EPISODE 435: THIS IS NOT THE WOOD FOR THE S'MORES

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

So IT Part Two came out this weekend, and as far as I can tell it’s pretty much IT Part One but with Bill Hader and extra Pennywise. (SO. MUCH. EXTRA.) There’s also a sequel to The Shining about to land, where Danny is old and Ewan McGregor and goes back to the Overlook Hotel to save a little girl with powers, and I’m all in as long as there’s absolutely no one dressed as a bear.

Stephen King also has another new book dropping this week, about an institution filled with kids with special powers, which is by my count at least his 13th book about kids with special powers (after Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, The Talisman, IT, Insomnia, Desperation, Hearts in Atlantis, Black House, Doctor Sleep and The Dark Tower Book VII), and usually the children are all 11 years old too, which is the age Stephen King was when his mother moved him and his brother back to Durham, Maine to care for her parents, and I’m not sure he’s ever written about his own experiences that year, but man I bet it was a doozy.

I’ve been driving up and down California the last five days. Just got home and my mind is melting like a high school gymnasium burned down during prom. This one’s probably going to be quick and dirty. Let’s do this.

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On Tuesday I had a surfing lesson. I’ve been in California nine years, I’ve often thought about trying to Ride the Waves (, Brah), but never had the guts. Until now!

It was an…interesting experience. (Does anyone know how to tell whether you’ve fractured your ribcage?)

So here’s the thing about surfing: It turns out, getting up is actually less hard than keeping yourself from sliding off the board while you are laying on your stomach just waiting for a wave to come. Honest to Cujo I just could not stay on the damn thing. The teacher told me the first time he got on a board he was in a swimming pool and even there he had trouble.

I did have a good time, as well as a pretty clear sense that if you could see the inside of my chest cavity it would be filled with bruises. I also found the whole thing gave me this new metaphor for life: Sometimes life is coming at you, and you find yourself able to ride it for a while, and it’s kind of great.

But eventually the crest of the wave crashes down on top of you and suddenly you are tumbling Tommyknocker over Dreamcatcher underwater, and it’s kind of overwhelming, but there’s not really anything you can do but just live with the chaos until it passes. And it always does.

Am I going to go out there again? I don’t know. I hope so, once I feel confident that my ribs have grown back stronger and I have practiced slipping and sliding on a large piece of wood in a still body of water.

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SUCCESSION fans: He’s never going to let Shiv have the company is he? What is wrong with that guy?

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Came upon some interesting thoughts about teaching this week. In his newsletter, author and teacher Philip Christman described part of his goal as a teacher as helping students “get better at being lost”: “It's the most important reading skill, arguably, and it's absolutely prior to a person's doing any interesting writing whatsoever. I need them to get lost a lot, and to learn not to resent the text or themselves for it.”

And then on the drive north I heard this great interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren about her love of teaching. Apparently she was a terror as a law school teacher at Harvard and yet most everyone loved her, too. And she had really thoughtful reflections on why she made things so difficult. Basically – and these are my words now – she understands a student as sort of like a hero on their journey. And for that journey to be a success, that student must face difficult obstacles, things that really push them beyond their perceived limits.

In this scenario, she sets herself up as the boss level, the monster that they have to figure out how to face down.

The interview also includes Warren talking about trying to teach a fifth grade Sunday school class, which she says was one of the hardest groups she ever had to work with. (So totally believable. Sunday school teachers, you are the real heroes.)

Things were so bad Warren was going to give up. Her breakthrough came when she stopped forcing them to do inane craft projects that didn’t really serve a purpose beyond distributing Elmer’s Glue all over the room and children’s hair, and pointed out crazy things in scripture passages like the idea of this guy Noah giving up his whole life to build a big boat for a supposed flood. Part of teaching is understanding your students and engaging them in ways that interest them.

I know there are some university professors out there; how do you think about the work of being a teacher?

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Also stumbled onto Anne Helen Petersen thinking about cheating in school. I guess the New York Times this week had a piece about websites where American kids are going to hire college graduates from other, poorer countries to write their papers for them.

And AHP, reading the piece, noted that in her experience cheating is usually much more about anxiety than laziness or entitlement.

When I was in the classroom, the students who plagiarized were never the worst students in the class. To be sure, there were a handful of students who are exactly the douchey, rich, entitled asshole you’re picturing as the customers of these services. But most teachers will tell you that the students plagiarizing weren’t the laziest, or the most entitled. They were often the solid B students, desperate, truly desperate, for As. They’d do extra credit, they never skipped class. For some assignments, they were in my office, asking questions, talking over drafts, incredibly anxious about thesis statements, at a loss about how to craft the rest of the essay. And then something would happen with an assignment — not even necessarily a big one! — where they’d get super overwhelmed, panic, and copy something from the internet.

These students don’t cheat because they’re lazy; they cheat because they’re incredibly anxious, terrified of failure, and haven’t been taught to come up with original arguments (or trust themselves when they do). They’re the students who got into a desired college through sheer determination. They’re not dumb or stupid or anything close to it. But they’ve become convinced that any sort of failure (on an assignment, in a class) is tantamount to total life failure, and accumulate anxiety about each assignment accordingly.

If you’ve never experienced anxiety, then it’s difficult to explain how counterintuitively it works: instead of helping you plan out the steps to succeed at a given task, it makes the task seem so insurmountable that you avoid it entirely, which creates more anxiety, which makes it seem even more insurmountable. Hence: googling “pay for essay” three hours before the assignment is due.

Many of these students are natural people pleasers: it’s part of how they got as far as they did. Which is why the idea of emailing or coming in to talk to their teacher about their failure to start the essay ahead of time is anathema. And a lot of teachers — myself included, in my early days of teaching — tell students things like “no extensions, no question” or “I’ll only entertain extensions if requested a day in advance.” And simply not turning something in, or turning it in late for a docked grade — also anathema for the striving, anxious student. So they do some ethical self-bargaining, and spend the money intended for food and “expenses” on an essay.

That spiral of anxiety – “they’ve become convinced that any sort of failure (on an assignment, in a class) is tantamount to total life failure, and accumulate anxiety about each assignment accordingly” – it's so true. And it makes me wonder whether the standard “You Cheat, You Leave” policy is always the proper response. Maybe counseling makes more sense, at least at first?

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For SUCCESSION fans who are up-to-date: What the hell was Shiv thinking???

(I was sort of eh about Succession’s first season. But this season it really is killing it, particularly in focusing on the uncomfortable conflicts within the family. Very hard to watch at times, but also also hard not to.)

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l learned so much from this story about the Amazon (and yes, most of it is terrible and sounds a lot like the way of the world 600 years ago).

I don’t know if you were at a family barbecue this weekend, but tell me this does not sound familiar.

Also, tell me this dance group from America’s Got Talent is not from Jersey.

Like, I said, quick and dirty (and maybe a little sleepy) this week. If you’re looking for something else to occupy your mind, I highly recommend All Systems Red by Martha Wells, the first of four novellas about a sort of cyborg assassin who rather than do its job likes to sit around watching all its favorite television shows. It’s funny and fantastic.

You may feel you are not who you want to be. You may feel stuck in some way, and see no path forward.

But just seeing often is the path. it’s like Heisenberg said, Observing changes the observed.

(Also, I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS.)

(You have to think were he to appear today the Real Heisenberg would be bombarded with that quote and even after watching the show he would have no idea what was up with all that.)

Some animals can squeeze between very small spaces. But it's worth noting, they don’t do it at full speed. So be gentle with yourself. Take your time. You are on the way whether it feels like it or not.

See you next week.