Catharsis

In English class recently we've touched briefly on the elements of tragedy and talked a bit about catharsis, which is a term with several meaning but is basically a "purging of emotion" that comes about by experiencing an intensely emotional story. Audience members would supposedly come to the play with an excess of emotion and the play would restore them to a more natural balance.

While medically speaking that's ridiculous, part of me believes there might be some psychological merit to it. How many people gravitate to the saddest part of a movie? How many people find themselves drawn to intensely sad stories? There are some films that are intensely sad all the way through (Like Schindler's List) and some that just have sad moments (like The Lion King).

What's interesting to me is that I don't really re-watch the intensely sad movies all that often. For example, the full movie of Schindler's List from above? I've probably really only seen it once all the way through. Everything else has been clips here and there. It's a tough pill to swallow. Instead, for my catharsis, I rely on other films that have maybe one sad portion in it. Like Homeward Bound. Man, that's a good movie.

Is that a bit wimpy? Yeah, probably. But it's not like I'm wanting to eat an entire cheese wheel of sadness. I want my films to be the cheese dip of sadness. Just enough to get a taste, and then move on to the main course.

So this is how nuclear wars begin...

So I need to set the record straight, here. 

One of my fellow English teachers, Jason Kohls, has falsely stated that I have claimed the title of "Alpha Male" of the English department.

Given that there are four male teachers in our department, that would be incredibly brazen of anyone to say. However, here are the facts:

• Yes, I did tape an article to Jason's door that implied he thought baby deer are adorable. 
• Yes, I did tell my kids to "prove they had more compassionate hearts than those jerks across the hallway" while raising items for the homeless. I can see how Greg Froese and John Knapp could misinterpret my meaning.
• Yes, I printed a tweet Jason made with the hashtag #whatupbauer
• Yes, I do like to be a snazzy dresser. 

But I started writing this blog post at first to DENY that I EVER said I was the alpha male. However, Jason gave the situation all the grave seriousness of a brewing nuclear conflict:

So, it would seen the battle for masculine supremacy has begun and threatens the pleasant and productive atmosphere of the upstairs south hallway. It is a shame, but what else can we do?

So I did what I hope our own country would do in a nuclear standoff. I point-blank refused to back down in the face of complete and utter misunderstanding:

JUST BECAUSE I DIDN'T SAY I WAS THE ALPHA MALE DOESN'T MEAN IT ISN'T TRUE

Your move, Kohls.

If ever there were an alpha male in our department, it would be me, by-golly. I think my extreme sense of masculinity oozes out of me when I'm doing something particularly manly. Like diagramming a compound-complex sentence. Or ordering a pumpkin spice latte. Or crying while watching Homeward Bound.

Let's see Walker Texas Ranger do THAT.

In all seriousness, in some respects being the alpha male in an English department is like saying you're the healthiest guy at McDonald's. Sure, you might legitimately claim that title, but it's not like there's an expectation or anything. It's a profession that has been dominated by women for literally billions of years. Teaching literature requires showing students how to empathize with characters in a story. Empathy is a trait men are not well-known for. Remember when King Xerxes tearfully embraced King Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae and sat down for peace talks? Yeah. Me neither.

When I was in junior high school, you could tell my English teachers were women simply by looking at my assigned reading list:

• Island of the Blue Dolphins
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Number the Stars
• The House on Mango Street
• Across Five Aprils

All but one of those books (Across Five Aprils) had a female protagonist. And even that one was about domestic life on a farm during the Civil War, so only the girls liked it. There weren't any battles or nothin'. I didn't truly start to love English until I got to read books like Animal Farm and Anthem in class. I felt like those books finally began to move away from some of the themes I was already used to.

But you wouldn't know the field of English was inherently feminine from looking at the department we have going in Buhler. I wish I could take credit for making our department manly, but honestly that's probably not the case. The manliness quotient probably comes from the women just as much as the men. The title of "dominant male" might just go to one of them. Especially the one with the firearm. Come to think of it, that last sentence might need to be plural.

This is a group that is so productive that it looks forward to in-service days with all the fervor of an approaching Harry Potter release. This is a group so eager and excited to share ideas that we have 26 different Google Docs folders with lesson materials for everything from timed writing prompts to links to audio recordings of To Kill a Mockingbird. This is a group filled with people who love what they do.

I don't know if that's masculine or feminine. What I do know is it's pretty dang sweet.

Citizenship Day

It was an inspiring day to work with the Buhler High School kids around on different projects in the community.

It's always a good day when you see groups of young people working to benefit their community. Recently (and separately) our English department began participating in Socktober. It was something started by "Kid President" on Youtube. You can check out the video below:

So far my classes have raised a box full of items, although we've only been at it two days and I only have 40 English kids. The idea to start participating in it came from Jason Kohls and all of our kids and their families have been tremendous in their response. Jason has been having to clean out more and more of his classroom closet to make way for the items kids have been bringing in.

Civic responsibility isn't something that has always been strong with me. It was probably weakest while I was in college simply because Fort Hays wasn't necessarily "home." It was where I lived and where I had friends, but Hays wasn't "home" for them, either. Now that I'm settled, I own a house, and have a child on the way, everyone pitching in to help each other out takes on a new level of importance.

It's important to me that the needy in our community get what they need because it's important to me that my community reflect the values that I strive to maintain. If that simply were not the case, I feel that there would be a greater sense of apathy. The notion that we are our brother's keeper would be gone.

Yes, I have a responsibility to others in my community. It is real. It matters. Just like it matters to an entire basketball team when one player fails a class. It also matters that we do unto others the way we'd have them do unto us.

Socktober. Citizenship Day. It's not an assignment. It's a duty.

Columbus Day is Awful

(I wrote this for The University Leader as a humorous opinion in 2010)

There are a host of serious issues plaguing the nation. This is not one of them.

I’m talking, of course, about Columbus Day. It was Monday. Did you remember? No, you didn’t.

You didn’t celebrate. You didn’t travel to Ohio. You didn’t wave Spanish flags.

Like me, you probably tried to ignore it until you found out the post office was closed.

Which brings me to my point: Columbus Day is the worst holiday ever because Columbus was the worst explorer ever.

I’m not even going to count the whole genocide of the Native Americans thing, which alone is reason to relegate Columbus to a footnote.

No, Columbus was a bad guy because he stank as an explorer. He was the worst. He’s the Paris Hilton of explorers, getting all the attention, but being completely devoid of talent or serious accomplishments and contributions.

He didn’t discover anything. Not really. He wasn’t the first person to discover America — Native Americans did that. He wasn’t the first European to discover America — Leif Erikson did that.

Heck, he didn’t even know he was in America. He thought he was in India. Shouldn’t that by itself be reason to say Columbus was a terrible, terrible explorer? What kind of explorer gets an entire continent completely wrong?

There are some who say that Columbus’ voyage was important because it proved the earth is round. Wrong.

People at the time of Columbus already knew the earth was round. They had even already estimated the earth’s size. Columbus didn’t prove anything, not even to his own people.

Even if he really proved the earth was round, wouldn’t it make more sense to actually sail around the earth? Not just blindly run into some land, declare that it’s India, and then sail back.

There are many reasons to get rid of Columbus Day. Chief among them is that it’s really, really annoying. Anyone else try to go to the bank on Monday? Yeah, I bet that was a lot of fun turning around and driving home, cursing that jerk Christopher Columbus under your breath.

Does anyone know how much money the economy loses by shutting down banks to worship Columbus each year? I don’t either, but I bet it’s a lot.

I’d probably be fine keeping a holiday in place of Columbus Day, but it would need to be changed to something more relevant and worthwhile. Like Comfortable Pants Day. Now that’s something that would look good on the second Monday in October.

Christopher Columbus was not only a terrible explorer, but he’s a terrible reason to take the day off.

I Didn't Die When I Saw The Conjuring

I've posted in the past about scary movies. Namely about zombies and about horror movies in general.

But this past summer I saw a horror movie that everyone seemed to claim must be the scariest thing to emerge from a movie theater since popcorn prices were raised to $10 a bucket.

Yes, I'm talking of course about The Conjuring.

My wife and I went with a couple of friends who had bought into the hype. Christina is pregnant, of course, and one of my friends was apparently concerned for her well-being.

"Um...do you think it's a good idea for a pregnant woman to be seeing this? What if the movie freaks her out so much that she...I don't know....goes into labor or something?"

We took our chances.

But I was a bit disappointed. It was a good movie, don't get me wrong. But single scariest movie ever made? Not really.

I hadn't quite grasped from the trailers that this was just another exorcism movie. I've seen my fair share of these films. I gotta tell ya, it definitely makes being Catholic look exciting. I can almost picture a hotline to the Vatican where the pope has to dispatch secret agents to fight these demons in their houses.

That's probably the biggest reason I didn't find myself on the edge of my seat like some of the folks in the theater. Exorcism movies aren't really novelties for me anymore.

Fantasy Football Team Names

Fantasy football is about to begin. I belong to a couple of leagues with a basic rule for team names: They must be named after a town or city in Kansas. You may pick whatever mascot you want.

The goal, of course, is to be as clever as you possibly can.

So, naturally, Christina and I set forth to come up with the best list of names we could.

The Potter Muggles (mine)
The Winchester Rifles
The Cuba Libres
The Reading Rainbows
The Assaria Assassins
The Axtell Clinics (our doctor works at Axtell Clinic in Newton)
The Dexter Laboratory
The Enterprise Rent-A-Cars (Christina's team name)
The Gypsum Gypsies
The Long Island Iced Teas
The Montezuma Revenge
The Mission Impossibles
The Perry Platypus
The Protection Detail
The Speed Racers

Our foes will quake before the might of our witty titles.

Legacy

Over the last week I've been reading my last book of the summer, Outliers, The Story of Success. It's a book that makes the argument that all of us, whether we know it or not, are products of our background. That we owe far more to our legacy and that legacy contributes as much to our personal successes as any special talents or work ethic we may have.

It makes an illustration with Asian commercial pilots. There was a time when Korea had some of the most unsafe airlines in the world. That's because their culture dictated deference to authority. The pilot did his job and his decisions were always respected and adhered to. Those beneath his command, like his engineer or first officer, would not question him or risk embarrassing him. That meant that when he made a mistake, that mistake would go unchecked and lead to another mistake, then another, then another, until seven mistakes later, there was a crash. The culture itself created a situation where pilots found it difficult to be effective because what could have been three sets of eyes on the control panel became just one. 

It had nothing to do with the skill or the work ethic of the pilot, but everything to do with the intricacies of that particular culture. 

In the same way, the book talked about how southerners tend to get red hot angry. The Appalachians were originally settled by herding people from Scotland, Northern England, and Ireland. They had lived in difficult terrain in the old country and had only been able to rely on their families and their clans for protection and support. They had to protect their herds with force, otherwise others could come in during the night and steal their livelihood. In this way, personal honor became very important to them. They were fierce, battle-hardened people because they had to. They formed strong bonds with their community because they had to.

So these same people settled in the Appalachians in the American South and that culture of honor is still there today. A study was actually done on what happens when you call a southern boy a certain seven-letter word (I'll let you try to figure it out) compared to what happens when you call anyone else that name. The result? The Southerners' testosterone levels were up and they were in fight mode. The others generally laughed it off. It had nothing to do with lineage. Many of the Southerners had no ancestry from Scotland, England, or Ireland, but they were influenced simply from having grown up in the South. The Southerners, though they may not know it, were still being influenced by hundreds-years-old cultures, from a land thousands of miles away.

It made me wonder just what legacies affect me and affect our communities. It's easy to see the legacy in Halstead and Buhler and much of the area around Hutch: German Mennonites. The Old Country still isn't that far away. Many communities in this area remain strong despite relative rural seclusion in no small part because the old settlers relied on community so much. Some people think I'm crazy, but I swear I can hear the faintest hint of a German accent from some of Halstead's older citizens.

My direct ancestry seems to have two predominant characteristics: Very German, and very Lutheran.

The Lutheran bit is easy enough to spot in my family (seeing as how my dad's a Lutheran pastor and all). Appreciation for classical music has always been strong, especially for Bach who's probably the most influential Lutheran of all time next to David Hasselhoff.

The German bit is interesting as well. I was always taught to be proud of my German heritage, although that usually didn't go much further than occasionally eating dumplings. That being said, I DO know the words to O, Tannenbaum.

But there's a very slight sense of separation from those who aren't Volga German, and part of me thinks that stems from the persecution the Volga Germans faced while in Russia. They became distinct groups with different experiences than other German immigrants and remained separate and prideful. The whole persecution bit very possibly made some socialists out of some of our ancestors. At least that's the family story, anyway. Maybe that's why we have a fair amount of moderate liberals in the family. 

Having lived in three separate states (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas) I tend to wonder how much I've changed as I've moved from one place to another. My older brother still lives in Texas and he's still steeped in Texas culture whereas we're definitely midwestern now. Part of me cheers for Sweden just because Christina went to a Swedish college. The weather isn't just polite conversation but a serious matter that affects the livelihood of an entire farming community. Oh, and no one likes Missouri. In fact, there might be a few that still believes Missouri will burn Lawrence again.

Oh, Missouri v. Kansas. Now THAT'S a legacy to talk about.