Missing the Point
Jun. 25th, 2017 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947Joey “The Lips” Fagan:
“O sing unto the Lord a new song,
For he’s done marvelous things’.
Psalm 98.”
Jimmy Rabbitte:
“You lied to me, Joey!
I always bought everythin’ you told us!
But you lied to me!”
Joey: “In time you’ll realize
What you achieved.”
Jimmy: “I’ve achieved nothing!”
Joey: You’re missing the point!
The success of the band was irrelevant!
You raised their expectations of life!
You lifted their horizons!
Sure, we could have been famous,
But that would have been predictable.
This way it’s poetry”
(The Commitments: 1991 movie)
On Saturday, June 17th, three colleagues, from another time and place, celebrated their retirement as teachers and administrators from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Privately, I would call them “old friends”, but they are not really THAT OLD, and unfortunately, I rarely see them anymore. They were teachers that I worked with, suffered with, and greatly admired and respected. They were people I liked – all in different ways.
I fell in love with Van Nuys MS from the first day I drove to it in the summer of 1995. After spending 7 years as an Assistant Principal and Principal in the Los Angeles communities of Sun Valley and El Sereno, Van Nuys was like coming home. It was a classically built, pre-WWII structure, with old-fashioned hallways and floors, walls of old wood, and cornices of solid, ancient cement. Best of all for a principal accustomed to the dreary asphalt of inner city playgrounds and P.E. fields, Van Nuys was garlanded with verdant front lawns and trees, lush P.E. fields on the side, and an interior courtyard with two large grass pastures and shady Chinese elm trees. It was a magical emerald isle, tucked a block away from the busy commercial street of Van Nuys Blvd, which our counselor, Marty Crowe, appropriately nicknamed “Shangri-la (and the name I used when referring to the middle school in previous blog essays).
There was never a doubt in my mind about going to this retirement party, when I received the invitation. All three were people I valued and esteemed, and Jim was an exceptionally good friend. Any nervousness about going was relieved when Sue Harris, my assistant principal at Van Nuys, informed me that she was going too. So I invited her to carpool with me, and we went together.
Let me take a moment to add at this point, that my 10 years at Van Nuys covered both the best times I had as a principal and periods of my deepest depression. I suppose I always wanted to maintain the belief that Van Nuys Middle School, my Shangri-la, was timeless and would always stay the same. That even if I were transferred and then retired, the place I loved, and the teachers and staff I cherished, would always be there. The only thing that would change would be the principal, and, as teachers never tired in telling me, “Principals come and go”. So I was jolted out of that dream immediately after my arrival. As I was greeting, hugging, and reminiscing with former colleagues, one after another told me that they and so-and-so were no longer at the school:
“She was transferred”, “he left,” “they were reassigned,” the stories seemed to go.
Prompted by my question as to how things were going, Dorothy, a magnet teacher who was the teacher’s union chapter chair during my time, pulled me aside.
“Tony,” she whispered, “everything is really different now. Since you left we’ve had a string of short-term principals. Many teachers and staff have left on their own or were moved, and loyalties and alliances have shifted”. She shook her head adding, “Things and people have changed. You wouldn’t recognize the school you left.”
As I’ve learned from recent experience, reunions are poor vehicles for satisfactory communication. When surrounded with so many old faces and acquaintances from a treasured time long ago, there is never enough time to talk or explain. There are simply too many people who you want to talk to, and who want to talk to you – all compressed in a limited amount of time. Of the few individuals I managed to speak with for an extended time was Tommy Hicks, a substitute teacher and old friend from Van Nuys and subsequent schools. While it’s unusual to befriend transitory substitute teachers, Tommy was unique. He was an engaging and dynamic, part-time Hollywood and New York actor and director, and the “preferred sub” for us and many other surrounding schools. Teachers loved him and students respected him. What bonded our friendship was his insight in regards to my son, Tony, who had chosen a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting as his college major. The topic of my son arose one morning when I was complimenting Tommy’s stubborn commitment to the difficult profession of acting in Los Angeles.
“Tony, Tony, Tony”, he said, smiling and patting me on the shoulder, after I described my son’s longtime involvement in children’s and high school theatre.
“Your son has a passion for acting! It’s a marvelous thing. You’ve got to trust him and let him pursue his passion. Theatre and the Fine Arts are not dead ends; they can lead to many career opportunities if acting doesn’t pan out. But passion is a gift from the gods.”
I took his advice to heart, especially coming from a joyous man who was still following his own passion, despite its trials and frustrations, and most of his predictions came true. Tony’s BFA degree did eventually evolve into a career in legal editing, and now in computer programming.
But his descriptions of the current situation at Van Nuys MS were disheartening. They were consistent with what I had heard from Dorothy, Rosario, Maria, and many more. Many of the original group of teachers had retired or left for other schools, some were displaced or transferred, and those who remained had redefined themselves in relation to the rapidly changing administrators and principals.
Fortunately, while listening to Tommy’s dolorous tales, I had a chance to pause and reflect, and I tried to gain some perspective on the situation he and others had been describing. I found it hard to believe that my presence at Van Nuys had played such a pivotal role in the formation of the school culture and the school community that thrived from 1995 to 2005. Surely it existed before I arrived and should have continued after I left.
“You know, Tommy,” I sighed, after listening to the discouraging news of the school. “Maybe we’re thinking about those days in the wrong way. Are you familiar with the movie The Commitments? You know, the movie about the formation of an Irish band of working class young people who learn to play Black Soul music. It’s one of my favorites, because of a great dialogue at the end of the movie between the wise old trumpet player and the manager. The old musician explains that ALL truly extraordinary events, like a group of working-class, novice musicians finally coming together to play authentic American black soul music, must come to an end.
‘Happy endings are predictable and boring’, he tells the manager. ‘Wonderful things don’t last forever’. Perhaps that’s what we had at Van Nuys for a while – a uniquely, wonderful thing”.
Even while describing that movie scene to Tommy as a possible explanation of the chimerical period of time we spent together at Van Nuys MS, the dialogue haunted me all afternoon, and I promised myself to find the exact wording later.
All three of the retiring teachers were already members of the Van Nuys Middle School faculty when I arrived in August of 1995. Marlene Hatcher was an English and French teacher, and Keli Koppel and Jim Clemmensen were P.E. Teachers. Jim was also Department Chair and director of a newly awarded State Demonstration Grant in Physical Education. I would eventually appoint him Magnet Coordinator, and he became a valued member of my administrative team. Jim worked in the District for 37 years – 36 of them at Van Nuys. Each of these teachers played a vital role in my decade-long tenure as principal of Van Nuys Middle School, and I appreciated them greatly – especially now, after 12 years have passed. Listening to the old funny and touching stories told by their friends and fellow teachers who spoke and paid tribute to these longtime professionals brought back a flood of memories of my own experiences with them and of my time at Van Nuys.
Marlene was always a puzzle for me. Was she a quirky, Prima Donna, or an efficient, hardnosed teacher who demanded quality effort from her students? Actually, she was both, and ultimately, she was the one master-teacher I wanted my own daughter to observe before going into her first teaching assignment. My key to understanding Marlene was first seeing her through the eyes of the people I trusted and admired at Van Nuys, and later I saw those qualities for myself. Keli was also a unique character that gave off mixed signals – especially to administrators. On the one hand, she seemed to be late, untimely, and unorganized with paperwork, and yet managed her P.E. students like a sophisticated efficiency expert and field general. The idiosyncrasies both these teachers displayed dissolved when they were observed in the classroom, albeit in a building or in the open air. They were leaders with a natural authority they communicated easily to their students, without raising their voices or going into hysterics. I learned that they were best judged by their interactions with students, the standards they set for them, and how they assisted children in achieving them. They were excellent teachers, but they had something more. They were able to communicate a love and confidence in the students’ natural ability to learn. It was this more that made them special, and the school unique.
Jim Clemmensen was able to institutionalize this extra more in the creation of a remarkable educational program that promoted the highest state standards of cutting edge, physical education instruction. With Kurt Kruger, Fernando Gallud, Christine Votrian, Pete Earhardt, and Keli, he molded a team of committed, professional educators who broke the stereotype of P.E. teachers as “coaches” who directed segregated boy and girl classes in calisthenics and then tossed out the balls and equipment to play sports. This P.E. Department, who on two occasions after 1995, was recognized by the California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (CAHPERD) as the Outstanding Middle School Program in the State of California, was committed to the principal of teaching lifelong health and fitness standards to integrated classes of boy and girls, through benchmarked learning, as demonstrated by student achievement. When observing P.E. classes at Van Nuys, you watched students learning, practicing while having fun, and recording their own achievements so as to be able to explain them later. The goals and methodology of this department, especially when described by Jim and Keli at staff development sessions with the entire faculty present, became the bedrock and model of the instructional program for the entire school. In many ways, the P.E. department led and sustained the school’s drive for excellence at Van Nuys Middle School.
That afternoon, while driving home at the end of the long luncheon, Sue and I compared notes of our conversations and impressions. We both came away with the same conclusion. The school community we had met, known, and in many cases, hired at Van Nuys between 1996 and 2007 no longer existed. All we had of that time were memories and departing friends. The three individuals who retired that day were now part of that fleeting past.
Later, while researching the movie, The Commitments, I realized that although I correctly expressed the spirit of the dialogue to Tommy, I weakened the power and beauty of the scripted words. In rereading the verbal exchange between Joey Fagan and Jimmy Rabbitte at the end of the movie (which I cited in the epigram), I became more convinced that the movie was a fitting metaphor for describing the Van Nuys Middle School experience between 1995 and 2005. As improbable as the idea of a group of struggling novice musicians, made up of working-class Irish men and women, coming together to form a wonderfully harmonious Soul Band; so too was the idea that a second chance principal, transferred from an East L.A. middle school because of friction with teachers and parents, successfully bonding with the teachers, administrators, and parents of a mid-Valley middle school that had caused their last principal to flee after only six months. And yet, the improbable happened, because all the stakeholders there, teachers, administrators, staff, and community, came together, committing themselves to showing that our students could and would learn and achieve. Just as in the movie, the 10-year process was racked with conflict and peace, pain and laughter, and joy and despair, but we never gave up. We kept working at getting better so the students would do better. Van Nuys MS became a LEARN school, went through a demoralizing Red Team Tribunal and Evaluation, began strategically targeting student test scores, and ultimately watched our students produce the highest middle school test gains in the District in 2004 and 2005. For a marvelous moment in time, we became a band of teachers, administrators, students, parents, and staff, and made poetry together.
This essay is dedicated to the poets I worked with at Van Nuys Middle School.
“O sing unto the Lord a new song,
For he’s done marvelous things’.
Psalm 98.”
Jimmy Rabbitte:
“You lied to me, Joey!
I always bought everythin’ you told us!
But you lied to me!”
Joey: “In time you’ll realize
What you achieved.”
Jimmy: “I’ve achieved nothing!”
Joey: You’re missing the point!
The success of the band was irrelevant!
You raised their expectations of life!
You lifted their horizons!
Sure, we could have been famous,
But that would have been predictable.
This way it’s poetry”
(The Commitments: 1991 movie)
On Saturday, June 17th, three colleagues, from another time and place, celebrated their retirement as teachers and administrators from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Privately, I would call them “old friends”, but they are not really THAT OLD, and unfortunately, I rarely see them anymore. They were teachers that I worked with, suffered with, and greatly admired and respected. They were people I liked – all in different ways.
I fell in love with Van Nuys MS from the first day I drove to it in the summer of 1995. After spending 7 years as an Assistant Principal and Principal in the Los Angeles communities of Sun Valley and El Sereno, Van Nuys was like coming home. It was a classically built, pre-WWII structure, with old-fashioned hallways and floors, walls of old wood, and cornices of solid, ancient cement. Best of all for a principal accustomed to the dreary asphalt of inner city playgrounds and P.E. fields, Van Nuys was garlanded with verdant front lawns and trees, lush P.E. fields on the side, and an interior courtyard with two large grass pastures and shady Chinese elm trees. It was a magical emerald isle, tucked a block away from the busy commercial street of Van Nuys Blvd, which our counselor, Marty Crowe, appropriately nicknamed “Shangri-la (and the name I used when referring to the middle school in previous blog essays).
There was never a doubt in my mind about going to this retirement party, when I received the invitation. All three were people I valued and esteemed, and Jim was an exceptionally good friend. Any nervousness about going was relieved when Sue Harris, my assistant principal at Van Nuys, informed me that she was going too. So I invited her to carpool with me, and we went together.
Let me take a moment to add at this point, that my 10 years at Van Nuys covered both the best times I had as a principal and periods of my deepest depression. I suppose I always wanted to maintain the belief that Van Nuys Middle School, my Shangri-la, was timeless and would always stay the same. That even if I were transferred and then retired, the place I loved, and the teachers and staff I cherished, would always be there. The only thing that would change would be the principal, and, as teachers never tired in telling me, “Principals come and go”. So I was jolted out of that dream immediately after my arrival. As I was greeting, hugging, and reminiscing with former colleagues, one after another told me that they and so-and-so were no longer at the school:
“She was transferred”, “he left,” “they were reassigned,” the stories seemed to go.
Prompted by my question as to how things were going, Dorothy, a magnet teacher who was the teacher’s union chapter chair during my time, pulled me aside.
“Tony,” she whispered, “everything is really different now. Since you left we’ve had a string of short-term principals. Many teachers and staff have left on their own or were moved, and loyalties and alliances have shifted”. She shook her head adding, “Things and people have changed. You wouldn’t recognize the school you left.”
As I’ve learned from recent experience, reunions are poor vehicles for satisfactory communication. When surrounded with so many old faces and acquaintances from a treasured time long ago, there is never enough time to talk or explain. There are simply too many people who you want to talk to, and who want to talk to you – all compressed in a limited amount of time. Of the few individuals I managed to speak with for an extended time was Tommy Hicks, a substitute teacher and old friend from Van Nuys and subsequent schools. While it’s unusual to befriend transitory substitute teachers, Tommy was unique. He was an engaging and dynamic, part-time Hollywood and New York actor and director, and the “preferred sub” for us and many other surrounding schools. Teachers loved him and students respected him. What bonded our friendship was his insight in regards to my son, Tony, who had chosen a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting as his college major. The topic of my son arose one morning when I was complimenting Tommy’s stubborn commitment to the difficult profession of acting in Los Angeles.
“Tony, Tony, Tony”, he said, smiling and patting me on the shoulder, after I described my son’s longtime involvement in children’s and high school theatre.
“Your son has a passion for acting! It’s a marvelous thing. You’ve got to trust him and let him pursue his passion. Theatre and the Fine Arts are not dead ends; they can lead to many career opportunities if acting doesn’t pan out. But passion is a gift from the gods.”
I took his advice to heart, especially coming from a joyous man who was still following his own passion, despite its trials and frustrations, and most of his predictions came true. Tony’s BFA degree did eventually evolve into a career in legal editing, and now in computer programming.
But his descriptions of the current situation at Van Nuys MS were disheartening. They were consistent with what I had heard from Dorothy, Rosario, Maria, and many more. Many of the original group of teachers had retired or left for other schools, some were displaced or transferred, and those who remained had redefined themselves in relation to the rapidly changing administrators and principals.
Fortunately, while listening to Tommy’s dolorous tales, I had a chance to pause and reflect, and I tried to gain some perspective on the situation he and others had been describing. I found it hard to believe that my presence at Van Nuys had played such a pivotal role in the formation of the school culture and the school community that thrived from 1995 to 2005. Surely it existed before I arrived and should have continued after I left.
“You know, Tommy,” I sighed, after listening to the discouraging news of the school. “Maybe we’re thinking about those days in the wrong way. Are you familiar with the movie The Commitments? You know, the movie about the formation of an Irish band of working class young people who learn to play Black Soul music. It’s one of my favorites, because of a great dialogue at the end of the movie between the wise old trumpet player and the manager. The old musician explains that ALL truly extraordinary events, like a group of working-class, novice musicians finally coming together to play authentic American black soul music, must come to an end.
‘Happy endings are predictable and boring’, he tells the manager. ‘Wonderful things don’t last forever’. Perhaps that’s what we had at Van Nuys for a while – a uniquely, wonderful thing”.
Even while describing that movie scene to Tommy as a possible explanation of the chimerical period of time we spent together at Van Nuys MS, the dialogue haunted me all afternoon, and I promised myself to find the exact wording later.
All three of the retiring teachers were already members of the Van Nuys Middle School faculty when I arrived in August of 1995. Marlene Hatcher was an English and French teacher, and Keli Koppel and Jim Clemmensen were P.E. Teachers. Jim was also Department Chair and director of a newly awarded State Demonstration Grant in Physical Education. I would eventually appoint him Magnet Coordinator, and he became a valued member of my administrative team. Jim worked in the District for 37 years – 36 of them at Van Nuys. Each of these teachers played a vital role in my decade-long tenure as principal of Van Nuys Middle School, and I appreciated them greatly – especially now, after 12 years have passed. Listening to the old funny and touching stories told by their friends and fellow teachers who spoke and paid tribute to these longtime professionals brought back a flood of memories of my own experiences with them and of my time at Van Nuys.
Marlene was always a puzzle for me. Was she a quirky, Prima Donna, or an efficient, hardnosed teacher who demanded quality effort from her students? Actually, she was both, and ultimately, she was the one master-teacher I wanted my own daughter to observe before going into her first teaching assignment. My key to understanding Marlene was first seeing her through the eyes of the people I trusted and admired at Van Nuys, and later I saw those qualities for myself. Keli was also a unique character that gave off mixed signals – especially to administrators. On the one hand, she seemed to be late, untimely, and unorganized with paperwork, and yet managed her P.E. students like a sophisticated efficiency expert and field general. The idiosyncrasies both these teachers displayed dissolved when they were observed in the classroom, albeit in a building or in the open air. They were leaders with a natural authority they communicated easily to their students, without raising their voices or going into hysterics. I learned that they were best judged by their interactions with students, the standards they set for them, and how they assisted children in achieving them. They were excellent teachers, but they had something more. They were able to communicate a love and confidence in the students’ natural ability to learn. It was this more that made them special, and the school unique.
Jim Clemmensen was able to institutionalize this extra more in the creation of a remarkable educational program that promoted the highest state standards of cutting edge, physical education instruction. With Kurt Kruger, Fernando Gallud, Christine Votrian, Pete Earhardt, and Keli, he molded a team of committed, professional educators who broke the stereotype of P.E. teachers as “coaches” who directed segregated boy and girl classes in calisthenics and then tossed out the balls and equipment to play sports. This P.E. Department, who on two occasions after 1995, was recognized by the California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (CAHPERD) as the Outstanding Middle School Program in the State of California, was committed to the principal of teaching lifelong health and fitness standards to integrated classes of boy and girls, through benchmarked learning, as demonstrated by student achievement. When observing P.E. classes at Van Nuys, you watched students learning, practicing while having fun, and recording their own achievements so as to be able to explain them later. The goals and methodology of this department, especially when described by Jim and Keli at staff development sessions with the entire faculty present, became the bedrock and model of the instructional program for the entire school. In many ways, the P.E. department led and sustained the school’s drive for excellence at Van Nuys Middle School.
That afternoon, while driving home at the end of the long luncheon, Sue and I compared notes of our conversations and impressions. We both came away with the same conclusion. The school community we had met, known, and in many cases, hired at Van Nuys between 1996 and 2007 no longer existed. All we had of that time were memories and departing friends. The three individuals who retired that day were now part of that fleeting past.
Later, while researching the movie, The Commitments, I realized that although I correctly expressed the spirit of the dialogue to Tommy, I weakened the power and beauty of the scripted words. In rereading the verbal exchange between Joey Fagan and Jimmy Rabbitte at the end of the movie (which I cited in the epigram), I became more convinced that the movie was a fitting metaphor for describing the Van Nuys Middle School experience between 1995 and 2005. As improbable as the idea of a group of struggling novice musicians, made up of working-class Irish men and women, coming together to form a wonderfully harmonious Soul Band; so too was the idea that a second chance principal, transferred from an East L.A. middle school because of friction with teachers and parents, successfully bonding with the teachers, administrators, and parents of a mid-Valley middle school that had caused their last principal to flee after only six months. And yet, the improbable happened, because all the stakeholders there, teachers, administrators, staff, and community, came together, committing themselves to showing that our students could and would learn and achieve. Just as in the movie, the 10-year process was racked with conflict and peace, pain and laughter, and joy and despair, but we never gave up. We kept working at getting better so the students would do better. Van Nuys MS became a LEARN school, went through a demoralizing Red Team Tribunal and Evaluation, began strategically targeting student test scores, and ultimately watched our students produce the highest middle school test gains in the District in 2004 and 2005. For a marvelous moment in time, we became a band of teachers, administrators, students, parents, and staff, and made poetry together.
This essay is dedicated to the poets I worked with at Van Nuys Middle School.
