Mastery Year 3: Part 2: Post 2: I Forgot

Classes have started.

I always like this time of year--there's a kind of upbeat energy to campus, a sense of getting this moving, as the first classes start and academics begin again.

The new yearlings are settling in, feeling like part of the community now--both to themselves and to the rest of us. It's funny, I see the same thing every year and I've started to notice the pattern, how each yearling class, regardless of who is in the class or what they think, want, or are capable of as individuals, collectively acts exactly the same until around mid-May. They go through the same stages.

There are the first few weeks when they all wander around looking confused and acting like rather shocked outsiders, and then they get really excited about the school and it's possibilities and they think they understand what's going on around here but they don't. Then classes start, and the new students get a bit overwhelmed and somewhat surprised that this strange and magical place has rather prosaic requirements such as homework--not that they'd admit to such a silly reaction, they knew this is an accredited liberal arts college, but there's a fantasy that happens, and fantasies seldom include real work. Mid-May is when they start to differentiate, to pursue their own paths through the school, and from there on in they are less predictable. To me, anyway. I imagine the masters are aware of deeper patterns and that we all appear quite predictable to them. It's embarrassing.

Anyway.

I'm not taking any classes except for the two required for candidates, and they don't meet every week. Instead I'm teaching. Charlie asked me, last year (or was it the year before?) to teach everything I learned at grad school to the students here, which didn't work well--I don't mean I did a bad job, I mean that most people here really aren't interested in a lot of the material, and since workshops and talks by candidates tend not to be that well attended anyway, attracting students was difficult. And it was expected to be difficult. I wasn't expected to win any popularity contests, and the few people who did show up gave me good reviews, and the long and the short of it is I'm done, now. Done and able to move on to putting together workshops that better fit the needs of my audience.

I've been thinking more about my role in the school, what I might be able to bring to the community once I earn my ring. The problem is that most of the things I could teach that the school does need are already being taught by Charlie--except for statistical literacy, and Allen does that. I make a fine substitute teacher, but fortunately Charlie doesn't get sick that often.

What I can do, though, is write--Charlie can too, obviously, but he doesn't do much about teaching it. No one does. Writing is part of most classes, but no class focuses on it.

So, I've put together a series of workshops and talks on different aspects of writing and editing and I'm also making myself available twice a week as a tutor and coach for people who need help with their homework. It's a need the school has that I can fill.

I'm still teaching tracking, and I'm also doing seminars on different aspects of plant and insect identification--Charlie covers that to some extent, but not in as focused and detailed a way. Again, a need I can fill.

That works out to a very full schedule, since I'm working off-campus at the landscaping company three days a week--ten hours a day makes 30 hours a week, and since I've gotten some promotions over the years, my hourly rate is pretty good, now. I'm not entirely destitute.

I feel...a bit like a grown-up. Which sounds funny, as I'm getting close to 30, but I've never had a full-time job, I've never lived on my own without housemates, I've never made a major purchase if you don't count paying for grad school, there's a lot of adult things I've never done. But I'm a married man, I'm an adjunct college professor, I'm paying down my student loans, and I have a slowly-growing savings account. All of which sounds not too shabby.

Remember John Crain? I mentioned him the other day. He's the treasurer, just started a few years ago. I had lunch with him today, more or less interviewed him as part of my efforts to learn more about this place. It's funny--I think of him as new, because he's been hired since I've been here, but he was one of the first students to come through after the school got accredited. Not that he needed the degree, he already had several. He's had a long, fairly successful career as an accountant, and this is more or less a retirement job for him. The point is he's been part of the community for decades. He's a recent hire, but he's not new.

But as a recent hire--what's that like? What's it like to move...from the outside to the inside, as it were? Is it weird? Do you spend half your time pinching yourself, trying to convince yourself it's real? What's it like?

And I forgot to ask him.

Mastery Year 3: Part 2: Post 1: Ostar

Note: I'm posting this a day before actual Ostar, but it's written as though it were after. Since the holiday fell on the 20th that year, a Friday, so I suppose I'm pretending that it's the 23rd, now.-D.

Happy Ostar!

This year, for the first time that I know of, we had an Ostar activity involving artificially colored eggs hidden by humans. It was Steve's doing, though I helped.

The issue is that little Sean lives here now, and while he's too young to really care one way or the other, his parents wanted a kid-friendly holiday activity and the rest of us decided to make it happen. It's not like their little family gets much in the way of light-hearted normality.

We invited all the sprouts--Ostar fell on a Friday, so the older ones had to take off school to come, but most of them did, including my nephews and niece (my brother and sister-in-law are really getting quite enlightened about this sort of thing). In fact, the only ones who didn't come were Alexis and Billie (Sarah Grimm's youngest), since they're both twelve and say they're getting too old for this sort of thing. And then, Ostar morning, while Charlie's egg-hunt (a search for the nests of actual breeding animals) went on as normal, the sprouts and their associated adults (including me) did our own thing.

It didn't seem right to me to just hide and then seek pastel-dyed chicken eggs, not on campus, and not in this company--there needed to be some kind of improvisation on the theme, some way of bringing more natural history into it. In fact, I'd initially approached Charlie about including the kids in the adult hunt, but he just growled that I must want the privacy of the birds invaded by dozens of squealing children. Which seemed a little unfair and most of them are either his relatives or mine, and I like to think we teach our families how to act, but perhaps he had a point.

"Anyway," he added, "I thought the whole point was to do something Sean can enjoy?"

So, what we did was to make mock-ups, using wood and paint, of the eggs of six different locally breeding birds (most of which are not breeding yet), a dozen eggs of each. "We," in this case, means me, Steve, Alexis, Billie, Aidan, and J.T., who is the grandson of John Crain, the new treasurer I don't think I've talked about yet. We did it last Sunday, made a little egg-assembly-line, while John himself, who is a fair artist, painted wooden cut-outs of each bird species standing near a nest of eggs and labeled with its name in large lettering. He also made another set of bird cut-outs without eggs.

Then, Ostar morning, we hid all the eggs in the garden and lawn in front of the Mansion and set up both sets of cut-outs--the ones without eggs pictured we attached next to buckets and the ones with eggs we set up in a line out of sight of the first group.

The idea was that the children should not only find the eggs but also put each found egg in the bucket for the right species. They could consult the other set of cut-outs for reference, but had to remember which egg went with which bird at least long enough to run from the reference to the buckets.

So, first they ran around finding the eggs (Sean had a good deal of coaching from his mother, and he held her hand because he has only just started walking and is not steady on his feet) with baskets in hand, and then, in a second stage, they sorted their finds into buckets (Sean didn't really do that part) and then they all got candy and then we all went to lunch.

The weather was warm and somewhat gray, the first Ostar I've had here when there was no snow, nor hint of snow, nor remnants of snow, but actual, springlike, warmth.

Lunch was a giant feast organized mostly around eggs and also the last of last year's potatoes, for the vegans. And afterwards we had actual, springlike, drizzling rain all afternoon, and we all gathered in the Great Hall for the slide show of the pictures from Charlie's egg-hunt and the awarding of the prizes (this time a pair of three-dimensional wooden puzzles that, when fully assembled, formed giant eggs--and when partially disassembled revealed that the chicks in question were velociraptors).

And I felt really torn. On the one hand, I had a lot of fun, planning and executing the children's hunt, and sitting watching the slide show with my niece, Ruthie, in my lap was pure, heart-bursting, sweetness. On the other hand....

After the slide show, I stayed behind with some of the novices to help Charlie clean up, and he approached me.

"So, how did it go?" he asked. I shrugged.

"It went well," I told him. "The kids had a lot of fun, and the egg-sorting thing worked. I'm really pleased by how it all went. But.... I wish I could have helped with the main egg-hunt. I guess I miss it."

Charlie looked at me for a few seconds.

"If it helps," he said, "remember that whenever you do something you learned from me, I'm with you."

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 1.

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

I'm making this my interlude week, even though it seems a little early, because I've decided I like posting the sabbat posts before the big day, not after--like how Christmas movies mostly come on before Christmas. It's a matter of anticipation.

For the first time in a long time, I find myself having to issue a clarification.

Reading over what I wrote last week...I described Sarah Kelly as sometimes seeming "crazy." I think I did use the scare-quotes, I was trying to indicate a subtlety of language that might have gotten lost. I meant that she sometimes acted in a a way that prompted me to think "she's crazy," probably because the bizarreness of her behavior frightened and confused me. I didn't mean that she actually was all the things that word implies.

"Crazy" is a pejorative, an insult based on the assumption that nobody wants to be compared to a mentally ill person. Of course, it insults mentally ill people in the process. So, first of all, I probably shouldn't use words, even in scare-quotes, that require me to explain the following week that I used insulting language but didn't mean it. I'm sorry.

Second of all, the popular ideas about what mental illness looks like are all wrong, or at least, I've never seen any of the several people I know who have such diagnoses act anything like what people do when they mimic mental illness as a joke--you know, maniacal laughter, exaggerated reactions to goofy hallucinations, all of that. So when I say that sometimes Sarah acted "crazy," I'm not only being insulting, I'm also not doing a very good job as a writer.

That word doesn't tell you what I mean.

I've never seen Sarah react to a hallucination, though she's told me about some of them after the fact. I have witnessed others' reactions--a large minority of the school population had them. The reasons, in a psychiatric sense, probably varied. Some had a history of hallucinogen use and had "flashbacks." Others had "natural" hallucinations for one reason or another. Interestingly, many did not define it as a problem but called it clairvoyance--the difference between a vision and a hallucination is complex and debatable and I'm not going to get into it now, except that there are people who see things and appear perfectly sane.  Other people see things and don't.

Usually when someone sees something they know it's not real in the normal sense and don't react overtly, except possibly by seeming briefly distracted. They might react emotionally to what they see--the vision might be funny, confusing, pretty, frightening, or whatever else--but it's the way people react to emotional thoughts or memories. It's not like people ducking to avoid invisible birds or that sort of thing.

What Sarah did that frightened me into thinking of her as "crazy" was to seem subtly irrational. The "weird" or "off" behavior I  noticed before she was hospitalized didn't come back, but sometimes when she spoke she would sound like she was speaking from inside the illogic of a dream.  More often she was simply easily distracted or confused. I don't know how much of it was her meds and how much was the disease. It never looked goofy, free-spirited, or fun--she is all those things, but only when she's healthy.

I  also said she couldn't be much of a mother--that, too, needs clarification. She couldn't be much of a care-giver, not for the first several years of Sean's life, not so much because of the dream-logic issue, though that didn't help, but more because she couldn't handle a lot of stress. But of course she was very much a mother in the other sense. She spent a lot of time with him, sharing affection and attention, while Steve and various friends and family took care of feeding, cleaning, safety, and all of that. Sean has no doubt whatever who his mother is.

Anyway, I wanted to clear these things up.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 3: Part 1: Post 5: Progress and Lack of.

Sean Kelly, Steve's son, is almost a year old, now. He can't walk, yet, unless he holds on to something, but he's been highly mobile on four legs for a while. He can't talk, either, but knows some sign language and can make himself understood by signing, pointing, and grunting. He's always been a quiet baby, anyway. He is a happy, observant, engaging child, with a somewhat unfortunate habit of breaking things to see how they work.

He'll get something apart, look up at a nearby adult, and squeal with delight in his own accomplishment, and it is impossible to be angry with him.

Sarah Kelly is living on campus most of the time, now, though her meds aren't really stable, yet. Some weeks she seems frankly "crazy," other weeks she seems just tired or depressed. For a while she was entirely normal except she was shaking all the time. She can't work--she can't even be much of a mother to Sean, yet--but she hopes to be able to in the future, and is doing what she calls "pre-working," doing research on what law and policy applies to mental health, building relationships with people involved in the "Mad Pride" movement, which I'd never heard of before, but clearly she intends to become a leader of it.

Steve had never heard of Mad Pride, either, but now he is becoming well-informed--just another axis of injustice for him to feel angry and overwhelmed about.

He and I have a rule--no talking about politics or law when we're outside exploring. No talking, in fact, about anything other than what we're observing around us. I'm training him to notice. I'm training him to pay attention. I'm teaching him enough natural history that what he observes becomes meaningful to him. And he's mentioned that now he looks forward to our walks together as a kind of break. Sometimes some problem that was bothering him before we went out resolves itself when we come back--it just doesn't seem so intractable anymore. He's said sometimes he'll be working off campus and something will start to feel like too much, so he'll go outside for a bit.

He's making progress. I feel like I'm able to help.

Which is a nice change, since I  feel pretty helpless, otherwise. Eddie is still off-campus and will be for a few more weeks--we offered to make him a place to stay on the first floor of the Mansion, so he could avoid the stairs, but he declined. The yearling who was hospitalized last week has formally withdrawn from school. For Allen to have to find a bed in a psychiatric hospital for someone twice in one year--I haven't talked to him about it, yet, but it must be hard.

It snowed again last night, but then shifted over to sleet and ice before freezing again. The world is an odd, hard, spider-web gray, and winter is starting to seem very long.