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Changing Minds and Addresses

Posted by :James Howden On : August 23, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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Well, loyal lurkers – and you, over there, stumbling upon this site, wondering where the cool graphics and flashing doodads are – thanks for dropping by (again). Look. I’ve been unfaithful. (There it is.) I haven’t “always been there for you”, wherever “there” is. Mea culpa. I cringe when I note the last date of entry into HowdenTown and, as you can imagine, the public outcry has been furious.

But life changes are sometimes needed, always good for a scribbler, and I surely have bountiful fuel for the writing bus if I can only remember where I left the keys! Here’s the thing: I’m now on a continent where I’ve never been, learning a language I hadn’t imagined needing, obliging myself to draw on spiritual capital I’ve blandly believed was available, and buzzing with anticipation. My bride and I, and our wide-eyed nine-year-old son, have packed up our cozy Canadian townhouse and our cozy professional kits to learn more of what world citizenship involves.

We’re learning. June and July were blurs: wrapping up school and work, dispensing with as many of the trappings of familiarity as we could bear, and seeing what we could find to know and to love in a new way. And here we are in China. CHINA! There will be details.

Where No One Has Gone Before?

Posted by :James Howden On : May 19, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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Every time I do it, I swear it’s the last time. But it only happens every year or two, and I forget. And when, by whim or happenstance, I’m interested in a mass-market film, ain’t no place to go but the Megatastic Carnival of Audiovisual and Commercial Excess. In my town, it’s called Silver City.

Sensory overload. Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Zeal of the misled martyr. Eagerness of lemmings.

Haven from contentment.

Supersaturated solutions to the hungers of mouth and eye.

And loneliness.

So.

Few things have me muttering as angrily (how soon I forget, how furiously I regret  not showing up late) as my voluntary submission to big-screen huckstering, first for ads exclusive to Cineplex Odeon! (oh, we, the favoured ones, the self-selected targets) and then, just when I thought it was safe to watch laugh-out-loud trailers for Michael Bay-ish movies I’ll never have to see – Transformers, my Lord in heaven, what sort of overgrown boyos will watch that while sober! – along came MORE ads that I can at least walk away from when they interrupt the hockey game. I wanted to throw things. I wanted to go all Howard Beale on my new best friends in the theatre. (Wondering: It’s over 30 years since Network. Would it seem quaint, rather so what’s the point to kiddies raised on televisual brain candy of the 21st century kind?) My bride thoughtfully slapped my thigh and shushed me. I restrained myself.

Finally, when Star Trek came on (Really? We get to watch a MOVIE, too? Oh, boy!), there were improbable Romulan mega-ships and inexplicable time warps and decades-old dialogue (wait for ‘em, Treksters!) and up-to-the-nanosecond CGI spectacle and passable acting (I quite liked Bruce Greenwood and Eric Bana as Secondary Good Guy and Primo Baddie, respectively) and backstories to Kirk and Spok as kiddies and in-joke introductions to the rest of the crew: Scott, Bones, Chekhov, Sulu, Uhuru. The gang’s all here.

And I had a good time, ultimately. It’s a silly thing, and you surely don’t want to think too hard about the space-time scientifishy elements. But There Will Be Sequels. This baby is preset to run for as long as humanity can stand it, and it’s engineered to not only grab the young male crowd but late-Boomers like me who remember Shatner and Nimoy and the first interracial kiss on television. And in between, it also puts a major hustle on the in-between generations, those who, like my sons, grew up on Star Wars; there are numerous fairly obvious reaches for the mysticism of the Jedi. I shouldn’t have liked it so well, but nostalgia is a strong brew and I took a good long gulp. The young feller doing Bones was superb. Uhura was, again, mainly a waste in a great legs! sort of way. Scottie was, as always, a caricature (but I still missed James Doohan). Sulu was, too, but a subtly enjoyable one.

It all comes down to Spok and Kirk, of course. And I haven’t made up my mind on them. By Sequel Three they’ll have grown into their characters more, and then we can begin to judge. Even without the popcorn, though, I have to admit it: I’m a sucker for space opera and the victory of even the most unlikely (and often fairly comical) forms of extraterrestrial nobility.

Better Read Than Never 2: WHAT I TALK ABOUT…RUNNING

Posted by :James Howden On : May 15, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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My series Better Read Than Never – okay, technically, it is now a series because there are two of ’em – has been stalled because I’m too anxious to do too good a job for the too few of you out there in Electronville who, come to think of it, are often too busy to read The Howden anyway. My library copy of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood has been renewed three times and I’ve nearly paid for it in fines; mind you, I’ve never begrudged library penalties, which are merely an unreceipted form of useful charity. The review is going to be long unless I terminate it thuddingly. But it’ll come soon-ish. (I think.) (Prologue ends.)

In the meantime, though, I’ve read a couple of other fine things, one of which is recent enough that it doesn’t quite fit the series rubric, but makes me eager to read two writers that I’ve mainly missed so far. It’s an odd little book, one I found occasionally flat yet generally compelling, called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It’s by a Japanese novelist and translator named Haruki Murakami, and it’s a curious kind of memoir. It mainly tracks his twenty-five year career as a recreational long-distance runner (and sometime triathlete), which roughly parallels and, he maintains, both informs and essentially supports his work as a writer.

Murakami is a diffident confidante, an unfamiliar voice that obscures as much as it reveals about the author. On more than one occasion, he notes that readers “probably wouldn’t like” him, and he is sometimes distant and bland in his summaries of the meaning of this observation or that running result. That’s just how I am. That’s life. This is how it goes. At first, I found these simple blurts disappointing, a signal that this book was something of a rush-job, but I came to see them as an accurate (and, finally, interesting) portrait of a man in search of some limited and non-ecstatic conclusions about his life and its meaning.

In fact, by the end I regarded his tone as a subtle rebuke to the my life is singular and rich and here’s how ALL could benefit from fingering its silken edges ambience of some (western) celebrity bios. For only one small example, an early casual mention of having been married at 22 seemed to me a clear signal that marriage was far in his rear-view window. In fact, his wife later makes brief and almost accidental appearances in this memoir of monkish discipline; she is never named or described, a level of biographical focus (and adherence to privacy, I suppose) that is startling. The Western attachment to personality, fame and disclosure seems exhibitionist by comparison.

He likes to be alone, and he’s with the Buddha: Life is suffering. This narrow gateway to understanding informs his thought about running and life: “[t]hey might not amount to much, but they are personal lessons I’ve learned through actually putting my body in motion….They may not be lessons you can generalize, but that’s because what’s presented here is me, the kind of person I am.” I’m a worn-out ex-jock who still tries to run, though the distances have never been what Murakami routinely pulls off. (The jerk.) I’m also a writer, and the confluence of these two themes – rigorously and sacrificially adhered to by this paragon of focus and discipline – really took me in. If you have either of these two interests, or both, you may be, too.

And the title? Its oddly rambling nature fits perfectly, but it wasn’t until Murakami’s after-word that I realized it was a homage to one of his favourite writers to read and translate into Japanese, the American minimalist Raymond Carver. (I know Carver only by reputation – writers often refer to him – and he keeps popping up for me. Another one for the Better Read Than Never list.) One of Carver’s best-known tales is the title story of a notable collection: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Ah. I think I understand. Hiraku Murakami loves running. He loves writing. He loves simplicity in both. That’s how things work for him.

Mothering On

Posted by :James Howden On : May 9, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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Nobody names their children Enid anymore, although I did christen a backyard crabapple tree with that early-20th century moniker two springs ago. We’d always had a messily dropping but spring-briefly glorious crab in our yard when I was a kid, and my mother loved those evanescent pink blooms much more than I begrudged raking up the apples in the fall.

Enid Mary Elizabeth Howden was born on April 27th in a distant 1920. The Great War still haunted many thousands of men who didn’t know that what they had was post-traumatic stress syndrome. The Spanish influenza pandemic had already killed most of its 60 million victims. The League of Nations was a brand-new baby that hadn’t yet been thrown out with the fascist bathwater. (Speaking of leagues, the NHL was a toddler with four hockey clubs we wouldn’t recognize, and the National Basketball Association wasn’t even a glint in anybody’s eye. But my Mum loved the Cleveland Indians forty years before the Blue Jays came along, and that American League baseball team had been born 20 years before she was.) ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Bahá’í community’s leader and best Example, was still alive. (So was Thomas Edison. So was Enrico Caruso. Legendary Canadian Sir Wilfrid Laurier had just left the building. Elvis wouldn’t show up for another 15 years.) I like to think of my Mum and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sharing the same planetary dust for a few months, way back there in the ‘20s. Whole ‘nother century, much different world.

I love my Mum. I didn’t get it in writing for her birthday, but I’m a day ahead for Mother’s Day. Interexistential greetings, Enid! Thanks for all that laughter, all that bloody tolerance and dogged hope, all that thin-lipped endurance and all those wide-open welcomes to friends, wives, spiritual inclinations and especially to More Boys.

She always grinned (eventually) when she claimed that the only reason I kept you and your brother Bill around is ‘cause you made me laugh. She didn’t even play at grudging acceptance, though, when the grand-kids came. It was bright-blue smiles, bowls of sweets and rosy admiration, even at the end when she didn’t always get the names right. My first three boys only have to think of “Mama Hoe-ney” (was that Dave’s toddler-attempt at “Grandma Howden”?) to get a shot of spiritual warmth and belonging, even as they prepare to say farewell to their other lovely granny. Sam’s only 9, though, and he’s starting to lose track of her. We’ll get out the photos tomorrow while we celebrate his own sweet Mummy, in so many ways “a girl / Just like the girl / That married dear old Dad”: blue-eyed, excitable, loving, determined as hell. (That song’s even older than my Mum — 1911 — but it’s inerasable on my mental J-Tunes. A syrupy sweet prophecy.)

Hug your mothers, kids. Pray for them as they pray for you.

Living Back to Front

Posted by :James Howden On : April 23, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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My brood – one bride plus one remaining brute equals a brood, for those of you who hate being told to “do the math!” – and I live in a three-bedroom attached house. Eco-bride emailed me the other day with the sales details for our (possibly fictitious) neighbours’ place a half-dozen houses down the row. (We’re not sure we’ve ever seen them.) What stood out to me was that the place apparently has four bathrooms, when it’s hard to imagine that as many as four people live there. My wife, meanwhile, was mock-offended that the ad “didn’t mention the friendly neighbours!” Ha. A sour little inside joke.

The whole point of places like this is to be free to ignore the neighbours. That’s why they’re all built backwards, as most suburban homes are. (Ours is more of a middle-class in-fill to what our real-estate agent thought of as a sketchy part of town – Vanier, for those who know Ottawa – but the same inversion principle applies.) The most prominent feature of our house is our garage, while the front door with its tiny front step is obviously something to pass through like a stealthy wind. That’s why our basketball goal off the drive is such an affront to our nearest neighbours.

We’re supposed to be invisible to each other. That’s why there are such tall and bland and ubiquitous fences. That’s why, ideally, one clicks the garage door opener and drives directly into the garage. That way, once you leave the hermetically sealed, climate-and-aural-environment-controlled ambience of your SUV, you can walk directly into the private foyer without having to risk the possibility of running into a human being not-of-your-same-address. That’s why most of us entertain only in the high-fenced micro-yards out the back patio doors.

And that’s why my wife is such an oddball when she throws a lawn chair out in our tiny front yard to read the newspaper on a warm spring morning. I like our little house, but I’m nostalgic for the old houses where I grew up, the ones with a rambling front porch where folks would drink their coffee, watch their kids, wave at passersby, jibe with the neighbours. And didn’t mind waiting for the bathroom to come free.

BetterReadThanNever 1: Talent, Potential and the Myth of Ability

Posted by :James Howden On : April 13, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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“Talent doesn’t exist. Talent is nothing. It’s all about what you do, how you work, how you dive into the process.” That was Ben. (It may still be Ben.) He was learning to love his trombone in a Jazz Performance program at Montreal’s McGill University.

“Listen, you’re right, process matters, it’s great to focus on what you can control. But you don’t believe in talent? You’ve never coached basketball, that’s for sure.” And that was me, his teacher-coach father.

This was a conversation that lasted hours, across several days and venues. I, of course, was the voice of balance and reason in the face of Ben’s extremist argument. Because every athletic coach knows this: if you’re gonna make rabbit stew, you’d better start off with some rabbits. Some kids you can teach for a week and they can do it slowly, and some are at high speed after 15 minutes. Everybody knows this, right? So maybe my argument was dispassionate, based on grey hairs and considered experience. And perhaps it wasn’t, always, because I was interested in reminding my boy that he was talented (always different from “skilful”), and I might also have been nurturing a niche or two of my own where I doggedly hope that there’ll be some natural flow and not all hard work. (See “Writing”.)

Surprised as I was by his “naïveté”, I was moved by his argument. It made sense, given his position: you’ve been accepted into a prestigious program after auditioning; you are what you play, so thinking about “natural ability” is distracting at best, corrosive at worst; and besides, the only thing you can control is your level of effort and quality of focus. I got that. It’s one of those beliefs that, regardless of its level of absolute truthfulness, is just useful to believe. It’s forward-looking, it’s practical, and it gives the person seeking mastery the permission to keep on looking. Good.

All of which reminded me that I hadn’t gotten ‘round to reading something all educators should (even if they don’t speak math), as should any who like to think about human potential and barriers to its expression. John Mighton, a Canadian writer and educator, came out with The Myth of Ability: Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child in 2003. Just as I had with Ben, I was dubious about Mighton’s egalitarian premise but excited about the possibilities it opened.

Mighton loved mathematics as a child, but left it behind in discouragement before he left high school. He went on, doggedly, to teach himself to write, which he did well enough to win a Governor General’s Award (Canada’s top literary prize) as a playwright. I’d heard about the book – a new approach to teaching math to kids – but I was at least as interested in the author, and his odd movement from writing for the stage to a belated doctorate in mathematics. He examined the systematic approach he’d taken to writing, and applied it to the rekindling of a stifled earlier love. He became an adult math prodigy, and he watched carefully how he did it and why it had taken him so long.

And along the way, he began volunteering to teach the “unteachable”, those kids – often from underprivileged and undereducated backgrounds – who had fallen “hopelessly” behind in their numeracy. He started with Lisa, a sixth-grader operating at about a grade one level; she was unable, for example, to count by twos to ten. Using the basics of what became the JUMP (“junior undiscovered math prodigies”) method – rigorously defined teaching by clear and tiny steps, coupled with dollops of unremitting praise – Mighton helped her to the point where she could pass grade 9 high school math at the academic level. It was the first of many remarkable success stories.

He’s convinced that the teaching of mathematics is rife with false ideas, chief among them the elitist notion that only a few students can be expected to excel in it. And, though he argues this rather gently, that it is poorly taught, based on the expectation that most will eventually fail anyway. Teachers, especially at the crucial elementary levels, either are among those who picked it up easily (and therefore unconsciously expect that everyone should do the same) or those whose own mystification with mathematics made them rather phobic about it. (Mighton doesn’t ask this, but I do: how many primary- and junior-level teachers actually like mathematics? Having trained as one, my unscientific answer is: not many.)

Everybody can learn mathematics. (There, I gave away the ending.) Mighton is evangelical about this message; it’s an educational call to arms, and an emphatically political one. The Myth of Ability takes the principle of democracy and slams it down into every grade school classroom in his province (Ontario) and beyond, arguing forcefully that it is deeply ingrained prejudice that makes us think that only the few can possibly have had the magic fairy dust of mathematical potential sprinkled upon them. (It reminds me of another bit of widely believed exclusivity: that art and creativity are only permitted to the rarely gifted, when what is really needed are the means, the time, and the confidence.)

To a man with a math obsession, of course, perhaps every problem looks like innumeracy: “more than half the world’s children still live in abject poverty. In affluent countries, violence, overconsumption and the destruction of the environment continue….Children who grow up…meeting only a fraction of their potential, unable to reason clearly or weigh the consequences of their actions…will be exploited and misled with ease by corporations and politicians…” Hyberbolic? Perhaps. Mighton is a mighty believer in the power of education, that good teaching and constant encouragement are the antidotes to apathy and failure. He writes: “If children in any part of Canada were being starved to the point where they looked like famine victims, people would demand that they be fed. But children regularly graduate from our schools after reaching only a fraction of their potential. Why do we tolerate this vast loss of potential…?….We must all believe, on some level, that these children are not being starved, they are simply incapable of eating.” Mighton has proved to himself, and the JUMP program seeks to demonstrate to more and more schools, that the great majority of young can not only eat math but love it, too.

It’s a challenging thesis, but a painless read. He writes clearly, engagingly, and concisely. Mighton tells his story, outlines the development of JUMP and pleads for a more challenging (yet more equitable) approach to education in well under 100 pages. (In fact, if you’re as lazy as me, you can skip the entire second half of the book, in which he reprints selections from the JUMP manual, from teaching fractions to something called “finite state automata”. Good thing I’m not getting paid for this review!) The Myth of Ability is a small but potent package, and well worth the read for anyone who believes – or wants to – in the importance of education and the undiscovered country of human potential. at times I felt that Mighton might slightly overstate his case, although he does not suggest that there aren’t inborn differences in ability. I think, though, that my “talent is nothing” son Ben would approve. He would nod furiously at Mighton’s title, that’s for sure.

Better Read Than Never

Posted by :James Howden On : April 6, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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I once described myself as an “accidental reader”, and it’s even clearer now. I have my lists, my piles, my really shoulds, and believe me, I really mean to be faithful. But they are usually trumped by the book (magazine, email, billboard, menu…) that flirts and flounces into my sight. Goodbye to faithfulness, and hello serendipity.

Yes, even my reading is erotically charged. Sure. What this actually means is that I don’t read what’s current. I’m too time-stingy to give those hours to writing that hasn’t yet shown some endurance, and too darned cheap to buy new and full-priced books. The Used Bookstore Syndrome. Coming soon, therefore, to this space: a semi-regular but entirely unscheduled look at reading that I finally get around to. Better Read Than Never. (Bonus books in the great book of life to anyone who writes to unpack the delicious blend of clichés underpinning this title. I am Title Guy. What am I saying? Bonus points to ANYBODY who writes me!)

Coming soon will a quick look at The Myth of Ability. Nice.

Return of the LitWit

Posted by :James Howden On : April 2, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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So I raise my head blearily from the long, muddy furrow in which I’ve been crawling for several months – it looks, to the inexperienced eye, like a clean and well-lit classroom – and I remember I used to believe in a question.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

That’s the novelist E.M. Forster (A Passage to India, Howard’s End) reminding himself and any would-be-wise guy that writing is, among many other things, a way of understanding. Judging from my strangled output over the last year and more, I don’t understand much when I’m teaching full-time. (And coaching. And trying desperately to influence the young, face to face. Madly off in all directions. (Thank you, Stephen Leacock.) Running to stand still? Sometimes.)

I do know exactly where I am when I face a group of students. It’s natural, it’s demanding, and I’m only slightly less manic-energetic than I used to be. But the sense of déjà vu sometimes weighs heavily, and while I know exactly what I’m doing, and while even a ninth-grade French class can turn into a chance to clarify and express my views on matters mighty and minor, I am not finding Forster. I have not been stretching and stressing my brain and typing fingers. More and more, lately, I’ve been feeling this absence from my life, hence today’s self-involved posting.

I’m back, not that cyberspace missed me much. Today, I like writing.

An End to Foreign-ness: This is London Calling

Posted by :James Howden On : July 12, 2008
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Category: At First Glance

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My last post bemoaned my neglect of this quiet little forum, and that was several months ago. If you happen to have been a regular reader when there was fresh fodder, sorry and thanks. If you’re new, thanks for showing up. (And “an end to foreign-ness”? It’s part of what ‘Abdu’l-Bahà, visionary and civilization-builder, called upon the world to create nearly a century ago. I love that phrase.) (I hope I don’t have to explain the “London Calling” reference, except maybe for my mother-in-law: Margery, it’s a great punk album by The Clash. You’re welcome.)

After a wobbly and jet-lagged first day in London, vacationing back to the Anglo-Saxon homeland with my wife and youngest son, I want to throw this into the ether before pitching myself into the loft of oblivion. Sleep, my friends. Sleep.

The next thing you’ll see is a little something I wrote to my Grade 10 English class — a group that should’ve been a delight, considering the material we studied and the brainpower of many of the kids, but was only occasionally so — as class ended in June. No coincidence that I’ve relaunched my writing / With gnashing and biting and / Blasts from a thousand kazoos after a week and more away from being a full-time educator. Teaching and writing is a balancing act I haven’t yet found the rhythm or the moderation to master…

Welcome.

Farewell to ENG 2D

Posted by :James Howden On : July 3, 2008
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Category: At First Glance

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Here’s an end-of-term bit of old-fashioned letter-writing — hand delivered, mind you! — to a group of kids champing at the bit to feel free of all the literacy I forced upon them. I just had a couple more things to say, and hope that 2 in 28 paid attention:

Friday the 13th
(Lucky us!)
June ‘08

Well, 2D,
(2D, or not 2D / That is the question.) (Sort of.) (Okay, not really, but it rhymes…)

Many a Journal has been written this semester, but not a one by me. Time to change that, ‘though as the photocopier hums merrily along behind me with last-day-of-class exam preparation sheets and other items of ground-wobbling importance, I’m not sure I’ll be able to complete the required full page. But it’s a start. After writing Journals quite madly for years – including, often, those written alongside my sweating students as they scribbled theirs – I’ve been in a Journal Drought. I’ve written many another thing, and some of ‘em were green and growing, but my personal coil-bound thought sanctuary has been a desert.

So this rambling scramble of a letter is my first baby step toward the restoration of my own private record-life-as-it-happens-so-I-learn-and-remember habit.

‘Cause that’s what a Journal is, besides its obvious value in helping/forcing you to get better and easier in putting your thoughts and feelings down on paper. (How can I know what I think ‘til I see what I’ve said? one writer asked.) For most of you of you, by now, getting it down is something you do easily and well; I wish I’d had more time to read and respond to the thoughtful, wonder(ing)ful, funny or frustrated things you spun out of your own life and intelligence. What’s more important, though, is that YOU will read what you’ve written, sometime down the road. There’s a vivid portrait, in words and exclamations and marginal scribbles, of yourself in there, one that you should value and that you should keep, right alongside your yearbook, maybe. (Great idea, sir!)

I wish you all the best, including a summer full of reading: the Best Single Thing you could do for your educational future, I say, AND for those quiet hours when only a book will do…

Peace and progress,
Mr. H.