When you walk to the front of the classroom and take up the big pencil in front of a group of young teens and twelve-year-olds, there is a strong pressure to learn how to sing and dance. That, of course, is a metaphor. I was always too arthritic and clunky in my movements to literally dance. But I looked out over a sea of bored and malevolence-filled eyes, slack and sometimes drooling mouths attached to hormone-fueled and creatively evil minds. And I was being paid to put ideas in their heads. Specifically boring and difficult ideas that none of them really wanted in their own personal heads. So I felt the need to learn to dance, to teach in ways that were engaging like good dance tunes, and entertaining in ways that made them want to take action, to metaphorically get up and dance along with me.
I wanted them to enjoy learning the way I did.
But the music of the teacher is not always compatible with the dance style of the individual learner. The secret behind that is, there is absolutely no way to prompt them to dance along with you until you learn about the music already playing in their stupid little heads. (And you can’t, of course ever use the word “stupid” out loud, no matter how funny or true the word is,) You have to get to know a kid before you can teach them anything.
The discordant melodies and bizarre tunes you encounter when you talk to them is like dancing in a minefield blindfolded. Some don’t have enough to eat at home and have to survive off of the nutrition-less food they get in the school cafeteria’s free-and-reduced lunch program. Some of them have never heard a single positive thing from the adults at home, enduring only endless criticism, insults, and sometimes fists. Some of them fall in love you. Some due to hormones. Some due to the fact that you treat them like a real human being. Some because they just stupidly assume that everyone dances to the same tunes they hear in their own personal head.
Some of them automatically hate you because they know that if you hear their own secret music in their own self-loathing heads, you will never accept it. They hate you because you are a teacher and teachers always hate them. Some of them, deep down, are as loathsome as they think they are.
But, if you find the right music, you can get any of them, even all of them, to dance. It might be hard to find. It might be a nearly impossible task to learn to play that music once you find it. But it can be done.
And if you get them to dance to your music, to dance along with you, I can’t think of anything more rewarding, anything more life-fulfilling. Have you ever tried it for yourself? If you are not a teacher, how about with your own children or the children related to you? Everybody should learn to dance this dance I am talking about in metaphors. At least once in your life. It is addictive. You will want to dance more. So the next time the music starts and you get the chance… I hope you’ll dance!
You know how in movies and on TV they play a soundtrack behind the action of the show? And how, sometimes, if the movie or TV show is any good, it enhances and underscores whatever is happening to the main theme of story and the action that expresses it on the screen? Yeah, that. A complex idea that lies just under the surface of consciousness, a something that somebody sometime thought up that actually works and can work quite well. But why does it work?
Put as simply as I can say an idea that is so layered and complex, it is because that is how real life works. Yeah, there is music in the background of every life. It plays almost unnoticed until that point where you suddenly realize how it defines your very soul.
Through childhood and junior high and high school, I used to joke with my…
Here’s wishing that Christmas elves find you this day. The Santa’s elf in the Paffooney is holding up greetings from snowflake elves and storybook elves to help you feel entertained, mystified, and victimized by elfshot. This season of Tchaikovsky Nutcracker elves and Fantasia elves and jolly old Saint Nicholas is constantly trying to frizzfry your senses and make you have feelings that pierce the hard-hearted feelings of everyday usual people living life with no magic and no imagination. Nuts to that! Christmas nuts! Nuts roasted on an open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose. Nuts carolling in the snow outside your door hoping you have some hot cocoa to spare because they were nutty enough to go out singing on a cold night with Jack Frost in a nipping frenzy already before they even began putting their nutty noses at risk. (Okay, maybe I don’t wish Jack is one of the Christmas elves that find you. They are not all wonderful.) And that magic that elves bring is the magic of being together with family, the magic of love. So here’s wishing that elves find you on Christmas, and you’ve run out of Scroogie elf repellent just in time to feel the love the season brings, and before the mangled elf-metaphors melt in the light of reason and rationality that take hold of us all the rest of the year.
It doesn’t matter what you believe in. This time of year is special. People are generally in a good mood, upward turns at the corners of the lips, singing out loud, or even singing in the heart alone. The magic we all believe in comes from the people we love and turning our attention to them.
The last couple of years we have started a new Christmas tradition, making a gingerbread house together. Of course, any Christmas tradition for my kids is a new one. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses up until recent years when the Brotherhood left us behind. You probably know already that it is against their religion to celebrate traditional holidays like Christmas. And I bear them no ill will for anything, but their ways are really not my ways anymore. So, since we are having our fourth Christmas mini-tradition, I prepared by finding gingerbread kits on sale at Walmart. I am not Scrooge anymore, but I still need to cut costs for poverty reasons.
Nothing says “Christmas Time is Here” like Charlie Brown and gingerbread.
I scored this one for only $5 because the Christmas rush is ending and they are trying to sell out the goodies that are growing old on the shelf. My daughter the Princess saw this and immediately declared she was looking forward to biting the head off Charlie Brown.
I responded to her somewhat-unexpectedly hostile comment against a cartoon character I love and identify with by showing her the back of the box.
The Charlie Brown figure will be the cardboard cut-out from the back of the box. The only candy figure is Snoopy. Of course, she then promised to decapitate and then cannibalize Snoopy. The girl ordinarily likes cartoons, so I don’t fully understand the double meaning behind her ravenousness.
As an added challenge to our artistical gustatory creativeness I also scored this gingerbread train, seen here pulling across the tracks at the Toonerville train station. All aboard! That won’t last long if we get it made this year. Of course it will fossilize if we try to save it for next year.
That, then, is the evil plan for Christmas that we are probably not supposed to be celebrating. But we will not roast in Hell for executing this evil plan. Jehovah’s people don’t believe in Hell.
No, that is not a typo. I only meant “gifts” in pun form. Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.
As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past. Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it. I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.
If you are wondering why a crazy old man who writes a daily blog would re-photograph and post a picture he did thirty years ago of a naked fairy princess riding on a chicken with her bug-boy boyfriend, then the answer is simple. He is ill again. Possibly coming down with the flu or something equally horrible and potentially fatal. And thinking is hard for him. He cannot even manage to shift his feverish head into first-person point of view. So enjoy the picture and save the complaints for when he is smarter again and answering with a cool head… or possibly when he croaks and becomes a ghost writer.
The picture is modeled on reality, by the way. And that is not merely the fever talking. He made the picture of the girl from a real nudist girl riding on a horse instead of a chicken. The rooster was also real. But probably not as large as portrayed here. Of course, the bug-boy was actually the girl’s older sister, and not entirely green. Oh, and the saddle that fits over chicken wings is entirely imaginary. So, there you have the proof. Real! 100% real! …well, if you subtract 65% for vivid imaginings anyway.
I am sure that once the goofy artist and blogger is healthy again… or relatively not dead in any case… he will be totally embarrassed at having posted this Paffooney picture and the accompanying positively perforated prose. So forgive him his indisposition, and better things will come tomorrow.
Trumpy Smurf and General Kelly Smurf, his chief of staff
Right now I think this country needs a good lesson in how to avoid a fascist dictatorship. And we can’t look to 1930’s Germany to get an example. They didn’t avoid it. They got Hitler even though he did not have a Twitter account to use for making himself der Fuhrer.
So let’s tell a story about fascists and infringe on copyrights at the same time by telling you a Smurf story.
There was a time in Smurf village when their local politics became entirely too polarized into only two factions. One side was made up of the good-time Smurfs who had all the money. They called themselves the Pub-Lickins because they liked to win elections by cheating and through massive donations from the richest Smurfs among them, and also because they loved to lick up all the liquor at…
Its companion book is this one, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. The two books happen at the same time with the same characters and events. But it comes to the story from different viewpoints and weaves different portraits of what happened.
Trumpy Smurf and General Kelly Smurf, his chief of staff 
Catch a Falling Star 
I Hope You Dance…
When you walk to the front of the classroom and take up the big pencil in front of a group of young teens and twelve-year-olds, there is a strong pressure to learn how to sing and dance. That, of course, is a metaphor. I was always too arthritic and clunky in my movements to literally dance. But I looked out over a sea of bored and malevolence-filled eyes, slack and sometimes drooling mouths attached to hormone-fueled and creatively evil minds. And I was being paid to put ideas in their heads. Specifically boring and difficult ideas that none of them really wanted in their own personal heads. So I felt the need to learn to dance, to teach in ways that were engaging like good dance tunes, and entertaining in ways that made them want to take action, to metaphorically get up and dance along with me.
I wanted them to enjoy learning the way I did.
But the music of the teacher is not always compatible with the dance style of the individual learner. The secret behind that is, there is absolutely no way to prompt them to dance along with you until you learn about the music already playing in their stupid little heads. (And you can’t, of course ever use the word “stupid” out loud, no matter how funny or true the word is,) You have to get to know a kid before you can teach them anything.
The discordant melodies and bizarre tunes you encounter when you talk to them is like dancing in a minefield blindfolded. Some don’t have enough to eat at home and have to survive off of the nutrition-less food they get in the school cafeteria’s free-and-reduced lunch program. Some of them have never heard a single positive thing from the adults at home, enduring only endless criticism, insults, and sometimes fists. Some of them fall in love you. Some due to hormones. Some due to the fact that you treat them like a real human being. Some because they just stupidly assume that everyone dances to the same tunes they hear in their own personal head.
Some of them automatically hate you because they know that if you hear their own secret music in their own self-loathing heads, you will never accept it. They hate you because you are a teacher and teachers always hate them. Some of them, deep down, are as loathsome as they think they are.
But, if you find the right music, you can get any of them, even all of them, to dance. It might be hard to find. It might be a nearly impossible task to learn to play that music once you find it. But it can be done.
And if you get them to dance to your music, to dance along with you, I can’t think of anything more rewarding, anything more life-fulfilling. Have you ever tried it for yourself? If you are not a teacher, how about with your own children or the children related to you? Everybody should learn to dance this dance I am talking about in metaphors. At least once in your life. It is addictive. You will want to dance more. So the next time the music starts and you get the chance… I hope you’ll dance!
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Tagged as being a teacher