Teacher Author Speaker
"Every single child wants to be successful. The problem is, if they can't be successful at being successful, they'll be successful at screwing up. Our job as educators is to change the latter to the former."
- from the The Missing Link by Steve Heisler
You can teach like your hair is on fire, teach like a pirate, teach like a champion, teach like anything you want. But if you are not first teaching like a compassionate human being, you haven't begun to teach anything of value.
It would be great if we got to vote directly on corporate welfare payments, the military budget, or any other of the millions of ways public money is disbursed. Alas, in New Jersey, the only tax we get a direct vote on is the school tax.
Unfortunately this can sometimes make school budgets the unwarranted recipient of more generalized taxation and public servant angers.
In the community where I live there is often much dissension regarding the school budget in large part based on the fact that a significant percentage of the public does not even use the school. Many send their children to private, parochial or charter schools and another significant portion of our population has aged out of the schools: their children long ago graduated. However my view is that persons who vote their own narrow needs when voting against a school budget are voting unethically.
When it comes to voting for the school budgets, there is only one reason to vote for or against it and it has nothing to do with whether you or your children use the schools. If the budgets reflects the genuine needs of the schools, regardless of how you feel about the teachers, administrators board members or even the schools, you must vote for it. If it doesn't, say for instance it squanders cash on a current technological fad not driven by thoughtful long term goals, vote against it.
I have struggled myself with just such a decisions. I have chosen to vote against budgets that seemed based on shoddy thinking, but I have also held my nose while voting for budgets because, though I may not have agreed with the decisions on how the money is spent, the decision making process seemed sound.The role of any individual in the community, and most religious and ethical thinking support this, is that sometimes we must vote against self-interest in order to be a good neighbor. To do anything less would seem a dereliction of moral duty regardless of which religious and political affiliation to which you are ascribed. How to be a good neighbor is among the higher questions we are ever called to answer
I am not so nostalgically deluded to believe that once upon a time every teacher was thrilled and all students simply couldn't wait to come to school each day. Not very many years ago a grant funded, Pre-K literacy program, was once denied permission to hire a Literacy Clown because it was fun "and if its fun, it's not learning."
Look at school furniture for a clear picture of this struggle There is some research that ergonomic, comfortable chairs have a positive impact on learning yet little has moved school furniture from its utilitarian design. Rooted in our Puritanical teachings, I suppose, is the idea that unyielding seats makes for unyielding values. Yet it's not that simple. We also recognize that the increased costs associated with "better" furniture also play into the choices schools make in respect of their students.
Professional educators who understand that learning happens in its own time are equally well aware that the buses run on a firm schedule. So we are always balancing the need of teaching the students against the needs of managing the students. Right now managing seems to be winning out and in the process too much of the exuberance of both teaching and learning has been wrung from schools.
It is not very likely that we will be rid very soon of standardized testing and standardized curriculum and the other simplified, thoughtless solutions with which urgency has burdened professional educations. However without giving up the struggle to change what is, we ought also balance our struggle with changing approaches within the context of what we are saddled with.
Albert Cullum, the teacher and writer once 'radically' proposed that we ought to teach the way children learn rather than to ask them to learn the way we teach. Children learn "through movement, through emotions, through activities, through projects, all the basics fit in and they're learning without realizing they're learning. Learning's not painful, learning should be joyful."
Urgency is a word I hear often, and it is critical but the word I don't hear enough of is fun. The academic futures of our students cannot wait for us to get around to fixing the significant imperfections of our current standardization mania. Seems to me the discussion ought not to be only about what's wrong, but how, as intermediaries of hope and builders of the future we can continue to manage to give the students what they need even as we meet the needs of their management.
I have been a teacher and teacher leader for 25 years, and the core teaching values of how to be successful have been at the center of my work. It is also the subject of my book, The Missing Link: Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills just published by Rowman and Littlefield.
Growing up in a home with Holocaust Survivor parents, who were unable to have much of an an education beyond grade school and yet were able to live meaningful, hopeful and successful lives, gave me a very explicit message that there are many ways to be successful and many paths to success outside of the mainstream avenues.
The reality is that being successful without education can happen if one applies the same identifiable skill set that, applied in schools, produces academic success. The two richest people in England, after all, were both high school drop outs.
Success skills matter more than learning, always. Yet, there is little question that success skills and education are more often a winning combination. If you can, succeeding in school will likely open more doors and perhaps create an easier way forward.
Yes, the two richest people in England were high school drops outs but on the rolls of poverty, I would guess, there are many more who are impoverished that are dropouts than there are dropouts that have climbed the parapets of success.
Based on even a glance, Ron Clark's 55 Rules for Success (excerpted here), appear to be not success skills at all. What they seem instead are rules that will make you successful so long as Ron Clark is in charge of your world. I would even go so far as to say that many, many other people share Ron Clark's narrow view of right and wrong. However these "success skills" boil down to, essentially: 'here is the rule, shut your pie-hole and follow it.' In my view, they are actually the antithesis of what good success skill teaching ought to be about.
Number 19, for example, “When I assign homework, there is to be no moaning or
complaining. This will result in a doubled assignment.”
Frankly, this is the kind of shit that just annoys me. If you changed that statement to a different set of standards, such as 'if you moan and complain about ten lashes, I'll give you twenty' most good folks would be shocked and outraged at such treatment.
Such "rules" have everything to do with enforcing a power structure and nothing to do with a meaningful rationale for homework that can result in the kind of student empowerment that becomes part of a student's habit of success. What you are actually teaching with such a rule is not a success skill unless you consider blindly following orders a success skill. Many folks might appreciate such a skill but it is not what I would want my child to learn.
Am I suggesting students should have a say in whether they get homework? Not really. However what I am suggesting is that if there is value in the work we are asking kids to do, we ought we be able to communicate its value without feeling that our authority is being questioned.
That seems to me simple logic: if a teacher cannot rationally defend the homework being assigned as being meaningful, maybe the teacher needs to work harder at creating more meaningful homework, though I suppose squelching dissent is probably more fun. I mean hey, Putin seems to dig it!
My just published book, The Missing Link: Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills, attempts to examine the problem of why students do not succeed. One reason is apparent in how teachers, schools and parents teach success skills. Many interactions around issues of fostering student success can be encapsulated in this burlesque exchange:
Hey, Pal, how do you get to City Hall?"
"Well Pal, usually I just get in my car and drive there."
Telling someone to 'make better decisions,' a phrase I have often overheard in schools, does not necessarily help students make better decisions. There is a vast gulf between wanting to do better and being able to do better!
The Missing Link develops simple actions for all people who care about student success to engage in constant facilitative interactions that helps students figure out what they need to do in order to improve. Experiencing success driven by personal action, even when guided, allows students to be the heroes of their own success stories and, as most readers know, the hero always wins!
Purchase The Missing Link: http://amzn.to/1i7zkI6
I am agnostic on the issue of Common Core in that I am not fully convinced what we teach matters quite as much as how we teach. It's not that curriculum choices are valueless, indeed they are a deep expression of values. A 'great books' curriculum is only valuable if it embraces great books from all cultures and not just Western books written by the writers from the dominant culture.
However no matter what is taught, at the end of the day, how the what is taught means a hell of a lot more than the what. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, people may forget what you say but they never forget how you made them feel. Teachers that use curriculum as a delivery system for teaching self-worth, confidence, hope, persistence, as well as thinking skills, are always teaching what is important.
The issue with common core may not be the stuff itself but just how little we value what is less measurable by standardized testing. Chiefly they are success skills that, at heart, are always what great teachers are always teaching.
Although I am not a Woody Allen movie fan (though Annie Hall was a really good movie) Blue Jasmine in many ways is the culmination of all that is wrong with his films. Blue Jasmine, while not great, was actually not as horrible to sit through as so may other pieces of crap like the abysmal To Rome with Love. Blue Jasmine however is made especially palatable by the work of the amazingly talented Cate Blanchette who brings emotional power to a role written without much power.
The script, as most of Allen's films are, is weak as shit on character development and full of clumsy plot twist cliches that do little except move the action where the auteur wants to go without having to do the work of actually developing a meaningful, precise script. That is not required, of course, of any work but this film, as do many of his other movies, pretends to be deep. Comparing this tepid script to the depth and emotional power of what was most certainly its source material, A Streetcar Named Desire, is to really understand this weaker script's failing.
I won't belabor all the weaknesses, and there are many, from characters whose only role is to foster some kind of reaction or plot shift, such as Jasmine's nephews and step-son, who are mainly set pieces, to Jasmine's husband's suicide in prison. Nothing is rooted and grown from any meaningful understanding of character. Perhaps I missed it but where is even a smidgen of an indication that the husband might be given to despair deep enough to want to die by suicide, let alone have the wherewithal to manage this in prison! The suicide function is there to remove what might force Allen to have to explore a complex struggle of internal loyalty conflicts (such as those played out by Ruth Madoff and her children) that might require a depth of human understanding I have seen only in glimpses in any film written by Woody Allen film and mostly by accident. I think, for instance, of how utterly disdainful his character was of his benighted fans in Stardust Memories or how creepy his character was in Manhattan (particularly while tying to beg his 30 - 40 years younger high school inamorata not to move on) as being probably the most nakedly real of any of his characters, .
A perfect example of his mediocrity is played out in the serendipitous meeting between Jasmine's former brother-in-law (played by Andrew Dice=Clay) and Jasmine outside of the jewelry store that sets the final denouement in motion. Out of nowhere along shambles Dice to do damage to her marital machinations by monologizing "every truth" of her life story, including the existence of her son, she has tried to keep from her benighted boyfriend. This fool one must assume, though there is little in the sprict to indicate any of this,is is too trusting and smitten or simply too ignorant to so much a do so much as even a cursory search about her online .
Perhaps I missed this too but did Dice and Jasmine's sister actually ever meet the son on screen? And it wasn't as though Jasmine wanted to share much about her life with her sister. in front of her befuddled boyfriend, another well played nothing character. This is the big cliche that precede's Jasmine's final comeuppance: a cliched ending to a person of questionable ethics who in effect had it coming. Is this bad...well, yes and know.
But this the point: such a scene could make perfect sense had the writer had the vision or the ability to build it into his script. I always believe that writers can do whatever they please, create the mist impossible happenings, who cares, But what great writers do is that they make the impossible believable by building verisimilitude, connecting all the dots: the deus ex machina went out with Sophocles, Woody!
Why isn't Dice obsessed with revenge, plotting, willing to destroy his whole life to exact some recompense. Could he not have picked up an inkling of Jasmine's burgining love interest, trailed her, plotted for the perfect opportunity, wheedled himself into becoming the plumber of the boyfriend. Who knows. Do your writerly work, Make it meaningful, make it real!
A story that might well be apocryphal concerns an incident that happened to James Joyce while he was living in Trieste at the turn of the century. Supposedly his landlord had pestered him incessantly to read his unpublished novel and the story goes that at last he wore down. Surprisingly what Joyce found was that his landlord's novel, where a man rejects the love of a woman and then regretting said rejection, spends the rest of his life perusing her without success, was neither horrid nor brilliant but rather had a voice and style that Joyce found interesting.
What Joyce suggested however was that what was missing was the very thing that elevated writing from merely story to shared human experience. What is essential is found in specifying rather than generalizing: what is the telling action that makes this story particular to this person, this place, this time. Joyce's suggestion was to make a very simple change and to revise from the top with this idea in mind.
In the final scene the old man finds the locket he gave his love oh so many, many years before in the dirt and realized all is lost. He lifts the thing to his lips, kisses it, and the book ends. What Joyce suggested was that what he should do, given the nature of this character, is wipe the dirt on his lapel just before he brings it to his lips.
This is the truth that Woody Allen never even came close to capturing in his mediocre film.
Although I don't drive a truck or dispatch them, my professional work for the decade or so as been primarily focused on delivery systems. In my case, educational delivery systems. The core of the work I have been doing has been working on instructional development in both technology infusion as well as the basic skills of planning and instructional decision making. From what I have seen, and experienced, delivery systems are mostly what we have been focusing on in the past several decades.
It reminded me of how I really loved playing catch with my (now) adult son. While I mostly looked forward to the opportunities, I cannot say that I always enjoyed it. Frankly, though he picked up skills quite rapidly, there were just too many missed catches and errant throws. You might say I had a teacher's enjoyment of playing with him, instructing and extolling his progress while I dourly trudged down the street to fetch a ball that had been launched at an angle that even Brooks Robinson himself could not have overcome.
Then there was a brief period where we had about the same skill level (he may have been about the age I was when I found out that I had no baseball player hope) but just as I was more capable than him before that, he became much more capable than me. Although we continued to play catch, Ben adjusted his abilities (slowing down his throws) to accommodate my diminishing reflexes and his superior ability. I'm sure he still loves playing catch with me though I suspect he does not always enjoy it.
To extend the metaphor, as professional educators we have really been focusing on developing our throwing. My experience tells me that we have seen many great improvements on the teacher side, but not quite so much on the learner side. Somehow we have gotten the message that the better we throw, the better they'll want to catch, and then, of course, the better they'll return the ball right to us. The reality has resulted in the same outcome as was behaviorally produced by the oft repeated just teach better myth explored in an earlier post. Teaching better simply isn't enough: you must also learn classroom management skills and teach self-management which are part and parcel of the highly evolved teacher's skills.
As educators we must have as much an impact on the recipient as we have on the shipping, but if we just expect it to happen as a result of better delivery itself, it never will. What I recall with my son was not just playing catch, nor even helping him play better and improve his physical skills. We also worked on focus, concentration, self-regulation, persistence again and again and again and again. I like to think that some of this seeped in, and even spread to other areas of concern, like school.
There is no question we need to make sure our instructional delivery system is as strong as we can make them but isn't it about time we started teaching these success skills too? Face it folks, no matter how good UPS is at getting the stuff you ordered to your doorstep, if someone does't get home eventually to take it in, all that really great stuff is just going to rot out there, right out there on your own porch.
There's a lot of concern, especially among young job seekers, about social media posting history and the potential for secure employment. It is a legitimate concern but on more levels than just getting a job. As a life long believer that protected speech is a more critical core value of democracy than almost any other constitutional protection (yes, this includes guns) the pressure on folks to self-censor seems to me a fearfully huge problem.
Clearly this is an issue with many attendant complications, not the least of which is privacy which one cannot necessarily expect to be respected. As Socrates said, "the minute a second person knows it, it is no longer a secret!" Moreover, we need to separate the right to do something from the consequences of having actually done that thing. If we choose to share something, whether with one individual privately or in a public venue, we need to give up the expectation that those comments will be greeted without judgement. Posting online, as James Baldwin might have said, is "putting your business on the street." Anyone expecting their dirty diapers to be wholly greeted with the level of parental joy they have come to expect from their significant others is in for a rude awakening.
Might a potential employer be alarmed by what he or she might see on one your social media pages? Absolutely. Might it affect you employment potential? Of course. That said, should we then hide ourselves from public view? Well, here's where it gets complicated.
It is perhaps a consequence of being born into, or becoming accustomed to, a digital reality but living online is as important to folks these day as social clubs were to an earlier generation. Many of these clubs were so important, in fact, that great edifices were erected to house them. Certainly being a member of say the DAR may have bought with it a certain cachet but even before they shamed themselves by not allowing Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall, being a member pf the DAR may well have closed several doors even as it opened many others. We make the choice, we pay the dues, we take the consequences.
So how do we balance this new social need even even as it conflicts with established mainstream values of being highly circumspect about what you share in public. Somewhere in this mix is the need to be truthful to certain genuine values about ourselves and have the courage of our own convictions to be willing to accept whatever consequences being who we are will bring. It is no easy task, particularly when the need of a job is greater than the need for self-expression (a place where I myself have gone to visit myself). However, as Cady Stanton pointed out, "the truth is always a safest ground to stand on." The same is true for what we choose to reveal about ourselves.
What is needed, as we teach those for whom we are responsible, as well as broach these decisions ourselves, is the courage to not shrink from posting out of fear. The question of what to post on a social media site should be driven by the desire to express what is genuinely true about ourselves, in the context of what the site is enabling us to share.
Fear of inadvertent offence, such as in 'do I dare post something that might make me a less desirable candidate for some position' is the kind of self censoring that almost always empowers others at a personal cost to our own sense of self. It's one of the tougher ideas to teach and to be sure the freedom to post...whatever...can and should be limited when it comes to our children until they reach the land of responsibility. At the end of the day though we need to equip our children to be able to make real world choices about their values about how they want to represent themselves, how they want to be seen and valued.
It would be as much a shame to let 'marketing' our image dictate everything we do in our public lives as it certainly does for so many political and business figures where sales (votes are sales, too) are the only desired outcome from any public action. Free people must take risks to remain free so when it comes to social media perhaps we can coach each other and our children to make meaningful choices about what to post. JFK saw the highest duty of the artist (and by extension, all of us) in a democratic society is to to "speak the truth as he or she sees it, and let the chips fall where they may."
Speaking truth is the key, and knowing that the truth is often hard to find. For instance, before you share anything, be sure you can answer this question: is this who I want the world to see, or am I playing to an audience, trying to please, impress, prove love, shock or otherwise enthrall and allure. Is this just a passing me that I am just testing out or is this an expression of deeply felt, core values. If it's you, really you, post it and consequences be damned. If it's not, consider giving a little more (or much more thought) before you put your business on the street.
If you can't stand by what you say, or even think that if the thing you are about to share goes viral it would destroy your life, don't do it, never, not for anyone. The key is 'living well out loud' is to be sure that when we do we are thoughtful instead of fearful. When it comes to what we choose to post let's not let being too careful keep us from living a public life that is a meaningful expression of a life that we can value but let's be thought all the same.
In the mid seventies the estimable Band Leader Count Basie was asked to compare musicians from the 30s and 40s to today's musicians.
Unequivocally he said that musicians in the 70s were so much better trained than they ever were. He noted that if he needed a replacement for his band in the 40s it was really tough to find someone who could just sit down, read his charts and fit in. Today, he said, finding a capable replacement is not a problem at all. What was missing, he said, was uniqueness.
When the training was more limited and less "codified," musicians really were able to develop highly individualized methods and stylized techniques that created a sound that was uniquely their own. A B-flat still needs to be a B-flat but you could hear the difference between a Harry "Sweets" Edison and a Roy "Little Jazz" Eldridge from the first B-flat blow.
We need to think about this as we think about nationalizing standards and assessments into a single common core. We need to make sure we are not just teaching everybody to sound the same.
A simple question: is teaching children to be successful the job of parents?
The answer is, absolutely. In fact there is little doubt that much of the success we find as adults is in some way reflected through what we have learned as a result of interactions with our significant others (from interactions both good and ill).
However, there is another simple question: if students don;t learn these skills at home, where then are they to learn them. The simple answer is school.
Are our teachers equipped and capable to help students who do not have these critical skills?
Well, there is the complex question. What do you think?
Watched an excellent report on 60 Minutes last night which detailed the successes of the Year Up program. It is powerful, of course, but for me especially exciting because it supports my book’s supposition that everyone wants to be successful and if they cannot be successful at being successful, they'll be successful and screwing up. What Year Up does, or so it appears, is that it gives a group of young people the opportunity as well as some of the tools to be successful at something worthwhile and then they do (this will be a shock) these young men and women become successful! What a concept!
There is absolutely no reason that such significant success training could not easily be a part of every instructional period, in every class, in every school. Every day that it is not is another day that students that need it the most will founder.
I am hearing the word passionate a lot lately. A multitude of personal statement in bios I’ve come across recently all seem to see their natures as passionate. Perhaps they are but I also wonder if these autobiographers really understand the difference between motivated and passionate?
The root of the word passion finds its meaning in the word ‘suffer.’ Motivation is rooted in the language of movement. While both words carry a sense of desire, and of willingness to sacrifice, passion implies an intensity that might even override the line of sanity and threatens to dovetail into obsession.
Not that it need become total obsession in order to be truly passionate. Yet the level of intensity, the depth of how powerfully connected and intertwined into the fabric of our daily lives something becomes in fact dictates whether it is merely motivation, like, love or actual passion.
I hope to write and explore more on this topic in the coming days and weeks but for right now let’s start by asking this simple question: what are you willing to give up in order to achieve your dream.
If the answer is ‘a lot’ you may well be deeply motivated.
If the answer is everything, we may actually be in the territory of passion.
On my Father's Yahrtzeit, I thought I would indulge myself by reprinting his eulogy.
As Flip Wilson would have said if he ever met Jack Heisler:
What You See Is What You Get
There is a story, I think, that defines my father’s view of his place in the world. It takes place while my parents were looking for a new house; I was 14 or so, and my sister was, well, 11 months older. The words non-conformity were very much on my sister’s and my lips in those days however little the meaning of it was in our actions. Yet very few of the homes in the suburbs of Buffalo, at least not those in my parents’ budget, had much about them that distinguished one from another. To our incessant complaining about the dull sameness of every house we looked at, my father finally replied. “If I really want to stand out from anybody else, I’ll put a neon sign on the roof.”
Given how he saw himself, I think my father would have not wanted a lot said about him today, though, after an eventful life of almost 83 years, brevity is the most difficult part. Particularly in that to tell the story of my father’s life, you really need to tell stories. Anyone who knew my father - and to know my father really, really well you only had to had to get to know him for about one minute or maybe just look into his open face – anyone who knew him would know that he was all about stories. I’ll leave most of the events to be retold elsewhere and I’ll try to share instead a few stories that really define Jack Heisler, at least to me.
My father didn’t need a lot to get him going on a story. The mention of the most inconsequential thing was enough to excite some memory. The blue sky overhead was exactly the same kind of blue sky that he was walking under that day in Budapest when he ran into his brother Bernie, on leave from the Army, who was searching for his lost siblings after the war, or so the story goes. His own son, Aaron, had just been born and though Bernie had yet to see him, he used his furlough to come to Eastern Europe and find his siblings. Having found them, he then moved heaven and earth (and bribed a few French officials) to bring them first to France and then to America. The best part of the story was when Dad would present his arm to show me the same goose bumps he had gotten on the day he saw Bernie that he would get every time he’d tell that story.
An oil lamp? You know that was all the light they had back in Bilke the day when his new cousin came to visit. She was already sleeping in the bed his brothers and sisters had vacated for this visiting family, the Sterns from Sighet, when he came home from Cheder but he could not wait until morning to see the cousin he had never seen before. His father took him quietly into the room and illuminated with the oil lamp the sleeping two year old that some eighteen years later a customs official, unable to make sense of her name, would change from Cillia to Sylvia.
Mud? Oh there was unbelievable mud that day in Auschwitz when he was forced to run in the mud and the freezing rain back to the barracks, slipping and crashing to the ground while the guards were screaming. He’d always tell how he fell to floor exhausted the minute he hit the front door of the Lager and how he just wanted to sleep right there caked in the wet mud, and how Eddie made him strip off the soaking clothes, helped him clean up and then found something, somehow to wrap him and keep him warm. In the morning his clothes were clean and dry enough to wear again for one more day to get through. “I would have never survived if it wasn’t for Eddie,” he said more than once. “It was Eddie who he kept me alive.”
Are you getting the picture here?
The story of my father stories, the stories of my father’s life was the story of the people in it, the beauty of the people in it, the extraordinariness of the people in it.
Skullcaps reminded him of his sister Leona who weaned him from his bitterness about being a Jew when he came to live with her after the war. He refused to wear a yarmulke and would snatch it from his head each time she placed in on there when they sat down to eat. How she would say nothing but gently try again each time he sat to eat. Eventually he said it was just easier to leave it there; eventually he was again a Jew.
Tfillin told the tale of his mother’s never feeding him breakfast until after she saw the marks on his arm that he had actually done what he was supposed to do. Though she apparently accepted speed reading the morning prayers, he managed to get it done in about two minutes most mornings, his sister Rose did not. She whispered to him, laughing, “I bet you wouldn’t like to fall on your nose for each letter you missed!”
Halloween made him remember the time he took my sister and I in our costumes to his sister Ethel’s house for trick or treat, and how, hiding outside, he sent us back again and again and again until Auntie Ethel finally realized something was up…weddings reminded him of the time Uncle David’s caterer at one of his daughter’s weddings tried to give him the bill. “Wrong brother,” he told him
And everything reminded him of the time he and mom, or He and Judy, or He and Adam, Ben, Cyndee, Joel, Ariel, Karen, me (or just about everybody he ever met) did, or said…whatever…
But the story you never heard from my father was what he did for others and the reason you never heard about it was the same reason my father never did put the neon sign on his roof. The true story of my father’s life was how he never really saw anything he did as extraordinary. The heroes were always others, the extraordinary ones were always others; ask my father to tell about something he did for someone else and he would be hard-pressed to come up with anything. He’d just tell you how lucky he had been all throughout his life, he’d tell you about his misrachstuts – his Godsends, like his parking places. Long before there were handicapped parking spaces, and long before my father needed one, my father would never park more than a few spaces away the entrance of whatever store he needed to go to.
“Park here, Dad, there’s a space!” It was maybe six spaces from the front. My father’s response was that if he wanted to walk he would have left the car at home, and sure enough, right down in front, there it was: his misrachshtut: a parking space right by the front door. Other misrachshtruts: his children Cyndee, Adam, Karen and me (there were no in-laws in my father’s world) and grandchildren, Joel, Ariel and Ben, of course, Judy and her family, especially Austin, and Brooke and Isaac. So many things were misrachshtuts to my father: everything was a blessing to him. If you knew Jack Heisler you knew that he thought the car starting was a misrachshtut. My mother especially was a misrachshtut. Jack Heisler adored Sylvia Stern, really from the moment he saw her in the buttery light of the oil lamp was she was all of two years old. But if you asked him, the key their happiness was all mom; fifty-plus years of wedded bliss but it was only because, all because of mom. Even if you asked him how he found the energy to keep going, to keep taking such extraordinarily compassionate care of my mother during the long years of her debilitating illness, it was only because she deserved it. He even told me that Mom took such incredible care of him for so long it was just his privilege to take care of her.
The Talmud defines the happy man as the man who is happy with that he has. I think they must have had my father in mind when they wrote this. He felt blessed by the ordinary, the everyday, whatever was on his plate. But my father genuinely never saw the relationship between his own nature and these blessings my father thought somehow just fell on him. But you really only had to meet my father to know that his humility was genuine and that the story of my father’s life was truly that he believed his easy going-ness, his simplicity, his capability for being loving and forgiving and his endless capacity for hope that made him the rare and special person he was, was just ordinary, the way everybody was. But my father I don’t think ever could see that because he was just too busy looking at what was so extraordinary in others to see what was so extraordinary about himself. And that is a story worth remembering about Jack Heisler.
A recent column I read ties creating helplessness to protecting children. This claim, by Tim Elmore, is that the Tylenol Murders of 1982 supposedly created a climate of 'over-protectiveness' that led to parents checking over children's candies on Halloween.
"That led to an obsession with their children's safety in every aspect of their lives," Elmore says. "Instead of letting them go outside to play, parents filled their kid's spare time with organized activities, did their homework for them, resolved their conflicts at school with both friends and teachers, and handed out trophies for just showing up.
"These well-intentioned messages of 'you're special' have come back to haunt us, We are consumed with protecting them instead of preparing them for the future. We haven't let them fall, fail and fear."
The tough guy approach which Mr. Elmore seems to advocate, letting your children "fall, fail and fear," as a way of dealing with the an over-reaction of a protectiveness borne by events in 1982 seems to ignores the reality that urban legends (such as razor blades in apples and LSD in cookies) drove parents to view all homemade and unwrapped candies suspiciously as far back as the 50s. if not before. It also ignores great movements in society, too complex to get into here, that have been creating a more child-centric landscape. Moreover his view that protecting children is debilitating can only be based on a misinterpretation of what effective, caring parents and teachers do
Empathy toward children that has been misunderstood might make too many parents, more likely driven by their own egos than the real needs of their children, want to rescue their children in debilitating ways. However protecting children is never over-protecting. Making a child feel special for nothing specific might be hurtful but any parent (or teacher) not willing to help their child discover what is special about them would be a pretty piss poor parent or teacher indeed.
Learning to fall, fear and fail is not the antidote to being helpless, but learning how to do things differently is! The simple fact is that consequences do not teach: they only reinforce learning that parents and teachers must provide. Neither let kids fail nor rescue them from their mistakes. Rather, help them be resilient in the face of struggles, help them learn and apply creative solutions, help them understand that struggle is a part of success and that failure is only failure if you quit. That is what is at the heart of my book: The Missing Link.
The idea that just 'teach better' and everything else in the classroom will work out is long outmoded. Indeed Abigail Adam's admonition that learning had to be "sought after" with perseverance and passion should have laid that to rest with the hegemony of England over the colonies. Desire for learning must be taught before students can be expected to desire to learn. Simple idea. Hard to do but absolutely doable.