Good morning. It’s garbage and re-cycle pick-up day in the neighborhood. In front of each house, cavernous green garbage bins ominously rose, guarding each house at the streets’ curbs like silent Easter Island megaliths. Some bins were overflowing. Their huge lids ajar and like open giant mouths vomiting society’s indigestibles. Next to them, loomed occasional piles of irregularly shaped shadowy masses of throw-aways looking like the oceans’ blighting floatsam haphazardly gathered and heaped on a beach after a storm.

At first, I didn’t think anything of them. My mind was on the mosquitoes with the wing spread of eagles that were hovering above me like featherless falcons looking for prey. In south Georgia, when you spring the clock ahead an hour, you spring over spring into torrid summer.

But, it was not soon that I began noticing this strange processional lining the streets. As I turned my head, I began thinking about one word over and over to the rythm of my steps and the cadance of passing each bin: junk, junk, junk, junk.

And as that word clunked around in my head, a series of events slowly came together like a confluence of tributaries forming a river. First, there was a disturbing, at least disturbing to me, message from a mid-western university professor I have been pondering for almost a week because I didn’t really know how to respond. He wrote me that the words I was providing Kenny for my dictionary of good teaching were, in his words, “dangerous” and illusionary.” “With the type of students they are now letting into our colleges and universities,” he asserted, “it’s impossible not to feel that going into a classroom is like trampling through a junkyard. You’re setting this Kenny up for a fall.” Now before you shake your head in disbelief, too many have the same thoughts and have uttered equal laments only in less graphic terms: “Oh, what is academia coming to!” “They’re letting anybody in these days.” “Students today don’t have the dedication to learning like they used to.” “They aren’t as prepared as they once were.” “They don’t want to work as they once did.” Those statements may sound somewhat benign, but they no less malign then does “junk.”

That, and those bins prodded a second thought. I thought of the time this winter, I saw three huge plastic planting pots placed on the curb for a garbage pickup. In the dim light, my gardener’s eye saw that vacant pots were filled with rich potting soil, a treasure for me. After my walk, I went back and loaded them in my car. I put them on my patio for the winter. Lo and behold, in these discards sprouted a hoard of purple cone flower and rudibekia seedlings that are now delightfully decorating my flower garden.

And finally, there was a student I’ll call Janet. This professor would probably call her a piece of junk. When she first enter the class and through most of the semester until about two weeks ago she would have initally agreed. She had been told in no uncertain terms by an adviser at another college that she should go to a vocational school because “she didn’t have what it takes to be in college.”

“I can’t get her words out of my head,” Janet would always say during conversation after conversation as I struggled to encourage and support her. I can’t tell you how many half dollars for the uncountable times she uttered and stuttered a negative about herself. “She made me feel like a piece of useless junk that should be thrown away and forgotten.” That retardant self-censor had extinguished the fire in her eyes, leaving her adrift and lost in a darkened “dead zone.” That word “junk” sat on her shoulder like an ugly, loop-necked vulture picking away at her spiritless carcass.

Two weeks ago, after making a creative presentation during the Scavenger Hunt Project, I’ll just say that her lump of coal became a diamond in the rough. After I gave her thumbs up after thumbs up, after I told her for all the other students to hear, “Don’t you ever disrespect yourself and call yourself a piece of junk again,” she said to me, “Think maybe I’m not a piece a junk but a chest with a few gems in me?”

“No maybe about it,” I winked. I can’t wait to see her Broadway Project production.

As I thought of these three images, without a warning, the fourth word in my dictionary for good teaching that I am to hand over to Kenny came to mind. With every step I found the loud, hard, sharp clunking of “junk” slowly being challenged by a whisper and then drown out with a resonant, melodic, and triumphant trumpeting: WILBY, WILBY, WILBY.

No, WILBY is not a jargon word or an anagram. Wilby is a person, and he can tell you something about junk and treasure. His name is Wilby Coleman. No, he is not a professor or an administrator or a staff person. Wilby Coleman is a local prominent ex-lawyer turned local prominent artist who abandoned his profession for his passion, his love. He now is more at home with an acetylene touch in his hand than he was with a writ; more comfortable in his cluttered workshop behind his house than in a pristine office and courtroom; more natural in his jeans than in a three piece suit; more delighted talking about his metal sculptures than his court cases.

How to describe his art. Some would call it junk art, but there is nothing junky about his art. Some would call it baffling, but he works with such clarity and dedication.

For him the junkyard is an oasis rather than a wasteland. What most people see as a dirty graveyard, for him is a rich repository fraught with life. What people pronounce dead, he hears a heart beat; what people turn from, he takes a turn at. In someone’s in a rusted radiator he feels a radiance; in someone’s discard, he finds a find; in someone’s throwaway, he finds a keepsake; in someone’s rubbish, he finds valuables; someone’s spring cleaning makes him spring. There junk yard is overflowing with cinderellas.

He doesn’t use one of earth’s honored, precious metals to make the stuff of dreams, but he dreams of making common metals uncommonly precious; he gets a bang out of other people’s clunkers; he sees life and function and worth in what other people decide is dead and no longer useful or functional. He makes the clunker ring and sing, the dull shine. But, to do all that he had to learn how to work with metal, to cut, torch, wield, bend–how to listen and see. But, to see a vitality in that tossed rusty saw, he first had to see his own vitality. When you see his art, you see him. There are no masks, no uniforms, no inauthenticity. To treasure that junk, he first discovered and revealed his own inner treasure, his own talent, own ability, own artistry, own creativity, own imagination, own potential, own truth, own purpose.

He has a midas touch in which inner beauty shines through and blots out surface ugliness; he invites excitement and banishes the mundane. He lets the materials tell him what to say; he lets them make what they want to make. He is in partnership with them.

As you walk up his long driveway, you cannot be non-chalant. Well, I guess you can, but then you wouldn’t be alive. His metal sculptures dot his wooded landscape, rising from the loam like strange looking saplings, dancing like wild flowers in the woods, swaying like tree branches in the breeze. One or two sing like the birds. They are playful objects, abstracts as mysterious as life forms from an alien world. His house is decorated by an orchestra of sizes, shapes, textures. You find drama or humor where you least expect it. In a corner or on the floor here, on a wall or up in the ceiling there, but always seriousness and importance everywhere. As he gave me a tour of his house, I found he likes the puzzled “huh,” the solving “ahaaa,” the ponderous “hmmmmm,” the excited “wow,” the understanding “yea.” He wants you to see, not just look; listen, not just hear; feel and think and reflect, not just walk by.

Like the good teacher, he is far more of a transformer than a tinkerer. His work speaks the vocabulary of the good teacher: begin, continue, enjoy, play, smile, love, hope, belief, faith, imagine, create, blossom, alive, nourish, embrace, self, challenge, question, happy, respect, patience, wonder, joy, endurance, fun.

He does it with such pizzaz. He is not a machine pounding it out in a production line fashion; this is a unique human being who sees a uniqueness, a special life, in each piece that makes up each sculpture. Like the good teacher, he opens us to an experience we don’t normally have with a thing or subject or person. Like the good teacher, Wilby has the power to see so much in so much that others see so little. “See life in a rusty saw,” he proclaims in both word and work. “Know that there is still spring in an old spring. Sit down with a tractor seat. Refuse to believe things are just useless refuse. Dress up dross.” No, for Wilby junk, uselessness, ugliness, beauty, useful treasure exist in the eyes of the beholder.

To use the jargon, he and his art is a metaphor for the good teacher’s powerful alphabetical pardigm shift from merely _M_oving in the classroom to _L_oving and therefore experiencing true L_i_ving. And when that happens, what to others seem to be an eyesore, with a little faith and belief–and hard work–for the good teacher is transformed into an eyesoar.

So, next time you have an inclination to see a student as a piece of junk, a throwaway, a reject, or a cast off, think of Wilby, and remember that every obstacle is an opportunity in disguise just as, in the right hands and with the right heart, every piece of apparent junk is a potentially, hidden treasure. Then, maybe you’ll take time to pause and notice and reach out and embrace.

Yeah, WILBY is my fourth word. I think Kenny will like it word when he understands.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Tragic, tragic, tragic. The events in Littleton, Col. The tragedy is so widespread. We have lost so much of the future. The tragedy lays in those people who had their lives snuffed out–shot and shooters alike– in the mourning families and friends left behind to wonder, in those kids–and they were kids–and their families, who did the shooting and others who may have been involved. It would be even more tragic if the rest of us let ourselves be victimized and placed things far out of proportion and not into some perspective however difficult that may be, if we pulled out our soapbox and used this monstrous human event to further a political or social agenda with a series of finger pointing “should haves,” “could haves,” “would haves,” and “I told you so’s.” That’s inevitable, but let the mourners mourn before we publically bemoan and accuse and blame.

I just told someone, using the vulgar vernacular, “shit happens.” That sounds so callous and clinical and disengaged. I don’t mean it to be. I passed my locked synagogue last night and said a small, silent prayer in the parking lot. I did the same thing on my walk this morning. But, Littleton events are by no means rampant. We shouldn’t let ourselves rush to judgement and panic into thinking that the extreme abberation is the norm; we shouldn’t see potential shooters around every corner, in every tattoo, in every body piercing, in every dyed hard, in every song and blouse; we shouldn’t imprison ourselves or our kids in unreasonable concerns or fear; and we shouldn’t look for quick and simple answers however initially they may be emotionally satisfying.

We always look for quick simple answers and want hardened guarantees. The cottage industry of pop-psychologists and professional talking heads are in full action standing atop their electronic boxes pontificating about security, guns, television, movies, music, family values, and on and on and on. In the process of the search we grossly distort the truth, whatever that truth may be. Maybe the truth is that there are no simple answers and there are no guarantees and there are no sure predictabilities simply because simply because we cannot control all people or events around us, and more importantly because each person is a unique variation on any generalization we can concoct. Each person is the authentic exception to the artificial rule. In cold statistical terms, school is still the safest place to be, your car is the most dangerous. I am about to fly off to present a teaching workshop. They tell me that flying is safer than driving. Of course, statistics don’t mean a thing , and you don’t want to know from statistics, when it happens to you and/or your loved ones, and your number hits for better or worse.

Now, I don’t know the what, whys, and especially the who’s, of what happened, who those kids were–and they were kids–whether they were outcasts, unnoticed, belittled. I do know, especially from personal experiences with my younger son, that in our rush for efficiency, in our concentration on controlled discipline, in our focus on grades, SAT scores, and the like we often unwittingly engage in a subtle form of human sacrifice in which students are unintended dispersonalized, screened, tracked, weeded-out, discarded, disregarded victims. We often lose sight of the truth that teaching is real and personal; that each student holds up a sign, as the TV ad tells us, that reads “I AM” and wants you to read, and which we must read; that the real magnificance is not in the technology, information or technique–not in the score or grade–but in the person. Each student, conformist or non-conformist, adjusted or troubled, in or out of the mould is a three-dimensional, valuable, unique human being. The mission of a teacher is not just to raise the SAT score, or to transmit a certain amount of information, or merely to appended a grade. It should be to wake up a consciousness, to make people think about things they haven’t thought about before, to offer hope, to change attitude towards life, to give each person an intellectually, emotionally, spiritually healthy start in life. So maybe if there is a lesson to be drawn, it is that each of us teachers should step out of the academic frame and bring back love and caring into a too often otherwise lifeless, cold data banking system.

Now, it is easy for me to write that no one should be left out, that no one should go uninvited to the party, that no one should be ignored or made fun of or whispered about, or left out in the cold. It is easy to profess a faith and hope in each person; it is easy to have a strong belief in each person. I find that the hard part is living my faith and hope and love, or, as they would say, putting my heart where my mouth and fingers are. But, living rather than merely professing, I have discovered is the only cure to an emotional and spiritual heart disease.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

No walking this morning. It’s my day off. But, I do have a quick thought. I think education, for both teacher and student, should be, as the young would say, a bomb whose shrapnel is supposed to hit both in the heart, head, and spirit–all over. And, when it doesn’t, it’s a dud.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Good morning. And, a happy Easter, Passover, and Id al-Adha to my Christian, Jewish, and Moslem friends.

This is a quickie. No walking. It’s my day off. The sun isn’t up yet. A few minutes ago, I was out standing on the darkened patio, sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee, munching on a piece of buttered matzo, listening to the seductive and mesmerizing trickling water of my koi pond’s three waterfalls.

For some reason I started thinking about bumper stickers. Don’t ask, maybe it is this holy season or maybe I’m still wrestling to find some more small but grandious words in my dictionary for good teaching to hand over to Kenny or maybe it was something else. Who knows what trigger this thought. Anyway, this is what I came up with for an educational, K-whatever bumper sticker:

IF YOU’RE NOT CREATING COMMUNITY, YOU’RE NOT EDUCATING.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–