Polymathematics

Whaddja get?

I hate it when the kids in my class ask each other what they got on their tests.  I always tell them I don't want to hear it in my classroom.  I think it puts a bunch of kids in an awkward position, whether they don't want to admit a bad grade or don't want to embarrass a friend because they got a good grade.

But I'm sure my hundreds of readers out there (yeah, right...hundreds) are wondering how I did on my black belt test this weekend.  The answer is an annoying "probably pretty good."  The 'probably' is in there because (as of about a year ago) the national organization of our branch of the martial art is requiring videotapes of all black best tests to be sent to headquarters so the top black belts can review it and be sure that a passing grade is really deserved.  They claim it's just a friendly review, and I doubt they would be harsher than the live examining boards—mine included just two people, but one was the actual head of the organization, and the other was my teacher.

The head of the organization was disappointed with one part of my test, but he was disappointed with that part of the test in all three of the black belt candidates, so I think he won't hold it against me as much.  I felt pretty good about the rest of the test.  As I wrote last time, tests just don't really faze me anymore.

Anyway, I can't be 100% sure for a couple of weeks, but I'm about 85% sure that I just earned myself a black belt.  Very strange.

A Little Incoherent.

I don't do a whole lot of posting about my everyday life on this blog...it's hard to imagine many people are interested.  My wife tries, but it's hard even for her to be interested in how Ken did on his test or whether Alice is going to stay in my class or move to a slower one.  Why should almost anyone be interested?  Except, of course, Ken and Alice.  That's the paradox of teaching.  On the one hand it's everyday life for me.  I had to write about 75 paragraphs this past weekend--a description of how each of my students is doing.  I just had to plan to be at work for most of the time.  It's a huge annoyance to my life, but...well...part of the job.  And it can mean depression or elation or grounding or vacation for my students.  I spend like 10 minutes on each one, and it could be a huge deal for them.  It's one of the things non-teachers don't really get, I think.  On one hand the pressure to be fair and precise and diplomatic is huge.  On the other hand I just want to get the hell out of there and get on with my weekend.

Since my martial arts organization (and bear with me here, there is a connection coming) doesn't really let you take a black belt test unless you're adequately prepared, the test itself feels like the afterword to the ordeal, not the ordeal itself.  Almost anti-climactic.  My anti-climax is this Saturday. It's hard to get nervous about this test, or any test I might take.  Not because it's no big deal.  Because it is.  But because I can't really feel huge emotion about any kind of test anymore.  I'm now a professional at tests.  That's pretty much the definition of a true professional:  someone who can do the job with skill, but not let his/her emotions get caught up in it too much.  I know that all tests are subjective, no matter what anyone says.  I've written many and graded many.  Taking one is just part of that now.  So it's hard to get nervous.

But it's the other side of the same coin.  I ***YAWN*** write tests while I'm "yes, I'll pick up some dinner" just living my (shit, I forgot to call the bank) life.  But for the students, those same tests are cause for sleeplessness or panic.  There's the slightly OCD kid who gets completely flustered if the instructions on page 2 of the test mention problems #7-#12, but the problems on the page are numbered #8-#15 because I changed the test from last year but forgot to change the numbers.  ***YAWN*** for me, panic for him.  Professional and unemotional for me, upset about a C because of the panic for him.

I'm pretty busy this week.  I'll probably not post until after my black belt test.  ***YAWN*** another test.  Next Saturday.  Tests are everyday life...and I don't post much about everyday life.

How do I feel about it?  Not much.  How should I feel about it?  I don't even know anymore.

Purging the Few, the Proud

With all due respect to the Marine Corps, I am working on purging the Few and the Proud from my mind.  And it's not easy.  The few and the proud in question are not, of course Marines.  They're wimps.

I always knew I wasn't very athletic.  Every year we had physical fitness tests in gym class, and I could look up my scores on their charts.  Pretty much never above the 20th percentile.  I was a little overweight, and reasonably well-coordinated, but just not strong and with no stamina.  My mom once asked me if there were any tests I actually scored near the average in.  In an 12-year-old burst of true sarcasm, I said, "Well, height," which cracked my mom up.

One of the requirements of 8th grade was to be timed running a mile.  The true athletes could do it in about 7 minutes, I think, and the average was somewhere around 8.5 or something.  I don't think I made it in under 10.  In what I see now as an obvious mechanism for coping with the humiliation of it, some other non-athletic friends and I found just a bit too much glee in being "the few, the proud, the wimps."

During my freshman year in high school, I started training in Tae-Kwon-Do.  I wasn't especially good at it, and it wasn't the best choice of style for me because I wasn't (and still am not) at all flexible.  But the instructor was very good about insisting on non-violence from his pupils, and I was persistent.  It helped my body image quite a bit.  When in my junior year I couldn't do the stupid parallel bars because I a) wasn't strong enough and b) had a bruise on my hand from when I had broken a board with it the previous night, which is much cooler than the parallel bars, I didn't really care as much.

But still, I excelled at academics and music, was teased by the jocks and cool kids, and very much defined myself in direct opposition to athletes.

So in a couple of weeks, I am scheduled to take my black belt test in my current martial art.  This January will be the 6-year anniversary of when I started (it was my New Millenium Resolution...kind of a tradition with me).  The art is more about rolls and throws and pins than punches and kicks.  It requires you to learn how to apply power without having to be especially strong, and it doesn't insist on hours of continuous hard workouts.  On the other hand, even the more athletically inclined will break a good sweat after training for just 20 minutes or so.

It has done wonders for my body image, and I think I'm in decent shape for a pushin'-40-year-old guy.  When I teach classes at the dojo or just help other students, I feel like I know enough to have a black belt.  More and more often in my training, I find that I've just executed a technique pretty well and I feel like the defense would really have worked in a true physical confrontation (not that I expect ever to have one, since I never have before).  If a student came to school with a knife and threatened to hurt other students or him/herself, I think I'd have a fair chance (50%-60% as opposed to 10%-20% for untrained people...those numbers are total guesses) of disarming him/her without life-threatening injury to myself, the student, or bystanders.

When I describe myself, it sounds like I'm on the verge of getting a black belt, and our teacher will pretty much not let you take the test if there's any real chance of failing, so it looks like I will be one soon.

But when I hear the phrase "black belt in a martial art," I still truly can't imagine that the description would apply to me.  It implies some true athletic skill that probably other people can see in me when I train, but which I just can't feel even when my training is going well.  Mike J. and Gary S. are still with me in wimp-spirit when I imagine how people will think of me if they find out I "have a black belt."  I still make a living by excelling in academics, and I have little to no interest in competitive sports either at my school or professionally.  (I have very little idea who's in the American League playoffs.  Seriously.  Boston and Chicago?)  Being an athlete is just not on my self-identification radar.

The Few, the Proud, the Surprisingly Difficult to Emotionally Purge.

A Different World

"A Different World" was the spin-off of "The Cosby Show" where one of the Cosby kids went to college.  The Different World in question was, I guess, two-fold:  living on his own, and being a Black man in the world instead of a Black kid in a familiar neighborhood.  But even that world is not as different as the world of Black kids in urban neighborhoods.

Yesterday and today (and several other times in the past few weeks), I took part in a program that my martial arts school is involved with.  We hold a weekly class for teenagers who have been convicted of drug-related offenses, but not violent offenses.  These kids are free in the sense that they are not confined, but their daily lives are scheduled to the minute, and there are always people keeping track of where they are.  And a few of them take our martial arts class for an hour a week.  For the most part, these are teenagers that are about 2 or 3 lucky breaks away from just being normal, trying-to-make-a-decent-life teenagers.  But because kids in those neighborhoods rarely get breaks, they were caught and sentenced to this program.  It's a triage principle, I guess.  The worst gang-bangers are just locked up.  The law abiding kids are left to fend for themselves.  These kids in the middle get a lot of attention so they won't end up in the first group.  All of the boys in the program are Black.  The girls are of several races*.

Only 5 of the boys stuck with the program for long enough to get to their first promotion test, which was today.  I've been helping teach them for a few weeks (since I have so much more time in the summer).  We practiced with them one last time yesterday.  While I was changing into my uniform in a different room, a large group of these kids was left alone for a while.  By the time I got back, it had degenerated into mass chaos.  They were immensely loud, and 2 pairs of kids were fighting;  they weren't angry, just playing--but the swings were real and could have seriously hurt someone if they had been good enough to actually connect.  I compare this to the Commons at my school where kids are regularly left alone.  Sure, they can get rowdy and there can be some play wrestling.  But nothing like the chaos I saw when I got back.  Society pushes all kids into non-kid behavior...that's the purpose of society, of course.  But a White-dominated society pushes these Black kids so hard that when they let loose, the outbreak is much more extreme.  It was not hard to see how, in a prison, this could turn into a riot.

Of course the 5 boys who tested did very well.  One of them, I'll call him Greg, is a big kid...maybe 5'11" and 260 lbs.  But he learned quickly that brute force doesn't work as well in martial arts as good technique, and when I thanked him for helping put away our mats, he said "no, thank you for coming out here."  None of the other kids had the guts and decency to thank us.  I will go to help out with that program whenever I can this summer, and Greg will probably still be in it by September.  I'll probably never find out what happens to him in the long run.  He's a really sweet guy, and I hope his guts and decency will bring him back from the brink.

Teaching those kids martial arts (even just an hour a week) is so drastically different from the teaching I do every day.  I don't think I could teach them math knowing the kind of apathy that's so prevalent in the classrooms in the city.  I like math, and I can overcome kids' math anxiety, but I have much more trouble with apathy.

Yeah, it's a different world.  But really, of course, it's not a different world.  I can drive there in less than half an hour.  So many White people live in fear of individual Black people they meet, and so many Black people live in fear of the overwhelming mass of White people who don't understand their frustrations.  We're both afraid of each other, and yet it's so easy to find a place (the martial arts mats, for instance) where race really just makes no difference at all.  At a recent weekend seminar for our martial art (drawing about 70 people from around the country--even a few from Japan and Israel--who study our branch of it) I was almost finished with it before I realized that this was really one place where nobody cared at all about race.  My roommate was Black, the instructors were Chinese-American, Japanese-American, White, Filipino, Latino.  I don't think this is just me failing to see racism because I don't want it;  I've been trained to see racism.  All it took was to take the focus off of race and put it onto something we all had in common.  It seems so easy.  But it's not easy.

Sad and encouraging at the same time.  A different world, yet not a different world.  Doesn't exactly follow the logic of math.

*I use the word "race" in its socially defined sense.  Genetically, there is more variability within a "race" than there is between "races".  So the word doesn't really describe any biological reality.  But it certainly describes a social reality.