Dearest Julia, I was saddened to hear you say today you felt you were unable to detach from the execrable online learning software the schools have offered up during this Coronavirus school closure crisis.  You claimed, “I have deadlines; my teachers send me emails. Daddy, I need to get a good grade because that is what school is about!” You went on to explain to me how school, in your experience, is all about jockeying for the grade. You are on the academic treadmill to turn in required work to get the all-important “A.” All your friends in the seventh-grade feel the same, you explained. Your voice shook with emotion.…

“Parents are the first and foremost educators of their children. Their role as educators is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it.” Vatican II We are fourteen days into this home-school experiment. On March 13, 2020 the local authorities cancelled school, and we have been at home since. The government has ordered us to “shelter in place” so as to help prevent the spread of the novel Coronavirus and “flatten the curve” and relieve pressure on the health care system. So Maria and I have taken over as teachers for our own children. Nobody else was going to do it, after all. I imagine millions…

“Improvise, adapt, and overcome.” U.S. Marine Corps Dearest Julia,  So here we are in the midst of this global Coronavirus outbreak. School is cancelled — for you and I both — and we are thrown upon each other. We are to “shelter in place,” and it is just you, your sister, Mommy, and me. At home. Indefinitely. We might have intense, positive interactions which we will remember for the rest of our lives. Or we might come close to wanting to kill each other. Maybe a little bit of both? We live in strange days, and events have conspired so that here we are. Public school is cancelled; home school…

I remember reading decades ago a passage in some book where the author claimed that in response to the traumatic news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he went to his piano and started playing Bach. He explained there was something spiritual in Bach’s solo keyboard music which offered him profound solace in moments of sadness and loss. That anecdote stayed with me for some reason. A few moments of reading many years ago struck a chord. It resonates to this day. I get it. I remember finding a used copy of the full Well Tempered Clavier, Book I while rummaging through the bargain bin of compact disks…

So some ten weeks ago there was nothing. Then news of an outbreak in Wuhan, China. It spread to South Korea and Japan. Then to Iran and Italy. A ripple traveling across the globe and arriving everywhere sooner or later. Including the United States. Yesterday the nearby Cal State Channel Islands campus closed down to try to halt the spread of the “Coronavirus” (COVID-19), following the lead of other universities elsewhere in California. Then today Ventura College closed. I could see plainly the writing on the wall: my school district would be closing imminently. Ten minutes ago I got the email. I am done until April 16, 2020. Four weeks…

“Reince Priebus.”* That is the person to blame, in my opinion. Say his name. Say it out loud. It was Reince Priebus who was the Republican Party Chairman during the 2016 presidential election when Donald Trump — real estate developer, reality TV show host, and conservative Rush Limbaugh-talk show protégé — enacted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Trump shooed aside more traditional “establishment” presidential aspirants, and he emerged as the party’s candidate. His pep rallies and use of social media directly energized a segment of the party, and he rode that populist wave into power. The rest is history. Reince Priebus, and the other Republicans of that time,…

I recently read an article written by Niki Marinis who claimed that if a man was to break up with her, he should do it by email or by phone call; it would be too painful to do it face-to-face, and she would prefer he spare her the trauma of the painful conversation in person and just do it by phone. Then he would not see her cry, see her fall apart in heartbreak. It was easier this way, Niki claimed. Here is her article: “If You’re Going to Dump Me, Do It Over the Phone” By Niki Marinis It might be easier to break up over the telephone, as…

I attended a meeting of parents for my daughter’s club soccer team last night. Much to my astonishment and chagrin, the meeting was “emotional and intense,” in the later words of the coach. Parents grew red in the face and raised their voices to each other and the coach, and for sixty long minutes it went back and forth as I largely stared at the ceiling in embarrassment. The meeting was angry and chaotic. Although I said next to nothing, being present at the meeting was emotionally lacerating. Certain of the parents heatedly complained that because of conflicts between different parents and with the coach they had suffered serious distress…

Cognitive Dissonance: In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, or values. This afternoon I find myself suffering from cognitive dissonance. I read yesterday in the New York Times an alarming article “How the Collapse of Local News is Causing a ‘National Crisis.’” I had two distinct and different reactions. WHY I APPRECIATE JOURNALISTS On the one hand, I am worried. Do I really want to live in a country where city councils, local police, and school boards operate…

I read the other day an outstanding article about abortion by the always wonderful Caitlin Flanagan —  “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate”by Caitlin Flanagan The essay is nuanced and complicated and full of insight and intelligence. It cuts across party lines and cannot be described as pro- or anti- abortion. I live for these kinds of articles. It is the opposite of propaganda. Her argument is unconventional. It does not fit neatly into the convention ruts most tread in looking at abortion. It is the way I try to think through difficult and complex issues. These sorts of issues are the ones worth engaging. As a high school teacher…

“Change — how do you change yourself? It’s easy to lose yourself or never find yourself. The older you get, the heavier that package becomes that you haven’t sorted through, so you run. I’ve done a lot of that kind of running. I’ve spent 35 years trying to let go of the destructive parts of my character and I still have days where I struggle with it.” Bruce Springsteen I spoke at some length in my last posting about finding peace, and being comfortable in my own skin at 52-years of age. Now I would speak about Bruce Springsteen and his observations about aging and seeking emotional equilibrium. Watch the…

Dear Mom, Hello. It is the 23rd anniversary of your death, and your husband and I visited your grave to pay our respects and leave flowers for you. It was a beautiful day, this October 31, 2019. Although you died at 56-years of age — decades before you should have — your peers are beginning to catch up with you. Left and right persons of your generation are struggling with health problems or succumbing to them. Walking near your grave I ran across Sylvia M.’s grave, and Trudy’s is freshly installed and waiting for her. Family friend Sharon M. is buying a grave for her husband Frank who is dying…

I read recently an article in Men’s Health titled “These Are the Unwritten Rules That All Guys Follow” that I would like to speak to — yes, I read magazines like “Men’s Health,” “Men’s Journal,” and “Maxim” on my Apple Newsfeed. They provide a welcome counterbalance to the humorless screeds (usually complaining about politics) which blanket the more “serious” publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Washington Post. Balance. The article listed was based on a Reddit thread that has some 5,700 responses. It summarizes a few of the main “unspoken rules” that men supposedly follow: Do not crowd next to each other when using the urinal in a…

I go round and round in a circle. I don’t quite know what to think about the homeless in Ventura where I live. There are new numbers of homeless people in the neighborhoods I travel in, and I have complicated and ambivalent feelings towards them. On the one hand, they are a burden to the community and a blight on the landscape. Here is this homeless person sleeping under a camouflage blanket in the mulch off to the left of the strip mall, or pushing an abandoned grocery cart heaped tall with their belongings down the street. It sends a signal of tawdriness and a neighborhood in decline. The public…

I did not have a good feeling about this tennis match. We were playing a men’s 4.5 USTA doubles league match against Ojai and they were always a solid squad. The competition would consist of three lines of doubles teams, and whoever won at least two out of the three is the winner. They had “stacked” their lineup, putting their weakest team on line one and their strongest on line three. Predictably, they won on line three and got crushed on line one. I knew I had been “out-captained” when they stacked their lineup. That did not feel good. The score was tied 1-1 and it was coming down to…

In three weeks it will be 23 years since my mother died. My mom was 55-years old when she passed away from lung cancer, and I will be 55 myself in three and a half years.  I was at a work training last Friday where I spoke with an English teacher from another high school. She had had the option to be part of the inaugural freshman class at the high school where I worked back in 2000. This lady was already 35-years old now and not a beginning teacher anymore, and it is strange to think that while she was starting high school I was already well into my…

“Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” Tching-Thang It is the third week of the new fall semester. The shock of the school year beginning has passed, and we are now more in the swing of things: we have found our stride, more or less. And when I say “we,” I mean both parents and children: Maria and Richard, elementary and high school teachers, and Julia and Elizabeth, seventh and fourth graders, respectively.  Summer has time aplenty where not much is going on, which is fine. Time doing not much of anything is still time doing something, in my opinion. My mother would occasionally…

I was cruising around my Apple News Plus feed the other day when I came across the following article “Polls, Fake News, and Trends” by Erick Erickson. Fifteen months away from the presidential election of 2020, Erickson writes the following: American voters are exhausted. They are tired of the drama. They are tired of the tweets. They are tired of the fighting. They are tired of the media sensationalizing everything. They want some semblance of normalcy. Americans, at this point, would love a president they do not have to think about, see or hear for weeks on end. President Donald Trump is stressing people out with his erratic nature, his…

Last night I was browsing the news when I came across the following article title and lede: “WHY IS JOE ROGAN SO POPULAR?” He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention. by Devin Gordon. I had never heard of Joe Rogan — or maybe I had head of him second-hand somewhere? Others talking about him? But if Rogan “understands men in America better than most do,” maybe I should know more about him? The clickbait intrigued me. I was game; I bit. I clicked on the link and read. The fifth paragraph into Gordon’s long article I read the…

Tomorrow is the first day of school. It is a fresh start — something we all deserve now and again. The past is past, the future is unknown, but the present is eternal. Stay present in the moment and the future will go better. With that in mind I am going to try meditating this year. Swimming and other activities are a form of meditation for me, but I want to try it more straight up. Make it a more specific, intentional practice. Tomorrow starts the seventh year of taking my daughters to school before my school day begins, and the turnaround where I drop my daughter off is a…

In a few days I start my twenty-sixth year of teaching. For all those years I have been stuck in the academic model of living: summer and winter/spring break off where I have more time free than I want, and then other times (like final exams, letters of recommendation deadlines) where I am so overwhelmed I am barely hanging in there. It is irregular and seasonal. Yes, it is the feast or famine lifestyle for me. I have had ten weeks off from work, and as usual I am itching to get back.  Not so much because I cannot wait to see my new classes and greet the students, but…

I spent a good chunk of this summer training for my tennis team’s USTA sectional playoffs last weekend at the Costa Mesa Tennis Center. I put in the “hard yards” both on and off the court to prepare for a weekend of intense tennis against players likely better than myself. I ended up winning neither of my two matches, as expected. I made my opponents work for their victories, though, and I was not unhappy with my performance: I left sectionals with my athletic ego only semi-ravaged. But I was physically exhausted at the end of some five hours of hard tennis under a hot Southern California summer sun. Around…

I don’t much like hanging out at home. It has been like that since I have been an adult. The world is just too interesting to stay at home for long: there are places to go, the world to view, things to learn. And so this summer I have been in many a restaurant, coffee shop, bistro, etc. — just sitting there for hours, reading or writing, but mostly just thinking. My wife and daughters accidentjailally came across me in a Carl’s Jr. just sitting there at a booth looking out the window into space, lost in my own thoughts. She thought it was plain weird, straining to understand. But…

As a young composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff had his first major piece (his First Symphony in D Minor) performed in 1897. It did not go well. Music critic César Antonovich Cui savaged it in a Russian newspaper: If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a programme symphony based on the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless…

I had occasion today to watch the famous scene in the movie Philadelphia where Tom Hanks listens to Maria Callas sing the “La Mamma Morta” aria from Umberto Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier. The character Hanks plays — “Andrew Beckett” — is dying of AIDS, pulling his IV pole around the room, as he encounters Callas singing music of death, hope, transcendence, and the energy which links us all together — love. The power of being alive. The power of art to capture the essence of our humanity. Obviously, Beckett is thinking of himself. He is affixed on his mortality and the tragic brevity of life, and he is preparing to…

So I turn 52 years old this week. And my father turns 80. Our birthdays are only two days apart, so for many years our tradition has been to celebrate our birthdays jointly. We drive to be together on the long Memorial Day weekend in late May and have a birthday party where our whole family can fête us both. It is always a happy time, particularly because it comes at the end of the school year. Summer — and summer vacation — are near. The weather is beautiful. This year is a bit different. My father turns 80 and that is a real benchmark. When he turned 70 and…

Portrait of an Activist Banging Head Against the Wall: Those dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade have enacted a whole series of legislative acts at the state level to try and make life difficult for women seeking to get an abortion. Mandatory waiting periods before an abortion, having to read scripts to the patient, or forcing the mother to see a sonogram or hear the heartbeat of her fetus. Or conservative states pass laws whereby doctors performing abortions have to have admitting privileges at a local hospital — even passing a law saying that abortion facilities must have hallways wide enough to allow hospital beds to move in them. The…

So today is my last match of this junior team tennis season. Actually we are to play two matches at two different locations, to finish the season before the deadline — and I am exhausted. All the text messages arranging practices and setting up matches with the other coaches from the other clubs, and then arranging to have courts reserved at my club on weekends busy with other adult league matches. It is a lot. I have to admit there has been a part of it that has been enjoyable. I have had some adorable fourth grade boys on my team. They look at me with wide eyes and call…

“The boundaries of privacy are in dispute and its future is in doubt. Citizens, politicians and business leaders are asking if societies are making the wisest tradeoffs.” New York Times The New York Times last month launched a whole series of pieces on the danger of privacy going the way of the Dodo — with articles like “It Is Time to Panic About Privacy.” by Farhad Manjoo. Long hours of laborious writing and and prominent space on the NY Times website was devoted to privacy in the digital era. It was a big deal. The two focuses of this series of articles were thus: the violation of privacy by big…

So I changed my health insurance last year so that this year I could have “PPO” rather than “HMO” health insurance. It has been worth it, even having to spend some money. As a result, I saw a quality physical therapist in January who took the time to train me about a longstanding issue I have with my Achilles tendon — and it was hours spent closely touching and educating me, not minutes. My previous physical therapists were more of the “spray and pray” method of health care. Twenty minutes of their time once and then never again. And my new “PPO” doctor did not just email me the results…