Man Issues: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

I saved Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs for a post of its own. I read this during my first two days at Banyon Bay on Ambergris Caye and was alternately moved, irritated, and vindicated by it.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have man issues. The only thing I remember clearly about my father is weekly child support checks amounting to $24. 90. He deducted ten cents from the checks for postage. With him out of the picture, I was raised by my mother, grandmother, aunt, and two sisters. Of course, with that number of young and single women around, I had a never ending supply of father figures to latch onto. Uncle Carl taught me how to play baseball. Future brother-in-law Terry taught me how to keep from embarrassing myself on a basketball court without much success. My sister Mary Jo's husband Dick taught me to drive his 1957 Ford station wagon. I could list names for at least two more paragraphs.

So, it is with this history that I began to read Michael Chabon's collection of essays gathered from a series of his magazine pieces and bound together in one thematic volume. I didn't read the book in some kind of self-help mode, but rather because I love reading anything Chabon writes. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was a revelation.

Manhood for Amateurs is an honest look at male roles and the problems attendant upon them. The sad outrage he expresses when a woman in a supermarket shopping line congratulates him for being a "great father" simply because he is a man with a grocery cart full of food and kids sets the tone. The standards for being a great father are so low. Would anyone congratulate a cart and kid pushing woman simply because she went shopping?

Everyone knows the issues we're talking about. The demands of male banter is an example. The fact that "a man who can't work with his hands isn't a man," as Willy Loman says, is another. Chabon likes to cook. He likes to spend afternoons inventing new cartoons or drawing old ones with his kids. He thinks it silly that men have to cram everything they need to carry in their pockets rather than carry a purse. He then spends an inordinate amount of time finding the perfect purse, not too effeminate, supple suede and sedately square.

He seems to have a more comfortable time in the company of females. I feel exactly the same way. There are so many things about male behavior that leave me cold. At faculty meetings, for example, the same group of thick necked men, some with emerging pot bellies, would always congregate around a table off to the side and to the rear. There they would sit, arms crossed, sporting ball caps high on their heads, talking to each other about the same stuff they always talked to each other about, "laughing like hyenas at stuff that wasn't even funny," as Holden Caulfield would say.

And now at retirement parties, there is that same group of guys, stomachs still fuller, gossiping at the back table. There is nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's just that I am not able to engage in that kind of man talk.

In Gran Torino Clint Eastwood takes his young Vietnamese neighbor to the local barbershop to "man him up." You're supposed to talk about people who aren't there, complain about your wife/girlfriend, brag about your new set of tires, or tell the great joke you pulled on whathisface the other day. Whatever the topic, you should be able to stand belly to belly, ball cap brims nearly touching, for seemingly ever.

There are lots of great guys at the Y and I look forward to seeing them each morning and the jokes about how the weights aren't getting any lighter, and the daily complaints about the temperature of the hot tub, or the rotten tiling job on the showers. But there are a few who are able to talk for two solid hours, rotating through various sympathetic listeners. I don't know how they do it.

I know what all this sounds like. Sour grapes. I can't talk about that kind of stuff and so I look down my nose at it. I suppose that's true. I know I would feel a lot more comfortable with myself if I could bullshit with the best of them. The only times I can keep up my end of a conversation is if I lapse into teacher mode and start asking questions, but I can only do that if I really have questions. When the conversation comes to gossip, money, funny jokes, and stuff like that, I don't give a shit.

Manhood for Amateurs doesn't offer that many new insights into manliness, but it reaffirms so much of what I already thought. I know lots of people who would profit from reading this book, but I think it might be taken the wrong way if I sent it to them.

Read anything by Michael Chabon. I've never been disappointed by him.

Back From Belize, Part Three

The flight from Belize City to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye is always a trip, so to speak. We board a Tropic Air one engine twelve passenger Cessna and hold on tight as the little plane groans its way off the runway and labors to get above the Caribbean for the fifteen minute flight.

After looking at the water for a while, you quickly come to the conclusion that if you had to you could probably wade across to the island; when you see what appears to be a runway jutting out from the surrounding bars, restaurants, dive shops, golf cart vendors, and time share hawkers, you wish you had.

But it does set down quite smoothly, thank you. And then you step out into a wall of humid air and bustling Toyota vans carrying tourists to various resorts up and down the island.

Right across from the terminal is Lime, a little watering hole that used to be run by a Canadian ex-patriot. I think everything on San Pedro is either owned by an exCanadian, or once was. Lime is a good place to get a Belliken while waiting for someone from the resort to pick us up. On Wednesdays they do a Jambel Jerk Pit Chicken night. I've never gone.

The streets are cobblestone all the way to Banyon Bay. They used to be hard packed dirt, but San Pedro decided to modernize a few years ago by putting stone on all the streets. It is a lot better when it rains, but mostly it has just succeeded in making everything more congested. It is getting to the point where you'll have to rent a golf cart instead of riding a bike just for safety's sake.

I've written about San Pedro before. If you are wearing a shirt or shoes you are overdressed. It is also too hot and humid to wear anything else. Belliken is not only the beer of choice, it is the only beer one can buy. Elvi's Kitchen has dirt floors, killer drinks, and great fried chicken. The Wild Mango has inventive and delicious wraps of all descriptions. Caliente's has great coconut shrimp and remains the best vantage point for watching the Chicken Drop on Thursday nights.

We like to ride our bikes as far North as we can* and then ride on the beach back to town, stopping at palapa bars on the way. We spend one day fishing, two days snorkeling, and all the rest hanging out by the pool, busy deciding where to have dinner.

*The photo above captures the feel of the northern end of our bike odyssey.

* * * * *

I accomplished two things hanging out at the pool: got a great tan; read three books.

Cold Wind by C. J. Box

This is one of those mystery novels that I look down my nose at as I am devouring every word. C.J. Box is a member of my holy trinity of mystery writers, along with Carl Hiaasen and John (I think it is John) Burdett, the author of the Bangkok 8 books. Box is probably my favorite, although nobody is funnier than Hiaasen can sometimes be, because his novels are all set in the Teton/Yellowstone area and I have been to all of the places where he sets his stories.

This one is about wind turbines.

When I drive between Laramie and Rawlins on I-80, there is a stretch of highway running between ridges lined with wind turbines that I just love. The juxtaposition is right up there with the stretch of I-70 that carves its way through Glenwood Canyon. Therefore, dedicated liberal and doomed romantic that I am, wind turbines tend to make me feel happy.

Of course, I don't have to live next door to them and listen to the constant whirring filling every room in my house. Box's novel, in addition to being a terrific mystery filled with all kinds of scenes of satisfying revenge, made me rethink my position on windmills as a viable form of restorable energy. But not completely!

If nothing more than the fact that Joe Picket is a great character, read anything by C.J. Box, especially Cold Wind.

My Losing Season by Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy's Lords of Discipline was my sure fire novel to turn a kid on to reading during the Sophomore Language Arts outside novel assignment. The Prince of Tides was extraordinarily powerful the first time I read it. My Losing Season joins the ranks of Conroy's best stuff.

The English teacher in me ranks him in a league with John Irving, maybe just a hair below, but not Phillip Roth, or Updike. Certainly, not a candidate for the pantheon on American literature. But fun to read.

My Losing Season is a memoir of Conroy's career as a pretty good basketball player. Along the way we get to hear about his dealings with his father who makes The Great Santini look a lot like Ward Cleaver. We meet his impressive mother, the source of Conroy's female characters, particularly in The Prince of Tides. We also get a close up view of cadet life at the Citadel. The fiction of The Lords of Discipline pales by comparison.

Mostly we hear Conroy wax rhapsodic about the joys and sorrows of college basketball as played in the Southern Conference. The series of memoirs present a chronology of Conroy's own coming of age that is every bit as compelling as his fiction.

I have to share one favorite impression. When Conroy was in high school in the Washington D.C. area, he had to wait after school until his basketball practice at seven. During those free hours he took his homework over to the National Gallery of Art, found a comfortable nook, and did his homework. What an image. The National Gallery of Art might by the most impressive single building I have ever seen. No wonder he turned out so well.

Back From Belize, Part Two

After checking out of Chaa Creek (previous post), we took a van to the Guatemalan border where we were picked up by the folks from La Lancha, a Francis Ford Coppola resort close to Tikal, the largest Mayan excavation in Central America. We spent two nights at the resort where we were awakened at 3 am by a family of Howler Monkeys and then again at 5 when the monkeys grew restless again. Our rooms over looked a 78 square mile lake close to Flores and presented us with another walk up some steps to the dining room. The food was terrific. I had a whole freshwater bass that had just been pulled out of the lake for my first dinner. It was so good I had one again the second night.

But the whole point of our excursion to La Lancha was to tour Tikal. It was magnificent and our guide, Jesus Antonio, was a fountain of information with a particularly liberal ax to grind. Needless to say, I liked his healthy disdain for the excesses of western civilization.

The photo above is of the four of us standing in front of Temple V. This was the last temple we looked at and you will notice my linen shirt that was supposed to keep me cool and my yellow bandana are both wringing wet, but by that time I was too hot to care.

We have visited lots of Mayan sites on our various trips to Belize and I have noticed at each site that Mayans must have had very small feet because the steps leading up to the top are always about half wide enough for a normal person to use, making the climb up and especially back down a dizzying experience. Bud and Kathie have height issues and so rarely scale the steps. Janet and I, on the other hand, usually find ourselves climbing up on all fours, oohing and aahing at the top, and coming back down on our butts.

Temple V was 200 feet high and a series of seven nearly vertical ladders were in place for anyone who wanted to climb to the top. We stood at the bottom. Janet looked up. I looked up. Janet looked at me, "You want to go up?" I don't know what got into me, but I said "sure, let's do it."

I began to question our sanity when the teenager from Holland in front of me kept looking back down the ladders with panic written on his face. But we kept plugging away. When we got to the top, even unflappable Janet admitted that she was a little dizzy and I noticed that she kept her hand on the back wall as we walked to the center of the temple and sat down. There were Kathie and Bud 200 vertical feet below and I started to come to grips with the fact that we would have to get back down.

After getting my feet on terra firma again, I noticed that the guys from Holland were a sweaty, trembling mass huddled at the base. That made me feel good, but if I ever go to Tikal again you can forget Temple V.

When we got back to La Lancha I immediately headed for the mini bar in our room and popped myself a little can of Sophia, Coppola's surprisingly nice champagne in a can, sat on porch, and listened for that family of Howlers.

No time for reading on this leg. Out to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye on the next day.

Back From Belize, Part One

The photo is an artsy craftsy shot of a mahogany sculpture in the open air dining room at Chaa Creek, one of my favorite places in the world. The Inn at Chaa Creek is an Eco-Lodge in central Belize near the Guatemalan border. It was our first stop on our yearly two week getaway to Central America with Bud and Janet Simmons.

Chaa Creek is not what one would call an EXTREME Eco-Lodge. We don't have to take showers under metal drums that collect rain water. We don't sleep in a tent with creepy things crawling all over the place. We don't have to walk 50 feet to use an outhouse, or anything like that. I mean, I approve of the concept of Eco-Lodges; I just don't want to go off the deep end.

No. We stay in the spa villa at Chaa Creek situated above the spa and all that implies: body wraps, coma massages, fingernails, toenails, soft music with no discernible melody wafting over you. The spa villa is also air conditioned, unlike the other more ecologically correct cabanas with bay palm thatched roofs and overhead fans that do nothing to fight off the 100 degree temperatures and 80% humidity. We do have to walk down the hill (136 steps - Bud counted) to get to the infinity pool, bar, and terrific restaurant. There is a river at the bottom of the property with canoes ready for any guest who wants to paddle upriver to a botanical garden, or float downstream to San Ignacio. The lodge will send a van to pick you up if you are too exhausted from your float to make it back upstream to the lodge.

In the morning you can have a guide take you around the 300 plus acres to spot 350 varieties of tropical birds. In the afternoon another guide will take you for a medicine walk and show you all the healing properties of the burgeoning vegetation on the place. You can take a horse back ride through the enormous organic garden that supplies the kitchen, or look at the furniture shop that supplies all the rooms.

Like all great places, it is filled with a staff of over 120 smiling, happy Belizeans who have been lucky enough to score a job at this place. Founded some thirty years ago by a young traveling couple as a farm, it has evolved into a show place that hosts educational seminars from all over Central America and funds numerous scholarships for lucky locals.

If you like birds, rivers, organic farming, great food, talented bartenders, this place is for you.

* * * * *

Books at Chaa Creek

Every vacation is a chance for me to read until my eyes fall out and this was no exception.

I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel on the plane to Belize City. It is a historical novel about Henry VIII that pretty much goes over the same events as A Man For All Seasons, but instead of focusing on Thomas More, who appears to be more stubborn than heroic, it focuses on Thomas Cromwell and his impressive machinations to keep the kingdom running through all of his monarch's whims and furies. I'm not an avid historical novel reader and this book gave me some trouble at first, but the last third is magnificent.

When we got to Chaa Creek, I switched to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. Jim, my lawyer friend at the Y, recommended it after we had had a conversation about other Bryson works. He wrote A Walk in the Woods, must reading for anyone who likes to hike, and a bunch of other works too numerous to name but all eminently readable.

The Thunderbolt Kid is a memoir set in the Des Moines of the fifties where Bryson spent his childhood. I was initially interested because Des Moines, Franny's base for so many years, is a place I have grown to love, plus I like reading about places that are familiar to me. I soon discovered that the book could have been set anywhere in the midwest. The important thing was his nostalgia for the fifties. Feel free to roll your eyes, but I feel sorry for anyone who didn't get a chance to grow up during that decade. Everything Bryson said and felt I have said and felt, only not nearly so eloquently.

There is nothing in the book that was necessarily new, but that is what makes it so great. On the other hand, I think it has a pretty esoteric audience in mind. When I started reading about Grand Avenue and The Des Moines Register, I thought Franny would love the book as well, but the further I got into it the more I realized it was about a time that no longer exists and its appeal was pretty much exclusively to people my age and older.

My timing was perfect as I finished Bryson's book on the day we left for Guatemala. More on that in the next post.

I'm Having a Good Time

Katherine today. I'm having a good time. I've fired off the appropriate understanding-but-threatening emails to DPS Alternative Licensure teachers who have to finish all the paperwork the Colorado Department of Education requires by this coming Thursday. It's a daunting task. A lot of trees die for Alternative Licensure. These teachers jump through inordinate hoops to meet state standards while meeting the demands of their students, schools and communities. I've coached them and been their best cheerleader all year long. They are tired. So am I. Today is a good day because it is the day I smell summer. I feel like Doug in Dandelion Wine. I feel like he felt when he heard that first lawn mower. I'm so close to being done I can taste it. I'm having a good time.

I hesitate to reveal what I'm doing right now, but I will. Jim is off deck-building with Bud and I'm enjoying a rare day alone in my house. That alone is a happy thing. I adore J., but I have my own guilty pleasures that are much happier experienced without his keen wit ready to point out the absurdity/silliness/cuteness/etc. of my behavior. Don't take me wrong--he has his own guilty pleasures--Rudy, for instance. It comes out even in most ways--he can watch Rudy and any number of incredibly depressing movies and I can watch Cleopatra and all the National Park shows on the Travel Channel. We just need to alone when we indulge in these pleasures.

The only problem here is that my time alone is pretty darn limited. Jim has plenty. I go off into teacher-land (only two weeks more) and he works at home--he writes, he takes care of the yard and the house and the food. He is wonderful. But if he wants to take the morning off and watch Rudy, well-he can.

Today is my day to watch my version of Rudy. It's equally embarrassing and I"m sorry if Rudy is your thing, but it just reminds me of the old Waltons TV show and Little House on The Prairie --fire, blindness, poverty and shortness, etc.--all set up to make me cry. Jim likes Rudy. I resent Rudy; It's best we don't watch together. I love Cleopatra (Gladiator, Spartacus--any movie with men in skirts unless Mel Gibson is involved). It's best we don't watch together.

I'm watching my recently recorded HD versions of my two favorite National Park Travel Channel specials today. One covers Grand Teton National Park and the other is about Yellowstone. Soon I'll watch what Samantha Brown has to say about Belize. Summer is coming and I'm going places that will restore me and make me believe in some things. I'll feel connected with the earth. I'll remember that somehow the world will not come to an end despite the battles between Democrats and Republicans and Tea Partiers and all the other factionists--Mayan ruins have a way of doing that. Summer means going outdoors and bathing in the woods. Summer is the beach off San Pedro in Belize. Summer is fasting from the news.

We go to Wyoming for two weeks each summer. We stay in the Tetons and go into Jackson several days each visit. I've just watched my Yellowstone recording and I'm thinking I'd like to make it the whole two weeks without entering civilization at all. I can probably convince Jim just because I couldn't buy any cowboy boots at The Boot Legger in Jackson that way. I have four pair of boots from Jackson. They are all truly wonderful. A girl can never have enough cowboy boots so I think he'd appreciate the sacrifice. Mostly, I just want to really get away from even the civilization that Jackson represents. Dornan's at the edge of the park would be my limit--it has a grocery store and a liquor store and gasoline. That should keep us going.


The Teton recording is up next. I have to pay attention there. This is what I watch to dream. It's my version of running away from home. The show will highlight trails we hike and vistas we know by heart. My heart will soar because we will be there soon. We will be in Belize sooner. I'm having a good time.

Why teaching defies measurement

Campbell's Law, formulated by Donald T. Campbell in 1976, states "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." This is closely related to Goodhart's Law and the Lucas Critique in economics and a lot like the Heisenberg Uncertainty in quantum physics which says that the act of measuring something changes the thing being measured.

For example, the recent scandal coming out of D.C. that a disproportionate number of erasures on answer sheets might explain the relatively huge jump in scores on mandated assessment tests seems to follow Campbell's Law. If a school or, in the case of D.C., a district commissioner knows that money and reputation are tied to performance, there will be efforts to cheat. Furthermore, the act of testing (measuring) will change the thing being measured. Mandated tests don't measure actual schools; they only measure how schools are when being measured. There is a difference.

Think about this when you read The Denver Post's editorial today (Friday, April 15, 2011), "Stay the course on school reform." This is an inevitable follow-up of the Posts' long and loud endorsement of SB191, Colorado's "landmark" teacher evaluation legislation. You know, that was the bill that changed the way teachers were to be evaluated (half of their evaluation will be based on standardized test scores) and attempted to put an end to tenure. The thinking behind the bill was and continues to be the current view that if we just got rid of all the incompetent teachers - the ones who are in the profession only for the money - all our educational problems would be solved.

Today's editorial is championing a state panel's suggested guidelines for teacher effectiveness and encouraging us all to support the next step, a compilation of quantifiable objectives and behaviors teachers would have to follow on the road to the retention of tenure.

The state board came up with 60 recommendations and as the Post says, "those recommendations comprise an important foundational document for the work ahead." The Post goes on to highlight a few of these important and presumably new recommendations. For instance, the board wants all teachers to guarantee "equitable learning opportunities and growth for all students." The board also recommends that good principals will be "responsible for the collective success of their schools."

"That sliver of the panel's work provides an idea of the broader principles," the Post remarks.

Wow! "Equitable learning opportunities." "Growth for all students." Why didn't I think of that? Just think, 35 years of teaching down the drain. If only there had been some government board to tell me how to proceed. "You mean I'm supposed to be concerned for ALL of my students? Well, that takes all the fun out of it right there."

The Post strongly suggests that all this new thinking and the new battery of ways for hapless principals to quantify everything is going to change the way educators think.

This argument is a good example of the kind of thinking that ensues when people who are on the periphery of classrooms try to turn teaching into something that can be measured.

In the three and a half decades I taught I was forced to sit down with the rest of the faculty at least once every three years to arrive at new methods for improving instruction. Each one of these sitdowns started out with a listing of goals and all of those goals sounded a lot like those "Equitable learning opportunities" alluded to above. We agreed to prepare students for an increasingly complex society. We agreed students should be able to meet the needs of society by effectively expressing themselves. We agreed they should have a basic understanding of government, etc., etc.

The goals are self-evident and nothing to cheer about. The problem comes when we have to measure our success.

Interlude: I had a kid once who bombed his CSAPS because the night before his mother and her boyfriend, who combined to lay the foundation for the kid's cocaine addiction, were arrested at his home. He snuck out the back window and roamed the streets all night. To make matters, the little creep did poorly on his reading test which is probably why I didn't get that great evaluation I was counting on.

There are too many variables. That's why teaching is an art. Would anyone seriously want to come up with a list of 60 characteristics of an effective artist? Characteristic 16: Has fondness for absinthe and self-mutilation.

My wife informs me that principals in DPS have a checklist of over 100 items they must use when evaluating teachers. To DPS's credit or damnation, the items are specific and measurable. Instead of something like "the teacher will conduct large group discussions during each unit," it will be more like "during a large group discussion the teacher will demonstrate effectiveness by having 70% of students with hands raised."

I have heard that many DPS principals are considering early retirement rather than go through the check list charade. I can't imagine how a principal could pull it off. When I taught I was lucky if an administrator was in my classroom more than twice a semester. The demands placed on principals are just too great. How many times would a principal have to visit a classroom in order to check off 100 behaviors? The whole notion is laughable.

The Post ends its editorial. "There is a long road ahead before a new way of looking at teachers and principals is fully deployed in Colorado. We hope the ensuing steps are as sound and purposeful as this one."

Trust me. If history and my experience are any indication, they will be every bit as "sound and purposeful." That's precisely why I can't stop rolling my eyes.

Anomie

Catherine Zeta-Jones checked into a mental hospital yesterday to receive treatment for Bipolar II Disorder. On The Today Show Matt Lauer explained that this is a recent offshoot of plain every day Bipolar, which used to be called manic depression when I went to school. Matt went on to explain the symptoms: a chronic depression punctuated by only occasional and not very intense highs.

It was then that I realized that I was a border line Bipolar II sufferer! It explains so much. I get up in the morning and either go to the Y where I have come to realize that I will never look like the guy in The Fighter (Depression), or I sit in the kitchen, drink some coffee, and read the morning paper (Major Depression). Then I discover that it is raining, or snowing, or too cold, or too hot to really do a thorough job of working on that deck I've been meaning to build (Still More Depression). After that, I might go and read Wolf Hall which reduces my erstwhile hero, Thomas More, into a blood thirsty, unforgiving fanatic (Sigh). Or I might pick up my guitar and realize that after some thirty years of dabbling on and off I will never play like Les Paul (Figures). Yeah, yeah, I know you're thinking "but what about your beautiful wife?" You've got a point, but she doesn't play like Les Paul either.

It seems to me that Bipolar II Disorder is a reasonable reaction to the world. Maybe it's the people who are not rushing to hospitals to have their meds adjusted we should be worried about.

This, of course, brings me to Emile Durkheim, sociology, and the five institutions of society.

Okay, we have FAMILY, EDUCATION, RELIGION, GOVERNMENT, BUSINESS. According to Durkheim (I think, but since this is a blog post, who cares?), these five form a pentagon of sorts enclosing/constraining/defining all those within the boundaries. Someone who doesn't measure up to the requirements of one or another of these institutions can be found outside the pentagon, an outcast.

As society progresses, these institutions take turns being the strongest. Right now BUSINESS seems to be in the vanguard, with RELIGION close behind. In the 60's EDUCATION was king, or at least it seemed that way. GOVERNMENT proclaimed its postwar power by building a plethora of pillored temples to anchor town squares everywhere. (The alliteration in that last sentence was purely accidental.)

Sometimes however, none of the institutions seem to work. This is such a time. And the feeling you get when you look around and see all of your institutions falling is called anomie. It is the feeling of having lost your moorings, of being set adrift.

To illustrate, I started weeping one morning last week when I read that the Civil Union Bill died in committee. There was a picture of a fat, old, white male looking askance at a lesbian couple holding hands next to him. I wasn't weeping so much at the failure of the bill as I was at the fact that not a single republican had the courage to buck his party and do the right thing. It was a disillusioning moment.

I think the five institutions allegedly holding up this crumbling society of ours are so universally held in contempt that all a comedian would have to do is walk on stage at a comedy club and open his act by saying, "Hey any of you guys involved in EDUCATION?" - the house roars. "Hey, are there any honest BUSINESSmen here tonight?" - the house roars louder - a gentleman at a corner table chokes on his olive. "Take my FAMILY, please."

That's what I'm feeling, anomie. I like the sound of it better than Bipolar II Disorder. They both spring from the same cause: paying attention.