Monthly Archives: March 2012

Life and Death as a Minimalist

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Mark Albert was one of my best friends when we taught together at the International Community School (I.C.S.) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia twenty-two years ago. A University of Pennsylvania grad, Mark was super smart, quirky/funny, outgoing, sports crazed, and overflowing with energy for middle schoolers and math. After watching most of his classmates go to Wall Street, he decided to teach math in West Africa as a Peace Corp volunteer. After three years in Gabon, he started his international teaching career at I.C.S. He arrived with a treasure chest filled with all of his worldly possessions which consisted mostly of math textbooks, some beautiful West African shirts, and an acoustic guitar. A model of minimalism. Maybe one can’t help but be a minimalist when living on a Peace Corp stipend.

Today, like me, Mark is 50 and a part of the Sandwich Generation (SG). The SG consists of people mostly in their 40s and 50s who are “sandwiched” between aging parents who need care and their own children. According to the Pew Research Center, just over 1 of every 8 Americans aged 40 to 60 is both raising a child and caring for a parent, in addition to between 7 to 10 million adults caring for their aging parents from a long distance. US Census Bureau statistics indicate that the number of older Americans aged 65 or older will double by the year 2030, to over 70 million. SGers face many challenges including saving for their own retirement while trying to save for their children’s education.

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about common challenges SGers face after elderly parents die:

As older parents approach death, they often leave lengthy to-do lists for their children. The tasks can be both physical and financial. Some children must deal with a tangle of arrangements—everything from heating-oil contracts to trusts—along with jumbled stock certificates, car titles or life-insurance policies for which there may be no backup copies. Others must sift through boxes or rooms full of belongings. Sometimes siblings get involved, complicating matters further. When the chores become overwhelming, it can be difficult for family members to recover sentimental treasures or tie up financial loose ends. At the extreme, the sheer volume of stuff can clutter a house and weigh down its value—a problem if the home must be sold quickly.

Often the heir(s) get so overwhelmed they procrastinate indefinitely. I didn’t realize how many estate sale and related companies exist to help heir(s) tie up every imaginable loose end. Probably a growth industry given the aging population.

While reading the article I reflected on how extremely lucky I am that my mom and in-laws have wills; have made arrangements for and already paid to be cremated; and have provided detailed, organized info on their finances. Their end-of-life planning is a natural extension of their lifelong love.

Another blessing, they’ve begun giving away things, but all that means is they have a tad bit less than a lot. Which got me thinking about my own death and how radically simplifying my life could be a powerful final act of loving kindness for my wife and/or daughters.

The mindless cliche, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” is exactly backwards because the larger your material footprint upon death, the more onerous the task for your heirs to divide up, toss, sell, and just plain deal with everything.

What if, as I age, I gradually shift from run-of-the-mill decluttering to radical minimalism. And how cool if I could time my death to give away everything except a token or two for memory sake—say my iPad 56 with pictures and video of our life together. So after the funeral, my heirs return to a near empty house, relax in a peaceful unhurried manner, open a bottle of wine, and say nice things about the guy who left so few loose ends.

The Teaching Profession Desperately Needs Some Linsanity

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ESPN’s Elizabeth Merrill waxes philosophic about Jeremy Lin of New York Knick NBA basketball fame. Her angle? Lin is inspiring legions of young Asian American ballers to rethink what’s possible.

In some classes I teach, I use an activity I created titled “The Making of a Multicultural School.” In the activity students assume the role of teacher leaders who advise me, the principal, on the most important changes to make in order to manage conflict and strengthen teaching and learning at an increasingly diverse, hypothetical high school. First the “teacher leaders” individually rank seven specific challenges nearly all culturally diverse schools struggle with and then in small groups, they share their rankings and work together to establish common priorities. I wrote the challenges by working backwards from a list of multicultural education “best practices” as described in one of James Banks’ many books on multicultural education. Our discussion is always around their rationale for their priorities.

One of the seven challenges, recruiting and retaining a culturally diverse faculty, almost always gets rated as the seventh most important challenge. Meaning in my mostly white, mostly middle class students’ minds, it’s the least pressing issue. This happens over and over. The usual reasoning, a teachers’ attitudes are all that matter.

My students, tomorrow’s teachers, are unable to imagine what it would be like to be a student of color and hardly ever see anyone that looks like them standing in front of the class, a graduate of college, with a professional license, assuming a role of serious responsibility. Janitors, bus drivers, and office staff, sure; teachers and administrators, very rarely. Year. After year. After year. What is the cumulative effect on what young people of color think is possible?

The bad news is far too few Jeremy Lins and Latino and African-American candidates are pursuing teaching credentials today. Meanwhile, the country’s K-12 student body grows increasingly more diverse every year. So the “looks like me” gap steadily widens. To make matters worse, fewer students of color can afford four or five years of higher education even with targeted scholarships and financial aid. Plus the Supreme Court is revisiting decisions that colleges have relied upon to admit moderately diverse classes and states keep ratcheting up teaching licensure requirements and fees.

Many newer state requirements, like content exams in Washington State, are proving nearly insurmountable to too many of the handful of candidates of color who persevere to the final stages of the constantly changing, ever more challenging, teacher certificate journey. These realities don’t bode well for schools hiring and retaining many Asian-American, Latino, or African-American teachers. It also makes it more difficult to successfully implement a multicultural education that inspires all students and provides them with equal educational opportunities. This is doubly true when too many teachers expect less from students of color as illustrated by this highly recommended personal story by Ed Taylor.

There are 3.2 million teachers in the U.S. As many as half are expected to retire in the next decade. Figuring out how to make sure more of those 1m+ are strong Asian-American, Latino, or African-American men and women is among the most important public policy issues of our time. Instead of focusing intently on that, opinion leaders and policy makers are choosing to tighten the screws on today’s experienced classroom teachers. They’ve convinced themselves there’s a panacea for what ails public education—making teachers more accountable for student learning by tying together their students’ test scores, their evaluations, and their compensation.

All of this does not bode well for an increasingly diverse country.

One True Religion?

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Indulge me while I paint with a broad brush. Most people are either religious or non-religious. Among the religious, quite a few believe their religion is the one true religion. Consequently, those outside their tradition are unsaved or infidels and doomed to eternal damnation.

This “zero-sum, sheeps and goats” line of religious thinking might make a modicum of sense if there was a genuine free-market of religious ideas from which each adult chose once they had considered a wide-ranging smorgasbord. A grand religious meritocracy if you will where the most enlightened, hopeful, helpful religions would probably hold claim to the most adherents.

But that’s not even close to how religious people “choose their religion”. People’s religious choices are mostly the result of where they’re born. And I don’t know about you, but I had no control over where I was born (shout out to my faithful following in Boise, ID). Born in Northern Nigeria, one’s almost certainly a Moslem; Southern Nigeria, a Christian; central India, a Hindu; Israel, a Jew; Alabama, a Southern Baptist: Utah, a Mormon. In fact, do people choose their religion or does their family’s religion or the predominant religion where they grow up tend to choose them?

If religious identities are rooted in geography and culture, “zero-sum, sheep and goat, mine is the one true religion” belief only makes sense if some countries and cultures are special, divinely created, better than the rest. And why trust anyone who believes they won the birthplace lottery of life about religion or anything else?

Related recommendation.