wanted: human beings

My children: I am in schools a lot and that’s all gearing up now, August. Last year, I was doing “reading pillow”, a Montessori practice whereby children are read to by an adult—they pick up the pillows, one for them and one for the adult, and when they set them down in a quiet hallway, nobody else may come into that private space of reading that the child and adult are sharing. Fatimah liked Clifford the Big Red Dog stories. No matter what the plot, she would point and say “I like that dog.” One day, Fatimah had taken the guinea pig (Brownie) out of its cage, put it under a metal chair leg, and then she sat down on the chair. She stayed sitting there a long time until one of the other children noticed her quiet pose above the dead classroom pet. I knew that. I asked her if she liked animals. She said, I killed the guinea pig. I said, Sometimes people do things that they want to do but they don’t know what will happen or how they will feel about it. She said, It wasn’t an accident. I asked, How did you feel about it? She smiled and shrugged, “I don’t know.”

From the classroom doorway, The Judge, playing Othello, looked on in jealous anguish:

I had rather be a toad,
And live upon the vapour of a dungeon,
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses.

Maria Montessori shares my birthday. “That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration.” She didn’t mean that sentimentally, she meant that consciousness is a burden which only a very few things (like wonder) can assuage.

My students, all grown up: They ask, “Is this going to be on the test?” When I get that question, I think of this science fiction novel I read once, DUNE, in which women had developed a test to determine who was a human being. Not like the aliens from the humans. I mean, who is human. The Test: Place your hand in a box. I will hold a needle of deadly poison to your juggler vein. Nothing will happen to your hand, but it will feel as if it is being burned off to a stump of ashes. When you pull it out, there will be no trace of the experience. If you can deal with that and not ask for the needle instead, you’re a human being.

Accreditors are visiting my campus. One of their biggest complaints, too little interaction between education students and the liberal arts (we’re the content portion). I feel like the gay friend/relative, who gets trotted out on certain occasions to prove “we like gay people.” I like the meetings about OUTCOMES ASSESSMENT the best. It’s fancy bullshit for ‘proving they learned something’. So let me get this straight I ask, There’s the student and the teacher and Othello. I give the students Othello, I force them to read it by telling them it’s going to be on the test, they read it, they pass the test . . . is that it? YES!

But wait, wait . . .

X (me) and Y (some occasion for us to know each other, like Othello whatever) and Z (you). X gives Y to Z. What did X get?

Cake - Shut the Fuck Up . . . (website)