I know I should be grateful, but this isn't what I signed up for

Before you read this, a warning. This will come across as selfish, self-indulgent, and self-pitying, and any other adjective you can think of that starts with "self" -- except selfless. Apologies.

OK, now that's out of the way, here comes the rant...

Yesterday was the "first day back". The first day with students engaged in distance learning, a phrase that, truthfully, I had never heard a month ago. The first day seeing the faces of students I had not seen since March 13. The first day sitting at my makeshift desk in my bedroom, going "live" with my students. And to be honest, in many ways, it felt like the first day of school: I was nervous, I was sleep-deprived, and I was underprepared.

My first class was at 8:30, and although I had worked most of Monday afternoon and evening, I still needed a couple of hours in the morning to frantically record those last few screencasts and post them on Google Classroom. It felt a little bit like preparing for having a substitute teacher.

For those of you who are not teachers, it is important to understand that preparing for a sub, preparing for when you are not going to be in the classroom -- which is exactly what I was preparing for -- takes far longer than planning for a normal lesson. Trade secret: this is the reason why so many teachers, myself included, only take sick days when they are at death's door. It is too much effort to take a couple of hours to write those sub plans, make the copies, and ensure the directions are simple enough to be understood by an 8 year old. Just dose yourself up and go to work so you don't lose a day of instruction.

Anyway, that's what it felt like. The instructions had to be perfect and the links all had to work. There was a video on Google Meet etiquette that I needed to make. I know there is so much information out there to help, but, trust me, we have been overwhelmed with information -- dozens and dozens of emails touting strategies, training, links to webinars, resources, blogs -- to the extent that I can't handle it anymore. In that sense, I feel like a first year teacher again.

A first year teacher making sub plans. Great.

Oh, and did I mention that I have no way to make the students do the work I set them?

On the bright side, at least I'm not going to get a snotty note from the sub about how the instructions were too complex and how the kids spent too much time on their phones.

To their credit, most of my students were actually "in class". They watched the screencasts, attended the Google Meet, and waved dutifully at me and answered the basic questions I threw at them. I thought it would be energizing and uplifting to see them all again, but something was missing.

On the plus side, my workspace is tidier than it's ever been.

It was physical presence.

I couldn't high five anyone. I couldn't catch someone's eye and say hi. I wanted to reach out and connect but I didn't know how. Each class over the course of the year establishes its own routine: the same kids arrive first, the same kids rush up to me to spill the latest tea or rant about their science teacher, and I greet the same kids in pretty much the same way every single day.

These are the myriad small moments that add up to a genuine relationship, and they are impossible to generate in a Google Meet with 36 students. Not having this made me feel powerless: I don't see a way to establish the kind of classroom culture I know I am good at fostering. Sure, I made a cute Flipgrid assignment but that actually made things worse because now they were speaking to me individually in their videos but I couldn't respond in real time.

And if classroom culture and authentic connection is important for teachers, imagine what it means to students. That's another post for another time, though. It's all about me today. I told you this was going to be self-indulgent.

These are kids whom, until March 13th, I had seen for 5 hours per week since August and -- there's no other way to say this -- I love them. They are the reason I do what I do. It was a very strange rush of emotions as the familiar faces popped up on the screen. I feel like I've already had to say goodbye to these kids and seeing them again made me realise exactly what this pandemic has cost me. And, truth be told, it hurt. In eight weeks I'll have to say goodbye again, but who knows whether there will be any semblance of a connection at that point.

A case in point: at the beginning of the break, over a month ago, I told one of my classes I didn't want them to do anything except read. As I watched their Flipgrid videos and looked at their faces in the Google Meet, it became patently clear that they'd done absolutely no reading of note. Despite my pleas in the various videos and letters I'd sent out them and their parents, urging them that they'd be losing valuable opportunities to improve the one thing that will help them in so many ways, it all fell on deaf ears. I felt so discouraged, especially since I knew that I'd be able to hold them accountable if they were physically in class with me.

And, moving forward, I don't even know if the kids are going to get anything out of this at all. They don't have to do any of the work (see my previous post for an explanation), they are not especially cognizant of this moment (hardly surprising, I suppose, since they're teenagers), and now they're dealing with a teacher who is basically lost.

Of course I also miss my colleagues, and I suspect I'll feel their absence more keenly as the workload gets more intense and the frustration and exhaustion rises. More than anything, we are each other's support system. I spoke to one of my colleagues this afternoon and she was already in tears. She is fed up of being alone in lockdown and today, although providing her with an opportunity to connect with students she hadn't seen in a while, merely reinforced that reality.

By now, I am totally aware that I am being self-indulgent and ungrateful, so I'm going to shut up in a minute. I don't want to come across as selfish. After all, I have a job. I'm healthy, and so is everyone in my family. We has enough food, good wifi, and a decent supply of toilet paper. I am not suffering like so many people. This is our new, albeit (hopefully) temporary, reality. I also know this will get better; it was only the first day, after all.

But as I fell into bed, exhausted and brain still whirring -- it actually hurt to close my eyes, yet another new sensation -- I could only come to one conclusion. I'm either going to hate being an online teacher or I'm going to be a terrible one, which in education is essentially the same thing. "Doing what I do" now looks totally different, and I feel cheated. Worse still, the kids are being cheated, and I'm not sure they even realise it.

Rant over. Time to get back to work.

"Coronabreak" has forced me to admit that I need my students more than they need me

It's been, to put it mildly, a strange time to be a teacher.

On March 13, I left school weighed down, both by the massive pile of grading in my backpack and by the uncertainty about the future. On April 13, we will start up again. The grading will be electronic, and probably considerably less, but the uncertainty is still very much there. What will class look like? How will I connect with students? How do I reach those who are unable or unwilling to engage in distance learning? How do I have video calls without children or piles of laundry embarrassing me in the background?  And, most importantly, can I do all this while still in my pyjamas?

Plenty to do during the "break".

A frustration has been that at our site at least, teachers have been moving a lot quicker than the district, which has been moving quicker than the county, which has been moving quicker than the state, which has been...You get the picture.  Finally, though, there seems to be some clarity to the plan moving forward, although what that will really look like on a day to day basis is anyone's guess.

One of the initiatives our district has put in place during this time of distance learning is a "do no harm" policy when it comes to grades. Any work students do during this time period can only help their overall grade in the class. It cannot lower it. When I consider the difficulties and stressors faced by many of our students at home, it makes sense. Being at school levels the playing field somewhat, mitigating some -- but certainly not all -- of the impact that children's very different home experiences have on their education.

This, however, was not my initial response to the policy. Like many teachers, I was deeply skeptical. A student who had an A on March 13 is now guaranteed that A at the end of the semester and has no obligation to do any work whatsoever. My mind reeled with the change: the traditional carrot and stick approach is now all carrots. And who wants carrots when you can have cake?

Of course, there were the platitudes from administrators about focusing on the learning and not the points. You come and teach my class, I wanted to say, before essentially preparing to present the same argument to my students.

As I hosted a Google Meet for my AP Literature students last week, I explained the new policy. And as I did so, I suddenly felt powerless. So much of the authority I wield as a teacher lies in the fact that students have to be there and that I have the power to impact their futures with my assignments and assessments. When I think about students who fail my class, the one trait they all have in common is that those things do not motivate them. These, it is no coincidence, are also the students who present the biggest behavioral problems.

So that was my first "gut check": my power to mandate and enforce has vanished. I will now have to rely on my ability to appeal to students' intrinsic motivation. And there are many strong arguments for continuing to learn when the rewards and consequences are not immediately obvious. I have been challenging my students in the lead up to this next Monday -- when we "go back to school" -- to embrace this unprecedented moment when they can learn without fear of failure.

My own fear of failure, however, looms large whenever I sit down at my makeshift workstation in my bedroom. During the three week break only about 30 of my 80 AP Lit students participated in my Google Meet readings of Hamlet; a handful reached out via email to ask what they could do to increase their grades, and still fewer listened to the podcasts I made every day.  If only 50% of my AP students, who have huge exams coming up in May, were engaged during this time, it doesn't augur well for my other classes.

The truth is, I want my students to want to participate in my activities. I'm insecure. My ego needs massaging. Put it any way you want: I take it personally when students don't do my work. I feel like a failure as a teacher when I realise that the only reason students are doing my work is because they have to. Sure, they -- mostly -- enjoy my class. They appreciate my attempts to meaningfully connect with them. But what do those smiling faces, kind words, and fun banter count for when it's no longer mandatory? I pour a lot of myself into my classes and my students, but I worry that they're only doing it for the grades and not for the meaningful interaction. Who am I kidding? They're high schoolers: of course they're doing it for the grades! That's the system's fault, and I am an integral, complicit part of that system.

Worse still, I am coming to the realization that many of my students don't actually need me at all. My AP students, for example, are talented kids, many of whom are much smarter than I am. They don't really even need me to prepare them for this year's truncated AP test. 45 minutes to write an essay on a prose passage? They have the whole internet at their disposal and 5 weeks to prepare. I was watching an AP Lit review webinar this morning. There are going to be about 25 of these daily lessons. They don't need me at all!

Yes, I know that there are a lot of my students, particularly my freshmen with special needs, whom the federal government has spectacularly and unforgivably tried to claim are no longer our responsibility, that desperately need guidance. They don't do their work a lot of the time. Those classes are often chaotic and very difficult to teach effectively. I know for sure many of them will see words like "optional" and see the writing on the wall. That will lead to a different kind of sadness: the sadness of seeing young people wasting their opportunity and not valuing their free public education.

One of the perks of being a teacher is the feeling of fulfillment that comes with knowing you're making a difference. I would love to claim that it it's a pure, noble, altruistic feeling, but to be perfectly honest, it's also a massive ego boost. And now that's gone, too.

I also think that one of things that makes me a decent teacher is the ability to connect with students. I do make an effort. I do care. It's an emotionally exhausting but wonderfully rewarding aspect of my life and it's why graduation is such an emotional occasion for me. It's also why it takes me several days to decompress after the end of the school year. I think it's because I'm grieving. And that grieving process has already started.  I really miss my students, even the knuckleheads. Especially the knuckleheads.

It's been hard to come to terms with this truth, let alone admit it, but my students don't need me anywhere near as much as I need them.

Literature is life, and we're all going to die.

When my AP Literature students walk into my classroom at the beginning of the school year, I am aware that I need to try to change the way they think about literature in a number of ways.  I've given this speech—or a variation of it—to my AP Literature students early in the school year for the last two years, and, in preparation for the start of this new semester, I thought I'd write it out in full.  I usually get some horrified looks from my students as my monologue unfolds, but before I start my rant, I ask them to consider the phrase "Literature is Life" and discuss with their table partners what they think it means.

How many of you noticed that the literature you read in high school tends to have sad endings?  Have you ever wondered why that is? Are your teachers trying to depress you? Do they take pleasure in ruining your faith in mankind?  Maybe they are trying to prove Wesley's quip in the Princess Bride: "Life is pain...Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."

It actually comes back to the phrase we talked about earlier: "Literature is life".  I want you to say it with heavy emphasis on the second word. 

Literature is life.

Literature is life just as two plus two is four.  Literature is representative of life. It reflects life.  It is a snapshot of life. Hamlet says that the purpose of drama is "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature".  Its purpose is to illuminate the human experience. And other than being born, every human shares one universal experience.  Dying.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one of the reasons that there are so few happy endings to novels, stories, and plays is that there aren't really any happy endings in life.  We all die. In other words, if books worth studying (studying, not just reading) are meant to teach us about what it means to be human, then they are being disingenuous when they claim, "And they lived happily ever after."  "Messily ever after," perhaps. "In seasons marked by both joy and grief for the rest of their days," perhaps. But regardless of how we live, we will one day stop breathing, and die, our bodies decaying under the ground or reduced to ashes in a furnace.

If literature is supposed to help us understand the human experience, then it has to include death, doesn't it?  Just as the love of Romeo and Juliet is made more dramatic set in a society torn apart by hate, the writer who wants to convey the majesty and aching beauty of life must juxtapose it with its counterpart: death.

In many ways, though, death is not just the biological reality of this world.  In literary tradition, going all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve, death is connected with and even created by human foolishness.  It is the ultimate penalty for stupidity, for sin, for vice. And so literature becomes, as much as anything, the story of mankind's folly. In East of Eden, John Steinbeck claims that there is only one story, and that "all novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves between good and evil".

We cannot escape this reality, for if we are honest, we live it every single day.  That is why we shouldn't read to escape the real world; rather, we should read to immerse ourselves in it and learn more about it.  And we can't learn about life if we insist on happy endings, on characters who are like us, on people we understand immediately. There is beauty, however tragic it may be, in our recognition of another human's struggles against his own frailties.  More than that, there is deep empathy gained when we see ourselves in someone who initially seems foreign and incomprehensible. So although many of you cannot immediately understand the hubris of Okonkwo, the narcissism of Hamlet, or the aloofness of Mr. Darcy, when you remember that these characters are simply part of a great human tradition—as you yourselves are—of choosing folly over wisdom, the text becomes instantly more accessible.  These are characters unlike anyone you know in person. But they are human, and how wonderful it is to know that! And, yes, they are fictitious, but it doesn't mean we can't learn from them. So we need realism, for it is only in realism that we can see the world for what it is: broken and messy.

A hastily made list of the works of literature I teach or that I've taught in the past.  I think it speaks for itself!

Now, this does not mean that literature has to be depressing, for we know that so much of life is glorious and beautiful.  We are not living, to quote Switchfoot, "in the world of if onlys, stretched tight in between our birth and our graves". For a start, while literature may reflect our lives, it does not have to define them.  I think that there are actually very few stories that fail to offer hope. Our mistake is, I think, in always looking at the ending. If we measured our lives by how they end, then we are all, by definition, unsuccessful, because we ultimately fail at living!  But scattered throughout the pages of all literature—and our lives—are those transcendent, transformative moments where good rises out of bad. Redemption coming out of suffering, forgiveness when it isn't deserved, power in weakness, and victory in defeat. That's why we read.   These are universal traits of the human spirit. Of course, the most memorable and beautiful stories often have these moments at the end, but the reality is that we can find them anywhere in good books. Most significantly, though, while there is plenty of literature that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit, we read, not because we have escaped foolishness through our moments of glory, but because we can only find true glory through, after, learning from, or even in the very midst of our moments of foolishness.  Or, as one of my students put it, "We read because humans have been fools for thousands of years."

I think there is one other thing that literature offers us.  Beauty. You may not see this in all literature, just as you may not see beauty in all aspects of life, but both life and literature shine a light on things—like sacrificial love—that sometimes make no sense in this world.  We can't put our finger on it, but there are things we can never explain about literature. C.S. Lewis suggests that beauty is a mere reflection of something greater: "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited".   It is why it is a travesty to claim that Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, merely teaches us that war is bad and that it takes away soldiers' humanity.  To reduce the meaning of that novel to a clean, precise phrase—which is, unfortunately, what I will be trying to teach you to do in order to pass the AP Literature exam—is to merely look at it scientifically, splitting it up into all its component parts.  And when we write about literature, we can't really avoid this. But perhaps I can convince you, as you read and discuss, to linger over the magic of words and the way they stir our souls in ways we can't accurately express.

So as you journey through the world of Shakespeare, Achebe, Bradbury, Austen, Ibsen, Chopin, and Baldwin, I hope you will discover the sometimes paradoxical truths that these writers illuminate and embrace the fragile, ephemeral, complicated existence we all share, whether you like it or not.

I, Claudius?

At the end of this past school year, my brain addled by the almost 1,000 AP Literature essays I had read during second semester, I assigned my students one final — but slightly different — piece of writing. I asked them to write about which character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet resonated with them personally and why.

I think the sign of a good essay prompt is that it tempts even the teacher to write. And so it tempted me. Look, it had been a long school year; writing an essay was the last thing I wanted to do. But if you’ve ever read, seen, or experienced the tale of the Danish prince, you will probably understand my compulsion to write. The play delves so deeply into the human experience that if we interact authentically with it in any way, some form of response is necessary.

So what follows was initially designed to be an exemplar essay that I could use for my students next year—hence the citations — so the tone may seem a little un-bloggy, if that makes sense.

Humans are designed to live in community. Whether you hold the view that the traditional, nuclear family is best, or you see benefit in other, non-traditional family arrangements, it’s easy to see that humans thrive when they are in supportive, loving, and united communities. The antithesis of living in community is living in isolation. Isolation robs humans of the empathy that contact with others provides. It traps people inside their own minds. Most of all, it deprives us of essential support systems that even the strongest among us needs. Perhaps the most dangerous form of isolation is when it afflicts those who seem to live in (or have convinced you that they are part of) a healthy community. William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is full of characters who appear to the outside world to be in a thriving community yet live in isolation and suffer its pernicious consequences. Gertrude, bereft of her first husband, is shunned by her own son and cannot be honest with her new husband. Ophelia, without the guidance of her absent older brother, is shamelessly used by her father and dies broken and alone. Hamlet, of course, is the first to show the effects of isolation. For him, Denmark certainly is “a prison” (II.2.262), but it is the twin monsters of grief and mistrust that greedily devour any meaningful connection he has with other people. Much as I see myself in Hamlet — that’s a story for another day — it is Claudius and his relationship with isolation that fascinates me. In not only suffering from but also in actively fomenting his own isolation, the usurping King of Denmark showcases our — and my own — tendency to shut ourselves off from others. The cost of this is simple but devastating; it is nothing less than our humanity.

Claudius has spent time curating the perfect image of a king: he is a shrewd diplomat, an effective ruler, a loving husband, and an apparently indulging step-father.   A closer look at his actions, however, would suggest otherwise.  We, of course, find out quickly that he murdered the previous King Hamlet — his brother — and then hastily married Gertrude, his former sister-in-law.  His villainy is clear, but I think it is intentionally maintained and increased by a lack of real intimacy with others.  Even when he refers to himself in the first person plural (the “royal we”), as he does throughout the play, it creates a false sense of togetherness. “We” and “us” suggests connectivity and communal decision making, but nothing could be further from the truth; at the heart of all Claudius does lies the one thing most humans crave: control. Claudius’ court is one of surveillance and spying, where “madness in great ones must not unwatched go” (III.1.202), where the watchmen can only "whisper" (I.1.91) their theories for why they seem to be in a state of war, and where he and Polonius, "lawful espials,...see[ing] unseen" (III.1.35-36), observe Hamlet's interactions with others.  This all serves to provide the King with information, but it also ensures that he protects himself from unwanted intimacy. Or any intimacy, for that matter.  Polonius does all his dirty work for him and passes on the "tea" so that Claudius can stay informed.  In the same way, I often rely on my wife to have those conversations with friends, the kids, even my own family members and then relay that information to me.  It's easy, clean, and the emotion greatly diminished now that it's a second-hand account.  I'm up to date but not really involved.  Facebook — when I was active on it — was the perfect way to do this: people giving you permission access to their intimate moments, albeit perfectly curated ones, without really making any of the kinds of meaningful connections that make life both rich and messy.

As a side note, it is perhaps worth pointing out that Claudius actually perpetuates isolation in others, even as he criticizes it. As Hamlet “persever[s] in obstinate condolement” in mourning for his late father, Claudius castigates him, calling it “unmanly grief” and accusing Hamlet of having “a heart unfortified” (I.2.96-100), and insisting that he stays with his family in Denmark "in the cheer and comfort of [his] eye" (120).  Claudius's inability to appreciate — itself a byproduct of his lack of emotional connection with his new stepson — the mechanics of grief merely deepens Hamlet’s own isolation.  To many, Claudius is simply saying the wrong thing, but his words are indicative of the real damage we can do when we attempt to help those who are suffering.  When my wife's brother died suddenly in 2005, I didn't know what to say, even to my wife or my in-laws.  My clumsy attempts at condolence were no better than Claudius's, and they exposed my lack of real intimacy in those relationships at that time and forced my wife into her own isolation of grief.  It was a dark period in our marriage.

As a Christian, I am usually comforted by the knowledge that God is with me and that He is the ultimate protector and comforter.  The times when I have felt separated from God have led to the most profound feelings of remoteness, and Claudius, it would appear, has done just this.  We first get the sense that Claudius is more complex than simply being a villain in Act III, Scene 1, when in a brief aside he refers to his duplicity and his "heavy burden" (62).   Then, in Act III, Scene 3, there is a remarkable moment where Claudius kneels alone, wrestling with profound ideas of sin, repentance, and forgiveness.   Admitting that his "offense is rank" (40), he claims that his guilt — the very conviction that he has done something wrong — is paralysing his attempts to make amends.   He knows full well that God has the ability to make his soul "white as snow" (50), but cannot bear the prospect of admitting to his crimes and giving up the benefits he has reaped from them.   He finds the notion of simply saying "Forgive me my foul murder" (56) ludicrous even as he knows that true repentance is the only way in heaven, where power and influence cannot "[buy] out the law" (64).  The climax of the speech comes with these heart-rending lines:

Try what repentance can.  What can it not?

Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?

Simply put, while Claudius longs to be free from the guilt and shame of his murderous, adulterous actions, he cannot bring himself to ask for forgiveness.  It is the story of so many of us when it comes to wrongdoing, of any kind.  It is amazing that we actually choose to feel guilty and to live with regret instead of asking for forgiveness.  We would rather stay isolated than return to the fold.  We would rather stay with brokenness than risk the renewed intimacy of healing.  The darkness feels safer than the light.  God's light of forgiveness exposes every corner of our hearts and many of us would rather hold on to those dark recesses, even if it risks separation from Him.  Even on his knees, Claudius still chooses isolation.

The start of Claudius's soliloquy: "O, my offense is rank..."

After this profound experience, Claudius's isolation is so entrenched that he cannot bring himself to talk honestly to his wife.  At the beginning of Act IV, Gertrude and Claudius have their only private conversation (fewer than 40 lines) in the entire play.  Much of what the king says to his wife here seems to be either the product or the instigator of isolation: there no grief for his trusted advisor Polonius, whose death at Hamlet's hands Gertrude is recounting; rather, he is focused on self-preservation and how to best limit the damage to his own image, saying that "this vile deed we must with all our majesty and skill both countenance and excuse" (1.30-33).  The real give away, though, is not the lack of any mention of his deep regrets and inner turmoil — we can perhaps understand why he wouldn't confide in Gertrude his past murder of her husband and his future plan to murder her son — but the use of the decidedly cold and impersonal "your son" (3).  Earlier, in an attempt to ingratiate himself to his new stepson, he refers to him as "my son" or at least tries to get Hamlet to see him as a father (I.2.66, 111-112, 121).  He has now emotionally withdrawn from both Hamlet, which makes any possible understanding of Hamlet's erratic behaviour impossible, and his wife, who, perhaps sensing her husband's duplicity, seems to be withdrawing from him, too.  In our most difficult times, we need to be honest and transparent with those around us, especially with those with whom we would claim intimacy.  I feel this keenly, particularly with the malicious impact of depression, which often forces me deeper into myself and stiffens my mask instead of making me seek support and solace from friends, even from those who love me and who know me best.

Death, of course, is the ultimate isolation.  In the play’s denouement in Act V, Scene 2, Hamlet, who has just come to terms with his own mortality (234-238), dies in the arms of his best friend, whereas Claudius’ last orders, “Do not drink” (317) and “Help me, friends” (355),  are notable in that they are not obeyed. Claudius dies alone, hated, and victim of the ultimate truth: that tyrants’ paranoia is rooted in the fear of those they rule.  One of Hamlet's obsessions is ensuring that Claudius dies "unshrived" — without a chance to confess his sins — and I wonder whether, in his final moments, with the poison coursing through his veins, Claudius thinks back to his missed opportunity where he was so close to repenting in Act III, Scene 3.  Either way, as John Steinbeck suggests about people who die unloved, "his dying must be a cold horror".

I also think that isolation is becoming more and more a Western problem.  In April 2018, I spent a week in northern Jordan with Syrian refugees. When I returned home and started back at work, I was convinced that the trauma I had witnessed and heard about was far beyond anything my students in middle-class San Marcos had experienced.  And perhaps it was.  However, I quickly found myself feeling far more pity for many of my students who were experiencing hardship and suffering.  Most of the Syrians I met lived in the community of an extended family.  They shared meals and beds, but they also shared the heavy burden of grief and trauma.  Many of my students have iPhones, but they don't have extensive support systems.  Like most of the characters in Hamlet, many of them go through stress, anxiety, and pain on their own, often pretending that everything is fine.  It is no way to live.

Truthfully, I actually often take real pleasure in being remote.  I'm an introvert, so I do need to be alone in order to relax and recharge.  However, I often seek sequestration because I just don't want to be around others and because I don't feel like being vulnerable or even honest.  This is, of course, patently unhealthy.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian martyred by the Nazis just weeks before the end of the Second World War, put it this way: "One who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair."  It is here that we meet Claudius, where we are forced to acknowledge that even our very needs can have dark consequences.

Shakespeare, as he does so often with antagonists, humanizes Claudius in a profound and powerful way.  The beauty of literature is that it allows us to see ourselves in even the most villainous, which then helps us see the villainous things in ourselves.

A good man is hard to find

Just before the US presidential election of 2008, I remember having a conversation with someone about Senator John McCain, who was running against Barack Obama.  After some back-and-forth discussion about McCain's policies and record, she said, with an air of finality, "He's a good man."

I've been thinking recently about this and about the idea of legacy.  What is it that makes a person good?  At what point can you look at someone's life and objectively say, "He was a good man"?

Let's leave aside the obvious answer that someone we know, love, or already admire is going to have much more of an opportunity to claim that title.  Not knowing someone, their story, or their background leaves us, I feel, much more liable to judge harshly.

Clearly, the reason that this is problematic is that none of us are perfect.  Like drops of black paint added to a bucket of white, each of our mistakes, errors, failures, sins—call them whatever you want —changes the balance of good and bad in our souls, in some cases barely perceptibly, but as anyone who's ever painted a bedroom or a bathroom will tell you, almost white is not white.

Yet we can all recite a list of people whom we consider essentially good: Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Grandma, our children.  Ourselves.

So if we have these two truths—some humans are good, and no-one is perfect—then we must have a measure or a standard of goodness.  Maybe, like the ancient Egyptians, we have some kind of cosmic scales on which we metaphorically weigh our hearts.  Maybe there's a way to add up all the good we've done and place it next to all the evil we've done.  And if so, what's the tipping point?  50%?  If I can say that I've done more evil than good over the course of my life, then I can claim to be a good person.  Right?  That seems fair.

But now we run into some other, more murky issues.  Do some deeds count more or weigh more heavily than others?  Is murder 1,000 times worse than running a stop sign?  If I then run 1,001 stop signs over the course of my life - come to California if you don't believe it's possible - am I now worse than a murderer?  Or does committing murder make me evil, regardless of how much good I do before or after?  And what about good deeds?  Do some count more than others?  Is holding the door open for a lady a good deed, or is it just basic human decency?  Or is it condescending and archaic, thus adding to your myriad run stop signs and other nefarious deeds in your life?

Maybe we can agree on just making sure we obey all laws.  If you don't break the law, you're a good person.  This is problematic too.  What laws are we talking about?  Different countries have different laws.  Heck, different families have different laws.  I know you can't go to prison for teasing your younger brother (although I'm willing to hear arguments for it), but just like any society, our household operates under certain rules.  Or are minors exempt?

Aren't some laws, let's face it, inconvenient or foolish?  And aren't some—Jim Crow and other segregationist policies—downright immoral?  And surely it's possible to keep all laws and still be a horrible person.  It's not against the law, for example, to lie to my wife and tell her that I've been working diligently in the garden when I've actually been binge-watching The Great British Baking Show.  It's not even illegal to cheat on one's spouse, but most people would agree that it's a pretty despicable act, all the same.  There are many people who make a very good living out of helping people do lawful, but arguably unethical actions, such as managing our money so that we pay as little tax as possible.  And that's the key, isn't it?  "Arguably".

It is very hard to establish whether someone is "good" or not when we have considerable differences of opinion over what is right or wrong.  And if that's the case, it must be true that we do not all have the same standards of morality.

Does morality change with location?  With time?  With administration?  If I attempted to enslave my children or my neighbors, people would be outraged, yet Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and he seems to have been given a pass by most of us.  The discussion over statues of historical figures, such as Winston Churchill, whose lives, actions, and thus legacies, are rendered far more complex after an objective view of history or a rethinking of our values, is another good example of this.

A good man?

So, to recap, we don't have a way of determining how much good a person needs to do to be considered good.  Nor do we have a universal standard against which we can measure actions and determine them to be good or bad.

It's a bit of a mess, and we haven't even looked at actions that could be deemed immoral but "don't hurt anybody" or unintentionally committed crimes (or even accidentally committed good actions), or thoughts and ideas that are immoral but aren't acted upon.

I don't think it's a stretch to say, though, that regardless of the apparently arbitrary standards we set for ourselves (or is it only for others?), we have all done things that are either illegal, unethical, or immoral, even if we've never been caught.

So where does that leave us?  None of us are Jesus.  None of us are as evil as Adolf Hitler.  Most would say it is reasonable to assume that we all fall somewhere between those two extremes.  Where on that spectrum does good end and evil begin?  And who determines that?

It seems as if many of us have fallen into one of two camps.  First, we have those who have a sliding scale of morality.  It changes by situation, location, time period, and intention and becomes a personalized morality that we essentially adjust as necessary.  The cynic would say we do this so that we make sure we fit somewhere on the good spectrum, along with our friends, family, and those who vote the same way we do.  Realistically, then, the only people we can truly judge are ourselves because we know that others have a different idea of what is moral.  Or worse, we expose ourselves as hypocrites because we overlook or even excuse actions we would usually consider immoral in people we know or like, such as our preferred presidential candidates.  It's an "us versus them" approach to morality.

The other camp consists of those of us who basically say that everything is permissible.  Because we cannot agree on what constitutes moral behaviour, and any attempt to enforce it creates unfairness, unnecessary restriction, and abuse of power, then we leave people to their own devices.  "Hey, do your thing.  As long as you're not hurting anyone, who am I to judge?"  It sounds good, doesn't it?  What's interesting, though, is that by not judging, we are actually judging.  When we say, "I'm not judging you", I am not only making a judgement, I am implicitly judging your behaviour as acceptable.

There is a third camp, whereby you assume that all humans are evil.  William Golding, particularly in Lord of the Flies, has a lot to say about this.  So does the Bible.  So do, interesting enough, a lot of pieces of literature which explore the darker side of humanity.  Personally, I subscribe to this point of view—that humans are redeemed but inherently immoral—but there aren't a lot of people I know who consider themselves evil.  In a recent interview on NPR, archeologist Sarah Parcak said, "In spite of all the terrible things we have done to each other, I think we're 51% good."  While this is clearly meant as a statement emphasizing the speaker's hope for humanity, rather than an empirical evaluation, it does speak to the tendency we have as humans—even as we recognize evil in others and not in ourselves—to believe the best of our race.  And while believing the best in others can be wonderful, it can also cause us to be myopic.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry is confronted by the complex legacy of several characters about whom he had very clear-cut beliefs.  Albus Dumbledore, his hero, was seduced as a young man by Grindelwald's ideas, causing great suffering in his own family.  Godric Gryffindor took the sword, which only presents itself to the valiant in times of need, from the goblins who made it.  Remus Lupin, another mentor, attempts to abandon his wife and child.  And then, of course, there's Severus Snape, whose hatred for Harry cannot be disregarded even after we find out the depths of his bravery and love.  Harry's conflicting emotions regarding Dumbledore, in particular, threaten to derail his entire quest to defeat Voldemort, and he has to learn the nuanced view of humanity that his godfather Sirius tries to teach him two books earlier: "The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters."  We always struggle when someone we idolize turns out to have previously unknown faults: witness the fallout over the recent discovery of Ronald Reagan using racist language.

If there's a story that helps us understand our difficulty with processing morality, it is Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find".  In it, a prim southern grandmother comes face to face with an escaped convict called The Misfit.  At the start of the story, it is clear who is good and who is evil.  By the end, we see the selfishness and arrogance of the grandmother and we listen to the background and rationale of The Misfit's actions, and as we honestly evaluate their characters, we are forced to objectively and baldly conclude that they are essentially the same—or at least that they are no different.

It seems that we could apply some of the nuance required to study literature to our own views when it comes to the innately flawed people on whom we pass judgement.  Neither we nor those we love are as good as we think.  By the same token, neither we nor those we despise are as evil as we think.  I don't think it does us any good to claim that someone's legacy is anything other than complex, and if we are convinced otherwise, we should at least be prepared for legitimate challenges to our view.

To do otherwise is to propose that those we put on pedestals—both figurative and literal— are not human.

Sooner or later, we're all just going to end up as soccer parents

Every so often, something reminds me rather suddenly and forcefully that I have "been around" for a while.  At my youngest son's soccer practice last season, one of the moms revealed to my wife that she had been a student of mine for one semester, back in 2004 - my first year of teaching.  I certainly had not recognized her and when I went up to her to see if I could figure out who she was, the memories came flooding back, and I actually remembered her name.

Teacher's and his former student's kids on the same team!

Ashley had been in my 5th period class - after lunch is always a tough one - and she remembers that she spent more time outside the class (sent out by me) than in it.  Now it became clear why she approached my wife instead of me!  "You hated me," she said.  Not true.  "And I was a bad person that year."  Also unlikely to be true.  She left after the first semester of 10th grade, went to continuation high school to catch up on her credits, and returned to graduate two years later.  Seeing someone for the first time in a while forces you to think about what you were like back then, too, and I was immediately struck by how much we had both changed.  Ashley was now married, with two children and a third on the way.  She was clearly happy and settled.  She'd gone straight into the workforce and now had a job at a car dealership that paid well and had helped her develop skills I (with my oh so impressive master's degree) knew I didn't have.  She was not the angry young lady who constantly disrupted my class and challenged my (close to non-existent) authority.

I, too, am not the same person I was back then.  Lest I forget, it is worth pointing out that I was a less than stellar teacher in my first year.  I was quick to anger and fairly intolerant of any students who failed to meet my expectations.  Today, I still have a long way to go to become the teacher, father, husband, and man I want to be, but I am - I think - more patient, more willing to listen to my students, and more emotionally and spiritually healthy than I was in 2004.  I tried - rather unsuccessfully, I think - to express the mixture of pride and guilt I felt in seeing her again.  I couldn't help wondering if 2017 Mr. St. John would have given her a better experience than she'd had in 2004, and how that might have changed the trajectory of her life.  But there's the rub.  Her life didn't need a different trajectory.  It worked out just fine.

I think our tendency is to be impressed with or even touched by the stories of people who have found success unconventionally.  We have such a rigid understanding of what children should do in order to become successful adults, and we see it as a setback or worse, a disaster when a child doesn't go to college or somehow messes up his or her education.  I was going to write about Nelson, another student of mine from that debacle of 2004-2005 and one of the chief instigators of the chaos that was my 4th period class, who is now a middle school teacher.  Then there's Sam, a student whose inability to follow basic directions in class exasperated me, and who, having been one of the least academically inclined students I've taught, went back to college in his twenties and now has a double major, speaks excellent French, and studies and climbs in Europe.  All while rocking a seriously cool man bun.

I think my response to these former students "finding their own paths" is more one of relief than pride.  Relief that the system - of which I am a part - didn't crush them.  Relief that they succeeded despite the system.

If we're honest, I think we all have had to find our own path.  I didn't know I wanted to be a teacher until I was 26.  I had a master's degree and I was cleaning school bathrooms and vacuuming classrooms for a living.  But it's not just about the careers we choose and the jobs we have.  It's about the people we become.  And when we stop to think about the paths we've taken as human beings - meandering, direct, potholed, smooth, voluntary, forced, hair-raising, yawn-inducing - the most important lessons along the way have probably not been learned in the classroom.

As I think back to that chilly October evening as I stood next to Ashley and found out about her life while our children tore around the soccer field together, I now realize that our paths, as different as they were, had brought us to the same place.   Being parents.  Raising our children.  Slaves to the dreaded schedule.  Doing our best to make a life for our families.  Worrying about money.  Loving our spouses.

It really is amazing to think that multiple degrees, 14 years of teaching, and approximately 13 more years on earth had merely led me to the same time, the same place, and the same activity as a 20-something former student.   The same activity that hundreds of thousands of regular Southern Californians do every day.  The great social equalizer: sitting in a foldable chair at their kids' soccer practice and hoping that the pizza at the end of season party won't be too greasy.

Luis

We do graduation well at my high school.  Really well.   It is the perfect blend of (slightly cheesy) tradition, spectacle, and celebration.  The students are exuberant but respectful, and by 6 pm, the summer heat has usually died down just enough to make sitting out on the football field bearable, and the Discovery Hills and San Elijo ridgeline form a spectacular backdrop that I never take for granted.

Usually, I know close to 100 of the graduating seniors, but because I'd only had two freshman classes in 2014-2015 and one sophomore class the following year, that number was much lower this year.  Maybe that was why one name kept coming up in my head, the name of a young man noticeable for his absence on the day he should have been graduating from high school.  Luis Canseco.  I couldn't stop thinking about Luis.

When I say I had only two freshman classes four years ago, that's not entirely correct.  The summer beforehand - 2014 - saw two cohorts of incoming freshmen take a Summer Bridge program at Mission Hills High School.  I taught the program with a math teacher, blending personal development and character building with academic content and study skills.  We were essentially equipping these kids - all of whom had been selected for the program due to their "at risk" status - to survive and thrive in high school.

Luis was in one of these classes.  He had a mop of thick, curly dark brown hair and arresting green eyes.  He smiled readily and was a very bright, articulate, and charismatic young man.  We gave him an award for Best Vocabulary.  He clearly had some issues in his personal life - I vividly remember him having a panic attack outside the classroom on one of the last days of class - but he was brimming with that kind of raw, untamed potential that so many 14 year-olds seem to have.

I saw Luis a few times on campus during his freshman year but quickly lost track of him amid the bustle and stress of the school year.  What I later found out was that he struggled academically, and by his junior year, he was attending the district's continuation high school in an effort to make up credits so that he could get back on track to graduate in 2018.

On Tuesday, 24th October 2016, at 8:30 pm, Luis was found dead, lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the road.  He had been shot multiple times.

At the time, when his murder was announced, his name didn't even register with me as being familiar.  That sounds terrible, and it is, for sure, but I have had many Luises over the years, just as many Cansecos, and at least two students with exactly the same name.  Add to that the fact that Luis wasn't even attending my school at the time.  And, just as my reaction foreshadowed, his death was quickly forgotten by the media and much of the community, probably as soon as news outlets reported Luis's murder as "possibly gang-related".

As I pondered the senselessness of Luis's death and how rapidly his story faded from our minds (mine included), I thought of another local high school student who was relatively recently violently killed.  In 2010, when Chelsea King was assaulted and murdered while jogging in Rancho Bernardo, the press coverage was relentless, as it should have been.  Chelsea's name lives on in a high profile yearly fundraiser and a foundation.  A documentary has been made about her.  A law regarding sex offenders now bears her name.  There are pages and pages on the internet devoted to her.  She has not been forgotten.  She will not be forgotten, and rightly so, for a child's murder is an unspeakably horrific event.

But what about Luis?  Why has there been no arrest in his case?  Why has there been no public outcry and high profile police investigation?  Where is his foundation?  Why did the press coverage of his death and the homicide case effectively stop that very same week?  I can find nothing on the internet about Luis published after October 29th.  Five days.  That was all Luis warranted in the public memory.  I live a mile from where he was killed.  I have often run past the very spot where he died.  There is no memorial, no plaque, no visible sign that something so brutal and violent happened on that bare stretch of concrete just beyond the Highway 78 overpass.

On first consideration, the answer seems obvious.  Chelsea was beautiful, athletic, white, and wealthy.  She'd had no run-ins with the law.  She fit the profile of the all-American high school teenager.  Luis fit a different profile.  He was Latino, on the verge of dropping out of school, living in a rough part of town, and mixed up in gang activity.  Call it socio-economics.  Call it lifestyle.  Call it race.  But I think that's too simplistic.

The fact is Luis's death conveniently fits a narrative that we as a society have decided is acceptable.  If people are stupid enough to get involved with gangs, we essentially say, then a violent death is inevitable.  We read the news, shake our heads sadly, but there is no public soul-searching or outpouring of grief.  In fact, based on comments from the White House regarding gangs, I would bet that a good number of people would even say, "Good riddance.  Gang members are animals."

Whatever we may claim or think - consciously or sub-consciously - we have clearly decided that some people's lives are worth more than others.  I'm guilty of it just as much as anyone: just look at my initial response to Luis's death.

It wasn't until I bumped into one of my classroom aides from that Summer Bridge class in July 2017 that I finally realized who had been killed.  Ten months after the fact, and - perhaps to assuage my guilt - I was frantically Googling Luis, obsessively driving down Smilax Road, and trying to glean every last bit of information about my former student with the beautiful green eyes whose body had been broken and ripped by bullets from a gun.

One of the last things students in that Summer Bridge class did was write a reflection on the 3 weeks we'd had together, and it didn't take me long to find Luis's reflection, buried deep in my Google Drive.  Reading through it brought his personality back to me in a rush of reminiscence.  It also provided tragic clues - foreshadowing, even - to the tumult in his life, tumult that a three-week summer class and Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens was not going to remove.

An excerpt from Luis's reflection (and my platitudes) at the end of the Summer Bridge class, July 2014.

"I’ve tried being proactive," he writes, "but I let my troubles get the best of me which is my problem that I need to stop and not let it continue." He goes on, "I learned about myself that you can plan out your entire life but out of everything you plan about half or less of the things you planned will actually go accordingly." "You have to be OK with that," says my comment on the side. He continues, almost prophetically, "I realized that life problems can’t be ignored because everything catches up to you eventually." Luis doesn't sound cynical, but he does seem defeated by his world. How can this already be the case with a 14-year-old? I despaired, when I read back over it. He ends, poignantly in retrospect, with this:

I really hope in high school I can find myself and realize what I need to do or what I’m meant for because now I feel lost like I have no where to go, in highschool I hope to do better. As in become someone, whether I become a known athlete or something I just want to be known for something good or interesting but right now I don’t do anything other than stay at home so what am I supposed to be known for? This is what I hope to find in high school, a new start, an actual beginning to my life.

And along the side of the document, my comments still exist: "Don't worry about how other people perceive you", "Be the best person you can be", "Enjoy the ride". They sound so hollow and meaningless.


I'm a fairly optimistic person, but Luis's story is very hard to spin in a positive light, and it has got me thinking about the dozens of young men I teach every day who, like Luis, already feel defeated. Our society tells young people that education is the key to success, and I think I believe that to a degree, but what happens if you live in a community where there are barriers to your education? The inability to study or do homework because of dynamics at home. Trauma. A perpetual cycle of violence and instability. We can't just point to the fact that many kids overcome all of these obstacles. Too many do not.

A few weeks ago, I met Todd, a police officer who runs a program that mentors young people who are constantly faced with these kinds of situations. I mentioned Luis, and immediately Todd told me that he had spoken to him just days before his death, warning him of issues in his life that he had to address. Todd told me that Luis assured him that everything was fine. "I got this," Luis had said.

I'm not entirely sure how to bring this to a close; it's already too long. But every word that I type is another word written about Luis. It's another small part of a memorial that, guilt-ridden, I feel obliged to compose. Luis died in near anonymity and at least maybe when people Google him, this post will show up. More than anything, though, this is a call to a recognition of our collective humanity, that the young man who was gunned down as he skateboarded home was not just a gangbanger. He was Luis, the charismatic, articulate young man with dreams, talents, friends, and striking green eyes. He mattered. He matters.