Development

Ask most teachers "how do you like professional development?" The answers will include boring, useless, and a waste of time.

During staff development I nod and look interested while writing in my notebook. I imagine tunneling out or going over the wall dodging management's spotlights and Tommy Guns. At one particularly awful presentation I calculated the factorials from 1 to 20. (20 factorial is equal to the product of 20 and all the positive integers less than 20. Google tells me it comes out to be 2,432,902,008,176,640,000. I wonder if I got it right.) All this because management frowns on my drinking bourbon while on the job.

It was a nice surprise yesterday wasn't a total waste. A full-day training in restorative circles was actually pretty useful. Though it was mostly a re-run of training we did just months ago, I learned a couple things. I'm surprised but happy.

I may be sanguine about this professional development because it is my last with this school. It helps to know I'm almost gone. Some fads and ideas brought in by management for our professional development are good, most are bad, but all of them fade and disappear after three to five years. Like riding a merry-go-round, we come back to where we started over and over. This time I'm getting off.

It's nice to go out on, if not a high note then at least not a low one. I'm grateful to the trainers, the participants, and the clock which moved steadily and without fail toward our dismissal. I'm grateful to my friend with whom I texted ridiculousness throughout. I'm grateful that I'm done with professional development in this organization. One more step toward something new.

A colleague sitting next to me at the training asked what that something new will be. I said I don't know yet. Ah, he said. What a good place to be. It really is a good place, an interesting place strange as that may seem. I've learned that much even if it wasn't part of the plan. Learning is unpredictable like that. We never know what we'll learn next.

Let's Not Forget The Fun

I wrote 500 words kind of about the Astrohaus Freewrite Traveler, a device that emulates the best of a typewriter (distraction-free writing, no real editing, no online connections). The piece was a continuation of some discussion I had with the guy who makes Writer: The Internet Typewriter which is the best distraction free writing tool online. I like the Traveler but it's expensive and needs a better editor, one like Writer. These aren't the only reasons I'm not buying one, but they are up there.

Here's the thing: the 500 words I wrote were done on my 1938 Corona Sterling manual typewriter that I had restored at Mohawk Typewriter. Typing with a great manual typewriter with a blue ribbon onto blue copy paper is simple and wondrous joy.

The piece I wrote would have to be retyped on the computer or scanned and fed into an OCR program in order to be shared online. Instead, it's a sheet of single-spaced typing sitting next to me here as I type this. It is mine and mine alone. It will likely stay that way. What an odd and lovely concept.

I wrote those 500 words for no other reason than I wanted to think through some ideas on the page. I think best in written word and I'm happiest when words are appearing on the page at the touch of my fingers. These words on the screen are good (especially because I'm typing them in Writer), but it's nothing like the pleasure of the typewriter or the smooth movement of a fountain pen over the page. That's the good stuff.

My work now is to find ways to move forward as a writer, maybe to make some money doing this work. Still, there's nothing better than enjoying the work, savoring the process, and loving the mechanics of making words on the page. When I'm forgetting those basics, I return to the typewriter and produce an artifact that is clear evidence of joy and reminds me what this is all about. And I write on.

FOBU: Fear Of Being Unwelcome

I get this feeling when I see someone I know in a store, when I'm out on a run, or in the school parking lot while I'm picking up the kids. It goes like this:

1. I hope I'm remembering their name right. (I'm so bad at names it feels like a medical condition.)
2. What will I say?
3. Should I just avoid them?
4. They don't want to see me.

If I do stop and talk with them, I'm left wondering, are they really happy to see me or desperately waiting for me to go away?

I'm not trained in psychology, but lack of authority never slowed me down, so I call the condition FOBU, the Fear Of Being Unwelcome. Its chief characteristic is a fear, often overwhelming, that people would rather not see the afflicted individual. FOBUs assume they are undesirable and unworthy of notice. FOBUs live primarily within their own heads and spend inordinate energy attempting to discern what others think of them. These largely negative assumptions reflect the FOBUs lack of faith in themselves. Paradoxically, FOBUs are often talented, creative, and seemingly confident people.

(See, that sounded like I'm trained in psychology, right? Straight out of the feaking DSM.)

I have spent time with four different FOBU folks this week. Each has not exactly shocked me with their confessions or demonstrations of FOBU, but I'm still surprised when anyone expresses this condition to me. It's like that Robert Burns poem: "Gin a FOBU meet a FOBU, comin thro' the rye" or something like that. Whatever it is, there is nothing quite like FOBU meeting FOBU. It leaves me wondering what the hell...?

There should be a point to all this, but I feel unqualified to say what it is. I'm just glad to have met these FOBUs and their FOBUness. None of them were unwelcome to me. Just the opposite. I'm so glad to have heard from them. It's as if I walked up to myself and was happy to see me comin thro' the rye.

Cooking, Writing, Learning

My wife was a little worried she was shirking our shared duties. "I'll help you cook in a little bit, but I need to finish this." I was peeling garlic. I told her not to worry about it. I'm not feeling obligated tonight. This is fun. I'm in the mood. I had the ingredients set out, pots on the stove, and a recipe in my head. Go Go Penguin was on the speakers. The dog waited for me to drop cheese. I'm good, I told her. The stars were aligned. The moon was in the seventh house. All of that.

Peeling garlic, done correctly, something I've only recently learned though I've been cooking with fresh garlic for twenty five years, is a soothing meditation. So too is chopping it with a good, sharp knife. Better still if I've sharpened the knife on my own stone, something friends helped me learn after many failures on my own. It's a skill I'm still honing. Rocking the knife on the bamboo board, turning the chunks of garlic into tiny mince, feels good. Smells good too.

A friend wrote of his first attempt at aging beef. It didn't go well. "This experiment went, in a word, wrong. Horribly, terribly wrong." This is the point when I often have to step back, curse all over the place, give up and swear I'll never try whatever it was again. It takes a while for me to cool down. Sometimes I go back to it, but it takes longer for me to get to the attitude he expressed in his very next sentence: "The good thing about failure is there is so much to learn from it. The bad thing is I can be a really slow learner." He's anything but slow at these things. He is dogged and skilled, something I've admired about him from the first. Often I need to remind myself that he's learning just as I am.

The garlic minced, I diced an onion and threw that in a pan with some oil. The garlic followed shortly thereafter, the sauce shortly after that. I put the cover on, checked the water in the big pot I had put on to boil, and, back at the bamboo board, grated cheese.

Baked ziti, at least the way I make it, is the easiest of dishes to prepare. No need for a recipe. It's a natural progression by now. Because of that, my mind can wander as I cook. Good thing I was done with the knife and am pretty well wired not to grate my fingers with the cheese. I was thinking about learning and change, advancement and mastery, practice and discipline.

A well-meaning friend, as several others have before him, stated that there isn't any money in the writing I'm doing and trying to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. SHut up. There's also no money in the short run I took earlier but I ran anyway. The other night when I said that I had to get a blog post together, my wife asked, "do you have to?" She was trying to give me permission for a break, but yeah, I have to. I've posted every day this year and am learning something from doing that. "The bad thing is I can be a really slow learner." The only way forward that I know of is to just keep going, slow and steady, and see what I can make happen.

The water boiled and I dumped in a bag and a half of pasta, stirred, rested the spoon on the stove, checked the sauce and adjusted the heat while I stirred that. I preheated the oven and brought out the big glass pan. Every so often I stirred the pasta and checked the quasi-recipe in my head for mistakes and omissions. The water bubbled and boiled, the pasta floating calmly in that storm. I watched it boil and waited as the minutes uncoiled on the timer.

There's no money in the things I'm doing but there seems a clear future in them. Not that I see the future clearly but it's clear to me that this is my future. It's such a big part of my present and has been a huge part of my past. I'm following it, trying to learn, wondering how to make some kind of leap.

The friend who is aging beef waited forty-five days to find it hadn't worked. Maybe someone could have intuited earlier that it was going wrong, that there was no profit in waiting. Maybe that would have been more convenient and less painful while being just as instructive. Maybe. But I doubt it. The very idea of aging beef for so long sounds ridiculous, counter-intuitive, maybe even foolish. Food is supposed to be fresh! My friend knows better than that and he's willing to stay in the game until he has it down. He will listen to advice but he needs to learn it himself.

Me too.

I drained the pasta, poured it back into the pot, took the sauce off the heat and poured that in. The parmesan went in along with a tub of cottage cheese (my family doesn't go in for ricotta) and some of the mozzarella. I add an egg too, don't tell anyone. I mixed all this up in the pot, poured it into the glass dish, sprinkled with more mozzarella, covered it with foil, and put it in to bake. Even before I uncover it for the last five minutes of baking and smell the goodnes, I know just how it will taste. I've learned this thing by heart. I've got it down. It will be perfect.

As for writing. Who knows? It might make money or it might not, but it will teach me something. There's no guessing about that. I've already learned plenty from it. Enough to know to keep going.