Heck Of A Guy

The Blog and The Lady

It is hardly surprising that thoughts of Lady Lawanda have dominated my thoughts since her death yesterday morning.¹ In hopes of transforming this obsession into a shared joyful remembrance, I’ve put together a few Heck of a Guy blog references to the charismatic, lovely, and beloved Lawanda.

Teach Your Children Well

Lady Lawanda was, in fact, the primary author of Teaching The Children A Lesson, a lesson plan so impressive that I dared publish it as a post.

Portraits of a Lady

The Heck Of A Guy’s Image According To Google, a post on graphics from this blog that earned high rankings on Google, features not one but two photos of Lawanda.

Excerpt #1:

Excerpt #2:

Lawanda’s Bestest Christmas

Returning readers may recall that the last two holiday seasons have featured Lady Lawanda’s Christmas Gift to Heck of a Guy Readers in the form of Wishing You The Bestest Of Christmases.

The Road to the Final Four Won’t Be The Same

Item #7 from 10 Things I Like About The NCAA Basketball Tournament is this excerpt:

The Posts About Health

Earlier posts addressing Lady L’s health problems include

• Don’t Give Up
• I’ll Just Be Here If You Want Me To Be Near You
• Re: Lawanda (or Using Blog Posts As Email)

The first two of these illness-related posts showcase specific songs while the third features, of course, a tattoo.

Lady Lawanda was also quite taken by the patient compliance ideas she found at my AlignMap site and, in fact, regularly promoted those principles and AlignMap to the many healthcare professionals with whom she came into contact. She also snapped this photo of a sign in a doctors’ office she visited.

That sign was the foundation of the post, Another Approach To Compliance. The tone of the piece can be extrapolated from this excerpt from the opening:

It’s Good To Be The Queen

Lawanda was also the photojournalist for the surprisingly popular The Heartland Spa Photodocumentary, which included the following evidence of the Clothes Fairy Effect:

While there were no confirmed sightings of the Clothes Fairy, Lawanda did capture the actual results of her exertions. The guest simply deposits the dirty clothing on the heart-shaped mat, thusly,

Shortly thereafter, the Clothes Fairy whisks away the nasty duds, replacing them with a clean, neatly folded outfit, thusly,

Très cool, eh?

As that post noted,

It’s good to be the Queen

Footnotes

1. See Her Sojourn Among Us Ends↩
2. That photo of Lawanda in costume also appears after many, many pages in “nude schoolteachers”↩

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Introduction By DrHGuy

In addition to wielding superior culinary skills, fulfilling leadership roles in her social, neighborhood, and professional communities, and demonstrating a superlative understanding of and appreciation for college basketball, Lady Lawanda has earned a reputation as an inspired, effective, and creative teacher.

Nonetheless, I would have wagered a significant portion of my kids’ inheritance against the proposition that I would ever ask her or any other instructor to write up a teaching project for posting on the Heck of a Guy blog.

Yes, I’ve foisted posts about broom corn on hitherto trusting readers, I’ve repeatedly served up pieces about the nuances of patient compliance, and I’ve sunk at times to publishing explications of the comparative workings of different web site statistics packages, but I do have my standards.

After all, the prospect of examining a lesson plan for second graders is not known as a gold standard means of igniting limbic systems into spasms of excitement. And, not once have I observed “Wanna check out my lesson plan?” successfully used as a pick-up line - even when the bar was closing down.

Yet, that is exactly what has happened (the ask Lady Lawanda to compose a post thing, not the limbic system thing or the pick-up line thing) - and all because Lady Lawanda, in the course of one of those tangent to tangent conversations friends construct for mutual entertainment, told me about her favorite teaching project. I was, in a word, impressed - especially with how she got the students invested in the lesson. I think you will be as well.

Lady Lawanda’s Ocean Cruise Project

Teaching Vs Test Preparation

Before the burdens of state standards, annual yearly progress assessments, state test prep, and - who can forget - The No Child Left Behind Act, were loaded on the backs of teachers, teaching was, goofy as it sounds, fun, exciting, and rewarding. Teachers were able to devote their instructional time to the implementation of best practices in teaching to educate kids rather than best practices in test preparation to improve the scores on whatever exam the state decided to mandate that year.

In that Golden Age, say 1994-1995, educational research indicated that enhancing the application of skills, i.e., enabling students to grasp how learning one thing applies to the understanding of another, could best be accomplished by integrating the curriculum.¹ Integrating the curriculum was and continues to be an effective means by which to engage students in the process of learning.

And, all research aside, integrating the curriculum is the way this teacher thinks.

I am a “big picture” kind of girl.

Present At Creation

So when it came to deciding how best to teach “interdependency of species in the environment”² to second graders, an epiphany befell me: the only possible solution - obviously - was to study the ocean.

And, being a visual, hands-on sort of teacher, I needed to do it in a big way.

How big? Well, the first post-epiphany hurdle was convincing my teaching partner, who had developed an unsettling involuntary flinch that erupted whenever I approached her with another idea for project. After several hours of planning, her initial doubts were allayed, and she was on board.

So out came the butcher paper, paints, sponges, brushes, tape and sand. (Yes sand, keep reading.)

By The Sea [Click on image to expand]

Over the next four weeks, a series of cataclysmic events took place, including changing an entire wall from ceiling to floor to “ocean” and the four feet of floor next to the wall into “beach.” Against this backdrop, the students studied everything from types of life in an ocean to ocean habitats to the food chain.

They created a life-like ocean mural complete with sea anemone, deep sea fish, schools of sergeant major fish, and crustaceans crawling on the 240 lbs. of sand along the ocean floor.³ (See photo below)

On The Beach [Click on image to expand]

The Premise

The premise of the project was that the students were on a cruise where they would study all the components of the ocean.

Each week they sent home a large postcard describing their ocean discoveries, including key facts they learned. They also wrote creative messages that were placed in a bottle which was set adrift in a water-filled wading pool (verisimilitude is everything).⁴

Every unit needs a culminating activity and what better event to mark the end of the cruise than a beach party?

On a Friday afternoon in 1995, Room 106 became Cumberland Beach. Desks were pushed aside and replaced with beach towels. Fifty-four seven- and eight-year olds who were parka-clad students on Thursday transformed into barefooted sun-worshipers in shorts and tank tops on Friday.

Accouterments such as sunscreen and sunglasses were in good supply as well. As the sounds of the ocean played softly on the boom box, the kids played ocean bingo while parent volunteers busily put together a beach-side snack bar featuring hot dogs, goldfish, blue Jello with floating gummy fish, fish shaped sugar cookies, and tropical punch.

The students left that Friday excited about all their accomplishments and their refreshed tans.

Once they were out the door however, my teaching partner and I prepared for the next unit - environment awareness and pollution. Yes, we played captain of the Valdez and poured oil on patches of the sand and “floated” plastic pop six-pack rings, candy wrappers, and plastic bags in the ocean.

Monday morning those smiling, happy children came through the door, still talking about Friday’s events, and stopped dead in their tracks when they saw their ocean had become a mess. “Outrage” was the vocabulary word of the day.

And the next unit began.

The sense of ownership the students shared about their ocean became the impetus to aggressively attack the information shared about protecting our environment. They learned consequences of careless human behavior - sometimes grand and sometimes minor - but always a negative consequence. They researched information, made posters, and wrote letters to the President of the United States. Most importantly, they took responsibility for their world. Those children are now young adults, soon to be graduating from college.

Denouement

I had the good fortune of spending a week at the Heartland Spa in Gilman, Illinois last March. At the introductory meeting I noticed a woman and her daughter who looked familiar. It was one of those “I know you from somewhere” moments. Afterwards, I approached her and, lo and behold, it was Katie and her mom. Katie was in that second grade class in 1995. And the first words out of her mouth were those every teacher craves hearing, “You were my all time favorite teacher,” which were followed without a pause by “Do you remember when we built the ocean?”⁵

Thinking back to that last day before Spring Break in March of 1995, my teaching partner and I just having re-bagged 240 lbs. of sand, torn down the ocean mural, and poured out the water in the wading pool, I guess there was good reason for that feeling of satisfaction of a job well done. Fifty-four students had just walked out of school feeling a sense of power and responsibility to the world. How exciting!

Within the ocean and ecology studies we covered the state standards, but not in isolation. We did it by engaging children in their learning. You can teach children the facts or you can teach students how to discover and use those facts. With today’s politics and the push to score well one tests, teachers don’t have the same latitude I did in 1995. What a shame.

Footnotes

1. Pop Quiz: In what area of academic performance are U.S. students least competent? You guessed it, application of skills. By segmenting concepts into little learning packets so students can pass a test we we miss the opportunity to to help students apply their knowledge.↩
2. ”Interdependency of species in the environment” lacks the consummate pomposity and impenetrability of “internalized parental imagoes,” DrHGuy’s fallback phrase, but nonetheless has its own perverse academia-speak charm↩
3. The sand was courtesy of the school custodian. As long as I promised to re-bag it and return it, my custodian was agreeable. He helped me load it up on a cart and sneak it past the principal. My motto - Don’t ask, just do and then smile and beg for forgiveness. I knew once the project was in bloom my using 240 lbs. of sand would be understood. Asking someone to visualize what that would look like was a little too much to ask.↩
4. Being able to put your message in a bottle, seal it, and float it in the pool was great motivation to get to the final draft.↩
5. I’m sure this is just coincidence, but Katie’s mom now runs a decorating business that uses only renewable resources and focuses on being green and toxin free. ↩

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Mortarboard Defies Gravity

With some last minute scholarly heroics (our household - apparently - loves the drama), my younger son did indeed rescue himself from his self-inflicted academic perils to graduate on 26 May 2007 from The Little School On The Prairie.

And, yes, the mortarboard remained in place until tossed aloof at the completion of the ceremony.

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Allan Lee And The Mad Magazine-Deficient Generation Y Hypothesis

The Bullet (You) Almost Dodged

I almost made it, and so did you.

Exhibiting ferocious white-knuckled effort (which, by the way, makes any keyboarding an iffy proposition) I had steadfastly resisted posting on the Allen Lee episode, sparing readers from yet another journalistic pontification on this topic - until today, when I caved.¹

After all, recent Heck Of A Guy entries have dealt with a local political blogger being escorted from a School Board Open Meeting and threatened with arrest by the police for laughing and suspicion of intent to heckle and a college student being denied a teaching degree because of a picture she posted of herself on MySpace committing the apparently unpardonable transgression of an adult imbibing (probably) an alcoholic substance while (certainly) wearing a silly pirate hat.²

Those three Heck Of A Guy posts³ in less than two weeks supporting the exercise of free speech represent an embarrassingly high level of constitutional issues and social awareness contaminating the usual business of this blog, e.g., lamenting the delayed onset of spring locally, paying homage to and (respectfully, gently, tenderly) cracking wise about Leonard Cohen, testing the reader’s ability to differentiate between wrestling holds and sex toys, developing the optimal dishwasher-dependent recipe for chocolate-infused vodka, …, especially since my investment in free speech typically extends no further than exercising my inalienable (one desperately hopes) right to ridicule anything that might generate a cheap laugh.

Adding another blog entry to that PBS-congruent issues group could well damage my reputation as a dilettante dabbling in the ephemerally superficial.

Consequently, I am, much like Noah, Saul on the Road to Damascus, and Moses, a reluctant servant of fate, undertaking this post only after a serendipitous epiphany revealed unto me not only the fundamental dynamic of this messy affair but also the solution for preventing similar trouble in the future. When a humanitarian imperative thus beckons, one has the responsibility to respond.

Before the presentation of this cosmic revelation and resolution, some background information is necessary for those of you who spent the past month residing in a non-networked cave.⁴

The Allen Lee Story

The bullet point⁵ version of the Allen Lee story follows:

• Allen Lee is a senior at nearby Cary-Grove High School, carrying a 4.2 grade point average with no previous record of behavioral, disciplinary, or legal problems.
• Last week, he and the other students enrolled in a Creative English course were given an in-class assignment to write about whatever came to mind and were specifically instructed not to censor what they wrote. According to Lee’s attorney, the teacher also urged the students to “be creative,” encouraging this goal by promising “there will be no judgment and no censorship.”⁶
• Lee responded to the assignment with an essay that spotlighted stabbing, drug use, and a dream about a shooting spree. A representative excerpt follows:
  “So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone…, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.”

  The essay ends with these lines:

  My current English teacher [the teacher who assigned the essay] is a control freak intent on setting a gap between herself and her students like a 63 year old white male fortune 500 company CEO, and a illegal immigrant. If CG was a private catholic school, I could understand, but wtf is her problem. And baking brownies and rice crispies does not make up for it, way to try and justify yourself as a good teacher while underhandedly looking for complements on your cooking. No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don’t be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting.
• Lee’s English teacher read the essay and reported its contents to a supervisor and the principal. After discussion, school officials reported the incident to the police.
• Lee was then charged with two counts of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine. According to the Chicago Tribune, “Cary police say they use that charge for pranksters who pull fire alarms or dial 911 unnecessarily; it also can apply when someone’s writings disturb an individual. … The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content,” [the police] said.”
• Lee is currently kept isolated from other students and is being tutored at administrative offices while school officials decide his future

The Response From The Public And The Press

The school is right. The school is wrong. Lee is creepy. Lee just handed in the essay as assigned. The essay is a cry for help. The essay is a barely veiled threat. The teacher is paranoid. The teacher fulfilled her responsibility to protect herself and the other students. The student should have been disciplined by the school but shouldn’t have been charged with a crime. He should go to jail. It’s because he’s Asian. It’s because he wrote about killing people. The press and bloggers have made too much of this. The school started it. I don’t care who started it, I’m going to end it. I’ll give you something to cry about. Do you want me to pull the car over?

Hmm. I may have overshot a tad, but you get the idea.

The DrHGuy Post-Alexandrian Gordian Knot Disentanglement Methodology

Allen Lee’s essay is easy to criticize. His stream of consciousness riff is not, for example, likely to be mistaken for a long-lost chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He misspells simple words,⁷ he changes point of view without warning, and there is also that dreadful quotation from the Green Day song.

Oh, and there’s blood, gore, necrophilia, and an evocation of the all too real Virginia Tech shooting, which was certainly in poor taste and, given the circumstances, inappropriate. As many writers have noted, there are implicit limits to free speech and to teacher’s instructions.

I was, in fact, reading these lines from one such admonition, a column by Eric Zorn, …

… when [cue the epiphany] the vision came upon me.

My epiphany took the form of a scenario I’ve seen played for unearned laughs at least a half-dozen times in movies and TV shows:⁸ The set-up consists of a therapist reassuring a new patient that nothing is out of bounds in a therapy session because he (the therapist) has heard it all before and there is nothing that will shock or upset him. The patient, overcoming significant hesitation and discomfort about his problem, does admit his secret concerns, at which time - of course - the therapist launches into an exhibition of extreme repulsion, declaring the patient’s revealed behavior so disgusting, so loathsome, so perverse that it is not only impossible to help the patient, it is impossible to sit in the same room with someone capable of such depravity. The patient, thus ambushed, is left dumbfounded, disillusioned, and devastated. Much mirth and hilarity ensue.

I immediately realized that the Allen Lee⁹ issues of taste, cries for help, level of threat, personal animosities between student and teacher, etc. could all be secondary to the actual nidus of the problem.

I submit that the crux of this matter could well be¹⁰ the failure of Allen Lee, like many in his generation, to recognize those implicit limits. In other words, I think it probable that, incredible as it may seem,

That poor schmuck.

By way of explanation,
Show of hands - does any reader over 40 think that a high school teacher’s instructions to “write about whatever comes to mind” means “write about whatever comes to mind, even if the first things that pop into your head are blood, gore, and necrophilia” or that “do not judge or censor what you are writing” means “do not judge or censor what you are writing, regardless of how threatening that writing is to others?”

I didn’t think so.

Eric Zorn would know better; heck, I would know better.

But, I think it’s not only possible but likely that Allen Lee thought he had carte blanche to write whatever he wished for no other reason than - well, his teacher saying he had carte blanche to write whatever he wished. It was an offer of a free shot, a no penalty opportunity to take a literary swing at his opponent.¹¹

But why would a smart kid, an honor student like Allen Lee take those words literally? How could he have a psychological blind spot that precluded his awareness of what was being said between the lines when that process is an elemental, involuntary exercise for most of us?

Well, not being acquainted with Allen Lee, I don’t know. Maybe because my generation has been too lenient as parents. Maybe because teachers give vacuous assignments like “write about whatever comes to mind.” Maybe he’s psychotic or afflicted by one of those weird autistic variations that have no symptoms of autism but are somehow conceptually autistic. Maybe he’s controlled by space aliens or he’s a time traveler unaccustomed to the ways of 21st century suburban America. Like I said, I dunno.¹²

But, I do have a theory

The Mad Magazine-Deficient Generation Y Hypothesis

One way or another, my cohort was taught that certain social conventions precluded always saying what one meant and that it was therefore incumbent upon us to figure out what others actually meant, regardless of the words they used. One especially effective didactic instrument toward that end, which I’ll use here as a representative for all means of conveying that message, was Mad Magazine.

During my childhood and adolescence,it seemed that everybody read Mad Magazine,¹³ one recurrent feature of which was an offering entitled What They Say and What They Mean

These articles paired the words spoken by certain individuals in certain situations with those individuals’ actual thoughts hidden behind those spoken words. While the following are not genuine Mad Magazine examples but are instead generated by me for this post, they are illustrative of the genre:

They say: We can find an acceptable compromise.
They mean: Do it my way.

They say: That’s an interesting idea.
They mean: That’s a idiotic, completely unworkable, and probably dangerous idea.

They say: There are no stupid questions.
They mean: Don’t ask any more stupid questions.

They say: I want a spouse who can also be my best friend.
They mean: I want a best friend who is sexually insatiable, good looking, and rich.

They say: No one ever accused me of being afraid of hard work.
They mean: I can sit idly among folks working like mad without showing a trace of fear.

They say: To protect others, we are charging Allen Lee with disorderly conduct on the legal theory that it is a crime to write something that disturbs an individual, even if the individual being disturbed is a teacher reading exactly the essay she assigned.¹⁴
They mean: We have to do something to make it seem as though we’re taking action and we need to make an example of this kid but not get carried away with a charge so severe that it will look like we’re making an example of this kid.

As the Mad Magazine and the other channels of teaching the younger generation to decode what people say into what they mean have become less available to Allen Lee and his cohort, this kind of error is likely to occur again. Perhaps if Allen Lee had been properly introduced to the classics, such as Mad Magazine, he wouldn’t be in this fix because he would have known that when

They say:
Write about whatever comes to mind

They mean:
Write about whatever comes to mind - that won’t upset or anger me. And, in fact, it might be a good idea to write about something that I’ll like.

If high school seniors don’t know this, the schools and society are sending them unprepared into the world.

What next? What if voters started believing politicians? Or the congress believed the President? What if husbands believed their wives really wanted to know if they were getting fat or if wives believed that their husbands really wanted to know if they were the best lovers ever? Oh, the carnage, the humanity.

Generation Y shouldn’t get mad; they should get Mad Magazine.

What more important legacy can our generation bequeath to the youngsters of today than that basic percept of human relationships emblazoned on our minds since the 60s:

Instilling just enough cynicism in an entire generation to allow them to properly interpret the meaning behind our social lies may require a concerted national campaign. If so, I have a candidate for the poster boy.

In any case, the kids somehow have to learn the principle, ancient when it was put into verse by Gilbert and Sullivan over 100 years ago in HMS Pinafore,

Because, God knows, the rest of us aren’t going to start saying what we mean.

Footnotes

1. For those in need of a simile to picture exactly how I caved, I would say that I caved “like a West Virginia coal mine supported only by a house of wet, unlaminated cardboard cards.”↩
2. There was also a Beastie Boys poster visible in the drinking photo, compounding the felony.↩
3. There were two “drunken pirate” posts↩
4. Not, one hopes, the West Virginia mine referenced in Footnote #1↩
5. OK, that’s the last bullet pun, I promise.↩
6. The assignment included the following guidelines for a “free writing” exercise:
   “Write nonstop for a set period of time.”
   “Do not make corrections as you write.”
   “Keep writing, even if you have to write something like, ‘I don’t know what to write.’ ”
   “Write whatever comes into your mind.”
   “Do not judge or censor what you are writing.”
   The assignment included additional guidelines such as, “If your free writing is neat and coherent, you probably haven’t loosened up enough.”↩
7. There is no reason ones stream of consciousness cannot be expressed by correctly spelled words↩
8. What? You expected an epiphany in the burning bush, penitent struck blind, voice-of-God-booming-from-the-sky mode? You do realize this is the Heck Of A Guy Blog, not Leviticus, don’t you?↩
9. For those unfamiliar with the workings of epiphanies, Allen Lee is the patient and his teacher is the therapist in the receding scenario. I am the producer of the show. You are the laugh track. Paul is the walrus.↩
10. Personal epiphanies are no excuse for pseudo-certainty and the attendant abandonment of the subjunctive, especially when dealing in the complex, confusing, and contradictory realm of psychology.↩