Apple a Day

Earlier this week, one of my students gave me an apple. I believe it was part of a fund-raising program at the school that involved students giving their favorite professors apples. Naturally, I was pleased to receive this beautiful piece of fruit, not the least because it came from an online student, and it's difficult to create those human connections with online classes.

This lovely gesture of apple-giving made me think of a being a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in the early 1900s. One of my great-grandmothers was such a teacher, and though I didn't really know her, I admire her for having this kind of fortitude and dedication to learning. This in turn got me thinking about the origin of students giving teachers apples, and I think it must prompted the student to think about this as well.  When I thanked her for the apple, she responded with a quote that she thought  might reveal something about the origins of the tradition: "Anyone can count the seeds in an apple but no one can count the apples in a seed." That's certainly a nice idea, and the quote, apparently from an unknown source, speaks for itself.

Other possible connections come to mind. Apples are associated with the pastoral landscape of America's past -- the America of abundance, the America of small farms and quaint orchards. We think of the legend of Johnny Appleseed, spreading the simple, nourishing beauty of apples across our young country as it grew and formed its identity. Apples are associated with hearty health and wholesomeness, as suggested by the old saying, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," which is sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin, himself quite a teacher and lover of knowledge (as well as being an ancestral cousin of mine). We think of apples and other wholesome fruits as nourishing the brain and allowing us to learn and grow, and of course, they do just that.

Then there's that famous apple. In popular accounts of Genesis, it is an apple (although it's an ambiguous "fruit" in the King James version) from the Tree of Knowledge with which the serpent temps Eve. This makes sense, in a symbolic way -- giving a teacher an apple because an apple represents knowledge, but it makes the gesture seem somehow more sinister or at least mischevious, as if the student is playing a trick on the teacher. In this case, is the apple meant to suggest that the teacher corrupts the student with knowledge? This anti-educational subtext may seem vaguely American in all the wrong ways, but it's way too complicated and irreverent to make much sense, as far as I'm concerned.

Of course, the idea of tricks makes me consider the apple's association with Halloween (dunking for apples, candy apples) and its general association with autumn (apple picking, apple pies). Now we're getting somewhere. Apples are abundant in the fall, which is why we ended up making pies with them to begin with, and school of course begins in the fall. Anyone with an apple tree in frontier America must have had more apples than they knew what to do with, so of course they'd bring one for the teacher. Teachers in America have always been underpaid, as school was considered a mere supplement to the rigors of farm life, so they might have welcomed the free food. I certainly welcomed my apple when I received it, although I have one colleague who suggested I get it x-rayed for razors. (He said perhaps he had seen Snow White, with its poisoned apple, too many times, which brings up the sinister side of apples....)

And then there's the Apple computer, itself a symbol of modern knowledge and learning. Additionally, apples are fruit, and we speak of the fruits of knowledge. We could really keep going with this for some time. But just as an apple can only be eaten once, so we must limit what we learn and explore at any given time. It's better to eat the fruit and enjoy it for what it is.  

Plans Change

It's pretty easy to make fun of The Brady Bunch, with its corny dialogue, goofy hairstyles, and hopelessly outdated mores. But this silly little show served as important cultural touchstone for people of my generation, as alluded to in the otherwise annoying Gen-X film comedy Reality Bites. It might be an exaggeration to suggest that The Brady Bunch was ahead of its time or that it was thematically complex, but it was a show of contradictions, a sitcom that idealized family life while celebrating the 1970s-era blended family. This was a show that, for all its flaws, continued to speak to viewers for many years after its initial run, as evidenced by its incredible popularity in reruns. (In fact, the show was more popular in reruns and was only known by people of my age as a show that came on after school.)

The other day, while on vacation in Puerto Rico, I apparently spent a little too much time lying in the sun and began idly thinking about those Brady Bunch vacation episodes. You know the episodes I mean -- the two-part Hawaii vacation in which Bobby finds a Tiki idol and Greg has a surfing accident, or when Bobby gets lost in the Grand Canyon (it seems Bobby was a bit bored on these vacations) and the family gets locked in a jail in a ghost town.

There was a less-remembered "special" vacation episode in which the family visits an amusement park in Ohio or something. This was not exactly as exciting as Hawaii or the Grand Canyon (talk about cliche middle-class vacation destinations, anyway), but the kids responded with great excitement, as always, to Mr. Brady's announcement at the beginning of the episode. It was supposed  to be a just a business trip for  Mr. Brady, after all. Yet somehow Mr. Philips and the other folks down at the architecture firm agreed to pay for Mr. Brady to take along his wife, their six kids, AND their maid.

The central mix-up of the episode's plot had Jan accidentally switching a Hanna-Barbera poster she'd bought at the amusement park with her dad's important architecture plans. I don't remember how Jan had access to her dad's plans, or why Mr. Brady left them lying about (he was probably getting drunk in the hotel bar). I also don't know whether as a kid I questioned the likelihood of Jan's poster (in its yellow tube) looking exactly like Mr. Brady's plans. I do remember thinking as a kid, What kind of doofus buys a poster at an amusement park, especially at the beginning of the day, when you know you'll have to haul the stupid thing around with you on all the rides? Geez, Marcia must have been annoyed with her, but then, Jan was always causing problems like this.

The incredible inanity of the plot was just one thing that made this a classic Brady episode. It had a lot of other classic elements: Jan screwing something up, Bobby and Cindy spending all their time eating, Greg smooth-talking a girl, the zany slapstick marathon running-of-the-poster through the park scene at the episode's climax. But the episode also, like so many Brady Bunch episodes, conveyed an important philosophical lesson, a lesson about the nature of plans.

Mr. Brady represents the Every Man of American culture, an upper-middle-class suburbanite with modest aspirations who is primarily motivated by a need to keep his family secure and happy. Of course, Mr. Brady also serves as the family's philosophical guide, teacher of morals, and a wise, Solomon-like arbitrator. He resolves problems in the family, but he also makes sure that his children learn something from their difficulties through careful self-reflection and moral inquiry.


In the amusement-park episode, Mr. Brady begins with an original set of masterful plans, expertly designed and perfectly executed. Yet he ends up with a full-color poster of Huckleberry Hound. As the usually misquoted poem goes (or doesn't go), "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." A neat and perfect plan can turn into something that is so chaotic and directionless it isn't a plan at all, just a cartoon swirl of colors and shapes. To put it more simply, sometimes your best plans unexpectedly turn into a poster of a stupid cartoon dog.

What do you do with such a plan? If you're the Bradys, you run around the park until you find the original plans and then do a relay race to the inevitable happy ending, passing the plans like a baton from one family member to the next. But you could also accept that sometimes plans don't work out, and that sometimes, in that symbolic sense implied by the changing of the plans here, a good plan turns into a cartoonish mess that's impossible to follow. At that point, you can just give up, or you can roll with it, and see how the new plan might develop into something workable.

If you put aside the silliness of the idea that the two posters would be stored in nearly identical tubes, you can see another philosophical message at work here. Many plans look alike on the outside, and it's only by breaking them open and really beginning to work with them that we can see what we're dealing with. A plan isn't really a good plan or a bad plan until it works or doesn't work. The plan has to translate to practical, real-world viability. The plan has to come out of the tube.

The Brady Bunch is in a more general sense a show about how plans sometimes change. You get married, have kids, and expect to spend the rest of your life with someone. But then your spouse dies (or divorces you, as may have been the case with Mrs. Brady's first husband), and you find your life changing in big and unexpected ways. Sometimes plan change. You have to deal with it one way or another.

We think of the Bradys as an unrealistically perfect family, but really it's an imperfect family that knows how to adjust to the changes life has in store for all of us. You take whatever plans you end up with, and you run with them, sprinting toward a happy ending. If your plans end up not working, for whatever reason, you take positive action -- you enlist your family to help pull you out of the mess, you make new plans, or you roll with the changes as best you can. 

Writing and Taekwondo

At the end of each semester, I always spend a little time reflecting on what students have learned, wondering whether I've taught them enough, and simultaneously wondering about the very old question of how writing can be truly taught. This sometimes leads me to think about tae-kwon-do, the martial art form that can be roughly described as "Korean karate."

I took a semester of tae-kwon-do as a P.E. elective while attending the University of Texas in Austin, and while I was quite untalented in and ill-suited to this sport, I learned something about the connection between the mind and body and also about how we learn. My poor performance in mastering the actual moves of tae-kwon-do probably helped me to learn these particular lessons more acutely, even if in a painful sort of way.

It's become a bit of a cliche to use martial-arts metaphors when musing on the ways in which we can lead a more stress-free life and stop struggling against unchanging forces, but there's a reason the comparisons seem so apt. In comparison to fighting styles that emphasize force or strength, Eastern martial arts especially depend on the mind-body connection and on learning to use outside forces in your favor instead of struggling against those forces. The word "do" (the third part of tae-kwon-do) translates to "way" or "path," which brings to mind the "paths" associated with Buddhist enlightenment. As Mr. Miagi from Karate Kid puts it (yes, I'm quoting a silly 1980s movie): "We learn to fight so that we don't have to fight."  In martial arts, paradoxically, you also learn not to fight in order to learn how to fight. Almost all of the Eastern martial arts emphasize using an opponent's movements against him, and learning not to expend energy in wasteful ways.

I earned a yellow belt at the end of my semester of tae-kwon-do, but I didn't feel as if I had mastered much in way of fighting moves. My instructor, a middle-aged Korean man who was quite short but whose power you could feel as he maneuvered you with his hands (yes, like Mr. Miagi), observed me toward the end of the semester and asked if I had missed many classes.

"No," I replied, although I knew what he meant. I was awkward in my movements, and I still had too much self-consciousness about my body. I still thought about tae-kwon-do too much as I went through the motions, and thinking about it too much is not only antithetical to an entire Eastern worldview, it's also quite counterproductive when it comes to fighting, especially Eastern martial arts. Ideally, it becomes like playing a musical instrument. You think about it at first, but when you've mastered the techniques, you learn to let go and focus on the emotion.

That little yell people do when chopping blocks of wood with their hands? This represents this idea of "clearing your head" in some form. The yell is a kind of meditation, a way of pushing out distracting thoughts in order to focus your physical and mental energy on the hit or kick.

In that direct sense, writing can be compared to tae-kwon-do because it is a kind of meditative act that involves getting into a kind of "zone" in which you forget you're writing altogether.  This is not as mystical as it sounds, because the best writing (before editing) involves pure thinking and learning to let go of the mental barriers that prevent us from writing in the first place. Of course the analogy only goes so far. In a paradoxical way, learning to write is quite different from fighting, because writing must be done with mental clarity and, at least by some definition, writing is "thinking too much." Also, good writing of nonfiction involves taking ownership of what you're writing and understanding, with some degree of "self-consciousness," that it needs to be understood by others.

Another parallel in this comparison involves the nature of learning. As I have pointed out, I was no great tae-kwon-do fighter when I earned my yellow belt, but you wouldn't expect a "yellow belt" to be too much of an expert, would you? The great thing about the belt system is that it defines degrees of learning and rewards the learning process as much as the results. As my Korean instructor pointed out, the belt, even a black belt, does not necessarily designate an absolute level of mastery or how much of a "bad ass" a particular belted person might be, but it does represent an accomplishment in learning. It is a sign that you have learned up to a certain level and mastered those lessons on some level.

Sometimes with writing, I think we expect mastery to come too quickly, when the reality is that every writer is a writer in process. Every good writer is always learning, because improvement is always possible. Successfully completing freshman composition does not mean that a young writer "knows how to write" in every possible situation or that they have mastered the craft of writing. It simply means that they have, hopefully, learned to take ownership of their process and to understand that they are in control of their own writing. I desire most of all to impart to students the idea that they don't write papers for me. I don't need more papers to read. They write papers to develop their own thinking and, in conjunction, their own writing.  
You must learn to not write in order to write, and you must learn to write so that you do not have to see writing as an impossible task involving procrastination and anxiety.  

Mrs. Ford, My Typing Teacher

When I think of down-to-Earth, competent and pleasant teachers who have had a great effect on students in spite of not being dramatic performers or extroverted personalities, I think of Mrs. Ford, my 12th grade typing teacher.

I was one of the last wave of high-school students to learn typing using the old electric typewriters. We spent our days drilling with timed exercises, in which our speed scores were calculated using deductions for our errors, and we learned to type things like memos and envelopes by counting returns and line spaces.

I took typing as an elective because I had vague ideas of wanting to be a journalist or a writer, but I soon found out I loved typing for its own sake. I loved the mechanical purity of typing, and I loved it as an exercise in mental concentration and meditative mind-hand coordination. While the regimentation of typing class and its emphasis on avoiding errors stressed out some hapless students, I found that typing relaxed me. My fingers danced across the keys and produced sheets of clean, typewritten exercises. I had always been plagued by bad handwriting, in spite of my ability to write decent prose, so typing for me was a kind of revelation. The QWERTY keyboard liberated me from the embarrassment of illegible handwriting, which was always slanting the wrong way and which conveyed an unintended lack of confidence in my ideas.

In my mastery of the wizardry of typing, Mrs. Ford was my Merlin, or if you prefer, my Dumbledore. Mrs. Ford was an old-school secretary, a professional-looking woman who wore glasses and always had her hair neatly pinned up. (She was not a fantasy-type secretary, however, in case the reader's mind has wandered in that predictable direction.) She ran the typing drills and exercises in the class with a precision and consistency that did not allow for goofing off or interacting much with the instructor. This was a skills-based class, after all, not a critical-thinking class in which we were to discuss the problems in the Middle East or the symbolism of Moby-Dick. We were just there to type.

Mrs. Ford was a no-nonsense woman, but she was not a drill sergeant or an old battleax. She was pleasant and straightforward, and she modeled for the students a kind of professional sensibility, showing us how to behave in ways that were appropriate to the workplace (depending on where you work) in spite of what we might be feeling or thinking. I never knew if Mrs. Ford was having problems at home or if she secretly despised certain students. She was just there to teach typing, and there wasn't a lot of creativity involved in teaching the most efficient methods for typing.

Mrs. Ford liked me, maybe because I was one of the few males in the class, but probably more so because I typed efficiently and quickly, and I learned from my mistakes. She smiled at me when I finished the exercises twenty minutes early and put my head on the desk to rest. In her own way, without saying so, Mrs. Ford believed that hard work was its own reward.

Some of us have had those "star" teachers who have made a huge impression, changing us in some fundamental way, but we also have had many other teachers along the way, good teachers who aren't praised often enough for being good and consistent, even when teaching a basically undynamic subject such as typing. And most of us hardly ever thank those teachers who have made an impact; by the time we think of doing so, usually years have passed. I never tried to contact Mrs. Ford again, never sent her a card or a thank-you note, and I don't know if she kept teaching or if she perhaps passed away. I hope Mrs. Ford knows she was a good teacher. Whenever I'm writing and I take a moment to think about the beauty of typing (which I'm still rather good at), the mechanics of this tool of the writer's trade, I think of Mrs. Ford and think, here's one thing I was taught that's still working, still keeping me ahead of the class.

On Learning Sign Language

Every semester at COM (the college where I teach), we can take one free class as part of our benefits package. This semester, I signed up for a six-week course in American Sign Language, and the experience has been quite interesting. I have bad hearing, so I was partly motivated to take the course by a vague notion that it might be good to begin learning sign language now. I've also always been fascinated by Deaf culture in America (the growth of which can at least partly be attributed to earlier educational efforts to quash sign language in America, an effort that included tying the hands of students so that they would learn to speak and write English instead of signing).

ASL is not structurally related to English in terms of syntax or morphology, although it's probably an exaggeration to say it's "completely unrelated" to English, as some claim. Much of the vocabulary has connections to the English word-equivalents. The sign for "french fries," for instance, is made using the sign for the letter "F", and there are many similar signs ("boy" uses the sign for B, and so on). The ASL alphabet (which is not the foundation of the language, but more like a supplement) also corresponds to the English alphabet, and is used for things like spelling names and movie titles. ASL uses a system of understood signs (many of them like picture words), mime, and facial expressions, along with some aspects influenced by American English.

Our instructor (an older woman originally from Thailand, I believe) was terrific, encouraging and supportive, and she worked in a lot of interesting stories about how the signs evolved or what visual pictures originally inspired the signs. The sign for "Spain," for instance, seems to have come from the movements of a bullfighter. ASL is a very original and beautiful language in its own right.

Alas, I don't think I took to learning ASL very well. My instructor did praise my ability to use facial expressions, a skill I must have honed through teaching. On the other hand (no pun intended), I seemed to struggle with remembering the shape of hand required and, whether the palm is supposed to be down or up with a given sign. I also disliked working in pairs, which is something she, quite logically, asked us to do quite often.

On the last day of class, I started to reflect about social anxiety and how that might hamper one's ability to learn language, which is essentially a social activity, after all. The sign-language instructor even mentioned that we were doing better than her other classes, because we weren't as shy. I may have learned to fake not being shy, but I think it still interfered with my ability to really take to sign language (that and a kind of self-consciousness about the body, which also hurt my efforts to learn karate). I'm just guessing here, but I imagine polyglots (those with an ability to learn many languages) would tend to have highly evolved social skills and be able to adapt to new situations easily. I'm afraid I don't fit that bill very well.

Or maybe I just didn't practice enough. There's no substitute for dedicated practice and a serious motivation to learn something. My motivation at this point was simply to be exposed to the language and to get a solid foundation, and I think I accomplished that.