The things you gave your life to broken . . .

"If you can bear to see the truth you've spoken
twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
and stoop, and build 'em up with worn out tools.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss . . . "

Rudyard Kipling must have known a thing or two about life. Though not the greatest writer to ever tread the earth, I sometimes suspect the literary world sells him short - perhaps it is because I, like he, grew up between two cultures, linked to both and identified with neither, that I see in his writings things which I suspect go unnoticed by many readers.

Or, maybe I am just biased in his favor because of this poem. Aside from The Jungle Book, "If" may be Kipling's best-known piece of writing. Although I like it now, my first impulse, years ago, was simple rejection. My 7th grade English teacher handed it out and told us all that we were going to memorize it. As I was, at that time, beginning to define the limits of my own personal sovereignty by delineating what I would and would not do, and as I had a particular aversion to dwarfish, red-haired teachers, I decided that this was one thing I would not be doing. After all, it was difficult, probably nearly impossible, and furthermore, stupid.

I must have thought of something cleverly biting to say about the poem, as I can think of no other reason that informing my father that I was not going to do it should have seemed like a smart idea. He asked for it, and then read it over. I remember him sitting at the kitchen table, legs crossed, head bowed over the piece of paper as he read it. He stayed there for a long time. Far longer than I thought necessary.

When he looked up he fixed me with a gimlet eye that only a chicken could approximate for cold, rapacious intensity. It was the look which usually indicated that simply by standing there I was treading a piano-wires thickness away from a death that would surely involve a periodic slow strangulation with my own intestines as a warm-up to actual dismemberment. I guessed the stupidity of the poem had not met his expectation.

My father told me 1. I was going to do it, and 2. He was going to to memorize it with me. He also said that someday I might like it. I doubted this greatly, but was simply grateful that the conversation was brief, and made no mention of the various uses of forks and pliers. My father worked with me, and eventually I did memorize it. And then I forgot it.

Fast forward 20 years and I am working in a greeting card factory over the Xmas break. My job was to load paper into one side of the printing press, then walk around the other side, wait a few minutes, and unload the printed cards back into the box from which they came, and repeat. I was so bored I wished to shoot myself. Many of my university acquaintances had family to go see, a lot of them had enough money that the little bastards didn't have to work, and it is no exaggeration to say that I pitied myself a fair bit.

The clankety-clank-clankety-clank-hiss-clankety-clank-clankety-clank-hiss of the printing press went on for long enough that I found myself in my boredom chanting nonsense to myself, and out of the repetitive chanting the poem, long forgotten, started emerging in bits and snatches. For a few days I worked on reassembling the poem, remembering every day more and more. And slowly, I began to see my current position in a much different light. It didn't matter that some kids got to be lazy and have everything handed to them. It didn't matter that some people had somewhere to go for the holidays. What mattered is how I acted in what I did, and there was a nobility to be found in this experience, if it was approached correctly.

Fast forward 7 years, and I had a private student in Valencia, Spain. He and his family had come to Spain from Argentina, because the economy in Argentina had crashed enough times, and wiped out their savings enough times that they had decided to start a new life. He left his job as a lawyer in Argentina, and was now working occasional work as a night security guard, trying to support his family at the age of 50, struggling to make ends meet, living in a tiny dark apartment, but still managing to take English lessons because they were important to him. I watched Julio and Marta's struggle for months, saw in the unspoken lines around his stories the scrimping that was going on - how he and his wife worked to hide from their daughter the truth of the situation. At around the same time I told them Cyn and I were leaving Spain, he announced to me that they were, too. The savings would soon be tapped out, and they had to go back. I felt so bad for them, to have tried so bravely, and in a sense, failed.

The last time I saw him he gave me a present. It was a piece of paper, of nice stock, longer than normal, rolled up with a ribbon around it. When I unrolled it, it was a pretty script in Spanish. It took me a while to realize that he had given me the poem IF. He said this poem was a beautiful poem, which meant a lot to him.

I can understand why. It speaks of winning and losing and struggle, and how nobility lies not in these things, but in HOW you win and lose and struggle. What I hadn't realized, all those years ago when my father was reading the poem, was that he and my mother had just come through the most difficult struggle of their lives. They had exerted so much effort, on so many fronts, trying to do the correct thing against the odds, and in return, had been told they were failures. They were unfit. What I didn't understand in those days, when I watched my father come home from his job as a carpenter, and sit at the empty table in his workboots and flannel shirt, and night after night silently contemplate his own cracked and skinned hands, was that he was, in his heart, a failure. He had tried, and was trying, but had ended up, after so much effort, in limbo - in a place he didn't want to be, in a job he didn't want to do, watching the years slide by, not knowing where to go.

When Cynthia and I came to Poland, it was for one reason - to get graduate degrees. The money we were making was small, the amount deducted every month for the degree was high. The amount left was barely enough to live on. When we heard that the director of the program was going to be in our town for Thanksgiving, Cynthia volunteered our kitchen and dining room to host the dinner. I stayed dressed in my best, in order to make a good impression when he arrived. It must have succeeded, because a full day and a half later, as he left, he tentatively offered to let us manage the site, in return for one free tuition.

Eventually our responsibilities expanded. In addition to managing all the logistical concerns for the particular site, I took over the admissions process, screening the candidates who wanted to join our program. Cynthia began to do all the liaising with the college in the states. Although our compensation was increased commensurate with our responsibilities, at a certain point we stopped doing it for the financial compensation, and began to do it because we cared. We believed in the vision of this program. The idea that we could serve others, people like us, who had made their lives abroad, and wanted to advance in their careers, yet couldn't afford to uproot their lives and go back to the states to pay for a graduate degree there.

Because we saw ourselves as serving a larger goal, of providing good opportunities for people, we really devoted ourselves to the task. We put in long hours. When we stopped to figure it up, the financial compensation, much appreciated and very needed in our budget, came to no more than minimum wage due to the sheer number of hours we put into the projects. We tried to strengthen the organization, developing best practices and good policies to insure long-term success. We tried to both minimize our financial risk, and introduce a new level of transparency and honesty with the students. We wanted them to know they were important, and that we cared about them.

In return, some said thank you. One class bought us a bottle of vodka. Other's offered to pay us if we split the organization up, and stole it out from under the director. Other's created small tornadoes of intrigue by suggesting that someone was greedily profiting off the students, who were being taken advantage of. The ingratitude and mob-like mentality of any group always amazes me, and has taught me that I should be one who goes out of his way to express gratitude to others, and that I should never expect a group to conform to the rules of reasonable and appropriate behavior we would expect of individuals.

I don't mean to whine here. Some of the students I will remember forever for their decency and kindness - their sheer solid character. I have met some gems, whom I will treasure appropriately. But largely, much of the education I received in this program has been from the schemers and complainers. To them I owe a larger debt of thanks. They have taught me that working overtime for a pittance on someone's behalf is no reason to expect they won't expect more. Temper tantrums on the part of others must be excused. A single sardonic response on my part should never be allowed. As an appointed leader, I must always bring to the table the highest standards of behavior and personal responsibility.

As I said, my wife and I truly bought into the vision of this organization. We gave of ourselves to it. We did everything we could for it, and last Sunday, agreed to let it die.

The program has had difficulty for some time in attracting a sufficient amount of students. We always considered this a marketing matter, and so tried to explore new avenues of making ourselves more visible. These obviously cost more money, which moved us into a precarious situation. We tried starting up a second program, and due to an unfortunate combination of a late start in marketing and a few people pulling out late in the game, ended up under-attended. When a few people who attended later reneged on paying, our position went from precarious to a shade of red. Eventually we recognized the inevitable.

We tried, and hard. We loved it, and it has done something good for a number of students. Every student who graduated while we were working for this organization we count as a success story to our credit. Yet in the end, if not enough people apply, if the balance sheet tips closer and closer to the red, if in the end people do not value what they have received enough to pay for it, if after all the hours and hours of work, it is no closer to being sustainable than before, then perhaps you are not helping people as much as you once thought. If so, you must let it go.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling

The tears of children

The measure of a great teacher is not in the test grades of his students, or the supposed "learning" which accumulates like so much cotton-wool between the synapses of their brains, or even in the future achievements or happiness of your students. The measure of a great teacher is in how many students cry on the last day.

Or cry in general, really. I am not going to be so picky as to just limit it to the last day. I try to begin prepping my students to cry early on in the year, letting them know that far from being unacceptable to cry in class, it gives me great joy when they do so, and sometimes is the only proper response to my behaviour as a teacher. I ask them periodically if they would like to cry, and if the response is negative I will sometimes go further and ask what I might be able to do to change that. Furthermore, I tell them, that the tears of children are precious. So if they are going to cry, please let me know right before, and I will give them a glass jar to catch the tears in. Voodoo doesn't just require dolls, you know. And virgin's tears go for extra!

Unfortunately, I feel as though I have failed in one of my classes, and egregiously so. Throughout the whole year they have manifested a stubborn and rebellious cheeriness that just rankles me to no end. Despite the fact that I refer to them alternately as "children" and "evil children" they refuse to acknowledge being insulted. Though I use their names in the example sentences, and place them in the most embarrassing of "hypothetical situations" involving Michael Jackson and his monkey, I have not had a single complaint registered with the head of the school. I have even stooped to shooting them with a rubber dart pistol in hopes of inducing feelings of victimhood, and still have not generated the necessary angst and broken hopelessness one would expect from a group of teenagers subjected to a relentless barrage of withering criticism and absurdly petty demands from an arbitrary dictator of a teacher.

In their defense, though, it would appear that my methods were, perhaps, ill-advised. The reactions to being shot with the rubber suction-cup darts, for example, was often to smile sweetly, and place the dart in their pocket. Such passive-aggressivity should have indicated to me earlier that a change of method was called for. Not that all the responses were passive-aggressive. One student stole the pistol and in a fair feat of marksmanship, shot me in the back of the head while I was writing at the board. I have also been on the receiving end of at least one thrown pencil, (why do they think things thrown at them in rage need to be thrown back?) which left a mark on my shirt, and, I need not say, a spurt of dark joy in my heart.

If this violence had been the rule, I think I would have been able to successfully adapt my methods and break their wills sooner. But the outbursts of violence were rare, and the intervening period would see gifts of, for example, chocolate, or a box of cookies on teacher's day. Sometimes when a student went to the ice cream shop before class, they would pick up an extra goody for me. All of this had the end result of confusing my strategy, as it made it difficult to judge the effect my teaching was having on them. Contrary to exhibiting signs of weakness and depression, they seemed to draw strength from the class.

It is not as though I didn't try to change my methods - I did. Partway through the second semester, I realized that other teachers had already calloused these students by taking ostensibly useful and interesting information and presenting it in the most mind-numbingly boring and useless ways, ruthlesssly stamping out any possible spark of interest or applicability to their lives by focusing in on the most pointless and trifling detail while ignoring the larger conceptual picture. These teachers had really outdone themselves by utilizing the most outdated, soul-crushing and joyless methods of teaching. Moreover, the students were independently boosting their endurance by subjecting themselves to long hours of study at home, independently, as well as arising early in the morning, taking extra classes of language, dance, or subject specific tutoring on the side, and staying up late at night to do their homework.

Once I realised this, I knew that if I were going to leave a dent on these children's souls, I would have to make it past the good-humored armor, the patience and endurance they had developed over the years. I would need to get them to let down their guard, and then, when they were unsuspecting, I could savagely destroy whatever personal confidence or joy was left cowering in some obscure, darkened corner of their frail little hearts.

The idea was actually suggested to my by suggestopedia, and one of my student's journals. If you have never read about the language learning method known as suggestopedia, and would like to take a nostalgic trip down the weirdness that was the 60's and 70's, I cannot recommend highly enough doing some research on suggestopedia. Any language-learning method whose founder begins his webpage with "Suggestopedia is a science for developing . . . non-hypnotic methods for teaching / learning languages" ranks pretty high in my book. Furthermore, if you are going to be a lingual-psycho-learning guru, Lozanov is a GREAT name to go with this hairstyle. (Note picture.)

The student's (obviously selfishly-motivated) suggestion was that the only way this class could be improved was to bring cookies to the class, and give them to the students. As suggestopedia, (a NON-hypnotic method of teaching, it should be noted,) recommends creating a pleasant atmosphere for the students, by utilizing art, music, (this I had been doing since much earlier in the year,) soft colors and generally a warm and fuzzy demeanor in the classroom in order to lower their affective barriers, I recognized that my best hope for getting these children to break down crying by the end of the year was to soften them with treats, thus lowering their barriers, and then hit them with the abuse.

Thus began the campaign of random cookies. It had to occur at random intervals, because tests on chickens have revealed that positive reinforcement at random intervals had a greater effect on behavior than a consistent, predictable reinforcement. As I try to conduct my classes with an eye toward scientific method, I randomized not only the days on which cookie-reinforcement would be used, but also the stage in the class at which the cookies would be produced. Furthermore, the role the cookies played would also be varied. Sometimes the cookies were freely distributed to all. Other times they were given to students whose answers were particularly good. Once, when the students had not done their homework, I simply stood in front of them and ate "their" cookies for them. On an unrelated topic, it should be noted that the students showed a preference for jelly-filled cookies over simple butter ones. Chocolate, sadly, cannot be accounted for as a factor, since it was present to a greater or lesser degree in all the cookies.

As a corollary to my strategy of random cookies, I would also periodically buy a small cup of hot-chocolate for a student who appeared to be depressed. The hope was that buy buoying their spirits at their most vulnerable moments, they might be less prepared for the neglect and cold-hearted criticism that would ensue, and thus I could more easily bring them to tears when I turned on them.

Yet somehow, as the end of the year looms over us, all my careful preparations have been for naught. It would seem that the treats and the music have been effective in lowering their barriers, but have also instilled the children with a persistent belief that, contrary to all evidence and my outright assurances to the contrary, that I am fond of them. Of course, being the shallow little bastards that they are, this somehow translates into greater feelings of self-worth (ie- the "teacher likes me, ergo, I am likeable" fallacy, which totally disregards the supremely reasonable and rather self-evident possibility that A. that it is all a malicious plot to cause you pain and suffering in the end, or, B that IF the teacher did like you, the teacher's judgment is quite likely unsound to begin with.)

And thus it is that once again, yet another year draws to its conclusion, and a nagging sense of failure tugs at my heart as I bid goodbye to a still resilient, cheerful, hard-working and intelligent bunch of students. I will not forget them ever, even if every time I think of them it is with some regret over tears left un-shed.

Would'cha? In Lodz?

Lodz cannot be typed on this keyboard, or if it can, I don't know how. What is lacking is a tilted bar across the upright of the L, which would change it from "Lowh-duhz" to "Woodge."

A number of Polish cities are currently running ads on BBC to attract tourism and business. Some fall quite flat - others are just a bit corny. One which I am afraid was particularly effective was one which repeatedly asks "Would you - like to see Poland's longest street of bars and clubs? Would you - like to visit a famous film school?" Would you be surprised how it's pronounced? You Lodz!"

What so pleased me about this ad was that it took what I had thought of as the city's most crippling attribute - the fact that the pronunciation of the name bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the spelling, and focused exclusively on it till you would probably forget your own mother's name first. And now that I have been there, I can assure you the name is not their biggest problem in marketing the city.

Woodge (Lodz) is Poland's second largest city. When a long weekend arrived recently, we cast about for somewhere to go, and eventually decided, most likely under the influence of this ad, to to to Woodge (Lodz.) Along with our friends Peter and Rachel, we reserved rooms, and bought tickets from Krakow to Warsaw, Warsaw to Lodz.

What we noticed immediately upon arriving in Krakow is that EVERYBODY was headed somewhere for holiday. The highways were choked going out of the city. The line to buy tickets in the train station was 16 people deep. Even the city buses were crammed full of people lugging huge back packs. When we finally got our tickets to Warsaw, however, and went to the platform, we found that despite all the travel apparently going on, apparently no one was headed our direction. When we arrived in Warsaw and finally found our way to the platform for Lodz, we began to suspect we might be the only people going to Lodz this weekend.

Our first impression of Lodz, as we departed the station, was post-communist depression. The buildings were gray, blocky, concrete, with a good layer of soot and dirt to hold them up. At the entrance to the park facing the train station what appeared to be a junkie prostitute was having a desperately wheedling conversation with two men. I say appeared to be because firstly, the way women dress here in general makes it hard to separate the prostitutes from the honest women, and secondly, I have always been particularly poor at discerning ladies of the night. It is usually only after I have had a 2-hour dinner while admiring the night-life on the street that it occurs to me as odd that there are women who have not moved from their regularly spaced intervals along the street in all the time I have been watching.

As we walked toward our hotel, we passed a few nicer, newer buildings, but the general impression of dank and unkempt persisted. We made it past "Poland's longest street of shops and bars," which did strike us as nice, and then continued on the 5 blocks or so to our hotel.

A few blocks away from our hotel we were approaching a group of 3 young men drinking unsteadily on their feet when Cynthia decided to go back turn back and buy some water in a shop we had just passed. This somehow attracted the eye of the most heavy-set hooligan, who began barking at us as we walked away. As we waited out on the street Peter and I remarked to each other that since we resembled his cousins neither by smell nor appearance, he might feel threatened and might therefore be barking to mark his territory. Or it could be a display brought on by the appearance of females from outside his band, meant to impress them with his prowess. When the ladies in question at last finished their purchases we walked past the young males in question, who confirmed our suspicions by emitting a musky odour and shouting aggressively in my face as I walked past. It was a true "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" moment, and I could have wished for nothing other than a pair of khaki shorts and a silver-haired Marlon Perkins calling me "Jim" to make the moment complete.