Book Review: Getting Schooled by Garret Keizer

I never could bring myself to read all the way through books by alleged super teachers like Ron Clark and Rafe Esquith.  While they offer some sound advice (and their tomes are nothing but a patchwork quilt of pithy recommendations, often enumerated and always emphatic), their primary example of how a classroom should look and operate was their own, and at times the pointless bragging about going to the White House or having the president namedrop them in a State of the Union speech grew tiresome.  To be honest, it wasn't "at times" or "grew tiresome."  It was as consistently annoying as trying to lie out in the hammock on a pleasant day only to be pestered by mosquitos (a common occurrence here in Savannah).

Imagine, then, my relief at Garret Keizer's testimony to the triumphs and trials of teaching, where right on the first page he lays naked his shortcomings and aspirations:

It's fair to say that I have never gone to work in a school with what might be called purity of heart, though much of what I know about purity of heart I learned there.

Keizer second guesses not only local and federal policies and procedures, but turns his bitter, geezerly, cynical eye mainly on his own soul.  When he does stab at policy, however, it is delightfully mordant:

... throughout the school year, I will repeatedly be struck by the sense that the professed goal of creating 'a level playing field' through education is little more than the goal of sorting winners from losers with a steady hand and a clear conscience.  The single greatest expression of the American project, American public education is also its most cynical lie. ... I'm still straining to keep my mouth shut ... 

He also does not spare his students this raking analysis and dry commentary:

I have a small, highly cooperative lunch-period study hall, and a most delightful girl on the list, someone whose studiousness and affability seem to rub off on her neighbors.  One day she has nothing to do ... I ask her if she likes art.  Yes, she likes art very much.  Music to my ears - among several of the books I've brought to school for browsing is an expensive coffee table compendium of painting and sculpture by three Italian masters ....  The girl glances at the book without opening it.  'Thanks,' she says, 'but I guess I'll just draw,' by which she means penciling in the scribbled loops on a torn-out page of lined notebook paper.  So much for the Renaissance.

The running theme, then, is hypocrisy and the disappointment it engenders.  But, again, Keizer rifles through no one's corrupt morality more than his own.  When he mentally criticizes a troubled student for her sloppy work ethic, he immediately pulls out the whip for a round of self-flagellation:

     Not that I would say such a thing, and I'm not exactly pleased with myself for thinking it.  Even in this funky little tutorial I am reminded of how hard it it to predict when and how a girl or boy is going to catch fire. ... I'm reminded as well of how hard-won an achievement a kid's mere attendance can be relative to the forces keeping her down. ... And, perhaps, who knows, my greatest contribution to her life may be the remembrance of a single late afternoon when she glimpsed what it means to be part of a community of scholars.  It will be my fondest remembrance too: I know even as I'm sitting here that the year will hold nothing better than this.

So the drive to change lives and teach, to be a teacher, to teach students, lets go the accelerator and drifts off to settling for a single moment of semi-successful after school tutoring.  Keizer's honesty allows his greatest insight, that we cannot really be those plastic Ken doll National Teachers of the Year, hailed by presidents, book publishers, and motivational speaker bureaus alike.  We try, and we fail.  We cannot change every life with which we intersect, after all, but we do well enough to try, and to have those occasional moments of epiphany when we realize that Bob Marley was right, that we don't have to worry about a thing, because every little thing is gonna be alright.  Even if it really won't.

Book Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

We've all experienced it: you have a dream so vivid and affecting that you wander all day in and out of recollections of the dream and marveling at how perfectly it dovetails with your waking life.  The sensible part of you reassures the speculative part that dreams don't really mean anything, that Freud has been largely debunked, and yet you can't shake the fog of dreams misting up before your eyes and making the air you breath a bit heavier.

Reading Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is much like that waking dream.  Even the piece of music Murakami selects as the novel's theme (he always does, whether it's The Beatles or Janacek) is a murky piece oscillating between dream and life.  The plot is simple: a middle-aged man seeks to discover why his four high school friends renounced him shortly after he left for college.  The overarching theme seems to be the idea of reconciling with one's past, and yet Murakami cannot leave things so simple.

When your girlfriend gives you a tie, is it just a tie?  After all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  But Murakami is a master at imbuing exchanges which appear dull with terrific meaning:

     "Thank you.  It's beautiful."
     "Some men don't like to get ties as gifts."
     "Not me," Tsukuru said.  "I never get the urge to go out and buy a tie.  And you have such good taste."
    "I'm glad," Sara said.
     Tsukuru removed the tie he'd been wearing, one with narrow stripes, and put on the one Sara had given him.

It's just a tie, right?  However, their relationship ends on a strange note, unresolved, with Tsukuru suddenly overwhelmed by desire for her but Sara asking for a three-day break from their relationship.  It's just a tie, right?  Everything in this novel is a mysterious quasi-symbol subject to interpretation, as if we were at a Freudian dream-reading seminar.

Early on in the book he introduces a little mystery:

     After trying out the piano, Midorikawa took a small cloth bag from his shoulder bag and gingerly placed it on top of the piano.  The bag was made of expensive cloth, the opening tied up with string.  Somebody's funeral ashes, maybe? Haida thought.  It seemed like placing the bag on top of the piano was his habit, whenever he played.  You could tell by the practiced way he went about it.

Having caught our interest, Murakami has his character ask about the bag:

     "What is that bag?" Haida's father ventured to ask.
     "It's a good-luck charm," Midorikawa said simply.
     "Like the guardian god of pianos?"
     "No, it's more like my alter ego," Midorikawa replied ... 

It turns out that Murakami is building dreamlike layers of storytelling, taking us both further from the main story and deeper into it.  The bag is a talisman, a "token," which grants the possessor a costly metaphysical "true sight."  But this story belongs to Midorikawa, told to Haida's father, retold to Haida, retold to Tsukuru (and then, of course, retold to us by Murakami).  These retellings lend the tale a folksy status, like Rowling's tales of Beedle the Bard, or, more significantly, like the retelling of a dream.  This story-within-a-story (within a story, within a story) casts Tsukuru's otherwise pedestrian odyssey in a different light.

He is not simply searching the dim corners of the past for meaning, looking to turn a bad ending into a good one.  He is trying to discover what is in the bag, and if it really allows the bearer to see the truth.  Murakami ingeniously makes his main character a builder, but a builder of train stations, a man who creates the in-between places, the spots we do not really seek out but only pass through, the way places of life.

So we cannot trust the pat ending Murakami offers for the cursory reader, as when Tsukuru parts from one of his former friends:

     "Thank you for coming all this way to see me," she said.  "I can't tell you how happy I am that we could talk like this.  I really feel like a great burden has been lifted, something that's been weighing me down forever.  I'm not saying this solves everything, but it's been a huge relief."
     "I feel the same way," Tsukuru said.  "Talking with you has helped a lot. ..."

We end not with this seemingly happy ending, but with a whisper of doubt, a wind of wondering what's in the bag: is there a way to possess understanding of the truth in life, or will life always be like a dream we can't interpret?

     He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep.  The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of the night, where it disappeared.  All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees.

What a perfect image of ungraspable nature of reality and dreams: a wind slipping through white birch trees.  In the end of the book, then, as in life, we do not gain a peek into the bag.