Scattershot

Picking and choosing levels of compassion

Someone fired into a crowd last weekend at a Denver rally, and a couple of people were shot. My first thought was, "Oh, no." My second thought was, "Oh, only two."

"Only" two? What scares me almost as much as the idea of people shooting randomly into crowds is that I could, for even a moment, mentally shrug off the lives of two human beings as "only" two, as if they didn't matter so much because they weren't among hoards shot in a mass killing or killed or wounded in an explosion.

Later I read headlines about a serious earthquake in China and a building collapse in Bangladesh, and I found myself pointedly not reading the articles, largely because China and Bangladesh have no personal meaning to my life. But the Boston Marathon bombing and the explosion near Waco—well, I paid attention. They seemed more important because I know a lot of runners, and I've been to both Boston and Texas.

I'm not an uncaring person, but in the face of so many disasters plastered all over newspapers and television and computer screens, I find myself picking and choosing the ones to pay attention to. How many others find themselves, like me, choosing our levels of feeling? Two people shot? Is that worth our attention? Maybe not. Twenty-six injured in an auto pie-up? Well, maybe we should take a moment to feel some compassion. 120 killed? Definitely, yes, that merits our interest and outrage—as long a it's got some personal connection to our own lives.

Desensitization. I hate that in our world today we are barraged constantly, almost instanty, by images and accounts of horrible things happening to human beings. We manage psychic overload, I think, by moving tragic occurrences into categories: "semi-terrible," "truly terrible," "affects me personally in some way", etc. Maybe such categorization helps us survive, but it also diminishes us as human beings. I wish our world allowed us to feel compassion for every person, anywhere, who deserves care, attention, and help.

Every single year...

Every single year I do it. After many days of warm weather and people popping up everywhere in flip-flops, I am sure that spring has arrived, and I pack up my boots and sweaters and stash them in a rather hard to access closet under the eaves.

Every single year, as I'm packing, I think to myself, "Why am I doing this? Every single year, as soon as I get everything boxed up, it snows." My next thought, every single year, is, "But this year, it really is spring. It will be okay."

Every single year, within days, it snows.

As I went outside yesterday to shovel over a foot of snow, after having located a pair of boots I had, thankfully, forgotten to pack, I thought to myself, "Next year, I am not going to be fooled into thinking it's spring. Next year I am not going to pack away my winter clothes until June, at the earliest."

And that's exactly what I think every single year.

A quick study, I am not.

Cha-cha-cha-step-turn-spin-cha-cha-cha

When I encounter people who are better than me at writing, tap dancing, skiing, cooking, or just about anything else, I do not generally feel resentful. So what the heck happened to me in my first Zumba class?

Zumba, for the uninitated, is a dance fitness program that involves a strenuous hour of exercise/dancing to upbeat Latin music. It's not easy, but I found myself smiling a lot and enjoying it. I struggled to follow all the moves, but I thought I was holding my own pretty well. (There was no mirror, so it was easy to delude myself.)

And then, suddenly, I saw HER up in the front row. If the rest of us were doing cha-cha-cha-step turn, she would be doing cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-step-step-kick-kick-spin-spin—all to the same bars of music. She was doing twice the moves we were, and she was doing them perfectly.

I wanted to smack her.

As the class progressed, I found myself despising this woman. Why was she bugging me so much?

Thinking about it later, I decided it was because she didn't belong. The other women in this class tended to be, well, not exactly teeny young things in leotards. I saw many who were older, overweight, or struggling mightily to keep up. There was a feeling in the air of, "This is an exercise class for people who hate exercise classes." We were a band of under-exercisers, united in sisterhood and trying to do better.

But Miss Perfect, Miss Star Zumba, Miss Zumba Queen reminded us with her every spin and extra kick that we were not really exercising. Every extra move seemed to say, "What you're doing is so dang easy that I have to double and triple the moves to get anything out of the class." She. Did. Not. Belong.

At least that's my theory.

She's probably a lovely person. She should be an inspiration to us all. She should motivate us to greater Zumba heights.

But I still wanted to smack her.

Perhaps I need to work on my character as much as my physical fitness.

 

Losing our minds?

Most of us have experienced being consumed by a problem to the point that we can’t think clearly. Details swirl about us, bumping into one another, and we reach out desperately, often blindly, often even stupidly, trying to find a solution. Sometimes the best course of action is to step away from the problem altogether, allowing time to let our heads and hearts clear.

I think that’s what frantic schools need to do—take a breath, stop fussing, and stop obsessing about teach, teach, teaching…learn, learn, learning….test, test, test, testing. Call a moratorium on it all and just let classes be for awhile. During this moratorium, ask everyone to step back and ask, “What is the most important thing a student should learn in this class? Really?”  

I read a recent New York Times article about how physical education teachers across the country now “post vocabulary lists on gym walls, ask students to test Newton’s Laws of Motion as they toss balls, and give quizzes on parts of the skeleton or food groups.” Because of the intense focus on student test scores, many districts are “pushing physical education teachers to move beyond soccer, kickball and tennis to include reading, writing and arithmetic as well.” Really? Have we lost our minds? Can't we give kids a break, even in p.e.?

What's the most important thing for kids to learn in gym class? I seriously doubt that it's Newton’s Laws of Motion or vocabulary words from language arts. I suspect it might be that they learn that being active can be fun, that it can help them feel good, that exercise might be something to continue through life. For some kids, it might even be, “Though I’m terrible at math, look at how good I am at playing volleyball. Isn’t it great that I can do something well?” Maybe the most important thing might even be to provide a place for kids to blow off a little steam and escape the pressures of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic.

A friend of mine works with very young immigrant children who don’t know a lot of English. She is required to spend endless hours teaching them to read nonsense blends quickly so that they can pass a timed test on them. The kids read “blug,” “treek,” “spad” and are mystified. Reading becomes, in their minds, this weird, boring thing they have to do. Wouldn’t it be smarter to entice them with stories and plays? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to help familiarize them with English by letting them hear English in context? Wouldn't it make sense to help them first want to learn to read by presenting reading as something joyful and interesting and worth knowing how to do? The answer to the "What's most important here?" question, for them, might be that "Reading can open up worlds" or "Reading can bring pleasure"—not that reading is all about pronouncing nonsense words quickly.

I’m not suggesting that teachers ignore everything except “What is most important here?” but it seems increasingly clear that a lot of wrongheaded stuff is going on.

For example, I just read about how a nearby school is offering Saturday classes to help struggling students become better writers. However, the school is not having students actually write or play with words or try to communicate ideas. Instead, the “writing” class will be drilling them on identifying parts of speech. Never mind that research has repeatedly demonstrated that studying parts of speech has little or no effect on student writing. It’s easy to ask, “Is this word being used as a verb?” That’s testable, so that’s what is being taught. Communicating an idea clearly in writing—well, that’s not so easy to measure. How do you fill in a test bubble for an idea?

Maybe, just for a while, we ought to stop trying to have perfect teachers and perfect schools and kids with perfect test scores. Maybe we ought to stop, step back, and take a hard look at what we are doing.

 

 

 

Slippery slope

I sent a quick text message to a friend yesterday and saw that Autocorrect had "corrected" a word incorrectly. Rather than correct the Autocorrection, I thought, "My friend will know what I mean." I also didn't take time to capitalize the name of a town.

What is happening to me? Is technology corrupting me?

I guess it is. My view of text messages has always been, "They don't count. Everybody knows they aren't real writing." But yesterday I suddenly found myself wondering, "Is that what people think about email messages, too—that they aren't real writing?"

I thought of a friend (You know who you are!) who is quick to point out ungrammatical constructions in the world around her but has never once included a single capital letter in any email she has ever sent me. Does she feel about email the way I feel about texting? Are we both at the top of a slippery slope, with lack of capitalization leading to lack of punctuation, leading to sentence fragments and run-ons and heaven knows what—including allowing incorrect Autocorrects to remain uncorrected?

It may be a slippery slope. I hereby turn over a new leaf: no more sloppy texting.

 

Losing patience

Finally, my father got hearing aids. Finally, I thought things would be better.

And they were. He could now hear my brothers, my husband, my sister, the neighbors—everyone except me. My voice is evidently in a register that the hearing aids don’t recognize. Or something. I don’t understand it. I only know that the sitiuation drives me C-R-R-A-A-Z-Z-Y-Y.

My husband and I just spent a couple of days with him, and here’s an example of how things went.

Me: Daddy, do you want me to make you a pan of those burritos you like?

Dad: What?

Me: (yelling) THOSE BURRITOES THAT YOU LIKE. DO YOU WANT ME TO MAKE A PAN OF THEM?

Dad: A pan? What?

Me: (to my husband) Ask him.

Ed: (talking in a normal voice) Do you want Cheri to make a pan of those burritos that you like?

Dad: (brightening) Oh, yes!

This kind of conversation tends to make me pretty cranky, and then I get mad at myself. He can’t help not being able to hear. I am a terrible daughter.

Making it worse, I remember how I used to get mad at him when he was my mother’s caretaker for so many years and was often short or impatient with her. I remember how a good friend caring for her sick mother-in-law became similarly short or impatient—and I reminded her that the woman couldn’t help not being able to remember things. I remember thinking my husband was being rather unkind when he impatiently told his mother he wouldn’t talk with her until she put in her hearing aids.

Oh, it’s easy to judge when you’re not the one dealing with a problem.

What I find surprising and not at all to my credit is that my awareness of Dad's problem does not magically neutralize my frustration. At all. Sigh.

Torn

As I listened to a bright sixteen-year-old yesterday talking about the future, I found myself thinking, "I would make a terrible high school counselor." Her counselor did what I'm sure a counselor is supposed to do, but I would not have been able to do it. Her counselor steered her away from majoring in musical theater in college.

The teenager I'm talking about lives and breathes musical theater. She is a wonderful singer with a powerful stage presence. She is a member of every vocal group in the school and appears in all the school plays and in community theater productions. She is smart, funny, talented, and resourceful.

Her counselor showed her a list of jobs the girl could get with a degree in musical theater, and there were ten of them, many of which didn't even require a college degree. (Actually, I'm surprised there were that many.) Musical theater, she learned, was clearly not the way to go. She is going to choose a more practical major.

Sigh. Must college always be just about getting a job? And is choosing a career path at that age really the most sensible thing in the world to do? In just seconds, I can come up with a list of people I know who are successful and not doing anything at all related to their college majors, even if they were "sensible" majors. An engineer I know became a stand-up comic. A man with a degree in medicine became a painter. An elementary teacher became a photographer. A history teacher became a stock broker. An economics major became a high school assistant principal. A human resources major became a watercolorist. Someone with a law degree decided to become a dentist.

I know that most parents want their children to pursue a degree that will lead directly to a good job, and I certainly agree that young people need to think about earning a living. I understand that. I agree with that. And if their interests happen to coincide with areas that offer great job opportunities, wonderful.

But I also understand passion. I understand wanting to learn everything you can about something for no other reason than that you love it. I want to grab this girl and say, "Spend your four years in college studying what you love. Don't plan on using it as a career path. Know that you will likely have to find work in another field, and take sensible steps toward making a living. But follow your passion in school. Just do it."

I would not and could not ever, in good conscience, steer a girl like this away from what is clearly her passion.

As I said, It's a good thing I'm not a counselor.

Dry, dry, dry

My father and one of my brothers are both farmers. They will plant nothing this year.

Nothing.

There is no water.

This week they received letters informing them that there will be no pumping allowed from their wells or any wells in the area this summer. They also belong to a canal system, and they have been told to expect no more than three short periods of time when they will be allowed to open the headgates and use water from the canal. This is in an area where the temperature often exceeds 100 degrees in the summer months, and it rarely rains at all. Obviously, plants there won't last long with no irrigation.

My father and my brother should be okay this year, as they still have corn and hay to sell from last year. But what about next year? What about the other farm families in the valley? My heart goes out to these people who work so hard and are at the mercy of the weather and our changing climate.

Growing up in such a dry climate, I may be hyper-aware of the preciousness of water, but a song by the Haunted Windchimes never fails to move me. This wonderful group from Pueblo, Colorado, near where I grew up, sings a song called "Make It Rain." The singer's increasingly desperate-sounding voice makes me feel, each time I hear it, the powerlessness that farmers must feel looking up, daily, at clear blue skies, empty of even the hint of a rain cloud.

Words without communication

We ran across the parking lot and climbed into the shuttle taking people from downtown Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to the hotels outside of town. It was cold, and hundreds of visitors were trying to find rides. My husband and friends and I sat in our shuttle, glad to be warming up and listening to the harried shuttle drivers communicating on the radio with each other and with the dispatcher.

Suddenly, the outraged voice of one driver came through loud and clear. "A man ran right into my bus!" he shouted. He spoke with an accent, and it seemed that our driver was perhaps used to clarifiying things for him. "Well, just take him where he wants to go," he said calmly.

The dispatcher interrupted with directions to pick up a group of people at a restaurrant, and then her voice broke up. We heard crackling, fragments of other conversations, and then the distraught driver's voice again.

"A man ran right into my bus!!!!!" He sounded even more upset.

Again, our driver tried to calm him. "Just take him wherever he wants to go."

Several of us on the bus were finally starting to realize that perhaps someone drove into the man's bus. Someone suggested that to the driver, so he asked, "Did the man run into your bus or onto your bus?"

More crackiling. More fragments of conversation. Then the voice, again:

"A man ran right into my bus!!!"

Our driver tried a different question. "Do you mean that someone came aboard your bus or crashed into your bus, as in an accident?"

"Yes! Yes!" he said. "The man ran right into my bus!!!"

Finally, communication. The dispatcher called the police, and we breathed a collective sigh of relief for the upset driver. I confess that we didn't even wonder how the car crasher had fared in the accident. After all, he had run right into the poor man's bus!

Spooked by the Internet

I love the Internet as much as anyone else, but sometimes it spooks me. A couple of months ago, I decided to look up remedies for plantar fasciitis because of a problem I was having with one of my feet. Suddenly the ads on every site were for foot braces, arch supports, and special shoes. Worse, it soon became apparent that I had been labeled "old" because the ads expanded to include menopause aids, vitamins, walkers, heart attack medicine, and those little medical alert things you hang around your neck. It was depressing. (What will yesterday's searches say about me? "The wingspan of whooping cranes." "Sheet music for the 'Angry Birds' theme song." "Jenna Marbles videos." "How to pronounce the real name of the actress who plays O'Brien on 'Downton Abbey.')

I have been lying awake seriously spooked by the latest digital interference in my personal life. An old friend and I, during a humorous discussion with our spouses about endearments (or, rather, lack thereof), gave each other ridiculous nicknames. We now use these nicknames with each other almost exclusively and in all e-mail correspondence. I'm not going to mention the names because of what happened next, but suffice it to say that they are very silly. Let's just imagine that I call him, oh, "Lord Snickersnootums."

So Don—Lord Snickersnootums—recently ordered a book from Amazon.com. A few days ago he received the usual follow-up e-mail from Amazon, asking him to rate the book. However, the e-mail did not say, "So, DON, how did 'Lunch with Buddha' meet your expectations?" It said, "So, LORD SNICKERSNOOTUMS, how did 'Lunch with Buddha' meet your expectations?"

Yikes. Lord Snickersnootums was a bit nonplussed, as am I. Since I had absolutely nothing to do with Lord Snickersnootum's purchase, how the heck did my stupid pet name for him become associated with his Amazon account? I really can't figure out how this could have happened.

Ideas, anyone?