Category Archives: Writing

Being A Public Secondary School Principal Is Not For The Weak Of Heart

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Or anyone lacking superhuman interpersonal skills.

Jessica Winters’s story in The NewYorker titled ” The Meltdown of a Middle School in a Liberal Town” (April 3, 2024) left me wondering how a school district starts over. It’s a case study of things completely falling apart in an Amherst, Massachusetts public middle school. It features angry parents, school personnel ignoring the separation of church and state, educators wholly unprepared to work with trans students, cultural conflicts of all sorts, and many other layers of public school dysfunction.

Today there’s a similarly harrowing story in The New York Times, titled, “A Principal Confronted a Teenage Girl. Now He’s Facing Prison Time.”

The heart of the matter:

“For educators everywhere, the criminal prosecution of Mr. Sanchez for an action that schools typically handle using their own disciplinary codes opens up new levels of potential risk. Fights are part of high school life. If a school official can be not just disciplined but also jailed for intervening to break up or prevent a fight, what are teachers supposed to do?

In an interview, Mr. Sanchez mentioned a fight last year in which a teacher told the students to stop but did not physically separate them. ‘And the parent was just so upset when they saw the video, like, ‘Why isn’t this person stopping it?’’ he said. ‘And to be honest, I was a little upset, too. I didn’t say that to the parent, but I did say, ‘Well, because sometimes people are worried about liability.’”

Recently, I did a writing workshop with fifteen K-12 teachers who are seeking school principal certification. More specifically, they were applying for grants that provide them substitutes for their classrooms so they can get the required hours interning as administrators-to-be.

Impressive group, but after reflecting on these stories, I can’t help but wonder if they know what they’re committing to. The numerous simultaneous challenges they will soon face. The public’s anger and disregard for one another. The tenuousness of the public commons. The toll it will take on them and their families.

My guess is not entirely, because if they did, they’d probably choose professional paths where mere mortals stand much better odds of succeeding.

Kara Swisher And The Female Ego

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I regularly listen to both of Kara Swisher’s podcasts, her own, and hers with Scott Galloway. As a result, I’m an expert on all things KSwish.

She’s a fascinating case study in gender because she prides herself in being atypically female. Her extreme self-confidence often tips over into bragging about herself. She makes no apologies for being the self proclaimed “best tech journalist” currently working. When you look up “swagger” in the dictionary. . .

She is good at what she does and she has accomplished a lot. At present, she’s on a nationwide book tour for her new book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, which is selling well. Among other things, people like that she’s so opinionated.

Normally, I think of her braggadocio as a harmless personality quirk, but her promoting of her book tour is proving way, way too much. The to-this-point undefeated male ego has finally met its match. Name an especially egregious male whose ego runs amok. KSwish would give that dude a run for his money.

Case in point. She recently bragged about doing the best job of anyone reporting on what really happened with Sam Altman’s firing and rehiring at OpenAI. She said something to the effect of, “It was cool to see I still got it. And that I can still be the best beat reporter going.” Swisher isn’t a reporter anymore because her ever expanding ego makes it impossible to defer to interview subjects. She has to be the story. End of story.

Maybe a women with an unbridled ego is alright, fuck the patriarchy and all, but I’m repelled by egomaniacs of either gender. I’m at an “advanced” stage of my life where I’m drawn to people who sublimate their ego in the service of others. Especially when that service takes the form of disciplined listening. Of choosing not to speak. Of looking, and listening, and learning.

That said, I am down with KSwish-like ambition. And even her admittedly excessive work ethic and intense focus on professional status. With the critical caveat that we keep Qoheleth’s Old Testament Ecclesiastes insight front and center—that’s there’s a season for everything. Including ambition, professional status, and ego.

In your 20s, 30s, and 40s, go crazy. Be ambitious. Work hard. Achieve things. Line your pockets. Increase your status.

But KSwish, like your Humble Blogger, was born in 1962. And listening to her promote herself over and over makes me wonder, when should one stop giving a shit? When is the time to cull our professional “to do” lists and create space for others?

Of course it’s a personal decision. KSwish would vehemently reject my suggestion that we think about our professional identities in terms of life chapters. She would profanely brush off my suggestion that we defer to our younger colleagues on their way up.

And that’s her prerogative.

I’m repelled by KSwish’s self promoting, look-at-me, in-your-face ego. But, but being the expert I am, I can say this with total confidence. She doesn’t give a shit about what I think about her. Which is her most appealing trait.

It’s My Parents’ Fault

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Suffice to say, my personal life has gotten significantly more difficult of late. Obviously, this isn’t the time or place for any details. Just know, as your humble blogger, I am “compartmentalizing” these days.

The GalPal wants me to find a therapist to help make things less difficult. I know lots of people who are benefitting from therapy, and intellectually I am definitely pro-therapy, but when push comes to shove, I am Resistant to seek the help of a mental health counselor myself.

Not only am I pro-therapy, I believe our well-being depends largely on the quality of our closest interpersonal relationships, and those relationships depend largely on our willingness to be vulnerable about our inner lives.

The gender stereotype that males think and talk almost exclusively about tangible objects—whether news, weather, or sports, okay maybe cars too—doesn’t apply to me. I’m always thinking about deeper things than just how bad UCLA men’s basketball is this year.* What to do with the nearly constant deeper inner dialogue, that is the question.

Two imperfect answers spring to mind. The first was modeled by a friend a week ago when he asked if we could talk. He suggested a bike ride, and despite the frigid temps, of course I was in. Looping FishTrap Loop shoulder to shoulder, I initiated, “So, what’s up?” “It’s a long story,” he started, but really it wasn’t. It was a very good talk/ride and I’d like to think he felt better afterwards.

What’s imperfect about that? With occasional exceptions like the one just described, my closest friends, being of the male persuasion, aren’t as adept as women at talking about their feelings. As a result, it’s rare for a male friend to genuinely ask, “So, what’s up?” Could I take more initiative with my friends in digging deeper into “real” life? Fo sho.

In theory, writing could be a helpful outlet too. That is, if I could figure out the endlessly convoluted privacy concerns of those nearest and dearest to me. Which I can’t. And before you suggest it, journaling ain’t the answer, because that’s just a more visible form of the inner dialogue.

So, given those limitations, why not just “do” therapy? Asked differently, what the hell is wrong with me, that I’m so resistant to “professional” help?

I’ve been mulling that around and around.

What I’ve concluded is that the Good Wife doesn’t fully appreciate just how much I am a product of my parents’ “too extreme for their own good” intense independence. Both my mom and my dad grew up without much, during the Depression, in eastern Montana. When my dad died, his obituary was in the New York Times. Individually and together, they developed resilient, “grin and bare it” approaches to life that worked for them.

Mostly. Better for my dad than my mom who would have benefitted greatly from therapy after my dad’s death, from which she never really recovered.

Again though, that knowledge of how helpful therapy can be is overridden by my parents’ modeling which was rooted in the brutal conditions of eastern Montana in the 1930’s. Suffering was synonymous with living. You just endure it, in whatever form it takes.

Asking me to just dial up a therapist feels like asking me to break from my past and my people, to defy my DNA. Despite all the decades, I am still of eastern Montana, still of Don Byrnes, still of Carol Byrnes, still of believing that I must grin and bare it mostly alone.

For better, or more likely, for worse.

*thank goodness for the women

On Today’s Run

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I listened to Ezra Klein talk to Gloria Marks about her book,“Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity”. Marks is a professor at UC Irvine.

I probably wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I was underwhelmed by Marks who confirmed Klein’s view that we’re easily distracted these days and how helpful walks in nature are to our paying attention and well-being more generally. Despite Klein’s borderline annoying earnestness, Mark’s came across as “All hat and no cattle.”

And let’s not rule out the very real possibility that I’m just jelly that I don’t have a remotely similar platform for my own peabrain ideas.

Maybe if I did a deeper dive into Mark’s work, I’d be more impressed, but having been around the academic block a few times, I suspect her academic profile is the result of two things—focusing exclusively on a highly relevant topic and mastering the art of self promotion. Do note the slick personal website.

Often, there’s a weak correlation between the intelligence and importance of a person’s writing/speaking and their relative popularity. It’s rarely, if ever, what you see is what you get.

I prefer more original writers/thinkers that cast wider nets, blur the lines between disciplines, and challenge my preconceived assumptions about things.

The Best Book of 2023

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In the 2022 film, Banshees of Inisherin, Colm Doherty’s motivation may not have been fully appreciated amidst the story’s intensity. Doherty wanted to avoid smalltalk at any cost because he realized he had become old and the end was near, so if he was going to leave any meaningful legacy, he had to focus exclusively on his musicianship.

I wonder if we avoid questions of legacy out of a fear of being forgotten. Will anyone remember? If so, who? And what will they remember? And for how long?

Enter Jonny feckin’ Steinberg, author of Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage. I predict Steinberg’s book will be the go-to source for understanding the end of apartheid for hundreds of years. I read it because I followed the anti-apartheid struggle closely in my twenties and I wanted to learn more about two of the central characters. And not knowing much about their marriage, I suspected there would be some salacious details.

Almost immediately though, I got distracted by Steinberg’s brilliance, constantly wondering how he managed telling such a complex and intimate story in the most intelligent way imaginable. Surgical is the word that springs to mind. Steinberg, working mostly from a 15,000 page file illegally held on to by one of the government’s top security officials, repeatedly takes readers inside the Mandela’s relationship, into Nelson’s Robben Island prison cell, inside the African National Congress’s machinations, and onto the streets of the Soweto uprising.

The descriptive writing is good, but what’s most exceptional about the book is Steinberg’s masterful interpretation of documents and events. It’s an ingenious example of historiography or how history should be written. Sometimes Steinberg opts for humility and uses tentative language such as “Although we can never know for certain, . . .” At others, he fearlessly calls into question both central characters’ veracity, especially Nelson’s. Most of the time though, he’s helpfully splitting the difference, thoughtfully offering a particular interpretation based upon the precise historical context and the preponderance of evidence. Very early on, Steinberg’s brilliant interpreting and reasoned judgement caused me to conclude that he was the most credible of narrators.

Steinberg’s acknowledgements reveal that he had eight editors across three publishing houses. And he’s generous in crediting his research assistant, several archivists, and numerous readers of his drafts. Writing may be a solitary endeavor, but publishing a seminal work of this nature, clearly is not.

In terms of the story itself, first and foremost, one can’t help but be overwhelmed by the scale of the government’s persistent human rights abuses and violence, but also the black-on-black violence it engendered.

Another lasting lesson is that the media places individuals on pedestals, whether Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy by limiting coverage of their failings, both personal and political. For if we get too close, we will always find, just like with Nelson and Winnie, the famous aren’t just fallible, they’re extremely flawed.

There are many other take-aways. While an imperfect analogy, I came to think of Nelson as a Martin Luther King like thinker and activist and Winnie as a female Malcom X. This tension begs important questions including how does social change happen, nonviolently or violently, slowly or quickly? And if changing a violent regime requires its own violence, how do the survivors turn off that spigot?

Sometimes There’s A Breakthrough

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The final paper. A self-assessment of one’s writing progress. Which admittedly, is a bit presumptuous.

A fave excerpt from one student’s paper.

“But this prewriting is different than what I thought it would be; my prewriting involves putting my professor into a (metaphorical) box, and I put that box into another box. Then, I put that box in the garage and forget about it. Only at this point do I return to my brainstorming and drafts. I have learned that if I do not do this I expend too much energy trying to inject the professor into my creation. Once I realized that my writing is for myself, not the professor, I found that writing is an engaging process of self discovery and growth. This is most evident in my penultimate paper on the concept of soulmates.”

Typically, academic writing is an impersonal jumping through hoops, with students preoccupied by grades. Students inevitably develop a teacher-centric orientation when writing in school, asking themselves, “To get the best grade possible, what and how am I expected to think and write?”

If I could only get all of my students to put me in a box, inside a box, in a garage. Yes, I would prob suffocate to death, but I would die happy.

It Was a Good Week

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A sign that you may be slipping. You can’t find where you wrote about our need for more fist fights in the humble blog’s archive.

Everyone’s lamenting the decline of the (dis)United States this week all because one Congressman allegedly elbowed another in the kidney and one Senator proposed fighting the Teamsters President during a formal hearing after the Teamsters President called the Senator a “clown” and “fraud” on social media before adding, “You know where to find me. Anyplace, anytime cowboy.”

That is good stuff. But it got even better.

The Senator replied, “Sir, this is a time. This is a place. You want to run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults — we can finish it here.”

I like the emphasis on both parties consenting. There has to be some sort of code. Fisticuffs should never be forced.

“OK, that’s fine. Perfect,” the Teamster President responded.

“Well, stand your butt up then,” Senator taunted, with Teamster President telling Senator to do the same.

Then, it was all RUINED by a Vermont Socialist who went all schoolmarm on his colleague.

Here’s what Senator Byrnes would’ve said if he was chairing the hearing.

“Thank you for not shooting at each other and risking not just your lives, but innocent bystanders lives. We should all take pride in the fact that no one died here today. Thank you to the gentleman from Oklahoma and the gentleman from the International Brotherhood for illustrating that some forms of violence are better than others. Similarly, we should all show some gratitude to the Former Speaker for opting to elbow his colleague in the kidney instead of shooting him. Clearly, we are evolving, maybe not as fast as some would like, but evolving all the same.”

Sometimes

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Sometimes you get an amazing student from Ethiopia by way of Turkey. Who says he’s never been asked to be introspective or write personal essays about existential questions. A student who explains that where he comes from people are preoccupied with food, shelter, and clothing. That there’s no context or momentum for what I’m asking.

Maslow and all.

He’s quiet in class. As in silent.

But, as it turns out, he’s listening closely and reading with an open mind. And oh, what a mind. As a result, he takes to being introspective like a duck to water.

And so he writes personally and beautifully about his family’s struggles and his own in a way that belies his youth. And starts to think that maybe he can help Ethiopians, and others in developing countries, start thinking about existential questions in ways that will benefit them.

A computer science major with serious math chops, he asks to talk after class.

“How can I improve?” I tell him, “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing—reading our texts closely, being introspective, and writing honestly about what you’ve overcome.” And “don’t deprive us of your insights during class discussions.”

He doesn’t think other students will relate to or understand his experiences since they’re so different. I suggest he might be surprised by the exact opposite, that they’ll be especially interested in his life experience because it’s so different.

He smiles at the thought and commits to contributing more. Meaning some.

I tell him he’s talented, that he could be a writer, that he has unique and compelling stories to tell.

And then, he says it. “I want to be a writer.”

My guess, he’ll travel the world; knock the technology ball out of the park; and become a popular, widely read writer.

To have played a small part in his journey is pretty damn cool.