Tag: change

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At Large Opinion

Sea Change

Photo © Lawrence Wee | Dreamstime.com

A pelican glides by just offshore, there, out where the blue dolphins dance, emerging and disappearing into the sea. The kite hangs overhead, side-slipping in the ocean breeze, tethered to your umbrella pole by a gracile thread. You push your new sunglasses up on your nose and soak in the sun, the blue sky, the bleached sand; you hear the surf mumbling, “Stay.”

I could do it, you think, shifting in your canvas chair. “I could get a job renting beach umbrellas or maybe working on a fishing boat. In the evenings, I’ll sip margaritas and finish the novel.”

Your young daughter hands you a sand dollar from a plastic bucket filled with saltwater currency. “Let’s go cash this in,” you say. “We’ll buy this place.

The cast is perfect, a dry fly circling at the deep end of an eddy. There is a flash of silver and a tug that feels like you’ve hooked the river and it wants off. The trout streaks into the current, jumps once, twice, takes line, gives it back a reel-turn at a time. You stand in the riffle, gravel crunching, sliding under your feet. “This is a good one,” you think. Minutes later you net the fat rainbow, admire it for a few seconds, and release it back into the pool.

“I wonder what a piece of land on this stream would cost,” you wonder. “I could live here, deep in these dark woods, enjoying a life of fishing, solitude, and contemplation — become a wise old man.”

You’re sitting on the pool steps, waist-deep in cool water, deep in the steamy jungles of Quintana Roo, south of Cancun. The house is modern, open, with glass walls overlooking the pool on one side and the twisted green jungle on the other. Every morning, a troop of monkeys swings by, screeching through the trees as you sit outside with your coffee, marveling at the strangeness of it all.

“I’ve decided this must be a drug lord’s house,” your wife says from her chaise lounge, not opening her eyes. “Who else would build a place like this in the middle of nowhere?”

“They didn’t mention that in the rental brochure,” you say, “but whoever owns this house certainly knows how to get away from it all.”

Two grackles land near the diving board and begin dipping their heads in the water and shivering it off. They chortle and chatter like an old couple in the park. You slip neck-deep into the pool and they fly away, complaining at the intrusion. 

“Hey, I’m thinking maybe we should look into property in this area.”

“Sure,” she says.

Two-hour layover in the Atlanta airport. You’re sitting in a bar that has a stupid name, talking to a man in gray — gray suit, socks, tie. He’s on his way to St. Louis, a software rep for a company you’ve heard of. You both watch as five men walk into the place — scruffy hair, tattoos, colorful funky clothes — obviously a band. You overhear them talking about going to the Bahamas to record. 

“Nice work if you can get it,” says the gray man.

“I used to be in a band myself,” you say.

“Really?” says Mr. Gray. “Me, too!”

You sigh and take another pull on your beer.

How many times have you been tempted to start over, to ditch your life, your career, and make a big change? If you’re like me, those moments occurred, but were seldom followed up on, unless you count moving to a new city to take a job, which last happened to me in 1993.

Change is difficult, even when the goal is worthy and attainable. It’s much more difficult when it’s not worthy and it’s forced upon you, and when you’re not sure how to fight against it. That’s where we all are now, in the midst of an attempt to change how our country will be governed, to overturn our core human values. Democracy itself seems tethered by a gracile thread. I take solace in knowing we’re all in this together, and that that’s the only way we’ll get out of it. I don’t know how it ends. I do think that we’re well past the “have a margarita and watch the dolphins” stage. Courage, my friends. 

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Baby Steps

Baby steps first (Photo: Youjnii | Dreamstime.com)

I’m learning to walk again. It was odd at first. After more than two months of being unable to bear weight on my left foot after an April 13th fall, broken bones, and three subsequent surgeries, my brain had begun to rewire itself not to, under any circumstance, step on that foot — or else. Or else, what? I wasn’t sure of the medical specifics, other than it would undoubtedly hurt and it could hinder the healing. Incredibly cautious and afraid of the consequences, I have exercised great care in this endeavor and have become increasingly skilled at hopping on one foot while using a walker and balancing on the good foot while standing. Not skills I’d ever thought I’d master, but hey, my right leg is a lot stronger now. And I can challenge anyone to a standing-on-one-foot timed battle. Who’s up for it?

Since I was given the green light from the surgeon to bear weight — still with caution, and in an orthopedic boot — I’ve had to relearn, in a way, how to walk. At first, I was scared. Is my ankle going to collapse when I stand? Will the titanium plate snap out of place? Are fragments of my healing tibia and fibula going to crumble again beneath the weight of my body? And beyond that, it just felt downright weird to put that foot on the ground — tingly, as if it had just awoken from a monthslong slumber, burning a bit as the nerves reignited to do the job they’ve done for decades. Just like riding a bike, I suppose, but accompanied by some strange lighting strikes of pain and a brain that didn’t want to cooperate. 

Last week, it started slowly, a step here and there as I remembered how to put one foot in front of the other, how to balance on two legs, expecting it to hurt. And it has. After the first full day of “walking” — some with a walker and some without, still in the boot and a little off-kilter — it felt like I’d traversed the expanse of Disney World, stood in long lines, and suffered the sorest feet (or foot) I’d ever felt. But the most I’d done was walk from the parking lot into the movie theater for a showing of Inside Out 2. (It was a great movie, by the way. I might have enjoyed it more than my niece and nephew. Among others, the part about losing joy as we grow up got me right in the feels.)

In this experience of learning to walk again, finding balance, and rewiring my brain to physically move forward once more, I’m struck with the notion that this applies to other parts of my life. Much has changed for me in the past year — in nearly equal parts good and bad — and even more in the last few months. In more than the literal sense, I’m learning to walk again — in the same environment with new characters, new challenges, new feelings I have to feel my way through. Sometimes it’s like looking at a dusty old box of pictures and letters with yellowing pages, so crisp as you pull at the folds. There’s not a lot of room for looking back though — wallowing in the holes left by a sister that’s moved far away, a dog that’s died, friendships that have grown apart. It stings and burns and pulls at the heart strings in a way that’s not conducive to the forward momentum needed to inspire those steps toward the future. And a voice inside quietly says, “Don’t look at them. It’s going to hurt.”

If you can rely on nothing else, you can on this: Change is a constant. We may want to cry and holler and resist when it comes, but it’s inevitable. In embracing mine, and in relearning to walk — literally and figuratively — I’ll try to muster the joy and gleeful vigor that’s seen in a baby taking its first steps. The whole world is new from an upright position, waddling unbalanced to and fro, tripping and falling down now and then. Both feet on the ground, wide eyes and a toothy grin, and so much — a lifetime — to look forward to. 

Categories
Opinion

The Next Superintendent

The next superintendent of Memphis City Schools should be too young for the job.

Too young, that is, by conventional standards. If ever a school system needed fresh blood, fresh thinking, and youthful energy and idealism, it is MCS.

Memphians are familiar with the superintendent search process. Engage some consultants and a local nonprofit or two with no vested interest — which means no children actually attending Memphis public schools — to do a “national search” for a Dr. Gerry House or a Dr. Carol Johnson, who brings along some friends to take the most important and well-paid administrative jobs.

They announce their “reforms,” make headlines, burden teachers with extra paperwork, polish their resumes, stay a few years, and suddenly leave for greener pastures. Then the school board names an “interim” superintendent who is over 60 years old and a 30-year employee of the school system: a Ray Holt, Johnnie B. Watson, or Dan Ward. Then the process starts all over.

What if, instead, MCS was run by a superintendent and staff of twenty- and thirtysomethings with recent experience as teachers, coaches, and principals of Memphis public schools or similar urban public schools?

There are two good sources for such candidates. One is the current pool of Memphis teachers and principals who have demonstrated results and earned the respect of their peers. The other is the national Teach for America program, which is now 17 years old and has enlisted 17,000 of America’s brightest college graduates into teaching in urban and rural schools. One of the goals of Teach for America is to keep its “corps members” in public education beyond their two-year obligation. One way to do that is to show them they can put their talent, training, energy, and idealism to work on a big stage while they are “too young.”

Of course, the truth is they are not too young. Last week, FedEx founder Fred Smith was interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “The riskiest strategy is to try to avoid risk altogether,” said Smith, who was five years out of Yale and a year out of the Marine Corps when he founded Federal Express.

In The Wall Street Journal last week, there was a story about the American soldiers who are running counterinsurgency classes in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them is Capt. Dan Helmer, a former Rhodes scholar. He is 26 years old.

Our best and brightest and bravest can start companies and fight wars and command armies, and they can run our failing school systems if we let them.

I have had the pleasure of getting to know several Teach for America teachers working in Memphis since the program came here in 2006. Most of them got placed at the toughest schools, not the optional schools with college-bound students. The good news is that almost all of the corps members are still working here and making a difference. The bad news is that some schools are worse than most people know unless they have close contact with teachers and students.

I often think about getting them to tell their war stories to the Flyer, but that might make their jobs harder. And these young teachers aren’t seeking sympathy anyway. They plug away in classes for five periods a day — often classes without textbooks for the first two weeks of school, classes with 40 students and only 30 desks for the first five weeks of school, classes where they are under pressure to get 80 percent of their students to pass the Gateway examinations, classes where a terrified teacher locked herself in her closet.

A “too young” superintendent and staff would make mistakes, but veterans make mistakes too. Look at the MCS transportation mess, the spoiled-food mess, and the grand jury investigation of construction contracts. But a young superintendent with recent classroom and administrative experience in Memphis or similar schools would make a lot of smart decisions too and grow into the job.

Willie Herenton became superintendent of MCS in 1978 when he was 39 years old. Within three years, he closed underused schools and helped start the optional schools program. Name a successor who accomplished as much.

As Fred Smith told Chris Wallace, you can’t be afraid to change, because if you are, then inevitably something bad will happen. In Memphis, it already has.