Just some observations

Student aides—in the front office walking you to the next office where someone had  a schedule for you, and bringing you your hat when you’d forgot it; in classes, grading and returning worksheets, sitting next to a student misbehaving and chatting with the teacher; in the library, so carefully lining up the chairs again after the first bell—he’d looked at me in the hall earlier and asked, I don’t know if forlornly or hopefully, if he knew me from somewhere. 

And the rowdy boys so easily cowed once their teacher called them out, but she’d given them a good while to themselves, letting them dig a bit of a hole for themselves first, while everyone else got to work. The one kid in the back who asked if I had change for a five showed up in the library the period after, escorted by the security guard who’d been sitting there reading until he’d said something into his radio and gone to get him. He listened while the boy told what had happened, impassive, until they both settled into a silence where each reflected the other, the peace of a tumult exhausted. He walked him back after a while without saying a word, and came back to read some more. I wanted to ask him what it was like being a security, but the period was nearly up. They’re really so short. Some of those rowdy boys would stop distracting each other when I just stood nearby, or in their line of sight between the ones who’d been placed across the room from each other. But with the kid who’d been with the security guy that didn’t work. 

And all that the others learned from this was to wait until they didn’t think the teachers were paying attention, then mess with each other again. They trained their attention to know when the others’ attention was absent—but that’s no good for any kind of constructive cooperation. It all stays a game. Winning is getting away with it, losing is getting caught, and maybe  punishment, which is silence—which is the same as behaving, but just a roundabout way of getting there.

Learning is learning to be silent, and so when it’s time to converse, share an opinion, explain oneself, you get responses in monosyllables, mumbles, if not just silence. Among themselves, kids learn to interact in their own way, and whatever of that they’re able to preserve underneath the silence and in those lacunae from the teacher’s attention, that’s their creativity and their joy. And they must have questions they don’t ask. There’s too much interesting stuff around the sides of the room not to notice—skulls, anatomical models, laminated posters, aquariums luxuriant with slime and humming filters. And Mendel the monk in the garden, eye colors. 

The questions com e out tentatively in the down time at the end of class—why can’t the whole lesson be this natural? We are afraid of the possibilities, of ways it can go wrong, and so don’t believe it might somehow get made to work. This process of improving things, so slow, interrupted, dragged backwards or tunnel-visioned, even for good, experienced teachers. To get kids to fear and toe the line, speaking in a loud voice and taking no sass, in particular at the beginning of the year, so that you can joke with them and they respect you later. But I don’t think I can keep a straight face.

Continued into February

All the time I’m looking for a palimpsest, and it’s harder and harder to find as all communication becomes immaterial and instantaneous. Where then do I turn my hand to give it the sense of creating things just for itself, and ordering stray thoughts by means of leftover pieces of the world? These are not entirely idle considerations. But they aren’t the most pressing issues either, not yet. 

The first thing is the way we use our time, and I mean this to include, how much of ourselves we put into the things we do, also, not only the outward results of what we accomplish, but the inward sense, the intention which impels it and the meaning which abides in it. We derive our inspiration about these things much more from the role models for what we want to be than from a real necessity to do much of anything—but as the outward importance laid on the products diminishes, the need for some inward satisfaction remains, and lacks its outlet. Then but if you go looking for just that, you find all false and empty answers, detached from their real context—self-help and yoga and ennui—whereas the most basic chores and work of living—housekeeping, bookkeeping, a yard or garden or front porch—go neglected, and you ignore the connection between the two. 

Go a little further afield, get more serious about being a good person instead of just making a living, living well, and perhaps you see some hope in service, through some organization dedicated to placing people just like you in the places where work needs to get done. But forasmuch as there is something good about this, and it makes you feel necessary and whole, there is something bad about it, too, something forced. Isn’t it that the person who should be doing this work be someone already there, and you find some work like this to do back where you are from? It is all to the good to have some experience of another place and another way of doing things, and while there learning it by doing the things—but then either you assimilate and stay there or you stay basically who you are and go back home to share it and better appreciate all that you had all along, leaving it to the people you met in that other place to take something of what you offered them and apply it to the particular needs they have, while you do the same. 

What prevents this from working, in fact, are the structures that keep communities from being self-sufficient , and the thought-cliches arising from this status quo reinforce it—a nomadism, rootlessness, dog-eat-dogedness—into which step well-meaning organizations which go on reinforcing it. There are enough people in any community the size of a neighborhood to provide for all the physical and spiritual needs they are born having, and then some—enough not just to survive, which any individual or family can do, but to live a human life in peace and grow at it, which takes a community. Anything bigger—as soon as you can’t account for each person by name and relationships, and don’t notice if they go missing—stops being on a human scale, and starts to serve other ends than the human development of all its members. Things like the pride of a ruler or glory of a god. But to get back into a community takes time and space, which only those benefiting from the status quo actually have, and don’t seem inclined to use for this purpose, or else the kind of violent uprising which never achieves quite what it says, though it may more or less destroy what had been before. But let’s look at persuading the people who could live this way if they really wanted to, rather than preaching armchair manifestos. 

Starting-places might be where a community is already implied, and only lacks the physical grounds for production and the actual proximity of its members in a more permanent way—places like churches, colleges, or various kinds of networks or organizations around a common cause. Sometimes these ties can become very strong, and to get stronger than the centrifugal effects of the status quo society requires some certain degree of belief or desperation, I can only conjecture, I’m not sure what it looks like—or whimsy, maybe, if the hippies had it right all along. 

The other side to try and start on would be where people are already close together, with the land and property perhaps even already turned to agriculture in the rural places, or fertile enough in the suburbs, or in the city tenements you would have to get creative, a la Crowley in Little, Big, but anyhow the externals are more or less there, it’s the other thing that’s missing, the shared purpose or dream. These people don’t know each other and seem to have all they need as it is, but they’re just Frankensteins lurching around, sewn up from various other peoples’ dreams and imaginary lives, and for all their material prosperity and superior knowledge their hearts are hollow. There’s nothing sustainable there, nothing to fight for, and from one generation to the next even the external well-being frays and grows ever more fraught, and the yearning for meaning and for a dream grows more insistent, wayward, inarticulate, frustrated. 

So what are the models for this movement, if there is going to be anything moving? Vaguely hearing of landless workers’ collectives in Brazil and Mexico isn’t necessarily going to appeal to your red-blooded American suburbanite, however compelling a sinking feeling they get when they look over the edges of their little life. That vertigo is the only teacher, and the leap it invites. You might invoke monastics of east and west, but the aim we’re going for is really the opposite, to appearances—a fuller connection with the world rather than an absconding from it for contemplation and mortifying the sinful parts—possibly there’s Rabelais’ monastery or convent he sketches out. 

Maybe we don’t really want models, but want something distinctive and original, the creation of which is a big part of everyone’s buying into it thereafter. Certainly it has to be up to the kids to go out and explore other places and make their own way, they aren’t stuck in their parents’ community longer than they can’t support themselves—but they do have some responsibility to their parents when they can’t support themselves.. Always this pulling back and surging out. 

We’ll avail ourselves of something of the past, that which speaks to the same strivings, without it being totally foreign to us, calling to the better natures in us we’re trying to live out. These are the books, stories, songs—Kierkegaard, Rabelais, Crowley—and the ways of looking and thinking about the world they imply—that there is beauty, there is truth, though we don’t necessarily agree about where, we are on the lookout for it. Something about this process of discovery is lost when the institutions are no longer questioned—even, especially, such a community has to be taken up at least once a generation, searched through, and founded anew down to its foundations, if it is going to remain living and relevant to its members—if it is going to be its members, their aspirations, their connections and love, and not some husk of dry traditions and vague memorized words. 

This is the same process of learning, but from things and people, not only books. There have to be schools in these communities, and everyone has to go to them, if learning and teaching, discovering and discussing, is going to be the breath of the democracy. Every family and group of friends has to have their own house to go back to, but it won’t be like it is now, a huge empty thing they never willingly emerge from, but something simple, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, a bed, and they won’t have to lock their doors when someone is always paying a visit and they themselves are hardly at home. 

I still envision it looking like Washington Grove, and much of the rest of Gaithersburg, but where now there are big stores and offices and parking lots, that land is cleared for cultivation. The train and metro still runs, but there is something in the air like India, because all the cars have been replaced by bikes and mopeds and buggies, and the roads are livelier and not so deadly, but not by much.

Rousseau in January

The important thing then remaining—what to do? And trying to do something unambiguously good is not so simple, as for instance reading to kids, helping the elderly about the house and yard, painting and beautifying public places, which all are undoubtedly positive, hurting no one, yet require such structures as do draw on doubts. A mode of transport to get there—which buses will run on a federal holiday? shouldn’t you have asked, for all the schedule said it would—and an organization to facilitate the project, give it words and legal documentation and a face of consistency, that it not be isolated acts, but hanging together and replicate itself and fit into some larger movement, without which those illusions of progress might be found out. And sure enough more numbers involved is better, for immediate results and for press. But the more there are, the harder to give reality to that image of a community at work together. This is inextricably bound to the deeper satisfaction of each individual at work, and the truth, if there is any, in the phrase ‘self-reliance’. 

So I can be awed by the erudition of a Harold Bloom, or any other secondary source on whatever side of the political-academic spectrum, but I can’t go along much with their claims and answers to questions of ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ I agree reading is important, without setting it on quite so hermetic a pedestal or ascribing to certain of its practitioners the indisputable status of gods, dismissing all the rest. The question can’t be just where is wisdom found, if it moves; first thing is to wonder where are we, then what we can do about it—out of these questions, wisdom is created. For each person, personal, but within cultural frameworks, practical considerations, situations or circumstances of life. By itself, reading is paltry. By ourselves, none of us becomes our best self. But it bears asking, still, how to read and why, from this perspective.

Volunteering with 826 again and bringing it to the suburbs—letting it arise in the suburbs, which are their own center anymore—and seeing how to instill or awaken and enrich and cultivate that love of learning whose reality we take as too good to ignore, how to turn it toward a worthwhile book. And after just one, maybe, it leads itself on of itself. Beyond books, too, but not forgetting them. So there should be more of them like Tales from Outer Suburbia, the Moomins, pushing with images against the page; Under Milk Wood, with voices; The Golden Compass, with themes—and yet all these accessible to young people, before they really know what they’re faced with drawn on entranced by stories, curiosity, wonder, why not escapism from dull or bleak or painful reality. And probably bringing them into play, or re-telling them, or wanting to make their own, much more than writing essays or bubbling in tests on them, at least.

In starting from literacy, aiming beyond it, back to the whole human being, holding onto the capability to learn without being carried away by it or paralyzed by it, but having at any rate to take up the mantle of understanding for the full conscience of actions, a better sense of what is possible and a hint of living up to it. Something like the development of subjectivity in community, if you want a more meaningful phrase than themes/units on identity and being yourself—which comes to the same thing, but one implies a lot more the real work it takes to get there, the process of changing that we are, rather than a totemic consistency. Because it is an objective world whose effect on us is practically totally dependent on our response to it—this is the power of thinking, and of reflection brought to bear upon the present. This is the solitary walker today, whatever Rousseau’s was, fully able to drive but choosing not to, if walking does no harm to anything, if the time saved driving is not worth the stress and expense and banal danger—the ultimate threat of dying a senseless statistic, where dying walking hit by a car, even, retains some human element more pronounced. And living being movement and distance, time commitments around the human rather than mechanical scale are not only preferable in thought but eminently practical to live by. Only it doesn’t have to be just stray individuals—it could be a lot less lonely having others join in. 

And in this place (St. John’s) a community so pure, as it were, and in line with the kinds of ideals I’m operating on. But still so elite and difficult of access—nurturing those with such ideals, but in what sense, if any, contributing their spark to others without it, or without the courage to pursue it for other considerations. The director kindly took on my brazen availability to conversation, telling me about the Touchstones program and Great Hearts Academies, tangentially related to the college without being linked with it. And I told her about the atmosphere, texture, aura surrounding different great books for me. I did a bad job; if she understood anything from what I was saying, it was thanks to the concrete starting-point, the dark mood with which Genesis closes, from the arch between beginnings and ends. That anyway begins to sketch an explanation for what I was talking about—a sense of the total effect of a work, based on its most basic movement between beginning and end. But of course everything else is in the middle, and all these moments and ideas accumulate into the mosaic of more impressionistic shadings, too, adding them to the total picture. But even with this language we’re still in just a visual phase of conceptualizing the, for  me, synesthetic quality of a book’s ambience. It has color and light and even phosphorescence, perhaps, in the case of the Great Gatsby for instance, but also shape and texture and heft and humidity and tone, style, grace, music, taste. Figuratively, of course, more or less. And so of all things this total impression, of a presence cast by books you read enough, with enough of yourself, will be subjectively true and different for each reader. The truth on this basis consisting of their honesty in addressing themselves to the work. And the picture or total impression that they come to associate with the work arising and differing based on the dominant meanings they interpret from it and all they bring to bear on it—the day, other books, and everything else it reminds them of. But somehow, the most important component to this total meaning and its figurative manifestation seems to be the cadence of the writing, the voice, the language in its fullest sense. 

Some examples—the full sunlight gold roundness surrounding Homer; the curtain like a starlit sky draped over the Bible; the scratchy red flannel shirt of Montaigne; the green gardens, parks, creeks and jungles Shakespeare plays in. Along with subjective associations, making them your own, books have their beauty more for themselves, too—in the images and truths and stories they hold. However you acquire them, they’re still there, still abiding in themselves and pointing beyond themselves—to ways of living; to their deeper inarticulate inspirations. Where beauty, practice, inspiration meet in a reader, books deserve their value as cultural riches. And where they don’t they can’t support the acclaim, and are more solid hypocrites, bundles of unfulfilled potential. To get someone to want to read is to once have them experience the first way, even with just one aspect of it enjoyable or striking some chord; to lose someone from reading for a long time, there’s enough disgust in one book that failed to connect with them to carry over into many others that might have, without giving them a real chance. 

Another analogy—the smells of other people’s houses, somehow hanging on their person to some extent and in character with them, --leading gradually to the realization that your house and yourself have a smell, too, to them, only you’ve grown so accustomed to it you can’t tell what it is. These early hints of subjectivity—the idea that other people think, just as you do; that most of them think in some other language when they think in words, and call to mind other images and melodies and dreams when they think of the most fundamental things—food, home, love—and want, for just as good reasons or just as unreasoningly, things other than you want; that they must have as much to tell you as you would tell them, if circumstances allowed. Fiercely aware of their favorite, beloved things, and that these are different is disarming at first—we are so open before enough happens to close us for a long time. Maybe part of what is so awful about school to a child is the sense of an imposition on nascent subjectivity, and being told and surrounded with competing wills and wants and valuations which seem to come from no recognizable person, but are simply thick in the air and the walls of the building—the first impression of what institutions mean for the free play of humanity. 

This is the fundamental stumbling block and strike against education, which I don’t know if I can overcome—if it amounts to being responsible for your neighbor’s morality, and willing instead of your neighbor’s will, for his own good, very well, but for your own good, too—making yourself the arbiter of what is good, and going about inculcating it all around. There are at least a couple of possible ways out of this, though. There is Rousseau’s appeal to nature, as good letting itself be known through lessons of necessity, and leading anyone open to it back to it. And there is the step beyond the non-profit industrial complex, substituting community action for outside-provided services—in the case of education, amounting to a sharing of ideas on curriculum, values, policies among as many of the vested parties as possible, to restore everyone’s faith in the efficacy of the teaching and making all the voices heard.

It all sounds very nice, of course, and yet between these two ways there is an evident contradiction, if we understand nature as Rousseau understands it, particularly the question of childish unreason. But if, as seems plausible, it is the nature of children to love and imitate and acquire rational thought through a process of learning and socialization, not being struck by it as by a thunderbolt one day around age ten—though this could admit of occasional leaps and plateaus—then they could be reasonably supposed to be valued members of the community after their fashion, and a kind of role model even to the adults of what authentic freedom, happiness, honesty look like. So that there is some connection between the two promising solutions, mutually reinforcing one another, if some kind of unselfish love is present, at work. It might be possible to give an evolutionary account of where this love comes from, but for now allow that is had to be believed to be seem, leave it a presupposition as pervasive as Rousseau’ s nature. And for now all that is implied in community love, as good and bad in its manifestations as Rousseau’s self-love, should demand recognition, from the possibility of a network of little utopias to the rise of fundamentalist entrenchments, depending on what the values are that the community comes up with, and how jealous and angry, or how free, it is in its love. 

For a long time we have been wrestling with the kind of nature we want to believe in, and the kind of love appropriate to it. We haven’t been able to quite let go of the dream of a love at first sight that endures, nor of the childhood so sufficient in itself to learn what is best through play, spontaneously. We balk at a love that can be conditioned by circumstance of place and movement, inconstant in emotions, analyzed to the point of distrusting them as real indicators of what we feel. We don’t like at fist the suggestion that is made in NurtureShock, either, about the kids going over how they will play, even writing a plan to the best of their ability, then going to play with all this held in mind or prompted by the teacher’s questioning, yet the results for their mental and social development are so impressive we then want to find a way to finesse the means that the end might be justified.  Again, wouldn’t it come down to a revision to our understanding of nature to include an element of reflection alongside spontaneous action? Even in kids, the action is better when it is understood as play—the more nuanced the understanding, the more sustained the play. Perhaps it is too difficult to say whether it is as fun. There still seems to be lurking something monstrous there, in the kindergarteners who didn’t join in the food fight, in the stillness of the kids told to imagine they were soldiers. 

Yet the imagination, too, has at least an aspect that needs to be sparked from somewhere, including the moral imagination, if the child is to develop. And in the same breath there must be reserved some space the play-plan doesn’t intrude into, and more free and spontaneous play, if the child is to be a child. The key seems to be to develop as quickly as possible, once you’ve once interfered, the kids’ ability to ask those questions for themselves, internalizing and making their own that suggestive imagination and reflection. When there is a story to be followed in the game, there’s the possibility of changing the story, adding onto it, and deriving something more from it than just the kind of overflowing of energy that unstructured play is, rather a kid of meaning that is missing or at least not yet found in ordinary life. Without getting too psychoanalytical, this amounts to a sublimation of some inner yearning into external and comprehensible significance, not very different from any artistic or relational significant, except in its level of sophistication and maturity. 

And the relative admixture of spontaneity to self-awareness is still high, giving the art and play of children a vibrant quality even when we recognize some element of reflection appropriate to their age interfering. The attempts to approximate this kind of innocence are varied, from dada or even prior in the roots of romanticism on through to Picasso and Pullman’s reimaging of Milton and Blake. To recover in maturity a kind of wise innocence not lost by experience but enriched by it is more or less a statement of the humanistic aspiration I have for my life, but it is helpful not to think of it as necessarily coming about in solitude, rather in relationships and community, and so the definition has to be broadened to include all people who might aspire to something like that, together. 

A huge piece of it does seem to be in the raising of children and the ongoing process of education, for children and adults, this process entails. And the kind of education that would be, clearly dialogic, has to include in some way the inarticulate, spontaneous impulses as well, at least allow for them, from childhood on up. Obviously the emphasis would be not on technical knowledge acquired in this education, though that would follow of itself, but on the process itself, by which interlocutors grow in self-knowledge and mutual understanding, subjectively, even if the objective quality they are seeking remains doubtful, their opinions on it opposed, and the result a kind of humbleness or frustration as the case may be. 

Only, as I’ve lately been realizing, not everybody has the perspectives on community, education, and a well-lived life that I’ve been pointing towards. If they do value technical prowess and possessions and hierarchical prestige above their human developments, then this kind of dialogue has its work cut out for it in reaching them. To say nothing of violent fanatics, merely vain or greedy or insecure people may not be amenable to dialogue. This amounts to saying, I don’t understand them, as they don’t get me, in our shared humanity, only in our interests and differences. But if it is not impossible to shift such basic presuppositions as seem opposed to dialogue back into line with the kind requisite to it, most likely this is more difficult the more time passes, and the more those presuppositions entrench themselves, but easier the younger the person, the more they experience this education as play and the more naturally they enter into it together with others. All the same, it is too sad and too blanket to think that no one who’s grown up into a closed-off, fiercely divided state, can be talked down from it, but will only ever spin harder off into destruction. The conversions and development of full-grown people are well-documented; and it’s too easy to make of all people two camps, whatever you call them—dialogic and conversant, radical and Mr But, socialist and capitalist—because the reality is much more various, and in changing circumstance and surroundings we turn coat. All the time. 

Still it seems important to stress the education of kids as a inclusive community endeavor, as benefitting the kids as well as their parents and neighbors, bringing all of us closer together, making all of us more participant, curious, and intelligent. It’s a commonplace teachers love to remark on, that they learn as much as the kids, but in a sense it is true—while ideally the presence of more teachers and students of different ages, mentors young and old, visitors, would blur the lines of student and teacher, and bring the school closer to the vision of a community in dialogue with itself and with other communities, and the kind of learning the teachers enjoy would be in the reach of the students as well—things like self-reflection, humility, peacemaking—at a level proper to them.

This is where I fall back on terms and concepts too much, maybe—natural and spontaneous, reflective and dialogic, authentic, proper. What is natural is natural to someone at some stage of development, in relation to an underlying dynamic nature, conditioned by an external cultural lens. We’re less concerned with the kind of knowledge or skills students acquire at school leading directly to an ideal job or station, but with instilling and growing their love of learning, the possession of which will make their way to a fulfilling job and lifestyle the natural result of their ongoing development, and each step of the way valuable in its own right, for being what they are. These stages are particular to each student, and might not depend simply on age or physical development. These benchmarks of value, nature, dialogue, authenticity depend on the community and culture around the children, educating them and judging their progress. 

Again, though, about as soon as elements of self-awareness and responsibility may be discerned, it seems crucial that the child feel a part of that community and that education, for herself and others, younger and older, and have an equal say in points of judgment, value, and the rest. She can begin to articulate what is natural for her, and knowing what she feels, she may do a better job than her sister or her mother, who only remember what it felt like—yet they have the advantage of knowing somewhat how it will change. In turn, they benefit from recognizing how it hasn’t. All I’ve been trying to get at here is another perspective on the school, as not just an admirable preparation of students, but a source of purpose, delight, and meaning for the whole community.

Recapitulation, reentry

http://liceovisits.blogspot.com/p/reflection.html

Ready to start again

Well, I've been away awhile. In Uruguay and a few other places--

http://ipaworkshop.blogspot.com/
http://liceovisits.blogspot.com/

keeping busy enough, I think.

More than anything, my belief in the relationships created in a learning environment, between teachers and students, has been reconfirmed. And my happiness when I'm a part of it. All the while, there are so many obstacles, but this essential relationship can still hold out the promise of human development.

Now I'm working on the Master's Degree at St. John's College in Annapolis.
Also thinking about ways to get involved with these networks--
http://www.edliberation.org/call-for-proposals-for-free-minds-free-people
http://www.couchsurfing.org/group.html?gid=5370

For TED / Once upon a school: Au contraire

(http://www.onceuponaschool.org/stories/282)

For six months I had served in Boston schools with City Year. In six months more I would be leaving to teach English on a Fulbright in Uruguay. But I was in between. And I was living back at home, without a job. I wanted to do more with my time than read and reminisce and daydream. One idea I had was to volunteer at my old high school, helping out my teachers and practicing my Spanish, and learning some French, all the while.

I emailed my teachers and looked up the county schools website to start coordinating the thing. Soon I was going three days a week for morning ESOL and French classes. I would circulate around the room talking to individual students, drawing them back into discussions about the material, or sharing extra bits and pieces of culture that might interest them--talking about Tintin, sports, possible field trips. Through a neighbor whom I had spoken to, I visited a nearby middle school, too.

Right away the teachers were genuinely happy to see me, and over time the students were, too. They liked to ask me about college and the other trips I'd taken, especially after someone from the AFS came to give a presentation. I hope they'll be inspired to study abroad and take advantage of all the opportunities out there--including those right next door, in the person of native speakers of other languages. My volunteering turned into a job for me, no less. The teachers pushed for me to become a substitute so I could put aside some funds for the trip. And whenever they needed a sub for those classes, they gave me a call.

Sticky notes

There was no hint of it when we went to school, but our teachers actually knew a lot. If they weren't so sick of dealing with us all day in class, maybe they would even have talked to us about some things, the way they talk to one another.

Mr. Perez knew why the esol boy would sometimes slump down suddenly in his seat and refuse to so much as say why. Fine one minute, the next he would have to be escorted out of class. In the hall, he was free to speak. It was nothing personal, just had to show the others he was tough from time to time. Why the girl wearing professional dress was suddenly humorless and uncommunicative and brittle, like a celebrity after a scandal, he had not yet discovered. But from calling home he knew her mom had noticed it, too.

Incredible how many Behavior Issues are caused by the whole class watching when the teacher picks a battle. Almost like when you are trapped in the line at Chipotle and a mom comes in screaming at her child PUt on that coat or you'll get NOTHIng to eat, and him keening in the most abject tantrum. Neither getting through to the other. All that delicious food turning to ashes in our mouths, those of us silent looking on.

The burritos are like learning, in this analogy, even if the situations are sort of different. That kid is not even in school yet; but when he is, woe to the teacher who has to try to wring any kind of reaction from him, desensitized to shouting matches and probably beatings, too, as he'll be.

Mr. Perez had met Gabriel Garcia Marquez one time. They were in Cartagena, Colombia, a town over by the sea, having a pleasant conversation about the weather, the people passing by, the military (how much do they pay you? he recalls the master asking). But then some enthusiastic reader came up and spoiled everything.

Oh my gosh, I love your books!

It was very nice talking to you. I have to go.

I sometimes am afraid I am always doomed to be that reader. But I have Mr. Perez' advice now, so I'll be careful not to come on too strong.