Trees, Doves and Cancer

A Five-year Survival Celebration

By Allan Roy Andrews

A Japanese cherry tree has been planted in my name.

My tree is near the Ferko Recreation Center on East Cayuga Street, a neighborhood facility in northeastern Philadelphia, part of the rejuvenated Juniata Golf Course (a city-owned course that is one of 63 parks in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System). A grove of trees has been planted in honor of those who in 2008 reached a five-year anniversary of surviving after cancer treatment.

I am among those survivors, having been treated for prostate cancer in July of 2003 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at Southwestern Regional Medical Center, one of five hospitals and clinics operated nationally by the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA). CTCA hospitals operate in Philadelphia, Pa.; Tulsa, Okla.; Zion, Ill.; Seattle, Wash.; and a new medical center set to open in 2009 in Goodyear, Ariz., just outside Phoenix.

When CTCA opened a new Eastern Regional Medical Center in 2005 in Philadelphia—across the street from the backside of the Juniata Golf Club—I decided driving to the city of brotherly love was much easier than flying to Tulsa for my annual checkups. Thus, I became a patient at the Philly facility.

All of the CTCA facilities celebrate life by planting trees for five-year survivors; it is a hopeful tradition. “We want to plant a forest,” the CTCA literature proclaims. CTCA’s original facility in Illinois planted 105 trees in 2008. The two-year-old Philadelphia hospital planted six.

Last month, the CTCA in Philadelphia invited the five-year survivors back for a two-day “Celebration of Life.” The hospital’s main parking lot was transformed by two huge tents into a dining hall and an assembly hall. Movie star Richard Roundtree, the original “Shaft” of the silver screen, himself a survivor of breast cancer, was the keynote speaker, but the real “stars” of the festival were the five-year survivors.

We were treated as celebrities. Although not all of us attended the full-blown program, we were interviewed and video-taped, feted by every speechmaker, seated for meals with the “suits” who administer and run CTCA’s multimillion dollar operations, and congratulated by every hospital staff member from the chiefs of surgery and radiology to the porters of maintenance and the drivers of CTCA's characteristic white buses and limos.

I frequently found myself responding to a congratulatory greeting by thinking, “What did I do?” It was as if the entire enterprise of CTCA was celebrating my birthday; and, in a way, I suppose that’s true.

My cancer treatment turned out to be a case of bombarding my prostate gland with external radiation beams, a non-invasive and almost pedestrian procedure—if any treatment for cancer can be considered pedestrian (think of trying to steadily hold a laser pointer on a postage stamp from about ten-feet away). In 2003, I spent a month at the facility in Tulsa receiving daily radiation. The treatment itself took about one hour each weekday. The rest of my time there was like being on vacation, or perhaps more like being on a cruise ship. My then 11-year-old youngest son spent a week in Tulsa with me, watching me undergo treatment via closed-circuit TV and learning to play BINGO at night with the other patients. He won an umbrella and a pair of kitchen scissors that we still use.

When I was undergoing treatment, the Southwestern Medical Center in Tulsa occupied several floors of the 20-, 30-, and 60-storey CityPlex towers that were built as the “City of Faith” by the television evangelist and faith-healer Oral Roberts. Financial considerations forced Roberts to lease the tower complex, but there remained an aura of holiness Christianity hovering over the place (as there is in much of southeastern Tulsa around Oral Roberts University).

Because of its innovative treatment approaches to cancer and its temporary location (Southwestern four years ago moved into a new facility of its own several miles to the east), I think CTCA in Tulsa had to deal with a wrong-headed image of “religious quirkiness” that some attached to its locale and its practice. The only truth in that image is that faith is not discounted or discouraged at CTCA, and chaplains are incorporated as professionals in the total comprehensive treatment plan. The only active association I learned of between CTCA and Oral Roberts University was that two of its chaplains held degrees from that school.

One woman who shared the celebratory spotlight in Philadelphia with me has become something of a willing and enthusiastic spokesperson for CTCA and a force for the medical and psychological fight against cancer.

Jan Pedersen is a survivor of ovarian cancer. She had been through surgery and had been advised that chemotherapy was her only hope or she would be dead in six months. Her oncologist, in Jan’s words, “scoffed” at her questions about diet, nutrition and supplements as a treatment program. That’s when Jan discovered CTCA and learned about what she calls “a team of professionals who cover every aspect of body, mind, and spirit. They treat the whole person, and this was what I was looking for . . . a team of doctors who would work with me to decide the best course of action to fight this disease.”

Treating the body, mind and spirit is a hallmark of CTCA, and among the many options for treatment that my wife and I investigated when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was by far the only option that integrated holistic medicine, psychological hope, state-of-the-art technology and the mystery of the healing spirit.

In Tulsa, I learned a great deal about nutrition and naturopathic medicine; one naturopathic physician planted a watchword in my brain: “take daily probiotics and drink lots of water!” I was ministered to daily by chaplains who understood that my spirit had cancer too. I ate meals with patients from all over the United States—and some from beyond. Many of them had been dismissed or rejected by other cancer treatment facilities, having been told in effect to “go home and prepare to die.” Not all of them, of course, lived to have a tree planted in their names, but I believe most found a modicum of hope and peace being among professionals who wholeheartedly joined their struggle to live.

When it comes to surgery, I rank among the top of the world’s wusses, and when my urologist, who biopsied my prostate, was ready to put me on the operating table the next day, I balked. Several discussions later, that urologist asked me as I spoke of pondering radiation treatment if I were willing to put “an atom bomb” in my body.

I have a close friend who is a top-notch radiology researcher, and I’d been talking to him about radiation therapy and the advances in that field in the 21st century. The urologist’s attempt at drama became for me a sign of misinformation. After a visit to Tulsa and consultations with the specialists there, the treatment choice for me was clear.

Five years later, I am celebrating that decision, which is not to say that surgery wouldn’t have kept me alive, but I’m quite certain the quality of my life would not have been what it has been for the past five years.

Jan Pedersen and I got to stand near the cherry trees planted in our names and then we opened a small cage and released seven white doves into the sky. The woman who had delivered the birds for the ceremony came from Bethlehem, Pa.--about a 90-minute drive away. She said the white messengers would be home before she. “They can fly about 80 miles an hour with the right wind conditions,” she told us.

The cherry tree and the white dove have become for me symbols of hope and freedom and my celebration of life as a cancer survivor.

My faith in God has been strengthened in my five-year odyssey, not because I’m convinced that God has something to do with my survival (which I am), but because I made the trip with fellow sufferers and cancer treatment experts who in their pursuit of knowledge and tools to combat this killer disease humbly acknowledge that medicine alone does not heal, no more than it causes a tree to grow or a dove to wing its way home.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thanks to Natalie Bounds-Adams, the alumni director at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, for correcting my error in suggesting that the CitiPlex Towers had ever been sold. The towers are still owned by the university. My editing of the essay reflects her correction. (ARA--July 25, 2008)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This posting has been reprinted in The Leaf, a newsletter of the Eastern Regional Medical Center in Philadelphia; August 2008, Vol. 3, issue 8.

Seeing old movies in a better light

July 4, 2008

Revisiting Movies

By Allan Roy Andrews

Teaching developmental psychology to freshmen and sophomores as a young professor gave me a great opportunity to test a theory I had about how students read.

I asked my classes to read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Of course, they all complained they’d had to read that book in high school English. Those that didn’t complain smugly thought they faced a cake-walk assignment. They could skim enough to pass any quizzes I might give.

But interesting things happened as we read (i.e., re-read) and discussed that book.

Almost every student in the class confessed that the book seemed different to them as they read it this time. The language didn’t shock them the way it had when they were first exposed to it; they viewed Holden Caulfield in a completely different light, they mostly said. Best of all from my perspective, they read with an analytic mind toward adolescence instead of with the defense of a life-style most of them had experienced as teens themselves.

What had changed? Not Salinger’s writing; it was the same text they’d read four or five years earlier.

Of course, they had changed; they had grown older; their perspective had matured; their readiness to deal with adolescent development had awakened, and I was rewarded because almost to a person the students thanked me for having them re-read the novel.

Recently, I’ve been having a similar experience with films. Thanks to the convenience of Netflix, I’ve been re-watching some older movies and have developed a completely different attitude and appreciation of them. This experience has reinforced my challenge to our culture’s tyranny of the new.

I offer three examples of films that have moved near to the top of my favorites list because I revisited them. Prior to my reviewing them, they had been enigmatic to me; they were films I should have liked better than I did. All three had won great accolades when they were new, but they didn’t impress me when I viewed them. Now, more than a decade later in some instances, my reviewing of them has allowed me to see their greatness, and at least two of them have moved into that constantly flowing category of “all-time favorites.”

The first is The Mission, a British film produced in 1986 starring Robert DiNiro and Jeremy Irons. It is a historic depiction of Jesuit missionaries working in South America and their conflict with commercial interests that sought to enslave the natives to whom the Jesuits were ministering.

When I first viewed this film, I saw it as a swashbuckling adventure story that focused on the repentance and conversion of a hardened mercenary. The film ends in tragedy and disappointment as the mission outpost is overrun and the heroes are slain. I concluded The Mission was a downer of a film.

This month, in re-watching the film, I see it as a sad but powerful telling of the power of faith even in failure. The film has become for me more of a challenge to my own comfort zone regarding faith than a historical rendering of a sad period in church history.

I noted in my newfound appreciation that Church Times magazine, the Anglican journal of news, opinion and culture, listed the 50 best religious movies of all time and placed The Mission at the top of its list.

Any argument I had with that placement would be nitpicking; this is a great movie and has become one of my favorites.

To understand my new appreciation for a second movie, one has to know that my ethnic background is that of Newfoundland. My parents emigrated from that British colony (it has since become part of the Canadian Confederation) in the North Atlantic early in the 20^th century and raised a family in Brooklyn, New York, that was more rooted in Newfoundland than in America.

Thus, it was with great anticipation in 2001 that I welcomed the film, The Shipping News, based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and starring Kevin Spacey and Judy Dench. The film tells the story of Quoyle, a journeyman pressman who marries a slut, has a daughter, and watches his life spin away from him.

An aunt shows up at his door looking for the ashes of her brother, Quoyle’s father, and convinces Quoyle to relocate to their family’s old home in Newfoundland, where Quoyle stumbles into a job reporting on the coming and goings of ships in the local harbor.

The movie, to me as a 2001 viewer, was dark and convoluted, and struck me as filled with juveniles who refused to grow. Its depiction of Newfoundland was stark and almost without hints of any joy that I’d known was a part of life in the outports of my parents’ homeland.

Seeing the film for a second time turned me about 180 degrees. I realized that Newfoundland is a character in the film, and that through it Quoyle finds strength, happiness and new life. I heard the accents of the natives (especially in the lines of Wavey Prowse, played by Julianne Moore) and was struck by their subtle authenticity that I knew from being surrounded as a boy by Newfoundland dialect. The film remains dark and quirky—but, hey, that’s Newfoundland.

The Shipping News, like The Mission, has moved into the top echelons of my all-time favorite movies.

Most recently, another film I’d pretty much written off when I first saw it came back to life for me, the 1997 thriller, Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

As Newfoundland was a character in The Shipping News, so Greenland is a character in Smilla.

The movie begins with an apocalyptic episode of a Greenland seal hunter at the turn into the 20th century who is overwhelmed in the aftershock of an asteroid that crashes into the barren tundra where he is hunting. Fast-forward to Denmark in the 1990s.

A Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson (played by Julia Ormond), who lost her mother and conflicts with the partner of her rich father, is now living in Copenhagen. Smilla cannot accept the hasty conclusion that a young boy—a neighbor and fellow Greenlander--died when he fell from the roof of their apartment building. Her investigation, including her “reading” of the child’s footprints in the snow on the roof, suggests he was frightened into running and falling off the roof.

Thus begins her convoluted, thrilling and enthralling quest for the truth behind the child’s death. As one might guess, the death and the asteroid are linked by greedy scientists and entrepreneurs.

When I first viewed this movie, I must have been mistakenly lured into thinking I’d be viewing a disaster movie; strangely, I found it difficult to recall all but the opening scenes of the movie. This time around I found myself intrigued by Smilla’s persistent amateurish detective work as well as with her persistent and strong feminist attitudes.

To be sure, the movie is flawed, including the convenience of her wealthy father who funds her romps in search of evidence; her unnecessarily harsh clashing with the young woman who has replaced her mother at her father’s side; the fanatic caricature of the secretary who gives her key direction to clues, and the shoot-‘em-up final episodes that diminish the power of the on-location filming in Greenland . The stuttering romance with her neighbor mechanic who assists her in her pursuit of truth and justice—often without her cooperation—also proves a bit clumsy.

Nevertheless, Smilla won me over on a second viewing, and gave me a new appreciation for the beauty of Greenland. Smilla’s Sense of Snow didn’t jump to the top of my favorites list, but it moved up significantly.

All of this is to say that re-viewing movies can be a rewarding and enriching experience, and I recommend it heartily, especially now that Netflix makes older films so accessible.

I’m afraid, however, you’ll still have to go to the bookstore if you’re looking to review Catcher in the Rye. To date, no one has gotten Salinger’s permission to write a screenplay or to adapt the story for the big screen.

God, faith, and some other dirty words

Monday, June 23, 2008

George Carlin and banned words

By Allan Roy Andrews

Comedian George Carlin’s humor was a delightful bashing of our human silliness, especially our penchant for euphemisms, e.g., bathroom tissue instead of toilet paper; landfill in place of dump; and sanitary engineer in place of garbage man. Carlin died Sunday at the age of 71. He had a 30-year history of heart ailments and a career almost double that in stand-up comedy. The New York Times noted that Carlin was a master of words that most people could not or would not speak.

It was Carlin, I believe, who first noted that we park on driveways and drive on parkways, and he marveled and got lots of mileage out of oxymorons such as “military intelligence” and “jumbo shrimp.” But in the end he’ll be forever remembered as the broadcaster of the seven dirty words banned on television.

Despite his profane reputation, Carlin’s clever arguments often made sense. There are no dirty words, he claimed: dirty thoughts, dirty intentions, dirty people, yes; but words simply cannot be dirty, he argued. His attitude was a bit like that of Jesus reminding us that what comes out of persons corrupts not what goes into them.

I think Carlin probably read the second-century Roman dramatist Terence, who is credited with saying, “nothing human is alien to me.” (I say probably, just as I’d say former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle probably copied without attribution one-liners from Carlin’s 1997 book, Brain Droppings, an obscene journalistic deception that eventually cost the columnist his job in Boston.)

Off course, Carlin’s reputation—call it notoriety, if you will—came from his irreverence, especially in cataloging the seven words that cannot be spoken on television or radio. His doing so led to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling (by a 5-4 vote) in favor of FCC regulation of language in broadcasting and made Carlin an iconoclastic culture superhero.

Here are Latinized versions of Carlin’s seven dirty words: defecation, urination, copulation, pudenda, fellatio, maternal incest, and mammary glands.

My list admittedly lacks the shock and punch of Carlin’s Anglo-Saxon—and for the most part single syllable—equivalents, but no court or station censor will object to the terms on my list; in fact, there’s a good chance many station managers wouldn’t understand several words on my list so I prefer my list as thought-provoking and educational rather than shocking. Even Alex Trebek (a philosophy major in college, by the way) has been known to utter words from my list.

In case you haven’t picked up on it, I have read several of Carlin’s books of humor (Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help, 1984; Brain Droppings, 1997; Napalm and Silly Putty, 2001; When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? 2004; and Three Times Carlin: An Orgy of George, 2006) and found beneath the blatant obscenities a piercing mind and an admirable and cogent social analyst.

What I find somewhat bewildering is Carlin’s castigating of religion. Apparently Carlin (in spite of his Roman Catholic upbringing; or, perhaps, because of it) would have preferred we not use words such as God, Christ, faith, hope, charity, sin or forgiveness in any serious context (yes, that’s seven words). He seemingly had no objection to their use in a profane context.

The late Harvard personality theorist Gordon W. Allport used to note that our value-language has been turned topsy by the Freudian revolution. In Freud’s day, Allport wrote, everyone talked about God and nobody talked about sex beyond the boudoir. In our day, everyone talks about sex (and for some inane reason, our talk is predominantly dirty!). God-talk in our culture, however, is borderline taboo, reserved for dimly lit rooms called sanctuaries.

God-talk as I define it, by the way, means real theological conversation, not the God-as-political-lever-and-lobbyist language that Carlin often chastised as part of American hypocrisy.

I never met Carlin, but I have fantasized a chance I might have to converse with him over a plate of pork chops and suggest that I think God laughs heartily and approvingly at the comedian’s exposition of our human silliness; but I’d also have to suggest that Carlin’s dirty words have become pedestrian, unnecessary and boring, and deserve but a marginal place in television, film or literature.

Recommended Reading:

Here's an anecdote that not many will access in the weeks following the comedian's death:
http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/blogs/bloom/2008-06-25.html

Congruent Reflections: Silence and Daily Meditations

June 15, 2008

[This is a rambling essay I wrote near the end of May for an online course offered through the Church Divinity School of the Pacific's CALL center. The course was called "The Uses of Silence" and was moderated by Maggie Ross.]

Reviewing April:
A Comment on the Serendipity of Congruent Readings.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Forward Day by Day provides daily meditational readings for Episcopalians. Published by the Forward Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio, the quarterly journal is endorsed by The Episcopal Church. Its daily selections, based on the lectionary, are written by anonymous writers identified only by the editor’s notes. Each writer provides a month’s worth of meditations, and each of the quarterly volumes provides three-month’s worth of readings that follow the daily lectionary for the church year. The readings range from highly academic to pedestrian in their approach; from expositional to metaphorical in their interpretations; from conservative to liberal in their theology.

In some instances, the writing is broken up among more writers. The current volume covering May, June, and July of 2008, for example, is written by the 11 deans of the 11 seminaries of the Episcopal Church. Each of the academics has written eight or nine meditations. Typically, a meditation on a scriptural passage and the optional inclusion of a brief prayer runs to about 330 words.

The cover of each issue often displays a well-known piece of art (or a detail from such artwork). The issue for February-April, for example, shows Italian Renaissance painter Bergognone’s Christ Risen from the Tomb, a 1490 oil painting from the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The Forward Day by Day selections for the months of February, March, and April, 2008, were unusual in that they were written by a single author identified by the editor as “a lay woman from the American Southwest who is a widely published spiritual director.”

Coinciding with my reading of the selections for April, 2008, was my participation in a course taught by Maggie Ross (an Anglican solitary and writer who spends a good part of every year living in relative isolation in Alaska) called “The Uses of Silence,” an online offering of the Center for Anglican Learning and Leadership (CALL) at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. What astonished me at this time was the congruence of what we were reading, discussing and experiencing in our online course and what was being presented by the author of April’s meditations in Forward Day by Day (FDD).

The April 1 meditation in FDD begins with a verbal look at Fra Angelico’s painting of the Annunciation. I learned here that the artist did this painting as a fresco on the walls of the monastery of San Marco in Florence, and that the painting was done at the head of the stairs leading to the monk’s upper dormitory at the monastery.

The writer says of the painter: “He placed the Annunciation . . . as though he meant the monks literally to approach and enter—to inhabit—the encounter between the Virgin and the archangel.”

Silence is implied in this encounter, and the writer says, “one is invited to enter more deeply all the unanswered questions, the still-listening freedoms in our own lives.”

The meditation, incidentally, is on verses from Luke’s gospel that include the Virgin’s words: “Let it be with me according to your word.”

The April 2 meditation on the Vine-Branches “I am” statement of Jesus focuses on discipleship. The writer provides a tiny critique of contemporary Christianity that echoes almost all of the discussion and readings in the “Uses of Silence” course, especially the invitation to contemplation by Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land (Laird, 2006). Laird offers a guide to contemplation that begins with the assertion “We are built for contemplation.”

The writer of the FDD April 2 meditation writes: “I suspect we often firmly believe . . . that the active part of our discipleship is way more important than our contemplative vocation to abide in Jesus.”

I don’t intend to go through the 30 days of April comparing the author’s meditations with the content of the CALL course (though that might be a worthwhile exercise), but having this kind of reinforcement of ideas with which one is grappling strikes me as a delightful example of the serendipity of the Holy Spirit.

One of the most important books we read in “The Uses of Silence,” I think, was The Paradox of Intention by Marvin C. Shaw (Shaw, 1988). Its subtitle stresses a phenomenon particularly important to any Christian’s striving for spiritual growth and direction: “Reaching the Goal by Giving Up the Attempt to Reach It.”

Having been steeped in the Logotherapy of Viktor Frankl as an undergraduate and graduate student of psychology, I was delighted to find Frankl’s therapeutic principle of paradoxical intention supporting a guide to spiritual growth, and I found Shaw’s conclusion that “The Way to Do is to Be” a wonderful antidote to the moralizing pedantry of evangelical attitudes in which I have been nurtured.

I see paradoxical intention in the FDD April 9 meditation on the passage from Matthew 3, where John the Baptist says to Jesus, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

The FDD writer points to this as an illustration of the humility of Jesus, and writes in clear though perhaps unwitting exposition of the paradox of intention: “It is shocking, the humility of God. That God would choose to share our human nature at all defies logic. That Jesus, without sin, would choose to join sinful humanity in ritual repentance makes no sense.

“But that is the heart of the mystery of love, the mystery of God-with-us.”

A favorite of mine among the FDD meditations for April focuses on the words in Colossians 3: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.” The writer confesses an uneasiness at the word “rule” expecting it should be a more contemplative term such as “rest” or “dwell.” Yet, she points out that the peace of Christ means “yielding to God’s sovereign authority over every aspect of my life” (FDD, 12April2008).

Quoting a poem by American William Alexander Percy, she notes that the disciples who cast their nets into the Sea of Galilee were,

Contented, peaceful fishermen before they ever knew
the peace of God that filled their hearts brimful, and broke them too.

This poem of Percy’s, which mulls what the FDD writer calls “this dangerous sort of turning-life-upside-down peace” is in The Hymnal of the Episcopal Church as number 661 and known as “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.”

I read the entire hymn and was struck by the closing verse:

The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.
Yet, let us pray for but one thing, the marvelous peace of God.

Perhaps I’m stretching here, but the sentiment of Percy’s poem is similar to that expressed by St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose words are brought to us in the obscure but important text of Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye (Brock, 1992).

The FDD writer explained a dream she had about peaceful sinking (FDD 16April2008) that she interpreted as a dream of “resting in God.” God wanted her to let go and allow God’s love to support her. She concludes: “Since then, I have learned that resting in (not striving for, not racing after, not talking about) the presence of God is a definition of contemplative prayer.”

Finally, let me share the FDD writer’s exposition of St. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians: “Pray without ceasing.” She focuses on the fourth-century men and women known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who went into the wilderness to live in silence and ponder what it meant to pray without ceasing.

“They realized,” she writes, “that it was only possible to pray constantly if prayer descended from the head, as it were, and entered the heart—if prayer somehow became not a conscious enterprise, but as constant as breathing.”

What would it mean, the writer asks in conclusion, “for us to attempt to pray—to breathe, to live—this way?

I don’t know what it would mean, but I think I’ve learned it must begin in silence.

References:

(FDD, April2008) Forward Day by Day. February/March/April 2008. Cincinnati, Ohio: The Forward Movement.

(Brock, 1992) Sebastian Brock. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications.

(Laird, 2006) Martin Laird. Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. New York: Oxford Press.

(Shaw, 1999) Marvin C. Shaw. The Paradox of Intention: Reaching the Goal by Giving Up the Attempt to Reach It. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press.

The Hymnal 1982. New York: The Church Pension Fund (No. 661)

A curriculum alone is not the path from good to great

May 17, 2008

The Path from Good to Great: Curriculum . . . Not!

By Allan Roy Andrews

Imagine a high school faculty as a collection of music-lovers.

Some favor classical music. These are the sophisticates with a long history of excellence and a precision of melody rarely matched in any other genre.

Imagine many who favor popular music. These are the bedrock of community. They comprise by far the largest collection of fans (and teachers). This is the music of the majority: Among their icons are Elvis, the Beatles, and ‘Ole Blue Eyes.’ Crooners and Rockers provide the music of historical landmarks: first date, first kiss, first heartbreak, first triumph.

Band music lovers are revered in educational institutions, perhaps because band music is the music of institutions with the military and the battlefield always in view. It is the music of discipline and precision, if not of tune certainly of choreography. This is the music of celebration; the music of victory.

A few faculty members favor country music. These are the patriots and the blue-collar bedrock. This is the music of trains and pick-up trucks with the themes of troubles and moaning. This is a world of values, where honesty trumps perfection, and sincerity defeats phoniness.

Pockets of this imaginary faculty are niche music-lovers. There are those who favor folk music, often with overtones of political activism. There are some with special tastes who favor Irish music or Celtic music, Italian love songs or German drinking songs. Drama-lovers lean toward show tunes, whether from the stage or the cinema.

A yet smaller cadre leans toward rap or hip-hop music, often defining an ethnic minority. In the classroom, the elders tolerate this genre as the choice of the immature.

In a religious institution, there are those who favor sacred music, often sung by choirs. Some favor praise music, celebrating the body and voice as instruments of worship. In many ways, the popular religious music sector mimics the secular music world, altering lyrics and themes with an eye toward God. (Unfortunately, the eye too frequently focuses on the performing ‘I’ who is doing the singing or praising.)

And in some dusty corner of the campus, there are the jazz fans. Typically, these are the least tolerated among the imaginary faculty. This is the music of chaos and improvisation. Of all genres, this is the music that defies curriculum. It is the music of nonconformists; it is the sound of the institution being challenged.

Enter the education mechanics who are laying the track for moving the institution from good to great. With their devotion to curriculum development, they leave little or no space for chaos, improvisation, and challenges to conventional wisdom. Curriculum does not easily tolerate jazz.

Please understand carefully my argument here: I am not opposing curriculum development. What I’m opposing is the tyranny of curriculum that brooks no questioning or challenging of the conformity that curriculum development demands. If it helps our understanding, let me propose an anti-curriculum component to the curriculum. Give the jazz-lovers the opportunity to improvise and experiment. A good deal of learning comes out of chaos.

When curriculum is king (or queen), an educational institution demonstrates that its goal is not education in the most clear and critical sense of encouraging the liberal (read as liberated—“. . . and the truth shall set you free”) mind; instead, it is driving toward conformity.

I write this with some passion since a favorite colleague of mine recently was refused a new contract because, as the conventional wisdom and the music-lovers’ gossip net puts it, “she didn’t follow the curriculum.” As I write this, I replay images of the arguments made against an excellent teacher—Mr. Keating-- in the film “The Dead Poets Society.” Don’t try to change things, he is instructed, “the curriculum is set!”

The institution at which this woman taught postures itself as one moving from good to great, and in making that move it has developed a strong attachment to its curriculum, as if curricula somehow define an excellent school. This is an idea, incidentally, that is out-of-hand rejected by those who have championed the good-to-great movement in education.

Curriculum is a guide, a sign-post suggesting the direction in which education should be traveling; it is not a lock-step straight-jacket that prevents educators from experimentation, improvisation, and—I dare say—failure.

The educational mechanics who demand strict conformity to a set curriculum unwittingly are driving toward educational fascism. As another former colleague of mine put it shortly before he departed this same school, “We’re educating the mind but not the imagination.”

I love the expression of another colleague, a younger woman who this year decided to leave her job and return to graduate school. “I’m often frustrated by the curriculum,” she told me. “What I want them to know is that in my classes I am the curriculum!”

I don’t know this for sure, but I’d guess in her heart—and in the hearts of my other dismissed or disappointed colleagues--there’s a soft spot for improvisational jazz.