Keeping On Keeping On

I worked a full day today, and I mean a full day-- not one minute off-- I covered a class and had a duty and finished Henry IV and started Hamlet . . . and then I raced home to prepare for what I believed was going to be a disastrous tennis match-- we were playing Edison, a huge school with a decent tennis program, and we were missing three starters-- Boyang and Jakob were on the DECA trip and Sapir was still in Italy-- but, as we know from Henry V: 

"The fewer men, the greater share of honor" 

and so our very depleted team took to the courts at Johnson Park and quickly fell behind; Ian was playing an athletic pusher at first singles and he couldn't figure him out; Alex was playing a hard-hitting second singles player who was nailing every shot; Ethan the freshman was playing an experienced senior at third singles; then our first doubles lost the first set in a tie-breaker, Alex got slaughtered in the first set; Ian was having a terrible time; Ethan was down but our wacky second doubles team came through and won a set; Alex decided he could run his kid to death-- not a fun way to play but a possibility-- Ethan battled back, and our first doubles won the second set . . . and then pretty much everything went our way (although it wasn't Ian's day, he couldn't figure out how to beat his kid) but everyone else battled back and won, so we managed a 4-1 victory in a match I thought was a throwaway loss, and it was all gutsy pressure-filled come-from-behind wins . . . really awesome, and after Alex won the second set in a tiebreaker and then-- with a strained hamstring-- basically ran his kid until he couldn't run any more-- he finished up, victorious, and his girlfriend Izzy did a little proposal poster with tennis puns on it (and some cupcakes that looked liked tennis balls) and it was an epic and excellent Friday afternoon, and-- in David vs. Goliath fashion-- a great win over a Group IV school . . . so we're now 6 - 0 and hanging on for dear life until everyone gets back from their various trips. 

It's All Happening in Dave's Brain

Things are pretty wild right now in my consciousness-- there's Semantle and Wordle and Globle and Worldle, plus transferring my Henry IV plans from analog to digital and learning to coach varsity tennis (and a bunch of healthy eating because my wife spoke to s nutritionist) and Ian starting to prepare for college applications and Alex is figuring out his Rutgers stuff . . . I keep thinking next year will be the one where it's easier, where everything is figured out . . . but I'm not so sure that's ever going to happen.

A Great Mystery (If You Know Some History)

In 2012, The British Crime Writer's Association named The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey as the greatest mystery novel ever written.

I just read it. I loved it, but it's an odd choice.

First of all, It's an exponentially faster read than Tom Jones. But that's not saying much. I whipped through The Daughter of Time in three days. I'd like to highly recommend it, but for one thing.

To enjoy the book, you need to have a working knowledge of The War of the Roses, Richard III, The Lancasters and the Yorks, and all that. You don't need to be a historian, but you need to at least be familiar with the key players in the way Americans would be familiar with the main characters of Hamilton.

Despite this cultural caveat, The Mystery Writers of America list the book as the fourth-best mystery ever. That's impressive.

I was already prepped to read The Daughter of Time because I've taught Shakespeare's Richard III and Henry IV many times. I've learned to boil down that period of history to something palatable for high school kids in a fun elective class.  I've also watched the entire Hollow Crown series. So I knew just enough to really enjoy the novel.

It's bizarre, as far as mystery stories go. Tey's detective, Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, is confined to a hospital bed. He hurt his leg when he fell through a trapdoor during a police chase. He's bored and doesn't want to read the typical formulaic literature that people have been giving him, so he ends up investigating a historical mystery. He is constrained to his bed for the duration of the novel. All the action takes place in the 15th century.

He wonders if Richard of Gloucester-- who eventually becomes Richard III-- really murdered the two young princes in the Tower of London. It's one of the most famous mysteries in history. Shakespeare's version of the hunchbacked Machiavellian villain certainly orchestrated the foul deed (and many other deeds nearly as foul). But the real Richard is much more elusive.

Grant lies in hospital bed and various people bring him books and assist him in his research into the mystery. Tey's book is more a treatise on how history is written to reflect the biases of historians than a crime novel.

This is what Grant says about an author of one of the accounts:

The spectacle of Dr. Gairdner trying to make his facts fit his theory was the most entertaining thing in gymnastics that Grant had witnessed for some time.

Apparently, this debate over the culpability and villainy of Richard III has been up for debate ever since he was deposed by Henry VII. But it took Tey's novel to spark interest among the general public.

If you are going to read the book, you probably want to avoid reading any historical debate over the answers. And even if you know nothing about the history of the Lancaster and the Yorks, you could probably follow along. The research goes step-by-step.

Grant begins his research by looking at children's books.

He then advances to denser secondary sources about Richard, his family, and the Princes in the Tower, learning about the secret marriage agreement the princes’ father had made, which, when discovered after the father’s death, rendered the sons illegitimate. (Richard, next in line for the throne after the princes, became king by an act of Parliament.)

Grant and his research assistant eventually come to an unusual conclusion . . . or so they think. But history is long, ambiguous, and generally lacking in first-hand accounts-- so just about any point of view you can think of has probably been professed at some time or another.

The final irony is that Tey-- in her reversal of procedure and legend-- may have committed the same error in logic that many historians fall prey to. This has something to do with inductive and deductive logic, though I always screw it up. Detectives and historians should mainly use inductive logic-- look at the specific clues and data and draw the most logical conclusion. But they often use deductive logic-- they come up with a hypothesis and then find facts to fit the theory. This is what Detective Grant criticizes, but it may just be the way humans operate-- even when they are trying not to.

Literary critic Geraldine Barnes explains this better than I could:

In the end, Grant’s “solution” to the mystery has less to do with the probabilities of history than with the manipulation of evidence to produce a neat tying up of loose ends and the revelation that, in the best clue-puzzle tradition, the person least likely is the culprit. The novel “solves” the murder of the princes in terms of its own logic, but that logic is predicated upon the unswerving assumption that the prime suspect is innocent . . . the fatal flaw in her method is to stretch the boundaries of detective fiction beyond their naturalistic limits to the point where Richard III is, simply, too good to be true.

I still highly recommend this book-- it's nothing like any other crime novel I've ever read, and the case is compelling, convincing, and still being debated by historians today.

Unsolved Mysteries: The Universe Eats Things

I have a giant metal storage cabinet in my classroom that I keep secure with a red and silver combination lock. The cabinet contains many very very valuable items. DVDs and photocopied materials and last years exams and my annotated copies of various texts.

These things may not sound valuable to you-- or to most people on the planet-- but they are worth a lot to me. Plus, I store my workbag and Lenovo Thinkpad in there at night. And there's detention in my room after school. All kinds of people wandering in and out. I don't need them perusing my Henry IV part 1 marginalia. So I like that lock.

More often than not, at the start of the day-- which is very early in the morning-- I take the lock off the cabinet and put it down somewhere weird (often inside the cabinet) and "lose" it for a few minutes. Then, inevitably, I find it and lock up the cabinet again.

Except for last Wednesday. I lost the lock, and even with the help of the sixteen kids in my Philosophy class, we could not find it. Sixteen kids searching the room! It seemed like a philosophical thought experiment, but it wasn't.

Is existence real? Can we trust our perception? Are we living in a simulation? Have I gone mad?

No. No. Yes. Yes.

I wish there was some kind of resolution to the story, other than I've descended into madness. The lock was in my pocket! The lock had fallen into the cuff of my pants! The lock was hidden in plain sight!

No such lock.

Where in Sam-fucking-Hill is that lock? It's got to turn up . . . and it's not behind the two (very heavy) filing cabinets next to the giant metal cabinet. I looked.

I was in denial for a couple of day-- my cabinet lockless-- but I'm bringing a new lock to school on Monday.

So I've solved the problem.

But will I ever solve the mystery?

Serial Season Two vs. Dave's Brain!

Last year, I taught Serial Season 1 to my high school seniors-- I couched the podcast within a process analysis unit, and the kids really enjoyed it; Serial Season 2 is a bit harder to get a grip on, but I like it even better than Season 1, perhaps because it reminds me of all the things I learned when I lived in Syria, and-- despite the difficulties, I am teaching to my seniors and (with the threat of constant quizzing) they are doing a fantastic job with a dense and difficult story . . . this time I've embedded the podcast in a compare/contrast unit, because that seems to be the main structural trope that ties the story together . . . here are some of the topics that the podcast invites you to compare and contrast:

1) the liberal interpretation of Bergdahl's story vs. the conservative perspective . . . Katy Waldman (on  the Slate's Serial Spoiler) calls the tone of the podcast "radical empathy" while many of Bergdahl's fellow soldiers consider him a deserter and a traitor;

2) Bergdahl and Jason Bourne;

3) Bergdahl and a "golden chicken";

4) Bergdahl and a "ready made loaf";

5) Bergdahl and and a "free-floating astronaut" with no tether;

6) the American Army and a "lumbering machine" and an AT-AT;

7) the Taliban as a mouse running beneath the machine's legs;

8) Pakistan as "home base," the mousehole in the wall in Tom & Jerry;

9) the rumors about Bergdahl vs. the reality of his captivity;

10) The Haqqani Network and the Sopranos;

11) Bergdahl's imprisonment and treatment vs. the imprisonment and treatment of Muslim detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib;

12) the feelings about infidels of moderate Muslims vs. radical Muslims;

13) the code of conduct required for POW videos vs. actual military expectations for POW videos;

14) the sovereign state of Pakistan and the tribal area of North Waziristan;

15) the captivity of Bergdahl and the captivity of David Rohde . . . Rohde was kidnapped and held for three months by the Haqqani network in the same area as Bergdahl at nearly the same time, he is a civilian journalist and not a soldier, and he wasn't blindfolded and isolated as much as Bergdahl, but his story is still very helpful in understanding what happened to Bergdahl;

16) the entire story and the children's book Zoom;

and these are the issues that I think will surface in the future-- I'm speculating, of course, but that's necessary when you're teaching a piece that's not finished yet . . . it's like teaching a book that hasn't been finished, it's exhilarating and exhausting, but also really fun; I can teach Hamlet and Henry IV in my sleep because I know what happens, while doing this is really keeping me on my toes, and this is where I imagine the story is going:

17) there will be comparisons drawn Bergdahl's endurance in captivity and the hero's journey . . . the fact that Mark Boal was interested in interviewing him for a movie and the fact that he is the longest held captive since the Vietnam War and the fact that they are viewing him with such empathy in the podcast leads me to believe it will head in this direction;

18) good leaders vs. toxic leaders . . . if Bergdahl is going to be portrayed as heroic, Serial is going to have to provide a reasonable story of why he deserted his post, and I think they are saving that portion of the narrative and I also think that it is going to open a whole crazy can of worms about the military and it's purpose;

19) the motivation behind Bergdahl's decision and the Pixar film Inside Out . . . which I have promised to show to my students if they survive the podcast;

20) the reaction you should have when you think about how long Bergdahl spent in captivity and the following clip from Grosse Pointe Blank (and while I realize that it doesn't connect exactly in a mathematical sense, the tone is perfect).

Dave Pleads His Case About Being Overwhelmed

I finished Brigid Schulte's book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No one Has the Time in the perfect setting: at jury duty, just after I had to plead with the judge to excuse me from a ten day straight asbestos trial-- she didn't care that I was a teacher who taught three different preps (who would teach Henry IV part I?) but I finally convinced her when I explained that I was the primary child-care person after school . . . but she didn't buy this right away, and grilled me about it-- I'm wondering if I were a woman, if she would have let me go easier; I told her the trial schedule was giving me an anxiety attack and that I was responsible for not only watching my kids after school, but getting them organized and to their various activities . . . and while I constantly fight against over scheduling, my kids have somehow become very involved in a lot of stuff-- orchestra, jazz band, basketball, soccer, piano lessons, art class, alternate art school auditions, etc. etc.-- and Ian and I have been trying to play tennis every day in the balmy weather (not that the judge would care about this) and there's a very active dog in the mix (would the judge care about this?) and while I told her I was happy to do a trial in the summer-- although it's hard to catch me then-- or a short trial, like a day or two, that there was no way I could manage ten days in a row, and she kept asking me if there was someone who could watch my kids for that time and I told her I would have to hire a sitter, and that was a red flag-- they can't make you do that, and once I told her I'd have to leave my ten year old alone quite a bit, she turned snotty and said, "Well, you shouldn't have to leave a ten year old alone" and I was like: that's what I've been talking about here! but I also didn't want to tell her that my ten year old was often alone, navigating the mean streets of our town, on his way from orchestra to art class, dragging his giant trombone-- or walking home from school and getting there before his brother . . . but now I know that child-care duty trumps jury duty and I'll write that to them when I get the next notice . . . my brother works in the courthouse and he later talked to the judge, who apparently knew who I was and told my brother I was "nervous" when i said my piece and I was like no shit I was nervous! how the hell do you schedule a ten day break from your life?  and when do you need to do this in front of a judge, four lawyers, and the other fifty random people who are waiting to do the same-- staring daggers at you, especially if you get to leave the room and go back downstairs, while a white noise generator creates a sound barrier so they can't hear exactly what you said to get you excused; Schulte's book addresses this, she covers the wild and variegated history of parenting . . . from less sentimentality to more, from hired help to permissiveness to "Donna Reed" style self-sacrificing and indulgent 1950's moms to the "benign neglect of the 1960s to the denigration of marriage in the 1970s because it was an "institution of oppressive patriarchy" to the intensive mothering of today . . . and then there's the inevitable comparison to the Danes, who work less hour than us, consume less, own less material possessions, spend more family time, have better child care and family leave, have more liberated women and working moms, more dads that cook and take care of the kids, better educational systems, less of an income gap, a low unemployment rate, six weeks of paid vacation,  great public transportation, and a host of other wonderful things . . . but they are a much smaller, much more homogenous country than the United States (which doesn't excuse our lack of quality childcare and downright pathetic family leave programs) and the final lesson of the book is to embrace the now and make the most of your time, to try not to allow it to become corrupted and fragmented, and I'm a big fan of this-- which is probably how I get this blog done each day and still manage to edit the podcast and make some time for recording music and playing sports . . . there was also one piece of research that made me very happy-- not only do we sleep in 90 minute cycles, but we work that way too, so it's much better to work in short bursts, which is how I do it-- not more hours, but less hours in more frenetic bursts-- and not only that, but top workers "rested more . . . they slept longer at night and they napped more in the day" and if there's one thing I'm all about, it's more sleep and more naps.

The Tree Grows Close to the Apple

Andrew Solomon's book Far From the Tree explores astonishingly difficult ethical dilemmas, such as:

1) should parents have the rights to genetically choose a child with a disability? . . . essentially insure that their child is deaf like them, or a dwarf like them . . . a process which might be regarded as the reverse of having a "designer baby"

 2) when should a parent abort a child? . . . is a disability a burden? something to be dreaded? or is it something unique that should be celebrated?

3) what is a disability? should we be able to screen our children for being gay or on the autism spectrum? and then be able to terminate them?

but despite these heavy questions, the final message of the book is a positive one: most parents do not want any other children than their own (though Shakespeare's Henry IV does wonder if some "night tripping fairy" has swapped his ne'er-do-well son with the heroic Hotspur . . . but in the end, he learns that Hal is the son for him) and parents will undergo mental gymnastics and passionate displays of emotion to love and enjoy and connect to whatever offspring they bear . . . Solomon ends saying "sometimes, I had thought the heroic parents in this book were fools, enslaving themselves to a life's journey with their alien children, trying to breed identity out of misery," but then he comes to the conclusion that all parents do this, they all seek some connection with their children, but also celebrate their individuality, and somehow see their children as different from all other children -- and so the tree that the proverbial apple doesn't fall far from is like an Ent, it may move closer to the apple if necessary, as the miraculous parents in this book did -- in figuring out how to care for deaf kids and the schizophrenic kids, kids with autism and severe disabilities, kids that commit crimes or are the product of rape, transgender kids, astounding prodigies, and kids with Down syndrome -- this is an intelligent and inspirational book and it will change the way you view the world, but it's super long, so you may have to read it in sections or choose the chapters that interest you; still, give it a shot, it is ground-breaking and heart-breaking, and it keeps things very real.

Dave's 105 Books to Read Before You Die (Which Will be Sooner Than You Think)

Everyone seems to have a top hundred list of something, and so here are my top hundred books (plus five bonus books in case you finish the top hundred too quickly) and each author is only represented once, so while Shakespeare and Italo Calvino may actually deserve more than one slot, for the sake of variety there are no repeats; also, there is fiction, non-fiction, and everything else on this list . . . and I should point out that once you finish reading all the books on this list, then you will be much smarter than me, because though I've read them all, I'm not sure I remember anything from them:

1.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2.   Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.   The Lives of the Cell by Lewis Thomas
5.   Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
6.   If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
7.   Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
8.   Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
9.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. V by Thomas Pynchon
11. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
12. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13.  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Into the Wild by John Krakauer
15.  Music of Chance by Paul Auster
16.  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
17.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
18. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
19. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
20. The Bible
21. Henry IV (part 1) by William Shakespeare
22. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
23. The Stories of John Cheever
24. Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver
25. The Image by Daniel Boorstin
26. Clockers by Richard Price
27. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
28. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
29. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
30. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan
31. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
32. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch  by Philip K. Dick
33.  Chaos by James Gleick
34.  The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky
35.  Watchmen by Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons
36.  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
37.  The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
38.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
39.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
40.  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
41.  Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
42.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
43.  War With The Newts by Karel Kapek
44.  The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
45.  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
46.  Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
47.  White Noise by Don Delillo
48.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
49.  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
50.  Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
51.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
52.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
53.  Bully For Brontosaurus by Stephen J. Gould
54.  The Drifters by James A. Michener
55.  Geek Love by Catherine Dunne
56.  The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
57.  Human Universals by Donald Brown
58.  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan
59.  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
60.  The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson
61.  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
62.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
63.  American Splendor by Harvey Pekar/ Robert Crumb
64.  The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz by Hector Berlioz
65.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
66.  The Castle by Franz Kafka
67.  Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
68.  Naked by David Sedaris
69.  Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
70.  The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
71.  The Big Short by Michael Lewis
72.  Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
73.  Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
74.  Monster of God by David Quammen
75.  Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
76.  Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
77.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
78.  Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
79.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
80. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
81.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright
82.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
83.  Manchester United Ruined My Life by Colin Shindler
84.  Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
85. From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
86. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
87. The End of the Road by John Barth
88. Neuromancer by William Gibson
89. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
90. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
91. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
92. Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
93. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
94. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
95. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
96. The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
97. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
98. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
99. 1493 by Charles C. Mann
100.  Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
101.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
102.  The Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
103.  Methland by Nick Reding
104. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
105. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Some Aid For Governor Christie

I've been very critical of Governor Christie's treatment of teachers, so in the spirit of fair play, I'll give him some ammunition to wield in his next attack on us: teachers are paid in salary and benefits, but we are also paid in moral superiority and no one accounts for how much this is worth monetarily when they are computing school budgets . . . I know when I'm done teaching a lesson about Shakespeare's Henry IV pt. 1-- one of great works of Western Civilization-- that I feel pretty damn superior; my self-esteem is riding high, my body is full of all kinds of positive hormones, and I feel as though I'm contributing something fantastic to the world . . . and that's worth a lot of money . . . of course, I don't feel as morally superior as one of those doctors without borders or someone who volunteers to work with the homeless or a scientist who has just cured leprosy . . . but I certainly feel morally superior to a gun runner arming a genocide or a guy who tranches synthetic CDO's or an elephant poacher.

Beans, Beans, They're Good For Your Heart . . .

Catherine made some delicious yellow lentils with sauteed onions and butter in the crock-pot a few days ago, and I took the remainder to work with me yesterday, but because of my lack of Tupperawareness, I packed far more than a single portion into my container, and I also had a sandwich (baked chicken and hummus, which is delicious, but hummus is also made from a legume . . . this will be significant later) so I decided to eat the lentils during my snack-time (around 9:15 AM) and I held up the medium sized Tupperware container-- which was filled to the brim with lentils-- and said to the new teacher, "There's no way I can eat this many lentils this early," but every spoonful was so smooth and buttery and delicious, and so fifteen minutes later the lentils were gone; I felt as if I had swallowed a medium sized tortoise, shell and all, but I had to go teach Henry IV, and I guess I didn't realize that lentils are in the bean family and have the same digestive effect, and it probably didn't help that later in the day I threw the chicken and hummus sandwich on top of this mound of beans, but luckily it wasn't bitterly cold outside and I was able to open my classroom windows, so no students suffered the consequences of my gluttony and I have learned a valuable lesson.