Chris Osmond PhD

Yesterday, as I stood in line at J.C.Penney’s to return a disappointing coffee maker, I heard a cover of Donald Fagen’s “I.G.Y.” come over the sound system. I smiled.

Haters will now commence hating; hipsters will arch an eyebrow hiply before returning to their Bon Iver. “Muzak.” That’s O.K. We devotees of the varied outputs of Fagen and Becker and their rotating gang of pale, squinting, studio-rat misfits are used to your scorn.

We even know all your moves: how the sheen of its production is just the grown-up version of disco, inauthentic and manufactured; how 2000’s Two Against Nature robbed Radiohead of their Grammy because of the accumulated guilt in the Academy for denying them previously; how generic and ersatz their funk is, how tiresome their growling, bitter schtick becomes as they drag out the band for yet another summer tour for the picnicking old white people at Wolf Trap.

Whatever. I know what I like, as surely as Peter Gabriel’s lawnmower, and I will love the world their music creates always and forever. The record that “I.G.Y.” opens was actually my introduction to that world. An older girl I was accompanying to her high school beauty pageant dropped it on me (truth being stranger than any fiction I could create). She picked me up for rehearsal – I didn’t have my permit yet – and eased the cassette into her 280-Z’s deck as we pulled away, saying “so, here’s the most sophisticated music I’ve ever heard.” That was that.

And every time I pull out The Nightfly, it’s the same experience. That terrifically thrilling mix of oblique substance and kitchen-clean, highly-polished surface that puts over Achtung Baby is working here. Not a hair out of place in the mix, and not an unambiguous declarative sentence to be found in the lyrics. Well, we mostly know what this record is about – more than any Steely Dan record, for sure, as Fagen gives it to us right there on the back of the record jacket:

Note: The songs on this album represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build. – D.F.

OK – so it’s a memoir. (By a boomer. How refreshing.) But like any memoir, what really makes it to the page or the wax is only a refraction of what actually lived. I cannot tell your story completely any more than you can mine, and I probably am even less able to give a full account of my own experience. I find an analog to the narrative shiftiness of this “autobiographical” record in the music itself, Clive Bell-style. I wonder at how the bass of the songs so seldom “roots” the listener in the key, instead anticipating the next set of changes as it slides around. I hear this most clearly on “New Frontier,” which has a confident melody buried in the chords of its vamp, but whose bass is always running ahead or hitching up behind, trying to tie its shoes. It’s so sly, and so endlessly engaging. (I wish I had more music theory to bring to this effort to explain Fagen’s “well-tempered Rhodes piano,” but we do what we can.)

I also confess to a crush on the high-modern dreams and schemes of the early 1960s – or at least the version that has trickled down to us in obsessively-maintained catalogs of the 1964 World’s Fair (and the more-loved-than-actually-watched series Mad Men, which we’ll welcome back tonight). That’s the reason why my own rhapsody in Fagen is here on my professional blog: it’s got me thinking about the way we’re doing educational policy right now, and how very “modern” it is.

I taught a chapter from Tyack and Cuban’s timeless Tinkering Toward Utopia last week. It’s a century-long look at education reform that tries to understand why some aspects of vigorously-implemented, top-down change efforts have actually impacted “the grammar of schooling” – its deep, unnoticed structure – but most have not. Their conclusion:

Should one conclude that it is impossible to improve schooling in basic ways? We think not, though the task is much harder than many people suspect. We suggest that actual changes in schools will be more gradual and piecemeal than the usual either-or rhetoric of innovation might indicate. Almost any blueprint for basic reform will be altered during implementation, so powerful is the hold of the public’s cultural construction of what constitutes a “real school” and so common is the teachers’ habit of hybridizing reforms to fit local circumstances and public expectations (p. 109).

I think that’s the core frustration that beats within the slick heart of “I.G.Y.” It’s a recollection of the clear-visioned, cool-headed aspirations of scientists who envisioned a world made infinitely, effortlessly better by the wholescale implementation of their technologies. I can’t begin to excerpt from the song, so here’s the whole thing:

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from new york to paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be a.o.k.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from new york to paris
(more leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

There’s the glorious, high-modern vision, laid out foursquare around the Unisphere for you to take in at your (increased) leisure. All we have to do is step up and take a bite.

And of course, it’s exactly that breed of sweeping hubris that Tyack and Cuban say leads to so few elements of such broad schemes ever really taking root. They pretend that they’re implemented in a vacuum, sweeping away all that goes before; they ignore the craft knowledge (metis) that already thrives in the hands and brains of the populace they seek to enlighten; they pretend local context and concern is a Lorax-like distraction  to be cleared away. So their innovations are, historically, “hybridized:” a teacher takes these three worksheets, and that lovely Call of the Wild poster, before returning to her classroom and closing the classroom door. After all, she knows what works and what doesn’t for her kids better than any egghead at the central office, thanks very much. Time for class to start.

It’s great to talk about this vibrant, insightful book. But then we note the publication date: 1995. That’s six years before the sweeping federal accountability legislation of “No Child Left Behind,” and thirteen before the “Race to the Top” program incentivized states to align their curriculum, accountability, and policy practices to national expectations in exchange for time-limited federal money that’s a pittance of my state’s education budget (we’ve received $470M over the next four years, against an annual budget of $7.5 B, if my math is right).

What’s past is prologue – but to what? The last decade and a half marks unprecedented federal involvement in the hand-to-hand, locally-managed work of educating children. Teacher autonomy to act in their students’ best interests behind the closed “classroom door” is mitigated or eliminated by regulated curriculum and assessment expectations. Their practice and results are increasingly measured and compared by top-down certainty that their successes can be adequately reckoned from far, far away.

The irony and scorn in Fagen’s lyric is revealed slowly. It starts as simple tribute to the “better, vanished time” of youth (who of us can’t sing that song), but is starkly clear by the time he describes the “just machines which will make big decisions,” at least to this listener. There’s no freedom in giving your decisions to machines; there’s only what has been lost as their algorithms erase what they – however compassionately programmed – can never see.

None of which is to say that accountability, rigor, improvement are anathema to school. It’s our trust to do the best we can by our kids, and to devote our lives to doing our work better and better. Articulating the “soft bigotry of low expectations” was a huge win of NCLB, and we’re better for having it out in the light to address.

But I think we are silly if we think this wave of top-down reform efforts is fully capable of making the change we seek. Change is a hearts-and-minds thing, and hearts and minds are changed when their strengths and differences and idiosyncrasies – their metis – are acknowledged and valued and celebrated and incorporated into the next step forward. So far I do not see state or federal will to proceed with those priorities in mind. That kind of reform is very expensive and messy, and outlasts accountability (and election) timetables.

Let’s enjoy the surface of well-wrought plans, but not be seduced by the gorgeous graphite and glitter of their all-consuming master narratives. I suggest that history (and some very well-executed sneaky pop music) teaches us we’re better off minding what we already know, even if it’s not “clean.”

Thanks to Wikipedia for this evocative picture of the Taiwan High Speed Rail, which I do not think can go under water but, from the looks of it, might.

I will never, in my life, love anything the way I loved Rush in seventh grade.

To be clear, as an adult I love many things more deeply and more abidingly: my family, my work, my friends, my grown-up toys and obsessions. But when I remember how I felt about Rush (as I did earlier this week, with the celebration of “Rush Day” on 2.1.12), I am overcome by the purity and satisfaction of my first deep connection with something worth caring about.

Rush was my first band. They weren’t my only band: my Rush crush matured into an obsession with The Who in late middle school, then a Genesis devotion through most of high school. Those of my generation now have me completely pegged, by those associations: square, probably in marching band (yup), not straight enough to love pop but not weird enough to be into punk (thanks SAP), and sure as heck not brave enough to admit I liked Duran Duran. Making ourselves through differentiation and affiliation – of finding who we are by naming who we are not – is perhaps an inborn aspect of adolescence. The dance has not changed, though the dancers (and of course the tunes) have.

What’s most interesting to me now – and what, I think, merits comment about a proto-metal power trio from Toronto on a professional education blog – is what my connection to that music in 1982 did for me, and the conditions that gave flower to it. I wonder if it has anything to say about school, because that’s where most of it happened (or didn’t).

Let’s see.

Rush taught me the satisfactions of looking and listening hard.

Listening to this band was the first time I experienced the joy of discerning interactions between the components of an artistic work. To the degree that the cognitive work of experiencing art leads to aesthetic experience, it was my first time having one. Exploring the aesthetic piece further will have to wait for another day: I want to focus on the cognitive and social ones here.

Rush taught me the joy of wanting to know more.

Once I had a taste of what was going on, I wanted to know everything I could about how it had been done and, intentional fallacy notwithstanding, who had done it. Which in that era meant diving bins in record stores and poring over album covers and posters for every shred of information they had to offer, and above all saving the lawnmowing money to actually see the band on tour – which I have three times, each in a different decade of my life.

The difficulty of finding out more led to investigative energy and skill. But more important than that, I think, was learning that much of what I wanted to know lay in the thing itself. This is about the time I began wanting to play drums (a country away from the geeky clarinet section), and I realized that what I heard on the records was, in fact, exactly what was happening. Things were being hit in different orders; I could also hit things in corresponding order (say, books spread out on my bed), and approximate what I was hearing.

The rise of MTV really supported this. There were so few intentionally made music videos at first that early MTV spun plentiful live or close-to-live performance films too. This meant footage of actual drummers actually playing, and you could watch closely to try to get some sense of technique, or at least learn what went where. (This is why I, a left-handed human, play a drum set arranged in the traditional right-hand manner – bass on the right foot, toms descending from the left. Thank heavens for it, too: makes it much easier to share the kit at gigs.)

I think all that close listening and looking made me a pretty quick study, and it’s connected to why I still love to listen to music. I have an abiding fascination with snare drums: how that most workaday drum, the one no rock band can go a measure without playing, sounds different every time someone new plays it. I am no expert in drum construction or recording, but I continue to be a student of its legion of sounds. I care about things like exactly when Rush’s Neil Peart started using the workmanlike Slingerland Artist that he bought used for $60 and anchored his kit with as it swelled and receded over the years, and why it sounds like an overturned mop bucket live in 1978 when it was so bright in the studio. (And if you think I am obsessed, check out this guy.)

I think these are worthwhile perseverations. I think they are part of an ongoing, vital engagement with the world, with the actual warp and woof of experience as we actually have it. The challenge and importance of showing up for daily life – actually seeing it, rather than just labeling it as “threat-or-not” and responding prudently – has been thrashed out by better minds than mine. But that’s the core thing going on here, or one of them.

Rush belonged to me, and very few others: therefore, it gave me someone to talk and listen to, and someone to be.

This is the affiliation part: by digging something that not everyone dug, I got connected to some people and not others, people who by either intention or happy accident were like me (or I became like them). Put another way, others were listening hard too, and we found each other and became each other’s first critics. For a bunch of kids in denim tuxedos, we were pretty discerning. It was my friend down the street who showed me that a closeup of photo of Pete Townshend’s hand in concert revealed the first chords on “Pinball Wizard”: that’s “making looking broad and adventurous” all right. And the pre-school meetings around the tape deck in the band room with the older kids were my first symposia.

I hope I am not indulging too much in boomer-style navel-gazing when I wonder what advantages the weird limitations around falling in love with music in that era afforded us. In Patton Oswald’s much-discussed Wired piece, he asks himself the same thing. (Since he’s six months older than I, I think he knows what I’m talking about.)

First, he remembers that a subculture used to take work to join, and that its secrets were not easily divulged. That was part of the joy of knowing about it:

…there’s a chilly thrill in moving with the herd while quietly being tuned in to something dark, complicated, and unknown just beneath the topsoil of popularity. Something about which, while we moved with the herd, we could share a wink and a nod with two or three other similarly connected herdlings.

He notes that the Japanese have a word – otaku – to describe those obsessed with minute, obscure interests. But he also wonders if obscure undergrounds are becoming harder to find:

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone considers themselves otaku about something—whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires—if not in depth, at least in length and passion—the same number of conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden thought-palaces—they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans.

He wonders if the explosion of readily available information, coupled with the rise of the otaku (or “geek”) as cultural archetype and world-inheritor, has diminished the very aspect that imbued him with the cultural power to begin with: obscurity. And he fears that the easiness with which subcultures can be understood is dangerous to the life that made them happen in the first place:

The Onion’s A.V. Club—essential and transcendent in so many ways—has a weekly feature called Gateways to Geekery, in which an entire artistic subculture—say, anime, H. P. Lovecraft, or the Marx Brothers—is mapped out so you can become otaku on it but avoid its more tedious aspects.

Here’s the danger: That creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The Matrix.

That is, it’s not about how hard it is to be cool and obscure nowadays. It’s about how it not being hard to learn about obscure, cool things is draining our will to become creative ourselves, because we don’t develop the urgent desire and the massive chops in unearthing obscurity that we’ll need to create our own art.

Which is why this whole question ultimately leads us back to education (told you I’d get there eventually – it’s a long arc). Seems to me that the information explosion in and of itself does not make “weak otakus”: it just makes it possible for them to “pass” as the real thing behind a cloud of “dead language.” In fact, looking hard at a million things is exponentially more rewarding than looking hard at one thing, if and only if you manage to develop the discipline to do it.

Which leads the whole question back around to how we can best support our students in developing the dispositions of looking hard, searching, affiliating, making themselves in relation to the things they love. I am persuaded by the idea that the discipline of looking hard at something has not changed, however the world we are trying to look at has. As Annie Paul has it,

Members of the Internet generation aren’t some exotic new breed of human, in other words. They’re simply the young of the same species. And they won’t be young forever. The digital age has brought all of us new and exciting tools that will surely continue to alter the way we learn and work. But focusing one’s attention, gathering and synthesizing evidence, and constructing a coherent argument are skills as necessary as they were before…

And, I’d add, the ways that subcultures find and define each other have evolved as well. Our job as educators continues to be that of the paidagogos: the “child-leader” who was “to act as a protector, guardian, and trusted guide who accompanied the child to school, and made sure the child was educated, kept healthy in every way, and did not run with the wrong crowd.”

It’s up to us to help our students become aware of when their life gives them the chance to look or listen hard to one thing and discern how its pieces work together. To notice how infrequently life in 2012 makes doing that easy, and support them in doing it anyway – with the things we think they should care about (i.e., curriculum), but also with the things they and theirs care about.

Which for me, this week, meant playing some Rush for my students. Happy 2112, everyone. Now go and dig something! Hard.

I boosted the image from Wired: thanks.

Can you be more specific about what might be involved in a “comprehensive, teacher-centered plan?” What sorts of criteria do you think are fairest in evaluating teachers?

Thanks to my best friend from freshman year for challenging me on some of my thoughts in the last blog post on Facebook. We’ve had a great discussion, and his last question, up top, deserves a thoughtful answer. Here’s mine.

First, let’s note that teacher quality begins with quality teachers: that preservice and inservice preparation of teachers has huge impact on those teachers’ capacity to help their students. It may seem a dodge to open with this perhaps obvious fact, but it bears repeating in North Carolina, where (as usual) teacher induction programs and professional development funds have been the first on the budget crisis chopping block. Ain’t nothing for free.

The present national answer to teacher assessment is “value-added” assessment, despite overwhelming evidence that such data “should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable“. VA analysis has the rhetorical advantage of yielding easily-compared scores, and the appeal of apparently straightforward data is hard to resist. Our cultural tendency toward side-by-side comparisons is known to cloud our judgment of the quality of what is being compared, or whether it is even the right thing to measure.

That’s what’s happening here, as a model never intended to be used to these ends has been reverse-engineered to supply comparable scores, sometimes through statistical hijinks that would be funny were their consequences less damaging.

But if not like this – then how? Three thoughts follow.

First, this California teacher makes great points that would help:

• be sure attendance is considered when deciding which students’ scores to include (she asks for only 90% or higher);
• empower teachers to remove disruptive students from the teaching environment;
• ensure students start the year at a comparable base level  by ending social promotion (I appreciate that this “kicking the problem downstairs” chases its tail, since someone, somewhere must draw a line, but I also know that schools continue to find ways for students to advance when they are not ready to).
• Benchmark student assessment to improvement, not an absolute standard.

Second, we should ensure that multiple measures of teacher efficacy are used when making assessment. Arne Duncan is on record as supporting this principle, and the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards does have years of experience in developing portfolio-based assessments of teaching quality that use multiple measures, and should be used to point the way.

But doing teacher assessment this way is hard, and resource intensive. The up-front costs are a fraction of the actual costs of completing the process, and most of the cost returns to the candidate (though NC is a state that has offered generous support for teachers seeking certification, which contributes I am sure to my own institution’s top rank of alumni teachers who are NBCTs).

I am not the only one concerned about the political will of policy makers to follow through on complex and resource-intensive assessment programs. But my concern really has little to do with whether or not those policy makers are acting in good faith: it has to do with what institutions are good at (counting and comparing standardized data) and what they are not good at (acknowledging and accounting for qualitative difference that falls outside the purview of comparability). As Parker Palmer notes, ” the functions of a profession are not necessarily those of the institutional structures that house it.”

Despite well-articulated and respected theory of what this kind of assessment can and should include, I despair a bit at whether we can ever actually institutionalize accurate and useful qualitative assessment of a process as complex and contingent upon conditions as teaching, even assuming infinite resources and well-considered intent (and we have neither). The NBPTS, despite its critics both friendly and not-so, seems like the best model we’ve got right now.

Third, we can capitalize on the potential for the debate to actually lead to a culture change on how we understand both teacher and student success. Our exercises in trying to define what good teaching and learning looks like shows us the shortcomings of our common sense. Or, as this pretty impressive B-School analysis has it,

…the use of hard data to pin down an objective measure of student progress and thereby teacher performance may be just the first step in a larger cultural shift toward a more rigorous and integrated evaluation of both student and teacher.

I see there’s probably some market-based ideology in this – i.e., as the public becomes less satisfied with the results of the current ways of doing things, they will press for more innovation that gets outcomes that better meet their needs. But let the market do what the market does best: make the changes that best serve the most, especially if it comes from public dissatisfaction about what “good learning” and “good teaching” is beginning to be defined as.

I hope this quick post gets my friend a little closer to an answer to his urgent question. Thoughtful responses don’t yield outcomes that make the cover of TIME: complex issues require complex responses. These are my best thoughts.

What have I missed? What do you think?

Thanks to http://www.thesingleblackfemale.net for image.

Post-mortem on the State of the Union address is our national Wednesday-in-January pastime. Since the President’s education comments were the unanticipated core of my classes this AM, I think I’ll try my hand at it. Here’s a few lines on sweeping changes that are coming for North Carolina teachers. They’re pretty vague – frustratingly so – but I don’t need a weatherman, etc.

For less than 1 percent of what our nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every state in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning — the first time that’s happened in a generation.

This of course refers to the Race to the Top program and the pittance (p. 36, here) that was required to supplant a tradition of local control of public education that has been in place since public education existed in our country with a national set of curriculum standards (I rarely sound like Rick Perry, but he was uncharacteristically articulate on this point, a little.) RTTT also ushers in an unquestioned acceptance of the value of individual teacher-level student outcome data being linked to decisions on teacher promotion and dismissal. This is not a common-sense conclusion, even if well-funded advocacy groups assert it as such in the public eye.

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced states to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies — just to make a difference.

That’s a textbook pathos gambit (teachers digging into pockets, working tirelessly), that also manages to reassert the idea that teachers, working alone, are responsible for a student’s success or failure (or earning power: he quotes a problematic claim, nicely discussed here). And if teachers are all that matters, look what we can NOT focus on in education: everything else, but especially socioeconomic disparity.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. (Applause.) And in return, grant schools flexibility: to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn. That’s a bargain worth making. (Applause.)

That is: let’s formalize the state-by-state rollback of the massively unpopular NCLB sanctions that are coming due (that’s the last guy’s plan, after all) in exchange for doing away with job security provisions for teachers that – it must be noted – were put in place in K-12 NOT to protect academic freedom but rather to ensure due process for a group of workers that was (and is) extremely vulnerable. And because it was cheaper to incentivize people to choose a teaching career by enshrining tenure than raising pay or improving working conditions, an assertion I do not have time to source precisely right now but I think is pretty clear.

And that’s the “deal” schools are being offered: to get off the NCLB hook, agree to Race to the Top-style innovations. The “flexibility” schools will be granted is the capacity to evaluate teachers based on student test data, predominantly, and the ability to use those data prominently in staffing decisions. That  is a low hurdle to clear in my non-unionized state: our RTTT commitments include to “fully implement the new NC teacher and principal evaluation processes statewide, with student achievement growth data used as a significant component in the balanced evaluation” (p. 10 here).

It is important to unpack the rhetoric and see what intentions and plans – already underway – it is hinting at, but not saying. Maybe that’s the point of SOTU: lots of words, not much clarity. But I think the dots connect easily enough.

I welcome other readings – anyone?

(Thanks to techimo.com for image. And nowhere to use this great brief history of how teachers came to be paid the way they are – but it’s fascinating.)

My youngest son loves to jump around the room to Van Halen. (I have no idea where THAT came from.) He’s got air guitar grokked too, and headbangs right there with the best of us. We don’t do it frequently, but usually take advantage of moments when we have the house to ourselves to crank the stereo and fully commit to these exercises. This morning involved a lovely session.

I should not be surprised he’s got an itch that’s so completely scratched by VH’s potent / stoopid mix of four-on-the-floor bass bombs, drums like trash cans, and boogie guitar shuffle (I understand Eddie plays lead too, but for me he’s the consummate rhythm player first and foremost). My son is attuned to music in his world like a woolly worm to the coming winter. It’s baked into him (into both of them – my eldest only missed the rock-out because he was at a sleepover). I recognize some of my own connection to music as I watch them. How they can’t tune out the incidental music that saturates our life, for good or ill, grooving to a well-placed XM soul station in Old Navy or cringing to…well, honestly we don’t cringe to much. Katy Perry, Gaga, Taio Cruz, even Disney pap like Lemonade Mouth. People like us believe there is beauty in the rhythmic undulation of a dragging muffler, if you hear it with the right ears.

I’m previewing Sir Ken Robinson’s terrific The Element this week, and need to celebrate his simple message. We don’t seem to have heard it yet.

You probably know SKR without knowing you know. If you saw a video about education last year, it was probably this one: a whiteboard animation of a speech he tossed off on education’s misshapen priorities that went viral. It touched a nerve among the inhabitants of 2011 school-land in this country, just like last year’s other viral hit of Matt Damon going off on a libertarian reporter. It made sense, but it wasn’t a kind of sense many people in power have been talking lately.

Here’s SKR’s message, in his book: we’re all different, and there’s a place in all of us where something we can do exquisitely well intersects with something we love almost more than breathing.

Finding that sweet spot should be the life’s quest; it should be education’s main perseveration, regardless of socioeconomic status or funding level or lack of time or any of the other issues that get in its way. And especially regardless of the claim that, actually, the only way to a happy and productive life is development of a small set of measurable proficiencies, mastery of which will ensure individual and national prosperity and happiness.

Sir Ken disposes of that construct deftly, noting that the world’s needs (and therefore, jobs) are changing faster than any present view of the training they require can handle. I’ll let him break it down:

The only way to prepare for the future is to make the most out of ourselves on the assumption that doing so will make us flexible and productive as possible.

Many of the people you meet in this book didn’t pursue their passions simply because of the promise of a paycheck. They pursued them because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else with their lives. They found the things they were made to do, and they invested considerably in mastering the permutations of these professions. If the world were to turn upside down tomorrow, they’d figure out a way to evolve their talents to accommodate these changes. They would find a way to continue to do the things that put them in their Element, because they would have an organic understanding of how their talents fit into a new environment (p. 20).

This insight has game-changing implications for how best to prepare kids for the future (though not completely novel ones). It means that first and foremost, we need to support them in engaging fully in their present.

I really don’t see the point of fancying this up. Its truth and value lays in its simplicity. People in touch with what makes them go will go harder and farther than anyone else, and will love the journey. Our job as educators is to enable that discovery by sustaining conditions that foster it, or at minimum not to impede it.

And our job as advocates for social justice in education: to resist the common sense that gives these conditions to better-off schools and buries low-income schools in measurable basic skills work only. Fairtest noted a few years back the deep source of this attitude:

…a view of learning in which one first gets “basics” and then later learns to “think.” Extensive research shows how flawed this approach is. However, it still dominates in schools serving lower income students: they are much more apt to get drill and kill instruction geared toward tests. Instruction which would engage them and help them learn “basics” and to think in a subject is usually absent (emphasis mine).

As if the power and importance of helping our students discover how they love the world is the province of those who can afford it. Yet another injustice rooted in socioeconomic disparity – the deepest problem, as Dr. King noted; the one it takes the most courage to address (“there is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will”). Schooling models that support some in finding their reason to be here and deny that opportunity to others are injust. We must have the vision and nerve to connect the dots, and work to right that wrong in whatever corner of the vineyard it’s ours to tend. Curriculum, for me, and working to shape how tomorrow’s teachers understand the profession they’ll inherit.

This afternoon, my son sits at the piano, hammering out C-major triads with both hands in in alternating rhythm and rocking back and forth. A few minutes later, he suspends them – moving all but the roots one note to the right – and his head snaps back, eyes closed, blissed out at the effect of the modulation on his deepest sense of pleasure and balance and rightness. When he finally stops, he doesn’t look up, but while studying the keys for his next assay states, “Daddy, I really love the piano.”

Yes you do, sir. Yes you do.

Image from the New Netherland Institute. Who knew how hard the Dutch rocked?

I spent a little time last night thrilling to what some of my past high school students have gone on to do with their lives since our paths crossed. Thank God for Facebook, and for students kind enough to friend their old teachers.

Check it out:

Ryan and Hays Holladay have formed Bluebrain, a groundbreaking musical project that could probably be booked by Phil Amoss in one of his amazing happenings. Meg Foley has a dance company; Andrew Markowitz is a photographer and Brandon Skall started a brewery. Both the Hessel sisters are in theater, and Lacy Simkowitz does design for an art museum. Even the folks who are working “square” are still hep: Emre Ersenkal’s a serious businessman in green energy, so I won’t link his hardcore rock and roll past here (I remember the day I taught him to swing), and Nigel Parkinson has a moving company while also making independent films.

This could go on all day. I am swept up in the swirl of seeing how people I knew at a brief, dependent point in their development have unfolded into autonomous actors in the world and creators of their own lives.

M.C. Richards discusses the “meristem” at great length in her work. That’s the cellular place where plants differentiate whether they are growing up or down; the living spot that never dies, but thrives even in the oldest among us (“We age toward youth, toward our growing tip…)”.

To work in a caring profession is to be with people at moments when the meristem is most visible and tender, to be present at the creation of something new. Doctors and nurses facilitate dramatic passage through pivot points of life or death. Social workers and chaplains hold people in galvanic moments when what comes next, or what to do about it, is still in flux. And teachers, in every moment, witness the imperceptible growth (and pulling back) that yields what comes later.

It’s teaching that’s best described by Richards’ model, I venture. Teaching is where the slow and persistent nature of growth happens. The compelling force that drove these students to become what they are becoming was engendered on my watch.

This isn’t pride speaking, though I am proud of what they are becoming, and especially thrilled to see their occupations correspond to who I think I knew them to be as children. It is more deep humility and gratitude at being around long enough to see some of the young people I was with grow into who they are, and begin to see what my role in the larger process was and was not. There’s a deepening of commitment to the responsibility of teaching that comes with this understanding, but also a gentle letting-oneself-off-the-hook of thinking that my work was – is – what mattered most in their lives.

That’s the twin reality I think most challenges caring professionals: to both know the impossibly high, moment-to-moment stakes of what one is doing, while at the same time not be crushed by them. To show up as one must, and keep oneself at an emotional distance – commit and pull back – all at once. Professional compassion, some call it, or negative capability: either way, its the core challenge of thriving in caring work, and one we almost never talk about.

I am also reminded of how extraordinary the place where I worked with those students was, and is: The Field School, in Washington D.C. Its steadfast commitment to the needs of individual students, and deep belief that academic, aesthetic, and kinesthetic experience are intimately intertwined, was the essential crucible for the remarkably whole lives these people seem to be living.

We never talked about M.C. Richards while I was there, but Natalia Kormeluk ran (and runs) its exquisite ceramics studio, and I am sure was familiar with her understanding of those connections. Richards’ question could have been hers to her students too:

Are you going to be an earthy person – practical, down-to-earth, and get-to-it? Or are you going to be a dreamer, visionary? We’re going to be both. And we can’t be – we shouldn’t be – talked out of it. We shouldn’t be talked out of it. I am both. Don’t tell me I have to choose. I don’t have to choose. I am “both…and.” I live in the crossing point.

Field prepares its students to be “both…and”: to thrive in the world while being true to who they really are. It remains one of the finest examples I know of what things look like in a school that is really giving kids what they need.

Leo Rosten taught me that to “kvell” is Yiddish for “to beam with intense pride and pleasure,” from the German quellen, to “gush or swell.” How appropriate that I get to swell with pride today from the life that continues to stir in the souls of these ex-students and so many others. Rock on, guys.

Thanks to quarterlifecuriosity for the image (not easy to find a picture for “kvell,” oy gevalt).

If you live in Boone and care about sustainability, fighting hunger, and strengthening our local community, read on!

An American Library Association “Building Common Ground” grant application I headed up last fall has been funded. It will support a year of collaboration between the Watauga County Public Library, the University Office of Sustainability, the Humanities Council, and local pay-as-you-can restaurant F.A.R.M. Cafe on the issue of food security in the High Country. Here’s more on the grant program, and the project narrative:

Food Security in the High Country: Compassion Comes to the Table

This means the Library will be recruiting participants in three book groups in the next weeks:

• Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (six sessions, February-September 2012)
• All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? (one session, May 2012)
• Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and my Journey from Homeless to Harvard (one session, September 2012)

The books are terrific, and will be provided free of charge to participants. If you would like to participate in any of these groups – or any of the other events we are planning – please let me know and I’ll get you in touch with the Library. Thanks!

…it may be more useful to locate the personal not in content that reflects the world but rather as a method for observing how we experience ourselves in the world. When the personal is considered as a method of experiencing rather than as an assertion of stable experience, new possibilities emerge for considering the personal as a construct for use in world-making. – Alice Pitt, The Play of the Personal, 89

As I prepare a new course (HON2515 – “Narrative and the Caring Professions”), I am back in my med school files this week. Here’s an excerpt from the “personal illness narrative” I wrote in 2008, while I was teaching a section of “Medicine and Society” to first-years at the UNC School of Medicine.

We’ll use a lot of narrative in all my classes this semester. The challenge will be to use story not as a way of making final sense of what has led us to here, but rather as a frame and a way-in. In this commitment to the contingent and incomplete nature of storytelling, the narrative medicine theory I dug at UNC has much in common with the currere frames I worked with as an education grad student. Neither approach has yet transformed its field; both should.

I am also taken this week by Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. He describes “restitution”, “chaos”, and “quest” archetypes for the stories the sick tell.

“Restitution” stories are culturally satisfying, because they conform to what the culture needs of its sick people (to want to get well, to do what they are told, and to heal up and get back into place). They are troubled by  “chaos” stories, which are culturally repellent, since describing the actual fragmentation and disorientation of illness overflows the capacity of language to contain (much less shape) it.

“Quest” stories, instead, are descriptions of transformation in which the old is swept away and a new, previously unimaginable engagement with life and its inevitable end becomes the new normal. Frank calls for an enlarged capacity to “witness” the true nature of sick experience, which empowers the sick, improves the quality of care, and above all engenders real community (“Witnessing always implies a relationship; I tell myself stories all the time, but I cannot testify to myself alone” – 143).

So here’s one of my stories. Not sure yet what to make of it through Frank’s eyes. What do you think? I look forward to telling – and witnessing – the stories of my students’ educational journeys this semester.

*                                         *                                        *

“You have alopecia areata. From the looks of how it has progressed so far I imagine you will lose the rest of your hair within the year. The cause is unknown – possibly autoimmune-related, but some also believe stress to be a factor. There is no cure, although steroid injections at the site have had moderate effect. There are also some early promising studies of Rogaine helping. There are no other serious health effects – your nails might get brittle and soft, but other than that you’re perfectly healthy. The nurse can talk to you more about treatment options.”

I had gone to the dermatologist at my fiancé’s insistence. It was 1995. In February I returned from a three-week stay in Spain with twelve of my high school Spanish students, and when she picked me up at the airport the first thing she said was “What happened to your eyebrow?” I looked in the visor mirror and noticed that half of my left eyebrow was gone.

I figured it was just part of my genes. My Dad had always had a few uneven patches in his beard (“firebreaks,” Mom called them), and I had noticed a couple of weird bald spots on my legs, but I thought it was just where my new motorcycle boots were rubbing on my shins. And the bald spot on the back of my head was around where that mole had been removed. No big deal. But she was really worried, so I made the appointment.

But in fact, according to this doctor with the bedside manner of a Doberman pinscher, I had a disease that would make me lose all my hair and could not be cured.

I was going to lose all my hair, very quickly.

The shock was disorienting. I do not remember if I had any more questions then, or if I got them answered on the still-new “internet” the next day at school. I do remember trying to understand what this would be like, and failing to really grasp the heft of it. It was frightening, but I was also quite numb – I don’t think it fully sunk in for several weeks.

The doctor mentioned it being related to autoimmune function, and I read that in essence what happened was that my immune system was “too strong” and was shutting down hair follicles as effectively as it was stopping disease (was this why I had so seldom been ill? What a tradeoff.) Mom had multiple sclerosis, which was autoimmune-related as well: was I at risk for that too? Further reading, though, suggested that the “strong immune system” explanation was too simplified to actually be “true” in any causative way. So much for science. How much else of what I thought I knew about health was really just “dumbed-down” for general consumption?

I lost the rest of my eyebrows pretty soon after that. I could not stand the way I looked without eyebrows. My face was alien – even though it is impossible to really see yourself in the mirror the way others see you, I could sense that my facial expressions were off, skewed by the absence of anything above my eyes. I seemed to look a little farther away than I actually was. It was scary, looking so strange. And my eyelashes must have gone about the same time, because suddenly I was getting dust blown into my eyes all the time. I never realized how useful they were until they were gone.

I kept losing hair. It came out in the shower over the next couple of months. I could feel my scalp under a light fringe at the back of my head, and I felt that I was looking progressively stranger. One day I decided that, if I was going to lose it anyway, I wanted to see what it looked like black, so I went to the drug store with my goth friends and bought a package of dye to make it so. The effect was ghastly, and I knew it – the pale of my weird featureless face all the more noticeable under bottle-black bangs. It helped in a way – I felt like I was saying “I cannot control being hideous, but I have taken control over how hideous I am.” God knows what my students thought during all of this.

Things went on this way for a few months, and I guess I was trying to pretend that it was no big deal and just “man up” and push through it like I was trying to push through everything at that point in my life. Mostly I think I was just scared. I attended a performance of “Stomp!” later that spring, and in the cast there was a drummer with a totally shaved head and a big gold hoop. I saw him and could identify. I was a drummer: maybe I could be like THAT guy. It looked good on him. He did not seem embarrassed at all. He chose to be bald.

The next night I cut off the rest of my hair in the bathroom, then used an electric razor out on the deck to shave down the rest. It hurt to do it – I think the razor was dull – and it took a long time, much longer than I thought. When I was done I wet-shaved the whole thing carefully, trying to navigate the unfamiliar topography of my skull with the aid of two mirrors and some cursing. Finally I was totally bald.

The first thing I noticed about being bald was that I was cold. COLD. All the time, regardless of the weather. And so vulnerable! I ducked every time anything grazed my head, even the slightest breeze. I was exposed to everything, experiencing the world completely unmediated. Ceilings seemed lower. I explained the new look to my students; everyone wanted to touch it, of course, and that was intense and intimate at first, unexpectedly so. I told them they could each choose to touch “the head” once at some time during the year, and they could chose when. I would track it in my grade book. And they did, respectfully, for the rest of the year – after a quiz, at lunch, on the bus back from the cross-country meet – then shivered and laughed and tried to explain to each other what it felt like.

I had – and still have – humor as my main response. My original smarty-pants defensive answer to questions about why I was bald (“because I’m from the FUTURE….”) got a lot of laughs, as did my claim that God had taken my hair away because, after twenty-four years of bad haircuts, I clearly did not know what to do with it. I even had a solid bit about my brief experience with cortisone injections, which I tried in my eyebrows for several months in 1996. They hurt more than anything on my face had hurt before or since, and the hair, when it came, was in strange little plug-like tufts. The shots needed to be given monthly if their effect was to be sustained, and each had a steep co-pay, which led to my devastating punch line: “I realized I wasn’t actually buying eyebrows, I was renting them!” My band even did a gag song called “Bald Men” on the topic. (“Bald Men / they’re playing saxophone / they’re not afraid of tax returns or soybean futures…”) The jokes covered the pain and the sadness that no “cure” was much of one. I stopped the treatments after a few months with nothing to show but some scarring.

I don’t make the jokes much anymore, and thirteen years on, I really do not think about it too often. As chronic conditions go, it is very manageable. I touch up my uneven scalp every morning in the shower as mindlessly as others shampoo, use sunscreen daily, and have a lot of hats that wear out pretty quickly. My nails split easily, which can be painful. Almost no one in my life now even remembers me with hair. My way of discussing it as I grew older has turned into a three-sentence summary for curious grownups and a Mr. Rogers-style “everyone’s body is different” response to my own children and their friends’ questions. For a while I told all my students at the start of every year about it, in fear that the kids would think I was sick if I didn’t, but it soon became apparent that it was not too troubling. After Michael Jordan, Bruce Willis, and Michael Chiklis, people don’t seem to look twice at a youngish bald man.

Every once in a while, though – a few times a year – it still backs up on me, sometimes hard. I have been told ad infinitum that “it looks good on me” since “at least I don’t have a bumpy head,” and I feel pretty good about the glasses I chose to minimize the eyebrow issue (and I think their blue color “cools off” all my pink skin). But some days I just want to be more or less invisible again, to look like everybody else. Demographically, alopecia afflicts more young teenage females than anyone else, and I know the self-confidence issues must be devastating. It could be so much worse. But in a small way I feel like my experience gives me some shred of insight into what it is to be different, to be unable to blend with “the crowd” through no choice of your own: to have something about you that you cannot change however you would like to. Which state of affairs, of course, would describe most of us.

That’s what Barbie taught us a few years ago. Could a hope that the national teacher corps would be intimidated by a flurry of numbers have fueled the craven attack on their profession in the WSJ earlier this week?

Outrageous, I know, but I would not put it past them. There’s a lot of data used very quickly in that piece, to pretty nefarious effect. Others (better at math than I) have already debunked a lot of their book-cooking, so I won’t reiterate it too much here.

I will offer that the piece’s real ugliness starts with how Biggs and Richwine take a swipe at teachers’ native intelligence, holding that if teachers were required to use their feeble brains in the private sector they wouldn’t make as much money as they can in the schools. And implying that teachers’ deep understanding of how they couldn’t keep up in the real world underlies their collective resistance to accepting base salary increases in exchange for “merit-based” evaluations of their effectiveness.

In DC, teachers correctly identified such promises as a sop designed to make it easier for administrators to “shape workforces” without acknowledging the factors that impact teacher outcomes. That’s a way more subtle thing to sell to the public than the image of teachers as welfare queens that gave Waiting for Superman and the Wisconsin collective bargaining flap so much ink. And this piece is still working it, noting that “the best public school teachers—especially those teaching difficult subjects such as math and science—may well be underpaid compared to counterparts in the private sector.” Translation: hey good teachers! Get out of there and earn! Or better: fight for the right to be compensated on your “merit,” even though you’ll have no recourse if your scores don’t climb or we decide to move the goal posts!

(By the way, we are also treated here to the rare sight of conservatives suggesting that 401Ks for teacher retirement funds are a worse idea than measly-earning pension funds. The economic downturn certainly has clipped some free-market wings. And those supposedly extravagant pensions are as weakened by the national aftermath of the private sector’s greed as any. So that’s just funny.)

I am also amazed at the durability of the argument that teachers are overpaid because they get so much time off. Teachers butt-in-chair prep, grading, and collaboration time goes far beyond their classroom time, and most of them are working in the summer to try to make ends meet. Biggs and Richwine’s beloved Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped another report in 2008 that tells that more-recognizable story about teachers’ work life:

• that they are more likely to work on weekends than other jobholders;
• that they are more likely to hold a second job;
• that they get up early and get more done in the AM than most (and predictably collapse by 4:00);
• that they, like most of us, try to take a vacation in the summer.

The same WSJ reported as much in an international comparison of hours that teachers spend at work last summer. So where’s the story here? Where are the government-dole fat cats that we need to police more closely to be sure they are doing what they’re paid for? I am not trying to selectively report these findings: I find them mostly unremarkable. They just say teachers work really hard. As we used to say: duh.

I think we can regard the WSJ article as last week’s salvo in the right’s efforts to devalue, defund, and ultimately eliminate the professional status of teaching. It’s in the oblique swipe of aligning teachers’ compensation to that of “occupations that some consider comparable, such as computer programmers and insurance underwriters.” No diss to computer and insurance workers, but I think they’d agree their occupations mostly consist of identifying the correct algorithm for the presenting problem and deploying it. Not a daily demand to use creativity, higher-level conceptual skills, team-building skills, and social acumen. Teaching work is more art and craft than algorithm, and requires all the highly-valued capacities of the knowledge economy. But if we can reduce it in the public mind to button-pushing, there will be less pushback as we de-skill, surveill, and ultimately privatize their work. And that will be the real crisis for our democracy: acceeding that education is not part of the public weal, but should instead be sold to the highest bidder and run by the bottom line.

“Education” was one of the Departments that Rick Perry managed to promise to eliminate last week (for him words are hard too, not just math – as we say around here, bless his heart). This story will have its numbers debunked, but the greater damage will be done as it puts one more drop in the bucket of public opinion that teachers care more about drawing a public salary without working for it than meeting the needs of their students. As that message becomes the new common sense, tracing the arc of that damage is almost harder than math. I hope we all continue to call it out when we see it, because the stakes for the children we serve could not be higher.

Your thoughts?

Image from the blog Carpricia’s Corner, with thanks.

My then-girlfriend-now-wife first turned me on to Juliana Hatfield, with the release that remains her biggest hit, 1993’s Become What You Are. I was teaching high school at the time, co-directing a jazz band with a guy who ended up in my own band as well. It was his characterization of the record’s unique sound that still sticks with me: “a little girl with a big guitar.”

Fair enough. The single the record spawned on the Reality Bites soundtrack is the quietest cut on an album dominated by crazy slabs of snarling Gibson. Beneath it hammers Todd Phillips’ incandescent drumming (on a snare that sounds like a steel trash can, and cymbals like lids); above it floats Hatfield’s tiny, squeaky voice. The record is completely sui generis. My friend was trying to name a category, but who else would belong to it? Maybe early Go-Gos, maybe Sleater-Kinney – but not really. They were straight-up punk bands. Hatfield’s no riot grrrl.

Even if she wanted to be, she was hamstrung by who she was. My friend got to try out his smarty-pants sobriquet on the artist herself a couple of years ago, when he interviewed her for Popmatters. She set him straight:

I remember getting your first solo record and loving your voice—the sweet and sour thing, a little girl with a big guitar.

I hated when people would say stuff like that.  I hated that.  I was not a little girl, but everyone saw me like that because I was shy and my voice sounded like that… part of what drove me crazy—people thought I was exploiting it or playing it up, and I wasn’t trying to.  I loved rock guitars, and I wanted to make rock ‘n’ roll, but the sound of my voice kept my music from being rock ‘n’ roll.  I was stuck between these two poles.

Looking back on those records, do you think, “Maybe it’s good I didn’t sound like Janis Joplin”?  Every bar band in American has a singer who sounds like Janis Joplin, but you sound like yourself.

I didn’t want to sound like Janis Joplin.  I wanted to sound like Chrissie Hynde or Patti Smith—I wanted to have a really distinctive, original voice.  Chrissie and Patti and even Courtney Love have really distinctive voices that are … serious.   When I was younger, all my musical heroes were rock ‘n’ roll men like Paul Westerberg of the Replacements.  And I could never sound like that.  So I gravitated toward women who sounded like men.  I love the sound of those voices—chicks that sounded like guys.   Now I am accepting of the sound of my voice.  But it has been a frustration throughout my career.  If I’m going to be honest, I have to admit that.

I hear her: the disconnect between what she wanted to be and what she was, the fear that what she wanted to say would never be heard because of what her voice wasn’t. That disconnect never let her be. Her apparently-inevitable ascension to the alt-rock goddess throne never materialized, on the rocks of bad promotion or changing tastes or whatever. A few later she penned the most acid response to the industry since Tribe Called Quest: “It’s not a sellout if nobody buys it / I can’t be blamed if nobody likes it.”

The record is on my mind this week, because my students are also trying to find their own voices in the teacher role they are working hard to grow into. Last Thursday we discussed the middle chapters of Kirsten Olson’s Wounded by School, against the backdrop of Lisa Delpit’s 1988 article on cultures of power and the exquisite Richard Yates’ short story, “Doctor Jack O’Lantern.” It’s a potent stew of perspectives on a teacher’s capacity to save a child’s life or hopelessly muck it up. Taken together, the readings reveal the places where individual teacher choices and personalities continue to saturate teacher practice – despite the ubiquitous pretending that “what works in education” is a settled question, that teaching is just a matter of following the right recipe (and perhaps adjusting for altitude).

We need to use texts like these carefully, because they run the serious risks of overwhelming future teachers with the scope and gravity of the task ahead of them. But by the same token, we need to bear in mind that only an authentic and personal engagement with the daily challenges of this work can sustain our students through satisfying careers that do not burn them out.

In this we have a lot in common with other caring professionals who work in high-stakes, resource-poor contexts. Compelling research in end-of-life care notes that, paradoxically, those caregivers who hold back something of themselves before the work’s stresses are the ones who burn out. It’s the ones who “become what they are” in the work – who bring everything they’ve got to the daily challenge, who sing in their real voice – that can ultimately be sustained by it. They are the ones who build the human-to-human relationships that endure and nurture. They are the ones who find success in long and rewarding careers, and whose students thrive.

This isn’t my original insight, not by a long shot. But it needs to be repeated and remembered ever time we climb into the ring with future teachers and try to have real talks about what the work will expect of them, and how they can bring everything they are to it. It involves the compassionate slaying of the dearly-held “hero teacher” narrative that gets sold back to us every three years or so. And then replacing it with the permission to bring one’s own unique voice and energy to the work – the affirmation that not only will it be enough, it will be the only thing that ever could be.

This post title comes from the last track on that record:

I’m a goddess in your eyes, and I will never die.
I was born of people’s needs, and what they don’t wanna believe.

I hope my work helps my students slay the idols of what teachers are supposed to be and supports them in becoming what they actually are. That’s what will meet the needs of the students that are waiting for them.

What do you think?

(image from VenusZine)