What I remember from the book was the idea that at a very early age, kids understand what school is, and how things are supposed to be. What I remember thinking when reading that book was how sad it is that at such an early age we so readily accept the way things are, that we see that the world around us is a game with rules, and that we just accept that the way things are is the way they are supposed to be.

A few years before reading this book I was a freshman in college taking an introduction to political theory course. It was one of my favorite courses because the professor taught about different political theories in the first person. On the day he was teaching about anarchism, he was an anarchist, if he was teaching about socialism, he was a socialist. In later philosophy course I took with him, he taught as specific characters in history. Everyone’s favorite class was the mid-term or final review because TA’s and former students were brought in to play each part and have a live symposium where they would debate, from the perspective of their character, questions that might show up on the exam.

But the thing I remember most from this introduction to political theory course was a simple idea from one of the very first days of class: is doesn’t equal ought. That just because things are a certain way it doesn’t mean that they ought to be that way, it only means that that is the way they are.

With that one little statement it was as if he had unbuckled the intellectual straight jacket that thirteen years of traditional schooling had been trying to put on me. With that one statement he gave me permission, if only in his classes, to unleash the full creativity of my brain. I could make my arguments from the perspective of what I believed instead of what I saw. I could let my imagination guide my reasoning. I could think of things that weren’t possible based on the current rules of the game because I was allowed to say that it’s possible for there to be other games.

When I started teaching I had both of these things (the book and that professor) in my head. I knew that I was going to be working in a system with rules and that everyone, from school administrators and my fellow teachers to students and their parents, had expectations as to how that system was supposed to work and what roles we were all supposed to play. I also knew that the way schools look is not the way that they had to look and, as far as I was concerned, not the way that they ought to look.

Keeping that knowledge in my head allowed me to ignore some of the expectations that everyone had about how I was supposed to be as a teacher. It allowed me to connect with my students on a human level. It allowed me to see the things about school that weren’t working for my students and it allowed me to create new structures that ended up working better for many of them.

One of these structures I called the Hallway Project. Hallway Project is an individualized, project based program that allows students and teachers to work together to design projects that the student will be interested in and will challenge the student to improve specific skills (more about Hallway Project can be found here).

Deciding to throw out our ideas of what school was gave us the freedom to look directly at what our students needed and create a program that addressed those need without worrying about how it would fit into the traditional structures. Then, once we knew what ought to be for these students we found a way to make it happen.

When tackling problems, whether they are large social issues or personal life decisions people often want to start by looking at what is. They say that they want to be realistic, manage their expectations. They know the reality of the world and they want to think of solutions that will work within that reality.

Yes, the world is the way it is but it doesn’t have to be. And we’ll never find a way to make real changes to the problems that we face if we only allow ourselves to think of solutions that work in the context of what already is.

Innovation comes when we throw out the world we see in front of us and instead imagine the world that we want to see.

When I am getting ready to look at a problem my starting point is never the way things are but the way I think they ought to be.

My first round interview was at 11:00 on a tuesday night in July 2002 and I was on a pay phone in the middle of a state part in the Catskill Mountains. At the end of the interview the principal asked me to come to the school to meet the staff and talk more about the job.

8 hours later I was walking into a high school in the Bronx. Round two of the interview consisted of me introducing myself to the principal who I had spoken with the night before, then being handed off to another teacher while she went to another meeting. This other teacher, Rick, had just been hired two days earlier and had no idea what to ask me so we ended up talking about bikes and chess.

The principal came back and asked Rick what he thought of me. She then asked me if I could write and teach a curriculum that incorporated, theater, literacy, physical education, and community building activities. I said yes. She said, “great come back in August”.

On Friday I went back to visit the school I helped start. It’s been four years since I last worked there. Almost all of the original staff are gone. I don’t know any of the students anymore. I still know a few of the teachers and a lot of the administrative and support staff.

My memories of the school are of a bustling start up with emerging systems and a dynamic staff that had to think and act on its feet. We were running a school and building a school at the same time. Everything was new, every day was an adventure.

The geography of the space was as I remembered it, including the little puzzles the principal keeps on her desk for fidgety students (and teachers) to play with while talking with her. But something felt different. The vibrance and frenetic energy of those early years was gone. On Friday the place I visited was a school.

I feel mixed about this. On the one hand I remember some of the early visioning sessions and the dreams that some of us had for the school to be more than a school. In that respect I have to mourn all of the things the school could have been. On the other hand, I saw some teachers filling out forms that were part of a structure that I had created. By all traditional measures the school, in its 10th year, is a success, and I can take some pride in that.

And yet here I am, an hour after the end of the Super Bowl and my heart is still racing. For three hours tonight I was completely immersed in a world outside of my life. I cheered, I cringed, I jumped for joy, I jumped with anxiety. And as the game ended with the ball bouncing around in the end zone and the Giants winning I felt a rush, first of panic (because I thought maybe it was caught), then of pleasure (when I realized it wasn’t), and finally a mix of shock and joy.

There’s not anything wrong with that. In fact I think it’s healthy to, for three hours, step outside of myself and put all of my energy towards caring about something completely insignificant

The problem comes when the emotional impact of the game outlasts the game itself.

I heard about a study that found that sports fans react more negatively to their team losing than they do positively to their team winning – that a loss feels more bad than a win feels good, and that the feeling of a loss lasts longer than the feeling of a win.

This means that over the course of a sports season, even the fan of a team with a winning record will feel more bad than good. And that the positive feelings that come with a great season can all be washed away by one loss.

I have found this to be true and not only with sports. I am generally a happy person. I do serious work but I don’t take myself too seriously. I work a lot, but I also play a lot. And most of the time I truly enjoy my life. But sometimes a negative feeling creeps in and wipes out all of my perspective.

Objectively speaking I had a pretty decent week. As part of my work I got to visit several museums and talk with the people who work in them. I had a couple of meetings with key people in the city about how to move the Education City Initiative forward. IDEA met its fundraising match challenge. And I had several productive conversations with people connected with fundraising for Fertile Grounds Project.

But looming over all of those positive things was one piece of my work with the ECI that was not going as well as it could have been. And because of that one negative and the way that it affected me, I lost the ability to take in, appreciate, or feel good about any of the positive things that happened.

The one thing that was going badly completely took over my mood even though it was out numbered by things that were going well. And it wasn’t until that one “loss” was confronted and turned into a “win” that I was able to feel better.

My new goal for the next month is to flip the script on this study. I am going to take in every “win”, every positive moment. I am going to let those moments fill me with good energy and I am going to hold on to them. At the same time I am going to let the “losses” go. I take in the negative feeling but then I’ll let them out and move on.

On MLK day I flew back to Puerto Rico and and went directly from the airport to the ocean. Being tossed around by the waves and salt water knocked the sick right out of me. I spent the next day at the computer, trying to keep my inbox manageable. Then I went to the center of Puerto Rico for the Essencia Vital workshops and six days away from phone and internet.

After one day back in Caguas to work on the ECI I went right to the IDEA board retreat. For the rest of the week I was immersed in big picture conversations about the direction and priorities of the Institute for Democratic Education in America.

There is a ton to say about each of these experiences. Some of them I wrote about in previous posts. But right now I’m feeling a little reflected out.

This week I am back to work in Caguas. Continuing to meet with people across the city and engage them in the ECI. I am looking forward to getting back into a routine even if it only lasts the week.

When I was not quite sixteen, I woke up at 4:00 in the morning to climb up a mountain in the desert in Israel. At the top of the mountain, where two thousand and some years earlier a group of Jewish zealots killed themselves rather than be captured by Roman soldiers, I stood, while the sun rose over our heads, with a group of my peers, as we collectively recited an oath to become leaders in our youth movement.

By the time I was twenty I had become fascinated with rites of passage rituals. I was furious that the best our society at large could come up with was high school graduation, and I was dissatisfied with the rituals of my Jewish community. The Bar Mitzvah was nice but it certainly did not prepare me for anything that was relevant to the changes I was going through in the world. And my youth movement leadership induction ceremony was a great show but there was no content, or valuable lesson in that experience either. Also we were somehow commemorating a mass suicide – which struck me as a little out of line with the values we espoused.

So when I, once again, got fed up with traditional schooling, and was contemplating dropping out of university, the thing I decided I wanted to do was travel the world and find rites of passage rituals that were based in values I could get behind, relevant to young people’s lives while being rooted in tradition, valuable experiences in and of themselves, and marked a clear transition point that had an actual impact on a person’s growth and status in a community. I wanted to find these experiences, learn from them, and use them to create new rites of passage for that were relevant to the young people that I was going to work with.

But I didn’t do it then. My parent’s kindly pointed out that I was a twenty year old kid with very little experience of my own and that I would be much better received at these places I wanted to visit if I first went out and did something with all of my thoughts about how education should be. So I got to work. I finished university, went to graduate school, worked at a high school and started a summer camp. Then I decided it was time.

Over the last six years my travels in education have taken me to Israel, Brazil, Vancouver, England, several places across the United States, and most recently Puerto Rico. I have seen fascinating schools and education organizations, I have met incredible people, with amazing initiatives from all over the world.

Yesterday, in a small cabin, by a river in the mountains, in the center of Puerto Rico, I was reminded of what I had been looking for all this time because I had found it.

Fourteen young people ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen, each one having dropped out of school, sat in a circle and shared the most painful moments of their lives with each other. These youth, from some of the toughest neighborhoods in Puerto Rico, sat together and wept as their shared experiences of death, abandonment, fear, and isolation. They laughed, as they performed skits about their struggles. They relaxed, as they sat by the soothing sounds of the river. And they felt pride when they made the decision to take control over the direction of their lives.

All of this happened over the course of a 48 hour workshop called Essencia Vital. The youth were candidates to become students at Nuestra Escuela. The workshop was their rite of passage and entrance exam. They were not tested on their literacy or math skills and their was no external assessor to let them know whether or not they passed. The test was a choice about how they wanted to live their lives going forward. And the only assessment was made by each participant of their self.

In the end all of the candidates chose to become students, to join the school community, to commit to a life guided by their personal mission, and be accountable to their word.

The new students of Nuestra Escuela then returned home, exhausted from the workshop, excited about their new community, and transformed by the experience. I stayed because another group of candidates will arrive and I will get to see this process happen all over again.

*Note: If you know of or have experienced any rite of passage rituals please share them with me. This weekend’s experience has reinvigorated my search and I would love to find a way to learn about and experience them.

Climbing trees is what compel me. Jumping onto a low hanging branch and swinging my way around the tree’s trunk, hopping from one branch to the next, to the next, until I find the right spot and I sit, back against the trunk, legs carefully balancing my body, and look out onto the forest, and take a deep breath. And in that breath, I feel grounded. In a tree, my senses are heightened, my body relaxed, and my spirit tuned into and connected the world.

But there were no trees. I started getting worried, so I quickly made a plan to use some downed branches to create the illusion of a good climbing tree. By the time we were sent off I had already constructed a tree fort in my minds eye and had completely forgotten that the point of the exercise was to allow myself to be lead to a place. As the circle broke I began walking, fully intending to carry out my plan.

Then, in the periphery of my vision appeared a rock. It was a large rock, four feet high, six feet wide. I could not see it from my position in the circle, but as I began walking, something about it seemed to call out to me. And as the images of my tree fort drifted away I was able to recall the instructions: go towards a place that compels you, approach it with care, get to know the place, spend time with it…

I walked up to this rock and stopped a few feet away from it. I took a deep breath and tears starting flowing down my face. I took a step closer and felt my throat close up. By the time I reached the rock I was sobbing uncontrollably, leaning up against the rock to keep from falling over. After a few minutes I looked up, took another breath, and sat by my rock until it was time to go back to the circle.

This was one of several workshops that I participated in during a professional development seminar last week. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is, as an experiential educator, to have opportunities to play the role of participant in workshops and activities that are similar in nature to the ones that I am often the facilitator of. It lets me see other facilitator’s styles, remember what it is like to be facilitated, and step outside of my own creative process, to learn from and provide feedback to my peers.

Perhaps most importantly it reminds to not over think things, to not be too complicated. It reminds me that in experiential education, most of the heavy lifting is done by the participants. As a facilitator my job is to frame the experience in context and reflection. My job is to create a safe place where the participants can trust me, trust each other, and trust themselves. My job is to bring them in and then get out of the way.

We sat for about an hour. She wasted no time. Within minutes of my sitting down she dove into her story; where she came from, why she was teaching, what she was struggling with, and what she wanted for her students. I sat there listening. I asked a few questions, I told a few stories, I shared some of my perspective on her situation and the general state of our education system. But mostly I listened.

Many of the struggles she was expressing are things that I have heard from countless teachers trying to come to grips with the realities they have to face in the profession, which end up being very different from the expectations they had, or the motivations that brought them there. So many young teachers enter the profession with dreams of helping young people grow and develop into well rounded, confident and caring adults.

Some come to the profession with a passion for science or history, and want nothing more than to inspire the next generation the way that they may have been inspired in their own youth. Others come with a passion for the arts and literature, or music, or mathematics. Still others enter teaching not because they are passionate about a particular subject, but because they are passionate about young people. They want to create positive supportive environments where young people can discover their own passions and build their own paths towards becoming confident and caring adults.

Whatever their personal passion, teachers, as a whole, love children and want the world that their children are going to inhabit to be a little better than the one they were born into. They want their students to dream, they want them to create, they want them to explore and discover the world.

But that is not what most teachers find themselves doing. At a far too rapidly increasing rate, teachers are spending their time testing their students and preparing them to be tested. Kindergarten teachers have been told to put away the blocks and dress up areas and replace them with desks, chairs, and worksheets. Elementary school students are made to take high stakes tests that determine if they will make it to the fourth grade. In high school, while students may demonstrating interest and expertise in particular discipline or content areas, they are all measured up to the same standards.

Teachers are no longer asked to be educators, they are asked to be technicians. They are not asked to design engaging curriculum, they are asked to follow a script rather than design a curriculum. They are not asked to teacher their students so that they can learn, they are asked to “teach to the test”. They are not asked to teach their students to read, they are asked to raise literacy scores. They are not asked to get to know their students and develop supportive relationships that will help the student grow into a caring, confident and capable adult. They are asked to raise their graduation rates.

Of all the frustrations and unfulfilled expectations that teachers have, the biggest struggle that I have heard teachers express is that they feel unsupported, that they feel alone. With all of the pressures of standardized testing, state and federal education mandates, public scrutiny, and the actual day to day work of managing overcrowded and underfunded classrooms, all teachers want is a little bit of support, a little bit of trust, and a little respect for them and their profession.

At the end of the conversation this friends of my friend confirmed my theory. She thanked me for sitting with her and sharing my thoughts and experiences. Then she looked up, took a breath, and said that really, what she appreciated most was just the opportunity to talk about her work, to put voice to the struggles and questions she was having, and to feel like she was not alone.

The year ended with a similar yet quite different bang. I don’t know the laws regarding setting off fireworks in Caguas, but I know that the uncoordinated, homemade, pyrotechnics display began as early as 10:30 and continued uninterrupted for two hours with a crescendo of explosive sounds fifteen minutes either side of midnight. From the kitchen, where we sat playing cards and sipping homemade concoctions featuring local Puerto Rican rum, you could see an occasional flare in the sky but for the most part it was an auditory experience.

Walking around Amsterdam as the calendar turned to 2011 I was contemplating all of the unknowns that had suddenly filled my life. Any stability that I thought I had, any plans that I had been making, were all being thrown out and I was, for maybe the first time in my life, facing the world without a plan. It was a terrifying and quite liberating experience. Standing on a bridge above the beautiful canals, talking with my friend who had just taken her own leap into the unknown I found myself beginning to imagine the possibility of a different life for myself.

In 2011 the word revolution has made quite a comeback in public discourse. From Tahrir  Square to Occupy Wall Street people have been talking about revolution. All over the world, we have been sitting in circles – in our homes, in public spaces, on the internet – and talking with each other. We have been talking about how we live and and what our values are, about how we make decisions and what kind of world we want to live in, about who we are and who we want to be. We have all begun to engage in the process of imagining… imagining different governmental structures… imagining different economic structures… imagining a different system for prioritizing our values. Ultimately we are each imagining a different life for ourselves and we are all imagining the possibility of a different life with each other.

We still mostly think about revolution as a sudden change in the political or social structure of a society – the overthrow of one regime or set of ideas to be replaced by another.  But in the dictionary the word revolution has another definition: a procedure or course, as if in a circuit, back to a starting point.

Today, as the earth completes another revolution around the sun, I think about the changes that this last year has brought to my life – living in a new country, speaking a new language, working on a new initiative; I think about the things that remain the same in my life – my values and passions, my life’s work, the love I have for my friends, my family, and the people around me; and I think about the places I am coming back to – my creativity, my confidence, and the joy I get from simply being alive.

I have no idea what the year 2012 will bring but I can only hope that for both the world and myself it will be another tumultuous revolution.

But as a Jewish boy, who already felt disconnected from main stream American consumer culture, the “season of giving” only served to further alienate me. I didn’t want to hear Christmas music or watch Christmas movies. I certainly didn’t want to buy Christmas presents and the last thing I wanted was for some strange man in a fake beard to remind me that everyone else was celebrating a holiday that had nothing to do with me and that I had no interest in.

My relationship with Christmas did not improve when I started teaching high school. Seeing the amount of stress and depression the holiday season stirred up in my students was devastating. I remember a conversation with one student who explained to me that he always got in trouble around Christmas. When I asked why he thought that was he very astutely responded that he would rather not get a present because he got in trouble than not get a present because his mom couldn’t afford it, so in order to be in control over the cause of his disappointment he got in the habit of getting in trouble.

Four years ago I was discussing the approaching holiday season with my friend Karim. He asked what I did while everyone else was gathering with their families and exchanging presents so I told him about Jewish Christmas – the tradition of eating Chinese food and going to see a movie. Karim, who is Puerto Rican, was fascinated by this. His family was all going to be gathering in Florida for Christmas that year but he wasn’t going to join them, so I invited him to experience his first Jewish Christmas. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Montague street in Brooklyn and went to see Will Smith roam the vacant streets of Manhattan with his dog in I Am Legend.

I’ve been thinking of that Jewish Christmas with my Puerto Rican friend a lot this week as I am experiencing my first Puerto Rican Christmas. As I have written previously in this blog I am spending much of this year living in Caguas Puerto Rico with my friend and IDEA colleague Scott, his wife and their three children, who are from Arizona by way of Portland and also spending the year in Caguas.

Christmas began a week and a half ago when our house was invaded in the middle of the night by a traveling party. The paranda, as it is known, is a tradition in which your friends show up at your house in the middle of the night, and stand outside singing and playing a wide variety of percussion instruments until you invite them in, feed them and serve them drinks. The singing continues until at a certain point everyone decides that this particular party is over and it is time to move on to the next one. As quickly as everyone arrived, they are gone. But they take you with them, so at the next house you are the one outside singing and clapping until you are let inside, fed and served drinks.

And the paranda was just the beginning. On Thursday there was an all day Christmas party on the Beach. Friday was decorating ginger bread houses. Last night (Christmas Eve) the adults stayed awake setting out presents which included putting together a giant cardboard house, while Scott shared with me his families Christmas traditions. This morning I was woken up by the sounds of excited children and the smells of a delicious breakfast. There was another party tonight. There will be another tomorrow, and the next day, and every day for the next two weeks.

I will probably not make it to every party but it won’t be fore lack of trying. Because unlike the television sponsored Christmas of my childhood, I have felt welcome and included in every minute of this holiday season, and not once have I seen the materialism that causes people to riot outside of Walmart the day after Thanksgiving upstage the pure spiritual joy that people experience when they are actually happy to be spending time together.

The warmth of all of the people I have celebrated with, the joyous nature of the celebration, and the welcoming atmosphere of everything I have experienced this Christmas in Puerto Rico has done wonders to help me re-imagine what kind of relationship a non-consuming Jew from New York could have with this holiday.

Feliz Navidad

Some of the songs on this playlist were very easy to decipher and the blurting out of them followed a very predictable pattern. My friend Paul, who worked for my father for a time, always knew when my father had returned from Cape Cod because he would skip around the print shop blurting out the lyrics to The Proclaimers “500 miles”. The secret to this pattern turned out to be that Cape Cod was where my dad kept his Proclaimers album. Then there were songs that I didn’t know actually were songs until I encountered them much later in life and in their own contexts.

Of all of the phrases and stanzas that my father would blurt out there was one that he sang more than any other. And it is the lyrics to this song that have been in my head as I have been going about my work for the last few weeks.

I saw two of my cousins last week. They have been hanging out at occupywallstreet protests and events. I was on my way to a meeting and I ran into them while they were marching just across the street from where my meeting was. When we were both finished we met up at a diner around the corner. They were with another friends and had been trying to explain to him what it was that I did. They were having trouble explaining it. “He does education… really cool stuff” was just about all they could muster.

I don’t blame them. Sometimes it’s hard even for me to keep up with all of the projects that I’m working on. When people ask I usually say: When I’m in New York I do summer camp and experiential education for New York City youth (Fertile Grounds Project). When I’m not in New York I support grassroots education change initiatives as an Advisor and Consultant to IDEA, specifically I am working on the Education City Initiative, connecting city resources with schools based on individual student’s talents and passions in Caguas Puerto Rico.

Even as I read that back now I can’t tell if it is a simple explanation of what I do or if, as my cousin suggested, I use too many words that I am used to using but don’t really mean anything to other people. But even if you stick with “he’s in education…” I’m afraid it doesn’t give a good picture of what my life actually looks like.

Yes, working on summer camp and education change projects is what I do, but it is very rarely what it looks and feels like I am doing. On a day to day basis I am very rarely in schools, and even more rarely am I working directly with young people. I am almost never in classrooms and sometimes I don’t even meet the young people that my work affects. Most of my time is spent either in or preparing for meetings.

In New York my meetings are mostly with school principals or people in the business world. In Puerto Rico my meetings are with school principals, business and community leaders, or the Mayor and his staff.

In New York I am selling Survival Project – with principals I am trying to get them to send their students on our program, with people in the business world I am trying to get them to sponsor the program. In Puerto Rico I am selling the Education City Initiative – with principals I am trying to get them to commit their schools to the process, with business and community leaders I am trying to get them to become resources for students individualized learning plans.

Regardless of who I am meeting and what we are meeting about, most of my work these days is the hardest kind of sales – getting people to buy in to a new concept. I am selling a paradigm shift. And through several transformations of my own I am becoming the perfect salesman for such a task.

And although I am enjoying the meetings and conversations that I find myself in, something has felt strange about it. And then I thought about this song and realized that it all made sense.

The number one song on my father’s playlist was “Express Yourself” by Charles Wright. The lyrics he sang over and over for most of my childhood are these:

It’s not what you look like 

when you’re doin’ what your doin’ 

It’s what you’re doin’ when you’re doin’ 

what you look like you’re doin’

For decades I struggled to understand what those words meant. I had no idea that they were giving me the confidence to keep doing what I knew I needed to be doing no matter what it looked like I was doing. I had no idea that this song was preparing me for the wonderful contradiction that is my life and work.

If my father was alive today he would claim that he knew what he was doing all along. Then he would look up, smile, and skip away singing and clapping.

I’ve copied a link to hear the original song (though not an original video) here