Life is bigger. It's bigger than you, and you are not me.

("Losing My Religion", REM, 1991)

It starts small, as little jokes that we rationalize away as a way to ease the stress and tension of life.  Then the sarcasm develops a sharper edge and becomes the cause of humorless laughter.  After that one gets used to smiling without feeling any happiness, and the joy of daily life is invisible.  Cynicism is the lens through which life is seen.

Why do we become cynical?  It doesn't achieve anything, help anyone, or accomplish any goal.  In fact, it's really the opposite of all of those things.  It only causes pain.  A child doesn't touch a hot stove twice, so what makes adults continue to be cynical about every major problem in life?

I think it's a faith problem.  Not necessarily a religious faith issue, but a lack of faith in general.  When cynicism has taken over, it's difficult to believe in the good of people, the possibility of improvement in a situation, or any good thing happening in the random way a flat tire or sore throat can occur.  This makes it hard to combat, because you can't just say to yourself, "Have faith!" and suddenly have it.  People have proven repeatedly that they will mess up.  A bad situation can be chronic and very slow to improve.  Good things don't just happen everywhere you turn.

Or do they?

I think the antidote to cynicism is watching a three-year-old share his toys.  Seeing that, I challenge anyone to believe in the worthlessness of all people.  It probably happens every day, too, even though it seems against the nature of the average toddler.  There are anomalies all around us.

The truth is that we are wrong when we are cynical.  We are stacking up all of our negative experiences and pointing them out as proof that everything is dumb and no one cares.  We are excluding every good thing that has ever occurred.  Feeling sorry for yourself may be fun for five minutes, but after that it loses its appeal.  So why not let go of it?  Search for an antidote until you find it.  Look for a nice person who will prove you wrong.

Or just be that person.

There's enough cynicism in the world.  Don't be a part of it.  Please.

Time Keeps on Slippin, Slippin, Slippin, into the Future

("Fly Like an Eagle," Steve Miller Band, 1976)

The talk in school hallways this time of year is all about scheduling the day within a classroom.  Every authority figure’s pet subject has a non-negotiable block of time that must be set aside for that purpose every single day, no exceptions.  Sometimes pet programs within those subjects get their own blocks of time too.  Often the sum of these blocks of time is greater than the total time in a teaching day.  The assumption is that if students just spend enough minutes doing something related to each skill we want them to know, they will learn at the rate we require of them.  I see some problems here.

Example time.  I am a horrible piano player.  When I took piano lessons, I always spent plenty of time sitting on the piano bench when I felt I should practice.  Sometimes I stared at the music, and other times my eyes drifted to the ivories themselves.  In moments when I felt especially ambitious, I actually moved my hands over the keys and produced a sound.  I found the difficult passages to be less fun, so I practiced the easier ones instead.  I was good enough at faking the hard parts so my teacher thought I had rehearsed them, but I never got better.  In spite of the time I spent actually playing the instrument, I never mastered it.  I did the same simple things over and over and never progressed.  Why would we expect anything different from a reluctant math student?  Requiring a child to spend a specific amount of time doing multiplication will not make the student better at multiplication unless some kind of learning is happening.  As we know, every student learns at a different pace – which makes the idea that there is a magic number that tells us how much time every kid needs to spend on every subject absolutely ludicrous.

I have watched every classroom teacher I know struggle to fit blocks of this and that special program into their daily schedule.  Engineering a schedule that meets all of the incredibly specific guidelines given to them is nearly impossible.  In fact, it probably never happens on a normal day.  It is only possible at all on paper, when no one has a runny nose or a new baby sister or a shirt he doesn’t like.  Since children are human, they can’t be expected to behave with the calculated precision of a well-calibrated machine.  We wouldn’t want them to.

Perhaps these struggling teachers could use their time in a more productive way.  If they were not required to fit unwieldy blocks of time into an already tight schedule, maybe their discussions with colleagues would focus on instruction instead of how to eliminate bathroom breaks in first grade to keep the scheduling engine running along.  Maybe they would collaborate with each other and learn new and innovative ways to teach.  Possibly they would find ways to reach students that seemed unreachable.

It’s not about the time you spend doing something, is it?  It’s all about quality.  If you make each minute worth something, then it won’t matter how many minutes you have.