Category Archives: Education

Education

Misreading the Outlier Distraction: Illiteracy Edition Redux

[Header Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash]

Arthur Young graduated from high school with honors. However, as an adult, he was illiterate.

Literacy expert Helen Lowe featured Young and concluded:

Arthur could not read, even at a primer level. He could not drive a car, because he could not pass the test for a driver’s license; he could not read the street signs or traffic directions. He was unable to order from the menu in a restaurant. He could not read letters from his family and he could not write to them. He could not read the mixing directions on a can of paint or the label on a shipment of sheet rock. He had been cheated.

This story may be shocking but also sounds disturbingly familiar to a recent story on CNN:

This young woman, of course, has also been “cheated.”

But here is something important to acknowledge: The dramatic story of Young is from 1961 as part of a book on the illiteracy crisis in the US, Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today.

Both problematic stories seven decades apart are outlier narratives that are both inexcusable failures but are not evidence of any generalizations about education, teaching, or literacy.

Stated bluntly, outliers can never lead to any sort of generalizations.

One of the great failures of public discourse and policy around reading and literacy in the US has been perpetual crisis rhetoric used to drive ideological agendas about what counts as literacy and how best to teach children and young adults to read and write.

If you had a time machine, you could visit any year over the past century in the US and discover that “kids today” can’t and don’t read because the education system is failing them.

These histrionic stories are compelling because they often include real children and adults whose lives have been reduced because of their illiteracy or inadequate literacy.

Ideally, of course, no person in the richest and most powerful country in the world should ever be cheated like that.

But here is the paradox: These outlier stories are distractions from doing the reform and work needed to approach all children and adults being literate.

Once again, reading test data for decades has shown exactly the same reality as all other forms of tests of student learning (math, science, civics, etc.): Over 60% of test scores are causally linked to factors beyond the walls of schools—access to healthcare, food security, housing security, access to books in the homes and communities, and thousands of factors impacting the lives and learning of children.

At best, teacher impact on measurable student literacy is only about 1-14%.

Yet, year after year, decade after decade, the US focuses on teacher quality, curriculum and standards, reading programs, and reading test scores without acknowledging or addressing the overwhelming impact of out-of-school factors on people acquiring the literacy they need and deserve to live their full humanity.

The two stories seven decades apart from above are likely far more complicated than any coverage could detail; the are both compelling and upsetting human stories that deserve our attention, in order to address their individual tragedies as well as taking greater care that others do not suffer the same fate.

However, misreading outlier distractions is not the way to honor that these people have been cheated.

Two things can be true at once: Outlier stories are heartbreaking and inexcusable; however, they prove nothing beyond the experiences they detail.

CNN uses outlier stories for traffic and profit.

Literacy ideologues use outlier stories to drive their agendas as well as to feed the education market.

We are all cheated, once again, when we play the outlier distraction game and refuse to acknowledge and address the crushing realities of inequity in the lives and learning of children.

Each child matters, and all children matter.

Yet, only the adults have the political and economic power to make that a reality.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, Multilingual Learners, reading, Science of Reading

Recommended: Voices from the Field: The Impact of the Implementation of Science of Reading Instruction and Policy on Emergent Bilingual/English Learner Literacy Programs and Teachers

Voices from the Field: The Impact of the Implementation of Science of Reading Instruction and Policy on Emergent Bilingual/English Learner Literacy Programs and Teachers

This new groundbreaking report from the National Committee for Effective Literacy (NCEL), Voices from the Field: The Impact of the Implementation of Science of Reading Instruction and Policy on Emergent Bilingual/English Learner Literacy Programs and Teachers, dives deep into the real-world implementation of Science of Reading (SoR) policies. Through interviews with nearly 80 educators who work directly with emergent bilinguals and English learners (EB/EL) in schools implementing state and district SoR policies, we uncover critical insights into the challenges and opportunities for supporting EB/ELs. This study points to the need for more comprehensive understanding of the SoR and for implementation supports that directly address the needs of EB/EL students and the contexts in which they are taught.

Free Download

Crisis, Education, education reform, reading, Science of Reading

Manufacturing Crises to Perpetuate Stories for Ideological Agendas

[Header Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash]

Some people have recognized that Elon Musk has willfully or ignorantly misread and misrepresented data on social security to create a story to support an ideological agenda—cutting social programs in the US government.

Note this thread on X/Twitter, notably Wolfer’s final post: “When everything they say is designed to mislead, you’re left to wonder why.”

Manufacturing crises to perpetuate stories for ideological agendas is very effective (and nothing new).

Why?

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” (a quote misattributed to Mark Twain, somewhat ironically).

Certainly, the Trump/Musk era of this strategy is an extreme moment in history; however, this is exactly how education reform has been conducted since the 1980s and how the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement is being orchestrated.

The entire education reform movement was grounded in a data lie manufactured by a political report, A Nation at Risk, to create a story of public school failure in the US in order to perpetuate Reagan’s ideological agendas (school prayer, school choice, etc.).

Now, as a subset of the manufactured education crisis, the SOR movement has misread and misrepresented NAEP data to manufacture a reading crisis in order to perpetuate a story of student literacy and “bad” teachers in order to perpetuate ideological and market agendas for teaching reading.

As Tom Mahoney concludes:

If evidence is being ignored, then it isn’t really about evidence.

It’s about ideology.

If you see through the manufactured crises of the Trump/Elon answer, you have a template for seeing through the manufactured education and reading crises.

In short, don’t buy any of it.

Note

Follow this thread:

https://twitter.com/electricfutures/status/1891898336208105676
Education, education reform, NAEP, reading, Science of Reading

Listen at Busted Pencils: Radical Literacy Scholarship, with Paul Thomas

Radical Literacy Scholarship, with Paul Thomas [CLICK to listen]

Returning Pencil Buster Dr. Paul Thomas joins us to help us break down the “science of reading.” This is a topic we’ve covered frequently, most recently with Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige this week. But Dr. Paul brings a uniquely nuanced and deep knowledge of the marketing scheme/regressive conservative political tool masquerading as a curriculum set to the show. Because Dr. Paul’s dug deep, and with his 40+ year career as a literacy educator, writer, and speaker he is one educated educator on the topic. Don’t be fooled by their talk of “science”, Dr. Paul urges us. It is a method for censorship and limiting of educators. We can do so much better. And our students deserve so much better. Yet conservative lawamakers have written laws literally banning the teaching of anything except the so-called “science of reading.” Come on, let’s not remove tools from our educators’ literacy teaching kits. That’s just foolish.

BustED Pencils: Fully Leaded Education Talk is part of Civic Media. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure not to miss out on a single episode! To learn more about the show and all of the programming across the Civic Media network, head over to https://civicmedia.us/shows. Join the conversation by calling or texting us at 608-557-8577 to leave a message!

Education, education reform, Poverty, Ranking

School Rankings Reflect “Social Capital Family Income Variables,” Not Education Quality

[Header Photo by Austris Augusts on Unsplash]

This is a short reminder about the problem with ranking schools. Let’s look at a top 10 high schools list in South Carolina:

#1 South Carolina Governor’s School for Science & Mathematics – [Poverty Index] 21.7

#2 Academic Magnet High School – 15.1

#3 Spring Hill High School – 32.7

#4 Mayo High School for Math, Science & Technology – 47.6

#5 SC Governor’s School for Arts & Humanities – 22.5

#6 HCS Early College High School – 80.2

#7 Catawba Ridge High School – 18.2

#8 Greenville Technical Charter High School – 29.5

#9 Berkeley County Middle College High School – 27.4

#10 River Bluff High School – 31.7

Now compare that list (I have added PI data) with this ranking by PI:

Eight of the ten ranked are in the least impoverished high schools in the state. I have included in orange several charter schools (12 of the least impoverished high schools out of the lowest 40 are charter schools) because charter advocates often enjoy comparing apples to oranges to promote charter schools. [Note that several of the so-called top 10 are schools allowed to select their students.]

These rankings reinforce a misconception that out-of-school factors are just an excuse when trying to educate students; however, historically and currently, reading test scores and achievement reflect a fact that has been replicated for decades:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables….The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

Rankings are harmful to education and perpetuate another false story about schools in the US.

Education

Reading Deserves a New Story, Different Reform

[Header Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash]

You know the story: Students today can’t read.

And those who can, don’t read.

But there is more.

Children who can’t read have been cheated by their teachers, who fail to teach reading skills such as phonics.

And our national reading crisis is a threat to our very nation, especially our international economic competitiveness.

However, there are a few problems with this story.

If you were to find a Time Machine, you could travel to any year over the past century and hear the exact same story.

As well, this crisis rhetoric has been used historically and currently with math—and every other content area tested in the US.

Here is a story about reading you probably are not familiar with: There is no reading crisis, and there is no evidence that reading test scores are driven by reading instruction or programs.

Further, again, there is nothing unique or catastrophic about reading test scores or reading achievement by US students.

Historically and currently, reading test scores and achievement reflect a fact that has been replicated for decades:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables….The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

Now, consider a newer story: Post-Covid students are suffering a historic learning loss:

Reardon’s call for “long-term structural reform” must follow a new story about reading and a different approach to reading reform.

First, since the vast majority of causal factors reflected in reading standardized test scores are out-of-school conditions, the new reading story and different reform must address universal healthcare, food security and eliminating food deserts, home and housing stability, and stable well-paying job for parents.

Another out-of-school reform needed for reading is guaranteeing students have access to books and texts in their homes, communities (public libraries), and then in their schools (school and classroom libraries).

A simple program that gives every child from birth to high school graduation 20 books a year (10 chosen by the child/parents and 10 common texts) would build a library and ensure access to texts, one of the strongest research-based elements of reading acquisition.

Without social reform, reading scores will likely remain flat and inadequate.

The most important different aspects of a new story and reading reform is confronting traditional approaches to in-school reform in the US common since the 1980s. A different approach to reading reform must include the following:

  • De-couple reading reform and instruction from universal or prescribed reading programs and center teaching children to read (not implementing reading programs with fidelity). Admit there is no one way to teach all students to read, and provide the contexts that allow teachers to serve individual student needs.
  • Reform the national- and state-level testing of reading. The US needs a standard metric for “proficient” and “age level” (instead of”grade level”) shared on NAEP and state tests in grades 3 and 8; and that achievement level needs to be achievable and not “aspirational” (such as is the case with NAEP currently). National and state testing must be age-based and not grade-based to better provide stable data on achievement.
  • End grade retention based on standardized testing. Retention is punitive, and it harms children while also distorting test data.
  • Monitor and guarantee vulnerable populations of students who are below “proficient” to insure they are provided experienced and certified teachers and assigned to classes with low student/teach ratios.
  • Address teaching and learning conditions of schools, including teacher pay and autonomy.
  • Honor and serve students with special needs and multi-lingual learners.

While we have no unique or catastrophic reading crisis in the US—and even hand wringing over learning loss seems unfounded—we have allowed a century (or more) of political negligence to ignore the negative impact of children’s lives on their learning.

We have remained trapped in a manufactured story of reading crisis and that poverty is an excuse.

All the available evidence suggests otherwise.

Crisis, miracles, blame, and punishment have been at the center of the story everyone is familiar with. That story has never served the interests of students, teachers, or public education.

In an era of intense political hatred and fearmongering, this is a tenuous call, but if we really care about students learning to read, and if we truly believe literacy is the key to the economic and democratic survival of our country, reading deserves a new story, an accurate story, and a different approach to reform grounded in the evidence and not our cultural mythologies and conservative ideologies.

See Also

Big Lies of Education: Series

Education, poetry

Poem: parenting

[Header Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash]

already exhausted
carrying your child

through the parking lot
just before sunrise

frost heavy on car windshields
as you feel yourself sweating

•

your toddler raises their arms
for you to carry them

i am tired too you say
you can walk by yourself

•

and then one day you realize
you haven’t carried your child

in several days at least
maybe even a few weeks

•

and then you realize
you’ll never carry your child again

—P.L. Thomas

Education

NAEP Serves Manufactured Education Crisis, Not Teaching and Learning

[Header Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash]

I teach an upper-level writing and research course for undergraduates as part of their general education requirements. The overarching project asks students to gather media coverage of an education topic in order to analyze the credibility of that coverage.

Since the course is undergraduate, I ask them to approach their analysis through critical discourse analysis, but I narrow that lens some for them. The process includes the following:

  • Identify the pattern of claims about the topics.
  • Evaluate the validity of the claims in the context of a literature review of the educational topic (limited to peer-reviewed, published recent journal articles).
  • Consider whose interests these claims serve (the CDA element).

I note that claims about education in the media tend to fall in a range of accurate, misleading, and false; however, for this analysis, identifying whose interest the claims serve is the key aspect of the evaluation.

False and accurate claims are typically easy to manage for students, but the misleading claims can be complicated.

For example, in public discourse about police shooting victims, two accurate data points are often cited: The majority of people shot and killed by police in the US are white and Black people are shot and killed at a higher rate than white people.

Failing to address both data points and clarifying why rates are more important than raw data contributes to media coverage being misleading, and thus, selectively emphasizing true data is often a form of manipulation and serves a particular population or ideology.

With another release of NAEP reading and math scores, we have an opportunity to address how media and political leaders tend to offer false and misleading claims based on NAEP score, but also, that NAEP itself serves to perpetuate the manufactured education crisis, which benefits the media (more clicks), political leaders, and the education market place.

Regardless of what national and state scores on NAEP are, the foundation of media and political claims is always “crisis.”

Ironically, perpetual “crisis” rhetoric and education reform since the early 1980s has had one clear outcomes—maintaining the status quo of educational and socioeconomic inequity in the US.

To consider this, let’s focus on Massachusetts and Tennessee.

Other than top-scoring DoDEA schools, MA sits atop reading scores in the US in both grades 4 and 8:

As a relatively low-poverty state, MA should rank above states with higher poverty students. However, MA certainly serves students in pockets of poverty as well as other vulnerable populations of students who tend to have low standardized test scores.

None the less, MA has joined the standard chorus in the US about reading. The Education Trust released a report in March 2024 providing “5 Things You Need to Know about the literacy crisis in Massachusetts.”

To be fair, MA is similar to most of the US where standardized tests scores have dropped post-Covid and those drops have coincided with MS’s Mass Literacy initiative from 2018:

Perpetual reform and perpetual crisis in education, regretfully, seems only to fuel more reform and more crisis.

Note that MA also has something in common with almost all states regardless of whether states have high or low NAEP results. Achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status have remained fixed for almost three decades:

While a top-scoring state like MA is shouting “crisis” primarily based on a sort of national psychosis about the “science of reading,” TN is trying to have it both ways with a reading crisis and a celebration of 2024 NAEP scores.

An October 2023 report from the TN Department of Education, “Tennessee’s Commitment to Early Literacy,” forefronts the “Literacy Crisis in Tennessee” based on (you guessed it) historically poor rankings in NAEP reading scores.

One important point here is that the media and political discourse tend to focus on “bad” statistics such as rankings and averages—which is how TN establishes their “crisis.”

Yet, while the 2024 NAEP data has spurred a great deal of misguided doom and gloom, TN is putting a positive spin on their results: Nation’s Report Card Shows Meaningful Academic Gains as a Result of Tennessee’s Commitment to Public Schools.

For political leaders, “we have a crisis” and “I have saved us from the crisis” are not a sequential series of events, however, but a permanent rotation.

So why this positive spin for TN?

While the national average on NAEP reading has dropped, TN has experienced in 2024 a slight uptick. Because most everyone else was dropping, then, TN has seen a rise in their rankings (a key example of why ranking is a “bad” statistic).

Important again is that like MA and most states, TN scores for racial and socio-economic gaps remain fixed: “This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998.”

These responses to NAEP by MA and TN reveal a stark lesson that NAEP serves the interests of the media, politicians, and the education market place, but at least since 1998, NAEP hasn’t provided the data needed for any sort of genuine education reform or analysis.

Education is a political and market football, in fact.

Here are a few better takeaways from NAEP:

  • NAEP’s achievement levels are designed to be confusing and support the manufactured education crisis (see here).
  • Using NAEP to rank and sort is misleading and doesn’t support needed reform.
  • NAEP scores do offer some important facts related to achievement gaps and the pervasive influence of affluence and poverty on educational outcomes, but the media and political leaders choose to ignore those lessons.
  • Decades of NAEP reinforce this conclusion by Maroun and Tienken: “Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.”
  • Media persist in focusing on only two stories about education: Crisis and outliers; both of which serve the interests of anyone expect students and teachers.

Like my students in my upper-level writing and research course, we would all benefit from evaluating the claims being made by media and political leaders in order to determine, first, is the claims are true (they often as misleading or false), and then to confront in whose interests these claims are being made.

Maybe this isn’t surprising given the current and historical political climate in the US, but almost never are the interests of students and teachers being served—especially when the interests of the most vulnerable students are the issue.

Education

The “Science of Reading” Ushers in NAEP Reading Decline: Time for a New Story

With the release of the 2024 NAEP reading results, a disturbing new story is developing:

The media has long been obsessed with reading in the US, crying “crisis” every decade over the past century. The most recent media-based reading crisis has prompted aggressive and new reading legislation reaching back over a decade, policy and programs identified as the “science of reading” (SOR).

The hand wringing over the 2024 NAEP reading results, however, seems to focus on learning loss and post-Covid consequences—not that reading achievement on NAEP was flat during the balanced literacy era and now has dropped steadily during the SOR era:

The senior cohort in the 2024 NAEP reading scores represent the SOR era begun in 2012.

Suddenly, media appears to forget that the SOR movement was built on a series of baseless claims: the US has a reading crisis (despite NAEP score being flat for decades) because teachers do not know how to teach reading and rely on failed reading programs and balanced literacy.

The foundational claim of the SOR movement has been firmly discredited: “[T]here is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution.”

But a key element of the SOR story is often overlooked: “One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America’s poor reading performance is poverty.”

In other words, the SOR story argues that the US has a reading crisis that is entirely the result of in-school policies and practices, that SOR-based reading instruction guarantees 95%+ of students will achieve reading proficiency.

How then is the recent 5-year decline in NAEP scores being blamed on out-of-school factors, Covid learning loss? The story being sold is such blame is merely an excuse.

The problem here is that the entire SOR story is a series of misrepresentations and ideological claims not grounded (ironically) is research or evidence.

As I have noted, NAEP achievement levels are confusing since “proficient” is well above grade level and “basic” tends to correlate with most state metrics for “proficient” (see here for a full explanation and state/NAEP correlations).

However, journalists persists is misrepresenting NAEP scores in order to feed their manufactured “crisis” story: Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It.

With the release of 2024 NAEP scores on reading, we have an opportunity to embrace a different story, a credible story, by examining scores from Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools as well as Mississippi and Florida.

First, note that DoDEA schools again are the top scoring schools in grade 4 reading, but MS and FL rank in the top 25% of states despite challenging populations of students being served (both states appear to be outliers defying the odds):

Both MS and FL have been praised for their reading and education reform; however, there are two parts to this “miracle” story that are often left out, that show there is a mirage, not a miracle.

First, MS and FL join many states that have enacted SOR reading reform over the past decade-plus, yet the research on that reading reform highlights something other than reading instruction or programs.

Westall and Cummings concluded in a report on reading policy: “[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component [emphasis added].”

States implementing K-3 grade retention are gaming the system by pulling out the lowest performing students and then re-inserting them into the testing population when older.

In fact, MS has been retaining about 9000-10,000 K-3 students a year since 2014, and FL retains about 17,000 students annually. [1]

Beyond the impact of grade retention on test scores, we should also ask: If SOR “works,” why do states continue to retain about the same number of students per year?

But NAEP also tells a story about SOR that has been ignored for years. Both MS and FL rank in the top 25% of grade 4 but the bottom 25% by grade 8 while DoDEA remains the top scoring schools in both grades:

Grade retention creates a mirage of achievement in grade 4 that disappears by grade 8, further evidence that SOR is not working at either grade.

Reading achievement as measured on testing has never been about reading instruction, teacher quality, or reading programs.

DoDEA school reading achievement is a testament to what research has shown for decades about student achievement:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables….The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

DoDEA student populations are diverse, often coming from impoverished and working class backgrounds; these schools also serve vulnerable and challenging populations of students.

However, teacher pay is high, and those students have healthcare, food and housing security, and parents with stable work.

DoDEA students almost all have the advantages mostly afforded children living in privilege so that how and what they are taught can matter.

If reading and literacy matter—and they do—and education matters in the US, we are well past blaming teachers, declaring false “miracles,” and jumping on the reading program merry-go-round once again.

Students must have their lives addressed so that their education can serve them well.

NAEP scores tell us little about reading (or math), but confirms again and again that the US is a country determined to ignore the corrosive impact of inequity on the lives and education of children.

Update

Media has only one story—a false one—about outliers in NAEP scores. Compare the coverage of MS in 2019 with LA 2024:

[1] Note that in the early 2000s, FL was the “miracle” state and established the Florida Model that essentially became the MS “miracle.”

Next up is Louisiana, and most of the coverage is claiming LA’s success is because the state has copied MS.

And a part of the lineage is more grade retention. Here are the currently available data on LA grade retention:

Education

64

[Header Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash]

Regret

More than a decade ago, close to one of the most celebrated birthdays, turning 50, I was ghosted.

Although I understand why, and even in some ways, accept that may have been the only option, since this was a person for whom I cared deeply, the experience was difficult—for many years.

Life altering.

But one thing just before that event has stayed with me; the person acknowledged we could no longer have a relationship but stressed they had no regrets.

In my last couple of days at 63—turning 64 Sunday—I know that I have made many mistakes but also that I have a life now that is often quite wonderful despite the inevitable tensions of living across seven decades.

Big picture, then, I do not regret the life that I have lived to get to the life I have.

Yes, I regret I forgot my father’s birthday (also my parents’ anniversary) just a year or so before he died. I realized that the next day and felt truly horrible—so lost in my own daily life, so unnecessarily lost in my daily life.

Yes, I regret that the night my mother died in Hospice, I was home, asleep; I slept through the call. I wasn’t there when she died.

But at nearly 64, I am aware that we mostly can only be the person we are capable of being at any moment in this life.

I simply don’t have time for regret—or blame.

I am fond of giving myself and others a break more often than not.

There may be some use in regret when we fall short of who we are and who we expect ourselves to be.

But most of the things of my life that others would judge me for, frankly, I don’t find to be anything done wrong; in fact, those are often those things that best reflect who I am and not who others expect me to be.

Melancholia

After I finished classes and lunch today, I had my usual nearly-hour drive home ahead of me. For an early birthday present to myself, I listened to The National’s First Two Pages of Frankenstein.

Lately, a couple of those songs have been on repeat in my mind—”Grease in Your Hair” and “Ice Machines.”

But the album is book-ended by two beautiful songs filled with melancholia—”Once Upon a Poolside” and “Send for Me.”

The first time I listened to “Send for Me,” I was in New Orleans the day after giving an invited presentation. F2PF was released that morning, so I sat in the hotel room after waking up early, my partner sleeping, to have a first listen.

When the final song played, I wept through it entirely. I was wrenched by the sweetness, the sadness, and the gentle humanity of the song.

Less than 48 hours from turning 64, I am filled with melancholia because aging is a heaviness.

I am fighting literal heaviness with my weight ticking up slightly year after year (and for someone who has lived as a serious cyclist weight has been an ever-present obsession for someone who looks mostly thin but persists in fretting over a bit of new weight here and there).

But aging is another heaviness.

The heaviness of awareness, the heaviness of knowledge.

I know a great deal, but most of all, I know what I don’t know.

The heaviness of the unknown, the heaviness of the unknowable.

Growing older may be as much bittersweet as melancholia because I am not sad. I am maybe as happy and content as ever.

It can be easier to come to peace with yourself and others with age.

And in the last days of my year 63, David Lynch died, just 5 days before his January birthday.

His creative works were incredibly important throughout my life so his death near my birthday feels heavier than it probably should.

As I told my students, I cried in public reading a story about Lynch requesting Cheetos in his dressing room in his last performance as an actor.

I have cried over the death of Kurt Vonnegut (when he died and when he died again in a biography).

I have cried over the death of George Carlin (when he died and at the end of a documentary on Carlin’s life).

There is something sweet and frail about someone of Lynch’s stature making a demure request for Cheetos.

And as sad as his death is, it has brought day after day of articles and videos sharing the quirky man Lynch was—a man at a sort of peace and self-awareness that makes me jealous, gives me hope.

As is usual, people I love and people who love me have asked what I want for my birthday, and I give my usual reply—nothing.

At least no gift, nothing special.

I want to wake up Sunday and continue with this life, this thing that is what it is and will be something I cannot predict.

I am better at this now, one advantage of aging, following Kurt Vonnegut’s advice:

So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

This is a simply thing, a true thing.

It is quite a nice thing to be here still.