A Little Inspiration from Yusuf

There was this concert on Rave HD which is a tv channel that plays concerts and shows like “Jools Holland” from the BBC which have live music on them.  This particular concert was called “Yusuf’s Cafe”.  For anyone who was curious, the man now known as Yusuf used to be known as Cat Stevens.  I have heard his newest album and despite the name change and persona change, he is still the beuatiful, music making, peaceful spirit that he has always seemed to be.  You watch this man play guitar wit his long shaggy gray beard and soulful eyes and smile, and you know he really has an emotional stake in his music.  It’s quite beautiful.

He played one of his classic songs “Father and Son” and it made me think. The lyrics and melody are haunting, and tell such a poignant story.  He dedicates this version to his granddaughter who is sitting in the audience.  She is an infant.  “How can I try to explain cause when I do he turns away again, it’s always been the same, same old story , from the moment i could talk, i was ordered to listen.”

Wow.  I mean think about that, this man just says it like it is, and scarily enough, it is like this for many young people in the world, and it has been like this for a long time. The minute they find their voice they are told to stifle it, and quiet down because it’s not “appropriate” or the right “etiquette”.  It makes me sad when I see beautiful, vibrant children who are silenced because of society’s constraints in all of our damn institutions.  I know that being an educator, I am part of one, but I always had this faith, I don’t know why, that schools could be a place of change.  A place where you could take risks, and be rewarded.  That’s what I thought as a student.  Sadly enough, now I realize, that many schools are not like this at all.  It’s all about the environment, it’s all about being told that you can use your voice, that you can express yourself.  It’s not the idea that you should let a child run free, but rather that you should let them express themselves with creativity.  There is nothing more heartbreaking to me than squashing a child’s creativity with one severe blow.  No one deserves that and I don’t think teachers should have that kind of power.  But they do.  And no one questions it.  A teacher can be one of the most influential people in your life, but no one ever says thank you.

Well, since this is a blog, I can.

Thanks Mrs. Becken for helping my creativity grow and always believing in me.

Thanks Mr. Wilhelm for supporting me when I took risks in my writing.

Thanks, Mr. Richins for showing me what to NEVER do to BEAUTIFUL, CREATIVE, children who just want to be themselves.

There are a lot more thank yous I could make, but my journey isn’t over quite yet.

Books

“Books interested me so much because they were my only friends.  I don’t know if I was happy then, but I do know that as I turned those dearly beloved pages I forgot my hunger and misery, and that saved me from resentment and fear.  As I learned to read, I forgot my tremendous loneliness.”(Fernando Baez)

I was happily surprised when I got started on a reading assignment for class today.  This professor doesn’t usually give thought provoking essays to us, but the intro to this piece “a universal history of the destruction of books” is really powerful.  It was really comforting to hear the story of someone else who lived in books, to know that as a bookwormy child I was truly not alone.  Often, in adolescence we feel alone, like no one has ever experienced the horrors that we have.  Somehow we have suffered most.  It is comforting to see, in a scholarly essay, no less, that we are all just nerdy bookworms underneath, that in our loneliness we are never, necessarily alone.

Isn’t that nice?

I suppose .  ..

deconstructing jessie

So I have to do this mid term paper for class of mine. I’m not usually intimidated by papers, just normal deadline anxiety and fear of failure. Heheh. But seriously, I’m not afraid of doing this paper, as much as I’m afraid of my professor’s response.

I know that it’s really sad to think that a professor that I pay tuition to go to see should invoke the fear of God in me, but he does. Why, you ask?

Because he’s a hater.

Let me give you a definition that might explain a few things . . .

Urban dictionary

	hater	144 up, 36 down
	A person who pretends to act happy for your successes than trash talks you behind your back. Someone who most likely dosen’t have shit to work with and has to hate on people who move up in the world. This term could be used to describe anyone who hates on another person for ‘good reasons. They will turn your good qualities around and make it look like something bad because they just arent happy with themselves and can’t achieve anywhere near what you have. Man, that Vitale is such a hater. He needs to stop drinkin that haterade and move on up in the world.

I know this is a bit of an odd definition, but stay with me anyway

This man is not only unresponsive in class, rude to students, obvious in his English higher ed snobbery, and much more.

Needless to say, the man gives me a bad feeling and I don’t like writing papers for people who make me feel bad by looking at me.  My mom has always said that no one can MAKE you feel bad.

I don’t know if I actually buy that.

But she’s a sweetie for trying.

So why do I actually care about what this professor says?

Probably because he’s a professor and I would like to be one, and i guess he can’t be all bad to have gotten where he is today?  Naw, even I don’t buy that.  If he was all that amazing he would probably be teaching somewhere else.  Sad but true.

On other notes, I’ve had this horrible cold that has made me a complete wreck for like two weeks now.  It’s quite horrible, and luckily is ending, but still, I hate when I feel so sick that I feel useless.  I think feeling useless and bored are two of the worst feelings a person can have.  Perhaps also worthless, oh and suicidal.

Nevermind.

In any case, I better get to that paper, so I can have enough time to worry myself into a huge panic attack about what my professor will think of it.

Oy.

A Brand New You

I am really happy that this video is on you tube. Because I am really happy that these kids have the opportunity to learn and perform on Broadway! They are given this awesome opportunity by a phenomenal composer, Jason Robert Brown, who has written a musical called, “13″ which is premiering on broadway. I’m not writing this blog entry to promote a random show, but to promote the message that it sends. JRB, as he is called by some has a teenage orchestra pit, and teenage cast. He is doing something that many teachers have yet to really do- PUT FAITH IN HIS KIDS. And the thing is that THEY ARE REALLY THAT GOOD! You watch these kids on stage and you never doubt for a second how much work they have done, and how courageous they are.

I think we, as educators, can learn a lot from what this man has done. He has taken a bunch of kids, who had the talent all along, and worked with them, and advocated for them, and created something new and exciting! This is what the classroom can be, if we make it so, if we come to teaching with that exciting, creative, determined energy that JRB started his project with.

I am also so ecstatic that he wrote it, because it will be a wonderful performance piece to bring to schools, where kids get to tell THEIR story and it’s not some poor 13 year old boy having to play Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” again, with a fake beard. How can that 13 year old relate to Tevye? He can’t, and as much as the school director will try, he can’t really perform the role authentically. But if this same boy is playing the principal role in “13″ he can most definitely relate to the character’s dilemmas,including, friend issues, parental divorce, changing schools, having a bar mitzvah, and much more. This is a musical that speaks to and for kids. JRB has done something amazing, in creating a piece FOR KIDS TO SHINE IN. These kids all look so happy on stage, because THEY ARE GENUINELY THRILLED TO BE THERE.

We, as teachers, compete with a lot of things in a kid’s life. Students have their social lives, family lives, personal problems, cell phones, nintendo ds systems and much more. Why should they be interested in school? What do we have to offer them? Perhaps the ultimate thing to offer them is the genuine desire to be there and to shine. Maybe they need to know that school is a place, a community, where talents and gifts will be nurtured. I know when I came into drama class in high school, my teacher was scary. He told us stories about “the horrors of public speaking” and about his old scary teachers. He didn’t make me want to perform, or even speak in class. He made me want to curl up in a ball in a corner.

Then, a year later, we got a new drama teacher/director. He was laid back and kind, and when I had a study hall, but couldn’t focus, and just needed to relax,I could go down to the performing arts center, and he would get on the piano,and we would just jam, singing showtunes and laughing. He was an advisor, a mentor,a counselor,and a great teacher. And it had nothing to do with instilling fear, or insisting on limitations, it all had to do with expanding, learning and becoming a better version of me.

I hope these kids on the Broadway stage realize how lucky they are to have someone like JRB, who believes in them,their worth,and their shine power. I hope one day to inspire kids to do great things as well.

Let’s go on with the show!

Blogging . .. Live from My Couch on the VP debate

Sarah Palin makes me want to vomit.

My fiancee keeps making these joking, sexual comments about her.

Truth of the matter if you take off the lipstick, she’s just a pig.

And an ugly one at that. She is fake, with all of her beauty queen wipe away charm.

I mean Biden may not be the youngest sprout in the bunch, but he’s genuine and has wrinkles.

Palin is picture perfect plastic and I don’t know how anyone can take her drawl talkin, dumb eyelash flirtin, Wasilla faluttin fanny seriously.

She just winked. Who is she winking at? Who is ACTUALLY ON HER SIDE? The only people who want to be on her side are the men who want to be on her front! She’s a pretty face ,a set of nice legs, some pumps and a big pair of lips that men love to think about.

“say it ain’t so, Joe, doggone it!”- she could not be a bigger moron.

Um, I wish I had something nice to say.

I probably shouldn’t say anything at all.

“I can see Russia from my house”

It has come to the point where we are T-1 days to the vp debate. Sarah Palin is beyond dumb. I’m not just blatantly insulting her, I am merely making an observation, and a painful one at that.

I watched Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric. I watched Tina Fey impersonate her. It’s kind of funny, because I think maybe Tina would be a better candidate for vp.

It’s sad when Elizabeth Hasselback on “The View” can’t think of three solid reasons why Sarah Palin should be VP.

The moment when I went from just thinking she was dumb to really despising her, was when I found out that she had attempted to ban books at the Wassila public library. My fiancee, and some other websites say it is not at all true, but why would a librarian make this kind of a nightmare situation up? No educator wants to be told to ban books. No one who wants to help children and the world should ever encourage banning books. I cannot support a candidate who would tell a kid not to read “Gatsby”. I wonder what she would want to replace it with, “The Wassila Moose Manual”? “Moose Stew For Dummies”?

She can see Russia from her house. I was watching Cnn and that’s actually false. There is only one place in Alaska, where you can see Russia and that’s on this one small island that has 150 inhabitants, that Palin has never been to. And as if that would give her foreign policy credentials. How are we even considering this woman?

I don’t wish it upon anyone, but what if McCain croaks? She is one breath away from the Presidency and although it seems impossible, I’m sure she would screw up the country even more than Bush already has.

My fiancee says that it’s ok to like Sarah Palin, and that we shouldn’t be afraid to like her.

But he’s not a woman.

I’m a woman, and the fact that this woman is representing us makes me angry, because I don’t like her. Because any intelligent, educated woman with common sense would know that Palin is obsessed with emasculating herself, and all she really wants, is to be part of the “Boy’s Club”. She hunts, fishes,all these things that make her acceptable to men. But to women,she’s a joke, a flake, and a total ruination of the name of woman in the political sphere.