If you live in the same community where you teach -- as I do -- there are inevitable moments when your professional and personal lives cross paths. Some teachers can navigate these moments with precision and grace. Me? Not so much. I’ve gotten better at it over the years, but too often I feel as caught off guard by these encounters as the students or parents themselves seem to be.
If it’s a family I know and we have some history and we all still like each other, things are very pleasant. If it’s someone I recognize well enough to place them and there isn’t any open loathing going on from either end, we can at least acknowledge each other with a polite hello. Since I live pretty close to a big shopping area, this happens a lot. I mean, a lot. It’s the rare occurrence when I can go into a store and not have to turn into my teacher self for at least a couple of minutes, or run a quick mental evaluation on whether or not there’s anything in my cart I might feel self-conscious about. As the students get older, I often have to run their faces through the mental database and try to account for age, unless their body language makes it pretty clear they either don’t remember me or would rather pretend they don’t, which is usually fine with me as well.
Here are some of the more memorable out-of-school encounters I’ve had with either students or parents over the years:
*I have seen parents and students in both doctor and dentist waiting rooms. This usually goes okay as long as there isn’t a kid there who doesn’t have the social filter it would take to not ask a question like, “Why do you have to see the doctor? Are you sick?” Though it is kind of fun to see how mortified the parents are when that question slips out.
*I was out bowling with a group of my cousins one Saturday. Someone noticed a little girl a couple lanes over, bowling with a blindfold. She was one of mine. Never got the backstory on that, but she did see me when the blindfold came off and we shared a wave.
*Many years ago, students would frequently invite me to watch their games, or recitals, or plays, or whatever. This still happens some now, but less than it once did. My favorites of these events were the girls basketball games. When I showed up I’d quietly climb up to one of the back rows, looking to keep a fairly low profile so I could minimize the number of impromptu parent-teacher conferences that always seemed to happen. There were ALWAYS parents who would be going to town on their kids with some pretty intense bleacher-coaching, throwing out the same power phrases I knew these poor girls had to listen to at home while practicing in their driveways. This would continue relentlessly up to the moment one of the girls spotted me, pointed me out to the others on the team, and they’d all wave from the sidelines and call out a hello. I’d wave back as half the adults in the stands would turn to see where I was. From that moment on the more boisterous parents started behaving themselves. I loved it.
*Another frequent collision point is church. These sightings are rarely more than a smile or a wave, which is easy enough. But I did have one girl sitting up in the balcony on the opposite side who made her family rush through the crowd when the service ended so they could cut me off at the closest exit and say hello. I only realized later she had probably been watching me from the moment she first saw me, and hoped that hadn’t been one of the mornings when I’d slipped into a quick nap.
*Restaurant sightings happen more often than not. One night I saw a student from many years before who was in college by that time. I’d stayed in touch with her, somewhat; she had earned some service hours in my classroom as part of an internship program through her high school. The problem here? I was on a date. And I don’t think it went over well that I was smiling and waving to this pretty twenty-something co-ed in the corner as we were leaving. Because it was a first date that never reached a second.
*I go to movies a lot, so I often see students or families at one of the local theaters. Usually I’ll go in the afternoon to avoid the crowds and take advantage of lower ticket prices, but one day I got stuck in a line with at least ten people ahead of me and fifteen people behind. While standing there hoping I’d have time to get a drink and sit down before the previews started, an eruption of screaming startled everyone in the line. I turn to see what was going on and saw eight of my girls charging out of a party room, sprinting toward me with wide eyes and excited smiles. I stood there kind of shell-shocked, very aware of everyone in the line watching the scene play out while I heard about all about the birthday and was invited back to the party room for some pizza when a camera flash caught the corner of my eye. I looked up and saw the parents of the birthday girl, a mom and dad I got along with very well, standing in the party room door way, holding a camera, waving, and getting the biggest laugh out of my discomfort.
*Not every real-life meeting happens in my backyard. The most unexpected one I can think of was running into a former student and his family in the concourse at the XCel Energy Center following a Queen concert. Okay, yeah, Queen and Paul Rodgers, not quite the same without Freddie, but that’s the closest I’m ever going to get so I took it. We laughed about the happenstance of meeting up there on a school night, talked about how much we’d enjoyed the show and about how important of a band Queen had been for us.... okay, this was me and the parents mostly, but the dad had a mischievous grin when he elbowed his son, prompting him, “Tell him what your favorite Queen song is.” This teddy bear of a kid, probably in middle school at the time, looked down with a shy smile and answered “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”
*The capper event to all of this has to be an encounter I wasn’t even there for. My sister and her family took a Black Hills vacation one summer, with my parents tagging along. They were enjoying a summer evening at the motel pool when my parents got to talking with another couple while relaxing in the nearby spa. After they had all been talking for awhile, my parents’ side of the conversation, as I understand it, went something like this: “So, where are you from?... Oh really, we’re from Minnesota as well. Whereabouts do you live?... Coon Rapids, no kidding? We don’t live far from there. In fact our son lives there.... He’s a teacher. Where do your kids go to school?.... Really! That’s where he works! What grades are they in?” And soon they had pieced together they had me in common. Of course I heard about this from my parents as soon as they were home, and then heard about it again from the family they had met when school started back up a couple of weeks later. It was such an unusual moment that it’s something I’ll still joke about occasionally with these parents when I see them.
Again -- a lucky thing this was a family I get along with.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Why You Should Always Listen to Your Dad
I had a mullet once. For about an hour and a half. But for the record I had never even heard the word "mullet" at that point in my life, so I can promise you it wasn't intentional.
I was in 10th grade or so, in the dead center of the 80s, a decade defined by so many forms of ridiculousness, including hair styles. I had asked Jan, the woman who had been cutting my hair since probably about sixth grade, if she could just leave it a little longer in the back than usual. I just wanted to try something different. I liked the way my hair hung down below my ears when it got longer, so I thought - why not give myself a head start?
When Jan was finished and spun me around, I had to hold back my shock. This was WAY longer than I had visualized. But she had done exactly what I'd asked, and even back then I was too non-confrontational to suggest I wasn't happy with how it turned out; this is a characteristic that has resulted in me living through far too many crappy haircuts in my lifetime, by the way. My mom gave it a neutrally appraising look, paid the bill, and we left.
It's just new, I told myself. I just have to get used to it. In another week, it'll be fine. Cool, even. Full-on denial here. I looked like I should have been playing saxophone in a Tina Turner video.
I went to my bedroom when we got home. My sisters weren't home and my mom went to get dinner ready before Dad got home from work. I heard him come in, and soon after was called to the dinner table. I went to the kitchen and sat down in my usual spot across the table from him. He looked up from scooping something onto his plate and saw me with my new haircut looking as artificially nonchalant as I could.
"No. Absolutely not."
"What?" I replied, with only the most timid of nods toward everything rock and roll had taught me about rebelling against parents when it came to haircuts. But it was pretty clear this wasn't going anywhere. Before dinner went any further my mother stood up and gently steered me into the bathroom, where she got out her hair clippers and quickly fixed me up to what I would have normally looked like after a haircut. Almost as if she had expected this was going to happen.
I was a little reflexively irked at the time, but deep down I was relieved I wasn't going to have to walk around looking like that. And this was only one of countless times my dad had been there to pull me back from the brink of my own bottomless well of teenage stupidity.
So, thanks for that one, Dad. And Happy Father's Day.
I was in 10th grade or so, in the dead center of the 80s, a decade defined by so many forms of ridiculousness, including hair styles. I had asked Jan, the woman who had been cutting my hair since probably about sixth grade, if she could just leave it a little longer in the back than usual. I just wanted to try something different. I liked the way my hair hung down below my ears when it got longer, so I thought - why not give myself a head start?
When Jan was finished and spun me around, I had to hold back my shock. This was WAY longer than I had visualized. But she had done exactly what I'd asked, and even back then I was too non-confrontational to suggest I wasn't happy with how it turned out; this is a characteristic that has resulted in me living through far too many crappy haircuts in my lifetime, by the way. My mom gave it a neutrally appraising look, paid the bill, and we left.
It's just new, I told myself. I just have to get used to it. In another week, it'll be fine. Cool, even. Full-on denial here. I looked like I should have been playing saxophone in a Tina Turner video.
I went to my bedroom when we got home. My sisters weren't home and my mom went to get dinner ready before Dad got home from work. I heard him come in, and soon after was called to the dinner table. I went to the kitchen and sat down in my usual spot across the table from him. He looked up from scooping something onto his plate and saw me with my new haircut looking as artificially nonchalant as I could.
"No. Absolutely not."
"What?" I replied, with only the most timid of nods toward everything rock and roll had taught me about rebelling against parents when it came to haircuts. But it was pretty clear this wasn't going anywhere. Before dinner went any further my mother stood up and gently steered me into the bathroom, where she got out her hair clippers and quickly fixed me up to what I would have normally looked like after a haircut. Almost as if she had expected this was going to happen.
I was a little reflexively irked at the time, but deep down I was relieved I wasn't going to have to walk around looking like that. And this was only one of countless times my dad had been there to pull me back from the brink of my own bottomless well of teenage stupidity.
So, thanks for that one, Dad. And Happy Father's Day.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Breaking Up
This is kind of painful to admit, but I’m on the verge of ending one of the relationships in my life. It was good while it lasted. It helped me see how much joy and possibility life could contain, and stayed at my side through some rough times. It showed me incredible highs and disappointing lows. It shaped my happiness over many a summer. And even though I’ve managed to stay loyal over three decades, with, at times, the kind of devotion most people would attribute to a stalker, I’m starting to question if that same commitment is deserved anymore. There have just been too many times in recent years when there has a been a flash of promise that things might, just maybe, go back to the way they were, and while they were good for awhile, that goodness never held together. There will always be memories, but I’m afraid we’ve now reached the stage where the memories are all that’s left.
I’m thinking hard about breaking up with Journey.
Not an easy decision. “Escape” was one of the first vinyl LPs I bought with my own money, even though “Who’s Cryin’ Now” never did it for me. Neal Schon was the first musician I was a fan of inside of a band I liked -- it wasn’t hard to figure out his guitar playing was what drew me to start with. When Journey went on hiatus in the late 80s, I followed Neal through solo albums and side projects, including one album that a student once described as “the kind of music they play in the background when they’re showing the weather forecast on the news.” I stayed with them through the break-up, the reunion, through the Steve Perry megalomania that saw half the band fired and replaced with touring backup musicians (yes, I mean you Randy Jackson; I don’t care how much you name-drop on American Idol, you WERE NEVER LISTED AS A FULL MEMBER OF THE BAND, SO SHUT UP ALREADY), the subsequent sound-alike lead singers after Steve Perry left for good, and the mediocre albums that resulted. The spark, the magic was gone, but I still hung onto hope that someday it would return.
Journey released a new album about a month ago, and soon it appeared on iTunes. I dismissed it at first, thinking it was going to be a rehash of the last one with the newest singer, a guy they discovered on YouTube singing in a cover band. But then I saw it actually get a review in Rolling Stone. Which was a surprise, because usually Rolling Stone, a magazine that prides itself on being far too cool for everyone except its own writing staff, would just dismiss a Journey album as another typical legacy money-grab. It didn’t get a great review - 2 stars out of 5 - but a few of the comments in the review made me curious. So I decided to give the band one more chance before we break up for good. If this album doesn’t work, we’re done. And right here, right now, you get to see this decision unfold in real time as I give the album my first listen.
The album is called “Eclipse.” It starts out promising because the cover art references “Escape” in three different ways: The one-word title starting with an “E”, the trippy way they substitute some of the letters with numbers like they did with “Escape,” and a return to the little outer-space June bug that came bursting through some kind of spherical prison on the “Escape” cover, a cover I knew well since I sketched it with some accuracy on my eighth grade social studies notebook. Also most of the songs are between five and seven minutes long, which is a plus for me.
Okay, here we go. Tuning out the world, volume slider up all the way. Please, Journey. Don’t screw this up.
City of Hope - Yeesh. Kind of a pandering title to start with. A fire alarm guitar riff in the beginning. This guy really does sound like Steve Perry... most of the time. Not bad musically, pretty good solo that wasn’t long enough. A lot of the lyrics sound like something a middle school girl would post on a friend’s wall if that friend needed extra encouragement after a bad day. A little extra guitar in the last minute, which gets ugly in a good way. Overall it’s sort of bland, but there’s promise.
Edge of the Moment - Hey, this one starts out pretty cool. Much more of a rock song from the get go, with a funky rhythm section. Almost makes me want to turn to the drum kit and play along. Two minutes in and I’ve decided I really like this one. Two shorter solos with a nice bridge in the middle. Definitely gets the job done.
Chain of Love - Opens with some spacey keyboards... hmm... let’s hope this is going somewhere soon.... Whoa. Some full-on steam-engine metal guitars as soon as the keyboard melody is resolved, but they get a little buried in the mix when the vocals start up again. Typical Neal solo... I’d rather see more fireworks from him, especially on a song like this.
Tantra - Piano with subtle strings in the background - this has token ballad written all over it. Guys, seriously, you really took this kind of song to its logical peak with “Faithfully.” You aren’t going to top that, so I don’t know if it’s worth trying. Hmm, the rhythm changes halfway through, kicks up the tempo. That’s interesting. Playing around with the time signatures a bit - I can respect that. Guitar solo is still kind of bland, though. I’ll stop commenting on that until something comes up worth a comment. It kind of plods along until the piano/string wash returns at the end, for no reason at all.
Anything is Possible - Just from the title, and the first ten words, I’m guessing this song came from leftover lyric ideas from “City of Hope.” I’m wondering if whoever Journey’s primary songwriters are now have melodramatic middle-school kids, and if they are raiding their diaries when their lyrical ideas run dry. Anything is possible? Except remembering anything about this song ten minutes after I hear it. Oohh.. nice solo at the end though. Sounds like something from Neal’s 90s band Hardline. Yeah, I know you haven’t heard of them. Just take my word on this.
Resonate - Nice title; I just like this word, so that’s a good beginning. Kind of a proggy, dramatic beginning... okay, keep this up... nice rhythm guitar going on here, good energy in the drumming. Just caught myself bobbing my head along with it. Yeah, baby. I’m diggin’ this one.
She’s a Mystery - Jangly, almost acoustic guitars - 12-string? I can never tell for sure, but that’s my guess. A nice, laid-back sun-on-your-face summer kind of song. If Joe Satriani’s “Rubina’s Blue Sky Happiness” had any lyrics, it would sound a lot like this. And then in the last two minutes huge power chords come pounding in, and it still fits everything that was happening earlier. I was liking it before, but now it’s awesome.
Human Feel - Longest song on the album -- let’s see if its merited. It starts out with drum beats accompanied by percussive guitar chords, then an old-school organ and the bass come in. It gets repetitive after awhile, and doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere new. It would have been a better song at 3:30 instead of 6:43.
My Ritual - I am stunned by the percentage of the lyrics on this album that are nothing but clichés. I’ll have to check the songwriting credits online to see if either Bryan Adams or Chris Daughtry was involved. We’ve got a faster song here, one that seems to be engineered to inspire fists pumping at the sky during a live show. It’s not bad, but it’s hardly noteworthy. I think I’d like this one more if it were only one song out of nine instead of one out of twelve, if that makes any sense.
To Whom It May Concern - Okay, if that’s what you call a song, you just aren’t trying hard enough. This is a good example of what I’m harping about with the clichés. Surprisingly enough, it’s a ballad... sure didn’t see that one coming. Ultimately its so forgettable it could have appeared on their last album, “Revelation,” or the one before it.... and I honestly can’t remember the title of that one without looking it up in the iTunes library. Oh, right. “Arrival.” Man, there’s still two more minutes of this? When a musical artist has worked their way up to a professional level, I’d think they’d want to put forth the best product they can, both to make sure they sell a lot of albums and to preserve their artistic legacy. And yet... filler like this.
Once You Let Someone - Once you let them what, exactly? This seems a little open ended, like that whole Meat Loaf “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” deal. Oh, okay. Once you let someone love you. There. Mystery solved. Two more words in the title didn’t work? Maybe they figured this song was already so generic they needed something that wasn’t blatantly trite for a title.
Venus - Shortest song on the album as the closer? Hmm. Bucks a trend, but whatever. We’ve got distortion and feedback to begin with, which eventually morphs into a riff that sounds vaguely familiar... I think this is some kind of instrumental reprise to an earlier song on the album, but I don’t remember which. Maybe it’s just a chance for Neal to shred things up a little, because he’s going to town here. The drummer is even coming to life. Not Mike Portnoy soloing or anything, but more than just keeping a beat. Then we start to fade out, but fade back in again? What’s up with that? There’s nothing going on here that needs to be revisited for another twenty-four seconds.
Perhaps the only intelligent comment David Lee Roth of Van Halen ever made was pointing out that most albums only have maybe three or four really good songs on them. If you follow music at all and really think about it, he had a point. And it holds true here.
You had a couple good moments on Eclipse, Journey. But I’m not sure it’s enough for me to see you again or buy whatever you do next.
I think it’s time we went our separate ways.
I’m thinking hard about breaking up with Journey.
Not an easy decision. “Escape” was one of the first vinyl LPs I bought with my own money, even though “Who’s Cryin’ Now” never did it for me. Neal Schon was the first musician I was a fan of inside of a band I liked -- it wasn’t hard to figure out his guitar playing was what drew me to start with. When Journey went on hiatus in the late 80s, I followed Neal through solo albums and side projects, including one album that a student once described as “the kind of music they play in the background when they’re showing the weather forecast on the news.” I stayed with them through the break-up, the reunion, through the Steve Perry megalomania that saw half the band fired and replaced with touring backup musicians (yes, I mean you Randy Jackson; I don’t care how much you name-drop on American Idol, you WERE NEVER LISTED AS A FULL MEMBER OF THE BAND, SO SHUT UP ALREADY), the subsequent sound-alike lead singers after Steve Perry left for good, and the mediocre albums that resulted. The spark, the magic was gone, but I still hung onto hope that someday it would return.
Journey released a new album about a month ago, and soon it appeared on iTunes. I dismissed it at first, thinking it was going to be a rehash of the last one with the newest singer, a guy they discovered on YouTube singing in a cover band. But then I saw it actually get a review in Rolling Stone. Which was a surprise, because usually Rolling Stone, a magazine that prides itself on being far too cool for everyone except its own writing staff, would just dismiss a Journey album as another typical legacy money-grab. It didn’t get a great review - 2 stars out of 5 - but a few of the comments in the review made me curious. So I decided to give the band one more chance before we break up for good. If this album doesn’t work, we’re done. And right here, right now, you get to see this decision unfold in real time as I give the album my first listen.
The album is called “Eclipse.” It starts out promising because the cover art references “Escape” in three different ways: The one-word title starting with an “E”, the trippy way they substitute some of the letters with numbers like they did with “Escape,” and a return to the little outer-space June bug that came bursting through some kind of spherical prison on the “Escape” cover, a cover I knew well since I sketched it with some accuracy on my eighth grade social studies notebook. Also most of the songs are between five and seven minutes long, which is a plus for me.
Okay, here we go. Tuning out the world, volume slider up all the way. Please, Journey. Don’t screw this up.
City of Hope - Yeesh. Kind of a pandering title to start with. A fire alarm guitar riff in the beginning. This guy really does sound like Steve Perry... most of the time. Not bad musically, pretty good solo that wasn’t long enough. A lot of the lyrics sound like something a middle school girl would post on a friend’s wall if that friend needed extra encouragement after a bad day. A little extra guitar in the last minute, which gets ugly in a good way. Overall it’s sort of bland, but there’s promise.
Edge of the Moment - Hey, this one starts out pretty cool. Much more of a rock song from the get go, with a funky rhythm section. Almost makes me want to turn to the drum kit and play along. Two minutes in and I’ve decided I really like this one. Two shorter solos with a nice bridge in the middle. Definitely gets the job done.
Chain of Love - Opens with some spacey keyboards... hmm... let’s hope this is going somewhere soon.... Whoa. Some full-on steam-engine metal guitars as soon as the keyboard melody is resolved, but they get a little buried in the mix when the vocals start up again. Typical Neal solo... I’d rather see more fireworks from him, especially on a song like this.
Tantra - Piano with subtle strings in the background - this has token ballad written all over it. Guys, seriously, you really took this kind of song to its logical peak with “Faithfully.” You aren’t going to top that, so I don’t know if it’s worth trying. Hmm, the rhythm changes halfway through, kicks up the tempo. That’s interesting. Playing around with the time signatures a bit - I can respect that. Guitar solo is still kind of bland, though. I’ll stop commenting on that until something comes up worth a comment. It kind of plods along until the piano/string wash returns at the end, for no reason at all.
Anything is Possible - Just from the title, and the first ten words, I’m guessing this song came from leftover lyric ideas from “City of Hope.” I’m wondering if whoever Journey’s primary songwriters are now have melodramatic middle-school kids, and if they are raiding their diaries when their lyrical ideas run dry. Anything is possible? Except remembering anything about this song ten minutes after I hear it. Oohh.. nice solo at the end though. Sounds like something from Neal’s 90s band Hardline. Yeah, I know you haven’t heard of them. Just take my word on this.
Resonate - Nice title; I just like this word, so that’s a good beginning. Kind of a proggy, dramatic beginning... okay, keep this up... nice rhythm guitar going on here, good energy in the drumming. Just caught myself bobbing my head along with it. Yeah, baby. I’m diggin’ this one.
She’s a Mystery - Jangly, almost acoustic guitars - 12-string? I can never tell for sure, but that’s my guess. A nice, laid-back sun-on-your-face summer kind of song. If Joe Satriani’s “Rubina’s Blue Sky Happiness” had any lyrics, it would sound a lot like this. And then in the last two minutes huge power chords come pounding in, and it still fits everything that was happening earlier. I was liking it before, but now it’s awesome.
Human Feel - Longest song on the album -- let’s see if its merited. It starts out with drum beats accompanied by percussive guitar chords, then an old-school organ and the bass come in. It gets repetitive after awhile, and doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere new. It would have been a better song at 3:30 instead of 6:43.
My Ritual - I am stunned by the percentage of the lyrics on this album that are nothing but clichés. I’ll have to check the songwriting credits online to see if either Bryan Adams or Chris Daughtry was involved. We’ve got a faster song here, one that seems to be engineered to inspire fists pumping at the sky during a live show. It’s not bad, but it’s hardly noteworthy. I think I’d like this one more if it were only one song out of nine instead of one out of twelve, if that makes any sense.
To Whom It May Concern - Okay, if that’s what you call a song, you just aren’t trying hard enough. This is a good example of what I’m harping about with the clichés. Surprisingly enough, it’s a ballad... sure didn’t see that one coming. Ultimately its so forgettable it could have appeared on their last album, “Revelation,” or the one before it.... and I honestly can’t remember the title of that one without looking it up in the iTunes library. Oh, right. “Arrival.” Man, there’s still two more minutes of this? When a musical artist has worked their way up to a professional level, I’d think they’d want to put forth the best product they can, both to make sure they sell a lot of albums and to preserve their artistic legacy. And yet... filler like this.
Once You Let Someone - Once you let them what, exactly? This seems a little open ended, like that whole Meat Loaf “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” deal. Oh, okay. Once you let someone love you. There. Mystery solved. Two more words in the title didn’t work? Maybe they figured this song was already so generic they needed something that wasn’t blatantly trite for a title.
Venus - Shortest song on the album as the closer? Hmm. Bucks a trend, but whatever. We’ve got distortion and feedback to begin with, which eventually morphs into a riff that sounds vaguely familiar... I think this is some kind of instrumental reprise to an earlier song on the album, but I don’t remember which. Maybe it’s just a chance for Neal to shred things up a little, because he’s going to town here. The drummer is even coming to life. Not Mike Portnoy soloing or anything, but more than just keeping a beat. Then we start to fade out, but fade back in again? What’s up with that? There’s nothing going on here that needs to be revisited for another twenty-four seconds.
Perhaps the only intelligent comment David Lee Roth of Van Halen ever made was pointing out that most albums only have maybe three or four really good songs on them. If you follow music at all and really think about it, he had a point. And it holds true here.
You had a couple good moments on Eclipse, Journey. But I’m not sure it’s enough for me to see you again or buy whatever you do next.
I think it’s time we went our separate ways.
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