unrest sees matters now. To protect Rediker's source, I can't make references about where he is today.

The email:

As of yesterday the options facing the country were well summarised by Simon Tisdall and Ellie Rose in The Guardian:
1 - Happy ending
To widespread surprise, the hardline Guardian Council conducts a thorough recount of votes, as ordered by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and decides, amid much embarrassment, that there should be a new election. Mir Hossein Mousavi wins. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accepts defeat. Pro-democracy demonstrators celebrate triumph of "green revolution". New government responds positively to US invitation to "unclench fist" and open talks on nuclear issue.

2 - Damp squib

The partial recount ordered by the Supreme Leader concludes Ahmadinejad won a clear victory, although by a narrower margin. Despite lingering suspicions of foul play, the opposition is forced to accept the verdict amid a continuing nationwide crackdown on dissent and warnings that further disorder will be dealt with harshly. Ahmadinejad, in bad odour with the Supreme Leader for provoking demonstrators, moderates his line on policy issues. Mousavi vows to fight again.

3 - Confrontation

The Guardian Council's partial vote recount and investigation into electoral fraud are rejected by the opposition. Demonstrations spread and intensify, with ever greater numbers of Iranians taking to the streets calling for the resignation of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. Security forces respond with increasing force, arresting thousands and closing down media coverage, texting networks, websites and Twitter. Purge of reformist leaders, intellectuals, students and journalists continues. Leaderless demos gradually peter out, leaving resentment. Ahmadinejad steps up anti-western rhetoric. Resumed protests at a later date considered highly likely.

4 - A second revolution

An insider cabal of senior clerical and establishment conservatives challenges Khamenei and forces his resignation after a vote in the Assembly of Experts. Former president Hashemi Rafsanjani is elected in his stead and orders an investigation into the actions of Ahmadinejad and other senior members of the regime. Hardliners rally round the president while reformists demand new elections. Amid growing instability, Iran's unique Islamic/secular system of governance appears in danger of collapse".

As of Mr. Khameneni's speech today it seems that (1) above is no longer an option. For everything that Mousavi has publically announced option (2) also seems unlikely.

Unfortunately for everything I know, it now seems its either (3) or (4).

By the way, two nights ago I went out to see a few things ... as the general crowds spread into their homes militia style Mousavi supporters were out on the streets 'Basiji hunting'.

Their resolve is no less than these thugs -- they after hunting them down. They use their phones, their childhood friends, their intimate knowledge of their districts and neighbours to plan their attacks -- they're organised and they're supported by their community so they have little fear. They create the havoc they're after, ambush the thugs, use their Cocktail Molotovs, disperse and re-assemble elsewhere and then start again - and the door of every house is open to them as safe harbour -- they're community-connected.

The Basiji's are not.

These are not the students in the dorms, they're the street young -- they know the ways better than most thugs - and these young, a surprising number of them girls, are becoming more agile in their ways as each night passes on.

Also, with $10K every local police station lock can be broken and guns taken out...the police too are crowd friendly...for sure put a gun in their hands and these young become a serious counter-balance to the Basij...call them 10% of 18-22 year olds - that makes circa 10 million around the country versus max 4 million Basijis.

For all I've seen, discussed and observed on the ground I wouldn't dismiss option (4) too easily.

I hope Mousavi has thought through strategy and next steps. Where his protesters have come to was predictable up to a point.

What is the unpredictable thing he may do to change the board?

A psychological doom notice

2009-06-17T06:54:00.002-04:00

In the eighties and early nineties a young woman in her early 20's with a history of volatile relationships and generally desperate and manipulative behavior would be diagnosed as having "borderline personality disorder". There was no WWW to confirm one's desperation...had there been, the landscape at the time would have seemed grim. No treatment, and a lifetime of despair, longing, and loneliness. And addiction, abusive relationships, and suicide.
Marsha Linehan changed all that. She drew significant insights from Buddhist ideas of non-attachment and the nature of suffering, and from the burgeoning field of Cognitive-Behavioral therapy. The untreatable became treatable. It is a huge amount of work demanded of the client, and boring, too. But it works. Life gets better. Linehan also made sure that the approach was designed in such a way that it produced reams of quantifiable data. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy opened up vast regions of help for once impossible clients.
It works for many, many different types of suffering. It works so well that one begins to wonder if the missing link between Borderline Personality, Bi-polar, and other such things (diagnoses that I find to be far less helpful than harmful) is really trauma and abuse.
Here is a refreshing little article from the NY Times (whose mental health coverage has been very, very good over the last few years) on DBT and the Borderline Diagnosis.

Iran pt 6

2009-06-16T21:30:00.001-04:00

from American Footprints

Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri is starting to become a presence in the ongoing Iran turmoil, both calling for three days of mourning for murdered demonstrators and saying the election results "cannot be accepted by anyone of sound mind." As others have noted, he has an interesting history, one which intertwines with that of Khamene'i in interesting ways.

Montazeri was close to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the 1980's, and a strong proponent of his version of the Islamic Republic. He was considered Khomeini's preferred successor until the late 1980's, when he became increasingly critical of the use of force against dissidents. Khomeini denied this was taking place, either for cynical reasons or because by his late 80's he was detached from day-to-day affairs and in denial over what had become of his experiment. As a result, he was fell from favor, and was forced to resign in March 1989. Shortly thereafter, and shortly before his death, Khomeini signaled that his new preferred heir was then-President Ali Khamene'i. Khamene'i did not have the proper clerical credentials, and it required a massive PR move to win some acceptance of him as an ayatollah. This is considered by many to have touched off one of the worst waves of "title inflation" in the Shi'ite world, which has devalued once-august designations and led to the creation of new ones, with "Grand Ayatollah" being the most recent.

After Khomeini died that June, the Assembly of Experts met and duly selected Khamene'i as his successor. Partly to enhance his status, however, they adjusted his titulature. In the constitution, the word "supreme" was inserted before "rule of the jurisprudent," and the same followed in the popular use with "Supreme Leader" gradually replacing just "Leader." Montazeri and many others objected to this change and its implications, as well, for which they were harassed and Montazeri eventually placed under house arrest. Khamene'i continued to accrue religious flattery, particularly when Ali Larijani was head of the state broadcasting company.

There's an additional angle that occurred to me while writing this, and that is that Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who moved from Speaker of Parliament to President in 1989, was rumored to prefer a council of jurists to a single powerful Leader. If he is, in fact, in Qom politicking among the Assembly of Experts to potentially remove Khamene'i, the issue of what to do after him will come up, and that may be a factor.

Some more psycho-pharm shenanigans...

2009-06-16T12:05:00.001-04:00

Faked research? Naw. Deaths caused by untested medications. Really?

Those untested ADHD drugs...

2009-06-16T11:11:00.003-04:00

In the study of 564 children and teens who died suddenly, researchers led by Madelyn Gould of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University in New York City found that that those who died suddenly were 7.4 times more likely than not to have been taking the stimulant medications. The results of the study are reported online in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

"Although sudden unexplained death is a rare event," the researchers said, "this finding should be considered in the context of other data about the risk and benefit of stimulants in medical treatment."

Read the whole article.

2009-06-16T11:09:00.000-04:00

and this:

Juan Cole

Hello, Tuesday!

2009-06-16T08:42:00.003-04:00

Some excellent links to the convulsions in Iran:

For general news and hourly coverage both of these have been excellent:
Talking Points Memo
Huffington Post

For some informed commentary on Iran:
Gary Sick
American Footprints

Late Posting Today, check in later...

2009-06-15T09:40:00.001-04:00

Back to School

2009-06-10T06:27:00.000-04:00

Staff meetings and such Wed-Fri. I'm rested and raring to go.

Aw, dem cute li'l puggles....

2009-06-10T06:03:00.002-04:00

Reproductively, monotremes are like a VCR-DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology in transition. They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.

Monotreme sex determination also holds its allure. In most mammals, a single set of XX chromosomes signifies a girl, a set of XY specifies a boy. For reasons that remain mysterious, monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike. Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.

And they are smart, too, with a neo-cortex that dwarfs ours, as a proportion of total brain mass.

just checking

2009-06-09T07:19:00.006-04:00

Only one of the eastern PA schools- Central HS in Philly, has a substantial percentage of subsidized lunches. Taken as a whole the rankings might mean that a) the wealthiest school districts in PA aren't all that good, even by their own (testing) standards and b) the struggling districts in PA don't have a chance of making the list.

I wouldn't suggest that these tests are the only measure of a school, of course. But it is interesting.

I note that Pennridge, Palisades, Easton, Hunterdon, CB west, and New Hope-Solebury all failed to turn up on the list.

This is interesting, and worth thinking about (from the person who crunched the data):

AP, IB and Cambridge are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations. Studies by U.S. Department of Education senior researcher Clifford Adelman in 1999 and 2005 showed that the best predictors of college graduation were not good high school grades or test scores, but whether or not a student had an intense academic experience in high school. Such experiences were produced by taking higher-level math and English courses and struggling with the demands of college-level courses like AP or IB. Several other studies looked at hundreds of thousands of students in California and Texas and found if they had passing scores on AP exams they were more likely to do well academically in college. In the latest Texas study, even low-performing, low-income students who got only a 2 on an AP test did significantly better in college than similar students who did not take AP in high school.

To send a student off to college without having had an AP, IB or Cambridge course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels. It is dumb, and in my view a form of educational malpractice. But most American high schools still do it. I don't think such schools should be rewarded because they have artificially high AP or IB passing rates achieved by making certain just their best students take the tests.

Damn, more rain.

2009-06-09T06:43:00.004-04:00

I can't believe it.

Something I can believe is how poor Pennsylvania's showing is on Newsweek's list of the best public high schools in America. 19 schools. That doesn't seem to compare well with states of similar size (e.g. Ohio with 25 schools, NC with over 50). Eastern PA is represented by Council Rock North, Central Bucks East, Central Philadelphia, Conestoga (in Radnor), and Masterton Lab (in Philly). That's it for one of the wealthier regions in the northeatern US.

Basically, the rankings reflect the total number of International Baccalaureate, Cambridge, and AP tests divided by number of seniors. The top rankings are almost all southern schools- I wonder what sort of student body they have. There is a lot of interesting information embedded in this chart.

You can sort by clicking on the columns, and there is information on the relative wealth of the school districts.

Graduation

2009-06-08T11:08:00.002-04:00

As usual, it was good theater. John, TAS's co-founder, read a passage from the Dhammapada. Two students then "performed" John Cage's 4'33". I followed with some comments on silence (no one missed the irony). A graduate then read the poem that Zen Master Chang Sik Kim wrote for the occasion.
After we handed out the twelve diplomas some of the graduates took center stage to speak. They were wonderful and varied comments, lovely and funny. I am always so moved by this part of the ceremony.

Here is the text of my talk:

Why begin with a piece of music that is not a piece of music? We sat here in silence, or did we? We sat, or for some us today, stood, as we often have this year quiet and trying to be attentive. Why do we need John Cage’s 4’33” to help us do that? For one thing, a piece of music that isn’t one is kind of funny, kind of a practical joke. It was intended that way in part, in 1952, up in the Berkshire mountains at Tanglewood.

It was also a bit of diabolical Zen humor, a koan, a conundrum- tweaking the noses of a classical music crowd to get them to listen to themselves and what is around them and to ask “can’t everything be music? Amidst all the muttering and complaining a thunderstorm broke over the performance space. There is your answer: what the thunder said.

The answer is yes. Everything is music. And silence is the core. Architecture is an organization of space, of material around usable space. A cup is useful because it is empty and can hold something. A bowl, a glass, a window, a doorway, a tunnel all bind space into some purpose of ours. That is from the Dao De Ching, the book the school is giving to each of the graduates. Thanks to Emma and Julian, we have shaped our own little tunnel, this time of silence, to focus us on what we feel and who we are.

Silence is at the core. A good teacher listens- that is silence. A good parent watches and listens- that is silence. We can let a hurtful comment hang in the air, and not say anything back, and let one person’s words speak back to them, that is a function of silence. Reflection is possible with silence. It is the classical Zen image of an enlightened mind: a perfect mirror, no dust, no distortions.

If you try playing music, or writing poetry, or painting, or cooking there is a moment where one must just follow where the material takes you. It is the same with teaching or helping others, you’ve got to follow. Sometimes it is very mixed, very unclear what is the right thing to do, but silence can do the heavy lifting...

For instance, I received some advice a few years ago. It came from the old chinese book the I Ching. My interpretation of the passage was this: when going into a confused, difficult situation organize your mind around being quiet, observe things carefully, and let the situation unfold over time. You will know when and how to act. Then take responsibility for the conseqences for they are the will of heaven.

In this John Cage piece, he extends the idea of space into music. Great musicians use space, in music space is called a rest- and rests are what form rhythm. 4’33” is all rests; or, as it say in the musical score: “Tacet”, which is latin for “it is silent”. It takes the music and unbounds it: is it the sound in your head? Or those in the room? Is it the wind outside? or the weather, or the whole world? or the entire of creation? It all comes pouring into this wonderful, witty silence for a few minutes.

There is, of course, no true silence. We have a moment of silence every day at lunch. Most of the time I initiate it. For some reason the tradition has evolved that spontaneously one student or another ends it. He or she says: thank you. Sometimes it is such a sweet and perfect stretch of time, sometimes it closes too quick. Often we are just hungry. But all that impatience and desire and waiting just hangs in the air, as if to be understood. It is always, always a perfect reflection of the school at that moment.

Silence is necessary because some feelings are too complex for words, and some phenomena so fleeting and some sounds so faint they would be otherwise entirely lost to us. Those fleeting worlds are ourselves being revealed to ourselves in silence.

And this knowing self- which makes space and silence for the world and its many beings to pour into, is also a following self. It seeks to connect with everything: that is our nature, it follows where the world is going and joins in. This is where compassion comes from.

Here at Tinicum we do noise pretty well, we do silence pretty well. It is all just music.

We are back....

2009-06-08T08:23:00.002-04:00

Sorry about the long delay, but now that school year is over, and especially that last manic phase of it (which brings to mind the static charge that builds up in front of the goal right before a shot is made), I have the brain space to blog again.

You can expect three postings a week, perhaps more. It will take a few days to get back into the rhythm.

For now, this is one of those "duh" articles: a movement to return to "client-centered medicine". What an interesting idea. Wouldn't it be something is this became part of psychiatric training?

By stepping off the big-clinic treadmill, where doctors are sometimes asked to see a different patient every 15 minutes, Dr. Batlle has joined the vanguard of physicians trying to redefine health care. These doctors spend more time with patients, emphasize prevention and education to keep them healthy and can handle many medical problems without referrals to specialists.

In many cases, this kind of care can reduce a patient’s medical bills. That’s more crucial than ever: according to a study published online by the American Journal of Medicine, 60 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were driven by health care costs.

Time Out for the next week or so.

2009-05-27T10:26:00.001-04:00

The end of the school year simply has too many demands to blog effectively. Check in, if you wish, but daily posting will not start again until June 8th.

Friday Poetry Abridged

2009-05-22T06:07:00.002-04:00

As forwarned, May is jammed-packed with things other than blogging. So here is a gesture to Poetry Friday, no more, no less.

One of my favorite American modernists, Muriel Rukeyser:

Then I Saw What the Calling Was

All the voices of the wood called “Muriel!”
but it was soon solved; it was nothing, it was not for me.
The words were a little like Mortal and More and Endure
And a world like Real , a sound like Health or Hell.
Then I saw what the calling was : it was the road I traveled,
the clear
time and these colors of orchards, gold behind gold and the full
shadow begin each tree and behind each slope. Not to me
the calling, but to anyone and at last I saw : where
the road lay through sunlight and many voices and the marvel
orchards, not for me, not for me, not for me.
I cam into my clear being; uncalled, alive, and sure.
Nothing was speaking to me, but I offered and all was well.

And I arrived at the powerful green hill.

The End of the Year

2009-05-20T09:51:00.002-04:00

Yesterday three students presented their remarkable senior projects. It was quite moving to feel the support and interest from the rest of the students, but most worthy of comment were the projects themselves: a labyrinth, a fashion show, a book on yoga.

If I take a moment to reflect on what the school year encompasses, I get overawed. I read of a woman who cannot forget anything at all. Every trivial detail remains vivid to her, harassing her. It is unbearable to always know the date and time of what so and so said on that hot afternoon thirty years ago. The dead are never dead, and the whole of a particular experience is never broken down and refitted to the unscrolling narrative of her life. The weather, the words, the image of the action, all are unweighted and unemphasized. A life-long drone of detail.

One of our seniors just arrived with a tiny dog in her arms. Her boyfriend rescued it from an abusive home. She says kids had painted it and were tossing the wretched creature repeatedly into a pond. How will this story be altered over time to reflect what we value, or the point we are trying to make: the virtue of this young man, the cruelty of drunk, neglected teenagers, the trauma syndromes of chihuahua- terriers, the pleasure of being able to bring your little abused dog to school. Each requires a different mix of detail.
A process we take for granted and totally foreign to the unforgetting woman.

So much happens from September to June. The changes accelerate as the end of the year approaches. The last day of school is a time for celebration, a holiday truly meaningful to the young. It marks time and achievement in a way that nothing else can. But being young, they may not reflect on it all that much, they may not drape habits of memory over it. They just live it.

We march in an impose our meanings on their school lives because we see it as our institution. They have to come to school because it is good for them.

But perhaps...perhaps since we make young people come to school we should be far more accommodating to them. At very least, cede to the them the very end of spring. Let them make the meanings.

Some Questions...

2009-05-19T14:26:00.002-04:00

The end of the year is nigh. Two students have presented their senior projects: the first was a student's self published book on a number of basic yoga positions. The second a beautiful printed labyrinth for walking meditation. Coming up in a few minutes, a fashion show featuring the designs of another student.

Almost as important are steps we are taking to deepen the insight and attunement of our staff. All of us will be writing a four or five page essay on our individual roles at TAS, our opinions on what is central to its character, and our professional goals.

Here are the questions:

What do you see as your role at TAS? How has it developed? Do you see yourself drawn to the high achieving kids, the strugglers, the orphans, the scufflers? What specific students do you identify most closely with, or are closest to? What classes are most satisfying for you to teach?

What aspects of TAS do you see as absolutely central to its character?

What do you feel are your accomplishments this year, what were your goals, and in what ways did you meet frustration and success?

What are areas in which you feel you need professional development? What support do you need? Have you done any trainings or retreats or taken any classes this year? If so, to what professional or personal ends? If not, why not?

What will be your goals for the summer and the next school year? How long do you see yourself teaching at TAS? How do you see your role changing in the near or middle term? What professional development, self development, academic classes, or degree programs will you pursue over the next year?

How does TAS and your role here fit into an overall personal philosophy of education, human devlopment, and ethical action?

Tuesday's a Wash as Well...

2009-05-19T12:20:00.002-04:00

Too Busy. Sorry again.

Tuesday

2009-05-18T10:10:00.000-04:00

Nothing Today. My Apologies.

Poetry Day!

2009-05-15T06:17:00.004-04:00

It seems that there are periods of transition and unpredictability that bring out the best art, times where the old conventions prove themselves so inadequate that a mere sweep of the hand is enough. At the moment I am reading Will in the World, a very grounded, but speculative, presentation of the forces that made Shakespeare Shakespeare.
There is little or no religion in his writing for good reason: Catholicism and the Church of England were wielded like truncheons, and more than a few intellectuals and poets got the worst of it. Out that era came Marlowe, Smart, and Ben Johnson, and many others. A dangerous time, to be sure, but it was the beginning of contemporary English literature.

Another period of that was the American Civil War, the aftermath of which made the wonderful poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and Longfellow seem crusty and pre-modern, while early early Modernists like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman found their voices.

Perhaps my favorite such period was in France during the resistance to the Nazi Occupation. Suddenly, the Surrealists (a who's who of French art in the 20's and 30's) found their concerns for art and the vitality of inner life vacated by emergency. The nation was absolutely at risk. It was being strangled. And for perhaps the last time in a western democracy, poetry became the central of all arts.

Circulated in secret, the poems of Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard asserted a firm commitment to what is beautiful, noble, and shared, and these simple, at times strange, purely lyric outpourings were on the lips of the men and women who harassed and confused the Nazis and their collaborators. Who were often tortured and murdered for their efforts.

The object of the poet's love was a woman, but that woman became conflated with France itself. French Surealist Poetry of the 40's is that very rare thing, patriotic poetry that is simple and moving, but forces a great and complex moral task on the listener.

This is translated by Samuel Beckett:

Lady Love (Paul Eluard)

She is standing on my lids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the colour of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes
And she does not let me sleep
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And make me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say.

Unrelated but...

2009-05-13T08:00:00.002-04:00

This morning I read this:

"Obama's new budget plan includes a little-noted sea change in U.S. nuclear policy, and a step towards his vision of a denuclearized world. It provides no funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, created to design a new generation of long-lasting nuclear weapons that don't need to be tested. (The military is worried that a nuclear test moratorium in effect since 1992 might endanger the reliability of an aging US arsenal.) But this spring Obama issued a bold call for a world free of nuclear weapons, and part of that vision entails leading by example. That means halting programs that expand the American nuclear stockpile. For the past two budget years the Democratic Congress has refused to fund the Bush-era program. But Obama's budget kills the National Nuclear Security Administration program once and for all.

"My colleagues just stared at that line," says Joe Cirincione, a longtime nonproliferation expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund. "They had never seen anything like that." Killing the program, he said, was "the first programmatic impact of the new [zero nukes] policy. People have said they want to see more than words, this is the very first action."

In the eighties two issues were of primary concern to me and my politically inclined friends, stopping Reagan's secret wars in Central America and getting rid of nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction was the "official" doctrine of strategic defense for both the Soviets and the U.S. We thought that was completely nuts.

These days, few people under 35 have any idea what living under that spectre was like. It is a distinguishing mark of a certain age cohort. Now that the inhabitants of the 24 hour news cycle are perpetually histrionic over even minor worries, I wonder if the under 35 set can even relate.

Nevertheless, despite quasi-pandemics, global warming, the ocean being fished out, and so on, nuclear weapons are a very real, very human problem. It amazes me to see it being addressed in such a substantive, but low key, manner.

It was, back then, considered to be a crucial step towards a better world. It still is.

Early Alcohol Awareness

2009-05-13T06:08:00.002-04:00

A good article in the Times about detecting problematic drinking patterns early on includes this passage:

Dr. Willenbring, who directs the institute’s Division of Treatment and Recovery Research, added: “Once they know who they are, most people at risk of becoming alcohol abusers can cut down on their alcohol consumption and reduce their risk. We know that many heavy drinkers are able to change on their own.”

For those who already drink at abusive levels, the new program can help them acknowledge their problem and seek treatment earlier, before they suffer irreversible medical and social problems like liver or brain disease, legal difficulties, job loss or divorce.

The beauty of Rethinking Drinking is that it can be used in the privacy of the home or in a doctor’s office, sparing people the embarrassment and stigma that often accompany public acknowledgment of a problem with alcohol and entering a treatment program.

This is probably something we should look at for our students at TAS.

A note: My posts have been sparse because May is a jammed packed month. My two boys have baseball four nights a week, TAS is winding up for the end of the year and the beginning of the next, and I've just started another round of classes at grad school. My apologies.

Yukon's visit

2009-05-12T10:12:00.002-04:00

What a wonderful presence some people have. Yukon, our monk friend and embassy from the Zen Mountain Monastery was so kind to teach a meditation class and to lead a session for us. Not all his mustard seeds fell on pavement, but rather he brought an everyday dignity and clarity to a practice that some of us take for granted at times. I hope he can visit often and help us create more and more opportunities to for each student to deepen his or her capacities.

Sitting is so simple and so difficult. Climbing a hill can be difficult too. As manic May pulls each of us in a thousand directions, that hill gets steeper and steeper. If all any one of us can do is be aware of what we are doing much of the time- speaking deliberately, walking deliberately, eating deliberately, all will be fine.

It is true.

Right and Left

2009-05-11T06:53:00.000-04:00

from Discover Magazine:

Lateralized brains are not unique to humans. Parrots prefer picking up things with their left foot. Toads tend to attack other toads from the right but go after prey from the left. Zebra fish are likely to look at new things with their right eye and familiar things with their left. Even invertebrates are biased. Pinar Letzkus, a vision researcher at Australian National University, rewarded bees with sugar whenever they extended their tongue at the sight of a yellow rectangle on a computer screen. He then fashioned tiny eye patches and put them on a new set of subjects. Bees with their left eye covered learned almost as quickly as did bees without a patch. But bees with their right eye covered did far worse.

The broken symmetry of the nervous system may thus be as old as the symmetry itself. If so, it is an ancient puzzle. Being biased to one side would seem like a serious handicap: A toad that hopped to the left whenever it was startled by a predator, for instance, would be easy prey for an attacker that could anticipate which way it would go; the same holds for any other kind of ingrained behavioral imbalance. A number of scientists have run experiments to find the benefits that might offset such costs.

One hypothesis is that a lateralized brain is more powerful than one that works like a mirror image. Instead of two matching parts of the brain performing an identical task, one can take charge, leaving the other free to do something else.

Special Guest, Special Talk

2009-05-10T21:05:00.002-04:00

A guest meditation instructor, the monk Yukon, from the Zen Mountain Monastery, will be joining us from 9 to 10:30 tomorrow. Please join us. All are welcome. There will be instruction, meditation, and a talk.

Poetry Friday

2009-05-08T05:37:00.004-04:00

Kenneth Rexroth.

All good poets are underrated these days, but Rexroth, though less well known then he should be, hold his own. His books- especially the translations of Chinese and Japanese medieval poetry- sell consistently. These are beautiful books. I would venture to call them perfect. They introduce a reader to a new world, they encapsulate that world wonderfully without seeming definitive, and they speak in a highly personal and moving voice.

Rexroth is one of the originators of jazz poetry, which gave rise to the beats. His was the first American poetry to truly embrace the poetic traditions around the world. In a sense he is poetry's Henry Cowell, another westerner who opened up this country to the world. And he railed against the elitism of the east coast scene. Moreover, he was self-educated and deeply, politically engaged. Perhaps most importantly he was a great nature poet who never fell prey to the impersonal, vadic voice that so often made mid-century poetry obscure and difficult.

Here is neat little overview of his books. And here is a poem, one that combines the voice of the chinese, the specificity of american nature poetry, and a rather beat cadence:

Yin and Yang

It is spring once more in the Coast Range
Warm, perfumed, under the Easter moon.
The flowers are back in their places.
The birds are back in their usual trees.
The winter stars set in the ocean.
The summer stars rise from the mountains.
The air is filled with atoms of quicksilver.
Resurrection envelops the earth.
Goemetrical, blazing, deathless,
Animals and men march through heaven,
Pacing their secret ceremony.
The Lion gives the moon to the Virgin.
She stands at the crossroads of heaven,
Holding the full moon in her right hand,
A glittering wheat ear in her left.
The climax of the rite of rebirth
Has ascended from the underworld
Is proclaimed in light from the zenith.
In the underworld the sun swims
Between the fish called Yes and No.

Achtung!

2009-05-08T05:26:00.003-04:00

The science of it...

When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.

These oscillations, called gamma waves, are created by neurons’ firing on and off at the same time — a feat of neural coordination a bit like getting strangers in one section of a stadium to start clapping in unison, thereby sending a signal that induces people on the other side of the stadium to clap along. But these signals can have trouble getting through in a noisy environment.

“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”

We have more than a few kids in school who seem incapable of NOT attending to the random electronic bleeps popping up all around them. They sneak in their cell phones. They text from the bathroom. They are so preoccupied with communication (that is, the girls are) that the facebook/cell phone/own brain nexus hums unceasingly. They boys are far more entangled in video games. All them seem to watch 20 movies a week.

What can we do? Ten year ago TAS' biggest problem was drug use and chaotic home lives. At least those were things one had a chance of growing out of...

another passage from the article:

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

Academic Developments pt II

2009-05-06T15:17:00.003-04:00

Later in the day, Jen and I presented some material on Attachment Theory and the way that underformed parental attachment plays out over the lifespan. One of my favorite exercises for the staff is to write all the students' names on index cards and spread them out on a large table. We then organize them into rough groups, for instance, according to which students have what type of language difficulties, or have suffered trauma, or know how to use free time productively. We do not seek definitive answers, but rather use it to stimulate discussion about the well being of our students and our efforts to make their lives better.

What emerged in our conceptualization of attachment difficulties is that many of our students (historically speaking- yesterday we included the names of many past students in the exercise) have or had significant trauma, attachment, and seperation issues that seriously impacted their school careers. We also observed that the vast majority of them become quite well adjusted over time. Our earliest students are now in their mid-twenties. Most seem to be doing pretty well.

Our mix of students is always changing, and always presents a powerful challenge to teaching orthodoxies. Our students learn how to be in relationships of various intensity, complexity, and type. They also develop a significant fund of general and specific knowledge. Where many seem to be less accomplished is in the execution of complex academic tasks. Part of this is an artefact of the kind of kid who comes to TAS. Some of it is the program itself falling short.

It is sobering to assess our work. Overall, we should be pleased that the vast majority of our students are moving towards happy, productive, interesting lives. Yet we may still be failing them in significant ways. There is real danger out there in the "real world" for underskilled adults. I think we are taking steps to address this. But the ultimate question is a complex one: what are the core skills a thirty year old American will need in 2020?

Is that question even answerable?

Academic Developments

2009-05-06T14:59:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was a productive day for the teachers at TAS. We began with working out the schedule for the fall term and started looking at some significant problems with the way we approach academics. The question is always: are we challenging our students enough? The answer is always mixed.
It is easy to provide a glib answer. We try to meet our students at least halfway. Some of them are excellent students who have recently left a very stressful school environment. Of these, the younger ones tend to get a little complacent. More mature students find their way and work diligently on the work they deeply care about, and are good sports about the stuff they don't particularly like.
Other students have very patchy academic skills and on top of this, have highly disrupted family lives and emotional development. Few of these kids see hard work as an escape, of course. With them we are always swimming against the tide.
One thing we are considering is replacing the trimester with the semester. It would give teachers a little more time to get into subjects, and might open up other opportunities as well. One possibility is to institute a three week period after Christmas break dedicated to intensive projects like theater and film, music, the winter fundraiser, and writing workshops.

The semester meets another important need. More and more of our students are going to college. Colleges find our transcripts and the multitude of classes coded therein to be difficult to follow. Semesters would simplify this. We would sacrifice some variety, but there would be ways of building variety and student choice into the courses themselves.
The Science and Mathematics curricula seem to be working out well. Our English and Social Studies curricula need to be streamlined and pointed in a clearer direction. Hopefully the fall term will see the beginnings of the Contemplative Education program coming into focus, with retreats and meditation training, as well as stress reduction classes. One wonderful idea was suggested by Jen Fusco-Perry, TAS' therapist: a storytelling class. Learning how to tell one's own story.
The importance of this is something I will follow up on later. It fits perfectly into the larger frame of self-awareness and self-development.

If there was one drug...

2009-05-04T10:22:00.002-04:00

that I would dedicate hours to exposing as dangerous and pointless, it would be Abilify:

(from Furious Seasons) A recent conference call with financial analysts by executives with Bristol-Myers Squibb, makers of Abilify--the antipsychotic that will cure your non-psychotic issues--is revealing. Over 10 percent of Americans now take an atypical antipsychotic for depression, according to the company. Much of that prescribing has got to be off-label as Abilify is the only approved antipsychotic for the condition, all of which makes me damn suspicious of how Seroquel's bipolar depression approval in 2006 may have been turned into a proxy approval for major depression.

Forget about Prozac Nation, this is Atypical Nation. Think I'm joking? Antipsychotics are now the top revenue producing class of drugs, topping even statins.

This is so grim, so cynical...even as real progress is being made on the disclosure and bribe front in the journals and medical schools, the big drug makers are pushing harder and harder.

Keep your kids off of this drug.

But in the interest of clarity, I am going to ring up a psychiatrist I know and trust and get his take on it.

Welcome to Monday

2009-05-04T09:42:00.002-04:00

The school year hurtles forward...a weekend trip to the Jersey Shore at the end of the month, mid-term reports this week, a prom-like dance in a couple of weeks, and most importantly, the planting of two large and just about ready to bear paw-paws.
Paw-paw? A native tree, resistant to most pests, that produces large amounts of banana-tasting fruit. The swallowtail subsists on its leaves. It was George Washington's favorite dessert, served frozen, from what I understand. We need to raise two hundred more dollars to pay for the trees.

Thanks to our Mr. Garza, ace kid-motivator and verbal buggy whip, the grounds are coming along nicely. A wet spring means success for tree planting.

A couple of weeks ago we had an interesting seminar on Quality Schools, the concept long advocated by William Glasser. Judith Clapp gave the presentation. It was gratifying to note that we already have in place much of what Glasser considers to be requisite for a school that meets our students' developmental needs.

Tomorrow we have another staff day. We will be pulling together the course offerings for next year, as well as planning for the summer, including the possibility of summer camp. Later in the morning, our school therapist, Jen Fusco-Perry and I will be presenting some material on attachment syndromes and developmental/relational issues.

Enjoy the day. This week a consistant posting schedule will be tightened up.