The Sound of Music

My director's notes for the program.

Come see The Sound of Music 

on 23-24 March at North Shore High School, Glen Head, NY.

Life is a movie too…Starring you,

your whole family is the cast and crew...that's a little secret between God and you

        - Stew, from the musical Passing Strange

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.

        - Lou Holtz, professional football coach

...there ain't no other way, baby: I was born this way

        - Lady Gaga

No one gets to pick where she is born, to what family, how tall or talented or unlucky he will be. What each of us does with this becomes the drama of our lives. It’s a long series of trials, adventures, risks, and dangers as we try to figure out who we are.

Your life is the story of what you were born to do.

When we meet Maria, our beloved heroine in The Sound of Music, she's totally lost. She's preparing to be a nun, but it feels like a bad fit. She loves the nuns and the convent, but she feels incomplete and alone.  Only when she sings on the mountain does she feel like she belongs. “I go to the hills when my heart feels lonely... [and they] fill my heart with the sound of music...” Maria uses her beloved music to turn away from confronting her fears.

Maria, fortunately, isn't allowed to hide. Her mentor, Mother Abbess, pushes Maria from the stability of the convent and into the world. Maria needs to find her place in the world.  Mother Abbess knows that the most powerful enemy in the world is not the Nazis. It's the unwillingness to take important risks. She knows that we must be willing to face the fear of failure with the unending hope of finding ourselves.

Our production of The Sound of Music has a cast and crew filled with searchers. Not all of them are great test takers. They don't all do well sitting in desks all day. Some of them will probably not finish college. But these young people have a lot to give. Some are great musicians. Others can operate a professional lighting board. They can anticipate safety hazards in the dark and look out for each other. They can build a dress. They can use their voices to transport you from your long week to the mountains of Austria, take a text and turn it into something inspiring and beautiful.

Just as it takes a brave mentor like Mother Abbess to imagine what a lost child needs, it takes a brave community to imagine what a generation of children needs. North Shore is facing some tough challenges these days. In business, government, and our homes, the mountains look pretty daunting.  Can we afford to hide?

We dedicate this show to the many kids in our schools who are listening to the sound of their own music:  musicians, dancers, actors, builders, stagehands, seam rippers, runners, point guards, trainers, fullbacks, short stops, painters, chefs, mechanics, designers, electricians, pitchers, goalies, robot builders, poets... all of them. Because these kids were born this way.

Welcome to the third and final piece of 2011-2012, our Season of Change.

Taking Kids to Spain

Students need to be in the zone

Spilling in reds, oranges, and blues, the Spanish sun splashes graffiti on the medieval flagstones. They stand there, the children, in their Nikes and Adidas, Uggs and slip-ons. Looking up, their eyes try to adjust to the unforgiving contrasts of light and dark.

“These vaults, the crotch vaulting- look at it, amazing- are the work of unknown craftsman from the 14 and 1500's...” The voice of our guide, Salome, echoes into nothingness, quickly replaced by the muffled chatter of the students. “You are standing in a place that represented the place between heaven and earth for the people of this town. Hundreds of years ago, if you'd been a peasant, you would have been in awe.”

The high school kids appear divided on this, in classic adolescent fashion. Some are bored and tired, barely aware of where they are. Others are fighting the ennui, trying to make sense of any of it. And then others: transfixed, mouth agape, eyes filled with wonder.

I make eye contact with one of them, a boy named Nick. It's been a long trip from NY to Spain and we've been here for days. I raise my eyebrows with a “what do you think?” expression. He looks at me and says, “Wow, Mr. Kleba, I had no idea. It's incredible. How did they do all this?”

The right response to him is, of course, "How do YOU think they got those stones up there, dude?" The ensuing conversation would be lovely and productive.  But I pause.

I look back up to the towering heights of the stone arches, questions of my own echoing in my head. Nick's reaction is the holy grail in education, the sublime moment. Normally at school, he's distracted and out of it, watching the clock. I've had him in class. But right now, he is wide open, ready to learn, thrilled by the idea of understanding more. He's prime meat.  In the cool dark of this cathedral, he is so bloody teachable. At this moment, he could learn just about anything.

And I ask myself: how did he get to this moment of wonder? What series of events led to this kid's specific experience? Why is he in the zone while others are not?

The Zone

Getting a person to the place where she is willing to learn is the single most important job of a teacher. Sure, we've got to keep the buggers in their seats, patrol them for petty crimes, and drag them through mazes of mandated tests, forms, and procedures. But, mostly, it's about getting them into the zone.

The best teacher you ever had-- think about him or her for a moment-- was a master at getting you in the zone. You never liked math until you had Ms. Murphy. Social studies made no sense until Mr. Psota breathed life into it. Chemistry was an inscrutable cloud until Mr. Ferris helped you pilot it.

In the zone, you found yourself more interested in learning. You let your wonder free. You forgot about the burdens of everything and became engaged in the matter at hand. You suddenly cared about how or why something worked.

Nick got in the zone because a bunch of teachers, working outside of the typical parameters, did a lot of stuff to help get him there.

1. TRAVEL. He had to leave the world of comfort and stability back home. Getting out of the unfamiliar was required. Strange language, strange food, strange bed-- all of it had an impact.
2. INVESTMENT. He needed to be invested in the trouble of it all-- paying a lot money to travel helped with that, but so did the work of packing and traveling he put in.  
3. GREAT MATERIAL. He had to be confronted with something worth learning, something bigger than himself. Something with undeniable value and meaning in of itself.
4. CREATIVE TEACHERS.  He needed teachers who could create and facilitate zone moments.

We only went to Spain so that Nick, and others like him, could get into the zone. The best thing we did was carefully pluck the kid out of the routine of his life and give him a way to appreciate something.

Factories Cannot Produce Experience

We are having the wrong conversations about education.  We want a more perfect education system-- and it's crazy.  We are spending too much money and time keeping kids in systems. Our education culture is stilted in its repetitive, construct-based model. We don't need better curricula-- we need better teachers. Frankly, we don't even need better testing-- we need better opportunities for the kids.  

We can't address what's not working in education by taking all the kids on field trips- that's not the point.  But creating conditions for kids to experience beautiful, inspiring, and challenging moments should be our prime focus.  And, culturally, politically, and economically, we aren't even talking about how to do it.  

Can we afford to take kids to Spain?  No, definitely not in this economy.  But can we afford not to?

Locking Up the Future

To hear this as a podcast, click here!

I get in trouble at my high school every once in a while. I admit it. Every few weeks, one of my many supervising administrators reminds me that I'm doing something wrong.

Hey, I'm like you. Unless you work for yourself, we have bosses who do this to us. It's the nature of management: telling people how to do things “right.” Even people who work for themselves have bosses who tell them how to do things right. These people are called “customers.”

Anyway, I get in trouble because I don't lock my door to my office. Students can go into my office without supervision, which is bad, I am told. So, I listen to my bosses. I lock my door. Locking my door is good, I am told.

I must admit something else: I'm not sure locking my door is good.

To a Hammer, Everything Is a Nail

What's the purpose of a locked door? What is the effect of a locked door?

Locking things up makes sense. You have something valuable and you want to protect it. Locking it up is brilliant-- you alone (or those you share the key with) have control, along with the security that you know your stuff is safe.

In this way, a lock is simply a barrier or a boundary that one can control- and we love them in our schools.

This should be the end of the conversation: locks and limits make sense. But it isn't because people learn how to neutralize the lock. There are a number of ways to get around a lock, and there is no shortage of time spent on this problem.

Let's consider ways in which we get around locks outside of school. While doing your taxes in the last month, you (or your accountant) spent some time finding ways to neutralize the lock of taxation with “deductibles.” Isn't that what a deductible is-- a lock pick? Any loophole is a lock neutralizer.

“You're not allowed to park here” Ok. I'll just throw on my hazard lights and run in and out of the store before a cop can bust me. Lock picked!

“The game is sold out” Sure it is. I'll just call my uncle Larry, the VP of marketing at the stadium, and I'll get seats. Lock picked!

“It's buy one taco, get one free-- limit one coupon per visit” No worries. I'll buy my taco, get one free, then get back in line and do it again as many times as I like. Lock picked!

A locked door doesn't just protect things. A locked door creates an arena, a playing field in which people are incentivized to neutralize the lock.

A locked door makes people into lock pickers.

You Are Not Invited

Locked doors protect kids and school property, we say. But locked doors discourage engagement and undermine self-responsibility. “You're not supposed to be here,” locked doors tell kids. “You are an untrusted guest with limited access.” Kids don't need to take care of anything because they aren't in charge of anything. Locking things up limits participation in the maintenance of a community. A place that locks things up is more interested in safety and control than in engendering responsibility and rational risk-taking.

Get Rid of Locked Doors?

Heck, no. It's not unreasonable to imagine that kids could do real damage to property or themselves if we didn't lock things up. The chemicals in the chemistry lab actually COULD hurt someone. The computer lab, filled with equipment, would likely be robbed or ruined if left unlocked.

Some locked doors are good-- but we must be extremely careful what we lock up. We must bravely attempt to leave as many doors unlocked as possible. We must replace our culture of locked doors with a culture of stewardship. An overwhelming number of teenagers long to be in charge of things. Let's make our schools places of stewardship and involvment.

Paraphrasing Adam Smith, chief apologist for laissez-faire government, I say: the fewer the locked doors, the more robust the growth. Let's lean towards “hands off” regulation in schools. As it is, we're just locking up the children.

Doors and curiosity have a special relationship. A locked door only promotes curiosity about how to break in to a room. An unlocked door facilitates curiosity of all kinds, welcomes people in and becomes a portal for wonder, discovery, and community.

Sigh. Looks like I might get in trouble again.

History Class, With Booze

A master teacher holds class in New Orleans, LA

The thing about drinking absinthe? It numbs your lips.

It doesn't happen fast. You're three or four minutes into your glass of milky green poison before you notice that you're losing sensation in your tongue.

“It's a sipper,” Joe tells you. “I saw a guy do five shots of absinthe once. Wasn't pretty. Guy couldn't walk. Stuff is still illegal in most states.” Joe's eyes twinkle from under his straw fedora. “It's legal in New York, San Francisco, and here, of course.”

He continues from his seat in a little bar in Pirates' Alley in the French Quarter. “Tennessee Williams used to say that these were the only three cities in America. Every place else is Cleveland.”

And so goes Joe Gendusa, professor of libations on The New Orleans Cocktail Walking Tour. A retired teacher and school counselor, Joe is a guy who loves his job. He often smiles as he tells a condensed history of one of the world's greatest cities, replete with stories of pirates, ghosts, archbishops, and presidents through the lens of an upturned highball glass.

It's so awesome to learn from a teacher who loves his material.

I've had absinthe before. But I never had it in a century-old bar that reputedly served it under the table during an international absinthe prohibition that began in the 19^th Century. The anise-spiked spirit opens its flavor with a little water and a burning sugar cube. It'll take you on a trip, people. And that's just one of the featured drinks of the tour.

I had a beautiful Pimm's Cup (a concoction of caramelized gin, lemonade, ginger ale, and cucumber) that's best made at the Napoleon House. Did you know that Napoleon planned to escape imprisonment in Europe by fleeing to New Orleans? He had the 2^nd floor of the Napoleon House ready to receive him. He died before he could move in.

I had a bizarre and absolutely wonderful cocktail named The Bayou Bash. Made with wine and Southern Comfort, it's as if Mark Twain made a drinkable rocket fuel: southern, hilarious, and ready to send you into orbit. The drink was invented by a native bartender who wanted to find a way to marry a distinctly Old World wine with a New World spirit. Like the best of any creole cuisine, the beauty comes in the exotic marriage of strange bedfellows.

Joe had us all at “hello,” using historical anecdotes to improve the cocktails-- and vice versa. Like any master teacher, his passion for the material not only engaged us: it made us work for him. Sure, we got to drink and that was cool. But, that wasn't what made the experience masterful.

We wanted to see the city the way Joe saw it. We wanted the secret knowledge of a passionate expert. Joe had us right where he wanted us. He had a class that wanted to learn.

That's a pretty far cry from most classes in our schools.

We've built our schools on the concept of containment and control. We value security way more than we value curiosity.

Administrators and teachers, hobbled by a culture that fears danger more than it hungers for growth, huddle in the shadow of litigation. Instead of putting discovery at the center of learning, we've put stability and security.

What makes Joe such a wonderful teacher reads like an indictment of what is missing in most public school classrooms:

1. Joe is as important as his curriculum. He loves his topic and relishes his time sharing his knowledge.

2. His classroom is wherever the learning happens. He literally explores his material with his students.

3. Instead of attempting to control learner curiosity, Joe surfs it.

4. The length of his class is based on how long it takes to learn, rather than on a predetermined time allotment.

Now, I'm not saying that the best education happens with a drink in your hand.

I. Would. Never. Say. That.

I am saying that we must recognize that the best learning puts great teachers in charge of where, when, and how students learn.

We need to start asking better questions about what makes a great teacher. About what makes a better learning environment.

And let's start drinking better cocktails.

Cartoons and Mirrors

A film review.


Once again, Pixar uses brightly colored playthings to smash us to pieces, only to glue us together again.

Prickly pieces have punctuated Pixar's productions in the past. In Finding Nemo, we find a desperate father absolutely devastated by the death of his long lost son. In The Incredibles, a family gets ripped to pieces by secrets that question identity and trust. Wall-E gives us harshly dystopian world in which an orphaned, trash picking robot is the only 'life' left on a planet destroyed by humans. And who can forget the brilliant opening sequence in Up? The perfect confection of boy meets girl leads unstoppably to the bitterness of loss and widowhood.

Dark stuff for kiddie movies. These people at Pixar aren't messing around.

This summer's Toy Story 3 avoids none of the bleakness, either. The end of childhood comes to toy-stewarding Andy, and never in the film do we see him happy to go to college. The focus remains on the toys, however, and here we find abandonment, attempted homicide, and the annihilation of a family.

I'm reminded of the unvarnished Grimm tales. Before Disney (ironically the parent company of Pixar) got a hold of a Grimm tale like "Cinderella," the story was filled with harsh consequences. For instance, the “evil” stepfamily abused Cinderella and constantly lied to her. Cinderella's name comes from the fact that she picked her food from the ashes in the fireplace- often for the sport of her family. Late in the story, when faced with a too-small glass slipper, one of the sisters cut off her own heel to make a gory fit. The prince recognized that Cinderella as the true owner of the shoe simply because “there was no blood in” the shoe when she slipped it on. Birds that spent the story helping Cinderella finish the tale by pecking out the eyes of the sisters, leaving them blinded for a life of darkness.

Yikes.

What makes a Grimm “children's story” tick are the abject desolation and violence that many stories of our time whitewash. Oh, sure, our stories have explosions and death; we love a good chase scene and showdown. But most of our stories often leave us where they found us, counting on the idea that all will be right in the end. The status quo will be preserved. The good guys (or girls) will win and everything will be returned to normal.

The storytellers at Pixar make no deals with us. They grasp that an authentic representation of the world must include irreversible consequences. On one hand, Pixar films seem to offer escape and bliss: we go to these movies expecting to have our heartstrings pulled while we giggle and laugh. On the other hand, Pixar films abuse us with the burdens of our sympathies: we lean forward, inhaling, worried that these little dolls/fish/robots might not actually survive how awful everything is.

We adults watching these films know that the world is an unforgiving place. Bad things happen to good people. Friends leave us. Homes are destroyed forever. People die. We know what's on the line for Nemo's dad when he breaks down in the face of how incredibly large and dangerous the ocean is. We understand that Wall-E's trash dump world is a reasonable, if avoidable, future to our own fragile green planet. And we know that Andy's loyal and determined toys, like all playthings, are all destined to be tossed off by a boy who outgrows his own childhood.

These Pixar characters are destined to be changed forever by their travails, left with permanent scars and irretrievable pasts. In Toy Story 3, Woody and Buzz and the toy gang go through a one-way door, forever leaving the familiar comforts of grown-boy Andy's bedroom. And Andy, too, goes through his own threshold, leaving his emptied bedroom for college. Andy, like his erstwhile plastic and fuzzy friends, will never be the same.

And we, watching from the chilly dark of our cineplex, recognize these primal forces at work. We know that these animations are merely ephemeral pixies, pretty things that glow from hard drives. (It's just a cartoon!) But something about the distance of it all-- the remove of the cartoon coupled with the remove of the cinematic experience, opens a window into the very center of us.

In the dazzling color of all, something wonderful happens. Through the unique alchemy of animation, Pixar makes us kids again. Witches are real, as are giants and monsters. We re-encounter the way we experienced stories as children. We look up at towering kitchen tables, looking through belt buckle perspectives and are reminded just how big and scary and thrilling this world can be.

Where nostalgia helps us shine up our memories, focusing on the good and the beautiful, Pixar's Toy Story 3 gives us the entire memory. We see mom's heartbreak at our newly emptied room. We remember our own favorite and worn toys from our childhood, knowing that these well-loved pieces are likely in a landfill somewhere.

And we remember that first, last time we looked at the place we grew up, that first time we left home. We clearly see that one way door that led from our technicolor childhood to our complex and ever-shifting adulthood.

For a moment, in that half light of the cinema, the fragility and durability of these animated toys pulls back the curtain. And the beauty is more than enough.

Boredom Is Learned

Part Two in my series on Curiosity.



There are no bored three year olds. They don't exist. Three year olds want to know everything: they explore the worlds through their eyes, hands, and mouths. Not always in that order. And that doesn't begin to describe a child in the presence of a strong odor, like fresh cookies or dog poo, or a loud sound, like fireworks or bird chatter. The five senses are hubs of great activity. The world is a whirling carousel of interesting things to a child. Things shimmer with possibility and purpose. Three year olds NEED to know everything.

So why don't thirteen year olds? Or thirty or forty or fifty year olds, for that matter?

I don't know. I suspect it has to do with the hidden cost of experience. As we grow and learn, we get energized by what is fresh and novel. Things happen that we don't expect. It's a ride! We experience something, we are thrilled/horrified/seduced/shocked by it, then expect to experience it again. Or expect it to change. Either way, by the very nature of learning, we use past experience to shape our present experiences. We know the world through the comparison between what happened yesterday and today. We feel wise when we recognize what's about to happen. We celebrate our ability to see the patterns in things; we reward those with the most correct answers. Our lives become safer and more stable as we become more steeped in the “causes and effects” of the world.

But something happens: as we grow, these expectations begin to erode our ability to experience something on its own terms. We experience fewer things that surprise us. We are constantly predicting what's going to happen-- and, often, we are right.

Life is scary! Predicting what's going to happen makes it bearable. Sometimes, it's the only difference between safety and danger.

The cost is that we often don't see everything that's there. We begin see ONLY the patterns that we've seen before; we focus on what's predictable and often miss the things that we don't expect.

As Sherlock Holmes tells us, we see what we expect to see.

And so, we learn to stop learning.

And that's how I define boredom: the result of displacing the wildness of curiosity with the stability of predictability.

We return to the three year old. Driven by curiosity, a child has no room for boredom. He wants to learn everything. As he grows, the preponderance of experience wears down his interest in the world, like the ocean lapping at an enormous stone on the beach. The sharp edges of curiosity, through predictability and experience, become the smooth contours of boredom.

How do we stop this erosion?

Do we even want to?

EAT! SCREW! RUN! KILL!

Part One in my series on Curiosity.

Why do we do anything?

I ate three hot dogs this week. I bought a Phoenix record. I ran twice. I got up early to watch the World Cup. I drank beer. I called my mom. I read about “Bloody Sunday.” I graded papers. I ignored a phone call. I DVR'ed the President and Glee. I watched one but not the other. I remembered a lost friend.

Why did I do any of this stuff? Seriously. What is the engine that drives human movement?

And how did I eat three hot dogs? Yikes.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be exploring why people do what they do. I'm interested in what moves us. I'll be examining myself and, if you freaky readers are into it, I'll be examining you.

I'll start this week with a list of concepts I'm playing with. Get in here if you've got ideas that I'm overlooking. Get in here!


I Blog America's Taxonomy of
“Why People Do Stuff”

The concept of INCENTIVE.
We love this one in our country. INCENTIVE is the prime mover. Desire + work = action. People don't do things altruistically. People do things to get something for themselves-- and all of us want things for ourselves. It's natural, baby. It's Adam Smith's economic psychology blended neatly with Thomas Aquinas' theological credibility; The Wealth of Nations' manifesto and the Quinque viae's undeniable elegance. All movement begins as the same force: to serve one's needs or desires.

The concept of SURVIVAL.
Here is Charles Darwin's contribution to the conversation. Not entirely distinct from the INCENTIVE argument, SURVIVAL boils things down to eating, reproducing, and running from danger/neutralizing danger. Keep the species, the relationships, the family, the business, the town, the country-- keep things going. Help things thrive and kill things that present danger. During a riveting episode of the BBC's Planet Earth, my tatooed, bearded, and reflective friend Brian eloquently observed that all of life is about four interjections: EAT! SCREW! RUN! KILL!

The concept of GUILT and SHAME.
Ok, I don't want to go to deeply into spirituality, religion, or psychology here. I have tremendous respect for all three and I recognize that the politics of these kind of conversations can often overshadow everything. And it's not to say that religion or psychology can be reduced to guilt or shame. But I would be remiss if I skipped the idea that we do things in order to avoid GUILT and SHAME. Here, we care less about what we want and more about avoiding what we don't want. We act in order to not feel bad.

Finally, my favorite concept of CURIOSITY.
Curiosity offers no unified theory. It's a messy idea, really. The CURIOSITY argument seems pretty easy to deny, actually: 1) the reason to do anything comes from curiosity and 2) people are curious because they want to understand the unknown. The deniability of CURIOSITY rests in the idea that, after childhood, our curiosity atrophies. I'm not sure we do very much to satiate our curiosity throughout the day. We don't investigate much, we don't explore much, we don't leave our comfort zones much.

We're not, actually, all that curious.

I mean, sure, we watch our celebrities or our politicians, we watch our children and our parents-- we are “curious” about some things. We want to know what's happening next door when the cops show up. We want to know what our best friend is doing at the hospital. We want to know what you will get me for my birthday in November. November 3rd-- just a heads up, people.

But we are not curious when we are eating three hot dogs. We are not curious when we call our moms. We are not even that curious when we are watching Glee or the President. We are not all that interested in understanding the unknown here. We're basically just being amused. Or irritated. But we're not being curious.

So why do I add it to the list of 'Why We Do Stuff?'

Because I suspect, in any effort to improve anything, CURIOSITY might be one of the most important and useful reasons to do act.