Month: October 2017

I’m not sure what prompted the early morning parade. Perhaps it was my conversation with the teacher/students in the EdD program the day before. Or Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS helping two more people find their roots. Gates reminds us of Mr. Payne, our Senior Honors English teacher at San Diego High School.

The parade began with the unlucky Miss Reddington, my third grade teacher in Seattle on whom I threw up trying to ask her to go to the bathroom so I could throw up. I compounded my embarrassment by putting the apology card I was supposed to hand to her personally in the mailbox without a stamp. So she never knew how sorry I really was.

In San Diego, Mrs. Remington played the piano for our fifth grade music period which we all loved though I have not sung “O Columbia the Gem of the Ocean “ since. Didn’t every grade school teacher play the upright piano that was in every classroom? And I remember Mr. Hennings in sixth grade ignoring my protestations that I really did spell “business” correctly, even though the “I” resembled a “y.”

Mr. Heim took me into Boys Chorus in 7^th grade and guided me through my transition from a decent soprano to a wobbly tenor. Miss Ludlow helped me take three years of math in two so I could join the rest of the honors sophomores in Geometry once I reached high school. For Miss Preston, I became skilled at diagramming sentences but more, I learned much about how parts of speech could be fitted together to make interesting, even rhythmic prose.

Both “Misses” seemed older than my grandparents; perhaps they were. Miss Preston seemed kinder than Miss Ludlow back then but Miss Ludlow did me a great favor spending extra time to help me make a big jump. Miss Preston would never know that her picture would be pinned to Judy’s bulletin board in her IPA office where the measure of a message being suitably written to distribute to the public was whether or not Miss Preston would approve. Under the photo, Judy inserted a caption, “Miss Preston is watching.”

Mr. Hill taught Social Studies. He caught me trying to cheat. “Danny, you are better than that” stung more than any discipline involving grades.

At San Diego High School, Mr. Hover introduced me to the Greeks and Romans, Mrs. Batchelder to a speed-reading machine, and Mr. Weiss to Spanish as a vehicle for having fun with words. From Mr. Anderson, I learned about Pythagorus, Euclid, and other Greek guys, and about Zeno who proved that if you only go half way each time, you never get to where you are going. I suppose the lesson was that if you wanted to get somewhere, you had to go more than halfway.

I met Max then, too, the choir and Madrigal conductor who rolled out opportunities for me to show my new classmates that I wasn’t just a nerd, even though we hadn’t invented that word yet.

Imagine, a sophomore who was really a freshman by age becoming the narrator for all choir and Madrigal performances, all those juniors and seniors being introduced by me. Max must have seen something in me.

Judy and I will never forget Mr. Carey in junior English. A little corpulent, balding with black-rimmed glasses and bulging eyes, his temper was legendary. What set him off most, coloring his whole head red, was any of us, supposedly the best and the brightest in our grade level, giving anything less than our best effort. I wrote what he must have thought was a decent paper about Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Heavy stuff, though when I re-read the book years later, I recognized how little I knew at age 15 about guilt, life, and 19^th century Russia.

It was for Mr. Carey that Judy and I were going to sell programs for the football game as our first date so, of course, we remember John Carey.

Mrs. Miller made U.S. History lively. In her class one day at 9:00 a.m. we sat and wondered if and when missiles from a USSR angry over the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba would land on North Island Naval Air Station, visible from our classroom windows. She found less scary ways to keep the stories of U.S. history dramatic. She had salt and pepper hair at a young age, like Judy. Judy used to say that I married our history teacher.

The tall and very Nordic Mr. Lundgren had to teach us the “new math” with this distributive property and that associative one, all forgettable and forgotten. Our texts were stapled trial versions of a new initiative marked SMSG. Some Math, Some Garbage he would chuckle.

In 12^th grade, Mr. Payne reigned supreme. He was a class advisor for seniors as well. A short, African-American (he would have said Negro) man who fussed over his moustache, he comforted us on November 22, 1963 when a student shouted into our classroom, “Kennedy has been killed.” I think Mr. Payne was devastated. In that hour, he modeled courage under fire, a stiff upper lip, being responsible for his kids.

People of a Certain Age, you have your own parade like mine. For me, these men and women shaped my instructional DNA. Out of my experience of them came, at least in part, how I was as a teacher.

Next week is Dia de Los Muertos. The souls in my parade will dance once more, some newer to the party than others. I imagine Mr. Weiss leading the party, in Spanish, of course. Mr. Heim and Max will take turns conducting the spirits in songs of joy and revelry.

If I land in someone else’s parade some day, my instructional DNA will be there, too, and those dancing souls will live on.

Daniel E. White

October 28, 2017

One of the great wonders of life is how words or ideas first heard early in one’s years can come back with amazing force later on. This happened recently and got me thinking.

At our wedding in 1967, somebody read 1 Corinthians 13, known as the “love chapter.” Lots of church weddings have favored this scripture, for obvious reasons. It is the same chapter that contains the promise I hold dear; “Now we see in a mirror dimly; then face to face.”

Tucked away in the second part of a long verse two are these words: “…and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” There’s a smackdown for zealots of any religion. Believe what you will but if you do not love others, you are nothing.

An obituary set me to thinking about faith and re-discovering these words in Corinthians. The obit ran in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser the same day as an op-ed piece about the impact of the man. His name was Michael Cromartie. His mission was to “insure that American political journalism [would be] imbued with religious tolerance, biblical literacy, historical insight, and an ecumenical spirit.”

The op-ed writer confirmed that her journalism had been improved by what Cromartie taught.

A key part of the obituary noted that Cromartie “never minimized his personal faith” which was evangelical; he was a reformed Anglican. However, in working with scores of journalists as he pursued his mission, he was “neither doctrinaire nor defensive.” And, added the writer, he never took himself too seriously.

He held the position of Vice President and Director of Evangelicals in Civic Life at the Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. He welcomed journalists of all religions and no religions to his seminars, the point of which was to insure fair and informed reportage about religion.

By all accounts, Michael Cromartie was a person of strong faith. In reading that he was “neither doctrinaire nor defensive,” “didn’t take himself too seriously,” and “upheld the spirit of ecumenism,” I concluded that Cromartie’s life was filled with love for humanity and the myriad ways humankind have expressed belief in something beyond themselves, a definition of faith.

A few weeks later, the Star-Advertiser wrote about a former colleague who continues in her role as the head of school in a Catholic school. The story was replete with accounts of her many successes in guiding her school through tough times and seeing it emerge again as healthy and sustainable. The reporter asked about the religious composition of the student body, and the head noted that there were many religions represented. She went on to say that, what mattered to her was that one be a good member of his or her religious community: “if you are Mormon, be a good Mormon.”

She added later, “faith is not knowing.” That got me thinking even more…

People of a Certain Age, the fanatical fundamentalism of far too many people around the world in far too many religions stems from confusing faith and knowing. Mix in the absence of love and therein lies how supposedly pious people can hate those who are different and despise to the point of killing alleged infidels.

I know that the tree outside my window is called, in English, a palm tree. I have faith that there is some kind of existence beyond physical death, the exact nature of which is unclear to me. I know that I am sending you what is called an attachment to an e-mail. I have faith that the teachings I follow are a path to clearer understanding of what comes after death after I die.

I know that others believe differently than do I. I have faith that a life lived grounded in love by anyone of any religion will count for something beyond the grave.

I know that the world could use more people like Michael Cromartie, firm in one’s faith but neither doctrinaire nor defensive, not taking themselves too seriously, committed to religious tolerance.

Faith can come with many faces. I count myself fortunate to have been raised by two people who carried an abiding faith in the teachings of Jesus as Mom and Dad understood them. Their approaches to faith seemed to be different. About my mom, my dad once said that she had a “child-like” faith: not childish, but free from much doubt. He might have been surprised about the doubt part had he known her in her 80s and 90s but he meant what he said as a compliment.

Dad’s faith might best be characterized as a lifelong wrestling match with angels. For him, doubt was an integral part of his faith. He wanted to know more and spent a lifetime seeking answers. He understood that faith was not knowing but that did not stop him from trying to know.

It is a part of my faith that Dad now knows, that he sees face-to-face.

It is also my hope that humanity will one day discover that the discouraging record of the human race in distinguishing between faith and knowing and in punishing those who believe differently could give way to the Michael Cromarties of the world.

Faith without love is nothing.

Daniel E. White

October 9, 2017