What’s In a Name?

03/07/2023Dusty 3 Comments

I want to write about the AP exam I scored. But those scores haven’t been released yet, and neither have the examples and so on, which show how the scores were earned; and I don’t want to get in trouble for posting confidential material.

So, without going into too much detail about the exam or the prompt or how a student earned a specific score, I’m going to talk about one general aspect of the exam which I noticed this year more than most: terminology.

In keeping with the theme I seem to have established of talking about my dad, and also of using quotations to center and introduce my thoughts, here is one of my dad’s all-time favorite quotes:

“The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing itself.”

This is from the science fiction novel, The World of Null-A, by A.E. van Vogt. It hasn’t been turned into a meme on the internet — so I’m going to put the cover of the novel here, because it’s awesome.

A.E. van Vogt – The World of Null-A (1948) Review | A Sky of Books and Movies — *Wouldn’t you love to live in Purple World? Arches and spires everywhere? STAIRCASES TO NOWHERE?!?*

The quote is slightly adapted from a statement originally from Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American philosopher and engineer, and while van Vogt’s words have not been memed, Korzybski’s have been.

Map And Territory - We Confuse The Map With The Territory

That’s the full quote, and you can see how quickly it makes one’s eyes cross. Here it is made even more confusing by the visuals:

The Map is Not The Territory – Explained in Simple Terms – Welcome to Club Street Post — *This was made by someone who does not understand how to explain things.*

But that’s okay, here’s the simpler version, complete with standardized background image:

*The more observant among you will notice the resemblance to a meme I used in yesterday’s post here.*

But really, I prefer this last version, because I also like Watts’s iteration of this — and I love Rene Magritte.

The map is not the territory - Tom McCallum

So the point of this, then, is to recognize the limitations of representation and image — and of language itself. The map is probably the best example, because a map always sacrifices detail for coverage, showing a greater area while not showing everything about that area. If a map showed every detail of the area it depicted, it would be a photograph, not a map — and its value would be limited.

(Though it might be funny sometimes.)

On some level, this shows the difference between “book knowledge” and “world knowledge” — which my students still, still, call “street smarts,” a perfect example of a name that has lasted despite its limitations, which makes it a perfect example of the second half of this statement. If you know the name of a thing, that is analogous to “book knowledge;” and if you understand the thing (which is where I think the quote is going here, to a point about understanding, because certainly with a concrete object there is no doubt that the word could be the thing itself: I’m not sitting in the word “chair” right now.), that is equivalent to the experiential and deeper understanding implied by “street smarts.” Knowing the name for something does not mean you understand that thing, because the word is not the thing itself; again like the map, words reduce specific details in order to gain another value — generally universality, and economy, meaning I can communicate a fair amount of information, to a lot of people, without too many words. If I say I own a black SUV, then you don’t have much detail about my car — but (if you speak English) you have a general understanding of the category of vehicle to which my car belongs, and a general idea of its size and shape and appearance and so on, because we understand what aspects are included in the category “SUV,” and we know the color “black.” Also, as my wife has pointed out many times, with steadily growing annoyance as each year passes, all SUVs look the same — and a large proportion of them are black. But that means, while you can get a general idea of many, many cars with just two words, you can’t really identify those specific cars very well. And you definitely don’t know the things that make my car special, that make my car into my car. Not terribly important to understand the special things about my car, of course; but if you want to understand a person, you need to know much more than their name.

This comes into focus with the AP exam because I teach my students that they don’t really need to know the name of what they are talking about: but they need to understand the thing. This is, clearly, not how all AP teachers instruct their students, because I had MANY essays that used vocabulary the student did not really understand: and it showed. They named things they didn’t really have, because they didn’t understand the thing named. So that I don’t do that, to explain the details lacking in the term “AP exam,” so that you have more understanding of this thing instead of just knowing the name, the essay I scored last month was for the AP Language and Composition exam, which focuses on non-fiction writing, and examines primarily rhetoric. “Rhetoric” is another good example of a word which people know and use without really understanding it, because the connotations of the word have changed; now it mostly comes in a phrase like “empty rhetoric,” and is used to describe someone — usually a politician — who is speaking insincerely, just paying lip service to some idea or audience, without saying anything of substance; or in more extreme cases, using words to lie and manipulate their audience for a nefarious purpose. My preferred definition of rhetoric, the one I teach my students, is: “Using language to achieve a purpose.” What I am doing now in this blog is rhetorical: I am choosing words and using examples that I think will achieve my purpose — in this case to explain my idea, and to a lesser extent, to convince my audience that I am correct in my argument: that knowing the name of a thing is less important than understanding the actual thing.

So in the AP exam on Language and Composition, which focuses on rhetoric — or understanding and explaining how a speaker or writer uses language to achieve their purpose, as when a politician tries to convince an audience to vote for him or her — there are 50 or so multiple choice questions, and three essay questions. This year I scored the second essay question, which is the Rhetorical Analysis question; for this year’s exam (This is not privileged information, by the way; the questions were released right after the exam in May. It’s the answers that are still secret.) they used a commencement speech given at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville by former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove. The goal of the essay was to “Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Dove makes to deliver her message about what she wishes for her audience of graduating students.”

Interestingly enough, the AP exam writers have given hints to the students in this instruction, which I’ve taken from the exam. They generally give important context in their instructions, quite intentionally; it’s easier to analyze rhetoric if you understand the context in which the speech or writing was delivered, so knowing that this speech was given at a commencement, at a university, in 2016, gives you a better idea of what is going to be said in the speech — you get the general shape of what is included in the thing named “commencement address.” One of the key aspects of this speech by Dove is both the expectation of what is included in a commencement address, and how she subverts that expectation: and that centers around the term “wish.” That’s the hint in the instruction there, along with the buzzwords “message” and “audience,” which are commonly part of a study of rhetoric and of rhetorical analysis.

Okay, that wasn’t interesting. I’ve lost you here, I realize. Let me use fewer words and just give you the general gist of my point: when students were analyzing Dove’s rhetoric, they did much better if they explained what she was doing and why, but didn’t know the proper name for her strategy; some of them knew the name of the strategy — or of a strategy — but couldn’t really explain it. They had the name, but not the thing itself.

Partly that’s because the study of rhetoric is very old, and thus has an enormous amount of terminology attached to it: much of it based on Latin and Greek roots, which makes the words sound really smart to modern speakers and readers of American English. It’s cool to use the words “antithesis” and “juxtaposition” and “zeugma,” so students remember the words and use them for that reason. I think it is also partly because a number of AP classes focus on remembering the word for something, rather than knowing the thing itself, because lists of words are easier to teach and easier to memorize and easier to test. Partly it’s because students under pressure try to impress teachers with the things they can do, to dazzle us and make us not notice the things they can’t do — like actually explain the thing they named.

Again, I don’t want to get into too many specifics on this particular essay because it hasn’t been released yet and I don’t want to get in trouble, so let me just give general examples.

There’s a rhetorical device called “polysyndeton.” (Cool name, isn’t it? Little annoying that the two y‘s are pronounced differently…) It means the use of more conjunctions than would be strictly necessary for grammar. If I listed all of my favorite activities and I said, “I love reading and writing and music and games and spending time with my pets and eating delicious food and taking walks with my wife,” that would be an example of polysyndeton. And if you were writing an essay about my rhetoric (Please don’t), you could certainly say that I used polysyndeton, and quote that sentence as an example. And if you used that sentence, it would be a correct example, and the person scoring your essay would recognize that you know what polysyndeton is, and you correctly defined and identified it, which is surely worth some points. Right?

But what does polysyndeton do? What did I do when I wrote the sentence that way, instead of, for instance, “I love reading, writing, music, games, spending time with my pets, eating delicious food, and taking walks with my wife.”? The ability to understand that, and to explain that — and, most importantly for the AP exam and for rhetorical analysis, the ability to explain how the effect I achieved through the use of polysyndeton helps to deliver my message, to achieve my purpose — that’s what matters. Not knowing the name.

(It’s a bad example here, by the way, because I made up the sentence just to show what the word meant, so it isn’t really part of my larger purpose; the purpose of using polysyndeton there was just to show what the hell polysyndeton is. And sure, I guess it was effective for that.)

The worst offenders here, on this year’s exam as in most, are the terms logos, pathos, and ethos, which are words used to describe certain kinds of argument, and also certain aspects of rhetoric. The words are Greek, and were chosen and defined by Aristotle; most rhetoric teachers at least mention them, usually, I imagine, as a way to show that there are many different ways to win an argument and to persuade an audience. That’s why I mention them in my class. But while a lot of students know the words, they don’t understand the thing itself, and so they find items in a passage they’re analyzing that looks like it belongs in one of those categories. Like statistics, which they identify as logos arguments, meaning arguments that appeal to reason and logic, which is indeed one way that statistics can be used. Dove uses a statistic in her speech, and a raft of student writers identified that as an instance of logos. The problem is that it isn’t logos, partly because it’s not a real statistic — she uses the phrase “150% effort,” and at one point lowers that to “75% effort” and “50% effort;” but at no time is she trying to present a reasoned and logical argument through the use of those numbers, which of course don’t come from any study or anything like that — and even more, because she’s not really trying to persuade her audience.

She was telling her audience an anecdote. And that’s where I ran into a stumbling block, over and over again in reading and scoring these essays: just because students know the name for something doesn’t mean they understand the thing: and just because students remember the name for something doesn’t mean they remember how to spell it.

Let me note, here and now, that these students are brilliant and courageous for even trying to do this damn test, for even trying to write three college-level essays in two hours AFTER answering 45 difficult multiple-choice questions in one hour. Also, because this was written under pressure in a short time frame, and with almost certainly only one draft, mistakes are inevitable and should be entirely ignored when they don’t get in the way of understanding. I knew what every one of these students were trying to say, so I ignored their spelling, in terms of scoring the essay. I also ignored their generally atrocious handwriting, not least because mine is as bad as any of theirs and usually worse.

I just thought this was a fine example of knowing a term but not really knowing it. Ya know?

(Also I apologize for the image quality. Just trying to make a point. And the picture is not the point.)

The first one gets it right. Another one gets it right — but spells “English” as “Enligh.” Also please note the spelling of “repetition” which students repeatedly struggled with.

Fun, huh? I scored 695 essays this year. Last year it was over a thousand. And that exam passage also used anecdotes.

I’m really not trying to mock the students; just using this fact to show that knowing a term doesn’t mean you understand the term, because the word is not the thing itself. By the same token, knowing the spelling doesn’t mean you know the term, or that you understand the thing itself; which is why we ignore misspellings in scoring these essays. I think understanding the thing is much more important than knowing the word — and I’m a word guy. I love words. (Flibbertigibbet! Stooge! Cyclops! Wheeeee!) But I’m a word guy because I think this world is magnificent and incredible, and I want to understand as much of it as possible; words help me to do that, and to share my understanding of the world we live in. That complicated image I used above to show how some people can’t explain things well? Here, I’ll bring it down here so you don’t have to be confused which one I’m talking about.

This makes a few important points, even if it makes them badly. I do like how it goes from an image of the Earth, to a jumbled collage of colors inside the head, to the one word “world.” I think that, once you can follow it, makes this point well, how much translation and simplification happens between observed reality and the words we use to represent them. Though it should also lead to another head, of a listener, and show how that one word activates their own jumbled collage of colors in their head represented by the word “world.” (Far be it from me to suggest making this more complicated, though.) Because communication happens between two minds, and both minds contribute to the communication: which is why language works despite this simplifying process.

I do also like the statement at the bottom of the image: “Change the map, you change the world.” (Even though I hate how they capitalized and punctuated it.) Because that’s the last point here: while words are not the things they represent, they are incredibly important to our understanding of the world and our reality. Because we think and communicate in words. Not exclusively: my wife, for one, is deeply eloquent in communicating with images; my dogs can communicate with a look; musicians communicate with sounds that are not words. And so on. But language is our best and most effective form of interpersonal communication: and also one of the main ways we catalogue and recall our knowledge inside our heads. So getting the names of things right is incredibly important to our ability to use the information we know, and to communicate it to others. And what is the most important factor in getting the names of things right? Understanding the things we are talking about.

Because a rose by any other name would smell as sweet — but if you want people to know you are talking about one of these, you better call it a rose.

How to Say Rose in Different Languages | 1800Flowers Petal Talk

And for my sake, please spell it right.

In Memoriam

02/07/2023Dusty 1 Comment

Tis Better to have Loved and Lost #Inspiration #Tennyson – Poems for Warriors

I am now always suspicious of quotations that I find on the internet. Too many of them get misquoted and misattributed; particularly when they are turned into lovely images with flowers and weathered wood in the background, as this one is.

Like this, for instance.

Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still. – FS News Online

There are many iterations of this one, which does in fact seem to be a Chinese proverb. Though the other images don’t have a baby sea turtle in them, so, y’know — lame. But definitely a Chinese proverb, at least according to the majority of the Google results.

Or wait: maybe it’s from a fantasy series by an author named Jeff Wheeler. Who created a culture named Dawanjir. (To be fair, the series is strongly influenced by Chinese culture, according to Goodreads. But still. This meme just says it is a Dawanjir proverb, and then slaps the author’s name under it.)

Jeff Wheeler Quote: “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still. – Dawanjir — *Also, where’s the turtle?*

Or maybe it was this Joshua Muax guy?

I'm not afraid of growing slowly,as long as i'm not standing: OwnQuotes.com — *I love that this website is called “Ownquotes.”*

No, wait, I’m wrong — it was Benjamin Franklin who said it.

Benjamin Franklin quote: By improving yourself, the world is made better. Be not...

(Benjamin Franklin is probably the one person most frequently given internet credit for stuff he never said.)

*This one is from a 1907 book of sermons by William L. Watkinson*

*This one’s from a 1919 religious advice publication, written by Rev. H.K. Williams.*

PosterEnvy - Ben Franklin Healthy Quote - NEW Humorous Nutrition Poster (he039) — *This one’s just mean.*

But it turns out that, in fact, my first meme has it right:

Alfred Lord Tennyson - 'Tis better to have loved and lost...

That is the actual quote, and it was originally written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in a poem (a VERY LONG poem) he wrote after a good friend, Arthur Henry Hallum, died young. The poem is called “In Memoriam A.H.H.” And I would quote it here, but — seriously, it’s over 180 pages long. It’s here, if you’d like to read it.

All of this is a very roundabout way to come to my question: is this true? Is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?

I started thinking about this last week, when I went to visit my father and help out with the memorial for his wife. My dad’s wife Linda (who was, of course, my stepmother, but I never ever called her that or thought of her that way) passed away in February, from complications from paraplegia, which she had lived with for about two and a half years. She and my father had been together at that point for thirty years, give or take; they had been married for almost twenty-five years.

Linda’s passing was hard. The two and a half years before that had been extremely hard, on both Linda and my father. The four months after her death were very difficult for Dad, as well. And so at the end of all of that, I certainly found myself wondering: was it worth it?

I won’t presume to even try to answer this for my father; I only bring up his love and loss to explain why my thoughts turned down such a cynical and morbid path. When I was thinking about this, I was thinking about myself and my wife: we also have been together for almost thirty years, and married for nearly twenty. I hope and expect to be with her until one of us passes: and that thought was the one that started me on this track.

Let’s be clear: the answer is yes. Without a doubt, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I would never give up my wife, or my life with my wife, no matter how difficult the end of our lives together may be. And I have some idea, now, just how difficult it may be, for one or both of us — but that doesn’t matter, because suffering would never wash out all the incredible happiness and the years – decades — of simple contentment which my marriage has brought me. I do not undervalue contentment, as I hope you don’t, either — as many people do when they think about love, and how love changes from fiery passion to simple human affection and connection. The novel The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, with which I have tormented several years’ worth of AP Literature classes (The book is good, but it’s written in Victorian English, which is not my students’ cup of tea; and the main character is intentionally obnoxious in some ways, which makes it hard to sympathize with her. Actually, all the characters are obnoxious, which generally makes students want to give up on the book.), features a protagonist who believes that life should be mad passion, extreme highs and lows, especially in love; this leads her to unfortunate decisions and a bad ending. My romance has stayed more passionate than many, I think (Mainly because my wife is SUPER hot); but even if it fades to simple companionship, I think that would be a wonderful thing to have in my twilight years.

More to the point, there are people who avoid romance and particularly commitment because they believe that the fire fades, that the passion diminishes; and that is somehow sad — and therefore they avoid love because they don’t want to suffer that diminishment. For them, tis better to have never loved at all, than to have loved and then lost that love, at least the passionate part of that love. And those people are clearly wrong.

But here’s the thing: I don’t know if they are. They don’t know if they’re right. Tennyson didn’t know if he was right: because there’s no way to compare the two states of being. If you have loved and lost, then you can’t have never loved; if you’ve never loved, then you can’t have loved and lost.

I’m not trying to logic my way into a clever Gotcha! to disprove Lord Tennyson; even I’m not that annoying, I hope. It’s not that we can’t live two lives in order to compare them: it’s that we can’t possibly know what our lives would be like if things went differently. I think about this a fair amount, not least because I’m a fantasy writer who reads and teaches science fiction as well, and so I have spent more than my fair share of hours thinking about time travel and alternate history. I’ve read (and taught) about the butterfly effect, and about the multiverse; I wrote two books about a time-traveling Irish pirate (They’re right here, and I swear to you that Book III will be out by spring of next year), for Pete’s sake. And in my own life, I have thought extensively about the slow accrual of causal events, themselves too insignificant to recognize, which add up to something significant, in terms of my life with my love: because if I had not been a screwup in high school, and therefore lacked the GPA to get into a four-year school; if my father had not lived and worked in California and had a friend who taught physics at UCSC, who mentioned to my father that UCSC had a creative writing program; if I had not gone to the community college after high school in order to transfer to UCSC to study writing; if my counselor there had gotten my transfer credits right and I had finished at community college in two years instead of three; and if I had not been wearing a button that said “A dragon on the roof keeps burglars away” and thus gotten into a conversation with a fellow gamer nerd who became my friend and eventually helped me get a job distributing student IDs at the school — I would never have met my wife. All those ridiculous coincidences had to happen in just that way for me to find the love of my life. And also, let me say, there are just as many on her side: just as many ways that her path could have taken her far away from me. Which would have changed both of our lives.

For the better? For the worse?

Who knows? Who can possibly say?

One way it could have gone differently would have been if I had been able to succeed as a student in high school. I got my first Ds and Fs in my freshman and sophomore years, mainly because I did not have study habits. But I developed those study habits, quickly, when I went to community college; so certainly I could have had them in high school. If I had stayed in my honors tracks and earned good grades, I might have followed most of my friends, who went to Ivy League or similar top-tier schools. I might have ended up a lawyer, as many of my friends in high school did. I love argument and I write and read well, so it would make sense. My oldest friend did that, and he started his own law firm; could I have joined him in that? Could it be McGuire, Humphrey and Associates, LLC? (No question Josh would get first billing, by the way.)

Would I be happier that way? Ignoring for the moment the obvious other possibility that goes along with that alternate track, which is that I would have met and fallen in love and presumably married someone else; and though she would not be as perfect and wonderful as my wife is — because there is no one as perfect and wonderful as my wife — I had fallen in love before I met my wife, and so I could probably fall in love with someone else. But forget that: the question is, would I be happy if I never fell in love, or at least never married?

My brother Marvin is three years older than me, so he’ll be 52 this month. And though I don’t know all the details of his romantic life (and don’t want to pry), I know that he has never lived with a woman and never married a woman. (Also I know that he is not gay, which wouldn’t matter to me in the slightest either way, but one of my favorite stories is from when Marvin had dinner with our dad and Linda, and after a prolonged silence at one point, Dad and Linda burst out with, “You know, it’s okay if you’re gay.” To which Marvin responded, in some way, “Thank you? But I’m not?” Which is a scene that still cracks me up. But Dad and Linda thought they should say that because Marvin had not brought home any women to meet them, and so they made a reasonable assumption.) Marvin is exceptionally accomplished: his degree is in music composition, and after he graduated he became a digital editor in a recording studio, teaching himself how to handle the equipment and the tasks involved; and then after that, he became a self-taught software engineer and web designer, which he now does professionally — all the while keeping up his music; he sings and plays several instruments, in addition to writing and arranging in several different genres. (Also, he can ride a unicycle off-road.) And the question has to be asked: would he have been able to do all that if he had gotten into a long-term romantic relationship? Would he have wanted to do the same things? Or would he have made entirely different choices?

To the point: my brother is essentially a happy man. I am also essentially a happy man. Though our father has not been all that happy for the last few years, for a very long time before that, he was an extremely happy man — and, now that he has moved through the most immediate grief, and reached the closure of a memorial service, I think he can be happy again. Our mother, by the way, has been single since she and Dad divorced in the early 90s; and she is also a happy woman, most of the time. She had one proposal, some years ago, from a man she had been dating; she turned him down. And went happily on her way.

So is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Frankly, I don’t think it’s possible to decide.

What is definitely true is this: once one has found love, real love, love that brings joy and contentment, love that lasts as long as life does and then even beyond that: there is nothing that would persuade one to give that love up. Not even the knowledge that some people might be happier living without that kind of commitment, that kind of potential turmoil, and without the devastating grief that waits at the end for all of us who love another person. I love my wife, and I always will; and that is who I am. Would I be happier if I had never met her? No: because that would not be me. That would be some other dude. Maybe a happy dude, but not me. My life became mine when that gorgeous woman came up to me in the cafeteria at Cabrillo Community College and said, “Hey — do you like gum?”

In truth, I love it. And her. Forever.

Welcome Back

01/07/202301/07/2023Dusty Leave a comment

And if that made you think of the Sweathogs and Mr. Kotter, then we are friends.

Welcome Back Kotter Dance GIF - Welcome Back Kotter Dance ...

Okay: lemme ‘splain.

No. Is too much. Lemme sum up.

Let Me Explain Sum Up GIF - Let Me Explain Sum Up Too Much GIFs

School ended on May 25th. That was at the end of a week including Graduation, which I hosted as Master of Ceremonies (A student of mine expressed distaste for the term “emceed,” and when I told her what it stood for, she said the full term was MUCH cooler than the phonetic abbreviation, so I’m going with that from now on.) and the usual grade-fest, necessitated by the fact that I accept all late work up to the last minute. Then I took a week or so to relax — though I did make a bed, as I described in my last post nearly a month ago.

And then the rocks arrived.

These first three pictures are my front yard. Notice it is nothing but dirt and a few plants. (This is after I weeded it, by the way. Bottom right corner of the first pic shows the weeds I had not yet gotten to, in front of the sage bush.)

And this is eleven tons of rock being dumped in my driveway.

The ton or so of dust is complimentary. And inevitable, in Tucson, which is mostly dust.

So then I started working on getting the rocks spread out across the yard. That means digging up the dirt to turn it and remove all the weeds I could get; then putting down weedblocking cloth; then hauling wheelbarrows full of rocks over to the cloth and dumping them. Since the temperature here has been well over 100 degrees for several weeks, it was hot, dirty, difficult work.

But my wife still made it look good.

*I joked that this was her Jackie O. pose; the scarf is actually weedblocker cloth. The gorgeousness is all her.*

In addition to the rocks, on June 10th I started my usual summer job: scoring essays for the Advanced Placement program’s Language and Composition exam. So that meant about eight hours a day staring at a computer screen trying to understand student handwriting — and spelling. I’d get up as early as I could (which is no hardship as I have always been an early riser) and lie in my hammock and grade for a few hours; then I’d go out in the yard with my wife and spread some rocks.

The rocks are not done, by the way, but it’s getting close; and it looks great.

Until June 18th, when I flew to San Diego to attend a three-day AVID conference.

This one had a roundabout genesis: back in March or so, a good friend of mine asked if I would go to the conference, because she was going and she wanted someone along whom she got along with. At first I turned her down, because I do not generally like pedagogy and conferences; my style and philosophy of teaching are not what other teachers’ are, and so most of the time, pedagogical instruction is lost on me — and it makes me feel bad, because I have just enough self-doubt and imposter anxiety, even after 23 years of teaching, to suspect that I’ve been doing it wrong all along. And the people who present at these conferences always seem so sure that their system is right.

AVID has a little more credibility with me, because when I started teaching in California in 2000, the school where I taught had an AVID program, and the teacher whose room I shared, who took on something of a mentor’s role for me, was the AVID teacher. So I had first-hand experience of how well the program can work, and I was more interested in being involved in bringing AVID to my school than I would be in most teacher conferences. I’ll write more extensively about AVID at some point, but the basic idea — it stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination, which I both love and hate, as I love and hate all good acronyms — is that it helps students who would struggle going to college and being successful there for reasons other than intellect, and tries to make those students more successful through teaching organization and study habits, and how to work with people and advocate for yourself, and so on. It’s a good system.

But I still would never choose to go to a three-day teaching conference if I could avoid it. So I said no when my friend asked me to go.

But in February, my father’s wife, Linda, passed away. It was, of course, devastating to my dad; and I promised him I would come to the memorial, and help him out in any way I could. And somewhere around April, my dad told me that Linda’s memorial would be Saturday, June 24th: the weekend after the AVID conference. My dad lives in Paso Robles, in wine country closer to the central coast of California than to San Diego; but my brother lives in San Diego, and would be driving up for the memorial anyway, of course. So I checked with my brother, and then my principal, to make sure I could extend my return flight from the conference and get a ride — and in the end, I went to the AVID conference, and then drove with my brother to Paso Robles and attended my father’s wife’s memorial.

Where I served as the master of ceremonies.

It was a beautiful ceremony.

May be an image of 7 people and wine — *This is my dad at the podium sharing his memories of his wife. My brother is the one leaning against the casks — the memorial was held at a vineyard, whose owners are close friends.*

***

I’m telling you all of this because I hope it explains why I have not posted on this blog for the last three weeks. I usually write and post on Sunday and/or Monday of each week. Well, last Sunday and Monday I was in Paso Robles, both helping my dad deal with his grief, and also going through my own (far, far smaller) suffering: because my dad is an extrovert, and he and his wife are extremely popular and well-loved among their family and friends and their community, so many people wanted to express their grief about Linda’s loss, and also to help my dad know that he is not alone: so we had four gatherings of people in the five days I was there visiting. Which was a lot for me. The Sunday and Monday before that, I was flying to San Diego and then attending the first day of a three-day conference for a program that I would actually be interested in learning about and bringing to my school, so I was trying hard to keep up with the information; and that was draining. Aaaand the Sunday and Monday before that, I was scoring essays and spreading rocks.

So here’s my plan. I’m counting this one, which I know is a bit of a nothingburger in terms of its value as a blog post (When I told my wife I was going to write “just sort of an update” for this post, she said “That doesn’t sound very exciting. Don’t you want your blogs to be about exciting things?”), and then I will be writing and posting for the next three days, to make up for the three weeks I missed, ending with a post for next week — which I’ll post on the Fourth of July. In honor of which, I plan to yell a whole lot about how the Supreme Court is fucking up this country. I have another idea for one of the other blogs; not sure about the last one — but I’ll think of something.

I don’t have anywhere else I have to go. Or any essays to grade. The rocks are almost done, and though I also need to work on my pirate book, otherwise I am just staying home with my wife and my pets.

I hope you’re all having a happy summer, too.

How To Make Your Bed

06/06/202306/06/2023Dusty 1 Comment

We bought a new bed.

Rather, we bought a new bed frame: a platform, because we want to lower the bed height, since we have a dog who is approaching Senior Dog status, and our dog Charlie developed arthritis in his shoulders partly from jumping down off of our bed, before we got him a ramp. We are going to go out and buy a new mattress, but we have to work up to that, because mattress shopping is the one activity guaranteed to turn me into a Boomer: the only time in my life I have complained audibly about how expensive something was was in a mattress store in Portland, Oregon, the first time I saw a premium mattress priced at five figures. “Jesus Christ, we’re not buying a car!” I was heard to say as my wife hustled me out the door like a drunk at a retirement party.

So we started with the frame: and partly to save money, we bought it online and had it shipped to us, which saved us a couple hundred dollars, and the headache of finding a truck that could haul a bedframe home.

Plus: it got us these directions. Which I am now going to share with you, in case you decide you want to buy a BTHFST LED King Bed Frame with USB Ports & Charging Outlets, Metal Platform Bed Frame with 2-Tier Shelf Headboard, King Bed with LED Lights, Upgraded Double-Row Support Bars, Noise-Free, Vintage Brown.

First of all: yes, we bought it on Amazon, and it came from China. I looked, hard, and the only other options, apart from a dozen different Chinese clones providing exactly the same bed frame for slightly different prices, were bed frames from Vietnam, and one absolutely gorgeous bed frame from Scandinavia. The Vietnamese frames were twice the price of the Chinese frames, with no less carbon cost in shipping and human cost in worker exploitation; the Scandinavian bed frame was literally eleven times the price — $200 vs. $2200. I would love to buy responsibly and ethically with every purchase I make.

But I just needed a new bed.

So here we go.

*What is 828 K*? *A secret code? A gang tag from a Chinese triad? (Probably the size of the file for the directions, I know. But the secret code is more fun.)*

First of all, please note that these directions are stapled together. Badly. Secondly, please appreciate with me the lightbulb graphic at the bottom of the page. Is that representing an idea? The beacon summoning us to the land of comfort? Well, maybe they’ll figure it out when they go to version 1.2.

It is a decent depiction of the frame itself, I will say.

Next page.

This is my favorite page of the instructions. Everything about it is excellent. I was in fact going to put this thing together by myself, but after seeing this, I asked my wife to be my second panda. Needless to say, we did not install the frame violently; we also did not call for help, though we did look online for videos showing the finished product. Because I frequently thought “?!” while trying to understand these directions.

One caveat: the first panda — the only one with natural coloration, for some reason? — is not showing the correct tools needed for this. A drill or impact driver would be handy as there are a large number of bolts to tighten; but they’re all hex bolts, which would require a hex-bolt attachment inserted in the end of that adaptor that is shown. Which attachment is not shown. It’s okay though: as with every other piece of some-assembly-required furniture ever sold, the kit came with two Allen wrenches. Which were what we used.

The bolts and various parts were depicted on the next page.

These are, naturally, not to scale; but fortunately, almost every piece of the bed was clearly labeled with a sticker bearing the appropriate number, which was genuinely helpful. Also note the quirky angle chosen to depict the two Allen wrenches (F and G at the bottom) which were, as you might assume, simply bent at the usual 90-degree angle, not this more obtuse choice shown here. Which, to me, gives them an air of looking far away, at the distant horizon…

Here is one of the number stickers on the now-assembled bed, along with the “buckles” depicted on the next page, which caused us some trouble because the images are not to scale; please note that the actual buckles, in addition to being clear plastic and shipped inside a ziplock bag along with the Strap magic tape, are the size of a half a stick of gum or one knuckle of my big fat fingers.

Also on that last page, I am curious about why Assembly and Instructions were capitalized — but not “bed,” which seems like the critical word here. The questionable capitalization continued with the next header:

*Note the deceptively sized “buckles,” which is not the word I would use to describe a small plastic case intended to lock around a connected plug.*

This time, Additional is capitalized but instructions is not; LED is, but light is not. More to the point, these are not the instructions for installing the LED: this is still the list of included materials. (Though there are some instructions for how to use the “strap magic tapes” in case the “wires are disordered” and need — errr — “binding.” A rather uncomfortable choice of word for me, coming from China.) Also that is definitely not a light “bar,” it is a cord wound around a spool like an old movie reel, as it looks in the illustration. Also, this may have just been a mistake at the factory, but we got three of them, not two.

Back to the instructions.

*I appreciate that you call this packet of stapled papers a “manual” — but how do I follow the instructions before starting the assembly?*

Way too many numbers. Far too many pieces. And I’m sad that my wife and I are no longer cooperative pandas — though at least we’re holding hands, or bumping rounded arm-ends or something. Also: who the hell is assembling this thing on a slope?! And why can’t I tighten the screws?!

Okay: so this page is the worst page in the — errrrr — “manual.” First of all: it tells you to do this first (See the number 1 in the top left). This is a bad idea. The light strip can easily and more rationally be placed once the headboard is assembled. Secondly, I had no idea what I was actually looking for in terms of this light “strip.” Here is the actual thing (this is the extra one still on the spool.)

It’s a strip. Like a piece of double-sided tape. So if you pull it out, you don’t “unfold” it, and it doesn’t end up in that angular ladder-shape — which was fine, it was obvious this was the LED strip regardless of their eccentric word choice in English; but that line about you can unfold it into TWO strips confused me. No, there are two reels with one strip apiece, each about six feet long. And we got three reels for some reason. But I was confused: was I supposed to cut the one strip in half to make two? And okay, then it says “One side of the light bar is sticky and the other side is luminous band.” It even exhorts me to “please distinguish it carefully.” So as you can see, one side is little circuits and diodes, and the other side is a bright blue — what one might even call a luminous blue. But the side with the circuits is not sticky. The blue side is tape covering the sticky side. So then the circuits are the “luminous band?” If the reverse side, under the blue tape, is the sticky side, then the circuits are the side that shows; but they’re ugly. Why is that the side that shows?!

And then, I am supposed to “tear off the anti sticking stip [Yup, “stip,” no more than two inches away from the correct “strip.”] of the light strip.” Which is the blue tape, which covers the adhesive back of the LED strip. And then “stick the lamp to the top.” Okay, lamp?! I’ve got an LED strip which you call a light bar — when did we buy a lamp?! And the top of what? This piece I’m supposed to stick the LED strip to is the middle of the headboard: above the large flat surface where the pillows go, below the two shelves. There is a conduit-like space, with a lattice of holes, where light would shine through; presumably that’s where the LED strip goes. But what is the top?

But hey: then I noticed the handy diagram. Which shows two light strips, their plugs at opposing ends, and they are somehow — invisible? And I am supposed to “Stick it here.”

Which I assume either means I should stick them to the instruction paper — or that there is an irritated Chinese manual writer who is telling me where I can stick my light bar. Where the sun don’t shine, of course.

This is when we looked online for help. We looked at the images of the bed on Amazon, hoping to see what it looks like assembled. This, apparently, is it.

*The book says “Stifter.” And the only reference I can find is to an Austrian poet who killed himself by slashing his neck with a razor. I’m worried about the person who staged this photo.* *Also that’s a bad place for candles.*

So okay, see the strip of blue light circles above the wooden headboard? That’s the piece where we’re supposed to stick the light strip “to the top.” There’s a space where the lights could go behind that lattice of holes — but it looks BLUE here. So are we supposed to stick the blue side of the LED strip to the backside of the holes?! We can’t: the blue has to come off to expose the adhesive. Are the little circuits and diodes supposed to go inside of the lattice? Or to the top of the conduit space, under the shelf above? The problem there is that the top of the conduit space in the metal bar has holes where bolts are supposed to go to hold the bar to the shelf above, and the light strip would at least impede and maybe cover those holes.

Let’s look at the next page of directions. Maybe that will make it more clear.

Look, I don’t mean to harp on the typos; I have no doubt that if I translated something myself into Chinese, that my prose would make me the laughingstock of China. But really. Come on. Consisent? Tahe? DISORDERDERED?!? *On the other hand, I appreciate all of my efforts thus far being referred to as “completed works.”*

Okay: first of all, why do they highlight that I am installing the light strip by myself? Do I have to send away my helpful panda-wife? Is there an option to not do this by myself, here? Can I call for help and they will send an LED strip installer out to do this for me? Secondly, they make a big deal of installing the two light strips with the plugs in the same direction. Which makes sense, and looking at the power cord immediately shows that the two light strips plug into one power cord, so you need the plug-ends of the light strips close together. No problem.

The problem is that they haven’t yet told me about installing the second light strip. Unless I’m supposed to install two inside the holed conduit bar. One on the top and one on the bottom, maybe? But then if you look at the “Stick it here” image of the diagram THE PLUGS ARE ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE TWO INVISIBLE CORDS.

Also, there is no embedded lock catch. Or embedded buckles. Nothing embedded at all. (I suspect they meant “included,” and decided to call the buckle a “lock catch.” Sure, why not; I wouldn’t call it a buckle, either.)

Whatever: this page of instructions pretty clearly shows the light strip going on the underside of the top of the metal bar with the lattice of holes. Where it gets in the way of the screw holes — also visible in the diagram here. Maybe, since I am actually supposed to cut the light strip if it is too long, I should also cut space for the screws to go through the light strip?!

So in the end, we skipped this step, assembled the headboard, and then went back and adhered the light strip to the bottom of the lattice conduit, so it wouldn’t interfere with the screws. (Yes, we did have to cut off the excess of the LED strip, which gave me fits of cognitive dissonance, but worked fine.) And then adhered a second LED strip to the bottom of the top shelf. The result was this:

Once we figured out how to handle the LED issue, by ignoring it while we put the frame together, the instructions got pretty reasonable.

Other than “Do not tighten the screws, just fix them,” this was a good page of instructions. (And sure, I hand-tightened the bolts without really ratcheting them tight until the whole things was assembled. I just think that “tighten” is less intense than “fix,” so the emphasis here is strange.) The next page was irritating again:

*Again I am to merely FIX the screws. NO TIGHTENING ALLOWED.*

Which side is the inside? (when assembled, of course) The side closest to the wall, or the side closest to our heads? My helpful panda said it should be the wall side, so we went with that. Sure, why not. At least we kept the plug direction consistent when we were pasting the sticky side opposite the luminous band to the bottom of the component along with the unfolded light bar stuck to the inside of the top of the front iron plate.

But then…

I’m sorry, I’m to LEAK the cord?! And which side is the “signal receiving end,” exactly?!

Well. At least NOW I can tighten all the screws. But I have no idea what to do with this power cord thing.

Okay. Now I got it. The top line of instructions? Most helpful ones yet. (Also “Shunt Interface” is the name of my new EDM band.) Totally made it clear what the buckles were, what size they were, how to use them and why. All made sense. I appreciate that they repeated the instructions for the Strap magic tape I am to use to bind the wires if they become disordered. They did not, so I did not use the Strap magic tape. I also have not scanned the QR code to get the app to control the lights yet; there is a remote that does it fine, and I can’t imagine wanting to change the LED lights with my phone instead. But I can, if I want to. So I got that going for me.

Which is nice.

Okay: home stretch.

*The tabs to hold the struts go on the inside. Actually helpful.*

*Footboard, crossbar. It’s all coming together.*

*Again, helpful to note the holes, which help distinguish the pieces from the other struts — though again, they had helpful numbered stickers on them, too.*

*All those bars… all those screws… And each one has two extra holes. Why? No clue. Do they face up or down? They actually appear in the image there, so we put them facing up. Dunno why.*

“A small sealing pocket” is a small plastic bag. And they call these things “crash pads” here, and then “anti-collision cushion” in the last instruction. Both terms are accurate: before we adhered those with the handy strips of Doubie faced adhesive tape, sticking them at an acute angle, Toni slammed her leg into it and gouged out quite a chunk of flesh. So always use your crash pards, okay?

And if you buy an unassembled bed frame, make sure you cooperate with your helpful panda. And build it on level ground.

Sweet dreams, everyone.

Where Is This Going?

29/05/202330/05/2023Dusty 1 Comment

Last week, I had no words; it was the end of the school year: when I have to grade everything, when I am not sleeping, when I am frustrated with my students every damn day, when I have to say goodbye to people I like and appreciate, either for the summer or forever. So I posted pictures instead.

The week before that, I was sad; so I wrote about being sad — and I got some…reactions. I’m glad that my writing reached people, and affected people, so that is overall a good thing; and talking about being sad led to more conversations about sadness, which is also a good thing. But it was hard to write that post, and hard to have the conversations afterwards; this shows why it’s important to talk about emotions, particularly negative emotions, so those conversations can get easier for all of us — but I didn’t (and don’t) want to write about all of that again, which was also why I didn’t post last week. The end of the school year is depressing, and that’s not what I wanted to write about.

But now? Now it’s summertime. At last. I have been work-free for two days (Almost. I had one student write to ask why they had not gotten a grade on a paper they claimed to have turned in, and one student whom I have been asking to turn things in so I can give them a passing grade. But both of those are minor tasks, both resolved in a matter of minutes — and both finished, now.), and so I have read my book, and I have walked my dogs, and I have played Minecraft. I have napped. It has been lovely.

So now I feel like I can find some time to put together some words that aren’t just a cri de coeur, or packaged a thousand at a time into a picture. Some of those words are definitely going to go into my book: because by God I am going to finish my third pirate novel, and wrap up the Damnation Kane series — the first series I will complete in my writing career. But some of the words can come here, I think.

So. What shall I write about?

Part of me wants to write about how much nicer it is to be relaxed and happy than to be stressed and sad; but that’s really pretty stupid. Because of course it is nicer. Nobody needs to hear that from me. And some people would probably be bothered hearing that from me, because they might have to think about how they are not relaxed and happy, and then they might feel bad for not being relaxed and happy. Also, I’m not simply nor entirely relaxed and happy. So we won’t be talking about that.

Part of me thinks I should review the political book that I read, which I said I would be reviewing; but I’m not sure that’s important. I have noticed, in looking at the stats for this blog, that my old book reviews and essays are by far the most popular posts over time; that some of my personal weekly essays get a lot of views, but the book reviews (like this one) and essays about books (like this one) are the ones that people keep coming back for, month after month; but those are about popular books, not political books — and not political books that are almost two decades out of date, which didn’t change the power of the book’s message, but did leave me wishing it was more current. Which probably means that fewer people will want to read this particular book with each passing year. So I don’t know how many people want to read my thoughts on that book; and I don’t think I could have fun with the review, as I did with the two linked above. So I think I will probably let it go, and maybe write a review of the next book I’m going to read — Slaughterhouse Five, which I am re-reading for the first time in a decade or two, as part of a book swap with my former student, the one who got me to re-read and actually appreciate John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

But that’s later. For now, right now, what have I got to write about?

I’ve got it. Let’s review this past school year.

Now, I haven’t moved far enough past this school year to be able to judge it fairly and logically; also, I don’t think it a good idea to take an entire segment of either life or education and boil it down to a simple rating out of five. (Because grades are garbage…) I just want to give some of my thoughts and impressions of this past year.

First of all, some of the good things: my wife came back to work at my school again this year. That is one of the best things that could ever happen, because my wife is my favorite person in the world; every time I get to see her at work, it makes my day better. This year I got to ride in to work with her every single day. I got to walk her to her classroom. I got to help her with tasks at school. When she left (Early in the day, because she only worked part time, exactly as she wanted to), she would usually stop by my classroom to say goodbye; it made my morning better, every single time. It’s also good because my wife is an excellent teacher, and I’m happy for the students who got to take her classes; even though not all of them appreciated it. She’s coming back next year, but with an even better schedule, because for the first time in her five years of teaching (Not counting her years of work as a sub, or her summer school experience, or the internship program she helped run and the computer skills class she taught as part of that program — want to know why she’s an excellent teacher? Because in addition to being a brilliant and sensitive and honest person, and in addition to knowing every single little thing about her subject, she has a ton of actual experience teaching. Unlike the administrators who give us our performance evaluations every year. BUT ANYWAY.) she will not be teaching middle school students who are all shoved into a mandatory art class that most of them don’t want. It’s awful to try to teach a subject to someone who doesn’t care about it and so doesn’t care if they learn or not, or if they pass or not; it’s especially tough when you love the subject and know the great value it can bring to lives, as my wife loves art, and as I love English.

Another good thing: in addition to the mandatory English classes I’ve always taught to students who don’t always want to learn English (It’s not as bad for me as it is for her: because I teach high school, not middle school. Middle schoolers are demons. My students are just annoying.), I got to teach my first elective this past year. It was a class in fantasy and science fiction literature, and though there were definitely some missteps, overall it went wonderfully well. It was fantastic to be able to select books because they mean something to my world as a nerd and a writer, rather than because they have lessons I think are important for students to learn; and the books I chose, though something of a mixed bag, generally went over quite well. I actually got a whole class full of students to read four complete novels this year, something I haven’t been able to do in the last two decades. They wrote short stories, and they participated in both discussions and in reading — and I didn’t give a single test. For the whole year. It was wonderful. It was also outstanding to feel vindicated in my choice of M.T. Anderson’s fantastic dystopian novel Feed, which I wanted to teach to my regular classes but was told I could not (Because the book uses dirty words, though with a clear and effective purpose), so I taught it to this class — and they loved it. And were deeply affected by it. One of my better teaching experiences.

(Lessons learned, by the way, from my missteps: The War of the Worlds is a seminal science fiction classic, but it is also as boring as snail snot. And Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a fantastic book, and an important book: but it is not much of a science fiction book. And it’s damn hard to read, because it does such a good job of depicting American chattel slavery. I think next year I will teach The Time Machine, and maybe Fahrenheit 451, and maybe Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)

Another good thing: all of my best teacher friends were all around me this year, and they all helped support me; and they’re all coming back next year. I have an excellent group of teacher friends at the school, and that makes a world of difference in the teaching experience. As important as it was to me to have my wife there every day, these wonderful people are critical to my survival and stability as a teacher and a person. Thank you Lisa, Aleksandra, Danielle, Scott, and Toni (whom all the teachers refer to as “Not your Toni”) — and let’s add Carrie and Anasazi to the group, shall we? Thank you all for your friendship.

I also had a number of wonderful students this year, both academically and personally, and I think, despite my constant self-doubts, that I was able to help most of them to get better, to learn and improve, to grow as people and as readers and writers. Even though I teach because I need the income, it means quite a lot to me that I can teach well, that I can have an impact on my students, that I can make their futures better, their lives fuller, by imparting to them curiosity and insight and some of my passion for language and literature. That happened this year — it doesn’t always — and I am grateful that it did.

All right, so those are the good things.

YARN | you're still thinking about the bad news, aren't you. | The Office (UK) (2001) - S01E06 Drama | Video clips by quotes | 7e789b6c | 紗

The main thing that went badly this year was something I’ve hinted at in the good news: my friends, my wife, and I are all returning to the same school next year. Which is remarkable (as in something about which I can remark) because there are so many others who are not returning. Out of a staff of 38, there are TEN people who are not returning. More than 25%. I don’t want to get into too much detail about this, about the reasons for people leaving, because it would cross a line I don’t want to cross, in that I would end up criticizing my school for things I think they have done wrong, and I would have to do it in a specific and even personal way; but the real essential reason for everyone who is leaving is the same: teachers are not valued commensurate with our effort and our worth. We are not paid enough, not supported enough, not cared for enough. Some of my fellow staff members are being actively devalued, and some have simply grown fed up with not being valued enough; but the result is clear: the school is going to change. Maybe in some cases the replacements will be better, sure — but not in all cases. In the years I have been at this school, and more broadly in the years that I have been a teacher, I have watched teachers and staff members come and go; and it seems to me that in all cases, over time, the staff replacements have been for the worse. Partly that’s because teachers who care get better with experience, all the way up to the point where we get so bitter and jaded that we give up, and then we become much worse; so improvement generally happens with teachers who stay, not teachers who leave and are replaced; but part of that is because good teachers quit when they aren’t valued, and new people coming into the profession are not always good teachers, just by the law of averages. Now they’re not even coming into the profession: we had one position that just never really got filled this year, instead being temporarily patched by a string of substitutes; maybe they’ll fill that spot with a full-time teacher next year. Or maybe they won’t, and the students will suffer again with subs. Maybe, if they find someone, that teacher will even be a good teacher, or someone who may become a good teacher over time.

And maybe they won’t.

It’s hard to watch your school get worse. I feel bad for the students who come here. Not because they get a bad education; I think we still provide what we always have, a generally good and useful education with some definite holes. Partly that’s because there are still teachers who are staying, and who have gotten better over their years of teaching — and yes, I am one of those — and partly it’s because there have always been holes, always been areas where we lack (Arts, along with CTE and practical skills classes, have always been the most glaring lack at my small charter school, and it is the reason why probably 10% of our students leave the school every year to go to larger schools with more programs. Our graduating class every year is half the size of our incoming class.), so the holes are shifting more than they are growing. When I came to the school, they had an incredibly strong math department; now we have an incredibly strong English department. I don’t think one or the other of those is better or worse: they’re just different strengths. (Okay, the strong English department is better. Because math sucks.)

But though we still do our jobs, it’s getting harder. Because the problems exist which are driving teachers away. Every year it gets more and more tempting to follow them, and that means that every year, it gets more strenuous to stay where I am. I’m getting tired of fighting to survive at my school, fighting to overcome the bad policies, the bad atmosphere, the bad personalities that all contribute to the decision so many people have made to leave. I hope things start to get better, at some point. I really do. But in the meantime, I feel bad for the students because their school is in a constant state of flux. It makes them uncertain, of course, and it takes away their relationships and replaces the familiar teachers with a string of new faces. It strikes me that, every year, the students ask me if I will be there next year. Even the seniors ask this, so it’s not only because they want to take my class, or even to see me in the hall; they just want to know that I will still be there, because I am part of their school as they understand it.

The second thing that was difficult this school year was the students. Hold on, hold on: I’m not going to complain about how the students are getting worse; they’re not. I’m also not going to complain about how the students are the root cause of every problem with education — though they are, of course; I say all the time that this job would be a breeze if it weren’t for the students.

Schools See Big Drop in Attendance as Students Stay Away, Citing Covid-19 - WSJ — *See how neat that room looks? How peaceful? Just a teacher by themselves, working on a computer. Bliss.*

No, the trouble with students this year was that the students were troubled. I think I have to write about this in more depth, and before I do that I need to talk to a couple of my former students, and get their opinions on how school has been for them; but I think we don’t really know the harm that was done by the pandemic and the quarantine. I do also recognize that it’s too easy to point to that enormous black cloud, the crater that it left in our landscape, and blame it for all the problems we face; I don’t think the pandemic experience is the only factor influencing students today, or the root of all the problems in education, any more than I think students themselves are the root of all the problems in education today.

But it happened. And it happened to these kids. And I think for them, it changed — everything.

All students are different. I tend to think that the trends my fellow teachers always see in the students are generally false. For instance, it has frequently been observed to me that this class or that class is a “bad” class, or a tough class; and my experience has rarely been the same as what my colleagues have told me it would be, based on their experience. I’m sure it goes the other way, too: I have in the past warned my fellow teachers about students and classes I’ve had trouble with, and frequently those students and classes have been great for my colleagues. Because the problem is not that the students are bad: it’s that not every student works well with every teacher, and not every teacher handles everything the best way, nor does every student. Bad circumstances can sour a working relationship very quickly, and often it never really sweetens.

But see, I think that’s part of what happened with the pandemic and the quarantine. The schools didn’t handle it properly. I’m not sure there was a way to handle it properly: my Republican countrymen would argue that schools should have stayed open, but I think there’s no reasonable argument that such a policy would not have led to a hell of a lot more sickness, and that would have had a negative impact on students as well. So I don’t mean to find fault with what we did or how we did it; we did our best. But the reality is that it didn’t work. Teaching a class on Zoom is simply not effective: not when the teachers and students are familiar and comfortable with in-person learning. It’s a separate question whether Zoom made the situation better or worse; it seems to me that simply cancelling school entirely for six months or a year would have been worse — but there’s an argument to be made that giving everyone a break would have been better, and the students could have come back to where they left off, and simply graduated a year later, and so what? I’m a fan of gap years. If I could have used that year to prepare, on my own, for the next year’s classes, my God, what I would have achieved. On the other hand, in that scenario, social isolation would have been much, much worse; I can largely ignore that because I live with my best friend and my four favorite animal friends; but I recognize that many of my students would have suffered even more without being able to hear friendly voices and see friendly faces every day, even if it was just on a screen.

But the gap year, or bulling ahead through sickness, is not what we did. What we did was try our best to pretend that nothing was wrong: when everything was wrong. The students were miserable; the teachers were miserable; the entire world was miserable. The transmission of education online did not work: students were bored and constantly distracted. Teachers were frustrated and floundering. So the result is that teachers lost confidence, because we watched ourselves suck at our jobs for an entire year; students lost faith in schools, because they watched schools fail them for an entire year, and they also lost faith in themselves, because when they were entrusted with the responsibility of being at school while they weren’t at school, they pretty much all failed to live up to it. That is not an insult: there’s not a doubt in my mind that I would have spent the entire school year at home stoned and playing video games while pretending to do my work, if there had been a quarantine while I was a student. The point is that students should never have been given that responsibility. They weren’t ready for it, and so they were set up for failure: and they failed. At the same time, the schools failed: and the students were shown what was behind the curtain of the schools. They saw that their teachers are not wizards, but, too often, traveling salesmen trying desperately to maintain a facade. The advantage we teachers have always had is that, frequently, just like the Wizard of Oz, the facade is enough: students are able to learn enormous amounts on their own, so if I can give them a poem which I myself don’t understand, and then just seem wise when I say, “Well what do YOU think it means?” Students have been able to pull real knowledge and improvement out of that — which knowledge they frequently then teach me. So as long as students had faith that we were really guiding them in the right direction, we were able to move them in the right direction even if we didn’t actually know the path ourselves. Because students could find the way.

But students saw that we couldn’t always get it right, that we didn’t always know the answer: and I think they don’t trust us any more. Combine that with their knowledge, gained from a year so far out in the wilderness that a path forward didn’t exist, and so they couldn’t get anywhere no matter how fast they ran in circles, that they themselves can’t always come up to snuff (This is not true, by the way — but there’s a certain amount of faith, which requires a certain amount of innocence, and these kids don’t have it, for the same reason: they realized that their ruby slippers are just shoes, with no magic at all, and that means they don’t have the ability to make the magic happen. The magic is still there, where it always has been, inside them; but if they don’t believe in it, they’ll never achieve it.), and the constant drumbeat all around in our society these days about how school is maybe not necessary and maybe even bad, how college is maybe not necessary and definitely too expensive — and who could blame them for giving up a little? Or a lot?

So what we have, what we had this year, is a school full of students who maybe don’t see the point of school, and so maybe they don’t do their part. They don’t do their assignments. They don’t pay attention in school. What’s more — what’s made this year much harder — they don’t really care about their grades, or about passing and graduating, no matter what their teachers say. They maybe don’t care as much about what their teachers say, either about the subject matter or about what’s important in life. Because they lost faith in us, and in schools, and in themselves. This is not true of all of them, I have to say; we always have students who are successful, and those show that the school system is not lost, is not entirely broken; but there are a lot of students now who don’t seem to see the point. And as a teacher, there’s nothing harder to deal with than students who don’t see the point.

I would like to apologize to all of my former teachers for what I put them through: because I was one of those kids. I must have been hell to deal with, for a lot of them. I’m sorry for that. Believe me, I’m getting my just desserts now.

So that has been this past year. It should be no wonder that I had a tough time with it. It should also be no wonder that so many of my colleagues are leaving now, that so many teaching jobs are hard to fill, and getting harder. I don’t mean to excuse my school, to put all the blame for the departures on the bad situation with the students; my school has made the problem much, much worse. But what’s more important is that the schools, and the teachers, and everyone else involved — including themselves — we all have to try not to make the situation worse for the students. Because they don’t have a lot of options. They don’t have a lot of opportunities to learn what they need to learn. If they can’t do it now, they may never get it right. And the more years they go through without succeeding, by their standards or ours, the harder it will get to actually succeed. If we keep failing them, we fail.

And then what?

How bad could it actually get?

Boy, good thing I didn’t write about sad things this week, huh?

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Photo Dump

22/05/2023Dusty 1 Comment

This is the last week of school, and my brain is broken, so I will not be writing. But here are pictures.

Every year we get teacher appreciation certificates. And every year, my administration tries to personalize them for every teacher — and every year, they think “Well he likes pirates…”

This appreciation gift, from one of my graduating seniors, was MUCH better. Those darts can really fly.

Last night the graduated seniors did the traditional Senior Prank. We have very nice students, so they try not to damage anything. This is what they did to the Dean of Students’ office:

They also came in this morning to clean up the mess.

And this is what they did to my room. This year’s theme was apparently — cabbage? I’m assuming it was an Avatar, The Last Airbender reference, but — I dunno, man. Cabbage. They left radishes, too.

The ridiculous mess of books and papers, by the way, is all me: I am not a neat man. And it is the end of the year.

See the two radishes? One in front of my keyboard, the other is under the phone.

This was the best cabbage placement. I left this one up for the day. (By the way: on top of the clock is a 3-D printed figurine of the Comic Book Guy from *The Simpsons.* He lives there.)

The cardboard head cutout was from Graduation; it’s a good likeness of one of our newest alumni. When he and I took a photo after the ceremony, I asked if I could have the head; so he left it for me last night. The Snickers bar, unfortunately, appears to be a new tradition: last year’s senior prank also included poop-chocolate on my chair. Sigh.

This is where the head cutout lives now: on top of the large Darth Vader cutout I already had on the inside of my door. This is now #DarthDrew.

And then one last thing, which has made me much happier than I was last week: at Graduation this year, and last year, we had a Flower Ceremony. We gave the graduates roses and asked them to deliver a flower to the person or people who helped them reach this achievement. Last year my favorite student tried to give me his rose (We only gave them one flower apiece last year; we realized the problem there and gave them two this year) and I told him to go give it to his mom. Then this year — I got four. Left me pretty close to speechless. Here they are (The fifth rose is actually an extra one I gave to Toni because she should always get flowers, but I’m letting it stand in for the flower I turned down last year. [Also I got her a new bouquet of flowers today because she should always get flowers.])

Thank you Than, Alex, Julia, Sofia, and Meghan. This meant the world to me.

Stop Apologizing For Hurting.

14/05/2023Dusty Leave a comment

Hi me, this is yourself. You want to talk to me about something.

You weren’t going to talk to me about this today, or tomorrow, though you thought about it last week, when I posted yet another self-denigrating comment attached to a pair of links.

Listen, me. I don’t suck. I am sad.

I am sad for a number of reasons: the school year is ending, and my students don’t want to learn anything. There are a number of stressful things happening in my life, mostly around the end of the school year and graduation, but also with my writing, and with the summer, and with my house, and with family. People around me are hurting, and I want to help, and I usually can’t. All those things make me sad, and you know it.

But I also know that being sad when hard things and sad things are going on is not a failing. It is not a weakness, it is not a mistake: it is a reasonable response to a situation that I can’t control.

It is also bothering me that I can’t control the situation. I really, really want to. You do too. But I can’t. Not even the things I want to control.

I can’t control how my students feel about school. They don’t want to learn at the end of the year. This is neither new nor surprising, students kinda never want to learn anything (though they always want to learn interesting and useful things, and that should say something about the curriculum we teach in our schools, which they do not want to learn most of the time), especially not in the last month or so of school. I’ve always fought that, you know, because I hate wasting time, and I want the students to gain as much as possible from their opportunity to learn, particularly a love and appreciation of learning, and also a love and appreciation of literature and language. But I’ve always, always failed. No, that’s not true; I have instilled something of a love of learning and of literature into some of my students, and I have encouraged the love that was already there in a number of others. I have helped students get through difficult times, and made their lives easier and better. But I’ve never been able to do those good things with all of my students. Maybe that shouldn’t matter to me, but when I keep hearing about how children fall through the cracks and get forgotten, how every student is precious and none of them should get left behind — it makes me feel bad that I fail to reach all of my students.

And then I tell my friends and fellow teachers not to take it to heart when they can’t reach all of their students, when some of their students have issues and opinions that no teacher will ever be able to touch, or solve. Especially now: because the pandemic had long lasting effects on students, and they, like us, are sad. They are dealing with a whole lot of shit, and it’s hard, and they’re not good at it. It doesn’t help that the adults in their lives are dealing with our own shit, so have less time and energy to help deal with theirs: but we can’t be sorry for that. There’s only so much of our shit we can push aside in order to deal with someone else’s shit, before we just pile up too much shit of our own, and we can’t handle it any more. I think I’ve been doing that a lot for the last few years, and I don’t think I can do it any more. And I’m not sorry about that.

If I should be sorry for anything, it is not taking my own advice to heart. Because I really, really suck at that. But that doesn’t make me suck: it just makes me like everyone else. Which also makes me a little sad, because if I can’t even solve my own stupid issues, then how can there be any hope for humanity? My issues are stupid: I am smart. I should be able to solve those stupid issues, I tell myself all the time. And yet, here I am, feeling bad for feeling bad. Partly — but not entirely — because if I could simply solve all my issues, then I would have so much more capacity for helping those around me deal with their issues, which I really want to do. It’d be awful nice if I could do that. But I can’t. And I feel bad about that. For still feeling bad.

I was just talking to a student that struggles with depression, and I was telling them that they are not allowed to feel bad for feeling bad. Depression is a real thing, and feelings are not logical and cannot be reasoned with; we have essentially no control over them, and therefore should not feel bad about having them, because you shouldn’t feel bad for things that weren’t your choice, which you can’t control. And there I was, telling them they shouldn’t feel guilty for feeling bad, which they do because they are empathetic and intelligent enough to recognize that their sadness makes people around them sad, as well; but feeling guilty is useless, and trying to remove or reduce feelings because you don’t like them has not ever worked and will not ever work.

And only at the end of that conversation did I realize that I was telling them to stop being illogical with their feelings, that the feeling of guilt wasn’t reasonable and therefore they should be able to eliminate it, by reasoning with their feelings and taking control of them to eliminate them. Like the feeling of guilt is any different in essence from the feeling of depression.

And only this morning did I realize that I am doing exactly the same thing to myself.

I shouldn’t be sad. I have a good life: I am a respected and even beloved teacher, with complete job security and a sufficient if not entirely satisfactory income. I have my health: I have never been seriously injured or seriously ill, and I can pretty much do everything now that I could when I was 25. I am proud of my past accomplishments, and of the person I am. I am married to my soulmate, and I love our family of pets. I do not suffer from clinical depression, nor from past trauma. I should be fine. Sure, my country is currently mired in a political shitshow and an economic train crash, and the globe is filled with political unrest and violence, with hatred and suffering, with climate change that will make all of us and our feelings moot…

Sorry, I was going to say that none of those things should make me sad: but of course they should make me sad. They are sad and terrible things, and I am an intelligent and empathetic person, and I recognize the state of the world around me, and how it could and should be so much better than it is.

Also, my feelings aren’t reasonable, and don’t respond to logical argument. I can’t even say that the desperate state of the world is the reason for my sadness: it’s not clear to me that my sadness has a reason. It might, of course; I started this post off with a list of reasons why I am sad, and any or all of those might be the cause of my emotions. It also might in that there are things around me that create stress in me, and that stress, unresolved as it is, is more likely to bring my mood down, even if the thing itself isn’t necessarily sad; for instance, graduation stresses me out, because I have to be the MC for it (I don’t have to, but it’s expected of me and I agreed to do it, so that’s stressful), but I’ve been the MC for graduation for the last five years, and it’s always gone fine; and also, graduation is a happy day; and also, it’s not about me, so I could screw it up in a dozen different ways and nobody would care at all, because they’re focused on the graduates, not me. But I’m still stressed about that. And about renewing my credential. And about finishing my grades. And about all the other tasks I have to do in the next month or so. All of that might be what’s making me sad.

But it’s also entirely possible that I’m just sad. For no reason.

And the important thing is this: it doesn’t really matter what the reason is, because emotions are not logical. They do not necessarily come to me because of reasons. To be more clear, there may be reasons, in that there may be triggers, situations and thoughts and experiences that create despair or sorrow or grief or anxiety, which then transforms into sadness and depression; but it’s essentially impossible to know the single cause of my sadness and to therefore address the single cause of my sadness — and therefore remove the sadness. I can find the potential trigger, and I can address it; but that’s not necessarily going to remove the sadness. Because sometimes I’m sad for multiple reasons, and solving one might even highlight the others which I can’t solve. And sometimes, I’m just sad for no reason.

I just had to go through that last paragraph and change the pronouns: because I had written it, as I often do in these posts, using “we” and “one,” as in “We can find the potential trigger, and we can address it; but that’s not necessarily going to remove one’s sadness.” I started this post talking to myself so I could face the truth head on: I am sad. It’s affecting me. I can’t simply control it and remove it. That is the truth. I want to face that, and say it to myself, so I hear it, from me. (I’m just dragging you along into my internal dialogue for the hell of it.)

And, as I realized both from talking to my student and in reflecting on it with regards to myself, I can’t control the feelings of guilt and inadequacy that happen in me because (If these feelings are caused by anything?) of that sadness. See, I don’t think I should be sad. I try to talk myself out of being sad by telling myself there isn’t any good reason to be sad, that on the contrary I have many reasons to be happy. And I frequently am happy: though not as frequently of late. Too much sad time. But that sad time is getting in the way of the things I want and need to do: I should be writing blogs — I was supposed to write a book review of the excellent book Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, which I just finished reading and discussing with my book club — and I should be working on my novel and I should be working on my house and I should be grading my students’ work; and all of those things just sitting out there unfinished is stressful, and that’s not helping me.

And yet when I came in here, to my office, to write the book review, instead I spent half an hour scrolling idly through Facebook. I don’t even like Facebook that much any more. But I still look at it. Same thing with Twitter: I almost hate Twitter nowadays. But I still look at it. I tell other people that social media is probably not good for their mood; I tell myself that I should avoid getting into arguments online and reading negative and hateful things; but I still do both.

Because I’m sad. And I don’t have the energy or will to do the things I know I should be doing. Which, of course, makes me (Does it make me?) feel guilty and also pretty useless; and then I feel bad about myself, and that makes me (?) sad.

Or maybe I’m just sad in the first place, and these are reasons I’m applying to that feeling in some attempt to take control of my feelings, and change them through logic and reason and force of will.

Which, of course, doesn’t work.

My student told me that they have had other conversations about being depressed, and people have asked them why they were sad: and they can’t come up with a reason. They’re just sad. And then they felt stupid because they couldn’t explain reasonably why they were sad. I immediately responded that there doesn’t have to be a reason for sadness, sometimes sadness just is, and they should never feel bad about their feelings. (See how good I am at telling other people about their problems? This is why I needed to talk to myself about this.)

But I still asked why they were feeling sad, when they told me they were. Because even though I know that emotions don’t necessarily have reasons or reasonable causes, I still act like they should, and we should be able to deal with our emotions through considering those causes and then addressing them.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes it works. Sometimes talking about why we feel a certain way makes us recognize apparent causes for our emotions; and sometimes — more rarely, but still, sometimes — we can then address those apparent causes, and feel better. (Sometimes — often, even — simply talking about them makes us feel better.) Like, I worry a bit about my health. I am 48, and I am a bit overweight; not too much, but I have a pretty sizeable amount of body fat around my middle. Which is unhealthy for someone my age, as it puts stress on my cardiovascular system. I also eat WAY too much salt, drink WAY too much caffeine, and I have high blood pressure — for those reasons, and also because of stress from my job (and everything else) and also because I don’t sleep well. Because of stress and so on, and my tendency towards insomnia, which I inherited from my father. And also probably (definitely) because of the caffeine that I drink. So, okay, I should address these things before they become too serious — before they become risks to my health, before I have a heart attack or a stroke. (When I think about this, I think of my grandfather, whom I never met because he died of a massive stroke before I was born. But I try not to think about it too much. It might make [?] me sad.) So I started meditating, about two years ago. And I started going to the gym, which I have done off and on for years now, but I’ve been good about it for the last four months or so. I have also cut down my caffeine intake, though it hasn’t yet paid off in good, solid, consistent sleep.

But I have seen results. I have lost a little weight. I have gotten stronger, and I have more stamina. My sleep has improved, and the meditation has maybe had an effect on my temper, which I don’t lose as often or as intensely as I used to (Though that also may be because I am sad, and particularly because I am tired. But it may be the meditation.). My blood pressure hasn’t gone down and stayed down — but also, my measurements for that are from when I donate plasma at the Red Cross, and there are other likely reasons for my blood pressure to be high when I go to get stabbed with a needle and then drained of my precious bodily fluids. So the worry about my health has brought to mind issues that may contribute to my anxiety, and to my sadness, and I have acted to address the problem, and I have seen some results.

But then I look at the images of myself recorded by our video doorbell, and I think, “Jesus, I’m fat. When did I turn into a potato?” And then I’m sad.

And notice that my reason for feeling sad is nothing to do with the other reasons I mentioned for why I worry about my weight.

And realize, also, that my video doorbell is not a fair camera: because it is a fish-eye lens, intended to capture a wide field of view, and not intended to take flattering pictures of me as I water the plants. Reasonably speaking, I shouldn’t feel bad about either my health or the way I look.

Hey, maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m sad because my father is grieving, because he lost his wife of thirty years this past February, and though I can talk to him and support him, and he says often that talking to me makes him feel better, I can’t make him not be sad, which makes me sad. Also thinking about my health makes me think that I need to make sure I am as healthy as possible because I don’t want to die and put my wife through what my father is going through. Also I don’t want to die. Maybe thinking about that is making me sad.

Maybe I’m sad because I can’t go visit my mother this summer, because I have to do too many other things and my school shortened my vacation, and I have too many things I want to do.

Maybe I’m sad because I have too many things I want to do and not enough time, and that stresses me out, particularly when one of those things is write: because I need to define myself as a writer, or else I will only be a teacher, and that would make me sad because I can’t make all of my students learn all the time, and therefore that makes me feel like a bad teacher. Also teachers don’t get paid enough, and I don’t want to think of myself as undervalued. Not that I get paid as a writer, of course, or at least not much. I don’t sell that many books.

And maybe I’m sad because I don’t sell many books, and so it doesn’t matter if I write the next book or not, because even if — WHEN — I finish it, it won’t sell, and that’s because I’m not that good a writer, and I should just go ahead and accept being a teacher. Even if that means everyone who disparages me and my fellow teachers online will have a better case for criticizing me, and I may have more trouble ignoring their criticisms by telling myself I’m really a writer as well as a teacher.

Maybe I should stop arguing online with people who disparage teachers. Though I do feel like I should take action when I can to make our world, and especially our society, a better place, and that means standing up to people who say nasty things, and correcting and teaching people who don’t know the truth or don’t know the whole story — and that means arguing. Even though it frustrates me and makes me despair, sometimes, because people just don’t listen or don’t change their ideas or their feelings, and no matter what I say or how I fight, I can’t control their feelings.

Maybe I’m sad because I can’t change people’s feelings: not my dad’s, not my students’, not my friends’. Not mine. I want to help all of us: but I don’t have control over that, over any of it, because emotions aren’t something you can control with willpower and rational thoughts.

Maybe I’m just fucking sad.

But here’s the thing: and this is the point I’m trying to make, and the reason why I decided to write this instead of the book review (Which I will write — it’s a good book and one worth reading, even though it’s depressing [Hey, maybe that’s why I’m sad…]): because while we can’t control our feelings with our thoughts, and we can’t even really control our thoughts (Also, that’s why I’m bad at meditation, which is a stupid thing to think, and one that the teachers on the meditation app I use keep telling me not to think, but the truth is that I can’t focus my attention solely on my breathing: the thoughts keep coming, and I keep focusing on them, even after two years of practice. I feel pretty dumb about it, and also kind of desperate because of it, because if I can’t keep myself calm through meditating, then what can I do to control my blood pressure or my anger? [Hey, maybe that’s why I’m sad…]), what we can control is our behavior.

I don’t like that I’m sad. I have shit to do, shit that I know will make me happier, but I have trouble making myself do it — because I’m sad. I don’t think I deserve to be sad, which makes me think both that I’m not really sad, and also that I’m just being self-indulgent, having a little pity party, when actually my problems aren’t that bad and I shouldn’t be upset about them. People around me are much sadder than me, for much better reasons; I should be supporting them, not making their situation worse by being sad all over the place. (Also, I shouldn’t be talking about it on this blog. This is going to make people sad, and that’s a terrible thing for me to do. But I’m doing it. [Hey…])

But rather than telling myself that I shouldn’t be sad, or that I’m really not sad, what I should do is: give myself room to be sad. Maybe don’t worry about the weekends where I can’t bring myself to write a blog. But if I do worry about that and feel bad about it — because I can’t actually control my feelings — I can still do something: I can not apologize, or be mean to myself. I don’t deserve to be mean. I don’t deserve to suffer my meanness. Nobody who reads these blogs needs or wants an apology from me on the weeks when I can’t bring myself to post. If I don’t feel like writing a particular post, rather than trying to force myself, or getting mad at myself for it, maybe I can post something else, like good links. Or maybe I can write something else, like an overly personal babble about my feelings, instead of an insightful book review. Will those things make me feel better?

As of this very moment: yes.

Though maybe I feel better because I also just took a break, took my dogs outside, cleaned up the yard a bit and watered the grass so the tortoise will have something to graze. And stood out in the sunshine, which was warm but not too hot.

I don’t know why I feel a little better now. My feelings aren’t rational, and the causes aren’t clear. But the fact is, I do feel better, and so it’s reasonable to think that maybe I can do these same things again and feel better again. Maybe when I am sad, I can write about being sad, instead of trying to ignore it. Maybe when I can’t face doing a large task from my home improvement list, I can do a small one. Maybe when I think about the problems I am having, I can also remind myself of the things I’m doing to make them better — how I’m supporting my dad, even if I can’t “fix” him. How I told my student that they can always be sad, and can talk to me about it if they want to, even if I can’t rationalize their feelings and therefore eliminate the bad ones; and that made them feel better. How even if I haven’t lost all the weight I want to yet, I’ve still gone to the gym twice a week every week for four months now, and I can see and feel the results. How even if I can’t empty my mind like a Buddhist monk, it’s still good for me to sit quietly and breathe deeply for fifteen minutes or so a day.

And maybe I can stop looking at myself in the videos from that goddamn doorbell.

And what I can do, for sure, is to stop apologizing for my feelings. Because I didn’t choose them and I can’t simply control them: so they are not my fault. And while I can try to work around the limitations that my feelings put on me, the first thing I have to do is recognize both the feelings and the limitations, and accept them. Because by doing that, I accept myself — whereas apologizing for myself and my feelings tells me that I am wrong, that I have done something wrong, and that I should fix it.

That act sucks. But I don’t.

Thank you for reading this. Thank me for writing it. Let’s try being better to ourselves, first. We’re worth it.

I Suck

08/05/2023Dusty Leave a comment

I had a crisis of confidence yesterday.

Right now, I feel like it’s not worth getting into; I did a (kinda) stupid thing, I reacted to it (kinda a little more) stupidly. I had a bit of a tailspin. I got out of it, but it colored my day, my night, and then this morning, too.

So all told, I don’t have it in me to write.

It doesn’t help that it’s the end of the school year, but mainly, it was yesterday.

So: I am going to give myself the grace and the space to have a bad day, and to skip, therefore, writing about anything this week. Instead, I am going to share two links with you all.

The first is an open essay from the author A.R. Moxon. I haven’t read his book yet (I will) but he is one of my favorite commentators, and I love both the way he writes and the thoughts he has. And this thought is a doozy. I also love the way he talks in this about the purpose of persuasion. So let me persuade you to read this.

https://open.substack.com/pub/armoxon/p/a-foolish-proposal?r=1b0hss&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

And then, I want to share an audio file from my favorite podcast, Unfucking the Republic. I think this one has a somewhat similar theme, and a similar purpose: and a second persuasive suggestion. I would like to propose the first link, the Moxon essay, as a thought-provoking read, and this link, this 20-minute podcast episode, as a path forward.

Let me know what you think. And I’ll try to write something next week. Assuming I don’t do anything else stupid.

Just Imagine

01/05/202301/05/2023Dusty Leave a comment

I want you to do something for me.

Imagine you were born with only one arm.

Doesn’t matter which one, left or right; for simplicity’s sake, imagine you have your dominant arm, whichever hand you write with. That one is still there, exactly as it is right now, and has always been there. But the other one — in my case, my left arm — was never there. You didn’t lose it in an accident, or to cancer or anything like that; you were just born without it. No stump, just a perfectly smooth shoulder.

Imagine that for a second.

Now, if you were born that way, with only one arm, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. Really: there are some things that would be difficult to do, because they require two hands working simultaneously; it would be a bit harder to drive, for instance (though you certainly could do it), and there are a lot of musical instruments you just couldn’t play, like guitar and piano (But if Rick Allen of Def Leppard is any example, you can play drums with one arm all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame); and sports would be challenging, especially baseball and basketball and hockey. You could play football, if that were your preference, though not all the positions; and soccer, of course, it wouldn’t even be a disadvantage, really. Other than that? You couldn’t play pattycake, and jumprope would be tough (unless you jumped double-dutch), but you could play tag, or hide-and-seek; and you could play with dolls and Legos. Some video games would be impossible or close to it: but you could play Wii, and handle most driving games; and of course with any strategy or puzzle based games, your one-armedness would mean nothing at all. Most parts of life, in fact, having one arm would mean nothing at all: you could still read and write and do math and science, you could use a computer or a smartphone, you could ride a bike, you could dance in the rain. You could date and fall in love (There might be some people who would reject you for only having one arm, but come on, how ridiculous and messed up is that?), you could marry and have children. You could be a lawyer, a doctor, a car salesperson, a carpenter, a sculptor, a farmer, an engineer, a rocket scientist, a dogwalker. You could live a full and healthy and rich life.

It would be difficult to find clothes that fit you well. People would probably stare. Little kids would make jokes, and tease you. For a lot of people, it would be the first thing they would ask you: it would be a thing that defined your identity, even though to you, it would mean next to nothing. You never had the arm. You don’t miss it. You may sometimes wish you had two arms so you could throw a flowerpot on a pottery wheel, or shoot a longbow; but it would be more comfortable for you to sleep on that side, because you’d never have to figure out where the hell to put your arm so your hand didn’t fall asleep. Mostly, it just wouldn’t matter.

Can you picture that? Try going through your day, in your mind, with only one arm. Some things might be a little tougher — mostly it would just take more time — but really, not that big a deal.

Okay: now imagine, having lived your life with only one arm, you came home today, took a lil nap because it’s Monday and we all deserve a lil nap on Monday; and when you woke up — you had two arms.

Picture that. Not how wonderful it would be to suddenly be able to juggle three chainsaws: but how incredibly brain-meltingly shocking and horrifying it would be to suddenly have a whole other limb where one hadn’t been before. Step out of this whole thought experiment for a second and imagine how it would feel to wake up from your lil nap to find you have three arms, one new one growing out of the middle of your chest. Would you think “Hell yeah, now I can juggle FOUR chainsaws!” or would you think “AAAAAAAAHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING GROWING OUT OF MY CHEST JESUS CHRIST GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!!”

I know what I would think. And so I know, for the person who had one arm their whole life, suddenly getting that second arm would be absolutely appalling. Your body would suddenly be different. Your balance would be off. All of your clothes, bought and maybe adjusted or even tailored to fit your one-armed self, would suddenly be different. Everyone who ever knew you would talk about nothing else, pretty much forever, especially if you didn’t have an easy explanation for what happened. If you have any fundamentalist Christian friends, they might decide it was a miracle, a gift of God, and they might try to make an example out of you; conversely, they might think it was the work of the Devil, and shun you, or try to exorcise the demon in your new arm.

Your whole idea of yourself would change. You wouldn’t recognize your body in the mirror. Imagine how weird it would be to keep seeing a hand, fingers moving and gesturing, in the wrong place, attached to the wrong side of your body. Everything you had ever thought, ever said, ever come to a difficult recognition of, about what it is like to be a one-armed person in a generally two-armed world — all of that would go out the window. You’d have to be — normal. But at the same time, not at all yourself. Everybody would think you were normal now, and they would probably congratulate you, and be super happy for you: but the whole time, you would, most likely, feel wrong. Just wrong. Not yourself. Not at home and not comfortable in your own body. You wouldn’t know how to sleep, because you’d have spent your whole life sleeping on the side where there was no arm, and being perfectly, totally comfortable that way: now there’s a fucking arm there, and the whole thing is different. Is wrong.

So here’s the question. If you felt that way, if you felt uncomfortable and strange and weird, all the time, would you grow to hate your new arm? You might. I might. I might not: I might adapt, might adjust; but I might not adapt, either. I might resent my new arm. I might miss being one-armed. And if there were people around me, if I had joined a group of one-armed people, say, and I had to see them sleeping comfortably with their single arms, I might really hate what had happened to me: and I might even grow to hate myself.

If that happened — and I know we’re getting pretty out there, but hold on, we’re close to the end — what if I came to a decision, and went to a doctor, and told that doctor to remove my left arm? To give me back my self-image the way I thought it should be, to make me into the person I knew I really was, no matter how I might look to others who thought I should be happy to have two arms like they do?

Would that be wrong of me to do? Would it be insane, to remove a healthy limb? Would it be butchery, for the doctor to agree?

What if I had really descended into depression and self-loathing? What if I were suicidal, because I had too many limbs, and I couldn’t stand it any more? Then would it be wrong of me to ask, and would it be wrong of the doctor to remove my unwanted body part?

I think it would not. I think it would be my choice, and I think there is nothing at all wrong with being one-armed. I think if someone chooses to be one-armed, then they have every right to make that decision, and to be that person if that’s what they want — particularly if being that person would help them to live a happy life, to have a good self-image and self-esteem, and to keep from harming themselves.

And that’s why I support trans rights.

Now: this may seem offensive. And if this were the actual analogy I were making, it would be; because there actually is a disadvantage in only having one arm, and there is literally no disadvantage, at all, in being transgender, other than how people treat transgender people. There is nothing “wrong” or “missing” in a transgender person, at all. But this is not the analogy I’m making: this is just the warm-up, just the practice round. (Okay, I’m kind of making this analogy: because there are a number of parallels. But it is an imperfect analogy. And it is not the main one I want to make.) Now it’s time to move to the actual topic of conversation here.

You see, there’s a trend I’ve seen in arguing with conservatives (And with assholes, let me point out, because I do my arguing these days on Twitter, which is now like the black hole of assholes [WON’T… MAKE… THAT… JOKE… WORSE… THAN… IT… ALREADY… IS!], pulling them all in until they have more mass than anything else in the solar system), and it has to do with the issue of transgender people getting gender-affirming health care, in two specific areas: one, young trans people getting puberty blockers and then hormone therapy during their adolescence, before they complete puberty; and two, trans people of any age getting surgery.

The trend is this: these folks, both the “compassionate” conservatives (And some of them probably are genuinely compassionate, but not a one of them tries to understand or empathize with what trans people experience, so their compassion is more performative than genuine) and the transphobic assholes, say that they don’t mind people being trans or living how they want: but they don’t agree with people changing their bodies to match their gender identity. They do what conservatives, and compassionate people, and assholes the world over have always done, which is claim to have the right to decide what other people should do, in this case because they are arguing only for young trans people: for children, they will tell you, children who are not mature enough to make decisions about themselves or their lives or their identities.

“What about a young person making decisions in collaboration with their parents, and with loving and competent medical care providers?” I ask these people, over and over again. I get either a simple refusal to accept anyone making a decision these people disagree with — or silence. It speaks volumes, either way. It shows that they are lying when they claim only to be watching out for children, only protecting those too young to protect themselves.

And at some point, I realized why.

They object to surgery, most specifically and frequently, because, they say, nobody should “cut off healthy body parts.” That’s crazy, they say. And for them, maybe it would be — though I would disagree with calling it “crazy,” because our bodies do not define us, we define our bodies: starting with tattoos and piercings and circumcision (Not that I’m getting into THAT conversation, because while I will fight all day with transphobes, intactivists scare the bejeebers out of me) and all kinds of voluntary surgery like cosmetic surgery and permanent birth control like vasectomies and tubal ligations; so honestly, if somebody decided their life would be better with only one foot, then I say mazel tov: go for it. Save all that money on shoes; now every sale is BOGO (though you’d need a friend who only had the other foot, in the same size. [Business idea: ShoeMates, for people who only need one shoe, to share with another person who only needs the other shoe. Call the Tinder people. Whole new meaning for swiping “left” or “right.”]). Make all kinds of jokes about “The shoe’s on the other foot now!” or waiting forever for the other shoe to drop. Joke — or lament — about how you will never again have to do the Hokey Pokey. But okay, let’s say that to someone who likes having two feet, removing a healthy foot would be crazy. Or to stop stigmatizing mental health, let’s just say it would be something they would never, ever do. To them, it would make no sense, and they’d never, ever do it. Just like most of us would never voluntarily choose to remove an arm, particularly not one that we’ve had our whole lives, particularly not a healthy one.

But what they are not considering is how one’s body feels if one is trans.

DISCLAIMER: I am not trans. I have never been trans, and I do not for one second think that I can speak for trans people or try to explain how they feel or how they experience the world or their bodies. I, unlike the conservatives and assholes I’ve been arguing with, would much rather leave ALL people, trans, cis, and everyone else, to make up their own damn minds about who they are and how they feel, and what their bodies should look like, with absolutely no unsolicited input from me at all, ever. But what I want to do, what I think I can do, is try to get some of the people who actually can be compassionate to understand what is wrong with this argument that I’ve been facing. This argument that it is wrong for someone to remove a “healthy” body part just because of how it makes them feel, particularly when they are young (though again, conservatives are not actually protecting young people, as can clearly be shown BECAUSE TRANS PEOPLE ARE AT PARTICULAR RISK OF SUICIDE AND SELF-HARM AND GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE IS PROVEN TO HELP WITH BOTH ISSUES AND IS THEREFORE THE BEST WAY TO PROTECT CHILDREN BUT I GUESS I FUCKING DIGRESS), and therefore, gender-affirming health care should be banned for those under 18 (or under 21, when the mask starts to slip and they reveal that it isn’t about children, it’s about control), particularly hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgery.

“Butchery.” They keep fucking calling it “butchery.” They insist on it. As if we weren’t talking about medical procedures carried out by fully trained and licensed physicians in a modern hospital with all the proper precautions and care and science around it.

It’s because they’re not trying to understand how the trans person feels, what made them decide to pursue hormone therapy or puberty blockers or surgery.

The people arguing against GAHC (Gender Affirming Health Care, and yes I hate the acronym, but it’s a pain to type out over and over and I don’t want to change the name from what it actually is because words matter and my opponents intentionally use the wrong terms) are thinking about what it would be like if they went to the doctor and removed their body parts. Their healthy body parts. Their wanted body parts.

That’s not it.

Here’s the real thought experiment. Ready?

So instead of picturing yourself with one arm, and then suddenly waking up with two, picture yourself as you are now: and then you take your lil Monday nap — and you wake up with the wrong genitalia.

If you are a woman, imagine waking up with no breasts. Not that they have been removed, which would be traumatic enough: they’re just not there. Flat chest, completely. And imagine in between your legs, you suddenly have a penis and testicles. If you are a man, imagine waking up without your penis and testicles. And you have breasts. And — forgive me for this, but it helps make the point — they’re big. That penis and testicles, those breasts, they’re HUGE. Just slapping around, there. Every time you move — and when you move, it’s awkward, because you never had them before so you do it wrong, and it hurts more than a little — they shift, they flop, they smack into something else, into your legs or arms, into your belly, into everything. They are there, and they are unavoidable.

And they are WRONG.

Joking aside: can you picture that? Can you imagine how awful it would be to wake up with the wrong body parts in the wrong places?

Now imagine you go running out and go to your loved ones, and say “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO ME!?!?”

And imagine if they acted like it was normal. And like you were strange for thinking those body parts were wrong. Maybe they would even be offended.

If I woke up with different body parts, with large lumps where before there had been no large lumps, I would immediately think it was cancer. Or like some kind of horrible infestation or infection, like the aliens had laid eggs in me. It would terrify me. It would be awful.

But to everybody else who wasn’t me, those lumps would be — healthy. Normal. Not only normal, but positive, important, defining.

Think back to when you went through puberty. When your body started changing. Did you have someone — a loved one, or maybe, like me, one of those terrible cheesy sex ed movies from the 70s — tell you that you were perfectly normal? That your body was supposed to change, that it was supposed to look like that? That you were becoming a man, or a woman?

What if you were becoming the wrong one?

Can you imagine how that would feel?

If I had woken up as a young woman, with breasts, with feminine hips (And imagine if I burst into tears, and immediately thought that I was crying like a little girl), my mother would have been ecstatic. I said before, she always wanted a daughter: it would be affirming for her if I had been her little girl. She could have taught me everything she knows about being a woman, as she understands it — and my mom knows a lot. She cooks. She knits. She sews. She is a nurse. She worked for decades with post-partum mothers and children with complications, so she can handle ANYTHING to do with babies. And my mom is a very feminine woman, in the classic stereotypical sense: she sings, she dances, she wears bright colors and pretty dresses. She would have LOVED to take me under her wing and show me how to dress and how to act with my feminine body. How to sing with my high feminine voice. How to live with my menstruation, and what it all meant for my future as a mother.

But if I was me — and in my mind I have always been male — all of that would be horrifying. Particularly because I would know that refusing to be the girl my mom wanted me to be would break her heart. But I’ll tell you right now: even apart from the horror of finding my body was not the body I wanted or expected it to be, the very thought of pregnancy and childbirth is the most horrifying thing I can imagine. It has always given me the heebie-jeebies in a way and to an extent that I can’t explain. I’m terrified of all of it.

And if I were, in my mother’s eyes, a girl, and she started talking about how lucky I was that I would get to look pretty in dresses, and eventually get married to a man (Ew) and have babies?

Aw, HELL no.

This is not how it feels to be trans. Puberty does not happen overnight, and doesn’t change a familiar, known, comfortable body into an entirely different body. But puberty does feel sudden, because you don’t notice the changes until you do: and then suddenly it feels like everything has changed. And for someone who is trans, that change might feel — wrong. And every day it continues unchecked, it gets worse: it gets wronger. But if you go to someone for comfort, for understanding, they will most likely not sympathize with your feeling: they will most likely tell you that your feelings are wrong, that your understanding of yourself is wrong, that your body is right, and you should just try to accept it. They might even get offended: and insist that the body, and the identity that they associate with it, is a good thing, a thing you should be happy about and proud of.

Picture that: you, as a man, wake up with breasts, and your loved ones say “But you’re such a pretty girl!” You, as a woman, wake up with a penis and testicles, and your loved ones say, “Come on, stop crying, BE A MAN! Show some BALLS!” But you are not a man. You do not want balls.

That’s the point. Don’t imagine GAHC as removing your body parts, healthy, wanted body parts: imagine if you had body parts you DID NOT want. Body parts that DID NOT belong on your body. They might look healthy to everyone else, but to you, they are more like tumors. More like infections, or infestations. They are wrong. They do not belong there. And worst of all, those body parts redefine you, in everyone else’s eyes, as something you are not. As something you do not want to be.

Wouldn’t you want them removed?

Wouldn’t you want to have the right body, the body you know, the body that you belong in?

What wouldn’t you do to get that body back?

That’s how we should think of GAHC. It’s not changing someone from what they should be into what they should not be: it is AFFIRMING a person’s body, making it look like what that person knows it should look like, what it should feel like. Making it into the right body. And, not least important, changing the way everyone else responds to that person and their body, so that they can live the way they know they should live.

I know that I have done this badly. I apologize for that. I know I’ve said this in a terrible cringey way, and I’ve probably been insulting. I do not mean to be. I just want people who think that GAHC, particularly gender affirming surgery, is removing “healthy” body parts, to understand that it is not what conservatives and assholes say it is. It isn’t about taking your body, that you belong in, and making it different; it is about taking a body that is already wrong — and making it right.

That’s the point. I hope, if I have said everything here crudely and stupidly, that I have at least helped make it more clear that most cis people think of GAHC in entirely the wrong way: we think about it like ourselves. But we never think about it as it is for trans people.

We should stop that.

Hey, you know what we should do?

Listen to the people in question tell us, themselves, what they need, what they want, what is right for them. And then we should support them so they can have that, the same way of life that most of us enjoy without ever recognizing how easy it is for us to live as ourselves.

Imagine that.

Take My Penis, Please

24/04/2023Dusty 2 Comments

Warning: I’m not sure how offensive this is going to get. Can it get more offensive than my title? you may ask. Of course it can. I don’t know how far I will go. I am not intending to offend everyone who is capable of being offended; there is a specific group of people that I intend to be maximally offensive to, but they will never care at all what I say, and the rest of you fine people are not targeted for intentional offense. I suppose the issue is more that this post might make you feel — kinda squidgy. Uncomfortable, like. For that, I’m sorry, but I can’t write anything other than this right now. I won’t. This is the one for now, until I finish this. Then I’ll go back to less squidgy things. Promise.

I mean — if I can.

I am a white male. I am, more specifically, a cis/het white male American. If any of those terms confuse you, allow me to explain: American should mean I was born in any of 35 countries or 13 territories in the North and South American continents or in the Caribbean; but because I was born on the pushiest, grabbiest, most narcissistic nation in the Americas if not on the planet, it only means that I was born in the United States. And I was: in the Northeast, in the state of New York, to be precise. “White” means nothing: we should probably switch to blanco, the Spanish version of the color name, because the “blank” cognate is much more appropriate than “Caucasian,” the usual, err, technical term for my race and ethnicity. Because “Caucasian” makes no sense. To find any of my ancestors who were anywhere near the Caucasus region (The hunk of land between the Black and Caspian Seas, which is mostly Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia.), you’d have to go back so far in my family tree that it wouldn’t be recognizable as my family tree. My race is, basically, “Nothing specific,” and my ethnicity is “More of the same.” I suppose I am European; what I know of my national heritages includes Welsh, English, Scottish, German, and French; my family name is most probably derived from a Saxon word that means “Defender of the Home,” though my grandfather theorized it came from “Dall’Umpre,” from Umpre, which he thought was an area of Spain where the Basque people lived. That’s way more interesting than my family heritage actually is, though. I’m just white. Moving on.

The “cis/het” is the most recent addition to my descriptors; I will add that I use the pronouns “He/him,” because I, unlike a whole bunch of goddamn idiots on the internet, am not upset nor offended by the use of pronouns. I speak English, I read and write English; I understand the necessity of pronouns in my language. If you don’t, allow me to present English without pronouns: here is the same paragraph I am finishing up now, without any pronouns. Ready?

The “cis/het” is the most recent addition to Dusty’s descriptors; Dusty will add that Dusty uses the pronouns “singular male signifier subjective case/singular male signifier objective case,” because Dusty, unlike a whole bunch of goddamn idiots on the internet, is not upset nor offended by the use of pronouns. Dusty speaks English, Dusty reads and writes English; Dusty understands the necessity of pronouns in Dusty’s language. If the audience reading this paragraph doesn’t, allow Dusty to present English without pronouns: here is the same paragraph Dusty is finishing up now, without any pronouns.

Isn’t that fun? Sorry: Isn’t the activity Dusty just completed fun?

Of course not. It’s garbage. Everything is better with good pronoun use. Everybody should, therefore, embrace the appropriate use of pronouns. Which means respecting what other people want you to use in reference to them. And which also means including your preferred pronouns in your self-description/introduction when you can, so we all can get used to asking about and respecting people’s preferred pronouns. I know that it may feel strange, especially to those of us who had the habit beaten out of us, to use singular “they,” or to use a pronoun that doesn’t obviously match a person’s appearance, or to use one of the new pronouns like xe/xem/xer [Those are pronounced “zee/zem/zurr”, and are, in order, subjective, objective, and possessive: Xe wanted a ride on xer pony, so we gave xem a turn.]; but suck it up. Practice a little bit, don’t feel bad when you unintentionally make a mistake; just do your best, and you’ll get used to it. My first trans student — pardon me; I had trans students whom I did not know were trans students at the time they were in my classes — my first out trans student used pronouns I wouldn’t have associated with him, based on my assumptions about his appearance, and I struggled with it more than once; but over the four years I knew him, I stopped making the mistake, and he never got mad at me about it. Partly because I never said anything like “This is hard and I’m tired of it, why can’t I just call you ______?” The only expectation, the only burden being asked of us is, “Don’t be an asshole.” Which is too much for some, I know, but don’t let them influence you: you don’t have to be an asshole. So don’t.

“Cis/het” means that I am cisgender, which is the opposite of transgender, meaning I identify as the gender to which I was assigned at birth, and which matches the stereotypical assumptions based on my appearance, at least most of the time — I had very long, very pretty hair for a long time, and I was frequently mistaken for a woman, which I did and do find flattering. Because the “het” part means I am heterosexual, so I am attracted to members of the opposite gender from myself, in this case women; calling me a woman means I would be, in my eyes, far more attractive than most men. (I say “most” because there are some very pretty men out there.)

Why am I saying all of this when most of you certainly already know this? Two reasons: one, it’s difficult to ask about all this stuff, and I know some people are still confused; it took me quite a while to remember what “cis” meant. And it’s difficult to ask for clarification because the issue seems very sensitive, and it often is: but remember, the only expectation is, Don’t be an asshole. I constantly ask my students to explain what their slang and lingo means, and they think it’s cute that I don’t understand. They love teaching me, even though they cringe, visibly, when I use the slang myself. You know why? Because I’m not an asshole. (I’m based, fam. frfr.) And also because I’m not an asshole, I very much want to normalize this entire topic: I want everyone to be comfortable talking about preferred pronouns, and transgender and cisgender people, and heterosexuality and homosexuality and bisexuality and pansexuality and asexuality, and everything in the queer world, in general. Because this is the queer world. Right here. Right now. We all live in it. There is no “normal.” There’s just — people. All of us. And all of us need to not be assholes: and that is the only expectation that matters.

The second reason I am talking about all of this is because there are, apparently, too many people in this country who don’t understand, or who misunderstand, and I assume that some of my friends and loved ones and my beloved readers are included in that group. That is not an insult: none of you are assholes. (Because assholes wouldn’t read what I write every week. I don’t hang out with assholes.) But some of you are uncertain, or confused, or misinformed, I assume. So I want to clarify. I want to help, and I believe that understanding reduces tension, and there is too much goddamn tension in this country right now. (Please also note: I am not an expert in this, and there is stuff I don’t know and stuff I get wrong. This is just what I do know, presented in the hopes that it will be helpful to some.)

So here I go: not talking about my penis.

The last word I used to describe myself is “male.” I identify as male. I think of myself as a man, which is not the same thing as being male: when I was young, I was male, but I was only a boy; when I was an adolescent, I was male, but I was an asshole. And in this whole list, the only one that has anything to do with my genitalia is the last one: because the main reason why I was an asshole when I was a teenager was because I had a penis, and the usual teenage sex drive, and the common total lack of morals or empathy where that sex drive was concerned. Too much focus on the penis makes one less of a man, I have found.

That’s why I picked the title. Because honestly? I don’t need it. I don’t care enough about it, and it drives me fucking nuts that there are so many goddamn people who believe that the existence of a penis attached to my body is somehow the most important defining characteristic when it comes to my gender and sex; so I’m sick of it. Take it. Give it to someone who wants it. I wish them well of it.

I wrote last week about being proud, and what it means to be proud. I am proud of being a man. I believe that is something I have accomplished over the years — though I will immediately and repeatedly say I didn’t do it all by myself. But I am not proud of my penis. My penis did not make me a man. My penis did even make me male: because the category of “male,” biologically speaking, means “of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.” [Also, writing this I realize that I may not be a male, because I have not to my knowledge ever produced offspring. So do my testicles actually produce spermatozoa? Maybe not.] Which means that my testicles made me male, and more generally, my XY chromosome structure (So far as I know. As I have never had my genes examined, I may not be chromosomally male, any more than spermatozoically male. That’s not a word.). Know how I know that my penis didn’t make me male? Because if I lost my penis in an accident, nobody would identify me as anything other than a cis male: because most people (Obviously no longer including Republican lawmakers, who are trying to pass bills requiring genital examinations as a prerequisite for sports. For fucking sports.) do not check my penis before deciding that I am a male. So its lack would go unnoticed in the face of secondary characteristics: I would still have facial hair and body hair in a “masculine” pattern, and I would still have a relatively deep voice, and I would have the same shoulders and hips, hands and feet and facial structure, and I would still be 5’10”. Those things, amusingly, are much more to do with my heritage, with my race and ethnicity, than with my gender or sex, because I am squarely in the average for most adult white people. Those things are also, at this point, not dependent on my testicles; I could lose those in an accident (And seriously, take ’em. Useless lumps. Itch and sweat and get in the way. And give me cancer scares. [Also, PSA to testicle-havers: do self-exams in the shower. Get used to how your testes are shaped, because you are looking for changes as a sign of potential problem.] Totally pointless, and very annoying.), or have them removed if they became cancerous, and still keep most of the same traits that would make people identify me as male; the ones that might fade would be easily recovered with some simple hormone treatments. Which many of my fellow men will get voluntarily as they get older, even without losing their testicles. And that won’t make them men, either, just as the natural decrease of testosterone doesn’t make one not a man. Regardless of what all those ads on the radio and the spam emails want me to believe.

You know what else didn’t make me a man? Having sex. I know because I had sex when I was still — I don’t want to say “a boy,” because that takes this into weird[er] places; I was between about 15 and 17 when I first had sex, so not a boy: but I was sure as hell not a man. I was an adolescent. I was immature. I was selfish. I was, as I said above, an asshole. And, again, not having sex would not make me not a man: if I lived the rest of my life as a celibate, I would still be a celibate man, and everyone would see me as a man, with no idea of what my sex life was or was not like. The vast majority of you, thankfully, not caring, and wanting to know nothing about it, as I don’t want to discuss it. Further, having children does not make you a man, because I don’t, but I am. (Again, and this still makes me chuckle, the ability to produce sperm that can father children apparently does make you male, which means I might not be male. Well, Mom always wanted a daughter.)

Being aggressive does not make you a man: I am an introvert, and I hate and fear and dread confrontation of all kinds. I can do it, and I have when it is necessary; but I hate it. Being violent does not make you a man: I have never committed an act of violence, never been in a fight, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse. (Killing a mouse does not make you a man. Elsewise cats would be men. Though of course they don’t want to be men: cats don’t want to be anything other than cats. Why would you? Once you’ve reached the peak, you don’t come down if you don’t have to.) Loving sports, especially blood sports, does not make you a man; I don’t care for most sports, but the ones I do like are generally skill and grace sports, like gymnastics and skateboarding.

We’ll come back to sports. Because there are a whoooooole bunch of assholes focusing almost exclusively on sports these days, in relation to this issue.

I think to be a man means, in part, not being an asshole. And I hate that, not only do millions of people disagree with that, but millions of people think the opposite: that being an asshole makes you more of a man. It does not. It just makes you an asshole.

And here’s the point: believing and affirming that trans men are not men, or that trans women are still men (or confused men, or “biological men”) makes you an asshole. Not a man. Not a rational person. Not a defender of women, or of people in general. It does not mean you adhere to science and accept objective reality. It means you are an asshole. Because you are helping to oppress and potentially destroy the lives of thousands upon thousands — millions, more likely — of trans people. Men don’t oppress and destroy innocent people. Monsters do that.

So okay, out of all of these things that do not make one a man — including a penis and testicles — what does make one a man?

Well that’s the thing: it changes, doesn’t it? It depends on context. I know that’s an annoying answer (This is why my students hate English sometimes, and prefer math, where there are definite answers. It’s easier that way. But please remember that life is poetry, not geometry.), but it’s the only one, and we know it. I’ve been giving some examples of the classic standards by which we define men, along with counterexamples that show those standards are not actually definitive: appearance does not make one a man, genitalia does not make one a man, fatherhood does not make one a man (Though it sure would be nice if more men were fathers and more fathers were men — though also, more fathers should be women and more women should be fathers. By which I only mean that shitty people shouldn’t be parents, and people who are parents shouldn’t be shitty people.). The only answer that actually fits all circumstances is this: I make myself a man. By deciding that I should act like one, according to my definition of a man’s behavior, and then doing it.

This is a dangerous answer, though. Because if I happen to think that being a Nazi and slaughtering millions of innocent people is what would make me a man, and I did that, then by my definition I would be a man; and I think it’s clear that would make me a monster, not a man. So there have to be some real standards of manhood, for the idea of manhood to have any meaning or value; and since, as I said, I am proud of being a man, I think we should retain the idea of manhood and manliness. I just really, really need us not to focus that idea on the genitalia. And preferably without any gender distinctions, because I think anyone can be a man who wants to identify themselves that way. Anyone who shows the qualities I define as manly qualities will absolutely be welcome to be called a man by me, if you want me to.

So what does manhood mean? First, it means being responsible, because being a man is about being an adult. Children are not men. Nor are they women: they are children. For me, the major difference between childhood and adulthood is responsibility. Responsibility means knowing what is needed, and then being strong and using that strength to do what is needed. Please note that this is not exclusive to men, because women also must be responsible and adult in order to be women — and also, children can be responsible and even adult in some ways, while still being children. The difference there is that children who must be adult are being harmed by that: asking adulthood of children is asking too much, and is harmful even if the kid can handle it; it’s still bad to make kids grow up too fast. Adults are those for whom responsibility doesn’t harm, it actually helps. I feel better when I am responsible, when I do my work, when I do what is necessary. I don’t like it, a lot of the time; but I feel better for it. Another aspect of adulthood which is necessary for manhood (and also for womanhood) is control: self-control, that is. Children do not have good self-control, but that is forgivable in children; it is less so in adults, in men and women. (Though I will note that everyone can be irresponsible from time to time, and also can give up self-control and let loose, sometimes. Just not all the time. Not when it matters. And to be an adult, you have to know when it matters.)

I will also say that one of the toughest kinds of self-control to have is the ability to keep yourself from controlling others. It is also, however, one of the most important. I have been struggling lately, because one of my classes needs to learn that it is important for them to pay attention to the class when I am teaching it; the way I am teaching them that is by not teaching them for a time, and letting them teach themselves. And they are doing a terrible job. And it is so damn hard for me not to stand up and take the class over and make them all learn the way they should be learning: but I need to not control them, I need them to learn. So I’m controlling myself, and letting them learn this vital lesson. It’s hard. But I’m doing it. Because I am a man. Men control themselves. (Also: please note, therefore, that rapists are not men. They are monsters. And any definition that allows rapists to be fully included in the ranks of men is a shit definition. Remember that when we talk about penises as man-defining.)

So that’s what distinguishes men from boys, from children. What distinguishes men from women?

As I said, it’s unclear: it changes. It depends on context. There is not a single trait of manhood that I could name that should not also be part of womanhood. Which is why transphobic bigots have to rely on the one clearly distinct difference in their eyes: genitalia. Ask them about intersex people (Intersex people are those who have more than one of the traits for male and female biological sex — so both ovaries and testicles, for instance. There is a wide range of people with a wide range of traits, and the term is non-exclusionary. Read more here. Note, for instance, androgen insensitivity syndrome, which can affect people with XY chromosomes and can, in some cases, mean that their cells reject male-trait inducing hormones entirely: and they will be phenologically [Is that a word? Should it be “phenotypically?”] indistinguishable from someone with a stereotypically female phenotype), or about men who lose their genitalia, and they will dodge the question. Every time. “Intersex people are so rare,” they will say. “I’m talking about MOST people.” Sure: most of the time “shit” means excrement; but sometimes (say, on 4/20) one might want to go out and buy some “good shit,” and would be VERY upset if someone sold them a baggie of excrement for $50. If you insist that “shit” only be used, ever, for the most common cases, you are losing some very important uses of the word — and your definition, therefore, is shit. A shit definition of shit. So too with simple definitions of “man” and “woman.”

I think in our society most people see the major distinction as being one between strength and kindness. Most people in our society see strong qualities as men’s qualities, and kind qualities as women’s qualities. People who are not assholes, of course, understand that everyone should be kind and everyone must be strong; but if there is a meaning to gender at all (And by the way, I’m totally cool with dispensing with gender entirely: I’m a human and a person much more than I am a man. I said I was proud of being a man, but I am really proud of being strong and responsible and kind.), I think it lands there. I think that I am a strong person, and my accomplishments that have required strength are the ones I am proud of, as a man. I have developed greater strength over time, and I am proud of that; though I think there is an upper limit (like, it’s not true that the stronger I get, the manlier I get, ad infinitum: if I am twice as strong as I used to be, I’m not two men [though I might like just repeating the syllable in one word, like I could go from being a man to being a manman, and then a manmanman].), I do think there is a general area where having enough strength to get through something — and often, to help someone else get through something — distinguishes one as a man from a child, because a child would need to take strength from someone else, where a man would provide strength to someone else who needed it. And a child who got through something requiring strength just on their own is seen as — grown up.

But here’s the thing: I may be a man because I am strong — but I am a good man because I am kind. So let’s not pretend that either virtue is exclusive, or disallowed to anyone in any category. Let’s not be assholes. Which category certainly includes a subset of both men and women. But recognize, again, that there are no traits that are exclusively men’s traits, and no traits that are exclusively women’s traits.

Which is why the debate over trans rights is so goddamn stupid. They have to focus on the only thing that they can point to as exclusively male: my penis. And ignore all the exceptions to that oversimplified definition. Most particularly, they have to ignore that the logical result of that argument is this: if someone who wasn’t born with a penis acquired a penis, then they would, by the anti-trans bigot’s own definition, become a man. This is why the more intelligent anti-trans bigots focus instead on chromosomes: which is just as reasonable and intelligent as distinguishing between people based on their skin color. You can describe someone with their chromosomes, if you can know their genes; but you can’t define them that way. Also, if you look at the intersex links I put above, you will find that there are people with chromosomes that just don’t fit into either category. “But those cases are so rare,” they say. “I’m talking about most people.”

You know what’s amazing about these people, and these arguments? That they then make the exact opposite point by claiming that trans athletes are a threat to sports. To women’s sports, of course — they never talk about trans men in men’s sports. (Someday a trans man is going to join a men’s gymnastics team, and he’s going to wipe the fucking floor with those dudes. But anyway.) Do you know how many trans athletes there are competing at the collegiate level in this country? In this nation of 330,000,000 people or more?

36. 36 trans athletes. (Source)

Out of 520,000 NCAA athletes, nationwide. (Source)

It is impossible to get a complete count of the number of trans athletes, of course, because not all of them are out; but whatever count you come up with, it is vanishingly small. So if you’re going to ignore intersex people and insist there are only two biological sexes, then you should bloody well ignore the tiny percentage of trans athletes and just let people compete. Actually, you should just let people compete even if there are millions of trans athletes: because people who want to compete should be allowed to compete. I wrote once before about how biological differences are sometimes accepted and sometimes not in sports, and it’s earth-shatteringly stupid to say that Usain Bolt has a fair advantage and Caster Semenya has an unfair advantage because Bolt has a penis and Semenya does not. Protecting women’s sports from trans athletes only makes sense if you pretend that trans women are not women: and they are. More importantly, why are we so goddamn concerned with some people winning sports and other people losing? Aren’t they still sports if you lose?

Or did all of my PE teachers lie to me?

Sports are supposed to be fun. I keep hearing they’re not about winning, they’re about sportsmanship and competing and building team spirit and so on; but apparently not so to Republican legislatures around this country, and all the assholes on Twitter, who are fucking up sports, and fucking up the lives of young people, because they hate and fear trans people. The assholes who constantly use videos and photos of trans adults to mock the idea that someone can be trans: and yet nobody speaks of all the men in the world who look damn “feminine,” and all the women in the world who look damn “masculine.” They only attack trans people, which shows how absurd their bigotry is: exactly like racism, exactly like thinking someone is less because of the color of their skin, but ignoring when some “White” people have darker skin than some “Black” people. Or more orange skin than any human anywhere. Because it’s not actually about appearance: it’s about hating the idea of trans people. They see trans people as toxic, as dangerous; as able to spread their “condition” (variously called an illness, a delusion, and every other shitty word that assholes use to insult other people unfairly) to others like a contagion.

That’s why all the arguments about people “turning” children trans, of trans kids being “peer pressured” into seeking gender-confirming medical care like puberty blockers or hormone treatments or even surgery. Look: I am a high school teacher. I have trans students, and I have had several trans students in the past. I did not know all the trans students I had in the past, because not all of them were out; until the last decade, none of them were out, so far as I know — but of course, I don’t know if any of my earlier students were trans and I never knew it, because they might have been visibly indistinguishable from other people of their identified gender; and some of them may have been transitioning without me knowing about it.

Know how much that affected me, or my relationship to them as students?

Neither do I, because I don’t know who or how many there may have been. So I’m going to have to say the impact of their being trans was — none. No impact. Didn’t matter in the least. As with the former students who have come out as trans, or queer, or genderfluid, or anything else under the sun: none of my relationships have been affected by their gender identity. Which is as it should be.

But those people themselves have been sometimes greatly affected by their gender identity. In every single case that I know of, these young people have been happier when they have been accepted as who they are, as people who have been able to find their way to live their truth, to define themselves according to their own standards. As I have been doing for myself in this blog, because I have a right to: and not because I have a penis. Those young people have struggled mainly because they have had people who denied their self-identification, people who told them they were wrong for being who they are, for knowing who they are, and for defining themselves, as we all not only have the right to do, but the responsibility to do, the obligation to do. And then, as reasonable human beings should, the rest of us are responsible for accepting what other people determine their own identity to be. As I have accepted with my trans students, which is why I have never had any trouble with them being trans. Nor will I ever: beyond sometimes slipping up with names and pronouns. But I’m not an asshole, so I do my best, and I always accept people for who they tell me they are. I don’t question or argue with it. Because it’s not up to me, and I don’t try to control other people’s choices, because I am a man, and I am not an asshole.

And in no case, not one case of any student I have ever had, or ever will have, has genitalia been anywhere in the consideration.

Right! See how horrible that is? The very idea of an English teacher judging a student by genitalia? SO WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYONE DO IT, EVER??? How can anyone rationally decide to pass a law requiring genital examinations as a prerequisite for participation on a specific sports team? How can that happen? What kind of insanity is that? It’s as ridiculous as me asking all of you to read this essay I titled with a consideration of my genitalia. Don’t nobody want that. (Actually, the anti-trans bills are unquestionably worse than my title for this piece. But I still feel guilty for talking about my piece in this piece. Kinda.)

By the same token, taken one small step further: we don’t actually judge anyone’s identity by secondary sexual characteristics, not in terms of identity. Nobody thinks a boy with a high voice is not a boy. Nobody thinks a girl with a flat chest is not a girl. Nobody (sorry, guys) thinks that a teenager with a sad peachfuzz mustache is actually a man. But also, I have students with more facial hair than I will ever grow: but I still don’t think of them as more manly than me. Because I am an adult, and they are not, however thick and luxurious their face-locks. Appearances don’t matter. Not for who people are.

So.

If someone wants to be called by a different name, call them that. (Definitely don’t ever be the person who uses only the name on the attendance sheet: my wife’s birth name was Anthony. Because her dad was a prick who wanted a son, not because she is not a woman. On a much less controversial note, my official name is Theoden, but I prefer to be called just Dusty. Partly because most people can’t pronounce Theoden correctly.) And because pronouns are not at all more meaningful than names, if they want you to use different pronouns, then use the different goddamn pronouns. Mistakes are fine, but do your best, and don’t be an asshole. (Unless you identify as an asshole, in which case, fuck you. And don’t ever make an “I identify as…” joke. They’re not funny.) Don’t judge someone by their appearance. Yes, someone is perfectly able and permitted to be a trans man or boy and wear dresses and long hair, as someone is perfectly allowed to be a cis male and wear dresses and long hair. Yes, someone can be a trans woman or girl and have facial hair. If you think it doesn’t look right, nobody cares what you think. It’s not up to you. If someone changes their name or identity or preferred pronouns several times, just try to keep up: and expect to make mistakes, and expect those mistakes not to matter, so long as you are being kind. Don’t question why they changed; it’s not up to you. Don’t say they’d be happier if they didn’t change, or you liked them better before; it’s not up to you. Your only job is to try not to be an asshole.

And one last thing. I wanted to write this blog because I heard about recent polls that show that the public view of trans people in this country is, in my opinion, going in the wrong direction. This research from Pew shows that the majority of Americans believe people’s sex is only what is assigned at birth (and that majority has grown over the last six years), and that the majority of Americans think that trans athletes should not be allowed to compete on teams that match their gender identity, and that almost half of Americans think that medical treatments should be limited for trans youth under 18.

So let me be clear. Gender is not determined by sex. Sex is not determined by chromosomes. And neither is set in stone and immutable. That being the case, who is the one person most likely to know best what their gender identity is? Themselves. (Notice the singular “they” there. And if you wanted me to write “Him/herself,” then get over it.) We know ourselves better than anyone else knows us. And sure, not all of us know ourselves very well; I have been confused about how much of myself I have discovered just in the last few years, and I’m 48 years old. So it’s reasonable to think that young people who think they may be trans may be unclear, or uncertain — just as some cis people are unclear or uncertain about who they are, for countless reasons, including the possibility that they may actually be trans, and not know it, or not be able to accept it.

In that case, you know who are the best people to help the young person figure out what their real self, their true identity is? It’s not reactionary, transphobic, attention-seeking Republican lawmakers, that’s for goddamn sure. No: it is the young person’s family, and their caring medical professionals. And of course some people have fucked up families, who shouldn’t be allowed to influence their children’s choices: but don’t you think that’s true in whatever way the family is fucked up? Macaulay Culkin’s family should not have been allowed to steal all his money. Brittney Spears’s father should never have been granted conservatorship over her. Abusive parents should not be allowed to abuse their children. But if you think that trans youth are only trans because their parents, or their friends, or their teachers, or their social media, tell them they should be trans, then you’re either an asshole, or an idiot. The world tells trans people they should not exist: nobody tells cis people they should be trans. Nobody chooses to be trans, just as nobody chooses to be white: some of us just are. The world should allow us to be who and what we are, so long as we don’t cause any harm. And trans kids don’t harm anyone by being trans. Or by playing on sports teams. Or by receiving gender affirming care, which is often critically important to prevent harm being done to the one person most likely to be hurt by a trans kid: themselves.

And if it helps, if the young trans person who told me that he wants a penis wants mine, he can have it. Take it. Please.

But it’s still not going to make you a man.

You’ve already done that, sir: because you are strong, and you are kind.

Now if only everybody else could be the same.

Just Dusty

Dusty Takes Over the Internet!

Author Dusty