Keynote address, Roosevelt HIgh School graduation June 17, 2016

Dear graduating class of 2016:

                On June 14^th, 1989, a few steps from here at what’s now Key Arena, I graduated from Roosevelt High School. I was obnoxious and inserted extra names on my name card as a shout-out to friends and also dolled up my big 1980s hair. I did the hair thing so often—nesting toys like a purple monkey up in my fro—that I won Most Distinctive Hairstyle in the Senior poll. I was very excited to be graduating, because I knew how happiness was made and how it wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t made running day after day from one period to the next filling out multiple choice tests in the company of arbitrary communities until a day a counselor could look at a piece of paper and label me educated.

                This is why the graduation announcement I sent around the country opened to the following words: “Come see me receive a rolled-up piece of blank parchment and hear the saccharin speeches of the select bureaucrats who have slowly been swallowing the fruits of my education and who will not leave so much as an impression upon my life (or yours) as an aftertaste.”

                Here’s the point: Adults thought they knew the important building blocks of our happiness. I was pretty sure they didn’t. But now I’ve spent more than half my life at Roosevelt, and I’m now the adult, here to deliver my very own saccharin commencement address.

                What’s more, I do think I’m wiser than you, in some respects. For example, if you put purple monkeys in your hair, I will laugh knowingly and say, “Ha ha, yes. Cute.” But I also think that adults much too easily dismiss the vibrant passions and thoughts of adolescents, probably because you say and do some really stupid things; still, many of these passions and thoughts and questions are absolutely visionary and can indeed guide a life that’s rich with adventure, love, compassion, artistry, commitment and devotion to a just, healthy world; and I do think you already know both the major building blocks and the stumbling blocks to a happy life, and have developed strategies to dealing with both.

                One thing I-think-you-think-you-know-but-I-no-longer-believe is that to be happy, you must do work that you love: “If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” This idea is dangerous, and not just because it’s elitist when so many in our country can’t make such choices, but because it’s spiritually misleading.

                 If you can find a job you love, that’s terrific, that’s great. I have two friends who are poets, one who’s a clown, and one who’s a professional artisanal pencil sharpener. They‘ve found ways to earn livelihoods out of their passions. I love my job too—about a quarter of the time, just like I love you all a quarter of the time. But I’m not talking about me, or poets or clowns or artisanal pencil sharpeners. Too many people I know feel like they’ve blown it somewhere because they’re not passionate about their jobs; they’re deeply dissatisfied with their very lives, believing a job is a way happiness is made and then demoralizing themselves when they try to force it to be so. But there’s nothing wrong in life with a not-perfect job that pays the bills.

                Love your family, your friends, your co-workers; love artistic and spiritual pursuits. You don’t have to love your job.

                That’s one thing I don’t trust you to fathom right now, and, really, you shouldn’t: go forth and honor your passions and interests; but in five or ten years, remember that you were given permission to place your identity in something other than what you do to get by.

                Everything else I want to tell you this evening, you already know. If you’re like I was in Seattle Arena in 1989, you’re idealistic and judgmental and you know something about how happiness is made and how it isn’t, and you’re right to be idealistic and judgmental.

                You know adults in your life who aren’t happy, and you know why: They’re working too hard, or they’re too focused on things that don’t ultimately matter, or they no longer try new things. Anyway, that’s what it may look like, and you may not be far off. I know I’m this adult often enough: it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just get through the day and week and then zombie out in front of a screen as an easy but not very effective means of rest and renewal.

                I also know that that’s been you. Are you okay with that? Who are you in the moment you are most numb and overwhelmed? How do you get through it? How do you revive? The struggles and strategies you employed in high school you can lean on for the rest of your life. But if you aren’t good at dealing with your coping mode now, you better work on it, because, believe me, what you felt the night before key terms were due or when you were struggling to make sense of my ridiculous writing rubric or when you had to sit politely through a long, ceremonial speech—that detached sense of a sometimes frantic coping—that is not unique to high school; and without self-reflection and deliberate action, you could be stuck following a pattern that will hurt and dull you. “When abstraction sets to killing you,” as Albert Camus says in The Plague, “you’ve got to get busy with it.”

                So what do I do? I read. I surf the net. Once a week, my wife and I go to dinner and come home and watch something on Netflix. That’s not enough. Certainly purple-monkeyed David would not be impressed with his adult self. But sometimes I write. Sometimes I dance with my daughters. We lived in Hungary for a year and tried new routines. Sometimes I bask in my family’s music (though sometimes I hide). At work I’ve been able to revive by taking on Meghan O’Kelley in a rap battle, or by getting a hug from Jessamyn, or by getting a big, clapping, Julianna Quinn Hello.  I also do take full advantage of the holiday moments that stop routine and demand reflection, like every year when I graduate from Roosevelt and think back on what I learned and where I’m going and whom I’ve grown to cherish. These are building blocks for happiness.

                As for you, I know one thing you do is seek out new experience and adventure. You’re way up on adults with this one. Studies show novel encounters trigger the brain’s limbic system, which is where happiness is made; and yet adults often find themselves in a comfortable soothing stagnation. Getting out of a comfort zone allows a greater shot at making happiness and memories, and when you’re making vivid memories, you’re also slowing down the high speed blur of time passing. Many studies have shown that, after basic needs are met, experience brings about more happiness than material things. Even a bad experience turns into a good story. So travel; take a dance class; go to a monster truck rally:  hang on to your sense of adventure, especially when it seems easier to just stay home.

                Another thing you do beautifully is engage with sensitive immediacy. This includes responding to the world’s wounded-ness, or expressing the social patterns undergirding your own pain. I only have time for platitudes at this point, but I’m saying what you already know; I repeat it because it’s too easy to get swept up in our own dramas and deadlines. Give everyone their due humanity—the partisan, the panhandler, the person cutting you off in traffic: shut down the clannish outrage machine and the numbing distant busy-ness of your life to respond to the humanity and pain in others and thus engage in the bright, tender humanity of your own. This keeps you vital and vibrant too.

                My younger self believed in the importance of questions and wrote in a journal that questions are more important than answers. I agree with me. So here’s one final meditation, because I can’t get off the stage without inviting us all to wonder about the dominant social interloper of our lives—the Internet. You know how plants use animals to reproduce? Like when a bear eats some berries and wanders off and then poops out the berry seeds in some other territory and the seeds stick to the ground in their own soft fertilizing goodness? You know how a plant uses a bear? How is the internet using you? How has your smartphone been training your mind to behave?

                Okay, that’s it. Because you already know how happiness is made and how it’s not, I remind you only to be purposeful: not just loving but deliberately grateful, admiring, understanding and warm; not just happy but deliberately reflective, creative, friendly and bold; not just generous, but deliberately empathetic, healing, humble and kind.

                To the graduating class of 2016, I leave you with this impression, and this aftertaste. May your lives be filled with love. I’ll miss you. Thank you.

David Grosskopf

Stepping in It

I feel like I’ve been dealing in shit all night. I finally came home from taking Maisie to orchestra in Edmonds, with ten minutes all day to eat a dinner, which is ten minutes more than I had for lunch, more than I had for breakfast, though I was able to eat cookies and little donuts by the sink in those ten minutes, and later, while I was waiting for Therese and Maisie, a Blizzard at Dairy Queen while I graded eight more papers after the fifteen I graded when I returned to school from the field trip and the pouring rain on my bike; when I finally came home after the three and half hours out towards Edmonds, the kitchen was a mess, the yard waste container was overflowing, and the plugged-up toilet, which Stephanie noted before she left for accompanying a rehearsal and I left with Maisie to orchestra, was still full of thick floating turds.

But Therese had also stepped in what seemed like eight cubic feet of shit before she got in the van; and me, having eaten only once at 5:30 in the morning and then some salami and cookies and donuts just before driving tonight, was in a spiritual-fast state, my senses utterly heightened, so that, for every stop light, of which there were maybe twenty along the way, and for every cycle before each stoplight, of which there were usually at least two or three thanks to the backed up traffic of rush hour further clogged by power outages and the chaos of I-go-you-go intersections all through the city, were already urgently aware of every car’s small lurch and slow start, and I was more aware than ever of every little sound, and the sound that was happening was Therese, who’d never been in a car with me, whispering, scream whispering, but not clear enough so I could understand, but what she was whisper screaming was about the poo on her binder and on her shoes, the shit somehow smeared thickly down her notebook, and what I later found was more shit glopped and scraped onto the floor of the van; in my fasting spiritual state, I was aware of the lights, the whisper shouts, and, at every warming stop before a stuttering traffic light, in the oven of our van as it belched out its heat, the shit the shit the shit, even when I opened the windows and the rain and wind came in.

“Can I leave the notebook in the car?” she asked when I was dropping them off. I stared at the hardening bulges of shitdust on her binder.

At Dairy Queen, after eating the Blizzard and grading the eight papers, I brought her folder to the bathroom and scrubbed it clean, went to the car and scrubbed what I could; retrieved Maisie and Therese and drove everyone home; and then, in my kitchen -- the full sink, the spilling yard waste, and Maisie coming down to say that the toilet upstairs was still plugged up.

Unhiding Old Writing

Last Saturday night, friends came over and shared old writing intended like fine aged cheese: stinky, but hopefully tasty. The event was inspired in part by Mortified Nation, a documentary I'd watched on Netflix, but mostly from an autobiography Stephanie's mother sent back to her after almost thirty years, during which Stephanie made pronouncements about the nature of love, world peace, her personal qualities, the depth of a boy, and the other boy, the one she tossed over for the deep one. The autobiography ran thirty typed pages; but such was her writing and adolescent delusion that if Stephanie started reading, no one wanted her to stop.

So, about a dozen friends and their kids came over, with the understanding that the kids could read something but then had to disappear from our shame. This was a request from a particular couple, one of whom, we discovered, justified the request. Her contribution was a letter to one man about the step-by-step process that led to the bed of another man who eventually turned out gay. My sister read from a journal she'd kept while traveling in Granada, a place so stunning, it knocked the verbs right out of her. Another friend read a letter from her then-fiance, now-husband explaining why he wasn't going to ask her to marry him yet, which she then followed up with three diary pages from the following month describing a perfect moment that came and went when he still didn't ask her to marry him. One person shared a diary of complaints about her furniture and thoughts about her boyfriend and time spent in the day, which was poignant because twenty years have now passed but the state of mind less so. 

I shared two journal entries from middle school, which reveal the sad little boy inside me, and one from high school.

1) "Alone. I hate that word. Unless I am with a person I am afraid of. Then I am even more alone."

2) From high school: "If you need a crutch, I have long bones. / If you are cold, warm yourself in my urine."

 3) And the best one of all, my first dance. "Slow music is bad for your system of fun."

I'm hoping to go to Seattle's Salon of Shame soon, and see what humiliation looks like for the pros.

Testing, testing...

This is the Roosevelt gym for the next two weeks while we are testing. The other gym is available, though.

For more testing. That gym is also full of chairs transported from a storehouse downtown.

A colleague of mine (department chair at Center School) captures her disgust in a great article  in everyday feminism. Jesse Hagopian explains why testing is a civil rights issue in generous detail. And a local blog explains the corporation behind the tests--Pearson.

We moved into our house!

Before and after renovations, rooms:

Living room before:

Living room after:

Library before (when it was a guest room):

Library after:

 Hallway before (when it was a library):

Hallway after:

 Kitchen before:

   Kitchen after:

Dining room before:

 Dining room after:

Upstairs bathroom before:

Upstairs bathroom after:

Maisie's room before (when occupied by all three girls):

Maisie's room after:

Sophie's room:

 Amelia's room:

They Stumble that Run Fast: Why I like teaching Shakespeare

            In 1995, I taught in a school district where I wasn’t allowed to teach Joy Luck Club to 17 year olds in an Honors American Lit class because a swear word appears on page 209, and I wasn’t allowed to teach Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Malcolm X or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, because they were too violent; and I couldn’t say out loud that Oscar Wilde was gay, which I know because our principal called me into his office and told me a parent said I was “recruiting.” At a certain point, I was annoying the Instructional Materials Committee with title requests so much they said I had to get all my dozen department colleagues as well as the principal to read any proposed book and each sign off on it before the IMC would even consider anything else.

            And that was how I fell in love with teaching Shakespeare—gender-flipping, triple-entendre, binary-busting, blood-and-blaspheming, pratfalls and poetry Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare I was automatically in the clear. Phone calls to the superintendent slowed to a trickle. But I wasn’t going to avoid nuanced or challenging themes or the complacencies that privilege brings to bear; I wasn’t going to infantilize students; I wasn’t going to trade what’s gorgeous and radical in literature—that it allows us to observe and take part in the messiness of social relations and human feeling, to steep ourselves in the experiences and points of view of people not ourselves—for testable content and skills.

           Teaching Shakespeare allowed me to close the door to my classroom and say fuck you, censorship—or rather, fuck you, canker blossom!

            Here’s an example—a Shakespeare text that gains meaning and power from directly mucking around in its grime.

            Many of my ninth grade students have already read Romeo and Juliet by the time they get to high school, and they groan to hear they’re reading it yet again. That means I’ve got them exactly where I want them.

            The play begins. Here come a couple servants from the house of Capulet, talking trash in the street.

SAMPSON: When I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.

GREGORY: The heads of the maids?

SAMPSON: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maiden-heads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.

Take it in what sense thou wilt. A little translation and students come to attention. Sampson is joking about rape.

GREGORY: They must take it in sense that feel it.

SAMPSON: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and ‘tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

Know what Sampson’s talking about there? I ask, whether or not they’ve started buzzing with the language. They hesitate, and I say, He’s talking about his pretty piece of flesh.

            They read these lines in middle school, but their teachers surely didn’t linger. I do. And I do it because there’s rowdiness in Shakespeare’s plays and I want them to experience the energy of that, but also because it feeds themes of the story so deeply—the swagger and energy and teasing and bluster of youth (and then the shattering disbelief when someone dies from their rough play); a sexism so pervasive and natural and potentially violent, Juliet thinks to die or feign death before even for a second imagining running off on an abusive father.

            Soon after, we meet Romeo, one of the great incarnations of love in all the world, and he’s gone nocturnal, running off to the woods each night to weep, and then collapsing in his room each morning for some fitful, despondent sleep. All this is because he’s in love. In love? “Out of her favor where I am in love.” What we find out is that he knows Rosaline doesn’t love him because she “hath Dian’s wit, / And in strong proof of chastity well armed.” After asking students about the goddess Diana (of the hunt) and the detail of most interest to Shakespeare (virgin, never to marry), I ask about chastity. Then students start to say, Wait a minute.

BENVOLIO: Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

ROMEO: She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste.

            This is such important character development for Romeo. When we first meet him, he is so certain he knows what love is; and he’s so certain that he loves Rosaline; and he feels all over his itchy body that Rosaline has no feelings for him, which he knows because she won’t “ope her lap to saint seducing gold.” Here’s this guy who’s supposed to be the greatest lover of all time, and he’s a just a kid: he’s passionate, articulate, pained, but young and dumb. How can we understand either that Romeo’s love for Juliet is different than this and therefore tragic in its explosive brevity, or even more tragically, that his love is not so different at all, but enthusiastic and bright, trusting and good?

            Take these things together, the boyish bluster of Romeo and Juliet’s wild, young love, and I just want to protect these kids. Because this is what the story for me is about: teenagers at play and in love who get caught in the spokes of adult foolishness. If you take out the rowdiness and horniness and the sexism, how do you understand the tragedy of this childhood forced so needlessly to its end?

            Infantilizing students by stripping literature of its vulgarities and of the disorders the art then reflects smothers students from grappling with issues as adults; and it does something else, too: it doesn’t let them take delight as children.