So Many Books

It has been a nebulous time, these last two weeks.

My students are finishing up their Advanced Placement exams and I am planning next year. Meanwhile, the school community prepares for Sunday’s open house and festival which includes Aram Saroyan’s visit and book signing.

Usually, teachers and students function like Pavlov’s dog during an ordinary school day. The bell rings, and we move. The entire day is organized around bells. But this week, the bells are often irrelevant. They ring, signifying the end or beginning of a class, but there are still students in the hallways. Students and teachers rehearse programs and performances; artists paint banners and posters on the floor in classrooms and hallways; janitors hang banners and bunting around the quad and playground. In short, it is chaos, a cacophony of busy work and artistic endeavor, occurring during the time of year when everyone, teacher and student alike, struggles to maintain focus. Final exams begin in fifteen days.

One of my many tasks this week is determining what books I will teach next fall. I have spent more time than usual on this process this year. I feel more and more that my students do not read enough, and therefore I need to bolster the text lists in my classes. However, I also feel they do not read carefully enough, nor deep enough, and therefore I have spent this year feeling like we are rushing through material. I keep hearing my mentor teacher’s voice from all those years ago: “ We teach children, not curriculum.”

How do we best serve our students? How do we get them to read broadly while also digging into the books and reading with depth and critical thinking?

So I have spent the week cutting down the text lists for each class to the bare minimum, thinking that I would dig more deeply into the works I teach. More close reading. More intensity. More background. More projects that reveal the nuances of text and writing.

Then I read an AP article, or examine a released exam, and realize by cutting the list, I am limiting my students’ experience with a variety of texts. So I start adding books back to the list. I go crazy, adding this book or that book, things I taught last year, or five years ago.

I also think about themes. I like organizing my reading lists for courses by theme. For the seniors, I am thinking of picking books that illustrate the philosophical questions of good and evil. Heart of Darkness. Crime and Punishment. Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” Dante’s Inferno. For sophomores, I think of Existentialism and Eastern philosophy—Siddhartha, The Stranger. And since they purchase a separate writing and grammar text, I would like to devote a semester to that book alone. Research writing—they should do a major paper. Or, I could assign several shorter assignments that cover a variety of research techniques. Juniors hate Huckleberry Finn, yet it is on every major course list from the state and the College Board. Who does not read Huckleberry Finn in high school? The same group loves The Catcher In The Rye, yet I find the language dated, and I wonder at the value of the book. Are there others that might serve the same purpose and offer a richer experience? Why do they respond so well to Salinger’s writing? There must be something there.

I come to the conclusion that to lessen the number of texts is to cut the blood flow, so to speak. I need to push hard through the books. I cannot let the current trends in our American society to read less discourage me from making my students read more. As hard as it is this year with all the distractions, I must carve out the time next year to make my students read broadly and deeply.

In all of this, I must admit, there is the flutter in the stomach, the excitement. Yes, I get butterflies thinking about the teaching, the assignments, the work. I love this. I think about reading these books for the first time when I was in school, and the smells, the tastes, the intensity come flooding back. I start thinking about how I can recreate this experience for my students. How can I get them to feel the things I felt in ninth grade, tenth grade, senior year, when I read 1984, Romeo and Juliet, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I have already decided that this summer I need to refresh my notes and materials. I will work through each text, even the ones I have taught a hundred times, and re-prepare to teach them once again. I will research new websites, new articles, new project possibilities, new directions. I do this every few years. Freshness is important when you are a classroom teacher. I cannot wait to reread the books, to spend the summer weeks rethinking the writers I love, the books I cherish.

Meanwhile, I must finish this year. We have Monday off since we must spend Sunday on campus at the open house. Tuesday begins the final fifteen days of 2007-2008. I must still finish teaching Fahrenheit 451, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, The Bell Jar. I need to write some final exams, finalize the Summer Reading List, distribute the final draft of my text list for 2008-2009. Final, finalize, finish. But the work of a teacher is never finished. There are always more books to read, more learning to absorb, more thinking to do.

Summer is a time of fireworks and picnics, swimming and playing, of youth and beauty. I will be the one on the blanket with his back against the tree, face buried in a book, dreaming of autumn and so many books.

Bonk

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and SexBy Mary Roach
W.W. Norton, $24.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-393-06464-3

Mary Roach is the journalist of the taboo, and that is what I like about her. One can count on her to explore the topics people always want to know more about but are afraid to ask. Previously, she wrote a book about human cadavers and another about the afterlife. They are both riveting works of inquiry. However, the books go into great detail about subjects that most people question only in the darkness of their quieter hours. In fact, that is the value of books like her latest, Bonk: they clearly address, with grace and humor, the taboos in human life.

Bonk concerns itself with sex research. All the star players are given their due credit: Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and Freud; she also brings in some lesser known players in the sex research game like Aristotle and Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon’s grand niece.

Roach writes with fluidity, understanding, and most important for this topic, a sense of humor.

Consider some of the facts she brings us: One, “Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women without looking.” Imagine visiting the doctor for something so intimate that the poor physician cannot look at you or your body part while conducting the examination.

Two, during medieval times, people believed “that breast milk was formed from…diverted menstrual blood.” The logical fallacies inherent in this assumption are clear.

Third, “Nasal congestion is an erection inside your nose.” Yes, evidently, the same erectile tissue in the genitalia is also present in the nose.

Fourth, “Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex.” Evidently, the rest of the animal kingdom just does the deed and who cares if the monkeys want to watch?

These are just the less racy facts. Let’s just say that the book is packed with trivia and insights about a subject that has only been vigorously researched for a little more than a century. Roach traces the entire history, from Robert Latou Dickinson to modern scientific papers from the last few years with the seemingly prurient titles of “Wet and Dry Sex—The Impact of Cultural Influence in Modifying Vaginal Function” (2005) and “Does Semen Have Antidepressant Properties” (2002).

Of course, what makes reading a book like this so uncomfortable are the implications. Roach, herself, makes it clear that the subject of sex and sex research makes people leap to conclusions, both about the researchers and those interested in the results. “With sex research, unlike, say, engineering or genome research, almost everything a scientist does can appear—to the uninformed or close-minded outsider—to be motivated by a perverse fascination with the subject.” A sex researcher risks being labeled a deviant, a pervert. To gather information, ask questions, investigate the mysteries of sex are all activities best not mentioned in polite society.

However, this is a book to recommend not only because it contains humor and insight into human behavior, but because Roach unmasks us in our most intimate moments. She details for us exactly what happens, anatomically and intellectually, when we have sex. But this is not a book for young people, those just learning about sex. This is a book that extends knowledge of human sexuality. Therefore, it is truly a book for adults.

The book also takes into account our modern world with its myriad cultures. In a chapter titled, “What Would Allah Say?” Roach discusses one of the few sex researchers operating in an Islamic country. His name is Ahmed Shafik, and his work is quite extraordinary. Even more incredible is that he has subjects upon which to conduct research, given the strictures of the Muslim faith.

“Shafik has published papers on a total of eighty-two anatomical reflexes that he has discovered and named,” Roach writes. His weirdest project? Dressing seventy-five rats in polyester pants for one year to see if the material influenced their sex lives. It did. The rats in polyester had sex less often than the rats who wore cotton pants. Shafik’s theory? The polyester created electrostatic fields in and around the mice’s genitals, damaging their sex drives. This is why all the fashion-conscious mice are wearing cotton Bermuda shorts for summer 2008.

Mary Roach combines good research with education, insight and fun in her book. Her writing does not constitute a literary masterpiece. I do not think that was her goal. She is writing to inform, to amuse, to enlighten. In this way, she is successful.

Like her previous work, Roach has written extensively about a secret in such a way as to illuminate the humanity of the act—in this case human sexuality—managing to entertain and enlighten us without resorting to lewdness or clinical jargon. We read her work even as we might blush and look away, and that is refreshing.

Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems

Complete Minimal Poems
By Aram Saroyan
Ugly Duckling Presse, $20.00 paper
ISBN 978-1-933254-25-8

Aram Saroyan, son of William Saroyan, and a well-known author, will be visiting my school on May 18 to speak with students about the fine art of writing. So it was with the interest of preparing my students for Saroyan’s visit that I introduced them to Ugly Duckling Presse’s recent publication of his Complete Minimal Poems. Then the controversy in the classroom began.

First, some background. Aram Saroyan has written a great number of books—novels, biographies, memoir, poetry, essays, photographs and words. This book, Complete Minimal Poems, “collects nearly all the poems Aram Saroyan wrote in the 1960s, when he was in his early 20s,” according to a recent review in The New York Times written by Richard Hell (April 27, 2008).

The genesis of these minimal or “concrete” poems began when Saroyan lived in New York City and decided to submit a piece to The American Literary Anthology edited by George Plimpton and to be published by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The piece was a poem of a single word:

lighght

One, tiny misspelled word, a $500 award from a government arts council, and the House of Representatives and Congress recoiled. The American people seemed to agree with the politicians—awarding this poem anything was outrageous. Yet, there it was, and more would follow.

From the distance of history, Saroyan’s poem does not seem very controversial when placed in context with the uproar over Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a bottle of urine. That work, too, was sponsored by the NEA. Or, we could place Saroyan’s work next to that of Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer who specialized in erotic and homoerotic images of nudes, and often had NEA backing.

In any case, Saroyan challenged contemporary notions of what constitutes poetry. His was not the only challenge to conventional forms of art. According to an article written by Ian Daly on the Poetry Foundation website (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/), Saroyan was influenced by Dadaists and the poet, Robert Creeley. They were playing with words on a page. “Lighght is something you see rather than read,” writes Daly. “Look at lighght as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph and you’ll be closer.”

Daly’s article also includes Saroyan’s take on the controversy. “All of this was a little hard to take seriously…at a time when 500 Americans a week were dying in Vietnam, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had recently been assassinated.”

Beyond all the cultural and political discussion of his poems, Saroyan had other matters to contend with, namely being the writer-son of a famous writer. In his published memoir of the last months of his father’s life, Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan, he wrote, “What am I describing here, after all, but the continuing skirmish of my very life itself, with my father in front of me, the great writer, bigger than I, or more famous, and no matter where I go, no matter how I struggle to get past him, he is still there in front of me…” Their relationship was extremely difficult at best. “My father never liked me or my sister, and he never liked our mother either…” the younger Saroyan wrote, “he never liked anyone at all after an hour or two…no one except a stooge, someone he could depend on to be a lackey, a nitwit he could make fun of behind his back, someone he could control completely by whatever means he could make work—fear, intimidation, or, because he was a famous and admired man, blind worshipfulness.” All of this acrimony was aired out publicly in his memoir and the resulting review in The New York Times (August 1, 1982). He wanted to distinguish himself as a writer and artist separate from his lineage. He wanted to become his own man. He succeeded.

Aram Saroyan was born in 1943. His mother, Carol Marcus, married William Saroyan twice, but later divorced him to marry the actor, Walter Matthau. Although Saroyan attended several colleges and universities, including Columbia University, he never completed a degree. He wanted the career of a writer, and according to one report, turned down the role of Benjamin Braddock, the Dustin Hoffman character in the 1967 film, The Graduate, in order to focus on his writing.

So the son of a great writer has himself become a most important figure of literary pursuits, bringing us to his upcoming visit with my students. Their initial reaction to Complete Minimal Poems was vocal and energetic.

“Couldn’t he spell ‘light’?” one asked.

“I’m sure he could.”

“So what was he thinking when he wrote it that way?”

I struggled to explain to them that a poet’s, an artist’s job, is to make us see the world differently. By writing a common, simple word that way, did we not think about the word differently? Did he mean “light”? What constitutes the word “light”? Is there some meaning behind the misspelling? And by asking these questions, are we not thinking about light differently, as a word and as a concept?

“Still,” my student persisted, “I want to ask him what he was thinking when he wrote these poems.” I urged them to keep an open mind.

“Anyone could have written these poems,” another student said. “I could have written these poems.”

“Yes, you could have,” I replied, “but you didn’t.” Does art have to take every ounce of talent from the artist? What about some of the more modern art pieces, a white canvas, let’s say, with a red dot in the center? Could you have painted that? Yes, but the artist was trying to say something about the human condition, maybe. In a symphony orchestra, should the individual parts come close to exceeding the abilities of the players? Many times simplicity is best; less is more.

“I do not think it’s art,” a student insisted. “It’s just words on a page.”

“Is not all writing just words on a page? It is up to us, the readers, to invest it with meaning.”

I reminded them how adults often view teenagers’ music. How many times has someone told them their music is noise? They were closing their minds to the poetry the way adults often close their minds to teenagers’ music.

Then, I had an epiphany. My students were vigorously discussing the nature of art. They were debating what constitutes poetry. They were engaged. They had always been a good discussion group—they are only tenth grade students and yet, we had some good philosophical discussions. Now, they were asking the questions of each other. These were not my made up questions, but inquiries driven by their desire to know, to figure things out for themselves.

If Aram Saroyan’s concrete poetry could cause this kind of debate, a critical discussion among fifteen and sixteen year olds in the crucible of the classroom, I can hardly wait until he comes on May 18 to join the discussion. Let the fireworks begin.

Take Flight

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

E.M. Forster Howards End (1910)

“Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.”

E.M. Forster Aspects of the Novel (1927)

I said goodbye to my senior class today. It was an emotional end to a stressful week. We held elections for Student Council, not without considerable controversy. And we were ramping up to AP exams next week. The seniors will now take those exams, plus their finals in other subjects, and then high school is over for them. Many of them have been on our campus, pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade, for fourteen years.

It was an emotional day, and when the final bell rang there were tears all around, both teachers and students. These young people have been my students for four years in five courses. I taught them, teased them, joked with them, disciplined them, wrote them letters of recommendation, letters of appeal, watched them succeed and fail, fly and fall. I witnessed them do extraordinary things, wrong things, right things. I saw them be determined and incredibly lazy. I watched friendships and love affairs begin, and often end. I listened to their stories, and they listened to mine. Some buried grandparents; at least one buried a parent. During high school, I know they experimented with alcohol and drugs. They explored darkness on the edge of adulthood. They often behaved like the children they once were, and in so many ways, still are.

Among my students, I can count artists, musicians, scientists, scholars, writers, editors, leaders, caregivers, teachers, playground lawyers, athletes, thespians, journalists, visionaries, and yes, sometimes failures, miscreants, delinquents, posers, wannabes, derelicts, sinners and saints. Occasionally, they displayed wisdom uncommon in someone their age. Ignorance, too, burbled forth.

They frustrated me. They challenged me. They made me a better human being, a better teacher. At least once a week, they made me proud.

I fell in love with them, I made friends, I was humbled. Secretly, they made me long for the days when I was young, but I also remembered why I would never want to relive my teenage years again. They reminded me what I have lost to age, what I regret, what I missed. Oh, the lost opportunities, the false steps, the dead ends. I can feel the disappointments, the emptiness, the loneliness, the feeling that the pain in my heart would never end. I remembered what it was like to be at the mercy of adults, to be trapped, to yearn to be free, to chart my own course, to reach out to my destiny.

To be a senior in high school is to work through your last best year of childhood. Tomorrow it is gone; you have grown up, and you are thirty years old with a mortgage and a car payment and a dead-end job that makes you wonder where you derailed your life.

Or, you are forty-four, remembering when you figured out how old you would be in the year 2008, and thinking that time was your friend. “Time is the fire in which we burn,” a poet once wrote, and today, my students and I felt the heat.

They can vote, go to war, get married, obtain credit, and sign away their lives. They can seize the day or let it slide. This is the death—childhood is dead, long live the children! “Oh the places you’ll go,” said Dr. Seuss.

“Good night, Moon.”

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.” But we all know that childhood dies. The lockers stand empty in the deserted hallways of the abandoned school. A breeze blows papers around the school yard. I hear the echoes. I hear the voices. Ghosts of who we once were, a long way off down the long dark hall.

And so, they fly away. Only I remain behind, to begin again with a new group of students, in the quiet time of year, the autumn. My tears today were selfish. I am jealous of my seniors. They are off to find their futures, to slay some dragons, to continue their journeys. My journey keeps me here in this classroom, studying words and stories, finding the poetry in the living, urging a new group—“Find the connections. Only connect. Search for the meaning, the relevance.” My seniors are no longer my students; hopefully, they become my friends, but I do not expect that because I do not want them to look back. They must go forward while time and tide are in their favor.

They explode into flight like birds, ever traveling, ever searching. I send my prayers with them, and I wish them Godspeed on their journeys. They will never travel alone, for my hopes and dreams fly with them.

In the end, it is the truth of poetry: “Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, time stays, we go.”

Farewell, men and women of 2008.

Another Issue of NY Times' Education Life

The Sunday, April 20, 2008 edition of The New York Times contained another issue of the special section entitled, “Education Life.” This is a tabloid-styled section about all things collegiate, including entrance and admissions information, college life on campus, and statistics regarding attendance and other factors. The section is a must-read for the college bound and their parents.

The tabloid begins with two short pieces of interest. The first is about how students who send in a picture with their application often fare better than those who do not. The photos help admissions officials put a face to the name and statistics on the application materials. The second short piece is on the typographical errors found in a typical high school student’s application packet. Having proofread several students’ essays and application materials this year, I am often appalled at the errors that slip by. One student misspelled San Francisco on her envelope. Another forgot to include the college name in the address, labeling her envelope with “Admissions Committee, 1234 Mockingbird Lane, Somewhere, California 90001. I had to pull her back in and question what university she was sending her application to as there were several in that particular city.

Another piece detailed the mistakes that can result in the scoring and reporting of test results such as the SAT and ACT, exams students must take to qualify for college admissions. As I tell my students, double and triple check everything. Computers and human beings make mistakes.

The Data section consists of raw numbers that often indicate a larger message. This edition, the Data focuses on endowments. The list includes public and private universities and how much they have in their endowment funds. The numbers are often astounding.

Many of my students not only know what they want to major in, they have also selected subjects in which to minor. Minors are secondary areas of study that students might select. These areas are included in fine print on their diplomas, and can account for extra time and money spent during the undergraduate years. Minors require additional classes beyond major coursework. Michelle Slatalla writes a column called “Guidance Counselor” where she examines the importance of minors and why a student may, or may not want to select one.

The cover story for this issue is about the college financial aid system. David Leonhardt walks us through the revamped system and discusses such topics as grants and loans, so-called free tuition, and selected financial aid policies at several colleges. Michael M. Grynbaum follows up with a sidebar article called “Keeping The Lid On: Five Answers to the High Cost of Higher Education.” The one sentence that stuck out at me? “Beginning next fall, many prestigious institutions will replace loans in their financial aid packages with grants, allowing students to graduate debt free.” Where were these new rules when I was in school? Karen W. Arenson examines the finances at a specific university, Princeton. Thus the examination of the current state of financial aid and tuition is complete.

Charles McGrath reviews three books he groups under the title of “Growing Up For Dummies,” security at campuses one year after the Virginia Tech shootings is scrutinized, and a pop quiz focusing on the Internet and its impact as media round out a very full issue.

The final essay discusses test scores—SAT, ACT, AP—and their impact on students, parents, and egos. “Education Life” can be accessed online at www.nytimes.com/edlife.

The Road

The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Vintage International, $14.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-307-38789-9

After September 11, 2001, I lost my faith in fiction. What story created in the laboratory of an author’s brain could match the intensity, tragedy, sheer terror, and heroism of that day? The real story far outstrips anything I have ever read. Even the congressional report makes for edge of the seat reading.

For fiction to regain its place, I felt authors had to somehow recognize what happened on that day, at least subconsciously, even if the actual novel had nothing to do with September 11 or terrorism. Our collective conscience now included the vision of the aircraft flying into the side of those iconic buildings. Everything fictional would now be measured against that, and I could not see how fiction could best the frightening absolute truth.

Cormac McCarthy restored my faith in fiction. In his novel, The Road, he establishes a standard for fiction in an era of terrorism and post-9-11 recoil. The novel centers on a boy and his father, walking through a barren, ashen world after some kind of holocaust. Nuclear? We do not know. A global war? Nothing is certain. An environmental disaster? That is a strong possibility. The description reminds me of predictions I heard in high school at the end of the Cold War about nuclear winter, where after the weapons of mass destruction detonate, the world is left with so much debris in the atmosphere that the earth is covered in ash, lakes and rivers dry up, and nearly everything is dead or dying.

The boy and his father remain nameless throughout the story. They speak in short, elliptical phrases without quotation marks or apostrophes. Their speech contains few adjectives and consists mostly of flat, declarative sentences. It is clear from the beginning that they are the “good guys” carrying “the fire.” The others left alive are cannibals scouring the earth for victims.

“What would you do if I died?” the boy asks his father.

“If you died I would want to die too.” McCarthy channeling Hemingway in a post modern, or post, post modern world. The Road is set in a new frontier. He dares to imagine the unthinkable: what if we move past the paradigm of 9-11? What if our greatest fears were realized? This is also the soul quest of fiction: to imagine the unthinkable.

Do we think McCarthy’s imagination has run wild? Take a look at New Orleans. It does not take much to destroy the fragile infrastructure of America. We might be a first world nation, but recent events have shown us our vulnerability. McCarthy, like Don DeLillo, dares to extrapolate out beyond the news loop of towering buildings imploding, spewing the dust of human remains and a firewash of jet fuel. What will happen to us after everything falls away, the proverbial end of days?

In flashback is the moment when the world we recognize ended. “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? She said. He didnt (sic) answer.” The description is reminiscent of the 1983 film, Testament, starring Jane Alexander. The end comes with a flash on the horizon followed by a spreading death that seeps into the living unseen and takes them silently, helplessly.

The boy’s mother kills herself in a flashback. In the first agonizing days after the event, she loses hope. She cuts herself with “a flake of obsidian.” The boy realizes she is gone. Now he is with his father, and they are “each other’s world entire.”

In lean language, there are moments of ethereal beauty in McCarthy’s prose. “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain,” he writes, describing the father contemplating his new existence in this world of chaos and anarchy. “Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.”

The novel’s pacing is slow and ponderous; acts of violence and depravity are seemingly random, and sneak up on the reader. From around a bend in the road come encounters with human beings gone mad, beyond the scope of animalistic behavior.

The duo encounter a cellar used as a human meat locker. The victims crouch waiting in the sour darkness. The captors come down periodically and hack off a limb for a dinner. Human beings squat there in the cellar, waiting for death.

They pass human remains along the road, burnt to a crisp, desiccated by the dry climate and burning ash. At first the father tries to shield his son, but then both develop an immunity to the horrors. They pass the corpses like so much dead foliage.

The two also encounter remnants of human decency. On the verge of starvation, they happen upon an undiscovered air raid shelter behind a house. Inside are clothes, food, batteries, radios, a gun and other necessities for this post-apocalyptic world. The father rounds up the supplies and places them in an old grocery cart. The boy wants to thank the people who made the shelter, but he realizes they are probably dead.

In the end, what is the point of such a novel? Where is the hope? Ultimately, is McCarthy trying to show us our end, the destruction of the fabric of all humanity, all our greater notions of humanistic achievement wiped out by the flash of a splitting atom?

Novels like this are inherently hopeful, even though a hopeful word may not be found in the entire text. There is hope. Even the boy knows this. “Are we the good guys?” he repeatedly asks his father.

“Yes.”

“And we carry the fire?”

“We carry the fire.” Even in destruction there is hope.

We must now imagine what our world will be like in the future. The “dirty bomb” becomes reality; nuclear war becomes the go-to option. How do we live with this?

Still, if we imagine our own destruction, are we not responsible for some of its architecture? The terrorists in those planes were the catalysts of destruction. They wanted the world to live in fear. In many ways, they were successful. Now we must imagine what the future might hold. As we travel this road through a new frontier, I can only hope we do not face the kind of world of the father and son in The Road. The book is quite simply stunning in its horror, devastating in its implications, but hopeful in its conclusion.

The Motivation Factor

There is a great scene in Brian De Palma’s 1987 crime drama, The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner and Sean Connery. As Eliot Ness, played by Costner vows to capture and prosecute Al Capone, Chicago police officer Jim Malone, played by Connery, asks him “What are you prepared to do?” Ness is a law and order kind of cop, a United States Treasury officer, so he hesitates at Malone’s insinuation.

“Anything within the law,” Ness replies.

“And then what are you prepared to do?”

“I have sworn to capture this man with all the legal powers at my disposal and I will do so,” Ness says.

“Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Malone says, “because you just took one.”

I like this scene for many reasons, but the main one is the line: what are you prepared to do? When faced with a difficult climb, it is always good to ask yourself what you are prepared to do to succeed.

I also use this line on my students when they talk about where they wish to go to college and what they want to be in the future. What are you prepared to do to reach these goals? They often make promises—to me, to themselves—and I often remind them of their answers in the successive years. Once graduation comes, the opportunities for choosing a college die away. The future has been decided. The time has come to deal with the consequences of failed plans, stillborn dreams, and create new goals to struggle toward in the years to come.

I have noticed a disturbing trend in some of my students. They lack motivation. The most common excuse I hear when they begin to slip is: “It’s too hard.” Yeah, life is like that. But difficult things are often the ones most worth doing.

I remember a teacher I respected in my undergraduate years wrote an essay that appeared in the newspaper where he said that if a student were serious about succeeding in school, he would not waste time working a job and put all his efforts into studying. Sacrifices would have to be made, but studying must go on. I was really angered by his views; at the time, I was working a forty hour week, carrying a full load in school, and supporting myself. I was burning up my strength and willpower like a raging forest fire. I was sick, tired, broke, depressed and devastated. I had been paying my own way in school since freshman year of Catholic high school. I literally had no other choice. It was pay the freight or drop out.

I never spoke to him about his essay. He mentioned in class that he had angered many people with his views, so I figured he had already heard whatever argument I had to offer, plus I was so damned tired, I had no strength to fight against his position. I just kept working.

Nowadays, if I could do it over again in a magical world, I would always have plenty of money to devote my energies only to study and the life of the mind. But that is the alternative universe of the “might have been.”

What I did vow to myself that year was should I ever become a teacher, I would not make judgments about what my students had to do to survive in their personal lives. One must walk in another’s shoes to fully understand his life, but here I am, doing just that—making judgments about people who come to me and say everything is so hard.

I am not wrong. Very few of my students face the kind of hardships I faced. They drive cars that cost my yearly salary or more. Many can wait until the end of senior year to get a job. Many do not work at all. They have a computer on their desk that gives them access to a wealth of information that would take me years in the library in the old fashioned way. There are some disadvantages they will encounter, but most are not faced with the kinds of dilemmas that defined my student years: should I write a bad check for my books and risk getting my records and registration held back, or run to the library and try to check them all out before some other student beats me to it? Should I pay my car registration and insurance on my five year old car, or pay my tuition? (No insurance meant no driving privileges in California during those years, so when the cop stopped me, I had to continue to drive illegally for another couple of weeks until I had the money for the fine and the insurance.)

Achievement takes sacrifice. The jagged edge of the pursuit of a dream cuts to the bone and you bleed. Sometimes it’s worth it: you succeed. Other times, you just bleed.

I wish I could tell my students it will be easy. I would be lying, and many of them would not listen anyhow. Like most young people, they believe they have everything all figured out. The people I hang around are middle aged now. None of us has it all figured out. I am wondering if we ever will.

You can’t be in a fight and not get hit. Life is what it is, and hard choices have to be made, and you have to absorb the blows and protect the body.

Life will not get easier, that is most certain, and the test never ends. The fight goes on and on and on. There is no time for excuses, for cries and wails that life is too hard, or that life is unfair. Life is guilty on both counts, but that’s the way life is.

Like Odysseus longing for Ithaca, we will all get home some day, but that is not the point. Constantine Cavafy summed it up best in his poem: Ithaca is not about the destination but about the journey. “Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage. Without her you would have never set out on the road. She has nothing more to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.”

In this life, on this journey, what are you prepared to do?