The Razor Wire Chronicles: Breaking More Rules

I did it again. It could be a carefully calculated impulse control disorder. Is getting bored too easily at 50 an issue? Is wanting to keep things interesting an issue for myself or the residents or both?

A few days ago I brought some knockoff kendos to work play with after dodgeball. That may not have been the best idea. A few residents treat dodgeball like Armageddon. They became a litttle too involved in the outcome of the game.  I  put my kendos away for another day.

A few days later before yoga class I circled up the boys and started talking about awareness, paying attention, stillness and other classic warrior concepts. It helped that I showed "Peaceful Warrior" the night before. They were tuned in and they were ready. I jokingly asked the woman who monitors the cameras to turn them off for an hour or two. It seems like some of my activities make her nervous.

After a brief chat and frontloading about not wanting to get smacked in the head we began tossing the kendos around. This was something new and different: weapons or potential weapons inside of a secure facility!

There is something about being trusted that brings out the best in people. We threw the fake swords for fifteen minutes or so and then we settled into a long vinyasa yoga class.  The boys got it. Every day that something works is a good day.

The Razor Wire Chronicles: Breaking the Rules

I broke the rules. I suppose it was just a matter of time. It wasn't like I required practice or it was something new. I have a long, familiar and fond association with breaking rules. A great deal of my fondest and most formative memories came from not quite doing things the way I was taught or told. In my last job I started from the beginning by deviating from the official curriculum.  While initially my methods were viewed with skepticism and doubt by official minds, eventually I was invited by state officials to present at state conferences on how I broke the rules and how much better that was than the old programs. At times, in formal classroom settings, I even teach kids to break rules. I teach them to break the three rules of dysfunctional families:

• Don't talk
• Don't trust
• Don't feel

The rule I broke was created by someone long ago at the institution and few doubt its veracity. Quite simply, the residents are not allowed to touch each other and staff are not allowed to touch residents. Nobody shakes hands, puts a friendly hand on a shoulder or hugs. The residents, in addition to passing weeks or months without natural sunlight, must forgo human contact for indefinite periods of time.

The first time I broke the no-contact rule, it was a matter of necessity. I was teaching a Yoga Calm (yogacalm.org) class. One resident, who might be slightly dyslexic, had twisted his body into an uncomfortable mutation of triangle pose. My attempts to "verbally adjust" his asana had only been met with frustration on his part so I simply asked if I could physically adjust him. I generally refrain from physical adjustments but this time it was the best option. He thanked me from his much more comfortable pose.

A week later I found myself with more residents in my yoga class. We had been doing pretty much the same flow for several weeks now and I wanted to shake things up a little. I inserted "Tree Challenge" into the routine. During Tree Challenge, two people stand in tree pose and while pressing palms against each other attempt to get their opponent to put the other foot on the ground.

After that it was easy. By the next week, several had been on work crew and were asking for poses that might relieve shoulder pain. I showed them my personal "one cord of wood asana." Then before I knew it I was asking them how they felt about doing partner stretches. All were in agreement so we just moved forward into Lynea and Jim Gillen's series of partner shoulder stretches. It might get worse this week. Stay tuned!

The Razor Wire Chronicles: Dodge Ball is Alive and Well

 The house of detention where I am am temporarily incarcerated and employed eight or more hours a day five days a week may be the only place in North America where people still get to throw volleyballs and basketballs at each other. The entire court is only about sixty feet long so the balls still have a lot of velocity. Play is fierce and frantic. It may the only time during the day when the residents can openly express aggression.

Some of the residents who cannot dominate in other areas of milieu life and otherwise don't "succeed" within the level system and other rules find 20 or 30 minutes of success. Of course there is the downside that like tag, dodgeball teaches youth how to pick off the weak and the slow.

Strangely enough, youth who to use the local vernacular, "suck" dodgeball still play it with abandon. They are often the first pegged by the rapid fire onslaught but it's a momentary escaped from the mundane and I think they consciously or unconsciously recognize that. At least when a ball is hurled at them they are getting some attention.

In America beyond the walls, whole committees of parents organize to remove dodgeball from PE. Maybe that's a good thing. But as this boomer one day away from 50 ponders these things I just have to remember that I survived dodgeball and somehow not completely avoiding pain, risk and injury in my childhood may have made me a better person that knows how to duck.

The Razor Wire Chronicles: Original Instructions

If you hang around Native people and Red Road ceremonies long enough, eventually you will hear allusions references to "the original instructions." Few people know what these actually are but they they are important. Even medicine women and men can't really explain what this means although most will try. It probably is just common sense stuff: honor the earth, protect the elders and the children, store enough food for hard times, never smile at cougars and never ever listen to bluejays (they are notorious liars).

When it comes to corrections, there were some original thoughts which we have strayed from as well. "Penitent" is the root word for penitentiary. The original idea behind penitentiaries was to be penitent. Those who broke the law were sent to a monastery like setting to live with monks and priests. The idea was to pray, meditate, reflect, and eventually be forgiven for one's sins.

If you go to a monastery or prison, you may notice some subtle similarities.  Austere quarters,minimal food and simplicity are the norm......but today the United States, with only 5% of the world's population has 20% of the world's prison population......Somebody must have forgotten the original instructions.....

To Be Continued

The Razor Wire Chronicles

These days, instead of walking past playgrounds full of laughing children on my way to my office in a school somewhere in America, I drive through a cyclone fence gate decorated with a coil of razor wire. I am working,  shall we say, on the other end of prevention.....prevention gone wild. This is where the kids go who flunked prevention. Perhaps all of our best efforts failed them. I am 49 years old and I have to go through three locked doors to go to the bathroom. The "residents" have a list of demands and grievances each day. They rarely say "hello" or "how was your day Jeff?"

Nevertheless I have already made changes. Almost all of the boys now have a yoga mat in their cells. Five large exercise balls materialized on the cellblock one night. Although a few boys abuse the privilege of these items I dryly warn them to keep their balls on the ground or they will be removed.

It can be a grim setting. With the exception of paper sized window in each cell, no natural light enters the facility. Residents can pass weeks or even days with only the glare of fluorescent lights coming off and on to mark the passing of night and day. Life in the institution could prepare them for a winter in the Arctic.

To Be Continued

Loud Fart No Remorse: Ebook Excerpt

State testing has given new meaning to the term “artificial intelligence.” When I started working in the public schools in the early 90’s I had almost free rein to do groups, counsel individual students and facilitate a large variety of classroom team building experiences. Schools had what now seem to be quaint and archaic offerings like band and FASCE (family and consumer science education---we used to call this home-ec). Some students might be caught welding or tearing apart an internal combustion engine in a shop class. Those days are gone now. Students sit inside now, grim faced and silent, numbed into submission in an endless flood of math and science classes. Even civics has mostly given way to the last gasp of the industrial revolution. The left brain dominates. Right brain thinkers have been marginalized. Creativity and contemplation seem quaint and viewed through eyes of historical wistfulness with fondness but the dominant thinkers have dictated that these soft arts have no place in the society of the future.

“We need more scientists and mathematicians” proclaim the new captains of industry. Everybody must go to college. We don’t have enough mathematicians and scientists and engineers. This is the mantra we all hear constantly.

“Hmmmm….scientists….aren’t those guys who brought us Hiroshima and Super Fund cleanup sites?” asks one longhaired skeptic. Granted, scientists also brought us solar energy and life saving medical equipment but we must look clearly at the whole picture……………………

I have known Leonard for nearly 5 years. He is one of those kids that constantly gets referred to group. He displays a decided lack of interest in most of what the school has decided to offer him. He falls asleep in English class. In one of his three math classed he sits numbly while the teacher draws charts and graphs on her “smart board” with her digital pen. That doesn’t impress him either. Often he is tired from staying up far too late the night before playing video games. That’s what interests him.

Somebody decided quite some time ago what “school” would consist of.  At one time that included art, music, shop, PE and consumer education. Those days are gone. Even recess is under scrutiny. The architects of the new world view all that aimless running around, jumping and shrieks of laughter with suspicion. What could the children possibly be learning during that free time? What a waste of human effort. We need to have them inside learning! These conversations actually occur. Education engineers and analysts put the entire school day under a microscope and determine with bizarre formulas that shaving three or four minutes off of recess could bump up their test scores seven to ten points! With Machiavelli as their inspiration……….

Leonard can play almost anything on a piano after listening to it just once. Sometimes he has listen to it twice because he didn’t catch my off tune out of key humming. Anything I play on my iPod he can duplicate almost immediately. He has most of the popular tunes of the last 40 years memorized and can play the entire song with little or no effort. Jesse is a musical genius. Leonard's school has no music program.

Fun suckers.

That’s what Nolan called them. Fun suckers are those joyless people who seem determined to suck all the fun out of life. And for this round in the great march forward of public education, the fun suckers have won. Fun suckers look at others playing and having fun suspiciously. That is nonproductive time. Fun is waste with noise. A child just sitting on a bench contemplating the nature of existence or the cosmos or the meaning of life has no place in the world of the future. After all, how are you going to test that, measure that, quantify that? Gone are the social and emotional skills classes. Juniors and seniors don’t even PE anymore. This in some strange way must prepare them for a future as a workaholic.

Work all your life and save your money until you die.

I don’t think so.

I don’t think so is the first though of the warrior and the anarchist. Looking out upon a soul less machine driven world, the warrior poet and the anarchist has a different vision.

The Beechnut Boys and the Wenatchee Youth Circus

Sometime in the 1970's, when I attended Orchard Junior High I belonged to an extracurricular non school affiliated boys only organization of misfits, neer do wells, underachievers, cowboys, trouble makers and unrecognized geniuses. We called ourselves the Beechnut Boys because our common connection was that we all chewed tobacco. Although several boys had already graduated to the "hard stuff" like Copenhagen and Skoal we had all begun our addiction with pouch tobacco like Beechnut.

Before and after school and during lunch time we gathered outside the building in the unmonitored areas and chewed and spit and told lies. It was a glorious time made more glorious by the fact that we were largely ignorant of and oblivious to the health hazards of chewing tobacco. Another crowd gathered in the alley on the other side of the school and smoked. We had great disdain for the smokers for reasons now obscured through the foggy lenses of time and selective memory.

As our addiction and boldness progressed in tandem we took to "taking a pinch" in the bathroom during longer class breaks. We were just foolish enough to think that six or seven boys going into the bathroom and not emerging would escape the vigilant and watchful authority figures. Ralph Pederson was the vice principal and Paul Pugh was the principal. Ralph was a thin tense man with spectacles and a nervous gait. Paul was a burly man with a shock of thick gray curly hair that older men would love to have.

We spent a great deal of time both eluding and annoying these two stock characters of authority. We had unspoken agreements between the authority figures and our clan. When we made a big mess with our foul vile habit they would pull the reins on---kind of like cops who tolerate a certain amount of drug dealing and crack down when it becomes noticeable. Occasionally our chewing got out of control and we would throw the big wads of spent tobacco on the wall to try and make it stick. To our surprise this angered both Ralph and Paul!

They must have waited until just every single Beechnut Boy was gathered in the boy's bathroom. They burst in like DEA agents on a bust and after checking each of us for chew, marched us up to the office for a long series of "hacks." A hack meant being paddled with a thin wooden board and although such discipline is illegal now it was the norm in those days.

They paddled us one by one. The unspoken code among us boys was that you could not cry even if it hurt like hell. We never gave them that satisfaction. If it did hurt enough to make you cry you waited until you were well out of their sight. Emerging tearless and barely suppressing a smile meant you had endured.

Paul Pugh was also the director of the Wenatchee Youth Circus. The drum for this group sat in a place of pride in his office. When you got a hack in his office you had to bend over, grab your ankles and look at the Wenatchee Youth Circus drum. I never did like that circus or circus kids much after that.

to be continued