Giving Flowers

This week the dean of US soccer journalism, Grant Wahl, passed away unexpectedly while covering the Argentina vs Netherlands quarterfinal match at the World Cup. His passing was sudden. He was eulogized by many. I appreciated Dave Clark's tribute in Sounder at Heart. Notably, there was an outpouring from corners of the internet I never expected and a tearful farewell on the Athletic's soccer podcast.

Each time we lose someone like Wahl, gone far too soon, I am reminded that we shouldn't wait until people are no longer with us to give them their flowers. So this week I decided to praise some folks; I want the important people in my life to know how much I appreciate them.

Flowers for Trusting Leadership - When I worked at Lincoln High School, my principal Pat Erwin, had a simple leadership style. He scouted out teaching talent: hired hard-working, committed educators, and empowered them to run the school. He acted more as a GM for a pro sports team than a principal. Our staff planned our own PD, based on our needs. If we needed money for a field trip or a classroom resource he’d find money somewhere in the budget. Major decisions around things that impacted the entire school were made collectively by a site-based decision making committee. He had an open door and faculty could come see him at any time with concerns or ideas. I didn’t appreciate it as much then as I do now, but he often served as a bulwark between teachers and the decisions made by other power centers outside our building. The Lincoln staff under Pat was the best teaching staff in the state of Washington and it wasn’t particularly close. He assembled a great team and gave them a sense of ownership–every student deserves that in their school. 

Flowers for Excellence and Professionalism - I have an amazing pair of colleagues in Abu Dhabi, to protect their privacy we’ll call them LeBron James and Minnie Driver. My admiration for them is bottomless. Jord… er… LeBron might be the hardest working person I have ever taught with.  She leaves me in the dust when it comes to organization and long-term planning. I love to sit with her and revise unit plans and assessments. She’s a good thought partner, principled but also pragmatic. Our collaborative sessions are efficient, productive, and (I think) we maintain a good distribution of labor and responsibilities. I can be honest with her if I think a task is wack and needs to be redesigned;  she is honest with me, if she thinks I am being ridiculous (which I often am). 

Minnie Driver is perhaps the most efficient person the Lord has ever created. She is the consummate professional–she knows when a meeting should be an email–when she has a meeting they are brief and focused. When I go to her with a professional dilemma or seeking a sounding board, she provides nuanced takes that are grounded in best practices and her deep experience in the classroom. She's the only person in my professional life who regularly makes me go "man, I gotta get my stuff together." She is organized in ways that I don’t even bother to aspire to, because there’s no way I’ll ever be on that level. Minnie is that dude. If she decided to leave our school, I’d start shopping around myself.

Flowers for Courage - Anti-Blackness is real. Sexism is real. People who hold anti-Black and sexist views online are often very loud about their opinions and travel in rabid digital packs. Few people I know have faced more abuse from online mobs than Shana White. She is the moral compass of the faction of justice-centered educators that I view as my fellow travelers. She is courageous–I am constantly in awe of her dogged commitment to speaking truth to power. In the face of threats, waves of harassment, even a months long suspension from Twitter for fighting back against a particularly egregious right-wing troll, she remains unbent and unbowed. If everyone in our profession had her courage, our schools would be a much better place. We need more people like Shana.

Dune Hits Different When You Live in Arrakis

Being from Tacoma, there’s a near civic obligation to like Frank Herbert’s Dune. He has roots in my hometown. He went to the high school where I used to teach. There’s even a park named after his book. I think the park was going to be directly after him but he was posthumously milkshake ducked.** 

Unlike the rest of my nerdy adult friends, I didn't read Dune at thirteen. Instead, I spent my teens reading Tolkien (like a respectable person) and then took a very regrettable near decade slide into the Ryan-verse (I acknowledge the error of my ways). Okay, that’s not quite true. I tried to read Herbert when I was younger and found it dull and impenetrable. I also vaguely remember watching David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of the book. It was bad then; upon revisiting it last year, it aged like buttermilk.

I have a theory about great books: You have to read them at the time it’s right for you. I loathed Gatsby in grade eleven. But when I picked it up while backpacking in Colombia, it became one of my favorite novels I ever read. I couldn’t read Dune when I was younger. Now that I’m older, living two hours from the desert that serves as Arrakis, it hits different. Herbert imagined an entire universe and a history (spanning 15,000 years) as deep as anything ever put to paper. Dune is remarkable–it’s white-savior nonsense, but it’s white savior nonsense par excellence.  

But however good the book is, Denis Villeneuve’s film is better. When it came out, we went opening night… and the next day… and then the following weekend. I was absolutely mesmerized by the way the film looked and sounded. This wasn’t how I envisioned it from reading the book, it was better. That never happens! The sets, the music, the costumes, the dampness of Caladan, the Zimmer score, the menace of the Sardaukar–all of it, perfect. 

They started shooting Dune II in UAE’s remote Liwa Desert earlier this month. So the cast and crew are all  in town. My wife and I even made a half-hearted effort to find the set deep in the desert. This past weekend, I went to a talk given by Patrice Vermette. He’s the Academy Award winning production designer for Dune and the sequel. 

Vermette, during his talk - Photo by Yer Boi

He was joined by Mary Parent, who co-produced the film. I was struck by Parent’s immersion into Herbert's lore; she talks about Dune with the depth of a r/FrankHerbert moderator. The two hour talk was a treat. Vermette is the MJ (or choose your own G.O.A.T.) of what he does. It’s rare you get to be in the presence of literally the best person in the world at what they do, especially not in such an intimate setting.

I have been thinking about the talk all week. He contrasted, with some pride, his work with some of his contemporaries. At length he discussed his hesitancy to use CGI, instead preferring to use practical effects when possible, but also how this clashes with the realities of modern studio filmmaking. It was a good metaphor for the everyday compromises and tradeoffs we make in life. Trying to please everyone is a one-way trip to an ulcer and an aneurysm. We have to make the decisions that work and sometimes make peace with the results.

Leaning into the Silence

Sometimes I catch my students having a conversation that’s so on-point I have to stop and reflect with them on their collective progress. It only happens a few times a year, but when it happens it feels dope. “Y’all remember when you couldn’t figure out [now elementary concept that previously confounded them]? Now listen to us talk about [a far more advanced concept, that I learned about in college]. That’s wild!” Usually, they’ll chuckle and someone will quip something along the lines of “yeah bro, we sound smart now.” Then I groan, loudly. High schoolers are dorks like that, they love to ruin a moment.

I had one of those moments this week. Here in Abu Dhabi, I teach a Comparative Politics class. In the course, we talk about the political institutions and societal trends in six comparative states: the UK, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran, Russia, and China. This unit on political culture, we're looking at civil society organizations and how they strengthen democracies. Because I'm extra, I rotate in additional states each unit. So we’re also examining Indonesia and the Philippines and tracing their trajectories, along the path of democratization, from former colonies → authoritarian states → emerging democracies (or whatever you consider them now). 

We Want a Revolution! No, Not Like That! This week students were assigned excerpts from Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men. It’s a book about the twentieth century history of Iran and revolutionaries that toppled the Shah’s monarchical regime, only to find themselves under theocratic rule. I joked at one point that this is the downside of revolutions–you can topple the government in place but the faction that’s most organized is best prepared to dictate the terms of the aftermath. In the case of Iran, it was the Mullahs and Ayatollah Khomeni. 

My opening question for discussion was “What do you think about the particular story being told by the Kinzer (the author) and what he chooses to include/exclude?” This is actually a fine question once their brains are warmed up but it was my opener and the silence afterwards was notable. But I leaned into it. Pedagogy nerds call it wait time. We sat there for nearly a minute before a student chimed in to reflect on the prevalence of male voices in the text. Then one by one the gears started grinding. Another talked about how the Mullahs were referred to several times but never really quoted in the text; they were seen but heard. Another student chimed in about the in-fighting between various reformist factions creating a power vacuum that allowed religious hardliners to take power, because they had a pre-established hierarchy. Someone joked about how the Shah's wives turned on him. Another explained that the tighter the Shah squeezed the weaker his coalition became. Others mentioned that whatever side was backed by the west was well-funded but lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We went on for like twenty minutes on that question. 

None of that wonderful conversation would have happened earlier in my career.  One of the hardest parts of teaching (and life) is knowing when to shut up. Often our instinct is to fill the silence, when the silence is actually students processing. Earlier in my career, I would've tried to reword the question, gone on to the next one, or (God forbid) started answering it myself. I’m a deeply impatient person but I am more patient in the classroom than I am in my own life.  It took me years to appreciate the power of contemplative silence in my classroom. But I get it now and I lean into it. I've been thinking more and more about the idea of silence lately. My new goal is to continue my reset from years of being hyper-online and lean more into the silence in my own life.