My Writing Exercise: A Heavy Mule at the Pierian Spring

Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turn'd Critics next, and prov'd plain Fools at last.
Some neither can for Wits nor Critics pass,
As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass.

I was told by my teaching mentor, " If you plan to teach writing, you had better write for at least two hours before you come to teach."  That meant getting up well before "It's time to get up."

It also meant that I needed to steal myself to a habit of engaging my craft.  Aristotle wrote, " We are what we repeatedly do,"  The famously taciturn President Calvin Coolidge said, "  Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

A grammar school coach, Tom Spatz said, " Losers have potential."  He also, asked me if I had polio a few years earlier, when he saw me dribble a basketball.

I still dribble a basketball like an exceptionally challenged human being. All Up in here!

However, since signing my contract at Bishop Martin D. McNamara High School in May of 1975, I have written for two hours before I went to teach my students.

This habit did not make me a great writer, but it did help me become something of an effective teacher.

Reading, speaking and writing forces one to engage other human beings.  Reading introduces thoughts, deeds and manners of expression far beyond our immediate social circle.  Speaking helps us say what we mean.  Writing requires exactness.

I write whatever comes to mind and that is a mixed bag to be sure.  What I hope will happen by end of my scribbling and correcting and modifying will be short, satisfying defense of all the things have made my life fun, fruitful and favorable to someone who reads what I have written.

Lessons learned from good people, who have provided for other people as tradesmen, butchers, milkmen, nurses, police officers, firemen, coaches and teachers mean as much and often more than picked up from pages from Balzac, Turgenev, Gorky, Joyce, Tacitus, or Swift. The harmonies of sounds pulled from the din of a loud basement full of relatives and family friends at a Christmas Party among picnic tables lifted from the forest preserves covered in table cloth and loaded with potato salads, cold cuts, pots of Italian beef, corned beef, Kapusta, Mostaccioli, cakes and soad bread; with blaring accordions, fiddles, tin whistles played by Cuz Teahan, Jimmy Neary, Tom Masterson and Kate Neary, or a powerful HiFi loaded with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Prima and John Coltrane.  Cousin doing Irish step-dancing, or Sugar push and out back steps to Gene Krupa.  Then of course just free-form, white guy moves to This Old Heart of Mine by the Four Tops.

An uncle pulls you aside and tells you to knock off whatever the hell it is that you think you are doing.

Your aunt tells him to go and have another beer and mind his own business and to turn the car keys over - Now. 

Scores of kids scream with delight, or terror.  Several cry because they being picked on and comforted until they can go and pick on someone for themselves and all is good.

Words impact from everywhere.

The meanings of those words will be lost on the world, unless someone remembers what the hell was said.  Memory can often be very convenient.

Memory is the burden carried by one who writes and that burden only gets eased with writing down the words.

Sometimes words seem like leftovers from a party.

Inside Out - Leo High School and a Little Flower Learning Moment Killed by PC

 

Little Flower Lancers: 1966-67  15 - 11   Palos Hills District Champions     
                             Thanksgiving Tourney Champions                             District Scores                                Semi-final Beat Stagg 85-42                             Title Game Beat St. Francis de Sales 69-66                             Oak Lawn Regional Tournament                                        

I am here at Leo High School every morning with the chirping of the birds, sometime between 4 AM and 5AM,depending on my duties to attend, or my level of laziness. This is a good time to get some work done and to write down ideas for development that might benefit this great old school.

In the winter months, I go directly to the boiler room and start up the furnaces.  It does not take long to heat up this well-constructed ninety year old gem and in the summer months my windowless inner cubicle gets hotter than the hinges of Hell.

Please, remember that I am talking about the building, a four story 32,000 square foot pile of concrete, ree-bar, wood, conduit, pipes, carpet and furniture.  It is not a school until at least one scholar arrives to learn and another to teach. Only then, does the place I drive to each morning become a school.
A school is a gathering of scholars usually disciples and a master, or masters.  From the Middle Ages all the way to the day John Dewey destroyed the notion of shared truth, students were called discipuli and the teacher magister. Latin was the langiuage of scholarly discourse.

In my lifetime, I witnessed the euthanizing of Latin and the Death of God by academics and churchmen.  Latin was deemed irrelevant, the vernacular ascended to Parnassus and the Vatican dome.  That is too bad.  The mystery of learning has gone the way of sacred liturgy -no mystery and no beauty.  Education means punching one's ticket for entry to something else.

Good teaching only comes from good scholars.  These days, paper means scholarship. Teacher certification is the stamp on the back of one's hand to the very special velvet roped section of Club Career marked education.

A good teacher has some capacity to articulate the facts, opinions, concepts and skills mastered over number of years in schools, or other occupations.  Two men who would recoil, if one called them scholars gave me a special learning moment. A young self-absorbed priest more concerned with social justice and artificial peace killed that moment.

I was in eighth grade when Little Flower High School Basketball was making a name for itself.  Parish founder and beating heart Monsignor McMahon was placed on Emeritus status and replaced by a nice guy, who allowed John Cardinal ( Louisiana Fats) Cody to systematically destroy the parish which featured a magnificent campus comprising the church, rectory, a fruit orchard grammar school and high school.  The grammar school was free to parishioners and high school almost free ( my 1969-70 tuition was $ 80).  We had many good teachers who volunteered their time, or received an almost invisible stipend for services - some were not even Illinois State Certified.

In my eighth grade year, we went to the community center in the high school - a state of the art gymnasium - to watch the Lancers on the hardwood.  These were athletic and graceful young men who had been coached by Tom Spatz (Leo '58) and Jim Dolan ( Leo '54).  They were magnificent human beings and they worked long and hard hours with us.

We (8th graders) were spazes. Uncoordinated bones and skin attached to undisciplined brain pans.

These two men, the  best PE teachers I ever had in all of my years of schooling,  made all of the boys in our class learn close order drill. Veterans Jim Dolan and Tom Spatz attempted to de-spaz thirty or more eleven year olds, by combining commands and movements: "Step with your left foot, Hickey! Your other LEFT!  Jesus Christ, did you have polio when you were younger, or are you deaf?"

We were awkward (spazmodic), graceless, distracted and chaotic, as all boys are, until we learned to keep pace, time and balance on command.

One the assistant priests, at Little Flower, a social engineer of the Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand stamp complained that Spatz and Dolan were turning us precious little boys into goosestepping storm troopers and the weak pastor bowed to political correctness.  Close order drill no more, Mr. Dolan de-volunteered and Mr. Spatz stuck to basketball.

We went back to spaz. In four years, Cardinal Cody sold the filled to capacity and debt free Little Flower High School and Community Center to the Chicago Board of Education.  The parish closed in 1993.

Father Cupcake saved us from the goosestep and Msgr, Go-Along made nice with Louisiana Fats.

Thus, a school activity that was deemed irrelevant by a person not engaged in the activity, whatsoever, was legislated out of existence The rise of the pest, the pain-the-ass in the vernacular, had dawned.

Good teaching has nothing to do with State Certification, Inquiry, or political correctness.

Just saying.