We Gave The Clock A Face: A Multi-Post

Eleven plus years ago I was preparing to teach high school full time. On the eve of the start of the job I bumped into a veteran teacher. He recommended Assertive Dicipline (or a reasonable faccimale). Whatever book I asked him to recommend or that he recommended on his own (my memory is fuzzy on this) I didn't like it. It seemed to be missing pieces of the people I'd be teaching and pieces of me, pieces too important to do without. Next to the suggested book I noticed the another book with the title Two Parts Textbook, One Part Love. I took it home and it's been my helpful mentor and friend ever since.

The book includes discipline, order, and responsibility as important ingredients (chapters with titles such as Rules Are Not Made To Be Broken, Don't Be Afraid Of Your Students, and We're Off To See The Principal) but there's a loving tone throughout. Here's an excerpt:

Tell Your Students Every Day That You Like Them

(If you don't like your students, please please please find a different job.) You may not be able to like every student personally, but if you look long and hard enough, you will find something good about every child. Focus on the little bits of goodness and try to remember that they are reacting to a crazy world in a way that makes sense to them. Children don't have the resources and options that adults have. If we hate math we can hire somebody to keep our books and manage our money, but children are stuck doing math for twelve years. If you remember your childhood at all you must remember that twelve minutes is an eternity. Twelve years is beyond comprehension. So, shildren try other tactics to avoid having to face the math book, such as acting so obnoxious that the teacher sends them out of the room temporarily.

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On Wednesday night I went with my dad to Shul and The Rabbi wasn't there. So this rabbi was asked to say a few words between Mincha and Maariv. It feels like just yesterday that I was seventeen and The Rabbi wasn't there and I went up between M and M for the first time. (That first time someone looked and me and shot out "Oh, the next Ari Winter (the young almost rabbi at the time who used to fill in, but who was also out that night) and I shot back - "No, the next Neil Fleischmann."

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What to say? To whom? Paul Reiser has a routine that like many a comedian's observation contains strong mussar. He says that people will say insulting things to other people and then try to save face with the line, "I'm just saying." This is a profound idea. There is no such thing as just saying. My addendum is that just saying is akin to just shooting. Imagine that someone shoots you in the chest and when you fall down they ask you why you're over reacting like that - after all they were just shooting.

k

Its not what you say but how you say it. People have been rejecting other people in love, friendship, and work forever. Also, people have been corrected, warned, taught, raised forever. Often the one of us who needs to speak to the other chickens out by saying something in a rough way, because in a way it's easiest. If we think think about the other that will hear our words, if we think about them very carefully (including how we'd want to be told what we were about to tell someone else) then our words will probably be phrased in a better way.

k

Many years ago a student told me that he had remembered a story from his teacher the year before. (It was one of my first years in the school and I was learning a lot from what kids told me about their previous teachers. One teacher that the kids spoke of positively was Rabbi Steven Finkelstein. They said that he told stories with moral messages that they thought about long after leaving his class.) I remember vividly one of the students who wasn't usually strong in the zitsfleisch department telling me (and the class) in detail the tale that touched him. (He's since become a teacher and married an associate principal's daughter). A rabbi died. The person assigned with the task of telling the sage's wife was extremely anxious about how to break the news to her. When he finally told her the first words that came out her mouth in response were: "It must have been very hard for you to tell me that." Can you imagine? At that moment, along with everything else, she was thinking about the person who'd just spoken to her.

k

There are great levels to aspire to regardng how we speak and listen and stand with eachother.

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Some time ago I spoke with a rabbi of a major Modern Orthodox synagogue. The rabbi told me that he has a connundrum when it comes to scholars in residence. On the one hand (this line is best read swinging thumb Talmudically) - people want people with top scholarly credentials. On the other hand most members of the shul come to the first presentation this guest gives and then don't come back because they find that the presentation doesn't interest them or relate to their lives. The rabbi went on saying that "someone like Rabbi Paysach X is a slam dunk." But someone like that doesn't fit the bill of who this shul want to have as its guest scholars. The few people that arrange the lectures and the few that are in a place where they like these scholarly scholars are happy with the dry intellectual speakers. But the vast majority of people seem to want and need something more user friendly - more stories and less xeroxed sheets.

I related that the same seems true at school. Perhaps more on ths another time. For a post, written during the thick of the school year, that relates this to teaching - see here.

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My new set up at my work table is such that I've been kcking down the speakers that are on an (unusually placed) shelf under the table. Each time I knock them to the floor I get frustrated and then put them back in the same place. It just dawned on me to turn them sideways so I won't bump into them. This little episode brings the following magnum opus to mind.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

By Portia Nelson

o
k

I. I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.am lost....I am helpless

It isn't my fault

It takes forever to find a way out.

II. I walk down the same street

there is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don't see it.

I fall in again.

I can't believe I am in the same place,

but, it isn't my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

III. I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.I still fall in....

It's a habit,my eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault.I get out immediately.

IV. I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

V. I walk down another street.

o

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u
Sadie greets her husband upon his return from the golf course. "How was your game," she asks. He tells her that everything was going beautifully until on the fifth whole his golf partner Cohen dropped dead. "Oy, that must have been awful," Sadie says. "Yes, it was terrible," Cohen sighs - "Hit the ball...Schlep Cohen...Hit the ball...Schlep..."

In all jest there is truth. Raymond Carver has a story about a woman who loses respect for her husband after she finds out that he and his fishing buddies discovered a dead body and didn't report it right away. Its been adapted to film twice (Short Cuts, Jindabyne).

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j

TThis is from Good Poems For Hard Times

which I just got for free at Barnes and Noble

(they're having a buy two get one free sale)

(I don't know how they stay in business -

I'm killing them with sales and coupons)

j
Things
j
What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

o

- Lisel Mueller

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l

The Jewish Week had a greak Back of The Book piece this week by Elicia Brown. It's about a movie called Arranged. Actually, it's about the executive producer of the movie, a nice,young single Boro Park girl (maybe you know someone for her?). She brought her idea to a film director and next thing you know the movie was written and done (or so the story goes). It's about the friendship of a Jew and a Syrian who share a friendship bult on the bond of their common experience with arranged marriages.