Bobby, here. Mrs. D. finally figured out how to get me an email address and get me onto this blog. A few false starts, including figuring out that she can't sign me up for an email account using my real birth date, duh...like I said before, not the brightest chipmunk in the tree. I'm about 45 in dog years, but they don't know how that works at Google.

We went to Texas for Spring Break, where things are not going especially well. We're staying with the folks who have a pet pig I'm not allowed to chase, and now they have a new puppy with no manners that I'm also supposed to get along with. This puppy thinks I am a puppy, apparently. I'm not.

The humans seem to be enjoying themselves, however. They think the puppy is cute, and they think the things they say to each other are important and sometimes even funny.

I am hunkered down and hoping for better days, but just thought I'd let you know I'm hooked up.

Wind Moon Waning

The Moon in Aries, after the Spring Equinox, called by disparate names—magic moon, seed moon, wind moon. Why this one should be more magic than any other, I don’t know. For the best Magic, I would favor the Harvest Moon, the one that falls in Virgo, in late August or early September, but perhaps that’s because I’m a Virgo myself.

Seed Moon makes sense, because the Spring Equinox begins the Planting Time, when the ebb-tide of Fire makes the earth ready for the powers of humankind to sow it.

But this year it was most of all the Wind Moon, blustery and wet. Monday night we met at the accustomed bar and hofbrau down near the shore, with our long-standing plan to go down to the water to greet the Moon after dinner. But one friend was sick, another exhausted, the weather impossible. Three of us drank, ate, felt kind of old, and called it a night. It felt like a defeat of sorts.

The work week has passed, the wind and rain continue. Hard on the old joints. A flyer from the teachers’ union in our mailboxes at work urges us to consider retiring now, before the current contract expires, because after they negotiate a new contract our retirement benefits may look rather different. However, I think my Magic for this season will be to just keep doing what I do, wind or no wind.

The story behind the way of things runs in a circle, and can be entered at any moment of the year.

This is the time of the God's transformation from child to man. He beholds the Lady, now a mature maiden, and is overwhelmed with love. She is ready for union, but knows that he is not yet ready for her.

Some say that there must be a swift, secret mating at this time, because it is nine months from now that the new God will be born. But there is really no need for the Gods to conform to the biological time frame of humankind, or any other species.

Be that as it may, the Lady sends him away, into the Greenwood. She gives him work to do, to prove his manhood; mysterious tasks, secret gifts--it is whispered between them, what is to do be done.

She sends him away, to live wild in the Greenwood until time and work are accomplished. She promises that if he does all that she requires, she will meet him on May Eve in the Greenwood, and become his wife.

Equinox

At the Spring Equinox, I was told by by first teacher of the Craft, the Fire tide reaches its height and begins to ebb. It marks the coming-of-age of the young God, who was born at Yule and will be crowned at Midsummer. With the ebbing of the fire tide comes the season for sowing; seed is sown for new life, new workings and new endeavors. Fire has the power to destroy and create anew, and now, in the ebb-tide, I have found that a Witch's power grows--the tides flow at the Great Sabbats, ushering in times ruled by the powers of Nature; the ebb-tides are more susceptible to the influence of human magic.

This, and the time of Harvest between Lammas and the Fall Equinox, are the two most demanding times of the year.

There may be hard work on many levels--professional, emotional, and magical. Projects to start, new developments in your relationships with others. Magical work that you undertake at this time may have far-reaching implications. All this work will use to the utmost the resources you have been mustering during the past few seasons.

You may well have feelings of pressure and urgency about all that needs to be done during this season, and you may find that you have little or no leisure time for a while. Be sure that you get enough food, sleep, and rest to sustain your health. Pay conscious attention to time
management, and do not get swept away by the feeling that you are too busy to be organized.

Seek out companions in your work whose company gives you pleasure and who share your values and goals. Such friends will make the work more enjoyable, and mutual-assistance arrangements can help get jobs done.

This is a time for sharing resources and tools, as in the old days a team of oxen and a plow could be shared around several farms until all the fields were sown.

The Bottom Five Percent

It’s good to hear that the Obama administration has taken notice of the failures of No Child Left Behind—beginning with the cruel irony of its name, because it has been leaving so very many children behind. (The ones I know best are the teenaged immigrants of Oakland who were abandoned in a weird triage program that funnels a strapped urban school system’s limited resources into the intensive coaching of the kids haven’t passed the test yet, but might. Fifteen-year-olds who turn up not speaking English aren’t going to pass the test any time before the age of 18, so just provide some kind of nominally supervised space for them to hang out in for a year until they can drop out. Then, if they or their families still have any aspirations for them, they will turn up in a community college where we do, in fact, have classes and teachers for them.)

But to return to Obama’s proposed renovations. Now, I wanted Obama with all my heart, but when it comes to education, which is what I do, I’m starting to feel like what Tom Lehrer described, in another context long ago, as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. First we heard about competitive grants and a “race for the top.” A race is by definition something that most people lose. It is not a good paradigm for public education. To get a competitive grant, you need a good grant writer. Good grant writers cost money. I’ve worked in inner city schools where nobody had the time or energy to fill out the forms for the most obvious non-competitive funds, let along any hard-to-get grants.

Here in California we lost this race, being too broke or too disorganized or too union-ridden or something. (California schools have a very high proportion of English language learners, and we who teach them have an unreasonable tendency to resent evaluations made of them, and us, based on tests administered only in a language they don't yet know very well.) But I think in fact that failling to qualify for this new game plan may be a blessing in disguise. Now the idea is to target the lowest five percent of the low-performing schools, and be very, very tough with them. Fire teachers and principals, who are obviously the culprits who are responsible. Give their jobs to creative and enthusiastic people who are waiting in the wings, just dying to take over. You snooze, you lose.

For several years, I worked as the coordinator of a family literacy program, funded by a competitive grant won by Catholic Charities, which can pay grant writers, which operated out of the lowest-performing elementary school in California. For a year or two it was second to the bottom, edged up by another one down in the LA area. But then we slipped down to the place of honor once again. It is probably a lot like the lowest-performing elementary school in most other states.

There is a lot about this kind of school that Obama does not seem to know. For one thing, before you go firing the staff, many of whom who are either recent college graduates rapidly recovering from their idealism or genuine saints hanging in there from dogged dedication, be very sure that you really have figured out who else wants to work there. It's not like casting a Broadway show, or anything like that. The jobs were very hard to fill, as I recollect. Perhaps in the present job market people are more available, but they won’t be any more creative or enthusiastic.

And please, before you blame the school for those low test scores, have a look at the community it's sitting in. The school where I worked serves two communities, living side by side in more or less equal numbers, with no love lost between them. It is an inner-city African-American neighborhood devastated by the drug epidemic. Kids damaged by drugs before they were born, kids surfing sofas, kids raised by impoverished and exhausted elderly relatives who do their best while the parents are off somewhere burning up the welfare checks in their crack pipes. The neighborhood also serves as a landing pad for recently arrived immigrants, mostly undocumented Mexicans, a more hopeful community, partly because their involvement in the drug scene is more peripatetic and more profitable, and partly because they tend to go find somewhere cleaner and safer to live around the same time that they start learning English, so that if the kids do eventually pass the Star test, it will be somewhere else.

Don’t blame the principal and the teachers in this place for the low test scores. Pin medals on them for their efforts to head off violence, scrounge up food and clothes for everybody, and remain calm at the sound of nearby gunfire.


In unrelated news, it's St. Patrick's Day.

"St. Patrick drove the serpents out, and brought the churches in,
'Twas a bloody poor bargain, I would say, be Pagan once again!"

(Lyrics by Isaac Bonewitz, to be sung to the tune of "A Nation Once Again.")

Evangelism

It’s a curious trait some people have, this compulsion to evangelize. They want to sell you their religion, or their diet. I have a couple of ecologically-minded friends who are always urging others to accept cast-off items for which they can imagine possible uses. More than one woman has tried to talk me into being a lesbian. Then as you get older, people try to get you to have the same ailments they do.

Not long ago, my sister’s friend Marge tried very hard to sell me on sleep apnea. She was sure I must have it.

“Why?” I asked

“Do you wake up during the night?”

“Yes, but that’s because I have to pee, or the dog is barking at the raccoons in the garbage barrels. Then I go back to sleep.”

“You don’t wake up because you need to pee. You wake up from the apnea, and then you feel like you need to pee.”

I think I wake up because I need to pee. I have dreams that ingeniously incorporate needing to pee and not being able to; say, I’m in the stall in a public restroom trying to pee, but there’s a bossy-looking woman standing in the open door, watching me, so I can’t. Then I wake up and go pee. I worry that one of these nights that woman is going to shut the door and go away, and then I will pee in the bed.

“Do you snore?”

“Who’s to know?” I said. Except the dog, of course. I burned out on men some years ago, even before I became uninteresting to them, and the aforementioned lesbian evangelists have not brought me around.

“Virtually anyone who is overweight will have sleep apnea,” said Marge, firmly. “And if you get treatment, you will be so much less depressed.”

“Do I seem that depressed?” I asked, beginning to doubt myself. But as it turned out, Marge was using “you” in the sense of “one,” that is to say “I,” and the depression in question was her own. She discussed it at great length, the various medications she had taken over the years, and I gradually gathered the impression that she was still battling depression and that having sleep apnea had perhaps not cheered her up so very much after all.

Evangelism seems to be based on an assumption that people are more alike than they really are, or perhaps a desire for company in your (one’s) own joys and misfortunes, or perhaps a bit of both.

I remember a conversation I once had with a Christian evangelist, back in the days when I used to have conversations with such people. (I’ve since learned that, like jerks hassling women in public places, they take any sign of notice as a sign of encouragement.)

This woman asked me whether I believed in reincarnation, and I said yes. Seeming to pounce on an opening here, she hastened to explain that Christ offers the promise of eternal life; if you are saved, you will spend eternity in heaven, and you won’t have to keep coming back.

Well, there you have it. She doesn’t want to come back. For her, this life is something to be saved from (I’d always sort of wondered what it was they were being saved from.) I want to come back again and again, to do the things I haven’t done, to repair mistakes, to try things differently the next time. I certainly don’t want an eternity of anything, no matter how pleasant it might be for the first ten thousand years or so. I have never heard any description of heaven that didn’t sound as if it would eventually get on my nerves.

She is happy with the prospect of not coming back, of spending eternity somewhere else. But all my hopes are of this world, and I am happy with the prospect of returning forever.

Paying to Learn

A traditional Craft information list I'm on again has started up the old thread about charging for training and initiation. We don't do this, and I shot back the reasons why--the Gods choose their own and you must keep their way clear, charging for a service rendered sets up a very different relationship than coven members have with each other, and anyway, what sense does it make to charge for what was freely given to us? Teachers do charge for other kinds of intiation in other places. Different situations, different relationships, different cultural baggage, all beside the point.

Someone contributed a cute story about a high priestess (not a traditional Wiccan one) who charges $180 for her training class, which is refunded if the student is eventually initiated, so that people "won't waste her time."

Aside from the little problem of people going through with an intiation just to get their money back, there is the larger matter of what it is a teacher does. I've been teaching much of my adult life, my day job and my night job. It inevitably involves a great deal of what appears to be wasted time. You are a resource, you set up learning opportunities, and have no way of predicting what, if any, use people will make of them. That's the way of it. This is the basic problem with the idea of merit pay for teachers. As a teacher, you have influence, not control, over what or how much people learn, just as a doctor has influence but ultimately no control over a patient's health--for all the same reasons. But this is another topic, for another post.

But to take a cue from this high priestess who doesn't want her time wasted; how if we were to have all our community college students who say they want to transfer to four-year schools pay triple their current tuition, and then get it back if they succeed? My guess is we could raise the transfer rate a bit and increase the community college budget at the same time.

However, the problem is the same as for the Craft; among the many other things that you cannot predict, you have no way of knowing that the student who is unable or unwilling to pay is not the very one you are looking for.