Me, as a Leader

Me, as a leader

                I’ve been hearing lots of different models of leadership lately. In college, William Jewell seemed flooded with “servant leaders,” leading humbly and without the kind of drill-sergeant persona many associated with leadership. It was gentle and caring.

                I’ve also heard people talk about “leading from behind” as a way of deconstructing that posture of leadership that seems to suffer when it glorifies the leader. As a teacher, that plucked a string loudly at the core of my being. My worst days of teaching were those that I walked away from the classroom feeling as though I’d only been focused on myself – the days I’d felt the most on stage. “Leading from behind” sounded like what I needed to do – get off stage and let the learners do the leading.

                Recently, though, I heard a soldier describe his commanding officers in Iraq. I could hear the disdain in his voice, the bile it raised in his throat, when he described one of his commanders as “leading from the back”. It struck me hard. How could I make the assertion that I was leading if I wasn’t willing to charge the front lines with my students? Keeping myself out of the fray seemed noble on paper, but when my students were in the midst of the intellectual battles I drew up for them, was sidelining myself unfair? How could I charge directly into the maw and put myself at risk as well?

                I think of teaching as leading. I think of it that way because I teach at the consent of the students. There are too many of them and they’re too big for me to force to do anything. They take a risk in deciding to learn from me, and I have realized in recent years that that means I have to risk something too.

                In terms of building leadership, I am at the absolute beginning of that experience. We are in our infancy as a district encouraging teacher leadership, so my opinions are inexpert at best.

                I know what my worries are, though. I worry that I’m waiting to be tapped. I sit in meetings and trainings and sessions and think to myself that I have the ability to facilitate, to engage participants, to challenge respectfully, and to partner with teachers as they think, but I’m not sure how to become that person. I have no psychological or emotional explanation for the egoless-ness I find myself having. It’s not that I don’t believe in myself; it’s that the moment I begin to push myself into a spotlight, I am completely filled with guilt. Who am I to push myself out there? Why should anyone listen to me?

                At the same time, when faced with opportunities and chances I perceive something in the way I present myself to the world that sabotages me. Am I too funny? Too critical? Too self-deprecating? Too fat?

                I’m beginning to believe that the people who have blown by me on their way to positions of “power” didn’t do so because of their merit. I think they grabbed the idea that they are leaders by the throat and created that reality.

                Now the question is whether or not I’m a throat grabber.

Me, as a Learner

                I remember sitting in the station wagon in the garage returning home from somewhere. I was in middle school, and my high school sister’s Algebra book was in my lap, open. She was in the front seat. I was reading it.

                “What are you doing?” she asked.

                “What is this?” I asked, “Is this math?”

                “Yeah,” Jami replied, “in high school it gets harder. You start using letters in with the numbers.”

                She didn’t say it like it was scary or anything. She was nonchalant, matter-of-fact. I walked into the house in a daze. What was it about letters that I didn’t know? Why was this being hidden from me?

                I remember this as the first time I grappled with an idea. There was a physical feeling in my head as I stretched and strained my brain to try and find the meaning of this cryptic message – “You start using letters in with the numbers.”

                I heard a blind man on the radio describe the feeling of being lost, alone in a hotel room. He described “groping” the walls try to understand and conceptualize the layout of the room. Though I’m not blind, I related to that in the way that I felt as I wrestled with big ideas. I groped and fondled and grasped but lacked the ability to conceptualize the entire picture.

                I’ve always loved this feeling. I read books and authors about subjects I have no expertise in; I ponder philosophical mysteries I haven’t done the coursework for. Not because I can understand the answer but for the lovely feeling in my head that comes from knowing that there’s something too big for me to grasp.

                I think that what I’m fascinated by is the feeling of possibility when I ponder a topic I can’t grasp. When I read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe about the nature of string theory, I walked away with a flawed and rudimentary idea of string theory. I couldn’t teach a class in it. I don’t understand the equations involved. Yet I find myself searching for that feeling all the time. I want to hear and read people who know more about a topic than I’d ever considered. It proves to me how much is out there, how little I know. It also reinforces to me the vastness of the human capacity to understand.

                I have a former player and student who went on to Lindenwood University on a bowling scholarship. When Brad was a junior in high school, I pulled him aside for “the talk”. If he was interested in going to college to play soccer, I needed to know where he wanted to go so I could start the recruiting process. That’s when he broke the news that he wasn’t going to play soccer. He wanted to focus on bowling. From there on out, I quizzed him every day about bowling. Why is it scored so weird? Why are there so many different balls? I learned about oil patterns and lane strategies.

                I got the same feeling in my brain listening to Brad conduct a master class on bowling that I got from reading about string theory.  

Me, as a Writer

                I write because it’s easy. The pushing I have to do to make it past the stuck word is like scratching an itch or stretching my legs after a long car ride. There’s relief after it arrives, and I don’t worry at all if it will come. It will come. It always does.

                I don’t value my writing because of that. I don’t sweat over it and fight it. I simply let it out and there it is.

                The only real criticism that I’ve ever received was my junior year of high school. I’d just come from another session of a creative writing class in which I’d been commended and treated as an expert. I was the creative writing student of the year for two years running and saw no particular challenge for a three-peat. I sauntered into my journalism class and our laissez-faire instructor, Mr. C. His hands off approach meant that I had no actual idea of what he was like as a teacher. He’d look over our shoulders every once in a while, but the editors ran the class. I was an editor.

                I had a poem in my hand when I walked through the door – one that the creative writing teaching had oo’d and ah’d over just moments before. She’d clucked about this literary magazine and that one and publication and imagery, and Mr. C could smell the smugness when I walked through the door.

                “What’ve you got there, Jeff?” he asked.

                “Latest poem,” I answered.

                “Lemme see…” I handed him the poem.

                It was about winter. Something about snow and frozenness, I’m sure. It probably included the word “crystalline”. I watched his face as he read it, and my concern started to grow when it didn’t begin to glow with wonder. His eyes didn’t widen and refocus as he read something that – boom – demanded to be read closely. That was life-changing.

                “It’s pretty,” he said.

                “Thanks,” I reached to take it back.

                “But what does it mean?” he didn’t move to give it to me.

                I stopped short hand in my grasp. Mean? “What? It’s…winter, you know…cold…nothing…” I trailed off both offended and worried. I felt naked. He’d uncovered my fear all along. Yes, I can put these words together, make it sound like meaning and sense, but what did it mean?

                He put the poem back in my hand and turned to go sit back at his desk. I wasn’t angry at him. If anything, he’d pulled back a curtain I’d known was there all along.

                I remember watching a home improvement show much later, after I was married, and seeing a designer hang curtains in a room with no windows. He’d walked in and said, “This room needs a window.” And instead of the major construction of putting a hole in the wall, he simply hung curtains where one should go. I remember thinking, ‘Geez, at least paint a window behind it. Maybe an African savannah or something.’ But I think my writing in high school was like that window. Decorations of nothing. I stopped writing for anything but assignments.

                But I can feel myself wanting to write – I’ve been feeling it for the past few years – and I feel the worry now of pulling back those curtains. Twenty years later, I realize that I have to write to find out if I have any meaning, if there will be a landscape behind those curtains or if I’ll pull them back to find a blank wall staring back at me. 

The Seeming Profundity of Moments in Slow Motion

     White everywhere. The hill I trudged up each day from the bus wasn't steep. It wasn't the kind of hill that required extra exertion on my bike. Nor was it the kind of hill you'd consider sledding unless you were anti-joy. But on this day, it felt like a hill.
     We hadn't had a snow day, but it was snowy. And icy. I was stomping from the bus to home through the snow, and as I made it halfway up our hill, I could see my dad standing on the back deck talking on the cordless phone with the long antennae. He was probably explaining to my mom why he hadn't driven the two blocks to pick me up because, see, there he is, he's fine.
     Then, I slipped.
     I didn't go down hard; it was slow, deliberate slip. Pretty comical, except for the car that lumbered around the corner. Going maybe 7 miles an hour but completely unable to stop. My dad is fifty yards away with foot deep snow between us, and the car is bearing down.
     Spoiler alert: I'm still alive.
     Strangely, it was all in slow motion. I don't mean that I could see each snow flake as it fell, registered the look on the driver's face, and my dad's voice came to me through some sort of low register voice bender machine. What I mean is that the car and I had the same problem. I was down, covered in mittens, snow boots, bulky coat, and snow pants, and panicking. My backpack was sprawled a foot away from me, and I was flailing and flopping slowly, weighed down by scarf and hat and gloves. I couldn't get any purchase.
     The car didn't have it any better. It just kept creeping, front tires turning back and forth to no effect. I remember thinking, 'This would be a stupid way to do die.' And then I imagined that the car would probably just bump into me and stop, like those concrete blocks at the end of parking spaces. I'll just be a curb.
     But those thoughts were happening somewhere else while the rest of me wriggled and walrused away to the easier traction of the snow on the side of the road.
     It was not a close call. As a matter of fact, as the car rolled past, I felt shame for panicking so hard. I didn't look at the driver. Shaken, I clomped across the backyards between me and my father and up the stairs of our deck. When I walked in the house, my dad and I had an awkward laugh at my not-that-near-death experience, and I went to play Nintendo Golf. I didn't even think to recount the story to my mom later.
     It's a strangely sobering moment to reconsider. As a parent, I can't imagine the horror my dad must have felt being unable to do anything than watch as I seemed to poise to have the most ridiculous and hilarious accidental death possible for a pre-teen. What a conflict.
      Glad we dodged that incredibly slow bullet.

Nutjob Wordsmithing

     I'm thinking about Ragnarok. John Hodgman used this term all last year as we blithely headed toward the end of the world as prophesied by the Mayans. It's a fun malapropism given that Ragnarok is more about the Norse end of the world as it descends into chaos and nothingness, while the Mayans seemed to be predicting a big reset button. I should mention that my knowledge base of Norse mythology comes entirely from Marvel comics storylines involving Thor and that of the Mayans comes from my perusal of crazy people's Facebook posts. In other words, solid as a rock.
     But it seems like purveyors of this kind of philosophy all share something, and I don't mean that behind-the-eyes craziness that makes you let them go ahead of you in the line at the hardware store. These doom salesmen and women are all great muddlers of language. And why wouldn't they be? Language is the prism through which we try and translate the raw data that enters our brains (massive pile of metal hurtling along this flat strip making loud noise) into sense that makes the world coherent (don't cross the street yet). So I imagine that it's not hard to get caught up when a person is able to use language to sound like coherent sense when it's just nutty nonsense.
     Here's what I mean, and I'm just making this up:
     When you're looking for Truth, why do you trust your eyes? Your eyes can lie; they've lied to you before. You have to trust the immutable strings the universe has tied to the very fiber of your awareness. It's not mathematical or empirical in any way. When you leave the trappings of the old ways behind, you find that the answers have been dwelling in the corners of your subconscious all along, lonely, waiting for you to find them. They glow with a reality your soul recognizes because it is made of the same fabric. 
     Look, I know I'm not very good at that sort of thing, so I'm not expecting anyone to join my commune based in the deep worship of chocolate chip cookies, but I think I did a pretty good job of sounding like I said something. I didn't. Go ahead, read it again. Nope, nothing. I told you to "listen to the universe". How about that for saying nothing? Who couldn't find a way to agree with that sentiment? It's not that it's a bad idea, but it's the kind of "truth" that isn't owned by anyone. It allows the person reading or listening to make it into whatever they need it to be. When I wordsmith it like that, it sounds like I know something that you don't. If I was better at that, maybe I'd have a following.
     And the new wave conspiracy theorists are a bonanza for this sort of magical thinking. There's a certain kind of vocabulary that lends credibility to even the most insane of assertions. It's alluring and frightening. The prophet is selling hope and Truth, and the conspiracy theorist is selling fear and Truth. And some people seemed hard-wired to ignore the emptiness of the message.
     Beware the prophet with a thesaurus.

Intro

  

There are things I do that surprise people. Their surprise is often a surprise to me. I do most if not all of the cooking in my house.  I don’t mean that I microwave some frozen garbage because (oh, poor us) we just don’t have enough time to cook. I make real, actual food that involves cooking. Vegetables even. Because I’m the cook, I do the grocery shopping. It just makes sense.

                When I mention these facts in casual conversation to people who have known me for years, there’s a generally googley-eyed, semi-insulting response as though I’ve casually mentioned that I feed my pet octopus kitten hearts. It makes me wonder who I am. Who am I that it’s impossible to believe that I sit down every night of the week with my wife of 13 years and 5 year old daughter to a healthy , wholesome meal that I prepared for them while they played mermaids?  Why is that so hard to believe? I was a frat boy. I am…ahem…husky. I have facial hair. I wear glasses. I’ve never understood what it is about what I am or was that makes me so confusing.

                I’m a truth addict. My dad and I still can’t find anything to talk about that isn’t a debate. I know this makes me unpleasant to be around sometimes. My wife and my mother leave the room when my dad and I get going. I’m unafraid of asking questions and challenging assumptions. In  a college class or a professional discussion, that may be valuable, but when we’re discussing whether or not you should like Game of Thrones, I can’t turn off the part of my brain that controls vociferous debate. I can’t resist trying to figure out why and how we build our values – even how we value different Asian cuisines.

                This brings me to my favorite chore. I love to iron. Obviously, I’m not going to debate which chores should be your favorite. I know what I want. I think it’s what I always want. I want the truth. The iron helps me find the truth of that shirt. The heat, the pressure eliminate the confusion. The steam carries away the veneer and reveals the truth. It’s not pleasant for the shirt, but in the end, it is what it’s always been.  Maybe I’m always ironing the people around me, trying to uncover their truth. Or maybe I’m trying to make them into what I think they ought to be. Not sure.

                I like to think that that’s what teaching is. I’m steaming and pressing the wrinkles doubt, assumption, and inconsistency to reveal the humanity beneath.

The Power of Place

                I think I missed out on some educational opportunities. The social current of school seemed to take me along for the ride, but I often found myself trapped in the limbo between cool kid on top of the world and outcast nerd vagabond forced to forge his own identity and sense of self. I wasn’t cool, wealthy, good-looking, athletic, or brave enough to feel like I belonged. But I also wasn’t able to dissociate myself from those kids entirely and go my own way as they were what passed for my friends. I was funny enough to be allowed to hang around on the fringe, and even the coolness on the outskirts of their lives was addictive.

                What I wasn’t was sure. That’s what I envied in my cool friends[1] and nerdy, outcast friends alike: their clear sense that they belonged where they were. Whether where they were was at the center of a spotlight during the homecoming dance, on top of a cornhusking parade float, standing in front of a locker room full of teammates, in a dingy basement watching and re-watching Monty Python’s The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, sitting at a kitchen table devouring pizza and playing role-playing games several orders of magnitude nerdier than Dungeons and Dragons, or nestled away in a tiny practice room perfecting  tuba skills, I wasn’t sure I belonged there. I didn’t like what I seemed to be good at and wasn’t good at what I liked.

                How did I get here? How did I get there? How have I gotten anywhere? The three things that pop into my mind as the catalysts for my current condition are disparate and don’t, honestly, hold together perfectly.

                In fourth grade I discovered three new friends, Monty, Curly, and Doc. Funny, energetic, imaginative, daring: these were my people. They entertained me and made me have genuine fun. I think it registered with me vaguely that they and their clothes were a bit dirty, but this was endearing to me. I was a kid who spilled and made messes with a clockwork regularity. I hated taking showers and baths. I loved spending my time in the “creek” near our house, crawling through tunnels and imagining battles and adventures along its length[2].

                Fourth grade was at Northwest. My teacher lived down the street from my family, and I spent days and weeks at her house. Her son was my proximal best friend[3]. Her classroom is the first place I ever misbehaved and where I discovered how much fun it is to make people laugh. Monty, Curly, Doc, and I paid much more attention to each than any lesson. My first school humiliation came from going into the class bathroom and having Monty follow me in as a joke. Mrs. Burns brought us both out. The class howled. I didn’t enjoy that. Maybe I decided that if a group was going to laugh at me, it would be on my terms. I wish it was that clear.

                But then Doc and Curly came to my house one day. I’m not sure if they’d walked across town or had been ditched by their families at the grocery store, McDonald’s , or Wal-Mart that was near our house, but here those dirty kids were. In this new context I was frightened of them. Frightened of what my parents would think of them (instinctively realizing we were different from each other) and frightened of what they were capable of outside of Mrs. Burns’s iron hand and rigid classroom control. Curly immediately ran into my neighbor’s yard and began hanging from a tree I was terrified to touch. Mr. Day was the meanest man I knew. I never touched his property. A baseball hit into his garden, even though it wasn’t fenced, was gone. Need a new one. We can’t get that one. And there’s Curly hanging from his tree, bending its branches dangerously and bouncing his full weight as he hooted like a monkey. Monty was digging through our garage for things to do. He came out with my dad’s pitching wedge. My stomach twisted in knots. You can’t do these things. How can you be so certain this is ok? I don’t know how to tell you not to do them. You should just know.

                My dad came out and their … somebodies … pulled up smoking in a wan yellow jalopy. It felt like they were being chased off, though the timing was coincidental. I followed my dad back into the house, and he asked me who those boys were. I remember getting all those anxious feelings I’m used to now: stomach in knots, cold, tongue thick and slow. There was nothing in my dad’s tone, expression, or demeanor to make me feel so defensive, so confessional. My dad was not looming over me with a booming voice demanding to know their identities. He was curious. Probably glad to see that someone seemed to like me[4]. He even drove me to Doc’s house one Saturday to hang out. Not one word was spoken against those boys.

                But I never felt right around them. Something was irreconcilably different between us. We didn’t live the same way, see the world the same way. They were smarter, braver, and funnier than I was, but they didn’t have nearly the success I had[5]. They were always on the edge of my consciousness and we could laugh together in the right moments, but they weren’t my friends. As we went through middle school, they got in fights[6]. And they attended special classes. Somehow all of these kids who I knew to be funny and smart were being pulled out of class for Special Ed. By high school, Curly had dropped out and Doc and Monty spent almost all of their time in the Special Ed rooms. When I’d walk by, I could see them in there. Humiliatingly condescending posters on the wall[7]. They never seemed to be doing much. The room was sparse and their faces were masks of frustration and apathy. Why wasn’t I in there?

                My parents had me tested for the gifted program, and I came back with the results I always came back with: not quite in, not quite out. I could be the dumbest kid in the gifted class or the smartest kid in the regular class. I don’t remember making that decision. I’m guessing my dad picked the second option for me. Sounds like him.

                But if I’m supposedly almost gifted, why was Monty in the Special Ed class? Why was Curly? I became and remain convinced that these boys socio-economic culture was mis-read. They were unruly, uninterested, and unapologetic. I watched teachers try again and again with me[8], calling me a success when it had taken me three weeks to master something it took other kids a few days. I felt like a phony. And when Monty would creep out of his seat to explore what mischief he could create, it was the sign of his bad upbringing. The sigh and the look on the teacher’s face was enough for me to see that she didn’t believe in Monty. And if she wasn’t going to, who would?

                So how does all this make me a teacher? Well, I certainly didn’t think I’d be one when I was in high school, but the gravity of the unfairness kept drawing me back. I became the critical, questioning a**hole that I am because I grew up around so much educational hypocrisy. What teacher would admit that he or she doesn’t believe in all of her kids? And yet I felt surrounded by them. They catered to the kids with the right last name, the right address, membership in the right church. They gave them chance after chance, the benefit of the doubt, filled in the blanks for them in their semi-coherent answers in discussion. But my friends from those other parts of town[9] either got with the program or were dismissed out of hand. Their disengagement seemed to fulfill an expectation. Kids like that aren’t interested in school. I’m not going to work harder than they do. I bristle when I hear my colleagues say these things and find myself challenged to remain professional in my comebacks[10].

                I’m here because being marginalized is so easy. I’m here because someone has to be the jerk who will challenge the status quo.

               

---

[1] Should I call them associates? Acquaintances? Friends is certainly too strong a word.

[2] I’d rather ignore the fact that the current me realizes that it was a drainage ditch. These kids wouldn’t have even cared about the difference.

[3] A concept I discovered or invented in middle school.

[4] Sorry, too pitiful. People liked me.

[5] Not that I set the elementary or middle school world on fire academically.

[6] Sometimes ugly, bloody affairs that were the fodder of school legend. “Donny threw his cousin Carl into a telephone pole so hard, his face exploded!” I believed that until high school even though I had talked to Carl the next day. He had a black eye.

[7] “We can’t spell success without ‘u’!” one cartoon own screeched with an accusing finger-feather pointing at me.

[8] Two hardest things to learn in fourth grade? The 7 times tables and that a three-letter word for color is ‘hue’.

[9] Which I rode my bike to as often as possible, and, you know, I just realized, they were on the other side of the railroad tracks. Whoa.

[10] Him: “I’m not going to work harder than they do.” Me: “Not much risk of that.”