Sharecropping in the Horse Industry 1.0

What follows is an email I wish I could send to what passes for our HR department: 

File under #2021Sharecropping 

Dear HR Person,

I could use some help understanding some new information about my wage.

My department admin advised me this week that my horse's board at Upper Campus has been considered a benefit at $5 per hour worked. As I have never seen this benefit listed on my paystub, and have never heard otherwise, I believed that all Equestrian Department employees – especially those who teach and supervise students – received this benefit at no cost. As a summer camp riding teacher, I saw no indication that my contract did not include a personal horse or that I earned less because my horse was in a school barn. Likewise, when I received housing as a teacher, this benefit appeared as discounted rent added and then subtracted from my paystub. 

In reviewing my most recent time cards, I calculate my horse's board benefit as $500 per month. I recall that is the amount our school charges students for privately-owned horse board and wonder why the school considers an employee benefit at the retail level. 

Additionally, our director may not have conveyed to you that I am responsible for approximately 80 percent of my horse's care, stall cleaning, turnout, hoof care, veterinary care, and I buy about 25 percent of his feed. At barns in and around our valley, $500 buys full board includes stall cleaning, feeding, and feed. In a quick internet search, I found a trainer who includes full board, two training rides, and a weekly lesson for $500. Even without an employee discount, the care my horse currently receives fits more in line with the local industry standard for a barn where owners do some or all their horses' care. Either of these calculations would make my hourly wage at least $17.50. 

As a school employee for four of the last five years, I am currently responsible for ensuring the health and well-being of between 15 and 24 horses, as well as the students I supervise and teach. With more than 50 of experience riding and caring for horses, a university degree that informs my riding instruction, and 25 years of high school classroom teaching experience, I am an asset to our school. Having my horse at the Upper Campus only increases my value to the school. I am a daily set of eyes on the horses and facilities whether I am on the work schedule or not. As I recall, administrators were as grateful for my presence in the early days of the pandemic lockdown as I was to have a place to fully quarantine. 

In short, please help me understand, one, why I receive no discount on my horse's board benefit and, two, why you would pay a less experienced employee more recently hired with fewer responsibilities fully 13 percent more than the school pays me. 

My supervisor's suggestion that I pay horse board elsewhere in the valley so as to receive a wage comparable to my less-experienced co-worker, wonderful and hardworking as she is, seems illogical. If the benefit I forfeit is worth $5 per hour, why would my wage only increase by $2.50?

This next sentence is a joke and not meant for any real email to my bosses, I promise.

Don't get me started on how the state and my unemployment insurance have been subsidizing you for my employment since 2019.

Fox, Trot, Canter, RUN!

This never-got-posted post is about eight months late. Typical. 

A California Gray Fox is my closest neighbor here in the deserted dorm village at the Ojai Valley School. He calls for a mate several times in the night and early morning. I must've done a passable imitation of a suitable lady fox night before last. When I stopped returning his screeches, he came into the courtyard and gazed up at my balcony, okay, really a metal deck in front of my window.

*****

13.July.2020 – Three months have passed since I chatted with that fox. Three fox kits were born and raised in the rocky culvert next to the barn. I've named two of the 50 or so resident lizards, Lefty and Stumpy. They've just molted (is it molting with lizards?) so I think Stumpy will be hard to find as his new tail section was looking more and more normal every week.  Lefty is missing three middle fingers on his left forelimb. Doesn't slow him down a bit.

People are still contracting COVID19 at an alarming rate here in California. Though we thought we had it wrapped up six weeks ago, we didn't and now the Southwest is the epicenter of the global pandemic. That is, the southern and western US states are gaining cases faster than anyone else in the world.

We have a fake-billionaire-reality-TV-host for a president and he appears to be trying to burn the entire country to the ground.

The school where I work is in some serious denial about the coming year. There's a so-called Roadmap to Reopening (lately I dislike the verb to open and loathe the word reopen) that fails to mention asymptomatic spread at all. It seems completely insane to write a set of rules and guidelines that makes no mention of the mode of transmission widely understood to cause 40 percent of the cases. Of course, these must be guidelines since we are asking for tons of money and probably won't make anyone do anything that endangers our chances of getting paid.

All I know is that I would not send my children to a school that pretends that 40 percent of cases in a deadly pandemic simply did not exist.

*****

Because some 70 percent of us will contract this disease eventually, according to the brainy Angela Merkel, and I have congenital risk factors that make survival a fifty-fifty shot at best, I think I must set down some notes for my sister here. She hates writing. Hates it. She's not a fan of tidying up after the dead either and I want to make it as easy as I can, should she have to sort through my crap.

If any of my friends from the early days want to remember me they will want to play good music and dance. Though some will remember the Boothbay Playhouse, others will remember studios in Santa Cruz or New York. The common denominator is dancing.

Even on horseback, it is rhythm and movement that made me me.

Pixies and Pandemics

Quickly, this blog no longer lives in Alna, Maine, though my house, and my barn, and most of my stuff are still there.

My horses and I moved back to my natal neighborhood of Ojai, California in 2016, and now I've re-booted the blog because all of us who live in the State have been told to go to our rooms for the good of all. Suddenly, I have plenty of alone time to ponder this old thing.

Ojai Pixies are a thing. So is this motherfucking pandemic. Order the Pixies to be delivered while you're inside waiting for COVID-19 to walk on by.

Down to one horse who lives in the barn here at Ojai Valley School, now closed due to the MFP, I'm happily hunkered in a dorm room living on peanut butter, crackers, kale from the abandoned Garden Club plot, and tamales from Santa Paula's Garden Market – sorry about the FB link. Order those, too, if you possibly can.

Here's the view from my commute:

More later. xoxo
L

The Boot

... and I don't mean, Das Boot.

Today marks the end of my second week at LL Bean's behemoth Return Center, where we "seasonals" learn  the finer points of refunds, exchanges, and dispositions. The latter is not, as you might imagine, a study of outdoorsy people's moods and character qualities. Rather, it describes what the heck you do with all the items from the Bean catalogue people send you when you have an almost No Questions Asked returns policy.

Though I'm still getting up to speed on the various computer--Windows, Ack!--systems and acronyms, known charmingly as Beanspeak, one thing is clear. If public schools fail because we don't do as the corporations do, I'll eat the next gnarly 27 year-old Bean boot that tumbles off the conveyor belt. 

With a dozen people in the newbie section of our class--those of us who have never worked in Returns--we have somewhere between three and five trainers, two will eventually be our supervisors. If public schools reproduce this corporate 12:3 student teacher ratio we would 12 times as many teachers. 

The trainers spend much of their time going over OSHA rules like how to exit the two-story, football field-sized building in an emergency. Sadly, some seem to want us to see OSHA as an onerous overseer rather than a lifesaving entity. In a long and tedious series of PowerPoints, no one mentions the context for these rules. I suggest the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, or say, the Bangladesh factory collapse this spring where over 1,100 people died. In fact, there seems almost an aversion to context.

Although we work in a giant Returns center, made necessary by the company's famous 100 percent guarantee, little mention is made of this anomaly. I wager that the returns center at comparably-sized companies pale in comparison. No one makes even an oblique observation about class or history until we discuss monograms. When a newly-minted high school grad in my class asks why the initial of a customer's last name goes in the middle of a monogram, the answer, instead of a history of monogramming, the trainer starts to give a non-answer like, That's the way it is, when your resident know-it-all pipes up. "It dates back to Greek and Roman times; then it became a mark of aristocracy." The teenager looked interested or at least polite; the trainer, not so much. Making friends every second, right?

The last time I went through this kind of training was in 1984 when, fresh out of NYU, I went to work for British Airways in NYC, as a reservationist. An avuncular, though tough, Welshman led us through three weeks of hard core computer and geography work. It was unsentimental, challenging, and extremely competitive. Ninety seconds of inattention could cost us our jobs. If, by the end of the first week, we didn't know 98 percent of the hundreds of cities BA served, we heard a polite "Cheerio." Good-bye to practically free flights to practically everywhere on earth. Good-bye to excellent union-supported benefits. Good-bye to a living wage in freaking New York City. Partly because we had been screened by an employment agency, and partly because the rewards beckoned, no one washed out. No one.

At the Boot, so far, the OSHA standards and several other skills, require only that we sign ourselves off. Students sign sheets of paper that say we have seen the documentation and can follow company policy, though we need prove that we understand neither the policies nor their origins. We sign not because we are confident that our skills have reached some measurable standard, but rather because we like and respect our "trainers," because we know that they know way, way, way more than we do about how to process the vast number and variety of items from the Bean catalog, and we understand that they too must get credit for providing us with this critical information. Though the real test comes "live" on the floor, we have at least three shots to demonstrate acceptable speed and accuracy.

What is mostly missing from the Bean scene is a sense of humor about the Bean brand. No one seems to find the uber-class-centric nature of the catalog ironic or even interesting. My friend Philip's friend Gail MacColl helped write "Items from our Catalogue" more than 30 years ago. Original copies of this terrific parody now sell for more than 60 dollars. I can't find our family copy and wish it were back in print so I could at least amuse myself.

Maine "Learners"

Here's a link to my op-ed published in our statewide paper, the Maine Sunday Telegram, 23.June.13, about Maine's Department of Education and its profiteering folly.

Testing I Can Get Behind

Cambridge brings back its entrance exam. This is a test, besides my own, I'd be happy to teach to.

Genius

You’ll never eat crabs again: Barry Levinson’s eco-freakout ‘The Bay’ | Grist

Frontline did the documentary so well, Levinson had to tell the story. Though I loathe scary movies, I love Levinson well enough that I might see this one.

Honing an Argument for Jenn-yoo-wine School Reform

Spurred by a recent "public notice" in the Kennebec Journal seeking bids to evaluate Maine teachers and administrators with an eye toward merit schemes, I started to scratch the surface of the ubiquitous "edreform" movement. As I look to accomplish this possibly Sisyphean task, Dear Reader, I recommend anyone interested in sorting out the vested interests read the recent NYer article on Diane Ravitch, her own blog, and a confirmed corporate ed skeptic, the edushyster.

 For the overachievers, here are the New York Review of Books Diane Ravitch pages.

Going to Bat for Poetry and Real Education Earns Me My First Twitter Block: I'm so proud

Dear Internet,

I love you.

Up until this morning I was a social media block virgin.

Well, at least this was the first time I cared whether I had access to a fellow Tweeter's timeline. I follow plenty of people, and am followed back, by many people and organizations whose politics and positions differ from mine, from Karl Rove to Dick Armey's Freedom Works.

A few days ago I fell over an astro-turf, supposedly pro-teacher association that says its primary goal is to increase pay for the superstars of teaching. The hedge fund manager founder of this group chose a sports allusion, thedraft.org as its URL and has minions posting emo education palliatives about the importance of great teachers.

Several things about the group's website, patter, and facebook page raised red flags. First, the logo bears a striking resemblance to the NBA and MLB.

 

Who is the audience for this look, who are they trying to sell on their ideas? What research are they using that says these images mean anything to teachers? I still have no idea, though I'm certain they mean nothing to this teacher. The perverse use of President Obama amongst the celebrities in the top post, a banal, meaningless bit of PR, on the group's website, raised my eyebrows. Is it designed to convince those of us who voted for President Obama that he somehow endorses this campaign? Though he may, there is no official sign that this group is aligned with any part of a White House plan for education.

 

 Then I watched a video of LPE founder Stephen Duneier.

 

Anyone who has followed the Crash of 2008 for more than 90 minutes can understand Duneier's coded language. It emanates from ALEC, Freedom Works, some branches of the Libertarian corner of the political labyrinth, and the Tea Party.

After a 10 minute google, I saw that Duneier is a hedge fund manager who worked for the London Diversified, then Peloton Partners, until the Crash, then jumped on the for-profit education wagon. His career path gives special meaning to LPE's subhead: Changing the Face of Education, One Million at a Time. Guessing that's his million, not teachers'.

So, then I decided to engage whomever was at the helm at LPE's Twitter page while asking other teachers for their takes.

Notice, the LPE tweep immediately suggests I am against "alternative" methods for improving education. I wrote that the profit motive fails the test of "alternative" method and this Twitter spox makes up a word in response, causing me and another teacher to engage in some mild ridicule.

Then last night, coincidentally, I see Chris Hayes on C-SPAN's BookTV discuss his new book, "Twilight of the Elites: America After the Meritocracy." Chris Hayes discussing his book on C-SPAN, where he discusses the etymology of the word "meritocracy" and the effect of our wrongheaded love affair with the concept and suggest the LPE Twitter spox read it.

Happy with the universe for providing me with such beautifully timed arguments, I headed over to Facebook, where I discovered the LPE geniuses had co-opted one of my favorite poets, Taylor Mali, and excerpted his famous poem "What Teachers Make" on their website. This clinched it.


That whomever is choosing material for this site failed to comprehend the profound irony of using Mali's poem supporting rigor in democratic education and the sacrifices teachers of all pay grade as reflecting LPE's "meritocratic" blather, demonstrated straight-up ignorance and avarice. I posted a comment under Mali's image and poem excerpt on LPE's FB page, and tweeted Mali about this use.

Mali thanked me within hours and the LPE minion scrubbed my thoroughly civil comment and blocked me from both FB and Twitter.

Guess I touched a nerve.

Postscript: Guess they need some people who know how Twitter works. I followed LPE with my teacher-y account, rather than my personal one and saw a Tweet go by addressed to me. I responded--thinking they had lifted my block.  Oy.

Disrupt

NEW Public Player With Switcher

This is not all. We public school teachers are not machines to be replaced by the next new thing.

If this is what the country wants, we deserve retraining. If we cannot embrace the creative economy, who can?

"Bullied" not "Bully" for Midcoast teens

Early in May, the high school visited the newly-renamed Oceanside East School in Rockland to watch a film called, “Bullied.” Though this documentary should not to be confused with “Bully”, a new independent film making its way to Maine in the next few weeks, “Bullied” addressed many of the same issues, including school policy and action, or lack thereof. The high school faculty agreed we and the students needed to see it, so we joined area schools and converged in the former Rockland District High School auditorium.

“Bullied” focuses on a gay man, Jamie Nabozny, who won a large settlement in a court case against his school system after its administration failed to protect him from the physical and emotional damage resulting from many years of anti-gay, homophobic bullying. Nabozny attended the Rockland screening, asked the students several questions and also took their questions. When he asked the Midcoast teenagers in the auditorium to raise their hands if they feel safe in school, not one Rockland, Thomaston, Vinalhaven or North Haven hand went up. This reality pointed squarely at Trekkers Executive Director Don Carpenter’s emotional introduction of Nabozny. Carpenter stood before several hundred teenagers and nearly a hundred faculty and staff members and admitted he had been on all sides of the bullying dynamic. “I have been bullied, I have been a bully, and I have stood by and done nothing when I witnessed bullying,” he said. This simple truth resonated with every person in the hall.

All the North Haven Community School faculty, not just high school teachers, administration and staff work every day to create and maintain a safe environment. As a teacher anywhere, let alone in a tiny school where we pride ourselves on personal, nearly one on one teaching, seeing evidence that your students find the climate threatening is uncomfortable at best, shaming at worst. We went to the screening of “Bullied” because we wanted to face reality, not because we wanted to be comforted.

In the film, Nabozny got abuse for being studious and emotional. To many bullies, kindness, nurturing, and concern for others equal weakness. We all have heard a version of this misogyny on the playground when a child gets criticized for playing a sport, “like a girl.” Because my NHCS classroom is adjacent to the high school locker rooms, outbursts from students who imagine they are out of earshot, too often contain epithets using the word “gay” as a euphemism for stupid, ugly, or confusing. Though consequences and conversation have helped, teachers around the country fight this stereotype, so we know we are not alone.

This fall we have an opportunity, with the coming high school grouping: eight girls, seven freshmen and one sophomore; and 11 boys, two seniors, four juniors, two sophomores, and three freshmen, to hear a wide variety of voices from the student body. With Principal-Elect Amy Marx’s leadership, faculty voices may discover new tunes while bringing Marx into the chorus that echoes in the halls of NHCS.

Cooperation, tolerance, sensitivity, empathy, and kindness build trust and personal relationships and give our work meaning. These traits are part and parcel of the NHCS mission exiting Principal Barney Hallowell has given his adult life to promote and embody. The finest appreciation of this legacy we could provide him would be to honor these precepts by living them.

Missed Deadline...gasp! Instead, let's talk about journalism.

So, no North Haven News. I let preparing for April vacation, getting to Florida for April vacation, doing my taxes during my April vacation, deflecting the compulsive overconsumption of my father's partner while on April vacation (does he have to buy everything in the county that is on sale, then talk about it for 10 minutes per item?),  enjoying a bit of April vacation and getting back from April vacation distract me from my appointed duties at the North Haven News.

For that I am sorry. Overwhelmed a bit, and sorry.

In lieu of anything intelligent from me, have a look at this Laurie Penney post on Warren Ellis's blog. Ask yourself, what is the traditional media and given what it is today, what good is it doing?

xx

L

p.s. Lest anyone think I would let traditional media evaporate, I have three words for you, This American Life.

North Haven HS News Column

Though I'm not blogging enough, I am writing this column for the North Haven News. It's (mostly) what's happening.

Mostly the days at North Haven Community School tick over like they do anywhere, at most jobs, in most industrialized countries. Like most people who work inside buildings, we have meetings, lots of meetings. This month, in addition to our usual meetings about policy, students, schedules, standards, and some other things I have certainly forgotten, we had meetings to meet the candidates for next year’s open principal position and meetings to discuss said principal candidates. Thankfully, the eventual news of our new principal, Amy Marx’s hiring came not in a meeting, but in a universally, at least as far as I could tell, well-received e-mail. Her warmth and intelligence swayed us all, and her wish to find the best place in the world to raise her children seems an excellent fit.

Like most teachers, we also spend most of our time with children. In the high school,  though they may be adult-sized, our 13 students remain children, even the seniors. Sure, we give tests,  grade papers, and monitor behavior, but we work hard to demonstrate the respect, even love, we have for the subjects we teach, on the off chance that these children will emulate our curiosity and desire to learn. The good news is, often they do, and their willingness to focus on Knowledge Fair, rolling toward us on the not too distant horizon, proves it.

Whether it is the relatively high adult to student ratio, the manners demonstrated at home, Fresh Pond’s water, or some ineffable quality I am too new to notice, our children grumble, yet they do their work. Though some do it easily, some struggle, some downright resist, I trust that come the Ides of March, every student will present an exploration of his or her topic in at least one tangible way. Here in the high school we have students studying a broad range of subjects, from a 1970s U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding Amish education to American courts’ definitions of mental health; diesel engines to modern warfare; testing in schools to WikiLeaks; bass guitars to hydroponic systems.

Advised by high school teachers Courtney Naliboff, Louis Carrier, Janis Jones, Kristen McGovern , Terry Goodhue and me, as well as Librarian Kate McQuinn and Principal Barney Hallowell, students study, write, paint, glue, and draw in the pursuit of discovering what is worth learning about the subjects they are studying. Though long term projects have become de rigueur in many schools, this will be my first experience with one that encompasses the entire student body. The project’s common purpose seems a rich bonding force among both teachers and students and I look forward to seeing these projects fully fruited and on display for the town.

Closer on the horizon looms the Maine Principal Association’s One Act Play Festival, Saturday and Sunday, March 9 and 10 at Strom Auditorium in Rockport, home of Camden Hills Regional High School.  Led by English and theater arts teacher Courtney Naliboff, the NHCS cast members, Kennedy Cooper, Adam Murphy, Craig Waterman, Gina MacDonald, Samantha Sparhawk, Caleb Mao, Maddie Hallowell, Leta Hallowell, Megan Goodell, Natalie Carrier and Adrianna Ames,  have been rehearsing play called “Mostellaria” by the early Roman Plautus wherein the boys play the girls and vice versa. The plot turns on a sociable young “man” whose father leaves the youth in charge of the family home. Apparently young people have been throwing parties in their parents’ absence for more than 2,000 years, and young Tranio is no exception. The parties continue until the father returns and creates the central problem of the play. The house and, in particular, a friend are in such a state that the young people decide to convince his father that in his absence ghosts have come to haunt his house. This ruse proves problematic and a classic picaresque, replete with knaves, rogues, and adventure, ensues.

    Apparently, there has been a plot afoot for years to keep residents of North Haven from attending the One Act Festival, as it is, according to Principal Barney Hallowell and One Act Director Courtney Naliboff, always scheduled during North Haven’s town meeting. This year, the curtain rises on our play at 2:30 p.m., just enough time to make it to Rockport from the middle boat, and the town meeting starts at 9 a.m. Oy.

Norovirus hits North Haven

With 15 students out--nearly a quarter of our population--and children who say even their parents are sick, we are running scared from "the Puke." One of the second graders came to me at recess to tell me that her dad is ill. "My daddy's sick," she reported. "What does he have?" I asked. "The Puke," she replied, adding that her brother had had it the day before.

Ugh.

For those who want to know more about this horrid creature--is a virus actually alive?--and vague hope for a vaccine, Scientific American tells us it can live in well water for years. Google trends shows that it hit hard right after Christmas and again last week and, depending on where you live, might be on the rise again.

All I can say is, wash your hands like mad and if you or your family gets it, stay the heck home for at least three days after you start to feel better. That's not me talking, that's the fracking CDC.

Good luck.

Islands Apart

To start this column, I first wrote, “Having never taught on an island...,” and that did not seem completely right. I thought for a moment and suddenly it dawned that my first teaching job was actually on an island. Apparently, the fact that it was an island with more than 20 bridges and countless car and rail tunnels linking it to the mainland, and a population of several million people confused me briefly. Manhattan’s George Washington High School, where I student taught before working as a long term substitute, sits high on a hill at the corner of 192nd Street and Audubon Avenue, overlooking the Harlem River and the Bronx. In 1776, the British chased General Washington’s army from nearby Fort Washington across the Hudson to New Jersey a rout that later led to the Battle of Trenton and eventually to that famous ferrying of his army across the Delaware.

In 1982 most of the 2000 students were either first or second generation Americans from the Dominican Republic. I could buy sweet milky Cuban coffee in any of eight bodegas between the subway exit and the metal-detector bedecked school entrance. In the school’s heyday luminaries like Maria Callas and Henry Kissinger earned their diplomas there. By my time there a general malaise, probably due to decades of fiscal neglect, prevailed. Historic WPA murals damaged in riots during the 60s and 70s faced their rooms with scarred faces. When I started my student teaching in late winter, the school had recently run out of lined paper and none would be provided again until September.

That a piece of historic American art marred by urban strife could be ignored for decades because of a lack of funding, or that a pre-computer age high school could run out of paper in the biggest city in America calls into sharp relief the differences between these islands and their schools. Here at NHCS, events like Spirit Week build the ties that bind us, connect the elementary children with the older kids, the teachers to students they may not have in class, teachers to other teachers, and all of us to the ideal of community education. We had no such goals on that larger island; keeping the kids off the streets sometimes seemed our sole objective and we felt as if we accomplished something when our pupils showed up.

As Spirit Week, an almost entirely student-organized series of events, unfolded last month, I marveled at the way children encouraged one another through creative, athletic, nourishing, even silly exercises. T-shirt painting and an egg-drop competition allowed us all to stretch our creativity a little; a hungie-gungie lunch provided delicious comfort food; a relay race gave the basketball geniuses a chance to showboat and the rest of us to be supported for our, at least in my case, somewhat less than stellar attempts.

According to NHCS Student Council President Leta Hallowell, Spirit Week coincidentally bumped up against the school’s traditional Gingerbread House Competition. In an apparently dependable part of this tradition, the faculty’s tropical-themed gingerbread house failed to prevail. This is just one sweet occasion created by Librarian Kate Quinn. Neither my last island school nor any school since has employed anyone in the role Kate has created at this school. As most readers must know, Kate delivers a tray of treats to both the faculty and the high school every Thursday. I will remember one of these concoctions, replete with butter, poppy seeds, and just the right amount of jam, as Heaven in a Cookie.

This month we had a mini-Spirit Week with some impromptu Homecoming events to mark the first home basketball games set to commence Friday the 13th. Meatball submarine sandwiches Thursday and basketball shooting contests and a round of Captain’s Coming--a nautical and more sophisticated version of Simon Says on Friday put the whole school in the mood to support our teams in Friday’s games.

True to its reputation, Friday the 13th proved less than lucky for the Hawks as lousy roads in the Bar Harbor area kept Acadia Christian closed and their basketball players leashed. When the home season finally began Monday, the standing-room only crowd saw our young teams demonstrate enviable tenacity and heart against Jackman’s strong, mature Forest Hills teams. Though the visitors won both the boys’ and girls’ games, North Haven spectators could see the teams offer up grace, speed, elegance and sportsmanship.

As freshman Hawk Megan Goodell played the national anthem on her flute to open the game Monday, I could not help but think of the tens of thousands of high school players and spectators hearing that song throughout the country. As I listened, I thanked whatever invisible workings of the universe allow North Haven Community School to offer its unique environment and education to its children, and embody community so thoroughly.



(This column was also submitted to the North Haven News.)

Can't seem to get past Christmas

Here's a bit of seasonal show biz kerfuffle courtesy of Tim Minchin and Director of Television for ITV Peter Fincham.

"If you like feeling things..."

Here's what I want to do with my summer vacation:
Music by, guess who? Tim Minchin, of course.
Royal Shakespeare Company, anyone? Oy.

One more Christmas song

In case you haven't been sentimental enough about the holidays just past, listen to this sweet Christmas song by the wry, dry, and slightly odd Tim Minchin. The Bloggess reminded me of how good and smart and musical he is.

Brannamanevangelism 1.0

This morning in a fit of last-moments-of-vacation procrastination, I watched a documentary I'd longed to see, Buck, the story of Buck Brannaman (forgive the autoplay trailer) and his cowboy Zen approach to all things horsey and non-horsey.

This film prompted uncounted thoughts and feelings, chief among them that I miss my horse and horses in general. There have been longish periods in my life when I believed work with horses held the key to anything important I would ever do, and this film poked at whatever armor I've built to protect against a sense of failing to fully act on those beliefs.

If you've seen the film and know much about horses, Brannaman's conversations about good horsemanship being a dance might resonate with you. For me they sound more like a pealing cathedral tower. Dance and riding are married in my viscera. I used to say I only got a bachelor's degree in dance because I couldn't get one in horseback riding. For me, they're both about metaphysics, movement and love.

This is not to say I plan to leave the best teaching job in the world to chase a dream conjured in my horse-crazed, 10 year-old girl self, rather to say this film all but shouted at me that I ignore dance and horses at my peril.

Watch David Letterman wax all respectful and humble around Brannaman. It's a sight to behold.

And Everything is Made New Again

"The novelty will wear off." That's what one of my young coworkers said the other afternoon. She had seen my eyes widen at the blue sky and the bluer ocean, punctuated by what the Irish call white horses, and Americans more banally call whitecaps, racing the breeze while we plowed across Penobscot Bay from Rockland to North Haven Island, my home as of about a month ago. 

Since then I've been wondering whether it is the novelty that has filled my heart since my interview and hiring at the North Haven Community School late this summer. I want to imagine she is wrong. I want to believe that the border between my home and the rest of the world will always be tangible, porous, measurable, palpable, and wet. 

Today our principal, Barney, said we have to, "get out of here." Encouraging us to avoid the comforts of complacency, he said that as soon as he began to feel that getting off the island was too much trouble or not worth the effort, it was a sign he needed to leave, and soon. I wonder when I should tell him that ship has sailed. My ultimate goal is to see how long I can stay without leaving, and I have been thwarted in that effort by everything from a hurricane to an island wedding.

Hurricane Irene took me to Harridan Central in Alna to close the cellar windows, and forced my hand regarding my horse Sami's winter arrangements. She now resides at the Taj Mahal of horsey homes, Whitefield's Acorn Hill Farm. There, she can claim blonde bombshell status while mingling with the elite--the tall, black, elegant Friesians farm owner Jennifer Grady raises and shows.

My island landlords had asked me back in August whether I would mind relinquishing my winter rental for one weekend in September as one of the island girls was marrying a summering boy, some 350 people had been invited for the wedding and their house was needed for the invasion.  If I had known it would be the most beautiful weekend of the year, I might have thought twice. I thought wistfully about the bride, though, imagining that she might find a minute or two to notice the good fortune of a warm, dry, sunny wedding day.

As for the expedition, well, it's an actual expedition into Maine's North Woods, replete with actual wilderness. I haven't encountered actual wilderness without lots of actual contact with modernity--so I guess that keeps it from being actual wilderness--since I was about 12, and I don't want to say how long ago that was. And we are canoeing. Canoeing the West Branch of the Penobscot River up near the Canadian border. When I told my dearest dear Stan that the expedition took us into the wilds, he scoffed. "Do you know how many people are on that river every summer? Do you know?" he asked. "250,000," he answered, harrumphing. I told him the itinerary, starting with, "We put in at Old Roll Dam." He consulted his iPad for a moment, then said, "Hmm. That's actual wilderness."

O.k., so it is novel to teach at a school of some 60 children, k-12. It is novel to start the school year with a trip down an ancient, storied river with a boatload of teenagers. It is novel to ride a ferry 12 miles across a bay to get home from a shopping trip or the bank. When and if the novelty does wear off, I would be surprised if some other novelty failed to replace it, though.

The neighbor's giant horse chestnut's leaves should drop in November, and my line of sight from the front porch to the thoroughfare will include the ferry. That will be new. In December, I will likely need coaching about how to manage my car without posted rules about the village's side street parking protocol. That will be new, though arguably not that fun. By February, I will want to know the finer points of the school's Knowledge Fair, and will look to my students and fellow teachers for ways to make it rich, beautiful, and informative. That will be new.

Suddenly, I am reminded of why I love teaching and why I feel grateful every day to the fates that brought me here. Everything is new. Every year. Every day.