RICHARD FLORES, FIRST GRADER

RICKY: ARMED

Unbelievable though it seems to me now, it’s been nearly 25 years.  And I still lose sleep.  

         I served as a principal of an elementary school.  I’d been doing this long enough to know that if, whenever possible, I could spend time on the yard at recess, I could minimize the number of second-hand disciplinary accounts I needed to wade through after recesses.  Plus, shooting baskets with kids – particularly as poorly as I shot baskets – always served as a positive.

         A new fifth grade boy named Ricky presented a particular uniqueness almost from the moment he walked on campus that fall.  Handsome as a kid could be, but big and intimidating. Intellectually very, very sharp, but, unable – or, perhaps, unwilling – to be a friend.  My goal was to make him mine by interacting, shooting a few hoops and making eye contact whenever possible.  It didn’t work.  I think he knew I was looking but for some reason, he wouldn’t look back.  

         After a string of questionable behaviors – running through jump rope games, being overly physical on the court or while in touch football, ‘getting into the face’ of another student – the kid eclipsed my patience when he approached a fourth grader who was playing basketball, grabbed the ball and kicked it across the yard.  The littler kid puffed out his chest and said, “Go get that!” at which point Ricky put the kid in a headlock and punched his face not once, not twice but three times.  That earned the big boy a three day suspension from school, even though an assault charge and a report to the police might easily have been in order.

 

Suspensions – the very few that I issued – always required a student-parent conference upon reentry to campus.  The conversation at this one was particularly memorable. 

 

Me:            I’m glad you’re back at school.  This place isn’t complete unless all my students are here.

Mother and child both likely viewed this as condescending. Perhaps it was.

Mom:          Ricky has something to ask you.

Me:            Go ahead.

Ricky:        Why are you always picking one me?

 

Flabbergasted, I didn’t know quite how to respond.  I wasn’t going to argue with the child, I wasn’t going to mention the criminal assault I’d witnessed, though should have. Instead, I just sat there with my mouth hanging open until I released him back to class.

         His mom then spent a good five minutes excoriating me for singling out her son. “He comes home and tells me how he’s being bullied all the damned time!  And you, you who’s supposed to be in charge, you turn out to be just another male who lets him down!”  

Quite the tirade, I thought.  The school secretary, having heard the commotion from outside my closed door, agreed.

         

Later that afternoon, I received an unsolicited phone call from Ricky’s grandfather.  He apologized for the behavior of his daughter’s son and for that of his daughter.  “The boy’s had a rough time since his father abandoned him and his brother.  Really left my daughter in the lurch.” I thanked him for his concern, but he continued. “I’ve decided I need to take a stronger hand in teaching him some respect and responsibility so I’ve decided to take him and his brother up to the ranch an learn ‘em both how to work the animals and maybe learn’ em how to fire a rifle.”

         “Fire a rifle?” I don’t think I stammered, but I might have.

         “Yeah.  Target shooting. Cleaning the thing afterward.  I think that’ll help teach ‘em how to be respectful and responsible.  Deep down, I know he’s a really good kid.”

         My heart had always told me that deep down, they’re all really good kids. But in this case, I didn’t understand the logic.  Here was an angry kid, one who had become an expert at posing as the victim when he was the victimizer.  Indeed, he was a bully – but one whose behavior was always accepted by his parent. What the hell was learning him how to use a rifle really going to do for him?

I didn’t respond with that question. Instead, I thanked Grandpa for his concern but as I hung up the phone, a distinct chill coursed through my body.  This kid potentially could bring a firearm to school and, instead of punching someone his junior, he could pull it out and shoot him. Or he could storm into my office and shoot me. 

         That sleepless night, I found myself thinking not so much about my own mortality, but that if I were somehow incapacitated, how would I be able to protect my kids out on the yard or in their classrooms?  The thought didn’t leave me, even when I transferred from that school site position to an administrative slot in the neighboring district office.  Ricky knew where to find me, I was sure.

 

Retired now some fifteen years, that eerie chill revisits every time some kid gains access to a weapon and makes his way onto a school campus. If I were there, I’d throw myself in front of the kid if I thought it might save the life of another. 

That urgent, weird feeling of regard and disregard returned on a recent Monday when news broke of a 14-year-old who took out two fellow students and two math teachers at a high school in Georgia.  The kid’s dad reportedly bought him an AR as a birthday gift.  

 

I didn’t sleep well that Monday night.  I kept thinking of my boy, Ricky, Even though he could no longer be a threat to me.

About twenty years ago, over a holiday break – several years after Ricky left my elementary school campus – as a junior or senior in high school, his mom found her son hanging from a closet rod in his bedroom with his Sunday-best tie looped around his neck and knotted over the dowel.

         Over the course of my 35-plus years in education, I lost five – maybe six – students to early deaths.  One with a congenital heart defect.  Another slipped over a waterfall.  With each, I found myself burrowing into a quiet room where I could shut the door, turn down the lights and simply cry. 

         Ricky would be no exception.

         But I still lose sleep.

© 2024

Church of the Open Road Press

WALKING THE FULL BELLY FARM WITH DR. BENJAMIN BLOOM

I never was too impressed with the term “organic.”  Like “new and improved,” “lite,” “authentic,” “life-time,” “limited,” and now, “gluten free,” the term organic seemed tagged to a product simply as a marketing ploy.  At least that’s the way I saw it.  My spouse would buy organic vegetables and fruits and eggs, paying a little more, but when I went to the store, because of my built in cynicism and the fact at chemicals hadn’t killed me yet, I didn’t.

Recently, we ventured up California’s State Route 16 into the luscious Capay Valley.  It seems the first weekend in spring, or thereabouts, the Full Belly Farm has an open house. Berkeley friends are subscribers to a program called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) wherein Full Belly offers neighborhood delivery of fresh organic produce to customers in the Bay Area and Sacramento.  We plan a rendezvous with our friends at the farm.

Springtime in the Capay Valley is what God must have had in mind when Eden was created.  Rolling green hills are dotted with blue oaks and mantled in poppies and lupine.  Row upon row of blossoming stone fruit trees - almonds, peaches, plums - provide spring's signature fragrance while, against an azure sky, the sun plays hide-n-seek through puffy, fair weather clouds.

The highway twists through farmlands and pastures and into and out of bergs with populations that can be enumerated with merely two digits.  

I’ve ridden the road many times in all seasons of the year, always wanting to linger longer and dig deeper.  This day, I’d get to.

The Full Belly Farm is roughly 400 acres backing up to Cache Creek.  Salvaged from an aging almond orchard in the ‘80s, its four partner/owners employ 60 people year round.  Almost unheard of in agriculture, this employment model is only one of the enlightened possibilities availed by the philosophy of the ownership group: sustainability.   The walking tour with co-owner Paul explains it all.

We stroll past an apple orchard where Fujis are in blossom. “Other apples do better in this heat,” we are told….

…and a strawberry field.  Paul lifts the deer fence to let the children crawl under.  “Grab yourself a strawberry, but please be careful not to step on the plants”…

…on the way to a seven-acre plot of garlic.

“Small, diversified croplands,” he says.  “We can produce so much more and care for the land so much better.”

A flock of hens is penned by a temporary fence.  Inside the enclosure is a rolling hen house.  The hens scratch at the land by day repairing to the henhouse at night.  At regular intervals the fence and henhouse is moved to a new plot leaving behind the natural fertilizer than chickens produce.

In another area, sheep graze down tall grasses using their natural digestive processes to return nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil.

Beyond the rows of garlic, a field of lettuce varieties grows uniformly.  Seeds are planted between furrows.  When weeds sprout, “we smother them with dirt keeping the non-favored plant from getting sunlight.”

Natural oils are used to discourage some pest insects, but swaths of land with lush growth are reserved as insect havens.  “If you stop and look, you’ll soon see a lot of movement, hear a lot of sound. 

“Too many in agriculture treat honey bees like farm workers – and we shouldn’t treat our farm workers this way.  Traditionally we’d use the bees in the almonds, then put ‘em in a box and ship ‘em to the next job."

Paul points to a section of tousled, knee-high weeds and grasses.  “Here, we don’t have honey bee hives, but honey bees and other pollinators live here because we’ve set up environments in which they thrive.”

Among the mixed tangle of weed-like plants grows a variety with blue flowers.  “Flax,” we are told.  “We are experimenting with growing the plant for its fiber.”

And about that year-round employment?  “Because of how we do things - planting, harvesting and planting again, spring summer and fall, we have to have people here all the time.”  Then he adds: "Bees, too."

As we walk along, I begin to think of Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999) a preeminent educational thinker of the mid-twentieth century.  His taxonomy of learning processes is something we all studied as teachers. 

But finding examples of his theory actually put into practice are elusive.  Alongside farmer Paul, I suddenly realize I am walking alongside a real, live Benjamin Bloom. 

The success of this organic endeavor rests squarely in the farmer knowing how to employ Bloom’s hierarchy of thought.  Here’s what I saw:

Recall (or knowledge): The farmer knows the soil.  He knows the seed, the water, the exposure to sun, the heat, the cold, the seasons.  And the market.

Grasp (or understanding): The farmer understands what crops will be successful in which corner of the property.  He understands the strengths and weaknesses of a plant or variety.

Application: The farmer makes decisions about what goes where in concert with that grasp.

Analysis: The farmer gathers data, which may be as simple as measuring the yield of a particular product on a particular plot.

Synthesis:  The farmer marries what he’s learned about yields with what he’s learned about the natural benefits of sheep grazing and chicken scratching or reserving space for insects or allowing weed cover to mature in order to conserve moisture to enhance the chances for greater results in subsequent efforts.

Judge or conclude:  Experimenting with new combinations of exposure, water retention, micro-climates and poop, the farmer allows less productive practices to slip away to be replaced by those practices he judges to be more successful.

Perfunctory Old Truck Picture

Walking back to the farmhouse, I tell Paul he should be a teacher “…you know, if this farming thing doesn’t work out.”  Clearly there’s educational practice stuff he gets, I’m thinking. 

He chuckles, offering a very modest reply and then says something to this effect: It’s relatively simple to engage in all of those levels of thinking when you’re working with your hands in the soil day by day.  Our livelihood depends on it.  “Schools, I suppose, can’t do this too effectively because of cost, logistics…”

He’s right, of course.  Our students could receive a much more hands on – much better grounded – experience if schools could somehow be more like farms.  They would graduate with a less sterile but far more heightened sense of how things work and how those things work together.

It’d be organic.

o0o

Full Belly Farm is located just on County Road 43, off Highway 16 about a mile and a half north of Guinda.  They are open to the public on select days (see their website) and offer organic produce and fiber through farmer’s markets and their Community Supported Agriculture program.

Internships are available, school field trips are encouraged and there’s a summer camp for kids.

Check out their website for coming events and to learn more: http://fullbellyfarm.com/

© 2015

Church of the Open Road Press

“Lincoln on Leadership” – A Review

 Our cause must be entrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends – whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work – who care for the result.

- Remarks from “House Divided” Speech 1858

Educators, in many surveys, are described as people who are non-risk takers, who seek to please; compliant and sensitive to others.  Collectively, these and other common traits serve the purpose of moving most kids through their educational years with some balance of empathy and rigor.  It is often assumed that educational leaders, mainly coming from the ranks of educators in general, possess those same characteristics.  Arguably then, tough decisions that arise for all leaders appear tougher when viewed through the complex lenses of the teacher-turned-leader.

As a by-product of a recent visit to Lincoln’s boyhood home, I picked up and read “Lincoln on Leadership,” by Donald T. Phillips subtitled “Executive Strategies for Tough Times.” If ever a leader were ever confronted with monumental crises, it would be our sixteenth president.

Phillips discusses the circumstances from which many of Lincoln’s most time-honored writings grew and concludes chapters with principles Lincoln employed as he brought the nation back from its most critical hours and days:

·      If subordinates can stand it, so can you.  Set the example.

·      Invest time and money in better understanding the ins and outs of human nature.

·      When you extinguish hope, you create desperation.

·      The organization will take on the personality of its top leader.

·      Truth is the best vindication against slander.

·      When you are in deep distress and cannot restrain some expression of it, sit down, and write out a harsh letter venting your anger.  But don’t send it.

Whether a leader finds him or herself in the role of turning around General Motors, crafting a plan for intervention in Syria or Iraq, or achieving consensus with a group of primary teachers, the issue always gets down to people hearing, understanding, assisting and clearing the way for other people.  Too frequently, we find ourselves learning techniques about leadership only from a small wedge of individuals who come from our own field, thus missing out on the wisdom afforded by those with a perspective of greater, or at least, different challenges.

Reflecting on my own career, I suppose I inherently got some of Lincoln’s teachings right, but there are a hell of a lot I wish I’d have understood at critical moments.  Phillips's book, at times, provided a less than comfortable mirror for me.

Teacher/leader buddies: this nicely proportioned volume comes highly recommended.  This is published by an imprint of Hachette Book Group, so don’t expect to find it on Amazon.  Instead, see your local bookseller.

o0o

“Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times.”  Donald T. Phillips.  Business Plus.  1992.  $15.

© 2014

Church of the Open Road Press

SCRABBLING TOGETHER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

How do you structure communication to ensure the greatest number within the population get the message? 

The effective message will have three components.  In order, those components will:

1            Tell the target audience what you’re going to tell them.

2            Tell the target audience.

3            Tell the target audience what you’ve told them.

Sound repetitive?  If the message is important, that may be just what it takes.

Just for grins, try this: 

Using a sheet of paper placed “landscape” in front of you, draw an east-west line across the middle edge to edge.

Make a row of letters, A through Z, using the tiles from a Scrabble^® Game.  No need to use either of the blanks.  You’ll only need twenty-six of the tiles.  Place the letters below the horizontal line in alphabetical order.

Assume that the row of letters represents the universe of people with whom you need to communicate an important message.

Compose a memo including those three sections of text.

Read section one [telling the audience what you’re going to tell them].  As you do this, move all of the vowels north of the line.  This is a smidge under 20% of the population.   

These letters represent the individuals in the organization that are involved and engaged in just about everything.  They are the ones who will figure out the point of your missive right off the bat.  They are essential to both communication and to getting the job done.  Imagine having to communicate any message wtht ny vwls whtsvr.  Move the Y north also, because s/he’s pretty much in that category.  [Note: if you understood “wtht ny vwls whtsvr” in less than a few seconds, you’re probably a vowel yourself.]

Next, read section two [telling the target audience].  As you do this, move any Scrabble tile with a point value less than five north of the line.   

The letters represent the people in the organization that have a lot to do, that may be distracted by the innumerable tasks at hand or issues du jour from some other aspect of their life.  They want to get the message and will get the message, but perform better when the message doesn’t sneak up on them.  Once they’ve received the message, they can go forward with the mission, integral to ensuring its success.

That leaves us with 5 letter tiles: J, K, Q, X and Z.  Again, just fewer than 20% of the population.  Before reading section three [telling the audience what you’ve just told them], consider where our language would be without these letters in our alphabet.   

How would we articulate “jazz,” or “kiss,” or “Quixotic,” or “exotic,” or “zest.”  Or "sex," for that matter!  Some of the most engaging, thought-provoking, sensual and meaningful words we speak employ some of the least used letters. 

These five letter tiles represent not the ne’er-do-well, who-gives-a-damn crowd.  Rather, they represent a creative element whose minds may be off in many directions simultaneously.  They are not multi-taskers; rather, while doing the task, they likely have dendrites engaged in lots of different endeavors.  These represent the if-you-want-to-get-something-done-ask-a-busy-person subgroup.  The first two sections of the memo were simply an effort to get their attention funneled in your direction for long enough to deliver the message.   

The third section, to them, is the message.

In short then:

The first part of the memo or talk alerts all that something important is coming.  (Note to leaders: Make sure that the something coming is important.)

The second part succinctly offers a narrative message, list of steps, procedural outline or management report important to the mission of the organization.

The third part represents the leader’s best effort to ensure everyone gets the message.

A small disclaimer: Should all communication include this repetitive format?  Probably not.  But understand that if the leader doesn’t make every effort to ensure that his or her most creative personnel absorb the critical message, the result of the overall mission will fall short of its potential.

Note:

Q:  Scrabble tiles include two blanks with no point value.  What should I do about them?

A:  What benefit are they offering the organization?

© 2012

Church of the Open Road Press

CULTIVATED IGNORANCE

A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR who’d lived in Chico for nearly two decades, held on to a lilting Australian accent even after all those years. As a young teen, I figured his affectation helped win the hearts of co-eds in the classroom, later adding to that thought, “and perhaps other places.” My mother felt his voice should have assimilated into the melting pot long ago. “Oh, he works at keeping it. He just has a cultivated accent.”


AT A COMMISSION MEETING for a rural California county, members were asked to approve actions that would support “Smart Growth.” The idea revolves around building communities with more efficient transportation networks, walking paths, bike trails; encouraging use of recycled and renewable materials; and encouraging the development of “Green” industries. The commission was unanimous. They voted it down. “Too much bureaucracy,” one stated. “Loss of local control,” stated another. “Global warming is a myth,” said a third.

It can be argued that it was prudent for these guys to be wary of change. Too frequently our legislative bodies respond what's couched as an urgent need only to end up with a solution that is worse than the problem. That said, however, it is not okay, in the face of mounting evidence, for a public representative to make decisions based upon cultivated ignorance. i.e.: "Global warming is a myth."


CULTIVATED IGNORANCE is something one ‘works at’ by being selective about that which the individual allows to influence his thinking. It breeds in people who are unwilling to change the radio dial, pick up a book or read a newspaper. Folks who get all of their news and information from the Internet are easily infected, too. Typically, folks suffering from C I aren’t in too great a rush to hear the other side of the argument.

Individuals and companies that benefit from the status quo are fans of Cultivated Ignorance. These entities know that if they can convince Joe the Plumber that climate change is a myth, regulation is bad, universal health care will kill grandma, and that tax money is always wasted, Joe will vote against his own and his community’s own best interest. And the wealth will continue to flow.

Just not to Joe. Joe will develop cancer or diabetes. His kid: asthma. Gas will continue to get more expensive. The summer droughts longer; the winter weather weirder and more severe. And the cops may not show up when Joe needs ‘em.


THE CURE FOR CULTIVATED IGNORANCE comes to a well-educated society in the form of scientific research; thoughtful, reasoned discussion; personal introspection absent – if just for moments – those influences that stand to gain from maintenance of the status quo; and a willingness to see change as opportunity.

We do need to take actions locally to stem the impact of our way of life on the planet’s natural systems. Such actions may not be beneficial to those to whom the wealth currently flows, but the eco-system doesn't really give a crap about who has money and who does not. Neither should we, because that’s one thing that probably isn't going to change.

But we should collectively care for our eco-system, which will change. And is.

A Parable

THE LOCOMOTIVE hung wheezing from the gnarled and ruptured rails just past the eastern bridgehead. Engineer and crew hours ago swept down river.


THE EVENT lurked sure as evil on a moonless night. The darkness, the storm, the lateness of the train’s arrival from Reno.

He’d been told the river was up – roadbed saturated from a week and a half of unseasonably warm rain. He hadn’t known an ancient Douglas Fir uprooted itself, washed down the torrent and loosed the trestle from its footings.

Warned to go light on the throttle, the rookie charged himself, instead, to “make up time.”

© 2009
Church of the Open Road Press